The Rudolf Steiner Archive

Today I would like to present you with something specific from the whole sequence of ideas on which the considerations presented here are based, in order to expand on it tomorrow from a more general point of view. You have gathered from the reflections that we have been cultivating here for some time that, in order to revive the declining culture of the West, it is necessary to develop a true knowledge of the human being based on spiritual science. This knowledge of the human being has been prevented for a long time. In the form in which it is needed for the future development of humanity, it has been prevented, first of all, by the kind of intellectual life that emerged in the 13th and 14th centuries of the Middle Ages, and then, again, by the intellectual trend of the time from the middle of the 15th century to the present, which has moved more and more towards materialism. On the one hand, we have seen the development of a detached, unworldly, religiously colored way of looking at things, which separated the spiritual from the world, did not allow it to approach the human being and therefore left the human being unexplained in terms of his essence. One might say: In the last centuries of the fourth post-Atlantean period, in the last centuries of the Greek-Latin development up to the middle of the 15th century, humanity increasingly began to look up to a completely unworldly divine-spiritual and lost the opportunity to get to know the human itself in its divine origin. Then came the time when mankind directed its gaze to the subhuman, to what nature principles are, but which only explained everything in the world that is not human, the mineral, the vegetable, the animal , and in this way again left man unexplained, so that in a certain sense in an older time there was a looking up to a foreign spiritual, from the later time to our days a looking at a subhuman material. Man fell through in between. To consider the human being in his entirety, spiritually and soulfully, is the task of our time, and to this end we have tried to bring more and more elements into anthroposophically oriented spiritual science.

Today I would like to talk about how the human being initially finds himself in the world between two extremes in his inner experience. Let us dwell first on the inner experience of the human being. On the one hand, the human being experiences the world of ideas, but he experiences it in such a way that the more he immerses himself in this world of ideas, the more abstract and cold it appears to him. When man rises to the level of ideas, he feels that he cannot become inwardly warm. But he feels something quite different. He feels that in these ideas, which are then also expanded into natural laws, into world laws, he has something that, as an idea, does not include a reality, that as an idea is basically merely an image. Therefore, when faced with the world of ideas, the human being does not feel, let us say, that he wants to somehow implant his own existence in this world of ideas in a cognitive way. No matter how much the human being likes to reflect, he gradually retains the feeling, even with the most perfectly spun philosophy, that he cannot find proof of his real existence in the universe in the world of ideas. The ideas have something, as it were, rootless about them, as they are experienced in ordinary life between birth and death. That is the one, so to speak, the one pole of outer experience in ordinary existence: the abstract, sober, cold ideas, in which one cannot anchor, nor would one want to anchor, the reality of the actual human being. And finally, modern humanity has not warmed to Descartes' maxim: “I think, therefore I am” (cogito, ergo sum), because no matter how much people think, they also feel: there is no getting out of thinking for the time being.

The other pole of inner experience is memory. Anyone who really practices psychology, not the art of words that is often practiced as psychology at universities today, knows that these memories we have are substantially exactly the same as the fantasies we create by working at them, so to speak, only that we use the same power we apply in weaving the fantasy differently when remembering. By remembering, by cultivating our memory, we ultimately live in the same element as in the creative process, only that we build on what we have experienced through the senses or through life in general and thus shape the “phantasms” in memory in a logical way, while in the imagination we let them roam freely. This is the other pole in our inner experience.

In the world of ideas, which we then also develop into laws of nature, we have the decisive awareness that our will cannot actually achieve anything through itself in the shaping of the world of ideas; it must submit to the inner logic, to the fabric of reality of the ideas. If we want to grasp reality, we cannot use our will to string one idea to another; we must adapt to the inner laws of this world of ideas, which is only pictorial and does not directly support any being. At the other pole, in phantasms, which also live in memory, we recognize very well: our will rules there – and our will is also quite appropriately there, and we notice in two respects that these phantasms, insofar as they shape memory, very much have to do with our ego, with our personality, with what our reality is. No matter how much we rail against mere fantasy or phantasmagoria, by sensing that our ego is at work in it according to its own arbitrariness, we feel at the same time that our ego, our personality, is contained in these phantasms. That is one thing.

The other is: in the moment when, due to some illness, our memory continuity is disturbed, when the thread of our memory breaks somewhere, so that we cannot remember a piece of our life, in this moment the real solidity of our inner I-experience is also disturbed. So, on the one hand, our sense of self is not directly connected to our world of ideas. On the other hand, we feel that this sense of self is part of what we call our world of phantasms, although we cannot rely on this world of phantasms and, in a sense, in this phantasmal world, although we know that it is active in it, and that it cannot properly live in our consciousness if this memory is not in contact with it.

The deepest riddles of life are contained in what I have now more or less abstractly discussed, and we can approach these riddles by taking together various aspects of what is scattered in our anthroposophical considerations today. The world of ideas appears abstract to us, pictorial to us! Where do we use it first? We use it when we think through what affects our senses from the outside world – colors, sounds, warmth and cold. We think through our perceptions. You will find more precise details in my books 'Truth and Science' and 'Philosophy of Freedom'. When we penetrate our perceptions with thinking, we use this world of ideas to imprint it, as it were, on our spiritual and psychological experience, on what we have as a world of perception. But we need to look a little more closely at what is actually happening. And this can be done by directing one's own soul abilities through spiritual scientific methods, as described in my books. One can actually raise the question: What would it be like if our sensory perceptions only penetrated us from the outside, if only what penetrates our eye as color, our ear as sound, our sense of warmth as heat, and so on, from the light, what would happen to us then?

