The Rudolf Steiner Archive

From the observations we made here the day before yesterday, and perhaps also in a broader sense from the public observations of these days, it will be seen that there is a certain necessity for humanity to develop spiritual-scientific interests, especially in the present day. For this spiritual science, in addition to its other tasks in the narrower sense for the individual human being, for his mind, his needs in life, his soul matters, is in a position to create clarity about certain things that man in the present must absolutely consider. And it is from this point of view that I have emphasized the necessity of regarding the seriousness with which spiritual science must be taken by those who approach it today, and of allowing it to appeal above all to the soul. We must try to explore in the most diverse directions how humanity could end up in such a catastrophic situation. For what this catastrophic situation means is still not considered by many people today in its full depth and with full seriousness. But the time will come when the events themselves, the facts themselves, will reveal this seriousness in a completely different way than is already the case today. But precisely on the basis of spiritual science, one should realize that it is not enough to wait until the very last moment, so to speak, to understand what one needs to understand in the face of the deeply dormant demands of the time. Above all, it is necessary to be prepared to face the fact that certain truths, which are necessary for humanity in the present and in the near future, are uncomfortable, that it is much more comfortable to sing the praises of how we have come so gloriously far in this or that respect, through the great achievements of cultural studies achievements, than to point out what is effective and alive in the relationships of human beings themselves, and what is effective and alive in particular in order to condition the character of contemporary humanity, so to speak. Contemporary humanity is challenged in many ways, it is necessarily led to understand this and that; but some things that are to be understood are just uncomfortable to understand, and require a certain unreserved, unprejudiced assessment of one's own human nature.

Certain tendencies exist in the development of time. Hypothetically, one can say that it would indeed be possible to continue to regard such things as something great, such as the so-called examination of aptitude mentioned the day before yesterday. Certain contemporary educators, namely, propagate these things, regard them as something tremendously great, and the rest of humanity disdains to form an opinion about these things, finds it inconvenient not to sleep in the face of such Ahrimanic tendencies, as they are introduced by something like the aptitude test and many other things. If such endeavors, such ideals – and of course they are ideals too – are to continue to exist, then this will have a profound influence on the whole development of the human soul, and above all a very specifically configured influence on the basic powers of the human soul: thinking, feeling and willing. One may hypothetically ask oneself, for it is not to take place, it is to be remedied by the efforts of those who profess the anthroposophical world view, but hypothetically one may ask oneself in order to know what one has to do: What configuration must the three main soul forces of man take on if such tendencies, as they are currently prevailing from the materialistic attitude, from the Ahrimanic, were to take hold alone, if they were not countered by spiritual striving, spiritual will? However great and powerful the influence of technical progress, which is fed by natural science, and of progress in other fields of natural science, may be, this very progress in natural science, this very structure of present-day thinking, will gradually impress more and more the character of narrow-mindedness, of limitation, on human imagination, on human thinking. There is no other way to characterize it, because in the broadest sense, I would say, the beginning of this narrow-mindedness, this limitation, is already apparent today, and it will consist in the fact that one will sin more and more

against something that was asserted in a public lecture yesterday: one will sin against opening up the whole soul to the world. More and more, people will limit themselves to listening theoretically and intellectually to what the concepts and ideas say. I also wanted to publicly point out that two people can say exactly the same thing with words, and one is by no means justified in thinking that what comes from both people is the same.

Today we live in the age of programs. The age of programs is precisely the age of intellectualism. What is it that people most like to do today when they devote themselves to the good of humanity? They found associations for all kinds of causes and set up programs and ideals. These can, of course, be very ingenious, very benevolent, very plausible; for the development of humanity they need not be worth a shot of powder. But one goes out of one's way to ask oneself: What does the person in question want? And if the person in question says – now, let's take something abstract, today one loves abstractions –: I want to cultivate universal philanthropy, then one thinks: What better thing could one do? Of course, one must join such an association! But we live in a time when, due to a certain oversaturation that culture has attained, it is extremely easy to come up with the most beautiful programs and the most beautiful ideas. In this regard, one can be a very limited person in terms of one's sense of and interest in the overall well-being of humanity and its true concerns. I might add that today, in the more delicate matters of culture, one can sometimes be right in the higher sense about things in which, according to the opinion of very many people, one is perhaps completely wrong. Thus, for example, today one may be led to set a higher value on poetic stammering which really and truly heralds the power of the inner soul than on perfect verses which are recognized as such simply because, as regards the outward configuration of poetry, language itself, the spirit of language, writes verses today and only employs the human soul to do so. Today, anyone can make brilliant verses in terms of the old verse style, even if they have no strong soul power. Such things must be taken into account in a time when great, eminently great questions arise for the development of mankind, as in this present time.

So it must be said: People must learn to open their whole soul to whole souls; people must learn to hold less and less to the content of what is said, and they must learn to gain more and more insight into the knowledge and power of what is brought into the world by this or that personality. We are, after all, experiencing the most terrible world-historical drama, that people all over the world worship principles such as those emanating from Woodrow Wilson, because these principles are plausible, because these principles cannot be refuted. Of course they are plausible, and of course they cannot be refuted, but they are as old as human thought; they have always been said that way. In all these things, there is nothing that is connected with the real, concrete, immediately present tasks. But people find it uncomfortable to put themselves in the position of the real, concrete, immediately present tasks, to develop the flexibility of thought. For this flexibility of thinking is part of the process of entering into the immediately concrete. Of course, it sometimes takes a long time to find one's way into this concrete; but today it is necessary to understand such things, to enter a little into the soul of the development of humanity.

There is a city in which a southern German population lives. In this city, a very important personality arose in the 18th century: Johann Heinrich Lambert. Kant, who was a contemporary of Johann Heinrich Lambert, called Lambert the greatest genius of his century; for if only Lambert's ideas had taken the place of the so-called Kant-La Place theory, something very significant would have emerged. This Lambert grew up in a city, which is now a southern German city, as the son of a tailor, and showed special talent at the age of fourteen. His father petitioned the city's council for support. After much effort, the council finally agreed to donate forty francs for the talented boy, on the condition that he never again request support. A hundred years had to pass before the city erected a monument to this man in the 1840s, the same city that had chased him out when he was fourteen. He was forced to leave the city and achieved greatness through special circumstances in Berlin. Now there is a beautiful monument, with a globe at the top to suggest that this genius was born out of this great, powerful city, which was able to harbor such geniuses, that the genius who knew how to embrace the world comes from this very soil!

Sometimes it takes even longer than a hundred years to realize what is teeming with talent. That may be, it may have been until our time. But how often has it been emphasized among us that the time has come when people must awaken to a free, self-reliant consciousness, in which people can no longer afford to be unaware of what is going on around them. This time is approaching with giant strides. People must learn to unlock their souls in order to see what is really there. Because, as I said, thinking is threatened by the peculiar configuration of materialistic culture, imagination is limited and becomes narrow-minded. Spiritual science provides concepts and ideas that do not allow one to become narrow-minded in one's thinking. One is constantly being asked, precisely through spiritual scientific concepts, to look at a thing from the most diverse sides. That is why even today many people in the spiritual science ranks are annoyed when they hear: Now a new cycle is coming, the matter will be approached from a completely different angle. — But it is inevitable that things are approached from the most diverse angles, and that we finally get beyond what I would call the absolutization of judgment. The truth, grasped in the spirit, cannot be well expressed in sharp contours because the spirit is a moving thing. So spiritual science works against narrow-mindedness in relation to thinking. Of course, it is difficult to say this to the present, but it is necessary.

The second faculty observed in the soul is feeling. Regarding feeling, regarding the world of feeling, what tendency does humanity strive towards from its materialistic culture? One can say that it has come a long way precisely in this area. In the realm of feeling, materialistic “culture” produces narrow-mindedness, philistinism. Our materialistic culture is particularly inclined to grow into the gigantic. Narrow-mindedness of interests! In the narrowest circle, people want to close themselves more and more. But today man is no longer called to close himself in the narrowest circle, today he is called to recognize how he is a tone in the great cosmic symphony.

Let us once again consider something, in order to immediately look at what is meant here from a comprehensive point of view, something that has already been mentioned here. I would like to say: you can calculate – and today people believe a lot in calculation – in what a wonderful way man fits into the cosmos. In one minute, we take about eighteen breaths. If you multiply that by twenty-four hours in a day, you get 25,920 breaths. Twenty-four hours, 25,920 breaths! Now try to calculate the following: You know that every year the vernal point, the rising point of the sun in spring, moves a little further along the vault of heaven. Let's go back to very distant times. The sun rose in Taurus in spring, then a little further in Taurus and again a little further until it entered Aries, and then again further, and so the sun goes around, apparently of course. How many years does it take for the Sun to move forward a little bit at a time in this jerky manner so that it arrives back at the same point? The Sun makes many such jerks: it takes 25,920 years to move forward in this way, which means that the Sun completes one revolution in the great cosmos in 25,920 years, in as many years as we take breaths in one day. Imagine what a wonderful coincidence that is! We breathe 25,920 times in a day, the sun advances, and when it has made the jerk 25,920 times, like our inner jerk, a breath, then it has come around the cosmos once. So we are a reflection of the macrocosm with our breathing.

It goes further: the average lifespan – this can of course go much further, but some people die earlier – the lifespan is on average seventy, seventy-one years. What is this actually, this human life? It is also a sum of breaths. Only they are different breaths. In ordinary physical breathing, we suck in the air and expel it. In a twenty-four-hour day, if we are ordinary, righteous people and do not go out at night in rags, we take a deep inhalation of our ego and the astral body when we wake up, and exhale our ego and astral body again when we fall asleep: that is also a breath. Every day is a breath of our physical and etheric body in relation to the I and the astral body. How often do we do that in a lifetime that lasts about seventy, seventy-one years? Calculate how many days a person actually lives: 25,920 days! That means that not only in one day do we imitate the course of the sun in the world by developing as many breaths as the sun makes jolts until it returns to the same point in the cosmos, but we also perform the great breath, the inhalation of the I and the astral body into the physical and etheric bodies, and the exhalation of the I and the astral body into the seventy-one years just as often as we breathe in one day: 25,920 times, which is the number of times the sun moves before it returns to the same point. We could cite many such things that show us how we, with our human lives, stand in the great harmony of the universe in terms of numbers and otherwise, and they would be no less surprising, no less magnificent, than if we feel what I have just explained. Much is hidden in the circumstances in which man stands in the world, but this hiddenness has its profound effect because it is actually the same as what was understood in ancient times as the harmony of the spheres.

This, indeed, calls forth our interest in the whole world. We are gradually learning to understand that we know nothing about ourselves as human beings if we restrict our interest in a philistine way to our immediate surroundings. But this has become more and more the characteristic of modern times, philistinism! Indeed, philistinism has become the basic tenor of the religious world view; and from there this basic tenor of philistinism radiated into many minds. Go back to the first centuries of Christianity: there was a doctrine that was grandiose. It was for that time. Today it must be replaced by our spiritual-scientific view, because different times make different demands on humanity, but at that time it was a grandiose doctrine, Gnosticism. Consider the magnificent way in which these Gnostics thought, in the research of the eons, in the research of the various spiritual hierarchies, how this small earth is aligned with the great cosmic world evolution with its many, many entities, but in whose ranks man is placed after all. It took flexibility of thought, a certain goodwill to develop one's concepts, not to let them calcify, become slimy, as one does now, in order to rise to Gnosis. Then came — not Christianity, but Christian confessionality. And ask around today what most official representatives of Christianity hate most of all: Gnosis. And they blacken anthroposophy most of all for that reason; they do not concern themselves with anthroposophy itself, they are too lazy for that, but when they glance into some book they have a dark suspicion, a dark notion: it could be some kind of gnosis too, for heaven's sake! We must take in new ideas, we must make the mind agile! We have finally brought people to simplicity of thought, especially in the religious sphere. It is said that one cannot gauge what will come of it when one soars to such lofty heights! – It is said: Man can indeed come to reach the highest divine in the simplest mind; there is no need to make an effort, but the simplest, childlike mind can reach the highest divine at every moment.

Yes, we must see through these things! It is important to really look at these things, because the prevailing mood of modern times, the philistinism, emanates from these things. That is why the religious sentiment in the various denominations has become so philistine, because what I have just described underlies it. Today it flatters people who pretend to be modest, but who are actually terribly immodest at heart, because immodesty, megalomania, is a fundamental characteristic of our time. Everything is judged, no matter how difficult it is experienced, no matter how much difficulty it bears on the forehead: it is judged, even by the one who can well know that he has not particularly endeavored to much experience, who only endeavored to arrive at the self-evident: that no effort must be made to recognize God, but that God must surrender Himself at all times to the simplest, most childlike mind if it wants Him. So one must see that philistinism must be pushed back by spiritual science before all else. But philistinism is rooted quite differently than is often assumed today, and many of those who believe that they have truly escaped philistinism are in fact mired in it up to their necks. Many “isms” and many modernisms that make it their program not to be like the philistines are actually nothing more than the most masked philistinism. That is the second point. In the realm of thinking and imagination, the encroaching narrow-mindedness must be pushed back; in the realm of feeling, the advancing philistinism. Broad-mindedness of interest must take its place, the will to really look at what is going on in the great tableau of earthly development.

The day before yesterday, we tried to characterize the effect of the folk spirits in concrete terms. These are archangels. From this you could already see that these folk spirits are connected with the places where certain people develop on earth. The folk spirit in Italy works through the air, and it works through everything liquid in the areas of present-day France and so on, as I have characterized it. But naturally these things intersect with many others, and one must be clear about the fact that people live side by side on earth, that certain phases of development are left behind in certain areas. In some cases, people advance them, in others they even cause them to decline. Now there is something tremendously significant to observe. If we regard the whole earth as an organism and ask ourselves: What is happening all over the earth? we can begin by looking at various areas of Asia, the Asian East, as it is called. In this Asian East, there are many souls incarnating today that, due to their karma, due to what they have brought with them from previous lives on earth, are still stuck in earlier peculiarities of human development. These are souls seeking bodies in which they can still be dependent on physical development up to a certain advanced age. The normal thing is that today one is only dependent up to the twenty-seventh year. This is what represents the fundamental character of our time: that one is dependent on physical development until the age of twenty-seven. This is very significant in our time. One understands much in our time when one considers these things. I have already pointed this out here.

I once asked myself: What would a person be like who was supposed to be the very type of our time, how would he have to enter this time with all his work, with all his activity? — He would have to, so to speak, exclude from himself everything that is otherwise brought to people from outside and affects them, leaving them to their own devices until the age of twenty-seven. He would have to be what is called a self-made man, a self-made person. Until the age of twenty-seven, he should be little affected by what the normal, the representative in our time, should be. Until the age of twenty-seven, he should develop entirely on his own. Then, just after he has made of himself what a modern man can make of himself, then, for example, he would have to be elected to parliament. Isn't it true that being elected to parliament is what it means to be in touch with the times today? Then, when he has been elected to parliament and after a few years has even become a minister, then he is in a sense stigmatized, then people notice later when one falls over in one direction or another and has this or that mishap. And then? How must it continue? One can no longer develop, one remains the type of one's time, one is the right representative of one's time. There are people like that today, as I said here some time ago: Lloyd George, for example. There is no one who expresses more characteristically and typically what is present in our time than Lloyd George, who by the age of twenty-seven had brought forth everything that a person can draw from the physical body. He was an autodidact, he came into life early, into socialism, and learned early on that at twenty-seven, you belong in Parliament. He was elected to Parliament and very soon became one of the most feared speakers there, even one of the most feared squinters – that's what they say: squinters – he always sat there and lurked when others were talking. There was something special about the way he looked up, that was well known to Lloyd George. Then the Campbell-Bannerman ministry came. Then they said: What do we do about Lloyd George? He's dangerous. It's best to make him a minister. And so they took him into the ministry. Yes, but to which ministerial post do we transfer him? He is a very talented person! Well, we transfer him to a position where he understands nothing. There he will be most useful, there he will be the least trouble! - He was made Minister of Railways and Shipbuilding. In a few months he acquired what he needed. He made the greatest reforms, the greatest things.

Surely, the type of man of the present cannot be better described than by portraying Lloyd George. It is as if it is concentrated, as if it is the essence of the materialism of the present, and one can understand much of the present if one is able to go into something like this. That is how it is in the middle of the world, I would like to say, between the Asian East and the American West. It is particularly the case in European culture that up to the age of twenty-seven one can extract from the bodily-physical what can also be significant for the soul-spiritual. Then a spiritual impulse must be aroused in the soul if one wants to progress, for the physical body has nothing more to give. Therefore, in a person like Lloyd George, everything that the present gives by itself is there, but he also has nothing of what is to be freely achieved. The present naturally gives much genius, many talents, but it gives nothing spiritual by itself. That must be conquered through freedom. But in Asia there is still ample opportunity to find bodies that allow the soul-spiritual development to continue beyond the twenty-seventh or twenty-eighth year. Therefore, souls incarnate there that still want to gain something from the physical body beyond this time. That is why there is still a spiritual culture, a culture that insists that the things around us be looked at spiritually, that the spiritual be recognized in the world. Of course, there is also a great deal of decadence in the East because materialism has spread, and since it is least suitable for the East, decadence has the greatest effect there. But among those who are the leading people, you can see how a natural spirituality is still present. They inwardly despise European materialistic culture in the most comprehensive sense. People like Rabindranath Tagore, who recently gave a speech about the spirit of Japan, who says: We Orientals naturally adopt European achievements for our external technical cultural conditions; but we put them in our sheds, in our stables, and certainly don't let them enter our living rooms, this European culture - because the spiritual is a matter of course for him. Today, we need to know such things, for these things are the basic forces of what is happening in the world, and on which world events depend today.

You will say: Yes, but we do have, for example, in our Central European culture, a firm foundation for a spirituality that is even based on clear, bright ideas! — We do have that too, and we can speak of this spirituality in the same way that I tried to speak of a forgotten current in German intellectual life in my book “Vom Menschenrätsel” (The Riddle of Man). In order to be imbued with a spirituality that would truly go beyond what Oriental spirituality has achieved in the development of humanity, we need only imbibe the wonderful imaginations that we find, for example, in Herder or Goethe. Oriental culture has not produced anything as great as Herder, who sees a picture of the new creation of the world in every new sunrise and describes it in a magnificent way. Those who do not want to be philistines today are still such philistines that they say: You no longer care about something that is so ancient – and if you ask people about Herder, it has long been forgotten. And the Oriental, when he judges the circumstances, naturally judges that which lives in the outer real current of Central European culture.

Read the perceptive Chinese scholar Xu Hung-Ming, who has sympathetically described Central European culture, or read the lecture that Rabindranath Tagore recently gave. Then you will see that people are asking themselves: What is the position of this Europe in the overall progress of humanity? — They have an inkling that this Central Europe would be called upon to lead people beyond what spiritualism has given them itself. But then they look to see whether this Central Europe has not failed to develop the great talents, the great seeds that are there, that it contains. People say that they had a Goethe; yes, but these honest, materialistic Germans do not know how to make use of him! When his last grandchild died, there was another opportunity to introduce Goetheanism into German spiritual life. Under the truly incomparably magnificent aegis of a German princess, the Goethe-Schiller Archive was founded. A great impulse was given in the 1880s. The Goethe Society was also founded, but they were constantly embarrassed to appoint someone to the top who would really have dealt with the spirituality of Goethe. They did not find that worthy, and in the last election they did not put a person at the head of the Goethe Society who would be steeped in the spirituality inspired by Goethe, but they appointed a former finance minister. Yes, but after such things the world must judge what is happening in Central Europe! Today, Goethe's heritage is administered by a former finance minister who, admittedly, has the symptomatic first name “Kreuzwendedich” (which means “Turn Yourself Around”). But I don't know if, if the symbolism of this first name were to be fulfilled, something better would take its place.

These things could only change if the place of narrow-minded interests were taken by great interests, if people really looked at how the impulses work across the earth, how the bodies in the east, I would like to say, make a somewhat spirituality for the souls who want to incarnate in such bodies today with a retarded spirituality, which still gives something of the physical body for the souls beyond the twenty-seventh year. In the East, people remain at an earlier stage of human development, they stop at what humanity has already gone through. Here in the middle, people have reached the point where a change must take place, where they can draw what is necessary from the physical body up to the age of twenty-seven. But for the further development of the human soul, if one does not want to grow old early and does not want to have nothing of one's youth, one must have a spiritual-soul impulse, a free spiritual impulse, not, like the Oriental, an unfree spiritual impulse.

If we go further west, to America, humanity is so constituted that it lags behind, that it does not reach this level. In the Orient, humanity has, in a sense, regressed to earlier stages; in the middle, you have the normal age; in the West, in America – I characterized it the day before yesterday – the subterranean of the earth is at work. Even on such minds as Woodrow Wilson, it has the effect of being obsessed by their own words, their own principles. They are like prematurely aged children, but the word has a slightly different connotation. They cannot achieve the full impact of what can be achieved up to the age of twenty-seven. Once we understand what makes such a strong impression on many people in the present day, we will ask ourselves, for example: How could it be that a mind like Woodrow Wilson's, which with its age never absorbed more than one absorbs up to the age of twenty-seven, could become the great world schoolmaster? — The breadth of interest to really bring such things to mind in a genuine way, you just don't have that. You don't want to get out of philistinism!

That remarkable trend in the evolution of humanity, which is characterized by the following: from the East to the West, from the preservation of an earlier time through the normal middle to the decadence of the West - this is to be found in the development of nations and the earth, not in the individual human being. Interest in it must be developed so that one knows what impulses are at work across the earth and so that one can evaluate them. And for a long time, the main influence here in the center of Europe came from the south, with the culture of Central Europe being permeated by Greco-Roman influences. The conservative nature of the south was adopted. Today we stand at a turning point. A particularly progressive element of the north must permeate the population of central Europe. And this special, I would say, favorable impulse of the Hyperborean time for today must pass through our soul. This is what must be taken into account. Otherwise, if man does not open his eyes and soul to these great impulses of human evolution, the earth will take a wrong direction of development, will not become humus for the cosmic world structure, and that which the last epoch of evolution of the earth should mean must be taken up by another planet.

There are great interests at stake. It is necessary to work one's way out of philistinism and develop towards great interests. Only by acquiring such interests can one come to evaluate certain phenomena of our present time in the right way. It can be clearly seen that human natures are bifurcating in our time. This is only the beginning today; but people are bifurcating. Some are natures that, so to speak, harden the physical body within themselves. They develop it in a certain hardening up to the age of twenty-seven, then they stop, they reject the spiritual-soul. If they do not have constant stimulation to stir up humanity, to lead humanity to disaster, like Lloyd George, then they become dull, stale, and turn into right-wing philistinism, becoming dull. In one direction lies the dulling of humanity. The others abandon themselves to all the driving, pulsating forces of the physical body until they are twenty-seven years old, drawing all spirituality out of the physical body. There is much in the physical. Do not forget, we all come into the world with tremendous wisdom; we only have to transform this wisdom into consciousness, to transform what is full of wisdom in our entire physical being. Spiritual science attempts to bring everything in the nerves, blood and muscles into consciousness in a harmonious, spiritualized way. Spiritual science rejects not only the dull-witted, but also, in many cases, those - and there are more and more of them - who, pulsating with life, feel until they reach sexual maturity and until the age of twenty-seven that which boils and seethes as genius in the nerves, blood and muscles. These overheated natures, which, so to speak, burn up human life, are becoming more and more common. They already occur extremely frequently today. They fill the lunatic asylums and so on. But it is not recognized that the real healing lies in anthroposophically 'oriented spiritual science.

A fine typical nature has indeed become a world celebrity in recent times. That is the philosopher Otto Weininger. Right, Otto Weininger was a person who, in the most chaotic way, unrefined, disharmonized, brought out what lies in the nerve, muscle, blood, and then wrote the book 'Sex and Character', which has become world-famous, and which people who fall for anything have also fallen for here. So that the Philistines were also taken in, who did not understand that, despite all the nonsense and repulsiveness, it was an idea, a revelation of an elementary fact about nerve, blood and muscle. The elemental approaches such people, out of their humanity itself, that which spiritual science would like to develop — only in an orderly, harmonious way. Such people, because they have not learned it from spiritual science — there they would learn it properly — but because their nerves, their blood, their muscles demand it, must ask a question that humanity must necessarily ask itself today. Without this question, humanity will not advance. It is: How can I, having entered the physical world through birth or conception, continue the development of my spiritual and soul existence from the last death to this birth? Such and similar questions, as we raise them in spiritual science, as we regard them as fundamental questions of progressive spiritual culture, must be raised and will be raised by those who boil up what is in nerve, blood and muscle.

You see, there is a chapter in Otto Weininger's work that is extraordinarily interesting. He asked himself: Why did I actually come into this world? — And he answered this question in his own way, out of what I have just characterized, out of the wisdom that lies in muscle, blood and nerve, but in a way that consumes and burns the human being. He asked himself: Why am I drawn out of the spiritual world, where I used to be, into earthly life? He found no answer except this: Because I was a coward, because I did not want to remain alone in the spiritual world and therefore sought the connection with other people. I did not have the courage to be alone, I sought the protection of the mother's womb. These were perfectly honest answers that he gave himself. Why do we have no memory, he asked, of what happened before birth? Because we have become that way through birth! — Literally he says: Because we have sunk so low that we have lost consciousness. If man had not lost himself at birth, he would not have to search for and find himself.

These are typical phenomena; today they still occur sporadically. They are those who, in their youth, extract from blood, nerve and muscle that which can only flourish in the whole human process if it is clarified and harmonized by that which spiritual science is to give. For this, however, the interests of general human life must be broadened. Philistinism must recede. The fact that people are locked in a narrow circle of interests must be systematically combated. Certain questions must take on a completely different form than they have done up to now. How has the religious development of the last few millennia itself structured the question that still binds people to the spiritual to some extent? A materialistically educated, witty person of the present day, who has taken a high position in a certain circle, once said to me: If you compare the state with the church, you get the opinion that the church still has it easier than the state. Well, I will not say anything about the value of this judgment, but that man thought that the church had an easier time than the state, because the state administers life, the church death, and people are more afraid of death than of life; therefore the church has an easier time. He considered this nonsense, of course, because he was a materialist.

But this chapter too has actually been brought into a rather selfish channel. Basically, people today ask: What happens to my soul and spiritual life when I have passed through the gate of death? — And there are many selfish impulses in this. Under the influence of spiritual science, the question of immortality in particular would take on a completely different form. In the future, people will not only ask: To what extent is the spiritual and mental life after death a continuation of life here on earth? But rather: To what extent is life on earth a continuation of the life I used to live in the spiritual and mental world? - Then one will be able to look at something like the following.

When a person passes through the gate of death, the imaginative presentation is very strong at first; a comprehensive world of images unfolds imaginatively. I would call this an unrolling of the world of images. The second third of the life between death and a new birth is filled mainly with inspirations. Inspirations occur in the human life in the second third of this life between death and a new birth. And intuitions in the last third. Now intuitions consist in the human being transferring himself with his self, his soul, into other beings, and the end of these intuitions consists in his transferring himself into the physical body. This transfer into the physical body through birth is merely the continuation of the mainly intuitive life of the last third between death and a new birth. And this must actually occur when the human being enters the physical plane; it must be a particularly characteristic trait in children: the ability to place themselves in the other life. They must do what others do, not what comes naturally to them, but imitate what the other does.

Why did I have to describe, when I was talking about “The education of the child from the point of view of spiritual science”, that children in the first seven years are mainly imitators? Because imitation, because putting oneself in the place of others, is the continuation of the intuitive world that exists in the last third of life between death and a new birth. If one looks at the life of the child here in a truly meaningful way, one can still see the life between death and a new birth streaming in and shining. The question of immortality will have to be posed on this basis: to what extent is life here on earth a continuation of the soul-spiritual life? But then people will also learn to take this life on earth very seriously, but not in an egotistical sense. Above all, they will adhere to a sense of responsibility, which is based on the realization that they are continuing here what is imposed on them by the fact that they have brought something with them as an inheritance from the soul-spiritual. It will mean an enormous change in the way people think when they speak from the other point of view. For that which the soul experiences between death and a new birth, this great spiritual realm, which is experienced in imaginations, inspirations, intuitions, that is the here and now for there; and what we experience here is the beyond for there. And the desire to understand and honor this Hereafter will become part of the newly formulated question of immortality, which will intervene in the spiritual development of humanity in a less egotistical way than the question of immortality has often done in the religious development of the past millennia.

I wanted to describe such things in order to show how humanity should emerge from philistinism, in order to show how one is not a philistine. You are not a philistine if you can go beyond your narrowest interest, and if you also have an interest in the fact that here on earth you take 25,920 breaths in one day, which corresponds to the number of days in an earthly life and also to the 'jerk' of the sun as it orbits in the cosmic ellipse. Our interest expands beyond what has led to the fact that there is a forgotten stream in German intellectual life; our interest expands beyond what is configured in the spirit all over the earth, what the keynote of oriental, middle, Western spiritual development: how the Asian spiritual development is dependent, so to speak, on an eastern current, which entered the West in a state of decadence, how the middle current, initially dependent on the South, will become dependent on the North in the future. These things lead us to the great plan of human development, overcome philistinism, correctly adjust our feelings in relation to human development and teach us to really feel for what lives in humanity as impulses.

And the will: the will also develops in a very specific way in the material impulses. It develops in such a way that people become more and more unskillful, and in the great classical sense, more and more unskillful. What can a person do today? The narrowest thing he is trained for puts him in a small circle. What develops in spiritual science in terms of concepts, feelings, and impulses extends to the limbs. When someone really immerses themselves in spiritual science, they become adept, adapt to their environment, and sometimes learn things in the course of their lives that, when they are still very young, show no aptitude for. If properly grasped, spiritual science will also make people adept. Today, people are not adept at even the smallest things. You meet people who do not know the simplest tasks, you meet gentlemen who cannot even sew on a button if it has come off, much less anything else. But it is important that people can become versatile again, that they can adapt to their surroundings, that this confinement to the narrowest circle and thus the becoming clumsy for the world be overcome.

However strange it may sound, humanity has this threefold task for the present and the near future with regard to thinking, feeling and willing: that narrow-mindedness be overcome and a flexible way of finding one's way into the circumstances of the world take hold, that philistinism be overcome and generous interests take hold of human hearts, that clumsiness be overcome and people become skillful and are also educated in skill in the most diverse areas of life. Learn to understand the world in the most diverse areas of life! Today, of course, we are doing the opposite of all this. We are heading towards clumsiness, philistinism, and narrow-mindedness, and these are the necessary consequences of the materialistic way of thinking. Of course, not everyone can learn to set a broken leg themselves, but there is no need to cultivate clumsiness to the point where someone no longer has any sense of how to help themselves in the simplest of cases of illness and the like. What matters is skillful understanding in order to cope with life in the most diverse situations.

