The Rudolf Steiner Archive

Gentlemen, the things we have discussed in the last few reflections are so important for understanding what I will say next that I want to at least briefly summarize these important things again.

We have seen that the human brain essentially consists of small star-shaped formations. But the rays of the stars are very wide. The extensions of these small entities intertwine and interweave, so that the brain is a kind of tissue, formed in the way I have told you.

Such little creatures, as they are in the brain, are also in the blood, with the only difference that the brain cells – as these little creatures are called – cannot live, only during the night, when sleeping, can they live a little. They cannot carry out this life. They cannot move because they are crammed together like sardines. But the blood corpuscles, the white blood corpuscles in the red blood there inside, they can move. They swim around in the whole blood, move their offshoots and only get something out of this life, die a little when the person sleeps. So sleep and wakefulness are connected with this activity or inactivity of the brain cells, and in fact of all the nerve cells and the cells that swim around as white blood cells in the blood, moving around in it.

Now I have also told you that it is precisely in an organ like the liver that one can observe how the human body changes in the course of a lifetime. Last time I told you that if, for example, the liver of an infant does not function properly – it is a kind of cognitive activity, the liver perceives and organizes digestion – so if the liver is disturbed in its perception, so that it actually perceives an incorrect digestion during infancy, this often only shows up in later life, I told you, in forty-five or fifty-year-old people. The human organism can withstand a lot. So even if the liver is already disturbed during infancy, it will endure until the age of forty-five or fifty. Then it shows internal hardening and liver diseases develop, which sometimes occur so late in humans and which are then a consequence of what was spoiled during infancy.

It is therefore best for the infant to be nourished with its mother's milk. Isn't it true that the child comes from the mother's body? So it can be understood that its entire organism, its entire body, is related to the mother. It therefore thrives best when it does not receive anything other than what comes from the mother's body, with which it is related.

However, it does happen that breast milk is not suitable due to its composition. Some human milk is bitter, some too salty. In such cases, it is best to switch to a different diet, provided by a different person.

Now the question may arise: Can't the child be fed on cow's milk right from the start? Well, it must be said that cow's milk is not very good as a food in the very earliest stages of infancy. But one need not think that a terrible sin is being committed against the human organism when one feeds the child with cow's milk that has been diluted in the appropriate way and so on. Because, of course, the milk of different creatures is different, but not so much so that one could not also introduce cow's milk instead of human milk for nutrition.

But if this nutrition is going on, it is going on in such a way that, if the child only drinks milk, nothing needs to be chewed. As a result, certain organs in the body are more active than they will be later when solid food has to be prepared. The milk is essentially so that, I might almost say, it is still alive when the child receives it. It is almost liquid life that the child absorbs.

Now you know that a very important thing for the human organism takes place in the intestines, an extraordinarily important thing. This extraordinarily important thing is that everything that enters the intestines through the stomach must be killed, and when it then enters the lymph vessels and blood through the intestinal walls, it must be revived. That is the most important thing to understand: that a person must first kill the food they take in and then revive it. The external life, taken up directly by the human being, is not usable in the human body. Man must kill everything he takes in through his own activity and then revive it. You just have to know that. Ordinary science does not know this, and therefore it does not know that man has the power of life within him. Just as he has muscles and bones and nerves within him, so he has an invigorating power, a life body within him.

The liver observes the entire digestive process, in which things are killed and then revived, in which what has been killed rises up inwardly in the new life and enters the blood, just as the eye observes external things. And just as in later life the eye can be affected by cataracts, that is, what used to be transparent becomes opaque, and hardens, so can the liver harden. And liver hardening is actually the same in the liver as cataracts are in the eye. Cataracts can also form in the liver. Then, at the end of life, a liver disease develops. At forty-five, fifty years of age, even later, liver disease develops. That is, the liver no longer looks at the inside of the person. It is really like this: with the eye you look at the outside world, with the ear you hear what sounds in the outside world, and with the liver you first look at your own digestion and what follows digestion. The liver is an inner sense organ. And only he who recognizes the liver as an inner sense organ understands what is going on inside a person. So you can compare the liver with the eye. In a sense, a person has a head inside his stomach. Only the head does not look outwards, but inwards. And that is why it is that a person works inside with an activity that he does not bring to consciousness.

But the child feels this activity. In the child it is quite different. The child still looks little to the outside world, and when it looks to the outside world, it does not know its way around. But all the more it looks inwardly in feeling. The child feels very precisely when there is something in the milk that does not belong there, that must be thrown out into the intestines so that it is discharged. And if something is wrong with the milk, the liver takes on the disease for the whole of later life.

Now, you can imagine that the eye, when it looks outwards, belongs to the brain. Simply looking at the outside world would not serve us as humans. We would stare at the outside world, stare all around, but we would not be able to think about the outside world. It would be just like a panorama, and we would sit in front of it with an empty head. We think with our brain, and think about what is outside in the world with our brain.

Yes, but, gentlemen, if the liver is a kind of inner eye that scans all the intestinal activity, then the liver must also have a kind of brain, just as the eye has the brain at its disposal. You see, the liver can indeed see everything that is going on in the stomach, how the entire chyme is mixed with pepsin in the stomach. When the chyme enters the intestine through the so-called pylorus of the stomach, the liver can then see how the chyme moves forward in the intestine, how it secretes more and more usable parts through the walls of the intestine, how the usable parts then pass into the lymph vessels and from these vessels then into the blood. But from there on, the liver can do nothing more. Just as little as the eye can think, so little can the liver do the further activity. There must come to the liver another organ, as to the eye the brain must come.

And just as you have the liver within you, which is constantly observing your digestive activity, so you also have a thinking activity within you, of which you are completely unaware in your ordinary life. This thinking activity – that is, you are not aware of the thinking activity, but you already know about the organ – this thinking activity is added to the liver's perception and comprehension activity just as the brain adds thinking to the eye's perception, and you have it, as strange as it may seem to you, through the kidneys, the renal system.

The kidney system, which otherwise only secretes urine for ordinary consciousness, is not at all such a base organ as one always looks at it, but the kidney, which otherwise just secretes the water, is the organ that belongs to the liver and performs an inner activity, an inner thinking. The kidneys are also connected with the other thinking in the brain, so that if the brain activity is not in order, the activity of the kidneys is also not in order. Let us suppose that we begin to cause the brain to work improperly in childhood. It does not work properly if, for example, we cause the child to study too much - I already hinted at this last time - to let it work with mere memory too much, if we make it learn too much by heart. The child needs to learn things by heart in order to develop a flexible brain, but if we make it learn too much by heart, then the brain has to exert itself so much that it carries out too much activity, which causes hardening in the brain. This causes brain hardening if we make the child learn too much by heart. But if hardening occurs in the brain, it is possible that the brain will not work properly throughout the whole life. It is just too hard.

But the brain is connected to the kidneys. And because the brain is connected to the kidneys, the kidneys no longer work properly either. A person can endure a lot; it only shows up later: the whole body no longer works properly, the kidneys no longer work properly either, and you find sugar in the urine that should actually be processed. But the body has become too weak to use the sugar because the brain is not working properly. It leaves the sugar in the urine. The body is not in order, the person suffers from diabetes.

You see, I want to make this very clear to you, that something depends on the mental activity, for example, on how much learning by heart there is, and that is how the person turns out later. Have you not heard that diabetes is particularly common among rich people? They can take extraordinary care of their children, materially and physically, but they do not know that they should also take care of a proper school teacher who does not make the child learn so much by rote. They think: Well, the state takes care of that, everything is fine, there is no need to worry about it. The child learns too much by rote, and later becomes a diabetic! You cannot make a person healthy through material education alone, through what you teach a person through food. You have to take into account what is in the soul. And you see, you gradually begin to feel that the soul is something important, that the body is not the only thing about a person, because the body can be ruined by the soul. No matter how well we eat as children and no matter how strong we are after eating the food that chemists study in the laboratory, if the soul is not in order, if the soul is not taken into account, the human organism will still break down. Through a true science, not today's purely material science, we gradually learn to tune into what is already present in a person before conception and what continues to be present after death, because we get to know what our soul is. Especially in such matters, we must take this into account.

But now think, where does it come from that people today do not want to know anything about what I have told you? Well, you can approach people with a so-called education today; it is “uneducated” to talk about the liver or even about the kidneys. It is something uneducated. Where does it come from that it is something “uneducated”?

You see, the ancient Jews in Hebrew antiquity – and after all, our Old Testament comes from the Jews – the ancient Jews did not yet regard speaking of the kidney as something so terribly uneducated. For example, the Jews did not say that when a person had tormenting dreams at night – you can read that in the Old Testament; today's Jews are educated enough not to repeat what is in the Old Testament when they are in decent company, but it is in the Old Testament – they did not say that when a person had evil dreams at night: My soul is tormented. Yes, gentlemen, it is easy to say that if you have no conception of the soul; then “soul” is just a word – it means nothing. But the Old Testament, speaking from the wisdom that humanity once had, said when someone had bad dreams at night: “Your kidneys are troubling you.” What was already known in the Old Testament is now being rediscovered through more recent anthroposophical research: kidney activity is not working properly if you have bad dreams.

Then came the Middle Ages, and in the Middle Ages, little by little, what is still valid today gradually emerged. For in the Middle Ages there was a tendency to praise everything that cannot be perceived, that is somehow outside the world. After all, the head is left free in the human being; everything else is covered up. One may only speak of that which is free. Of course, some ladies, especially in the educated world, walk around today leaving so much exposed that one is far from allowed to talk about what is exposed. But anyway, what is then inside the person has become something that, for a certain kind of Christianity in the Middle Ages — in England it was later called Puritanism — one is not allowed to talk about. One is not allowed to talk about it in terms of mere material sensuality. It is not spiritual, one must not speak of it. And so, little by little, they lost their whole spirit. Of course, if one speaks only of the spirit where the head is, one cannot grasp it so easily. But if one grasps it where it is seated in the whole human body, one can grasp it well.

And you see, the kidneys are then what thinks in addition to the perceptive activity of the liver. The liver observes, the kidneys think; and they can think the activity of the heart and can think everything that the liver has not observed. The liver can still observe the entire digestive activity and how the digestive juices enter the blood. But then, when it begins to circulate in the blood, thought is needed. And that is done by the kidneys. So that man actually has something like a second man within him.

Now, gentlemen, you cannot possibly believe that the kidneys you cut out of dead bodies and then place on the dissecting table – or, if they are beef kidneys, you even eat it; you can easily look at it before you eat or cook it – but you will not believe that the piece of meat with all the properties that the anatomist is talking about, that piece of meat thinks! Of course it does not think, but what is inside the kidney of the soul thinks. That is why it is as I told you last time: The material that is in the kidney, for example, let's say in childhood, is completely replaced after seven or eight years. There is a different substance in it. Just as your fingernails are no longer the same after seven or eight years, but you have always cut off the front part, so everything that was in the kidney and liver has been replaced by you.

Yes, you have to ask: if the substance that was in the liver seven years ago is no longer there, and yet the liver can still become ill after decades due to what was neglected in it as an infant, then there is an activity that cannot be seen, because the substance does not reproduce. Life continues from infancy to the age of forty-five. It is not the material that can become diseased – it is excreted – but the invisible activity that is there and that goes on throughout a person's entire life is what continues. There you see how the human body is actually a complicated, an extremely complicated being.

Now I would like to tell you something else. I said: the ancient Jews still knew something about how kidney activity is involved in such dull, dark thinking, as dreams are at night. But at night it is the case that our ideas have gone; then one perceives what the kidneys are thinking. During the day, our heads are full of thoughts that come from outside. Just as when there is a strong light and a weak candlelight, you see the strong light, and the weak candlelight disappears next to it. It is the same with a person when he is awake: his head is full of ideas that come from the outside world, and what is going on down there in the kidneys is just the small light; he does not perceive it. When the head stops thinking, then it still perceives as dreams what the kidneys think and what the liver looks at internally. That is why dreams look the way you sometimes see them.

Imagine there is something wrong with the intestines; the liver sees that. During the day you don't pay attention to it because there are stronger ideas. But at night when falling asleep or waking up, you notice how the liver perceives the intestinal disorder. But the liver is not as smart and neither are the kidneys as smart as the human mind. Because they are not so clever, they cannot immediately say: “These are the intestines that I see.” They create an image out of it, and the person dreams instead of seeing reality. If the liver saw reality, it would see the intestines burning. But it does not see reality, it creates an image out of it. It sees flickering snakes. When a person dreams of flickering snakes, which he does very often, then the liver is looking at the intestines, and that is why they appear to it as snakes. Sometimes the head is just like the liver and the kidneys. If a person sees something, for example, a bent piece of wood nearby and in an area where snakes could be, the head can even mistake this bent piece of wood for a snake when it is five steps away. Thus, the inner vision and thinking of the liver and kidneys considers the winding intestines to be snakes.

Sometimes you dream of a stove that is heated up. You wake up and have heart palpitations. What happened? Yes, the kidney thinks about the stronger heart palpitations, but it imagines it as if it were a stove that is heated up, and you dream of a boiling stove. That is what the kidney thinks about your heart activity.

So there inside the human stomach – although it is again 'not formed', to speak of it – sits a soul being. The soul is a little mouse that slips into the human body somewhere and sits inside. Isn't it true that people used to do that? They thought: where is the seat of the soul? But you don't know anything about the soul if you ask where the soul is located. It is just as much in the 'ear lobe' as in the big toe, only the soul needs organs through which it thinks, imagines and creates images. And in such an activity, which you know very well, it does it through the head, and in the way I have described to you, where the inner being is looked at, it does it through the liver and kidneys. You can see the soul at work in the human body everywhere. And you have to see that.

This, however, requires a science that does not simply cut open dead human bodies, lay them on the dissecting table, cut out organs and look at them materially; it requires that one really makes one's whole inner soul life visible in thinking and in everything a little more active than the people who just look. Of course it is more comfortable to cut open human bodies, to cut out the liver and then write down what you find there. There is no need to exert much mental effort. That's what the eyes are for, and it only takes a little thought to cut the liver in all directions, make small pieces, put them under the microscope, and so on. It's an easy science. But almost all science today is an easy science. We have to activate our inner thinking much more, and above all we must not believe that from the moment we put the person on the dissecting table, cut out his organs and describe them, we can get to know the human being. Because we are just cutting out the liver of a fifty-year-old woman or man and, when we look at it, we don't know what has already happened in the infant. We need a whole science. That is precisely what a real science must strive for. That is the endeavor of anthroposophy, to have a real science. And this real science does not just lead to the physical, but, as I have shown you, to the soul and to the spiritual.

I told you last time that the blue blood vessels, that is, the veins in which the blood flows not as red blood but as blue blood, that is, blood containing carbon dioxide, enter the liver. This is not the case in any of the other organs. In this respect, the liver is a quite extraordinary organ. It takes up blue blood vessels and almost makes the blue blood disappear into itself (see illustration $. 70).

This is something extraordinarily significant and important. So when we imagine the liver, the usual red veins also go into the liver. The blue veins go out of the liver. But in addition, a special blue vein, the portal vein, which contains a lot of carbon dioxide, goes into the liver (see drawing on plate 4). Now, the liver absorbs this and does not let it out again, which then enters the liver as carbonic acid through this special blue blood.

Yes, that's right. When conventional science has cut out the liver, it sees this so-called portal vein, but doesn't think much more about it. But anyone who has been able to arrive at a real science does make comparisons.

Now there are still organs in the human body that have something very similar, and that is the eyes. With the eyes, something is very small, only gently hinted at, but nevertheless, it is also the case with the eye that not all blood, all blue blood, that goes into the eye, goes back again. Veins go in, red veins go in, blue ones go out. But not all the blue blood that enters the eye goes back again, but is distributed just as it is in the liver. Only, in the liver it is strong, in the eye it is very weak.

Isn't that proof that I can compare the liver with the eye? Of course, one can point out everything that is in the human organism. That is how one comes to the conclusion that the liver is an inner eye.

But the eye is directed outwards. It peers outwards and consumes the blue blood it receives in order to look outwards. The liver consumes it inwards. Therefore, it makes the blue blood disappear inside and uses it for something else. Only sometimes, you see, the eye also gets into the habit of using its blue veins a little. That is when a person becomes sad, when he cries; then the bitter-tasting tear fluid wells up in the eyes, in the lacrimal glands. This comes from the little bit of blue blood that remains in the eye. When this is particularly stimulated by sadness, the tears come out as a secretion.

But in the liver, this story is always present! The liver is always sad because the human organism, as it is in life on earth, can make you sad when you look at it from the inside, because it is predisposed to the highest, but it just doesn't look that great. The liver is always sad. That is why it always secretes a bitter substance, bile. What the eye does with tears, the liver does for the whole organism in the secretion of bile. Only – the tear flows outwards and the tears are gone as soon as they are out of the eye; but the bile throughout the human organism does not disappear, because the liver does not look outwards but inwards. Here, the function of looking back is reduced, and the secretion, which can be compared to the secretion of tears, comes to the fore.

Yes, but, gentlemen, if what I am telling you is really true, then it must show up even more clearly in another area. It must be shown that those beings on earth who live more in their inner life, who live more in their inner thinking activity, that the animals do not think less than man, that the animals think more - thus less in their heads than man, they have an imperfect brain. But then they must observe more the liver life and the kidney life, must look more inward with the liver and think more inwardly with the kidneys. This is also the case with animals. There is external proof of this. Our human eyes are so constructed that the blue blood that enters them is actually very little, so little that today's science does not even talk about it. It used to talk about it. But in the case of animals, which live more in their inner being, the eyes do not just look, but the eyes think as well.

If one could say that the eyes are a kind of liver, one could now say that in animals the eye is much more liver than in humans. In humans, the eye has become more perfect and less liver-like. This can be seen in the eye. In the animal, it can be clearly demonstrated that there is not only what is found in humans: a glassy, watery body, then the lens of the eye, again a glassy, watery body – but in certain animals, the blood vessels go into the eye and form such a body in the eye (see drawing). The blood vessels go right into this vitreous humor, forming a body inside it called the fan, the eye fan. In these animals, it is... (gap in the transcript). Why? Because in these animals, the eye is even more liver. And just as the portal vein goes into the liver, so this fan goes into the eye. That is why it is so in animals: When the animal looks at something, the eye is already thinking; in humans, it only looks, and it thinks with the brain. In animals, the brain is small and imperfect. It does not think so much with the brain, but thinks in the eye, and it can think in the eye because it has this sickle-shaped projection, so that it can use the used blood, the carbonic acid blood, in the eye.

I can tell you something that will not really surprise you. You will not assume that the vulture, high up in the air with its damn small brain, would succeed in making the very clever decision to fall down right where the lamb is sitting! If the vulture's brain were important, it could starve to death. But the vulture has a thinking process in his eye that is only a continuation of his kidney thinking, and so he makes his decision and shoots down and catches the lamb. The vulture does not do it by saying to himself: There is a lamb down there, now I have to get into position; now I will fall down just right in that line, I will come across the lamb. — A brain would make this consideration. If there were a man up there, he would think about it; he would just not be able to carry it out. But with the vulture, even the eye thinks. The soul is already in the eye. He is not even aware of this, but he still thinks.

You see, I told you, the old Jew, who understood his Old Testament, knew what it means: God has plagued you by your kidneys in the night. - With that he wanted to express the reality of what appears to the soul as mere dreams. God has tormented you through your kidneys in the night - so he said, because he knew: There is not only a person who looks out through his eyes into the outer world, but there is a person who thinks through his kidneys and looks through his liver into the inner self.

And the ancient Romans knew that too. They knew that there are actually two people: the one who looks out through his eyes, and then the other, who has his liver in his stomach and looks into his own interior. Now it is the case that, with the liver – you can see this from the distribution of the blue veins – if you want to use the expression, you have to say that it actually looks backwards. This is why a person is so unaware of their insides; just as you are unaware of what is behind you, the liver is not consciously aware of what it is actually looking at. The ancient Romans knew this. They just expressed it in such a way that it is not immediately obvious. They imagined: a person has a head at the front, and in the lower body he has another head; but this is only an indistinct head that looks backwards. And then they took the two heads and put them together, forming something like this (see drawing): a head with two faces, one looking backwards and the other forwards. You can still find such statues today if you go to Italy. They are called Janus heads.

You see, the travelers who have the money go through Italy with their Baedeker, also look at these Janus heads, look in the Baedeker – but there is nothing sensible in it. Because, isn't it true, you have to ask yourself: how did these old Roman guys come to develop such a head? They weren't actually so stupid as to believe that if you travel across the sea somewhere, you'll find people with two heads on the ground. But the traveler, who is not educated by his eyes, must imagine something like that when he sees that the Romans have developed a head with two faces, one facing backwards and one facing forwards.

Yes, well, the Romans knew something through a certain natural thinking that all of later humanity did not know, and we will come to that now, come to it independently. So that we can now know again that the Romans were not stupid, but were clever! Janus-head means January. Why did they set it at the beginning of the year? That is also a special secret.

Yes, gentlemen, once you have come so far as to realize that the soul works not only in the head but also in the liver and kidneys, then you can also observe how it differs throughout the year. In summer, the warm season, the liver works very little. The liver and kidneys enter into a kind of sleep-like state of soul, performing only their external bodily functions, because the human being is more dependent on the warmth of the outside world. It begins to be more inactive within. The entire digestive system is quieter in midsummer than in winter; but in winter, this digestive system begins to be very mental and emotional. And when the Christmas season comes, the New Year season, when January comes and begins, the liver and kidneys are most active in the soul.

The Romans knew this too. That is why they called the people with the two faces the January people. When you independently come back to what is actually there, you no longer need to stare at things, but can understand them again. Today, people only stare at them because today's science is no longer there. You see, anthroposophy is really not impractical. It can explain not only everything that is human, but even everything that is historical; for example, it can explain why the Romans made these Janus faces! Actually, I am not saying this out of vanity. In fact, if people are to understand the world, they need to consult an anthroposophist in the guidebook, otherwise they will actually go through the world half asleep, just gawking at everything and unable to reflect.

