The Rudolf Steiner Archive

In attempting to give a kind of introduction to Anthroposophy I shall try to indicate, as far as possible, the way it can be presented to the world today. Let me begin, however, with some preliminary remarks. We have usually not sufficient regard for the Spiritual as a living reality; and a living reality must be grasped in the fulness of life. Feeling ourselves members of the Anthroposophical Society and the bearers of the Movement, we ought not to act each day on the assumption that the Anthroposophical Movement has just begun. It has, in fact, existed for more than two decades, and the world has taken an attitude towards it. Therefore, in whatever way you come before the world as Anthroposophists, you must bear this in mind. The feeling that the world has already taken up an attitude towards Anthroposophy must be there in the background. If you have not this feeling and think you can simply present the subject in an absolute sense—as one might have done twenty years ago—you will find yourselves more and more presenting Anthroposophy in a false light. This has been done often enough, and it is time it stopped. Our Christmas meeting should mark a beginning in the opposite direction; it must not remain ineffective, as I have already indicated in many different directions.

Of course, we cannot expect every member of the Society to develop, in some way or other, fresh initiative, if he is not so constituted. I might put it this way: Everyone has the right to continue to be a passively interested member, content to receive what is given. But whoever would share, in any way, in putting Anthroposophy before the world, cannot ignore what I have just explained. From now on complete truth must rule in word and deed.

No doubt I shall often repeat such preliminary remarks. We shall now begin a kind of introduction to the anthroposophical view of the world.

Whoever decides to speak about Anthroposophy must assume, to begin with, that what he wants to say is really just what the heart of his listener is itself saying. Indeed, no science based on initiation has ever intended to utter anything except that which was really being spoken by the hearts of those who wished to hear. To meet the deepest needs of the hearts of those requiring Anthroposophy must be, in the fullest sense, the fundamental note of every presentation of it.

If we observe today those who get beyond the superficial aspect of life, we find that ancient feelings, present in every human soul from age to age, have revived. In their subconscious life the men and women of today harbour earnest questions. They cannot even express these in clear thoughts, much less find answers in what the civilised world can offer; but these questions are there, and a large number of people feel them deeply. In fact, these questions are present today in all who really think. But when we formulate them in words they appear, at first, far-fetched. Yet they are so near, so intimately near to the soul of every thinking man.

We can start with two questions chosen from all the riddles oppressing man today. The first presents itself to man's soul when he contemplates the world around him and his own human existence. He sees human beings enter earthly life through birth; he sees life running its course between birth (or conception) and physical death, and subject to the most manifold experiences, inner and outer; and he sees external nature with all the fullness of impressions that confront man and gradually fill his soul.

There is the human soul in a human body. It sees one thing before all others: that Nature receives into herself all the human soul perceives of physical, earthly existence. When man has passed through the gate of death, Nature receives the human body through one element or another (it makes little difference whether through burial or cremation). And what does Nature do with this physical body? She destroys it. We do not usually study the paths taken by the individual substances of the body. But if we make observations at places where a peculiar kind of burial has been practised, we deepen this impression made by a study of what Nature does with the physical, sensible part of man, when he has passed through the gate of death. You know there are subterranean vaults where human remains are kept isolated, but not from the air. They dry up. And what remains after a certain time? A distorted human form consisting of carbonate of lime, itself inwardly disintegrated. This mass of carbonate of lime still resembles, in a distorted form, the human body, but if you only shake it a little, it falls to dust.

This helps us to realise vividly the experience of the soul on seeing what happens to the physical instrument with which man does all things between birth and death. We then turn to Nature, to whom we owe all our knowledge and insight, and say: Nature, who produces from her womb the most wonderful crystal forms, who conjures forth each spring the sprouting, budding plants, who maintains for decades the trees with their bark, and covers the earth with animal species of the most diverse kinds, from the largest beasts to the tiniest bacilli, who lifts her waters to the clouds and upon whom the stars send down their mysterious rays—how is this realm of Nature related to what man, as part of her, carries with him between birth and death? She destroys it, reduces it to formless dust. For man, Nature with her laws is the destroyer. Here, on the one hand, is the human form; we study it in all its wonder. It is, indeed, wonderful, for it is more perfect than any other form. to be found on earth. There, on the other hand, is Nature with her stones, plants, animals, clouds, rivers and mountains, with all that rays down from the sea of stars, with all that streams down, as light and warmth, from the sun to the earth. Yet this Realm of Nature cannot suffer the human form within her own system of laws.¹ The human being before us is reduced to dust when given to her charge. We see all this. We do not form ideas about it, but it is deeply rooted in our feeling life. Whenever we stand in the presence of death, this feeling takes firm root in mind and heart. It is not from a merely selfish feeling nor from a merely superficial hope of survival, that a subconscious question takes shape in mind and heart—a question of infinite significance for the soul, determining its happiness and unhappiness, even when not expressed in words. All that makes, for our conscious life, the happiness or unhappiness of our earthly destiny, is trivial in comparison with the uncertainty of feeling engendered by the sight of death. For then the question takes shape: Whence comes this human form? I look at the wonderfully formed crystal, at the forms of plants and animals. I see the rivers winding their way over the earth, I see the mountains, and all that the clouds reveal and the stars send down to earth. I see all this—man says to himself—but the human form can come from none of these. These have only destructive forces for the human form, forces that turn it to dust.

In this way the anxious question presents itself to the human mind and heart: Where, then, is the world from which the human form comes? And at the sight of death, too, the anxious question arises: Where is the world, that other world, from which the human form comes?

Do not say, my dear friends, that you have not yet heard this question formulated in this way. If you only listen to what people put into words out of the consciousness of their heads, you will not hear it. But if you approach people and they put before you the complaints of their hearts, you can, if you understand the heart's language, hear it asking from its unconscious life: Where is the other world from which the human form comes?—for man, with his form, does not belong to this. People often reveal the complaints of their hearts by seizing on some triviality of life, considering it from various points of view and allowing such considerations to colour the whole question of their destiny.

Thus man is confronted by the world he sees, senses and studies, and about which he constructs his science. It provides him with the basis for his artistic activities and the grounds for his religious worship. It confronts him; and he stands on the earth, feeling in the depths of his soul: I do not belong to this world; there must be another from whose magic womb I have sprung in my present form. To what world do I belong? This sounds in men's hearts today. It is a comprehensive question; and if men are not satisfied with what the sciences give them, it is because this question is there and the sciences are far from touching it. Where is the world to which man really belongs?—for it is not the visible world.

My dear friends, I know quite well it is not I who have spoken these words. I have only formulated what human hearts are saying. That is the point. It is not a matter of bringing men something unknown to their own souls. A person who does this may work sensationally; but for us it can only be a matter of putting into words what human souls themselves are saying. What we perceive of our own bodies, or of another's, in so far as it is visible, has no proper place in the rest of the visible world. We might say: No finger of my body really belongs to the visible world, for this contains only destructive forces for every finger.

So, to begin with, man stands before the great Unknown, but must regard himself as a part of it. In respect of all that is not man, there is—spiritually—light around him; the moment he looks back upon himself, the whole world grows dark, and he gropes in the darkness, bearing with him the riddle of his own being. And it is the same when man regards himself from outside, finding himself an external being within Nature; he cannot, as a human being, contact this world.

Further: not our heads but the depths of our subconscious life put questions subsidiary to the general question I have just discussed. In contemplating his life in the physical world, which is his instrument between birth and death, man realises he could not live at all without borrowing continually from this visible world. Every bit of food I put into my mouth, every sip of water comes from the visible world to which I do not belong at all. I cannot live without this world; and yet, if I have just eaten a morsel of some substance (which must, of course, be a part of the visible world) and pass immediately afterwards through the gate of death, this morsel becomes at once part of the destructive forces of the visible world. It does not do so within me while I live; hence my own being must be preserving it therefrom. Yet my own being is nowhere to be found outside, in the visible world. What, then, do I do with the morsel of food, the drink of water, I take into my mouth? Who am I who receive the substances of Nature and transform them? Who am I? This is the second question and it arises from the first.

When I enter into relationship with the visible world I not only walk in darkness, I act in the dark without knowing who is acting, or who the being is that I designate as myself. I surrender to the visible world, yet I do not belong to it.

All this lifts man out of the visible world, letting him appear to himself as a member of a quite different one. But the great riddle, the anxious doubt confronts him: Where is the world to which I belong? The more human civilisation has advanced and men have learnt to think intensively, the more anxiously have they felt this question. It is deep-seated in men's hearts today, and divides the civilised world into two classes. There are those who repress this question, smother it, do not bring it to clarity within them. But they suffer from it nevertheless, as from a terrible longing to solve this riddle of man. Others deaden themselves in face of this question, doping themselves with all sorts of things in outer life. But in so deadening themselves they kill within them the secure feeling of their own being. Emptiness comes over their souls. This feeling of emptiness is present in the subconsciousness of countless human beings today.

This is one side—the one great question with the subsidiary question mentioned. It presents itself when man looks at himself from outside, and only dimly, subconsciously, perceives his relation, as a human being between birth and death, to the world.

The other question presents itself when man looks into his own inner being. Here is the other pole of human life. Thoughts are here, copying external Nature which man represents to himself through them. He develops sensations and feelings about the outer world and acts upon it through his will. In the first place, he looks back upon this inner being of his, and the surging waves of thinking, feeling and willing confront him. So he stands with his soul in the present. But, in addition, there are the memories of experiences undergone, memories of what he has seen earlier in his present life. All these fill his soul. But what are they? Well, man does not usually form clear ideas of what he thus retains within him, but his subconsciousness does form such ideas.

Now a single attack of migraine that dispels his thoughts, makes his inner being at once a riddle. His condition every time he sleeps, lying motionless and unable to relate himself, through his senses, to the outer world, makes his inner being a riddle again. Man feels his physical body must be active and then thoughts, feelings and impulses of will arise in his soul. I turn from the stone I have just been observing and which has, perhaps, this or that crystalline form; after a little time I turn to it again. It remains as it was. My thought, however, arises, appears as an image in my soul, and fades away. I feel it to be infinitely more valuable than the muscles or bones I bear in my body. Yet it is a mere fleeting image; nay, it is less than the picture on my wall, for this will persist for a time until its substance crumbles away My thought, however, flits past—a picture that continually comes and goes, content to be merely a picture. And when I look into the inner being of my soul, I find nothing but these pictures (or mental presentations). I must admit that my soul life consists of them.

I look at the stone again. It is out there in space; it persists. I picture it to myself now, in an hour's time, in two hours' time. In the meantime the thought disappears and must always be renewed. The stone, however, remains outside. What sustains the stone from hour to hour? What lets the thought of it fluctuate from hour to hour? What maintains the stone from hour to hour? What annihilates the thought again and again so that it must be kindled anew by outer perception? We say the stone ‘exists’; existence is to be ascribed to it. Existence, however, cannot be ascribed to the thought. Thought can grasp the colour and the form of the stone, but not that whereby the stone exists as a stone. That remains external to us, only the mere picture entering the soul.

It is the same with every single thing of external Nature in relation to the human soul. In his soul, which man can regard as his own inner being, the whole of Nature is reflected. Yet he has only fleeting pictures—skimmed off, as it were, from the surfaces of things; into these pictures the inner being of things does not enter. With my mental pictures (or presentations) I pass through the world, skimming everywhere the surfaces of things. What the things are, however, remains outside. The external world does not contact what is within me.

Now, when man, in the sight of death, confronts the world around him in this way he must say: My being does not belong to this world, for I cannot contact it as long as I live in a physical body. Moreover, when my body contacts this outer world after death, every step it takes means destruction. There, outside, is the world. If man enters it fully, he is destroyed; it does not suffer his inner being within it. Nor can the outer world enter man's soul. Thoughts are images and remain outside the real existence of things. The being of stones, the being of plants, of animals, stars and clouds—these do not enter the human soul Man is surrounded by a world which cannot enter his soul but remains outside.

On the one hand, man remains outside Nature. This becomes clear to him at the sight of death. On the other hand, Nature remains external to his soul.

Regarding himself as an object, man is confronted by the anxious question about another world. Contemplating what is most intimate in his own inner being—his thoughts, mental images, sensations, feelings and impulses of will—he sees that Nature, in whom he lives, remains external to them all. He does not possess her.

Here is the sharp boundary between Man and Nature. Man cannot approach Nature without being destroyed; Nature cannot enter the inner being of man without becoming a mere semblance. When man projects himself in thought into Nature, he is compelled to picture his own destruction; and when he looks into himself, asking: How is Nature related to my soul? he finds only the empty semblance of Nature.

Nevertheless, while man bears within him this semblance of the minerals, plants, animals, stars, suns, clouds, mountains and rivers, while he bears within his memory the semblance of the experiences he has undergone with these kingdoms of Nature, experiencing all this in his fluctuating inner world, his own sense of being emerges amid it all.

How is this? How does man experience this sense of his own existence? He experiences it somewhat as follows. Perhaps it can only be expressed in a picture:

Imagine we are looking at a wide ocean. The waves rise and fall. There is a wave here, a wave there; there are waves everywhere, due to the heaving water. One particular wave, however, holds our attention, for we see that something is living in it, that it is not merely surging water. Yet water surrounds this living something on all sides. We only know that something is living in this wave, though even here we can only see the enveloping water. This wave looks like the others; but the strength of its surging, the force with which it rises, gives an impression of something special living within. This wave disappears and reappears at another place; again the water conceals what is animating it from within. So it is with the soul life of man. Images, thoughts, feelings and impulses of will surge up; waves everywhere. One of the waves emerges in a thought, in a feeling, in an act of volition. The ego is within, but concealed by the thoughts, or feelings, or impulses of will, as the water conceals what is living in the wave. At the place where man can only say: ‘There my own self surges up,’ he is confronted by mere semblance; he does not know what he himself is. His true being is certainly there and is inwardly felt and experienced, but this ‘semblance’ in the soul conceals it, as the water of the wave the unknown living thing from the depths of the sea. Man feels his own true being hidden by the unreal images of his own soul. Moreover, it is as if he wanted continually to hold fast to his own existence, as if he would lay hold of it at some point, for he knows it is there. Yet, at the very moment when he would grasp it, it eludes him. Man is not able, within the fluctuating life of his soul, to grasp the real being he knows himself to be. And when he discovers that this surging, unreal life of his soul has something to do with that other world presented by nature, he is more than ever perplexed. The riddle of nature is, at least, one that is present in experience; the riddle of man's own soul is not present in experience because it is itself alive. It is, so to speak, a living riddle, for it answers man's constant question: ‘What am I?’ by putting a mere semblance before him.

On looking into his own inner being man receives the continual answer: I only show you a semblance of yourself; and if you ascribe a spiritual origin to yourself, I only show you a semblance of this spiritual existence within your soul life.

Thus, from two directions, searching questions confront man today. One of these questions arises when he becomes aware that:

Nature exists, but man can only approach her by letting her destroy him;

the other when he sees:

The human soul exists, but Nature can only approach this human soul by becoming mere semblance.

These two truths live in the subconsciousness of man today. On the one hand, we have the unknown world of Nature, the destroyer of man; on the other, the unreal image of the human soul which Nature cannot approach although man can only complete his physical existence by co-operating with her. Man stands, so to speak, in double darkness, and the question arises:

Where is the other world to which I belong?

Man turns, now, to historical tradition, to what has been handed down from ancient times and lives on. He learns that there was once a science that spoke of this unknown world. He looks to ancient times and feels deep reverence for what they tried to teach about the other world within the world of Nature. If one only knows how to deal with Nature in the right way, this other world is revealed to human gaze.

But modern consciousness has discarded this ancient knowledge. It is no longer regarded as valid. It has been handed down to us, but is no longer believed. Man can no longer feel sure that the knowledge acquired by the men of an ancient epoch as their science can answer today his own anxious question arising from the above subconscious facts.

So we turn to Art.

But here again we find something significant. The artistic treatment of physical material—spiritualisation of physical matter—comes down to us from ancient times. Much of this treatment has been retained and can be learnt from tradition. Nevertheless, it is just the man with a really artistic subconscious nature who feels most dissatisfied today; for he can no longer realise what Raphael could still conjure into the human earthly form—the reflection of another world to which man truly belongs. Where is the artist today who can handle earthly, physical substance in such an artistic way?

Thirdly, there is Religion. This, too, has been handed down through tradition from olden times. It directs man's feeling and devotion to that other world. It arose in a past age through man receiving the revelations of the realm of Nature which is really so foreign to him. For, if we turn our spiritual gaze backwards over thousands of years, we find human beings who also felt: Nature exists, but man can only approach her by letting her destroy him. Indeed, the men who lived thousands of years ago felt this in the depths of their souls. They looked at the corpse passing over into external Nature as into a vast Moloch, and saw it destroyed. But they also saw the human soul passing through the same portal beyond which the body is destroyed. Even the Egyptians saw this, or they would never have embalmed their dead. They saw the soul go further still. These men of ancient times felt that the soul grows greater and greater, and passes into the cosmos. And then they saw the soul, which had disappeared into the elements, return again from the cosmic spaces, from the stars. They saw the human soul vanish at death—at first through the gate of death, then on the way to the other world, then returning from the stars. Such was the ancient religion: a cosmic revelation—cosmic revelation from the hour of death, cosmic revelation from the hour of birth. The words have been retained; the belief has been retained, but has its content still any relation to the cosmos? It is preserved in religious literature, in religious tradition foreign to the world.

The man of our present civilisation can no longer see any relation between what religious tradition has handed down to him and the anxious question confronting him today. He looks at Nature and only sees the human physical body passing through the gate of death and falling a prey to destruction. He sees, more-over, the human form enter through the gate of birth, and is compelled to ask whence it comes. Wherever he looks, he cannot find the answer. He no longer sees it coming from the stars, as he is no longer able to see it after death. So religion has become an empty word.

Thus, in his civilisation, man has around him what ancient times possessed as science, art and religion. But the science of the ancients has been discarded, their art is no longer felt in its inwardness, and what takes its place today is something man is not able to lift above physical matter, making this a vehicle for the radiant expression of the spiritual.

The religious element has remained from olden times. It has, however, no point of contact with the world, for, in spite of it the above riddle of the relation of the world to man remains. Man looks into his inner being, and hears the voice of conscience; but in olden times this was the voice of that God who guided the soul through those regions in which the body is destroyed, and led it again to earthly life, giving it its appropriate form. It was this God who spoke in the soul as the voice of conscience. Today even the voice of conscience has become external, and moral laws are no longer traceable to divine impulses. Man surveys history, to begin with; he studies what has come down from olden times, and—at most—can dimly feel: The ancients experienced the two great riddles of existence differently from the way I feel them today. For this reason they could answer them in a certain way. I can no longer answer them. They hover before me and oppress my soul, for they only show me my destruction after death and the semblance of reality during life.

It is thus that man confronts the world today. From this mood of soul arise the questions Anthroposophy has to answer. Human hearts are speaking in the way we have described and asking where they can find that knowledge of the world which meets their needs.

Anthroposophy comes forward as such knowledge, and would speak about the world and man so that such knowledge may arise again—knowledge that can be understood by modern consciousness, as ancient science, art and religion were understood by ancient consciousness. Anthroposophy receives Its mighty task from the voice of the human heart itself, and is no more than what humanity is longing for today. Because of this, Anthroposophy will have to live. It answers to what man most fervidly longs for, both for his outer and inner life. ‘Can there be such a world-conception today?’ one may ask. The Anthroposophical Society has to supply the answer. It must find the way to let the hearts of men speak from out of their deepest longings; then they will experience the deepest longing for the answers.

• 1. This sentence and the rest of the paragraph in which it occurs must of course be read in the context of the lecture as a whole. Taken by itself it may well arouse the objection: ‘The human form is as much within Nature's system of laws as those of the plants and animals. Certainly Nature destroys it after death; but does she not also bring it to birth?’ It may help to remind the reader that Dr. Steiner is at this stage merely putting into words a feeling, which, he expressly says, arises when we stand in the presence of death. Later on in the book, when he deals with the relation in which the human body stands to the world of nature, he shows how the human form in fact has an origin quite different from those of other living creatures. Editor.

Man really only faces the riddles of existence when he has developed a degree of awareness of life, when he feels compelled to form ideas, sensations, feelings about his relationship to the world. But then, when he has reached such a situation, then the riddles of existence mean to him what can be called a vital question, because they are not only connected with some theoretical longings, with mere external questions of education, but the whole position of man in the world depends on them, the way in which man can find his way in the world, the degree of security he can have in life, and the inner support with which he can move through this life.

But now there is a considerable difference between the various types of riddle of existence. Man stands in the face of nature, must form ideas and feelings about his relationship to nature, and if I may use a comparison, I would like to say: When man has come to consciousness in the way I have characterized it, and he cannot find his way into certain things that confront him as mysteries of nature of nature, then existence, to which he once belonged — as I said, it is only expressed as a comparison — appears to him as a spiritual darkness; he feels as if he has been placed in a dark world, he feels that he cannot orient himself in this dark world. But to a certain extent this whole relationship to the world secrets of outer natural existence remains something external for the human being; it concerns his outer relationship to existence.

The human being's attitude to the riddles of his own soul is quite different. These riddles are what he lives by, and what basically constitute mental health and illness, but which can also become physical health and illness. For the life of the soul is something extraordinarily complicated, however simple it may initially appear. What we carry in our consciousness during our waking hours from morning to evening – it is indeed scientifically recognized today – is only a part of our soul life. A large part of our soul life rests in unconscious or, I could also say subconscious depths; it rises to the surface in the form of vague feelings, of vague moods, and also of all kinds of other soul content, and forms what is an indefinite basic state of our soul life. But what takes place and surges up in this more or less indeterminate way in the depths of our soul life is intimately connected with what actually constitutes the happiness or suffering of our lives. And anyone who tries to penetrate into the soul life of a human being by anthroposophical means will soon notice how everything that surges up indeterminately from the depths of the soul is connected with the physical body, and then more and more our entire state of health, which makes us capable of living or unable to live, can depend on these subconscious soul moods.

Today, however, I do not want to speak to you in the way that this unconsciousness of the soul is currently spoken about very often, by simply placing everything that shimmers unclearly in consciousness into the great container of this unconscious and by having more or less vague ideas about how this unconscious or subconscious works. I have been speaking here in this place about questions of anthroposophical research for many years and therefore cannot start from the most elementary of this research today, but I would like to consider the questions of soul life in their very essence in the way that they are connected to the happiness or unhappiness of life. But to do that, we must enter into what, flooded with all kinds of elements that are initially unknown, can have a disturbing or calming, happy or sorrowful effect on human mental life, which we want to point out more or less clearly through today's reflections, and what lies in between.

Now, if we look at our soul life, even if only superficially, we find two clearly distinguishable poles: on the one hand, the life of the imagination, which encompasses everything that takes place clearly and brightly in our consciousness, and on the other hand, the life of the will, which, in a certain way, initially emerges from the depths of the soul in darkness and darkness.

We distinguish – as I have often mentioned here – in the ordinary course of a person's life between two states of consciousness, of which only one is actually a distinct state of consciousness: the waking state and the sleeping state. In the sleeping state, the conscious life of imagination ceases; the entire soul life sinks down into a more or less dark darkness. But when we look at our soul life in the waking state with complete impartiality, we can only speak of the fact that we are truly awake with regard to everything that is conceptual. We have, so to speak, taken possession of ourselves as waking human beings, in that we have filled our consciousness with clear images, with thoughts full of light. We also accompany our volitional impulses, we accompany our actions with thoughts. But even in the simplest movement of the human body, how the thought of consciousness is connected with what actually happens during a volitional impulse, during an action, remains completely dark. How dark it is, what actually happens inside the arm when I just raise this arm, when the thought that has the goal of raising this arm wants to realize itself, so to speak, wants to shoot in and voluntarily set the arm in motion.

What happens in our own organism eludes our waking consciousness just as much as what happens in the human soul from falling asleep to waking up, so that we actually have to say: It is the case for the human soul that even in the waking state we have an element of sleeping, that the state of sleeping constantly permeates us and that we are only fully awake in the act of imagining, in the experience of clear, luminous thoughts. Between these two states, between the, I would say, fully waking state of imagination and the will life immersed in darkness, participating in both, lies the life of feeling and of the mind. Our feelings permeate our ideas. We bring certain sympathies and antipathies from our feelings into our imaginative life, and in doing so we usually either connect or separate our ideas. We accompany what flows into our will impulses with our emotional judgment, in that we perceive some actions as being in accordance with duty and others as transgressions of duty. And because we experience a certain emotional satisfaction when we perform our duties or dissatisfaction when we fail to fulfill our duties or for some other reason, our emotional life flows back and forth between our mental and our volitional life.

But the real soul mysteries do not present themselves to the dull person who, in the manner just described, devotes himself to the life of ideas on the one hand and to the life of feeling and the life of will on the other, but these soul mysteries emerge as man becomes more and more aware and aware. And even then the riddles of the soul do not arise in full consciousness, but they belong to the more or less subconscious experiences of the human being. Man never becomes quite clear in his consciousness as to the actual origin of the moods and dispositions of his soul life, which so influence his daily happiness and daily suffering. One must seek out and clearly express that which lives unclearly in the consciousness. And this is what I ask you to bear in mind first of all when I make the following remarks: that I will be obliged to express something in clear words that never lives in this clarity in the consciousness, but that is present in the soul life, healing and causing illness, that the person feels without being able to bring it to consciousness. And because this is so, the riddles of the soul are not merely theoretical, they are riddles of existence that are thoroughly experienced.

When man devotes himself to the life of imagination — as I said, I am speaking clearly about what is only felt vaguely, what is never fully brought to consciousness — he feels something like the vanity of his own existence. The life of imagination is an experience of images. The life of imagination is something that fills up during our waking day-to-day life with what we receive from the outer world in the way of impressions and perceptions. What we experience from nature forms the content of our imagination, it lives in us, it is what we draw up out of our memories. But we are aware: Yes, you are active in that you process your ideas in your ideas, in that you separate and connect the ideas; you are active inwardly, but you do not have your activity fully present in your mind; what is present in your mind is basically a reflection of the outer world. We know that we have to base our imaginative life on this external world. What we have is merely a picture of the external world; we live in pictures when we live in our imaginations, we do not feel fully alive in our imaginative life.

And this feeling, it lives subconsciously, as strange and paradoxical as it may sound. And as little as it is present in consciousness, it is alive in the subconscious; this feeling lives out in certain anxious feelings in relation to the life of ideas, in feelings of fear.

It sounds paradoxical, but this undercurrent of the human soul does exist. Most people know nothing about it, but most people, or actually all people, are constantly under its influence. And this undercurrent is an anxious current, that we could, so to speak, lose ourselves in the world, that we stand over an abyss because our world of imagination is a world of images. And again, the indefinite longing lives in the human soul: How do I find existence in this mere world of images?

This unconscious feeling in the undercurrent of the soul can be compared to the feeling that a person has when they are physically short of air, when they suffer from air hunger and thus consciously fall into anxious feelings. What a person consciously experiences through physical conditions is actually always unconsciously felt as a concomitant of the life of ideas. And so, on the one hand, attention can be drawn to a mystery of the soul, not in theoretical formulation, but by bringing up from the depths of the soul something that germinates or slumbers in this soul.

On the other hand, by living towards the element of will, the human being feels the opposite state. There is a different undercurrent in the life of the soul. Here the human being senses how he is exposed to his drives, his emotions, his instincts, how something natural plays into the human soul life that does not open up to the clarity of thinking, that is always immersed in a certain way in a reality that we cannot penetrate with light, that forms a darkness within ourselves. And if one can penetrate into these undercurrents of the soul with unbiased observation, one can indicate - one must always say a contradiction if one wants to characterize that which exists in the depths of the soul - how that which lives there is unconsciously felt. One must then characterize it by saying: It is felt in the same way as anger is felt in consciousness, or also the way a person feels when he cannot breathe out, when his blood circulation is so disturbed that the inhaled air is not properly converted in his body, when a kind of suffocation sets in. Something like anger-patience is always there in the human soul as a result of such a way of living towards the element of the will.

These are forces that live deep in the unconscious of the human soul, that surge up and constitute the real mystery of the human soul's life. And if you merely take the ideas in their pictorialness, the will in its instinctuality, as they present themselves to consciousness, you may feel these soul mysteries as something vague, as an indefinite sensation of the soul, but he does not make these soul riddles clear to himself, he does not really know what the indeterminate workings in him are that deeply influence his happy or unhappy mood in life.

It must be said again and again: the soul riddles are not the same as those we feel in nature; the soul riddles are those that are experienced inwardly, that flood up from the deep undercurrents of the soul and that must first be interpreted. That is why all science – which of course, as I have already emphasized here, has nothing to object to in its legitimate field – knows little about the actual mysteries of the soul. We see it – and I would like to cite two examples of this – in all of modern scientific thinking, how helpless science, which celebrates such great triumphs in other fields, actually is when it comes to the soul life, despite the fact that the greatest riddles of existence are connected to this soul life of man. I would like to recall two examples, which, however, I am convinced are deeply significant of what is there and of what is scientifically necessary in order to penetrate into the actual realm that the human being experiences as a soul mystery.

Almost half a century ago, the great physiologist Du Bois-Reymond gave a speech at the 45th Naturalists' Conference in Leipzig that must be referred to again and again, although it has been discussed extensively and is now almost forgotten and has disappeared from the discussion. This speech was about the “limits of knowledge of nature”, and Du Bois-Reymond rightly states, on the one hand, that the material world is the limit of knowledge of nature in its essence. He says: Into the realm of matter the human spirit cannot penetrate. It penetrates into the outer observation of the outer sense phenomena to the revelation of material existence, but it cannot state what matter itself actually is. Du Bois-Reymond states this as the one limit. As the other limit, he states that of human consciousness; but today this is nothing other than that of the human soul life. He says: With the most perfect knowledge of nature, one cannot even gain any idea of how the simplest sensation in the human soul comes about. Even if one knew quite clearly how atoms of carbon, hydrogen, nitrogen and oxygen move in the human brain, one would never be able to fathom from a clear insight into these movements how the simplest sensation - “I see red”, “I smell the scent of roses” - comes about, that is, how the first elements of mental life come about.

And Du Bois-Reymond is actually completely right in this statement. There is a second limit for external natural science here, except that Du Bois-Reymond's conviction is precisely the one that must be overcome through anthroposophical research. Du Bois-Reymond believes that the boundaries of knowledge of nature are the boundaries of all science. Therefore, he says: If one wants to penetrate into this realm of the spiritual and soul, one must do so by means other than scientific ones, because where supernaturalism begins, where, in other words, one enters the realm of the spiritual and soul, science ends. Anthroposophical research seeks to defend the idea that science need not be limited to the external natural world, but can develop the means to penetrate into the spiritual and soul realms.

The other example I would like to give is that of an outstanding personality, Franz Brentano, who wanted to establish a psychology entirely according to the method of modern natural science. That was his ideal. I have discussed the whole situation underlying Franz Brentano's research in detail in the third part of my book 'Von Seelenrätseln' (Puzzles of the Soul) and would like to mention only a few principles here. Franz Brentano then tried to write a psychology at the beginning of the seventies of the last century. The first volume was published in spring 1874. The second volume was promised for the fall; it never appeared. The whole work was intended to be in four volumes; except for the first volume, nothing was ever published except individual attempts, which, however, are always only attempts. The whole work remained a torso. In the work mentioned, I have discussed why this had to be so. Franz Brentano wanted to conduct research into the life of the soul in the same way as in the natural sciences, and in this first volume one finds a remarkable confession by Franz Brentano. He says, for example: With this scientific research, it is possible to find one's way around the details of mental life in a modest way; one can indicate how one idea connects with another, how one idea separates from another, how certain feelings attach to ideas, how volitional impulses attach to ideas, how memory works, and so on. But if, as Franz Brentano says, it had to remain the case that one could only investigate these details of mental life, and if knowledge of the most important questions of human existence had to be bought with this strict scientific method, where would that get us? For Brentano finds justified the yearning that already lived in Plato, in Aristotle, in ancient Greece: to pursue that which can be investigated in detail about the human soul all the way to the great questions from birth to immortality. And it would be sad, says Franz Brentano, if, in the desire to be scientific in our exploration of the soul's life, we had to renounce knowledge of how the better part of the human being in us fares when the physical part is handed over to the earth at death.