With the advent of this newer time, have we not seen clearly how things have actually developed? Anyone who has asked around with discerning eyes about the phenomena of the present in the last decades has clearly seen that the sense of developing a worldview, of making impulses for a worldview the subject of consideration, was only present in those who at the same time had the will to develop purely materialistic worldview interests, namely in the field of socialism. Basically, consideration of ideological issues only occurred where people wanted to reform the world in a socialist sense. If one came up above the socialist flood, there was disinterest; at most narrow clique interests, clinging to the old, or if one thought one was grasping at something new, it was abstract words, the forerunners of Wilsonianism, as it raged particularly badly in the so-called liberal parties in the second half of the 19th century. There was no will to penetrate into the intellectual and spiritual impulses of the world, as socialism wanted to penetrate into the material; there was dullness where the bourgeoisie began – on the whole, of course; exceptions are disregarded. Those present are always excepted, that is a matter of politeness.

Now, to confront these phenomena and to answer such questions as have been raised today, also in the sense in which we have tried to answer them today, is basically one and the same thing. For great things are connected with these matters. In the East of Europe, we see something being prepared, I would say in the extract, for which Europe today has terribly little understanding. We have often pointed out the developmental germs of this European East in our field. This European East wants to learn to understand that all human life has meaning! And when the sixth post-Atlantic cultural epoch approaches, the European East is to show in the evolution of the earth that all human life has a meaning, and not just believe as true what is taught in school in one's youth. The East should show that man is in a process of development until death, that every year brings something new, and that when one passes through the gate of death, one is still connected with the earthly and brings wisdom with one even after death. What does the soul element want, which until recently could be called Russian, and which is now provisionally entering a state of chaos, but will find its way into the development of European culture and thus into the cultural development of all humanity? What does this element of the East want?

It wants to see the dawn of an understanding that all human life is in a state of development, and that the moment of death is only an especially important moment in this development. This principle must indeed find followers and confessors in Central Europe, and from such prerequisites as we have mentioned, it will find them. But until this principle is recognized, people will always believe that the younger you are, the more you can have a point of view. The youngest badgers and badger females today have their own fixed point of view, and basically have nothing of the great expectation and hope that every year new secrets will be revealed, that the moment of death will reveal new secrets. The European East is developing souls that today are still developing an understanding in the subconscious that man is wisest and can judge best about earthly, human conditions precisely when he dies. And from these souls living in the East today, there will arise those who do not merely seek advice from the young badgers, from the parliaments, on how to decide on human affairs, but who also seek advice from the dead, who will learn to establish contact with the dead and to make fruitful the contact with the dead here for earthly development. In the future people will ask: What do the dead say about it? And they will find spiritual paths if they delve so deeply in spiritual science that they ask the dead, not just the living, when it comes to deciding the great matters of people here on earth. That is what the East wants. And never has anything clashed more badly than it is happening today in the European East. For that which is the soul of this European East is the exact opposite of what, in the form of Trotskyism or Leninism, has been superimposed on it today from the purest, albeit self-misunderstanding, materialism of the present. Never before in the development of mankind have two things that are so incongruous collided as the spiritual germ of the East and materialistic Leninism, this caricature, this most grotesque caricature of human cultural progress, which has no sense or understanding of anything truly spiritual but which is so understandable in terms of the fundamental nerve of the present day. The future will learn to recognize this.

That, my dear friends, is what I just wanted to tell you in summary with regard to such things that should ignite interest in our hearts. One must have understanding for such things; one must not remain dull to what is going on in the deeper sense in the souls. That is what I wanted to put into your souls and hearts during our meeting today.

In the last few reflections, I have tried to introduce you to the ideas and impulses that have been moving proletarian circles for a long time, that are alive in proletarian circles, and that will contribute the most essential thing to what will be world-shaking events from the present into the near future. Today, in order to bring these considerations to some kind of conclusion tomorrow, I would like to point out some of the forces that are available for the present from the past, so to speak, that can be perceived by the observer, especially the observer of spiritual science, as forces that have been preparing themselves in the past, are now are there, but which are actually not as obvious as most people today believe, but which must be taken into account by anyone who, at any point in world development, and at one point everyone is indeed, wants to participate in the shaping of events - one can already speak of such a shaping of events - that will form from the present into the future.

What happens always happens out of certain forces that have their center here or there and then radiate in different directions. We have seen how, in the last four and a half catastrophic years, long-standing forces have been unleashed in many different directions, taking on the most diverse forms, so that what has happened in the last four and a half years has taken place shows clearly distinguishable epochs, even if they are short in time, and one cannot get by with simply referring to these events of the last four and a half years as the “war” of the last years. The events came to a warlike ignition at a certain point, I would say. But then quite different forces were added to the things that first, I might say, shone more illusively into human consciousness and were also interpreted in the most illusory way by the broadest circles. In a relatively short time, people's decisions and impulses of will became quite different from what they had been before.

All this must be carefully considered. In the future, one will see that here and there these or those impulses of will will emerge. In one place, in one center, people will want one thing, in another center they will want another. These impulses of will, which will emanate from groups of people, will interpenetrate and mutually oppose each other in the most diverse ways. There is no possibility of thinking of a harmony of the effective forces, but the only thing to be considered at first is that the individual really acquires understanding for what occurs here or there. Today very few people are at all prepared to assess this or that in the right way, because people have become too accustomed to judging things according to preconceived opinions, according to catchwords. In the course of the nineteenth century and up to the present day, people have gradually been educated in such a way that they have diverted their attention from what really matters. As a result, it is hardly possible today to easily assess the weight of the volitional impulses emanating from this or that group of people in the right way. The course of recent events has provided sufficient evidence of this. This evidence will one day be recorded by history. Perhaps sooner than people think, they will be recorded by history. But for those who want to form an opinion on events in any way, it is necessary that they develop the will today to assess the free events, to assess the events.

I say: there is plenty of evidence for what I have just said. One only needs to provide a striking example, a proof whose validity unfortunately still extends far into the present, in that in this respect, in places where the judgments should not be clouded, these judgments are often clouded. In the course of the past few years we have had the distressing experience that precisely people who were in positions of responsibility here or there in the most diverse fields, that people who had to direct or manage this or that or even just had to judge this or that – because a great deal depends on judgment, on so-called true public opinion, which is sometimes actually is the unexpressed thought of men and which has nevertheless a certain deep meaning -, we have made the experience and it still works in the present, that people in decisive places or also in non-decisive places, which however are still taken into consideration, have formed illusion judgments about everything, about which they should have had a healthy judgment. I have already mentioned the fact that the German people in particular have been given a bad reputation by foreigners, which has had more influence than one might think in the course of recent events: that is the reputation of the German Kaiser. This judgment of the German Emperor is now being somewhat corrected by the very latest events, but it is only just beginning to be corrected. The worst thing about these judgments was that it had an almost devastating effect, considering this man to be an important man. If he had not been considered an important man, but a highly insignificant one, not at all relevant to the events, as he was throughout the years since he came to power, then the terrible judgment of the foreign countries would not have come about, which – as history will show – has caused greater devastation than one can even imagine today.

Not true, it will certainly help to correct the situation if we look at the terrible fear that a few people in Germany had when this man, still reluctant to resign, fled to headquarters in the last few days, in order to find some information at headquarters that might help him to hold on, to somehow hold on to the old conditions. If one could correctly assess the voices of those who always advised him to return to Berlin, where he belongs, then one must say that this shows the weight of necessary judgments. Things must not only be thought, they must be weighed, they must be weighed. It is highly reckless when, for example, an article appeared in a Basel newspaper yesterday, effectively apologizing for the German Kaiser and accusing the German people. This German people has truly suffered enough over decades from all that has been achieved through the insignificance and theatrical exaggeration of all circumstances, through the tiresome bullying. And when, as happened in yesterday's Basler Zeitung, the German people are now being accused in the most foolish way, by making the foolish claim that this man was merely an exponent of the German people – which he was absolutely not – then this is an act of profound recklessness that must be condemned unconditionally. It is important today that such reckless judgments do not gain a foothold, especially in neighboring countries. People must look at such judgments, which are likely to poison the whole atmosphere into which we must enter.

These things must really be looked at today with a more penetrating eye. One must not sleep in the face of these things, one must be awake. One must really be able to take these things in with a non-emotional, but with a truly intellectual temperament, and one must feel an indignation, feel it intellectually, when such follies are brought into the world today that are likely to completely distort a proper judgment. And an objective judgment is necessary today above all. Try to take things really as they are to be taken today, by taking them in their weight, by not spreading opinions about things that stir up sentiment, with an indifferent humor, which is no humor, and let everything slide, since it is nevertheless about events that, each in itself, can have an enormous, far-reaching, world-historical significance. These things must be observed today against a more urgent background. And I would very much like to see something enter the hearts of those who want to profess anthroposophy that I would call a world-historical sense of judgment. I would like something to enter into your hearts that constitutes the importance of the moment, that you really get beyond the mood that has never been there since I tried to bring an anthroposophically oriented worldview into the world , that the mood would change from one that takes what is presented in Anthroposophy only as a Sunday afternoon sermon, as something intended only to warm the heart and to soothe, to temper the soul. No, everything based on an anthroposophically oriented worldview was intended to guide hearts and souls into that world current that has been gathering since the end of the nineteenth century, that pointed more and more to the significant, great events that have come to shake humanity and will continue to come more and more. Everything was geared towards directing hearts to the forces at work, not just to please people's ears with something that tempers souls and warms hearts a little, so that when they have absorbed what an anthroposophically oriented worldview offers, they can sleep with a certain more peaceful soul than they would otherwise be able to sleep with. Today, the individual is no longer able to look only to themselves, to simply receive a new religion to soothe their own heart. What is demanded of humanity calls upon the individual to participate in what surges and billows through human sociality.

To do this, it is necessary to look at things in a larger context. I admit that it was necessary in the course of the last few years, under the impulses that the anthroposophically oriented worldview was to bring to people's hearts, to bring a lot in quick succession because time was pressing, to let ideas quickly replace each other. If the material that had to be presented during the course of a week had sometimes been available a month or even longer, it could have been offered in small portions, which, due to the urgency of the times, necessarily had to be brought to the hearts quickly, it might have been absorbed more deeply into the souls. But that was not possible. Time was pressing, and events have shown that time was pressing. I admit that the speed with which the teachings of the anthroposophically oriented worldview were presented to the members of the anthroposophical movement sometimes led to the fact that the later erased the earlier. But one cannot be in such a serious matter without changing one's whole mind. And in a certain sense, the word that had to be spoken again and again at the time of the founding of Christianity is being repeated in the present: Change your mind. It is not enough that we accept this or that teaching in terms of content; what matters is that we change our whole way of thinking, that we strip away everything that was decisive for the direction of our judgment from the nineteenth century, which can truly be called, as I said earlier in reference to a saying, the century of indecent psychology, of indecent soul direction, where, because of that lack of trust in the divine spiritual powers of the soul of which I spoke yesterday, one can see only arbitrariness or only powerlessness or only inaction within the human soul, where one has never grasped anything like Fichte's saying: “Man can what he should; and when he says, ‘I cannot,’ he means, ‘I will not’.” This nineteenth century was a century of great scientific achievements. But these achievements were such that they paralyzed the will of men and awakened the belief that everything that comes out of the human breast comes out of it only as something purely accidental. That the Divine Eternal radiates out of every human breast and that every human being is responsible for representing the Divine Eternal through himself, that is what the nineteenth century completely suppressed, that is what the Goethean Age into the age of philistinism; that is what makes today's intelligentsia so unprepared for all that I have indicated to you and what runs through millions and millions of proletarian souls as an impulse.

Understanding is the first thing that matters in the present. Doing will only come when people have really tried to understand. None of the things that the bourgeoisie, for example, believes today could be good in the future, none of them will somehow attack the impulses that I have given you these days as the impulses of the proletariat striving from bottom to top. Some of the quackery emanating today from those who should have learned from the events of the past decades would be tragicomic if it were not so tragic.

So today, in order to prepare for something that is of immediate relevance and that I still have to present, I would like to say that we are creating a larger basic tableau, creating a background, so to speak. You see, everything that has an effect on modern society, everything that acts as forces that will discharge in the most diverse ways towards the future, comes from certain basic forces that interact in the most diverse ways. Yesterday I pointed out in conclusion that the struggle, which is a purely material struggle, will be staged more and more from the West and will plunge humanity into materialistic struggles. From the East, the blood will counteract what comes from the West as an economic struggle. We must interpret this word in more detail, for it will be extraordinarily important in the future in social terms and is important for anyone who wants to form a clear judgment. Over the past few years, I have had the opportunity to talk to a wide variety of people about the things that should be taken from the active forces in order to give the future this or that direction here or there. At every opportunity to discuss something effective, I was almost horrified, I would say, oppressed by the short-sightedness that has gradually taken over the judgment of modern humanity. Today, it is taken for granted that anyone who wants to have a say in what is developing should know the national conditions here or there. But people do not seek this knowledge in the ways in which it must necessarily be sought today, and that is why grotesque and grandiose errors arise. The one error I have mentioned is only a partial error. In order to visualize the full weight of what is involved, it must be pointed out that the time is now running out when whole masses were driven into the most nonsensical judgments.

Yesterday I showed you that the majority of people, because that is the proletariat, have a power of belief that extends only to purely material things. I had to tell you: if the power of belief, which, for example, has developed over decades in the proletariat through Marxist impulses, if this power of belief had existed to even the slightest degree in the bourgeoisie, things would be somewhat different than they unfortunately are today. But it would then have been necessary for precisely those people who, by virtue of their social position, would have had the opportunity to take advantage of this opportunity — since they did not do so, they must do so in the future — to enter the paths to judgment, on which alone real judgment can be gained; I do not mean judgment about this or that, but judgment in general. Just consider that not just one nation, but people over a wide area, were able for years to consider two generals to be important people, who were in fact highly insignificant people: Hindenburg and Ludendorff. Such a distortion of judgment for entire broad sections of the population is a characteristic of our time. This is mainly due to the fact that people do not feel the responsibility involved in forming a judgment. Of course I know that one could say: Yes, if someone had already formed a judgment, a correct judgment, for example, about Ludendorff, who must be seen as a pathological nature, who must be seen as a nature that, so to speak, since the beginning of the war can no longer be judged from any other than a psychiatric point of view. I know that one could say: What would such a judgment have helped at a time when a judgment was not allowed to be pronounced? Of course that is true, but that is not the point. The point is that people should at least form their own judgment in the first place. And now it must be said all the more, because the power of events has meant that individual judgments have to be corrected by the so-called central powers. This power of events has not yet arrived for the correction of the judgments of the Entente and the American powers. And that would bring a tremendous disaster upon humanity if the correction of the judgments were also to wait until the power of events speaks; if now, for example, there were an inclination to worship the rulers of the Entente; if the hearts did not mature the resolve to see clearly how things really are. If worship of success should arise now, if the destiny of judgments should be determined only by the outer course of events, then it would have tremendously devastating consequences for the development of humanity. That will not be a sign of how one or the other will be able to express themselves under the gagging of judgment, but at least in his or her own way, man should form an independent judgment about that which is. One forms this opinion when one feels within oneself that one is not a personality flung into the world by chance, who can think whatever he wants, but when one feels that one is a member of the divine world order and that the power which places a judgment in this heart, in this soul, is a power to which one is responsible even with one's most intimate thoughts. In the course of the events of the last four and a half years, many things have happened. This or that has happened here or there. It can be said that almost nothing has happened about which, for example, the German government or the German military leadership has formed a correct judgment in a responsible position. They have judged wrongly about everything and continued to act under false judgment. These are clear proofs of how little the present and the recent past have educated people to judge things.

I said that I have had occasion to talk to a wide variety of people. People do have the opinion, in abstract terms, that one should get to know what is going on in the various popular movements, for example. They are satisfied when one or another journalist is sent to this or that area and writes his newspaper article, and people do not know what to make of it when the same principle is applied to the field of spiritual life, as is necessary in mathematics, for example, where elementary basic maxims are taken as starting points and the furthest conclusions are reached. When bridges or railways have to be built, people admit that science is needed to build them, a science that starts from the simplest things in order to arrive at the most far-reaching conclusions. But people want to do history, to make history, without any principles, and they will not be able to do anything with it when you tell them: No one can judge European conditions without at least knowing the elementary fact that on the Italian peninsula the sentient soul is the soul of feeling, which is primarily effective in the folk, in France the soul of mind or feeling, in the British Empire the soul of consciousness, and so on, as we have come to know it. These things are the basis of what happens, just as the multiplication table is the basis of arithmetic. And unless you start from these things in relation to knowledge of the real conditions in the world, you are an incompetent person, no matter what your position in the structure of social or political life in today's world, just as you would be an incompetent person in bridge building if you did not know the simplest things in mathematics. People must come to realize this; they must learn to see through it. For the future of humanity depends on people being able to see through this. That is what matters.

Because only when you know these basic facts can you understand the various forces that radiate into what is happening. You cannot properly assess the path of a country peddler to the city if you are unable to place the peddler's journey from the countryside to the city within the fabric of social life. Humanity was allowed to live through social life in an atavistically drowsy state to a certain extent, and in the nineteenth century people preserved this state in order to sleep more deeply. In the future, humanity will not be allowed to continue living in this way. Rather, it will be obliged to think about what the hierarchies of the Angeloi, Archangeloi, Archai and so on think about the course of human evolution and what they radiate into what people do. The smallest must be linked to the greatest in everyday judgment. If today you see councils, workers' and soldiers' councils, emerging in this or that country, if you are in danger of seeing workers' and soldiers' councils emerging everywhere except in the Entente countries, then you must be able to appreciate the significance of such a fact in the right way. What is needed above all is to gain a judgment about these things. Do not ask first: What is to be done? What is to be done will come by itself, if only a real judgment is present, so that the smallest thing can be linked to the great lines of world events. The great world event, that is the peculiarity of our time, is becoming topical in these days; it will no longer be a mere theory, but will become topical.

For example, in the course of European events – American events are only a colonial appendix to European events – forces are at play that have been in preparation for a long, long time. The observer of European conditions – and we have been pointing this out from various points of view in recent days – should pay attention to the particular configuration of, say, the social conditions in the British Empire, and he should pay attention to the particular configuration of the social conditions in Eastern Europe, in Russia and in Central Europe, and he should pay attention to the forces that are at play there. For on the surface of events these events mask themselves in many ways, and he who observes only the surface of events will easily arrive at, as one says, catchwords, one can also say catch-ideas, catch-concepts, through which he wants to master events. In many cases, superficial stuff is going on in people's heads today. But in people's impulses, forces are at play that have been preparing themselves not just for centuries, but for millennia, and that are only now beginning to take on their very significant form.

You see, there is no possibility that that international entity, which I have characterized as the mood of the proletariat, which is mainly nourished by Marxist ideas, in the broadest sense, of course, Marxist ideas, really spreads across Europe. That is an illusion of the proletariat. And since the proletariat will one day wield a certain power, this is a very pernicious illusion of the proletariat. We must not overlook the fact that the worst would come to pass if this illusion of the proletariat were to gain world domination, for then one would be compelled to overcome this domination again. It would be better to see how things are preparing and how they can be counteracted. Even assuming that the impulses of the proletariat come to power in certain areas, what would happen as a result? Well, they would come to power externally; you can kill as many people here or there as Bolshevism killed in Russia. But all these ideas are only suitable for plundering, only suitable for consuming the old and not for establishing the new. When the ideas of the proletariat are realized socially, when they become established, then the existing values will be gradually consumed, consumed in rapid progression. Please take only such facts – I will show you a few, they could be greatly increased – take just one such fact: the treasury in Russia, for example, still had an income of 2,852 million rubles in the ill-fated year 1917. Bolshevism broke in. It practiced plundering. The state revenue of Russia in 1918: 539 million rubles! That is about one-fifth of the previous year's revenue. From such figures you can calculate for yourselves the progression that must occur when plundering is carried out. One must not look at these things from the point of view of the judgments that are formed from above, but one must look at them from the point of view of how the objective course of events in human history unfolds under the influence of this fact. If this social order were to spread, one would arrive at zero, at nothing. But before this nothing happens, the reactions from the subconscious of people emerge here and there, and into the spreading proletarianism, which is permeated by Marxism, everything that has been prepared over the centuries, sometimes over millennia, in the beliefs, impulses, illusions or even follies of human beings must again mix in the most diverse centers. It will not mix in the same form in which it was there, but it will mix in a transformed form. Therefore, one must know it and be able to assess it in the right way.

Now the powers that are now partly doomed but partly still rule the world have always made it their more or less conscious or unconscious task to deceive people. How much has not been deceived by means of so-called historical instruction! In all kinds of countries, history is nothing more than a legend; history is only there to train people's minds to take the direction that seems pleasant to those in power and seems like the right direction. But the time has come when people will have to form their own judgment. Over the years, much has been done in this regard, precisely in order to correct one judgment or another. But today something else must be asked. Today, among the—one does not know how many to say in terms of numbers—among the hundreds of questions that arise urgently, above all the question must be asked: How did the various power relations, the various social structures come about, for which people here or there are enthusiastic or have been enthusiastic or have quickly forgotten how to enthuse in recent weeks? For years, humanity has lived by catchwords, catchwords such as “Prussian militarism” or “German militarism,” “League of Nations,” “international law,” and so on, which were just catchwords. These have dominated and confused people's minds. As I said, a lot has been said here to correct these judgments. But the important thing is to realize that, of course, these things will not appear in the same form in the near future, but we must know them so that we will recognize them when they appear in a new form.

It is not to be assumed, for example, that the Hohenzollern dynasty will reappear as such. But the feelings of the people among whom the Hohenzollern dynasty was able to live will continue to live, masquerading in a different form. Or, it is not even very likely that, even with the will of the Entente, which to a certain extent certainly exists, the unfortunate Habsburg dynasty will somehow resurface. But that is not the point. The sentiments which were able to keep this Habsburg dynasty in the hearts of men will live on. They will not, of course, go so far as to restore the Habsburg dynasty, but they will contribute to that reaction against proletarianism of which I spoke; they will reappear in quite a different form. Therefore, it is necessary to see through what will arise from the most diverse centers with a truly healthy judgment. Then it is a matter of looking at the circumstances, but looking with a gaze that is directed by reality. The facts as such have no value. In my books—you can find this in the most diverse places—I have spoken of fact fanaticism, which has such a devastating effect. This fanaticism for facts is rooted in the belief that what is seen outside is already a fact. It becomes a fact only by being harnessed to right judgment. But right judgment must have behind it the impulse of the right directing power.

Take an example. You know that I have often said that in Central Europe all folk impulses are primarily conditioned by the fact that in this Central Europe the folk spirit works through the I, in contrast to the most diverse regions of Western Europe. But the I has the peculiarity, I might say, of circling up and down among the other regions, which are fixed. So let us assume: in the south and west, the sentient soul, mind or emotional soul, consciousness soul, but in the center the I (it is drawn). The I can be in the consciousness soul, in the mind soul, in the sentient soul. It oscillates up and down, so to speak, it finds its way into everything. Hence the peculiarity: If you look to the west of Europe, you have, I would say, sharply defined national contours. There is sharply defined nationality, nationality that you can really, I would say, define, that is within a good framework. Look to Central Europe, preferably to the German people, and you have a nature that is defined on all sides. And now follow history, judging these basic maxims in the right way. Look wherever you want, in the west as far as America, in the east as far as Russia, and see how German nationality has worked as a ferment everywhere. It penetrates into these foreign regions, is within them today, and will have an effect in the future, even if it has denationalized itself, as they say; it penetrates into these regions because the I soars and descends. It loses itself in it. You can find this out quite precisely from the fundamental nature of the people. Just look at how this whole Russian culture is permeated with the German character, how hundreds of thousands of Germans have immigrated there over a relatively short period of time, how they have given the national character its stamp to infinite depths. Look at the whole of the East and you will find this influence everywhere. Go back centuries and ask the question today. Take Hungary, for example, which is supposedly a Magyar culture. This Magyar culture is based in many ways on the fact that all kinds of Germanic elements have been introduced there as a ferment. The whole northern edge of Hungary is inhabited by the so-called Zipser Germans, who have naturally been majoritized, tyrannized, denationalized, who have suffered unspeakably, but who have provided a cultural ferment. If we go further east, to Transylvania, we find the Transylvanian Saxons, who once lived on the Rhine. If we go further to the so-called Banat, there you have the Swabians, who immigrated from Württemberg and who have left behind a cultural legacy. And if I were to show you a map of Hungary, you would see here the broad border of German people who have become Magyars, here the Zipser Germans, in the southeast the Transylvanian Saxons, here in Banat the Swabians, not counting those who have become individualized. And the peculiarity of this German nationality is that, precisely because its national spirit works through the ego, it perishes outwardly as a nation, so to speak, but forms a cultural ferment. That is what can contribute to the assessment of the effective forces. That is such an effective force.

Let Andrássy and Karolyi work away, let an old politician in the old feudal sense, as they say, work away; the only reason that what they are doing is not a slogan is that we must take into account what will be brought about in the future from the subconscious of the people through such historical events, as I have shown you one - and hundreds of others are involved -, in the future. And that radiates into the rest of what is happening in Europe, and basically one has to proceed quite thoroughly if one wants to get to know this complicated structure of Europe today. For example, one must not forget, when judging an important participant in the future shaping of Europe, namely the European East, that to a certain extent everyone who spoke the truth about Russia in a historical context was not only a heretic, but also in mortal danger. Russian history is, of course, not much more than the other histories, but it is also a historical legend. For example, those who learn Russian history in the usual sense are not even aware of what was developed here a few years ago: that at about the same time as the Normans were exerting their influence in western Europe, Norman-Germanic influence was also being exerted in the east. And today's Russian history has an interest in showing, going back further and further, how everything, absolutely everything, comes from Slavic people, from Slavic elements, and also an interest in denying that the decisive element, the one element from which what is in the East is still deeply influenced today, comes from impulses that are Norman-Germanic in origin. You don't get much further back in Russian history than telling people – well, that's the stereotypical sentence that is always said –: We have a great country, but we have no order, come and rule us. That is more or less how it begins, while in truth it should be pointed out that what had spread in Russia by the time of the Mongol invasion was of Germanic-Norman origin and had a Germanic-Norman social configuration. But that means that something spread in Russia at that time that was overgrown by later conditions, which, I might say, has been preserved and conserved in its purest form, for example, within the social fabric of the British Empire. There you have a straight line of development. If you take the social development of the British Empire, you have a current that naturally changes over the centuries, but which is the straight line continuation of the old Norman-Germanic social constitution. In the east, towards Russia, you have the same current spreading out, but under the Mongol yoke, under the Mongol influence, I would say, from a certain point onwards it breaks off. That is to say, if the same thing that was prepared under Norman-Germanic influence in the social structure of the British Empire at the time of William the Conqueror and developed until the nineteenth century to occupy its present position in the world had developed further in Russia, Russia would be similar to England.

Nowhere has anything that has worked more deeply in the hearts and souls of people than in Russia. Now, we must not forget: what is it that comes with the Norman-Germanic influence? This Norman-Germanic influence, in working itself out, has also had counter-effects in the West. I say: here it has developed in a straight line, it has developed in the straightest line, but it has also had counter-effects here. What it encountered here as a counter-effect, from which it emancipated itself to a certain extent and which modified its developmental current, is, on the one hand, the Western Roman Catholic Church and, on the other, Romanism in general, which contains an abstract legal element and an abstract political element. So that we see the national influence, from which all the stratifications of the estates, all the formation of classes and castes, as they are found within the British essence, originate, joined by what came from the church and what came from Romanism. All this is at work in it, but in such a way that, to a certain extent, the British character emancipated itself early on from the profound influence of the Church, which then continued to have an effect and flourish in Central Europe and still does so today; but that, comparatively speaking, this character emancipated itself less from the Romanesque-abstract element of legal-political thinking. The truth is that this Norman-Germanic element has also extended into the various Slavic areas, which have been present on the territory of present-day Russia since ancient times, as the dominant element, as the element that has shaped the social structure.

This Norman-Germanic nature is based on a certain view, which then finds expression in social facts. This Norman-Germanic nature is based on the view that what has blood relationship, closer blood relationship, should also have this blood relationship in an inherited or hereditary way in a social way, based on a certain social institution of the clan and the superclan, the nearest family clan and the clan standing above it, which then leads to the prince, who rules over the sub-clan, the clan that goes further. This is what a social constitution brings about according to a certain blood configuration.

This is in the sharpest possible contradiction to what, for example, the Romanesque-legal-political essence assumes. The Romanesque-legal-political essence brings abstract connections everywhere, sets up everything according to contracts and the like, not according to blood. This is something that brings the facts less to mind than to paper, something radical. Only one thing was thoroughly diverted by this Germanic-Norman nature. If it had worked alone – this is, of course, a hypothesis, it could not have worked alone – but if it had worked alone, there would never have been a monarchical state constitution in any European territory. For a monarchical state constitution does not lie in the development of those social impulses that emanate from the Norman-Germanic essence, but rather, this Norman-Germanic essence is based on the impulse of an organization according to clans, according to family configurations, which are relatively individual and independent of each other, and only from certain points of view do they unite under a prince, who then controls the overarching clan. And above all: apart from this, a monarch could never have taken hold of this Norman-Germanic essence, and pure monotheism could never have come from this essence, because it came from the south – I would actually say from the south-east – through the theocratic-Jewish element. If the Norman-Germanic element had remained purely isolated, it would be easier today to assert the rightful monotheism, which in turn does not accept the abstract single God, but rather the succession of hierarchies, angels, arch angeloi and so on, and not the nonsense that the one God, for example, protects two armies that are furiously facing each other, the Christian and the Turk at the same time, because he is the one God of the whole world. The nonsense that proliferates as abstract monotheism would never have been able to take hold, because within this element, abstract monotheism was not present. The people were pagans in the modern sense, that is, they recognized the most diverse spiritual beings that guide the forces of nature, and thus lived in a spiritual world, albeit in an atavistic way. What monotheism is, a nonsense, was only imposed from the southeast by the theocratic element. That is why it is so difficult today to get across what must necessarily be accepted: the diversity of spiritual beings that guide natural forces and natural events, the gods. But it was on Russian soil that the damping down of what came from the north took place to a certain extent. Some time ago I even talked about the name Russian here. You will remember that I pointed out that the name Russian indicated where these people came from in the north. They called themselves Vaeringjar.

But the actual idea of the state is a construct that should be carefully studied. This idea of the state comes, in a certain respect, from the same corner of the weather where many other significant things for Europe come from. Especially when discussing such things, one must remember that history can only be considered symptomatically. When we consider some phenomenon that is an external fact, we must recognize it as a symptom. In Russia, as long as this Norman-Germanic influence was present and shaping the social structure, there was no sign of any state idea. The Slavic areas were, so to speak, closed in on themselves, and what had spread was what I have called the clan idea. The clan idea has entwined this in a network-like way. The various closed Slavic areas had within them what modern man might call the democratic element, but at the same time linked to a certain longing for a lack of domination, with a certain insight that centralized ruling powers are not actually needed to bring order to the world, but only to create disorder. This lived in these closed Slavic areas. And in what extended from the Norman-Germanic element, the clan idea actually lived, the idea that was connected with blood.

