The Rudolf Steiner Archive

Dear Attendees!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

by Marie Steiner

The wealth of ideas and spiritual treasure bestowed upon us by Rudolf Steiner in his lectures often makes it difficult to arrange certain series of lectures under one category and heading. They are like concentrated foci of energy from which sparks shoot out in every direction, lighting up the near and the far, piercing their way to the primal beginnings and again into infinitudes of space and time—then giving sharp definition to details which may seem unessential but are of great symptomatic importance. Out of the cumulative mass of details the necessities of storm-charged destiny arise but also a sustaining power of the Spirit. We discern the play of forces which preceded the sufferings of our present time, discharged itself with unparalleled fury in the world war and its aftermath and will burst out in tempests yet to come. We understand why this had to be, what failings will be forgiven, what demands made of us. A great and impressive tableau of history unrolls from the precision given to details otherwise ignored and from the vast cosmic-human background against which the life of man stands out in bold relief.

These vistas of primordial cosmic happenings, of ages of grey antiquity in human history which, nevertheless, shed clearest light upon our present time, are opened up with particular vividness in the lectures given to members of the Anthroposophical Society—with certain interruptions, but in constantly recurring rhythm—in places where Rudolf Steiner made his home between continual travelling: Berlin and Dornach. The lectures were given in order that the conscience of a small group of human beings at least might be made alive to the tasks of the time, to the vital significance of the hour in which we were living before the world war, and are still living today.

Rudolf Steiner spoke gravely and impressively, like the voice of destiny itself, like the awakened human conscience, linking his arguments with factual details in every sphere. And then, when in the world outside, all supports hitherto thought secure tottered for every eye to see, as the forces burst upon one another with elemental might, it was he who tried ever and again to formulate the thoughts of deliverance and recovery without which chaos cannot be overcome. Although an unfledged humanity could not understand this voice, a light must somehow be brought into the chaos—even though it might reach only a small group of immature, but eager-hearted people. An attempt had also to be made to penetrate here and there into the field of concrete, practical life. To be sure, the representatives of this “practical side of life” as they are pleased to call it, scornfully and with vicious measures of sabotage, rejected everything that seemed to them so remote from reality in that it spoke of spiritual worlds. Yet the living thought has the power to outlast the moment and to rise up again in a new form. Its duty is to work even where there is no prospect of success; in all its purity it has to find its way to souls who, through constant testing, gradually become open to receive it. Out of the concrete realities of existence from which his spiritual vision was never willing to withdraw, Rudolf Steiner created a science of knowledge embracing every domain of life and able to pour vitalising, creative impulses into the manifold branches of science and art, philosophy and religious activity.

To live through this was, and remains, an intense upliftment, like climbing up steep mountain crests in snow-cleansed, sun-pierced air. Deep, refreshing breaths can be drawn in this region of the higher cosmic realities which imbue human life with meaning and even now shape the picture of destiny in those future times, when, out of a quickened consciousness, thought will encompass higher and higher spheres of existence.

Treasures of the Spirit of well-nigh frightening brilliance have been bequeathed to us, demonstrating through their very existence that the might of the Dark Age, of Kaliyuga, has been broken and conquered. True, the darkness is within us still, but the Light is there and may not be withheld—not even from a humanity living in shadow.

The Light—of which Rudolf Steiner says that it is the Christ Impulse—had first to prepare and shape the vessel of human consciousness into which it can flow; it will bring to men that re-awakening by which alone they can wrest themselves from downfall.

Neither the powers of the Sentient Soul, nor the fervent passion of religious experience known to the Middle Ages, to the saints and the mystics along the path of the Christian Initiation, are competent to overcome the obstructions brought by the age of rationalism. But wise Providence, guide and leader of human existence, inaugurated, even before the dawn of the modern age, a second path of Christian Initiation along which souls were gradually to be made ready for the demands of a later future.

The call of this, the Christian-Rosicrucian path, went out above all to the powers of the Consciousness Soul, the Spiritual Soul. Hence its mission was also to establish the human being firmly within the personality, to allow him to experience to the full the significance of the single life. Through study, through imagination and contemplation, it led the human being out into the macrocosm—which was discovered again, in image, within his own being. But the full development of the forces of the personality, whereby the “ I ” could be led to conscious realisation of the Spirit, made it necessary that the knowledge of repeated earth-lives should, to begin with, be hidden for a time from the portion of humanity destined to unfold these forces of personality.

What the new age needs is not a return to the past through a revival of the methods of Yoga, nor of the Gnostic or Rosicrucian paths in the form in which they served the spiritual weal of men in days gone by. In accordance with the demands of the modern age, a new impulse must be given to the rigorous path of Rosicrucian knowledge which in its true form has nothing whatever to do with the charlatanry that has usurped its name—a new impulse, in the form of the revelation of the great truths of Reincarnation and Karma.

Until the task of proclaiming these truths devolved upon Rudolf Steiner, Rosicrucianism concealed them, kept silence about them. But it came about that with the passage of the centuries, these truths were able to flash into the consciousness of minds in Europe, as the result of rigorous and strenuous ways of thought, and as a fruit of knowledge born of alert reason; as a concern, too, of mankind, through which the evolution of human history receives meaning and significance, not as a concern of the single individual whose goal, as in Buddhism, is liberation from the wheel of rebirth. We need only mention the names of Goethe and Lessing.

The salvation of the individuality passing onwards and unfolding through the recurrent earthly lives, the rebirth of the Divine “ I ” in man—this is the deed wrought by Christ, and with the stupendous power of knowledge at his command Rudolf Steiner brought this deed ever and again before our eyes.

When after long reluctance he had made up his mind to comply with the request of German Theosophists to lead their work, he was able to accept the proposal because of the avowed task of the Theosophical Society: to establish knowledge of Reincarnation and Karma in the world. The lectures leading to the request that he should become the leader of this Movement in Germany were those on Mysticism at the Dawn of Modern Spiritual Life, and Christianity as Mystical Fact. Therewith, the impulse which he was to bring to the Movement had been clearly indicated, and he was assured of absolute freedom to teach as he would. He himself acted in line with the spirit of true occultists of all ages who make a link with the store of spiritual knowledge already existing in order to preserve its life and lead it forward. He still saw hope of being able, through the new impulse, to rescue the Theosophical Society, too, from lapsing into the rigidity of dogma, to imbue it with fresh forces and enrich its very defective understanding of the Mysteries of Christianity.

Without overthrowing anything at all, gradually laying stone upon stone, he created the basis for this understanding. For the new insight must be acquired by the listeners only through knowledge consciously put to the test of reason. And so, to begin with, he adopted the terminology current among the Theosophists, gradually widening the ideas and giving them life so that they might conform to the more alert consciousness of the modern mind. The basis once created, wider and wider perspectives could be opened out, until, from the side of the super-sensible, there broke the light which reveals the mission of the earth and the tasks of mankind.

Not only from the point of view of their content, but also from that of chronology, the opportunity of studying every such series of lectures given by Rudolf Steiner seems to us to be of great importance for newcomers to Spiritual Science, for only so is it possible to realise the living, organic growth of the work. Remarks interpolated here and there in the lectures about contemporary happenings seeming to have little bearing at a later time, have such moral and educational value that they are of lasting significance.

There can be no concealment of the firm stand Rudolf Steiner was compelled to take against the attempts that were clouding objective truth and corrupting the Theosophical Society by the introduction of pet projects and personal ambitions. The warnings given in this connection may not always be understood by the reader today. In the main they were connected with the occult despotism—for so indeed it may be called—which took the form of the announcement of the coming of a World-Saviour in the flesh—to whom they dared to give the name of Christ. The Indian boy Krishnamurti was chosen for this role and the “Order of the Star in the East” founded with a flourish of trumpets. The Theosophical Society was expected to place itself in the service of this new aim. By these crude means it was hoped to win souls who were open to listen to the explanations of Christian Esotericism given by Rudolf Steiner. But a campaign, fought with all the arms of calumny, was launched against him. The International Theosophical Congress which was to have been held in Genoa in the year 1911 and in which Rudolf Steiner was to have given two lectures on “Buddhism in the twentieth century” and “Christ in the twentieth century,” was cancelled at the last minute for inadequate reasons—but in reality because of fear that the influence of Dr. Steiner's words might be too strong. In the lectures that year, many references had to be made to this affair which to very many people was absolutely incomprehensible.

