The Rudolf Steiner Archive

Here in Berlin, as well as in other localities where our Society has spread, much has been discussed that concerns the comprehensive realm of theosophy, that emanates, so to speak, from the high regions of clairvoyant consciousness, and it is natural that a desire should have arisen to do something toward a serious and adequate substantiation of our spiritual current.

The present General Assembly, which brings our members together here at the seventh anniversary of our German Section, may be taken as the proper occasion for contributing something toward strengthening the foundations of our cause. This I shall attempt to do at this time in the four lectures on Anthroposophy.

The lectures in Kassel on The Gospel of St. John, those in Düsseldorf on the hierarchies, those in Basel on The Gospel of St. Luke, and those in Munich on the teachings of oriental theosophy, were all occasions for rising to high altitudes of spiritual research and for bringing back spiritual truths difficult of access. What occupied us there was theosophy and, at least in part, its ascent to exalted spiritual peaks of human cognition.

It does not seem unjustifiable, given a gradually acquired feeling in the matter, to see something deeper in what is called the cyclical course of world events. At the time of our first General Assembly, when the German Section was founded, I delivered lectures to an audience composed only in part of theosophists; those lectures may be characterized as the historical chapter of anthroposophy. Now, after a lapse of seven years that constitute a cycle, the time seems ripe for speaking in a more comprehensive sense on the nature of anthroposophy.

First, I should like to make clear through a comparison what should be understood by the term anthroposophy. If we wish to observe a section of country, together with all that is spread out there in the way of fields, meadows, woods, villages, roads, we can do so by going about from village to village, through streets and meadows and woods, and we will always have a small section of the whole region in view. Again, we can climb to a mountain top and from there overlook the whole landscape. The details will be indistinct for the ordinary eye, but we have a comprehensive view of the whole.

That approximately describes the relation between what in ordinary life is called human cognition or human science, and what theosophy stands for.

While the ordinary search for human knowledge goes about from detail to detail in the world of facts, theosophy ascends to a high vantage point. This extends the visible horizon, but without the employment of quite special means the possibility of seeing anything at all would vanish. In my book, Knowledge of the Higher Worlds and Its Attainment, is set forth how one can reach this ideal peak without losing the power of clear vision.

But there is a third possibility, lying between the two described. It is to ascend part way, remaining half-way up. At the bottom you cannot survey the whole; you observe only details and see the top from below. At the top, everything is beneath you, and above you have only the divine heavens. In the middle you have something above and something below you, and you can compare the two views.

Any comparison lags and limps, but all that was intended at the moment was to place before you the manner in which in the first instance theosophy differs from anthroposophy. The latter stands in the middle, the former on the summit: it is the point of departure that is different. Thus far the comparison is helpful, but it is inadequate in characterizing what follows.

Devotion to theosophy necessitates rising above human points of view, above the middle, from self to higher self, and it implies the ability to see with the organs of this higher self. The peak attained by theosophy lies above man, ordinary human knowledge, below, and what lies half-way between, that is the human being himself: between nature and the spiritual world. What is above reaches down to him; he is permeated by the spirit. In contemplating the world from a purely human angle, he does not take his point of departure from the summit, but he can see it—see the spirit above. At the same time he sees what is merely nature beneath him; it reaches into him from below. There is a risk connected with theosophy; unless the above-mentioned means are employed to see with the higher self—not with the ordinary self—there is danger of losing contact with the human element, and this results in forfeiting the ability to see anything at all adequate, of recognizing reality below. This danger disappears, however, as soon as those means are employed. Then we can say that theosophy is what comes to light when the God within man says, “Let the God within you speak; what He reveals of the world is theosophy.”

Take your stand between God and Nature and let the human being in you speak. Speak of what is beneath as well as what is above you, and you have anthroposophy. It is the wisdom spoken by man.

This wisdom will prove an important fulcrum, a key to the whole realm of theosophy. After a period of immersion in theosophy, nothing could be more profitable than seriously to seek the firm center of gravity provided by anthroposophy.

All that has been said so far can be historically substantiated in many directions. We have, for example, the science calling itself anthropology. As it is practised, anthropology comprises not only the human being, but everything pertaining to him; all that can be gleaned from nature, everything necessary for understanding man. This science is based on moving about among objects, passing from detail to detail, observing the human being under a microscope. In short, this science, which in the widest circles is regarded as the only one dealing authoritatively with man, takes its view from a point beneath human capacities. It is chained to the ground; it fails to employ all the faculties at the disposal of man, and for this reason it cannot solve the riddles of existence.

Now contrast all this with what you encounter as theosophy. There one searches the most rarefied regions for answers to the burning questions of life. But all those who are unable to keep pace, whose standpoint is anthropology, consider theosophy an air-castle, lacking foundation. They are not able to understand how the soul can ascend step by step to that summit from which all is spread out beneath it. They cannot rise to the planes of imagination, inspiration, and intuition. They cannot ascend to the peak that is the final goal of human evolution.

Thus we find anthropology on the lowest step, theosophy on the summit. What becomes of theosophy when it wants to reach the top but is not in a position to do so with the right means? We can find the answer in the historic example of the German theosophist, Solger, who lived from 1770–1819. Conceptually, his views are theosophical, but what means does he employ to attain the summit? Philosophical concepts, concepts of human cerebration long since sucked dry and emaciated! That is like climbing a mountain for the purpose of observation, and forgetting to take your field-glasses; you can distinguish nothing whatever down below.

In our case the field-glasses are spiritual, and they are called imagination, inspiration, and intuition. Man's ability to reach that peak diminished more and more through the centuries—a fact that was clearly felt and acknowledged as early as the Middle Ages. Today it is felt too, but not acknowledged. In olden times that capacity to ascend existed, as you know, though only to a minor degree. It was based on a clairvoyant twilight condition in man. There really was an ancient theosophy of that sort, but it was written that such revelations from the summit should come to a close, that they should no longer be open to the ordinary means of cognition.

This old theosophy, which considers revelation a thing of the past, became theology, and thus we find theology running parallel with anthropology. Theology's ambition is to climb the heights, but for its means it depends upon something that was once revealed, was then handed down, and is now rigid; something incapable of continually revealing itself anew to the striving soul. Throughout the Middle Ages, anthropology and theology frequently opposed without rejecting each other, but in recent times the contrast is sharp. Nowadays theology is admitted along with anthropology as something scientific, but no bridge is found between the two. If we do not stop with the details but ascend half-way, we can establish anthroposophy by the side of theosophy.

Within modern spiritual life attempts have been made to practise anthroposophy, among other things, but again, as in the case of theosophy, with the wrong, inadequate means of a defunct philosophy. The meaning of philosophy can really no longer be understood by philosophers—only by theosophists. Historical contemplation alone yields this understanding. Philosophy can be comprehended only by contemplating its origin, as can be seen by an illustration. In former times there were the so-called Mysteries, abodes where the higher spiritual life was cultivated, where the neophytes were guided by special methods to spiritual vision. One such Mystery, for example, was in Ephesus, where the neophytes could learn through their training the secrets of Diana of Ephesus; they learned to look into the spiritual worlds. As much of such matters as could be made public was communicated to the profane and received by them, but not all of these realized that higher secrets had been revealed to them. One of those to whom such communications from the Mysteries of Ephesus had penetrated was Heraclitus. He then proclaimed these, by means of his partial initiation, in a way that could be generally understood. In reading the doctrines of Heraclitus, “The Obscure,” we still find immediate experience, the experience of the higher worlds, shining through between the lines. Then came his successors who no longer realized that those doctrines originated in direct experience. They no longer understood them, so they began to improve them, to spin them out in concepts. They began to speculate intellectually, and this method persisted through the generations. Everything we have in the way of philosophy today is but a heritage of ancient doctrines squeezed out and sucked dry of all life, leaving only the skeleton of the concepts. Yet the philosophers take that skeleton for a living reality, for something created by human thinking. There is, as a matter of fact, no such thing as a philosopher who can think creatively without having recourse to the higher worlds.

Just such a skeleton of concepts was all that the philosophers of the nineteenth century had to work with when they took up what may be called anthroposophy. The term actually occurred. Robert Zimmermann wrote a so-called Anthroposophy, but he constructed it of arid, empty concepts. Indeed, everything that has attempted to transcend anthropology without employing the right means has remained a shriveled web of concepts no longer connected with the subject.

Like philosophy, anthroposophy too must be deepened through theosophy; the latter must provide the means for recognizing reality within the spiritual life. Anthroposophy takes the human, the middle standpoint, not the subhuman, as does anthropology. A theosophy, on the other hand, as practised by Solger, though spiritual in its point of view, employs only inflated concepts, and when Solger arrives at the summit he sees nothing. That is spinning at the loom of concepts, not living, spiritual observation. It is something we do not intend to do. We aim in these lectures to confront the reality of human life in its entirety. We shall encounter the old subjects of observation, now illuminated, however, from a different point whence the view is both upward and downward.

The human being is the most important subject of our observation. We need but to contemplate his physical body to realize what a complicated being he is. In order to gain a sentient understanding of anthroposophy's aims, let us first ponder the following. The complicated physical body as we encounter it today is the product of a long evolution. Its first germinal potentiality came into being on old Saturn, and it evolved further on the old Sun, the old Moon, and the Earth. The etheric body was added to it on the Sun, the astral body on the Moon. Now, these members of the human being have changed in the course of evolution, and what we encounter today as the complicated physical human body, with heart, kidneys, eyes, ears and so forth, is the product of a long development. It has all grown out of a simple germinal form that originated on Saturn. Through millions and millions of years it has continually changed and been transformed in order that it might achieve its present perfection. If today we wish to understand a member or an organ of this physical body—say, the heart or the lungs—we can do so only on the basis of this evolution. Nothing of what we encounter today as the heart existed on the old Saturn. Only gradually did these organs assume their present form, one being developed and incorporated earlier, another later. Some organs we can actually designate Sun-organs, as having first appeared during the Sun evolution, others Moon-organs, and so on. If we would understand the present physical body of man we must assemble our concepts from the whole Universe—that is the theosophical method of observation.

How does anthropology set to work? Theosophy ascends to the ultimate heights and from this spiritual summit examines individual phenomena. Anthropology remains on the ground, takes its point of departure from the details, and now even investigates individual cells in their juxtaposition. Everything is mechanically lined up and the cells are studied individually, but this does not reveal their relative age. Yet, far from being immaterial, it is important to know whether a given group of cells developed on the Sun or on the Moon. Much more could be said concerning these complicated conditions. Consider, for example, the human heart. True, as constituted today it evolved late, but as regards its first germinal potentiality it is one of the oldest human organs. During the period of the old Sun, the heart was dependent upon the forces governing there. During the Moon period its development continued; then the Sun withdrew from the Moon, with which it had been united, and henceforth its forces acted upon the heart from without. Here the heart underwent a different development, so that from then on a Sun element and a Moon element can be observed in its tendencies. Then Earth, Sun, and Moon were united again and worked upon the heart. After a pralaya the Earth evolution followed, during which the Sun first withdrew again. This separation resulted in an intensification of the Sun's influence from without. Then the Moon withdrew as well and also acted upon the heart from without. So, being among the oldest human organs, the heart comprises a Sun element, a Moon element, a second Sun element during the Earth evolution, a second Moon element during the Earth evolution, and finally, after the withdrawal of the Earth, an Earth element—all corresponding to cosmic evolution.

If these elements of the heart accord, as in the cosmic harmony, the heart is healthy; if any one element preponderates, it is sick. All human sickness derives from disharmony among the elements within the organ in question while their cosmic counterparts are in harmony. All healing depends upon strengthening the element that lacks its share, or subduing superfluous activity, as the case may be, thereby bringing the elements into harmony again. But talking about this harmony is not enough. In order to effect it one must really penetrate into the wisdom of the universe; one must be able to recognize the different elements in each organ. That will suffice to give an idea of genuine occult physiology and anatomy, which comprehend the whole human being out of the whole cosmos and explain the details out of the spirit.

Occult physiology speaks of Sun and Moon elements of the heart, larynx, brain, and so forth, but since all these elements are at work upon man himself, something in him confronts us today in which all these elements are consolidated. If we look into the human being himself and understand these elements, we also understand the etheric body, the astral body, etc., the sentient soul, the intellectual soul and the consciousness soul, as man is constituted today. That is anthroposophy, and in anthroposophy, too, we must start at the lowest step, gradually ascending to the highest.

Man's lowest member is the physical body that he has in common with the sensory world that is perceived through the senses and the sensory-physical mind. The theosophical point of view, starting from the universe, contemplates man in his cosmic contexts. In the matter of the sensory-physical world, anthroposophy must start from man, in so far as he is a sensory being. Only then can we deal appropriately with the etheric body, then the astral body, the ego, and so forth, and what is to be learned from them.

Observing the human being in this anthroposophical sense, we ask what it is that must first engage our interest. It is his senses, and it is through these that he acquires knowledge of the physical-sensory world. Starting from the physical plane, it is therefore these that anthroposophy must consider first. Let the study of the human senses then constitute our first chapter. Thereafter we will ascend to the study of the individual spiritual regions in man's nature.

Beginning with the study of the human senses, we at once find anthroposophy invading the territory of anthropology, for anthroposophy must invariably start from all that the senses tell us is real. But it must keep in mind that what is spiritual, influences man from above. In this sense it is genuine anthropology. Ordinary anthropology has thrown everything pertaining to the human senses into complete confusion, groping its way from detail to detail and examining only what is on the ground, so to speak. Important matters are disregarded because men have no Ariadne-thread to lead them out of the labyrinth of facts into the light. Anthropology cannot find its way out of this maze and must fall a victim to the Minotaur of illusion, for the saving thread can be spun only by spiritual research.

Even in the matter of the human senses, anthroposophy has a different story to tell than has external observation. At the same time it is interesting to note how external science has lately been forced by material facts to go to work more thoroughly, seriously and carefully. There is nothing more trivial than the enumeration of the five senses: feeling (touch), smell, taste, hearing, and sight. We shall see what confusion reigns in this enumeration. Science, it is true, has now added three more senses to the list, but as yet doesn't seem to know what to do about them. We will now list the human senses according to their real significance, and we will endeavor in the following to start laying the foundations of an anthroposophical doctrine of the senses.

The first sense in question is the one that in spiritual science can be called the sense of life. That is a real sense and must be as fully acknowledged as the sense of sight. What is it? It is something in the human being of which, when it functions normally he is not aware. He feels it only when it is out of order. We feel lassitude, or hunger and thirst, or a sense of strength in the organism; we perceive these as we do a color or a tone. We are aware of them as an inner experience. But as a rule we are conscious of this feeling only when something is out of order, otherwise it remains unobserved. The sense of life furnishes the first human self-perception; it is the sense through which the whole inner man becomes conscious of his corporeality. That is the first sense, and it must figure in the list just as does hearing or smell. Nobody can understand the human being and the senses who knows nothing of this sense that enables him to feel himself an inner entity.

We discover the second sense when we move a limb—say, raise an arm. We would not be human beings if we could not perceive our own movements. A machine is not aware of its own motion; that is possible only for a living being through the medium of a real sense. The sense of perceiving our own movements—anything from blinking to walking or running—we call the sense of our own movements.

We become aware of a third sense by realizing that the human being distinguishes within himself between above and below. It is dangerous for him to lose this perception, for in that case he totters and falls over. The human body contains a delicate organ connected with this sense: the three semicircular canals in the ear. When these are injured we lose our sense of balance. This third sense is the static sense, or sense of balance. (In the animal kingdom there is something analogous: the otoliths, tiny stones that must lie in a certain position if the animal is to maintain its equilibrium.)

These are the three senses through which man perceives something within himself, as it were; by their means he feels something within himself.

Now we emerge from the inner man to the point at which an interaction with the outer world begins. The first of such reciprocal relations arises when man assimilates physical matter and, by doing so, perceives it. Matter can be perceived only when it really unites with the body. This cannot be done by solid or fluid matter, but only by gaseous substances that then penetrate the bodily matter. You can perceive smell only when some body sends out gaseous matter that penetrates the organs of the mucous membrane of the nose. The fourth sense, then, is the sense of smell, and it is the first one through which the human being enters into reciprocal relationship with the outer world.

When we no longer merely perceive matter but take the first step into matter itself, we have the fifth sense. We enter into a deeper relationship with such matter. Here matter must be active, which implies that it must have some effect upon us. This takes place when a liquid or a dissolved solid comes in contact with the tongue and unites with what the tongue itself secretes. The reciprocal relationship between man and nature has become a more intimate one. We become aware not only of what things are, as matter, but of what they can induce. That is the sense of taste, the fifth sense.

Now we come to the sixth sense. Again there is an increase in the intimacy of the interaction. We penetrate still deeper into matter, things reveal more of their essence. This can only occur, however, through special provisions. The sense of smell is the more primitive of these two kinds of senses. In the case of smell, the human body takes matter as it is and makes no effort to penetrate it. Taste, where man and matter unite more intimately, is more complicated; then, matter yields more. The next step offers the possibility of penetrating still more deeply into the outer world. This takes place by reason of an external material substance being either transparent or opaque, or by the manner in which it permits light to pass through it, that is, how it is colored. An object that rays out green light is internally so constituted that it can reflect green light and no other. The outermost surface of things is revealed to us in the sense of smell, something of their inner nature in taste, something of their inner essence in sight. Hence the complicated structure of the eye, which leads us much deeper into the essence of things than does the nose or the tongue. The sixth sense, then, is the sense of sight.

We proceed, penetrating still deeper into matter. For example, when the eye sees a rose as red, the inner nature of the rose is proclaimed by its surface. We see only the surface, but since this is conditioned by the inner nature of the rose we become acquainted, to a certain extent, with this inner nature. If we touch a piece of ice or some hot metal, not only the surface and thereby the inner nature are revealed, but the real consistency as well because what is externally cold or hot is cold or hot through and through. The sense of temperature, the seventh, carries us still more intimately into the fundamental conditions of objects.

Now we ask ourselves if it is possible to penetrate into the nature of objects still more deeply than through this seventh sense. Yes, that can be done when objects show us not only their nature through and through, as in the case of temperature, but their most inner essence; that is what they do when they begin to sound. The temperature is even throughout objects. Tone causes their inner nature to vibrate, and it is through tone that we perceive the inner mobility of objects. When we strike an object its inner nature is revealed to us in tone, and we can distinguish among objects according to their inner nature, according to their inner vibration, when we open our inner ear to their tone. It is the soul of objects that speaks to our own soul in tones. That is the eighth sense, the sense of hearing.

If we would find an answer to the question as to whether there exist still higher senses, we must proceed cautiously. We must beware of confusing what is really a sense with other terms and expressions. For example, in ordinary life—down below, where much confusion exists—we hear of a sense of imitation, a sense of secrecy, and others. That is wrong. A sense becomes effective at the moment when we achieve perception and before mental activity sets in. We speak of a sense as of something that functions before our capacity for reasoning has come into action. To perceive color you need a sense, but for judging between two colors you do not.

This brings us to the ninth sense. We arrive at it by realizing that in truth there is in man a certain power of perception—one that is especially important in substantiating anthroposophy—a power of perception not based on reasoning, yet present in him. It is what men perceive when they understand each other through speech. A real sense underlies the perception of what is transmitted to us through speech. That is the ninth sense, the sense of speech.

The child learns to speak before he learns to reason. A whole people has a language in common, but reasoning is a matter for the individual. What speaks to the senses is not subject to the mental activity of the individual. The perception of the meaning of a sound is not mere hearing because the latter tells us only of the inner oscillations of the object. There must be a special sense for the meaning of what is expressed in speech. That is why the child learns to speak, or at least to understand what is spoken, before he learns to reason. It is, in fact, only through speech that he learns to reason. The sense of speech is an educator during the child's first years, exactly like hearing and sight. We cannot alter what a sense perceives, cannot impair anything connected with it. We perceive a color, but our judgment can neither change nor vitiate it; the same thing is true of the sense of speech when we perceive the inner significance of the speech sound. It is indispensable to designate the sense of speech as such. It is the ninth.

Finally we come to the tenth sense, the highest in the realm of ordinary life. It is the concept sense, which enables us perceptively to comprehend concepts not expressed through speech sounds. In order to reason we must have concepts. If the mind is to become active, it must first be able to perceive the concept in question, and this calls for the concept sense, which is exactly as much a sense by itself as is taste or smell.

Now I have enumerated ten senses and have not mentioned the sense of touch. What about it? Well, a method of observation lacking the spiritual thread confuses everything. Touch is usually tossed in with our seventh sense, temperature. Only in this meaning, however, as the sense of temperature, has it in the first instance any significance. True, the skin can be called the organ of the temperature sense—the same skin that serves also as the organ of the touch sense. But we touch not only when we touch [TRANSLATOR'S NOTE: The verb tasten can mean “to touch.” Indeed, the sense of touch is der Tastsinn, but more often it signifies something like our “groping,” as one gropes in the dark by means of the sense of touch: “feeling around for something.” In this sentence the first “touch” is to be understood in this sense, the second (berühren) as meaning “to come in contact with.”] the surface of an object. We touch when the eye seeks something, when the tongue tastes something, when the nose smells something. Touching is a quality common to the fourth to seventh senses. All of these are senses of touch.

Up to and including the sense of temperature we can speak of touching. Hearing we can no longer describe as touching; at least, the quality is present only to a small degree. In the senses of speech and concepts it is wholly absent. These three senses we therefore designate as the senses of comprehension and understanding. The first three senses inform us concerning the inner man. Reaching the boundary between the inner and the outer world, the fourth sense leads us into this outer world, and by means of the other three we penetrate it ever more deeply. Through the senses of touch we perceive the outer world on the surface, and through those of comprehension we learn to understand things, we reach their soul. Later we will deal with other senses transcending these.

Below the sense of smell, then, there are three senses that bring us messages out of our own human inner being. The sense of smell is the first to lead us into the outer world, into which we then penetrate deeper and deeper by means of the others. But what I have described to you today does not exhaust the list of senses. It was only an excerpt from the whole, and there is something below and something above the ten mentioned. From the concept sense we can continue upward to a first astral sense, arriving at the senses that penetrate the spiritual world. There we find an eleventh, a twelfth and a thirteenth sense. These three astral senses will lead us deeper into the fundamentals of external objects, deep down where concepts cannot penetrate. The concept halts before the external, just as the sense of smell halts before the inner man.

What I have given you is an urgently needed foundation upon which to build cognition of the human being. Through its neglect in the nineteenth century, everything pertaining even to philosophy and the theory of knowledge has been most horribly jumbled. Merely generalizing, people ask what the human being can learn by means of the individual sense, and they cannot even explain the difference between hearing and sight. Scientists talk about light waves in the same way they do about sound waves, without taking into account that sight does not penetrate as deeply as hearing. Through hearing we enter the soul-nature of things, and we shall see that by means of the eleventh, twelfth, and thirteenth senses we penetrate their spirit as well: we enter the spirit of nature. Each sense has a different nature and a different character.

For this reason a great number of expositions given today, especially in physics, concerning the nature of sight and its relation to its surroundings may be regarded unhesitatingly as theories that have never reckoned with the true nature of the senses. Countless errors have arisen from this misconception of the nature of the senses. That must be emphasized, because it is quite impossible for popular representations to do justice to what has here been set forth. You read things written by people who can have no possible inkling of the inner nature of the senses. We must understand that science, from its standpoint, cannot do other than take a different attitude. It is inevitable that science should spread errors, because in the course of evolution the real nature of the senses was forgotten.

This true nature of the senses is the first chapter of anthroposophy.

The last few years have shown what intense feelings of hatred and antipathy are capable of flowing through the souls of the peoples of the Earth. In his life of feeling, at any rate, no one can blind himself to the truth that earthly life can never progress fruitfully along such paths. And so it may be useful today to speak of elements which, in the light of spiritual-scientific knowledge, can unite at all events the whole of civilised mankind.

Knowledge and feeling, of course, are two very different matters, but spiritual-scientific knowledge is much more intimately bound up with the whole being of man, with his innermost nature, than are the abstract truths current in the world of materialism. The truths of Spiritual Science are able to kindle ideas, feelings and impulses of will in human beings. Inner strength develops from a spiritual-scientific knowledge of the elements uniting the different peoples of the Earth and this also intensifies feelings of sympathy and mutual love.

Just as it is true that in the course of evolution man has progressed from an instinctive and unconscious to a conscious life, to a full and free understanding of his mission, so, as regards the future it must be said that vague sentimentality alone will not suffice to unite the peoples of the Earth. A conscious and mutual understanding of what the one may expect of the other—that is what is needed.

In another sphere of life it is comparatively easy today to see the necessity for this unification of men all over the Earth, for we have but to look at the disastrous things that are happening in the world of economics. When we seek for the root cause of these disasters and destructive tendencies, we realise that a striving to make the whole Earth into one economic sphere is an unconscious urge in the whole of mankind today. On the other hand, the peoples of the Earth have not yet reached the point of ennobling their national egoisms sufficiently to enable a collective economy of the whole Earth to arise out of the economic values they individually create. One nation tries to outdo the other in matters of economic advantage. Unreal points of view thus arise among the peoples, whereas the new instincts of mankind call out for a common economic life of the whole Earth—in effect an Earth economy. The leading minds of the times are forever laying stress upon this. There is indeed a striving for a uniform Earth economy in contrast to the separate national economies which have existed right up to the twentieth century, and it is this opposition of the national economies to an Earth economy that has caused the present havoc in economic life.

When it is a question of one nation understanding another or assimilating its spiritual riches, it is not enough simply to travel among other peoples or to be led there by destiny. Mere knowledge of everyday dealings between man and man will never bring about mutual understanding between the peoples. To travel and live among other peoples is not enough, any more than cursory observation of a man's gestures and movements enables us to understand his whole being. It is true that if one has a feeling for such things, a great deal may be conjectured about the inner being of another man from his gestures and movements, but if circumstances are such that his speech is understood, the knowledge is much more fundamental, for one can then receive from him what his own inner being wants to communicate. Is it then possible for something akin to this transmission of inner force, of inner being, to arise between peoples and nations? It cannot inhere merely in speech or language or in those things we observe in the daily life of the peoples, for this is but the intercourse between man and man. Something which transcends the individual human element must be revealed by knowing and understanding another man. We are really faced with a difficulty when we want to speak intelligibly of a nation or people as an entity. Is there anything as real as an external object, as real as external life, which justifies us in speaking of a nation or a people as an entity? We can speak of an individual human being merely from sense-perception of him; but for sense-perception a nation or a people is only a totality of so many individuals. Before we can recognise a nation as a reality we must rise to the super-sensible—it is the only way.

Now a man who undergoes spiritual training, who develops those forces of super-sensible knowledge which otherwise lie slumbering in his daily life, will gradually begin to see a nation or a people as a real being—of a super-sensible order, of course. When he perceives the spiritual, a foreign people is revealed to him as a spiritual being, a super-sensible reality, which—if I may use a somewhat crude expression—pervades and envelops the sense-nature of the individuals belonging to it, like a cloud. Supersensible knowledge alone enables us to penetrate into the real being of a nation or a people, and super-sensible knowledge cannot be acquired merely from the observation of daily life. I want to speak in outline today of how Spiritual Science strives to gain a really profound knowledge of the relationships among the peoples of the Earth. And here it is above all necessary to understand the being of man in the light of Spiritual Science. In a previous lecture here, as well as in my book Riddles of the Soul, published a few years ago, I said that man, as he stands before us in daily life, is not a unitary being, but that three divisions or members, clearly distinct from each other, are revealed in his bodily structure.

In the human organism we have, in the first place, all that is related to and centralised in the head system—the so-called system of nerves and senses. By means of this system man has his sense-perceptions, his thoughts and ideas. Today, as the result of an unenlightened science, it is thought that the whole being of Spirit and soul in man is based upon the system of nerves and senses—is, in fact, a kind of parasite upon the rest of the organism. This is not so. If a brief personal reference is permissible, I may say that more than thirty years' study of the nature and being of man—a study which has always tried to reconcile Spiritual Science with the results of natural science—has led me to confirm this threefold nature of the human organism. It is a general assumption of modern natural science that the life of Spirit and soul runs parallel with the life of nerves and Senses. In reality it is only the thought-life of man that is bound to the system of nerves and senses. Sentient life (feeling) is bound up with the rhythmic processes in the human organism. The feeling-life of man is connected directly with the rhythms of breathing and blood circulation, just as the life of thought and perception is connected with the system of nerves and senses. Similarly, the life of will is connected with the metabolic system (digestion and assimilation) in man. The seemingly lowest division of the human organism—the metabolic system (in the sense of a process, of course, and not of substance)—is the bearer of man's life of will.

In his nature of soul and Spirit, man is also a threefold being. The spiritual will, the feeling-life of the soul, the thinking, ideation and perception directed to external material phenomena—these are the three members or divisions of man's nature of soul and Spirit. These three members correspond to the three members of the physical organism—to the system of nerves and senses, to the rhythmic life of blood circulation and breathing, and to the metabolic life.

Now if we observe human beings in any given regions of the earth, we find that in terms of this threefold organisation they are by no means absolutely the same the whole Earth over. Another great error in modern thought is to imagine that one common social programme could be issued for the whole of the Earth and that men could adjust themselves to it. Human beings are individualised, specialized, in the different regions of the Earth. And those who would learn to know the true being of man as he lives on the Earth must be able to develop love not only for an abstract, universal humanity—for that would be merely an ‘idea’ of humanity, a dead, empty idea. Those who would really understand their fellow-beings must develop love for the individual forms and expressions of human nature in the different regions of the Earth.

In the short time at our disposal it is impossible to characterise all the individual peoples. All that can be done is to consider the main types of earthly humanity. We are led, in the first place, to a very characteristic type and also one of the very oldest—to the oriental, as expressed in many different ways in the ancient Indian peoples and in other Eastern races. This oriental type reveals one common element, especially in the Indian people. The man of the East has grown together, as it were, with the Earth which is his own soil. However clearly it may appear that the oriental has received the Spirit with intense devotion into his heart and soul, however deeply oriental mysticism may impress us, if we study the racial characteristics of the oriental, we shall find that the lofty spirituality we so justly admire is dependent, in his case, upon the experiences of the will flowing in the human being, the will that is, in turn, bound up with the metabolic processes. However paradoxical it may appear at first sight, this very spirituality of the oriental peoples, and especially of the ancient Indian, is something that—to use a crude expression—wells up from the metabolic processes. These processes are, in turn, connected with the processes of Nature in the environment of the oriental. Think of the Indian in very ancient times. Around him are the trees and fruits, everything that Nature in her beauty and wonder gives to man. The oriental unites this with the metabolic processes within him in such a way that the metabolism becomes a kind of continuation of all that is ripening to fruit on the trees and living under the soil in the roots. In his metabolic nature, the oriental has grown together with the fertility and well-being of the Earth. The metabolic process is the bearer of the will—hence the will develops in the inner being of man. But that which develops in the innermost being, in which man is firmly rooted and by means of which he relates himself to his environment—this does not enter very vividly into consciousness. A different element streams into the conscious life of the oriental. Into the feeling and thinking life of the oriental—especially of the most characteristic type—the Indian—there streams something that to all appearance is experienced in the metabolic processes in a material sense. In its spiritual ‘mirror-image,’ however, it appears as spiritual life.

Thus when we enter into all that has come forth from the soul and the thought of the really creative peoples of the East, it appears as a spiritual product of the Earth itself. When we steep ourselves in the Vedas that we pervaded by the light of the Spirit and speak with such intensity to our souls, if we respond to the instinctive subtlety of Vedanta and Yoga philosophy or go deeply into such works as those of Lao Tzu and Confucius, or are drawn to devote ourselves to oriental poetry, oriental wisdom, we never feel that it flows in an individual form from a human personality. Through his metabolic processes the oriental grows together with Nature around him. Nature lives and works on, seethes and surges within him, and when we allow his poetic wisdom to work upon us, it is as though the Earth herself were speaking. The mysteries of the Earth's growth seem to speak to mankind through the lips of the man of the East. We feel that no Western or Central European people could ever interpret the inner Spiritual mysteries of the Earth herself in this way.

The highest types of oriental peoples seem to move over the face of the Earth, expressing in their inner life something that really lives under the surface of the Earth. This grows up from below the Earth and bursts forth in blossoms and fruits, just as it does in the Spirit and soul of the man of the East. The inner essence of the Earth becomes articulate, as it were, in the oriental peoples. We can therefore understand that in accordance with their whole being, they have less feeling for the physical phenomena on the surface of the Earth and the external facts of the material world. Their innermost nature is one with the sub-earthly forces of which the external sense-phenomena are the outcome. They are therefore less concerned with what is taking place on the surface of the Earth. They are ‘metabolic-men.’ But the metabolic processes are expressed, in their case, in the life of soul and Spirit.

Now when an ideal arises before the peoples of the East, what form does it take? The injunction given to pupils by oriental sages was somewhat as follows: ‘You must breathe in a certain way; you must enter into the rhythm of life.’ These teachers instructed their pupils in certain rhythms of breathing and blood circulation. The way in which they taught their pupils of the higher life of soul is highly characteristic. The whole organisation of man as we see him in the ordinary life of the East, belonging to an Asiatic people, and especially to a Southern Asiatic people, is based upon metabolism. When he forms a concrete ideal of how he can become higher man, he develops his rhythmic system, by an act of free-will he strives for something that is higher, that is not given him by Nature.