Now came the Mongol invasion. These Mongols are indeed portrayed as being quite evil. But the worst thing they did was actually demanding high tributes and taxes, and they were more or less satisfied when people paid their taxes, of course in the form of natural produce. But what they brought – and please take this as symptomatic and don't think that I am saying that the idea of the state came from the Mongols – what they brought at that time, taken symptomatically, is the idea of the state. The monarchical idea of the state comes straight from this corner of the world from which the Mongols also came, only that it was brought to the further west of Europe earlier. It comes from that corner of the world that one finds when one follows the culture, or, for that matter, the barbarian wave that rolled over from Asia. What remained in Russia of the Mongols is essentially the idea that a single ruler with his paladins has to exercise a kind of state rule. This was essentially borne by the monarchical idea of the khans, and that was adopted there. In Western Europe it was only adopted earlier, but it came from the same weather angle. And essentially it was a Tartar-Mongolian idea that put together the so-called state structure in Russia. And so for a long time precisely that which characterized the culture of the West from many points of view proved to be without influence in Russia: feudalism, which was actually without influence in Russia because, by skipping monarchy spread, which was always disturbed in the West, initially by feudalism, by the feudal lords, who actually always fought the central monarchical power and who were an antithesis to the monarchical power.

The Roman Church is the second. This was ineffective in the East because the Eastern Church had already separated from the Western Church in the tenth century. The Greek-Roman, Roman-Greek education, as it has worked in the West and has contributed very much to the development of the modern bourgeoisie, has been ineffective in Russia. Therefore, the monarchical idea of the state, which has been brought in by the Mongolians, has taken its deepest roots there.

You see, you have a few of the impulses that one must know, because they will appear in the most diverse ways, masked, changed, in metamorphosis. Here or there you will see this or that flash up. You will only appreciate it correctly if you appreciate it from this point of view, which I have now stated. And above all, you will recognize the importance of the fact that within the establishment of world domination by the English-speaking population, which I have been talking about for many years now, the training of the consciousness soul is essentially effective, that this is precisely appropriate to our age, and that a healthy judgment should be applied in assessing the circumstances.

The social question will play a major role in the shaping of conditions in the future. The social thinking that already exists among the proletariat can only lead to overexploitation, to degradation, to destruction. It is a matter of really realizing that the shaping that the social question assumes, the shaping in particular that the proletarian movement will assume, makes it necessary that what today is furthest removed from spirituality as proletarian feeling must be brought closer to spirituality. What seems to be furthest apart on the outside is intimately related on the inside: proletarian will and spirituality. Of course, the proletarian today fights against spirituality with his hands and feet – one can say with his hands and feet, because he does not fight much with his head. But what he wants, without knowing it, cannot be achieved without spirituality. Spirituality must join forces with it. And it must join forces in all areas. And one must really acquire a feeling that one is at an important turning point in time. The mood that has prevailed in the most diverse areas in the nineteenth century must pass.

If you observe individual events and evaluate them correctly, you can already see, I might say, if I may express myself trivially, which way the wind is blowing. Through Mr. Englert's kindness I was recently given a letter written from Russia, which very vividly describes present-day Russian conditions. It also talks about art. The way in which people are introduced to art is very interesting; but what they paint, these people who are brought in directly from the factory, people who have lung diseases and can no longer work in the factory and are then placed in an artistic institution so that they learn to paint something there, so that they are driven from the proletariat into art, the painting – they don't paint quite like they do in our dome, but you can see it, they start painting in such a way that from this beginning, what is painted in our dome will ultimately result, even if it is still called Futurism today. That is on the march. Especially in those things where there is no programmatic approach, it becomes clear what impulses lie in the present. Those who look at programs – not to mention government programs – will always go astray. Those who look at the impulses that develop alongside and between the programs, namely from the unconscious, will see much that is radiating in the world today. You can be quite sure that the paths will be found, even if it is difficult. Once people begin to read something straight from the impulses that are emerging today in the proletariat in such a primitive, predatory way, I will not say the things themselves, which are imperfect and must be replaced by others, but things like my mysteries or the anthroposophical books, they will only be read with the right interest by the better elements that are streaming upwards from the proletariat, while what the bourgeoisie licked its fingers around in the nineteenth century: Gustav Freytag's 'Soll und Haben' or similar works, or Gottfried Keller, will interest no one. Today, for example, it is an insult to humanity to mention Gottfried Keller in the same breath as Conrad Ferdinand Meyer. While Conrad Ferdinand Meyer represents an element of the future, an element that actually contains true spiritual life for the future, Gottfried Keller is the bourgeois poet of the sleeping humanity of Seldwyler Switzerland.

This must be seen everywhere and in all areas. There will be no interest in the future for this when people put models in studios and imitate what nature can do much better and then delight in it, whether it looks really natural or whether it is really like the model. After that, one will demand that something is there in the world that is not made by nature itself. Understanding for this will have to be prepared. Therefore, the model as such had to be fought against here as well. You remember how I once spoke about art from this point of view years ago. An understanding must be created that one follows the impulses that are there. For example, the stupidity that people want to learn about how the people live, say, by reading Berthold Auerbach's “Village Stories” or similar stuff, where a person who knows the people, well, as one who goes out into the countryside on Sunday afternoons and looks at the people from the outside, describes how one has so beautifully described the people, must end. That is not what matters. What matters is not observing the temporary, but the eternal that lives in man must be observed more and more. That is what matters.

We will talk more about these things tomorrow.

Dear attendees! First of all, I would like to express my heartfelt thanks for the kind words of welcome and for your invitation to this lecture. I have taken the liberty of making the relationship between the direction I represent in supersensible knowledge and the science of the present the subject of today's presentation. The objections that are raised against the possibility of supersensory knowledge in general – and in particular against the direction of supersensory knowledge that I intend to present and that works towards scientific methodology – are based primarily on the opinion that supersensory knowledge contradicts the scientific method of research and the actual task of scientific thinking.

Now I would like to point out one thing, first of all historically. I would like to point out that such extrasensory knowledge, as it is sought through anthroposophy, can actually only be a result of our time, of our civilization, and for the reason that this our time — and by that I mean roughly the last three to four centuries up to the present —, because this our time has only produced what can be called a complete way of knowing the world of the senses.

Sensory knowledge as we have it today, as a result of scientific research methods, was not available at all until three or four centuries ago. This sensual knowledge is actually only a result of the endeavors that were initiated by Copernicus, Kepler and others, and they celebrated their greatest triumphs in the course of the nineteenth century, particularly in its last third, and also in the twentieth century. Any kind of world view, any kind of spiritual research that wanted to develop in contradiction to this scientific knowledge and way of thinking today would certainly have no prospect of having any kind of convincing effect on those people who count today, on people with a scientific education.

Out of this conviction, anthroposophical spiritual science, above all, seeks to work in such a way that it becomes aware: It has to work in this scientific age of ours. Not only does it not want to contradict science, it wants to work entirely from the same foundations, the same prerequisites as recognized science. But, precisely because we have come so far within the methods of sensory observation and experimentation, because we have developed exact types of knowledge within these research methods , and because these exact methods of knowledge are directed primarily towards the investigation of the sense world, we need – and I believe I can explain this to you today – we need a knowledge of the supersensible today.

Science itself demands that the unbiased gain knowledge of the supersensible. For let us just visualize for a moment, my dear audience, how knowledge was gained in earlier centuries, or even further back. People were unable to observe that which expresses itself according to its own laws in the external sense world. One need only recall how difficult it was in the course of the nineteenth century to expel from science the so-called life force, a mystical monster that had been created purely through inner speculation, through inner thinking, this life force that was not a result of observation or experimentation, that was purely imagined. In a way, it was the last remnant of the old mystical monstrosities.

Before the actual scientific age, people believed that they had to put as much into their sensory observations through self-opinionated thinking as their external sensory observations gave them. Usually, one does not notice – and it is not necessary for ordinary science – how, let us say, a scientific book looked in the twelfth or thirteenth century. There is just as much in it that a kind of scientific fantasy has put into things from the human being, from what has been inspired in the human being by his emotions, his feelings and so on and so forth, as from external observation.

What observation and experiment can scientifically give to people is provided by the empirical sensory sciences in connection with mathematics. But what this science has become for the education of educated humanity in modern times is what, above all, something like the anthroposophical spiritual science meant here must focus on. For not only have we explored outer nature and man himself, insofar as he is an outer nature, through observation and experiment; not only have we thereby obtained a sum of results that confront us today in the practical application, in the technical practical application of modern natural science, that confront us in natural science, and so on and so forth; not only has humanity gained from this development of natural science, but above all, humanity has undergone a tremendous education through this laborious work, in which man forbids himself to transfer anything of his inner thoughts and dreams into natural objects and natural processes , man has managed to use his thinking only to shape his observation and his experiment in a pure way, so that observation and experiment express their essence and, for this external science, thinking is basically only the servant of that which is to be produced in external science, so that it expresses its lawfulness.

To achieve this, a significant renunciation was necessary in relation to what had previously been incorporated from the human soul into the world view. A moral development is already taking place alongside scientific development and its results, which has brought humanity to the has brought humanity to the point where man renounces seeing anything spiritual in natural objects and natural processes, and applies his own spirit only to the fact that nature expresses itself purely and in accordance with its essence. This was not known in earlier centuries, before about the fifteenth century, to make thinking only a servant of the method, so to speak, so that nature can express itself. What has been achieved in inner human development, what one can go through inwardly in the soul through the scientific method, that is what anthroposophical spiritual science, above all, wants to acquire.

In other words, my dear attendees, anthroposophical spiritual science does not want to conquer any terrain that the other sciences have; anthroposophical spiritual science wants to penetrate into the world of the spiritual from the same attitude that is otherwise used for research today. We need only consider what has brought about our scientific progress; it has been brought about precisely by the fact that man has completely excluded himself, that he, by letting nature speak, does not add anything of himself to his knowledge. But as a result of this, it turns out in the end – people usually do not believe it, but it turns out – that because man does not allow his will, his creative imagination, to flow into nature, because he makes thought only a servant of his research, it turns out that he can get to know everything in the world that is not himself.

By excluding everything that lies within him from the justified objective method of research, man learns to recognize everything except himself. He is ultimately excluded from all that constitutes the very greatness, the triumphs of modern knowledge. Thought has become, so to speak, only a language about natural processes. And in fact, in today's external science, we only apply the mathematical to our full satisfaction in internal experience. But with this mathematical, one stands in a peculiar way to nature, if one does not simply apply it naively, but if one consciously asks oneself: What are you actually doing when you apply mathematics to nature? If one draws the mathematical externally, it is only a drawing. In reality, the mathematical arises entirely from the human being itself. We build something purely spiritual in mathematics, and we actually only find that mathematics has this great justification in nature because we see how we can apply it, because it can be applied, so to speak, everywhere to that which we can observe and which we can experiment with.

And we feel secure in mathematics because we extract this mathematics entirely from within ourselves. When we have a mathematical problem, it does not depend on whether hundreds of people say yes to it. If I understand the matter all by myself, I am secure. I live with my insight; I am completely immersed in it with my soul. And by grasping nature mathematically, by connecting what I develop within myself with natural processes in calculating experimentation and observation, I know that I am proceeding scientifically. I combine what lies within me, but what lies objectively within me, over which my subjectivity has just as little influence as it has over natural processes themselves. I combine the mathematical knowledge gained from within myself with natural processes.

That, dear attendees, is basically the model for what is meant here as supersensible knowledge, except that one does not proceed exactly with external nature, but first proceeds exactly with oneself. One starts from what I would call intellectual modesty. You say to yourself: You were once a small child with dreamy soul abilities. You developed into what you have now become. The abilities through which you can orient yourself in the world have gradually arisen in you. Now you say to yourself: Just as you have developed through life and education from the abilities of a small child to those that you possess today, can you not go further? Could there not also be abilities slumbering in the soul of the adult human being, just as they slumber in the child? And could one not take one's self-education into one's own hands, so that one can go beyond the abilities that we are so proud of in ordinary life, just as one goes beyond those that one had as a child?

But now, people say, scientific education in recent times demands that one does not fumble around in the vague nebulae, the mystical, by extracting human abilities from the soul. We have become accustomed to proceeding exactly in the mathematical-exact treatment of external natural processes, to proceed in such a way that one does not speculate dreamy-mystically, nor, as one says, merely immerse oneself dreamy-mystically, but rather to proceed in such a way that one follows each individual step with full deliberation, with full consciousness, as is the case with a mathematical problem. In this way one can develop one's own soul by awakening its dormant abilities. But the method of doing this is an exact one. One only develops into another soul being insofar as one makes every step one takes to develop these abilities as exact and supernaturally deliberate as one has learned in mathematics.

Please note, my dear audience, that we take as our model what we do with the external world, whereby we do science from the external world, become scientists, and we develop the exact way we have learned to develop our own soul. So while today's science, the science of the present, proceeds exactly in its treatment of the external world, leaving it at the abilities that one acquires through ordinary life and ordinary education, and then proceeding exactly in the external world, one proceeds exactly in one's own development, that is, only those soul abilities that can be directly grasped need to be developed. One develops exactly.

But this leads one to practise what I have characterized in my book, “How to Know Higher Worlds”, or in my “Occult Science”, or in other books, as the meditation and concentration in thinking appropriate to modern education. This includes what is necessary to develop inwardly in the manner indicated, and it encompasses many details. And anyone who believes that the anthroposophical spiritual science referred to here is a casual product of inner experience or fantasy is greatly mistaken. What is striven for in it is truly no easier to attain than what is striven for in any other science; it is only more intimately connected with the deepest longings and needs of the human soul, and concerns not only those who have to pursue botany, astronomy and so on, but concerns every human being as a human being.

You can find more details in the books mentioned. I will only hint at the principles here. What is at issue is this: in modern, exact thinking, one has become accustomed to maintaining this structure of thinking while abstracting from all sense impressions. But one tries to bring the thinking that one has acquired into such activity and energization that, even if one has no external impressions, one can rest in ideas that one brings to the center of one's consciousness.

It does not matter to what extent these ideas initially correspond to external reality, but it does matter that we do something similar with these ideas in our soul as we do, for example, externally and physically with our arm when we work with it or when we exercise it. We strengthen its muscles. Meditation and concentration are concerned only with the exercise of the soul powers. But by strengthening one's soul abilities in thoughts that one freely holds, without passively leaning on an external sensory perception, purely actively internally in thoughts, and by systematizing one's inner life, but proceeding with full deliberation in this one's own inner development and activity , as otherwise only the mathematician does, one finally comes to it - for some it takes months, depending on their abilities, for others it takes years, but everyone can basically achieve it according to the current stage of development of humanity - one comes to develop what can be called with some justification exact clairvoyance, exact clairvoyance. However much the word clairvoyance is frowned upon today, I use it ruthlessly because it has a certain justification. It has its justification for the following reason: Let us reflect on how and why we, when we are in the outer world of the senses, perceive the things around us as seeing human beings. We perceive them when the sun or another light source sends its rays to the things and these things become visible to us under the influence of an external light source. We as human beings are thus within the light-space that is there through an external light source.

By continuing such exercises, which consist of meditation and concentration, as I have indicated in principle, more and more, we ultimately arrive at an inner experience in the soul that is not the same as the external light, but which makes us our own source of soul light. We really experience something, my dear attendees, which I would like to call an inner sunrise, a sunrise that has arisen because, through meditation, forces and abilities within us have been uncovered that previously and we are now able to really illuminate our environment with the soul light that we have kindled, just as the sun previously illuminated things in physical space. The awakening of an inner light justifies speaking of clairvoyance. And because we do not allow ourselves to bring about this clairvoyance in any other way than through exercises that are as straightforward as only the most exact mathematical and scientific problems, that is why this clairvoyance may be called exact.

But as a result of this, my dear attendees, we also develop something more and more within ourselves that is otherwise only presented under the influence of external perception. Try to honestly admit to yourself what a tremendous difference there is between the aliveness in which we are with our whole soul, with our whole human being, while we perceive colors, while we hear sounds, while we expose ourselves to impressions of warmth; try to realize quite clearly how we we live completely as human beings in our soul while we perceive colors, sounds, and differences in warmth, and how gray, how abstract, how lifeless our ordinary thoughts are through which we inwardly envision the external sensory world, how pale these thoughts are.

These pale thoughts, these inanimate abstractions, are inwardly filled with such liveliness through the exercises I have described that what most people run from because it gives them no warmth of soul, the abstract thoughts, becomes so full of life inwardly, so pictorially concrete, as otherwise only the impressions of the external sense world.

This is, so to speak, the first step we have to take in exact clairvoyance: that we, by merely thinking, but having a strengthened, inwardly animated thinking, an energized thinking, that we, without receiving external impressions, are so as we are when asleep, that we thereby develop an inwardly active life in an activity that is otherwise just a thinking one, which is now completely illuminated and energized with real images, but with images that are not stimulated from outside, that arise from the human being itself.

Now, however, we must continue this composure, for the sake of which I was able to call the acquisition of such a level of knowledge 'exact clairvoyance'; we must continue this composure to the extent that we feel completely subjective in this inner glow and image-generating. In the moment when we do not know that the whole tableau of images, the whole world of pictures that we produce as an inwardly self-illuminating one, is only our own being, is a world unto itself, in that moment we are not spiritual researchers; in the moment when we already consider this world of images to be real, we are visionaries, we are perhaps pathological personalities.

A healthy continuation of sensory knowledge into the supersensible world requires that we also bring our composure to the point that I have just described, and know that what we have gained have attained is indeed more inwardly alive, saturated, and concrete than the wonderful structures — I call them that because one can indeed be enthusiastic about mathematics — than the mathematical structures are. They are our product, like the mathematical figures. But still, to be immersed in it with your whole soul, to experience it, while always having your full, level-headed self standing by, with both feet in the real world of the senses, that must be there, otherwise you are not dealing with exact clairvoyance, but with an unreal, fantastic being.

By finding our way into this world of images, we can compare it to mathematical formation. But it is different. In mathematics, we know that we cannot apply it to our soul itself; we produce it from the soul, but we have to apply it to the external world. The external world gives us the content for it. The triangle as such is not a reality. But when I find the lawfulness of the triangle in an external sensual content, I penetrate reality in a certain way. But what one experiences in the way described as an inner world of images, as a result of meditation, in that one nevertheless senses an inner reality. You have to be clear about it as a level-headed person: it is only subjective, but it is an inner reality, it is not just a mathematical one, it is an inner reality. And if you go through this inner reality, you feel it out in your soul, so to speak, you devote more and more inner energy to experiencing inwardly what is contained in the images, then these images take on a very specific form for each person. We do not then live in remembered images, but we do live in a tableau that presents us with the formative forces of our own human beingness since our birth during our physical life on earth.

Let us remember what happens to a person during this physical life on earth. It is so wonderful to observe how, as a small child, the human being pours more and more soul power into his physiognomy, into his gaze, into his speech organs. Observing a child as it brings its physicality to life from within is one of the most wonderful observations one can make. For one can make such observations not only with the one-sided theoretical power of the human being, but with the whole human being.

But if one could also observe in the same way how the child unconsciously works wisely according to its own inner being, then the wonder one experiences would be a hundredfold too little expressed. Just think how little plastic the child's brain is in early years, how in the first seven years of life an unconscious wisdom works in the child's being to make this brain plastic. And the one who can study this in spiritual science, which I can only hint at in principle today, immerses himself in this inner plastic work of the child, full of wisdom, in the whole organism. And what the child initially sends inwards as a force, almost just fidgeting around, and plasticizes its internal organs, this later connects with actions that are performed outwards, through which one grasps things, orientates oneself in the world; this connects with the sense power. And from all that works within, what is received from the outside, what is experienced with the soul, from all this, what permeates the human being emotionally is formed. The memories and mental images we have of our experiences are only weak reflections of what we really live through, including what we live through unconsciously, what is created within us, which ultimately goes back to the growth forces, to the digestive forces, to the forces of nutrition.

When one rises to such an exact inner clairvoyance, one does not merely have a tableau of memories before one, but one has one's own human weaving and shaping, both inwardly in the organism and outwardly in the world. One has oneself before one as a second human being, and one says to oneself from this moment on: you have, in being outwardly in space, your physical spatial body, your physical spatial organization. Everything is interconnected. But you also have a time organization, a time body within you that is not spatially oriented, that is in the process of becoming, that is in the process of shaping, in which the shaping that you send into your inner being grows together with the shaping that you accomplish outwardly under the influence of the other world and of people, which in turn has an effect on you.

You see, the realization of this temporal body – that which cannot be painted any more than lightning can be painted; you can capture it for a moment, but you know that it is a temporal process – the of this creative process, which lies behind memory, memory, the stream of consciousness is like on the surface of what one is now looking at, illuminated by its inner sun, in spiritual scientific research one can call this the human etheric body.

Do not believe that a level-headed spiritual researcher speaks of the human etheric body as if it were a kind of foggy organization that only permeates this physical body. You can see it, albeit through a kind of fog, through a certain clairvoyance. That is not what it is about. That is what the opponents say. Those who really delve into spiritual science know that the first thing one sees in supersensible knowledge is a process, an event, but a real event. One gets to know oneself as a second being within oneself, which represents a temporal organization. The lasting in our soul life is presented to us in the smallest details, as in a comprehensive tableau. The physical substances we absorb and process internally are replaced every seven to eight years. The physical body is actually subject to constant change, to constant metamorphosis. What I am now pointing to, which can only be grasped by looking inwardly, is a continuous process during our earthly lives.

Dear attendees, present-day science worthy of the name proceeds in a precise manner in its external research. The supersensible knowledge that is meant here proceeds in a precise manner in the bringing about of the forces that man needs to see a supersensible world. The development of man is made exact so that, as it were, higher psychic sense organs are obtained, which are precisely manufactured and which can then see the supersensible world. In this way one has not only a theoretical conviction, but a real view of his spiritual being during physical life on earth. One would not yet know anything about the problem of, let us say, the immortality of the soul, which is so close to man. For this a further step is necessary, a further step that demands even more inner soul energy.

You see, when you bring ideas into your meditation that you are grounded in, so that you ultimately come to this inner aliveness, which, I would say, gives birth to an inner sun that then illuminates such images that you have to say, after perceiving them, they are real. You really only find something subjective, namely your own experience. That is what you initially feel as real in the images. You have nothing objective yet, you have your own experience, but as reality. This takes it beyond the mathematical. The mathematical gives form to the environment. It contains no reality in itself. What you achieve at this first level of exact clairvoyance allows us to sense an inner reality. And I said that if you scan the images inwardly alive, then they gradually form themselves into a tableau not only of our inner life, but of the formative, growing forces, even of those forces that we develop to effect nutrition, to effect inner nourishment. We get to know ourselves as a second person.

This is what we first perceive as a reality in our subjective imaginations, which may be subjective because they initially give us the subjective, our own life in forces, but in reality. But once you have devoted yourself to such strong thinking that you have become capable of looking beyond memories, so to speak, it is much more difficult to remove from your consciousness what you have achieved in your concrete, living thinking.

Some people find it difficult to remove images, especially if they are still alive in their soul through emotions, through feelings. Such images, for which one has applied a special effort in order to be able to experience them in the soul, are more difficult to remove. But this too must be learned. Just as one has learned, as it were, to look into a region that otherwise remains completely unconscious, that only brings forth images at the surface of the memory, so one must now learn to develop an inner strength that is more than just forgetting. Then, if I may say so, one must be able to get rid of the strong forces that arise in one through meditation, to be able to erase and remove from one's soul that which one has just first worked into one's soul with all one's strength. One must learn to empty one's consciousness, to empty it completely, so that one only watches.

Dear attendees, this is not actually saying little; it is saying a lot. You just need to remember what most people who are untrained in this regard do when they make their consciousness completely empty – they fall asleep; consciousness ceases. Before that, for the visualization I have just described, you must first eliminate all external sensory impressions. But you make the thinking as strong as I have described. Now you must in turn eliminate this strong thinking. The consciousness remains empty; but it remains empty only for moments. If you remain awake, you develop a state of mind that represents only wakefulness. Then the objective external spiritual world, the supersensible world, enters into this alert and empty consciousness; just as the external air for breathing enters into the lungs, so the spiritual world enters into the empty consciousness, which, however, has first been made empty in the way I have described. And in this moment, the first thing we perceive is the spiritual soul that underlies external nature.

We learn to recognize that just as our time body lies behind our memory and is the creative element in us in our earthly existence, we learn to recognize that spirit beings are hidden everywhere behind the nature that appears to us in sensory perceptions. Just as we enter a sensory world through our eyes, through our ears, through our other sensory organs, so we enter a spiritual world through the soul being that has been prepared in this way, where we become, so to speak, completely soul-eyed for our spiritual surroundings; we enter a spiritual world, a world of spiritual beings and spiritual processes. We really get to know a spiritual cosmos. And we then realize very soon that what we have had earlier as level-headed people in sensory perception, can be brought into a context with what we now know as the spiritual world. The ordinary visionary rises, so to speak, from his ordinary consciousness into another, where he gets to know all kinds of dream-like things, but knows no context.

The person who comes to exact clairvoyance in the way I have described retains his old consciousness alongside the new one he has attained. He can constantly check what he sees in the spiritual world against what he has been given here in the physical world.

This is the difference between the spiritual researcher and the visionary. The visionary, when he lives in his visions, has completely forgotten his ordinary human self, because he would not be a visionary if he saw the outer world of the senses as it is seen by the normal person. But the one who is an exact spiritual researcher sees the spiritual world, and at any moment he can put himself back into it in full composure, because, I repeat it again and again: everything I describe here as human development takes place with mathematical composure, as does this putting oneself into the spiritual world in a different consciousness and putting oneself back into the ordinary composure. So that you are able, my dear audience, to say to yourselves: With my outer eye I see the sun. That which I see with my outer eye in the sensual image of the sun is connected to that which I now see spiritually as certain entities of the supersensible world, it is connected to the sun beings in the spiritual world. The physical sun is the physical image of spiritual sun beings, just as my physical body is the physical image of my soul-spiritual being.

And so one learns to see a spiritual world behind the physical-sensual one. But then one must go further by developing the strength to remove from consciousness what is within, to empty the consciousness, to wait. One must take this so far that one removes from the temporal body the entire tableau that one first discovered, the creative process during one's life on earth, and that one also removes this, that one completely disregards oneself. So after you have come so far as to see how the forces of growth have shaped your body since childhood, how external experiences have affected it, after you have established what, I would say, lives under the surface of memory, you create it away in a radical abstraction, if I may express it thus, so that our consciousness now not only becomes as empty as I have described, but even more thoroughly empty, in that one's own earth-life, including the supersensible part of one's earth-life, is removed. Then, just as in the case I have just described, when beings who are behind the physical image of the sun come to meet one from the spiritual world, so now, when one's earthly life has been , as an inner experience, but at the same time it lives in a kind of cosmic consciousness. One feels at one with the cosmos, with the consciousness of the world. The pre-earthly existence comes to the fore. You get to know yourself as a spiritual being, as you were before you descended to the physical earth, united as a spiritual being with that which comes from your father and mother, which comes to light in the hereditary current and which forms our physical body, with which we unite. We actually look at this pre-earthly existence. In external science, we have given the view: that which we develop mentally as knowledge comes afterwards, the images that we develop inwardly of the outwardly visible existence come afterwards.

If we want to see into the spiritual and supersensible world, we must continue the education we have received in developing scientific concepts by developing our inner soul powers. Then we will be able to turn this development of our inner soul powers into a soul eye. And at the level I have just described, we see into our pre-earthly existence. If I may say so: in present-day external science, things are there first; afterwards comes the theory. What we draw on in forming theories, we bring to inner life. Thus, after the theory, comes the intuition. And we know that it is a reality.

You see, the same objection is raised over and over again: Yes, how can you know that what you are now grasping with the empty consciousness is not also your subjective, just an autosuggestion or something like that? Yes, my dear audience, distinguishing mere fantasy from mere perception of reality, only life can do that. It cannot be defined externally, full of life, what the difference is between an imagined hot iron and a real hot iron. The more precisely we imagine the real hot iron, the better it is, the less we make the difference. But the difference arises when we touch the iron. The real hot iron burns us, the imagination does not. We only have to grasp reality in life, and we have to grasp it in life.

So if, for example, someone comes, as often happens, and says: But there is also this, that when someone has vividly imagined a lemonade, they have the taste of lemonade in their mouth, so if you really imagine an image as a reality. Such objections are frequently made. One can only say that one should just try to imagine what it is like to look into the pre-earthly existence after the earthly life has been eliminated and to feel the reality of the soul, perhaps through the centuries before it descended to the earthly existence ; and one will no longer say: 'You will have the taste of lemonade through the imagination'; but one will then say, 'Yes, you will have the taste through the imagination, but do you also believe that you can really quench your thirst?' You cannot. You cannot. When you see through all the circumstances of reality and enter into the right context, you will know what is reality and what is mere autosuggestion in a corresponding case. So the reality of the supersensible world must be experienced. But it can be experienced when the abilities to do so are first present in the way described.

Now, my dear attendees, I would like to say that we have already presented the one side of the eternity of the human soul, beyond birth or conception. That part of human eternity for which we do not even have a word in the newer languages. We talk about immortality, that is, the duration of the human soul beyond death, but we do not talk about the unborn. We must also talk about it, because one only comprehends eternity when one understands the unborn as well as one understands immortality. But immortality can also be visualized. It can be brought to view by the fact that we now not only train our thinking in meditation, so to speak, to the point of inner energy and concreteness, as I have described it, but also by beginning to train our will.

Now, I will only hint again in principle – the more precise details can be found in the books I have mentioned – how to train the will. Consider, for example, that one grasps the will that lies in thinking itself, because thinking is always, when it is not completely passive, a mere brooding, as one's own body broods, when it is inward activity, thinking is always permeated by the will. But we adhere to the external natural processes with this will. We think of what happened earlier first, then what happened later; and when we think dialectically, logically, it is usually only to arrive at what was earlier and what is later in human nature. He who wants to cultivate the will inwardly must, as it were, tear thought away from its adherence to the succession of external nature. It can be done. I will give an example.

When we imagine our daily life backwards in the evening, when we imagine what was at five o'clock, was at three o'clock and so on, that is, backwards. So we tear thinking away from the course of nature, in which it runs forward, like the course of nature itself. Or we imagine a melody backwards, or a drama, in as much detail as possible. We remember how we climbed a staircase, imagine ourselves first at the top, then on the penultimate step, and so on, in other words, backwards. When we learn to practice a thought process that runs counter to the course of nature, our will is strengthened.

In addition, there may be exercises where we consciously change our habits. Let's be honest, dear attendees, life usually changes us so much that we say to ourselves when we turn 50: we were different when we were 25. But life has taken us over, life has changed us.