It had become necessary to make it clear that methods so grievously degrading the level of the Theosophical Society, could not be countenanced. Dr. Steiner stated this firmly, but with pain, and pouring his very heart's blood into the words, he spoke repeatedly of his one great wish—that the Society led by him might not succumb to the failings into which occult societies so easily lapse when they fall short of the demands of strict truthfulness and drift into vanity and ambition.

The words should live like cleansing flames in the souls of those who represent his work and over and over again arise before them as an exhortation and warning.

The lectures given in Berlin in the year 1912, contain many references to the struggles Rudolf Steiner was obliged to face in order that in spite of hidden attacks, the spirit of such a Movement might be rescued in its purity, for Spiritual Science. The lapse in the Theosophical Society made it necessary to lay sharp emphasis upon the autonomy of the anthroposophical work in Middle Europe vis-à-vis the Anglo-Indian Theosophical Society, and during the last days of December, 1912, the “Anthroposophical League (Bund)” was officially founded. The rhythms of the years recall such days vividly to the memory.

Thirty years ago, on the 20th October, 1902, in Berlin, Rudolf Steiner gave his first lecture on Anthroposophy, and on the 21st translated into German the theosophical lecture delivered by Annie Besant who at that time had not come under the sway of the unhealthy influences to which she afterwards fell victim. Twenty years ago, Rudolf Steiner was obliged to protect the anthroposophical Movement inaugurated by him from the despotic attacks going out from Adyar, and to speak the words which are like a heritage left by the lectures and are now being made available to us once again as a memorial of those days. They rang out in power during the last days of December of that same year, in Cologne, when in Rudolf Steiner's lectures on The Bhagavad Gita and the Epistles of St. Paul, the purest oriental wisdom was presented to the listeners with unprecedented grandeur, in the light of Christian knowledge.

Again his concluding words were an impressive appeal for self-knowledge and humility in those belonging to the Movement inaugurated by him. But the opposing powers were not slumbering. Ten years ago, on New Year's night, 1922-23, the Goetheanum was in flames. Only the Group, sculptured in wood, portraying the Representative of Humanity between the vanquished Adversaries, was saved. We are hoping that by Christmas of this year, this Group will stand in a space worthy of it, in the new Goetheanum. There is a moving description of the Representative of Humanity, of the Christ Figure, at the end of one of the lectures of 1912, when there was no thought—even of the possibility—of its execution in sculpture. It came before us then in words, and now it stands before our eyes as a work of Art.

Marie Steiner
December, 1932.

Those who have worked their way through this essay might be interested in studying an extended passage of Max Dessoir's writing. The first quotation is the opening paragraph of his preface to the first edition of Beyond the Soul (Vom Jenseits der Seele), 1917. It is indicative of the “scientific” and human level of the whole book:

For a long time now, German science has exercised the most extreme restraint with respect to the field that we are to deal with here. And not without good reason. Serious, life-filling research tends to be conservative in its approach, especially when conducted within a working community—as in universities—whereas the amateur science [Liebhaberwissenschaft] of isolated individuals throws itself light-heartedly into the arms of what is new or striking. The scientific sense for cleanliness avoids contact with that murky circle in which charlatans and falsifiers, half-crazy females, and pretentious scatterbrains do their thing. It seems to us beneath our dignity, repugnant, time-consuming, and useless to bother ourselves at all about the mischief of spiritists and faith-healers, the fantasies of the theosophists, and the silly hair-splitting of modern cabalists.

The following quotation is from the preface of the second edition of Max Dessoir's Beyond the Soul, 1920. It is his response to Rudolf Steiner's essay and provides a classic study of the tactics necessary to someone who is careless about the truth:

...In the chapter on anthroposophy, to be sure, I have made no changes, because Herr Dr. Steiner, in his recently published book Riddles of the Soul, zeros in on my word choice; so everything better remain as it was. With the second part of the Steinerian book the fact of the matter is namely: Steiner escapes from any factual discussion by asserting that what I presented has nothing at all to do with his views, that I read his books incompletely and superficially, and that my version of his work was almost entirely a distortion and falsification. In order to show this, for seventy pages he conducts “a little bit of philology.” Oh, if only it were good philology! But it is all pettifoggery, hair-splitting, and much worse, intended to divert attention from the main points. Mr. Steiner says that he regrets being forced to do what he does, and I am happy to believe that he did not feel so well as he was doing it. I am absolutely unable to express how heavily it weighs upon me to enter into this kind of conflict. For, the only real point at issue, little is gained; Steiner's adherents will probably hear little about my refutation, or if they do, will remain true to their master's watchword; what is more, I am at a disadvantage since I do not have seventy pages at my disposal. Nevertheless I would like to respond, in order to spare the friends of my book any doubts they may have.

Let us begin with the first page that is dealt with in more detail, page 254. Here my assailant nails a word that seems suitable to him for proving the low degree of my scientific exactitude. There I call The Philosophy of Spiritual Activity Steiner's “first” work (Erstling). “The truth is that my literary activity begins with my introductions to Goethe's natural-scientific works.” Sure. It is only that, with a really amazing coolness, Steiner is silent on the fact that I communicate this same “truth” on the third and fourth lines of my book, to the effect, namely, that I am speaking of a “first” work relative to theosophy—as the context in which this word appears also shows clearly.

To the factual statements about that book is added then: “Look and see whether there is anything in The Philosophy of Spiritual Activity that could be synthesized into such monstrously trivial statements.” I looked it up and found the following:

Steiner: “We have, it is true, torn ourselves away from nature; but we must nevertheless have taken something over with us into our own being... We can find nature outside us only when we first know it within us. What is akin to it in our own inner being will be our guide. Thus our course is sketched out for us.” [end of chapter 2.] and further: There is a reason why we can know thinking “more directly and more intimately than any other process of the world. Just because we bring it forth ourselves, we know the characteristics of its course... What is impossible with respect to nature, namely, creating before knowing, we do accomplish with respect to thinking.” [Chapter 3.]

My (Dessoir's) paraphrase: In Steiner's The Philosophy of Spiritual Activity it is stated “that man has taken over into himself something from nature, and therefore, through knowledge of his own being, can solve the riddle of nature; that, in thinking, a creative activity precedes knowing, whereas we are not involved in the coming about of nature and so are dependent on knowing it subsequently.”

Does that suffice? In the last sentence, left out here,¹ of my quote from my footnote on page 254—which, as an almost verbatim paraphrase, Steiner cannot easily deny—Steiner censures the little word “merely,” even though it only means that his teachings on intuition in that first theosophical work have not yet been fully unfolded. Furthermore, with very evil fallout, he turns against my sentence on page 255: “When our soul powers are enhanced ... the ‘I’ in its perception of colors and sounds, can even exclude the mediation of the body from this experience." The basis for this—not the whole basis, to be sure—was a passage in the book Riddles of Philosophy, whose “nonuse” is held up to me by Steiner. There one can read: “And a true knowledge of our ordinary soul life does present itself as one of our first experiences when this new spiritual life has been attained. In reality, even our ordinary soul life is not produced by the body, but rather runs its course outside the body. When I see a color, when I hear a sound, I do not experience the color or sound as resulting from my body; rather, as a self-conscious ‘I,’ I am connected outside of my body with the color or sound. The task of the body is to function as a kind of mirror... The human body is not a producer of perceptions, nor of any soul life; it is an apparatus for reflecting what takes place in a soul-spiritual way outside of the body.”

