The Rudolf Steiner Archive

Editor's/Translator's note: By the time Rudolf Steiner had given the first nineteen First Class Lessons (Volumes One and Two), so many new members had joined, or wanted to join, that he felt it necessary to recapitulate the lessons already given rather than continue to advance. However, although the mantras (verses) used are the same as in Volume One, the descriptions are sufficiently different to justify a new volume. Furthermore, much new and valuable material is introduced, which is not in the previous volumes.

As it turns out, many more friends have come to this Class Lesson—and probably will to the next lessons as well—who had not attended the previous ones. So, it would be impossible to simply continue in the same way as we have with the previous lessons. But it is also true that a repetition of these Class Lessons will not be a disadvantage for those members of this esoteric school who participated in the earlier lessons, because the content of this esoteric school is such that it works again and again on the soul. Therefore, for those who today are experiencing a repetition, it also constitutes a continuation.

But for all those who are here for the first time it means something else: it means an acquaintance with the beginning of the esoteric path.

And even those who are far advanced on the esoteric path see in it the advantages of their continued striving, in that again and again they return to the beginning. This return to the beginning is always also the endeavor to reach a more advanced stage. We should therefore consider this lesson of today in that sense. And so for the members of the School who are here for the first time, the meaning of the School must be explained beforehand.

As the impulse of the Christmas Conference with the spiritual laying of the foundation stone of the Anthroposophical Society took place in this hall, from now on an esoteric breath is to flow through the whole Anthroposophical Society—as I said yesterday—an esoteric breath that can already be noted in everything undertaken within the Anthroposophical Society since Christmas. The nucleus of this esoteric activity of the Anthroposophical Society must be the Esoteric School. This Esoteric School, coming from the entire character of anthroposophy, is to take the place of what has been previously attempted as the so-called Free School for Spiritual Science, which cannot exactly be described as having been successful.

It was at the time when I did not yet personally have the leadership of the Anthroposophical Society, and thus had to entrust those who wanted to try something, to let them try. In the future, this cannot continue. The intention of what was formed together with me as the Christmas impulse was that the Free School for Spiritual Science, with its various sections, would form an esoteric nucleus for all the esoteric work in the Anthroposophical Society.

An esoteric school, however, is not founded as an earthly entity. An esoteric school can only be one if it is the earthly reflection of what has been founded in the super-sensible worlds. And it has often been declared among anthroposophists that in the succession of the reigning hierarchy of Archangels, those who reign over human spiritual life, the Archangel Michael took over this guidance during the last third of the nineteenth century. And it was made known that this guidance has a very special significance for the spiritual life and evolution of humanity on earth.

It is the case that in human evolution life is guided successively by seven Archangels who together comprise the spiritual ruling substance of the planetary system, to which the sun, earth and moon also belong. The impulse of one of these Archangels lasts about three to four centuries. And when we consider the Archangel under whose impulse the spiritual life of the present stands, when we consider Michael, we have the Archangelos who possesses the spiritual force of the sun in everything he does and supports.

Previously, again lasting for three to four centuries—that is, from the last third of the nineteenth century back through three to four centuries—was the reign of the Archangelos Gabriel, who mostly bears the moon's forces in his impulses.

And going further back we come to the centuries in which a kind of revolution against spiritual activity and spiritual being in humanity took place during the middle ages, even by those who were the bearers of civilization—the reign of Samuel, who had his impulses in the Mars forces.

When we go even further back we come to the era in which a medicinally oriented alchemy deeply influenced spiritual life under the rule of the Archangelos Raphael, who bears the Mercury forces in his impulses.

And when we go even further back, we are approaching more and more the Mystery of Golgotha, but have not yet reached it. We find there the reign of Zachariel, who bears the Jupiter forces in his impulses, and the reign of Anael—with whom we are getting very close to the Mystery of Golgotha—who bears the Venus forces in his impulses. Then we come to the time when the brilliance of the Mystery of Golgotha asserted itself against a profound spiritual darkness on earth—under the reign of Oriphiel, who bears the Saturn forces in his impulses.

Then we come back to the previous reign of Michael, that coincides with the great international, cosmopolitan impulses through Alexander the Great and Aristotle, which until that point was brought to humanity by means of the Greek mysteries and spirituality, and was then brought by Alexander over to Asia, to North Africa, so that what was the spiritual life of a small territory streamed out to the whole civilized world of those times. For it is always an attribute of a Michael era that what had previously blossomed in one place streams out to other localities in a cosmopolitan manner.

Thus, after having completed the cycle of successive Archangeloi epochs, we always return to the same Archangelos. We can go back further—again through the succession of Gabriel, Samuel, Raphael, Zachariel, Anael, Oriphiel—and would come again to Michael. And we would find that after the Michael era streams over us, an Oriphiel era follows.

So, my dear friends, we should be aware that the Michael impulse lives in the way characterized in everything which is spiritual activity and being in the present. But it is a more important Michael era than the previous ones. I would like to emphasize this.

When the Anthroposophical Society was placed at the service of the esoteric during the Christmas Conference, its esoteric nucleus, this Esoteric School, could only be founded by the spiritual power which is incumbent for its guidance at this time. Thus, we are in this Esoteric School as one which the spirit of the times himself, Michael, has founded; for it is the Michael-School of the present.

And only then, my dear friends, can you correctly understand what is being said here—when you are aware that nothing else is being said but what the Michael stream itself wishes to bring to humanity in the present time. All the words which will be spoken in this School are Michael words. Michael will is all that is willed in this School. You are all students of Michael in that you are present in the right way in this School. Only then, when you are aware of this, is it possible to be present in this School in the right way—with the correct disposition and attitude, feeling yourselves to be members not only of what enters the world as an earthly institution, but as a heavenly institution.

It is of course therefore a condition that every member of this School accept certain self-evident responsibilities. It is a property of the Christmas impulse of the Anthroposophical Society, that it has taken on the characteristic of complete openness. Therefore, nothing is demanded of members of the Anthroposophical Society other than what they themselves demand: that they receive through the Anthroposophical Society what flows within the anthroposophical spiritual movement. One does not take on further responsibilities when one becomes an anthroposophist. The responsibility for being a decent person is taken for granted.

It is otherwise when one seeks to enter this School. Then, based on the truly occult spirit of this School, the member assumes the responsibility of being a worthy representative of anthroposophy before the world with all his thinking, feeling and willing. One cannot otherwise be a member of this School.

That this is taken seriously, my dear friends, can be seen by that fact that since the short existence of this School in twenty instances temporary expulsions have already taken place. This strict measure will have to continue to be followed in the same way. One cannot play around with true esoteric matters; they must be realized with utmost earnestness. In this way, through this School the earnestness that is absolutely necessary for the anthroposophical movement to spiritually prosper can stream into it. That is what I wanted to say as an introduction.

If you—I'm speaking now to those of you who are here for the first time—if you receive the words spoken here as real messages from the spiritual world, as truly Michael-words, then you will be here in the right way, in the only way you should be here.

And so now we want to bring to our souls the words which resound to the human being when he objectively observes everything in the world that surrounds him—in the world above, in the middle and below. Let us look at the mute kingdom of minerals, at the sprouting plant kingdom, at the mobile animal kingdom, at the thinking kingdom of humanity on earth; let us direct our gaze to the mountains, to the seas, to the rivers, to the effervescent springs, to the shining sun, to the gleaming moon and the sparkling stars. If the human being keeps his heart open, if he can listen with the ears of soul, the admonishment resounds to him which is contained in the words which I shall now speak:

O man, know thyself!
So resounds the Cosmic-Word.
You hear it strong in soul,
You feel it firm in spirit.

Who speaks with such cosmic might?
Who speaks with such depth of heart?

Does it work through distant radiant space
Into your senses' sense of being?
Does it ring through weaving waves of time
Into your life's evolving stream?

It's you yourself who,
In feeling space, in experiencing time,

Create the Word, feeling foreign
In the soulless void of space
Because you lose the force of thought
In time's destructive flow.

And when we let the meaning and the spirit of these words work in us, then we feel the desire to go into the springs from which our true humanity flows. To really understand these words means to crave the path that leads to those waters from which the human soul flows—to seek the source of human life.

In seeking, my dear sisters and brothers, you will be rewarded to the extent it lies in your karma. But the first step will be to understand the inner meaning of the esoteric path. This esoteric path will be described in Michael-words here in this School. It will be described in such a way that everyone can follow it, but not that everyone must follow it, rather that it be understood; for such understanding is in itself the first step. Therefore, what Michael has to say to present-day humanity will flow in mantric words. These mantric words will at the same time be words for meditation.

Again, it will depend on karma how these words for meditation work for each individual. And the first thing is to understand that from the spoken words about human self-knowledge the desire arises to direct one's attention to the sources of human existence: O man, know thyself! Yes, this desire must awaken. We must seek: Where are the sources of what lives in the human soul, what our humanity actually is?

At first, we must observe the surroundings that have been given us. We must look around at all the little things we have been given, at all the great things we have been given. We observe the mute stone, the worm in the earth, we look at all that grows and exists and lives around us in the kingdoms of nature. We look up to the powerfully glittering stars. We listen to the turbulent thunder.

It is not by being ascetic that we can solve the riddle of our own humanity; it is not by despising the earthworm, the stars glittering in space, not by despising them as outer sensible phenomena and instead seeking an abstractly chaotic path; but when we develop a feeling for the transcendence of what shines down on us from the stars, for all that enters through the senses and becomes our perception: beauty, truth, purity, transcendence, magnificence and majesty. When you can stand there as an observer of all that surrounds you—of the plants, of the stones, of the animals, of the stars, of the clouds, of the seas, of the springs, of the mountains—and can absorb their majesty and greatness and truth and beauty and radiance, then can you first say with complete intensity: Yes, great and powerful and majestic and glorious are the worms that crawl under the earth, the stars that glitter above in heaven's space. But your being, O man, is not among them. You are not in what your senses reveal to you.

And then we direct our questioning gaze, laden with riddles, to the far distance. From here on, the esoteric path will be described in imaginations. We direct our gaze to the distance. Something like a path is shown, a path that leads to a black, night-cloaked wall that reveals itself as the beginning of deepest darkness. And we stand there, surrounded by the majesty of sensory perception, marveling at the greatness and majesty and radiance of sensory perception, but not finding our own being in it, with our gaze directed to the limits of sensory perception. But black, night-cloaked darkness begins there. But something in our heart tells us: Not here, where the sun reflects its light from all that grows and moves and lives, but there, where black, night-cloaked darkness is staring at us, are the sources of our own humanity. From out of there the answer must come to the question: O man, know thyself!

Then we go, hesitating, towards the black darkness and become aware that the first being who confronts us stands where the black, night-cloaked darkness begins. Like a previously unseen cloud formation taking shape, it becomes human-like, not weighted by gravity, but human-like nevertheless. With earnest, very earnest gaze, it meets our questioning gaze. It is the Guardian of the Threshold. For between the sun-radiating surroundings of humanity and that night-cloaked darkness there is an abyss, a deep, yawning abyss. The Guardian of the Threshold stands before us on this side of the abyss. We call him this for the following reason.

Oh, every night while sleeping the human being with his I and with his astral body is in that world that with imaginative gaze now appears as black, night-cloaked darkness; but he doesn't realize it—his soul-senses have not opened. He doesn't realize that he lives and acts among spiritual beings and spiritual facts between falling asleep and awakening; were he to consciously experience without further preparation what there is to experience there: he would be crushed! The Guardian of the Threshold protects us—therefore he is the Guardian of the Threshold—protects us against crossing the abyss unprepared. We must follow his admonitions if we wish to tread the esoteric path. He encloses the human being in darkness every night. He guards the threshold so that the human being does not, when falling asleep, enter into the spiritual-occult world unprepared.

Now he stands there—if we have sufficiently internalized our hearts and delved deeply into our souls—there he is, admonishing us as to how everything is beautiful in our surroundings, but that in this beauty we cannot find our own being and that we must seek beyond the yawning abyss of existence in the realms of night-cloaked, black darkness; that we must wait until it becomes dark here in the sunlit radiant realm of sensory light and it becomes light for us there, where now there is still only darkness.

That is what the Guardian of the Threshold reveals to our souls. We are still at a certain distance from him. We look at him, and perceive his admonishing words still from a distance, which resound so:

Where on earthly ground, color on color
Life is manifest in creation;
Where from earthly matter, form on form,
The lifeless is given shape;
Where sentient Beings, strong in will
Warm themselves in joy of existence;
Where you, O man, your bodily being
Is shaped from earth and air and light.

There your true being enters
Deep, night-cloaked, cold darkness;
You ask in the dark sweeping expanse
No longer, who you are and were and will be.
For your own being the day grows dimly
To the soul's night, to spirit-darkness;
And you turn with angst of soul
Toward the light that from darkness streams.

That is the Guardian of the Threshold's first admonishment, the earnest admonishment that tells us that our surroundings are beautiful and grand and sublime, radiant with light, sun-filled; but that this radiant, sun-filled world is for the human being the true darkness; that we must seek there, in the darkness, that darkness becomes light, so that humanity, illuminated from out of the darkness, can approach us, so that the riddle of humanity may be solved from out the darkness. The Guardian of the Threshold continues:

And from out of the darkness comes light,
—you in image-shape revealed—
Your likeness manifesting you,
Yet also a parable of you,
Earnest spirit-words in cosmic ether
Heard by your heart, imparting strength,

The Spirit-Messenger, who alone
Can light for you the way;
Before him the fields of sense widen,
Behind him yawn the abyss-depths.

And before his dark spirit-fields,
Hard by the yawning abyss of being,
Resounds his anciently potent creative words:
Behold, I am the only gate to knowledge.

[The mantra is written on the blackboard, with the last line underlined.]

The Guardian speaks:

Where on earthly ground, color on color
Life is manifest in creation;
Where from earthly matter, form on form,
The lifeless is given shape;
Where sentient Beings, strong in will
Warm themselves in joy of existence;
Where you, O man, your bodily being
Is shaped from earth and air and light.

There your true being enters
Deep, night-cloaked, cold darkness;
You ask in the dark sweeping expanse
No longer, who you are and were and will be.
For your own being the day grows dimly
To the soul's night, to spirit-darkness;
And you turn with angst of soul
Toward the light that from darkness streams.

And from out of the darkness comes light,

(The continuation of this phrase follows after a few lines. What comes now is an intermediate clause.)

— you in image-shape revealed,
Your likeness manifesting you,
Yet also a parable of you,
Earnest spirit-words in cosmic ether
Heard by your heart, imparting strength —

(The intermediate clause has ended; the phrase “And from the darkness comes light” continues.)

The Spirit-Messenger,
(the Guardian of the Threshold) who alone
Can light for you the way;
Before him the fields of sense widen,
Behind him yawn the abyss-depths.

And before his dark spirit-fields,
Hard by the yawning abyss of being,
Resounds his anciently potent creative words:
Behold, I am the only gate to knowledge.

For it is the Guardian himself who, once he has imparted to us this first admonition: to feel light as darkness, darkness as light, indicates the feelings and sensations which can come anciently potent from our souls. He speaks them aloud, does the Guardian, as his gaze becomes even more earnest, as he stretches out his arm and hand to us, he speaks further with these words:

From the distant beings in space
Who experience existence in light,

(We feel ourselves impelled to take a few steps closer to the Guardian.)

From the stages of the course of time,
Which finds expression in creating,
From the depths of heart-felt feeling
Where in the Self the world is fathomed:

They resound in the speech of the soul,
They gleam in the spirit-thoughts,
From divine curative powers,
In the cosmic formative forces
The undulating existential words:
O you man, know thyself!

It is different if we first hear these words from sensory beings, and if we correctly understand the words which resound: “O man, know thyself!”, or if they now resound before the terrible abyss of existence from the mouth of the Guardian of the Threshold himself. The same words: two different ways to grasp them. These words are mantric, for meditation, they are words which awaken the capacity in the soul to come near to the spiritual world, if they are able to ignite the soul.

[The mantra is written on the blackboard and the title and last line are underlined.]

The Guardian at the abyss

From the distant beings in space
Who experience existence in light,
From the stages of the course of time,
Which finds expression in creating,
From the depths of heart-felt feeling
Where in the Self the world is fathomed:

They resound in the speech of the soul,
They gleam in the spirit-thoughts,
From divine curative powers,
In the cosmic formative forces
The undulating existential words:
O you man, know thyself!

While the Guardian is saying these words, we have moved close to the yawning abyss of being. It is deep. There is no hope of crossing the abyss with the feet given us by the earth. We need freedom from earthly gravity. We need the wings of spiritual life in order to cross over the abyss. By at first beckoning us to the yawning abyss of existence, the Guardian of the Threshold made us aware of how our Self, before being illuminated and purified for the spiritual world, where actually today we are everywhere surrounded by hate for the spiritual world, by mockery of the spiritual world, by cowardice and fear of the spiritual world—the Guardian makes us aware of how this, our Self, which wills and feels and thinks, is constituted today in our present evolutionary cycle in its threefold character of willing, feeling and thinking. We must first recognize this before we can become aware, in real self-knowledge, of our true Self, which is implanted in us by the gods.

All three beasts, which arise from the abyss one after the other, appear to us as seen from the viewpoint of the eternal divine force of healing: human willing, human feeling, human thinking. As they appear one after the other—willing, feeling, thinking in their true form—the Guardian explains them:

We are standing at the edge of the abyss. The Guardian speaks—the beasts rise up:

Yes, you must beware of the abyss;
Otherwise its beasts will devour
You, if you pass by me in haste.
Your cosmic age has placed them there
In you as enemies of knowledge.

Behold the first beast, the crooked back,
The bony head, the scrawny body,
His skin is all a dullish blue;
Your fear of creative spiritual being
Begat the monster in your will;
Knowledge bravery alone will overcome it.

Behold the second beast, it bares
Its teeth in a warped face, scornfully it lies,
Yellow with gray spots is its body;
Your hate of spiritual revelation
Begat this weakling in your feeling;
Your flame for knowledge must subdue him.

Behold the third beast, with cloven muzzle,
Its eye is glassy, posture slouching,
Dirty-red its form appears to you;
Your doubts in the power of spiritual light
Begat this ghost within your thinking;
Your creative knowledge must make it yield.

Only when you've defeated the three
Will wings sprout upon your soul
To fly the abyss over,
Which separates you from the knowledge fields
To which your heart desires
to consecrate itself in healing.

I will write these mantric words on the blackboard next time.

When one has heard this directly from the mouth of the Guardian, one may return, remembering, to the point of departure. There exists everything before the soul that all beings in our surroundings say, if we understand them correctly; what all beings in the most distant past already said to humanity, what all beings say to humanity in the present, and what all beings will say to the human beings of the future:

O man, know thyself!
So resounds the Cosmic-Word.
You hear it strong in soul,
You feel it firm in spirit.

Who speaks with such cosmic might?
Who speaks with such depth of heart?

Does it work through distant radiant space
Into your senses' sense of being?
Does it ring through weaving waves of time
Into your life's evolving stream?

It's you yourself who,
In feeling space, in experiencing time,

Create the Word, feeling foreign
In the soulless void of space
Because you lose the force of thought
In time's destructive flow.

These are the words of the Michael-School. When they are spoken, Michael's spirit flows in waves through the room in which they are spoken. And his sign is what confirms his presence.

Michael-Sign (red)

Then Michael leads us to the real Rosicrucian School, which shall reveal the secrets of humanity in the past, in the present and in the future through the Father-God, the Son-God and the Spirit-God. And then pressing the seal on the words “rosae et crucis”, the words may be pronounced:

Ex deo nascimur

In Christo morimur

Per spiritum sanctum reviviscimus

accompanied by the sign of Michael's seal, which are for the first words “Ex deo nascimur” [See note]:

secondly by the words “In Christo morimur”:

thirdly by the words “Per spiritum sanctum reviviscimus”:

As we say the words “Ex deo nascimur”, we feel them confirmed by the seal and sign of Michael—

“Ex deo nascimur” by this sign [makes the gesture—see note]:

I esteem the Father

“In Christo morimur” by this sign:

I love the Son

“Per spiritum sanctum reviviscimus” by this sign:

I bind myself to the Spirit

That is what the signs mean.

Michael's presence is confirmed by his seal and sign.

Michael-Sign [see note]

The mantric words written on the blackboard may only be kept by those who are legitimate members of the School, that is, who have been issued the blue certificate. No one else may possess these words. Of course, those may have them who for some reason cannot attend a particular session of the School, or because of the distance from their homes cannot attend. As members of the School they can receive them from other members.

However, in each case permission to pass on these words must be obtained. The one who is to receive the words may not request permission, but only the one who passes them on. He or she obtains permission either from Dr. Wegman or from me. This is not a mere administrative measure, but must be the basis for every passing on of the words that permission must be granted either by Dr. Wegman or by me. The words may not be sent by letters, but only personally; they may not be entrusted to the mail.

Note: It is not possible to determine from the stenographic records of the seven Repetition Lessons exactly when during each lesson, Rudolf Steiner drew the Michael-Sign and the Michael-gestures with their corresponding words, or when he made the signs and the gestures.

As I propose to follow up the theme of our lecture yesterday,¹ I would remind you of the three figures whose outstanding importance has lasted from the turn of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries right on into our own times, namely, Giordano Bruno, Lord Bacon of Verulam and Jacob Boehme. We feel how they wrestled within themselves to understand man, to know something of the being of man, but yet were unable to attain their goal. In the time in which they lived, ancient knowledge of the being of man had been lost and the genuine strivings of the most eminent minds of the day were unable to lead to a new knowledge.

It was said that out of the strange and incoherent utterances of Jacob Boehme there resounds a kind of longing to know the universe in man and man in the universe. Out of the sum-total of his knowledge of the universe and of the being of man something glimmers which, to deeper insight, seems to point to man in pre-earthly existence, to man before he descends to earthly life. And yet we find in Jacob Boehme’s works no clear definition or description of man as a pre-earthly being.

I expressed this more or less as follows. I said that Jacob Boehme describes in halting words the being of pre-earthly man but the man he places before us would have had to die as a being of soul-and-spirit in the spiritual world before he could have come down to the earth. Jacob Boehme describes a rudiment only of pre-earthly man. And so he is incapable of understanding the reality of the universe in man and man in the universe.

If we then consider Giordano Bruno—semi-poet and semi-scientist—we find in him a knowledge of the universe which he expresses in pictures of great majesty. He too tries to fit man into his place within this majestic picture of the universe and he too is trying to recognise the universe in man and man in the universe. But he does not actually reach this knowledge. Giordano Bruno’s imagery is full of beauty and grandeur. On the one side it soars into infinitudes and on the other into depths of the human soul, but it all remains indefinite, even nebulous. Everything that Giordano Bruno says reveals a striving to describe the man of the present in the universe of space and the nature of the spatial universe itself.

And so while Jacob Boehme harks back ineffectually to pre-earthly man, Giordano Bruno gives us a blurred picture of man as he lives on earth in connection with space and with the cosmos too. The picture is not sufficiently clear to indicate real insight into that relation of man to the cosmos which would open up a vista of pre-earthly and post-earthly man.

If we then turn to Lord Bacon of Verulam, we find that he, in reality, no longer has any traditional ideas of the being of man. Of the old insight into human nature which had survived from ancient clairvoyant perception and from the Mysteries, there is no trace in him whatever.

Bacon, however, looks out into the world that is perceptible to the senses and assigns to human intelligence the task of combining the phenomena and objects of this world of sense-existence, of discovering the laws by which they are governed. He thus transfers the perception of the human soul into that world in which the soul is immersed during sleep, but there he only arrives at pictures of nature other than human nature. These pictures, if they are regarded as Bacon regarded them merely from the logical and abstract point of view, merely place the external aspect of human nature before us. If they are inwardly experienced, however, they gradually become vision of man’s existence after death, for a true clairvoyant perception of man’s being after death is to be obtained through this very medium of a real knowledge of nature. Thus Bacon too, at the turn of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries is one of those who strive to recognise man in the universe and the universe in man.

But even his powers were inadequate for he did not intensify the pictures into a new experience. Indeed he could not do so, because the old reality was no longer living in the experiences of the soul. Bacon stands as it were at the threshold of the knowledge of life after death but does not actually attain to this knowledge.

We can therefore say: Jacob Boehme still shows signs of possessing a knowledge of pre-earthly man—a knowledge drawn from ancient tradition, but inadequate. Giordano Bruno embarks upon a description of the universe which might have led him to a knowledge of earthly man as he stands there with his life of soul on the one side and his cosmic background on the other. But Giordano Bruno fails to give an adequate description either of the cosmos or of the life of soul which, as presented by him, shrinks into an animated ‘monad.’

Bacon indicates the lines along which natural science must evolve, how it must seek with the powers of free human cognition for the spark of the Spiritual within the merely material. He points to this free activity of human knowledge, but it has no content. Had it been imbued with content Bacon would have been pointing to post-earthly man. But this he cannot do. His knowledge too remains inadequate.

All the living knowledge which in earlier epochs of human evolution it had been possible to create from the inner being, had by that time been lost. Man remained empty when he looked into his inner being with the object of finding knowledge of the universe. He had really ‘lost’ himself, together with his inner life of knowledge, and what remained to him was the vista of the outer world, of outer nature, of that which is not man. Jacob Boehme had gleaned from the Folk-Wisdom something like the following: In the human being there are three principles—salt, mercury, sulphur, as he calls them. These words have, however, an entirely different significance in his language from the significance attaching to them in modern chemistry. Indeed if we try to connect the conceptions of modern chemistry with Jacob Boehme’s magnificent, albeit stammering utterances, his words are entirely devoid of meaning. They were used, of course, by Boehme with a different meaning.

What did these expressions—salt, mercury, sulphur—still mean in the Folk-Wisdom from which Jacob Boehme derived his ideas? When Boehme spoke of the working of the salt, the mercury or the sulphur in man, he was speaking of something absolutely real and concrete. When man to-day speaks of himself, of his soul-nature, he gives voice to abstract ideas which have no real content. Jacob Boehme gathered together, as it were, the last vestiges of knowledge filled with concrete reality. Outer nature lay there perceptible to the senses, comprehensible to human reason. In this outer nature man learnt to see the existence of processes and phenomena and then in the succeeding centuries proceeded to build up an idea of the make-up of man from what he had been able to observe in nature. That is to say, understanding of the being of man was based on what was perceived to be outside man and in seeking thus to understand human nature by way of these external media, a conception of man's body too was built up without any knowledge as to whether this conception was in accordance with his true being or not.

By synthesising the processes which are to be observed in the outer, sense-perceptible world and applying them to the inner processes which take place within the limits of man’s skin, a kind of human spectre is evolved, never the real being of man. In this human spectre the faculties of thinking, feeling and willing also come into consideration, but they remain abstractions, shadowy thought-pictures filled with so-called inner experiences which are, in reality, mere reflections of processes in outer nature. At the time of Bacon there was no longer the slightest inkling of the way in which the being of spirit-and-soul penetrates into the bodily nature, and traditions which had been handed on from the old clairvoyant knowledge were not understood.