But you can also take your own development in terms of will into your own hands by exerting inner willpower, so to speak. You can say to yourself: You have to develop a very specific, radically different habit within three or seven years, and you can then work on your will in the most diverse ways. What do you achieve by doing this? Well, my dear audience, what you achieve by doing this is only real if it goes through a bitter feeling of pain. Without going through a bitter, deep pain, you still can't really come to a higher realization. That is the first experience one has: a terrible pain, as if one had become completely alienated from oneself, as if one had plunged the body only into pain.

From this pain, another area of higher knowledge then emerges. I can characterize this in the following way: When one has lived oneself into pain to such an extent that one has overcome it, then something has emerged from this culture of will that I can call a spiritual transparency of our own body, of our whole human being. I can explain this by using the eye as an example. What makes the eye the sense organ that we can use so easily? Because it is selfless, because it does not assert its own materiality, it is transparent. The other works in it, which comes from outside. The eye denies itself. In the moment when we get the cataract, the eye asserts its own materiality in the eye. Then the eye becomes selfish. But then we can no longer use it for seeing.

Nor can we use our organism for seeing the higher world, just as it is quite right for the physical world. Do not think that I preach asceticism, that would never occur to me. Man should stand with both feet in reality. But he should also allow moments to arise when he makes himself a knower of the supersensible worlds. In such moments, after a person has done such exercises as I have described, the person can make their entire body like a single transparent, but soul-transparent, sensory organ. Otherwise, a person experiences themselves as a human being in their bodily organs. Now, as a result of such exercises of will, one no longer experiences one's bodily organs as one really stands outside one's body with one's experience. The body becomes transparent to the soul. And this separation from the body, this possibility of being outside the body and yet not sleeping, but having a consciousness outside the body, so that one can then see one's own body from the outside, that it is an object, not a subject, this can only be achieved by first acquiring the ability to divest oneself of one's body.

But this can only be achieved through the pain described. You have to go through this pain, then the culture of will leads you not only to have exact clairvoyance, as I have described, but to experience how you can also do something in the spiritual world. You notice this from the following: When a person falls asleep in the ordinary course of the day, his consciousness passes into the unconscious. One cannot say, from external observation, that the physical organism of the person has not simply taken on other functions, which simply, as one extinguishes a flame, extinguish consciousness, because consciousness arises again through another metamorphosis of functions when one wakes up. This cannot be said from ordinary research. But the one who has come to the stage of supersensible seeing, which I have just described, knows that the actual spiritual-soul aspect emerges from the physical body when one falls asleep, only it does not have the strength to perceive one thing or another in the world of the spirit, in which it was now, in ordinary life. Now, after going through a culture of will and, first of all, a culture of thought-images, one also learns to look into the real being that one is outside of one's body every night during sleep. And now one learns to recognize what the soul does with this being. Now one learns to recognize that in everyday life one is unconsciously asleep. And that which sleeps, one looks at with the acquired supersensible knowledge as that which exists in sleep outside of the physical body,

And one now learns to recognize: When you go through the gate of death, then, then this, what you have unconsciously created, remains. It is your actual humanity, your moral deeds. That which you have acquired in your soul in your dealings with the world and with people as a moral quality becomes real in this being, which separates from you in every state of sleep. But this is also something that is independent of your body; because you have learned to experience outside of the body, you also learn to recognize death in the image.

One learns to recognize oneself in what one otherwise is every night and what can exist without the body. And by now having in the supersensible picture of knowledge in real perception what one is without the body, one learns to recognize death, one learns to recognize the overcoming of death by the human soul, one learns to know the other side of the human being, one learns to know immortality in its real contemplation. By making the body transparent to the soul in the way described, one learns to be without the body, one learns to be in the spiritual world through what one has become without the body, and one knows how one has discarded the physical body to be in a spiritual world after death. One has become familiar with the soul's inner work, which is purely spiritual and prepares both the future worlds and one's own future earthly lives. Idealistic magic has been added to exact clairvoyance, the inner work. One consciously learns what is otherwise only unconsciously practiced.

Anyone who, as so many often do in this day and age, speaks of an external magic is simply a charlatan. The one who speaks with inner religious feeling to science of the present day of magic, speaks of exact clairvoyance, of idealistic magic, in that one gets to know that which is created within physical life on earth and what then lives beyond death in further stages of existence in order to prepare later lives on earth.

What I have tried to show with these discussions, dear attendees, is the relationship between supersensible knowledge, as it is meant in anthroposophy, and contemporary science. I wanted to show how this anthroposophical spiritual science is aware that it has to prove its legitimacy to contemporary science every moment.

And let us consider how this science of the present day, in relation to external knowledge, has managed to recognize precisely that which does not include the human being, in that the human being, by making the renunciation described at the beginning of my discussion today, has renounced the need to be objective and initially uses thinking only as a servant. But what one has acquired in serving thinking gives one the attitude to make this thinking so inwardly alive that it fulfills it. For exact clairvoyance, renunciation gives one the powers that the soul has in the will to call upon for real activity, an activity, however, that works in the spirit, that has nothing to do with the physical and sensual existence of man, but that goes beyond death. So that we get to know the eternal part of the human soul, and get to know both the unborn and the immortal, through a realization that really looks like a genuine continuation of what man acquires as sensory knowledge.

But precisely because we get to know what is outside of us through the exact sensory knowledge that has been developed today, we, as clairvoyant human beings, are confronted with a world about which we have to ask ourselves: How does our morality operate in it? Is our morality just a vapor that rises in the purely natural world order, which, according to a modified Kant-Laplacean world creation, transitions to the more complicated, more perfect being, only to sink into heat death, whereby the end of that which arises in us as moral impulses would be given with the general cosmic cemetery?

The anthroposophical supersensible knowledge referred to here describes morality as a creative force and places moral impulses on an equal footing with purely naturalistic ones. Through this supersensible knowledge, the human being knows himself in a real world through his moral impulses, through his human morality. He knows that the real world we see with our eyes today is the result of previous spiritual worlds, and that what man brings into his own soul and spirit today as moral impulses — that separates from him in every sleep, that then passes through the gate of death — that this is now the germ of future real worlds. Man feels that he is placed in a moral cosmic order. And through such spiritual knowledge as I have described, he also has the possibility of feeling religiously. For man cannot feel religiously in the face of the moral nature with its mere natural laws. Super sensory knowledge is made necessary precisely by the perfection of our sensory knowledge.

If the ancients received a spiritual element at the same time as their senses gave them colors and sounds, we only faithfully receive what our senses give us through our observations and experiments, but we stand there as human beings in the face of this perfect science and ask ourselves: What is our position in the world as sentient, as total human beings? Supernatural knowledge gives us the answer. And because it is true and exact knowledge, it leads man up to the moral sense, to the religious sense, and unites science, morality and religion.

Thus, my dear attendees, the necessary acknowledgment of today's science, when unfeignedly and honestly acknowledged, leads to the acknowledgment of genuine supersensible knowledge. And what we gain through supersensible knowledge, we gain, my dear assembled guests, for the human being. The human being has become disinterested in relation to external science, wants to be objective, excludes his subjectivity. This is given back to him just as objectively as external nature is given to us in experimental science, in true exact supersensible knowledge. But with that, our minds are warmed from within by this supersensible knowledge, our wills are made strong. We are imbued with warmth, with strength for life, in which we must have security - if our fate is not to be a sad one - for life, in which we must work powerfully if we are to be right members of the human social order.

That is the significance of real supersensible knowledge, that it does not remain merely a theoretical view, that it permeates our minds so that we know we are united with the world and with other people through it in that warmth of life and love that we need to live, that we feel imbued with that energy which engages us in the work of the day and in the labors that are more lasting within our human life on earth. True supersensible knowledge imbues our humanity with powers from the supersensible world. Just as the world is a creation of the spiritual, so we make our own deeds a creature of the spiritual by first taking the spiritual into our humanity.

In no way does the supersensible knowledge that is meant here detract from the real external, the true external science of the present. It concedes to this science: Yes, you have found the right ways to recognize the extra-human. You recognize your limitations. One often speaks of the limitations of this science. But these limitations are only those that are drawn from observation in the experiment of the senses. The thinking that we develop in us through this observation, through this experiment, can be further developed. Then we will be able to permeate our inner being, as it is permeated with blood in our physical life, with soul and spiritual forces. Then we will become truly human in the true sense of the word through supersensible knowledge that comes from the spirit.

Such knowledge can be investigated if one is only unbiased enough to do so. One need not become a spiritual researcher oneself – which everyone can do to a certain extent, as the books mentioned show – but one need not become one. Just as one does not need to be a painter to feel the beauty of a picture, so one does not need to be a spiritual researcher, but only to surrender to one's unbiased mind, not distracted by any prejudices, not even by science, one will be able to make what the spiritual researcher has to say fruitful for one's life, just as one who is not a painter can understand a picture sensitively. One must be a painter if one wants to paint a picture; one must be a spiritual researcher if one wants to present the truths of the supersensible world. On the other hand, one can understand the picture sensitively, even if one is not a painter. One can understand what the spiritual researcher says if one only devotes one's unprejudiced common sense to it; one will find everything consistent and in harmony with the whole of human life. And supersensible knowledge can be assimilated just as one assimilates astrology or biology or something else, even if one is not oneself an astrologer or a biologist or something of the kind. Supersensible knowledge will lead not only to knowledge of the supersensible and of the outer human, but also to warmth of soul and spiritual power of the human.

Man will be able to add to what he has so perfectly recognized – although perfection only exists in an ideal, in any case – man will be able to add to what is extra-human the contemplation of man, after the relative independence with which he has recognized the extra-human. And in all knowledge, in all essentials, however much we may look around us in the world, understandingly, cognitively, in the end, when we are to work, when we are to be effective, and that is what matters, we must still be right people and place right people in a world that has attained a certain perfection through the science of the present. Supernatural knowledge worthy of the name attempts to place right human beings in this world so that they can work through this present-day science. It does so by educating the human being from the spiritual to become a right human being through life itself.

Pedantic lecturers upset the listeners' stomachs. Learn lecturing by listening: watch how others do it, good or bad. Reluctance to speak is the virtue, not eagerness to hear one's own voice. A debater turns his opponent's image and word against him. Jokers create too much acidity in the listeners' stomachs. Words precede deeds.

One has to accustom oneself to speak differently on every soil, if one intends to be active as a lecturer ... Thus, a talk is to be formulated differently, depending on whether it is delivered here in Switzerland, in Germany, or whether at this or that time.

One would, of course, have to speak again quite differently in England or in America. What can be done from here, in Europe, in regard to these two countries, can only be a sort of substitute. It is good, for example, if Die Kernpunkte der sozialen Frage [The Threefold Social Order] is translated, it is good if it is widely distributed; but, as I have said from the beginning, the really proper thing finally would be if the Kernpunkte were written quite differently for America and for England. For both Switzerland and Central Europe, it can be taken quite literally, word for word, the way it stands. But for England and America it would really have to be composed quite differently, because in those countries one addresses people who, first of all, have the opposite attitude of what existed, for instance, in Germany in April of 1919. In Germany the opinion prevailed that something new would have to come, and to begin with it would suffice if one knew what this were. There wasn't the strength to comprehend it, but there was the feeling that what this rational innovation might be, ought to be known. Naturally, in all of England and America not the slightest sense of this exists anywhere. The only concern there is how to secure and save the old. The question is how properly to secure the old. The old values are good! One must not shake the traditional foundations. I am aware, of course, that when anything like this is said, it can be replied: Yes, but there are so many progressive movements in the Western hemisphere!—Still, all these progressive movements, regardless of whether their content is new, are reactionary and conservative in so far as their management is concerned. There, the feeling that things cannot continue the way they have gone until now, must first be called forth.

***

Things must everywhere be sought out in the concrete.

... I would like to show how an elasticity of concepts for these things [rights relationships] has to be acquired—how one has to point out both sides of a question,—and how one must be able to dispose oneself first, in order to have the necessary fluency to speak in front of people.

There is another reason why a lecturer of today must be aware of such things. Most of the time, he is condemned to speak in the evening, when he wants to present something concerning the future. This means that he has to make use of the time when people really prefer to be either in the concert hall or in the theater. Thus, the lecturer must be absolutely clear that he is speaking to an audience that, according to the mood of the hour, would be better off in the concert hall, the theater, or some other place,—but not in fact down there, where it is supposed to listen, while above, a lecturer talks about things vouchsafed for the future. One must he aware of what one is really doing, down to the last detail.

For, what does one in fact do when addressing an audience such as one is mostly condemned to speak in front of nowadays? Quite literally, one upsets the listener's stomach! A serious speech has the peculiarity of adversely affecting the pepsin, of not allowing the stomach juices to take effect. A serious lecture causes stomach acidity. And only if one is oneself in such a mood that one can present a serious talk, at least inwardly, with the necessary humor, can the stomach juices be assisted again. A lecture has to be presented with a certain inner lightness,—with a certain modulation, with a certain enthusiasm; then one aids the stomach juices. Then one neutralizes what one inflicts on the stomach in the time when we normally have to lecture today. The threefold social order is not being served, but rather stomach specialists, when people speak in all gravity, with heavy expressive manner, pedantically, on three-folding. It must be done with a light touch and matter-of-factness or else one does not further the threefold social order but the stomach specialists. It is just that there are no statistics available on the number of people who have to go to stomach specialists after they have listened to pedantic lectures! If there were statistics on these things, one would be astonished at the percentage among patients of stomach specialists who are eager lecture-goers nowadays.

I must call attention to these things, because the time is drawing near when it must be known how the human being actually lives.—How seriousness affects his stomach, how humor affects his stomach juices; how, let us say for example, wine is like a kind of cynic who doesn't take the whole human organism seriously, but plays with it. If the human organism were approached with human concepts rather than with the wishy-washy concepts of today's science, it would be observed all over how every word and every world-relation calls forth an organic, almost chemical effect in the human being.

Knowing such things makes lecturing easier too. Whereas there is otherwise a barrier between speaker and audience, this barrier ceases to exist if it is to some extent perceived how the stomach juices curdle, and eventually become sour in the stomach and impair the stomach walls, in the case of a pedantic talk. Occasionally there is the opportunity of seeing it: though less in lecture-halls of universities,—there, the students protect themselves by not listening!

From all this, you can see how much depends on the mood in lecturing,—how much more important—preparing the atmosphere, having it in hand, is, than to get the lecture ready word for word. He who has prepared himself often for the correct mood need not concern himself with the verbal details to a point where, at a given moment, the latter would make him the upsetter of stomach juices.

Various things—if I may so express it—go to make up a duly equipped speaker. I should like to present them at this particular point because an explanation of “rights concepts” requires much that has to be characterized in this direction. [In another part of this lecture, Rudolf Steiner had already discussed aspects of justice not having to do with the art of lecturing.—Note by translator.] I would like to present this now, before talking tomorrow about the interweaving of the “economic elements” in speaking.

An anthroposophist once brought the well-known philosopher, Max Dessoir (1867–1947)—whom you also perhaps know—along one evening, to the Architektenhaus in Berlin, when I was to hold a lecture there. This one-time friend of Max Dessoir said afterwards, “Oh, that Dessoir didn't respond after all!—I asked him how he had liked the lecture and he replied: ‘Well, you know, I'm a lecturer myself, and anyone who is himself a speaker can't listen properly; he has no opinion on what another lecturer says!’ ”—Now, I did not need to form a judgement about Dessoir after this declaration; I had other opportunities for that, indeed I wouldn't have done so based on this utterance, since I could not know at all whether it was really true, or whether, as usual, Dessoir had lied this time also. But assuming it were true: what would it be a proof of?—That at any rate the one who holds such a view can never become an adequate speaker. A person can never become a good speaker who likes to speak, who likes to hear himself talk, and attaches special importance to his own speaking. A good speaker really always has to endure a certain reluctance when he is to speak. He must clearly feel this reluctance. Above all, he should much prefer listening to another speaker, even the worst, to speaking himself.

I know very well what I say with this statement, and I well realize how difficult it is for some of you to believe me in this. But it is so. Of course, I concede that there are other pleasures in the world than listening to poor speakers. But at all events, speaking oneself ought not to belong to these other greater pleasures. One must even feel a certain urge to hear others; even enjoy listening to others. For it is really through listening that one becomes a speaker, not through love of speaking oneself. A certain fluency is acquired through speaking, but this has to proceed instinctively. What makes one a speaker is actually listening, developing an ear for the distinctive traits of other speakers, even if they are poor ones. Therefore, I shall answer everyone who asks me how best to prepare himself to become a good speaker: he should hear and especially read—I have explained the difference between hearing and reading—he should hear and read the lectures of others! (That can after all be done, since the nuisance prevails of printing lectures.) In this way one acquires a strong feeling of distaste for one's own speaking. And this distaste for one's own speaking is actually what enables one in fact to speak adequately. This is extraordinarily important. And for those people who don't yet manage to view their own speaking with antipathy, it is good at least to retain their stage-fright.—To stand up and lecture without stage-fright and with sympathy for one's own speaking is something that ought to be refrained from, since under all circumstances, the results thus achieved would be negative. It leads to lecturing becoming sclerotic, to ossification, and to capsulated talk, and belongs to the elements that ruin the sermon for people.

I would truly not be speaking about lecturing in the sense of the task of this course if I were to enumerate rules of speaking to you, taken from some old book on rhetoric, or from copied, old rhetorical speeches. Rather, I would like to enjoin upon you, out of living experience, what one should really always have at heart when one wants to affect one's fellow-men by means of lecturing.

Things certainly alter somewhat if one is forced into a debate—if, I should like to say, a certain rights-relationship between person and person arises in the discussion. But in the discussion, through which rights-relationships could be learnt most beautifully, this projecting in of general rights-concepts into the relationship which prevails between two people hardly plays a role today. There, it is really a matter of not being in love with one's own way of thinking and feeling, but rather of feeling averse toward what one would like to say on the topic, and what one actually brings up. This can be done if one understands how to hold back one's own opinion, one's own annoyance or excitability, and can get across into the other person's mind. Then this will be fruitful even in the debate when a statement must be rejected. Of course, one can not simply reiterate what the other person says, but one can appropriate from him what is needed for an effective debate.

A striking example is the following: ( It is retold in the latest issue of Dreigliederung; I experienced it more than twenty years ago.) The delegate Rickert delivered a speech in the German Reichstag, in which he reproached Bismarck for changing his political alignment. He pointed out that Bismarck had gone along with the Liberals for a time, turning afterwards to the Conservatives. He gave an impressive speech, which he summarized in the metaphor, that Bismarck's politics amounted to trimming one's sails to the wind. Now, you can imagine what an effect it has inwardly, in terms of feeling, when such an image is used in a hall of parliament [—the proper German translation for parliament is really Schwatzanstalt.—] Bismarck, however, rose and with a certain air of superiority, to begin with, turned the things he had to say against delegate Rickert. And then he projected himself into the other as he always did in similar cases, and said, “Rickert has reproached me for trimming my sails to the wind. But pursuing politics is somewhat like navigating. I would like to know how one can steer properly if one does not want to adjust to the wind! A real sailor, like a real politician, must obviously adjust according to the wind in steering his course,—unless, possibly, he wants to make wind himself!”

You can see, the image is picked up and used, so that the arrow in fact hits back at the archer. In a debate it is a matter of taking things up, of getting things from the other speaker. Where a frivolous illustration is concerned, the matter is comprehensible. But one will also be able to do it in seriousness; seeking out from the opponent himself what unravels the matter! As a rule it will not be much use merely setting one's own reasons against those of the opponent.

In a debate one should be able to attune oneself as follows: The moment the debate gets going one should be in a position to dispose of everything one has known hitherto, drive it all down into the unconscious, and actually only know what the speaker whom one has to reply to, has just said. Then one should squarely exercise one's talent for setting aright what the speaker has said! Exercise the talent for setting aright! In debate it is a matter of taking up immediately what the speaker says, and not simply pitting against it what one already knew long ago. If that is done, as happens in most debates, the debate actually ends inconsequentially, in fact it comes to nothing. One has to be aware that in a debate one can never refute someone. It can only be demonstrated that a speaker either contradicts himself or reality. One can only go into what he has set forth. And that will be of immense importance if it is made use of as the basic principle for debates or discussions. If a person only wants to say in the debate what he has known before, then certainly it will be of no significance at all when he puts it forward after the speaker.

This once stared me in the face in a particularly instructive way. In Holland I was invited on my last trip also to give a lecture on Anthroposophy before the Philosophical Society of the University of Amsterdam. The chairman there was, naturally, already of a different opinion than I. There was no doubt at all that, if he were to engage in the debate, he would say something quite different than I would. But it was equally clear that what he said would ultimately make no difference as regards my lecture, and that my lecture would have no particular influence on what he would say, based on what he knew anyhow. Hence, I considered he did things quite cleverly. He raised what he had to say not subsequently in the debate, but in advance! What he did add later in the debate to his preliminary words he could equally have presented beforehand, at the start—it would not have changed matters a bit.

One must not cherish any illusions about such things. Above all a lecturer should familiarize himself very, very thoroughly with human relationships. But, if things are to have an effect, one cannot allow oneself any illusions about human relationships. Above all—I should like to tell you this today, since it will provide a certain basis for the next lectures—above all, one should not surrender to illusions about the effectiveness of talks!

Inwardly, I always have to get into a terribly humorous frame of mind when well-meaning contemporaries say again and again: It's not a matter of words, it's a matter of deeds! I have heard it declaimed again and again at the most inopportune points, not only in dialogues, but also from various podiums: Words don't count; actions count! As far as what happens in the world in the way of actions, everything depends on words! For those able to get to the bottom of the matter, no actions take place at all that have not been prepared in advance by someone or other through words.

But you will realize that the preparation is something quite subtle! For, if it is true—and it is true!—that through pedantic, theoretical, abstract, Marxist speaking one actually upsets people's stomach juices—whereby the stomach juices infect the rest of the organism—then outside actions, which very much depend on the stomach juices, are the consequence of such bad speeches. The stomach juices flow into the rest of the organism, when dispersed. On the other hand again, when people only act as jokers, stomach juices are produced incessantly, which really works like vinegar,—and vinegar is a frightful hypochondriac. But people will keep on being entertained, and what flows nowadays in public is a continuous whirl of fun-making. The joking-around of yesterday is still not digested, when the fun-making of today makes its appearance. With that, the digestive juices of yesterday go sour and become like vinegar. The human being will in turn be entertained today. He can make merry. But by the way he takes his place in public life, it is really the hypochondriacal vinegar which operates there. And this hypochondriacal vinegar is then to be met with!

In fact, in saloons it is the Marxist speakers who ruin people's stomachs. And if people then read the Vorwaerts [—apparently a comic paper], then this is the means by which the upset stomach must be put in order again. That is a very real process!

... It must be known how the realm of speaking takes its place within the realm of actions. The untruest utterance—because from false sentimentality (and everything stemming from false sentimentality is untrue!)—the untruest utterance vis-a-vis speaking is: “Der Worte sind genug gewechselt, lasst mich auch endlich Taten sehen!” [“The words you've bandied are sufficient: 'tis deeds that I prefer to see.”—Faust, Prelude on Stage.]

That can certainly stand in a passage of a drama. And where it stands it is even justified. But when it is torn out of context and made out to be a general dictum, then it may be “correct,” but good it is quite certainly not! And we should learn not merely beautiful, not merely correct, but also goodspeaking. Otherwise we lead people into the abyss, and can in any case not confer with them about anything worthy of the future.

Notes:

Note 1.Mainly the second part of a lecture given in Dornach on 14 October 1921. The lecture is the fourth of the Speakers' Course, published in German under the title: Anthroposophie. soziale Oreigliederung und Redekunst. (Rudolf Steiner Verlag, Dornach 1971.) Translated by Maria St. Goar. Revised.

From within our work in the Anthroposophical movement we look forward into the future of humanity and we let our souls and hearts be permeated with that which we believe will embody itself in the streams of evolution and in the forces of evolution of the future of humanity. When we contemplate the great truths of existence, when we look up to the Forces, Powers and Beings who reveal themselves to us in the spiritual worlds as the cause and foundation of all that meets us in the sense-world, here also we rejoice to know that the truths which we bring down from the spiritual worlds will and must be gradually realised more and more in the souls and hearts of the men of the future. Thus for the greater part of the year our spiritual gaze is directed either to the immediate present or the future.

All the more do we feel ourselves impelled on the special days of the year—on the Festivals which come through to us from time and its changes as set reminders of that which earlier humanity imagined and devised—on these feast days we feel ourselves impelled to realise our union with this earlier humanity, to sink ourselves a little into that which led men of past time out of fulness of heart and soul to place these sign-marks in the course of time which come down to us as the ‘Festivals of the year.’ If the Easter Festival is such as to awaken in us, when we understand it, thoughts of human powers and of the power of overcoming all the lower through the higher, everything externally physical through the spiritual, if the Easter Festival is a festival of resurrection, of awaking, a festival of hope and confidence in the spiritual forces which can be awakened in the human soul; so, on the other hand, the Christmas Festival is a festival of the realisation of harmony with the whole cosmos, a festival of the realisation of Grace. It is a festival that can again and again bring home the thought: No matter how doubtful everything around us may appear, however much the bitterest doubts may enter into faith, however much the worst disappointments may mingle with the most aspiring hopes, however much all that is good around us in life may totter, there is something in human nature and essence—this the rightly understood thought of the Christmas Festival may say—that only needs to be brought vitally, spiritually, before the soul, which reveals to us perpetually that we are descended from the powers of good, from the forces of right, from the forces of the true. The Easter thought points us to our victorious forces in the future—the Christmas thought points us, in a certain sense, to the origin of man in the primeval past.

In such a case one can clearly see, how the unconscious or subconscious reason or spirituality of man stands far, far higher than man with his consciousness can wholly compass. We have often reason to admire that which men have established in the past out of the hidden depths of the soul more than that which they have established out of their intellectual thoughts and understanding. How infinitely wise it appears to us, when we open the calendar, and for the 25th December we find registered the Birth-Festival of Christ Jesus, and then we see registered in the calender for the 24th December ‘Adam and Eve.’ It may be said: How clearly reasonable and spiritual it appears that out of the dim subconscious work of the Middle Ages, when Christmas plays were performed here or there about Christmas time by people from different places, when the ‘singers’ as they were called gathered for their Christmas plays, that the Paradise Tree should be brought forward. As in the calender ‘Adam and Eve’ appeared before the Christ Birthday Festival, so in the Christmas plays of the Middle Ages, the Tree of Paradise was brought forward by the troupe which took part in the performance of the Christmas plays. In short, there was something in the deep hidden soul-depths of men which caused them to place directly together the earthly beginning of humanity and the Jesus Birth Festival. In the year 353, even in ecclesiastical Rome, the 25th December was not kept as the Festival of the Birthday of Jesus. Only in 354 the Jesus Birthday Festival was celebrated for the first time in ecclesiastical Rome. Previous to this, there was a festival which brought to men a consciousness similar to the Jesus Birth Festival, namely, the 6th January, the day of remembrance of the Baptism by John in Jordan, the day which was commemorative of the Descent of the Christ from the spiritual heights, and the Self-immersion of the Christ into the body of Jesus of Nazareth. That was originally the Birth of the Christ in Jesus, the remembrance of the great historical moment which is symbolically presented to us as the hovering dove over the head of Jesus of Nazareth. The 6th January was the commemorative day of the birth of the Christ in Jesus of Nazareth. In the fourth century, however, it had for a long time been impossible for the self-assertive materialistic philosophy of the West to understand the penetration of Jesus with the Christ. Like a powerful fight this thought with instantaneous illumination was present to the Gnostics, who were in a certain respect contemporaries or direct followers of the Event of Golgotha. They were in the position of finding it unnecessary to seek the depth of this wisdom of the ‘Christ’ in ‘Jesus’ as we have to seek this wisdom again through modern clairvoyance. The Gnostics were able, by means of the last flickering of those old, original human clairvoyant powers to see, as it were, in the light of grace that which we must acquire again for ourselves concerning the great secrets of Golgotha. Much was clear to the Gnostics which we have to acquire again, for example, in particular, the secret of the birth of Christ in Jesus at the Baptism by John in Jordan.

Just as the old clairvoyance faded away for humanity generally, so did also the peculiar kindling of the highest clairvoyant power, of the highest Christmas light of humanity, which the Gnostics possessed. In the fourth century Western Christianity was no longer able to understand this great thought. Hence in the fourth century the true meaning of the Festival of the appearing of the Christ in Jesus was lost to Western civilisation. Man had forgotten what this ‘Festival of the Appearing’ of the 6th January actually meant. They had for a time—yes, right into our time, buried under much materialistic intellectual rubbish what indeed would not allow itself to be destroyed, the feeling toward the Christ-Figure in human evolution. If man could not understand that One Most High, as compared with humanity, had manifested Himself in the Baptism by John in Jordan, yet he could understand,—for that did not contradict materialistic knowledge,—that that bodily organism which was selected for the reception of the Christ was something significant. Hence they put back the Spirit-birth, which indeed took place in the John-Baptism in Jordan, to the Child-birth of Jesus of Nazareth, and set the ‘Jesus-Birth-Festival’ in place of the ‘Festival of the Appearing.’ To represent quite rightly and in detail, that which became the Christmas Festival of humanity always aroused significant feelings, high exalted feelings. Something significant lived in the human soul at the approach of Christmas, which may be expressed as follows: If man contemplates the world in the right sense, he can, by belief in humanity, fortify himself against certain things, against all life’s dangers and blows of fate; in the feeling of love and peace man can fortify himself in his deepest soul against all disharmony and strife of life. This is something which becomes ever more clearly bound up with the Christmas Festival. For what was it actually of which man reminded himself? From our anthroposophical point of view let us look at what man remembered.

We know what significant, real and powerful preparations human evolution had to go through in order that the Mystery of Golgotha could enter this human evolution. The human being who was the reincarnated Zarathustra, had to be born as one of the two Jesus children. He also had to be born for whom the real Jesus-Birth-Festival was the commemorative festival; he had to be born whose soul-substance had remained in the spiritual worlds. So long as humanity went through all that was possible within heredity through the generations up to the Mystery of Golgotha—for all other human souls had gone through the generations—so long had man been taking up the destroying forces that crept right into the blood. One single soul substance had remained behind in the spiritual worlds, guarded by the purest Mysteries and Mystery-centres, and then it was poured out into humanity as the soul of the second Jesus-child, the child of the Luke Gospel, that Jesus-child to whose birth all the commemorations and representations of the Christ-Festival, of Christmas, belong. At Christmas-time men’s thoughts went back to the origin of humanity, to the human soul, which had not yet descended, not even into Adam’s nature. They would say: In Bethlehem, in Palestine was born that soul-substance which had not taken part in the descent of humanity, but had remained behind, and for the first time in fact entered into a human body, in incarnating in the Jesus described by Luke. The human soul, when its thought is directed to the fact, may feel: One can believe in humanity, one can have faith in humanity; however much conflict, however much disbelief, however much disharmony has entered into it—and they have entered into all that has flowed into humanity from the time of Adam to the present—when one looks back on that which in olden times was called ‘Adam Kadmon,’ which became later the ‘Christ’ conception, there was kindled in the human soul confidence in the soundness of human force, and there was kindled confidence in the primeval peace-and-love nature of humanity. Hence the subconscious soul of man drew together the Jesus-birth Festival and the Adam and Eve Festival because man saw in fact his own nature in the Christ Child that was born, but his own nature in its innocence, in its purity.