On that same page 255 I called the cross a symbol for “annihilated lower drives,” whereas Steiner called it a symbol for the “annihilated lower element of our drives.” Steiner takes this deviation—which, please note, does not occur in a direct quotation or anything—as cause for highly excited reproaches and ends with the statement: “Only with respect to these misrepresentations is Dessoir's critique possible.” That is pretty strong medicine, for—I did not mount any critique at all on this point! Bewildered by this, one must ask oneself: Can blindness really go this far?

On page 257 Steiner discovers another example of that superficial and distorted reportage for which he chastises me in front of the "1 through 4,000" readers of his first edition. He, Steiner, is not explaining the objective fact of a limb's so-called “going to sleep” as resulting from the separation of the etheric body. “Only if one takes my formulations the way they are given can one form an opinion as to the significance of my statements...” We had best keep quiet about the significance of the statement, but how do matters stand relative to the formulation? Here it is: “During our life between birth and death a separation of the etheric body occurs only as an exception and only for a short while. For example, if someone puts pressure on a limb, a part of his etheric body can separate from the physical. We say of a limb where this has occurred that it has ‘gone to sleep.’ And the strange sensation that one feels then results from the separation of the etheric body. (Of course, a materialistic way of picturing things can also deny here the invisible element present in the visible, and state that this all results only from the physical disturbance caused by the pressure.) In a case like this, clairvoyant observation can see how the corresponding part of the etheric body extends out from the physical.” (Occult Science, an Outline) I really do not know how it could be an objective blunder, and possibly even a moral failing, for me to have been so bold as to assert that we others “do not wish, with Steiner, to ‘explain’ the ‘going to sleep’ of a leg through the separation of the etheric body from the physical body.”

After all this, I am almost happy to admit that Steiner, in an objection to page 258 of my book, is correct to some extent. I say there that “through” the spiritual beings assumed by Steiner processes of nutrition and excretion supposedly “developed” on Saturn, whereas I should have expressed myself as Steiner demands, more exactly—and also more in detail, to be sure, than is possible in a brief summary—to the effect that through an “interaction” in the etheric body of that entity “an activity arises that now in its turn leads to the nutritional and excretory processes of the primal planetary form.” I emphatically request the reader to extend my sentence accordingly, and furthermore I beg him most urgently to take note of the fact that he does not after all live in the sixth “Post-Atlantean cultural epoch,” but in the fifth. For my part, however, he can believe that I am not particularly upset about my mistaken number, because for me these Post-Atlantean periods and those nutritional processes in the primal planetary form are just humbug.

I now come to page 260. The focal point is the passage “Especially a person who himself teaches wisdom...” Steiner wishes to show what "Dessoir does by retailoring the relevant passage of my book for his readers." The "relevant" German is pitiful and its coarseness certainly obvious (curious, in what tones anthroposophical refinement lets itself be heard). Nevertheless we must linger here for a moment. Before the sentence that I quoted verbatim, there was, among other things, the following: a person who is joined by adherents, “through genuine self-knowledge, can easily become aware that precisely the fact that he has found adherents gives him the feeling that what he has to say does not originate from him.” Several general thoughts follow, among them the ones I cite, and then Steiner continues: “Socrates experienced something like this... Many efforts have been made to explain this ‘daimon’ of Socrates. But one can explain it only if one wishes to give oneself over to the thought that Socrates was able to feel something like what is described in the above discussion.” These presentations are supposedly reinterpreted in a malicious way in my book. Let us listen to Mr. Steiner: “Where I speak of Socrates, he twists the matter to seem that I am speaking about myself by stating, ‘as Mr. Rudolf Steiner confesses’ and even putting my name in italics. What are we dealing with here? With nothing less, in fact, than an objective untruth. I leave it up to any fair thinker to form a judgment about a critic who employs such means.” Easy does it, Herr Dr. Steiner! Is it merely Socrates who is supposed to have experienced “something like” what is described in the “above” discussion, and is the “above” description a “genuine self-knowledge”? Are you perhaps denying that what is expressed here as a general case and later applied to Socrates stems from your own experience? Or do you yourself have no connection with the “spiritual powers from higher worlds”; does everything you recount to your gullible anthroposophists spring from your "ordinary consciousness"? And one more thing, Herr Dr. Steiner: do you really believe that my italicizing of your name is wicked of me? A man like yourself, who has published several thousand pages in your life, must have noticed that in my book, every time a writer's name appears on a page for the first time it is italicized.

Let that be enough. It fills me with burning shame that I could not simply remain silent about accusations that basically touch upon human integrity. As I wrote the pathological history of idealism in the last chapters of my book, I had no inkling that the historian would again be compelled to act as doctor. My personal experiences were more of a sort to make me tired and sad. I had learned to know occult researchers whose weakness in thinking was regarded as a power of inner enlightenment; I had to experience that valuable people are enticed by the empty will-o-the-wisp of spiritism or of faith-healing. Nevertheless, my aim was to take hold of all this with a cautious hand. The most important point, it seemed to me, would be to show that such strange contemporaries are not breathing in the morning air, but rather are surrounded by the thick fumes of the most ancient past. If this effort succeeds, then perhaps the living forces, hidden even here, of the purer forms of idealism could be won, just as from the phenomenological realm something can be rescued for science. Have I been too optimistic? I believe not. For ultimately:

Every flame is upward striving,
Every spirit kindles others,
Through the smoke of words is climbing
Mankind into azure silence.

Berlin, January 1918
M.D.

• 1. Why?! Please see page 47f. of this book! Ed.

[ 1 ] When the ordinary consciousness sets Will in action there is a part of the astral organism at work which is more loosely connected with the physical organism than the part which corresponds with feeling. And already this part of the astral organism corresponding with feeling is more loosely connected with the physical organism than is the part corresponding with thinking. At the same time we have in the astral organism of the will the true nature of the Ego. While something psychic-spiritual which is continually active in the rhythmical part of the physical organism corresponds with feeling, the will-part of the soul continually permeates the metabolic organism and the organization of the limbs. But it is only actively connected with these parts of the human body while in the act of volition.

[ 2 ] The connection between the thinking part of the soul and the head-organization is a surrender of the psychic-spiritual to the physical. The connection between the feeling soul with the rhythmical organization is an alternate surrender and drawing-back. But the connection of the will-part to the physical is at first felt to be something unconsciously psychic. It is an unconscious longing for the physical and etheric event. This will-part is by its own nature prevented from being resolved into physical activity. It stands back from it and remains psycho-spiritually alive. Only when the thinking part of the soul extends its activity into the metabolic and limb-organization, the will-part is stimulated to surrender itself to the physical and etheric organization and to be active in it. [ 3 ] The thinking part of the soul is founded on a destructive activity of the physical organism. During the making of thoughts this destruction extends only to the head-organization. When the will ordains something the destructive activity of metabolism and of the limb-organization takes charge. The thought-activity flows into the organization of trunk and limbs, where a corresponding destructive activity of the physical organism takes place. This stimulates the will-part of the soul to oppose this destruction with a re-building and the dissolving organic activity with a constructive one.

[ 4 ] Thus life and death are warring together in the human being. In thought is manifest an ever dying activity while will stands for something life-awakening, life-giving.

[ 5 ] Those exercises of the soul which are undertaken as exercises of the will, aiming at supernatural vision, are successful only when they become an experience of pain. The man who succeeds in raising his will to a higher level of energy will feel sorrow. In former epochs of the development of mankind this pain was directly occasioned by ascetic practices. They reduced the body to a state which made it difficult for the soul to absorb herself in it. This caused the will-part of the soul to break away from the body and to be stimulated to independent experiences of the spiritual world. [ 6 ] This kind of practice is no longer suitable to the human organization which has reached the present moment of earthly development. The human organism is now so constituted that the presentation of the ego-development in it would be disturbed if we went back to the old ascetic practices.

At present we must do the opposite. The soul exercises now wanted to set free the will-part of the soul from the body have been characterized in the previous studies. They do not achieve the strengthening of this soul part from the direction of the body, but from the direction of the soul. They strengthen the soul and spiritual part of man and leave the physical part untouched.

