The Rudolf Steiner Archive

This article was written during 1919. In the Collected edition of Rudolf Steiner's works, the volume containing the German texts is entitled, Der Goetheanumgedanke Inmitten der Kulturkrisis der Gegenwart. Gesammelte Aufsaetze aus der Wochenschrift “Das Goetheanum” 1921 – 1925 (Vol. 36 in the Bibliographic Survey, 1961). Published in Anthroposophy: A Quarterly Review of Spiritual Scienceby kind permission of Frau Marie Steiner, from Das Goetheanum, July 23rd, 1922.

People talk of the ‘spirit of a language,’ but it could hardly be said that there are many at the present day for whom the conception, so expressed, presents any very clear picture to the mind's eye. What they mean when they use these words, are general characteristic peculiarities in the formation of words and sounds, in the turn of sentences and the handling of imagery. Whatever ‘spirituality’ there may be exists in their minds alone and never goes beyond abstractions. As for anything worthy of the name of ‘Spirit’—they never get so far as that.

There are, however, two ways we can take to find the ‘Spirit’ of language to-day in all its living force. One of these ways is discovered by the soul which pushes on beyond mere conceptual thinking to that seeing which reveals the life and being of things. This kind of sight is an inner experience, an inward realisation of a spiritual actuality which must not be confounded with any vague, mystic sensation of a general ‘something.’ It is an actuality that contains nothing sensibly perceptible, but is no less ‘substantial’ in the spiritual sense.

In this kind of sight the seer travels far away from anything that can be expressed in language. What he sees cannot directly find its way to the lips. He clutches at words and has at once the feeling that the substance of his vision is changed. And—if he is bent on telling others about it—now begins his battle with the language. There is no possible form of speech that he does not press into his service to make a picture of what he has seen. Chimes and reminiscences of sounds, turns and twists of phrasing—he leaves nothing unexplored within the realms of the sayable. It is a hard inner struggle. And finally he has to say to himself: ‘This language is obstinate and has a will of its own. It says every conceivable thing in its own fashion. You will have to “give in” to it and humour it if you want it to accept your observations and receive them into itself.’ When we come to mould in speech what we have seen in spirit, then we find that we are dealing, not with a mass of soft wax that allows itself to be modeled into any form, but that we have to do with a living Spirit—the Spirit of language, the ‘Speech-Spirit.’

And, if it is honestly fought out in this manner, the battle may end excellently, indeed quite delightfully. For there comes a moment when we feel: ‘The Spirit of the language has laid hold of what I saw, has taken it up!’ The very words and turns of phrase in themselves take on something of a spiritual nature. They cease to be mere signs of what they usually ‘signify’ and slip into the very form of the thing seen. And then begins something like living intercourse with the Spirit of the language. The language takes on a personal quality. We feel that we can, as it were, discuss things with it, come to terms with it, as we should with another human being.

That is one way by which we may begin to feel the Spirit of language as a living being. We come to the second way, as a rule, by going through the first. But this is not necessary and we can quite well take it independently. We are well on this second path when we realise the original, concrete significance of words and idioms that have come in the present day to have a merely abstract character, and feel them in all their first, fresh, visual meaning. We speak to-day, for instance, of an ‘inborn conviction,’ and say also that a conviction is ‘born in upon’ us. When we say in the present day, ‘I have an inborn conviction,’ we feel that the soul is already in the position of having laboured through to the inner verification of a thing. We have already learnt to feel ourselves detached from and ‘outside’ words.

But if we feel our way back into the word again, there rises up, as a similar process on different planes, the bringing-to-birth in the body and the bringing-to-birth in the soul. We have visibly before us what actually goes on in the soul when a conviction is ‘born in’ upon it. Take another instance. We say of a person who is affable and obliging, that he is ready to ‘fall in’ with others. Such expressions open up a wealth of inner life. A person who is prone to falling loses his balance, takes leave of his consciousness. And one who is ready to ‘fall in’ with others lets himself go for the time being, sinks his own consciousness in that of the other. He goes through inwardly, something not altogether remote from what is meant by ‘falling down in a faint.’

If we have a healthy sense for such things, if we feel them in a genuine, matter-of-fact way and are not merely playing a clever game with words or trying to find ingenious arguments for debatable theories, then we are driven finally to admit to ourselves that in the formation of language there does dwell Intelligence, Reason, Spirit. It is not a Spirit that has been put there first by man's consciousness, but a Spirit that works in the subconsciousness and that man finds already there before him in the language as he learns it. And by this road man can really come to understand how their own spirit is a creation of the Spirit of language, of the ‘Speech-Spirit.’

On this road, the necessary conditions for getting to the Speech-Spirit are all there. The results of modern research contain everything requisite. And a great deal indeed has already been done. What is needed now is the conscious construction of a psychological science of language.

It is, however, not so much our concern here to point out whatever may be needed in this direction, as to indicate things that have a practical bearing on life. Anyone who considers such facts as the above and looks at them all round, must come to recognise that deeply hidden in language there is something that leads out and beyond it to something higher, something that is over language—to the Spirit itself. And this Spirit is not such that in the manifold languages it too can be manifold. It lives within them all as a single unity.

This spiritual unity amongst the languages is lost when they shed their first native, elemental vitality and are seized by the spirit of abstraction. Then comes the time when a man in speaking no longer has within him the Spirit, but only the verbal clothing of the Spirit. It is quite a different matter for a man's soul whether, in using such expressions as the above, he feels within him the picture of what actually takes place between two people when one, let us say, ‘falls in’ with the other—or whether he only attaches to the phrase a conventional, abstract notion of the relation between them.

The more directly abstract men's sense of language becomes, the more their souls become cut off from one another. Whatever is abstract is peculiar to the individual. He elaborates it for himself and lives in it as in something identified with his own private ego. This element of abstractedness, it is true, is only perfectly to be achieved in the world of concepts; but to some degree a very near approach to it has been made in words and phrases as actually sensed and used, especially in the languages of civilised nations.

But in the age in which we are now living, in face of all that tends towards the disseverance of men and peoples, every bond that links them together must be consciously fostered. For even between men who speak different tongues, that which divides them falls away when each sees and feels the visible reality imaged in his own form of speech. To awaken the slumbering ‘Speech-Spirit’ in each language should be an important element in all social education.

Anyone who turns his mind to such matters must find how much the prosecution of any movement—of what people to-day call social movements—depends on watching the living process of men's souls, not on mere thinking and studying over external institutions and schemes. In face of the tendency towards the separation of peoples into languages it is one of the most urgent tasks of the times to create a counter-tide towards understanding each other.

There is much talk about ‘Humanism’ in these days, and of cultivating the genuine human principle common to all men. But, for any such tendency to become quite genuine, it needs to be applied seriously to the different concrete provinces of life. Think what it means for anyone who once has felt words and phrases invested with an absolutely distinct and visible reality. How much fuller and keener is the sense a man then has of his own human nature than when language is merely felt in its abstraction! We need not think, of course, when a person sees a picture and says, ‘How delicious!’ that, whilst looking at the picture, he must at the same time have a vision of his joints being loosened until he is in a state of such complete ‘delectation’ that he begins to feel as if his being were dissolved! Still, anyone who has once vividly felt the corresponding picture in his soul, will—when he speaks such words—have a quite different inner experience from one who has never known them as anything but an abstraction.

In the conventional and scientific language of the day, the overtone in the soul must of necessity be abstract, but the undertone should not be abstract too. In primitive stages of civilisation men had a visual sense of language. In its more advanced stages this visual sense of language must be provided by education in order that it may not be wholly lost.

This volume contains seventeen of the more than 6000 lectures given by Rudolf Steiner (1861–1925) during the early part of this century. As with many of his lectures Steiner assumes a certain familiarity with his basic writings an the part of his listeners, a familiarity which can be gained by reading one or more of his introductory works. Chief among these are four books: The Philosophy of Spiritual Activity, An Outline of Occult Science, Theosophy, and Knowledge of the Higher Worlds and Its Attainment. The readers unfamiliar with the above works might be well advised to consider first reading one or more of them before attempting this volume both as a way of increasing their appreciation and comprehension of this work and in fairness to Steiner who explains in detail how he came to his knowledge in these four volumes.

Some of the volumes of Steiner's lectures are known as cycles because they addressed a single theme and were delivered over a short period of time to the same audience. The seventeen lectures collected in this sequence do not, strictly speaking, constitute a cycle. They are strung together along a definite path stretching between the dates of August 6 to September 18, 1920; but two were delivered before a very different audience, in Berlin. Added to these lectures is an address to the General Assembly of the Berlin branch of the Anthroposophical Society.

To the careful student of Rudolf Steiner's work it may seem, however, as if these lectures indeed form a definite cycle. They transmit a powerful appeal to all those who are deeply concerned with the condition of the social fabric, irrespective of political partisanship; but who look to its cultural and philosophical basis as a means for social action and renewal.

The range of these lectures is enormous, and thereby symptomatic of Rudolf Steiner's contribution to the civilization of our time. We only need look at some of the themes of the lectures:

Spiritual science must be a knowledge of action.

The twelve senses of the human being in their relation to Imagination, Inspiration, Intuition.

The science of initiation and the impulse for freedom.

Viewpoints for the forming of a healthy social judgment.

The lectures turn to profound and deeply stirring observations concerning the inherent tasks and intentions of the peoples in the West and East, and describe the diverse influences upon them through various spiritual powers. To this stream a talk is added in honor of Hegel's 150th birthday, making us aware of the pervasive, albeit mostly unconscious, influence of this thinker upon the West, and by no means only in the form in which Communism claimed him.

The lectures which follow belong perhaps to the most exciting ones we can find in Rudolf Steiner's lectures an the fundamentals for a social renewal. Like a slow-growing plant they begin to open only gradually into full significance.

The initiative to make this volume available in English arose out of a circle of people, including this writer, who have long concerned themselves with social renewal. We are a group who have chosen to live and work with handicapped people all over the world in special communities, the Camphill communities.

The social forms developed by these Camphill communities are new types of villages or related forms of communal life. In these villages we have enabled exciting relationships, new ways and new values of labor to emerge and for these strivings this volume might become a constant source of strength and encouragement. Just as there exists a curative course¹ by Rudolf Steiner which provides insight and inspiration for educators of handicapped children, so these lectures can be regarded as a source of inspiration for the whole range of activities which unfold as social therapy. The practical labor arising therefrom thus could give the right background for applying the indications given in these lectures. The lectures would then provide truly new ways of understanding the impulses and efforts of community life. They would demonstrate what it means to become free from those often highly developed thoughts which have, nevertheless, led the actions of individuals, groups and nations into catastrophic situations for several hundred years. And they still continue to do so despite increasingly desperate calls for change! But do we truly want to change? Without insights of a spiritual nature we cannot and will not attempt to change. Neither can it be expected to be an easy task or to be done by the mere acceptance of some creed.

Rudolf Steiner says in the 10th lecture:

We come closer and closer to total decline precisely because our intellectuals will not venture to construe the tasks in this world by utilizing ideas other than those gained from waking life, from what lies between birth and death.

At the same time we must be aware of the slow, though fundamental process to which we can aspire when we take seriously what Rudolf Steiner has to say at the very beginning of the 12th lecture:

One becomes acquainted with the same things from everchanging viewpoints; thus, conviction increasingly gains in strength.

This growing conviction becomes firmer, the more flexible the standpoint, the deeper and the more truthful the shift from one to another perspective is, and it brings that certainty we can see in the planetary companions of the sun as they move in their regular orbits, in that galaxy to which they belong, to which we ourselves belong. Ultimately, this is the cosmos of love and truth.

The practical-minded expert will either smile or get angry at this. What role shall such lofty sentiments play in a world of brutality, deceit and despair? In the midst of such conditions (where the practitioners of old vices and their political and power-seeking responses continue to be at work, Rudolf Steiner spoke the following, describing neither a wish nor an ethical utopia, but describing rather his sober insight into a law, that is akin to a law of nature.

This will be the healthy social relationship in the future. You can see it already today. Labor will be a free activity out of the insight into the necessity that labor has to take place. Men labor because they look at the human being and recognize that he needs labor. What was labor in the ancient world? It was a tribute; it was done because it had to be done. And what is labor today? It rests upon self-satisfaction, and that kind of enforcement which is exerted upon us by egoism. Because we are where we are, we want to be paid for our labor. We work for our own sakes, for our own wages. In the future we will labor for the sake of our fellow human beings, because they need what we can work for. This will be the reason for our work. We will clothe our fellow human beings, we will make our work available to them for what they are in need of—as a completely free activity. Wages have to be completely separated from this. A tribute was labor in the past—an offering it will be in the future. Labor has nothing to do with self-satisfaction, nothing to do with payment. If I allow my work to be dictated by the needs of my brothers with a view to what mankind really needs, then I will find myself in a free relationship to it, and my work becomes an offering for mankind. Then I shall work with all my strength, for I love mankind and put my strength at its disposal.²

Who cannot imagine the unbelieving, if not contemptuous, faces raised upon hearing this—the cynicism and impatience? For all those who at times play at intellectual games with Rudolf Steiner's indications, another paragraph of the same lecture shall be quoted. Rudolf Steiner continues:

This must become possible and will only be possible when life's requirements are separated from work. And this will indeed happen in the future—no one will be the owner of the products of his own labor. Mankind must be educated for free labor, one for all and all for one. Each one will have to act accordingly. Today, if you would found a small community in which each one throws into a communal account what he earns and each one works as best he can, then his very life's existence—his needs—will be brought about out of the communal consumption. This will cause a greater freedom than the ordering of wages according to production. When that happens we shall turn in the right direction. Today, this could flow into law, into each regulation; of course, not in absolute terms, but approximately. One could today build up factories in this way. But it will require healthy, clear and sober thinking in the sense of anthroposophy.

A deeper understanding of all this can be obtained from the present volume of lectures.

If Rudolf Steiner's printed work needs a preface or an introduction at all, it is to emphasize that it cannot be read like other books. It belongs to the type and quality of his thoughts that they have the characteristics of living things: the inherent power of growth and potential for change which lies in the unfolding of all living things. We are not accustomed to such activity with thoughts, with thinking as a force akin to doing. Yet such is the nature of Rudolf Steiner's thoughts. They appeal to an otherwise dormant participation in us and offer an invitation to social activity. No doubt, this is an unusual demand. Conceivably it can cause offense. But the request is emphasized here and with good cause.

In our time, no one can be free from grave concerns for the future, which is reaching with its tentacles right into the present. Much good will and increasing desperation is spent on finding “solutions,” on seeking, on organizing, on imploring to try different ways; ways of amelioration, of appeasement, of change with a truly human face—with few results. It would not be, then, a wasted effort to enter into the reading of these lectures with more than that intellectual scanning to which we have become accustomed, but instead to hear, almost from the first words, the intonation of a selfless voice, selfless even in search for knowledge. This voice speaks with the tone of hope and of insight and with the aspirations of all of us. Its familiarity should, in the encounter with its message, lead us securely—and far more deeply than we usually listen—to those places of the will in us which alone can bring about change and evolutionary responsibility.

Carlo Pietzner
Michaelmas 1985

• 1. Curative Education, Rudolf Steiner Press, London, 1984
• 2. These two quotations come from a public lecture given by Rudolf Steiner in Berlin an October 26, 1905. This lecture was published only recently for the first time in Beitrage zur Rudolf Steiner Gesamtausgabe, St. John's Time 1985, #88.

In the last lecture I sought to show how in the spiritual culture of the present day, it is due to misunderstandings when there is so little understanding between those who direct their research to the soul and to the processes within the soul's realm and those who direct their attention to the material processes in the human organism which run their course—however one wishes to call it—as accompanying phenomena, or also, as materialism maintains, as the necessary causes of soul phenomena. And I sought to show what the causes are of such misunderstandings. Today I should, above all, like to draw attention to the fact that such misunderstandings—as well as misunderstandings in other regards—necessarily arise in the search for real, for genuine insight when one fails to take one aspect into consideration, in the cognitive process itself, an aspect which forcefully reveals itself to the spiritual investigator. This aspect reveals itself more and more as an immediate perception during the course of further, extensive spiritual-scientific research. This is something which at first appears very odd when one expresses it: In the sphere in which world conceptions arise, that is in the sphere of insight into spiritual reality, when, I would like to say, one ties oneself down to certain points of view, there necessarily arises a way of regarding the human soul which can both be unequivocally refuted and can just as well be proven correct.

Therefore, the spiritual-scientific researcher more and more tends to abandon the habit of reinforcing one or the other conception by bringing to bear what, in ordinary life would be called a proof, or a refutation. For, in this sphere, as has been said, everything can be proved with certain reasons and everything can, also with certain reasons, be contradicted. Materialism, in its totality, can indeed be strictly proved correct, and, when it addresses itself to single questions about life or about existence can also equally well be shown to be correct. And one will not necessarily find it easy to refute this or that argument which the materialist brings forward in support of his views by merely seeking to refute his conclusion by bringing forward opposing points of view. The same thing holds true for the one whose point of view is a spiritual view of existence. Therefore, the one who truly wishes to conduct research in spiritual fields must, in regard to any world conception know not only all that which speaks for the point of view, but also all that speaks against it. For the remarkable fact arises that the actual truth only becomes evident when one allows to work upon the soul that which speaks for a certain thing, as well as that which speaks against it. And the one who allows his spirit to stare in fixation upon any constellation of concepts or mental representations of a one-sided world view, such a one will always be closed to the fact that just the opposite can appear to be valid to the soul, indeed the opposite must appear to be correct up to a certain point. And such a person can be compared with someone who might insist that human life can only be sustained by breathing in. Breathing in assumes breathing out, both belong together. So also, our concepts, our representations, relate to one another in questions concerning world conceptions. We are able to put forward, in regard to any matter, a concept which confirms it and we are able to put forward a concept which refutes it; one way demands the other, just as inbreathing requires outbreathing, and vice versa. And thus, just as real life can only reveal itself through breathing out and breathing in—when both are present—so, also, the spiritual can only manifest itself within the soul when one is able to enter in an equally positive manner into the pro as well as the con of a particular matter. The supportive, confirming concept is like a breathing out, within the living wholeness of the soul, the reflecting, denying concept like a breathing in, and only in their living working together does that element reveal itself which is rooted in the spiritual reality. It is for this reason that spiritual science is not concerned to apply the methods, to which one is so accustomed in current literature, where this or that is proved or is refuted. The spiritual scientist realizes that that which is brought forward in a positive form concerning world conceptions, can always in a certain sense be justified, but, equally so, what appears to contradict it. When one moves forward in world conception questions to that immediate life which is present in positive and negative concepts, just as bodily life lives in outbreathing and breathing in, then one comes to concepts which truly are able to take in the spirit; one comes to concepts which are equal to reality. However, in doing so, one must often express oneself quite differently than when one expresses oneself according to the habits of thought of ordinary life. But the way in which one expresses oneself arises from the livingly active inner experience of the spirit. And the spirit can only be inwardly experienced, not, in the manner of material existence, be outwardly perceived.

Now, you know, that one of the principal world conception questions is that which I dealt with in the first lectures which I held here this winter, namely, the question concerning matter, concerning physical substance. And I shall touch on this question by way of introduction from the points of view which I have indicated.

One cannot come successfully to terms with the question about substance or about matter if one attempts, again and again, to form mental images or concepts about what matter actually is; when one tries to understand—in other words—what actually is matter, what is substance. One who has truly wrestled in his soul with such riddles—which are very far from the beaten track for many people—such a one knows what is involved in questions of this kind. For, if he has wrestled for a time without yielding to this or that prejudice, he comes to a very different point of view in relation to such a question. He comes to a point of view which allows him to consider as more important the inner attitude of the soul when one forms such a concept as the concept of matter. It is this wrestling of the soul itself which is raised to consciousness. And one then comes to a way of looking at these riddles, which I might characterize in the following way.