Why then was the Divine Child placed before humanity for hundreds and thousands of years as the highest there was for the human soul to revere? For the reason that when man looks at a child and sees the child not yet able to say ‘I’ to himself, he can know that the child is still working on the human body, the Temple of the Eternally Divine, and because the human child who cannot yet say ‘I’ nevertheless clearly shows the sign of his origin from the spiritual world. Through this contemplation of the child nature man learns to have full trust in human nature. Here, where he can most easily foregather, when the sun shines least and warms the earth least, when he is not busied with the ordering of his outer affairs, here, when the days are shortest and the nights longest, when the earth gives him the best opportunity to foregather and to enter into himself, when all outer brightness, all outer beauty withdraws for a while from the outward view—here, the Western civilisation places the Birth-Festival of the Divine Child, that is, of the Human Being who enters the world pure and unsullied—and through the innocent entrance into the world can give to man at the time of his closest assembling with others, the strongest, the highest confidence through the knowledge of his divine origin.

To the anthroposophist it is a confirmation of the great truth that one can learn most from the child, when one sees that a festival of a child’s birth is placed in the course of time as a great significant festival of confidence in human evolution. So we admire the subconscious, the spiritual reason of the men of the past, who have placed such sign posts in the path of time. We feel then like those who decipher wonderful hieroglyphs, produced by the men of old through the placing of such festivals in the writing of the times and we feel one with these men of old. Whilst at other times our look is directed towards the future, whilst at other times we are willing to place our best powers at the disposal of the future, to strengthen and increase all faith in the future, here, on such festival days, we seek just to live in remembrance, to draw towards us as though incarnated the old thoughts teaching us at the present time that we can think truly in our way of what lies in the spiritual at the foundation of the external world; but that in earlier times—in a different way, it is true, but not less right, not less magnificent and significant—the True and Sublime was thought and experienced through the realisation of the oneness of humanity and the high possibilities that then lay ahead of humanity. This is our anthroposophical ideal, to be able to feel one with that which the men of old produced—often from the most hidden depths of the soul. These festivals, particularly the great ones, encourage this, if we can only through the anthroposophical truths imprint in our souls the significance of the hieroglyphic signs written in the path of time.

A wonderful thought unites with a wonderful emotion in our souls when we see how, in those centuries which followed the fourth which first transferred the Jesus-Birth Festival to the 25th of December, how there here flows into the souls of those men the feeling of confidence awakened through the child-nature, so that in painting, in the Christmas plays, everywhere, is shown how all the creatures of the Earth-kingdom bow before the Jesus-Child, before the Divine Child, before the divine origin of man. There comes before us the wonderful picture of the manger, how the beasts bow before this primal man; to these may be added those wonderful stories, as for instance that when Mary had taken the Child Jesus on the way to Egypt, a tree bowed itself, a very ancient tree, as the border was crossed by Mary with the child. Traditionally the legends of almost the whole of Europe relate that the trees in a remarkable way, in the Holy Night, bow to this great event. We could go to Alsace, to Bavaria, everywhere we find legends, how certain trees bear fruit in the Holy Night. All wonderful symbols which proclaim in fact how the birth of the Jesus-Child reveals itself as something which is connected with the whole life of the earth. When we recollect what we have so often said—that the ancient spiritual streams were given by the Gods to mankind, and how in ancient times men had clairvoyant insight into the divine spiritual world, how this clairvoyance gradually vanished from humanity in order that men might be able to come to the gaining of the ego—if we picture how here, in the whole human organisation something like a drying-up, a withering, of the old divine forces is taking place, and how through the Christ-Impulse which came through the Mystery of Golgotha there is a flooding of the withering divine forces with new water of life; then there appears to us in a wonderful picture what the Christmas legends relate to us, how the dried up and withered roses of Jericho shoot up of themselves in the Holy Night. That is a legend which we find everywhere noted down in the Middle Ages, that the roses of Jericho blossom in the Christ-night and unfold, because they first unfolded under the footsteps of Mary, who, when she carried the Child Jesus on the journey to Egypt, stepped over a place where a rose tree was growing. A wonderful symbol of what happened to human divine powers, that even things so dry and lifeless as that which one usually finds on the wayside, as the roses which apparently are dead, can spring up again and shoot forth through the Christ-Impulse which entered into the time evolution.

That to man was first given in reality what was destined from the beginning is expressed in the Jesus-Birth Festival, in the festival of the Birth of the Jesus infant. Before Adam and Eve existed, that was destined for humanity—so the Christmas legend says—which yet lies in the quite unspoilt divine child-nature of man. In truth however—and really on account of the influence of Lucifer—man has only been able to attain it after the whole period of time from Adam and Eve to the Mystery of Golgotha.

A deep emotion awakens in our souls when we take for our meditation a feeling, compressed into the one night of the 24th and 25th December, of what mankind has become from Adam and Eve to the birth of Christ in Jesus, through the Luciferic powers. If we can realise that, we shall really grasp the significance of this Festival, and realise the goal before humanity. It is as though humanity, if it would use its opportunity and take these sign posts of time as material for meditation, could really become aware of its pure origin in the cosmic forces of the universe. Here, looking up into the cosmic forces of the universe and penetrating a little by means of Anthroposophy, through the true spiritual wisdom into the secrets of the universe, humanity can first become ripe to understand this, that what as the Christ-Birth Festival was once understood by the Gnostics, was in fact the festival celebrated on January 6th, the Festival of the Birth of Christ in the body of Jesus of Nazareth, as a higher stage of the Birth-Festival of Jesus. To enable us to plunge into the twelve great Forces of the universe, the twelve Holy Nights are set between the Christmas Festival and the festival which should be celebrated on the sixth of January, which now is the festival of the Three Holy Kings, and which in fact is the festival we have been speaking about.

Again, without man’s really knowing it in present knowledge, these twelve Holy Nights are established out of the hidden wise depths of the soul of mankind, as though they would say: ‘Realise the depths of the Christmas Festival, but sink during the twelve Holy Nights into the holiest secrets of the cosmos, that is, in the realms of the universe out of which Christ descended to the Earth.’ Only when mankind wills to be inspired through the thought of the holy childlike divine origin of man, to let himself be inspired by the wisdom that works through the twelve forces, through the twelve holy forces of the universe, symbolically presented in the twelve signs of the Zodiac, due in truth to spiritual wisdom—only when mankind sinks into true spiritual wisdom and learns to discern the course of time in the great cosmos and in the single human being, only then will the mankind of the future, fructified through Spiritual Science, find to its own salvation the inspiration which can come from the Jesus-Birth Festival so that thoughts for the future may be permeated with fullest confidence and richest hopes.

Thus we may as anthroposophists allow the Christmas Festival to work on our souls as an inspiration festival, as a festival that brings the thought of human origin in the holy divine primeval human child so wonderfully before our souls. That light which appears to us in the Holy Night as the symbol of the Light of humanity at its source, that Light which is symbolically presented to us later in the lights of the Christmas-tree, rightly understood, is the Light that can give to our striving souls the best and strongest forces for our true real world-peace, for the true blessedness and real hope for the world.

Let us feel ourselves strengthened for the needs of the-future by such thoughts on the facts of the past, on the establishing of the festivals in the past; Christmas thoughts, remembrance thoughts on the origin of humanity, thoughts well-rooted which will unfold themselves to real, to most mighty soul-plants for the true future of humanity.

We shall best understand how karma is anchored in the individual and in the evolution of humanity, and how the single facts of karma lend themselves to description, if we begin by considering how human consciousness has evolved since the time when, even in his ordinary life, man had a direct, elementary perception of his karma. To-day it is a fact that in his waking consciousness man knows nothing of his karma. The world in which he lives from awaking to falling asleep prevents him from having any direct knowledge of his karma. But humanity has not always lived in the state of consciousness that is considered normal to-day. In olden times, moreover during the earlier Post-Atlantean periods of evolution, quite different states of consciousness prevailed, even in the everyday life of man. There are three states or conditions of normal consciousness to-day—I have often described them to you. Firstly, there is waking consciousness; secondly, dream-consciousness into which scattered reminiscences of the day's experiences make their way but mingled, too, with influences from the spiritual world; and lastly, sleep-consciousness proper, in which dimness and darkness surround the human soul and consciousness sinks away, so to speak, into unconsciousness.

1. Waking consciousness.
2. Dream consciousness.
3. Sleep consciousness.

It was not always thus. There was a time in man's evolution when the experiences of his everyday consciousness took quite different forms. Let us look back some eight or ten thousand years to the epoch immediately following the Atlantean catastrophe whereby many widespread forms of civilisation and culture were wiped out of existence.

It was an epoch when land began to arise where formerly there had been sea, and sea to cover tracts that had once been land, a time moreover when the earth was destined to pass through a period of intense cold. We discover there a humanity which had survived the Atlantean catastrophe and was also endowed with three distinct kinds of consciousness but of an essentially different character from those of to-day. The prosaic, everyday consciousness of modern man in his waking hours, by which he sees other human beings and the creatures and happenings of nature in sharp outlines—this the men of those ancient times did not possess. They saw the human being without sharp contours, extending in all directions into the Spiritual, spreading out into the aura; and in this aura they saw his soul. Animals too were seen in great and mighty auras; in their case it was the inner processes—digestion, breathing and so forth—that became visible in the aura. Plants reached up with their blossoms into a sort of cloud which permanently surrounded the Earth. Everything was bathed in a dying astral light. The day-consciousness of men who lived directly after the Atlantean Flood was a gradually fading astral vision of the physical world. I say “fading,” for in its power of giving light it was gradually waning away; before the Atlantean catastrophe this power of vision in astral light had been much stronger and more intense.

The awakening to this condition of consciousness—for the entering into it may be compared to an awakening—was very different from the awakening of normal man to-day, where the soul is confronted with chaotic dreams before passing into the waking consciousness of day. When these people of antiquity awakened it was no mere world of dreams that invaded their consciousness; they were within a world of reality of which they knew also that therein they had been among spiritual Beings of the higher Hierarchies and elementary spirit-beings. “Waking up” was for them as it might be with a man of to-day who leaves a place in which he has had many experiences and goes somewhere else where in a sphere of new experiences he remembers the others. When in those ancient times a man entered waking life, he had the new experiences of day; but the remembrances remained with him of how he had been in another world, with other beings, not with the physical human beings who together with the plants and animals are generally around him, but with disembodied human souls living between death and a new birth, and with other beings, too, who never incarnate on the earth.

Man felt that he had departed from beings dwelling in the cosmos and was now placed into another world, into the world of physical experience between birth and death, Nevertheless he still preserved a memory of the spiritual world, the world through which human beings pass between death and a new birth. Vision of the spiritual world still streamed into his already fading astral vision. The condition of consciousness in which man to-day lives among purely physical beings did not then exist at all. In those times men had the following experience—it was not a dream but a picture that was graphic and real: when they passed into the day-consciousness and looked at trees, animals, mountains, rocks and clouds, they felt that this was the same world in which were living those spirit-beings and human souls who were not incarnate on the earth but living in the spiritual world that is man's habitation between death and a new birth. And then there came to these men a concretely real picture of how these beings pass into the trees and rocks while man is in his waking consciousness, how they disappear into the depths of the mountains or rise up to the heights of the clouds, steal away into all the created things of outer physical nature.

On going into a forest, a man would, for example, notice a tree and know that it was the hiding place of a being with whom he had been together in the night. Men then saw clearly, as an Initiate can still see to-day, how spirit-beings made their way into physical habitations as though into their homes. No wonder that all these things passed over into the myths and that men talked of tree-spirits, water-spirits, spirits of clouds and mountains, for they saw their companions of the night disappearing into the mountains, into the waves, into the clouds, into the plants and the trees.

Such was early dawn in the experience of the soul: men saw the spirit-world disappearing into the physical world of sense. They spoke reverently of the great and lofty Spirits as taking rest by day in these physical habitations; they spoke of the lesser, elementary beings who live among men and often among animals, as lurking in the things of nature. They expressed it even roguishly. But whether expressed in sublime and reverent language or in pleasantries, it was exactly what they felt about this condition of early dawn in the soul's experience.

Picture it to yourselves. A human being had been in a spiritual world during the last phase of his sleep; it was when he awoke, and only then, that he clearly remembered having been in this spiritual world. How was this? Why did he only see this spiritual, super-sensible world as he awoke, when the spirits were already disappearing? Why did he only then see this spiritual, super-sensible world in which he lived between death and birth? It was because in those days, when during the last phase of his sleep man was able to see the spirit-world, he experienced yet a third condition of consciousness which conjured up another, an entirely different world before his soul. For it was so that during the time he was “asleep” in his earthly existence and present with power of vision in the spiritual world, he looked back on the evolution of his own karma.

This third state of consciousness experienced by men during the epoch immediately following the Atlantean catastrophe, consisted in a vision of karma. This vision of their own karma was an absolute reality to them.

1. Waking consciousness .... Fading astral vision.
2. Dream consciousness ..... Vision of the spiritual world.
3. Sleep consciousness ....... Vision of karma.

As the three states of consciousness alternate in the life of man to-day, so did ancient man experience successively the three conditions of a darkening astral vision, a vision of spiritual worlds and a vision of karma.

It is a fact that in olden times a vision of karma was a reality of consciousness for man; we can truly say that man once had a consciousness by means of which he beheld the reality of karma.

Evolution then took the following course. First of all this vision of karma ceased in the sleep that was of course no sleep as we understand it. The vision of karma began to grow dim. Of the facts of karma there only remained the knowledge possessed by the Initiates in the Mysteries. That which had once been vision and actual experience became a matter of learning and erudition. The ancient consciousness darkened and there only remained—so it was in the old Chaldean-Babylonian-Egyptian period—the power to look up into the spiritual world. Thus, in the centuries which preceded the Christian epoch, a vision of the super-sensible world still came about quite naturally, but the facts about karma were only taught, they were no longer seen. In the times immediately preceding the Christian era there was still an intense consciousness of the spiritual world, of the world in which man lives between death and a new birth, although the consciousness of karma had faded and was simply not there for humanity in general when the Christian era began. It is therefore understandable that special emphasis was laid upon man's connection with the spiritual world while he is in the disembodied state. Especially in the ancient Egyptian conception we can discern this intensely strong consciousness of the spiritual world, a purified, and clear-sighted consciousness of the world which man enters through the gate of death, when he becomes Osiris. But there is no consciousness any longer of repeated earthly lives.

Then came the gradual approach of the time which has now reached its apex and properly belongs to the humanity of our day. Astral vision has sunk into the prosaic, matter-of-fact consciousness we have in ordinary life between awaking and falling asleep, when we only perceive, for example, that insignificant part of man which is enclosed by his skin and consists in flesh and bones and different vessels; that is all we see in our day-consciousness. One can well understand that people want to array it in all kinds of so-called beautiful clothes in an attempt to give it some importance, since deep down in the sub-consciousness there is a feeling that in itself it is of no significance and belongs, rightly, in the radiant, glowing garment of the aura, of the astral and Ego nature. And when men became aware of the change from the vision that sees the human being in his aura to the vision that sees only the unimportant, bodily part of him, they endeavoured to imitate in the clothing what had once been seen as the aura; so that the fashions of old—if I may put it so—were in a certain sense copies of the aura. As for modern fashions, well, I can assure you they are no such thing!

The consciousness of the super-sensible world has taken on the form of chaotic dreaming. Man dreams it away! And in respect of the karma-consciousness, man is fast asleep. He would have the consciousness of karma if that part of his consciousness which is dreamless between falling asleep and awakening were suddenly to awake. Then he would have the consciousness of karma. Thus in the course of ten thousand years or thereabouts, the great change has taken place. Man “wakes” away—not only “sleeps” away—the spiritual reality in the physical world. He “wakes” away the Spiritual in nature, he “dreams” away the true spiritual world, he “sleeps” away his karma.

This development was necessary, as I have often told you, in order that the consciousness of freedom might arise. But humanity must now again emerge from its present condition of consciousness.

We have heard that what was a natural, albeit a dreamlike state of consciousness in olden times, namely knowledge of the super-sensible world and of karma, gradually grew dim and then became Mystery-teaching, while in the modern age of materialism it has been entirely lost. But in this age the possibility must again be found of building a bridge to consciousness both of the super-sensible world and of karma.

This means, in other words: When we picture to ourselves how in olden times at early dawn, the spirit-beings with whom man lived from falling asleep to awakening hid themselves in trees and clouds, in mountains and rocks, so that in the day man could say to himself when he saw a tree or a rock or a spring: “A spirit has been enchanted into it, a spirit with whom I was together during my sleep-consciousness”—so now, by accepting the new Initiation-Science, we must learn in our present day-consciousness to recognise the spirit and as we look at every rock or tree or cloud or star, or sun or moon, to recognise the spiritual beings in all their diversity.

We must set out on the path that leads to this. We must prepare for the time when it shall be even so. As truly as a man of olden time, on awakening, saw the spirit-beings with whom he had lived during the night steal into the trees and rocks, so truly for modern man shall the spirit-beings steal forth again from tree and rock and spring!

It can really happen, and in this way. A man can lay aside the standpoint of ordinary prejudice in which he has been living, into which even children in the kindergarten are led to-day; he can put aside the prejudices that make him imagine he cannot with healthy human understanding see into the spiritual world. And when the Initiate comes and tells of things of the spiritual world and of events that happen there, then, although he cannot yet himself see, nevertheless by making use of his unprejudiced human understanding, he can be enlightened by the communications that are given concerning the spiritual worlds. This is indeed, and under all circumstances, the right first step for each one to-day.

But difficulties are always cropping up ... Last year, after one of my lectures on how to attain knowledge of the spiritual worlds, a well-meaning paragraph appeared in a newspaper of some standing. We can really call it “well-meaning” and even “respectable” as compared with many vehement expressions of opposition to Anthroposophy to-day! In this lecture I had pointed out that there is no need to become clairvoyant in order to have knowledge of the spiritual world, but that when the seer imparts the knowledge it can be received and understood by the healthy human intellect. I had emphasised this very strongly. The man who wrote the paragraph said in all good faith: “Steiner wants to apply the healthy human intellect to knowledge of the super-sensible world. But so long as the human intellect remains healthy it can certainly know nothing of a super-sensible world; as soon as it does, it is no longer healthy.” I think I have never heard it put so honestly before! For it is after all what everyone is bound to say if he denies to the healthy human intellect a knowledge of the super-sensible world, and if he speaks in the usual way of the boundaries of knowledge. Either he must give up the present point of view, or he must agree with this assertion; no other way is really honest.

A modern Initiate can speak from clear and conscious knowledge of how from every star a spirit-being is released, of how other spirit-beings are released from plants. They come forward to meet us as soon as we pass beyond external sense-observation. Every time we go out into nature we may see all around where nature begins to be a little elemental, kobold-like elementary beings coming out of their stony shelters; if we become friendly with them, especially with the elementary beings of the mineral world, we can see behind them higher Beings who finally lead up to the First Hierarchy, to the Seraphim, Cherubim and Thrones.

It is a fact that if the exercises given in my book Knowledge of the Higher Worlds and its Attainment are practised regularly with strong inner energy, selflessness and devotion, they will lead—provided we have the necessary courage—to a new power of perception. We become able to see, for instance, in certain strata of the mountains, whole worlds of elemental beings lying hidden in rock and stone. They come forth on every side, they steal out, they grow big—and we discover that they have only been as it were rolled up and packed tight into these fragments of the elementary world. Beings are present in the mineral kingdom of nature, especially where the earth begins to grow green, and feels so fresh that we can scent its aroma and the aroma of the plants that cover it. But when we enter this sphere of elemental beings, we find that they can indeed inspire us with fear. For the beings we thus encounter are incredibly clever. We must be humble enough to say to ourselves, when we see these little dwarf-like beings emerging from the objects of nature: “How stupid man is! and how clever is this elemental world!” And because many do not like to say this in earnest, do not like even to admit that judged by spiritual perception a little new-born child is much wiser than a learned scholar, therefore these elementary beings withdraw from man's vision. If however we can discern them, the horizon is widened and the foreground opened up to us by these clever, playful little sprites leads away into a background that reaches right up to the Seraphim, Cherubim and Thrones.

Thus by means of the exercises to which I referred, a man whose consciousness has been made clear and quick by the study of what humanity has learned through modern natural science, can enter this world of elemental beings, and thence a higher world. If by a loving surrender to nature we thus acquire a consciousness that is not “sicklied o'er” by the authority-ridden knowledge that holds the ground to-day, we may gradually rise through Initiation-knowledge to that knowledge which humanity has lost.

And he who eventually attains the faculty to see the tree-spirits come forth from the trees—the same that the ancients saw stealing away in the dawn, and darting out again in the evening twilight—he will also be able, as he approaches a human being, to see emerge from him the figures of his earlier lives together with the evolution of his karma. For this kind of vision leads on to a vision of karma.

In the mineral world, where at first we perceive the clever, mischievous little dwarfs, the vision leads us to the Seraphim, Cherubim and Thrones.

In the plant world, the vision leads us to the Exusiai, Dynamis and Kyriotetes.

In the animal world (when we see emerge from the animals their own spiritual beings) we are led to a vision of the Archai, Archangels and Angels.

And in the human kingdom the vision leads to karma.

Behind the manifestations of the Seraphim, Cherubim and Thrones, behind all the other Beings of the higher Hierarchies, behind all the elemental nature-spirits who startle us by their cleverness when they dart forth from the minerals, or who come to meet us with their gentle importunities from the plant world, behind all that comes from the animals—fierce, passionate and violent as that may be at times, and also icy cold—behind all that stands here so to speak as a foreground, we face the overwhelming, the sublime manifestations of karma. For behind all the mysteries of the world there lies, in truth, the great mystery of human karma.

Having thus prepared our hearts and minds in the right way, we shall pass on in the remaining lectures to speak of particular facts of karma.

We shall best understand how karma is anchored in the individual and in the evolution of humanity, and how the single facts of karma lend themselves to description, if we begin by considering how human consciousness has evolved since the time when, even in his ordinary life, man had a direct, elementary perception of his karma. To-day it is a fact that in his waking consciousness man knows nothing of his karma. The world in which he lives from awaking to falling asleep prevents him from having any direct knowledge of his karma. But humanity has not always lived in the state of consciousness that is considered normal to-day. In olden times, moreover during the earlier Post-Atlantean periods of evolution, quite different states of consciousness prevailed, even in the everyday life of man. There are three states or conditions of normal consciousness to-day—I have often described them to you. Firstly, there is waking consciousness; secondly, dream-consciousness into which scattered reminiscences of the day's experiences make their way but mingled, too, with influences from the spiritual world; and lastly, sleep-consciousness proper, in which dimness and darkness surround the human soul and consciousness sinks away, so to speak, into unconsciousness.

1. Waking consciousness.
2. Dream consciousness.
3. Sleep consciousness.

It was not always thus. There was a time in man's evolution when the experiences of his everyday consciousness took quite different forms. Let us look back some eight or ten thousand years to the epoch immediately following the Atlantean catastrophe whereby many widespread forms of civilisation and culture were wiped out of existence.

It was an epoch when land began to arise where formerly there had been sea, and sea to cover tracts that had once been land, a time moreover when the earth was destined to pass through a period of intense cold. We discover there a humanity which had survived the Atlantean catastrophe and was also endowed with three distinct kinds of consciousness but of an essentially different character from those of to-day. The prosaic, everyday consciousness of modern man in his waking hours, by which he sees other human beings and the creatures and happenings of nature in sharp outlines—this the men of those ancient times did not possess. They saw the human being without sharp contours, extending in all directions into the Spiritual, spreading out into the aura; and in this aura they saw his soul. Animals too were seen in great and mighty auras; in their case it was the inner processes—digestion, breathing and so forth—that became visible in the aura. Plants reached up with their blossoms into a sort of cloud which permanently surrounded the Earth. Everything was bathed in a dying astral light. The day-consciousness of men who lived directly after the Atlantean Flood was a gradually fading astral vision of the physical world. I say “fading,” for in its power of giving light it was gradually waning away; before the Atlantean catastrophe this power of vision in astral light had been much stronger and more intense.

The awakening to this condition of consciousness—for the entering into it may be compared to an awakening—was very different from the awakening of normal man to-day, where the soul is confronted with chaotic dreams before passing into the waking consciousness of day. When these people of antiquity awakened it was no mere world of dreams that invaded their consciousness; they were within a world of reality of which they knew also that therein they had been among spiritual Beings of the higher Hierarchies and elementary spirit-beings. “Waking up” was for them as it might be with a man of to-day who leaves a place in which he has had many experiences and goes somewhere else where in a sphere of new experiences he remembers the others. When in those ancient times a man entered waking life, he had the new experiences of day; but the remembrances remained with him of how he had been in another world, with other beings, not with the physical human beings who together with the plants and animals are generally around him, but with disembodied human souls living between death and a new birth, and with other beings, too, who never incarnate on the earth.

Man felt that he had departed from beings dwelling in the cosmos and was now placed into another world, into the world of physical experience between birth and death, Nevertheless he still preserved a memory of the spiritual world, the world through which human beings pass between death and a new birth. Vision of the spiritual world still streamed into his already fading astral vision. The condition of consciousness in which man to-day lives among purely physical beings did not then exist at all. In those times men had the following experience—it was not a dream but a picture that was graphic and real: when they passed into the day-consciousness and looked at trees, animals, mountains, rocks and clouds, they felt that this was the same world in which were living those spirit-beings and human souls who were not incarnate on the earth but living in the spiritual world that is man's habitation between death and a new birth. And then there came to these men a concretely real picture of how these beings pass into the trees and rocks while man is in his waking consciousness, how they disappear into the depths of the mountains or rise up to the heights of the clouds, steal away into all the created things of outer physical nature.

On going into a forest, a man would, for example, notice a tree and know that it was the hiding place of a being with whom he had been together in the night. Men then saw clearly, as an Initiate can still see to-day, how spirit-beings made their way into physical habitations as though into their homes. No wonder that all these things passed over into the myths and that men talked of tree-spirits, water-spirits, spirits of clouds and mountains, for they saw their companions of the night disappearing into the mountains, into the waves, into the clouds, into the plants and the trees.

Such was early dawn in the experience of the soul: men saw the spirit-world disappearing into the physical world of sense. They spoke reverently of the great and lofty Spirits as taking rest by day in these physical habitations; they spoke of the lesser, elementary beings who live among men and often among animals, as lurking in the things of nature. They expressed it even roguishly. But whether expressed in sublime and reverent language or in pleasantries, it was exactly what they felt about this condition of early dawn in the soul's experience.

Picture it to yourselves. A human being had been in a spiritual world during the last phase of his sleep; it was when he awoke, and only then, that he clearly remembered having been in this spiritual world. How was this? Why did he only see this spiritual, super-sensible world as he awoke, when the spirits were already disappearing? Why did he only then see this spiritual, super-sensible world in which he lived between death and birth? It was because in those days, when during the last phase of his sleep man was able to see the spirit-world, he experienced yet a third condition of consciousness which conjured up another, an entirely different world before his soul. For it was so that during the time he was “asleep” in his earthly existence and present with power of vision in the spiritual world, he looked back on the evolution of his own karma.

This third state of consciousness experienced by men during the epoch immediately following the Atlantean catastrophe, consisted in a vision of karma. This vision of their own karma was an absolute reality to them.

1. Waking consciousness .... Fading astral vision.
2. Dream consciousness ..... Vision of the spiritual world.
3. Sleep consciousness ....... Vision of karma.

As the three states of consciousness alternate in the life of man to-day, so did ancient man experience successively the three conditions of a darkening astral vision, a vision of spiritual worlds and a vision of karma.

It is a fact that in olden times a vision of karma was a reality of consciousness for man; we can truly say that man once had a consciousness by means of which he beheld the reality of karma.

Evolution then took the following course. First of all this vision of karma ceased in the sleep that was of course no sleep as we understand it. The vision of karma began to grow dim. Of the facts of karma there only remained the knowledge possessed by the Initiates in the Mysteries. That which had once been vision and actual experience became a matter of learning and erudition. The ancient consciousness darkened and there only remained—so it was in the old Chaldean-Babylonian-Egyptian period—the power to look up into the spiritual world. Thus, in the centuries which preceded the Christian epoch, a vision of the super-sensible world still came about quite naturally, but the facts about karma were only taught, they were no longer seen. In the times immediately preceding the Christian era there was still an intense consciousness of the spiritual world, of the world in which man lives between death and a new birth, although the consciousness of karma had faded and was simply not there for humanity in general when the Christian era began. It is therefore understandable that special emphasis was laid upon man's connection with the spiritual world while he is in the disembodied state. Especially in the ancient Egyptian conception we can discern this intensely strong consciousness of the spiritual world, a purified, and clear-sighted consciousness of the world which man enters through the gate of death, when he becomes Osiris. But there is no consciousness any longer of repeated earthly lives.

Then came the gradual approach of the time which has now reached its apex and properly belongs to the humanity of our day. Astral vision has sunk into the prosaic, matter-of-fact consciousness we have in ordinary life between awaking and falling asleep, when we only perceive, for example, that insignificant part of man which is enclosed by his skin and consists in flesh and bones and different vessels; that is all we see in our day-consciousness. One can well understand that people want to array it in all kinds of so-called beautiful clothes in an attempt to give it some importance, since deep down in the sub-consciousness there is a feeling that in itself it is of no significance and belongs, rightly, in the radiant, glowing garment of the aura, of the astral and Ego nature. And when men became aware of the change from the vision that sees the human being in his aura to the vision that sees only the unimportant, bodily part of him, they endeavoured to imitate in the clothing what had once been seen as the aura; so that the fashions of old—if I may put it so—were in a certain sense copies of the aura. As for modern fashions, well, I can assure you they are no such thing!

The consciousness of the super-sensible world has taken on the form of chaotic dreaming. Man dreams it away! And in respect of the karma-consciousness, man is fast asleep. He would have the consciousness of karma if that part of his consciousness which is dreamless between falling asleep and awakening were suddenly to awake. Then he would have the consciousness of karma. Thus in the course of ten thousand years or thereabouts, the great change has taken place. Man “wakes” away—not only “sleeps” away—the spiritual reality in the physical world. He “wakes” away the Spiritual in nature, he “dreams” away the true spiritual world, he “sleeps” away his karma.

This development was necessary, as I have often told you, in order that the consciousness of freedom might arise. But humanity must now again emerge from its present condition of consciousness.