Yes, gentlemen, as you can see, we are really serious when we say that we have to start with the physical in order to reach the soul. Well, I will continue speaking about the soul next Saturday. Then you can also think about what questions you want to ask. But you will have seen that it is really no laughing matter how one wants to get from the physical to the soul, but that it is a very serious science.

It is already the case that the methods of observation, consideration and judgment that are otherwise customary today, according to the habits of thought that have developed over the last three to four centuries, cannot simply be applied to anthroposophical spiritual science. What is initially pointed to by intellectual concepts is actually only a kind of guideline in anthroposophy, to help us focus our observation of life and the world in the direction that will allow us to see reality, the full reality. Therefore, in the initial concepts of spiritual science, one has little more than a kind of scheme that draws attention to certain observation methods. These schemes are taken from the spiritual science that is to a certain extent complete, so that those who engage with spiritual science do indeed get something that may initially make sense to common sense, but which can only be fully understood when one brings what science and life otherwise give to these schemata.

One receives such a schema relatively early on when one begins to get to know anthroposophical spiritual science. And it is such a schema that guides us to look at the human being in such a way that we take the physical body, etheric body, astral body and I as the basis of this approach. In my book Theosophy, I immediately tried not to provide a mere scheme with these four elements of human nature, but to fill these abstract four concepts with a certain concrete content through the way they are presented there. So that to a certain extent - more can never be done - one realizes how justified it is to consider the human being according to these four categories.

But these things only come to life in a truly objective way when one enters into what is revealed in human life, in man's relationship to the world, and in the world in general, and then what the initially schematically defined concepts fill with a very specific content. From a certain point of view, we will try to do so again today.

We will start with what we call our self, insofar as we consciously experience this self, what this self actually represents. You know that this self as consciousness is interrupted in the course of life by all the states that occur between falling asleep and waking up. With the exception of dreaming, and actually to a certain extent even during dreaming, this sense of self is lost for the time between falling asleep and waking up. We can say: this sense of self is always kindled at the moment of waking up – whereby, of course, kindling is only an expression used in a figurative sense – and it fades away at the moment of falling asleep.

I have often presented this as a finding of soul observation. I made it particularly clear in a lecture I gave at the Philosophers' Congress in Bologna in 1911, where I tried to show how what is experienced as the self should not be separated from the whole range of sensory experiences. We must therefore say: the I is essentially bound – I am always speaking of experience – to the sense perceptions. Right? We are not considering the I as a reality now; on the contrary, we want to point to the I as a reality in the course of these three lectures, today, tomorrow and the day after tomorrow. We now want to focus solely on what we call the I-experience in the realm of our lives.

You know how difficult it is to live in abstract ideas, in ideas that are not imbued with the content of sensory experiences. This goes so far that there are many philosophers who claim that such thinking, such imagining, that is free of sensuality, without any sensory perceptions being present at the same time, even if they are only sensory perceptions reflected from within, is not possible at all. But now, when we really observe our soul, it soon becomes clear that our inner experience is not exhausted by sensory perceptions, that we simply penetrate from sensory perceptions to what we call ideas. We only get the pure picture of the presentation when we look clearly at what arises from a complex of sense perceptions, which we have turned away from and which we still imagine afterwards, but now with the help of the same forces that otherwise serve us in remembering. Of course, it cannot be said that the content of the sense perceptions does not enter into these presentations. But the activity that can be observed in the human soul is different when we experience a sensory perception in connection with the outside world or when we merely imagine this sensory perception.

But this life of imagination leads us away to a great extent from what is actually the essence of our ego experience in sensory perception. We cannot say that we have a strong sense of self when we are merely imagining; on the contrary, when we are merely imagining, there is always the tendency for this sense of self to become obscured, which manifests itself in the transition to a dreamy state or even to a kind of drowsy state when we are merely imagining. We delve deeper into our inner being when we merely imagine than when we live in connection with the outer world through sense perception. In this regard, each individual must turn to self-observation. One can observe how there is a tendency to dampen the I when sense perception is dampened. We can then make progress if we link the experience of the senses to the idea of our I in our astral body.

So that we can say: just as life in sensory perception belongs together with the experience of the I, so the experience of the idea belongs together with the astral body. Above all, this damping of the ego is expressed – and this is actually the most significant thing to take into account if one wants to understand what I am actually explaining now – by the fact that, when we perceive with our senses, we have something quite individual. The complex of sensory perceptions that we are currently experiencing cannot be experienced exactly the same way by anyone else. It is something quite individual, and in this quite individual we have at the same time our I-experience. In so far as we ascend to the experience of thinking, we have at the same time the power to arrive at something more general, for example to form abstractions which can then be communicated in the same form to others, and which others can understand in the same way that we do. We ourselves can only understand the individual sensory perceptions that we have throughout our lives; but the images that we attach to them take on a form that is more general , that it can, as it were, be communicated to a larger number of people.

But this already testifies that the I attenuates as we move from sensory experience to imaginative experience. But at the same time we go deeper within ourselves; that is also an immediate experience. Now, as the images, or rather what takes place within us for their formation (which we will leave undetermined for today), as this continues to develop, the images become memories. Images actually initially disappear from our consciousness. From some unknown source – let us leave it undefined for today – facts arise, in the wake of which we can evoke the same ideas.

That is the only thing we can assert. If we stick to the facts, we cannot go along with those psychologists who say that the representations then go down into the subconscious, where they go for a walk without the consciousness knowing anything about it, and when one remembers, they come up again. That is not the fact of the matter. There is initially nothing to suggest that an idea that I formed three years ago continued to exist until today and went for a walk somewhere in the depths of the soul, only to come up again today when I remember it. Rather, the only thing that can be said, if one wants to speak precisely, is this: At that time I formed the ideas; those abilities that followed on from the formation of these ideas are capable, in their further development, of bringing these ideas consciously to the surface again today. That is the only fact. And if people were inclined to look at the facts everywhere, there would certainly be far fewer theories and hypotheses in the world than there are. For precisely with regard to what I am now explaining here, most people believe that what they have once formed as an idea lives somewhere in the indefinite and then comes walking back.

But we also know that the idea that one forms in connection with a sensory experience is precisely temporary, and that, even if this is sometimes concealed, an inner force must be developed that can be experienced when a past experience in the memory becomes an idea again. That which becomes the cause of a memory-image is seated deeper within us than the ordinary image linked to a sensory perception. It is a memory-image grounded in our organization. It is also connected with what we are as a temporal being. We know that images can be remembered in different ways, depending on how far back in time they lie. If we summarize all the facts that come into consideration, we have to say to ourselves: in any case, what has been experienced in a sensory perception has entered the stream of time in which we ourselves live. Certain sensations that we have while a memory emerges tell us how remembering is actually connected to our entire organization. We also know how, in the different stages of life, that is, in the succession of time in our life between birth and death, the power of remembering is greater or lesser.

If we follow all these facts, then we will be able to say that, just as the power of imagination lies in the astral body, the power of remembering lies in the etheric body. So that, if we summarize remembering in the word memory, we can say: Memory is as one with the etheric body as the life of imagination is with the astral body, as sense perception is with the I. In any case, what underlies the imagination is taken up in the course of time of our existence. Just as our growth and development between birth and death is contained in a certain stream of time, so what is experienced as memory, what is experienced as memory, is contained in this same stream and we feel the connection. Now, however, something is added to those things that I have discussed so far, and which can already be found by anyone with some subtle attention in faithful self-observation. That the I is connected with sense perception is a very obvious fact, and the one who does not admit it simply does not want to observe a very obvious fact. That the experience of imagination is connected with the astral body is something that can be discovered through ordinary observation. However, more subtle observation is required if one wants to examine the interconnection of the etheric body and memory. But even here one can still, I would say, manage scientifically, especially if one observes pathological cases, memory disorders and the like, and sees how they are connected with growth and nutritional disorders in particular. And we must consider the nutritional forces as lying in exactly the same direction as the growth forces or the reproductive forces. It is certainly possible to put together a series of observations that still show this connection between memory and the etheric body.

On the other hand, what I have to add now only arises from imaginative observation, and I would say that it can at best be sensed by ordinary observation. But when it has been found through imaginative observation, the whole context in which these things can be placed gives the healthy human mind complete assurance of the matter. We penetrate further and further into our own being, so to speak, starting from the outside and going inwards, if we start from sensory perception and the I, from mental experience and the astral body, from memory experience and the ether body, and then descend into the physical body.

In the physical body, we are indeed dealing with something that is still connected to memory, but not in the same way as the etheric body. To better understand what is present in imaginative observation and what I will characterize in a moment, we can take the result that is present in some pathological disturbances. The person then acquires certain inclinations, I might say tendencies, in their physical body; these do not have to go so far as to cause involuntary movements or spasms, but they could of course go so far as to cause death, but that actually belongs to a different field. When involuntary movements occur, I would like to say, of a more innocent kind, then the person who wants to deal with such things at all can already see that in a certain category of involuntary movements there are after-effects of experiences. If someone shows a tendency to do this or that habitually but involuntarily with his fingers, then one can always point out, if one has only enough examination records, how this or that complex of experiences leads precisely to these things. These must not be movements beyond a certain degree of involuntariness, but, I would say, semi-involuntary movements.

You see, it is the case that what has been experienced is too strongly imprinted in the physical body; it may still be imprinted in the etheric body, but not too strongly in the physical body. If it leaves too strong an impression on the physical body, then the physical body comes under the influence of the memory. It must not do so. Imagination shows us that what works in memory is still movement in the etheric body, is still, as it were, evolving movement in the etheric body. It accumulates in the physical body. It must not completely permeate the physical body; it must be repelled by the physical body.

If I wanted to draw a diagram, it would be like this: Let us assume that we have the physical body here (see drawing, red), we have the etheric body here (orange), we have the astral body here (green), and finally we have the I here (white). Now a sensory experience takes place. This sensory experience is first taken up into the I. An idea is attached to it by becoming rooted in the astral body; the power takes effect, which then makes remembrance possible by becoming rooted as a movement in the etheric body. But now it has to be stored. It must not go further, it must not penetrate the physical body completely, but must be stored here. In the physical body, an image arises, of course at first quite unconsciously, of what lives in the memory. The image is not at all similar to what the experience was, it is a metamorphosis; but an image arises. So that it must be said: just as the memory is connected with the etheric body, so an actual inner image is connected with the physical body. We always have an impregnation, an image, in our physical body when such a movement originates in the etheric body; of course, this image can only be reached through imaginative visualization. There you can see how the physical body actually becomes the carrier of all these images. You may say: But I cannot possibly have the image of a church tower in my physical body! I will first give you an idea of how you can indeed have the image of a church tower in your physical body by picturing the matter for you.

Suppose, for my sake, you have a face in front of you, and you let this face be reflected in some mirror that completely distorts the face (it is drawn). Let us assume that something terrible arises within, something terrible. Now I do not mean that from the external experience, say of a church tower, something terrible arises as an impregnation in the physical body, but in any case, of course, something unlike it must arise. Now think, if you get such a monster here from this beautiful forehead, it is caused by the curvature of the mirror. If you can take into account the curvature of the mirror, then you can reconstruct the face from the caricature in connection with the curvature of the mirror, even if you do not have this face in front of you right now. So, if you understand the nature of the caricaturing mirror through which you receive the caricature, you can reconstruct the beautiful face. So there is no need for something similar to a steeple or a drama to be present inside the person, something that one has experienced or the like, but what arises in connection with the nature of the whole person naturally makes it possible to reconstruct the thing in reconstruct the matter in the same way.

So no objection can be made from the fact that, of course, because the world is large and shaped differently from the human interior, the image cannot be there in the human interior. The image is there, and in a sense the image is the last thing in the human being, where the external experience arrives. The other, imagining, remembering, are transitional moments. What we experience in the outer world must not simply pass through us. We must be an insulator; we must hold it back, and in the end our physical body does that. Our astral body changes it, makes it pale in our imagination; our etheric body takes away all content and contains only the possibility of evoking it again. But what is actually produced in us is pictorially impressed upon us. We live with it. But we must not let it pass through us. Suppose we were to let the image pass right through; it would not be reflected back by the etheric body in an elastic way, so to speak; it would pass through the etheric body, pass through the physical body, and we would always fidget around in the world as the events command us to. It is not easy to describe more complicated things, but if, for example, I saw a person moving from right to left, I would immediately want to dance from left to right, to imitate everything I see. I would want to imitate in myself, in my form, everything that I experience externally. It first arrives in the astral body, which already has a paralyzing effect, then in the resiliently reflecting ether body, then especially in the physical body, which accumulates the whole thing. In this, there is an isolation of what I perceive from the outside. And in this way, what I experience in the outside world works in me.

From knowing that a person consists of a physical body, an etheric body, an astral body and an ego, we know a scheme; but what matters is that we then fill in the concrete results into this scheme, in this case sense perception, imagination, memory and then the very concrete image. This is what gives content to these schematic concepts. And one must arrive at such content more and more if one wants to advance to an understanding of what is reality in the world. One cannot, for example, say: Yes, one divides the human being into physical body, etheric body, astral body and I, as if there were boundaries! If you are a reasonable person, you do not initially claim that there are other boundaries than those that arise when you take the formation of images, the experience of memory, the experience of imagination and the experience of sensory perception. But you have to have an open mind about the differences between these four types of experience.

That is one way of approaching these things. But now let us approach the subject of human beings and their behavior in the world from a different direction. Suppose we go for a walk. When we walk around – I have already touched on this here in another context – we cannot, in our external observation, distinguish between our walking and the movement of an inanimate object. Whether I observe a stone in its trajectory from the outside, merely in terms of movement, or whether I observe a person running – if both have the same speed, then the same fact is present in the external image. If I disregard everything else and look only at the body in motion, then in the case of both the stone and the person, I am dealing with a change of location. I observe this change of place, this speed. And this is ultimately what we are aware of when we move in everyday life; for we must distinguish between the intention to carry out a movement and the actual movement. When I think about a movement, I can remain completely calm. I can think myself into motion, and if I have some imagination, I can visualize myself moving. The idea that I then have when I really move is no different from the imaginative idea that I have when I am still and just think about moving.

So we have to distinguish very carefully between thinking about our movements and our real movements. But these real movements, we also imagine them only externally, no differently than we imagine motionless objects. We see how we thereby obtain different distances from these or those objects. We perceive our movements quite externally; that is added. And when we speak of movements – I do not want to go into the question of whether this is a hypothetical idea or a more or less well-founded idea, that is a matter for another chapter – but when we have movements, we also have force.

So, first of all, I will stick to the usual facts: where there is movement, there is naturally the development of a certain force. So we can say: The moving human being unfolds a certain force. We cannot speak of more than force, and we must also identify this force that it unfolds with some object, even an inorganic one. So let us consider only the physical body, either as a whole or in its individual parts; in that it moves, it moves like any other inanimate object. So, when we imagine ourselves moving and look at the physical body, we can only speak of force here.

The situation is different when we begin to look inside the being. We must be clear about one thing: while we are moving, inner processes are taking place in us. Substances are being consumed. Something is happening that is connected with the forces of growth, nutrition and reproduction. These are forces that we cannot address in the same way as we address the forces that we perceive in the external movement of an inanimate body. When we observe a plant in its growth, we must be clear about what is present when the plant grows larger and larger – and the same applies to the growth forces of animals and humans – that the unfolding of forces is different from that which underlies it when we have a merely externally observable moving body, be it the externally observable moving of one's own body or a human body in general. What is present when growth processes take place – and I also call growth processes in the broader sense those that take place when we are in motion, for example – what takes place there, we must look for in the etheric, in the etheric body. What we observe in the external movement, in the relationship of the person who is in external movement to this external world, does not cause us to look at the etheric body. At the moment when we observe what is happening internally, we must look at the etheric body. And if we define the concept of growth as broadly as I have just done, we can say that the specific growth force, which also includes nutrition, the use of materials, and so on, this specific force now urges us to move up to the etheric body. We see this growth force in the plant world.

To show you that these things are not merely contrived but can at the same time be corroborated by spiritual scientific observations, I would like to expressly say that what we see in the growing or generally internally changing organism , namely in the plant organism, where it appears purely, is entirely due to the fact that the power which otherwise expresses itself only in external movement comes into a certain relationship with what may truly be called ether. I would also like to convey this to you figuratively.

You are familiar with the often-mentioned fact that a solid body in a liquid loses as much of its weight, receives a lift, as the weight of the displaced water body. Now, the forces that underlie the external movements of physical bodies are, in a sense, rigid. They have an inner rigidity, just as a solid body has a certain weight. When you put a solid object into water, it loses some of its weight. When you combine the forces that normally cause external movement with the forces of the ether, they lose their rigidity; they become internally mobile. Thus a force, which as the moving force of the inorganic is so great and cannot become greater if it is only an external moving force, loses its rigidity when it combines with the ether, it can expand or contract. And as such a force it is then active in growth, and in all internal processes.

This Archimedean principle can be expressed as follows: Every solid body loses in a liquid as much of its weight as is the weight of the displaced liquid body. Every force, so one can continue to say, loses, when it combines with the ether forces, of its rigidity, as much as the ether forces are of their suction forces, as the ether forces bring to it in suction forces. It becomes movement, and with that it becomes what it becomes active as, say, in the plant organism, but also remains active in the animal organism and in the human organism. If we now go further up from the etheric body to the astral body, thus in the outer view from the plant to the animal, what was initially an inwardly mobile force in the growth force is now free – as I have already described in the case of the forces that are released in the seventh year with the change of teeth – inwardly free, so that what is taking place is no longer bound to the forces of the physical body. What expresses itself as free forces are the instinctive forces in animals and in humans. So we penetrate up to the astral body and what is still force below is given to us as instinct. And if we penetrate up to the I, instinct becomes will.

I: sense perceptions will
Astral body: life of imagination instinct
Ether body: memory growth power
Physical body: image power

This relationship of the will to the instincts, which arises in an unbiased observation of ordinary mental life, is in turn suitable for a rational self-examination. From another side, we have filled what is here only a mere scheme with the content of experience.

We can say that when we look at the physical body, from the inside it presents itself to us as that which continually accumulates experiences and images; when viewed from the outside, it is an organization of forces. And it is also correctly observed in the physical body that it actually consists of an interaction of forces with images. If you imagine a painted picture, you would have to imagine it spatially, in such a way that it is not a rigid picture, but an inwardly moving picture, with forces at work at every point. Then you get something of what must be imagined in reality under the physical body.

If you imagine the growth forces from the inside and think of them as imbued on the other side of what underlies memory – but now not as mutually concealing ideas, but precisely as what underlies memory – so ether movements on the one hand, which swell up, accumulate through the inner processing of the absorbed nutrients, which accumulate through the movements of the human being, in conflict with what sinks down from all that has been perceived by the senses and imagination and then vibrates downwards in the ether body to preserve the memory, if you imagine this interaction of above and below, that is, of what vibrates downwards from the imagination and what comes up from below, from the process of nutrition, growth and eating, both interacting: then you get a vivid picture of the ether body. And again, if you think about everything you experience yourself when instincts are at work, where you can clearly understand how blood circulation, breathing, how the whole rhythmic system works works in the instincts, and how these instincts depend on our upbringing, on what we have absorbed: then you have the living interplay of the astral body. And if you finally imagine an interplay between the acts of will, there is kindled everything that you want with what the sense perceptions are, so you have a living picture of what lives into consciousness as the I.

But this is only a rough scheme. We have only had a very small sample of experiences, and they have to be fitted into a scheme. You first have to have the cupboard before you can put the objects in it. Not so, the ordinary psychologist or physiologist, who first observes these things. And if someone happens to have all kinds of linen and clothes but no cupboard, and just piles them up, well, then it will turn into chaos in the course of time! That is our present-day psychology and physiology. You really need a closet. Just as the person who makes the closet should know in a certain way how the closet needs to be organized so that you can really get in what you want to put in, so now what is being organized must what is being organized must still be inexplicit in a certain way, even though it can only be abstract – just as a cupboard is abstract when it is still empty, but not when it is full. If there is an empty cupboard somewhere, it is also inexplicable.

So you see, there are of course an awful lot of points of attack on anthroposophy, depending on where you start. But one can also, and I have tried this in my “Theosophy”, already let it be known that while one is obliged to set up the cabinet first, something concrete is already pressing to do so. But then one must have the patience to ascend to that which brings abundance into the scheme. And this is what must always be said to anthroposophists in particular: one should not create the impression in the world that everything has already been said when such abstract terms as physical body, ether body, astral body and I are used. If one merely says: 'The human being consists of a physical body, ether body, astral body and I', then one has said nothing at all except four words. For there is, of course, a great difference between saying this out of the fullness of knowledge, as a structure that can be used as a guide to build upon, and dogmatizing it and communicating it as dogmas.

That is why it makes such a repulsive impression when it is simply handed down: The human being consists of a physical body, an etheric body, an astral body and an ego. It all depends on how you say such things. You don't have to go as far as was once said in an anthroposophical lecture: “For the sake of simplicity, we divide the human being into seven parts.” The nonsense is already great if you believe that you can capture something real just by putting it into some kind of scheme. It is there to provide guidelines within which observations can be made.

After I have shown you how certain viable concepts, such as will, memory and so on, can be incorporated into the anthroposophical conceptual scheme, we will move on to a further consideration of the human being tomorrow.

Spiritual science must become an instrument of mutual understanding, whereby we learn to understand each other, as it were, across all of humanity and into the soul. And this learning to understand each other, even into the soul, must permeate us as an anthroposophical attitude, so to speak, and live in us, otherwise the occult truths that flow into humanity through spiritual science will not be easily understood by us either. In this respect, spiritual science can, because it is, so to speak, the key to understanding the innermost, bring about peace and harmony across the earth. How can it do that?