He who wishes to understand matter in the way in which it is usually conceived resembles a person who says; I now wish to form an impression of darkness, of a dark room. What does he do? He turns on the light and regards this as the correct method to gain an impression of a dark room. Now, you will agree, this is just the opposite of the right way to go about it. And, it is in the same way, the opposite of the right way—only one has to come to realize this through the inner wrestling which I have pointed to—if one believes that one will ever come to know the nature of matter in setting the spirit into motion in order to illuminate matter, to illuminate substance, by means of spirit. The one and only place where the spirit within the body can silence itself is where an outer process penetrates into our inner life, that is in sense perception, in sensation, where the life of representation, of forming mental images, ceases. It is just by letting the spirit come to silence and by our experiencing this silence of the spirit that we can allow matter, substance, truly to represent itself within our soul.

One does not come to such concepts through ordinary logic; or, I would say, if one does come to them through ordinary logic, then the concepts are much too thin to call forth a genuine power of conviction. Only when one wrestles within the soul with certain concepts, in the way which has been indicated, will they lead to the kind of result which I have pointed toward.

Now, the opposite is also the case. Let us assume, someone wants to comprehend spirit. If he seeks it, for example, in the purely material outward formation of the human body, he is similar to someone who extinguishes the light in order to comprehend it. For it is the secret in this matter, that outer, sense-perceptible nature contradicts the spirit, extinguishes the spirit. Nature builds the reflected image of the spirit, in the same way that an illuminated object throws back, reflects, the light. But nowhere can we find the spirit, in whatever material processes, if we do not grasp the spirit in living activity. Because that is just the essential nature of material processes that the spirit has transformed itself into them; that spirit has incorporated itself into them. And if we then try to come to know the spirit out of them, we misunderstand ourselves.

I wanted to give this as a preface, in order that ever greater clarity can be brought to bear on what the actual cognitive attitude of heart and mind of the spiritual researcher is, and how it is that he needs a certain width and mobility in his life of forming mental images, to be able to penetrate into those things which require penetration. With such concepts it then becomes possible to illuminate the important questions on which I touched last time and which I will briefly indicate in order to move on to our considerations for today.

I said: as things have developed in recent spiritual education and culture, one has come ever more and more to a one-sided way of looking at the relationships of the soul-spiritual to the bodily-physical; a way of looking which expresses itself in the fact that one actually only seeks for the soul- spiritual within that part of the human bodily constitution which lies in the nervous system, that is to say within the brain. One assigns the soul- spiritual exclusively to the brain and nervous system, and one regards the remaining organism, when one speaks of the soul-spiritual, more or less as a kind of incidental supplement to the brain and nervous system. Now, I tried to make clear the results of spiritual research in this field by drawing attention to the fact that one only comes to a true insight about the relationship of the human soul with the human body when one sees the relationship of the entire human soul to the entire bodily constitution. But there it became clear that the matter has yet a deeper background, that is the membering of the entirety of the human soul into the actual representational thought life, into the life of feeling and the life of will. For only the actual representational life of the soul is bound to the nervous organism in the way in which it is assumed by more recent physiological psychology. In contrast, the life of feeling—let it be rightly noted, not in so far as it is represented mentally, but in so far as it arises—is related with the human breathing organism, with everything which is breathing, and which is connected with breathing, as the life of mental representation is related with the nervous system. Thus, one must assign the life of feeling of the soul to the breathing organism. Then further: that which we designate as the life of will, is in a similar relationship with that which in the physical body we must designate as the metabolism, of course into its finest ramifications. And in as much as one takes into consideration that the single systems within the organism interact and interweave—metabolism, of course, also occurs in the nerves—they interpenetrate, I would say, the three systems interpenetrate at the outermost periphery. But a correct understanding, however, is only possible when one regards matters in such a way that one knows: will impulses belong with the metabolism in the same way that the experiences of forming mental images belong with the human nervous system, that is to say, with the brain.

Matters of this kind can, of course, only be indicated to begin with. And just for this reason, objection after objection is possible. But I know quite definitely: when one no longer approaches that which has just been presented out of merely partial aspects of today's natural scientific research but rather out of the whole spectrum of anatomical, physiological research, then the result will be a complete harmony between the assertions which I have made from the spiritual scientific point of view and the assertions of natural science. Regarded superficially—allow me to cite the following objection only as a characteristic example—objection after objection can be brought forward against so comprehensive a truth. Someone could say: Let us agree that certain feelings are connected with the breathing organism; for no one can really doubt that for certain feelings this can be very convincingly demonstrated. But someone could also say: Yes, but what do you have to say to the fact that we perceive certain melodies, that melodies arise in our consciousness; and the feeling of an aesthetic pleasure connects itself with melodies. Can one, in this case, speak of any kind of connection of the breathing organism to this which quite evidently arises in the head, and so obviously is connected with the nervous organism according to the results of physiological research? The moment one considers the matter rightly, the correctness of my assertion becomes evident with complete clarity. Namely, one must take into consideration that with every outbreath an important parallel process occurs in the brain: the brain would rise with the outbreath if it were not prevented from rising by top of the skull—the breathing carries forward into the brain—and in reverse, the brain sinks with the inbreath. And since it cannot rise or fall because of the skull, there arises, what is well known to physiology: there arises the change in the blood stream, there occurs what physiology knows as brain-breathing, that is to say, certain processes which occur in the surrounding of the nerves run parallel with the process of breathing. And in the meeting of the breathing process with that which lives in us as tone through the ear there occurs what points to the fact that feeling, also in this realm, is connected with the breathing organism, just as the life of mental representations is connected with the nervous organism.

I want to indicate this because it is a relatively remote example and can, therefore, provide a ready objection. If one could come to an understanding with someone concerning all the details given by physiological research, one would find that none of these details contradicts what was presented here last time and has been brought forward again today.

It should now be my task to extend our considerations in a similar way as was done in the last lecture. And, to do so, I must enter more closely into the manner in which the human being unfolds the life of sense perception, in order to show the actual relationship between the capacity for sense perception, which leads to representations, and the life of feeling and of will, indeed, altogether, the life of the human being as soul, as body, and as spirit.

Through our sense life we come into connection with the sense- perceptible environment. Within this sense-perceptible environment natural science distinguishes certain substances, let us rather say, substance-forms - - because it is on these that the matter depends; if I wished to discuss this with the physicist I would have to say aggregate-conditions—solid, fluid, gaseous. Now, however, as you all know, natural scientific research comes to assume—in addition to the above-mentioned form in which physical substance appears—also another condition. When natural science wants to explain light, it is not satisfied only to recognize the existence of these substance- forms, which I have just mentioned, but science reaches out to include that which at first appears to be finer than these sorts of substance; it reaches out to that which one usually calls ether. The idea of ether is an extraordinarily difficult one, and one can say: the various thoughts which have been developed about the ether, what can be said about it, are as different, as manifold as one can imagine. It is, of course, not possible to go into all these details. Attention should only be drawn to the fact that natural science feels impelled to postulate the concept of the ether, which means thinking about the world not only as filled with the immediate sense perception of the more solid substances, but to think of it as filled with ether. What is characteristic is that natural science with its current methods fails to ascend to an understanding of what the ether actually is. Natural research for its real activity always requires material bases. But the ether itself always escapes, in a certain sense, from the material foundations. The ether appears in union with material processes, it calls forth material processes; but it is not to be grasped, so to speak, with those means which are bound to the material foundations. There has, therefore, developed in recent times a strange ether-concept, which, basically, is extraordinarily interesting. The concept of the ether which one can already find today among physicists, goes in the direction of saying: the ether must be—whatever else it may be—something which at any rate has no attributes such as ordinary matter has. And in this way, natural scientific research points toward the recognition of something beyond its own material basis, when it says of the ether, it possesses aspects which research, with its methods, cannot find. Natural scientific research comes to the acceptance of an ether, but with its methods is unable to come to fill out this representation of the ether with any content.

Spiritual science yields the following. Natural scientific research proceeds from the material foundation; spiritual research from the spirit-soul basis. The spiritual researcher—if he does not arbitrarily remain within a certain limit—is also, like the natural scientist, driven to the concept of ether, only from the other side. The spiritual investigator attempts to come to know what is active and effective within the interior of the soul. If he were to remain standing at the point where he is able to experience inwardly only what takes place in the ordinary life of the soul, he would actually in this field not even advance as far as the natural scientist who postulates the concept of an ether. For the natural scientist at least forms the concept of an ether; he accepts it for consideration. The soul researcher, if he fails to come to a concept of ether, resembles a natural scientist who says: Why should I trouble myself about what else lives? I accept the three basic forms: solid, fluid, gaseous bodies; what is finer than that, about that I do not concern myself. This is, for the most part, just what the teachings of psychology in fact do.

However, not everyone who has been active in the realm of soul research acts in this way; and one finds especially within that extraordinarily significant scientific development which is based on the foundation laid in the first third of the nineteenth century by German Idealism—not in this Idealism itself, but in that which then evolved out of this Idealism—one finds the first beginnings leading toward the concept of the ether from the other side, from the spiritual-soul side, just as nature research ascends to the idea of ether from the material side. And, if one truly wishes to have the concept of the ether, one must approach it from two sides. Otherwise, one will not come rightly to terms with this concept. What is interesting is that the great German philosophical Idealists, Fichte, Schelling, Hegel, despite their penetrating power of thinking—an ability which I have often characterized here—despite this, they did not form the concept of the ether. They were unable to so enstrengthen, to empower, their inner soul life in order to conceive of the ether. Instead, there arose within those who allowed themselves to be fructified by this Idealism, who, in a sense, allowed the thoughts which had been brought forth to work further within their souls - - despite the fact that they were not as great geniuses as their Idealist predecessors—this concept of the ether arose out of their research into the soul's realm. We first find this ether concept in the work of Immanuel Hermann Fichte, the son of the great Johann Gottlieb Fichte, who was also his father's pupil. He allowed that to continue to work within his soul which Johann Gottlieb Fichte and his successors, Schelling and Hegel, had accomplished. Immanuel Hermann Fichte, allowing this thought to become condensed to an even greater effectiveness within him, came to say: When one contemplates the life of soul and spirit, when one so to speak, traverses it in all directions, one comes to say: This soul-spiritual life must flow down into the ether, just as the solid, fluid, gaseous states flow up into the ether. So must, in a sense, the lowest element of the soul flow into the ether, just as the highest element of matter flows into the ether above. Characteristic also are certain thoughts which Immanuel Hermann Fichte formed about this matter, by means of which he, indeed, penetrated from the spirit- soul realm and came to the boundary of the ether. You will find this passage from his book Anthropology, 1860, quoted in my most recent book, Of the Human Riddle:

“One cannot find, within the material elements of substance ... that which truly endures, that uniting formative principle of the body, which reveals itself as operative during our entire life.” “Thus, we are directed to a second, essentially different causative principle in the body.” “Inasmuch” as this “contains that which actually persists, endures in the metabolism, it is the true, inner, invisible, but in all visible substantiality present body. That other, the outward manifestation of it, built up out of incessantly active metabolism, may from now on be designated ‘body,’ which is, in fact, not that which persists and is not the enduring whole, and which is the mere result or the after-image of that inner bodily presence, which casts him into the constantly changing world of substance, in a way similar to the way the magnetic force prepares an apparently solid body out of the particles of the iron filings, but which dissolves in all directions when the force which unites them is withdrawn.”

For I. H. Fichte there lived within the ordinary body, consisting of outer material substance, an invisible body, and this invisible body we might also call the etheric body; an etheric body which brings the single substantial particles of this visible body into their form, which sculpts them, forms them. And I. H. Fichte is so clear about the fact that this ether body, to which he descends out of the soul realm, is not subject to the processes of the physical body, that the insight into the existence of such an etheric body suffices to enable him to transcend the riddle of death. In this context I. H. Fichte says in his Anthropology:

“It is hardly necessary still to ask, how the human being finds himself in the process of death. The human being remains after this last, for us still visible act of the living process, he remains in his essential being entirely the same in spirit and in organizing power as he formerly was. His integrity is preserved; for he has indeed lost nothing of that which was his and belonged to his substance during his visible life. He only returns in death into the invisible world, or better said, as he never left this world, as it is that which actually endures within all that is visible—he has simply stripped off a particular form of the visible. ‘To be dead’ only signifies, to be no longer perceptible to the usual comprehension by the senses, just as in the same way, that which is actually real, the final ground of bodily manifestation is imperceptible to the senses.”

I have shown in the case of I. H. Fichte how he advances from the soul realm to such an invisible body. It is interesting to note that in a number of instances in the after-glow of the spiritual life of German Idealism, the same thing appears. Some time ago I also drew attention to a lonely thinker, who was a school director in Bromberg, who had occupied himself with the question of immortality, Johann Heinrich Deinhardt, who died in the sixties of the nineteenth century. At first, he concerned himself with the question of immortality as others had also done, seeking to penetrate the question of immortality through thoughts and concepts. But more resulted for him than for those who merely live in concepts. And it was there possible for the publisher of the treatise about immortality which J. H. Deinhardt had written to quote a passage from a letter which the author had written him, in which J. H. Deinhardt says, that, although he had not come so far as to publish it in a book, his inner research had, nevertheless, resulted clearly in the recognition that the human being, during his entire life between birth and death, works on the formation of an invisible body which is released into the spiritual world at death.

Thus, one could draw attention to a variety of other instances within German spiritual life of such a direction of research and of a way of seeing and comprehending the world. They would all show that in this direction of research there lay an urge not to remain limited by mere philosophical speculation, which results in a mere life in concepts, but rather to so enstrengthen the inner life of the soul that it presses forward to that degree of concentration that reaches through to the etheric.

Along the paths on which these researchers entered, the real riddle of the etheric cannot yet be resolved from within, but one can, in a certain sense say: these researchers are on the way to spiritual science. For this riddle concerning the etheric will be resolved when the human soul undergoes those inner processes of practical exercise which I have frequently characterized here, and which are described more exactly in my book How to Attain Knowledge of the Higher Worlds. The human being, when he undergoes these inner soul processes, does indeed gradually attain to the etheric from within. Then the etheric will be directly present for him. Only then, however, is he really in the position to understand what a sense perception is, to understand what actually occurs in the perception by the senses.

In order to characterize this today, I must seek access to this question, in a certain sense, from another side. Let us approach that which actually occurs in the metabolic processes for the human being. Simply expressed, we can think of the metabolic processes in the human organism as occurring in such a way that, essentially, they have to do with the fluid material element. This can be easily understood if one acquaints oneself, even only to a limited extent, with the most easily accessible natural scientific ideas in this field. What constitutes a metabolic process lives, one can say, in the fluid element. That which is breathing lives in the airy, gaseous element; in breathing we have an interchange between inner and outer processes in the air, just as in the metabolism we have an interchange between substance processes which have occurred outside of our body, and such which occur within our body. What happens then when we perceive with our senses and then proceed to form mental representations? What corresponds to this actually? In just the same way that the fluid processes correspond to the metabolism, and the airy processes correspond to breathing—what corresponds to perception? What corresponds to perception are etheric processes. Just as we in a sense live with our metabolism in the fluid, and live with our breathing in the air, we live with our perceiving in the ether. And inner ether processes, inner etheric processes, which occur in the invisible body, about which we have just been speaking, occur, come into contact with external etheric processes in sense perception. When it is objected: Yes, but certain sense perceptions are self-evidently metabolic processes!—this is especially obvious for those sense perceptions which correspond with the so- called lower senses, smell, taste. A more accurate consideration shows that along with that which is substantial, that belongs directly to the metabolism, along with every such process, also with tasting, for example, an etheric process occurs, by means of which we enter into relation with the external ether, just as we enter into relation with the air with our physical body when we breathe. Without the understanding of the etheric world, an understanding of sense perception and sensation is impossible.

What is it that actually happens? Well, one can only really know what happens there when one has gone far enough in the inner soul process that the inner etheric-bodily element has become a reality for one. This will happen when one has achieved what I called imaginative thinking in lectures which I recently gave here. When one's thinking has been so strengthened, by means of the exercises given in the book already mentioned, that they are no longer abstract concepts, such as we normally have, but are thoughts and mental representations filled with life, then one can call them imaginations. When these representations have become so alive that they are, in fact, imaginations, then they live directly in the etheric, whereas, if they are abstract representations, they live only in the soul. They grasp the etheric. And then, if one has progressed far enough, one might say, in an inward experimentation that one experiences within oneself the ether as living reality, then one can know, through experience, what happens in sense perception, in sensation. Sensation as it arises through sense perception—1 can only present this today in the form of results—consists in the fact that the outer environment sends the etheric from the material surroundings into our sense organs, thus making those gulfs, about which I spoke the day before yesterday, so that that which is outside also becomes inward within the sphere of our senses. We have, for instance, a tone between the life of the senses and the outer world. As a result of the fact that the external ether penetrates into our sense organs, this external ether is deadened. And as the outer deadened ether enters our sense organs, it is brought to life again through the fact that the inner ether from the etheric body works towards the deadened etheric coming from outside. Herein we have the essential being of sense perception and sensation. Just as the death process and enlivening arise in the breathing process, when we breathe in oxygen and breathe out carbon dioxide, so also a process of exchange takes place between the dead ether and enlivened ether in our sense experience.

This is an extraordinarily important fact which can be found through spiritual science. For that which no philosophical speculations can find, and on which the philosophical speculation of the last centuries has ship-wrecked countless times, can only be found along the path of spiritual scientific research. Sense perception can thus be recognized to be a fine process of exchange between the outer and the inner ether; to be the enlivening of the ether that is deadened in the sense organ by the forces of the inner etheric body. So that that which the senses kill for us out of the environment, is inwardly made alive again through the etheric body, and we come, thereby, to that which is indeed the perception of the outer world.

This is extraordinarily important, because it shows how the human being when he devotes himself to the sensations arising from sense perception, does not only live in the physical organism, but rather in the supersensible etheric, and shows how the entire life within the senses is a living and weaving in the invisible etheric. It is this which, in the time mentioned above, the more deeply insightful researchers have always sensed, have inwardly divined, but which will be raised to certainty through spiritual science. Among those who recognized this significant truth, I would like still to mention the almost totally forgotten J. P. V. Troxler. I have mentioned him here in earlier lectures, in earlier years. He said in his Lectures about Philosophy:

“Already in earlier times the philosophers have differentiated a finer, purer soul organism from the coarser body. ... a soul, carrying a picture of the bodily organism, which they called Schema, and which was for them the higher, inner human being. ... In recent times, even Kant in his Dreams of a Spiritual Seer, dreams earnestly, but jokingly, a whole inward soul man, who bears all the limbs of the outer body in his spirit body; Lavater composes poetically and thinks in a similar vein. …”

These investigators were also clear, however, that in the moment when one ascends out of the usual materialistic way of seeing things to the perception of this supersensible organism in us, one has to move from the usual anthropology to a way of recognition of such a kind that it achieves its results through an intensification of our inner capacities. It is, therefore, interesting how, for example, both I. H. Fichte as well as Troxler are clear that anthropology must ascend to something different, if it wishes to comprehend the whole human being. I. H. Fichte says in his Anthropology:

“Consciousness based in sense perception ... together with the whole, human life of the senses, has no other significance than to provide a place in which that supersensible life of the spirit occurs, by introducing—through a free, conscious deed of one's own—the spiritual content of the ideas (which lives beyond ordinary consciousness) into the world of the senses ... The fundamental comprehension of the being of man in this way thus raises ‘Anthropology’ in its final result to ‘Anthroposophy.’”