We have heard that what was a natural, albeit a dreamlike state of consciousness in olden times, namely knowledge of the super-sensible world and of karma, gradually grew dim and then became Mystery-teaching, while in the modern age of materialism it has been entirely lost. But in this age the possibility must again be found of building a bridge to consciousness both of the super-sensible world and of karma.

This means, in other words: When we picture to ourselves how in olden times at early dawn, the spirit-beings with whom man lived from falling asleep to awakening hid themselves in trees and clouds, in mountains and rocks, so that in the day man could say to himself when he saw a tree or a rock or a spring: “A spirit has been enchanted into it, a spirit with whom I was together during my sleep-consciousness”—so now, by accepting the new Initiation-Science, we must learn in our present day-consciousness to recognise the spirit and as we look at every rock or tree or cloud or star, or sun or moon, to recognise the spiritual beings in all their diversity.

We must set out on the path that leads to this. We must prepare for the time when it shall be even so. As truly as a man of olden time, on awakening, saw the spirit-beings with whom he had lived during the night steal into the trees and rocks, so truly for modern man shall the spirit-beings steal forth again from tree and rock and spring!

It can really happen, and in this way. A man can lay aside the standpoint of ordinary prejudice in which he has been living, into which even children in the kindergarten are led to-day; he can put aside the prejudices that make him imagine he cannot with healthy human understanding see into the spiritual world. And when the Initiate comes and tells of things of the spiritual world and of events that happen there, then, although he cannot yet himself see, nevertheless by making use of his unprejudiced human understanding, he can be enlightened by the communications that are given concerning the spiritual worlds. This is indeed, and under all circumstances, the right first step for each one to-day.

But difficulties are always cropping up ... Last year, after one of my lectures on how to attain knowledge of the spiritual worlds, a well-meaning paragraph appeared in a newspaper of some standing. We can really call it “well-meaning” and even “respectable” as compared with many vehement expressions of opposition to Anthroposophy to-day! In this lecture I had pointed out that there is no need to become clairvoyant in order to have knowledge of the spiritual world, but that when the seer imparts the knowledge it can be received and understood by the healthy human intellect. I had emphasised this very strongly. The man who wrote the paragraph said in all good faith: “Steiner wants to apply the healthy human intellect to knowledge of the super-sensible world. But so long as the human intellect remains healthy it can certainly know nothing of a super-sensible world; as soon as it does, it is no longer healthy.” I think I have never heard it put so honestly before! For it is after all what everyone is bound to say if he denies to the healthy human intellect a knowledge of the super-sensible world, and if he speaks in the usual way of the boundaries of knowledge. Either he must give up the present point of view, or he must agree with this assertion; no other way is really honest.

A modern Initiate can speak from clear and conscious knowledge of how from every star a spirit-being is released, of how other spirit-beings are released from plants. They come forward to meet us as soon as we pass beyond external sense-observation. Every time we go out into nature we may see all around where nature begins to be a little elemental, kobold-like elementary beings coming out of their stony shelters; if we become friendly with them, especially with the elementary beings of the mineral world, we can see behind them higher Beings who finally lead up to the First Hierarchy, to the Seraphim, Cherubim and Thrones.

It is a fact that if the exercises given in my book Knowledge of the Higher Worlds and its Attainment are practised regularly with strong inner energy, selflessness and devotion, they will lead—provided we have the necessary courage—to a new power of perception. We become able to see, for instance, in certain strata of the mountains, whole worlds of elemental beings lying hidden in rock and stone. They come forth on every side, they steal out, they grow big—and we discover that they have only been as it were rolled up and packed tight into these fragments of the elementary world. Beings are present in the mineral kingdom of nature, especially where the earth begins to grow green, and feels so fresh that we can scent its aroma and the aroma of the plants that cover it. But when we enter this sphere of elemental beings, we find that they can indeed inspire us with fear. For the beings we thus encounter are incredibly clever. We must be humble enough to say to ourselves, when we see these little dwarf-like beings emerging from the objects of nature: “How stupid man is! and how clever is this elemental world!” And because many do not like to say this in earnest, do not like even to admit that judged by spiritual perception a little new-born child is much wiser than a learned scholar, therefore these elementary beings withdraw from man's vision. If however we can discern them, the horizon is widened and the foreground opened up to us by these clever, playful little sprites leads away into a background that reaches right up to the Seraphim, Cherubim and Thrones.

Thus by means of the exercises to which I referred, a man whose consciousness has been made clear and quick by the study of what humanity has learned through modern natural science, can enter this world of elemental beings, and thence a higher world. If by a loving surrender to nature we thus acquire a consciousness that is not “sicklied o'er” by the authority-ridden knowledge that holds the ground to-day, we may gradually rise through Initiation-knowledge to that knowledge which humanity has lost.

And he who eventually attains the faculty to see the tree-spirits come forth from the trees—the same that the ancients saw stealing away in the dawn, and darting out again in the evening twilight—he will also be able, as he approaches a human being, to see emerge from him the figures of his earlier lives together with the evolution of his karma. For this kind of vision leads on to a vision of karma.

In the mineral world, where at first we perceive the clever, mischievous little dwarfs, the vision leads us to the Seraphim, Cherubim and Thrones.

In the plant world, the vision leads us to the Exusiai, Dynamis and Kyriotetes.

In the animal world (when we see emerge from the animals their own spiritual beings) we are led to a vision of the Archai, Archangels and Angels.

And in the human kingdom the vision leads to karma.

Behind the manifestations of the Seraphim, Cherubim and Thrones, behind all the other Beings of the higher Hierarchies, behind all the elemental nature-spirits who startle us by their cleverness when they dart forth from the minerals, or who come to meet us with their gentle importunities from the plant world, behind all that comes from the animals—fierce, passionate and violent as that may be at times, and also icy cold—behind all that stands here so to speak as a foreground, we face the overwhelming, the sublime manifestations of karma. For behind all the mysteries of the world there lies, in truth, the great mystery of human karma.

Having thus prepared our hearts and minds in the right way, we shall pass on in the remaining lectures to speak of particular facts of karma.

Eight days ago began with a presentation to help us understand the language of John. We considered how the Apocalypse is to be read and what is hidden behind some of the mysterious expressions, for example, behind the lamb as the beast with seven eyes and seven horns. We also sought to explain the beast with two horns and considered the number 666 as an example of how we must live into this mysterious book. Today, we again seek to find the meaning of this book.

The record of the New Testament is a record of initiation. Using individual images as examples we have seen how deep their meaning really is. All the images have shown us that the Gospels express, in pictorial form, the deepest imaginable meaning of the evolution of the world. It could occur to someone to ask why there are contradictions in the individual Gospels, why they do not correspond to each other. What needs to be said concerning this is already laid out in my book, Christianity as Mystical Fact.¹ The Gospels are not records of the biography of Christ Jesus, but rather records concerning initiation. And the Apocalypse is the profoundest record. Augustine said: What is now called the “Christian religion” is the ancient true religion. What was the true religion, now is called the Christian religion.²

We understand what is meant by this statement when we consider the fundamental assertion of Christianity: “Blessed are those who do not see and yet believe.” John 20:29) In this way something entirely new has come into the world. The teachings are already contained in other religious systems. Among those who understood who “Christ” is the main emphasis was never placed on the content of this teaching. One can also find this content in records from earlier times. What is important with Christ is what this individual means for humankind. We can acquire an understanding for this most readily if we take a look at the ancient mystery centers.

Until the time of Christ only a few specially chosen people were initiated. After severe testing they were permitted to learn the teachings that can now be found in my book Theosophy.³ One had to wait a long time until the higher degrees of vision were permitted. Only the most initiated knew the tradition of how to carry out an initiation. If someone wanted to become a pupil, as a first step they had to do this, as a second step, that, and so forth. The initiation concluded when the pupil had gone through the preparatory stages and was led by the wise ones into the mysteries themselves. That took place in a state of consciousness called “ecstasy,” a state of existence outside the physical body. It was connected with a diminution of consciousness, but at the same time with a vision of the spiritual world. An inner schooling consisting of certain will impulses, meditations, and a purification of the desires brought the pupil to a point where the last step was possible. Then the pupil was put by the initiator into a state that lasted three and a half days, a state like the one we enter when we fall asleep at night. External sense impressions disappeared. When we are asleep, nothing enters into the place where the sense impressions of sight and sound have disappeared, but with those being initiated a new world appeared. They were surrounded by a new world, a world of astral light, not the darkness, nothing of what today's human being experiences in the night appeared to them. The darkness was permeated by spiritual light and beings that are incarnated within the spiritual light. These beings became visible in the astral light. Then, after awhile, the astral world full of flowing light began to resound with the music of the spheres. What had merely been seen earlier began to be heard; it was a pure, spiritual music. External music is only a shadow-like reflection of the sounds of the spheres the seer hears, the seer who also perceives the inside of spiritual beings. Suppose we enter a large room filled with people; only when they begin to speak do they reveal their inner life to us. That is how it is in the spiritual world. First the beings become visible, then the inner life of the beings speaks to us. That is the harmony of the spheres.

Then, when the initiates were led back to vision of the physical world, they experienced themselves fully transformed into new human beings. Everyone who returned in this way then typically expressed: “My God, my God, how you have glorified me!” (Compare Matt. 27:46 and Mark 15:34)⁴

And so they returned, knowledgeable concerning the spiritual world out of their own experience. They were then seen as messengers from the spiritual world. What they had experienced up to the point of entering the spiritual world was prescribed precisely, stage by stage.

Although the rites of initiation were not recorded exactly, still there were canons of initiation containing prescriptions for all the steps. Everywhere, whether in the Egyptian schooling of Hermes, or in the Persian school, or in the Greek mysteries, or with the Druidic or Drotten mysteries, there were typical, traditional rules concerning what was to be experienced by anyone wanting to become an initiate.

Typical, similar characteristics appear wherever the lives of the great apostles of religions or world-views are described. The lives of Orpheus, Pythagoras, Hermes, and Buddha have many features in common, features that are important for all religious heroes. Why is this? Superficial researchers have believed that one borrowed from the other. But that is not true. Nevertheless, all of these typical religious heroes passed through these steps up to the highest stage of initiation. There were no biographies in ancient times that took into consideration the external conditions of a person's life. The further back we go before the turning point of time, the less value we find ascribed to the externals of life. Absolutely nothing was said concerning what the very greatest heroes of humankind experienced externally on the physical plane. Their lives were entirely dedicated to initiation. Telling the story of their initiation meant telling the story of their life. The main thing about a Hermes or a Buddha was what he had experienced until the initiation. Since the stages of initiation were similar everywhere, one heard a spiritual description of the life of the great initiates.

What in the past had been experienced only in secret became historical fact in Christianity. What could be described of Herme' experience took place in inner mysteries, at locations far removed from profane eyes.

In Christianity, for the first time, something was experienced as an external physical event that otherwise only took place in the mystery centers. The course Christ's life followed is the same as that experienced by all initiates when, to begin with, they had their etheric bodies lifted out of their physical. Everything that Christ Jesus experienced physically, on the physical plane, they had experienced in the etheric realm. Their last words were also, “My God, my God, how you have glorified me!” They had experienced earlier in the etheric body what Christ experienced in a physical body. In this way the prophecies of the prophets were fulfilled. This one time only experience of Christ represents the greatest decisive turning point in our world history and separates it into two parts.

The evangelists did not write ordinary biographies, but took rather the existing canonical initiation books. All four Gospels are to be seen as initiation writings, each presented from a different perspective. Since, however, initiation is described everywhere in the same way, the Gospels are in agreement on the most important things. We can describe the life of an initiate if we consider it as a life dedicated wholly to initiation. It would have seemed unholy to the evangelists to give an ordinary, external, historical biography of Christ Jesus. They had to take the building blocks for their writings from books derived from the mysteries. Hence, to a certain extent, what the prophets had said was fulfilled.

In a certain sense the Apocalypse represents a new kind of initiation; it shows how the old mysteries were transformed into Christian mysteries. When we look back at the old mysteries we find in them a more or less unified feature. It consisted of the following: Whether we go to Egypt, or to Persia, or to India, whether we are deepened in the Orphic or the Eleusinian mysteries, we find there complete agreement in one feature: a prophecy concerning the One who is to come.⁵ This trait is also found in the Northern European mysteries. There was an initiate in the most ancient times who was signified by the name “Sig.” The Drotten mysteries, which were in Russia and Scandinavia, the Druidic mysteries in Germany all derived from an initiate with the name Sig, who was the founder of the northern mysteries. What happened in the mysteries has been preserved in the various myths and legends of the German nation and other Germanic peoples. The myths and legends are pictorial representations of what was experienced. In the Siegfried legend⁶ we see most clearly that feature that seeks for an end. This feature is expressed in mythological terms in the “Gotterdammerung,” the twilight of the gods.⁷ This is characteristic of all the northern mysteries.

In all mysticism the image of the feminine is used for the soul; this image is also used by Goethe in his “chorus mysticus,” in the concluding scene of the second part of Faust. It is the eternal in the human being, the divine soul that draws the human being forward. Just as initiation was described in ancient Egypt and Persia as the union of the soul with the spiritual, so was it also described here in the north. Here in the north it was understood best that a man proved his worth on the field of battle. Those who counted for something in the north were honored as fighters who fell in the field of battle; those were the ones who entered into eternal life; the others died in their sleep. The fallen fighters were received by the Valkyries,⁸ their own soul; union with the Valkyries was union with the eternal. It was said of Siegfried that he had already united with the Valkyries here on earth; that shows he was an initiate. The meaning of the story, that Siegfried had already experienced union with the Valkyries here on earth, is that he was an initiate. This legend tells us something with the death of Siegfried. When experiencing initiation in the ancient mysteries the initiate is told: We can only bring you to a certain point ... further than this only another can bring you—this other one is Christ Jesus—all that we can give you will be darkened when he comes, the One who will bring the new initiation. Siegfried is vulnerable to Hagen⁹ on his back because the cross has not yet been placed on the back of the one who will take over from the ancient initiation. This part of the body will one day be made invulnerable when the cross has been laid across it. In this way the northern mysteries alluded to Christ Jesus.

All the ancient mysteries looked toward him who was to come, who will live on the physical plane so as to found a new world order. The new initiation is what will occur through the impulses he gave. We find a portrayal of this in the Apocalypse. It tells us how initiation will proceed until Christ Jesus comes again in a new form. The Apocalypse refers to the time when an organ for receiving Christ will be developed. The time until Christ Jesus again will approach is described in the Apocalypse. We will understand the individual words if we adopt the way of thinking of one who has experienced such an initiation. We remember here the words of Christ—if we understand them we will also understand the Apocalypse—“Before Abraham was, I am.” (John 8:58) Christ directs his view from the past over to the present because for him there is an eternal present.

If we wish to understand what is meant by this we need only remember the fourfold human being who consists of physical body, etheric body, astral body, and I. When the I lights up in the course of evolution then the astral and etheric bodies are changed; and then finally the physical body too. The I is here for eternity; it is born out of the womb of a higher spirituality. Whether we look into the past or into the future, this I is what is eternal. If we observe an individual we can ask the question: What transformation has this person's I gone through? If we look back to the great Atlantean flood and then further back we do not find the I in a body such as exists today. At that time we were in a state wherein we could not think as well as we can now. When we look into the future we find the I in bodies ever more perfect, bodies having a perfection that we today with our thinking cannot even imagine. We cannot now imagine the perfection of thinking, the purity of feeling, and so forth in the future bodies of humankind. Initiates must make use of the form the human body has at any given time. Christ, too, had to use the ordinary form of the human body in his time. Still, when we look deeper we see in him a stage of evolution that humankind will only achieve in the distant future. Christ Jesus was the first born among those who could overcome death.

Let us compare the two ways of developing. The human being is born, goes through a life on earth, dies, goes through an astral condition, through devachan, and is then born again. When we go back to the beings who were present before the Lemurian age we have beings who do not die and are not reborn. They are constantly exchanging sheaths, as we do between physical birth and death. Then a certain revolution enters in. Today, human beings alternate between spiritual and physical life. With the group souls of animals it happens this way: Individual animals discard their bodies but the group souls themselves never die.

If we try to imagine the very highest being, the one who was as highly developed at the beginning as others will be at the end of evolution, then we have the image of Christ. He was the I that was as highly developed at the beginning as the human being will be at the end. “Grace to you and peace from him who is and who was and who is to come ...” (Rev. 1:4) He is the first and the last.

The one who gives the Revelation to John is thus described. It is a Christian book; that is proven by the passage that reads: “... and from Jesus Christ the faithful witness, the first born of the dead and the ruler of kings on earth. To him who loves us and has freed us from our sins by his blood and made us a kingdom, priests to his God and Father, to him be glory and dominion forever and ever. Amen.” (Rev. 1:5,6)

Christianity represents the greatest possible individualization of the human being, the freedom of the human being as an individual. At the beginning of the human race we see small communities held together by blood ties. Love was limited to those of the same blood. Now Christ Jesus comes and expands all ethnic groups and communities to include all of humanity. All ethnic religions are overcome through him. Christianity is the religion of the world. Within it there are only human beings; Christianity knows only human beings. Christianity would never be able to speak of the community of religions, but only of community of human beings. An age began when the secret mysteries became accessible to everyone through the mystery of Golgotha, which was placed in the center of the world. The chosen priests and kings gradually cease to exist. A final state is pointed to wherein everyone is a priest and a king, a state wherein all distinctions are swept away and all human beings are made equal. Therefore, the Apocalypse speaks of: “... a Kingdom, priests to his God and Father.” (Rev. 1:6)

The book portrays a real initiation, an ascent, to begin with, through learning on the physical plane. This step is portrayed in the words concerning the seven letters to the seven communities. The seven letters present what must first be learned. Then a number of pictures lead us to the astral plane. We see groups of beings undergoing transformation in the astral light: “... and he who sat there appeared like jasper and carnelian, and, round the throne was a rainbow that looked like an emerald.” (Rev. 4:3) “And before the throne there is as it were a sea of glass, like crystal.” (Rev. 4:6) The quality and being of the astral light is indicated by the transparency. In the astral light we can see through objects; they appear like glass. The entire astral world is like a glass sea.

The four living creatures then follow; they are to represent the human group souls. They were full of eyes within and without and had no peace day or night. There is constant movement in the astral world—astral eyes are everywhere and everything is transparent to them, both within and all around.

We see how, at first, the mysteries of the physical plane are described and then, out of the sealed book, the astral imaginations. They approach us in pictures.

After the seer has perceived the spiritual beings in the astral light for awhile, they begin to sound forth. This is described in the resounding of the trumpets when the sixth seal is opened. That is the condition of devachan. The seer becomes “clairaudient,” able to hear spiritual sounds—the spiritual ear is opened.

The stage then follows when the seer expands his consciousness over the entire earth. This is indicated in the swallowing of the book. It expresses the ascent into the higher regions of the spiritual worlds.

• 1. Rudolf Steiner, Christianity as Mystical Fact (Hudson, N.Y.:Anthroposophic Press, 1993).
• 2. Actual words: “For what is now called the Christian religion existed even among the ancients and was not lacking from the beginning of the human race until ‘Christ came in the flesh.’ From that time, true religion, which already existed, began to be called Christian.” Augustine, The Retractions Book I, chapter 12, section 3, trans. Mary Inez Bogan in The Fathers of the Church (Washington D.C.: The Catholic University of America Press, 1968).
• 3. Steiner, Theosophy (GA 9) (Hudson, N.Y.: Anthroposophic Press, 1993).
• 4. ompare lecture of September 12, 1910 in The Gospel of St. Matthew (GA 123) (Hudson, N.Y.: Anthroposophic Press. 1965).
• 5. Compare the lecture cycle Wonders of the World, Ordeals of the Soul, and Revelations of the Spirit (GA 129) (London: Rudolf Steiner Press, 1963); Mystery Centers (GA 232) (London: Rudolf Steiner Press, 1973); and World History in the Light of Anthroposophy (GA 233) (London: Rudolf Steiner Press, 1977).
• 6. Compare the lecture of October 21, 1904: “Die Siegfriedsage” in Esoterik und Weltgeschichte in der grieschischen und germanischen Mythologie [“The Legend of Siegfried” in Esoteric and World History in Greek and German Mythology] (Dornach, Switzerland: Rudolf Steiner Verlag, 1955).
• 7. Compare the lecture of August 14. 1908 in the lecture cycle Universe, Earth and Man (GA 105) (London: Rudolf Steiner Press, 1987).
• 8. he virgin heroines of Germanic mythology.
• 9. One of the main heroes of the Nibelungen saga: he treacherously suffocates Siegfried after a hunt while Siegfried is drinking at a fountain.

Dear Attendees!

As at my previous visits here in Munich, I would like to take the liberty of speaking on one of the two lecture days about a subject that does not strictly belong to the field of spiritual science, but rather touches on general German intellectual life. In these fateful times, this can be considered particularly appropriate.

And the day after tomorrow – on Sunday – I will return to a consideration from the narrower field of spiritual science, as I have been allowed to present it here for years, myself.

But it is not only because of my feelings in the face of the momentous and far-reaching events of our time that I would like to talk about today's topic, but because I may assume, not out of purely national feelings , but because I believe that I can assume, based on the facts, that the spiritual-scientific worldview represented here is intimately connected to very specific currents and aspirations of German intellectual life.

Not, dear ladies and gentlemen, to stoop to the level of Germany's opponents – the opponents of German national identity – who not only accuse but also defame what German intellectual life has produced, not to stoop to that level – I believe that is not necessary within German intellectual , but because I would like to make this observation, because our time requires a kind of self-reflection on the actual essence of the developing German national spirit, also with regard to the attainment of a spiritual world view, because self-reflection on this matter of German spiritual life must arise like a kind of basic need of the soul currently within this spiritual life.

When one engages in such reflection, one's spiritual gaze naturally falls first on the three great figures that I spoke of during my last visit here. And I would like to begin by saying a few words about these three great German thinkers and philosophers, about whom I was already able to speak here last time, even at the risk of having to say some things again that have already been said before, at the risk of having to say some things again that have already been said before, at the risk of having to say some things again that have already been said before.

First of all, our spiritual gaze must fall on that personality who had grown entirely out of German intellectual life and who, even in one of the most difficult times in German life, found tones that were suited to carry the whole nation along in a world-historically necessary enthusiasm: our spiritual gaze must fall on Johann Gottlieb Fichte.

Fichte – I believe one must say of him: on closer, more thorough examination of his work, it becomes apparent how deeply true it is that he expressed what he felt to be his own sentiments in the most diverse forms. The best that he has to say in his world view was born in his soul from an intimate conversation that he repeatedly had with the German national spirit itself.

I do not want to present this as an external judgment, but rather as something that Fichte himself felt in his deepest innermost being. And what exactly is this innermost path of Fichte's striving? I think it can be described as a well-founded conviction: to so power the innermost part of the human soul, the center of the human spirit-soul-being, to so inwardly enliven it that in this heightened experience of the innermost soul life, that which interweaves and lives through the world as divine-spiritual resonates, that one enters into the innermost being of this conviction by , so that what one can go through inwardly in one's own soul - not in everyday life, but in moments of celebration in life - grows together with the spiritual-divine currents themselves, but now not only in our inner being, but also in the whole of nature and in all spiritual, outer spiritual life, which pulsates through the whole world.

Now, in Fichte it is as if something is revealed from a particular side of the soul that has taken root in him, from a soul power that was particularly strongly developed in him, from that soul power that can perhaps be described as follows: Of the three powers of the human soul – thinking, feeling and willing – he felt the willing above all. And he himself felt the I in such a way that the most essential thing in the experience of the I is that the human being can indeed come to say to himself: the I actually consists in the fact that one can will, and always will anew; and that one's eternity is guaranteed by feeling within oneself the authorization to will it again and again; and that into this volition there penetrates what one feels in the very deepest sense as a commitment to life and the world; that in this commitment to life and the world one can at the same time feel something that strikes from the divine-spiritual expanses into one's own being. So that one can say: the highest that one can experience is the duty that reveals itself to one's own soul in the whole of the world, that strikes into one's own being and gives one the certainty that, because one has interwoven into what goes through the world as a duty-bearing will, as an eternally duty-bearing will, one oneself stands in this world as an eternal being.

From such an experience, from the experience of such a relationship to the world, Fichte's entire - one cannot even say “worldview”, but entire - way of thinking and feeling and speaking about the world emerged.

But it did not follow from his nature that one could speak of a theory, of a theoretical side, about the world. It followed from his nature - and he always felt that to be the German thing about his way of thinking about the world - it followed from his nature that what was like a general sense of the world, a general view of the world, was the most direct, personal power of his nature. And so it was the most immediate force of his being that it basically emerged when Fichte was very young, a boy.

And so allow me to describe a few traits that characterize this personal relationship to the world: There we see Johann Gottlieb Fichte, the son of poor people, at the age of seven – he was already a schoolboy – there we see him one day standing by the stream that flowed past his father's small weaver's cottage, and he has thrown a book into the stream. He stands there crying; his father comes to him.

What had actually happened? As I said, Johann Gottlieb Fichte was already a schoolboy at the age of seven; and since he had often been praised for his good learning, it was now clear to see how, since his father had given him the book that he had now thrown into the stream, he was no longer as attentive and diligent at school as he had been before; this had often been criticized of him. This book was a description of the deeds of “Horned Siegfried.” And when young Johann Gottlieb Fichte, who could already read, got hold of this book, he became absorbed in these great exploits; his attention to school subjects waned, and he was reprimanded for it.

But then the deepest trait of his character immediately showed itself in his soul.

However your inclination may speak, however your enthusiasm may be kindled by the figure of “Horned Siegfried” – he thought to himself – that must not be; duty is the highest. Because he does not want to diminish duty in any way, he throws the book into the water – as a seven-year-old boy! Thus, what later became the keynote of his relationship to the wider world was already alive in the boy: this permeation of the human soul with the will borne by duty, which he later felt to be the fundamental force of the whole universe.

And two years later, the nine-year-old boy Fichte, we see him in the following example: the neighbor of the estate – who later became Fichte's benefactor – had set out to hear the sermon in Fichte's hometown on a Sunday; but this neighbor from the neighborhood had arrived too late. The sermon was already over. The neighboring landowner was a little sad; he would have liked to hear the sermon. And while they were talking, they came up with the idea that there was a boy who knew how to listen to sermons in such a way, even though he was only nine years old, that he was able to repeat them quite faithfully. They fetched young Johann Gottlieb Fichte, who appeared in his blue peasant's smock, at first rather awkwardly, then warming up, repeating the whole sermon, not repeating it in such a way that he rattled it off without inner participation, but in such a way that one saw – and this had the effect, as I said, so deeply significant that the estate neighbor later became the benefactor of Johann Gottlieb Fichte – so that one saw: this entire boy's soul was interwoven with every word, and with what lived in each word, and could give the whole sermon anew, as one's own spiritual property!

Interweaving this, the environment, the why, the observation with the innermost of one's own experience in the soul, that is the characteristic that Johann Gottlieb Fichte always felt was the basic feature of the formation of a specifically German world view. This was very much alive in him, that only by strengthening this inner self, by experiencing what sits in the deepest soul, can one also experience what lives and weaves through the world as divine-spiritual.

Something like this lived, for example, in a basic trait that the profound Steffens tells us about, which he himself experienced in Jena when Fichte was already a “professor”. There Johann Gottlieb Fichte stood before his audience and said: First of all, gentlemen of the audience, think of the wall! He did not just want to speak to the audience in such a way that he communicated a content to them, but he wanted to create a living bond between his soul and the soul of the audience. They were to participate in a spiritual process that he allowed to take place directly: Think of the wall! Well, the people could do that. After he had let them think of the wall for a while, he said: So, now think of the one who thought the wall! That was more perplexing; they were no longer fully engaged in the activity he was asking of them. But he immediately pointed to this inwardly grasping and seizing of that which works and lives in the world.

Therefore, the whole way in which Johann Gottlieb Fichte presented was very special. People who heard him say how his speech flowed like rolling thunder, and how the individual words discharged like lightning strikes. Yes, we are told how he seemed like a person who not only inhabits the transcendental realm of ideas, but directly rules in it. And this is a word coined by his loyal listeners.

And indeed, they too have retained such a saying. If you have an ear for tracing history in its more intimate currents, you can follow what became of Johann Gottlieb Fichte's students and how they retained such a saying. People who understood him said: He does not just want to educate good souls, he wants to educate great souls!

This should give a rough idea of the depth of Fichte's work; for when he stood before his audience, he was not really concerned with saying this or that, he was not just concerned that his listeners should take up this or that of his words; he did not prepare himself at all for the individual wording, but he tried to live that which he wanted to bring home to his listeners - to live in it with a living, inner part of the soul. Then he would go before his audience. And, as already mentioned, it was not important to him that they should take up these or those words, but what he experienced in saying them was most important to him: to express the Will of the World, so that the Will of the World would live on in his words. That this should surge and surge to the souls of his listeners, that was what he wanted, this will that felt so alive in him in what underlies the world according to his view.

That is why he was able to find those stirring words to characterize German national character, which he found in his “Discourses to the German Nation.” No one understands their deeper meaning, which is Fichte's soul, and is unable to respond to the deep needs from which they arose. We may say: That which the German spirit had to say to the world was realized through Fichte's personality in terms of the will.

If we consider the second figure — the figure of someone who follows on from Fichte, Schelling — we see a completely different side of the German nature. When Fichte speaks, it is as if the element of will itself were rolling through his words. Schelling did not appear to his listeners that way. Even as a very young professor in Jena, still a youth among youths, Schelling spoke enchantingly, in a way that perhaps no one before or since has achieved through a directly academic speech.

Why does Schelling have this effect? With Fichte, we can say that what he said to the world lived in the will. With Schelling, everything lives from the mind, from that mind for which only the German language has a word, from that mind that wants to convince with love, even when it recognizes that it wants to submerge with love in the things to be achieved. Thus, for Schelling, what it means to be in nature flows together, and he wants to immerse himself in this with love so that all of nature becomes like the outer countenance of his hidden spiritual life, spirit in nature. He went so far that he could utter the one-sided saying, Schelling: “To know nature is to create nature.” Certainly a one-sided, in this one-sidedness quite untrue word; but it points us precisely to the essential thing with him, Schelling, to this creating and weaving of the spirit, which lives behind nature, and in which the human spirit wants to grasp itself in order to know itself as one with all natural and with all spiritual existence.

Because he worked in this way, he appeared to his listeners as a seer, so that while he spoke, Schelling was able to convey the spirituality of which he spoke and which surrounded him. While Fichte conveys the will, with Schelling it is as if he had spoken as a seer and directly said what he saw while saying it.

One learns such things most easily – I would say – from direct, traditional observation. Therefore, allow me to describe the impression that a truly deep mind, who was Schelling's friend and first listener – Schubert – had of him; because it is good to put oneself directly into what happened in a certain period of German intellectual development.