Let us illustrate this with a concrete example. Take, for example, the relationship between two people who have different religious beliefs across the earth, let us say Christianity and Buddhism. What we can say with reference to Christians and Buddhists, who provide us only with classical examples, we could of course also say for the world views of two people living side by side in Europe; for what applies on a large scale will also apply on a small scale through spiritual knowledge. If we take the Christian and the Buddhist as they are in the traditional orthodox creeds, how do they relate to each other? Well, in such a way that the Christian actually believes that the Buddhist can only be saved if he accepts Christianity in the form that he has. And so we see the missionary activities of Christians among Buddhists; they take their particular confession there. And the orthodox Buddhist behaves in a very similar way. Suppose both became anthroposophists. How would a Christian, as an anthroposophical Christian, relate to a Buddhist? Well, let us say that he hears what is one of the most important things in Buddhism and what, basically, is only properly understood by someone who lives within Buddhism itself. Today, there are two ways of learning about the content of the various religious beliefs: from people who study comparative religion and from those who learn about the content of the various religious beliefs in a spiritual-scientific way. If we consider those who practice comparative religion, we must say that they are extraordinarily hardworking and active people who endeavor to cultivate the scholarly comparison of different religious beliefs. But when they compare these religious beliefs, something very special comes to light; then what they are looking for, even if they do not admit it, is actually only the untruthfulness of the various religious beliefs. These people are looking for what is not true, what was accepted by the various religious beliefs in childlike times; that is, they are looking for untruth. The person who studies this as a spiritual scientist seeks the main core in the individual religious beliefs; he seeks what is contained in a single nuance, but still as a perceptional nuance, in this or that religious belief. He seeks, therefore, what is true in the individual religious beliefs, not what is false.

In this respect, things can go strangely. Isn't it true that no one who knows the facts will have anything but the greatest respect for Max Müller, perhaps the greatest scholar of comparative religion or the greatest authority on religious studies. He, too, did not give much more than what one might call: the untruth of the oriental creeds. But he believed that he was giving everything with it. And then H. P. Blavatsky appeared and spoke quite differently. She spoke in such a way that one saw in her: she knows the main core of the oriental creeds.

What did Max Müller say? His judgment is somewhat grotesque and shows that a scholar does not necessarily need to be well-versed in logic. He thought that people follow Blavatsky, who only gives them a completely false representation of oriental religions, while she does not take into account the true representation of them, which, for example, he, Max Müller, gives. And he used the following comparison: Yes, when people are walking down the street and see a real pig grunting, they are not particularly surprised, but when they see a person grunting like a pig, it causes a stir. He wanted to compare what is naturally given in the oriental religious systems, namely his kind of religious comparison, with the pig that grunts naturally – I am not making the comparison! - and wanted to compare what H. P. Blavatsky has given with a person who grunts like that. Well, I won't even talk about the tastelessness of the comparison; because it doesn't seem very logical to me: I would be a little surprised if I met a person who could grunt deceptively. But I would not, really not, use the other comparison of comparative religious studies with the said animal, and it is strange that Max Müller himself used it.

Spiritual science introduces us to the truth of different religions. Take a key point in Buddhism: the Buddhist knows, when he has understood the basic tenet of his faith, that there are bodhisattvas, and he knows that these bodhisattvas, once beginning as an individuality, undergo a more rapid development than the other human individualities and then ascend to the Buddha. Buddha is a general name for all those who, in a human, carnal incarnation, ascend from the bodhisattva to the Buddha. And one of those who are especially honored with the name Buddha is precisely the son of Shuddhodana: Gautama Buddha. And with regard to him, it must be recognized, as with every Buddha, that when he attained the dignity of Buddha at the age of twenty-nine, the incarnation in which this occurred was his last incarnation, and that he would not need to descend again to a carnal incarnation on earth. This is regarded as a truth by Buddhists. A comparative religion scholar would regard it as a childish notion. But the anthroposophist, who familiarizes himself with the secrets of religions in all fields, does not approach the Buddha in this way, but he knows that such a thing is a truth. And so, just like any devout Buddhist, the anthroposophist faces Buddhism and says: Yes, I know that there are such things as bodhisattvas who ascend to the Buddha, who do not need to reincarnate again. That is one of the sentences of your religious community that I recognize, just as you do, and by acknowledging it, I can look up to your Buddha with reverence, just as you do. That is to say, the anthroposophical Christian begins to fully understand what the Buddhist says, and he has the same feelings and perceptions with him, he shares them with him, and they understand each other from the one side at first.

Now let us take the opposite case, where the Buddhist has also become an anthroposophist and is learning to recognize what the Christian, who has raised himself above the narrow-mindedness of the confessional orthodox point of view, knows about Christianity. Let us assume that the Buddhist Buddhist hears what a Christian can say about the Christ Impulse itself. He hears that within Christianity, within Christian esotericism, it has been recognized that at one point in the course of evolution, a being called Lucifer approached man in his development; he then hears that as a result, this human being descended lower than would have been the case had there been no Luciferic influence. And he then hears that it is actually something that we look up to as if it were a matter for the gods when we consider the rebellion and revolt of Lucifer against the progressive powers of the gods. So we are looking into a matter for the gods. And then we hear from the Christian who really understands his Christianity that the settlement of this matter between the advancing gods and Lucifer had to become what we call the Mystery of Golgotha. And why?

Well, in its present form, death and everything associated with death has really come about through the influence of Lucifer. But death is something that can only be found in the physical world. There is no death in a supersensible world, insofar as supersensible worlds are accessible to man with his clairvoyant consciousness. Not even the group souls of animals die; they only transform. There is metamorphosis, but not what is called death. The disintegration, the falling apart of a part of a particular entity, death, only exists in the physical world. Now, as a compensation, it had to be chosen - this can only be hinted at - by supernatural beings to suffer death in order to have a common cause with men, something that could be a compensation for the Luciferian rebellion. To conquer Lucifer, the Divine had to go through death; to do so, it had to descend to earth.

So what happened through the Mystery of Golgotha is a divine matter through which a compensation was created for the Lucifer matter. It is the only divine matter that has taken place before the eyes of men. This unique impulse, which cannot be imagined as anything other than the passing through of the Divine through death on the physical plane and the emanation of the Christ impulse into the spiritual atmosphere of the earth from that point on. This is now regarded by anyone who knows Christianity as the primary essence of that Christianity. In this way, Christianity, understood in a deeper sense, differs from all other religions in that the other religions see the main thing about their origin in some religious founder, in a personality; but that Christianity does not see the essential in the person of Jesus of Nazareth, but sees in this personal founder only the bearer of the Christ impulse, that Christianity sees the essential in a fact. This must be grasped with all possible intensity: in a fact that had to take place as such at some point in the evolution of the earth: in the passing through of the divine through death. That is the special truth of Christianity: that it is not an individuality but a fact, an event, an experience that is placed at the starting point. Of course, it does not matter if someone says to us, “Yes, look, Jesus of Nazareth still has all kinds of passions, all kinds of qualities that a, let us say, according to oriental views, somehow advanced man should no longer have.” That does not matter at all. That is not the point at all. Anyone who allows themselves to be misled by this has no understanding of Christianity, because Christianity is not about Jesus of Nazareth at all, but about the event of Golgotha, about that fact. Let other founders of religions have personal qualities that other peoples like better than those of Jesus of Nazareth! But those who become Buddhists or anthroposophists will realize that in Christianity it is the event of Golgotha that matters, and they will give the Christian back what he has given them. They will say: Just as you yourself admit that there are bodhisattvas who develop as individualities, ascend to the Buddha and then do not need to incarnate again, so we admit that once in the development of man such a passing through of the divine through death has occurred. You admit that there is a shade of truth in our religion, and we admit that there is a shade of truth in yours. — Thus both sides understand each other. They would not understand each other, for example, and discord would be created if Christians came who thought they had become Anthroposophists and said: I don't believe you that a Buddha can no longer appear in a physical body, but I assume that in a certain time the Buddha will appear again in a physical body. - That would be an impossibility for someone who recognizes the essence of Buddhism. It would be impossible to expect the Buddhist to believe that his Buddha could appear in the flesh again. The Buddhist would say: “You do not understand Buddhism.” And it is quite natural and should not be a matter for discussion that just as the person who claims that a Buddha will come again in the flesh does not know Buddhism, so the person who claims that a Christ can come flesh again, who therefore does not realize that it concerns here a unique life of a divine entity on Earth, precisely for the purpose of passing through death on the physical plane, and not something else. So it concerns mutual understanding across the whole Earth, to really grasp each other and thereby establish peace. Discord would be caused if one were to claim to a Buddhist that Buddha would reappear in the flesh; and discord would be caused if one were to claim that the Christ could come again in the flesh. Such things would have to take a deep revenge, for they are impossibilities in view of what really lives in the evolution of mankind. It would be grotesque if anyone were to claim that the Christ had to come again and that people should understand him better now than they did then and should prepare themselves better for him and not kill him: such a person would not know that the killing was crucial and that without it there would be no Christianity at all! The good will to understand really does lead to mutual understanding, and we see how spiritual science can be an instrument for seeking the main core in the individual religious denominations everywhere. If you really want to, you will find it. That is why it is the message of peace for the world. Spiritual science will have to create a cultural soul for the whole world, just as it has given rise to the material cultural body that now extends across the whole earth in industry and commerce. It is precisely by recognizing the diversity that has been given to humanity in the various religious beliefs, and then in turn relating to that which appears to us as the core of truth through spiritual science, that we achieve a kind of synthesis, a unification of the various world views in our time. This should be emphasized with regard to one point.

The aim of the anthroposophically oriented movement that we are pursuing here has never been to present the differences between religious denominations in such a way as to ascribe advantages to one religious denomination and disadvantages to the other. How often has it been said: The spiritual height that was there immediately after the Atlantic catastrophe in the culture of the ancient Indian Rishis has not been reached at all today. It has therefore not been reached by Christianity as it exists today either. We do not indicate advantages and disadvantages, but present the individual religions in their essence. So we also only present when we draw attention to other differences. If we follow the more oriental way of thinking, namely the one that has the most followers, the Buddhist one, you will see one thing: there the main interest of the people is taken up by what is called the passage through the various incarnations. They speak there of a bodhisattva; but a bodhisattva is not one who lives only from the year of birth to the year of death, but one who comes back again and again and then becomes a Buddha; and one speaks of bodhisattvas as if they appeared in various numbers within the development of humanity. One generalizes more, one grasps more the individualities that remain. But how has it been done so far in the Western view? The exact opposite was the case. When people spoke of Socrates, Plato, Raphael, Michelangelo, they were referring to personalities, and here the Western view presents the limited entities as the essential being. This had its good side, because thereby a special education was achieved to chisel out and work out the individual human personalities. This was essentially the case with those views that H. P. Blavatsky, for example, did not understand: the ancient Hebrew and the New Testament views.

One looked, for example, to Elijah. The occult researches about him have something surprising. I need only say that we notice the uniqueness of which makes him a forerunner of what should have happened through the Christ Impulse. He still understands the matter in such a way that the Divine Being is expressed in the National Ego; but he already points out that the most worthy means of recognition lies in the Ego itself. In this respect, Elijah can be seen as a kind of herald of Christianity, and none of the other prophets seems to me to be a herald in the same way as Elijah. There is still a hint of Jehovah in his words, but with him we find Jehovah as close to the human ego as possible. Then we turn our attention to another figure, again as an individual personality, to John the Baptist. We find how he precedes the Christ Impulse, how John the Baptist really presents himself as the one who characterizes the Christ Impulse in words. He says: Change your mind, no longer look to the times of ancient clairvoyance, but seek the Kingdoms of Heaven within your own humanity! — That which the Christ Impulse is in reality: John the Baptist characterizes it. He is a herald of Christianity in a most wonderful way. What lives in the heart of John the Baptist appears to us as a kind of further development, an inner spiritual further development, compared to what lived in Elijah.

We then turn to Raphael and look at him as seemingly a very different figure from John the Baptist; but by looking at Raphael - yes, we just need to immerse ourselves in him a little in a truly human way, and we find in him a herald of Christianity.

Take the following. We turn to a passage from the Acts of the Apostles, the passage where it says: “And Paul came to Athens, and the Athenians gathered around him, and Paul stood before them and said: You women and men of Athens, you have so far worshiped your gods in all kinds of signs; but the Godhead does not live in external signs in reality. You also have an altar, however, on which it says: “To the unknown God!” But I say to you that the unknown God is the one who cannot be indicated by external signs in his true form, but who underlies all that is alive and all that exists. He is the one who lived on earth and was resurrected, the one who, through resurrection, will lead man himself to resurrection.” And further on, the Acts of the Apostles tell us – and we can almost see Paul standing before the Athenians – how some Athenians believed and others did not. Among the former was Dionysius, the Areopagite. Then we look at the painting that hangs in the Camera della Signatura in Rome and was painted by Raphael, and which is called “The School of Athens”. Now let us assume – as was quite natural at the time –

Raphael had before him the passage from the Acts of the Apostles that we have just been discussing. It came to life in him. And now we look at the various Athenians, to whom he gave the faces, and except for the hand movement, we see stepping forward – stepping forward among the Athenians – a figure whom we recognize if we just consider Paul in the Acts of the Apostles.

And so we could go through the most diverse things with Raphael. If we focus on his various Madonnas, we must ask ourselves, however: Isn't one thing strange about Raphael, he is great when he paints the scenes that show the becoming, the growing in the emergence of Christianity, the little Jesus as something that contains the whole of Christianity becoming in the germ. But we do not find Raphael's painting of Judas betraying Christ, nor does he actually paint Christ carrying the cross, because his Christ carrying the cross seems to us to be forced, not at all like Raphael's other works. Instead, we find the Annunciation, the Ascension, that is, the things that point precisely to the emergence of Christianity.

And how did these things speak to people? Yes, they spoke most peculiarly. You know that one of Raphael's most magnificent works is in Dresden: the Sistine Madonna. People who think superficially might think that this is a work of art that was paraded through Germany like a victor. It made no impression on Goethe at all because he had heard how people generally thought about this work. As a young man, Goethe was not yet as sure in his judgment as he was in his old age and was still receptive to what people said. What did the museum officials in Dresden tell him? Well, that the child was ugly in its entirety, that the Madonna had been painted over by an amateur, that the little putti below had been added by some kind of handyman. That was still the attitude towards the Sistine Madonna when Goethe came to Dresden as a young man. But let us see how it is now. Let us consider what Raphael actually has become for people! Raphael worked in Rome at a time when there was much dispute about religious dogmas. The way in which Raphael paints the Christian mysteries is interdenominational. If we take the later great Italian painters, we see the religious mysteries painted in such a way that we recognize: this is the Christianity of the Latin race. Raphael paints in such a way that we are dealing with universal renderings of Christian mysteries that transcend nations. That is why we see how, in a short time, the Sistine Madonna finds its way into the souls even in Protestant areas. And if anthroposophy is to work for the understanding of the Christian mysteries, it will find its way best into those souls in which the feelings live that are won by images like the Sistine Madonna, into those souls that are prepared in this way. And when we say today that Christianity is only at the beginning of its development, that it will only receive its true form through the spiritual key that anthroposophy is able to give, then we know that Raphael stands as a herald for this Christianity.

And again we turn our gaze to yet another figure, taking only what is Western in outlook: we turn to the figure of the German poet Novalis. If we turn to Novalis, we find traces of the purest anthroposophical teaching in every detail; one need only unravel them, so to speak. Thus we see how Novalis is imbued with an anthroposophical Christianity.

We have thus presented four figures as personalities. That was the Western view. Now comes the spiritual-scientific deepening. Through this, people will already experience why, for example, Raphael feels that magnetic attraction to be incarnated into the earth on a Good Friday, in order to outwardly suggest through the birth on Good Friday that he has something to do with the Easter mystery. These things can only be hinted at today; in a few decades people will understand the things that are being asserted in this way, just as they understand scientific facts today: that it is the same individuality that lived in Elijah, John the Baptist, Raphael and Novalis. First they will recognize the personalities, then the individuality as it has passed through them. And now we understand the fourfold heraldry and the ascent in this fourfold heraldry. Now we stand by such a thing quite differently than we used to. Today we already know that the original form of the Stanze in Rome can no longer be seen; they have been spoiled, are no longer as they were painted by Raphael's hand, and only centuries need pass for these things to disappear. Even if the replicas will have a longer life, what created the individuality is dissolved into its atoms. But even if Raphael's physical works are pulverized by the passage of time, we know that the same individuality that created those works was present again in Novalis and brought about, in a different way, what was in him.

Thus we see how today, in addition to what the Western way of looking at things has achieved, the limited vision of personalities is added to individuality; how, in other words, the best that the Western world view has achieved is combined with the best that the Eastern way of looking at things has. This is how time progresses. As humanity progresses and realizes these things, the spiritual world will not remain silent, but will speak to humanity in even the most mundane of phenomena. And so, people will not only have to rise to the spiritual world through a kind of knowledge, but more and more this knowledge will be transformed into a kind of, one might say, experience. But for this to happen, a real spiritual movement is needed today. That such a movement is necessary is evident simply from the fact that people no longer judge even the simplest things in the right way.

Let us single out one detail today. A person who leads a healthy life goes through waking and sleeping in the course of twenty-four hours. We know that when he falls asleep, the physical and etheric bodies remain in bed and the astral and I go out. What then happens to what remains in bed? When the clairvoyant looks back from his astral body at what is happening in the etheric and physical bodies, he sees how a more vegetative life begins, a life that has actually been destroyed by daytime consciousness. Fatigue is compensated for; that is, the etheric body and the physical body now flourish and sprout, and the astral body and the I have been withdrawn. When they submerge again into the physical body and etheric body in the morning, they have to make them tired again; they graze, let wither what has sprouted during the night.

Everything that is in the microcosm is also present in the macrocosm. When we see in spring how the earth lets its greenery shoot out in the plants, how flowers and leaves sprout and how the plants prepare to bear fruit, what do we have there? The one who compares externally will say that the waking up in the morning can be compared to the waking up of nature in spring. But the opposite is true! We have to compare the blossoming in spring with falling asleep. We have to compare the emergence and growth of plants in spring with what happens in the etheric and physical body of a person when they fall asleep. Then, as summer approaches, it becomes more and more alive, as in the human physical and etheric bodies in the middle of the sleep period. And in autumn it becomes as if the human being descends into the physical and etheric body in the morning, in autumn, which causes withering of what has sprouted during spring and summer. One must correctly put together what happens outside and inside; one must not seek external allegories and compare spring with waking up and autumn with falling asleep, but the other way around.

So that we can say: That which is the spirit of the earth goes to sleep in spring and wakes up as earth spirits in autumn and winter. In winter, they are connected to the earth as earth spirits, in order to rise again in spring and summer to the heights of heaven, to the astral heights and to the other side of the earth. When spring comes again, they go back to sleep.

It does not contradict that the earth sleeps once on one half and the other time on the other half. Something similar is also the case with man in a certain respect. The person who follows the processes clairvoyantly sees that in spring it is the same as when a person falls asleep, where the individual spirit withdraws into the astral world; he sees that in spring what we call the earth spirits withdraw into the astral world, and vice versa. Yes, today's humanity – except for those sitting here, who would probably burst out laughing if one were to speak of the falling asleep and waking up of the earth spirits. One believes this humanity; it does everything to prove that it has no idea of the real processes of the world. But it was not always so, not at all, but it was different in the past! There was an old human clairvoyance, and that saw these facts correctly. It was seen that the earth spirits withdraw in spring to go up, so to speak, into cosmic heights. In autumn these spirits descend again. This was recognized in ancient times. It was natural to point out that in the middle of summer there is something like an absence of the actual earth spirit from the earth. Instead, there is an upsurge of the elemental nature spirits, as in a paroxysm, and a lagging behind of what is earthly-bodily on the earth, which thus emerges through the senses. If one wanted to make this clear, one could not do better than to move the Feast of St. John to this time, in order to point out how the sprouting nature spirits and the actual spirits of the earth, which are the I and the astral body of the earth, work.

But what about when winter approaches? Then the earth wakes up, and the astral body and the ego are connected with the earth. That is when we have to move the festivals that primarily relate to the spiritual part of the human being. That is where Christmas has been moved to. And then, when the spirit of the earth moves upwards, which is indicated by Easter, this movement away from the earth, this movement into the astral, was related to the relationship between the sun and the moon.

All these things that we are looking into connect us in a wonderful way with ancient clairvoyance, showing us how, in what has been handed down from ancient times, we have to see something that has to do with ancient human clairvoyance. It is quite natural for the materialistic world view to say that it has only the body to educate, that it says: It is inconvenient for us, especially with regard to cheque transactions and similar things, to have Easter early one year and late the next, and this must be remedied so that trade and industry can get away with it as comfortably as possible. Easter should always be celebrated on the first Sunday in April! — This is only appropriate for the materialistic age, which has no connection with the spiritual world. Just as it is appropriate for materialism to entertain such ideas, it is equally true that a spiritual movement must maintain the connection with humanity's ancient festivals. And we will not hold back in doing what is appropriate for a spiritual worldview, especially with regard to practical activity.

And this should be expressed in what is presented to you in our calendar, which of course appears ridiculous to the outside world, but we do not want to withhold it from them, even if they think we are fools because of it. It is expressed through this calendar that we must maintain the connection with ancient times. In the illustrations for the calendar, which were created by a dear and beloved member of our group, you have a renewal of that which has already become dry and barren: the imaginations that relate to the constellations of the sun and moon and the signs of the zodiac, renewed for the soul of today, given in such a way that you really benefit from it when you look at the sequence of weeks and days. If you ask how you can gain access to such things yourself, then take a look at the Soul Calendar: these meditations are the result of many years of occult research and experience. If you make them effective in the soul, you will see that what is forming in the soul is the connection between the effectiveness of spiritual

worlds in the succession of time. And what we call the Mystery of Golgotha, we have made outwardly, exoterically, so that it does not shock at first glance. We have drawn a circle around it, on which 1912/13 is written, but inwardly the calendar is calculated in such a way that the beginning is marked by the birth of human ego-consciousness, that is, with the Mystery of Golgotha. And besides, the years are counted from Easter to Easter, which is bound to prove rather inconvenient for commercial life, but is necessary for spiritual life.

Thus something is provided that has grown out of our way of thinking and that can be used by everyone, so that by using it they can take a step closer to the spiritual path than can be achieved by any other means.