And it can be seen from what Franz Brentano has expounded in the first volume of his psychology that his whole scientific yearning is to lead the individual questions, which basically have little to do with the wider public and which this wider public is willing to leave to the scholars, on a long path to the great questions of human immortality and the divine-spiritual content of the world, as reflected in the soul. But Brentano did not find this way out of his natural scientific way of thinking, and because he was an honest researcher by nature, he left the following volumes, for which he found no research path, unwritten until his death a few years ago.

I would like to say that it is precisely this researcher's fate that shows in the truest sense how tragic it is that what is often recognized today as the only scientific approach must falter when faced with the great riddles of the human soul. That is it - again I have to say it - that anthroposophy must defend before the world today: that the path that Brentano could not find from natural science can be found! And it can be found if we do not stop at the ordinary capacities of the soul life, as they present themselves in outer life and as they are used in ordinary science.

I have often said that there are dormant, let us say, scientifically latent cognitive abilities in every human soul that must first be brought out of this soul, just as certain abilities must be brought out of a child through education. Those who have already matured for the ordinary cognitive abilities must train themselves in devotional inner soul exercises so that they develop those soul abilities through which not that which I have characterized on both sides as human, enigmatic soul - the experience in relation to the ideas, the experience in relation to the impulses of the will - but so that the human soul process becomes, so to speak, transparent, so that one can penetrate into what actually takes place in the human life of ideas and in the human life of will. For without penetrating into these everyday soul riddles, one cannot find the way to the great questions of human immortal existence and the divine-spiritual content of the world, in which the human soul also originates.

Now, in my lectures here, I have often described how a person can do inner exercises, purely soul-spiritual exercises, through which he awakens the otherwise dormant cognitive abilities to existence, so that they can really help him in his knowledge. I have pointed out how one can strengthen one's own power of imagination. Just as we strengthen a muscle when we use it continually in work, so we can strengthen our imaginative life when we, in the way I have described in detail in my book “How to Know Higher Worlds,” , when we direct this life of imagination in a certain direction through inner soul work, when we bring certain easily comprehensible images into the center of consciousness and thus repeatedly devote ourselves to this kind of imaginative work to which we would otherwise not devote ourselves. I can only hint at this in principle here, but you will find clear indications in the work just mentioned and also in the second part of my “Occult Science” that the imaginative life of the human being can become something quite different through such meditation and concentration exercises of thinking. I would like to say: without any kind of abnormal practice, but through the mere development of what is normal in a person's thought life, a stronger, more powerful thought life can be created.

And by generating this stronger imaginative life, by elevating oneself through meditation and concentration above that which is merely pictorial in our ordinary imaginative life, one comes to what I call in the books mentioned, the imaginative presentation rich in content.

This imaginative presentation lives with such inner vividness in the mere thought as otherwise man lives in his outer perceptions. But through this, one gradually comes to the point where the life of the imagination is no longer merely abstract, I might say merely pictorial, but through purely inward research — which, however, is pursued with the same seriousness as any scientific research — one makes the discovery that the soul, which could otherwise only fill its imaginative life with the results of external impressions, is inwardly filled with forces that, so to speak, shoot into the soul life. The images are no longer merely this light fluid when they are formed through meditation and concentration, but they are imbued and permeated with forces that I would like to call formative forces, forces that make up an inwardly spiritual-plastic element. And after a while one discovers that through this training of the life of imagination one grows together with that which the formative forces of the human body itself are; after some time one makes the discovery that the life of thought is, so to speak, nothing other than the rarefied life of forces of human growth. What gives us our physical body from birth to death in a plastically formative way is, I would say, in a 'diluted' state our imaginative life in ordinary consciousness.

We look at the newly born child. We know that in this newly born child, starting from the brain, the plastic forces are at work shaping the body. We follow the growth of the child, how it radiates straight from the plastic brain activity, we follow it to a certain point in human life on earth, until the teeth change, until around the age of seven. We will initially perceive this life of forces, which pulsates in man and is vividly active in him, as something indeterminate. On the other hand, by powerfully developing our life of ideas through meditation and concentration, we are unconsciously led to the same element that has been vividly working in us from our earliest childhood. And this is a significant discovery of the inner human life: that one can strengthen the life of the imagination to such an extent that one can make it so intense inwardly that one then feels oneself in it, in what the human formative forces are, what formative forces are in one's growth, in one's metabolism. However strange it may still sound to today's research, it is the case that it is possible to grow into what, so to speak, then takes us up as that which plastically shapes our outer physical body as its formative forces, by strengthening our soul life. One grows into reality through the life of the imagination; one grows into a formative element.

And in this way one gets to know what lies behind the mere thought process; one learns to recognize how a spiritual, with which one has now connected oneself, works in the human organism from birth to death. The life of thinking acquires its reality; the life of thinking is no longer the mere life of picturing, the life of thinking becomes a life of strength that is inherent in existence itself.

And only through such an insight can that which the undercurrent of anxiety and fear produces in the human soul be conquered from consciousness, so that it is indeed not a theoretical solution to the riddles of the soul that anthroposophy points to here, but a thoroughly inward, practical solution that can be experienced.

Anthroposophy must point out that, on the basis of its research, what lives in the human being, what, I might say, only appears to have become so rarefied as to emerge as our ordinary life of thought, but which in truth is the inner sphere of growth of our existence, can enter into human consciousness and be grasped through human consciousness. And on the other hand, when a person loses the main focus of their mental life and enters into a fearful undercurrent of this soul life, they can absorb the results of spiritual science anthroposophy through their mental life and can consolidate this mental life through the path of knowledge. Anthroposophy does not offer a solution to this soul riddle by putting forward a theory, but by putting a result in front of the human being that he can fully grasp with his common sense and that then - like giving weight - appears in the life of ideas for his consciousness, for his soul life, so that the soul mood, the soul constitution, can flow into it, solving riddles, which Anthroposophy seemingly asserts as mere knowledge about the life of ideas.

On the one hand, we can see how the human being is a formed being, how he appears as a whole in a certain form, how his individual organs are formed out of the spirit and how we — so that we can be free beings, so that we do not act only through these inner forces, but can surrender to free mirror images until our merely pictorial representations develop into something vividly formed. I explained this at the beginning of the nineties of the last century in my 'Philosophy of Freedom', by showing that man is a free being precisely because he can live in pure thoughts that are not connected with any external reality for his consciousness, that he can form his moral impulses in these pure thoughts. In relation to mirror images, one will be in the position of having to do something oneself if the mirror image is to change; mirror images do not determine one causally. A human being would never be free if he were determined by a reality in his ordinary consciousness. In his ordinary consciousness, ideas live as images, but he is not determined by them, just as one is not determined by mirror images. He is free. In order for him to be free, his life must be distinguished from that which permeates it in a plastic way as a growth force, as a body of growth, one could say, as a body of formative forces. But this life in freedom must be paid for by the person with the characterized anxious undercurrent in his or her soul life, and therefore, in his or her ordinary consciousness, the person must come to fully experience his or her sense of freedom, but also, as a polar opposite, to be able to counter this experience of freedom with what anthroposophy can give as a way of strengthening the life of ideas in the way indicated.

But if one continues along this path, one does indeed advance from what I would call the very rarefied, purely pictorial life of ideas to what is real reality, what lives in the human being in a formative way. It is not the physical body, it is not the physical organs, it is a supersensible force, but it is there. One grasps something that lies outside the physical body, and by simply pursuing the riddles of the soul in one direction, one penetrates into that which has a supersensible reality in man, independently of the human physical body. One advances to that which is prepared by birth or by conception as a human physical body, by mere hereditary conditions, by mere external natural facts. One learns to recognize how the inherited traits, which come from parents or ancestors, combine with the whole body, which is formed in the maternal organism, from the spiritual world, to create what one finds in life when one strengthens one's imaginative life.

One arrives, I would say, at one side of the question of immortality. One looks at what is immortal, what is eternal in human nature, because it penetrates from a spiritual world through conception and birth into what is humanly physical, and because it continues to have an effect during earthly life as the inner plastic formative power with which we connect by strengthening our thought life in the manner indicated.

In this way, anthroposophy offers the perspective that someone like Franz Brentano was looking for. Brentano also began with an investigation of thoughts, but he left thoughts as they are in ordinary consciousness. He confined himself to merely registering what was present in ordinary consciousness. It is only by strengthening the life of thought through meditation and concentration that this life of thought leads to the inner, plastic formative power, and it really leads along the path that begins with the grasping of the simple everyday thought and ends with the spiritual-soul that lived in the spiritual and soul realm before birth, before conception, and that has connected with the hereditary forces and the physical forces of the human body.

There is no other solution to the riddle of the soul than to really find this path from the simplest phenomena of everyday life to the great riddle of existence.

So far, I have pointed out what a person can achieve in relation to their thoughts. There he comes to what, so to speak, drives the human being out into space, what vividly permeates the human being's spatial corporeality, what is lived out in form, what, as I have indicated, descends from the spiritual world and flows into the outer form of the human being, and also into the form of his inner organs. But this is only one side of human life, and the soul also participates in the other side of human life. Just as we can develop our thinking through meditation and concentration, we can also develop our will, not in the sense of strengthening it, but in the sense of making it more devoted and spiritualized.

This can be achieved by, in a sense, tearing the life of the will away from its everyday nature. I have given many individual exercises. Spiritual science is no easier than research in an observatory or in a clinic. These exercises would have to be practised for years, but I would like to pick out just a few to suggest the principles. It can happen that [this breaking away] by the fact that one, which works in ordinary thinking as a will - because in thinking there is always a will, the thoughts are shaped by the will, the thought is only one side, in the life of the soul is always the will is interwoven with the thoughts and the thoughts with the will - that one tears this element of will, which lives in the thoughts, away from its usual course, which adheres to external physical facts, by, for example, presenting something backwards. Let us say, for example, that instead of presenting a drama from the first act to the fifth, we present it backwards, starting from the last scenes and working back to the beginning. We then proceed to present external facts backwards. For example, one can imagine one's usual daily life in reverse, proceeding in as small portions as possible, from evening to morning, even to the point of imagining going up a staircase in such a way that one imagines it as going down backwards from the top step to the penultimate step and so on.

Because we are accustomed to thinking in the same direction as external facts unfold, thinking actually plays a passive role for us in relation to the will that unfolds in it. It becomes actively inwardly active, permeated with inner initiative, when we train it through such exercises as retrospection, where we tear it away from the course of external facts and make it rely on itself. For if we reinforce what we achieve in this way through careful and energetic exercises with a truly serious self-observation, observing what we do as a person of will as if we were standing beside us and observing ourselves piece by piece in our development of will, or even if we were to proceed to action, if we were to do exercises with the express purpose of making a resolution and then executing it with iron energy exactly, so that we live completely in the element of will. I just wanted to mention in principle such exercises that not only tear the will away from external facts, but also from its ties to the body itself, that make the will independent, spiritualize it. Then we actually come to a development of the will in this way, so that we experience ourselves with our soul life, which now develops the will, outside of our body. It is a momentous experience. But only through this do we begin to understand what the will is. In ordinary life, the will is bound to the organs. We see it unfold as we move our limbs. We observe the processes, the effects of our will, only through our thought life. We see into it when we have detached it from the body, when we experience it in itself, when we become completely one with it. Then it is permeated by an elevation of the power that is otherwise also bound to our physical organism, permeated by the power of love. And that devoted element in our soul life is developed into a transparent, bright clarity, which - I would say dark, as an emotional life of will in love - rode towards us.

I know how little people today want to accept love as a force of knowledge. In ordinary life it is not; but when it is so developed that the will is no longer rooted in instincts, in drives, in emotions, but that it lives in the purely soul realm, apart from the body, then this will is actually only recognized in its essence, and then it shows itself as something quite different from what the thought element has shown itself to be. The thought element, in its intensified form, has shown itself to be that which shapes in a constructive way, which, I might say, allows an organ to flow out of an organ, which culminates in human reproduction. The thought element unfolds as the plastic activity, from the soul into the human body. The will element unfolds in the body in such a way that, when it is recognized separately from the body, one can see how it affects the body. The physical body is not shaped plastically, but rather the plastic form is reduced, dissolved, atomized, made to flow. The element of will is what continually — please do not misunderstand me — I would like to say, again burns the formed elements of the human being, lets them go up in flames, spiritually speaking. The expression is meant figuratively, but it means something very important.

Human life, as it pours out of the soul into the body, can only be understood by seeing it, on the one hand, as this plastic element and, on the other hand, as the re-dissolving of the plastic element, as that which, I would like to say, lets the plastic element enter into the atomized and the deliquescent. And in that everything that unfolds as will in the human being is such a dissolving, atomizing, and deliquescent element in the human body, this will-like element is what is now experienced as pointing the way to the other side of human life, pointing the way to death.

Just as we first get to know the spiritual-plastic element of the human soul through the sculpture of thinking, which moves into the physical body through birth or conception, so we learn to recognize how the will-like element dissolves the human body, but in dissolving - as I said, figuratively speaking - pure spirituality emerges from the flame. We get to know the soul's departure from the body. In this way we learn to understand death through the dissolution of the will element. We learn to understand what happens to a person in death because we learn to understand what happens in a person in everyday volitional decisions. The everyday volitional decision brings about a kind of burning process in the physical body, but it is out of this burning process that our inner soul life emerges. What we feel inwardly as soul could not be there if we were always merely body, merely shaped in a plastic way. The plastic must be broken down, flow, and from the flowing of the plastic, from the ever-continuing destruction of the bodily, the experiencing of the soul arises. And we comprehend the departure of the human soul from the physical body at death, which, summarized into a single moment, represents that which is always represented in the unfolding of the will to the spirituality of the soul. Just as I experience my will in the present moment, how it forms a kind of process of combustion, dissolution in the body, how through this destruction the spiritual comes to life in the human body, so I learn to recognize how the other destruction of the body in death, which is nothing other than the last effect of the will hidden in the body, how the spiritual returns to the spiritual and soul world.

This is what leads us from anthroposophy into the riddles of the soul in a living way. Anthroposophy is not intended to be a theory; it certainly wants to provide knowledge, but not theoretical knowledge. It wants to provide knowledge that nourishes the soul. And in this way it can present the individual daily experiences of the soul being before the spiritual eye; it can then proceed from these individual experiences to the great questions of soul life.

Allow me to go into one detail so that you can see what is at the very basis of what anthroposophy is meant to bring to the riddles of the human soul. Allow me to give the details of human memory.

Once one has attained the intensified life of imagination that I have characterized, and once one has also become acquainted with how the plastic is continually being broken down by the life of will, then one also sees the inner soul processes with transparent clarity for the first time. One sees how the human being stands in relation to the outer world, how he receives his impressions from the outer world, how he then forms ideas and thoughts about these outer impressions, how after some time - or even after a long time - he brings up these ideas as memories from certain backgrounds or how they also arise of their own accord, as one says today, as “free-rising” memory ideas. For anyone who wants to look at the human soul with an open mind, the mere emergence of these memories heralds a significant psychological puzzle. It can be said that, in a very curious way, people have spoken of what the essence of memory actually is. People have imagined – and sometimes still do today – that impressions are evoked by the senses, then they are passed on through the nervous system, and finally they are transformed by the power of imagination. These images then enter into certain depths of the soul and come to the surface when they are remembered. Now, no person who thinks impartially can form any clear idea about how these ideas, when we do not have them, are supposed to go for a walk down there in unknown depths of the soul's life, only to come up again through arbitrariness when they are either needed or want to lean against something that appears as a new perception, as a new impression of the outside world.

Anthroposophy goes beyond this to the real, true observation of the human soul life itself. By knowing the intensified life of imagination and the spiritualized life of will, it sees through the whole process that takes place from the perception of the external thing through the formation of imagination, through the formation of memory, to the re-emergence of the remembered imaginations. The fact that anthroposophical research penetrates to the forces of knowledge through such a shaping of the life of imagination and will, as I have indicated, transforms the whole process of soul and body and the way in which these two interact with each other, is so transformed that, if I may compare it to something very dark and opaque that I have before me, it is suddenly made transparent by being illuminated. The whole human soul process becomes transparent through this strengthened life of imagination and spiritualized life of will.

And what do we now see with regard to what I have indicated? We see how the outer impressions stretch for miles, how the whole process continues and how, in fact, what I have described as the formative, plastic element of the intensified life of thought, works in the ordinary process of perception as a continuation. I perceive outwardly, but it is not only the abstract thoughts that I have in my ordinary consciousness that work in me, but also what is merely fathomed through spiritual science, that works continually; this plastic quality in the perceptions works down into the depths of the human soul and body. And then, when this has happened, when the thought has taken shape in the depths of the soul and body, then the human being moves on to something else. A volitional decision is at work here, the will is active, but the spiritualized will is present. In that part of the human being that is connected to the external brain, this will unfolds, it builds by dissolving the plasticity of the brain, what the impression has built up for the ordinary consciousness, so that we have spread an outer brain surface, if I may express myself roughly, over substrates, but where the plasticity continues to have an effect.

Now let us assume that I remember something in an arbitrary way, then it happens in such a way that I unfold this will out of a certain series of images. The development of the will is in turn connected with a breakdown, if external impressions do not now penetrate; and the fact that these do not come is ensured by the development of the will, which is a breakdown. And this dismantling allows what is in the subconscious during the voluntarily evoked memory to emerge as a sculpture of the human being. If free-floating ideas arise, the opposite happens. There is some external impression that forms into a thought. The thought is vividly active. It is imprinted on the brain. This plastic activity is similar to that which has formed in the subsoil that which can live in a certain form in the subsoil. This lives in the plastic that the thought has now formed.

You see, in this way the life of the soul becomes transparent; one learns to recognize it in its interaction with the life of the body, in the interaction of the spiritual with the bodily and with the soul; one learns to recognize it in its inner plastic structure, in its continuous extinguishing, burning away through the will element. And by learning to understand every single moment of life, one learns to grasp in these currents of life what the great questions of life are. One learns to recognize from the thoughts what moves into physical life at birth, one learns to recognize from the will what moves out into the spiritual world at death.

In this way, the results of anthroposophical research appear to penetrate from the details of life to the enigmatic essence of the human soul.

In this way, by recognizing how thought already works plastically in ordinary memory, as if something is being formed in the body, we also experience how that which is not yet in the body, but connects with the body through birth and conception, how that intervenes plastically in the body. We get to know the human life element in this plastic form because we get to know the individual plastic element that already appears in the formation of memory.

Anthroposophy wants to look at the riddles of the soul with a full life! This should be understood as the essence of anthroposophical research: that it stops everywhere at the scientific conscientiousness that has been cultivated today through the great, powerful advances of external natural science, but that by stopping at this conscientiousness, it simultaneously goes beyond what mere external observation and mere external experiment can offer, that it progresses from the abilities which, precisely by their special presence, make the human soul a mysterious being for the human being himself, that through the development of these abilities it leads to the soul's riddles being solved not theoretically but practically.

There is no need to fear that someone who approaches the so-called solution of the soul's riddle from this point of view might one day, as if it were a fait accompli, present the solution as a completed insight, so that the soul might then fall into lethargy and carelessness towards its own life. No, the soul poses the riddles that I have mentioned today as the living, as the experienced soul riddles, in every moment of life, and in every moment of life we need the results of spiritual research anew, which have a balancing effect on that which arises so mysteriously from the dark depths of the soul. What I have called the anxious undercurrent of human soul life and the wrathful undercurrent are nothing other than the inner call of the human soul not to take itself for granted, but to accept itself in such a way in its full ongoing experience that this human soul is constantly a mystery to itself, that it constantly needs the solution to this mystery. And it is precisely such a continuous solution to the mystery of the soul that anthroposophical research seeks to offer, linking it to the reality of existence in such a way that one can say – if I may use a trivial comparison – Just as a person in their physical life is a being that must constantly take in nourishment, that cannot be satisfied with a single intake of nourishment because they consume this nourishment, because they combine this nourishment with their life process, so it is with what is offered to us by anthroposophy as the result of the soul's riddle. Its intense inner effectiveness eludes us if we do not constantly contemplate it, if we do not constantly progress. Because we are dealing here with a reality, not with a theory that can be learned and memorized, as with the reality of nourishment, we are dealing with something that must penetrate the ongoing process of life through anthroposophy.

And it is true. The human being will become aware of the following when dealing with the results of anthroposophy in relation to the riddles of the soul: learning – as strange as it may sound, it is a truth that anyone who deals with anthroposophy can experience with regard to the riddles of the soul – basically, you cannot learn anthroposophy; you can let its results approach you, you can read books, listen to lectures; but if you do not continually experience what you have absorbed in this way, if you do not, in a continuous process, just as one continually connects the bodily substances of the external world with the bodily processes through the process of nutrition and metabolism, one connects that which is presented in anthroposophy with the human soul, with the soul process. If this is not continually introduced into this bodily process, one will see that it loses its significance for the soul, just as the physical loses its significance for the body if it is not continually introduced into this bodily process. And just as hunger and thirst express themselves physically in the absence of physical nourishment, so a fearful and morbidly angry nature that wells up from the depths of the soul expresses itself when it is influenced by a real knowledge of the spiritual significance of the life of the imagination and the will. And if a person advances by always being able to cultivate in his consciousness, as a nourishment for his soul, what anthroposophical research gives him, then he finds what he needs to balance his soul life, what he must feel and experience as a continuous living solution of the soul riddles that are also continuously alive.

And it must be said again and again: although the fact that one allows and examines what is set out in the books mentioned above can lead one to embark on the path of independent anthroposophical research, anthroposophy does not depend on every person being able to verify what is presented in anthroposophy by following this path. Even if one does not do this, one can still use one's common sense to find what comes to light in anthroposophy reasonable or unreasonable. A person can use his or her common sense to follow what the anthroposophical researcher claims without becoming an anthroposophical researcher himself. But apart from this common sense, a person has something else. A person, even if he is a layman in the physiological or biological field, does not know the chemical composition of his food; but he tests what food really is for a human being by consuming it, by combining the forces with the forces of his bodily processes. In this way, he can unite the results that anthroposophy offers him, and the way in which it solves the soul's riddles, with his soul life, and he will find that it satisfies him soulfully. And what, in essence, are soul riddles in front of this anthroposophical forum? Soul riddles, grasped in their vitality, are nothing other than the expression of soul-spiritual hunger and soul-spiritual thirst. And the solution of soul riddles is basically nothing other than the assimilation of true spiritual content, true spiritual beings, which unite with the human spirit and with the human soul life. And so, I would say, spiritual saturation, which must continually repeat itself, is the solution to the riddle of the soul. The more vividly one grasps the process and the more one realizes how anthroposophy seeks to reach into every aspect of practical life, how it seeks to take root in the most mundane things and reach up to the great riddles of existence, by introducing the human being to the divine spiritual source of existence, by leading him to his own immortality, the more one will realize that anthroposophy cannot be theory, but something that can be experienced.

From this point of view, anthroposophy tries to have an effect on the most diverse practical areas of life; from this point of view, it has tried to shape what I have often presented here as the founding of our Waldorf School by Emil Molt, that is, something that is done in the practical social sphere.

Anthroposophy, as you can see, solves the riddle of the soul by addressing the whole living human being, body, soul and spirit. In doing so, it overcomes the one-sidedness of the knowledge and soul life that necessarily had to arise with the fully recognized results of modern natural science in their field, which is also thoroughly recognized as a triumph by anthroposophy.

But people would take note of such things – and they would be taken note of if anthroposophy were not so misunderstood – as happened, for example, here in Stuttgart at the anthroposophical Congress, where Dr. von Heydebrand, in a lecture that was also printed, used Waldorf education to explain the one-sidedness of mere external experimental psychology. Not because opposition should be taken against this experimental psychology – it will be possible to appreciate it in the right way in its own field with its own results, if on the other hand what is explored in such an external way can be combined with what can be achieved spiritually and soulfully through anthroposophy. For it is through anthroposophy that what works spiritually and soulfully out of spiritual and soulful worlds in the physical body of man is understood. But in this way, all external research can be enlivened, as can education, medicine (this too has been discussed here in earlier lectures), and social life.

Here, too, I would like to refer to a fine example in the lecture given by Emil Leinhas at the above-mentioned congress – which is also available in print here – which explains what economics, which has been developed purely on the basis of imitated natural science methods, cannot achieve. A start has been made here on a real recovery of social life that comes from the spiritual and soul realms. And what is the reason for this in the end?

Through anthroposophy, we can see how thought has a formative effect. Now, it not only has a formative effect in the human body as the soul-spiritual, it also has a formative effect when we can introduce it into human social life in the right way as social ideals, and the will that has been understood in the right way also works in a social relationship. For just as we know that the human body is dissolved through it and led to a certain combustion, so that which is introduced into social life as a comprehended element of will will recognize at the right moment when any institution has outlived itself and must disappear so that its fruits can be reborn in a new form. Just as the soul and spirit rise up out of the physical in the way described, so the higher structures of social life rise up through the disappearance of certain external institutions that have outlived their purpose, and through this disappearance working together with the formative and constructive. What is seen in the right anthroposophical understanding of the human soul riddle can flow out into social life, I would even say, solving the riddle of social problems as well.

But this is how the human being comes to understand himself in the right way, to be filled with the right inner strength, with the true strength of his real self, which lives in human feeling, in human soul. Between the life of imagination and the life of will, there lives the always incomprehensible, always unfathomable, but no less tangible emotional life of the human being; and in this emotional being, for those who are able to look at life in this way, as I have characterized it today in relation to the riddles of the soul, the eternal self is revealed, which goes through repeated lives on earth. Then one knows how to look at the plastic-creative, developed life of the imagination and the spiritualized life of the will, which breaks it down.

In this way one learns by touching the human being what has entered into the human being through birth or conception in such a way that it initially points back to earlier earth lives to the state in which, in all primeval times, the outer cosmic was so little separated from the inner human life that it required not repeated earth lives but a continuously progressing spiritual-soul-natural life in order to bring about progress. One learns to look at repeated earth lives, at spiritual-soul lives lying between them; one learns to look into the future until a state where man will again have connected himself so strongly with the spiritual that the repeated earth-lives lose their meaning - in that man rises to the spiritualization of his existence, I might say, with an experience that rises out of the mere inanimate into spirituality.

One is led to the true solution of the riddle of the world through the solution of the riddle of the soul; one rises to the human soul, to the cosmos. But through this one attains living knowledge, living insight, which, as I have already indicated, is spiritual nourishment. But through this, knowledge as it is presented by anthroposophy becomes a real inner support for the soul in the element in which life wants to falter. Security, support and orientation in life can be found by seeking the spiritual nourishment that comes from anthroposophy. It brings us back to ourselves, transforming it into inner support, giving our inner balance an inner center of gravity. And in the difficult moments of life, when we are often in danger of sinking into misfortune, we can also find support in a mood of the soul that is carried inwardly by the full consciousness of the spirituality that fills the human being, when we become fully aware that the life of thought is not in vain, that it can find reality in the power of the soul to shape the world in a plastic way, and that the will is that which always gives this plastic shaping of the soul power. that the life of thought is not in vain, that it can find reality in the power of the soul and the world, and that the will is that which brings this power of the soul back to the spirit again and again. This gives support in the difficult moments of life, it puts life on a firm foundation and leads in the right way to the end of life.

And so, here, in reference to what has been said today, we can be reminded of the saying of an old Greek, pre-Socratic sage, who, out of an initially intuitive realization, speaks the weighty word: “When the human soul, freed from the body, soars into the free ether, it is an immortal spirit, freed from death.”

Yes, the riddles of the soul can be solved through real science. One can come to this conviction by trying to solve the riddles of everyday life of the soul through real spiritual insight. One can see a reflection of the knowledge of immortality in the ordinary events of life. And he who can judge the individual unfolding of thought, of feeling, of will in the right way, already sees the immortal in them, and he then looks up to the immortal in the all-embracing sense and thus comes to a real grasp of the eternal in human nature, which is rooted in the eternal ground of the existence of the Cosmos, of the evolution of the world.

after the lecture

Now, my dear friends, having shared this with you, I also feel obliged to briefly share something that will help us to find our way back to the earth even more so than plants can. I will only share it very briefly, so that you know, because I do feel obliged to substantiate some of what is always said. I will start by putting together two facts that deserve to be thought of together, as you will see in a moment.

I don't know if you saw that it was announced here too – which, by the way, is announced in many places in America and Europe – that lectures in Basel and the surrounding area were announced in the newspaper issues around the 20th. Here is an example of the ad: “All nations marching to Armageddon. Six million now living will never die. Public lecture Monday, October 21, 8 p.m. at the Hans Huber Hall of the Basel City Casino. Free admission. International Association of Serious Bible Researchers.”

You can also find the same announcement in the Birsecktagblatt: “All nations marching to Armageddon. Six million now living will never die. Public lecture Saturday, October 20, 8 p.m. at the Hotel Bahnhof Münchenstein, Monday, October 21, Gasthof Zum Ochsen Arlesheim. Free admission. International Association of Serious Bible Researchers.”

Hold on to the title of this announcement; you may have been able to read it in the Birsecktagblatt, as it is pointed out there that the Bible is now to be interpreted correctly according to the Book of Daniel and according to the Apocalypse and so on. It is promised to the people who will be the victors in the great struggle that is to unfold until the year 1927 that they will not die in their physical bodies at all. And I was approached by people during the performance of our Vienna Congress last year, asking how one can ensure that one will not die in the Battle of Armageddon. You know that many such lectures are given in Switzerland. So this is about the subject that is linked to the Battle of Armageddon.

Now I would like to read to you from a little booklet called “The Antichrist. The prophetic secrets of the biblical end times, especially for 1924-1927”, by Paul Westphal - a book that is not available through ordinary bookstores, but is widely distributed through those channels that lead precisely to the population that does not go to bookstores to buy books, but receives the books in other ways. Their education then flows from what comes from such books.

Now I will just tell the introduction, the main chapter, because of which this writing is actually written, because I cannot read to you for hours. The main chapter is called “In the Footsteps of the Antichrist”. And then it is told how the sowing was. In the description of this sowing, the following is told: Once, in the years 1897 to 1900, a man who later became a modern Dr. Faust edited the “Magazin für Literatur” (Magazine for Literature), and in this “Magazin für Literatur” a novel “Aus der Dekadence” (From Decadence) was published.

And it really was published. It was written by the son of a member who had died in Stuttgart a long time ago. This novel was published. Of course, I had no part in it other than that of the editor, who had to judge the matter artistically and according to its literary value, and otherwise the bitter aftertaste that that particular novel earned me a lawsuit with the publisher of the magazine at the time, a lawsuit that lasted for years, which is not a pleasant memory. But this novel is taken up again as a sign that the person who edited the “Magazin für Literatur” back then had already begun to use the aberration of the times to his own ends.

Then it is further shown what transformations it has undergone, how it has become a kind of Faust Secundus, a kind of second Faust, and in fact in a sometimes highly remarkable style, from year to year: “Around 1900, a not well-fed man of about forty looks at those old sculptures with a strange interest and is suddenly struck by a premonition. Despite his extensive knowledge, he has not yet achieved bourgeois security; since he is half a foreigner, he has the fate of the superfluous. Yet he is ambitious in the greatest style, power-hungry, almost too aware of his abilities – somewhat vain.

Then this man is ascribed all kinds of other characteristics that are supposed to be connected with his lust for power. For example: “He senses and scents in all directions where success is to be found; his appearance” – it is very interesting – “his appearance at that time somewhat resembles that of Napoleon when he was ‘available’ in 1793.”