Let us be clear about this: when we are awake, we never let this world flow into us alone. Even if we develop only a little active thinking in ideas, we nevertheless bring, as it were, from within ourselves, to meet these sounds, colors, smells, tastes, and all sensory qualities that are rushing towards us, the counter-attack of the world of ideas that rises from within us. And anyone who does not think according to the abstract psychology of words of the present time, but who has really learned to observe, can ask themselves: How do the contents of perception that rush in from outside and the counterattack from within, the world of ideas, meet in our sense organs? If we were merely given over to the world of perceptions, then we would actually live as human beings in our etheric body and with our etheric body in an etheric world. Just imagine how you, surrendered through your eyes to the world of colors, would live in a surging, ethereally surging world of colors, how you, surrendered through your ears to the sounding world, would live in a surging sea of sound. This is not ethereal at first, but it would be ethereal if you did not provide the counterblow through ideas. The way in which sounds are for us human beings is the way they are in the etheric. We swim in the ocean of air and thus in the condensed etheric. It is therefore aetheric that is only condensed materially up to the air; the tones are only the air-shaped material expression of the etheric. And so it is with the warmth qualities, with the taste qualities, with the smell qualities, with all sensory qualities. So, imagine the counterattack of the world of ideas from within. Imagine that you live in an ethereal sea as an ethereal being. You would never come to that human consistency with which you actually stand in the world between birth and death. How can you come to this consistency? By being organized to kill this ethereal, to paralyze it. And how do we paralyze it? How do we kill it? Through the counter-attack of ideas! It is really so: the world of the content of perception in living ethericity (red) would come from outside, so to speak — if I am to draw schematically — and we would swim as etheric beings in living etheric substance, if we did not send out from within the counter-impact of the world of ideas (blue), which, as it is the world of ideas between birth and death, kills the etheric substance and allows us to perceive the world as a physical world. We would have an etheric world around us if we did not kill this etheric substance through the world of ideas, bringing it down to physical form. The world of ideas, as we have it as human beings, connects with the sensory qualities in our organs, paralyzing these sensory qualities and bringing them down to what we experience as the physical world.

That is the fact of the matter. You can see from Dr. Stein's short paper, from his dissertation, how close he has come to this, through a spirited interpretation of what can be gained in the field of anthroposophy, of the character of the world of perception. In fact, there is nothing in the current physiological literature as good as this little book by Dr. Stein regarding the physiology of the senses.

So on the one hand we have this fact: that through the world of ideas we dampen the etheric surge of the sense qualities. What is the broader context of this? It is connected with the fact that the world of ideas that we experience as human beings between birth and death, as rising up from within, does not appear in its true form. People cannot see through this, that the ideas as they are experienced by them as human beings in the physical body do not have the true form of these ideas. People are still so crudely organized in present-day civilization that they would never think of saying to themselves, for example: You wake up from sleep, you have experienced a whole dream that has symbolically expressed to you what is screaming “Fire!” outside on the street. One experiences symbolically something that is quite different outside. What we have in ideas is very different from the way an external event is formed in the dream fantasy; but in the world of ideas we nevertheless also have something that is nothing other than the reflection of a completely different world. And what world is it? We have often spoken of this. It is the world that the human being has gone through before birth, or let us say before conception. This is what is shadowed here in life, up to the abstract world of ideas, experienced in a concrete way. Between death and a new birth, we live in the reality of what is only present here in the world of ideas in these shadow images of concepts, perceptions and ideas. Just as the outer world shines into the dream, so the prenatal world shines into our world between birth and death, by having an effect on the formation of ideas. But while everything is alive in what the ideas are between death and a new birth, while what is real in the world of ideas touches our own being, while we touch our own substantial being by touching ourselves, as we now touch our physical body, only that which we do not even know is cast into this earthly life from the world of ideas. But we use this shadow of our spiritual existence to make our very existence on earth possible. What do the gods give us when they send us into this world through birth? They give us the shadow image of the existence we have between death and a new birth. These shadows are the ideas, and these ideas serve us here to become physical human beings at all, otherwise we would swim as ethereal beings in the ethereal sea. We kill off the etheric life with the shadow images of our life between death and a new birth.

In this way, we place the human being in the whole universe, in the cosmos. This is another point where we gain real human insight. Here we connect what we have in our present experience with eternal experience. Here we say: When you think, when you look at the outer world through your senses and dull the etheric life that takes place in your eyes and ears with your ideas so that you can bear it and be human, then you do so with the inheritance, with the after-effect of your eternal human being, as you have developed it between death and a new birth.

Thus expanding human consciousness, thus pouring into the human being some of the knowledge that connects us with the whole universe — that is a need of the present. And all outer science will wither away, all outer culture will lead to decline. The death of the West will occur when people do not decide to acquire such a knowledge of the human being that, by observing the external conditions of life, reconnects the human being to the cosmos and thus reconnects the human being to the cosmos in such a way that the human being, by experiencing the world of ideas here, becomes aware of the eternal. It is precisely for this reason that this world of ideas is something so sober and abstract, because it is only the shadow image of the eternal and because it is basically intended to deadening the sense life that otherwise floods us ethereally.

