The Rudolf Steiner Archive

In a series of lectures the fact has now been brought home to us that behind all that we call Maya or the great illusion, there is the Spiritual. Let us once again ask ourselves in what way it has been made evident that the spiritual is to be discerned behind everything perceptible to our senses and our physically limited view.

In order to describe this spiritual essence we were obliged in the last lecture to sweep the nearest external phenomena away from our field of vision and pierce through to such qualities of the reality as those described as the willingness to sacrifice, and the virtue of bestowal or renunciation, in fact, to those virtues with which we can only become acquainted by looking into our own souls, and which we can only fully comprehend by means of our own souls. Now if we are really to attribute such virtues as these to what we have to think of as the reality—we might almost say the ‘true’—behind the world of illusion, we must admit that in this world of true existence, in this world of reality, there lives that which fundamentally, as regards its qualities, can only be compared with the qualities we primarily perceive in our souls. For instance if we have to characterise that which is outwardly expressed in the phenomena of heat, presenting it in its true character of sacrificial service, as the flowing sacrifice in the world, it means precisely that we must reduce the elements of heat back to the spiritual, to the incorporeal, doing away, as it were, with the outer veil of existence, showing that which in the external world is similar to what we recognise as the spiritual in ourselves.

Now before we carry these observations further, another idea is necessary. That is the following. Does all that we have in this world of Maya or illusion really vanish into a sort of nothingness? Is everything around us in this world of sense, the world of our external comprehension which to us appears as the real or part of the real—is all this actually nothing?

It would indeed be quite a good comparison if we were to say that the world of truth, the world of reality, is at first concealed, as the inner forces of a lake or even of the ocean are concealed in the body of water, and that the world of Maya might be compared with the rippling play of the waves on the surface. That would be a good comparison; for it shows exactly that there is in the depths of the ocean something that causes the movement of the waves above, something that is the substantiality of the water and the configuration of its force. So that whether we select this example or any other is a matter of indifference, we may very well put the question:--Is there in the wide realms of our Maya or illusion, anything that is real? In this lecture we shall follow the same system as in the last. We shall slowly approach what we wish to bring before our mind, by starting with the inner experience of our soul; and indeed, as we have moved forward spiritually through the Saturn, Sun and Moon-existence, and have now approached that of the earth, we shall start from more intimate, we might almost say more common soul-experience than those referred to in our last lecture. We then started from the hidden depths of the soul-life, from what arises in the astral body. There we felt longing arising within it, and we saw how the longing works in the nature of man, actually leading the life of the soul to find satisfaction only in the advance of that world of ideas which we have been able to grasp as the inner movement of that life. We thus found the way from the microcosmic soul to that cosmic creating which we ascribed to the Spirits of Movement. To-day we shall begin with a still more intimate experience of the soul, one indeed to which attention was already drawn in ancient Greece, which in its reality is even to-day of profound significance. It is indicated in the words: all philosophy, and all striving for a certain kind of human knowledge, must come from Wonder. This is really the case. Any man who has devoted a little reflection and thought to the whole sequence in experience in his own soul, as to how he was brought to any particular learning, will come to know that a sound way to learning is always to start from wonder, from astonishment at something. This wonder, this astonishment, from which every form of learning must proceed, belongs precisely to those experiences of the soul which we described as bringing sublimity and life into anything, however dry. What kind of learning would it be which found a place in our soul, without proceeding from wonder! It would truly be a learning swamped in prosiness and pedantry. That process in the soul which leads from wonder to the bliss we feel when our riddles are solved, which first arises from wonder, in that alone constitutes the sublimity and vital power of the process of acquiring knowledge. We should be able actually to feel the dryness and withering of any knowledge not originating in these two movements of the mind. Sound knowledge is framed in wonder and the bliss of solved riddles: Any other kind of knowledge may be acquired externally and established by man through any kind of reasoning. But a knowledge not framed by these two feelings, does not spring from the soul of man in real earnest. All the fragrance of knowledge created by the atmosphere of vital power, proceeds from these two, from wonder and the bliss of is satisfaction.

But what is the origin of wonder itself? Why is it that wonder, astonishment at anything external, arises in our souls? It arises, because, when we first meet with a being, a thing or a fact, it appears strange to us. This strangeness is the first element leading to wonder and astonishment. But we do not feel this for everything that is strange to us; but only for that to which we feel ourselves in a sense related, so related that we say: ‘In this being or thing there is something that is not as yet in me, but which may fill me.’ So that we can feel related to a thing yet strange, which at first we must grasp through wonder and astonishment, our inner ‘wondering’ is our perception of the quality of an outer ‘wonder’ to which a man at first as far as his own perception goes, considers himself in no wise related. That however depends on himself, or at least it need only do so. And he should not adopt a challenging attitude towards what appears to him as ‘a wonder’ unless he can in a certain way make claim to explain it because it is related to him. Why else should people who start from purely materialistic or purely intellectual concepts deny what others designate as a ‘wonder’, when they have no direct proof that a fabrication, a falsehood, is brought forward? Even philosophers to-day are obliged to admit that it can never be proved by any of the phenomena known to man, that the Christ incarnated in Jesus of Nazareth did not rise again. Proof can be brought against this assertion; but what is the manner of these proofs? Logically they are not tenable! Even enlightened philosophers now admit that. For all the reasons brought against it from the materialistic side—as for instance, the statement that no man has yet been seen to have risen like Christ—all these reasons are on the same level as the argument of a man who had never seen anything but fish and therefore wished to prove the non-existence of birds. It is impossible logically to prove by the existence of one class of beings, that others do not exist. Just as little is it possible through the experience a man may have on the physical plane to disprove, what must at first be described as a ‘miracle’, anything connected with the event of Golgotha. But if something is communicated to a person, which although it may be true, he must call a miracle and he says that he cannot understand it, he does not thereby contradict what we have said about the idea of wondering; for his attitude shows clearly that this fundamental basis of all knowledge is already established in him. He demands that what he has been told should find an echo in himself. He wishes it to become its own property intellectually and as he believes that he cannot have that, and it is not related to him, he challenges it. Even if we ourselves arrive at the concept of the miraculous, we should see that astonishment or marvel, upon which is based all the ancient Greek philosophy, is aroused by a man finding himself confronted with something strange to him, but to which at the same time he recognises a relationship. Let us try to create a connecting link between this idea and those brought before our minds in the last lecture.

We have said that a particular advance in evolution was brought about through the willingness of certain Beings to sacrifice, and their sacrifices being rejected and thrown back, and we learnt to recognise in the rejected sacrifice one of the principle factors in the ancient Moon-evolution. One of the most vital points in that evolution is the fact that during that period sacrifice was to be offered by certain Beings to Entities even more exalted, and that it was renounced by them; so that, as it were, the smoke of the sacrifice offered by the ancient Moon-Beings pressed through to the Higher Entities but was not accepted by them; and that this was sent back as substance into the Beings who had desired to offer it up. We also saw that much of the peculiar character of the Beings belonging to ancient Moon was caused by their feeling within them what they had wished to send up to the Higher Entities as sacrificial substance. We saw, indeed that this, which aspired, but was unable to ascend to the Higher Entities, remained behind within the Beings themselves—thereby was developed in certain Beings—in the Beings of the rejected, the force of Longing. We have still, in all that we sacrifice in our own souls as longing, a legacy from the bygone events on ancient Moon when those Beings found their sacrifice rejected. In a spiritual sense the whole character of the ancient Moon-evolution, its whole spiritual atmosphere, may be described in many respects by saying that Beings were present there who desired to offer sacrifice, but found that this sacrifice was not accepted because the Higher Entities resigned it. The peculiar feature of the spiritual atmosphere of ancient Moon was; the rejected sacrifice. And the rejection of the sacrifice offered by Cain, which symbolically represents one of the starting points of the evolution of earthly humanity, appears as a kind of recapitulation of this peculiar feature of the ancient Moon evolution taking place in the soul of Cain, who sees that his sacrifice is not accepted. This is something which reveals to us a pain, which gives birth to Longing, just as was the case with the Beings belonging to the old Moon-existence. We saw in the last lecture, that between this rejected sacrifice and the longing arising in these beings through its rejection, an adjustment was produced through the appearances on the old Moon of the Spirits of Movement. They created a possible way by which the longing arising in the Entities of the rejected sacrifice, could in a sense be satisfied. You must picture the position very clearly in your minds. You have the exalted Beings to whom sacrifice is about to be made; the substance offered in sacrifice to them rejected; and the longing thereby arising within the Beings who desired to offer and now feel: ‘Had I been able to accomplish my sacrifice, the best part of my own being would be living in those exalted ones; but now lam shut out from them, I am here while they are yonder!’ The Spirits of Movement, however, and this can be taken almost literally, bring the Beings in whom the rejected sacrifice is as a longing after the Higher Beings, into such a condition that they can approach them from many different sides. That which remains in them as the sacrifice which could not be offered, can at any rate now be adjusted, through the wealth of impressions received from the Higher Beings, who are as it were, encircled by the substance of the rejected sacrifice. So is adjusted what could not be harmonised, because of the rejection of the sacrifice, inasmuch as a relation is established between these beings and the Higher Entities which conveyed the impression of a presented sacrifice. We can form a clear idea of what this implies, if we think symbolically of the more exalted Entities united as a Sun, and then, in one position, as a planet, the less exalted gathered together. Now suppose that the Beings of the lesser planet wished to make sacrifice to the greater planet—to the Sun [Editor's Note: The Sun was once a planet]—and that the Sun refused to accept it and threw it back; the substance of the sacrifice must remain in the Beings whose sacrifice was not accepted. Then in their loneliness, their isolation fills their Being with longing. Now the Spirits of Movement bring them into the periphery of the more exalted Entities; this makes it first possible for them, hi place of the direct upward flow of their sacrificial substance, to set that substance itself in motion and thereby to bring it into connection with the Higher Entities. This is exactly like a man who cannot be contented within himself by means of a single great satisfaction, but experiences a number of partial satisfactions; the result of these different experiences being to set all his feelings in motion. This was gone into more minutely in the last lecture. We saw that as the Beings were unable to feel an inner connection with the Higher Beings through the sacrifice, impressions came to them outside in the place of this, by which we saw that they were still able to obtain a certain satisfaction.

But it is an undeniable fact that that which was to have been offered up would have continued its existence within the Higher Entities in a different fashion from its state within the lower Beings. The actual conditions necessary to that existence are in those Higher Beings. It became necessary, therefore, for different conditions of existence to arise in the lower Beings. This again can be symbolically expressed. If a planet were able to pour all its contents into the Sun and these were not rejected, the essence of that planet would find different conditions of existence within the Sun from those it would have met with in the planet outside if the Sun had thrown it back: an estrangement of what we must call the contents of the sacrifice takes place, it is alienated from its origin.

Now bear in mind the thought that certain Beings are compelled to retain within them something which they would gladly have offered up in sacrifice, and concerning which they both feel and perceive that it could only attain its real meaning, if it could be offered up.

If you can picture the feelings of such Beings, you will have an idea of what may be called: ‘The exclusion of a certain number of Cosmic Beings from their actual meaning, their great Cosmic purpose.’ Certain Beings have within them something, which, speaking symbolically, could only fulfil its purpose elsewhere. The consequence of this is that the ‘displacement’—if we may once more speak symbolically—of the rejected incense, of the rejected sacrificial substance, excludes it at first from the rest of the Cosmic process.

If you grasp these thoughts with your feeling—not with your reason, for that does not extend to matters such as these—you will perceive that this represents something like a rending away from the universal Cosmic process. To the Beings who rejected the sacrifice it is only something they put away from them; to the other Beings, those within whom the sacrificial substance is retained, this is a something on which an alien character is imprinted from the outset. Thus there are Beings in whose substance this alien stamp is imprinted from the beginning. If we can present these things to our soul through inner feeling, we are reminded of something in which an alien character is inherent from the beginning:—that is Death! Death is none other than that which necessarily enters the universe with the rejection of the sacrificial substance of those Beings who then had to retain it within themselves. Thus we advance from Resignation, from Renunciation—which we encounter at the third stage of evolution; to that which comes into existence through the renunciation by the Higher Entities of Death.

In its true significance death is neither more nor less than the attribute of the inner contents of certain Beings, contents which are shut out and not in their proper place. Even when death comes to a man in a concrete form it is fundamentally the same thing. For when we look at a corpse left behind in the world of Maya, we know that it consists of nothing but matter which at the moment of death, was shut out from the Ego, astral body, and etheric body, alienated from that within which alone it had a meaning. The physical body without the etheric body, astral body, and Ego has no meaning, it is purposeless; at that moment it is excluded from its purpose. That which we can no longer perceive when a man dies, is then for us in the macrocosm. On account of the Cosmic Beings who belong to higher spheres having rejected what was to have been brought to them in sacrifice, the rejected sacrificial substance within the Beings to whom it was thrown back lapses into death, for death signifies the exclusion of any Cosmic substance or Cosmic Being from its actual purpose.

We have now come to a spiritual characteristic of what we call the fourth element in the Universe. If (1) fire represents the purest sacrifice—and where-ever we encounter fire or heat, behind it there is its spiritual counterpart: Sacrifice—if (2) behind all the air spread out around our earth there really lies the virtue of giving, a really flowing virtue; if (3) we may describe flowing water or the element of fluidity as spiritual resignation or renunciation, so must we describe the element of Earth, (4) which alone can be the bearer of death—for death would not exist without it—as that which was severed from its purpose by renunciation. Now we have something in a concrete form, showing how the solid was formed from the fluidic. For this too reflects a spiritual process, in a certain sense. Suppose ice forms in a pond; the water then becomes solid. The real reason of this is that the water in becoming ice is cut off from its purpose. This gives us the process of solidification, the spiritual process of the Earth's becoming; for as far as the distinguishing marks of the four elements are concerned, ice too is earth, and fluid alone is water. Earth is the element in which death appears and may be experienced.

We began by putting the question as to whether anything real could be found in our world of illusion and Maya, whether there is anything in it corresponding to a reality. I want you to hold clearly to the idea we have just been considering. At the beginning of this course I told you that the concepts to be considered were somewhat complicated. It will therefore be necessary that we should not only try to understand them, but also to meditate upon them; for only then will they be clear to us. Now let us take this conception of the relation of death to the earth; for it presents a truly remarkable aspect. Whereas concerning all our other concepts we could say that there was nothing real in all the world of Maya around us, but that the reality must be looked for in the spiritual behind it—we have now ascertained that within the world of Maya there is that, which, precisely because it is divided from its purpose, because it ought to be in the spiritual world may be called death. Thus something is cut off in Maya, which actually ought not to be there. In the whole wide realm of Maya or the great illusion, we have nothing but deception and illusion before us. Yet there is something there which corresponds to a reality, because it is cut off from its true meaning in the spiritual; and as soon as it enters Maya it encounters annihilation and death. That declares to us nothing less significant than the great occult truth: ‘In the whole world of Maya one thing only shows itself in its reality—Death!’ All other phenomena must be traced back to their reality; all other phenomena entering into Maya have reality behind them; death is the single reality in Maya for it consists in the fact that something was cut off from reality and taken into Maya. That is why death is the one and only reality in Maya. And now if we turn from the universal Maya to the great principles of the world, a very important and essential consequence of this statement presents itself to occult science from yet another side, that in our world of Maya, Death is the only reality. We can begin by considering the beings of the other kingdoms surrounding us. We may ask: do minerals die? To the occultist there could be no sense in saying that minerals die. It would he just the same as saying that our fingernails die when we cut them. The finger-nail is nothing which s complete being has claim to existence; but it is part of us, and when we/cut it off we separate it from ourselves, tear it away from the life it has in connection with us. In reality it dies only when we ourselves die. In the same sense, according to occult science, the minerals do not die. They are merely members of one great organism, just as a finger-nail is a member of our own, and although a mineral may appear to perish, it is in reality only severed from this great organism, just as the piece of finger-nail is severed from our organism when we trim it off. The destruction of a mineral is no death for the mineral has no life in itself, but only in the great organism of which it is a member. The plant as such is not independent; it is a member—not of one great organism, like the mineral—but of the whole organism of the earth. To occult observation there would be no sense in speaking of individual plant-organisms, only of the organism of the earth of which the plants everywhere form part. And when we put them to death it is just as when we cut away one of our finger-nails. We cannot say that the finger-nail has died. Just as little can we say that of the plants; for they belong to a great organism that is identical with the whole earth, and that is an organism which falls asleep in spring, sending forth the plants as its organ towards the Sun; and in Autumn it takes them back into itself when it gathers their seeds into itself. There is no sense in considering the plants as independent, for the whole earth organism does not die when its separate plants fade—just as we ourselves do not die when our hair goes grey, although we cannot restore it its natural colour even if we dye it.

We are, however, in a different position from the plants. But the earth may in this respect be compared to a man who could restore his grey hair to its natural colour. The earth does not die; what is observed in the fading of the plants is a process that takes place on the surface. So we can never say that the plants really die. And even of the animals we cannot actually say that they die, as we die. For in reality a separate animal does not exist; what really exists is its group-soul, which is in the super-sensible world. The reality of the animals is only to be found on the astral plane as group-soul, and the individual animal is condensed out of that. The death of an animal means the casting off a member of the group-soul, which replaces it by another.

Thus what we encounter at death in the mineral, plant, and animal kingdoms is only apparent death, only in the world of Maya is that ‘death’. In reality man alone dies, for he has developed his individuality so far that it descends into his physical body, in which during the earth-existence he must become real. In reality death has only meaning for the Earth-existence of man.

If we grasp this we must say: Man alone can truly experience death. Thus for man there is, as we learn through occult research, a real overcoming of death, a real victory over death. For every other being death is only apparent, and does not in reality exist. If again we were to ascend higher—from man to the Beings of the Higher Hierarchies—we should find that they do not know death in the human sense; so that in reality actual death, that is death on the physical plane, comes only to those beings who have to acquire something on that plane. Now man has to acquire his ego-consciousness there. Without death he could never find it. Neither with respect to the beings below man in rank, nor to those higher than man, is there any meaning in speaking of actual death. But on the other hand as regards the Being whom we call the ‘Christ-Being’ it must clearly be impossible to obliterate his most significant earth deed. For indeed we have seen that the most essential event to be considered in connection with the Christ-Being is the Mystery of Golgotha; that is, the conquest of death by life. But where can this conquest of death alone be accomplished? Can it be accomplished in the higher worlds? No! For even as regards the lower beings referred to as the mineral, plant and animal kingdoms—as they have their beings in the higher, super-sensible worlds—we cannot speak of death. And in the course of our studies this winter we shall further show that neither among the Higher Beings can there be a question of death; only of change, metamorphosis, transformation. Only with regard to man can we speak of the incision into life that we call ‘death.’ Man can only experience this death on the physical plane. If man had never descended to the physical plane, he would know nothing of death; for no being who has not trodden the physical plane knows anything about death. In other worlds there is no such thing as that which we call death, nothing but transformation, metamorphosis. Would Christ undergo death He must descend to the physical plane! There alone could He experience it.

Thus we see that even in the historical development of man, the realities of the higher worlds play their part in Maya, in a remarkable way. Whereas concerning every other historical event we can only interpret it correctly by saying: ‘This historical event took place here on the physical plane, but the cause of it is up above in the spiritual world, we must look for that’; we cannot say of the event of Golgotha, ‘this event is here below on the physical plane and something corresponding to it exists in the higher worlds’. Christ Himself belongs to the higher worlds and came down to the physical plane. But there is no prototype above of what was accomplished on Golgotha, such as we must look for with respect to other historical events. That was enacted on the physical plane alone! Among the many proofs of this fact which occult science is able to provide, is the following: That the event of Damascus will, in the course of the next three thousand years, as we have often said, be renewed for an ample multitude of mankind. This means, that capacities will be developed in man which will enable him to perceive the Christ as an etheric figure of the astral plane, as Paul saw Him on the road to Damascus. The event on of man gradually becoming able to perceive the Christ by means of the higher faculties which will be developed in the next three thousand years, has its beginnings in the 20th century. From now on these capacities will gradually spread, and in the course of that span of time a vast number of persons will know, by personal vision into the higher worlds, that Christ is a reality; that He lives; they will learn to know Him in the life He lives now. And not only will they know the nature of His present life, but they will also be convinced just as Paul was—that He died, and rose again. But the foundation for this cannot be laid in the higher worlds: it must be laid on the physical plane. Thus if anyone comes to have an understanding of these things, if even at the present time he understands that the development of Christ Himself is progressing—and that at the same time certain human capacities are also developing, if his understanding of modern Anthroposophy has taught him this, then there is nothing to prevent him, when he has passed through the portal of death, from taking part in this event when it actually appears as a first shining forth of Christ in the world of man. So that a man who prepares himself in his physical body to-day for this event, may be able to experience it in the intermediate life, between death and re-birth. But those who do not prepare for it, who acquire no understanding in this incarnation, will, in the life immediately following this—the life between death and re-birth--know nothing of what is taking place with respect to the Christ for the next three thousand years from our present century. They will have to wait until they are again incarnated and then make necessary preparations on the earth. The death at Golgotha, which is enacted on earth as the origin of all the subsequent Christ development can only be understood in the physical body. Of all the facts important to our higher life, this alone is comprehensible in the physical body. It is then further developed and perfected in the higher worlds, but we must first have understood it while in the physical body. Just as the Mystery of Golgotha could never have taken place in the higher worlds and has no prototype there, but is an event which—since it includes death--is confined to the physical plane, so, too must the comprehension of it be acquired on this plane. Indeed, it is one of the tasks of man on earth to acquire this understanding first in some one of his incarnations.

So that we must say: we have found pre-eminently on the physical plane something which displays an undeniable reality, a direct truth. What then is real on the physical plane? On the physical plane so that we can stand by it, we have a reality, death—death in the world of man, not in the other kingdoms of nature. When we wish to study the historical events that occur in the course of the earth's development, we must look for a spiritual prototype for each one of them—but not for the Mystery of Golgotha! There we have something which in itself directly belongs to the world of Reality!

Now it is extremely interesting that another aspect of what has just been said, can also be seen. It is really remarkably significant to observe that this event of Golgotha as a real event is to-day denied, and that people say—speaking of external history—that it cannot be proved by any historical connection. Among vital historical facts there is hardly one so difficult to prove on external realistic, historical grounds, as the Mystery of Golgotha. Just think how easy it is in comparison with this to work on historical ground if we wish to prove the existence of a Socrates, a Plato, or any of the Greek heroes, in so far as they were of significance to the progress of man in the external world, and how up to a certain point it is perfectly justifiable to say that ‘no history can assert that there ever was a Jesus of Nazareth!’ This statement cannot be contradicted historically! This cannot be dealt with like other historical facts. It is very remarkable that this Event, which occurred on the external physical plane, has this in common with all super-sensible facts: they cannot be ‘proved’. Much the same people who deny the existence of a super-sensible world lack the capacity for grasping this fact, which is not super-sensible. Its existence can be surmised by its effects. But, these people think that effects such as these might also appear, even without the real event having occurred in history; and they attribute these effects to sociological relations. To one who knows the inner course of the world's development, the idea that effects such as these produced by Christianity could be brought about without having a power behind them, is just as wise as it would be to say cabbages could grow in a field without having been sown there I Indeed we might go yet further, and admit that it was not possible for those who took part in the final shaping of the Gospels to prove, the historical event of the Mystery of Golgotha—as historical event—on historical grounds! For it took place leaving hardly any trace perceptible to outer observation. Do you know how those who took part in the later compiling of the Gospels convinced themselves as to these events, with the exception of the writer of the John-Gospel, who was an immediate contemporary? They could not above all convince themselves by historical documents, for they had nothing but oral traditions and the Mystery-Books, as is set forth in Christianity as a Mystical Fact. They were able to convince themselves of the actual existence of Christ Jesus by the constellations, for they were then still very learned as to the connection between the Macrocosm and the Microcosm. They knew how to set up a map of the heavens for that point of the world's history (as can still be done to-day); and they concluded: if the stars were in such and such a position, then He whom they call the Christ must have lived on earth at that time. In this very way the writers of the Gospel of Matthew, Mark and Luke convinced themselves of the historical happenings; they obtained the rest clairvoyantly. But first they convinced themselves in the same way as we can make sure to-day that any particular event will happen on the earth; by the position of the constellations in the Macrocosm. Anyone who knows anything of this cannot but believe in them. It is a fruitless task to prove the inaccuracy of what is brought against the historical status of the Gospels. Rather should we, as anthroposophists, understand that we must take a very different stand: one which is only possible through an insight into occult science.

With reference to this I should just like to mention a point I already endeavoured to establish elsewhere. That is, that the realities of which Anthroposophy speaks cannot be injured by any objections, however correct these may be in themselves; no matter how correctly people may argue from the knowledge they themselves may possess. Anthroposophy cannot be contradicted. In the lecture I gave here, entitled: ‘How can Theosophy be established?’ I made use of the example of the little boy in a village whose duty it was to fetch rolls for the family breakfast. Now in that village each roll cost two kreuzers and he was always given ten kreuzers. The baker gave him a number of rolls, and being no great arithmetician, he did not trouble to count them, but brought them home. But a foster-son entered the family and was sent for the rolls instead of the other boy. This lad was a good reckoner and he said to himself: ‘I have been given ten kreuzers, each roll costs two kreuzers, therefore I must bring home five rolls’; off he went, bringing back six rolls. He said to himself: ‘This must be wrong, I ought not to have so many, and as my reckoning is correct, tomorrow I must only bring back five rolls’. The next day he took the ten kreuzers, and again he received six rolls. The reckoning was correct—only it did not correspond with the reality; for that was a different matter. The reality was that it was the custom in that place to give six rolls instead of five to anyone who spent ten kreuzers. The boy's argument was quite correct; but did not accord with reality.

In like manner the cleverest thought-out objections to Anthroposophy may all agree with each other, yet need have nothing to do with the reality; for ‘reality’ may be based on very different foundations. The example quoted is quite practical, and serves to explain, even scientifically, what is correctly calculated, and what is actual fact.

We have tried to trace the world of Maya back to the realities and in doing so we have shewn that all Fire is sacrifice, everything of the nature of Air is the generous flowing virtue of giving, and Fluid the results of renunciation and resignation. To these three truths we have to-day added the fact that the true essence of the earth or solid matter is death, like the cutting off of any substance from its cosmic purpose. Because this has occurred death itself has entered the world of Maya or illusion as a reality. Even the Gods themselves could not taste death at all without descent into the physical world in order to comprehend death in the physical world, the world of Maya, or illusion. This is what I wished to add to-day to the concepts we have already formed. But once more let it be said that if we wish to arrive at a clear understanding of these concepts which are so necessary, and if we are thoroughly to enter into the various ideas in St. Mark's Gospel, the only possible way of doing so is by careful meditation and by bringing these things again and again before the soul. The Gospel of St. Mark can only be understood if based on the greatest and most significant cosmic conceptions.

Thus the fact has now been brought home to us in a series of lectures that behind all that we call Maya or the great illusion, there is the Spiritual. Let us once again ask ourselves in what way it has been made evident that the spiritual is to be discerned behind everything perceptible to our senses and our physically limited grasp of the world.

In order to describe this spiritual element we were obliged in the course of the last lectures to sweep the nearest external phenomena away from our field of vision and pierce through to such qualities of reality as those described as the willingness to sacrifice, and the virtue of bestowal or renunciation, in fact, to those virtues with which we can only become acquainted by looking into our own souls, and which we can only fully comprehend by means of our own souls. Now if we are really to attribute such virtues as these to what we have to think of as the reality—we might almost say the “true”—behind the world of illusion, we must admit that in this world of true existence, in this world of reality, there lives that which fundamentally, as regards its qualities, can only be compared with the qualities we primarily perceive in our souls. For instance if we have to characterise that which is outwardly expressed in the phenomena of heat, presenting it in its true character of sacrificial service, as the flowing sacrifice in the world, it means precisely that we must reduce the element of heat back to the spiritual, to the incorporeal, doing away, as it were, with the outer veil of existence, showing that which in the external world is similar to what we recognise as the spiritual in ourselves.

Now before we carry these observations further, another idea is necessary. That is the following. Does all that we have in this world of Maya or illusion really vanish into a sort of nothingness? Is everything around us in this world of sense, the world of our external comprehension which to us appears as the real or part of the real—is all this actually nothing?