“At the beginning of his main activity, Faust is at the age given in Dan. 6:1, he is about 62 years old. Just as Darius, mentioned in Dan. 6, Darius creates a tripartite division of functions in his empire (verse 3), so Dr. Faust begins by following the ‘triad of the state powers’...”, and so on. “When Satan tempted the Lord in the wilderness, he also took into account the needs of these three parts by not giving the bread, the miracle and the power, but holding them out as a prospect...”

“Among his followers are the ladies, those unsatisfied ones who suffer from their emptiness and long for something positive or masculine to fill them up. The firm demonic will gives them content and turns them into self-acting power centers that work exactly according to the mechanical formulas implanted in them by suggestion. Particular efforts are made with young people; the master lets them practise dance rhythms and lurkingly monitors them to see who might be brought to ecstasy by the rapid movements. He then selects them as tools for his magical purposes; the rest may just continue to dance and naively believe that they are thereby performing cultural achievements. The false prophet often ponders how he should relate to the church. Initially, he tried to make his system palatable to the more intellectually demanding as “esoteric Catholicism.” The pope, cardinals, archbishops, and prominent church teachers may be subjected to long-distance magical treatment. From the success of this occult influence it will depend whether the false prophet the pliable parts of the church harnessed to his service or will strike against the whole church with the fury of the apocalyptic beast.”

And now the more detailed description, as far as it is given, of what is described by this side about the effectiveness:

Well, there are more descriptions like this. And then comes the following:

“According to the prophecy, when the rule of the Antichrist comes to an end after three years, i.e. in late autumn of 1927, and the false prophet dies in the great battle of Armageddon, he will have reached the exact age of 66.6 years. One should check whether the number of people in Rev. 13:18 means the years of the false prophet's life.”

You see, in this way the lower classes are being worked on! You see that it has been said that it is necessary to wake up. This is not without significance, because on the opposite side, people are very vigilant. There they know the method of how to manipulate all sections of the population in an appropriate way.

As for how to manipulate the middle, the so-called intelligent section of the population, I would like to read another example. It is from the fourth volume of Fritz Mauthner's “Atheism and its History in the Occident”. Perhaps you will be interested in my review, which I granted to the first two volumes of Fritz Mauthner's “Atheism” when the third and fourth volumes – that is, this “Atheism” – had not yet been published; and you can make a curious comparison there. In the fourth volume of Fritz Mauthner's “Atheism” the following can be found: “The concern of the pacifists and freethinkers was not entirely unjustified, that the agony of the world war could trigger a resurgence of medieval popular superstition; only that the epidemic broke out quite differently than the church servants had hoped and their opponents feared. After the first shock, the fourth estate no longer wanted to be driven back into the church by the fear of death; doubt and disbelief had become too strong. But the third estate, the semi-educated middle class, also preferred to grasp at a more recent superstition than at one of the oldest. The tangible effect of the war emergency was mostly a surge of enthusiasm for spiritualism, which may also be called a form of religious need. The number of spiritualists and theosophists increased in England and Germany. Delusion drew new strength from despair. Unconcerned about the fact that history is not a science, prophets arose who predicted the future, as ingenious and as scientifically as Spengler in his Decline of the West, as stupid and as insolent as his vulgar imitators. Of course, the mood was also used by common impostors: A housepainter presented himself as a savior, as the Jesus of Düsseldorf, and is said to have booked an annual income of several million; another savior of the world, a wine traveler, was motivated less by love of money than by love of women and was finally beaten up; yet another “Christ II” made trouble in the Frankfurt am Main area and was expelled from Germany only as a very rich man. Perhaps the Jewish mystic Eliphas Levi (not a Jew by birth), whom Meyrink should have introduced with more humor, also belongs to this group of swindlers. But the fat skimmed off the wallets of miracle-seeking little men and women was skimmed off by Rudolf Steiner, the theosophist who evasively calls himself an anthroposophist, who, when extolling his superhuman gifts of remote viewing with the most brazen pseudoscience, refers to Buddha, Christ, Goethe and everything else of high value and has found considerable favor with the gawky. A refutation of this new Cagliostro would be more difficult for a healthy logic than one might think; the witchcraft is not to be refuted, only laughed at. A strong comedy writer would have to take possession of the material.

And the footnote to this reads:

You see, all sections of the population are well provided for, and anyone who can follow the lies that emanate from there to the powers that cause them, may say that more vigilance is really needed than is found in our ranks and that more interest could actually be developed for what I have to say from time to time about these things. It is hard to believe that hatred of the truth is currently increasing to an extent never seen before in the world and that therefore those whose duty it is to represent the truth might find some understanding when they speak of the need for vigilance.

Now, I do not want to go into the details of this lack of vigilance today, but I did want to give you at least a picture of the current state of those things that are in the works; one can already say: that are in the works. I always have to wait until there is some interest in the things that I have to sprinkle into the lectures as episodes, so that the things do not remain completely unconscious.

The next lecture will be tomorrow at 8 o'clock .

[ 1 ] If one observes how, up to the present time, the philosophical world conceptions take form, one can see undercurrents in the search and endeavor of the various thinkers, of which they themselves are not aware but by which they are instinctively moved. In these currents there are forces at work that give direction and often specific form to the ideas expressed by these thinkers. Although they do not want to focus their attention on the forces directly, what they have to say often appears as if driven by hidden forces, which they are unwilling to acknowledge and from which they recoil. Forces of this kind live in the thought worlds of Dilthey, Eucken and Cohen. They are led by cognitive powers by which they are unconsciously dominated but that do not find a conscious development within their thought structures.

[ 2 ] Security and certainty of knowledge is being sought in many philosophical systems, and Kant's ideas are more or less taken as its point of departure. The outlook of natural science determines, consciously or unconsciously, the process of thought formation. But it is dimly felt by many that the source of knowledge of the external world must be sought in the self-conscious soul. Almost all of these thinkers are dominated by the question: How can the self-conscious soul be led to regard its inner experiences as a true manifestation of reality? The ordinary world of sense perception has become “illusion” because the self-conscious ego has, in the course of philosophical development, found itself more and more isolated with its subjective experiences. It has arrived at the point where it regards even sense perception merely as inner experience that is powerless to assure being and permanence for them in the world of reality. It is felt how much depends on finding a point of support within the self-conscious ego. But the search stimulated by this feeling only leads to conceptions that do not provide the means of submerging with the ego into a world that provides satisfactory support for existence.

[ 3 ] To explain this fact, one must look at the attitude toward the reality of the external world taken by a soul that has detached itself from that reality in the course of its philosophical development. This soul feels itself surrounded by a world of which it first becomes aware through the senses. But then it also becomes conscious of its own activity, of its own inner creative experience. The soul feels, as an irrefutable truth, that no light, no color can be revealed without the eye's sensitivity for light and color. Thus, it becomes aware of something creative in this activity of the eye. But if the eye produces the color by its spontaneous creation, as it must be assumed in such a philosophy, the question arises: Where do I find something that exists in itself, that does not owe its existence to my own creative power? If even the manifestations of the senses are nothing but results of the activity of the soul, must this not be true to even a higher degree with our thinking, through which we strive for conceptions of a true reality? Is this thinking not condemned to produce pictures that spring from the character of the soul life but can never provide a sure approach to the sources of existence? Questions of this kind emerge everywhere in the development of modern philosophy.

[ 4 ] It will be impossible to find the way out of the confusion resulting from these questions as long as the belief is maintained that the world revealed by the senses constitutes a complete, finished and self-dependent reality that must be investigated in order to know its inner nature. The human soul can arrive at its insights only through a spontaneous inner creativity. This conviction has been described in a previous chapter of this book, “The World as Illusion,” and in connection with the presentation of Hamerling's thoughts. Having reached this conviction, it is difficult to overcome a certain impasse of knowledge as long as one thinks that the world of the senses contains the real basis of its existence within itself and that one therefore has to copy with the inner activity of the soul what lies outside.

[ 5 ] This impasse will be overcome only by accepting the fact that, by its very nature, sense perception does not present a finished self-contained reality, but an unfinished, incomplete reality, or a half-reality, as it were.

As soon as one presupposes that a full reality is gained through perceptions of the sensory world, one is forever prevented from finding the answer to the question: What has the creative mind to add to this reality in the act of cognition? By necessity one shall have to sustain the Kantian option: Man must consider his knowledge to be the inner product of his own mind; he cannot regard it as a process that is capable of revealing a true reality. If reality lies outside the soul, then the soul cannot produce anything that corresponds to this reality, and the result is merely a product of the soul's own organization.

[ 6 ] The situation is entirely changed as soon as it is realized that the human soul does not deviate from reality in its creative effort for knowledge, but that prior to any cognitive activity the soul conjures up a world that is not real. Man is so placed in the world that by the nature of his being he changes things from what they really are. Hamerling is partly right when he says:

Certain stimuli produce the odor within our organ of smell. The rose, therefore, has no fragrance if nobody smells it. . . . If this, dear reader, does not seem plausible to you, if your mind stirs like a shy horse when it is confronted with this fact, do not bother to read another line; leave this book and all others that deal with philosophical things unread, for you lack the ability that is necessary for this purpose, that is, to apprehend a fact without bias and to adhere to it in your thoughts. (Compare pages of this volume.)

How the sensory world appears when man is confronted with it, depends without a doubt on the nature of the soul. Does it not follow then that this appearance of the world is a product of man's soul? An unbiased observation shows, however, that the unreal character of the external sense world is caused by the fact that when man is directly confronted by things of the world, he suppresses something that really belongs to them. If he unfolds a creative inner life that lifts from the depths of his soul the forces that lie dormant in them, he adds something to the part perceived by the senses and thereby turns a half-reality to its entirety. It is due to the nature of the soul that, at its first contact with things, it extinguishes something that belongs to them. For this reason, things appear to the senses not as they are in reality but as they are modified by the soul. Their delusive character (or their mere appearance) is caused by the fact that the soul has deprived them of something that really belongs to them.

Inasmuch as man does not merely observe things, he adds something to them in the process of knowledge that reveals their full reality. The mind does not add anything to things in the process of cognition that would have to be considered as an unreal element, but prior to the process of knowledge it has deprived these things of something that belongs to their true reality. It will be the task of philosophy to realize that the world accessible to man is an “illusion” before it is approached in the process of cognition. This process, however, leads the way toward a full understanding of reality. The knowledge that man creates during the process of cognition seems to be an inner manifestation of the soul only because he must, before the act of cognition, reject what comes from the nature of things. He cannot see at first the real nature of things when he encounters them in mere observation. In the process of knowledge he unveils what was first concealed. If he regards as a reality what he had at first perceived, he will now realize that he has added the results of his cognitive activity to reality. As soon as he recognizes that what was apparently produced by himself has to be sought in the things themselves, that he merely failed to see it previously, he will then find that the process of knowing is a real process by which the soul progressively unites with world reality. Through it, it expands its inner isolated experience to the experience of the world.

[ 7 ] In a short work, Truth and Science, published in 1892, the author of the present book made a first attempt to prove philosophically what has been briefly described. Perspectives are indicated in this book that are necessary to the philosophy of the present age if it is to overcome the obstacles it has encountered in its modern development. A philosophical point of view is outlined in this essay in the following words:

The initial form in which reality confronts the ego is not its true manifestation but the final form, which the ego fashions out of it, is. The first form is altogether without significance for the objective world; it is of importance only as a basis for the processes of cognition. Therefore, it is not the form of the world that is presented by theory that must be considered subjective but the one the ego encounters initially as in mere perception.

A further exposition of this point of view is given in the author's later philosophical work, Philosophy of Freedom (1894) (translated also with the title, Philosophy of Spiritual Activity). There an attempt is made to give the philosophical foundations for a conception that was outlined in Truth and Science.

It is not due to the objects that they are given to us at first without their corresponding concept, but to our mental organization. Our whole being functions in such a way that from every real thing the relevant elements come to us from two sources, from perceiving and from thinking. The way I am organized for apprehending the things has nothing to do with the nature of the things themselves. The gap between perceiving and thinking exists only from the moment that I, as a spectator, confront the things.

And later on it is stated:

The percept is that part of reality that is given objectively; the concept the part that is given subjectively, through intuition. Our mental organization tears the reality apart into these two factors. The one factor presents itself to perception, the other to intuition. Only the union of the two, that is, the percept fitting systematically into the universe, constitutes the full reality. If we take mere percepts by themselves we have no reality but rather disconnected chaos. If we take by itself the law and order connecting the percepts then we have nothing but abstract concepts. Reality is not contained in the abstract concept. It is, however, contained in thoughtful observation, which does not one-sidedly consider either concept or percept alone, but rather the union of the two.

[ 8 ] In accepting this point of view we shall be able to think of mental life and of reality as united in the self-conscious ego. This is the conception toward which philosophical development has tended since the Greek era and that has shown its first distinctly recognizable traces in the world conception of Goethe. The awareness arises that this self-conscious ego does not experience itself as isolated and divorced from the objective world, but its detachment from this world is experienced merely as an illusion of its consciousness. This isolation can be overcome if man gains the insight that at a certain stage of his development he must give a provisional form to his ego in order to suppress from his consciousness the forces that unite him with the world. If these forces exerted their influences in his consciousness without interruption, he would never have developed a strong, independent self-consciousness. He would be incapable of experiencing himself as a self-conscious ego. The development of self-consciousness, therefore, actually depends on the fact that the mind is given the opportunity to perceive the world without that part of reality that is extinguished by the self-conscious ego prior to an act of cognition.

The world forces belonging to this part of reality withdraw into obscurity in order to allow the self-conscious ego to shine forth in full power. The ego must realize that it owes its self-knowledge to a fact that spreads a veil over the knowledge of the world. It follows that everything that stimulates the soul to a vigorous, energetic experience of the ego, conceals at the same time the deeper foundations in which this ego has its roots. All knowledge acquired by the ordinary consciousness tends to strengthen the self-conscious ego. Man feels himself as a self-conscious ego through the fact that he perceives an external world with his senses, that he experiences himself as being outside this external world and that, at a certain stage of scientific investigation, he feels himself in relation to this external world in such a way that it appears to him as “illusion.” Were it not so, the self-conscious ego would not emerge. If, therefore, in the act of knowledge one attempts merely to copy what is observed before knowledge begins, one does not arrive at a true experience of full reality, but only at an image of a “half reality.”

[ 9 ] Once this is admitted to be the situation, one can no longer look for the answer of the riddles of philosophy within the experiences of the soul that appear on the level of ordinary consciousness. It is the function of this consciousness to strengthen the self-conscious ego. To achieve this it must cast a veil over the connection of the ego with the objective world, and it therefore cannot show how the soul is connected with the true world. This explains why a method of knowledge that applies the means of the natural scientific or similar modes of conception must always arrive at a point where its efforts break down. This failing of many modern thinkers has previously been pointed out in this book, for, in the final analysis, all scientific endeavor employs the same mode of thinking that serves to detach the self-conscious ego from the true reality. The strength and greatness of modern science, especially of natural science, is based on the unrestrained application of this method.

[ 10 ] Several philosophers such as Dilthey, Eucken and others, direct philosophical investigation toward the self-observation of the soul. But what they observe are those experiences of the soul that form the basis for the self-conscious ego. Thus, they do not penetrate to the sources in which the experiences of the soul originate. These sources cannot be found where the soul first observes itself on the level of ordinary consciousness. If the soul is to reach these sources, it must go beyond this ordinary consciousness. It must experience something in itself that ordinary consciousness cannot give to it. To ordinary thinking, such an experience appears at first like sheer nonsense. The soul is to experience itself knowingly in an element without carrying its consciousness into that element. One is to transcend consciousness and yet be conscious! But in spite of all this, we shall either continue to get nowhere, or we shall have to open new aspects that will reveal the above mentioned “absurdity” to be only apparently so since it really indicates the direction in which we must look for help to solve the riddles of philosophy.

[ 11 ] One will have to recognize that the path into the “inner region of the soul” must be entirely different from the one that is taken by many philosophies of modern times. [ 12 ] As long as soul experiences are taken the way they present themselves to ordinary consciousness, one will not reach down into the depths of the soul. One will be left merely with what these depths release. Such is the case with Eucken's world conception. It is necessary to penetrate below the surface of the soul. This is, however, not possible by means of the ordinary experiences. The strength of these rests precisely in the fact that they remain in the realm of the ordinary consciousness. The means to penetrate deeper into the soul can be found if one directs one's attention to something that is, to be sure, also at work in the ordinary consciousness, but does not enter it while it is active.

[ 13 ] While man thinks, his consciousness is focused on his thoughts. He wants to conceive something by means of these thoughts; he wants to think correctly in the ordinary sense. He can, however, also direct his attention to something else. He can concentrate his attention on the activity of thinking as such. He can, for instance, place into the center of his consciousness a thought that refers to nothing external, a thought that is conceived like a symbol that has no connection to something external. It is now possible to hold onto such a thought for a certain length of time. One can be entirely absorbed by the concentration on this thought. The important thing with this exercise is not that one lives in thoughts but that one experiences the activity of thinking. In this way, the soul breaks away from an activity in which it is engaged in ordinary thinking.

If such an inner exercise is continued long enough, it will become gradually apparent to the soul that it has now become involved in experiences that will separate it from all those processes of thinking and ideation that are bound to the physical organs. A similar result can be obtained from the activities of feeling and willing and even for sensation, the perception of external things. One can only be successful with this approach if one is not afraid to admit to oneself that self-knowledge cannot be gained by mere introspection, but by concentrating on the inner life that can be revealed only through these exercises. Through continued practice of the soul, that is, by holding the attention on the inner activity of thinking, feeling and willing, it is possible for these “experiences” to become “condensed.” In this state of “condensation” they reveal their inner nature, which cannot be perceived in the ordinary consciousness. [ 14 ] It is through such exercises that one discovers how our soul forces must be so “attenuated” or weakened in producing our ordinary form of consciousness, that they become imperceptible in this state of “attenuation.” The soul exercises referred to consist in the unlimited increase of faculties that are also known to the ordinary consciousness but never reach such a state of concentration. The faculties are those of attention and of loving surrender to the content of the soul's experience. To attain the indicated aim, these abilities must be increased to such a degree that they function as entirely new soul forces.

[ 15 ] If one proceeds in this manner, one arrives at a real inner experience that by its very nature is independent of bodily conditions. This is a life of the spirit that must not be confused with what Dilthey and Eucken call the spiritual world. For what they call the spiritual world is, after all, experienced by man when he depends on his physical organs. The spiritual life that is here referred to does not exist for a soul that is bound to the body.

One of the first experiences that follows the attainment of this new spiritual life is a true insight into the nature of the ordinary mental life. This is actually not produced by the body but proceeds outside the body. When I see a color, when I hear a sound, I experience the color and the sound not as a result of my body, but I am connected with the color, with the sound, as a self-conscious ego, outside my body. My body has the task to function in a way that can be compared with the action of a mirror. If, in my ordinary consciousness, I only have a mental connection with a color, I cannot perceive it because of the nature of this consciousness, just as I cannot see my own face when I look out into space. But if I look into a mirror, I perceive this face as part of a body. Unless I stand in front of the mirror, I am the body and experience myself as such. Standing in front of the mirror, I perceive my body as a reflection. It is like this also with our sense perceptions, although we must, of course, be aware of the insufficiency of the analogy. I live with a color outside my body; through the activity of my body, that is, my eye and my nervous system, this color is transformed for me into a conscious perception. The human body is not the producer of perceptions and of mental life in general, but a mirroring device of psychic and spiritual processes that take place outside the body.

[ 16 ] Such a view places the theory of knowledge on a promising basis. In a lecture called, The Psychological Foundations and Epistemological Position of Spiritual Science, delivered before the Philosophical Congress in Bologna on April 18, 1911, the author of this book gave the following account of a view that was then forming in his mind.

On the basis of epistemology one can reach a conception of the ego only if one does not think of it as being inside the bodily organization and as receiving impression “from outside.” One should conceive this “ego” as having its being within the general order (Gesetzmässigkeit) of the things themselves, and regard the organization of the body merely as a sort of mirror through which the organic processes of the body reflect back to the ego what this ego perceives outside the physical body as it lives and weaves within the true essence of the world.

[ 17 ] During sleep the mirror-like relation between body and soul is interrupted; the “ego” lives only in the sphere of the spirit. For the ordinary consciousness, however, mental life does not exist as long as the body does not reflect the experiences. Sleep, therefore, is an unconscious process. The exercises mentioned above and other similar ones establish a consciousness that differs from the ordinary consciousness. In this way, the faculty is developed not merely to have purely spiritual experiences, but to strengthen these experiences to such a degree that they become spiritually perceptible without the aid of the body, and that they become reflected within themselves. It is only in an experience of this kind that the soul can obtain true self-knowledge and become consciously aware of its own being. Real experiences that do not belong to the sense world, but to one in which the soul weaves and has its being, now rise in the manner in which memory brings back experiences of the past. It is quite natural that the followers of many modern philosophies will believe that the world that thus rises up belongs in the realms of error, illusion, hallucination, autosuggestion, etc. To this objection one can only answer that a serious spiritual endeavor, working in the indicated way, will discipline the mind to a point where it will clearly differentiate illusion from spiritual reality, just as a healthy mind can distinguish a product of fantasy from a concrete perception. It will be futile to seek theoretical proofs for this spiritual world, but such proofs also do not exist for the reality of the world of perceptions. In both cases, actual experience is the only true judge.

[ 18 ] What keeps many men from undertaking the step that, according to this view, can alone solve the riddles of philosophy, is the fear that they might be led thereby into a realm of unclear mysticism. Unless one has from the beginning an inclination toward unclear mysticism, one will, in following the described path, gain access to a world of spiritual experience that is as crystal clear as the structures of mathematical ideas. If one is, however, inclined to seek the spiritual in the “dark unknown,” in the “inexplicable,” one will get nowhere, either as an adherent or as an opponent of the views described here.

[ 19 ] One can easily understand why these views will be rejected by personalities who consider the methods used by natural science for obtaining knowledge of the sense world as the only true ones. But whoever overcomes such one-sidedness will be able to realize that the genuinely scientific way of thinking constitutes the real basis for the method that is here described. The ideas that have been shown in this book to be those of the modern scientific method, present the best subject matter for mental exercises in which the soul can immerse itself, and on which it can concentrate in order to free itself from its bondage to the body. Whoever uses these natural scientific ideas in the manner that has been outlined above, will find that the thoughts that first seem to be meant to depict only natural processes will really set the soul free from the body. Therefore, the spiritual science that is here referred to must be seen as a continuation of the scientific way of thinking provided it is inwardly experienced in the right way.

[ 20 ] The true nature of the human soul can be experienced directly if one seeks it in the characterized way. In the Greek era the development of the philosophical outlook led to the birth of thought. Later development led through the experience of thought to the experience of the self-conscious ego. Goethe strove for experiences of the self-conscious ego, which, although actively produced by the human soul, at the same time place this soul in the realm of a reality that is inaccessible to the senses. Goethe stands on this ground when he strives for an idea of the plant that cannot be perceived by the senses but that contains the supersensible nature of all plants, making it possible, with the aid of this idea, to invent new plants that would have their own life.

Hegel regarded the experience of thought as a “standing in the true essence of the world;” for him the world of thoughts became the inner essence of the world. An unbiased observation of philosophical development shows that thought experience was, to be sure, the element through which the self-conscious ego was to be placed on its own foundation. But it shows also that it is necessary to go beyond a life in mere thoughts in order to arrive at a form of inner experience that leads beyond the ordinary consciousness. For Hegel's thought experience still takes place within the field of this ordinary consciousness.

[ 21 ] In this way, a view of a reality is opened up for the soul that is inaccessible to the senses. What is experienced in the soul through the penetration into this reality, appears as the true entity of the soul. How is it related to the external world that is experienced by means of the body? The soul that has been thus freed from its body feels itself to be weaving in an element of soul and spirit. It knows that also in its ordinary life it is outside that body, which merely acts like a mirror in making its experiences perceptible. Through this experience the soul's spiritual experience is heightened to a point where the reality of a new element is revealed to the soul.

To Dilthey and Eucken the spiritual world is the sum total of the cultural experiences of humanity. If this world is seen as the only accessible spiritual world, one does not stand on a ground firm enough to be comparable to the method of natural science. For the conception of natural science, the world is so ordered that the physical human being in his individual existence appears as a unit toward which all other natural processes and beings point. The cultural world is what is created by this human being. That world, however, is not an individual entity of a higher nature than the individuality of the human being.

The spiritual science that the author of this book has in mind points to a form of experience that the soul can have independent from the body, and in this experience an individual entity is revealed. It emerges like a higher human nature for whom the physical man is like a tool. The being that feels itself as set free, through spiritual experience, from the physical body, is a spiritual human entity that is as much at home in a spiritual world as the physical body in the physical world. As the soul thus experiences its spiritual nature, it is also aware of the fact that it stands in a certain relation to the body. The body appears, on the one hand, as a cast of the spiritual entity; it can be compared to the shell of a snail that is like a counter-picture of the shape of the snail. On the other hand, the spirit-soul entity appears in the body like the sum total of the forces in the plant, which, after it has grown into leaf and blossom, contract into the seed in order to prepare a new plant. One cannot experience the inner spiritual man without knowing that he contains something that will develop into a new physical man. This new human being, while living within the physical organism, has collected forces through experience that could not unfold as long as they were encased in that organism. This body has, to be sure, enabled the soul to have experiences in connection with the external world that make the inner spiritual man different from what he was before he began life in the physical body. But this body is, as it were, too rigidly organized for being transformed by the inner spiritual man according to the pattern of the new experiences. Thus there remains hidden in the human shell a spiritual being that contains the disposition of a new man.

[ 22 ] Thoughts such as these can only be briefly indicated here. They point to a spiritual science that is essentially constructed after the model of natural science. In elaborating this spiritual science one will have to proceed more or less like the botanist when he observes a plant, the formation of its root, the growth of its stem and its leaves, and its development into blossom and fruit. In the fruit he discovers the seed of the new plant-life. As he follows the development of a plant he looks for its origin in the seed formed by the previous plant. The investigator of spiritual science will trace the process in which a human life, apart from its external manifestation, develops also an inner being. He will find that external experiences die off like the leaves and the flowers of a plant. Within the inner being, however, he will discover a spiritual kernel, which conceals within itself the potentiality of a new life. In the infant entering life through birth he will see the return of a soul that left the world previously through the gate of death. He will learn to observe that what is handed down by heredity to the individual man from his ancestors is merely the material that is worked upon by the spiritual man in order to bring into physical existence what has been prepared seedlike in a preceding life.

[ 23 ] Seen from the viewpoint of this world conception, many facts of psychology will appear in a new light. A great number of examples could be mentioned here; it will suffice to point out only one. One can observe how the human soul is transformed by experiences that represent, in a certain sense, repetitions of earlier experiences. If somebody has read an important book in his twentieth year and reads it again in his fortieth, he experiences it as if he were a different person. If he asks without bias for the reason for this fact, he will find that what he learned from his reading twenty years previous has continued to live in -him and has become a part of his nature. He has within him the forces that live in the book, and he finds them again when he rereads the book at the age of forty. The same holds true with our life experiences. They become part of man himself. They live in his “ego.” But it is also apparent that within the limits of one life this inner strengthening of the higher man must remain in the realm of his spirit and soul nature. Yet one can also find that this higher human being strives to become strong enough to find expression in his physical nature. The rigidity of the body prevents this from happening within a single life span. But in the central core of man there lives the potential predisposition that, together with the fruits of one life, will form a new human life in the same way that the seed of a new plant lives in the plant.

[ 24 ] Moreover, it must be realized that following the entry of the soul into an independent spirit world the results of this world are raised into consciousness in the same way that the past rises into memory. But these realities are seen as extending beyond the span of an individual life. The content of my present consciousness represents the results of my earlier physical experiences; so, too, a soul that has gone through the indicated exercises faces the whole of its physical experience and the particular configuration of its body as originating from the spirit-soul nature, whose existence preceded that of the body. This existence appears as a life in a purely spiritual world in which the soul lived before it could develop the germinal capacities of a preceding life into a new one. Only by closing one's mind to the obvious possibility that the faculties of the human soul are capable of development can one refuse to recognize the truthfulness of a person's testimony that shows that as a result of inner work one can really know of a spiritual world beyond the realm of ordinary consciousness. This knowledge leads to a spiritual apprehension of a world through which it becomes evident that the true being of the soul lies behind ordinary experiences. It also becomes clear that this soul being survives death just as the plant seed survives the decay of the plant. The insight is gained that the human soul goes through repeated lives on earth and that in between these earthly lives it leads a purely spiritual existence.

[ 25 ] This point of view brings reality to the assumption of a spiritual world. The human souls themselves carry into a later cultural epoch what they acquired in a former. One can readily observe how the inner dispositions of the soul develop if one refrains from arbitrarily ascribing this development merely to the laws of physical heredity. In the spiritual world of which Eucken and Dilthey speak the later phases of development always follow from the immediately preceding ones. Into this sequence of events are placed human souls who bring with them the results of their preceding lives in the form of their inner soul disposition. They must, however, acquire in a process of learning what developed in the earthly world of culture and civilization while they were in a purely spiritual state of existence.

[ 26 ] A historical account cannot do full justice to the thoughts exposed here. I would refer anyone who seeks more information to my writings on spiritual science. These writings attempted to give, in a general manner, the world conception that is outlined in the present book. Even so, I believe that it is possible to recognize from it that this world conception rests on a serious philosophical foundation. On this basis it strives to gain access to a world that opens up to sense-free observation acquired by inner work.

[ 27 ] One of the teachers of this world conception is the history of philosophy itself. It shows that the course of philosophical thought tends toward a conception that cannot be acquired in a state of ordinary consciousness. The accounts of many representative thinkers show how they attempt in various ways to comprehend the self-conscious ego with the help of the ordinary consciousness. A theoretical exposition of why the means of this ordinary consciousness must lead to unsatisfactory results does not belong to a historical account. But the historical facts show distinctly that the ordinary consciousness, however we may look at it, cannot solve the questions it nevertheless must raise. This final chapter was written to show why the ordinary consciousness and the usual scientific mind lack the means to solve such questions. This chapter was meant to describe what the characterized world conceptions were unconsciously striving for. From one certain point of view this last chapter no longer belongs to the history of philosophy, but from another point of view, its justification is quite clear. The message of this book is that a world conception based on spiritual science is virtually demanded by the development of modern philosophy as an answer to the questions it raises.

To become aware of this one must consider specific instances of this philosophical development. Franz Brentano in his Psychology points out how philosophy was deflected from the treatment of the deeper riddles of the soul (compare page of this volume). He writes, “Apparent as the necessity for a restriction of the field of investigation is in this direction, it is perhaps no more than only apparent.” David Hume was most emphatically opposed to the metaphysicists who maintained that they had found within themselves a carrier for all psychic conditions. He says:

For my part, when I enter most intimately into what I call myself, I always stumble on some particular perception or other, of heat or cold, light or shade, love or hatred, pain or pleasure. I can never catch myself at any time without a perception and never can observe anything but perceptions. When my perceptions are removed for any time, as by sound sleep, so long am I insensible of myself and may truly be said not to exist. (Treatise of Human Nature, Part IV, Sect. 6.)

Hume only knows the kind of psychological observation that would approach the soul without any inner effort. An observation of this kind simply cannot penetrate to the nature of the soul. Brentano takes up Hume's statement and says, “This same man, Hume, nevertheless, observes that all proofs for the immortality of the soul possess the same power of persuasion as the opposing traditional views.” But here we must add that only faith, and not knowledge, can support Hume's view that the soul contains nothing more than what he finds there. For how could any continuity be guaranteed for what Hume finds as the content of the soul? Brentano continues by saying:

Although it is obvious that a denial of a soul substance eliminates the possibility to speak of an immortality in the proper sense of the word, it is still not true that the question of immortality loses all meaning if a supporting substance for psychic activity is denied.