[ 7 ] Our ordinary consciousness makes us realize already how the experience of sorrow is connected with the development of psychic experience. Whoever has gained any kind of supernatural knowledge will say: The happy, joy-giving events of my life I owe to fate; but my really true knowledge of life I owe to my bitter and sorrowful experiences.

[ 8 ] If the will-part of the soul has to be strengthened as is necessary for the attainment of ‘Intuitive cognition’ we must first strengthen the desire which in ordinary human life is satisfied through the physical organism. This is done by the exercises described. If this desire becomes so strong that the physical organism in its earthly form cannot be a foundation for it, then the experience of the will-part of the soul enters into the spiritual world and intuitive vision is attained. And then in this vision the spiritual-eternal part of the soul grows conscious of itself. Just as the consciousness living inside the body realizes the body in itself, so spiritual consciousness realizes the content of a spiritual world.

[ 9 ] In the alternating processes of destruction and construction of the human organization, as they are manifested in the thinking, feeling and willing organization of mankind, we must recognize the more or less normal course of human life on earth. It differs in childhood from that of the grown-up man. The task of the true pedagogue is a perception of the effect of the destructive and constructive activities in childhood and of the influence of education and tuition upon them.

A true educational science can only arise from the supernaturally-derived knowledge of the human nature complete in its physical, psychic and spiritual being. A knowledge keeping solely within the limits of what is attainable to natural science cannot be called a foundation of a true educational science.

[ 10 ] In illness the more or less normal course of the inter-relation between the constructive and destructive elements is disturbed throughout the whole organization—or in separate organs. We get there an overbalancing either of construction in a prolific life or of destruction in shifting forms of single organs or processes. What exactly happens in this case can only be seen in the whole by someone who has complete knowledge of the human organization, according to its physical, etheric and astral organism, as well as to the nature of the ego; and the cure can be found only by means of such knowledge. For in the realms of the outer world are to be found mineral and herbal things in which constructive knowledge recognizes forces which counteract certain kinds of too strongly stimulating. or too actively lowering forces in the organism. In the same way such a counteraction can be found in certain functions of the organism itself, which in a state of health are not applied or stimulated. A genuine medical knowledge, a real Pathology and Therapy can be built up only on a knowledge of the human being which embraces spirit, soul and body, a knowledge, moreover, which knows how to value the products of Imagination, Inspiration and Intuition. The demand for such a medical science is to-day called childish, because we view everything from the ground of a physical science. From this point of view this is quite intelligible, because according to it one has not the least idea how much more is a complete knowledge of the human being than mere knowledge of the human body. We can genuinely say that Anthroposophy is aware of the objections of its opponents and knows how to appreciate them. But just for this reason we also know how difficult it is to convince these opponents.

[ 11 ] The will part of the soul experiences also what passes in the feeling parts, unconsciously as far as the ordinary life of the soul is concerned; but in the depths of man's organization it occurs as a combination of facts. The evaluation of human earth-activity completed through feeling and will is there transformed into an effort to contrast in further experiences a more worthy deed with a less worthy one. The whole moral quality of the man is unconsciously experienced; and from this experience is formed a kind of spiritual-psychic being which during life on earth grows up in the unconscious region of the human being. This spiritual-psychic being represents whatever earthly life produces as a desirable objective, unattainable however by man in earthly life, because his physical and etheric organism with their forms predestined from former earth life, make it impossible. Therefore man strives through this spiritual-psychic being or nature to form another physical and etheric organism, through which the moral results of the earth-life can be transformed in the subsequent existence.

[ 12 ] This new form can be achieved only if man carries with him this spiritual-psychic nature through the gates of death into the supernatural world.

[ 13 ] Immediately after death the psychic-spiritual man retains for a short time the etheric organism. In his consciousness at this point he has no more than an indication of the moral value which has unconsciously arisen during earth-life in the spiritual and psychic part of him. For man is there completely pre-occupied with the vision of the etheric cosmos. In the following longer state of experience (which I have called the Soul-world in my Theosophy) a clear consciousness of this moral valuation is actually present, but not yet the strength to begin working at the construction of the spirit-cell which is to be a future physical earth-organism. Man then still has a tendency to look back at his earthly life because of his moral qualities acquired there. After a certain time man can find the transition to a state of experience in which the tendency is no longer there. (In my Theosophy I have called the region here traversed by man the real domain of the spirit.) From the point of view of the supernatural thought-content to which man attains—after death—in the cosmic consciousness—we might say: For a short while after death man lives turned towards the earth and is permeated with those spiritual activities which have their outward reflection in the physical phenomena of the moon. Outwardly he has been separated from the earth, but he is indirectly connected with it through a spiritual-psychic content. Everything of world-spiritual value that man during his presence on earth has developed into a real value in his astral organism (or as expressed above: in the unconscious region of his soul-life according to feeling and willing), all this is permeated by the spiritual moon-activities already described. This moral being with its spiritual quality is related by content with the spiritual moon-activities, and it is they which hold man bound to earth. But for the development of the spirit-cell for the future physical organism he must also sever himself psycho-spiritually from the earth. This he can only do by cutting himself loose at the same time from the region of the moon-activities. There he must leave behind that moral quality-being with which he is related. For the working for the future physical organism in conjunction with the spiritual beings of the supernatural world must take place unhampered by that quality-being.

[ 14 ] Man cannot obtain this severance from the region of the spiritual moon-activities through his own psycho-spiritual powers. But it has to be done nevertheless.

[ 15 ] Before the mystery of Golgotha the science of initiation could speak to man as follows: At a certain period of existence after death, human experience has to be withdrawn from the lunar sphere which keeps man within the region of planetary life. Man cannot himself bring about this withdrawal. Here it is that the being, whose physical reflection is the sun, comes to man's aid, and guides him into the sphere of pure spirit in which he, himself and not the spiritual moon beings are active. Man then experiences a stellar existence in such a way as to view the spiritual patterns of the fixed star constellations from the farther side, as it were; from the periphery of the cosmos. This vision is non-spatial even though the stars are made visible to him. With the powers now permeating man his ability to form the spirit-cell of physical organism out of the cosmos grows. The divine in him brings forth the divine. Once the spirit-cell has ripened, its descent to earth begins. Man enters once more into the lunar sphere and finds there the being of moral-spiritual quality which he left behind at his entry into the pure stellar existence; he adds it to his psychic-spiritual being to make it the foundation of his destined future life on earth.

[ 16 ] The Initiation-science of Christianity finds something else. In the absorption of the strength accruing to the soul through the contemplative and active sympathy with the earthly life of Christ and the Mystery of Golgotha, man gains, already while still on earth and not aided only by the solar-being after death, the faculty of withdrawing from the lunar activities at a certain point after his earthly existence, and of entering into the pure stellar sphere. This faculty is the spiritual counterpart, experienced after death, of the freedom brought about in earthly life by the ego-consciousness. Man then takes over in the period between death and re-birth his moral-spiritual quality-being, left behind in the lunar sphere, as the designer of his fate which he can thus experience in freedom in his new existence on earth. He also carries within him in freedom the earthly after-effect of his god-filled existence between death and rebirth as religious consciousness.

[ 17 ] A modern science of Initiation can recognize this and can see the activity of the Christ in human existence. It adds to a living Philosophy and to a Cosmology which recognizes also the spirit cosmos, a religious knowledge which recognizes the Christ as the mediator of a renewed religious consciousness and as the leader of the world in freedom.

[ 18 ] In these studies I have not been able to do more than sketch a possible beginning of a Philosophy, a Cosmology and a Religious Cognition. Much more would have to be said if the sketch were to be converted into a coloured picture with all its colours.