It would indeed be quite a good comparison if we were to say that the world of truth, the world of reality, is at first concealed, as the inner forces of a lake or even of the ocean are concealed in the body of water, and that the world of Maya might be compared with the rippling play of the waves on the surface. That would be a good comparison; for it shows exactly that there is in the depths of the ocean something that causes the rippling of the waves above, something that is the substantiality of the water and the configuration of its force. So that whether we select this example or any other is a matter of indifference, we may very well put the question:—Is there in the wide realms of our Maya or illusion, anything that is real? To-day we shall follow the same system as in the last lectures. We shall slowly approach what we wish to bring before our mind, by starting with inner experiences of our soul; and indeed, as we have moved forward spiritually through the Saturn-, Sun- and Moon-existence, and have now approached that of the Earth, we shall start from more intimate, we might almost say more common soul-experiences than those referred to in our last lecture. We then started from the hidden depths of the soul-life, from what arises in what we call the “astral body.” There we felt longing arising within it, and we saw how the longing works in the nature of man, actually leading the life of the soul to find satisfaction only in meeting that picture-world which we have been able to grasp as the inner movement of that life. We thus found the way from the microcosmic soul to that cosmic creating which we ascribed to the Spirits of Movement. To-day we shall begin with a still more intimate experience of the soul, one indeed to which attention was already drawn in ancient Greece, which in its reality is even to-day of profound significance. It is indicated in the words: all philosophy, and all striving for a certain kind of human knowledge, proceeds from Wonder. This is really the case. Any man who has devoted a little reflection and thought to the whole process in experience in his own soul, as to how he was brought to any particular learning, will come to know that a sound way to learning is always to start from wonder, from amazement at something. This wonder, this amazement, from which every form of learning must proceed belongs precisely to those experiences of the soul which we described as bringing sublimity and life into anything, however dry. What kind of learning would it be which found a place in our soul, without proceeding from wonder! It would truly be a learning swamped in prosiness and pedantry. That process in the soul which leads from wonder to the bliss we feel when our riddles are solved, which has raised itself above wonder, that alone constitutes the sublimity and vital power of the process of acquiring knowledge. We really ought to be able to feel the dryness and withering of any knowledge not originating in these two movements of the mind. Sound knowledge is framed in wonder and the bliss of solved riddles; any other kind of knowledge may be acquired externally and established by man through some kind of reasoning. But a knowledge not framed by these two feelings, does not spring from the soul of man in real earnest. All the fragrance of knowledge that is created by the atmosphere of the life element in knowledge, proceeds from these two, from wonder and the bliss of its satisfaction. But what is the origin of wonder itself? Why is it that wonder, amazement at anything external, arises in our souls? It arises, because, when we first meet with a being, a thing or a fact, it appears strange to us. This strangeness is the first element leading to wonder and amazement. But we do not feel this for everything that is strange to us; but only for that to which we feel ourselves in a sense related, so related that we say: “In this being or thing there is something that is not as yet in me, but which may pass over into me.” So that we can feel related to a thing yet strange, which at first we must grasp through wonder and astonishment, our inner “wondering” is our perception of the quality of an outer “wonder” to which a man at first as far as his own perception goes, considers himself in no wise related. That, however, depends on himself; or at least it need only do so. And he would not adopt a challenging attitude towards what appears to him as “a wonder” unless he were in a certain way to demand that it should disclose itself to him because it is related to him. Why else should people who start from purely materialistic or purely intellectual concepts deny what others designate as a “wonder,” when they have no direct proof that a fabrication, a falsehood, is brought forward? Even philosophers to-day are obliged to admit that it can never be proved by any of the phenomena known to man, that the Christ incarnated in Jesus of Nazareth did not rise again. Proof can be brought against this assertion; but what is the manner of these proofs? Logically they are not tenable! Even enlightened philosophers now admit that. For all the reasons brought against it from the materialistic side—as for instance, the statement that no man has yet been seen to have risen like Christ—all these reasons are on the same level as the argument of a man who had never seen anything but fish and therefore wished to prove the non-existence of birds. It is impossible logically to prove by the existence of one class of beings, that others do not exist. Just as little is it possible through the experiences one may have of men on the physical plane to deduce something—which in the first place is described as a “miracle,” concerning the event of Golgotha. But if something is communicated to a person, which although it may be true, he must call a miracle and he says that he cannot understand it, he does not thereby contradict what we have said about the idea of wondering; for his attitude shows clearly that this starting point of all knowledge is already established for him. He demands, in fact, that what he has been told should find an echo in himself. He wishes it to become its own property intellectually and as he believes that he cannot have that, and it is not related to him, he challenges it. Even if we ourselves arrive at the concept of the miraculous, we should see that amazement or marvel, upon which is based all philosophy in the sense of ancient Greece, is aroused by a man finding himself confronted with something strange to him, but to which at the same time he recognises a relationship. Let us try to create a connecting link between these ideas and those brought before our minds in the last lecture.

We have shown that a particular advance in evolution was brought about through the willingness of certain Beings to sacrifice, but that their sacrifices were rejected and thrown back, and we learnt to recognise in the rejected sacrifice one of the principal factors in the ancient Moon-evolution. One of the most important points in that evolution is the fact that during that period sacrifice was to be offered by certain Beings to Beings even more exalted, and that it was renounced by them; so that, as it were, the smoke of the sacrifice offered by the ancient Moon-Beings pressed up to the higher Beings but was not accepted by them; and that this was sent back as substance into the Beings who had desired to offer it up. We also saw that much of the peculiar character of the Beings belonging to ancient Moon consisted in their feeling within themselves what they had wished to send up to the higher Beings as sacrificial substance. We saw, indeed, that this, which aspired, but was unable to ascend to the higher Beings, remained behind within the Beings themselves—and that thereby was developed in certain Beings, in the Beings of the rejected, the force of Longing. We have still, in all that we experience in our own souls as longing, a legacy from the bygone events on ancient Moon when those Beings found their sacrifice rejected. In a spiritual sense the whole character of the ancient Moon-evolution, its whole spiritual atmosphere, may be described in many respects by saying that Beings were present there who desired to offer sacrifice, but found that this sacrifice was not accepted because the higher Beings resigned it. The peculiar feature of the spiritual atmosphere of ancient Moon was: the rejected sacrifice. And the rejection of the sacrifice offered by Cain, which symbolically represents one of the starting points of the evolution of earthly humanity, appears as a kind of recapitulation of this peculiar feature of the ancient Moon evolution taking place in the soul of Cain, who sees that his sacrifice is not accepted. This is something which reveals to us a sorrow, a pain which gives birth to longing, just as was the case with the beings belonging to the old Moon-existence. We saw in the last lecture, that between this rejected sacrifice and the longing arising in these beings through its rejection, an adjustment was produced through the appearance on the old Moon of the Spirits of Movement. They created a possible way by which the longing arising in the Beings of the rejected sacrifice, could in a sense be satisfied. You must picture the position very clearly in your minds. You have the exalted Beings to whom sacrifice is about to be made; the substance offered in sacrifice to them rejected; and the longing thereby arising within the Beings who desired to offer and now feel: “Had I been able to accomplish my sacrifice, the best part of my own being would be living in those exalted ones; but now I am shut out from them, I am here while they are yonder!” The Spirits of Movement, however, and this can be taken almost literally, bring the Beings in whom the rejected sacrifice glows as a longing for the higher Beings, into such positions that they can approach them from many different sides. That which remains in them as the sacrifice which could not be offered, can at any rate now be adjusted, through the wealth of impressions received from the higher Beings, who are as it were, encircled by the Beings of the rejected sacrifice. So is adjusted what could not be harmonised, because of the rejection of the sacrifice, inasmuch as in the position of these Beings to the higher Beings a relation is established between them which conveys the impression of a presented sacrifice. We can form a clear idea of what this implies, if we think symbolically of the more exalted Beings united as a Sun, and then, in one position, as a planet, the less exalted gathered together. Now suppose that the Beings of the lesser planet wished to make sacrifice to the greater planet—to the Sun, and that the Sun refused to accept it; the substance of the sacrifice must remain in the Beings whose sacrifice was not accepted. Then in their loneliness, their isolation fills their being with longing. Now the Spirits of Movement bring them into the periphery of the more exalted Beings; this makes it first possible for them, in place of the direct upward flow of their sacrificial substance, to set that substance itself in motion and thereby to bring it into connection with the higher Beings. This is exactly like a man who cannot be contented within himself by means of a single great satisfaction, but experiences a number of partial satisfactions; the result of these different experiences being to set all his feelings in motion. This was gone into more minutely in the last lecture. We saw that as the Beings were unable to feel an inner connection with the higher Beings through the sacrifice, impressions came to them outside in the place of this, by which we saw that they were still able to obtain a certain satisfaction.

But it is an undeniable fact that that which was to have been offered up would have continued its existence within the higher Beings in a different fashion from its state within the lower Beings. The actual conditions necessary to that existence are in those higher Beings. It became necessary, therefore, for different conditions of existence to arise in the lower Beings. This again can be symbolically expressed. If the whole substance of a planet could flow into the Sun and it were not rejected, the Beings of that planet would find different conditions of existence within the Sun from those they would have met with in the planet outside if the Sun throws them back: an estrangement of what we must call the “contents of the sacrifice” takes place, it is alienated from its origin.

Now bear in mind the thought that certain Beings are compelled to retain within them something which they would gladly have offered up in sacrifice, and concerning which they both feel and perceive that it could only attain its real meaning, if it could be offered up.

If you can picture the feelings of such Beings, you will have an idea of what may be called: “The exclusion of a certain number of Cosmic Beings from their actual meaning, their great cosmic purpose.” Certain Beings have within them something, which, speaking symbolically, could only fulfil its purpose elsewhere. The consequence of this is that the “displacement”—if we may once more speak symbolically—of the rejected incense, of the rejected sacrificial substance, excludes it at first from the rest of the cosmic process.

If you grasp these thoughts with your feeling—not with your reason, for that does not extend to matters such as these—you will perceive that this represents something like a rending away from the universal cosmic process. To the Beings who rejected the sacrifice it is only something they put away from them; to the other Beings, those within whom the sacrificial substance is retained, this is a something on which an alien character is imprinted. Thus there are Beings in whose substance this estrangement from its origin is imprinted. If we can present these things to our soul through inner feelings, we are reminded of something in which an alien character is inherent: that is Death! Death is none other than that which necessarily enters the universe with the rejection of the sacrificial substance of those Beings who then had to retain it within themselves. Thus we advance from the resignation, the renunciation of what has been rejected by the higher Beings—which we encounter at the third stage of evolution—to Death.

In its true significance death is neither more nor less than the nature of essential contents, contents which are shut out and not in their proper place. Even when death comes to a man in concrete form it is fundamentally the same thing. For when we look at the corpse left behind in the world of Maya, we know that it consists of nothing but matter which at the moment of death was shut out from the Ego, astral body, and etheric body, alienated from that within which alone it had a meaning. The physical human body without the etheric body, astral body, and Ego has no meaning, it is purposeless; at that moment it is excluded from its purpose. That which we can no longer perceive when a man dies, is then for us in the macrocosm. On account of the Cosmic Beings who belong to higher spheres having rejected what was to have been brought to them in sacrifice, the rejected sacrificial substance within the Beings to whom it was thrown back lapses into death, for death signifies the exclusion of any cosmic substance or cosmic being from its actual purpose.

We have now come to a spiritual characteristic of what we call the fourth element in the Universe. If fire represents the purest sacrifice—and wherever we encounter fire or heat, behind it there is its spiritual counterpart: Sacrifice—if behind all the air spread out around our earth there really lies the virtue of giving, a really flowing virtue; if we may describe flowing water or the element of fluidity as spiritual resignation or renunciation, so must we describe the element of Earth, which alone can be the bearer of death—for death would not exist without it—as that which has been severed from its purpose by renunciation. Now we have something in a concrete form, showing how the solid is formed from the fluidic. For this too reflects a spiritual process, in a certain sense. Suppose ice forms in a pond; the water then becomes solid. The real reason of this is that the water in becoming ice is cut off from its purpose. This gives us the spiritual process of solidification, the spiritual process of the Earth's becoming; for as far as the distinguishing marks of the four elements are concerned, ice too is earth, and fluid alone is water. Earth is the element in which death appears and may be experienced.

We began by putting the question as to whether anything real could be found in our world of illusion and Maya, whether there is anything in it corresponding to a reality. I want you to hold clearly to the idea we have just been considering. At the beginning of this course I told you that the concepts to be considered were somewhat complicated. It will therefore be necessary that we should not only try to understand them, but also to meditate upon them; for only then will they be clear to us. Now let us take this conception of death, that is, of the earthly; for it presents a truly remarkable aspect. Whereas concerning all our other concepts we could say that there was nothing real in all the world of Maya around us, but that the reality must be looked for in the spiritual behind it—we have now ascertained that within the world of Maya there is that, which, precisely because it is divided from its purpose, because it ought to be in the spiritual world, may be called death. Thus something is cut off in Maya, which actually ought not to be there. In the whole wide realm of Maya, or the great illusion, we have nothing but deception and illusion before us. Yet there is something there which corresponds to a reality, because it is cut off from its true meaning in the spiritual; and as soon as it enters Maya it encounters annihilation and death. That declares to us nothing less significant than the great occult truth: “In the whole world of Maya one thing only shows itself in its reality—Death! All other phenomena must be traced back to their reality; all other phenomena entering into Maya have reality behind them; death is the single reality in Maya for it consists in the fact that something was cut off from reality and taken into Maya, That is why death is the one and only reality in Maya. And now if we turn from the universal Maya to the great principles of the world, a very important and essential consequence of this statement, that in our world of Maya, Death is the only reality, presents itself to occult science.

We can approach what I want to say from yet another side. We can begin by considering the beings of the other kingdoms surrounding us. We may ask: do minerals die? To the occultist there could be no sense in saying that minerals die. It would be just the same as saying that our finger-nails die when we cut them. The finger-nail is nothing which as complete being has claim to existence; but it is part of us, and when we cut it off we separate it from ourselves, tear it away from the life it has in connection with us. In reality it dies only when we ourselves die. In the same sense, according to occult science, the minerals do not die. They are merely members of one great organism, just as a finger-nail is a member of our own, and although a mineral may appear to perish, it is in reality only severed from this great organism, just as the piece of finger-nail is severed from our organism when we cut it off. The destruction of a mineral is no death; for the mineral has no life in itself, but only in the great organism of which it is a member. The plant as such is not independent; it is a member—not of one great organism, like the mineral—but of the whole organism of the earth. To occult observation there would be no sense in speaking of individual plant-organisms, only of the organism of the earth of which the plants everywhere form part. And when we bring them to their “death” it is just as when we cut away one of our finger-nails. We cannot say that the fingernail has died. Just as little can we say that of the plants; for they belong to a great organism that is identical with the whole earth, an organism which falls asleep in spring, sending forth the plants as its organs towards the Sun; and in autumn it takes them back into itself when it gathers their seeds into itself. There is no sense in considering the plants as independent, for the whole earth organism does not die when its separate plants fade—just as we ourselves do not die when our hair goes grey, although we cannot restore its colour by natural means.

We are, however, in a different position from the plants. But the earth may in this respect be compared to a man who could restore his grey hair to its natural colour. The earth does not die; what is observed in the fading of the plants is a process that takes place on the surface. So we can never say that the plants really die. And even of the animals we cannot actually say that they die, as we die. For in reality a separate animal does not exist; what really exists is its group-soul, which is in the super-sensible world. The reality of the animals is only to be found on the astral plane as group-soul, and the individual animal is condensed out of that. The death of an animal means the casting off a member of the group-soul, which replaces it by another.

Thus what we encounter at death in the mineral, plant, and animal kingdoms is only apparent death, only in the world of Maya is that “death.” In reality man alone dies, for he has developed his individuality so far that it descends into his physical body, in which during the earth-existence he must become real. In reality death has only meaning for the Earth-existence of man.

If we grasp this we must say: Man alone can truly experience death. Thus for man there is, as we learn through occult research, a real overcoming of death, a real victory over death. For every other being death is only apparent, and does not in reality exist. If again we were to ascend higher—from man to the Beings of the Hierarchies—we should find that they do not know death in the human sense; so that in reality actual death, that is death on the physical plane, comes only to those beings who have to acquire something on that plane. Now man has to acquire his ego-consciousness there. Without death he could never find it. Neither with respect to the beings below man in rank, nor to those higher than man is there any meaning in speaking of actual death. But on the other hand as regards the Being whom we call the “Christ-Being it must clearly be impossible to obliterate his most significant earth deed. For indeed we have seen that the most essential event to be considered in connection with the Christ-Being is the Mystery of Golgotha; that is, the conquest of death by life. But where can this conquest of death alone be accomplished? Can it be accomplished in the higher worlds? No! For even as regards the lower beings referred to as the mineral, plant and animal kingdoms—as they have their true being in the higher, super-sensible worlds—we cannot speak of death. And in the course of our studies this winter we shall further show that neither among the Higher Beings can there be a question of death; only of change, metamorphosis, transformation. Only with regard to man can we speak of the incision into life that we call “death.” Man can only experience this death on the physical plane. If man had never descended to the physical plane, he would know nothing of death; for no being who has not trodden the physical plane knows anything of death. In other worlds there is no such thing as that which we call death, nothing but transformation, metamorphosis. Would Christ undergo death He must descend to the physical plane! There alone could He experience it.

Thus we see that even in the historical development of man, the reality of the higher worlds plays its part in Maya, in a remarkable way. Whereas concerning every other historical event we can only interpret it correctly by saying: “This historical event took place here on the physical plane, but the cause of it is up above in the spiritual world, we must look for it there”; we cannot say of the event of Golgotha, “this event is here below on the physical plane and something corresponding to it exists in the higher worlds.” Christ Himself belongs to the higher worlds and came down to the physical plane. But there is no prototype above of what was accomplished on Golgotha, such as we must look for with respect to other historical events. That was enacted on the physical plane alone! Among the many proofs of this fact which occult science is able to provide, is the following: That the event of Damascus will, in the course of the next three thousand years, as we have often said, be renewed for a sufficiently great number of mankind. This means, that capacities will be developed in man which will enable him to perceive the Christ as an etheric figure on the astral plane, as Paul saw Him on the road to Damascus. The event of man's gradually becoming able to perceive the Christ by means of the higher faculties which will be developed in the next three thousand years, has its beginnings in our twentieth century. From now on these capacities will gradually arise, and in the course of that span of time a vast number of persons will know, by personal vision into the higher worlds, that Christ is a reality; that He lives; they will learn to know Him in the life He lives now. And not only will they know the nature of His present life, but they will also be convinced just as Paul was—that He died, and rose again. But the foundation for this cannot be laid in the higher worlds: it must be laid on the physical plane. Thus if anyone comes to have an understanding of these things, if even at the present time he understands that the development of Christ Himself is progressing—and that at the same time certain human capacities are also developing, if his understanding of modern Anthroposophy has taught him this, then there is nothing to prevent him, when he has passed through the portal of death, from taking part in this event when it actually appears as a first shining forth of Christ in the world of man. So that a man who prepares himself in his physical body to-day for this event, maybe able to experience it in the intermediate life, between death and re-birth. But those who do not prepare for it, who acquire no understanding in this incarnation, will, in the life immediately following this—the life between death and re-birth—know nothing of what is taking place with respect to the Christ for the next three thousand years from our present century. They will have to wait until they are again incarnated and then make necessary preparations on the earth. The death at Golgotha, which is enacted on earth as the origin of all the subsequent Christ development can only be understood in the physical body. Of all the facts important to our higher life, this alone is comprehensible in the physical body. It is then further developed and perfected in the higher worlds, but we must first have understood it while in the physical body. Just as the Mystery of Golgotha could never have taken place in the higher worlds and has no prototype there, but is an event which—since it includes death—is confined to the physical plane, so, too must the comprehension of it be acquired on this plane. Indeed, it is one of the tasks of man on earth to acquire this understanding in some one of his incarnations.

So that we must say: we have found pre-eminently on the physical plane something which displays an undeniable reality, a direct truth. What then is real on the physical plane On the physical plane, so that we can recognise it as real, we have a reality, death—death in the world of man, not in the other kingdoms of nature. When we wish to study the historical events that occur in the course of the earth's development, we must look for a spiritual prototype for each one of them—but not for the Mystery of Golgotha! There we have something which in itself directly belongs to the world of Reality!

Now it is extremely interesting that another aspect of what has just been said, can also be seen. It is really remarkably significant to observe that this event of Golgotha as a real event is to-day denied, and that people say—speaking of external history—that it cannot be proved by any historical connection. Among vital historical facts there is hardly one so difficult to prove on external realistic, historical grounds, as the Mystery of Golgotha. Just think how easy it is in comparison with this to work on historical ground if we wish to prove the existence of a Socrates, a Plato, or any of the Greek heroes, in so far as they were of significance to the progress of man in the external world, and how up to a certain point it is perfectly justifiable to say that “no history can assert that there ever was a Jesus of Nazareth!” This statement cannot be contradicted historically! This cannot be dealt with like other historical facts. It is very remarkable that this Event, which occurred on the external physical plane has this in common with all super-sensible facts: they cannot be “proved.” Much the same people who deny the existence of a super-sensible world lack the capacity for grasping this fact, which is not super-sensible. Its existence can be surmised by its effects. But, these people think that effects such as these might also appear, even without the real event having occurred in history; and they attribute these effects to sociological relations. To one who knows the inner course of the world's development, the idea that effects such as those produced by Christianity could be brought about without having a power behind them, is just as wise as it would be to say cabbages could grow in a field without having been sown there! Indeed we might go yet further, and admit that it was not possible for those who took part in the final shaping of the Gospels to prove the historical event of the Mystery of Golgotha—as historical event—on historical grounds! For it went by leaving hardly any trace perceptible to outer observation. Do you know how those who took part in the later compiling of the Gospels convinced themselves as to these events, with the exception of the writer of the John-Gospel, who was an immediate contemporary? They could not above all convince themselves by historical documents, for they had nothing but oral traditions and the Mystery-Books (as is set forth in Christianity as Mystical Fact). They were able to convince themselves of the actual existence of Christ Jesus by the star-constellation, for they were then still very learned as to the connection between the Macrocosm and the Microcosm. They knew how to set up a map of the heavens for that point of the world's history (as can still be done to-day); and they concluded: if the stars were in such and such a position, then He whom they call the Christ must have lived on earth at that time. In this very way the writers of the Gospel of Matthew, Mark and Luke convinced themselves of the historical event; they obtained the rest clairvoyantly. But first they convinced themselves in the same way as we can make sure to-day that any particular event can happen on the earth; through the constellations in the Macrocosm. Anyone who knows anything of this cannot but believe in them. It is a fruitless task to prove the inaccuracy of what is brought against the historical status of the Gospels. Rather should we, as anthroposophists, understand that we must take a very different stand: one which is only possible through an insight into occult science.

With reference to this I should just like to mention a point I already endeavoured to establish elsewhere. That is, that the realities of which Anthroposophy speaks cannot be injured by any objections, however correct these may be in themselves. No matter how correctly people may argue from the knowledge they themselves may possess, that does not disprove Anthroposophy. In the lecture I gave entitled: “How can Theosophy be established?” I made use of the example of the little boy in a village whose duty it was to fetch rolls for the family breakfast. Now in that village each roll cost two kreuzers and he was always given ten kreuzers. The baker gave him a number of rolls, and being no great arithmetician, he did not trouble to count them, but brought them home. But a foster-son entered the family and was sent for the rolls instead of the other boy. This lad was a good reckoner and he said to himself: “I have been given ten kreuzers, each roll costs two kreuzers, therefore I must bring home five rolls;” off he went, bringing back six rolls. He said to himself: “This must be wrong, I ought not to have so many, and as my reckoning is correct, tomorrow I must only bring back five rolls.” The next day he took the ten kreuzers, and again he received six rolls. The reckoning was correct—only it did not correspond with the reality; for that was a different matter. The reality was that it was the custom in that place to give six rolls instead of five to anyone who spent ten kreuzers. The boy's argument was quite correct; but did not accord with reality.

In like manner the cleverest thought-out objections to Anthroposophy may all agree with each other, yet need have nothing to do with the reality; for “reality” may be based on very different foundations. The example quoted is quite practical, and serves to explain, even scientifically, what is correctly calculated, and what is actual fact.

We have tried to trace the world of Maya back to reality and in doing so we have shown that all Fire is sacrifice, everything of the nature of Air is the generous flowing virtue of giving, and Fluid the result of renunciation and resignation. To these three truths we have to-day added the fact that the true nature of the Earth or solid matter is death, the cutting off of any substance from its cosmic purpose. Because this severing has entered, death itself enters the world of Maya or illusion as a reality. Even the Gods themselves could not taste death at all without descent into the physical world in order to comprehend death in the physical world, the world of Maya, or illusion. This is what I wished to add to-day to the concepts we have already formed. But once more let it be said that if we wish to arrive at a clear understanding of these concepts which are so necessary, and if we are thoroughly to enter into the various ideas in St. Mark's Gospel, the only possible way of doing so is by careful meditation and by bringing these things again and again before the soul. The Gospel of St. Mark can only be understood if based on the greatest and most significant cosmic conceptions.

These lectures will perhaps have given you some idea of what a complicated being man is and from how many sides we must consider him if we would come near to his real nature. I want now to point to one more fact of evolution, and it is one that may be classed among the most significant of all the results we can arrive at when, with the help of clairvoyant research, we study the whole course of man's evolution—looking back over the period from very ancient times until to-day, and looking forward to what shall come for the race of man in the future. I have, in the course of these lectures, drawn your attention to a perception that man can acquire when he educates his faculty for knowledge in the way we described; when, that is to say, his soul in its efforts after knowledge enters into the moods we characterised as wonder, reverence, wisdom-filled harmony with the events of the world, and lastly, devotion and surrender to the whole world process. You will remember I explained how if the soul enters upon these moods or conditions, man's faculty of knowledge can gradually rise to a perception of two converse processes that are everywhere around him. Man learns to distinguish in his environment between what is becoming and what is dying away. He says to himself at every turn: Here I have to do with a process of becoming, something that will reach perfection only in the future, and here again, on the other hand, I encounter a gradual dying away, a gradual disappearing. We perceive the things of the world as existing in a region where everything is either coming into being or passing away. And I pointed out in particular how the human larynx is really an organ of the future, how it is called to be in the future something entirely different from what it is to-day. To-day it merely communicates to the outer world by means of the spoken word our inner moods and conditions, whereas in the future it will communicate what we ourselves are in our entirety; that is to say, it will serve for the procreation of the whole human being. It will be the reproductive organ of the future. A time will come when the larynx will not merely help man to express by means of the word what is in his heart and mind, but man will use the larynx to place his own self before the world; that is to say, the propagation of man will be intimately connected with the organ of the larynx.

Now in this complicated microcosm, in this complicated “little world” which we call “man,” for every such organ that is only as yet a seed and will later on in the future attain a higher degree of perfection, there is another corresponding organ which is gradually dwindling, gradually dying away. And the corresponding organ for the larynx is the organ of hearing. In proportion as the hearing apparatus little by little disappears, in proportion as it grows ever less and less, will the larynx grow more and more perfect and become more and more important. We can only estimate the greatness of this fact when we look back, with the help of the Akashic Records, into a far distant past of mankind and then from what our research reveals are in a position to form some conception of what the ear was once like. Great new vistas are opened up for a knowledge of the nature of man when we trace back the human ear to its original form. For in its present state this hearing apparatus of ours is no more than a shadow of what it once was. To-day it hears only tones of the physical plane, or words that express themselves in tones on the physical plane. But that is only a last remnant of what used to flow into man through the hearing; for through this hearing apparatus once flowed into man the mighty movements of the whole universe. And as to-day we hear earthly music with our ear, so in ancient times did world music, the music of the spheres, flow into man. And as to-day we men clothe words in tones, so in times past did the divine Word of the Worlds clothe itself in the music of the spheres—that Word of the Worlds of which the Gospel of St. John tells, the Logos, the divine Word. Into what we may call man's hearing in the old sense of the word, there flowed from the spiritual world a heavenly music, the music of the spheres, just as now into our hearing flows the human word and the earthly music, and within the music of the spheres was what the divine Spirits spoke. And as to-day man compels the air into forms with his word and his singing and his tone, so did the divine words and the divine music bring forth forms.

And now let us consider that most wonderful of all the forms created by Divine music. We may approach it in the following way. When to-day you give utterance to a word or even only to a vowel, let us say the sound “A”—then through this sound the possibility arises of creating a form in the air. It was in like manner that form entered into the world out of the cosmic Word, and the most precious of all these forms is man himself; man himself was created in his original state by being spoken out of the divine Word. “The Gods spake!” As to-day the air comes into forms through the word of man, so did our world come into its form through the Word of the Gods. And man is the most excellent of these forms. The organ of hearing was, of course, then infinitely more complicated than it is now. It is to-day quite shrunk and shriveled. To-day it is an external organ, penetrating only a limited distance into the brain, but once it extended inwards over the whole human being. And everywhere throughout man's being moved the paths of sound which spoke man into the world, as the utterance of the Word of God. Thus was man created—spiritually—through the organ of hearing, and in the future, when he has ascended again, he will have an ear that is quite small and rudimentary. The meaning and purpose of the ear will have completely gone. The ear is in a descending evolution; to compensate for this, however, the larynx, which is to-day only like a seed, will have developed to greater and greater beauty and perfection. And in its perfection it will speak out what man can bring forth for the world as the reproduction of his being, even as the Gods have spoken Man into the world as Their creation. So is the world process in a sense reversed. When we consider the whole human being as he stands before us we have to see in him the product of a descending evolution, and when we take an organ like the ear we find it has already reached a densification of the bony matter in the small bones of the ear, it is, as it were, in the last stage of descending evolution. The sense as such is disappearing. Man, however, is developing on into the world of spirituality, and his ascending organs are the bridges that carry him over into spirituality. Such is the relationship between the world of the senses and the world of the spirit. The world of the senses makes itself known to us in descending organs, and the world of the spirit in ascending organs.

And it is the same everywhere. In the whole world as it presents itself to our view we can follow in some way this becoming and dying. And it is important that we should learn to apply the idea to the other things in the world. It will teach us a great deal. Thus in the mineral world, for example, we can also find something that is in an ascending evolution, something that is to-day only at the seed stage. It is quicksilver. Quicksilver is a metal that will undergo transformations in the future but transformations that will lead to greater perfection. Quicksilver as metal has not yet pulverised all the forces that every substance possesses in the spiritual before it becomes substance at all. Powers that belong essentially to the nature of quicksilver still remain in the spiritual, and these it will in the future be able to bring forth and place into the world. It will assume new forms. Thus quicksilver corresponds in the world of the minerals to the human larynx, and also in a sense to the organ that is attached to the larynx—the lung. Other metals—copper, for example—are in a kind of descending evolution. Copper will, in the future, show itself as a metal that has no more inner spiritual forces to place out into the world, and that is consequently more and more obliged merely to split up and crumble to cosmic dust.

I have here set before you a few examples of connections which will in future increasingly become an object of study. Men will study more and more the relationships between the processes of becoming and of passing away in the several kingdoms of nature, and will learn to find—not through experiments and tests but through an Imaginative knowledge—relationships between particular metal substances and particular organs in the human body. And as a result substances whose effects are already partially known from external experience will, through Imagination, be able to be known in all their healing power, in all their reproductive and restorative power over the human body. All kinds of relationships and connections will be discovered between the several things and beings of the world.

