The Rudolf Steiner Archive

Address given during the first Anthroposophical College Course at the Goetheanum, in response to the call to academic youth.

Dear fellow students! You will understand that I cannot speak about the content of the call itself, since it is too closely associated with my person. And so it will be best if I, in the words that I am allowed to speak to you today, refer more to what actually announces itself as a desire from the current student body for new scientific and general cultural goals, as well as for social life.

When I consider this appeal, it reminds me of another appeal that was also supposed to start from Stuttgart some time ago: the appeal that was then intended to form a cultural council.

In 1919, when our work began in Stuttgart, it was initially based on the “Appeal to the German People and the Cultural World”, which I was allowed to write and which made its way around the world in March of the previous year. And this work was based on what I tried to set out as social guidelines in my book “The Key Points of the Social Question”. At that time a number of prominent people who stood by the convictions and social aims of the Kernpunkte decided to found a Cultural Council as one of their most important undertakings. They intended to show the world how to approach the renewal of spiritual life and the permeation of spiritual life with new impulses.

You know, in the “Key Points of the Social Question” attention is drawn to the fact that the most important aspiration of our time must be to raise a subconscious goal of present humanity to conscious action. That is precisely: the shaping of the social organism into a threefold one.

Anyone who has the slightest insight into the seething and pulsating life of humanity today can already feel that there is nothing utopian in these “key points”. Rather, it is the result of thirty to thirty-five years of observation that years of observation, what actually the majority of people fundamentally want, or let us say, actually should want according to their instincts, according to their feelings, but what they do not yet admit to themselves because they have a certain fear of raising it to their consciousness.

We can see the need for new paths to be taken in all three areas of life: in the spiritual, in the legal, state and political, and in the economic. And in my “Key Points” I tried to show how the main obstacles to walking on such new paths arise from the fact that over the last three to four centuries we have become accustomed to the suggestion that the unitary state must do everything. One could say that the unified state has gradually occupied the university system as well. The university system was annexed and occupied. Just consider that this university system has developed out of intellectual life itself. Consider that, in a time not so long behind us, the validity of the university system was based entirely on the individual fertility of the individual universities. Consider how people spoke of the law faculty in Bologna, how they spoke of the medical school in Salerno, how they spoke of other important schools; how they derived the reputation of the university system in the world from the special individual achievements of what was available in the individual universities. And it is basically only a more recent occupation or annexation, carried out by the states that were increasingly seizing power, that our higher education system finally ended up serving the external needs of the individual states. Today, in particular, anyone who feels connected to the pursuit of knowledge and the spirit and to the cultural aspirations of humanity should have some kind of historical memory of times when it was up to the universities to decide what they wanted to give the state and what they wanted to make of the state. And, I would like to say, a certain inner impulse, which comes from reflecting on things, should lead one to realize that, as was emphasized again and again at the end of the 18th century, at the beginning of the 19th century of the Age of Enlightenment, in the times of the Middle Ages, science was the servant of the theological and ecclesiastical establishment. How often has it been repeated, what Kant – you know that I am no Kantian – said with the words: the time is over when all the sciences followed in the train of theology. The sciences have become independent. They are called upon to carry the banner of all other culture. But basically only after such words had become popular from a justified feeling towards the spiritual life in the branches of science, only after that the state has created the current that has now made the university system the servant of the state, of politics, of jurisprudence. And, my esteemed fellow students, whether it is better for theology, that is, at least for something spiritual, to trail behind, or for the external state to trail behind, is still an open question. The coming times will have to pass judgment on that. For it was not nice, either, that, so to speak, a century after Kant spoke, science no longer wanted to follow theology, the rector of the Berlin Academy of Sciences, the famous physiologist Du Bois-Reymond, said that the gentlemen members of the Berlin Academy of Sciences felt very honored to be allowed to call themselves: the scientific protection force of the Hohenzollerns. This is ultimately the result of what I would like to call the occupation of the higher education system by the state. And it goes without saying that the state does not care for science, but for its “civil servants”. Recently, my dear fellow students, the rector of the University of Halle was able to publish an essay that throws a very strange spotlight on the old attitudes that he has come from after becoming rector. The rector of the University of Halle seems to be reasonably well informed about important events behind the scenes, because he points out with concern and in great detail in a newspaper article that there is an intention to close a large number of German universities and to establish civil service schools in their place, where civil servants will be trained in the right way. Yes, my dear fellow students, one must look at these things if one wants to understand that a relatively sharp language was used at the time in that appeal to a cultural council that originated in Stuttgart. Because what has had an effect on the university system has not only affected the appointment of professors and the inconvenience of the examination system, but has also affected the sciences, knowledge, and the spirit itself. And that is why a remedy was sought at the time, by calling upon everyone who was believed to have a heart and a mind for furthering the cause of education and spiritual matters in general. And it was the hope of those people who set to work on this appeal with a warm heart for such a cause that the first step was to turn to the representatives of spiritual life itself. Many well-meaning people thought that the university teachers themselves would see reason and go along with the emancipation of the university system from the state.

Well, my esteemed fellow students, a truly active support was not found. But all the more often one could hear how the gentlemen expressed themselves in a peculiar way. They said: Yes, if this threefold social order were realized, with its free spiritual life, then it would come about that instead of the minister of education and his civil servants, the teachers at the universities themselves would exercise a kind of administration of the entire educational system. No, said the gentlemen, I would rather be under the minister of education and his deputies than be subject to the decrees and measures that my colleagues make. And one could hear very strange statements about one's colleagues. And since one had the opportunity, in this journey through the opinions of university teachers, to hear what A said about B and B about A, not many of those remained who could be relied upon in this self-administration, this desire of the spiritual organism to be left to its own devices. One had quite sad experiences. You may already be aware that this whole cultural appeal, with all its good intentions, was in vain, that basically no one from the circle of spiritual workers wanted to stand up for a free spiritual life.

But one can also sense from external appearances what has happened in recent decades. Some people do not yet appreciate things in the right way. I would just like to emphasize that, for example, what one used to become by being part of the School of Spiritual Science was expressed in something that, so to speak, grew out of the scientific and the striving for knowledge itself. What had something to do with the quest for knowledge is the degree system at the various faculties. One only notices how the state examination system has crept into this degree system, which emerged from the self-administration of the universities. Finally, compared to the state examinations, what grew out of the universities, out of the sciences themselves, has become only a decoration.

Of course, such things are only symptoms at first. But as symptoms they show very clearly that a process of absorption of intellectual life by the political, by the external state life, has taken place to a high degree. And you can be quite sure that the state system, which I have pointed out today, and which only wants to be a state system, will kill the universities altogether because it does not need them as universities, as centers of learning. Because it has needed what it has needed from the universities so far only as a school for state officials, it will transform everything into schools for state officials. That is the tendency of the time. When something like this is mentioned, people always want to dismiss it as utopian, as the words of a false prophet. But one must also be able to see a little in the direction in which the times are moving. And finally, it has already progressed so far that we see a school of civil servants emerging from the law faculty, and an aspiration emerging from the medical faculty that aims to turn the healer of people into a mere cog in the state machine. And at the philosophy faculty? What is of much value today is what prepares people to be teaching officials, not educators, in the sense of the state! In Germany, the model country, in democratized Germany, teachers are no longer even called teachers or professors, but – horror of horrors! – Studienassessor or Studienoberassessor and the like. But these outward appearances have to do with the whole inner spirit of the sciences. And it was truly a sad thing that one had to realize that on the part of the teachers there is absolutely no heart and no sense for an independent intellectual life.

I must bear this in mind when I now take up the call that comes from the student body. If old age cannot do it – there is no other way to put it – then young people must feel it as their sacred duty to stand up for the freedom of intellectual life. Because we can be sure of one thing: if no one stands up for the freedom of intellectual life, if no one stands up for the original sources of a renewal of knowledge, then the times in which the next generation of our civilized humanity grows up will be dire. It is not without significance that a man as brilliant as Oswald Spengler can already prove scientifically, that is, with the means of the old science, that Western civilization is heading towards barbarism. We have learned to prove many things scientifically. Today, it is really being proved with great force that all our knowledge leads to barbarism.

This is something that, as one can believe, must weigh like a nightmare on the youth, who, after all, must not grow up today in blind faith in authority, who must not allow themselves a blind faith in authority, but who must look with seeing eyes at what is going on at the institutions they enter in order to grow into life. And one may therefore believe that it can make a certain beneficial impression, apart from everything - and I will and can disregard all that relates to me personally in the appeal - it makes a beneficial impression that now, in contrast to the old leaders, the led are speaking out and saying what they want, and that they are saying it in concrete terms. Because, my dear fellow students, the liberation of intellectual life, the independence of the intellectual organism, cannot be achieved through tirades or rhetoric. That which has been absorbed by the state must be pulled out again. But this can only happen if there is a real intellectual force. And just as in the age of materialism science was powerless in the face of the state's desires for absorption, so would a material science remain powerless in the face of the state's desires for absorption, transforming science into barbarism. To lift the spirit of science and knowledge out of politics, out of all that it is involved in today to its detriment, can only have a positive effect. Just as material science has fallen prey to unscientific powers, so too will spiritual science, through its own essence, through its own power, be able to pull this science out of the unspiritual powers again. And only it will be able to establish the free spiritual life, the spiritual part of the social organism that is independent.

Of course, you who are signing this appeal must realize that it will be perceived as a storm, especially when it comes from such a source. But, my esteemed fellow students, we cannot make progress without a storm today; without the will and courage to truly transform what needs to be transformed, we will not move forward, but instead continue to decline, into barbarism. It must be clear from the outset that this appeal cannot be favorably received by certain quarters. But I believe that all those who wholeheartedly and courageously subscribe to it are also aware that nothing at all could be achieved with an appeal that would be favorably received by certain quarters, to which I am alluding here. We must be prepared for a fight with those who want to do the opposite today.

Of course, it will be important not to simply issue a call in words and send it out into the world. My dear fellow students, I have seen many calls in the course of my life. And I know that appeals mean nothing if there are no people standing behind them, for whose will such an appeal is basically only an expression, even an external means of expression. People whose strength does not wane when they see how everything is opposed to what one wants in the early days, energetic people must stand behind such a cause, otherwise words of such severity are not justified. But they must be justified in our time, basically after all the experiences that have been made. But all that must be made clear as criticism to those who are concerned in this way through such criticism of the existing, all that must be juxtaposed to the positive work. And we will probably have to see, if what is intended is to succeed, that circles are formed and more and more circles are formed, ever larger and larger areas, completely internationally, that really work in the sense of spiritual science, that they fertilize the individual scientific disciplines with spiritual science.

It has gradually come to something strange when it has been a matter of connecting young, aspiring minds to the operation of spiritual life. I would think of many things if I wanted to talk about this chapter. I will just tell you an example of a nice scene that once took place at a philosophical faculty, where a young, hopeful doctor wanted to habilitate for – yes, for philosophy. He went to the professor, who held him in high esteem, and told him that he wanted to habilitate, and what would now be pleasant for him was that this would be chosen as the topic for his inaugural lecture. Then the professor, who, as I said, was well disposed towards the young doctor and who wanted this young doctor to become a private lecturer at his side, said: Yes, but that's not possible at all! I can't recommend you to my colleagues for a lectureship; they'd all turn on me. You've only written about philosophical events and personalities of the 19th century in philosophy; we can't allow someone like that to become a lecturer. You must have written about much, much older things. – Yes, said the young doctor, what should I do now, Mr. Hofrat? I thought what I wrote about Schopenhauer, about the development of aesthetics in the 19th century, would be good? Perhaps the Viennese present already realize who it is? Yes, said the Privy Councillor, it doesn't depend on what you write about, but only on it being old and unknown. Let us look up an old Italian esthete in the encyclopedia. They opened the encyclopedia and came to G, where the name Gravina was listed. Neither of them knew anything about him, but the professor in question thought it was the right thing to do. And the young doctor wrote his habilitation thesis on this interesting topic, a completely unknown, insignificant Italian esthete. And now the professor could admit him as a private lecturer. But the whole process took much longer than that; he had to work on it for at least a year and a half, I think, because it was not that easy to put the merits of this unknown Italian esthete in the right perspective.

That is just an extreme case. But you can imagine the huge number of such cases.

Let us just take a look at how it came about that, little by little, all freedom in the choice of dissertation topics basically ceased. In a subject such as modern philology, Wilhelm Scherer, for example, actually managed to schematize and organize the entire dissertation process. A student who came and asked for a dissertation topic was simply allowed to do that dissertation, whether it suited him or not, whether he had done something special on the subject or not, it did not matter. He was allowed to do the dissertation that could serve some professor who then wanted to write a detailed book on the subject by collecting the individual dissertations and the like. But this external activity corresponds more closely than one might think to the inner workings of the spiritual life. And I do not think I am mistaken if I say that it would be of the greatest benefit to you, my esteemed fellow students, if you could really counter the spirit that is blowing from there with a fresh, elementary source of scientific work. If you formed circles and, with all the tools and sources at your disposal, tried real, original, elementary scientific work. From group to group in individual cities, those who want to work in this spirit may come together – I would say that if you want my advice. If you want to work for the lively flourishing of scientific life, of the life of knowledge, then the chemist, the physicist, the philosopher, the lawyer, the historian, the philologist will be able to contribute to some common topic in a common effort. And if it is desired, then we who work in Dornach for these university courses will endeavor to create a kind of free committee of those lecturers who have lectured on the various branches of science that have been fertilized by anthroposophically oriented spiritual science, and that this committee can make suggestions about what should be dealt with first. The topics should not be chosen out of the spirit that has come from people who govern in these fields to this day, but rather, it should be suggested more out of the need for the general spiritual life of humanity. And again, the free choice should be counted on. Those who have had some experience may say what is necessary. Those who see what is needed from this free committee may decide what they are particularly suited for. And so those who have now pioneered a kind of free college system here in Dornach by giving lectures could work together with those who, as enthusiastic students, are interested in the question of what will become of the spiritual life of Western civilization through this spiritual science.

This is roughly the way in which one could initially attempt to put the words of the appeal into practice in a positive way in scientific work. Of course, it is not yet time to give more detailed advice. But you can be sure that those working here in Dornach or in Stuttgart will always be ready to use all their strength to support, to support, to advise, to help wherever an enthusiastic student body wants to contribute its mite, there or there, in this or that group to what today must be a great, comprehensive, intensive task, an enormous ideal: to lead from a renewed spiritual research going back to the original sources, to a spiritual life - and thus to the general cultural and civilizing life of humanity - to an ascent, to a dawn, not to a decline, not to a sunset, as some believe.

And by promising that everything in me will be done to ensure that intensive scientific collaboration based on inner harmony takes place, by promising you this, I would like to answer the question that was put to me: what I advise as a positive thing to do first. If we really work together in this spirit, then the student body will be able to produce the results that have unfortunately not been produced by those who supposedly lead the student body, whose task it would be, however, to provide the student body with leaders. If they do not prove themselves as such, well, then a good school in breaking away from all belief in authority will be what you will have to go through if you stand on the ground of free scientific work. I believe I can foresee that you will be able to work well together with spiritual science and with all that is wanted from Dornach and from Stuttgart, if you place yourself on such ground. And it is from this attitude that I would like to have addressed you today, my esteemed fellow students.

My dear fellow students! It is clear from many statements of this kind that we are counting on you with all our hearts for what we are thinking of here as anthroposophically oriented spiritual science. We are counting on you with all our hearts because, if we are to work against the impending downfall of Western civilization, it can only come from science, given the state of affairs today. Consider that what has brought us into today's situation, after all, basically also comes from science. I will point out much less what is actually, so to speak, on the palm of your hand: that the destructive anti-cultural institutions of the latest time are basically scientific results. It is easy to imagine that, so we don't have to discuss it here. But we want to consider something else. You see, the proletariat, if I may use the grotesque expression, has a kind of Janus face today. It is quite true that the proletariat must be brought in if the situation is to be reorganized today. That, again, is something that is as self-evident as can be. And perhaps I may remind you that in Stuttgart, among the nearer and more distant surroundings, the cold was at its worst when I once used a certain word in a public lecture, but which, I believe, was spoken out of a real insight into present conditions. I said that the bourgeoisie suffers first of all from a decadent brain and that it is absolutely dependent on replacing brain work with the work of the ether brain, with something spiritualized. That is as obvious as anything can be. By contrast, the proletarian, in the context of the present vertical migration of peoples, does not yet have a decadent brain. He can still work with his physical brain if only he can be persuaded to do so. This, of course, has caused a great deal of resentment among the bourgeoisie in the immediate and more distant vicinity. But today it is not a matter of whether people are more or less resentful, but of bringing the truth to light.

Now, however, the proletariat is revealing this. On the one hand, the proletarians will always be inclined to say to themselves: Yes, we don't want to know anything about what you are bringing us. It's too difficult for us; it's not of interest to us for the time being. But on the other hand, these proletarians are completely fed up with the waste products of the science of the 19th and early 20th centuries. They only work with what has fallen away from it. We must make up our minds to look at it that way. We must say to ourselves: Of course it will be quite difficult to enter the proletariat with what we are working out of science in a very serious way. But if we do not let up, if we do not let ourselves be deterred, but rather base ourselves on this social action: we must win the proletariat from science! then we will also certainly get through to the proletariat with something sound, just as one has come to the proletariat with Marxism and Bolshevism. It is only a matter of not losing our breath too soon, that we actually carry out what we have once recognized as correct. That was always and always my principle in anthroposophical work. Therefore, I never compromised, but simply made enemies with full insight into the matter, because there was no other way than to simply reject everything that came up amateurishly. And if it were worth the effort, it would be very easy to prove that the majority of our current enemies are people who were once rejected because of over-amateurism. You would see, if you went into the details, that this is the case. All you need is a substitute for memory. After all, memory is no longer as strong! If you have access to spiritual training, you know that. Then you know how to assess the enemies. They often emerge from the shallows only after years.

Therefore, you must not shrink from a powerful adherence to what was once recognized as correct, then it will also go with the proletariat. For the proletariat suffers only from an exaggerated sense of authority. But as soon as you have it for yourself, you would win it. It is still difficult today to make people understand that their leaders are their greatest enemies from the bottom to the top; that they are pests. But this must be taught to people little by little; then it will work. Then one will probably give the proletariat an interest in this healthy scientific work that we are scientifically developing. Then one will have an extraordinarily good audience in the proletariat. And for a long time to come, the proletariat itself must, of course, be an 'audience' in its mass.

But now I would like to point out something else. You see, for many years I have been active in the anthroposophical movement and have always tried to work in a certain direction, which consisted of bringing together the anthroposophical and the specifically scientific. I could give you specific examples of the difficulties that have always arisen in this regard. For example, many years ago a scholar approached us who was an extraordinarily learned man in terms of Orientalism and Assyriology. On the other hand, he was enthusiastic about anthroposophy. It would have been natural for someone who really had Orientalism and so on in his fingers as a scholar and was enthusiastic about anthroposophy to work on these two things at the same time. But he could not be brought to do that; the man could not be brought to build a bridge from one area to another. He could make progress in both, but he could not build a bridge. Nevertheless, it must also be the case that this bridge must be tried absolutely. And you can find it; you can find the entrance to every single science through anthroposophy.

On the other hand, I found a well-known professor of botany who was also an enthusiastic 'theosophist'. The man in question wrote botanical works and he wrote about theosophy. He did not belong to the Anthroposophical Society, but to the Theosophical Society. He wrote about theosophy in the same way that Annie Besant wrote about it. He was completely a botanist when he closed the book on Theosophy and completely a 'Theosophist' when he taught or wrote books on Theosophy, without one being able to recognize that he was a botanist. He even found it abhorrent when I spoke to him about botany and wanted to prepare a kind of bridge.

You see, this is the result of the culture of the last few centuries, this double bookkeeping – that is what I must always call it. One wants that which relates to life in the specialist journal, and that which one then needs for the mind, for the “interior”, as one calls it, in the Sunday supplement of one's political newspaper. Politics is in between; according to the “tripartite structure” that has existed up to now, you want to get that from the political paper. These things are the ones that you actually have to see through above all. And then you will perhaps be the ones most qualified to help find this bridge everywhere. In a sense — it won't always appear so radically — things are like that.

You see, poor Hölderlin already expressed the beautiful word at the turn of the 18th to the 19th century when he said to himself, when he looks around his Germany, he finds officials, factory owners, carpenters and tailors everywhere, but — no people. He finds scholars, artists and teachers and so on, but — no people. He finds young and older and old, sedate people, but – no people.

One would like to say today: We actually have the least of all in our learned professions, that there are people there! We have sciences, and the scientists actually swim around as something factual. Basically, we actually live to a high degree quite apart from science, in that we feel like human beings. Just think, if we today – I mean, if we summarize all of our scholarly knowledge – if we do a piece of work today to habilitate, what do we do then? We cannot just sit down and write what flows from our soul into such a scholarly work. That doesn't work. Then we would very soon be reproached: Yes, he writes from the wrist. You mustn't do that. You mustn't write from the wrist, but you have to study the books for your doctoral dissertation, which you otherwise don't pay attention to, maybe don't even read, only open at the pages where something is written that you have to quote. In short, you have to have as external a relationship as possible to what you are working on, and you absolutely must not have an internal relationship to it! When people meet again, I can tell you about a strange meeting in Weimar that took place during my working hours at the local Goethe-Schiller Archive, where I was able to attend the meetings of the Goethe Society. As soon as someone said something that was related to Goethe, or as soon as someone touched on something scientific, they would say: There's another group talking shop, that's not on! The purpose of the gathering was something that had to be avoided at all costs, so as not to be seen in a bad light of talking shop. But all of this is essentially to blame for the fact that we have ended up in this situation. In Weimar, one could really see all the specialists – many of them offered a kind of combination of all subjects – in these seven years, and there was basically no strong differentiation by nationality. For example, when Mr. Thomas from a very Western university in America writes, there is no real difference between the work and thinking of any Schmidt or Scherer student, even in his work and thinking - he worked on Goethe's “Faust.” It was basically international, because Thomas only differed from the others in that he sat on the floor and crossed his legs when he sat on the floor in front of the bookcase. That was how he distinguished himself as an American. But otherwise he worked like the others. The only exception was a Russian councilor. The man didn't know what questions he was researching. But when he came to an inn in the evening, where people would gather, they would always say to the others: “Don't look around, because the councilor is walking around!” Because he kept starting to talk about what he knew of Goethe's Faust, people avoided sitting with him. These things are actually more important than one would usually think; for they could be amply multiplied and would still explain something about how the scientific life has developed bit by bit. And we want to get out of this! We certainly do not want to become pedants or new-fangled simplifiers, but we must realize that man stands higher than all science, that he need not let himself be tyrannized by it. And the emancipation of the spirit is actually working towards combating science as such in its abstraction, and putting man first. So that we not only have science as Bölsche writes about the “immortality” of science. Wilhelm Bölsche has also set up a kind of spiritual science, but he seeks it in libraries, which are, however, full of paper and blackened print of the actual spirits.

But this is what we must work towards: this humanization of scientific life, this: putting people in the foreground in so-called objective science. Objective science must actually have its existence in life in man. And having this does not make one dry and arid. On the contrary, by combating abstract thinking, one becomes a useful co-worker in that which we so urgently need: the combating of barbarism in the life of Western civilization.

This is what is most urgently needed by those who enter the learned professions, or professions supported by the sciences. Therefore, I believe that it will be extraordinarily beneficial if you get together at the individual universities and freely address such topics scientifically, develop such topics, as it is to be attempted from the bodies that we already have, especially from the Waldorf school. I am not thinking that a school-like operation should be set up, not at all, my dear fellow students, but I am thinking of something else. We will try, so to speak, to shape the threads in such a way that they are woven out of the necessities of the time, that they are basically found in view of what actually lies in the ethos of the overall context of our culture. And then certain individuals among our Waldorf school teachers, the body of teachers, which in turn should maintain a kind of unity with those who have presented here, should simply be given the task of identifying the topics that need to be resolved today. And it should only be said to the student body what tasks are necessary according to the insights that these circles can have. The rest is therefore not letting oneself be led by the tasks, but it is a fathoming of what is particularly necessary today. And there will be the opportunity to work really correctly from scientific foundations. I would like to emphasize that it must be avoided that small scientific circles, more or less really or supposedly working, isolate themselves and believe that they can do enough with that today. This could, of course, be very useful and will be very useful, and it must also be done, but we also need a broad student movement that is truly aware today: things cannot go on as they would among young people if these young people were only to follow in the footsteps of those who still hold office today out of old traditions and old times. If one says that the Social Democrats must get rid of their leaders, then it is above all necessary that the youth of today get rid of the old leaders in a certain way. That will be more difficult than it should be.