When people pay attention to the interests of their soul, then the question to which our today's reflection is dedicated - the question of life and death - is certainly a recognized important and meaningful one, and the answer to this question must meet deep needs of the human soul life. Nevertheless, it is difficult to talk about such things in our present time, because it is difficult to strike a chord in the soul, because the concepts, views and ideas that our time has gained from seemingly established scientific concepts contradict what must be said from spiritual scientific research; and it is difficult to bring an unbiased approach to bear on these scientific concepts.

Now it could be that those who are trying to answer these questions today should be met with an unbiased approach, but one only has to pay attention to what is presented to us in the [contemporary scientific] literature and one will recognize how little healthy thinking, how few healthy concepts there are and have a broad audience.

The concept of “life” - let us take the “physiology” of one of the greatest naturalists of modern times, Huxley: here we have an exemplary book in terms of [contemporary] science, and in this book we find an examination of the concept of life. First, he talks about humans, and it is said that human life depends on the brain, lungs and heart, and if any of these elements do not function properly, then life is endangered. And then a curious transition is made. It is said that if you can, so to speak, deprive a person of his brain but artificially maintain the lungs and heart in operation, then life will continue. From a certain point of view, which is so popular today, this of course makes sense, but from the point of view of a world view that encompasses the whole human being, it does not make the slightest sense, because one would be grateful for a life that is not aware of the things one experiences. The true death occurs where this consciousness ends. Thus, the greatest naturalist of the present day is not at all capable of grasping the concept of “life” in the right way.

[In today's science, it is extremely easy to define life.] It is thought that life is the same in humans, animals and plants – everything is mixed up, while we should be clear about the fact that we have to consider each being in relation to this question at its [own level]. The most essential thing in the world view is ignored, because Huxley has become accustomed to looking at that in man which is most indifferent to human life and nature: the material of the body. And so he quotes Hamlet's saying quite seriously - and it is fitting for Hamlet, in his melancholy mood, to make such a statement and, looking at the material of the body, to pursue this material after the great Caesar has died, and to say:

The great Caesar, dead and turned to clay.
Might well plug a hole from the raw north;
Oh that the earth, to which the world has trembled,
Might wall up a wall against wind and weather.

And Huxley points to an [imaginable] “Negro slave Caesar” or a “chained dog Caesar” and says: Even in this slave or in this dog could be the atoms of the great Caesar. In this way, one pursues that which is most indifferent to human life, and is not aware that one should pursue that which shapes the substance in such a way that it conforms to humanity. Physics will soon abandon these fantasies about atoms – radium research has already shown that atoms disintegrate in the hands of man.

So you see: even at the heights of knowledge, one does not form any real concepts about what life and death are. But science is at an important turning point today, and those who do not work from buzzwords, but rather approach scientific knowledge and observations, see that science is already beginning to grasp the spirit.

It cannot grasp the concept, and perhaps it cannot do so because it has no proper concept of life. The biologist Weismann says: Only the experience that death occurs can convince of the same; one cannot grasp it from life itself. There is talk of the immortality of single-celled organisms. It is said that one such organism splits into two, continues to live as two, and this goes on and on. One speaks of a multiplication in number, and these innumerable beings are the same as the first being. One cannot speak of death in this case. But the fact that Weismann sought a definition of death in this way has led to a calamity, which is characteristic of the way it is understood in the present day and which has turned out strangely. He says that the essence of death is that a corpse is present. Contemporary natural science is only able to speak of life when it is no longer there, and wants to recognize the relationship between life and death by the dead, by the corpse. Verworn, Haeckel's student, says that the individual living beings die, but that life persists. They have resorted to all sorts of things to solve the riddle of life and death, but the confusion has only grown.

Spiritual science does not have it so convenient to be able to throw everything together - [end of transcript; continued after second transcript].

First of all, it should be noted that death in plants and animals is quite different from that in humans. It is a characteristic phenomenon of many plants that they die when they produce a new being; at the moment of fertilization, they pass over into a different form of existence. Until that moment, they were permeated by the etheric body. It is not difficult to make fun of such things; however, it has been shown time and again that anyone who is deeply involved in observing life phenomena cannot get by without the assumption of the etheric or life body. The dying off and withering is based on the fact that the plant follows the physical and chemical laws. Through the etheric body, the plant is withdrawn from the effect of the physical and chemical laws. Where does what is taken from the plant go? It passes over into the new plant; it is the stream of life that passes through the ranks of plants. Even more lives in the animal than the etheric body: in order for consciousness to arise in it, it is provided with an astral body, which is the builder of the organs of consciousness. — In humans, the I is added.

The difference between animals and humans can easily be determined; one must not look for the differences where they are not. The desire to completely erase the difference, as materialistic monism is doing now, did not yet exist in the last century. But the difference in the lower jaw was emphasized with pathos - [so] Kant. Goethe did not like this approach because he was able to think spiritually. He studied anatomy and physiology in Jena and proved that it was nonsense to claim this difference. He demonstrated the small ankle bone, [the premaxillary bone], also in humans, and showed that it was only fused. These things will be dealt with in more detail in the forthcoming booklet on anthroposophy. We should look for the difference in the spiritual realm. In animals, the scope of their abilities is tied to their organs and to what they inherit through birth. In humans, various activities remain open, for which they must first develop the ability. Animals have certain abilities that humans must first acquire through intellectual effort. The monkey has a predetermined equilibrium; humans must first learn to walk and stand. Equilibrium is not innate in them; only the mind gradually works on it. Goethe says:

The ancients said that animals are taught by their organs; I would add that human beings are likewise taught by their organs, but they have the advantage of being able to teach their organs in return.

Today, efforts are being made to trace all human abilities back to heredity, and then the help of far-back ancestors is enlisted. But what interests us about the individual person, what determines his or her particular position, his or her task in the world, cannot be explained by the line of ancestors. The unbiased educator can even recognize a clear boundary between inherited traits and those inner forces of the person that arise from previous lives. The fact that animals can also be trained is not a valid objection for someone who is able to see the essential. We ascribe to animals a group, species or generic soul. It is a fact, however, that we take just as much interest in the individual human being as we do in an entire species of animal. In the case of animals, the spiritual individuality does not come into existence in the individual being, but in the whole species. One can compare the individual feelings of a human being with those of an individual animal and the whole human being with the animal species. The animal lives as long as the group soul has not lost interest in the individual specimen. Weismann cannot find the reason for the death of an animal because he overlooks this fact. In the case of man, something comes into existence through birth that is not found in animals, plants or minerals.

There are thinkers, however, who have overcome the opinion that man is only composed of inherited forces. They recognize that an individuality precedes physical existence and shapes it, but they do not find the solution by assuming repeated lives on earth; see Immanuel Hermann Fichte, “Anthropology”:

Parents are not the producers in the full sense: they provide the organic material, and not only that, but at the same time that middle, sensual-comfortable, which shows itself in temperament, in the peculiar , in a particular specification of the drives, etc., as the common source of which “imagination” has been shown to exist in the broader sense that we have demonstrated. In all these elements of personality, the mixture and peculiar combination of the parents' souls is unmistakable; to explain this as a mere product of procreation is perfectly justified, especially if, as we have to assume, procreation is understood as a real soul process. But the actual, concluding center of the personality is missing here precisely; because with deeper penetrating observation it turns out that even those cozy peculiarities are only a shell and a tool to grasp the actually spiritual, ideal facilities of the human being, suitable to promote them in their development or to take, but not capable of letting them arise from themselves. [...] Each preexists according to its basic spiritual form; for, spiritually considered, no individual resembles another, any more than one animal species resembles any of the others.

Francesco Redi was the first to claim that living things can only arise from living things. Only an inaccurate observation could lead to the belief in earlier times that hornets arise from rotten oxen, bees from horse carcasses and wasps from donkeys. Just as today's natural science protests against such superstition, so the spiritual researcher must protest against the fact that the spiritual soul can be explained by the line of inheritance. Human individuality points back to itself in earlier earthly lives.

