The Rudolf Steiner Archive

In order to round off, so to speak, what we could only superficially outline during the last few days regarding education based on anthroposophical investigations, I would like to add something today, as an example of how these ideas can be put into practice, about how the Waldorf school is run. What has to emerge clearly from the spirit of this education is that equal consideration be given to everything pertaining to the human body, soul, and spirit. If the actual teaching is carried out as characterized, therefore, it will at the same time become a kind of hygiene in the life of the child and, if necessary, even a therapy.

To see this clearly, one has to be able to look at the child's being in the right way. And here it must be understood that everything we have said about the child's development, from birth to the change of teeth, is revealed most of all in the activities of the nerve-sense system. Every organic system naturally extends over the entire human body, but each system is at the same time localized in a definite part of the physical organism. Thus the nervous system is mainly organized in the head. But when speaking about the three main organic systems of the human being—the nerve-sense system, the rhythmic system, and the metabolic-motor system—we do not imply that they are confined only to the head, the chest, and the metabolic-limb systems, because this would be completely inaccurate. It is impossible to divide the human organization into three separate spatial regions. It can only be said that these three systems interpenetrate one another, that they work and weave into each other everywhere.

The nerve-sense system is, nevertheless, localized primarily in the region of the head. The rhythmic system, which includes everything of a rhythmic nature in the human being, is mainly organized in the chest organs, in the organs of breathing and blood circulation. Here one must not ignore the fact that everything that furthers the rhythms of digestion—and ultimately those of sleeping and waking—also belongs to the rhythmic system, insofar as digesting, and sleeping and waking are based physically within the human organism. The actual chemical-physiological process of digestion is closely connected with all that forms the human motor system. As for movement itself, a reciprocal activity occurs between the nutritional and digestive system on the one hand, and the actual physical movement on the other.

All of this means that, although the three systems work naturally into each other during the child's early years until the change of teeth, the formative and malleable shaping forces involved in the child's growth and nourishing processes work mainly downward from the head, the center of the senses and the nervous system. Consequently, if a young child becomes ill, that illness is due primarily to the influences of the nerve-sense system. That is why young children before their second dentition are especially likely to suffer from illnesses that originate from within—those called childhood illnesses.

The influences that emanate from the environment, those that reach children through their urge to imitate, have a very powerful effect on this vulnerability to childhood illnesses, more than is commonly realized by the medical profession within the current materialistic climate. Thus, a sudden outburst of anger by an adult, when witnessed by a young child, can be responsible in many cases for an attack of measles. I am not referring to the psychopathic outburst of a psychopath, but to a less violent form of temper that can very often be seen among people. The shock that follows, together with its moral and spiritual implications, must certainly be seen as a contributing factor for measles. Furthermore, all these influences that work on the child will remain as after-effects until almost the ninth year. If a teacher happens to become very angry in school (for example, if a child accidentally spills some ink, and the teacher reacts by shouting, “If you do that again, I'll pour the entire inkwell over your head!” or “I'll throw it at your head!”), then we shouldn't be surprised when this has a very damaging effect on the child's physical health. Of course, I have chosen a fairly drastic example, but this kind of thing can happen too easily in a classroom.

Inner dishonesty in teachers also has a very harmful effect on children, even after their second dentition. Falsehoods can take on many different guises, such as insincerity or hypocritical piety, or establishing a moral code for the children that the adults would not dream of applying to themselves. In such cases the element of untruth weaves and lives in the words spoken, and in what unfolds in front of the child. An adult may remain totally oblivious to it, but children will take it in through the teachers' gestures. Through the nerve-sense system, dishonesty and hypocrisy have an extremely powerful effect on the organic structure of the child's digestive tract, and especially on the development of the gall bladder, which can then play a very significant role for the rest of the child's life.

All pedagogical interactions have to be permeated by this intensive awareness of how spirit, soul, and body constantly interweave and affect each other, even though it is unnecessary for teachers to speak of it all the time. And since the human organism, from the head downward, is so active during these early years—that is, from the polarity of the nerve-sense system—and because abnormal conditions can easily override socalled normal conditions in the head region, the child is particularly vulnerable to childhood diseases at just this age.

The years between the change of teeth and puberty, strangely enough (and yet, true to the nature of the human organism) are the child's healthiest years, although this is not really surprising to anyone with insight into human development. This is because the child's entire organic structure at this age radiates from the rhythmic system. This is the very system that never becomes tired or overstimulated on its own. Symptoms of illness that occur during these years are due to outer circumstances, although this statement must not be taken too strictly, of course, and only within the context of actual life situations. The child who is subject to illness at this particular age, when the rhythmic system plays such a dominant part has been treated improperly, one way or another, in outer life.

When puberty is left behind, the occurrence of illness radiates outward from within—that is, from the metabolic-motor system. That is the time of life when the causes of illness, to which young people are exposed, arise from within. Because the method of teaching the actual lessons plays a large part in the physical well-being of the students, we must always allow a certain physical and soul hygiene to be carried, as if on wings, by our educational ideas and methods. This must always be part of whatever we do with our classes, particularly during the second period of childhood.

Here certain details can be indicated. Let us take, for example, a child with a melancholic disposition. If you give that child sugar—an appropriate amount, of course—you will find that the sugar has a totally different effect than it would have on a predominantly sanguine child. In a melancholic child the sugar will have a suppressive effect on liver activity. This gradual lessening of liver activity, in radiating out into the entire being of the child, effectively curbs the melancholic tendencies from the physical side. It is a useful expedient, but one has to understand it. Using it as an aid does not mean the denial of soul and spirit, because anyone who knows that spirit is working in all physical or material processes—as anthroposophy reveals—will not view the effect of an increased sugar-intake on the activity of the liver as something merely physical, but as the working of soul and spirit brought about by physical means. (Naturally, the result always depends on the correct dosage.) In the case of a sanguine child it can be beneficial to stimulate liver activity by withholding sugar.

This is an example of how knowledge of the interaction and mutual working of body, soul, and spirit can greatly benefit the three systems of the human being. It definitely allows one to say as well that, contrary to frequently held opinions, Waldorf pedagogy (which arises from spiritual foundations) certainly does not neglect the physical aspects of education. On the other hand, you will find that other forms of pedagogy, bent on developing the physical part of the child according to fixed, abstract rules indeed serve it least, because their adherents do not realize that every soul and spiritual stirring within a child has a direct effect on his or her physical nature.

Because of all this, I felt it necessary to give a seminar course before the opening of the Waldorf school, for the benefit of those who had been chosen to become its first teachers.¹ One of the primary aims of this course was to bring the fundamental and comprehensive thought of the working together of soul, body, and spirit into the new pedagogy before its actual launching; for knowledge of this has been lost gradually during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries—more so than is generally realized.

During the years after the Waldorf school founding, shorter supplementary courses were also given.² It goes without saying that anyone who seriously considers taking an active role in Waldorf education must live in the spirit of these courses. This is what really matters. If one wants to treat a certain subject in a living way, the details are not as important, because they can always be worked out of the spiritual background. The details will then also appear in proper perspective. You may already have seen, through talks given by Waldorf teachers such as Dr. von Baravalle³ and Dr. von Heydebrand,⁴ how the attempt was made to let the spirit living in this education flow into the ways of teaching various subjects. Something like lifeblood will pulse through the lessons when the human structure is comprehended in terms of an all-comprising spiritual entity. In this respect, of course, much of what can be said today will have to remain brief and superficial.

I mentioned yesterday that a united faculty of teachers, functioning like the soul and spirit of the entire school organism, is absolutely fundamental to running a Waldorf school. According to one of its pedagogical impulses, it is not so much a statistical collection of the teachers' observations expressed during the meetings that is important, but that a living and individualizing psychology should be jointly developed from out of the actual experience of teaching lessons. I would like to give you an example.

In our school, boys and girls sit next to each other. When we started, there were just over one hundred students in the Waldorf school. But our numbers have grown so quickly that we had seven hundred pupils last year, which necessitated opening parallel classes, especially in the lower grades of the school. Now we find that there are more girls than boys in some classes, while in others there are more boys. The number of boys and girls more or less even in very few classes. To insist on equal numbers in each class would not only be pedantic, but would not work. First of all, new arrivals do not come neatly paired, and, second, such a scheme would not represent real life. The right way to proceed in such a situation is to make it possible to apply educational impulses whatever the outer circumstances may be.

All the same, we soon found that a class with a majority of girls presented a very different psychological picture than those with more boys, aside from outer circumstances—that is, aside from the most obvious. What gives such a class its psychological character is the imponderable element that easily escapes one's notice. Nevertheless, when working together in our meetings, the opportunity was presented to make fruitful investigations in this direction. And it soon became clear that sharing such questions of common interest greatly contributed to the school's becoming a living, ensouled organism.

Let's imagine someone who says, “I want to think only thoughts that will be useful to me later in life. I don't want to allow anything to enter my soul that does not have direct value for later life, because this would be uneconomical.” Such a person would become an appalling figure in life! First, because such a person would have nothing to dream about—indeed, could never dream. Of course, people who are inclined in this direction might simply reply, “Dreams are unimportant. One can very well do without them, because they really don't mean anything in life.” True, dreams have little consequence for those who accept only external reality. But what if there were more to dreams than just fantastic images? Naturally, those who believe they see something highly significant and deeply prophetic in every dream, even if it is only caused by the activities of their liver, bladder, or stomach—people who consider dreams more important than events in waking life—they will not draw any benefit from their dreaming. Yet, if one knows that in one's dream life forces are expressed—even if only indistinctly—that have either a health-giving or an illness-inducing effect on the breathing, circulatory, and nerve-sense systems, then one also knows that half of the human being is mirrored in these dreams, either in a hygienic or in a pathological sense. Further, one will recognize that not to dream at all would be similar to undermining the digestion or circulation through taking some form of poison. It is important to realize that much of what may appear unnecessary in a human being for outer life, nevertheless, plays an important part—similar to the way we see outer nature. Just compare the infinite number of herring eggs, distributed all over the seas, with the number of herrings actually born, and you could easily reproach nature for being tremendously wasteful. However, this could only be the opinion of those who do not know of the powerful spiritual effects the dead herring eggs have on the growing herrings. A certain number of eggs have to die so that a certain number of eggs may thrive. These things are all interconnected.

If we now relate this thought to the school as a living organism, we have the following situation: In the staff meetings of our teachers such matters as the proportion of boys to girls, and many other problems, are being worked through from a psychological and pneumatological aspect as part of a common study of soul and spirit. Efforts are made continually to effect a new understanding of the psychological and pathological problems facing the school. And, in order to cover every contingency, something else is essential in the life of a school, something we have in the Waldorf school, and that is a school doctor. He is a full-time staff member, who also teaches various classes in the school. This allows the teachers—insofar as they actively take part in all the meetings—to discuss and work through pathological and therapeutic questions, as well as those posed by the specially gifted child. Problems are studied not only for the benefit of individual cases—more or less statistically—but they are worked through in depth. In this way, much can be learned from each individual case, even if it does not always appear to be immediately useful.

One could compare this situation with someone who has taken in one thing or another, and declares it to be of no use in life. Nevertheless, life may prove otherwise. Similarly, whatever is worked through by the teachers in these meetings, creating a living psychology, a living physiology, and so on, continues to have an effect, often in very unexpected places. Imagine you had occupied yourself, let's say, with the spiritual functions of a child's gall—forgive this expression, but it is fully justified—and that through this study you had learned to find a way into this kind of thinking. If you were now suddenly called on to deal with a child's nose, you actually would relate very differently to the new situation. Even if you may think, “What is the good of learning all about the gall if now I have to deal with the nose?” Once you find a point of entry, you meet every problem and task differently.

In this sense, the teaching faculty must become the spirit and soul of the entire school organism. Only then will each teacher enter the classroom with the proper attitude and in the right soul condition. At the same time, we must also remember that, in just these matters, an intensely religious element can be found. It is unnecessary to have the name of the Lord constantly on one's lips or to call on the name of Christ all the time. It is better to adhere to the command: “Thou shalt not take the name of the Lord God in vain.” Nevertheless, it is possible to permeate one's entire life with a fundamental religious impulse, with an intensely Christian impulse. Certain experiences of old, no longer known to the modern mind, will then begin to stir in one's soul, experiences deeply rooted in human evolution, in the Christian development of humankind. For example, teachers who in the depths of their souls are seeking the proper stimulation for finding appropriate forms of pedagogy (especially in these pathological-physiological areas) would do well to allow themselves to be inspired, time and again, by what radiates from the Gospel of Saint Luke. (To modern ears such a statement must sound bizarre.) On the other hand, teachers who want to instill the necessary idealism for life in their students, would do well to find a source of inspiration by reading again and again the Gospel of Saint John. If teachers do not want their pupils to grow up into cowards, but into the kind of people who will tackle life's tasks with exuberant energy, they should look for inspiration in the Gospel of Saint Mark. And those who are enthusiastic to educate the young to grow into perceptive adults, rather than into people who go through life with unseeing eyes, may find the necessary stimulation in the Gospel of Saint Matthew. These are the qualities that, in ancient times, were felt to live in the different Gospels. If our contemporaries were to read that in past ages the Gospel of Saint Luke was felt to radiate a healing element in a medical sense, they could not make anything of it. On the other hand, if they entered life as real pedagogues, they would begin to understand such matters again.

This is one way one can speak about these things. It is just as possible to speak of them in an entirely different way, no less religious or Christian. For instance, the main theme during a seminar course could well be the four temperaments of the human being—that is, the psychic, physical, and spiritual natures of the choleric, melancholic, sanguine, and phlegmatic temperaments. First, one would give a description of these four temperaments and then one could discuss how they must be treated in class. For example, it has a salutary effect if one seats choleric children together in one corner of the classroom, giving a certain relief in this way to the rest of the class, because the teacher is freed from having to constantly discipline them. Choleric children can't help pushing and hitting each other. If they now find themselves suddenly at the receiving end, this in itself produces a thoroughly pedagogical effect, because the ones who do the pushing and shoving, goading others into retaliating, are being “shaped up” in a very direct way. And if, by seating the phlegmatics together, one lets them “phlegmatize” each other, this also has a wonderfully pedagogical effect. However, all this needs to be done with the appropriate tact. One really has to know how to handle the situation in each individual case. You will find a detailed treatment of the children's various temperaments in the published version of the first training course, given to the teachers of the Waldorf school.⁵

What I have said about the four Gospels, fundamentally speaking, is exactly the same when seen from a spiritual perspective, because it leads one into the same element of life. Today it is ordinarily felt that, if one wants to learn something, the relevant elements have to be put neatly side by side. But this is a procedure that will not lead to fundamental principles, as they have to be dealt with in actual life. For example, one cannot understand the human gall or liver system unless one also has an understanding of the human head, because every organ in the digestive tract has a complementary organ in the brain. One does not know anything about the liver unless one also knows its correlative function in the brain. Likewise, one does not have an inner understanding of the immense inspiration that can flow into the human soul from the Gospels, unless one can also transform these into the ways that character and temperament are imprinted into the human individuality here on Earth. To livingly comprehend the world is very different from comprehending it through dead concepts.

This will also help one to see that if children are raised in light of the education spoken of here, one allows something to grow in them that will outlast their childhood days, something that will continue to affect them throughout their lives; for what do you have to do when you grow old? People who do not understand human nature cannot assess how important certain impulses, which can be implanted only during childhood, are for life. At that tender age it is still possible for these impulses to be immersed into the soft and pliable organism of the child, still very open to the musical-formative forces. In later years the organism becomes harder, not necessarily physically, but in any case, tending toward psycho-bodily hardening. What one has absorbed through one's upbringing and education, however, does not grow old. No matter how old one has become, one is still inwardly endowed with the same youthful element that one had from, say, the tenth to the fifteenth year. One always carries this element of youthfulness within, but it has to remain supple and flexible to the degree that the now aged brain—perhaps already covered by a bald head—can use it in the same way that the previously soft brain did. If a person's education has not helped this process, however, the result is a generation gap, which appears so often these days, and is considered unbridgeable.

Sometimes people say something that is actually the opposite of what is really happening. For example, one often hears the comment, “The young today don't understand the elderly, because old people no longer know how to be young with the young.” But this is not the truth. Not at all. What really happens is that the young generation expects the old generation to be able to properly use the physical organization which has grown old. In this way, young people recognize something in the old that is different from their own condition, something they do not yet have. This is the quality that leads to the natural respect for old age. When young people meet an old person who can still use an already-bald head in the way children use their tousled heads, they feel that something can be received from the older generation, something that they cannot find in their contemporaries. This is how it should be.

We must educate young people so that they know how to grow old properly. It is the malaise of our time that as young people grow up, they do not recognize among the older generation those who have aged properly. They see merely childish individuals, instead, who have remained at the same level of development as the young generation. This is because of the inadequate education of old people who cannot properly use their physical organization, and they remain infantile. The expression “overgrown kids” is really chosen with great ingenuity, for it implies that such persons lost the ability to get hold of their entire organism during the course of their lives.⁶

They can work only with the head, which is precisely what children or young people are meant to do. So the young respond by saying, “Why should we learn from them? They are no further along than we are; they are just as childish as we are.” The point is not that old age lacks youthfulness, but that it has remained behind, is too infantile, and this causes difficulties today. You see how expressions, sometimes chosen with the most goodwill, mean the opposite of what they intend convey.⁷

These things must all be seen in the proper light before education can stand on its feet again. This has become more than necessary today. Forgive this somewhat drastic way of saying it, but in our intellectual age education really has been turned upside-down.

Thus, one of the characteristic features of Waldorf pedagogy is to learn that it is not the externals that are important. Whether a teacher draws substance to nourish the souls of students from the different qualities of the four Gospels, or whether this is done by using what was presented in the Stuttgart teachers' training course with regard to the four temperaments does not matter at all. What does matter is the spirit that reigns in everything developed there. Because of how superficially these things are often regarded today, it could easily happen that someone, when told that the treatment of the four temperaments could be studied in the fundamental course given in Stuttgart, could also consult a later course where one would find something about the teacher's attitude toward the four Gospels. The reaction of such a person might well be, “In this case, I should study the later course as well.” It certainly is a good thing to approach different subjects by using different sources. But there is also another way of looking at it—that is, one may find a common message running through both courses, given in two different places at different times, even though outwardly the subjects may appear very different. This inner correspondence found within different lecture courses can be uncomfortable because of the way their various points are interlinked, instead of fitting into the more conventional patterns of cause and effect.

Thus, the educational course given here at the Goetheanum just over a year ago (where some English friends were present, and which was rendered very competently and artistically by Mister Steffen)⁸ can be compared with what I presented to you again differently in this course.⁹ You will find that, basically, the substance of both courses is the same as, for example, the head and the stomach; each form a part of one organism. It may be uncomfortable that, because of how various themes mutually support each other, one cannot say: I have read and understood the first course; and because the later one is supposed to carry the same message, there is no need for me to study it as well. The fact is, however, that, if one has studied both courses, the earlier one will be understood in greater depth, because each sheds light on the other. It could even be said that, only when one has digested a later teachers' course, can one fully understand an earlier one because of these reciprocal effects. Mathematics is built on purely causal sequences, so it is possible to understand earlier stages without any knowledge of subsequent stages. But when it comes to teaching in a living way, its subject is affected by mutual interconnections, so that what was given at an earlier date may receive further elucidation by what was presented later.

I mention this because it is all part of the living spirit that has to permeate the Waldorf way of teaching. One has to have the good will that wants to know it from all sides, and one must never be satisfied with having comprehended one particular aspect of it. As a Waldorf teacher, one has to be conscious of the necessity for continually widening and deepening one's knowledge, rather than feeling satisfied with one's achievements and, indeed, considering oneself very clever. If one has lived into the Waldorf way of teaching, such delusions are soon overcome! For a real Waldorf teacher, everything that flows from this activity must be permeated with true heart and soul forces. It has to spring from the right kind of self-confidence, which rests on trust in God. When there is awareness of the divine forces working within, one will be fed by a constantly flowing fountain of life, flowing since time beyond memory, and very much apart from what one may or may not have learned externally. It is only the beginning of the way when self-confidence stems from outer achievements. One is in the proper place when self-confidence has led to confidence in the working of God, when it has led to an awareness of the power of the words: Not I, but the Christ in me. When this happens, self-confidence also becomes self-modesty, because one realizes that the divine forces of Christ are reflected in whatever is carried in one's soul. This spirit must reign throughout the school.

If it were not present, the school would be like a natural organism whose lifeblood was being drawn out, or that was slowly being asphyxiated.

This is the spirit that is most important, and if it is alive, it will engender enthusiasm, regardless of the staff or the leadership of the school. One can then be confident that a somewhat objective spirit will live throughout the school, which is not the same as the sum of the teachers' individual spirits. This, however, can be nurtured only gradually within the life of the teaching staff.

As a result of working in this way, something has emerged in the Waldorf school that we call “block periods” or “main lessons.” These main lessons—much longer than the ordinary lessons, which allow one subject to be studied in depth—do not distract children, as often happens because of too many subject changes. For example, students might typically be given a geography lesson from 8 to 8:45 A.M., followed by an entirely different subject, such as Latin, from 8:45 until 9:30 A.M. This might be followed again by math, or some other lesson. Block periods of main lessons, on the other hand, are structured so that the same subject is taught every day for about three or four weeks (depending on the type of subject) during the first half of the morning session. For example, in a main lesson period, geography would be studied for perhaps three or four weeks—not severely or in a heavy-handed way, but in a more relaxed, yet completely serious way. When the same subject is taken up again during one of the following terms, it will build on what was given during the previous block period. In this way, the subject matter covered during one year is taught in block periods instead of during regular weekly lessons. This method is, no doubt, more taxing for teachers than the conventional schedule arrangements would be, because such lengthy geography lessons could easily become boring for the children. This is solved by the teachers' much deeper immersion in the subjects, so that they are equal to their freely-chosen tasks.

After a mid-morning break, which is essential for the children, the main lesson is usually followed by language lessons, or by other subjects not taught in main lesson periods. Two foreign languages are introduced to our pupils as soon as they enter the first grade in a Waldorf school. Using our own methods, we teach them French and English—the aim not being so much a widening of their outer horizons, but an enrichment of their soul life.

You will ascertain from what was said yesterday that physical movement, practiced most of all in eurythmy and gymnastics, is by no means considered to be less important, but is dealt with so that it can play a proper role within the total curriculum. Similarly, right from the beginning in the first grade, all lessons are permeated by a musical element according to various ages and stages.

I have already indicated (with unavoidable briefness, unfortunately) how our pupils are being directed into artistic activities—into singing, music-making, modeling, and so on. It is absolutely necessary to nurture these activities. Simply through practicing them with the children, one will come to realize exactly what it means for their entire lives to be properly guided musically during these younger years, from the change of teeth through the ninth and twelfth years until puberty. Proper introduction to the musical element is fundamental for a human being to overcome any hindrance that impedes, later in life, a sound development of a will permeated with courage. Musical forces effect the human organism by allowing, as smoothly as possible, the nerve fluctuations to become active in the stream of breath. The breath-stream, in turn, works back upon the functions of the nervous system. The breathing rhythms then work over into the rhythms of the blood circulation, which in turn act on the rhythms of sleeping and waking. This insight, afforded by anthroposophical investigation, of how musical forces creatively work within the structure of the human being, is one of the most wonderful things in life.

One learns to recognize that we have an extremely sensitive and refined musical instrument in the raying out of the nerves from the spinal marrow, from the entire system of the spinal cord. One also learns to see how this delicate instrument dries up and hardens, whereby, inwardly, the human being can no longer properly develop qualities of courage, if musical instruction and the general musical education do not work harmoniously with this wonderfully fine musical instrument. What constitutes a truly delicate and unique musical instrument is coming into being through the mutual interplay between the organs of the nerves and senses with their functions on the one hand, and on the other hand, the human motor functions with their close affinities to the digestive rhythms and those of sleeping and waking.

The upper part of the human being wants to influence the lower part. By directing the child's entire organism toward the realm of music, we enhance the merging of external sounds (from a piano during music lessons, or from the children's singing voices) with the nervous and circulatory systems, in what can be recognized as a divine plan of creation. This is a sublime thing, because in every music lesson there is a meeting between the divine-spiritual and what comes from the earthly realm, rising, as it were, within the child's body. Heaven and Earth truly meet in every achievement of musical culture throughout human earthly evolution, and we should always be aware of this. This awareness, plus the teachers' knowledge that they are instrumental in bringing together the genius of Heaven with the genius of Earth, gives them the enthusiasm they need to face their classes. This same enthusiasm is also carried into the teachers' staff meetings where the music teacher may inspire the art teacher, and so on. Here you can see clearly how essential it is that spirit works through every aspect of Waldorf education.

To give another example: not long ago, during one of our teacher meetings, it truly became possible to work out to a large extent what happens to the students' spirit, soul, and body, when first given eurythmy exercises and then directed in doing gymnastics. Such insight into the relationship between gymnastics and eurythmy (which is very important to how these lessons are presented) was really accomplished in one of our teacher meetings the other day. Of course, we will continue our research. But, this is how teacher meetings become like the blood that must flow through the school as a living organism. Everything else will fall into place, as long as that is allowed to happen.

Teachers will know also when it is proper to take their classes for a walk or for an outing, and the role of gymnastics will find a natural and appropriate place within the life of the students, regardless of which school they attend. Doubts and anxieties will disappear with regard to the remark: What is done in a Waldorf school may all be very good, but they neglect sports there. Admittedly, it is not yet possible for us to do everything that may be desirable, because the Waldorf school has had to develop from small beginnings. Only by overcoming enormous obstacles and external difficulties was it possible to have gone as far as we have today. But when matters are taken care of with spiritual insight, the whole question of the relationship between physical and spiritual will be handled properly.

The following analogy could be used: Just as it is unnecessary to learn how the various larger and smaller muscles of the arm function (according to the laws of dynamics and statics, of vitalism, and so on) so that one can lift it, so it is also unnecessary to know every detail of the ins-and-outs of everything that must be done, as long as we can approach and present lessons out of the spirit that has become transformed into the proper attitude of the teacher—as long as we can penetrate properly to the very essence of all our tasks and duties.

I could only give you brief and superficial outlines of the fundamental principles and impulses, flowing from anthroposophical research, according to which the Waldorf school functions. And so we have come to the end of this course—primarily because of your other commitments.

At this point I would like to express once more what I already said during one of our discussions: If one lives with heart and soul, with the ideal of allowing education to grow into a blessing for all humankind in its evolution, one is filled with deep gratitude when meeting teachers from so many different places; for you have come to this course to obtain information about the way of teaching that arises from anthroposophical investigation, which I have attempted to place before you. Beyond whether this was received by one or another participant with more or less sympathy, I want to express my deep gratitude and inner satisfaction that it was again possible for a large group of souls to perceive what is intended to work on the most varied branches of life, and what is meant to fructify life in general through anthroposophy. Two thoughts will remain with you, especially with those who dealt with the organization and practical arrangements of this course: the happy memory of the gratitude, and the happy memory of the inner satisfaction as I expressed it just now. And the more intensely these thoughts can be inwardly formed—the thoughts of the work based on such gratitude and satisfaction—the more hope will grow that, in times to come, this way of teaching may yet succeed for the benefit of all of humanity.

Such hope will intensify the loving care for this way of teaching in those who already have the will to devote themselves to it with all their human qualities.

It should also be said that it was not only the Waldorf teachers who may have given you something of their practical experience, because those of you who have been present here as visitors have certainly given equally to them. By allowing us to witness what lives in us begin to live in other souls as well, you have fanned the glow of love that is both necessary and natural, and just that can engender genuine enthusiasm. And we may hope that out of feelings of gratitude and inner satisfaction, of hope and love that have flowed together during this course, good fruits may ripen, provided we can maintain the necessary interest in these matters, and that we are inwardly active enough to sustain them.

Ladies and gentlemen, my dear friends, this is what I want to pour into my farewell, which is not to be taken as formal or abstract, but as very concrete, in which gratitude becomes a firm foundation, and inner satisfaction a source of warmth, from which hope will radiate out, bringing both courage and strength. May the love of putting into practice what is willed to become a way of teaching for all human beings be turned into light that shines for those who feel it their duty to care for the education of all humankind!

In this sense, having to bring this course to its conclusion, I wish to give you all my warmest farewell greetings.

Question: Would it be possible to implement the Waldorf way of teaching in other countries, in Czechoslovakia, for example?

Rudolf Steiner: In principle it is possible to introduce Waldorf education anywhere, because it is based purely on pedagogy. This is the significant difference between Waldorf pedagogy and other educational movements. As you know, there are people today who maintain that if one wants to give pupils a proper education, one must send them to a country school, because they consider an urban environment unsuitable for children's education. Then there are those who hold the opinion that only a boarding school can offer the proper conditions for their children's education, while still others insist that only life at home can provide the proper background for children. All of these things cease to be of real importance in Waldorf education. I do not wish to quarrel about these different attitudes (each of which may have its justification from one or another point of view), but since Waldorf education focuses entirely on the pedagogical aspect, it can be adapted to any outer conditions, whether a city school, a country school or whatever. It is not designed to meet specific external conditions, but is based entirely on observation and insight into the growing human being. This means that Waldorf pedagogy could be implemented in every school.

Whether this would be allowed to happen, whether the authorities that oversee education, the establishing of curricula, and so on would ever agree to such a step being taken, is an entirely different question. There is nothing to stop Waldorf pedagogy from being applied anywhere in the world, even tomorrow, but the real question is whether permission for this to happen would be granted. This question can be answered only in terms of the various local government policies. That is really all one can say about it.

• 1. See Rudolf Steiner, The Foundations of Human Experience, Anthroposophic Press, Hudson, NY, 1996, and Practical Advice to Teachers, Rudolf Steiner Press, London, 1976, and Discussions with Teachers, Rudolf Steiner Press, London, 1967.
• 2. See Balance in Teaching, Mercury Press, Spring Valley, NY, 1990; Education for Adolescents, Anthroposophic Press, Hudson, NY, 1996; and Deeper Insights into Education (to be republished).
• 3. Dr. Herman von Baravalle (1898–1973) teacher of mathematics and physics at the Waldorf school in Stuttgart.
• 4. Caroline von Heydebrand (1866–1938) class teacher at the Waldorf school.
• 5. See footnote page 171. See also the 1909 lecture, “The Four Temperaments,” contained in Rudolf Steiner, Anthroposophy in Everyday Life, Anthroposophic Press, Hudson, NY, 1995.
• 6. The German expression is Kindskopf, literally “child's head.”—Trans.
• 7. See Rudolf Steiner's The Youth Section of the School of Spiritual Science, March 9, 1924 (published in The Constitution of the School of Spiritual Science, Anthroposophical Society in Great Britain, 1964), which states:
  
  But the youth today does not see in the older men and women any human quality different from its own, yet worthy of its emulation. For the older people of the present day are not really “old.” They have taken in the content of many things and can talk of these. But their knowledge has not ripened in them. They have grown older in years, but in the soul they have not kept pace with the advancing years. They speak out of an older brain in just the same way that they spoke when the brain was young. Young people feel this fact. They do not perceive maturity when they are with their elders; they see their own young condition of soul in older bodies, and they turn away, for this does not seem true to them.
• 8. Albert Steffen (1884–1963), Swiss poet, novelist, playwright, and a leading student of Rudolf Steiner beginning in 1907.
• 9. See Rudolf Steiner, Soul Economy and Waldorf Education, Anthroposophic Press, Hudson, NY, 1986.

I must ask my audience to be considerate with me to-day, because I have only just arrived after a very tiring journey and shall probably not feel able to speak to you adequately until tomorrow.

I want this first lecture to be a kind of introduction to the series I am to deliver here. I had not really intended to speak during the Conference, because I think the stimulus given by anthroposophical research to medicine and to scientific thought ought to be worked out by those who are specialists in the various domains. Indeed, all that comes from anthroposophical investigation in regard to medicine and, for instance, physiology, can be nothing more than a stimulus which must then be worked out empirically. Only on the basis of this empirical study can there arise valid and convincing judgments of the matters in question—and this is the kind of judgment that is needed in the domain of therapy.

These lectures, however, are given at the request of doctors who are working with us and I shall try to deal with just those points where Anthroposophy can throw light into the realm of medicine. I shall endeavour to show, first of all, that an understanding of the human being in health and disease can be enriched and deepened through anthroposophical conceptions.

By way of introduction, I may perhaps be permitted to speak of the sense in which the anthroposophical mode of thought should be understood to-day, in our own age. People so readily confuse what is here called Anthroposophy with older traditional ideas. I have no wish to waste words about the value of these old conceptions, or to criticise them in any way. But it must be emphasised that the conceptions put forward by me are founded on a basis quite different from that of the various mystical, theosophical and so-called gnostic ideas which have arisen traditionally in the course of human history. In order to make myself clear, I need mention only the main points of difference between the conceptions which will be put forward here and those of earlier times. Those earlier conceptions arose in human thought at a time when there was no science in our sense; mine have been developed in an age when science has not only come into being but has reached a certain—albeit provisional—perfection. This must always be remembered if we would understand the meaning and significance of our studies, for it applies to all that may be said and discovered by Anthroposophy in regard to the different domains of human knowledge and capacity.

You all know—there is no need to enlarge upon it—that in those earlier times man had a real but non-scientific conception of the super-sensible world. Medicine, too, was permeated with conceptions of the human being that did not originate, as is the case to-day, from empirical research. We need go back only to the age shortly before that of Galen, and, if we are open-minded enough, we shall everywhere find traces of spiritual conceptions of the being of man on which medical thought, too, was based. Permeating these conceptions of the form of man, of his organs and organic functions, were thoughts of the Supersensible. According to the modern empirical way of thinking, there are no grounds for connecting anything super-sensible with the nature and constitution of man, but in those older conceptions the super-sensible was as much a part of man as colours, forms and inorganic forces now seem to us part and parcel of the objects in the outer world.