Because, you see, I cannot, of course, avoid the issue that is actually at stake. And I must ask you to be quite clear about the fact that I am talking about these things with complete honesty and sincerity. You can be quite sure: we would make easy progress in the anthroposophically oriented spiritual movement if we had the freedom to work only for the spirit and as a stimulus to the spirit. Assigning posts, awarding degrees, letting students fail their state exams – that is what the others do. And that is an important factor. We certainly do not underestimate it in our field. For we know full well what courage and boldness are needed today, especially for the prospective scholar and prospective scientific worker, to be and remain with us. Because, in fact, we can offer him very little today. If we can gradually build up our individual movements, then things will improve. When the Waldorf School was founded, I said: the founding is nice, but it has no meaning if at least ten more schools are not founded in the next quarter, because then it is only established. And I have definitely envisaged – as I always follow up practical ideas, not just ideas that can be handed down – that if we can found schools everywhere, then we will be able to appoint to our schools those who, under certain circumstances, do it the way Dr. Stein told us himself. But it is not a system. He enrolled, saw what a few lectures were like, but otherwise he read cycles and other things, read what was quoted there, and completed his academic studies. Of course, this cannot be generalized, because probably only three quarters of the professors would agree that if there were only students like Dr. Stein, they could actually only attend the first three lectures and then go for a walk. This cannot be easily realized for the general public today. So I do not want to propagate that. But I just want to draw your attention to the fact that at any rate the spirit that sits on the chairs in the lecture halls today, if it is transferred to the school benches, does not bring us any future. Out of this necessity you must already find the courage to at least in some way ally yourselves with what is wanted here. But on the other hand, I thought practically, as the Waldorf School was founded: if we are able to truly emancipate spiritual life, we will have more and more Waldorf Schools, and then we will also be able to offer our young friends from the student body a future. It is not at all unidealistic for me to say that. But then it will be easier. But we have to support each other from both sides. We will only be able to work on founding independent schools and universities if we see an understanding student body coming towards us. To do this, we need not only small groups, but a student movement that wants to work on a large scale and advocate on a large scale for what is being considered here.

I must point out that what I have said in these days as the reason for the World School Association is meant very seriously. I think of it as international, so that it is to be created, so to speak, out of the thinking and feeling of today. If we can first make the world understand that there are really only two movements today that have to struggle with each other, on the one hand Bolshevism, which is leading the world into the swamp, and on the other hand the threefold social organism, then people will also be faced with a choice as soon as they see that the old impulses will no longer work! Either it must happen, that those who want to advance civilization in a reasonable way must gradually live into the impulse of threefolding, or, if people are too lazy to do so, Bolshevism will flood Europe and barbarize European culture. If people understand this, they will be easier to win than they are today.

There are three things that must be taken into account. When one speaks to the international world today about a project such as the one in Dornach, and that money is needed for it, people take the view that it must all be idealism! You can't be so mean as to give money for it! Money is much too dirty to be used for such an idealistic cause. In short, people are not easily won over to something like this unless they are prepared for it for a long time. And since we cannot complete our building in Central European countries because of the foreign currency, we are dependent on other parts of today's civilized world. But they don't give us any money just like that. Basically, they are very tight-fisted. On the other hand, people are still relatively easy to win over if you tell them you want to set up sanatoriums. You can get as much money as you want. We can't do that now, set up sanatoriums, but we can get involved in the middle way. The middle way is what I mean by the world school association. The World School Association can finance all cultural institutions if it is understood in the right way. And there is still some understanding for the establishment of the school-based approach, but less for something that is directly the building. We have to work for what is in the middle, so to speak. Therefore, it is important that this foundation of the World School Association, which we will have as something universal, be prepared in a certain way, that the mood be set for this World School Association. And so I would like to suggest that it would be best if you were to include in your decisions, in your strongest initiative, that you approach everyone you can, and convince them that this World School Association must spread across all countries, that it is up to them to emancipate intellectual life. That it must finance as many free schools across the world as possible. The emancipation of spiritual life must be pursued on the grandest scale. We must come to emancipate ourselves from that which, in essence, enslaves us spiritually. But we can only do that if we create the right mood. The tyranny is greater than one might think. From a place in Europe, I will attempt to inaugurate this founding of the World School Association myself. But what must come first is to create the right mood for it. Because today you can't achieve anything by forming groups of twelve or fifteen people to work things out. Rather, it is important that we spread this idea as widely as possible: a world school association must come into being. Now, I can well imagine, and I am quite satisfied with the fact, that of course the students can't exactly open their wallets very wide. That is not necessary. The others belong to this. But what the student can open, that is – you know, I mean this cum grano salis – what the student can open, that is his mouth. That is what I mean: that you can make it possible for the World School Association to open its mouth wherever you go. So that when we establish this World School Association in the near future, we will not fall on deaf ears, but on prepared people. That is what must be.

As you can see, we have enough to do. What we need is nothing more than real courage and a clear view of the world. Why should we not be able to overcome with youthful strength the things that must be overcome because they still tower over our time with all the hallmarks of the old age and seek to oppress us? We must not let ourselves be oppressed. We must realize today that we are dancing on a knife's edge, or, as we might say, on a volcano. It is not the case, my dear fellow students, that things will continue as they are now. We are heading for very, very sad times. But we can remedy these sad times by growing into them with courage and energy. And I believe that spiritual science, anthroposophy, can be of help to you in this. It can be of help to everyone.

I ask you in conclusion only: do not pursue things particularistically, sectionally, but in the broadest style. Do not exclude anyone, but include everyone who wants to work with you. The only thing that should count is the will to work honestly with us in the direction we have set, the direction of growing into the scientific professions. It seems to me, my dear fellow students, that we must not sin in this direction any longer. We must be broad-minded. We must regard everyone who honestly wants to work with us as a very welcome co-worker. We must not allow any distinction to arise between people and people, but we must let everyone who simply has the will to work with us, work with us. This should also be the case, as it has always been in the anthroposophical movement. We have never demanded that anyone give up anything they otherwise represent in the world. No one has ever had to give up anything; they only had to accept what the Anthroposophical movement could give them. And perhaps I may recall something personal. You know how I am always reproached for having once been part of the Theosophical movement. It was not a matter of me going along with it! The Theosophical Society actually approached me; it joined me for a time, until it threw out what I stood for. But I said to the Theosophists at our first meeting in London that it was not a matter of us accepting anything from the center, but rather of us bringing to the common altar what we had to bring at that particular time.

In this sense, we can work together to the greatest extent possible. And if you work in the style of such work, especially in student circles, then we will make progress.

At the suggestion of German students, a meeting was held on the afternoon of 9 April 1921 to discuss the question of how anthroposophical work could be built up at universities. Dr. Steiner spoke at the end.

Dr. Stein has, however, pointed out the three most important things to be considered here: whether to organize or not, as desired. But above all, I would like to emphasize one thing: if you are involved in a movement like ours, it is necessary to learn from the past and to lead further stages of the movement in such a way that certain earlier mistakes are avoided.

What it will depend on in the first place is this: that anthroposophy, to the extent that it can already be accepted by the student body in terms of understanding and to the extent that it is at all possible through the available forces or opportunities, that anthroposophy in its various branches be spread among the student body as positive spiritual content. Our experience has basically shown that something real can only be achieved if one can really build on the basis of the positive.

Yesterday I had the opportunity to point out that years ago an attempt was made to establish a kind of world federation for spiritual science, and that nothing came of this world federation, which actually only wanted to proceed according to the rules of formal external organization. It ended, so to speak, in what the Germans call a “Hornberg shooting”. But because a sense of cohesion and collaboration were needed at the time, the existing adherents of anthroposophy had to be brought together in the “Anthroposophical Society”. These were now more or less all people who had simply been involved with anthroposophy. It is only with such an organization, where there is already something in it, that one can then do something.

Of course it will be especially necessary for the student body not only to work in the sense of spreading the given anthroposophical problems in the narrower sense, but also to work out general problems and the like in the sense that Dr. Stein just meant. Of course, it will not be so necessary at first to work towards dissertations with such things. It has often, really quite often, happened that I have been asked by younger students in recent times along the following lines: Yes, we actually want to combine anthroposophy with our specific science. How can one act so that one works in the right way towards one's goal after graduation, after the state examination? What should you do? How should you organize your work? — I always gave the following advice: Try to get through the official studies as quickly as possible, to get through them as quickly as possible, and I am always very happy to help with any advice. Choose any scientific topic that seems to emerge from the course of your studies, as a dissertation or state examination paper or the like. Whichever topic you choose, each one is of course diametrically opposed to the other approaches in anthroposophical terms; there can be no doubt about that. Each is diametrically opposed. But now I advise you to write your dissertation in such a way that you first write down what the professor can censor, what he will understand; and take a second notebook, and write down everything that arises for you in the course of your studies and that you believe should actually be worked in from anthroposophy. You then keep that for yourself. Then you write your two pages — that is how long a dissertation must be — and you submit them. And try to complete them. Then you can really help anthroposophy energetically with what you have acquired in addition to this one in the second notebook. For one only really realizes what significant problems arise, specialist and specialized problems, when one is put in the position of having to work scientifically on a certain topic and the like. But there is a danger of unclear collaboration with the professors. And submitting dissertations to the professors that are written “in the anthroposophical sense” – these are usually not suitable for professors – I do not consider this to be favorable because it actually slows us down at the pace that the anthroposophical movement should be taking.

We need as many academically trained colleagues as possible. If there is anything that is seriously lacking in the anthroposophical movement today, it is a sufficiently large number of academically trained colleagues. I do not mean the externality of needing, let's say, stamped people. It is not meant that way. But first of all, we need people who have learned to work scientifically from within. This inner scientific work is best learned in one's own work. Secondly, however, we need co-workers who come from the student body as soon as possible, and who are no longer held back by considerations for their later professional studies. — You see, it is not at all surprising that it is as difficult as it is in Switzerland, for example. As a student, of course, it is easy to join such an association in the first few semesters if you are free-minded enough to do so. Then come the last semesters. You are busy with other things, and it becomes more difficult. And so, one by one, the threads you have pulled are torn away. This has just been emphasized.

So I would like to say, especially for scientific collaboration: During such a transition period, the topics must be dealt with in two ways: one that the professor understands and the other that is saved for later. Of course, I am not saying that very special opportunities that arise should not be seized, and that these opportunities, which are there, should not be vigilantly observed by the student body in the most eminent sense and really exploited in the sense and service of the movement. On the one hand, I hope, and on the other hand, I fear almost silently, that our dear friend, Professor Römer in Leipzig, will now be inundated with a huge number of anthroposophical dissertations! But I think that would also be one of the things he would probably prefer. And such a document of student trust would show that he is not one of the professors just mentioned. That would come from the foundation.

Now, however, we need an expansion of what has already been discussed here in Dornach, namely a kind of collaboration after all. You will work out among yourselves later how this can best be done technically. It would be good if, with the help of the Waldorf teachers, who would be joined by other personalities from our ranks – Professor Römer, Dr. Unger and others – a certain exchange could take place, especially regarding the choice of topics for dissertations or scientific papers, without in any way compromising the free initiative of the individual. It can only be in the form of advice. It is precisely for this scientific work that a closer union should be sought – you do not need an organization, but an exchange of ideas.

The economic aspect is, of course, a very, very important one. It is a fact that the university system in particular, but actually more or less the entire higher education system, will suffer greatly from our economic difficulties. Now it is a matter of really seeing clearly that it is only possible to help if it is possible to advance such institutions, as for example for Germany it is the “Kommende Tag”, as it is here the “Futurum”. So that a reorganization of the economic situation of the student body can also emanate from these organizations. I can assure you that all the things we are tackling in this direction are actually calculated on rapid growth. We do not have time to take our time; instead, we actually have to make rapid progress with such economic organizations. And here I must say that the members of the student body, perhaps with very few exceptions, can help us above all by spreading understanding for such things. It has really happened in relation to other things that the student could get something from his father for this or that, could get something from his relatives. Not everyone has only destitute friends. And then there really is something that works like an avalanche. Just think about how powerfully something like an avalanche works, based on experience: when you start somewhere, it continues. Something like this continues to have an effect when you act out of the positive: try to study these brochures that have been published by “Kommender Tag” and “Futurum”, and try to create understanding for something like this.

It is this understanding that the oldest people in particular find extremely difficult to work their way up to. I have seen how older people, I would say, have chewed on the desire to understand what “Tomorrow” or “Futurum” want, how they have repeatedly fallen back on their old economic prejudices, like a cat on its paws, with which they have rushed into economic decline, and how they cannot find their way out. I believe that my dear fellow students really do have a clear understanding that could also have an effect on the older generations. We cannot make any progress in any other way. Because I can tell you: when we have come so far in relation to these economic institutions that we can effectively do something, that we first of all have enough funds to do something on a large scale – because only then does it help – and on the other hand can overcome the resistance of the proletariat, which is simply hostile to an economic improvement in the situation of students, then it must indeed be the first concern of these our economic organizations to work economically in relation to the student body.

The “struggle problems”! Yes, you see, the point is this. The Anthroposophical Society, even if it was not called that in the past, has existed since the beginning of the century, and it has actually only ever worked positively, at least as far as I myself am concerned. It let the opponents rant and rave, do all sorts of things. But of course the opponents then come up with certain objections. They say, this has been said, that has been said, yes, that has not even been refuted. It is indeed difficult to find understanding for the fact that it is actually the person making the claim who has the burden of proof, not the person to whom it is attributed. And we could really experience it, again and again, that strange views emerged precisely among academics, I now mean lecturers, professors, pastors and those who had emerged from the ranks of academics. Just think, for example, of the things said against anthroposophy, anthroposophists and so on by professors who are, I would say, 'revered' by the outside world (but I say this only with caution) – things that are so well documented that following up the evidence is a mockery, a bloody mockery, of all possible methods of making a claim in science. and so on, which are so documented that if one follows these documents with reasons, it is a mockery, a bloody mockery of all possible methods of asserting something in science. Therefore, with someone like Professor Fuchs, I simply had to say: It is impossible that this person is anything other than a completely impossible anatomist! Am I supposed to believe that he conscientiously tests his things when, after all that has been presented, he tests my baptismal certificate in the way he has tested it? You have to draw conclusions about the way one person treats one area from the way they treat another. Such things simply show – through the fact that people step forward and show their particular habits – the symptoms of how science is done today. Even the things that are presented at universities and technical colleges today are basically no better founded than the things that are asserted in this way; it is only that the generally extremely loose habits in scientific life are emerging in this way. And that is what is needed: to raise the fight to a higher level, so to speak.

And here it is not necessary, as my fellow student wished, for example, and as I very well understand, to play the game as a “fighting organization.” That is not necessary. Rather, only one thing: to avoid what has occurred so frequently in the Anthroposophical Society. In the Anthroposophical Society, this always came to the fore, as incredible as it is – not in everyone, of course, but very often: one was obliged to defend oneself against a wild accusation, and then to use harsh words, for example, say, in the case when a gentleman of Gleich invents a lecturer “Winter” by reading that I myself have held winter lectures, then invents a personality “Winter” and introduces it into the fight in a very evil way. Yes, you see, I don't think one would say too harsh words in this case if one were to speak of foolishness! Because here, even when it occurs in a general, we are dealing with a genuine, pure-bred idiot. And in the Anthroposophical Society, it was usually the case that one was not wronged by the one who acted somewhat like Mr. von Gleich, but by the one who defended himself. Until today! We have learned from experience that one must not become aggressive in this way. In the eyes of many people, to become aggressive means to defend oneself in this way. It is necessary to follow things with a watchful eye and to reject them, without emphasizing that one is a fighting organization or the like. You have to be positive about it. And then the others must stand behind them, behind the one who is obliged to defend himself. It is not a matter of us becoming fighting cocks ourselves; but it is a matter of the others standing behind us if it should become necessary to defend ourselves. And it is a matter of really following the symptoms of the world-descriptive, scientific, religious and so on in this respect in our time, taking an interest in them.

Take this single phenomenon: I was obliged to characterize in the appropriate way the philosophical, or what should one call it, scribblings of Count Keyserling – in my opinion it does not matter what you call them – because in his incredible superficiality he mixed in the madness that I had started from Haeckel's views. This is not only an objective untruth, but in this case a subjective untruth, that is, a lie, because one must demand that the person who makes such an assertion search for the sources; and he could have seen the chapter that I wrote in the earliest years of my writing in my discussions with Haeckel, in the introduction to Goethe's natural science writings. You can all read it very well. Now Count Keyserling has had a small pamphlet published by his publisher: “The Way to Perfection”. I will not characterize this writing further, but I recommend that one or two of you buy this writing and pass it around; because if everyone wanted to buy it, it would be a waste of money; but I still recommend that you read it so that you get an idea of what, so to speak, goes against all wisdom in this writing “The Way to Perfection” by Keyserling. There is the following sentence, which he made up, more or less, as I remember it – it is not literal: Yes, if I said something incorrect, that Dr. Steiner started from Haeckel, Dr. Steiner could have simply rectified that; he could have corrected me, because I have — and now I ask you to pay close attention to this sentence — because I have no time for a special Steiner source research.

Now then, you see, we have already brought it so far in scientific morality that someone who founds a “school of wisdom” considers it justified to send things out into the world that he admittedly has no time to research, that he therefore does not research! Here one catches a seemingly noble thinker - because Count Keyserling always cited omnipotence in his writing; that is what is so impressive about Count Keyserling, that he always cites omnipotence. All present-day writing has arrived at a point where it is most mired and ragged. And despite the omnipotence, there is a complete moral decline of views here. And so people have to be told: Of course, nobody expects you to do Steiner source research either; but then, if you don't do any Steiner source research, if you don't have time, then – with regard to all these things about which you should know something about the matter: Keep your mouth shut!

You see, it is necessary that we have no illusions, that we simply discard every authority principle that has arisen through convention and the like, that we face ourselves freely, really, truly examining what is present in our time. Then we will be able to notice quite a lot of it today.

I would advise you to look at some of the sentences that the great Germanist Roethe in Berlin occasionally utters, purely in terms of form – I will completely disregard the view, which one can certainly respect. Then you will find it instructive. We do not need to be a fighting organization. But we must be ready and alert to take action when the things that are leading us so horribly into decline actually materialize. Do we need to be an organization of anthroposophical students to do that? We simply need to want to be alert, decent, and scientifically conscientious people, then we can always take a stand against such harm from our most absolute private point of view. And if we are also organized for positive work, then the number of those who are organized for it can stand behind us and support us. We need the latter. But it would not be very clever of us to present ourselves as a fighting organization. On the other hand, it is important that we really work seriously on improving our current conditions. And to do that, we first have to take note of the terrible damage that is coming to light in one field or another – and which is really easy to see, because it involves enormous sums of money – and have the courage to take a stand against it in whatever way we can.

You have already done something if you can do just that: simply set the record straight for a small number of your fellow students with regard to such things, even if it happens only in the smallest of circles. Yesterday, I said to one of our members here regarding the World School Association: I think it is particularly valuable, especially with regard to such things, to start by talking to one or two or three others, that is, to very small groups, even if there are only two of them; and, to put it very radically, if someone can't find anyone else, then at least say it to yourself! So these things are quite tangible in terms of what the individual is able to do. Some will be able to do much more, as has actually already happened with a doctor who was a member and whose fellow students proved to be very enthusiastic. The point is not to make enemies by appearing as fighting cocks in a wild form, but also not to shy away from the fight when others start it. That's it: we must always let the other start; and then the necessary help must stand behind us, which does not allow the tactic to arise, because it has arisen: that we would have started. If they start from the other side, then one is forced to defend oneself; and then you can always read that the anthroposophical side has used this or that in the fight as an attack and so on. They always turn the tables. That is the method of the opponents. We must not let that happen.

As for the World School Association, I would just like to say this: in my opinion, it would be best if the World School Association could be established independently of each other in Entente and neutral countries, but also in the German-speaking area of Central Europe. If it could happen at the same time, so that things could develop independently of each other, so to speak, it would be best. Of course, a certain amount of vigilance is required to see what happens. I believe that Switzerland, in particular, should mediate here. It would be good if we could do it right now. I can assure you: things are on a knife's edge – and if the same possibilities for war existed today as existed in 1914, then we would have had war again long ago. Things are on a knife edge in terms of sentiment and so on. And we won't get something like this World School Association off the ground if, for example, it is founded in Germany now, and then the others, if only for a week, have to play catch-up. It would simply not come off; it would be impractical to do so.

On the other hand, we must not allow any doubt to arise about our position regarding these matters. This School of Spiritual Science is called the Goetheanum. We gave it this name during the First World War while we were still here. The other nations, insofar as they have participated in anthroposophy, have adopted the name and accepted it. We have never denied that we have reasons to call the School of Spiritual Science 'Goetheanum', and it would therefore not be good if in Germany things were allowed to appear as some kind of imitation from the other side.

So it would be a matter of proceeding in this regard — forgive the harsh word — a little less clumsily, of doing it a little more skillfully in the larger world cultural sense! Switzerland would now have to work with full understanding here. So it would actually have to be taken up simultaneously by Central Europe, by the Entente and by the neutral countries.

For the time being, I don't know whether it will take off in just one or two places. This morning I received the news that the committee, which was convened yesterday and which wanted to work so hard, went to bed a few minutes after yesterday's meeting left the hall; it was postponed until tonight. We will wait and see if they meet tonight. We have already had very strange experiences; and based on this knowledge, that we have already had the most diverse experiences, I have taken the liberty of speaking to you here about the fact that the experiences made should be taken into account in the further course of the movement.

On the other hand, I am convinced that if the necessary strong impulse and proper enthusiasm can be found among my fellow students, especially for what I myself and other friends of mine have mentioned in the course of this lecture: enthusiasm for the truth – then things will work out.

I would also like to say: I recently read an article from a feature page, and I can assure you that what recently took place in Stuttgart is not the slightest bit an end, but only a beginning, and I can assure you that things will get much, much worse. I have often said this to our friends here – a very, very long time ago already. I recently read a piece from a feature article in which it says: “Spiritual sparks, which flash like lightning after the wooden mousetrap, are thus sufficiently available, and it will take some of Steiner's cleverness to work in a conciliatory way so that one day a real spark of fire from the Dornach glory does not bring about an inglorious end.

I really do think that whatever must occur as a reaction against such action, which will grow ever stronger and stronger, will have to be better shaped and, above all, more energetically carried out. And I believe that you, my dear fellow students, need to let all your youthful enthusiasm flow in this direction, in what we have often mentioned here during this course: enthusiasm for the truth. Youthful enthusiasm for the truth has always been a very good impulse in the further development of humanity. May it be so in the near future through you in a matter that you recognize as good.

Address in Dornach after the fire of the Goetheanum on New Year's Eve 1922/23.

My dear friends! Esteemed attendees! I would have to read you a book if I wanted to share with you all the extraordinarily kind words and the words of heartfelt connection with what has been lost here as a result of the terrible catastrophe; I will therefore take the liberty of just sharing the names of those who have signed such words of sympathy and devotion to the cause. Some of them are a sign of how deeply the hearts of many people have been touched by what may be communicated from here to the world. Some of them are also signs of truly heartfelt desires and energetic resolutions of will to regain what we have lost. The widespread sympathy for our work and for our loss will certainly be a source of strength for many of you, and for this reason alone I am allowed to communicate all this here. For our cause should not be merely a theoretical one; our cause should be one of labor, of philanthropy, of devoted service to humanity, and therefore, what should be said from here should also include the communication of what is being done or intended to be done. I will only take the liberty of mentioning those names that do not belong to personalities who are here, because what the hearts of those who are here have to share has been expressed more silently, but no less deeply and clearly, in these days, in these days of truly painful togetherness. So you will allow me not to mention the dear friends of the cause who have expressed their sympathy in writing. You know them, of course. [The names are read out.]