A well-known objection to this is: If a person does not remember, then the earlier experiences have no value. But there is also a time between birth and death that is not remembered: the first years after birth – and yet one was there; the sense of self was just not yet strong enough. The point in time at which self-awareness first arises is also the limit for remembering back. Thus this being-in-it of the self forms the possibility of remembering. When a person learns to remember, he will remember. It is not easy to grasp this; only through a very specific mode of perception, absolute equanimity, and no fear of fate: with this, our self makes a leap forward. The theory of inheritance has produced strange results, for example that a genius is at the end of an inheritance line and not at the beginning. This is no more surprising than a man who has fallen into the water being wet when you pull him out. We all know Goethe's joke:

From my father I have the stature,
the serious conduct of life,
from my mother the cheerful disposition,
and the desire to tell stories.
[...]
What then is
original about the whole creature?

Well, what is original about the “creature” is something that humanity already knows. Our body is built up from the powers that we have acquired from previous embodiments; but the soul abilities that we acquire now in this embodiment create the conditions for the next life. In this body a soul has developed that has greater abilities than in the previous life; and we feel a sense of gratitude that this body dies, because when the senses become dull, the soul is already building itself another body and can discard what is not up to the further development of the soul. Modern natural science is already very close to this assumption. It has already been found that we only tire from activities that involve our consciousness; that is something. A modern naturalist, Thomson, says: The soul is to the body as the rider is to his horse. That is the thought that ancient art expressed with the centaur. There are, of course, people who claim that the ancient peoples of the East saw the wild peoples riding through the mists as if they were one with their horses, and that this inspired their imagination to create the centaur.

The spiritual researcher does not look at the corpse, but at what the corpse leaves behind:

The smallest man on earth
A son of eternity,
Will conquer death in new life
.

[IMAGE REMOVED FROM PREVIEW]

This performance was specially organized for visitors to the Swiss Trade Fair in Basel. Pastor H. Nidecker-Roos reported on it in the Christlicher Volksbote für Basel (No. 23/1920) on June 9, 1920: “On large posters, visitors to the Mustermesse in Basel were invited to visit the sanctuary of the so-called Anthroposophists, which was nearing completion, and to attend the subsequent ‘Eurhythmic Games’. [...] In front of the large main entrance, the approximately 300 visitors gathered around the striking figure of Dr. Steiner, who vividly resembled a priest. He had not only designed the building down to the last detail, but, to use his own words, had also “felt” it. The explanation of the building was at the same time an introduction to the main ideas of anthroposophy. [...] This was followed by the 'Eurhythmic Games' ('eurhythmic' can be translated as 'in well-measured time'). The idea is as follows: when speaking, the human larynx performs certain movements in which the will that is expressed in language is revealed. These movements are to be transferred to the whole body through a more serious form of individual dance, and so the whole person is to be a single expression of the spoken word. About thirty daughters, dressed in white and wearing colored veils, danced in this way, among other things, the first scene of the second part of Goethe's Faust, recited by Mrs. Steiner, as well as various poems by Goethe, Morgenstern and Steiner. The attempt was very successful in several numbers. There is nothing theatrical about the dances. They are serious attempts to express speech and soul processes through the movements of the body. The impression of the plays is one of seriousness, of a thoroughly spiritual nature.

Dear guests!

As I always do before these eurythmy performances, I would like to say a few words by way of introduction. These introductory words should never be used to comment on or explain the art of eurythmy in any real sense; that would be unartistic from the outset. For everything that is truly artistic must justify itself through itself before the act of beholding it, before the direct impression. But with eurythmy, as it is cultivated here, something new is being attempted, both in terms of artistic sources and in terms of artistic formal language, which cannot be directly compared with any neighboring arts, dance arts and the like. And so it is necessary to say something in advance about the sources and the particular way of expression of this eurythmic artistic experiment.

You will see, ladies and gentlemen, all kinds of movements performed on stage by individual people through their limbs – mainly through arms and hands, but also with the other physical limbs – and you will see movements of the individual human being in space, movements and mutual positioning of groups of people, and so on. These are not arbitrary gestures, invented in the moment out of some random fantasy. What underlies the eurythmic presentation always includes something poetic or musical, especially in what you encounter as eurythmy, where you are really dealing with a silent language, a language that uses only different means than our ordinary spoken language. Nothing arbitrary is expressed in it.

If I wish to characterize what has been attempted here, I may truly speak of Goetheanism, for everything that is connected with the spiritual current that is renewed by this structure is Goetheanism in its further development. For I need only recall a word that Goethe often used and that is particularly apt for the kind of artistic nature that underlies eurythmy: I would like to recall Goethe's words about sensuous-supernatural vision. It is through this sensuous-supernatural vision that the forms of movement of the mute language of eurythmy are gained.

You know that in our ordinary lives, even when enjoying poetry or song, we turn our attention to the tone and the sound of speech or song, and that we naturally have no idea of the movements that the larynx and the other speech organs carry out in order to produce speech. Now, the first thing to be considered is that, through sensory-supersensory observation, one can indeed obtain clear images of what takes place as movement while we turn our attention to the sound. But that is not what underlies eurythmy directly. Instead, all these movements, which are small vibrational movements that are transmitted through the special arrangement of the larynx and the other speech organs to the air, all these small vibrational movements are based on movement tendencies, and these movement tendencies can be observed. These tendencies, which are by no means arbitrary but are connected with our organism in a lawful way, in that it is a speech organism, these lawful movements can be transferred from the localized speech organ to the whole human being.

Goethe's principle of metamorphosis – although individual thinkers as early as the 19th century were trying to get to the bottom of this idea of metamorphosis, it is still not sufficiently incorporated into our intellectual life. For it will be seen that while it is still more or less accepted today as a formalistic principle, it will be seen how a true realization of the principle of metamorphosis opens up an understanding of the living world and how one can then transfer directly into the artistic that which underlies the principle of metamorphosis underlies the metamorphosis principle, which Goethe expressed not as a mere image but as a profound natural principle of formation, that the whole plant is an intricate leaf, that each plant is a transformed, a metamorphosed form of another form, the leaf form.

Transposing these forms into art shows that the whole person carries out movements that are otherwise movement tendencies in the individual organs of the larynx and its neighboring organs; in a sense, what you see on the stage would be the whole person as a moving larynx, I would say. Nothing arbitrary, nothing pantomimic, nothing mimetic - just as little as language itself is mimetic or pantomimic. Of course, in detail it passes over into one or other; but just as little as it is mimetic or pantomimic as a whole, so little is that which presents itself here as eurythmy something pantomimic or mimetic or consists in random gestures. Just as music, even in its melodious element, is a lawful succession of sounds and sound images, so here everything consists in the lawful succession of movements.

However, one must look a little into the artistic striving of the present, into the strange artistic search, if one wants to find what is being striven for with this eurythmy. In a sense, it goes back to the very origins of artistic creation, in that the human being himself - but the whole human being - is called upon as a means of artistic expression, a truly artistic means of expression. The human being himself becomes the artistic tool, and the movement possibilities inherent in him become the artistic language of form.

Today, because much that is artistic has become conventional, people are seeking to return to the original, elementary artistic sources. In poetry, there is a tendency – very, very much so, actually, can be felt already (?), and especially the civilized languages have to transfer the linguistic element more and more into the prosaic, we need the conventionality of language as a lingua franca, we need our other insights and so on – [there is a tendency] to express the forms of our technology. We need the conceptual and the ideational in language – precisely because language continues to develop, it becomes more and more the vehicle of ideas, thoughts, and conceptions, and in so doing, it distances itself from the artistic. For the death of everything artistic is the ideational, the conceptual. The artistic must be felt directly – admittedly as something profound, but not as something conceptual – from the image in human language. As it emerges from the larynx, the thought element and the will element unite out of the human being, but now, if I may use the trivial but apt expression, what shoots out of the whole human being is what the larynx accomplishes, there united as a will element with the thought element.