We see within this stream of German spiritual life which tends to drive idealism out of its abstraction toward reality, the premonition of Anthroposophy. And Troxler says, that one must assume a super-spiritual sense in union with a super-sensible spirit, and that, thereby, one can grasp the human being in such a way that one no longer has to do with a usual anthropology, but with something higher:

“If it is indeed highly welcome that the most recent philosophy, which ... in every Anthroposophy ... must reveal itself, climbs upward, it is, nevertheless, not to be overlooked that this idea cannot be the fruit of speculation, and the true ... individuality of the human being may not be confused, either with that which it postulates as subjective spirit or as finite I, nor confused also with that which it places in opposition with it as absolute spirit or as absolute personality.”

What is brought forward as Anthroposophy in no sense arises arbitrarily. Spiritual life leads to it with necessity, when concepts and mental pictures are not experienced as mere concepts and mental pictures, but rather are—I once again wish to use the expression—condensed to the point where they lead into reality, where they become saturated with reality.

One does not, however—and this is the weakness, the lack, in this research—if one merely raises oneself from the physical to the etheric body, one does not really find one's way; rather one comes to a certain boundary, which must, however, be transcended; for only beyond the etheric lies the soul-spiritual. And the essential thing is, that this soul-spiritual can only come into a relationship with the physical through the mediation of the etheric. We thus have to seek the actual soul element of the human being, working and impulsating within the etheric in a fully super-etheric way; working in such a way that the etheric, in its turn, forms the physical, just as it (the etheric) is itself formed, impulsated, enlivened by the element of the soul.

Let us now try to understand the human being from the other pole, the pole of will. We have said that the will-life is directly connected with the metabolism. In as much as the will impulse lives in the metabolism, it not only lives in the external, physical metabolic processes, but as the entire human being is everywhere present within the limits of his being, so the etheric also lives in that which is active as metabolism when an impulse of will occurs. Spiritual science shows that what lives in the will impulse is exactly the opposite of that which is present in sense perception. In the case of sense perception, the etheric outside of us is, in a certain sense, enlivened by the etheric within us. That is to say, the inner etheric pours itself into the dead etheric from outside. In the case of an impulse of will the situation is such that when the will impulse arises from the soul- spiritual, the etheric body is loosened, is expelled out of the physical body in those areas in which the metabolism occurs, through the activity of the metabolism and everything which is connected with it. As a result, we have here the exact opposite: the etheric body in a certain sense pulls back from the physical processes. And it is just in this that the essential element in will actions lies. In such actions of the will the etheric body draws back from the physical body.

Those among my audience who have heard the earlier lectures will remember that, in addition to imaginative cognition, I have also distinguished inspiration and, finally, actual intuitive cognition. Just as imaginative cognition is an intensification and a strengthening of the soul's life, which enables one to attain to the life of the etheric, in the way I have indicated, so is intuitive cognition achieved through the soul's learning by mighty impulses of will to participate—indeed, actually herself to call forth—what one can call: the pulling back, the withdrawing, of the etheric body from the physical processes. Thus, in this realm, the soul-spiritual penetrates into the bodily-physical. If an impulse of will arises originally from the soul-spiritual, it unites itself wit^h the etheric and the consequence is that this etheric is withdrawn, pulled back, from one or the other area of metabolic activity of the physical-bodily organism. And by means of this working of the soul-spiritual, through the etheric, upon the bodily organism, there arises that which one can designate as the transition of a will impulse into a bodily movement, into a bodily action. But it is just here, when in this way, one takes the whole human being into consideration, that one attains to one's actual immortal part. For as soon as one learns how the spirit-soul weaves in the etheric it becomes clear to one that this weaving of the spirit- soul in the etheric is independent also of those processes of the physical organism that are encompassed by birth, conception and death. Thus, along this path it becomes possible to truly raise oneself to the immortal in the human being, to raise oneself to that which unites itself with the body, received through the stream of inheritance, and which continues when one passes through the portal of death. For the eternal spirit is connected through the mediation of the etheric with that which is here born and dies.

The mental pictures, the ideas, to which spiritual science comes, are powerfully rejected by the habits of thought of the present day and human beings, as a result, have great difficulty in finding their way into an understanding of them. One can say that one of the hindrances which make it difficult to find one's way into this understanding—along with other difficulties—is that one makes so little effort to seek the real connection of the soul-spiritual with the bodily organism in the way which has been indicated. Most people long for something quite different from that which spiritual science can offer. What actually happens in the human being when he or she forms mental pictures, forms representations? An etheric process occurs, which only interacts with an external etheric process. What is necessary, however, in order that the human being remains healthy in soul and body in this regard, is that he or she becomes aware where the boundary lies in which the inner etheric and the outer etheric come into contact with each other. This occurs in most cases unconsciously. It becomes conscious when the human being ascends to imaginative cognition, when he inwardly experiences the stirring and the motion of the etheric and its encounter with the external ether, which dies into the sense organ. In this interaction between the inner and outer etheric, we have, in a sense, the furthest boundary of the effectiveness of the etheric on the human organism. For that which is at work in our etheric body affects the organism primarily, for example, in its growth. In growth it forms the organism from within. It gradually organizes our organism so that the organism adapts itself to the outer world, in the way in which we see it, as the child develops. But this inner formative grasping of the physical body by the etheric must come up against a certain limit or boundary. When it passes this boundary, as a result of some process of illness, the following occurs: that which lives and weaves within the etheric and which should remain contained within the etheric, overreaches and lays hold on the organism so that, as a result, the organism is permeated by that which ought to remain a movement within the etheric. What happens as a result? That which should only be experienced inwardly as mental representation now occurs as a process within the physical body. This is what one calls a hallucination. When the etheric activity crosses its boundary towards the bodily—because the body is unable to resist it in the right way, due to a condition of illness—then there arises what one calls a hallucination. Very many people who want to penetrate into the spiritual world wish, above all, to have hallucinations. This is, of course, something which the spiritual researcher cannot offer them; for a hallucination is nothing other than a reflection of a purely material process, of a process which from the viewpoint of the soul occurs beyond the boundary of the physical body, that is it occurs within the body. In contrast, what leads into the spiritual world consists in the fact that one turns back from this boundary, returning into the realm of the soul, attaining to imagination instead of to hallucination, and imagination is a pure soul experience. And inasmuch as it is a pure soul experience, the soul lives in imagination within the spiritual world. Thus, the soul penetrates the imagination in the fully conscious way. And it is important that one understands that imagination—that is the justified way to achieve spiritual cognition—and hallucinations are the direct opposite of each other, and, indeed destroy each other. He who experiences hallucinations, due to a condition of organic illness, puts obstacles in the way to achieving genuine imagination, and he who attains true imagination protects himself in the surest way from all hallucination. Hallucinations and imagination are mutually exclusive, destroy each other mutually.

The situation is similar also at the other pole of the human being. Just as the etheric body can overreach into the bodily organism, sinking its formative forces into the body, thereby calling forth hallucinations, that is calling forth purely organic processes, so, on the other side the etheric can be drawn out of the organism—as was characterized in relation with the action of the will—in an irregular way. This can happen as the result of certain pathological formations of the organism or also as a result of exhaustion or similar bodily conditions. Instead of the etheric being drawn out of the physical metabolism in a certain area of the body, as in a normal, healthy action of the will, it remains stuck within it and the physical metabolic activity in that area—as a purely physical activity—reaches into the etheric. In this case, the etheric becomes dependent on the physical, whereas in the normal unfolding of the will the physical is dependent on the etheric, which, in its turn, is determined by the soul- spiritual. Should this occur, as a result of such processes as I have indicated, there then arises—I would say, like the pathological counter picture of a hallucination—a compulsive action; which consists in the fact that the physical body, with its metabolic activities, penetrates into the etheric, more or less forces its way into the etheric. And if a compulsive action is called forth as a pathological manifestation, one can say: compulsive action excludes that which, in spiritual science, one calls intuition. Intuition and compulsive action are mutually exclusive, just as hallucination and imagination exclude each other. Therefore, there is nothing more empty of soul than—on the one hand—a hallucinating human being, for hallucinations are indications of bodily conditions which should not be; and, on the other hand, for instance, one can have the whirling dervishes. The dance of the dervish arises through the fact that the bodily-physical forces itself into the etheric so that the etheric is not effective out of its connection with the spiritual-soul element, but rather those characteristic compulsive actions occur. And he who believes that revelations of a soul nature manifest in the dance of the whirling dervish, such an one should consult spiritual science in order to become clear that the whirling dervish is evidence that the spirit, the spirit-soul, has left the body and he, therefore, dances in this way.

And, I should like to say, that for instance automatic writing, mediumistic writing, is only a somewhat more comprehensive example of the same phenomenon as that of the dervish dance. Mediumistic writing consists in nothing else than that the spirit-soul nature has been completely driven out of the human organism and that the physical body has been forced into the etheric body and has there been allowed to unfold; to unfold itself after being emptied of the inner etheric under the sway of the outer etheric which surrounds it. These realms lead away from spiritual science, they do not lead towards the science of the spirit, although no objection should certainly be raised from those points of view from which generally so many objections are raised against these things. Just in relation to the whirling dervish one can study what a truly artistic dance should be. The art of dance should consist just in the fact that every single movement corresponds to an impulse of will which can fully rise into the consciousness of the individual involved, so that she or he never is engaged in a mere intrusion of physical processes into processes of the etheric. Artistic dance is only achieved when it is spiritually permeated by mental pictures. The dance of the dervish is a denial of spirituality. Many, however, may object: But it just reveals the spirit!—That it does, but how? Well, you can study a mussel shell by taking up the living mussel and observing it; but you can also study it when the living mussel has left, and you study its shell: the form of the mussel is reproduced in the mussel shell, this form is born out of the life of the organism. Thus, one might say, one also has an after-image of the spirit, a dead after-image of the spirit, when one has to do with automatic writing or with the whirling dervish. For this reason, it resembles the spirit as closely as the mussel shell resembles the living mussel, and, therefore, can also so easily be confused with it. But only when one really penetrates inwardly into the genuine spirit, can one achieve a true understanding for these matters.

When we take our start from the bodily, ascend through sense perception and sensation to the activity of forming representations, to thinking, which then carries over into the soul-spiritual, we come along this path to the spiritual-scientific recognition that that which is stimulated through sense perception and sensation, at a certain point is brought to an end and becomes memory. Memory arises as the sense impression continues on its way into the body, so that the etheric is not only effective within the sense impressions themselves, but also engages itself with what is left behind in the body by the sense impression. Thus, that which has entered into memory is again called up out of memory.

It is of course not possible to go into more detail concerning these matters in an hour's lecture. But one will never come to a true understanding of the reality of mental representation and of memory and how they are related to the soul-spiritual if one does not proceed along the spiritual-scientific path here indicated.

At the other pole there is the whole stream which flows from the spirit- soul life of our will impulses into the bodily physical, as the result of which outer actions are brought about. In ordinary human life the situation is that the life of the senses goes as far as memory and comes to a halt with memory. Memory places itself, so to speak, in front of the spirit-soul so that spirit-soul is not aware of itself and how it works when it receives sense impressions. Only an indication, a confused indication that the soul weaves and lives in the etheric, arises when the soul—living and weaving in the etheric—is not yet so strongly impelled in its etheric weaving that all of this ether weaving breaks against the boundary of the bodily-physical. When the soul-spiritual weaves within the etheric in such a way that that which it forms within the etheric does not immediately break against the physical body, but rather so restrains itself in the etheric that it is as if it came to the boundary of the physical body, but remains perceptible in the etheric, there dream arises. When dream life is really studied it will prove itself to be the lowest form of supersensible experience for the human being. For the human being experiences in his dreams that his soul-spiritual cannot unfold itself as will impulses within that which appears as dream pictures because, within the dream life, it lacks strength and forcefulness in its working. And inasmuch as the will impulses are lacking, inasmuch as dreaming spirit and soul do not penetrate the etheric sufficiently for the soul herself to become aware of these will impulses, there arises this chaotic tapestry of dreams.

What on one hand the dreams are, on the other hand are those phenomena in which the will—which comes out of the spirit-soul realm—takes hold of the outer world through the etheric-bodily nature. But, in doing so, the will is as little aware of what actually is going on, as one is aware in the dream—because of the weak effect of the spirit-soul—that the human being weaves and lives in the spirit. Just as the dream is in a way the weakened sense perception, so something else occurs as the intensified effect of the spirit-soul element, the strengthened effect of the will impulses; and this is what we call destiny.

In destiny we have no insight into the connections, just as in the dream we have no insight into what actually weaves and lives there as reality. Just as material processes which flow up into the etheric are always present as the underlying ground in dreams so there storms up against the outer world the spirit-soul element which is anchored in the will. But the spirit-soul element in ordinary life is not so organized that it is possible to perceive the spirit in its effective working in what unfolds before us as the sequence of the so-called experiences of destiny. In the moment in which we grasp this sequence, we learn to know the fabric of destiny, we learn to know how, just as in ordinary life the soul conceals for itself the spirit through the mental representations, so also it conceals for itself the spirit active in destiny through the feelings, through the sympathy and antipathy with which it receives the events which approach it as the experiences of life. In the moment when one—with the help of spiritual scientific insight—sees through the veil of sympathy and antipathy, when one objectively takes hold of the course of life experiences with inner equanimity—in this moment one notices that everything which occurs as a matter of destiny in our life between birth and death is either the effect of earlier lives on earth or is the preparation for later earth lives. Just as, on one hand, outer natural science does not penetrate to spirit and soul, not even to the etheric, when it seeks for the connections between the material world and our mental representations, so also, in regard to the other pole, natural science today fails in its cognitive efforts. Just as, on one side, science remains bound to the material processes in the nervous organism in its attempts to explain the life of mental representations, so also, science remains caught at the other pole in unclarity, that, is, I would say, science teeters in a nebulous way between the physical and the realm of soul.

These are just the realms where one must become aware how concepts within world conceptions allow themselves to be proved as well as to be contradicted. And for the one who clings rigidly to the proof, the positive position has much to be said for it; but one must also—just as breathing in belongs necessarily with breathing out—be able to think one's way through to the experience of the negative. In recent times there arose what has come to be known as analytical psychology. This analytical psychology is, I would say, inspired by good intimations. For, what does she seek? This analytical psychology, or as it is generally known, psychoanalysis, seeks to descend from the ordinary level of the soul to that which is no longer contained in the generally present life of the soul, but which remains from the soul's earlier experiences. The psychoanalyst assumes that the soul's life is not exhausted with its present soul experiences, with that which is consciously experienced by the soul, but rather can dive down with consciousness into the subconscious. And in much that appears in the soul's life as disturbance, as confusion, as this or that one-sided lack, the psychoanalyst sees an effect of that which surges in the subconscious. But it is interesting to note what it is that the psychoanalyst sees in the subconscious. When one hears what he enumerates in this subconscious it is, to begin with, disappointed life expectations. The psychoanalyst encounters one or another human being who suffers from this or that depression. This depression need not have its origin in the current consciousness of the soul's life but may originate in the past. Something occurred in the soul's experience in this life. The human being has overcome the experience, but not completely; in the subconscious something is left over. For example, he or she has experienced disappointments. Through his education, or through other processes, he has transcended these disappointments in his conscious life of soul, but they live on in his subconsciousness. There these disappointments surge up, in a sense, to the boundary of consciousness. And there they then bring forth the indefinite soul depression. The psychoanalyst seeks, therefore, in all kinds of disappointments, in disappointed life hopes and expectations which have been drawn down into the subconsciousness, what determines conscious life in a dim, unclear way. He seeks this also in what colors the soul's life as temperament. In all of that which colors the soul's life out of certain rational impulses, the psychoanalyst seeks a subconsciousness which, in a certain sense, only strikes up against consciousness. But then he comes to a yet further realm—I am only reporting here—which the psychoanalyst seeks to grasp by saying: That which plays up into conscious life is the fundamental substratum, the primeval animalistic residual mud, of the soul. One can certainly not deny that this primeval mud is there. In these lectures I have already drawn attention to the fact that certain mystics have had experiences which result from the fact that certain things, for example, eroticism, are subtly refined and play up into consciousness in such a way that one believes that one has had especially lofty experiences, whereas actually only the erotic, “the primeval animalistic mud of the soul,” has surged up and has sometimes been interpreted in the sense of profound mysticism. One can document, even in the case of such a fine, poetic mystic as Mechthild von Magdeburg, how erotic sensibilities penetrate into even the single details of her mental representations, of her thoughts. One must grasp just these matters clearly, in order that one does not fall prey to errors in the sphere of spiritual scientific investigation. For it is just the one who wants to enter into the realm of the spirit for whom it is a special obligation to know all the possible paths of error—not in order to pursue them—but rather just in order to avoid them. But the one who speaks about this animalistic primeval mud of the soul, who only speaks about life's disappointed hopes and other similar matters, such a one does not go deep enough into the life of the soul; such a one is like a person who walks across a field in which there is nothing yet to be seen and believes that only the earth, or perhaps also the fertilizer is present in it, whereas this field already contains all the fruits which will soon spring forth from it as grain or as some other crop. When one speaks of the primeval mud of the soul, one should also speak of everything which is embedded in it. Certainly, there are disappointed hopes in this primeval mud; but in that which is embedded there is hidden also a germinating force which represents, at the same time, that which—when the human being will have passed through the gates of death into the life which runs its course between death and a new birth, and which then enters into a new life on earth—makes something very different out of the disappointed hopes than merely a depression. It makes something in the next life which leads, one might say, to an “appointment,” not to a “disappointment,” which leads to a strengthening of soul initiative. There lies in that which the psychoanalyst seeks in the disappointed life-hopes in the soul's deepest levels, there lies—if he only goes deeply enough into it—that which prepares itself in the present life to take hold in the next life according to the laws of destiny.

One thus finds everywhere, when one digs over the animalistic primeval mud—without thereby dirtying one's hands, as, regrettably so often happens with the psychoanalysts—the spiritual-soul weaving of destiny which extends beyond birth and death within the spiritual and psychic life of the soul. It is just in analytic psychology that we have a realm in which one can so well learn how everything can be right and everything can be wrong when it comes to questions of world conceptions, looked at from one point of view or from another. But there is a tremendous amount which can be brought forward in support of the one-sided assertions of the psychoanalysts, and, therefore, the disproving of these assertions will not greatly impress those who swear by these concepts. But if one learns to form one's judgments in accordance with the method of gaining knowledge which was characterized at the outset of this lecture, in which one recognizes both what speaks for a point of view and what speaks against it, then just out of this for and against the soul will experience what is truly at work. For, I would like to say, between that which one can only observe in the soul realm, as the psychologists do who only concern themselves with the conscious realm, and that which the psychoanalyst finds down below in the animalistic primeval mud of the soul, just between these two realms of research lies the sphere which belongs to the eternal spirit and soul and which goes through births and deaths.

The penetration of the whole human inner realm leads also to a right relationship with the outer world. More recent natural science not only speaks in vague, indefinite ways about the etheric, but also speaks about it in such a way that just the greatest world riddles lead one back to it. Out of etheric conditions there is thought to have formed itself what then took on fixed shapes and became planets, suns and moons, etc. That which occurs as the soul-spiritual in the human being is regarded, more or less, as a mere episode. Before and behind is dead ether. If one learns to know the ether only from one side then one can come to a hypothetical construction of world evolution about which the sensitive thinker Herman Grimm—I have frequently quoted his statement, but it is so significant that it may well be brought before the soul again and again—says the following. As he became acquainted with the train of thought which asserts that out of the dead cosmic etheric mist arose that wherein now life and spirit are unfolding, and as he measures this against Goethe's world conception, he comes to the following expression:

“Already in his (Goethe's) youth, the great Laplace-Kantian phantasy of the origin and the eventual destruction of the earth planet, had for a long time asserted itself. From the rotating cosmic mist—with which children already become familiar in school—the central gaseous drop forms itself, out of which the earth emerges, and undergoes, as a rigidifying sphere, in the course of unimaginable epochs of time, all those phases—including the episode of its habitation by the human race—in order, finally, to plunge back into the sun as a burned-out slag: a lengthy, but for the public in our (Goethe's) time an entirely comprehensible process, for whose origin no other outer intervention is needed than the effort of some external force, to maintain the sun at a steady temperature of heat. No more fruitless perspective for the future can be imagined than this which is to be forced upon us today in the expectation of its scientific inevitability. A bone of a carcass, around which even a hungry dog makes a detour, would be a refreshing, appetizing object in comparison with this ultimate excrement of creation, as which our earth would finally plunge back into the sun. The intellectual appetite with which our generation takes up something of this kind and feels impelled to believe it, is a sign of the sick phantasy, which learned scholars in future ages will need much cleverness to explain as an historical phenomenon of our time.”