It will become more and more apparent how the things we undertake within our anthroposophical movement are actually conceived from a unified basic principle and impulse, and how the individual does not owe his existence to a whim, but is placed in such a way that he really fits into our work as a whole as a single building block. For this, of course, it is necessary that more and more individual members also develop an understanding of this collaboration and that we move beyond special interests and special aspirations and focus more on what unites us. Of course, it is understandable that many individual members have special aspirations and special requests, that some would like to bring this or that into the anthroposophical movement. But especially here in this place, where truly selfless cooperation will be necessary if we really want to achieve what we have planned, it must be deeply, deeply rooted in our hearts that we will only have a beneficial effect if we do not assert our special aspirations, but rather what can be integrated into the whole, what is being striven for, as a building block. Otherwise it cannot become a whole. This is so extraordinarily important, and in this respect I believe that the realization of what should have happened there is the basis for studying how the anthroposophical movement should develop.

So today I have tried to present to you some of our anthroposophically oriented views, and we have thus created a kind of substitute for what should have been this time, but could not be because not all the official approvals have been obtained: namely, the laying of the foundation stone of our Johannesbau. But we hope that in the not too distant future we will be able to make up for this. For perhaps in doing so we will also lay the foundation stone for a revival of the anthroposophical movement as we understand it in the West. And if we succeed in doing the right thing in this field, then we will already have provided the proof that we, in all loyalty to the truth, without any inclination towards sensationalism, are making those occult efforts our own which present-day humanity needs for its further development.

The last lectures here were essentially devoted to an examination of the way in which we have to think about the present time consciousness. I then tried for the last time to reach back into earlier periods and to draw attention to the fact that what now lives in the souls has actually been preparing itself within Western civilization for a very long time. Today I would like to highlight some episodes from the immediate present that may draw your attention to how a spiritual life must necessarily arise out of the general consciousness of the times, simply out of the necessity inherent in the development of humanity. We can say: Wherever we observe man, whether in the West of present civilization, in the Middle or in the East, everywhere, on closer examination of the times, it can become clear to us how, without the onset of a spiritual impulse, things simply can no longer go on.

Today, we want to take a look at the last fifty years of Central European spiritual development, so as to prepare for tomorrow and the day after tomorrow, by considering the characteristics of the beginning and the end. I will do this symptomatically. I will characterize some things at the beginning and at the end of these last fifty years.

If we go back to the beginning of the 1870s, we find a wide range of spiritual phenomena that indicate the state of the human soul at the time. I will highlight a few of these spiritual phenomena. In 1872 and 1873, for example, there was a sensational novel that was closely related to the trends of the time. These things are actually forgotten for the younger people in our time, but the novel I mean is one that did indeed capture the imagination in an extraordinarily incisive way fifty years ago. I am talking about Paul Heyse's “Children of the World”. Paul Heyse, who was a famous writer of novellas at the time, wanted to use this novel to depict a number of personalities in their lives, all of whom were already imbued with a certain vague religiosity, but who had at the same time fallen away from some religious denomination or other. So, the children of God, whom, I might say, Paul Heyse saw in the traditional terminology of belonging to some denomination, he wanted to contrast with the children of the world, who belonged to no denomination, who, as they were said at the time, were without religious affiliation, but who nevertheless had a certain tendency towards embracing a religious belief. Now I do not want to talk too much about this novel itself, but I would like to draw attention to how such a work, which thus portrays people who are undenominational, made an impression in those days.

I have often mentioned my old friend and teacher Karl Julius Schröer before. He had the peculiarity of following intellectual phenomena as they made their impact in broader social life. Karl Julius Schröer characterized the effect of Paul Heyse's “Children of the World” by saying that it was extraordinarily strange how this novel was passed around fifty years ago, how it interested everyone, interested in how this novel actually gave people the idea that they had never thought about before: that they had no connection to any positive religious belief and that their religious search did not stop at any particular religious belief. And Schröer made the extraordinarily interesting comment at the time that people who had previously taken part in the religious practices of their church, who had thus gone along with their old religious practices, the customs of their church, out of habit, that such people said that this work actually expresses their innermost convictions. And then Schröer concludes with a sentence that is actually interesting: that in the face of such an apparition, religious disputes appear as an anachronism, as something that no longer fits into the present – he is referring to the present at the beginning of the 1970s – because people have already moved beyond them in their thinking. But as I said, although all this is true, we must still say: the people who are described there have lost all connection with any of the existing faiths, but there is a certain trait in them that allows them to find some kind of religiosity. They just can't find it. They go through the world without any religious affiliation, unable to find a connection to a spiritual world through religious feeling.

If we now look from such a phenomenon, which took place more within the literary-belletristic life, into the lecture halls, we find that it is roughly the same time in which the conviction of an extraordinary number of people within science was expressed by Du Bois-Reymond with the “Limits of Natural Knowledge”, which I have already mentioned frequently. In this famous lecture, which Du Bois-Reymond gave in 1872, it is stated that certain knowledge is only possible if one follows and penetrates the external phenomena of nature through experiment and observation, to a kind of mathematical-mechanical thinking about the structure of the world, to a kind of mechanism, an atomistic mechanism of the world. Science does not go beyond such a comprehension of the world, everything else must be left to faith. But if one had asked the people who spoke in this way at the beginning of the 1970s, such as Du Bois-Reymond in his “Grenzen des Naturerkennens” (The Limits of Natural Knowledge), how people should now seek their way into spiritual worlds in a religious way, no answer would have been forthcoming. There would only have been a comment, very similar to the comments made by the people in Paul Heyse's “Children of the World” who are described as having no religious affiliation.

Now it must be said that all those people who took part in the life that one calls educated, who absorbed something of scientific thought, who adopted something from other schools of thought, who lived in that time, were actually all more or less in a certain frame of mind. Whether they continued to practice their old religions or not depended essentially on old habits, on all kinds of prejudices and the like, and not on a strict and rigorous assertion of what the Zeitbewußtsein would have given to souls. In the last fifty years, people have actually lived in an indefinite, fickle relationship to the spiritual world. But we can also find something similar in other areas. A few years before the publication of Heyses “Children of the World” and Du Bois-Reymonds “Limits of Natural Knowledge”, the famous art writer Herman Grimm published “The Invincible Powers”, which is also a novel. In it, the prejudices and differences between social classes that dominate people in Western civilization are presented as invincible powers. And in an interesting way, this novel contrasts the differences in class and rank within Western civilization with what developed from certain, I would say unhistorical, habits in America as a new life, as a life that did not have to struggle in the same way with class differences and class prejudices. And it is interesting how Herman Grimm, at the end of the 1860s, that is, also about half a century ago, describes how, despite everything, European man, despite all his liberalism, despite all his humanism, does not have the strength to truly overcome class differences. These are insurmountable forces for him.

If you want to go deeper and ask yourself: Why are such things insurmountable forces for the European man? then one cannot get any other answer than this: because thinking, which in the case of the European has assumed a certain passive character, the thinking that I have characterized when, for example, I spoke about Richard Wahle, that thinking extends only to “events” and does not want to go into the primal factors, that therefore does not want to grasp forces but only wants to grasp appearances, because this thinking has dominated precisely the decisive people in the last fifty years. With such thinking, which has no power in itself, which is actually only a thinking, one might say, in powerless thought images, with such thinking one simply cannot overcome what has arisen in reality as class differences and class prejudices. What was needed was a thinking imbued with reality, a thinking permeated by reality. And this thinking permeated by reality, which once created the differences in social standing, which once created everything socially real, this dynamic thinking, in contrast to mere descriptive thinking, has actually been completely lost to people within European civilization over the last fifty years. It was absent from their science, which was therefore based only on observation and experiment; but it was also absent from their lives, so they continued to reproduce what had arisen from old habits based on old class prejudices. They did not think about it any further. Because if they had wanted to think about it, they would have needed active thinking. And when the proletarian class began to consider class differences, then this weak thinking, which contains no dynamism, was completely abandoned. It was said: these class differences do not come from forces that would have been within human thinking, but only from economic, physical forces. A conclusion was simply drawn.

There you have the situation at the starting point of our modern intellectual life fifty years ago. And now I want to present to you a work that was published recently and that is characteristic of our time, namely Werfel's “Mirror Man”. There you have something that has been born out of certain forces of our time, just as the “Children of the World” or the “Invincible Powers” were born out of the time of fifty years ago.

So what is the situation for people like Werfel today? In recent decades, this weak and anemic thinking has been at work. People have somehow sought something of a religious context, of a connection with a spiritual world, but nothing has emerged. But human nature cannot remain one-sided in the long run. It can do so in the development of world history for about fifty years, but then a reaction of human nature begins again. In a certain way, it wants to strive for something more powerful – if we stick with the last fifty years – than the powerless and insipid thinking was. Now, quite a few contemporary works already bear witness to this striving for a more powerful grasp of reality, but Werfel's 'Spiegelmensch' is particularly illustrative of this.

Werfel's “Mirror Man” compels us to speak about the present in this way: for long enough, people have sought their way in an indefinite, weak and impotent manner to something that makes man a full human being in the first place. Now an indefinite inner feeling asserts itself on the paths that have been taken in the last fifty years and which are actually not paths at all, but slippery passageways on which one continually slips. Nothing can really be achieved on these slippery passageways; one must get some iron into one's blood again. From such a striving for the times, something like this “mirror man” has emerged. Let us sketch with just a few lines what is depicted in this “mirror man”. It is not my intention to sin against the artistic by characterizing what is in this mirror man. But that is not the point at all; rather, we will see immediately afterwards that what I am about to say also touches on the artistic.

We see here a half-grown human being who has grown tired of the outer life as it can be led today. He takes leave of this outer life and now actually wants to become human. For he admits to himself that within the ordinary life, as we live it today, both in Asian and European and American civilization, one cannot really become human. You get up in the morning, have breakfast and do something to maintain yourself within the social order, you eat lunch or receive your guests and say things that perhaps need not be said, that ultimately do not aim to achieve much more than to make the lips move, that are not idle; you take your guests for a walk or whatever else you do today. You can't become a person in such company – I'm not quoting verbatim, I'm just characterizing. It is necessary to try a different path if you want to become a person. And so this “hero” – to use the old aesthetic style – tries to become a person by seeking admission to a monastery. But he is told that this is something extraordinarily difficult. I do not want to characterize the details, but only point out what is important to me today. He is therefore informed that it is something extraordinarily difficult and that, above all, he must be clear about the fact that he has to go through three stages of knowledge. In the first stage of knowledge, he would have to become clear about the human being's position in the world, insofar as this position is contained in the human ego itself. So this life in the ego and this striving to overcome the ego as the first level of knowledge. The second view of the world would consist in the fact that, after one begins to shed the ego in a certain sense, one no longer sees the world from one's prejudiced point of view, as one used to do before, when one had not even begun to shed the ego. And the third vision would be where man would truly penetrate into the world and its reality, not as seen by man living in his ego. He is told this. And he is admonished in the appropriate way not to want such an incarnation too urgently. He is made aware of the difficulties. But he does not back down.

So he is initiated in the appropriate way. The initiation takes place – I will mention only the essentials – by being led into solitude for the night, into a room where only a monk watches over him. And there, after he has initially abandoned himself to his thoughts, he falls into a brief sleep, from which he very soon believes he will wake up. And now he finds himself in the room whose one wall has a mirror on it. In this mirror he sees himself, and he is amazed at what is meant. It is meant that when one, after a collection of thoughts and after such a strong decision as this person has made, steps in front of his own reflection, one sees oneself in a different way. So it is actually pointed out that the person is only now beginning to see himself. The mirror image looks so similar to him, but yet again somewhat different. And by doing what must follow from such a surprising experience: by striking the mirror, believing that he has wounded himself, the mirror man steps out of the mirror towards him, that is, that of him which, in a certain respect, is himself and yet again not himself.

Now the person has arrived at the first step of knowledge. He must get used to not only going through the world as a person without ego consciousness, but also to having that which is himself and yet not completely himself, his mirror-person, accompany him. In the company of this mirror-man, who now tempts him to do all kinds of things in the outer world, lies a new encounter with world phenomena, with his own deeds, in that he finds himself precisely in the presence of his own ego.

Now, I do not want to go into the details. The person in question is actually lying in bed, but he goes through what he can go through according to his previous experiences of external world experiences and external actions. These are not always very nice. But how someone describes something like that depends on their own taste. You can see from the way the author describes things how he feels about such a case. People also experience the world according to their tastes. So we are led through the experiences of the world. Just as Mephisto in Faust has something of the driving force, this mirror man is now always the driving force, and he is led from event to event, being made to do many wrongs. Everything appears to him in a new light, because he has looked into the mirror and seen himself. He now sees one thing after another in the world. He sometimes sees things as they appear to him because he is an ego-person, and sometimes as they appear to him after he is already able to see his reflection. He becomes more and more familiar with the phenomena of the world. In the process, he comes out of his ego more and more. The mirror-man, who is rather slight at first, becomes fatter and fatter. This is a polar-parallel phenomenon, which is not uninteresting. And so this person now lives through the world by experiencing in a different way what he could have experienced earlier, now that he has seen his own self. And in the end he has become so entangled in the experiences of the world that he has to become his own judge, condemning himself to death, which is again very characteristic. He finds that he cannot really live in the world.

When he entered the monastery, he realized that it is impossible to live in today's society if you want to become a human being. This has increased to such an extent that now, when he has become his own judge, he condemns himself to death. And now he awakens. In a sense, he awakens from the execution of his own death sentence. He is again in the same room where he was. Now he looks at the mirror again. But by looking now, he notices, for example, that the mirror does not reflect a procession of monks passing by. Earlier, when he looked into the mirror, he saw himself and everything in front of the mirror. But now a procession of monks is passing by and is not reflected. He realizes from this that he is not standing in front of a mirror now, but that the mirror has become a window. He looks through it and sees out into the wide world, sees the landscape. He has attained the third vision. Now he sees the world, whereas at the beginning he saw only what the mirror gave. Because he had the mirror man at his side, he saw what he had seen before in a different way. But now, as it were, he sees through the surface of things - that is how it is presented - out into the free reality. It is, of course, implied that he now also sees out into the spiritual reality.

So we have a trilogy before us: the first is the mirror, the third is, let us say, the window. The mirror has become the window. So there we have the two polar opposite views of the world. At first, everyone sees in the other 'their own reflection', sees only what they already have within themselves in the other, where they are caught up in their own ego, and thus sees only their own reflection everywhere in their neighbor or in anything they see in nature. Finally, after breaking through the mirror, they no longer see the mirror, but through the surface of things into the spiritual. And in between

where the two merge into one another:

1. The mirror
2. One into the other
3. The window

Now, I would like to point out two characteristic features of this drama. The first is this: we see that there is a desire to depict a person in the process of rising to a certain religious connection with another world. That the first part, the mirror, is short, one can forgive, because it is very interesting to see how the person lives into an insight into his own ego, so that this ego becomes so concrete to him that it now accompanies him through his experiences in the world. The middle part is quite detailed, and a great many experiences are described. In order to find these appealing at all, one must have a taste, one could even say sometimes, distaste, for them. But as I said, everyone has to do it according to their own taste. In any case, this part, where one looks into the experiences of the world, is very long. But the third part is quite short, and what is seen out there is actually only hinted at, I would say symbolically, by looking through the window; nothing real comes into view. It is quite short, this third part. That is the one peculiarity I would like to emphasize. But the other peculiarity is this: one must recognize that here is the most beautiful expression of the striving to pour strength and energy into thinking. But one also sees that the modern man, of the kind that Werfel is, cannot do that at first. Why? Yes, it is very peculiar. When I had finished reading this drama – and I read with the greatest interest, I must say, because it is extremely significant for our present spiritual life as represented by individual personalities – I had to say the following to myself: the process is as follows: 1. Der Spiegel; 2. Eins ins andere; 3. Das Fenster. But one could also read the whole thing backwards from front to back. Of course, it would have to be rewritten, but one could also read the whole thing backwards from front to back. Because why? It is entirely possible to understand the matter in such a way that one says to oneself: the way a person initially relates to the world is how things appear to him. He is no different from the things. He has not awakened to his sense of self. He stands before the window, looks out into the world. Now we could say that the old monk, to whom he has now come and to whom he says that he can no longer bear it, that everything is always only inside, what he sees through the window, that he wants to find himself – that the old man now says to him: Yes, there are three views to go through. The first view shows us the world without our finding our ego in it. We lose ourselves to the world. The second view allows us to gain something of the ego, and then, gradually, a multitude of beings comes towards us from the world. The world is brought to life, spiritualized. We used to see it as spiritless, now the world is spiritualized. Everywhere, from every being, from plants, animals, clouds and so on, something spiritual comes towards us. Many spiritual beings come towards us in this second part. In the third part, we wake up. We step in front of the window, we look out. But we see everything anew, because now we see the real world for the first time. The window has been transformed into a mirror, the human being has come to himself. He unites all these mirror beings that have come to meet him in the world of plants, animals, clouds; they are in his only self, which has become cosmic to him. And now, by recognizing himself, he actually sees the cosmos for the first time.

You could easily describe the whole thing backwards, the last part of the trilogy first, then the middle part, then the part with which it started. That is extremely interesting, because it is precisely this that makes this drama particularly characteristic of the present. What is the peculiarity of intellectualism?

Yes, the peculiarity of intellectualism is this: you can start with the idea anywhere and stop anywhere, and you can assert one thing and you can assert another – I have emphasized this many times. In terms of thought, you can prove anything, in terms of thought you can refute anything. Intellectualism, which is nothing more than a system of vapid and feeble thoughts, allows you to start anywhere and go somewhere, but you will stop at a certain point. But you can also start at this latter point and go the other way.

Today, one can be a very clever person and a gross materialist, because materialism can be quite well proven in an intellectual way. And if one is purely intellectual, one can, in the way it happened after our anthroposophical congress in Vienna at a meeting, one can, from the standpoint of today's monism, quite intellectually lead the fight against the spirit. One can prove very well that materialism is right. But one can also want to be a spiritualist and prove this just as well. All these things, as long as one lives only in the intellectual, can be proved quite well, and they have the appearance of tremendous cogency, these intellectualistic discussions.

And so it is in our time. People do not suspect, as they become entangled in spiritualism, materialism, realism, idealism, that they are becoming entangled in the intellectual spirit. They rightly feel: this can be firmly proven. They are the creatures of intellectualism. Because it is indeed true that things can be proved, that is why it is so dismal when one is obliged today to seriously discuss something based on reality, and then 'free discussion' is set up. One person says this, another says that, a third says something else. Basically, if you are just a little bright, you can say: they are all right. Of course, they are all equally wrong. The whole point of the talk is, after all, that one or the other sees what a tremendous swindle of one's own self it is to live in intellectualism, because with intellectualism, everything can be easily proven. The only thing that matters is that one has immersed oneself long enough in some direction or current, in some sect or party or something else, then one can quite rightly say: Yes, that's all clear; the other one who claims the opposite is an idiot. - Certainly, but the other one can just as easily prove that the first one is an idiot and his own claim is correct. Today, with the configuration that intellectual life has attained, this is perfectly possible and is taken for granted. And so it is a matter of course that one can write such a piece today without arriving at a real spiritual insight. The fact that Werfel is not approached proves that nothing significant is seen through the window; the spiritual insight would only begin if something significant were seen through the window. But if you merely describe three steps, and then, after describing how he woke up and looked out, you do not describe what he sees, if you make so many concessions to the general consciousness that you can write such a “Mirror Man” and still say something reasonable in response to something like “Occult Science in Outline” or “How to Attain Knowledge of Higher Worlds” or the like: If one has to say that one would not be in one's right mind if one accepted it, and if one can only say: Yes, the person in question has arrived at the window, but I am wary of seeing what one sees when looking out through the window, then one is simply not yet ready to immerse oneself in the real spiritual life, then one is simply completely stuck in intellectualism.

That is why I was allowed to speak in this way. Of course, one would not have the right to give a philosophical critique of a work of art. But I did not give a philosophical critique at all; what I said is just as much an artistic view. Because it happens to you, you read a trilogy, read it with the utmost interest. Afterwards, when you're done, you suddenly feel upside down! It's an uncomfortable feeling, and to get back on your feet again, you would have to rewrite the whole story from back to front. It would take a very long time before you could finally work your way back to your feet, to your footing. Yes, it is quite true that one is also artistically cheated by becoming aware: in there is the spinning wheel of intellectualism, while the work of art must indeed make a beautiful impression. You cannot reverse that. Try to turn Goethe's “Faust” around, to start writing from the back to the front. You cannot! A work of art cannot be turned around. Here in this work you can, because the intellectualism predominates, because it has not penetrated to the real looking. Intellectualism has indeed received the vague, unconscious feeling that there must be juice and strength in the thoughts, but in reality neither juice nor strength has entered, there is nothing in it. There is only a pattern of a more real inner experience in it. And so we see just from something that is really full of spirit, which is extremely significant in terms of what our time can bring forth, where the path must go.

For fifty years it has been the case that people actually feel: they must go in the direction of something spiritual, but they would avoid the real path. So they take something out of all kinds of old traditions, like the three-part path and the like. But it is characteristic that today they take up this three-part path; you can find it in all kinds of books that describe some old atavistic clairvoyant paths.

As long as one refrains from accepting what one sees when looking through the window, this story of “mirror” and “one into the other” and “through the window” can very easily still be part of our spiritual life. It is easy to describe if one only has such general ideas about it. But as long as you stop at that, you still can't get out of intellectualism, which holds the people of the present day captive with a tremendous magic.

I have pointed out this intellectual element in our time in the most diverse forms. I have pointed out how one could get into all kinds of branches in the Theosophical Society, and there were great schemes, races and rounds, whole world systems and all kinds of things were built up in wonderfully intellectual forms - all intellectual! On the other hand, when it was a matter of characterizing the structure of the human being, there was a scheme: physical man: dense physical matter; etheric body: finer matter; astral body: even finer; kama manas: even finer; manas: even finer, ever finer and finer. Yes, but only from the intellectual point of view! This thinning out did not stop at all! But it is just purely intellectual. Just as you can always turn a wheel, you can, if you just stick to the intellectual, let matter become thinner and thinner. And so we had an intellectualized theosophy, and so we have here an intellectualized poetry that even borders on mysticism and that will certainly be admired by a great many of our contemporaries, and rightly so, because one can see from such poetry how the striving of our time is again turning towards something spiritual.