When we now turn to eurythmy, we leave the conceptual element, even of poetry, only as a companion. And in what is presented on stage, only the movements of the individual and the groups of people express the will element. The whole human being is transformed into movement. Anyone who has a sense of how our individuality must develop in language – I would say it becomes something rigid. We all feel, when we speak, if we have a sense for it, we all feel, when we speak, that we have to speak ourselves into a language that does not just come from our individuality. What arises individually from us must travel on the waves of the vernacular and so on. You feel that. You feel how the individual does not always want to be included. And anyone who does not feel that is not a whole person, at least not an artistic nature; because the artistic nature wants to shape the individual.

In a sense, by reproducing in eurythmy what is to be presented artistically, we stop what lives in the human being earlier than phonetic language can stop it. For example, Schiller always had a melody or an indefinite, nebulous sequence of melodies in mind first when writing his most significant poems, and only then did he add the actual words. This shows how he perceived the musical element, which is actually the artistic element of language. Or you could say: the plastic quality that lies behind speech is what is artistic.

Today, in an unartistic age, we actually place a great deal of value on the literal, including in poetry. In the age of German Romanticism, people liked to sit down together and listen to poems that had very precisely formed verses in languages that they did not understand, or at least found it difficult to understand, because in those days, in a more artistic age, people were more sensitive to rhythm, meter, to everything that is actually artistic in language. And Goethe was still there with the baton like a conductor when he rehearsed his “Iphigenia”, placing much more value on the correct speaking of the iambs and so on than on the literal content. These things are lost on us today.

In eurythmy, one seeks precisely this plastic and musical element behind the spoken word and thereby arrives precisely at the artistic element, thus going back, as it were, to the source of artistic creation, seeking particularly not into the abstract, into the abstract, watered-down, tonal, but seeks to enter into the rhythmic-tactile, into a way of speaking that we find more and more the more we penetrate to the original epochs of any language.

There is, of course, a great deal to be said about this. I will just add that, on the one hand, our eurythmy performances are accompanied by the musical element or, on the other hand, by the recitation element. And in the art of recitation, in particular, we are in the process – as you will hear – of once again moving away from what is cultivated in the art of recitation in today's unartistic age: the literal, the prosaic content. We are compelled to go back from the prosaic content and the literal to the rhythmic, the one that is actually artistic in poetry. And so it may well be said: there is so little arbitrariness in this eurythmic art that when two people or two groups of people present one and the same thing, the individual expression will not be more different than when a Beethoven sonata or something else is presented by two different performers.

You will see, dear attendees, that even drama can be supported by eurythmy today. You will find lyricism and epic, humor, satire and so on presented; everywhere, excluding pantomime, an attempt is made to recreate the content through artistic expression. Those who have visited us often will see how hard we have worked, especially in the last few months, to anticipate something in the formation of form.

Although we are our own harshest critics and we know that we may not even be at the beginning of an attempt today, but only at the beginning of an attempt, we still think that one day it will be possible - I have not yet been able to do so, but it is something we should work on. We should also be able to conquer the dramatic in an artistic eurythmic way, so that the dramatic forms themselves can one day be transformed into eurythmic forms. Until now, we have only tried to help the dramatic through the eurythmic in our recurring rehearsals of scenes from Goethe's “Faust” by depicting them in eurythmy. We do this wherever Goethe – as he does so often in his “Faust” and in his other poems, wherever he points to the supersensible in what takes place only in the physical realm — where he presents these scenes, which shows us the connection between the human soul and the supersensible, as is the case with this first scene from the second part of 'Faust', in which Goethe has indeed been attacked so often.

It would be interesting if I could explain – but there is not enough time – how much this particular scene from “Faust” has been misunderstood. It is indeed difficult to understand, when Faust – and this is the result of the first part – is standing there with the most severe pangs of conscience, apparently laden, with terrible guilt on his soul, he is supposed to live life, he is supposed to strive “to the highest existence forever”. Yes, it is necessary to point out in the most intimate way what can enter the human soul from the spiritual world and heal it. This is what Goethe attempted in this scene, which we want to present here with the help of eurythmy.

Until now, we have always presented the actual scenes taking place in physical life dramatically, as is usually the case. Where the sensual passes over into the supersensual, we must resort to the eurythmic art. We hope that we will eventually succeed in translating the drama, the actual dramatic form into eurythmy. But, as I said, the eurythmic art is still in its infancy, and I would ask you to consider what we have already rehearsed as a beginning. We are, however, convinced that this beginning can be perfected – probably by others, in part we ourselves will still be able to do it – but we are of the essence of this eurythmic art believe that this eurythmic art will one day be able to stand as a full-fledged art alongside the other full-fledged sister arts.

The first part of the performance took place in the domed room of the Goetheanum, the second part in the provisional hall of the carpentry workshop.

1st part (Goetheanumbau)

“The Fairy Tale of the Spring Miracle” from “The Testing of the Soul” by Rudolf Steiner with music by Leopold van der Pals
“Dance Song“ by Friedrich Nietzsche
Saying from the Calendar of the Soul (20) by Rudolf Steiner
“Joy” by J. W. v. Goethe
Saying from the soul calendar (21) by Rudolf Steiner
“Elfe“ by Joseph von Eichendorf
“From old fairy tales” by Heinrich Heine
“The violet“ by J. W. v. Goethe
“The metamorphosis of plants” by J. W. v. Goethe

II. Part (joinery)

“Trauermarsch” by Felix Mendelssohn-Bartholdy
From Pierrot Lunaire by Albert Giraud, translated by Ötto Erich Hartleben: “Abend” (Evening), “Gebet” (Prayer), “Harlekin” (Harlequin), “Souper” (Supper)
Humoresques by Christian Morgenstern: “The somersault”; “Label question”; “Toilet arts”; “The horse”

Dear attendees!

Allow me to accompany the performance that we will attempt in eurythmic art with a few introductory words. The reason for this is not to explain the artistic aspect itself - the artistic must work through itself in the immediate view, and an explanation would itself be something unartistic - but what is being attempted here as eurythmic art is based on artistic sources that are still unfamiliar today, and it makes use of an artistic formal language that is also unfamiliar. And it is these artistic sources and this artistic formal language that I would like to say a few words about.

What you will see presented on stage, dear attendees, consists of movements that are mainly performed by individuals and groups of people. All this aspires to be a real visible language, and indeed a language that, as a visible one, can truly be connected to the sound or phonetic language, but which, on the other hand, despite being revealed through human movements, has nothing to do with mere facial expressions, with pantomime and the like.

What the human being experiences in his soul and what is expressed in the most diverse ways through his bodily organization, viewed from a certain point of view, moves entirely between two poles: between the speech or sound language, which passes into the no longer artistic, prosaic speech, and between what the human being attempts to develop out of, I would like to say, equilibrium positions and forms of his organism .

Now, man is on both paths, both towards the use of sounds and towards pantomime, absolutely on an inartistic path, or rather on a path that leads to inartistic goals.

That which man forms out of his soul experiences, whether in music or in speech, could be described, if one feels its essence, as that which man, after having developed it within himself separately from the outside world, in a sense imposes on this outside world. This imposition of the human being's own nature on the outside world is most evident in prose speech. Aesthetically sensed, one might say that the imposition of one's own human being on the outside world actually lies in this prose speech. And in doing so, man proceeds in such a way that he transforms more and more what he develops within himself as soul experiences into the expression of thought, which then either becomes the expression in words for the inner, spiritual experience or for the conventionally communicable.

In both, in the conventionally communicable, to which particularly the languages of culture must develop, and in that which is expressed in inner soul experiences, the aesthetic conscience is lost, one would like to say, and logical reflection takes its place. To the same extent that logical reflection encroaches on oral expression, to the same extent the aesthetic conscience is lost, what is actually artistic is lost. On the other hand, in the mimetic arts, man must behave in such a way that he either uses his organism in such a way that he shapes this organism; then he is dependent on the natural laws that govern the organism. Or he sets himself in motion in space, so that pantomime becomes dance-like.

In this movement, which encompasses the soul, the opposite happens to the human being. He hands himself over to nature, as it were. He hands himself over to the outside world. He integrates himself into the outside world.