What arises here once again within German spiritual life as a feeling born out of a healthy life of soul, just this is shown in a true light by spiritual science. For, if one learns to know how the dead etheric is enlivened through the soul element, through the living ether, then, through inner experience one distances oneself from the possibility that our universal structure could ever have arisen out of the dead etheric. And this world riddle takes quite another aspect if one becomes acquainted with the corresponding riddle of the soul. One comes to know the ether itself in its living form, one comes to know how the dead ether must first originate out of the living. Thus, as one returns to the origins of world evolution, one must return to the soul, and to the recognition that one must seek the origin of all that develops today in the realm of the spirit and the soul. The spiritual-soul will remain a mere hypothesis, something merely thought out, in relation with the outer world riddles as long as through spiritual science one does not learn to know the whole living and weaving of the etheric by experiencing how the living ether from within meets with the dead ether from without; only along the path of spiritual science the world mist itself will be recognized as being alive, as being of the nature of spirit and of soul.

So you see, also for the world riddles, a significant perspective is gained just through an understanding of the riddles of the soul. I must close today with this perspective. It is, you see, just through a genuine consideration of external and of inner life from the viewpoint of spiritual science that one is led by way of the etheric into the spirit and the soul, as well within the soul as within the outer world.

There stands in opposition to such a cognitive attitude of soul, indeed, the point of view expressed by a man to whom I referred last time and whom I named on that occasion. We can today at least have the feeling that from the way in which spiritual science thinks about the bodily nature of man, the bridge leads directly to the spirit-soul realm, in which ethics and morality are rooted and which stem from the spirit—just as the sense perceptible leads into the spirit. But in its preoccupation with the purely external material world, science has developed an attitude of mind which completely denies that ethics is anchored in the spirit. One still is embarrassed to deny ethics as such, but one today speaks about ethics in the following way, as it is expressed in the conclusion of the lecture by Jacques Loeb, which in reference to its beginning I brought forward last time. There he who comes through natural scientific research to a brutal disavowal of ethics says:

“If our existence depends on the blind play of forces and is only the work of chance; if we ourselves are only chemical mechanisms—how can there be for us an ethical reality? The answer to this is that our instincts form the roots of our ethical being, and our instincts are as subject to heredity as the constituent forms of our body. We eat and drink and reproduce ourselves, not because metaphysicians have attained the insight that this is desirable, but rather because we are mechanically predisposed to do so. We are active because we are forced mechanically to be so through the processes in our nervous system, and if human beings are not economic slaves, nevertheless it is instinct which determines the direction of their activity in regard to their successful triggering, or to their successful work. A mother loves her children and cares for them not because metaphysicians had the bright idea that this would be a lovely thing to do, but rather because the instinct to care for the offspring is as firmly implanted, presumably through the two sexual chromosomes, as is the morphological character of the female body. We enjoy the company of other human beings because we are compelled to do so by the conditions of our human inheritance. We fight for justice and truth, and are ready to make sacrifices for them, because, instinctively, we desire to see our fellow human beings happy. That we possess an ethical trait, for this we have solely to thank our instincts, which are determined for us chemically and through heredity in the same way as the form of our body.”

Ethical action leads us back to instinct! Instincts lead back to the effects of physical-chemical activity! This logic is indeed most threadbare. For, certainly as a matter of course, one can say, that one should not wait with ethical action for the metaphysicians, until they have spun out some metaphysical principles, but that is the same as if someone were to say: Should one wait with digestion until the metaphysicians or the physiologists have discovered the laws of digestion? I should once like to recommend to Professor Loeb that he not investigate the physiological laws of digestion as he storms with brutality against the metaphysical laws of ethical life. But one can say: One can be a significant investigator of nature today—but the habits of thought tend in the direction of cutting one off from all spiritual life, tend to prevent even a glance in the direction of the life of the spirit. But parallel with this there is always the fact that one can document a defect in thinking, so that one never has the full effectiveness which belongs to a thought.

One can have peculiar experiences in this regard. I recently brought forward such an experience; but I would like to present it once again because it links with the statements of a very significant natural scientist of the present time, who belongs with those whom I attack just because in one sphere I value them very highly. This natural scientist has earned great achievements in the field of astrophysics, as well as in certain other fields of natural scientific research. When, however, he came to write a comprehensive book about the present-day view of the universe and about the evolution of this world view, he comes, in his foreword, to a curious statement. He is, in a certain sense, delighted how wonderfully advanced we are in that we can now interpret all phenomena from a natural scientific perspective, and he points with a certain arrogance, as is customary in such circles, to earlier times, which had not yet advanced so far. And, in this regard, he calls upon Goethe, by saying: Whether one can truly say that we live in the best of times, that we cannot determine, but that we live in the best of times in regard to natural scientific knowledge in comparison with earlier times, in this regard we can call upon Goethe, who says:

Forgive! It does seem so sublime,
Entering into the spirit of the time
To see what wise men, who lived long ago, believed
Till we at last have all the highest aims achieved.
Faust, translated by Walter Kaufman

Therewith a distinguished natural scientist of the present day concludes his exposition by calling Goethe to witness. Only he forgot, in doing so, that it is Wagner who makes this assertion, and that Faust remarks to this assertion, after Wagner has left:

Hope never seems to leave those who affirm,
The shallow minds that stick to must and mold—
They dig with greedy hands for gold
And yet are happy if they find a worm.

To reflect on what Goethe actually says, the distinguished researcher neglected to do in the moment in which he called upon Wagner in order to lend expression to the thought of how splendidly advanced we are. In this, I should like to say, we can catch a glimpse of where it is that thinking fails in its pursuit of reality.

And we could cite many such examples if we were to explore, even a little, the scientific literature of the present day. It will surely not be held against me—as I have said that I greatly value the natural scientist whom I have just quoted—if, in relation with such natural scientific research, which prides itself on being able to impart information about the spirit, I seek to bring to expression the true Goethean attitude of mind and of heart. For, we can forgive one or another monistic thinker, when, out of the weakness of his thinking he fails to come to the spirit; it is dangerous, however, when the attitude of soul, which arises in Jacques Loeb and in the natural scientist just quoted, who presents himself as Wagner, while believing to characterize himself as Goethe, when this attitude of soul gains authority more and more in the uncritical acceptance of the widest circles. And this is what is happening. The one who penetrates into that which can arise as an attitude of mind and heart out of spiritual science, such a one, perhaps—even though it may not appear sufficiently respectful in the face of such a statement as that natural scientist made, in connection with Goethe—may come to the genuinely Goethean attitude, when he connects himself with those words of Goethe's which I would like to paraphrase in closing this lecture

Forgive! It is a shock indeed
Entering souls that in their greed
Cling to matter with all their might
And for the spirit have no sight.

To round out the contents of this volume, reference may be made to some further important references Rudolf Steiner made to the cosmic alphabet with the help of which it is possible to read the cosmos, the great book of nature.

In a lecture given in Dornach on 1 August 1924^a he looked back on how for him there had been a kind of shibboleth (test word, motto) for the anthroposophical movement from its beginning to enable people to read the great ‘book of nature’ again in the spirit, to find the spiritual background to the world of nature again. For this, he said, was one of the most important impulses for the new Michael age which had started in 1879. He showed how one can read the book of nature by comparing it with printed books. These involve a specific number of letters, and so does the writing in the book of nature, except that there the letters are categories, archetypes, cosmic thoughts. These make up the alphabet of cosmic alphabet. Just as someone who sees only the individual letters—a, b, c, etc.—and does not know how to combine them properly, is unable to appreciate the greatness of Goethe’s Faust, for instance, so, Steiner said, all that is active and moving in the cosmos, and the way the human being is connected with this, can only be read by someone who knows how to combine the letters of the cosmic alphabet.

In the same sense, he once said with reference to Occult Science: ‘What does it actually say in this Occult Science? [...] Thoughts are written in it, but these are not ordinary thoughts. They are the thoughts which do creative work in the world out there. [...] I may call the powers I have described in it the world-creative powers or cosmic thoughts.’ (Dornach, 24 March 1922, [in German] in GA 211.)

We can understand that the letters of the cosmic alphabet cannot be found with logical or philosophical conclusions but are gained from vision in the spirit. In the course of human evolution, people have again and again sought to read the great book of nature. This is why there are different alphabets, or rather different names given to individual letters in the cosmic alphabet. Rudolf Steiner emphatically referred to Aristotle’s ten categories and the ten sephiroth of the Jewish cabbala as such alphabets. (Dornach, 10 May 1924).^b The same applies to the book of ten pages to which the French philosopher Saint-Martin referred as late as the 18th century.

The Rosicrucians also know of a ten-letter cosmic alphabet. (See German text on the ten metamorphoses of the Sun Logos according to the Rosicrucian chronicle in GA 88; also the discussion of the Rosicrucian words ‘One who is able to understand well the work of numbers, will see how his world is made ...’, [in German] in esoterische Stunden, Berlin, 12 February 1908, GA 266/1.) In his report on the theosophical congress in Munich in 1907 Rudolf Steiner referred, clearly not without purpose, to the fact that the letters E. D. N.—1. C. M.—P. S. S. R. in the programme were ‘the ten initial letters of the words expressing the goal of true Rosicrucianism: ex deo nascimur, in Christo morimur, per spirituatn sanctum reviviscimus.'

A number of statements Rudolf Steiner made show that the results of his spiritual scientific investigations were also due to the ability to read the cosmic alphabet. He said this most clearly in a lecture given in Dornach on 22 April 1924 (in GA 233a).^c Considering Aristotle’s categories, he said: ‘Basically everything anthroposophy has given us and will ever be able to give, is experienced the way anything read in Faust is experienced from the letters [in the book]. For all the secrets of the physical and the spiritual world are contained in these simple ideas which make up the cosmic alphabet. [...] So you see how in ten concepts, the inner power of light and influence needs to be unveiled again, one had what for millennia had been a tremendous, instinctive revelation of wisdom.’

20 years earlier, in the lecture on the Cabbala (Berlin, 18 March 1904, in this volume) he was quite specific about this: ‘You will find it said in my Theosophy that the occult teaching [in the Cabbala] agrees with the things taught in theosophy.’

He put it even more definitely in a lecture given in Dornach on 19 September 1922 ([in German] in GA 344): ‘If we consider the whole human being as I have presented the subject in my Theosophy, in his nine parts, we find that from above down they are spirit human being, life spirit, Spirit Self, spiritual soul, rational soul, sentient soul, sentient body, ether body and physical body. These are nine. They would not connect with earthly life in the right way if there were not also a synthesis, which is the tenth. This gives us ten, and these also appear in the sephiroth of pre-Christian times, though in a form that was right for that time, when I-awareness did not yet wholly exist.’ See also the two undated sketches by Rudolf Steiner (archive Nos. 685 and 712) which follow below.

As the nine becomes the seven which determines all evolution, and as ultimately everything goes back to the three, which in turn must be seen as the two and the one—since everything can only manifest in polarities, with the one as the oneness behind them—all this can be seen from the notes made for J. Peelen and E. Schuré (in this volume).

A look at his cosmological investigations connected with the secret of numbers permitted the following to be said in a lecture given in Stuttgart on 29 August 1906:^d ‘There are thus seven planets with seven times seven states each, which is written as \(777\) in occult writing. In occult writing, the seven in the unit position indicates the globes, the \(7\) in the tens the rounds, and the one in the hundreds the planets. These numbers have to be multiplied with one another. Our planetary system thus has to go through \(7 \times 7 \times 7 = 343\) transformations.’ He then referred to a ‘strange passage’ in Blavatsky’s The Secret Doctrine, the content of which Steiner said was largely inspired by one of the most sublime spiritual figures: ‘But the great initiates always expressed themselves with great caution; they only gave pointers. Above all they always let people do some work for themselves. The passage is therefore full of riddles. H. P. B knew this. The teacher did not speak of consecutive incarnations, he merely said: Learn to solve the riddle of \(777\) incarnations. He wanted that one should learn that these are \(343\) [states of transformation]. The task is given in The Secret Doctrine, not the solution. This has only been found quite recently.’

The solution was evidently found by Rudolf Steiner himself. It may be found in the fragment written in 1903/04, where he used completely original German terms for the 7 metamorphoses gone through in states of conscious awareness, life and form. In the lectures on planetary evolution (in this volume), he also pointed out that the sum of the digits in these 343 states in the whole of evolution is 10. What does the number 10 signify?

Ten was the number given as the basis of cosmic order even in the occult knowledge of antiquity. The Pythagoreans considered it to be the all-encompassing, all-limiting mother, for it is the sum of the first four numbers: \(1 + 2 + 3 + 4 = 10\). And the four is the sign of the cosmos or of creation, since Earth is in its fourth embodiment—everything we find on our Earth, including the fourth principle in the human being, depends on the fact that this creation is in the fourth state of its planetary evolution (Stuttgart, 15 September 1907, in GA 101).^e As the sum of the four is ten, we speak of ten creative or cosmic thoughts.^*

It is evident from the material presented in this volume that Rudolf Steiner’s spiritual scientific alphabet is differentiated into three and seven letters, the three main letters conscious awareness - life - form, in theosophical terms first, second and third Logos, in Christian terms Father, Son and Spirit, and their possible relationships, of which there are only seven. In the 12^th lecture on planetary evolution in this volume, Rudolf Steiner added the terms used in the sankhya philosophy founded by the Indian sage Kapil: sattwa, rajas, tamas, the three gunas, also with seven possible ways of combining them. These are the foundation of the sankhya system (shankya = number). Here it is enlightening to read what Rudolf Steiner said in the lectures he gave at the end of 1912, when the Anthroposophical Society was founded (GA 142).^f

In 1924, the last year of his lecturing work, Rudolf Steiner had been asked by the Christian Community priests to talk to them about Revelation. Once more the fundamental significance of the principle of number in occult investigation emerged on a grand scale. This completed a great sequence which had begun with Christianity as Mystical Fact in 1902.^g In the chapter on Revelation, he showed the route, as it were, which he had to follow to reveal ‘the cosmic thoughts which are the basis of all things, the ‘fundamental ideas of creation’. Immediately after this—in 1903—he began to work on the unveiling of those cosmic thoughts in writing Theosophy, and the spiritual scientific cosmology which remained a fragment, progressively developing the theme more and more strongly.

H. W.

• a. Steiner R. Karmic Relationships vol. 3. Tr. G. Adams. London: Rudolf Steiner Press 1977.
• b. Steiner R. From Beetroot to Buddhism. Answers to Questions GA 353. Tr. A. R. Meuss. London: Rudolf Steiner Press 1999.
• c. Steiner R. The Easter Festival. Tr. G. Adams. London: Rudolf Steiner Press 1968.
• d. In At the Gates of Spiritual Science GA 95. Tr. E. H. Goddard, C. Davy. London: Rudolf Steiner Press 1976.
• e. Steiner R. Occult Signs and Symbols from GA 101. Tr. S. Kurland. New York: Anthroposophic Press 1972.
• *. Why it is ten and not twelve, seeing that the number of the macrocosm is really twelve, may be seen from the lecture on the Cabbala. It ‘distinguishes twelve principles in the world, the first and last of which remain secret because they cannot be put into words at all. Only the other ten are put in words.’
• f. Steiner R. The Bhagavad Gita and the Epistles of Paul GA 142. Tr. L. D. Monges, D. M. Bugbey. New York: Anthroposophic Press 1971.
• g. Steiner R. Christianity as Mystical Fact GA 8. Tr. A. Welbum. Hudson: Anthroposophic Press 1997.

I have already expressed my gratitude to the committee, to Miss Beverley, and to all of you who have devoted the past two weeks to studying our subject. Rest assured that a warm sense of gratitude will remain with me as a pleasant memory of this lecture course. Now, I just want to add a few words to the perspectives expressed in the lectures. Most of you are familiar with the relationship between Waldorf educational principles and spiritual science as it exists in the anthroposophic movement, and perhaps as we close this conference you will allow me to say a few words on this subject.

People today still have an erroneous view of the anthroposophic movement, perhaps because one of my wishes—however impractical—cannot be fulfilled. It is true that the Waldorf movement grew out of the anthroposophic movement, but it is equally true that I would truly prefer to give a different name to that movement every week. I realize that it would be terribly confusing, but I would very much like to do this, because names actually do a great deal of harm today. The confusion this would create in people’s minds is obvious—if letterheads were changed each week, and people were to receive a letter printed with the previous week’s name, “since superseded.” Nevertheless, it would be very good for the anthroposophic movement if it had no permanent name, because most people today are concerned only with names and never get to the subject itself.

People can turn to a Greek lexicon and, in their own language, invent words to express anthroposophy, and thus invent an idea of what spiritual science is and judge us accordingly. People form an opinion about us according to their idea of the name, thus avoiding the trouble of looking into the substance of spiritual science.

The book table at the door of this hall has disappeared, but I assure you that I shuddered every day as I arrived and saw the mass of literature there. I would be happy if there were less of it, but people must study spiritual science, of course—there is that. One cannot look only a name, and this is why it would be such a good thing if we were spared the need to have one. Obviously, that would not work, but in a lecture course about applying spiritual science to life, I think it shows how far we are from any sectarianism or any desire to fill people’s heads with dogma. The only goal of spiritual science is to acquire knowledge of the essence of cosmic truths. And if there is any wish to participate constructively in evolution, it is essential to truly understand the world’s events.

It is sad that there is so little inclination to look into the course of world events today, but this is in fact the purpose of spiritual science. This, too, is why we can speak of special areas such as education without beginning with a scheduled program or the like. In establishing the Waldorf school, we saw that it is not a matter of introducing the rigid dogma that spiritual science is believed to represent; rather, we never introduce anything of spiritual science as it is intended for adults. We realized that spiritual science must live within us as a power that leads to a fresh understanding of human nature and an unbiased observation of the world, which in turn leads to free activity.

Not long ago, I read an extraordinary criticism; it was very antagonistic. There are many such criticisms, and I have no wish to discuss them in detail. This particular critic said that I seem to make efforts to be unbiased—but the words implied a serious criticism. I would have thought it was a common duty today—especially in spiritual matters—to work toward open-minded knowledge, but apparently it can be a matter for severe reproach. Nevertheless, I think that the subject of education in particular can lead to ready understanding between the Continent and England, and when I see what your attitude has been toward these lectures, I consider it as a very good sign. When trying to describe our time, people like to use the abstract phrase, “We are living in an age of transition.” Of course, every age is an age of transition—always from one period to the next. The point is, however, what is it that is in transition? At the present time, all kinds of signs indicate that we are indeed caught up in the process of a grand transition.

Perhaps the best way to explain this is to lead your thoughts back to the stage of spiritual evolution reached in England during the twelfth to the fourteenth centuries. At the beginning of the fourteenth century, those who claimed to be cultured spoke French. English consisted of dialects that did not enter the general culture of the people, and the language of science was Latin. If, for example, we want to study the general nature of education in England during the fourteenth century, around 1364, we can do so from Higden’s Polychronycon, which was published at the time. Written in Latin, the book makes it clear that the medium of culture was Latin. When that book was written, the language of culture was Latin, but schools were being established in which the national language was finding its way into education (and this was also true of other countries in Europe). Schools were established in Winchester and Oxford, in which the national tongue was already in use. In the late fourteenth century, we find the important transition from Latin—an international language—to the national tongue.