Now the strange thing is that the further we pass from the Asiatic to the European peoples, and especially to those of Middle Europe, we find an outstanding development of the rhythmic system in the ordinary daily life of man. The peoples, not of Eastern or of Western Europe, but of Middle Europe, possess as a natural characteristic that for which the Indian strives as his ideal of a superman. But it is one thing to have to acquire a quality by dint of self-discipline and free spiritual activity, and another to possess it naturally and instinctively. The man of Middle Europe possesses by nature what the oriental has to develop from out of his metabolic life which is inwardly connected with the Earth. Thus, what is for the oriental an ideal, is for the European a natural possession of daily life; his ideal, therefore, must necessarily be different. The ideal of the European lies one stage higher; it is the life of thought bound up with the life of nerves and senses.

There is a quality of unbridled phantasy in the artistic creations of the oriental. It seems to rise from inner Earth activity, just as vapour rises from water into the clouds. The inner, rhythmic ‘wholeness,’ which is the essence of the life of Middle Europe, enabled the ancient Greek people—who accomplished so much for the whole of modern civilisation—to create what we call European Art. The Greek strove for all that makes manifest the inner harmony of earthly man. The material elements and the etheric-spiritual elements are balanced—and the ‘middle’ man is expressed. The creations of oriental phantasy always run to excess in some direction or other. It is in the artistic conceptions of Greece that the human form was first imbued with harmonious roundness and inner wholeness. This was because man realised his true being in the rhythmic system. When the man of Greece set himself an ideal, it was one he strove to reach by dint of inner discipline of soul, by dint of education. He used the organ of thinking just as the oriental uses the organs connected with rhythm in the human being. The Yogi of India endeavours to regulate his breathing according to the laws of Spirit and soul so that it may bear him above the level of ordinary humanity. The man of Middle Europe trains himself to rise above the instinctive processes of the rhythmic system, of the blood circulation, of the breathing, to what makes him truly man. Out of this the life of thought is developed. But these thoughts, especially in the highest type of Middle European, become merely an ‘interpreter’ of the being of man. This is what strikes us when we turn to the productions of European culture after having steeped ourselves in those of oriental humanity. In the highly spiritual creations of oriental culture we see, as it were, the very blossoming of earthly evolution. Human lips give expression to the speech of the Earth herself. It is not so in the man of Middle European nor was it so in the ancient Greek.

When the man of Middle Europe follows the promptings of his own true nature, when he is not false to himself, when he realises that self-knowledge is the noblest crown of human endeavour, that the representation of the human in Nature and in history is a supreme achievement of man—then he will express as his ideal everything that he himself is as a human being. The very essence of the man of Middle Europe is expressed when he gives free play to his own inherent being. Hence we can understand that the wonderful thought expressed in Goethe's book on Winckelmann could arise only in Middle Europe. I refer to the passage where Goethe summarises the lofty perceptions, profound thought and strong will-impulses of this wonderful man into a description of his own conception of the world, for it is like the very sun of modern culture: “In that man is placed on Nature's pinnacle, he regards himself as another entire Nature, whose task is to bring forth inwardly yet another pinnacle. For this purpose he heightens his powers, imbues himself with perfections and virtues—summons discrimination, order and harmony and rises finally to the production of a work of art.” Man's own spiritual nature gives birth to a new being.

This application of all the forces to the understanding of man himself is especially manifest in the man of Middle Europe—when he is true to his own being. It is only in more modern times that this has fallen into the background. The man of Middle Europe has every motive to consider how he should develop this veneration, understanding and penetration of what is truly human.

If we now look at the East and its peoples from a more purely spiritual point of view, we shall find that the oriental peoples, just because they are ‘metabolic men,’ develop the spirituality which constitutes the connection between the human soul and the Divine. If man's nature is to be complete, he must bring forth, in his inner being, those qualities with which he is not endowed by the elemental world; in his own consciousness he must awaken the antithesis of all that he possesses by nature. Thus the oriental develops a spirituality which makes him conscious of the connection between the human soul and the Divine. The oriental can speak of man's connection with the Divine as a matter of course, in a way that is possible to no other race, in words that touch the very heart. Other peoples of the Earth may subjugate and conquer oriental races and try to instil into them their own idiosyncrasies, laws and regulations, but they do, nevertheless, assimilate what the East has to say about the connection of man with the Divine as something which applies to themselves also.

In modern times we have seen how Western peoples, steeped in materialism though they may be, turn to oriental philosophers such as ancient Laotze to Chinese and Indian conceptions of the world, not so much in search of ideas but in order to find the inner fervour which will enable them to experience man's connection with the Divine. Men steep themselves in oriental literature much more in order that their feelings may be warmed by the way in which the oriental speaks of his connection with the Divine than for the sake of any philosophical content. The abstract nature of the European makes it difficult for him really to understand oriental philosophy. Again and again people who have studied the sayings of Buddha, with all their endless repetitions, have expressed the opinion to me that these sayings ought to be abridged and the repetitions eliminated. My only answer could be: ‘You have no real understanding of the true greatness of oriental philosophy, for it is expressed in the very repetitions which you want to cut out.’ When the oriental steeps himself in the sayings of Buddha, with the repetitions which only irritate people of the West, he is on the way to his ideal the rhythmic recurrence of the motif. The same phrase is repeated over and over again. Now, as we have seen, the oriental lives naturally in the processes of the metabolic system. When he gives himself up to the recurring phrases of Buddha, there arises within him a spiritual counterpart of the system of breathing and blood circulation; he has brought this about by dint of his own free endeavours.

If a European really tries to understand all that is great and holy in the oriental nature, he gains a knowledge which will elude him unless he consciously develops it. It is quite natural that the European should want to eliminate the repetitions in the sayings of Buddha, for he lives in the breathing rhythm and his ideal is to raise himself to the element of thought. When the thought is once grasped he wants no repetitions—he strives to get beyond them. If we are to study these oriental repetitions, we must, in effect, develop another kind of quality—not an intellectual understanding but an inner love for what is expressed in individual forms by the different peoples. Our whole attitude should make us realise that the particular qualities which make one people great are not possessed by the others, and we can understand these qualities only when we are able to love the other Peoples and appreciate the full value of their particular gifts.

It is just when we penetrate into the inner nature and essence of the Peoples of the Earth that we find the differences of their individual natures. And then we realise that the all-embracing sphere of the ‘human’ is not expressed in its entirety through any individual man, or through the members of any one race, but only through the whole of mankind. If anyone would understand what he is in his whole being, let him study the characteristics of the different peoples of the Earth. Let him assimilate the qualities which he himself cannot possess by nature, for only then will he become fully man. Full and complete manhood is a possibility for everyone. Everyone should pay heed to what lives in his own inner being. The revelation vouchsafed to other peoples is not his and he must find it in them. In his heart he feels and knows that this is necessary. If he discovers what is great and characteristic in the other peoples and allows this to penetrate deeply into his own being, he will realise that the purpose of his existence cannot be fulfilled without these other qualities, because they are also part of his own inner striving. The possibility of full manhood lies in every individual, but it must be brought to fulfilment by understanding the special characteristics of the different peoples spread over the Earth. It is in the East, then, that man is able to express with a kind of natural spirituality his connection with the Divine.

When we turn to the peoples of Middle Europe, we find that what is truly characteristic of them is hidden under layers of misconception—and these must be cleared away. Think of all the great philosophers who, having thought about Nature and God in a human sense, have with almost no exception raised another question as well. Nearly every great German Philosopher has been occupied with the question of equity, of rights as between man and man. The search for equity, misunderstood and hindered though it be, is a characteristic of the Middle European peoples. Those who do not recognise this have no understanding of the peoples of Middle Europe, and nothing will divert them from the prevailing materialism (which has quite another source) back to what is fundamentally characteristic of true Teutonic stock.

Just as the man of the East is the interpreter of the Earth because his spiritual life is a blossom or fruit of the Earth herself, so is the Teuton an interpreter of himself, of his own being. He faces himself questioningly, and because of this he faces every other man as his equal. The burning question for him, therefore, is that of equity, of right. Wherever Teutonic thought has striven to fathom the depths of the universe, in men such as Fichte, Hegel or Schelling, it has never been a question of adopting the old Roman tradition of equity but of investigating its very nature and essence. The abstract results of these investigations, to be found in Fichte, Hegel, Schelling and Humboldt, are fundamentally the same thing as we find in Goethe when he seeks along multifarious paths for the expression of the truth, harmony and fullness of man's nature. In this sense Goethe is the representative of the Teutonic, Middle European nature. Just as the oriental faces the Earth, so does the Middle European face man, with self-knowledge.

If we pass to Western Europe and thence to America, we find the figure of the true Westerner expressed in abstract thinking. To use a figure of speech employed, I believe, by that deeply spiritual writer, Rabindranath Tagore, the Westerner is pre-eminently a ‘head-man.’ The oriental is a ‘heart-man,’ for he experiences the process of metabolism in his heart; the Middle European is the ‘breath-man.’ He stands in a rhythmic relationship to the outer world through the rhythmic processes within him. The Westerner is a head-man and Tagore compares him to a ‘spiritual giraffe.’ Tagore loves the Westerner, for when it is a question of describing characteristics, sympathy and antipathy do not necessarily come into play. Tagore compares the Westerner to a spiritual giraffe because he raises everything into abstractions—into abstractions such as gave rise, for instance, to the ‘Fourteen Points’ of President Wilson. Speaking in the sense of spiritual reality, one feels that the Westerner's head is separated from the rest of his body by a long neck and the head can only express in abstract concepts what it offers to the world. A long path has to be trodden before these abstract concepts, these husks of words and ideas, finds their way to the heart, the lungs and the breathing system, and so to the region where they can become feelings and pass over into will.

The characteristic quality of the Western man inheres, then, in what I will call the thinking system. The ideal for which the Middle European strives—which he endeavours to attain as a result of freedom, of free spiritual activity—does not have to be striven for by the Westerner and especially not by the American through this free Spiritual activity, for the Westerner possesses it instinctively. Instinctively he is a man of abstractions. As I have said, it is not the same to possess a quality instinctively as to strive for it by dint of effort. When it has once been acquired it is bound up with man's nature in quite another way. To acquire a quality by dint of free spiritual activity is not the same thing as to possess it instinctively, as a gift of Nature.

Now here lies a great danger. Whereas the Indian in his Yoga philosophy strives upwards to the rhythmic system, and the Middle European to the thinking system, the Westerner, the ‘spiritual giraffe,’ must transcend the merely intellectual processes if he is not to lose his true humanity. As I recently said quite frankly to a gathering attended by a number of Westerners, this is the great responsibility facing the West at the present time. In the case of the Middle Europeans it will be a healthy, free striving that leads them to spirituality, to Spiritual Science. The whole nature of Western man will be lost in an abyss, if, as he strives to rise beyond the thinking-system, he falls into an empty ‘spiritualism,’ seeking for the qualities of soul in a region where the soul does not dwell. Here lies the danger, but also the great responsibility. The danger is that the Westerner may fall into soul-emptiness as he strives to transcend the qualities bestowed on him by Nature; his responsibility is to allow himself to be led to true Spiritual Science, lest by virtue of his dominant position in the world he should lend himself to the downfall of humanity.

It is a solemn duty of the peoples of Middle Europe—for it is part of their nature—to ascend the ladder to spiritual knowledge. But on their path of ascent from the rhythmic, breathing-system to the thinking-system, they gain something else in the sphere of the human. The danger confronting Western peoples is that they may leave the sphere of the human when they set up an ideal for themselves. This really lies at the root of the existence of the many sectarian movements in the West—movements which run counter to the principle of the ‘universal human’ at the present time.

In the oriental, whose metabolic system is so closely related to the Earth, a spiritual activity along the paths or Nature herself arises. The man of the West, with his predominantly developed thinking-system, turns his gaze primarily to the world of sense. It is as though something under the surface of the Earth were working in the oriental; the man of the West seems to pay heed only to what is above the Earth's surface, the phenomena which arise as a result of sun, moon, stars, air, water and the like. The thought-processes themselves, however, have not been derived from what is happening at the periphery. I said in a previous lecture that the spiritual in man cannot be explained by the study of the earthly world around him. The spiritual fruits of the Earth arise in the very being of the true oriental and he knows himself, as man, with the living Spirit within him, to be a Citizen of the whole Cosmos—a member not only of the Earth but of the whole Cosmos. The Westerner, with his more highly developed thinking-system, has been deprived of this Cosmos by modern science, and is left with nothing but the possibility to calculate it in mathematical and mechanical formulae. The Westerner must realise that the origin of his soul is cosmic, that indeed he could not exist as a thinking being if this were not so, and he must also realise cold, barren mathematics is the only science which remains to him for the purpose of explaining the Cosmos. The outpourings of the Earth herself have become part of the very being of the oriental—his poetic wisdom is like a blossom of the Earth. The Middle European has to recognise that his essential human quality is revealed in man and through man. In effect the human being confronts himself.

The qualities of most value in the man of the West are those bestowed not by the Earth, but by the Cosmos. But the only means he has of approaching these cosmic, super-sensible gifts is by mathematical calculation, by equally dry spectral analysis or by similar hypotheses. What the Middle European seeks as an expression of equity between man and man is sought by the Westerner through his dedication to economic affairs, for the human rights he values as an expression of the spirit seem to him to emerge only as the fruit of economic life. Hence it is not surprising that Karl Marx left Germany, where he might have learnt to recognise the nature of man in a Goethean, humanistic sense, and went to the West, to England, where his gaze was diverted from the truly human element and he was misled with the belief that what man can know is nothing but an ideology, a fact of economic life. This is not a truth in the absolute sense, but is fundamental to the nature of the man of the West, just as it is fundamental to the oriental peoples to behold Nature side by side with the being of man and then to speak of the connection of the human soul with the Divine as a self-evident fact. That is why many men of the West who feel the necessity for looking up to the Divine—for, as I have already said, all men feel the need at least to become complete man—are aware of a longing, even when they try to conquer oriental peoples, to receive from them what they have to say about man's connection with the Divine. Whether we apply this to smaller races and individual peoples, or confine ourselves to what is typical everywhere we see that man in his whole nature is not expressed in the members of any one people or race. Full manhood is as yet only an urge within us, but this urge must grow into a love for all humanity, for those qualities we do not ourselves possess by nature but can acquire if we sincerely seek for knowledge of the nature of other peoples of the Earth.

The internationalism prevailing in the age of Goethe assumed this form. It is this kind of internationalism that permeates such thoughts as are found, for instance, in The Boundaries of the State by William Von Humboldt. It is the striving of a true cosmopolitanism which, by assimilating all that can be acquired from a love extended to other races, ennobles and uplifts the individual people; knowledge of one's own race is sought by assimilating all that is idealistic, great and beautiful in other peoples of the Earth. It is because of this that in Germany's days of spiritual prime there arose from out of the rhythmic life of her people a lofty cosmopolitanism which had been sought from among all other peoples. Just think how Herder's search took him among other peoples, how he tried to unravel the deepest being of all peoples of the Earth! How penetrated he was by the thought that permeating the individual ‘man of flesh’ there is another man, greater and more powerful, who can be discovered only when we are able to pour ourselves out over all peoples.

We cannot help contrasting this spirit, which at the turn of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries was the germ of greatness in Middle Europe, with the internationalism of today. In its present form, internationalism is not a living pulse in the world; it is preached throughout the world in the form of Marxism—and Marxism believes only in human thinking. Internationalism nowadays is a more or less weakened form of Marxism. There is no longer any inkling of the differentiation of full and complete humanity over the Earth. An abstraction is set up and is supposed to represent humanity, to represent man. Such internationalism is not the first stage of an ascent but the last stage of a decline, because it is devoid of all endeavours to reach after true internationality, which always ennobles the individual stock. The kind of internationalism which appears in Marxism and all that has developed from it is the result of remaining stationary within a one-sided and wholly unpractical system of thought that is applied merely to the world of sense and has not penetrated to the real national qualities. True internationalism, by contrast, springs from a love which goes out to all peoples and races in order that the light received from them may be kindled in the deeds, concepts and creations of one's own people. Each individual race must so find its place in the great chorus of the peoples on the Earth that it contributes to the full understanding which can alone unite them all in real and mutual knowledge.

In this lecture it has not been my object to speak of matters which might seem to indicate a ‘programme.’ I wanted to speak of the spiritual-scientific knowledge that is kindled in the spiritual investigator as a result of his higher knowledge of the communal life of man on the Earth, for this true communal life is indeed possible.

One can, of course, speak from many different points of view of what is necessary for the immediate future of humanity; one can speak of this impulse or that. But it must be realised that a spiritual comfort flowing from the knowledge I have tried to indicate, more in fleeting outline than in detail, may be added to all that can be said in regard to social, political or educational affairs. It is a comfort that may flow from knowledge of the rhythm, I say expressly the possible rhythm, of the historical life of humanity.

This lecture should show you that the hatred and antipathy in the world today can indeed be followed by international love with healing in its wings. This is indeed possible. But we are living in an age when all that is possible must be consciously, deliberately and freely striven for by men. There must be knowledge of the conditions requisite for uniting the peoples of the Earth, in order that, as a result of this knowledge, each individual people may help to make the waves of love follow those of hatred. Human love alone has power to heal the wounds of hatred. If mankind has no wish for this love, chaos will remain. That is the terrible alternative now facing men who have knowledge. Those who realise its terrors know that the souls of men dare not sleep, for otherwise, as a result of the powerlessness caused by the sleep into which the souls of the peoples have fallen, the healing waves of love will not be able to flow over the waves of hatred.

Men who realise this will acquire the kind of knowledge that flows from a spiritual conception of the relationships between the peoples. They will take this knowledge into their feeling—love for humanity will be born. They will take this knowledge into their will—deeds for humanity will be accomplished. The evolution of the age, with all the terrible paralysis that is appearing at the present time, places a solemn duty before the soul: to gather together all that can unite mankind in love and array it in opposition to the destructive elements that have made their appearance in recent times. This quest for loving unification, for unifying love is not merely a vague feeling. To those who understand the conditions of life today, it is the very highest duty of man.

Preliminary remark: Eugen Kolisko's lecture was not written down. However, Rudolf Steiner said the following about it the next day in his lecture for physicians (March 31, 1920, in GA 312): “It was very interesting how Dr. Kolisko pointed out in yesterday's evening lecture that the chemistry of the future must actually become something completely different, and how the word 'physiology' was mentioned again and again, which testifies that a bridge should be built between the chemical and the physiological. I was always reminded of various things that, of course, cannot be fully expressed where public lectures are concerned, because the prerequisites for understanding are actually completely lacking. We do, of course, find carbon in nature outside of the human being, in what I would like to call seemingly extra-human nature. For what in nature is actually extra-human? Nothing, really, because everything that is extra-human in the extra-human world around us has been removed from the human being in the course of human development. Man had to enter into stages of development, which he could only enter into by certain processes taking place in the external world, opposite to him, and by which he was given the possibility of taking certain other processes into his inner being, so that there is actually always an opposition and also a relationship between certain outer processes and certain inner processes."

After Eugen Kolisko's lecture, a question was asked about the effects of allopathic and homeopathic remedies. The stenographer did not record the wording of the question.

Rudolf Steiner: It is more or less assumed today - because of atomistic thinking - that the process that takes place within a substance is, to a certain extent, the same process that takes place within the human organization, or I could also say the animal organization. But it is a very naturalistic assumption to indulge in the idea that the substance borrowed from the dead organism, so to speak, shows the same properties as the same substance, say for example blood, when it is still within the living human or animal organism. Once we realize what bundles of completely unscientific assumptions and postulates are in the sciences in use, only then will we truly feel what is necessary to put today's scientific view on a healthy basis. And so this healthy basis is also not available for those processes that are brought about when certain remedies are introduced into the human organism. For example, the question of how any substance that we supply to the human organism in this or that form, allopathic or homeopathic, is now dissolved in this human organism, how it behaves in the human organism itself, has not been investigated. For example, no consideration is given to the question of what the human organism actually does with this substance. And here we find – I can only hint at this, as it would take many hours to explain in full detail – that spiritual science shows that those substances which we supply to the human organism all , are in a sense, homoeopathized by it, if I may use the term. This means that they undergo internally the same process that the homoeopathic pharmacist causes to occur with his substances in his experiments. It is the case that the mode of action of the allopathically administered healing substances is also not based on the properties that are chemically ascribed to them today, but rather on properties that they only acquire as a result of the human organism processing them with the help of its own powers.

The question of allopathy and homeopathy, really considered in relation to the human being, is therefore not whether large or fragmented small amounts have an effect on the human organism when they produce healing effects, because the substances also do that when they are administered in allopathic amounts. The question is not this at all, but the question is whether it is permissible to expose the human organism to the side effects that arise from what is added with the allopathic substance and what is not homeopathized by the human organism itself, that is, is not used for healing. The question is whether this method is really permissible in order not to burden the human organism with what must be left over. Whether one supplies a very large quantity, while the organism needs only a small quantity, and whether the dispersion of the substances has the same effect as remedies that otherwise also have an effect in small quantities – that has been explained by Dr. Kolisko. If substances are dispersed in the human organism itself and only a small quantity is necessary for this, why should large quantities be introduced? It seems to me that the question is therefore not based on what is usually stated [in relation to homeopathic and allopathic remedies], but that something essential is actually [unspoken]; the questions should actually arise in other areas or, let us say, in other forms. For example, it should be clear whether the whole view and way of thinking about the clinical picture is healthier in the field of homeopathy or in that of allopathy. By this I mean whether, for example, those doctors who profess homeopathy or those who profess allopathy are more likely to focus on the complexity of the human organism. And here it must indeed be said that the doctors who work on a homeopathic basis are much more willing – experience simply shows this – to move away from the materialistic, atomistic idea and to adapt to certain views that I would say are more in line with the nature of the human organism.

As I said, I do not want to go into the actual discussion here, because it could be misunderstood if you have to explain it so briefly. I just wanted to suggest how our scientific views usually pose the questions in such a way that they cannot be answered at all as they are posed; the points of view are completely shifted, the questions are completely shifted to the point of view of materialism.

Then I was asked to speak about the relationship between Leadbeater's book and “occult chemistry”. Now, dear attendees, I do not want to dwell on the word “occult” here, because it is so misunderstood; it shocks the public, so to speak, when the word “occult” is used. But one can also stop at the word “spiritual scientific” or the like. You see, the occult is only occult as long as it is not known, and with those who know it, it is no longer occult. There are very many people who have every reason to call mathematics an occult science, and some sciences are occult for some people. So this is actually something that is quite relative in this respect. You will not find such a concoction as this so-called “occult chemistry” justified or recognized by anyone who is truly capable of spiritual thinking. This “occult chemistry” of Leadbeater's is modeled entirely on the usual materialistic atomism in the way it is presented. This “occult chemistry” is the best proof of what certain conceptions calling themselves spiritual have already come to in our materialistic time. I need only remind you that in certain theosophical circles the following idea once even emerged: they thought about what could be present in successive earthly lives so that it would remain from one earthly life to the next, and they came up with the grotesquely foolish idea of the so-called permanent atom. A single atom was supposed to be saved from one life from so many hundred years ago to the next life and thereby maintain the continuity of these two lives. That is, these spiritualists had fortunately managed to think along the lines of the materialistic-atomistic view. And Leadbeater has now put together his “occult chemistry” according to the pattern of ordinary atomistic chemistry, in a completely arbitrary way - but he has stated that it is a product of clairvoyance - but it is a completely arbitrary construction and cannot be recognized by any truly serious spiritual researcher in the world.

This is precisely the best example of how certain atomistic ideas have taken hold of humanity today, that one was able to carry these atomistic ideas into the fields of a certain sectarian theosophical direction. This is something that has nothing whatsoever to do with what is being striven for here. And it is precisely this introduction of the atomistic-materialistic way of thinking into spiritual scientific investigations that shows how deeply the present is corroded by atomistic basic ideas. Consider that particularly in certain circles of English scientific thinkers, where one strives for an external visualization, attempts have been made to construct models for those structures that have been presented to you today, so that one could see outwardly that atoms are arranged in such a way in various complicated forms that it is possible to show so beautifully why there is a left-turning and a right-turning acid. You just need to have the atoms arrange themselves symmetrically and then you can say: Because the atoms always arrange their forces in this way in symmetry, there is a left and a right. It is just not understandable, if you can really think logically, why you should attribute the necessity that the shapes occur symmetrically to a configuration of the smallest parts. Please do not take this as a protest. Because if it is really true that only through the forces of the smallest parts the acid appears as right-polarizing, rotating and the other as left-rotating, then it should also be true that the left hand could fit on the right, because the smallest parts are formed in this direction.

These things have emerged in so-called “occult chemistry”, and these things have now been transferred to the views in so-called occult books. There you will also find quite terrible views and constructions of molecules or atoms. All this has also been imitated in the field of spiritual science; the materialistic theory has even been imitated in the spiritual view. I experienced it once at a congress held by so-called Theosophists, in Paris it was. There they talked about this and that, and afterwards I asked someone what impression this congress had made on him. The person in question said: “Oh, there were such good fluids in the whole hall.” So the person concerned saw nothing of all the concrete thoughts and so on that were expressed there, except for a materialistic translation of what people said to each other into material fluid effects between the individual personalities. You have to look at these things in terms of the way of thinking. You are not a follower of a spiritual world view just because you talk about spiritual beings, but only if you can talk about spiritual qualities. What you find, for example, in the theosophical literature today is that the physical body is described, then the etheric body, which is a bit thinner, possibly more nebulous, but still material, then the astral body, again a bit thinner, but just thinner matter, and so on. This continues up to the highest spiritual realms, Manas, Kama-Manas and so on, and actually everything is nothing but rarefied matter, only that in the end it really becomes very <“homeopathic”>. These are the things that show that it does not matter whether one speaks of the spirit today, but whether one is able to show something that really leads into the spiritual realm.

Question: How can chemistry be further developed in line with anthroposophy?

If we undertake the kind of phenomenology that Dr. Kolisko has in mind, then it must be said that this question is so all-embracing that it can only be answered in the most general terms. Above all, it is necessary to realize that one would first have to arrive at a corresponding phenomenology. A phenomenology is not a compilation of mere phenomena in an arbitrary way, or in the way they are obtained by scientific experiments, but a real phenomenology is a systematization of phenomena, as was attempted by Goethe in his Theory of Colors. It is a tracing back of the complicated to the simple, to the fundamental principles, where the basic elements, the basic phenomena, confront us.

Now, of course, I know very well that very clever people will say: Yes, but if one gains such a list in relation to the connection between qualitative phenomena and archetypal phenomena, then such a structure cannot be compared at all with how, for example, complicated geometric connections can be traced back mathematically to axioms; because the geometric connections are, so to speak, built from pure inner construction. The further development of mathematics, [starting from] these axioms, is in turn experienced as a mathematical process seen in inner necessity, while in the development of phenomena and archetypal phenomena we have to rely on observing the external facts.

But this is not the case, even if it is simply asserted – it is asserted more or less clearly and distinctly in the broadest context. The fact that this is asserted is only the result of an incorrect theory of knowledge, and in particular it is the result of a confused muddling of the concept of experience with other concepts. And this confused muddling of the concept of experience with other concepts leads, for example, to the following.

It is not considered that the way in which experience is present is thoroughly formed in relation to the human subject. I cannot form the concept of experience at all without thinking the relationship from the object to the human subject. And now it is merely a matter of whether there is a fundamental distinction between the way in which, for example, I have a Goethean urphenomenon before me and complicate this urphenomenon into a derived phenomenon, where I seem to be dependent on external experience confirming what I express in judgment? Is there a difference in this whole behavior of the subject in relation to the object with regard to experience, when I state in mathematics that the sum of the three angles of a triangle is 180°, or when I state the correctness of the Pythagorean theorem? Is there in fact a difference?

That there is no difference in this respect has already been pointed out by quite ingenious mathematicians of the nineteenth century and up to the present day, who, because they saw that ultimately mathematics is also based on an experience - in a sense, as one speaks of experience in the so-called empirical natural sciences - that have constructed, albeit initially only constructed, a non-Euclidean geometry to the Euclidean geometry. And here one must say: Theoretically it is, of course, perfectly possible to think geometrically that the three angles of a triangle are 380°. However, one must assume that space has a different degree of curvature. In our ordinary space we have a regular [Euclidean] measure, which has a curvature of zero. Simply by imagining that space is more curved [that is, that the curvature of space is greater than 1], one arrives at a sentence like: the sum of the three angles of a triangle is greater than 180°.

Interesting experiments have been carried out in relation to this, for example by Oskar Simony, who examined this. These endeavors show that from a certain point of view it was considered necessary to say: what we express as judgments in mathematical or geometric sentences also requires empirical verification in the same way as what we express in phenomenology.

Preliminary note: In his lecture, E.A.K. Stockmeyer had spoken, among other things, of warmth corresponding to will, light to imagination, chemistry to feeling, which feels the external within. The lecture was not written down; the stenographer merely recorded the following scheme written on the blackboard: “Life forces / chemical forces / light / warmth / gases / fluids / solids”.

Question: Conventional mathematics encompasses solids, liquids and gases in terms of shape, surface and direction of force. How do you imagine a mathematics of the thermal, chemical and life spheres?

Rudolf Steiner: Well, the first thing to do is to extend the field of mathematics in a way that is appropriate to the subject if we want to encompass higher fields, or I should say, even if we only want to encompass them in an analogous mathematical way.

If we consider that in the 19th century there arose the need to extend mathematics itself – I will mention only what has already been mentioned on other occasions, I believe only yesterday, that there arose the need to add to Euclidean non-Euclidean geometry, — when one considers that at that time the need arose to carry out calculations for higher manifolds than we usually do, then we already have a hint at extensions of mathematics. And we may say: When we consider ordinary ponderable matter, we do not come to use any appropriate application of other manifolds than that of the ordinary three-dimensional manifold.

But today there is still so little inclination to enter into an appropriate view of the fields of heat, chemical and life elements that the continuation of mathematical thinking into these fields is still very problematic today.

For example, there is absolutely no contradiction between the failure to recognize the essence of mass, as propagated by physicists, and the failure to consider the essence of the image of light as presented by Goethe. A reasonable physicist will of course reject the idea of considering the essence of things. However, this immediately leads to the dilemma: the physicist may refuse to go into the essence of things; but anyone who then, from the conventional physical, physical point of view, brews up a philosophy no longer just refuses to do so, but declares: one cannot penetrate into the essence of things at all.

And so we have [today a very one-sided view of the] earth, since in physics we are never concerned with mere geology, but with what results as a conclusion from such a single field for overall knowledge. Thus we are already dealing with harmful consequences of what has gradually emerged over time for physics, not mathematically, but as a mechanistic world view.

What Goethe means when he says that one should not actually speak of the essence of light, but should try to get to know the facts, the deeds and sufferings of light - for these, after all, give a complete description of the essence of light - is not at all identical with the rejection of the question as to the nature of the light, but precisely the indication that a correct, a real phenomenology - which is arranged in the sense that it was discussed here yesterday - ultimately gives a picture of the essence that is being considered. Insofar as it is and wants to be phenomenology and is correct phenomenology, insofar as it concerns the mechanistic field, it gives us a picture of the essence, namely of the essence of the phenomena.

And so one can indeed say: when it is not a matter of mechanical phenomena or of that which is merely mechanical in physical phenomena, when it is a matter of other areas than the mechanical, then the mechanistic view of these other areas of phenomena hinders any advance towards an actual essence of things that can be recognized by the human being. And in this respect it is necessary to emphasize the radical difference between such a phenomenology, as Goethe means and as it can be cultivated in Goetheanism, and what basically wants to dispense with delving into the essence of things.

This has nothing to do with any supposed advantage of the mechanistic method for the drive to dominate over nature. For, ladies and gentlemen, it is self-evident that in the very field in which there have been great triumphs in recent centuries, namely in the technical-mechanical field, the mechanistic part of knowledge of nature could provide a certain satisfaction of the urge to dominate nature. But just ask to what extent this urge to dominate nature has been left behind in other areas precisely because it has been rejected to penetrate to an equally profound level of knowledge as has been striven for in the mechanistic field.

The difference between the mechanistic field and those fields that start with the physical and then go up through the chemical to the organic and so on is not that in these higher fields one is dealing only with qualitative properties or the like, but the difference lies in the fact that what relates to the mechanistic field, to mechanistic physics, is simple, it can be observed, it is the most elementary. Therefore, we have also achieved a certain satisfaction of the instinct to dominate nature in this most elementary field.

But then the question arises: how do we satisfy this urge to dominate when we move into the higher realms that no longer follow mechanistic [laws]? And here we must certainly expect that there will also come times when our domination of nature extends a little beyond the merely mechanistic realm.

In the mechanistic field it is extremely easy, through lack of control, lack of control in the cognitive sense, to bring about, I would say, revenge of nature, revenge of reality. If someone builds a bridge for the railroad without proper knowledge of the mechanistic laws, then at some appropriate opportunity the bridge will collapse and the train will rush down the embankment. In this case, the reaction will immediately manifest itself in the form of an improper control of the cognitive drive. If the control has to relate to somewhat more complicated areas, which, however, must be taken not from the quantitative or the mechanistic, but must be taken precisely from the procedure of actually working out a phenomenology, then this proof is perhaps not always so easy. It can be said with a fair degree of certainty that a bridge built with a deficient cognitive drive will collapse after the third train has crossed it. But today it is not easy for a doctor to immediately recognize the connection between the cognitive drive and the domination of nature when a patient dies. It is less said that the doctor has cured someone to death than that someone has built a bad bridge.