We may assume that what has been attempted here is deeply rooted in many hearts, and I would like to fill this evening's lecture by interrupting the reflections of these days, as it were, and remember that it was a course that brought a large number of friends from outside to join the friends who otherwise try to work on the anthroposophical matter here at the Goetheanum. And in particular, I would like to turn first in thought to the young, to the younger friends who have come here for this course and who, to the greatest satisfaction of all those who are serious about anthroposophy, have recently found their way into this movement in such a beautiful, deep and heartfelt way.

We must be absolutely clear about the significance of young souls, souls that are striving to acquire all that can be acquired by a young person today in the way of science, art and so on, finding each other to work within the anthroposophical movement. These younger friends who have come to this course here are among those who came here recently, saw the Goetheanum, saw it again and probably thought that they would leave it in a different state than they are now on their return journey. And if I turn first to these younger friends in my thoughts, it is because everyone who cares about the anthroposophical movement must feel that everything that concerns any group or individual within the movement is their direct concern. Most of our younger friends are people who want to find their way into anthroposophical work through what is today called spiritual life. And I would particularly like to speak first to those who belong to academic life and have felt the urge — but hardly generated by it — to join with others within the anthroposophical movement for further striving.

Above all, it is the holy earnestness of the striving for the fulfillment of the human soul with spiritual life that has driven these young people. Within anthroposophy, however, there is talk of a spiritual life that cannot be acquired in direct contemplation in the easy way that is particularly loved today. And it is made no secret of the fact – not even in the literature, from which everyone in the broadest circle can see for themselves what they will find within the anthroposophical work – that the paths to anthroposophy are difficult. But difficult only for the reason that they are connected with the deepest, but also with the most powerful, of human dignity, and because, on the other hand, they are also connected with what is most necessary for our age, our epoch, what may be said that the discerning person, who correctly appreciates the phenomena of decline in our time, must recognize the necessity of such progress as is at least attempted by the anthroposophical movement.

Now it should certainly not be forgotten that the anthroposophical cause can be of value to the modern man in many ways. He can indeed benefit from it if he tries with true inner devotion to gain a direct insight into the spiritual worlds, and thereby convince himself that everything that is communicated from the spiritual worlds is absolutely based on truth. But I must emphasize again and again that, however necessary it may be for individuals, or perhaps for an unlimited number of people, to take this serious and difficult path in the present day, anyone with unbiased, common sense can gain an insight into the truth of anthroposophy that is based entirely on real inner reasons.

This must be emphasized again and again, lest the objection, which is quite invalid, seemingly gains validity: that actually only the one who clairvoyantly looks into the spiritual world can somehow gain a relationship to what is proclaimed as truth in the anthroposophical movement. Today's general intellectual life, general civilization and culture, they indeed bring forward so many prejudices that it is difficult for man to come to full consciousness in the healthy human mind, to convince himself of the truth of the anthroposophical cause without clairvoyance.

But it is precisely in this area that the Anthroposophical Society should lead the way and focus its work, so that the prejudices of contemporary civilization are increasingly overcome. If the Anthroposophical Society does its duty in this direction, then one can hope that those inner powers of knowledge will arise even without clairvoyance in those who, for whatever reason, cannot strive for the exact clairvoyance that is being spoken of here, but that they can still come to a fully-fledged conviction of the validity of anthroposophical knowledge.

But there is another very special path that younger academics can now find for themselves to anthroposophy. Consider what academic study should and could actually provide today as a solid starting point for coming to one's own view – and I say this expressly: for coming to one's own view – of the anthroposophical spiritual knowledge, if science and knowledge and inner life within our school system were present in the way that the possibility for this is actually available today.

But consider how little younger people today are inwardly connected with what they are supposed to strive for as their science, as their knowledge, within the present civilization. Consider how it cannot be otherwise today, for the most part, than that the individual sciences approach younger people more or less as something external. They approach with a system that is not at all suited to letting the often extraordinarily significant, so-called empirical knowledge speak for itself in its full value. Yes, my dear friends, today within every science that is cultivated, there are harrowing truths, sometimes harrowing truths in details, in specialties. And there are, in particular, such truths that, if properly presented to young people, would act as a kind of mental microscope or telescope, so that, if properly used by the soul, they would unlock tremendous secrets of existence.

But precisely those things that would be tremendously revealing if they were properly cultivated, that would carry hearts and minds away if they came from the depths of humanity and personality within academic life to the youth, precisely those things must be said today in many cases are often brought to young people within a spun-out, indifferent system, often with indifference, so that the relationship of young people to what our empirical science has produced in the most diverse fields of information remains a thoroughly external one. And one would like to say: many, indeed most, of our young academics today go through their studies without any inner interest, letting the subject pass by more or less as a panorama, so to speak, in order to be able to take the necessary repetitions for the exams and find a permanent position.

It almost sounds paradoxical to say that the hearts of academic youth should also be involved in everything that is presented to them. I say that sounds like a paradox, although it could be so. For the possibility exists, because for those who have a subjective disposition for it, sometimes even the driest book or lecture can be enough to be deeply moved, if not by the power of the writer or lecturer, then perhaps by one's own strength, even in one's heart. But I must say that sometimes it goes quite deeply to the soul when one notices, perhaps even in the best of the young friends who come to the anthroposophical movement, that through no fault of their own, but through their destiny within today's civilization ization life, not only have they received nothing for their hearts from the current knowledge base, but — perhaps some will not forgive me for saying this, but most of the young academics here will probably understand — they have also received nothing for their minds.

Today, in this age, as a result of the development of science, which I have tried to characterize during this scientific course, we have reached a point in the development of civilization where it is possible that, without any Anthroposophy, through the mere practice of the life of science and knowledge by fully human beings, young people would have to experience what I would call a kind of deep mental oppression from ordinary natural science. Yes, contemporary science is such that precisely those who study it diligently and earnestly and take its things seriously feel something like a mental oppression, can feel something of what comes over the human soul when it wrestles with the problem of knowledge. For anyone who looks around a little from this or that point of view, which is available within natural science today, is confronted with great world problems, world problems which, however, are often clothed, I might say, in small formulations of facts. And these formulations of facts urge one to seek something in one's own soul, which, precisely because these scientific truths exist, must be solved as a riddle; otherwise one cannot live, otherwise one feels oppressed.

Oh, if this oppression were the fruit of our scientific studies! Then not only the longing for the spiritual world would arise from this oppression, which takes hold of the whole person, but also the gift to look into the spiritual world. Even if one takes knowledge that cannot satisfy the human being, it is precisely through the unsatisfactory, when it is brought to the soul and heart in the right way, that the highest striving can be kindled.

That, my dear friends, is what is sometimes felt as so terrible, so devastating, within the realm of knowledge in the present day, that no claim is made to allow people to feel how the things that are present in the present in such a way that he is prevented in his young life from even approaching what is most human in nature, if he does not, precisely because of a particularly strong yearning, free himself from that which only afflicts him with the obstacles that are placed in his way.

And if we look away from the natural sciences to the humanities, we see that during the age of natural science they have reached a state in which, if a young person were to be given instructions that would treat these humanities from a fully human point of view, they would be able to devote themselves to them in such a way that they would at least receive what I would call a spiritual sense of urgency. All the abstract ideas, the results of documentary research and all the other things that are contained in the humanities today, if they were at least presented to young people with a human element, could pursue the goal of awaken in him the urge to ascend into the fresh air that is to be brought into the field of today's spiritual contemplation through anthroposophical world view.

Anyone who has followed the spirit of my lectures on the scientific development of modern times will certainly not be able to say that I have criticized this natural science of the present unnecessarily. On the contrary, through my lectures I have proved its necessity, have tried to prove that natural science and, finally, also spiritual science of the present time can be nothing but foundations, for they served and must serve as the foundations of civilization, which must be laid once so that further building can be built on them.

But man cannot help it, being human, being full of humanity in body, mind and soul. And since today's young people have to live in an age in which they are inevitably confronted with something that does not include the human being at all, the noblest and most powerful human striving could nevertheless be aroused if only that which is necessary but not humanly satisfying were to be offered to them today in the highest sense of the word, out of full humanity. If that were to happen, our young people would need nothing more than to hear about the achievements of today's physical science and today's spiritual science at the academies themselves; and from this they would receive not only the innermost urge but also the ability to absorb spiritual science in full humanity. And from what would then live in young people, it would arise of its own accord that the anthroposophical form of science would also become that which is necessary for us to progress in human civilization.

I believe that our younger friends, if they reflect on the words I have spoken, which may sound somewhat paradoxical, will find that they go some way to characterizing the main difficulties they have had to endure during their academic years. And I can assume that this difficulty is the reason why they have come to us. But for many of them, this difficulty belongs to the past, a past that can no longer be made up for. For what one should actually have in a certain period of youth can no longer be had in the same form later. But nevertheless, I believe that one thing can serve as a substitute. What should be a substitute for what one can no longer have is the realization of the task that younger people in particular have among us to cultivate anthroposophical life in the present. |

Set yourselves this task: to do for the anthroposophical movement what you already know, from your own conviction, can be done for it, or what you can, in the course of time, become convinced of in your innermost being, in your very individual innermost being, that it is necessary for the further civilization of mankind: then you will be able to carry something in your heart for longer than this earthly life lasts: then you will be able to carry the awareness of having done your duty to humanity and the world in an age of greatest human difficulties. And that will be a rich reward for what you may rightly lose.

If you have a true sense of the situation of young people in our age, you will also look in the right way at the fact that academic youth has found its way into our circles, and then, if I may may say so, the talent will gradually arise within the Anthroposophical Society to gain a relationship with this youth, on the part of those who, let us say, do not belong to it as youth in this or that respect.

But I believe that there is a word that can come from our present mourning, that I can also speak to the oldest members of the Anthroposophical Society, and that is this: that the human being who today can truly understand himself as a human being within the Anthroposophical Society, and that this, in turn, must be taken seriously if civilization is to continue for humanity, if the forces of decline are not to gain the upper hand over the forces of ascent. It has almost come to this within general culture and civilization of the present day, that it almost sounds funny when someone says: When a person is in his spiritual-soul life between falling asleep and waking up, he should have ensured that his spiritual-soul life can behave in the right way during this time. But within the anthroposophical movement, you learn that this spiritual-soul, as it lives between falling asleep and waking up, is the germ that we carry into the eternity of the future. What we leave behind in bed when we sleep, what is visible to us when we perform our daily work from morning to evening, that we do not carry out through the gate of death into the spiritual, into the supersensible world. But we do carry out into the spiritual, supersensible world that which is subtlest in our natures and exists outside the physical and etheric bodies when we are between falling asleep and waking up. We shall not concern ourselves here with the significance of the life of sleep for man here on earth. But it can be made clear to man through anthroposophical spiritual science that this fine, substantial something, imperceptible to ordinary consciousness, , lives between falling asleep and waking, is precisely what he will carry within him when he has passed through the gate of death, when he has to fulfill his task in other worlds than this earthly world. But the tasks he has to perform there, he will be able to perform them, depending on how he has cultivated these spiritual and mental abilities. Oh, my dear friends, in that spiritual world, which is around us just as the physical world is, those human soul beings also live a present existence who are not in a physical body right now, but may have to wait for decades, centuries, for their next embodiment on earth. These souls are there just as we physical people are there on earth; and in what happens here among us physical people, what we later call historical life, not only do the earthly people work in it, but also those forces that reach out from people who are currently between death and a new birth. These forces are there. As we stretch out our hands, so these beings stretch their spiritual hands into the immediate present. And it is a desolate historiography when only the documents are recorded that deal with the earthly, while the true history that takes place on earth is also influenced by the spiritual forces from the spiritual world of those who are between death and a new birth. We also work together with those who are not embodied on earth.

And just as we commit a sin against humanity if we do not educate young people in the right way, we commit a sin against humanity, a sin against the noblest work to be done from invisible worlds by not embodied human beings, we commit a sin against the evolution of humanity if we do not cultivate our own spiritual nature so that it passes through the portal of death in such a way that it can develop there more consciously and more consciously. For if the soul and spiritual aspects are not cultivated on earth, it happens that this consciousness, which in a certain way immediately and then more and more between death and a new birth begins to shine, remains clouded in all those souls who do not cultivate a spiritual life here. When a person becomes aware of his full humanity, then the spiritual belongs to it.

Those who truly understand the impulses of the anthroposophical movement should take it seriously, knowing that what has been acquired through anthroposophical spiritual science is a world-life treasure, a world-life force. It is a sin in the higher sense to neglect to cultivate that which must be there in order to further develop the earth, in order to further develop mankind on earth, because its absence must lead to the downfall of the earthly. And in many ways, it depends on feeling the deep seriousness of connecting with a spiritual and comprehensive human cause, in addition to what one may more or less accept in theory from spiritual science.

And that, my dear friends, is something that does not apply to a particular category of people, it is something that most certainly applies to young and old alike. But that also seems to me to be the one thing in which young and old can come together, so that one spirit may prevail within what is the Anthroposophical Society.

May the younger people bring their best, may the older people understand this best, may understanding on one side find understanding on the other: only then will we move forward. Let us, from the sad days we have gone through, from the painful suffering we have been imbued with, let us let resolutions enter our hearts that are not mere wishes, not mere vows, but that are so deeply rooted in our souls that they can become deeds. Even in a small circle, we will need deeds if we want to make up for the great loss.

Youthful deeds, if they are in the right direction, are deeds that can be used around the world. And the most beautiful thing that one can want as an older person is to be able to work together with those people who can still perform youthful deeds. If one knows this in the right way, oh, my dear friends, then youth will indeed come to meet you with understanding. And only then will we ourselves be able to do what is necessary to compensate for our great loss, when young people, who can offer us what was once necessary for the future, can see – and most certainly then to their own satisfaction – beautiful examples of what older people can do to compensate for this loss.

Let us endeavor to see the right and powerful in each other, so that strength may be added to strength, for only in this way will we make progress.

When we consider man from the anthroposophical point of view, as we have done before, we first have to distinguish in him the physical organism. We have this physical organism penetrated by the etheric organism, and with this system which is formed by physical and etheric organism we have joined the astral organism and the ego. From the way that man goes into the sleeping state and from there over again into the waking state, we see that on one side the physical and etheric organism are connected more closely and on the other side ego and astral organism. Though in waking state these four members are united, yet in sleep they are separated, so that on one side ego and astral body, so to speak, hold together, and on the other side physical and etheric organism. So that the astral and etheric organism do not unite as strongly as, for example, ego and astral organism, or physical and etheric organism.

If we want to consider these things in detail, we have to put them before our soul once more in their effectiveness. Now, I would like to start with something concrete. What does it mean: man sees the surrounding world? If, for once, we look merely on the factual act, it means that something makes an impression on him. But if we have the whole human being in mind, we must ask: on what, in him, has the surrounding an effect?

For a superficial observation it might look as if the effect on the physical organism is that which comes about from seeing the surrounding. Yet it is not so. We do have, when we are seeing, the physical eye, (diagram, bright) but everything that goes on in the physical eye is only something mediating. In reality, what happens first is a play of processes in the ego and the astral organism. I will indicate this by mingling the eye with this (yellow diagram) as the ego (naturally, it then goes farther into the organism) and with this “red” as the astral organism. We have to be absolutely clear about this: what first comes into consideration in seeing, are the processes in the ego and in the astral organism.

You can acknowledge this immediately, if you observe your seeing not superficially, but in a more intimate way. You only have to call to your mind, if you can, while seeing somewhere a red color, distinguish yourself, in regard to your ego, from this red. You cannot do that. You are this red. You cannot distinguish yourself from the red. This red is something that fills your consciousness completely, you are nothing else than this red. You can realize this especially well, if you, let us say, imagine that this red is the only thing you see. You see a large surface. You first have to make it clear to yourself, while looking at this large red surface, that you are an ego. You have to separate first the ego. But, while looking at the large red surface, during this time, the red and the ego have flown together. And it is the same with the astral organism of man.

So, the first thing we have to look at, where we are seeing, are processes in the ego and the astral organism. With the eye, there comes into consideration (just see for once the complicated way in which the eye comes into consideration) that man has a kidney system,—I design it here schematically (diagram, dark blue). This kidney system belongs first of all to the physical organism of man and has in itself parts that are solid. You know, I have told you quite often: man does not have so extraordinarily much of the solid, the mineral, in himself: 90% of him is a column of water. Nevertheless, he has firm parts in himself. These solid parts really swim continuously in a liquid; in something watery. Therefore we have to look at the kidney system as the starting point of the watery, which is not only there in excretion of the kidney system, but goes through the whole organism; among others, it also goes up to the eye.

But this liquid that, as it were, radiates from the kidney system into the whole organism and also radiates into the eye, is by all means not a dead watery substance, but a living water. You would get a totally wrong idea of what the water (the watery) is in man, if you had the picture that within the living human organism, one might find water, as it runs in a brook (see diagram, blue). This is not the case. In the brook, we have dead water, in the human organism we have a living liquid. Not only the plasma-liquid is living, all that is liquid in the human body is living. And in this liquid there are finely dissolved those solid parts, mentioned before, which are carried forth as it were, on the waves of the watery, also up into the eyes. Two different things meet now in the eye, the etheric organism of man (blue) fills out the eye, which is the optic nerve of the eye; and what is streaming now into this liquid which is filled by the etheric organism,—that is the astral picture which arises in the human astral body (red). And this (yellow) is what arises through the ego. That is what streams into here, and also streams further on.

Therefore, there are coming together on one side in the human eye and also in the human optic nerve, the impression from outside, which had at first really been in the ego—and the astral body and then from inside the physical and etheric body—the physical born from the mineral parts of human nature and the etheric body on the liquid parts of the human body.

Now, it is so, that this does not stay with the eye. Instead, what the eye is mediating, radiates into the remaining organism. In seeing, we have to deal altogether with an encounter of those processes, which occur in an extraordinarily complicated way in the ego and astral body and those which come to meet these as physical and etheric bodies but as physical body in the mineral constituents and as etheric body on the waves of the living liquid.

What I have shown you here for the act of seeing, continuously occurs in the human organism. Continuously in the human organism the etheric body—I would like to say—under the impulse of the physical body and on the waves of the living water, meets the astral body with all that which outer impressions are under the impulse of the ego. On the ways and means, how these two currents meet our whole human constitution, our-whole inner situation depends, because they have to meet in the right way. What does that mean: to meet in the right way? Well, we have to deal again with something extraordinarily complicated. The head-organization of man is, at first so (see diagram 1) that the head is a plastic image of the forces which man had as a soul-spiritual being in pre-earthly life. The head is formed by plastic forces, it is also developed very early during embryonic life, and it retains really only the power to give form. If the human head did not have this power to give form (zu gestalten) it would be indeed only a dead body. This human head is a marvelous creation (Gebilde). It is a faithful impression of the physical, etheric, even of the astral and even of the ego; it is an image of their descent from super earthly worlds into earthly existence. The head forms itself truly as an image of those cosmic experiences, which man went through in pre-earthly existence and retains only the plastic formative forces. If we look at the child we see that all plastic formative forces start from the head. Man receives from his head radiating into the remaining organism that which gives the plastic configuration to his organs during his growth correspondingly.

Then, it is throughout only the plastic forming force, which goes out from the head. If something enters the head, as it happens in seeing, it is right away received in a way that a force is forming which wants to give shape. What is entering there the eye wants to take shape inside of man. Most of all it wants to form the nerves,'the nervous system, in a way that in the inner organism there will be, so to say, a copy of that which had been the outer impression (diagram). One can say in this direction (arrows from above downward) from the senses going inside, goes a forming force. This force wants to make man, as it were, into a statue. It is really so: everything we see, wants to make us into a statue in a certain fine way. Against this force—for example, from the kidney system (arrows from below to above) another force comes forth, which continuously dissolves. What wants to be formed there? Imagine, how that is. If I wanted to trace this down for you I would have to say: Coming from the eye a very fine picture wants to form; up to a physical shaping of forms this wants to go. There is always a tendency like that taking place, that salty substances which otherwise are dissolved stick together, that is, they want to become salt. So that we continuously have a tendency for form shaping. Now, from below there always arises a tendency to dissolve that again. So we have continuously a tendency in the human organism from without towards the inner that should become a statue, and from the inside continuously it is dissolved again.

This process that takes place through the encounter of the astral with the etheric, that comes to meet the astral on the waves of the watery, is of immense importance for human life, basically it really means the whole of human life.

Imagine, someone tells you something tonight. It is also an impression. It occurs differently in the way of the senses, than when you see a red plane, but it also is an impression. What has been communicated to you there, again wants to take form in you. If it can take on form, then it stays in you as remembrance. And if you happen to have a head which is very much inclined to salt (to pickle) right away all impressions, then you will have a marvelous memory. Like an automaton, you can always repeat everything that someone communicates to you. But with most people it is not that way, because with most people there is the strong tendency to dissolve this in turn; what, as radiation of the watery element in connection with the etheric body comes to meet the plastic formative forces, dissolves this again. In reality it is a warm current which continuously is dissolving. If one looks at this matter, something extraordinarily interesting will result.

If one wants to remember things as a human being—not as a human automaton—then one must not get such a rigid inner salt-formation right away, when someone tells us something, so one can always repeat (abtratschen—like a parakeet) the matter right away. There are such people, but they become dependent, they are not themselves any more, who remember things, but the things take hold of them, one becomes an automaton. If one wants to be an independent human being, the following procedures have to happen:

What someone is telling you, or what one reads is, at first, in the ego and the astral body and wants to penetrate now through the organization of the brain, of the head, first into the liquid, and then wants to consolidate,—to call forth a sort of mineral salt-like formation. But it is good when the inner current comes and extinguishes this presently, so that, at most, the impression penetrates the liquid (but it dissolves) and at present no rigid form can come about. Since, at present, it cannot become a firm shape, the matter remains in the astral body. Now one is asleep, the next night. There it goes out with the astral body and the ego. There it reinforces itself somewhat during the state of sleep. (See diagram 3, right) Then it comes back in again with awakening (left), and will possibly be extinguished again; and this happens as a rule three to four times. Only after the fourth, having been asleep, the extinguishing force will not be strong enough anymore, and then this is fixed so firmly, that this plastic formation (Gebilde), which cannot be dissolved in there anymore, becomes the basis for memory-representation, for recollection.

You will say: But I can remember those things also, that I have heard yesterday, when I did not sleep a couple of times afterwards. That is right, but this is not the question now. That you can remember those things which you have heard yesterday has its cause from the fact that the matter is still in the astral body, and perhaps makes, an impression into the ether body; but one does not forget really after one day, not after the second or the third. If the matter really is forgotten, then the inner dissolving force is still so strong after the fourth day, that the whole matter will be dissolved; then it is dissolved. Because, if it is, then there is so much strength existing, that it comes in a fourth time and can still be dissolved, then we forget the matter unrefutably.

You see, this is a very interesting fact. And this fact, which one can observe by the way of imagination, if one simply sees how things are remembered, leads us to something else. It leads us to the realization that the head of man is altogether a much slower fellow than the rest of man. When we talk about the threefoldness of man, and keep at first the rhythmic organization in the middle, on one side his nerve-sense organization, that is the organization of the head,—on the other side the metabolic-limb organism, then we can say: the head-organism in its whole development, in all its being and becoming takes up a much slower pace than the metabolic-limb organism. And it is so, that while this inner consolidating (diagram), this shape-giving, would take a second for any impression (it is not so, but I say it as an example) there would have been already four impacts of dissolving from the side of the kidney-system. This can be seen in the fact that our pulse beats four times, while we inhale once. The respiratory system works upward From the rhythmical system towards the head and imparts to it the four times slower beat. That which comes to expression through the four times faster beat of the blood circulation which brings about the dissolving factor. What expresses itself in the four times slower pace of the head has in its working all that which tends to solidify, which makes man into a statue.