So while man imposes himself in the language of sound and also in the musical language - [in eurythmy] he transforms that which he experiences within himself into air again; he hands over that which is his inner experience to outer objectivity. While this is not the case with speech, with the tonal, on the one hand, the human being integrates himself, selflessly surrendering to the laws of nature when he meaningfully sets his own organism in motion.

But just as man loses himself in the spiritual when speaking or singing, so he loses himself in the natural when he passes over into pantomime and dance. Here too the aesthetic conscience ceases. And something occurs that ultimately, when pantomime is worked out more and more to one side [to a certain perfection], makes it appear as if the person is being pulled by wires, thus being incorporated into an inhuman or extra-human system.

When he moves into dance, he comes close to ecstasy and thus to something inartistic. Eurythmy, as a visible language, is situated between these two extremes, without straying into either. It has come into being through the careful study of the movement tendencies in which human beings live, which are then taken up in the larynx and the other speech organs, as it were, in the process of their formation, in order to be translated into air movements. This is what is studied. And just as Goethe sees something in the whole plant that contains all the secrets of the green leaf in a complicated way, so what is otherwise the basis of movement tendencies for speech can be transferred to the movement of arms and hands for singing, but this will only be true if the person speaks or sings. And this can become as lawful as in language and singing, an inner lawfulness can be carried out by the outer movement of a person or a group of people. So that one does not have an arbitrary pantomime, not a coincidence of one form with another, but one has a real, coherent linguistic expression of what is going on in the human soul.

When a language that is actually visible is formed in this way, it can become the expression of what, on the one hand, a person experiences musically as that which he transmits from himself, from his own being, to the outside world, and what he experiences on the linguistic side. This can be transferred into movements through which the human being, as it were, integrates himself into the outer world, integrating himself into the pictoriality of this outer world. Therefore, those things that have arisen in poetry as truly artistic, which are also contained in the musical-tonal, but are accessible to pictoriality, come to the fore particularly through this moving plastic art, eurythmy.

In the case of poetry, if it is truly poetic, one can say that the poet is actually fighting a battle. Language tends towards prose content, that is, towards that which allows logic to shine through. Here the aesthetic conscience is suppressed. The poet, in his desire to express himself linguistically, is seized, as it were, by this aesthetic conscience, and he in turn pushes back what is effective in prose language. Through rhythm, meter, rhyme, and thematic motifs, he pushes it back into the language form, so that what has flowed into the spirit in prose language is led back into the soul.

In eurythmy, the soul is not led into appearance as it is in pantomime, where one does not so much feel that the person is expressing poetry or poetic forces, but rather the soul is kept entirely inward, only to be directly transferred into the organic movement. Therefore, the very possibilities that the poet strives for in speech formation, which express the truly artistic in poetry, can be brought out through this visible language of eurythmy, through what is thought eurythmically in speech formation from the outset. I would like to draw your attention to the way in which the “Fairytale of the Miracle of the Spring” comes about in eurythmy: in this way it is self-evident how it flows into the outer eurythmic movement sculpture.

On the one hand, we can find the eurythmic accompanied by music; for one can sing in this visible language, in this visible sound-weave of eurythmy, I would say, just as one can sing through the sound. And on the other hand, what is performed eurythmically on the stage will be accompanied by the corresponding poetic, literal, but artistically shaped expression of the soul experience.

But here it becomes clear how eurythmy, in a certain way, must return to the original source of the artistic in this field as well. In our thoroughly unartistic time, one sees in declaiming and reciting an art in the literal shaping of language — not one that the poets have struggled for — where the literal content and the prosaic is to be emphasized. That which strives for this side no longer knows anything of what Goethe, for example, wanted when he rehearsed his iambic dramas with his actors, baton in hand, like a conductor, so that particular emphasis was placed on speech formation and speech treatment. It would not be possible to accompany eurythmy correctly in the way we want to recite or declaim today; instead, what comes to the fore is what reciting, declaiming, what speech treatment, what tone, rhyme, meter, what thematic development is. This must truly prevail in the recitation and declamation of the artistic treatment of language, in contrast to the mere prosaic content. The prosaic content is the unartistic element. The form in which it is expressed must come from the artistic source. And so, gradually, we can strive for a complete correspondence between what is recited and what appears before the spectator as eurythmic speech, which can then also be judged artistically.

This is essentially the artistic side of eurythmy. But there are other sides to it as well. I would like to mention just one: the therapeutic, hygienic and medical aspects, which are also included in the training. The movements that arise in the human being during eurythmy are truly drawn from the human organism. Therefore, it cannot reveal itself in the same way as it does artistically, but in a way that almost promotes what the human organization is in a certain way. It can therefore be applied in a healing way, so that the human organism is transformed into healing movements. This work of developing eurythmy as eurythmy therapy has already begun. I just want to mention that.

A third aspect is the pedagogical-didactic one, which has already been applied in the Waldorf School founded by Emil Molt in Stuttgart, which I run, where eurythmy is taught to children from the first grade, from the youngest children to the highest grades, as a kind of mental gymnastics.

One need not, as I always say, go as far as a famous contemporary physiologist – you would be amazed if I were to mention his name, because he is perhaps mentioned as the most famous today – who told me, as I also indicated gymnastics, that it is actually only a physical means of education and later, when one has come back from one-sided prejudices, it will not be as much as it is today. I could not go that far, although, as I said, you would be amazed if you knew the name of this physiologist. But one can say that what is developed as gymnastics is based entirely on the culture of the physical, while what appears as movements in eurythmy comes from the whole human being, from body, soul and spirit, and yet body, soul and spirit are increasingly more and more harmonized.

Therefore, one can see that children perform the movements they are asked to do as something natural, with elementary strength, coming from their own bodies. And they feel that the whole human being is incorporated into these movements. Hence the inner satisfaction of this spiritual-soul gymnastics, which is not at all one-sided, for instance, in that it leaves the physical unattended to. The whole human being is engaged, for in anthroposophy the physical is not neglected. This spiritual-soul gymnastics is therefore a significant educational tool that has already proven itself as such. I should also like to add that, while one can continue to practise external physical gymnastics, one needs just as much the spiritual-soul gymnastics, which is eurythmy, because it has an effect on the will.

Due to the limited time available, we can only show you the artistic aspects that are hinted at in this eurythmy. As always before these performances, I must ask for your forbearance. For although something is being aimed at that arises artistically from the whole being of the human being, eurythmy is only just beginning to have an effect today, so the viewer's forbearance must be called upon again and again.

Nevertheless, the following may be said. If Goethe says: “When nature begins to reveal her secrets to someone, they feel the greatest yearning for her most worthy interpreter, art,” then we may say: “When someone is revealed the entire inner, essential natural order of the human organism, they want to create a tool in this human organism that, like a microcosm, a small world, also contains natural secrets and can therefore also express them artistically.

When Goethe says elsewhere, for example, that “man is placed at the summit of nature, so he sees himself again as a whole nature, which in itself has to produce another summit. To do so, he elevates himself by permeating himself with all perfections and virtues, invoking choice, order, harmony and meaning, and finally rising to the production of the work of art.” So one must probably add: When the human being takes order, measure, harmony and meaning, as they are present in his own organism, and develops them, then, if he does not yet merely use an external tool, but uses his own human organism itself with all its possibilities as a tool, then something must come out that is artistic in a higher sense.

Therefore, those who inaugurate this eurythmy may believe that, even if it is still in its infancy and therefore imperfect today – we are our own harshest critics in this regard – it will continue to develop, still partly through us, but certainly through others; so that ultimately, because it draws from the genuine artistic realm and even from the human, this eurythmy will one day be able to stand alongside its older, fully recognized sister arts as a worthy, fully recognized younger art.

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

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

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

atman
buddhi
manas

kama manas
astral body
ether body
physical body

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Someone with hidden resentment shows figures like snakes:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Translated by Steiner Online Library