Only prejudice will speak of those earlier ages in the development of medicine as if its ideas were merely childish, compared with those that have been evolved to-day. Nothing could be more inadequate than what history has to tell in this connection, and anyone who has the slightest understanding of the historical evolution of mankind, who does not take the point of view that perfection has been reached and that everything earlier is mere foolishness, will realise that even now we have arrived only at relative perfection and that there is no need to look back upon what went before with a supercilious eye. Indeed, this is patent when we consider the results that were achieved. On the other hand, a man concerned with any branch of knowledge to-day must never overlook all that science has accomplished for humanity in this age. And when—to use the Goethean expression—a spiritual conception of the human being in sickness and health strives to express itself to-day, it must work with and not against modern scientific research.

After what I have said, you will not accuse me of any desire to rail against the concepts of modern science. Indeed, I must emphasise at the outset that such a thing is out of the question and for a very fundamental reason. When we consider the medical views that were held in an earlier period of civilisation, we find that although they were by no means so childish as many people imagine nowadays, they did lack what modern science has been able to give us, for the simple reason that man's faculty of cognition was not then adapted to the study of objects as we approach them with modern empirical thought, which is assisted, moreover, by all kinds of scientific instruments. The doctor, or I might just as well say the physiologist or biologist of olden times, had an entirely different outlook from the outlook of modern man. In the ages that really came to an end with Galen, medical consciousness had quite another orientation. What Galen saw in his four elements of the human organism, in the black and yellow gall, in the phlegm and in the blood, was utterly different from the modern conception.

When Galen describes all this and we understand the terminology—as a rule, of course, words handed down by tradition are not understood—we get the impression of something vague and nebulous. To Galen, it was a reality; in what he called phlegm he did not see the substance we call phlegm. To him, phlegm was not only a state of fluidity permeated with life, but a state of fluidity permeated with soul. This was as clear a perception to him as our perception of the red or blue colour of some object in front of us. But precisely because he was able to perceive something outside the range of modern scientific perception, Galen was not able to see many things that are brought to light to-day by our scientific consciousness. Suppose, for example, a man with not so very abnormal sight looks through spectacles, and by this means the contours of objects become more definite. As the result of modern empiricism, all that was once seen in a cloud, but none the less permeated by Spirit and soul, has disappeared and given place to the sharp contours of empirical observation. The sharp contours were not there in olden times. Healings were performed out of a kind of instinct which was bound up with a highly developed sensitiveness to one's fellow-men. A sort of participation in the patient's disease, which could even be painful, arose in the doctor of olden times, and on the basis of this he set about his cure.

Now for the reason that the advance to objective empiricism is rooted in the evolutionary process of man, we cannot merely brush it aside and return to the old. Only if we develop certain atavistic faculties shall we perceive Nature as the ancients perceived her, in all domains of knowledge, including that of medicine. When we pass out into modern culture, equipped with the kind of training given in our elementary schools—not to speak of higher education—it is simply impossible to see things as the ancients saw them. It is impossible, and moreover, if such a thing were to happen, a man would be regarded as being if not gravely, at any rate mildly pathological, not quite ‘normal’—and, indeed, not altogether unjustly. For there is something pathological to-day in all instinctive ‘clairvoyance,’ as it is called. Upon that point we must be quite clear. But what lies in our power is to work our way up to a perception of the spiritual by developing inner faculties otherwise latent in our being, just as in the course of generations the eye has worked itself up from indefinite vision to clear, concrete vision.

To-day, then, it is possible to develop faculties of spiritual perception. I have described this development in my book, Knowledge of the Higher Worlds and How to Attain It, and in other writings. When these faculties have developed in a man he perceives, to begin with, a world not previously visible to him, a world embracing a spiritual Cosmos as well as the Cosmos revealed to sense-perception to-day, including all the discoveries and calculations of astronomy. To the material Cosmos that is permeated with natural law, a spiritual Cosmos is added. And when we seek to discover what exists in this spiritual Cosmos, we also find man. We contact a spiritual universe, a universe permeated with soul, where man has his rightful place.

If we pursue ordinary science, we begin either with the simplest living being or with the simplest form of life—the cell—and then trace the simple on into the more complex, ascending thus from what most resembles purely physically organised substance to the highly intricate organism of man. If we seriously pursue Spiritual Science, we begin really at the other end. We descend from a comprehension of the spiritual in the universe, regarding this as complex, and the cell as the simplest thing in the organism. Viewed in the light of Spiritual Science, the universe is the summit of complexity, and just as we elaborate our own act of cognition in order, let us say, to pass from the cell to the human being, so do we progressively simplify what the Cosmos reveals and then come to man. We go an opposite way—that is to say, we begin at exactly the opposite starting-point—but when to-day we thus pursue Spiritual Science, we are not led all the way into the regions embraced by material empiricism. I lay great stress upon this point and hope there will be no misunderstanding. That is why I must ask you to-day to forgive certain pedantic ideas.

It is quite conceivable that someone might think it useless to adopt the methods of empirical thought in physiology or biology. What need is there for any specialised branch of science?—he might ask. One develops spiritual sight, looks into the spiritual world, arrives at a conception of man, of the being of man in health and disease, and then it is possible to found a kind of spiritualised medicine. As a matter of fact that is just the kind of thing many people do, but it leads nowhere. They abuse empirical medicine but they are, after all, abusing something which they do not understand in the very least. There can be no question of writing off empirical science as worthless and taking refuge in a spiritualised science brought down from the clouds. That is quite the wrong attitude to adopt.

Now it must be remembered that spiritual-scientific investigation does not lead to the same things that can be examined under the microscope. If anyone tries to pretend that with the methods of Spiritual Science he has found exactly the same things as he finds under a microscope, he may safely be summed up as a charlatan. The results of modern empirical investigation are there and must be reckoned with. Those who seriously pursue Spiritual Science must concern themselves with the phenomena of the world in the sense of ordinary empiricism. From Spiritual Science we discover certain guiding lines for empirical research, certain ruling principles, showing us, for instance, that what exists at some particular place in the organism, must also be studied in reference to its position.

Many people will say: ‘Yes, but a cell is a cell, and purely empirical observation must determine the distinguishing feature of this cell—whether it is a liver-cell or a brain-cell and so on.’ Now that is not correct. Suppose, for example, I walk past a Bank at 9 o'clock in the morning and see two men sitting there side by side. I look at them and form certain ideas about them. At 3 o'clock in the afternoon it happens that I again walk past the Bank. There are the two men, sitting just as before. The empirical state of affairs is exactly the same—allowing for very slight differences. But now, think of it: one of the men may have remained sitting there for the whole six hours. The other may have been sent out on quite a journey directly after I first passed the Bank, and may have only just returned. This changes the picture fundamentally and has nothing to do with what I actually perceive with my senses. So far as my senses are concerned, the same state of things presents itself at 9 o'clock in the morning and 3 o'clock in the afternoon, but the objective fact must be judged from its connections, its attendant circumstances.

In this sense our conception of a liver-cell must differ essentially from our conception of a cell in the brain or the blood. For only if it were correct to say, for the sake of example, that the basis of everything is a primeval germ-cell which has been fertilised and that the whole organism can be explained by a process of simple fission and differentiation of this primeval germ-cell—only then could we proceed to treat a liver-cell exactly the same as a brain-cell in accordance with the purely empirical facts. Yes, but now suppose that this is by no means correct; that by virtue of its very position in the organism the relation of a liver-cell to forces outside man, outside the bounds of the skin, is not at all the same as the relation of a brain-cell to these forces. In that case it will not be correct to look on what is happening merely as a continuation of the process of fission and subsequent location in the body. We must rather assume that the relation of the brain-cell to the universe outside is quite different from that of the liver-cell.

Suppose a man looks at the needle of a compass, finds it pointing from South to North, from North to South, and then decides that the forces which set the needle in this direction lie in the needle itself. He would certainly not be considered a physicist to-day. A physicist brings the needle of the compass into connection with what is called terrestrial magnetism. No matter what theories may be evolved, it is simply impossible to attribute the direction of the needle to forces lying within the needle itself. It must be brought into relation with the universe.

In the study of organic life to-day, its relations to the universe are usually regarded as quite secondary. But suppose it were indeed true that merely on account of their different positions the liver and the brain are actually related quite differently to cosmic forces outside man. In that case we could never arrive at an explanation of the being of man by way of purely empirical thought. An explanation is possible only if we are able to say what part the whole universe plays in the moulding of the brain and again of the liver, in the same sense as the Earth plays its part in the direction taken by the needle in the compass.

Suppose we are tracing back the stream of heredity. We go to the forefathers, pass on to the present generation and then to the progeny, both in the case of animals and of human beings. We take account of what we find—as naturally we must—but we reckon merely with processes observed to lie immediately within the human being. It hardly ever occurs to us to ask whether under certain conditions it is possible for cosmic forces to work in the most varied ways upon the fertilised germ. Neither do we ask: Is it perhaps, impossible to explain the formation of the fertilised germ-cell if we remain within the confines of the human being himself? Must we not relate this germ-cell to the whole universe? In orthodox science to-day, the forces that work in from the Cosmos are secondary. To a certain limited extent they are taken into consideration, but they are always secondary. And now you may say: ‘Yes, but modern science leads us to a point where such questions no longer arise. It is antiquated to relate the human organs to the Cosmos!’ In the way in which this is often done, it is antiquated. The fact that as a rule such questions do not arise to-day is due entirely to our scientific education. Our education in science confines us to this purely objective and empirical mode of research, and we never come to the point of raising such questions as I have indicated by way of introduction. But the extent to which man is able to advance in knowledge and action in every sphere of life depends upon the raising of questions. If questions never arise, it means that a man is living in a kind of fog. He himself is dimming his free outlook upon reality, and it is only when things will no longer fit into his scheme of thought that he begins to realise the limitations of his conceptions.

Now I think that in the domain of modern medicine there may be a feeling that the processes taking place in the being of man are not wholly reconcilable with the simple, straightforward theories upon which most cures are based. There is a certain feeling that it must somehow be possible to approach the whole subject from another angle. And I think that what I shall have to say in this connection will mean something to those who are specialists in their particular branches of science, who have practical experience of the processes of health and disease and have realised that current conceptions and theories are too limited to grapple with the intricate organism of man.

Let us be quite honest with ourselves. During the nineteenth century a kind of axiom was put forward by nearly every branch of scientific thought. With a persistence that was enough to drive one to despair, it was constantly being said: ‘Explanations must be absolutely simple.’ And indeed they were! Yes, but if facts and processes are complicated it is prejudging the issue to say that the explanations must be simple. The thing is to accustom ourselves to deal with their complexities. Unspeakable harm has been done in the realms of science and art by the insistent demand for simplification. In all her manifestations, small and great, Nature is highly complicated, never simple. We can really grapple with Nature only if we realise from the outset that the most seemingly comprehensive ideas are related to the reality just as photographs of a tree, taken from one side only, are related to the tree. I can photograph the tree from every side and the photographs may be very different. The more photographs I have, the more nearly will my idea approximate to the reality of the tree.

The prevalent opinion to-day is this: such and such a theory is correct. Therefore some other theory—one with which we do not happen to agree—must be wrong. But that is just as if a man were to photograph a tree from one side only. He has his particular photograph. Somebody else takes a photograph from another side and says to the first man: ‘Your photograph is absolutely false; mine, and mine alone, represents the truth. In short, my particular view is correct.’ All controversies about materialism, idealism, realism and the like, have really taken this form. They are by no means dissimilar to the seemingly trivial example I have given. At the very outset of our studies I ask you not to take what I have to say as if it were meant to tend in the direction of materialism, idealism, or mysticism, but merely as an attempt to go straight for reality to the extent which the capacity of human thought permits. Materialistic conceptions often achieve great results when it is a question of mastering reality, but the spiritual aspect must be introduced as well. If it is impossible to keep the various aspects separate, our ideas will appear rather as if one took many different photographs all on the same plate. Indeed, many things are like this to-day. It is as if photographs from many different aspects had been taken on one plate.

Now when the forces lying latent in the soul of man are energised by the methods outlined in my book Knowledge of the Higher Worlds, we rise above the ordinary condition of knowledge—to which the latest phase in biology pays special devotion—and reach what I have described as Imaginative Cognition. A still higher level is that of ‘Knowledge by Inspiration,’ and the highest—if I may use this expression—is that of true Intuition, Intuitive Knowledge. In Imaginative Knowledge one comes to pictures of reality, knowing very well that they are pictures, but also that they are pictures of reality, and not merely dream-pictures. The pictures arising in Imaginative Cognition are true pictures but not the reality itself. At the stage of Knowledge by Inspiration reality begins to stream into these pictures, something lives within them; they tell us more than the picture alone. They themselves bear witness to a spiritual reality. And in acts of Intuitive Knowledge we live within the spiritual reality itself.—These are the three stages described in Knowledge of the Higher Worlds.

Now these three modes of higher knowledge give us, to begin with, an understanding of spiritual worlds, of a spiritual universe and of man as a being of Spirit and soul; they do not, in the early stages, reveal to us the findings of empirical research in the realm, say of, biology. When Imagination, or Inspiration, or Intuition, is used for gaining understanding of the being of man, a different way is followed.

Take, for instance, the structure of the human brain. It does not perhaps strike physiologists and doctors as very extraordinary, but to those who call themselves psychologists it is remarkable in the extreme. Psychologists are a strange phenomenon in our civilisation because they have managed to develop a science without subject-matter—a psychology without a soul! Think for a moment of a psychologist who takes his start purely from empirical science. In recent times people have really been at a loss to know what to make of philosophy, because it has been impossible to know whether philosophers know anything or not. Scientists, however, are supposed to know something, and so certain scientists who dabble in philosophy have been given Chairs of Philosophy. Current opinion has been this: the scientists must have some knowledge, because although it is quite possible in philosophy to talk round and round a subject, it is not possible in science to talk hot air about something that has been observed under a microscope, through a telescope, or by means of Röntgen rays. All these things can be tested and proved, but in philosophy it is not so easy to prove whether or not a man is talking out of the clouds.

And now, think of how Theodor Ziehen speaks of the structure of the brain. In this connection I once had a very interesting experience, and perhaps I can make the point more concrete by telling you a certain anecdote. Many years ago I once attended a meeting where an eminent doctor was speaking about the structure of the brain. He analysed the structure of the brain in relation to the soul-life of man from a point of view which might justly be called materialistic. He was an out-and-out materialist, one who had analysed the structure of the brain quite well to the extent to which it has been investigated in our times, and he then proceeded to explain the life of soul in connection with the brain and its structure. The chairman of the meeting was a follower of Herbart, and he, therefore, was not concerned with analysing the structure of the brain but the life of conception and ideation, as Herbart, the philosopher, had once done. He—the chairman—then said the following: ‘Here we have something very remarkable. The physiologist or the doctor makes diagrams and figures of the structure of the brain. If I, as a Herbartian, make drawings of the complicated associations of ideas—I mean a picture of the ideas which associate and not of the nerve fibres connecting one nerve-cell with another—if I, as a genuine Herbartian who does not concern himself with the brain as a structure, make symbolic diagrams of what I conceive to be the process underlying the concatenation of ideas, my drawings look exactly the same as the physiologist's sketches of the structure of the brain!’

This comparison is not unjustified. Science has taught us more and more about the structure of the brain. It has been proved in ever greater measure that the physical structure of the brain does, indeed, correspond in a marvelous way with the organisation of our life of ideation. Everything in the life of ideation can be found again in the structure of the brain. It is as if Nature herself had intended to create in the brain a plastic image of man's life of ideation. Something of the kind strikes us forcibly when we read statements like those of Meynert—nowadays they are already considered rather out-of-date. Meynert was a materialist, but an excellent brain-physiologist and psychologist. What he, as a materialist, tells us is a wonderful contribution to what is discovered when the actual brain is left out of account and we deal only with the way in which ideas unite, separate, etc., and then draw figures and diagrams. In short, if anything could make a man a materialist it is the structure of the human brain. At all events this much must be admitted: If, indeed, the Spirit and soul exist, they have in the human brain so perfect an expression that one is almost tempted to ask why the Spirit and soul in themselves are necessary for the life of ideation, even if people still hanker after a soul that can at least think. The brain is such a true mirror-image of the Spirit and soul—why should the brain itself not be able to think?

All these things must of course be taken with reservations. To-day I only want to indicate the tenor of our studies as a whole. The human brain, especially when we begin to make detailed research, is well calculated to make us materialists. The mystery that really underlies all this clears up only when we reach the stage of Imaginative Knowledge, where pictures arise—pictures of the spiritual world not previously visible. The pictures actually remind us of the configurations in the human brain formed by the nerve-fibres and nerve-cells.

What, then, is this Imaginative Knowledge, which functions, of course, entirely in the super-sensible world? If I were to attempt to give you a concrete picture of what Imaginative Knowledge is, in the way that a mathematician uses figures to illustrate a mathematical problem, I should say the following: Imagine that a man, living in the world, knows more than sense-cognition can tell him because he can rise to a world of pictures which express a reality, just as the human brain expresses the life of soul. In the brain, Nature has given us as a real Imagination, an Imagination that is real in the concrete sense, something that is attained in Imaginative Knowledge at a higher level.

This, you see, leads us more deeply into the mysteries of the constitution of man. As we shall find later on, this marvelous structure of the human brain is not an isolated formation. Through Imagination we behold a super-sensible world, and it is as though a part of this world had become real in a lower world; in the human brain a world of Imagination lies there, in concrete fact, before us. I do not believe that anyone can speak adequately about the human brain unless he sees in its structure an Imaginative replica of the life of soul. It is just this that leads us into difficulties when we take our start from ordinary brain-physiology and try to pass to an understanding of the life of soul. If we confine ourselves to the brain itself, a life of soul over and above this does not seem to be necessary. The only persons with a right to speak of a life of soul over and above the brain are those who have a knowledge of it other than that which is acquired by customary methods. For when, in the act of spiritual knowledge, we come to know this life of soul, we realise that it has its complete reflection in the structure of the human brain, and that the brain, moreover, can do everything that the super-sensible organ of soul can do by way of conceptual activity. Down to its very functions the brain is a mirror-image. With brain-physiology, therefore, no one can prove or disprove materialism. It simply cannot be done. If man were merely a being of brain, he would never need to say to himself: ‘Over and above this brain of mine, I possess a soul.’

In contrast to this—and I shall now describe in an introductory way something that will be developed in the subsequent lectures—let us consider a different function of the human organism, not the life of ideation, but the process or function of breathing. Think of the breathing process and of what passes into consciousness with regard to it. When we say to ourselves: ‘I have an idea which reminds me of another idea I had three years ago and I link the one to the other’—we may well be able to make diagrams, especially if we take a series of ideas. Such diagrams will bear a great resemblance, for instance, to Meynert's sketches of the structure of the brain. Now this cannot be done when we try to find an expression in the organism of man of what is contained in the breathing-processes. We can find no adequate expression of the breathing process in the structures and formations of the physical organs. The breathing process is something for which there is no adequate expression in the human organism, in the same sense as the structure of the brain is an adequate expression for the life of ideation and perception.

In Imaginative Knowledge pictures arise before us, but if we rise to knowledge by Inspiration, reality streams through the pictures from behind, as it were. If, then, we rise to Inspiration and gaze into the super-sensible world in such a way that the Imaginations teem with spiritual reality, we suddenly find ourselves standing in a super-sensible process which has its complete analogy in the connection between the breathing process, the structure of lungs and arachnoidal cavity, central canal of the spinal cord and the continuous flow of the breath into the brain. In short, if we rise to Inspiration, we learn to understand the whole meaning of the breathing process, just as Imaginative Knowledge leads to an understanding of the structure of the brain. The brain is an Imagination made concrete; everything connected with the breathing process is an Inspiration made real, an Inspiration brought down into the world of sense. A man who strives to reach the stage of Knowledge by Inspiration enters a world of Spirit and soul, but this world lies there tangibly before him when he observes the whole breathing process and its significance in the human organism.

Imaginative Knowledge, then, is necessary to an understanding of the structure of the brain; Knowledge by Inspiration is necessary before we can understand the rhythm of breathing and everything connected with it. The relation of the breathing process to the Cosmos is quite different from that of the brain. The outer, plastic structure of the brain is so completely a mirror-image of the Spiritual that it is possible to understand this structure without penetrating very deeply into the super-sensible world. Indeed, we need only rise to Imagination, which lies quite near the boundaries of ordinary cognition. The breathing process cannot be understood by means of Imagination; here we must have Inspiration, we must rise higher in the super-sensible world.

To understand the metabolic process we must rise higher still. The metabolic process is really the most mysterious of all processes in the human being. The following lectures will show that we must think of the metabolic process quite differently from the way in which it is thought of in empirical physiology. The changes undergone by the substances as they pass from the tongue to the point where they bring about something in the brain cells, for instance, cannot, unfortunately, be followed by means of purely empirical research, but only by means of Intuition. Intuition leads us beyond the mere perception of the object into the very object itself. In the brain, the Spirit and soul create for themselves an actual mirror-image, but they remain, in essence, outside this image. As Spirit and soul they influence and pass into the breath-rhythm but constantly withdraw. In the metabolism, however, the Spirit and soul submerge themselves completely; as Spirit and soul they disappear in the actual process. They are not to be found—neither are they to be found by empirical research.

And now think of Theodor Ziehen's subtle descriptions of the structure of the human brain. It is, indeed, also possible to make symbolic pictures of the memory in such a way that the existence in the brain of physiological-anatomical mirror-images of the faculty of memory can be proved. But when Ziehen comes to the sentient processes, there is already a hitch, and that is why he does not speak of feelings as independent entities, but only of mental conceptions coloured with feeling. And of the will, modern physiologists have ceased to speak I Why? Very naturally they say nothing. Now when I want to raise my arm—that is to say, to accomplish an act of will—I have, first of all, the idea. Something then descends into the region that, according to current opinion, is wholly ‘unconscious.’ Everything that cannot be actually observed in the life of soul, but is none the less believed to be there, is thrown into the reservoir of the ‘unconscious.’ And then I observe how I move my hand. Between the intention and the accomplished fact lies the will, which plays right down into the material nature of the physical organism.

This process can be followed in detail by Intuitive Knowledge; the will passes down into the innermost being of the organism. The act of will enters right into the metabolism. There is no act of will performed by physical man which cannot be traced by Intuitive Knowledge to a corresponding metabolic process. Nor is there any process of will which does not find its expression in demolition, dissolution—call it what you will—within the metabolic processes. The will first demolishes what exists somewhere or other in the organism, in order that it may act. It is just as if I had to burn up something in my arm before being able to use this limb for the expression of my will. Something must first be done away with, as we shall see in the following lectures.

I know that this would be considered a fearful heresy in science to-day, but nevertheless it will reveal itself to us as a truth. Something that is of the nature of substance must be destroyed before the will can come into play. Spirit and soul must establish themselves where substance existed. Understanding of this belongs to the very essence of Intuitive Knowledge, and we shall never be able to explain the metabolic processes in the human being unless we investigate them by its means.

These three processes—the nerve-sensory process, the rhythmic processes (breathing and blood circulation) and the metabolic processes—include, fundamentally speaking, every function in the human organism. Man is really objective knowledge, knowledge made actual—no matter whether we merely observe him from outside or dissect him. Take the human head. We understand what is going on in the head when we realise that there is such a thing as Imaginative Knowledge; the processes in the rhythmic system become clear when we know of the existence of Knowledge by Inspiration; we understand the metabolic processes when we know of the existence of Intuition. Thus do the principles of reality interpenetrate in the being of man. Take, for example, the specific organs of the will—they can be understood only by an act of Intuitive Knowledge.

As long as we apply a rigidly objective mode of cognition to the being of man, we shall not realise that he is, in fact, not at all as he is usually supposed to be. Modern physiology knows, of course, that to a great extent the human being is a column of fluid. But now ask yourselves quite honestly whether physiology does in fact reckon with man as a column of fluid, or whether it does not proceed merely as if he were a being consisting of solid forms. You will probably have to admit that little account is taken of the fact that he is essentially a fluidic being and that the solids have merely been inserted into this fluid. But, as a matter of fact, man is also an airy, gaseous being, and a being of warmth as well. The solid part of man can well be understood by means of ordinary objective cognition. Just as in the laboratory I can become familiar with the nature of sulphide of mercury, so by chemical and physical investigation of the human organism I can acquaint myself with all that is solid. It is different with the fluids in the being of man. The fluids live in a state of perpetual integration and disintegration and cannot be observed in the same way as the stomach or heart are observed and then drawn. If I make drawings of these organs as if they were solid objects, a great deal can be said about them. But it is not the same if we take this watery being of man as something real. In the fluids something is always coming into being and disappearing again. It is as if we were to conceive of the heart as continually coming into being and disappearing—although the process there is not a very rapid one. The watery being of man must be approached with Imaginative Knowledge.

The importance of the organic functions in the human organism, and their connection with the circulation, are of course well known, but how these functions play into one another—that follows precisely the pattern of Inspiration. Only through Inspiration can the airy part of man be understood.

And now let us pass to the warmth in the human being. Try to realise that man is something very special by virtue of the fact that he is a being of warmth; that in the most various parts of his structure warmth and cold are found present in the most manifold ways. Before we can realise how the Ego lives in the warmth in man, we must ourselves live in the process. There must be an act of Intuitive Knowledge.

Before man can be known in his whole being—not as if he were simply a mass of solid organs with sharp contours—we must penetrate into the organism from many different angles. Just as we feel the need to exercise Imagination, Inspiration and Intuition as we pass from the brain to the other organic phenomena, so it is when we study the aggregate states of matter within him. The solid part of man, his solid bodily nature, hardly differs at all from the state in which substances exist outside the human organism. There is an essential difference in the case of the fluids and gases, and above all in the case of the warmth. This will have to be considered in the next lecture. But it is, indeed, a fact that only when our observation of man widens out in this way do we realise the full significance of the organs and systems of organs.

Empirical physiology hardly enables us to follow up the functions of the human organism further than the point where the chyle passes from the intestines into the lymphatic vessels. What follows is merely a matter of conjecture. All ideas about the subsequent processes in the substances we take in from the outside world, for instance the processes in the blood stream, are really nothing but fantasy on the part of modern physiology. The part played by the kidneys in the organism can be understood only if we observe the katabolic processes side by side with the anabolic processes, which today are almost invariably regarded as the only processes of significance. A long time ago I once said to a friend: ‘It is just as important to study those organs which are grouped around the germ of the human embryo, and which are later discarded, as to study the development of the germ itself from conception to birth.’ The picture is complete only when we observe the division of the cells and the structure arising from this, and also trace the katabolic processes which take their course side by side with the anabolic processes. For we not only have this katabolic process around us in the embryonic period; we bear it within us continually in later life. And we must know in the case of each single organ, to what extent it contains anabolic and to what extent katabolic processes. The latter are, as a general rule, bound up with an increase of consciousness. Clear consciousness is dependent on katabolic processes, on the demolition of matter.

The same must be said of the excretory processes. The kidneys are organs of excretion. But now the question arises: Although from the point of view of material empiricism the kidneys are primarily excretory organs, have they no other purpose in the constitution of man beyond this? Do they not, perhaps, play a more important part in building up the human being virtue of something other than their excretory functions? If we then follow the functions still further, passing from the kidneys to the liver, for example, we find this interesting phenomenon:—The kidneys secrete in the last resort, outwards; the liver, inwards. And the question arises: How is the relation of the kidney process to the liver process affected by the fact that the kidneys send their excretory products outwards and the liver inwards? Is the human being at one time communing, as it were, with the outer world and at another with himself?

Thus we are led gradually to penetrate the mysteries of the human organism, but we must bring to our aid matters that are approached in the ways of which I have to-day given only preliminary hints. I will proceed from this point in the following lectures, showing how these things lead to a true understanding of pathology and therapy, and how far they may become guiding principles in orthodox empirical research. No attack on this kind of research is implied. The only object is to show that guiding principles are necessary.

I am not out to attack scientific research or scientific medicine in any sense. My aim is to show that in this scientific medicine there is a mine of opportunity for a much wider knowledge than can be attained by modern methods, and above all by the current outlook on the world.~ We have no wish to scoff at the scientific mode of observation but on the contrary to give it a true foundation. When it is founded upon the Spirit, then, and only then, does it assume its full significance.

To-morrow I will speak further on this subject.

Dr. Steiner: Is everyone here? We have gathered today because we have a number of things to discuss, and also because Mr. S. believes there are some things he needs to say about the events of the last meeting. I am not certain whether we should do that first.

A teacher: What should we do about the parents of the children who were expelled? We think their progress reports should not include any remarks about the expulsion.

Dr. Steiner: People all over Stuttgart are talking about the school and those rumors will then conclude that the faculty did not have the courage to admit what it had done.

If something like what occurred here came up in another school, it would not be such an affair as we have here. There has been some talk about whether one thing or another corresponds to what is normal in other schools, but this situation could, under certain circumstances, bring the entire Waldorf School into discredit if it is improperly used. You speak as though you did not know Mr. von Gleich exists. If someone were expelled in some other school, no one would care. What I fear is that if we do come to agreement, but handle it the way we are now, we will soon have a repetition.

I did not say he must be removed, but that it is possible that we may have to expel him. The goal of all of the suspensions was to enable us to discuss the matter. When you came to me in Dornach with that pile of unbelievable interrogations, there was nothing more to do. There was nothing more we could do. I said that you should look into the matter, but I did not mean that you should formally interrogate the boys and girls. I wanted the suspensions because I had lost trust.

A teacher: My recollection is that you said the other students must be suspended.

Dr. Steiner: I used the conditional tense: “If G.S. really gave the injections, then it might well be necessary to expel him.” You looked into the matter only afterward.

A teacher: The situation with the injections was completely clear.

Dr. Steiner: It is clear that the boys played around. No one knows what he injected. There were some stupid pranks. The reason for the suspension was to be able to look into the matter when I got here. The problem is that the case of G.S. in connection with the others has created these difficulties. The problem that will create difficulties for the school is that the others had to be removed. The difficulty lies in the situation as a whole.

A teacher asks Dr. Steiner to say something about the lack of contact with the students.

Dr. Steiner: The contact between the faculty and the students in the upper grades has been lost. That is not something new. It was quite clear when the students in the upper grades requested a meeting with me. That fact alone speaks quite clearly about a loss of contact with the students. That is the foundation of the whole problem. As soon as such contact is genuinely present, things like this will no longer occur.

How do you think I could make a decision about such a matter over the phone, when I could not actually look at the situation? At the point when Mr. S. brought me the minutes of the interrogations containing things that should never have been discussed, a genuine conflict between the faculty and the students existed. There was nothing for me to decide, since I could not go so far as to make the students into teachers. The problem was a polarity, teachers or students. That became grotesquely apparent. Things slid so far that the students themselves spoke about the teachers speaking to them differently as teachers and as human beings. There was an open conflict between the faculty and the students, and there was, therefore, no other possibility than to make a decision. All that was left was to find the right words. What I said on the telephone was that you should look into the matter and determine the cause. Instead, you interrogated the students. It is only possible to understand “looking into the matter” as trying to determine what the problem is through observation. My understanding was that the faculty would try to find out what was behind the situation, but holding interrogations was simply impossible. I also do not believe that you held these interrogations before our first telephone conversation.

A teacher: There were no interrogations before the second telephone conversation.

Dr. Steiner: What I said could have only meant that if the suspicion were correct that G.S. had injected a student with morphine or opium, we would have to expel him.

A teacher: When a boy injects someone, it seems to me that that is such bad behavior that there is nothing else to be done other than throw him out.

Another teacher: Could we take that back?

Dr. Steiner: That would harm the movement most. You need to remember the following. I had to speak about the Waldorf School recently. I had to present the Waldorf School to the public as a model school, and in fact, it is broadly seen as such. Those people in Stuttgart who are interested in the Waldorf School need only to ask around, and they hear exactly the opposite. These are the things I am always referring to that arise from our position and make it possible to undermine the anthroposophical movement. The question is whether we want to create something that would help undermine the movement. The anthroposophical movement will not be undermined if we expel some students. It would, however, be undermined if people say things that we cannot counter. I am powerless against things that take place in discussions in which I do not participate. It is impossible for me to speak with the expelled students. There is nothing I can say when things have gone so far that the students have left. Through such events, I cannot speak at all about the school. This occurs just at the time when everyone is talking about the school.

I deeply regret that despite the fact that I have been here, I could not see everything. I did see most things, but not everything. I have to say that some aspects of the teaching in the Waldorf School are really very good and are still maintained in our old exemplary form. I really prefer, as long as it is not otherwise necessary, to say exemplary. However, there are certain points that show that the Waldorf School principles are no longer being carried out. We really need to discuss everything here in our meetings. It is an impossible situation when I come into a class, and the teacher has a book in hand and reads an arithmetic problem out of it, where the question is to compute the sum of the ages of three people and then another question is asked so that the children need to determine the sum of the ages of seven people. We are part of a movement that says that we should do only what is true to reality, and then we ask the children to compute the total ages of a group of people. What result do you expect? There is no reality in that. If such sloppiness happens in the school, then what I presented to you in our seminar course was simply for nothing.