Now what has Spiritual Science to say to this? When in the first place we study the bodily nature of man, we have to do with processes connected with the senses, with nutrition, and also with those in which nutrition and sense-perception coincide. When man eats, he absorbs nutriment; he takes into himself the external substances of nature but at the same time he tastes them, so that a sense-perception is intermingled with a process which is continued from nature outside, on into man himself.

Think for a moment of the process of nutrition being accompanied by the perception of taste. We find that while the sense of taste is stimulated and the process of nutrition is set in operation, the outer substances are dissolved in the fluids and juices within the human organism. The outer substances which the plants absorb from lifeless nature are all, to begin with, given form. That which exists on earth without form, in lifeless nature, is really cloven asunder. Crystals are at the basis of all substances. And those substances which we do not find in crystallised form, but formless, in dust and the like, are really crystallisations which have been shattered. Out of crystallised, lifeless nature the plant draws its substances and builds them up into that form which is peculiar to its own nature. From this again the animal derives its nourishment. So that we may say: Out there in nature, everything has its form, its configuration. When man takes in these forms, he dissolves them. This is one form of the process which goes on in man’s organism. The forms, as they exist in outer nature, are dissolved. They are transmuted into the organic fluids.

But when the substances have been absorbed and transmuted into fluid, forms which were first dissolved begin to build up again. When we eat salt, it is first dissolved by means of the fluids in the organism, but we then give it form again. When we eat substances drawn from plants, they are dissolved and then inwardly reformed, not, this time, in the bodily fluids, but in the etheric body.

And now think of what happened in ancient times, when, for example, a man ate salt. It was dissolved and re-formed in his etheric body but he was able to perceive the whole process inwardly. He had an inner thought-experience of the formative process undergone by the salt. When he ate salt, the salt was dissolved and the salt-cube was there in his etheric body. From this he knew: salt has the shape of a cube. And so, as man experienced his being inwardly, he also experienced nature within himself. The cosmic thoughts became his thoughts. What he experienced as imaginations, as dreamlike imaginations, were forms which revealed themselves in his etheric body. They were cosmic forms, cosmic configurations.

But the age dawned when this faculty to experience in the etheric body these processes of dissolution and reconstruction was lost to man. He was obliged more and more to turn to external nature. It was no longer an inner experience to him that salt is cubic in form. He was obliged to investigate outer nature to find out the true configuration of salt.

In this way man’s attention was diverted entirely to the outer world. The radical change to this condition wherein men no longer experienced cosmic thoughts through inner perception of the etheric body, had been taking place since the beginning of the fifteenth century and had reached a certain climax at the time of Giordano Bruno, Jacob Boehme and Bacon of Verulam.

Jacob Boehme, however, had still been able to gather up those crumbs of Folk-Wisdom which told him: Man dissolves everything he assimilates from the outer world of matter. It is a process like salt being dissolved in water. Man bears this water within himself, in his vital fluids. All substances, in so far as they are foodstuffs, are salt. This salt dissolves. In the salts, the cosmic thoughts are expressed on earth. And man again gives form to these cosmic thoughts in his etheric body. This is the ‘salt-process.’

Jacob Boehme expressed in halting language that which in olden times was an inner experience. But if Anthroposophy did not shed light upon what Jacob Boehme says, we should never be able to interpret his stammering utterances. We should read into them all kinds of dark, mystical meanings. Jacob Boehme connected the thinking—the process by which the world presents itself to man in pictures—with the salt-process, that is to say, with the dissolving and re-forming process undergone by substance within the organism of man. Such was his ‘salt-process.’

It is often pathetic, although at the same time it shows up the conceit of some people, to see how they read Jacob Boehme and whenever they come across the word ‘salt,’ pretend to understand it, whereas in reality they understand nothing at all. They come along with their heads in the air saying that they have studied Jacob Boehme and find in him a profound wisdom. But there is no trace of this wisdom in the interpretations they bring forward. Were it not an evidence of conceit it would be quite pathetic to hear such people talk about matters of which Boehme himself had only a glimmering understanding from the Folk-Wisdom which he then voiced in halting words.

These things indicate the existence of an altogether different wisdom and science in olden times, a wisdom which was experienced through inner perception of the processes taking their course in the etheric body—processes which revealed themselves to man as the ever-recurring cosmic thoughts. The world constructed from the thoughts which are embodied in the crystal-formations of the earth, to which man gives form in his etheric body and consciously experiences - such was the ancient knowledge which disappeared in the course of time.

If we were able to transfer ourselves into one of the old Mystery-sanctuaries and listen spiritually to the description which an Initiate would give of the universe, it would have been something like the following: All through the universe the cosmic thoughts are weaving; the Logos is working. The crystal-formations of the earth are the embodiments of the single parts of the cosmic Word. Now the sense of taste is only one of the many senses. The processes of hearing and of sight can be dealt with in a similar way though in their case the working of the salts in etheric form must be thought of in a more outward sense. Man receives through his senses that which is embodied in the salts and re-forms it in his etheric body, experiences it within himself. Cosmic thoughts repeat themselves in the thoughts of men. The universe is recognised in man and man in the universe. With concrete and unerring intuition the Initiates of olden times were able to describe this out of their visionary, dream-like knowledge of the universe and of man.

During the course of the Middle Ages this wisdom was gradually superseded by a merely logical form of knowledge which, though of great significance, became, nevertheless, entirely academic and on the other side had trickled away into Folk-Wisdom. What was once sublime wisdom, relating both to the cosmos and to man had degenerated into sayings used by simple folk who by that time understood little of their meaning but who still felt that some great value was contained in them. It was among such people that Jacob Boehme lived. He absorbed this Folk-Wisdom and by his own genius revived it within him. He was more articulate than those among whom he lived but even he could do no more than express it in halting language.

In Giordano Bruno there was a feeling that man must learn to understand the universe, must get to know his own nature, but his faculties did not enable him to say anything so definite as: ‘Out there are the cosmic thoughts, a universal Word which enshrines itself in the crystal; man takes into himself these cosmic thoughts when, knowingly and deliberately, he dissolves the salts and gives them new form in his etheric body.’ It is so, indeed: from the concrete thoughts of the world of myriad forms, from the innermost thoughts of man, there arises an etheric world as rich in its varied forms as the world outside us.

Just think of it: This wealth of thought in regard to the cosmos and to man shrinks, in Giordano Bruno, into generalisations about the cosmos. It hovers into infinitudes but is nevertheless abstract. And that which lives in man as the world re-formed, shrinks into a picture of the animate monad—in reality, nothing but an extended point.

What I have described to you was real knowledge among the sages of old; it was their science. But in addition to the fact that these ancient sages of the Mysteries were able, by their own dream-veiled vision, to evolve this knowledge, they were able to have actual intercourse with the spiritual Beings of the cosmos. Just as here on earth a man enters into conscious relationship with other human beings, so did these ancient sages enter into relation with spiritual Beings. And from these spiritual Beings they learned something else, namely that what man has formed in his etheric body—by virtue of which he is inwardly another cosmos, a microcosm, an etheric rebirth of the macrocosm—what he thus possesses as an inner cosmos, he can in the element of air, by the process of breathing, again gradually obliterate.

And so in those ancient times man knew that within him the universe is reborn in varied forms; he experienced an inner world. Out of his inner vital fluids the whole universe arose as an etheric structure. That was ancient clairvoyance. Man experienced a real process, an actual happening. And in modern man the process is there just the same, only he cannot inwardly experience it.

Now those spiritual Beings with whom the ancient sages could have real intercourse did not enlighten them only in regard to the vital fluids from which this micro-cosmic universe was born but also in regard to the life-giving air, to the air which man takes in with his breath and which then spreads through his whole organism. This air which spreads itself over the whole of the microcosm, renders the shapes therein indistinct. The wonderful etheric universe in miniature begins, directly the breath contacts it, to become indefinite, That which formerly consisted of a myriad forms, is unified, because the ‘astral’ man lives in the airy element, just as the etheric man lives in the fluids. The astral being of man lives in this airy element and by the breaking up of the etheric thoughts, by the metamorphosis of etheric thoughts into a force, the will is born from the working of the ‘astral man’ in the ‘air man.’ And together with the will there arise the forces of growth which are connected with the will.

This knowledge again expressed a great deal more than is suggested nowadays by the abstract word ‘will.’ It is a concrete process. The astral lays hold of the airy element and spreads over that which is etheric and fluidic. And thereby a real process is set up which appears in outer nature at a different stage, when something is burnt. This process was conceived by the ancients as the sulphur-process. And from the sulphur-process there unfolded that which was then experienced in the soul as will.

In olden times men did not use the abstract word think to express something that arose in the mind as a picture. When a real knower spoke about ‘thinking’ he spoke of the salt-process just described. Nor did he speak in an abstract way of the ‘will’ but of the astral forces laying hold of the airy element in man, of the sulphur-process from which the will is born. Willing was a process of concrete reality and it was said that the adjustment between the two—for they are opposite processes—was brought about by the mercury-process, by that which is fluid and yet has form, which swings to and fro from the etheric nature to the astral nature, from the fluidic to the aeriform. The abstract ideas which were gradually evolved by Scholasticism and have since been adopted by modern science, did not exist for the thinkers of olden times. If they had been confronted with our concepts of thinking, feeling and willing they would have felt rather like frogs in a vessel from which all the air has been pumped. This is how our abstract concepts would have appeared to the thinkers of old. They would, have said: It is not possible for the soul to live or breathe with concepts like this. For the thinkers of old never spoke of a purely abstract will-process, of a purely abstract thought-process, but of a salt-process, of a sulphur-process, and they meant thereby, something that on the one hand is of the nature of soul-and-spirit and on the other of a material-etheric nature. To them, this was a unity and they perceived how the soul works everywhere in the bodily organism.

The writings of the Middle Ages which date back to the thirteenth, fourteenth and fifteenth centuries still showed traces of this ancient faculty of perception and of a knowledge that was at the same time inner experience. This kind of knowledge had faded away at the time of Giordano Bruno, Jacob Boehme and Bacon of Verulam. Ideas had become abstract; man was obliged to look, not into his own being but out into nature. I have told you that our concepts to-day would have made the wise men of old feel like frogs exhausted by lack of air. We, however, find it possible to exist with such ideas. The majority of people when they speak of thinking, feeling and willing, consider them at most mirror-pictures of external nature which appear in man. But precisely in our age it is possible to attain to what in olden times was not possible. Man lost the spontaneous, inner activity which gives birth to knowledge. In the interval which has elapsed since the fifteenth century, man has lost the capacity to discover anything when he merely looks into his inner being. He therefore looks out into nature and evolves his abstract concepts. None the less it is possible so to intensify these concepts that they can again be filled with content because they can be experienced. We are, of course, only at the very beginning of this phase of development, and anthroposophical Spiritual Science tries to be such a beginning.

All the processes I have described above—the salt process, the sulphur-process—are nowhere to be found in this form in external nature; they are processes which can only be known by man as taking place in his image being. In outer nature there transpires something which is related to these processes as the processes in a corpse are related to those in a living man. The salt- and sulphur-processes spoken of by modern chemistry are those which the old Folk-Wisdom living in Jacob Boehm conceived as taking place within a corpse. Such processes are dead, whereas they were once filled with inner life. And as he observed them in their living state, man saw a new world—a world which is not the world surrounding him on earth.

The ancients, then, were able with the help of their inwardly experienced knowledge, to see that which is not of the earth, which belongs to a different world. The moment we really understand these salt-and sulphur-processes we see the pre-earthly life of man. For earthly life differs from the pre-earthly life precisely in this: the sulphur- and salt-processes are dead in the external world of sense; in pre-earthly existence they are living. What we perceive with our senses between birth and death, is dead. The real salt- and sulphur-processes are living when we experience them as they are in pre-earthly existence. In other words, understanding of these processes of which Jacob Boehme speaks in halting words, is a vision of pre-earthly existence. That Jacob Boehme does not speak of pre-earthly existence is due to the fact that he did not really understand it and could only express it in faltering words.

This faculty of man to look back into pre-earthly existence has been lost—lost together with that union with the spiritual Beings who help us to see in the sulphur-process the reality of post-earthly existence. The whole attitude of the human soul has entirely changed. And Giordano Bruno, Jacob Boehme and Lord Bacon of Verulam lived precisely at the time of this change.

In the last lecture I drew your attention to the fact that of the way man felt himself placed in the universe in earlier times not the faintest notion remains to-day. Consequently no great importance is attached to information which dates back beyond comparatively recent times.

Here in Dornach we have given many performances of the play of the Three Kings. This story of the visit of the Three Kings to the Child Jesus is also given in the old German song of the “Heliand.” You are aware that it dates back to a comparatively early period of the Middle Ages and that it originated in Central Europe. There is something remarkable here. It is obvious that something else is connected with this visit of the Three Kings from the East. These Kings relate that they have come from regions where conditions were very different from what they now find (i.e., at the beginning of our era). They tell us that they are the descendants of ancestors who were possessed of a wisdom incomparably greater than any contemporary wisdom. They speak of an ancestor far back in time—an ancestor who was able to hold converse with his God. And when he came to die, this ancestor assembled all his family and told them of what his God had revealed to him, namely, that in the course of time a World-King would appear whose coming would be heralded by a star.

When search is made for an indication of this ancestor, we find—and even literature points to this—that he is Balaam, mentioned in the fourth book of Moses in the Old Testament. These three Holy Kings from the East, therefore, are referring to Balaam, the son of Beor, of whom it is related in the fourth Book of Moses that he held converse with his God and that he regulated his whole earthly life in accordance with that converse.

In short, when we examine the facts, they tell us that at the time when this old German poem originated, a consciousness still existed of ages when men had intercourse with the Gods. A very real conception of this still remained, with men. Again here, we have an indication of something which the contemplation of history revealed to these people and which proves to us that we have passed from those olden times when men felt themselves placed in a living universe, into a Philistine age. For our civilisation is really a Philistine civilisation. Even those who believe that they have grown out of it are by no means so opposed to Philistinism that they would find it possible to accept such traditions as that of Balaam being the ancestor of the Three Kings. Such people have by no means grown beyond Philistinism. The most that could be said of them is that they are ‘Bohemians!’

These things indicate what a mighty change has taken place in the attitude of the human soul. Centuries ago it was known that with their dreamy clairvoyant faculties men were able to observe the actual working of such processes as the sulphur-process and the salt-process. And because of this they were able to see into the pre-earthly state of existence.

Certain people who did not desire the upward progress, but rather the retrogression of humanity, but who were nevertheless initiated in a certain sense, saw in advance that human beings would lose this capacity; that a time would come when nothing would be known any longer about pre-existence. And so they laid it down as a dogma that there is no pre-existent life, that man’s soul is created together with his physical body. The fact of pre-existence was shrouded in the darkness of dogma. That was the first step downwards of what had once been knowledge of man’s place in the universe. It was a step downwards into ignorance for it is not possible to understand man if one part of his existence is obliterated, especially so important a part as his pre-existent life.

Now Jacob Boehme, Giordano Bruno and Lord Bacon of Verulam lived at a time when this insight into pre-existent life had faded away. And moreover the age had not yet dawned when the inner experiencing of knowledge was to give place to a spiritual perception of external nature, whereby man, who can no longer find himself in his inner being, finds himself again in nature outside. For a long time there had been Initiates who wished to lead mankind on the downward path. Such Initiates did not desire that the new faculty of insight—which was exactly the reverse of the old clairvoyance—should make headway. And they tried by means of dogma to replace the new form of knowledge by mere faith and belief in the life after death. And so, in Giordano Bruno's time, dogmatic decrees had wiped out the possibility of knowledge of pre-existent life and of life after death. Giordano Bruno stood there wrestling—wrestling more forcibly than Jacob Boehme and much more forcibly than Lord Bacon. Giordano Bruno stood there among the men of his time, unable to transmute the Dominican wisdom that lived in him into a true conception of the universe. And he expressed in poetic language the somewhat indefinite views which he was able to evolve.

But the knowledge which Giordano Bruno possessed in so nebulous a form must give birth to a definite and precise understanding of man in the universe and the universe in man, not by means of a recrudescence of inner clairvoyance but by means of new clairvoyant faculties acquired by free spiritual activity.

With these words I have indicated what must take place in the evolution of mankind. And in our day humanity is faced with the fact that the will to attain this higher knowledge is violently opposed and hated by numbers of people. This too is apparent in events of which history tells. And when we understand these events we also understand why it is that bitter opposition arises to anthroposophical conceptions of the world.

• 1. Published in Anthroposophy, Christmas, 1930.

By considering in retrospect what has been presented in the last lectures concerning happenings, facts and actions in the super-sensible worlds—it was all more or less supplementary to my little book, The Spiritual Guidance of Man and Mankind—you will understand that it is essential to realize that in our time a mighty event is taking effect. It is the event of which I said that it belongs essentially to the 4th century A.D. and it consists in the transference of rulership of the cosmic thoughts from the Spirits of Form to the Spirits of Personality, the Archai or Primal Powers. If we are mindful of the whole import, the cosmic import of this significant event, we may say: it consists in giving men in the course of their evolution what should rightly become theirs in our present Fifth post-Atlantean epoch, the epoch of the evolution of the Consciousness Soul, namely, inner freedom, the possibility for the individual to act from his own inner self. We know, of course, that human evolution on Earth was in essentials a kind of preparation for this very epoch, that the natural foundation had first to be laid down in man, so that within the sphere of what this foundation has enabled him to become, his soul might progress towards freedom. How is this connected with the super-sensible event previously characterized?

If we picture this event in broad outline we can say: on the one side, from our survey of the super-sensible world, we realize that the outstanding spiritual leaders of mankind are the Beings whom we must call Spirits of Personality, Archai, but those Archai who have been vested with rulership of the cosmic thoughts by the Exousiai, the Spirits of Form. These Archai to whom man in his evolution owes the possibility of formulating thoughts through the inner efforts of his own soul, are hampered in their activity by those Beings who, as Exousiai, as Spirits of Form, have remained behind at an earlier stage of evolution; they are Beings who, as Spirits of Form, have not ceded rulership of the cosmic thoughts. And now, in this epoch of the Consciousness Soul in which we have been living since the 15th century A.D., man is confronted with the great choice in some one of his incarnations definitely to decide for freedom or, which is the same thing, to have the possibility of this freedom through turning to the legitimate Archai.

We do indeed see, in our own age, how men strive to free themselves from those spiritual Beings who, as Exousiai, were unwilling to cede rulership of the cosmic thoughts. What part these Beings play in the present phase of the evolution of humanity will be clear to us when we realize what role was justifiably played in earlier times by the Exousiai who were then undergoing normal development.

In earlier times men did not unfold their thoughts as they have to do today. They did not unfold their thoughts by inner activity, inner effort. They unfolded thoughts by devoting themselves to the contemplation of external Nature and just as we perceive colours and sounds today, they simultaneously perceived the thoughts. But in still earlier ages, when men gave themselves up to instinctive, unconscious clairvoyance, they received, together with the clairvoyant pictures, thoughts as a gift from the divine-spiritual worlds. Men did not work out their thoughts; they received them. It was inevitably so in olden times.

Just as the child must first develop his physical nature, must first lay a foundation for what he can learn only in later life, so humanity as a whole could achieve the inner, active development of a world of thoughts only when this world of thoughts had first penetrated from outside into the whole nature of man.

This period of preparation had to be lived through. But during it man could really never say that he was qualified to become a free being. For, as you can see from my The Philosophy of Freedom, the basic condition of human freedom is precisely that man shall unfold his thoughts himself in inner activity, and that out of these self-evolved thoughts which in my book I have called ‘pure thoughts’, he shall also draw his moral impulses.

Such moral impulses, springing from the soil of man's own being, did not and could not exist in the earlier epochs of the evolution of humanity. Moral impulses had then to be imparted together with the thoughts, which were, so to speak, God-given, like commandments that were unconditionally binding and made a man unfree. You will find this aspect of the subject presented in the The Philosophy of Freedom: the transition of mankind from bondage by commandments which exclude freedom, to action out of moral intuition which includes freedom.

Now the Spirits of Form are Beings who always work from outside when they bring about something in man. All stimuli from outside that cause a man to work on his own being bring to expression the deeds of the Spirits of Form. And it was definitely the case that as long as the Spirits of Form instilled the cosmic thoughts into man, the thoughts either came to him from stones, plants or animals as perceptions, or else rose up from instincts and impulses within him. In those days men floated, as it were, on the waves of life, and the waves of life were thrown up—but also calmed in so far as they brought thoughts—by the Spirits of Form. It was from outside, therefore, that there came to man what he then laid hold of in his inmost soul. Hence in those olden times man's feeling for his Gods was such that he turned primarily to them when seeking to find the causes of world-happenings and of his own life. When a man spoke of the Gods he spoke as though he was seeking to find in them the causes of his own existence on Earth, and of the manifestations of nature on Earth. He always looked back to the Gods as the primary causes of things. Whence came the world? Whence came I myself? These were the great religious questions of an earlier humanity.

If you study the ancient myths, you will always find, in the biblical story of Creation too, references to Genesis-myths, because men were seeking primarily for the origin of the world, but actually stopped short at this point in their search.

The whole mood and attitude of the human soul were due to the fact that in the world of his thoughts man was dependent upon the Spirits of Form. Until the 4th century A.D. and in its after-effects right on into the 15th century, the Spirits of Form were, so to speak, fully authorized in the world-order—if I may use this expression—to rule over and direct the cosmic thoughts and to promote thinking, the unfolding of thoughts, in man from outside.

Since that period things have changed. Since then the Exousiai, the Spirits of Form, have ceded the rulership of the cosmic thoughts to the Archai. But how do the Archai exercise this rulership? It is no longer as if they themselves were ruling over the thoughts, as if they were laying them into man from outside; they make it possible for man to evolve these thoughts himself. How can this be? It can come about for the reason that we men have all passed through a number of lives on Earth. In those olden times, when it was right for the Exousiai to bring the thoughts from outside, men had not lived through as many lives on Earth as is now the case. They could not yet, even when they awoke the impulse for it in themselves, produce activity of their own in order to engender the power of thoughts within themselves. We live today in such and such an earthly incarnation. And if only we have the necessary will for it—for it depends upon the will—we can find in ourselves the force to produce our own world of thoughts, an individual world of thoughts, as I have also described it in the The Philosophy of Freedom. Such is the Progress consisting of the transference of the rulership of thoughts by the Spirits of Form to rulership by the Spirits of Personality.

The Spirits of Form drew these thoughts out of the cosmic reservoir of thoughts, in order to instil them into men from outside. Man took the cosmic thoughts into himself and willynilly felt like a creature propelled forward in the Hoods and waves produced in the cosmos by the Spirits of Form. The world of thoughts within the cosmos transmitted its harmony to man himself. But man was an unfree being within the cosmos! Today he has acquired the freedom to work out his own thoughts but these thoughts would all remain hermits in the cosmos if they have not been taken from and brought back again into the cosmic harmony. And in our epoch this comes to pass through the Archai.

Here the foundation is laid for the solution of that immensely significant historic cleavage that has come about in modern times and has plunged human souls into such infinite confusion. Do we not perceive this cleavage? From other points of view I have often told you that man learns, on the one hand, that the whole cosmos is permeated by a nature-order, that this natureorder also plays into man's own being, that there was once an archetypal nebula out of which sun and planets took shape, and then man himself. Do we not see on the one hand the system of cosmic laws of nature to which man feels himself yoked? And on the other hand, do we not see how man, in order to preserve his true human dignity, is urged, in his capacity as a being arising out of nature, to quicken in himself the thought of a moral world-order so that his moral impulses may not fly off and be scattered in the universe but have reality?

In the course of the 19th century this cleavage has again and again resulted in a certain philosophical hair-splitting. Think of those religious conflicts which, within Protestantism, are allied with the school of Ritschl.^NoteNum Most people know nothing of these religious-philosophical conflicts as such, for they have taken place within the narrow framework of the theological or philosophical schools. What goes on within this narrow framework, however, does not remain within its bounds. It is not important whether you or humanity in general know what Ritschl thought about the moral-divine world-order, or about the personality of Jesus. But what such people have thought in the course of the 19th century about the personality of Jesus flows down and persists in the teachings given to children from six to twelve years old. That will become, and indeed has become, a universal attitude of soul. And although men do not realize it in full clarity it is nevertheless present in them as vague feelings, as dissatisfaction with life; and it then passes over into action that must eventually bring about an era as chaotic as that in which we are now living. This is the anxious question facing modern humanity; it arises because man is obliged to say to himself: Here is the world of natural law, having issued from the primal nebula, reaching eventually total entropy, and therefore heading towards a condition where everything of the nature of soul and Spirit will have become submerged in a world which lacks all mobility and must inevitably become a great cemetery. All moral ideals proceeding from the individuality of man would have perished.

People do not acknowledge this today because they are not honest enough to do so. But all that they get from modern civilization would inevitably lead them to suffer on account of this immensely significant cleavage in their world-view, to suffer—only they do not realize it—from being subject to a natural world and also from being obliged to assume the existence of a moral world, yet having no power, because of the modern outlook, to ascribe any reality to moral ideas.

It was not so for an older humanity. An older humanity felt that its moral ideas came from the Gods. That was in the days when the Exousiai, the Spirits of Form, instilled the thoughts into man—including, of course, moral ideas. At that time man knew that even if the Earth did indeed perish, the divinespiritual Beings who draw the world-thoughts out of the cosmos would be there in the future. Man knew that it was not he who made the thoughts, that they were there in the same way as processes of Nature are there; they must therefore always have been in existence, like the external processes of Nature.

We must be quite clear that many people—in greater and greater numbers—simply cannot come to terms with life. Some admit this to themselves—they are possibly the best. Others do not admit it, and the world-chaos into which we have fallen is due to their actions.

All the chaos, the disorder that exists today, is the direct consequence of this inner cleavage, this ignorance of the extent to which the moral world has reality. Men prefer to blunt their understanding of the great world-problems since they are unwilling to force themselves to admit where the cleavage actually lies. They prefer to ignore it.

Now the cleavage cannot be healed by what is today called civilization. It can be healed only an the basis of a spiritual world-outlook sought by way of Anthroposophy. Man comes to realize the existence of Archai who have now received the task in the cosmos of linking the thoughts of man—which now arise in isolation in the soul—to the world-processes in due arrangement.

In a grand and impressive way man again finds the foundation for the moral world-order. How does he find it? He could not become free if he were incapable of feeling: You unfold your thoughts out of your own individuality; you are yourself the elaborator of your thoughts.
But this at once implies that we have wrested our thoughts away from the cosmos. In ancient times it was like this:

If I draw the ocean of cosmic thoughts (yellow) and man diagrammatically (red), then I must indicate what passed into each man as his share of the world of cosmic thoughts. He clung to the world of cosmic thoughts—it came down into him. That this could take place was due to the action of the Spirits of Form.