In short, one should be a little more sparing with this emphasis on the urge to dominate nature, purely on the basis of the well-known fact that it is only in the field of mechanistic technology that such a satisfaction of the urge to dominate has become possible through the mechanistic view of nature. Other views of nature will be able to give a completely different satisfaction of the urge to dominate. For example, I will just point out – I already pointed this out from a different point of view yesterday – that one can never build a bridge from the mechanistic world view to the human being, but that the bridge is immediately built when a correct phenomenology is applied.

In Goethe's Theory of Colors, you not only have the presentation of physiological phenomena, the presentation of physical phenomena, but you have the whole field transferred to the sensual-moral effect of colors, where the phenomenon, the whole field, is immediately brought to the human being. And from this area, to which Goethe is still pointing – the sensual-moral effect of colors – one comes, if one continues to work spiritually, to the complete area of human knowledge and thus again to the complete area of knowledge of nature.

And in a way it would perhaps be good if attention were drawn to the fact that a large part of what humanity experiences today as decadent phenomena within European culture is connected with the fact that we have only brought it to a satisfaction of the urge to dominate on one side, on the mechanistic side. We have indeed come a long way in this respect; not only have we built railways and created telegraphs and telephones, until we came to wireless telegraphy, but we have even gone so far in satisfying the urge to dominate that we have destroyed large parts of Europe by concreting them over. We have taken it as far as destruction by thoroughly satisfying the urge to dominate.

It is now as follows: this satisfaction of the urge to dominate nature, which has led to destruction, was basically a straightforward continuation of the purely technical urge to dominate; it lay in the straightforward continuation. These things also belong to those which must now be thoroughly eradicated if the unhealthy expansion of the mechanistic view to encompass all physical phenomena is to be replaced by something that does not simply eliminate the truly specific nature of physical , but when one actually moves away from the mechanization of ideas, which, in their field, give a very good physics, to that which is specific to physical phenomena.

And here it must be pointed out that precisely this approach, which of course cannot be taken to its ultimate conclusions in one hour, that this approach will lead to an expansion of the mathematical field itself, out of the corresponding reality. We must realize that it is precisely out of the mechanistic confusion that such things have become possible, that over the last thirty, forty, fifty years all sorts of views have been put forward about the so-called ether. It was Planck, the physicist mentioned earlier in relation to another field, who finally came to the conclusion: If one wants to talk about the ether in physics at all, then one must not ascribe any material properties to it. One must not think of it materially. So physics has been pushed to the point of not ascribing any material properties to the ether.

What, then, are the actual errors in the ether ideas, in the ether concepts? Well, my dear audience, they did not consist at all in the fact that too little mathematics were done or something like that, but in the fact that one - because one was only inspired by the tendency to extend the mathematical over the specific extended to the specific physical, that one used wrong mathematics in formulas in which the effects of the ether also played a part, that one used the quantities in the same way as one uses them for ponderable matter. The moment we realize that the possibility of inserting ordinary quantities into mathematical formulas ceases when we enter the etheric realm, the impulse will arise to seek a real extension of mathematics itself. You see, one only needs to point out the twofold aspect. The physicist Planck says: If one wants to talk about the ether at all in physics, then in any case one must not ascribe any material properties to it. And in Einstein's theory of relativity, or in relativity theory in general, one found it necessary to eliminate the ether altogether.

Now, the ether cannot be canceled! This is something that I can only hint at now. Rather, the point is that the moment we move from the ether to our physical formulas, that is, to the mathematical formulas that are applied to physics, we are forced to insert negative quantities into the formulas.

We have to insert these quantities negatively - just as we also move from positive to negative quantities in formal physics - simply because, by advancing from positive matters to zero, we have in the ether neither a nothing - what Einstein means - nor a pure negative that must be thought of as a something - as Planck says - but because the ether must be thought of as something that is endowed with properties that are as opposed to the properties of matter as negative numbers are to positive ones. And here, even before we come to realize the character of the negative itself, the pure extension of the mathematical [into the negative] – one may now dispute what a negative quantity is – gains a certain significance for reality, even before we come to realize the character of the negative itself, the extension of the numerical line into the negative gains a certain significance for reality.

Of course, I am well aware that in the 19th century there was a significant dispute in the field of mathematics between those who saw something qualitative in the positive and negative signs, while others saw only a subtrahend in the negative signs, for whom the negative minuend is missing. But that is not the point. The point is that we may indeed be obliged to follow the same path in physics itself that we follow in formal mathematics from the positive to the negative, by moving from ponderable effects to ethereal effects. Then we have to see what will come out of the formulas if we decide to treat the quantities in this way.

And then it will come about, despite the fact that much solid work has been and can be done in formal mathematics, that we are simply obliged to use imaginary quantities in physics as well, for the positive and negative quantities. But in this way we come to a mediation with the quantities in nature.

I am well aware that this has only been very briefly outlined, summarized in just a few words. But I must nevertheless draw attention to the fact that in progressing from ponderable matter up to where one comes to the life forces, one is compelled everywhere to insert negative quantities into the formulas, precisely for the reversal of the material quantitative in general, and that then, as soon as one goes beyond life, one is compelled to move from mere negative quantities to imaginary quantities. But then you don't just have formal quantities, but quantities that now have the property that they no longer refer to the [positive or negative] material, but to the substantial, which thus qualitatively-internally relates to both the ethereal as well as to the ponderable, just as the imaginary number line relates to the positive and negative numbers, to the real number line - so that one can indeed connect what one has in formal mathematics with certain areas of reality.

It would be very unfortunate if attempts to approximate human ideas to reality, to bring human ideas to submerge into reality, were to fail because of the trivial notion that what truly rational physics has to offer would satisfy human instinct for domination of nature to a lesser extent. It would satisfy him more than the so glorified application of the mechanistic world view to mechanistic technology. This mechanistic technology has certainly brought great things to humanity in the development of culture. But those who are always talking about how calculating physics – that is, physics calculated in the way that physics has calculated up to now – how physics has brought glorious progress in the field of natural science and in the technical field, they should consider that other fields may have suffered greatly from this mere focusing of attention on the purely technical field. And to escape from the plight, from the decadence into which mere technical control and its foundations, mere mechanistic knowledge, has brought us, to escape from this plight, from this decadence, we would be in great need of a leaning towards a physics that really cannot speak in the same way of a rejection of the knowledge of the essence, as it must indeed apply to the mechanical field, which is accessible to mechanistic knowledge.

Yes, you see, it is so easy for the mechanical field to dispense with essence because this essence, I would say, is so obvious, because it is spread out in space. And it is somewhat more difficult to achieve the same in the field of physics as in the field of the mechanistic. Hence all the talk of not getting into the essence. It is easy for the physicist to simply refuse to recognize the essential if he only wants to think in mechanistic terms. Because behind what today's formulas, as they are used today to express this [mechanistic] mathematically, there is no essence. The essence only begins where one no longer just applies these formulas, but where one penetrates into the mathematical essence itself.

That was just to answer the question of how one might think of the mathematical in an extended way beyond the imponderable.

Roman Boos: How can the principle of establishing legal norms through codification develop in the future? How can the legal effect be exercised from the parliamentary centers without the codification principle being paralyzed or dying, as is the case today?

Rudolf Steiner: The vitalization of the legal life, of which Dr. Boos spoke, will, it seems to me, be brought about in a very natural way in the threefold social organism. How should we think of this formation of the threefold social organism in concrete terms? Truly in a similar way - it is not intended to express a mere analogy - truly in a similar way as one has to think of the organic threefoldness in the natural human organism.

The view, which Dr. Boos also criticized today, that the heart is a kind of pump that drives blood to all possible parts of the organism, this view must be overcome for physiology. It must be recognized that the activity of the heart is the result of the balanced interaction of the other two activities of the human organism: metabolic activity and nerve-sense activity. If a physiologist who is grounded in reality now wants to describe this human organism and its functioning, then in general it is only necessary to describe the metabolic activity on the one hand and the nerve-sense activity on the other in a truly objective way, for it is through their polar interaction and interpenetration that the balancing rhythmic activity arises; this is already formally present. This is something that must be taken into account if we want to imagine life in the threefolded social organism. This life in the threefolded social organism can only be truly imagined if one still has a sense of the practice of life.

When I had published a few things and spoken about threefolding in a variety of ways, I was met with the objection that it is indeed difficult to imagine how the law can acquire content when it is to be separated in life from the spiritual part of the social organism on the one hand and the economic part on the other. Especially people like Stammler, for example, who has been mentioned often today, they understand the law in such a way that they only recognize a kind of formalism on the one hand. On the other hand, they believe that this [formal system] acquires its material content from the economic needs of the social organism. On the basis of such views, I was told that law cannot be separated from economic life for the simple reason that the forces of economic life must produce the legal statutes by themselves. When one includes something in one's concepts, one constantly thinks of something inanimate, of something that just amounts to making statements, for example, from economic forces, which are then codified and can be used as a guide. One mainly thinks of the fact that such codified statements exist and that one can look them up.

In the natural, living threefold organism, we are dealing, I might say, with two polar opposites: on the one hand, with spiritual life and, on the other, with economic life. Spiritual life, which arises when people are born and develop into existence through their own actions, represents a reality through its own content. The fruitful side of intellectual life will develop if no restrictions are imposed by any standards that limit what one can do. The fruitful side will develop quite naturally simply because it is in the interest of people that those who can do more and have greater abilities can also achieve more. It will be a matter of course that, let us say, a person is taken on as a teacher for a number of children, and those who are looking for a teacher can be sure that he can achieve the desired results in his sphere. If intellectual life is truly free, the whole structure of intellectual life arises out of the nature of the matter itself; the people who are part of it work in this intellectual life. On the other hand, we have the economic part of the threefold social organism. Here the structure of economic life arises out of the needs of consumption and the possibilities of production, out of the various interrelations, out of the relationships that arise. Of course, I can only briefly hint at this in this answer to the question. But the various relationships that can play between people and people or between groups of people and individuals or between different groups of people also play a role. All of this will move economic life. And in these two areas, what is called “law” is actually out of the question, insofar as these two areas take care of their own affairs. If we think in real terms – of course people today do not think in real terms but in theoretical terms, proceeding from what already exists, and so they confuse the legal ideas that the spiritual realm already has with the legal ideas of the economic realm – if we think in real, practical terms, then in the free spiritual life we do not consider legal impulses at all, but we consider impulses of trust, impulses of ability. It is simply absurd to speak in the free spiritual life of the fact that someone who is able has a right to work. There can be no question of speaking of such a right, but one must speak of the fact that one needs him, that he should work. The one who can teach children will naturally be taught, and there will be no question of whether or not there is an entitlement; it is not somehow a question of right as such. It is the same in economic life. Written or oral contracts will play a part, and confidence in the observance of contracts will have to play a part. If economic life is left to its own devices, the fact that contracts are being observed will be seen in the simple fact that economic life cannot function if contracts are not observed.

I am well aware that when such practical matters are discussed today, they are considered by some to be highly impractical because they bring in highly impractical matters from all sides and then believe that what they have brought in and what is supposed to have an effect is practical, whereas what has been described here is impractical. But now we must bear in mind that in these two spheres, in these organs, in the economic sphere and in the spiritual sphere of the threefolded social organism, these things live side by side. If we now honestly consider how this coexistence can be organized democratically, with people living side by side in the two areas - in the economic structure and in the spiritual structure - then the necessity arises for the relationships to be defined from person to person. Here the living necessity simply arises that the one who, let us say, stands at some post of spiritual life, has to establish his relationship to many other personalities and so on. These living relationships must arise between all mature people, and the relationships between mature people and non-mature people arise precisely from the relationship of trust in the field of spiritual life. But all the relationships that arise from the living forces on the one hand of economic life and on the other of spiritual life, all these relationships require that, to a certain extent, people who have come of age begin to define their relationships in their spheres of life among themselves. And this gives rise to a living interaction, which will, however, have the peculiarity that these determinations - because life is alive and cannot be constrained by norms - must be flexible.

An absolutely codified law would appear to be something that contradicts development. If you had a rigidly codified law, it would be basically the same as having a seven-year-old child whose organic life forces you would now determine and, when the child has reached the age of forty, would demand that it still live by them. The same applies to the social organism, which is indeed a living organism and will not be the same in 1940 as it was in 1920. For example, in the case of land, it is not a matter of laying down such codified law, but rather it is a living interrelationship between the soil and the personalities who stand in the other two characterized areas - the spiritual and the economic - and work in such a way that everything can be kept in flux, in order to be able to also change and metamorphose the true democratic soil on which all people live their present relationships. This is what needs to be said with regard to the establishment of public legal relationships. Criminal relationships arise only as a secondary matter when individual personalities act in an anti-social way against what has been established as the right relationship between people who have come of age. However, when considering criminal law in the context of the threefold social organism, it becomes clear that it is necessary to take a closer look at the justification of punishment in a more practical and realistic way. I must say that the much-vaunted legal science has not even managed to develop a clear legal concept in this area. There is a now rather old work, “Das Recht in der Strafe” (The Right to Punish) by Ludwig Laistner. In it, the introduction presents a history of all theories about the right to punish: deterrence impulses, educational impulses, and all the rest. Laistner shows, above all, that these theories are actually quite fragile, and then he comes to his own theory, which consists in the fact that one can only derive a right to punish from the fact that the criminal has entered the sphere of the other person through his own free will. Let us assume, then, that one person has created some circle of life for himself, and that is also hypothetical; the other person enters this circle of life by entering his house or his thoughts, for example, and robbing him. Now Ludwig Laistner says: “He has entered my sphere of life, and that is why I have power over him; just as I have power over my money or my own thoughts, so I now also have power over the criminal because he has entered my sphere. This power over him is conceded to me by the criminal himself by entering my sphere. I can now realize this power by punishing him. The punishment is only the equivalent for him entering my circle. That is the only thing that can be found in legal thinking about the justification of punishing a criminal. Whether this happens directly or in a figurative sense, by having it carried out by the state, are secondary questions. But why are these things actually unclear? Why is there something that constantly prevents us from having really clear-cut concepts? Because these concepts are taken out of social conditions that are already full of ambiguities. It presupposes that there is an organism present and that through the organism there is living movement and thus circulation – just as the heart presupposes that other organs are present in order for it to function. The legal institution is, in a sense, the heart of the social organism and presupposes that other things will unfold; it presupposes that other forces are already present. And if there is any lack of clarity in these other circumstances, then it is also quite natural that there can be no clearly defined legal system. But a clearly defined legal system will come about precisely because the other forces that are inherent to the other members of the social organism are allowed to develop in this three-part social organism. Only in this way can the foundations be laid for the development of a true legal system.

Above all, we have not even clearly raised the question today: What is the actual content of the legal system? Yes, you see, in a certain sense, a legal science must be very similar to mathematics, to a living mathematics. But what would we do with all our mathematics if we could not realize it in life? We must be able to apply it. If mathematics were not a living thing and we could not apply it in reality, then all our mathematics would be no science at all. Mathematics as such is, first of all, a formal science. In a certain sense, a properly elaborated jurisprudence would also be a formal science first of all. But this formal science must be such that the object of its application is encountered in reality. And this object of its application in reality is the relationships of people who have come of age and live side by side, who not only seek a balance between their spheres of life here, but are also still within the spiritual and economic links of the social organism.

Thus, only this threefold structure of the social organism will really make it possible for public thought to be formed, and a right that is not publicly thought is not a naturally established right. This would make it possible for such legal concepts to be formed publicly, which would then be flexible, as has rightly been demanded today. Therefore, I believe that it was a good thing that Dr. Boos called for the reform of legal life precisely from the realization of the threefold social organism.

The terrible catastrophe of last New Year's Eve, the destruction by fire of the Goetheanum, which will remain as a painful memory for the many who loved it, may provide occasion to connect today's thoughts about the anthroposophical knowledge and conception of the world with this Goetheanum. But a connection is all I have in view; for the lecture itself that I am to present to you is not to be essentially different in kind from those I have been permitted to give here in Basel, in this same hall, for many years past.

That dreadful calamity was just the occasion to bring to light what fantastic notions there are in the world linked with all that this Goetheanum in Dornach intended to do and all that was done in it. It is said that the most frightful superstitions were disseminated there, that all sorts of things inimical to religion were being practiced; and there is even talk of all kinds of spiritistic seances, of nebulous mystic performances, and so on.

In respect to all this, I should like today to answer, at least sketchily, the question: What is this Anthroposophy to which the Goetheanum was dedicated?

Many people were scandalized at the very name, “Goetheanum,” because they failed to consider the fundamental reason for this name, and how it is connected with all that is cultivated there as Anthroposophy.

For me, my dear friends, this Anthroposophy is the spontaneous result of my devotion for more than four decades to Goethe's world-conception, and to his whole activity. Of course if anyone studies Goethe's world-conception and what he did by considering only what is actually written in Goethe's works, and from that deduces logically, as it were, what may now be called Goethean, he will not find what gave occasion to call the Dornach Building the “Goetheanum,” But there is, I might say, a logic of thinking and a logic of life. And anyone who immerses himself in Goethe, not merely with a logic of thinking, but who takes up actively his impulse-filled suggestions, and tries to gain from them what can be gained—after so many decades have passed over humanity's evolution since Goethe's death—he will believe—no matter what he may think of the true value of Anthroposophy—that by means of the living stimuli of Goetheanism, if I may use the expression, this very Anthroposophy has been able to come into being through a logic of life, by experiencing what is in Goethe, and by developing his conclusions, in a modest way.

Now this Goetheanum was first called “Johannesbau” by those friends of the anthroposophical world-conception who made it possible to erect such a building. The name was in no way connected with the Evangelist, St, John; but the building was named—not by me but by others—for Johannes Thomasius, one of the figures in my Mystery Drama; because, above all, this Goetheanum was to be dedicated to the presentation of these Mystery Plays, besides the cultivation of all the rest of the anthroposophical world-view. But of course it was inevitable that this name, “Johannesbau,” should lead to the misunderstanding that it was meant for the author of St. John's Gospel.

Hence, I often said, I think even here in this place, in the course of the years in which the Goetheanum was being built, that for me this building is a Goetheanum; for I derived my world-view in a living way from Goethe. And then this name was officially given to the Building by friends of the cause. I have always regarded this as a sort of token of gratitude for what can be gained from Goethe, an act of homage to the towering personality of Goethe; not because it was supposed that what was originally given by Goethe would be cultivated in the best and most beautiful way in the Dornach Goetheanum, but because the anthroposophical world-view feels the deepest gratitude for what has come into the world through Goethe.

If, then, the name “Goetheanum” is taken as resulting from an act of homage, an act of gratitude, then no one, as I believe, can take exception to it. For the rest, it is quite comprehensible that anyone unacquainted with the anthroposophical world-view, when approaching the building on the Dornach hill, would be at first peculiarly affected by the two dove-tailed dome-structures, by the strange forms without and within, and so forth. But this building proceeded as an inner artistic consequence, from the anthroposophical world-view. Therefore, I shall be able to form the best connecting link with what the Building stood for, if I try first—today in a somewhat different way from the one I have employed here for many years—to answer the question: What is Anthroposophy?

To start with, Anthroposophy claims to be a knowledge of the spiritual world, which can fully take its place beside the magnificent natural science of our time. It aims to rank with natural science, not only as regards scientific conscientiousness, but it also requires that anyone who wishes, not merely to receive Anthroposophy into his mind, but to build it up, must, before all else, have gone through all the rigid and serious methods used today by natural science.

In all this the purpose of Anthroposophy is the complete opposite of what I have cited as the opinions of the world about it. With regard to these opinions, which I have given only in part, we can only be astonished that it is possible for ideas about anything to become fixed in the minds of the public, which are the exact opposite of what is really intended. For it can be flatly said that all I have mentioned as opinions of the world is not Anthroposophy, but that Anthroposophy purposes to be a serious knowledge of the spiritual world.

You well know, my dear friends, that today anything claiming to be knowledge of the spiritual world is regarded somewhat contemptuously, or at least with great doubt. The scientific education that mankind has enjoyed for the past three or four hundred years was of such a nature that in the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th, the opinion came gradually to be held that, by means of the strict methods employed today by natural science, man can know what is presented to the senses in his environment, and also what the human intellect can deduce from sense-perception, with the help of its methods of experiment and observation. But on the other hand, knowledge of the spiritual is declined, by those very people who are firmly convinced that they stand on the strict basis of this natural-scientific world-view. For it is said, whether with a certain arrogance or with a certain despondency, that with regard to the spiritual there are barriers to man's knowledge, that with regard to the spirit man must be satisfied with concepts of belief.

Because of this there results a serious inner soul-discord for very many people who get their education from the natural science that is everywhere popularized today. The concepts of belief are handed down from ancient times. It is not known that they also correspond to concepts of knowledge which humanity attained at earlier stages, and that' these are still contained in the traditions, in what has been handed down. If they are accepted just as concepts of belief, then the soul is brought into contradiction with everything it takes in when it accepts what in our day is won for humanity and for practical life in such a rigorous way by the methods of natural science.

What is won in this way cannot really be called the possession of a small group of educated people; rather, this special mode of thought derived from natural science has already penetrated the instruction of the primary grades of school. And we might even say that the condition of soul that results from natural science, if not natural science itself, has been spread everywhere, ever farther and farther, even into the most primitive, outermost human settlements. This brings it about that many people do not know that their soul-longing is for concepts about the spiritual world similar to those they have about the natural world; but this causes in many of them, nevertheless, a discord of soul which is expressed in all kinds of dissatisfactions with life. People feel a certain inner unrest and perplexity. With the concepts and feelings they have, they do not rightly know how to take their place in life. They ascribe the trouble to all sorts of things, but the real cause lies in what I have said.

People today long for real knowledge-concepts about the spiritual world, not for concepts of belief. Such knowledge-concepts are what Anthroposophy strives for; but in doing so it must, of course, vindicate an entirely different concept of knowledge from the one we are accustomed to today. And if I am to characterize this concept, I should like to do it by means of a sort of comparison, which is, however, more than a mere comparison, and is to lead directly to the way in which Anthroposophy strives to know the super-sensible-spiritual.

Let us think first of the strange world which each of you knows as the other side of human existence, as it were, the other side of human consciousness—let us think of the dream-world. Each of you can remember the variegated, diverse, colorful pictures that appear out of the dark depths of sleep. If you observe dreams from the waking state, you will find that these are connected in some way with what one is or does while awake. Even when at times they are prophetic dreams, which is by no means to be denied, they are nevertheless connected with what the dreamer has experienced—only a natural formative fantasy acts in the most extravagant way to metamorphose these experiences. In a different way such dreams are connected with the human bodily conditions; difficulty in breathing, rapid heart-action, disturbances in the organism, are experienced symbolically in dreams in many ways.

Let us imagine for a moment, merely to develop the thought that is needed here, that a person lived in this dream-world, that he had no other world; he would never be able to emerge from this world, but' would regard it as his reality. If through some kind of outer forces, the human life took its course exactly as it does now, that we went about in the cities and did our work, but did not consciously see this work, just always dreamed, then we human beings would regard the dream-world as the only reality, just as the dreamer in the moment of the dream regards his variously decked-out dream-world as his reality» Only when we wake up can we truly form a judgment, from the waking point of view, by means of the way we are then related to the world of our environment, about the real value and significance of the dream, While remaining in the dream, we can come to no such judgment. It is only possible from the point of view of the waking life to judge to what extent the dream is related to life-reminiscences, or to bodily conditions. To form a judgment about the dream, one must first wake up.

Now the human being lives also in his will, for it is particularly the will that, upon waking, is projected into the events of the outer sense-world; man lives now in the pictures which this sense-world transmits to his soul. We have no judgment whatever about the reality, except the feeling of being in the sense-world, the feeling of union with this sense-world; and from this point of view—I might say of insertion of the whole soul-being into this world by means of the body—we at first regard it as reality, and the deceptive pictures of the dream as not belonging to this reality.

But now, especially when anyone surveys all that the pictures of the outer sense-reality give to him, certainly at some time the question will appear: How is what he himself experiences within him as his soul-spirit-being related to the transformations and the variability of the outer sense-world?

The great questions of existence present themselves when a man compares what he sees in the outer sense-world with what he feels as his own being, in his thinking and feeling, his sensing and his willing, rising out of the depths of his humanness,—those great questions of existence which may perhaps be comprised in the one question: What value, as reality, has that which pertains to the soul? This then expands to questions of soul-immortality, of human freedom, and numberless others that spring up. For one will soon feel how entirely different the experience is when looking outward and receiving sense-impressions, from that of looking inward and having soul-experiences. And from such experiences the question must of necessity arises Is it perhaps possible, through some kind of second awakening, a higher awakening, to attain from a higher standpoint knowledge about sense-reality itself, in the same way that a man acquires from the sense-reality a judgment about the dream-world, when, as a matter of course, he awakes in the morning?

When a man is convinced that the imagination of the dream can be judged with regard to its value as reality, only from the standpoint of waking life, then he must strive to gain a point of view which can in turn reveal something about the value as reality, of the higher value, of sense-experience itself.

And now the great question concerning a knowledge of spirit may be put this way: Can we perhaps wake up in a higher sense from our everyday waking consciousness? and does' there result from such second waking a knowledge about the sense-world, just as from the sense-world comes knowledge about the dream?

Now we can, of course, have a feeling about it, but exact observation gives us certainty about how the dream works. When dreaming we feel that our whole soul-life is laid hold of by vague powers. At the moment of waking, we feel that we now have control of our physical body. We feel that the extravagant concepts of the dream are disciplined by the physical body. And the reason we feel that these dream-concepts are extravagant is that, when waking up or going to sleep, there is a moment ' when we do not have the physical body completely in hand. Can a higher, a second awakening, be brought about by conscious soul-activity, in the same way that we are wrenched out of the dream, out of sleep, by the forces of the organism itself?

This question can only be answered when we test, I might say in a higher sense, whether the soul finds forces within itself for such a higher awakening; and only by finding the answer to this can a different form of knowledge-concept be produced from that to which we are accustomed today, and which leads only to one's saying with regard to the spiritual world, “Ignorabimus,” “We shall not know.”

Now we shall have to turn first of all—and Anthroposophy proceeds in this way—to those soul-forces that we already have, and ask: Can something higher, still stronger, be developed out of these soul-forces, just as the waking soul-life is stronger than the dreaming life? We may reason that even this waking soul-life of the adult person has been gradually developed from the dreamy soul-life that we had at the beginning as very little children. If we had stopped with the soul-life that was ours during the first three years on earth, we should see the world in a sort of dream-form. We have grown out of this dream-form.

This may give courage, to begin with, to seek certain soul-forces which can be developed still further than the development achieved since earliest childhood. And anyone who deals with such a problem seriously will turn first to a soul-force concerning which even significant philosophers of the present admit, as a result of purely philosophic deliberation, that it points to a spiritual activity of man which is more or less independent of the body. This is our power of recollection, residing in the memory.

Let us picture to ourselves what exists in our ordinary memory. Of course this memory is not a force with which immediately to penetrate into the super-sensible, spiritual worlds. Above all, we know that this memory is only in perfect order when we can bring to expression in the corporeal what is in the soul. But nevertheless, there is something peculiar here. Among our recollections appear pictures of experiences which were perhaps decades in the past. Something experienced in our relation to the sense-world and to ordinary people appears in varying pictures—according to one's organization—which are really very similar to dream-pictures, only more disciplined. And if our memory is good, there comes today from the soul-depths a living knowledge of what occurred years ago, and is not now before us in sense-reality. This is expressed in a very popular way, of course; but we must start from a definite point of view. So we may say: There are images in the memory which portray inwardly something which was, indeed, once present, something experienced, which is not now present.

And so the question may arise which is still vague at first, and naturally acquires significance only when one can answer it—but we shall see that it can be answered. It is this: Is it possible for anyone, by soul-spiritual work, to acquire a further soul-force, a transformation as it were of the memory-force, whereby he pictures not only what is no longer present, though it once was, but whereby he depicts something which does not exist in the earth-life at all, either through sense-perceptions or any intellectual combinations? This can be decided only by serious inner soul-work; and this soul-work consists of an inner education of the essential element of memory; namely, the capacity for imagining.

How, then, do representations come about? and how is the activity of representation accomplished in ordinary life? Well, outer things make an impression upon us. First, we have sense-perceptions; then from these sense-perceptions we form our concepts, which we carry in the memory. And we know that a certain force is required when we wish to call up a memory-concept of something witnessed in earlier years in which we were involved. But we know too that man surrenders passively to the outer world, in order to have true concepts of this outer world, to bring nothing fantastic into the pictures of it. And this passive self-surrender, assisted besides by all possible experimental methods, is right for natural science. But we can do something more than this with the conceptual life. We can try to take up with inner activity concepts of any content whatsoever—only their content must be easily survey-able, so as not to work suggestively; an idea that is difficult to survey, such as one brought up from the depths of the soul, may easily work suggestively, We now try to ponder with inner activity upon such a concept, so that we surrender ourselves again and again with our whole soul-life to this thought,

I have minutely described what I might call the technique of such surrender to an active living in representation, in my books, “Knowledge of the Higher Worlds” and “Occult Science;” here I want to sketch the principle involved. If anyone devotes himself again and again to the content of an idea, quite independently of the outer meaning of the concepts he employs inwardly, upon which he inwardly rests, with which he unites himself, to which he allows his whole being to open—if anyone surrenders himself in this way to such an idea, he will gradually notice that in this inner work, in the thinking and representation, a notable aliveness is developed, an aliveness which one must first come to know before an opinion can be formed about it. But when anyone does come to know it, he begins to think somewhat as follows: A muscle we continue to use becomes stronger; in exactly the same way the thinking force of our soul-life is strengthened, if we do not surrender passively to the impressions of the outer world, but work inwardly; if in this way we again and again bring the soul-life inwardly and livingly into a certain condition with regard to an idea.

In this way we finally reach the point where the thinking—which otherwise appears shadowy, even in memory-pictures, and exhausts itself just in the mere presentation of pictures—is filled with a soul-spiritual content, just as in life we feel that we are filled with the breath, with the circulating blood. Life-force, if I may speak in this way, streams into thinking that has thus become active.

Truly, real Anthroposophy, as spirit-knowledge, is based upon intimate, inner methods of the soul, not upon any sort of necromancy? it is based upon the changing of the soul-forces of knowledge by the soul itself, making them into something different. And anyone who strengthens his thinking more and more in this way comes at last—it may be even years later—to a very special experience, an experience that may be described as follows: When we call to mind only outer objects or outer actions, we dive down to a certain depth of the soul-life, and from this depth we must then draw up the recollections. But when we actively work on our thinking in the way I have described, we finally come to the point where we know that with this thinking life we go farther down than the power of recollection reaches.

It is an important experience when we have reached the point of observing the recollections as at a certain level to which we dive down in the ordinary consciousness, and from which we bring up memory-concepts; and then when we glimpse that deeper down in the soul-life there is another level to which we have now penetrated, and from which, with our strengthened thinking, we can draw up concepts that are not the same as those to which we first submitted ourselves, but are entirely different. And while we can represent in recollections what was once present in the human life, but is no longer present, so we now learn that when we draw from this deeper level, we come to concepts that are beyond anything one otherwise ever has in life.

Through this gate of knowledge we have now penetrated into the spiritual world; and the first experience that results is this: we get a really tableau-like retrospect of our whole earth-life up to the present. We might say that in a flash—that is a somewhat extreme statement, but it is almost so—our earth-life up to this moment lies spread out in mighty pictures before the consciousness, with time changed into space, as it were. But these pictures are truly different from those we should get if we were to sit down and draw forth in recollection all that can be drawn out of our life, and should get continuous pictures of this earth-life almost to the time of our birth. This tableau is intrinsically different from the one described before. You see, in ordinary recollections the concepts are passively formed, and contain altogether not much more than our impressions from the outer world. For example, in recollections we call to mind how we met some one, the effect someone had upon us, how a friendship was formed; or again, we experience the effect upon us of some natural occurrence, what we experienced of pleasure or suffering from it, or from the influence of some one, and so on.

The content of the tableau, as I have described it, attained by strengthened, invigorated thinking, is this: A man sees himself—the way he approached another person, as a result of his temperamental qualities, or of his own character, or the desire, or the love, he had. While mere recollection gives to a man what is brought to him from outside, this memory-tableau brings to the fore what he himself has contributed to the experience, what has come out of himself. In the ordinary recollection, let us say of a natural occurrence, he has before him what this occurrence brought of pain or pleasure, that is, the effect upon him of the outer world. In the memory-tableau it would be rather his longing to be in whatever region of the earth he had this experience. The part a man himself has taken in an occurrence is what he experiences in the memory-tableau, In short, I might say that this total impression a man has of his life is diverted from the outer world, and that it contains all his activity during life. One really sees himself as a second person. When anyone has this memory-tableau, he has little impression of his physical space-body; but he feels himself within all that he has experienced, and he feels at the same time that it is all a flowing, etheric world, so to speak. And with this flowing, etheric world, which contains his own life in mighty pictures as in an onward-flowing stream, one learns at the same time that the moving etheric world of his own existence is connected with the universal etheric world. When as physical human being with his physical senses, a man confronts the outer world, he feels that he is enclosed within his skin. He feels other things as outer things. He feels a strong contrast between subject and object, to express it philosophically. This is not the case when, with strengthened thinking, one enters into what I may call the fluctuating world of the second man, of the time-man, in contrast to the corporeal, physical space-man.

We can really speak of a time-body, for a man becomes aware simultaneously of his whole previous life, and he feels this previous earth-life as moving in a universal world, like unto itself. He can say, that to the solid, dense, physical world is added a more rarified world, in which one has spent his life in flowing movement. Only now does he come to know what an etheric world is, and what man himself is as second man, as second human being in this etheric world. But with all this one has reached only the first stage of super-sensible knowledge.