It is indeed interesting that this encounter which I have described to you, that is, the surging upward of the thrusts coming from the kidney system and the downward beat of the thrusts, which derive from outer influence that indeed while the impression is happening, four times an attack of dissolving is made on one. And that is the reason that we have to sleep four times over it, so that the act of striking from outside will be sufficiently fastened.

All these things fit (gliedern sich) together in a marvelous way if one can enter truly into the inner configuration of the human organism. But this is still connected also with something else.

You see, in going upwards in man and coming to the head, we find a pace of life (lebenstempe) which is four times slower than the one we find when we go, for example, to the organs of digestion, or, let us say, to the kidney-system. The kidney system works very fast and brings its inner working to the etheric, which swims on the waves of the living water. If man closes his eyes and subdues his brain consciously and then looks through that which flows out from the kidney; these are the imaginations, which swim on the living water—in such a way that his own inner life presents itself to him in imaginations. This is an extraordinarily interesting formation (Gebilde). If there is here (see diagram 4) the kidney system, then from the kidney system the living water flows towards the whole organism. What is excreted there, is only the superfluous, which goes to the outside through the relatively solid influx; but at the same time, this living water, which is permeated by the etheric organism goes also towards the whole organism. But, when the kidney is sick, and because of the sick kidney a radiation which is too strong takes place, then all kinds of images will form in there and the well-known subjective phenomena will come about, that people with sick kidneys will show. What is working there, what basically is a thrust pulsated through by inner body warmth, what then meets with that which comes from the outside wanting to become a form, this works four times faster than what comes from the outside towards the inner. This shows itself again in certain periods of our life in so far as these periods are regarded as coming about from the etheric organism, which I have drawn here this way. We must speak of seven year periods as you know; of the change of teeth, of puberty and so on. But against these periodical rhythmic processes, which go on from seven to seven years, something coming from the head is working, that wants to slow down these processes, because the head is going at a much slower pace. The head arrives at the end of the 28th year only where the main organism of man is at the end of the seventh year. This is a very important secret of human individual development.

On the outside, it expresses itself only through the fact that we can call ourselves completely grown up inwardly and outwardly in the late twenties. Everything that comes from the head completes itself really only at this time. The head is in reality only seven years old at 28. So, this is something, which one has therefore in the entire being of man. As one has on one side respiration and blood circulation—how blood circulation is in relation to respiration—the same way in life, in the whole becoming of life, the processes of the head are in relation to the processes, which proceed from the digestive system, altogether form the metabolic limb system. That also has one to the other the beat, of one to four. This is of great importance for life. It means, for example, that everything we bring to a child in education or instruction between the seventh and 14th years lives only in the head very slowly and has come to an end there, so that it is caught up in the head up to the 35th year; only up to the 35th year of life its vibrations in the head have completely come to an end. Four times seven years come into consideration. (The four times seven year periods are repeated from the seventh year on) Then at 35 only, the head has really caught up.

This throws an extraordinarily important light on a right method of education and teaching. It shows you, that teaching and education must be arranged in a way that it lasts long enough. You can, if you look only out for that which the child takes up from the seventh year to the 14th year, and which occupies him and what he comprehends, teach the child what he wants to grasp at the present moment. But these processes in the metabolic-limb system of man which are first the physical carrier of what has been grasped, leave after seven years. Now something must remain, even when matter has left; must be taken up by the head, must last up to the 21st year. Then again, the physical matter is gone, it must last up to the 28th year, then again matter is gone and it still must last until the 35th year. Now it finally is entirely in the ether body and from there it is not so easily ousted because the ether body is not always excreted in the same way.

You see how in life things work into each other, that we truly have to know that, being 28 years old, we would be only seven years in reality, if we were a head being only. If we are 35 years old, we would be in fact only 14 years if we were only head. We are continuously attacked in our quiet development by the metabolic limb system in regard to what the head of man really wants. Therefore, if one wants to understand man one must not regard the substantial constitution of the rest of the body. Instead one has to see the interplay between the metabolic? limb system and the head organism in their rhythm. But this enters into every single organ.

Diagram 5 Click image for large view

Take the eye. On one side you have the optic nerve, on the other side are blood vessels (diagram 5, red). Since the blood vessels spread,you have the metabolic-limb system in the eye. Through the optic nerve being there, you have the sense? nerve organism in the eye. Now look into the eye. There exists a relation of one to four among the processes in the optic nerve, the retina and the thrust of, the blood beat. Inside the eye things are continuously vibrating into each other, whose rhythms are related as one to four. On this vibrating into each other of two different rhythms the inner processes of the eye are based. What takes place in the arterial skin of the eye wants to dissolve; already in the eye, what wants to consolidate in the nerve of the eye. The nerve of the eye wants to create continuously forms with contours in the eye. The arterial skin with the blood flowing there wants to dissolve this continuously.

Diagram 6 Click image for large view

It is not as coarse as one generally presents it; instead it is so that the arteries of the blood have their own course and the veins join in again (diagram red), so that not one also loins the other. In the eye especially, the artery runs so that the blood flows out so to say, and is there only then absorbed in turn by the vein, so that a slight flowing off and a reabsorbtion comes about in the eye.

It is an entirely false and coarse view, if one believes that arterial blood immediately goes over there into the veinous blood. It is not so. A fine flowing out and again an absorbtion takes place. In what takes place as the outflowing vibrates the rhythm of circulation and in the nerve adjacent to it, the rhythm of the respiration vibrates really in these two rhythms which hit into each other. Imagine these two rhythms were alike, then we would not see.

Imagine you run along next to a wagon. If you run just as fast as the wagon, you will not notice the wagon. But when you walk four times slower and yet hold the wagon, then you will notice the pull. The wagon will go on and you will have to hold back if you want to slow it down. And so it is inside the eye. That is the function of the optic nerve which wants to hold back the rhythm which is four times faster. In the arresting is formed what then is perception, which appears as perception of sight, just as you notice the wagon if you run times slower; if you run in the same speed you will not feel it.

And you yourself, how do you experience yourself as an ego? You experience yourself because your head runs four times slower than the rest of your organism. That is the inner sensing of one's self, the inner perception of one's self, the running after the tempo of the limb-metabolic organism with what is function of the head.

Numberless cases of illnesses in people are based on the following; a certain measure of balance exists for every organism between four and one. One can always say: according to the way a person is orgainized a certain measure of balance is there. Of course, it never is exactly one to four, but there are all kinds of possible conditions; in this way people are individualized. But for every human individuality a certain relationship exists. If that is disturbed and if conditions would arise, by which the relation is then not one to four, but one to 4 1/7 the dissolving force then works too strongly, then the person cannot become a statue sufficiently. You only have to remember certain forms of illness, where man dissolves too much in himself, and you have the type of such kind of illness.

The other condition can come about just as well. Then those phenomena appear, which present cramp-like conditions. When the astral forces vibrate too fast through the etheric and physical organism, when the astral forces quiver through too fast and do not approach slowly enough, the cramp-like phenomena come about.

For example, take the ordinary children's cramps. These common cramps are based on nothing else than on the necessity that with the child the astral organism and the ego have to permeate first the etheric and physical organism in the right way. Now imagine, the astral organism and the ego which vibrate then into the limb-metabolic man, are vibrating too fast. The other part of man cannot take that right away. If it vibrates in the right way then you have, for example a part of physical and etheric man, which have to be permeated by astral and ego-man so that it gets slowly permeated. I would like to say:: every current of the astral force seizes always in the right way a droplet of living water, through which the etheric flows. It adapts to each other, if the right tempo is in it. But if that vibrates in too fast (see drawing 6, red, light), then the astral bursts through the etheric and with that also through the living water, cramp-like conditions come about as can especially appear in children's cramps, because here the right rhythm must assert itself first in the entering of this streaming in. (red, blue drawing 7)

This has a far reaching meaning. It has for example, the meaning that a very bad form of illness, which causes much headache today, finds its explanation here at least: namely that the right beat together is disturbed in a special way. Such an illness for example, is the bitterly bad illness of polio, which can be explained this way, though the healing is not found at the same time, because conditions lying farther back have caused that things are not tuned in together.

Altogether it is possible only to look into the human organism if one can take into consideration such conditions seriously if one knows that in that, which is outside at night of one's physical and ether body, the impulses are lying for a much slower activity of life than in that part which remains back at night, if one knows that man sleeps not only in an abstract way with his ego and astral body outside of his physical and etheric body. At sleep man is nearly all limb-metabolic man up into the brain, because everything proceeds then under the influence of metabolic-man.

Now, inwardly man is in regard to what underlies the slow rhythm exposed to a high degree to the ahrimanic forces, in regard to all, that corresponds to the fast rhythm his exposure very strong to the luciferic forces. Therefore, you could also say if you might look once at the wooden carved group; here everything ahrimanic has the tendency towards the slow rhythm, which hardens the forms and makes them pointed and rigid. In all that is luciferic, everything is worked towards the fast rhythms which makes everything round, because it runs off faster and therefore rounds off everything; it does not make things rigid, but wave-like. You can see it at the plastic forms there, that one deals with a beating together in the relation of three or four to one.

These matters are important as well for the understanding of the healthy human organism as they are important for the understanding of the sick human organism. One will see how one will have need in science of this completion which can come only from the side of what is called here anthroposophical spiritual science. I will continue these considerations intending to close them off in a way that on one side out of man history, and on the other hand out of history man will come to meet us.

Today I would like to indicate how everything which can be comprehended about man can serve as a basis which can enable us to take greater connections of history into consideration. So that tomorrow we can go onto understand something in this direction about our present time. The day before yesterday, as you know, I spoke about man himself in his constitution. I would like to do this today from a different point of view.

Let us look at man simply, as he stands in life from day to day and From the very ordinary side this time. Man needs nourishment to sustain himself. He has to take up into his own organism what we call substances from nature, from the animal, plant, and also partly from the mineral kingdom. But what man takes into himself from the outer environment undergoes a very powerful change inside his organism. The first one is that when we take up food we receive it ordinarily—at best prepared by cooking—as it is outside in nature, maybe just made ready in some way. Besides that we receive the air through breathing again 'in that state as it exists in our environment. Let us look at first other things, which basically are still more important, as for example light, which we also receive from our surroundings, as it is as light. But also the foodstuff and the air must undergo powerful changes inside our organism, so that they can satisfy and become human, so to say, inside our organism.

Described externally the process is very well known today. We take up the food—staying with this now next—perhaps somewhat prepared already, as said before. Next we inwardly digest particularly through the excretion of the glands, through the other digestive apparatus. We take it into us, wash it, saturated with a substance called ptyalin, which is excreted by the salivary glands of the mouth. We then bring the food farther into our digestive apparatus. I don't have to characterise here the way the whole process is taking place. By taking articles of food into ourselves and assimilating them, they will already be somewhat changed in regard to what they are in our surrounding outside. The foodstuffs never could become through outer proceedings what they become inside our organism. We can work at the substances, that present our food in the most different ways inside chemical laboratories—but never can occur there, what happens to the food when we bring it into our stomach and from there into our digestive apparatus. There the foodstuffs change over into something entirely different from what they were outside.

First every trace of life is extinguished, so to say. People eat meat. This is taken from the outer surrounding, from the animal kingdom. But by eating it man drives out right away just through the first stage of digestion (varverdauung) I would like to say—and through further digestion all that what these substances present in the body of the animal. Also, all what the vegetable foods—since they were part of a living being in the plant—have as life in themselves, has to be driven out. Only the real mineral particles we take up as outer material substances. Where we add to our meals salt, which is already of an outer mineral substance, if we add sugar, which through outer preparations—though originally it might come out of the organic has been driven so Far, that it has become dead, we have taken up something already dead. These underlie the least transformations in us; they really undergo only a transformation, which one could accomplish already also in an exterior way inside a laboratory. But everything that gets into our organism from the animal or plant kingdom, has to be thoroughly killed, if I want to express myself that way.

In our cooking we accomplish also a sort of advance killing by subjecting the food to heat and so on. This is done more thoroughly through our digestion, so that—where our foods have undergone a certain inner development until they get into the bowels, where they have approached these lower digestive organs—essentially all has been driven out what they are externally by being, for example subjected to the etheric body of the plants, by being subjected to the astral body of the animal etc. Consequently it must first be achieved on the way from the mouth to the bowels, that all foodstuffs are dead.

Diagram 1 Click image for large view

Because, when now the foodstuff gets to the glandular organs, which transmit the articles of food from the bowel into the lymphatic glands and then into the vessels of the blood, on this way back a reviving of the food must take place. The food at first must become dead in us and then must be revived again. We cannot tolerate in our human organism a continuation of that kind of life, which exists in the animal or the plant from which we take the food. We can at most take up the inorganic nature so that it presents us our own laws. We cannot, let us say, eat cabbage, cannot let it arrive during the digestive process at our villous intestines so that the same etheric forces would be present there, which the cabbage has, because it is a plant. The etheric, the astral, what the foods have, these must be first removed. Then, what we receive this way must be taken hold of by our own etheric body, so that it can be revived again. Life of the nourishment inside us, must come from us. And this happens on the way from the intestinal organisation through the vessels toward the heart. So that you can have the picture: where the foodstuffs coming from the mouth reach the intestines, the last traces of the outside world gradually have been lost (see drawing 1, red) but here they will be revived anew on the way to the heart. Being enlivened anew means, that they are taken up by our own etheric body. But now they would have too little of a character of the earthly, if only would happen what I have described to you up to now. Namely we would have to be beings who have a mouth—and a digestive apparatus only up to the heart, and then we would have to begin to be angels, because our ether body would take up the foodstuffs and completely dissolve them. We would not be able to be earthly beings. We would be a kind of mouth flying about with an esophagus attached to it. We would still have a stomach, intestines and heart and then you see, all that would be taken up by our ether body. But then we would be just an ether body and in the ether body the food would then dissipate. We would be able to be earthly beings. That we can be earthly beings is brought about by oxygen which is taken up now from the air. Thus, into what has been permeated by the ether body as foodstuffs oxygen of the air is taken up. Therefore, the possibility stays with us to be earthlike (flesh-like) beings here on earth between birth and death (diagram 1, white). It is oxygen that makes us again into an earthly substance that otherwise would dissipate in our ether body. Oxygen is that kind of substance which brings into the earthly state, what other wise by itself would form only as something etheric. The heart would not yet make us into an earthly human being but would bring us only far enough that we would unite our heart with the ether body and fly around on earth as such angels. But since the heart is connected with the lung and takes up oxygen the food that is taken up is not only etherised but also made earthly.

Now the necessity arises that what is taken up by our ether body and is saturated by oxygen, so that we can be earthly human beings, has to be inserted into the astral body. So far, it was not taken up by the astral body, only by the ether body. Now an activity has to be developed that everything that had been formed up to the heart-lung activity, will be taken up by the whole organism; but in such a way that also the astral organism has something to do with it. This is mediated by the human kidney system, which excretes now, what cannot he used of the matter that had been taken up, but leads the remaining into the whole organism on paths which today's physiology does not really describe at all, but which do exist.

And now the whole pulp—if I may express myself that way which now already stays alive—it was only completely killed inside the intestinal canal and has now been revived, and saturated by oxygen—is forwarded into the astral body through the activity of the kidney system which extends over the whole organism and radiates everywhere, so that this' astral body can cooperate in the further configuration of all that, what is effected in us through the food. (see diagram 1, yellow)

This astral organism in so far as it receives its impulses from the kidney system is in turn connected with the head-sense-system, which, so to say, is like a ceiling above. Kidney-system and head-system together work continuously, so that all which is liquid and dissolving through the activity of the heart, will be formed now into the special organs. We would not have firm organs if only mouth, stomach, intestines, heart and lung were there. But the stomach itself would have to be a dissolving organ movable in itself, the same with the heart, the lung. All that could not be firm. These organs get their configuration through the kidneys, and the kidneys are helped by what comes forth from the head.

These organs have not only to be formed during childhood, but continuously because our organs are continuously destroyed. Such an organ as the stomach is completely destroyed in the course of 7–8 years. Its substance is completely demolished, altogether removed, and is always renewed again. There have to be always form—giving forces existent, which renew these organs. Still much more has to be worked on this in childhood. But later on these form—giving forces are also there.

Diagram 2 Click image for large view

This happens as follows: (diagram 2). The kidney system, which radiates forth these forces on one side would bring these organs about only in a one-sided way. Or, for example, it would form one lobe of the lung in a way that it would be quite well defined backward, but in the front it would dissipate. Here the force of the head must come and meet, so that the frontal surface will be formed by the head; so that the single different forms of the human being are always formed in a way that the kidney radiates forth the forces and that from the head then the forces come and restrain, in order that the organs get contours, that they are rounded. By the head the surfaces are formed at the exterior. But the kidney delivers a kind of radiation into the organism. It is approximately somewhat as if I wanted to build something plastically. I take mortar, or any soft substance, into the hand and then I teach myself to throw the mortar upward (see diagram 2a, yellow—red)

Diagram 2a Click image for large view

Here you have what man receives, as nourishment driven to the point where it is taken up into the astral body of the human organism. These processes, as I have described them to you, take place also in the animal, though somewhat differently. The animal also has these processes going even still farther in the higher animal. But only indications take place in the lower animal of what is coming now. The higher animals have it, because they were branched off from the human race, they still have it, but it is deformed and degenerated with them.

Now something else is radiating into all that which is being formed there. First we have the foodstuff driven to the point where they are killed. Then we get approximately so far that we have the pancreatic gland as one of the last glands which bring the foodstuffs far enough that, while being pushed towards the lymph and being revived, they can be taken up by the ether body; so that then through the communication from the heart towards the kidneys the whole can he driven into the astral body. But now the ego also must be engaged. Everything we have in our organism must be occupied by the ego.

I have shown you now how that which unites itself with us is claimed by the etheric and astral organism, how it is taken up by the kidney system, radiating into the astral, and how with the help of nitrogen it is made into an earthly thing. Otherwise we would have to become angels again, if nitrogen were not working in us, which maintains us through the astral body within the earthly realm through the kidney system. But all this would not give us a configuration in which the ego takes part in the whole, if the liver-system would not be there. (see diagram 1)

The absorption through the lymphatic vessels is still something that belongs to the heart. As a rule, the heart is that organ, which together with the lung is driving the outer substances into our own etheric organization. From thereon it is the kidney system, which drives them into our astral organization. And then only the liver system with its gall excretion drives the whole into our very ego. The gall and liver-system is also found only in the higher animal kingdom, not with the lower animals, not even the gallic acid will be found with them in the bodily substances. Thus the liver-system then with its peculiar construction of the portal vein and so on—one can also verify this anatomically in every part—conducts the whole now so, that it is taken hold of by the ego. If only that what is radiated out by the kidney were there inside the body, it would be taken up only by the astral body. Because of the liver being there and the gall being excreted by the liver and mixed already with the chyme inside the intestines and the whole is permeated already by the liver products (diagram 1, blue), all this is driven into the ego organism. This way also our ego organism takes part through the liver, which has as its representative essentially hydrogen, in the whole building of the human organization. Man, in fact, has to take up nothing living, nothing astral from outside. All this he has to transform first inside his own organic system in such a way that it can be taken up into his astral and his own etheric being and into his ego-system.

Here, we have then the whole normal organization of man. Imagine, how all this has to be in time together. For example the activity of the kidneys must not be interrupted. If this should happen through a shrunken kidney, the astral body will not be engaged. In reality, the reverse is the case: if the astral body does not function in the right way, a shrunken kidney will develop. Therefore, if a shrunken kidney exists, we will have an exact picture with a degenerate heart of that which is going on in the ether body. I have told you last time, that there is even a going in accord of the rhythm. There are always 4 thrusts present in the radiation coming from the kidney (diagram 1, yellow) while what happens in the rounding forces, coming from the head only one thrust is there. That is the same relationship as it is expressed in the relation between respiration and pulse. Therefore, I should say if I may use this comparison again, the rounding forces are 4 times slower here than with the hand. That is the way namely, the organism is doing it.

All this must be tuned together in the finest way. Otherwise it will not work. Being ill means, that it is not in tune. Take for example the following: the ether body is completely in order, but the astral body is not strong enough to take up all that is flowing from the heart towards the kidneys and to work it through sufficiently. This can happen through' the etheric body, if it is working too strongly. I had said, the ether body might be all right;, but let us assume now, that it is working too strongly. If this is the case and the astral body is normal, the shrunken kidney can develop with its peculiar consequences. The etheric body being in the right condition and the astral body working too strong the kidney is not engaged enough. What is radiating across, because the astral body is working too strongly, will be claimed by it without the kidney working along in an orderly way in the right regulation. The kidney is put out of use thereby and the shrunken kidney develops. At the same time, because it causes a reaction, this will lead to a generation of the function of the heart and of the heart itself.

You see how one can look this way in a summary on what is going on in the human organism and that one can see by the degeneration of the organs how the members of the human being, physical body, etheric body, astral body and ego are not working together in the right way.

One has to make it clear for oneself how all these things must be in accord with one another and how they have to work in the right way. Let us assume, for example, that any area of the system of the organs is not permeated in the right way, but wrongly, by any member of the human organism, perhaps by the astral body. This can happen in a twofold way. Either what is coming forth from the kidney-system (as mentioned before, the rounding forces go out from the head, while from the kidney-system come the radiations) is stimulated too strongly, so that really everything that is working from the heart towards the kidney-system will be too much of a stimulation for the kidney system. In such a stimulation, which is too strong, you finally discover the original causes for all inflammation and ulcerations in the human organism. One has to find the way in which anywhere in the organism such an inflammation develops. One has to try there to balance the matter by medication in such a manner that one reduces the too strong effect on the kidney activity.

Diagram 3 Click image for large view

The simplest means to achieve this is to try to dam the too strong development of radiating inner body warmth, to induce an inner cooling off. Perhaps this might be done with the help of application of substances which are generated in the blossoms (organs) of plants. It is the peculiarity of these substances, which are generated in the blossom organs of plants, that one can counteract inflammations through them and bring about an inner cooling off. Or, it can also be that the plastic activity of the kidney, is working too strongly. Then some tumorous formations will arise. Here the plastic, the rounding off, the crystalising activity—I would like to say—is too great. Then one has to envelop the tumor through warmth from outside (see diagram 3, yellow, red). All tumors are in fact healed from outside. One only has to bring about in the organism, through injections of substances that diffuse in a certain way, the possibility to get the tumor enwrapped by radiation of such substances (diagram, red). If you succeed in getting a radiation into and around the tumor, then it will dissolve, crumble, and stop. If you have an inflammation, you have to bring the remedy into the organ through the digestive apparatus, where the inflammation is located. You have to bring something cooling, by way of the digestive apparatus. An inflammation has to be treated from inside (diagram 3a).

One only has to find the way here. Every substance has a specific way of spreading in the human organism. For example there are substances which, given by mouth to a human being, don't pay heed to the esophagus; it doesn't matter at all to them—all the pepsin, ptyalin and so on—they care, for example, only for the heart. To others the heart does not matter: They are conducted first through the stomach, through the heart, to the kidneys, and become active only there. So every substance has its affinity; one only has to apply the right substance. But there are also those substances which, if you vaccinate them, would not pay heed to a stomach-carcinoma at all, but would take care very much, let us say, of a breast carcinoma.

Therefore one has to find the way to attack an ulcer or an inflammation internally, to take something on from the outside, to besiege it, as it were. The tumors have to be besieged from outside. Things have to be studied this way, and they must be tuned together in a thorough way. Of course, to do this one has to know the higher members of human nature. It is impossible to talk at all about the kidney if one puts man on the dissecting table, simply, and opens him up after he has died. Then the kidney is lying next to the liver, as far as I am concerned; but what does one know more about the kidney and the liver than that both consist of cells, that both are built up, in different ways, of cells! But the kidney has an intimate. relationship to the astral body and the liver to the ego. That alone gives them their character. Without considering this, it is altogether senseless to define or to consider the whole matter.