In the course of evolution this has changed. We have here the ocean of cosmic thoughts (yellow) but the rulership of it has passed to the Archai. If I indicate individual men (below, red), their thoughts are detached; they are no longer connected with the cosmic thoughts. This is inevitable, for man could never be a free being if he did not wrest his world of thoughts away from the cosmos. He must wrest his thoughts away in order to become a free being but then they must be linked again with the cosmos. What is necessary, then, is that the rulership of these thoughts—which is not a direct concern of human life (green) but of the cosmos—should be exercised by the Archai, the Spirits of Personality.

But now, if we turn to the moral aspect of these thoughts we shall say to ourselves: When we enter the spiritual world—either through the gate of death or in the Earth's future or whenever it may be—when we enter the spiritual world we shall meet the Spirits of Personality, the Archai. We shall then be able to perceive what it has been possible for them to do with our thoughts which, to begin with, for the sake of our freedom were isolated within ourselves. We shall then recognize our worth and dignity as men from what the Spirits of Personality have been able to do with our thoughts. And cosmic thought turns directly into moral sensibility, moral impulsion.

Moral impulsion can arise anywhere today from Anthroposophy if rightly grasped—only it must be grasped by the whole being of man.

If we grasp this thought, the thought of responsibility to the normally evolving Archai, if we truly grasp our spiritual function in the cosmos, then we shall also find the place that rightly belongs to us in our epoch; we shall be true men of our time. And then we shall look in the right way at what, indeed, is forever around us: not a world of sense alone but also a spiritual world. We shall regard the Archai as the spiritual Beings to whom man must be responsible if, as a member of humanity, he is to undergo his evolution rightly in the course of earthly time. We shall realize that in the present age what was once the necessary world-order is still opposed by all that has remained from those Spirits of Form who are still intent upon ruling over the cosmic thoughts in the old way. And this is the most important concern of civilization in our time. The deeper talks of man today consist in this: through a right attitude to the Archai, the Spirits of Personality, to become truly free so that he may also adopt the right attitude to the Spirits of Form who today are not within their rights when they strive to exercise rulership over the cosmic thoughts as formerly, but were once the legitimate rulers. On the one hand we shall find what makes life in the world difficult, but we shall also find everywhere ways out of these difficulties. Only we must seek for these ways as free individuals. For if we have no will to achieve a free development of thoughts, what could the Archai possibly make of us?

What is important in our age is that man should have the resolute will to be a free being. In most cases he still does not will it and so has to accommodate himself to the idea. It is still difficult today for a man to wish to be a free being. What would please him most would be to wish what he likes and that the right Spirits would be there to carry out his wishes in an invisible, super-sensible way. Then he would perhaps feel free, feel his dignity as man! We need only wait for one or two incarnations—not such a very long time, until about the year 2800 or 3000—and then in our next incarnation, when looking back on the earlier one, we should never be able to excuse ourselves if we had confused human freedom with the furtherance of human comfort by indulgent Gods !

Today man does exactly this—he confuses freedom and indulgence of benevolent Gods with his love of ease and his wishes for comfort. There are still many people today who wish that there were benevolent Gods to carry out their wishes without much assistance from themselves. But as I said, we need only wait for the year 2800 or 3000 and in a subsequent incarnation we shall thoroughly despise such an attitude. Today, if we develop a truly moral attitude of mind this must be allied with a certain moral strength, with a genuine desire for freedom—inner freedom in the first place; outer freedom will soon follow in the right form if the will for inner freedom is present. But to this end it is essential to perceive exactly where the unauthorized Spirits of Form are active.

Well, they are active everywhere. I could imagine—the human intellect has such a strongly Luciferic tendency—that there may be people who say: Yes, it would certainly be much more sensible for the divine ordering of the world if these backward Spirits of Form were not causing havoc, indeed if they were not there at all ! I advise individuals who think like this also to consider as sensible people whether they could nourish themselves without at the same time filling their intestines with unpleasant substances. The one process is simply not possible without the other. Similarly it is not possible in the world for the things upon which the greatness and dignity of man depend to exist without their correlates.

Where, then, do we see backward Spirits of Form in action? Today in particular we see them active in the national chauvinisms which have spread over the whole world wherever the thoughts of men arise, not directly from the innermost core of human nature but out of the blood, out of what comes from the instincts.

In this connection there are two attitudes to nationality One is this: a man scorns the normal Archai and simply lends himself to what the backward Spirits of Form achieve through the nationalities. He then grows up simply as a national, boasting in chauvinistic style of what he has become through having been born with national blood in his veins. His speech is a product of his nationality, his thoughts come to him in the language of his nationality, the very form of his thoughts too comes from the particular form of this language. He grows from the soil which the Spirits of Form have made out of the nationalities.

Now suppose there is someone who is willing to fall in with the backward Spirits of Form and is at the same time an extremely ambitious individual, placed by destiny in a special position, then—with an eye to the national chauvinisms—he may compose ‘Fourteen Points‘. He then finds followers who regard Woodrow Wilson's Fourteen Points as a splendid gift to the world!

Seen truly, what were these Fourteen Points? They were something flung to the world as an inducement to pander to what the backward Spirits of Form were intent upon inculcating into the different nations. The Fourteen Points were directly inspired from that source.

One can speak of all these things on very different levels. Exactly what I am saying today on one level in characterizing the Archai and the Exousiai, I said years ago in order to underline the significance of Woodrow Wilson's Fourteen Points, because they have lulled the world in a cradle of illusions, have caused untold disaster and chaos.

Further, we see today how the influence proceeding from these backward Spirits of Form makes itself felt in the one-sided, materialistic world-view of natural science, where there is downright horror—or, better said, an unholy dread—of engaging in real activity of thought. Just picture what a terrible scene an orthodox professor would make if a student in the laboratory were to look into the microscope with the aim of producing some thought. That would never do ! One must carefully record only what external sense-perception presents. People are quite unaware that this presents only half of the reality—the other half being produced through a man's own creative thought-activity. But the present mission of the normally developed Archai must be known and understood. In the science that has been vitiated by the backward Spirits of Form, it is essential that the true mission of the Spirits of Personality shall make itself felt. And there is the greatest possible fear of this prospect today.

You have probably heard the well-known anecdote of how scientific knowledge is obtained by the different nations in accordance with their fundamental character. What happens when it is a question today of learning in orthodox zoology about a camel? How do the different nations set to work? The Englishman makes a journey into the desert and observes the camel. It may take him two years to observe the camel in every set of circumstances but in this way he gets to know its nature thoroughly, describes it, omitting all thoughts—as would be expected; he describes everything without formulating any thoughts of his own. The Frenchman goes to a menagerie where a camel is on show, looks at it and describes the animal as seen in the menagerie. He does not, like the Englishman, get to know the camel in natural situations of its life but describes it as it is in the menagerie. The German goes neither into the desert nor into a menagerie but sits down in his study, gathers together all the thoughts he can educe from what he has learnt, constructs the camel a priori and on the basis of this a priori construction, describes it.—This is how the anecdote is generally narrated. Moreover it is nearly, very nearly correct; for everywhere one has the feeling that whether a camel is being described, or man himself, or anything else, the description has originated in the ways indicated. One thing, however, is omitted. This alone would have given the right answer: there might be a fourth participant in this threefold anecdote. It matters not whether this hypothetical fourth goes into the desert or whether, having no opportunity to go into the desert or into a menagerie, he studies books. He may even go to a painter of animals and Look at pictures in which animals are portrayed with genius. But no matter whether he sees the camel in the desert or in a menagerie or whether he takes the a priori descriptions out of books, he is able from what he learns to put this question to the divine-spiritual world-order itself: What is the real nature of a camel? The individual who has made this inner effort sees the camel in the menagerie and also how it behaves in the desert; he also perceives what can be gathered from reading different books, perhaps even books containing horribly caricatured, philistine, pedantic descriptions. Nevertheless if he can discern the essential nature of a camel he can still gather the important points from pedantic treatises and all kinds of a priori constructions.

What mankind needs above everything else today is to find the way to the spiritual, not, of course, by excluding but by including experience of the world gained through the senses.

Here again we have the indication of what, in every domain of our striving for knowledge, will lead to insight into how the backward Spirits of Form can mislead us, and how a true understanding of the mission of the Spirits of Personality can give us, as men, our rightful place in the epoch in which we are living. And what is most important of all is to inform ourselves about growing children, in order to achieve a true art of education. For a glaring defect in all education nowadays is that people hold fast to what man has become in the course of evolution through the backward Spirits of Form; it is assumed that everything is as it should be.

Now the child's nature revolts against this attitude—thank God, we may say. The grown-up person is content with this state of things, but the child's nature revolts against it; youth above all revolts against it.

Here again we have one of the characteristic features of the modern Youth Movement and one of the points where modern education must, shall I say, become clairvoyant—or at least must allow itself to be fructified by the findings of clairvoyance—so that it may be recognized that when a human being is born nowadays the seed of inner activity of thoughts is born with him. Then if this seed of the inner activity of thoughts is present, we learn one essential thing which men today are for the most part incapable of achieving. Do you know what that is? It is that they cannot become old! And youth would like to have as leaders men who have become old in the true sense. The young do not want to be led by the young—even if they insist that they do, they are deceiving themselves; they would like to have as leaders men who have understood how to grow old in the genuine sense and have brought with them into old age the living seed of the development of thoughts. If youth can perceive this it will follow such leaders, knowing that men have something real to say if they have known how to become old in the right way. But what does youth encounter today? Its own likeness ! Men have not understood how to become old and have remained infantile. They know no more than the fifteen and sixteen-year-olds know already. No wonder that the fifteen and sixteen-year olds refuse to follow the sixty- and seventy-year olds who have grown no older than they are themselves. The others have not understood how to bring activity into their old bodies. Youth wants people who have become old in the real way, people who may be old in appearance, with wrinkles, white hair and bald scalps but who, despite old hearts, are fundamentally as young as themselves. Youth wants human beings who have understood how to become old, who therefore in becoming old have increased in wisdom and inner strength.

The problem of the Youth Movement would be easily solved if it were to be grasped in its cosmic significance, if, for instance, fundamental lectures were to be given an the theme: How is it possible in the world today not to remain infantile in ripe old age? There is the real problem.

With those who have become old in the real sense, who have not remained infantile, youth will ally itself, will harmonize quite naturally. But from those who are exactly like itself youth can learn nothing. It simply seems grotesque to a young man, himself perhaps only eighteen years old and possibly not having learnt a great deal—he has of course learnt something—whose hair is still quite dark or fair, who has no wrinkles, still a chubby face, not a beard yet—it seems grotesque to this young person to have to follow someone who is inwardly no older than himself, who looks so funny with his grey hair and bald crown, who has learnt no more than he has himself—but yet it all looks different! That is fundamentally the core of the manifest disharmony between youth and age.

If you take very seriously, in all its significance, what I have tried to express in a humorous way, you will also be able to perceive clearly much that constitutes a great and burning question in modern civilization.

• NoteNum. Albrecht R. Ritschl, 1822–1869. Protestant theologian.

The essential characteristic of our present age in evolution is to be recognized in the fact that the thoughts of man on Earth are abstract and dead, persisting in us as a residue of the living nature of the soul in pre-earthly existence.

This stage of development leading to abstract, that is to say, to dead thoughts is connected with the acquisition of consciousness of freedom within the process of evolution. We will give special attention today to this aspect of the subject by studying the course taken by evolution in the post-Atlantean era.

You know that after the great Atlantean catastrophe, the gradual distribution of the continents on the Earth as we know them today took place and that on the dry land, or within the areas of the dry land, five successive civilization- or culture epochs have evolved, epochs which in my book Occult Science: an Outline I have called the ancient Indian, ancient Persian, Egypto-Chaldean, Graeco-Latin and our present Fifth culture epoch.

These five epochs are distinguished by the fact that the constitution of man, in the general sense, is different in each of them. If we go back to the very early culture-epochs this constitution is also expressed in the whole outer appearance of man, in his bodily features. And the nearer we come to our own epoch, the more clearly is the progress of humanity expressed in the natural tendencies of the soul. Matters relating to this subject have often been described but today I will speak about them from a point of view to which less attention has hitherto been paid.

If we go back to the first, the ancient Indian civilization-epoch which was still partly a direct outcome of the Atlantean catastrophe, we find that in those days a man felt himself to be far rather a citizen of the Cosmos beyond the Earth than a citizen of the Earth itself. And if we study the details of life at that time which, as I have often pointed out, takes us back to the seventh/eighth millennium B.C., it must be emphasised that, not out of intellectual observation—for that was unknown in those days—but out of deep, instinctive perception in that remote past, great importance was attached to the outer appearance, the external aspect of a man. Not that the people of those days engaged in any kind of study of physiognomy—that, of course, was utterly foreign to them. Such a practice belongs to much later epochs, when intellectualism, although not yet fully developed, was already dawning. These men, however, had a sensitive feeling for physiognomy. They felt deeply that if someone had this or that facial expression it indicated certain musical talents. They attached great importance to divining the musical gifts of an individual from his facial expression but also from his gestures and movements, his whole appearance as a human being. In those olden days men did not strive for any more definite knowledge of human nature in general. At that time, if anyone had come to them saying that something should be ‘proved’, they simply would not have known what was meant. It would have troubled them, would almost have given them physical pain; indeed in still earlier times there would have been actual physical pain. To ‘prove’—that would be like carving someone with knives ... so these men would have said. Why should anything have to be proved? We do not need to know anything so certain about the world that it must first be proved.

This is connected with the very vivid feeling these people still had of having come from pre-earthly existence, from the spiritual world. In the spiritual world there is no such thing as ‘proving’. There it is known that proving is a matter that has meaning on the Earth but not in the spiritual world. The wish to prove something in the spiritual world would seem to indicate a definite norm of measurement : the height of a human being must be such and such ... and then, as in the Procrustean myth, something is cut off from one who is too tall and someone too short is stretched! This is more or less what ‘proving’ would be in the spiritual world. Things there do not allow themselves to be manoeuvred into proofs ; things there are inwardly mobile, inwardly fluid.

To an Indian belonging to the ancient Indian epoch with his vivid consciousness of having descended from the spiritual world, of having simply enveloped himself in this external human nature—to such an Indian it would have seemed highly curious if anyone had demanded of him that something should be ‘proved’. These people much preferred what we today should call ‘divining’ because they wanted to be attentive to what was revealed in their environment. And in this activity of ‘divining’ they found a certain inner satisfaction.

Moreover a certain instinct enabled them to infer cleverness in a man from a face of this or that type; from another face they inferred stupidity; from the stature they inferred a phlegmatic temperament, and so on. In that epoch, divining took the place of what we today would call explanatory knowledge. And in human intercourse the aim of reciprocal behaviour was to be able to infer the moral quality of a man from his attitude of soul; from his movements and gestures, his stature.

In the earliest epoch of ancient Indian existence there was no such thing as division into castes—that came later. In connection with the Mysteries of ancient India there was actually a kind of social classification of men according to their physiognomies and their gestures. This was possible in early epochs of evolution, for a certain instinct prompted men to accept such classifications. What later arose within Indian civilization as the caste system was a kind of schematic arrangement of what had been a far more individual classification based upon an instinctive feeling for physiognomy. And in those olden days men did not feel outraged if they were ranked here or there according to their physiognomy; for they felt themselves to be God-given beings of Earth. And the authority of those from the Mysteries who were responsible for this classification, was absolute.

It was not until the later post-Atlantean civilization-epochs that the caste system gradually developed from antecedents of which I have spoken in other lectures. In the epoch of ancient India there was a deep and strong feeling that the basis of man's being was a divine IMAGINATION.

I have told you a great deal about the existence of a primordial, instinctive clairvoyance, a dreamlike clairvoyance. But in remotely distant times of the post-Atlantean era men not only spoke of seeing dreamlike Imaginations, but they said : In the particular configuration of the physical body of man when he enters Earth-existence there is present a divine Imagination. A divine Imagination becomes the basis of the being who descends to the Earth as man, and in accordance with it he forms his physiognomy and the whole physical expression of his manhood, from childhood onwards.

And so men not only looked instinctively, as I have indicated, at the physiognomy of an individual; they also saw there the Imagination of the Gods. They said to themselves : The Gods have Imaginations and they imprint these Imaginations in the physical human being.—That was the very first conception of what man is on the Earth, as a being sent by the Gods.

Then came the second post-Atlantean epoch, the ancient Persian. The instinctive feeling for physiognomy was no longer as strong as it had been in earlier times. Now men no longer looked upwards to Imaginations of the Gods but to THOUGHTS of the Gods. Formerly it had been assumed that an actual picture of man exists in certain divine Beings before a man comes down to the Earth. Afterwards, the conception was that Thoughts, Thoughts which together formed the Logos—the expression subsequently used—were the basis of the individual human being.

In this second post-Atlantean epoch—strange though it seems, it was so—great importance was attached to whether a human being was born during fine weather, whether he was born by night or by day, during the winter or the summer. There was nothing resembling intellectual reasoning but men had the feeling: whatever heavenly constellation is approved by the Gods, whether fine weather or blizzard, whether day or night, when they send a human being down to the Earth, this constellation gives expression to their Thoughts, to their divine Thoughts. And if a child was born perhaps during a storm or during some other unusual weather conditions, that was regarded by the laity as the expression of the divine Thought allocated to the child.

This was so among the laity. Among the priesthood, which in turn was dependent on the Mysteries, and kept the official register, so to speak, of the births—but this is not to be understood in the modern bureaucratic sense—these aspects of weather, time of day, season of the year and so forth, indicated under what conditions the divine Thought was allocated to a human being. This was in the second post-Atlantean epoch, the ancient Persian epoch.

Very little of this has persisted into our own time. Nowadays something extremely boring is suggested if it is said that a person talks about the weather. It is considered derogatory to say of anyone nowadays that he is a bore, he can talk of nothing but the weather.—In the days of ancient Persia such a remark would not have been understood ; it was someone who had nothing interesting to say about the weather who would have been regarded as exceedingly boring! And in point of fact it is true that we have lifted ourselves right out of the natural environment if no connection can be felt between human life and meteorological phenomena. In the ancient Persian epoch an intense feeling of participation in the cosmic environment expressed itself in the fact that men thought of events—and the birth of a human being was an important event—in connection with what was taking place in the Universe.

It would be a definite advance if men—they need not merely talk about the weather being good or bad, for that is very abstract—if men were again to reach the stage of not forgetting, when they are relating some incident, to say what kind of weather was experienced, what natural phenomena were connected with it.

It is extremely interesting when, here or there, striking phenomena are still mentioned, as, for instance was the case in connection with the death of Kaspar Hauser. Because it was a striking phenomenon, mention is made of the fact that the sun was setting on the one side while the moon was rising on the other, and so forth.

And so we can come to understand human nature as it was in the second post-Atlantean epoch.

In the third post-Atlantean epoch this instinct in men had very largely already died out—the instinct for perceiving the spiritual, for perceiving divine Thoughts in the phenomena of weather—and then men began gradually to calculate, to compute. Calculation of stellar constellations replaced the intuitive grasp of the divine Thoughts of man in the natural order; and when a child was born into the world they calculated the positions of the stars, of the fixed stars and the planets. It was essentially in the third, the Egypto-Chaldean epoch that the greatest importance was attached to the capacity to reckon from the stellar constellations the conditions under which a human being had passed from the pre-earthly into the earthly life.

So there was still consciousness of the fact that man's earthly life was determined by conditions of the extra-terrestrial environment. But now it was necessarily a matter of calculation; the time had come when the connection of the human being with the divine-spiritual Beings was no longer directly perceptible.

You need only consider how the whole mental process is really external when it is a matter of calculation. Most certainly I am not going to speak in support of the laziness of youth or of the later indifference to arithmetic shown by grown men. But it is a very different matter to give precedence to external modes of thinking which have very little to do with the whole being of man, and are simply arithmetical methods. These methods of calculation were introduced in all domains of life during the third post-Atlantean epoch. But, after all, the calculations were concerned with super-earthly conditions in which Man was at least reckoned to have his rightful abode. Whatever was calculated had been permeated through and through with feeling. But calculations today are sometimes thought out, sometimes not even thought out but arrived at simply by the application of method; calculation today is often unconcerned with content, being simply a matter of method. And the absence of content that is sometimes obvious in mathematics because method alone has been followed, is really appalling—I do not say this out of ill-will—but it is terrible. In the Egypto-Chaldean epoch there was still something thoroughly human in calculations.

Then came the Graeco-Latin epoch. This was the first postAtlantean civilization-epoch in which man felt that he was living entirely on the Earth, that he was completely united with the Earth-forces. His connection with the phenomena of weather had already become a matter of mythology. The spiritual reality with which he had still felt vitally linked in the second post-Atlantean epoch, that of ancient Persia, had become the world of the Gods. Men no longer stressed the significance of climbing Olympus and plunging their heads in the mist veiling the summit; they now left it to the Gods, to Zeus, to Apollo, to plunge their heads in this Olympic cloud. Anyone who follows the myths belonging to this Graeco-Latin culture-epoch will even now have the impression that at one time men felt a relationship with the clouds and with phenomena of the heavens, but that later on they transferred this relationship to their Gods. Now it was Zeus who lived with the clouds, or Hera who created havoc among them. In earlier times man was involved with his own soul in all this. The Greek exiled Zeus—this cannot be stated in drastic terms but it does indicate how things were—the Greek had exiled Zeus to the region of the clouds, to the region of light.

The man of the ancient Persian epoch felt that together with his soul he still lived in that region. He could not have said, ‘Zeus lives in the clouds or in the light’—but because he felt his soul to be at home in the realm of the clouds, in the realm of the air, he would have said: ‘Zeus lives in me.’ The Greek was the first man in the post-Atlantean epoch who felt himself to be wholly a citizen of the Earth, and this attitude too developed only slowly and by degrees. Hence it was in the Graeco-Latin epoch that the feeling of connection with pre-earthly existence first died away. In all the three earlier post-Atlantean civilization-epochs men were keenly aware of their connection with the pre-earthly existence. No-one could have confronted them with a dogma denying pre-existence. In any case such dogmas can be formulated only if there is some prospect of their being accepted. One must be sensible enough to lay down as a dogma only that for which a number of people are prepared through evolution. The Greeks, however, had lost all awareness of pre-earthly existence and they felt themselves to be entirely men of the Earth—so much so that although they felt themselves to be still permeated by the divine-spiritual, yet they were thoroughly at one with all that belongs exclusively to the Earth.

One must have a feeling for the reason why such mythology could be evolved for the first time in the Greek period, after the connection of man's own soul with super-earthly phenomena had been lost. In the first post-Atlantean epoch man felt himself to be the product of divine Imagination which he conceived as being present in the sphere of soul and spirit (diagram). Later he felt himself to be the product of divine Thoughts manifesting in the phenomena of the heavens, in wind and weather, and so forth. Then he gradually lost the consciousness which once led him into the cosmic expanse but had narrowed more and more into the confines of the Earth. Then came the Egypto-Chaldean epoch, when through calculation man was recognized as a cosmic being. And then came the fourth epoch, the Graeco-Latin epoch, when man became wholly a citizen of the Earth.

If we look back once again into the third post-Atlantean epoch, we come to a time when, although men calculated the conditions of their heavenly existence, at the same time they still had very strong feelings about where they were born on Earth. This is a particularly interesting fact. Except for calculation, men had forgotten their heavenly existence and in any case the calculation had first to be made. It was the age of astrological calculations. But a man who perhaps had no data at all for the time of his birth, nevertheless felt the effects of calculation. One who was born in the far south felt in what he could experience there, the effects of the calculation; he attached more importance to this than to the calculation itself. The calculation was different for one who was born in the north. The astrologers of course could work out the calculation itself but the man felt the effects of it. And how did he feel these effects?

He felt them because the whole natural tendency of his soul and Body was bound up with the place of his birth and its geographical and climatic characteristics ; for in this third postAtlantean culture-epoch man felt himself to be primarily a creature of breath. His breathing in the south was not the same as it was in the north. He was a being of breath. Of course, outer civilization was not advanced enough to enable such feelings to be expressed ; but what was living in the human soul was a product of the breathing-process; and the breathing process in turn was a product of the place on Earth where a man was born, where he lived.

This was no longer so among the Greeks. In the Greek age it was not the breathing-process or the connection with the locality on Earth that was the determining factor. In the Greek age it was the tie of blood, the tribal feeling and sentiment that gave rise to the group-soul consciousness. In the third postAtlantean epoch, group-souls were felt to be connected with the earthly locality. In that epoch men pictured to themselves wherever there is a holy place, the God who represents the group soul is within it; the God was attached to the locality. This ceased during the Greek period. Then, together with the Earth-consciousness, with the attitude of soul bound to the Earth through man's feelings, sentient experiences and instincts, there began the feeling for kinship in the blood. Man had been brought right down to the Earth. His consciousness no longer led him to Look beyond the Earth; he felt that he belonged to his tribe, to his race, through his blood.

And what is our own position in this fifth post-Atlantean epoch? This is almost obvious from the diagram I have sketched in accordance with the facts. Yes, we have crept into the Earth. We have been deprived of the super-earthly forces; we no longer live and should no longer live, with the purely earthly forces which are astir in the blood; we have become dependent upon subterranean forces, sub-earthly forces.

That there are indeed such forces you may learn from what is done with potatoes. You know, of course, that in the winter the peasants bury their potatoes in trenches; then they keep alive, otherwise they would perish. Conditions under the Earth are different; there the summer warmth is maintained during the winter.

Now the life of plants in general can only be understood when we know that up to the flower the plant is a product of the previous year. It grows out of the Earth-forces; it is only the flower that needs the actual sunlight.

What, then, does it signify for us as human beings that we become dependent upon sub-earthly forces? It is not the same for us as for potatoes. We are not laid in trenches in order that we may thrive during the winter. Our dependence upon sub-earthly forces signifies something quite different, namely, that the Earth takes away from us the influence of the super-earthly. We are deprived of this influence by the Earth. In his consciousness, man was first a divine Imagination, then a divine Thought, then the result of calculation, then Earth-man. The Greek felt himself to be a man belonging altogether to the Earth, living in the blood. We, therefore, must learn to feel ourselves independent of the super-earthly ; but independent, too, of what lies in our blood.

This has come about because we no longer live through the period between our twenty-first and twenty-eighth years in the same way as men did in earlier times; we no longer have the second experience described yesterday, we no longer have living thoughts as the result of consciousness influenced by the super-earthly, but we have thoughts which have no inner vitality at all and are therefore dead. It is the Earth itself, with its inner forces, which kills our thoughts when we become Earth-men.

And a remarkable vista ensues: as Earth-men we bury what is left of man in the physical sphere; we give over the corpse to the Earth-elements. The Earth is also active in the process of cremation; decay is only a slow process of burning. As to our thoughts—and this is the striking characteristic of the Fifth post-Atlantean period—when we are born, when we are sent down to the Earth, the Gods give over our thoughts to the Earth. Our thoughts are buried, actually buried, when we become men of Earth. This has been so since the beginning of the Fifth post-Atlantean epoch. To be possessed of intellect means to have a soul with thoughts from which the heavenly impulses have been taken away by the Earth-forces.