It is only because one feels himself to be a spirit-soul being in a spirit-soul world that he knows from direct perception, as it were, that the whole world is interpenetrated and interwoven by a spirit-soul substantiality, which man also holds within himself, But as yet he knows no more than this. And most of all, he does not yet know of another spirit-soul world besides that one which unites him as earth-man with the surrounding etheric world.

But now we can go farther. If a man has acquired this ability to experience himself in the etheric realm, to experience the etheric world along with himself, then he can rise to another kind of development of the soul-forces.

This consists in bringing about in the soul what I might call the opposite process to the one first characterized. First we try to make the thinking inwardly very active, very much alive, so that, instead of passive thinking, we have within an active flow of forces, surging and weaving. Now we must try with the same inner force of free will to suppress again the freely soaring thought that we have put into the soul.

In the soul-exercises to which I am alluding, everything that I describe for you must be done in the same way that the mathematician works out his problems; so that it is all carried out with complete self-possession, with nothing whatever in it of false mysticism, of fantasy, even of suggestion, or anything of the kind. The exercises must be performed in the soul with the same objective coldness with which a geometric problem is solved—for the warmth and enthusiasm come not from the method, but from the results. Nevertheless, we experience the following: that when we acquire this strengthened thinking, it is difficult to dispel the representations we get by it, especially those of the previous life, with which we can be completely engrossed if we want to dwell on them. But we must develop in us the strength to disperse the images again, just as we can call them forth, by our own activity. In other words, we must acquire the faculty to extinguish in our consciousness all thinking and imagining, after having first most actively kindled it. Even extinguishing of ordinary concepts is very difficult, but this is relatively easy in comparison with the obliterating of those concepts that have been set up in the soul by spiritual activity.

Therefore this obliteration means something entirely different. And if one succeeds, again through long practice—but these exercises can be done along with the others, so that both capacities appear simultaneously—if one succeeds in producing these strong, active processes of thought in his consciousness, and then in obliterating them again, something comes over the soul that I might call the inner silence of the soul—for we must have expressions for these things you know. There is no knowledge whatever of this inner silence in the consciousness of the ordinary life.

Of the two things needed by the spiritual researcher who wants to make research in the anthroposophical way, the first is the strengthened conceptual life, the strengthened thought-life, by means of which he comes to self-knowledge in the way indicated; the other is that he must cultivate a completely empty consciousness; in which all the thinking, feeling and willing, otherwise in the soul, is silenced—but silenced only after this soul-activity has been enhanced to the highest degree. Then this silence of soul is something quite special. It represents the second stage, as it were, of spirit-knowledge; and I can describe it somewhat as follows:

Let us imagine that we are in a great city where there is a terrific uproar, and we become quite deafened by it. We leave the city, and when we have walked for some time, we still hear the roar behind us, but the noise has already become somewhat less, and the farther we go the quieter it becomes. If we finally reach the stillness of the forest, it may be that all about us will be quiet. We have experienced the whole range from raging noise to outer silence. But now I can go farther. This will not take place in outer reality, of course, but the concept is an entirely real one, when we come to what I have just designated as silence of the soul, I will for once use a very trivial comparison: We may have a certain wealth and keep spending it; we have less and less and finally nothing at all. Then our wealth is zero. But we can go still farther; we can go into debt; then we have less than nothing. We know from mathematics that one can have less than nothing.

Well, it can be the same with quiet, with silence. From the noise of the world complete silence can be restored, equal to zero. This can even become less; it can become more silent than the silence that equals zero, more and more silent, negative silence, negative quiet. And that is really the case when the strengthened soul-life is blotted out, when the silence in the soul becomes deeper than zero silence, if I may express it so. A quiet is established in the soul-life that tends toward the minus side, a stillness that is deeper than the mere silence of the ordinary consciousness.

And when we have penetrated to this silence, when the soul feels that it is removed from the world—not only when the world around it is still, but when the soul feels that the world-quiet can only equal zero, but that the soul itself is in a deeper silence than the silence of the world—then, when this negative silence sets in, the spiritual world begins to speak, really to speak, from the other side of existence.

Ordinarily, we ourselves as human beings interrupt the quiet of the world with our words projected into the air, When we have established in ourselves this quiet that is deeper than zero-quiet, this silence that is deeper than mere silence, the spiritual world begins to speak; but it is a language to which we must first become accustomed, a language utterly different from the language of words, a language formed in such a way that we gradually become accustomed to it by drawing upon our knowledge of the sense-world, of colors, of tones, in short, all that we know of the sense-world. We use this to describe the special impressions of the spiritual world according to our experiences of the sense-world,

I want to call attention to a few details. Suppose that in this inner silence of soul we get the impression of the presence of something out of the depths of spirit which attacks us aggressively, as it were, and excites us in a certain way. We know first of all that it is a spiritual experience, that the spiritual world is revealing itself. We compare this with an experience we have had in the sense-world, and learn that in the sense-world this experience has about the same effect upon us as the color yellow. In exactly the same way that we coin a word to express something in the sense-world, so now we take the yellow color to express this spiritual experience; or in another case we might take a tone to express it. As we use speech to talk about the things of the sense-world, so now we make use of sense-qualities and sense-impressions in speaking about what is spiritually received from the spiritual world in the silence of the soul.

This is the way to describe the spiritual world. I have described it in this way in my book “Theosophy” and in “Occult Science,” and the descriptions need only to be rightly understood. We must understand that for the silence of the soul there is a new language. While we have articulated speech for outward expression as human beings, something comes to us from the spiritual world which we must put into appropriate words, but it can be apprehended only in a subtle way, and must be translated into human speech by using words formed from sense-perception.

And when you have these experiences in the silence of the soul, you come to know that the world of invigorated thinking that you had at first is really only a picture,—a picture of what you see only now, for which you only now have a language, a picture by which you penetrated into the silence of the soul. The spiritual world now speaks to you through the silence of the soul. And now you are able also to efface this whole life-tableau, which you yourself have formed, which has brought the earth-life etherically before you, as by magic. This inner quiet of the soul appears now also in the personal life as you live it here on earth. The illusion of that ego which exists only in the physical body now ceases.

Anyone who holds too firmly to his ego, through a theoretical or a practical egotism, does not succeed in establishing this silence of soul in the presence of his own life-tableau. A man who combats theoretical and practical egotism comes to see that he first has this ego to enable him to make use of his body in the physical life, that the body gives him the possibility of saying “I” to himself. If he then passes from this corporeal sense of the ego into what I have described as the etheric world, where one flows together with the world, where the world is etherically united with one's own etheric being, he will no longer hold firmly to this ego. He will experience that of which this life-tableau, to which he has lifted himself, is a picture. He will experience his pre-earthly existence, in a spiritual world, before he descended through conception and birth into a physical human body,

Anthroposophy does not speak from philosophical speculations about the immortality, the eternity of the human' soul, but it tells how, through a special development of the soul-forces, one may struggle through to the vision of the soul-being before it descended to the earth. There actually appears now to the silenced soul a direct view of the soul as it dwells eternally in the world of spirit. As we look in recollection at what we have experienced on earth, as the past earth-life awakes in memory, so now, after we have learned in the soul-silence the language of the world of spirit, as I have described it, events appear that have not existed in the earth-life at all, events by which we have been prepared for this earth-life before we descended to it,

And now one looks upon what he was before he came down to the earth-life. As long as he was still beholding the life-tableau, he knew that he himself and the world are permeated and interpenetrated by moving, weaving spirit—though finer and more etheric, it is still a sort of nature-spirit, which he finds in the world and experiences as akin to himself. But now, when he looks into the pre-earthly existence, being united with what father and mother give at birth, he sees the unity of the moral world-order and the physical world-order. In this pre-earthly existence are all the forces that are prototypes of the forms produced during the physical earth-life. Here one sees that the spiritual forces reign and weave in the human body even in the physical earth-life. One marvels at the structure of the human brain as it gradually takes shape. One notices how undifferentiated this brain was when the child was born, what it became with the seventh year of life, about the time of the change of teeth. One turns his gaze upon the inner, plastic, formative forces; and does not stop short with the indefinite dictum about heredity.

We know that what the child works out in the first years of' life alone, in the plastic formation of the brain and the whole organism, is the after-effect, the imitation, of the far-reaching, universal events experienced in the spiritual world, where the soul was among spiritual beings, in just the same way that we live among the creatures of nature and human beings on earth. And one now comes to know that the spiritual world works into the physical earth-world, and that the after-effects of this pre-earthly existence are contained in all that is active in the inner organization of our being; one knows that he himself is a soul-spirit-being within the physical corporeal.

As we go farther, a third experience must be added to what I have already described, I have called attention to the necessity of first overcoming the illusion of the ego; one must overcome the ordinary, everyday, theoretical or practical egotism; and one must understand that this ego of our earth-life is bound up with the physical body, and comes to consciousness first of all in the sensations of the physical body. But there is something in the physical earth-life which, when I name it, may perhaps cause a little disturbance here and there in one's theory of knowledge, because it is usually not counted at all among the forces of knowledge, and it may be found distasteful to place it there. But it must be done nevertheless. And anyone who has come in the way described first to the invigoration of thought and then to soul-silence, will understand that it must be done. There must be added to these, as a third, a higher development, a more intensive development, of what exists in the ordinary life as love: love for people, love of nature, love of all our work, love for what we do. All the love that already exists in the usual life can be increased by doing away with theoretical and practical egotism in the way described. Love must be intensified, And when this love is increased, when the expanded love-force is joined to the strengthened thinking and the silence of soul, one comes to a third experience, Man comes now to the conscious laying hold of the true form of the ego, when he comes to know not only the pre-earthly existence, but when he now learns by means of this that an augmented love-force further energizes the other developed, strengthened forces of knowledge. He comes to an exact experience: All that has been won has nothing to do with the physical body; you experience yourself outside the physical body; you experience the world as it cannot be experienced through the body. Instead of natural phenomena you experience spiritual beings. You experience yourself, not as a natural being between birth and death, but as a spiritual being in a pre-earthly existence.

If a man has won this, and there is added to it a heightened, increased capacity of love, the possibility of dedicating himself, of surrendering himself with his whole body-free existence, to what he sees here, then there comes to him the knowledge of what exists within man in the immediate present, independent of the physical and even of the etheric body. He gets a direct view of what rests within him and goes through the gate of death into the post-earthly existence, when we enter again into a spiritual world. Because he comes to know what he is in a body-free state, he learns also of that which continues to exist, free of the body, when the physical body is laid aside at death.

You see the purpose of it all is to come to the perception of the eternity of the human soul. But in particular, one attains by means of it to the perception of the true ego, that ego which goes through birth and death, of which one cannot say that it dwells in the body, but that it rests in the body. One learns at the same time of the movement and activity of this ego in the pre-earthly existence in the spiritual world. One comes to know it in the same way that we know the human being here in the sense-physical existence through the sense of sight. Just as a man goes about here among the things of nature, among natural phenomena, among other people, so one learns to know, I might say, how the soul moves about in the pre-earthly existence in the spiritual world. But one learns also that the soul's movement and its relations there are dependent upon an earlier earth-life. I said that one learns of the oneness of the moral and the natural; one learns that in the pre-earthly existence man is permeated not only by spiritual but also by moral impulses, While one merely perceives, during the continuance of the etheric life-tableau, that spirit streams through the whole world, one now learns that in the pre-earthly existence there pulsated through our soul-spirit-being the moral impulses which appear in the memory during the physical life, and especially in the moral predispositions» One has now come to know the oneness of the moral and the physical world.

But now, in this moral-physical world (physical only in the pictures shining up into the spirit from the physical existence)—in this world experienced by the soul in the spiritual realm, one comes to know how the soul, as man's real ego, lives in the spiritual world in conformity with the previous existence. Truly when we come to spiritual vision and escape from the illusion of the ordinary ego, then we come to know how the ego has already passed through the spiritual world between death and a new birth; we learn how it comported itself, in conformity with its former earth-life, in this world endowed with moral impulses; and we learn that it is all carried into this earth-life as an inner determination of destiny. We see this expressed in the tendencies of a person, or in the special coloring of the desire which drives a man to one thing or another in the earth-life.

This does not encroach upon freedom. Freedom exists within certain limits, in just the same way that we are free, when we have built us a house, to occupy it or not; but we will occupy it because we have built it for ourselves for a certain reason. In the same way we are still free, even though we may know that there are impelling forces in our physical body which cause us to turn this way or that in life, or to live in one way or another. On the one hand we can regard this as a destiny that we have woven for ourselves out of earlier earth-lives, out of the world through which we have passed that contains not only spiritual but also moral laws. These have permeated what we were in a former life with definite spiritual impulses, and out of these have formed the destiny for our earth-life. But we notice also, when we look at what comes from the former earth-life, in the way described, that it is the eternal in the soul that has determined our earthly destiny» After we have passed through the gate of death, and have united what is of moral or soul-nature with our soul-being, in order to bring greater harmony into our relation with the demands of the moral world—we carry this into the world and come down again into a new earth-life, with what I might call the resulting total from what we were in life and what the spiritual world has made of us between death and a new birth.

So you see the really important thing is first to develop a certain perceptive faculty, with which one can look up into the spiritual world.

You must bear in mind, my dear friends, that not everyone has the gifts of a mathematician. It is very difficult for most people even to have these geometrical concepts, that are really to be formed only in the imagination. Geometry is not a spontaneous element of nature, but we understand nature by means of it. We must first produce geometry within ourselves, and by means of geometry we create the forms which will lead us into the structure of the lifeless world. With just such inner rigor do we produce inner vision, by developing strengthened thinking, silence of soul, and love which has become a force of knowledge, so that we may apprehend the living, the sentient, the self-conscious. In the same way that we apprehend the lifeless through mathematics, we come to an understanding apprehension of the living, the feeling, the self-conscious, when we proceed in a purely mathematical way, and develop a certain kind of vision with vigor and exactness.

So we may say that anyone who is serious about Anthroposophy pursues it as if he were required to give account of the use he makes of his forces of knowledge to the strictest mathematician. The forming of mathematical concepts is elementary Anthroposophy, if I may speak thus. And when anyone has learned to develop this self-creativeness of mathematics in order to apply it to the lifeless things of the world, he gets the impulse to develop further the kinds of knowledge which will lead to the vision I have described to you. We come to know that the lifeless world has a different content when we know it mathematically—mathematics is elementary Anthroposophy—and we know the living, sentient, self-conscious world when we study it with complete anthroposophical understanding.

Therefore, what in ordinary life is called clairvoyance, or anything of the kind, must not be confused with what we have in Anthroposophy for obtaining knowledge of the spiritual world. When we call this clairvoyance—and of course we can do so—we must mean exact clairvoyance, just as we speak of exact mathematics, in contrast with the mystical, confused clairvoyance, which is usually what anyone has in mind when this word is used.

Now you will perhaps have received the impression from my description that this is difficult. Yes, it is difficult] it is not easy. Hence, many people who presume to have an opinion about what goes on in Dornach do not try to understand what appears so difficult to them, but judge according to the trivial, confused clairvoyance. And then the result is all that I mentioned at the beginning of my lecture» But the Anthroposophy with which we are concerned is an exact kind of knowledge, which can actually be understood by anyone with sound human intelligence, just as anyone can understand a picture without himself being a painter. To get Anthroposophy one must be an anthroposophical researcher; to paint a picture one must be a painter; but everything I have described can be understood by anyone with good common sense, if only he does not himself put hindrances and obstructions in the way.

To paint a picture one must be a painter; to judge it one must rely upon sound human nature. To build up Anthroposophy one must be a spiritual researcher; to understand Anthroposophy one need only meet the more or less well-given descriptions of it with his healthy, free human spirit, undisturbed by natural-scientific and other prejudices. But Anthroposophy is only in its beginning, and what I have perhaps not described very well today will be described better and better as time goes on; and then the time will come which has always arrived ultimately for anything new in humanity. How long it was before the Copernican world-view was accepted! It has nevertheless upset all concepts previously held. Today it is accepted as a matter of course, and is taught in the schools. What is considered by people today the quintessence of fantasy, of nonsense, perhaps madness, will later be a matter of course—just as it was with the Copernican world-theory. Anthroposophy can wait until it is a matter of course.

This Anthroposophy, above all else, was to be cultivated at the Dornach Goetheanum. Therefore—permit me to say this in conclusion—more than ten years ago friends of our cause conceived a plan to build an abode for this Anthroposophy, and commissioned me to carry out the plan—I was only the one to execute it—and this abode is the Goetheanum. If Anthroposophy were a theoretical world-conception, or even a mere idea of reform, what would have happened the moment the idea appeared to build a home for Anthroposophy? An architect would have been consulted who would simply have erected a building in antique, or Renaissance, in Gothic or rococo style, or something of the sort. But Anthroposophy does not work merely theoretically, merely as scientific knowledge; it passes over into the whole human being, lays claim to the whole human being. This is very soon noticed by the anthroposophical researcher.

You see when a man wants to think about outer nature, he needs his head, and if he wants to indulge in philosophic speculations, he needs it even more. What appears before the silent soul, as pertaining to the spiritual world, in the way I have described it to you, is something that appears more fleetingly. One needs presence of mind in order to take it in quickly; but one needs for it also his whole human being. The head is not enough. The whole human organization must be placed in the service of the spirit, in order to bring into the memory, into the recollection, what one sees spiritually without the body. To illustrate this, let me give a personal experience.

I have never been accustomed to prepare any lecture in just the way lectures are usually prepared; but it is my custom to experience spiritually the thoughts that appear necessary for a lecture, as one must also experience spiritually what one wishes to hold as the result of spiritual research. What is experienced in strengthened thinking and in the human soul must be conveyed into thought and for this mere head-thinking will not suffice. One must be united more intimately with the whole human being, if one wishes to express what has been experienced in the realm of spirit. There are various methods by which such experience can really be brought into the ordinary consciousness, so that it can be put into words. It is my custom, with pencil in hand, to write down, to formulate, either in words or in some kind of signs, all that comes to me from the spiritual world. Hence I have many cartloads of note-books, but I never look at them again. They exist, but their only purpose is to unite with the whole human being what is discovered in spirit, so that it is grasped not only with the head, so as to be communicated in words, but is experienced by the whole human being.

Anthroposophy does indeed lay hold of the whole human being, therefore it is in still another regard an expression of the Goethean world-conception. It is, to begin with, an expression of the Goethean world-conception, in that it was induced by Goethe's method of observing the metamorphoses, the transformations of life in the plant and animal world. In this Goethean mode of observation the thought is so alive that one can then try to strengthen it in the way I have described. But Goethe is also that personality who built the bridge from knowledge to art.

Out of his artistic conviction Goethe voiced this beautiful expression: Art is a manifestation of secret laws of nature which without art would never be revealed. This means that Goethe knew one lays hold in real knowledge of the ruling and weaving of spirit, and then implants this into substance, be it as sculptor or musician or painter. Goethe knew that artistic fantasy is a kind of arbitrary projection of what man can experience in its pure form in the spirit.

Any knowledge which, like Anthroposophy, is rooted thus in the life of the spirit, flows of itself into artistic creativeness. It comes into artistic activity, when one knows the human being in the way I have described, and sees how the pre-earthly forces work into the earthly-corporeal existence. Then one has the feeling that the human being cannot be comprehended with the mere intellect, merely in concepts. At a certain point abstract concepts must be allowed to pass over into artistic seeing, so that you feel: Man is created by nature as a work of art.

Of course this can easily be ridiculed, for nothing seems more dreadful to people nowadays than to hear anyone say that to know something it must be comprehended artistically. But people may declaim as long as they please about the need to be logical rather than artistic when something is to be understood—if nature works artistically, then man simply does not find out about it by logic. He must pass over to artistic seeing to learn the real secrets of nature.

This is what Goethe meant when he said: “Art is a manifestation of secret laws of nature which without art would never be revealed.” And this is what Goethe meant also when, after years of longing, he reached Italy and believed he had attained his ideal of art. He said: “When I behold these works of art, I have the notion that the Greeks in the creation of their works of art proceeded by the same laws according to which nature creates, and I am on the track of those laws.”

Goethe was a personality who always aimed to transpose into a work of art whatever was comprehended as knowledge in the soul. Because Anthroposophy is of this same conviction, it was not possible simply to go to an architect and say: Build us a dwelling-place for Anthroposophy—and it would then have been built in Renaissance or antique or rococo style; our building has to be based on an entirely different conception of life and of art.

I have often compared the basic necessity here in a somewhat banal way with the relation of the nut-shell to the nut-kernel. The kernel of the nut, which we eat, is fashioned according to definite laws of form, but the shell is also made in accordance with the same laws. You cannot imagine a shell being fitted to the nut from the outside; the shell arises from the same laws of form as the kernel. So the forms of the outer visible building, what was painted in the domes, the sculpture placed in it, had to be fashioned as the shell, so to speak, of what was proclaimed within through the word, through art, spoken or sung. As the nut-shell to the nut, so this building had to be related to what was fostered within it. This was really the result not only of my conviction, but of that of many others. We have had eurythmy performances, the presentation of an art which has a special language in movement, in which the stage-picture consists of moving persons or moving groups? and the movements are not dance-movements, and not imitative movements, but an actual visible speech. We have developed here on the stage of the Goetheanum an expressive art of movement. The lines in which the human soul expresses itself harmonize in a beautiful way with the lines of the architraves, the lines of the capitals, the columns, with the whole form of the building, and with the paintings in it. What was cultivated within and the covering were one. When something was said from the platform, when what was learned in spiritual vision was put into words and sounded out into the audience-room, then what was spoken from the podium was the kernel which lived within. The artistic form had to correspond with the kernel. The style of the building in all its details had to come from the same impulse, from the same source as Anthroposophy itself. For Anthroposophy is not abstract, theoretical knowledge, but a comprehension of life, of the whole life. And therefore it becomes art quite spontaneously. It fulfils what Goethe said again: He who possesses science and art has also religion] he who possesses neither should have religion.

I might say, all that lived in the forms, all that may ever have been said or artistically presented in the Goetheanum, was intended to be comprised in a wood-carved group about 30 feet high, in which Christ, as the Representative of mankind, is portrayed in the Temptation by Ahriman and Lucifer.

This does not mean that Anthroposophy has anything to do with the forming of any kind of sect. Anthroposophy is far removed from hostile opposition to any religious conviction, or from any wish whatsoever to found a new religion. But Anthroposophy can show that real spiritual knowledge leads to the climax of religious development, to the Representative of humanity, Christ, to the incorporation of the Christ-God in the body of Jesus of Nazareth. It shows also how spirit-knowledge needs the picture of this central point of all earth-evolution, the picture of the Mystery of Golgotha. Quite certainly a man becomes religiously inclined through Anthroposophy, but Anthroposophy is not the founding of a religion.

What Anthroposophy wanted to offer artistically in the Goetheanum had to come from the same impulses from which the spoken word and the song proceed. It can even be said that when anyone stepped on the platform—I want to say this in all modesty—the forms of the columns, the whole form of the inner architecture, the inside sculpture and painting—all this was like an admonition to speak in a manner that would really approach the inner being of the listeners. It was like a continuous challenge to the speaker to put his word into this building in a worthy way.

To sum up: The building was to be an outer garment for Anthroposophy, which came wholly from the spirit of Anthroposophy, but was there for physical eyes to see» There was nothing symbolic, nothing allegorical. The whole building was created in its architecture, in its sculpture, in its painting, in everything connected with it, in such a way that what was livingly grasped in spirit-vision expressed itself, not in intellectual, symbolic forms; but living ideas and mobile thoughts about the spiritual world come to artistic expression in such a way as to be directly felt and seen. There was no symbol in the whole building, and if anyone maintains that the building had a symbolic meaning, he speaks as one who knows nothing about Anthroposophy.

And so the building was for the eye what Anthroposophy is to be for the soul of man. Anthroposophy has to be that kind of spirit which knows that a longing for the unveiling of the super-sensible vibrates and quivers through present humanity; that this humanity—made what it is by its scientific education, which intends to be generally popular, and already is to a certain extent—can no longer be satisfied with traditional concepts of belief; that concepts of knowledge must come, which tend upward to the spiritual world; and that unrest and dissatisfaction of soul result from the lack of such concepts of knowledge.

Anthroposophy wants to serve the present by providing in the right way what men need to take from this present into the near future. What Anthroposophy wants to be, invisibly, for human souls, the Goetheanum wanted to be, visibly, as vestment, as home. Had the Goetheanum been only a symbolic building, the pain at its loss would not have been so great, for then one could always bring it alive again in recollection. But the Goetheanum was not for mere remembrance. It was something intended to bring tidings from the spirit to the sense-world, and like any work of art, wanted to be manifested directly to the sense-world. Therefore with the burning of the Goetheanum, all that the Goetheanum wanted to be is lost.

But it has perhaps shown that Anthroposophy wants to be nothing one-sidedly theoretical, mere knowledge; it can be and must be a life-content in all realms. Hence, it had to build its abode in a style of its own. The Spirit, which Anthroposophy places before the soul, the Goetheanum wanted to place before the eyes. And Anthroposophy must place before the human soul what this soul really demands as the innermost need of the modern time; namely, a view, a knowledge, an artistic comprehension, of the spiritual world. Souls demand this because they feel more and more that only by experiencing the whole human destiny can they discover the complete human worth.

The Goetheanum could burn down. A catastrophe has swept it away. The pain of those who loved it is so great that it cannot be described. That structure which came from the same sources as Anthroposophy, and through it willed to serve mankind, had to be built for the sense-eye, had to be made of physical material. And as the human body itself, according to my description today, is the sense-image and the material effect of the eternal spiritual, but in death falls away, so that the spiritual can be developed in other forms, so also could that—permit me to close by comparing the Dornach misfortune with what happens in the usual course of the world—so could that be destroyed by flames which had to be made out of physical substance, in order to be seen by physical eyes. But Anthroposophy is built out of spirit, and only flames of spirit can touch this. Just as the human soul and spirit are victor over the physical when this is destroyed in death, so Anthroposophy feels alive, even though it has lost its Dornach home, the Goetheanum. It may be said that physical flames could destroy what had to be built of outer physical substance for the eye; but what Anthroposophy is to be for the further development of humanity is built of spirit. This will not be destroyed by the flames of the spiritual life, for these flames are not destroying flames; they are strengthening flames, flames that give more life than ever. And all that life which is to be revealed through Anthroposophy as life of knowledge of the higher world, must be tempered by the flames of the highest inspiration of the human being, his soul and his spirit. Then Anthroposophy will continuously evolve.

He who lives in this way in the spirit feels no less the pain caused by the passing away of the earthly, but he knows at the same time that surmounting all this depends upon the realization that the spirit will ever be victorious over matter, and in matter will be transformed ever anew.

Dear attendees! When the Goetheanum in Dornach, before its actual completion, organized autumn courses on the various sciences and on various branches of human life last fall, the aim was not to focus exclusively on spiritual science as such in these courses, but to let the individual sciences express themselves in such a way that what they themselves could experience as a fertilization through spiritual science would have to come to light. For this reason, it was considered important that experts from the individual scientific fields were able to express themselves at this event, that they were heard, and that personalities from practical life, from commerce, industry and so on, were also heard, in other words, from thoroughly practical life. The idea was that those people who are either directly involved in science or those who have experienced the hardships and challenges of life and at the same time have truly penetrated into that which is to emerge as spiritual science at the Goetheanum in Dornach, should be able to discuss the experiences they have with the introduction of spiritual science into their particular field. But it has also been used to highlight what is supposed to be the actual origin of the anthroposophically oriented spiritual science represented by the Goetheanum. What is to be represented here is not something that even remotely has the intention, say, of founding some new religion. Nor is it about wanting to set up some kind of sectarian movement, but the starting point of spiritual science is taken entirely from the scientific life of modern times and especially of the present.

I would like to express myself through a comparison, as what is to be represented as Anthroposophy from Dornach is particularly related to the scientific life of modern times and the present. If I make such a comparison, it is only to explain something. Please do not think – I hardly need to mention this – that with this comparison, spiritual science itself is to be compared with the world-historical event that I am citing. That could be left to some cheap quip or the like. But I would like to point out to you – just to explain something – the views with which the discoverers of America set out, these discoverers of America who found the courage to sail across the ocean that had not yet been crossed. They believed they were arriving in India, reaching India from the other side, so to speak, hence the term West India and so on. So what did they predict? They predicted that by venturing out across the ocean, they would reach something familiar.

This is also how I would like to try to go further and further within modern science, as it has developed over the last three to four centuries. You are well aware that serious, conscientious researchers strive for this ever-advancing progress of science, and that extraordinarily conscientious researchers, it should be recognized, then speak of the fact that one must come to the insurmountable limits of human knowledge. But on the other hand, when one comes to these limits, all kinds of assumptions are made about the atomic and molecular world, and so on and so forth. One assumes, when working methodically in the laboratory, when doing research in the clinic, when trying to fathom the secrets of the world at the astronomical observatory, that somehow, through the sea of the scientific method, one must arrive at something that is either an insurmountable limit or something similar to what is already known. Just as Columbus more or less predicted that he would have to find something already known, so it is also assumed in science that one must find something already known. After all, molecules and atoms are nothing more than, I would say, penetrating into the smallest, into that which one also sees with ordinary eyes, making sense.

But this experience of the scientist seems perfectly understandable to someone who is immersed in scientific life, understandable because when you work further and further with modern methods, you don't actually arrive at a solution to important life and human riddles, as you might expect. If you believe that, you are indulging in an illusion. On the contrary, anyone who approaches science with an open mind, or rather, I should say, who conducts methodical research, especially if they not only pursue the natural sciences, but also want to transfer the scientific method to history, to the so-called humanities, will find that no solutions arise, but that the number of puzzles instead increases. You only really learn to recognize how mysterious the world around us is when you get to know it through the methods of modern science. But there is one thing we have to acknowledge when we reflect on ourselves in our research: What is it that we apply, regardless of whether we are conducting research in the laboratory or in the astronomical observatory or in the clinic? Well, my dear audience, however much some people, I would say through a radical materialism, may be mistaken about this, it is nevertheless not even a very high truth, but rather a trivial one, that if one wants to do scientific research, one must apply spirit, that in some way the spirit must be active in man.

And now it is a matter of combining these words, the spirit must be active in man when he researches externally, in the sensual-scientific, with these words, some real, scientific meaning. You cannot do this any differently than by researching what this spirit is. You cannot find it in the external world. You have to apply it to the knowledge of the external world, you have to get the spirit out of yourself. If we want to express ourselves at all about what science is, we speak of the spirit all the time. But we also have to be able to come to it through some particular way of knowing: What is this spirit actually? And by now trying to make the journey, I would like to say through the sea of modern science, one finally discovers that one does not arrive at something known, but that one arrives precisely at that which is previously in consciousness when one utters the word “spirit” or by saying, “The spirit searches,” one does not arrive at something known, but one arrives at that unknown and actually experiences something similar to what Columbus experienced when he discovered America between Europe and India.

On the journey to the world's mysteries, one actually experiences what the spirit is. Only, in a sense, science has lost it. And this is shown, I would say quite bitterly, in life that this science has lost it. This newer natural science recognizes the spirit only in thoughts, in ideas, in abstractions. And this view has been adopted by millions and millions of people, who call everything that arises through the spirit in life - morality, religion, science, law, and so on - an ideology, that is, something that would only arise as smoke from what is either sensual truth, or what some material production processes are, or the like. But this is what one discovers, not through any kind of belief, but through a real scientific observation within anthroposophical spiritual science, what the spirit is as a real being, what the spirit is as a living being, like what one observes through the outer senses in all its liveliness.

Now, my dear audience, to arrive at this view, one needs a certain starting point. And I would like to call this starting point: “intellectual modesty”. First of all, a moral quality is necessary, albeit an intimate moral quality, if one wants to find the right starting point for the spiritual science meant here.

To characterize this starting point in intellectual modesty, I would like to choose the following comparison. Imagine a five-year-old child is given a volume of Goethean poetry. What will he do with the volume of Goethean poetry? He would perhaps tear it up or play with it in some way, but in any case he would not do what the volume of Goethean poetry is actually there for, which one can do when one is in a different state than the one in which the child will be when he is ten or fifteen years older. He will do something different with the volume of Goethean poetry than he would at five years of age. What is the reason for this? The reason for this is none other than that the child's soul has developed in the meantime, developed from within. The child is now capable, because it has developed those qualities that it did not have at five years of age, of discovering something that was already there in the volume of poetry when the child was five years old. He was just the same externally in the eyes of the child as he might be when the child is twenty years old. But because something has taken place within the child, because something has been brought out of the child's inner being, purely because of this, the child treats everything it now does with the volume of Goethean lyric poetry quite differently.

Nowadays, especially in science, but also in life in general, we take the view that we develop those qualities in people that are, let us say, inherited, that can be acquired through ordinary education, and then we are usually ready for today's life and for scientific life. This is the point of departure, especially in scientific life. One regards oneself as more or less complete in a certain way, in terms of one's ordinary inherited qualities and one's education, and one looks at the world, so to speak, from this completed point of view. One combines what the mind and the senses provide and, without going deeper, one might say that one only considers what is missing in the area one wants to explore. One expands, one also expands by perhaps arming the eye with a telescope or microscope or [spectroscope] or X-ray machine. But in this way one attains nothing more than, I would like to say, even if indirectly, by means of the spectroscope or the X-ray apparatus or the telescope, one sees the same thing that one otherwise has before the senses and the other senses. But what one needs to have for spiritual science is intellectual modesty. That means that at some point in life one must simply say to oneself: Man can develop abilities from the age of five to the age of twenty. In a sense, he draws out of his inner being what is latent in him. And only because he has drawn something out of his inner being does the world now look different to him. If one merely describes the external senses: It is no longer there, but it is now more present for him because he has brought abilities and qualities out of the depths of his soul. So one says to oneself: There could be other abilities in this soul, abilities that do not come through the ordinary inherited qualities in their natural development and through ordinary education, but that perhaps only come through taking the soul life intimately inwardly — albeit with the appropriate modesty, because it is only a sensualization —, deeply inwardly, and that one brings it beyond the point of view that can otherwise be obtained in life and in ordinary science.