As far as I am concerned, if that were simply one case, I would have said nothing. And if there were simply some points that were not so carefully considered, I would not be leaving with such a heavy heart. I have always tried to stress that the Waldorf School can put you above normal, everyday superficiality, but now the Waldorf School has fallen into the typical Stuttgart system. That is, for me, the most bitter thing that can occur, especially when I have to present the Waldorf School as a model. Somehow, that you have lost contact with one another must lie in the atmosphere here.

I must admit I’m really very concerned. When we founded the Waldorf School, we had to make a kind of declaration that after the students had completed three grades, they would be able to move to another school without difficulty. When I look at what we have achieved in three years—well, we just are not keeping up. It is really impossible for us to keep up.

The school inspector’s report was somewhat depressing for me. From what you told me earlier, I had thought he was ill-willed. But, the report is full of goodwill. I must admit that I found everything he wrote necessary. For example, you are not paying enough attention, so the students are always copying from one another. The things contained in the report are true, and that is so bitter. You gave me the impression he had done everything with ill intent. However, it is actually written in such a way that you can see he did not at all want to harm the school. Of course, he speaks that way when we are totally ruining the children. And of course, the result will be that things that are so good in principle become so bad when they are improperly used. We must use what is good. What we need is a certain kind of enthusiasm, a kind of inner activity, but all this has slowly disappeared. Only the lower grades have some real activity, and that is a terrible spectacle. The dead way of teaching, the indifference with which the instruction is given, the complete lack of spontaneity, must all disappear. Some things are still extraordinarily good, as I said before, but in other places there is a total loss of what should be. We need some life in the classes, real life, and then things will fall into place. You need to be able to go along with things and agree with them if you are to present them publicly, that is no longer possible for me. In many cases, people act as though they did not need to prepare before going into class.

I do not want to imply that is done elsewhere. I say it because no one wants to understand what I have been saying for years, namely, that through the habits of Stuttgart, the anthroposophical movement has been ruined. We were not able to bring forth what we need to care for, the true content of the movement. The Waldorf faculty has completely ignored the need to seek out contact. Now, the Society does not try to contact the teachers, and if you ask why, you are told that they do not want us. That is certainly the greatest criticism and a very bitter pill! Each individual needs to feel that they belong to the Society, but that feeling is no longer present. I always need to call attention to the fact that we have the movement. As long as people did not start things and then lose interest in them after a time, things went well for the movement. However, here in Stuttgart things have been founded where people have lost interest in them, and the Stuttgart system arose in that way. Every clique goes its own way, and now the Waldorf School is also taking on the same characteristic, so that it loses consciousness of its true foundation.

That is why I say it is obvious that this event will have no good end. If it were possible to guarantee that we would again try to work from the Waldorf School principle—if only such a guarantee were present! But, there is no such guarantee. There are always a lot of people who want to visit the Waldorf School. I am always sitting on pins and needles when someone comes and wants to visit. It is possible to discover a great deal when you think about things away from school. I certainly understand how difficult it is to create such classes, but on the other hand, I certainly miss the fire that should be in them. There is no fire, only indifference. There is a kind of being comfortable there. I cannot say that what was intended has in any way actually occurred.

A teacher: ... I want to leave...

Dr. Steiner: I do not want to create resentments. That is not the point. If I thought that nothing else could be done, I would have spoken differently. I am speaking from an assumption that the faculty consists of capable people. I am convinced that the problem lies in the habits of Stuttgart, and that people act with closed ears and closed eyes. They are asleep. I have not accused any teachers, but a sloppiness is moving in. There is no more diligence present. But diligence can be changed, it is simply no longer present.

A teacher: I would like to ask you to tell us what we have missed.

Dr. Steiner: This way of forcing something that has absolutely nothing to do with a mechanism into a mechanized scheme is simply child’s play in contrast to the inner process of it. This way of ignorantly putting all kinds of things together and calling it a picture when it is really not a picture is simply a method of occupying the students for a few hours. I believe it is absolutely impossible to discover an external mechanical scheme for the interaction of things connected with language. What would the children get from it when you draw a figure and then write “noun” and so forth in one corner? That is all an external mechanism that simply makes nonsense of instruction.

I hope that no animosities arise from what I am saying. Actually, our pedagogical discussions have been better than that. This fantasizing is most definitely not real. I was very happy with physical education. We should absolutely support that by finding another gymnastics teacher. The boys have become quite lazy. I wanted to draw your attention to the fact that there are also other impulses. Mr. N. has greatly misunderstood me. I did not claim that anyone was incapable of doing things the way that I would like. The problem is that we need to be colleagues in the movement.

A teacher: I have asked myself if my teaching has become worse.

Dr. Steiner: The problem you have is that you have not always followed the directive to bring what you know anthroposophically into a form you can present to little children. You have lectured the children about anthroposophy when you told them about your subject. You did not transform anthroposophy into a child’s level. That worked in the beginning because you taught with such enormous energy. It must have been closer to your heart two years ago than what you are now teaching, so that you awoke the children through your enthusiasm and fire, whereas now you are no longer really there. You have become lazy and weak, and, thus, you tire the children. Before, your personality was active. You could teach the children because your personality was active. It is possible you slipped into this monotone. The children are not coming along because they have lost their attentiveness. You no longer work with them with the necessary enthusiasm, and now they have fallen asleep. You are not any dumber than you were then, but you could do things better. It is your task to do things better, and not say that you need to be thrown out. I am saying that you are not using your full capacities. I am speaking about your not wanting to, not your not being able to.

(Speaking to a second teacher) You need only round yourself out in some areas and get away from your lecturing tone.

(Speaking to a third teacher) I have already said enough to you.

A teacher asks about more time for French and English since two hours are not sufficient in the eleventh grade.

Dr. Steiner: We can do such things only when we have developed them enough that we can allow the children to simply decide in which direction they want to be educated. We cannot increase the number of school hours. The number of school hours has reached a maximum, for both teachers and children. The children are no longer able to concentrate because of the number of hours in the classroom. We need to allow the children to decide. We need to limit Latin and Greek to those students who want to take the final examinations, and those students will also have to limit their other subjects. We already had to limit modern languages for them and allow more teaching time in Greek and Latin.

A teacher: The children come to me for Latin and Greek immediately after shop, eurythmy, and singing. I cannot properly teach them when they are so distracted.

Dr. Steiner: That may be true. Allowing the children to participate in everything cannot continue.

A teacher: We need to differentiate between those going into the humanities and those going on in business. Could we cut the third hour of main lesson short?

Dr. Steiner: Main lesson? That would be difficult. We can certainly not say that any part of the main lesson is superfluous.

A teacher: I wanted to make a similar request for modern languages in the tenth grade.

Dr. Steiner: It is certainly difficult to discuss moving forward in languages if we do not provide what the children need to have in other areas. In previous years, we did not do enough in those areas.

A teacher: If they have shop, I cannot teach Latin.

Dr. Steiner: That is a question of the class schedule and that needs to be decided by the faculty. You wrote down the class schedule for me. I will go through it to see if there is something we can do based purely upon the schedule. On the other hand, I was startled by how little the children can do. There is no active capacity for doing in the children, not even in the objective subjects. The children know so little about history. In general, the children know too little and can do too little. The problem is that an indifference has crept in, so that the things that are necessary are not done. There is no question of that in the 8b class. You need to be there for only five minutes and you can see that the children can do their arithmetic. This all depends upon the teachers’ being interested in the material. It is readily apparent how well the children in the 8b class can do arithmetic. What they can do, you do not see through examples of how they solve problems. That does not say very much. What you can see is that they were very capable in arithmetic methods. Individual cases prove that, but arithmetic is going poorly nearly everywhere.

(To a class teacher) The children know quite a lot, but you should not leave it to the children to decide when they want to say something, as those who are lazy will not speak up. You need to be careful that no one gets by without answering. Those who did speak knew quite a lot, and the history class went very well.

A teacher asks whether it would be possible to hold evening meetings where the teachers could meet together with students who were free.

Dr. Steiner: That would certainly be good. However, it is important how the teachers behave there. Such meetings must not lead to what occurred previously when the students voted for a student president.

A teacher: I thought more of lectures, music, and such things. Not a discussion.

Dr. Steiner: That might well be good, but it could also lead to a misunderstanding of the relationships.

A teacher wants to have one additional hour for each of the ancient languages.

Dr. Steiner: We cannot increase the amount of school time.

A number of teachers speak about the class schedule and increasing the amount of school time.

Dr. Steiner: An increase in the amount of school time cannot be achieved in an absolute sense. We can only increase the number of hours in one subject by decreasing them in another.

A teacher: The tenth grade has students who have forty-four hours of school per week.

Dr. Steiner: That is why many cannot do anything. I will look at the class schedule.

A teacher asks what to do for those who want a more musical education.

Dr. Steiner: If we begin allowing differences, we will have to have three different areas, the humanities, business, and art. We must look into whether that is possible without a significant increase in the size of the faculty.

A teacher: The students want to be involved in everything.

Dr. Steiner: That is perhaps a question for the faculty, and you should discuss it.

Now, to the things that are not as they should be and that have grown to cause me considerable concern. I am concerned, particularly for the upper grades, that the instruction is tending toward sensationalism. That occurs to the detriment of the liveliness in teaching. They want to have a different sensation every hour. The teaching in the upper grades has developed into a craving for sensations, and that is something that has, in fact, been cultivated. There is too little emphasis upon being able to do, and too much upon simply absorbing. That is sensational for many. When the students have so little inner activity, and they learn to feel responsibility so little, they assume that they can do whatever they want. That is often the attitude. You have copied too much from the university atmosphere. The boys think this is a university, and there is not enough of a genuine school atmosphere.

A teacher: If the students would participate energetically, I could give two hours of languages without becoming tired.

Dr. Steiner: Keeping the class active makes you more tired than when it sleeps.

A teacher asks about finding a new teacher for modern languages.

Dr. Steiner: We have been talking about a teacher for modern languages for quite some time. We could ask Tittmann, but I do not dare do that because we need to economize in every area. Try to imagine where we would get the money if we had no money for the Waldorf School. I would like to see the size of the faculty doubled, but that is not possible.

All this is something that is not directly connected with the difficulties. Most of them lie in attitude and will. For example, we must certainly stop using those cheap and sloppy student editions in our classes.

We can discuss the question of the teaching plan when I return. I would ask that you continue in the present way until the end of October. I hope that by the end of October we can move on to radical changes, but I fear they cannot be made.

A teacher asks about an explanation of the situation with the expelled students that is to appear in Anthroposophy and in the daily newspapers. Not only inaccurate, but also completely fabricated things had been reported publicly as facts.

Dr. Steiner: This explanation would refute what has already been published. The story is really going all around Stuttgart. It is a waste of time to explain things to bureaucrats, but the public should not remain unclear about it. We need to say that people could think what they want about the reasons, but we should energetically counter everything and declare them to be false. We should not forget that our concern here is not simply connected with the school, but is also a matter for the anthroposophical movement. Here I do not mean the Society, since it is asleep. But, we need to give some explanation. That would be the first thing to do. We can certainly not get by without that. When we expel some students, we also need to justify that publicly, otherwise it would just be one more nail in the coffin of the movement. We need to do it without making a big fuss, and we cannot act as though we were defending ourselves. That is why I was so surprised when you sent me the record of the interrogations while I was in Dornach. I found it mortifying to go into a “court procedure” with some students because of some dumb pranks.

A teacher: Would it be possible to write the text now?

Dr. Steiner: Well, you can make proposals. I don’t think it would be so easy to write by simply making proposals now. It needs to be written by someone with all due consideration.

A teacher asks about progress reports for these students.

Dr. Steiner: Progress reports? Giving in to someone like Mrs. X. (a mother who had written a letter to the faculty) is just nonsense. I cannot participate in the discussion because people would then complain that this is the first time they had heard about the situation. The faculty has made the most crass errors. You should have let the parents know earlier. As far as I am concerned, the reports could be phrased so that what the children are like is apparent only from the comments about their deportment, but that would only make things worse. Everyone knows they have been expelled, but then they receive a good report. Most teachers do not know that expulsions occur only rarely.

The best would be if Dr. X. would write these progress reports. Perhaps I could also look at them. Mr. Y. is too closely involved. I don’t think it would be a good idea for those most closely involved to do it. Form a committee of three, and then present me with your plans.

Concerning the parent meeting, you could do that, but without me. They might say things I could not counter, if I hear something I cannot defend. The things I say here, I could not say to the parents. We need to clear the air, and the teachers must take control of the school again. You do not need to talk about the things not going well. I think a meeting with the parents would be a good idea, but you, the faculty, would have to really be there. The things I took exception to earlier are directly connected with this matter. The school needs a new direction. You need to eliminate much of the fooling around. We need to be more serious. How are things with the student Z. who left?

A teacher gives a report.

Dr. Steiner: We need to be firm that he left the second, not the third, grade. Then we must try to show why it only seems that students are not so far along at the end of the second grade. The examples of his work we sent along show that Z. did not progress very far, that he only could write “hors” instead of “horse.” There are many such examples, but they are not particularly significant. Take another example. “He could only add by using his fingers.” That is not so bad. It is clear he could not add the number seven to another number.

The two places that could be dangerous for us lie in the following. The one is that people could claim he could do less than is possible with a calculator. To that, we can say that our goal is to develop the concept of numbers differently. We do not think that is possible with such young children. We will have to go into this business with calculators. The other thing that is dangerous for us is his poor dictation. There, we can simply say that dictation is not really a part of the second grade in our school. The situation is quite tempting for someone with a modern pedagogical understanding. That is how we can most easily be attacked. We will have to defend ourselves against that. We need to energetically and decisively defend ourselves. We need to stop the possibility of being criticized on these two points. We need to ward off this matter with a bitter humor. The report that was sent along makes things more difficult. He got a good report from us. This letter was written with good intent. For example, “I could not develop his knowledge further within the context of my class.” On the other hand, though, it is incomprehensible to a schoolmaster that he could write “horse” as “hors.”

A teacher: We have also received students who could not write.

Dr. Steiner: We should use such facts. If you can prove that, then you should include it. He wrote two-and-a-half typed pages, and then scribbled in some more. We should write just as much. We need to write back to him sarcastically. We need to develop some enthusiasm. We can certainly go that far. You need only look at Goethe’s letters, and you will also find errors of the same caliber. The faculty seems like a lifeless lump to me. You give no sign of having the strength to throw these things back into people’s faces. We need to use such things. The faculty is simply a lifeless lump. You are all sitting on the curule chairs of the Waldorf School, but we must be alive.

We need to use the resources we have. We need to write just as much, not like Mr. X. writes, but with a tone that is well-intended and not attacking.

A teacher: Do I always write such bad letters?

Dr. Steiner: Perhaps it is only this one case that I saw. A teacher asks about a student from out of town who cannot come to school when the weather is bad.

Dr. Steiner: We could give the father a binding answer. We could tell him that if the child lived in Stuttgart, we could, to the extent possible, take over the responsibility. However, when the boy has to make a longer trip, we can hardly be responsible for sending him out into bad weather when that might make him ill. We should tell the father that we understand the boy’s situation. However, we can make no decision other than to say that if the boy does not move into Stuttgart, he should leave the school. We need to take on that responsibility.

A teacher: Some students in the upper grades are taking jobs.

Dr. Steiner: That is no concern of ours if they are good students.

A teacher mentions a letter about a visit of some English teachers.

Dr. Steiner: We will have to accept their visit. However, I hope that by then there is a different atmosphere in the school. They can visit the various classes.

A teacher asks about how to treat colors in art class.

Dr. Steiner: Couldn’t you do what I said to the boys and girls yesterday? What I said today was concerned more with modern history. What I have said specifically about how to treat colors could be the subject of a number of lessons. Perhaps Miss Waller could send it to you from Dornach. I think you could go directly into the practical use of color with this class, so they become aware of what they have done in the lower grades. They should become aware of that. Of course, you must then go into the many things that must be further developed, the things you have begun, so that you also have them draw. I do not mean simply curves. You could also do the same with colors. For example, you could do it just as you did with curves to contrast a rounded and well-delineated blue spot and a curved yellow stroke. You should not do that too early. In the lower grades, the colors should live completely in seeing.

From there, you can go on to comparative anatomy; you could contrast the extremities in front and back. You could contrast the capacity of certain animals for perceiving and feeling with the wagging of a dog’s tail. That is actually the same problem. In that way, you can really get into life, you get into reality. Such things need to be brought into all areas of instruction. For many children, it is as though their heads were filled with pitch—they cannot think. They need to do such things through an inner activity, so that they genuinely participate. You can learn a great deal from the gymnastics class.

Yesterday, the boys were really very clumsy. I mean, they had a natural clumsiness and gymnastics is quite difficult for them. We need a second gymnastics teacher. The most you can teach is fourteen hours of gymnastics. If we had eighteen, we would need a second teacher. Particularly for boys, gymnastics, if it is not done pedantically, as it usually is, but, in fact, becomes a developmental force for the physical body, is really very good with eurythmy. The gymnastics teacher: I begin with the sixth grade.

Dr. Steiner: Of course, we need to begin earlier. I would find it not at all bad if Mr. Wolffhügel would see to it that our classrooms are not so plain, but that they had some artistic content also. Our school gives the impression we have no understanding of art.

A teacher: B.B. is in my seventh grade class. Could you give me some advice?

Dr. Steiner: He is in a class too high for what he knows. He is lazy? I think it is just his nature, that he is Swedish, and you will have to accept that he cannot quickly comprehend things. They grasp things slowly, but if you return to such things often, it will be all right. They love to have things repeated. That is perhaps what it is that you are observing with him.

A teacher: He is a clever swindler and a facile liar.

Dr. Steiner: He does not understand. A swindler? That cannot be true. He does the things we have often discussed, but they only indicate that you need to work with him so that he develops some feeling for authority. If he respects someone, as he does Mr. L., then things are all right. What is important is that you repeatedly discuss things with him. He is not at all impertinent. It is important that you put yourself in a position of respect.

A teacher tells about an event.

Dr. Steiner: That was an event connected with a curious concept of law. In a formal sense, it was not right, and he thought the man should be punished. He was preoccupied with that thought for a long time. Sometimes you need to find out about such things from the children and then speak about them and calm them. If such things continue to eat into them, then things will become worse, and that is the case with all of these boys. It is bad when children think the teacher does not see what is right. We cannot be indifferent in that regard. We need to take care that the children do not believe that we judge them unjustly. If they believe that, we should not be surprised if they are impertinent.

A teacher asks about languages in the seventh and eighth grades. A third of the class are beginners and two-thirds are better. The teacher asks if it would be possible to separate the beginners from the more advanced students.

Dr. Steiner: It is miserable that we do not group the children who are at the same stage. Is it so impossible to group them that way? You would need to put the fifth graders in a lower group. It has gradually developed that we are teaching language by grade, and that is a terrible waste of our energy. Couldn’t we teach according to groups and not according to grade?

A teacher: There is a time conflict.

Dr. Steiner: I am always sad that I cannot participate more in such things. I cannot believe it would not be possible. I still think it would be possible to group the students according to their capabilities, and at the same time work within the class schedule. That must certainly be possible if you have the goodwill to do it.

A teacher: It is possible with the seventh and eighth Grades.

Dr. Steiner: I think we could keep the same number of classroom hours. I cannot imagine that we cannot have specific periods for language during the week. Then we could do that.

A teacher: The problem is the religious instruction.

Dr. Steiner: Perhaps we could do it if we fixed the languages classes to specific hours during the week.

A teacher asks whether Dr. Steiner had looked at W.A. in the seventh grade.

Dr. Steiner: God! He certainly is disturbed by everything. He has gotten better, and if you ask him sometimes to say good things, he is also happy to do that. He likes some things. It would be a good idea if you gave him more serious things to write in his book. Curative eurythmy would not be much help. He needs to practice very serious things.

A teacher: Have you anything more to say about my class?

Dr. Steiner: In general, your class needs to be more involved with the material. They are not really in it. They are, what, about thirteen- year-old boys and girls. I think, of course, that enlivening arithmetic would do much to awaken them. They are not particularly awake. I do not think that they have a good understanding of what powers and exponents are. Do you do anything explain why they are called powers?

A teacher: I began with growth.

Dr. Steiner: I think you should include something like stories in the arithmetic instruction so that the process becomes clear from within. There are many ways you can do that, but you must always connect them with the material. The methods you have used with the children, where they use their fingers, are nothing more than an external contrivance with no inner connection. It tends toward being only play. If the children do not really concentrate, I do not believe the boys and girls will be able to solve the same equations a year from now that the present eighth-grade class can. It is a question whether they will be able to do that. They are not awake. They are still at the stage of thinking like a calf. In the other seventh-grade class, if we take the children’s abilities into account, they are actually more capable and more awake. Your class is not very awake. On the whole, you have a rather homogeneous class, whereas H.’s class has some who are quite capable and some who are quite dumb. Your class is more homogeneous. It is a very difficult group. You have some gifted children in your 8b class. The 8b class is made up of just about only geniuses. I think in your seventh-grade class there are quite a number who are basically dumb, and I think that you need to pull them out of their lethargy. They are covered with mildew. I am quite sorry I have not had time enough everywhere. Many things would have been easier had we not had these tremendous moral difficulties that have taken so much time. If the masters of pedagogy sitting on top of the mountain really had a more positive attitude toward the pedagogical course, I could have been more effective here. As it was, everything was very difficult. You do not need to get angry if I say that the faculty is like a heavy, dense mass sitting lazily upon their curule chairs, and because of that, we are all being ground up. We have yet to experience the worst opposition.

A teacher: Everything builds up because you are here so seldom.

Dr. Steiner: Then we have to find some way of making the year 975 days long. Recently I’ve been on the road all the time. Since November of 1921, I am almost always traveling. I cannot be here more. Things would go better if Stuttgart cliques don’t gain too strong a hold. The anthroposophical movement should never have expanded beyond what it was in 1914. That is not the right thing to think. The medical group says exactly the same thing. Mr. K., from Hamburg, thinks I need to go to Hamburg. However, I can discuss that question only when I have seen that they have done everything else. The pedagogical course I held contains everything. It only needs to be put into practice. I would never say such terrible things to the medical group if I had seen things progressing there. But they have simply left things aside. It is as though I had never held the seminar here.

A teacher mentions the difficulties that have arisen due to bad living conditions.

Dr. Steiner: Certainly, that has some effect, but there is an objection I could raise if I really wanted to complain. That has nothing to do with the fact that the school is as it is. That has nothing to do with that. It is not my intent to point my finger, I only want to say how things are. It is very difficult. I have said much that sticks in your throat, but it all came from a recognition that things must be different. The fact that, for instance, there really is no contact among you certainly has nothing to do with the problem of your housing. That everyone goes their own way is connected directly with how the school itself is. If anthroposophical life in Stuttgart were more harmonious, that would benefit the school, but recently things have become worse. In a moral sense, everyone is walling themselves off, and we will soon be at a point where we do not know one another. That is something that has become worse over time. What each individual does must affect others and become a strength in the Society. What we need is a joyful recognition and valuation of what is done by each individual, but the goodwill for that is missing. We are missing a joyful and receptive recognition of the achievements of individuals. We are simply ignoring those achievements. You should speak about what is worthy of recognition. The Stuttgart attitude, however, is non-recognition, and that curtails achievement. If I work and nothing happens, I become stymied. Negative judgments are justified only in connection with positive ones, but you have no interest in positive achievements. People become stymied when not one living soul is interested in the work they have done.

To a large extent, the contact between student and teacher has been lost and something else has developed. When there is such disinterest, I have no guarantee that such things as have happened could not be repeated again in the future.

A teacher asks about a permanent class teacher for one of the upper grades.

Dr. Steiner: Things were no different before. There was a time when the students just hung on Dr. X. That occurred until a certain time and then stopped.

A teacher: Things have become so fragmented due to the many illnesses.

Dr. Steiner: The catastrophe occurred just at that time when not so many people were away. In general, our students are not bad students. I do not want to overemphasize it, but it seems to me that there is a certain kind of indifference here. Indifference was not so prominent when the teachers had more to do. Since the teachers have had some relief, a kind of indifference has arisen.

There must be some reason factions arise. People are talking about causality, that is, cause and effect. In the world around us, the effects arise from their causes, but here in Stuttgart, the effects arise from no cause at all. There are no causes here, and if you want a cause, there is none. If you try to pin someone down to a cause, that person would give a personal explanation, but you cannot find the cause.

The effects are devastating. We have seen what they are. Due to the Stuttgart attitude, we have here an absolute contradiction of the law of causality. The reasons actually exist, but they are continually disputed so that no one becomes aware of them. We always have effects, but the causes are explained away. If you multiply zero by five, you still have nothing, and I would certainly like to know what value nothing has.

Comments concerning the Pedagogical Youth Conference held October 3 through 15 in Stuttgart.

Dr. Steiner: Had I come here and heard that all these young people are barging in and then not going away, I think I would have seen that was a situation that would have called for some words to slow it down. But, on a particular occasion when I asked why Y. was not here, I was told that people did not think there was any reason he should be here.

I do not intend to make the slightest accusation in that regard, and even if we discussed it further, there would be no reasons for it. The really sad thing about this Stuttgart attitude is that there are effects that have no causes.

You will not readily admit that you do not properly consider the matter if you say they have no trust. On the contrary, we must ask why we have not achieved what is right so that they would have had a more reasonable trust than presently exists? Many things have been neglected. The question for us is how can we win people’s trust. You have simply done nothing to allow a positive cooperation to occur. People have no reason to be distrusting. Things have not gone so far that the question could have been discussed even at a feeling level. The question did not even arise. The young people do not even notice you were there, they did not notice the spirits on top of the mountain. Had someone told me that Y. was difficult to get along with, I would have had a reason, but they said that they had not even thought about it.

The result is not that young people have no trust, but that they are given no opportunity to develop it. The great masters on the mountain are simply not there. People did not know you were there. They did not know that there was a Union for Independent Cultural Life.

A teacher: X. is among those who did not want to know that such a union exists.

Dr. Steiner: That is an effect. People would have found a way, but no one did anything to help them.

It is not good to fall into this Stuttgart attitude. I would like to see that you take the lack of cause more seriously in the future. This is a serious thing, as otherwise it will really be too late to get the situation under control.

[ 1 ] It was said by critics of this book immediately after its publication that it does not give a picture of Goethe's “world-conception” but only of his “conception of Nature.” I do not think that this judgment has proceeded from a justifiable point of view, although, externally considered, the book is almost exclusively concerned with Goethe's ideas of Nature. In the course of what has been said, I think I have shown that these ideas of Nature are based upon a specific mode of observation of world phenomena. I think I have indicated in the book itself that the adoption of a point of view such as Goethe possessed in regard to natural phenomena can lead to definite views on psychological, historical and still wider phenomena. That which is expressed in Goethe's conception of Nature in a particular sphere, is indeed a world-conception and not a mere conception of Nature such as might well be possessed by a personality whose thoughts had no significance for a wider world-picture. On the other hand, moreover, I thought that in this book I ought only to present what may be said in immediate connection with the region that Goethe himself developed from out of the whole compass of his world-conception. To draw a picture of the world revealed in Goethe's poems, in his ideas on the history of Art, and so on, would of course be quite possible, and indubitably of the greatest interest. But those who take the character of the book into consideration will not look for such a world-picture therein. They will realise that I have set myself the task of sketching that portion of Goethe's world-picture for which the data exist in his own writings, the one proceeding consecutively from the others. I have indicated in many places the points at which Goethe came to a standstill in this consecutive development of the world-picture which he was able to present in regard to certain realms of Nature. Goethe's views of the world and of life reveal themselves in a very wide compass. The emergence of these views from out of his own original world-conception is not, however, so evident from his works in the sphere of natural phenomena as it is here. In other spheres, all that Goethe's soul had to reveal to the world becomes clear; in the domain of his ideas of Nature it becomes evident how the fundamental trend of his spirit won for itself, step by step, a view of the world up to a certain boundary. Precisely by going no further in the portrayal of Goethe's thought-activity than the elaboration of a self-contained fragment of world-conception, one will gain enlightenment as to the special colouring of what is revealed in the rest of his life's work. Therefore it was not my aim to portray the world-picture that emerges from Goethe's life-work as a whole, but rather that part of it which in his case comes to light in the form in which one brings a world-conception to expression in thought. It does not necessarily follow that views originating from a personality, however great, are parts of a world-view complete in itself and connected directly with the personality. Goethe's ideas of Nature are, however, such a self-contained fragment of a world-picture. And as an elucidation of natural phenomena they do not represent merely a view of Nature; they are an integral part of a world-conception.

[ 2 ] It does not surprise me that I should have been accused of a change of views since the publication of this book, for I am not unfamiliar with the presuppositions which lead one to such a judgment. I have spoken about this endeavour to find contradictions in my writings in the Preface to the first volume of my Riddles of Philosophy and in an essay in the journal Das Reich, Vol. II. (Spiritual Science as Anthroposophy and the contemporary Theory of Knowledge). Such an endeavour is only possible among critics who wholly fail to understand the course which my world-conception is bound to take when it wishes to consider different regions of life. I do not propose to enter into this question here again but to confine myself to certain brief remarks in reference to this book on Goethe. In the Anthroposophical Spiritual Science that I have presented in my writings for the past sixteen years, I myself see that mode of cognition for the spiritual world-content accessible to man, to which one must come who has brought to life within his soul Goethe's ideas of Nature as something with which he is in accord, and with this as his starting-point, strives to experience in cognition the spiritual region of the world. I am of opinion that this Spiritual Science presupposes a Natural Science corresponding to that of Goethe. I do not only mean that the Spiritual Science which I have presented does not contradict this Natural Science. For I know that the mere fact of there being no logical contradiction between two different statements means very little. They may none the less be wholly irreconcilable in reality. But I believe that Goethe's ideas in reference to the realm of Nature, when they are actually experienced, must necessarily lead to the Anthroposophical truths that I have set forth when man leads over his experiences in the realm of Nature to experiences in the realm of spirit. Goethe has not done this. The mode and nature of these latter experiences are described in my spiritual-scientific works. For this reason, the essential content of this book, which was published for the first time in 1897, has been reprinted again to-day, as my exposition of the Goethean world-conception, after the publication of my writings on Spiritual Science. All the thoughts presented here hold good for me to-day in unchanged form. In isolated places only have I introduced slight alterations and they have nothing to do with the form of the thoughts but merely with the wording of certain passages. And it is perhaps understandable that after twenty years one would like here and there to make certain changes in the style of a book. The new edition differs from the first only in certain extensions that have been made, not in alterations of content. I believe that a man who is looking for a scientific basis for Spiritual Science can discover it through Goethe's world-conception. Therefore it seems to me that a work on Goethe's world-conception may also be of service to those who wish to concern themselves with Anthroposophical Spiritual Science. My book, however, is written as a study of Goethe's world-conception per se, without reference to Spiritual Science proper. In my book Goethe's Standard of the Soul: as illustrated in Faust and in the Fairy Story of the Green Snake and the Beautiful Lily ¹ will be found something of what may be said about Goethe from the specially spiritual-scientific point of view.

[ 3 ] Supplementary Note: A critic of this book (Kantstudium III, 1898), thought he was making a special discovery with regard to my “contradictions” by comparing what I say about Platonism (in the first edition, 1897) with what I said practically at the same time in my Introduction to Vol. IV of Goethe's Natural Scientific Works (Kürschner): “Plato's philosophy is one of the most sublime thought-edifices that have ever emanated from the mind of man. It is one of the saddest signs of our age that the Platonic mode of perception is regarded in philosophy as the opposite of sound reason.” Certain minds will find it difficult to understand that when looked at from different angles, every single thing reveals itself differently. The fact that my different utterances about Platonism do not represent real contradictions will be evident to those who do not stop at the mere sound of the words, but who penetrate into the different connections in which Platonism in its essential nature impelled me to bring it at one time or another. It is on the one hand a sad sign when Platonism is held to be contradictory to healthy reason, because it is thought that to remain stationary at pure sense-perception as the only reality alone conforms to this healthy reason. And it is also contradictory to a healthy perception of idea and sense-world when Platonism is applied in such a way that it brings about an unsound separation of idea and sense-perception. Those who cannot bring themselves to penetrate the phenomena of life with thought in this sense will always remain, together with what they apprehend, outside of reality. Those who—speaking in the Goethean sense—set up a concept in order to circumscribe a rich life-content do not understand that life unfolds in relationships that operate differently in different directions. It is naturally more convenient to substitute a schematic concept for a view of life in its entirety; with such concepts one can easily judge schematically. Through such a procedure, however, one lives in lifeless abstractions. Human concepts become abstractions for the very reason that man imagines he can manipulate these concepts in his intellect in the same way as objects manipulate each other. These concepts are, however, more comparable to pictures that man receives from different sides of the same object. The object is one, the pictures many. What leads to a real perception of the object is not concentration upon a single picture but the bringing together of many. Unfortunately I have had to recognise how great the tendency is among many critics to construe “contradictions” from what is really observation of a phenomenon from different points of view—a mode of observation that strives to be permeated with reality. For this reason I felt obliged by a slight alteration of style in this new edition first to make still clearer in my remarks concerning Platonism what I thought was clear enough twenty years ago in the first edition; secondly, to show by direct quotation from my other work in juxtaposition to what is said in this book, the complete harmony that exists between the two utterances. However, if there is anyone who still thinks he can discover contradictions in these matters I have thereby spared him the trouble of having to collect them from two books.

• 1. Anthroposophical Publishing Company, 46 Gloucester Place, London, W.1. Price 2/6.