Similar transitions occurred earlier or later in other regions of the civilized world, and this phenomenon has great significance. Insofar as England is concerned, we can place it in the late fourteenth century. When Higden wrote his book in 1364, he was able to tell us that the Latin tongue was still the universal medium for education. When a certain Trevisa translated it into English in 1385, we are told that English had been introduced into schools. Thus, we see the transition from the international language of Latin, which cultured people all over the world used to discuss matters of education, to the age when national language rises above the level of dialect to become, for various peoples, the medium for education. This is a significant transition.

According to the anthroposophic view, we can describe it as a transition from the age of the intellectual soul, in which people felt more connected to the universe, to that of the spiritual soul, in which human beings are to become aware of their free inner power of resolve and action. This transition is the essence of modern civilization; this alone could institute the great cosmic process in which we are still immersed today.

The effects of this emerging national language did not enter human souls and hearts immediately. Initially, in England, too, the Renaissance movement, or “Humanist” movement, began to flow north from the south. In its early days, the Humanist movement indeed aspired to the qualities of the spiritual soul, but never reached the point of real understanding. Thus, it was established that, to be truly human, one must absorb the humanist, classical culture. This struggle for human freedom and the exercise of inner, spiritual activity has continued for centuries, right up to our own day. But increasingly, the needs of civilized humanity become obvious.

In the age before this urge toward spiritual soul, language itself gave rise to the element of internationalism, making it possible for the cultured people of every country to work with one another. Language was the international element. We can place the actual transition in the second half of the fourteenth century, when this language could no longer serve as a medium for international understanding. There was an urge within human beings to develop spiritual activity from depths of their own being, and they resorted to national language, which made it increasingly necessary to understand at a level higher than that of language or speech.

We need spirituality that no longer arises from mere language, but issues more directly from the soul. A true realization of spiritual science that connects history with the present time shows that its purpose is to find, throughout the world, an international medium of understanding, through which people can find their way to one another—one that transcends the level of language.

All interaction between human beings is incorporated by the faculty of speech into sounds communicated through the air. In speech, our being is truly active in the material world. If we understand one another at a level beyond speech by means of deeper elements in the soul—through thoughts carried by feeling and warmed by the heart—then we have an international medium of understanding, but we need heart for it to come into being. We must find the path to human spirit at a level beyond speech. The search for a language of thought—and everything related to philosophy, education, religion, and art—is the purpose of the anthroposophic movement during the present period of history.

Ordinary speech lives and moves through the medium of air and exists in the material world. The language that spiritual science looks for will move through the pure element of light passing from soul to soul and heart to heart—and this is not just a figure of speech. Modern civilization will need such a medium of understanding, not just for the matters of high culture, but also for everyday life. Before this can be realized, of course, many different kinds of conferences will be held, but during recent times, the fruitfulness of such congresses for healing human beings has not been very apparent. The anthroposophic movement would like to intercede for a true healing of humankind, which can arise only through mutual understanding. Because of this, we try to understand our own age within the context of history, so that we can become human in the true sense—human beings with a fully aware soul, as was true of another stage of evolution, when Latin was the medium of international understanding. The function once served by Latin must now be taken up by universal human ideas, through which we can find our way to other people all over the earth.

Anything that lives in the world requires soul and spirit as well as a physical body. In the very truest sense, spiritual science would be the soul and spirit of the “body” as it has entered our global civilization as the world economy and the other worldly activities. Spiritual science does not disdain or avoid the most practical areas of life; it would gladly infuse them with the only element that can lead to real progress in human evolution.

I am so infinitely grateful that you wish to understand how, in this sense, our educational attempts are based on the anthroposophic movement as a true expression of the present stage of evolution. I am grateful, too, for your interest in the illuminations and shades of meaning I have tried to introduce, in addition to speaking of the historical significance of the aims of this art of education. And I especially thank you for your cordial feelings toward a course of lectures given with the object of describing the goals of Waldorf education toward the progress of civilization as it confronts today’s needs.

I have tried to describe how Waldorf education points to the deepest needs of humankind in the present age, and, as I say, your sympathetic understanding will indeed remain in my heart and soul as a very good memory of this course.

[ 1 ] Philosophy did not arise in the same way in which it is continued in modern times. In these days it is a connection of ideas which are not experienced in one's inner being, in the soul, in such a manner that a man, conscious of self, feels himself in these ideas as in a reality. Therefore we seek after all possible theoretical means to prove that the philosophic content does refer to a reality. But this way leads only to different philosophic systems, and of these one can say they are right to a certain extent; for mostly the grounds on which they are refuted are of as much value as those on which it is sought to prove them.

[ 2 ] Now with Anthroposophy it is a question not of attaining the reality of the philosophic content by theoretic thought, but by the cultivation of a method which on the one hand is similar to that by which in ancient times Philosophy was won, and on the other, is as consciously exact as the mathematical and natural scientific method of more recent times.

[ 3 ] The ancient method was semi-conscious. Compared with the condition of full consciousness of the modern scientific thinker it had something almost dreamy. It existed not in such dreams as concealed indirectly by their very nature their real content, but in waking dreams, which pointed to reality precisely by means of this content. Nor had such a soul-content the abstract character of the modern presentation, but rather that of picture-making.

[ 4 ] Such a soul-content must be regained, but in full consciousness, according to the modern stage of human evolution; exactly in the same sense of consciousness as we find in scientific thought. Anthroposophical research seeks to attain this in a first stage of supersensible knowledge in the condition of ‘imaginative consciousness’. It is reached through a process of meditation in the soul. This leads the entire force of the soul-life to presentations which are easily visualized and held fast in a state of rest. By this means we finally realize, if such a process is constantly repeated over a sufficient period of time, how the soul in its experience becomes free from the body. We see clearly that the thought of ordinary consciousness is a reflection of a spiritual activity which remains unconscious as such, after having become so by the incorporation of the human physical organism in its course.

All ordinary thinking is dependent on the supersensible spiritual activity which is reproduced in the physical organism. But at the same time we are conscious only of what the physical organism allows us to be conscious of. [ 5 ] The spiritual activity can be separated from the physical organism by meditation, and the soul then experiences the supersensible in a super-sensible way; no longer the physical but the etheric organism is the background of the soul's experience. We have a presentation before our soul's consciousness with the character of a picture. [ 6 ] We have before us in this kind of presentation pictures of the powers which, coming from the supersensible are the basis of the organism as its powers of growth, and also as the very powers which function in the regulation of the processes of nourishment. We gain in these pictures a real vision of the life-forces. This is the stage of ‘imaginative cognition’. This is life in the etheric human organism, and with our own etheric organism we live in the etheric Cosmos. There is between the etheric organism and the etheric Cosmos no such sharp distinction relating to subjective and objective as there is in physical thought about the things of the world.

[ 7 ] This ‘imaginative knowledge’ is the means whereby we can recall the very substantial reality of ancient Philosophy, but we can also conceive a new Philosophy, and a real conception of Philosophy can only come into being by means of this imaginative knowledge. And when this Philosophy is once there it can be grasped and understood by the ordinary consciousness; for it speaks out of ‘imaginative’ experience in a form which springs from spiritual (etheric) reality, and whose reality-content can, through the ordinary consciousness, be recalled in experience.

[ 8 ] A higher activity of knowledge which is forthcoming when meditation is extended, is required for Cosmology. Not only is intensive quietness cultivated on a soul-content or subject matter but also a fully conscious stationary condition of the quiet, content-less soul. This is after the meditative soul-content or subject matter has been banished from the consciousness. The stage ‘is reached where the spiritual content of the Cosmos flows into the empty soul—the stage of ‘inspired cognition’. We have in part of us a spiritual Cosmos, just as we have a physical Cosmos before the senses. We succeed in seeing, in the powers of the spiritual Cosmos, what takes place spiritually between man and the Cosmos in the process of breathing. In this and the other rhythmic processes of man we find the physical reproduction of what exists in the spiritual sphere in human astral organization. We attain to the vision of how this astral organism has its place in the spiritual Cosmos outside the life on earth, and how it takes on the cloak of the physical organism through embryonic life and birth, to lay it down again in death. By means of this knowledge we can distinguish between heredity, which is an earthly phenomenon, and that which man brings with him from the spiritual world.

[ 9 ] In this way, through ‘inspired knowledge’, we attain to a Cosmology which can embrace man in respect of his psychic and spiritual existence. Inspired knowledge is cultivated in the astral organism because we experience an existence outside our bodies in the Cosmos of the Spirit. But the same thing happens in the etheric organism; and we can translate this knowledge into human speech in the images which present themselves in this sphere, and we can harmonize it with the content of Philosophy. So we get a Cosmic Philosophy.

[ 10 ] For Religious Cognition a third thing is necessary. We must dive down into those existences which reveal themselves in picture form as the content of ‘inspired knowledge’; and this is attained when we add ‘Soul-exercises of the Will’ to the kind of meditation which we have till now been describing. For instance, we attempt to present to ourselves events which in the physical world have a definite course, but in reverse order, from the end to the beginning. Doing this we separate the soul-life, through a process of will which is not used in ordinary consciousness from the cosmic externals, and let the soul sink into those Beings which manifest themselves by inspiration. We attain true intuition, a union with beings of a spiritual world. These experiences of intuition are reflected in etheric and also in physical man, and produce in this reflection the subject matter of religious consciousness.

[ 11 ] Through this ‘intuitive cognition’ we gain a vision of the true nature of the Ego, which in reality is sunk into the spiritual world. The Ego which we know in ordinary consciousness is only a quite faint reflection of its true proportions. Intuition provides the possibility of feeling the connection of this faint reflection with the divine primal universe, to which in its true shape it belongs. Moreover, we are enabled to see how spiritual man,, the true Ego, has his place in the spiritual world, when he is sunk in sleep. In this condition the physical and etheric organisms require the rhythmic processes for their own regeneration. In a waking condition the Ego lives in this rhythm and in the metabolic processes that are a part of it; in the condition of sleep, the rhythm and the metabolic processes of man have a life of their own as physical and etheric organisms; and the astral organisms and the Ego then take their place in the spirit world. The translation of man into this world by inspired and intuitive knowledge is conscious; he lives in a spiritual Cosmos, just as by his senses he lives in a physical Cosmos. He can speak of the content of the religious consciousness from knowledge, and he can do this because what he experiences in the spiritual sphere is reflected in the physical and etheric man. Moreover, the reflected pictures can be expressed in speech, and in this form have a meaning which throws religious light on the human disposition of ordinary consciousness.

[ 12 ] Thus we reach the heart of Philosophy by imaginative cognition, of Cosmology by inspiration, and of the religious life through intuition. Besides that already described, the following soul-exercise helps towards attaining intuition. One tries so to grasp the life, which otherwise unconsciously unfolds itself from one human age to another, that one consciously contracts habits which one did not have before, or consciously changes such as one had. The greater the effort that such a change necessitates, the better it is for gaining intuitive knowledge; for these changes bring about a loosening of the will-power from the physical and etheric organism. We bind the will to the astral organism and to the true form of the Ego and consciously immerse both of them into the spirit world.

[ 13 ] What we may call ‘abstract thought’ has been perfected only in the modern spiritual development of mankind. In earlier periods of evolution this kind of thought was unknown to man, though it is necessary to the development of human spiritual activity, because it frees the power of thought from the picture-form. We achieve the possibility of thinking through the physical organism, though such thinking is not rooted in a real world; only in an apparent world where the processes of Nature can be copied without man himself contributing anything to these pictures. We attain a copy of Nature, which, qua copy, can be genuine, because the life in the thought-copy is not in itself reality, but only apparent reality. But the moral impulses can also be taken up into this pseudo-thought, so that they exercise no compulsion on man. The moral impulses are themselves real because they come from the spirit world; the manner in which man experiences them in his apparent world enables him to adapt himself in accordance with them, or not. They themselves exercise no compulsion on him either through his body or his soul.

[ 14 ] So man strides on; thought which was in ancient times completely bound to the unconsciously imagined, inspired and intuitive knowledge, thought in which the subject matter was laid as open as Imagination and Inspiration and Intuition themselves, becomes abstract thought conducted through the physical organism. In this thought, which has a pseudo-life, because it is spirit substance translated into the physical world, man has the possibility of developing an objective nature-knowledge and his own moral freedom.

More details on this subject you will find in my Philosophy of Spirit Activity, my Knowledge of Higher Worlds and how to attain it, Theosophy, Occult Science, etc. What is necessary in order to return to a Philosophy, a Cosmology and a Religion that embrace all man, is to enter upon the province of an exact clairvoyance in Imagination, Inspiration and Intuition; and this consciously—that is in contradistinction to the old dreamlike clairvoyance. Man attains to his full consciousness in the province of a life of abstract presentations. It remains to him, in the further advance of humanity, to bring this full consciousness of the spiritual world to bear on his daily life.

[ 1 ] In the state of sleep, sense-experience ceases for the ordinary consciousness as does also the psychic activity of thinking, feeling and willing. Thus man loses what he terms as ‘himself’.

[ 2 ] Through the psychic exercises of the soul which have been described in the previous studies, thinking is the first to be seized by the higher consciousness. Without being lost first however, thinking cannot be thus seized. In successful meditation one experiences this loss of thinking. One does actually feel oneself as an independent inner being; there is actually some kind of an inner experience. But one cannot at once experience one's own entity so strongly as to comprehend it through active thought. This only becomes possible by degrees. The inner activity grows and the power of thinking is kindled from a quarter other than ordinary consciousness. In this ordinary consciousness can one only experience oneself in a momentary glimpse. But by the rekindling of thought through the psychic exercises, after passing through not-thinking and arriving at imagining, one experiences the content of the whole cycle of life from birth to the present moment as one's own proper Ego.

The memories of ordinary consciousness are also experiences of the moment, images realized in the present which point to the past only through their content.

[ 3] Such memories are at first lost when image-making begins. The past is then seen as if it was something present. As in sense-perception the senses are led to the things which are side by side in space, so the kindled activity of the soul is led to the different events of one's own life in image-making. The course of events in time is presented as happening at the same time. A process of growth becomes something present at the moment.

[ 4 ] But in higher consciousness there is something else than just the memories of the ordinary consciousness. There you have the activity of the etheric organism previously unknown to this consciousness. The memories of the ordinary consciousness are only images of man's experience through his physical organism of the outer world, whereas the ‘imaginative’ consciousness knows the activity which the etheric organism has effected in the physical organism.

[ 5 ] The rising-up of this experience happens in such a way that one has the feeling of something rising from the depths of the soul which before had indeed lain hidden in one's own nature, but had not surged up into the consciousness. All this must be experienced in full consciousness; and that is the case if the ordinary consciousness continues to be kept side by side with the ‘imaginative’.

The experiences gained in the active exchange between etheric and physical organism must always be capable of being brought into relationship with the corresponding memory-life of the ordinary consciousness. Whoever is not able to do this is not dealing with imagination but with an experience of a visionary kind.

[ 6 ] In visionary experience consciousness is not adding a new content to the old, as in imagination, but it is changed; the old content cannot be recalled at the same time as the new. The man who has ‘imagination’ has his ordinary self next to him, as it were; the visionary has been turned into quite a different being.

[ 7 ] Anybody criticizing Anthroposophy from the outside should take note of this. Imaginative knowledge has often been considered as leading to something visionary. This view has to be strictly rejected by the true researcher into the spirit. He does by no means replace the ordinary consciousness by a visionary one, but he incorporates an imaginative one into it. Ordinary thinking fully controls imaginative experience at every moment. The visionary picturing is a stronger entering of the ego into the physical organism than is the case in the ordinary consciousness. Imagining on the other hand is an actual ‘stepping-out’ from the physical organism, and the ordinary constitution of the soul remains by its side consciously held in the physical organism.

We grow conscious in a part of the soul which before was unconscious, but that part which before was conscious in the physical organism remains in the same psychic condition. The interchange between the experience of imagination and that of ordinary consciousness is just as real a happening to the soul as is the guiding to and fro of soul-activity from one thought to another in the course of ordinary consciousness. If this is kept in mind one cannot mistake imaginative knowledge for something of a visionary nature. It tends, on the contrary, to drive out all inclination to what is visionary. But he who uses ‘imaginative cognition’ is also in a position to realize that visions are not independent of the body but dependent on it in a far higher degree than sense-experiences. For he can compare the character of visions with that of imagination which is really independent of the body. The Visionary is more deeply immersed in his physical functions than the man who perceives the outer world by means of his senses in the ordinary way.

[ 8 ] When Imagination takes place ordinary thinking is recognized as something having no substantial content. Only what is introduced into consciousness by imagination is found to be the substantial content of this ordinary thinking. Ordinary thinking may indeed be compared to a mirrored picture. But while the mirrored picture rises in the ordinary consciousness the imagined picture is alive unconsciously.

We imagine also in our ordinary psychic life, but unconsciously. If we did not imagine we should not think. The conscious thoughts of ordinary psychic life are the reflections of unconscious imagining mirrored by the physical organism. And the substantial part of this imagining is the etheric organism which is manifest in the development of man's earthly life.

[ 9 ] A new element enters the consciousness with inspiration. In order to attain inspiration the individual human life must be abstracted, as has been described in the previous studies. But the power of activity which the soul has won for itself by imagining still remains. Possessing this power the soul can attain pictures of that which in the universe underlies the etheric organism just as this underlies the physical.

[ 10 ] And thus the soul is faced with its own eternal nature. In the ordinary consciousness it happens that the soul can only give its activity a conceptual form by grasping the physical organism. It dives into it and there finds the pictured reflections of that which it experiences with its etheric organism. This latter, however, the soul does not experience in its activity. This etheric organism is itself experienced in imaginative consciousness. But this happens through the soul having gone further back with its experience to the astral organism. As long as the soul merely ‘imagines’ it lives unconsciously in the astral organism, and both the physical and etheric organisms are contemplated; as soon as the soul attains ‘inspired’ knowledge the astral organism is also brought into contemplation; for the soul now lives in the eternal centre of its being, and can contemplate this by means of the continuation of ‘intuitive’ cognition. Through this it lives in the spiritual world, as in ordinary existence it lives in its physical organism.

[ 11 ] The soul learns in this way how the physical, etheric and astral organisms grow out of the spiritual world. But it can also observe the continued activity of the spiritual in the organization of the earthly being—man. It sees how the spiritual centre of man's nature sinks into the physical, etheric and astral organism. This sinking is not really a merging of something spiritual into something physical, so that the former dwells in the latter. But it is a transformation of part of the human soul into the physical and etheric organization. This part of the soul disappears during earthly life by being transformed into the physical and etheric organism. It is this part of the soul which is experienced through thought by the ordinary consciousness in its reflection. But the soul emerges again elsewhere.

This is the case with that part of it which in earthly existence is experienced as volition, which has a different character from thought. Volition even during wakefulness contains a section which is asleep. The soul receives a thought clearly. Actually man when he thinks is fully awake, which is not the case with volition. The will is stimulated by thought. Consciousness extends as far as thought. But then the act of volition sinks into the human organism. If I deliberately raise my hand I have the causal thought in my ordinary consciousness to start with, and the sight of my raised hand with all the accompanying sensations is the result of my act of will. What is between remains unconscious. What happens in the depths of the organism when a man puts his will into action escapes the ordinary consciousness just as do the events of sleep. Man has always a part of himself asleep even when he is awake.