The characteristic of our manhood today is that in our inmost soul, precisely through our thinking, we have united with the Earth. On the other hand, as a result of this, it is only now, in the Fifth post-Atlantean culture-epoch that it is possible for us to send back to the Cosmos the thoughts which we imbue with life through our earthly deeds in the way described at the end of yesterday's lecture.

Evolutionary impulses of this nature lie at the very roots of the significant products of human culture. And our feelings cannot but be profoundly stirred by the fact that at the time when European humanity was approaching this Fifth postAtlantean epoch, poetic works such as Wolfram von Eschenbach's ‘Parsifal’ appeared. We have often studied this work as such but today we will direct our eyes of soul to something that is to be found there as a majestic sign of the times. Think of the remarkable characteristic that now becomes evident, not only in Wolfram, but wherever the poetic gift comes to expression in men of that period.

A certain uneasiness is perceptible concerning three stages in the evolution of the human soul. The first trait to be observed in a human being when he comes into this world, when he submits himself to this life and is living in a naive connection with the world—the first trait to be observed is simplicity, dullness.

The second, however, is doubt. And precisely at the time of the approaching Fifth post-Atlantean epoch, doubt is graphically described. If doubt is close to the heart, a man's life (or soul) must have a hard time¹—such was the feeling prevailing in those days. But there was also the feeling: man must wrestle his way through doubt to blessedness. And blessedness was the word used for the condition created when man has brought divine life again into thoughts that have become ungodly, into dead thoughts that have become completely earthly. Man's submergence in the earthly realm—this was felt to be the cause of the condition of doubt; and blessedness was felt to be a break from earthly things through the vitalizing of thoughts.

SIMPLICITY—DULLNESS
DOUBT
BLESSEDNESS

This was the gist of the mood prevailing in the poetic works of the 12th, 13th and 14th centuries, when man was struggling onwards to the Fifth post-Atlantean epoch. The dawn of this epoch was felt more intensely at the time than it is today, when men are weary of thinking about these things, when they have become mentally too lazy. But they will have to begin again to think deeply about such matters and to set their feelings astir, otherwise the ascent of mankind would not be possible. And what does that really mean? The Earth acts as a mirror for man; he is not intended to reach a sub-earthly level. But his lifeless thoughts penetrate into the Earth and apprehend death, which pertains to the Earth-element only. However, the nature of man himself is such that when he imbues his thoughts with life he sends them out into the Cosmos as mirror-pictures. And so all the living thoughts that arise in man are seen by the Gods glittering back from evolving humanity. When man is urged to make his thoughts come alive he is being called upon to be a co-creator in the Universe. For these thoughts are reflected by the Earth and stream out again into the Universe, must make their way again out into the Universe.

Hence when we grasp the meaning of the evolution of mankind and the world, we feel that in a way we are led back again to the epochs that have already been lived through. In the Egypto-Chaldean epoch, man's status an Earth was arrived at by means of calculation; but for all that he was always brought by this means into connection with the surrounding world of stars. Today we proceed historically, starting from man; man becomes the starting-point for a study which you will find presented in the book, Occult Science: an Outline, where we have actually sent out living human thoughts and noted what they have become when we follow them in the cosmic environment as they speed away from us, when we learn to live with these living thoughts in the cosmic expanse.

These processes indicate the deep significance of the fact that man has come to the stage of having dead thoughts, that he is, so to speak, in danger of uniting completely with the Earth.

Let us follow the picture further. Genuine Imaginations make this possible. It is only deliberately thought-out Imaginations that lead us no further. Think for a moment of a mirror. We say that it throws the light back. The expression is not quite accurate, but in any case the light must not get behind the mirror. There is only one way in which this could happen and that would be if the mirror were broken. And indeed, if man does not vitalize his thoughts, if he persists in harbouring merely intellectualistic thoughts, dead thoughts, he must destroy the Earth.

Admittedly, the destruction begins with the most highly rarefied element: warmth. And in the Fifth post-Atlantean epoch man has no opportunity of ruining anything other than the warmth-atmosphere of the Earth through the ever-increasing development of purely intellectualistic thoughts. But then comes the Sixth post-Atlantean epoch. If by that time man has not been converted from intellectualism to Imagination, destruction would begin, not only of the warmth-atmosphere but also of the air-atmosphere, and if their thoughts were to remain purely intellectualistic, men would poison the air, ruining, in the first place, all vegetation.

In the Seventh post-Atlantean epoch it will be possible for man to contaminate the water, and if his exudations were to be the outcome of purely intellectualistic thoughts, they would pass over into the universal fluidity of the Earth. Through this universal fluidity of the Earth, the mineral element of the Earth would, in the first place, lose cohesion. And if man did not vitalize his thoughts, thereby giving back to the Cosmos what he has received from it, he would have every opportunity of shattering the Earth.

Thus the life of soul in man is intimately connected with natural existence. Intellectualistic knowledge today is a purely Ahrimanic product, aiming at blinding humanity to these things If a man is persuaded that his thoughts are merely thoughts and have nothing to do with happenings in the Universe, he is being deluded into believing that he can have no influence upon the evolution of the Earth, and that either with or without his collaboration the Earth will at some time come to an end in some such way as foretold by physical science.

But the Earth will not come to a purely physical end; its end will come in the way brought about by mankind itself.

Here again is one of the points where we are shown how Anthroposophy connects the moral world of soul with the physical world of the senses, whereas today no such connection exists and modern theology even considers it preferable to regard the moral sphere as being entirely independent of the physical. And philosophers today who drag themselves about, panting and puffing, with backs bent under the burden of the findings of science, are happy when they can say : Yes, for the world of nature there is science; but philosophy must extend to the Categorical Imperative, to that about which man can know nothing.

These things today are often confined to the schools and universities. But they will take effect in life itself if mankind does not become conscious of how soul-and-spirit is creative in the physical-material realm and of how the future of the physical material realm will depend upon what man resolves to develop in the realm of soul-and-spirit. With these basic principles we can become conscious on the one side of the infinite importance of the soul-life of mankind, and on the other side of the fact that man is not merely a creature wandering fortuitously over the Earth, but that he belongs to the whole Universe.

But, my dear friends, right Imaginations give rise to what is right. If man does not vitalize his thoughts, but is more and more apt to allow them to die, then his thoughts will creep into the Earth and, in the end, he will become an earthworm in the Universe, because his thoughts seek out the habitations of the earthworms. That too is a valid Imagination.

Human civilization should avoid the possibility of man becoming an earthworm, for should that happen the Earth will be shattered and the cosmic goal that is quite clearly within the scope of human capacities, will not be reached. There are things which we should not merely take into our theories, into our abstract speculations, but deeply into our hearts, for Anthroposophy is a concern of the heart. And the more clearly it is grasped as a concern of the heart, the better it is understood.

• 1. With a slight variation Dr Steiner was quoting the opening couplet of Wolfram von Eschenbach's ‘Parsifal’. In the original the lines are as follows:
  Ist zwîfel herzen nâchgebûr.

In this final lecture of our conference on education based on anthroposophic insight into the human being, I would like to speak about the moral and religious aspect in teaching, two related subjects that naturally belong together. Again, there is time for only a few characteristic observations.

There is hardly any other subject that pervades every aspect and branch of education with such an all-embracing and unifying spirit, born from a real knowledge of the human being. Yesterday I spoke to you about physical education, whereas today’s theme must be considered truly spiritual—very much so when we look at it from the spirit of our civilization. I want to emphasize immediately that these two subjects—both physical and spiritual in nature—must flow together and form a unity in the kind of education we are considering here, even though they tend to be treated as two very separate branches in traditional education. It may take time for this to happen in general. But in our Waldorf school, we have tried to make a small beginning in this intimate intermingling of spiritual and physical activities by introducing eurythmy as a required subject in all classes that could be seen as a kind of soul and spiritual form of gymnastics. Eurythmy uses the human physical body as a medium to express whatever it brings. Yet, right down to the smallest detail, every movement is also meaningfully permeated by soul and spirit. Eurythmy depends on the physical organs, as speech depends on the human speech organs, without which there could be no vocal communication. The physical speech organs carry soul and spiritual content.

The spiritual element in language can lead directly into the moral and even religious sphere if we are perceptive enough; there is a reason that the Gospel of St. John begins with “In the beginning was the Word.” Thus we can say, This flowing together of body, soul, and spirit is cultivated by teaching eurythmy in every class of the Waldorf school, though it is not a well known subject and, as yet, employs a somewhat instinctive way. Although directly linked to physical movements, eurythmy is one of the subjects that can show, perhaps more clearly than any other, how the unification of body, soul, and spirit can be practiced methodically within class lessons. In the future, many other activities will have to stand alongside eurythmy, offering possibilities as yet undreamed of by people today, and working even more directly into the soul and spiritual realm. Such possibilities are inherent in what has already been given, and waiting to be realized; the way is there. Even if our first efforts in eurythmy are far from perfect and limited in scope, the principles of eurythmy will eventually overcome all imbalance in gymnastics, which is the result of today’s materialistic influences.

One really feels an inner urge to speak about the ethical and religious aspects of education, even if this can be done only aphoristically. On the one hand, we wish to appeal most strongly to what all human beings share as a common bond, beyond the limits of race and nationality. On the other, it has become obvious that it is almost impossible to speak of matters so intimately connected with people’s inner lives in a way that is both understood and accepted by all nationalities. An example may show how very different moral and religious attitudes are in various regions of the world, and how one thus feels inhibited when trying to reach people on this particular level. In reality, such intimate questions of morality and religion can be approached only through the national and religious background of the people concerned.

In all the previous considerations during our conference, I was able to speak in far more general terms about human affairs than I can today. But the anthroposophic view of the world engenders a strong desire to build bridges across all divisions into nationalities, races, and so on. In its inmost being anthroposophy feels compelled to speak with a voice that is supranational, or international. Nevertheless, we are acutely aware of the difficulties in speaking with a voice of universal humanity about such intimate matters of human life, especially in the contemporary scene, which, after all, is the reality that confronts us. So I must beg you to take what I am going to say with the attitude I just mentioned. It is an example intended to illustrate the deep gulfs dividing humankind.

During these lectures I have mentioned Herbert Spencer, who, regardless of personal opinions of his philosophy, must be considered an exponent of Western civilization. I have indicated that Spencer introduced the world to specific educational principles, one of which may be summarized as follows: It is the goal of humankind to reproduce in kind; consequently, it is in our moral interests to raise and educate our offspring accordingly. We must therefore endeavor to provide suitable parents and educators. Such, approximately, are Spencer’s views, which begin with, and aim at, a physical picture of the human being. He follows the development of the human race with an eye on its reproduction and adapts his educational goals accordingly.

Now let us look at another person who, though living a little later, can nevertheless be seen as representing an Eastern worldview. Let us consider the philosophy of Vladimir Solovyov. Although he expresses himself in Western terminology, a true Russian folk soul speaks through his works. And so we find that the ethical and religious aims of Solovyov have a very different message for humankind, one permeated by the spirit of the East. He tells us that, on the one hand, people must strive for perfection with regard to truth, and, on the other, people must partake of immortality. Here Solovyov does not imply an earthly immortality resulting from fame or glory, but the real immortality of the soul, which rightly belongs to every human soul. He goes on to say that, without this effort toward perfection in truth—in other words, without the attainment of real knowledge—human existence would be worthless. Only if we are able to perfect ourselves more and more will our human life gain in value. But if the human soul were denied immortality, then all perfection, all ability to strive toward perfection, would be nothing but a monstrous cosmic deception. Then, all human achievements in the search for truth would be submerged, and humankind would be cheated of its most precious aspirations by the very cosmic foundations themselves. However, Solovyov claims, this would be the case if, through earthly development, humankind were to consider human reproduction the final and most important goal. Then humankind’s special task in the world would be shunted from one generation to the next, and the human course would be like the spinning of an unchanging wheel, at least in terms of the moral values of existence. In other words, in the spirit of the East, Solovyov clearly rejects the Western ideals of Spencer.

This twofold way of experiencing and judging our human task on earth colors all the many divisions with regard to moral and religious issues. If we wish to understand the ethical and moral aims of humankind, we must first free ourselves from prejudice. Then we need to make an honest effort to understand the various diverging philosophies of life. The opposing views of these two thinkers show how the human constitution differs in terms of the intimate subject of today’s discussion.

The anthroposophic worldview itself is intended to help people, wherever they live on earth, toward knowledge that is beyond all limits of race or national language. Consequently, spiritual science tries to speak a supranational language (not in any physical sense, of course), a language that can be understood throughout modern civilization. For now, we can realize these goals only to a limited extent. But even these initial steps will enable us to appreciate wider issues as well. Once we have a better understanding of what was just said, we will see how little can be accomplished in moral and religious education as long as we introduce religious dogmas and fixed moral concepts to children. At best we can teach them to become Christians, Jews, Roman Catholics, or Protestants, according to our own religious beliefs. But we must eradicate from a true art of education any attempt to indoctrinate young people into our own particular ideology.

A specific problem in education may help illustrate this point and also help us respect matters of human freedom when dealing with children. And we will quickly realize that we must respect the inherent freedom of children if we also recognized that a dull or a bright student, or even a budding genius, should be treated with equal care. What would happen if teachers were to decide that students should take in only what was near to their own souls? In their bodily nature, those of a lower intelligence are born with a heavy burden. A genius, on the other hand, is born with a winged soul. We must admit to ourselves that we are called to help carry the burden of a disabled person. But we must also admit that, as teachers, we may not be able to follow the flight of a young genius. Otherwise, every school would have to be staffed with great geniuses, and this is probably impossible. Our teaching methods must nevertheless ensure that we do not impede the progress of an inherent genius. We must never clip the wings of a genius’s spirit. We can do these things only by developing an art of education that does not interfere with the spiritual forces that must work freely in growing human beings.

All of our previous considerations of this conference were directed to this goal, and once you examine these things in greater depth, you will find it is true. You will also find that the principles of Waldorf education can be implemented in practical life in such a way that teachers need to deal only with what they can develop in children, even in one who will eventually become a genius. Just as a teacher of short stature cannot prevent a student from becoming tall, similarly a teacher’s spiritual limitations need not limit a student’s innate possibilities for spiritual growth. The later lives of students will remain unimpeded by the inevitable shortcomings of teachers as long as we stand on a knowledge of the whole human being, which emanates from the complete human being just as the forces of physical growth do.

Consequently, I welcome the fact that, in the Stuttgart Waldorf school, something has emerged that could easily go unnoticed by a passing visitor; nevertheless it is a concrete reality. I’m speaking of the spirit of the Waldorf school, which exists independently, irrespective of the personal situations of various staff members, whose soul and spiritual lives thrive as a result of communal efforts to cultivate it. This spirit encourages teachers more and more to educate children, even when they have to help carry the heavy burden of the disabled. The teachers’ group study of the human being helps them bear this burden while making every effort to avoid the educational error of hindering a highly gifted student’s free development. This is our ideal, and it goes without saying that it does not exist just in the clouds of cuckooland, because the teachers make concerted efforts to bring it into daily life at the Waldorf school.

When dealing with the moral and religious aspects of education, we cannot draw material from existing ideologies, religious institutions, or established ethics. Our task is to reach the students’ inner being so that, in keeping with their destinies, they will be able to work freely with others in the social sphere. Consequently, we do not begin teaching by appealing to their conceptual faculties. Although knowledge provides meaning, it does not make it possible to go into the intimate regions of the soul in a living way. When imparting knowledge—and we are bound to do this in our school—when addressing the faculty of thinking as one of the three soul faculties, we must realize that thinking, too, must be channeled toward ethical aims. However, when dealing with the moral and religious aspects of education, we must appeal first and foremost to the feeling life of students. We cannot address the will directly, because human activities immediately connect people socially, and social activities are determined largely by the prevailing conditions and demands of the social milieu.

So we cannot turn directly to thinking, which always wants to turn in a certain direction, nor to willing, which must take its impulses from prevailing social conditions. We can, however, always appeal to feeling, which to a certain extent is the private domain of each individual. If we appeal to this element when teaching, we meet forces of the human soul that have a moral and religious quality. Yet, we must go beyond cultivating the students’ thinking, feeling, and willing as though each were a separate faculty. We must try to train the soul forces together. Obviously, it would be wrong to concentrate on training thinking in a lopsided way, just as it would it be wrong to concentrate only on the will. Rather, we must let feeling flow into both thinking and willing.

With thinking, only knowledge of the world and the human being—based on spiritual science—really helps us, because it allows us to build on a physical foundation. With such knowledge, we can safely turn to subjects such as physics and chemistry without the danger of being unable to rise to the level of metaphysics, or spirit. If we reach the suprasensory world along the way, we engage not only thinking but also feeling. The very moment we lift knowledge of the world to a suprasensory level, we begin to achieve a moral relationship with the ground of the world and to suprasensory beings themselves.

The element of feeling is the first of three soul faculties to which we must turn in moral and religious education. If fostered correctly, feeling will be transformed into gratitude. Right from the very beginning of school life, we must systematically develop a mood of gratitude in children—something that modern education allows in only a limited and relatively unconscious way. We must try to engender a mood of gratitude for everything children receive, with every concrete example we take from life itself.

When this feeling is developed properly, it can rise to the highest realms of cosmic laws available to cognition. At such a moment, people feel how the sensory world surrounds them. They come to understand natural laws and see themselves within the sensory realm. They begin to understand that whatever they discover through the senses alone will never make them fully human. Gradually they find a way of knowing the human being that points beyond the limits of the sensory world but, nevertheless, is accessible by scientific methods. They then not only experience the activity of universal cosmic laws in themselves, but divine the existence of spiritual beings. Such awareness changes knowledge into a deep feeling of gratitude toward the suprasensory beings who placed them into the world. Knowledge broadens into gratitude toward divine beings. We know we have given young people knowledge of the world in the right way if it eventually wells up in them as a feeling of gratitude toward the suprasensory world.

Thus, a feeling of gratitude is the first quality within the three human soul faculties that leads into the moral and religious sphere and that we must cultivate in young people. Gratitude itself includes a certain quality of knowing, since we must understand why we are grateful. It is characteristic of this feeling that it is closely related to our powers of comprehension. In the Waldorf school, we do not appeal to faith as handed down by tradition; this is left to our visiting religion teachers. After the ground has been prepared by class teachers, religious teachers are invited to relate what they can give to life in general.

With the students’ faculty of thinking, we first try to create a mood of gratitude. When we turn to feeling, what we find takes us beyond ourselves and out into the world. With the experience of gratitude, we find ourselves facing other beings. And, if we can identify with other beings to the extent of experiencing them as ourselves, then something begins to develop in our feeling life that we call love in the true sense of this word. Love is the second mood of soul that needs to be nurtured in moral and religious life, the kind of love we can nurture at school by doing whatever we can to help students love one another. We can provide a firm foundation for this kind of love by helping children make a gradual transition from the stage of imitation and authority, in the ninth or tenth year, to a genuine feeling of love for their teachers, whose bearing and general behavior at school must naturally warrant it.

In this way we lay the foundations of a twofold human quality; we instill the essence of the ancient call to love your neighbor as you love yourself, while helping to develop a feeling of gratitude that points more to a comprehension of the world. “Love your neighbor as you love yourself ” is complemented by the call to “love Divine Being above everything.”

Such words of truth have a familiar ring to most people today, for they have sounded through the ages. However, knowing them in theory and repeating them is not the point. It is most important to find ways to put them into practice in the immediate present, thus every age sees a renewal of humankind. We often hear the admonition to love our neighbor as we love ourselves, and God above everything, yet we see little evidence of it. Life at school should try to assure that such things are not just talked about but become infused with new life.

There is only one way that offers a firm foundation for the capacity to love in a mature way, and that is the natural transformation of the childhood stages of imitation and authority to that of love. If we work in harmony with children’s natural development toward the attainment of love—whose quality should be self-evident when seen in this light—we will not need to invent the sort of long-winded theories that are fabricated by materialistic thinkers, intended to guide sexually maturing adolescents in their first experiences of love. A whole literature has been written on the subject, all of which suffers from the simple fact that one no longer knows what to do with young people once they reach sexual maturity. The reason for this failure is that children were not prepared properly, because people did not know how to handle the previous stages of childhood. If adolescents have been guided correctly up to this incisive time in their lives, we do not have such difficulties with them.

In children’s life of will, we must guide the developing soul so that feelings flow freely into the will in the right way. Children must naturally express many different will impulses outwardly, but what asserts itself now? If we were unable to use our physical powers to express our will impulses, we would not be human in the physical sense, especially when our actions are seen in the light of morality and religion. By engendering love, we pour ourselves out into the world. By willing, we return to ourselves, and because willing is essential to our lives, we enter the realm of instincts, drives, and emotions. At the moment we look for a path to morality and religion, we must realize that everything that makes us human must now flow into our instincts and desires. This path reveals itself to us when we knowingly contemplate the universe and find the human being there. Ancient tradition put this into words by telling us that human beings are images of the Godhead.

Volition that has an ethical and religious character arises only when we can carry this kind of experience into our deliberate actions—when we can find the image of God even in our instinctive impulses. Thus we know that our true humanity remains alive in the domain of the will. What are we doing when we allow will impulses to enter the world so that, right down to the level of instincts, people recognize a true human being in us? By developing a feeling for our own humanity, which we pour into our will impulses and activities, we reveal the third of the three soul moods. There is no word in German for this third element. So, to make my meaning clear, I have to borrow a word from English—the word duty. There is no German word for duty. Those who can experience how words reveal the genius of language (as described a previous meeting) will be able to sense my meaning. It is true that anyone who, without further ado, translates simply according to what one finds in a dictionary, would translate the word duty into the German word Pflicht. But this word does not meet the need at all. As a noun, formed from the verb pflegen, it comes from a very different region of the soul. One would have to approach this matter very differently if we were to base it on Pflicht. This difficulty of finding the right word presents another example of how differently people are constituted in various parts of the earth. If we aim to be conscientious and correct in our use of language, we cannot translate duty with Pflicht to express the third mood of soul, because it would not reflect the truth. It would be a lie, even if only a technical one.

1. Gratitude
2. Love
3. Duty

Again, it is characteristic that we can use the German words for gratitude (Dankbarkeit) and love (Liebe), but that there is no German word for expressing the third mood of soul. It is characteristic because we find ourselves entering a definite geographic locale as soon as we step from the area of cognition, which links us to humanity (since thought can be shared by all thinking people), and as soon as we leave the realm of love, which can unite people everywhere, and enter the sphere of individual volition. Here we are called on to form our lives and become aware of the individuality being developed in us by our having been placed into a definite location on earth.

However, if we approach students through their life of feeling during their ninth or tenth year, when previous powers of imitation and the inborn sense of authority have gradually changed into new faculties, our teaching will, by its very nature, lead to a moral and religious experience on their part. And when human beings are permeated by the feeling that they want to be truly human, that they must conduct their lives so that, right down to the level of instincts, they themselves and others will recognize true humanity in them, they immediately become messengers, angels of the divine world. Moral life will be pervaded by a religious mood.

If students have been guided properly up to the twelfth year, the introduction of new subjects will lead them into what lies beyond the human realm. This makes them realize that, by observing outer nature, they are entering another world, limited by the senses and obedient to the laws of a lifeless, inorganic world. (We have already described this period and indicated the right pedagogical approach.) At that moment, children feel, deep down, that they want to be truly human, even in their lower nature, at the level of instincts and drives. And then the third mood of soul arises, which is a sense of duty. Thus, through our education and in conformity with the children’s nature, we have guided them to experience the three moods of soul. Naturally, the ground had to be prepared during the previous school years.

At the stage of development toward the twelfth year, a certain loss of inner harmony will manifest in our students’ religious experiences. I mean that, in their religious life, a most important moment has arrived. Naturally, students have to be prepared for this turning point so that they can pass through it in the right way. Educators must not simply accept the “fact” that certain conflicts caused by modern civilization are inevitable. In our time, people have their moral and ethical views, which are deeply rooted in the human soul and without which they cannot imagine human dignity and human values. On the other hand, they find themselves surrounded by the effects of natural laws that, in themselves, are completely amoral, laws that affect human lives regardless of any moral issues and can be dealt with only if questions of morality are left entirely out of consideration.

In educational circles today, there is a widespread tendency to conveniently bypass this issue when children reach this critical point in their lives. In our present civilization, however, this conflict in the human soul is both deep-seated and tragic. This must be resolved one way or another before adulthood. Unless students can reconcile the moral and natural orders of the world so they are seen as part of a unity, they may suffer an inner conflict that has the strength to tear their lives apart. Today such a conflict exists in the lives of nearly all thinking people, but they remain unaware of it. People prefer to fall back on traditional religious creeds, trying to bridge what remains unbridgeable unless they can rise from the sensory world to the spiritual world, as anthroposophy endeavors to do.

For adults, such a conflict is indeed tragic. If it arises in childhood before the eleventh year, it brings disturbances in its wake that are serious enough to ruin the soul life of a child. A child should never have to say, “I study zoology and find nothing about God. It’s true that I hear of God when I study religion, but this does not help explain zoology.” To allow children to be caught in such a dilemma would be awful, since this kind of questioning can completely throw them off their proper course in life. Of course, the education we have been considering during the last few days would never allow such a schism to develop in a child’s soul, because it fully considers the importance of the eleventh to twelfth years and all that follows. Only then (not before) is it time for the student to become aware of the disharmony between life as seen in terms of nature and life seen from the moral point of view. We should not overprotect children by glossing over certain facts of life—such as the fact that, apart from gratitude, love, and duty, the world is a duality seen with human eyes. However, if education is based on the principles elaborated here, students will be able to resolve this seeming disharmony in the world, especially at this particular age. Certain problems will deepen and enrich our students’ religious lives far more than if they were fed only the traditional sorts of religious instruction, which have to be accepted on faith. Such real meaning assures students that a bridge can be built across the abyss they have experienced for the first time, because it is a reality.

Our civilization requires that we let our ethical and religious views play their proper role in life as it is. And in our religious teaching we must take our cue from the critical moments of the students’ developing life of feeling. The difficulties of finding the kind of bridge I have described are highlighted by a book published in London toward the end of the eighties. It is called Lux Mundi, and among its contributors are several authors who represent the official views of the High Church of England. It attempts to take what has crystallized in the Church and integrate it more into social life. Even members of the High Church are at pains to build such a bridge—needless to say, from their point of view. You find people discussing this everywhere, and it could well become the substance of our religious life.

Can we really offer something that is being debated so much today as a subject for growing children? Are we in a position to lead young people into Christianity, while theologians increasingly argue about the reality of Christ? Should it not be our task to find ways to help each person relate to Christianity as a free individual? We must not teach accepted dogmas or fixed formulas as ethical and religious instruction; rather, we must learn to nurture the divine spiritual element that lives in the human soul. Only then shall we guide children correctly, without impinging on their inner freedom to eventually choose their own religious denomination. Only then will students be spared inner uncertainty on discovering that one adult is a member of the High Church while another may be a Puritan. We must succeed in enabling students to grasp the real essence of religion. Likewise, through the cultivation of the three moods of soul, we must succeed in allowing morality to develop freely in the souls of children instead of trying to inculcate them by means of set moral precepts. This problem is at the very heart of the social question, and all the talk or social work related to it will depend on whether we provide the right basis for the moral education of young people. A significant part of the whole social question is simply a question of education.