This is what must naturally take as its starting point the intellectual modesty just characterized, the view that there may still lie in the soul something as yet undeveloped, but which can still be developed. From this point of view, what is anthroposophically oriented spiritual science? From this point of view, it really seeks to shape out of the soul that which is latent in the soul. The methods it uses for this cannot really be compared with any external measures. They are methods that are intimately applied to the inner life of the soul itself. But one should not think that what comes about through the development of intimate inner soul abilities is somehow easier than research in the laboratory or clinic or astronomical observatory. Rather, what I am now briefly indicating to you in principle requires years and years of inner, serious and dedicated soul work. This dedicated soul work is not appreciated by some people who know little about the subject. And so they believe that what is said in the field of spiritual science is something fantastic, plucked out of the blue. But that is not the case at all.

What I am now going to mention very briefly, you will find more fully described in my book “How to Know Higher Worlds”. Of course I cannot give all the details here, but I would like to suggest in principle that the matter at hand when researching the spiritual worlds, as meant in anthroposophy, is not at all something that has been miraculously brought forth or the like, but that it is only a continuation, a further development of the ordinary human soul abilities. Please excuse me, therefore, if I explain in a somewhat elementary way how one can move from the ordinary soul abilities to those through which, in science, one can look deeper into the reasons for existence than is the case with the ordinary external senses and with the combining mind.

You are all familiar with two human abilities. If I speak to you about a development in the first ability, perhaps not so many people will take offense at it, because they will at least admit that what comes about through such an ability can still be called science. But when I speak to you about the development of the second ability, then, of course, the objections will increase, which is quite understandable. The objections, ladies and gentlemen, are well known. Then, in particular, the scientific people will initially rebel against something like this, but only as long as the full transformation of the corresponding abilities is not envisaged.

The two abilities – there are, of course, many others, but these are the two main abilities that I want to characterize – these two abilities of the human soul, which, so to speak, have to be taken up at the point where they are in ordinary life and from there have to be further developed, just as the mental abilities of a five-year-old child have to be further developed. These two abilities are, on the one hand, the human ability to remember and, on the other hand, what we call love in our ordinary and social lives. The ability to remember and the ability to love – we apply them in science at least as aids. Memory and love play an enormous role in our ordinary and social lives. However, both abilities can be developed further than they are in the ordinary life of the human soul.

As you know, the ability to remember is what brings coherence into our lives. Initially, we have this ability to remember in such a way that we can conjure up an event that we may have experienced many years ago at a certain later point in our lives. At that time, we were fully immersed in this event with our whole being. At that time we touched, so to speak, that which was the cause of a certain experience in the external world. At that time our senses were exposed to this experience. In later periods of life, perhaps through an external cause, perhaps through an inner cause or something similar, we evoke in the soul itself in the form of an image that which was once an experience. And if we have healthy soul powers, we know quite precisely, simply inwardly through what is formed in the life contexts for our soul existence, whether we are imagining some kind of fantasy, whether we are merely thinking up something or whether what arises in our soul is only the image, so to speak, the imagination of what we have experienced in the outer sense world.

Those who have studied the significance of the ability to remember for the human soul in more depth know that our self is never truly healthy if something is wrong with this memory – going back to the point in time to which we can usually remember going back in the first years of life. If there is a period of life that cannot be reached in memory, where the thread of life is interrupted, something will show up that disturbs the self so much that the self, the center of the human soul, cannot feel healthy. And you also know how morbid conditions can intervene in the ego and how, through the rupture of memory, quite terrible mental illnesses can arise. There are people – you will have heard of them, my dear audience – who got on a train somewhere and rode it to some point. Then they got off. They only found their way again later. They have completely severed the thread of life. And afterwards? They cannot remember what they have been through. This thread of memory is what holds our ego together.

What is actually the basis for remembering any event? Yes, by going through the experiences, they are, so to speak, in front of us in the moment. We can relive what we experience in them inwardly over and over again. And what we have done over and over again can be inwardly revived in our soul as an image. I do not need to dwell today on what actually takes place in the human being's inner life; you can find that in my works on spiritual science literature. The fact of the matter is that we can bring forth images of experiences we have had, and that in this way the experience becomes a lasting one in our soul. You see, we have to hold on to this quality of permanence and, I would say, learn to experiment with it, just as one experiments with external things in a chemical laboratory. We must actually learn to think about these inner things in the same way that we have acquired skills in science, in modern science, whose merits should not be overshadowed by spiritual science. Just as we set out to do certain things in modern science, so we come to a different conclusion about what we can only observe in nature. Just as one goes from observing nature to conducting experiments and thereby arriving at certain things that could not be inferred from observation itself, but are only inferred from this artificially arranged observation of the experiment, so too can certain human soul abilities not be developed if one does not, so to speak, resort to inner work on the soul abilities themselves.

What is characteristic of memory images is duration, and that is what one absorbs. One forms easily comprehensible images, images that cannot be mixtures, that cannot emerge from some subconscious, that would be the complicated images. No, one forms easily comprehensible images, the individual components of which one can see quite well. You put them into your consciousness, just as you would otherwise put a memory into it. You now dwell on such images for a long time. But don't think that it is enough to do this twice. Such exercises must be continued for years, just as one must research serious science for years. Because one must gradually bring up the abilities that lie in the depths of the soul and can thus animate such ideas and sustain them in this way.

And in addition to this, a certain training must also be undertaken, I would like to say, of inner life experiences. Because, my dear attendees, you will have heard that there are all kinds of mystics and the like who are now also striving for inner vision. What is meant here as anthroposophical spiritual science is by no means such nebulous mysticism. Quite the opposite! The one who works in this way on the inner life of his soul sets himself a very conscious ideal in this work. He also sets himself the ideal in this work that one can also acquire in a science, but only if one really devotes oneself to this science with full clarity and independence, with inner freedom.

This is the methodology that Goethe had in his research: although he was not actually a mathematician, he wanted to conduct research in the field of nature in such a way that he could give an account of his method to any strict mathematician. This is also how the humanities scholar does it. In mathematics, one works with transparent concepts. One does not describe the Pythagorean theorem in nebulous mysticism; one has everything one needs to see in order to arrive at this Pythagorean theorem. Those concepts that one constantly works with must be presented to the soul with such inner clarity and light. I call this resting on such ideas “meditation”, and I ask you not to imagine anything else by this meditation but firstly: this resting on easily comprehensible ideas that cannot have anything nebulous about them. They will have less nebulousness the more you acquire the ability, through a certain inner soul experience, to recognize such nebulousness and subconsciousness as soon as it arises.

Modern science has also dealt a great deal with this subconscious, which rises up from the depths of the soul and then lives in us. We do not really know its cause, but it belongs to the life of the soul. It is precisely about these things that anyone who wants to become a true spiritual scientist must first know.

Let me give you an example that you can also find in ordinary literature. A professor of zoology is walking down the street. He passes a bookstore, looks into the shop window and sees a book about lower animals. The title of the book is something about the lower animals. And you see, it happens to the good professor – just imagine: a professor of zoology! It happens to him, just by looking at this book title – it's a very serious book title about earthworms or something like that – that he has to start laughing. So, a professor of zoology who has to laugh at a perhaps very serious book title! He can't believe it himself. So he decides to tell himself: I'll maybe close my eyes to try to figure out why it has to happen to me that I laugh at this serious book title. He closes his eyes. And lo and behold, by not seeing, he hears better. And he hears a melody in the distance, played by a barrel organ grinder. And now he remembers: decades ago, he had danced his first dance to this same melody, which the barrel organ grinder is now playing. What he had experienced back then had not crossed his mind since, but had been lying dormant in his subconscious. But now, as he looks at a book title, he hears and does not hear – as if in an intermediate state between hearing and not hearing – and the melody brings it back to his memory. And he has to smile, as he laughed when he had his dancer in front of him and he danced his first dance to the same melody.

You see, by becoming acquainted with something like this — and there is an enormous amount of such things in human life —, one experiences how many so-called reminiscences can be found in the soul, and how easily illusions and fantasies can arise when one gives oneself over to some kind of imagination. That is why some mystics are like that. They believe that by constantly emphasizing, they look into the soul and find all kinds of things in it, which they then often characterize with lofty words that they think they find in the soul. But what one has once absorbed in this way in the soul does not always have to come up in the same way. It can also change. And when someone talks about all kinds of great opportunities and experiences that he claims to have had himself, it may just be the transformed tones of the melody of the barrel organ that he heard decades ago. Please excuse this comparison, but I hope I am being understood.

So what is actually present in the soul, what the possibilities of limitation are, must first be thoroughly and clearly understood by anyone who wants to be a spiritual researcher. He must have these experiences. Only then will he be able to feel correctly. I would now like to characterize it from my use of words, if these words are not misunderstood.

This inner experimentation, this resting on clear ideas, which cannot be reminiscences, of which one knows that only what is present in consciousness is effective, ultimately brings up certain powers from the depths of the soul, which develop through such practice in the same way as muscular strength develops when one works physically. The soul powers develop and one attains a faculty that goes far beyond mere remembering. Mere remembering brings experiences to mind in the form of images that we have gone through in this physical life. But what one now develops as a soul ability through a further development of the ability to remember, that teaches one so well that the human being, as he stands there in the world, is indeed born out of the whole of nature and the universe. It teaches us that everything that is spread out in the world and everything that has ever been spread out in this time, in this world that surrounds us and in which we ourselves are, that all this is in some developmental context with the human being.

It is certainly never my intention to resurrect any old ideas, but one can use expressions – even if one is easily misunderstood by those who want to misunderstand – but one can use old expressions to describe something that one has directly observed.

For example, it is an old idea that the human being is a small world, that is, a microcosm. This means that everything that exists in the world in some way is also present in the human being in its own way. It is interesting that the most recent researchers have repeatedly pointed out that when we look at our machines in terms of their principle, we are actually looking at nothing other than transformed human sensory organs or other human organs. You can prove in almost every machine how it is formed in principle, how something is in the human being. That which is observed externally can, when truly observed internally, come to full consciousness.

When this developed capacity for memory occurs, one brings forth, so to speak, something different from the human soul in terms of effects than one can bring forth from this soul through the ordinary capacity for memory, which conjures up images of what we have experienced before the soul. Through the faculty of memory of which I have just spoken, through the developed faculty of memory, what comes to the soul is in fact what is unknown to the soul itself, what precisely represents the connection of the human being with the whole environment, with the great world, with the macrocosm. And what also comes to the soul is what actually forms this physical body inwardly, because it is nothing other than the instrument of the soul. We need only look.

And when we have a sense of what is at work in the human being, I would say of inner plastic power, even after birth – one need only look with the necessary devotion and with the necessary seriousness and impartiality at the developing child, how it develops from day to day, from week to week, from year to year, how its movements become more and more articulated, how the marvelous happens, it is something marvelous for the one who looks at it impartially – that speech develops. When one sees an unknown person's work at first – but as if from a plastic-engraving principle – in the child at first, one continues to research. And that which works in man from within, which has already worked before he was born or conceived, which shapes his physical existence out of the spiritual world, that is what now shoots into our soul just as in later years a memory of experiences that we have gone through.

The spiritual researcher, ladies and gentlemen, cannot, like a spiritualist, present to your external sensory perception what he has researched. He can only hint at how, through the development of the soul from a point of intellectual modesty, through the ever-increasing unfolding of such powers as memory, one comes to see what initially passes through life as a great unknown.

One simply looks at things with this inner consciousness, with which one otherwise only looks into one's physical life through the ability to remember. Just as images of a mathematical nature arise before the soul, but these have no existence, so when the soul works from its inner being and does not work out something empty or fantastic, but something in which it recognizes reality when the image is there, and the soul works this out of itself and recognizes reality as in ordinary memory, where she also knows, you are not imagining anything, there is something in this image that is connected to reality – then you know that through this further developed ability to remember, you also have images in your soul that are connected to realities, that are built up in your soul in exactly the same way as the images, let's say, of geometry, but which, as I said, lack existence, while one now plunges into an inner, soul-like experience, which, however, through its own essence, indicates how it is connected with existence, and with spiritual existence, from which man is born just as he is born from physical existence, how it is connected with spiritual existence. It is truly not a fantasy, but rather, through the same efforts, whereby one gradually comes to understand the mathematical structures in their secret relationships, through efforts - but which go much further - to develop such inner abilities that, to a certain extent, give a world tableau, an internally constructed world tableau that provides world knowledge.

This is simply a fact that one arrives at by starting from intellectual modesty. And one must simply deny the human being the ability to develop if one does not want to admit at first that something like this is possible. The rest then depends only on whether one really tries. Everyone is free to try things out. Others prove that they are leading people to the microscope, and it is said that this is not based on blind faith, because everyone can see for themselves.

It is no different with spiritual science; it just has to demand different things. Everyone can see for themselves what spiritual science claims. But just as one must really look into the microscope in physical science, so in spiritual science one must actually go through that which the spiritual researcher shows must be developed if one wants to look into the spiritual worlds. Then one does not merely acquire a belief from the spiritual worlds, but one actually acquires real knowledge, an insight into the spiritual worlds. Then one beholds that which one can call the eternal aspect of human nature, for one does not just see that which is produced in life, which stands before our sensory eyes as a human body, but one sees the producing spiritual-soul aspect, that which forms this human body, but also that which, at the same time, takes care of the breakdown of this physical aspect in the moment when the physical is formed. Because, however, my dear audience, one also sees that! From such starting points, one actually penetrates certain secrets of our brain structure quite differently than with external anatomy or physiology.

Above all, through inner observation, one gets to know how thinking, how imagining, is connected with the structure of our brain, with our nervous system. Materialists believe that the ordinary growth process that otherwise builds our body also continues in the brain, and that such an organic process of building, which, for example, underlies our growth or our nutrition, also underlies our brain when we think. This can only be believed as long as one fantasizes about these things. This can no longer be the case when one looks at these things inwardly. Then you know that the brain must be well nourished. But why? Because it is constantly destroying itself. And it is this process of destruction, not the process of building, that is connected to what we call thinking and imagining. We could not think if the brain were constantly growing, constantly feeding and building.

What the building process is – you can observe it when you observe twilight or sleep states, where the growth processes become too strong. That which is growth, that which is building processes, leads to unconsciousness, not to conscious ideas. Conscious imagining occurs precisely in the breakdown of the brain, in the breakdown of the nerves. And that which is the building of the nerves is precisely the retroactive process. This in turn forms the nerves, it forms them out of the organic process. But if thought is to take place, if something of the soul is to develop in a person, then the brain must degrade. In a sense, the brain must first make room for the soul to unfold. If one understands this process, then one can never arrive at the view that the brain thinks. The brain only thinks to the extent that it destroys itself as a brain.

The brain thinks just as little as one can say – let me express myself with a comparison: someone walks along a muddy road, or a car drives along a muddy road, and the footsteps or wheel tracks that one steps or drives into the ground become visible. Now someone comes along and says: There are all kinds of shapes in the ground, so I have to assume that below the ground there are forces at work that shape forms, footsteps. Anyone looking for these forces in the ground will, of course, search in vain. They must assume that something completely different is involved, something that has nothing to do with the ground, except that the ground must be there, because otherwise one would sink into the abyss. The ground must be there, but it is only the foundation. However, what causes the forms in the ground is something that has nothing to do with the ground. In the same way, thinking and imagining have nothing to do with the brain other than the brain provides the physical substrate on which the soul-spiritual develops, making its impressions. No wonder when the physiologist or anatomist comes and says: Yes, everything that takes place in the soul can also be seen in the brain. You see it, but the soul is what does it in the first place, the soul is expressed there. And it needs the brain for nothing other than to provide a kind of resistance, just as I need the ground when I cross the street. This is expressed by a comparison.

But what can really be seen through spiritual science, as one sees, I would like to say the emergence of man out of the spirit through the developed ability to remember, I cannot go into it further now, as I said the methods are described in “How to Know Higher Worlds.” — one comes to say to oneself: Basically, one begins to die by being born, because this process of degradation is constantly there. And what happens at death is nothing more than that the body, which can no longer be created, is torn away from the spiritual soul. This spiritual-mental now seeks out other worlds. One learns to recognize the passing through of the spiritual-mental, of the eternal in human nature, through the fragile body, by watching the process of dying itself in thinking, I would say from hour to hour, by constantly dying in the small things, I would say, when we think. So everything that one finds in life appears in such a way that one sees it in its true form through spiritual science.

I must first describe [this] to you – my dear audience – in very elementary terms, because this is the only way we can communicate. In every science, one must start from the first principles. I would just like to mention in parenthesis that I have said that what is developed memory is a tableau, comparable to the mathematical tableau, that it calls up before our soul, but that this tableau introduces us to the [spiritual-soul life] from which we are formed.

The names are not important – my dear attendees – what you can perceive there must also have a name. In my books, I have called this the “Akasha Chronicle” because it actually has something to do with chronicling. Just as memory itself has something to do with chronicling, so that which leads us out of it has, like memory, only into ordinary life, into the life of the world. Therefore, I would say, if we simply call the spiritual 'ether' or 'akasha', we can speak of an 'ether chronicle' or an 'akasha chronicle'. These words do not have any kind of mystical meaning. Nor is there any kind of mystical meaning to these words, any more than there is any mystical meaning to the whole of geometry. It can certainly be compared to the totality of geometry, which, however, does not apply to time but to space. Therefore, geometry cannot be called a chronicle. But this can certainly be understood that way. The things meant here must not be taken out of context, but only considered in context. If you look at them in this way, you will find that they actually mean something quite different from what may appear to you if you tear them out of context. Nowhere is it a matter of nebulous mysticism, but everywhere of emerging from the sources of the soul's existence, which can be followed piece by piece, and in such a way that the individual pieces stand before the soul with mathematical clarity.

The second faculty of the soul – honored attendees – that needs to be cultivated so that one does not merely have images, because all that I have described to you so far are basically only images. One knows, as with memory images, that they are about life, but one does not have life. You know full well that you do not live in a fantastic world. You have imaginations, imaginations of reality, but you do not stand in this reality. In order to live in this reality, in order to have this direct experience of the spiritual-real, it is necessary to experience the power that is otherwise only bound to our human organization, which, by confronting us in life, always equips us with a good deal of egoism, so that we develop this ability further and further, so that we can indeed gradually come to look at things in such a way that we can completely forget ourselves, can completely immerse ourselves in each individual thing, and in each individual being. It is necessary to develop this ability more and more.

This training is based on a very simple thing: human attention, in that I take an interest and turn my attention to some thing or process. I can pay attention to what I am actually doing inwardly by turning my attention away from other things and turning it to a new being. I have to become aware of how this attention works. And by training this ability, which in turn takes years of training, I grasp inwardly, as it were, the capacity of attention. I transform it into the power to devote myself to a thing, to become completely absorbed in a thing or process. In short, what one otherwise experiences only as an abstract ability to pay attention can be increased to become devoted love.

By developing this love more and more, one comes close to what I described in my “Philosophy of Freedom” as early as 1893, showing that only the person who truly has this love can be free, whereby he also does not carry out his actions out of his capacity for desire, but out of loving immersion in the things of the world. He finds that something has to happen. He is completely indifferent to what his desire is. From objectivity, he realizes that something has to happen. This development of the ability to see that something has to happen leads, on the one hand, to real human freedom and, on the other hand, to the power of love.

And then, when you have developed this ability, my dear audience, you can not only receive such images that arise within and depict a reality, but you can also remove these images from your consciousness at will. Just as in physical matters one must have the ability to look at a thing and then look away, otherwise one would not have a healthy soul life, so one must develop the ability, when one has inner vision, to have the images and then not to have them. One must become completely inwardly master of having these images. And by being able to alternate between the things that live in the soul and the completely empty state of the soul, by learning this alternation in the soul, one also learns to have an image and then to let the image disappear in the soul. Then one lives on. The image is gone, but one has the experience of the inner reality of things. One experiences the spiritual. You experience it through the power you have acquired, through the development of love. Just as you learn the spiritual anew through the development of your ability to love, so you learn to experience the spiritual through the increase, through the ever-increasing increase of the power of love.

I know how much is opposed to the scientist when he is to regard the ability to love itself as a power of knowledge. The scientist demands that what is to apply objectively in the scientific should only be attainable to the exclusion of love. But in doing so, he reaches the limits of knowledge. These limits of knowledge arise from the fact that one does not enter into the inner workings of things with one's soul, but stops and fantasizes all kinds of things, all kinds of molecules and atoms. If you experience through the increased power of love what comes to you from the surface of things, and then you experience what you can have in images through the increased ability to remember, then you know where images come from in the [increased] depths of existence. For one can compare what one sees in the picture with that into which one then submerges with the experience. And one practices, so to speak, if I want to use these expressions so simply, being constantly in being, as one otherwise inhales and exhales. That is what really leads one into the spiritual world, what allows one to get to know what actually underlies the human being.

Now, my dear attendees, what develops in this way in man as certain abilities to look into the spiritual world can now be applied in every single science. It is not at all that what happens in the laboratory, in the observatory and so on, or in the clinic, is despised. But now one learns to look at it in such a way that one can observe every detail at the same time as that which reveals itself as spiritual. And one does not fantasize, as the German natural philosophers did, for example, but one researches just as objectively as one searches with one's eyes objectively, as one combines with the outer mind objectively — although one can certainly err. But in the inner vision, those things simply come before the soul's eye that otherwise cannot appear at all, just as little as what is in Goethe's book of poetry can appear before the soul of a five-year-old child. And so, in all the individual sciences, one arrives precisely at that which these individual sciences are currently lacking. This is not just something that can be spoken about only in abstract generalities. In this way, light can be brought into the science that is closest to human life, into medical science, for example. And we are now in the process of setting up such institutions in individual places, which deal with the science of therapy in a spiritual scientific sense. It is primarily a matter of deepening scientific life. That is what it is about in Dornach, not to meddle with the sphere of any religion, not to engage in anything sectarian, but to engage in serious science, as this science allows itself to be engaged with by deepened powers of cognition, which are just as deepened as I have stated.

I myself experienced that epoch, esteemed attendees, that epoch of science, in a formerly most important medical faculty, where the capacities were just piling up – Oppolzer, [Rokitansky] and so on. I myself experienced how that remarkable therapeutic direction emerged, which was then called medical nihilism. This medical nihilism no longer prevails to the same extent as it did when I was young – a long time ago – but what emerged back then as medical nihilism denied medicine at the time the ability to move from the pathological examination of the clinical picture to the healing process, to therapy. They did not want to find a bridge between pathology and real therapy. And this cannot be found if one proceeds with mere external natural science. One can explain this in a very popular way, why it cannot be found.

Is this not the case, the healthy human organism undergoes certain processes that we call natural processes. And we can say: Let us look at the healthy person in terms of his physical nature. We perceive natural processes. But is the sick person, what takes place in the illness, not just as much a natural process? Do we not have a natural process in the healthy and in the sick person? Do we have two natures? How does one natural process relate to the other? If we speak of causality in the one natural process, we must also speak of causality in the other.

Spiritual science shows us that whatever enters the world spiritually always gives rise to the opposite natural process. The natural process of human growth is initially a constructive one. The process that must occur for the spiritual to simply intervene is a destructive one. We do indeed get to know processes from different directions when we immerse ourselves in spiritual science. We learn to look inside this remarkable structure that is the human organism and we get to know that there are indeed two opposing processes. And we then learn to recognize the human being in his connection with the rest of nature, learn to recognize how the rest of nature works on the human being. And from all this, the spiritual view of the world then arises that there is a connection between certain healing processes or substances and what happens in the human being, who is connected to the whole world. One can say: one can indeed come to a real healing art through spiritual science. I am giving this as an example, I could just as easily have mentioned another science. That is what matters.

You learn to recognize, especially when you are immersed in this modern scientific life – and truly experienced, level-headed scientists already admit this today – that science today does not offer solutions to riddles, but on the contrary, piles up riddles more and more. The further you research with the microscope, you research all the more riddles in the small, but you research just as few real riddles with the telescope. These riddles can, however, be solved to a certain extent by calculation.

But it is necessary not to assume that we will find something known, but to be open to finding that unknown, as America was between Europe and India at that time, that unknown that the mind finds as its own essence when it reflects on itself. We apply the mind in the individual sciences. Even a materialist must do this. The spiritual researcher is only trying to understand himself. He applies the spirit, seeks to discover what this spirit is, and actually comes to realize that this spirit is not connected with the anabolic processes – with which it would have to be connected if the materialistic view were correct – but that the spirit is connected with the catabolic processes, that the spirit presents precisely that as fact, which directly runs counter to the material process, breaks it down, undermines it. These are the significant experiences that are made in spiritual science, for example.

This is how it is with spiritual science. The other science basically works on the human mind, only in such a way that the human being can develop what intelligence is. Now, many people are already saying, especially in the field of contemporary education, that what has emerged from more recent scientific life as school education actually trains the intellect too much and not the mind. It does not want to take hold of the will, not the whole person. But to ensure that this is the case, one does not just have to declaim that it should be so, that the mind should be formed again. Rather, just as the more recent period has ultimately formed the outer science, one also needs a spiritual science that does not just speak to the intellect, but that could take hold of the whole person.

This can also be seen from the fact that we have recently been able to introduce this spiritual science into existence as an element in individual areas. One of these attempts is our Waldorf School in Stuttgart, which was founded by Emil Molt, initially for the children of his factory. But since then it has already doubled in size! Pupils have flocked to this school from all walks of life and from all sides. This school is not a school of world view; it is only a slander when it is said that it is. It is not about grafting anthroposophical world view or some new religion into children. When this school was founded, I myself agreed to run the school. It was established from the very beginning that the religious education to be given to the children – to Catholic children by the Catholic priest and to Protestant children by the Protestant pastor – should be given by the children's respective religious teachers. We completely refrain from any kind of world view in this school. Only those children whose parents belong to no confession or the like, who therefore do not want to send their children to any religious education, should be free to attend religious education that we can provide ourselves. Otherwise, these children would have no religious education at all if it were not given to them. But those who want a particular religious education, based on the life they have grown up in, will receive such instruction from their religious teacher.

This should prove to you that we, while not standing on anthroposophical ground, do not want to found a new religion or somehow graft a world view onto people. Rather, what should guide us, for example, is this: Anyone who has a science like anthroposophical spiritual science has something that seizes the whole person, that makes him skillful, that above all makes his soul skillful, that makes him a judge of character, also a judge of children, a judge of the developing human being, the child. [And that is why we have brought it about in the Waldorf school that we only work through the method, through the didactics, through the art of education, which can be developed out of anthroposophy, in the way we teach, and that is what matters, not the inculcation of some religious creed that is somehow supposed to be new compared to the others. We take great care to ensure that the child is treated in the way that is appropriate to him or her, which is only possible if we really take into account the totality of the soul and spirit, and I would say every year, the seventh, the eighth, the ninth, in its particular abilities.

Now, my dear attendees, in this school, precisely because the teachers are imbued with spiritual science and bring this atmosphere into the classroom, there is, I might say, an atmosphere of love. Of course, people may not take it particularly deeply when I say something like that. But every time I come to Stuttgart to audit this school, I ask the children in each class and in the assembly hall: Dear children, do you also love your teachers? You can tell by the way the children behave and the way their eyes light up whether they really mean it or not. And that is something that always gives one great joy, that something has happened after all, that such a didactics has been formed out of anthroposophy: when the children respond with their whole being, with a “yes” that comes from the whole soul, that has not been rehearsed.

Dear attendees! When we handed out the school reports after the first school year, there was nothing in them of the usual. Otherwise, they say: “satisfactory”, ‘almost satisfactory’, ‘less than satisfactory’, ‘almost satisfactory’ and so on. Rather, for each child, despite the fact that some classes are quite large, there was something in it that was or is entirely appropriate to the child's individuality, so that the children repeatedly pick up these reports and, I would like to say, repeatedly see themselves reflected in them. Again and again they read what the teacher gives them as a force of life, so a single saying or the like, not something out of a scheme that tends to be, I would say, “less satisfactory” and the like. It is, of course, a bit radically expressed, but it can be done if you enter the class with some knowledge of children, even in large classes, so that the individuality of the child comes into its own.

This is an example of how anthroposophy can become an integral part of life, that is, it can be applied in human life. And after all, schooling and teaching are a very important part of human life. [But now, this is only one part, the part that has been brought to us by the more intellectual education of recent times.

Let us look – esteemed attendees – at what has become great. Certainly, anyone who wants to deepen science into a spiritual science will not underestimate the great triumphs and the importance of modern science – on the contrary! In speaking to you here, I fully recognize the importance of modern science for our external lives. But on the other hand, they only educate the head, they only educate that which arises from the head in social life. And so, in modern times, we have developed what we know as the great, significant technology that surrounds us everywhere out of this scientific approach. But in this modern age, in which technology has developed to such an extent that it has become an external-mechanical technology in the entire world economy, in all world traffic, at the same time it has grown into all of modern life, what we call the social question.

It must be said that modern science has indeed come to terms with the external mechanism, with that which can be composed of external natural forces, that which can serve human life. But we see this in the chaos that has emerged to the present day, and which has led to millions of people being shot dead and beaten to cripples in recent years. We see that modern science, as soon as it wants to be active in social life in any way, fails. It can't help. It goes as far as the machine, as far as the mechanism, it can go that far with what it borrows from nature. But just as the machine has been introduced between the account book in the office and the cash book and what is produced in production, and an intimate connection has been formed, no such intimate connection has been formed in recent times between those who were leading personalities in the course of the last [decades] and those who are in the outer work. Man has found his way to the machine, but he has not found his way to the human being.

We will only find our way to the human being through a humanly deepened science that grasps the human being as deeply as the spiritual science meant here, because that will also be a life-oriented science for social life. [That which is based on it — as a conception, as a theoretical view —, only destroys the human organism, the transfer to the outer world, it becomes destruction.] Today you only need to see how people are creating something so devastating in Eastern Europe today, that it would almost have to lead to the downfall of civilization, if it lasts as it is in Russia. How these people, who are doing this, are acting in good faith and believe that in Marxism and the like they are only extending modern science to social life. But it becomes the death of social life. It must be a different science, a science that does not arise from the human mind alone, but from the human being as a whole. It is a science that does not arise merely from a contemplation of the physical world and from there forms its methods, but that is drawn from the human-spiritual being itself, as spiritual science is. If one studies this spiritual science, if one attempts to build up, as I have attempted — however contestable it may be in detail — in these two books, 'The Core Points of the Social Question' or 'In Implementation of the Threefold Social Organism', if one attempts to arrive at a social view from this spiritual science, then it is a thoroughly constructive one. This then proves itself in social thinking, which can truly lead the human being to the human being, as a life-giving treasure.

And so I could cite many examples to you — such as this in general, as well as the school system in particular — where this spiritual science proves to be a vital asset. It is absolutely necessary that, in order to cope in social life, we first and foremost deepen our understanding of the human being, help him to see the spiritual and soul life within him.

If we begin by characterizing spiritual science in these elementary terms, we have the goal towards which it strives. We can only assess its details if we enter into its interrelationships. I could go on talking for hours, but I just want to say one more thing today in conclusion. Just as it was thought centuries ago that Copernicanism, by coming into the world, would endanger religion, would endanger Christianity, so it is also believed today that spiritual science, as it is seeking to enter the world today through the Goetheanum in a more intensive way, would endanger religion, would endanger Christianity.

Dear attendees! When I am confronted with something like this, I always remember what a friend of mine did many years ago. I was very close friends with Professor Müllner, who at the time was a professor of Christian philosophy at the Vienna Faculty of Theology. When he took up his year as rector, he spoke about Galileo in his inaugural speech as rector of the university. And this Professor Müllner – he died a long time ago – spoke in such a way that his last spoken word was that he died as a loyal son of his church. And yet, what did he say when he gave his rectorate speech about Galileo? He said: Today, within Christianity, when we look at the things of this world with a truly open mind, we view Galileo's ideas differently than the Church did during Galileo's lifetime.

The Church today must realize that no new scientific discovery can in any way detract from the deep human forces of Christianity. On the contrary, the Church today must look at these things in such a way that it says to itself: Through every new scientific discovery, the glories of divine spiritual life become visible and evident to humanity only to a higher degree. This is what Professor Müllner said at the time – I cannot quote it to you in full today – this professor of Christian theology, the Catholic Christian at the Vienna Catholic Theological Faculty, who before his death spoke the word that he wanted to die as a loyal son of his church. It was still the pontificate of Leo XIII. Today, we look down on the grave of Galileo differently than his contemporaries in Rome at the time looked up at Galileo.

Now, ladies and gentlemen, when Professor Laurenz Müllner spoke in this way, he knew that he was using these words not to endanger Christianity, which he himself represented, but to create an even firmer foundation for Christianity from a scientific point of view. This is how a Christian priest spoke. I often have to remind myself of that. I also had many private conversations with him and with other theologians who were frequent visitors to his house.