Thus, man will come to recognise that the virtues which lie in the seed of a plant are differently connected with man than the virtues contained in the root. All that we find in the root of a plant corresponds in a manner to the human brain and to the nervous system belonging to the brain. [see Summary] It goes so far that in actual fact the eating of what is to be found in plant roots has a certain correspondence with the processes that take place in the brain and nervous system. So that if a man wants his brain and nervous system to be influenced from the physical side in its task as physical instrument for the life of the spirit, he receives with his nourishment the forces that live in the roots of plants. In a sense we may say that he lets think in him what he thus receives in food, he lets it do spiritual work in him, whilst if he is less inclined to eat of the root nature of plants it will be rather he himself who uses his brain and nervous system. You will see from this that if a person consumes a quantity of root food he is liable to become dependent in respect of his experiences as soul and spirit; because something objective and external works through him, his brain and nervous system surrender their own independence. And so if he wants it to be more himself who works in him, then he must diminish his consumption of roots. I am not, my dear friends, giving suggestions for any particular diet, I am merely informing you about facts of nature. And I warn you expressly not to set out to follow what I have said without further knowledge. Not every person is so far advanced as to be able to dispense with receiving the power of thought from something outside himself; and it may very easily happen that a man who is not ripe to leave it to his own soul-life to provide him with the power of thinking and feeling—it can easily happen that if such a man avoids eating roots he will fall into a sleepy condition, because his soul and spirit are not yet strong enough to evolve in themselves out of the spiritual those forces which are otherwise evolved in man quite objectively, and independently of his soul and spirit. The question of diet is always an individual question and depends entirely upon the whole manner and condition of the development of the person in question.

Again, what lives in the leaves of plants has a similar connection with the lungs of man, with all that belongs to the system of the lungs. Here we may find an indication of how a balance can be created, for example, in a person whose breathing system, owing to inherited tendencies or to some other condition, works too powerfully. It would be well in such a case to recommend the person not to eat much of what comes from the leaves of plants. There may be another person whose breathing system requires strengthening, and then we shall do well to advise him to eat freely of such food as comes from leaves. These things have their close connection also with the healing forces that are in the world in the several kingdoms of nature, for those parts of the individual plants which have a definite relationship to man's organs contain forces of healing for those regions of man's organism. Thus, roots contain great forces of healing for the nervous system, and leaves for the lung system.

The flowers of plants contain many healing forces for the kidney system, and seeds in a particular way for the heart, but only when the heart sets itself too strongly in opposition to the circulation of the blood. If the heart yields too easily to the circulation, then it is rather to the forces that are in the fruits, i.e. in the ripened seeds, that we must turn. These are some of the indications that result when we take into consideration that the moment we pass from man to surrounding nature all that presents itself to our senses in the world of nature is actually only the surface.

• Roots—Brain.
• Leaves—Lungs.
• Flowers—Kidneys.
• Seeds—Heart.
• Fruits—Blood system.

In the plants, what belongs to the world of the senses is only on the surface. Behind what reveals itself to sight and taste and smell are the soul-and-spirit forces of the plant. But these soul-and-spirit forces are not present in such a way that we could speak of each single plant as ensouled, in the same way that each single human being is ensouled. That is not the case. Whoever were to imagine it would be giving himself up to the same delusion as a man who thought that a single hair or the tip of the ear, or, let us say, a nose or a tooth, were ensouled. The whole human being is ensouled in his totality, and we only learn to look into the soul nature of man when we pass from the parts to the whole. And we must do the same in the case of every living thing. We must take care to observe it spiritually and see whether it is a part or in some sense a whole. All the various plants of the earth are by no means a whole for themselves; they are parts, they are members of a whole. And as a matter of fact we are only speaking of a reality when we speak of that to which the several plants belong, as parts belong to a whole. In the case of man we can see at once to what his teeth, his ears, his fingers belong; physically they belong to the whole organism. In the case of the plants we do not see with the eye that to which the single plant belongs, we cannot perceive it with a physical organ at all, for the moment we reach the whole we come into the realm of the spirit. The truth about the soul nature of the plant world is that it has the plants for its individual organs. There are, as a matter of fact, for our whole earth only a few beings who are, so to say, collected together in the earth and have as their single parts the plants, just as man has the hairs on his body.

We can, if we wish, refer to these beings as the group souls of the plants. We can say, when we go beyond what our senses can behold of the plant, that we come to the group souls of the plants, which are related to the single plant as a whole to a part. Altogether there are seven group souls—plant souls—belonging to the earth, and having in a way the centre of their being in the centre of the earth. So that it is not enough to conceive of the earth as this physical ball, but we have to think of it as penetrated by seven spheres varying in size and all having in the earth's centre their own spiritual centre. And then these spiritual beings impel the plants out of the earth. The root grows towards the centre of the earth, because what it really wants is to reach the centre of the earth, and it is only prevented from pushing right through by all the rest of the earth matter which stands in its way. Every plant root strives to penetrate to the centre of the earth, where is the centre of the spiritual being to which the plant belongs.

You see how extraordinarily important is the principle we laid down—to go always to the whole in the case of every being or creature, to see first whether it is a part or a whole. There are scientists in our days who look upon the plants as ensouled, but they look upon the individual plant in this way. That is no cleverer than if we were to call a tooth a man; both stand at the same mental level. Many people are ready to think, when they hear views like this put forward, that they are quite theosophical, just because the plants are regarded as having soul; but really all such talk on the part of science has no value at all for the future, the books are so much waste paper. To look for individual souls in the separate plants is to say: I will extract a tooth from a human being and look in it for a human soul. The plant soul is not to be found in the single plant but has its most important point in the centre of the earth, whither the root tends, for the root is that force in the plant which strives ever towards the most spiritual part of plant existence.

When we are considering a theme such as this we shall find, my dear friends, that we come across statements made from the standpoint of the present-day view of nature which can bring us near to the gateway of truth, but only to the same degree as Mephistopheles can bring Faust into the realm of the Mothers—namely, just to the outermost door and no further. For as little as Mephistopheles can go down with Faust into the realm of the Mothers, so little can present-day natural science enter into the spiritual. But as in a certain sense Mephistopheles gives the key, so does natural science. Natural science gives the key, but it does not want to enter itself, even as Mephistopheles does not want to enter himself into the realm of the Mothers. It is true in a sense that natural science gives us clues which, if we have acquired the mode of knowledge described in these lectures, can often bring our knowledge to the gateway of truth.

Natural science to-day, following the impulse of Darwin, has drawn—from observation of the world of the senses alone—an important conclusion; natural science speaks of the principle of the so-called “struggle for existence.” Who is not ready to see this struggle for existence all around him as long as he takes cognizance only of what the external world of the senses affords? Why, we meet with it at every turn. Think of the innumerable eggs laid by the creatures of the sea, how many are destroyed and perish, and how few actually grow up and become new creatures. There you have, apparently, a fearful struggle for existence. One could well begin to lament over it if one listened only to the world of the senses, and say: of the millions and billions of eggs so many, so very many, go under in the struggle for existence and so few survive. But this is only one side of a thought, my dear friends. Take hold now of the same thought at another end! In order to bring your thinking on in a certain direction, let me ask you to grasp the same thought at another point. You can also lament in a similar way over the struggle for existence in another connection. You can cast your eyes over a field of corn where so-and-so many ears are standing, each holding so-and-so many grains of corn, and you can ask the question: How many of these grains of corn are lost in some way or other and never fulfil their true purpose; and how few of them are planted again in the earth that they may become new plants of the same kind as the old ones? We can thus look over a field of corn that is promising a rich and plenteous harvest and say to ourselves: How much of all that sprouting life will perish without having attained its goal! Only a very few grains will be buried in the earth for new plants of the same kind to arise. Here again we have an instance, only in a rather different sphere from that of the sea-creatures, where also only a very few come to fulfilment.

But now let me ask you what would become of the human beings, who must eat something, if every single grain of corn were buried again in the earth? Let us suppose that it were possible—theoretically we can suppose anything—for such an abundant growth to take place that every single grain of corn could come up again; but we must also think of what would happen to the beings who have to find their nourishment from corn. Here we come to a strange pass; a belief that might appear justified when we look at the world of the senses is shaken. When we look at a field of corn in respect of its own physical existence we might seem quite justified in concluding that every single grain should grow into a whole plant. And yet the standpoint is perhaps false. Perhaps in the whole connection of things in the world we are not thinking correctly when we ascribe to each single grain of corn this aim and object, namely to grow into a whole plant. Perhaps there is nothing to justify us in saying that the grains of corn which serve other beings for food have somehow failed in their cosmic aim. Perhaps there is nothing that compels us to say that the eggs of the creatures of the sea have failed in their aim when they have not grown into fishes. It is in reality no more than human prejudice to suppose that every single seed ought to become again the same being. For we can only measure the tasks of the individual beings when we turn our eyes to the whole. And all the eggs that perish by the million in the sea every year, and do not grow into fish, provide food for other beings who are only not yet accessible to man's vision. And in very truth those spiritual substances which struggle their way through to existence and become the countless eggs of the sea that are apparently lost—they do not lament that they have missed their goal; for their goal is to be nourishment for other beings, to be received up into the very being of these other beings. Man stands outside with his intellect and imagines that only that has meaning which strives towards the goal which he, through his senses, is bound to see as the ultimate goal. But if we look at nature without prejudice and with an open mind we shall see in every single stage of every single being a certain perfection and fulfilment, and such perfection does not rest only in that which the being will eventually become, but is contained already in what it is.

These are some of the thoughts, acquired in occultism, which must take root in your heart and minds. And if you now turn away from the external world and look into your own soul you will observe that you have there in your soul a rich store of thoughts. Thoughts are perpetually streaming into your soul, perpetually lighting up within it; and only a very few of these thoughts are clearly grasped, only a very few become a conscious part of the human soul. When you go for a walk in the town, reflect how much enters your soul by way of your senses, and yet how little you observe in such a way that it becomes a permanent part of your soul-life. You are continually receiving impressions, and the sum of all the impressions you receive is related to the portion of them which becomes a permanent conscious possession of your soul as the great mass of fish spawn in the sea that is brought into being year by year is related to the proportion of it that actually grows into fish. You, as well, have to be forever going through this same process in your own soul, the process of bringing, over a vast region, only a very small quantity to fulfilment. And when man begins to lift the veil a little and gain some vision of the great flood of pictures of fantasy and of thought out of which he emerges when he emerges from sleep—the dream affords for many persons a last trace of the immeasurably rich life man leads in sleep—then he can come to realise that there is meaning in the fact that he receives so many impressions that do not come to clear consciousness. For the impressions that actually come to clear consciousness are lost to the inner work of man, they cannot work upon the system of the sense organs, nor the system of the glandular organs, nor the system of digestion, neither can they work upon the systems of nerves, muscles and bones. That which becomes conscious in the soul, and which present-day man carries in him as his conscious inner soul-content, has no more power to work upon the organism; its characteristic is that it is torn loose from the mother earth of the whole human being and thus comes into his consciousness. All the rest of the soul-content—which bears the same relation to these conscious thoughts and ideas as the many eggs do to the few that become fish—all the countless impressions that come into our soul from without and do not come into consciousness, work upon the whole human being.

Everything in his environment works continually upon man in his totality. The dream can sometimes teach you how far what lives on in your soul as conscious idea, how very far that is from being all that enters your soul; many other impressions are entering your soul all the time. You have only to give attention to such things and you will find they occur constantly in life. You dream of some situation. Perhaps you dream you are standing opposite a man who is talking with another man. You are standing there and making a third. In your dream you have a clear and exact picture of the countenance of the man opposite you. You say to yourself: “How do I come to have such a dream? It gives the impression of being concerned with people I know in physical life, it seems to relate itself to physical life. But where does it come from? I have never heard or seen this person.” And now you pursue it further; and when you examine carefully you find that a few days ago you were opposite this person in a railway carriage, only the whole experience passed by you without your consciousness being awakened. In spite of that, however, it entered deeply into your life. It is only owing to inexactitude of observation that people as a rule know nothing about these things.

The conceptions that dreams bring before us in this way are by no means the most important of the impressions that work upon the soul. The most important are quite other impressions. Think for a moment, my dear friends, how the process I described to you yesterday has been continually happening all the time in the evolution of humanity. By means of his bony system man has been continually producing Imaginations, by means of his muscular system he has been sending into the world Inspirations, and by means of his nervous system Intuitions. All these are now there in the world. The outstreamings that are evil, each man must himself receive back again and carry away through his destiny. But the rest builds up and takes form and is perpetually there in man's environment. In very deed all the Imaginations and Inspirations and Intuitions that man has given out into the earth world, even only since the Atlantean catastrophe, are present and are part of our environment. The good things man has given out—these the individual men do not need to take back again in the course of their Karma; but what they have sent out into the spiritual atmosphere of the earth all through the centuries of the successive epochs is actually present for the men who are now living on earth, just as much as the air is present for physical man. As man breathes physical air, as the air from his environment enters right inside him, so do the Imaginations, Inspirations and Intuitions that have been developed penetrate into man, and man partakes of them with his soul and spirit. And now it is important that man should develop a real relation to all this in his environment, that he should not meet what he has himself imparted to the earth in earlier epochs of its existence as if it were strange to him, as if he were unconnected with it. He can, however, only become connected with this spiritual content he has given to the earth when he gradually acquires the power to receive it into his soul.

How can this come about? When we come to make a deep study of the spiritual meaning of earth evolution we discover that in the time when post-Atlantean man had still something left of ancient clairvoyance, Imaginations, Inspirations and Intuitions were communicated in great abundance to the spiritual atmosphere of the earth. That was a time when spiritual substance was given forth in large measure. Since the fourth post-Atlantean epoch, and especially from the present day onwards, we gradually send out less and less; what falls rather to us is to receive the old substance, for it is something with which we are intimately connected; we have the task to take up again into ourselves what has been sent out. That means it is required of man to replace an earlier spiritual outbreathing by a spiritual inbreathing. Man must grow ever more sensitive and receptive to the spiritual that is in the world. In ancient times that was not so necessary, for men of those olden times were able to put forth from them spiritual substance, they had, so to speak, a reserve store. But this reserve of spiritual substance has been so deeply drawn upon since the fourth post-Atlantean epoch that in future man will, in a sense, only be able to send out what he has first absorbed, what he has first inbreathed. In order that man may be able to take his place with full understanding in this new task in earth existence—to this end is Anthroposophy or Spiritual Science there in the world. When a man feels drawn to Anthroposophy it is not just that it takes his fancy as one among many other things in the world that take his fancy. He is drawn to Anthroposophy because it is intimately and deeply bound up with the whole of earth evolution, intimately bound up with the task that lies immediately before man to-day in evolution, namely to develop understanding for the spiritual all around him. For from the present time onwards it will be the case that those who do not develop understanding for the spirit behind the senses, for the world of the spirit behind the world of the senses, will be like men whose breathing system is so injured that they cannot take in air and they suffer from difficulty in breathing. To-day we still have left in our ideas a certain inheritance from primeval human wisdom, and we feed upon these old ideas. If, however, we are able to observe the evolution of mankind in modern times with the eye of the spirit we shall perceive that while discoveries abound in the field of the material and external, in the spiritual a kind of exhaustion shows itself, a strange poverty of spiritual content. New ideas, new concepts, arise less and less among mankind. It is only those who do not know of ancient concepts and who are always rediscovering the old for themselves—that is to say, their whole life long remain in a sense immature—who can imagine that it is possible for ideas to develop and mature in these days. No, the world of abstract ideas, the world of intellectual ideas is exhausted. There are no more new ideas springing up. The time of Thales marks the rise of intellectual ideas for Western thought. And now we stand at a kind of end; and philosophy as such, philosophy as a science of ideas, is at an end. Ideas and thoughts belong only to the physical plane, and man must learn to lift himself up to what lies beyond ideas and thought, that is, beyond the world of the physical plane. To begin with he will lift himself up to Imaginations. Imaginations will again become for him something real and actual. That will bring about a new fructification of the spiritual in mankind. That is why, my dear friends, Anthroposophy or Spiritual Science gives Imaginations of great and mighty world processes. Note how different from everything else of its kind is the description given of Saturn, Sun and Moon. Compare it with the abstract concepts of natural science. Everything in Spiritual Science has to be given in pictures, it has to be presented in such a way that it is not directly realisable in the external world of the senses. We say of Old Saturn that it had a condition of warmth, of warmth alone. That is sheer nonsense for the present-day world of the senses; for the world of the senses knows nothing of warmth substance as such. But what is nonsense for the world of the senses is truth for the world of the spirit, and the next step required of man in the near future is to live his way into the world of the spirit. Those who will not resolve to breathe the air of the spirit—and Spiritual Science has come into the world to make the soul of man susceptible to the air of the spirit—those who do not want to make themselves responsive to Spiritual Science will actually approach a condition of spiritual shortness of breath and spiritual exhaustion. One can already see many persons approaching this condition, and it leads on to a spiritual wasting and decline, to an actual “consumption” of the spirit.

Such would be the lot of men on earth if they wanted to stop short at the world of the senses. They would go into a spiritual decline. In the future development of civilisation there will be men full of sensitiveness for the spiritual, full of heart for all that Spiritual Science will give, and for the world of Imagination, Inspiration and Intuition as it springs up spontaneously in the souls of men. So will it be for a part of humanity: they will have understanding and devotion for this world of the spirit. And it will be these men who will fulfil the task that is set before the earth in the near future. Others perhaps will be content with the world of the senses, not wanting to go beyond it, not wanting to go beyond that shadow picture which the conceptions of philosophy and of natural science afford. Such people are moving in the direction of spiritual shortness of breath, spiritual consumption, spiritual sickness and disease. They will become dried up in earth existence and not attain the goal that has been set for earth evolution. Evolution goes on, however, in such a way that each one is compelled to ask himself the question: Which way will you choose? In the future men will stand, as it were, on two paths, to the right and to the left. On one path will be those for whom the world of the senses alone is true, and on the other will be those for whom the world of the spiritual is the truth.

And since the senses, such as the ear, for example, will disappear, since at the end of the earth all the senses that belong to the earth will have completely disappeared, we can form some idea of what that consumption and wasting away will be like. If we abandon ourselves to the world of the senses we abandon ourselves to something which abandons man in the future of earth evolution. If we press through to the world of the spirit we develop ourselves in the direction of something that wills to come nearer and nearer to man in the future of earth evolution. If we want to express it in a symbol we may say that it is possible for man to stand there at the end of the earth evolution and to speak as Faust did when he had been blinded physically—(for man will be not only blinded to the world around him but deaf to it in addition, he will stand there blind and deaf and deprived of taste and smell)—he will be able to say with Faust: “But in my inmost spirit all is light—yes, and all is glorious ringing tones and words of men!” Thus will the man be able to speak who has turned to the world of the spirit. But the other, the man who wanted to remain at the world of the senses would be like a Faust who, after he was blinded, would be compelled to say: “Blind hast thou become without, and within shines no light of the spirit, darkness alone receives thee.”

Man has to choose between these two Faust natures in his relation to the future of the earth. For the first Faust would be one who had turned to the world of the spirit, whilst the second would be one who had turned to the world of the senses and had thereby become closely united with something of which man must feel that it is unsubstantial and unreal, and moreover that it robs him of his own reality and being. Thus does that appear which we set out to discover and bring from occult heights—thus does it appear, my dear friends, in its relation to the immediate daily life of man. I think I need not spend words in pointing out what moral principles and will impulses for present-day humanity can proceed from a real understanding of occult science.¹ For out of a rightly understood wisdom will a rightly understood goodness and virtue be born in the human heart. Let us strive after a real understanding of world evolution, let us seek after wisdom—and we shall find without fail that the child of wisdom will be love.

• 1. Printed by C. F. Hodgson & Son, Ltd., 2 Newton St., London, W.C.2.

It has often been said that when Spiritual Science will spread, it should play its part as a true force of life. And this assertion may be strengthened by the most varied considerations of life's relations. By the very fact that we become more and more acquainted with the characteristics of that invisible world which is the foundation of the visible world, do perceptions, concepts take hold of our soul which in their turn become impulses toward quite definite actions, toward a quite definite attitude in life. Of special importance will be the attitude which may be initiated in regard to the so-called dead, concerning those who during our life span go through the time between death and a new birth. Just as man here in the physical body is, through his soul and body, related in the most varied ways with the physical world, and the spiritual nature underlying it, so does he also stand between death and a new birth in the most varied relations to the facts, happenings, and beings of the supersensible world. And just as human beings have an occupation, an activity, in the physical world between birth and death, so they also have activities, occupations, if you please, between death and a new birth. What we may learn about human life and human activity between death and a new birth will lead more and more to what is called the removal of the abyss which, especially in our materialistic age, opens up between those living on earth and the dead. Between the living and the so-called dead, an increasing mutual intercourse will be established.

Let us today call attention to details in this intercourse between the living and the dead, as well as to the occupations and ways of living of the souls who live between death and a new birth. Those who die before others with whom they had relations here on earth must naturally often look back from the spiritual world on the beings they loved, or who have otherwise remained in the life on earth. Now, the question is whether such souls existing between death and a new birth can perceive human beings living here between birth and death. If we have developed the faculties which enable us to penetrate into the life between death and a new birth, we have quite special, one might say, deeply moving experiences. For instance, one may find souls of the dead who sometimes say the following in the language which is possible between the departed souls and the seer, and which can only be understood by the latter who is able to look from our world into the world of the dead. In the following way, for instance, a soul was able to make itself known to the seer after death (it was a soul embodied in its last incarnation in a male body): “All my thoughts and memories go back to that person who was my faithful wife when I was below in the life on earth; she was, so to speak, the sunshine of my life. When, my business completed, I came home in the evening, my soul was refreshed by what she was able to be for me, by what then came into my soul from hers. A true spiritual bread of life she was for me, and longing for her has stayed with me. My spiritual eye is directed toward the earth and I cannot find her, she is not there. From all I have learned, I know that this soul must be on earth as she was before in a physical body, but for me she is as though extinguished, as though she were not there.”

This deeply moving experience one may often have with reference to souls who think back about those left behind and who feel as though fettered, so that they cannot get through, cannot look down on these earthly souls. They are fettered, not by their own essential being, but rather by the other soul left behind. And if one investigates the reason why the soul from the beyond cannot perceive the soul remaining on earth, then one learns that the soul who has remained on earth has not, on account of the existing circumstances of our age, been able to be inspired by, to be imbued with, any thoughts which might become visible, be perceptible, to a soul having gone through the portals of death. We might make another comparison. Souls who have gone through the portals of death and long for the sight of those remaining in physical bodies, such souls have a dim idea of the existence of others on the physical plane, but are unable to manifest themselves to them. Just as one who is dumb is unable to call attention to himself by means of language, therefore is inaudible to others, so does the entire soul remain mute to the disembodied soul who longs for it; it is in its spiritual nature inaudible to the one who has already passed the portals of death.

There is a great difference between one soul and another here on earth, depending on whether these souls have one content or another. Let us consider a soul who lives here in the physical body and from the time of awaking to the time of going to sleep is only concerned with thoughts taken from the material world; such a soul, filled entirely with thoughts, concepts, ideas, and sensations taken solely from the material world, cannot be perceived at all from the other world. No trace of such a soul can be found. A soul that is filled with spiritual ideas, as for instance those which Spiritual Science gives, and which is aglow with and irradiated by spiritual ideas—such a soul is perceptible from the beyond. Therefore, souls who have remained behind, however good they may be as human beings, are without reality and imperceptible to the world beyond if they are immersed in materialism. These are deeply shocking, terrible impressions for the seer who certainly has attained serenity. But these experiences, possible with reference to the world beyond, especially in our era, are numerous. In our era it is just as though every contact were cut off between souls who here are often so closely linked. This is frequently the case when a soul has gone through the portals of death; while it can always be found that the souls who live beyond, who have gone through the portals of death and look down on human beings harbouring spiritual thoughts, even though only now and then, and letting them permeate their soul, can then perceive these, so that these earthly souls remain real souls for them. Even more significant: what is touched upon here can become of practical import. The spiritual thoughts which souls harbour here can not only be perceived, they can be understood by the souls beyond. And in this way something can be brought about which may become of great importance for the intercourse between souls here and souls beyond, namely, that which may be called “Reading to the Dead.” And such “Reading to the Dead” is often extraordinarily important.

Here, too, the seer can have the experience that human beings who have entirely disregarded spiritual wisdom, now have a strong longing for spiritual wisdom and wish to hear about it after having passed through the portals of death. Then, if the souls that have remained behind make a clear mental image of the dead person and, at the same time, bring to mind an anthroposophical train of thought or open an anthroposophical book and in thought, not aloud, read to the dead whose spiritual image stands before them, the dead will become aware of it. It is in the anthroposophical movement that we have had, in this regard, the most excellent results, when still living anthroposophists read of their departed relatives. One can often see how these dead long to hear what penetrates to them from here. One thing is of especial importance during the time immediately after death in order that one may enter into a relationship with a soul. It is not possible without further ado to enter into relation with any supersensible being. There is often much deception, much illusion in this respect, it is not as easy as it seems. It is a grave error to think that a human being need only to die in order, so to speak, to come into contact with the whole spiritual world. On one occasion I met a man who was otherwise not really very smart, but who, nevertheless, talked incessantly about Kant, Schopenhauer, and so forth who even gave lectures on Kant and Schopenhauer. This man, when I lectured about the nature of immortality, answered me in a rather smug way. He said: “Here on earth we cannot know anything about immortality, since we do not experience it until we die.” One might say that, with his present equipment, he will not differ in his soul very much after death from what he is now. It is deep prejudice that believes the souls become quite wise as soon as they have passed through the portals of death. On the contrary, we cannot after death establish so easily connections with human beings, if we have not already established them before death. Connections that have been already established here are effective for a long time. It does not occur readily that a soul be instructed immediately by souls in the beyond, because it cannot have a connection with them. But the departed human being has connections with people on the earth, and they can bring him the food for which he is starving, they can bring him spiritual wisdom by reading to him and thus bring about immensely meritorious effects. The dead would not be helped if we read them external, materialistic science, perhaps chemistry or physics; that is a language they do not understand because these sciences are of value only for life on earth. But what is said about the spiritual worlds in the language of anthroposophy remains comprehensible to the dead. During the time immediately following death, one thing, however, has to be considered; during that period the souls retain an understanding for things communicated in the languages they usually spoke here on earth. Only after a time do the dead become independent of language; then one may read to them in any language and they will understand the thought content. During the time immediately following death, the departed is also more connected with the language he has last spoken, if he has exclusively spoken only one language. We should really consider the fact that during the time immediately following death we have to send our thoughts to the dead,—we must send our thoughts to them—in the language they were accustomed to. Here we have come to a point in our considerations which can teach us how the abyss may be bridged over by the fact that anthroposophy flows into our spiritual life in this world and in the other world, in the world in which we live between death and a new birth. While materialism only allows us to bring into life an intercourse between souls confined to their earthly existence, anthroposophy will open the way for a free communication, an intercourse between the souls on earth and the souls dwelling beyond in the other world. The dead will live with us. And truly, what we may call the passing through the portals of death will often after a time be felt merely as a change in the form of existence. And the entire change in the life of spirit and of soul, which will take place when such things have become common knowledge, is going to be of great significance.

We have just dealt with an example of the effect of the living on the dead. We may also form a conception of the way the dead in their turn affect the living. Several times I have ventured to mention—please excuse the personal reference—that in the past I had to instruct many children. I had to instruct several children in a family where only the mother was living; their father was dead and I felt it to be my task—this must be the task of any educator—to discover the potentialities and talents of these children in order as educator to guide and instruct them. Regarding these children of whom I am speaking, something remained incomprehensible; no matter what was tried they showed a certain behaviour that was not a consequence of their inherent qualities or of their surroundings. One could not quite manage them. In such cases one must call on everything for help; and spiritual research resulted in the following: the father had died, and in consequence of special circumstances, which had occurred among the relatives, he was not in accord with the way in which the children were being treated by the relatives nor with the things which happened within the intimate family circle—and, because of special circumstances, his influence had an effect on the children. And it was not until the moment I could take into consideration that there was something special which neither derived from potentialities nor from surroundings, but which came out of the supersensible world from the departed father who directed his forces into the souls of his children—it was not until then that I could be guided by it. Now I had to take into consideration what the father really wanted. And the very moment I investigated the will of the father who had passed through the portals of death, and considered him as a real person, like the other persons in physical existence who had their joint effect on the children—it was then that I succeeded in my task.

This is a case in which it was clearly shown that spiritual knowledge can tell us, indicate to us, the effect of the forces from the supersensible, spiritual world on this physical world. But in order to perceive such a thing one needs the right moment. One must try, for instance, to develop a kind of force which makes it possible to perceive, as it were, the raying in of the supersensible force—in this case that of the father—into the souls of the children. This is oftentimes difficult. It might be easy, for instance, to try to recognize how the dead father wants to implant this or that thought into the children's souls. But that often proves incorrect and, especially, it cannot always be repeated. It may then prove to be a good device to procure a picture giving the father's form, the way he looked at the last; if a distinct picture of his handwriting is held in memory and is kept there before the mind's eye, and we thus prepare ourselves for the kind of instruction meant here by concentrating on handwriting or picture, then we take into our own work the views, the intentions, the aims of the dead person. The time will come when we are going to take into account what the dead want for those left behind. Today we can only take into account the will of those who are on the physical plane. There will be a mutual, one might say a free intercourse between the living and the dead. We shall learn to investigate what the dead want for the physical plane. Just imagine the great upheaval, one might also say of the external factors of physical life, when the dead shall play a part and through the living have an effect on the physical plane. Spiritual Science, if it is rightly understood, and it always must be rightly understood, will not be a mere theory. Spiritual Science will become more and more an elixir of life which pervades all existence, transforming it the more it spreads. And it will surely accomplish this, for its effect will not be that of an abstract ideal which is preached, or which is “sold” by societies. It will, slowly but surely, take hold of the souls on earth and transform them.

There will be an enrichment of our conceptions in many other respects. In our existence our life with the dead shall change because we shall understand what the dead are doing. Many things now remain quite incomprehensible regarding the relations between the world here on earth, the physical plane, and the world which we experience between death and a new birth; for much that happens here in the physical world remains incomprehensible. And since all that happens here corresponds to what happens beyond, the relation of the world and humanity to the supersensible world remains incomprehensible. But if anthroposophy is rightly understood, comprehension will increasingly take the place of non-comprehension in this realm.