[ 12 ] This is the part in which continues to live during earthly existence as much of the Spirit-Soul as had not been transformed into the physical organism. One perceives this when true intuition has been achieved by the exercises of the will previously described. Then we recognize behind the will the eternal part of the human soul, which is transformed into the head-organization; and disappears in its form-life during earthly existence, rises again on the other side to pass through death and to become ready once more to help in a future physical body and earthly life.

This brings this study to the event of death which is to be further touched upon in the next. For by the views I have put before you to-day we are led only to the continuity of the Will and to a knowledge of that part of the soul from the past, which is transformed into human head-organization. We have not reached the destiny of the ego-consciousness, which can only be treated in conjunction with the Christ-problem. Therefore that study will again lead us back to a consideration of the mysteries of Christianity.

[ 13 ] The customary Philosophy of Ideas consists of thoughts; but they have no life, no substance. The substance comes by leaving behind the physical organism in ‘Imagination’. As I have shown, formerly the ideas of Philosophy were only mirrored pictures. If these are built up into a Philosophy, and if one studies them without prejudice, one must feel their unreality. One feels vaguely the moment here described as the one in which all remembered thought entirely disappears.

Augustine and Descartes have felt this, but have inefficiently explained it to themselves as ‘doubt’. But Philosophy acquires life when the unity of life is substantiated in the soul.

Bergson perceived this, and has expressed it in his idea of ‘Duration’. But he did not proceed beyond this point.

Starting with this as a basis, we shall proceed to consider its bearing upon Cosmology and Religious cognition.

[ 1 ] The Cosmos reveals itself to man, first of all, from the aspect of the Earth and from the aspect of what is outside the Earth, viz. the world of the stars.

[ 2 ] Man feels himself related to the Earth and its forces. Life gives him very clear instruction regarding this relationship.

[ 3 ] In the present age he does not feel himself related in the same way to the stars that are around him. But this lasts only so long as he is not conscious of his etheric body. To grasp the etheric body in Imaginations means to develop a feeling that we belong to the world of the stars, just as we have this feeling regarding the Earth through the consciousness of the physical body.

[ 4 ] The forces which place the etheric body in the world come from the Cosmos around the Earth; those for the physical body radiate from the centre of the Earth.

[ 5 ] But together with the etheric forces which stream to the Earth from the sphere of the Cosmos there come also the World-impulses which work in the astral body of man.

[ 6 ] The ether is like an ocean in which the astral forces swim from all directions of the Cosmos and approach the Earth.

[ 7 ] But in the present cosmic age only the mineral and plant kingdoms come into a direct relation to the astral, which streams down to the Earth on the waves of the ether; not the animal kingdom and not the human kingdom.

[ 8 ] Spiritual vision shows that in the animal embryo there lives, not the astral that is now streaming to the Earth, but that which streamed in during the Old Moon period.

[ 9 ] In the case of the plant kingdom we see how its manifold and wonderful forms are developed through the astral loosening itself from the ether and working over to the world of plants.

[ 10 ] In the animal kingdom we see how, from out of the Spiritual, the astral which was active in very ancient times—during the Moon evolution—has been preserved, and works as something stored up and preserved, remaining on at the present time in the spirit-world, and not coming forth into the etheric world.

[ 11 ] The activity of this astral is, moreover, mediated by the Moon-forces, which have likewise remained in the same condition, from the previous stage of the Earth.

[ 12 ] In the animal kingdom we have, therefore, the result of impulses which manifested themselves externally in Nature in a previous stage of Earth-existence, whereas in the present cosmic age they have withdrawn into the Spirit-world which actively penetrates the Earth.

[ 13 ] Now it is manifest to spiritual vision that within the animal kingdom only the astral forces which have been preserved in the present Earth from the former period are important for the permeation of the physical and etheric bodies with the astral body. But when the animal is once in possession of its astral body, the Sun-impulses appear actively in this astral body. The Sun-forces cannot give the animal anything astral; but when this is once in the animal, they must set to work and foster growth, nutrition, etc.

[ 14 ] It is different for the human kingdom. This, too, receives its astrality to begin with from the Moon-forces that have been preserved. But the Sun-forces contain astral impulses which while they remain inactive for the animal kingdom, in the human astral continue to act in the same way in which Moon-forces worked when man was first permeated with astrality.

[ 15 ] In the animal astral body we see the world of the Moon; in the human, the harmonious accord of the worlds of the Sun and Moon.

[ 16 ] The fact that man is able to receive, for the development of self-consciousness, the Spiritual which rays forth in what belongs to the Earth, depends upon this which belongs to the Sun in the human astral body. The astral streams in from the sphere of the Universe. It acts either as astrality which pours in at the present time or as astrality which streamed in, in ancient times and has been preserved. But everything that is connected with the shaping of the Ego as the vehicle of self-consciousness must radiate from the centre of a star. The astral works from the circumference; that which belongs to the Ego works from a centre. From its centre the Earth as a star gives the impulse to the human Ego. Every star radiates from its centre forces which mould or shape the Ego of some being.

[ 17 ] This shows the polarity existing between the centre of a star and the sphere of the Cosmos.

[ 18 ] From the above it may also be seen how the animal kingdom still stands there today as the result of former evolutionary forces of the Earth's being, how it uses up the astral forces which have been preserved, and how it must disappear when these have been consumed. Man, however, acquires new astral forces from that which belongs to the Sun. These enable him to carry on his evolution into the future.

[ 19 ] From all this it may be seen that the nature of man cannot be understood unless we are just as conscious of his connection with the stars as of his connection with the Earth.

[ 20 ] And that which man receives from the Earth for the unfolding of his self-consciousness depends also upon the Spirit world active within all that belongs to the Earth. The circumstance that the Sun gives to man what he needs for his astral depends upon the activities which took place during the Old Sun period. At that time the Earth received the capacity to unfold the Ego-impulses of humanity. It is the Spiritual from that period which the Earth has preserved for itself from the Sun nature; and it is preserved from dying out through the present activity of the Sun.

[ 21 ] The Earth was itself Sun at one time. Then it was spiritualised. In the present cosmic age, what belongs to the Sun works from outside. This continually rejuvenates the Spiritual which originated in ancient times and is now growing old. At the same time this which belongs to the Sun and acts in the present, preserves that which belongs to a former period from falling into what is Luciferic. For that which continues to work, without being received into the forces of the present, succumbs to Luciferic influences.

[ 23 ] We may say that man's feeling of belonging to the Cosmos beyond the Earth is in this cosmic epoch so dim that he does not notice it within his consciousness. And it is not only dim, it is drowned by his feeling of belonging to the Earth. As man is obliged to find his self-consciousness in the elements of the Earth, he so grows together with them during the early part of the age of the Spiritual Soul, that they act upon him much more strongly than is compatible with the true course of his soul-life. Man is to a certain extent stupefied by the impressions of the world of the senses, and during this condition, thought which is free and has life in itself cannot rise within man.

[ 24 ] The whole of the period since the middle of the nineteenth century has been a period of stupefaction through the impressions received by the senses. It is the great illusion of this age that the over-powerful life of the senses has been considered to be the right one—that life of the senses whose aim was to obliterate completely the life in the Cosmos beyond the Earth.

[ 25 ] In this stupefaction the Ahrimanic Powers were able to unfold their being. Lucifer was repulsed by the Sun-forces more than Ahriman, who was able to evoke, especially in scientific people, the dangerous feeling that ideas are applicable only to the impressions of the senses. Thus it is exactly in these circles that one can find so little understanding for Anthroposophy. They stand face to face with the results of spiritual knowledge and try to understand them with their ideas. But these ideas do not grasp the Spiritual because the experience of the ideas is drowned by the Ahrimanic knowledge of the senses. And so they begin to fear that if they have anything to do with the results of spiritual investigation, they may fall into a blind belief in authority.

[ 26 ] In the second half of the nineteenth century the Cosmos beyond the Earth became darker and darker for human consciousness.

[ 27 ] When man becomes able to experience ideas within himself once more, then, even when he does not support his ideas on the world of the senses, light will again meet his gaze from the Cosmos beyond the Earth. But this signifies that he will become acquainted with Michael in his own kingdom.

[ 28 ] When once the Festival of Michael in autumn becomes true and inward, then this thought will arise in all sincerity in the mind of him who celebrates the festival, and it will live in his consciousness: Filled with ideas, the soul experiences Spirit Light, when sense-appearance only echoes in man like a memory.

[ 29 ] If man is able to feel this he will also be able, after his festive mood, to plunge again in the right way into the world of the senses. And Ahriman will not be able to injure him.

(March, 1925)

Further Leading Thoughts issued from the Goetheanum for the Anthroposophical Society (in connection with the foregoing study: Man in his macrocosmic Nature)

[ 30 ] 168. In the beginning of the age of the Spiritual Soul, man's sense of community with the Cosmos beyond the Earth grew dim. On the other hand—and this was so especially in men of science—his sense of belonging to the earthly realm grew so intense in the experience of sense-impressions, as to amount to a stupefaction.

[ 31 ] 169. While he is thus stupefied, the Ahrimanic powers work upon man most dangerously. For he lives in the illusion that the over-intense, stupefying experience of sense-impressions is the right thing and represents the true progress in evolution.

[ 32 ] 170. Man must find the strength to fill his world of Ideas with light and to experience it so, even when unsupported by the stupefying world of sense. In this experience of the world of Ideas—independent and in their independence filled with light—his sense of community with the Cosmos beyond the Earth will re-awaken. Hence will arise the true foundation for festivals of Michael.

We will concern ourselves today with something that will show us how significant it is, based on research that can be done in the higher worlds, to experience what the future holds in store for humanity. The mission of the spiritual scientific movement is connected with the important events of the transition period in which we live. From this we can be certain that much still lies before us in the future, and we therefore seek in spiritual science for guidance in taking the appropriate measures in the present. We must know, therefore, what is of special significance in thinking, feeling, and willing in our time.

There is a great distinction between the spiritual stream that came from Buddha and the one that arose from the Christ impulse. This is not meant to place these streams in opposition to one another; it is rather necessary to understand in what regard each of these streams can be fruitful. Both streams must unite in the future, and Christianity must be fructified by spiritual science. For a time, Christianity had to set aside the teaching of reincarnation. It was included in the esoteric teaching but could not be received in exoteric Christianity for certain universal pedagogical reasons. In contrast, reincarnation was a fundamental principle of Buddhism. There it was bound up with the teaching of suffering, which is exactly what Christianity is intended to overcome. Once we have recognized the purposes and missions of both streams, we will also be able to distinguish clearly between them. The main distinction can be seen most strongly when one examines the two individualities, Buddha and Paul.

Gautama Buddha came to knowledge through his enlightenment under the Bodhi tree; he then taught that this world is maya. It cannot be considered real, because therein lies maya, the great illusion, that one believes it to be real. Man must strive to be released from the realm of the elements; then he comes into a realm, Nirvana, where neither names nor things exist. Only then is man freed from illusion. The realm of maya is suffering. Birth, death, sickness, and age are suffering. It is the thirst for existence that brings man into this realm. Once he has freed himself from this thirst, he no longer needs to incarnate. One can ask oneself why the great Buddha preached this doctrine. The answer can follow only from a consideration of the evolutionary course of humanity.

Man was not always the way he is today. In earlier times, man not only had his physical body at his disposal for achieving knowledge, but there was also a kind of clairvoyant knowledge diffused among human beings. Man knew that there were spiritual hierarchies in the same way that we know that there are plants. He had no power of judgment but could see the creative beings themselves. This wisdom gradually disappeared, but a memory of it remained. In ancient India, Persia, even in Egypt, there was still a memory of previous earthly lives. The human soul at that time was such that one knew: I was descended from divine beings, but my incarnations have gradually penetrated the physical so strongly that my spiritual gaze has been darkened.

Man experienced the progress in this time as a degeneration, as a step backward. This was felt especially by all those who could still, even in much later times, leave their physical bodies at particular moments. The everyday world appeared to them in these moments as a world of illusion, as maya, the great deception. Buddha only spoke out of what lived in the human soul. The physical, sensible world was experienced as that which had pulled man down; he wished to leave this world and ascend again. The world of the senses bore the guilt for the descent of humanity.

Let us compare this conception with the Christ impulse and the teachings of Paul. Paul did not call the sensible world an illusion, although he knew as well as Buddha that man had descended from the spiritual worlds and that it was his urge for existence that had brought him into this world. One speaks in a Christian sense, however, when one asks if this urge for existence is always something bad. Is the physical, sensible world only deception? According to Paul's conception, it is not the urge for existence in itself that is evil; this urge was originally good but became harmful through the fall of man, under the influence of Luciferic beings. This urge was not always harmful, but it has become so and has brought sickness, lies, suffering, and so on. What was a cosmic event in Buddha's conception became a human event for Paul.

Had the Luciferic influence not interfered, man would have seen the truth in the physical world rather than illusion. It is not the world of the senses that is wrong but human knowledge that has been dulled through the Luciferic influence. The differences in these conceptions bring different conclusions with them. Buddha sought redemption in a world in which nothing of this world of the senses remained. Paul said that man should purify his forces, his thirst for existence, because he himself had corrupted them. Man should tear away the veil that covers the truth and, through purifying himself, see again the truth he himself had covered. In place of the veil that conceals the plant world, for example, he will see the divine-spiritual forces that work on and behind the plants. Rend the veil, and the world of the senses becomes transparent; we finally see the realm of the spirit. We believed we saw the animal, the plant, and the mineral kingdoms; that was our error. In reality, we saw the hierarchies streaming toward us.

That is why Paul said, “Kill not the pleasure of existence; rather purify it, because it was originally good.” This can occur when man takes the power of Christ into himself. When this power has permeated the soul, it drives away the soul's darkness. The gods did not place man on the earth for no purpose. It is man's duty to overcome what hinders him from seeing this world spiritually. Buddha's conclusion that one must shun incarnation points to an archetypal wisdom for humanity. Paul, in contrast, said, “Go through incarnation, but imbue yourselves with Christ, and in a distant future all that man has cast up as illusion will vanish.”

This teaching, which put the blame not on the physical, sensible world but on man himself, had of necessity to become a historic doctrine. Exactly for this reason, however, it could not be given in its entirety at the beginning. Only the initial impulse could be given, which must be penetrated. This impulse would then gradually enter all spheres of life. Although almost two thousand years have passed since the Mystery of Golgotha, the Christ impulse is only beginning today to be received. Whole spheres of life, such as philosophy and science, have yet to be imbued with it. Buddha was more able to give his teaching all at once, because he referred to an ancient wisdom that was still experienced in his time. The Christ impulse, however, must prevail gradually. A theory of knowledge based on these facts contrasts sharply with that of Kant, who did not know that it is our knowledge itself that must be purified.

Paul had to instruct human beings that the work in each individual incarnation is actually of great importance. In contrast to the relatively recent doctrine of the Buddha that the individual incarnation is worthless, he almost had to overstate this teaching. One must learn to declare, “Not I, but Christ in me!” This is the purified I. Through Paul, the spiritual life became dependent upon this one incarnation for all the future. Now that such an education of the soul has, been completed and a sufficient number of human beings have gone through it in the past two thousand years, the time has come again to teach reincarnation and karma. We must seek to restore our I to the condition in which it was before incarnations began.

It is always said that Christ is constantly in our midst. “I am with you every day until the end of the earth.” Now, however, man must learn to behold Christ and to believe that what he sees is real. This will happen in the near future, already in this century, and in the following two thousand years more and more people will experience it. How will this actually occur? We might ask, for example, how we now see our planet. The earth is described mechanically, chemically, and physically by science, according to the Kant-Laplace theory and the like. Yet we are now approaching a reversal in these fields. A conception will arise that will see the earth not in terms of purely mineral forces but in terms of plant, or what could be called etheric, forces. The plant directs its root toward the earth's center, and its upper part stands in relation to the sun. These are the forces that make the earth what it is; gravity is only secondary. The plants preceded minerals just as coal was once plant life; this will soon be discovered. Plants give the planet its form, and they then give off the substance from which its mineral foundation originates. The beginnings of this idea were given through Goethe in his plant morphology, but he was not understood. One will gradually begin to see the etheric, because it is that which is characteristic of the plant realm. When man is able to receive the growth forces of the plant kingdom, he will be released from the forces that now hinder him from beholding the Christ. Spiritual science should be an aid to this, but this will be impossible as long as man believes that the ascent of the physical into the etheric has nothing to do with his inner being. It is of no matter in the laboratory whether a man has a strong or weak moral character. This is not the case, however, when one is concerned with etheric forces. Then one's moral constitution affects one's results. For this reason, it is impossible for modern man to develop this ability if he remains as he is. The laboratory table must first become an altar, just as it was for Goethe who, as a child, kindled his small altar to nature with the rays of the rising sun.

This will happen before long. Those who are able to say, “Not I, but Christ in me,” will be able to work with the plant forces in the same way that mineral forces are now understood. Man's inner being and his outer surroundings work into one another reciprocally; what is outside transforms itself for us, depending on whether our vision is clear or clouded. Even in this century, and increasingly throughout the next 2,500 years, human beings will become able to behold Christ in His etheric form. They will behold the etheric earth from which the plant world springs up. They will also be able to see, however, that inner goodness works differently on the environment from evil. He who possesses this science in the highest degree is the Maitreya Buddha, who will come in approximately 3,000 years. “Maitreya Buddha” means the “Buddha of right-mindedness.” He is the one who will make clear for human beings the significance of right-mindedness. This will all lead human beings to know in which direction they must go. You must undertake to transform abstract ideals into concrete ideals in order to contribute to an evolution that moves forward. If we do not succeed in this, the earth will sink into materialism, and humanity will have to begin again, either on the earth, after a great catastrophe, or on the next planet. The earth needs anthroposophy! Whoever realizes this is an anthroposophist.

It is now my task to explain, episodically in a sense, something that is related directly to the practical and general outward life of humanity, in order to cast light on the direct relation to life that is essential to spiritual science in our time. I hope we shall still come to the parts of our lectures that have more to do with the inner life. As a whole, the central concern of our present considerations is to attain a spiritual scientific understanding of the position of the individual human being in practical, even vocational, life. On The Karma of Vocation is the title I should like to give these lectures I have been giving for some time. Thus, it is necessary to gain a broader basis, and so I must explain in a more comprehensive sense much that is related to the questions we are discussing.

We have made it clear that what the human being achieves for the world in any vocation is by no means something to be set aside as being prosaic, but that, as we have seen, it is most intimately related with his remote cosmic future. Each person integrates himself in a way into the social order of life. Because of his karma he or she is impelled to a certain vocation, none of which is to be considered more prosaic or poetic than the other, and we know that what a person accomplished within the social order is the first germ of something destined not only to have significance for our earth, but to evolve as the earth passes through the states of Jupiter, Venus, and Vulcan. What may be called an understanding of vocation, a knowledge of the significance of the immediate life, may truly dawn upon us through such reflections. It is precisely the mission of our spiritual scientific endeavors not merely to communicate pleasant sounding theories. Rather, we must let our souls be touched by what is suitable to place us correctly in life so that each person is in his or her own place in accordance with the spirit of our age, with the arché⁸⁰ of our time. Thus, our truths bear a character that is always strong enough to constitute the basis for a real judgment of life. We will not revel in comforting conceptions, but will take in those that will carry us through life.