Dear attendees! I will not talk about the relationship between anthroposophy and Christianity today, but I would like to say just one thing in conclusion: that one can follow the development of Christianity through philology, one can follow the development of Christianity through history. One can also follow the development of Christianity through anthroposophical spiritual science, and one comes thereby to certain truths about Christianity, which one can find only through this spiritual science. But the truths about Christianity that one comes across in this way are truly not suitable to endanger Christianity in any way. And anyone who believes that Christianity as such could be endangered by any new cognitive truths, whether in the physical or spiritual realm, I would like to believe that he does not have a high enough opinion of Christianity. The one who has a high opinion of Christianity and the secrets of the Mystery of Golgotha, when he recognizes what Christianity is in the spiritual-scientific sense, says to himself: Christianity and the Mystery of Golgotha have given the development of the earth its true meaning.

I have often said that it is only a comparison, and that nothing is to be said about the inhabitants of any other worlds. If any inhabitant of Mars were to descend, he would see much of our world – it is my innermost conviction, which I have acquired precisely through spiritual science – much that would be incomprehensible to him. But if he were to see what has come down to us as Leonardo's painting 'The Last Supper' – Christ among his apostles – if he were to see only that which is there (he needs nothing more than this painting), then he would say to himself: 'I have come upon a strange plan. What is depicted by this image points to those deeds within earthly life that are not mere earthly facts, but are a fact of the whole world, and without which all life on earth would have no meaning; the meaning of the earth lies in this fact. This is something one learns to recognize more and more, precisely by immersing oneself spiritually in Christianity and in the secrets of the Mystery of Golgotha.

Truly, one must have too low an opinion of Christianity to believe that it could be endangered in any way by a new discovery. Truly – even if it is not written in the Bible – just as Christianity was not endangered by the discovery of America, so too neither can any physical or spiritual truth, be it the Galilean truth or the repeated lives on earth, which I have not spoken about today but But you can follow from the literature as being in the straight line starting from what I have spoken today, just as little can one endanger Christianity in any way if Christianity remains in its inner truth, and may millions and millions of physical or spiritual insights still go through the world. On the contrary, through all these realizations, the Christian truth is deepened and more accurately recognized, and more thoroughly introduced to the human souls, when these truths are really taken out of the Spirit of Truth itself.

But, my dear audience, the different times need such views on all the things of the world, arising out of their spiritual needs, as they arise out of the age. Therefore, I may tell it again and again: I once spoke on the subject of “Bible and Wisdom” in a southern German city that is no longer in southern Germany today. There were also two Catholic theologians at this lecture. It was precisely in this lecture not just something that they could somehow dispute. They came to me and said: “Well, what you said - we could indeed subscribe to it, but the way you say it, we cannot admit it. Because it is not for all people, it is for some prepared people. But we speak for all people.” At the time, I could only say: Reverend, it goes without saying that you think you speak for all people. That corresponds to the natural feeling that we must have as human beings. But through that which is spiritual science, one gradually works one's way through to a different point of view. One comes away from oneself. You no longer believe that you can shape things the way you want to shape them within your environment. You learn to look at what time demands, what objective facts demand. And now I ask you what the objective facts demand, how you treat it. It remains the case that you believe you speak for all people, but that does not decide anything. The only thing that matters is whether all people still go to your sermons. And you see, you cannot answer “yes” there. Among those who do not go to church, there are also those who seek the path elsewhere. I am not speaking to those who go to church with you, but to those who also want to find the path to Christianity and who do not go to you. This is clear from the facts. But the fact that we have religious education in the Waldorf School given to the children by the respective pastors under the given circumstances, and that we have set up religious education only for those who would otherwise have no religious education, proves that this is not something that detracts from religion. So we are not harming anyone [by doing what is desired under the circumstances, but on the contrary, we are imparting something to the 'dissident children' that can lead them to a genuine religious experience] while they would otherwise hear nothing of a religious nature in the best years of their development.

All this might lead one to point out that this Goetheanum and this spiritual science is not just some fantastic product of human willfulness, but something that as a scientific grasp of the spiritual in an age that would otherwise remain unbelieving, at least where science would have to remain at the mere external grasp of things, while people want to develop further. Because if the present chaos wants to bring civilization more and more into decadence, then out of the circumstances of the time itself that great teaching will come, which basically wants to be followed by this anthroposophically oriented spiritual science. And the truth will prevail, no matter how many obstacles are put in its way. In the short term, the aims of spiritual science can be suppressed, perhaps even destroyed for a time, but the truth has paths that can be found through everything. And that these paths can be followed if the methods by which the spirit is seen are honestly and sincerely sought, one can decide for one's conviction in a certain way.

For anyone who really gets involved, not just with their heads but with all their senses, and who engages with everything human, with the individual human being, with the individual life, will always come to the point where they have to say to themselves: science must not just remain on the surface, it must also progress as science, as knowledge, to the spirit. Because

For an upward development, people need what is being sought there – they need the spirit! And without the spirit, humanity will not progress. Spiritual science does not pursue an abstract spirit with ideas and fantasies, but the living spirit, which is to enter into the souls in a living way. And let it be said once again: humanity, if it wants to progress, needs the spirit. Therefore, we must ask for the spirit.

Discussion and Closing Words

Ulrich [Dikenmann]: Dear speaker, dear attendees! Dr. Steiner has made an effort this evening to make anthroposophy more accessible to us and to inspire confidence in us. And we are very grateful for the additions that have been presented to us this evening compared to the lecture that would have been given eight days ago. I would now like to ask a question about what Dr. Steiner has presented and which perhaps can be touched on a little more from his side.

Dr. Steiner spoke of two different ways of attaining higher knowledge, of spiritual experiences, which perhaps many of us are only superficially familiar with. He spoke of a deepened ability to remember that yields results for spiritual science, and he spoke of love. I now see a gap in that there is something about these two methods that we should still be enlightened about before we can have deeper trust in the matter. As far as I remember from his books, it can be read there that before the goal in these spiritual results, light phenomena appear before the eye of those who deal with anthroposophical science – it could also have been color phenomena, I do not remember exactly – at a certain level of spiritual science. I would now be grateful if Dr. Steiner would tell us a little more about this.

Because, you see, dear attendees, when we or our younger friends turn to anthroposophy, we may have to allow ourselves to be guided by empirical, in-depth psychology. What else is the nature of spiritual science if someone, after a long period of self-reflection, begins to experience such light phenomena? Is this what he is experiencing, ecstasy, or is it something like a spiritual presentiment, which still lies in the realm in which we can examine scientifically, in which logic and understanding and reason are applied?

Secondly, we have learned from Dr. Steiner's remarks that those who aspire to the highest levels must surrender themselves to a spiritual leader to a great extent, that they cannot draw entirely from themselves. From my point of view as a Protestant theologian, this seems to me to be a somewhat serious matter. For, as is well known, there are always two dangers associated with excessive devotion to a personality. Either the person who surrenders too much to his leader becomes spiritually dependent and lethargic, and he is no longer sure what his own conviction is or what has been placed more in his soul, placed in his soul by suggestive means. And on the other hand, the person who enjoys the extensive trust of a second person is subject to a powerful temptation that only highly developed, highly spiritual personalities can resist: namely, the temptation to be pleased with the power he has gained over the other person, and then easily exert too much influence over him in all things. This is not meant to imply that I have any mistrust of the lecturer, who has spoken so excellently to us, in this regard. But it has been proven throughout world history, even if one only surveys it in a certain way, as I survey it, that there is a certain danger here, which we must be careful of and to which we must be attentive when we want to encourage one or the other of our acquaintances to take an interest in spiritual science. Incidentally, I am pleased to note that what Dr. Steiner said this evening about his religious views has been very beneficial for me personally.

Roman Boos: Dr. Steiner has the final word, if there are no further questions?

Rudolf Steiner: Dear attendees! Of course, I would have been very happy to take any questions. I am particularly pleased about the two questions that have been put to me today, and I am very pleased to have the opportunity to address them to you this evening.

It is necessary that what lives in the soul when one has progressed to what I have characterized today as seeing, that if one wants to express it, it must be named in some way, and that one has very different words, a certain terminology. If you follow my writings, some of which have already appeared in very large print runs, you will see, if you follow the individual print runs, how I have endeavored from print run to print run – or at least always over several print runs – to formulate the sentences sentences in such a way that what needs to be said about such a subject, which, after all, is not easy to put into words, is said with a certain clarity and distinctness.

We must not forget that our language, especially as it has developed among civilized peoples today, is to a large extent already something extraordinarily conventional and that, above all, it has incorporated the meaning that has entered the world view through the materialism of the last few centuries. Therefore, today, when using words, it is extremely difficult to strip these words of their materialistic meaning and to give something that is meant spiritually the appropriate meaning. Nevertheless, I have tried again and again, and especially in the fundamental books you will find a struggle for expression. By this I do not mean to say that in the last editions this struggle has everywhere led to an ideal — of course not! But now, the special characteristic that I have given of what one sees, by using [to characterize the color perceptions] – isn't it true that I am saying that one is dealing with imaginations; these imaginations are completely different from what one can have in the sensory world. Now I would like to choose the following approach so that we can understand each other.

If you study Goethe's Theory of Colors – perhaps some of you, esteemed attendees, know that for forty years I have been endeavoring to present the significance of Goethe's Theory of Colors in relation to today's physics. Well, in Goethe's Theory of Colors you will find an extraordinarily significant chapter at the end about the sensual-moral effect of colors. This chapter will perhaps meet with the least opposition from physicists and, when read, it is an extraordinarily stimulating read. What is written here can also be found elsewhere; but so wonderfully beautifully compiled, it can actually only be found in Goethe.

What do we find there, in the characterization of external colors? We also find the emotional experience of color mentioned. We find the experience that one has, for example, with yellow, this peculiar aggressiveness of yellow, the excitement of yellow, similar to red. We then find the balancing of green, the devotion of violet. We have these soul experiences when we let the sensual colors affect us. If you ever visit Dornach, you will see that an attempt has been made there in the Goetheanum to paint entirely from color, to create the picture from the color. In particular, you will find this in the small dome, for example, where an attempt has been made to shape what then leads to the transformation of the picture entirely from the color experience.

Now, on the one hand we have the sensory experience of color, and on the other hand we have the inward spiritual experience, which, however, quite clearly belongs to the experience of color. If we are fully human, we cannot have the sensory experience of color without having the corresponding spiritual experience. This is what Goethe described in his theory of colors.

When one enters the spiritual world, one has experiences that are truly not ecstatic — just as little as the life in geometric representations is an ecstasy. If one were not fully aware that one is in one's psychological state exactly as one is when mathematically imagining, then one would not be on the right path. So, one experiences something that is completely in line with the pattern of mathematical experience in the soul, but one experiences a real spiritual world. And by experiencing this real spiritual world, one does not initially experience colors, but rather those experiences that we inwardly experience in the sensual colors. Of course, one must now have developed to the point where one pays attention to these experiences.

You see, a certain presence of mind is required for spiritual experience. So, one must have this inner experience, which is otherwise experienced with color. The best way to characterize this experience is to remember the color, to really have the color in front of you. Just as one has, let us say, the triangular experience by drawing the triangle inwardly, so one has that which one experiences inwardly best when it is before one, not by drawing a geometric figure, but by painting a colored picture. This colored image is then as adequate to the spiritual experience as, let us say, drawing a triangle with its 180° and angles is identical to the triangular experience, while you have to know that it is a kind of sensualization, then, if you express it in Goethean terms, it is also a supersensory-sensory representation of what is actually experienced.

This, of course, points to subtle experiences, so that one should not draw them out roughly, but one should really go into them. But then one will find that a real thing has indeed appeared by describing it in colors. I have tried to develop this very precisely in the last editions of my basic books. You can't help but describe what you experience in just such a way; otherwise you would become even more materialistic if you described it, and would describe it too symbolically.

But in this way, one describes by actually covering that which is an inner experience through the experience of color. One is always aware of this – that one proceeds in a certain way, as in the presentation of the mathematical – and there is nothing of ecstasy in any way.

I am extremely grateful to the previous speaker for touching on this question. Because I have had to experience it, that I have been told from many sides: what is experienced in the imaginations is repressed ideas, repressed nervous forces, which then come up and represent something fantastic, unhealthy. You see, if someone wanted to maintain such an assertion, at most the proof would have to be provided that the person who speaks of such things cannot, just as the other person who accuses him of such things, speak in a strictly scientific sense. If one has not lost one's scientific sense on the one hand, but is firmly grounded in the scientific sense, and then consistently goes out to something else, then such an accusation cannot be made.

Nor can the objection be raised that it is merely a matter of suggestion. I have already indicated today how it essentially belongs to the schooling of the spirit that one can, I might say, enter into all the special processes of the subconscious life of the soul, so that one can compensate for and exclude every source of error that presents itself. You will see, when you read my book 'How to Attain Knowledge of Higher Worlds', how I have tried to describe all the precautionary measures that need to be taken into account.

Now, I have often been asked: How can one easily distinguish suggestions from non-suggestions, from the truth? For example, it can happen in life that someone only has to think of lemonade and they taste lemonade in their mouth. I readily admit this, since these things are well known. But—and this is addressed to those of you who are present—anyone who is an epistemologist knows that a real experience can only be determined through life. Only through life and the context of life can we determine whether anything we imagine corresponds to reality — but it is only from the context of life that we can be certain [of it]. It is the same in relation to the higher worlds; there too, we can only determine it from the context of the whole. If one wants to go from the suggestion of the taste of lemonade to the totality of the experience, then the comparison no longer applies. One must now say: It is nice to have the taste of lemonade in one's mouth through suggestion, but the question arises as to whether anyone has quenched their thirst with such an image of lemonade. You cannot claim that. There you have the transition to the totality of phenomena. And that is what must always be borne in mind: reality cannot be decided by remaining with the partial phenomenon, but the phenomena of life always have something that signifies their transition to totality.

I would like to draw attention to something that may seem rather remote, but which can be very usefully applied to the sensitization of the matter. You see, if you have a salt crystal, a salt cube, it is in a sense a closed reality. It can exist for a certain period of time, a very, very long time on earth, as a salt cube in front of you. Take a rosebud. A rosebud is not really a reality as we see it, because it can only be conceived as a reality in connection with the totality of the rose bush, the roots and so on. Realities have very different degrees, different meanings. If we do not go into this, we will not arrive at clear, luminous concepts.

And so it is also necessary, in the face of such descriptions as those given by the esteemed gentleman who spoke before me, to bear in mind that the totality of the experience is taken as a basis. Then one will already notice how such color appearances are meant. One does not lose the connection with ordinary consciousness at all, does not go over into foolishness, but the opposite is the case for the paths that are chosen to get into anthroposophy. This lies precisely on the opposite path to the pathological; they lead precisely away from the pathological, they make the human being inwardly consolidated. Therefore, they can not only make drawings, especially in mathematical forms, but also see certain drawings in colors, that is, have a supersensible experience. I don't know if that satisfies you.

Regarding the second question, I would like to say: You are absolutely right in both directions, but I must emphasize that wherever I have the opportunity to talk about these things, you will find that I myself have pointed out that these two dangers can indeed arise, but that they must also be recognized and avoided in genuine spiritual research. If you do not avoid them, you cannot achieve what spiritual research is supposed to achieve. They are avoided precisely when you are aware of them, when you know that such dangers can be present. And if you also have a sense of responsibility, you will certainly try to avoid them.

Regarding the so-called student, I have to say that in spiritual research, what can be described as the relationship between the student and the teacher is basically nothing more than the transfer, only to a different area, of the same relationship that also exists when someone learns something from someone else. It is true that the guidance for spiritual training reaches somewhat more intimately into human life, but, you see, there is a corrective, I would say. It is actually not at all correct that there are no dangers for the student in the outer life in current science.

Just think about how little students are actually immune from blind faith in authority, and especially from that which is initially there as a constraint but which, over the years, becomes something that is very strongly inculcated – [the compulsion to say what is] and so on. There are also dangers for the independent development of the student or listener, which can be described in the same way as those that are present in those who want to advance in spiritual science.

But in addition, there is a corrective, especially when one strikes more intimate chords of the human soul with spiritual science, I would like to say, by wanting to learn something. In this way, an extraordinary sensitivity for independence also develops, especially when one awakens the soul's abilities. And experience shows that such a sense of authority, as it sometimes exists in external science – such swearing by the words of the master, such going away with the notebook and swearing by what one has written in the notebook after hearing it – does not take place in a truly responsible handling of the method of spiritual training.

A sensitivity given by experience shows one – especially when one has to deal with something that deeply intervenes in the soul life of the human being – that the urge for freedom is thereby definitely increased. And in any case, in my experience, those who come into consideration as serious spiritual students soon even move on to accepting something not in good faith, but only after sometimes very extensive examination; so that one can say that it is precisely the sense of freedom that awakens to a particular degree.

Now, of course, there is the other side, where I absolutely have to agree with the esteemed previous speaker that there is a very real danger for the person who is to take on such a role – let us just say that they have to advise someone based on their own experience, because it is almost impossible to do otherwise – and say: you will be able to develop your memory or your love through this or that. Then a temptation can approach the teacher – we know that this temptation can approach. And if I may tell you my own conviction in this regard – my dear audience: when you are in the middle of what spiritual research is about, there is actually nothing more repugnant than what could somehow be called personal adoration or the like. Even though the people who want to slander you keep pointing to such stuff. That is not at all what it is really like; it is actually something that you fundamentally find very repulsive. If you are even a little advanced on the path – which spiritual science indicates – then the truth cannot escape you. The truth cannot escape one that to the same extent as one exercises an unauthorized power, one loses the ability to recognize. That is just the way it is, that is an objective fact, and one recognizes it when one walks the path in spiritual science, through direct experiential knowledge.

Isn't it true that the path to spiritual science is a subtle one, one that must be kept alive through constant inner experience of the soul? To the same extent that one now practices things that correspond to the capacity for desire, that correspond to vanity or the sense of power, to that same extent one obscures precisely those forces that want to spread. Just think, it takes an enormous amount of work to develop what I have called the ability to love. It is the greatest unkindness that one can fall into when one develops feelings of power. I don't know if I am being given a context from your side in this way, but it is true that the feeling of power actually obscures the real feeling of love.

And so there are opportunities everywhere to see clearly how to reject such temptations. And yet, although it is absolutely right that this temptation can approach me, I would say, countless times, the one who has some kind of guidance to give also knows that succumbing to it – this temptation – is what can bring him down the most. For it can only be explained by vanity, by a hunger for power. But these are things that lead away from the paths one must follow if one really wants to achieve something.

I do believe that the distinguished gentleman who spoke before me was also referring to these things in his remarks, based on his own profound experience. Such things have occurred, of course, and will continue to occur, naturally. But there is no reason for this – my dear attendees – to refrain from the path of development just because there are dangers lurking somewhere; rather, if there are dangers lurking somewhere, this can be a reason to avoid the dangers if one recognizes the necessity of the matter in a healthy way. Is that perhaps a sufficient answer to the question that has been asked? If it is not, then I would be happy to elaborate further.

Now, esteemed attendees, since no other questions have been asked, I have nothing special to add on this matter. I would just like to point out very briefly that the spiritual science as it is meant here does not want to be a religion.

The question has been raised: It may explain the position of anthroposophy in relation to denominations if you tell us what you teach children of non-denominational parents in religious education.

You see, my dear audience, my opinion is this – but in the sense that I have gained it entirely from spiritual science – that something as intimate as religious education can only be taught within the framework of that which fills one's soul completely. This refers to religious education for children of non-denominational parents or those who are expected to be regarded as non-denominational at school. In this intimate area, therefore, only that which one carries in one's soul, that one is completely filled with, can come into question. And that is what is taught. And what it is about is that the anthroposophical direction that I follow is, in the first place, actually a method, a path, a living life. And that is why it can have an effect on all the individual sciences, and why it can also have an effect on the art of education, and indeed on art itself, as the artistic conception of the Dornach building shows. But ultimately, what is being researched is the living spirit, and that can only lead to a deepening of religious life.

Now, we are of course dependent on imponderables to a great extent, and I prefer to make things clear by means of concrete details rather than speaking in abstract generalities. You see, we try to show the children the way to the Christ in such a way that this way leads out of the rest of human life. However much it is claimed by some denominational sides – or rather by representatives of certain sides – it is not true that anthroposophy wants anything other than to show the way to the Christ in this religious field in its own way, to those who need to find him in this way.

You can certainly be a follower of anthroposophy and want nothing more than a deepening of the sciences, biology, psychology and so on. You don't need to establish any kind of relationship between anthroposophy and religion. But there are a great many people here today who, on the basis of anthroposophy, of spiritual science, are seeking a religious deepening in the same way that people, on the basis of materialism, have sought a religious deepening, albeit perhaps an older religion, as, for example, David Friedrich Strauß, the author of 'Der alte und der neue Glaube' and the like. Not true, as at that time a number of such people tried and sought a kind of materialistic religion, so one finds a truly spiritual religion and also the way to Christ - among many others - on the way to spiritual science. In addition to medicine, psychology, philosophy, biology and so on, which one can deepen, one also acquires, I might say, a certain knowledge of those peculiar paths that must be followed.

Let us assume that we first need to teach children the concept of the immortality of the soul. We try to do this – as I said, I am talking about an example, it could easily be explained differently – but let us assume that we try to teach the child through an image. We point to the butterfly pupa. The butterfly emerges. We then try to show how the soul of a human being also leaves the body at death and enters a [different] world, albeit now in the invisible, and so on. You can think up something like that. But if you just make it up, you will notice – you need pedagogical experience to do so, but if you have it, you will notice: if you have just thought up this point of view – I am so clever and the child is so stupid, I have to bring it to the child, then in reality you are not teaching it to the child. You teach it to the brain, to word recognition, but not to the heart. You only teach the heart what you can believe in yourself; then you teach it, I might say with joy, if there really is something real in it, if you can say to yourself, 'Yes, I have a correspondence there; I believe in it.' That is precisely what is formed in our spiritual science, but not in a nebulous, hazy way. For that is something that is rejected by spiritual science, as it is meant here.

It is again a slander when we are accused of phantasms. What we seek is not an abstract spiritual reality, but a concrete spirituality is contained in the details. And so, for those who recognize the spirit in nature, this process of the butterfly emerging from the chrysalis is the same at a lower level as what is death with the immortal soul of man at a higher level, a reality. It is not I who makes the picture, but the phenomena of the world themselves make the picture. And when I stand in them and judge the phenomena of the world in such a way that nature becomes, as it were, for me the living vision of what I can bring forth from the whole world as the understanding of the divine essence, then I am also able to teach it to the child. For then not only, I might say, the ordinary relations to the child are formed. There are imponderables, forces that work from person to person. And it is these imponderable forces that lie within, that make it possible to teach another person only that in which one can believe with all one's strength. And the basic truths that present themselves to us, the awareness of religious truths on the path that can be taken through spiritual science, that is what makes religious education possible, where it is necessary to give to the child.

We have put a great deal of effort into finding a method for teaching religion. And I have to say that it is actually something that works very well. And I have been able to emphasize again and again at the various school celebrations what seems to me to be a truth now, that in our Waldorf School the Christian spirit is not only present in the religion lessons, but it is there when you enter the school or leave class. It is present in everything, without one always saying “Lord, Lord” or constantly pointing to that which somehow is religiosity with words. That which is the religious spirit is something quite different, when the rest flows into objectivity.

That is what underlies it. And when I say that our paths lead to Christ, then perhaps despite all the hostility that comes from various sides, I may also recall a Bible verse that is truly important to me not only because it has been handed down, but because it is daily proving to be true and has certainly become a valuable Bible verse. This is the one that is put into the Savior's mouth:

I am with you always, even to the end of the age.

Thus He is not only present during the time of His life on earth, but He is always present. And if one is willing, one can always experience what the living Christ wants among people. This living understanding of Christ is especially important – this ever-present Christ – which, of course, does not exclude the Mystery of Golgotha as an historical event from us. And in order to avoid misunderstandings, I emphasize that it is understood as a supersensible event and that it has even been possible to lead Protestant clergymen, who were dissatisfied with the existing presentation, which has become quite rationalistic – the journal literature already shows this today – back to a real, supersensible understanding of the Mystery of Golgotha, precisely through anthroposophy.

All this shows you that our religious education is looking for a method that brings it into connection with all other aspects of the world, with all other human activity and with human life in general, and on the other hand, that the matter does not lead away from Christianity.

And you see, dear ladies and gentlemen, we do not force anyone from any religious community or any other community, but we have nevertheless managed to have Jewish children sitting in our Waldorf School who listen to the knowledge of Christianity with complete inner soul and with truly religious fervor, without this being anything extraordinary.

Education can be such that, for example, the following occurred with us at the Waldorf School, but it was not a merit of the Waldorf School, the boy had already done that before he came to the Waldorf School. A Jewish boy who was later sent to the Waldorf School received Jewish religious education before the school was established. When he came to our school and heard what goes on here, he compared it with the way religion is approached in his parents' home. And he simply ran away, just walked out the door and went into the other class where free Christian religious education was being taught, and stayed inside. So if the claim is that Christianity is not being cultivated, that is not true. Although we have to say: we are not a sect, we do not compete with any religious community; our sources lie first and foremost in science, as I have explained today. So it would be a completely unjustified accusation to claim that Christianity is not being cultivated.

And if you look at real life, you will see how far we have already been able to go in the most diverse fields using the anthroposophical method of understanding the world. It will become clear to you how unfounded what is already being said against anthroposophy in a somewhat indefinable way from some quarters is. But that is not what is worthy of discussion in the first place. Rather, it is important to know that this spiritual science does not want to remain in the sphere of mere theoretical development, in the sphere of mere theoretical knowledge, because that is ultimately something that alienates people from the world and keeps them far removed from it. Rather, it seeks to penetrate the sphere of the will, into all of human life, and is therefore far removed from any nebulous mysticism, any mysticism that seeks to withdraw from life.

There are, of course, people who, in complete good faith, believe that this world is too bad after all, that one must withdraw into another, mystical world. I have met many such people; they were quite good people, but they were not the kind of people that today's difficult times need. Today's world needs people who not only believe in the spirit in knowledge and abstract theories, but today's difficult times need people who absorb this spirit in such a way that they can carry it into matter and into life themselves.

Dear attendees! We have experienced it – and the deeper connections show it to a deeper understanding – these things have led us into disaster. We have experienced it that people were religious on the one hand according to their own view, and then they had nothing from religion in their external actions during the whole week, except that in the bookkeeping in the ledger it still says on the first page: “With God”. I don't know if that is true or not. But in any case, something has occurred that I would call a kind of double way of life: on the one hand, one can be a follower of any confession, and on the other hand, nothing can be brought into one's life from that confession. Likewise, there are already a great many scientists today who pursue their science in such a way that they handle it on the one hand, and then they grasp life quite differently on the other. They make two things out of these things that should actually be one. But we must come to a unified life, not just a conception of life, but a way of life.

That is what is striven for through anthroposophical spiritual science: not just to recognize the spirit in abstract, mystical contemplation and immersion, and believe that one has the spirit when one withdraws from the external life but to absorb the spirit into the soul in such a way that one can then carry it into matter, into external matter, and thus deepen the external life. The human being must not only work as a knower of the spiritual order of the world, but as a realizer of the spiritual order of the world. And that is the basis of the impulse of spiritual science:

is based: not just to recognize the spirit in abstract ideas and to be able to speak of it, but to take this spirit so fully within oneself that one is able not only to carry it in concepts, but to carry it in one's mind and will, so that one oneself belongs to those powers in the world that actualize the spirit, that one can become a servant for the realization of the spirit in the world order.

Someone who pursues the spiritual life in the present recognises that many contemporaries search something exceptionally uncertain that they—if they want to form mental pictures of their human condition—do not know with which they should comply.

If you go into the reasons impartially why their search is so uncertain, you find probably that just the scientific insight into the outer processes of the world existence and the consequences arising from it for the practical life cause that.

One may easily say that this scientific insight, this habit of understanding the world scientifically works on the human being that the fact is associated with it that it is impossible to penetrate into the mental area in this way. Perhaps it will arise just from the today's considerations that it is connected with the triumph of scientific knowledge that natural sciences cannot explain the human soul life with their means.

However, this scientific way of thinking arrogates all habitual ways of thinking of the modern human being to itself in a way. It has changed certain mental pictures of the soul structure. If one sees back how before the rise of the modern cultural life the world was considered, it becomes apparent that the human being of that time formed mental pictures of the world that were suitable to get to information of the natural processes and of the soul life at the same time. Today one does not always note because we are not used to observing the development of the soul life properly how much the today's mental pictures differ from the older ones.

On the other side, all confessions are echoes from old times. In them, a certain way has remained to think about the human soul and its position in the world. The scientific authority has made that totter.

Today the human being is no longer content with that what is delivered to him from old times because he is accustomed to look scientifically at the world, and wants to have explanations about the position of his soul in the universe and his development from science. However, there one has just to admit that that which science offers cannot satisfy him. If one considers that what, for example, a philosophical psychology just offers, the human being who tries honestly to approach this psychology can find nothing of which he can make anything. There are striking examples of the fact that that is right which I have just said.

There is the strange philosopher Richard Wahle who is oddly discontented with his science which pretends to be able to give some indication of the most essential in the human being, but to which he cannot ascribe that it can give such explanation. I have pointed to that already last time.

I am not at all willing to awaken the belief that such single personalities with their views have a deeper influence on the thinking, on the mental pictures of the contemporaries. I believe that the opposite is true: in such personalities appears what pulsates in many contemporaries.

Well, this philosopher talks oddly about his philosophy. He says, one can compare the philosophers of former times—he is also extremely discontented with them—with cooks and waiters in a restaurant who pass rotten dishes to the people. However, one can compare the modern philosophers to cooks and waiters who are standing and have nothing to do in the restaurant.—So this philosopher wants to say about his science that it was good for nothing in old times, could not give any explanation of the most important in the human being and that it is not only good for nothing today, but also offers nothing.

As odd it is, if a man thinks about his science in such a way, nevertheless, it is justified that such phenomena appear in our time. Since with the appearance of the modern natural sciences mental pictures have formed which are substantially different from the old mental pictures that matched nature and spirit equally well according to the need of the past.

Psychology has not changed the old mental pictures. It has stopped at the old mental pictures with which the human being cannot be content just today because he has learnt to think scientifically, and because in him the unaware demand awakes to be able to investigate the soul also in such a way as natural sciences investigate the outer nature. This causes an inner conflict just with the best of our time.

This inner conflict comes to light in the fact that they have to recognise: in psychology that what is offered, consists partly of empty phrases. One wants to explain what is a mental picture, a feeling, or a will impulse. One wants to take this as starting point of the question for the transient or everlasting being of the soul. Someone who approaches these things with common sense notices very soon that he has, actually, nothing substantial, nothing real in that which is said about the soul life that the old mental pictures have lost their carrying capacity compared with the scientific mental pictures and that new ones have not yet been formed.

That is why people look around instinctively for a new psychology, for a new knowledge of the soul. However, there is not yet clarity in the public consciousness how one should search.

From these undergrounds, the anthroposophically oriented spiritual science has originated. One considers it today often as anything and everything, but not as that what it is. As the outflow of any sectarian current as something that wants to found a new religion or as the case may be. No, this anthroposophically oriented spiritual science wants to be that what the modern human being needs most of all.

It wants to give that with which one can comply if one should search the riddle of the human soul life in the modern sense. Indeed. The ways that this spiritual science has to take are so unusual to the modern thinking that many people find it difficult how one speaks about these things; others find it paradoxical or fantastic. However, every newly appearing spiritual achievement shares this fate with anthroposophy.

Hence, I would like to speak in particular about the most important soul questions and their coherence with the bodily life from the viewpoint of this science. At the beginning, I would like to point out that spiritual science is not that which a big part of our contemporaries imagines. On the contrary, the scientific progress urgently demands it. This scientific progress has just brought one thing nearer to the human beings with a certain authoritative habituation of thinking. This is the belief that there are certain limits of knowledge, which one cannot cross.

One says to himself, perhaps there is nothing beyond these limits of knowledge. On this side of the limits of knowledge is only the material world.—That is why either one has generally to refrain from assuming a mental-spiritual life, or alternatively one has to say to himself, one cannot cross the limits which separate us from this mental-spiritual life. It is this essential point which those realise who contemplate much about such things which, however, vaguely, subconsciously and instinctively worries all thinking human beings today. From this viewpoint, just spiritual science begins. Since it takes two inner experiences as starting points of this soul science, they are associated with the appearance of the limits of knowledge. It does not want to be contradictory in amateurish way to natural sciences if they arrive at limits of knowledge, no, it just tries to cope with the experience of the limits of scientific knowledge properly. Spiritual science does not theorise, but it attempts with the scientific methods to progress to cognition with the help of scientific mental pictures. It tries to find its way with full inner clearness to the point where one can have the feeling: here you stand at the limits of scientific knowledge.—Then it tries to experience what one can experience at these limits of knowledge.

Lo and behold, this psychology or soul science has to admit these limits of knowledge at first. Just while it familiarises itself thoroughly with how natural sciences do research, it gets to an experience at the limits of knowledge which I want now to characterise.

It says to itself, one can pursue processes of nature with scientific thinking, but one will always arrive at certain cornerstones of knowledge that one cannot pass. I could bring in many such cornerstones, but I want only to state “energy and matter.” The human being can realise if he develops scientifically that he can make progress with dismembering physical processes that then he feels compelled, however, to accept certain concepts, just energy and matter. He has to say to himself then, compared with these concepts that show realities in the sensory world you do not get further, there you cannot enter with natural sciences.