Thus we are connected with our life with the prenatal. The traditional religious denominations do not like to point to this prenatal, indeed they even decisively reject it. I have already touched on the fact that it is precisely the peculiarity of the present traditional religious denominations that they speak only of the after-death, not of the prenatal, of the pre-existence. They do not want to speak of this because then one cannot appeal to man's egoism, to which one appeals when one preaches to man only about the life after death; for man wants to enjoy the knowledge of the life after death between birth and death. That which imposes obligations on them for this life, because the gods have released them from the spiritual world to fulfill their mission, does not appeal to human selfishness, it appeals to human responsibility and human obligation. That is why one finds little agreement when one speaks of this prenatal life. And these religious beliefs have managed to make people sleep so much about this prenatal life that we may well have a word 'immortality', that is, we negate mortality, but we have no word 'unbirth', which would be equally justified. For just as little as we die with our spiritual-mental, just as little are we born with our spiritual-mental. We should have a word in the language that suggests this. Yes, the German language needs the word unbirthlich (unborn) as much as it needs unsterblich (immortal), for man recognizes only half of himself if he can only say the word unsterblich but not the word unbirthlich. From the inability of language we can recognize the inability to rise to spiritual heights in this realm.

If we now look at the other pole, we see that man has in the phantasms, from which he also forms his memory images, something in which his I surges and surges, but often surges and surges in a chaotic way. Although man knows that his I lives in it, he does not rely on letting himself be told something about the nature of this I from the phantasms. If we look at the facts — and you can see this in the most diverse passages of our anthroposophical literature —, we have to ask ourselves: What exactly is it that develops from within us as the sum of our memory images, or, for that matter, as the sum of our imaginative images? It is nothing other than the transformation of that which, before it is metamorphosed into the power of memory or the power of imagination, lives in us as a growth force. What lives in the body as a growth force, when it emancipates itself from the physical, becomes the soul-spiritual power of memory. You know that up to the age of seven, when the change of teeth occurs, the same force appears in the human being that later forms well-contoured memories in the soul memory; it works on the body, shaping it. What ultimately drives out the teeth is the same force that lives in us as the power of imagination. In short, in what lives in us as phantasms, we have the same power that actually makes us grow, that underlies our becoming organic. We emancipate it from the organism. What does that mean?

There is another significant life riddle hidden there; it says: We are, so to speak, tearing this phantasmagorical power out of our organism. If we think that we leave it inside, how would we stand in the world? Imagine that everything you detach from your organism, so to speak, so that you can control it at will with your ego, with your personality, everything would surge in your organism. You would not say: I will – but you would feel the surging of your blood that drives you to your movements; you would not say: I take up the pen – but you would feel the mechanism of your arm muscles. You would feel yourself inside, losing yourself in the world, if you did not tear the world of phantasms away from your organism. Your independence would disappear. What moves within you, what lives within you, would be only a continuation within your skin of what is outside. Man must therefore say to himself: the grass grows out of certain forces outside my skin, within my skin my spleen grows, my liver; but I would not feel any difference if I could not tear my phantasms away from what organizes within me. Out there, I do not tear something away; I take the entity in its totality. Within my skin, I tear away the world of my phantasms. In this way I come to my independence. This is how we can find the bed, the substrate for the 'I'-ness in man. That is the other pole of inner experience.

While we have to kill our sensory experience through the world of ideas so that we can place ourselves in the physical world, for otherwise we would flood as spectra in the etheric sea, we have to tear away the world of phantasms from our organic events, otherwise we would simply be a link in nature like the growing tree. We would not stand there as an independent entity, emancipated from the rest of the world.

In this way, we recognize ourselves as human beings in our essence within the human being. And if we look further, we say to ourselves: This personal life between birth and death is what makes us experience the ego here between birth and death. But we do not experience the whole of our inner life, that which lies within our skin; this remains a shadow of that which constitutes our being after death. Just as we are connected to the pre-birth through the pole of ideas, we are connected to the after-death through the pole of phantasms, in which the will lives. We are attached to our unborn through our world of ideas, and to our immortal through our world of phantasms, which is now a world of phantasms, so that when we pass through the gate of death, it is shaped into a regular cosmos in which we then weave, live and are after death.

This is the effect of a true knowledge of the human being, of a spiritual realization of one's place in the cosmos. By answering these questions in terms of what he really recognizes in himself, in terms of what has entered from the cosmos into our inner being, the human being knows where he comes from, where he stands, and where he is going. Such knowledge is not like the knowledge that has gradually destroyed the culture of the West. Such knowledge has a different significance. This culture of the West has really been destroyed by its knowledge. Look back at the knowledge that people had until the middle of the 15th century. People today scoff at this knowledge. They consider it the childish knowledge of a childish humanity. They say to themselves: We have come so gloriously far in the present; only now do we have real chemistry, real physics, real biology, and so on. But there is a significant difference between the old knowledge, when it can only be properly understood in its truth and the rootless knowledge of the present. If you look into the old knowledge, as it existed until the middle of the 15th century, you will see: by appropriating elements of knowledge from the world, the human being always took something with him, through which he was connected to the world. Just consider: however cleverly you reflect on a tree and however much conceptual content you absorb into your soul about the tree, you are still aware that more lives in the tree than you can absorb with your ideas; the same applies to a flower and even to a crystal. If you look at the modern world, which has gradually become machine-like, then the human being is, I would say, standing in front of the object that has become completely transparent in terms of ideas. The machine we build, the mechanism we construct, we see through it. We know: the machine is built from these forces, in this and that combination. - Following the pattern of what man has built in technology, he has then also formed a world view and he now also imagines the universe as a large machine.

Because we have lost reverence for the enigma in the mechanical cultural order, because the machine has become ideationally transparent to us, we need to reconnect with the human being today in order to rediscover spirituality. People who could still seek spirituality by looking for it in natural objects did not need knowledge that was brought forth from the human being as we need it. We, who have gradually torn ourselves away from the world to the point of mechanically grasping it, to the point of building a mechanized technology, need the living spiritual science in contrast to dead technology, which also impacts our thinking life. This spiritual science connects human beings to the spiritual universe, to the spiritual cosmos, in the way we have again indicated today. But we must achieve this connection in the present by truly transforming our inner being before we go to the outside world. This transformation is taken into account by anthroposophically oriented spiritual science wherever it occurs in practice.