Now, take an organ like the spleen. Ordinary physiology and medicine don't have much to say about it. You will find in all corresponding textbooks the notation: about the spleen one does not yet have anything to say today. You will find that everywhere, if you look it up. That is not very surprising. You see, the speech genius is really wiser in this respect than science. In this case,—in other cases it is the German speech genius which is extraordinarily wise,—it is the English speech genius who designates the (Milz) as “spleen”. And that is an extraordinarily favorable designation, because the spleen is connected with all those activities of man which go beyond the ego, which approach the spirit-self. The spleen is even directly the organ of the spirit-self. It enters fully into the spiritual realm. Only one must be able to stand. it. Most people cannot take the real spiritual element. Therefore they are not in any way animated through the activity of the spleen to an activity that is spiritual, but become “spleeny”. In reverse, they are tuned down. The “spleen” is nothing other than a spirit which, instead of going into the head, twists itself into the bowels. Therefore “spleen” is an extraordinarily good designation, which points directly towards the spirit, for which the spleen is the corresponding organ.

The spleen is effective in bringing about a balance, as presented in the pamphlet,—which has been worked out in our institute of physiology particularly by Fr. Dr. K.,—where the activity of the spleen is presented in relation to the formation of the development of membranes and the whole digestive process.

(Dr. Steiner then expressed his disappointment that this, which was being worked out inside the society, did not reach the outside world. Also that the members did not pay attention ...) This is what I want to say today only in parenthesis.

Indeed we can understand the human organism only if we understand its higher organization. You see how these things have to fit together. There is something out of order in the organism, if something which does not proceed in the right way works into the astral organism, because in that moment the kidney does not work in the right way, then all the phenomena that follow up a kidney which does not work rightly will appear.

But this is not so for man in general, instead, this changes from one era to another. The organization of man is an extremely fine one, but it is not always the same. If we go back a few centuries only—a couple of centuries are not much for the whole of evolution, it seems—then we come to a time where our present age, the real epoch of development of the consciousness soul, has begun. We go back from the 15th, 14th, and 13th centuries into the post-Christian time. It has been so,—as grotesque as this might appear to man today, especially in the civilized world,—that approximately during the whole time from the 4th until the 14th century the activity of the kidney was most important. Since then, the activity of the liver has become that which is most important for the entire nature of man. The anatomy and physiology of man really changes in the course of centuries, and especially of millenniums. One cannot study history if one does not enter into the fine structure of man, so that one knows how such transformations regarding outer phenomena in civilization, such as that from the middle ages into recent time, are also connected with a transformation of the whole human organization.

One has to come back again to such matters; otherwise on one side science will always come to a standstill, becoming more and more irreligious and antireligious, since finally it will only grope about with the probe and the dissecting knife, and so on,—and on the other side, there is religious life, which does not have anything to say anymore about the world, but addresses itself only to the egotistic instincts of man for life after death. These things are standing side by side. Our religious attitude of today has simply forgotten that God has created the world, and that one can find everywhere in the things of the world traces of divine creation. But one must not talk of abstract cloudlike changes of civilization in history; one must know how, especially through the delicate human organization, through this tuning in of the infinite fine clockwork of man's organization, the divine, creative forces transform man. As at one time they tighten the strings of the kidney activity somewhat more, then they relax and tighten the strings of the liver-activity, and a completely different music of civilization comes about.

Only if we don't restrict ourselves to looking at a God who is separate, but instead follow God into detailed activity, will we arrive at that which mankind needs in the future. Otherwise mankind will finally care only for the abstract, and arrive at a purely materialistic science. Only and solely if we can penetrate into concrete details, the effectiveness of matter in divine creation, will we get where we can permeate religion with science and lead science back to religion.

You see, around the turn of the 12th, 13th, and 14th centuries an attitude comes about in Europe, which I have already characterized from very different sides. It is expressed in the legend of the Grail, in the Parsifal legend, in all that has been written by poets like Wolfram von Eschenbach, Hartman von der Aue, Gottfried von Strassburg, and so on. There the motifs emerge. In the Parsifal epic, in the true Parsifal epic one motif especially arises. It consists in the sudden desire, to now present how man has to develop himself towards something one called at that time “Sälde”. It is the feeling of a certain inner sensation of happiness—Sälde—related to what we would call “bliss” but it is not the same. Sälde means being penetrated by a certain feeling of happiness. This emerges and dominates the whole civilization of the 13th and 14th century. All poetic motifs, but in particular the Parsifal motif, are permeated by it and everything strives towards it. One strives towards this Sälde, towards this inner feeling of bliss, which should not be irreligious, or perhaps a state of blissful comfort, but a state of being ensouled with the divine forces of the Creator.

Why does this arise? It arises because the transition from the kidney activity to the liver activity takes place. You will be able to understand this if you are aided by physiology. The earlier physiologists, of course, were better physiologists in many respects than the materialistic physiologists of today. Those, I mean, were the writers of the Old Testament, where one, for example, said, if one had had bad dreams—I have already drawn attention to this—“the Lord has punished me this night through my kidneys.” The knowledge of certain connections of an abnormal kidney-activity with bad dreams continued, and in the 8th, 9th and 10th centuries, for example, one was still deeply permeated by the conviction, that one becomes heavy through the activity of the kidney. The activity of the kidney had developed into something like heaviness for man. Of course, one spoke outwardly only about something that became heavy for man. One couldn't quite get out of it. One was stuck to the earthly. And then one sensed that one became penetrated by the gall from the physical side—but in a way that was connected with being “inwardly permeated by Sälde”—as a deliverance, an inner redemption—but it was an inner God-filled feeling of bliss,—a striving away from the dullness of the kidney. It is so, that the kidney also develops an activity of thinking. The kidney develops the dull thought-activity in man via the detour of the ganglious system. This is then connected through induction with the system of the spinal cord and the system of the brain. It develops in particular that kind of thinking which has also played a direct role in the middle ages. One called it at that time “dullness”, (Tumpheit). And this development from Tumpheit to illumination, Sälde; this was what became the motif of Parsifal. Parsifal develops from dullness to Sälde.

One must not only look at this in an abstract manner, but one must also look at it with feeling and a sensitivity. In the beginning Parsifal is as one arising out of a culture that has become heavy. One cannot quite get him in movement. Only later, after he has passed through his doubting, does Saelde permeate him. This doubt in him arises through being jolted by the heart-lung system. After he has gone through that, he finds the entry into Sälde.

It is possible to follow up into the members of the human organism what has gone on in the larger history of the world. One can say: leading individualities, like those who have fashioned the Parsifal-motif, they were pioneers, the first precursors of the modern human corporeal organization, which has proceeded from the old kidney-activity to the newer liver activity.

One must not feel contempt for something like that. One must not say: that is only the lower sensual nature. Even God did not despise the creation of lower matter—in fact, He was its Creator! By the same token we are obliged through cognition, to pursue the divine activity of the creator into the outermost ramifications of what is material. One should not be a dignified historian who describes Parsifal and says: If one describes Parsifal, one must not look at the same time at something so low as the physiological activity of man.

The world is a unity, and to understand the great historical connections, one has to be able at the same time to illuminate the different human connections. Men of ancient times, and even up until the Middle Ages, still had traces of such knowledge. You can follow that up in descriptions as that of “Armen Heinrich”, where we see that healings of a moral nature are still occurring, and so on.

These matters discussed today should be a preliminary indication of the fact that all human cognition presents a great unity. One can descend from what has to be conceived as the highest religious ideas to something that people often regard as being so low, that they don't want to look at it. Present-day science is guilty of such an attitude, because it does not at all realize that one must follow the spirit into the outmost ramifications of matter. But only then does one learn to understand the world. Only then does one also learn to strive upwards towards a true religious comprehension of the world. Otherwise one generally has just an egotistic point of view, which speculates on the egotistic motives of man, but does not enter into cognition and will lead us into decadence, instead of a renewal of civilization.

A new arising of civilization is connected with people receiving Light into themselves and contemplating the world in this Light, and not in darkness. Today's physiology and anatomy, just places people on the dissecting table and looks but at those symptoms which can still be observed in sick people by materialistic science. But this never attains to a real understanding of man.

One can say: foodstuff taken up, killed, revived, astralized, transformed into the ego—only then one understands ptyalin, pepsin, in the food that has been taken up and killed, and then transported into the lymphatic glands conveyed to the heart, fired by the heart. The kidneys then radiate through it, and all is astralized, taken up by the liver functioning and conveyed to the Ego. Then the whole can be caught up by the activity of the spleen and then, under certain circumstances the person will be made into an enthusiast, one who receives strength from the spiritual world through the activity of the spleen,—or otherwise he will be made into a “spleeny”, depressive person—one without the will to hold his head upright—through the activity of the spleen—one who only wants to sit on his chair and preFers not to he permeated by the spirit, who does not want to do any thinking. There are many people like—that today. They sit on their chairs, really only a big lump, as if they did not have a head at all. The activity of the spleen, which could be something lofty in man, really has a crushing effect on these people. Instead of enthusiasm, they have “spleen” and the “spleen” appears today already in a variety of forms.

But what one needs today is the kind of work that transforms spleen into enthusiasm, into fire so that men do not have a sleepy, but rather a wakeful civilization. This is what should come forth from Anthroposophy: to be awake, to have enthusiasm, to transform cognition into true activity, into deeds, so man does not only know more but will become something through Anthroposophy. Only then has Anthroposophy a goal and can such a goal be truly attained. But to become sleepy through Anthroposophy means that one gives much too much respect to the physical quality of the spleen and that one does not fructify the high spiritual nature of the spleen. But this points towards something that present-day mankind sorely needs. Men need fire, they need enthusiasm, they need to be inspired about something. As long as we cannot do that, as long as we think only about ourselves, we are placing too much value also on that which is excreted by us as urea, uric acid, which is not meant to be contained in the sphere of a cell, of protein—but should be brought into the state of fluctuating protein, which we are in our whole being. Basically we are something like a living, but large cell-like being, that stays in continuous, vivacious movement. Because we have carbon in us, we receive oxygen through the etherisation of the food, we get nitrogen, because the food substances are radiated through by the activity of the kidneys. We receive hydrogen, because the activity of the liver plays into it, and in connection with the activity of the senses, we do also receive sulphur—either the unsuitable one, which is the one mostly discussed today—or the proper sulphur. We really get what is necessary, so we are a living being who consists of protein—carbon, oxygen, nitrogen and also sulphur—but it must he the proper sulphur. (This is related to a joke about a philosopher in Wurzburg, on whose door students had written “sulphur—shack”.) That I don't mean. But man must be alive through and through, through and through ensouled, through and through permeated by spirit. This is something one also can learn, especially if one observes this in the outermost ramifications of matter. Only then will we get a physiology, then also will we get something which can really approach therapeutically the nature of man.

You will have seen from several earlier contemplations, that I do not like the phrase: “We live in a time of transition”, because every age is a time of transition—a transition from the earlier time to the later one. It is only a question of in how far a time is the time of transition—and just what is changing?

For the person who can see into the spiritual world, ours is indeed the time of an important transition.The wisdom of oldest time has always pointed to this important transition. During the epochs in which a spiritual world was still spoken of truthfully—if only out of dreamlike knowing—it was always said: after a certain time had passed, the so-called Dark Age will come to an end and a light-filled age would begin. If one now examines the words of the old wise men and takes them seriously, one indeed comes to realize that they meant that the transition from the Dark to the Light Age would occur around the turn of the 19th and 20th century—the time in which we now live. But we do not have to go through Anthroposophy to a renewal of the old dreamlike wisdom. I often have said that this is not the case, that with Anthroposophy it is the question of what one can acquire as knowledge in our time through spiritual research. Anthroposophy shall therefore not be the renewal of any kind of old wisdom, but a present-day mode of cognition. But as regards the transition from the Dark Age into the Light Age, present cognition has to completely concur with the old wisdom.

Although one can hardly say that we as mankind, especially as civilized European mankind, enter from worse conditions into better ones, what the old wisdom had in mind regarding the passing over into the light age, and what we also must think today, is nevertheless true. Only we must understand matters in the right way. I would like to make clear, with the help of an example, what the difference is between a Light Age—meant in this way—and a Dark Age.

Those people who once—in about the 5th pre-Christian millennium—spoke about such Dark and Light Ages, looked at this dark age as at the continuation of an earlier Light Age, and they expressed the opinion that, after the Dark Age had lasted for some time, a Light Age would come again. It would be instructive to look back and see how—mainly in human affairs—the Light Age, which once existed (approximately in the 7th or 8th millennium) was different from the later Dark Age, out of which we as mankind shall now emerge.

I would like to make that clear by an example—as I said—through the example of healing. The example of healing is very suitable in this respect, because one can see much by it. Namely, during that Light, or illuminated age, we did not look to the physical human body. One did not think of that at all. Altogether, one did not speak during that old Light Age of illness in the manner that one still speaks today of illness, but will speak no longer in the future. Of course one had in those olden times also the phenomenon that a person experienced the decay of his organs in this or that direction, that he simple was not healthy. However, one did not speak of illness, but said right out: Death exists and He takes hold of man. One saw something like a struggle between life and death in the situation where we would say today: this person is ill. So in those olden times one did not speak of illness and health when a person had become ill in the sense we understand, but one spoke about it in this way: in him death is fighting. And making well one regarded as combating, as driving out death in this way. Illness was only a special case of death, one might say, "a little dying", and health was life.

Why did one speak that way? One spoke that way because healing was then done entirely from the etheric body of man. One did not pay attention to the physical body; instead one was healing altogether in relation to the etheric body.

How was this done? Let us assume now, that a human being had become ill of something we would call pneumonia today. The form of illness in case of pneumonia was of a somewhat different type at that time, but one can nevertheless speak of this type of illness. One then said to oneself: this person has become too dependent on the region of the earth where he lives. This took place in times when migrations of people, when the moving away from places, was more unusual than today. People—at least the majority of people--mostly spent all their life at the same place. Nevertheless in such a case one said: this person has become too dependent upon the earthly spot where he was born. In those olden times one knew very specifically: man has already had a pre-earthly existence; through the survey, so to speak,through his destiny, he had decided about the place on earth himself. Therefore one said to oneself if a person has been taken ill before his 40th year or earlier by pneumonia, then he simply has not chosen his place on earth in quite the right way. He does not quite fit on this place on earth. In short, one derived the illness from the relation his human organization had to the spot on earth on which he was.

Diagram 1 Click image for large view

If I would sketch this, it would be this way: (diagram 1). If one imagined the earth this way, one said to oneself: if the person lives there, then he is too strongly dependent upon this particular spot on earth. One has to heal him by freeing him inwardly from the outer dependence on this earthly spot. One can do this by bringing him into connection with the surrounding cosmos to the outer heavenly cosmos. Heaven is that which had been man's home before he came down to earth. He does not quite fit into the earthly surroundings. One has to heal him in bringing him into the right relationship to the cosmos. One did this in such a way that one said: since this person has too many effects of the earth in himself—because there is too much gravity, and what is connected with gravity, in him, one has to give him relief—one has to bring super-earthly forces into him. One said to oneself: In these or other plant-blossoms, super-earthly forces are working. Therefore one prepared these or other plants by extracting their juice. One said to oneself: this plant is blossoming at a certain season, it is blossoming at this season through the influence of the cosmos. One investigated now, how far this person is influenced by this season in particular. In olden times the dependence of a person upon the cosmic forces was investigated through a kind of horoscope. One gave then as medication something that brought his ether-body into a general vibration. One expressed it to oneself in the following way: If this is a man (diagram 2, red), then this will be his ether body. He became ill of pneumonia because his ether body in the region of the lung is too much inclined towards the earth (blue) and because the forces of the earth have too great an influence on him. Mow one simply imparts to him juices from plant blossoms, which will work in him and help him to overcome these forces (Yellow). In this way one imparted forces to him which brought him into connection with the cosmos. One was striving through this treatment to place the whole ether body into the right vibration to balance the different single incorrect vibrations. So one always was asking: what does one have to do regarding the ether body?

Diagram 2 Click image for large view

Altogether, how could one proceed in such a way? One could do that, because one had a distinct picture of the human ether body. One did not only see the physical human body in those old times, but one saw the physical human body luminous, one saw the ether body. Man was a being of light, and as one judges today by a person's complexion, e.g., if someone is pale, that he is ill—in the same way one formed an opinion about his state of health by his ether body, by the color, if it became red, or blue or green. On what did one base one's knowledge of the human being in those times? On the light, on that which was Light in man. One has to take it quite literally: it was the Light Age, it was the age in which one really saw what was living in man as Light.

If you look at man from today's point of view in regard to health and illness, you will find that today, also, it must be said: light has a tremendous strong influence on human health. People have to take care that they receive the right quantity of light into their organism. We know that children who at a delicate age suffer from lack of light, will contract rickets or other illnesses ,which are throughout related to a lack of light. Of course these are related to other factors, too—an illness can never be derived from only one cause—but such cases as rickets, can connected throughout with lack of light. One can relate with certainty how frequently rickets occurs among children who live in city apartments, where little light enters, and how little children are inclined to rickets—approximately, of course—who can be exposed to light in the proper way. So we can rightly say today as well that the human being takes light into himself.

But the light that man receives today is—if I may express myself that way—mineral light. Man takes up that light which is radiated onto the earth, onto the minerals, and is radiated back to him, or else the light which he receives directly from the sun. It is mineral light. The light that falls on the meadows and on the trees is also conveyed to us in a mineral way. It is dead light that we absorb through our skin, throughout our whole human being. During that old light-filled age, which preceded our dark age, men were conscious that this dead light was of no meaning to them.

The research historian of today, as well as the cultural historian know absolutely nothing about such things. The light that we appreciate so much today was not considered worthy of appreciation by men of olden times. They differentiated between the light they appreciated and the light that is so much esteemed today. For example—we sit down at the table and have plates and forks and knives, and on the plate some kind of cake or something else that is edible. We then eat the cake; naturally, we also appreciate knives and forks, but we don't eat them, they are just there. What we value as light stood in relation to what the ancients valued as light much as the utensils stand in relation to the cake. But what they regarded as light comes from the plant kingdom. This we do not take up at all any more, as it was taken up in the old light ages. We enjoy ourselves today when we can walk in the sun. The man of old enjoyed himself when he walked over a meadow, or through the woods, because he absorbed into himself—through his skin—the light that the woods had first absorbed, which had been enlivened in the woods, enlivened on the meadow. The other, the dead light—that was an addition, “trimmings,” as it were. For us, the trimmings have become the main thing. The man of old lived in the light, which the flowers, the trees of the woods gave to him. For him that was a source of being quickened inwardly with light, with inner living light and not with dead light. With our abstract joy of the woods, with our abstract joy about flowers, with all that, we have, basically, what I might call philistinism, in the cosmic sense. It may still be very beautiful, but it is philistine in contrast to what was existing in the old people as inner jubilation of the soul in face of the wood, of the meadow, in face of all that was living outside. The man of old felt himself related with his trees, with all that was for him precisely the suitable plant. He felt sympathy and antipathy in the most animated way with this or that plant. We, for example, walk across such meadows as those around the Goetheanum in autumn. We judge in a philistine way: the meadow saffron, the colchium autumnale might perhaps be beautiful. The man of old passed by these plants and became sad, so that even his skin seemed to become somewhat dry. He even sensed something like his hair becoming limp. While, when he passed—let us say, by red blooming plants, they might be such plants as the poppy is today, his hair became downy, soft. Thus he experienced the light of the plants in an absolute way. It was the light-filled age, and his whole cultural life was directed accordingly. Accordingly it was also directed that he could heal—that is, could combat death—through observation and treatment of the ether body.

This remained effective for a long time and we still see, when we go back to the older Greek medicine, to Hippocrates, how one spoke then of the “humors” of man, of a black or light bile, of blood and of phlegm. This was really thought about as remembrances of the old light age. Phlegm was essentially taken to mean the ether body and blood, those vibrations which the astral body effects in the ether body, and so on, So these after-effects were still there, and basically only at the time of Galen did one start to rely on the mere physical world, including the remaining human cultural life. The conception of man, in as far as it should be the foundation for processes of healing, received a physical character. One looked at the physical body.

But it was in fact only at the great turn in the first half of the 15th century that one did not know anything at all any more of the human ether body, not even how it expresses itself in the temperaments; that one began to look more and more only at the physical body of man. The older physical medicine was still something else than it was to become later, mainly in the 18 and 19th centuries. The old physical medicine always had traditions, at least, of the earlier healing through the ether body. One really has the impression that in this older European medicine, one had retained old principles and had only carried them over into the physical. In a certain way the physical human organism still continued to be seen as under the influence of the etheric organism. Only in more recent times—in the time of Copernicus and Galileo—did one begin to observe more and more merely the physical human body and cease to know something the earlier times had known in an exact way. Today one thinks: if man eats this or that substance, which one finds out there in nature, it will stay basically the same inside the human organism. But that is not true. Only the salts remain approximately the same. But all that is there in the animal and plant kingdom becomes something entirely different in the human organism. The human organism changes it completely. One knew that the human physical organism “is not from this world” in its inner consistency and one knew fundamentally that becoming ill is nothing else than a continuation of what happens through eating. In fact there was a time, especially among the Arabian physicians, when one regarded every digestion as a partial process of illness, where one looked at digestion in a way that.was not really wrong; when man has eaten, he has brought something foreign into himself and that he really is “sick”. He must first, through his inner organism, through inner organic functions, overcome the illness. So that one continuously lives in a state of being “a little bit sick,” and “a little bit overcoming the illness.” One eats oneself sick and one digests oneself well again. This was in fact for some time, especially among Arabian physicians, a point of view which is altogether—if I may express myself that way—something quite healthy, because there exists no real borderline between what one calls today “eating oneself well” and “eating oneself ill.” Just think how easy it is to get one's stomach in disorder, something that—as one says—could normally still be overcome, quickly goes over into something one cannot overcome any more. Then one is simply sick. But the borderline is really not to be drawn at all.

It is just as difficult to draw a borderline regarding confusions between something that still can be evened out in a completely natural way and something where one has to come and give help through a process of healing. So once one correctly saw illness as a continuation of eating—eating that was not done correctly. One studied the daily process of digestion, that is: digesting oneself into health; this one studied.

In this respect it is quite a good practice if one person or another who cannot tolerate this or that food unsalted, adds more salt for himself. Somebody else even has to add pepper, others add paprika—isn't that so? Because he cannot digest the things just as they are, he adjusts them to his needs. There again is no borderline, if somebody needs pepper or paprika as a healing factor; there again is no borderline, if one gives more pepper or paprika, so one can digest oneself well, or if, when things get worse, one takes something out of the mineral kingdom. It does not matter if one then gives that as addition to the food, or as medicine. There again things flow into each other, there is again no borderline.

What was therefore known in a precise way was that if man takes something completely from the outer world, this will injure his inner organism and he must by all means overcome it. If finally I push a rusty nail into myself and my organism has to fester it out, or if I bring something into my stomach, which must not be allowed to stay that way, and my organism has to go through all these processes so it can assimilate this—these are only gradations of difference. But the knowledge that the human organism is not of this earth, and that it can sustain itself on this earth only if it is continuously stimulated to overcome the forces of this earth—this knowledge did exist. Namely, we do not eat to get this or that food into oneself, but we eat so that we can develop the forces inwardly which can overcome this food. We eat to bring forth resistance to this earth, and we live on this earth in order to bring forth resistance.

But this was gradually forgotten. One just took the whole matter in a materialistic way and finally one only still tried to see if this or that substance in these or other plants might give help. Yes, you see that is what was once meant, and what we again must have in mind regarding the dark age. Everything has simply become dark. In earlier times one looked at the light ether-body, and regarded this as man. Now one does not see anything of this light any more. One perceives only where there is matter, and one holds on to the dead light. But this dead light gives man only abstract conceptions, it has brought forth only intellectualism. But today we stand in a transition to the necessity to recognize the light again in a new way. Before, man knew within himself: he had this light ether body. Now we must increasingly develop such knowledge, and recognize the etheric in the outer world, especially in the plant kingdom.