If you do not take the Kantian view one-sidedly as starting point, but check this inner experience at the limits of knowledge impartially, you ask yourself, why does this scientific method put us to such a limit, to certain cornerstones of thinking?—The human beings normally do not get on it because they do not order their thinking in such a way as I want to characterise it after, and, hence, they do not get to the observation of the inner life. They do not note that the human being himself is to blame for the fact that he has to approach such cornerstones. The human beings cannot ask themselves: why do we face such cornerstones? They cannot go over from such an experience to another scientific experience, to a soul experience. If you become able of it in a way, you experience limits of the scientific knowledge on one side.

Then you try on the other side to obtain clarity about the inner experience that you simply have if you face another person. You will note if you have developed your soul life: facing a physical process scientifically analysing is a different thing than facing a person with whom you want to consort, to come close emotionally. You notice if you can compare now in this area that that soul force which enables you to face the person with understanding builds a bridge between human being and human being and makes the human life only possible. This soul force—because it is always between us because it must also always be there because it cannot be neutralised if we do research scientifically—leads us to the limits of knowledge.

We could not simply feel love or sympathy from person to person if we did not have the soul force that obstructs the scientific cognition. Because the human being is a whole because he must also have the capacity for love and because this capacity for love is continuously active if one recognises scientifically, the scientific limits arise. The same force that allows us to love puts scientific limits to us. The spiritual researcher recognises if natural sciences were not put at limits, the human being could not love.

This one important experience activates the inner driving forces of the soul, so that one gets to the anthroposophically oriented spiritual science. You must not be an opponent of natural sciences; you must be able to react to them if you want to be active spiritual-scientifically. However, you have to change that what the naturalist normally has as a theory only into experience, and then from the experience appears that this is in such a way as I have just explained it with the peculiar interaction of the scientific cognitive faculties and the capacity for love.

Some people realise this consciously, some unconsciously. They feel it instinctively. Then they turn in another direction to overcome the limits of scientific cognition and to get to a knowledge of the soul. Then they search in mystic way what natural sciences cannot offer.

You realise from that which I have said that one cannot get with natural sciences to any soul research. However, one does wrong by spiritual science if one confuses it with mysticism. Since just as the spiritual researcher must have experienced that it is impossible to find his way to the mental area with scientific knowledge, so that he has the right starting point, he must also have the other experience that shows that the usual mysticism does not enter into the soul life.

Spiritual science imitates neither natural sciences nor mysticism. However, it has to have gone through the mystic experience, as well as it must have gone through the experience with natural sciences. As it has arrived at the limits of the scientific knowledge, it must get the insight on the other side that it is impossible to penetrate into the inner life with mysticism and to find thereby the core of the human soul, the connection with the everlasting. The spiritual researcher has also to know the mystic limits well. He has to recognise on the mystic ways that he enters into something uncertain that finally says nothing to him. Of course, this is only a sensation at first. If he continues investigating, he finds that also an inner soul force is active which prevents from obtaining a psychology with mysticism as the capacity for love prevents from getting to a psychology scientifically.

There appears the following: if the human being makes an effort ever so much with the usual consciousness to descend in his inside, nevertheless, he finds nothing but what has slipped in the soul life during the life between birth and death in any way. Of course, on this point scientists who tend to mysticism become entangled in a big vagueness. They often believe to be able to get out this and that with contemplation what can give some indication of the riddles of this soul life. However, today we have already advanced so far with researching the physical processes of the human being that we are no longer deterred by such a contemplation if we go forward thoroughly.

I want to bring in an example from literature as evidence as it were, so that you can check it.

(As in the previous talk, Steiner describes Louis Waldstein's experience where he was made smile while reading a title of a book because a hardly audible melody elicited a pleasant memory in him unconsciously.)

You realise how the human soul life functions, actually, how little one is inclined to pay attention in the usual life to this inner soul life and its structure.

However, the expert of this inner soul life knows first that a lot of that which the human being believes that he has not experienced it most certainly but originally gets out of the soul, is nothing but any memory of the childhood or youth or as the case may be. As mystic one is often inclined to believe, for example, that one can bring out something of his soul; and, besides, one brings out memories of his youth or as the case may be. But the expert knows that not only these impressions can change in the course of time that they become something quite different, yes ,that they change into symbols and are not at all similar to the original if they emerge again. Nevertheless, one deals with nothing but with that what one has just brought up. Thus ,there is many a mystic who gets percepts of the divine from his subconscious, of the eternity of the soul, great truths, as he means, and lo and behold: the great truths are nothing but the transformed tones of a barrel organ which have remained as memories. With it, I want to say only how necessary it is if one talks of mysticism to pay attention to these things.

It is true, spiritual science is not an intellectual game, but is scientifically founded. That is why it looks closely at the inner soul life. Then there it gets the result, why with the methods which I immediately want to characterise one finds an inner soul force that prevents us from descending in the everlasting core of the human being.

In exactly the same way as the capacity for love prevents us from penetrating into the inside of nature, there is a soul force which prevents us from descending in our inside. Without this inner soul force, our usual consciousness is not healthy. It is simply the memory that holds us together as human beings in our consciousness between birth and death. This memory power prevents that we look down into our everlasting because we can look with the usual consciousness only at that surface at which our experiences are reflected. Thus the memory power sets limits to us which the mystic experiences.

This is the second experience. The one is that you cannot get to the mental area with natural sciences; the other is that you cannot penetrate into your inside with mysticism because the memory power opposes. If one experiences spiritual research intensely, has experienced these things, one attains the force for further things just with the disappointments of these experiences, with the inner tragedy of these experiences. What does this other consist of? This other consists of the decision to renounce on one side to penetrate with the usual consciousness into the riddles of the things; but also to look for another consciousness at the same time. Both experiences induce the spiritual researcher to add another consciousness to the usual one.

The new psychology has to add to the old, no longer suitable psychology that one cannot get any information about the soul life with the usual consciousness, neither scientifically nor mystically, but that it must evolve into another consciousness.

Hence, the spiritual-scientific research develops such method by which a science is searched which does not only research with the usual consciousness, but which changes the soul into another state of consciousness in which one investigates the soul life. This new psychology is able not only to speak about words as the official psychology does today, but also to approach mental realities.

Now I want to indicate the methods of the development of the consciousness only in principle, which is able to lead into the riddles of the soul life. There you must develop a certain soul force at first that transforms your memory. The memory prevents us from penetrating into the human soul core.

You find viewpoints among the methods in my writings how one gets around to carrying out such internal soul performances without appealing to the memory. I may state here how I have noticed decades ago how difficult it is to change this inner soul force to get to soul research.

(As in the previous talk, Steiner tells how difficult it was for him as pupil to keep mathematical formulae in mind that he had to derive them, therefore, always ad hoc.)

I found out for myself that in the fact of not reflecting the memory is contained a soul arrangement. This was for me the starting point to look then further for those methods that I have described in my books and which consist in the fact that one envigours the imagining with meditation as usually the internal soul life with perceiving.

It is a certain liveliness in our soul life if we perceive with the senses and accompany the percepts with our mental pictures, isn't that so? While meditating you make this different. While meditating you use mental pictures that you have formed yourself that you can exactly survey with which you exactly know that they do not contain any memories, but you have created them yourself, you can survey them clearly.

To such mental pictures you dedicate yourself, strengthen the inner soul force gradually,—without getting to imagining with the outer percepts—so that it comes to life as the mental stay in percipience which is accompanied by mental pictures. However, you note something else if you pursue this spiritual research. It becomes obvious that the mental pictures that you grasp then, just the most essential, the most important and most basic ones, must be created always anew that they do not transition into memory. These mental pictures live in the soul without appealing to the memory.

What I say to you now, is just simple experience, it is something that one can only describe; of course everybody can say, this must be proved first. Inner experience does prove it. Not by spiritistic arrangements, not by any outer mechanistic things, but only by the fact that one evokes this quite different consciousness that does not appeal to memory you get around to beholding into the real spiritual life.

Since only such mental pictures that do not appeal to memory are suitable to lead into the spiritual life. Indeed, they only deliver pictures of this spiritual life at first. While the human being if he perceives with his senses has immediately the feeling—the epistemologists may argue against that—that he faces reality, the human being knows also if he advances to such imagining which does not appeal to memory that he can experience something with these mental pictures that he cannot experience, otherwise, but only in pictures. Now he gets clear on this level of the soul life, which he has reached in this way that he is related to the sense-perceptible world with his body as he is related with his soul to a spiritual world that emerges to him in pictures at first. A soul science of the present and the future is not possible, because the old one is no longer useful due to the scientific imagining, without this great experience.

It is significant that another consciousness can develop from the usual one and that this other consciousness gives information: not only a sense-perceptible world surrounds the human being, but also a spiritual world. As it is true that every human being lives with his body in the sense-perceptible world, it is true that he is with his soul in a spiritual world, in a world of macrocosmic beings. The human being if he has this experience ceases speaking with unclear pantheism: there is spirit and spirit and spirit... [Gap in the transcript].

Pantheism is nothing but an illusionary worldview. That what appears, indeed, only in pictures at first, is a concrete spiritual world that faces the soul in details as spiritual beings as the sense-perceptible world faces the soul in concrete details. However, these are pictures.

That is why I call the level of consciousness that the human being attains the Imaginative consciousness in meditative way. The spiritual world approaches the human being, as the sense-perceptible world approaches him in colours, in light and darkness. However, he also has the consciousness if he develops his imagining only, that he deals with pictures. You realise that a development of imagining is necessary if the human being should become able to behold into the spiritual world that way.

If the human being wants to get beyond the pictures to spiritual realities and beings, he has to develop not only the imagining but also the will. As we imagine in the usual consciousness, actually, only by the way and form thoughts about the outside world,—but this is more or less a concomitant—, the will is a concomitant for the usual consciousness.

We can observe the will as a rule only in such a way that we direct our activities upon the outside world. However, thereby we do not get to know the will really. If we think about the will, we do not cope with it. You normally do not look into this area. You realise with the usual consciousness only that the human being goes over from his inner life to an outer life, while he lets his will transition into the action, while his outer life just becomes a copy of his will impulses. By the observation of this will with the usual consciousness, you cannot penetrate into the being of the will.

It is about the following: as the imagining is developed to the Imaginative knowledge while one produces a certain relation to memory, a certain relation of the human will to the capacity for love has to be produced. This happens by the fact that as it were inner light is brought in the will that the human being becomes much more active internally in his will than he is usually. Thereby he can bring in the will into another sphere.

(As in the previous talk, Steiner mentions two ways of writing, a body-conditioned one and a kind of painting or drawing which such persons show who exhibited great capacity for love in their youth.)

This only shows that with the usual writing the human organisation is usually involved. However, he can also slip that in the writing what works, otherwise, only in the intellectuality or in the knowledge, he can slip the observation, the imagining in. However, this is connected internally. Even as it is connected with love if a person copies the letters in his whole life in such a way as if he were a painter or illustrator, the love penetrates objectively always into the will if the ability of observing joins the will. You can attain this with strict self-discipline, namely in the following way.

Someone who can look back only a little at his life knows that today he has another spiritual condition than ten years ago. Not only because we change because of new experiences, but also because our habitual ways of thinking have changed. However, we do this unconsciously for the most part. Life, education, the conditions bring us forward. Somebody who wants to research spiritually must be able to pursue this inner development consciously. He has to develop the power in himself that he really changes by his mental pictures, by his ideas. This simply belongs to the preparation of spiritual research.

You cannot penetrate into the inside of the spiritual life if you cannot incorporate the same development impulses by imagining. Consider only how the usual life works in this respect. People often have the best intentions if they want to cast off this or that quality or to appropriate this or that quality. They appropriate other qualities, but by education, by the conditions, by the outer life. Nevertheless, just the inner soul life is not strong enough to intervene in the will.

However, the methods that I have described in my books enable the core of the person to settle down into the will. Then a special development of the capacity for love takes place. While on the one side one has to develop an ability in the spiritual research, which does not appeal to memory, on the other side one has to develop an ability, which immensely deepens the capacity for love, makes it objective.

Since what militates against the fact that our innermost mental pictures transform us? Nothing but self-love. The possibility to change by inner imagining is because you can change self-love into objective love. If you progress this way, you can attain a state of consciousness that is different from the usual one. Then you may say to yourself, I have pictures; I know, there is a spiritual world around me in which my soul lives. Now I know: these pictures correspond to a reality that I touch because I have developed an impulse with systematic efforts.

You face now not only the pictures of spiritual beings but also the spiritual reality itself. You have attained this level. You have got out another consciousness from the usual one. You can now really figure out the human soul life with these just described abilities. Above all one thing becomes obvious that the spiritual researcher can describe only how he gets to these things. Then people may easily say: where are your proofs?—The proofs just are that he describes how he has got to these things that one can check these things with common sense and that every person can get around to them if he checks the things.

That which can appear, for example, as a first possibility if you have appropriated the abilities of this supersensible consciousness is that you can now give some indication of the rhythmical change of waking and sleeping what you could not do up to now because of the thresholds, the mystic one and the scientific one. If you have developed this consciousness, you wake in such a way that you know clearly: from falling asleep until awakening I had an inner soul life that is different from that while I am in my body, at no time I was in nothingness. Now you notice that beside the bodily processes the soul processes take place that they are drowned only from awakening until falling asleep by the bodily experiences. The human being lives from falling asleep until awakening in the spiritual world beyond his body and that which he experiences there is extinguished when he wakes up and enters into his body because he needs the bodily tools to get percepts. It is an echo there in the human being; but you recognise clearly that you have lived in the spiritual from falling asleep until awakening if you have learnt to live in such mental pictures that do not appeal to the memory.

Since this is just the interesting: we have a soul life from falling asleep until awakening, but we forget because we were trained to know that only with the usual consciousness that we can keep in mind. So that the healthy soul life can be, we cannot grasp the mental pictures of sleep in the usual consciousness, which are not designed to become memories in the usual sense but to be forgotten. We can grasp them only if we have a soul life that is not designed to oblivion but to memory.

Hence, we may say, as you look back at the room if you have advanced in the room, you can look back, if you have awoken, at that what you have experienced. Remembering changes into inner looking back. However, because you develop such abilities, it is given at the same time that these abilities of a supersensible consciousness increase more and more and you become more able to study the soul life.

You can study as a first, for example, the emotional life. It is good if you take your starting point from the emotional life and are oriented towards the experience of awakening and falling asleep with the developed abilities of the supersensible consciousness. If you investigate the feeling of the human being at any time of his life with the consciousness of which I have just spoken, the strange comes to light that in this emotional life everything flows together at one moment that one has experienced before and what one will still experience after.

I have attempted to ascertain this matter spiritual-scientifically with examples with which one can ascertain this, for example, with Goethe. One takes his feeling life in 1790. Now one can study what Goethe had experienced what he had thought and felt until 1790 and that what he experienced then from 1790 to 1832: if you take the basic character of the experiences before and after 1790 as effective, you find the emotional state of Goethe in 1790. The emotional state of a human being at any time is the confluence of his immediate past since his birth, and of that which he will experience until his death.

You will receive interesting results, for example, in the following way with this new psychology: you look for the soul life of persons shortly before they die. Someone who has an unbiased view realises everywhere that a rapid death expresses itself just in the emotional life; since the emotional life is the confluence of that what was there before, and what will be after, what is already there, however, like the summer lightning of the future, which expresses itself in the colouring of the feelings. Thus, you get to know the inside of the course of life, which consists mainly of flowing feelings. Then you can ascend, after you have investigated the feeling in this way, to imagining. However, you can explain the imagining only if you have enabled yourself by the development of the supersensible consciousness to look, for example, really at the moment of awakening where the awakening makes its impression in the body. You know that awakening is immersing in the body.

You recognise the independence of the soul in this way. Now you get to know that this awakening of the mental takes place repeatedly as it were in short, successive rhythms in the usual thinking and imagining. These rhythms take place in the ongoing usual consciousness what you hardly note what single modern psychologists have noted; John Ruskin (1819-1900, English art critic, social thinker) describes this in detail.

Hence, the real process is always in such a way that only a miniature of awakening is there. You are awaking perpetually if you go over from non-imagining to imagining. This is exceptionally important.

If you get to know the nature of imagining this way, you can build the bridge between imagining and awakening, you know that the imagining is only a minor awakening, you also know that the independent soul moves to and fro in the bodily. While one builds the bridge from imagining to awakening on the one side, one can get the ability to build the bridge from awakening to immersing of the mental in the bodily at conception or birth on the other side.

The spiritual-scientific psychology is able to point to this continuous way. If you get to know the imagining in its reality, the straight bridge leads from imagining to awakening, from observing the transition of the independent soul life to the bodily life, but from there the other bridge leads to the beholding of the spiritual life before conception. Someone who can bring that what he has developed in the supersensible consciousness into the usual imagining knows that he not only looks back at the former spiritual life, but he knows that this former spiritual life also works on the present imagining.

Here is the point where one can laugh even today or mock if spiritual science points to a pre-birth spiritual life of the soul, points to former lives on earth which one gets to know from own experience. One may laugh; but the way can be indicated with which this is scientifically investigated, after one has brought about the possibility of this scientific investigation.

As well as I have shown today how spiritual science originates, how it looks for the immortal of the human soul with conscientious research, and gets to the certainty of the immortality of the human soul by immediate perception, spiritual science is suitable to perform that which I shall bring forward the day after tomorrow of which many people believe today to perform it with quite different means. You cannot investigate the soul life unless you penetrate into the supersensible consciousness. You cannot investigate the basis of the social structure of the human society unless you penetrate with the means of the higher consciousness into the basis of the moral, the religious, the sociopolitical life in modern sense. It becomes necessary also historically that the human being, so that he can fulfil the big demands which face him from the necessities of the evolution, penetrates with this supersensible consciousness into that what people are thinking, doing and willing. I would like to show that the day after tomorrow. Today, however, I wanted only, I would like to say, to deliver the preparation of this talk which is more keeping with the times.

One has either to look for these new ways, which I have indicated, for a new psychology to satisfy the biggest inner needs or one would generally have—what would be unfortunate—no psychology. One will either search a new anthroposophic psychology or renounce any psychology. However, humanity will never do this.

Hence, someone who knows the spiritual way has the consciousness and hope that this spiritual way does not originate from mere subjective arbitrariness, but that it arises from the social progress of the human race and that, therefore, humanity will take it.

Preliminary note: Walter Johannes Stein's lecture was not written down. The questions from the participants were submitted in writing.

Question: How is it that the color perception on the right and left is of different intensities?

Rudolf Steiner: This is connected with the fact that the entire vitality in the human being is different on the left and right. We are not at all organized in such a way that the human being functions the same on both sides - the left-handed person and the right-handed person, if I may say so. That which lives in our consciousness is actually always an intermediate state between that which lives through the left-handed person and that which lives through the right-handed person, and the extreme states, the lopsidedness and so on, are just radical formations of that which is actually already present in every person by nature. The difference in intensity stems from the fact that we, as symmetrical human beings, live and function with the two [dis]symmetrical parts in varying degrees of intensity.

The next question was: What is the significance of the warmth points? To what extent can the warmth points be regarded as organs of warmth perception, of general inner and outer perception?

In general, however, something comes into consideration that would be extremely difficult to explain in brief. I would have to give you a whole lecture about it. What is referred to here as heat points, they do not actually serve like the sense organs, but they serve to spread the sensations of warmth as such throughout our organization, so that we identify ourselves with the warmth within us.

This spreading is actually essentially there to perceive us in the sensation of warmth as a unified being, as we must generally hold that we as human beings are organized in such a way that we also stand out from our animal nature through our sensory organization. Our animal nature is actually organized in the way our sensory physiologists usually describe it. In contrast, our human senses are formed in such a way that the orientation towards the I is already inherent in the individual sensory activities. The I is basically a resultant of the twelve partial effects that come together from our various senses. We should not actually say, if we formulate the facts precisely, that we perceive through the eye. Perception as such is much more rooted in a process that lies further back. What actually takes place through the eye is the activation of the process of perception in our entire ego process – it is the same with the other senses – so that we are distinguished from animals by the fact that our senses are already oriented towards the ego. This can also be demonstrated externally by the fact that the further down the animal scale we go, the more dissimilar, and to some extent more complicated, the senses become in comparison to our human senses.

The next question: How are the biogenetic and phylogenetic processes to be understood?

This will become very clear once we start to properly study embryology and a reasonably conducted embryology will then also lead to a reasonable interpretation of phylogeny. Present-day embryology is actually a very one-sided science; it actually only considers the development of the ovum in its complexity. However, it attaches very little importance to the decadent organs, to that which disappears in the developed embryo, i.e. to what disappears, such as the amniotic sac, the allantois, the chorion and so on. These things regress, while that which then becomes the visible human organs develops forward. The mistake that is made today is that one actually only looks at the evolutionary processes, not the involutionary processes, not that which develops in the opposite sense as a result of the other evolving. If embryology is ever studied in such a way that the organs that develop in the opposite direction, that then fall away, are also considered, then it will be possible to properly observe the transformations of form in phylogeny as well, and then it will become clear that what has been presented to you schematically today can be characterized as the real summary of everything that can be well traced phylogenetically.

Today, the empirical sciences have a wealth of material available, but this rich material is by no means exploited in a rational sense. There is, so to speak, a great deal of chaos in this rich material, and as a result, the facts on which this more schematic presentation is based are still hidden from the observations of comparative anatomy, comparative physiology, and comparative biology in general. The relationships that have been indicated here, for example, the transformation, the metamorphosis of the sense of taste into the sense of sight, is something that can already be read today between the lines of the usual physiological descriptions. This can already be proven. Likewise, the process can be observed phylogenetically in the animal series: If we go back to lower-formed eyes, which, however, already have the organization of the eyes of higher animals and humans, we will find that this metamorphosis of the taste organ into the organ of vision can actually be demonstrated if we just want to see impartially.

Another question: What does the kidney actually perceive and what role does the adrenal gland play in this?

Well, the perception we are dealing with here is, of course, very much in the subconscious. When we speak of “renal perception”, we are actually dealing with an analogous use of the word. After all, the point is that we can go into this process of perception without thinking of it in the same crude way as the external senses. The perception in question can be characterized as follows:

Let us say that a person perceives with their sense of hearing. They perceive in the way that has been described to you here today: they perceive outwardly, and this perception takes place in the conscious mind. A perception that we can describe as the opposite pole of auditory perception, we would have to characterize as being conveyed to the region of rhythmic activity. Certain processes that take place in human metabolism have to be conveyed to the region of rhythmic activity, these processes, the metabolic processes, are in a certain way conveyed to the rhythmic processes by something analogous to perception, just as, for example, the external vibrational processes are conveyed to the brain by the perception of sound.

It is only possible to connect a clear concept with these things if one can imagine that inner vitality as it is in the three-part human being. What is in the metabolic human being, for example, must be conveyed for the rhythmic human being. The rhythmic person can only be in harmony with the metabolic person through mediation, and this mediation is provided by kidney activity. The strength of the secretion, the quality of the secretion, forms the mediation, so to speak. In this way, the kidney creates a reagent for the rhythmic person in relation to the metabolic person.

Of course, these things can only be characterized superficially. They lead into such profound things of the human organization that they are hardly suitable for a brief answer to a question.

The question was also asked about the nature of the secretion. What is meant by secretion here?

Surely, one can only use the word “seclusion” in this case if one means the following: when we speak of the sense of warmth, we are dealing with the perception of something in the external world that is present in the same way in ourselves, so that, as it were - as was also mentioned in today's lecture - only the difference in level is actually perceived between the external warmth and the internal warmth. And it is indeed the case that, basically, the same process is taking place as with the thermometer, only externalized.

With sound perceptions, it is the case that we not only penetrate into something that we also carry within us, it is the case that we not only penetrate into something that is, so to speak, a common medium in which we are inside and the object is inside, but in the case of sound perception, we penetrate into something that is inherent in the object. We can certainly say, for example, that every metal has its own sound. So in a sense we penetrate into the interior of an object in a weaker way than we penetrate into the interior of another person when we listen to how he speaks and how he reveals his inner self to us. We do not penetrate into something that is common to both us and him – only the mediations are common, but not the content. Thus we penetrate out of ourselves by penetrating into the object through the perception of sound.

This can be characterized by the fact that, while ascending from the sense of sight to the sense of warmth, we still live in something that is a common medium for what is perceived and for ourselves, but that something separates when we go from the sense of sight to the sense of hearing. There is also an intensification in this, because we not only perceive a sound, but we perceive an inner mental process.

Thus, in the sense of sound, a further differentiation can be perceived. And one cannot arrive at a schematization, if I may say so, or a classification of the senses, other than by considering this activity of the human being from the inside out, this absorption, this ever-increasing absorption in the sense of sound. Only in this way can one arrive at an objective classification of the senses. Precisely because this has not been done, it has been overlooked that one really must proceed from the sense of hearing to the sense of sound, and from the sense of sound in turn to the sense of concept. For it is an absolute nonsense to speak of perceiving, let us say, what the other person puts into language as his soul content, with the sense of hearing. To separate these two senses, the sense of sound and the sense of tone, leads only to a failure to understand anything about these things in the world.

It is therefore a matter of actually setting a boundary where such a boundary is given by the objects, and of seeing this separation, which is not yet present in the sense of warmth. What is actually perceived by the subject himself first occurs in the sense of sound, and then increasingly in the other senses, in the sense of sound and so on, or even in the sense of self. Everything is thrown into confusion. In this theory, which we can hear today, it is actually the case that the perception of the other self should come about through me approaching the other person and seeing a nose, two eyes, hair and so on, and then say to myself through a half-unconscious conclusion: I also have a nose, two eyes, hair; what he has, I also have, therefore what I see will have an I like I have.

This unconscious conclusion is what we see at work today. It is often called “empathy” or something similar, as chattering psychologists, for example Lipps, have said. We find this unconscious conclusion at work everywhere, and we do not notice how direct the process is that lies in the fact that I actually perceive the ego of the other person.

Some people who study such things, such as Scheler, have indeed become aware of how immediate this perception of the self of the other is and how fundamentally, radically different this perception of the self of the other is from all the processes that lead me to the inner experiences, which I then summarize into the overall state of the inner life.

I believe that what has been mentioned is a radical process that proceeds in many ways and intervenes in the inner life, while the human being's perception of the self is on the same level as other sensory perceptions, except that here we are entering the realm for which humanity is not yet predisposed today. I would like to say, to speak of organs in the way we speak here of the organ of the sense of self, that would hardly be easy to understand today in the context of our psychology or physiology - which, as I mentioned earlier, has even led to the development of an analytical psychology, a so-called “psychoanalysis” - that would hardly be easy to understand today in the context of these complexities.

But at least the pure fact must be presented to the world today: that I-perception is something other than the summarizing, the synthetic summarizing of those processes that then lead to the confirmation of the fact of the inner I of the subject.

The next question: what processes are involved in dowsing?

With regard to the divining rod, it must be carefully noted that, when the corresponding phenomena occur, there is an intensified sensory process for which, however, the whole human being is the mediator. We are not dealing with inner mechanical or magnetic processes or the like, but with the intensity of the person, which is then expressed in what is transmitted through the person to the divining rod.

The facts of the matter are such that one can indeed point out how people who really have no inclination to engage in spiritual science are quite seriously forced to deal with such a problem, such as that of the divining rod, both physically and physiologically.

I still remember – although I do not want to speak here in favor or against something in this direction – how a Viennese researcher blew the whistle on Hansen – after all, most of the nonsense that Hansen did with hypnotism at the time – and how this same researcher is now forced to seriously deal with the phenomena of dowsing. I need only recall that in fact experiments in locating springs and the like with the help of the divining rod have even played a certain role during this war, so that in fact here in this field exact research is beginning. But this research does not want to consider the fact that we are not dealing here with processes that have been separated from the human being, but with processes that are based on the fact that the human being is involved in the entire process, so to speak. This is confirmed, for example, by the fact that the movements of the rod vary greatly depending on whether one or the other person is using it. We are dealing with something in whose reactions the intervention of the human being plays a role.

These questions are such that if we wanted to answer them exhaustively, we would need the whole night to do so, and that cannot be expected of us.

Dear attendees, the terrible fire disaster of last December night destroyed an outer shell of anthroposophical endeavor. This event, which is so painful for many who have grown fond of this building – the Goetheanum in Dornach – may perhaps give me cause to address these reflections first to the Goetheanum in Dornach today. I have been privileged to give many reflections of this kind here from this place, and today's reflection, too, is only intended to be given in the same style as the others, and only the connection is to be made to the Goetheanum. This Goetheanum has certainly had many people who, out of an insight into the will that wanted to emanate from this Goetheanum, greatly revered and loved this Goetheanum. But one may say that the vast majority of visitors, the numerous visitors who have been there over the years, could not make anything special out of this Goetheanum. There were many people who were annoyed by the very name Goetheanum. And then there were many who looked at the forms of this overall structure, composed of two domed buildings, and found them to be simply peculiar, perhaps merely the expression of a fantastic aspiration. There were then people who, on one or other of these grounds, believed that all kinds of spookish, perhaps spiritistic, goings-on took place in the Goetheanum, that it had been built to represent some kind of unclear, hazy mysticism, and perhaps even, as some put it, to serve the most blind superstition and so on, and so on.

And yet one might be amazed at how far what is believed in the present day about this or that can be from the actual fact. Because the Goetheanum has certainly not served any of the above. And if there are those today who fight against all these more or less backward or superstitious tendencies, those who want what was really wanted in the sense of building the Goetheanum, they certainly belong to these opponents. But I do not want to speak of the negative today; I want to speak of what the Goetheanum wanted and what Anthroposophy, for which it was intended to be a place, actually wants for present-day humanity.

The fact that the name Goetheanum was chosen over time was basically in line with the heartfelt desire of a number of admirers of the Goetheanum and Anthroposophy. The name of one of the figures in my mystery dramas, Johannes Thomasius (not John the Evangelist, but a character in my mystery dramas) was the first name chosen for this building on the hill at Dornach. It was accordingly named the Johannesbau.

Of course, this in particular gave rise to many misunderstandings, as is easy to understand, and I have therefore had to emphasize again and again that for me this Dornach building is a Goetheanum. Why? I can say that for more than 40 years I have been occupied with that which is based on Goethe's knowledge, art and world view. And anyone who delves into Goethe's striving for knowledge, into Goethe's art, into Goethe's striving for a worldview with an open mind, anyone who immerses themselves in it, will not only be stimulated to look at what Goethe wanted externally, but Goethe works when one really engages with him and with the universality of his striving. One can imbue one's soul with what he wanted, as with a spiritual lifeblood. And from this imbued experience of what one might call Goetheanism, I am convinced that it was wanted by Goethe in accordance with his time for certain parts of human perception, from this experience of what one might call Goetheanism, Anthroposophy has arisen.

Of course, anyone who takes Goethe's world view, Goethe's artistic intention and looks at it from the outside will not be able to extract from Goethe, with any kind of logic or, let us say, with any kind of ordinary artistic taste, what is contained in Anthroposophy. But there is, I would say, a logic of thought, and there is a logic of life. Those who make the logic of life their own can immerse themselves in something like that which Goethe revealed to the world, so that it comes to life in them, and continues to grow and develop. And in this sense of a living logic, I feel how Anthroposophy emerges from Goetheanism without contradiction, however little one admits it today. And because anthroposophy basically owes its origin to Goethe, it was a natural emotional need to call the place where anthroposophy, the descendant of Goethe's world view, so to speak, was cultivated, the Goetheanum.

This is not meant to be a silly claim to represent what Goetheanism is with any kind of perfection, but rather, I would like to say, this Goetheanum wanted to be a kind of place of homage for what Goethe gave to the world. It should not serve to represent Goethe's way of thinking for the sake of prestige, but rather it should be an expression of gratitude for what can be obtained from Goethe's world striving. And those who feel that this naming is in line with the expression of a feeling of gratitude will probably no longer be annoyed by the name.

But if I am to go further – my dear audience – and show you what the Goetheanum was intended for, then I must continue today the reflections that I have often been privileged to make in this hall and say what anthroposophy is intended for. Anthroposophy is indeed intended to find the answer, as far as it can be found by man, to the highest questions of human existence, to those questions that are related to human destiny and human dignity in the highest sense of the word. If a person does not numb their own soul life, then the question of the soul's eternity arises again and again. Then the question arises: Is the human soul a free or a non-free being? Then the question arises: To what extent does the human soul rest and work in that which can be called a divine world order?

Our present-day science, which has achieved such unspeakably great things for the external fields of life, has become rather timid about these questions, which are often called the last questions of existence, because this outer science wants to real, true science only that which can be perceived by the senses, which can be combined by human intellectual activity from sensory perceptions, and it rejects that which goes beyond the sensual. But in doing so, it also rejects any answer to the deeper questions of human existence, as just characterized. For without an entry of knowledge into the supersensible realm, man cannot even dare to attempt to approach a humanly possible answer to this question.

Anthroposophy, however, does not want to give the answers to these questions in a mere doctrine, to the extent that this is possible for man. Nor does anthroposophy want to give the answers to these questions through an unclear mysticism, but anthroposophy wants to penetrate as far as possible into these answers in the same way as today's sciences actually strive. The only thing is that anthroposophy is clear about the fact that what man calls knowledge still has to be grasped in a completely different way than it is often done today, especially by the most authoritative authorities, if one wants to see these questions in the right light at all.