This becomes immediately evident if one considers that, with or without supporting substance, one cannot deny that our psychic life here on earth has a certain continuity. If one rejects the idea of a soul substance, one has the right to assume that this continuity does not depend on a supporting substance. The question as to whether our psychic life would continue after the destruction of our body will be no less meaningful for such a thinker than it is for others. It is really quite inconsistent if thinkers of this school reject the essential question of immortality as meaningless also in this important sense on the basis of the above-mentioned reason. It should then, however, be referred to as the immortality of life rather than that of the soul. (Brentano, Psychology from the Empirical Standpoint, Bk. I, Chap. 1.)

This opinion of Brentano's, however, is without support if the world conception outlined above is rejected. For where can we find grounds for the survival of psychic phenomena after the dissolution of the body if we want to restrict ourselves to the ordinary consciousness? This consciousness can only last as long as its reflector, the physical body, exists. What may survive the loss of the body cannot be designated as substance; it must be another form of consciousness. But this other consciousness can be discovered only through the inner activity that frees the soul from the body. This shows us that the soul can experience consciousness even without the mediation of the body. Through such activity and with the help of supersensible perception, the soul will experience the condition of the complete loss of the body. It finds that it had been the body, itself, that obscured that higher consciousness. While the soul is incarnated, the body has such a strong effect on the soul that this other consciousness cannot become active. This becomes a matter of direct experience when the soul exercises indicated in this chapter are successfully carried out. The soul must then consciously suppress the forces that originate in the body and extinguish the body-free consciousness. This extinction can no longer take place after the dissolution of the body. It is the other consciousness, therefore, that passes through successive lives and through the purely spiritual existence between death and birth. From this point of view, there is reference to a nebulous soul substance. In terms that are comparable to ideas of natural science, the soul is shown how it continues its existence because in one life the seed of the next is prepared, as the seed is prepared in the plant. The present life is shown as the reason for a future life, and the true essence of what continues when death dissolves the body is brought to light.

[ 28 ] Spiritual science as described here nowhere contradicts the methods of modern natural science. But science has to admit that with its methods one cannot gain insight into the realm of the spiritual. As soon as the existence of a consciousness other than the ordinary one is recognized, one will find that by it one is led to conceptions concerning the spiritual world that will give to it a cohesion similar to that that natural science gives to the physical world.

[ 29 ] It will be of importance to eliminate the impression that this spiritual science has borrowed its insights from any older form of religion. One is easily misled to this view because the conception of reincarnation, for instance, is a tenet of certain creeds. For the modern investigator of spiritual science, there can be no borrowing from such creeds. He finds that the devotion to the exercises described above will lead to a consciousness that enters the spiritual world. As a result of this consciousness he learns that the soul has its standing in the spiritual world in the way previously described.

A study of the history of philosophy, beginning with the awakening of thought in Greek civilization, indicates the way that leads to the conviction that the true being of the soul can be found below the surface of ordinary experience. Thinking has proved to be the educator of the soul by leading it to the point at which it is alone with itself. This experience of solitude strengthens the soul whereby it is able to delve not only into its own being but also to reach into the deeper realities of the world. The spiritual science described in this chapter does not attempt to lead behind the world of the senses by using the means of ordinary consciousness, such as reflection and theorizing. It recognizes that the spiritual world must remain concealed from that consciousness and that the soul must, through its own inner transformation, rise into the supersensible world before it can become conscious of it.

[ 30 ] In this way, the insight is also gained that the origin of moral impulses lies in the world that the soul perceives when it is free of the body. From there also the driving forces originate that do not stem from the physical nature of man but are meant to determine his actions independent from this nature.

[ 31 ] When one becomes acquainted with the fact that the “ego” with its spiritual world lives outside the body and that it, therefore, carries the experiences of the external world to the physical body, one will find one's way to a truly spiritual understanding of the riddle of human destiny. A man's inner life is deeply connected with his experiences of destiny. Just consider the state of a man at the age of thirty. The real content of his inner being would be entirely different if he had lived a different kind of life in his preceding years. His “ego” is inconceivable without the experiences of these years. Even if they have struck him serious blows of fate, he has become what he is through them. They belong to the forces that are active in his “ego.” They do not merely strike him from outside. As man lives in his soul and spirit with color that is perceptible only by means of its mirror-effect of the body, so he lives in union with his destiny. With color he is united in his soul life, but he can only perceive it when the body reflects it. Similarly, he becomes one with the effect of a stroke of destiny that results from a previous earth life, but he experiences this blow only inasmuch as the soul plunges unconsciously into events that spring from these causes. In his ordinary consciousness man does not know that his will is bound up with his destiny. In his newly acquired body-free consciousness he finds that he would be deprived of all initiative if that part of his soul that lives in the spiritual world had not willed its entire fate, down to the smallest details. We see that the riddles of human destiny cannot be solved merely by theorizing about them, but only by learning to understand how the soul grows together with its fate in an experience that proceeds beyond the ordinary consciousness. Thus, one will gradually realize that the causes for this or that stroke of destiny in the present life must be sought in a previous one. To the ordinary consciousness our fate does not appear in its true form. It takes its course as a result of previous earthly lives, which are hidden from ordinary consciousness. To realize one's deep connection with the events of former lives means at the same time that one becomes reconciled with one's destiny.

[ 32 ] For a fuller coverage of the philosophical riddles like these, the author must refer to his other works on spiritual science. We can only mention the more important results of this science but not the specific ways and means by which it can become convincing.

[ 33 ] Philosophy leads by its own paths to the insight that it must pass from a study of the world to an experience of it, because mere reflection cannot bring a satisfactory solution to all the riddles of life. This method of cognition is comparable to the seed of a plant. The seed can work in a twofold way when it becomes ripe. It can be used as human food or as seed for a new plant. If it is examined with respect to its usefulness, it must be looked at in a way different from the observation that follows the cycle of reproducing a new plant.

Similarly, man's spiritual experiences can choose either of two roads. On the one hand, it serves the contemplation of the external world. Examined from this point of view, one will be inclined to develop a world conception that asks above all things: How does our knowledge penetrate to the nature of things? What knowledge can we derive from a study of the nature of things? To ask these questions is like investigating the nutritional value of the seed. But it is also possible to focus attention on the experiences of the soul that are not diverted by outside impressions, but lead the soul from one level of being on to another. These experiences are seen as an implanted driving force in which one recognizes a higher man who uses this life to prepare for the next. One arrives at the insight that this is the fundamental impulse of all human soul experience and that knowledge is related to it as the use of the seed of the plant for food is comparable to the development of the grain into a new plant. If we fail to understand this fact, we shall live under the illusion that we could discover the nature of knowledge by merely observing the soul's experiences. This procedure is as erroneous as it is to make only a chemical analysis of the seed with respect to its food value and to pretend that this represents its real essence. Spiritual science, as it is meant here, tries to avoid this error by revealing the inner nature of the soul's experience and by showing that it can also serve the process of knowledge, although its true nature does not consist in this contemplative knowledge.

[ 34 ] The “body-free soul consciousness” here described must not be confused with those enhanced mental conditions that are not acquired by means of the characterized exercises but result from states of lower consciousness such as unclear clairvoyance, hypnotism, etc. In these conditions no body-free consciousness can be attained but only an abnormal connection between body and soul that differs from that of the ordinary life. Real spiritual science can be gained only when the soul finds, in the course of its own disciplined meditative work, the transition from the ordinary consciousness to one with which it awakens in and becomes directly aware of the spiritual world. This inner work consists in a heightening, not a lowering of the ordinary consciousness.

[ 35 ] Through such inner work the human soul can actually attain what philosophy aims for. The latter should not be underestimated because it has not attained its objective on the paths that are usually followed by it. Far more important than the philosophical results are the forces of the soul that can be developed in the course of philosophical work. These forces must eventually lead to the point where it becomes possible to recognize a “body-free soul experience.” Philosophers will then recognize that the “world riddles” must not merely be considered scientifically but need to be experienced by the human soul. But the soul must first attain to the condition in which such an experience is possible.

[ 36 ] This brings up an obvious question. Should ordinary knowledge and scientific knowledge deny its own nature and recognize as a world conception only what is offered from a realm lying outside its own domain? As it is, the experiences of the characterized consciousness are convincing at once also to this ordinary consciousness as long as the latter does not insist upon locking itself up within its own walls. The supersensible truths can be found only by a soul that enters into the supersensible. Once they are found, however, they can be fully understood by the ordinary consciousness. For they are in complete and necessary agreement with the knowledge that can be gained for the world of the senses.

[ 37 ] It cannot be denied that, in the course of the history of philosophy, viewpoints have repeatedly been advanced that are similar to those described in this final chapter. But in former ages these tendencies appeared only like byways of the philosophical inquiry. Its first task was to work its way through everything that could be regarded as a continuation of the awakening thought experience of the Greeks. It then could point the way toward supersensible consciousness on the strength of its own initiative and in awareness of what it can and what it cannot attain. In former times this consciousness was accepted, as it were, without philosophical justification. It was not demanded by philosophy itself. But modern philosophy demands it in response to what it has achieved already without the assistance of this consciousness. Without this help it has succeeded in leading the spiritual investigation into directions that will, if rightly developed, lead to the recognition of supersensible consciousness. That is why this final chapter did not start by describing the way in which the soul speaks of the supersensible when it stands within its realm. Quite to the contrary, an attempt was made to outline philosophically the tendencies resulting from the modern world conceptions, and it was shown how a pursuit of these innate tendencies leads the soul to the recognition of its own supersensible nature.

On last Wednesday I had the opportunity to explain to you how a super-sensible knowledge may come into existence out of the further development of those capacities of the human soul which belong to our every-day life, and which are recognized also in science when methodically applied. I undertook to show how a systematic further development of these capacities of the soul actually brings about for the human being a form of perception whereby he can become aware of a super-sensible world just as he becomes aware of the physical sensible world environing him by means of his physical senses. Through such vision we penetrate upward not only to an abstract sort of conviction that, in addition to the world of the senses, there exists also a world of the spirit, but to acquisition of real knowledge, to a real experience, of spiritual beings, which constitute the environment of man himself to the extent that he lifts himself up into a condition of spirituality, just as plants and animals constitute his environment in the physical world.

Such a super-sensible knowledge is something different in its entire nature from that which we designate as knowledge in ordinary life and for our every-day consciousness, as well as in ordinary science.

In this ordinary knowledge we come into possession, in a certain sense, of ideas—for example such ideas as embrace the laws of nature. But this possession of ideas does not really penetrate into the soul in such a way as to become an immediate power of the soul, comparable as a spiritual power to muscular force as this passes over into activity. Thoughts remain rather shadowy, and every one knows through immediate experiences how indifferent, in a certain sense, is the reaction of the human heart to thoughts when we are dealing with matters which affect the human heart in the profoundest degree.

Now, I think I have shown already in the first lecture that, when a human being actually penetrates into the spiritual world by means of such a perception as we have in mind here, he then becomes aware of his super-sensible being as it was before it descended to the earthly existence. And the fact that he achieves for himself something of this kind as regards his own self in its relationship to the spiritual world, does not leave his heart, the needs of his profoundest sensibilities, to the same extent unaffected, as in the case of abstract forms of knowledge. It is certainly true that one who has himself led a life devoted to the acquisition of knowledge does not undervalue all the inner drama of the soul associated with the struggle for knowledge even in the ordinarily recognized sense, yet the knowledge that we thus acquire remains, nevertheless, mere pictures of the external world. Indeed, if we are scientifically educated at the present time, we are generally proud of the fact that these pictures merely reflect, in a certain sense, quite objectively the external world and do not dart with such inner force through the life of the soul as, in the case of the physical body, the circulating blood drives its pulsing waves through man's being. The fact is that what is here meant by super-sensible knowledge is something which acts upon the human being in a manner entirely unlike that of ordinary knowledge. And, in order that I may make myself perfectly clear precisely in reference to this point, I should like to begin with a comparison—which is, however, something more than a comparison, something that fits the matter completely in its reality.

I should like to begin with the fact that the human being, even in ordinary life, lives in two states of consciousness—we might say three states, but let us consider sleeping and dreaming as constituting a single state of consciousness—that he is separated completely from the external world during sleep, and that a world existent only within him, reveals its effects in dreams in a grotesque and often chaotic manner. Even though we are in the same space with many other persons, our dream world belongs to us alone; we do not share it with the other persons. And a profounder reflection upon the world of dreams is the very thing that may show us that what we have to consider as our own inner human nature is connected with this dream world. Even the corporeal nature of man is reflected in a remarkable way in dreams: it is mirrored in fantastic pictures. One condition or another affecting an organ, a condition of illness or of excitation, may emerge in a special symbol during a dream; or some noise occurring near us may appear in a dream in a very dramatic symbolism. The dream creates pictures out of our own inner nature and out of the external world. But all of this is intimately connected, in turn, with the whole course of our life upon earth. From the most remote epochs of this life the dream draws the shadows of experiences into its chaotic but always dramatic course. And, the more deeply we penetrate into all this, the more are we led to the conclusion that the innermost being of man is connected, even though in an instinctive and unconscious manner, with that which flows and weaves in dreams.

One who has the capacity, for example, for observing the moment of waking and, from this point on, fixing the eye of the mind upon the ordinary daily life, not in the superficial way in which this usually occurs, but in a deeper fashion, will come to see that this waking life of day is characterized by the fact that what we experience in a wholly isolated manner during sleep and during dreams, in a manner that we can share with other persons at most only in special instances,—that this soul-spiritual element sinks down into our corporeal being, inserts itself in a way into the will, and thereby also into the forces of thought and the sense forces permeated by the will, and thus enters indirectly, through the body, into a relationship with the external world. Thus does the act of waking constitute a transition to an entirely different state of consciousness from that which we have in dreams. We are inserted into the external course of events through the fact that we participate, with our soul element, in the occurrences of our own organisms, which are connected, in turn, with external occurrences. Evidences of the fact that I am really describing the process in a wholly objective way can, naturally, not be obtained by the manner of abstract calculation, nor in an experimental way; but they are revealed to one who is able to observe in this field—particularly one who is able to observe how there is something like a “dreaming while awake,” a subconscious imagining, a living in pictures, which is always in process at the bottom of the dry, matter-of-fact life of the soul, of the intellect. The situation is such that, just as we may dive down from the surface of a stream of water into its profounder depths, so may we penetrate from our intellectual life into the deeper regions of the soul. There we enter into something which concerns us more intimately than the intellectual life, even though its connection with the external world is less exact. There we come also upon everything which stimulates the intellectual life to its independent, inventive power, which stimulates this life of the intellect when it passes over into artistic creation, which stimulates this intellectual life even—as I shall have to show later—when the human heart turns away from the ordinary reflections about the universe and surrenders itself to a reverent and religious veneration for the spiritual essence of the world.

In the act of waking in the ordinary life the situation is really such that, through the insertion of our soul being into the organs of our body, we enter into such a connection with the external world that we can entrust, not to the dream, but only to the waking life of day, responsibility for the judgment which is to be passed upon the nature of the dream, upon its rightness and wrongness, its truth and untruth. It would be psychopathic for any one to suppose that, in the chaotic, though dramatic, processes of the dream something “higher” is to be seen than that which his waking experience defines as the significance of this life of dreams.

In this waking experience do we remain also—at about the same level of experience—when we devote ourselves to the intellectual life, to the ordinary life of science, to every-day knowledge. By means of that absorption, immersion, and I might say strengthening of the soul about which I spoke on the previous occasion, the human being exercises consciously at a higher level for the life of his soul something similar to what he exercises unconsciously through his bodily organization for the ordinary act of waking. And the immersion in a super-sensible form of knowledge is a higher awaking. Just as we relate any sort of dream picture to our waking life of day, through the help of our memory and other forces of our soul, in order to connect this dream picture, let us say, with some bodily excitation or external experience, and thus to fit it into the course of reality, so do we arrive by means of such a super-sensible cognition as I have described at the point where we may rightly fit what we have in our ordinary sensible environment, what we fix by means of observation and experiment, into a higher world, into a spiritual world in which we ourselves are made participants by means of those exercises of which I spoke, just as we have been made participants in the corporeal world in the ordinary waking by means of our own organism. Thus super-sensible knowledge really constitutes the dawn of a new world, a real awaking to a new world, an awaking at a higher level. And this awaking compels him who has awaked to judge the whole sensible-physical world, in turn, from the point of view of this experience, just as he judges the dream life from the point of view of the waking life. What I do here during my earthly life, what appears to me by means of my physical knowledge, I then learn to relate to the processes through which I have passed as a spirit-soul being in a purely spiritual world before my descent into the earthly world, just as I connect the dream with the waking life. I learn to relate everything that exists in physical nature, not “in general” to a fantastic world of spirit, but to a concrete spiritual world, to a spiritual world which is complete in its content, which becomes a visible environment of the human being by reason of the powers of knowledge I have described as Imagination, Inspiration, and Intuition.

But, just as a person feels himself in ordinary life to be in different states of soul when awake and when dreaming, so does the whole state of soul become different when one arrives at this higher awaking. For this reason, in describing super-sensible knowledge in the manner that I have employed here, we do not describe merely the formal taking of pictures of the super-sensible world, but the transition of a person from one state of consciousness into another, from one condition of soul into another. In this process, however, even those contents of the soul in which one is absorbed in ordinary life become something entirely different. Just as one becomes a different person in ordinary life through awaking, so does one become, in a certain sense, a different human being through this super-sensible knowledge. The concepts and ideas that we have had in ordinary consciousness are transformed. There occurs not only a conceptual revolution in a person consisting in the fact that he understands more, but also a revolution in his life. This penetrates into the profoundest human conceptions. It is precisely in the profoundest human conceptions, I wish to say, in the very roots of the soul being, that a person is transformed through the fact that he is able to enter into the sphere of this super-sensible knowledge—something which happens, of course, only for momentary periods in one's life.

Here I must call your attention to two conceptions that play the greatest imaginable role in every-day life. These are conceptions completely and profoundly valid in ordinary life which take on an utterly different form the moment one ascends into the super-sensible world. These are the two concepts on the basis of which we form our judgments in the world: the concepts true and false, right and wrong. I beg you not to imagine that in this explanation I intend, through a frivolous handling of the problem of knowledge, to undermine the validity of the concepts true and false, right and wrong. To undermine something which is wholesome in ordinary life is by no means in keeping with a genuine super-sensible knowledge. This higher knowledge enables us to acquire something in addition for ordinary life, but never subtracts from it. Those persons who—whether really or in sentimentality—become untrue in their ordinary lives, unpractically mystical for this aspect of life, are also unsuited for a genuine super-sensible knowledge. A genuine super-sensible knowledge is not born out of fantastic persons, dreamers, but out of those very persons who are able to take their places in their full humanity in the earthly existence, as persons capable in real life. In other words, it is not our purpose to undermine what we experience in our every-day lives, and what is bound up in its very depths with the concepts true and false, right and wrong; on the contrary, truthfulness in this sphere, I should like to emphasize, is strengthened in one's feelings by that very thing which now comes about in connection with a higher knowledge by reason of a metamorphosis, a transformation of the concepts true and false, right and wrong.

When we have really entered into this higher, super-sensible world, we do not any longer say in such an abstract way that a thing is true or false, that it is right or wrong, but the concept of the true and the right passes over into a concept with which we are familiar in ordinary life, though in a more instinctive way; only, this concept belonging to the ordinary life is transmuted into a spiritual form. True and right pass over into the concept healthy; false and wrong pass over into the concept diseased. In other words, when we reflect about something in ordinary life—feel, sense, or will something—we say: “This is right, that is wrong.” But, when we are in the realm of super-sensible knowledge, we do not arrive at this impression of right or wrong but we actually reach the impression that something is healthy, something else is diseased.

You will say that healthy and ill are concepts to which a certain indefiniteness is attached. But this is attached to them only in the ordinary life or the ordinary state of consciousness.

The indefiniteness ceases when the higher knowledge is sought for in so exact a manner as I have explained in the first lecture. Precision then enters also into what we experience in this realm of higher knowledge. Healthy and ill,—these are the terms we apply to what we experience in association with the beings of the super-sensible world of whom we become aware through such a form of knowledge.

Just think how deeply that which becomes an object of super-sensible knowledge may affect us: it affects us as intimately as health and illness of the body. In regard to one thing that is experienced in the super-sensible, we may say: “I enter livingly into it. It benefits and stimulates my life; it elevates my life. I become through it in a certain way more ‘real.’ It is healthful.” In regard to something else I say: “It paralyzes—indeed, it kills—my own life. Thereby do I recognize that it is something diseased.” And just as we help ourselves onward in the ordinary world through right and wrong, just as we place our own human nature in the moral and the social life, so do we place ourselves rightly in the super-sensible world through healthy and ill. But we are thus fitted into this super-sensible world with our whole being in a manner far more real than that in which we are fitted into the sense world. In the sense world we separate ourselves from things in this element of the right or the wrong. I mean to say that right does not benefit us very intensely and wrong does not cause us much distress—especially in the case of many persons. In the super-sensible world it is by no means possible that experiences shall touch us in this way. There our whole existence, our whole reality, enters into the manner in which we experience this super-sensible world. For this realm, therefore, all conflict of opinion ceases as to whether things are reality or mere phenomena; whether they manifest to us merely the effects produced upon our own sense organs; and the like—questions about which I do not wish to speak here because the time would not suffice. But everything about which people can argue in this way in relation to the physical reality,—to carry on such discussion with reference to the spiritual world really has no significance whatever for the spiritual, super-sensible world. For we test its reality or unreality through the fact that we can say: “One thing affects me wholesomely, another thing in an ill way—causing injury,” I mean to say, taking the word in its full meaning and weight. The moment a person ascends to the super-sensible world, he observes at once that what was previously knowledge void of power becomes an inner power of the human soul itself. We permeate the soul with this super-sensible knowledge as we permeate our bodies with blood. Thus we learn also in such knowledge the whole relationship of the soul and the spirit to the human body; we learn to see how the spirit-soul being of man descends out of a super-sensible prenatal existence and unites with the inherited body. In order to see into this, it is necessary first to learn to know the spirit-soul element so truly that through this reality, as healthy or diseased, we experience the actuality in our own—I cannot say body here, but in our own soul.

Supersensible knowledge, therefore—although we make such a statement reluctantly, because one seems at once to fall into sentimentality—is really not a mere understanding but an ensouling of the human being. It is soul itself, soul content, which enters into us when we penetrate to this super-sensible knowledge. We become aware of our eternity, our immortality, by no means through the solution of a philosophical problem; we become aware of them through immediate experience, just as we become aware of external things in immediate experience through our senses.

What I have thus described is exposed, of course, to the objection: “To be sure, one may speak in this way, perhaps, who participates in such super-sensible knowledge; but what shall any one say to these things who is himself not as yet a participant in this super-sensible knowledge?” Now, one of the most beautiful ways in which human beings can live together is that in which one person develops through contact with the other, when one goes through the process of becoming, in his soul nature, through the help of the other. This is precisely the way in which the human community is most wonderfully established. Thus we may say that, just as it is not possible for all persons to become astronomers or botanists and yet the results of astronomy and botany may possess importance and significance for all persons—at least, their primary results—and can be taken in by means of the insight possessed by a sound human intellect, it is likewise possible that a sound human mind and heart can directly grasp and assimilate what is presented by a spiritual-scientist who is able to penetrate into the super-sensible world. For the human being is born, not for untruth, but for truth! And what the spiritual-scientist has to say will always be clothed, of course, in such words and combinations of words that it diverges, even in its formulation, from what we are accustomed to receive as pictures out of the sensible-physical world. Therefore, as the spiritual-scientist lays open what he has beheld, this may work in such a way upon the whole human being, upon the simple, wholesome human mind, that this wholesome human mind is awakened—so awakened that it actually discovers itself to be in that state of waking of which I have spoken today. I must repeat again and again, therefore, that, although I have certainly undertaken to explain in such books as Occult Science—an Outline, and Knowledge of the Higher Worlds and Its Attainment, and in other volumes, how it is possible to arrive through systematic exercises at what I must designate as “looking into the spiritual world,” so that every one possesses the possibility today, up to a certain degree, of becoming a spiritual-scientist, yet it is not necessary to do this. For a sound human constitution of soul is such that what the spiritual-scientist has to say can be received when it comes into contact with the human soul—provided only that the soul is sufficiently unprejudiced—as something long known. For this is precisely the peculiar characteristic of this spiritual research, this super-sensible knowledge to which we are referring: that it brings nothing which is not subconsciously present already in every human being. Thus every one can feel: “I already knew that; it is within me. If only I had not permitted myself to be rendered unreceptive through the authoritarian and other preconceptions of natural science, I should already have grasped, through one experience or another, some part of what this spiritual research is able to present as a connected whole.”

But the fact of such a thing as this transformation of the concepts true and false into the healthy and the diseased renders the inner experience of the soul more and more intense. At a higher level man places himself more intensely within a reality than he places himself in the physical reality through the ordinary waking of the daily life. In this way, feelings, sentiments, experiences of the soul are generated in relationship to these items of knowledge, which are altogether exact, just as they are generated through our being confronted by external things. That which the super-sensible knowledge can bestow lays hold upon the whole human being whereas it is really only the head that is laid hold of by what the knowledge of the senses can bestow. I trust you will permit me to visualize this relationship of super-sensible knowledge to the complete human being by referring to something personal, although the personal in this realm is also factual, for the facts are intensely bound up with the personal.

In order to render it clear that super-sensible knowledge cannot really be a mere head-knowledge, but lays hold upon the human being in a vastly more living and intense way than head-knowledge, I should like to mention the following. Whoever is accustomed to a living participation in ordinary knowledge—as every true super-sensible knower should really be—knows that the head participates in this ordinary knowledge. If he then ascends, especially if he has been active through his entire life in the ordinary knowledge, to super-sensible knowledge, the situation becomes such that he must exert all his powers in order to keep firm hold upon this super-sensible knowledge which comes upon him, which manifests itself to him. He observes that the power by means of which one holds fast to an idea about nature, to a law of nature, to the course of an experiment or of a clinical observation, is very slight in comparison with the inner force of soul which must be unfolded in order to hold fast to the perception of a super-sensible being. And here I have always found it necessary not only, so to speak, to employ the head in order to hold firmly to these items of super-sensible knowledge, but to support the force which the head can employ by means of other organs—for example by means of the hand. If we sketch in a few strokes something that we have reached through super-sensible research, if we fix it in brief characteristic sentences or even in mere words, then this thing—which we have brought into existence not merely by means of a force evoked through the nerve system applied in ordinary cognition, but have brought into existence by means of a force drawing upon a wide expanse of the organism as a support for our cognition,—this thing becomes something which produces the result that we possess these items of super-sensible knowledge not as something momentary, that they do not fall away from us like dreams, but that we are able to retain them. I may disclose to you, therefore, that I really find it necessary to work in general always in this way, and that I have thus produced wagon-loads of notebooks in my lifetime which I have never again looked into. For the necessary thing here lies in the activity; and the result of the activity is that one retains in spirit what has sought to manifest itself, not that one must read these notes again. Obviously, this writing or sketching is nothing automatic, mediumistic, but just as conscious as that which one employs in connection with scientific work or any other kind of work. And its only reason for existence lies in the fact that what presses upon us in the form of super-sensible knowledge must be grasped with one's whole being. But the result of this is that it affects, in turn, the whole human being, grasps the whole person, is not limited to an impression upon the head, goes further to produce impressions upon the whole human life in heart and mind. What we experience otherwise while the earthly life passes by us, the joy we have experienced in connection with one thing or another, joy in all its inner living quality, the pain we have experienced in lesser or deeper measure, what we have experienced through the external world of the senses, through association with other persons, in connection with the falling and rising tides of life,—all this appears again at a higher level, at a soul-spiritual level, when we ascend into those regions of the super-sensible where we can no longer speak of the true and the false but must speak of the healthy and the diseased.

Especially when we have passed through all that I described the last time, especially that feeling of intense pain at a certain level on the way to the super-sensible, do we then progress to a level of experience where we pass through this inner living dramatic crisis as super-sensible experiences and items of knowledge confront us: where knowledge can bestow upon us joy and pleasure as these are possible otherwise only in the physical life; or where knowledge may cause the profoundest pain; where we have the whole life of the soul renewed, as it were, at a higher level with all the inner coloring, with all the inner nuances of color, with all the intimate inwardness of the life of the soul and the mind that one enjoys through being rooted together with the corporeal organization in every-day existence. And it is here that the higher knowledge, the super-sensible experience comes into contact with that which plays its role in the ordinary life as the moral existence of the human being; this moral existence of the human being with everything connected with it, with the religious sentiment, with the consciousness of freedom.

At the moment when we ascend to a direct experience of the health-giving or the disease-bringing spiritual life, we come into contact with the very roots of the moral life of man, the roots of the whole moral existence. We come into contact with these roots of the moral existence only when we have reached the perception that the physical life of the senses and that which flows out of the human being is really, from the point of view of a higher life, a kind of dream, related to this higher life as the dream is related to the ordinary life. And that which we sense out of the indefinite depths of our human nature as conscience, which enables us to conduct our ordinary life, which determines whether we are helpful or harmful for our fellow men, that which shines upward from the very bottom of our human nature, stimulating us morally or immorally, becomes luminous; it is linked up in a reality just as the dream is linked up in a reality when we wake. We learn to recognize the conscience as something existing in man as a dimly mirrored gleam of the sense and significance of the spiritual world—of that super-sensible world to which we human beings belong, after all, in the depths of our nature. We now understand why it is necessary to take what the knowledge of the sense world can offer us as a point of departure and to proceed from this to a super-sensible knowledge, when we are considering the moral order of the world and desire to arrive at the reality of this moral world order.

This is what I endeavored to set forth thirty years ago as an ethical problem, merely as a moral world riddle, in my Philosophy of Spiritual Activity. Without taking into account super-sensible knowledge, I sought by simply following out the moral impulses of the human being to establish the fact that the ethical arises in every instance, not out of the kind of thinking which simply absorbs external things, external occurrences or the occurrences of one's own body, but out of that thinking life of the soul which lays hold upon the heart and the will and yet in its very foundation is, none the less, a thinking soul life, resting upon its own foundations, rooted in the spiritual nature of the world. I was compelled to seek at that time in my Philosophy of Spiritual Activity for a life of the soul independent of the corporeal being of man, a life that seems, indeed, a shadowy unreality in comparison with the solid reality of the external world of the senses, but which is rooted in its true nature in the very spiritual foundations of the universe. And the fact that the ethical impulses proceed from this kind of thinking, purified from the external world of the senses but wholly alive within man, gives to the human being his ethical character. When we learn to see now through super-sensible knowledge that what is rooted in us as our conscience is, in its essence, the mirroring within our inner being of the real spiritual world which weaves and breathes throughout the world of the senses, we then learn to recognize the moral nature of man as that which forever unites us without our knowing this, even when we sense it only as a still small voice within us, with that spiritual world which can be laid open to us through super-sensible knowledge.

But let no one say that this super-sensible knowledge is meaningless, therefore, for our moral life for the very reason that we have the voice of conscience, for the reason that we possess the practical intentions of life for its individual situations. Especially will one who sees that the ancient spiritual traditions, super-sensible knowledge handed down from primeval times and continuing until now, have faded away and continue their existence today as pale religious creeds, will be able to see that man stands in need of a new stimulus in this very sphere. Indeed, many persons are the victims of a great delusion in this field. We can see that scientific knowledge, which is considered by many today as the only valid knowledge—that the form which this scientific knowledge has taken on, with its Ignorabimus, “We cannot know”—has caused many persons to doubt all knowledge, in that they say that moral impulses, religious intentions, cannot be gained out of any knowledge whatever, but that these ethical-religious impulses in the conduct of life must be developed out of special endowments belonging to man, independent of all knowledge. This has gone so far, indeed, that knowledge is declared not to possess any capacity for setting in motion in the human being such impulses as to enrich him in his moral-religious existence through the fact that he takes in his own spiritual being—for this is really what he does take in with super-sensible knowledge. It has gone so far that people doubt this possibility! On the other hand, however, especially if one is not such a practical person as the so-called practical persons of our present-day life, who merely follow a routine, if one takes the whole world into account, on the contrary, as a genuinely practical person—the world consisting of body, soul, and spirit—one will certainly see that, in the individual life situations for which we may be permeated in actual existence with moral-religious content, more is needed than the faded traditions, which cannot really any longer inspire the human being in a completely moral sense. One recognizes something of this sort.