Goethe made a beginning with this in his theory of metamorphosis, although he still put the whole into abstract conceptions. This must develop more and more into Imaginations. And we must be clear that we simply must reach the point of perceiving the being of the plant in luminous pictures. While man himself was luminous in the earlier light age, in the future nature around us, as far as it is plant-world, has to become aglow in the most manifold Imaginations of plant forms. And just with the help of these plant forms, luminously shining forth, will we be able to find new remedies in the plants. This necessity confronts us. While man in the earlier light age saw an inner light, people of the present age have the obligation of “seeing” in the outer world, to behold again a light, this light in the outer world.

This light can be kindled, if one deepens more and more the study of spiritual science. You may say: spiritual science, Anthroposophy—there also I read only concepts, and finally, if I read Occult Science, I also find only concepts there; that does not give me an occasion to really “perceive.” Yet, my dear friends, this Occult Science does have a twofold goal. The first is that one learns to know what is related there; but that is not the whole. If you have read my Occult Science like another book, then you will know only the match. But if you want to have fire, you must not say: this match is no fire! It is nonsense to say, if he gives me a match, that he gives me fire, it does not look like fire! Occult Science does not look like clairvoyance; that is like saying the match does not look like fire. Yet it will look like fire if you will but strike the match. And if it does not work the first time, you will strike another time, and so on. That is how it is with Occult Science. If you have read it like another book, then it is simply only “the match,” but if you have rubbed it in the right way in your whole human being, then you will see, it kindles! It has kindled only a little! But it does kindle, my dear friends. And the person who says: this remains far away from what one is striving for, namely clairvoyance, he will only look at the match and not strike it. But the fact is, one must first know the match, otherwise one will give oneself up to the illusion that one could kindle it with a pin. Of course, you cannot kindle it with a pin—that is, with modern science—you can do it only with a real match.

The human race is confronted precisely by this necessity and it may be especially shown in something such as medical knowledge and medical ability. If one will find the transition from a mere looking at the darkness in substances—in the way that one somehow looks at a plant blossom, as it is done today—to an imaginative way of looking, by “striking the match”—then one acquires the knowledge of how this or the other substance will affect the human being. And if one now thinks over the matter a little, one has to say to oneself: today's mankind is confronted with that: out of the darkness it should enter again into the light, it should learn to judge in a light-filled way.

Diagram 3 Click image for large view

I want to make this clear once more by an example. Let us assume that a physician of today is making a diagnosis of, let us say, an enlargement of the heart. He does it the way it is done today. One cannot do much with such a diagnosis. Perhaps one has tried if this or that can help here. But the fact is that one does not have any comprehensive connections. One does not have anything comprehensive because one does not look through the whole matter. A real penetration of the whole would result in the following: Assume once that the human being, as I have, presented him quite often, renews his organism after seven years. But I also mentioned last time how this renewal comes about. There are always unfinished substances in a way sent upwards or also forwards or downwards by the kidneys' system. From the head the rounding off is done (diagram 3) so that continuously such waves (blue) are coming from the head-system, which give form, and that through the kidney-system such effects take place—four times faster—which are broken off and formed by the waves (red) as I described.

Take an organ such as the heart (orange). There too such an exchange takes place in every human after 7 or 8 years. The heart is being renewed. It is made anew. What you see at the fingernails, that they grow outwards and always grow again after one cuts them off, that is also the case with the whole human being: he renews the material substance from the center. Now assume once that the rhythmic man might not be in order, that it might be so for his organization, that the rays from the kidney system burst forth much too rapidly, so that the right relation of 4 to 2 is not there. That varies for the individual—every person is an individuality in this respect—but it is the case in regard to his whole construction as a human being. Assume then, that this is not in order, that the radiation from the kidney-system is pushing too fast. What will happen thereby?

Diagram 4 Click image for large view

The following can happen. The process of renewal is indeed happening continuously; let us then imagine that the new heart moved in (red) before the old heart is completely ejected (diagram 4, light). Then it goes too fast. If the renewal goes on too fast, such phenomena as an enlargement of the heart occurs. First and foremost you can detect in the beginning of an enlargement of the heart that something is not in order in the activity of the kidney. Just where you take this matter of a renewal of the human being in 7-8 years seriously you will see: if that which will come as renewed substance is already there after 6 years, that which is there as the old heart has not yet been removed sufficiently and the organ expands, or tries at least to expand itself. That is how one must learn to look at things; one must learn to see things in living movement. That is what confronts us. One must see most of all what one always has seen in fixed limits. How does the physician today make a diagnosis?

The physician of today comes to a diagnosis in such a way that he likes best to trace down the contours of the heart to what it is as a finished organ. It is not so much the question of looking at what the finished organ is, since it simply is an organ that is always floating away and getting pushed back again. In this going away and pushing back there is something inwardly mobile. If I lay hold of it, it is essentially as if I were to lay hold of lightning—it is constantly in movement, Therefore if I want to comprehend man, I have to grasp him in his liveliness. This liveliness I understand and find today only if I understand the whole world, and man out of the world and cosmos. This is what we are confronted with: every thing has to pass over into knowledge that is flexible. It is something dreadful if we keep the children in school immobile. For example, it is always quite grievous for me to see the children use any kind of finished triangle, with which they make all sorts of things. This fixed object is really nothing. One should really have a kind in which the triangle can be shifted. This is the point: that the children get the conception in the right way that everything should be grasped in movement. (diagram 5).

Diagram 5 Click image for large view

It is, of course, dreadfully difficult to get an understanding in regard to these things with such people who want their peace and quiet, who are already angry, when children are making a row—and now the tools for instruction are making a row! It is, of course, something dreadful: but it is so, we have to change over to liveliness. All this taken together results in the challenge to move upward into the light, luminous
age. Out of the dark age we must enter into the light luminous age.

And because people can not do it—that is, they imagine that they cannot do it—because people do not want it, because people cling to the old, and don't want to step into the new, and because the old does not fit any more—it is because of this that we experience the terrible catastrophes in our present time. And we will experience them still more if people don't want to take the trouble to enter into the new.

What occurs as catastrophe is the reaction of the dark age, which does not belong in our time. But it is, of course, terribly difficult to come to an understanding. At best something like an inkling appears in the contrasting attitude between the old people and youth today, like an inkling of the new light: filled age. Young people say as a rule: oh, the old people are philistines. This also has its forerunners. The great German philosopher Johann Gottlieb Fichte had something of an inkling beforehand of this in making the classical declaration, that one really should kill all people at the age of thirty because man is only a decent human being up to his 30th year. This is a famous sentence of Fichte and since Goethe at the time that Fichte made this sentence was already considerably older, he was terribly annoyed and has ridiculed this whole theory in the second part of his Faust. It was really provoking for Goethe, of course! So one finds that youth agrees that the old people are philistines, but up to now no serious results have come about in this matter, because young people declare this up to a certain age and then become even greater philistines than the old ones have been. Even this side must be looked upon from an inner vantage point.

What I mean is the question that we already know: either Spenglerism—that is, the decline of the West—or taking the trouble to adjust ourselves to the new appearance of the light age in contrast to darkness, during which men were “earthworms” in regard to the cosmos. It cannot be different. But for a while in the course of history man had to he an earthworm because otherwise he would have been taken up completely by the light. He could strive to gain his freedom only during the dark age, and most of all during the termination of the dark age, in the more recent times. He could acquire his freedom only because the light left him unmolested so that he could lead an earthworm existence.

But now I tell you: men of the light ages preferred to receive the light of the plant world. The plants were, so to speak, drinking the cosmos light and man in turn drank the light out of the cup the plants presented to him.

Today we have only the dead light. But on the rays of the dead light Christ has come and has achieved the Mystery of Golgotha. That is the great cosmic Mystery of the newer time. Though we have the dead light—the dead light that cannot make us blessed—yet on this dead light's rays has Christ entered the earth and achieved the Mystery of Golgotha. And though outwardly we have around us the dead light we can bring the Christ in us to life. And with Christ in us in the right way we will enliven all of the light on earth around us—we will carry life into the dead light, we ourselves will have a reviving effect on the light. This means we must enter the new age with the right Christ impulse. The denial of the Christ-impulse is the basis of all that keeps men away from seeing rightfully how a dark age transits into the light age.

Diagram 6 Click image for large view

It is really so. Where the plant grows out of the earth (diagram 6) it develops the seed bud—as I have shown you already—still through the forces of the previous year; only the petals grow out of this year's light. What pulls the plant out of the earth really comes from the previous year. So it was actually conserved light which the plants once gave to man during the old light age. We have to find the possibility to comprehend the dead light with the mind and heart that is engendered in us if we receive the strength of Christ in the living perception of the Mystery of Golgotha. Then we will revive the light as I have indicated. But we can do that only if we learn to try to look at all things in the way I have tried to describe to you in these lectures.

These lectures will deal with the two states of life through which man passes: in the spiritual world between death and a new birth, and in the physical world between birth and death.

I want to remind you today of certain matters to which your attention was directed in recent lectures here. I said that during the very important period stretching between death and a new birth, man finds himself in the spiritual world with an essentially higher kind of consciousness than he has during his physical life on Earth.

When we are living here on Earth in our physical body, the earthly consciousness that is connected with the senses and nerves depends upon the whole organism. We feel ourselves as human beings in as much as within the boundary of our skin we have brain, lungs, heart, and the systems connected, with these organs. Of all this we say that it is within our being. On the other hand we feel ourselves connected with what is around us through our senses or through our breathing, or again through the taking of food. When we are living between death and rebirth we cannot, however, speak in the same sense of what is ‘within’ us. For directly we pass through the gate of death, even directly we go to sleep, the conditions of our existence are such that the whole universe may be designated as our inner being.

Thus whereas here on Earth our constitution as human beings is revealed by our organs and their interaction inside our skin, during sleep unconsciously but between death and a new birth in full consciousness, our inner nature is revealed to us as if it were a world of stars. We feel ourselves related to the world of stars in such a way that of the Beings of the stars we say that they are our inner nature, just as here on Earth we say that the lung or heart belong to our inner physical nature. From the time of going to sleep until that of waking, we have a cosmic life; from death until a new birth we have a cosmic consciousness. That which here on Earth is our outer world, particularly when we gaze out into the cosmic expanse, becomes our inner being after death.

What, then, is our outer world in that spiritual existence? It is what is now our inner nature. We fashion what is then our outer world into a kind of spirit-seed from which our future physical body on Earth is to spring into existence. Together with the Beings of the Higher Hierarchies we elaborate this spirit-seed, and at a certain point of time in our life between death and a new birth, it is there as a spirit-entity, bearing within it the forces which then build up the physical body, just as the seed of the plant bears within it the forces which will eventually produce the plant. But whereas we picture the seed of the plant to be minute and the plant itself large in comparison, the spirit-seed of the human physical body is, so to speak, a universe of vast magnitude—although in the strict sense it is not quite accurate to speak of ‘magnitude’ in this connection.

I have also said that at a certain point this spirit-seed falls away from us. From a certain point of time onwards we feel: in association with other Beings of the Universe, with Beings of the Higher Hierarchies, we have brought the spirit-seed of our physical organism to a definite stage of development; now it falls away from us and descends into the physical forces of the Earth with which it is related and which come from the father and the mother. It unites with the human element in the stream of heredity and goes down to the Earth before we, as beings of spirit-and-soul, ourselves descend. Thus we still spend a certain period—although a short one—in the spiritual world when the nexus of forces of our physical organism has already gone down to the Earth and is shaping the embryo in the body of the mother.

It is during this period that we gather together from the cosmic ether its own forces and substances and so build up our etheric body to be added to our astral body and ego. Then, as a being of ego, astral body and etheric body, we ourselves come down to the Earth and unite with what the physical body—the seed of which was sent down earlier—has now become.

To anyone who observes this process closely, the relation of man to the Universe becomes very clear, above all if attention is directed to three manifestations of human nature to which reference has often been made here and at other places—I mean the three manifestations of human nature by virtue of which man becomes the being that he is on Earth.

When we are born we are quite different from the beings we afterwards become. It is on the Earth that we first learn to walk, to speak, and to think. The will that remains dim between birth and death, and feeling that remains half dim, are already present in a primitive form in the very tiny child. The life of feeling, although it is concerned entirely with the inner functions, is present in the very earliest years of childhood. The life of will is also present, as is proved by the movements, however chaotic, made by the little child. The reason why the life of feeling and the life of will become different at a later stage of existence is that thinking gradually begins to permeate feeling and will, making them more mature. Nevertheless they are already present in the tiny child. Thinking, on the other hand, is developed by the child only on Earth, in association with other human beings and in a certain sense under their instruction. And it is the same with the faculties of walking and speaking, which in reality are acquired before the faculty of thinking.

Anyone who has a sufficiently deep feeling for what is truly human will realize, simply by observing how the child develops through walking, speaking, and thinking, what a tremendously important part is played by these three faculties in the earthly evolution of man. But man is not only an earthly being; he is a being who belongs not only to the Earth with its forces and substances, but equally to the spiritual world; he is involved in the activities proceeding between the several Beings of the Higher Hierarchies. It is, so to speak, only with a part of his being that man belongs to earthly existence; with the other part he belongs to a world that is not the material world perceptible to the senses. It is in that other world that he prepares his spirit-seed. Let it never be imagined that man's achievements in culture and civilization on the Earth, however complex and splendid they may be, are at all comparable with the greatness of what is achieved by him together with the Beings of the Higher Hierarchies in order to build this wonder-structure of the human physical organism. Nevertheless, what is thus fashioned—first of all in the spiritual world and, as I explained, sent down to the Earth before the man himself descends—is differently constituted from the being who is afterwards present here on Earth between birth and death.

The spirit-seed of his physical body built up by man in the spiritual world is imbued with forces. Its whole structure which afterwards unites with the physical seed—or rather, which becomes the physical seed of the human being by taking substances from the parents—is endowed with all kinds of qualities and faculties. But there are three faculties for which the spirit-seed receives no forces at all in the spiritual world. These three faculties are: thinking, speaking, and walking—which are essentially activities of man on the Earth.

Let us take walking, and everything that is related to it. I might describe it as the process whereby man orientates himself within the sphere of his physical existence on Earth. When I move my arm or my hand, that too is related to the mechanism of walking, and when a tiny child begins to raise itself upright, that is an act of orientation. All this is connected with what we call the Earth's force of gravity, with the fact that everything physical on the Earth has weight. But we cannot say of the spirit-seed that is built up between death and a new birth that it has weight or heaviness.—Walking, then, is connected with the force of gravity. It is, in fact, an overcoming of gravity, an act through which we place ourselves into the field of gravity. That is what happens every time we lift a leg to take a step forward. But we do not acquire this faculty until we are already here on Earth; it is not present between death and a new birth although there is something that corresponds to it in that world. There too we have orientation but it is not orientation within the field of gravity, for in the spiritual world there is no force of gravity, no weight. Orientation in that world is of a purely spiritual character. Here on the Earth we lift our legs to walk, we place ourselves in the field of gravity. The corresponding process in the spiritual world is that of becoming related to some Being of the Higher Hierarchies, belonging, let us say, to the rank of Angel or Archangel. A man feels himself inwardly near in soul to the influence of a Being, say, of the Hierarchy of the Angels, or of the Exusiai, with whom he is then working. This is how he finds his orientation in the life between death and a new birth. Just as here on the Earth we have to deal with our weight, in yonder world we have to deal with what proceeds from the several Beings of the higher Hierarchies by way of forces of sympathy with our own human individuality.

The force of gravity has a single direction—towards the Earth; but what corresponds to the force of gravity in the spiritual world has all directions, for the spiritual Beings of the Hierarchies are not centralized, they are everywhere. The orientation is not geometrical like the orientation of gravity, towards the center of the Earth, but it goes in all directions. According to whether man has to build up his lung or perform some other work together with the Beings of the Hierarchies, he can say to himself: The Third Hierarchy is attracting me, or the First Hierarchy is attracting me. He feels himself placed into the whole world of the Hierarchies. He feels himself, as it were, drawn to all sides, not physically, as through the pull of gravity, but spiritually, or also, in some cases, repelled. This is what corresponds in the spiritual world to physical orientation within the sphere of gravity on the Earth.

Here, on the Earth, we learn to speak. This again belongs to our inherent nature, but within the spiritual world between death and a new birth we cannot speak; the physical organs needed for speech are not there. In the spiritual world between death and a new birth, we have, however, the following experience.—We feel ourselves in rhythmically alternating conditions; at one moment we have contracted, as it were, into our own being; our higher consciousness also contracts. Between death and a new birth there are times when we shut ourselves within ourselves, just as we do while we are asleep on Earth. But then we open ourselves again. Just as on the physical Earth we direct our eyes and other senses out towards the Universe, so in that other world we direct our spiritual organs of perception outwards to the Beings of the Hierarchies. We let our being stream out, as it were, into the far spaces, and then draw it together again.

It is a spiritual breathing process, but its course is such that if we were to describe in earthly words, in pictures derived from earthly life, what man says to himself there in the spiritual world, we should have to speak somewhat as follows: I, as a human being in the spiritual world, have this or that to do. I know this through the powers of perception I have in the spiritual world between death and a new birth. I feel myself to be this human being, this individuality. As I breathe out on Earth, so do I pour myself out in soul into the Universe and become one with the Cosmos. As I breathe in on Earth, so do I receive back into myself what I experienced while my being was poured out into the Cosmos.—This is constantly taking place between death and a new birth.

Let us think of a man feeling himself enclosed within his own being and then as though expanded into the cosmos. At one moment he is concentrated in himself and then has expanded into the Universe. When he draws into himself again it is just as when we breathe in the air from the physical spaces of the Universe.

Now when we have poured our being over the Cosmos and draw it in again, it begins—I cannot express it otherwise—it begins to tell us what it was that we embraced when our being was outspread as it were, in the cosmic expanse. When we draw our being together again it begins to tell us what it is in reality, and we then say, between death and a new birth: The Logos in whom we first immersed ourselves—the Logos is speaking within us.

Here on the Earth we have the feeling that in our physical speech we shape the words when we exhale. Between death and a new birth we become aware that the words which are outspread in the Universe and reveal its essential nature, enter into us when our being is inbreathed and manifest themselves within us as the Cosmic Word. Here on Earth we speak as we breathe out; in the spiritual world we speak as we breathe in. And as we unite with our own being what the Logos—the Cosmic Word—says to us, the Cosmic Thoughts light up within our being. Here on Earth we make efforts through our nervous system to harbor earthly thoughts. In the spiritual world we draw into ourselves the Cosmic Thoughts out of the Cosmic Speech of the Logos when our being has been spread over the Universe.

Now try to form a vivid conception of the following. Suppose that you say to yourself between death and a new birth: I have this or that to do ... all that you have experienced hitherto makes you aware that you have this or that task to perform. Then, with the intention of performing it, you spread your being into the Universe; but the process of expansion is actually one of orientation.

When you say to yourself here on Earth that you must buy some butter ... that too signifies an intention. You set out for Basle to buy your butter there, and bring it home with you. Between death and a new birth you also have intentions—in connection, of course, with what has to be achieved in that other world. Then you expand your being; this is done with the intention of acquiring orientation—it may be that you are drawn to an Angel or perhaps to a Being of Will, or to some other Being. Such a Being unites with your own expanded being. You breathe in; this Being communicates to you its participation in the Logos and the Cosmic Thoughts connected with this Being light up within you.

When the spirit-seed of man comes down to the Earth (as I have said, he himself remains a little while longer in the spiritual world), he is not organized for thinking or speaking in the earthly sense, nor for walking in the earthly sense, when gravity is involved; but he is organized for movement and for orientation among the Beings of the Higher Hierarchies. He is not organized for speaking but for enabling the Logos to resound within him. He is not organized for the shadowy thoughts of earthly life, but for the thoughts that become radiant in him, within the Cosmos.

Walking, speaking, and thinking here on the Earth have their correspondences in the spiritual world: in the orientation among the Hierarchies, in the resounding of the Cosmic Word, and in the inner lighting up of the Cosmic Thoughts.

Picture vividly to yourselves how man goes out after death into the wide space of the Cosmos. He passes through the planetary spheres around the Earth. I have spoken of these things in recent lectures here. He passes the Moon-sphere, the Venus-sphere, the Mercury-sphere, the Jupiter-sphere, the Saturn-sphere. Having passed right out into the Cosmos he will see the stars always from the other side. You must picture the Earth and the stars around it. From the Earth we look up to the stars; but when we are in the Cosmos we look from outside inwards. The forces that enable us here on Earth to see the stars, give us the physical image of the stars. The forces that enable us to see the stars from the other side, do not allow them to appear to us as they do here, but from that other world the stars appear to us as spiritual Beings. And then, when we leave the planetary spheres—I am obliged to use earthly expressions—then, as conditions now are in world-evolution (the ‘now’ is, of course, a cosmic ‘now’ of lengthy duration), we realize with the understanding acquired through the higher consciousness belonging to our life between death and a new birth, what an infinite blessing it is for us that the forces of Saturn not only shine inwards into the planetary world of the Earth, but also outwards into the cosmic expanse. There, of course, they are something altogether different from the tiny, insignificant, bluish rays of Saturn that can be visible to us here on Earth. There they are spiritual rays, radiating out into the Universe—even ceasing to be spatial; they radiate into a sphere beyond space. They appear to us in such a way that between death and rebirth we look back in gratitude to the outermost planet of our earthly planetary system (for Uranus and Neptune are not actual Earth planets; they were added at a later stage). We are aware that this outermost planet not only shines down upon the Earth but out into the far spaces of the Cosmos. And to the spiritual rays which it radiates out into the Cosmos we owe the fact that we are now divested of earthly gravity, divested of the physical forces of speech, divested of the physical forces of thought. Saturn, as it radiates out into cosmic space is in very truth our greatest benefactor between death and a new birth. Regarded from a spiritual standpoint it constitutes, in this respect, the very antithesis of the Moon-forces.

The spiritual Moon-forces keep us on the Earth. The spiritual Saturn-forces enable us to live in the wide expanse of the Universe. Here, on Earth, the Moon-forces are of very special significance for us as human beings. I have explained that they play their part even in the everyday happening of waking from sleep. What the Moon-forces are for us here on Earth, the Saturn-forces that radiate into the Universe from the outermost sphere of our planetary system are for us between death and a new birth. You must not picture that from one side Saturn radiates towards the Earth and from another out into the Universe. It is not so. The physical Saturn appears like a hollow in this sphere of the cosmic Saturn which radiates, spiritually, into cosmic space. And from a certain point of time onwards after death, what thus radiates outwards hides everything earthly from us—hides it all with light.

Here on Earth, man is under the influence of the spiritual Moon-forces; between death and a new birth, he is under the influence of the Saturn-forces. And when he descends again to the Earth he draws himself away from the Saturn-forces and enters gradually into the sphere of the Moon-forces. What happens then?

As long as man is related to the sphere of the Saturn-forces—and Saturn is helped by Jupiter and Mars which have special functions to perform of which I shall speak on some future occasion—as long, therefore, as man is under the influence of Saturn, Jupiter and Mars, he is a being who does not strive to walk or speak or think in the earthly sense, but to find his orientation among spiritual Beings, to experience the Logos resounding within him, to have the Cosmic Thoughts lighting up within him. And with these inner aims and intentions the spirit-seed of the physical organism is, in very truth, dispatched to the Earth.

In effect, the human being who is descending from the spiritual worlds to the Earth has not the least inclination to be exposed to earthly gravity, to walk, or to bring the organs of speech into movement so that physical speech may resound, neither has he any inclination to think with a physical brain about physical things. He has none of these faculties. He only acquires them when, as a physical spirit-seed, he is sent down from the sphere of the Saturn-forces to the Earth, passes through the Sun-sphere and then enters the other planetary spheres—the spheres of Mercury, Venus and Moon. The Mercury, Venus, and Moon-spheres transform the cosmic predisposition for spiritual orientation, experience of the Logos and lighting up of Cosmic Thoughts inwardly, into the rudimental faculties of walking, speaking, and thinking. And the actual change is effected by the Sun, that is to say, the spiritual Sun.