When we recall something I have frequently emphasized, we shall see that even our scientific endeavors have the tendency to touch our souls with what is really meaningful for life. I have often called your attention to a significant fact that may, in a relatively short time, perhaps play a most important scientific role if only those whose mission is to cultivate learning are not too obtuse. A great deal of emphasis is placed today on the role heredity plays in human life, and teachers who talk about the vocations a person is destined to have also mention inherited characteristics when they wish to pass judgment on those things related to the future vocation of a person just entering life. Of course, they are just parroting what constitutes the current scientific view of the world. But those discussing the problem of heredity today mean that children inherit certain characteristics from their parents and ancestry strictly in a physical sense. External science cannot yet open its mind to a recognition of repeated earth lives and the carrying over of human characteristics from previous incarnations. People talk about heredity, but a correct opinion of it will be attained only when we introduce something that can be understood when we grasp the content of my little book, The Education of the Child in the Light of Anthroposophy.⁸¹ There we see that human life first passes through a period of seven years, approximately to the change of teeth; a second period to the fourteenth year; a third to the twenty-first, and so on all the way to the twenty-eighth year. Something more thorough on this subject may be found also in a small brochure that contains the substance of my lecture delivered a short time ago in Liestal,⁸² in which I wished to call attention again, from another point of view, to these truths of the division of human development between birth and death into seven-year periods. We know that, in essence, the physical body develops inwardly between birth and the change of teeth, that the etheric body develops up to puberty, and that the astral body then passes through its development.

Let us direct our attention today to the time between the fourteenth and sixteenth years, accepting that it differs according to climate, nationality, etc. At that time, humans become mature, as we know, and are able to beget children. Now, it will be recognized that the consideration of this particular time is of the greatest importance to the scientific theory of heredity because the human being must by this time have developed all those characteristics that enable him to impart traits to his descendants. He cannot develop these capacities later, so this makes this an important period of life. To be sure, traits of secondary importance that are developed later may be passed over to descendants, but human beings are so constructed from the scientific point of view that they become fully mature between the fourteenth and sixteenth years with respect to transmitting traits to their descendants. It cannot be said, therefore, that what is essential in human development after this point has significance for the question of heredity. Science must find the reasons why humans cease at this point to develop the bases for the transmission of hereditary characteristics. It is entirely different in animals because they make no essential further progress in life beyond this time. It is this that we must carefully consider.

Now, without discussing many related things here, I wish to point out from the spiritual scientific view what really lies at the bottom of the matter. When we fix our attention back beyond the time of birth, a longer period of time stretches out before us that the human being lives through in the spiritual world between the last death and this birth. Within this stretch of time lie those processes I have often described in mere outline. All that takes place then between death and a new birth naturally has an influence on a human being and includes especially many things that are related to what he works out in his physical life between birth and the fourteenth or sixteenth years. The very thing a person is elaborating here mainly in the unconscious, he or she elaborates between death and the new birth from a higher consciousness. Let us be clear about this matter. Here upon the earth the human being perceives through his eyes and other senses the mineral, vegetable, animal world, etc. But while he is in the spiritual world together with Angels, Archangels, Archai, Exusiai, and also with those humans who have passed through the portal of death and are able to be in some close relationship with him, his attention is then directed, when he looks below, primarily upon what is connected with life in this period of time. It is from there, as I have explained even in exoteric lectures, that everything underlying heredity is determined. From a reflection I have already set before you,⁸³ we know that, as a residue of the processes between death and a new birth, all that results from a previous vocational life manifests itself in the physiognomy, gestures, and in the entire hereditary tendency. Thus, it is really possible to see in the human being during this period of time, in the way he walks, in the movements of his hands, in his general bearing, the result of his vocational life during his previous incarnation.

But then the period from the fourteenth until the twenty-first year begins, which stands in opposition, in a sense, to the preceding period. As you have heard, the hereditary impulses cannot continue to work in the same fashion during this time; the time is past during which these hereditary impulses develop. Science as yet pays no attention whatever to such matters, but, if it is not to be completely divorced from all reality, it will be compelled to do so. This is the period, however, in which the human being is guided toward his new vocation through the vague and unconscious working of certain impulses into which the processes that occur between death and a new birth play in lesser degree. During this period the impulses of the preceding incarnation are effective in far greater measure. While circumstances are thus developing, he believes along with others that he would be impelled to enter this or that vocation even if only these external circumstances were effective. But they are really unconsciously connected with something living within his soul that comes directly from the preceding incarnation. Note the difference. During the preceding period from the seventh to the fourteenth year, the previous incarnation, fructified by what has happened between death and a new birth, passes into our bodily organization, thereby making us a copy of our preceding vocation. In the following period, however, the impulses no longer work into us, no longer impress gestures on us, but guide us on the way to a new vocation.

You will see what infinitely fruitful thought for future education will result from these reflections if only external world culture can decide to reckon with repeated earthly lives, rather than taking fantastic ideas as truths—fantastic because they only consider a fragment of reality, one that encompasses only the present life between birth and death. Here we must gain a perspective of the immeasurable importance of the entrance of spiritual science into those circles connected with the education and development of the human being, and also with the influence on human life of the external social order. Naturally, we are here looking out over wide perspectives, but they are connected through and through with reality; what governs the evolution of the world is not chaos but order—or even disorder, but nevertheless something that is to be explained only on the basis of spiritual life. So a person who knows the laws that are connected with repeated earthly lives can face the world in counsel and deed in an entirely different manner; he can utter things, or even set things in motion, that have to do with the course of human life.

Bear in mind that, after all, everything in the world runs in cycles in a sense. We know, of course, the vast cycles of the post-Atlantean age: the Indian, ancient Persian, Chaldaic-Egyptian, Greco-Latin, our own and what will follow. Human souls are born many times in all these cycles—some of them only once. But it is not only here that we can see how life on earth runs in cycles: it takes its cyclic course in such a way that certain conditions can be determined when one knows how to properly judge previous conditions. If, for instance, we are able to judge in the right way what was spiritually at work in the first centuries of the Christian development—let us say from the third to the seventh centuries—so that we know the spiritual impulses of that time, we can judge, in turn, what social needs may be effective today.

Cyclic evolutions do take place. We bring unhappiness to a person who is destined to be placed in a certain fashion in the cyclic evolution when we advise him or her to assume a different relationship to life. Since, however, human beings must become increasingly conscious in life during our fifth post-Atlantean epoch, a knowledge of the corresponding laws must gradually come to light. It must become possible for a person to consider himself or herself in a connection with what is taking place and playing its role in their environment. This does not consist merely in learning how to direct children to the right vocation, but also in developing the right thoughts—for we know that thoughts are realities—about the relationship one has to the world. No matter what our station in life is, what we may think of all that is occurring in the world due to the development of the spirit of the time will become increasingly important, and the human soul will have to become increasingly more conscious of this.

Now you will recall how I have undertaken to characterize the currents that have arisen with the fifth post-Atlantean epoch. I have shown you⁸⁴ how a current has arisen over the western regions that tends especially to make people bourgeois—a comprehensive, approximate expression, but nevertheless the bourgeoisie has arisen in Western Europe and America. We have contrasted this ideal with the pilgrim, the Eastern goal, which is still only a goal since it has come less clearly to expression than that of the comparatively more advanced Western culture. These two ideals, the bourgeois and the pilgrim, face each other and, unless we realize the significance of this for life, we cannot possibly develop the understanding that is growing within us. In earlier ages men could face life without understanding since they were guided by divine spiritual powers; today, however, as we develop toward the future, we must have understanding.

You see, such things as I have explained to you in the form of the two currents, one having its source in heredity and the other in redemption, must be fully considered if we wish to judge life today because they force themselves upon us more and more. That these things press upon us is not a mere assertion of mine but something that may be said from present reality—something felt and to a certain extent known for a long time past by people who were not dull and indolent, but who confronted life with full participation. Indeed, I have already called your attention to the peculiarity of our times. Many people today have a thorough feeling for the things that are coming to pass in life, but they do not possess the ability—remember what I told you about Jaurés⁸⁵—to ascend to an understanding of repeated earthly lives and karma, either of the individual or of the world; they cannot, therefore, comprehend the very thing they perceive. But at numerous points within modern evolution we find those whose eyes are open to what is happening, in spite of the fact that they never developed the ability to explain matters from the standpoint of repeated earthly lives. Because of their failure to accept repeated earthly lives, they contributed much toward bringing about the very conditions they severely criticized. This is exactly the peculiarity of people today, even those of clearest vision; they criticize what exists and yet labor toward bringing about the very things they criticize while judging them correctly. That is how unconscious impulses play into human life.

Let us take, for example, a man who really saw a good deal in an extraordinarily clear manner, especially in the life of his environment. Such was John Stuart Mill,⁸⁶ who was born in 1806 and died in 1873, a famous English philosopher, looked upon by many as actually the one who renewed logic and developed it further. He also developed social insights in the most comprehensive way, directing his attention especially to the social evolution of the world as he knew and encountered it in his environment. He wanted to answer the question that assumed for him a tragic character: In what direction does the present age advance? Where does what has forced itself as a social character upon the life of the nineteenth century lead? He said that the bourgeois was the human type that had developed in the nineteenth century and asked how the bourgeois differs from earlier human types. He answered by saying that in earlier times the individual was more significant; that more individuality spoke through the earlier human being. I will couch this more in our concepts, but Mill expressed fundamentally the same thing in his. According to him, the soul had in a certain way elevated itself up above the immediate external physical reality. On the other hand, the bourgeois type works toward levelling and rendering all men equal in the social order. But what, asked Mill, is the result of this process of becoming equal? Not the result of becoming equal in the greatness of the human soul, but of becoming equal in its nothingness. He thus indicates a future for humanity during this fifth post-Atlantean epoch in which men in their social life would become ever more the “pressed caviar” of bourgeois nothingness, and he felt this to be a tragic knowledge.

People sense such things in different ways, however, depending on whether they are born in the Western or Eastern culture. The Russian thinker, Herzen,⁸⁷ acquainted himself thoroughly with these assertions, with these items of knowledge presented by Mill. In his soul, however, all this worked differently. The Western thinker describes this perspective of bourgeois life with a certain nonchalance, one might say, but the Eastern thinker suffers terribly under the thought then maintained by Mill and Herzen that Europe was on the way toward taking on the nature of China. As you can deduce from the writing of Herzen of 1864, both Mill and Herzen—the one with an Eastern and the other with a Western coloring—consider what has come about earlier in China as the goal toward which Europe is aiming as a later stage; that is, toward a new Chinese entity in which men will become the “pressed caviar” of bourgeois nullities. A constriction of the intellect will come, says Mill, a constriction of the intellect and of the energies of life, a polishing away of the personality, everything that leads to a levelling down. Constant flattening out of life, as he expresses it, constant exclusion of general human interests from life—so does Mill express the matter, and Herzen confirms it, but from a mood of tragic sensitivity; it is a reduction to the interests of mercantile offices and bourgeois prosperity. So did Mill and Herzen express themselves even in the sixties of the last century! Mill, who speaks first of his own country, said that England was on the way toward becoming a modern China, and Herzen said that not only England but all of Europe was on the way to becoming a modern China. It may be deduced from Herzen's book of 1864 that he and Mill more or less agreed that unless an unexpected upswing should take place in Europe, which might lead to a rebirth of human personality giving it the force needed to overcome the bourgeois, Europe, in spite of its noble forefathers and its Christianity, would become another China. These words were spoken in 1864!

Herzen, however, had no opportunity to take karma and repeated earthly lives into account. He could admit such knowledge as we have mentioned with only the deepest feeling of tragedy, which he expressed by saying that we are not the physicians, but rather the sufferings, of our time because what now approached—perhaps the thought can be better expressed with the English term used by Herzen and Mill than with the German—is “conglomerated mediocrity.” Herzen expressed this from a feeling of tragedy, saying that a time will come in Europe when the realism of the modern scientific view will have been carried so far that no one will any longer believe in anything belonging to another, a super-sensible, world. It will be said that outward physical realities are the only goal to be striven for, and human beings will be sacrificed for the sake of physical realities without any one realizing that they are something more than simply the connecting link for those who are to follow. The individual will be sacrificed to the future common colony. Such were the words uttered by Herzen who thought the one barrier to preventing Europe from rapidly becoming another China was Christianity, which is not so easily overcome. Yet, he saw no way of escape. He felt that Christianity had also become shallow, flattened out by revolution, which, as he said, was also growing shallow and had deteriorated to the bourgeois liberalism of the nineteenth century, to a conglomerated mediocrity. Referring to what Mill had stated and having in mind the downfall of ancient Rome, Herzen said, “I see the inevitable collapse of old Europe; at the portal of the old world (he meant Europe), there stands no Catiline, but death.”

With a certain justification and as one who sees much that is around him in the contemporary world yet is utterly unable to admit the sustaining concepts and ideas of spiritual science, the contemporary Russian writer, Merezhkovsky,⁸⁸ who has learned a good deal from these two thinkers, Mill and Herzen, remarks that today the yardstick has taken the place of the scepter of earlier times, the account book has usurped the place of the Bible and the sales counter replaces the altar. His mistake lies in not going beyond the mere criticism of these things. The yardstick, the account book, and the counter do have a place in our fifth post-Atlantean epoch. We know that it must be so and that it is in accord with irrevocable world karma. What is needed is not merely to condemn these things, but to pour into this world of the yardstick, the account book, and the counter the spirit that alone is the equal of them; this is the attitude of spiritual science.

These are serious matters, and I wish to make it clear, as I always endeavor to do on such occasions, that I am not merely setting forth what I myself believe, but that what I have expressed is in agreement with those who have viewed life with open and wakeful eyes. Many people may hold views and opinions, but the important question is how these views are related to their time, whether they have roots in the soil of the time and whether these people can prove the things they assert. It is a significant fact that the age is taking on a certain character which can be seen by people who are willing to do so. It is not a question of attributing a certain character to the age in whatever way we please, but that we must really see how the spiritual evolution of humanity advances from cycle to cycle.

I have called your attention to the fact that there are occult brotherhoods that possess a knowledge of these things based on traditions handed down from ancient times and derived from atavistic occult teaching. As you know from previous discussions, these brotherhoods—especially in the West but men of the East have also become their adherents—have taken on a dubious character. This does not prevent them from preserving certain secrets of existence even though they do so in a way unsuitable for the present. The person who listens to the spiritual message for our time and communicates that portion of spiritual science that can be given publicly according to the intention of the spirit of the time, frequently meets with marked opposition that comes from dark sources. But this opposition is directed and guided everywhere by spiritual powers, which must always be taken into consideration. It will readily be understood, therefore, that today opposition is easily raised against the spiritual science that is to live within our movement, by the constantly repeated suggestion that such a spiritual science should not be created for large groups of people. All sorts of accepted powers are summoned in order to render this spiritual science innocuous. University professors travel from one country to another to declare that they are forced to oppose especially my spiritual science because people today, as they say, must look at reality—the kind of reality that they alone see—and not at such things that draw men away from it. Often there is method in such attacks because anyone who is not blind sees how these people seek out the places that are politically right for them to work most effectively through the respect felt for them as university professors, for example; these are the places where they believe they can most effectually discredit an opponent. They believe they can accomplish most when they choose the right places and use the right words; that is, words that speak to current passions.

All these things are contained within a larger relationship, however, and what causes the greatest fear of all, we might even say what horrifies these people, is the thought that a number of individuals might come to understand a little of the characteristic life of our day. The utmost desire is felt, especially by those who belong to the occult brotherhoods I have described, to prevent human beings from attaining clarity in everything connected with the real laws of life, since it is among the uninformed that the interested individual can best work. He can no longer exert an influence when people begin to know how they really stand in the contemporary world. This is dangerous for those who want to fish in troubled waters, who desire to keep their esoteric knowledge to themselves, applying it so as to shape human social relationships as they wish them to be. There are members of occult brotherhoods who, within their own ranks, are fully convinced that spiritual powers are at work everywhere in our environment and that there is a bond between the living and the dead. In fact, within their occult brotherhoods they do not talk about anything except the laws of the spiritual world. Our spiritual science, too, possesses a certain part of this knowledge, but it is soon to be made public. They talk about this truth that they have taken over from ancient atavistic tradition and then publish articles in the newspapers in which they oppose the very same things, branding them as medieval superstitions. These are often the very same persons who, in their secret association, nurture spiritual science as a traditional teaching and then come out in opposition to it in the public press, designating it as a medieval superstition, a traditional mysticism, and so forth. They consider it to be entirely proper that they should not know by what principles they are being guided. Of course, there are also all kinds of strange members of occult brotherhoods who know only as much about the world as they can touch with their noses. They too talk about the present impossibility of imparting publicly the content of mystery teachings to human beings.

Now, there are various ways of keeping human beings in a fog of ignorance as I have indicated in my Liestal lecture⁸⁹ and in other public lectures. Just as true spiritual science will impart to us certain ideas and concepts that are like a key giving us access to the spiritual world, so also can certain concepts be found through which it is possible to delude that part of the population that has not arrived at the flattening out of the understanding through a scientific view of the world of which Mill and Herzen speak. Indeed, it is possible to form concepts in more than one way. If it were known how concepts are really formed publicly today in order to manipulate the souls of men in the “right” way, many a person would gradually sense an impulse to come to true spiritual science, which speaks of these things in an honest, upright way. I shall not deal today with all the lofty concepts communicated to persons as ideals, which are not intended, however, to produce what lies within these ideals but rather have an entirely different purpose, but I wish to make clear to you by means of a simple example how those who are craving satisfaction of certain mystical longings are easily deluded.

I will give a most stupid example. It might be said, for instance, that even the ancient Pythagoreans looked upon numbers as containing the laws governing the world. Much is concealed within numerical relationships. Let us take, for example, two numerical relationships:

Nicholas II of Russia:
Born in the year ........................... 1868
Ascended the throne in ................ 1894
Reigned for ................................. 22 years
His age was ................................. 48 years
Total ..... 3832

Dividing this total by 2, we get 1916, the most important year of the war. This is stated on the basis of a “most secret” numerical relationship. Let us take:

George V of England:

Half of this is 1916.

The destinies of these two individuals are intimately connected. Here you see how the Pythagorean laws of number play a role in the world! But, to provide a surfeit, let us take also:

Poincaré:
Born in the year .......................... 1860
Has ruled since ............................ 1913
That amounts to .......................... 3 years
His age is ......................................56 years
Total ...... 3832

Half of this is 1916.

You see how the numbers agree among these three Allies!

It is, of course, one of the dumbest examples imaginable. If I now went down into the audience and asked one of the ladies—as I shall naturally not do—when she was born, how long she has been a member of the Anthroposophical Society, how old she is—which, as I have said, I shall not ask—when she became a member of the Society, and then added these numbers and took half of the total, I would arrive at precisely the same figure. It is an ideal example and so that it may include present reality, let us select, then, any lady or gentlemen; it may just as well be a gentlemen:

XY was born in the year .......................... 1870
He entered the Anthroposophical Society.... 1912
So he was in the Society .......................... 4 years
And he is .................................................. 46 years old
Total ................... 3832

Half of this is 1916.

It is a really absurd example. I can assure you, however, that all sorts of things that have to do with searching out the secrets of numbers rest on nothing more; the problems are simply a little more concealed than those I have given. Moreover, concepts taken from other fields can just as well be shaped in the right manner and used for throwing dust into the eyes of people; by using proper methods people are hindered from seeing what is concealed behind these things and many have been taken in even by the example I have given. It is profoundly significant that destiny chooses 1916. Had we calculated for 1914, it would have been connected with the beginning of the war! Just as these numbers have been put together for these three Allies, any kind of numbers can, after all, be put together. Many things have been similarly fabricated from different concepts but they are not at all more significant or intelligent. They are less easily observed when somewhat more concealed. Then, when all sorts of numerical relationships are produced along with such expressions as “unfathomable,” and “deep as the world,” anyone can find innumerable adherents and also give the impression that he is speaking from profound depths of human knowledge. But there is really something to the methods used by certain individuals who wish to throw dust in the eyes of the people. In one place or another this or that concept is made public and other things are added, and those pronouncements go back to some occult connection which calls for the attainment of certain purposes. Then one must only become acquainted with the course these people will adopt.