We founded the Waldorf School in Stuttgart. Little by little, people come to observe in the Waldorf School. This is what people of the modern age do; when something interests them here or there, they go and see it, then they “know” it, and under certain circumstances they can also set something like that up. That is how our lives have gradually become. But that is not what the Waldorf School is about. What it is about is the fact that, above all, one can delve into the inner life that has been introduced into the didactics and pedagogy at the Waldorf School. It is about the fact that one can grasp the relationship between the human being and the world in a completely new way. In terms of the world of ideas, people are indeed generous. Man does not want to keep his world of ideas to himself. He would like everyone to have the same ideas, that is, he would like to give his ideas to all people. Man is not so generous with regard to other goods; he prefers to keep them to himself. He is happy to give everyone his ideas. This is precisely what makes the radical difference between the spiritual world on the one hand and the economic world on the other. This difference is radically present if one only wants to look at it, and basically, if someone under the old system tends to be a teacher, it only consists of generosity with regard to the world of ideas. This is because children are even better at accepting gifts than adults, who may encounter you with criticism and resistance. It is even easier to give gifts of knowledge to children.

Of course, these instincts must also be taken into account in Waldorf schools and by Waldorf teachers. But a new element is introduced that can only come from the spirit of anthroposophically oriented spiritual science. That is, to what was always traditional in the earlier confessions, to the afterlife, is added the decisive view of the prenatal, so that we are clear that in the child that grows up, what comes down from the spiritual worlds is gradually revealed. We came down from the spiritual worlds at a certain time. The gods sent us into this world, and we carry out what the gods have placed in us. The children come down later; they have been in the spiritual world longer. We look to what shines out of the children's souls. They carry messages from the spiritual worlds, where they were longer than we were. A feeling that something is coming down from the spiritual world into the present, that falls into the children, that the teacher first has to unravel, that a giving, which one so gladly does, is joined by a taking - that can only come from the spirit of true spiritual science, when the idea of pre-existence is joined by the idea of post-existence in living feeling.

What is new and what is poured into the pedagogy and didactics of the Waldorf school is what matters; that is to say, basically only someone who has taken up anthroposophically oriented spiritual science into his own heart and soul can understand the Waldorf school. And only then should he sit in on classes, otherwise the few hours he has sat in on classes at the Waldorf school will show him nothing but writing on the board or speaking to the children and so on. But it is so inconvenient for people in the present day to really find their way into spirituality. Basically, why should we want to find the cause of this? If we take such works, which are truly born out of a current of the old, into our hands, we can ask: What is thought about the acquisition of spirituality by the human being?

I have laid out in front of me the “Textbook of Philosophy on an Aristotelian-Scholastic Basis for Use in Higher Educational Institutions and for Self-Teaching” by Alfons Lehmen, a Jesuit priest, fourth expanded and improved edition, published by Peter Beck, a Jesuit priest. The work was first published in 1899 and the fourth edition was published in 1917. I would like to read to you what is written on page 8 of the introduction about the spirit of this philosophy, which is thus genuinely Catholic philosophy. We will see in a moment that we are dealing with genuine Catholic philosophy. It says:

"From what has been said, it is not difficult to see what is to be thought of the principle of the ‘absolute freedom of science’. This principle grants every individual the right to form and advocate any opinion they choose, without fear of any doctrinal authority objecting to it. But freedom is not boundless. The Church's teaching authority has the right to condemn a philosophical opinion if it contradicts a revealed teaching or logically leads to such a contradiction. We assume here that an ecclesiastical teaching authority has been established by God with the task of protecting and interpreting divine revelation. With this mandate, the right in question is directly established. For the execution of the mandate given to it, the teaching office of the Church must be able to explain the true meaning of the word of God and to designate false interpretations as false. Hence, when the opinion of a philosopher or of a school of philosophy directly or indirectly challenges the true meaning of the content of revelation, the teaching authority of the Church has the power to judge the error as such and the authority to condemn it before the public.

This is quoted as the preface to a textbook on philosophy! Now, if you take the whole spirit of such a controversy, as is also the case today, what does it reveal? It reflects the whole Christian spirit that Paul meant when he spoke the word: “Not I, but the Christ in me.” As the Christ lives in us, He awakens the spiritual element in us, and it is precisely through this Christ-ization that we become able to connect man to the spiritual cosmos. We have often spoken about this meaning of the Mystery of Golgotha and we will speak about it again in more detail tomorrow. But there is one thing the Christ had to make clear to people, in order to show people how man has to gain his truth from the spirit, from the divine spirit. One need only recall another saying of Christ Jesus, and everything in this direction is given: “My kingdom is not of this world”; that is, the kingdom that the Christ wants to ignite in man must not be established in this world. It must be established by man's finding the way out of this sensual world and into the supersensible world.