But my judgment is not an unartistic one. When I look at this mirror man who accompanies the hero throughout his entire evolutionary life, this mirror man is something completely different than Mephisto in relation to Faust. There is life in Faust. You know, I once showed how Mephisto is ultimately only the other side of Faust, like Wagner. “You resemble the spirit you comprehend, not me.” You resemble Wagner, you resemble Mephisto, and so on. But there is life in it. But it is not yet life when the self jumps out of the mirror, is initially frail and then becomes fatter and fatter as the person himself grows more and more out of life.

In short, what dominates from beginning to end is the inanimate, the abstract. The abstract can always be turned around. And because nowhere in the artistic work can one feel a full-blooded, intense contemplation, but everywhere one sees only thought-patterns blown up into images, one feels an unartistic quality. And it is strange that in the present day, this is often defended by saying: Anthroposophy, yes, that is only the pursuit of ideas, and that is not artistic. But in Anthroposophy, the aim is to gain insight, only one must really be prepared for this insight. One must look through a window and see something. But here, the actual artistic is called something that has not quite hatched, that is just about to hatch from the egg, but is content to remain in the egg. You know what I mean, that the chicken does not really hatch from the egg to live in the world. It is as if man wants to begin a journey of knowledge, but still avoids the spiritual world in all its concreteness and certainty. I don't want to say how the egg feels when the chicken just can't get out! But isn't it true that it is just the same with such intellectual products that don't really get out.

This is not to say anything against the value of such things. In the sense of the present I actually see something of the very first order in this mirror-man. But from a higher point of view it must be characterized and placed in the spiritual life, in the whole cultural life of the present, as I have tried to sketch it.

The waking state is, of course, what we know most directly, but it is not within this familiar realm that the riddles of existence are actually revealed. If the solution to the riddles of life could be found in the waking state, as it serves us in our ordinary lives and in ordinary science, then these riddles would not actually exist, because they would be constantly being revealed. Man would never come to ask the question. That man asks: What are the deeper reasons for life? That he may not arrive at an exact formulation of this question of the riddle of life, but that from the depths of his soul he has the longing to know something that is not answered by ordinary consciousness , testifies to the fact that something comes up from the depths of the human soul, that is, in a more or less unconscious way, something that belongs to the human being but that must first be sought if it is to come to clear consciousness. And this leads those who observe life less to speculate and develop all kinds of philosophies. Such philosophies then ultimately remain unsatisfactory. But anyone who looks at the phenomena of life with a certain impartiality must realize that in the other state, the state opposite to waking, the state of sleep, something is veiled, and that an understanding of sleep could lead to an understanding of life. We have often discussed such things; but these things must be returned to again and again from the most diverse points of view, for anthroposophy can only be grasped if one tries to grasp it from the most diverse sides.

Now, out of sleep, the dream life surges up first. The dream life proceeds in images. One can very soon notice, when one begins to observe this dream life, that the images do indeed point to something in life, in ordinary conscious life. Even if one can often say that things are dreamed that one has not experienced in this way, I would like to say that the pieces from which the dream is composed, the pieces of images, are of course nevertheless taken from ordinary consciousness. But the drama of the dream, the way in which the dream builds up its tensions, how it can evoke inner feelings of fear, inner feelings of joy, feelings of momentum, is something else. What the course of the dream images means goes even deeper into human nature, and one can see this if one considers the following.

You dream that you are walking along a path and come to a mountain. You enter a mountain cave. At first it is still dark. It gets darker. But an unknown urge causes you to keep going. Anxiety sets in. This all increases until you are finally in a state of fear, let's say, of falling into an inner abyss. You can awaken from this state of fear by continuing to experience this state of fear during awakening.

You can also dream that you are standing somewhere and see a person coming from afar. He comes closer and closer, but he has a terrible expression. And as he gets closer, you realize that he intends to attack you. Your anxiety grows. He comes ever closer. He may transform the initially harmless instrument that he showed you from afar – after all, dreams are transformers – into a terrible murder weapon. Your anxiety increases again to fear, and you now wake up with this fear, which in turn continues into the waking life of the day.

These are two very different images. One time it is a series of images that takes you into the interior of a mountain, the other time it is a series of images that is associated with an approaching enemy. The soul can go through the same thing, even though the two series of images are quite different. What the soul goes through is something quite different from what consciousness experiences when waking up. One could say that it is not the images that are important at all, but rather how the soul undergoes a certain inner drama: how the soul initially has an urge, or how something comes to the soul instead of the urge, but how this then transitions into anxiety, into fear, and then, in a sense, causes the person to shake themselves out of sleep and into ordinary consciousness. What is important is the increasing forces behind the dream, which are not perceived themselves, but which clothe themselves in images. And the two series of images that I have characterized could be multiplied many times over; the same soul content could clothe itself in ten, twenty, a hundred different images. We must therefore say: there is something - if I draw schematically - that takes place in the soul (blue, green. See drawing on page 46). But what takes place in the soul, the human being does not notice; he does not know it. What he does know are images. I draw them schematically on it (yellow). These images are then experienced by the person in his consciousness of the dream. But what matters is the escalation: weak anxiety, stronger anxiety, greatest fear. The dream images are more or less taken from life, because both the mountain and the mountain cave, everything is basically borrowed from life. The enemy that approaches is borrowed from life, his weapon is borrowed from life. The images take their content from life. But that is only the clothing. If, through what I have often characterized as the imaginative consciousness, you have the opportunity to go beyond this clothing, not to form images at all, but to remain here in the soul forces, which are anxiety, fear, and extreme fear, to remain with the imaginative consciousness, if you are able to form images within, then something completely different comes about.

Because when you are asleep, you are initially outside of your etheric body and physical body, with only your ego and your astral body. When you wake up, if you are in a normal state, you enter your etheric body very quickly – you pass through it very quickly – and then immediately enter your physical body. But if you are in some abnormal state and do not enter the physical body immediately, but enter the etheric body before entering the physical body, that is, enter the etheric body first, then these images from life are formed. For in ordinary consciousness, the human being has no perception in sleep itself, and only at the moment when he either penetrates into his body and passes through the etheric body does he receive images, or when he goes out of the physical body while falling asleep but still remains in the etheric body, then he has dream images again. So only in these intermediate states do such dream images form, which are taken from life.

But imaginative consciousness leads to the fact that one can live completely outside of the body in that which stands there as the forces of the soul behind the dream. And then one lives in another reality. Then one lives in the world in which man is from falling asleep to waking up. Man lives from falling asleep to waking up in a world in which he becomes unconscious. You can imagine it as if a person were to submerge in water and lose consciousness, and only regain it when the water carries him out and releases him again. The same thing that happens physically also happens to the soul when a person falls asleep. He submerges into the spiritual world. There he loses consciousness. He leaves his body with his soul and loses consciousness. When he wakes up, he reappears and regains consciousness. But reappearing means entering the body. And if, as I said, one does not immediately enter one's body, but still notices the transition in the etheric body, then the dream images arise. But if one does not get involved in this and need not get involved in getting such dream images, but if one gets images entirely outside of the physical body in the spiritual world itself, then not just any images come out, but images come out that you can find as a description of the evolution of the world in my “Occult Science”. And everything that is presented as I have presented it in my “Occult Science” has this origin, which I am now characterizing for you.

If you ask yourself: What is actually written in this “Occult Science”?, then you will say to yourself: Well, thoughts are in it. You can also think about it. I always emphasize that again, with common sense you can think about all of this. Thoughts are in it, but they are not ordinary thoughts. They are the thoughts that are creatively active in the world outside. Man can live in these thoughts when he stands beyond the threshold that leads into the spiritual world. Man can live in these thoughts that work on the world. It is the first thing he finds when he enters the supersensible world.

These are not dream images, because, as I have explained to you, dream images come about in a completely different way. Instead, they are experiences in the spiritual world. I would like to say: Imagine a person who is asleep. During sleep, the most comprehensive and intense processes take place in the soul. The person is unconscious during sleep and is therefore unaware of them. In the morning he enters his physical body, and immediately he is immersed in it. He uses his eyes, sees colors and light, he uses his ears, hears sounds, and so on, and thus he becomes conscious. But there is this intermediate state: he does not immediately enter the physical body, he enters the etheric body. Then he has a dream or dreams. But imagine if a person became conscious before he even entered his etheric body. He would become conscious while still in the outer ether that fills the whole world. Then he becomes aware of what is described in my “Geheimwissenschaft.”

If, for example, you became conscious in the middle of the night without returning to your physical body, so that the physical body emerged next to you and you saw it – because you could see it then – then you perceived this cosmology, then you perceived what I described in my Secret Science. I may call what I have described: the formative forces of the world, or even world thoughts.

This presents itself in such a way that one can say how one otherwise has individual thoughts in daily life: the earth came into being in such and such a way, used to have a moon existence, a sun existence, a Saturn existence; in short, everything that I have described in my “Occult Science”.

But this way of perceiving in the spiritual world is only one of three. When a person looks at his state of daytime consciousness, he knows that in this state of daytime consciousness he can distinguish between thinking, feeling and willing. But just as the day-consciousness has these three states, thinking, feeling and willing, so also the night-consciousness, which in the case of the ordinary person is unconsciousness, has three states. One does not always sleep in the same state from falling asleep to waking up, just as one does not always wake in the same state. One wakes by thinking, or also by feeling, or also by willing. One can wake in three states, and likewise one can sleep in three states. For the fact that someone who has imaginative consciousness sees the world-forming forces, the formative forces of the world, comes only from the fact that he has acquired a consciousness of them, a knowledge of them. But every person falls asleep in these formative forces of the world, in the thoughts of the world. Just as you submerge when you jump into the water, so when you fall asleep you initially submerge in the formative forces of the world.

But in addition to this life in the formative forces of the world, there are two other states for the sleeping state, just as there are feeling and willing in addition to thinking for waking. When we consider thinking, having thoughts, in sleep this corresponds to life in the formative forces of the world. This means that when you become aware of the lightest state of sleep, then in this lightest state of sleep you live in the formative forces of the world. It is as if you were swimming through the universe from one end to the other, moving through thoughts, but these are forces. This is the lightest sleep, where you move in the thought-forces of the world. But there is a deeper sleep, a sleep from which, if one does not do special soul exercises, one cannot bring anything into one's daily life through dreams. One can only bring something into one's daily life from the lightest sleep through dreams. But then the dreams, as I have described to you, are not decisive as images, because the same dream can take on the most diverse images. But even the lightest sleep can lead to dreams, that is, one can bring something into consciousness, one can at least sense that one has experienced something during sleep. But one can only sense from this lightest sleep that one has experienced something.

Only those who attain an inspired consciousness can know anything of the deeper sleep. Such a one then perceives more than just what I have described in my “Occult Science”. In this “Occult Science” I have, to be sure, described some of what comes through from the inspired consciousness, but let us just realize what can only be described through anthroposophy – what the transition is like in experience from the quiet sleep to the deeper sleep, to the sleep from which the person in ordinary life can bring back no dreams.

When sleep is so quiet that one can bring back dreams in ordinary life, then the person who can look into these worlds sees the surging, weaving thought images, the imaginations of the world that reveal the secrets of the world to him, which reveal to him which world the human being belongs to, except for the one in which he is with his consciousness from the moment he wakes up until he falls asleep. For what I have described in my “Occult Science” is not something that is merely painted on a surface, but is in perpetual motion, in perpetual activity. But from a certain moment on, images begin to appear in this world, which every person experiences in a quiet sleep – they just do not know about it. These images become clear, they increase their splendor, they reveal certain underlying essences. They subside again, these images. Once again, one has nothing in consciousness but a kind of feeling that the images have been dulled. Then the images appear again. But while the images become more active and then fade away, something occurs that can be called the harmony of the spheres, a kind of cosmic music occurs, but a cosmic music that does not merely live in melody and harmony, but that represents the deeds and actions of those beings that inhabit the spiritual world, the deeds of the angels, the archangels, the elemental forces, and so on.

In a sense, you can see the beings moving on the surging sea of images, directing the world from the spirit. It is the world perceived through inspiration, the second world. I can call them the appearances of spiritual world beings. And this world, this world of manifestation of the spiritual beings of the spiritual world, is just as much the second element of sleeping as feeling is the second element of waking. So that during sleep man not only enters into the world which the thoughts of the world present, but within these surging world thoughts the deeds of the beings of the spiritual world are revealed.

But now, in addition to these two states of sleep, there is a third one. Most of the time, people have no idea about this third state of sleep. They usually know that they have a light sleep, and they also know that dreams reveal themselves from this light sleep. That he has a dreamless sleep, he notices. But that there is a third kind of sleep, that is something that people become aware of at most when they feel when waking up: there was something very heavy in them during sleep, it is something that they must first overcome in the first hours when they are awake again. I am quite sure that a number of you are familiar with this state in the morning, when you know that you have not slept in the usual way, but that there was something within you that leaves you with a certain heaviness that you first have to overcome over a longer period of time when you are conscious in the morning. This points to a third kind of sleep, the content of which can only be grasped by intuitive consciousness. And this third kind of sleep has a great significance for the human being.

When a person is in the lightest sleep, he actually experiences much of what he otherwise goes through when awake. He still participates, albeit in a different way, in his breathing. He still participates, if not from the inside, then from the outside, in his blood circulation and in the other bodily processes. When a person is in the second type of sleep, they no longer participate in physical life, but one could say that they participate in a world that is common to their body and soul. Something still passes over from the body into the soul. Something passes over, as light passes into the plant when the plant develops in the light during the day. But when a person is in the third phase of sleep, there is something in him that has become, if I may say so, like a mineral. The salts in his body are particularly strongly deposited. There are strong salt deposits in the physical body during this third phase of sleep. But in return, the human being is connected with his soul to the mineral world within.

Imagine you could do the following experiment: you go to bed, first fall into the light sleep, from which dreams can come out for the ordinary consciousness, then you fall into the deeper sleep, from which no dreams come, but which still leaves the soul of the person in a connection with the physical body. But now you are sleeping in a way that there are strong salt deposits in your body. You cannot have a relationship in your soul to what is going on in your body. But if you had placed a rock crystal on the nightstand next to you, you could be completely inside the rock crystal with your soul. You would slip into the rock crystal and perceive it from within. You cannot do that in the first or second kind of sleep. In the first kind of sleep, the content of which can enter into dreams, if you dream of the rock crystal, you would still experience it as a kind of rock crystal. You would experience something shadowy, but still something rock-crystal-like. If you sank down into the second kind of sleep, you would no longer experience the rock crystal in such a limited way. If you were still able to dream — you usually cannot, but let us assume that you could — then you would experience that the rock crystal becomes indistinct and forms into a kind of sphere or ellipsoid and then withdraws again. But if you could dream, that is, if you could access intuition from the deep sleep, from the third kind of sleep, then you would experience the rock crystal in such a way that you feel as if you are running along these lines inside, then running towards the tip, then running back again: you then experience the rock crystal within. You inhabit it. And so for other minerals. And not only do you experience the form, you also experience the inner forces. In short, the third type of sleep is something that brings the human being completely out of his body and completely into the spiritual world. During this third type of sleep, the human being stands in the third kind of world, in the essence of the spiritual world itself. That is to say, you are surrounded by the essence of the angels, the archangels, all those beings that one otherwise perceives only externally, that is, only in their revelations. You see, if you apply your sense consciousness from waking to sleeping, you see, so to speak, the external revelations of the gods in nature. During sleep, you enter either into the world of images in the lightest sleep, or in the second type of sleep into the world of appearances, into the world of revelations, or else, when you come to the third type of sleep, into the inner being of the divine spiritual entities themselves.

Thus, just as man lives himself out during the day through thinking, feeling and willing, so he lives himself out during sleep, either by flowing into the thoughts of the world, or by the deeds of the divine spiritual beings being revealed to him out of the thoughts of the world, or but these entities themselves take up the human being, so that he, as it were, rests with his soul in them. Just as thinking or imagining is the brightest, clearest, most distinct for the day-consciousness, just as feeling is somewhat duller - because feeling is actually always a kind of dreaming - and how willing, the most dull state of consciousness during the day, is, in a sense, a sleeping, so we have three states of sleep: the sleeping state in which ordinary consciousness experiences dreams and higher consciousness, the seeing, clear-sighted consciousness experiences the thoughts of the world. We have the second kind of sleep, which remains unconscious even for ordinary consciousness, but which appears to the inspired consciousness in such a way that the deeds of the divine-spiritual entities reveal themselves everywhere. We have the third kind of sleep, which presents itself to the intuitive consciousness, in which it lives in the divine-spiritual entities themselves. As I said, this announces itself by, for example, submerging into the interior of minerals. But this third kind of sleep has a special meaning for man.

If you take the second kind of sleep first, then you will find, as I said, the world beings of the angels, the archangels and so on, in the appearing, disappearing, surging images, but you will also find yourself. You find yourself in it as a soul, not as you are now, but as you were before your birth or before conception. You get to know yourself, how you have lived between death and a new birth. That belongs to this second world. And every time we sleep without dreaming, we live in the same world in which we lived before we descended and took on a physical body. But if you were to enter the third stage of sleep and were able to wake up there – the intuitive consciousness wakes up – so if you imagine entering the third stage of sleep and waking up there: then you experience your destiny, your karma. Then you know why you have special abilities in this life, from the nature of your previous lives. Then you will know why you are brought together with these or those personalities in this life. Then you will get to know karma, then you will get to know your destiny. This destiny can only be recognized if one - I am now approaching the matter from a different point of view - is able to penetrate into the interior of minerals. If you are able to see a rock crystal not only from the outside but also from the inside – of course you must not chop it up, because then what you see would always be on the outside, naturally – but you must, as I have described, be inside it; if you can do that, if you can see the crystal from the inside, then you can also understand why you are struck by this or that blow of fate in this life. Take any crystal, take an ordinary salt cube.

You see it from the outside: that is how you see it with ordinary consciousness. In this state, your life remains opaque to you. If you can penetrate into it - the spatial size does not matter - if you can see it from the inside out, then you are in the world in which you can also understand your destiny. But you are in this world every night when you enter the third stage of sleep.

But this third stage of sleep still has something very special. You see, people before the Mystery of Golgotha – and we were all there ourselves in our earlier lives on earth – people in the development of time before the appearance of Christ on earth, they very often came into this third kind of sleep. But even before they sank, I might say, into this third kind of sleep, their angel appeared and brought them back up again. For that is the peculiar thing: one can always get oneself out of the first and second kinds of sleep as a human being, but not out of the third. In the third kind of sleep, a person would have had to die before the appearance of Christ on earth if he had not been brought out by angels or other entities. Since the appearance of the Christ, the power of the Christ, as I have often emphasized, is connected with the earth, and every time a person must awaken from this third kind of sleep, then the power of the Christ, which through the Mystery of Golgotha has united with the earth, must come to his aid. Without the power of the Christ, a person could no longer awaken from this third kind of sleep. He can slip into the crystals, but he cannot get out again without the power of the Christ. For when one looks behind the scenes of existence, one already realizes what significance this Christ impulse has for life on earth. I therefore emphasize it strongly: man could enter the crystals, but he could not get out again.

These things were felt particularly strongly wherever, after the Mystery of Golgotha, after the appearance of Christ on Earth, a strong, ancient, pagan consciousness still existed and yet the Christ Revelation was already there, as for example in Central European regions. There were people known to have died as a result of falling into a deep sleep. They would not have needed to die if the Christ had come to their aid.

So, for example, people felt - I do not want to say anything other than what people felt - with Charlemagne or with Frederick Barbarossa. Despite the fact that Frederick Barbarossa drowned in the physical world, that was how it was felt. But it was felt particularly clearly with Charlemagne. Where did this medieval consciousness believe such a soul went? Into the interior of crystals. That is why it was placed in mountains, where it was supposed to wait until the Christ came and awakened it from its deep sleep. This kind of myth formation is connected with this consciousness. The strong connection with the Christ impulse since the Mystery of Golgotha on Earth, that is what now causes the world of the Angeloi, the Archangeloi and so on, to get man out again, because otherwise he would not be able to be brought out again when he sinks into the third kind of sleep. This, then, is connected with the power of Christ, not with belief in the power of Christ; for whether one belongs to this or that religious denomination, what Christ did on earth is done in the objective sense, and what I am describing here as objective takes place for man quite independently of belief. We will discuss the significance of faith in the next few days. But what I am talking about now is an objective fact that has nothing to do with faith.

But how did this happen? It happened because a different fate has entered the world of the gods than was previously in it, a fate that I would characterize by saying: People here in the physical world are born and die. It is the peculiarity of the divine spiritual beings that belong to the higher hierarchies that they do not die and are not born, but merely transform. The Christ, who lived with the other divine spiritual beings until the time of the Mystery of Calvary, decided to experience death, to descend to Earth, to become a human being, to go through death within human nature, and then to regain consciousness after death through the resurrection.

This is a very significant event in the divine spiritual world, that a God has gone through death in order to be able to do all that we already know or that I have now described again. We can therefore say: there is the significant event in the history of the development of the earth that the God became man and thereby floods his power into such significant phenomena as those that I have now characterized for you. The God who became man has such power in earthly life that He can bring human souls out of the depths of the soul if they have descended there. So that when we speak of Christ we speak of a World Being, of whom we must say: He is the God who became man. What would be His counter-image? His counter-image would be the man who became God. It does not have to be an absolutely good God; but just as Christ descended into the human world and accepted death, that is, first accepted the human body in order to share in the fate of human beings, so we are led to the opposite pole, to the human being who frees himself from death, frees himself from the conditions of the human body and becomes a god within the earthly conditions. He would then cease to be a mortal man, but would walk on the earth, though not under the same conditions as an ordinary mortal man, who goes from birth to death and from death to a new birth, but such a man, having become a god, would be found as a god who had come to earth unlawfully. Just as Christ is a legitimately incarnate god, so we would have to look for his counter-image in the illegitimately god-become human, the no-longer-mortal-but-wandering-about human who has assumed the nature of god in an unlawful manner. And you are aware that just as the Christian tradition points to the rightly incarnated God, to Christ Jesus, so it points to Ahasver, to the man who has become God unlawfully, who has laid aside the mortality of the human nature. Thus we have in Ahasver the polar opposite of Christ Jesus. That is the deeper reason, the deeper meaning of the saga of Ahasver, the saga that speaks of something that must be spoken of because it is a reality: of a being that wanders the earth. This figure of Ahasver is there. He wanders the earth, he wanders from people to people. Among other things, he does not allow the Hebrew faith to die out. This figure is present, this Ahasver figure, the god who has become unlawful.