Permit me to introduce here a special example.

Out of everything that fails to satisfy us in that which confronts us today also in the educational life, what concerned us when the Waldorf School was to be founded in Stuttgart on the initiative of Emil Molt was to answer the question how a human being ought really to be educated. In approaching this task, we addressed this question to the super-sensible world of which I am here speaking. I will mention only briefly what sort of purposes had then to be made basic.

First of all, the question had to be raised: “How is a child educated so that he becomes a real human being, bearing his whole being within himself but also manifesting his whole being in the ethical-religious conduct of life?” A genuine knowledge of man in body, soul, and spirit was necessary for this. But such a knowledge of man in body, soul, and spirit is entirely impossible today on the basis of what is considered valid—most of all such a knowledge as may become actually practical so that it enables one to lay hold upon the manifold duties of life. In connection with this let me discuss the question by pointing out to you very briefly that what we so generally feel today to be a just ground for our pride—external science, dealing through observation and experimentation with material substance—is not qualified to penetrate into the secrets of the material itself. What I shall introduce here now will be stated very briefly, but we can find it set forth with all necessary proofs in my writings, especially in the volume Riddles of the Soul [Von Seelenratseln—not yet translated.] When we pay attention nowadays to ordinary science, we receive the conception, for example, that the human heart is a kind of pump, which drives the blood through the organs like a pumping machine. Spirit-science, such as we have in mind, which introduces us to a view of what constitutes not only the physical body of the human being, but his spirit-soul nature, shows us how this spirit-soul nature permeates the corporeal nature, how the blood is driven through the human being, not as if by the action of the “heart pumping machine,” but through the direct action of the spirit-soul nature itself; how this spirit-soul nature so lays hold upon the circulation of the blood that it is this spirit-soul element which constitutes the force that causes the blood to pulse through our organism. But the heart is then looked upon as something like a sense organ. As I consciously perceive the external world with my eyes, and through my concepts make this something of my own, thus do I likewise perceive through this inner sense organ of the heart—again, in an unconscious way—that which I develop unconsciously through my spirit-soul forces as the pulsation in my blood. The heart is no pump; the heart is the inner sense organ through which we perceive what the spirit-soul nature develops inwardly in connection with our blood, just as we perceive through the external senses the external world. The moment that we pass over from an intellectual analysis of the human organism to a vision of the whole human being, the heart reveals itself in its true essence, in its true significance—as an inner sense organ. In the heart the effects of the circulation of human blood, with its life impulses, are manifest; the heart is not the instrument causing this pulsation.

This is an example of the tragic fact that the very science bearing a materialistic coloring is not able to penetrate into the secrets of the material life; an example of the fact that we do not penetrate into the secrets of the material life until we do this by observing the spirit in its true work, in its creative work upon matter.

When we become aware through such super-sensible knowledge, on the one hand, of the creative spirit in the very course of material occurrences, we become aware on the other hand of the power-filled spirit—not merely of the abstractly thinking spirit—of the real spirit in its essence. Then only does there result a genuine knowledge of man, such a knowledge as is needed if we wish to develop in the growing child that which can live and breathe in the human being until death, full of power, suited to life, corresponding with reality. Such an intensive vitalizing of the knowledge of man causes the educator to see the child as something fundamentally different from what he is to the merely external observer. In a fundamental sense, from the very first moment of the earthly life, the growing child is the most wonderful earthly phenomenon. The emergence out of the profoundest inner nature, at first mysteriously indeterminate, of something that renders the indeterminate features more and more determinate, changing the countenance, at first so expressionless, into an expressive physiognomy, the manner in which the vague, unskillful movements of the limbs come to correspond to purpose and objective,—all this is something wonderful to behold. And a great sense of responsibility is necessary in bringing this to development. If we stand in the presence of the developing human being in such a way that we say, with all the inner fervor associated with super-sensible knowledge: “In this child there is manifest that which lived as spirit and soul in the pre-earthly existence in super-sensible beauty, that which has left behind, in a certain sense, its super-sensible beauty, has submerged itself in the particular body that could be given to it in the course of physical heredity; but you, as a teacher, must release that which rests in the human body as a gift of the gods, in order that it may lay hold year by year, month by month, week by week upon the physical body, may permeate this, may be able to mold it plastically into a likeness of the soul, you have to awaken still further in the human being that which is manifest in him,”—if we stand thus before the child, we then confront the task of educating the child, not with intellectual principles, but with our whole human nature, with the fullness of our human heart and mind, with a comprehensive sense of human responsibility in confronting the problem of education. We then gradually come to know that we do not have to observe only the child if we wish to know what we must do with him at any particular time, but that we must survey the whole human being. This observation is not convenient. But it is true that what is manifest in a person under certain circumstances in the period of tenderest childhood, let us say, first becomes manifest in a special form as either health-giving or disease-bringing only in high old age after it has long remained hidden in the inner being. As educators, we hold in our hands not only the immediate age of childhood but the whole earthly life of the human being. Persons who frequently say from a superficial pedagogical point of view that we must present to the child only what it can already understand make a very serious mistake. Such persons live in the moment, and not in the observation of the whole human life. For there is a period of childhood, from the change of teeth until adolescence, when it is exceedingly beneficial to a child to receive something that it does not yet understand, something that cannot yet be made clear to it, on the authority of a beloved teacher—to the greatest blessing for this human life, because, when the child sees in the self-evident authority of a teacher and educator the embodiment of truth, beauty, and goodness, in a certain sense, when it sees the world embodied in the teacher, the effect of this is the awaking of the forces of life. This is not something which contradicts human freedom; it is something which appeals to self-evident authority, which in its further development becomes a fountainhead of strength for the whole life. If, at the age of 35 years, we bring something into our heart and mind which is suited by its nature only now to be understood by us as mature persons, but which we took into our hearts upon the authority of a beloved teacher personality even in our eighth year,—if we bring that up into consciousness which we have already possessed, which lived in us because of love and now for the first time at a mature age is understood by us, this understanding of what was present in us in germ is the fountain for an inner enrichment of life. This inner enrichment of life is taken away from the human being when, in a manner reducing things to trivialities, only that is introduced to the child which it can already understand. We view the mode of a child's experience in the right way only when we are able to enter into the whole human being and, most of all, into that which enters as yet primarily into the human heart.

For example, we become acquainted with persons who radiate a blessing when they enter the company of other persons. Their influence is quieting, bestowing peace even upon excited persons whose tempers clash with one another. When we are really able to look back—as I said, this is not convenient—and see how such persons, apart from their innate qualities, have developed such a quality also through education, we often go back into a very tender age of the life where certain teacher personalities have stood very close to these children in their inner heart life, so that they learned to look up with reverence to these personalities. This looking up, this capacity for reverence, is like a mountain brook which flows into a crevice in the rock and only later appears again on the surface. What the soul acquired then in childhood exerts its influence below in its depths, manifesting itself only in high old age, when it becomes a power that radiates blessing.

What I have just introduced to you might be indicated in a picture if we say that, in relationship to the universe as well, the human being may be so educated that he may transmute into forces of blessing in high old age the forces of reverence of his tender childhood. Permit me to indicate in a picture what I mean. No one will be able to open his hands in blessing in old age who has not learned in tender childhood to fold his hands in reverent prayer.

This may indicate to us that in such a special case a life task, education, may lead to an ethical-religious attitude of mind; may indicate how that which our hearts and minds, and our wills, become as a result of entering livingly into spirit-knowledge may enter with vital reality into our conduct of life, so that what we develop otherwise, perhaps, only in an external and technical way shall become a component part of our moral-religious conduct of life. The fact, however, that instruction and education in the Stuttgart Waldorf School, and in the other schools which have arisen as its offshoots, have been brought into such an atmosphere does not by any means result in a lack of attention to the factual, the purely pedagogical; on the contrary, these are given full consideration. But the task of education has really become something here which, together with all its technique of teaching, its practice of instruction and everything methodical, at the same time radiates an ethical-religious atmosphere over the child. Educational acts become ethical-religious acts, because what is done springs from the profoundest moral impulses. Since the practice of teaching flows from a teacher-conscience, since the God-given soul nature is seen in the developing human being, educational action becomes religious in its nature. And this does not necessarily have any sentimental meaning but the meaning may be precisely what is especially necessary for our life, which has become so prosaic: that life may become in a wholly unsentimental sense a form of divine service to the world, as in the single example we have given of education, by reason of the fact that spiritual science becomes a light illuminating the actions of our life, the whole conduct of life. Since super-sensible knowledge leads us, not to abstractions, but to human powers, when these forms of knowledge gained through super-sensible cognition simply become immediate forces of life, they can flow over, therefore, into our whole conduct of life, permeating this with that which lifts the human being above his own level—out of the sensible into the super-sensible—elevating him to the level of a moral being. They may bring him to the stage where he becomes in consecrated love one with the Spirit of the World, thus arriving at truly religious piety.

Indeed, this is especially manifest also in education. If we observe the child up to his seventh year, we see that he is wholly given over, in a physical sense, to his environment. He is an imitator, an imitative being even in his speech. And when we observe this physical devotion, when we observe what constitutes a natural environment of the child, and remains such a natural environment because the soul is not yet awake, then we feel inclined to say that what confronts us in a natural way in the child is the natural form of the state of religious consecration to the world. The reason why the child learns so much is that it is consecrated to the world in a natural-religious way. Then the human being separates himself from the world; and, from the seventh year on, it is his educational environment which gives a different, dimly sensed guidance to his soul. At the period of adolescence he arrives at the stage of independent judgment; then does he become a being who determines his own direction and goal from within himself. Blessed is he if now, when freed from his sensuous organism, he can follow the guidance of thought, of the spirit, and grow into the spiritual just as he lived in a natural way while a child in the world,—if he can return as an adult in relationship to the spirit to the naturalness of the child's feeling for the world! If our spirit can live in the spirit of the world at the period of adolescence as the body of a child lives in the world of nature, then do we enter into the spirit of the world in true religious devotion to the innermost depths of our human nature: we become religious human beings.

We must willingly accept the necessity of transforming ordinary concepts into living forces if we wish to grasp the real nature, the central nerve, of super-sensible knowledge. So is it, likewise, when we view the human being by means of what I described the last time as super-sensible knowledge in Imagination. When we become aware that what lives in him is not only this physical body which we study in physiology, which we dissect in the medical laboratory and thereby develop the science of physiology, when we see that a super-sensible being lives in him which is beheld in the manner I have described, we then come to know that this super-sensible being is a sculptor that works upon the physical body itself. But it is necessary then to possess the capacity of going over from the ordinary abstract concepts which afford us only the laws of nature to an artistic conception of the human being. The system of laws under which we ordinarily conceive the human physical form must be changed into molded contents; science must pass over into art. The super-sensible human being can not be grasped by means of abstract science. We gain a knowledge of the super-sensible being only by means of a perception which leads scientific knowledge wholly over into an artistic experience. It must not be said that science must remain something logical, experimental. Of course, such a demand can be set up; but what does the world care about what we set up as “demands!” If we wish to gain a grasp of the world, our process must be determined in accordance with the world, not in accordance with our demands or even with our logical thoughts; for the world might itself pass over from mere logical thoughts into that which is artistic. And it actually does this. For this reason, only he arrives at a true conception of life who—by means of “perceptive power of thought” to use the expression so beautifully coined by Goethe—can guide that which confronts us in the form of logically conceived laws of nature into plastically molded laws of nature. We then ascend through art—in Schiller's expression “through the morning glow of the beautiful”—upwards into the land of knowledge, but also the land of reverent devotion, the land of the religious.

We then learn to know—permit me to say this in conclusion—what a state of things we really have with all the doubts that come over a human being when he says that knowledge can never bestow upon us religious and ethical impulses, but that these require special forces far removed from those of knowledge. I, likewise, shall never maintain, on the basis of super-sensible knowledge, that any kind of knowledge as such can guide a human being into a moral and religious conduct of life. But that which really brings the human being into a moral and religious conduct of life does not belong in the realm of the senses: it can be investigated only in the realm of the super-sensible. For this reason a true knowledge of human freedom can be gained only when we penetrate into the super-sensible. So likewise do we gain real knowledge of the human conscience only when we advance to the sphere of the super-sensible. For we arrive in this way at that spiritual element which does not compel the human being as he is compelled by natural laws, but permits him to work as a free being, and yet at the same time permeates him and streams through him with those impulses which are manifest in the conscience. Thus, however, is manifested to man that which he vaguely senses as the divine element in the world, in his innocent faith as a naive human being imbued with religious piety.

It is certainly true that one does not stand in immediate need of knowledge such as I have described in order to be a religious and pious person; it is possible to be such a person in complete naiveté. But that is not the state of the case, as history proves. One who asserts that the religious and ethical life of man must come to flower out of a different root from that of knowledge does not realize on the basis of historical evolution that all religious movements of liberation—naturally, the religious aptitudes always exist in the human being—have had their source in the sphere of knowledge as super-sensible sources of knowledge existed in the prehistorical epochs. There is no such thing as a content of morality or religion that has not grown out of the roots of knowledge. At the present time the roots of knowledge have given birth to scientific thinking, which is incapable, however, of reaching to the spirit. As regards the religious conduct of life, many people cling instead to traditions, believing that what exists in traditions is a revelation coming out of something like a “religious genius.” As a matter of fact, these are the atavistic, inherited traditions. But they are at the present time so faded out that we need a new impulse of knowledge, not working abstractly, but constituting a force for knowledge, in order that what exists in knowledge may give to the human being the impulse to enter even into the conduct of the practical life with ethical-religious motives in all their primal quality.

This we need. And, if it is maintained on the one hand—assuredly, with a certain measure of justification—that the human being does not need knowledge as such in order to develop an ethical-religious conduct of life, yet it must be maintained, on the other hand, as history teaches in this respect also, that knowledge need not confuse the human being in his religious and his ethical thinking. It must be possible for him to gain the loftiest stages of knowledge, and with this knowledge—such, naturally, as it is possible for him to attain, for there will always remain very much beyond this—to arrive at the home in which he dwelt by the will of God and under the guidance of God before he had attained to knowledge. That which existed as a dim premonition, and which had its justification as premonition, must be found again even when our striving is toward the loftiest light of knowledge. It will be possible then for knowledge to be something whose influence does not work destructively upon the moral conduct of life; it may be only the influence which kindles and permeates the whole moral-religious conduct of life. Through such knowledge, however, the human being will become aware of the profounder meaning of life—about which it is permissible, after all, to speak: he will become aware that, through the dispensation of the mysteries of the universe, of the whole cosmic guidance, he is a being willed by the Spirit, as he deeply senses; that he can develop further as a being willed by the Spirit; that, whereas external knowledge brings him only to what is indefinite, where he is led into doubt and where the unity which lived within him while he possessed only naive intimations is torn apart, he returns to what is God-given and permeated of spirit within himself if he awakens out of the ordinary knowledge to super-sensible knowledge.

Only thus can that which is so greatly needed by our sorely tested time really be furthered—a new impulse in the ethical-religious conduct of life: in that, just as knowledge has advanced up to the present time from the knowledge of vague premonition and dream to the wakeful clarity of our times, we shall advance from this wakeful clarity to a higher form of waking, to a state of union with the super-sensible world. Thus, likewise, will that impulse be bestowed upon the human being which he so imperatively requires especially for the renewal of his social existence at this time of bitter testing for humanity in all parts of the world—indeed, we may say, for all social thinking of the present time. As the very root of an ethical-religious conduct of life understanding must awaken for the fact that the human being must pass from the ordinary knowledge to an artistic and super-sensible awaking and enter into a religious-ethical conduct of life, into a true piety, free from all sentimentality, in which service to life becomes, so to speak, service to the spirit. He must enter there in that his knowledge strives for the light of the super-sensible, so that this light of the super-sensible causes him to awaken in a super-sensible world wherein alone he may feel himself to be a free soul in relationship to the laws of nature, wherein alone he may dwell in a true piety and a genuine inwardness and true religiousness as a spirit man in the spirit world.

A writing,¹ I do not want to write a review about it. What I will say will be only words that express my subjective feelings when reading the writing and that may be directed from a deeply satisfied soul like a spiritual greeting to the author.

Only in this way can I speak about a writing that, from the point of view of my spiritual-scientific striving, characterizes Pastor Ernst.

I feel that, first of all, the writing expresses the deeply religious, but also the only truly plausible view, which knows that in the development of mankind nothing truly religious can arise or develop without a real intervention of the divine-spiritual into the physical world. Without a person or persons having real contact with the supersensible, nothing religious can come into the world: Edmund Ernst is quite clear about this.

That is why he starts from the reformers' supersensible experiences. He shows how Luther's whole life was basically oriented towards contact with the supersensible. How Luther was well aware of the dangers of this contact, how he knew that supersensible beings can sometimes appear in a good mask, while they are of a devilish nature. Ernst also shows how Zwingli, in a decisive point, made his behavior dependent on a truth that had been revealed to him from the spiritual world.

The spiritual-supernatural source is spoken of simply but forcefully in the book as a religious source.

In this way, however, the author's meaning is implanted in the book, which makes the religious man. The book proves to be one that is written from a spirit-filled heart living in the spirit. From such a heart-felt attitude, light-filled warmth always falls on the individual's execution. And with Ernst, this warmth is never channeled into the sought emotional exuberance; it remains objective throughout and seeks to get the “yes” and “no” for an assertion from the objective.

Given such conditions, should we not speak of the deepest satisfaction when Pastor Ernst courageously makes three main questions the content of his book? These are three questions that I myself should never have been allowed to speak about; to hear what is said about them from such a source, may be called an inner festival of life. “1. Is there a possibility, from the spiritual experience of the Reformation, to understand what presents? 2. Must the spiritually real element of the Reformation capitulate before what 'anthroposophically oriented spiritual science' possibly brings in the way of new ideas? 3. Must the results of the spiritual scientist's research be rejected from the point of view of the experience of the Reformation?"

It must be deeply satisfying to see these questions treated in a thoroughly religious way, after Ragaz, for example, has written about the spiritual science I have described: ”In this higher knowledge, God comes to Himself in man. The promise of the snake is fulfilled: Eritis sicut Deus, you will be like God. Thus Theosophy becomes Anthroposophy” (Leonhard Ragaz: Theosophy or Kingdom of God? Flugschriften der Quelle 3. Rotapfelverlag 1922, page 18). Or: “Woe to the world if it were to abandon the God of the Bible for the God of Theosophy – it would sink into dream and death, lose God and man.” Page 34. – Anyone who acquires knowledge of the human soul through spiritual research does not find a soul like Ragaz's in her dark storms against Anthroposophy incomprehensible. One can see through her in her conscious world of ideas, and also in the subconscious and semi-subconscious depths. And one recognizes how she cannot allow the feeling to arise in her from these depths: there is a path in anthroposophy to the spiritual world. Can this not lead to a renewed understanding of the biblical word of revelation, which also comes from the spiritual world? Ragaz' soul cannot come to this feeling because she has blocked the very path through the ways to the Bible that she has now chosen, through which the Bible itself - in accordance with the corresponding time - came about, and which has been recreated in anthroposophical spiritual research in a way appropriate to the responsibilities of knowledge in our time.

Now Ernst's statement (on pages 24f. of his book) is juxtaposed with a statement by Ragaz. I truly feel a spiritual blush as I transcribe the words here: “Insofar as Steiner represents the fact that it is possible to recognize the supersensible world and that it is possible to educate people to this knowledge, he presents himself as the recipient of a message from the spiritual world. Only that he also shows – and this goes beyond Luther – how others can also arrive at becoming such recipients through the path of seeing.

And Pastor Ernst understands in a clear way how I would like to apply anthroposophical spiritual knowledge to human life. It is far from my intention to appear in any kind of religious way or to interfere in any religious confession. I have no other aspiration than this: to communicate to present-day humanity, in a form of knowledge with the right sense of responsibility before today's science, what I am able to explore in the supersensible worlds. I present what I may say to myself is either appropriate for present-day humanity in its state of spiritual maturity, or something else for which individual groups of people are first acquiring the maturity in an (esoteric) preliminary training.

When the Christian Renewal movement came into being, it was not on my initiative, but on that of a number of Christian theologians who were seeking a new spiritual impulse precisely out of their genuine Christian sensibilities. believed that they could find this in the spiritual insights, especially those that are also possible through a cultus, of anthroposophy; and I was obliged to give this group of people everything I could give from my knowledge. I remained the one communicating the insights from the supersensible world; and the recipients and inquirers did what was necessary to establish the Fellowship for Christian Renewal.

Today I would like to address some fundamental anthroposophical questions about life and then move up from these fundamental questions, from the everyday to the all-encompassing, the fundamental. The most fruitful gain of our striving should be that we learn through spiritual science to judge life more and more in its truth, in its reality, to judge it in such a way that this judgment itself can lead us most efficiently and energetically into life and how it can place us in the position that we have to fill out of our karma, that we have to fill out of our greater or lesser mission in the time in which we are embodied in the earthly body.

And so I would like to start with some of life's qualities that present themselves to us every day, either in ourselves or in our surroundings. We only begin to understand the full scope and significance of these qualities when we are able to view them in the light of spiritual science. I would like to start with two vices in life and then talk about some virtues, starting with the virtues of goodwill and contentment and the vices of lying and envy.

Let us first consider these two vices, which we often encounter in life. It cannot be denied that in the broadest circles, both among the simplest people and among those who, so to speak, already belong to the leaders of life, there is a deep, deep aversion and antipathy towards what we can call envy and mendacity. To mention right away some people who were among the leaders of life, I refer to the sculptor Benvenuto Cellini and to those passages in his autobiography where he says that on close self-examination he must accuse himself of many vices, but may still say that he was never really a liar. This artist therefore finds a certain satisfaction in the fact that, on the basis of his self-observation, he can exclude lying from his character traits. And Goethe once says, as a result of his self-observation, that he must accuse himself of many things, but that envy, this ugly vice, had not really eaten at his heart. Thus we see, as it were, at the summits of life, how one feels antipathy for mendacity and envy, how one is told everywhere, where one is accustomed to look at life a little deeper, even where great abilities are, as it were, inherent in the life of the soul: You must guard against these vices in particular. And who would deny that this fundamental antipathy to falsehood and envy runs through all, all layers of our humanity. You only need to remember how much it would eat away at your heart if, in a certain moment, you had to say to yourself during truly honest and correct self-observation: I am an envious person. If you had to admit this resolutely to yourself, you would certainly feel in this confession that you would have to take something into yourself, such as fighting against this envy, fighting against envy. It is a deeply rooted feeling that mendacity and envy are ugly human traits. Why do we feel that way, then? Yes, you see, people do not always realize why they have such a deep antipathy to this or that. They often do not realize what is slumbering in the more or less subconscious part of their soul life and is undoubtedly present. In the face of envy and mendacity, man feels that he is violating something that is connected with the very essence of humanity and the very essence of human value. We need only utter a word and we will feel this. Spiritual science should gradually make us aware that, in addition to the individual personalities incarnated in the flesh, there is something like a unified, universal humanity that dwells in all souls in the same way as the divine-human. And here it is precisely spiritual science that presents this to us as a great ideal and that gradually leads us to have an understanding of the universal human. And yet, in an emotional way, there is something in all human hearts that always says in a certain way: Seek a bond that holds all people together, that always entwines itself from soul to soul, and you will find it. — And the corresponding feeling is expressed in the word “compassion”. Compassion is such a general human quality that we have to say: In this compassion, it is darkly announced the bond that goes from every soul to every soul. And there one feels again in the subconscious how one is violating compassion, the recognition of what is common in all people in the most eminent sense, with falsehood and envy.

What do we actually do when we tell a lie? We do nothing else than erect a partition between us and the other person. What should connect us with him, the common knowledge of some truth that should live in our soul and in his, if things were right, we tear that apart by telling him a lie. We do not recognize, in the moment when we tell the untruth, that we should actually live in the other with the best part of ourselves.

And when we envy someone, be it for abilities or for something else in life, then we sin against compassion in the way that we do not recognize the person for what he or she should actually be for us, as something that actually belongs to us and whose advantages and gifts and strokes of luck we should actually rejoice in if we felt truly connected to him or her.

So we are sinning against the most beautiful thing in human life, against compassion, when we are envious and untruthful people. And why is this so vehemently expressed in the dissatisfaction with these two qualities? Why is that? Well, both qualities can show us how that which resides in our soul reproduces itself, progresses to the shells of our being and has a meaning for these shells.

Envy is something that, when observed occultly, is clearly expressed in a very specific nature of the astral body when it is present in a person. And an envious person, no matter how much he is able to hide this envy from the outside world, reveals the quality of envy in his astral body. Our astral body has very specific basic properties. Even if it is different in every person and shows the most diverse differences in different people, it still has certain basic properties. And when we look at it with clairvoyant vision as an aura, it has very specific color properties. These fade in a remarkable way in the case of envious people; they fade, they become weak and dull. And the astral body of an envious person becomes, as it were, poor in the strength that it should supply to the whole human organism.

In the case of untruthfulness, it is again the case that it, and also every single lie, expresses itself in the etheric body. The etheric body loses vitality and life energy when a person is untruthful. This can even be observed externally. However strange it may sound for our age, it is nevertheless true that wounds, for example, heal more slowly in people who lie a lot than in truthful people, under otherwise similar conditions. Of course, one should not draw absolute conclusions, there may also be other reasons. But all other things being equal, wounds are more difficult to heal in dishonest people than in truthful people. It is good to observe such things in life. And that is also easily explained. The etheric body of a person is the actual life principle, it is what must contain the life forces. But these are undermined by untruthfulness. So that the etheric body cannot give as much life force as is necessary for a healing if this etheric body has had its life force withdrawn through untruthfulness, if it has not always been permeated by those movements, by those facts that arise from truthfulness. We should pay attention to such things, for we shall understand life better in many respects if we do.

Now you know that we must see what is happening to people in the light of two powers that influence human life as it develops from incarnation to incarnation. We must look at human life under the influence of the forces of Lucifer and Ahriman. The forces of Lucifer are those that act on our astral body, that radiate their power into our astral body and tempt us in relation to it. The forces of Ahriman are those that tempt us in relation to our etheric body. Yes, it is Lucifer who, so to speak, grabs us by the scruff of the neck when we are envious people. Envy is truly a Luciferic quality, a quality that comes from Lucifer, whereas untruthfulness is a quality that comes from Ahriman. For Ahriman sends out the forces and powers that radiate into our etheric body.

Now we can say: It was absolutely necessary that Lucifer and Ahriman were delegated by the wise powers of the world so that they could influence us to become independent. In that they cause us to abuse our independence, they are in a sense enemies of the higher development of mankind. But even if they are in a sense enemies of man in his higher development, they are very friendly and make very peculiar compromises among themselves. We can speak of these compromises when we consider human qualities such as envy and lying.

Envy! The moment a person who is not completely corrupt says to himself, 'I am an envious person', he will do anything to fight that envy. You don't have to be particularly high to do anything. But sometimes things are much deeper than our power, which comes from consciousness. And sometimes people imagine that it is too easy to fight such things. So it happens that they fight such things because they perceive them as ugly, but they do not go away, they actually only change their form, they reappear in a different area. They then appear in masks, in disguises. And because one hates envy so much, one fights against it, but if the soul is not yet strong enough to fight it thoroughly, it disappears as envy but reappears in another form.

You all know that human trait that is so common and that you could call: criticism and faultfinding, paying attention to the faults of our fellow human beings. When someone has to say to themselves, “I am an envious person, I don't want my fellow human beings to have advantages,” they feel bad. They feel that they have to fight it. But when they can say, He feels that the fault-finding is justified to a certain extent, and he feels right in his element. Just imagine, if that were not the case, how many coffee parties and beer societies would have to be abandoned, where basically nothing else is done so often but to give rein to this carping and fault-finding. And then man finds himself justified before himself. He says to himself: Yes, one sees the faults, one must see them, one cannot close one's eyes. — It is only a matter of why we see the faults of our fellow human beings, whether we see the intention to improve life, or whether we follow a tendency of our soul, which is often nothing more than a masked envy. People fight envy because they hate it, but they are too weak to uproot it. So it takes on the guise of a critical nature and continues to roam the soul in this way. Then you have not fought envy, you have only forced it into a different metamorphosis. In reality, what has happened is that man has fought Lucifer, because he is above the envy of the Regent, as he is above much. But Lucifer then says to Ahriman, if I may express it thus: 'See, dear Ahriman, man hates my mode of ruling envy; he does not want to be envious. Now you take him in relation to this quality! Then Ahriman says: Yes, I will press that into the etheric body. — And it is pressed into the etheric body as a critical mind, as a critical spirit, as a misguided judgment about the world. For the ability to judge always has something to do with the movements and forces of the etheric body. Here the command of our soul passes from Lucifer to Ahriman. And so many qualities, which if they presented themselves in their original form we would hate and fight against, appear in disguise. Sometimes they present themselves in such a way that we actually find them very justified and even take some pride in being able to see what is right in life. Then we are truly caught in the tentacles of the other power, the Ahrimanic power. We must not forget that a quality is much more dangerous when it appears in disguise than when it appears in its original form. Therefore, when we see this or that in life, it is always good to ask: Is it not perhaps only a transformed other vice? — This is extremely necessary so that we learn to look at life in its truth. We can only do this if we use the guidelines that anthroposophical wisdom gives us to properly observe life.

Now we must say: What appears in life as this or that vice, whether in its true form or in disguise, we often see as a karmic effect in a single incarnation. We do not even have to wait for the transition from one incarnation to another. We see the karmic effect of a quality that occurs in any period of life in one incarnation. And those who really want to observe life and pay a little attention, will not get to know life if they always forget tomorrow what happened today, but if they consider longer periods of human life, they will find karma at work even in one embodiment, in one life. It is really necessary to pay very, very careful attention to how the sins of life basically only show up after decades. But people are a forgetful generation. Of all the races, beginning with the human race and extending to all higher worlds, people are truly the most forgetful generation. Even if we have known someone for decades, we forget what came to light ten years ago; we are very happy to let it fade from our memory. I may have already mentioned a small example here, but it can show us how we have to look at life in larger periods of time if we want to recognize it in its true form – something external that I just want to insert. It concerns the time in which I had the opportunity to observe many children in different families. When you educate children, you not only have to observe the children you are educating yourself, but also the more or less young offspring of uncles, aunts, nieces and nephews, and so on. And you can take note of many things for life. Well, it was a long time ago, fashions change. When I had children of my own, it was fashionable for their teachers to give them quite a few tins of red wine with their meals during the day as a form of sustenance. It was done, and it was thought to be a good thing. If you made a note of it at the time: this child and that child were given red wine and the other was not, you can now, if you have the opportunity again, as I always try to observe what has become of these children, gather strange insights. I can say that the two- to three- to four-year-old children of yesteryear – now people of twenty-seven, twenty-eight, twenty-nine years – who were given red wine as children, are fidgety, nervous people who sometimes find it extremely difficult to find their way in life. Of course, one should not just make one's observations over a period of five years. Today it is so common to try this or that, and if it shows some success in the next few months, it is quickly a widespread remedy. People are forgetful in this area too. How many remedies have gone out of fashion after five years, people have forgotten again. But, as I said, if you extend your observation over decades, then you can really feel how life works. There really is a big difference between children who were given red wine in those days and those who were not given any. But you would have to make your observations over three decades, so to speak, to see that. And that is how it is. I have included this to show that if you want to see karma at work, it is necessary not to be forgetful, but to extend your observations over longer periods of time. The same applies to what comes to light in a more psychological way.