My kingdom is of that other world, which is not this sensual world. Who has sinned most against this Word of Christ? The one who claims that a kingdom founded on this world, a kingdom that has its center in Rome, in physical Rome, a kingdom that works with physical advice and counsel, such a physical kingdom that is entirely of this world, is the kingdom that can somehow spread the Christian truth. Since the Kingdom of Christ is not of this world, it is certainly not of Rome. We are thus pointing out that in the present time, all that is of this world, all that wants to stamp even the truth so strongly with the character of this world that it says: ” The teaching authority of the Church has the right to condemn a philosophical opinion when it is in contradiction to a revealed doctrine or when it leads consistently to such a contradiction,” that is, insofar as the Church decrees it! Therefore, such books do not appear as books, for example, by anthroposophists, that one enters with one's whole personality and only with this and says: What I have to represent, I represent out of my connection with the spirit of Truth” — but here is the title: ‘Textbook of Philosophy on an Aristotelian-Scholastic Basis’, by Alfons Lehmen S. J., fourth edition 1917. If you turn the pages, you will find: Imprimatur Friburg, Thomas, Archbishop. That is, here not a personality represents what she has to represent as a personality, but a worldly body, from which everyone who wants to publish something that is to be recognized must get the imprimatur. Here a body, which is of this world and stamps truth from this world, represents that which is established as truth!

Today, we must not be cowardly, but look courageously at what true Christianity is and what alleged Christianity is. We are living in a time that has led to this catastrophe because people have been cowardly enough not to live outwards what they have more or less recognized inwardly. Our catastrophe is, in its origin, a spiritual catastrophe – as we have often said – and we will not emerge from this catastrophe until we turn to the Spirit of Truth, which, in spiritual vision, seeks that power which gives it the “Imprimatur”, not an ecclesiastical authority established by a worldly organization.

Yesterday I pointed out that much will depend on how at least the main concepts and main images of spiritual scientific knowledge are incorporated into general cultural life. Yesterday I tried to give some examples of how it might be thought that the way people think would really take up the main ideas of the physical body, the etheric body, the astral body and the I, and really make these ideas fruitful for the most diverse areas of life and science.

Today I would like to point out another example. What we distinguish as physical body, etheric body, astral body and I, these are members of the human soul, we could also say of the human soul life, which, of course on a much higher plane, are related to each other in much the same way as, I would say, on a lower plane the individual color nuances of our color scale. And just as there can be no real knowledge of the inner nature of light and its inner relationships to the rest of the world without imagining this division into color shades, so there can be no real knowledge of the soul without having ideas about how soul members such as I, the astral body, the etheric body and the physical body relate to one another. But just as the individual colors do not simply stand next to each other, but merge into one another, so that one cannot always exactly indicate in the color scale where one shade ends and where the other shade begins, so it is also with these soul members: they merge into one another, and only our minds actually separate them as we usually do.

Now it is important to consider, for example, the transition of the I and the astral body into the eye. What we call the I of the human being really merges into the astral body, just as the red nuance of the color spectrum merges into the orange nuance. We must only realize once and for all what we are actually talking about when we speak of the human ego. We speak of the human ego, and we must of course be quite clear about the fact that the actual essence of the ego is outside of everything that can be observed as the physical human body. The ego experiences itself only in inner experiences. As is well known, the etheric body and the astral body are not experienced directly at all. Rather, the physical body is experienced through external observation, through external perception, and the I in its manifold experiences is experienced in an internal way. This is absolutely the case for experiences on the physical plane. Between the physical body and the I within stand the astral body and the etheric body; both belong to such facts of the event, we can say, that are not directly experienced by the human being on the physical plane. Neither can the etheric body be directly observed externally without prior esoteric training, nor can the astral body be experienced. It contains everything that is often called the sum of subconscious or unconscious mental experience.

The I is divided into the most diverse experiences of consciousness. And now let us single out one such experience of consciousness, or rather, one conscious mode of experience. Conscious life is indeed very diverse, but we want to highlight, as I said, a very simple, elementary mode of experience, the way we experience taste. Just as the I experiences the experiences of sight, hearing, smell and imagination, so it also has taste experiences, interactions with the external physical world. I am referring to the very ordinary taste experiences that are related to nutrition, not those that are called artistic.

What we experience when we have a taste sensation is an experience of the I, in that this taste experience is consciously occurring for us. So when we bring a food into our mouths and have a taste experience, this taste experience is an experience of our I. The manifold taste experiences are simply manifold experiences of the I.

Now, in an interesting way, we can study the transition from the ego to the astral body, from conscious experiences to subconscious experiences, through taste experiences. It is not difficult to see that the taste experiences, as it were, die away when the food has travelled a certain distance through the digestive system. For conscious life, the taste experiences die away, but this is only apparent. In reality, to put it in rough terms, the taste experience of the mouth merges into the taste experience of the whole organism; and the whole organism is basically permeated by taste experiences in the course of the food entering our body, in the course of digestion and so on; and what we consciously taste is only a small part of the general tasting that our whole body experiences.

Not only the nerve endings of our mouth taste, but our entire digestive tract tastes, and as the nutrients enter the organism, into the blood and so on, the whole organism tastes again what the digestive organs have prepared for it. One could say that the whole organism is permeated by taste sensations. And this organism is so permeated and permeated with taste sensations that one can speak of differentiated tastes. One can speak of organ tastes. Each organ has its own specific taste experience; the stomach has its own specific taste experience, the liver, lungs and heart have their own special taste experiences. The general taste differentiates into the organ taste.

Here we see how the sphere of I-experiences submerges into the sphere of astral experiences. These differentiated organ tastes are unconscious; they do not come to the consciousness of the human being, and yet they are infinitely significant. For the normal development of human life depends on the normal development of these organ tastes, and aging consists partly in the fact that the astral body gradually becomes dulled to the habit of tasting. Do understand me. The astral body dulls in relation to the habit of tasting; but the word “habit” is used in the sense in which I used it yesterday; little by little it dulls. But if the stimulus is no longer exerted on the astral body and thereby also on the etheric body and the physical body, which finds its expression in the fact that one tastes, then the possibility no longer exists for the astral body to permeate the life events of the etheric body and the physical body through taste experiences. A good deal of what we call aging is based on the astral body becoming dulled to tasting, and the fact that a single human organ loses the fresh ability to taste, that is, is not permeated by its astral body in the appropriate way, results in organ diseases.