Man has every reason, if he wants to get to know real history, to turn his attention to such ingredients of this history, to see how the forces and beings play down from the supersensible worlds into the sensual world, how Christ came out of the supersensible worlds into the sensible world, but also how the sensible world in turn plays a role in the supersensible world, and how we also have in Ahasver a real, actual world power, a world being. There has always been an awareness of this wandering of Ahasver, who of course cannot be seen with physical eyes, but only under the condition of a certain clairvoyance. And the legends that point to him have a good, objective basis. One does not understand human life if one looks at it only externally, as described in the history books, if one does not look at the special forms it takes.

For it is true that just as Christ lives in our inner being since the Mystery of Golgotha, and can be perceived in our inner being when we first awaken our inner gaze, so when we look around us at human life, and since the seeing glance arises in us for most people, for those to whom the seeing glance arises, it is the case, then, as it happens unexpectedly to the person who crosses the threshold of consciousness, Ahasverus, the eternal Jew, will appear to us. Man will perhaps not always recognize him, he will mistake him for something else. But it is just as possible that the eternal Jew will appear to man as it is possible that the Christ will shine forth when man looks into his inner being.

These things belong to the secrets of the world which must needs be revealed in our time, when many secrets should be revealed.

Today our guests from further afield who have already arrived make up the majority of those present at this opening performance of eurythmy. There is no need for me to speak particularly about the nature of eurythmy, for our friends know about this from various writings which have appeared in print. But especially since we are gathering once more for an anthroposophical undertaking I should like to introduce this performance with a few words.

In the first instance eurythmy is that art which has originated entirely from the soil of Anthroposophy. Of course it has always been the case that every artistic activity which was to bring something new into civilization originated in super-sensible human endeavour. Whether you look at architecture, sculpture, painting, or the arts of music or poetry, you will always find that the impulses visible in the external course of human evolution are rooted in some way in occult, super-sensible ground, ground we may seek in connection with the Mysteries. Art can only flow into human evolution if it contains within it forces and impulses of a super-sensible kind. But the present-day view of art arises in the main from the entirely materialistic tendency in thinking which has seized hold of Europe and America since the fifteenth century. And though a certain kind of scientific knowledge can flourish in this materialism, anything genuinely artistic cannot. True art can only come forth out of spiritual life.

Therefore it is as a matter of course that a special art has arisen out of the spiritual life of the Anthroposophical Movement. It is necessary to understand that art must be born out of the super-sensible realm through the mediation of the human being. Considering the descending scale stretching from the super-sensible realm down to externally perceptible phenonema, you find the faculty of Intuition at the top, at the point where—if I may put it like this—the human being merges with the spirit. Inspiration has to do with the capacity of the human being to face the super-sensible on his own, hearing it and letting it reveal itself. And when he is able to link what he receives through Inspiration so intensely with his own being that he becomes capable of moulding it, then Imagination comes about.

In speech we have something which makes its appearance in an external picture, though it is an external picture which is extraordinarily similar to Inspiration. We might say that what we bear in our soul when we speak resembles Intuition; and what lies on our tongue, in our palate, comes out between our teeth and settles on our lips when we speak is the sense-perceptible image of Inspiration.

But where is the origin of what we push outwards from our inner soul life in speech? It originates in the mobile shape of our body, or I could say in our bodily structure in movement. Our ability to move our legs as well as our arms and hands and fingers is what gives us as little children our first opportunity to sense our relationship with the outside world. The first experience capable of entering into the consciousness of our soul is what we have in the physical movement of arms, hands and legs. The other movements are more connected with the human being. But the limbs which we stretch out into the space around us are what gives us a sense of the world. And when we stretch out our legs in a stride or a leap, or our arms to grasp something, or our fingers to feel something, then whatever we experience in doing this streams back to us. And as it streams back, it seizes hold of tongue, palate and larynx and becomes speech.

Thus in his organism the human being is through movement an expression of man as a whole. When you begin to understand this you sense that what in speech resembles Inspiration can descend into Imagination. We can call back something that is a gift to our limbs, to our tongue, our larynx and our palate and so on, we can recall it and let it stream back, asking: What kind of feelings, what kind of sensations stream outwards in our organism in order to create the sound Ah? We shall always discover that an Ah arises through something which expresses itself in one way or another in the air, through a particular movement of our organs of speech; or an Eh in optical axes crossing over, and so on. Then we shall be able to take what has streamed out in this way and become a sound or element of speech, and send it back into our whole being, into our human being of limbs, thus receiving in place of what causes speech to resemble Inspiration something else instead, something which can be seen and shaped and which therefore resembles Imagination.

So actually eurythmy came into existence when what works unconsciously in the human being to transform his capacity for movement into speech is subsequently recalled from speech and returned to the capacity for movement. Thus an element which belongs to Inspiration becomes an element belonging to Imagination.

Therefore an understanding of eurythmy is closely linked with discovering through eurythmy how Intuition, Inspiration and Imagination are related. Of course we can only show this in pictures, but the pictures speak clearly.

Consider, dear friends, a poem living in your soul. When you have entirely identified yourself inwardly with this poem and have taken it into yourself to such an extent and so strongly that you no longer need any words but have only feelings and can experience these feelings in your soul, then you are living in Intuition. Then let us assume that you recite or declaim the poem. You endeavour, in the vowel sounds, in the harmonies, in the rhythm, in the movement of the consonants, in tempo, beat and so on, to express in speech through recitation or declamation what lies in those feelings. What you experience when doing this is Inspiration. The element of Inspiration takes what lives purely in the soul, where it is localized in the nervous system, and pushes it down into larynx, palate and so on.

Finally let this sink down into your human limbs, so that in your own creation of form through movement you express what lies in speech; then, in the poem brought into eurythmy, you have the third element, Imagination.

In the picture of the descent of world evolution down to man you have that scale which human beings have to reascend, from Imagination through Inspiration to Intuition. In the poem transformed into eurythmy you have Imagination; in the recitation and declamation you have Inspiration as a picture; and in the entirely inward experience of the poem, in which there is no need to open your mouth because your experience is totally inward and you are utterly identified with it and have become one with it, in this you have Intuition.

In a poem transformed into eurythmy, experienced inwardly and recited, you have before you the three stages, albeit in an external picture. In eurythmy we have to do with an element of art which had from inner necessity to emerge out of the Anthroposophical Movement. What you have to do is bring into consciousness what it means to achieve knowledge of the ascent from Imagination to Inspiration, and to Intuition.

The shorthand report ends here. The eurythmy performance began after a few more words on the actual programme.

The Christmas Foundation Conference was opened on 24 December. It had been preceded during the course of the year by a number of general meetings of the Anthroposophical Society in Switzerland at which the problems needing an early solution were discussed. The discussions had been particularly lively during the conference of delegates from the Swiss branches of 8 December 1923,²⁰ and preparatory meetings had also taken place on 22 April and 10 June. A good many representatives of non-Swiss groups had been present as early on as the general meeting of the Verein des Goetheanum²¹ on 17 June. These non-Swiss representatives had arrived in large numbers for the international meeting of delegates from 20 to 22 July,²² which had been devoted to the problems of rebuilding the Goetheanum and establishing it on a firm financial footing.

Dr Steiner had agreed to be present at these consultations but was not prepared to take the chair. His opinion had been sought quite a number of times, and he had emphasized above all the need for a moral basis. Rudolf Steiner und die Zivilisations-aufgabe der Anthroposophie contains many of the contributions he gave on that occasion. In the minutes of the meeting of 22 April we find the following:

‘Let me add a few words, not as a statement but simply in the realm of feeling, to what has been said so far today.

‘What we would look forward to in the outcome of the recent meeting in Stuttgart,²³ and also of today's meeting—and I hope similar meetings in other countries will follow—is that they should take a definite positive course, so that something positive can genuinely emerge from the will of the meeting. Mention has been made of the way the Anthroposophical Society is organized. But you see it has to be said that what marks the Anthroposophical Society is the very fact that it is not organized in any way at all. Indeed, for the most part the membership has wanted to have nothing to do with any organizing whatever, even on a purely human level. This was manageable to a certain degree up to a particular moment. But in view of the conditions prevailing now it is impossible to carry on in this way. It is necessary now to bring about a situation in which at least the majority of the membership can represent the affairs of the Society in a positive way, or at least start by following them with interest.

‘The other day I was asked what I myself expect from this meeting. I had to point out that it is now necessary for the Anthroposophical Society to set itself a genuine task, so that it can take its place as something, with its own identity, that exists beside the Anthroposophical Movement; the Society as such must set itself a task. Until this task has emerged, the situation we have been speaking about today will never change. On the contrary, it will grow worse and worse. The organization of the opposition exists and is a reality. But for the majority of members the Anthroposophical Society is not a reality because it lacks a positive task which could arise out of a positive decision in the will. This was the reason for calling the meetings in Stuttgart and here. In Stuttgart the delegates meeting could not decide on a task for the Society. Instead it sought a way out in the suggestion that the membership of the Anthroposophical Society in Germany should be divided into two parts in the hope that out of the mutual relationship between these two Societies something might gradually develop of a kind that was not forthcoming from the delegates meeting. Today's meeting should have the great and beautiful aim of showing how the Anthroposophical Society can be set a positive and effective task which can also win the respect of those on the outside. Something great could come about today if those present would not merely sit back and listen to what individuals are putting forward so very well, as has happened so far, but if indeed out of the Society itself, out of the totality of the Society a common will could arise. If it does not, this meeting, too, will have run its course to no purpose and without result.

‘I beg you, my dear friends, not to break up today without a result. Come to the point of setting a task for the Anthroposophical Society which can win a certain degree of respect from other people.’

The Christmas Foundation Conference for the founding of the General Anthroposophical Society was opened at 10 o'clock on the morning of 24 December. Dr Steiner greeted those present and introduced the lecture by Herr Albert Steffen on the history and destiny of the Goetheanum.

• 20. Reports of these meetings will be included in GA 259. See Note 2.
• 21. See Rudolf Steiner Aufbaugedanken und Gesinnungsbildung, Dornach 1942. To be included in the Complete Works in the series ‘Zur Geschichte der anthroposophischen Bewegung und Gesellschaft’ (The History of the Anthroposophical Movement and Society).
• 22. Report to be included in GA 259. See Note 2.
• 23. See Rudolf Steiner Awakening to Community, op cit.

[ 1 ] The Cosmos reveals itself to Man in the first instance from two sides—the Earth, and outside the Earth the Universe of Stars.

[ 2 ] To Earth and her forces Man feels himself related. Life teaches him this relationship with great distinctness.

[ 3 ] Not in the same way does he feel himself, in the present age, related to the Star-World about him. This however only lasts so long as he remains unconscious of his ether-body. To lay hold of the ether-body in Imaginations, is to acquire the same feeling of kinship with the starry Universe as one has through the consciousness of the physical body with the Earth.

[ 4 ] The forces which put the ether-body into the world come from the circumference of the Cosmos, just as the forces of the physical body radiate from the central point of the Earth.

[ 5 ] But along with the ether-forces that rain down upon the Earth from the circumference of the Cosmos there come also those cosmic impulses which work in the astral body of Man.

[ 6 ] The ether is like an ocean, on whose waves from all sides out of farthest worlds the astral forces come sailing to the Earth.

[ 7 ] In the present cosmic age however, it is only the mineral and the vegetable kingdoms that can come into direct relation with this astral life streaming in on to the Earth upon the waves of the ether; not the animal kingdom, nor the human kingdom.

[ 8 ] With the animal kingdom, spiritual observation shows that what is at work in the embryo is not the astral life at the present day flowing to the Earth, but that which flowed into it long ago, in the old Moon-Age.

[ 9 ] With the vegetable kingdom, one can see how its manifold, marvelous forms are being shaped by the astral influences, as they separate themselves out of the ether and hover over the plant-world.

[ 10 ] With the animal world, one can see how, from out of the spirit-sphere, astral forces of old times, that were active long ago—during the old Moon-Age of evolution—have been preserved and are now at work. They work as old, preserved forces, which remain at the present day altogether in the spirit-world, and do not come out into the ether-world.

[ 11 ] This form of astral influence is, moreover, transmitted by the present Moon-forces, which have themselves remained over from the previous stage of the Earth.

[ 12 ] We have then, in the animal kingdom, the result of impulses which in the previous evolutionary stage of the Earth manifested themselves externally as elements of Nature, whereas in the present cosmic age they have withdrawn into the spirit-world which flows with active force through the Earth.

[ 13 ] Now it is seen by spiritual observation that for the permeation of the physical and ether-bodies with the astral body in the animal kingdom, the forces that are of importance are solely these astral forces which have been preserved from an earlier time in the present life of Earth; but that, once the animal has his astral body, then the Sun-impulses begin to be active in it. The Sun-forces can give the animal nothing for his astral life; nevertheless, when once this is in the animal, they are required to provide for growth, nutrition, etc.

[ 14 ] With the kingdom of Man it is otherwise. This too receives its astral element in the first place from the old, preserved Moon-forces. But the Sun-forces have in them astral impulses which remain ineffective for the animal kingdom, but which in the human astral continue to act in the same manner as the Moon-forces acted when Man was first permeated with astrality.

[ 15 ] In the astral body of the animal can be seen the Moon-world. In the astral body of the human being can be seen the harmonious accord of the Sun-and Moon-worlds.

[ 16 ] It is this Sun-like power in the human astral body which makes it possible for Man to take up into himself the outward-radiating spiritual force that is in the Earth and use it for the development of his self-consciousness. Whatever is astral, flows from the circumference of the Universe. It acts either as a stream flowing in at the present time, or as one that flowed in in olden times and has been preserved. On the other hand, everything which has to do with giving shape to the I, as bearer of individual self-consciousness, must radiate from a Star-center. The Astral works from the circumference; everything of the I-kind from a central point. The Earth, as a Star, from its center gives the impulse for the human I. Every star from its center radiates forces by which the I of some being or other is shaped.

[ 17 ] This shows the polarity between Star-Center and Cosmic Circumference.

[ 18 ] The description shows at the same time that the animal kingdom lives on to-day as a product of earlier forces, which once had to do with the evolution of the Earth. It exists by drawing on the preserved store of old astral forces and must disappear on the preserved store of old astral forces and must disappear when these are exhausted. In Man, on the contrary, new astral forces come in, that are drawn from the Sun-Power. These make it possible for him to carry on his evolution into the future.

[ 19 ] It is not possible—as all this shows—to understand Man in his own special form of being, unless one recognizes his connection with the whole Star-life as clearly as his connection with the Earth.

[ 20 ] Even what Man receives from the Earth for the development of his Self-consciousness, proceeds from the action of the spirit-world within the earthly sphere. That the Sun-Power can give Man what he needs for his astral life, is the result of influences that were active during the old Sun-Age. It was then that the Earth received the capacity to develop the I-impulses of mankind. It is the spiritual part which the Earth has preserved within her from the old Sun-life, and which is kept from dying out by the sun influences of the present day.

[ 21 ] The Earth herself was once Sun. Then she passed over into a spiritual form. In the present cosmic age, what is ‘Sun’ works from without. This Sun-influence from without is a spring of ever-renewing youth to those spirit-forces from an earlier age which are wearing old. At the same time, as an active force of the Present, this Sun-influence keeps what is of the Past from falling into Lucifer's domain. For whatever continues to work on as an influence from the Past, without being taken up into the forces of the Present, falls a prey to Lucifer.

[ 22 ] Man's feeling of his own intimate connection with the extra-terrestrial Cosmos may be said, in this cosmic age, to be so dulled, that he is not aware of it in his consciousness. It is not only dulled, it is ‘deafened’ by the feeling of his intimate connection with the sphere of Earth. Because Man's consciousness of his individual Self must be learnt in the sphere of Earth, he begins the age of the Spiritual Soul by growing so closely involved with this earthly sphere, that it exerts a much stronger influence over him than is compatible with the course which his soul-life should rightly take. Man is, as it were, deafened, dazed by the impressions of the sense-world. Overpowered by their clamour, he fails to call up the free, active Thinking, that has life in itself.

[ 23 ] The whole time, from the middle of the nineteenth century on, was a period of being dazed and deafened by the loudness of the sense-impressions. It has been the Great Illusion of this period, that in it people took this over-powerful life of the senses to be the right one—a life of sense which was doing its best to blot out all life in the non-earthly, extra-terrestrial Cosmos.

[ 24 ] Into this dazed condition the Ahrimanic powers could come in and work their will. Lucifer was more held in check by the Sun-forces than Ahriman. Ahriman was in a position to arouse—notably amongst the men of science—the dangerous notion that Ideas are only applicable to the impressions of the senses. Accordingly it is just in these circles that Anthroposophy meets with but little understanding. Faced with the results of Spiritual Science, they try to understand them with their ideas. But these ideas cannot comprehend the Spiritual, because their inherent, living knowledge is deafened and over-powered by the ahrimanized science of the senses. And so people take alarm, and think they would be committing themselves to a blind belief in authority if they were to enter seriously upon the results obtained by the spiritual seer.

[ 25 ] Darker and darker grew the extra-terrestrial Cosmos for human consciousness in the second half of the nineteenth century.

[ 26 ] When Man again grows able to realize the life of Ideas within him, even when not supporting himself and them upon the world of Sense, then, to the eyes of the enquirer an answering light will stream again from the Cosmos beyond the realm of Earth. And this is to make acquaintance with Michael and his kingdom.

[ 27 ] When a time comes, when the Festival of Michael in the autumn fall will be kept in truth and inwardness—then, in the feelings of those that keep the festival there will arise with innermost sincerity, as ‘leit-motif,’ this strain and live in men's consciousness: In the fullness of Ideas the soul experiences spirit-light, even when the outward show of the senses linger but as memory in the mind of man.

[ 28 ] When, with some such tone of mind as this, Man can celebrate the Michael Festival, after it he will be able worthily to enter again into the world of the senses. And Ahriman will be unable to harm him.

Leading Thoughts

[ 29 ] With the beginning of the Age of Consciousness, dullness came over Man's feeling of his connection with the extra-terrestrial Cosmos. On the other hand, his feeling of connection with the Earth, through his life in sense-impressions, grew so strong—more especially with the men of science—as to amount to a dazed and benumbed condition.

[ 30 ] In this condition the working of the Ahrimanic Powers is peculiarly dangerous; for Man lives under the illusion that this overpowering life in sense-impressions is the right thing and a real step forward in evolution.

[ 31 ] Man must find the power to shed light through his world of Ideas and to live in these Ideas as in a world of light, even when unsupported by the clamorous world of the senses. In this living inner realization of the self-dependent—and, in their self-dependence, luminous—world of Ideas, will awake the feeling of Man's connection with the non-earthly, outer Cosmos. A foundation will thus be laid for Festivals of Michael.

[ 1 ] The thought then hovered before me that the turn of the century must bring a new spiritual light to humanity. It seemed to me that the exclusion of human thinking and willing from the spirit had reached a climax. A revolutionary change in the process of human evolution seemed to me a matter of necessity.

[ 2 ] Many were talking in this way. But they did not see that man will seek to direct his eyes toward a world of real spirit as he directs them through the senses toward nature. They only supposed that the subjective spiritual temper of the soul would undergo a revolution. That a real, new objective world could be revealed – such a thought lay beyond the range of vision of that time.

[ 3 ] With the experiences that came to me from my perspective of the future and from the impressions received from the world about me, I was forced to turn the eyes of my mind more and more to the development which marked the nineteenth century.

[ 4 ] I saw how, with the time of Goethe and Hegel, everything disappeared which knowingly takes up conceptions of a spiritual world into human forms of thought. Thenceforth knowledge must not be “confused” by conceptions from the spiritual world. These conceptions are assigned to the sphere of faith and “mystical” experience.

[ 5 ] In Hegel I perceived the greatest thinker of the new age. But he was just that – only a thinker. To him the world of spirit was in thinking. Even while I admired immeasurably the way in which he gave form to all his thinking, yet I perceived that he had no feeling for the world of spirit which I beheld and which is revealed behind thinking only when thinking is empowered to become an experience whose body, in a certain measure, is thought, and which takes up into itself as soul the Spirit of the world.

[ 6 ] Since in Hegelianism everything spiritual has become thought, Hegel represented to me the person who brought the ultimate twilight of the ancient spiritual light into a period in which the spirit became hidden in darkness from human knowledge.

[ 7 ] All this appeared thus before me whether I looked into the spiritual world or looked back in the physical world upon the century drawing to an end. But now there came forth in this century a figure which I could not trace on into the spiritual world – Max Stirner.

[ 8 ] Hegel was wholly the man of thought, who in his inner unfolding strives after a thinking which goes ever deeper, and in going deeper extends to farther horizons. This thinking, in its deepening and broadening, becomes at last one with the thinking of the World-Spirit which includes the whole world-content. And Stirner was all that man unfolds from himself, bringing this wholly from his individual personal will. What exists in humanity lies only in the juxtaposition of single personalities.

[ 9 ] I dared not just at that time fall into one-sidedness. As I stood completely within Hegelianism experiencing this in my soul as my own inner experience, so must I also wholly submerge myself inwardly in this opposite.

[ 10 ] Against the one-sidedness of endowing the World-Spirit merely with knowledge must, indeed, the opposite appear, the assertion of man merely as a will-being.

[ 11 ] Had the situation been such that this opposition had simply appeared in me as an experience of my own mind in its evolution, I would never have permitted anything of this to enter into my writing or lecturing. I have always observed this rule with regard to such mental experiences. But this particular contradiction – Hegel and Stirner – belonged to the century. Through this the century expressed itself.