“What was it”

as Gotthilf Heinrich Schubert asks.

“that attracted young men like mature men from far and near to Schelling's lectures? Was it only the personality of the man or the peculiar charm of his oral presentation, in which this attractive power lay?”

It was not only that.

“There was in his lively words”

indeed

"an absorbing power, which no young soul, wherever it met with any receptivity, could resist. It might be difficult for a reader of our time

Schubert writes down in 1854 what he had experienced with Schelling in the 1890s

"who was not, like me, a young and enthusiastic listener, to make it understandable how it often felt to me when Schelling spoke to us, as if I were reading or hearing Dante, the seer of a world beyond that was only open to the consecrated eye. The powerful content of his words, as if measured with mathematical precision in lapidary style, seemed to me like a bound Prometheus, whose bonds to be loosened and from whose hand the unquenchable fire to be received, is the task of the understanding mind."

All of this must have been magical. I myself knew people who got to know Schelling when he was already an old man [...] because he expressed what he, as a shearer of the spiritual worlds, brought to his listeners in such a way that, as people who saw and knew him in those days say, he not only spoke to them, but his words, as he wanted to communicate them, flooded out of his eyes to them. That was still the case in old age; what must he have been like as a youth!” Schubert then says:

"But it was neither the personality nor the invigorating power of the oral communication alone that so soon after their public announcement by writing, evoked such interest and excitement for or against the direction of Schelling's philosophy, as no other literary phenomenon of a similar kind has been able to do for a long time before or since. ... In matters of sense-perceptible things or natural phenomena, one will immediately recognize whether a teacher or writer speaks from his own insight and experience"

from the spiritual world

“speaks or merely speaks of what he has heard from others, or even has thought up according to his own self-made ideas...”

Now, dear audience, it is probably fair to say today that it would be a childish view of the world to believe that by describing such spirits, one is demanding to speak to followers or opponents. In such matters, allegiance and antagonism are not important. One need not subscribe to a single word that Fichte or Schelling have written or spoken, nor need one be their opponent for not subscribing to a single word. The content is less important in this regard. The content of worldviews is in a state of dynamic development.

We will have much to discuss the day after tomorrow, especially about the living development of these worldviews and what the content has to do with it. It is not about defending this or that position that Fichte or Schelling took, but rather about looking at the lives of the personalities – at how they were situated within the whole of German intellectual life.

It is something tremendously significant when such minds try to recognize what nature is and what historical life is, so that they - as Fichte himself was well aware - grasp what is around them in a living way, submerging themselves in the things with their own knowledge. And that was what these minds strove for.

But because of this – and one really does not need to speak out of narrow-minded national sentiment, but one can speak entirely from the factual; as I said – we do not need to fall into the tone in which our enemies today fall! In this, as Fichte also emphasized, life in the German world view shows itself to be different from, say, the Western European, French or British world view.

Last time I pointed out what an enormous difference there is between this kind of Fichte and Schelling and - however much one may fight against them in terms of content - [what an enormous difference there is] between this kind of Fichte and Schelling, between penetrating into the foundations of things, where the whole outer world lives and gains life in knowledge itself, to what Fichte calls the dead world view, the world view of the inanimate among Western European minds [; where the world] of the inanimate begins, we say, within French folklore at the beginning of the seventeenth century with Descartes or Cartesius. But then it develops further, and we find it particularly pronounced, shortly before Fichte and Schelling, as has been described, appeared before their German nation, we find this world view of the dead, of the merely material and mechanical, over in France; we find it expressed, for example, in de La Mettrie.

This world view, as it can be found in de La Mettrie, for example – in this father of materialism, of modern materialism – is not to be fought against; it is only to be pointed out how precisely the French nation, in contrast to the German nation, is moving towards the dead and the mechanical. We see this already in Descartes, in Cartesius, in that for him not only minerals, plants, but also animals are merely moving machines. For de La Mettrie, the world finally becomes what he was able to put down in his book: “Man a Machine”.

Now, of course, dear audience, it is easy to find materialistic and spiritualistic elements in every culture and so on. But I am aware that I am not following this convenient mode of expression, but that I am highlighting precisely the characteristic that is related to the culture, and that for the German culture, Fichte and Schell ing in their striving - even if perhaps not in their thinking, as we shall see shortly - are as characteristic and as significant for German folklore as de La Mettrie - this could be proved in detail - for French folklore.

Everything is explained in such a way – and this is justified because it is self-evident – that one can see how man is dependent on what also works in him materially.

De La Mettrie comes to some strange assertions when he wants to prove how everything that exists depends on what is taken in through eating. Perhaps it is not entirely unnecessary to draw attention to a passage in de La Mettrie's book, “Man a Machine”, and to point out this passage in the Frenchman's book precisely in our present time. Of course, we do not need to endorse this passage in the way it is quoted here. We do not want to think such terrible things of a nation that is now at war with us, as the Frenchman de La Mettrie thought at the time. But it is perhaps interesting to quote what he says in order to prove how an entire nation, by eating in a certain way, acquires very specific mental and spiritual qualities, and thus wants to deduce the dependence of the soul and spirit of an entire nation on what is taken in materially through eating and drinking. So de La Mettrie says in the book 'Man a Machine':

"Raw flesh makes animals wild; men would become wild if they had the same food. How true this is can be seen from the fact that the English nation, which cooks meat less than we do and eats it quite raw and bloody, shows greater wildness, which is partly brought about by such food and partly, of course, by other causes, which only education can suppress. This wildness produces pride, hatred, contempt for other nations, stubbornness and other feelings in the soul that corrupt the character, just as coarse food produces a heavy and clumsy mind in a people whose main characteristics are laziness and dullness."

As I said, we do not need to subscribe to this harsh judgment of a Frenchman about the English; but it is perhaps interesting to recall it, especially in our time, when so much else is heard today, moving in other directions from this side, towards today's English allies.

The third person, who is very much honored by being present, and to whom attention must be drawn, because the third side of the German character speaks through him – and of the soul's character in general – is Hegel.

Of course, when people speak of Fichte, Schelling and Hegel today, the first thing that comes to mind is: Yes, but you really can't expect people to deal with Fichte, Schelling and Hegel! And most of them will indeed open a book and then close it again because they find it too difficult.

But, dear attendees, anyone who is familiar with the more intimate sides of intellectual life will not entirely disagree with me when I say that the time will come when these three minds will be so grasped in their striving that they can be vividly presented in modern times, so that what is essential – which, of course, had to first be expressed by them in a language that is difficult to understand – can be understood by everyone. And this treasure, which lies in these three minds, will once again bear fruit for every German child, if we are no longer too casual and too lazy to delve into the greatest treasures of the mind.

The third, as I said, is Hegel. If in Fichte it is the will that seeks that which weaves and breathes through the whole world; [if] in Schelling it was the mind, in that love is sought, which can recognize all exteriority in its liveliness – so in the present case it is the conviction that man, when he ascends to the thought that is not permeated by sensuality, when he ascends to the thought that is free of sensuality, and allows this sensuality-free thought to grow and live within him, that this thought, which the soul now experiences within itself, is a flowing in the soul, in which the divine-spiritual thoughts, from which the universe itself is created, work and weave. The soul is permeated by the Divine Being, and the soul thinks free of all sensuality.

The content may be wrong – and you can read more about this in my book “The Riddles of Philosophy” – but something significant underlies it, and this in turn resonates with the most intimate trait of German spiritual life: mysticism as a striving, but not mysticism, which attempts to solve the riddles of the world in the dark and confused, which wants to reject all ambiguity, as mysticism so often wants, namely amateurish mysticism, confused mysticism, which we will talk about the day after tomorrow. Hegel's striving is mystical, namely to unite the soul with the very weaving of the world. But the goal is to achieve this mystical experience not in a dark emotional chaos or in a dark inner visionary chaos; but in the full clarity of the world of ideas, in the clarity of the world of ideas of the spirit of all things.

And this mystical connection in clarity is one of the deepest traits of the German character. One almost recoils from finding such a connection to the German character as a German and from emphasizing its significance for the German character. Therefore, let me present to you another characteristic of the German character, esteemed attendees. In 1877, someone noted in his “Diary”:

"Perhaps only the Germanic mind has the need to think for itself, to search for the source of things. The Slavs and Romans are more strongly under the rule of convention, tradition, custom, prejudice, fashion; and when they break through them, it is as a result of revolt and rebellion, without therefore recognizing from within themselves the law immanent in things, their true standard, not the written, arbitrary one that has been read into them. The German wants to get back to nature; the Frenchman, the Spaniard, the Russian stop at convention."

So that I cannot be accused of characterizing from a one-sided national sentiment, I bring you this characterization, written from a soul torn by pain, and which – dear lady – was not written by a German, but by the French Swiss Amiel, in 1877! I think it behoves us to be more forgiving of the others, who perhaps have more justification from their feelings and from their observations to express themselves about the relationship of the German spirit to the other national spirits of Europe. And the same Amiel wrote in his “Diary” in Geneva in 1875:

“Thirst for truth is not a French passion. Appearance is more important than essence, the shell more than the kernel, form more than substance, gloss more than fertility, public opinion more than conscience.”

This is how the French Swiss write; as I said, as a German I would not say it directly.

“Appearance is more important than essence, the shell more than the kernel, form more than substance, the shiny more than the fertile, public opinion more than conscience.” This means that the Frenchman's center of gravity is not within himself, but in the others, in the great multitude. Individuals are zeros; the digit that forms them into a number comes from outside: That is the sovereign, the writer of the day, the most-read newspaper, in a word, the current master of fashion. All this can be deduced from an exaggerated sociability; it stifles in the soul the courage to resist, the ability to judge, personal conviction, the cult of the ideal."

Thus the Frenchman Amiel, a Frenchman who was familiar with German intellectual life, about what he had noticed. Amiel himself says, as early as 1862:

"I feel a common bond with a Goethe, Hegel, Schleiermacher, Leibniz, who are different enough among themselves, while the French philosophers, orators or mathematicians leave me cold despite their great qualities, because they do not carry the sum of general life within them, do not control the whole of reality, gag me or make me suspicious. What the French lack is direct knowledge of the living unity, a sense of the sacred, a feeling for the mysteries of being; what is theirs is the foundation of specialized sciences, the art of making a book, it is style, politeness, grace, a spirit of order, didactic art, discipline, elegance, truth in the details, staging, proselytizing zeal, strength in practical conclusions. But for the journey through Inferno and Paradise, other guides are needed; they are rooted to the earth, in the realm of the finite, changing, historical, and limited. Mechanism and dualism are the pinnacles of their intellectual flight. To break out of this circle, they must force themselves."

The same approach could be taken for other Western European cultures. But it is more important to take a look at these three minds that created a German worldview, which forms the backdrop to what German intellectual life produced in Goethe, Schiller, Lessing, Herder and the others associated with them, as a flowering of intellectual human experience that can only be compared to the flowering that existed in ancient Greece. But when we consider Fichte, Schelling and Hegel in particular, when we look at them in this context, we have a special feeling; we can almost believe that something else is speaking, something higher that lives in all three of them than is expressed in each individual personality. One picture expresses more than one speaks when this feeling is expressed: the German national spirit speaks through these three personalities. And that is perhaps the solution to a riddle that must emerge when we consider the German intellectual life that follows on from these three personalities, albeit in a much more faded and forgotten form, which I will now try to sketch in a few characteristic strokes.

We are witnessing something very special. Within a more or less forgotten current of German intellectual life, which has been forgotten throughout the entire nineteenth century and into our own days – only this forgotten tone has been little studied so far – there are spirits who, in terms of their intellectual makeup, in terms of the extent of what they know and can do, in terms of the their genius, are far below the tone-setters Fichte, Schelling and Hegel, but who, curiously enough, when one looks at what must be striven for today through spiritual science, have created more of spiritual science or have created more that corresponds to it than the great inspirers: Fichte, Schelling, Hegel.

The lesser minds that come afterwards create more significant things than the great minds that preceded them. It is a striking phenomenon. It does not need to be a cause for great surprise, because it is self-evident that it is easier for those who follow; as lesser minds, they can achieve greater things than those who preceded them under certain circumstances. In the extreme, this can indeed express itself in the fact that every schoolboy can understand and grasp the Pythagorean theorem - and for its first formulation Pythagoras himself was necessary.

Thus the great men had to come; the clever ones are already there, pointing the way into the spiritual world. But that which has come out of the German folk spirit through them lives on now. Even if it is still emotionally restricted and spiritually surrounded – one can also speak of spiritual encirclement – it still forms the vanished, the faded tone in the world view that I would like to talk about now.

Here we find, dear ladies and gentlemen, the son of the great Fichte, Johann Gottlieb Fichte: Immanuel Hermann Fichte, who was influenced by his father's ideas. But we also find that he is able to penetrate deeper into the knowledge of the spirit than his father, despite being a much lesser spirit than his father. Immanuel Hermann Fichte already speaks of the fact that man, on the one hand, has this physical world. He, Hermann Immanuel Fichte, calls physical the substances and forces that the outer physical world also contains. Through this physical world, man is connected with the physical substances and forces of the earth world, he is connected with what appears to him as something past. But behind this physical body, for Immanuel Hermann Fichte lies what he calls the etheric body; and just as the physical body contains within itself the substances and forces, so the etheric body contains substances and forces of a supersensible nature, which link this inner man, this supersensible spiritual man, to the great world of the spirit and place him in it.

Thus, Immanuel Hermann Fichte sees behind the other person the etheric human being, who is a reality for him, not just an image. And everything that spiritual science has to say about the etheric body, about these supersensible powers of human nature, in the sense often hinted at here in these lectures, can be found very beautifully in Immanuel Hermann Fichte.

But, one might say: Even with regard to the path that has been characterized here more often, an infinite amount already lives in the germ of another, who is to succeed in the world view of the great period of German idealism: For example, we see Troxler. Who knows Ignaz Paul Vital Troxler today? Who reads Troxler? Who, even among those who write the history of philosophy, takes more of an interest in Ignaz Paul Vital Troxler than to scribble five or six lines that say nothing about Troxler! Who is Troxler?

Ignaz Paul Vital Troxler is indeed a mind that – even if he has not yet fully mastered the spiritual science, for which it is only now at the right time – but Troxler is a personality who is on the path to this spiritual scientific research. We see then how Troxler coins strange words that show that something lives in his soul of the living spirit of spiritual science itself. Troxler coins strange words such as “supersensory spirit” and “supersensory mind”.

“Supersensory spirit” is relatively easy to understand; now, “supersensory spirit” is precisely what Goethe calls “contemplative judgment”. For – Goethe, in his real world view, is on exactly the same ground – because “supersensible spirit” is precisely that power of the human soul which unfolds in such a way that, without the help of the body, without external senses and without the sense bound to the brain, the human being directly “looks” into the spiritual environment, just as the spirit itself does – “supersensible spirit”.

But “super-spiritual sense”? By speaking of the “super-spiritual sense”, Troxler shows that he really has an understanding of the essence of spiritual science. I have mentioned it often, as there are people, idealistic philosophers, who say: Yes, of course, that is quite clear: the physical world is not the only one; spirit is present behind the physical world. Spirit, spirit and always spirit — they say. And that's where that pantheism comes out, that worldview that, doesn't it, spreads such a general spirit sauce – it doesn't specialize in that, it's nothing; maybe today you would have to say “dipping sauce” instead of “sauce” – [that worldview that] thinks it has spread such a general dipping sauce over everything that appears before people as physical objects and physical facts, doesn't it.

But that was not the case with Troxler! Troxler would have said: Those who speak only in a pantheistic way of spirit, spirit and spirit again, they seem to me to be saying: Why should we speak of tulips or lilies, of snowdrops, for example? Nature, nature is everything! And why should we speak of individual experiments in the laboratory? Nature, nature is everything. Those who speak of naturalism in this way should just / gap in the transcript /

But what matters is not just to talk in generalities about the spiritual, but to be able to point out that we are surrounded by a spiritual world that consists of individual entities and individual facts just as much as the physical world does.

That is why Troxler, because he knows this, speaks of the “super-spiritual sense” - which is of course a figure of speech, but which testifies that one can really look into, is able to look into the spiritual world and observe it in its details - not just as a “general spirit dip”.

And in yet another way, Troxler – in his “Lectures on Philosophy” in 1835, he speaks very beautifully about all these things – in yet another way, Troxler speaks of a kind of spiritual-scientific path that he has already taken. He says: The most beautiful powers of the soul that rule man here, insofar as he lives in his physical body, that man can make his own, insofar as the soul expresses itself through the physical body, these powers are those of faith, love, hope. But now – Troxler says: faith, love, hope, as great and significant as they are for the life that the soul spends in the physical body, they are – this faith, this love, this hope – the outer shell for the soul's spiritual powers that lie behind them and that this soul will experience when it has discarded the body and passed through the gate of death.

While the soul lives in the body, it lives out – through the bodily organs, of course through the finer bodily organs – the power of faith. [But, says Troxler, this power can be experienced not only as the power of faith, but also – as Troxler believes – as spiritual hearing, as spirit-hearing, in such a way that the power of faith becomes the outer, physical shell for a spirit-hearing of the soul; this organ would allow itself to be experienced free of the body – a wonderful, great thought.]

And love, this bloom of outer physical life on earth, this highest development of outer physical life on earth, insofar as the soul lives in the physical body in earthly life: For Troxler, this love, this love-power, one could say, is the outer shell again for something that the soul has within, that envelops this physical body. And what Troxler now addresses as a spiritual sense, a spiritual feeling - as one today senses physical things with the physical - lies behind the power of love. When the soul is able to free itself from the body or passes through the gate of death, then its spiritual organs unfold. And as it hears through that which lies behind the power of faith, what resounds as facts in the spiritual world, so it is able to feel the spiritual facts and entities through its [“groping”] spiritual organs, which the soul extends out of itself. While when it lives in the physical body, the spiritual feeling powers, touching powers bring themselves as love to revelation.

And in a similar way, behind the power of hope, in the power of an expectant confidence in something, lies for Troxler, spiritually, what he calls “spiritual vision”.

Thus, Troxler knows that a soul dwells in the physical body of man, endowed with spirit-hearing, spirit-touching, spirit-seeing, and that this soul passes through the portal of death with these three powers, but that it is also able to experience, when it frees itself from its ties to the body, that which spiritually surrounds and envelops us.

And, for example, Troxler expresses how he thinks – and I would like to share this with you in his own words – and at the same time points out that he has certain comrades in relation to such a way of looking at the world. He points to these or those spirits. I would like to read one of these passages to you verbatim. He says:

"The philosophers of old distinguished a fine, noble soul from the coarser body (or in this they assumed a kind of shell for the spirit), a soul that had an image of the body, which they called a schema, and that was the inner, higher man for them. This view, even if it is only an explanation, was also held by most of the first great church fathers, such as Origen, Irenaeus, Lactantius, Tertullian, and Augustine. In more recent times, even Kant in Dreams of a Spirit-Seer seriously jokes about an entire, inward, spiritual man who wears all the limbs of the outward man on his spirit body. Lavater also writes and thinks in the same way; and even when Jean Paul humorously jokes about the Bonnese under-skirt and the Platner-esque soul-corset, which are said to be hidden in the coarser body rock and martyr's robe, we still hear him asking, “What is the use and origin of these extraordinary talents and desires within us, which, like swallowed diamonds, slowly cut our earthy shell? [Why was I stuck to this dirty lump of earth, a creature with useless wings of light, when I should rot back into the birth clod without ever wriggling free with ethereal wings? “The inner man,“ he says in another place, ‘this ’veiled God in nature,' is not himself of stone, like the latter.] In the stony limbs” — of man — “his living limbs grow and mature according to a way of life unknown to us. We could

”still cite a myriad similar ways of thinking and writing, which in the end are only different views and ideas in which [the one Evangelical-Apostolic idea is revealed,

"we could cite a myriad more similar ways of thinking and writing, which in the end are only different views and ideas in which [the one Evangelical-Apostolic idea is revealed that Paul expressed to the Corinthians , saying: “A body that the soul has quickened is laid down, and a body that the spirit has quickened rises, for there is a body that has been quickened by the soul, there is also a body that has been spiritualized. And in this is] the true, only teaching of the individuality and immortality of man.”

And now a remarkable – I would even say a decisive – thought arises for Troxler. He thinks something like the following. It is quite clear when you let his various writings sink in, especially his lectures on those subjects, which he had already written and delivered in 1835. The following thought is on Troxler's mind: There is an anthropology, a knowledge of man, he says. How does it arise – a knowledge of man? Man comes to know it by observing what can be observed of man with the senses and with the intellect, which is connected to the brain – that is how anthropology comes about. But this man who sees with the senses and observes through the intellect – in this man the higher man lives. And we have seen how clearly Troxler can express himself about this higher man. This higher human being, with his “supersensible sense” and with his “supersensible spirit”, can now also observe that which is supersensible and superspiritual in the other human being. In this way, just as anthropology arises in a lower realm, a higher science arises: the science of the spiritual human being - anthroposophy. And Troxler expresses himself about this in the following way:

"While it is highly gratifying that the latest philosophy, which [we have long since recognized as the one that founds all living religion and] must reveal itself in every anthroposophy, thus in poetry as well as in history, is now making headway, it cannot be be overlooked that this idea cannot be a fruit of speculation, and that the true personality or individuality of man must not be confused either with what it sets up as subjective spirit or finite ego, nor with what it confronts with as absolute spirit or absolute personality.

Troxler speaks of a foundation of an “anthroposophy” in contrast to “anthropology”!

And so one has the right to speak of the germs of that which must now be incorporated from the universe into the spiritual development of humanity as spiritual science. One has the right to speak of it in such a way that it is present as a germ in these personalities. These germs, however, ladies and gentlemen, are firmly anchored in German intellectual life, in keeping with its nature. I can only hint at how firmly these things are rooted in German intellectual life. And how German intellectual life, through its innermost development, cannot but produce them. Everywhere we look back, we find that this is firmly rooted in German intellectual life, and we can only hope that it can incorporate itself as a spiritual science into the future development of humanity.

Such a tone has been forgotten many times; it has faded away. But, dear ladies and gentlemen, it still exists! And it was able to live in the most diverse fields. Not only does it live, so to speak, in the spiritual heights, but wherever there was spiritual striving, there were also such endeavors as these. And the time will come when people will gain a new understanding of the deepest essence of German striving, and that this must be brought up again.

Much has covered up precisely this innermost part of the German being! This can be seen when one tries to seek out the German essence in very specific, particular, concrete areas. For thirty-three years, esteemed attendees, I have endeavored – forgive me for making this personal – for thirty-three years I have endeavored to show the significance of Goethe's Theory of Colors for a true knowledge of nature that penetrates to the essence of things, and the significance of Goethe's dispute with Newton, who is rooted in British nationalism!

But, as I said, it is not only external political life that has been encircled; the deeply, deeply influential, brutal foreign scientific attitude has come to such a pass that it is still a laughing-stock for the physicist to speak of the justification of Goethe's theory of colors! But the time will come when, in this field, there will be a deeper understanding and the chapter “Goethe vindicated against Newton” will be revived, precisely on the basis of the spirituality of the most Germanic nature; and it will be revived in a completely different way than one might have dared to dream of today.

One must then be able to bear the fact that one is regarded as a fool for representing in advance what must come, what must be recognized, when one is fully aware of it. But, as I said, this striving lives not only on the spiritual heights, but also in many ways in the German character. I could cite hundreds and hundreds of cases for this; one for many shall be cited, because we do not have time to cite many. One for many shall be cited: I would like to point to a small booklet published in 1856 by a simple pastor Rocholl in Sachsenberg in the Principality of Waldeck - a small booklet. It was published in 1856 and is called “Contributions to the History of a German Theosophy”. Today, one may find much of what is written in this little book fantastic; one may even be right in much of what is said when calling the little book fantastic. But this little book, published in 1856, shows Pastor Rocholl in an awakened, true spiritual striving that at least wants to penetrate world phenomena with a “supernatural sense,” with a “supernatural spirit.” And in wide-ranging spiritual views, an attempt is made to characterize how natural life and spiritual life, sensual life, are one, and how divine spiritual forces weave and work, and how man has the possibility to ascend to them.

The level of education and the depth of knowledge are the things that come to light in such phenomena, which, as I said, can easily be ridiculed. But we also encounter this in other areas and with other personalities. Here, I would like to draw your attention, most esteemed attendees, to a spirit who, unfortunately, is all too forgotten: Christian Karl Planck.

After the Swabian Vischer – the V-Vischer – referred to him in an essay, I tried again in more recent times, as early as the first edition of my “Welt- und Lebensanschauungen im neunzehnten Jahrhundert” (World and Life Views in the Nineteenth Century), to draw attention to this primordially German world-view personality, Christian Karl Planck. But what use is that today? People generally have other things to do than to look into the German character, or the most German character.

I can only give a brief description here of what Planck's German nature was. And in his case it was certainly grasped out of his German nature, what he presented. We will see in a moment how conscious he was of the basis of his world view. I will illustrate this with an example.

When people today look at the earth as natural scientists, they see it, let us say, as a geologist would see it. The earth is seen as it is built up from mineral forces, as known from geology. For Planck, such a view of the earth would not have been considered without higher world-view questions. For him, it would have been like looking at a tree and only wanting to accept the wood and bark, but not the leaves, flowers and fruits! It is clear to him that the leaves, flowers and fruits are part of what makes up the essence of the tree, and that anyone who only looks at the wood, bark and roots is not looking at the full tree. To Karl Christian Planck, this seemed to be an earthly consideration that is only held in the sense of geology.

For Planck, the full earthly consideration is not only an ensouled, but also a spiritual-soul being. And man, as he walks on earth as a physical human being, belongs to the earth, to the essence of the earth, which one has to seek if one wants to learn to recognize the earth, just as one has to see the essence of the fruits and the flowers and leaves together with the essence of the tree if one wants to recognize the tree in its essence; a worldview - I would like to say - genuinely spiritual and genuinely interwoven with life.

Christian Karl Planck wrote many books in an effort to gain recognition; he did not succeed! For example, in 1864 he wrote a book, his “Fundamentals of a Science of Nature”. And from this book I will read a passage to prove how much this Christian Karl Planck belongs to that forgotten, faded tone of German intellectual life - the German intellectual development that was conscious for some of the personalities who worked for him, as the work is from the primal power of German nationality. There Planck says in 1864:

“The power of deeply rooted prejudices from the previous view of his”

the author's

"Schrift entgegensteht, dessen ist er sich vollkommen bewusst; allein wie schon die Arbeit selbst, trotz aller Ungunst der Umstände, die zufolge der ganzen Lage und Berufsstellung des Verfassers einem Werke dieser Art sich entgegenstellte, doch ihren Durchführung und ihren Weg in die Öffentlichkeit sich erkauft hat, so ist er auch gewiss, that what must now first fight for its recognition will one day appear as the simplest and most self-evident truth, and that in it not only his cause, but the truly German view of things, will triumph over all still unworthy external and un-German conception of nature and spirit.

People who have different ways of thinking first see it as pure folly – then it becomes a matter of course. This is how it was with the Copernican worldview; this is how it was with everything that belongs to the development of mankind's worldview. And Planck says words that prove how he consciously penetrated from the German spirit to his spirit-based worldview. And he continues:

"What our medieval poetry has already unconsciously and profoundly foreshadowed will finally be fulfilled in our nation in the maturity of the times. The impractical inwardness of the German spirit (as Wolfram describes it in his Parzival), which has been visited with harm and ridicule,

1864, written before Wagner's Parsifal!

“Finally, in the strength of her unceasing striving, she attains the highest; she looks into the last simple laws of things and of human existence itself; and what poetry has symbolized in a fantastically medieval way in the wonders of the Grail, the rule of which her hero attains, that, conversely, receives its purely natural fulfillment and reality in the lasting knowledge of nature and of the spirit itself.”

Karl Christian Planck wrote this in 1864; he died in 1880. In the last years of his life he had written his Testament of a German, in which he summarized all the individual lines of his world-view. In 1912 the second edition of this Testament appeared; it did not attract much attention and was not much studied. One had other works to deal with, which had appeared in the same publishing house at the time! For example, one had to deal with a world view that is truly not one that has somehow emerged from the German character or is even related to it! You can read more about this in my book, “Riddles of Philosophy.” However, the passage in question was not written under the influence of the war; it was written long before the war. In 1912, people were too busy dealing with Henri Bergson – yes, he is still called Bergson today, Henri Bergson he is still called – to deal with this Henri Bergson, who, as I mentioned last time, tells his Parisians all kinds of slanderous things in prominent places of his intellectual work! Next time he will also do it in Sweden.

When you look at this Bergson: Let us highlight just one aspect of his philosophy, one aspect that does resonate with something that is truly being recognized today: the aspect where he says – I could of course highlight many other things, among other things – the beautiful sentence that has been so admired throughout Europe: that one can only recognize the soul if one comprehends it in its duration and in particular if one understands the sentence in relation to the essence of the soul “Duration endures”. I have had to read an awful lot about this infinitely ingenious sentence by Henri Bergson: “Duration lasts”. I have never been able to find it any differently than when one says “The wood is wooding” or “The money is moneying”. But let's ignore that.

A fruitful world view would only be achieved if one did not start in an abstract way, as some do, who actually start with the most imperfect beings and go up to the most perfect, and believe that they have a perfect derivation, but if one starts from the most perfect, from man, and places man at the origin, and then considers the other kingdoms - animals, plants, minerals - and considers them in such a way that they have arisen like waste from the overall flow.

Certainly, a good thought. But it is presented in a slightly distorted way by Henri Bergson. And what is essential: long before Bergson expressed it - I point this out in the second volume of my “Riddles of Philosophy” - this thought was expressed - as early as 1882 - by the German thinker Wilhelm Heinrich Preuss, most recently in his book “Geist und Stoff” (Spirit and Matter), but also in earlier books! There we find this idea powerfully expressed from the very basis that I have just characterized as the very basis of the German essence.

One can now assume two things: Bergson, who expressed this idea later, may not have known Heinrich Preuss – which is just as unforgivable in a philosopher as if he had known him and failed to mention that he got this idea from this source – one could believe the latter, now that it has come out that entire pages of Bergson's books have been copied from Schelling or Schopenhauer! However, this is a basic feature of the times, isn't it, to confront German culture, which appears “mechanistic” to him, and which he says has come down from its great heights and only produces mechanistic things.

I said it before: He probably expected that when the French shoot with guns and cannons, the Germans will come and quote Novalis and Goethe! He could hardly have expected that, could he? But he speaks of a “mechanistic culture”. I would like to know: is copying entire pages from German philosophers and then slandering them the opposite of the “mechanical”?

But we do learn a great deal in this field, and we have to find our way through these things. But the only way to find one's way, dearest attendees, is to try, as a person living in Central Europe today, to delve into that which, from a certain point of view, is able to unfold this Central European and, above all, especially the German essence to unfold, the power that must be present today in the physical world in an external way, so that in our fateful time the German can defend itself against all attacking enemies. This same power lives, expressing itself in a different way, in the German spiritual being. The two are intimately connected. The two cannot be completely separated. In the distant future, when the fateful situation of the Central European German people in this fateful time is judged, history will have to be spoken of in this way.