Now a relationship will be established which may show what strangely devious ways are taken by the beings who, so to speak, carry out the further development of world wisdom. Strangely devious ways are taken by these beings, but nevertheless, if we follow them, they show themselves full of wisdom in every respect. Let us consider various conditions. Let us first consider souls whom the eye of the seer may perceive in their occupation between death and a new birth. There we see—and again that is for the seer something deeply affecting—we see many souls who are condemned for a certain time between death and a new birth to be the slaves of the spirits who send sickness and death into physical life. Thus we see there souls between death and a new birth who are under the dominion of beings whom we call the Ahrimanic spirits, or the spirits of hindrance, of those who work at death in life, and of those who bring obstacles into life. And a hard lot it is which the seer observes, in some souls, when they have to submit in this manner to the slave yoke. If one traces back such souls to the life they led before they passed the portals of death, one finds that the souls who for a certain time after death must serve the spirits of resistance have prepared this for themselves by self-indulgence during life. And the slaves of the spirits of sickness and death have prepared this fate for themselves by having been unscrupulous before death. So there we see a certain relation of the souls of men to the evil spirits of sickness and death, and to the evil spirits of resistance. But now let us take a further look at the following, let us look at the souls who here on earth are subjected to that which such souls must do. Let us look at the souls who perish here on earth in the flower of their youth without reaching the death of old age. Let us look upon the souls who here on earth are subjected to sickness, who are pursued by misfortune, as obstacle upon obstacle arises before them. What does the seer observe when he considers souls who die early or are pursued by misfortune and then pass into the spiritual world? What does the seer notice about such souls? One may have strange experiences concerning human destinies on earth. We shall point to at least one example, to one of the very moving destinies on earth, and which may certainly happen.

A child (a little girl) is born; the mother dies at the birth of the child; the child is orphaned at birth with regard to the mother. The father, on the day the child is born, learns that his whole fortune which was tied up in a ship on the high seas is lost; he learns that the ship has been wrecked; because of this he becomes melancholic; he, too, dies, leaving the child completely orphaned. The little girl is adopted by a wealthy woman; she is very fond of the child and wills her large fortune to her. The woman dies while the child is still comparatively young. The will is probated and a technical error is found—the child does not get a penny of what was willed to her. For the second time she is cast out into the world penniless and must hire out as a servant, must do menial work. She meets a man who falls in love with her, but they cannot be united on account of the prejudices governing the community: they belong to different denominations. But the man loves her so very much that he promises to adopt her faith as soon as his father, already very old, dies. He goes abroad; there he learns that his father has fallen ill. His father dies; he adopts the girl's faith, and as he hurries to her side, she falls ill and dies. When he returns, she is dead. He feels the deepest pain and will not be satisfied until the grave is opened so that he can see her once more. And from the position of the corpse, it can be seen that the girl was buried alive. This is a legend—Robert Hamerling, the Austrian poet, has retold it in his writings—it is a legend which is not reality, but it might occur in innumerable instances. We see that a human soul does not merely perish in the flower of her youth but we see her pursued by misfortune from the beginning of life in a certain way. In the working out of such conditions those souls cooperate who, on account of unscrupulousness, become the servants of the evil spirits of sickness, death and misfortune. Thus such unscrupulous souls must be active in the preparation of such hard fates; here is a relationship! To the seer this is especially evident in such happenings as, for instance, the catastrophe of the Titanic, by investigating the effect of the souls who for lack of conscience have become the servants of these spirits of sickness and misfortune. Karma must be carried out, these things are necessary; but it is an evil fate which engulfs the souls who, after death, are bowed down under such a yoke of slavery.

But let us ask further: What about the souls who here on earth suffer such a fate, who perish in the flower of their youth, who are destroyed early by epidemics? What about these souls, when they pass through the portal of death into the spiritual world before their time? We learn the fate of these souls when with the eye of the seer we penetrate, so to speak, into the occupation of the spirits who give a forward impulse to the evolution of the earth, or to all evolution. These beings of the Higher Hierarchies have certain forces, certain powers to further development; but they are in a certain way limited with regard to these forces and powers. Thus the following becomes manifest:

The completely materialistic souls, those who lose all sense of the supersensible world, are in fact already in this our era threatened by a kind of blight, a kind of cutting off from progressive development. And in a certain way already in our era the danger exists that a large portion of humanity may not be able to keep up with evolution, because they are, so to speak, bound to the earth by the heaviness of their own souls, being completely materialistic souls, so that they are not taken along for the next incarnation. But this danger is to be deflected according to the decision of the Higher Hierarchies. The truth is that the hour of decision for the souls who, having cut themselves off completely, are not carried along with the evolution, that the hour of decision does not come until the sixth period—actually, not until the Venus evolution. Souls must not fall prey to the downward pull of gravity to such an extent that they are compelled to remain behind. It is actually according to the decision of the Higher Hierarchies that this must not happen. But these beings of the Higher Hierarchies are in a certain way limited in their forces and capabilities. Nothing is unlimited, even among the beings of the Higher Hierarchies. And if it were only a question of the forces of these Higher Hierarchies, then completely materialistic souls, through themselves, would have to be already cut off in a certain way from progressive evolution. The beings of the Higher Hierarchies really cannot alone by themselves save these souls—so an expedient is used. Namely, the souls that die here an early death have, as souls, a possibility before them. Let us say they die through some catastrophe; for instance, they are run over by an express train—then indeed the bodily sheath is taken from such a soul; it is now free from its body, denuded of its body, but it still contains the forces which might be active in the body here on earth. By going into the spiritual world such souls carry up very special forces, which in fact still might have been effective here on earth, but which have been prematurely diverted. Forces, especially applicable in helping, are carried up by those who die early. And the beings of the Higher Hierarchies use these forces to save the souls whom they could not have saved by their own power.

Souls that are materialistically inclined are thus led away to better times and saved, since their strength is only sufficient for the regular course of mankind's evolution. Salvation is achieved by the fact that these beings of the Higher Hierarchies experience an increase of strength by such unused forces coming from the earth, which have still unused energy. These forces accrue to the beings of the Higher Hierarchies. Thus the souls who perish early help their fellowmen who otherwise would be submerged in the morass of materialism. Here we have what those souls must do who depart early. Strange interdependence, is it not, in the complicated ways of world wisdom! Thus the world wisdom permits, on one side, the sentencing of human souls for lack of conscience to cooperate in bringing sickness and early death into the world. The souls who suffer it are used by good beings of the Higher Hierarchies to help other men. In this manner happenings that seem evil outwardly in maya are often transformed into good, but in complicated ways. The ways of wisdom which are taken in the world are very complicated. It is only gradually that one learns to find one's way in these paths of wisdom. One might say: There, up above, the spirits of the Higher Hierarchies sit in council. Because men must be free, they are given the possibility of plunging into materialism, into evil. The Hierarchies give them so much freedom that these human souls, so to speak, escape them, these souls who could not, by their own strength, carry on up to a certain point of time. They need souls who develop on earth forces which retain their inner potential through the premature separation from the body when these souls have to return to the spiritual world in consequence of accident and an early death. This early death is brought about by the services of human souls who, in pursuance of their freedom, have fallen into unscrupulousness. A wonderful cyclic path is opened up here, we may say, a cyclic path of world wisdom. We should not believe at all that the so-called simple things are the universal ones. The world has become complicated. It really was a significant word of Nietzsche which was revealed to him as though by inspiration, when he said: “The world is deep, and deeper than the day had thought.” Those people are completely in error who think that everything may be grasped by the day-wisdom of the intellect. For the higher spiritual light is not that which shines into the wisdom of the day, but that which shines into the darkness. We must seek this light in order to find our way in the darkness in which, nevertheless, the world wisdom is at work.

If we accept such concepts, ideas and thoughts, my dear friends, then it may come about that we contemplate the world with other eyes than before. And it will become more and more necessary that we learn to contemplate the world with new eyes; for humanity has lost many things since ancient times. What it is we lost may be understood if we consider the following:

Still in the third post-Atlantean period there were intermediate states between sleeping and waking, in which souls looked up into the world of the stars and saw not merely physical stars, as is the case today, but the spiritual beings of the Higher Hierarchies; the directing and leading forces of stellar destiny and stellar movement were observed by them. And what existed as old stellar maps from immemorial times when all kinds of drawings were made of group souls, looking like animals without being animals, all this is not born out of fantasy, but is spiritually perceived. The souls perceived this in the realm of the spirit. They were able to carry this spiritual element through the portals of death. The soul has now lost this vision of the supersensible world. Today when the souls are born, they confront the physical world with the bodily sense organs and see nothing but the external physical world. They no longer can see that which surrounds the external physical world as the world of spirit and of soul, the world of the Higher Hierarchies, and so forth. But what is the nature of the souls who appear in the bodies of today? All the souls of persons sitting here were incarnated in former times, and the great majority were incarnated in Egypto-Chaldaic bodies and through those bodies they looked out into the world in which they also had spiritual perception. This spiritual experience they took into themselves, it exists in them today. Not in all the souls; but the souls who today no longer see anything but physical facts, they once lived in contemplation of the spiritual world, they lived a completely perceptive life of the spiritual world. How do these souls live now? They live exactly as though they had totally forgotten this spiritual world. They have forgotten the spiritual perceptions they once absorbed. But what we have forgotten is merely forgotten for our present consciousness; it still lives in the deepest recesses of our souls. Thus the peculiar situation exists: the souls living today have around them, consciously, nothing but a physical sense image of the world; but in their inner being the perceptions which once they received as true spiritual vision are still living unconsciously in the depths of their souls. Of these perceptions the souls know nothing; they only show peculiar conceptions which burrow in the depths of the soul, but which do not rise into consciousness; these conceptions have a paralyzing, deadening effect. And thus something actually arises in the human beings of today which exists in them as a deadening element.

If as a seer one contemplates the human being of today as he is anatomically constructed, one finds in this human being, especially in the nervous system, certain currents, certain forces which are forces of death and which stem from conceptions that were alive in former incarnations. These spiritual conceptions which he has now forgotten have a consuming quality. This would show itself more and more, the farther man advances toward the future, if there were not something present which counteracts it. What could this be? Nothing but bringing up into consciousness that which was forgotten. One must remind the souls of that which they have forgotten. That is what Spiritual Science does, fundamentally it does nothing but remind the souls of the conceptions they have absorbed. Spiritual Science lifts these conceptions into consciousness. In this way it gives again to men the possibility of enlivening what would otherwise be like a dead impulse in life.

Now note these two things which you received in the course of today's consideration. On the one hand the seer perceives human souls who have passed through the portal of death, who long for the souls left behind, whom they cannot perceive, because in these souls there exist only materialistic images of the world, though they may perhaps belong to quite good men. For the seer, though he may have achieved calmness of soul, it is deeply moving to perceive these starving souls. On the other hand, the seer looks into a future of humanity which will contain more and more dead matter, if it does not revivify the conceptions which it once received and which will kill it, if they are not raised into consciousness. The seer would have to look into a future when people, through all kinds of hereditary traits would show signs of old age much earlier than is the case today. Just as one may see today examples of infantile old age, even senility, so people would then show, soon after being born, wrinkles and other indications of old age, if through lack of spiritual knowledge forces did not appear which are memories of conceptions once received in a natural way. In order to provide the dying human race with a life-giving elixir, in order to give the dead the possibilities of coming into contact with the relatives they have left behind on earth—in order to accomplish this, the seer, conscious of this fact, searches for a language which is not only understood here on earth by the souls incarnated in a physical body, but which is spoken in common by the souls living here between birth and death and those souls living beyond between death and a new birth—a language common to the living and the dead.

And truly, it is not that one feels mere sympathy for what is a Spiritual Science—a theoretical sympathy as for other things—truly, this is not what should prompt us; but he who really understands, he who looks into the world, feels that this Spiritual Science has a world-mission. He says to himself: the necessity exists to find the common language, to find the elixir of life which keeps men from becoming arid regarding the various conceptions we mentioned. That is the mission of Spiritual Science for the spiritual worlds themselves. One feels this mission as a high and sacred duty, as something very serious and significant. And we must not merely find pleasure in the ideas which Spiritual Science can give us for our theoretical satisfaction, but we must feel the spiritual power which it must derive from the necessities of the development of humanity and of the world. Then we shall have the right feeling for the reason, for the existence of Spiritual Science, why it has to be implanted into the spiritual life of humanity. It is this feeling which we must actually achieve and we must be permeated by it. This feeling has a highly curative power, it is one which brings to the human soul a real harmony of its forces. This is a fact. The more we allow our souls to be permeated with that which belongs to the world of supersensible truths, the more our feelings will become inwardly able to direct us in our lives, the more essential will these feelings become. The man who is merely pleased with Spiritual Science, who embraces it out of curiosity, or for some similar reason, that man will perhaps make a very bad use of it in his life. But he who is permeated by the feeling we characterized above, by that sacred feeling that comes to us because we know that Spiritual Science must exist out of inner necessity, he will take his place in life with the right attitude toward this Science. He will be able to find his way through Spiritual Science, at least inwardly, even in the most difficult situations; he will perhaps find it especially when outwardly the greatest difficulties arise. For Spiritual Science is an affair of the future, it has entered into the world today because it must serve mankind in the most comprehensive sense, in the most comprehensive manner. But the result of this is that those who in a way have a fear of the spiritual worlds in the depths of their souls manifest this fear in their consciousness as hatred.

Many human feelings are related to each other; ambition and vanity, for instance, are related to fear. And in a complicated manner all kinds of feelings are related to each other. Why is man ambitious, vain? What does it mean to be ambitious, vain? To be ambitious, vain, means wanting to be valued in the opinion of one's environment, and to take pleasure in the value one gains in the opinion of one's environment, to take intense pleasure in that opinion. Why does one want that? One may want it for a number of reasons. But today is the time when men, if we look into the depths of their souls, reveal themselves as particular cowards. Some of them who appear to be quite robust in their outward consciousness are cowards in the depths of their soul. And they seek all kinds of narcotics when they have such fear of the supersensible worlds. That is, because some people are afraid of losing their foothold when they gain access to the spiritual worlds, fear overcomes them; but they want to stifle this fear, sometimes because they are afraid of the earnest and solemn strength which they must use in order to enter into the spiritual worlds. We have seen many a man who believed he could be in the spiritual world at the end of four weeks, but there are—oh, the most terrible of terrors—hindrances: it proves impossible for this man to become in this incarnation, on the basis of spiritual knowledge, that which he would like so much to be—a famous man. Many a man then loses his joy, that is what he is afraid of, and he wants to stifle this fear; and so he creates against this Spiritual Science an antipathy permeated by hatred and vanity.

This mood will spread farther and farther in the present, for the inwardly cowardly, outwardly vain souls will become more and more prevalent in the world. And it may well come to pass that much more hatred, many more attacks will be launched against Spiritual Science than has been the case so far. Thus, there is certainly sufficient reason to see quite clearly, to feel quite clearly in all these things; in spite of the characterized feelings, we should have harmony, even though outwardly it may often seem that everything may go awry. To see clearly and distinctly, that will be necessary if one wants to stand firm on the ground of spiritual knowledge. For in our times those who most intensely believe they are qualified to criticize often do not know at all what they are talking about. There are people who, let us say, begin to write articles about Spiritual Science, who criticize terribly the “fantasies” of the spiritual researcher. Then, in the second half of the article there appears all kind of information about the author, which is entirely false, which is not true. A wild fantasy governs these descriptions. No one who ascends to the supersensible worlds could think up such fantasies as the person who in the first part of his article has criticized the “fantastic” Spiritual Science. Thus things are turned around in the human soul. Those who think they can tell the truth very clearly and who are gifted with a certain impure imagination about the facts of the physical plane partially stupefy themselves by holding forth against that which is supersensibly perceived. Thus humanity seeks oblivion not merely by means of alcohol, but by all kinds of other means. In many things we must see clearly, and the spiritual conception of life will give us the guidance to clear seeing. The most varied narcotics are sought and also found, and they are found for the reason that demonic beings are increasingly active in the hidden depths of the souls of men. These demonic beings will certainly be released by degrees against that which is to fructify humanity from the spiritual side.

This is something, my dear friends, which I wanted to paint before your souls just at this time as a kind of picture of the future, because it is well that we remind ourselves in our time of the way we shall have to take a firm and secure stand on the ground of this Spiritual Science by creating the right feelings toward it and its mission, if we really recognize this Science and its mission. From this ground we can tranquilly watch in our innermost being the development into the future, even though perhaps we may be brought outwardly more and more into disharmony, even though we may more and more be put in the wrong.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Privately printed for the members of the College of Spiritual Science at the Goetheanum. No one is considered competent to pass judgment upon these writings who has not acquired the prerequisite knowledge demanded by this school, either through the school itself or in a manner approved by it. Opinions expressed by other persons will be disregarded; the authors of the writings in question will engage in no discussion regarding them.

This lecture was given at Basel in December of 1918, and is included in Volume 187 of the Bibliographic Survey, 1961. It is lecture 1 of 8 from the lecture series: How Can Humanity Find the Christ Again? It was published in German as, Wie Kann die Menschheit den Christus Wiederfinden? Das Dreifache Schnattendasein Unserer Zeit und das Neue Christus-licht. It has been translated from notes unrevised by the lecturer, by Olin D. Wannamaker.

Like two mighty pillars of the spirit have the two annual festivals, the festivals of Christmas and Easter, been set by the Christian cosmic feeling within the course of the year, which should be a symbol of the course of man's life. We may say that in the conception of Christmas and the conception of Easter there stand before the human soul those two spiritual pillars upon which are inscribed the two great mysteries of man's physical existence which he must look upon very differently from the way in which he views other events in the course of his physical life. It is true that a super-sensible element is projected into this physical life—through sense observation, through intellectual judgments, through the content of feeling and will. But this super-sensible element is in other cases clearly manifest as such—for instance, when the Christian cosmic feeling undertakes to symbolize it in the festival of Pentecost. In the Christmas conception, however, and that of Easter, attention is drawn to those two events occurring within the course of the physical life which are in their external appearance purely physical but which—in contrast with all other physical events—do not immediately manifest themselves as physical events. We can look upon the physical life of man as we look upon nature; we can thus look upon the external side of the physical life, the external manifestation of the spiritual. But we can never view with our physical vision the two boundary experiences of the course of human life—not even the external aspect, the external manifestation—without being brought face to face, even through our physical vision, with the tremendous riddle, the element of mystery, in these two events. They are the events of birth and death. And in the life of Christ Jesus stand these two events of man's physical life—and likewise in the Christmas and Easter conceptions, reminding us of them—confronting the responsive Christian heart.

In the thought of Christmas and the thought of Easter, the soul of man wills to look upon the two great mysteries. And, as it thus looks, it finds in this contemplation strength filled with light for man's thought, content filled with power for the will, an upright lift of the whole man, from whatever situation he needs this upright lift. As they thus confront us, these two pillars of the spirit—the thought of Christmas and the thought of Easter—they possess an eternal worth.

But, in the course of man's evolution, his capacities of conception have approached in manifold ways the great Christmas thought and the great Easter thought. During the earliest times of the evolution of Christianity, when the Event of Golgotha had penetrated with shattering effect into human emotions, men gradually found their way to the view of the Redeemer dying on Golgotha, as they came during the earliest Christian centuries to feel in the Crucified One hanging on the cross the thought of Redemption, and gradually formed for themselves the great and powerful imagination of the Christ dying on the cross. But in the later times, especially since the modern age began, Christian feeling—adapting itself to the materialism rising in human evolution—has turned to the picture of the childlike element entering the world in the newborn Jesus.

We can certainly say that a sensitive feeling will find in the way in which the Christian sentiment of Europe has turned during recent centuries to the Christmas manger something of a materialistic Christianity. The craving—this is not said in a bad sense—to caress the infant Jesus has become trivial in the course of the centuries. And many a song about the infant Jesus felt in our day to be beautiful—or charming, as many express it—will not seem to us to possess a deep enough seriousness in the presence of these more serious times.

But the Easter thought and the Christmas thought, my dear friends, are two eternal pillars, eternal memorial pillars, of the human heart. And we can truly say that our age of new spiritual revelations will cast a new light upon the Christmas thought; that the Christmas thought will gradually come to be felt in a new form and in a glorious way. It will be our task to hear in the present world events the call to a renovation of many an old conception, a call to a new revelation of the spirit. It will be our task to understand how a new conception of Christmas, for the strengthening and uplifting of the human soul, is working its way up through the present course of world events.

The birth and death of the human being, no matter how we may analyze them, how intensely we may look at them, manifest themselves as events which play their role directly upon the physical plane, and in which the spiritual is so dominant that no one who earnestly reflects upon things could deny that these two events, these earthly events of human life, give evidence as they work upon the human being that man is the citizen of a spiritual world. No vision of the natural world can ever succeed—in the midst of what can be perceived by the senses, understood by the intellect—in finding in birth and death anything other than events in which the intervention of the spirit is manifested directly in the physical. Only these two events manifest themselves thus to the human heart.

As to the Christmas event also, the event of birth, the human and Christian heart must have an ever deepening sense of mystery. We can say that men have seldom risen to the level whence they could, in the true sense, direct their look to the mysterious nature of birth. Very seldom, indeed, but then in concepts that speak to the utmost depths of the human heart.

So it is, my dear friends, in the conception associated with the spiritual life of Switzerland of the fifteenth century, with Nicholas von der Flue. It is related of him—and he himself related this—that, before his birth, before he could breathe the outer air, he had beheld his own human form, that which he would wear after his birth should have occurred and his life should have begun its course. And he had beheld before his birth the ceremony of his own christening, the persons who were present at the christening and who shared in his earliest experiences. With the exception of one elderly person who was then present and whom he did not know, he recognized the others because he had already seen them before he beheld the light of the world.

However we may view this narration, we shall not be able to escape the impression that it points in a way to the mystery of human birth, which confronts world history so magnificently symbolized in the Christmas conception. In the story of Nicholas von der Flue we shall find the suggestion that there is connected with our entrance into the physical life something which is concealed from the every-day view of humanity only by a very thin partition wall; by a wall which can be broken through when such a karmic situation exists as was present in the case of Nicholas von der Flue. Such a startling allusion to the mystery of birth and of Christmas still meets us here and there; but we must say that humanity has as yet become very little aware of the fact that birth and death, the two boundary pillars of human life facing us in the midst of the physical world, reveal themselves even in their physical manifestation as spiritual events, such as could never occur within the mere course of nature; as events in which, on the contrary, spiritual divine Powers intervene, as is evident in the very fact that both these boundary experiences of the course of human life must still remain mysteries, even in their physical manifestation.

The new revelation of the Christ now leads us to contemplate the course of man's life—so we may safely say—as Christ wills that we should contemplate it in the twentieth century. Let us recall today, as we desire to enter deeply into the thought of Christmas, a saying reported to have been uttered by Christ Jesus which can rightly lead us to the Christmas conception. The saying runs thus: “Except ye become as little children, ye shall not enter into the Kingdom of Heaven.” “Except ye become as little children”—this is truly not an exhortation to strip away all the mystery character of the Christmas conception, and to drag it down to the triviality of “dear little Jesus,” as many folk songs and artistic songs have done—but the folk songs less than the artistic—in the course of the materialistic evolution of Christianity. This very saying—“Except ye become as little children, ye shall not enter into the Kingdom of Heaven”—impels us to look upward to mighty impulses surging through the stream of human evolution. And in our own present time, when all that is taking place in the world surely does not give occasion for lapsing into trivial conceptions of Christmas, when the human heart is filled with so much that is painful, when this human heart must reflect upon so many millions of human beings who have met their death in the last few years, must reflect upon countless multitudes who hunger for food,—in this time surely nothing is fitting for us save to behold the mighty thoughts within world history which impel humanity in its onward course, thoughts to which we can be guided by the saying, “Except ye shall become as little children,” which we can supplement by this other saying: “Unless you live your life in the light of this thought, you cannot enter into the Kingdom of Heaven.”

My dear friends, the very moment when the human being enters into the world as a child he withdraws from the world of spirit. For what occurs in the physical world, the procreation and growth of his physical body, is only the ensheathing of that event which cannot be described otherwise than by saying that man in his deepest being withdraws from the spiritual world. Man is born out of the spirit into a body. When the Rosicrucian said: “Ex deo nascimur,” he meant the human being to the extent that he enters the physical world. For that which constitutes the sheaths around the human being, which renders him a physical totality here on the earthly globe, is what is indicated by the saying: Ex deo nascimur. If we look at the centre of the human being, at the inner midmost entity, we must say that man journeys out of the spirit into the physical world. Through that which occurs in the physical world, that upon which he has looked down from the land of the spirit before his conception or his birth, he is enveloped in his physical body, in order that he may experience in his physical body things which cannot be experienced except in such a body. But, in his centre-most being, man comes out of the spiritual world. And he is of such a nature that in his earliest years—to the eyes of those who will to see things as they are in the world, who are not blinded by the illusion of materialism—he is of such a nature, this human being, that he reveals even in his earliest years how he has come out of the spirit. What we experience in connection with the child is of such a character, for those who possess insight, as to reveal to one's feeling the after effects of experiences in the spiritual world.

It is to this mystery that such narrations as that associated with the name of Nicholas von der Flue are intended to allude. A trivial view, strongly influenced by a materialistic mode of thinking, declares in its simplicity that the human being gradually develops his ego in the course of his life from birth to death; that this ego becomes more and more powerful and mighty, more and more distinctly manifest. This is a naive way of thinking, my dear friends. For, if we look upon the true ego of man, upon that which comes into a physical sheathing at the birth of the human being out of the spiritual world, we then express ourselves very differently about man's whole physical evolution. That is, we then know that, as the human being progressively develops in the physical body, the true ego actually vanishes out of the physical form, that it becomes less and less manifest; and that what develops here in the physical world between birth and death is only a mirrored reflection of spiritual occurrences, a dead reflection of a higher life. The right form of expression would be to declare that the entire fullness of the being of man gradually disappears into the body, becoming continually less and less manifest. As the human being lives his physical life here upon the earth, he gradually loses himself in his body, to find himself again in the spirit after death. So does one who knows the facts express himself. But one who is ignorant of the facts declares that the child is incomplete, and that the ego little by little develops to an ever greater perfection, growing out of the undefined subconscious levels of man's existence. He who knows what is beheld by the spiritual seeker must express himself in just this realm otherwise than is done by the sense-consciousness of our age, enmeshed in external illusions, still always materialistic in the trend of its sentiments.

Thus man enters the world as a spiritual being. His bodily nature, while he is a child, is still undefined; it has as yet laid small claim to the spiritual nature, which enters the physical existence as if there falling asleep—but appearing to us so little filled with content only because we can perceive this spiritual being, in ordinary physical life, just as little as we can perceive the sleeping ego and astral body when they are separated from the physical and etheric bodies. But the fact that we do not perceive a being does not make it less perfect. This is what the human being has to acquire by means of his physical body—that he entombs himself more and more in the physical body for the purpose of achieving by means of this burial in the body capacities which can be acquired only in this way, only through the fact that the spirit and soul being for a time loses itself in the physical existence. In order that we may always remember our spiritual origin, that we may grow strong in the thought that we have journeyed out of the spirit into the physical world—it is for this reason that the Christmas conception stands there like a mighty pillar of light amid the Christian cosmic feeling. This thought, as a Christmas thought, must grow ever stronger in the future spiritual evolution of humanity. Then will the Christmas conception become powerful again for humanity; then will mankind once more approach the Christmas festival in such a way as to draw forces for the physical life out of the Christmas conception, which can remind us in the right way of our spiritual origin. Seldom can this Christmas thought be so powerful at the present time as it will then be in human hearts. For it is a strange fact, but rooted in the very laws of spiritual existence, that what comes to light in the world—bearing mankind forward, helpful to mankind—does not at once appear in its ultimate form: that it first appears, as it were, tumultuously, as if prematurely brought forth by unlawful spirits in world evolution. We understand the historic evolution of humanity in its true meaning only when we know that truths are not to be understood only as they first appear oftentimes in world history, but that we must consider in relation to truths the right moment for their entrance into human evolution in their true light.

Among many kinds of thoughts which have entered into the evolution of modern humanity—certainly inspired by the Christ impulse, but at first in a premature form—is the conception of the equality of mankind before God and the world, the equality of all men, a thought profoundly Christian but capable of an ever increasing profundity. But we should not place this thought before men's hearts in such a generalization as that given to it by the French Revolution, when it first appeared tumultuously in human evolution. We must be aware of the fact that this life of man from birth to death is involved in a process of evolution, and that the primary impulses working upon it are distributed in time. Let us reflect about the human being as he enters into the sensible existence: he enters life filled with the impulse of the equality of the human nature in all men. We sense the child nature with the greatest intensity when we see a child permeated through his whole being by the conception of the equality of all men. Nothing which creates inequality among men, nothing that so organizes men that they feel themselves different from other men—nothing of all this enters at first into the child's nature. All this is imparted to the human being in the course of the physical life. Inequality is created by the physical existence; out of the spirit human beings come forth equal before the world and God and before other human beings. Thus does the mystery of the child declare.

And to this mystery of the child the Christmas conception is united, which is to find its deeper meaning in the new Christian revelation. For this new Christian revelation will take into account the new Trinity: the human being, as he directly represents humanity; the Ahrimanic; and the Luciferic. And, as it comes to be known how the human being is placed in the world in a relationship of balance between the Ahrimanic and the Luciferic, it will be understood also what this human being really is in the external physical existence.

Most of all must understanding come about, Christian understanding, in reference to a certain aspect of human life. Clearly will Christian thought proclaim in future what has already been affirmed by certain spirits since the middle of the nineteenth century, though in stammering accents and never quite distinctly. When we grasp the fact that the thought of equality enters the world in the child, but that forces of inequality later develop in man, as if from the fact of his having been born, forces that do not seem to belong to this earth, then just in regard to the conception of equality another profound mystery faces us. To see into this mystery, and through seeing into it to gain a true conception of man, will belong from the present time onward among the weighty and essential needs in the future evolution of the life of the soul. This is the depressing problem that faces man: Truly, human beings grow to be unlike, even though they are not so in childhood, by reason of something that is born within them, that is in the blood: their varied gifts and capacities.