Now you understand that certain perspectives arise under this condition. Firstly, there is the perspective that is important in a pedagogical-hygienic sense: it is not to be underestimated to have a well-developed sense of taste. I have already discussed this for our friends on one occasion when I was talking about child education. It is important to realize that one should develop a living relationship with the different foods one eats, that it matters to a certain extent whether one eats lettuce or spinach, but that one should have a living relationship with the differentiations of the plant world in lettuce and spinach. For what one experiences in tasting lettuce and spinach are living relationships between the macrocosm and the microcosm, and these living relationships continue in the subconscious taste experience of the astral body, which passes through all the organs. Those who become vegetarians, for example, should not associate this with false asceticism, for instance by using their vegetarianism to dull themselves as much as possible to the friendly relationship with the nature of nature. Instead, they should develop the ability to taste the subtle differences between the individual food types. One can do this particularly well as a vegetarian because one is able – if the word is not misunderstood, I would like to say – to taste those fine, refined differences between the individual plants and what one prepares from them as food, whereas, of course, if one is not a vegetarian, one has more brutal differences with meat dishes. Because if we become blunted in this respect, there is a real danger that we will extend this blunting from the conscious part of the astral taste experiences to the subconscious part of the taste experiences. But by doing so, we cut off the living influences that emanate from the astral body to the lower limbs of our organism. And it is an uncomfortable sight to come to some vegetarian restaurants and see how people pile a mountain of all kinds of mixed food on their plates and stuff it into their mouths without understanding, and then act particularly superior to what the ordinary person has in terms of a friendly relationship with their natural environment when it comes to taste experiences.

That is one thing, my dear friends. Once our understanding of the outer experience in relation to eating is penetrated by our understanding of the astral body and its workings, then a healthy hygiene of eating will really arise, and we will need it because the unconscious instinctive life of the human race will gradually be lost and must be replaced by a conscious relationship with the cosmic environment.

But on the other hand, there is also another perspective, and that is that there really is a certain relationship between the whole plant world that is spread out over the earth and the human organism, the microcosm. And this relationship is expressed in the specific taste of an organ. What I am saying is really true and not just a symbol: any plant growing outside tastes only to a certain organ in the human being, it does not taste to other organs. A particular organ can be stimulated by the forces of this plant, but not another. Once these relationships have been studied, something very important will have been gained.

I have told you on various occasions: although the plant, when we take its form, consists of the physical body and the associated etheric body, it stretches, as it were, as it develops upwards, its flowering into the surrounding astrality, and when we look over a bed of plants, we find astrality spread over the plants, astrality that belongs to the plants. Not every plant has its own particular astral body, but it is the case that the general astrality – spread over the surface of the earth as air is spread out physically – becomes specific. That which, as it were, descends from the earth's astral body to a particular flower, let us say a lily flower, expresses itself differently than that which descends to a clover flower. There the general astrality is specified.

This relationship that exists between the astrality of the earth and the entire spread out carpet of plants, this relationship also exists internally between the human astral body and its individual organs. In this respect, too, the human being is a microcosm, only that an unhealthy relationship can arise between the human astral body and its individual organs, in that individual organs lose their living sense of taste and become dulled. The relationship that exists between the general astrality of the earth and the entire plant cover is essentially - and I say essentially - a healthy one, and if one finds out the relationships between the individual plants and the human organs, then one also finds the possibility of stimulating the organs again by supplying the substances of the individual plants and making them healthy from within. For when the substances of a particular plant are introduced into the human organism, the affinity that the plant has with the general astrality of the earth is also introduced. If this affinity to the astrality of the earth is dulled in individual organs of the human organism, it can be stimulated again, also in the human astral body, by introducing the forces of the plant in question into the human organism.

You can see from this the possibility of setting up a plant system that corresponds in some way to the human organization and which at the same time represents a rational system of certain remedies for certain organ diseases. One would get beyond the purely empirical, trial-and-error search, and one would really be able to rationally ascend to a rationalization of plant therapy by parallelizing the human organ tastes with the forces of the plant world.

All these aspects arise in an extremely fruitful way if one really wants to engage in making anthroposophy or spiritual science fruitful for life. And just imagine, after the few samples that could be given yesterday and today, what wonderful and stimulating tasks for contemporary life arise from spiritual knowledge! One can only hope that humanity will not be too lazy in the near future to devote itself to a greater extent to the penetration of science with what spiritual science has to offer in detail.

It is certainly infinitely important that the central insights of spiritual science be communicated to humanity, because if these central insights were not communicated, the basis for further development would be lacking. But instead of taking these central insights, as many feel tempted to do, in all sorts of new, poorly written repetitions of what already exists, but to say the same thing over and over again, the focus should be on developing the individual chapters of these central insights and really introducing spiritual-scientific insights into science and life. I mention this for the reason that there are really quite a lot of people within our movement, and some of them stand out in particular, who find it more comfortable to reproduce and repeat what is already available in the literature, instead of getting involved in introducing spiritual scientific knowledge into the areas that are particularly close to them.

When we consider this, the repeated emphasis on the fact that spiritual science must become a pervasive attitude in human life takes on a different shade of meaning.

Not so much the setting up of these or those program points, as it was popular in the time immediately preceding our sad epoch, but rather the living-grasping of spiritual-scientific knowledge, that will bring about a more dignified epoch, that we can lead out of the chaotic events of our present time. The less people believe that what we have to defend now already exists in any real area of European humanity, the less they will believe that and the more they will believe that they have a new future to expect and hope for, a more spiritual future, a future of more spiritual views, the more they will find what is right.