If you look at the second half of a person's life in context with the first, you can see how a person who was untruthful or envious, or who expressed envy under the mask of criticism, will experience the karmic effect of this in the second half of their life. Dishonest people always show a certain karmic effect of dishonesty in one incarnation: a certain shyness, an impossibility, one might say, to look people straight in the eye. That will certainly come true. Just try to observe the matter. You will find it confirmed. Folk proverbs sometimes have a deep, wise core. It is not without reason that in many regions people say that one should beware of a person who cannot look another in the eye. This is because of the karmic effect of untruthfulness.

Envy, on the other hand, or envy masked as criticism, manifests itself in a later life epoch of the same incarnation in such a way that the person in question has the characteristic of not being able to stand on his or her own two feet, so that he or she has the longing to lean on others, to need advice on all sorts of things, and always wants to run to someone else for advice. Independence in life is lost through envy, criticism, and a tendency to find fault. Such a person becomes weak in spirit.

Now these qualities, with their karmic effects, confront us spiritually when we consider one incarnation. We will take a moment to consider how the karmic effects play out as we move from one incarnation to another.

But now, so as not to be one-sided, we also want to consider good qualities: goodwill and contentment. Everyone knows what a benevolent person is. A benevolent person is someone who feels satisfied when someone else succeeds or achieves something, when they notice good qualities in someone. Goodwill is present when, in a sense, one experiences what the other person experiences as one's own. This goodwill, in turn, has a very specific effect on our astral body, which is almost the opposite of the effect of envy. We see how the lights of the astral body shine when a person expresses goodwill. The astral body becomes brighter and more radiant when there are feelings of goodwill in the soul of the person. The aura becomes more luminous, more radiant and thus richer; it becomes more saturated, and it is then able to infuse into the person first something like warmth of soul and then even a sense of well-being.

And when we see a contented person before us, a person who is not inclined to be grumpy about everything from the outset, to be dissatisfied about everything, then the etheric body shows us very definite qualities. It is important that we take note of this in a certain way. For we should actually realize how much of our dissatisfaction basically really depends on ourselves. There are those who cannot do enough to ferret out everything that can make them dissatisfied. And we feel that not only happier natures, but also better natures, are capable of paying a great deal of attention to the fact that, however bad things may be, we still have reasons to be happy about this or that. There are such reasons. And if someone does not want to admit that these exist, it is their own fault. Satisfaction, especially when it is brought about by a better quality of our soul, strengthens the etheric body in terms of its life force. And again it is the case – all other conditions being equal – that wounds or other things heal more easily in a contented person who has good reason to be contented, and does not get worked up about what happens to him, than in a grumpy and discontented person who gets worked up about everything and, as I said, leaves unsatisfied, under otherwise similar circumstances. Now we can also see quite clearly in a lifetime – and this is important for us to bear in mind when educating others – that someone who is truly imbued with contentment during a certain period of their life and who strives to seek out things that can satisfy them, perhaps despite pain and suffering, that a karmic effect will occur in the same life, even if it takes decades. This is expressed in particular by the fact that such a person, who has endeavored to acquire contentment in a certain period of his life, radiates a certain beneficial balance of life to his environment. You know that this exists. There are people around whom others have to fidget, and there are those who simply by being there calm others. People who have endeavored to be content in one epoch of their lives gain, as a karmic effect for the next epoch of the same life, the possibility of having a harmonizing effect on their environment, so to speak, purely by their existence, being benefactors to their environment.

We can always observe that benevolent people who have endeavored to be benevolent reap the karmic effect of all things that depend on them and are intended by them succeeding in a later epoch of life. Sometimes it seems inexplicable to us that some people succeed in everything, that they feel up to whatever they undertake, while others do not succeed and everything they touch fails. This leads back to the karmic cause of goodwill or ill will. You can observe these things, which I am presenting to you as guidelines, in life. If you exclude the sources of error that exist, you will see that life confirms what I have said.

When we now pass from one incarnation to another, we have to say: in one incarnation, the karmic effects can actually only show themselves in the soul. The effects of envy show themselves in certain weaknesses and in a lack of independence, the effects of untruthfulness in shyness, the effects of goodwill and contentment as I have described them to you. In this incarnation we do not have the same thorough and profound influences on our bodily organization that would enable us to make more progress with the karmic effects than a psychic basis. These things only take effect in the body, in the structure and organization of the body, in the next incarnation. And while we make ourselves spiritually dependent on others in one incarnation through envy and a tendency to find fault, these have the effect of constituting the body weakly and building it up weakly into the next incarnation. A weak body is built up by someone who was formerly plagued by envy or by masked envy, by a tendency to find fault, to be critical.

But now, if we have studied spiritual science a little, we must also say that it is truly not by chance that we are brought together with this or that person in a new incarnation. We are led into the family and environment with which we have something to do. And so you will not find it very strange if I say: If someone in an incarnation was an envious person, he will be reborn with the people – be they his parents or others – whom he envied, judged or gossiped about, or blamed. He will be reunited with them. And we may be reunited with them because we are led into this environment with weak organization. This makes the matter very practical, bringing the teaching of karma close to our practical life. We can say that when a human child is born with weak organization, This is the consequence of the envious disposition of the previous incarnation, and we are the ones who were envied, and this human child has been brought together with us karmically because we are the ones who were the target of their envy and gossip. It is fruitful when we say to ourselves: If karma has any meaning at all, it is justified to look at it this way. So let's look at it that way.

Of course, the only way to make it fruitful is to ask ourselves: What should we do in the face of such a weak human being? We only need to ask ourselves: What seems morally best in ordinary life when someone persecutes us with their envy and criticism? Perhaps it is not always possible to do the best in our ordinary, everyday lives. But what seems best to us? - Now, most certainly, forgiveness seems to us to be the very best. We may say that our lives are perhaps not such that we can always forgive, but the best is undoubtedly the forgiveness, and the most effective and also the most fruitful in life is the forgiveness. We cannot always practise it in our ordinary lives, but if we can say that the best thing in life is to forgive, it turns out that the real application of the principle of forgiveness is in the right place in all circumstances. This is when we have to acknowledge what I have said as a karmic effect from past incarnations. If a weak human child is born into our environment or brought together with us, we must then say to ourselves: Since karma should not remain merely a theoretical idea, we must think that we were the envied ones, the gossiped about. Now, under all circumstances, we can practice in our deepest hearts the feeling of forgiveness and of forgiveness. We can, so to speak, envelop such a human child in an atmosphere of repeatedly stirred feelings of forgiveness. If we did that in life, if we felt united with people who are weak, and did not just grasp the idea of forgiveness in theory, but always renewed the feelings in our souls, I have something to forgive you for, I want to forgive you, and always renew this feeling, then that would be a practical introduction of the anthroposophical attitude into life. You would certainly see the effect. Just try to put it into practice and you will see that people who are born into our environment in a weak state will flourish when you forgive them in this way and renew the feeling of forgiveness, that our feeling has a healing and invigorating effect on them. And we can become healers, healers of the people with whom we have been brought together by karma. In this way, anthroposophy becomes fruitful if we do not merely regard it as a collection of ideas that interest us. It is basically quite selfish when we begin to get enthusiastic about anthroposophy because the thoughts of anthroposophy inspire us and seem true to us. For what are we satisfying then? We are satisfying our longing for a harmonious worldview. That is very beautiful. But the greater thing is when we permeate our whole life with what results from these ideas; when the ideas go into our hands, into every step and into everything we experience and do. Only then does anthroposophy become a principle of life, and until it does, it has no value.

We can also speak in a similar way with regard to the other qualities. If, for example, we have been liars in a previous incarnation and are born again, we will be brought together with those to whom we may have lied to their faces. It is not uncommon, if one is a true student of the occult, to find that a human being is born into an environment to which he cannot find the right relationship, is not understood by it and does not understand it. Sometimes we have a peculiar effect on our environment. I don't know if you have already observed that this has a much wider impact than just on people. There are certain people: if they want to raise flowers, these flowers thrive, they have a lucky hand for it. The fact that it is they who raise the flowers makes them thrive. Other people can do whatever they want: the flowers wither. That happens. There are simply much more mysterious relationships between the individual beings of existence than one usually thinks. These mysterious relationships are, of course, mainly from person to person. And if we are brought together through karma with a human child who brazenly lied to us in a previous incarnation, it is so that we, so to speak, find it difficult to relate to this child. We should pay attention to this. We should not judge this merely according to our temperament, but karmically. We should say: “This comes from the fact that we were perhaps often lied to by this human child.” Now we can in turn help this human child, strengthen and empower him.

What is the best way to forgive something that can be expressed something like this, another person tells you a lie. The best way to forgive that is to teach him a truth. With the other, by rectifying the lie, you are already doing some good, but you have not helped the person any further. You can help him further by trying to teach him a useful truth. You have to follow a kind of policy in your dealings with people, and that helps people to progress. If we are obliged to look at the matter karmically, it is particularly advantageous that we endeavor to be truthful to people with whom we are karmically brought together and who we know do not find a relationship with us because they are shy around us. Then we will see how these people in turn flourish under our openness and how this openness is of great advantage to them. Thus we see how we can gain life principles by looking at the workings of karma in a practical way.

What we have just characterized as the effect of goodwill in a single life, we can see as having the effect of harmonizing life, but initially in the soul. People in whom this has an effect from one incarnation to the next, we find that they are actually born with a happier organization, which we can call 'skillful'. Good will, contentment in one incarnation, brings about skillfulness in another incarnation. It is true that this is the case, because it can always be proven in the field of occult research. And one can very well observe oneself and experience some of the ways in which the previous incarnation works its way into the present one. We can be quite sure that it is so in the case of people whose fingers are quite unsuitable for sewing on a button that might tear, or in the case of people who, when asked to carry a glass into the cupboard, happily throw it to the floor – I am exaggerating a little now. But in more subtle nuances, there are very many people who are so organized that they cannot help but move their fingers in the wrong way, that they always make awkward mistakes. Whether one can use the instrument of one's body well or whether it presents treacherous obstacles at every turn has a profound significance for one's life. This is extraordinarily important. And when we see a clumsy child growing up, we must assume in most cases that in the previous incarnation he lacked contentment and goodwill. When we see skill emerging, so that the person, when he touches something, already literally knows how to do it, then that is most certainly the karmic effect of goodwill and contentment. |

If we look at it this way, we can say that we can actually have a wonderful effect from one incarnation to the next. It is possible for us to really work on our next incarnation. And we will change a lot for our next incarnation if we seriously resolve to observe whether we have a little bit of faultfinding and criticizing in us after all. If we try to examine ourselves to see if we have even a little of this, we find that we have it to a considerable extent. It is good to try to examine ourselves to see if we have even a little of it. Then the process of working on ourselves begins. And we may be able to avoid being born weak and pale in the next incarnation, avoid in this life becoming, so to speak, dependent human beings.

When we consider these things, we will say to ourselves: It is no longer a fantasy to combine the individual incarnations like links in a human chain and to really regard the earth as a kind of training through which we learn to use what is offered to us in the individual incarnations so that we come higher and higher, go further and further. After all, why are we incarnated, in principle? We can best understand this by asking ourselves what the two great differences are between our incarnations in the old, pre-Christian times and our present incarnations, which are taking place after the Christ Impulse has been present. There is a very, very significant difference.

This difference between our incarnations in ancient pre-Christian times and our present incarnations could best be described by saying: When you look back at the incarnations of people in the pre-Christian era, to a certain extent the souls in that pre-Christian era had all retained something of what all souls had at the beginning of their earthly incarnations. All souls had natural clairvoyance, an insight into the spiritual world. And the progress of incarnations consists precisely in the fact that this inheritance from the spiritual world, from the spiritual origin, has gradually been lost, that people have increasingly emerged onto the physical plane, and the spiritual world has increasingly faded from them. The Christ impulse means that when we find the possibility to receive the Christ in us, to connect him with our ego, we in turn begin to ascend more and more to what we were at the beginning, only richer. That we are again at the end of the incarnations in the spiritual as we were at the beginning of our incarnations, is effected by the reception of the Christ power, when we apply our next incarnations so that we absorb more and more of the Christ. These are the great differences between pre-Christian and post-Christian incarnations. We are actually still in a transitional period in this regard. We have been pushed far out of the reach of normal human perception onto the physical plane, onto mere physical perception, and today is actually a high point in terms of physical perception. For the Christ impulse is only just beginning, and in subsequent incarnations people will truly take up the Christ, will only come to love these incarnations because they give them the opportunity to experience what can only be experienced through earthly existence: the acceptance of the Christ impulse into the soul. We can observe this even in great personalities, how there is, so to speak, a tremendous difference between the incarnations before the Christ impulse on Earth and after. I would like to tell you a detail.

Some time ago I was called upon to spend a few days lecturing in our southernmost European branch – I mean in so far as we speak of Rosicrucian Theosophy – in Palermo. And when I entered Sicily from Naples by ship, I already had the very definite feeling that there was something to be learned there about occult facts that are difficult to study in the north alone. For there is a personality, an individuality that emerged, which I cannot name now, that played a certain role at the turn of the Middle Ages and the modern era, which made a lot of noise in our and neighboring areas and which makes the occultist wonder: What was the previous incarnation of this personality? That was an important research question for me, and strangely enough, I hoped to find out something about this question through the occult research that was possible there, especially at this entrance to Sicily. And that was indeed the case very soon. Of course, what is being told is something intimate, but within our branches, there is no longer any need to hold back on these intimate things. Something very, very remarkable has been poured out into the whole spiritual atmosphere of Sicily – I do not say the outer, but the spiritual atmosphere. And the pursuit of this remarkable thing really led at last to its origin, to a great sage who worked in Sicily and who is also dismissed with a few words in the history of philosophy, but whom we really know very little about in an outwardly exoteric way. His name is Empedocles.

If one wants to characterize Empedocles as an occultist – and I would like to do this for you – then one must say: in some respects, Empedocles was very much ahead of his time, he was overripe for his time. In other respects, however, he could not go beyond his time. There was a deep conflict in his soul. Empedocles is truly a great, all-embracing personality. He was active in Sicily not only as a philosopher, not only as a mystery teacher, but also as a statesman, as an architect, as all kinds of things – he was a kind of organizer, this wonderful Empedocles. Empedocles lived in Sicily about four or five centuries before the Christ Impulse, and he was ahead of his time in that he had the urge to delve into the material world. In the past, people had never delved into matter as superficially as they do today. When someone spoke of water, like T'hales, for example, they meant something spiritual. Empedocles was the one who, in a certain respect, nevertheless anticipated a materialistic principle by composing all being out of the four elements, which he, however, conceived materially. And by mixing and unmixing this matter, he conceived the constitution of the world. He lost the spiritual because he — precisely as an occult personality, looking back on his incarnations — should have found the Christ impulse; he would have been called to do so. When we look back in the Akasha Chronicle today, we find the Christ impulse at a very specific point; but the one who lived before the Christ impulse could not do so. He could not absorb it as an earthly impulse, because it had not yet existed physically. Empedocles lacked that, it could not pour into his soul. He did not have the counterweight against the materialism that flared up in him. But because he was a personality with strong impulses, albeit with the impulses of an occultist, this led him to live out this disharmony. That is what turned out to be the truth. This led him to want to be one with the material of the four elements, just as one would otherwise, when seeking the truth, want to unite with this spiritual in spirit. And he plunged into the Atna. He really did throw himself into it to be one with the elements. He sought the divine in the material, identifying with the divine that appeared to him in the material image. And I would like to say: this product of Empedocles' combustion in the fiery floods of Etna is still present today in the atmosphere of Sicily as a fertilizing force, like the effect of a sacrifice. Something great and mighty is present, but it is emanating from this, one might say, false, blasé, wrongly placed in time – do not misunderstand the term 'false' – materialism. Empedocles, who, looking back, could not find the Christ, although he should have found him, throws his life away. Thus it happened that he came to life again in such a remarkable way at the beginning of the newer time and lived quite differently. It is not yet time to speak of the personality in which he was reborn. A wonderful view of what the Christ Impulse actually is in the course of evolution arises. Between the previous and the later incarnation of Empedocles stands the Christ event in the midst. And by comparing the two incarnations of Empedocles, one can see, by observing his individuality, what effect it has, whether one, as a spirit belonging to the newer observation, can look back and find the Christ impulse or not. This makes an enormous difference. Just as souls in ancient times had to go back from incarnation to incarnation to see how they had allied themselves with the divine spiritual being in earlier incarnations, so we must have the opportunity, when we go back from our own incarnation and trace the time from our birth to our previous death and again from that to our previous birth and so on, to find the Christ impulse in this way. The spiritual researcher in particular must find it. This Christ impulse lights a light for him, whereas otherwise he would be plunged into darkness at this moment and everything that existed would lie in darkness. We need the Christ impulse like a torch in the field of spiritual research, otherwise darkness comes, otherwise we cannot see clearly into the true reasons of the Akasha Chronicle of ancient times. This can be observed in a wonderful way in examples such as that of Empedocles. Then one gets a feeling for how these incarnations follow one another in our earthly existence; how, so to speak, man has moved in a descending direction up to the Christ Impulse, how he has emerged further and further onto the physical plane, and how we are in the process of gradually ascending into the spiritual realm again. The last great spirit of descent is the great Buddha, the first great impulse for ascent is that of Christ Jesus, and perhaps there is no better way to feel the tremendous difference between the Buddha principle and the principle of Christ Jesus than by contemplating something that the great Buddha once said to his most intimate disciples, looking back at his enlightenment, which is symbolically called the enlightenment under the bodhi tree. There Buddha says: When I look back on earlier incarnations, I see how I proceeded from the divine-spiritual source of the world, how I went from incarnation to incarnation, always dwelling with the spiritual essence in the outer body temple, descending into the physical world. But now, in this incarnation, I have found the possibility of no longer having to return to an incarnation. From body temple to body temple I have gone, in every incarnation the Godhead has erected the temple of my body for me. But now, as I am embodied in it for the last time, I feel how the beams of this body temple are cracking and that I no longer need to return to such a temple. For that is what he proclaimed: that the true striving must be to escape from this earthly activity, to no longer have any connection with this temple of the body, but to strive out of it to the last incarnation, in order to live on only in the spiritual. That was the last reference to man's descent, to the memory that men can have of primeval wisdom, of what stands at the beginning of the human race.

Oh, it must move us when we see the Buddha standing, saying: From temple to temple of the body I have passed; now I feel that it is for the last time. If we compare this – and disregard all metaphysical backgrounds – with an intimate saying of Christ to his intimate disciples, with the words: “Destroy this temple, and in three days I will raise it up again”, we see that in the Buddha was a great longing for the beams of the temple of the body to collapse, so that there would be no need to return to it; but that in Christ there was the promise: “Tear it down, and I will rebuild it in three days.” The love for the earthly world expresses itself in the fact that for the following incarnations of human beings, in which they find the possibility to build their body temple again and again, so that they can learn again and again and ascend higher; so that then, when the earth has reached its goal, the earth itself will become a corpse, so to speak, fall away from the soul of all humanity, just as our body falls away from the soul when we pass through the gate of death. But then people will have come higher and higher. By becoming Christianized, people will be able to live on to new levels of existence as humanity. What is meant by Christ's saying that he himself wants to return to the physical body, but that he will return to the principle of building the body, that he will remain in the earthly existence until the end of the earth.

That is what I tried to express in what I say through Theodora, the seer in the Mystery Drama, where you can see how the Christ will become more and more familiar to human life, although he does not return to a physical body. But he is experienced in the physical body temples of human beings. And in this saying of his, “Destroy this temple, and in three days I will raise it up,” lies the promise: Yes, I will make it true that I can enter into the souls of men, so that more and more people can come who, in the sense of Paul, can say, “Not I, but the Christ in me!”

Thus we see how we can contemplate in a small way spiritual science as a principle of life, by gaining the possibility of seeing certain qualities of our character and soul taking effect karmically between birth and death, and of seeing them working their way into the bodily organization of the next incarnation. And so we see how spiritual science presents the loftiest ideals to us and tells us what we will become — Christ-like human beings — when the Earth will become a corpse and fall away from the soul-like in man, when man will be called upon to progress to other planetary conditions. Spiritual science can thus give us the greatest ideals and can flow into the smallest circumstances of life. In this way it becomes practical for everyday life, and it can and should become more and more so. When we become anthroposophists in the sense that all our actions, no matter how remote from what might be considered anthroposophical activity, are imbued with anthroposophical thinking and feeling, only then can we say that our beings have been imbued with anthroposophy. Anthroposophy must be regarded not as a theory but as a way of life, but as a way of life that needs to be learned. And basically we must realize that we have to encourage ourselves through the true, concrete content of anthroposophy if it is to be a way of life for us, not wanting to say: I understand this from anthroposophy and that is the right thing to do, but rather that we first have to familiarize ourselves deeply with what spiritual science has to say to us. Then it must become the strength of our lives. And it can only do so when we permeate ourselves with it. But then it will do so in the smallest and in the greatest, then the perspective for the connections of human progress and for the smallest facts of everyday life will open up for us.

If we pause at times in the midst of our anthroposophical considerations and then ask ourselves: What leads us into a spiritual movement such as our anthroposophical movement? ... we may of course answer a similar question from many different stand-points. One of the standpoints (although it is not the only one, it is nevertheless the most important one) which is able more than any other to supply a satisfactory answer is the contemplation of the course of life which the human soul experiences in feelings between death and a new birth. Indeed, the events which take place during the long span of life between death and a new birth are not less important or detailed than the events which take place between birth and death; yet we are only able to single out a few of the important things which we must experience. We may say, however, that whenever and at whatever point we observe the life between death and a new birth it always convinces us that humanity must prepare itself for a time when it will know and feel something concerning the super-sensible worlds.

Let us now penetrate at once into definite and concrete facts. If a clairvoyant who is able to contemplate life between death and a new birth perceives what will be described below, this sight may indeed induce him to consider it as an urgent task to spread the knowledge of the spiritual world! Let us take the case of a man who has died. The clairvoyant seeks him, he tries to see him some time after the person in question has passed through the portal of death. In the manner in which it is possible to communicate with the dead, he may hear the following words spoken by the departed one. (This is a concrete case.) The departed one will speak to him as follows: “I have left my wife behind; I know that she is still dwelling in the physical world.” (Of course, the dead man does not express himself with physical words.) “While I was living with her in the physical world, and while I attended to my work at the office from morning to night, she has always been the sunshine of my life. Every one of her words filled me with happiness; indeed, my life was so that I could not imagine it without the sunshine shed over it by the partner of my life. I then passed through the portal of death and left her behind. Now I am longing to be back again, I feel how I miss everything and my longing soul seeks to find a path leading to the companion of my life. But I cannot find this soul, I cannot penetrate to where she is dwelling, it is just as if she were no longer there. And if at times I have an inkling of her presence and feel as if she were there, as if I were in her neighbourhood, she is dumb, so that I only compare this with the case of two people, one of whom is filled with the desire that the other one speak a few words to him, while the other silent and cannot speak. Thus the soul that has filled me with bliss for such a long time during my physical life has now grown silent”.

You see, if we investigate what may be the cause of all this we obtain the answer: there is no language in common between the departed and the living who have remained behind. Nothing fills the soul with a substance which would continue to render it perceptible. Because a language in common is lacking, two souls feel separated.

This was not always the case. If we go back further into human evolution we find that the souls possessed a certain spiritual inheritance, a spirituality rendered them perceptible to one another not only upon the physical plane, but also when one of them dwelt in the physical and the other in the spiritual world. But the old heirloom of spiritual inwardness has been used up and to-day it exists no longer, so that the distressing case may really arise that one soul who has been loved by the other as dearly as I have just described, cannot be found beyond death by the soul, because nothing of what can be perceived by the departed soul lives within the soul who has remained upon the earth. What can be perceived by the departed soul is spiritual knowledge and spiritual feelings: this is the link which connects the soul upon the earth with the spiritual world. If here upon the earth a soul who has remained behind has fostered the knowledge of spiritual world, and if thoughts connected with the spiritual world have passed through this soul, these thoughts may be perceived by the departed soul, even the old religious feelings suffice to give soul something which may be perceived by the other soul. If it were possible to trace this case still further, the seer would discover that even when both souls have passed through death the departed souls are only able to perceive one another dimly; they are quite unable to establish a reciprocal connection, or they have the greatest difficulty in doing this, because they have no language in common. Clairvoyance reveals the deeper meaning of Anthroposophy: it is the language which will gradually be spoken both by the living and by the dead, by those who dwell in the physical world and by those who live between death and a new birth. The souls who have remained behind and who have taken up within them thoughts concerning the super-sensible worlds become visible to the souls of the departed. If they have strewn out love before death, they will do this also after death. This may convince us that Anthroposophy is a language which renders perceptible to the super-sensible world what takes place in the world of physical events. Indeed, the danger threatening humanity upon the earth is that the souls will become more and more estranged from one another and will be unable to build a connecting bridge, if spiritual ideas do not enable them to find the thread which links up souls. This is the reality of Anthroposophy, for it is not a mere theory. Theoretical knowledge is the very least; what we take up within us is a real soul-elixir, real substance. This substance enables the soul who has passed through death to see the soul who has remained behind. We may say that the seer who has an insight into these things, who has once perceived a soul filled with longing to see what it has left behind upon the earth, but unable to see it because its family has not yet found Anthroposophy—the seer who has perceived how the souls suffer under similar privations, knows that he cannot do otherwise than to speak to his fellow-beings about spiritual wisdom, and to consider that the time has come when spiritual wisdom must enter the hearts of men. We may say that those whose mission is based upon the knowledge of the super-sensible worlds feel that it is an urgent necessity to speak about the super-sensible worlds, a necessity which cannot be overlooked, for this would be the greatest sin of all. Thus they feel the necessity of proclaiming anthroposophical truths, of making revelations concerning the super-sensible worlds.

What has just been said may show you the tremendous earnestness connected with the necessity of revealing spiritual truths. But there is still another aspect of the communication between the living and the dead. We have not advanced very far in this direction, but we shall gradually progress. In order to understand how the living will gradually be able to establish a kind of communication with those who have departed, we must bear in mind the following things. Very little indeed is known concerning the physical world. For how is this knowledge of the physical world acquired? By using the senses and applying thought, by feeling what comes toward us from the world outside. But this is only the very least part of what is contained in the world outside. It contains still other things. I would like you to have some idea of the fact that there are still other things in the world which are far more important than what is real in a physical sense. I do not mean the super-sensible world, but something else. Imagine, for instance, that you are accustomed to go to your office every day at 8 a.m. One day you discover that on that particular morning you are three minutes late, and you happen to cross a certain square where you would have been obliged to pass through a kind of garage with a roof supported by columns. On that particular day on which you cross the square three minutes later than usual you realise that had you been punctual—that is to say, had you not been three minutes late—you would have been killed by the collapsing roof. Try to imagine this quite vividly You may also take the case of a man who misses a train which is afterwards wrecked in a collision; he would have been killed had he left by that train! All these are things which have not taken place, and this is why people do not notice them. But if something similar faces you, so that you must hit upon it, it will undoubtedly make an impression upon you. The day's course from morning to night always contains things which have not occurred to you. These are beyond your range of sight, things which may perhaps seem “invented”, yet they belong to the most important ingredients of life. You will have an inkling of these facts if you consider, for instance, the case of certain man in Berlin who had booked a berth on the Titanic. He met an acquaintance who told him: “I wish you would not leave on the Titanic!” He actually succeeded in persuading him to postpone his departure. The Titanic was sunk, and so this man escaped death. This undoubtedly made an indelible impression upon him. This is a special case, yet similar cases continually occur unnoticed: if they are noticed, they make a deep impression upon the human soul.

Let us now observe things from another aspect: How many impressions and feelings escape our attention because we are unable to perceive the dangers from which we have been preserved!

If we could observe everything that is so closely connected with these things and that escapes notice, we would pass through the world with entirely different feelings. The seer discovers the following possibility: Let us suppose, that the above-mentioned example is true. You actually cross that square three minutes later than usual. The moment in which you cross the square is the most appropriate one in which to hear a dead person who wishes to be perceived by you, who wishes to speak within you. You may then think or feel: Whence do the feelings come which now arise within my soul? This is not necessarily restricted to these particular cases, it may occur in many ways. Men will begin to feel these things if they observe also the world of possible events, not only the world of physical happenings. Real are, for instance, a great number of herrings in the sea; but they are possible only because an infinite quantity of eggs has been laid. Thus an infinite wealth of possibilities lies concealed within the depths of life. What is real, is related to the example of the herrings in the same way as the life destroyed within the eggs. This is what makes such an infinitely significant impression upon the seer who reaches the boundary line separating the two worlds. The seer may there obtain the following impression: “How infinitely great and full of contents are, events which take place in the super-sensible world, yet only a small part of all this becomes real in our world of the senses!” If this has been experienced, also the following may be felt: “Infinite things lie concealed within the depths of life.“ This feeling will develop with the aid of anthroposophical thoughts. We shall be able to feel that every point containing something which is real in the physical meaning, conceals something within it. Behind every flower, every breath of air, little stone and crystal lie infinite possibilities. Anthroposophists will gradually develop this feeling, so that reverence and devotion for what lies concealed within things will gradually unfold. If human beings gradually develop this feeling they will discover quite independently that during moments such as those which have just been described they will enter into a relationship with those who are dead as far as earthly life is concerned. The dead will begin to speak. In the future, men will experience as something quite normal that a dead person is speaking within their soul. They will gradually learn to know the source of these communications; that is to say, they will recognise who is speaking to them. Only because to-day men pass by so carelessly before the infinite world of the dead and the infinite depth of what is possible, only because of this they do not hear what the dead wish to speak within the hearts of the living.

The twofold aspect of the things which I have just explained to you, namely, that through the living souls, through the thoughts of anthroposophists, something is formed here which can be perceived by the dead—and that the dead will be able to speak to the hearts that have found their way into anthroposophical feelings—may show you the transformation which can take place for the whole of humanity through the spreading of Anthroposophy. A bridge will be built uniting these worlds with the worlds beyond. And it is a fact that the life between death and a new birth will change. It will not merely be a theory, it will become a reality, so that communication will be established between the so-called living and the dead, who are, however, more alive than we. The souls upon the earth will then also be able to feel what can be so fruitful for the dead. For if we do not feel how beneficial it is for the dead, if we reach out to them, we cannot do this in the right way.

Let us now take an extreme case. You may experience it if you are an anthroposophist and live with someone else as brother or sister, father or mother, husband or wife. Whereas one of the two feels attracted by Anthroposophy, the other one may be filled with hatred while the former is approaching Anthroposophy! How often we come across this! It may indeed take on this form in the sphere of consciousness, but not within the soul. Something else may take place there. In the astral body there is the sub-consciousness. Whereas someone may be raging violently against Anthroposophy, his sub-consciousness may be filled with an intense desire to know something about Anthroposophy. The more someone inveighs against Anthroposophy, the more he will have in his sub-consciousness the longing and the impulse to know something about Anthroposophy. When we cross the threshold of death, things take on their true aspect and nothing can be masked. Here upon the earth we may tell lies and pretend to be different from what we really are; but after death everything becomes true and shows its real countenance. If during our life on earth we have inveighed strongly against Anthroposophy, a longing for Anthroposophy will arise after death, and we shall suffer torments because this longing cannot be satisfied. A person who is still alive could, for instance, imagine that he is sitting in front of a departed one; he should then harbour anthroposophical thoughts, for the departed soul will understand these thoughts, even if he has not been an anthroposophist during his lifetime. If the living person is an anthroposophist, the departed one will in that case be able to perceive him.