The question of gifts and capacities, which cause so many inequalities among men, faces us in connection with the thought of Christmas. And the Christmas festival of the future will always admonish men most earnestly, reminding them of the origin of that which differentiates them so widely over the earth, the origin of their gifts, capacities, talents, even the gift of genius. They will have to inquire about the origin of these. And a true balance within the physical existence will be attained only when the human being can point rightly to the origin of the capacities which differentiate him from other men. The light of Christmas, or the Christmas candles, must give to evolving humanity an explanation of these capacities; it must answer the profound question: Do individual human beings suffer injustice between birth and death under the ordering of the universe? What is the truth about faculties and gifts?

Now, my dear friends, many things will be seen in a different light when humanity shall have been permeated by the new Christian feeling. Most particularly will it be understood why the Old Testament occult conception possessed a special insight into the nature of the prophetic gift. What were the prophets who appear in the Old Testament? They were personalities who had been sanctified by Jahve; they were those personalities who were permitted to employ in the right way special spiritual gifts reaching far above those of ordinary man. Jahve had first to sanctify their capacities, which are born in men as if by reason of their blood. And we know that Jahve works on human beings between their falling asleep and awakening We know that Jahve does not work within the conscious life. Every true believer of the Old Testament said within his heart: That which differentiates men as regards their capacities and gifts, which rises to the level of genius in the nature of the prophet, is born, indeed, with the person, but it is not used by him for a good purpose unless he can sink down in sleep into that realm in which Jahve guides his soul impulses, and transforms from the spiritual world gifts which are otherwise only physical, inherent in the body.

We point here to a profound mystery of the Old Testament conception. The Old Testament view, including that in regard to the nature of the prophet, must disappear. New conceptions must, for the redemption of humanity, enter into the cosmic historic evolution. That which the ancient Hebrew believed was sanctified by Jahve in the unconscious state of sleep the human being must become capable of sanctifying in the modern age while he is awake, in a state of clear consciousness. But he can do this only if he knows, on the one hand, that all natural gifts, capacities, talents, even genius, are Luciferic endowments, and work in the world Luciferically. unless they are sanctified and permeated by all that can enter into the world as the impulse of the Christ. We touch upon a tremendously important mystery of the evolution of modern humanity when we grasp the central kernel of the Christmas conception, and call attention to the fact that the Christ must be so understood and so felt by men in their hearts that they stand as New Testament human beings before the Christ and say: “In addition to the inclination of the child, his aspiration, toward equality, I have been endowed with various capacities and talents. But they can lead permanently to good results, to the welfare of humanity, only provided these gifts, these talents, are dedicated to the service of Christ Jesus; only if the human being strives to permeate his whole nature with the Christ, in order that human gifts, talents, genius may be freed from the grasp of Lucifer.”

The heart permeated by the Christ takes away from Lucifer what works otherwise Luciferically in man's physical existence. This thought must powerfully influence the future evolution of the human soul. This is the New Christmas thought, the new annunciation of the influence of the Christ in our souls, bringing about the transformation of the Luciferic—which does not enter into us because we journey out of the spirit, but is to be found in us because we are clothed in a blood-permeated physical body which bestows upon us capacities derived from the line of heredity. Within the Luciferic stream, within that which works in the stream of heredity, do these characteristics appear, but they are to be conquered and mastered during the physical life by that which the human being can feel in connection with the Christ impulse, not through Jahve inspiration in sleep, but through the fruition of man's experiences in full consciousness.

“Direct yourself, O Christian, to the Christmas thought”—thus does the new Christianity speak—“and lay there upon the altar set up for Christmas every differentiation you have received as a human being from your blood, and sanctify your capacities, sanctify your gifts, sanctify even your genius as you behold it illuminated by the light which comes from the Christmas tree.”

The new annunciation of the spirit must speak a new language, and we must not be dumb and unheeding toward the new revelation of the spirit which speaks to us in this deeply serious age in which we live. When we are sensitive to such thoughts, we are living with the power with which man ought to live in this time in order to discharge the great duties which are to be assigned to humanity in this very age. The full gravity of the Christmas thought must be experienced: that in our day there must enter into the waking consciousness of humanity what the Christ willed to say to men when he uttered the words: “Except ye become as little children ye shall not enter into the Kingdom of Heaven.” The thought of equality which the child manifests, if we look upon him in the right way, is not convicted of falsehood by reason of these words, for that Child whose birth we commemorate on Christmas eve, proclaims to human beings in the course of their evolution through the history of the world—revealing ever new thoughts—clearly and distinctly, that the differentiating gifts we possess must be placed within the light of the Christ who ensouled this Child; that all which these differentiating gifts bring about within us human beings must be placed upon the altar of this Child.

You may now ask under the inspiration of the Christmas thought: “How may I experience the Christ impulse within my own soul?” Alas, this thought is often a heavy burden in men's hearts.

Now, my dear friends, that which we may call the Christ impulse does not become rooted in our souls in a moment, forthwith and tempestuously. And in different ages it takes root differently in man. In our day man must take into himself in full clear waking consciousness such cosmic thoughts as have been stammeringly imparted by spiritual knowledge as guided by Anthroposophy, to which we belong. As these thoughts are proclaimed to him—provided he truly understands them—they can awaken within him the assurance that the new revelation, the new Christ impulse of our age, truly enters into him on the wings of these thoughts. And such a person will sense the new impulse if only he pays heed to it.

Make the endeavour, in the sense we intend, in living reality as is appropriate to our age, to take into yourselves the spiritual thoughts of the guidance of the world; seek to take them into yourselves, not as mere teaching, not merely as theory—-seek so to imbibe them that they will move your souls to their very depths, warming, illuminating, permeating them—that you shall bear them livingly within you. Seek to feel these thoughts so intensely that they shall become to you something which seems to pass through your body into your soul and to change your very body. Seek to strip away from these thoughts all abstractions, anything theoretical. Endeavour to discover for yourself that these thoughts are such as constitute a true nourishment of the soul. Seek to discover for yourself that, with these thoughts, not merely thoughts alone enter your souls, but spiritual life coming from the spiritual world.

Enter into the most intimate inner union with these thoughts, and you will observe three things. You will observe that these thoughts gradually eliminate something from within you, which appears so clearly in human hearts in our age of the consciousness soul: that these thoughts, however they may be expressed, eliminate self-seeking from the human soul. When you begin to notice that these thoughts kill egoism, destroy the force of self-seeking, you have then, my dear friends, sensed the Christ-permeated character of spiritual thought guided by Anthroposophy.

In the second place, when you observe that, in the moment when untruthfulness approaches you anywhere in the world, no matter whether you yourself are tempted to be too careless about truth or whether untruthfulness approaches you from another direction—if you observe that in the moment when untruthfulness enters the sphere of your life, an impulse makes itself felt by you, warning you, pointing to the truth, an impulse which will not permit untruth to enter your life, always admonishing you and impelling you to hold fast to truth, then do you sense, in contrast with the life of the present day, so strongly inclined toward mere appearance, the living impulse of the Christ. No one will find it easy to lie in the presence of spiritual thoughts guided by Anthroposophy, or to lack all feeling for mere appearance and untruth. A sign pointing your way to the sense of truth—apart from all other knowledge—you will feel in the thoughts of the new revelation of the Christ. When, my dear friends, you shall have reached the point where you do not strive for a mere theoretical understanding of spiritual science, as this is sought in relation to any other science, but when you have reached the stage where the thoughts so penetrate you that you say to yourself: “When these thoughts become intimately united with my soul, it is as if a Power of conscience stood beside me admonishing me, pointing me toward truth,”—then will you have found the Christ impulse in the second form.

In the third place, when you feel that something streams from these thoughts which works even into your body, but especially into the soul, overcoming sickness, making the human being well and vital, when you sense the rejuvenating, refreshing power of these thoughts, the adversary of illness, then will you have sensed the third part of the Christ impulse in these thoughts. For this is the goal toward which humanity strives through the new wisdom, in the new spirit—to find in the spirit itself the power to overcome self-seeking: to overcome self-seeking through love, the mere appearance of life through truth, the force of illness through health-giving thoughts which bring us into immediate unison with the harmonies of the universe, because they flow from the harmonies of the universe.

Not all that has been indicated can at present be attained, for man bears within him an ancient heritage. It is a mere lack of understanding when such a back-stairs politician as Christian Science twists into a caricature the thought of the healing power of the spirit. Yet, even though our ancient heritage renders it impossible for thought to become sufficiently potent at present to achieve what the human being craves thus to achieve—perhaps, from a self-seeking motive—nevertheless thought possesses healing power. In such things human thinking is always perverted. Some one who understands these things may say to you that certain thoughts give health, and the person who hears this may at a certain time be affected by this or that illness. Indeed, my dear friends, the fact that we cannot at present be relieved of all illnesses by the mere power of thought is due to an ancient heritage. But are you able to say what illnesses would have overtaken you if you had not possessed the thoughts? Could you say that your life would have been passed in its present degree of health if you had not possessed these thoughts? In the case of a person who has applied himself to spiritual science guided by Anthroposophy and who dies at the age of 45 years, can you prove that, without these thoughts, he would not have died at 42 or 40 years of age? Human beings tend always to think from the wrong direction when they deal with these thoughts. They direct their attention to what cannot be bestowed upon them, by reason of their karma, but do not pay attention to what is bestowed upon them by reason of their karma. But if, in spite of everything contradictory in the external physical world, you direct your look with the power of inner confidence which you have gained through intimate familiarity with the thoughts of spiritual science, you then come to feel the healing power, a healing power which penetrates even into the physical body, refreshing, rejuvenating—the third element, which the Christ as the Healer brings with his never ceasing revelations into the human soul.

We have desired to enter more deeply, my dear friends, into the thought of Christmas, which is so closely bound up with the mystery of human birth. What is revealed to us today out of the spirit as the continuing extension of the Christmas thought we desired to bring in brief outline before our minds. We can feel that it gives strength and support to our lives. We can feel that it places us amid the impulses of cosmic evolution, no matter what may befall, so that we can feel ourselves in unison with these divine impulses in the evolution of the world; that we can understand them, and can draw power for our will from this understanding, and light for our life of thought. Man is evolving; it would be wrong to deny this evolution. The only right course is to go forward with this evolution.

Moreover, Christ has declared: “I am with you always even to the end of the world.” This is not a phrase; it is truth. Christ has revealed Himself not only in the Gospels; Christ is with us; Christ reveals Himself continually. We must have ears to harken to what He is ever newly revealing in the modern age. Weakness will overcome us if we have no faith in these new revelations; but strength shall be ours if we have such faith.

Strength will come to us if we have faith in the new revelations, even should they speak to us from life's seemingly contradictory suffering and misfortune. With our own souls we pass through repeated earth lives during which our destiny comes to fulfilment. Even this thought, which empowers us to sense the spiritual behind the external physical life, we can realize only when we take into ourselves in the truly Christian sense the revelations following one upon another. The Christian—the true Christian—when he stands before the candles on the Christmas tree, should begin to work with the strengthening thoughts which can come to him today from the new cosmic revelation, to give power to his will, illumination to his life of thought. And his feeling should be such that the power and the light of this thought may enable him in the course of the Christian year to draw close to that other thought which admonishes of the mystery of death—the Easter thought, which brings the final experience of the earthly life of man before our souls as a spiritual experience. For we shall sense the Christ more and more if we are able to place our own existence in the right relation with His existence. The medieval Rosicrucian, uniting his thought with Christianity, declared: Ex deo nascimur; in Christo morimur; per spiritum sanctum reviviscinius. Out of the Divine have we been born as we contemplate ourselves as human beings here on the earthly globe. In Christ we die. In the Holy Spirit we shall be again awakened. This actually pertains to our life, our human life. If we turn our look away from our life to the life of Christ, then what is represented in our life is a mirrored reflection. Out of the Divine are we born; in Christ we die; in the Holy Spirit we shall again be awakened. This saying, which is true of our first-born Brother, the Christ living in our midst, we can so affirm that we shall feel it to be the Christ-truth raying forth from Him and mirrored in our human nature: Out of the Spirit was He begotten—as this is represented in the Gospel of Luke in the symbol of the descending dove—out of the Spirit was He begotten; in the human body He died; in the Divine will He rise again.

Truths which are eternal we can take into ourselves in the right way only when we see them in their contemporary reflection—not made into something absolute, made abstract in a single form. And if we feel ourselves as human beings, not only in an abstract sense but human beings existing actually at a certain time when it is our duty to act and to think in harmony with this time, then shall we seek to understand the Christ, who is with us always even to the end of the world, in His contemporary language as He teaches us and gives us light regarding the Christmas thought, filling us with the power of the Christmas thought. We shall desire to take this Christ into ourselves in His new language. For the Christ must become intimately related to us. Then shall we be enabled to fulfil in ourselves the true mission of Christ on the earthly globe and beyond death. The human being in each epoch must take the Christ into himself in his own way. This has been the feeling of human beings when they have looked in the right way at the two great pillars of the spirit: at the Christmas thought and the Easter thought. Thus did the profound German mystic, the Silesian, Angelus Silesius, contemplating the Christmas thought, declare:

Should Christ a thousand times in Bethlehem be born,
And not in thee, then wert thou still forlorn.

And, contemplating the Easter thought, he said:

The cross of Golgotha must be upraised in thee
Ere from thy sin its power shall make thee free.

Truly the Christ must live within us, since we are not human beings in an absolute sense, but human beings of a definite epoch. The Christ must be born within us according to the sound of His words in our epoch. We must seek to bring the Christ to birth within us, for our strengthening, for our illumination, as He has remained with us until now, as He will remain with mankind throughout all ages even to the end of earthly time, as He wills now to be born in our souls. That is, if we seek to experience the birth of Christ within us in our epoch, as this event becomes a light and a power in our souls—the eternal power and eternal life entering into time—we then behold in the true way the historic birth of Christ in Bethlehem and its counterpart in our own souls.

Should Christ a thousand times in Bethlehem be born,
And not in thee, then wert thou still forlorn.

As He creates the impulse in our hearts today to look upon His birth—His birth in human events, His birth in our own souls—so do we deepen the Christmas thought within us. And then we look away to that night of consecration which we ought to feel coming to pass within us for the strengthening and illumination of human beings for the endurance of many evils and sorrows which they have had to live through and will yet have to live through.

“My Kingdom,” said Christ, “is not of this world.” It is a saying which challenges us, if we look upon His birth in the right way, to find within ourselves the path to the Kingdom where He abides to give us strength, where He abides to give us light amid our darkness and helplessness through the impulses coming from the world of which He himself spoke, of which His appearance on Christmas will always be a manifestation. “My Kingdom is not of this world.” But He has brought that Kingdom into this world, so that we may always find strength, comfort, confidence, and hope out of this Kingdom in all the circumstances of life, if we only will come to Him, taking His words to heart—such words as these:

“Except ye become as little children, ye shall not enter into the Kingdom of Heaven.”

Our last discussions here were about the possibility, on the one hand, of seeing in the natural realm that which is connected in a certain way with the moral, with the soul, and on the other hand, of seeing in the soul again what is present in the natural. In this very area, humanity today is confronted with a, one might say, disturbing puzzle. Not only that, as I have often mentioned in public lectures, when man applies the laws of nature to the universe and looks at the past, he must say to himself: Everything around us has emerged from some primeval nebulous state, that is, from something purely material, which then differentiated and transformed itself in some way, and from which the beings of the mineral, plant, and animal kingdoms emerged, and from which man also emerged. This will be there again in a certain way, albeit in a different form than at the beginning, as a purely physical thing, even at the end of the universe. But then what is born in us as morality, our ideals, will have basically faded away and been forgotten, and there will be the great churchyard of the physical, and nothing will have any meaning within this final physical state, which has arisen as a spiritual development in man, because it was just a kind of bubble. The only reality would be that which develops physically out of the primeval mist to the strongest differentiation of the various beings, only to return again to the general slag-like state of the world.

Such a view, which must be arrived at by anyone who honestly – that is, honestly to himself – professes the natural philosophy of the present day, can never build a bridge between the physical and the moral-spiritual. Therefore, such a view always needs, if it does not want to be completely materialistic and actually see the only thing in the world in material processes, always needs a kind of second world, so to speak, brought out of abstraction, which, if only the first world is recognized as given for science, would then be given to faith alone. And this belief, which is expressed in the fact that it in turn thinks: That which arises in the human soul as good cannot remain without compensation in the world; there must be certain powers which - however one thinks of it philosophically, it comes out the same - reward good and punish evil and so on. In our time there are people who profess both views, although they are incompatible. There are people who, on the one hand, accept everything that the purely scientific world view has to offer, who go along with the Kant-Laplacean theory of the primeval nebula, who go along with all that is put forward for a slag-like final state of our development, and who then also profess some religious world view: that good works somehow find their reward, evil sinners are punished and the like. The fact that there are numerous people in our time who allow both the one and the other to be presented to their soul stems from the fact that there is so little real activity of the soul in our time, because if there were this inner activity of the soul, then one could not simply assume, out of the same soul, on the one hand, a world order that excludes the reality of morality, and yet, on the other hand, assume some powers that reward good and punish evil.

Contrast the moral and physical worldviews, which arise from the intellectual and emotional laziness of many people today, with something like what I explained here last time as a result of spiritual science. I was able to point out that we see the world of light phenomena around us first, that we look at everything in the outer nature that appears to us through that which we call light. I was able to point out to you how one has to see in all that exists around us as light, what dying world thoughts are, that is, world thoughts that were once, in the distant past, the thought worlds of certain entities, thought worlds from which world entities of long ago recognized their world secrets. What were thoughts in the beginning now shine out to us, in that they are, so to speak, the corpse of a thought, a world thought that has died. They need only open my “Occult Science” and read the relevant pages to know that when we look back into the distant past, the human being as we understand him today did not yet exist. He was only a kind of sensory automaton, for example, during the Saturn period. But you also know that the universe was inhabited in those days, as it is now. But in those days, other beings that inhabited this universe took the place within this universe that man occupies today. We know, of course, that those spirits whom we call archai or primal beginnings, that these entities were at the human stage during the old Saturn time. They were not human as humans are today, but they were at the human stage. With a completely different constitution, they were at the human stage. Archangels were at the human stage during the old sun time and so on.

We are looking back into the distant past and saying to ourselves: Just as we now go through the world as thinking beings, so these entities went through the world as thinking beings with the character of humanity. But what lived in them then has become an external world thought. And that which lived in them then in thought, so that it could only be seen from the outside as their aura of light, is then seen in the universe, appearing in the facts of light, so that we have to see dying worlds of thought in the facts of light. And now darkness plays a role in these light facts, and in contrast to the light, that which can be called the will in a soul-spiritual sense lives out in the darkness, which can also be called love with a more oriental turn of phrase. So that when we look out into the world, we see, on the one hand, the world of light, if I may say so; but we would not see this world of light, which would always be transparent to the senses, if darkness did not make itself perceptible in it. And in what now permeates the world as darkness, we have to look for what lives in us as will in the first stage of the soul. Just as the world outside can be seen as a harmony of darkness and light, so too can our own inner being, insofar as it initially spreads out in space, be seen as light and darkness. Only for our own consciousness is the light thought, imagination, the darkness in us will, goodness, love, and so on.

You see, we get a world view in which what is in the soul is only soul and what is outside in nature is only natural; we get a world view in which what is outside in nature is the result of earlier moral processes, where the light is dying worlds of thought. But this also means for us: When we carry our thoughts within us, they are initially, in that they live in us as thoughts, released from our past by virtue of their power. But we continually permeate our thoughts with the will from the rest of our organism. For precisely what we call purest thoughts are remnants from the distant past, permeated by the will. So that even pure thinking - I have stated this very energetically in the new edition of my “Philosophy of Freedom” - is permeated by the will. But what we carry within us goes back to distant futures, and in distant futures what is now in us as the first germ will shine in the outer phenomena. There will then be beings who look out into the world as we now look out from the earth into the world, and these beings will say: “Nature shines around us.” Why does it shine for us as it does? Because deeds have been accomplished by people on earth in a certain way, because what we now see around us is the result of what people on earth have carried within themselves as a seed. — We now stand there, looking out into the natural world around us. We can stand there like dry, sober abstractors, we can analyze light and its phenomena as physicists do: we will analyze these phenomena coldly, as laboratory people; this will produce some very beautiful and ingenious results, but we do not then stand as full human beings in relation to the outer world. We can only face the outer world as fully human beings if we can feel what appears to us in the dawn, what appears to us in the blue firmament, what appears to us in the green plant, if we can feel what we perceive in the rippling wave – for light does not only refer to the light that can be perceived through the eye, but I use the term light here for all sensory perceptions. What do we see when we perceive what is around us? We see a world that can indeed uplift our soul, that reveals itself in a certain way for our soul as something we must have in order to be able to look meaningfully out into a meaningful world. We do not stand there as fully human beings when we merely face this world by analyzing it dryly as physicists. We only face this world as a whole human being when we say to ourselves: What glows there, what sounds there, is ultimately the result of what beings developed in their souls long ago in the distant past; we must be grateful to them. We do not look out into the world like dry physicists, we look out with feelings of gratitude towards those beings who, let us say, during the ancient Saturn time, lived as humans for so many millions of years, as we live today as humans, and who thought and felt in such a way that we have the wonderful world around us today. That is a significant result of a world view saturated with reality, in that it leads us to look out into the world not just as a dry, sober person, but full of gratitude for those beings in the most distant past who, through their thinking and their deeds, have brought about the world around us that lifts us up. Imagine this only with the necessary intensity, let yourself be filled with this idea of being obliged to thank the distant prehistoric men, because they have made our environment. Let yourself be filled with this thought, and then bring yourself to say to your soul: We must arrange our thoughts and feelings in the appropriate way, in a way that we have in mind as a moral ideal, so that those beings who come after us can look at an environment for which they must be just as grateful to us as we can be grateful to our distant ancestors, who now literally surround us in terms of their effects as guiding spirits. We see a luminous world today; millions of years ago it was a moral world. We carry a moral world within us; after millions of years it will be a world of light.

You see, a complete world view leads to this world-sensation. An incomplete world view, admittedly, leads to all kinds of ideas and concepts, to all kinds of theories about the world, but it does not fulfill the full human being, because it leaves his sensation empty. This has a very practical side, although today's man hardly yet realizes its practical side. But anyone who is honest about the world today knows that he must not let it go into decline; he wants to look to a school and college of the future where people do not go in at eight in the morning with a certain casual, indifferent feeling, and come out at eleven or twelve or one o'clock with the same casual, indifferent feeling, at most with a little pride that they have once again become so and so much smarter - let's assume they have become. No, one can direct one's gaze into a future perspective in which those who leave at eleven or twelve or one o'clock leave the places of learning with feelings towards the world that go out into the universe, in that, in addition to cleverness, the feeling toward the emerging world, the feeling of gratitude toward the very distant past, in which beings worked who shaped our surrounding nature as it is, and the feeling of great responsibility that we have because our moral impulses in us become later appearing worlds. It remains a belief, of course, when one wants to tell people: the primeval fog is real, the future slag is real, in between beings create moral illusions that rise up in them as foam. Belief does not say the latter; it would have to say it if it were honest. Is it not something essentially different when man says to himself: Yes, that which is retribution, that exists, because nature itself is so constituted that this retribution occurs: your thoughts become shining light. The moral world order reveals itself. What is the moral world order at one time is the physical world order at another time, and what is the physical world order at any one time was the moral world order at another time. Everything moral is destined to emerge into the physical. Does the person who views nature spiritually still need proof of a moral world order? No, in the spiritually comprehended nature itself lies the justification of the moral world order. One rises to this image when one regards man, I would like to say, in his full humanity.

Let us start with an occurrence that we all go through every day. We know that falling asleep and waking up are based on the human being in his I and his astral body detaching from the physical body and the etheric body. What does this actually mean in relation to the cosmos? Let us imagine that the physical body, etheric body, astral body and I are connected with each other for waking. Now let us imagine them separated for sleeping: What is the, I would say, cosmic difference between the two? You see, when you look at the state of sleep, you experience the light in this state of sleep. By experiencing the light, you experience the dying world of thoughts of the past. And by experiencing the dying world of thoughts of the past, you are inclined to have a receptivity to perceive the spiritual as it extends into the future. The fact that man today has only a dull perception of it does not change the matter. What is essential to us now is that we are receptive to the light in this state.

When we now submerge ourselves in the body, we become inwardly soulful – when I say inwardly soulful, it means that we are souls and not scales – we become soulful receptive by immersing ourselves in the body, in contrast to the light, for the darkness. But this is not a mere negative, but we become receptive to something else. Just as we were receptive to light when we slept, we become receptive to heaviness when we wake up. I said we are not scales; we do not become receptive to heaviness by weighing our bodies, but by immersing ourselves in our bodies, we become inwardly receptive to heaviness. Do not be surprised that this is somewhat vague at first when it is expressed. For the actual soul experience, ordinary consciousness is just as dormant when awake as it is when asleep. In sleep, a person in today's normal consciousness does not perceive how he lives in the light. When awake, he does not perceive how he lives in heaviness. But that is how it is: the basic experience of the sleeping human being is life in the light. In sleep, the soul is not receptive to heaviness, to the fact of heaviness. Heaviness is, as it were, taken from him. He lives in the light. He knows nothing of heaviness. He first learns to recognize heaviness inwardly, then subconsciously. But the imagination immediately picks up on this: he learns to recognize heaviness by immersing himself in his body.

This can be seen in spiritual scientific research in the following way. If you have raised yourself to the level of knowledge of imagination, then you can observe the etheric body of a plant. When you observe the etheric body of a plant, you will have the inner experience: This etheric body of the plant, it continually draws you upwards, it is weightless. If, on the other hand, you look at the etheric body of a human being, it has weight, even for the imaginative presentation. You simply have the feeling: it is heavy. And from there one then comes to recognize that, for example, the etheric body of the human being is something that, when the soul is in it, gives the soul heaviness. But it is a supersensible archetypal phenomenon. When asleep, the soul lives in the light and therefore in lightness. When awake, the soul lives in heaviness. The body is heavy. This force is transferred to the soul. The soul lives in heaviness. This means something that is now transferred to consciousness. Think of the moment you wake up, what does it consist of? When you are asleep, you are lying in bed, you do not move, the will is paralyzed. However, the images are also paralyzed, but the images are only paralyzed because the will is paralyzed, because the will does not shoot into your own body, does not make use of the senses, and therefore the images are paralyzed. The basic fact is the lameness of the will. What makes the will active? The fact that the soul feels heaviness through the body. This coexistence with the soul [heaviness] gives the earthly human being the fact of the will. And the cessation of the will of the human being himself occurs when the human being is in the light.

So you have presented the two cosmic forces, light and gravity, as the great contradictions in the cosmos. Indeed, light and gravity are cosmic contradictions. If you imagine the planet: gravity pulls towards the center, the light points away from the center into the universe (arrows). One thinks of the light only as being at rest. In truth, it points out from the planet. Anyone who thinks of gravity as a force of attraction, in other words in Newtonian terms, is actually thinking in a rather materialistic way, because they are thinking that there is actually something like a demon or something sitting inside the earth, with a rope that you can't see, and it is pulling the stone towards it. People talk about a force of attraction, which no one can ever prove anywhere other than in their imagination. But people talk about this force of attraction. Now, people may not want to sensualize this thing, but they may talk about the force of attraction in Newtonian terms. In Western culture, it will always be the case that whatever is there must be presented in some way that can be sensed by the senses. So someone could say to people: Well, you can imagine the force of attraction as an invisible cord; but then you must at least imagine light as a kind of swinging down, as a kind of flinging off. You would then have to imagine light as a flinging-off force. For those who prefer to remain in reality, it is enough if they can simply understand the cosmic contrast between light and gravity.

And now, you see, what I am about to say concerns many things related to the human being. When we look at the everyday event of falling asleep and waking up, we say: when we fall asleep, we leave the field of heaviness and enter the field of light. By living in the field of light, he gets, if he has lived long enough without gravity, again a vivid desire to be embraced by the gravity, and he returns to the gravity again, he wakes up. It is a continuous oscillation between life in the light and life in the gravity, waking up and falling asleep. If someone develops their sensory abilities to a higher degree, they will be able to directly perceive this as a personal experience, this sense of rising from heaviness into the light, and then being taken up by heaviness when waking up.

But now imagine something else, now imagine that the human being is bound to the earth as a being between birth and death. He is bound to the earth by the fact that in this state between birth and death, when his soul has lived in the light for a while, it will always hunger for heaviness again and return to a state of heaviness. When we talk about this in more detail, a state has been reached in which this hunger for heaviness no longer exists, then man will follow the light more and more. He does this up to a certain limit (see red line in the illustration). He follows the light up to a certain limit, and when he has reached the outermost periphery of the universe, he has used up what gravity gave him between birth and death. Then a new longing for gravity begins, and he returns to his path (see white line in the illustration) to a new incarnation. So that also in that interim between death and a new birth, around the midnight hour of existence, a kind of hunger for heaviness arises. This is initially the most general concept for what man experiences as a longing to return to a new earth life. But now, while man returns to a new earth life, he will have to go through the sphere of neighboring, of the other celestial bodies. These have the most diverse effects on him, and the result of these effects he then brings with him into this physical life by entering it through conception. From this you can see that it is important to ask: what position do the stars occupy in the spheres through which the person passes? For, depending on the sphere through which the person passes, his longing for the heaviness of the earth takes on different forms. Not only the earth, so to speak, radiates a certain heaviness, which the person longs for again, but also the other heavenly bodies, whose spheres he passes through as he moves towards a new life, have an effect on him with their gravity. So that man, by returning, can indeed come into different situations, which justify saying, for example, that man returning to earth longs to live in the gravity of the earth again. But he first passes through the sphere of Jupiter. Jupiter also radiates a heaviness, but one that is suitable for adding a certain joyful note to the longing for the heaviness of the earth. So not only will the longing for the heaviness of the earth live in the soul, but this longing will also receive a joyful nuance. The person passes through the sphere of Mars. He longs for the heaviness of the earth. A joyful mood is already in him. Mars also has an effect on him with its heaviness, planting, as it were, the activity in the soul that joyfully longs for earthly heaviness, to enter into this earthly heaviness in order to make powerful use of the next physical life between birth and death. Now the soul has already progressed so far that in its subconscious depths it has the impulse to long clearly for the heaviness of the earth and to make powerful use of the earthly incarnation, so that the longing joy, the joyful yearning, is expressed with intensity. Man still passes through the sphere of Venus. A loving grasp of the tasks of life is added to this joyful longing, which tends towards strength.