It was possible to present only a few rough outlines of the moral and religious aspect of Waldorf education, which we have been studying during the last few days. If our educational aims are rooted in a true knowledge of the human being, and as long as we realize that we must refrain from introducing dogmas, theories, or moral obligations into our teaching, we will eventually succeed in laying the right foundation for the moral and religious life of our students.

So we must continue to work toward a true art of education that conforms to the needs of our time. Perhaps I may hope that what I presented to you during the last few days will show that I an not at all against the achievements of general education. Broadly speaking, our present civilization is not lacking in good educational aims and principles, and during the nineteenth century, they were stated in abstract terms by the great educators of various countries around the world. Waldorf education has no intention of opposing or belittling their findings, but it believes it knows that these ideas can be implemented only through the appropriate measures, and that such measures can grow only from a real and deep experience of the human being and the world. Fundamentally, Waldorf education tries to bring about what most people are looking for, though their goals may be somewhat abstract or ill-defined. We are seeking ways to achieve something that everyone would really like to see in education, and if this is the feeling that has arisen among those who have shown genuine interest in an anthroposophically based education as practiced in the Waldorf school, then the right kind of response has been evoked here.

Ladies and gentlemen, it has meant a great deal to me to be permitted to speak to you in this spirit. It is more important to me that you appreciate the spirit from which I have spoken than that you hear the details of what I brought. Details might have to be modified or adapted in one way or another. What matters are not the details but the spirit behind them. If I have succeeded in evoking some experience of the tolerant and humane, yet active spirit behind our education based on spiritual science, then perhaps just a little of what I wanted to bring in these lectures has been achieved.

In conclusion, I wish to emphasize once more my firm conviction that it is of utmost importance to speak from this spirit during our time. I would like to thank you for the interest you have shown during these lectures. I would also like to thank you for spending your time at this conference, especially during this festive season, and I hope that, as you leave, you feel at least some justification for your journey to Dornach. If this is the case, I would like to give you my heartiest farewell in the hope that we may meet again, in the sense in which I spoke to you at the opening of this lecture course.

I have carefully considered for some time whether or not to include today's chapter in this lecture series, for its subject matter can only be presented in outline. But I have decided to include it, even if only to prove once more how greatly such things may be misunderstood. For on the one side, some people have long endeavoured to prove that Anthroposophy and its doctrines are muddled nonsense. Recently, however, it appears to have dawned on some other people that this opinion can no longer be held, but that Anthroposophy appears to correspond with the results of additional research into the ancient mysteries. So the attack is now from the other side: I am represented as a betrayer of the mysteries. Thus people can always find a possibility of accusation and attack, whether on one score or the other. If they can no longer state that these things are false they can at least maintain that it is extremely wrong to say them.

I must first of all repeat that the exclusively physical study of man only surveys a part and a comparatively small part of human nature This is for the simple reason that man contains the etheric body, the astral body and the ego, which are constantly working upon and moulding the physical organism, yet entirely inaccessible to external physical judgment—I use this term with intention and reference to what follows. At the same time it is not impossible for the human being to educate himself and evolve (granting steadfast effort) to the point of acquiring and assimilating a certain degree of clairvoyance into the operation of intellect and judgment. This will not yet mean the attainment of a proper clairvoyance associated with definite visual images, but it will be possible to attain a type of judgment capable of strong and reliable coincidence with the results of clairvoyance.

Now consider this. Let us begin with the ego—as it were the opposite extreme from the physical. The ego works upon the other human vehicles, and at the present stage of evolution its main sphere of action is on the physical body. In mankind today the ego has as yet comparatively little capacity for governing the etheric body. During childhood, it has such power strongly but unconsciously. This ceases later on. Only in those who retain in later life a vivid imagination or fantasy, is there a strong ego influence over the etheric body. In general, however, in all persons who develop their intelligence as distinct from their imagination and become dry intellectualists, there is a strong ego-influence over the physical body and only a slight influence over the etheric.

If you try to visualise this influence over the physical body, you will not need to go much further in order to picture in your minds as the work of the ego an intricate framework extending throughout the bodily organism; a delicate, weblike scaffolding. This scaffolding in the physical body, like a kind of phantom of man, is always present. We human beings carry with us through life, a framework imprinted into us through our ego-organisation; its structure is most delicate, and indeed it is the forces of the etheric body that insert it into the physical. But in the course of our lives, we gradually forfeit the power of consciously contributing to this structure. Only in people with creative imagination we find a half-conscious, dreamlike remnant of such power.

As you will have easily conceived, this weblike framework which the ego “timbers” into the organism of man is actually in some sense a “foreign body.” And there is a constant tendency to resist it. Every night during sleep, the human organism seeks to tear down this structure. Although we remain unaware of it in everyday waking life, do not let us forget this tendency. For this continuous tendency on the part of the ego-framework to break up, to fall to pieces in the organism, is the secret and permanent source of inflammatory conditions.

The concept of this kind of phantom-structure inserted by the ego into the human organism is of great importance, as is the realisation of the constant organic defensive reaction against it as a “foreign body,” and its continuous tendency to break up within the physical organisation. You will arrive at a visualisation which helps your judgment if you study psycho-physiologically the organisation of the human eyes. For all that takes place as between the eye itself and the external world, that is to say, between the soul and the external world by means of the eye, represents par excellence the erecting of this scaffold. There is an intimate interaction between the ego-framework proper and the results of the interplay of the eye with the world around it. I have often had occasion to study this interaction of eye and ego, in blind-born persons and in those who had lost their sight. Such cases reveal very plainly the mutual reactions of that phantom—normal to most people—which becomes incorporated in the organism by the mere fact of sight, and the other phantom which is the result of the ego's activity in the organism.

Suppose that an attempt be made to represent all this in graphic form. Through sight, through the visual process, a phantom is incorporated into the organism: and the other ego-structure lies a little deeper within, a little more inward. (See Diagram 25. Yellow portion and white portion.) The latter, more deep-seated structure is so constituted as to be perceptibly tinged with physical forces. It is an almost physical phantom that the ego inserts and erects; a real scaffold, but what the eye transmits is still etheric. And here we come to a striking difference between short-sighted and long-sighted people. In people of short sight, these two frameworks approach one another; the portion coloured white in the diagram moves inwards, closer to the yellow. In long-sighted persons, on the other hand, the white framework moves outwards, away from the yellow. In fact, if you study the organisation of the eye in any human being you will have the material for a sound judgment of the person's etheric body; the etheric body which is so like what I have just termed a framework. You cannot better train yourself to divine something of the nature of an individual etheric body, than by attentive study of the organisation of the organ of vision. Having once grasped this, you will find that the rest will be easy. Acquire the habit of observing whether individuals focus their gaze at a distance or near by, and let this impression work on you; and you will cultivate a sensibility to the perception of the etheric body. Call meditation to your aid, and it will no longer be so difficult to ascend from a devoted attention to the effects of the eye-organisation to the contemplation of the etheric body itself.

This will convince you that the process linked with the eye organisation is continuous, and it is the normal form of a process which may appear in an abnormal form. It is normal in the life of everyday, and it has its abnormal counterpart in cases of inflammation, indeed in all inflammatory conditions. So that you are justified in stating that a too vigorous development of this framework (which in the physical body is similar to the etheric) give rise to inflammations and to all the sequelæ of the inflammatory states. You can confirm your convictions in this matter by the external use of an animal product, formic acid. The best manner of studying the application of this substance is in its highest possible dilution, e.g., sprinkled in bath water. If the mildest dilution of formic acid is made to work on the human being through bath water, you will cause a consolidation of the ego-scaffold coloured yellow in the Diagram. (See Diagram 25). This consolidation takes place because by means of the formic acid the ego is forcibly compelled to approach the framework so that it becomes penetrated with the ego. And thus it is possible to counteract the tendency to inflammation for the framework only inclines to disintegrate in the inflammatory process if it is not properly permeated by the ego and restrained by it; for the ego and this framework belong together. They may be brought together by the use of bath fluid, but in extremely high dilution—for this stimulates the peculiar properties of formic acid.

A certain amount of attention to symptomatology is necessary, if you wish to enter into these matters. For instance: observe carefully in treating inflammatory conditions, whether or not they appear in persons with a concurrent tendency to obesity. For it is only in such cases, where you find both sets of symptoms, the tendency to inflammations and also to adipose deposits, that any real benefit can accrue from the external formic acid treatment just described. You will always attain extremely good results, if you have sound reason to believe in the disintegration of the ego-framework—which may be deduced from other symptoms, to be described presently—and if there is a simultaneous tendency to excessive fat.

For Spiritual Science is aware of something that shocks and offends contemporary mankind in its simple enunciation. It knows that what has to happen in the human organism, in order that the eyes shall be formed, and formed in the manner indispensable to human evolution—of course in the long run of this evolutionary history—is really a permanent process of inflammation, which is continually transferred into the normal and does not break out. Think of the processes inherent in inflammations, think of them held up, slowed down, and telescoped together, so to speak, and you will have before you the formative process of the human eye in the human organism. You are even able to obtain an idea of individual tendency to inflammatory conditions, or the reverse, by looking at the person's eyes. It is possible to see this if one trains one's judgment. Indeed the experiences we may meet with regard to human sight are closely linked with the observation of the etheric body of mankind. In referring to the existence of the etheric body and its conscious perception, we must distinguish two methods of approach. There is of course that inner process which leads to genuine clairvoyance, by way of meditation. And there is also an educative process working from outside. If we take the trouble to see and estimate the processes of nature aright, we shall acquire a visualisation of these things which is based on judgment. The actual organs of clairvoyance must be developed from within; but judgment is developed in contact with the world outside ourselves. If we develop the finer shades of judgment in the external world, this highly evolved judgment will come towards that more intimate process which passes outwards from within, in meditation.

Perhaps some of you will ask—and quite justifiably ask—“Well, but cannot all these manifestations and reactions be observed in the animal world?” My friends, the fact is simply that the things that concern man cannot be found through the study of animals. I have often stressed this difference in public lectures, and should like to emphasise it still more here. People are in the habit of thinking: an eye is an eye, an organ is an organ, lungs are lungs, a liver is a liver, and so forth. But that is not so, the eye in man is the organ which also exists in the animal world as eye, but with a modification: it is changed by the fact that in man the ego has been incorporated. The same is the case with all other organs. And for the occurrences within the organs, especially in cases of disease, the permeation by the ego is of much greater importance than what happens in the animal's organs, where there is no such permeation. This essential difference is still far too little regarded and men persist in off-hand pronouncements of this sort: “here I have a knife; well, a knife's a knife, isn't it? One knife is the same as another, so both, being knives, must have the same origin.” But suppose that one of these “identical” knives is a table knife, the other a razor. In that case the simple proposition that “a knife's a knife” becomes untenable. It is making the same mistake to explain the human eye and the animal eye by the same methods and terms. It is simply nonsense to seek for the explanation of anything in its mere external aspect; moreover such an approach is entirely barren as a foundation for study. Study founded on animal “material” simply hinders the adequate study of certain conditions in mankind; for it is only possible to form a just estimate of the dissimilarity here, by realising that in man it is precisely the peripheral organs which are the most permeated by the ego and moulded by it.

In a completely different way is the human ear formed. It is possible to train oneself to a discriminative grasp of the human ear, just as in the case of the eye. And in this manner we then approach the clairvoyant apprehension of the etheric body. We can train ourselves to understand the fact that the ear is incorporated into man as it is in animals, but that its structure is permeated by the human ego. If with this faculty we study the formation of the ear we shall find that it is connected with a process in the deeper interior of the human organism, in the same manner as the eye formation of the etheric body is connected with some more peripheral process. Thus we arrive at the insight that the ego is concerned in the formative process of the ear, just as in that of the eyes. The ego incorporates yet another framework into the organism, differing somewhat from that already described; and akin to this framework is the whole process lying at the base of the ear formation. In order to keep these separate frameworks distinct, I will colour the one just mentioned blue; it lies more inward than the yellow, and it extends less into the limbs, so that if it could be extracted and revealed to the light of day, it would have only stumps in the place of arms and legs. Thus we might say that this framework in its formation has remained at the stage of childhood. It is also much less differentiated towards the head than is the other one. But we shall find that it corresponds to the basic principle underlying the formative forces of the human ear and the whole process of hearing. This latter principle I will color violet in the Diagram. (See Diagram 25). This framework has also its specific characteristic in the human organism. It can become abnormal if the ego works too strongly; i.e., if its activity works too much internally. We have already touched on the reverse case, when the ego's activity is too strong in the periphery.

The following suggestions may be of use, in the study of the problem before us. Again take the external symptoms as a starting point: consider cases where the tendency is to become more or less thin, and never put on fat. In these cases you see before you human beings in whom the ego works too strongly internally, and intensifies this latter framework. This framework, however, has a different tendency from the other one: the tendency to internal exuberance. The first framework inclines to disintegrate or to splinter itself; the last to exuberate internally.

The treatment of this scaffold can proceed on two lines. Firstly, it can be so developed that exuberance does not ensue, because the ego as it were, shimmers out of it. For both exuberance and disintegration of the scaffolds always arise from the inadequate permeation by the ego, from it shimmering away from it. If the ego does this and at the same time is strong enough to keep itself at work within the organism, there arise certain consequences for the soul and the body. The consequence for the soul is hypochondria; for the body, constipation and similar phenomena.

This is the one aspect. On the other hand it may be that the ego is too feeble to hold itself together when it glitters away from the scaffold, that it collapses in its essential quality as ego; and not owing to the faults in its physical vehicle, the scaffold, but to its own. Consider how strange this is: the ego is so feeble that its debris as it were become embedded in the organism. And this occurs because individuals of this particular constitution, when they fall asleep, are not able to take with them the whole of what shimmers and glitters away. Thus the debris remains within the body and proliferates as a sort of soul-like ego. And this type of individual constitution with these exuberations of the soul-like ego, which develop especially during sleep, is one that inclines to tumorous formations. This process is of infinite significance. Persons with tumorous tendencies are those who do not sleep properly, for the reason that remnants of the ego remain after they fall asleep. These remnants and debris are the real excitants of tumours, including malignant growths, and these growths are linked up with the whole complex of symptoms which I have just enumerated. It is a fact that we are faced on the one hand by hypochondria and constipation, and on the other hand, if the organism cannot help itself by making the individual suffer from hypochondria and constipation, it exuberates inwards and the most malignant growths appear. We shall deal with this subject further, but for the moment we are considering merely the general principle.

You can reach the conviction that this is how things stand from a study of the external side, in indications given in a preceding lecture. As I have already remarked, it is possible to deal with the formative tendencies to inflammation by the use of very highly dispersed animal formic acid, in bath water. That is an external application; now try the same substance, suitably diluted, internally, and observe the effects it will have on thin people. It will disperse the tumorous tendencies in thin persons, and counteract the formation of growths.

These matters must be observed macroscopically and they afford striking proof of the need to acquire this macroscopical view. One must learn to have a comprehensive vision of the whole stature and physique of a man, and the many marks of his individual constitutional type, and combine this with all the phenomena emerging in sickness. Thus we shall acquire also a sense of how to divide the treatment into external and internal respectively. To test and trace the effects of the same substance by the two different routes, will furnish most interesting information. Here again, spiritual science reveals something extremely enlightening in respect of these two parts of the organism. It knows that all the formative forces of the human ear are at an early stage on the same path of development as those forces which, finally, when they are allowed to go too far lead to the formation of internal tumours.

The fact that we have a human auditory organ, is due to a process which is kept normal because the tumour-forming force has emerged in the right place. The ear is an internal tumour extended into the region of the normal. Just as the evolutionary process of the eye's formation is akin to the process of inflammation, so that of the ear's formation is allied to the tumorous. It is indeed a wonderful relationship between disease and health in man; for the processes are the same in both, only in the case of normal health they proceed at the right rate, and in the case of disease at an abnormal rate. If the inflammatory process were abolished in nature, no living creature would be able to see. Living creatures have the power of sight only because the inflammatory process is inserted into the whole of nature. But it has a certain velocity, a definite tempo. If it proceeds at a wrong speed then the abnormal process of inflammation results. Similarly, the process of tumorous formation has its significance in nature, at the right rate of development. If it were abolished no being in the world would be able to hear. If the rate is wrong, there results all that happens in cases of myoma, carcinoma, sarcoma. We will deal with this later.

Those who are not in a position to find and recognise the healthy counterpart of every morbid process, cannot understand its place within the human organisation. For the human organisation is founded on the fact that certain processes dispersed throughout the periphery of nature become interiorised and centralised in man.

Many things are discussed in our physiological text books: we should fix our attention elsewhere, on subjects whose existence is admitted but whose significance is constantly under-rated. Here is one instance. You are able to observe—quite macroscopically and as it were in a commonplace way—that the epidermis covers the human body, and has various inward folds or pockets; and its continuing membrane lines the parts situated to the interior. This is very important—the reversal of functions, as, e.g., we find it in passing from the cheeks and the external parts of the face, over the edge of the lips to the interior. There indeed one finds, in the external formation of man, the vestige of the process which where all development really proceeds by means of folding inwards and invaginations. In following up the differences in the reaction of the upper epidermis and the internal mucous membrane to preparations of formic acid, and fully realising the delicate differences in these results, one would reach tremendous results. For all the facts I here set before you are really nothing but specialisations of the elementary structural principle indicated. The study of these facts will bring before you the whole polar opposition of that external lining (also etherically) of the human organism and that which goes inside and becomes central in the same organism.

This is of importance in the following. To what corresponds the second phantom indicated in the rough sketch? (See Diagram 25). The blue phantom is that physical framework within the organism, which tends to exuberate unduly. Its normal form is associated with the formation of the ear. Educate yourselves, train yourselves in the study of man so far as to have regard to this ear organisation and especially its interiorisation, and at the same time to the characteristics of the organ of sight. Then remember that the process of sight occurs in the etheric, the process of hearing in the air. This is a considerable difference. All that lies comparatively low in the ascending scale of ponderable and imponderable is associated and linked with the more deep-seated organs and functions in the interior of man's organism. All that is more akin to the etheric and imponderable, is situated towards the surface and periphery.

The outlines coloured violet (See Diagram 25) define nothing less than that which lives in the human astral body. If you train your power of judgment, through the study of the ear, for the observation of man, you get a kind of substitute or preliminary apperception for the clairvoyant vision of the astral body. To learn to observe sight is training for the observation of the etheric body. To learn to observe hearing is training for the observation of the astral body.

The most interesting observations can be made in persons who have been deaf from birth or have lost their sense of hearing; deeper connections of nature are then revealed. I suggest that you should try to study children who have been born deaf: if they had not been born with that defect, they would develop the most terrible tumours even at that early age. We stand here before outlets supplied by nature itself, and they are rooted not only in the single individual organisation between birth and death; but they reach out into and must be understood from the repeated earth lives in which the compensation is brought about. If we follow up these phenomena beyond a certain point, we shall arrive at some apprehension of repeated lives on earth.

If you attempt to stimulate the peripheral areas in man, you will reinforce what has been dealt with in explaining the relationship of the ego to its framework. If you find it necessary to reinforce the human ego, there is a choice of methods; therapeutic or educational. Wherever it is possible to observe a tendency to inflammation, you will find that it will be necessary to re-invigorate the ego's activity in the individual. If this be done, the ego will insert itself in the proper way into its phantom, its framework; for this framework will not disintegrate where the ego adequately takes hold of it.

An appreciable reinforcement and stimulus to this activity of the ego may be obtained, e.g., by baths containing a very finely distributed solution of rosemary—that is, of the juices extracted from the leaves of the rosemary. This solution stimulates the periphery to such a degree that the ego can act and function better in that which approaches man through the finely distributed rosemary juice. The results are quite remarkable.

Now let us consider the human eye, and its specific insertion into the human organism. The process of sight depends on the power of the human ego to penetrate this isolated part in our organism. There is very little of the animal process in the eye, the sense of sight depends on the fact that man with his soul and spirit nature penetrates a region which has ceased to be animal; so that man can identify himself with the external world, not only with his internal processes. If you identify yourself with a muscle, you identify yourselves from inside, with the formative process of man. But if you identify yourself with the eyes, you really identify yourself with the external world. For this reason, I have already called this organ a gulf which the external extends physiology to neglect the facts, thereby engendering those foolish fairy stories of “subjectivity” and so forth. For it is the fashion today to ignore the fact that “objectivity” is intruded upon us and that within this “objectivity” we share in a part of the processes of the external world. For the last century and a half, every sort of sensory physiology has been founded upon subjectivity because there has been no inkling of the entry of the external world into these organic gulfs, by which we participate, through our senses, in the processes outside ourselves. To understand this rightly means also to understand the action of some foreign substance in this fine dispersal.

Take the human skin, and its pores and all the processes linked with the pores. (See Diagram 26). Sprinkle very mild dilutions of rosemary juice in a bath, immerse the patient in it and you will not be surprised to know that a sensory interaction is set in train between the skin and the minute drops of the Rosemary juice. Through this stimulation, an effect is produced upon the sensory process. This stimulation of the sensory process works on the human ego and it becomes more closely inserted into its framework. A further benefit may accrue from the same method, if it is used in time and not postponed till too late. If the skin of the head is exposed to the stimulation of diluted rosemary juice, you may be able to arrest the peripheral process of loss of hair. Only, of course, it must be applied in the correct manner. Well, there again you have something active on the surface and periphery of the human organism.

Let us suppose now, that the collaboration of the ego with the human organisation suffers a rupture from the outside world. The ego is, of course, not only a point, but a point active around itself; and this working abroad signifies the formative force of the whole human organisation; the ego-organising force spreads throughout the human organisation, permeating it throughout. Let us suppose that an external injury is inflicted on some area, interrupting this mutual action of ego and human organisation; in such cases it will be necessary to attract to this place something springing from the astral organisation (which stands a step below the ego-organisation); something which, working from out of the astral organisation, may so permeate the human organism as to enable the ego to develop its curative forces at the seat of the external injury. The astral body as I have indicated (See Diagram 25) lies nearer the centre of the total organism. Call it to your aid; not this time by means of immersion in any bath, but by a compress of arnica in woolen cloths—a proper arnica compress. The application of arnica compresses to any sprain or dislocation or similar lesion ‘ wherever the injury may have been inflicted—which impairs the efficiency of the ego's function, summons the astral body from inside; calls to it to come to the aid of the ego, and has a compensating effect on the peripheral area.

In these phenomena we have a standard for comparison of the different substances available in the external world. They may have a great tendency towards expansion, and thus be of benefit to the peripheral regions, if administered in baths, for the support of the ego's action. Or again, they may belong to the group which includes especially arnica and are thus indicated when we wish to summon the astral body and draw on its power for the indirect support of the ego.

It is impossible to understand the operation of such substances except as summoners of help from the ego and astral body. To recognise this principle must be indeed fundamental for a theory of therapeutics. both for internal and external treatment.

If we look again at the three most important phases of elementary school, then we see that they are: first, from entering elementary school at about the age of six or seven until the age of nine; then second, from the age of nine until about the age of twelve; and finally from twelve until puberty. The capacity to reason independently only begins to occur when people have reached sexual maturity, even though a kind of preparation for this capacity begins around the age of twelve. For this reason, the third phase of elementary school begins about the age of twelve.

Every time a new phase occurs in the course of human life, something is born out of human nature. I have previously noted how the same forces—which become apparent as the capacity to remember, the capacity to have memories, and so forth—that appear at about the age of seven have previously worked upon the human organism up until that age. The most obvious expression of that working is the appearance of the second set of teeth. In a certain sense, forces are active in the organism that later become important during elementary school as the capacity to form thoughts. They are active but hidden. Later they are freed and become independent. The forces that become independent we call the forces of the etheric body.

Once again at puberty other forces become independent which guide us into the external world in numerous ways. Hidden within that system of forces is also the capacity for independent reasoning. We can therefore say that the actual medium of the human capacity for reason, the forces within the human being that give rise to reasoning, are basically born only at the time of puberty, and have slowly been prepared for that birth beginning at the age of twelve.

When we know this and can properly honor it, then we also become aware of the responsibility we take upon ourselves if we accustom people to forming independent judgments too soon. The most damaging prejudices in this regard prevail at the present time. People want to accustom children to forming independent judgments as early as possible.

I previously said that we should relate to children until puberty in such a way that they recognize us as an authority, that they accept something because someone standing next to them who is visibly an authority requests it and wants it. If we accustom children to accepting the truth simply because we as authorities present it to them, we will prepare them properly for having free and independent reasoning later in life. If we do not want to serve as an authority figure for the child and instead try to disappear so that everything has to develop out of the child’s own nature, we are demanding a capacity for reason too early, before what we call the astral body becomes free and independent at puberty. We would be working with the astral body by allowing it to act upon the physical nature of the child. In that way we will impress upon the child’s physical body what we should actually only provide for his soul. We are preparing something that will continue to have a damaging effect throughout the child’s life.

There is quite a difference between maturing to free judgment at the age of fourteen or fifteen—when the astral body, which is the carrier of reasoning, has become free after a solid preparation—than if we have been trained in so-called independent judgment at too early an age. In the latter case, it is not our astral aspect, that is, our soul, which is brought into independent reasoning, but our physical body instead. The physical body is drawn in with all its natural characteristics, with its temperament, its blood characteristics, and everything that gives rise to sympathy and antipathy within it, with everything that provides it with no objectivity. In other words, if a child between the ages of seven and fourteen is supposed to reason independently, the child reasons out of that part of human nature which we later can no longer rid ourselves of if we are not careful to see that it is cared for in a natural way, namely, through authority, during the elementary school period. If we allow children to reason too early, it will be the physical body that reasons throughout life. We then remain unsteady in our reasoning, as it depends upon our temperament and all kinds of other things in the physical body. If we are prepared in a way appropriate to the physical body and in a way that the nature of the physical body requires—that is, if we are brought up during the proper time under the influence of authority—then the part of us that should reason becomes free in the proper way and later in life we will be able to achieve objective judgment. Therefore the best way to prepare someone to become a free and independent human being is to avoid guiding the child toward freedom at too early an age.

This can cause a great deal of harm if it is not used properly in education. In our time it is very difficult to become sufficiently aware of this. If you talk about this subject with people today who are totally unprepared and who have no good will in this regard, you will find yourself simply preaching to deaf ears. Today we live much more than we believe in a period of materialism, and it is this age of materialism that needs to be precisely recognized by teachers. They need to be very aware of how much materialism is boiling up within modern culture and modern attitudes.

I would now like to describe this matter from a very different perspective. Something remarkable happened in European civilization around 1850, although it was barely noticed: a direct and basic feeling for rhythm was to a very large extent lost. Hence we now have people a few generations later who have entirely lost this feeling for rhythm. Such people are completely unaware of what this lack of rhythm means in raising children. In order to understand this, we need to consider the following.