‘A translation has to be made out of the spirit of the language of the country just as if the respective book were written in this language’ (R. Steiner, Soul Economy and Waldorf Education, Lecture 14, 5.1.22, GA303 [RSP/AP 1986]).

With this sentence, Steiner encapsulates the translator's ideal. It is echoed by Gerald Vann: ‘Translation must always of course be a rendering not of word for word but of idea for idea; to be content to transliterate is merely illiterate’ (G. Vann, ‘Translator's Note to Teilhard de Chardin, Hymn of the Universe [Collins, London 1965]). I do not think any translator believes a fixed ‘fundamentalist’ view concerning Steiner's terms is a tenable position. Words with Teutonic roots are not automatically holy or accurate, whoever the author might be. Nor does anybody claim pommes de terre has anything to do with apples! We have all heard of ‘anthrospeak’, that habit of jargonizing which we try to avoid in serious discourse. We all know that language is a living reality, and we try to be sensitive to its development.

These remarks arise from a perception that general awareness of our use of language is not as precise as it might be, that several factors are involved, and that a translator of a text on music inherits a difficult and controversial situation from which, nevertheless, I am convinced much good can result. Questions of terminology began to be aired at last in the Newsletter of the Association of Eurythmists in the United Kingdom and the Republic of Ireland, Aberdeen, Winter 1993. Potential critics may care to know that the aims expressed in Anna Meuss' article ‘Translating Rudolf Steiner's lectures’ (in Anthroposophy Today No. 20, RSP Autumn 1993) match my own. Most translators working in English owe much to her example. With the question of spelling and what to italicize, I have followed The Oxford Dictionary for Writers and Editors (1991). The few alternative American musical terms are included in brackets.

The course of lectures on music eurythmy translated here was held in February, 1924, for an audience of eurythmists and musicians. It represents the greatest of Steiner's contributions to music, and should interest all artists. Other lecture courses were planned, including one for musicians, but Steiner's death in 1925 prevented this. Nevertheless a rich fund of insights was offered with which artists can begin working: the lectures published under the title Das Wesen des Musikalischen GA283, most of which are published in The Inner Nature of Music and the Experience of Tone (AP 1983), also Art as seen in the Light of Mystery Wisdom GA275 (AP 1984), and The Arts and their Mission GA276 (AP 1964). Lea van der Pals, a leading eurythmist in Dornach, has achieved a creative synthesis of what Steiner gave on the subject in her book, The Human Being as Music (The Robinswood Press, Stourbridge 1992).

Eurythmie als Sichtbarer Gesang GA278, was first published in English as Eurythmy as Visible Song in 1932. In the second edition (1977) this title was changed to Eurythmy as Visible Music, presumably on the grounds that eurythmy is not practised with singers (for reasons Steiner gives in Lecture 7 below). However, the original designation sichtbarer Gesang is unusual in German, too. The literal translation ‘visible singing’ is what Steiner had in mind, more active than either ‘visible music’ or ‘visible song’. (Steiner sometimes said sichtbares Singen, ‘visible singing’ [14.2.20 in GA277 and Tb642, and in the essay ‘Das Goetheanum ...’ IV, 1924 in GA36 and Tb635, p. 142]; and in Lecture 6, in connection with instrumental music, he said Gesangseurythmie—‘a singing eurythmy’.) Gesang is translated as ‘singing’ because it points to three central issues:

(1) the human being as creative source of music;

(2) the origin of all instrumental music in singing, intrinsically and historically;

(3) the possibility of expressing this human essence in artistic movement.

Steiner sums it up: ‘Eurythmy is a singing through movement; it is singing. It is not dancing; it is not mime’ (Lecture 7; see GA277, p. 337 too). Ralph Kux explains: The eurythmic artist ... perceives instrumental music through the ear and straight away transforms it into an inwardly heard singing, and fashions this singing into visible movement. Consequently we can speak of a “visible singing” and not of a “visible music” ’ (R. Kux, Erinnerungen an Rudolf Steiner, Mellinger Verlag [Stuttgart 1976], p. 52; translation A. S.).

It also seems reasonable that a conscientious translator should be consistent in following the use of one of the main branches of the English language. Clarity of meaning is thereby encouraged. As this translation aims, in the first place, for accuracy in English as it is used in Britain, we should clarify three words. The German Ton means ‘sound’, more specifically ‘musical sound’, and ‘note’. In the USA the term ‘tone’ might cover some, but not all, of the uses: both English and American musicians sing and play ‘notes’. To British musicians, the word ‘tone’ denotes a major second; it also refers to the quality of sound. Interestingly, Shakespeare's Titania begs, ‘I pray you gentle mortal, sing again / Mine ear is much enamoured of thy note’; Don Pedro advises: ‘do it in notes’. Steiner, too, sometimes uses Note and Noten in his lectures. Eurythmy employs sound as its raw material: Laut—speech sound, Ton—musical sound. For Lauteurythmie we rightly say ‘speech eurythmy’, and for Toneurythmie, logically ‘music eurythmy’. This term suggests itself as one which avoids misunderstanding and consequently one which could be internationally acceptable. But it may genuinely not be desirable to have an ‘internationally acceptable’ term.

Incidentally, Steiner uses the expressions musikalische Eurythmie (‘musical eurythmy’) and musikalisches Eurythmisieren (literally ‘musical eurythmizing’) in Lecture 5; musikalische Eurythmisierende (‘the person engaged in music eurythmy’) in Lecture 6, and Musikgebärde (‘gestures of music [eurythmy]’) in Lecture 1. Owen Barfield, in his article ‘The Art of Eurythmy’, in The Golden Blade (London 1954), speaks of ‘speech eurythmy’, ‘musical eurythmy’, and simply ‘eurythmy’.

The Romance languages use the words ‘music’ and ‘musical’: eurythmie musicale (French), euritmia musicale (Italian), eurythmia da musica (Portuguese), eurythmia de la musica (Spanish). Hebrew possesses only one word for both musical and speech sound (tzlil), and so uses ‘music’ too: oritmia im-musica. Eastern Europe uses the word ‘musical’, for example: muzikalaija evritmija (Russian), musikalna evritmia (Bulgarian). The Japanese, too, use their equivalent word for ‘music’. Since this translation uses English as it is spoken in Britain, Ton is translated as ‘sound’, ‘musical sound’ and ‘note’ according to the context. Here, as in general, I have been guided by the Oxford Dictionary of Music (1985) and The New Oxford Companion to Music (1983), The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians (1980), and Collins Encyclopaedia of Music (1976). Those who feel they are closer to the Teutonic tradition, and who prefer the earlier terms ‘tone’ and ‘tone-eurythmy’ that have been hallowed by use, will realize that these terms sound like jargon, at least in Britain. It should also be said that the modern meaning of the word ‘tone’ for acoustics and electronics, for example, as implied in ‘a musical note, without its harmonics’ (from the first sentence of the entry ‘Tone’ in The International Cyclopaedia of Music and Musicians, ed. Oscar Thompson [Dodd, Mead and Co, New York and Toronto / Dent, London; 10th edition 1975], p. 2293), is the opposite of what Steiner means by Ton. However, I have been asked to retain the term ‘tone eurythmy’ in the lectures.

Eurythmists, Steiner explains, have to ‘raise’ their bodies ‘through work’, so that their bodies (their instruments) can appear as if moving in the etheric realm. Translators, similarly, have to ‘raise’ their thinking. In fact, anyone who manages to do this can ‘approach [the archangel] Michael’ (lecture 13.1.24 in GA233a). ‘Christology,’ Steiner says elsewhere (Lecture 1.8.15), ‘has nothing to do with any division of man and mankind.’ But he does emphasize that realization comes only from within. The ‘raising’ mentioned above is also attempted by all those who have contributed their labour of love to the present work. No translation, of course, can claim to be ‘perfect’. Even were this translation good, it could still be better. Any comments in this direction that would assist preparation for the day when a fourth edition is needed, will be appreciated. Endnote numbers in square brackets refer to the section ‘Notes to the Lectures’ in the companion volume to the present lectures. This companion volume also contains eight Appendices on specific subjects.

Eurythmists will be for ever grateful to Marie Steiner for her incalculable contribution to eurythmy. Her main concern, however, was the speech work. Her synopsis of the present lectures which appeared in the first edition (Eurythmy as Visible Song) even contains an occasional misleading statement. Her original titles for these lectures have been slightly revised here. This third edition of Eurythmy as Visible Singing is planned to appear during the bicentenary of Schiller's Aesthetic Letters (1794) and the centenary of Steiner's own The Philosophy of Freedom (1894). Both books are recommended by Steiner for eurythmy students. What worthier companions could be imagined for the present lecture course, which is an attempt to blaze a trail between naturalism and abstraction in art, in order to get beyond materialism? May this edition, planned to appear in 1994 (seventy years after the lectures were held), encourage a further step in bringing about that which Goethe called ‘Nature's worthiest exponent, Art’.

Dear Attendees!

The momentous events in which the German nation finds itself justify my speaking, as I have done for many years in other German cities, about subjects related to spiritual science. This year, as in the past, last year, I shall not speak about a narrow subject of spiritual science itself, but about something that is intimately connected with the spiritual life of the German people, with that which is suitable to reveal something about the position of the German people within the overall development of humanity.

If I do this, it is certainly not to give expression to mere emotional views, which are particularly close to the soul in these difficult but also, in a certain sense, hopeful times, but because it is not based on dark feelings and perceptions , but rather, as I believe, on real facts, cognitive facts, well-founded conviction, that what has always been characterized here as spiritual science, that it is rooted in the innermost depths of precisely those expressions of German intellectual life that we can count among the peaks of that intellectual life.

We have no need, dearest ones present, as Germans in the present, to express our feelings and thoughts by denigrating and even slanderously distorting, before all things – as it is also done by the most outstanding personalities in the ranks of our enemies – that which what is outside of German life - as it is done from the other side in relation to the German essence - but we can look at it from a purely factual point of view, based on the German national character.

It should be mentioned briefly in the introduction that spiritual science, as it is meant here, is based on the fact that it is possible, from within the human soul – through processes of the soul's life, which have been described here in this city many times and which can also be found in our literature can be found in our literature, that it is possible to develop such powers in the human soul that lead a person to an understanding of that which is not exhausted in the time between birth and death, but which goes through births and deaths and represents the eternal, the immortal essence of man. That such a deepening of the soul life is possible, and such a strengthening of the powers of the soul life, that the human being becomes aware within himself within his physical body that which has shaped this physical body out of the spiritual world and which, when the human being passes through the passes through the gate of death, returns to the spiritual world, that such knowledge is possible, and that such knowledge must gradually be incorporated into the spiritual life of humanity in our time, that is the spiritual-scientific conviction as it is meant here.

And this spiritual-scientific conviction, which – as I believe – is true spiritual science, is contained in the most beautiful and meaningful striving of the German people.

Now, precisely one objection could be raised: it is supposed to be about spiritual science, about that which gives the mind a similar knowledge to that of natural science for external nature, so it is supposed to be about a science. People who stand at a certain point of superficiality will immediately object: Yes, science is something completely international!

This objection is so overwhelming for many because it is so endlessly superficial. One could say: superficial to the point of being taken for granted; because the moon, for example, is also common to all peoples internationally. But what the individual peoples have to say about the moon, what struggles out of their souls to characterize the moon, that differs from people to people. And if one could also say that this is limited to poetry, then the one who is not merely a scientist, who sees in science not only that which is a description of external things in the most external way, but also that which one can know about things , emerges from the foundations, from the basic forces and basic drives of the human being, and is individual, as the human souls themselves are individual, that is to say: that is why they are shaped so differently, depending on the way in which the individual peoples are predisposed to knowledge of the world. But these predispositions, these inner impulses of the individual people, are what carries humanity forward – not what can be described as “international” in a superficial sense that takes for granted everything that has gone before.

If we want to characterize the German quest for knowledge, what immediately comes to mind are three figures, three great figures, which should only be mentioned in the introduction to today's discussion. But the development of German thought rests on the ground they prepared. These three figures are perhaps not often mentioned in the general German nation today. But that is not important. What is important is that these three figures are difficult to understand in what they created, but that these three figures will nevertheless play an ever greater and greater role in the development of German intellectual life in the future. And these three figures are: Fichte, Schelling, Hegel – the three figures who, as world-view thinkers, formed an enormous background, [who] from the depths of German nationality provided that from which the great creations of German intellectual life also flowed, which we encounter in Goethe, Herder, Lessing, Schiller, and which, after Greek culture, represented a greatest cultural flowering in the development of humanity.

Fichte, Johann Gottlieb Fichte, what do we see before us? He who only appears to be a difficult philosopher to understand, who rather felt that what he had to give as so-called philosophy is really, in the highest sense, the result of a dialogue that he himself held with the German national spirit. And when we approach Fichte, what does he show us?

He shows us how a personality rooted in the essence of Germanness, in its quest for knowledge, starts from the premise that the human soul itself has something through which it can grasp and inwardly see that which lives and weaves through the world as spiritual and divine in its own inner experience.

In terms of the power with which this came to expression in Fichte's soul, one might say that Fichte stands almost completely alone in the history of human development. Fichte tried to get into his own soul what pulsates and lives and weaves through the world. He was clear about the fact that one could not get to that point, [to experiencing in one's own experience what pervades the world as its fundamental essence, divinely and spiritually], through external observation, [not] through the senses, nor through the mind that is bound to the brain, but only by invoking the soul's deep, hidden powers. And in this he shows a fundamental disposition of the German character: this growing together in the innermost part of the soul with the secrets of the world, this not being able to be satisfied otherwise than by experiencing in the innermost part of the soul what spreads in the great, wide universe as the most hidden, the most mysterious.

One need only recall a few details about this Johann Gottlieb Fichte, which I will mention because they are so characteristic of a figure like Fichte, and one will see how we have to revere in him a personality who, by virtue of his innermost disposition, must seek to give himself completely with his soul to that which he can call experiencing the mystery of the world. Fichte, the son of very simple people, from a simple Saxon village, is seven years old; he was already at school and was a good schoolboy. As a reward, he received a book from his father for Christmas when he turned seven: 'Gehörnte Siegfried' (The Horned Siegfried). After a while, it became apparent that he, who had previously been very eager to learn, was becoming careless about his studies. This was pointed out to him. One day, his father meets him standing by the stream that flows past the simple house: “Der gehörnte Siegfried”, which the boy had thrown into the stream, is floating in it.

An extremely characteristic trait for seven-year-old Johann Gottlieb Fichte. What had passed through his soul? What had passed through his soul was that he said to himself: I have neglected my duty by taking an almost irrepressible interest in this great, powerful material of Siegfried; but duty is what must come before everything else. That is why the book is thrown into the water! To live up to his duty.

And another example: our Johann Gottlieb Fichte is nine years old; the neighboring landowner comes to the simple village one Sunday to listen to the pastor's sermon. He comes too late. The landowner is very sorry that he was unable to hear the village pastor's sermon. Then one reflects and realizes that there is a nine-year-old boy who remembers well what the pastor said in his sermon. They call the nine-year-old Johann Gottlieb Fichte; he steps forward, awkwardly, in his blue peasant's smock; but soon he gets into the rendition, so that he repeats the entire sermon with heartfelt sympathy for the neighboring estate owner – not from a dead memory, but he repeats it because his soul has grown together with what he heard and what then tinged his ear to his soul.

This is what is characteristic of this growing together of Fichte's own soul with that which is experienced. And so this develops more and more in Fichte, so that in the end the whole universe is pulsating with will. The world will, the divine world will, it weaves and lives through all spaces and through all times, it sends its currents into the soul weaving of the human being.

And when this weaving of the soul has been completely surrendered, then the soul experiences within itself a stream of the infinite world-will. Then one is united with that which pulsates through the world as Divine-Spiritual. Then one is borne by that which flows as the world-duty on the waves of the will, which shines into our soul and which is the highest that Fichte sought to grasp. Thus, his world view arises from the innermost essence of his personal character. This is the most German thing, to seek out the most personal and the most objective. Fichte is not seeking some soul essence that can be proven, but rather a soul essence that continually participates in the divine-spiritual creative power of the world, so that it can create itself in every moment. And in this inner creativity, which rests in the divine-creative, lies for Fichte the guarantee of the eternal, which goes through births and deaths and which lives in the spiritual world even after the human being has passed through the gate of death.

In his beautiful speeches in Berlin in 1806, which he calls “Instructions for a blessed life”, Fichte says of what flows from the eternal duty of the divine power into the soul of man, in Berlin in 1806, which he calls “Instructions for a blessed life” - of which Fichte says: People talk about the fact that the immortal essence of man only comes into its own after death. The one who really gets to know the soul knows that immortality can be grasped directly in life within this body; and that is why he is immediately certain that - even if this body disintegrates into its elements - that which is grasped within it through real knowledge goes through the gate of death into the spiritual world.

But Fichte is also convinced that the eternal spirit must be grasped in the most intimate inner self at the same time. Therefore, as a teacher at the then-famous University of Jena – because it was the home of the greatest German men – he is fundamentally quite different from any other teacher. He does not teach in order to impart a certain content, a certain set of propositions to his students, but prepares himself in such a way that what he has to teach is first an inner life in his soul, so that he experiences what he wants to let flow into the souls of his listeners.

One listener who understood him well once said beautifully: Fichte's speech rushes along like a thunderstorm. What he had to say in words escaped him as if in a raging thunderstorm. It is clear that he does not just want to educate good people, he wants to educate great souls. Therefore, his endeavor was not just to communicate something to people, but to let something pass into them, so that these souls became something else when they left than they were when they entered the lecture hall. And more and more he referred to the power of the soul, to the strength that lies within the human being, which is beautifully demonstrated in the following sentence. In his lectures, there was always a striving for the direct coexistence of one's own soul life with that of the audience, which he sought to achieve through such beautiful things as this one, for example. An audience member, the naturalist Steffens, described it like this. In the course of his lecture, Fichte called upon the audience: “Think of the wall!” So they thought of the wall. He let this happen for a while – so said the man, Steffens. “And now think of the one who thought of the wall!” [was Fichte's next prompt].

There the human being was referred to himself. There the listeners were taken aback at first; they could not grasp it immediately. But it was the way to refer the human being to his own soul, as to the power that can arise from it, in order to live together with the divine-spiritual powers of the world.

And so there he stands, this Johann Gottlieb Fichte, truly such that enthusiastic listeners could say of him: He lives in the realm of concepts as if in a transcendental world; but in such a way that he not only dwells in this transcendental world, but also rules over this transcendental world. And Fichte was aware that what lived in his soul had been in intimate dialogue with the spirit of the German people itself.

In saying this, I am not characterizing something out of national narrow-mindedness, but rather something that Fichte experienced directly as his perception, and through which he was able to have such a great, such a significant and supportive effect on this German nation in one of the most difficult times for the German people.

One need only compare what it means that a worldview like Fichte's could arise from a particular nationality with what is the pinnacle of the Romance worldview, a worldview that in turn arose entirely from the essence of the French national spirit. At the beginning of the seventeenth century, we have the French philosopher – one of the greatest and precisely one of those who most strikingly characterizes French nationality: Descartes or Cartesius.

He also started from what lives in the human soul. He can therefore be compared favorably with Fichte. His “I think, therefore I am,” the “Cogito ergo sum,” has become famous. But what does it consist of, what he says: “I think, therefore I am. - Cogito ergo sum”? – By the fact that the thought lives in me, I can prove that I remain myself. That which lives in the soul is revealed, it is proved by a logical conclusion. Fichte wants to grasp it in direct life, that is the distinguishing feature. This extends to the broadest aspects of the world view. You can see this from a single detail.

Dear attendees, you see, Descartes, who creates out of French folklore, comes to form a view of the world. What is this view? Yes, this view is this, that – I have to pick out one example because we don't have much time to characterize everything in detail – that he comes to see not only the external nature as one – one might say soulless, but that he also sees the animals as a soulless world. Only humans have a soul because they can experience it inwardly within themselves. Thus Descartes says: animals are no more than moving machines.

This then continued to have an effect on the French world view well into the eighteenth century, when man was also made into a machine. When this world view then confronted Goethe, Goethe, out of his German consciousness, said: Yes, they offer us a world view in which the whole world is a machine, nothing but atoms and molecules bumping into each other. And if they could at least explain to you how the beautiful, glorious world comes from this mechanical pushing, then one could still be interested in such an undertaking. But they simply put the world machine in place without explaining anything about it. That was Goethe's objection to what comes from the French West as a mechanistic worldview.

However, Fichte's view can be compared with this, which wants to immerse itself in every single creature and being, to live with everything, in order to recognize the will, the divine will in everything. This immersion in the world of beings is German.

This confronting, only seeing soul in oneself, making everything a machine - [that is not spoken out of national narrow-mindedness] - that is the French way of doing things, for example.

Now we are looking at Fichte's world view from a different perspective. For him, that which is only revealed to the senses is what he called: a material field for the fulfillment of duty. Everything that is not divine spiritual will, which weaves and lives through all beings, that which only presents itself to the senses, that is, as Fichte says, material material for duty to have an object on which it can exercise itself. That is the great thing that Fichte wants to experience – the spiritual in his own soul – and that he brings to the world, experiencing this spiritual in his own soul also from the other things.

Let us compare this with what emerges, for example, within the English world view, insofar as this English world view has emerged entirely from English nationality. Of course, it is not the individual who is meant; the individual can always rise above his nation; but what is meant is that which is connected with nationality. We see that not only in older times the world view of Bacon of Verulam is based merely on the useful, merely on that which presents itself externally to the senses, for which the spirit, which experiences in itself, stands only as bands that bind together so that the spirit can find its way. There the spirit is only the means to bring the external sense into a system. There is no co-experiencing with what lives as spiritual in all sensuality. And that has been preserved until today. We see pragmatism at work there. For pragmatism is a word for something that, placed next to the Spruce worldview, really looks like darkness next to light.

What is pragmatism? For pragmatism, there is not a truth for its own sake – truth that is sought so that one experiences it as truth in the soul – but the truth: Now, that is something that man forms as a concept, as an idea, so that he can find his way in the outside world. So man forms the concept of the “uniform soul”; but he does not want that in his soul, which is something like soul unity, but because man shows different expressions of his being, does this and does that. And one finds one's way around by assuming a concept like “uniform soul”. It is useful for holding together external, sensory things, for inventing something like truth. Truth only exists because it allows us to orient ourselves in sensory things. And in that which can be experienced at all, truth has no independent meaning.

The opposite is the case in Fichte's quest for a worldview. What is external and sensual is certainly not underestimated; we are not dealing with a false, world-alien knowledge. But we are dealing with a desire for the soul to grow together with the world spirit and with an assertion of truth, which is experienced in the spirit as the most original, living and breathing in the world. For Fichte, things are there to reveal the world, not as they are for the pragmatists as the only reality; while that which is called truth is only there to have such bindings and brackets with which to summarize the externally coincident sense world so that the mind can comfortably survey it.

I am not exaggerating, that is how things are! And so Fichte, in developing this view more and more, stands in 1811, 1813, before his Berlin students and tells them that anyone who wants to penetrate the world must look to the spirit. He speaks of a new spiritual sense – Fichte – and means by this that this sense can be developed, that when one speaks of the experiences of this sense, it is really, in the face of people who do not want to admit it, as if a single seer were speaking among a crowd of blind people! But Fichte strives to achieve in the human being that which directly connects the soul with the spiritual world. And from this he also draws the strength that is so profoundly evident in his “Speeches to the German Nation” at one of the most difficult times for the German people, through which he wanted to pour supporting forces into the future of the German people, into their souls.

One can only characterize this extraordinary personality in these few words because of the shortness of the time! The even lesser known Joseph Wilhelm Schelling then stands there as his follower. But precisely this shows the infinite versatility of the German nature: that Schelling, too, wants to arrive at a world picture through the soul's living together with the secrets of the world, but — I would like to say — through completely different soul forces. While Fichte is the powerful man who wants to experience the will in himself and, in his own will, creates the world will, the eternal world will. Schelling creates out of the soul. And through this out-of-the-mind-creation, a world picture arises for him, through which nature and spiritual life grow together wonderfully. Even if it is difficult to read today what Schelling created - it is not at all important that one accepts the content, but the striving - even if it is difficult to read: one does not have to accept it like a teaching, in relation to which one must become a follower or an opponent. Look at people who have striven in this way – who have striven from the very heart of the German national character. Schelling strove to penetrate into every single being; to experience that which works within the being as a spiritual being. In this way, nature became for him a physiognomic expression of the spirit. And the spirit was that which built itself on the soil of nature. Just as the present human soul is built on the basis of its memories, so, in Schelling's sense, man felt himself to be facing nature with his spirit, as if he had lived through all times, but had left nature behind. And as he now looks at it, it offers him the memory of what he had previously created unconsciously, so that the ground for his consciousness could then be there. In this way, soul and nature grow together in Schelling.

While Fichte had to be characterized by his contemporaries as the one who, above all, stood before them in German power, those who listened to Schelling, and who appreciate him, characterized him as a seer, as a personality who, when he spoke, was surrounded by what immediately showed that he was shaping words while his mind looked into a completely different world.

Perhaps I may read such a word of a student and friend of Schelling, because it shows more than anything else how Schelling was seen by those who knew him. Even as a young man in Jena, Schelling had such an effect that the young men around him were immediately convinced that he not only had something to tell them that would immediately ignite their souls, but that, as he spoke, his spirit lived in the spiritual world and he spoke from within it. That is why Gotthilf Heinrich Schubert, a man who himself tried to descend into the spiritual depths of the human soul, says the following. He characterizes Schelling as follows:

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

No, Schubert believes, it was not only that.

“There was a compelling power in his lively words, which, wherever it met with even a little receptivity, none of the young souls could resist. It might be difficult for a reader of our time,”

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

"who, unlike me, was not a youthfully participating listener, to make it understandable how it often felt to me when Schelling spoke to us, as if I were reading and hearing Dante, the seer of a world beyond that was only open to the consecrated eye. The mighty content, which lay in his speech, as if measured with mathematical precision in the lapidary style, seemed to me like a bound Prometheus, whose bonds to dissolve and from whose hand to receive the unquenchable fire, is the task of the understanding mind."

So it was once possible, esteemed attendees, to speak to the German people in such a way that it made this impression, from the spiritual world, that it could make this impression!

Those who knew Schelling, and I myself knew people who still heard him in his old age, say that what he had to communicate was effective simply through the glance of his eyes, which still burned in his old age; so that one saw: it is the personality itself that wants to grow together with the world by giving a world-view.

And the third of those who, coming from the depths of the German folk-soul, wanted to penetrate to a Weltanschhauung, is Hegel. Hegel, from whom those who do not want to make any effort when they are to absorb something flee at the first sentences - Hegel, what did he want?

Schelling tried to create a world picture through the German soul. To penetrate into the spirit and the spiritual worlds through the will: Fichte. Through that which thought is, through the pure thought that lives in the soul when this soul does not turn its eye to the outer world of the senses, does not want to devote itself to the outer world of the senses with the mere intellect, through that which lives as pure, crystal-clear thought in the soul, Hegel tried to grow together in his own soul with that which is at work in the world. So that he says: When I think the thought purely, when I give myself to the life of thought, to the life of thought free of sensuality, in my own soul, then it is no longer my own arbitrary thoughts that live in the thoughts that live in the soul, but they are the thoughts that the divinity itself is in its soul. Then that which is light and illuminates the whole world ignites a little flame in one's own soul, and through this little flame the soul grows intellectually together with the world spirit. The soul rests in the world thought. In the German way, there is a striving for that which can be called mystical, but not a mysticism that revels and wants to revel in dark, confused feelings, but a mysticism that, while emotionally striving for what all mysticism strives for - a living together of one's own soul with the secrets of the world - does so on the basis of crystal-clear thinking.

And this, in turn, is something characteristic of the German character: that the highest is striven for in all-spiritual clarity, not in confused, chaotic feelings. This is the world view that is in the background and from which it has also grown – from the same mother soil – from which Goethe's “Faust” and the other great works of art and literature of that time have grown, they too have grown from this same soil, as it were. And Goethe basically stands on this same soil.

And Goethe says – in contrast to Kant – in a small, beautiful essay on “Contemplative Judgment,” he expresses how he strives for a knowledge that has indeed resounded within the soul, but which is an immediate revelation of that which is to develop out of it in the world. The soul does not limit itself to merely looking at the external world of the senses and judging it; but when the soul withdraws into itself, then something should awaken in this soul, so that the judging power itself becomes a contemplation - so that one learns to see spiritually.

Goethe speaks of spiritual eyes and spiritual ears, which look directly into the spiritual, just as the physical eyes and ears look directly into the physical world. This permeates the Goethean soul.

And Fichte could rightly say when he published his seemingly quite abstract trains of thought in 1794, he could write to Goethe:

[“Philosophy has not yet reached its goal, as the results of reflective abstraction do not yet nestle against the purest spirituality of feeling. I regard you, and have always regarded you, as the representative of the latter at the present level of humanity. Philosophy rightly turns to you. Your feeling is the same touchstone.”]

There is a close harmony between what has emerged as the greatest, also in a poetic sense, from German intellectual life, and what lives in the background as a world view. Even if, in the period that followed, simply because the height of the outlook was simply astounding, something else came to the surface within the development of German thought than a pure continuation of the powerful thoughts of Fichte, Schelling and Hegel, these thoughts are, after all, what lies at the depths of the German essence, what will continue to develop, has also continued to develop, as we shall see shortly, and what must lead to the most beautiful blossoms and fruits of the German essence.

When we call to mind the spirits of Fichte, Schelling and Hegel, we see that they reveal from three different sides what can be gained from a different kind of dialogue with the German national spirit. But behind them, as if invisible, is the German national spirit itself. And one expresses more than a mere image when one says: like a shade of the German national spirit itself, what comes to the surface through Fichte, Schelling and Hegel is like a shade of that which the German national spirit itself expresses. And behind that, one senses what passes through the currents of German intellectual life as an even more powerful wave.

Hence the peculiar phenomenon can occur that the great minds of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries were followed by lesser minds, who were less talented and who, in a certain way, sought to present that which had passed through German intellectual development as an aspiration through the German intellectual development in an even more beautiful, even brighter light.

It is indeed a remarkable phenomenon, is it not, that minds that were less talented than these greats had more opportunities in later times, precisely because the German national spirit also stood behind the greats, which could then continue to work through the following, who already had the inspiration of the preceding ones. We see one such in the son of the great Johann Gottlieb Fichte: Hermann Immanuel Fichte.

Immanuel Hermann Fichte says it outright: that which the senses can see of man, which the mind, bound to the brain, can recognize of man, but can recognize through science, that is merely the outside of man; that contains only the powers that hold man together more for earthly things. But in this physical human being, according to Immanuel Hermann Fichte's view, there lives an etheric human being who permeates this physical human being and who is just as connected in his powers with the eternal world forces as the powers that live in the physical human being are connected to the actually perishable powers of the earth.

What has been described here in these lectures over the years as the spiritual background of man, as the etheric human being, is laughed at by the current, but even within Germany , because it is influenced by foreign countries —, this etheric man has also been pointed out here in this city in lectures over the years, again and again.

But we see an even higher, even more magnificent pointer to what Fichte saw in the human soul as a mere potential force, but which can be drawn out so that these eternal forces weave and live more and more. We see this even more clearly, even more magnificently, in an almost completely forgotten spirit, Troxler: Ignaz Paul Vital Troxler. Who still knows him? But he stands on the shoulders of Fichte, Schelling and Hegel! And he delves even deeper into the spiritual background of the world than his predecessors, who were far greater in terms of intellectual gifts than he was. He was simply able to receive the stimulus from them.

What do we see in this Ignaz Paul Vital Troxler? We see in this Troxler how he definitely points out that when a person develops their soul, when a person brings out of their soul that which cannot be there for the outer life of the senses, then spirit is found in the human soul, that which Troxler calls on the one hand the “supernatural spirit”. And by this he means that if a person develops what lies dormant in his soul, he is then in a position to have nothing in his soul life when he turns his senses away from the outer world, but that an awakening can take place that goes beyond the senses – a supersensible spirit, a spirit that sees spiritual processes in the world as the senses see sensual processes and beings: a supersensible spirit. Even those who, as idealists, as abstract idealists, want to grasp the world through ideas and concepts will admit this.

But Troxler goes further. He not only speaks of the supersensible spirit, but also of the 'super-spiritual sense'. What is super-spiritual sense?

When this spirit, which looks at the world, is able to speak not only of concepts, not only of ideas, but when it can describe actual concrete entities, which it can describe as one describes an individual animal, so that one ascends to a world of higher beings that cannot be seen with the ordinary s , but which the “super-spiritual sense” can see - something that, again, popular science can easily laugh at, but which, as an energetic striving in this faded, forgotten tone, of which I will now speak to you, comes to us in such a wonderful way within the development of German thought.

It becomes even more wonderful when we see the following in Troxler. Troxler says: When the human being brings forth the most beautiful thing that can live in his soul, insofar as this soul lives in the body; when he brings forth the most beautiful thing from his soul, the most beautiful thing in the soul that is bound to the body – when the soul becomes cosmic and is confronted with the world as a cosmic soul, then it develops in faith, in love, in hope. But faith, love, hope, for Troxler they are what outwardly reveals itself as the flower of earthly life, but only for this earthly life. Behind faith, behind the power of faith, which belongs to the soul insofar as the soul lives in some way, behind this power of faith, a higher power lives in the soul; the supersensible hearing, says Troxler. And faith is only the outer manifestation of a supersensible hearing, through which one can hear, as the sensory ear hears the sensory tones, the spiritual tones of the spiritual world, the spiritual language of the spiritual world , in a sense the soul in its world, because such a spiritual hearing takes place and because the soul lives in the body between birth and death, this spiritual hearing takes on the form of faith in the physical embodiment. This faith is the external revelation for the spiritual hearing.