You see, we are talking about different types of gravity emanating from celestial bodies and relating them to what can live in the soul. Again, by looking out into space, we seek to address the spatial-physical at the same time as the moral. If we know that the will lives in the forces of gravity and if we know on the other hand that the light is opposed to the will, we may say: From Mars light is reflected, from Jupiter light is reflected, from Venus light is reflected; in the forces of gravity the modification through the light lives at the same time. We know that dying world thoughts live in the light, and that nascent worlds live in the forces of gravity through will-germs. All this radiates through the souls as they move through space. We consider the world physically, and at the same time we consider it morally. A physical and a moral aspect do not coexist. Man is only inclined to say this in his limitedness: on the one hand is the physical, on the other the moral. No, these are only different aspects, they are unified in themselves. The world, which develops towards the light, develops at the same time towards retribution, towards revealing retribution. A meaningful cosmic order reveals itself out of the natural cosmic order.

One must be clear about the fact that one does not arrive at such a world view through a philosophical interpretation, but that one grows into it by gradually learning to spiritualize physical concepts through spiritual science; in this way it moralizes itself. And when one learns to see through the world of the physical into the world in which the physical has ceased to exist and the spiritual is present, one recognizes: morality is present there.

You see, people today could really come to this conclusion from certain ideas. I just want to show this to you at the end, although it is outside the way of thinking of most of you. I would like to say that it takes a great deal of study to understand what I have just said. So you have this line, which is not an ellipse, but which differs from the ellipse in that it is more curved here (drawing on the left) – you often see this line on buildings – the ellipse would be something like this (dotted line). But this is only one special form of this line; this line can also, if you change the mathematical equation, take on this shape (lemniscate). It is the same line as the other one. Sometimes I go around like this and close here; but under certain conditions I don't go up to the top like that, but go around like this and then return again and close at the bottom. But the same line has another form. If I start here, I only appear to close here; now I have to get out of the plane, out of the room, have to go over here, come back here. Now I have to go out of the room again, have to continue the line here and close it at the bottom. Only the line is somewhat modified. These are not two lines, it is only one line, and it also has only one mathematical equation; it is a single line, only that I go out of the room. If you continue this idea, then the other is also possible: I can simply take this line (lemniscate), but I can also imagine this line in such a way that its half lies within the space; by getting around here, I have to go out of the space. I have to go out of the room, then I finish it like this: here is the other half, but it is only outside the usual room, it is not inside the usual room. It is also there. And if one were to develop this way of thinking, which mathematicians, for example, could have today if they wanted, if one were to develop this way of thinking, one would come to a different conception of going out of space and coming back into space. This is something that corresponds to reality. For every time you set out to do something, you think the thing you have set out to do; before you want to, you go out of the room, and when you move your hand, you go back into the room. In between, you are out of the room, and you are on the other side of the room.

This idea must be developed thoroughly — from the other side of the room. Then one comes to the idea of the truly supersensible, but above all, one comes to the idea of the moral in its reality. The reality of the moral can be so difficult to imagine from today's world view because people want to imagine everything they want to imagine in space, to determine it in terms of mass, weight and number, whereas in fact reality at every point, I might say, in space transcends space and returns to space. There are people who imagine a solar system, comets in the solar system, and they say: The comet appears, then it goes through a huge long ellipse and then it comes back after a long time. — That is not true for many comets. It is the case that comets appear, they go out, scatter here, stop, but form again from the other side, form again from here and come back from there, describe lines that do not return at all. Why? Because comets leave space and return from a completely different place. It is entirely possible in the cosmos for comets to disperse from space and return from a different place in space.

In tomorrow's continuation of these considerations, I will not torment you with the ideas that I presented to you in the last ten minutes, because I know that they would be far removed from the range of ideas of a large number of you. But I must sometimes point out that this spiritual science, as it is cultivated here, could count on the most highly developed scientific ideas if the opportunity were available, if in other words there were the possibility of really permeating with spirit what is being done today in a spiritless way, especially in the so-called exact sciences. Unfortunately, this possibility does not exist; in particular, things like mathematics and so on are mostly done in the most spiritless way today. And that is why, as I emphasized during my recent public lecture in Basel, spiritual science is for the time being dependent on making itself felt to educated laymen — which many people who now want to be considered learned reproach it for. If scholars were not so lazy when it came to spiritual contemplation, spiritual science would not need to assert itself only before educated laymen, because it can count on the highest scientific ideas and, up to these highest scientific ideas, also counts on complete accuracy because it is aware of its responsibility.

Of course, the scientists behave in a very peculiar way in the face of these things. You see, there is a learned gentleman - I already pointed him out in a public lecture recently - who has obviously heard that university courses have been held here in Dornach. He had heard something about the Waldorf School and had apparently read my inaugural address for the Waldorf School and another essay in the “Waldorf-Nachrichten”. In the inaugural address, I mentioned a pedagogue out of context who is a kindred spirit of that scholar in many ways. On such occasions, the gentlemen who so often accuse anthroposophy of leading to suggestion or autosuggestion are immediately hypnotized because they hear: “Someone was mentioned who is a scientific comrade of mine.” The gentleman then became very attentive. Now it became obviously clear to him from all that has been achieved at the Dornach School of Spiritual Science. Nevertheless, he could not refrain from writing the following: “At the anthroposophical college courses in Dornach near Basel, which took place in the fall of this year, it was hoped that great and powerful ideas would be introduced from here to initiate a new development of our nation and breathe new life into it. Anyone who examines the ethical foundations of this movement at its true value cannot share this hope unless these foundations are subjected to critical examination, which is what the above lines are intended to encourage.

Now, why were these “above lines” actually written? So the university courses, their ethical basis must be examined, subjected to criticism, because they must have something to do with what such a gentleman now has to declaim, what he calls the moral low, because he begins his essay, which he has titled “Ethical Mis »: «In times of a moral low such as the German people have probably never experienced, it is doubly important to defend the great landmarks of morality, as established by Kant and Herbart, and not to let them be shifted in favor of relativistic inclinations. The words of Baron von Stein, that a people can only remain strong through the virtues by which it has become great, must be considered one of the most important tasks in the midst of the dissolution of all moral concepts today.

Now the man dates the dissolution of moral concepts since the war and finds one very remarkable: “That a writing of the leader of the anthroposophists in Germany, Dr. Rudolf Steiner, is involved in this dissolution, must be particularly regretted, since one the idealistic basic feature of this movement, which aims at a strong internalization of the individual human being“ - that is what he has taken from a few essays in the ‘Waldorfnachrichten’ - ‘cannot be denied, and in his plan of the threefold social order, which was discussed in No. 222 of the ’Tags”, one can find healthy ideas that promote the welfare of the people. But in the book “The Philosophy of Freedom” (Berlin 1918), he takes his individualistic approach to such an extreme that it leads to the dissolution of the social community and must therefore be fought."

So you will see: in 1918, the “Philosophy of Freedom” was written out of the moral low that resulted from the war! Of course, the good man did not care about the “Philosophy of Freedom” for decades, when it was around, only read the last edition, namely 1918, so carefully that he did not notice how old this book is, that it certainly dates from the time when he talked about how wonderfully far we have come, to what clarification, where he has not yet spoken of a moral low for a long time: Well, so! Such is the conscientiousness of these youth educators. The man is not only a professor of philosophy, but above all an educator. So he not only has to teach at universities, but also educate children pedagogically. And he is so well educated himself that he perceives the writing as having been written in 1918, the “Philosophy of Freedom.” Therefore, it is also easy for him to report on the purpose of this writing. Consider the situation: in 1893, the “Philosophy of Freedom” appears. So the ideas arise at that time. If one assumes that the “Philosophy of Freedom” was published at that time, what sense do the following words make, which are almost the culmination of the whole essay: “But these free people of Dr. Steiner are no longer human. They have already entered the world of angels on earth. Anthroposophy has helped them to do so.”

Now, I ask you: in 1893, the “Philosophy of Freedom” was published with the intention of providing people with the ethics that anthroposophy helps them to achieve: “Would it not be an unspeakable blessing in the midst of the manifold confusions of earthly life to be able to place oneself in such surroundings? Assuming that a small group succeeds in stripping away all that is human and entering into a purer existence in which the truly free are allowed to live fully beyond good and evil, what remains for the broad masses of the people who are most closely intertwined with the material needs and worries of life?

So you see, the matter is presented as if the “Philosophy of Freedom” had been published in Berlin in 1918, and anthroposophy was there to educate the people described in the “Philosophy of Freedom”!

With this conscientiousness our scholars write about things today. It is the same conscientiousness with which a doctor of theology writes that a nine-meter-high statue of Christ has been fabricated, with Luciferian features at the top and animalistic features at the bottom, despite the fact that the statue of Christ has a purely human ideal face at the top and is still a wooden block at the bottom, in other words, is not there at all yet. He does not just describe it as if someone had told him, this doctor of theology, but he writes as if he had established this fact, as if he had been there himself. This reminds me of the anecdote I mentioned in Basel in public, about how someone determines whether he is sober or drunk when he comes home in the evening: he lies down in bed and places a cylinder in front of him on the bedspread; if he can see it clearly, he is sober; if he sees it double, he is drunk. You have to be at least in that state if you see what is being made here as a statue of Christ as that doctor of theology saw it.

But, leaving these attacks aside, in this case one can still ask the question: What kind of theologians are they? What kind of Christians are they? What kind of educators are they for young people, who have such a relationship to truth and truthfulness, and what must a science look like that is endowed with such a feeling for truth and truthfulness? But such a science is actually represented today by most people in lecterns and in books; humanity lives from such science. Among all the other tasks it has, spiritual science also has the task of purifying our spiritual atmosphere from those vapors of untruthfulness, of mendacity, which does not just prevail in the outer life, which can be proven today down to the depths of the individual sciences. And it is from these depths that what has such a devastating effect on social life emanates. The courage must be mustered to shine the right light on these things. But for that, it is necessary first to warm to a world view that really bridges the moral world order and the physical world order, in that the shining sun can be seen both as the concentration of descending of thought worlds, and that which bubbles up from the depths of the earth can be seen at the same time as the preparation of that which lives on into the future, in the form of germs, volitional forces that permeate the world volitionally. We will continue this discussion tomorrow.

In the last lecture I tried to point out how by means of the kind of knowledge cultivated by Anthroposophy, man may be seen in his whole nature—consisting of body, soul and Spirit. I tried to show also how an inner knowledge of the conditions of health and disease can only be arrived at when the entire nature of man can be perceived in this way; and how in learning to know the true connections between the things which take place within man and the external processes and conditions of substances in Nature, we also succeed in establishing a connecting link between pathology and therapy.

Our next task will be to explain in detail what was only given in general outline in the first lecture. And for this it will above all be necessary to observe how disintegration is proceeding in the human organism and how, on the other hand, there is a constant process of integration. Man has, to begin with, an external physical organisation which is perceptible by means of the outer senses, and whose manifestations can be comprehended by the reason. Besides this physical body there is also the first super-sensible body of the human being: the etheric, or life-body. These two principles of the constitution of man serve to build up (integrate) the human organisation.

The physical body is continually renewed as it casts off its substance. The etheric body—which contains the forces of growth and of assimilation—is, in the entirety of its constitution, something of which we can gain a conception when we behold the growing and blossoming plant-kingdom in the spring; for the plants, as well as human beings, have an etheric or life-body. In these two members of the human organisation we have a progressive, constructive evolution.

In so far as man is a sentient being, he bears within himself the next member, the astral body. (We need not feel that such terms are objectionable; we should perceive what they reveal to us.) The astral body is essentially the mediator of sensation, the bearer of the inner life of feeling. The astral body contains not only the upbuilding forces but also the forces of destruction. Just as the etheric body makes the being of man bud and sprout, as it were, so all these processes of budding are continually being disintegrated again by the astral body; and just because of this, just because the physical and etheric bodies are continually being disintegrated, there exists in the human organisation an activity of soul and Spirit.

It would be quite a mistake to suppose that the soul and Spirit in man's nature inhere in the upbuilding process and that this process at last reaches a certain point—let us say in the nervous system—where it can become the bearer of soul and Spirit. That is not the case. When eventually (and everything points to this being soon), our very admirable modern scientific research has made further progress, it will become apparent that an anabolic, a constructive process in the nervous system is not the essential thing; it is present in the nervous organisation merely in order that the nerves may, in fact, exist. But the nerve-process is in a continual, though slow state of dissolution; and because it is so, because the physical is always being dissolved, a place is set free for the Spirit and soul.

In a still higher degree is this the case as regards the actual Ego-organisation, by means of which man is raised above all the other beings of Nature surrounding him on the Earth. The Ego-organisation is essentially bound up with katabolism; it is of greatest moment in those parts of the human being that are in a state of disintegration.

So when we look into this wonderful form of the human organism, we see that in every single organ there is construction, integration (whereby the organ ministers to growth and progressive development), and also destruction, whereby it ministers to retrogressive physical development, and by so doing gives foothold for the soul and Spirit. I said in the last lecture that the state of balance between integration and disintegration which is present in a particular way in every human organ, can be disturbed. The upbuilding process can become rampant; in that case we have to do with an unhealthy condition. When we look in this way into the nature of the human being (to begin with I can only state these things rather abstractly; they will be expressed more concretely presently), when we proceed conscientiously, with a sense of scientific responsibility and do not talk in generalisations about the presence of integration and disintegration, but really study each individual organ as conscientiously as we have learnt to do in scientific observations to-day—then we shall be able to penetrate into this condition of balance that is necessary for the single organs and so find it possible to obtain a conception of the human being in health. If in either direction, either with respect to constructive or with respect to destructive processes, the balance of an organ is upset, then we have to do with something that is unhealthy in the human organism.

Now, however, we must discover how this human organism stands in relation to the three kingdoms of Nature in the outer world—the mineral, plant and animal kingdoms—from which we have of course to extract our remedies. When we have studied this inner state of balance in the manner described, we shall see how everything that is present in the three kingdoms of Nature outside man is, in every direction, being overcome within the human organism.

Let us take the simplest example:—the condition of warmth in man. Nothing of the outer conditions of warmth must be carried on unchanged when it is once within the human organism. When we investigate the manifestations of warmth outside in Nature, we know that warmth raises the temperature of things in the outer world. We say that warmth penetrates into things. If we, in our organisation, were to be penetrated in the same way by warmth we should be made ill by it. It is only when, through the forces and quality of our organisation we are able to receive this warmth-process which is being exercised upon us, into our organism and immediately transform it into an inner process, that our organisation is in a state of health. We are harmed by either heat or cold directly we are not in a position to receive it into our organisation and transform it.

In respect of warmth or cold everyone can see this quite easily for himself. Moreover the same holds good for all other Nature processes. Only careful study, sharpened by spiritual perception, can lead to the recognition that every process taking place in Nature is transformed, metamorphosed, when it occurs within the human organism. We are indeed incessantly overcoming what lives in our earthly environment.

If we now consider the whole internal organisation of man we must say that if the inner force of the human being which inwardly transforms the external events and processes that are always working in upon him—for example, when he is taking nourishment—if this force were removed, then all that enters man from outside would work as a foreign process, and in a sense—if I were to express it crudely or trivially—man would be filled with foreign bodies or foreign processes. On the other hand, if the higher members of man's being, the astral body and the Ego-organisation develop excessive strength, then he does not only so transform the outer processes of his environment that enter into him as they should be transformed, but he does so more rampantly. Then there is a speeding-up of the processes which penetrate him. External Nature is driven out beyond the human—becomes in a certain sense, over-spiritualised; and we are faced with a disturbance of the health.

What we have thus indicated as an abstract principle is realty present in every human organ and must be studied individually in the case of them all. Moreover the human being is related in a highly complicated manner, to all the different ways in which he transforms the external processes.

He who strives to get beyond the undisputed testimony of up-to-date anatomy and physiology, who tries to develop his understanding so that he can transform the conception of the human organism yielded by a study of the corpse or pathological conditions, observing them not merely in regard to their “dead” structures but according to their living nature, will find himself faced with endless enigmas of the human organism. For the more exact and the more living our knowledge becomes, the more complicated does it appear. There are, however, certain guiding lines which enable us to find our way through the labyrinth. And if I may be allowed to make a personal observation here, it is that the discovery of such guiding lines was a matter with which I occupied myself for thirty years before I began to speak about it openly—which was about the year 1917. As a comparatively young man, in the early twenties, I asked myself whether there was any possibility of research into this complicated human organisation. Were there certain fundamental principles which would enable one to arrive at a comprehensive understanding? And this led me—(I have just said that the study took me thirty years)—to the fact that one can regard the human organisation from three different aspects: the system of nerves and senses, the rhythmic system, and the metabolic and limb system.

What we can call the organisation of nerves and senses predominates over all the others. It is, moreover, the bearer of all that can be described as the life of concepts. On the other hand, what we describe as the rhythmic organisation is, in a certain respect, self-contained. There is the rhythm of the breath, the rhythm of the circulation, the rhythm manifested in sleeping and waking, and countless other rhythmic processes. It was by making a practical and accurate distinction between the rhythmic organisation and the nerves-and-senses organisation that I first discovered how one could distinguish between the different constituent parts of the human being. I was compelled to ask myself the question—it is now nearly forty years ago, and to-day human hearts are more than ever burdened with baffling physiological problems—I was compelled to ask myself whether on this basis it is really possible to say that the whole inner life of thinking, feeling and willing is bound up with the system of nerves and senses. At the same time I felt that there was a contradiction: how can thinking, feeling and willing be bound up with the nerves and senses? Naturally I cannot go into all this detail to-day, I can only indicate it; but when we come to consider the domain of therapeutics much will be explained. For instance if from the physiological standpoint we carefully and accurately study the effect of music upon the human organisation, if we know the intimate connection that exists between our experience of music and the rhythmic processes within us, if we understand the quality of soul in music itself, and study the measure of our feelings with regard to melody and harmony, we say to ourselves at first that the feeling-life of man is not altogether directly connected with the nervous system; on the contrary, it is experienced in the rhythmic system. It is only when we rise to a higher conception of what we feel at first to be directly connected in musical experience with the rhythmic system that we find that the conception of it is actually carried by the nervous system. Thus we come to the conclusion that the nervous system and the rhythmic system are really inwardly organised as two entirely separate things.

Take modern physiology with all that it has to offer, especially all that it can tell you with regard to the experiences you can have in connection with music. If you study, for instance, such a thing as the human ear as it perceives the different sounds and tones, you will certainly say that audible phenomena (i.e. one particular class of sense-perception), are first of all incorporated into the rhythmic system of man, rise rhythmically to the sense-organisation, rhythmically approach the nervous system and then become a concept created by means of the nervous-system. The rhythmic system is in immediate connection with the nervous system, which is the bearer of thought—but it is the bearer of feeling only in so far as we become aware of our feelings through thoughts and these thoughts are carried by the nervous system. We can proceed in the same way if we apply physiology to the metabolic-limb-system. It may seem strange to connect metabolism and limbs together; but you need only consider how everything that has to do with movement and which belongs to the limb-system, reacts upon the metabolism. The metabolism and the limbs taken together are certainly a uniform whole.

When we investigate these things accurately and not in a confused way, it becomes evident once more that the system of metabolism and limbs is the direct bearer of all manifestations of the human will. Once more, then, it is as follows:—When that which is taking place in the metabolic-limb-system as the bearer of the manifestations of will, works upwards, sends its force up into the rhythmic system, then it passes into the realm of feeling. We unfold our feelings in our will and our will is directly inherent in our metabolic processes—absolutely directly. We experience the will as ‘feeling’ in the rhythmic system, indirectly. And we make thoughts for ourselves about our volitional acts because the metabolic system and rhythmic system drive their forces up into the nervous system.

Thus we have guiding lines for penetrating into the human organisation. For if we first of all perceive what has been given in regard to the nervous system—(to begin with we will leave the rhythmic system lying between the two others)—then we shall find a polar antithesis in every direction: the nervous system and the metabolic system are polarically opposite. As the metabolic-limb-system builds up, so the system of nerves and senses destroys and vice versa. This and many other things demonstrate the polarity. Everything that constitutes the Ego-organisation is intimately bound up with the system of nerves and senses; everything that constitutes the etheric body is intimately bound up with the metabolic and limb system; everything that constitutes the astral body is bound up with the rhythmic system; the physical body permeates the whole, but is continually overcome by the three other members of the human organisation. Only when we observe the human organism in this way can we leam to penetrate into the so-called normal or abnormal processes.

Let us take first the organisation of nerves and senses. But first, so that I may not be misunderstood, I would like to make a short digression. A very sceptical naturalist who had heard in quite a superficial way about these members which I posit as the basis of man's nature, said that I had attempted to distinguish between “head-organisation,” “chest-organisation,” and “abdominal organisation:” thus that I had in a sense located the system of nerves and senses only in the head, the rhythmic organisation in the chest, and the metabolic-limb system in the abdomen. But that is a very unjust statement. For without separating the systems spatially, the nerves and senses may be said to be organised principally in the head, but they are also to be found in the other two systems. The rhythmic system is principally located in the middle organisation; but it again is spread over the whole man; similarly the metabolic organisation. It is not a question of making a spatial separation between the organs, but of understanding their qualitative aspect and what is living in and permeating the single organs.

When we study the system of nerves and senses from this standpoint, we find that it spreads throughout the whole organism. The eye or the ear, for example, are organised in such a way that they pre-eminently contain the nerves and senses, in a lesser degree the rhythmic, and in a still less degree the metabolic system. An organ like the kidney, for instance, does not contain so much of the nerves and senses system as of the rhythmic or metabolic organisation, yet it contains something of all three. We do not understand the human being if we say: here are sense-organs, or there are digestive organs. In reality it is quite different. A sense-organ is only principally sense-organ; every sense-organ is also in a certain way a digestive and a rhythmic organ. The kidneys or the liver are to be understood as being principally assimilatory or excretory organs. In a lesser degree they are organs of nerves and senses. If, then, we study the whole organisation of man with its single organs from the point of view of the system of nerves and senses (in its reality, and not according to the fantastic concepts often formed by physiology), we find that man ‘perceives’ by means of his separate senses—sight, hearing and so on; but we also find that he is entirely permeated by the sense-organisation. The kidney, for instance, is a sense-organ which has a delicate perception of what is taking place in the digestive and excretory processes. The liver too, is—under certain conditions—a sense-organ. The heart is in a high degree an inner sense-organ and can only be understood if it is conceived of as such.

Do not imagine that I have any intention of criticising the science of to-day; I know its worth and my desire is that our view of these things shall be firmly grounded upon it. But we must nevertheless be clear that our science is, at present, not able to penetrate fully and precisely into the being of man. If it could, it would not relate the animal organisation so closely to the human in the way it does in our time. In respect of the life of sense, the animal stands at a lower level than the human organisation. The human nerves and senses organisation is yoked to the Ego-organisation; in the animal it is yoked to the astral body. The sense-life of man is entirely different from that of the animal. When the animal perceives something with its eyes—and this can be shown by a closer study of the structure of the eye—something takes place in the animal which, so to say, goes through the whole of its body. It does not happen like that in man. In man, sense-perception remains far more at the periphery, is concentrated far more on the surface. You can understand from this that there are delicate organisations present in animals which, in the case of the higher species, are only to be found in etheric form. But in certain of the lower animals you find, for instance, the xiphoid process which is also present in higher animals but in their case it is etheric; or you may find the pecten or choroid process in the eye. The way in which these organs are permeated by the blood, shows that the eye shares in the whole organisation of the animal and is the mediator to it of a life in the circumference of its environment. Man, on the other hand, is connected with his system of nerves and senses quite differently and therefore lives, in a far higher sense than the animal, in his outer world, whereas the animal lives more within itself. But everything which is communicated through the higher spiritual members of the human being, which lives itself out through the Ego-organisation by way of the nerves and senses, requires—just because it is present within the domain of the physical body—to receive its material influences from out of the physical world.

Now if we closely study the system of nerves and senses at a time when it is functioning perfectly healthily, we find that its working depends on a certain substance, and on the processes that take place in that substance. Matter is something which is never at rest; it merely represents what is, actually, a ‘process.’ (A crystal of quartz, for instance, is only a self-contained, definitely shaped thing to us because we never perceive that it is a ‘process,’ though indeed it is one which is taking place extremely slowly.) We must penetrate further and further into the human organism and learn to understand its transformative activity. That which enters into the organism as external physical substance has to be taken up by it and overcome, in the way described in the introductory lecture.

Now it is especially interesting that when the system of nerves and senses is in a normal, i.e. a healthy state (which must of course be understood relatively), it is dependent upon a delicate process which takes place under the influence of the silicic acid which enters the organism. Silicic acid, which in the outer realm of Nature forms itself into beautiful quartz-crystals, has this peculiarity: when it penetrates into the human organism it is taken up by the processes of the nerves and senses; so that if we look at the system of nerves and senses with spiritual sight, we see a wonderfully delicate process going on in which silicic acid is active. But if we look at the other side of the question—as when I said that man has senses everywhere—then we shall notice that it is only in the periphery, that is, where the senses are especially concentrated, that the silicic acid process is intensified; when we turn to the more inner parts of the organism, to the lungs, liver or kidneys, it is far less strong, it is ‘thinner’; while in the bones it is again stronger. In this way we discover that man has a remarkable constitution.

We have, so to say, a periphery and a circumference where the senses are concentrated; then we have that which fills out the limbs and which carries the skeleton; between these we have the muscles, the glands and so on.

In that which I have described as the “circumference” and the “centralised,” we have the strongest silicic acid processes; we can follow them into the organs that lie between these two, and there we find that they have their own specific silicic acid processes but weaker than those in the circumference. Thus in respect of the outer parts, where man extends in an outgoing direction from the nerves into the senses, he needs more and more silicic acid; in the centre of his system he requires comparatively little; but where his skeleton lies, at the basis of the motor system, there again he requires more silicic acid. Directly we perceive this fact we recognize the inexactitude of many assertions of modern physiology. (And again let me emphasise that I do not wish to criticise them, but merely to make certain statements.) For instance, if we study the life of the human being according to modern physiology, we are directed to the breathing-process. In certain respects this is a complex process, but—speaking generally—it consists in taking in oxygen out of the air, and breathing out carbonic acid. That is the rhythmical process which is essentially the basis of organic life. We say that oxygen is breathed in, that it goes through certain processes described by physiology, within the organism; that it combines with carbon in the blood, and is then ejected on the breath as carbonic acid. This is perfectly correct according to a purely external method of observation. This process is, however, connected with another. We do not merely breathe in oxygen and combine it with carbon. Primarily, that is done with that portion of the oxygen which is spread over the lower part of the body; that is what we unite with the carbon and breathe out as carbonic acid.

There is another and a more delicate process behind this rhythmical occurrence. That portion of the oxygen which, in the human organisation, rises towards the head and therefore (in the particular sense which was mentioned previously) to the system of nerves and senses, unites itself with the substance we call silica, and forms silicic acid. And whereas in man the important thing for the metabolic system is the production of carbonic acid, so the important thing for the nerves and senses system is the production of silicic acid. The latter is a finer process which we are not able to verify with the coarse instruments at our disposal, though all the means are there by which it can be verified. Thus we have the coarser process on the one hand, and on the other the finer process where the oxygen combines with the silica to form silicic acid, and as such, is secreted inwardly in the human organisation.

Through this secretion of silicic acid the whole organism becomes a sense-organ—more so in the periphery, less so in the separate organs.

If we look at it this way, we can perceive the more delicate intimate structure of the human organism, and see how every organ contains, of necessity, processes related to substances each in its own distinct degree.

If we are now to grasp what health and illness really are, we must understand how these processes take place in any one organ. Suppose we take the kidney, for sake of example. Through some particular condition or other—some symptomatic complication, let us say—our diagnosis leads us to assume that the cause of an illness lies in the kidneys. If we call Spiritual Science to the aid of our diagnosis, we find that the kidney is acting too little as a sense-organ for the surrounding digestive and excretory processes; it is acting too strongly as an organ of metabolism; hence the balance is upset.

In such a case we have above all to ask: how are we to restore to it in a greater degree the character of sense-organ? We can say that because the kidney proves to be an insufficient sense-organ for the digestive and excretory processes, then we must see that it receives the necessary supply of silicic acid.

Now in the anthroposophical sense, there are three ways of administering substances that are required by a healthy human organism. The first is to give the patient a remedy by mouth. But in that case we must be guided by whether the whole digestive organism is so constituted that it can transmit the substances exactly to that spot where they are to be effective. We must know how a substance works—whether on the heart, or the lungs, and so forth, when we administer it by mouth and it passes into the digestive tract. The second way is by injections. By this means we introduce a substance directly into the rhythmic system. There, it works more as a ‘process;’ there, that which in the metabolism is a substantial organisation, is transformed at once into a rhythmic activity and we directly affect the rhythmic system. Or again, we try the third way: we prepare a substance as an ointment to be applied at the right place, or administer it in a bath; in short we apply our remedy in an external form. There are, of course, a great many different methods of doing this.

We have these three ways of applying remedies. But now let us observe the kidneys which our diagnosis reveals as having a diminished capacity as a sense-organ. We have to administer the right kind of silicic acid process. Therefore we have to be attentive, because, in the breathing process as described just now, where the oxygen combines with silica and then disperses silicic acid throughout the body, and because during that process too little silicic acid has reached the kidneys, we must do something which will attract a stronger silicic acid process to them. So we must know how to come to the assistance of the organism which has failed to do this for itself; and for this we must discover what there is externally which is the result of a process such as is wanting in the kidneys. We must search for it. How can we find ways and means to introduce just this silicic acid process into the kidneys?