The fact that there has always been a presentiment of what spiritual science must one day bring to clear consciousness has often been touched upon here, especially in this place, and even provided with external evidence. Again and again we have to be reminded that, while spiritual science is in a certain sense something radically new in our time, it was well prepared in the entire newer spiritual life, so that wherever there is active spiritual life, intuitions have arisen not only of spiritual scientific knowledge, but intuitions of the far-reaching significance of this spiritual scientific knowledge. You see, the following is an interesting example: a European spirit once tried to reflect on which influences had become particularly significant for his inner life. This European spirit, who was thinking about which influences had become particularly significant for his inner life, then mentioned three relatively newer spirits that had had a great influence on his life. He mentions Emerson, whom you have also characterized from certain points of view in these lectures, Ruysbroek and the German mystic Novalis. These three spirits have had a particular influence on this Central European spirit, as he himself explains. Now this European spirit seeks to gain a certain measure of what must enter into human spiritual life if this spiritual life is to truly experience the necessary new fertilization. And here the spirit says something most remarkable. It says: If you look, for example, at Shakespeare or Sophocles, you will find that human conflicts are presented, but ultimately - so the person concerned thinks - what kind of conflicts are they that play out around Hamlet and Ophelia, around Antigone or Electra? Of course, he says, they are highly significant conflicts for the earthly beings called human beings, but, he says, if a spirit were to come down from another planet, that is, from completely different experiences, from a planet where experiences are completely different, he would not be particularly interested in what is going on around Ophelia or Wallenstein or Mary Stuart. That may interest people from the earth, but if a spirit came from another planet, he would demand that people have something to tell him that is not only of interest to creatures from the earth, but that is of interest to creatures that belong to the cosmos in the broader sense. And the person in question believes that there are still very few such souls who have something to say that could also give a spirit descending to earth something. And the thinker in question counts the poet Novalis among these souls. He finds the soul experiences in Novalis's poetry so fine, so intimate, so brought out of what cannot only interest people, what does not only live in the temporal, but what weaves and lives in the eternal, so that for such a spirit as Novalis, a being could also be interested that descended from another planet. I will read to you the words he wrote when he got to know Novalis, or got to know what Novalis has to give as his soul experiences. They are very beautiful words, so beautiful that I would like to read what the thinker in question has to say with reference to the Novalis experiences:

“But if other proofs were needed,” says the thinker in question, in connection with what he himself experienced with Novalis, and which he thinks would also interest the spirits of other planets: “But if other proofs were needed, it would” - namely the human soul - “lead him among those whose works almost stir to silence. She would open the gate of the realm where some loved her for her own sake, without caring about the small gestures of her body. They would climb together to the lonely plateaus where consciousness is heightened by a degree, and where all those who are plagued by restlessness about themselves attentively survey the immense ring that connects the world of appearances with our higher worlds. She would go with him to the borders of humanity; for at the point where man seems to end, he probably begins, and his most essential and inexhaustible parts are only in the invisible, where he must be on his guard unceasingly. On these heights alone are thoughts that the soul can approve of, and images that resemble her, and that are as imperious as she is. There humanity has reigned for a moment, and these dimly illuminated peaks are perhaps the only lights that announce the earth to the spiritual realm. Their reflection truly has the color of our soul. We feel that the passions of the mind and body would resemble the tolling of bells in the eyes of a higher reason; but in their works, the people mentioned have come out of the little village of passions and said things that are also of value to those who are not of the earthly community."

These are truly beautiful and glorious words! The speaker believes he experienced them through Novalis, beautiful and glorious words that characterize how humanity must truly come to something that directly connects with the eternal, that leads us beyond mere earthly experiences into the experiences of the cosmos. Maurice Maeterlinck spoke of Novalis in the words I have read to you, and that was some time ago, not in the last few months! But you can see from this that wherever there are people who are able to reflect, and when they have time to reflect, there is a true and genuine awareness of the path into the spiritual world that the evolution of humanity must truly take.

I would like to give you another example. In spiritual science today, we consciously speak of how, through initiation, one can experience oneself in the I and astral body, separate from the physical body and etheric body, a conscious experience of oneself, as otherwise happens unconsciously during sleep. At the same time, spiritual science is able to provide the necessary information about the experience of death. What the spiritual scientist experiences outside the body with regard to the physical body and ether body is the same as what the soul experiences after death, looking back at its physical body and the fate of the ether body. spiritual scientist speaks in a special way of a view of the physical body and the ether body merging into the world process from the point of view that the soul gains when it has passed through the gate of death. It means an infinity for the further development of all human consciousness, of all human spiritual-cultural life, that such conceptions can enter into this spiritual-cultural life, such as the conception that people will more and more come to know that when the soul has passed through the gate of death, it looks back on the whole past life and on what is happening to the body, just as you now look back in your memory on your experiences in the ordinary life between birth and death. When the time comes that it is as trivial as looking back at experiences in the body after death, just as one looks back at experiences of earlier times in the life between birth and death, when it has become natural to look back in this way, then something tremendous will have been achieved. And from various things that I have discussed with you, you will realize how necessary it is that such an awareness of general humanity be achieved as quickly as possible.