One needs only to consider a few figures, but these figures, which will speak to the most distant times, must come to mind when the following questions are asked: What, then, is actually confronting what is to unfold in Central Europe with the spiritual content just characterized? Not counting smaller nations: 741 million people encircle 150 million people in Central Europe! And do these 741 million people, who are facing the 150 million people, have reason to envy the ground on which these 150 million people stand?

One need only remember that this humanity encircling Central Europe owns 69 million square kilometers of the earth – compared to 5 to 6 million square kilometers of the Central European population! 69 million square kilometers compared to 6 million square kilometers in Central Europe! 9.5 percent of the earth's population is pitted against 47 percent of the earth's population! So half the world is being called out against Central Europe. That will stand out in history in simple numbers!

And how does this surrounding population, which does not even rely on direct combat but on starvation, how does this surrounding population view this population, this Central European culture, of which one says – the least one can hear –: The spirit – this spirit that is all around – fights against the raw material in the middle!

And this view, we find it in a certain modification also when we look across to the East. And there we find, as it developed throughout the entire nineteenth century, one can say from the simple Russian people, who are predisposed to something completely different - you can read more about this in my little book “Thoughts During the Time of War”, which will soon be available again; at the moment it is out of print. There we find that a Russian intelligentsia is developing from the Russian people – but one could also follow the development in other areas – that grows up to hold very, very strange views. Much of what is in my little book Thoughts During the Time of War would have to be repeated – and much would have to be added to it – if one wanted to even begin to characterize the trend that is taking hold in Russian intellectual life, the intellectual life of the intelligentsia, which draws from the belief that Central Europe in particular, but also Western Europe, is basically an aged, decrepit culture, and that it must be replaced by the culture of the East, that this culture of the East is young and fresh and must be brought into Europe because everything within Europe has become decrepit.

For example, we find – just to mention a few things, although I could of course talk about this for hours – we find, for example, as early as 1827, Kirejewskij indicates a tone that is then found again and again. Only, various things have been done to prevent the good Germans in particular from noticing this tone; sometimes strange ways have been sought to prevent the Germans from noticing this tone. One of these ways is this: after the lecture that I have given in various places about Tolstoy, no one will attribute to me the claim that I do not value Tolstoy precisely as a spirit of the very first order; but precisely with spirits of the very first order, whom one does not need to fight as spirits, one can find the characteristic peculiarities that develop in them out of their nationality. Now, even in Tolstoy's works of fiction, one finds this tone, this sense of the staleness and decrepitude of Central and Western European intellectual life. But, you will say, people have read Tolstoy's works, they can't possibly have forgotten that they found this in them!

Something strange is going on here. Until Raphael Löwenfeld published his complete edition of Tolstoy's works at the end of the 1890s – which is the most accurate – all earlier translations had deleted the passages that were directed against Germanness! All the works that Löwenfeld translated before the complete edition was published – and who had the complete edition by Löwenfeld in their hands? – all of Tolstoy's works that had been translated by others before that, were presented to the German people in this way!

In 1829, Kirejewskij said:

“The fate of every European state depends on the union of all the others; the fate of Russia depends on Russia alone. But the fate of Russia is decided in its formation: this is the condition and source of all goods. As soon as all these goods will be ours, we will share them with the rest of Europe, and we will repay our debt to them a hundredfold.”

You see what the background here is – to make Russia Russian and then generously assign to the individual what one wants to assign to him. And seriously: this tone runs through the whole of Russian intellectual life. And in a strange way, it appears in various places in more recent times. For example, in [Michajlovskij] there is a Russian spirit that takes this - as he thinks - strangely decrepit, crippled, brutalized intellectual product of Central Europe, Goethe's “Faust”, and says: What then is this Goethe's “Faust” actually like as a personality? Well, just as in Central Europe one strives for metaphysics, so Faust strives metaphysically. —- He needs the expression, this Michajlovskij: a metaphysician is a person who has gone mad with fat! I don't know how many metaphysicians one has come to know with this characteristic! But he regards Goethe's Faust as such a metaphysician, who has become alien to all human life.

But let us go to the end of the nineteenth century; there we find a mind like that of Sergius Jushakow; he wrote a book in 1885 that reflects much of what is currently in this Russian intellectual life: he despises Western Europe as something decrepit! He says, Yushakov: “Let us look across to Asia, where we find the fruits of European culture, which must be eradicated through Russia and replaced by something else. Let us look across to Asia, where we find these Western and Central European fruits of culture. There we find these Asian peoples, and it reminds Yushakov of an Asian legend that truly expresses what lies in the development of Asian peoples. He says: “These Asian peoples have expressed their destiny themselves by speaking of Ormuzd and Ahriman. Then there are the Iranian peoples, to whom the Persians and Hindus also belong; they have had to fight against the Turanian peoples, who are under the leadership of Ahriman. And as the people of Ormuzd, the Iranians, to whom the Persians and Hindus belong, have what they have conquered materially and spiritually through their culture, they have conquered it through the kindness of the good spirit Ormuzd against the evil Ahriman.

But then, according to Jushakov, the evil Europeans came and did not help the Asians to continue their Ormuzd culture, but came to take away from them what they had received under Ormuzd and to deliver them to the bondage and dangers of the Ahriman culture. Russia must intervene against this unpeaceful, unloving Western European culture. Russia must turn, says Yushakov, towards Asia and join forces with the Asian peoples languishing under Ahriman, in order to save them from the parasitism of Western European culture.

Yushakov says that it will be two powers that will join forces, two powers that express the greatest, most significant, and strongest cultural forces of the future. It will be two powers that will look towards Asia from Russia – I am not saying it, Yushakov is saying it; so if it sounds strange, read Yushakov! There are two powers: the simple Russian peasantry will join forces with the greatest bearer, with the noblest bearer of spirituality, with the Cossacks! Peasants and Cossacks will rescue the Asian population and the ancient Asian culture from the clutches of the Western Europeans. One day the world will owe this to Russia and its mission, which is made up of the deeds of the peasants and the noble Cossacks.

The book that Sergius Jushakow wrote in 1885 is called: “The” - yes, it is called “The Anglo-Russian Conflict”. And he characterizes the Asian peoples from a Western European point of view in terms of what they have suffered. He says, for example: These Asian peoples are viewed by Western Europeans – he couldn't take the Germans, so he didn't take the Germans – these Asian peoples are viewed by Western Europeans, he says, as if they existed solely

“to clothe themselves in English fabrics, fight among themselves with English weapons, work with English tools, eat from English vessels and play with English tinsel.”

And then Jushakow continues, summarizing what appears to him to be a great, pan-Asian ideal, so in summary, he says:

“England exploits millions of Hindus, but its very existence depends on the obedience of the various peoples who inhabit the rich peninsula; I do not wish anything similar for my fatherland – I can only rejoice that it is sufficiently far removed from this state, which is as brilliant as it is sad.”

I do not wish anything similar for my homeland, says Yushakov, a leading Russian, in 1885 – about England! It is probably on this path that we should seek that strange world-historical consequence – the forging of the alliance between Russia and England! For at first little was noticed of the current, of the mission to Asia, which should have come about under the influence of the peasants and Cossacks. For the time being, we can only note that Russia has allied itself with England and France, the latter of which have thus betrayed European culture in reality! It has allied itself in order to uproot the decrepit, decrepit Europeanness root and branch, at least that is what they said.

Dear attendees, it is necessary to speak out, as I said, without falling into the tone that is being struck around us, and anyone who is even a little familiar with this tone knows that today's tone has not tone of the English, French, Russians, without falling into the tone that is being struck around us today, purely on the basis of the facts, can point out what is going on within German intellectual life for self-reflection. There it is, after all, [that what lived in minds like Troxler, Planck, Preuss and so on, and in the minds of others – what was a germ, will also come to fruition as a flower and as fruit]!

However, through this tone of German intellectual life, which still resonates today, a realization must come to those of you who are present: intellectual observers of the world are not the impractical people that they are often made out to be by the very clever people – and especially by the very practical people. Because that is, after all, the general tone, isn't it, that one thinks: Well, people like Planck, like Troxler or like Preuss and so on may have very nice thoughts - but they don't have a clue about practical life. That's where the practical people have to go, those practical people who, in their own opinion, have a practical insight into practical life. Because the others are those impractical idealists!

Well, but I could also give you hundreds and hundreds of examples in support of the refutation of this sentence. Karl Christian Planck, for example, who was one of the most German of Germans, died in bitterness in 1880. And the dullards will no doubt say: something like megalomania sometimes emerges from the last thing he wrote - after time itself had driven him to a certain nervousness because he could not convey to his contemporaries what was in his heart. The dullards will even say: he became megalomaniac. But he died in 1880, and in 1881 his “Testament of a German” was already in print. It contained words that I will read to you now. So they were already written in 1880. Planck – about whom certainly quite practical diplomats, politicians and people who know everything about practical life will judge disparagingly – Christian Karl Planck spoke of the present war, of this war in which we are now embroiled. He spoke the following words in 1880. They were written by this “impractical idealist,” who was, however, a very practical thinker and who should have been put in a practical position, because the power that lives in the spiritual life also knows how to judge practical life correctly. This “impractical” Planck, who in 1880 wrote about the present war, which he knew would come, the words:

"No political cleverness, no love of peace on the part of Germany can prevent this hostile clash within the current merely national order. For the nature of the circumstances is more powerful than all cleverness; and already now, despite the friendly attitude of Germany and Austria, the hostile mood of the Russian East is only emerging all the more clearly because one could not give it a free hand in everything, but had to set a certain goal. And if it comes to a fight one day, then, however much we have to fight it for the good of Europe, the latter will not stand by our side, but as in the East, we will also have to defend ourselves in the West and in the South at the same time; on all sides, national jealousy will rise up against the new empire in their midst."

I ask you, how many diplomats believed – you can point the finger at them – much later, yes, much later, that Italy might still be dissuaded from participating in the war. I will only point out the one point. But these are the “practical” people, they have eaten practice for breakfast, lunch and dinner. But the unpractical Christian Karl Planck, in 1880 he characterized what happened in 1914, 1915 and so on, so that what he said back then has appeared again exactly in the real, actual facts!

Oh, one should listen to what a spiritual man creating out of the real depths of the German essence would be able to create if this German essence were to once fully consciously stand on its own feet – symbolically speaking.

But for this to happen, the present moment in world history must provide the right conditions. For the German spirit will also one day solve the problem for the world of the fact that it must be realized from within the German spirit what it means that power – the power of the incompetent, which crushes so many legitimate aspirations – is actually the ruling power in so many parts of the world! It is precisely in this area that the German spirit must have a healing effect. Without in any way seeking to flatter national pride, this can be emphasized in the present fateful hour from the facts themselves.

Finally, let us point out to you, esteemed attendees, how those who were steeped in this German essence, who know how to grasp it with their whole soul, with their whole heart, how they always experienced what has now taken place. I may, since I have spent almost thirty years of my life in Austria and had to go through the last times just at the end of these thirty years within the struggles that Germanism had to wage there, [since I was] in the midst of these difficulties of the German essence, I would like to draw attention to how naturally it lived in a spirit like Robert Hamerling, one of the most German spirits in Austria, one of the best spirits in Central Europe in general, how he expressed what lived in him so beautifully: “Austria is my fatherland; Germany is my motherland!” These words express a vivid sense of the spiritual reality that has forged Germany and Austria into this Mitteleuropa out of necessity in these difficult times. But such minds as Robert Hamerling's not only grasped such a thing in its depth, in its full depth, but also experienced it, esteemed attendees. This is particularly evident when you look at Robert Hamerling – not, of course, in the poem that has been distributed and which so many people have fallen for, even quite clever people have fallen for it, it is, of course, a forgery, the prophetic poem that has now been widely published in the newspapers – I don't mean something like that, of course! Anyone who knows Robert Hamerling even a little recognizes it as a fake from the very first lines. But in Robert Hamerling's work, there are enough clues to see how this Mitteleuropa lived! In 1862, he wrote his “Germanenzug”. Let us highlight the “Germanenzug” from the many. In 1862, he wrote in his “Germanenzug” how the ancestors of the Germans moved among the Germanic peoples from Asia - this is described to us in a wonderful mood , as they camp there - it is evening - how they camp there still in Asia; it is a beautiful evening atmosphere: the setting sun, the rising moon, the Teutons are asleep as they move across. Only one is awake: the blond Teut. And above him appears the genius of the future Germans and speaks with him. And that which one must cite as a fundamental trait of the German striving for knowledge - the genius speaks with him, with the blond Teut of this German future - is expressed by Robert Hamerling through the genius of Germanness to the blond Teut. I would like to say: the beauty of what is a German trait is already evident in the “Philosophus Teutonicus”, in Jakob Böhme, where this Jakob Böhme regards all knowledge in such a way that this knowledge, insofar as it comes from the German mind as knowledge, is at the same time a kind of worship. Jakob Böhme says so beautifully:

"When you look at the depths

, he means the depths of the blue sky

“When you look at the depth of the sky, the stars and the earth, you see your God, and in the same you live and are you too. And the same God reigns through you and also reigns you.” “You are created from this God and live in the same. Also, all your knowledge stands in this God, and when you die, you will be buried in this God.”

This mood also lived in Robert Hamerling when he let the genius of the German spirit speak to the blond Teut:

"To whom will the word break out of the depths of the soul one day
Like your people, so rich, so delicate, so powerful?
Who breathes so solemnly into the strings of the searching thought to the stars
so boldly and strives and fights on all paths?
Whom leads so high, so deep his urge, his foreboding?
Who grasps so faithfully the near as the far?
Where does every earthly and heavenly zone
reflect itself as in your thinking, O Teuton?»

This mission of the German character - Robert Hamerling was already aware of it at the time he wrote his “Germanenzug” (The German Character).

To see clearly the full world-historical, the all-embracing world-historical significance of this German nature – one can indeed look across to Asia in a different way from that in which Yushakov did: there one sees these Asiatic peoples, how they once, in primeval times, aspired upwards to the spiritual worlds. They brought it from India; they did it by sinking and muffling everything that forms the basis of the human ego, the center of the human being, into a kind of dream life. And by muffling the ego, they created something within themselves that arose out of a dream life, which introduced them to the spiritual that permeates and lives through the whole world. This world cannot and must not arise again as it was, as a witness of what remained from ancient times over there in Asia; for after the greatest impulse that earth-dwelling humanity could experience, the Christ-impulse, had broken into the development of earth-dwelling humanity, something else must come than this former elevation to the spiritual world.

And this other - with the same inwardness, deep inwardness, with which the spirit was once to be experienced in the ancient Orient, with the same inwardness it is to be experienced again through this other; but this other is to develop in the exact opposite way: The ego is not to be paralyzed, it is to be strengthened, it is to be invigorated - precisely by rising up, by living to the full, Fichte, Schelling and Hegel, want the other spirits, who are rooted in the depths of German intellectual life, to penetrate into the spiritual world: And so this German essence is to give the Orient what it once had in the form of profound inwardness in pre-Christian times; it is to give the German essence in a new way, as it must be given in the post-Christian era.

This was already clear to Robert Hamerling when he had the genius of the Germans speak to the blond Teut, the leader of the Germanic peoples, in his “Germanenzug”. Robert Hamerling draws attention to the fact that all cognition in the German is to be a kind of worship, that the German wants to know himself in such a way that he knows himself as born out of the divine-spiritual powers, living in the divine-spiritual powers, and being buried again with the divine-spiritual powers.

That is why Robert Hamerling lets the genius of Germanness speak these beautiful words to the blond Teut:

"But however proudly you may strive, high above other swarms, you will still keep a blazing, ancient, sacred fire: the dream-filled drunkenness of God, the blissful warmth of the heart of Calm existence
This holy ray, a temple fire, free of smoke, with pure flame, will glow in your chest and soul, remaining your pilot and your rudder! You strive only because you love: your most daring thought will be devotion that wants to sink into God."

So the one who, as a Central European German, feels at home in the intellectual life of Central Europe, which I have tried to characterize today, also in one of its faded tones, in one of its forgotten intellectual currents, but precisely in the intellectual current that shows which seeds, which roots of a striving for the real, for the real spirit, are anchored in German intellectual life.

The insight that this is so will always give the one who recognizes and feels German essence within himself the justified conviction: Whatever arises from the 68 million square kilometers around against what lives on the 6 million square kilometers, whatever has such roots, such germs, will bear its blossoms and its fruits against all enemies in the way and as they are predisposed in it! This hope, this confidence and also this love for the German essence is precisely what characterizes anyone who truly recognizes the German essence.

Let me summarize in four simple lines by Robert Hamerling, after I have tried to characterize such a Central European spirit to you. Let me summarize what can arise in the soul from an objective observation of the German character and immersion in this German character today, in the face of our difficult, fateful events.

I believe that these four simple lines, with which I would like to conclude today's reflection, these four simple lines by Robert Hamerling, which state that it is true, that not only out of national overheating, but out of objective knowledge, it may be said:

“And if ever the day
proves hostile to the German name,
from sea to sea
the German spirit will find its way.”

The grasp of life given by Theosophy is in the highest sense practical. The light it throws on questions of education will be deeply useful to humanity long before people are clairvoyant, and long before a person attains to direct vision he can convince himself that in Theosophy the truth about life is to be found.

Once he is born, the human being enters on a new life, and his various bodies develop in different ways and at different times. The educator should always bear this in mind. The period from the first to the seventh year is very different from the second seven-year period from the seventh to the fifteenth or sixteenth year—earlier with girls, later with boys. Then there is a change again after the sixteenth year, or shall we say after puberty. We can properly understand how a human being grows to maturity only if we keep before our eyes the different ways in which the various members of his being develop.

From birth to the seventh year it is really only the physical body that parents and educators have to consider. At birth the physical body is released into its environment; before birth it is part of the maternal organism. During the whole period of pregnancy the life of the mother and of the human embryo are intermingled. The physical body of the mother surrounds the physical body of the child, so that the outer world has no access to the child. At birth, things change; only then can the child receive impressions from other beings in the physical world. But the child's etheric and astral bodies are still not open to the external world; up to the seventh year, indeed, the external world cannot influence them, for they are inwardly absorbed in building up the physical body. At about the seventh year the etheric body begins to be free to receive impressions from outside, and it can then be influenced. But from the seventh to the fourteenth year no attempt should be made to influence the astral body, or its inward activity will be disturbed. During the first seven years it is best to leave the etheric and astral bodies quite unmolested and to rely on everything happening of its own accord.

The best way to influence the child during his first seven years is through the development of his sense-organs. All the impressions they receive from the outer world are significant, and everything a child sees or hears affects him in terms of his sense-organs. The sense-organs, however, are not influenced by lesson-books or verbal teaching, but by means of example and imitation. The most important thing during the first seven years is to nourish a child's sense-organs. He will see with his eyes how people round him are behaving. Aristotle²³ was quite right in saying that man is the most imitative of all creatures; and this is particularly true during the first seven years. Hence during these years we must try to influence a child's senses, to draw them out so that they become active on their own account. That is why it is such a mistake to give a child one of those “beautiful” dolls; they hinder him from setting his own inner powers to work. A normal child will reject the doll and be much happier with a piece of wood, or with anything which gives his imagination a chance to be active.

No particular method of teaching is needed for the etheric and astral bodies, but it is extremely important that the subtler influences which pass over to them unconsciously from their environment should be favourable. It is very important that during these early years a child should be surrounded by noble-minded, generous-hearted and affectionate people with good thoughts, for these stamp themselves on the child's inner life. Example, therefore, in thought and in feeling is the best means of education at this stage. It is not what we say but what we are that influences a child during his first seven years. Because of the extreme sensitivity of the inner members of a child's being, his surroundings should be kept free from all impure, immoral thoughts and feelings.

From the seventh to the fourteenth, fifteenth or sixteenth year—that is, until puberty—the etheric body goes through a liberation, just as the physical body is thrown open to its environment at birth. During this period, then, we must direct our efforts to the etheric body, the vehicle of memory, of lasting habits, of temperament and inclinations and enduring desires. Accordingly, when the etheric body is set free we must take every care to develop these features; we must influence a child's habits, his memory, everything which will give his character a firm foundation. The child will grow up like a will-o'-the-wisp if care is not taken to imbue his character with certain lasting habits, so that with their aid he will stand firm against the storms of life. This, too, is the time for exercising his memory; memorising is more difficult after this age. It is at this time also that a feeling for art awakens, particularly for the art of music, so closely associated with the vibrations of the etheric body. If any musical talent exists, this is when we should do all we can to encourage it. This again is the time for stories and parables; it is wrong to try to develop critical faculties so early. Our age sins greatly in this respect. Care must be taken to see that the child learns as much as possible through stories and analogies; we must store his memory with them and must see to it that his power of comparison is exercised on concepts drawn from the sense-world. We must bring before him examples taken from the lives of the great men of history, but there must be no talk of “this is good” or “this is bad”, for that would make a demand on his judgment. We can hardly place too many such pictures or examples before the child; these are the things which act on the etheric body. This, too, is the age when stories and fairy tales, which represent human life in the form of pictures, have a powerful effect. All this makes the etheric body supple and plastic and provides it with lasting impressions. How grateful Goethe must have been to his mother for telling him so many fairy stories at this age!

The later the power of critical judgment is aroused in a child, the better. But children ask “why?” We should answer such questions not with abstract explanations but through examples and images. And how infinitely important it is to find the right ones! If a child asks questions about life and death, and the changes that accompany them, we can use the example of the caterpillar and the chrysalis, and explain how the butterfly arises from the chrysalis to a new life. Everywhere in nature we can find such comparisons, relevant to the highest questions. But quite specially important for the child of this age is authority. It must not be an enforced authority—the teacher must gain his authority quite naturally, so that the child will believe before it has knowledge to go on. Theosophical education demands of the teacher not only intellectual knowledge, not only educational principles and insights; it demands that the type of people chosen to be teachers must be those whose natural gifts show promise of their becoming “an authority”. Does this seem too much to ask? Surely we cannot fail to get such teachers, since the future of mankind depends on it. Here a great cultural task for Theosophy opens up.

When the child enters the third period of seven years, the age of puberty, the astral body is liberated; on it depends the power of judgment and criticism and the capacity for entering into direct relationships with other human beings. A young person's feelings towards the world in general develop in company with his feelings towards other people, and now he is at last mature enough for real understanding. As the astral body is liberated, so is the personality, and so personal judgment has to be developed. Nowadays young people are expected to offer criticism much too early. Seventeen-year-old critics can be found in abundance, and many of the people who write and pass judgments are quite immature. You have to be twenty-two or twenty-four before you can offer a sound judgment of your own; before then it is quite impossible. From the fourteenth to the twenty-fourth year, when everything around him can teach a person something, is the best time for learning from the world. That is the way to grow up into full maturity.

These are the great basic principles of education; countless details can be deduced from them. The Theosophical Society is to publish a book²⁴ for teachers and mothers which will show how from birth to the seventh year the essential thing is example; from the seventh to the fourteenth year, authority; from the fourteenth to the twenty-first year the training of independent judgment.

This is one example of how Theosophy seeks to lay hold of practical life through all its stages.

Another example of practical Theosophy can be drawn from a study of the great law of karma: a law which really makes life comprehensible for the first time. The law of karma is not mere theory, or something that merely satisfies our curiosity. No, it gives us strength and confidence at every stage in life, and makes intelligible much that would otherwise be unintelligible.

First of all, the law of karma answers the great human question: why are children born into such widely differing conditions? For instance, we see one child born to wealth, perhaps endowed also with great talents and surrounded by the most loving care. And we see another child born to poverty and misery, perhaps with few talents or abilities, and so apparently predestined to failure—or a child may have great abilities but no chance to develop them. These are serious problems, and only Theosophy gives an answer to them. If we are to face life with strength and hope we must find an answer. How then does the law of karma answer these riddles?

We have seen that a man passes through repeated lives on Earth, and that when a child is born, it is not for the first time: he has been on Earth many times before. Now in the external world the rule of cause and effect prevails, as everyone recognises, and it is this great natural law of cause and effect which we see, carried over into the spiritual realm, as the law of karma.

How does the law work in the external world? Take a metal ball, heat it and put it on a wooden board. It will burn a hole in the wood. Take another ball, heat it but throw it into water before you put it on the board, and then it will not burn a hole. The fact that the ball was thrown into the water is significant for its later behaviour. The ball goes through a sort of experience, and its behaviour will vary accordingly. Thus the effect depends on the cause. This is an example from the inanimate world, but the same law holds everywhere. Animals gradually lose their eyesight if they go to live in dark caves. Now suppose that in a later generation such an animal were able to reflect: why have I no eyes? It would have to conclude that the cause of its fate was that its ancestors had gone to live in caves. Thus an earlier experience shapes a later destiny, and so the rule of cause and effect holds.

The higher we move in the scale of nature towards man, the more individual does destiny become. Animals have a group-soul, and the destiny of a group of animals is bound up with the group-soul. A man has his own Ego, and the individual Ego undergoes its destiny just as the group-soul of animals does. A whole species of animal may change over the generations, but with man it is the individual Ego that changes from one life to another. Cause and effect go on working from life to life: what I experience today has its cause in a previous life, and what I do today shapes my destiny in my next life. The cause of different circumstances at birth is not to be found in this life; nothing immediate is responsible for it. The cause lies in earlier lives. In a previous life a man has prepared his present destiny.

Surely, you might say, it is just this that must depress a man and rob him of all hope. But in fact the law of karma is the most consoling law there is. Just as it is true that nothing exists without a cause, so it is equally true that nothing existing remains without its effects. I may be born in poverty and misery; my abilities may be very limited; yet whatever I do must produce its effect, and whatever I accomplish now, by way of industry or moral activity, will certainly have its effect in later lives. If it depresses me to think that I have deserved my present destiny, it may equally cheer me to know that I can frame my future destiny myself. Anyone who really takes this law into his thinking and feeling will soon realise what a sense of power and of security he has gained. We do not have to understand the law in all its details; that becomes possible only at the higher stages of clairvoyant knowledge. Much more important is it that we should look at the world in the light of this law and live in accordance with it. If we do this conscientiously over a period of years, the law will of its own accord become part of our feelings. We verify the truth of the law by applying it.

At this point all sorts of objections may arise. Someone may say: “Then we should certainly become sheer fatalists! If we are responsible for whatever happens to us and cannot change it, the best thing is to do nothing. If I am lazy, that is my karma.” Or perhaps someone will say: “The law of karma says we can bring about favourable consequences in our next life. I will start being really good in a later life; for the moment I will enjoy myself. I have plenty of time; I shall be returning to Earth and I will make a start then.” Someone else says: “I shall not help anyone any more, for if he is poor and wretched and I help him I shall be interfering with his karma. He has earned his suffering; he must look after changing his karma by his own efforts.”

All these objections reveal a gross misunderstanding. The law of karma says that all the good I may have done in this life will have its effect, and so will everything bad. Thus in our Book of Life there is a kind of account-sheet, with debit and credit sides, and the balance can be drawn at any moment. If I close the account and draw the balance, that will show my destiny. At first this seems to be a hard, unbending law, but it is not so. A true comparison with the ledger would run as follows: each new transaction alters the balance and each new action alters the destiny.

After all, a merchant does not say that since every new transaction upsets his balance, he can do nothing about it. Just as the merchant is not hindered by his ledger from doing new business, so in life a man is not hindered from making a new entry in his Book of Life. And if the merchant got into difficulties and asked a friend to lend him a thousand marks to help him to recover, it would be nonsense if his friend replied that he really couldn't do anything because it would mean interfering with the state of his friend's account-book. In the same way it would be nonsense if I refused to help another man in order not to come into conflict with the law of karma. However firmly I believe in the law of karma, there is nothing to prevent me from relieving any misery and poverty. On the contrary, if I did not believe in the law, I might doubt whether my help would have any effect: as it is, I know that my help will have a good effect. It is this aspect of karma which can console us and give us energy for action. We ought to think of the law of karma not so much in its relation to the past as in its bearing on the future. We may indeed look back on the past and resolve to bear its karma, but above all we should be positively active in laying a foundation for the future.

Christian clergymen often raise the objection: “Your Theosophy is not Christian, for it ascribes everything to self-redemption. You say a man must work out his own karma quite alone. If he can do this, what place is there for Christ Jesus, who suffered for all mankind? The Theosophist says he needs no help from anyone.”

All this indicates a misunderstanding on both sides. Our critics do not realise that free-will is not restricted by the law of karma. The Theosophist, on his side, needs to see clearly that because he believes in karma he does not depend entirely on self-help and self-development; he must recognise that he can be helped by others. And then a true reconciliation between the law of karma and the central fact of Christianity will not be hard to find. This harmony has always existed; the law of karma has always been known to esoteric Christianity.

Let us imagine two people: one is in distress because of his karma, the other helps him because he has the power to do so, and in this way the karma of the former is improved. Does this exclude the law? On the contrary, it confirms it. It is precisely the working of the law of karma which makes the help effective.

If someone has more power than this, he may be able to help two or three or four others if they are in need. Someone still more powerful may be able to help hundreds or thousands and influence their karma for the better. And if he is as powerful as Christianity represents Christ to be, he may help the whole of humanity just at a time when it is in special need of help. But that does not make the law of karma ineffective; on the contrary, Christ's deed on Earth is effective precisely because the law of karma can be built upon.

The Redeemer knows that by the law of karma His work of redemption will be available for everyone. Indeed, He accomplished that deed in reliance on the law of karma, as a cause of glorious results in the future, as a seed for a later harvest and as a source of help for anyone who allows the blessings of redemption to act upon him. Christ's deed is conceivable only because of the law of karma; the testament of Christ is in fact the teaching of karma and reincarnation. This does not mean that each one must bear the consequence of his own actions, but that the consequences must be borne by someone, no matter whom. If a Theosophist maintains that he cannot understand the unique deed of Christ having been accomplished once only for all mankind, this means that he does not understand karma. The same is true of any priest who declares that karma interferes with the doctrine of redemption. The reason why Christianity has hitherto failed to emphasise the law of karma and the idea of reincarnation is bound up with the whole question of human evolution and will be dealt with later.

The world does not consist of single “I's”, each one isolated from the rest; the world is really one great unity and brotherhood. And just as in physical life a brother or friend can intervene to help another, so does this hold good in a much deeper sense in the spiritual world.

• 23. Aristotle, 384–322 B.C. The sentence cited here is from the treatise, “On the Poetic Art”, Chapter 4.
• 24. “A book will be published”: “The Education of the Child from the Standpoint of Spiritual Science”, given as a lecture in various places in Germany; first published, made into an article, in Rudolf Steiner's periodical, Lucifer-Gnosis, 1907, and in the same year as a pamphlet. An English translation is available, entitled, The Education of the Child in the Light of Anthroposophy.