I would like to start from a parable-like observation, but one that is supposed to be more than a mere parable. You see, my dear audience, every soul that contemplates the world, without thinking that it can gain special insights into the answers to the riddles of the world, every soul stands, perhaps only in amazement and admiration, before the images of that muffled world that we call the world of dreams. I start from the world of dreams, certainly not in order to mystically extract something from this world of dreams, but to illustrate how anthroposophy thinks about that which must become knowledge for humanity if the characterized questions are to be approached.

Imagine the manifold, colorful dream world before the sleeping soul. Imagine how, on the one hand, the content of the dream is a reflection of what we know well from the world we live in during the waking hours. But one should also imagine the soul, in which the dream world floats and envelops the soul in a freely moving way, transforming it, becoming more fantastic. And anyone who has an open mind, anyone who has a healthy mind and, above all, a healthy will in the world, will have no choice but to say to themselves: We can never recognize the reality value of the dream world during the dream itself.

We could, I would say, dream our whole life long, then we would simply, as we do in the dream experience, consider the dream content to be our reality. We would believe that the world we dream is the real world. But since we wake up from the dream world through our organization, we gain the perspective in waking life to examine the reality value of the dream world. Only when we are outside the dream, only when our senses and our will are, as it were, switched on to the external world around us, do we have a point of view from which to assess the reality value of the dream world. Of course, no one may judge what is spatial reality from the point of view of a dream. For healthy thinking and healthy willing, only the reverse assessment is possible.

Now, while someone is absorbed not in a dream world, but precisely in the world of daily reality, which, although in a different way from a dream, also provides us with diverse, colorful images, but images whose inner content we only recognize when we penetrate them, when we penetrate them in their interaction with what our mind gives us. As anthroposophy delves into this world of reality, as anthroposophy approaches the world of everyday reality in the same way that a dreamer approaches his dream world, you come to the question: Yes, is it not possible that a second awakening takes place, so to speak, in the human soul life? Just as the natural workings of our organism tear us out of our dreams, as our will is switched on during awakening into the external sensual world of reality, so it could indeed be possible that a further awakening is possible from the world that concerns our everyday consciousness. If that is the case, then it must be said that the reality value of the sensory world can only be assessed from the point of view of the world into which one awakens, the supersensible world, just as the reality value of the dream world can only be assessed from the point of view of the everyday world. I would like to say: Anthroposophy first asks itself the big question: Is such a second awakening possible? It does not want to sink back to recognize the world, into dream-like reality. It wants to go the opposite way; it wants to go the way that man goes from the dream into sensory reality. It wants to go further from sensory reality into supersensible reality. Whether one can do this depends, of course, on how one is able to penetrate the human soul life, in fact the whole human life. I would like to say: one must simply subject the soul and its life to examination to see whether it has the possibility of such a second awakening.

Now, my dear audience, such a second awakening is possible. Above all, it is possible if a person does not give in to intellectual arrogance, by which he says to himself: You were a small child at first, you were not yet equipped with the ability to think, feel or willpower as you have as an adult; you had to develop them with the help of your human environment, with the help of your education, with the help of life, these abilities, to the degree that you now have them. But if, as an adult, you discard intellectual arrogance and ask yourself: Is it possible for the abilities to be further developed from the level at which you have brought them as an adult, just as they have developed from the childlike stage to the stage of everyday life? And you are led on the path of such further development of human abilities when you pay special attention to individual such abilities.

Let us first turn our attention to that faculty of the human soul or, let us say, of the human being that is usually called memory in life, the gift of remembrance. Let us first consider it as memory presents itself in everyday life. Out of the realm of the soul, in the midst of impressions of the present, perhaps evoked by these impressions of the present, thought images emerge, pale thought images of something we may have experienced years ago. And so what emerges from the depths of the soul or is brought up by present-day perceptions is mixed with the all-embracing, transforming power of the imagination, perhaps with some fantasy too. And so, through the power of memory, we have before us images of something that can undoubtedly be said to It is in a fairly realistic way, in the kind of reality that we are accustomed to when we open our eyes and when we hear our surroundings with our ears; it is not present in this reality. We take events into our memory images that simply consist of our having entered into this or that relationship with this or that person, this or that natural event, or something else, years ago.

What took place there is no longer reality today. But we have the ability to present to ourselves from the depths of our soul, in more or less pale or more or less meaningful images, what, in the way we otherwise perceive reality through the senses, is not present reality. This ability to remember can be cultivated. And it is cultivated when a person delves into his or her own thought life in a way that is not usually done in everyday life, particularly today. When people devote themselves to their thoughts today, they are usually thoughts that have been inspired from outside or that arise as memory thoughts in the way I have described. If someone is honest with his soul life, he must say to himself: what the external impressions provide, what arises from the depths of the soul life as memory, is actually what makes up this exterior of the soul life.

But there is something else we can do. We can tear ourselves away from this, I would say passive role that we play in relation to our thinking. We can try to live in our thoughts with an ever-increasing inner activity. You can live in thought in such a way that you simply form thoughts that you can easily grasp; so that you can be sure that if you devote yourself to these thoughts with strong inner activity, you will not fall prey to suggestion or mystical dreams, if you only present thoughts that are easy to grasp to your soul in such a way that you do not let them scurry away like thoughts that are stimulated from outside or inside. Then you realize that in this thinking, which is brought about by your own arbitrariness – in this life, in the activity of thinking, something develops within the soul life that can be compared to what happens when we use a part of our muscles in external physical work, for example. They become stronger, they become more powerful, it is precisely in active application that the muscles become stronger and more powerful. However, we notice this in a different way, in that we repeatedly and repeatedly immerse ourselves in thoughts that we have woven ourselves or even made ourselves or acquired from some spiritual researcher, through our inner will — if I may put it that way. We become inwardly stronger in soul, and we notice when we do such exercises – for some it takes longer, for others shorter, it can take weeks, it can take years – when we continue such exercises, we notice: the inner strength of our soul awakens. And it awakens in such a way that we become acquainted with that which we previously only knew as a memory in a transformed, reshaped form. A new inner ability, I would say an increased ability to remember, but one that does not simply deliver memories to us, we feel them in our soul.

And in the moment when this power has become strong enough, when the thinking that has been repeatedly and repeatedly seized in inner activity – the thinking that is now not only thought but is experienced, so that one feels it as an inner reality – in the moment when this inner thinking has become strong enough, something occurs, it usually occurs piece by piece, something occurs before this human soul that it has not known before. It is not just memory that comes before the human soul, but the direct perception of what the person has experienced since about the first years of childhood within this earthly existence. But what the person experiences is not a collection of laboriously recalled images, but something that suddenly presents itself to the soul like a vast tableau of life, so that one can see one's past life as it is present, as if time had become space. If one is able to do this, then one also feels one's self in a completely different way than is possible in ordinary consciousness, actually no longer in the physical body. One feels connected with one's self with all the experiences one has gone through and which now come up in this enormous memory tableau for the consciousness.

I would like to call that in which one now experiences oneself, as one experiences oneself in physical life in one's earthly life in the arms, the head, in the legs, I would like to call this sum of life images, of which one feels: It is oneself, it is one's self, only extended beyond one's earthly lifetime. I would like to call it the temporal body in contrast to the spatial body, in which one perceives oneself for the ordinary consciousness. It is the first supersensible experience that one has in this way.

But now — and this is the significant thing — one does not experience this tableau, this time body, in such a way that one looks at it externally, but rather, by immersing oneself in thinking again and again with activity, with inner activity, one has acquired the possibility of being immersed in the experiences, of having them as if they were present, of really being one with this temporal body, not just existing in space but moving through time and feeling like a human unit through the time that one moves through. One expands one's existence almost to the point of one's birth as a continuous reality.

That is the result of what I would call transformed memory. While you are in this state, looking at yourself as being immersed in your previous life, you do not have the opportunity to develop the memory in any particular way. In fact, the one who experiences this must experience it again and again, at least in a shadowy way, if he wants to have it before him. The fact that one has turned memory into something else for this supersensible world, into the contemplation of a finer world of time, has the effect at the same time that memory itself is extinguished for the moments when one beholds this higher world. But the one who develops in this way in a healthy way will not, like a mystical dreamer or a somnambulist, involuntarily come to a different way of imagining, but will come to this different way of imagining with full consciousness. This also enables him, I might say, to return again and again to the ordinary consciousness of everyday life. He is able, despite looking first into the first realm of the spiritual world, to stand with both feet in sensual reality in a healthy way and not to become a mystical dreamer and fantasist.

But in this way, man attains true self-knowledge. For it is not what has approached me from the outside that appears in this tableau of life, but precisely how one has intervened in external events. There is a difference between someone making an effort to recall the events they have experienced in their ordinary consciousness and memory, and what I have just described, when one recalls the events one has experienced at one's birth in one's ordinary consciousness and memory. Above all, one is interested in how the world has affected one, how this or that person has approached one, what effect this or that natural event has had on one. When you have this higher spiritual, transformed memory tableau before you, then you actually do not see what another person has done to you, but rather you see how you yourself have behaved towards the other person, how you have behaved towards this or that natural event, this or that fact of life. One sees oneself as acting, as active. In short, my dear audience, one has advanced to a real self-knowledge, to a vivid self-knowledge. This is due, if I may express it so, to the strengthening of thinking to such an extent that one feels one is now living in one's thinking as one otherwise lives in one's blood circulation, in one's breathing.

In ordinary life, thoughts are dull and shadowy. They are not compelling; they are not something in which one lives as one does in one's blood or as one does in one's breathing. By practicing in the way I have described, one senses one's life in thought, as it were, just as one otherwise senses one's life in the physical body. And then one knows that in addition to the physical body that a human being carries, there is this second time body, which is not spatial – it can be drawn spatially, but that is only an illustration – that there is this second time body, which is infinitely finer, if one may use this expression at all, than the physical body. In my writings I have called it the etheric or formative body, because one must have an expression for these things. One need not be offended by expressions. This, alongside the physical body, is the second link in the human being, and it leads up the first stage to the supersensible body in order to penetrate further. For one learns through such contemplation only one's own human being for this earth life.

To penetrate further, it is necessary, so to speak, to develop the opposite strength to that which consists of immersing oneself in thoughts. It is indeed the case that Anyone who is familiar with this immersion in thought knows how it captivates people. Indeed, if you do it the way I describe it in my book 'How to Know Higher Worlds' or in 'Occult Science: An Outline', you do preserve yourself. You do acquire this world, however, if you do the exercises the way I describe them there, in a completely free way. You are not influenced by what you experience, you stand in it as a free human being in the sensual outer world.

But still, to the same extent that anything in the external world that particularly moves us captivates us, this world, which we experience when we immerse ourselves in thought, captivates us; little by little — it is not even an exaggeration, my dear audience — one has the feeling: you now live in this power of thought, just as you otherwise live in your physical body. And yet, if one wants to progress in supersensible knowledge, it is necessary to overcome precisely this stage. For one must be clear about this: this stage is actually only what I have called an [imaginative] stage in my books. One experiences what the world has implanted in one during one's life on earth, what one has, so to speak, imagined as one's own conception, feeling, will — not in the sense of a fantastic education, but in the sense of really imagining what one has imagined.

But one experiences only what one is in the strictest sense as a human being, one experiences only one's human soul. And one does not yet have the right to say that this human soul, which one experiences as in a time body, that this has a continued existence beyond earthly life. For this, higher exercises are necessary. For this, it is necessary that one can now inwardly put oneself – just as one has placed the thinking before the soul, how one has immersed oneself in the thinking, so that the thinking became a life – to suppress this thinking again at any time in complete inner freedom. But that means something special now.

If you have freed yourself from the physical body in the sense I have just described, if you have settled into the etheric body, then initially suppressing the life of thought does not mean falling back into the physical body, but remaining outside of the physical body. But what one has acquired from outside the physical body is suppressed. And one establishes what one might call an empty consciousness. That is the significant thing, that man develops his inner soul abilities to this level of empty consciousness.

I would like to say: just as a person breathes in ordinary life, how he inhales and then exhales again, how the inhalation contains the air of life and the exhalation the air of death, so too, at this higher level of experiencing the mind through thinking, the person must come to stir thinking within himself, just as he stirs the inhaled air as a physical organism. But he must also be able to bring this thinking experience out of his soul. Then the consciousness becomes empty. But once one has attained this possibility of an empty consciousness, one has penetrated to alternating in the soul between being filled with inner powerful thinking, which proceeds in the images as I have described in the tableau of life; once one has achieved being able to alternate between these images and between having nothing in the soul, then after a while – all these things have to be awaited with patience and energy – the empty consciousness that one has achieved in this way does not remain empty, but external perceptions do not arise either. A spiritual world appears around us. And we acquire the ability to live for a while in what we awaken within as images of our own earthly life, and to change it by suppressing these images, by taking the approach of creating empty consciousness by alternating with being filled with external spiritual world content.

Yes, my dear audience, into this empty consciousness now enters the phenomenon of a spiritual world, which we distinguish from what we know ourselves to be in the time body, just as we distinguish the outer colors and sounds from our physical body when we stand in the world of space, in the physical world. We learn to distinguish between what we perceive externally as the spiritual content of the world, as a world of spiritual beings that is around us just as the physical world of physical facts and physical beings is around us, and we learn to distinguish ourselves from this spiritual world.

If I was able to say that the first step of supersensible knowledge comes to a real kind of self-perception, which is an intensified thinking, then this second step, through which we recognize a real spiritual world, through which we experience that there is a spiritual world around us, like the sensual world. This second ability can be compared to the soul activity that we pour into our physical organism when we speak. Speaking is not just a physical, mechanical expression of the human organism. What the physical organism reveals when a person speaks is poured into what is the soul life, and what flows in the words and sentences is what soul life is. When we learn to suppress amplified thinking as I have described it, we learn something in addition to this suppression of thinking, which I will describe in a few words. It is something that is known, but in this case it is described differently with these words. One does not just learn to suppress thinking, but rather one learns to be inwardly silent in a higher sense than is the case in ordinary life. Yes, when the empty consciousness is established, the inner experience is there: now the soul is silent. I said that I use the word as it is used for not speaking in ordinary life. But the word means something different in this case. This silence after suppressed thinking is now a positive inner experience, so to speak, as we otherwise fill ourselves, say, with joy or pain, with what our speech contains, what our words contain. In the same sense, we now feel ourselves immersed in our supersensible being in the way described: we are filled with silence. And this silence is of a special kind in yet another respect.

I have to use a comparison to express myself clearly. I have to say: let's assume we are in the middle of a big city, with all kinds of noise around us. We move out of the city, the sounds get weaker and weaker because they sound further and further away; it gets quieter and quieter. We go out into the solitude of the forest – it becomes even quieter. Finally, we are surrounded by complete silence. But I would like to say: this silence is only the zero. We can go further. We can diminish even further what silence means simply as something that is not heard – if I may use a very trivial expression – just as we can diminish even further when we have spent our assets down to zero, we can diminish these assets even further by getting into debt, by having even less than zero. This is how we can diminish silence. There is something deeper in the soul after the thinking has been suppressed than there is in silence. There is an inner strength in this intensified silence, and in this intensified silence, this stillness, which goes beyond the stillness of zero, this stillness produces something that is not an external thing but an inner language , a language that does not come from the depths of the soul, but that – one experiences it clearly – comes from the supersensible world, in which one is now in this supersensible being, as I have described it. One now feels compelled to describe what one experiences in the inner silence of the soul. One experiences the spiritual world, and from the spiritual world it is as if it speaks to us through the silence of our soul. It really speaks to us. Only one must not pour this speaking into the words that are otherwise produced with our speech organs, but one must pour it by using the natural phenomena themselves to express that which is revealed there as the spiritual world. That is how it happens. But what happens is that — my dear audience — one wants inner elementary naturalness, as it is the behavior towards the outer sensory world. I perceive something spiritual in the world in the way described. This spiritual makes an impression on me, a very specific impression. This impression stands directly before my silent soul. It is the same as the impression made by the color red, not in the way I saw the red color, but just as when I see in my memory a red color surface completely illuminated, I see not the redness of the color, but the memory of the color, the redness of the color. But it is something completely different. So I now experience the direct presence of a spiritual in the soul. I have to express this direct presence of a spiritual in such a way that I remember, so to speak. This spiritual affects me like the red or blue color. I can compare the spiritual in the red or blue color with this or that sound, although it is not at all meant to be any sound of the external sensory world. In other words, my language in relation to the spiritual world becomes very special. My language in relation to the spiritual world becomes such that I make use of sensory phenomena to characterize and express what is revealed to me in the spiritual world. However, these sensory phenomena belong to the spiritual entities and events just as little as the word thinking ultimately belongs to thinking itself. One describes that which one beholds in the spiritual world, as I have described it, for example, in my “Theosophy”; but it is a language that one uses. One makes use of the colors of the senses, the sounds of the senses, in order to describe that which one has to describe in the spiritual world. It is a language, it is the language of the silent soul.

And when the soul has progressed in this way, then even if the power that suppresses thinking and creates silence in the soul is simply strengthened, the whole tableau of self-introspection can be erased. I can, as it were, extinguish my temporal body. Just as I would otherwise only extinguish individual images or isolated thoughts from my consciousness, I now extinguish everything that I have experienced as an earthly human being since my birth. Once I have learned to establish consciousness with the silence of the soul, not only does the comprehensive spiritual world emerge, as I have just described, but also one's own true being, which the person was before descending into a physical world in a previous existence. Now, through the suppression of what one has experienced as an earthly human being, through the empty, silence-filled consciousness, one gets to know one's pre-earthly existence, thus the soul in the state in which it is eternal, in which it was before it entered physical earthly life through the physical human germ. Now one attains, not through philosophical speculation, but through a real contemplation, the knowledge of the eternity of the human soul.

But with that, one also attains knowledge of the whole connection between this human soul and the human body. For one now learns to look into the world in which one was before one descended to earthly existence. And now one learns to recognize how, in this world, which is a purely spiritual one, in which one was before one descended to earthly existence, now one learns to know how this human being, the one who is before one, is the human being, just as the extra-human on earth is the world. One learns to recognize how the human being had developed his supersensible senses — if I may use this paradoxical expression —, his supersensible senses, before he descended into a physical body, precisely in terms of the nature and essence of the human being, how he then, in his pre-earthly existence, saw through the secrets of man, as he saw through these secrets of man in the spiritual world, while he was in his eternal nature, not clothed in his physical body.

And with that, the realization of it also presents itself, the vivid, not speculated realization of how the human being passes through that which it maintains in its eternal being when the human being passes through the gate of death. Beliefs can be formed about that which lives beyond death. It is not at all intended to say here that these beliefs need to be wrong or inadequate; nothing should be said against their correctness. However, we are already living in an age in which man is directed to penetrate to that which is given to him through knowledge and the content of knowledge, not through the content of faith. Therefore, the path of knowledge should be sought, not the mere path of faith.

One comes to understand how the human soul itself is connected to the physical body, how it lives within the blood circulation, lives in the breathing process, lives in every single bodily function. One therefore learns to recognize how not only an ascending, sprouting, and burgeoning life is present in physical life on earth, but, after getting to know the eternal character of the human soul, one sees how this human soul lives in the physical body. One learns to recognize that the will, the growth force, is bound to the sprouting and sprouting forces, but one also learns to recognize that thinking and a part of feeling are bound to the destructive forces of the human organism.

Yes, my dear audience, when you grasp a thought, an idea, it is not a process of growth that takes place, but a process of decay, a kind of atomistic dying process. We are constantly dying as we think, and the same applies to part of our feeling. As physical human beings on earth, we carry within us that which grows like a plant grows. But we also carry within us that which, within our nervous system, continually withers away like a plant withers. But while the plant, in withering away, only decays, we have, alongside what I would call the crumbling away of dying, the possibility of thinking and part of feeling within us. In this way, we look at human life on earth differently than we would through a mere external physiology. We see how the human being comes to his or her thinking, how thought first takes hold, so to speak, when matter is no longer alive in its growth force or even when the structure of matter is destroyed.

Matter is so little the master of our thinking that matter must give up its own nature in our organism where thought wants to rule. Thought rules in our organism in that its whole structure is not the growth of matter, but in that matter withers away. Matter first makes way for thought. If we learn to know partial death in this way, I would say, we learn to recognize how something always dies in us, precisely in order to make room for our spiritual, then we arrive, especially when we have trained our thinking and inner silence as I have described, then we arrive at being able to really see and recognize the human eternity on the other side, beyond death. But something else is needed for this.

And now, dear audience, I must briefly mention something that will certainly seem extremely paradoxical, but it is nevertheless a reality. There is still a soul power that needs to be specially developed if one is to see through the fact that death is just hinted at. While one is developing this empty consciousness, this inner silence of the soul, one also increasingly acquires the need to further develop a soul force that is otherwise present in us, that plays an extraordinarily important role in human life, such a soul force into the spiritual, into the soul. This is the power of love. Love, the noblest of the soul forces, can also be the lowest in a certain respect. It plays its great role in life. So when a person goes through this stage, first feeling at home in his temporal body, then looking to this much higher body – if I may use this expression – which he wore in his pre-earthly existence, his soul powers are so heightened that he also feels the need to increase his ability to love. That is why I have also indicated in my writing 'How to Attain Knowledge of Higher Worlds' those exercises that increase the ability to love. If one increases this ability to love in parallel with the other abilities mentioned, then one gradually comes to experience in one's own life on earth that which one has seen as one's own nature in the pre-earthly existence. And now one experiences a third aspect of human nature.

In ordinary life, one has otherwise experienced one's physical body, through the way I have described, one's etheric or formative body, the temporal body. Now one experiences oneself in one's actual supersensible body, in which the soul life takes place. One now recognizes this as the one for whom space must always be created by matter, in that matter destroys its structure so that the actual soul-spiritual can spread throughout our organization. And now we also experience, by first seeing how, as it were, matter falls out of the nervous system, becomes dead, and the soul-thought element asserts itself, now we learn to recognize how the soul passes over into the spiritual world when the whole body falls away in death.

I had to describe to you, my dear audience, while speaking of human immortality – I wanted to characterize this question of the three mentioned today – while telling you this, I had to speak in a different way than is often spoken in a philosophical way. In philosophy, it is assumed that one can stick with ordinary thinking, that one can combine thoughts and that one can thus arrive at insights into the immortality of the soul through judgments and conclusions. But here I had to point out to you, based on anthroposophical striving, how one must first develop the human soul with the suppression of intellectual arrogance in order to arrive at the contemplation of the eternal essence, the soul-spiritual essence in man.

But this, dear attendees, is not a mystical activity in the soul, not a dream; it takes place in the soul with the same inner clarity, yes, I would even say with the same inner sobriety as breathing and thinking. Actually, anyone who engages in anthroposophy in the way I have indicated, as you can read in my books, always feels an obligation to treat their soul powers no differently than a mathematician does, to always give an account of the part of their soul life, step by step. It is the same activity that one performs in anthroposophy as in mathematics, except that mathematics deals with dead spatial and numerical relationships and thus what it inwardly grasps spiritually in its forms, in its geometric, arithmetic and algebraic and so on, is applicable only to the outwardly dead. Anthroposophy, on the other hand, creates in the living. Everything is alive. And therefore, what it has grasped, I would say in a mathematical way, it can apply not only to the living, but also to the spiritually existing dead.

When you are surrounded by his pictures in a room, you are alone with yourself as a human being. The person standing next to you, the other people who may be in the room, have a completely different world. If they are all dreaming, they may dream of different things. With his dream world, man is completely alone, isolated. The moment he wakes up, the moment he turns on his will and his senses into the surrounding sensory world, he is no longer isolated; he experiences a shared external world with the other people. But his inner life, his actual soul life, is something that man has only for himself, even within the sensory world of earthly existence. It is like a dream. We only have this for the sensory world outside; inside, everyone dreams their own soul world. In the moment when we look into the pre-earthly existence or, as I have described it, into the existence that a person enters before passing through the gate of death, in that same moment we also have a spiritual-soul existence with the other person. We live in a spiritual world like all souls. Therefore, anthroposophy does not merely open up the idea of immortality, but a real understanding of it: when you pass through the gate of death, you discard your physical body, you continue to live in the spiritual world in your spiritual and soul nature. But also those earthly relationships you had with other people – those you had with those you loved, were related to, or otherwise cared for, friends, like-minded people, and so on – all that is earthly about them falls away. But what your own soul lives on, you live that in community with those with whom you have entered into relationships, you also live that with those who have preceded you, perhaps or after they have also come to the spiritual world.

The real community relationship after people have gone through the gateway of death comes to the immediate realization of knowledge, which has achieved it — if I may use this expression — to develop inwardly transparently and clearly like mathematics, and on the other hand wants to reach up again to the highest questions of human existence. Anthroposophy honestly strives for such knowledge.

And since humanity has actually become accustomed to gaining clear and transparent insights into what it wants to know through the admirable science of nature, if humanity has not numbed itself, it will not be satisfied in the long run with mere beliefs – which, after all, also only incidentally emerged from ancient knowledge – humanity will have to attain spiritual insight just as it has attained natural insight over the past three, four, five centuries. The human soul would have to numb itself to the highest questions of its existence if it did not strive for such spiritual insight. Call it anthroposophy or whatever you like, but such spiritual insight is a need for most people of the present day, even if this need is still deeply rooted in the subconscious. So much of the weal and woe of present-day humanity stems from this need. If we shed light on what sits unconsciously in the mere perception of today's humanity, which feels unsatisfied, which has become nervous, which has all kinds of disharmony and chaos in the soul and also carries this into the world, then we come to the conclusion that that although these people do not grasp this or understand it, they have a deep need to gain knowledge about the spirit, just as humanity has gained knowledge about nature, which has led to external technology. This knowledge will lead people to an understanding of external experience, but also to a deeper understanding, to a truly inward soul understanding of morality. This too, ladies and gentlemen, is what anthroposophy is meant to achieve.

And the Goetheanum wanted to be the outer shell. Goethe spoke beautifully about art when he first encountered it in Italy. In his own way, he wrote beautiful words to his friends in Weimar: “I have a suspicion that the Greeks proceeded according to the very laws by which nature proceeds and which I am on the trail of.” Goethe was seeking in art a sensual expression, a sensual revelation of that which spiritual knowledge glimpses when Goethe spoke from the depths of his soul the words: “Art is a manifestation of secret laws of nature that would never be revealed without it” – without art, that is. Goethe was looking at the cognitive aspect of the human being in relation to the spiritual world – not the sensory world – as that which permeates the human being to such an extent that he then, as a sculptor, painter, musician and so on, wants to conquer form out of spirit. So, one could say, for Goethe, knowledge was one expression of human endeavor, artistic creation and artistic enjoyment the other. It is only in the course of human development, in the direction of abstract thought, of the theoretical, in which we have become so immersed today, that art of knowledge has become alien. Goethe, on the other hand, strove to bring knowledge to art and art to knowledge because he knew that nature, namely by creating the human form, creates itself as an artist.

What use is it – dear attendees – to say, however strongly you may want to, that you cannot visualize artistic images if you want to recognize something? If nature itself creates like an artist, then you simply do not learn to recognize nature if you only want to recognize it logically, and you least of all learn to recognize people if you are not able to gradually move from strict logical thinking to an artistic, visualizing comprehension of what lives in the human form, in colors, in everything human. A straight path leads from the cognitive to the artistic.

Now, in this sense, one also wanted to be Goethean in that moment when some friends of that world view, which I have again sketched out for you today with a few strokes, came together in a spirit of sacrifice to create a place in Dornach near Basel. I was commissioned to build this place.

Many people have got into the habit of saying: those who call themselves anthroposophists follow my word, they believe only in my authority. Now, dear ladies and gentlemen, I believe that no one can say that they see their will fulfilled less through their followers than I do. I say this, although it may sound paradoxical: most of the time, what I want does not happen.

I was commissioned to build this very place in a certain way. If such a place had been built for any other worldview, one would have gone to this or that architect; the architect would have built a Gothic, Renaissance or ancient building in this or that style for the cultivation of this worldview or spiritual current. That could not be done for anthroposophy. For Anthroposophy wants to be — you will have recognized this from my description today — something that fits into the spiritual development of humanity as a new impulse. Anthroposophy really wants to lead to a change in knowledge: that the human being can achieve this second awakening, of which I have spoken, which is shown when the attempt is really made in the described way. Then the human being wakes up into the supersensible world. Then he can judge the sensory world here as he can judge the dream world from the sensory world. But that, ladies and gentlemen, is not abstract knowledge, it is not a sum of theories, it is not a thought-up world view, it is something that one must experience. It is not something that merely fills the head, it is something that fills the whole human being and seeks its human center in the heart. Then, however, it cannot be exhausted in a one-sided activity, then it must permeate everything that comes out of human nature. Then a person cannot advocate a worldview within a structure that was built from a completely different worldview. Within a Greek or antique, thus actually a Renaissance or Gothic building, one can advocate that which has emerged from the Greek or Gothic outlook. Anthroposophy needs its own envelope by its very nature. For it is not merely an outlook, it is not merely a theory, it is life and becomes life in man, as blood does in an organism. And just as blood builds up the human body artistically, so does the one who experiences anthroposophy build what he builds as a place for it. I have often used a simple, trivial comparison, but it is meant to be deeper. I have said: look at the nutshell. You cannot imagine that other forces are at work in the nutshell than those within [in the nut itself, which we eat instead of the nutshell]. Out of the same forces, in a similar form to which the nut itself is created, [the nut shell] is completely adapted to the nut; so the building envelope must be that which is not theory, but life, in the grasp of all the life forces of the human being.

And so the Goetheanum had to be such that, for example, when one stood on the podium and spoke, the words one chose to express what was revealed by supersensible vision thought-forms, they had to express what spoke to people's eyes from the forms of the columns and the paintings on the domes. The whole had to be in harmony down to the last sensual form.

And again, when the art of eurythmy was cultivated in Dornach, this art in which the human being comes to a visible language through complicated gestures that are completely drawn from his nature, so that one can express a poem in individual movements as well as through recitation and declamation — when the stage was filled with moving people, who were performing some kind of poetry or music in their movements, not dancing but singing in movement —, what was happening on stage was a continuation of what the forms were that surrounded the audience in the building. When the spectator turned his eye to the columnar forms, to the forms of the cupolas among themselves, when he turned his eye up to the cupola paintings, he had a similar basic feeling as when he looked at the stage and eurythmy was taking place.

Just as the nut can only be in its shell through the laws it has formed itself, so when Anthroposophy was given the opportunity to have its own house, it could only create this shell artistically out of the spiritual realm, out of which it itself experiences its world view, out of which the whole world view that takes hold of people is born. The Goetheanum wanted to be to the eye what Anthroposophy is to the direct apprehension of the soul through the word.

Because Anthroposophy still seems strange to people today and because all sorts of things are made of it by those who do not know it — I have characterized this in the beginning —, therefore what was the outer shell of a new architectural style seemed strange to people, just as the nutshell will seem strange to someone who knows nothing about nuts but believes that something is present in an arbitrary form and shape. Just as the world itself is shaped, so attempts have been made to create out of a spiritual world of impulses, taking hold of the anthroposophical world view, and also artistically, in Dornach.

The Goetheanum wanted to show this in its external forms under construction, entirely in the Goethean style: Art is a revelation of those secret laws of the universe that cannot be revealed without art – just as the Goetheanum speaks in sensual forms where the thought itself expired into sensual forms. There was no symbol, there was no allegory, there was artistic feeling everywhere, where the thought as mere thought is no longer enough, where the thought only becomes complete when it overflows into artistic form. But since the thought is born of the spirit, that into which it pours is also born of the spirit. Art is entirely for contemplation, but it is nevertheless, like everything in the world, born out of the spirit. Therefore, my dear audience, even for those who truly understand anthroposophy in their innermost being, something has been lost at the Goetheanum that is, in a sense, irreplaceable, because the Goetheanum was not intended for thinking up, explaining or describing, but for contemplation, because it was intended to visualize that which comes from the same source, namely anthroposophy. But what Anthroposophy can only give in words, which almost cries out to be poured out into a sensory form — what should be vivid —, that is what the fire has taken away, so to speak. In short, the way Goethe thought in relation to knowledge is what he wanted to be embodied in the Goetheanum. The Goetheanum wanted to reveal what Anthroposophy is meant to express.

Just as the human soul reveals itself as immortal in the mortal body through anthroposophical contemplation, so I may say without sentimentality: the body may fall away, even though all the pains and all the suffering that we know are attached to it. Only when the body falls away do we think of the immortality of the soul. And so today I may well conclude with the words that are only intended to illustrate what I meant not theoretically but humanly, emotionally, and intuitively today in answering the question: “What is anthroposophy and what did the Goetheanum want?” I would like to say — when the question arises: “What did the Goetheanum want?” it must be said: The Goetheanum wanted and needed to express the spirit in external matter, just as the human body is formed in external matter. That which is expressed in external material can be destroyed by the elements; but that which should live in the Goetheanum is itself of a spiritual nature. Anthroposophy does not want to be built and cannot be built out of external material; it can only be formed out of that which reveals itself from the spiritual, supersensible world. But this cannot be destroyed by any element, it is of a duration that may be characterized by saying: Yes, anyone who can look at the human soul impartially today knows that the human soul cannot remain calm for long when it comes to what it can learn today from knowledge about the [sensual]. It demands, even if still unconsciously, a supersensible knowledge. And because humanity will not be able to do without the knowledge of the supersensible in the long run, Anthroposophy may hope that, although it has now lost its home, it will revive all the more when humanity becomes aware that it needs it to grasp true human dignity and to see through true human destiny. spiritual word, that it will come to life even more when humanity becomes aware that it needs it to grasp true human dignity, to see through true human destiny, as the realization of the true spiritual, eternal essence of the human soul.