In life people alternate between sleeping and being awake. People think they understand the state called wakefulness because they are aware of themselves. During this time, through sense impressions they gain an awareness of the external world. But they do not know the state between falling asleep and awakening. In modern life, people have no awareness of themselves then. They have few, if any, direct conscious perceptions of the external world. This is therefore a state in which life moves into something like a state of unconsciousness.

We can easily gain a picture of the inner connections between these two states only when we recognize two polar opposites in human life that have great significance for education. I am referring here to drawing and music, two opposites I have already mentioned and which I would like to consider from a special point of view again today.

Let us first look at drawing, in which I also include painting and sculpting. While doing so, let us recall everything in regard to drawing that we consider to be important to the child from the beginning of elementary school. Drawing shows us that, out of his or her own nature, the human being creates a form we find reflected in the external world. I have already mentioned that it is not so important to hold ourselves strictly to the model. Instead we need to find a feeling for form within our own nature. In the end, we will recognize that we exist in an element that surrounds us during our state of wakefulness in the external world, in everything that we do forming spatially. We draw lines. We paint colors. We sculpt shapes. Lines present themselves to us, although they do not exist in nature as such. Nevertheless they present themselves to us through nature, and the same is true of colors and forms.

Let us look at the other element, which we can call musical, that also permeates speech. Here we must admit that in what is musical we have an expression of the human soul. Like sculpting and drawing, everything that is expressed through music has a very rudimentary analogy to external nature. It is not possible to simply imitate with music that which occurs naturally in the external world, just as it is not possible, in a time where a feeling for sculpting or drawing is so weak, to simply imitate the external world. We must ask ourselves then if music has no content. Music does have its own content. The content of music is primarily its melodic element. Melodies need to come to us. When many people today place little value upon the melodic element, it is nothing more than a characteristic of our materialistic age. Melodies simply do not come to people often enough. We can well compare the melodic element with the sculptural element. It is certainly true that the sculptural element is related to space. In the same way the melodic element is related to time. Those who have a lively feeling for this relationship will realize that the melodic element contains a kind of sculpting. In a certain way, the melodic element corresponds to what sculpting is in the external world.

Let us now look at something else. You are all acquainted with that flighty element in the life of our souls that becomes apparent in dreams. If we concern ourselves objectively with that element of dreaming, we slowly achieve a different view of dreams than the ordinary one. The common view of dreams focuses upon the content of the dream, which is what commonly interests most people. But as soon as we concern ourselves objectively with this wonderful and mysterious world of dreams, the situation becomes different. Someone might talk about the following dream.

I climbed up a mountain, but just before I came to the peak there was an obstacle that I was unable to overcome. I was therefore unable to reach the peak. As I attempted to overcome that obstacle, I was met by evil, unfriendly animals, beings with demonic forms.

Another person might describe the following:

I was walking along a path and came to a cave. I went into the cave and it grew suddenly dark so I could go no further. I then encountered all kinds of obstacles, but I could go no further and could not reach my goal.

A third or a fourth person could tell still other stories. The pictures are quite different. One person dreams about climbing a mountain, another about going into a cave, and a third about still something else. It is not the pictures that are important. The pictures are simply woven into the dream. What is important is that the person experiences a kind of tension into which they fall when they are unable to solve something that can first be solved upon awakening. It is this moving into a state of tension, the occurrence of the tension, of becoming tense that is expressed in the various pictures.

What is important is that human beings in dreams experience increasing and decreasing tension, resolution, expectations, and disappointments, in short, that they experience inner states of the soul that are then expressed in widely differing pictures. The pictures are similar in their qualities of increase and decrease. It is the state of the soul that is important, since these experiences are connected to the general state of the soul. It is totally irrelevant whether a person experiences one picture or another during the night. It is not unimportant, however, whether one experiences a tension and then its resolution or first an expectation and then a disappointment, since the person’s state of mind on the next day depends upon it. It is also possible to experience a dream that reflects the person’s state of soul that has resulted from a stroke of fate or from many other things. In my opinion, it is the ups and downs that are important. That which appears, that forms the picture at the edge of awakening, is only a cloak into which the dream weaves itself.

When we look more closely at the world of dreams, and when we ask ourselves what a human being experiences until awakening, we will admit that until we awaken, these ups and downs of feeling clothe themselves in pictures just at the moment of awakening. Of course, we can perceive this in characteristic dreams such as this one:

A student stands at the door of a lecture room. He dreams about how another student comes up to him and says such nasty things that it is obvious that this is a challenge to duel. The student dreams that the seconds are chosen, that they go out into the forest, and that everything is prepared. First shot. The student hears this sound and awakens to find that he has knocked over a chair standing next to his bed: that was the shot. That was the only external event.

Thus the entire picture of the dream flashed through his head at that moment. However, what was clothed in those pictures is a lasting state of his soul.

Now you need to seriously compare what lies at the basis of these dreams—the welling up and subsiding of feelings, the tension and its resolution or perhaps the tendency toward something which then leads to some calamity and so forth. Compare that seriously with what lies at the basis of the musical element and you will find in those dream pictures only something that is irregular (not rhythmic). In music, you find something that is very similar to this welling up and subsiding and so forth. If you then continue to follow this path, you will find that sculpture and drawing imitate the form in which we find ourselves during ordinary life from awakening until falling asleep. Melodies, which are connected to music, give us the experiences of an apparently unconscious state, and they occur as reminiscences of such in our daily lives. People know so little about the actual origins of musical themes because they experience what lives in musical themes only during the period from falling asleep till awakening. This exists for human beings today as a still-unconscious element, though revealed through forming pictures in dreams. However, we need to take up this unconscious element that prevails in dreams and which also prevails as melody in music in our teaching, so that we rise above materialism.

If you understand the spirit of what I have just presented, you will recognize how everywhere there has been an attempt to work with this unconscious element. I have done that first by showing how the artistic element is necessary right from the very beginning of elementary school. I have insisted that we should use the dialect that the children speak to reveal the content of grammar, that is, we should take the children’s language as such and accept it as something complete and then use it as the basis for presenting grammar. Think for a moment about what you do in such a case. In what period of life is speech actually formed? Attempt to think back as far as you can in the course of your life, and you will see that you can remember nothing from the period in which you could not speak. Human beings learn language in a period when they are still sleeping through life. If you then compare the dreamy world of the child’s soul with dreams and with how melodies are interwoven in music, you will see that they are similar. Like dreaming, learning to speak occurs through the unconscious, and is something like an awakening at dawn. Melodies simply exist and we do not know where they come from. In reality, they arise out of this sleep element of the human being. We experience a sculpting with time from the time we fall asleep until we awaken. At their present stage of development human beings are not capable of experiencing this sculpting with time. You can read about how we experience that in my book How to Know Higher Worlds. That is something that does not belong to education as such. From that description, you will see how necessary it is to take into account that unconscious element which has its effect during the time the child sleeps. It is certainly taken into account in our teaching of music, particularly in teaching musical themes, so that we must attempt to exactly analyze the musical element to the extent that it is present in children in just the same way as we analyze language as presented in sentences. In other words, we attempt to guide children at an early age to recognize themes in music, to actually feel the melodic element like a sentence. Here it begins and here it stops; here there is a connection and here begins something new. In this regard, we can have a wonderful effect upon the child’s development by bringing an understanding of the not-yet-real content of music. In this way, the child is guided back to something that exists in human nature but is almost never seen.

Nearly everyone knows what a melody is and what a sentence is. But a sentence that consists of a subject, a predicate, and an object and which is in reality unconsciously a melody is something that only a few people know. Just as we experience the rising and subsiding of feelings as a rhythm in sleeping, which we then become conscious of and surround with a picture, we also, in the depths of our nature, experience a sentence as music. By conforming to the outer world, we surround what we perceive as music with something that is a picture. The child writes the essay—subject, predicate, object. A triplet is felt at the deepest core of the human being. That triplet is used through projecting the first tone in a certain way upon the child, the second upon writing, and the third upon the essay. Just as these three are felt and then surrounded with pictures (which, however, correspond to reality and are not felt as they are in dreams), the sentence lives in our higher consciousness; whereas in our deepest unconsciousness, something musical, a melody, lives. When we are aware that, at the moment we move from the sense-perceptible to the supersensible, we must rid ourselves of the sense-perceptible content, and in its place experience what eludes us in music—the theme whose real form we can experience in sleep—only then can we consider the human being as a whole. Only then do we become genuinely aware of what it means to teach language to children in such a living way that the child perceives a trace of melody in a sentence. This means we do not simply speak in a dry way, but instead in a way that gives the full tone, that presents the inner melody and subsides through the rhythmic element.

Around 1850 European people lost that deeper feeling for rhythm. Before that, there was still a certain relationship to what I just described. If you look at some treatises that appeared around that time about music or about the musical themes from Beethoven and others, then you will see how at about that time those who were referred to as authorities in music often cut up and destroyed in the most unimaginable ways what lived in music. You will see how that period represents the low point of experiencing rhythm.

As educators, we need to be aware of that, because we need to guide sentences themselves back to rhythm in the school. If we keep that in mind, over a longer period of time we will begin to recognize the artistic element of teaching. We would not allow the artistic element to disappear so quickly if we were required to bring it more into the content.

All this is connected with a question that was presented to me yesterday and which I can more thoroughly discuss in this connection. The question was, “Why is it not possible to teach proper handwriting to those children who have such a difficult time writing properly?” Those who might study Goethe’s handwriting or that of other famous people will get the odd impression that famous people often have very strange handwriting. In education, we certainly cannot allow a child to have sloppy handwriting on the grounds that the child will probably someday be a famous person and we should not disturb him. We must not allow that to influence us. But what is actually present when a child writes in such a sloppy manner? If you make some comparisons, you will notice that sloppy handwriting generally arises from the fact that such children have a rather unmusical ear, or if not that, then a reason that is closely related to it. Children write in a sloppy way because they have not learned to hear precisely: they have not learned to hear a word in its full form.

There may be different reasons why children do not hear words correctly. The child may be growing up in a family or environment where people speak unclearly. In such a case, the child does not learn to hear properly and will thus not be able to write properly, or at least not very easily. In another case, a child may tend to have little perception for what he or she hears. In that case, we need to draw the child’s attention to listening properly. In other situations it is the teacher who is responsible for the child’s poor handwriting. Teachers should pay attention to speaking clearly and also to using very descriptive language. They do not have to speak like actors, making sure to enunciate the ending syllable. But they must accustom themselves to living into each syllable, so that the syllables are clearly spoken and children will be more likely to repeat the syllables in a clear way. When you speak in a clear and complete way, you will be able to achieve a great deal with regard to proper handwriting for some children. All this is connected with the unconscious, with the dream and sleep element, since the sleep element is simply the unconscious element. It is not something we should teach to children in an artificial way.

What is the basis of listening? That is normally not discussed in psychology. In the evening we fall asleep and in the morning we awake; that is all we know. We can think about it afterward by saying to ourselves that we are not conscious during that period. Conventional, nonspiritual science is unaware of what occurs to us from the time we fall asleep until we awaken. However, the inner state of our soul is no different when we are listening than when we are sleeping. The only difference is that there is a continual movement from being within ourselves to being outside ourselves. It is extremely important that we become aware of this undulation in the life of our souls. When I listen, my attention is turned toward the outer world. However, while listening, there are moments where I actually awaken within myself. If I did not have those moments, listening would be of absolutely no use. While we are listening or looking at something, there is a continual awakening and falling asleep, even though we are awake. It is a continual undulation—waking, falling asleep, waking, falling asleep. In the final analysis, our entire relationship to the external world is based upon this capacity to move into the other world, which could be expressed paradoxically as “being able to fall asleep.” What else could it mean to listen to a conversation than to fall asleep into the content of the conversation? Understanding is awakening out of the conversation, nothing more. What that means, however, is that we should not attempt to reach what should actually be developed out of the unconsciousness, out of the sleeping or dreaming of the human being in a conscious way.

For that reason, we should not attempt to teach children proper handwriting in an artificial way. Instead we should teach them by properly speaking our words and then having the child repeat the words. Thus we will slowly develop the child’s hearing and therefore writing. We need to assume that if a child writes in a sloppy way, she does not hear properly. Our task is to support proper hearing in the child and not to do something that is directed more toward full consciousness than hearing is.

As I mentioned yesterday, we should also take such things into account when teaching music. We must not allow artificial methods to enter into the school where, for instance, the consciousness is mistreated by such means as artificial breathing. The children should learn to breathe through grasping the melody. The children should learn to follow the melody through hearing and then adjust themselves to it. That should be an unconscious process. It must occur as a matter of course. As I mentioned, we should have the music teachers hold off on such things until the children are older, when they will be less influenced by them. Children should be taught about the melodic element in an unconscious way through a discussion of the themes. The artificial methods I mentioned have just as bad an effect as it would have to teach children drawing by showing them how to hold their arms instead of giving them a feeling for line. It would be like saying to a child, “You will be able to draw an acanthus leaf if you only learn to hold your arm in such and such a way and to move it in such and such a way.” Through this and similar methods, we do nothing more than to simply consider the human organism from a materialistic standpoint, as a machine that needs to be adjusted so it does one thing properly. If we begin from a spiritual standpoint, we will always make the detour through the soul and allow the organism to adjust itself to what is properly felt in the soul.

We can therefore say that if we support the child in the drawing element, we give the child a relationship to its environment, and if we support the child in the musical element, then we give the child a relationship to something that is not in our normal environment, but in the environment we exist in from the time of falling asleep until awakening. These two polarities are then combined when we teach grammar, for instance. Here we need to interweave a feeling for the structure of a sentence with an understanding of how to form sentences.

We need to know such things if we are to properly understand how beginning at approximately the age of twelve, we slowly prepare the intellectual aspect of understanding, namely, free will. Before the age of twelve, we need to protect the child from independent judgments. We attempt to base judgment upon authority so that authority has a certain unconscious effect upon the child. Through such methods we can have an effect unbeknownst to the child. Through this kind of relationship to the child, we already have an element that is very similar to the musical dreamlike element.

Around the age of twelve, we can begin to move from the botanical or zoological perspective toward the mineral or physical perspective. We can also move from the historical to the geographical perspective. It is not that such things should only begin at the age of twelve, but rather before then they should be handled in such a way that we use judgment less and feeling more. In a certain sense, before the age of twelve we should teach children history by presenting complete and rounded pictures and by creating a feeling of tension that is then resolved. Thus, before the age of twelve, we will primarily take into account how we can reach the child’s feeling and imagination through what we teach about history. Only at about the age of twelve is the child mature enough to hear about causality in history and to learn about geography.

If you now look at what we should teach children, you will feel the question of how we are to bring the religious element into all this so that the child gains a fully rounded picture of the world as well as a sense of the supersensible. People today are in a very difficult position in that regard. In the Waldorf School, pure externalities have kept us from following the proper pedagogical perspective in this area. Today we are unable to use all of what spiritual science can provide for education in our teaching other than to apply the consequences of it in how we teach. One of the important aspects of spiritual science is that it contains certain artistic impulses that are absorbed by human beings so that they not only simply know things, but they can do things. To put it in a more extreme way, people therefore become more adept; they can better take up life and thus can also exercise the art of education in a better way.

At the present time, however, we must refrain from bringing more of what we can learn from spiritual science into education than education can absorb. We were not able to form a school based upon a particular worldview at the Waldorf School. Instead from the very beginning I stipulated that Protestant teachers would teach the Protestant religion. Religion is taught separately, and we have nothing to do with it. The Protestant teacher comes and teaches the Protestant religion, just as the Catholic religion is taught by the Catholic priest or whomever the Catholic Church designates, the rabbi teaches the Jews, and so forth. At the present time we have been unable to bring more of spiritual science in other than to provide understanding for our teaching. The Waldorf School is not a parochial school.

Nevertheless the strangest things have occurred. A number of people have said that because they are not religious, they will not send their children to the Protestant, Catholic, or Jewish religion teachers. They have said that if we do not provide a religion teacher who teaches religion based solely upon a general understanding, they will not send their children to religion class at all. Thus those parents who wanted an anthroposophically oriented religion class to a certain extent forced us to provide one. This class is given, but not because we have a desire to propagate anthroposophy as a worldview. It is quite different to teach anthroposophy as a worldview than it is to use what spiritual science can provide in order to make education more fruitful.

We do not attempt to provide the content. What we do attempt to provide is a capacity to do. A number of strange things then occurred. For example, a rather large number of children left the other religion classes in order to join ours. That is something we cannot prohibit. It was very uncomfortable for me, at least from the perspective of retaining a good relationship to the external world. It was also quite dangerous, but that is the way it is. From the same group of parents we hear that the teaching of other religions will soon cease anyway. That is not at all our intent, as the Waldorf School is not intended as a parochial school. Today nowhere in the civilized world is it possible to genuinely teach out of the whole. That will be possible only when through the threefold social organism cultural life becomes independent. So long as that is not the case, we will not be able to provide the same religious instruction for everybody. Thus what we have attempted to do is to make education more fruitful through spiritual science.

You will not only have to be teachers and educators at the Waldorf School, but if things go well you will also have to be protagonists of the whole Waldorf School system. For, of course, you will know far more exactly what the Waldorf School really means than can be conveyed to the neighbouring or more distant outside world. But to be the true protagonists of the aims of the Waldorf School and of its aims for civilization in general you will have to be in a position to conduct your defence against prevailing opinion wherever this shows itself antagonistic or even merely demurring. Consequently, I must introduce into these pedagogical-didactic reflections a chapter which will quite naturally connect with what we have already so far analysed in our discussions on method.

You know that in the sphere of educational theory, as well as other spheres, much is expected at the present time from the so-called experimental psychology. Experiments are carried out on people to determine an individual's gift for forming ideas, for memorizing, even for willing, although this can naturally only be ascertained by a detour. The will fulfils itself in sleep, and the electrical apparatus in the psychological laboratory can only indirectly discover an individual's experiences during sleep, just as these cannot be observed directly by way of experiment. Such experiments, indeed, are carried out. Do not imagine that I object to such experiments as a whole. They can be valuable as tendrils of science, as offshoots of science. All kinds of interesting things can be learnt from such experiments and I have decidedly no desire to condemn them, lock, stock, and barrel. I should like everyone who is attracted to work of this kind to have the means of acquiring such psychological laboratories and of carrying out their experiments there. But we must consider for a moment the rise of this experimental psychology in the form in which it is especially recommended by the educationist, Meumann,¹ who is really one of the Herbartian school.

Why is experimental psychology practised to-day? Because people have lost the gift of studying man directly. They can no longer rely on the forces which inwardly bind one man to another—or, to the child. So they try to discover by external devices, by external experiments, what should be done with the growing child. Clearly our principles and methods of teaching take a much more inward course. This is, moreover, urgent and vital for the present day and the immediate future of mankind. Granted, then, on the one hand, the urge to experimental psychology, on the other hand, as a result of this experimental psychology, we get the misconstruction of certain simple facts of life. Let me illustrate this by an example.

These experimental psychologists and educationists have lately been particularly interested in what they call the process of comprehension; for instance, the process of comprehension in reading, in the reading of a given passage. In order to ascertain this process of comprehension they have tried to work with “subjects,” as they are called. If we summarize the steps taken in great detail, this is the procedure. A “subject,” a child or an adult, is given a reading passage, and the investigation is now directed as to which is the most effective method for the child, for instance, to adopt, in order to arrive at the most rapid comprehension. It is discovered that the most effective method is first to “dispose” the reader to the reading passage, that is, first to introduce the person concerned to the meaning of such a reading passage. Then, after numerous tests, the “subject” carries out what is called “passive comprehension.” After having dealt with the meaning, by making “scheme” or plan, it is supposed to be passively comprehended. For through this passive assimilation of a reading passage there should occur what is called “learning to anticipate”: repeating once more in free spiritual activity what has just been worked out in scheme or plan and then passively assimilated. And then follows, as fourth act to this drama, the filling in of all that until now has remained uncertain, that is, of all that has not penetrated completely into the life of the human spirit and soul. If you let the subject carry out, in correct succession, first the process of familiarizing himself with the meaning of a reading passage, then of passive assimilation, then of learning to anticipate, then of returning to the as yet incompletely assimilated parts, you then see that a given reading passage is most effectively grasped, read, and remembered. Do not misunderstand me: I mention this procedure because it must be mentioned in view of the fact that people talk to-day so much at cross-purposes, for they may want to imply the same thing with diametrically opposed words. Accordingly, the experimental psychologists will say: “A scrupulously faithful method like this reveals exactly what should be done in education.” But those who have a profounder understanding of the life of the whole being know that this is not the way to true education—any more than you can put together again a living beetle from its separate parts after it has been dissected. It cannot be done. Nor can it be done by trying anatomy on the human soul-activity. It is interesting, of course, and in another connection it can be extremely valuable for science, to practise anatomy on the activity of the human soul—but it does not make educators. For this reason there can proceed from this experimental psychology no new true building up of education; this can only proceed from an inner understanding of man.

I had to say this for fear lest you should misunderstand me when I make a statement which will naturally cause annoyance to a supporter of modern opinion. The statement is one-sided in its way, and its one-sidedness must, of course, be counterbalanced. What do the experimental psychologists get, when they have split up into atoms like this the soul of their subject and have made a martyr of him—this process is not pleasant if it is inflicted on you—what good do they get out of it? According to them they have obtained an extraordinarily valuable result, which is constantly being impressed by italics in educational textbooks as a conclusion arrived at. This statement, translated into decent German, runs roughly like this: You can remember a reading passage better when you have understood the meaning than when you have not understood the meaning. It has been “determined by research”—to use scientific jargon—that it is useful firstly to understand the meaning of a reading passage if you want to learn it easily. And here I must make the heretical declaration that, in as far as this theory is correct, I could have known it before, for I should like to know what person with a normal human intelligence does not know for himself that a reading passage can be remembered better when its meaning has been understood than when this has not been understood. Every single one of the conclusions of experimental psychology is an appalling platitude. The platitudes printed in the textbooks of experimental psychology are sometimes of such a kind that only those people can have anything to do with them who have already trained themselves in the pursuit of science to submit to intense boredom for an occasional striking point. You are easily trained to do this by the drill of the school-system—for even the elementary school has this defect, although it is less conspicuous here than at the universities.

This heretical statement is meant particularly for the educationist: It is to some extent self-evident that one must first understand the meaning of a thing which is to be remembered. But there is this to consider: that what has been assimilated by understanding the meaning, only affects the observation, only affects thought-perception, and that this elevation of the human being to the level of sense-comprehension educates him one-sidedly to a mere observation of the world, to a thought-perception. And if we teach simply and solely in accordance with this theory we shall get nothing but weak-willed people. The statement, then, is in a sense correct—and yet not conclusively correct. It ought, as a matter of fact, to be further expressed in these terms: If you want to do the best possible thing for the thinking perception of the individual you can do it by analysing the meaning of everything that he absorbs. And, in fact, if we were to analyse merely the meaning of things, we could go very far in educating human observation of the world. But we should never educate a man's will—volitional man—for the will cannot be forced by simply throwing the light on the meaning of a thing. The will likes to sleep, and it does not wish to be fully awakened by what I should like to call the perpetual unchaste laying bare of the meaning. And the point is, that the very inevitability of life breaks in upon this simple truth of the value of revealing meanings, so that with the child, too, we must study subjects which do not lay bare the meaning. Then we shall educate his will.

The mischievous effects of the one-sided application of the principles of explaining the meanings have been particularly active in movements like the Theosophical Movement. You know how much I have protested for years against a certain mischievous influence in Theosophical circles. I have even had to see Hamlet, for instance, a pure work of art, explained in terms of theosophical cant like this: “This is Manas, this is the Ego—that is the astral body. This character represents one thing—that one another.” Such explanations were particularly in favour. I protested against them because it is a sin against human life to interpret symbolically what is meant to be taken directly, in its elements, as art. It leads to a mischievous reading of a meaning into things, and this is dragged to the level of mere observation to which it should not be dragged. This all arises from the fact that the actual Theosophical Movement is a decadent movement. It is the furthest-flung offshoot of a declining culture; in its entire attitude it has nothing to do with Anthroposophy. Anthroposophy aims at being the opposite: at being an ascending movement, the beginning of an ascent. That is a radical difference. That is why so much is written in the field of Theosophy which is really an extreme symptom of decadence. But that there exist people at all who contrive to interpret Hamlet symbolically, character by character, is the result of the appalling way in which we have been educated only to look for meanings.

Human life makes it indispensable that we should not only be educated in terms of the meaning, but from what the will experiences in the sleeping life: by rhythm, measure, melody, harmony of colours, repetition, in fact all spontaneous activity which does not seek to comprehend. When you let the child repeat sentences which he is far from understanding because of his tender age, when you encourage the child to take in these sentences just by memory itself, you certainly do not influence his comprehension—because you are unable to enter into their meaning, for that must only dawn later—but you influence his will, and that is what you should do; that is what you must do. You must try first of all to acquaint the child with things which are first and foremost artistic: music, drawing, plastic art, etc.; but on the other hand you must also give the child things which can have some abstract form of meaning in such a way that he does not, it is true, understand this at once, but only later in life. Then he will understand it because he has assimilated it by repetition, and can remember, and later understand, with his greater maturity, what he could not understand before. There you have worked upon his will. And quite especially you have worked upon his feeling—and you should not forget this. Just as feeling—this can be observed of the soul as well as of the spirit—lies between willing and thinking, so does the education of feeling lie midway between the methods of educating the thinking and those of willing. For the thinking knowledge or thinking perception we must definitely practise subjects concerned with revealing meanings: reading, writing, etc.; for action inspired by will we must cultivate everything which does not aim at a mere interpretation of meanings but at a direct impression through the whole being, for instance, of artistic subjects. What lies midway between the two (i.e. thought and will) will chiefly influence the development of feeling, the formation of its disposition. You can produce a strong effect on the education of the feeling nature when the child is made to assimilate something first of all only by rote, uncomprehended, without tampering with its meaning. For only after some time, when he has matured through other processes, and remembers it, can he understand what he absorbed earlier. This is a subtlety of education which must absolutely be respected, if we are to educate people with inner feelings. For feeling plays a peculiar role in life. In this sphere, too, people should make observations. But they do not observe rightly. I will indicate an observation which you can easily, with a little industry, make for yourselves.