What we may call, a certain inclination toward the language spoken during life, this is a fact which should be borne in mind, because soon after death the dead person still has a certain connection with the language which he has spoken during his life. For this reason, we should clothe our thoughts in the language which the dead person was accustomed to speak; after five, six, eight years, however—in some cases even sooner—it is evident that the language of the Spirit is able to overcome the obstacles arising out of the external form of speech, and the deceased can understand anthroposophical thoughts even if he has spoken another language during his lifetime. In any case, it has proved to be something very beautiful if an anthroposophist has read to a departed friend, particularly to one who has not been an anthroposophist during his lifetime. This has proved to be an enormous benefit to the dead, one of the greatest services of love. We do not merely wish to spread Anthroposophy as a teaching—this should be done, of course, for it is necessary—but Anthroposophy should also be active within the soul in a far more unobtrusive way. Spiritual tasks, even spiritual offices, may, as it were, develop and be of great help to the souls in their development after death. And this is what we should strive after more and more: to help the souls who live between death and a new birth to overcome a great difficulty, consisting therein that the old spiritual inheritance does not exist any longer, for a time has come in which it is very difficult for the souls to find the right direction after death, in which it is almost impossible for the souls who dwell between death and a new birth to find their way about.

The seer may then discover that, between death and a new birth, there are souls who are forced to undertake certain tasks, which they do not, however, understand. This, for instance, is a fact: The seer who directs his clairvoyant gaze toward the life between death and a new birth may discern souls who are obliged to fulfil definite tasks. For a certain length of time they must be the servants of powers who are known to us as the spirits of death and illness. We must here speak of a death which does not occur as a regular phenomenon, but takes hold of men before their time, so that they die in the flower of their life. When illnesses arise, these are physical events, but they are caused by forces coming from the super-sensible worlds. The deeds of super-sensible beings lie at the foundation of illnesses which spread rapidly. It is the task of certain spirits to bring premature death. That this is nevertheless rooted in wisdom, is a fact which we cannot consider just now; but it is essential to observe that we come across souls who are under the yoke of these beings. And although the seer must have grown accustomed to a certain composure and calmness, it is nevertheless painful and distressing to watch these souls labouring under a yoke, who are obliged to bring illness and death to the human beings upon the earth. And if the seer tries to retrace the path of these souls until he comes to their preceding life upon the earth, he will discover why these souls are now condemned to be the servants of the spirits of illness and death. The cause lies in the unscrupulousness which these souls have unfolded during their physical life. To the extent in which they have been unscrupulous during their life upon the earth, they now condemn themselves to be the servants of these evil beings. Just as cause and effect are connected when two balls collide, so must unscrupulous people become the servants of these evil powers. This is a deeply moving fact! There is still another thing which the seer perceives: there are souls who are under the yoke of ahrimanic spirits; they must prepare the spiritual causes of everything which occurs here in the form of obstacles and hindrances to our actions. Ahriman also has this task. All the obstacles which arise here, are the result of influences emanating from the spiritual world. Servants of Ahriman do this. Why are these souls compelled to perform these services? Because they were addicted to a comfortable, indolent way of living during their existence between birth and death. And if you consider how many people are indolent and lazy, you will find that Ahriman may expect a very great number of recruits! It is this lazy indolence which influences human life to a great extent. Even modern political economists now take into account not only human egoism and competition, but also this inclination toward a comfortable life. Comfort has become a life-factor.

It is another matter, however, if we have these experiences so that we are able to find our way about and know why we must experience them, or whether we experience them unconsciously, without knowing why we must serve these spirits. If we know why we are under the yoke of the evil spirits who bring epidemic diseases, we also know what good qualities will be required in our next life in order to bring about a cosmic adjustment annulling the evil influences. If we cannot understand these experiences, we do indeed form the same karma, but we create something which will be adjusted only in the second incarnation, so that we retard our real progress. For this reason, it is important to learn to know these things here upon the earth, for after death we shall experience them. We must learn something about them here upon the earth. Also this shows us how urgently necessary it is to render this new knowledge accessible to men by spreading spiritual truths, because the old form of knowledge no longer exists. The question, “Why are we anthroposophists?” should be answered by the spiritual facts themselves, which appeal profoundly not only to our understanding, but also to our feelings. Thus we gradually learn to consider Anthroposophy as a universal language enabling us to break down the barrier between the worlds in which our soul alternately dwells within a physical body and outside a physical body. The dividing wall hiding the super-sensible world from our sight will fall if spiritual science really penetrates into the souls of men. We must feel this, and then we shall have a true, inward enthusiasm for Anthroposophy.

Let me speak of still another phenomenon. The seer will experience that a special moment enters the life of the souls between death and a new birth, a moment which has an enormous influence upon the seer, and also upon those who are passing through it. This moment will lie further back in the case of some souls, and in the case of others it will appear sooner. If we observe sleep with a clairvoyant eye, when the human being is outside his physical body with his astral body and his Ego and looks back upon the physical and etheric bodies, we shall generally gain the impression that the physical body appears to be slowly dying. Only during earliest childhood, until the child acquires an understanding and his memory begins, the sleep in the child's body appears as something which blossoms and flourishes; but very soon, and in a way which is clearly evident to the seer, the body begins to wither away soon after it has entered physical life; death is merely the last stage of this process of decadence. Sleep exists in order that the used-up forces may become regenerated. But this regeneration is incomplete. The unregenerated part which remains behind is always, to a small extent, a cause of death. If these unregenerated parts accumulate, so that the forces of regeneration can no longer assert themselves, the human being falls a prey to physical death. Thus, if we observe the human body, we see that death is a gradual process. We really die slowly and gradually from the moment of birth onward. This makes a very profound impression upon us when we first become aware of it.

Between death and a new birth the soul is faced by a moment in which it begins to develop forces enabling it to enter the next existence. Let me indicate an example showing you what I really mean: To-day there are already quite a number of books dealing with Goethe's character and natural dispositions. Scientists endeavour to discover the ancestors from whom Goethe may have inherited this or that capacity. The source and cause of spiritual capacities are therefore sought in the physical line of heredity. I do not wish to contest this, but if one follows the path of the soul between death and a new birth, the following fact may be discovered: Let us take Goethe's soul. Long, long before it is born, it already exercises an influence upon its' ancestors from the super-sensible worlds, and it is already connected with the ancestors through forces living within it. Its influence is even of such a kind that it brings together in an appropriate way the men and women who are able to supply, after a long time, the qualities required by the soul. This is not an easy task, for many souls are involved in it. If you bear in mind the fact that men of the 18th century descend from souls of the 16th century, and that all these souls have been working together, you will realise that such an understanding is most important. Souls who are born in the 18th or 19th century must come to an understanding with other souls already during the 16th century in order to arrange the whole net of relationships. A great deal of work must be done between death and a new birth. We do not only work in an objective way by filling up one part of our time with services rendered to the spirits of hindrance, and so forth, as explained above—but we must also develop forces which render it possible for us to reincarnate. It then appears that we must prepare our form in a primal image. This makes the very opposite impression of what the seer perceives when he looks clairvoyantly upon the sleeping physical body and the etheric body. During sleep, the physical and etheric body appear to be withering away; but what is formed there as a primal image which gradually penetrates into physical Nature gives us the impression of something which blossoms and flourishes.

An important moment, therefore, appears between death and a new birth: it lies between the recollection of the preceding life and the transition to the next existence, when the human being begins to build up his physical organism. If you imagine physical death and compare it with this moment, you will find that it is the exact opposite of physical death. Physical death is the transition from physical existence to a non-existence; the moment described above is the transition from non-existence to a growing existence. If we are able to understand this moment, we experience it in an entirely different way than if we do not understand it.

A thought such as this one, dealing with the opposite aspect of death and with what occurs between death and a new birth, should really become a feeling within the soul of an anthroposophist. It should not merely be grasped with the intellect, but should be felt and permeated with feeling. Then we shall be able to experience how much richer our life becomes if the soul takes up similar ideas. Something else will then arise: namely, that, generally speaking, the soul will gradually acquire a feeling for the many things which exist in the world. If we walk through a wood in the spring and have first meditated upon the idea which I have described above, we shall not be far—if we really notice these things—from perceiving the spirits that weave and work in between the physical things. The perception of the spiritual world would really not be so difficult if the human beings themselves would not render it so difficult. If we try to permeate our feelings with what we have taken up in our thoughts, if we try to awaken them inwardly to life, this striving will open our spiritual eyes. Things such as those which have been explained to-day are intended as a help, so that anthroposophical striving may acquire life. The description of similar things always makes us feel that it is like a stammering, because our language is adapted only for the physical world, and it requires a great effort in order to produce at least a faint idea of the reality of these things; in fact, special means of description must come to our aid. But just this way of speaking about these things may awaken within our hearts what we may designate anthroposophically as a substance of feeling.

Anthroposophy should become for us a substance of feeling and a life-substance, so that we may not look upon the acquisition of anthroposophical ideas as something insignificant, but gladly take hold of them, and attribute the chief importance not to the thoughts themselves, but to what Anthroposophy makes of us.

Rudolf Steiner: Good morning, gentlemen! Has an interesting question occurred to someone?

Question: Sir, in reference to anthroposophy: what is it actually? What is its aim and its task in the world?

Dr. Steiner: The questioner wants to know what anthroposophy is and what its significance is for humanity in general. I think he means its significance also for the working class.

It is obviously difficult to speak briefly about these matters. Those who have been here for a considerable time will have become more and more convinced that anthroposophy is something that had to enter the evolution of humanity. Those who have not been here long will naturally have some difficulty and only gradually be able to understand.

First and foremost, we must realize that people are little inclined to accept something new when it comes into the world. Remarkable examples could be given of how new scientific discoveries have been received. Think, for instance, of the extent to which everything today has been affected by the discovery of the power of steam and the invention of the steam engine. Think what the world would be like today if there were no steam engines in their many different forms! When the steam engine was first invented, a small boat, driven by steam, made its way up a river and was smashed up by the peasants because they said they were not going to put up with such a thing; it was such a silly, useless thing! Nor has it always been the peasants who behaved in that way. When an account of meteorites was given for the first time in a learned assembly in Paris, the lecturer was declared to be a fool. And I told you recently about Julius Robert Mayer, who is regarded today as a most illustrious man and a very great scholar: he was shut up in an asylum!

The fate of the railroads has been particularly remarkable. As you know, they have not been in existence very long; they came into use for the first time in the 19th century. Before that, people had to travel by stagecoach. When it was proposed to build the first railroad between Berlin and Potsdam, the Director of Mallcoaches³³ said that two went empty from Berlin to Potsdam every week, so he couldn't imagine what use railroads would be. It didn't occur to him that once the railroads were there, more people would travel by them than by the stagecoach.

Even more interesting was the attitude of a body of medical men,³⁴ in the forties of the 19th century. When the railroad from Furth to Nuremberg was being built, these learned gentlemen declared that the work should be stopped, because the speed could very easily make a traveler ill by damaging his nerves. When the people refused to accept this ban, they were told that high plank walls must be erected on both sides of the tracks, in order to save the peasants from concussion of the brain when the trains passed! You can still read about this in delightful old documents. But despite all this opposition, the railroads made rapid headway. And anthroposophy, too, will make its way in the world, simply because it is a necessity, because nothing in the world can really be understood unless the spiritual foundation of things is recognized and known.

Anthroposophy has not come for the purpose of opposing natural science: it has come just because natural science is there. But science with its elaborate instruments and remarkably clever experiments has discovered a mass of facts which—in the way it presents them—cannot really be understood. Nor will they ever be understood until it is realized that the spiritual world is behind everything and within everything.

Let us take a very ordinary, practical matter: the eating of potatoes. Once upon a time there were no potatoes in Europe; they were introduced into Europe from foreign countries. It is maintained that Sir Francis Drake³⁵ introduced potatoes, but that is not correct; they were introduced from a different source. Yet in Offenburg there is a memorial statue of Drake. During the war we were once obliged to stop at Offenburg, and I was curious to find out why this statue had been erected. I looked in the encyclopedia and there it was: A memorial statue of Drake stands in Offenburg because he was the man who first brought potatoes to Europe.

But now what about potatoes? Suppose a scientist or a doctor were asked to say what effect potatoes have when they are eaten. As you know, potatoes have become a staple. In some places it is very difficult to dissuade the people from feeding almost exclusively on them. What does the modern scientist do when he tests potatoes for their nutritional value? He makes a laboratory investigation to find what substances are contained in the potato. He finds carbohydrates, which consist of carbon, oxygen, and hydrogen in definite proportions; he also discovers that in the human body these substances are finally transformed into a kind of sugar. But he gets no further than that; nor can he do so. For think of this: if some animal is fed on milk, it may thrive. But if the milk is analyzed for its chemical components and if these chemical components are given to the animal instead of the milk, it will waste away for lack of nourishment. Why is that? It is because something is working in the milk in addition to the chemical components. And in the potato, too, there is something more than the mere chemical components: namely, the spiritual element. A spiritual element works everywhere, in all of nature.

If in spiritual science (anthroposophy is, after all, only a name) genuine investigation is made into how the potato nourishes the human being, the potato is found to be something that is not completely digested by the digestive organs, but it passes into the head through the lymph glands, through the blood, in such a way that the head itself must also serve as a digestive organ for the potato. When potatoes are eaten in large quantities, the head becomes a kind of stomach and also digests.

There is a very great difference between eating potatoes and, for instance, good, wholesome bread. When wholesome bread is eaten, the material part of the rye or wheat is digested properly and healthily in the digestive tract. And consequently only what is spiritual in the rye or wheat comes into the head, where it belongs.

This kind of knowledge can never be derived from natural science. When things are genuinely investigated with respect to their spiritual quality, it becomes apparent that in this modern age humanity has been seriously injured by the excessive consumption of potatoes. Spiritual science finds that the eating of potatoes has played a very large part in the general deterioration of health in recent centuries. That is a crude example of how spiritual science can investigate the excellent results of natural science by taking them as the basis for its research.

But there is something else as well. Every substance in the world can be examined to determine its spiritual quality. That is the only way in which real remedies for illnesses can be discovered. So spiritual science provides a very definite foundation for medicine as well.

Spiritual science is only an extension of natural science; it is by no means something that refutes natural science. And besides that, we have in spiritual science something that investigates the spiritual in a scientific way and therefore does not ask people simply to believe things that are said. Matters of faith are thus replaced by scientific inquiry.

It must also be said that in all provinces science acquires a certain amount of knowledge. Humanity cannot, of course, concern itself with scientific details, but every individual ought at least to know something about the essential things in the world.

I'd like to tell you something that will show you how important it is to be able to recognize how the spirit actually works. In the year 1773, a rumor suddenly spread in Paris that a distinguished scholar³⁶ was to give a lecture in a certain learned Society, in which he would prove that a comet was about to collide with the earth and destroy it. In those days it was believed that such a thing could be proven exactly and scientifically. So at that time, in the 18th century, when superstition was still rife, a terrible panic spread through the whole of Paris. If we read the records of what happened in Paris at that time, we find that there were enormous numbers of miscarriages: the women gave birth prematurely out of sheer terror. People who were seriously ill, died; others became ill because of fright. There was terrific agitation throughout Paris because it became known that a learned man would announce in a lecture the coming collision of a comet with the earth and the consequent destruction of the earth. The police—who, as you know, are ever on the alert—forbade the lecture, so the people never discovered what the professor had intended to say. But there was anxiety nevertheless! You may now ask: Was the professor who wanted to give the lecture right or wrong?

Well, the matter is not quite so simple as that. For since Copernicus propounded his new theory of the universe, everything has become a matter of calculation, and the calculations at that time led to the following conclusion: The sun is taken to be the center of the universe; then come Mercury, Venus, Moon, Earth, and Mars, then the planetoids, then Jupiter, then Saturn. And now the comets and their orbits. And now think of it: the earth is circling and men can calculate when it will reach a certain point where the comet will be approaching it. Bang!—according to the calculations-they will collide. And at that time, gentlemen, they would actually have collided—only the comet was so small that it dissolved in the air! Not exactly in the air over Paris, but somewhere else. The calculation was therefore quite correct, but there was no ground for anxiety.

In the year 1832 there was an even stranger story. For then it was calculated that a comet—it was the Biela comet—was about to cross the earth's orbit and would pass quite near to the earth. This comet was not such a midget as the other, and was likely to be more dangerous. But the calculation turned out happily, for it showed that when the comet would be passing the earth it would still be 13,000,000 miles away—and that's at least a tiny bit away, don't you think? So there was no need to fear that the earth would be demolished. But even so, the people were very alarmed at the time, because heavenly bodies are mutually attracted to each other, and it had to be expected that the comet would cause great convulsions in the oceans and seas through the force of gravity, and so on. Nothing very special happened-there was, it is true, a general unrest in nature, but nothing of particular interest. The comet was 13,000,000 miles away—the sun is thirteen times farther away—so no harm was done to the earth at that time.

In 1872, when I was a boy living with my parents at a small railroad station, we were always reading in the papers: “The world is going to be destroyed!”—for the comet was due to appear again. Certain comets always do return, and this one, on its return, would now be nearer to the earth and therefore more dangerous. This remarkable comet had already come in 1845/46 and again in 1852—but it had then split in two! Each half had become more rarefied in consequence of the split. And what was there to be seen in 1872? Something like a gleaming rain of shooting stars, a great number of shooting stars! The comet had indeed come nearer but it had split and was throwing off rarefied matter that came down like shining rain. Everyone could see it, for when such a tremendous array of shooting stars occurs in the night, they can be seen coming down from the sky. And some people who saw this happening believed that the Day of judgment had come. Again there was great alarm. However, the shooting stars dissolved in the atmosphere.

Now think of this: If the comet had remained whole, our earth would have suffered badly in the year 1872. As I said, papers reached our station announcing the imminent destruction of the earth. The astronomers had calculated the time. According to scientific reckoning this was quite correct. And it really would not do to put on record how many people at that time paid large fees to their priests—to be safely absolved from their sins. In 1773 too, in Paris, the father-confessors had made a great deal of money because the people wanted to be absolved from their sins immediately!

There was an astronomer called Littrow³⁷ who made a noteworthy calculation about what would have happened if things had remained as they were in the year 1832, that is, if the comet had not split up as it subsequently did. In the 19th century it was still thirteen million miles away from the earth, but every time it came it came closer. Littrow reckoned quite correctly that in September 1872 there would be the danger of the comet colliding with the earth. If the comet had then reached the point which as a matter of fact it did not actually reach in that year until November 27th, it would not just have been a matter of meteor showers but it would have been a serious matter. Such things do indeed happen. Littrow calculated that in 1933 (we are now in 1924), if the comet had remained as it still was in the 18th century, a collision would be inevitable and the earth would be demolished. The calculation was correct to the breadth of a hair. But the comet had not remained as it was! And so already at that time people could say: The comet has been merciful, for if it were still fiery, in 1933 it would be striking the earth in such a way that all the seas would surge from the equator to the North Pole and the whole earth would perish. Yes, the comet split up and it threw off the substance that had become too heavy for it, in the form of meteor stones that are not harmful.

So you see, we are living at a time when we can say: If that comet had not been merciful, none of us would be sitting here today! That is a fact. What has finally happened is this: The comet no longer appears as a comet, but on those dates when in the ordinary course of events it would have appeared, there are always showers of meteors. Gradually through the centuries it is throwing off its entire substance. Soon it will no longer be visible because it will have given up its substance to the universe and to the earth.

But now I want to show you the other side of this matter. It is obvious that in the process of human evolution man's spiritual faculties are constantly changing. Those who do not believe this simply do not understand the spiritual evolution of mankind. For think of it: All our modern discoveries would have been made long ago if men had possessed the same spiritual faculties that they possess today. In ancient times their spiritual faculties were not less, but they were different. I have explained this to you in the most various ways, also in answer to questions on the subject.

And now to return to the comets. The comet of which I've been speaking is not the only one that was merciful enough to split up and dissolve in cosmic space at the right time. There is a large number of other comets that have done the same. A great deal of superstition has always been connected with the subject of comets. Anthroposophy approaches the matter in an absolutely scientific way.

But now, what will happen if we go on developing in the same direction as we are developing today? Mankind is now so dreadfully clever! Just compare a man of today with all his cleverness, with all that he has learnt in school, with someone living in the 12th or 13th century, when very, very few people could write. Think of this: there is a beautiful poem by Wolfram von Eschenbach,³⁸ who was a nobleman of the 13th century. He composed the poem, but he could not write, so he was obliged to call in a priest to whom he dictated it. And that poem was the “Parzival” from which Wagner composed his opera. So you see, in those days people had different faculties. We need to go no further back than the 12th or 13th century. At that time a nobleman could not write. Wolfram von Eschenbach could read but not write.

These faculties of ours do not come to us ready-made; they are developed. And if we continue our present way of living, when between the ages of seven and fourteen we are crammed with scientific knowledge of every kind – there is, of course, a good side to this as well—we'll gradually all suffer from something that was previously quite unknown and that is now so prevalent. We'll all suffer from what you call “nerves”, from nervous illnesses. This shows you that those wise doctors in the forties of the last century who believed so “stupidly” that people would not be able to live if railroads were built, were—from the knowledge they had—not so stupid after all! For everything they knew at that time convinced them that if a man travels in trains, he will eventually become utterly incapable of work, lose his memory, exhaust his nerves and become shaky and abnormally restless. The science of their day justified them in their conviction. Moreover, what they said was correct, absolutely correct.

But there is one thing they left out of account. People have indeed become more nervous. You yourselves, when you get home from work, are not quite like the people of the thirties and forties of the last century who would simply put on their nightcaps in the evening and be snug and cozy without any trace of “nerves”. The world has certainly changed in this respect. But what was it that those Nuremberg doctors could not know at that time? They could not know that while they were learning all these things from their science, the comet was already in the process of dissolving. And what has the comet done? It gives us the meteors, the fine meteor rain. Instead of colliding with the earth and breaking people's heads it is giving all its substance away, and this substance, every piece of it, is in the earth. Every few years the comet gives something to the earth. And people who want to live by science alone and who will not admit that the earth receives something from the cosmos are every bit as stupid as someone who would say that when a person eats a piece of bread, it is not in him. Obviously, what the comet gives us is in the earth, but science takes no notice of it. Where, then, is it to be found? It goes into the air, is passed from the air into the water, from the water into the roots of the plants, from the roots of the plant into the food on our tables. From there it passes into our bodies. We eat what the comet has been giving us for centuries! This, however, has long been spiritualized. Instead of the comet putting an end to the earth in 1933, its substance has long been in the earth as a means of earthly nourishment, and it is a remedy, a cosmic remedy: it alleviates nervous troubles in human beings.

There, you see, you have a little piece of history. The comets appear out there in the heavens, and after a time they find their way into us out of the earth. By that time their substance has become spiritualized.

Such things play a real part in human life. History can no longer be presented as it is still being presented by those who want to be philistines; account must now be taken of what is going on in the world spiritually. That is possible only when light is shed upon the world through anthroposophy. You may say: Oh, well, life will go on just the same. All that comet business shows that it doesn't matter if we're stupid, and there is no need for us to bother about it! Although people want to be enlightened, in practice they are dreadfully fatalistic, thinking that everything in the world will go on “as it is meant to.” Well, perhaps—but there is also the opportunity either to take up a true science or to ignore it.

You recall, gentlemen, that for years I gave lectures to workers.³⁹ And I often called attention to a splendid lecture given by Lassalle⁴⁰ in 1863 entitled “Science and the Worker”. I don't know whether there is still any widespread knowledge of it, but in the meantime I've grown older and I've witnessed the rise of the labor movement. From my parents' house in the early seventies of the last century I could look out the window and watch the first Social Democrats—they still wore big hats, “democratic hats”—marching out into the woods where they held their meetings. So I've seen all stages in the development of the movement. At that time Lassalle was still greatly venerated; wherever workers' meetings took place, busts of him were displayed. Today these things have been more or less forgotten, for fifty years have elapsed since then. I was ten or eleven years old at the time, but I was already paying attention to what was happening. Lassalle had given this lecture, Science and the Worker, about eight or nine years earlier. In it he had stressed that science is absolutely crucial for the solution of the whole labor problem and that out of science the workers have developed a social outlook that has occurred to no one else. In a certain sense this was an extremely important thing that he said.

But now think what has happened since that time. I ask you: Are you satisfied? Can you be satisfied with the way the labor problem has developed, with the form it has taken? Are there not many widespread complaints about the way the workers are tyrannized by their labor unions and so forth? These things are in the air and the worker is aware of them. But what he does not perceive is where these conditions come from. Where do they come from? The answer is that in very fact the solution of the labor problem cannot be found without science. Formerly, these problems were solved through religion and the like; today they must be dealt with by means of science. But this requires genuinely scientific thinking—which was nowhere to be found because attention was invariably riveted upon matter, and science itself was sheer materialism. Nothing that is contained in our social problems will ever be solved until science becomes spiritual again.

This can happen only when science is prepared to look for the spiritual element in every single thing—whether it be a potato or a comet. For spiritual knowledge alone enables us to investigate the true connections of things. The true connections of social problems, too, can only be discovered through spiritual knowledge. These connections must be fully understood; and when they are, it will be found that the things which have been brought into prominence through Marxism, for example, were extremely well-meant, but they were based upon an erroneous science. I will show you in what respect this was the case. Nothing that is based on an erroneous science can really prosper.

Marx's arguments and calculations are uncommonly astute, uncommonly clever, and cannot be denied, because the principles upon which he bases them are from a science that is purely materialistic. Everything tallies, just as it tallied for the astronomers who calculated that the comet would collide with the earth in 1773, but then actually the comet had dissolved to such an extent that no harm was done to the earth! (This was the earlier, not the later comet.) The conclusions reached by Marx are based upon an equally meticulous but equally incomplete science.

One of his calculations was the following. He said: When a man is working, he uses up inner forces. The forces are given up to his work and in the evening he is fatigued. During the day he has used up a definite quantity of force or energy. Naturally, the worker needs something that enables his forces to be restored. It can be calculated with exactitude how much pay will make it possible for the worker to restore his forces. Yes, but along these lines expounded by Marx, does one really get at the right and proper wage for labor? The question is: Does one get at it in that way? Obviously, up to now no great progress has been made in this direction, but the fact is that it simply cannot be got at in that way—because although the science itself is admirable, it is untrue.

Think of someone who does no work the whole day long, someone who has private wealth. He can go for walks, or he can move from one armchair to another—and from morning till night he's using up his forces just the same. I've noticed at workers' concerts that those who had been working all day were much less fatigued than the well-to-do people who had done nothing at all. The latter kept yawning, while the others were bright and lively.

You see, there is an error in the calculation. The forces used up inwardly in our organism are not the ones we use in our outer work or labor. That is why the calculation cannot be based on scientific foundations. The whole matter must be approached in a different way; it must be based upon the intrinsic dignity of man, upon his rights as a human being, and so forth. The same applies in many other spheres. And the consequence is that science, as it has presented itself up to the present day, is responsible for dreadful confusion of thought, for ignorance in the social field.

Spiritual science will show you what nutritive value there is in potatoes, in cabbage, in salt, and so on. And then you can get at what the human being needs in order to be healthy and to thrive. You can only get at this through spiritual science, only on the basis of knowledge that comes from spiritual science. Then you can proceed to the study of social problems. And then the labor problem will look quite different. It will finally be given a sounder basis, because everything in connection with it will be looked at from a spiritual point of view.

People today simply don't understand how things are connected in this world; they believe everything goes on just as it is. But that is not true. People must understand how things in the world are constantly changing. And the greatest misfortune, one might say, is that in earlier times humanity was superstitious and now it is scientific! For little by little, superstition has crept into science itself. Today we have a natural science that is full of superstitions. People believe that when their stomach is full of potatoes, they have had a nourishing meal. The truth is that the health of their head is impaired, because the head itself then has to become a digestive organ.

Thus all problems should be dealt with in such a way that the spiritual aspect is not ignored as it has been for a long time now. It should be included in every consideration. In the sixties and seventies of the last century, people said: The worker must have science!—and rightly so. But it must be a true science. In those days it was not in existence. Now it is to be found in spiritual science, which has the name, anthroposophy. Anthroposophy refuses to put the cart before the horse as was done formerly. It will put spirit before matter, where it belongs. Then people will discover how things really are. And they will find proper educational methods. There will be a pedagogy that educates children as they really should be educated. Upon that, very much, very much indeed depends. And then human beings will find their right place in society.

In a single hour, naturally, I can give no more than hints; but we have arranged these lectures so that you could indicate by your questions what you want me to talk about. And so perhaps I should speak further on today's subject in the next session. Today I could only lay the foundation. But at least you have been able to glean something as to the real aim of spiritual science.

So we'll meet again next Wednesday.

• 33. Karl von Nagler, 1770–1846, Prussian statesman. Postmaster 1823 – 1846. Initiated our modern mail system.
• 34. See R. Hagen, “Die erste deutsche Eisenbahn,” 1885.
• 35. Sir Francis Drake, 1540–1596. Famous British navigator.
• 36. J.J.L. Lalande, 1732–1807. French astronomer.
• 37. Joseph Johann Littrow, 1781–1840, Über den gefürchteten Kometen des Jahres 1832 and über Kometen überhaupt, Wien, 1832.
• 38. Wolfram von Eschenbach, 1170–1220, “Parzival,” completed in 1210. Richard Wagner, 1813 – 1883, “Parsifal, a sacred dramatic festival” appeared as poem in 1877; the opera was finished in 1882.
• 39. Rudolf Steiner taught in the Arbeiterbildungschule, a workmen's college, Berlin, 1899 – 1904. See The Course of My Life chap. 28, Dornach, 1962. Anthroposophic Press, Hudson.
• 40. Ferdinand Lassalle, 1825–1864. Founder of Socialism in Germany.

Translated by Olin D. Wannamaker, revised

Anyone who speaks today about super-sensible worlds lays himself open at once to the quite understandable criticism that he is violating one of the most important demands of the age. This is the demand that the most important questions of existence be seriously discussed from a scientific point of view only in such a way that science recognizes its own limitations, having clear insight into the fact that it must restrict itself to the physical world of earthly existence and would undoubtedly become a degenerate fantasy if it were to go beyond these limits. Now, precisely the type of spiritual scientific perception about which I spoke at the last Vienna Congress of the Anthroposophical Movement (and shall speak again today), lays claim not only to being free from hostility toward scientific thinking and the scientific sense of responsibility of our times, but also to working in complete harmony with the most conscientious scientific demands of those very persons who stand on the ground of the most rigorous natural science. It is possible, however, to speak from various points of view regarding the scientific demands of the times that are imposed on us by the theoretical and practical results in the evolution of humanity, which have emerged in such a splendid way in the course of the last three or four centuries, but especially during the nineteenth century. Therefore, I shall speak today about super-sensible knowledge in so far as it tends to fulfill precisely this demand, and I wish to speak in another lecture about the super-sensible knowledge of the human being as a demand of the human heart, of human feeling, during the present age.

We can observe the magnificent contribution which scientific research has brought us even up to the most recent time—the magnificent contribution in the findings about relationships throughout the external world. But it is possible to speak in a different sense regarding the achievements which have come about precisely in connection with this current of human evolution. For instance, we may call attention to the fact that, through the conscientious, earnest observation of the laws and facts of the external world of the senses, as is supplied by natural science, very special human capacities have been developed, and that just such observation and experimentation have thrown a light also upon human capacities themselves. But I should like to say that many persons holding positions deserving the greatest respect in the sphere of scientific research are willing to give very little attention to this light which has been reflected upon man himself through his own researches.