Love, this most beautiful, this most glorious flower of the soul's life within the body, is the outer revelation for the spiritual seeker of what he calls spiritual sensing, spiritual feeling. Just as one physically reaches out to touch material things, so behind the power of love lies another power, the purely spiritual power, through which the soul can extend its spiritual feelers to sense what lives as a concrete spiritual being in the spiritual world.

In 1835, the beautiful lectures were published in which Troxler speaks so much about the spiritual-soul person who stands behind the believing, loving, hoping person. And behind what is the power of hope, the power of confidence, lies, in the soul, what Troxler now calls: spiritual vision, spiritual seeing.

When the soul enters the body, it transforms spiritual hearing into faith, spiritual feeling into the power of love, and spiritual vision into the power of hope.

And when the soul passes through death, that which was in its power of faith in the body between birth and death is transformed into spiritual ears; that which was in its power of light is transformed into spiritual touch; that which was in its power of hope is transformed into spiritual vision, into seeing the spiritual world.

Thus Troxler speaks of “sensitive thoughts” - where thoughts do not pass ordinary judgments on the outer world, but where thoughts are inwardly so seized, so vividly seized, that through thoughts the spiritual world is directly grasped. And he speaks of “intelligent feelings,” where the soul does not judge through the intellectual power of mere intellectual science, as Schelling once expressed himself - that is strong, of course, but great people have the faults of their virtues - , but where the soul really judges in such a way that it lives with its thoughts together with the outer world, as it otherwise only lives with the feelings, but in clarity; Troxler speaks of “intelligent feeling”. Truly, this forgotten tone of the German world view, of the development of German thought, is wonderful. It is not necessary to be offended by the fact that this wonderful, faded tone has not continued to live externally visible; that does not matter, esteemed attendees: The important thing is that it is there and that, although it has not become outwardly visible, it nevertheless lives on in what Germanness strives for and hopes for in the world, and that it will revive again in the midst of even this materialistic science; and that the world position of the German people is precisely in the spiritual realm: to bring man and his soul to the spirit, as it lies in the sense of this faded, forgotten sound - only externally forgotten sound - of the German development of thought.

Troxler quotes a beautiful sentence from his book in which he describes how he now conceives of the ethereal human being, the human being who is bound to eternal forces within the physical human being, who is bound to temporal power. Troxler says:

"In the past, philosophers distinguished a fine, noble soul body from the coarser body... a soul that had an image of the body, which they called a schema, and which for them was the higher inner man... In more recent times, even Kant in the Dreams of a Spirit-Seer seriously jokes about an entire inner spiritual human being who carries all the limbs of the outer one on his spirit body; Lavater also writes and thinks in the same way; and even when Jean Paul humorously jokes about Bonnert's under-skirt and Platner's soul-laced bodice Platner's soul-string-bodice, which are supposed to be hidden in the coarser body-coat and martyr's robe, we still hear him asking, “What was the point of and where did these extraordinary abilities and desires come from, which, like swallowed diamonds, slowly cut our earthy shell? ... In the stony limbs”

of man

“grow and mature in a way that is unknown to us.” “We could

continue to

"we could cite a myriad similar ways of thinking and poetizing, which in the end are only different views and conceptions in which... the true, only teaching of the individuality and immortality of man is contained.

That is a tone of the development of German thought that has faded away, but has not ceased to have an effect, and it is a great, powerful tone! If the German people today have the task of securing their place in the world through external forces, then what must be fought for today through the weapons is only the other side of the same essence, hidden in the depths of the German soul, which, through its versatility, could ascend to these peaks of thought life. - And Troxler says beautifully elsewhere:

"If it is highly gratifying that the latest philosophy, which... must reveal itself in every anthroposophy... reveals itself in every anthroposophy, it is nevertheless undeniable that this idea cannot be a fruit of speculation, and that the true individuality of the human being must not be confused with either what it posits as subjective spirit or finite ego, nor with what it juxtaposes as absolute spirit or absolute personality.

Troxler is clear about the fact that there is a higher human being within each of us. And when this inner human being begins to work, then first comes not anthroposophy – anthropology, human science, first comes when the outer mind observes the human being, anthropology comes first, Troxler says. When the inner human being comes to the fore and gets to know the higher forces, the spiritual forces, the spiritual feelings, then anthroposophy comes. One therefore has the right to call a science that has grown out of the innermost striving of a German national being anthroposophy.

And this must be stated, esteemed attendees, because it must not remain merely a forgotten and forgotten sound, but must become part of German national life again. And we shall see – perhaps official science will not accept the things, but it is only a prejudice that these things are too difficult to understand – a time will come when it will be recognized that the simplest person – it is precisely the simple souls that show this when they are approached in the right way – will understand that these things can be incorporated into the education of every child! Then this education of children will also be able to create from the very depths of German national character.

This must be mentioned because one truly does not need national narrow-mindedness to characterize the world position of the German and his task in the overall development of humanity, because one does not need to lapse into a tone like that of some Frenchmen, like for example, leading world-view thinkers like Boutroux and Bergson – yes, it is still called Bergson, although it does not sound very French – like Boutroux and Bergson, who are still talking such nonsense to their French. You wouldn't believe it! For example, this striving of the German to grow together with what lives outside in things, what the soul wants to grasp within itself. Boutroux, who traveled around here in Germany before the war, who was also allowed to teach at German universities, was allowed to preach, who spoke of the fraternization of the German and the Latin, Romanic being, now, for example, he speaks of the fact that he says: the French have no expression for “Schadenfreude”. The Germans are characterized precisely by the fact that they have the word 'Schadenfreude', they have such a word; so they have Schadenfreude. On the other hand, they have no word for 'generosity', only the French have that. So the Germans don't have that, generosity, only the French have that. He also indoctrinates his French with other things. For example, the French are very easily inclined to treat everything with a certain wit.

In this regard, it is perhaps not unnecessary to read the judgment on the French character. One could still have a small spark of faith that I also wanted to speak out of narrow-minded nationality here. Therefore, I will give another judgment - a judgment on the French character, French intellectual endeavor:

“Thirst for truth”

is the verdict of this judgment.

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

Everywhere just the opposite of what we have seen today. ... it suffocates everything!

So I am not speaking; not even a German speaks, but Henri Frederic Amiel, the French Swiss Amiel, who as a French Swiss wrote these words on January 22, 1875. I have chosen the words of this man, this man of spirit who seeks to understand life, Henri Frederic Amiel, because he is actually a French Swiss who has only just become acquainted with German life, and can therefore compare it with what he knows within the French character. The Frenchman cannot easily understand this desire to grow together with the innermost essence that lives and moves in the most outwardly sensual thing!

That is why Boutroux gives a speech in which he ridicules the German who wants to grasp everything from within: “The Frenchman,” he says, “who wants to get to know a camel goes to the menagerie, where he gets to know the camel. The Englishman goes on a journey and seeks out the camel in its environment; yes, he travels to distant countries on earth to get to know the camel where it lives. The German withdraws into his study, goes neither to the menagerie nor on a journey to distant lands, but rather deals with the camel in himself, as he can recognize it from his own soul.

From this Boutroux draws the conclusion – yes, you can present this to your French people today, present it to your Parisians – from this Boutroux draws the conclusion: the Germans imagine that what they experience in their own soul is the delusion that this is the whole world. That is the one that really matters. And that is why, says Boutroux to his French audience, the Germans also imagine that they are something in the world. And then they don't look at the world any further; rather, what they imagine they are is directly divine-spiritual. And to explain that, he then made this joke.

The French are, as everyone knows, a witty people; but the joke that Boutroux made was by Heinrich Heine! And so it is not even a joke. It was born on French soil, on French intellectual soil.

Within German intellectual life, what I have called a forgotten tone is by no means something that perhaps only presents itself on the heights of philosophical endeavor, but it lives, it really lives. Isn't it, for example, truly wonderful? In 1856, a book was published, a small pamphlet by a simple pastor in Waldeck, in the countryside, in Sachsenberg, in the Principality of Waldeck. His name was Rocholl, and he was a simple parish priest; the little booklet is called “Contributions to the History of German Theosophy,” which shows, I would like to say, how its author is completely immersed in a view of the world as it reveals itself to the spirit. Even if some of it may not appear so simple as true in this little book today, but only fantastic, it does not matter whether one becomes a follower or an opponent, but it does matter that one sees how what man's striving is towards the spirit of the world can really reveal itself everywhere, especially within German intellectual life.

If I had time, I could give you hundreds and hundreds of examples that show how, in our time – but that was not so long ago, a decade ago – a foreign essence, which also has taken over German intellectual life, [how] in an incredible way, only what can live within German intellectual life has been forgotten at first by foreign influence; for it is precisely because of this that the German people will have to take their great position in the eternity of time development.

And that is what now has to defend itself in the small, relatively small area of Central Europe against the immense superiority of the rest of the world. For how will history speak one day about what is happening in the present? One can say in simple words how history will speak: 777 million people against a maximum of 150 million people in Central Europe! That is what history will have to record: 777 million people encircling 150 million people, defaming and slandering the spiritual life of these people.

They need not be envious of the size of the earth's surface, these 777 million people! Because they have 68 million square kilometers, the 777 million people, compared to 6 million square kilometers that the Central European powers have - 6 million square kilometers that are surrounded! History will have to record that. And history will say that these 777 million people, with 68 million square kilometers, did not want to conquer the 150 million people on the 6 million square kilometers by bravery alone, but by starving them.

The German may feel what is living in his national soul and what significance this has in the overall development of humanity. The German may live with calmness and confidence towards the future, precisely because he is aware of the forces that live in the depths of his national soul. They have always lived on; for what matters is not whether they have become famous, but that which is not known externally is revealed internally as the significant, the great.

It is often difficult to bring out what is actually German spirit in contrast to foreign spirit. For example – I may mention this because I myself have been in the middle of a struggle of more than thirty years in relation to this: Goethe, in his German scientific consciousness, turned against Newton's mechanistic optics, which is still not at all understood today. But physics is so inundated with Western mechanism that today every physicist still sees nonsense in Goethe's optics. And for thirty-three years I have endeavored to establish what may be called: Goethe's right over Newton. It will take some time before people realize the situation regarding the chapter 'Goethe's Right over Newton'.

Despite everything overwhelmingly self-evident that physics has presented to Goethe, there have always been individual German minds who knew whose side the law was on in this field! From Grävell, who wrote the beautiful book “Goethe Right Against Newton,” to what I myself have written about Goethe's physical-optical studies, about his color studies, one is dealing with something that, in terms of truly entering into German intellectual life, is still reserved for the future. But that future will come.

In the 1850s, from the same stream of the faded, forgotten sound of German intellectual life, a man emerged: Planck, Christian Karl Planck. He wrote beautiful writings, wanting to see nature everywhere as itself imbued with spirit, forming the subsoil for the spirit, beautiful writings: “Truth and shallowness of Darwinism”, “Foundations for a science of nature”, “Spirit and Nature” - wonderful writings, entirely arising from - as he was aware, as he himself was aware - from the very deepest power of German thinking, German feeling, German scientific ethos, he describes the German essence. I can only emphasize one example: when we speak of the Earth today, how does external science speak of the Earth, how does a geologist speak of the Earth? The Earth is a material sphere, and it is only mentioned in passing that man also walks on it. For Planck, it is not. For Planck, the Earth is that to which all living beings belong. Christian Karl Planck seeks to develop a conception of the Earth that corresponds to what someone looking at the Earth from the outside would see, with all that it spiritually carries. It is not just an organism, but a spiritual being, and man belongs to the Earth as part of it. And to merely imagine the earth in terms of pure physical geology, that would be for Planck's consideration as if one would only look at the tree in relation to the trunk, at a lignified trunk, and does not see that what blossoms and fruits are, is connected with the innermost nature of the tree. Just as these belong to the tree, blossoms and fruits, according to its essence, so when one has the earth before one, one cannot be satisfied with a mere geological view. And so it is with Planck.

And so, in Planck's view, something comes into play that he wanted to use to have a powerful effect on his contemporaries, but was unable to do so because they were not yet mature enough to absorb this view so directly. He wanted to say: By living with nature, one lives not only with external nature, but together with the spirit of nature. That is what he wanted, that the religious consciousness of humanity should be included in the moral, in the sense of right and wrong. The time in which Christian Karl Planck lived has not yet had the opportunity to see things in perspective. It has ultimately branded him as an “overly nervous person”. Such a thinker can often stand alone, not only in life. So that his last written work was published after his death by his dear friend Köstlin, under the title Testament of a German.

All that I have mentioned led to Planck being spoken of as a hyperexcitable person; so that those who today only have a vague idea of the matter might speak of a megalomaniac. But he is a person who lives deeply and consciously within the forgotten tone of German intellectual life – so consciously that in 1864 Karl Christian Planck was able to write about what he wanted to seek as a German scientist:

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

of the author

“He is fully aware of the power of deeply rooted prejudices from the previous view of his”

sure that what must now first fight for its recognition will one day appear as the simplest and most self-evident truth, and that in it not only his cause, but the truly German view of things, will triumph over all still unworthy external and un-German conception of nature and spirit.”

Now he continues:

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

written in 1864, before Wagner's Parsifal!

“Finally, in the power of her unceasing striving, she attains the highest; she looks into the last simple laws of things and of human existence itself; and what the poem has symbolized in a fantastically medieval way in the wonders of the Grail, the mastery of which is attained by her hero, is, conversely, fulfilled and made real purely naturally in the lasting knowledge of nature and of the spirit itself.”

Thus Planck in 1864, with the awareness that he could bring forth a spiritual-scientific discipline out of the German tradition.

Now, many people will say, won't they, “Well, a poor philosopher who dreams in his mind doesn't know anything that actually lives in reality!” In addition, there are the practical people who know how to handle and judge practical life in the right way. When such philosophers come with their ideals: But what do they know of reality? Yes, I would like to give you an example of this Christian Karl Planck. The man died in 1880; in 1881 his Testament of a German was published – in 1881, ten years after the Franco-Prussian War had changed some of the German conditions. Let us note this point in time. How many Germans have since then believed different things about European affairs, have imagined what would come, statesmen and non-statesmen, diplomats and non-diplomats, what have they all imagined the “practical” people, who know how things are going out there! What have they all imagined! How they smiled at the idealists who, from their dream world of ideas, formed an idea about the currents in the world! Well, the “impractical idealist” Christian Karl Planck wrote in 1880 at the latest – because he died in 1881 – he wrote in his “Testament of a German”: A great European war will come!

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

And now I ask you to listen carefully to these words:

“And should it ever come to a fight, then, however much we may have to fight it for the good of Europe, the latter will not find us on our side, but as in the East, we will also have to defend ourselves in the West and in the South; hostile national jealousy will rise up against the new empire in their midst on all sides.”

This is the “dreaming philosopher” of 1881, who says to people: You will be able to do whatever you want, I no longer believe it today - he couldn't say it then, but there is something in his words that clever people still [believed] in 1913, 1914, that for example Italy would be on the side of the Central Powers. The “impractical man”, the “impractical philosopher” Christian Karl Planck no longer believed it as early as 1880! You just have to get to know the true situation of life as it is today, the true situation of life that rests in the depths of the spiritual being, the whole situation as it is today was written down by a philosopher, by a German philosopher in 1880. It can be read by everyone! In 1912, the second edition of this “Testament of a German” was published by a publishing house that, at that time, had much more to do in its printing work than to deal with the “Testament of a German.” Rather, it preferred to focus on the numerous translations of the works of the French philosopher Bergson in Germany, as they say, popularized, that Bergson - I have in my “Riddles of Philosophy in their History as an Outline” also referred to Bergson in the new edition of the work “World and Life Views in the Nineteenth Century”. But however difficult it may have been, or in fact still is, to realize that, although I pointed out the full significance of Christian Karl Planck as early as 1900 in my “Welt- und Lebens-Anschauungen im neunzehnten Jahrhundert” (World and Life Views in the Nineteenth Century) – supplemented by a prehistory of Western philosophy and continued up to the present – and conscious of the fact that a German philosopher can speak in this way, it did not even have the effect that I was able to point out in the past – written down even before the war – what, for example, is accepted as a particularly significant idea by those ignorant of Bergson, such as the famous sentence “Duration endures.” You could see that as saying nothing more than ‘Duration endures.’ It would be the same as saying ‘The heart beats.’ But what could be seen as something different was that in Bergson's work, the next thing that man has to consider in terms of a world view [...] is that he starts from man and puts the human being at the forefront, and the other beings as it were fall away from human development - that first the human being is there, then something arises from the realm of minerals, plants, animals, which some will consider madness, but which is the actual real world view - one admired that and pointed it out. One might say that in this case, because there is no full diversity among those who have so enthusiastically turned to Bergson's philosophy and regurgitate many things. One was somewhat saddened when Bergson concluded his speech by saying that during the war the Germans had sunk so low – and I already mentioned this last year here that the Germans have come down so low from their heights, as they once had in Schelling, Schopenhauer, Hegel, [as they had it] in a Goethe -, [that the Germans] have come down so low now that everything is mechanistic with them, [that they] want to let everything merge into machines and the industrial. The good Bergson probably believed that the Germans would declaim a Novalis, a Goethe or a Schiller for them.

But I was able to show you at the time – this happened before the war – that what had been so admired as a weaker thought in Bergson, that in the German Wilhelm Heinrich Preuss – but in the works that appeared as early as the 1870s, especially in 1882 —, [that this] appeared and was advocated in a much more powerful way by the German Preuss!

There we see how Wilhelm Heinrich Preuss, in his 1882 work “Geist und Stoff” (Mind and Matter), cites this entire forgotten and forgotten pursuit and current of German intellectual life as an example, and he very energetically points out that one must start from the human being. And only a view of nature that is not at all aware of the real connection between the human spirit and the spiritual can start from the lower beings and develop everything up to the human being, while what is otherwise present is seen as splintering. Preuss says:

"It may therefore be time to establish a [different] doctrine of the origin of the organic species, which is not only based on one-sidedly established propositions from descriptive natural science, but is also in full agreement with the other laws of nature, which are at the same time also laws of human thought. A doctrine, at the same time, that is free of any hypothetization and is based only on strict conclusions from scientific observations in the broadest sense; a doctrine that rescues the species concept according to actual possibility, but at the same time adopts the concept of evolution as proposed by Darwin and seeks to make it fruitful in its realm.

The center of this new doctrine is man, the only species on our planet that recurs: Homo sapiens. It is strange that the older observers started with natural objects and then went so astray that they could not find the way to man, which Darwin only managed in the most miserable and thoroughly unsatisfactory way by seeking the progenitor of the Lord of Creation among the animals, while the naturalist would have to start with himself as a human being, in order to gradually return to humanity through the whole realm of being and thinking.

It was not by chance that human nature emerged from the development of all earthly things, but by necessity. Man is the goal of telluric processes and every other form that emerged alongside him borrowed its features from his. Man is the first-born being of the whole cosmos...

When its germs had emerged, the remaining organic residue no longer had the necessary strength to produce further human germs. What emerged was animal or plant...

Did Bergson not know whether he had actually known Preuss, Wilhelm Heinrich Preuss? Which would be just as big a mistake as if he had known him and simply written what Preuss's property is without pointing out that it is from Wilhelm Heinrich Preuss.

It would be conceivable for him – the latter as well; for it has now become sufficiently well known that Bergson – who accuses the Germans of a mechanical world view in order to prove how they have degenerated in the present day – has himself taken a very strange path. It is sufficiently well known that Bergson copied entire pages of his books – Bergson's books! from Schelling, Schopenhauer and other German philosophers, simply copied – not a mechanical way of writing his books! And to copy pages and pages from the personalities of a people, a people that is so reviled and slandered! You simply copy, and thereby gain great fame and praise.

These are things that are so easily forgotten in the present. Some people already see how things are! For example, Henry Frederic Amiel once said:

"Perhaps only the Germanic mind has the need to think for itself, to search for the origin of things. The Slavs and Romans are more strongly under the sway of convention, tradition, custom, prejudice, fashion; and when they break through them, it is as a revolt and rebellion, without therefore recognizing from within themselves the law immanent in things, their true standard, not the written, arbitrary one that has been read into them. The German wants to penetrate to nature; the Frenchman, the Spaniard, the Russian stop at convention. The root of the problem lies in the question of the connection between God and the world: immanent or transcendent - it decides from stage to stage the significance of everything else. If the spirit is outside of things, then it does not need to adapt to them. If the spirit lacks truth, then it must be given to it by the prophets. Then thought despises nature and is subject to the church, that is the Latin world."

Thus Henri Frederic Amiel, the French Swiss, who wrote these words about the Germanic spirit and the French, Spanish and Russians in 1877, when he was staying in Ems.

Through such things, dear attendees, you get to know what actually lives in the six million square kilometers that are now not only being enclosed, but also vilified and defamed by the prominent personalities of those who live on the 68 million square kilometers.

But if we try to extract the essence, the most significant part of the individual national spirits as they now have to fight with each other, yes, we can truly say: if we look at the Italian national soul – I am sure there are many listeners here who know that I have been the war, not only to Germans but also to other European nations, so that they are not just caused by the mood of this war, these words, but are based on objective knowledge of the facts. If you look at the Italian people's soul, you can find a simple word to characterize it. The Italian turns to the world – of course I do not mean the individual, but insofar as he belongs to his people – the Italian turns to the world; but he says: this world must be such that I like it! Quite solely from this point of view – nationality is that.

The Frenchman also turns to the world. But he says: This world must think nothing but what I want, what I, in my French concepts, imagine the world to be. And if he encounters different thinking somewhere, then it must be subordinated. Woe betide if something exists that the Frenchman cannot understand from his Frenchness.

The Englishman, the Briton, thinks: Yes, the world is good too; the world, right, very good; but it must be made in such a way that it serves the Briton, that the Briton can assert his ego in this world above all else, and that it is otherwise arranged in such a way that it serves him. You can read about it in detail, especially in those who believed that they were creating from the depths of the English national soul - historians, philosophers - wherever you look, you can see it everywhere.

The German in his development of thought thinks: The world is there, and as I stand as a human being before the world, I want to develop my human soul so that it becomes the threefold image of the great world. That is the essence of German thinking and feeling.

The Russian, who thinks: the world as it is, is worth nothing at all; it must be replaced by another. And it is a matter of putting that world in the place of this world, in which the Russian person can flourish. That is the mood of the Russian people.

Henri Frederic Amiel, the Swiss Frenchman, once painted a strange picture of what it would be like if the Russian national character were to flood and dominate Europe - as it wanted, and as the entire Russian national current in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries actually portrayed it from its own impulses. Henri Frederic Amiel says:

“What terrible masters the Russians would be if they ever extended the power of their rule over the countries of the south!”

He names Russia as the country of the north, and includes France and Germany among the countries of the south.

"What they would bring us would be polar despotism, a tyranny the world has never known, silent as the fog, cutting as ice, rigid as iron, with the loveliness of falling snow and its cold splendor; slavery without return or relief. But probably they will gradually lose the virtues and vices of their semi-barbarism. The centuries will mature these sons of the north, and they will intervene differently than as a threat or discordant note in the harmony of nations...

In relation to Germany and Austria, the peoples allied with them, as we know, that time has not yet come. But just as the East, the Russian East, gradually learned to think about the European West in the course of the nineteenth century – what the European West is for it, which in the nineteenth century included not only Central Europe but also Western Europe, France and England – that which lies in the Russian people, incited by an incomprehension of the Western intellectual culture, especially also the German spiritual culture, has heated up to the point of megalomania, which has truly not only been counteracted in the “Testament of Peter the Great”, in the falsified or non-falsified “Testament of Peter the Great”, but has been counteracted in the whole developmental principle of leading personalities in nineteenth and twentieth century Russia.

You can read more about this in my booklet “Thoughts During the Time of the War. For Germans and Those Who Don't Hate Them”; it is currently out of print, but the second edition will be coming out soon. It is therefore not available at the moment because it is out of print.

It is a strange process. More and more, one sees in Russian literature, in the descriptions of Russian philosophers, a development of thought that says: everything that lives in the West, especially in German intellectual life, these thoughts that have emerged from Fichte, Schelling, Hegel and the others, are abstract thoughts that do not grasp the depths of what is happening. It is all decrepit; it is a world that must be done away with. And in its place must come the Russian world, the world that the Russian man will create. Kireyevsky is one of those who started with this way of thinking. In 1829, it was already a tone that had become dominant, then became political, and when the Russian steamroller was now to be sent over Europe. This Kireyevsky, who writes:

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

... 1829! So: all European goods, as soon as Russia extends over all of Europe. This is not only the political program, it is also the literary program, the artistic-aesthetic program, to possess all of Europe and then, out of good nature, to share as much as one sees fit - according to Kireyevsky.

But Russian intellectual life did not immediately embrace the West. As late as 1885, we find a book by Yushakov, who dreams, as is typical of deeply rooted Russian identity, of having to exert an influence in Asia first – a kind of Pan-Asianism. Yushakov constructs a curious theory: he says that there are peoples living over there in Asia who once had a wonderful spiritual and economic culture. They themselves – these Asian peoples – have in a wonderful but true legend of Ormuzd and Ahriman that which has arisen and developed within their lives. They call Ormuzd the good god; Ahriman was always the evil god. But the Iranian peoples, to which the Indians and the Persians also belong, have placed themselves in the service of Ormuzd. They have taken from the evil Ahriman that which opposed them, so to speak, that which Ahriman left to them, the evil Ahriman left to them, took from him. And in 1885, Yushakov looks particularly at the West, at the Western peoples of Europe, and especially at one Western European people: the English. How were they robbed of their gifts of the good Ormuzd by these English, these Asians! These English treated the Asian peoples in such a way, intervened with what could come out of their worldview. But what did they bring to these Asian peoples? - says Yushakov in his book “The Anglo-Russian Conflict”, 1885. These English came to the Asian peoples and thought that they were only there to dress in English clothes, fight each other with English weapons, work with English tools, eat from English vessels and play with English baubles.

Then he goes on to say: Now the Russians have to take charge of the cultural blessings. They will not take away from the Asians what Ormuzd has given them, but they will ally themselves with the poor people enslaved by Ahriman and share their Ormuzd with them, in order to work their way up with them and collect Ormuzd's goods anew in Asia. In their hearts, with the hearts of the Asian peoples, they will be - not I say this, but Jushakow. So it will be that they will go over from Russia, those from Russia who are the real future types of humanity from Russia, the farmer and the Cossack, the greatest bearers of the moral world order, the greatest bearers of selfless humanity. From the union of the peasant and the Cossack will come forth that which will make Asia happy again.

And then he, Yushakov, goes on to say, pointing again to England - 1885:

“England exploits millions of Hindus, but its very existence depends on the obedience of the various peoples who inhabit the rich peninsula.”

So England's existence. And then he continues:

“I wish my fatherland”

my Russian fatherland

“nothing similar – I can only rejoice that it is sufficiently far removed from this state of affairs, which is as brilliant as it is sad.”

and has nothing to do with this terrible England. This was said by a Russian in 1885 about England, who longs for a state and is grateful that Russia is sufficiently far removed from what England brings upon the world.

In such things lie the reasons, not the logical ones, but perhaps the illogical ones, who will then experiment on the world, who will then take the place where the Russian people have treated relations with the Asians, which, in the opinion of these people, and which one would have to free from Ahriman again that the Russians did not initially ally themselves with the Asians to fight the evil Ahriman and destroy him with them, but that the Russians initially allied themselves with the evil Western peoples, with the evil English, to crush Europe. We need not descend into the [tone] into which so much has been descended today on the part of the opponents of Germanness [...], who for martial reasons have also become opponents of the German essence and national character. With the characterization of Christian Karl Planck given earlier, we can say:

"[...] the German mind has not in vain devoted its deepest and most intimate strength to this, [not in vain has even its poetry made the image of this indelible urge to understand itself and reality. That unbiased, purely objective and universal sense, by which it has become possible for the German alone to fully appreciate foreign education and nationality, and which gives him the genuinely human consecration in religious, moral and artistic respects, it also includes the knowledge of the general natural law of things, as soon as in the perfection of time] the mind has matured for it."

Therefore, we prefer to look at what, from a world-historical point of view, in terms of pure fact, the German spirit must strive towards. There we see something that existed long before the appearance of Christ on earth, in the form of spiritual striving in Asia. There they also tried to unite with the spirit that permeates and animates the world, the whole world, to attain a culture – for no culture can be attained otherwise. But how they tried to achieve this in Asia! By weakening, by extinguishing the I, by extinguishing the I as much as possible!

This world view must belong to the past, now that the Christ Impulse, the greatest impulse to have come to Earth, has entered into life on Earth, and given it true spirit and meaning. This world view of the Orient can no longer found a real spiritual view. There the I must not extinguish itself, but must strengthen and uplift itself, and through this elevation grow as I into the spiritual universe, into the spiritual universe.

Panasiatism has thus shown this Hinduism, whose height had been reached by extinguishing the ego. In more recent times, after the influence of the Christ Impulse, the realization of the self has been sought through knowledge, not by damping down the self, but by the self becoming aware of itself, experiencing itself, so that in its experiencing it has a sense of the world. The German receives this as his task; such a task was always present in the depths of the German people's striving for knowledge. And those who lived in Central Europe as Germans were united in such striving.

And finally, I would like to mention a few words from an Austrian German, an Austrian German who says of Austria, “Austria is my fatherland; but Germany is my motherland,” to express in the 1860s - it is 1862 written in 1862 to express how a shared spirit unites what was later – it only happened after Robert Hamerling's death – was later welded together so firmly by external ties, as Central Europe now stands. Robert Hamerling, the Austrian German, Austria's greatest poet in the second half of the nineteenth century, summarized this in the words: “Austria is my fatherland; but Germany is my motherland.”

I, as a closer compatriot of Hamerling, I, who myself lived almost thirty years of my life in Austria among Austrian Germans and fought with them, I may point out precisely this seriousness of the German character within the German-Austrian. Robert Hamerling expresses this trait, this trait in world history, beautifully in his “Germanenzug” (The German March) – as I said, written in 1862 – where he describes, as in a dream, how the ancient Germanic peoples migrate from Asia to Europe – and in them, as in a germ, the later Germans – how they seek out their new European homeland. It is beautifully described: the moon rises; it is evening. The Teutons lie down to sleep, these future Teutons migrating to Europe; only one is awake: the blond Teut. The genius of Teutonia, the genius of the later, the future Germany, speaks to Teut. He speaks of the spirituality that must rest in striving, which is German striving. Then Hamerling says, that is, he lets the spirit of the German people say it to the blond Teut:

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

This is the very deepest knowledge that can be derived from the tone of the partially forgotten tones quoted today from the development of German thought. It is a tone that can never be anti-religious, the tone that will also grasp all knowledge in man in such a way that this knowledge is offered as if on the altar to the world spirit, to the spiritual, real world. that tone of which Jakob Böhme, the “Philosophus teutonicus” - as he was also called - has spoken in the beautiful words that suggest the true popular character of German knowledge:

Wenn du, O Mensch, die Tiefe

he means the depth of heaven, the blue

and the stars and the earth,
so you walk in God,
so you strive in God,
so you die in God,
and so you will be buried in God.

These are deep, German words.

And Robert Hamerling, Austria's great German, who knew how to empathize with even the smallest German being – just by the way, I mention that in 1884 a statue of Strasbourg was erected in Paris and the German flag in front of the statue was burned, that went so close to Hamerling's heart that he wrote the words:

"May you believe in revenge
And in the victor's wreath in the future

he wrote to the French

Hope not to rob back
A clod of German land!
You may rave like ravens<
Around an Alsatian statue,
Strasbourg you will not have,
Strasbourg nevermore!

So it sounded from Austria to the French as they danced around the Strasbourg statue and burned the German flag.

But Hamerling also knew how to remind people of the fact that the German spirit is the continuation of the greatest that once appeared in the world spirit in the ancient Orient, from which the ancient ancestors of the Germanic peoples emerged; he knew how to point out that, just in a pre-Christian manner, by a lowering of the ego, man wanted to merge with the universe, but how this still lives, is raised to a higher level, lives in the German character, which has to bring the greatest that the world once created in the Orient to this world in a new form, as befits Christian development.

This connection with the whole development of humanity comes to Robert Hamerling's mind – also in his “Germanenzug” – this basic trait that everything the German recognizes should grasp his deepest being, become one with his whole personality; but that at the same time it is something that is a world-historical mission and ties in with the highest aspirations of humanity in the past. Therefore, Robert Hamerling again lets the spirit of the German people speak:

"But however proudly you may strive,
high above other swarms,
you will always keep the ancient, sacred fire:
the dream-filled, drunken drunkenness of God,
drunken with God, the blissful warmth of the heart
of the ancient Asian homeland.
This holy ray, a temple fire
of humanity, free of smoke, with a pure flame
will glow in your chest and soul
and remain a pilot at your helm!
You strive only because you love: your most daring thought

We may and must actually immerse ourselves today in that which can bring us to the realization of how truly the roots of a high spiritual striving live, which must have an effect on the future for the benefit of humanity. This spirituality lives in the most beautiful expressions of German intellectual life in the 6 million square kilometers that are threatened today by people who live in 68 million square kilometers.

And one does not need to speak out of national sentiment, but out of objective knowledge, when one speaks of the world vocation of the German people, which cannot be overcome by those who today - not understanding it - not only revile but slander it.