If such things are to become impossible in the future, it is necessary that a number of people shall not have that constricted understanding and energy of life to which Mill refers; rather, they must have the sustaining understanding and supporting life energy that come from spiritual science. These are to work in a fructifying way upon the intellect and life energy of men so that their approach to life shall be such that no one can delude them. These things are connected with the feeling of fear and even horror which the strange news—travelling from eastern Europe to the West—aroused that an individual such as Mme. Blavatsky⁹⁰ had made her appearance as if coming from nowhere. I have often pointed out⁹¹ that this was decidedly significant for the course of the nineteenth century. She appeared at the very time when the struggle was most bitter between the so-called esotericists and the so-called progressive occultists. That is, the reactionaries called themselves the esotericists. They used the word thus because they wished to keep the occult secrets to themselves. The life of Blavatsky fell into this period. There was the danger, through the special construction of this life in which truly far-reaching forces were at work from the subconscious, that spiritual secrets might be revealed through her and people might learn something in the right way. This danger really existed and people were living under it from the 1840's on—in a sense, ever since her birth or childhood. From then on, there was a constant endeavor so to arrange things that Blavatsky might be brought into the service of the Western occult brotherhoods. She would then have been able to bring to light only what they considered suitable for their own ends.

The whole affair took a strange turn, however. I have told you how the effort was made at first by the “Grand Orient” to lure Blavatsky, and how this failed because she set conditions that could not be fulfilled. She then caused mischief in an American brotherhood because her temperament always rebelled against what others wanted to do with her. I have told you how she was then expelled, and how there was no way left to deal with her other than by imposing upon her a kind of occult imprisonment, and by bringing her into the Indian occult brotherhood, whose practice of occultism was considered harmless to the so-called Western brotherhoods because it resembled that of Blavatsky. They thought, “Oh well, even if all sorts of things come to light from Indian sources, they are by no means able to disturb our circles much.” Most of the occultists who were working with serious occultism said, “Now, how can anything much result since we have surrounded Blavatsky with all those pictures that shut her out from a real knowledge of the spiritual world. She will take in only such things as the old ladies, male and female, discuss among themselves at afternoon teas (I am quoting here!) and this will not seriously disturb our circles.”

The affair became uncomfortable only after our movement appeared, which took things in a serious way and opened an access to the fountainhead of a real spiritual world. But you also see that the bases of the conflicts that then resulted lie most deep. The truth is that something of the impulses that had to come from the Eastern world actually was in Blavatsky, and there was really a certain necessity for a synthesis to take place with the Western World. But the important fact was that it had gradually come about that certain purposes and goals were striven for which, as I have already indicated, do not have truth as their objective but are really seeking quite different goals. Think about it, when it is known how human cycles take their course and what the character of the present world must be in relation to its Archai after this or that has happened in earlier evolution, it is then possible to be active in accordance with this truth. If a person possesses, on the one hand, traditional occult knowledge and, on the other, comes out in the press and public life against this occult knowledge as a medieval superstition, he can work in the dark and achieve the important things he is actually striving for. Things are interrelated in the world, but it is not always necessary that people should understand what the interrelationships are, because for many these connections can play their role in the subconscious. As I have indicated yesterday, what is important is that one knows how to direct one's perception to the right places. There something often appears to be quite insignificant, but when seen in the right connection, it explains much more than is explained by what one considers to be significant. Here the same thing may be said regarding many other things in the world, as Hamlet asserted concerning good and evil: Nothing is good or evil in itself, but man makes it so in his thoughts. So it is also with many other matters. The significance of one thing or another is not to be found in what it represents for outer maya, for the great illusion, but the significance of things must be recognized by associating the right concepts with them. I will mention an example taken from the most recent times in Europe, without thereby intending to enter any sort of partisan or political current.

There may be men here in Europe who, since they all like to think short-sightedly nowadays, look upon the outbreak of the present war as being connected with the murder of the Archduke Franz Ferdinand,⁹² Heir Apparent to the Throne. I do not say that this is untrue or that there is no truth in it, but on the basis of this event they can explain certain occurrences that they trace back to this murder of July 1914. But there may also be other persons who stress that, in a Western newspaper of January 1913, the statement appeared that the Archduke Franz Ferdinand was to be murdered in the near future for the well-being of European humanity. What I mean to say is that we may go back as far as the actual murder, but we may also go back to the notice of it that appeared in a Western newspaper in January 1913.⁹³ It is also possible to go back to the murder of Jaures on the last evening before the war began—probably never entirely explained, as I recently suggested. But it is equally possible to go back to the same newspaper to which I just referred, which carried the statement in 1913 saying that if conditions in Europe should lead to war, Jaures would be the first to meet his death—You may consult a certain occult almanac⁹⁴ that was sold for forty francs and find in the issue for 1913, which was printed, of course, in 1912, the statement that he who was expected to be the ruler in Austria would not be the ruler, but rather a younger man, whom people wouldn't even now consider as the successor to the old Emperor Franz Josef.⁹⁵ That was printed in a so-called occult almanac for 1913; printed, therefore, in the autumn of 1912. Moreover, in the same almanac for 1914, printed in 1913, the same remark was repeated⁹⁶ because obviously the attempt on Emperor Franz Josef's life had miscarried in 1913. When these things are seen more clearly, the connection will someday be discovered that exists between what actually happens externally and what is cooked up by hidden, dark sources. Many will recognize the threads that lead from public life into this or that brotherhood, and how stupid it is for other brotherhoods continually to declare that silence should be maintained regarding certain mystery truths. Such people may be as innocent as children, in spite of the fact that they may be old members of this or that brotherhood of Freemasons which lay claim to secret sources. Nevertheless, they further intensify the obscurity and darkness that is already present among human beings.

I recently gave an example in St. Gallen and Zurich of an especially enlightened pastor and professor,⁹⁷ who belongs to an occult brotherhood, and pointed out the discontinuity in his thinking. He is one of those people who make their presence felt through their own denseness which they acquire in their occult brotherhoods. It is the mission of many leaders in those brotherhoods to keep members like this professor in the dark, and by this a rather unfavorable influence is exerted. People must open their eyes, but these eyes must first learn how to see. The direction of one's perception is determined by the enlightenment one has received regarding the spiritual world. Judgments are continually made that seldom take human relationships into account. Thus, as I have once indicated, I, too, was at one time to be made tractable through being “appointed” to some post in the Theosophical Society at the time Alcyone (Krishnamurti)⁹⁸ was “appointed.” Everything that pulses through our movement might have been neatly swept away if I had fallen in with what was suggested to me; that is, to become the “reincarnated John!” Certain sources would then have announced that Alcyone is one thing and he is the reincarnated John. Then the entire movement need not have experienced what later occurred.

Vanity also belongs among the various things that stupefy people. Much can be achieved by getting hold of it in the right way, especially if the methods are known by which certain concepts are to be formed. I have already pointed out that the Theosophical Society simply worked too amateurishly. The others do these things more cleverly and practically, but it is naturally not possible to do much that is clever when it is necessary to reckon with a personality under whom those near her have groaned a good deal; when it is necessary, for example, to reckon with such a personality as Annie Besant,⁹⁹ who is full of violent emotion. Those in her company have sighed for years because of the state into which they declared she would bring them because she also, of course, had come within the aura of a particular Indian occultism. Moreover, she also possessed curious characteristics that came from strange depths and were rather inappropriate for a number of people even in the Theosophical Society. A number of individuals, mostly men—excuse me, but no allusion is intended—groaned because they were forever trying to get Annie Besant a little more on the track so things might proceed. But there were women also who sighed, and they always gave in to her again since they always tried, above all, to practice theosophy—to be sure, in the sense in which it was there practiced, but in such a way that it should become something like a theosophical sort of conglomerated mediocrity. There was a desire to introduce into the practice of spiritual science what John Stuart Mill called conglomerated mediocrity.

I myself observed how a representative of the Theosophical Society worked in a city belonging to the section of which I was at that time the general secretary.¹⁰⁰ I went to this city to deliver some lectures, having been called there by a lady representative. But she said to me, “We shall gradually give up the lectures because they do not have the right objective. We must arrange afternoon teas and invite people to become mutually acquainted.” Her idea was that this is done best along with sandwiches. “But the lectures (and she said this with a certain disparaging expression) will have a less and less important role.” It may be said that this personality was also enveloped in the right sheaths from a particular direction. There are, indeed, many individuals working as representatives who do not know at times where the wires that pull them originate. Wires are frequently not needed. Small twine will work, even packaging cord. Indeed, it is lamentable to see how humanity behaves at times even when the holiest and most serious things of mankind are at stake.

In particular, the greatest fear was that Blavatsky, provided she continued to be healthy and brought up to the surface what was in the subconscious parts of her nature, would be politically dangerous simply because of her special gifts and exceptional connection with her own Russian people. Many special efforts were made to prevent this from happening. Indeed, beginning in the sixties and seventies, if what then lived in Blavatsky could have become effective, many things of which such individuals as Mill and Herzen had a perfectly clear view would then have taken an entirely different course. But certain ahrimanic powers succeeded in eliminating a great deal. Well, we will see how things will go with our spiritual science under the present distressing conditions. Right thinking about it will be possible only for those who are capable of perceiving its significance in reference to the mission of our fifth post-Atlantean epoch. You have already been able to discover to what extent our spiritual science really takes into account only what is purely human, and I think it is also possible to perceive a distinction between these things. We have often discussed Goethe's Faust and even produced it on the stage. It does not require a national background to present Faust in all its occult depths. But I leave it up to you to decide whether it is necessary to harbor nationalistic feelings or perhaps even a peculiar nationalistic fervor, in order to call Goethe, Schiller, and Lessing spirits of mediocre rank, as Maeterlinck¹⁰¹ has most recently done, and to write long articles about the mediocrity of Goethe, Schiller, and Lessing that the important newspapers of the world are persuaded to publish. You may decide there are even deeper reasons behind this.

Just put two things together. In the course of these reflections I have pointed out to you that Ku Hung Ming,¹⁰² the Chinese, has written a truly ingenious book claiming that the only salvation for the Europeans is to apply themselves to what is the essence of China. Thus, they would be enabled, so Ku¹⁰³ with a Magna Carta of loyalty, which can come only from what is essentially Chinese. Ku Hung Ming is a discerning spirit who, from a profound knowledge of the Chinese nature, confirms what Mill and Herzen already had sensed. He is a spirit, moreover, who is not a philologist or schoolmaster, but one who came from a practical profession like Max Eyth, whom I have already mentioned; that is, he is neither a theologian, schoolmaster nor philologist, but one who originally was a merchant, has had many occupations and knows life. Ku Hung Ming represents the Chinese nature, the life of China. From Ku Hung Ming's remarkably vivid descriptions, it is possible today to gain a conception that gives us the impression that Mill and Herzen—read Herzen's book of 1864—were entirely right when they called the teaching of Confucius and Laotze¹⁰⁴ the final consequence that must follow if Europe should be seized by the so-called positivistic realism, supported by conglomerated mediocrity, by bourgeois nothingness. The Chinese way of thinking is the final consequence of what is promulgated in the universities today and is spreading to the masses as the contemporary world view. It came from an earlier culture six hundred years before our era. Ku Hung Ming describes it clearly. Mill and Herzen described the way that will be taken by a European culture based solely upon external positivistic realism. From one side Europe will take hold of the Chinese entity; from the other, the only salvation for Europe lies in the Chinese way of thinking.

Perhaps there may be a third side and I hope you will permit me to raise this very question at the conclusion of today's considerations. How would it be if there were also a side to which it would be entirely agreeable if a Chinese should advise the Europeans to choose their only existing salvation? How would it be if it were not mere chance that this teaching of Ku Hung Ming is being introduced into Europe today? It is brilliant from the standpoint of the Chinese nature, but is it not also capable of confusing those people who do not receive it with a clear mind, with senses awakened by spiritual science and possibly designed to maneuver the people to a point where they embrace the ways of China? This is precisely what is intended, just as Mill and Herzen have already correctly seen that certain occult brotherhoods have set their sails in the direction of acquiring the essence of China, since in a Chinafied Europe it would be easiest to include what they want. Why, then, should it not be in keeping with the will of a brotherhood that a Chinese should advise the Europeans to pay heed to the beauties that might come from this Chinese way of thinking? Why may we not expect that the so-called most enlightened should be captivated by the advice of a Chinese since Europeans no longer know what to do?

Since I have said how significant that Chinese book is, I also feel obligated from the representative standpoint of spiritual science to call attention to the following: Such phenomena as the book of Ku Hung Ming—or really, the books, since two have appeared—should certainly be examined but we also must know that, under certain circumstances, far-reaching objectives are concealed behind them. It is entirely wrong not to become acquainted with them, but it is also wrong to be taken in by them. It is also most important to examine carefully everything that appears today, often from the most dubious sources, in the form of mysticism or occultism. Those of you who take into account what I have so frequently presented will endeavor also to see these things correctly. The modern world stands in the midst of all sorts of other currents, raising the question as to whether or not individuals possess the will power to see clearly and distinctly. We must, for example, be able to estimate thoroughly the difference between this current and one that still possesses more power today than is ordinarily opposed, and that proceeds from certain Roman Catholic sources. Initiation principles frequently stand behind them, though naturally those who bring them into the world are blind to what guides them. Let us now contrast certain things with others. On the one side, there is the Roman Church and, on the other, those occult brotherhoods. The Roman Church, which works in the way well-known to you, and those brotherhoods that, of course, wage a deadly war with the Church but also certainly possess and use occult knowledge; yet, before the public, they brand this as medieval superstition so that they may keep people in the right current and use them for their own purposes. Contrast this with the Roman Church. Just take the encyclical of December 8, 1864, Freedom of Conscience and of Worship,¹⁰⁵ that was proclaimed ex cathedra. Those principles in which men believe are mentioned there and they are then condemned: “It is stated by some people that freedom of conscience and or worship is the right of every human being. This is madness. This is an absurdity.” In the view of the Roman See, it is an absurdity, a madness, for the orthodox Catholic to lay claim to freedom of conscience and worship. This is one of the currents; the other finds that it is better not to say such things but rather to do things whereby the freedom of conscience, the freedom of one's own conviction, most of all, and the introduction of one's own conviction in human life, shall be abolished. Here you have two contrasting movements that are most significant for today; much depends on this.

The reason for my concluding today's lecture with these reflections was to admonish those who stand within our spiritual scientific movement to grasp the inner impulse of the soul and not belong among the somnolent, but among those who determine to strive for a vision of life as it is. To receive items of spiritual scientific knowledge and to believe them does not make one a spiritual scientist. Only that person is a spiritual scientist in the true sense whom the spiritual scientific truths have made into a clear-sighted human being, but also into one who possesses the will really to look in the right way at what is in his other environment, and at the right points, so as to be able to judge the situation in which one is placed in the world. If we wish to speak in a fruitful way about the karma of vocation, then this also belongs to the discussion.

We shall soon continue these reflections. The necessary light will then be cast upon what belongs more in the immediate, everyday life, the immediate karma of vocation.

• 80. The archai are the spirits of the time. “Arché“ is the singular of “archai.“
• 81. Printed in: Luzifer-Gnosis 1903–1908, Bibl.-No. 34, CE (1960) and as a separate edition.
• 82. The lecture was given on October 16, 1916, and was entitled “Das menschliche Leben vom Gesichtspunkte der Geisteswissenschaft (Anthroposophie)“ [Human Life from the Point of View of Spiritual Science (Anthroposophy)]. It is printed in: Philosophie und Anthroposophie. Gesammelte Aufsätze 1904–1918 [Philosophy and Anthroposophy. Collected Essays 1904–1918], Bibl.-No. 35, CE (Dornach, 1965).
• 83. Cf. Lecture V of November 13, 1916.
• 84. The reference is to lectures on October 7 and October 14, 1916, published in Innere Entwicklungsimpulse der Menschheit [Inner Developmental Impulses of Mankind], Bibl.-No. 171, CE (Dornach, 1964).
• 85. Lecture of October 29, 1916, “Innere Entwicklungsimpulse der Menschheit“ [Inner Developmental Impulses of Mankind], Bibl.- No. 171, CE (Dornach, 1964).
• 86. John Stuart Mill (1806–73), British philosopher and economist, espoused a modified humanitarian utilitarianism but is also regarded by some as one of the founders of positivism.
• 87. Alexander Ivanovich Herzen (1812–70) was a Russian writer and revolutionary. Steiner refers to Herzen's work Last Things and First Things (1864) and quotes from Dimitri S. Merezhkovsky's book Der Anmarsch des Pöbels [The Advance of the Mob] (Munich, 1907).
• 88. Dimitry Sergeyevich Merezhkovsky (1865–1941) was a renowned Russian critic and novelist who spent nearly half of his life in exile in Paris.
• 89. See footnote 82.
• 90. Helena Petrowna Blavatsky (1831–91). Together with Colonel Henry Steel Olcott she founded the Theosophical Society in the year 1875 in New York.
• 91. Steiner did this in detail in the lectures he gave in the fall of 1915. Cf. “Die okkulte Bewegung im 19. Jahrhundert und ihre Beziehung zur Weltkultur,“ Bibl.-No. 257, CE (Dornach, 1969). The Occult Movement in the Nineteenth Century, (London, Rudolf Steiner Press, 1973).
• 92. Franz Ferdinand, Archduke of Austria-Este (1863–1914) was assassinated in Sarajevo on June 28, 1914.
• 93. The newspaper referred to was Paris-Midi. Cf. the speeches by Jean Jaures published by Victor Schiff (Berlin, 1919).
• 94. Almanach de Mme de Thèbes [pseudonym of an alleged Mme Anne Victoire de Savigny, died in 1917), “Conseils pour etre heureux“ (Paris, 103 ff.).
• 95. Cf. “L'assassin,“ in Almanach de Mme de Thebes 1913 (Paris, 1912): “The one who is supposed to rule Austria (Franz Ferdinand) is not going to rule but rather a young man who at this time is not intended to be the ruler (Karl I).“
• 96. See “Més predications de l'an passé,“ Almanach de Mme de Thebes 1914 (Paris, 1913): “The tragic event that I predicted for the Austrian imperial family has not yet occurred, but it will definitely take place before the first half of the year has elapsed.“
• 97. The reference is to Dr. Friedrich Mahling, Hamburg. In his lecture on October 26, 1916, in St. Gallen, Rudolf Steiner quotes from Mahling's booklet Die Gedankenwelt der Gebildeten [The World of Thought of the Educated]. Cf. Die Verbindung zwischen den Lebenden und den Toten [The Connection between the Living and the Dead], Bibl.-No. 168, CE (Dornach, 1976).
• 98. Jiddu Krishnamurti (1895–1986) was proclaimed by the Theosophical Society in 1909 as an incarnation of Maitreya, the messianic Buddha. After a two-year tour of America and England with Annie Besant, Krishnamurti renounced these claims in 1929.
• 99. Annie Besant (1847–1933) was elected President of the Theosophical Society in May, 1907.
• 100. Rudolf Steiner had been secretary of the German branch of the Theosophical Society since its founding on October 20, 1902.
• 101. Maurice Maeterlinck (1862–1949) was a Belgian writer.
• 102. Ku Hung-Ming, Der Geist des chinesischen Volkes und der Ausweg aus dem Krieg [The Spirit of the Chinese People and the Way out of the War] (1916).
• 103. pp. 168–169 in Ku Hung-Ming's book (cf. footnote 102): “Therefore, the first task must be to find some way to give the generals and politicians power, the power to make peace. The nations now waging war in Europe can achieve this only by tearing up their present Magna Cartas of Freedom and by replacing them with a new Magna Carta of Loyalty, such as we Chinese have it in our religion of the good citizen.“
• 104. Confucius, Chinese Kung Fu-tse (551–579? B.C.), a Chinese philosopher. Lao-tze (born approximately 604 B.C.) was also a Chinese philosopher and the co-founder of Taoism. He was called “the old master.“
• 105. This encyclical has become known as the so-called “Syllabus Pius' IX.“