Suppose you are trying to get a clear idea of the state of Goethe's soul in 1790. You can do this by studying a selection of the works composed by Goethe in the year 1790. You find, of course, at the end of every edition of Goethe a chronological index of his poems, in their order of composition; so you take out the poems written in 1790 and the plays written in 1790 and study them. You remember that in precisely this year he finished the beautiful essay, Die Metamorphose der Pflanzen (“The Metamorphosis of Plants”); you recall that just at that time he conceived the first idea of the Farbenlehre (“Theory of Colour”); you imagine from all this the state of his soul in 1790 and ask yourselves: “What were the influences active on Goethe's psychic life in 1790?” You will only be able to answer this question if you cast a critical glance on all Goethe's previous experiences from 1749 to 1790 and on what followed after this year—of which Goethe at the time was still unaware, but which you now know—during the period from 1790 to 1832, that is, to his death. Then there emerges the remarkable realization that the actual state of his soul in the year 1790 was a combination of what was to come later, the conquests remaining for the individual to make, and those he had already experienced. This is an extraordinarily significant discovery. People only avoid it because it leads into provinces which they quite naturally do not like to enter for observations of this kind. Try to extend your observations in this way to the soul-life of an individual who died recently and whom you have known for some time. If you train yourself to a more careful study of the soul you will then find this: A man, a friend of yours, died, let us say, in 1918. You have known him for some time, so that you can ask yourselves: “What was the state of his soul in 1912?” If you consider everything that you know of him you will find that the state of his soul in 1912 was such that the preparation for his approaching death was unconsciously reflected in his psychic disposition at that time; it was unconsciously reflected in his feelings. Taken as a whole I call the life of the feelings the psychic disposition, “Mood of Soul” (Seelenstimmung). A man who is soon to die has a quite different inner disposition from one who has still long to live.

You will now understand that people do not like to study these things, for it would create a very unpleasant impression—to put it mildly—if we were to observe the signs of approaching death in people's psychic disposition. These, however, can be observed. But in everyday life it is not wise for people to notice these things. That is why they are usually hidden from this life just as the will is withdrawn, as a sleeping power, even when we are awake, from the waking consciousness. But the educator must, after all, take up a position outside ordinary life to some extent. He must not be afraid to take up his stand detached from his usual life and to absorb truths for his teaching which are rather disturbing, rather tragic, for everyday life. In this connection there is lost ground to cover in the educational system of Central Europe. You know that especially the teachers in the universities in the early decades of this Central European system of education and teaching were people on whom the actual man of the world rather turned up his nose in scorn. Unworldly, pedantic fellows, who could not adapt themselves properly to the world, who always wore long, black frock-coats and never evening dress; these were the former educators of youth, especially the teachers of more mature youth. In these days things have changed. The university professors have begun to wear correct evening dress and to adapt themselves to worldly custom, and it is considered a great mark of progress that their former state is at last a thing of the past. It is a good thing. But it must be a thing of the past in other senses, too; it must in future be a thing of the past to the extent that the detachment from life does not merely consist, as it did formerly, in the teacher's wearing the invariable long pedantic frock-coat when other people did not. The detachment from life can remain to some extent, but it must be bound up with a profounder conception of life than that of people who wear evening dress for dinner. I am only speaking figuratively, of course, for I have nothing against “evening dress.”

An educator must be able to study life more profoundly, otherwise he will never give appropriate and fruitful attention to the growing child. Consequently, he will have to accept, among others, such truths as I have just mentioned. Life itself, to a certain extent, demands the presence of mysteries. We need no diplomatic secrets in the near future. But for education we need the knowledge of certain mysteries of life. The old Mystery teachers withheld such secrets of life esoterically because these could not be revealed directly to life. But in a certain degree every teacher must know truths which he cannot impart directly to the world, because the world would be confused in normal progress, if it had access to such truths all the time. But you do not fully understand how to treat the growing child if you cannot estimate the influence on him of something imparted in such a way that he does not fully understand it at the time. He will understand when it is returned to later, and when he is told, not only what he then realizes, but what he had assimilated earlier. This makes a profound impression on the feelings and disposition.

For this reason the custom should be followed in every school as faithfully as possible—wherever possible—of the teacher retaining his same pupils; of taking them over for the first form, of keeping them the next year in the second form, of going up with them again in the third year, etc., as far as this is possible in conjunction with outside regulations. The teacher, after finishing with the eighth class, should then begin anew with the first class. For one must sometimes be able to come back years later in a positive way to what was instilled into the children's souls years before. In any case, the formation of the disposition or feeling life suffers greatly when the children are passed every year to a fresh teacher who cannot himself develop what he instilled into children in earlier years. It is part of the teaching method itself that the teacher should go up with his own pupils through the different school-stages. Only in this way can we enter into the rhythm of life. And in the most comprehensive sense life has a rhythm. This manifests itself even in everyday decisions, in the rhythm of day to day itself. If you have accustomed yourself, for instance, only for a week, to eat a buttered roll every day at half-past ten in the morning, you will probably feel hungry for the buttered roll at the same time in the second week. The human organism conforms as closely as this to a rhythm. But not only the external organism, but the whole being, is rhythmically organized. For this reason, too, it is a good thing throughout life as a whole—and that is what we are concerned with when we educate and teach children—to be able to attend to rhythmical repetition. For this reason we do well to think that even every year is not too often to return to quite definite educational themes. Therefore select subjects for the children, make a note of them, and come back to something similar every year. Even in more abstract things this method can be followed. You teach, let us say, in a way suited to the child's disposition, addition in the first school year; you come back to addition in the second, and teach more about it, and in the third year you return to it in the same way, so that the same act takes place repeatedly, but in progressive repetition.

To enter like this into the rhythm of life is of quite particular importance for all education and teaching—far more important than continuously repeating: Do build up your lessons according to the principle of meaning—thus inartistically pulling to bits whatever you deal with. You can only divine what is demanded here by gradually developing a feeling for life itself. But you will then part company very markedly, precisely as educationists, from the external experimental aims so frequent to-day even in education. Again, not to condemn, but to correct, certain tendencies which have proved detrimental to our spiritual culture, do I emphasize these things. You can embark on modern textbooks of education where the results are worked out which have been obtained through experiments on memory. The “subjects”—people experimented upon—are treated in a strange way. Tests are made on them to show how they can remember something of which they have understood the meaning; then they are given words written one after the other with no connecting sense, and they have to learn these, etc. These experiments for ascertaining the laws of the memory are practised very extensively to-day. Again a result has been obtained which is committed to formulae in scientific form. Just as, for instance, in physics, the Law of Gay-Lussac, among others, is formulated, people are anxious to formulate such laws in experimental education or psychology. You find, for example, very learnedly expounded, the gist of conclusions about a certain scientific yearning which is quite justified, namely, to prove the existence of types of memory. Firstly, the quickly or slowly assimilating memory; secondly, the quickly or slowly reproducing memory. So a “subject” is tormented to furnish evidence for the fact that there are people who memorize easily and people who memorize with difficulty; then other “subjects” are tormented to prove that there are people who can call back to mind easily, and people who can call back to mind only with difficulty, what they have once learnt. Now it has been determined by research that there are such types of memory; those showing a rapid or a slow assimilation, and those showing an easy or painful recollection or reproduction of what was assimilated. Thirdly, there are also types of memory which can be called “true and exact;” fourthly, there is a comprehensive memory; fifthly, a retentive and reliable memory, in opposition to the type which easily forgets. This answers very satisfactorily to the craving of modern science to systematize. The scientific result has now been obtained. We can ask: “What has been discovered scientifically in exact psychology about the types of memory?” And we learn: firstly, there is a type of memory which assimilates easily or laboriously; secondly, a type which reproduces easily or laboriously; thirdly, there is a true or exact memory; fourthly, a comprehensive memory, that is, there are people who can remember great passages of prose in contrast to those who can only remember short ones; fifthly, a retentive memory, which has perhaps remembered things from years ago, in contrast to the kind which forgets quickly.

This scientific method of observation scrupulously and very conscientiously maltreats innumerable victims, and sets to work most ingeniously to obtain results, in order that education, too, after having tested the children in experimental psychology, may know what various types of memory are to be differentiated. But with all due respect for such a science, I should like to make the following objection. Anyone endowed with a little sound common sense must know that there are people who commit things to memory easily or with difficulty; there are also those who easily or laboriously recall things once known, and again there are people who can recount things truly and accurately, in contrast to those who muddle everything they try to tell. There are people with an extensive memory, who can remember a long story, in contrast to those who can only remember a short one; and there are also people who can remember a thing for a long time, even years, and people who have forgotten everything in a week! It is part, in fact, of the fairly ancient wisdom of sound common sense, but it is discovered again in a science which inspires us with respect, because the methods which it applies are so ingenious.

There are two conclusions to be drawn from this: firstly, let us, above all, prefer to cultivate sound common sense in education and teaching, rather than expend it on such experimenting, which will, it is true, develop ingenuity very considerably, but which will not bring the teacher in touch with the quality of individuality in the child. But we can also draw a second conclusion: our age is actually in a sorry plight if we have to assume that the people who are going to become our teachers and educators have so little healthy human intelligence that they can only learn in this roundabout way that there are the different kinds of memory which we have just mentioned. Moreover, these things must undoubtedly be considered symptoms of the state of our present spiritual standard.

I had to draw your attention to these things. For people will say to you: “Well, you have let yourself be appointed at this Waldorf School. It is only a dilettante institution; the people there don't even want to know anything about the greatest conquest of our time: about the methods of experimental psychology. The study of this experimental psychological method is for experts, but the methods of the Waldorf School are quackery in comparison!” You will have to realize that you will sometimes have to acknowledge the connection of science—which must not be respected any the less for that—with what remains to be built up by us on an inner educational theory and method, but which, compared with the external relations which are set up by experiment, inspires an inner loving attentiveness towards the child. Certainly this quality has not completely disappeared; it prevails even more than is realized. But it definitely prevails in opposition to the ever-encroaching aims of scientific educational theory. To a certain extent it is true that the pursuit of science can destroy a good deal in modern life, but it has not the power to drive out all healthy human intelligence. This healthy human intelligence or sound common sense should be our starting-point, and when this is properly cultivated it will produce an inner connection with the ideals of teaching. We must realize, of course, that we live at the beginning of a new age, and we must completely master this fact. Down to the middle of the fifteenth century the surviving traditions of the Greek and Latin-Roman times were preserved. After the middle of the fifteenth century these are only the clattering after traditional repetition. But the people whose life is in this “clattering” still feel, in certain sub-regions of their consciousness, the craving to return to the Graeco-Latin age, which we can admire profoundly in its place, of course, but whose persistence into our age is no longer a living thing. Just think for a moment how self-satisfied the person is in these days, who has learnt something and can descant on it in the following terms: “A good teacher must not merely bring out the rhythm, and the rhyme in a poem; he must comment technically on the text; he must introduce the meaning, and only when he has unravelled the meaning will the pupils absorb it as an inner activity.” After such a person has long held forth on the importance of starting with the meaning, he concludes with: “As the old Latin said: rem tene, verba sequuntur, if you have understood the question, words will follow of themselves.” These are tactics which you will frequently find in people who imagine that they have learnt a great deal, that they have gone far beyond dilettantism in enunciating something first as a piece of sublime contemporary wisdom, and then following it up with, “as the old Latin said. ...” And, of course, he has only to say it in Greek for people to believe implicitly that it is something quite extraordinary. For the fourth post-Atlantean period of civilization, this attitude was desirable; it is unbecoming in our age. The Greek did not introduce his children, first of all, to old grammar schools where they could learn, let us say, ancient Egyptian; he made them learn Greek. But to-day we begin by introducing people to ancient tongues before their own. That is a fact which must be realized.

• 1. See Dr. C. v. Heydebrand, Gegen Experimentalpsychologie und Pädagogik.

My dear friends! Today I would like to say a few more words in continuation of what was said yesterday and the days before, and then I would ask you to use the next discussion hour in such a way that all the individual questions that are on your minds are actually put forward, so that we can then turn the hour into a real discussion. Today I would like to do it differently for the reason that what I said yesterday makes it absolutely necessary to look at the whole thing from the other side as well, namely to also consider the subjective process of redemption. We have, so to speak, set out what belongs to the act of redemption outside of man and must now say something about the other part of the question, about how redemption looks in the Lutheran sense, in the anthroposophical sense and so on, and that in relation to redemption, insofar as it is something subjective.

The first question that arises, my dear friends, is what are we to be redeemed from, what do we need to be redeemed from, what is it about human beings that is in need of redemption? I must confess that I have actually found the most inaccurate ideas about this question in the sphere of Christianity, and this is because people today do not like to go into things in detail and ask questions quite seriously. You know, of course, that the act of redemption is actually something outside the course of the ordinary external development of the world. This can already be seen from all that I said yesterday. Therefore, the relationship between the act of redemption and the human being must also be something that leads the human being out of his subjectivity. Now, the concept of original sin already suggests something that leads out of the human being's subjectivity, because essentially it is about redemption from original sin. Of course, this raises the big question: what is original sin? Now, however, one finds that in many conceptions of original sin there is actually, one can say, in the truest sense of the word, blasphemy. For if one is convinced that everything that works and lives within creation owes its origin to the divine Creator, then one must ascribe to God the presence of a sin that is, as it were, injected into the course of the world. Such such ascribing of sin to God is in fact nothing less than blasphemy, and there is no way to maintain original sin on the one hand and on the other hand to speak of a God who, as the unified Creator, underlies everything. If you want to have any chance of arriving at a concept in this area that does not involve blasphemy, then you have to be able to hold on to the tri-personality of God.

The tri-personality of God does not at all imply a transition from monotheism to a polytheism, to a tri-theism, but it is absolutely, if it is understood, properly compatible with a thoroughly monotheistic world view. But the question arises: by what subjective power do we humans come to a sense of the deity? It may be said that within the mystery, the Christian mystery and the mystery outside of Christianity, no other view of how to reach God has ever been accepted than that God lives in love. And it is actually a matter of clear insight, in the sense in which I expressed it this morning, of complete human insight into the sentence that God lives in love. This sentence can only be understood if we ask ourselves: what other paths could there be to God than the one that, if I may put it this way, is paved with love? What other paths to God could there be, or rather, in what imaginations could we see God except in the imagination of love?

There are two other ways to approach God through inner experience, besides love. There are two other possibilities, namely the way of wisdom and the way of power. And from there one could have the three judgments: God lives in wisdom, God lives in love, God lives in power. After all, something like this has emerged from certain confessional backgrounds, which already lack the full human clarity in this area: all differentiations have been swept aside, so to speak, and God is worshipped or prayed to as the Almighty, the All-loving, the All-knowing. It is impossible to arrive at a pure and correct relationship between human beings and humanity and God for our time after the Mystery of Golgotha if one starts from the sentence: God is attainable through wisdom. It was one of the most profound sentences that has been spoken through the Gospel: God is not attained through wisdom. Of course, God lives in wisdom, but this must not be revealed to humanity in such a way that humanity in this day and age simply wants to find God through wisdom. For if we imagine the wise God, then, if we attach any real, concrete value to the idea, we must imagine this wisdom of God, which then works in the world, as surpassing all human wisdom; and then we immediately come to find no bridge to God by the way of wisdom. We lack the bridge if we want to seek God on the path of wisdom, because God's wisdom must infinitely outshine all human wisdom and we could never enter into the weaving and essence of God if we wanted to build the bridge with human wisdom.

We will always find an abyss, my dear friends, if we want to seek God on the path of wisdom, the abyss at which we must absolutely stop. It is not the case that we cannot regard our human wisdom as a gift from God, it is. But we must not seek God on the path of wisdom, nor must we seek God on the path of power. For if we were to seek God by the way of might, the might of God would tower so high above all in the one seeking Him that all individual freedom would be excluded. And so it would be impossible for any freedom of the human being to develop on this earth if we were to seek God only by the way of that which is truly involved in Him as Almighty.

The only way that truly leads to God, that connects the creature with the Creator, is the way of love, the love that man freely gives to God, which is nothing other than the universal human understanding of the love that God gives to man. This is the one thing that really does not lead us to an abyss, but rather leads us to finding a way to God, so that we do not have to look for some image when it is said that God lives in love, but that we have to imagine this as a reality before our soul. I am not speaking of something individual, my dear friends, but of something that, as I said, is the mystery wisdom of all times, whether it is brought out from the beginning of all knowledge or not, that is not important at this moment. What is important is that this knowledge: God is love – or: God lives in love – is the common mystery wisdom of all times.

Now, when we understand this in a living way, it has a certain consequence that we can visualize when we look at the overall development of man on earth. We live in a certain state of consciousness in our time. You already know from the lectures of the past few days that this state of consciousness has not always been there in the development of mankind, but that the present state was preceded by a much duller, dream-like state, which was, however, brightened up so that at that time man could perceive the divine in images which were like images in a dream, and that the actual dream-like awareness of God in all of nature has ceased around the time of the Mystery of Golgotha, so that a new approach, a new way of finding the path to the divine has become necessary. We must therefore clearly distinguish the path that the human race has taken up to the proximity of the Mystery of Golgotha, from generation to generation, where consciousness was by no means awakened in the same way as it is today. Of course, for external activities it was similar to our present state of consciousness, but [people were] always able to put themselves, as it were, into states that lie between waking and sleeping and that led them to the divine through direct atavistic, imaginative contemplation, through contemplation of the divine in images. The oldest documents speak a great deal about this way of approaching the divine; that was the way, my dear friends, to approach the divine through wisdom, through human wisdom.

Why was it possible in those days to approach the divine through human wisdom? Yes, you see, the state of consciousness was subdued; as a result, man was protected from experiencing in the fullest sense, with the intensity that exists today, those qualities in his organization that are inherited qualities, that is, from experiencing everything that comes into the individual human being through inheritance. Of course, even in ancient times people attached importance to their inherited characteristics, to racial characteristics, to consanguinity and similar things, but this was always counterbalanced by the assumption of a spiritual element in these inherited characteristics. One has to imagine that, by entering the earth, man has come into such a community with the physical process of development that he had to absorb inheritance into himself, so that something is actually inherited through the blood. But man had not yet reached the stage of consciousness where he could fully live by these inherited qualities. In fact, man experienced the inherited qualities of original sin within himself when he was dreaming. These were the impulses that constantly pushed him away from the divine, constantly urging him to sink below the level of his humanity. But he had, as it were, the counterweight in the atavistic clairvoyance, so that he did not completely merge within this hereditary current. That he entered into this hereditary current with full consciousness only became clearly established around the time of the Mystery of Golgotha; there man enters into this hereditary current more deeply and more intensely. Thus one can say: In the course of his evolution, man was led down to the experience of original sin, and he became in need of redemption from this inherited evil; but he only needed this redemption from the moment when the Mystery of Golgotha approached in the evolution of mankind. When man — if I may use the biblical image — entered the earthly element on earth through Adam's [fall into sin], he was lowered into the region of inherited qualities, but his consciousness was not yet so far advanced that he could be carried away by all that comes from inherited qualities. Original sin also developed, and so did being pushed into the inherited qualities. This is something that is given to the whole human race. It is something that lives in evolution as an impulse for the whole human race. This had to be counteracted by another impulse, which can now lift human consciousness up again, out of the sphere of inherited traits. This impulse was to be given by the Christ impulse. In a spiritual-soul way, man was to become acquainted with everything that he had previously experienced only in the blood, in the succession of generations, but which had become so that he was no longer allowed to experience it only in the blood.

Thus, in ancient times, mankind was allowed to seek the way to God through wisdom, and that is through human wisdom, which had not yet been fully entangled in original sin. This was corrupted in the last phases of paganism, and it was also corrupted in the last phases of Judaism; it is just that actually the historical records report only on these last phases and not on what preceded them.

What is it, then, that actually carries a person down into the region of inherited qualities within the earthly world? Let us ask what it is. We come across concepts that, I would say, are quite embarrassing for today's earthman, because one comes to speak about an area that today's man either very easily helps himself with all sorts of tirades, or or that he understands it in the sense in which it has become customary in recent times — as it can only be understood by anthroposophy as the culmination of the recognition of sin — in the psychoanalytical sense. We come to an area where the lowest phase of love life must be touched upon — only with regard to world orientation the lowest — that is, sexual love life. From the same source that a person is born human, from the same source arose what a person experienced in ancient wisdom. Only in this ancient wisdom, I would say, was the human being not fully awakened to life in the impulses of inheritance. Man is fully awakened here on earth through love, first of all as sexual love, and as a continuation of sexual love through child love and parental love, which, as long as they are bound by blood, always have something that pushes man deeper down than he should actually be in the world according to the original divine intention.

And so it becomes necessary, starting from love itself, to sanctify this love by replacing the blood ancestor, the blood-ancestral rule, with the ancestor to whom one professes allegiance, not because of inherited qualities but because of one's own qualities, which one can develop as a human being beyond inherited qualities, or which can be developed in a person beyond inherited qualities. To profess such an ancestor means to include in one's consciousness, in addition to blood relationship, the relationship that arises from free choice, from free decision, that is, to add to blood relationship the elective affinity with Christ, with the ancestor who appears as the ancestor of love, spiritualized love, which now has nothing to do with blood, and which can therefore take hold of the whole human race because it arises from free choice, because it is a choice affinity. Now arose the idea of seeking the inner impulses for freely choosing a being, that is, of being educated in the course of one's individual life in such a way that this choice is a free one, but that one then professes this ancestor, chosen in free election, just as one used to profess the God of Abraham through blood relationship. After all, all ancient religions are based on direct blood relationships. That which was lived in the polytheism of later times was nothing more than a transformation of the service to the ancestors, that is, the kinship felt with the ancestral god as the blood relative.

Now came the great realization that what had previously lived on earth only in the blood, what was somehow connected with the blood, had been handed over to the earthly life of the spirit and soul. Who handed it over? He who lives in the blood relationship and who sent the old wisdom out of the blood relationship into human consciousness. Who was it? It was the Father-God. It had to be recognized that the Father-God lives in such a way that human beings could remain human in a certain sense, right up to the time of the Mystery of Golgotha. Then he had to make a decision – and human consciousness is only possible because it understands something like this, because it moves beyond everything earthly not only to a supermundane experience, but to an [understanding of the] supermundane decision – to give up the one who was always connected with him, to give the son to the earth, to let him go through an event, as a result of which the son was no longer united with the father as he had been before, but where a different relationship between the son and the father had come about through the relationship of the son to humanity.

It is extremely difficult to put these things into words, but I will try to put it into words as clearly as possible, as clearly as I can.

We are referred back to the ancient recognition of the Father-God, who, subconsciously, passed through the generations with the blood, who enclosed the Son within himself, who, with wisdom, gave people the experience of love, and we are also referred to the ancient sacrificial service.

You see, my dear friends, in the later corrupted times of the Gentiles and also in the later corrupted times of the Jews, people did not seek the essence of the sacrifice in what the sacrifice actually is. Let us take the characteristic sacrifice, the animal blood sacrifice. What is its essential nature? That the animal sacrifice was performed did not alone constitute the essence of the sacrifice, but rather that something that belonged to someone or to a community was given up, and in such a way that this individual or this community no longer had the possession. That is an essential part of the sacrifice. The further back we go in the evolution of time, the more we find that this concept is inseparable from the concept of sacrifice: the giving up of something one possesses. Animal sacrifice only became such because the animal was given to the fire; in older times, all animal sacrifices were carried out on living animals. When the sacrifice was made on the living animal, the life also perishes; something living is sacrificed. It was therefore definitely intended that through the sacrifice one should redeem and free oneself from a possession that one had, a possession which, if understood in the usual egoistic sense, consisted in something that benefited one, in something that one had inherited. If you understand it in a spiritual sense, then the possession was something that brought you down below humanity, something that you only had through blood. This was also to be given up again in the blood sacrifice, insofar as it was to be taken away from people.

But one could only think in this way as long as one was allowed to believe that the innocent degree of consciousness, which does not reach down into original sin, is maintained, even when going through the moment when the blood fire, because the merging of the blood in the fire is, after all, the opposite act of what happens to the blood when it enters and pulses in the human organism, and what is precisely the carrier of original sin. But in order that what lies in the blood in the activity of the Father-God might be taken away for the whole human race in a uniform manner, the event of Golgotha had to be given to mankind through the sacrifice of the Son, so that henceforth the Son does not live in the succession of births as he formerly lived with the Father, but that he lives in that in which human consciousness immerses itself without falling into the powers that go through the succession of births, and that looks to him who has gone through death on Calvary. This victory over death and the feeling of what can be felt in this context, pulls one out of the context of being placed into original sin, as people said in ancient Christianity, in mystery Christianity. The elective affinity with Christ pulls one out of the original sin of blood relationship. You may sense your relationship to the event of Golgotha in a shadowy way, then this sense of yours brings about nothing but at most again wisdom, which was also there before the event of Golgotha, but you can also sense your connection with the Christ so strongly, you can strengthen your relationship to the Christ so much that you love him as you loved out of the blood. If you can do that, then your feeling of love for Christ works in you in the opposite way to how original sin worked in you. Then you heal the original sin in you. And then the Father God, the underlying of the world as the one aspect, the one person of the Godhead, the one mask or form of the Godhead, but which is connected to the other mask, the other form, the other person of the Godhead, to the person of the Son of God.

But in the succession of time, especially when we think of the time that lies behind the mystery of Calvary in the gray time of the origin of mankind, we think of the God who works through the blood and through the succession of generations. And we think of God the Father, who sacrificed his Son, to whom love – which, as we have said, is the only real way to God for man – to whom love in the spiritual and soul life in man can be kindled so much can be so strengthened when he contemplates the full tragedy, the full horror of the Mystery of Golgotha; and when this love becomes so strong, then there is indeed in man a power that counteracts original sin. This then asserts itself from the body, in the effect of the blood in the original sin, in the inherited qualities, but we do not then merge into these inherited qualities; we rise with the feeling and willing gaze that we direct to Golgotha, above life in the original sin in consciousness itself and thereby bring about such a strong power in consciousness that it counteracts original sin. There is no other way to counteract original sin than to look at the Mystery of Golgotha. My dear friends, there is no self-redemption to counteract this original sin, there is only the redemption through Christ, the redemption through the vision of Christ passing through the Mystery of Golgotha. And by developing this feeling towards Christ, which consists of nothing but love, we may now look up to the God of might, to the Father-God, who underlies the creative activity in the blood and who allowed this might of his to pass over into the working of the Son. So that we can say: We do not need to look to the omnipotence of God, as we stand today in the development of the times; we leave that beyond love; it is in God, but we do not find the way to God if we go this way of power.

The last emanation of the principle of original sin, my dear friends, is human knowledge that relies entirely on inherited characteristics. In the moment when – as a final phase – that which emerges from the impulses that lie in the blood flowing through the generations merges into knowledge, it becomes intellectualistic knowledge, it becomes the knowledge of modern natural science. It is the last phase of the original human sin; it is the spirit of antiquity transferred into the abstract; it is that which requires healing; it is that which makes it necessary for man now no longer to believe that he comes to God through the spirit alone, as it was possible in ancient times, when the divine was attained through wisdom. What is needed is the realization that man cannot attain the divine through wisdom alone, but that this path of wisdom must be sanctified. This is what has now come through the consequence of the event of Golgotha through the experience of knowledge in the power of the Holy Spirit. We have the third form of the Godhead. We have to look at the unified God in three forms. We now know that we may not behold the God of might without the mediation of the Christ in love, by reflecting back to the God of might what is given to us in the Christ, to whom we cleave through true love, and we also know that we may not receive any wisdom without sanctifying it, healing it through the Spirit sent to humanity through Christ. We must lift up human wisdom by the power of Christ, by the power that we have within us when we contemplate the event of Golgotha; we must regard it as sick and heal it by letting that supersensible permeate it, which can come to us and which is meant by permeation, by sanctification through Christ.