We Germans may look back to that which, in Germany's greatest spiritual period, has incorporated itself into the development of German thought and what lives in it and will flourish again. And we may look to what has presented itself to us in such a way that we look to it as to roots and germs. And by recognizing the rooting and germinating power of that which has passed, we have faith in the continued effect of this past. And in this belief in what we have to cherish and cultivate not only for the sake of the German people, but for the sake of humanity, we may love these roots of German national identity and cherish the hope and confidence that what has been recognized as germs and roots will bear blossoms and fruit in the future! Despite everything and everyone who rises up against it today, we are imbued with the power that expresses itself on the one hand in German intellectual life and that today has to undergo such trials in relation to our external daily life. We look to the future and trust this power, which must carry the German essence in the future as it has carried it in the past.

From this, what was meant by these arguments can be briefly summarized, according to feeling. Again, in the words of Robert Hamerling, looking at what is being said against us, the Germans, and against our name, today, looking at what the German essence must be in the development of humanity, what I wanted to express today out of true, discerning feeling can be summarized in four short lines by Robert Hamerling, an Austrian German who sensed how strongly what is today welded together by the same, by such great and such sorrowful and such trials and tribulations rich time conditions in Central Europe belongs together. He, Robert Hamerling, who felt this, he coined the beautiful words with which we want to conclude this reflection:

“And when ever the German name
sees a hostile day,
From ocean to ocean
will find its way the German mind.”

From the foundations of psychology to the vital questions concerning the boundaries of human existence

It is understandable that in this scientific age people want to turn to a scientific psychology, especially with regard to the major riddles of life and the world, the riddles of the soul. However, if one is able to sum up the present situation in scientific psychology it has to be said that it is going through a kind of death, for its traditions come from ancient times and whilst it is meant to be in many ways a science, without bias, people are in fact working with those traditions.

Speaking about the scientific basis of higher insight here the day before yesterday I mentioned the name of a present-day philosopher, Richard Wahle. ¹⁰⁰ He is not very widely known. Yet his views are extraordinarily significant, especially what he says about modern scientific psychology in his books. I would say that the approach used by this philosopher is of symptomatic importance especially for those who are able to think scientifically today. I won’t say that he is someone likely to have much of an influence, nor that he has actually had much influence, but his approach is important from the symptomatic point of view. In many respects it could tell us the way in which we have to think today to be in accord with the demands generally made in science. I am therefore able to say that on the one hand the spiritual science of which we are speaking here can agree with what such a philosopher says with regard to psychology, although on the other hand, as we shall see today, it has to be the absolute opposite of such ideas. This philosopher is well versed in the way of thinking and the attitude to research which people can have now if they are highly educated in today’s scientific way. That is why anyone who tries to approach the life of the psyche with the ideas that are current in science today will of necessity come to realize that the psychology which is generally on offer is dying.

In external terms this is evident from the fact that this philosophical psychology is gradually disappearing again from professorial chairs at universities, whilst at the same time there is a growing desire to put people who think in natural scientific ways, from physiology or another natural science, on the chairs previously held by philosophers. It is hoped by many that the enigmas of the psyche, which earlier on were to be investigated by a specific psychology, may be solved by considering the physiology of the brain, the physiology of nerve structures and the like.

If we really go into all justifiable natural science to be found in psychology, we realize that in the usual psychology people speak of many things that really can no longer be said to be valid ideas today. They speak of forming ideas, of thinking as such, of feeling, of will impulses, memory, attention, and so on. And if we try in all honesty to go into the things this psychology offers in this respect, to meet the needs of the human soul, the vitality the human soul needs, all we have in the end are really just words. And we have to say that if we consider the historical evolution of human cultural life we can say to ourselves—I can only mention it here, for today’s lecture would be too long if I were to give the proof—that in earlier times, when those concepts of thinking, of memory, attention and so on were first created, people had very different ideas about natural phenomena, ideas that would indeed serve to understand the inner life in a way adequate to those earlier times. But things that were established then and have become like spectres that still haunt psychology, turn into mere word shell, mere word, in the light of the scientific thinking which all human beings have today, albeit subconsciously, if they have made any effort at all in culture and academic learning.

Something else also comes into this. For centuries, we may reasonably say, psychology has developed in the academic caste, and within this academic caste has assumed the form we get today in the usual lectures or publications on psychology.

Someone wanting to learn something out of the fullness of life about these most important existential questions which after all culminate in questions as to the divine nature of the cosmic order and as to immortality—someone seeking information concerning these questions in modern psychology will be disappointed. Franz Brentano,¹⁰¹ a serious and profound investigator of the psyche who died here in Zurich last year, made great efforts to gain insight in psychology, but remained caught up in the old ideas about the psyche that have become mere words. He said a very important thing: If we look at modern psychology it will be found that psychologists think they can try and establish insights concerning the development of ideas, concerning feelings and will impulses, and also concerning attention, love and hate; yet if they seek to stick to natural science they will not go beyond this circle. Franz Brentano went on to say that however much one might say about these elementary aspects of the inner life, none of it could replace the great question which Plato and Aristotle put long ago: whether it is possible to discover something about the part of our inner life that remains when the mortal bodies which hold that inner life pass away in death. This is what an acknowledged expert in modern psychology said.

In the science of the spirit which takes its orientation from anthroposophy, the aim is to achieve a renewal of psychology on the basis of what I said here the day before yesterday. The aim is to go beyond mere word shells and investigate the reality of the inner life. The way this is done does, of course, still have to take fully into account today the objections and opposition that may come from conventional psychologists. One must be able to wrestle with everything that exists in the recognized approach to psychology. On the other hand the conditions I have outlined for the renewal of psychology should lead to knowledge of the psyche, a view of the psyche that can now truly feed the souls of striving humanity in a much wider sense and can—to use a commonplace term—be popular in the best and highest sense of the word.

Psychology must be taken out of the academic caste where, to put it metaphorically, it has become guilty of falling into abstractions. These may be brilliant, but they cannot in any way provide psychologists with insights into the boundary issues of human existence which justifiably are of burning interest in the inner life of man.

Human thinking has changed completely compared to earlier times, when the ideas used in psychology which have now become words originated. Because of this, the new psychology must also let go of the starting points people wanted to use in their desire to continue further and further into the realm of the psyche. There must be new starting points. These are such that having come to them we can only base ourselves on premises like those of which I spoke the day before yesterday, and that means remaining true to the way of thinking that has been trained in the natural sciences. We cannot simply ask: What is an idea? We cannot simply want to observe what ideas are, what thinking or will are, or what memory is, and so on. Just as modern natural science in laboratory and clinical practice starts from entirely different premises than the natural science of earlier times, so psychology must relate to the realities of life which, however, must first be distilled out, I would say, from the wholeness of human life.

Initially there are two moments in human life where the newer psychology should come in. From there it can then go back again to concepts of idea, will and so on, so that they in turn will gain full soul value. These two starting points or moments are, however, most difficult to observe, truly no easier to observe than many a process in nature that will only reveal itself when one uses carefully prepared methods and experiments. These moments flit past in human life, and their nature is such, in a way, that it is impossible to take hold of them in conscious awareness. We must first train our minds, as it were, so that we can catch hold of them. They are the moments of going to sleep and waking up.

Going to sleep and waking up are the moments in human life when the whole state of consciousness changes and the human being moves from one state of soul into another that is radically opposite. I need not say much to show that these brief moments are difficult to observe. For when we go to sleep our conscious awareness goes, and we therefore do not observe the moment of going to sleep. When we wake up, we can sense that we are tearing ourselves away from some kind of life in progress; but anyone who tries to pick up experiences he had in sleep with the conscious mind will very soon and very easily discover that he fails in this.

Here we can only train soul observation, using the means I briefly referred to the day before yesterday and about which I am now going to say more, to observe the moments of going to sleep and waking up. This training must involve a degree of strengthening, greater power given first of all to the life of ideas itself, and then also to the life of will. But the inner processes, subtle processes in the psyche, that will give such strength and power to the life of will, do differ quite considerably from anything we are used to in our everyday inner life.

The other day I called the process which strengthens the life of ideas meditation. If you use methods given in my Knowledge of the Higher Worlds and also in my Occult Science and other books to let ideas and conscious awareness be present in the mind, thinking not just in the usual sense but resting on your thinking, doing so more and more, you let your thinking enter into the soul and your soul into your thinking in a completely different way than you usually do. You then strengthen the life of ideas to such effect—as I said, details of the methods are given in my books—that you can form ideas in a way that is as lively and active as you normally know only when your mind is involved with sensory perceptions of the outside world.

Goethe had an inkling, even if initially it was only an inkling, of this way of forming ideas—having taken up something Johann Christian Heinroth¹⁰² had said, for Goethe considered his own thinking too be too object-bound. He was able to say that he believed he was gradually able to think in such a living way that the inner strength and inner intensity of this thinking was equivalent to the mental activity which otherwise only exists when we consider the natural world outside us with our eyes, use our ears to follow events in the natural world, and so on.

It is possible to strengthen the life of ideas so much and be so intensive in this that we may say: This life of ideas itself becomes a form of direct vision; the activity is like that of direct vision; and the life of the senses is taken into the sphere of ideas in such a way that the senses are not involved although the vitality of their life is retained.

This is one aspect—strengthening the life of ideas. As you progress further and further in this a power of observation will indeed develop which is unknown in our ordinary state of mind. We need this if we are to investigate the moment of going to sleep and that of waking up in the way in which we investigate objects and events in everyday life using the methods of natural science.

It will also be necessary to train the will in a certain way. This can only be done by self control as we pay attention to something in life that is usually little regarded. In ordinary life we go along, accompanying anything we perceive in the world outside with our inner life experience. Now it is necessary to go beyond this to something else. We must turn our attention to the fact that our inner life is changing, being transformed, developing year by year, month by month and indeed day by day and hour by hour. We do not normally bring this development process in the life of the psyche into the sphere of the will. We let it flow on. With a little bit of self education we do take care to get rid of habitual faults and acquire certain virtues, abilities and so on. Something very different will have to come into our life, however, if we are to gain the self control of the will of which I am speaking. People must be able to gain the inner insight that there is something in them which they can bring into the will, I might say, bringing it into the will in such a way that self cultivation, self control will look very difficult to them, yet at the same time also appear as desirable as only the acts of will relating to wholly inevitable drives in human life normally are.

Let us look at this from another point of view. There are today particularly many people who consider themselves capable—well, maybe I am putting this in somewhat radical terms, but you’ll find such a radical view justifiable if you think more deeply about our present time—of reforming the whole world. They have ideas, as it were, as to what should happen so that people could live together happily, the social order in life was right, and so on. An enormous number of programmes exist in this area. In reality more or less everyone is a kind of reformer in his mind as soon as he begins to think about the outside world; it is just that the world does not give them the opportunity to bring their reforms or perhaps also their revolutionary ideas to realization.

Here indeed the will impulse, the desire extends to the world outside. We must know, however, that there is something in the human being to which intentions and impulses may be directed just as well that will take the individual from one period of life to another, and indeed just from one week to the other. We must know that in no way do things get going on their own in the human being, the way he mostly wills it, but that human beings are able to use their will to follow their development in time. And when the will comes in with such method in that area, the way I have described it in the books I have mentioned, you get that inner strength, the inner vision, a direct vision of the will element which we will never gain in our relationship to the outside world. You get the direct vision of the will which has to be added to the strengthening in the life of ideas I have just mentioned if you are to be able to observe the moments of going to sleep and waking up.

However, before you come to investigate those moments of going to sleep and waking up, having strengthened your inner life, you come to realize that the concepts humanity has today, and these cannot be the concepts of the old way of looking at nature, will only give you a view of the life of ideas that leads human beings to non-reality, their feeling life into confusion and their life of will to incomprehensibility.

Essentially what we have to say has also been said by the philosopher I mentioned when he spoke of philosophy having come to an end, of philosophy dissolving, handing over to physiology, and the like. He already had a feeling, though it was not entirely clear, about the concepts we are able to have today, concepts that are infinitely useful in the study of the natural world around us and for introducing to human life what is really the most essential content of a new civilization. He felt that these concepts, useful as they are when applied to outside things, do not answer the question, when we want to study the soul: What are the ideas we have of things? But it is because of them that in the life of ideas we can directly come to the ‘I think, therefore I am not,’¹⁰³ and discover the non-reality of the inner life.

We come to realize that the more we enter into the life of ideas, the less are we able to say what the soul is if we consider the life of ideas merely the way it is in ordinary life and not in the way of which I have been speaking. We come to realize that the life of feelings we know in the ordinary life of the psyche is confused, and that the life of the will is wholly incomprehensible. Hence the interesting phenomenon that it is exactly people who think in the natural scientific way as they write works on psychology that are highly significant today believe they are able to say something about the life of ideas when they are in fact considering the physiology of the brain. They then reach a point, however, where they say to themselves that the physiology of the brain does not determine anything. Read the relevant chapters in Theodor Ziehen’s book on physiological psychology¹⁰⁴ and you’ll find that what I have been saying is true for a renowned natural philosopher of our time.

We have to say, therefore, that this natural scientific way of thinking more or less shows what Schopenhauer also did not perceive, or only half perceived, though he had an inkling of it. This is that the will is something we cannot reach with the ideas of recent times, and that it is something incomprehensible.

It is a good preparation for the newer kind of psychology if we understand this non-reality of the soul in the life of ideas, this confusion in our life of feeling, this incomprehensibility of acts of will. Having gained clarity in this way—paradoxical though this may sound, but we have after all gained clarity about one thing—we can penetrate further. We can then use the thinking which has been made more acute, stronger, through meditation, and the life of the will that has subjected itself to self control to pay real attention to the moment, let us say, first of all of waking up. The moment of waking up can then enter into the field of observation in the soul in a quite specific way. We will experience something when considering the waking-up process that cannot be experienced in an untrained inner life. If we have gained the necessary calm by training in the way I have mentioned, we will be able to establish immediately after waking up that the whole of the inner life which was there in the unconscious on waking up has gone away. Only it does not have one quality, this life which the soul has in the time from going to sleep to waking up—it does not evoke memory of itself. You realize this when a significant moment arises: All the time you were asleep you let the soul flow in the same life in which is also flows when you are awake; but this flow of the soul in sleep does not become imprinted into your power of memory. It is therefore forgotten as you wake up. This is the essential point.

Memory is important in everyday life—as I said the day before yesterday. Forgetting is equally important, with the soul’s experience such that it can also forget what it has lived through. It is important for the development of the soul principle, for its continued flow between birth and death, and so on. Indeed, it is only if we are able to observe the moment of waking-up in this way that we get an idea of the significance which sleep really has in the life of the human soul. We come to realize that our life could not continue if it were wholly filled with things that become memories and that the memory principle loses its power to let our life flow on. We need to fall asleep in order that we may forget what we live through in the time when we are asleep. Our ordinary, everyday inner life will feed the soul and give it life if it is forgotten, not if it is remembered. Remembering things depletes the soul. Forgetting restores the vital energies of the soul.

This is how you get a definite insight into the vital process which is reflected in our waking up. And with this you perceive the inner life, though it really takes the form of a review in reverse. But now the ordinary conscious awareness was there between going to sleep and waking up is not poured out over it. You gain tremendously much in thus being able to perceive the inner life of the soul, for it will give you the basis for a level of understanding.

No one can truly grasp what it means to say: I form an idea, and what it means to say: I develop a thought in my soul, unless he is actually able to observe the moment of waking. For when we progress from merely being awake, merely living our life in the waking state, to active thinking, to developing an idea of a thought, this is qualitatively, though to a lesser degree, exactly the same inner process as waking up. You need to strengthen the transition from the sleeping to the waking state in order to know the waking up, and you have then created a basis for yourself for the principle that will answer the question: What actually happens in my psyche when I form an idea? The power we develop in the soul when we form an idea is the same as the power we must develop, though much more powerfully so, when we wake up. When we wake up, it is the unconscious mind which does it. And what the unconscious does as we wake up comes to conscious awareness if we make the inner effort that lets us think and form ideas in conscious awareness and with a will.

Here we get a quite specific view concerning the way in which ideas are formed. The mere shells of words that have come from an earlier psychology are given real content again. We realize that forming ideas is a weaker form of waking up that comes whilst we are in the waking state. This is an important insight. If we connect this insight into the nature of ideation with the nature of the waking-up process, it becomes possible to make the ideation in our everyday life, which otherwise really takes us into the non-reality of inner life, into something that is real. By connecting ideation with waking up, it becomes possible to relate to a factual element that does not depend on us.

Having made the connection with this waking-up process and thus got to know the nature of ideation, let us turn to the moment of going to sleep. Just as meditation is a special help in exploring the moment of waking up, so self control over the will is a special help in exploring the moment of going to sleep. Control of the will makes it possible to enter into the process, observing our going to sleep, truly observing how something happens as we enter into sleep that is similar to the forgetting that comes on waking up, becoming aware that memory of the inner life is extinguished during sleep. Otherwise we may always be in dispute, saying that somehow the body is always involved in what the soul experiences in sleep. If we are able to grasp the moment of going to sleep consciously, by controlling the will, we find that we enter into the same inner life which we leave when we wake up, but that we enter into it in such a way that all possibility of perceiving things through the senses comes to an end. We then come to realize what it means to say that on going to sleep we enter into a realm that lies beyond the senses. We come to know this because we find that on thus entering into the other realm we experience something that cannot come to conscious awareness in the kind of conscious awareness we usually have in our inner life. This is bound to the organization, dependent on the organization, between birth and death. We find that we become independent on the organization, something about which illustrious people may be in dispute for ever. The matter needs to be observed; we then find that on going to sleep we enter into the realm that lies beyond the senses.

And we then see the difference which exists between the inner life when we leave it on waking up and the inner life into which we enter on going to sleep. They are the same in so far as they are supersensible by nature; but by means of the observation I have characterized we note an essential difference. An analogy will help you to see this.

The difference is like the way a child differs from an old person. Both are human beings, but they are at different stages of life, different age levels. In the same way both forms of inner life are supersensible by nature—the inner life from which we rise on waking up and the inner life into which we enter on going to sleep. However, the inner life into which we enter on going to sleep is the ‘child’, and the inner life from which we waken is the one which has grown ‘older’. We follow a road from going to sleep to waking up. The inner life changes so that—no analogy is ever perfect—the element into which we enter is similar to the one from which we wake the way a child is similar to a very old person, both being human. This is a subtle difference that has to be noted. It provides something of a basis on which we can come closer to an important element in our investigation of the inner life, and that is the life of feelings.

The life of feelings, a mere collection of words in our customary psychology today, can only be truly understood if we study it on the basis of which I have been speaking, that is after we have come to perceive the supersensible inner life by observing the moments of waking up and going to sleep. There is one other important aspect of going to sleep which we must consider before we come to the life of feelings. We have to ask: What is it, really, that changes in a specific way in the inner life as we go to sleep? What is the effect of leaving the reality perceptible to the senses on going to sleep and entering into supersensible reality? It is the transformation of the will. And the process which is a more powerful one when I go to sleep also happens to a lesser degree when I resolve something in my will. We cannot grasp the will unless we do so on the basis of the going-to-sleep process.

The reality of the will in the depth of our inner life is wholly beyond comprehension in our life of ideas, just like anything that happens during sleep. This is why you do not find anything about the will in natural scientific works on psychology. It cannot be grasped because the life of ideas does not go that far. But if we know the process of going to sleep, we know that our ordinary inner life becomes submerged in an act of will, though to a lesser degree than it does when we go to sleep. Every resolution is a lesser form of going to sleep that happens when we are fully awake.

If we keep apart these two realities—waking up and going to sleep—one of which becomes explicable in relation to the life of ideas, the other with reference to the life of the will, which becomes explicable if we consider the process of going to sleep, we can begin to take a real look at the enigma presented by our life of feeling. A possibility arises of bringing clarity into the confusion which we usually see in the life of feelings. How do we bring clarity into something? By means of perceptive insight. There is nothing else. I could bring detailed epistemological proof, but that would take us too far today. With perceptive insight, clarity is brought into something if there is a clear and real distinction between the one who perceives, the one who is gaining insight, and the object perceived.

This is what makes the life of feelings always confusing for our ordinary life in the psyche. In everyday life we do not need to distinguish between two things unless we wish to gain perceptive insight into the ordinary life of feelings. These are two things of intrinsic value and they are opposite to one another, just as we are opposite to the world we perceive outside through the senses—world perceived through the senses there, human being there. In the same sense two things are opposites in the life of feelings. Which are they?

We can only perceive them, subject and object, if we are able to investigate them on the basis of ideas gained in the way I have been describing. We then come to perceive who it is who actually feels, and we discover what can actually be perceived in the life of feelings. The remarkable fact emerges that the one who feels is always the one—and this does seem a paradox—whom we have not yet lived through. If we feel something now, at this moment, it is the human being in us whom we are only now beginning to live and will continue to live tomorrow, the day after tomorrow, next year, and until we die. When we feel, the subject, which is otherwise unknown, is our life, which is in us from the moment when we have the feeling to our death. And we perceive the life we have lived through from birth to the moment when we feel—a vast prospect in investigation, that the life of feeling lies in this starting point.

You can do a number of things—I would not talk about these things in this way if I had not done these investigations in many different fields; a large number of investigations and challenges lie in this field—you can do a number of things to prove what I have just been saying in a wholly natural-scientific way. You only need to take sensibly written biographies and relate them to the requirement I have just mentioned. Take a sensible biography of Goethe. Consider Goethe in 1790; study him the way he was from 1790 until his death in 1832. Try and get a clear picture of the specific things Goethe went through from 1790 until his death, and consider the way in which it would have been perceptible in Goethe’s life of feelings in 1790. Then consider his life, his inner life, the way the outside world touched him, from his birth in 1749 to 1790. And in getting a clear idea of how the Goethe from 1790 to 1832, who was already there, inwardly perceived during one moment in 1790 what he had lived through earlier—every feeling. Every feeling we have is such that our future essential nature perceives our past essential nature.

You can also do other things. You might try and develop an eye for people whom you saw die, where you had the opportunity to share their life, perhaps for a short time, from a certain point in time until their death. Try and bring this clearly to mind—how they lived then and what their human nature was. And then try and get a clear picture—you’ll always be surprised by the result—for instance of the situation being one where death was approaching, the actual character, of how the essential nature was poured out over the life of feelings.

These are two possible ways. Other things become apparent in a genuinely natural-scientific way, though this comes close to the most profound and inward interests of human nature when you investigate what I have so briefly referred to as the life of feelings. The life of feelings, the essential nature of feeling, will then not be the empty shell of words which we have in ordinary scientific psychology today. If you want to simply inwardly observe feeling in all its confusion, you cannot in fact observe anything. Just as you cannot scientifically observe water unless you separate it into hydrogen and oxygen, so you cannot observe the life of feelings in a scientific way unless you are able to separate it into what the human being was before he had the feeling and in what comes afterwards, unless you know the active principle which lies deep down in there like a seed, just as the seed is active in this year’s plant for the plant that will grow next year.

Studying the life of feelings in this way you will find that your ideas come to be filled with real strength. And you will gain a psychology for the life of feelings which is alive from the very beginning, which we live everywhere, and which we fill with life ourselves. And if we know that anything we feel in a moment does not exist in isolation, then the moments in our inner life will also be connected with the whole process of our development from birth to death. Future and past in our development on earth will then come together in every single feeling, even the least of them. In the same way, though it is best to do so only after investigating the life of feelings, you can, under the conditions I have given, turn to the life of ideas. The results will be even more surprising, the reason being that people will consider them paradoxical because it is something they do not know, neither according to the ideas which arise in the ordinary way in our inner life nor according to the ideas held in modern science.

If you discover that every forming of an idea, of a thought, is a attenuated form of waking up, and if in your inner observation you bring together the active element in the forming of ideas and the waking-up process, then connecting a mental image with waking up, which is a true activity, you enter into a current in your vision that carries you along, showing you that waking up, too, is an attenuated form of something more powerful. This other, more powerful element which you then perceive just as if, having seen the image of a person, you then meet the real person, is the insight that the forming of an idea and every waking up is a recapitulation, attenuated to become an image, of something we may call entering into life on earth through conception and birth.

The thread you have thus spun simply widens out as an inner connection has been made in your perception between waking up and forming an idea. The power gained in this way widens out, so that you do not observe the two in isolation but in their whole context. It widens out because you realize that in forming ideas as such we do not live in reality but have an image. Yet the very insight that we have an image, something that is not real, gives us the strength to come to something that is real, and we find that every time the forming of an idea or waking up is a process of entering into the physical world, a process attenuating reality to image, going through the process of putting on a physical body, of going through conception and birth.

You then realize where something comes from that has occupied the minds of serious investigators for a very long time. If you make the effort to consider what has occupied human minds from the time of Locke, Hume and Bacon, you will find that these investigators were never in a position to form adequate ideas about the way the life of ideas relates to the real world outside which we perceive through the senses. They were unable to find an answer to the question as to how, when we observe the reality outside, using the senses, the idea which is supposed to correspond to that reality enters into the human mind.

If one has the preconditions of which I have spoken, you’ll realize that there is a problem about this question as a question. I might characterize this as follows. Let us assume someone makes the observation that carbon dioxide is exhaled by human beings. If he then assumes that the carbon dioxide comes from the lung and has therefore been produced there, he has the wrong idea. It is equally wrong if a superficial view, which is of course quite natural for our ordinary inner life, leads to the thought that the power to form ideas comes from the body. It certainly does not come from the body!

Whatever may be active there in the body, in the inner life, it is only image attenuated to image on entering into the life of the senses. And the power we have in us when we form ideas is the same power—this is what you will discover—that was active before you ever came in contact with the world perceived through the senses at your conception. It is the power which shines across through time, from the period before birth and indeed conception. This is thinking in us, and not we ourselves in the here and now. This is why scientists were unable to discover how the forming of ideas comes to human beings. Because of this we also find that the forming of ideas is something unreal. From birth, or conception, the forming of ideas has transformed its reality into bodily life. The spiritual, supersensible principle active in us which can only show itself as we wake up and as we go to sleep, when we are not in our bodies, now lives powerfully in the forming of ideas. Gaining insight into the way ideas are formed we are taken to life before birth, to life outside the body. This is done in a wholly scientific way which we have learned to use in modern natural science.

There is no need to malign the more recent science of the spirit with its anthroposophical orientation by saying that it rehashes old ideas taken from Buddhism and the like. It does not do so. Instead, inner strength is gained in the life of the psyche by consistently adhering to the natural scientific way of thinking. However, being thus consistent it takes us beyond what natural science itself can give. When we truly grasp the process of forming ideas, we see it to be image, an attenuated image of what we lived through before we were in a physical body, when we were in the world that lies beyond the physical before we were born or conceived.

From the world of ideas a tangible bridge is created to the ability to grasp the supersensible and immortal human being. The boundary questions in our existence are found if we grasp the elementary phenomena of the inner life in the right way. It is this which truly matters.

We can then also observe the following in more detail. How is it, really, with this pre-birth life that has faded to become ideation? We may ask ourselves: What would happen if what is not real but mere image in ideation were truly to enter into the life of the body, not as image but as reality?

Now we come to something that is highly significant. Taken out of its spiritual scientific context it will of course seem rather odd at first, and I’ll therefore first look at something that is closer to hand. If we make the life of ideas into immediate reality we get something that is particularly common in natural scientific research, except that people doing such work do not see it in its whole cognitive context. For when we do experiments we are not looking at the natural world, we are looking at something the human mind has put together. However, whenever we force nature into our experiment we actually have to kill its living reality. We really have a nature before us that we have killed when we do an experiment; for the experiment is entirely made up according to the non-real methods the human mind uses in forming ideas. If we take this further, of course, it will help us to realize what would actually happen to us if the forming of ideas did not enter into our lives in an attenuated form, remaining merely an image of the pre-birth existence we had before conception, but if it were to be reality, the kind of reality we have in the field we perceive through the senses in life, it would immediately kill us.

That is the situation in life. Something we live through in an image or an idea and which is an echo with image character, if I may put it like this, of our non-physical life before conception, would kill us if it were to become as real as the living human body. It would be a poison in us, penetrating us as we would be penetrated if we were to produce an artificial human being and force him through our blood and through our muscles. We see that in the natural context the non-physical enters into us as a reflection of itself in image form.

We may then move on to consider the will, complementing the thought which is thus stimulated from the one side.

We investigate the will by considering it in connection with going to sleep. We find that when we are awake during the day an attenuated going-to-sleep process is present in every act of will, so that we go down into the non-physical world. When we have established this link between the act of will and the process of going to sleep, we have again gained the power in our investigation to continue the steps we took in observing the psyche with regard to going to sleep. What we had so far gained in taking those steps then widens out, for our observation will extend not only to going to sleep but to death. And we come to perceive what dying means for the human being.

In science, things like these are often taken the easy way today. Concepts like death or dying are more or less treated in a way that would be like saying: A knife is a knife. And they give you a razor to cut up your meat. A knife may be a cutting tool, but a razor has to be used and handled differently from a table knife.

Death is today seen as something people want to investigate as such. The approach used in the science of the spirit is less easygoing, for here one aims for reality and does not seek to shape reality according to preconceived concepts and ideas. Here one must ask specifically: What is death in the plant world? What is death in the animal world? What is death in the human world? For death does not equal death, just as knife does not equal knife. People like to denigrate the science of the spirit by saying that its concepts are confused, dark and nebulous. Its distinguishing characteristic is, however, that one always seeks to enter into the most open fairway, and this science demands clarity, succinctness and unbiased observation as preconditions for human ideas. People who say that in the science of the spirit one works with confused ideas are merely bringing their own confused ideas into the science of the spirit.

Once the bridge has been built between the act of will and the process of going to sleep, looking at sensory perception takes you forward across this bridge to see what death is in the human being. You then find that the powers that take the human being out of the world perceived through the senses at the moment of death also take effect in the human act of will, though not in the fully developed but rather in a more embryonic form. Every time we will something, making our intentions come true in actions, we configure something that relates to dying the way the child relates to the old man in terms of being human.

This also builds a bridge between the principle which in form of elementary soul phenomena dies in the will in our everyday conscious awareness, with this will an attenuated dying process just as forming ideas is an attenuated process of getting born and being conceived through the soul. It is merely that forming ideas has image quality, whilst will intent is embryonic. Will intent is a reality; it is not image but reality. But it is an act that is not as yet completed. If it were to be complete, if the act of will were to be fully grown, it would always be a process of dying. What makes the will into will is that whatever evolves in will intent remains embryonic and does not enter into existence in reality. For if it were to develop further from the embryonic state of will intent and gain full strength, it would always be a dying process. In our will intent we are potentially dying all the time. We bear the powers of death in us. And for someone able to penetrate the soul as an investigator, every act of will is an attenuated dying process that has remained embryonic.

In the genuine observation of the psyche which has developed more recently, an elementary act of soul thus also makes the connection with the great boundary riddles of human existence. We then come to perceive not only the triad of being born, waking up and developing a thought but also the triad of will intent, going to sleep and dying. We can actually gain our orientation from the going-to-sleep process by investigating this process, where we enter into the sphere beyond the senses, withdrawing from the senses; here we have the process of dying in embryo. And we perceive dying to be a transition from the world perceived through the senses to the world that is beyond the senses. Will intent can only be perceived in its embryonic state because we have previously realized that on going to sleep it is the young life of the soul which the soul perceives. Otherwise we would never be able to bring the embryonic nature of will intent before the inner eye in any way whatsoever.

You see that thinking, feeling and will intent are understood on the basis of facts. By becoming facts in the anthroposophically orientated psychology that must evolve, they take us at the same time to the great boundary issues of human soul life. No one is fantasizing about some kind of immortality but an investigation is made into the nature of ideation. This will in one respect take us to immortality, to life before birth. The will is investigated. It takes us to immortality after birth. And when these are taken together we come to immortality as a whole, the eternal quality of human nature which has its roots in the world beyond that perceived by the senses.

Through meditative life—I can refer to it only briefly—we thus come to perceive more and more how unreal the ordinary I is, for it has wholly and entirely given over its existence to the body. And in pursuing this non-reality in a way similar to the way in which we have pursued the other elements that come into the inner life, we also gain insight into repeated lives on earth, an aspect which seems so incomprehensible to people today—the repeated lives on earth through which the human being goes, with lives in the world of the spirit coming in between.

This general outline which, as I said, does still sound strange today, need not necessarily be taken to be the logical conclusion. For someone who takes the route of genuine study of the psyche which has been characterized today, the insights that take him through the forming of ideas and through the will and bring the non-physical to such immediate, factual reality out of the moments of going to sleep and waking up, lead to the realization that we go through repeated lives on earth.

Having shown you how the connection can be made from a psychology that once again is concerned with realities to the great boundary issues of human existence, I still have to point out to you that the state of soul on which this is based and which must enter into scientific research again if we are to have a true psychology, must indeed evoke a quite specific constitution of the inner life for specific elements or moments in doing research, but not for the whole of everyday life. For to gain true insight in the way I have been describing today we must be able to attach special significance in life to our waking up and going to sleep. It means we should not merely live the inner life as something that happens by the way, which is how we live through it in the ordinary way. We must strengthen our thinking in the way I have described and gain self control in the will so that we live the inner life to a higher degree than we live our ordinary lives. The precondition for this investigation of the soul is a state of soul which is little known in everyday life. It will be easiest for me to characterize it in the following way.

If you are really active in ordinary life and not a lazy person, you will after a certain number of hours during which you have been awake feel the need to sleep, to be at rest and sleep. Just as you live through this physical existence in your ordinary waking life, so you need to be able to live in such a natural, matter-of-course way through the inner life as an investigator of the psyche, an inner life that comes with strengthened thinking and self control in the will.