Through the fact that man enters the sphere of the Moon—and the Moon-forces are helped by those of Venus and Mercury—through this, the heavenly predispositions for orientation, for experience of the Logos, and for Cosmic Thought, are transformed into the earthly faculties. Thus to a child here on Earth, as he begins to raise himself upright from the crawling position, we ought in truth to say: Before you were received into the spheres of Mercury, Venus and Moon, yonder in the heavenly spheres you were organized for spiritual orientation among the Hierarchies, for inner experience of the resounding Logos, and for inner illumination with Cosmic Thoughts. You have accomplished the metamorphosis from yonder heavenly faculties into earthly faculties in that you passed through the whole planetary sphere, and transformation of the Heavenly into the Earthly was wrought by the Sun.

But while this is happening, something else of tremendous significance takes place. Passing from the heavenly into the earthly realm, the human being experiences one side only of the etheric world. The etheric world extends through all the spheres of the planets and the stars. But the moment the heavenly faculties are transformed into the earthly, the human being loses the experience of the Cosmic Morality. Orientation among the Beings of the Higher Hierarchies is experienced not merely as a manifestation of natural laws but as moral orientation. Likewise the Logos speaks in the human being not in an a-moral way as do the phenomena of Nature—for although they do not speak in an anti-moral way, they speak ‘a-morally.’ The Logos speaks morality; so too the Cosmic Thoughts light up as bearers of morality.

Saturn, Jupiter and Mars—this must be said despite the horror it will cause to physicists—Saturn, Jupiter and Mars contain, as well as their other forces, forces of moral orientation. It is only when man transforms the heavenly faculties that have been characterized into walking, speaking, and thinking that he loses the moral elements. This is of immense importance. When here on Earth we speak of the ether—in which we live when we are approaching the Earth in order to be born—we ascribe to the ether all kinds of qualities. But that is only one side, one aspect, of the ether. The other aspect is that it is a substance working with a moral effect. It is permeated through and through with moral impulses. Just as it is permeated with light, so it is permeated with moral impulses. In the earthly ether these impulses are not present.

Yet man as an earthly being is not altogether bereft of the forces within which he lives between death and a new birth. Even if by some decree in the divine World-Order, man on the Earth had no inkling whatever that as well as having a physical nature he ought also to be a moral being, it might conceivably be that his earthly faculties of walking, speaking, and thinking would be dimly felt to correspond to a heavenly Orientation, a heavenly Logos, a heavenly illumination with Cosmic Thoughts. True, without some inner stimulus man knows very little on Earth of these heavenly correspondences of his earthly faculties; but for all that he has faint inklings of them. If there were no after-effects of the Heavenly here on Earth, every link binding man with the spiritual world would have been forgotten, leaving not a single trace. Even conscience would not stir.—I will take my start from something quite concrete, and although what I shall now say will seem strange to begin with, it is in exact accordance with facts established by spiritual research.

Think of the Earth with the air around it; farther outward is the cosmic ether, gradually passing over into the spiritual sphere. Here on the Earth we inhale and exhale the air. This is the rhythm of breathing. But out yonder we pour our being into the Cosmos, receiving into ourselves the Logos and the Cosmic Thoughts. There we let the World, the Universe, speak in us. This too takes place in rhythm—in a rhythm determined by the world of the stars. Out in the Cosmos there is also rhythm. As human beings on the Earth we have the rhythm of breathing, which is related in a definite way to the rhythm of blood-circulation: four pulse-beats to one breath. In yonder world, we breathe out and breathe in again spiritually; this is cosmic rhythm. As men on Earth our life depends upon the fact that we take a definite number of breaths a minute and have a definite number of pulse-beats a minute. Out in the Universe we live in a cosmic rhythm, in that we breathe in, as it were, the moral-ethereal world; we are then within ourselves. And when we breathe it out again we are united with the Beings of the Higher Hierarchies.

Just as here in our physical body inside our skin, regular movements are set going rhythmically, so out in the universe the course and the positions of the stars set the cosmic rhythm into which we pass between death and a new birth. We live in the air, and in the air unfold our breathing rhythm with its extraordinarily true regularity. If the rhythm is irregular, this betokens illness for man. Out in the Universe—although we have first to pass through intermediate cosmic space—we experience the cosmic rhythm inasmuch as we are then living in the cosmic ether, permeated as it is with the moral element. Thus there are two different rhythms: human and cosmic. In truth they are both human rhythms, for the cosmic rhythm is the human rhythm between death and a new birth.

On the Earth, the Universe has, so to speak, the rhythm proper to mankind; in yonder world it has the rhythm in which we ourselves participate between death and rebirth. What, then, lies between the two? The rhythm proper to mankind gives us the faculty between birth and death to speak human words, to master human language. Cosmic rhythm enables us between death and a new birth to let the Cosmic Word resound within us. The Earth endows us with the gift of speech. The Universe, the spiritual Universe, gives us the Logos. You will realize that conditions are utterly different in the sphere where cosmic rhythm gives us the Logos, from conditions here on the Earth, where we articulate the human word in the air.

What, then, constitutes the boundary between the one realm and the other? Looking out into the physical world we have no perception of the cosmic rhythm. There is inner law and order in each realm, so what is it that lies between them? Between them—if I may put it so—is the boundary at which the cosmic rhythm breaks in that it is coming too near the Earth; between them is that which, in certain circumstances, may also bring the human breathing-rhythm into disorder. Between them, in effect, are all the phenomena pertaining to meteorology. If on the Earth there were no blizzards, storms, wind, cloud formations, if the air did not contain, in addition to oxygen and nitrogen for our breathing, these meteorological phenomena which are always there, however clear the air may appear to be—then we should look out into the Universe and be aware of a different rhythm—actually the counterpart of our breathing rhythm, only transformed into infinite grandeur. Between the two spheres of the World-Order lie the chaotic phenomena of wind and weather, separating the cosmic rhythm and the human breathing rhythm from each other.

Man on the Earth is subject to gravity. He co-ordinates his gait, every movement of his hands with this force of gravity. Out in the Universe the forces are altogether different. Orientation there is in all directions; the lines of force run from Being to Being of the Hierarchies. What is between the two? As meteorological phenomena are between heavenly rhythm and human rhythm on Earth, what is between the cosmic force that is the opposite of gravity and earthly gravity?

Now just as meteorological phenomena lie between the two rhythms, so between the force of gravity and the opposite heavenly force of orientation there lie the volcanic forces, the forces which manifest in earthquakes. These are irregular forces.

(Note by translator. At this point in the lecture, Dr. Steiner referred to the report alleging that Easter Island, far out in the Pacific Ocean with its marvellous relics of ancient civilizations had been destroyed by a terrible earthquake. It will be remembered that the report was afterwards found to have been incorrect.)

When viewed from the standpoint of the Cosmos in the way I have described, the forces working in meteorological phenomena are intimately connected with our breathing processes. What takes place in the operations of volcanic forces is connected with the forces of gravity in such a way that it would really seem as though from time to time the supersensible Powers were taking back fragments of the Earth by interfering with the laws of gravity and casting into chaos what the forces of gravity have gradually built up, in order to take it back again.

All earthly formations built up by the force of gravity are subject to these terrestrial phenomena. But whereas in the manifestations of weather the elements of air, warmth, and water are astir, in this case it is the solid and the watery elements that are involved. Here we have to do with forces that lead beyond the sphere of the regular laws of weight and gravity and which in course of time will do away with the Earth.

Now as well as the meteorological and volcanic manifestations there is a third kind of which I shall speak on another occasion. Ordinary science does not really know what to make of volcanic phenomena and often gives an explanation similar to the one I read just now in connection with the appalling earthquake which affected Easter Island. The author of an article on what was said to have happened was a geologist—therefore one possessed of expert knowledge in that particular domain. Having referred to what had happened, he added: When we reflect about the cause of these phenomena which recur from time to time and cause such destruction, we must include this recent earthquake in the category of tectonic tremors of the Earth.—What does this tell us? ‘Tectonic tremors of the Earth’ are tremors which cause an upheaval among portions of the Earth. So if we are to speak of the cause of such an upheaval, we must speak of the upheaval! Poverty comes from pauvreté!

It is indeed a fact that in order to see the connections between these things, we must approach the Spiritual. The moment we pass from the realm of ordinary natural law in some sphere—that of gravity, for example, or of rhythmic phenomena in the ether—the moment we pass from this into what is an apparent chaos (although through this chaos we are led into higher realms of the Cosmos) ... in other words, if we are to understand volcanic and meteorological phenomena, we must turn towards the Spiritual.

Happenings in world-existence that seem to be purely fortuitous—for so we call them—are revealed in the spiritual realm in their lawful setting. It is through the working of the meteorological domain that we, as human beings between birth and death, are taken out of the sphere in which we live between death and a new birth. If instead of the many abstractions current at the present time we are to speak concretely, we may say: In the Heavens man lives in a World-Order that is hidden from him here on Earth through the fact that he is involved in the meteorological phenomena of the surrounding atmosphere. The meteorological domain is the dividing-wall between what man experiences on the Earth and what he experiences between death and a new birth.

In this way I want, if I can, to show you the realities of these things, not merely to talk round them.

The essential purpose of the lectures I have been giving here for some weeks past was to show how through his spiritual life man partakes in what we may call the world of the Stars, just as through his physical life on Earth he partakes in earthly existence, earthly happenings. In the light of the outlook acquired through Anthroposophy we distinguish in man the forces that lie in his physical body and in his etheric or formative-forces body, and those that lie in his Ego and his astral body. You know, of course, that these two sides of his being are separated whenever he sleeps. And now we will think for a short time of a man while he is asleep. On the one side the physical body and the etheric body lie there in a state of unconsciousness; but the Ego and the astral body are also without consciousness.

We may now ask: Are these two unconscious sides of human nature also related during sleep?—We know indeed that in the waking state, where the ordinary consciousness of modern man functions, the two sides are related through thinking, through feeling and through willing. We must therefore picture to ourselves that when the Ego and astral body plunge down, as it were, into the etheric body and the physical body, thinking, feeling, and willing arise from this union.

Now when man is asleep, thinking, feeling, and willing cease. But when we consider his physical body we shall have to say: All the forces which, according to our human observation belong to Earth-existence are active in this physical body. This physical body can be weighed; put it on scales and it will prove to have a certain weight. We can investigate how material processes take their course within it—or at least we can imagine hypothetically that this is possible. We should find in it material processes that are a continuation of those processes to be found outside in Earth-existence; these continue within man's physical body in the process of nutrition. In his physical body we should also find what is achieved through the breathing process. It is only what proceeds from the head-organization of man, all that belongs to the system of senses and nerves, that is either dimmed or plunged in complete darkness during sleep.

If we then pass on to consider the etheric body which permeates the physical, it is by no means so easy to understand how this etheric body works during sleep. Anyone, however, who is already versed to a certain extent in what Spiritual Science has to say about man will realize without difficulty how through his etheric body the human being lives, even while asleep, amid all the conditions of the ether-world and all the etheric forces surrounding existence on Earth. So that we can say: Within the physical body of man while he is asleep, everything that belongs to Earth-existence is active. So too in the etheric body all that belongs to the ether-world enveloping and permeating the Earth is active.

But matters become more difficult when we turn our attention—naturally our soul's attention—to what is now (during sleep) outside the physical and etheric bodies, namely, to the Ego and astral body of man. We cannot possibly accept the idea that this has anything to do with the physical Earth, or with what surrounds and permeates the Earth as ether. As to what takes place during sleep, I indicated it to you in a more descriptive way in the lectures given here a short time ago, and I will outline it today from a different point of view. We can in reality only understand what goes on in the Ego and astral body of man when with the help of Spiritual Science we penetrate into what takes place on and around the Earth over and above the physical and etheric forces and activities.

To begin with, we turn our gaze upon the plant-world. Speaking in the general sense and leaving out of account evergreen trees and the like—we see the plant-world sprouting out of the Earth in spring. We see the plants becoming richer and richer in color, more luxuriant, and then in autumn fading away again. In a certain sense we see them disappear from the Earth when the Earth is covered with snow.

But that is only one aspect of the unfolding of the plant-world. Physical knowledge tells us that this unfolding of the plant-world in spring and its fading towards autumn is connected with the Sun, also that, for example, the green coloring of the plants can be produced only under the influence of sunlight. Physical knowledge, therefore, shows us what comes about in the realm of physical effects; but it does not show us that while all the budding, the blossoming and withering of the plants is going on, spiritual events are also taking place. In reality, just as in the physical human organism there is for example the circulation of the blood, just as etheric processes express themselves in the physical organism as vascular action and so forth, and just as this physical organism is permeated by the soul and spirit, so also the processes of sprouting, greening, blossoming and fading of the plants which we regard as physical processes, are everywhere permeated by workings of the cosmic world of soul and spirit.

Now when we look into the countenance of a man and his glance falls on us, when we see his expression, maybe the flushing of the face, then indeed the eyes of our soul are looking right through the physical to the soul and spirit. Indeed, it cannot be otherwise in our life among our fellow-men. In like manner we must accustom ourselves also to see spirit-and-soul in the physiognomy—if I may call it so—and changing coloring of the plant-world on our Earth.

If we are only willing to recognize the physical, we say that the Sun's warmth and light work upon the plants, forming in them the saps, the chlorophyll and so forth. But if we contemplate all this with spiritual insight, if we take the same attitude to this plant-physiognomy of the Earth as we are accustomed to take to the human physiognomy, then something unveils itself to us that I should like to express with a particular word, because this word actually conveys the reality.

The Sun, of which we say, outwardly speaking, that it sends its light to the Earth, is not merely a radiant globe of gas but infinitely more than that. It sends its rays down to the Earth but whenever we look at the Sun it is the outer side of the rays that we see. The rays have, however, an inner side. If someone were able to look through the Sun's light, to regard the light only as an outer husk and look through to the soul of it, he would behold the Soul-Power, the Soul-Being of the Sun. With ordinary human consciousness we see the Sun as we should see a man who was made of papier-maché. An effigy in which there is nothing but the form, the lifeless form, is of course something different from the human being we actually see before us. In the case of the living human being, we see through this outer form and perceive soul-and-spirit. For ordinary consciousness the Sun is changed as it were into a papier-maché cast. We do not see through its outer husk that is woven of Light.

But if we were able to see through this, we should see the soul-and-spirit essence of the Sun. We can be conscious of its activity just as we are conscious of the physical papier-maché husk of the Sun. From the standpoint of physical knowledge we say: ‘The Sun shines upon the Earth; it sparkles upon the stones, upon the soil. The light is thrown back and thereby we see everything that is mineral. The rays of the Sun penetrate into the plants, making them green, making them bud.’—All that is external. If we see the soul-and-spirit essence of the Sun, we cannot merely say: ‘The sunlight sparkles on the minerals, is reflected, enabling us to see the minerals,’ or, ‘The light and heat of the Sun penetrate into the plants, making them verdant’—but we shall have to say, meaning now the countless spiritual Beings who people the Sun and who constitute its soul and spirit: ‘The Sun dreams and its dreams envelop the Earth and fashion the plants.’

If you picture the surface of the Earth with the physical plants growing from it, coming to blossom, you have there the working of the physical rays of the Sun. But above it is the weaving life of the dream-world of the Sun—a world of pure Imaginations. And one can say: When the mantle of snow melts in the spring, the Sun regains its power, then the Sun-Imaginations weave anew around the Earth. These Imaginations of the Sun are Imaginative forces, playing in upon the world of plants. Now although it is true that this Imaginative world—this Imaginative atmosphere surrounding the Earth—is very specially active from spring until autumn in any given region of the Earth, nevertheless this dreamlike character of the Sun's activity is also present in a certain way during the time of winter. Only during winter the dreams are, as it were, dull and brooding, whereas in summer they are mobile, creative, formative. Now it is in this element in which the Sun-Imaginations unfold that the Ego and astral body of man live and weave when they are outside the physical and etheric bodies.

You will realize from what I have said that sleep in summer is actually quite a different matter from sleep in winter, although in the present state of evolution, man's life and consciousness are so dull and lacking in vitality that these things go unperceived. In earlier times men distinguished very definitely through their feelings between winter-sleep and summer-sleep, and they knew too what meaning winter-sleep and summer-sleep had for them. In those ancient times men knew that of summer-sleep they could say: During the summer the Earth is enveloped by picture-thoughts. And they expressed this by saying: The Upper Gods come down during the summer and hover around the Earth; during the winter the Lower Gods ascend out of the Earth and hover around it.—This Imaginative world, differently constituted in winter and in summer, was conceived as the weaving of the Upper and the Lower Gods. But in those olden times it was also known that man himself, with his Ego and his astral body, lives in this world of weaving Imaginations.

Now the very truths of which I have here spoken, show us, if we ponder them in the light of Spiritual Science, in what connection man stands, even during his earthly existence, with the extra-earthly Universe. You see, in summer—when it is summer in any region of the Earth—the human being during his sleep is always woven around by a sharply contoured world of Cosmic Imaginations. The result is that during the time of summer he is, so to speak, pressed near to the Earth with his soul and spirit. During the time of winter it is different. During winter the contours, the meshes, of the Cosmic Imaginations widen out, as it were. During the summer we live with our Ego and astral body while we are asleep within very clearly defined Imaginations, within manifold figures and forms. During winter the figures around the Earth are wide-meshed and the consequence of this is that whenever autumn begins, that which lives in our Ego and astral body is borne far out into the Universe by night. During summer and its heat, that which lives in our Ego and astral body remains more, so to speak, in the psycho-spiritual atmosphere of the human world. During winter this same content is borne out into the far distances of the Universe. Indeed without speaking figuratively, since one is saying something that is quite real, one can say: that which man cultivates in himself, in his soul, and which through his Ego and astral body he can draw out from his physical and etheric bodies between the times of going to sleep and waking—that stores itself up during the summer and streams out during winter into the wide expanse of the Cosmos.

Now we cannot conceive that we men shut ourselves away, as it were, in earthly existence and that the wide Universe knows nothing of us. It is far from being so. True, at the time of Midsummer man can conceal himself from the Spirits of the Universe, and he may also succeed in harboring reprehensible feelings of evil. The dense net of Imaginations does not let these feelings through; they still remain. And at Christmastime the Gods look in upon the Earth and everything that lives in man's nature is revealed and goes forth with his Ego and astral being. Using a picture which truly represents the facts, we may say: In winter the windows of the Earth open and the Angels and Archangels behold what men actually are on the Earth.

We on Earth have gradually accustomed ourselves in modern civilization to express all that we allow to pass as knowledge in humdrum, dry, unpoetic phrases. The higher Beings are ever poets, therefore we never give a true impression of their nature if we describe it in barren physical words; we must resort to words such as I have just now used: at Christmastime the Earth's windows open and through these windows the Angels and Archangels behold what men's deeds have been the whole year through. The Beings of the higher Hierarchies are poets and artists even in their thinking. The logic we are generally at pains to apply is only an outcome of the Earth's gravity—by which I do not at all imply that it is not highly useful on Earth.

It is what lives in the minds and hearts of men as I have just pictured it, that is of essential interest to these higher Beings; the Angels who look in through the Christmas windows are not interested in the speculations of professors; they overlook them. Nor, to begin with, are they much concerned with a man's thoughts. It is what goes on in his feelings, in his heart, that in its cosmic aspect is connected with the Sun's yearly course. So it is not so much whether we are foolish or clever on Earth that comes before the gaze of the Divine-Spiritual Beings at the time of Christmas, but simply whether we are good or evil men, whether we feel for others or are egoists. That is what is communicated to the cosmic worlds through the course of the yearly seasons.

You may believe that our thoughts remain near the Earth, because I have said that the Angels and Archangels are not concerned with them when they look in through the Christmas windows. They are not concerned with our thoughts because, if I may use a rather prosaic figure of speech, they receive the richer coinage, the more valuable coinage that is minted by the soul-and-spirit of man. And this more valuable coinage is minted by the heart, the feelings, by what a man is worth because of what his heart and feeling contain. For the Cosmos, our thoughts are only the small change, the lesser coinage, and this lesser coinage is spied out by subordinate spiritual beings every night. Whether we are foolish or clever is spied out for the Cosmos every night—not indeed for the very far regions of the Cosmos but only for the regions around the Earth—spied out by beings who are closest to the Earth in its environment and therefore the most subordinate in rank. The daily revolution of the Sun takes place in order to impart to the Cosmos the worth of our thoughts. Thus far do our thoughts extend; they belong merely to the environment of the Earth. The yearly revolution of the Sun takes place in order to carry our heart-nature, our feeling-nature, farther out into the cosmic worlds.

Our will-nature cannot be carried in this way out into the Cosmos, for the cycle of the day is strictly regulated. It runs its course in twenty-four hours. The yearly course of the Sun is strictly regulated too. We perceive the regularity of the daily cycle in the strictly logical sequences of our thoughts. The regularity of the yearly cycle—we perceive the after-effect of this in our heart and soul, in that there are certain feelings which say to one thing that a man does: it is good, and to another: it is bad.

But there is a third faculty in man, namely, the will. True, the will is bound up with feeling, and feeling cannot but say that certain actions are morally good, and others morally not good. But the will can do what is morally good and also what is morally not good. Here, then, there is no strict regularity. The relation of our will to our nature as human beings is not strictly regulated in the sense that thinking and feeling are regulated. We cannot call a bad action good, or a good action bad, nor can we call a logical thought illogical, an illogical thought logical. This is due to the fact that our thoughts stand under the influence of the daily revolution of the Sun, our feelings under the influence of its yearly revolution. The will, however, is left in the hands of humanity itself on Earth. And now a man might say: ‘The most that happens to me is that if I think illogically, my illogical thoughts are carried out every night into the Cosmos and do mischief there—but what does that matter to me? I am not here to bring order into the Cosmos.’—Here on Earth, where his life is lived in illusion, a man might in certain circumstances speak like this, but between death and a new birth he would never do so. For between death and a new birth he himself is in the worlds in which he may have caused mischief through his foolish thoughts; and he must live through all the harm that he has done. So, too, between death and a new birth, he is in those worlds into which his feelings have flowed. But here again he might say on Earth: ‘What lives in my feelings evaporates into the Cosmos; but I leave it to the Gods to deal with any harm that may have been caused there through me. My will, however, is not bound on Earth by any regulation.’—

The materialist who considers that man's life is limited to the time between birth and death, can never conceive that his will has any cosmic significance; neither can he conceive that human thoughts or feelings have any meaning for the Cosmos. But even one who knows quite well that thoughts have a cosmic significance as the result of the daily revolution of the Sun, and feelings through the yearly revolution—even he, when he sees what is accomplished on the Earth by the good or evil will-impulses of man, must turn away from the Cosmos and to human nature itself in order to see how what works in man's will goes out into the Cosmos. For what works in man's will must be borne out into the Cosmos by man himself, and he bears it out when he passes through the gate of death. Therefore it is not through the daily or the yearly cycles but through the gate of death that man carries forth the good or the evil he has brought about here on Earth through his will.

It is a strange relationship that man has to the Cosmos in his life of soul. We say of our thoughts: ‘We have thoughts but they are not subject to our arbitrary will; we must conform to the laws of the Universe when we think, otherwise we shall come into conflict with everything that goes on in the world.’—If a little child is standing in front of me, and I think: That is an old man—I may flatter myself that I have determined the thought, but I am certainly out of touch with the world. Thus in respect of our thoughts we are by no means independent, so little independent that our thoughts are carried out into the Cosmos by the daily cycle of the Sun. Nor are we independent in our life of feelings, for they are carried out through the yearly cycle of the Sun. Thus even during earthly life, that which lives in our head through our thoughts and, through our feelings in our breast, does not live only within us but also partakes in a cosmic existence. That alone which lives in our will we keep with us until our death. Then, when we have laid aside the body, when we have no longer anything to do with earthly forces, we bear it forth with us through the gate of death.