So, my dear friends, there can be no other redemption from original sin than that through Christ Jesus; the other sins are consequential sins. Individual sins are committed by man because he can be weak through original sin, can be inclined to sin. These individual sins find their atonement in what must be achieved through self-redemption; they must be atoned for through self-redemption in the course of earthly or supermundane life. But that which is the original sin, the mother of all other sins, that could only be taken out of the human race through the act of redemption by Christ. And the moment someone, through something like – call it anthroposophy, call it Christianity, call it religion, it does not matter – the moment someone comes to a true realization of these things, there can be no doubt about it. And if there is still doubt, it stems from the inability to put it into words. For in itself there must be something directly convincing, something freely convincing in what leads to the historical Christ in love and to His deed, to the event of Golgotha.

Not that which lives in Harnack's 'Essence of Christianity' (to give a specific example), can be a path that leads to Christ; the path can actually only lead away from Christ if one has the Christ merely as [the proclaimer] of the doctrine of the Father-God, where the main thing lies in the teaching. No, the path to the Christ, to the Mystery of Golgotha, does not lie in a teaching, it lies in freely developing, freely flowing love. Only through this is the path to the Christ attainable. And when this freely flowing love is present, our wisdom will also take up within itself the Spirit, which is the healing, the Holy Spirit. This is the same Word, but it means at the same time that no other human relationship can redeem man than the relationship to the historical Christ, to the one who has gone through the Mystery of Golgotha. There is no other human relationship that can take away original sin from a person than the relationship to the historical Christ, who went through the mystery of Golgotha. The wisdom that only reveals itself as the last descendant of original sin says, with Harnack: “We don't want to talk about what happened in the Garden of Gethsemane, after all, no eye has seen it; in any case, however it may have happened with the resurrection, the belief in resurrection, that is, the Easter belief, emerged from it. It is not Christian to speak in this way. And once, in an association called the Giordano Bruno Association (it was not the Giordano Bruno League), I explained how someone who speaks in the spirit of Harnack has no right to call himself a Christian, especially not in the sense of the newest spiritual consciousness, I pointed out the passage where Harnack says in his “Essence of Christianity” that what matters is not the factuality of the resurrection but the belief in the resurrection. Then the chairman, who was a well-informed man and who felt he was a well-informed Christian, told me that it was nowhere in Harnack's “Essence of Christianity,” that he had not read it in Harnack's “Essence of Christianity”; and if it were in there, it would not be Protestant, it would be pagan-Catholic, because it simply resembled the statement – not me saying this, but him saying this – that was made by the Catholic side about the origin of the Holy Robe of Trier; there it also did not depend on where it actually came from, it depended on the faith that one associates with the Holy Robe of Trier; but that is not Protestant, that is pagan-Catholic. He had not found this in Harnack's Essence of Christianity, he said.

I told him that I did not have the book with me and that I would send him the page number tomorrow. But at the same time I saw from this how such ideas are received today and in what a trivial sense one takes such things seriously and lives into them. One does not feel at all that the literary products that appear in the theological field are no longer Christian at all, and that the Overbeck, who made a great impression on Nietzsche in Basel, was quite right in all that he wrote about modern theology [in his book] “On the Christianity of Our Present-Day Theology”, in which he had actually already provided proof in the 1870s that modern theology, whatever it may be, is no longer a product of Christianity. And Harnack's 'Essence of Christianity' is the least of all that has something to do with Christianity. If you replace the name Christ with the name Yahweh, the Father-God, wherever Harnack uses the name Christ, you are justified in saying that the person who wrote this book no longer knows the real relationship that the Christian must have with his Christ.

I do not believe, my dear friends, that we can feel the full seriousness of what needs to be done to renew Christian religious life if we do not feel how far removed from Christianity those are who often think they can uphold Christianity before the world today by sacrificing everything in this great apologetic process that theology undertakes before the world, ultimately even their relationship to Christ himself. One cannot imagine anything more un-Christian than Harnack's principle that the gospel does not belong to the Son, but only to the Father, and that the gospel is not a message from the Son, but only the message of the Son from the Father. Someone might confess something like this today under the pressure of modern materialism, but they would have to have the honesty to then stop calling themselves Christian.

There is no other way than to present these things in all their complexity and thereby rise to the realization: redemption from original sin means having such a relationship with the historical Christ, who passed through the Mystery of Golgotha, that this relationship pulses through our veins in a spiritual-soul way just as truly as blood pulses through our veins in a physical way. That is the power, that is the strength that can be called the power and the strength of faith. One should not seek an abstract concept for faith, but this strength, this power for faith. To believe means to find in one's soul such strength and such power for the Christ that this soul power, this soul strength is as great as that which the blood ties can achieve in us. Then we will find the way to the unified Christ of all humanity, to that unified Christ who, through the event of Golgotha, is also the real objective cause for every subjective act of redemption. But then we will no longer seek the act of redemption in external signs; on the contrary, we will seek through the sacraments that which is the real relationship of the human soul to the Christ. We will have to talk about this in the other part. Then we also do not seek in an abstract or mystical way a relationship to a Christ who eludes us, but we establish in the human spirit and in the human heart and in the whole human being an elective affinity to the Christ, just as we have a consanguineous relationship to the life of the Father-God, in so far as this life expresses itself in the blood of mankind, that is to say, in the life-creative power of mankind in the physical realm.

I have tried to present to you the subjective side of the idea of redemption. I do not believe that in this day and age one can arrive at an objective understanding of the subjective idea of redemption from other premises, from other antecedents.

I would now like to ask you, my dear friends, to prepare your questions well so that we can really get into a discussion, a back-and-forth of words, in the afternoons over the next few days.

In this lecture I would like to speak about certain colorations regarding the characteristics of the present spiritual life, which our lecture work will have to assume. We must not limit ourselves to focusing our speech merely on understanding the intellectual side of social issues, but we must work to make the world aware of how, with regard to certain things, people must feel differently from the way they currently feel, especially in the supposedly influential circles. For what lives outwardly in institutions, what happens outwardly in people's social actions, depends entirely on the way people think, feel and will. That is why I have emphasized so strongly that the human being as such must be placed at the center of the social as well as the whole view of life and the world. But we ourselves must develop a sense of how misguided and lost the life of feeling has become in the present day. We must have a keen sense that it is precisely through this often quite perverse life of feeling that the civilized world has come to its present situation. We should make such things clear to ourselves by means of examples. And we should also make them clear by means of examples from the world. We can easily find such examples if we just discuss the treatment that the anthroposophical movement is receiving in our time, with a certain objective sense.

When discussing social issues, the moral aspect must always be emphasized. This consists in the fact that the leading people of the immediate past have allowed events of the time to unfold in a rather irresponsible manner. Is it not the case that the leading circles were only concerned with the staging of the course of the world in the sense in which modern technology and the forms of materialism that have emerged in recent times support the course of the world, and how the course of the world is supported by them? And it is quite clear: no attention has been paid to the influence that this course of the world must have on the countless people who, as the proletariat, have been formed precisely by this course of the world. All this has really been allowed to happen with a carelessness that now, of course, appears tragic, but which must be clearly recognized if any improvement is to occur.

A glaring example of this carelessness is, of course, this, which I have mentioned several times before: at the end of the 1960s, Austria had a Minister of Police, Giskra. Even then, there were some people who pointed out that a social question was looming on the horizon of modern civilization. And when certain questions were put to him about the social question, this police minister replied: “Austria knows no social question. That stops at Bodenbach!”

Now, this burying one's head in the sand, this ostrich-like policy, has been pursued to the greatest extent by the leading circles in modern times. And this, my dear friends, must be seen through, it must be sharply brought to the present. For one can say: Unscrupulousness has gradually moved out of the external world and into thinking itself, and there it asserts itself, unfortunately unnoticed by very many people. This results in a coarsening of thinking, and this coarsening of thinking is usually denied, especially by today's intellectual people. I would like to illustrate what I have just said with a recent example.

You see, a certain Count Hermann Keyserling, who founded a so-called “School of Wisdom” in Darmstadt, is still a plant from the circles that have operated with the greatest carelessness and unconcern for the course of world events. His bookshop advertises this “School of Wisdom”. And a booklet has just been published that bears, as you may admit yourself, the rather pretentious title 'The Path to Perfection'. This booklet needed to be advertised by the bookstore. The following is added to this advertisement on the outside of the so-called belly band: 'Responding to Rudolf Steiner's attacks'. The bookshop then adds in its announcement: 'Count Keyserling's position on Theosophy in general and on Steiner's Theosophy in particular is communicated in the 14th chapter of his last book 'Philosophy as Art' under the title 'For and against Theosophy'. Rudolf Steiner found it necessary to respond to these entirely objective statements, which proclaimed the truth, with personal insults.” This is the kind of advertising that the bookstore writes for this ‘school of wisdom’! Now it is really necessary, if a social recovery is to occur in the present, to keep an eye on people like this Count Hermann Keyserling and to really say openly and frankly to the world what has been discovered by looking at them. For the pests of contemporary civilization must be exposed.

What this Count Keyserling's inner and intellectual dishonesty is, may be seen from the way in which he proceeds in this writing, which, incidentally, contains the beautiful sentence: “Only the members of the student community are entitled to longer personal discussions with Count Keyserling outside of the general members' meetings. For them, he is available to speak to, by prior appointment and with the exception of Saturdays and Sundays, if he is not traveling, every afternoon between 3 and 5 o'clock in the school premises at Paradeplatz 2, entrance from Zeughausstraße. Should anyone, without being a student, wish to take advantage of the headmaster's time in matters of wisdom, the management reserves the right to charge special consultation fees for the benefit of the school in such cases."

My dear friends, it is certainly justified to laugh at such things; but the things are not ridiculous. It is precisely in these things that the original damage to our social life lies. For you will find the following sentence on page 47: You know that I have, with a certain ruthlessness, but it is necessary in such cases and is well considered, characterized the dishonesty of Count Hermann Keyserling with regard to my dependence on Haeckel, which he has maintained, here in a public lecture, in due form characterized the untruthfulness of Count Hermann Keyserling with regard to my dependence on Haeckel. In response to this characterization, he writes the following sentence: “.... and instead of correcting a possible error on my part, which I would gladly accept, because I did not have time for special Steiner source research... Steiner simply accuses me of lying...” So, this man has the nerve to suggest that anyone can write any untruth and get no other kind of a rap on the knuckles for it than to have it corrected! Just imagine this intellectual laxity, almost working towards it: you can write anything, and the other person is obliged to correct it. If we were to work in this way, we would end up in the social mire. And to write in such a way: “I have no time for too much specialized research into Steiner's sources...” what does that really mean? It really means: I am not taking the time to check exactly what I am writing. And such a man claims that as his good right!

My dear friends, we must have a sense of the perverse intellectualistic sentiments of the present. If we do not acquire this sense, we cannot confront the present with the exposure of this swamp, and then all the rest of our talk is in vain. I must keep repeating that mere defense is of no use. We must take what is used as an attack against us only as a symptom, in order to characterize the intellectual decay that exists. For humanity must know how it is actually being led spiritually today.

This is in contrast to the beautiful denunciation carried out by a Basel university professor who always pops out of the woodwork like a brownie in the night and is perhaps called Professor Heinzelmann for this reason. Dr. Boos has indeed struck out in a somewhat sharp manner in a reply to certain attacks. It was claimed in Swiss newspapers that anthroposophy was borrowed from various ancient writings; something was said about the Indian Vedic and Vedanta literature, the Bhagavad Gita was mentioned, and among the things that were mentioned was also the Akasha Chronicle! Now, you see, Dr. Boos was probably right when he said: to claim something like that is to provide proof that one is telling a deliberate untruth; because the person who says something like that must know that if he goes to the bookcase, he cannot take out the Vedas, the Bhagavad Gita and then the Akasha Chronicle one after the other. That was how the matter was presented. So they must know that they are writing a falsehood. That “Brownie” from Basel now writes, after I have characterized it accordingly, that my characterization is a “completely new definition of knowing untruthfulness”; I would have provided the definition on page so and so much, an objective untruthfulness is present where one incorrectly asserts something that one should actually know; this contradicts the previously familiar definition of “knowing untruth,” which consists in asserting something “against better knowledge.”

So this university professor writes that there is a definition on that page. But there is no definition at all! I only said that what he says about the Akasha Chronicle is really asserted against better knowledge. So, it is simply lied that there is a definition on that page. People are being hoodwinked by being distracted from the real issue: that it is precisely the assertion against better knowledge that matters.

You see, these are seemingly pedanticities. In reality they are not, but they are what is most necessary today in the moral relationship: that we assert the point of view to the leading personalities, how morally marshy thinking has actually become. And this moral marshmallow is basically spread over the whole of intellectual life today.

Now it is true that this moral decay comes from two sources: firstly from scientific life itself, and secondly from journalism. But that cannot prevent us from seeking out these things wherever they assert themselves and bringing them to people's attention again and again.

And if we want to make it clear, especially to the people of the present day, who are so difficult to understand, how necessary it is for intellectual life to become independent, we will be able to do so by pointing out what has become of intellectual life under the leadership of the state and the economy. It is quite natural for us to present these things in a purely descriptive way, without becoming polemical, and I might say with the same tone with which we endeavor to present any other objective fact. This does, of course, presuppose that we care about such things. And we must be able to have that in general: a clear, open view of what is happening, of what is going on around us. I have already emphasized this from other points of view.

It will not be difficult to show the harmfulness of much of what is found in this brochure by Count Keyserling. Because, isn't it true, in this brochure, where the talk is of that blissful atmosphere into which those who devote themselves to the School of Wisdom in Darmstadt are welcomed, sentences of this caliber can be found: “This” - the atmosphere - “will soon mean such a factor of power that the mere stay in its rooms will be enough for the receptive novice to grasp emotionally what is striven for in it.” Then further: “But the creation of a certain cultural atmosphere does not mean the main intention underlying the School of Wisdom. The atmosphere is the basic prerequisite for achieving more important things. This, however, consists in promoting the called individual not only through the involuntary unconscious influence of a certain lifestyle and the level of being of the leading personalities, but also through intensive private treatment.” And again: “He may hold any world view, adhere to any political program, believe in any faith, pursue any interest; he may be young or old, man or woman: in the School of Wisdom he will learn to relate any ‘being’ to a deeper ‘being’.” At another point, it is emphasized how beautiful the School of Wisdom is because it does not concern itself with whether, for example, people who speak of free money are right or not, or whether other directions are right or not; the School of Wisdom in Darmstadt considers it a small matter whether anyone is right or not in any direction. Rather, all these directions should come together on the ground of the Darmstadt parquet! Because all these arbitrary interests, arbitrary beliefs, arbitrary human conditions are caused there to “refer an arbitrary existence back to a deeper being.”

You see, basically this is only the dark side of something that cannot really get any better unless spiritual life is placed on a completely new and free foundation. For anyone who wants to talk about the recovery of social conditions today must be fully aware that we are at an important moment in the development of humanity in world history, that certain things are simply being sought by working them out of the depths of the human soul. And one of the most important impulses to work out of the depths of the human soul is to overcome the old compulsions in the relationship between people.

Please note this formula: overcoming the old compulsions in the relationship between people. We look back at the social conditions of humanity. We find that in ancient times there existed the institution of effecting social stratification on the basis of mere blood; by virtue of being born of this or that tribe, of this or that family, one was lord, the other servant, one the commanding, the other the dependent. The further back we go in the development of mankind, the more we find that social life was built on such blood and hereditary relationships. They have partly been preserved in the consciousness of the people. What still exists today as the class consciousness of the nobility ultimately stems from ancient times and is essentially a continuation of those social demands that were based on blood in ancient times.

Now, in more recent times, another stratification has been superimposed on this social stratification. And this other one is based on economic power. The social stratification that arose from blood ties has been joined by another stratification that arose from modern economic conditions: the stratification that arises from economic power. Those who are economically powerful belong to a different class from those who have nothing, who are economically powerless. This has been superimposed on the old. Basically, much of our present social conditions are still based on the survival of the old constraints. Today's human consciousness is rising up against this. And basically, a large part of what we call the social questions is based on this democratic rebellion against the old constraints. Therefore, the question arises: how should we act in this regard?

And here we must realize that without the emancipation of the free spiritual life from the other members of the social organism on the ground that I have just characterized, a lasting social state cannot be created. If the spiritual life is really placed on its own ground, then there can be no social coercion in this spiritual life, but only the relationship of free recognition. And this free recognition will arise of its own accord within social life. To put it crudely: You would hardly hire someone as a music teacher who had never played a musical instrument in their life, and democratic sentiment will never demand that absolute equality should prevail among all people with regard to appointing a music teacher. Rather, in completely independent free recognition, someone will be appointed as a music teacher who knows and is able to do the things that are necessary to be a music teacher. And one will not be able to deny recognition to the one who knows and is able to do the things, when there is nowhere something that is practiced by force; recognition will arise all by itself.

In a free spiritual life, there will be a great deal of things that are similar to building on authority. But it will be a building on self-evident authority everywhere. For what is the rebellion of countless people in the present time against all authority based on? This rebellion is based on nothing other than the fact that people perceive that economic conditions impose forced subordination on us, and we do not recognize that economic conditions impose forced subordination on us. Nor do people recognize that forced subordination is imposed by political or blood relations. And this is opposed by the historical element, which I have characterized as the democratic feeling that is now emerging from the depths of humanity. And since, of course, the broad masses have learned from intellectuals and spiritual leaders not accuracy but superficialities, they take history to mean that they reject all authority in economic life. And now the third, intellectual life, is also taken into the bargain, because it does not appear before the soul-eyes of men in its own particular essence. It can only do so when it stands actually in direct free self-administration. The necessity for the liberation of intellectual life must be made clear to people from the most diverse backgrounds.

And we must also emphasize the following: there must be a sphere in which people can truly feel equal. This is not the case today because, on the one hand, the state has absorbed spiritual life and, on the other hand, economic life draws it in, so that it draws the authoritative from both sides into its being and there is actually no ground on which people who have come of age can feel completely equal. If the ground is there on which people who have come of age can feel completely equal, can someone really feel: I am equal to every other human being as a human being. - Then he will also recognize authority in the area where he cannot feel it because it is an absurdity, or he will recognize associative judgment.

Something will arise again – it is not yet opportune to tell people this today, but I am telling you – something will arise that is like what played a certain role in ancient times from different circumstances. Take a village in ancient times: the pastor was a kind of deity in the truest sense of the word. But there were occasions when the pastor appeared purely as a human being among other human beings. They valued this very much. If we now have, on the one hand, spiritual life with the recognition, the free recognition of self-evident authority, and on the other hand, economic life with group judgment, which is based on the confluence of the judgments of associated human beings, and in between a place where people meet without distinction of the rest of the authoritative - and that would be the case if the threefold social organism were there - then it would actually have a real effect in the very deepest sense on solving the social question. But in the deepest sense it must be the case that the teacher, the spiritual person - I mean this symbolically now - takes off his toga when he appears on the ground of the social state life, and that the worker can take off his blouse when he the ground of the social life of the state, so that in fact people meet from both sides in the same uniform, which need not be a uniform in the ordinary sense, but can be equivalent when it is based on the legal-state.

We must attach great importance to the fact that such, I would say, moral impulses, which also live externally, really do come back into human society. For savagery and barbarism would undoubtedly occur if what a true Marxist regards as the ideal social order were to be realized. On the other hand, we can be quite certain of one thing: if the broad masses of the people, after the experiences they have had in Europe in the last few months, listen in the right way, unperturbed by their leaders, long enough, to what the meaning of the threefold social organism is, then a light must finally dawn on them.

But at the same time as this action is being taken, something else must be done: the moral decline, as I have just characterized it, must be brought to consciousness in the judgment of the present. We must prove quite palpably where people simply fall out of morality in their judgments, as is the case with Count Hermann Keyserling. For the man is to a high degree a sand-in-the-eyes-scatterer, and one must only place such a specimen of a human being in front of the contemporaries in the right way. Then one has done something extraordinary morally.

You see, after Count Hermann Keyserling had done, or had done through his bookstore, all that I have mentioned to you, he then accomplished the following. He says: “I only touch on the case in order to make it quite clear by his example how carefully one must distinguish between ‘being’ and ‘knowing’. I cannot possibly have a favorable impression of Steiner's being; noblesse oblige – by this he means: noblesse oblige one not to call a liar a liar – “... but as an expert I still find him very remarkable and advise every critical mind with a psychic disposition to take advantage of the rare opportunity of the existence of such a specialist to learn from and with him. I am familiar not only with his most important accessible writings but also with his cycles, and from them I have gained the impression that Steiner is not only extraordinarily gifted but actually has unusual sources of knowledge at his disposal. He lacks any finer organ for the sense, and therefore must find all wisdom abstract and empty that does not relate to phenomena; but what he presents about such phenomena deserves serious examination, however absurd some of it may sound at first and his style as a revealer of his essence inspires so little confidence, which is why I deeply regret that his action against me, which came as a complete surprise to me, deprives me of the opportunity to make personal contact with him. For it remains true, as I wrote in the same essay that provoked Steiner's anger in defense against his opponents, that an important person should be judged solely by his best qualities; interest in his knowledge and abilities must not be affected by his infirmities and faults. On the same day that I received Steiner's diatribe, I recommended to a student of mine the serious study of his writings and even joining his society, since this seemed to me to be his path and I did not consider contact with the questionable aspects associated with Steiner to be dangerous in his case. One should never forget that every being is multifaceted, that no bad quality devalues the good; and that the character of a society depends entirely on the spirit of its predominant members. The Anthroposophical Society can still have a future if it abandons dogma and sectarianism, if it gives up its dirty agitation and truly becomes what it is supposed to be according to its statutes.

So, as you can see, for those who, unfortunately, are also numerous in the Anthroposophical Society, there is plenty of opportunity to say: Yes, what does Steiner want? Keyserling praises him to the skies! But for me it is not about whether he praises me, but whether he is a pest of civilization or not. Because it seems to me that everything Keyserling says in the end is such that I can only characterize it by saying: This man tries to cover up everything that his superficiality inflicts on the world behind what I can't call it otherwise in this case, adulation. I say this simply because I am fully convinced that Count Keyserling does not have the slightest organ for understanding the things he praises here.

And this must be much more important to us: to go into this objectively, to show the world in our lectures – I have only cited Count Keyserling as an example today – what superficiality and unjustified aspirations there are today. If the world realizes what kind of people are leading it, then it will gain an understanding for the liberation of the spiritual life. For it will be impossible for such heroes to emerge from a free spiritual life. Quite certainly, my dear friends, the earthly life that man spends between birth and death will never produce anything but angels. And only someone like Professor Rein in Jena can make the strange claim that anthroposophical morality is actually meant for angels, as he once did in an article. But even if there are bound to be all kinds of strange eccentrics in the free spiritual life, the majority will not be able to do so, but the majority will be educated differently, precisely because of the inner strength and impulsiveness of the spiritual life. Of course, it is easy to give the world the kind of empty thoughts that Count Keyserling gives, if one has acquired one's social position through old blood ties, as Count Keyserling has, and if one perhaps receives some support from other quarters, which need not be mentioned here, for the establishment of such “schools of wisdom”. But such folly will never be able to arise in a free spiritual life. Because there will certainly be enough people who reject such ideas.

You see, what was important to me in that lecture was to point out the emptiness and abstractness of Keyserling's arguments, the lack of reality in them. And anyone who remembers well will know that I first characterized this emptiness and abstractness, this insubstantiality, this empty verbiage, and then added: Anyone who indulges in empty abstractions and empty verbiage is then compelled, when he encounters something of substantial content, to resort to untruth. That was the context. And at that time, it was the context that was essential. And what has been made of it now? It would be interesting to hear what a man who has been accused of suffering from emptiness, from intellectual and spiritual shortness of breath, has to say in his defense. But the count has the following to say in his journal “The Way to Perfection,” “Communications from the Society for Free Philosophy,” “School of Wisdom.” He says, and he means me, that he finds my wisdom bloodless, abstract and empty and claims that he can always say in advance what people of my ilk might bring forward; the essence of my philosophy is “spiritual shortness of breath, an inner gasping for air,” and I “don't have a clue about anthroposophy, not even a blue one.” So you see, the way I have given this characteristic characterizes Count Keyserling himself. But in this respect he is really only an example. It is precisely that which is contained in the present spiritual life as the main tone that ultimately leads back to such things.

The development of abstract intellectual life in recent centuries has indeed given us the opportunity to see outstanding scholars in various fields who, when it comes down to it, are unable to formulate a single correct and meaningful thought. A good example of this is the excellent biologist Oscar Hertwig from the University of Berlin. When you read his book criticizing Darwinism, you cannot help but say: This is a person who must be considered completely significant in his field. And the book 'The Development of Organisms', it is said, is a good book. But one needs nothing to write such a good book as to be immersed in the mechanism of thoughtless experimental research, to be diligent, to be promoted a little - he was indeed pushed into a certain clique as a Haeckel student - and can be a very important person there if the circumstances are favorable. He is so important that he was even chosen to add something to the wisdom of the former German Emperor Wilhelm II in Berlin, and he was allowed to present him with particularly sensational findings from research into lower organisms! Now, soon after the book on Darwinism by Hertwig was published, which is an excellent book in its field, Hertwig also published a book on social issues. This is nothing more than a compilation of pure nonsense, line after line. Why? Well, you see, with the book 'The Becoming of Organisms' you didn't need to think. One was completely immersed in the mechanism of modern scientific endeavor. But to make a sound judgment in the social sphere, it is necessary to begin thinking for oneself. So it turned out that the great scholar cannot think in the simplest, most primitive way.

We have to grasp the fact that we live in a so-called scientific and intellectual life that can basically be conducted to the exclusion of any real independent thinking. And as such a spiritual life became more and more prevalent, real thinking, meaningful, substantial thinking, increasingly disappeared.

And then we experienced the strange phenomenon that people wanted to test children's abilities with experimental psychology, by incorporating some nonsense words into their memory in order to determine this memory, or similar gimmicks that are passed off as “exactly scientific”. These are even more rampant in America than in Europe, but they have already come up quite high in Germany. By introducing this into school life, it means nothing more than that we have so strongly emphasized the human being out of social life that the teacher no longer has a relationship with the child, that he no longer comes from the child, but that he has to determine through apparatus what the person in question is capable of. And if Bolshevism continues in Russia for a long time, this method will perhaps be used in Russia to a very considerable extent instead of examinations. Children will be tested like machines to see if they are good for anything in life. This is one of Lunacharsky's ideals.

These things must be characterized impartially, then perhaps, little by little, we will evoke in the people of the present day a feeling that so palpably shows how we need a renewal, a fertilization of intellectual life, and how this renewal, this fertilization, can take place on the basis of the isolation of the intellectual from the other social elements. We must try to illustrate these things in terms of contemporary phenomena, which we present in all their starkness.