Then it must also be possible for certain phenomena to occur. For example the kind of thinking which we are accustomed to in ordinary life can really go on and on without hindrance. Sometimes it might really give one the horrors, especially when one hears people gossiping over their tea cups or other things, to think of the ways in which people can go on thinking all the time, accompanying external life with their thoughts. This is something you cannot do with the inner life that takes you into the soul’s reality in the way I have described. When an investigator of the psyche works the way he is meant to do in anthroposophy, so that he will truly obtain the kind of results I have spoken of today, he will very soon feel—in the way he is working, for example, with regard to anything he seeks to elicit from the element or moment of going to sleep and waking up, so that he may then develop it further with greater acuity of thinking and to support the will—he will very soon feel, with as much necessity as we otherwise feel when we have done hard physical work with our muscles, hands and arms, that he cannot go on working. That is the inner feeling one gets after doing investigations in the way I meant today for just a short time. You can’t go on, you need to relax. And you find this relaxation in everyday life. Care is thus taken to see that the true psychologist does not turn into a dreamer or solitary visionary, an eccentric. If he investigates the soul in the right way, which I have described, he will speak of getting tired in the soul just as the physical body grows tired if we labour long and hard in the ordinary sense. And just as you need rest and sleep for this, so you need here to change to everyday life, the absolutely cheerful, hard-working and quite ordinary everyday life. We need this in a healthy way, not in the way of an eccentric. The investigator of soul and spirit needs this as much as we need sleep in ordinary life.

Someone who does not dream up all kinds of fantastic and unreal things about the life of the psyche but enters into the true nature of it in the kind of serious way I have described, with simple phenomena taking us to the most sublime questions of immortality and indeed to accepting the truth of immortality, will never be someone who is useless in ordinary life. Entering into the world beyond that perceived through the senses demands that he stands firmly, robustly in waking life, taking it fully and soundly, just as sound waking life calls for a change in the form of sleep. This is the one thing, There are other things as well, which I must leave aside today. But I wanted to speak of these difficulties to show the kind of inner condition one has to develop if one wants to be a true psychologist in the newer, anthroposophical sense.

I would have liked to have seen a possibility to speak directly about natural science, social science, about religion and history, which would complement this quite appropriately. But it is not to be, though there is a suggestion that further lectures may follow.

You will have seen—this is what I'd like to say in conclusion—that with psychology, too, even if it is based on anthroposophy, it truly is not a matter of somehow just talking and talking, using confused ideas, but that even where we consider the question of immortality, it must be a matter of proceeding in a serious and properly trained way in the psychology that takes its orientation from anthroposophy. However, it will be possible for this serious, specially trained approach—where we still have to struggle today to come to terms with ordinary psychology and therefore use the kind of expressions I have been using today—gradually to take us closer and closer to the popular way of thinking. For this psychology will take matters of the soul out of the scholar’s study. It will be possible to offer the results of its investigations to every human heart and every human soul. We’ll not face the danger of really only counting on abstract, prepared questions such as What is the forming of ideas? What is will, memory, attentiveness? What is love and hate? Instead it will build a bridge from the ordinary everyday phenomena of forming ideas, feeling and doing things out of the will to life before birth and after death, to the life that exists beyond sensory perception, if I may put it like this, and human immortality.

Such a psychology will be able to meet the hopes—as the psychiatrist Brentano¹⁰⁵ called them, though he himself did not find them fulfilled—the hopes of Plato and Aristotle that psychology will help us to know something about the best part of our essential nature, something which remains when the mortal earthly body decays. Brentano, a great mind, attempted to develop such a psychology on the basis of scientific thinking. He did not want to move on to genuine investigation in the fields that go beyond sensory perception. Since he was however honest enough to go only as far as he was able to go, this led to the remarkable result that this scientist wrote the first volume of his psychology in 1873, promising his publisher—the first volume appeared in the spring—that the second would follow in the autumn, and then the third and the fourth. Those further volumes never appeared. To anyone who knows Brentano’s story—I described it in my obituary, which is the third chapter in my book Von Seelenrätseln—this was not only for external reasons but the fact that Brentano felt a need to approach phenomena of the psyche with concepts that were not the traditional ones. Yet for the reasons I discussed the day before yesterday, which still live in the subconscious of people today, he shrank back from making the transition to investigative work in the sphere beyond anything perceived by the senses. When this transition can be made, we shall have a psychology that will interest not only academics but can be grasped by the whole of humanity. It can be the basis for a truly healthy human life, for it will not stop at things that can only be made interesting in artificial ways in a scholar’s study but will pour forth on everything that wells up in every healthy human heart, the soul of every healthy human being as a need to gain insight in the spirit. The psychology of which I am speaking, a psychology that goes into spheres beyond those perceived by the senses will be a popular psychology for everyone as the basis for a healthy religious life.

Anyone who knows psychology and its present situation will be able to say to himself—and I would like to conclude with this as something that throws a light, as it were, on our time and into the future—anyone who knows what can be gained with supersensible investigation in psychology will say that a psychology—and perhaps today’s attempt to characterize it has been very inadequate as yet—a psychology that truly takes us to the question of the soul’s immortality, to the most sublime phenomena of the soul, must be the psychology for the future. For as we have seen exactly from our look at psychology as it is current today, either it will have no future at all, as philosophers like Richard Wahle say, who are perfectly right about this, or this future will be the way it will have to be if it arises from the anthroposophical view of the world.

Questions and answers

Following the lecture given in Zurich on 10 October 1918

Question. How do feelings relate to bodily life, seen from the spiritual scientific point of view?

This is the very question, and it is a most interesting one, which I have tried to consider in the appendix to my book Von Seelenrätseln. There I also said that in the science of the spirit, such questions must have highly significant preconditions. You can only talk in the right way about such issues—spiritual science is strongly connected with our personal life—by speaking of your own investigations. I may say that I have indeed been working with questions that go in this direction for more than 30 years, and that 1 considered these things from many different points of view before I dared to talk about them in public the way I did after 30 years in that book, just touching on the subject. For questions like this only find an answer if you go back to them again and again in your investigations—questions as to the essence of the whole life of the psyche, as to the way the whole life of the psyche relates to the bodily sphere.

And I found—time is short; permit me therefore to give just a brief indication—that conventional science is altogether not investigating these relationships in an adequate way. The way people usually talk when they want to investigate these relationships is to put the soul on one side and bodily life on the other. But this causes total confusion. You don’t get anywhere at all. You will only get results—you’ll discover this if you carry out a serious investigation—if you place the life of the psyche on one side, that you truly differentiate it into living in one’s thinking, living in one’s feelings, living in one’s will intent. Once you have differentiated the life of the psyche so that you have a proper overview, you can relate it to bodily life. And you will find that every element in this life of the psyche has quite specific relationships to life in the body.

First of all you have to consider the life of forming ideas, of thinking. This relates to life in the nerves if we understand it rightly in a scientific way. The mistake people usually make is to relate the whole life of the psyche to life in the nerves. Of course it is still quite unacceptable today to hear the truth on this subject. It will, however, soon be known. Today, people relate the whole life of the psyche, including feeling and will intent, to life in the nerves. But we should only relate thinking life to life in the nerves.

This will also make it clear that there truly is a real connection—like the real connection between someone standing in front of a mirror and the mirror itself—between thinking and the life of ideas on the one hand and life in the nerves on the other. For someone who seeks the truth and not preconceived notions, it will be apparent that the life of feelings relates to something quite different, compared to the way in which thinking life relates to life in the nerves. The life of feeling demonstrably relates to life in the body in such a way that everything rhythmical in the life of the body corresponds to it—the whole life of rhythms, blood rhythm, respiration, and altogether everything that moves in rhythms. This is a direct connection, not one first mediated by the nerves. It is immediate.

One should not presuppose that confused notions are used in spiritual science. Instead one is working towards much more sustainable ideas than those used in conventional science, where confusion often reigns. We need only to be factual, investigating such real things as an impression gained in music, for instance. The spiritual investigator knows all the objections that may be raised; he raises them himself and does not even need to hear them from people who want to raise them, for he has sufficient practice in raising them himself. People will say that we hear musical notes with our ears, and the experience therefore arises with an impression made on the senses. No. The matter is not as simple as that but rather completely different. The situation is that there is indeed a relationship between the actual musical experience, which we have in our feelings, and everything that is rhythmical in our bodies.

You need only think of a hidden rhythm. Specific movements arise in the diaphragm, for instance, when we breathe in. As a result, the cerebrospinal fluid continually surges up and down in the head. This is a rhythmical inner process that corresponds to an experience of music in the soul. Because this rhythmical element, this rhythmical experience impacts on sensory impression, the experience of music arises in the harmony between the human bodily rhythm and the impression gained through the sense of hearing.

The important point is, however, that an impression on the sense of hearing only becomes the experience of music if it comes up against the inner rhythm in the human soul. A psychological study of the experience of music is enormously interesting. It merely substantiates what I am saying, which is that the life of feeling relates to the life in rhythmic movement inside the human being.

And the life of will—strange though it may also seem—relates to metabolism, metabolism in the widest sense. It appears to be most materialistic of all, although the life of will is actually the most supersensible of all. Energies enter into the life of matter. One day, when natural science sees itself in the right light, scientists will be able to take further—not actually generate, but take further—what I have said with regard to the life of will. They will find—the beginnings are already there—that with every act of will specific poisons arise out of the human organization itself, and that ‘in terms of the physical body’ what happens in the will process is really a toxic process. This will build a bridge between the act of will, which really is death in embryo being a toxic process, a kind of poisoning, and death itself, which is merely an act of will on a larger scale. I have thus shown how these three—will, feeling and thinking—relate to bodily experience. I could only do it briefly, so that I may now move on to the other question which exactly because of this last question is to some degree connected with what I have just been saying.

Question. How does the science of the spirit relate to psychopathology’, that is, to diagnosing mental diseases and so on?

There cannot be real diseases of the mind or soul—I can only say this briefly—and diseases of the psyche are really always in some way diseases of the organism. The organism cannot be used as an instrument in the right way. And just as we cannot perform the necessary function if the instrument is useless, so the organism, in living out the life of the psyche, cannot do so in the right way. This does not lead to materialism but actually to proper insight into the supersensible. One thing is particularly interesting here. It is interesting that insight gained in the science of nature, where we are more and more compelled to do experiments abstracted from nature, does indeed help us to gain the scientific insights that provide the basis for technology. But the more we experiment, I would say, the more do we come to the scientifically established conviction of which Goethe had an inkling when he said that all experimenting done with tools, external tools, really takes us away from the world of nature.¹⁰⁶

Goethe also had the right feeling for the other thing, the opposite. This is most interesting. Whilst experimentation does not tell us anything worthwhile about the natural world at a deeper level but only about the most superficial connections in it, abnormal developments given in nature itself take us into those deeper backgrounds. An experiment pushes us out of those backgrounds, as it were; abnormal developments take us deeper into nature.

Oddly enough, experimentation is singularly unfruitful in the psychology which seeks to base itself on physiology—not in all areas, but certainly in the areas that matter most. Something which is extraordinarily fruitful is observation of brain traumas and of other disorders in the organism which also make the life of the psyche appear abnormal. We are able to say that whilst experimentation separates us from the world of nature, observing the sick organism bring us together with it. Again a paradox, but we should not be afraid of reality, should not be afraid, even unconsciously so, when wanting to enter into the real world. The condition of the brain, also in the case of criminals, for example, takes us deeply into the secrets of nature. This branch of natural science is not fruitless, but it is connected with what the science of the spirit is able to establish—that everything connected with the will—and the will, though an independent entity, influences all else, including our thinking—is in a sense, in a certain respect, connected with the development of toxic states, abnormalities in the human organism.

And if the misfortune should happen and the human organism grow abnormal, then because of the very fact that the supersensible is driven out of the abnormal organism—for it only fits rightly in a normal organism; if the brain is injured, therefore, the supersensible is driven out—then it is because of this that the person, who may otherwise continue to be connected with the supersensible, is unable to gain his orientation, he loses it. Things that are often considered to be pathological in the psyche are therefore due to a physical abnormality.

We are thus able to say that we must really study the will in order to perceive why the study of abnormalities in the brain and so on gives such deep insight into certain conditions of the psyche. Just as we take everything supersensible out of the body on going to sleep and enter into the life of the psyche, but in a healthy way, so does an organism which has become abnormal push the supersensible out when there is pathology. We then enter into that life in a disoriented way, whilst we enter in a healthy way, which helps us to cope with the situation, when we enter into healthy sleep.

• 100. Wahle, Richard (1857–1935) Das Ganze der Philosophie und ihr Ende. Ihre Vermächtnisse an die Theologie, Physiologie, Aesthetik und Staatspädagogik, Vienna and Leipzig 1894. Ueber den Mechanismus des geistigen Lebens, Vienna and Leipzig 1906.
• 101. See note 18.
• 102. Goethe’s essay ‘Bedeutende Foerdemis durch ein einziges geistreiches Wort’ (1823). See note 10. Goethe received Johann Christian Heinroth’s Lehrbuch der Anthropologie (Leipzig 1822) on 29 October 1822. In his Annals for the year he wrote: ‘Heinroth’s anthropology gave me insights into my approach to the study of nature just when I was endeavouring to produce my natural scientific journal.’
• 103. See Rudolf Steiner on the subject in the lecture given on 8 October 1918 (in this volume).
• 104. See note 72.
• 105. Brentano, Franz. Psychologie vom empirischen Standpunkt 1. Band. Leipzig 1874.
• 106. Goethe’s actual words were: ‘The human being as such, in so far as he uses his sound senses, is the greatest and most accurate physical apparatus there can be, and it is indeed the greatest evil in modern physics that experiments have been separated off from the human being, as it were, and the aim is to gain insight into nature only from what artificial instruments show, thus limiting it and providing proof.’ Sprüche in Prosa, see note 10.

My dear friends! You have requested that we meet here to discuss matters that are closely related to your profession, and I may assume that this request of yours has arisen from the realization of the seriousness of our situation, a seriousness that becomes particularly apparent when one tries to work from a religious point of view in the civilizing life of our time. And I may further assume that you are primarily not concerned with what could be called a theological matter, but with a religious matter. It is indeed true that the burning question of our time is not only a theological one. One might think that even with a good deal of goodwill, some people could come to terms with the theological question in a relatively short time. But what must be clear to anyone looking impartially at our time is precisely not the question of dogma, not the question of theology, but the question of preaching and everything connected with it, the question of religion and especially of religious work as such. But with this we are pointing to a much broader and more comprehensive question than the theological one could ever be.

If one takes the religious standpoint from the outset, then the aim is to find a way of making the spiritual worlds with their various forces of activity accessible to people, initially – if we limit ourselves to the religious – through the word. And here we must be clear about the fact that the whole of our more recent development in this respect presents us with a question of the very deepest seriousness. He does not overlook the question who thinks that from the starting point on which the older people among us still place themselves today, something else could arise than actually the complete disintegration of religious life within our modern civilization. Anyone who believes that religious life can still be saved from the old assumptions is actually taking an impossible point of view. I say this in the introduction not because I want to start from some kind of spiritual-scientific dogma from the outset – that should not be the case – but because what I say simply shows up the unbiased observation of life in our time.

We must be clear about whether we can find an echo in the hearts of our contemporaries today when we preach, when we speak of those things that must one day be spoken of within true Christianity. And I assume that these days here will be such that we will discuss the matters that are actually on your minds in question and answer and disputation, but today I would like to touch on some of the issues that are actually at hand.

We must be clear about the fact that what has emerged in the last three to four hundred years as scientific education in humanity has already drawn a wide circle around itself. Those who are older can still notice the difference that exists in this respect between what was available in the 70s or 80s of the last century and what surrounds us today. In the 70s and 80s of the last century, you could still talk to a large part of the population about questions of spiritual life that arose from the traditions of various denominations and sects, and you could still find hearts and souls in which such talk resonated. Today, we are basically facing a different time. Of course, there are still many people who have not taken in much of the newer education that has found its way into our civilization; and we could still speak to these people about such concepts as Christ, the effect of grace, redemption, and so on, without something like resistance immediately asserting itself in these hearts. But even this will not last much longer. For a certain popular view of education is spreading with lightning speed, penetrating into the broadest masses of people through the literature of newspapers and popular magazines, and basically also through our school education. And even if this educational outlook does not directly develop ideas, feelings that rebel against such concepts as Christ, redemption, grace, and so on, do flourish, we must not forget that these ideas, which are absorbed, are cast in forms that simply give rise to an inner resistance to actual religious life in the broadest circles, unless a new starting point is sought for it. We should not deceive ourselves on this point.

You see, if the view of education continues to spread, which, based on seemingly established scientific premises, describes the universe in such a way that it began in a certain mechanical way, that organic life developed from mechanical tangles, and then, for my sake, the external-physical , then, if the facts are traced that have led to such hypotheses, so that one forms ideas about a corresponding end of the earth or our planetary system from them, then, for all those who seriously and honestly accept these ideas, the religious ideas, especially of Christianity, no longer have the possibility to flourish.

That this is not already very much in evidence today is only because there is so little inner honesty in people. They simply allow the mechanical-physical order of nature and Christianity to coexist and even try to prove theoretically that the two things can go side by side. But this only serves to obscure what is felt in every unbiased soul. And even if the intellect seeks all possible harmonies between Christianity and modern science, the heart will extinguish all these attempts at mediation, and the consequence can only be that there will be less and less room for religion in the hearts and minds of our fellow human beings.

If we do not consider the question from these deeper perspectives, we fail to appreciate the seriousness of the situation in which we currently find ourselves. For the difficulties indicated are encountered not only in theology, but most of all where they are not clearly expressed, where they remain hidden in the subconscious of our fellow human beings; one encounters them precisely when one does not want to practice theology but religion. And that is the important thing that must be understood above all else.

You see, the Ritschl school with all its offshoots is particularly characteristic of what has happened in this field in more recent times. This Ritschl school is still regarded today by many people working in the field of religion as something extraordinary. But what exactly is the Ritschl school? The Ritschl school takes the view that the last few centuries, especially the 19th century, have brought us a large amount of scientific knowledge. This scientific knowledge is dangerous for religious life. The Ritschl school is clear on this: if we let scientific knowledge into religious life, whether it be for criticism or for the formation of dogmas, then religious life will be undermined by it. So we have to look for a different starting point for religious life, the starting point of faith.

Yes, now, in a sense, we would have split the soul in two. On the one hand, we would have the soul's theoretical powers of knowledge, which deal with science, and on the other hand, we would have the establishment of a soul realm that develops very different abilities from the realm of knowledge: the realm of faith. And now there is a struggle, a struggle by no means for harmony between science and religion, but a struggle to exclude science from religion, a struggle for an area in which the soul can move without letting scientific thinking in at all. To allow as little as possible – if possible, nothing at all – of any scientific knowledge to enter religious life: that is the ideal of the Ritschlians.

But now, regardless of whether something like this can be established theoretically, regardless of whether one can persuade oneself that something like this dichotomy of the soul could exist, it is nevertheless true that for the actual life of the soul, so much rebellious power comes from the subconscious against this dichotomy of the soul that precisely religious life is undermined by it. But one could disregard it oneself. One need only go to the positive side of Ritschlianism itself, then one will see how this view must ultimately lose all content for religious feeling itself.

Let us take the most important forces that play a role in religious life. First, there is the realm of faith – whether or not this leads into knowledge is a question we will discuss later – secondly, there is the realm of actual religious experience – we will also take a closer look at this realm of religious experience later – and thirdly, there is the realm of religious authority. Now, one might say that since Luther, Protestantism has done an enormous amount to clarify, explain and so on the concept of authority. And in the struggle against the Catholic Church, one might say that Protestant life has extracted a pure perception with regard to the concept of authority. Within Protestant life, it is clear that one should not speak of an external authority in religion, that only Christ Jesus Himself should be regarded as the authority for individual souls. But as soon as one comes to the content of religious life, that is, to the second point, from the point of view of the Ritschlian school, an enormous difficulty immediately arises, which, as you know, has very, very significantly confronted all the newer Ritschlians. Ritschl himself does not want to have a nebulous, dark, mystical religious experience, but rather he wants to make the content of the Gospels the soul content of religious life. It should be possible for the religious person to experience the content of the Gospel, which means, in other words, that one should also be able to use the content of the Gospel for the sermon. But now the newer Ritschlians found themselves in a difficult position. Take, for example, the Pauline Epistles: in them, of course, there is contained a whole sum of Paul's religious experience, of a religious experience that is, from a certain point of view, entirely subjective, that is not simply a universally human religious experience to which one can relate only by saying to oneself: Paul had this experience, he put it into his letters, and one can only relate to it by saying: I look to Paul, I try to find my way into what his religious experience is, and I enter into a relationship with it. But that is precisely what the newer Ritschlians want to exclude. They say: what is subjective religious experience in this way cannot actually be the content of general Protestant belief, because it leads to simply recognizing an external authority, albeit a historical authority, but one should appeal to that which can be experienced in every single human soul. Thus the Pauline letters would already be excluded from the content of the gospel. For example, the Pauline letters would not be readily accepted into the content of general preaching.

Now, if you look at the matter impartially, you will hardly doubt that what the Ritschl School now presents as the rest that is to remain as objective experiences can, for an impartial consideration, only be considered a subjective experience. For example, it is said that the account of the life of Christ Jesus, as related in the Gospels, can basically be relived by everyone, but not, for example, the doctrine of vicarious atonement. So one must include in general preaching that which relates to the experiences of Christ Jesus, but not something like the doctrine of vicarious atonement and other related things. But on unbiased examination, you will hardly be able to admit that there is such a core of general experience in relation to Christ Jesus that could be appealed to in a very general sermon. The Ritschlianers will just end up, if they are unbiased enough, feeling compelled to drop piece after piece, so that in the end there is hardly much left of the content of the gospel.

But if the content of the gospel is no longer part of the sermon, if it is no longer part of religious instruction at all, then we are left with nothing of a concrete content that can be developed; then we are left only with what could be described as the general – and as such it always becomes nebulous – as the general nebulous mystical experience of God. And this is what we are encountering more and more in the case of individual people in modern times, who nevertheless believe that they can be good Christians with this kind of experience. We are encountering more and more that any content that leads to a form — although it is taken from the depths of the whole person, it must still lead to a certain formulation — any such content is rejected and actually only looked at from a certain emotional direction, an emotional direction towards a general divine, so that in fact in many cases it is precisely the honest religious-Christian endeavor that is on the way to such a vague emotional content.

Now, you see, this is precisely where the Protestant church has arrived at an extraordinarily significant turning point, and even at the turning point where the greatest danger threatens that the Protestant church could end up in an extraordinarily bad position compared to the Catholic church. You see, the Catholic principle has never placed much emphasis on the content of the Gospels; the Catholic principle has always worked with symbolism, even in preaching. And with those Catholic preachers who have really risen to the occasion, you will notice to this day – yes, one might say, today, when Catholicism is really striving for regeneration, even more so – how strongly symbolism is coming to life again, how, so to speak, dogmatic content, certain content about facts and entities of the supersensible life, is clothed in symbols. And there is a full awareness, even among the relatively lower clergy, that the symbolum, when pronounced, penetrates extraordinarily deeply into the soul, much deeper than the dogmatic content, than the doctrinal content and that one can contribute much more to the spread of religious life by expressing the truths of salvation in symbolic form, by giving the symbols a thoroughly pictorial character and not getting involved with the actual teaching content. You know, of course, that the content of the Gospel itself is only the subject of a lecture within the context of the Mass in the Catholic Church, and that the Catholic Church avoids presenting the content of the Gospel as a teaching to the faithful, especially in its preaching.

Anyone who can appreciate the power that lies in a renewal of the symbolic content of the sermon will understand that we are indeed at this important turning point today, that the main results of Protestant life in recent centuries have been very, very much put in a difficult and extremely difficult position in relation to the spreading forces of Catholicism.

Now, when you see how the Protestant life itself loses its connection with the content of the Gospels, and on the other hand you see how a nebulous mysticism remains as content, then you can indeed say: the power of faith itself is actually on very shaky ground. And we must also be clear about the fact that the power of faith today stands on very shaky ground. Besides, one really cannot avoid saying to oneself: No matter how many barriers are erected around the field of faith, no matter how much effort is put into them, no matter how much barriers are erected against the penetration of scientific knowledge, these scientific findings will eventually break down the barriers, but they can only lead to irreligious life, not religious life. What the newer way of thinking in science can achieve, insofar as it is officially represented today, is this – you may not accept it at first, but if you study the matter historically, you will have to recognize it – that ultimately there would be such arguments as in David Friedrich Strauß's 'Alter und neuer Glaube' (Old and New Belief). Of course the book is banal and superficial; but only such banalities and superficialities come of taking the scientific life as it is lived today and trying to mold some content of belief out of it.

Now, as I already indicated earlier, we absolutely need such concepts as Christ, the effect of grace, redemption, and so on, in the realm of religious life. But how should the unique effect of the mystery of Golgotha be possible in a world that has developed as it must be viewed by today's natural science in its development? How can you put a unique Christ in such a world?

You can put forward an outstanding man; but then you will always see, when you try to describe the life of this outstanding man, that you can no longer be honest if you do not want to avoid the question: How does the life of this most outstanding man differ from that of Plato, Socrates or any other outstanding man? One can no longer get around this question. If one is incapable of seeing any other impulses in the evolution of mankind on earth than those which science, if it is honest, can accept today, then one is also incapable of somehow integrating the Mystery of Golgotha into history. We have, of course, experienced the significant Ignorabimus of Ranke in relation to the Christ question, and it seems to me that here the Ignorabimus of Ranke should play a much more significant role for us than all attempts, emanating from Ritschlians or others, to conquer a particular field as a religious field, in which Christ can then be valid because barriers are erected against 'scientific life'.

You see, I would like to get straight to the heart of the matter in these introductory words; I would like to get you to think about it: how can one speak of ethical impulses being realized in some way in a world that operates according to the laws that the scientist must assume today? Where should ethical impulses intervene if we have universal natural causality? — At most, we can assume that in a world of mechanical natural causality, something ethical may have intervened at the starting point and, as it were, given the basic mechanical direction, which now continues automatically. But if we are honest, we cannot think of this natural mechanism as being permeated by any ethical impulses.

And so, if we accept the universal mechanism of nature and the universal natural causality, we cannot think that our own ethical impulses trigger anything in the world of natural causality. People today are just not honest enough, otherwise they would say: If we accept the general natural causality, then our ethical impulses are just beautiful human impulses, but beautiful human impulses remain illusions. We can say that ethical ideals live in us, we can even say that the radiance of a divinity that we worship and adore shines on these ethical ideals, but to ascribe a positive reality to this divine and even to state any kind of connection between our prayer and the divine and its volitional impulses remains an illusion.

Certainly, the diligence and good will that have been applied from various sides in order to be able to exist on the one hand, on the side of natural causality, and on the other hand to conquer a special area in religious life, is to be recognized. That is to be recognized. But there is still an inner dishonesty in it; it is not possible with inner honesty to accept this dichotomy.

Now, in the further course of our negotiations, we will probably not have to concern ourselves too much with the very results of spiritual scientific research; we will find content for the religious questions, so to speak, from the purely human. But I would like to draw your attention to the fact that spiritual science, which does indeed produce positive, real results that are just as much results as those of natural science, is not in a position to stand on the ground of general natural causality. Let us be clear about this point, my dear friends.

You see, the most that our study of nature has brought us is the law of the conservation of matter and the conservation of energy in the universe. You know that in the newer science of the soul, in psychology, this law of the conservation of energy has had a devastating effect. One cannot come to terms with the soul life and its freedom if one takes this law of the conservation of matter and the conservation of energy seriously. And the foundations that today's science gives us to understand the human being are such that we cannot help but think that this law of the conservation of matter and the conservation of energy seems to apply to the whole human being.

Now you know that spiritual science – not as a dogma of prejudice, but as a result of [spiritual research] – has the knowledge of repeated earthly lives. In the sense of this knowledge, we live in this life, for example, between birth and death, in such a way that, on the one hand, we have within us the impulses of physical inheritance (we will come back to these impulses of physical inheritance in more detail). The world in which we live between death and a new birth includes facts that are not subject to the laws of the conservation of matter and the conservation of energy. If we seek the spiritual connection between our present life and our next life on earth and further into the lives that no longer proceed physically, but that, after the end of our earthly existence, proceed spiritually, if we draw this connecting line, we encounter world contents that do not fall under our natural laws and therefore cannot be conceived under the law of the conservation of matter and the conservation of energy. What, then, is the connection between that which plays out from an earlier life into a later one, and that which a person then lives out in his deeds under the influence of earlier lives on earth? This connection is such that it cannot be grasped by natural laws, even if they extend into the innermost structure of the human body.

Every effect of that which was already present in me in earlier lives, in the present life, is such that its lawfulness has nothing to do with the universal laws of nature. This means that if we have ethical impulses in our present life on earth, we can say with certainty that these ethical impulses cannot be fully realized in the physical world, but they have the possibility of being realized from one life on earth to the next, because we pass through a sphere that is released from the laws of nature.

We thus arrive at a concept of miracle that is indeed transformed, but can certainly be retained in terms of knowledge. The concept of miracle in turn takes on meaning. The concept of miracle can only make sense if ethical impulses, and not just natural laws, are at work. But when we are completely immersed in the natural world, our ethical impulses do not flow into the natural order. But if we are lifted out of this natural context, if we place time between cause and effect, then the concept of miracle takes on a completely new meaning; indeed, it takes on a meaning in an even deeper sense.

If we look at the origin of the earth from a spiritual scientific point of view, we do not see the same forces at work as in the universal context of nature today. Rather, we see the laws of nature being suspended during the transition from the pre-earthly metamorphosis to the present-day earthly metamorphosis of the earth. And when we go to the end of the earth, when, so to speak, the Clausiussche formula is fulfilled and the entropy has increased so much that it has arrived at its maximum, when, therefore, the heat death has occurred for the earth, then the same thing happens: we see how, at the beginning of the earth as well as at the end of the earth, natural causality is eliminated and a different mode of action is present. We therefore have the possibility of intervening precisely in such times of suspension, as they lie for us humans between death and a new birth, as they lie for the earth itself before and after its present metamorphosis, the possibility of intervention by that which is today simply rejected by natural causality, the possibility of intervention by ethical impulses.

You see, I would say that humanity has already taken one of the two necessary steps. The first step is that all reasonable people, including religious people, have abandoned the old superstitious concept of magic, the concept of magic that presupposes the possibility of intervening in the workings of nature through this or that machination. In place of such a concept of magic, we now have the view that we must simply let natural processes run their course, that we cannot master natural causality with spiritual forces. Natural causality takes its course, we have no influence on it, so it is said, therefore magic in the old superstitious sense is to be excluded from our fields of knowledge.

But, as correct as this may be for certain periods of time, it is incorrect when we look at larger periods of time. If we look at the period of time that lies between death and a new birth for us humans, we simply pass through an area that, before spiritual scientific knowledge, appears in the following way: Imagine we die at the end of our present life; we first step out of the world in which we perceive the universal natural causality through our senses and our intellect. This universal natural causality continues to rule on earth, which we have then left through death, and we can initially, after death, when we look down from the life in the beyond to this one, see nothing but that effects grow out of the causes that were active during our life; these effects, which then become causes again, become effects again. After our death, we see that this natural causality continues.

If we have led a reasonably normal life, then this life continues after death until all the impulses that were active during our earthly life have experienced their end in earthly activity itself and a new spiritual impact takes place, until, that is, the last causalities cease and a new impact is there. Only then do we embody ourselves again when the spiritual gives a new impact, so that the stream of earlier causalities ceases. We descend to a new life, not by finding the effects of the old causes of our former life again – we do not find them then – but we find a new phase of rhythm, a new impact. Here we have, so to speak, lived spiritually across a junction of rhythmic development. In the next life we cannot say that the causes that were already present in the previous life are taking effect, but that in our human life they have all been exhausted at a crossroads – not yet the effects of the animal, plant and mineral kingdoms, which will only be exhausted at the end of the earth's time. But all that concerns us humans in terms of ethical life has been exhausted, and a new approach is needed. And we take the impulses for this new approach from the spiritual life that we go through between death and a new birth, so that we can connect with those impulses that shape the earth out of the ethical-divine. We can connect with them when we are in the world ourselves, from which the new impulse then flows. So that we have to say: If we now look at our life between birth and death, there is certainly no room for the superstitious-magical, but in the next life the connection is such that one can really speak of magic, but not of an immediate influence of the spiritual into the physical. That is the important thing that one gets to know through spiritual science, that there is not simply a continuous stream of causalities from beginning to end, but that there are rhythms of causality that pass through certain periods of time, which are not even terribly long in relation to the entire development of the earth; they arrive at the zero point, then a new causality rhythm comes. When we enter into the next rhythm of causality, we do not find the effects of the earlier rhythm of causality. On the contrary, we must first carry them over into our own soul in the form of after-effects, which we have to carry over through karma.

You see, I just wanted to suggest to you that spiritual science really has no need to accept anything from those who want to regenerate religion today – for many, this would mean the acceptance of a new dogmatism –; I just wanted to suggest that it is possible for spiritual science, for the science of the outer world, without prejudice to the seemingly necessary validity of the laws of nature, to give such a configuration that man in turn fits into it, and fits into it in such a way that he can truly call his ethical impulses world impulses again, that he is not repelled with his ethical impulses towards a merely powerless faith. At least this possibility must be borne in consciousness, for without it one is not understood by those to whom one is to preach.