If we only give a little thought to what this light has illuminated, we see that human thinking, through the very fact that it has been able to investigate both narrow and vast relationships—the microscopic and the telescopic—has gained immeasurably in itself: has gained in the capacity of discrimination, has gained in power of penetration, to associate the things in the world so that their secrets are unveiled, and to determine the laws underlying cosmic relationships, and so forth. We see, as this thinking develops, that a standard is set for this thinking, and it is set precisely for the most earnest of those who take up this research: the demand that this thinking must develop as selflessly as possible in the observation of external nature and in experimentation in the laboratory, in the clinic, etc. And the human being has achieved tremendous power in this respect. He has succeeded in setting up more and more rules whose character prevents anything of the nature of inner wishes of the heart, of opinions, perhaps even of fantasies regarding one's own being such as arise in the course of thinking, from being carried over into what he is to establish by means of the microscope and the telescope, the measuring rule and the scales, regarding the relationships of life and existence.

Under these influences a type of thinking has gradually developed about which one must say that it has worked out its passive role with a certain inner diligence. Thinking in connection with observation, with experiment, has nowadays become completely abstract—so abstract that it does not trust itself to conjure anything of the nature of knowledge or of truth from its own inner being.

It is this gradually developed characteristic of thinking which demands before everything else—and above all it seems—the rejection of all that the human being is in himself by reason of his inner nature. For what he himself is must be set forth in activity; this can really never exist wholly apart from the impulse of his will. Thus we have arrived at the point—and we have rightly reached this point in the field of external research—of actually rejecting the activity of thinking, although we became aware in this activity of what we ourselves mean as human beings in the universe, in the totality of cosmic relationships. In a certain sense, the human being has eliminated himself in connection with his research; he prohibits his own inner activity. We shall see immediately that what is rightly prohibited in connection with this external research must be especially cultivated in relationship to man's own self if he wishes to gain enlightenment about the spiritual, about the super-sensible element of his own being.

But a second element in the nature of man has been obliged to manifest its particular side in modern research, a side which is alien to humanity even though friendly to the world: that is, the human life of sentiment, the human life of feeling. In modern research, human feeling is not permitted to participate; the human being must remain cold and matter-of-fact. Yet one might ask whether it were possible to acquire within this human feeling forces useful in gaining knowledge of the world. One can say, on the one hand, that inner human caprice plays a role in feelings, in human subjectivity, and that feeling is the source of fantasy. On the other hand, one can reply that human feeling can certainly play no distinct role as it exists chiefly in everyday and in scientific life. Yet, if we recall—as science itself must describe it to us—that the human senses have not always, in the course of human evolution, been such as they are today, but have developed from a relatively imperfect stage up to their present state, if we recall that they certainly did not express themselves in earlier periods as objectively about things as they do today, an inkling may then dawn in us that there may exist, even within the life of subjective feeling, something that might evolve just as did the human senses themselves, and which might be led from an experience of man's own being over to a comprehension of cosmic relationships in a higher sense. Precisely as we observe the withdrawal of human feeling in connection with contemporary research must the question be raised: could not some higher sense unfold within feeling itself, if feeling were particularly developed?

But we find eminently clear in a third element in the being of man how we are impelled from an altogether praiseworthy scientific view to something different: this is the will aspect of the life of the soul. Whoever is at home in scientific thinking knows how impossible it is for such thinking to grasp the relationships of the world other than through causal necessity. We link in the most rigid manner phenomena existing side by side in space; we link in the strictest sense phenomena occurring one after another in time. That is, we relate cause and effect according to their inflexible laws. Whoever speaks, not as a dilettante, but as one thoroughly at home in science, knows what a tremendous power is exerted by the mere consideration of the realms of scientific fact in this manner. He knows how he is captivated by this idea of a universal causality and how he cannot do otherwise than to subject everything that he confronts in his thinking to this idea of causality.

But there is human will, this human will which says to us in every moment of our waking life of day: “What you undertake in a certain sense by reason of yourself, by reason of your will, is not causally determined in the same sense that applies to any sort of external phenomena of nature.” For this reason, even a person who simply feels in a natural way about himself, who looks into himself in observation free from preconception, can scarcely do otherwise than also to ascribe to himself, on the basis of immediate experience, freedom of will. But when he turns his glance to scientific thinking, he cannot admit this freedom of will. This is one of the conflicts into which we are brought by the condition of the present age. In the course of our lectures we shall learn much more about the conflicts. But for one who is able to feel this conflict in its full intensity, who can feel it through and through—because he must be honest on the one side concerning scientific research, and on the other side concerning his self-observation—the conflict is something utterly confounding, so confounding that it may drive him to doubt whether there is anywhere in life a firm basis from which one may search for truth.

We must deal with such conflicts from the right human perspective. We must be able to say to ourselves that research drives us to the point where we are actually unable to admit what we are everyday aware of: that something else must somehow exist which offers another approach to the world than that which is offered to us in irrefutable manner in the external order of nature. Through the very fact that we are so forcibly driven into such conflicts by the order of nature itself, it becomes for human beings of the present time a necessity to admit the impossibility of speaking about the super-sensible worlds as they have been spoken about until a relatively recent time. We need go back only to the first half of the nineteenth century to discover individuals who, by reason of a consciousness in harmony with the period, were thoroughly serious in their scientific work, and yet who called attention to the super-sensible aspect of human life, to that aspect which opens up to the human being a view of the divine, of his own immortality; and in this connection they always called attention to what we may at present designate as the “night aspects” of human life. Men deserving of the very highest regard have called attention to that wonderful but very problematical world into which the human being is transferred every night: to the dream world. They have called attention to many mysterious relationships which exist between this chaotic picture-world of dreams and the world of actuality. They have called attention to the fact that the inner nature of the human organization, especially in illness, reflects itself in the fantastic pictures of dreams, and how healthy human life enters into the chaotic experiences of dreams in the forms of signs and symbols. They pointed out that much which cannot be surveyed by the human being with his waking senses fords its place in the half-awake state of the soul, and out of such matters conclusions were drawn. These matters border upon the subject that many people still study today, the “subconscious” states of the life of the human soul, which manifest themselves in a similar way.

But everything which appears before the human being in this form, which could still give a certain satisfaction to an earlier humanity, is no longer valid for us. It is no longer valid for us because our way of looking into external nature has become something different. Here we have to look back to the times when there existed still only a mystically colored astrology. Man then looked into the world of the senses in such a way that his perception was far removed from the exactness which we demand of science today. Because he did not demand of himself in his sense life that complete clarity which we possess today, he could discover in a mystical, half-conscious state something from which he could draw inferences. This we cannot do today. Just as little as we are able to derive today, from what natural science gives us directly, anything other than questions regarding the true nature of man, just so little can we afford to remain at a standstill at the point reached by natural science and expect to satisfy our super-sensible needs in a manner similar to that of earlier times.

That form of super-sensible knowledge of which I shall speak here has an insight into this demand of our times. It observes what has become of thinking, feeling, and willing in man precisely through natural science, and it asks, on the other side, whether it may be possible by reason of the very achievements of contemporary humanity in thinking, feeling, and willing to penetrate further into the super-sensible realm with the same clarity which holds sway in the scientific realm. This cannot be achieved by means of inferential reasoning, by means of logic; for natural science justly points out its limitations with reference to its own nature. But something else can occur: the inner human capacities may evolve further, beyond the point at which they stand when we are in the realm of ordinary scientific research, so that we now apply to the development of our own spiritual capacities the same exactness which we are accustomed to applying to research in the laboratory and the clinic. I shall discuss this first in connection with thinking itself.

Thinking, which has become more and more conscious of its passive role in connection with external research, and is not willing to disavow this, is capable of energizing itself inwardly to activity. It may energize itself in such a way that, although not exact in the sense in which we apply this term to measure and weight in external research, it is exact in relationship to its own development in the sense in which the external scientist, the mathematician, for example, is accustomed to follow with full consciousness every step in his research. But this occurs when that mode of super-sensible cognition of which I am here speaking replaces the ancient vague meditation, the ancient indistinct immersion of oneself in thinking, with a truly exact development of this thinking. It is possible here to indicate only the general principles of what I have said regarding such an exact development of thinking in my books, Occult Science, an Outline, Knowledge of the Higher Words and Its Attainment, and other books. The human being should really compel himself, for the length of time which is necessary for him—and this is determined by the varying innate capacities of people—to exchange the role of passive surrender to the external world, which he otherwise rightly assumes in his thinking, for that different role: that of introducing into this thinking his whole inner activity of soul. This he should do by taking into his mind day by day, even though at times only for a brief period, some particular thought—the content of which is not the important matter—and, while withdrawing his inner nature from the external world, directing all the powers of his soul in inner concentration upon this thought. By means of this process something comes about in the development of those capacities of soul that may be compared with the results which follow when any particular muscles of the human body—for instance, the muscles of the arms—are to be developed. The muscles are made stronger, more powerful through use, through exercise. Thus, likewise, do the capacities of the soul become inwardly stronger, more powerful by being directed upon a definite thought. This exercise must be arranged so that we proceed in a really exact way, so that we survey every step taken in our thinking just as a mathematician surveys his operations when he undertakes to solve a geometrical or arithmetical problem. This can be done in the greatest variety of ways. When I say that something should be selected for this content of concentration that one fords in any sort of book—even some worthless old volume that we know quite certainly we have never previously seen—this may seem trivial. The important point is not the content of truth in the thing, but the fact that we survey such a thought content completely. This cannot be done if we take a thought content out of our own memory; for so much is associated with such a thought in the most indeterminate way, so much plays a role in the subconscious or the unconscious, and it is not possible to be exact if one concentrates upon such a thing. What one fixes, therefore, in the very center of one's consciousness is something entirely new, something that one confronts only with respect to its actual content, which is not associated with any experience of the soul. What matters is the concentration of the forces of the soul and the strengthening which results from this. Likewise, if one goes to a person who has made some progress in this field and requests him to provide one with such a thought content, it is good not to entertain a prejudice against this. The content is in that case entirely new to the person concerned, and he can survey it. Many persons fear that they may become dependent in this way upon someone else who provides them with such a content. But this is not the case; in reality, they become less dependent than if they take such a thought content out of their own memories and experiences, in which case it is bound up with all sorts of subconscious experiences. Moreover, it is good for a person who has had some practice in scientific work to use the findings of scientific research as material for concentration; these prove to be, indeed, the most fruitful of all for this purpose.

If this is continued for a relatively long time, even for years, perhaps—and this must be accompanied by patience and endurance, as it requires a few weeks or months in some cases before success is achieved, and in some cases years—it is possible to arrive at a point where this method for the inner molding of one's thoughts can be applied as exactly as the physicist or the chemist applies the methods of measuring and weighing for the purpose of discovering the secrets of nature. What one has then learned is applied to the further development of one's own thinking. At a certain moment, then, the person has a significant inner experience: he feels himself to be involved not only in picture-thinking, which depicts the external events and facts and which is true to reality in inverse proportion to the force it possesses in itself, in proportion as it is a mere picture; but one arrives now at the point of adding to this kind of thinking the inner experience of a thinking in which one lives, a thinking filled with inner power. This is a significant experience. Thinking thus becomes, as it were, something which one begins to experience just as one experiences the power of one's own muscles when one grasps an object or strikes against something. A reality such as one experiences otherwise only in connection with the process of breathing or the activity of a muscle—this inner activity now enters into thinking. And since one has investigated precisely every step upon this way, so one experiences oneself in full clarity and presence of mind in this strengthened, active thinking. If the objection is raised, let us say, that knowledge can result only from observation and logic, this is no real objection; for what we now experience is experienced with complete inner clarity, and yet in such a way that this thinking becomes at the same time a kind of “touching with the soul.” In the process of forming a thought, it is as if we were extending a feeler—not, in this case, as the snail extends a feeler into the physical world, but as if a feeler were extended into a spiritual world, which is as yet present only for our feelings if we have developed to this stage, but which we are justified in expecting. For one has the feeling: “Your thinking has been transformed into a spiritual touching; if this can become more and more the case, you may expect that this thinking will come into contact with what constitutes a spiritual reality, just as your finger here in the physical world comes into contact with what is physically real.”

Only when one has lived for a time in this inwardly strengthened thinking does complete self-knowledge become possible. For we know then that the soul element has become, by means of this concentration, an experiential reality.

It is possible then for the person concerned to go forward in his exercises and to arrive at the point where he can, in turn, eliminate this soul content, put it away; he can, in a certain sense, render his consciousness void of what he himself has brought into this consciousness, this thought content upon which he has concentrated, and which has enabled him to possess a real thinking constituting a sense of touch for the soul. It is rather easy in ordinary life to acquire an empty consciousness; we need only fall asleep. But it requires an intense application of force, after we have become accustomed to concentrating upon a definite thought content, to put away such a content of thought in connection with this very strengthened thinking, thinking which has become a reality. Yet we succeed in putting aside this content of thinking in exactly the same way in which we acquired at first the powerful force needed for concentration. When we have succeeded in this, something appears before the soul which has been possible previously only in the form of pictures of episodes in one's memory: the whole inner life of the person appears in a new way before the eyes of his soul, as he has passed through this life in his earthly existence since birth, or since the earliest point of time to which one's memory can return, at which point one entered consciously into this earthly existence. Ordinarily, the only thing we know in regard to this earthly existence is that which we can call up in memory; we have pictures of our experiences. But what is now experienced by means of this strengthened thinking is not of the same kind. It appears as if in a tremendous tableau so that we do not recollect merely in a dim picture what we passed through ten years ago, for instance, but we have the inner experience that in spirit we are retracing the course of time. If someone carries out such an exercise in his fiftieth year, let us say, and arrives at the result indicated, what then happens is that time permits him to go back as if along a “time-path” all the way, for instance, to the experiences of his thirty-fifth year. We travel back through time. We do not have only a dim memory of what we passed through fifteen years earlier, but we feel ourselves to be in the midst of this in its living reality, as if in an experience of the present moment. We travel through time; space loses its significance, and time affords us a mighty tableau of memory. This becomes a precise picture of man's life, such as appears, even according to scientific thinkers, when anyone is exposed to great terror, a severe shock—at the moment of drowning, for instance—when for some moments he is confronted by something of his entire earthly life in pictures appearing before his soul—to which he looks back later with a certain shuddering fascination. In other words, what appears before the soul in such cases as through a natural convulsion now actually appears before the soul at the moment indicated, when the entire earthly life confronts one as in a mighty tableau of the spirit, only in a time order. Only now does one know oneself; only now does one possess real self-observation.

It is quite possible to differentiate this picture of man's inner being from that which constitutes a mere “memory” picture. It is clear in the memory picture that we have something in which persons, natural occurrences, or works of art come upon us as if from without; in this memory picture what we have is the manner in which the world comes into contact with us. In the super-sensible memory tableau which appears before a person, what confronts him is, rather, that which has proceeded from himself. If, for instance, at a certain definite point of time in his life he began a friendship with a beloved personality, the mere memory picture shows how this person came to him at a certain point of time, spoke to him, what he owes to the person, and so on. But in this life tableau what confronts him is the manner in which he himself longed for this person, and how he ultimately took every step in such a way that he was inevitably led to that being whom he recognized as being in harmony with himself.

That which has taken place through the unfolding of the forces of the soul comes to meet one with exact clarity in this life tableau. Many people do not like this precise clarity, because it brings them to enlightenment regarding much that they would prefer to see in a different light from the light of truth. But one must endure the fact that one is able to look upon one's own inner being in utter freedom from preconceptions, even if this being of oneself meets the searching eye with reproach. This state of cognition I have called imaginative knowledge, or Imagination.

But one can progress beyond this stage. In that which we come to know through this memory tableau, we are confronted by those forces which have really formed us as human beings. One knows now: “Within you those forces evolve which mold the substances of your physical body. Within you, especially during childhood, those forces have evolved which, approximately up to the seventh year, have plastically modeled the nerve masses of the brain, which did not yet exist in well-ordered form after your birth.” We then cease at last to ascribe what works formatively upon the human being to those forces which inhere in material substances. We cease to do this when we have this memory tableau before us, when we see how into all the forces of nutrition and of breathing and into the whole circulation of the blood stream the contents of this memory tableau—which are forces in themselves, forces without which no single wave of the blood circulates and no single process of breathing occurs. We now learn to understand that man himself in his inner being consists of spirit and soul.

What now dawns upon one can best be described by a comparison. Imagine that you have walked for a certain distance over ground which has been softened by rain, and that you have noticed all the way tracks or ruts made by human feet or wagon wheels. Now suppose that a being came from the moon and saw this condition of the ground, but saw no human being. He would probably conclude that there must be all sorts of forces underneath the earth which have thrust up these traces and given this form to the surface of the ground. Such a being might seek within the earth for the forces which have produced the tracks. But one who sees through the matter knows that the condition was not caused by the earth but by human feet or wagon wheels.

Now, anyone who possesses a view of things such as I have just described does not at all look, for this reason, with less reverence, for example, upon the convolutions of the human brain. Yet, just as he knows that those tracks on the surface of the earth do not derive from forces within the earth, he now knows that these convolutions of the brain do not derive from forces within the substance of the brain, but that the spiritual-psychic entity of man is there, which he himself has now beheld, and that it works in such a way that our brain has these convolutions. This is the essential thing—to be driven to this view, so that we arrive at a conception of our own spirit-soul nature, so that the eye of the soul is really directed to the soul-spiritual element and to its manifestations in the external life.

But it is possible to progress still further. After we strengthen our inner being through concentrating upon a definite thought content; and after we then empty our consciousness so that, instead of the images we ourselves have formed, the content of our life appears before us; now we can put this memory tableau out of our consciousness, just as we previously eliminated a single concept, so that our consciousness is empty of this. We can now learn to apply this powerful force to efface from our consciousness that which we have come to know through a heightened self-observation as a spirit-soul being. In doing this, efface nothing less than the inner being of our own soul life. We learned first in concentration to efface what is external, and we then learned to direct the gaze of our soul to our own spirit-soul entity, and this completely occupied the whole tableau of memory. If we now succeed in effacing this memory tableau itself, there comes about what I wish to designate as the truly empty consciousness. We have previously lived in the memory tableau or in what we ourselves have set up before our minds, but now something entirely different appears. That which lived within us we have now suppressed, and we confront the world with an empty consciousness. This signifies something extraordinary in the experience of the soul. Fundamentally speaking, I can describe at first only by means of a comparison what now appears to the soul, when the content of our own soul is effaced by means of the powerful inner force we apply. We need only think of the fact that, when the impressions of the external senses gradually die away, when there is a cessation of seeing, hearing, perhaps even of a distinct sense of touch, we sink into a state closely resembling the state of sleep. Now, however, when we efface the content of our own souls, we come to an empty state of consciousness, although this is not a state of sleep. We reach what I might call the state of being merely awake—that is, of being awake with an empty consciousness.

We may, perhaps, conceive this empty consciousness in the following way: imagine a modern city with all its noise and din. We may withdraw from the city, and everything becomes more and more quiet around us; but we finally arrive, perhaps deep within a forest. Here we find the absolute opposite of the noises of the city. We live in complete inner stillness, in hushed peace. If, now, I undertake to describe what follows, I must resort to a trivial comparison. We must raise the question whether this peace, this stillness, can be changed still further into something else. We may designate this stillness as the zero point in our perception of the external world. If we possess a certain amount of property and we subtract from this property, it is diminished; as we take away still more, it is further diminished; and we finally arrive at zero and have nothing left. Can we then proceed still further? It may, perhaps, be undesirable to most persons, but the fact is that many do this: they decrease their possessions further by incurring debt. One then has less than zero, and one can still diminish what one has. In precisely the same way, we may at least imagine that the stillness, which is like the zero point of being awake, may be pushed beyond this zero into a sort of negative state. A super-stillness, a super-peace may augment the quietness. This is what is experienced by one who blots out his own soul content: he enters into a state of quietness of soul which lies below the zero point. An inner stillness of soul in the most intensified degree comes about during the state of wakefulness.

This cannot be attained without being accompanied by something else. This can be attained only when we feel that a certain state, linked with the picture images of our own self, passes over into another state. One who senses, who contemplates the first stage of the super-sensible within himself, is in a certain state of well-being, that well-being and inner blissfulness to which the various religious creeds refer when they call attention to the super-sensible and at the same time remind the human being that the super-sensible brings to him the experience of a certain blissfulness in his inner being. Indeed, up to the point where one excluded one's own inner self, there was a certain sense of well-being, an intensified feeling of blissfulness. At that moment, however, when the stillness of soul comes about, this inner well-being is replaced completely by inner pain, inner deprivation, such as we have never known before—the sense that one is separated from all to which one is united in the earthly life, far removed not only from the feeling of one's own body but from the feeling of one's own experiences since birth. And this means a deprivation which increases to a frightful pain of soul. Many shrink back from this stage; they cannot find the courage to make the crossing from a certain lower clairvoyance, after eliminating their own content of soul, to the state of consciousness where resides that inner stillness. But if we pass into this stage in full consciousness there begins to enter, in place of Imagination, that which I have called, in the books previously mentioned, Inspiration—I trust you will not take offense at these terms—the experience of a real spiritual world. After one has previously eliminated the world of the senses and established an empty consciousness, accompanied by inexpressible pain of soul, then the outer spiritual world comes to meet us. In the state of Inspiration we become aware of the fact that the human being is surrounded by a spiritual world just as the sense world exists for his outer senses.

And the first thing, in turn, that we behold in this spiritual world is our own pre-earthly existence. Just as we are otherwise conscious of earthly experiences by means of our ordinary memory, so does a cosmic memory now dawn for us: we look back into pre-earthly experiences, beholding what we were as spirit-soul beings in a purely spiritual world before we descended through birth to this earthly existence, when as spiritual beings we participated in the molding of our own bodies. So do we look back upon the spiritual, the eternal, in the nature of man, to that which reveals itself to us as the pre-earthly existence, which we now know is not dependent upon the birth and death of the physical body, for it is that which existed before birth and before conception which made a human being out of this physical body derived from matter and heredity. Now for the first time one reaches a true concept also of physical heredity, since one sees what super-sensible forces play into this—forces which we acquire out of a purely spiritual world, with which we now feel united just as we feel united with the physical world in the earthly life. Moreover, we now become aware that, in spite of the great advances registered in the evolution of humanity, much has been lost which belonged inherently to more ancient instinctive conceptions that we can no longer make use of today. The instinctive super-sensible vision of humanity of earlier ages was confronted by this pre-earthly life as well as human immortality, regarding which we shall speak a little later. For eternity was conceived in ancient times in such a way that one grasped both its aspects. We speak nowadays of the immortality of the human soul—indeed, our language itself possesses only this word—but people once spoke, and the more ancient languages continue to show such words, of unborn-ness (Ungeborenheit) as the other aspect of the eternity of the human soul. Now, however, the times have somewhat changed. People are interested in the question of what becomes of the human soul after death, because this is something still to come; but as to the other question, what existed before birth, before conception, there is less interest because that has “passed,” and yet we are here. But a true knowledge of human immortality can arise only when we consider eternity in both its aspects: that of immortality and that of unborn-ness.

But, for the very purpose of maintaining a connection with the latter, and especially in an exact clairvoyance, still a third thing is necessary. We sense ourselves truly as human beings when we no longer permit our feelings to be completely absorbed within the earthly life. For that which we now come to know as our pre-earthly life penetrates into us in pictures and is added to what we previously sensed as our humanity, making us for the first time completely human. Our feelings are then, as it were, shot through with inner light, and we know that we have now developed our feeling into a sense organ for the spiritual. But we must go further and must be able to make our will element into an organ of knowledge for the spiritual.

For this purpose, something must begin to play a role in human knowledge which, very rightly, is not otherwise considered as a means of knowledge by those who desire to be taken seriously in the realm of cognition. We first become aware that this is a means of knowledge when we enter the super-sensible realms. This is the force of love. Only, we must begin to develop this force of love in a higher sense than that in which nature has bestowed love upon us, with all its significance for the life of nature and of man. It may seem paradoxical what I must describe as the first steps in the unfolding of a higher love in the life of man.

When you try, with full discretion for each step, to perceive the world in a certain other consciousness than one usually feels, then you come to the higher love. Suppose you undertake in the evening, before you go to sleep, to bring your day's life into your consciousness so that you begin with the last occurrence of the evening, visualizing it as precisely as possible, then visualizing in the same way the next preceding, then the third from the last, thus moving backward to the morning in this survey of the life of the day; this is a process in which much more importance attaches to the inner energy expended than to the question whether one visualizes each individual occurrence more or less precisely. What is important is this reversal of the order of visualization. Ordinarily we view events in such a way that we first consider the earlier and then the subsequent in a consecutive chain. Through such an exercise as I have just described to you, we reverse the whole life; we think and feel in a direction opposite to the course of the day. We can practice this on the experiences of our day, as I have suggested, and this requires only a few minutes. But we can do this also in a different way. Undertake to visualize the course of a drama in such a way that you begin with the fifth act and picture it advancing forwards through the fourth, third, toward the beginning. Or we may place before ourselves a melody in the reverse succession of tones. If we pass through more and more such inner experiences of the soul in this way, we shall discover that the inner experience is freed from the external course of nature, and that we actually become more and more self-directing. But, even though we become in this way more and more individualized and achieve an ever-increasing power of self-direction, we learn also to give attention to the external life in more complete consciousness. For only now do we become aware that, the more powerfully we develop through practice this fully conscious absorption in another being, the higher becomes the degree of our selflessness, and the greater must our love become in compensation. In this way we feel how this experience of not living in oneself but living in another being, this passing over from one's own being to another, becomes more and more powerful. We then reach the stage where, to Imagination and Inspiration, which we have already developed, we can now add the true intuitive ascending into another being: we arrive at Intuition, so that we no longer experience only ourselves, but also learn—in complete individualism yet also in complete selflessness—to experience the other being.

Here love becomes something which gradually makes it possible for us to look back even further than into the pre-earthly spiritual life. As we learn in our present life to look back upon contemporary events, we learn through such an elevation of love to look back upon former earth lives, and to recognize the entire life of a human being as a succession of earthly lives. The fact that these lives once had a beginning and must likewise have an end will be touched upon in another lecture. But we learn to know the human life as a succession of lives on earth, between which there always intervene purely spiritual lives, coming between a death and the next birth. For this elevated form of love, lifted to the spiritual sphere and transformed into a force of knowledge, teaches us also the true significance of death. When we have advanced so far, as I have explained in connection with Imagination and Inspiration, as to render these intensified inner forces capable of spiritual love, we actually learn in immediate exact clairvoyance to know that inner experience which we describe by saying that one experiences oneself spiritually, without a body, outside the body. This passing outside the body becomes in this way, if I may thus express it, actually a matter of objective experience for the soul. If one has experienced this spiritual existence one time outside of the body, clairvoyantly perceived, I should like to say, then one knows the significance of the event of laying aside the physical body in death, of passing through the portal of death to a new, spiritual life. We thus learn, at the third stage of exact clairvoyance, the significance of death, and thus also the significance of immortality, for man.

I have wished to make it transparently clear through the manner of my explanation that the mode of super-sensible cognition about which I am speaking seeks to bring into the very cognitional capacities of the human being something which works effectually, step by step, as it is thus introduced. The natural scientist applies this exactness to the external experiment, to the external observation; he wishes to see the objects in such juxtaposition that they reveal their secrets with exactitude in the process of measuring, enumerating, weighing. The spiritual scientist, about whom I am here speaking, employs this exactness to the evolution of the forces of his own soul. That which he uncovers in himself, through which the spiritual world and human immortality step before his soul, is made in a precise manner, to use an expression of Goethe's. With every step thus taken by the spiritual scientist, in order that the spiritual world may at last lie unfolded before the eyes of the soul, he feels obligated to be as conscientious in regard to his perception as a mathematician must be with every step he takes. For just as the mathematician must see clearly into everything that he writes on the paper, so must the spiritual scientist see with absolute precision into everything that he makes out of his powers of cognition. He then knows that he has formed an “eye of the soul” out of the soul itself through the same inner necessity with which nature has formed the corporeal eye out of bodily substance. And he knows that he can speak of spiritual worlds with the same justification with which he speaks of a physical-sensible world in relationship to the physical eye. In this sense the spiritual research with which we are here concerned satisfies the demands of our age imposed upon us by the magnificent achievements of natural science—which spiritual science in no way opposes but, rather, seeks to supplement.

I am well aware that everyone who undertakes to represent anything before the world, no matter what his motive may be, attributes a certain importance to himself by describing this as a “demand of the times.” I have no such purpose; on the contrary, I should like to show that the demands of the times already exist, and the very endeavor of spiritual science at every step it takes is to satisfy these demands of the times. We may say, then, that the spiritual scientist whom it is our purpose to discuss here does not propose to be a person who views nature like a dilettante or amateur. On the contrary, he proposes to advance in true harmony with natural science and with the same genuine conscientiousness. He desires truly exact clairvoyance for the description of a spiritual world. But it is clear to him at the same time that, when we undertake to investigate a human corpse in a laboratory for the purpose of explaining the life which has disappeared from it, or when we look out into cosmic space with a telescope, we then develop capacities which tend to adapt themselves at first solely to the microscope or telescope, but which possess an inner life and which misrepresent themselves in their form. If we dissect a human corpse, we know that it was not nature that directly made the human being into this bodily form, but that the human soul, which has now withdrawn from it, made it. We interpret the human soul from what we have here as its physical product, and one would be irrational to assume that this molding of the human physical forces and forms had not arisen out of what preceded the present state of this human being. But from all that we hold back, as we meanwhile investigate dead nature with the forces from which one rightly withdraws one's inner activity, from the very act of holding back is created the ability to develop further the human soul forces. Just as the seed of the plant lies out of sight under the earth when we have laid it in the soil, and yet will become a plant, so do we plant a seed in the soul in the very action of conscientious scientific research. He who is a serious scientist in this sense has within himself the germ of imaginative, inspired, and intuitive knowledge. He needs only to develop the germ. He will then know that, just as natural science is a demand of the times, so likewise is super-sensible research. What I mean to say is that everyone who speaks in the spirit of natural science speaks also in the spirit of super-sensible research, only without knowing this. And that which constitutes an unconscious longing in the innermost depths of many persons today—as will be manifest in another public lecture—is the impulse of super-sensible research to unfold out of its germ.

To those very persons, therefore, who oppose this spiritual research from a supposedly scientific standpoint, one would like to say, not with any bad intention, that this brings to mind an utterance in Goethe's Faust all too well known, but which would be applied in a different sense:

The little man would not sense the Devil
Even if he held him by the throat.

I do not care to go into that now. But what lies in this saying confronts us with a certain twist in that demand of the times: that those who speak rightly today about nature are really giving expression, though unconsciously, to the spirit. One would like to say that there are many who do not wish to notice the “spirit” when it speaks, although they are constantly giving expression to the spirit in their own words!

The seed of super-sensible perception is really far more widespread today than is supposed, but it must be developed. The fact that it must be developed is really a lesson we may learn from the seriousness of the times in reference to external experiences. As I have already said, I should like to go into the details another time: but we may still add in conclusion that the elements of a fearful catastrophe really speak to the whole of humanity today through various indications in the outside world, and that it is possible to realize that tasks at which humanity in the immediate future will have to work with the greatest intensity will struggle to birth out of this great seriousness of the times. This external seriousness with which the world confronts us today, especially the world of humanity, indicates the necessity of an inner seriousness. And it is about this inner seriousness in the guidance of the human heart and mind toward man's own spiritual powers, which constitute the powers of his essential being, that I have wished to speak to you today. For, if it is true that man must apply his most powerful external forces in meeting the serious events awaiting him over the whole world, he will need likewise a powerful inner courage. But such forces and such courage can come into existence only if the human being is able to feel and also to will himself in full consciousness in his innermost being, not merely theoretically conceiving himself but practically knowing himself. This is possible for him only when he comes to know that this being of his emerges from the source from which it truly comes, from the source of the spirit; only when in ever-increasing measure, not only theoretically but practically, he learns to know in actual experience that man is spirit; and can find his true satisfaction only in the spirit: that his highest powers and his highest courage can come to him only out of the spirit, out of the super-sensible.