And now we find that the function of the kidneys, especially as it is a sense-function, is dependent upon the astral body. The astral body is at the basis of the excretory processes and of this particular form of them. Therefore we must stimulate the astral body and moreover in such a way that it will somehow carry the silicic acid process which is administered from outside, to an organ such as the kidney. We need a remedy that, firstly, will stimulate the silicic-acid process, and, secondly, which will stimulate it precisely in the kidneys. If we seek for it in the surrounding plant world, we come upon the plant equisetum arvensæ, the ordinary field “horse-tail.” The peculiar feature of this plant is that it contains a great deal of silicic acid. If we were to give silicic acid alone it would, however, not reach the kidneys. Equisetum also contains sulphurous acid salts. Sulphurous acid salts alone work on the rhythmic system, on the excretory organs and on the kidneys in particular. When they are intimately combined as they are in Equisetum Arvensæ (we can administer it by mouth, or if that is not suitable, in either of the other ways)—then the sulphurous acid salts enable the silicic acid to find its way to the kidneys.

Here we have touched upon a single instance—a pathological condition of the kidneys. We have approached it quite methodically; we have discerned what can supply what is lacking in the kidneys; and we have erected a bridge that can be followed step by step, from pathology to therapy.

Now let us take another case. Suppose we have to do with some disturbance of the digestive system—such as we usually include under the word ‘dyspepsia.’ If we again proceed according to Spiritual Science, we shall discover that here we have to do principally with a faulty and inadequate working of the Ego-organisation. Why is the Ego-organisation not acting strongly enough? That is the question. And we must search somewhere in the functional regions of the human organism for what it is that is causing this weakness of the Ego-organisation. In certain cases we find that the fault lies in the gallbladder secretions. If that is so, then we must come to the assistance of the Ego-organisation (just as we came to the assistance of the kidneys with the equisetum) by administering something which, if it reaches the required spot by being prepared in a certain way, will there strengthen the inadequate working of the Ego-organisation. Thus, even as we find that the silicic acid process (which lies at the root of the nerves-and-senses system) when introduced in the right way to the kidneys enhances their sense-faculty, so we now find that such a process as the gall-bladder secretions (which corresponds primarily with the Ego-organisation) is really connected in quite a special manner (also in relation to other things) with the action of carbon. Now a remarkable thing to be observed is that if we wish to introduce carbon into the organism in the correct way for treating dyspepsia, we find that carbon—(though it is contained in every plant)—is contained in chichorium intybus (chicory) in a form that directly affects the gall-bladder. When we know how to make the correct preparation from chicorium intybus, we can lead it over into the functions of this organ as a certain form of carbon-process, in the same way as is done with regard to the silicic-acid process and the kidneys.

With these simple examples—which are applicable either to slight or in certain circumstances to very severe cases of illness—I have tried to indicate how, by a spiritual-scientific observation of the human organism on the one hand, and on the other of the different natural creations and their respective interchanges with each other, there can be brought about firstly an understanding of the processes of illness, and secondly an understanding of what is required in order to reverse the direction of those processes. Healing becomes thereby a penetrating Art. This is what can be achieved for the art of medicine, the art of Healing, by the kind of scientific research that is called Anthroposophy. There is nothing of the nature of fantasy about it. It is that which will bring research to the point of extreme exactitude with regard to the observation of the whole human being, both physically, psychically and spiritually. The condition of illness in man depends upon the respective activity of the physical, the psychic and the spiritual. And because man's constitution consists of nerves and senses system, rhythmic system, metabolic and limb system, we are enabled also to penetrate into the different processes and their degrees of activity. We learn to know how a sense-function is present in the kidneys as soon as we direct our attention to the essential nature of sense-functions; otherwise, we only seek to discover sense-functions under their cruder aspect as they appear in the senses themselves. Now however, we become able to comprehend illness as such.

I have already said that in the metabolic and limb system processes take place which are the opposite of those that take place in the system of nerves and senses. But it can happen that processes which primarily are also nerves and senses processes, and are, for instance, proper to the nerves of the head where they are ‘normal’—it can happen that these processes can in a certain sense become dislodged by the metabolic and limb system; that through an abnormality of the astral body and Ego-organisation in the metabolic-limb-system something can happen which would be ‘ correct’ or ‘normal’ only if taking place in the system of nerves and senses. That is to say, what is right for one system can be in another system productive of metamorphosis or disease. So that a process which properly belongs, for instance, to the system of nerves and senses makes its appearance in another system, and is then a process of disease. An example of this is found in typhoid fever. Typhoid represents a process which belongs properly to the nervous system. While it should play its part there in the physical organisation, it plays its part as a matter of fact in the region of the metabolic system within the etheric organisation—within the etheric body—works over into the physical body and appears there as typhoid. Here we see into the nature of the onset of illness. Or it can also happen that the dynamic force, or those forces which are active in a sense-organ—(and must be active there in a certain degree in order that a sense-organ as such may arise)—become active somewhere where they should not. That which works in a sense-organ can be in some way or another transformed in its activity elsewhere. Let us take the activity of the ear. Instead of remaining in the system of nerves and senses, it obtrudes itself (and this under circumstances which can also be described) in another place—for example in the metabolic system where this is connected with the rhythmic system. Then there arises, in the wrong place, an abnormal tendency to produce a sense-organ; and this manifests itself as carcinoma—as a cancerous growth. It is only when we can look in this way into the human organism that we can perceive that carcinoma represents a certain tendency, displaced in respect of the systems, to the formation of a sense organ.

When we speak of the fertilisation of medicine through Anthroposophy, it is a question of learning how abnormal conditions in the human organism arise from the fact that what is normal to one system transplants itself into another. And only by perceiving the matter thus is one in a position really to understand the human organism in its healthy and diseased states, and so to make the bridge from pathology to therapy, from observation of the patient to healing the patient.

When these things are represented as a connected whole, it will be seen how nothing that is said from this standpoint can in any way contradict modern medicine. As a first step in this direction I hope that very soon now the book [Fundamentals of Therapy, by Dr. Rudolf Steiner and Dr. Ita Wegman. (Anthroposophical Publishing Co.) Price 7/6.] will be published that has been written by me in collaboration with Dr. Wegman, the Director of the Clinical and Therapeutic Institute at Arlesheim. This book will present what can be given from the spiritual-scientific standpoint, not as a contradiction of modern medicine but as an extension of it. People will then be able to convince themselves that it has nothing to do with the kind of superficiality which is so prevalent to-day. This book will show, in a way that will be justified by modern science, the fruitfulness that can enter into the art of healing by means of spiritual scientific investigation. Precisely when these things can be followed up more and more in detail and with scientific conscientiousness, will those efforts be acknowledged which are being made by such an Institution as the International laboratories of Arlesheim, where a whole range of new remedies is being prepared in accordance with the principles here set forth.

In the third lecture it will be my endeavour to consolidate still further (in so far as that can be done here in a popular manner), what has already been indicated as a rational therapy, by citing certain special cases of illness and the way in which they can be cured. Anyone who can really perceive what is meant will certainly not have any fear that the things stated cannot be subjected to serious test. We know that it will be the same in this as in all other domains of Anthroposophy; to begin with, there will be rebuffs, abuse and criticism by those who do not know it in detail. But those who do learn to know it in detail will stop their abuse. Therefore, in my third lecture I will go more into the particulars which will show that we are not evading modern science but are in full agreement with it, and that we proceed from the desire to enlarge the boundaries of science by spiritual knowledge in the sphere of anthroposophical medicine.

Only when this is understood will the art of healing stand upon its true foundations. For the art of healing concerns man. Man is a being of body, soul and Spirit. A real medicine can therefore only exist when it penetrates into a knowledge which embraces man in respect of all three—in respect of body, soul and Spirit.

I pointed out yesterday how the child's development undergoes a radical change with the loss of his first teeth. For in truth, what we call heredity or inherited characteristics are only directly active during the first epoch of life. It is however the case that during the first seven years a second life organism is gradually built up in the physical body, which is fashioned after the model of the inherited organism. This second organism is, we may say, completed at the changing of the teeth. If the individual who comes down out of the spiritual pre-earthly world is weak, then this second life organism is similar to the inherited one. If the individual is strong, then we see how in the period between the change of teeth and puberty, from seven years till about fourteen, a kind of victory is gradually accomplished over the inherited characteristics. Children become quite different and they even change in their outward bodily form.

It is specially interesting to follow the qualities of soul which now reveal themselves in this second life epoch. In the first epoch, before the change of teeth, we may describe the child as being wholly “sense-organ.” You must take this quite literally: wholly sense-organ.

Take for example the human eye or ear. What is the characteristic of such a sense-organ? The characteristic thing is that the sense-organ is acutely sensitive to the impressions of the outer world. And if you observe the eye you can certainly see what kind of process takes place. The child during the first seven years is really completely and wholly an eye. Now consider only this thought: in the eye a picture is formed, an inverted picture, of every external object. This is what ordinary Physics teaches everyone. That which is outside in the world is to be found within the eye as a picture. Physics stops here, but this picture-forming process is really only the beginning of what one should know concerning the eye; it is the most external physical fact.

But if the physicist would look upon this picture with a finer sense of observation, then he would see that it determines the course of the circulation of the blood in the choroid. The whole choroid is conditioned in its blood circulation by the nature of this picture within the eye. The whole eye adjusts itself according to these things. These are the finer processes that are not taken into consideration by our ordinary Physics. But the child during the first seven years is really an eye. If something takes place in the child's environment, let us say, to take an extreme example, a fit of temper when someone becomes furiously angry, then the whole child will have a picture within him of this outburst of rage. The etheric body makes a picture of it. From it something passes over into the entire circulation of the blood and the metabolic system, something which is related to this outburst of anger.

This is so in the first seven years, and according to this the organism adjusts itself. Naturally these are not crude happenings, they are delicate processes. But if a child grows up in the proximity of an angry father or a hot-tempered teacher, then the vascular system, the blood vessels, will follow the line of the anger. The results of this implanted tendency in the early years will then remain through the whole of the rest of life.

These are the things that matter most for the young child. What you say to him, what you teach him, does not yet make any impression, except in so far as he imitates what you say in his own speech. But it is what you are that matters; if you are good this goodness will appear in your gestures, and if you are evil or bad-tempered this also will appear in your gestures—in short, everything that you do yourself passes over into the child and pursues its way within him. This is the essential point. The child is wholly sense-organ, and reacts to all the impressions aroused in him by the people around him. Therefore the essential thing is not to imagine that the child can learn what is good or bad, that he can learn this or that, but to know that everything that is done in his presence is transformed in his childish organism into spirit, soul and body. Health for the whole of life depends on how one conducts oneself in the presence of the child. The inclinations which he develops depend on how one behaves in his presence.

But all the things that we are usually advised to do with Kindergarten children are quite worthless. The things which are introduced as Kindergarten education are usually extraordinarily “clever.” One is, I might say, quite fascinated by the cleverness of what has been thought out for Kindergartens in the course of the nineteenth century. The children certainly learn a great deal there, they almost learn to read. They are supplied with letters of the alphabet which they have to fit into cut out letters and such like. It all looks very clever and one can easily be tempted io believe that it really is something suitable for children, but it is of no use at all. It really has no value whatsoever, and the whole soul of the child is spoilt by it. Even down into the body, right down into physical health, the child is ruined. Through such Kindergarten methods weaklings in body and soul are bred for later life.¹

On the other hand, if we were simply to have the children there in the Kindergarten and so conduct ourselves that they could imitate us, if we were to do all kinds of things that the children could copy out of their own inner impulse of soul, as they have been accustomed to do in the pre-earthly existence, then indeed the children would become like ourselves, but it is for us to see that we are worthy of this imitation. This is what you must pay attention to during the first seven years of life and not what you express outwardly in words as a moral idea.

If you make a surly face so that the child gets the impression you are a grumpy person, this harms him for the rest of his life. This is why it is so important, especially for little children, that as a teacher one should enter very thoroughly into the observation of a human being and human life. What kind of school plan you make is neither here nor there; what matters is what sort of a person you are. In our day it is easy enough to think out a curriculum, because everyone in our age is now so clever. I am not saying this ironically; in our day people really are clever. Whenever a few people get together and decide that this or that must be done in education, something clever always comes out of it. I have never known a stupid educational programme; they are always very clever. But it is not a question of having programmes of this kind. What matters is that we should have people in the school who can work in the way I have indicated. We must develop this way of thinking, for an immense amount depends upon it, especially for that age or life epoch of the child in which he is really entirely sense-organ.

Now when the change of teeth is complete the child is no longer a sense-organ in the same degree as previously. This already diminishes between the third and fourth year, but before then the child has quite special peculiarities of which one generally knows nothing whatever. When you eat something sweet or sour you perceive it on the tongue and palate, but when the child drinks milk he feels the taste of milk through his whole body for he is also an organ of sense with regard to taste. He tastes with his whole body; there are many remarkable instances of this.

Children take their cue from the grown-ups and therefore at fifteen, sixteen or twenty they are, nowadays, already blasé and have lost their freshness, but there are still children to be found who in their early years are wholly sense-organ, though life is not easy for such. I knew for example a small boy who on being given something to eat that he knew he would enjoy, approached the delectable object not only with those organs with which one generally approaches food, but he steered towards it with his hands and feet; he was in fact wholly an organ of taste. The remarkable thing is that in his ninth or tenth year he became a splendid Eurythmist and developed a great understanding for Eurythmy. So what he began by “paddling” up to his food as a little child was developed further in his will organs at a later age.

I do not say these things jokingly but in order to give you examples of how to observe. You very rarely hear people relating such things as these, but they are happening every moment. People fail to perceive these characteristic phenomena of life and only think out how to educate the young instead of observing life itself.

Life is interesting in every detail, from morning till evening; the smallest things are interesting. Notice, for instance, how two people take a pear from a fruit bowl. No two people take the pear in the same way; it is always different. The whole character of a person is expressed in the way he takes the pear from the fruit dish and puts it on his plate, or straight into his mouth as the case may be.

If people would only cultivate more power of observation of this kind, the terrible things would not develop in schools which one unfortunately so often sees today. One scarcely sees a child now who holds his pen or pencil correctly. Most children hold them wrongly, and this is because we do not know how to observe properly. This is a very difficult thing to do, and it is not easy in the Waldorf School either. One frequently enters a class where drastic changes are needed in the way the children hold their pencils or pens. You must never forget that the human being is a whole, and as such he must acquire dexterity in all directions. Therefore what the teacher needs is observation of life down to the minutest details.

And if you are specially desirous of having formulated axioms, then take this as the first principle of a real art of education. You must be able to observe life in all its manifestations.

One can never learn enough in this direction. Look at the children from behind, for instance. Some walk by planting the whole foot on the ground, others trip along on their toes, and there can be every kind of differentiation between these two extremes. Yes indeed, to educate a child one must know quite precisely how he walks. For the child who treads on his heels shows in this one small characteristic of his physical body that he was very firmly planted in life in his former incarnation, that he was interested in everything in his former earth life. In such a case you must draw as much as possible out of the child himself, for there are many things hidden away in such children who walk strongly on their heels. On the other hand the children who trip along, who scarcely use their heels in walking, have gone through their former earth life in a superficial way. You will not be able to get much out of these children, but when you are with them you must make a point of doing a great many things yourself that they can copy.

In this kind of way you should experience the changing of the teeth through careful observation. The fact that the child was previously wholly sense-organ now enables him to develop above all the gift of fantasy and symbolism. And one muss reckon with this even in play. Our materialistic age sins terribly against it. Take for example the so-called beautiful dolls that are so often given to children nowadays. They have such beautifully formed faces, wonderfully painted cheeks, and even eyes with which they can go to sleep when laid down, real hair and goodness knows what all! But with this the fantasy of the child is killed, for it leaves nothing to his imagination and the child can take no great pleasure in it. But if you make a doll out of a serviette or a handkerchief with two ink spots for eyes, a dab of ink for a mouth, and some sort of arms, then the child can add a great deal to it with his imagination.

It is particularly good for a child when he can add as much as possible to his playthings with his own fantasy, when he can develop a symbolising activity. Children should have as few things as possible that are well finished and complete and what people call “beautiful.” For the beauty of such a doll that I have described above with real hair and so on, is only a conventional beauty. In truth it is horribly ugly because it is so inartistic.

Never forget that in the period round about the change of teeth the child passes over into the age of imagination and fantasy. It is not the intellect but fantasy which fills his life at this age. You as teachers must also be able to develop this life of fantasy, for those who bear a true knowledge of the human being in their souls are able to do this. It is indeed so that a true knowledge of man loosens and releases the inner life of soul and brings a smile to the face. Sour and grumpy faces come only from lack of knowledge. Certainly one can have a diseased organ which leaves traces of illness on the face; this does not matter, for the child takes no account of these things, but if the inner nature of a person is filled with a living knowledge of what man is, this will be expressed in his face, and this it is that can make him a really good teacher.

And so between the change of teeth and puberty you must educate out of the very essence of imagination. For the quality that makes a child under seven so wholly into a sense-organ now becomes more inward; it enters the soul life. The sense-organs do not think; they perceive pictures, or rather they form pictures from the external objects. And even when the child's sense experiences have already a quality of soul, it is not a thought that emerges but an image, albeit a soul image, an imaginative picture. Therefore in your teaching you must work in pictures, in images.

Now we can work least of all in pictures if we are teaching the child something that is really quite foreign to him. For example, the calligraphy of today is quite foreign to the child whether in the written or printed letters. He has no relation whatever to this thing which is called an “A.” Why should he have a relation to an “A”? Why should he be interested in an “L”? These are quite foreign to him, this “A,” this “L.” Nevertheless when the child comes to school we take him into the classroom and start to teach him these things. The result is that he feels no contact with what he has to do. And if we teach him this before the change of teeth and set him to stick letters into cut-out holes, for example, then we are giving him things that lie right outside his nature and to which he has not the slightest relationship.

But what he does possess is an artistic sense, a faculty for creating imaginative pictures. It is to this that we must appeal, to this we must turn. We should avoid a direct approach to the conventional letters of the alphabet which are used in the writing and printing of civilised man. Rather should we lead the children, in a vivid and imaginative way, through the various stages which man himself has passed through in the history of civilisation.

In former times there was picture writing; that is to say, people painted something on the page which reminded them of the object. We do not need to study the history of civilisation, but we can show the child the meaning and spirit of what man wanted to express in picture writing. Then he will feel at home in his lessons.

For example: Let us take the word “Mund”—English “mouth.” Get the child to draw a mouth, or rather paint it. Let him put on dabs of red colour and then tell him to pronounce the word; you can say to him: don't pronounce the whole word but begin only with M; and now we can form the M out of the upper lip (see drawing). If you follow this

process you can get your M out of the mouth which we first painted.

This is how writing really originated, only today it is difficult to recognise from the words themselves that the letters were once pictures, because the words have all been subject to change in the course of the evolution of speech. Originally each sound had its own image and each picture could have but one meaning.

You do not need to go back to these original characters, but you can invent ways and means of your own. The teacher must be inventive, he must create out of the spirit of the thing. Let us take the word “fish.” Let the child draw or paint some kind of fish. Let him say the beginning of the word: “F,” and you can gradually get the F out of the picture (see drawing).

And thus, if you are inventive, you can find in point of fact, pictures for all the consonants. They can be worked out from a kind of painting-drawing, or drawing-painting. This is more awkward to deal with than the methods of today. For it is of course essential that after the children have been doing

this painting for an hour or two you have to clear it all away. But this just has to be so, there is nothing else to be done.

From this you can see how the letters can be developed out of pictures and the pictures again directly out of life. This is the way you must do it. On no account should you teach reading first, but proceeding from your drawing-painting and painting-drawing, you allow the letters to arise out of these, and then you can pass over to reading.

If you look around you will find plenty of objects which you can use to develop the consonants in this way. All the consonants can be developed from the initial letters of the words describing these objects.

It is not so easy for the vowels. But perhaps for the vowels the following is possible. Suppose you say to the child: “Look at the beautiful sun! You must really admire it; stand like this so that you can look up and admire the glorious sun.” The child stands, looks up and then expresses its wonder thus: Ah! Then you paint this gesture and you actually have the Hebrew A, the sound Ah, the sound of wonder. Now you only need to make it smaller and gradually turn it into the letter A (see drawing).

And so if you bring before the child something of an inner soul quality and above all what is expressed in Eurythmy, letting him take up this position or that, then you can develop the vowels also in the way I have mentioned. Eurythmy will

be of very great help to you because the sounds are already formed in the Eurythmy gestures and movements. Think for instance of an O. One embraces something lovingly. Out of this one can obtain the 0 (see drawing). You can really get the vowels from the gesture, the movement.

Thus you must work out of observation and imagination, and the children will then come to know the sounds and the letters from the things themselves. You must start from the picture. The letter, as we know it today in its finished form, has a history behind it. It is something that has been simplified from a picture, but the kind of magical signs of the printed letters of the present day no longer tell us what the picture was like.

When the Europeans, these “better men,” went to America at the time when the “savages,” the Indians, were still there,—even in the middle of the nineteenth century such things happened—they showed these savages printed writing and the Indians ran away from it because they thought the letters were little devils. And they said: The Pale-faces, as the Indians called the Europeans, communicate with each other by means of little devils, little demons.

But this is just what letters are for children. They mean nothing to them. The child feels something demonic in the letters, and rightly so. They have already become a means of magic because they are merely signs.

You must begin with the picture. That is not a magic sign but something real and you must work from this.

People will object that the children then learn to read and write too late. This is only said because it is not known today how harmful it is when the children learn to read and write too soon. It is a very bad thing to be able to write early. Reading and Writing as we have them today are really not suited to the human being till a later age, in the eleventh or twelfth year, and the more one is blessed with not being able to read and write well before this age, the better it is for the later years of life. A child who cannot write properly at thirteen or fourteen (I can speak out of my own experience because I could not do it at that age) is not so hindered for later spiritual development as one who early, at seven or eight years, can already read and write perfectly. These are things which the teacher must notice.

Naturally one will not be able to proceed as one really should today because the children have to pass from your Independent School into public life. But a very great deal can be done nevertheless when one knows these things. It is a question of knowledge. And your knowledge must show you, above all, that it is quite wrong to teach reading before writing, for in writing, especially if it is developed from the painting-drawing, drawing-painting, that I have spoken of, the whole human being is active. The fingers take part, the position of the body, the whole man is engaged. In reading only the head is occupied and anything which only occupies a part of the organism and leaves the remaining parts impassive should be taught as late as possible. The most important thing is first to bring the whole being into movement, and later on the single parts.

Naturally if you want to work in this way you cannot expect to be given instructions for all the little details, but only an indication of the path to be followed. Therefore just in this method of education which arises out of Anthroposophy you can build on nothing else but absolute freedom, though this freedom must include the free creative fancy of the teacher and educator.

In the Waldorf School we have been blessed with what I might call a very questionable success. We began with one hundred and thirty to one hundred and forty pupils; but these pupils came from the industrial works of Emil Molt, so they were at that time to a certain extent “compulsory” children though we had some children from anthroposophical families besides.² In the short time of its existence the Waldorf School has grown so big that we have now more than eight hundred children and between forty and fifty teachers. This is a doubtful success because gradually it becomes impossible to keep a clear view of the whole. From the arrangements of the Waldorf School which I shall describe to you, you will soon see how difficult it is to survey the whole; though I shall later indicate certain ways of making this possible. We have had to form parallel classes; in the case of the fifth and sixth there are three parallel classes: A, B and C. These classes are still overfull and have more children than the other classes in the school.

There is therefore a teacher in Class A, another in Class B. Just imagine how this would work out in a “proper” educational establishment of today. You come into Class I A, where you find a particular educational drill going on which is considered the best. Now you go into Class I B. It could equally well be called ‘A,’ only that different children are sitting there, for in both classes exactly the same thing goes on, because the “right method” is used. This is of course all most cleverly thought out: what is intellectual has but one meaning and it cannot be otherwise.

With us in the Waldorf School you find no such thing. You go into the first Class A. There you see a teacher, man or woman, who is teaching writing. The teacher lets the children make all kinds of forms, let us say with string. They then go on to painting the forms and gradually letters arise. A second teacher likes to do it differently. If you go into Class B you find that this teacher is letting the children “dance” the forms round the room, in order that they may experience the forms of the letters in their own bodies. Then she carries over these forms also into the letters themselves. You would never find uniformity of teaching in Classes A, B and C. The same things are taught but in completely different ways, for a free creative fancy holds sway in the class. There are no prescribed rules for teaching in the Waldorf School, but only one unifying spirit that pervades the whole. It is very important that you should realise this. The teacher is autonomous. Within this one unifying spirit he can do entirely what he thinks right. You will say: Yes, but if everyone can do as he likes, then the whole school will fall into a chaotic condition. For in Class V A, there could be goodness knows what kind of hocus-pocus going on, and in V B, you might find them playing chess. But that is exactly what does not happen in the Waldorf School, for though there is freedom everywhere you will find in each class the spirit which is in accordance with the age of the children.

If you read the Seminar Course, you will see that you are allowed the greatest liberty, and yet the teaching in each class is what is right for that age³ The strange thing is that no teacher has ever opposed this. They all quite voluntarily accept this principle of a unifying spirit in the work. No one opposes it or wants to have any special arrangements made for himself. On the contrary, the wish is often expressed by the teachers to have as many discussions as possible in their meetings about what should be done in the various classes.

Why does no teacher object to the curriculum? The school has been going for several years. Why do you think that all the teachers approve of the curriculum? They do not find it at all unreasonable. They find it in its very freedom excellent because it is bound up with real true human knowledge.

And just in such things as creating one's teaching matter out of fantasy it can be seen that freedom must prevail in the school. Indeed it does. Each of our teachers has the feeling that it is not only a question of what he himself thinks out and discovers out of his own fantasy, but when I sit with my Waldorf teachers in their meetings, or when I go into the classes, I get more and more the impression that when once the teachers are in their classrooms they actually forget that a plan of teaching has previously been drawn up. In the moment of teaching every teacher imagines that he himself is creating the plan of work. This is the feeling I have when I go into the classes.

Such is the result when real human knowledge lies at the basis of the work. I have to tell you these details even though you might think they were said out of vanity; indeed they are not said out of vanity but that you may know how it is and then go and do likewise; this will show you how what grows out of a true knowledge of man can really enter into the child.

It is on fantasy then, on imagination, that our teaching and education is to be built. You must be quite clear that before the ninth or tenth year the child does not know how to differentiate himself as an ego from his surroundings. Out of a certain instinct the child has long been accustomed to speak of himself as “P,” but in truth he really feels himself within the whole world. He feels that the whole world is connected with himself. But people have the most fantastic ideas about this. They say of primitive races that their feeling for the world is “animism,” that is, they treat lifeless objects as though they were “ensouled,” and that to understand a child you must imagine that he does the same as these primitive peoples. When he knocks against a hard object he hits it because he endows it with a quality of soul.

But that is not at all true. In reality, the child does not “ensoul” the object, but he does not yet distinguish between the living and the lifeless. He considers everything as a unity, and himself also as making up a unity with his surroundings. Not until the age of nine or ten does the child really learn to distinguish himself from his environment. This is something you must take into consideration in the strictest sense if you wish to give your teaching a proper basis.

Therefore it is important to speak of everything that is around the child, plants, animals and even stones, in such a way that all these things talk to each other, that they act among themselves like human beings, that they tell each other things, that they love and hate each other. You must learn to use anthropomorphism in the most inventive ways and speak of all the plants and animals as though they were human. You must not “ensoul” them out of a kind of theory but simply treat them in the way which a child can grasp when he is not yet able to distinguish between the lifeless and the living. For as yet the child has no reason to think that the stone has no soul, whereas the dog has a soul. The first difference he notices is that the dog moves. But he does not ascribe the movement to the fact that he has a soul. One can indeed treat all things that feel and live as if they were people, thinking, feeling and speaking to one another, as if they were persons with sympathy and antipathy for each other. Therefore everything that one brings to a child at this age must be given in the form of fairy tales, legends and stories in which everything is endowed with feeling. The child receives the very best foundation for his soul life when in this way we nourish his instinctive soul qualities of fancy. This must be borne in mind.

If you fill the child with all kinds of intellectual teaching during this age (and this will be the case if we do not transform into pictures everything that we teach him) then later he will have to suffer the effects in his blood vessels and in his circulation. We must consider the child in body, soul and spirit as an absolute unity. This must be said over and over again.

For this task the teacher must have an artistic feeling in his soul, he must be of an artistic disposition. For what works from teacher to child is not only what one thinks out or what one can convey in ideas, but, if I may express myself so, it is the imponderable quality in life. A very great deal passes over from teacher to child unconsciously. The teacher must be aware of this, above all when he is telling fairy tales, stories or legends full of feeling. It very often happens in our materialistic times that we notice how the teacher looks upon what he is telling as childish. He is telling something which he himself does not believe. And here Anthroposophy finds its rightful place if it is to be the guide and leader of the true knowledge of man. We become aware through Anthroposophy that we can express a thing infinitely more fully and more richly if we clothe it in pictures than if we put it into abstract ideas. A child who is naturally healthy feels the necessity to express everything in pictures and to receive everything also in picture form.

Remember how Goethe learnt to play the piano as a boy. He was shown how he had to use the first finger, the second finger, and so on; but he did not like this method, and this dry pedantic teacher of his was repugnant to him. For Father Goethe was an old Philistine, one of the old pedants of Frankfurt who naturally also engaged Philistine teachers for preference, because they are the good ones, as everyone knows. This kind of teaching was repugnant to the boy Goethe, it was too abstract. So he invented for himself the “ Deuterling” (“the little fellow who points”), not “Index finger,” that is too abstract, but “ Deuterling.”⁴

The child wants an image and he wants to think of him- self as an image too. It is just in these things that we see how the teacher needs to use his fantasy, to be artistic, for then he will meet the child with a truly “living” quality of soul. And this living quality works upon the child in an imponderable way—imponderable in the best sense.

Through Anthroposophy we ourselves learn once more to believe in the legends, fairy tales and myths, for they express a higher truth in imaginative pictures. And then our handling of these fairy tales, legends and mythical stories will once more be filled with a quality of soul. Then when we speak to the child, our very words, permeated as they will be by our own belief in the tales, will flow over to him and carry truth with them; truth will then flow from teacher to child, whereas it is so often untruth that passes between them. Untruth at once holds sway if the teacher says: the child is stupid, I am clever, the child believes in fairy tales so I have to tell them to him. It's the proper thing for him to hear them. When a teacher speaks like this then an intellectual element immediately enters into the relating of the stories.