I would also like to make a point for you here that I have often made for the teachers at the Waldorf School, which forms an important pedagogical principle. You see, if you want to teach children something, you must not believe that this something will be accepted by the child if you yourself do not believe in it, if you yourself are not convinced of it. I usually take the example that one can teach small children about the immortality of the soul by resorting to a symbol. One speaks to the child of the butterfly emerging from the chrysalis and draws the comparison by saying: Just as the butterfly lives in the chrysalis, our soul lives in us, only we do not see it; it flies away when death occurs. Now, there are two possible approaches to such teaching. One is to imagine: I am a terribly clever guy who doesn't think that using this comparison says anything about immortality, but I need it for the child, who is stupid, you teach them that. If you are unbiased, you will soon recognize that this sublimity of the child's perception cannot lead to fruitful teaching. What you do not have as a conviction within yourself will not convince the child in the end. Such are the effects of imponderables. Only when I myself can believe that my symbol corresponds to reality in every single word, then my teaching will be fruitful for the child. And spiritual science, of course, provides sufficient occasion for this, because in spiritual science the butterfly that crawls out of the chrysalis is not just a fictitious symbol, but it is actually the case that what appears at a higher level as immortality appears at a lower level. It is ordained by the Powers That Be that what is the transition of the soul into the immortal appears in the image of the butterfly crawling out.

So, if you look at the picture as if it were a reality, then the teaching is fruitful, but not if you imagine that you are a clever fellow who forms the image, but if you know that the world itself gives you the image. Thus the imponderable forces work between the soul of the teacher and the soul of the child; and so it is also in religious instruction, in preaching. One must have in one's soul the full content of the foundations for that which one presumes will be understood by those to whom one speaks. Indeed, one must not even have concepts that contradict this matter. I would like to express myself as follows: Suppose you are a person in the sense of today's Ritschlianer or something like that, who is thoroughly religious in terms of soul immortality, the existence of God and so on, but at the same time you are weak enough to accept the Kant-Laplace theory, and in fact as it is taught by today's natural science. The mere fact that this Kant-Laplacean theory is in your mind and is an objective contradiction of what you have to represent as the content of your Christian confession, already that impairs the convincing power that you must have as a preacher. Even if you are not aware of the contradictions, they are there; that is to say, anyone who wants to preach must have within himself all the elements that make up a consistent worldview. Of course, theology will not be of much use to us in preaching; but we must have it within ourselves as a consistent whole, not as one that exists alongside external science, but one that can embrace external science, that is, relate to it sympathetically.

We can look at the matter from another side. You see, in philosophy, in science, they talk today about all possible relationships between man and the world around him; but the things they talk about are hardly found in the people who, as simple, primitive people, even among the urban population, are listening to us today, uneducated. The relationships that our psychologists, for example, posit between the person who observes nature and the person himself are not real at all; they are actually only artificially contrived. But what lives in the simplest farmer, in the most primitive person in our world, is that deep within himself he seeks — I say seeks — something deep within himself that is not out there in nature. He searches for a different world view from the one that comes from nature, and one must speak to him of this world view if the feeling that he has as a religious feeling is to arise at all. Primitive man simply says, as it lives in his subconscious: “I am not made of this material that the world is made of, which I can see with my senses; tell me something about what I cannot see with my senses!” This is the direct appeal that is made to us if man is to make us his religious guides: we should tell him something about the positive content of the supersensible world.

All our epistemology, which says that sensory perceptions and sensations are subjective or more or less objective and so on, is of little concern to the vast majority of people. But the fact that something must live in the world that does not belong to the sensory world by its very nature is something that people want to learn about from us. And here the question is: How can we meet this need of the human being? We can only do so by finding the right path from the subject-matter of teaching to the cultus; and I will say a few introductory words about this question tomorrow. Today, I would be very grateful if you would express yourselves so that I can get to know your needs.

Perhaps we will arrive more at formulating questions than at answers, but it would be quite good if we could formulate the main questions. During my time here, I would like to give you what can lead to such a handling of the religious, which, I would say, lies in the profession of the religious leader, not in theology. So it should be aimed at religious practice, at the establishment of religious institutions, not so much at theological questions. But if such questions are on your mind, we can also talk about them. I would ask you, if we are talking about what is particularly on your mind today, to at least formulate the questions first.

A participant suggests that Mr. Bock from Berlin formulate the questions.

Emil Bock: Last night I reported on what we in Berlin have tried to make clear to ourselves in our inner preparation, and we have tried to distinguish between different sets of questions. And in connection with what we have heard, we can now formulate the one question that combines three of the areas we had distinguished: the questions of worship and preaching and the question of the justification of the community element in the community. Yesterday evening I tried to make this clear by referring to the church-historical trend of the community movement. And there we actually found that for us it is about a clarity of the relationship between anthroposophical educational work on religious questions and purely religious practice, so either in worship, the relationship between ritual and sermon, or, with a transformation of what must take place outside of the cult, the relationship of the service as a whole to the religious lecture work or the religious ritual to teaching children, because what is ultimately gained through symbolism has not yet been realized by the human being. Now the question for us is: to what extent does it have to become conscious at all, and if it has to become conscious, how does it have to be done and balanced between the symbolic work on the part of the person and the part of the person that simultaneously tries to develop an awareness of it, which in turn will be divided into several problems when we consider the diversity of those we will face later? For many people may not have the need to raise the impulses into consciousness, while many people may first have the problem of consciousness at all.

And so the question arose for us: How do we actually harmonize the striving for a communal religious life with the striving for a vitalization of the I-impulse? For we have to reckon with the fact that, as far as we can see, in the case of many people who belong to bourgeois life, what would first come into question would be a proper independence for the individual through religious practice, a connection to the forces of the I, while in the case of many other people we would have to bring about a regulation of a lost sense of self. This is what we sensed in the question of communal forces, in a way that we could understand in relation to the Moravian Church in church history.

This is how I have now described the one complex of questions that was important to us last night. But we also had three other areas that raised a number of questions for us, and the first of these was the purely organizational. If we prepare ourselves, make ourselves capable and draw the consequences for our personal field of work, which then arise when we realize that, after all, it is a matter of founding communities according to a new principle, then the question is before us, and this is in every case, of course, differentiated in practice, depending on the situation in which the individual stands: What preparatory work do we have to do? Can we do preparatory work through lecturing? How can we practically distribute ourselves to the points where something needs to be worked on, and how can we work out something together about these things? It was clear to us that, of course, we do not expect things to be made easy for us now and that we will get a place. We are prepared to create such fields of work. But perhaps there is something to be learned about how this can be made easier for us in a certain sense. Then there is a great deal that is perhaps purely organizational that we would like to ask about during our discussion.

The second point, in addition to purely organizational matters, was our relationship to theological science. Above all, there were two questions: firstly, the theological training of those who later have to work in such communities, insofar as such training can come into contact with university activities and we can learn from it. Then there is the question of the new understanding of the Bible, which, after all, presupposes a theological education that goes beyond a knowledge of the anthroposophical worldview to a certain extent, as a technical education. Perhaps there are some practical questions in one heart or another; perhaps one or the other has more of an inclination for scientific work, and it would be interesting for all of us to see how this theological-scientific work can perhaps be made fruitful for the religious life of the present.

And then, last of the six areas we see – and this is probably the one that can least be formulated directly in questions – is the question of the quality of the priesthood that we must expect of ourselves if we set out to work on something like this. But then something practical comes together again very closely, about which one should already ask, that would be the question of the selection of the personalities who should then finally enter into this work, because somehow we must also orient ourselves as to how we should select ourselves, quite apart from where the decision about this will initially lie for the direction of self-evaluation. I think I have roughly said what it was about last night.

Rudolf Steiner: These are the questions that must be asked at this turning point, to which I have alluded, and this will actually be the content of our being together. We must, in particular, be clear about these questions and also about some things that, I would say, form the prerequisite for them. I would just like to point out a few things after the questions have been formulated, before we discuss them: It is the case that we are living in a time in which such questions must be judged from a highest point of view, also from a highest historical point of view. It is not at all in the direction of the spiritual scientist to always use the phrase; “We live in a transitional period.” Of course, every period is a transition from the earlier to the later, but the point is to look beyond what is considered a transition to what is actually passing away. And in our time, there is something that is very much understood in the process of transition: human consciousness itself. We are very easily mistaken if we believe that consciousness, as it still manifests itself in many ways today, is, so to speak, unchangeable.

We say to ourselves today very easily: Yes, there are people who, through their higher education, will want to become aware of the content of the cult; other people will have no need for it, they will not strive to bring it into conscious life at all. You see, we are living at a point in the historical development of humanity when it is characteristic that the number of people who want to be enlightened in a suitable way about that which is also a cult for them is increasing very rapidly. And we have to take that into account. We must not form the dogmatic prejudice today that you can enlighten him, but not her. For if we assume today that people who have attained a certain level of education do not want to be enlightened, then we will usually be mistaken in the long run. The number of people who want to achieve a certain degree of awareness of the symbolic and of what is alive in the cultus is actually growing every day, and the main question is quite different, namely this: How can we arrive at a cult and symbolic content when we at the same time demand that, as soon as one consciously enlightens oneself about this symbolic content, it does not become abstract and alien to the mind, but rather acquires its full value, its full validity? — This is the question that is of particular interest to us today.

If it is not too religious, you can refer to Goethe's fairy tale of the green snake and the beautiful lily, which emerged from a person who, if you want, if you want to squeeze the concepts, can be spoken of as a person who always dreamed about such things. One also speaks of the fact that Schiller interpreted Goethe's dreams. In a certain respect, however, Goethe was much more aware of what lived in his fairy tale than what Schiller became. But his consciousness is one that can live in the image itself; it is not that abstract consciousness that one experiences today solely as consciousness. Today one confuses understanding with consciousness in general. The one who visualizes is believed to be not as conscious as the one who conceptualizes. Conceptualization is confused today with consciousness.

We will have to talk about the question of the consciousness and unconsciousness and superconsciousness of a cult and a symbolism, which must indeed occupy our present time in the very deepest sense. For on the one hand we have the Catholic Church with its very powerful cult and its tremendously powerful and purposeful symbolism. What tremendous power lies in the sacrifice of the Mass alone, when it is performed as it is performed in the Catholic Church, that is, when it is performed with the consciousness of the faithful, which is present. And the sermon by the Catholic priest also has a content that relates to symbolism, and in particular it is very much imbued with will. [On the other hand,] the Protestant development of the last few centuries has led to the development of the cultus being transferred to the actual teaching content, to the teaching content. The teaching content is now that which tends to have an effect only when it is attuned to the understanding of the listener or reader. That is why Protestant churches face the danger of atomization, the danger that everyone forms their own church in their hearts, and precisely because of this no community can be formed. And this danger is one that must be countered.

We must have the possibility of forming a community, and one that is built not only on external institutions but on the soul and inner life. This means that we must be able to build a bridge between such a cult, such a ritual, that can exist in the face of modern consciousness and yet, like the Protestant confession, leads to a deeper understanding of the teaching.

The teaching content individualizes and analyzes the community until one finally arrives at the individual human being, and even analyzes the individual human being through his or her tendencies. A psychologist can see the conflicted natures of the present day; they are individualized right down to the individual. We can actually see today people who not only strive to have their individual beliefs, but who have two or more beliefs that fight each other in their own souls. The numerous conflicted natures of the present day are only a continuation of the tendency that individualizes and analyzes the community. Cult, symbol, and ritual are synthetic and reuniting; this can be perceived everywhere where these things are practically addressed. Therefore, this question is at the same time the one that must be really underlying the question of the community movement.

The question of anthroposophical enlightenment and purely religious practice must in turn be detached from our present-day point in time. Today, however, we are experiencing something tragic; and it would be particularly significant if a force could emanate from your community here, so to speak, that could initially lead us beyond this tragedy. If one has such an explanation, as it arises, I would like to say, as a religious explanation in consequence of the entire anthroposophical explanation, which, after all, has not only religious but also historical explanations, scientific explanations, and so on, if one considers these religious explanations of Anthroposophy , the ideas one encounters and, as a consequence, the feelings that arise from them, cannot but lead to a longing for external symbols, for images, in order to take shape. This is so often misunderstood that Anthroposophical ideas are already different from those ideas that one encounters today. When one is exposed to other ideas today, whether from science or from social life, they work in the sense that they are called enlightened in the absolute sense, and in the sense that they criticize everything and undermine everything. When one is exposed to anthroposophical ideas, they lead to a certain devotion in people, they are transformed into a certain love. Just as red blood cannot help but build up the human being, so the anthroposophical ideas cannot help but stimulate the human being emotionally, sensually, even volitionally, so that he receives the deepest longing for an expression of what he has to say, in the symbolic, in the pictorial at all. It is not something artificially introduced when you find so much pictorial language in my “Geheimwissenschaft”, for example; it just comes about through expressing oneself pictorially.

In Dornach — those who have been there have seen it, later on it will be seen in its perfection — we have at the center of the building a group of Christ figures: Christ with Lucifer and Ahriman, both of whom are defeated by him. There, in the Christ, a synthesis of all that is sensual and supersensual is presented to the human eye. Yes, you see, to develop such a figure plastically, that does not come from the fact that one has once decided to place a figure there, so that the place should be adorned. It is not at all like that, but when one develops the anthroposophical concepts, one finally comes to an end with the concepts. It is like coming to a pond; now you cannot go any further, but if you want to get ahead, you have to swim. So, if you want to go further with anthroposophy, at a certain point you cannot go on forming abstract concepts, you cannot go on forming ideas, but you have to enter into images. The ideas themselves demand that you begin to express yourself in images.

I have often said to my listeners: There are certain theories of knowledge. Particularly among Protestant theologians there are those who say: Yes, what one recognizes must be clothed in purely logical forms, one must look at things with pure logic, otherwise one has a myth. Isn't that how people like Bruhn speak? He works very much against anthroposophy by saying that it forms myths, a new mythology. Yes, but what if someone were to ask the counter-question: just try to fathom the universe with your logic, without passing over into the pictorial. If the universe itself works not only logically but also artistically, then you must also look at it artistically; but if the universe eludes your logical observation, then what? In the same way, the outer human form eludes mere logical speculation. If you take the true anthroposophical concepts, you get into the picture, because nature does not create according to mere natural laws, but according to forms.

And so it can be said that as anthroposophy comes to fruition today, it takes into account what is at play in the hearts of our contemporaries, [the need] to get beyond intellectualism. This is actually admitted by every discerning contemporary who is following developments. They realize that we have to move beyond intellectualism, in theology too, of course. But most do not yet realize that this flowing into the pictorial, which then becomes ritual cultus in the sphere of religious practice, has just as much justification and just as much originality as the logical.

Most people imagine that pictures are made by having concepts and then clothing them in symbolism. This is always a straw-like symbolism. This is not the case [in Dornach]. In Dornach, there is no symbol based on a concept, but rather, at a certain stage, the idea is abandoned and the picture comes to life as something original. It is there as an image. And one cannot say that one has transferred a concept into the image. That would be a symbolism of straw.

This striving to overcome intellectualism is there today, this striving for a spiritual life that, because of objectivity, passes into the pictorial. On the other hand, there is no belief in the image at all today. This makes it tragic. One believes that one must overcome the image if one is really clever; one believes that one only becomes conscious when one has overcome the image. — Such images as in Goethe's Fairy Tale of the Green Snake and the Beautiful Lily are always divested of their reality when one tries to explain or interpret them by mental maziness. One can only lead to the fact that the person concerned can take up these images, that they can become concrete for him, but not mentally comment on them. This is what distinguishes what I have contributed to the interpretation of Goethe's fairy tale from what the other commentators do. They make comments and explain the images mentally.

For what the real imagination is based on, the mental explanation is just as foreign as what I say about the Chinese language in German, for example. If I want to teach someone Chinese, I have to lead him to the point where he can grasp the Chinese language in its entirety to such an extent that he can enter into it. And so one must also prepare for real pictorial thinking; one must proceed in such a way that the person concerned can then make the images present within himself and not have to attach an explanation to them.

That is the tragedy, that on the one hand there is the deepest need for the image, and on the other hand all belief in the image has actually been extinguished. We do not believe that we have something in images that cannot be given in the mind, in intellectual concepts. We must first understand this when we talk about the question of symbolum and consciousness in the near future. In particular, we will only be able to fruitfully answer the question of how to balance the subconscious and the conscious, which plagues so many people today, when we are clear about this matter.

So I would like to ask you to consider what I have now suggested about the relationship between the concepts of the intellect and the real images until tomorrow. From this point of view, we will also find that we can enter into community building, because community building depends very much on the possibility of a cult. The practical successes of community building also depend on the possibility of a cult.

You see, when people get to know India and the Indian religions, one thing is always emphasized with great justification: Of course there are many sects in India; these have a very strong sense of community that extends to the soul and can manifest itself in practical community life. In some respects, of course, the version that has to take place in the East can compete with many of the principles on which the brotherhood is based. This is often based on the fact that the Oriental in his individual life does not really know what we call subjective, personal conviction in relation to the community around him. The Oriental, if he participates at all in spiritual life, does not understand at all that one cannot have one's own opinion about everything, for example about a community and a body of teaching; that is something he does not understand at all. Conceptually, everyone can have their own opinion; the only thing that is common there is only the image, and one is only aware that the image is common. It is peculiar that in the West there is a tendency to place the emphasis on conviction, and that this leads to atomization. If one seeks conviction and places the main emphasis on it, then one comes to atomization. This does not occur if one seeks commonality in something other than conviction. Conviction must be able to be completely individual.

We must ask ourselves the question: On the one hand, the self stands as the pinnacle of the individual life, while on the other hand, Christ stands as the power and essence that is not only common to all Christians, but of which the claim must be made that it can become common to all human beings. And we must find the way to bridge the gap between the very individual self, which to a certain extent wants to believe what it is capable of, and the commonality of Christ.

We shall then have to devote special attention to the question of forming communities, and, as the Lord very rightly said, to the preliminary work for this. For these are, of course, matters that will meet with quite different difficulties. On the one hand, we are today almost dependent on conducting preliminary work through instruction in such a way that we find a sufficiently large number of people in whose souls there is initially an understanding of what can actually be wanted. On the other hand, we are faced with humanity that is completely fragmented. The simple fact that we appear with the pretension of knowing something that another person might have to think about for a day to judge is almost enough to get us dismissed right now. The effect from person to person is extremely difficult today. And of course this also makes the formation of communities more difficult.

Nevertheless, if you want to achieve something in what you have only been able to strive for by appearing here, then we will have to talk at length about the question of forming a community and, above all, about the preparatory work for it, which should essentially consist of us feeling, already spiritually, as community builders. And we can hardly do this other than by – perhaps it will not be immediately understandable at first hearing what I want to say, because it touches on one of the deepest questions of the present – first of all trying to refrain from lecturing other people as much as possible. People just don't take lectures today; this should not be our main task.

You see, however small the success of anthroposophical work may be, which I have had to set myself as my task, in a sense this success is there, albeit in a small circle; it is there. And what is there is based on the fact that I actually — in the sense in which it is understood at our educational institutions — never wanted to teach anyone in a primarily forceful way. I have actually always proceeded according to a law of nature, I always said to myself: the herrings lay an infinite number of eggs in the sea, very few of them become herrings, but a certain selection must take place. And anyone who knows that that which goes beyond the materialistic continues to have an effect, knows that even the unfertilized herring eggs already have their task in the world as a whole – they have their great effect in the etheric world, the selections only take place for the physical world – then comes to terms with this question: Why do such herring eggs remain unfertilized? That which remains unfertilized has its great task in another world. These unfertilized herring eggs are not entirely without significance. And that is basically how it is with teaching people. I have never believed, whether I have spoken to an audience of fifty or to one of five hundred (I have also spoken to larger audiences), that one-half or one-quarter of them can be taught. Rather, I have assumed that among five hundred there will perhaps be five who, at the first stroke, will have their hearts touched by what I have to say, who are, so to speak, predestined for it. Among fifty people, one, and among five people, one in ten. It is no different, and one must adjust to that. Then what happens through instruction in the present time cannot happen through selection. People come together with whom one has found an echo. Selection is what we must seek first today; then we will make progress.

It takes a certain resignation not to live in this sense of power: you want to teach, you want to convince others. But you absolutely must have this resignation. And why people so often lack it depends precisely – I am only talking here about people who practise religion – depends precisely on their theological training. This theological training is basically based entirely on the fact that one can teach everyone, that one should not actually make selections. Therefore, ways and means must be found to include in the theological training, above all, the emotional relationship to the content of the spiritual.

You see, unfortunately even theology has arrived at the point of view that knowledge of God is always more important than life in God, the experience of the divine in the soul. The experience of the divine in the soul is what gives one the strength to work with the simplest, most unspoiled people, and that is what should actually be developed. Recent times have worked against this completely. The more we strive to seek abstract concepts of some kind of supersensible being, and the less we absorb this supersensible being into our souls, the more we will work against it. We really need a life-filled preparation and education for theological science. And of course something esoteric comes into play here, you see, where we have to point to a law that already exists. First of all, you have to have within you what I mentioned earlier: not only as a clever person, how are you supposed to teach a picture or something to someone else – you have to have that to the full – but you must also have the other, that you must always know more than what you say. I don't mean that in a bad way at all. But if you take the standpoint that is actually held today in the professorial world, that one should only appropriate that which one then wants to communicate to others, then you will certainly not be able to achieve much with religious communication. For example, when you speak about the Bible, you must have your own content, in which you live, in addition to the exoteric content, which is nothing other than an esoteric content expressed. There is no absolute boundary between the esoteric and the exoteric; one flows into the other and the esoteric becomes exoteric when it is spoken out.

This is basically what makes Catholic priests effective. That is what praying the breviary consists of. He seeks to approach the divine in a way that goes beyond the layman by praying the breviary. And the special content of the breviary, which goes beyond what is taught, also gives him strength to work in preaching and otherwise. It has always been interesting to me – and this has happened not just once, but very frequently – that Protestant pastors who had been in office for a long time came to me and said that there should be something similar for them [to the Catholic breviary]. Please do not misunderstand me; I am not speaking in favor of Catholicism, least of all the Roman one. There are pastors who have been in office for a long time who have said to me: Why is it that we cannot come into contact with souls in the same way as a Catholic priest, who of course abuses it? — That is essentially because the [Catholic priest] seeks an esoteric relationship with the spiritual world.

This is really what we are striving for in the threefold social organism. The spiritual life we have today as a general rule — we are not talking about the other one — the spiritual life we have is not really a spiritual life, it is a mere intellectual life. We talk about the spirit, we have concepts, but concepts are not a living spirit. We must not only have the spirit in some form or other in the form of concepts that sit in our heads, but we must bring the spirit down to earth, it must be in the institutions, it must prevail between people. But we can only do that if we have an independent spiritual life, where we not only work out of concepts about the spirit, but work out of the spirit itself.

Now, of course, the Church has long endeavored to preserve this living spirit. It has long since disappeared from the schools; but we must bring it back there and also into the other institutions. The state cannot bring it in. That can only be brought in by what is at the same time individual priestly work and community work. But it must be priestly work in such a way that the priest, above all, has within himself the consciousness of an esoteric connection with the spiritual world itself, not merely with concepts about the spiritual world. And here, of course, we come to the great question of selection, to the judgment of the quality of the priests. Now, this judgment of the quality of the priests is such that it can very easily be misunderstood, because, firstly, many more people have this quality than one might think, it is just not developed in the right way, not cultivated in the right way; and secondly, this question is often a question of fate. When we come to have a living spiritual life at all and the questions of fate come to life for us again, then the priests will be pushed out of the community of people more into their place than out of self-examination, which always has a strongly selfish character. It is true that one must acquire a certain eye for what objectively calls upon one to do this or that.

Perhaps I may also tell you what I have said in various places as an example. I could also tell other examples. I gave a lecture in Colmar on the Bible and wisdom. Two Catholic priests came to me after the lecture. You can imagine that Catholic priests have not read anything by me, because it is actually forbidden for them, and it is basically the case that it is considered an abnormality for a Catholic priest to go to an anthroposophical lecture. But they were probably harmless at the time; they approached me quite innocently, since I did not say anything in this lecture that would have opposed them. They even came to me after the lecture and said: Yes, actually we cannot say anything [against what you have presented, because] we also have purgatory, we also have the reference to supersensible life after purgatory. Now in this case I thought it best to give two lectures. 'Bible and Wisdom' I and II, and in the first lecture nothing was said about repeated lives on earth, so they did not notice that there was a contradiction to the Roman Catholic view. Now they came and said that they had nothing against the content, but the “how” I said it was very different, and so they believed that they could not agree with this “how”. Because the “how” would be right for them, because they spoke for all people and I only spoke for certain prepared people, for people who therefore have a certain preparation for it. After some back and forth, I said the following: You see, it doesn't matter whether I or you—you or I, I said—are convinced that we speak for all people. This conviction is very understandable. We might not speak at all if we didn't have the conviction that we formulate our things in such a way and imbue them with such content that we speak for all people. But what matters is not whether we are convinced that we speak for all people, but whether all people come to you in church. And I ask you: do all people still come to church when you speak? Of course they could not say that everyone still comes, but they had to admit that some do not come. That is objectivity. For those who do not go to you and who also have the right to seek a path to Christ, I have spoken for them. — That is how one's task is derived from the facts.

I just wanted to show a way to get used to having one's personal task set by the question of destiny and also by the great question of objectivity. I wanted to show how one should not brood so much, as is the case today, over one's own personality – which, after all, is basically only there so that we can fill the place that the divine world government assigns us – but rather we should try to observe signs from which we can recognize the place we are to be placed. And we can do that.

Today, when people speak from their souls, they repeatedly ask: What corresponds to my particular abilities, how can I bring my abilities to bear? This question is much, much less important than the objective question, which is answered by looking around to see what needs to be done. And if we then really get seriously involved in what we notice, we will see that we have much more ability than we realize. These abilities are not so much specific; we as human beings can do an enormous amount, we have very universal soul qualities, not so much specific ones. This brooding over one's own self, and the over-strong belief that we each have our own specific abilities that are to be particularly cultivated, is basically an inward, very sophisticated egoism, which must be overcome by precisely the person who wants to achieve such qualities as are meant here.

Now I think I have told you how I understand the questions. We can think about the matter until tomorrow; and if it is all right with you, I would like to suggest that we meet again tomorrow at around 11 o'clock. And I would ask you not to hold back on any matter, but we want to deal with the things that are on your mind as exhaustively as possible.

[ 1 ] It was said by critics of this book immediately after its publication that it does not give a picture of Goethe's “world view” but only of his “view of nature.” I do not think that this judgment comes from a justified point of view, even though, looked at externally, the book deals almost exclusively with Goethe's ideas about nature. For I believe that in the course of what has been said I have shown that these ideas about nature rest upon a quite definite way of looking at the phenomena of the world. And in my opinion I have indicated in the book itself that taking a point of view toward the phenomena of nature such as Goethe had can lead to definite views about psychological, historical, and still wider phenomena of the world. What expresses itself in Goethe's view of nature about a particular area is, in fact, a world view, not a mere view of nature which a person could also have whose thoughts have no significance for a wider picture of the world. On the other hand, however, I believed I should not present anything in this book other than what can be said in direct connection with the realm which Goethe himself worked through out of the totality of his world view. To sketch the picture of the world which arises out of Goethe's literary works, out of his ideas on an history, etc. is of course altogether possible and certainly of the greatest possible interest. A person who is attentive to the stance of this book will not, however, seek in it any such world picture. Such a person will recognize that I set myself the task of resketching that pan of the Goethean world picture for which in his own writings there are statements which emerge in an unbroken sequence from each other. I have indeed also indicated in many places the points at which Goethe got stuck in this unbroken development of his world picture, but which,he did successfully achieve in certain realms of nature. Goethe's views about the world and life show themselves to the broadest extent. How these views emerge out of his own particular world view, however, is not observable in his works outside the area of natural phenomena in the same way that it is within this area. In these other areas what Goethe's soul had to manifest to the world becomes observable; in the area of his ideas about nature there becomes visible how the basic impulse of his spirit achieved, step by step, a world view up to a certain boundary. Precisely through the fact that one does not for once go further in sketching Goethe's thought-work than to present what developed within him as a conceptually cohesive part of a world view, light will be shed upon the particular coloration of what otherwise reveals itself in his life's work. Therefore I did not want to paint the picture of the world which speaks out of Goethe's life work as a whole but rather that part which comes to light with him in the form in which one brings a world view to expression in thought. Views which well up in a personality, however great that personality may be, are not yet parts of a world view picture which is cohesive in itself and which the personality himself conceives to be a coherent whole. But Goethe's nature ideas are just such a cohesive part of a world view picture. And, as illumination for natural phenomena, these ideas are not merely a view of nature but rather a part of a world view.

[ 2 ] The fact that I have also been reproached with respect to this book for changing my views after its publication does not surprise me since I am not unfamiliar with the presuppositions which move a person to make such judgments. I have expressed myself about this search for contradictions in my books in the preface to the first volume of my Riddles of Philosophy and in an article in the journal, Das Reich (“Spiritual Science as Anthroposophy and Contemporary Epistemology”). This kind of search is possible only for critics who completely fail to recognize how in fact my world view must proceed in order to grasp the different areas of life. I do not want to go into this question in a general way again here but rather will just briefly state a few things about this book on Goethe. I consider the anthroposophically oriented spiritual science which I have been presenting in my books for sixteen years to be a way of knowing the spiritual world content accessible to man; and a person who has enlivened within himself Goethe's ideas on nature as something right for him and, starting there, strives for experiences of knowledge about the spirit realm, must come to this way of knowing. I am of the view that this spiritual science presupposes a natural science which corresponds to the Goethean one. I not only mean by this that the spiritual science presented by me does not contradict this natural science. For I know how little it signifies for there to be only no logical contradiction between different assertions. In spite of this they could in reality be utterly incompatible. But rather I believe I have insight into the fact that Goethe's ideas about the realm of nature, if really experienced, must necessarily lead to the anthroposophical knowledge presented by me, if a person does something which Goethe did not yet do, which is to lead experiences in the realm of nature over into experiences in the realm of spirit. The nature of these latter experiences is described in my spiritual scientific works. This is the reason for also reprinting now, after the publication of my spiritual scientific books, the essential content of this present book, which I brought out for the first time in 1897, as my recapitulation of the Goethean world view. I consider all the thoughts presented in it to be still valid today, unchanged. I have only in individual places made changes which do not pertain to the configuration of thoughts but only to the style of individual expressions. And the fact that after twenty years one would want to make a few stylistic changes here and there in a book can, after all, seem comprehensible. Otherwise, what is different in the new edition from the previous one are only some expansions, not changes, of the content. I believe that a person who is seeking a natural scientific foundation for spiritual science can find it through Goethe's world view. Therefore it seems to me that a book about Goethe's world view can also be of significance for someone who wants to concern himself with anthroposophically oriented spiritual science. But the stance of my book is that it wants to consider Goethe's world view entirely for itself, without reference to actual spiritual science. (One will find in my book, Goethe's Faust and the Fairy Tale of the Green Snake, something of what there is to say about Goethe from the particularly spiritual scientific point of view.)

[ 3 ] Supplementary note: A critic of this book of mine on Goethe believed he had found a special trove of “contradictions,” when he placed what I say about Platonism in this book (in the first edition of 1897) beside a statement I made at almost exactly the same time in my introduction to volume four of Goethe's natural scientific writings (Kuerschner edition): “The philosophy of Plato is one of the most sublime edifices of thought that has ever sprung from the spirit of mankind. It is one of the saddest signs of our time that the Platonic way of looking at things is regarded in philosophy as the exact opposite of healthy reason.” It is indeed difficult for certain minds to grasp that each thing, when looked at from different sides, presents itself differently. It will be easy to see that my different statements about Platonism do not represent any real contradiction to anyone who does not get stuck at the mere sound of the words but who goes into the different relationships into which I had to bring Platonism, through its own being, at this or that time. It is on the one hand a sad sign when Platonism is regarded as going against healthy reason because only that is considered to be in accordance with reason which stays with mere sense perception as the sole reality. And it does go against a healthy view of idea and sense world to change Platonism in such a way that through it an unhealthy separation of idea and sense perception is brought about. Someone who cannot enter into this kind of thinking penetration of the phenomena of life remains, with what he grasps, always outside of reality. Someone—as Goethe expresses it—who plants a concept in the way in order to limit a rich life's content has no sense for the fact that life unfolds in relationships which work differently in different directions. It is more comfortable, to be sure, to set a schematic concept in the place of a view of the fullness of life; with such concepts one can indeed judge easily and schematically. But one lives, through such a process, in abstractions without being. Thus human concepts turn into abstractions, which one believes can be treated in the intellect in the same way that things treat each other. But these concepts are much more like pictures which one receives of a thing from different sides. The thing is one; the pictures are many. And it is not focusing on one picture that leads to a view of the thing but rather looking at several pictures together. Unfortunately I now had to see how strongly many critics are inclined to construct contradictions out of such a consideration of a phenomenon from different points of view, which strives to merge with reality. Because of this I felt moved, with respect to the passages on Platonism in this new edition, first of all to change the style of presentation and thus to make even more definite what seemed to me twenty years ago really to be clear enough in the context in which it stands; secondly, by directly placing the statement from my other book beside what is said in this book, to show how both statements stand in total harmony with each other. In doing so I have spared anyone who still has a taste for finding contradictions in such things the trouble of having to gather them from two books.