[ 12 ] And, indeed, it is true that philosophers are not to be principally considered in relation to their influence on their times. Certainly one can mention very strong influences proceeding from Hegel. But this is not the main thing. Philosophers show in the content of their thinking the spirit of their age as a thermometer shows the warmth of a place. In the philosophers that becomes conscious which lives unconsciously in the age.

[ 13 ] And so the nineteenth century in its two extremes lived through the impulses expressing themselves through Hegel and Stirner: impersonal thinking which most delights to yield itself to a contemplation of the world in which man with his inner creative powers has no part; and wholly personal will with little feeling for the harmonious co-operation of men. To be sure, all possible “social ideals” appear, but they have no power to influence reality. This more and more takes on the form of what can come about when the wills of individuals work side by side.

[ 14 ] Hegel would have the thought of the moral take objective form more and more in the associated life of men; Stirner feels that the “individuals” (single persons) are harmed by everything which thus gives harmonious form to the life of men.

[ 15 ] My own consideration of Stirner was connected at that time with a friendship which had a decisive effect upon very much in what we are here considering. This was my friendship with the important Stirner scholar and editor J. H. Mackay. It was while still in Weimar that I was brought in contact by Gabrielle Reuter with this personality, to me likewise altogether congenial. He had occupied himself with those chapters in my Philosophy of Spiritual Activity which deal with ethical individualism. He found a harmony between my discussions and his own social views.

[ 16 ] At first it was the personal impression I received from; J. H. Mackay that filled my soul when in company with him. He bore the “world” in him. In his whole inner and outer bearing there spoke world-experience. He had spent some time in both England and America. All this was suffused with a boundless amiability. I conceived a great affection for him.

[ 17 ] When, therefore, J. H. Mackay came to reside permanently at Berlin, there developed a delightful friendship between us. This also, unfortunately, has been destroyed by life and especially by my public discussion of anthroposophy.

[ 18 ] In this instance I must only describe quite objectively how the work of J. H. Mackay seemed to me at that time, and still seems, and what effect it had upon me. For I am aware that he would express himself quite differently about it.

Profoundly hateful to this man was everything in human social life which is force, Archie. The greatest failure, he felt, was the introduction of force into social control. In “communistic anarchy” he saw a social idea in the highest degree objectionable because this proposed to bring about a better state of humanity through the employment of force.

[ 19 ] Now it was a risky thing for J. H. Mackay to battle against this idea and the agitation based upon it while choosing for his own social thought the same name which his opponents had, only with another adjective preceding it. “Individualistic anarchy” was his name for what he himself represented, and that, too, as the very opposite of what was then called “anarchy.” This naturally led the public to form nothing but biased view concerning Mackay's ideas. He was in accord with the American, B. Tucker, who stood for the same conception. Tucker visited Mackay at Berlin, and in this way I came to know him.

[ 20 ] Mackay is also a poet of his conception of life. He wrote a novel Die Anarchisten.¹ I read this after I had become acquainted with the author. This is a noble work based upon faith in the individual man. It describes penetratingly and with great vividness the social condition of the poorest of the poor. But it also sets forth how out of the world's misery those men will find a way to improvement who, being wholly devoted to the good forces, so bring these forces to their unfolding that they become effective in the free association of men rendering compulsion unnecessary. Mackay had the noble confidence that men could of themselves create a harmonious order of life. He considered, however, that this would be possible only after a long time, when by spiritual ways a requisite revolution should have been completed within men. He therefore demanded for the present that those individuals who were far enough advanced should propagate the idea of this spiritual way. A social idea, therefore, which would employ only spiritual means.

[ 22 ] Destiny had now given such a turn to my experience with J. H. Mackay and Stirner that here also I had to submerge myself in a thought-world which became to me a spiritual testing. My ethical individualism I felt to be a pure inner experience of man. It was by no means my intention when I formulated this to make it the basis of a philosophy of politics. Now at this time, about 1898, a sort of abyss had to be opened in my mind in regard to this purely ethical individualism. It had to be changed from something purely human and inward to something external. The esoteric must be shifted to the exoteric.

[ 23 ] Then, in the beginning of the new century, when I had succeeded in stating my experience of the spiritual in Die Mystik im Aufgange² and Christianity as Mystical Fact, ethical individualism again stood after the test in its rightful place.

Yet the testing took such a course that the outward expression played no part in full consciousness. It took its course just below this full consciousness, and because of this very proximity it could influence the forms of expression in which, during the last years of the past century, I spoke regarding things social. Certain discussions of that time, however, which seem all too radical must be compared with others in order to arrive at a correct conception.

[ 24 ] One who sees into the spiritual world always finds his own being externalized when he ought to express opinions and conceptions. He enters the spiritual world, not in abstractions, but in living perceptions. Nature likewise, which is the sensible copy of the spiritual, does not represent opinions and conceptions, but places these before the world in their forming and becoming.

[ 25 ] A state of inner movement, which drove into billows and waves all the forces of my soul, was at that time my inner experience.

[ 26 ] My external private life became one of absolute satisfaction by reason of the fact that the Eunicke family was drawn to Berlin and I could live with them under the best of care after having experienced for a short time the utter misery of living in a home of my own. My friendship with Frau Eunicke was soon thereafter transformed into a civil marriage. Only this shall be said concerning this private affair. Of my private life I do not wish to introduce anything into this biography except what concerns my process of development. Living in the Eunicke home enabled me to have an undisturbed basis for a life of inner and outer movement. Otherwise, private relationships do not belong to the public. It is not concerned in these.

[ 27 ] Indeed, my spiritual development is, in reality, utterly independent of all private relationships. I am conscious of the fact that this would have been quite the same had the shaping of my private life been entirely different.

[ 28 ] Amid all the movement in my life at that time came now the continual anxiety concerning the possibility of an existence for the Magazine. In spite of all the difficulties I faced, it would have gained a circulation if there had been available to me the material means. But a periodical which at the utmost could afford only sufficient compensation to give me the bare necessities of a material existence, and for which nothing whatever could be done to make it known, could not thrive upon the limited circulation it had when I took it over.

[ 29 ] So long as I edited the Magazine it was a constant source of anxiety to me.

• 1. The Anarchist.
• 2. Mysticism at the Beginning of the Modern Spiritual Life.

Dear Attendees!

Once again, as in my previous attendances during this fateful time, it seems appropriate to me to begin with a consideration that is related to the development of German intellectual life, and then tomorrow to come to a subject that more strictly belongs to spiritual science.

And if today's reflection is to be linked to the development of German thought, then I would like to emphasize, first and foremost, that this reflection should not fall into the trap of establishing an external connection between all kinds of intellectual changes and the fateful historical facts of our time, a trap into which so many reflections today fall. At a time when the fate of nations is decided by the force of arms, the word cannot possibly intervene, meaningfully intervene, for example, in that which is to be decided by the force of arms. But this is the age in which self-reflection - including national self-reflection - seems to be entirely appropriate.

Now, when it is said, from the point of view of science, including spiritual science, that certain developmental forces of such a spiritual science are rooted in popular forces, as is to happen today, one will immediately encounter, dear attendees, all kinds of objections, objections that are extremely reasonable because they are so self-evident, from a certain point of view, that they seem extraordinarily plausible precisely because of their self-evidence to those who do not want to rise to certain higher points of view. In such a consideration, one will repeatedly encounter the objection that science as such, and everything that somehow wants to claim that it is so, is said to be “international,” and that one is not entitled to claim any rootedness in popular culture.

This objection can be appropriately countered only by means of a comparison. “International”, dear attendees, is also the moon, for example. It is the same for everyone; but what different things the various peoples have to say about the moon! Of course someone may object: Yes, that is in the realm of poetry. Yes, of course; but anyone who delves a little deeper into the spiritual life of humanity will notice that – even if the observations and insights relating to the external, actual things are all the same in the science of the moon – that which comes from the innermost drives of the human soul, on the basis of what man can recognize, that this is different for each individual people, and that each people penetrates more or less deeply into the secrets of existence, depending on their different dispositions and drives. And the overall progress of humanity does not depend on what is the same everywhere, but on what is incorporated from the driving forces of the overall development of humanity, which are peculiar to the innermost individual nature of each people.

From this point of view, it should be pointed out today how German nationality is intimately connected with the endeavour not only to found an external science of the senses, but also to penetrate deeply into the spiritual secrets of existence – how the very search for a way to arrive at the spiritual secrets of existence is peculiar to much of what can be called German nationality.

And there is another reason, esteemed attendees, for such a consideration here, because it is my conviction – not arising from a narrow-minded, parochial sentiment, but from what I believe is the appropriate consideration of the German essence that what has been advocated here for years as spiritual science is strongly rooted in the general spiritual life of the German people, that all the seeds of a genuine spiritual science are present in the spiritual development of the German people.

Dear attendees, I will take as my starting point three personalities about whom I had the honor of speaking here in this city a few months ago, when I tried to sketch out the world view of German idealism. Even at the risk of repeating certain details, I will take as my starting point the three great figures who appear within the development of thought and spirit of the German people and who create a world view that provides the foundation, the background, one might say, for what was then artistically and poetically achieved by Goethe, Schiller, Herder, Lessing and so on within German intellectual life, as a flowering of the newer intellectual life in general, which can only be compared with the tremendous flowering of human intellectual life in ancient Greece: Fichte, Schelling and Hegel were the starting point once again.

Fichte stands before us – and I already remarked this in the lecture a few months ago – as he has something like the feeling that he has given his people everything that he has to give as the best, in terms of a world view and insights into the nature of his people, and that he has gained this through a dialogue with the German national spirit itself. Carried inwardly by the consciousness that the most German essence speaks out of his soul, Johann Gottlieb Fichte is.

It is also he who, not only in one of the most difficult times of German intellectual development, found tones that were highly suited to inspiring the entire nation to rise up from oppression, but he was also [the one] who, in the way he wants to receive a world view for his knowledge, so clearly shows that he seeks this world view from the qualities of the human soul, from the powers of the human soul, which are essentially German qualities of spiritual life, German powers. He emphasized that. And that is certainly the truth with regard to Johann Gottlieb Fichte.

And what is it that is so distinctly German about Johann Gottlieb Fichte's endeavors? It consists in the fact that, out of his Germanness, as he himself calls it, Johann Gottlieb Fichte was led to seek in a living way to deepen and at the same time strengthen his own soul-being, his own ego, and was convinced from the living inner that what permeates the world as divine-spiritual, illuminates and warms, can flow into this I, if it experiences itself in the right way, if it becomes fully aware of itself. So that, in Fichte's view, what speaks outside in all natural phenomena, what speaks in the course of history, but also what speaks behind natural phenomena and behind history as spiritual forces, flows into human will.

The human will that asserts itself in the self is only the innermost, secret expression of the soul for that which permeates and warms all beings in the world, from the most materialistic to the most spiritual. This intimate interconnection of the experiences of the soul with the great mystery of the universe, as far as man can fathom it, that is the very German in Johann Gottlieb Fichte's striving.

And if you observe Fichte as he presents himself, you can see how this is to be judged, how it is not something invented, something acquired, but how it arises from the most secret depths of his soul as his natural disposition. To substantiate this, a few details from Johann Gottlieb Fichte's life will be given. As I said, even at the risk of repeating details that I have already taken the liberty of mentioning.

For example, we see this Johann Gottlieb as a small, seven-year-old boy in front of his father's house, who was a poor master weaver. We see Johann Gottlieb Fichte, seven years old, standing in front of the small stream that flows past his father's house; and he has thrown a book into this stream. His father comes along and is amazed at what has happened. What had happened? Well, Johann Gottlieb Fichte was a six- to seven-year-old boy and a diligent student. That which is called a sense of duty lived in his soul with the greatest strength; and because he was so diligent, his father gave him a book for the last Christmas: “Gehörnte Siegfried” (Siegfried Horned). The seven-year-old boy, who could already read fluently, was so extremely interested in the book of the “Horned Siegfried” and he was always absorbed in the great figure of the horned Siegfried; so that one could have noticed that he had become a little less diligent at school, and it was held against him. Now, within the life of the will, even in the seven-year-old boy, the soul's duty stirred: he no longer wanted to read on, nor be tempted to read on in the book of horned Siegfried. And to be quite sure, he throws the book into the stream, crying! Such was the nature of the one who, according to his own consciousness, was to create the German worldview for his time!

And again, let us look at nine-year-old Johann Gottlieb Fichte. One Sunday morning, the estate neighbor had come to hear the sermon. But he had arrived too late, and so was unable to hear the sermon. Some of the squire's acquaintances had hit on the expedient of sending for little Johann Gottlieb Fichte, who was so good at listening to sermons that he could repeat them word for word. So they fetched nine-year-old Johann Gottlieb Fichte. After he had appeared awkwardly at first in his blue peasant's coat, he then stood and repeated the sermon, but now not in a way that was only an external adherence to the words, but with the most inner participation, not only in terms of memory, but with the most inner participation, so that one saw: everything that had been spoken lived a very own life in his soul.

These are the small traits that show how intimately entwined Johann Gottlieb Fichte's soul was with what he called duty on the one hand, and on the other hand with what was in him the urge to elevate his own human ego so powerfully that what willfully permeates and warms the world as primal laws could live and reveal itself in him. And how he later aimed to work when he was appointed professor in Jena is told to us by people who heard him speak and who assure us that when he spoke, his words were serious and strict, but at the same time forceful, as if interwoven with the language that spoke the secrets of the world from the nature of things themselves. His language was like the rolling of thunder, and the words discharged themselves – so someone who heard him speak and was friends with him tells us – the words discharged themselves like lightning. His imagination was not lavish – we are told – but it was majestic and grand. And so we are told that he lived in the realm of supersensible ideas, not like one who merely dwells within it, but like one who essentially mastered this realm of ideas.

And it was also peculiar, for example, how he perceived his teaching profession: there was not much of what one is accustomed to from a speaker or teacher. He was in constant inner work. His preparation for any lecture or speech consisted not so much in working out the content as in trying to place himself, with his soul, in that spiritual inwardness that he wanted to infuse not only through the content of the words, but through the way in which he , he strove to work in such a way that it was not so much the content of his words that mattered as the fact that the souls of his listeners were moved by the whole way in which the spiritual was expressed in the flow of his speech. Thus, again, someone who knew him well could say: He strove not only to educate good people, but great souls.

We should like to draw attention to a little-known trait that must be mentioned again and again if we want to bring to life the direct and lively way in which Fichte related to his audience. For example, the deep thinker Steffens told us that in Jena Fichte said to his listeners: “Think the wall!” – The people found that easy, of course: they thought the wall. After he had let them think the wall for a while, he said: So, and now think the one who has just thought the wall! – Some were amazed!

This was an indication of one's own soul, in which that which flows through and warms the world at its deepest core should be ignited. However much he may have amazed people with this, at the same time it is also a testimony to how Fichte actually did not just want to convey spiritual ideas to his listeners with clever words. He wanted to work through words, not just in words. That is why it could happen that this man also sought to actively grasp the historical aspect of the creative national spirit. And in that he wanted to connect vividly, as with the workings of the world in general, he also wanted to connect vividly with that which is part of this world-working and lives close to him as a member of his nationality; he wanted to connect with the essence of the German national spirit. And no one can understand the meaning and the significance of the wonderful words which Johann Gottlieb Fichte addressed to the German people in his 'Discourses to the German Nation' during such a difficult period in the history of the German nation. No one can understand this unless he sees the connection between the way in which Fichte wanted to grasp the world-will in himself in his own ego, and then to carry the power that arose in his soul into action, into events, into the social and other forms of human coexistence, and into the conception of life.

There he stands before us – albeit in our way – this Johann Gottlieb Fichte! And – as I said – it is not out of narrow-minded patriotism, but rather out of actual observation that these things are to be said, which must now be discussed. We need not fall into the error that the enemies of the German spirit are now falling into, who not only accuse this German spirit, but even slander it in the truest sense of the word; we can take an objective point of view within the considerations of the German spirit and will be able, precisely through this objective point of view, to recognize in the right way what the essence of German nationality is.

Fichte wanted to grasp the will of the world in itself. And this will of the world was for him the bearer of what he called the duty of the world, which in turn separates into individual human duties. Thus, that which lives outside becomes for him a living being everywhere. But this also puts him in opposition to everything, as he himself emphasized in his “Discourses to the German Nation.” You can read about this in my essay in my little booklet “Thoughts During the Time of War,” which is now out of print , but will soon be reissued, [how] he, Johann Gottlieb Fichte, seeks the living everywhere and is aware that he is thus in opposition to much of what he calls a dead science. And this dead science, Fichte also finds it among the Western European peoples, among the French and the British. Only, as I said, for the sake of actual characterization, not to impose anything on any people, may that be said; but it must be recognized in which relation the German spirit stands to the other national spirits in this fateful time!

In my earlier essay on the world picture of German Idealism, I pointed out that Descartes, Cartesius, is a typical example of the development of the French world-view at the beginning of the seventeenth century. I pointed out how he characteristically expresses that which lives in his worldview from his nationality, in that not only the mineral and plant world, but even the animal world is nothing more to him than a sum of living — not souled, but only moving — machines! That is the peculiarity of this Western mind, that it can only grasp a dead science at bottom.

In this respect, Fichte, with his living approach in all his works, stands in essential contrast to the path of knowledge and the striving of the West, [where] animals are like machines. This has continued. And not long before Johann Gottlieb Fichte worked in Germany to show life in all the facts and beings of the world from the living grasp of the secrets of the world, a descendant, I might say, of that Descartes - Cartesius - worked in France: de La Mettrie.

And while Cartesius at least conceded to man a special soul from inner experience, from inner experience, de La Mettrie, in an exaggeration of this western dead science, expressed himself in his book “Man a Machine” that even that which stands before us as a human being is itself part of the world in the same way as a mere machine; that we can understand the whole person by regarding him as the result of purely material processes and forces. According to de La Mettrie, everything about a person, including all soul qualities and activities, should be understood in such a way that the person is only recognized as a machine.

Of course, to a certain extent, man is a machine. This is not the essence of spiritual science, that it contradicts what such assertions have right about it; but that it can show other ways - we will talk about this tomorrow - that it can show other [supplementary] ways to this, that it knows other ways that also lead beyond the justified claims of materialism. De La Mettrie is basically, from the French folklore, one of the most significant minds of this view that the whole world of man is only a kind of mechanism. And it is interesting to consider the contrast between the Frenchman de La Mettrie and the German Johann Gottlieb Fichte. For de La Mettrie, everything about man is mechanism; for Fichte, everything is spirit. He received into his soul what he calls the will of the world, and for him, the external material world is only an internalized field for the performance of duties arising from the spirit. Hence that beautiful, that wonderful striving of Fichte to derive everything that appears to man in the world of the senses from the spirit; whereas, in de La Mettrie, everything is imbued with the goal of regarding the external physical as an immediately decisive impulse for the spiritual as well.

De La Mettrie is sometimes quite witty in such matters, for he is just as deeply immersed in his mechanistic worldview as Johann Gottlieb Fichte is in his spiritual worldview. For example, when de La Mettrie says in his book The Machine Stops Here: Can't you see how the body shapes the soul? Take a famous poet, for example, whose soul can be seen to consist of one half rascal and the other half Promethean fire. de La Mettrie was a little clever in not saying which poet he meant, but Voltaire flew into a rage at this remark. When he was told this, de La Mettrie said: Well, okay, I withdraw the one half of the claim – he meant half of Prometheus! – but I maintain the “filou.” He just expressed it in his own way; there's no need to press it. But if you take the individual statements, that man is a machine – and in this he is tireless in showing how the machine-like, the heating-up [gap in the transcript] in man, as it were, how that characterizes the whole man, causes satisfaction – that is where he sometimes becomes quite remarkable. And I don't know, and I don't know with what feelings a passage from 'Man a Machine' will be read in France today! I certainly don't want to quote it as something that a German, for example, needs to share; but I would like to quote it because it is quite characteristic and because – you will see in a moment why I would like to quote it – one could perhaps ask precisely from the point of view of spiritual science: how such a soul – he did deny that this was possible – but how such a soul, more than a hundred years after its death, looks down on the praise that has been exchanged between France and England, when he, de La Mettrie, the Frenchman, in his book “Man a Machine” proves how people's characters are dependent on the way the materialistic affects them, when he says the following:

As we have gathered here⁵² on the eve of our annual general meeting, and look forward to a stimulating time, it may seem appropriate to open the sequence of meetings with a lecture for visitors from outside Berlin and as well as for our Berlin members. A lecture like this,⁵³ not part of the programme but offered as a free gift, may thus be on a subject that would fit in less well with the normal run of theosophical lectures—something for advanced theosophists and at the same time also for people who are at the very beginning. The latter will however need to find their way into things first. They will need to pay serious and careful attention if they are to be able to follow completely. On the other hand we also offer something for those who want to hear something about the parts of the higher worlds that are accessible to us.

Our theme will be the relationship of the human senses to the outside world, to the physical and the non-physical world around us.⁵⁴ We shall touch on a subject to which we are not yet paying sufficient attention among ourselves—the question as to how we should really see the relationship between the four bodies that make up essential human nature.

One of the first things people learn in the science of the spirit is that the human being consists of a physical body, an ether body, an astral body and a body which we have always been calling the I-body in our discussions. The I-body holds the seeds for our higher development. All this is given in elementary books on theosophy and in the things theosophists gradually come to hear in their first lectures. But people often say that the I-body is the highest of the four bodies, the astral body is less high, the ether body even less high, and the physical body the lowest of them all.

atman
buddhi
manas

kama manas
astral body
ether body
physical body

Anyone can read up about this in my Theosophy. We are interested in the four lower bodies also known as the Pythagorean quadrangle. The one called the ‘I’ or ‘kama manas’ is widely considered to be the highest, followed by the astral body, the ether body and the physical body as lower bodies. That is a fairly biased view, however, and I have often said that it is not correct. In its own way the physical body is the most perfect and also the oldest part of the human being. Consider this physical body in all its parts, study it, using the means given in modern science! You only have to give it some real thought and you’ll have to say to yourself: ‘This physical body is most marvellously constructed in all its parts, filled with the greatest wisdom the world has ever known.’ Nothing in this world—in so far as we are able to investigate it by physical means—is more perfect than the human physical body. You may look at a whole cosmos of stars, or study the most artful mechanism human beings can devise, and you’ll not find anything more perfect than the physical body. If you study the human heart and the functions it has to perform, looking at it as a purely physical apparatus, or just consider a piece of bone with all the marvellous struts inside, you’ll find this to be true. Just take a bit of the thigh bone. It has struts that run like this (Fig. 2):

The cleverest engineer would be unable to produce a structure as perfect as this, a system created by the cosmos to support the upper part of the human body. And it is the same with the human brain and all the organs that are part of the human physical body. You may study the whole of nature—there is nothing to equal this physical body in perfection.