But the child, especially in the age between the change of teeth and puberty, has a most sensitive feeling for whether the teacher is governed by his fantasy or his intellect. The intellect has a destructive and crippling effect on the child, but fantasy gives it life and impulse.

It is vital that we should make these fundamental thoughts our own. We will speak of them in greater detail during the next few days, but there is one more thing I should like to put before you in conclusion.

Something of very special importance happens to the child between his ninth and tenth year. Speaking in an abstract way we can say that he then learns to differentiate himself from his environment; he feels himself as an “I,” and the environment as something external which does not belong to this “I” of his. But this is an abstract way of expressing it. The reality is this, speaking of course in a general sense: the child of this age approaches his much-loved teacher, be he man or woman, with some problem or difficulty. In most cases he will not actually speak of what is burdening his soul, but will say something different. All the same one has to know that this really comes from the innermost depths of his soul, and the teacher must then find the right approach, the right answer. An enormous amount depends on this for the whole future life of the child concerned. For you cannot work with children of this age, as their teacher, unless you are yourself the unquestioned authority, unless, that is, the child has the feeling: this is true because you hold it to be true, this is beautiful because you find it beautiful, and therefore point it out to him, and this is good because you think it good. You must be for the child the representative of the good, the true and the beautiful. He must be drawn to truth, goodness and beauty simply because he is drawn to you yourself.

And then between the ninth and tenth year this feeling arises instinctively in his subconsciousness: I get everything from my teacher, but where does he get it from? What is behind him? The teacher need not enlarge on this because if you go into definitions and explanations it can only do harm. The important thing is to find a loving word, a word filled with warmth of heart—or rather many words, for these difficulties can go on for weeks and months—so that we can avert this danger and preserve the feeling for authority in the child. For he has now come to a crisis as regards the principle of authority. If you are equal to the situation, and can preserve your authority by the warmth of feeling with which you deal with these particular difficulties, and by meeting the child with inner warmth, sincerity and truth, then much will be gained. The child will retain his belief in the teacher's authority, and that is a good thing for his further education, but it is also essential that just at this age of life between nine and ten the child's belief in a good person should not waver. Were this to happen then the inner security which should be his guide through life will totter and sway.

This is of very great significance and must constantly be borne in mind. In the handbooks on education we find all kinds of intricate details laid down for the guidance of teachers, but it is of far greater importance to know what happens at a certain point in the child's life and how we must act with regard to it, so that through our action we may radiate light on to his whole life.

• 1. In Germany the children remain in the “Kindergarten” until their seventh year so that the above remarks apply to all school life up to this time, (including, for instance, the “Infants” Departments of State Schools in England).
• 2. In 1919 the first Rudolf Steiner School was founded by Emil Molt, Director of the Waldorf Astoria Cigarette Factory, Stuttgart. The first pupils were all children of the factory workers.
• 3. Just before the opening of the Waldorf School, in 1919, Dr. Steiner gave three simultaneous courses of lectures to the teachers two of which have been published in English under the titles ofStudy of Man and Practical Advice to Teachers.
• 4. Compare the old country names for the fingers referred to by Walter de la Mare inCome Hither p. 515, e.g. Tom Thumbkin, Bess Bumpkin, Long Linkin, Bill Wilkin and Little Dick.

The explanations which I gave you yesterday on the path which the human intellect will take in future, are based upon quite definite facts, which come to light through spiritual-scientific knowledge. Let me indicate some of these facts today. You should realize that practically when the human being stands before you, he is that being described in Anthroposophy. That is to say, we first have before us (you know this from my THEOSOPHY) a fourfold being. We have before us the Ego, the so-called astral body, the etheric body and the physical body. The fact that whenever we face a human being we always have before us these four members, implies that the ordinary way of looking at the world today does not really enable us to know the true essence of the person who stands before us. We really do not know it. We think that the person we see before us fills out space with his physical body and that we see his physical body. Yet we could not see this physical part as we generally see it with our ordinary power of vision, if it only stood before us as a physical body. We see the physical body with our ordinary eyes, as it generally appears to us, only because it is permeated by the etheric body, by the astral body and by the Ego. It may sound strange to you if I tell you that our physical body is a corpse, even during the existence between birth and death. When we see a human corpse, we really have before us man's physical body. The corpse is the physical body which is not permeated by the etheric body, by the astral body and by the Ego. It is abandoned by these bodies and then reveals, as it were, its true being. You do not have a true conception of yourself if you think that you are carrying through space what you imagine to be your physical body. You would have a far better conception of yourself, if you were to think of yourself as a corpse, carried through space by your Ego, your astral body and your etheric body.

If we go back as far as the 8th Century, B.C., which is as you know, the beginning of the 4th post-Atlantean Epoch, we come, as you also know, to the Egyptian-Chaldean epoch of the earth's development. There, human bodies had a different constitution from that of today. The human bodies of olden times, the mummies which you can now see in museums, were not constituted, in their finer essence, as human bodies are now constituted. They were filled to a far greater extent with vegetative life, they were not so lifeless, not so corpse-like as the human bodies of today. These physical bodies were, so to speak, far more similar to the plant nature, whereas the physical body of modern man—and this is already the case from the Graeco-Latin epoch onward—has a greater resemblance with the mineral world. If through some cosmic miracle we would now be endowed with the bodies of the Egyptian-Chaldean peoples, we would all be ill. They would bring us illness. We would bear within our body tissues which tend towards an over-exuberant growth. Many an illness simply consists in the fact that the human body in part goes back to conditions which were normal in the Egyptian-Chaldean epoch. In the present time we find ulcerous growths in the human body, which are simply due to the fact that in the one or in the other person a piece of the body tends to become something resembling the whole body among the Egyptian-Chaldean population.

What I told you now, essentially depends on the development of humanity. We modern people therefore carry about with us a corpse. This was not the case with the Egyptian: his knowledge was different from ours, his intelligence worked differently from our intelligence.

Now consider carefully the following question: What does the human being recognize with the aid of that knowledge which he designates as modern science and in which he takes so great a pride? Only lifeless things! Science constantly emphasizes that the ordinary intelligence cannot grasp life. To be sure, some investigators believe that if they continue experimenting, they will one day be able to understand the alternating play of life through complicated combinations of atoms, molecules and their alternating forces. This will never arise. Along the chemical-physical path, they will only be able to understand the mineral, lifeless substance; that is to say, they will only be able to grasp that part of living matter which is now a corpse.

But that part in man which is intelligent and exercises cognizant forces, is nevertheless the physical body; that is, the corpse. What is really done by the corpse which we carry about with us? It goes furthest of all along the path of mathematical-geometrical knowledge. There, everything is transparent; but the further away we go from the mathematical-geometrical sphere, the less transparent things become. This is because the human corpse is, today, the true instrument of cognition, and because a lifeless instrument can only be used to recognize lifeless things. The etheric body, the astral body and the Ego in man are not instruments of cognition, but they remain, as it were, standing in the dark. If the etheric body were able to cognize, in the same way in which the physical body recognizes lifeless things, it would first of all recognize the living essence of the vegetable world.

With their living, plant-like body, the Egyptians perceived the plant world quite differently from the way in which we perceive it now. Many an instinctive knowledge concerning the plant world can be traced back to Egyptian insight, to what became embodied with the Egyptian culture through an instinctive form of cognition. Even certain botanical facts in the medical sphere are, in many respects, based on the traditions of ancient Egyptian wisdom. Indeed, to the lay judgment it may often appear amateurish to draw in Egyptian sources, when certain truths are transmitted which do not seem to be of great value. You know that many so-called lodges, which have not a right foundation, call themselves “Egyptian Lodges.” This is only because in these circles there still exist traditions of the wisdom which could be obtained through an Egyptian body.

We can say that with the gradual transition from the Egyptian into the Graeco-Latin epoch, man's living plant-like body died; already in ancient Greece this living, plant-like body had more or less died, or was at least dying off slowly. Now we already have a physical body which is dead to a high degree, and this lifeless condition particularly applies to the human head. I already explained to you that an initiated spiritual scientist can perceive the human head as something lifeless, as something which is constantly dying. Humanity will grow more and more conscious of the fact that it is the corpse which we use as an instrument of cognition, and that this corpse can only grasp lifeless things.

The more we advance into the future, the more intensive will be the longing to recognize only that which is living. But the ordinary intelligence, which is bound up with the lifeless body, cannot perceive what is alive. Many things will be needed in order that man, who has lost the possibility to penetrate into the world in a living way, may once more attain to this. We should bear I mind all that we have lost.

When the human being passed over from the Atlantean to the post-Atlantean age, he was as yet unable to do many of the things which he does now. You see, each one of you, from a certain time of your childhood upward, can say “I” when referring to yourself. You pronounce this word “I” very carelessly. But in the course of human development this word was not always uttered so carelessly. There were older times in the evolution of humanity—though even in ancient Egypt these olden times had to a great extent already waned—there were older times in which the Ego was designated by a name, and if this name was uttered, it dazed people. One therefore avoided pronouncing it. If the name applicable to the Ego, which was only known to the initiates, had been pronounced in the presence of people in the times immediately following the Atlantean catastrophe, the sound of this name would have dazed the whole congregation; all the people would have fallen to the ground, so strong would have been the effect of the name applicable to the Ego.

An echo of this may still be found among the ancient Hebrews, where one spoke of the unutterable name of God in the soul, a name which could only be pronounced by the initiates, or shown to the congregation in eurhythmic gestures. The origin of God's unutterable name may therefore be seen in the facts explained to you just now.

But little by little this name was lost. And with it was lost the deep effect which radiates from such things.

During the first post-Atlantean epoch we have a deep influence proceeding from the Ego; during the second post-Atlantean epoch, a deep influence proceeding form the astral body; during the third post-Atlantean epoch, a deep influence going out from the etheric body, but one which people could bear, for, as I explained to you yesterday, it brought them in connection with the universe, made them feel their relationship with the universe. In the present time, we may pronounce the word “I,” we may pronounce all manner of things, but they do not make any effect upon us, because we now grasp the world through our lifeless body. That is to say, we only take hold of the lifeless, mineral essence of the world. But we must again ascend and return to the regions enabling us to grasp life. Whereas from the Graeco-Latin epoch, beginning in the 8th Century, B.C., up to the middle of the 15th Century A.D., the greatest value was attributed to an ever larger acquisition of knowledge through the lifeless body, our intelligence now follows the path described to you yesterday. But we must resist mere intelligence. We must add something to our intelligence.

A characteristic which we should bear in mind is that we must now retrace the path in a right way; in the present time, in the 5th post-Atlantean epoch, we must in a certain way learn to know the vegetable world; during the 6th epoch we must learn to know the animal kingdom, and only during the 7th epoch the real kingdom of man. Thus it is one of the tasks of humanity to transcend the mere knowledge of the mineral world and ascend to the knowledge of the vegetable world.

Now that you are able to understand this upon a deeper foundation, consider who is the person whose chief characteristic is this search for a knowledge of the plant world. This man is Goethe. By approaching life from the basis of lifeless things and by reaching, in opposition to the science of his days, the law of metamorphosis, the living process of plants, Goethe appears to us as the representative of the 5th post-Atlantean age, in its first beginnings. Read Goethe's small pamphlet, written in 1790, entitled: “An ATTEMPT to explain the metamorphosis of plants,” and you will find in it that Goethe incessantly tried to grasp the plant in its process of growth, not as something dead and finished, but as something in a constant process of growth, passing from leaf to leaf. Here you may find the beginning of the knowledge which should be sought in the 5th post-Atlantean age.

Goetheanism therefore strikes the fundamental note for what we should seek during the 5th post-Atlantean epoch. Science should, as it were, wake up to the meaning of Goethe and proceed from the study of lifeless things to that of living things. This is what I mean when I continually emphasize that we should acquire the capacity to abandon dead, abstract concepts and to penetrate into living, concrete concepts. The explanations which I gave you yesterday and the day before yesterday really constitute the path leading into these living, concrete regions of thought.

But it will not be possible to penetrate into such thoughts and concepts unless we take the trouble to unite the elements which form our world conception and our views on life. Through the special configuration of modern civilization, the different currents of our world conception are allowed, as it were, to run inorganically side by side. Consider how inorganic and disunited are in many cases a person's religious and natural-scientific views! Many people have both religious and scientific concepts, yet they do not throw a bridge from the one to the other. Indeed, they have a certain reluctance, a certain fear in doing this. Yet we should clearly realize that things cannot remain as they are.

During my present visit, I pointed out to you how selfishly modern people develop their world conception. I drew attention to the fact that today people are chiefly interested in the soul's life after death. Out of pure egoism they take an interest in the life of the soul after death. I have also told you that it is now necessary to take an interest in the life of the soul from birth onwards insofar as this life is a continuation of the life before birth or conception. Our world conception would become far less selfish than it is today, if we were to observe a child's development, the way in which it grows as a continuation of its pre-natal, soul-spiritual existence, with the same longing and the same interest with which we think of the life after death.

This egoistic character of our modern world conception depends on many other things besides. Now I come to a point which clearly shows that modern people must become more and more conscious of the real facts lying at the foundation of these things. During the epoch leading up to the present time, the egoistic element chiefly developed in man; the Ego has permeated our world conception and the Ego has also permeated the human will. Let us not fall a prey to any illusion in regard to this.

Most egoistic of all have become religions, religious creeds. Even superficial facts can show you that religious beliefs have become egoistic. Consider how much a modern priest must reckon with people's egoism. The more he takes into account human egoism, the more promises he makes for the soul's life after death, the more easily he reaches his aims. Among modern people we do not really find much interest for any other thing, for they do not care much for that weaving spiritual life of the soul which manifests itself so wonderfully after birth; i.e., after conception.

One result of this egoistic interest in the life after death is the way in which modern people think about God in the different religions. To think of God as the highest Being, does not imply anything special. In this connection it is necessary to eliminate every delusion. What do most people imply when they speak of “God”? I have already mentioned this before. What kind of Being do they mean, when they speak of God? It is an Angel, an Angelos—their own Angel whom they call God! It is nothing else, my dear friends! People still have some inkling of the fact that a guiding spirit accompanies them in life; to this guiding spirit they look up, and it is this Angel-being whom they call God. Though they do not speak of it as an Angel, though they name it “God,” they nevertheless only mean their Angel. The selfish note of religious faiths is that their idea of God does not go beyond the Angel. As a consequence, human interests have grown narrower, a trait which may be clearly seen today in public life.

What are the questions which people ask today? Do they inquire after the general destinies of humanity? Oh, in a certain sense it is very painful today to speak to people of general human destinies! People also have no idea how many changes have taken place in this connection, even in a comparatively short space of time. You see, today we may tell people that the war which has been waged on earth during the past four or five years will be followed by the mightiest spiritual battle ever waged, a battle which will spread over the whole world, which never existed before in this form, a battle which is a consequence of the fact that the Occident designates as a Maya or as an ideology what the Orient designates as reality, and that the Orient designates the ideology of the Occident as a reality. Today we may draw attention to this important, weighty fact, yet people do not even realize that if this same thing had been said only a hundred years ago, it would have stirred the souls so much that they would have had no peace!

The most striking fact of all is this change in humanity, this indifference in regard to the great destinies of human existence. Today nothing penetrates into the human souls, but rebounds, as it were. The most encompassing, the most important and intensive facts are now taken as sensational facts. They do not shake the human souls enough. This is only dependent on the fact that the constantly increasing, intelligent egoism restricts human interests.

People may now have democracies or parliaments—they may come together in parliaments, but the destinies of humanity do not breathe through these parliaments, for the men who are elected into parliament are not filled with the breath of mankind's destinies. They are filled with the breath of egoistic interests. Each person has his own egoistic interest. External schematic similarities in these interests, often due to a common profession, induce people to form groups. And if these groups are sufficiently large, they become majorities. In that case it is not human destinies which pass through parliament, or through these representative groups of people, but only human egoism, multiplied by so and so many persons.

Even religious faiths have been transferred to the sphere of egoism, because the human souls are only filled by interests which appeal to their egoism. Religious faiths will pass through the renewal which they need, when human interests have grown wider, when they have acquired a form which transcends the purely personal destiny and ascends to the destiny of mankind as such, when people will once more be stirred, deeply stirred on hearing that in the West there is a civilization which differs from that of the East, and that in the Centre there is a civilization differing from that of the two poles of East and West; a religious renewal will come when human souls will be stirred to hear that in the West the great goals of humanity are sought (if they are sought at all!) by turning to mediumistic people, who in a trance condition are, as it were, consciously brought into a sub-earthly connection with the spiritual worlds so that they reveal, mediumistically, something about the great historical aims.

In Europe, one could so frequently explain, though people will not believe it, that there really exist societies in Anglo-American countries where people with mediumistic faculties are brought into a kind of trance, in order to discover from them, by cleverly formulated questions, something about the great destiny-goals of humanity.

People also do not believe that the Orientals, too, obtain information concerning the great destiny aims of humanity, not mediumistically, but mystically. This is almost palpably evident today, for one can everywhere buy Rabindranath Tagore's beautiful speeches, revealing on a large scale how an Oriental thinks about the goals of humanity. People read his poems, as if they were the feuilletons of some cheap writer, for today they do not distinguish cheap writers from men endowed with great spirituality such as Rabindranath Tagore. They do not realize that today the most varied racial substances live, as it were, side by side. I already explained to you, in many lectures, the standpoints which should be applied to Central Europe, but these explanations were not taken as they should have been taken.

With these words, my dear friends, I only wish to prove that it is possible to grow conscious of something which transcends egoistic human destinies, something which is connected with the destiny of whole groups of man, so that differentiations can be made throughout the world. If we raise our soul's eye with understanding to these destinies of mankind in the whole world, if we take a deep interest in this element transcending the personal destinies, we attune our soul for the comprehension of something higher and more real than the Angel; namely, the Archangel. Thoughts revealing the true nature of the Archangel cannot come to us if we only move in spheres pertaining to purely egoistic, personal human interests. If preachers only move in the regions of human egoism, their sermons may be full of words dealing with the Divine, yet they will only preach of the Angel. The fact that they give it another name constitutes an untruth, and does not change it. Only if we begin to take an interest in human destiny extending over wide spaces do we attune our soul for the comprehension of the Archangel.

Let us now pass over to something else. Let us try to develop a feeling of the successive impulses in the evolution of humanity, indicated in recent lectures. Consider the fact that a great number of our leading men are given a classical education during the years in which the human soul can still be shaped and molded; they are taught in schools which are not the product of modern civilization, but of a past culture, of the Graeco-Latin epoch. You see, if the Greeks and Romans had done the same thing which we are doing now, they would have established Egyptian-Chaldean schools. But they avoided this. They took their subject of instruction from life itself. We take it from the preceding epoch and train the human beings accordingly. This has a great significance in human life, but we have not recognized it. Had we recognized the importance of this fact, the feminist movement would have struck a different note, voicing the following truth; Men who are to learn how to use their intellectual powers are now being trained in antiquated schools. This hardens their brain. Women fortunately were not admitted to these schools (the “gymnasiums” of the Continent). Let us therefore develop our intellectual powers more originally; let us show how they can unfold in the present time, if they are not dulled in youthful years by a Graeco-Latin schooling.

But the feminist movement did not strike this note. On the contrary, it often advanced the following claim: Men have crept under the Graeco-Latin schooling, let us women also creep into it. Let us also have a gymnasium training.

You can therefore see, my dear friends, how the understanding of the things which were really needed, did not exist. We should know that in the present time we are not being educated in keeping with modern requirements, but in accordance with standards pertaining to the Graeco-Latin culture. Consequently this Graeco-Latin culture fills modern life. We should be aware of this. We should feel the Graeco-Latin ingredients of culture in the leading personalities of our days, in the so-called intelligentsia, among the intellectuals; this is one stratum which exists in the present time. Our whole spiritual culture is permeated by it. We do not read any newspaper which does not contain traces of Graeco-Latin culture, for we write in a Graeco-Latin style, even though we write in our own language.

As already explained to you, our juridical views are steeped in Roman thought—which is again something obsolete and antiquated. Roman life fills modern law. Sometimes the old native law comes into conflict with Roman law, but it cannot assert itself. This, too, should be felt: That what we call justice or injustice in public life is steeped in the impulses of a past epoch.

In the economic sphere alone we really live in the present. It is a significant fact that we only live in the present in the economic sphere. Some things will therefore have to be modified. Let me say in parenthesis that many women collect modern concepts only in regard to cooking; i.e., in domestic economy, so that there they are truly modern; but everything else is antiquated; it is something which we graft into the present. I do not say that this is a specially desirable thing—in any case, the other thing is not at all desirable; namely, that in the present time even the souls of women turn back to antiquated cultures.

When we survey our cultural environment, we do not find in it only that which is active in space, but also the impulses which come from very remote times. And if we acquire a feeling for such things, we discover not only the influence of the past, but also that of the future. In fact, it is our task to introduce into the present these impulses of the future. For, my dear friends, if a kind of rebel against the past would not live in each one of us, opposing the Greek character of our culture and the Roman character of modern legislation, if the future were not to shed its light into these spheres, our fate would be a sorry one.

In regard to modern culture, we should therefore consider, in addition to space, also time; that which penetrates into the present, into the history of our times, from a remote past and from the future. As modern people we should realize that in the same way in which America, England, Asia, China and India exist in the present time, so the past and the present exist in the human soul and send their influences into it, insofar as we are Europeans, for past and present represent the two poles of East and West. We thus have within us ancient Greece and ancient Rome and the future. And if we take the trouble to envisage this fact, if we realize that past and future, or things to come, live in our soul, we are filled by a new feeling, which can transcend egoism in human destiny; it is a feeling which differs from that of a mere spatial contemplation of life.

Only if we develop this mood in our soul, will we acquire the possibility to develop thoughts concerning the sphere of the Spirits of Time, or the Archai. That is to say, we come to the third Divine element in the hierarchic order. It is good to envisage these three Hierarchies in thoughts and concepts, with the aid of the means just explained. For the Spirits of Form, which come after the Archai, are far more difficult to understand. But for modern people it suffices to make the attempt to transcend egoism and to penetrate into the unegoistic sphere; they should repeat this attempt again and again and occupy their minds with the things just characterized!

This should particularly be the case with teachers (let me emphasize this). What I explained to you just now should be borne in mind particularly in the training of teachers. Teachers should not have the right to educate and train children unless they acquire a concept of that egoism which only reaches up to the nearest Divinity; i.e., the Angel, and unless they acquire a concept of the unegoistic powers which determine destiny and which exist spatially side by side here on earth; i.e., the Archangels. And they should also acquire a concept of the influences of past and future in modern culture—the Roman character of law, the Greek spiritual substance—and of the undefined rebel of the future in man, who can rescue him.

At the present time, however, people are not much inclined to penetrate into such things. A short time ago, I emphasized again and again in my lectures that one of the social tasks of the present time is to extract our educational substance for the years which young people now pass in schools, from the present, to do the same thing which the ancient Greeks also did: to extract our educational substance from the present.

At the same place where I repeatedly spoke of this matter as one of the most important social problems, there appeared a short time after my lectures—I do not wish to construct a casual connection; this is indifferent, but it is symptomatic!—a large number of advertisements in all the local newspapers making propaganda for the local “gymnasium.” I gave lectures in which I characterized, as I have now done, the classical gymnasium education and at the same time advertisements appeared in praise of a gymnasium education, stating all that the youth of Germany owes to its gymnasiums for the “strengthening of national consciousness” of “national strength”, etc., etc. And this, a few weeks before the Peace of Versailles! These advertisements were signed by the local school celebrities, etc. What one has to say today from a truly objective foundation of human evolution always rebounds, flies back again. People reject it—it does not touch the depths of their souls.

This explains the difficulty of acting in regard to the social question. For the superficial attitude with which people approach the social question will never be of any use. The social question is a deeply significant one; it is a problem which cannot be solved unless one is willing to look into the depths of man's being and of the universe. This very fact should be able to show us how necessary it is to set up certain truths contained in the threefold structure of the social organism.

But we must acquire an organ capable of grasping what our present time really needs. It will be difficult to acquire this organ in the spiritual sphere, for the spiritual substance in education, which has gradually been assimilated by the ruling body, the state, drew out of the human being every active force, every true striving, thus transforming him into a “resigned” member within the structure of the state. I have already spoken to you here, I think, of the question: How does the great majority of the people really live? (Exceptions are, of course, always borne in mind). Up to the sixth year of his life a human being is allowed to live unhampered, for he is still too grubby for the state! The state would not like to take over the tasks entailed by the care of young children; the state therefore leaves the human being in the care of powers outside its own sphere. But then it lays claim on the human being, the state then trains him so that he may fit into the state economy, into the stereotyped model; he ceases to be a real human being and becomes something which bears the imprint of the state. In that case he can be “of use” to the state. He strives after this, for it is inculcated into him; in that case, the state does not only look after him while he is working, but also when he ceases to work, by according him a pension until he dies. To many people a position entailing the right of a pension is a great “ideal”! And the religions speak of a kind of pension for the time after death! The soul obtains a pension; without any effort on its own part it obtains eternal life through the church itself. The church sees to this! It is uncomfortable to hear that salvation can only be attained by a free spiritual striving, independently of the state, and that the state should limit itself to the juridical sphere. The right of having a pension will NOT exist in a juridical state! This alone is for many people one reason ... for rejecting it! One can see this again and again.

And in regard to the most intimate life of the spirit, we must say that religious life will, to be sure, require a world conception valid for the future; it must demand from man that he should work for his immortality, that he should be active in his soul, so that he may take up the divine impulse, the Christ Impulse, through his own activity.

During my life I received innumerable letters from church people stating that Anthroposophy is a fine thing, but that it contradicts the “simple”, “plain Christian faith” of the soul's salvation through Christ, of eternal life attained through Christ, without having to do anything for it. “Faith in the salvation through Christ” is something which they cannot abandon. When people write or say such things, they think that they are especially pious. But they are simply selfish, thoroughly selfish and egoistic, for they do not wish to make any effort in their soul, they wish to leave everything to God, who will carry their soul safely through the portal of death and pension it off.

Matters will not be so comfortable in the world conception which will in future create the religious substance. We will have to grasp that the divine essence within us must be developed within the soul. It will then no longer be possible to submit passively to churches who promise to carry the human souls safely through death ... one objectionable custom at least has now ceased; namely, to do this in exchange FOR MONEY, but secretly this still plays a certain role, even in regard to the attainment of eternal life. This transition to a stage of inner activity, so that we look up to a world to which we belong, is an urgent requirement, yet it does not attract mankind greatly.

In order to acquire a feeling for the requirements in this sphere, we must envisage the facts explained today—the metamorphosis of humanity since the times of ancient Egypt, where even the body had a more plant-like character. But if it were now to fall back into this plant-like condition, it would grow ill—ulcerous growths, etc. would appear—and then the fact that we really carry a corpse about with us, which is the true instrument of cognition. These truths enable us to gain a feeling for the requirements of humanity, showing us how to progress in the right direction, how progress can now be made in regard to the social question. We should no longer be content to regard an important matter such as the social question in as simple a way as possible.

You see, this is the extraordinary difficulty of the present time, and you should bear in mind the fact that modern people like to hear explanations on the most important facts of life in a few abstract sentences. When a book like the “Fundamental Points of the Social Question” contains more than a few abstract sentences, when such a book contains the results of an observation of life itself, then people say that they cannot understand it, and that it seems confused to them. But it is the misfortune of the present time that people do not like to penetrate into the very things into which they should penetrate. For abstract sentences which are quite transparent, only deal with lifeless things; but the social sphere is a living sphere. Here we must apply elastic conceptions, elastic sentences, elastic forms. It is therefore necessary, as I frequently explained to you, to consider not only the transformation of single things, but we must also learn to think differently in regard to the innermost structure of our thoughts and reflections.

On taking leave from you again for a couple of weeks, my dear friends, I wished to speak of these things, for now we must feel that we are standing under the sign of cooperation in our anthroposophical or social movement. I would like you to be filled more and more with the understanding that if anything is to be attained in the social sphere, the spiritual science of Anthroposophy must flow into human souls. Let me recommend one thing to you, although I repeated it again and again—it really is essential that the anthroposophical truths which we are able to gain for ourselves should be recognized as the true rule of conduct for our activities and for our striving in the present time; we should have the courage and the will to push through with anthroposophical truths. The worst thing of all is that modern people lack the courage to push through with something which is really needed. They allow the best forces of their will to be broken; they are not willing to carry them through, although this is so sorely needed.

You see, my dear friends, learn to stand courageously by the fact that the people who take an interest in the representative edifice of our spiritual efforts, in the Goetheanum, are well accepted by you; be glad for each person who shows but a grain of understanding, and go towards him, but do not set store on the fact that people bring bad will, or what is more frequent today, lack of understanding towards Anthroposophy—limit yourselves to reject this in a corresponding way. The essential thing is the courage to push through with these things. Let us consider ourselves as that small group of men whose destiny it is to know and to communicate to the world the very things which it needs most of all. Let the people mock at us, let them say that it is conceit to think this; it is nevertheless true. To say to ourselves that “it is nevertheless true,” to say this earnestly, so that our whole soul is filled by it, calls for an inner courage which we must have. Let this courage fill our soul with anthroposophical substance. This will enable us to do what must be done by each one in the place where he is standing. This is what I wish to tell you today.

We can really say that we are welcoming each day which brings us nearer to the goal (which now encounters the greatest obstacles) of working in the world through our Building. For this Building is, after all, the only thing which takes into account even in its architectural forms, the great destinies of humanity. And it is good that people already begin to take notice of the Goetheanum. But another thing is needed for a progressive activity in regard to the social question; namely, that through a means such as the Goetheanum, with its forms which are stronger than any other architectonic forms of the present, an influence should be exercised on the spiritual improvement of the human forces; people should once more become accessible to truths which must be known, so that they may rise up not only to the sphere of the Angel world, but also to the sphere of the Archangel world and that of the Time Spirit.