Man passes through the gate of death laden with what has come out of his acts of will. Just as here on Earth he has around him all that lives in minerals, plants, animals and in physical humanity, all that lives in clouds, streams, mountains, stars, in so far as they are externally visible through the light—just as he has all this around him during his existence between birth and death, so he has a world around him when he has laid aside the physical and etheric bodies and has passed through the gate of death. In truth he has around him the very world into which his thoughts have entered every night, into which his feelings have entered with the fulfilment of every yearly cycle ... “That thou hast thought; that thou hast felt.” ... It now seems to him as though the Beings of the Hierarchies were bearing his thoughts and his feelings towards him. They have perceived it all, as I have indicated. His mental life and his feeling-life now stream towards him.

In earthly existence the Sun gives light from morning to evening; it goes down and night sets in. When we have passed through the gate of death, our wisdom rays out towards us as day; through our accumulated acts of folly, the spiritual lights grow dark and dim around us and it becomes night. Here on Earth we have day and night; when we have passed through the gate of death, we have as day and night the results of our wisdom and our foolishness. And what man experiences here on this Earth as spring, summer, autumn and winter in the yearly cycle, as changing temperatures and other sentient experiences, of all this he becomes aware—when he has passed through the gate of death—also as a kind of cycle, although of much longer duration. He experiences the warmth-giving, life-giving quality (life-giving, that is to say, for his spiritual Self) of his good feelings, of his sympathy with goodness; he experiences as icy cold his sympathy with evil, with the immoral. Just as here on Earth we live through the heat of summer and the cold of winter, so do we live after death warmed by our good feelings, chilled by our evil feelings; and we bear the effects of our will through these spiritual years and days. After death we are the product of our moral nature on Earth. And we have an environment that is permeated by our follies and our wisdom, by our sympathies and antipathies for the good.

So that we can say: Just as here on Earth we have the summer air around us giving warmth and life, and as we have the cold and frosty winter air around us, so, after death, we are surrounded by an atmosphere of soul-and-spirit that is warm and life-giving in so far as it is produced through our good feelings, and chilling in so far as it is produced through our evil feelings. Here on Earth, in certain regions at least, the summer and winter temperatures are the same for all of us. In the time after death, each human being has his own atmosphere, engendered by himself. And the most moving experiences after death are connected with the fact that one man lives in icy cold and the other, close beside him, in life-giving warmth.

Such are the experiences that may be undergone after death. And as I described in my book Theosophy, one of the main experiences passed through in the soul-world, is that those human beings who have harbored evil feelings here on Earth, must undergo their hard experiences in the sight of those who developed and harbored good feelings.

It can indeed be said: All that remains concealed to begin with in the inner being of man, discloses itself when he has passed through the gate of death. Sleep too acquires a cosmic significance, likewise our life during wintertime. We sleep every night in order that we may prepare for ourselves the light in which we must live after death. We go through our winter experiences in order to prepare the soul-spiritual warmth into which we enter after death. And into this atmosphere of the spiritual world which we have ourselves prepared we bear the effects of our deeds.

Here on Earth we live, through our physical body, as beings subject to earthly gravity. Through our breathing we live in the surrounding air, and far away we see the stars. When we have passed through the gate of death we are in the world of spirit-and-soul, far removed from the Earth; we are beyond the stars, we see the stars from the other side, look back to the world of stars. Our very being lives in the cosmic thoughts and cosmic forces. We look back upon the stars, no longer seeing them shine, but seeing instead the Hierarchies, the Spiritual Beings who have merely their reflection in the stars.

Thus man on Earth can gain more and more knowledge of what the nature of his life will be when he passes through the gate of death. There are people who say: ‘Why do I need to know all this? I shall surely see it all after death!’—That attitude is just as if a man were to doubt the value of eyesight. For as the Earth's evolution takes its course, man enters more and more into a life in which he must acquire the power to partake in these after-death experiences by grasping them, to begin with in thought, here on the Earth. To shut out knowledge of the spiritual worlds while we are on the Earth is to blind ourselves in soul and spirit after death. A man will enter the spiritual world as a cripple when he passes through the gate of death, if here, in this world, he disdains to learn about the world of spirit, for humanity is evolving towards freedom—towards free spiritual activity. This fact should become clearer and clearer to mankind and should make men realize the urgent necessity of gaining knowledge about the spiritual world.

In the course of our present studies I should like it to become increasingly clear that man does not belong to the Earth alone, to Earth-existence alone, but also to the Cosmos, to the world of Stars. Much of what there is to say in this connection I have, as you know, already said. I want now to begin with a brief remark in order that misunderstandings may be avoided.

Anyone who speaks of man's connection with the world of the Stars is probably always liable to be accused of leanings towards the superficial form of Astrology that is so widely pursued nowadays. But if what is said on this subject is rightly understood, the immense difference will at once be apparent between what is meant here and the amateurish interpretations of ancient astrological traditions that are so common today.

When we say that man, between birth and death, is a being connected with the Earth and earthly happenings, what do we mean by this? We mean that man owes his existence between birth and death to the fact that, in the first place, he takes the substances of the Earth into his metabolic system as nourishment and digests them; further, that through his breathing, and through the inner processes connected with his breathing, he is related in still another way to the Earth—that is to say, to the atmosphere surrounding the the Earth. We also say that man perceives the outer things of the Earth by means of his senses, perceives indeed reflections of what is extra-terrestrial—reflections which are, however, of a much more earthly character than is generally supposed. So that in general one can say: Man partakes of earthly existence through his senses, through his rhythmic system, and through his metabolic system, and has within him the continuation of the processes set in operation through this Earth-existence itself.

But equally there takes place in man a continuation of cosmic, extra-terrestrial processes. Only it must not be supposed, when it is said that an influence from the Moon, or Venus, or Mars, is exercised upon man, that this is to be understood merely as if rays of light are sent down from Mars or Venus or the Moon, and permeate him. When, for instance, it is said that man is subject to the influence of the Moon, this must be taken as an analogy of what is meant by saying that man is subject to the influences of the substances of the Earth. When someone passes an apple-tree, let us say, picks an apple and eats it, it can be said that the apple-tree has an influence on him; but we should not construe this so literally as to say that the apple-tree had sent its rays towards him. Or, if you like, when a man passes a meadow where there is an ox, and a week afterwards eats its flesh, we shall not at once form the idea that the ox has exercised an influence upon him. Neither must we picture so literally what is said about the influence upon man of the world of the Stars. The relation of the world of the Stars to man and of man to the world of the Stars is for all that just as much a reality as the relation of the man to the ox he passes in the meadow and the flesh of which he afterwards eats.

Today I have to speak of certain connections which exist between man and the worlds both of Earth-existence and of extra-earthly existence. If we again turn our attention to how man lives in the alternating conditions of waking and sleeping, we must first be clear that it is in the waking state that his reciprocal relationship to earthly substances and earthly forces is actually established. During waking life he perceives through his senses; during sleep he does not. Moreover he eats and drinks only when awake—though possibly some people would like to do so in sleep as well! The breathing process and the process that is connected with the breathing, i.e. the circulation of the blood, as well as the other rhythmic processes—these alone continue in man both in the waking and sleeping states. But they differ in the two states. I will speak later of the difference there is between breathing during waking life and breathing during sleep. To begin with we will confine ourselves to the fact that man is related to the outer world during the waking state through his senses and through his metabolism. We will consider this at first in connection only with things that are common knowledge.

Let us then start from the fact that during his waking state man takes foodstuffs into himself from the outside world, inner activity being promoted by the process of digestion. But it must not be forgotten that while, in the waking state, after the food has been taken, inner physical and etheric activity proceeds under the influence of the intaken foodstuffs, this physical and etheric organism of man is permeated by his Ego-organization and astral body.

It is also the case that during the waking state, man's Ego and astral ‘being’ take command of what goes on in the physical and etheric bodies in connection with the process of nourishment. But what thus takes place under the influence of the Ego and astral being does not continue during sleep. During sleep the physical and etheric bodies of man are worked upon by forces that issue, not from the Earth but from the cosmic environment of the Earth—from the world of the Stars.

It might be said—and not in a figurative sense for it has real meaning—that by day man eats the substances of the Earth and by night takes into himself what the Stars and their activities give him. In a certain sense, therefore, man is bound up with the Earth while he is awake and removed from the Earth while he is asleep; heavenly processes take their course in his physical and etheric bodies during sleep.

Materialistic science thinks that when a man is asleep, the substances he has consumed simply activate their own forces in him, whereas in reality, whatever substances a man takes into himself are worked upon during his sleep by the cosmic forces in the environment of the Earth. Suppose, for instance, we consume white of egg—albumen. This albumen is only fettered to the Earth through the fact that during the waking state we are permeated by our soul and spirit—our astral body and Ego. During sleep this albumen is worked upon by the whole planetary system from Moon to Saturn, and by the world of the fixed Stars. And a chemist who wished to study the inner processes taking place in man during sleep would have not only to be versed in earthly chemistry but also in a spiritual chemistry, for the processes then are different from those that take their course during waking life.

The Ego and astral being of man are, as you know, separated from the physical and etheric bodies during sleep and are not directly related with the world of the Stars; but they are directly related with the Beings of whom the Sun, Moon and Stars are the physical mirror-images—namely, with the Beings of the Hierarchies. Man asleep is a duality; his Ego and astral body—I could equally well say, his spirit and soul—become subject to the spiritual Beings of the higher kingdoms of the Universe. His bodies, the physical and etheric bodies, are subject to the physical reflections, the cosmic-physical mirror-images of these higher Beings.

Aware of himself as an earthly being, man has become more and more a materialistic philistine under the influence of intellectualism. Almost as aptly as the modern age is called the epoch of intellectual and scientific progress, it could be called the epoch of materialistic philistinism. For man is not conscious that he is dependent on anything else than sense-impressions coming from the Earth, the rhythmic processes set going in him by earthly processes, the metabolic processes also occasioned in him by earthly conditions. Hence he does not know his real place in the Universe. The factors in operation here are of tremendous complexity. As soon as the veil that is spread before man in order that he may see only the sense-world and not the spiritual world behind it, is drawn aside, life becomes extraordinarily complex.

It is found to begin with that man is influenced not only by those Beings and their physical reflections, the Stars, which can be directly observed, but that within earthly existence itself, supersensible Beings akin to those of the world of Stars have so to speak set up their abode in the earthly realm.

You know that the people of the Old Testament worshipped Jehovah—who was an actual Being, connected with what manifests in the physical world as Moon. It is of course more or less a figure of speech to say that the Jehovah-Being has his dwelling in the Moon, but at the same time there is reality in the expression. Everything pertaining to this Jehovah-Being is connected with the Moon.

Now there are Beings who ‘scorned’—if I may so express it—to make the journey to the Moon with the Jehovah-beings when the Moon separated from the Earth, and who remained in the earthly realm. So that in a way we can divine the existence of the true Jehovah-beings when we look at the Moon. We can say: that is the outer physical image of everything that participates in a regular way in the World Order in connection with the Being known as Jehovah. But when we learn to know what takes place inside the surface of the Earth—whether in the solid or the watery states—we find beings there who have disdained to make their home on the Moon, and have in an irregular way made the Earth their dwelling-place.

Now the Moon-beings, as I will call them, have helpers. These helpers belong to Mercury and Venus, just as the Moon-beings belong to the Moon. The Venus-beings, the Mercury-beings and the Moon-beings form a kind of trinity. The so-called regular beings of this kind in the Universe belong to these Stars. But both in the solid and the watery constituents of the Earth, we find beings belonging, it is true, to the same category, but—one might say—to a different epoch of time. They are beings who did not share in the Earth's cosmic evolution.

These beings have an influence upon sleeping man just as the regular cosmic beings have; but their influence is pernicious. I must characterize it by saying: when a man goes to sleep, then in the condition between falling asleep and waking, these irregular Moon, Venus and Mercury-beings approach him and set about persuading him that evil is good and good evil. All this takes place in man's unconscious condition, between going to sleep and waking.

It is a shattering experience connected with initiation that beyond the threshold of ordinary consciousness things by no means without danger to humanity are encountered. People holding the materialistic view of life have no idea to what man is exposed between going to sleep and waking. He is actually exposed to these beings who persuade him in his sleeping state that good is evil, and evil good. The moral order on Earth is bound up with the human etheric body, and when man sleeps, he leaves his moral achievements behind him on the bed. He does not pass over into the state of sleep armed with his moral qualities.

Natural Science today is everywhere touching the fringe of things which need to be explained by Spiritual Science. You may recently have seen in the newspapers some interesting and thoroughly well-founded statistics. It was stated that criminals in the prisons have been found to have the soundest sleep of all. Really hardened criminals are never tormented during their sleep by bad dreams or the like. This only happens when they dip down again into their etheric bodies, for it is there that the moral qualities lie. It can much more easily happen to one who is striving to be moral, that through the constitution of his etheric body, he carries over something into his astral body and is then tormented by dreams as the result of comparatively trifling moral lapses. But generally speaking it is a fact that man does not carry over at all, or only to a very slight extent, the moral constitution he acquires during earthly existence but is exposed during sleep to the beings just referred to.

These beings are identical with those I have always designated as Ahrimanic. They set themselves the task of keeping man on the Earth by every possible means. You know from the book Occult Science that the Earth will one day pass over into the Jupiter condition. That is what these beings want to prevent. They want to prevent man from developing in a regular way together with the Earth and then passing over into the Jupiter condition in a normal way. They want to preserve the Earth as Earth and mankind for the Earth. Hence these beings work unceasingly and with great intensity to achieve the following.—You must remember that these are things that take place behind the scenes of existence—real processes that have been going on ever since there has been a human race on the Earth.—Man passes into the state of sleep in his Ego-being and astral-being. These Moon, Venus and Mercury-beings who are living unlawfully on the Earth, now endeavor to give man an etheric body composed of the Earth's ether whenever he is asleep. They hardly ever succeed. In rare cases of which I will speak at some later time, they have succeeded; but this hardly ever happens. Still they do not give up the attempt for over and over again it seems to them that their efforts might succeed, that they might surround, permeate a man while he is asleep and has left his etheric body behind, with another etheric body built up from the Earth's ether. That is what these beings desire.

If an Ahrimanic being of this category were actually to succeed in bringing a complete etheric body stage by stage into a man every time he slept, such a man would be able after death, when living in his etheric body, to maintain himself in that body. Otherwise, as you know, the etheric body dissolves in a few days. But a man to whom the above had happened would be able to continue existing in his etheric body and after a time there would arise a race of etheric humanity. That is what is desired from this side of the spiritual world, and then it would be possible by such means to preserve the Earth.

Within the solid and the fluid components of the Earth there are in very truth a host of such beings. Their desire is to make mankind into pure phantoms, etheric phantoms, until the end of the Earth's evolution, so that the normal goal of Earth-evolution could not be attained. And in the night-time these beings by no means lose courage; over and over again they believe that their efforts may succeed.

Now man today has quite a passably good intellect which has developed considerably at the present time when philistinism is on the increase. Man can certainly pride himself upon possessing intellect. But this intellect is not even remotely on a par with the intellect of those higher beings who desire to achieve what I am now describing to you. Let nobody say: ‘These beings must be fearfully stupid.’ They are certainly not stupid. Seeing that they work only upon human beings in sleep, there is nothing to deter them from believing that they might succeed before the end of Earth-evolution in preventing a large portion of the human race from reaching their future destinations—destinations bound up with the Jupiter embodiment of the Earth.

But one who is able to see behind the scenes of physical existence can perceive that these beings do sometimes lose courage, are disappointed. And the disappointments they experience are not experienced in the night, but by day. One sees, for instance, how these Ahrimanic beings suffer disappointments if one comes across them in hospitals.

Now of course the illnesses that befall men have one aspect that calls upon us in all circumstances to do everything we possibly can to heal them. But on the other side we must ask: how do the illnesses suffered by men arise out of the dark sources of natural existence?

Those illnesses which are not the result of external influences but arise out of the inner constitution of man, are connected with the fact that when the Ahrimanic beings have almost succeeded in making a man assume an etheric body that is not his normal one, then, instead of bringing the lawful working of the etheric forces into his physical body and into his own accustomed etheric body on waking, such a man bears into himself causes of illness. Through these causes of illness the true Venus, Mercury and Moon-beings protect themselves against the harmful influences of the irregular beings. Indeed if a man did not at some time or another get this or that illness, he would be liable to the danger of which I have just spoken. In any illness his body breaks down, collapses, in order that there can be ‘sweated out,’ if I may use the expression, whatever irregular etheric processes he has taken into himself through the Ahrimanic influences.

And a further reaction called forth in order to prevent man from falling a victim to this Ahrimanic influence, is the possibility of error. And a third thing is egoism. Man is not fundamentally intended to be ill, to fall a prey to error, or to be egoistic to an exaggerated degree. Egoism as such is again a means of holding man to the evolution proper to the Earth instead of being torn out of it by the Ahrimanic beings. This, then, is one order of beings which can be discovered behind the scenes of ordinary sense-existence.

One can form an idea of another order of beings by knowing that not only Moon, Mercury, and Venus have an influence upon man but that an influence is also exercised from beyond the Sun—from Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn.

You know from the lectures I gave in the so-called ‘French Course’^NoteNum that the Moon is the physical reflection of those beings who bring man into the physical world. Saturn is the physical reflection of those beings who bear him again out of the physical world. The Moon draws man down to the Earth; Saturn draws him again into the Universe and then into the spiritual world.

Just as the Jehovah-Moon-God has Venus and Mercury-beings as helpers, so Saturn has Jupiter and Mars-beings as helpers in bearing man into the Cosmos and into the spiritual worlds. These influences and the influences connected with the Moon-beings work upon man in exactly the opposite way.

The influences of Moon, Venus, and Mercury upon us are predominant until our 17th or 18th years. Then later on, when we have passed our 20th or 21st year, an influence from Mars, Jupiter and Saturn becomes particularly active; only in later years does this come to the point of leading us out of earthly existence into the spiritual world. The inner constitution of man is, in fact, dependent upon this transition, as one might say, from the inner planets to the outer planets. Until our 17th or 18th years, we are dependent, for instance, upon the major blood-circulation which affects the whole body. Later in life we are dependent upon the minor blood-circulation—but these are matters which must be left for future lectures. At the moment we must pay attention to the fact that just as the irregular beings of Moon, Venus, and Mercury have their habitations in the solid and fluidic components of the Earth, so the irregular beings of Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn have the conditions for their existence—or, to speak pictorially, their habitations—in the warmth and in the air surrounding the Earth.

These beings have a great influence upon man during his sleeping state. But their influence works in exactly the opposite direction. The aim of these beings is to make man into a moral automaton—if I may so express it—into a moral automaton of such a nature that in his waking state he would not listen to his own instincts, his desires, or the voice of his blood, but would spurn all this and hearken only to the inspiration of these irregular Mars-, Jupiter-, and Saturn-beings. He would then become a moral automaton, without any prospect of a future state of freedom. That, then, is what these beings desire; and their influence too is strong, exceedingly strong. It is they who every night want to induce man to take the influence of the world of Stars into himself and never again the influence of the Earth. They would fain carry man right away from earthly existence. They desire—and have desired this ever since the human race first arose on the Earth—that man shall spurn the Earth, that he shall not awaken to freedom on the Earth—where alone this is possible. They desire that he shall remain a moral automaton as he was in the preceding metamorphosis of the Earth, in the Old Moon.

And in the middle, between these two hosts, of which the one sets its camp in the element of warmth and that of air, and the other in the elements of earth and of water—between these two opposing cosmic hosts stands Man. Life in his physical body conceals from him the fact that a fierce battle is waged in the Cosmos for possession of his being.

Today man must consciously find his way to such knowledge for it concerns him deeply and essentially. His very existence as a human being is constituted by the fact that forces are everywhere active around him, forces from the spiritual world. It is important for man today to have knowledge of his real position in the Universe.

A time will come when people will be far more justified in holding a poor opinion of our dark, materialistic knowledge compared with what will be known in the future about the spiritual reality behind the physical, than we are justified in saying that the scientific knowledge possessed by the Greeks was puerile, that they were mere children, whereas we have made splendid progress! In philistinism we certainly have made splendid progress and we shall have much more right to criticise when we can speak with full knowledge of this battle that is waging on the Earth for possession of man's being.

There are signs that a knowledge of these things must begin to spread in our time. It is certainly true that what I have told you today about the battle of the Ahrimanic and Luciferic beings in the Cosmos for the being of man is still hidden from the majority of people in the dark recesses of their inner nature. But these battles are now beginning to send their waves into that realm of existence of which men are clearly conscious. And today, if we are not to lead a sleepy existence in our civilization, we must know how to recognize the first waves that beat in upon us from those regions of the spiritual world which I have just characterized.

These two hosts—the Luciferic in the warmth and airy element of the Earth, the Ahrimanic in the solid and watery—these two hosts send their waves into our cultural life today. The Luciferic hosts are making their influence felt above all in outworn theology. In our cultural life, as an outflow of this Luciferic power, we encounter statements endeavoring to make Christ into a myth. The Christ descended to the Earth through the Mystery of Golgotha as a real Being, and that is naturally a truth that cuts right across the intentions of the beings who would like to make man into a moral automaton, without freedom. Therefore: Do away with the reality of Christ. Christ is a myth! You can discover in the literature of the 19th century, how clever and ingenious were the hypotheses of theologians like David Frederic Strauss, Kalthoff and those who merely echoed them, or better said, apish babblers like Arthur Drews! Everywhere the view is advanced that Christ is a mythological figure, a mere picture which has impressed itself upon man's imagination.—There will be many more attacks from these hosts—but this is the first.

The first waves coming from the Ahrimanic host in the solid and watery elements of the Earth press home the opposite view. In this case, Christ is denied and validity allowed only to the ‘simple man of Nazareth,’ to Jesus as the physical personality. Here again is a tit-bit presented by theology!

Making Christ into a myth—a purely Luciferic activity. Making the One who went through the Mystery of Golgotha into a mere man—even if endowed with every possible quality—a purely Ahrimanic activity. This, however, does not succeed at all easily, for the many testimonies and traditions have to be eliminated before producing this ‘simple man of Nazareth.’ Nevertheless this other tit-bit of theology is evidence of the onrush of the Ahrimanic breakers into human culture.

If these things are to be rightly assessed we must be able also to detect them behind the scenes of our ordinary existence on Earth. Otherwise, if men are not willing to turn their attention to what can be said today out of the spiritual world, they will become less and less able to judge such phenomena correctly, and these phenomena will then take effect in the sub-consciousness. It will become increasingly dangerous for men to surrender to the subconscious. Clear, thoughtful observation of what actually exists—a feeling for reality—that is the growing need of humanity.

Perhaps we can trace most definitely where this clear thoughtfulness, this sense of reality, must be applied, when we perceive the increase of such extraordinary phenomena as the theology which on the one hand denies Christ, and on the other hand makes Christ a myth. Such phenomena will become more and more prevalent, and if they are not to lead to corruption, humanity must acquire a clear, unswerving perception of the spiritual influences that are exercised upon the physical world, and particularly upon man himself.

I told you once before of the two men who found a piece of iron bent into a certain shape. The one said: “A good horse-shoe! I will shoe my horse with it.” The other said: “Not at all. It is a magnet and can be used for quite different purposes than shoeing a horse!” “I see nothing like a magnet about it,” said the other man. “You are crazy to say that there are invisible magnetic forces in it. It's a horse-shoe—that's its use!”

This is rather like the people today who are not willing to receive the knowledge that comes from the spiritual world. They want to “shoe horses” with everything in the world—if I may so express myself—because they will not acknowledge the reality of the supersensible forces. They want to shoe horses—not to make anything in which the magnetic forces are put to use. There was once a time—nor does it lie very far behind us—when a piece of iron so shaped would have been used for the shoeing of horses. But today this is no longer possible.

A time will come when in ordinary social life too, men will need what can be communicated from the spiritual world. Of this we must be mindful, and then Anthroposophy will penetrate not only into the intellect—that is of less importance—but above all into the will—and that is of great importance. Upon this we will ponder more and more deeply.

• NoteNum. Printed under the title: Philosophy, Cosmology and Religion. An abbreviated version of ten lectures given by Dr. Steiner in Dornach, 6th-15th September, 1922.