Why is this physical body so perfect? Human beings have not always been the way they are today. They have gone through a long process of development. The human beings you see before you today, consisting of these four elements, have more than just long evolution on this physical planet earth behind them. Another planet, the predecessor of our earth, went before. That was the ancient Moon. This was preceded by the ancient Sun, and the Sun by ancient Saturn. Think of it in terms of a human being going through incarnations. The earth, too, has gone through similar states. We are able to trace four of them. In doing so, we are looking back on immeasurably long periods of time, stretches of time beyond the comprehension of an earthly human being. But something of this human physical body was present even then.

The first beginnings of the physical body existed on ancient Saturn. Nothing was there as yet of our present-time ether body, nor anything of the astral body, let alone the human I. We can see from this that the physical body has gone through four stages. On the ancient Saturn planet it emerged as a simple physical body, a kind of basic supportive structure. It then went through a transformation and entered into a twilight state, a pralaya. The physical body later emerged again on the ancient Sun—which was something very different from today’s sun—but now at a higher level. There the ether body joined it. The ether body is thus very much younger than the physical body. The young ether body developed under the influence of the physical body that already existed, now at its second level of perfection. During that time on the ancient Sun, when the physical and the ether bodies both existed, nothing existed as yet of the astral body. This only joined them during the third earth incarnation, on the ancient Moon. There the human physical body went through its third level of perfection, and the ether body through its second stage. On the Moon, the physical body may have been said to be in class 3, the ether body in class 2, and the astral body in class 1. The I only joined them on earth and had not yet been through anything until then. When the physical body appeared on earth, this was its fourth appearance. The human I-body will have reached the stage at which the physical body is today only after another three planetary stages, the astral body after another two planetary' stages. And the ether body will have reached the level of perfection of today’s physical body when one more planetary stage has been gone through.

Some quite commonplace reflections can convince us that the astral body is much less perfect than the physical body. The physical body in its wisdom would never fall into the kind of crude error the astral body does. Just think of the appetites created by the drives, desires and passions that live in the astral body. The heart has to stay fit for decades in spite of appetites in the astral body that are harmful to it. That is the case, for instance, if we drink coffee or tea, and so on. The heart does not want such stimulants, but the astral body does. The astral body does something that goes against the grain for the physical body at its present level of development. On the planet we call Venus, the astral body will have reached a level where it will be as wise in its behaviour as the physical body is now, unless it is disturbed.

We thus have to see the physical body as the most carefully developed and most perfectly made part of essential human nature. It has learned something every time it has completed another planetary stage, and has become increasingly more perfect. Looking at the physical human body you see that it consists of a number of organs. People do not give much thought to the way these organs have come into existence. In anatomy, in science, the human being is said to consist of such and such organs, having a liver, a heart, a nose for smelling, ears for hearing, eyes for seeing. And these organs are described in detail in modern science. But when people do this they are doing something that can only be compared with the following.

Imagine one were to put an old table and a new table side by side and describe them in a very basic way. One table has four feet, a top, it has such and such a colour, and the other table also has four feet, a top, such and such a colour, and so on. Those descriptions may be perfectly accurate and yet they do not really tell us what matters in this case—that one table is old and the other new. You can describe the eyes and ears in the same way. You can tell people what they look like today. You can describe the auricle, the auditory canal and everything, the acoustic nerves, and so on. You can describe the human eye in the same way. Both descriptions will look good, and it might appear that they are equal in value. But in the highest occult sense they are not. The two are not equal in value because these two organs—eyes and ears—have evolved at very different times.

If you were to go back to ancient Saturn and examine the first beginnings of the human physical body, when there was no question as yet of an ether body, astral body and I, if you were to examine the peculiar physical body that existed in those very early times, you would look in vain for even the first beginnings of eyes. But you would not be able to find them, for even the potential for eyes would not yet exist. You would find the potential for the human ear. This, then, is the age difference, and you can understand it if you realize that the physical body has gone through as many stages of evolution as our planet. At the first stage it went so far as to develop the full potential for the ears. These were already preformed when the human being came to Saturn from other, very different worlds. Human beings already had the potential for hearing when they entered into this particular chain of evolution.

They added the potential for a sense of temperature on that first planet, a feeling for warmth. This is generally called a skin sense. But careful distinction has to be made between two things. In the first place it is the sense of touch, perceiving hard and soft; then it is also the sense of temperature, perceiving hot and cold. This is the sense of temperature we are speaking of. So you have a sequence. First we have hearing and then the feeling, the sense of temperature. This sense of temperature evolved on the earth's planetary incarnation which we call Saturn. Such a sense does of course go through transformations at different stages of evolution. When it first appeared it was very different from the way it will be in its later form.

The ancient sense of hearing which human beings brought with them into planetary evolution was a quite peculiar sense of hearing. The best way of characterizing it is perhaps to say: ‘Basically that the human physical body was just one big ear.’ The human being was all ear at the time of entering into this planetary evolution. As a physical body the human being hardly differed at all from the environment. Man sounded, and everything else sounded as well. In the whole of their bodies, human beings perceived what lived out there as the sounds of the world. Just as a string vibrates when another is plucked or struck, so there was a vibration in the human physical body for every sound that arose in the world. Everything resounded.

The further development of the senses was a matter of specialization. Human beings had been all ear to begin with, and then the sense of temperature arose. Something that had been one before became differentiated into two structures. This also became apparent at the physical level. Organs appeared that would mediate only hearing, others that would mediate only temperature perceptions. The whole human being thus changed each time the physical body reappeared. The senses became specialized, and a simple form gradually grew highly complex.

Human beings thus entered into Saturn evolution with the potential for hearing. On Saturn they acquired a sense of temperature. During the Sun evolution that followed they gained the sense of sight. The potential for a sense of sight which developed during Sun evolution was thus the third stage, with the other senses becoming transformed so that on the Sun the human being was able to hear, feel and, in a way, to see.

Continuing along the line of evolution we come to the Moon. The Sun had first gone into pralaya again. It then rose again as Moon. On the Moon, the sense of taste developed in addition to the other senses. Four of our present-day senses had thus evolved. The others again specialized, distributing themselves among individual organs. You can literally follow the way this physical body opened up to be an organ for the outside world. The sympathetic nervous system had already evolved on the Sun. During life on the ancient Moon, the other organs also evolved in stages, but we’ll just consider the senses here. On the Moon, then, the sense of taste was added and on earth the youngest of the senses, the sense of smell. If you study the senses today, you can tell yourself that the sense of smell is the youngest, having developed last in the human being. The sense of taste was already there during Moon evolution and has been refashioned once. Every refashioning makes the senses more perfect. The sense of smell is the least perfect. The sense of taste has corrected its errors once, the sense of sight twice, the sense of temperature three times. Our sense of hearing is the most perfect, however, for it had already gone through four transformations and is going through the fifth on earth.

You thus have to see the human body as a highly complex entity and realize that much had to happen so that the physical body was gradually able to develop. One has to know their relative ages if one is to form an opinion about different parts of this body. So the senses again have different relationships to other spirits, also as regards their level of perfection. A sense organ which is more perfect, having gone through quite a number of transformations, relates to completely different worlds from those to which a sense organ relates that has only gone through a few transformations.

Let us stay with the sense of hearing for now. It has gone through a whole sequence of stages, for potentially it existed already when the human being entered into this evolution. So what happened? Physical Saturn evolution took the sense of hearing a stage further, and then added the first beginnings of a sense of temperature. Then, during Sun evolution, the ether body was added to the physical body. From Moon onwards the astral body played a role, and from earth evolution onwards the I-body. But this whole scheme of things also meant something else. The I does not yet have an influence on the sense of smell because the sense of smell only joined the other senses on earth and is still wholly caught up in physical evolution. The human ether body has an influence on the sense of taste, the astral body on the sense of sight, and the I-body on the sense of temperature, of warmth, of feeling.

The first beginnings of manas developing in the human being, as the potential for a higher spiritual self, have an influence on the sense of hearing. This principle, which belongs to man’s higher nature, thus only has an influence on the sense of hearing today. None of the things the four lower senses make their own becomes part of our eternal soul. Only the things that can be expressed in words, things we are able to put into words—a word only has to be thought and it will be heard inwardly—are part of the eternal, immortal part of the human being. All thoughts that can be put in words, feelings that are so clear in our minds that we can put them in words, all the impulses to which human beings can put a name and which do not live in them as dim drives but are so clear that they can be put into words—all this belongs to the eternal part of the human being. The word is therefore something that is part of the eternal basis of the human being. And if we start to speak of things eternal at all, we must quite literally speak of the word. At the time when the earth entered into its evolution, when earth evolution began on Saturn, this first potential for the word was there. Now, on earth, this potential has evolved. The statement: ‘In the beginning was the word’⁵⁵ must be taken quite literally. Those gospel words should not be taken as symbolic, but their meaning has to be developed until they can be understood in their literal sense. The word is also the beginning of the eternal part of the human being. Because of this, the word, the audible word, is the first part of the human being that proves useful for developing the future world. Everything the other senses produce is of no use at all for the evolution which the earth must still go through.

Legends and myths often contain profound truths, or do you think legend does not know that anything produced by the sense of smell is of no immediate use in earth evolution? That further planetar evolutions have to be gone through before the principle that lies in the sense of smell will be of use? The father of all obstacles thus is one who leaves a horrible stench behind—the devil is recognized after he’s gone because of the stench he leaves behind. The world of legend holds the deepest truths; one only has to know how to take them literally in the highest sense.

Our study of the senses and the way they relate to the world can take us yet further. Let us take one of the senses, say the sense of sight. It is the middle one of the senses. I’d now like you to follow me into something rather subtle. You know that the astral body, in which man’s inner drives, appetites and passions live, shows itself to the clairvoyant as a light body. In this light body you see all kinds of configurations and colours. Every passion, every drive has a specific colour. All this, and even a person’s basic mood, comes to expression in this light body. Looking at the light body of someone who is rather nervous, you see it pregnant with glittering dots that flash and shine out. It all shines out and vanishes again in a rich play of colour.

If there is a terrible affect, you see rays like this:

Someone with hidden resentment shows figures like snakes:

This is difficult to draw, because it is in constant motion, rather like lightning. The person is feeling anger or resentment or anxiety when the soul is twitching like this inside. That is where a human being inwardly experiences his state of soul. Outwardly this state of soul shows itself in light phenomena to the clairvoyant.

The physical eye sees lights and colours around it. Just as a clairvoyant sees red, blue, yellow and green in the astral body, so does the physical eye see red, blue, yellow and green around it. In both cases the cause is exactly the same. Just as an appetite lives behind the red in the astral body, so there is an appetite behind the red of a flower as the ‘thing in itself’. What the sense of sight does when it goes beyond this point is no different from turning a coat inside out. Whilst man's astral nature comes to expression in his aura, external astral nature lives behind the whole world of colours and light, the world that exists for the sense of sight. There would be never be any colours in the world if all things were not completely imbued with astral spirits. The colours that show themselves in the world come from the astral spirits that show themselves in colours. In turning inside out, the spirit moves from the higher to the lower plane.

You can achieve the following by means of meditation. If you have a green area before you, perhaps the leaf of a plant, and now go outside yourself to look at the matter from the other side, you would see the astral spirit that is behind the green colour and shows itself to be present by means of the colour green.

So you have to see it like this. Looking out in the world and seeing it decked out in colours, you can assume that astral spirits are behind those colours. Just as you let the colours of your aura become apparent to the clairvoyant, so does the tapestry of colour in the world reflect the cosmic aura. All colour in this world is aura turned inside out. If you were able to turn your aura the way you do a coat, the other side your aura would also become physically visible to you. This applies to the sense of sight, and you can see from this that the sense of sight is closely bound up with the astral world.

Taking the sense of feeling, the sense of temperature, this in turn has a universal relationship to the lower parts of the astral world. While the sense of sight relates more to the upper parts of the astral world, the sense of feeling or temperature has the same kind of relationship to the lower parts of the astral world, more to the region where the astral world begins its transition to the ether world. The sense of hearing is directly related to the physical world, and the things you perceive as sense of hearing are oscillations in the physical air.

This is something I would ask you to consider in a most subtle way, in the right way. If you want to see something, an astral spirit must be behind the colour you see. There must also be an astral spirit behind the heat or cold you feel. If you want to hear something, you have fully arrived in the physical world, since the sense of hearing is the most perfect of the senses and you can hear a physical entity. It is thus only in the word that the world of the spirit has rightly descended as far as the physical world.

Starting from the top therefore [on the board], we are able to say that the phenomena of the sense of heating are entirely on the physical plane, those of heat are already somewhat higher up, those of the sense of sight are on the astral plane, and the phenomena we perceive through the least perfect of the senses belong to the higher parts of the spiritual world. Whatever extends down into the physical world is simply the least perfect. Anything the sense of smell is able to perceive, anything it brings down into the physical world, is most incomplete. Where this goes its own way, it separates out from the great scheme of things, from evolution. The phenomena revealed in the sense of smell should only arise in intimate connection with the most sublime worlds today.

Let us then take the spirits which at one time, just when the sense of smell had started to evolve on earth, separated out from evolution and became independent. These are spirits that make themselves known mainly through the sense of smell. And so it is rather nice that legend speaks of fallen angels making themselves known in a most unpleasant way through the sense of smell. Having left the stream of evolution, they have become perceptible to the sense of smell.

If we therefore ask ourselves what really lies outside the skin which encloses the human sense organs, we have to say to ourselves that there we do indeed have the different higher planes and their spirits.

Research at the physical level is in most beautiful agreement here. Just think of how an eye develops. Initially it starts from the outside. A small depression develops in the skin of the creature developing an eye. This gradually deepens,

and after a time it looks like this. This then fills up with a kind of fluid and finally closes up.

And so the eye is indeed pushing in from the outside. The human organs do not develop from the inside but push in from the outside. It is the same for all human and animal organs. The technical term for it is ‘invagination’ or ‘inversion’. In vertebrate animals, a channel first developed, and the spinal marrow integrated itself into this from the outside. That is also how the senses integrate themselves from the outside.

What makes the eye push in like that? This is the work of the spirits that are active in the light. It is the spirits active in the ray of light which create the eye from the organism, spirits that are behind the outer appearance of things, astrally, of which we have said that we would be able to see them if we could turn our conscious mind inside out. They have pushed the eye into the physical organism. The eye is thus created by spirits of light. The other organs are created in the same way by other spirits from the different worlds. When you feel yourself to be inside your skin, you can feel yourself to be in the condition where spirits have worked on your body from different sides. When man arrived on Saturn in his very first evolution, only the most sublime spirits were able to work on his organ of hearing. He was taught to hear by higher and then also by lower spirits until on earth, too, the spirits embodied in the outside air began to share in the work on his organ of hearing. Man hears air in motion with his organ of hearing; that is where sound lies.

If we really take this into our hearts and minds, we shall begin to understand in a very deep sense why air played such a special role in the Genesis story, why it had to be breathed into man, so that it might play this role also with regard to his organ of hearing. ‘The creator breathed the living breath in man, and he became a living soul.’⁵⁶ Man himself is at his highest level created by the word, by sound. This also shows the relationship human beings have to their whole environment through the senses.

Looking at the sense of sight you can say that the spirits which live on the astral plane have worked on the sense of sight. They live in the ray of light. The ray of light has a physical and an astral part. Now imagine it falling on something. It contains the external physical light and also the astral spirits which live in the ray of light. Now make yourself stand in such a way that you stop the ray of light, letting the sun shine on your back. You will stop the physical light but not the astral spirits. An astral spirit will then be in front of you, in your shadow. An astral spirit lives in he shadow which you cast before you. This astral spirit living in your shadow is no more and no less than an image. An image of what? Of the body. And what lives in it takes its form from the soul. This is one of the methods by which one can gradually see one’s own soul. Primitive peoples were not entirely wrong when they said that the soul lived in a person’s shadow. You will find this in countless legends—the soul goes with the shadow. The soul first shows itself to astral vision in the shadow, in its form.

You’ll now also understand the deep significance of Chamisso’s Peter Schlemihl, the man who lost his shadow.⁵⁷ Read Chamisso’s short story with this thought about the shadow in mind and you will realize that much, much deeper meanings lie behind many such stories.⁵⁸

You will in fact realize more and more that someone who does not know of these things is going about more or less like a blind Person. Someone who knows nothing of the worlds of spirit does not have the slightest notion of what he is taking along with him in his shadow. All the subtle things that surround us will be opened up again to people through the science of the spirit. The world is very puzzling for someone who wants to respond to it inwardly. When people become aware of the riddles that face them, they will no longer consider the spiritual scientific view to be something superfluous, something dreamt up by people with vivid imaginations, but realize that the reality which exists all around us only opens up for us through the science of the spirit. We should never tire of studying everything around us. Many spirits have had a hand in the complex structure we call the human being. This is also why the structure has so many different levels of perfection. The physical ear only gained the right to hear at the physical level once it had gone through many stages. A chela⁵⁹ who under the guidance of his master goes early to the Venus stage, will also be able to perceive other people on the physical plane in light activity; for then light activity will also extend down to the physical plane.

The process of evolution is quite regular. Just as the sense of hearing has descended to the physical plane, so will the sense of sight descend to the physical plane permitting genuine clairvoyance. The logic of this is quite apparent. Someone who is prepared to think can already see the sense of it, and no one can refute it by mere thinking. That is how it is with all things in the science of the spirit. Only people who do not want to think will fight the science of the spirit, or people wanting to apply their thinking activity only to the things they are used to thinking. Of course someone may come and say: I don’t want to go on a train, but this does not mean we can deny the existence of the railways. So there may also be people who say: There’s nothing in this business of higher worlds. But that does not mean we can deny the existence of the higher worlds. They do exist.

We have spoken of the human sense organs and tried to throw some light on the surrounding world. We have found that the sense organs exist only because other spirits create them. In the same way we could have spoken of the inner spirit that bases itself on the surrounding world. It is not possible to understand these things with a science of the physical world. There it may well be possible to show the structural differences between eye and ear, but not the difference in age between eye and ear. This needs occult science, where it is possible to see behind the surface. We could also have shown that the liver is much younger than the spleen. In that case we would have found that the spleen existed when the ether body joined forces with the physical body, whilst the liver only came with the astral body, with human passions. This is most beautifully shown in the story of Prometheus. The eagle that pecked at the liver of Prometheus who had been chained to a mountain peak is deeply significant.

You might thus consider the great truths to be found in legends in a new way. Ancient legends and myths hold profound wisdom. The myths did not arise from the poetic fantasy of the people, that is an academic superstition. Academics are the most superstitious people in the world. People who believe in ghosts are not as superstitious as are our academics. It is superstition to say that there is a popular fantasy that creates blindly. In reality the great myths come from initiates who knew the things which are now being made accessible again to humanity in the great theosophical truths.

In earlier times, societies where theosophy was taught existed in the part of the world where we are now. Some would go out and tell the things they had heard in their circles to the people, presenting them in myths. Myths thus hold spiritual truths, and anyone who tries can discover these again in the myths. Only lesser myths do not go back to the great initiates. Genuine myths come from them, they are their creation. If you remember this, you’ll see that the myths of different peoples are miraculous writing. Learn to read the myths and look deeply into the souls of peoples that have gone before, peoples that created from inside, as it were. Turn the myths inside out, as we turned the astral plane inside out earlier, and you have modern science, in concept.

In modern science you find the same truths, the evolutional truths to be found in the myths. Hence the strange agreement between the idea of evolution, understood at a deeper level, and the very earliest teaching given to humanity. The elements of mythology are seen from inside, modern science sees them from the outside; but they are the same elements. This brings to mind the remarkable fact that truths found in the earliest religious beliefs come up again in scientific facts that are rightly understood. It need not surprise us to hear that modern science is mythology transformed. It therefore has to be the same in structure as something that existed before.

We have been considering the way the senses relate to the world around us.

Tomorrow at 2 p.m. we'll talk about theosophical matters that do not come from so far away but nevertheless play a role in everyday life.

• 52. The Architektenhaus in Berlin had lecture rooms which could be rented. Rudolf Steiner lectured there from 1903 to 1918, giving a comprehensive introduction to anthroposophy in his longest continuous series of lectures.
• 53. A further set of notes became available for this lecture (19 Oct. 1906). Changes in the text compared to the 1st German edition of 1974 are due to this.
• 54. On this subject, see Steiner R. Theosophy of the Rosicrucian (GA 99), lectures of 1 & 2 June 1907. Tr. M. Cotterell, D. Osmond. London: Rudolf Steiner Press 1981. Welt, Erde and Mensch (GA 105), lecture of 3 August 1908 (in German). It seems significant that Rudolf Steiner was considering the subject as preparations were in progress for the Annual General Meeting of the Theosophical Society's German Section. For the same occasion in 1909 he developed a theory of the senses based on the science of the spirit in the lectures he gave on 23-25 Oct. that year, publ. in The Wisdom of Man, the Soul and the Spirit (GA 115). In his own words, this gave the European spiritual scientific movement he was leading a firmer foundation. He intended to publish this theory of the senses in book form, but the work remained fragmentary. Published posthumously as Anthroposophy (A Fragment) (GA 45).
• 55. John 1: 1
• 56. Genesis 2
• 57. Chamisso, Adalbert von (1781–1831). German poet, writer and biologist. Peter Schlemihl published in 1813.
• 58. Changes in the German text compared to the 1974 edition are the result of making comparison with another set of notes.
• 59. Chela (Sanskrit), adept or disciple in the spirit.