And now let us see whether these ideas, which are now being given fully consciously in such clear outlines in elementary spiritual science, whether such ideas - if we look for an intuitive understanding - were always completely foreign to the human race before spiritual science arose. When Fichte delivered a series of lectures in which he sought to transform the way his people were brought up - a transformation such as Pestalozzi had called forth, only more universally - Fichte said that there were certainly many people who could not go along with the idea that one could, as it were, reshape and revive the human race through such thoughts. Such people cling to the old that they can imagine, Fichte said. And now he sought a comparison to express very clearly what they have learned and to which they cling. Fichte sought a comparison, and this comparison is very strange. I will read it to you.

“Time,” says Fichte - he means all the people of the time who cannot imagine that something new can arise from the old - “time appears to me like a shadow that stands over its corpse, from which an army of of diseases has just driven out, stands and laments and cannot tear his gaze away from the once-so-beloved shell and desperately tries every means to get back into the dwelling of the plagues. The invigorating breezes of the other world, into which the deceased has entered, have already taken her in and surround her with a warm, loving breath. Secret voices of the sisters (by which he means the other spiritual beings that surround us) already greet her and welcome her, and she is already stirring and expands within her in all directions, in order to develop the more glorious form into which she is to grow; but she has no feeling for these airs or hearing for these voices, or if she had, she is overcome with pain at her loss, with which she believes she has lost herself at the same time.

Yes, is it not as if someone who comes from the field of spiritual science were to take a comparison from that field of looking at the corpse after death? This is how Fichte spoke in 1808. We can see from this how everything tends towards spiritual science, and how in the best minds this spiritual science arises as an inkling, but, as this example shows, as an inkling that expresses itself in very specific forms.

You will understand, from what you are accustomed to hearing from me, and especially how you are accustomed to hearing it, how such words are meant. But could not a very definite intuition, a very definite feeling arise in the souls of men when they read something like this, which was expressed in 1808? Could it not evoke a very definite feeling in the souls of those who take human culture seriously? Could these souls not say to themselves: Should we not, in view of the fact that such presentiments existed, have clung to them and actually have made some progress long ago in the spiritual-scientific knowledge of the world? And then such souls might perhaps come to the realization: How ashamed we are! If only many souls were to have such feelings, it would be a great blessing for the development of the spiritual life of humanity. But I think that many souls will continue to choose the easier way for a long time to come, accepting what they like, for example, in the words of Fichte, but reading right over the things they do not like. And when one points this out to them, they will say: Well, great minds are allowed to be contrary in certain respects. And then they make such comparisons that are not taken from reality at all.

It will be possible to permeate life with what spiritual science, through its concepts, stimulates in the human soul. And it is truly for no other purpose than to point out as forcefully as possible how life can be permeated by spiritual concepts that our building was actually built and will show all the details that it will contain.

In this building, no sin is to be committed against the naive life and feelings of human beings. All those who repeatedly emphasize that artistic creation must proceed unconsciously believe that they do not commit this sin in themselves or in others. In truth, it is only more comfortable when artistic creation proceeds unconsciously than when it is elevated to knowledge. For knowledge, when it becomes knowledge of the cosmos, is just as naive as the primitive unconscious, which so often in life, out of people's comfort, is presented as that which is necessary in art, in phrases such as I have just given.

Consider the following, which you can draw as a consequence from a variety of discussions. You will also get the impression that important impulses can and must be given from spiritual science for artistic details as well. When we look at a person in the light of today's spiritual science, we know that this person has not developed in the way that today's natural science presents it one-sidedly, but that this person needed a Saturn, Sun, and Moon development and then the previous Earth development to become what he has become. And we know, even when we consider the individual parts of the outer physical human form, that whole generations of beings from the higher hierarchies have been working on it over long periods of time, and that their activity was as specified as we have described it in the evolution of Saturn, Sun, Moon and Earth.

We know that what appears today as a finished part of the human being, for example the head, first had to go through the evolution of the sun, moon and the whole of the earth so far in order to become what it is today, that it had to be transformed and remodeled, that it first existed during the evolution of the sun, that it reappeared and was transformed during the evolution of the moon, and that it was again transformed during the evolution of the earth. If we then consider how man should actually be studied, we will first come to feel the full complexity of this human organization and its connection with the macrocosm, and then gradually learn to recognize it.

Today I will only hint at a few things that will be explained in more detail in the near future. I will hint at them because they will lead us to a final thought. As I said, I will elaborate on this in the next few days. For example, we have parts of our organism which, in their configuration, still clearly bear the original impulses of the old Saturn development, but which have been transformed and reshaped many times, so that they cannot easily be recognized in their present form without studying the Akasha Chronicle. Schematically represented (see drawing p. 148, a), the bones surrounding the spinal cord were first laid down during the ancient Saturn evolution, still in the element of warmth, and were always transformed during the next evolutions. Those bones that attach as ribs were then added at the time of the moon evolution. They have been less remodeled because their first rudiments were laid less long ago.

Other organs have been set upward, first during solar evolution, and then remodeled. That which we today call the human skull, the human head, was laid down during solar evolution and then remodeled many times. But if only the changes that the evolution of the sun has brought about in the human skull had taken place, then man would have to carry his head in a way that it cannot be carried, namely, so that it would always be directed upwards. Therefore, during the evolution of the earth through the influence of the sun, a ninety-degree turn has occurred, so that what should be directed upwards is now directed that way. Instead of thus drawing the solar arrow for the evolution of the earth, we must now draw it for the evolution of the earth (see illustration). It is part of the normal evolution that the human form has undergone under the influence of the cosmos that the shape of the head, having been directed upwards, has been directed forwards, turned towards the front.

Those spirits, then, who have remained behind in their development on the moon, have brought with them the endeavour to turn people's heads upwards by penetrating and pervading them. People who have the tendency to carry their nose high in an unsympathetic way, as one says, are seduced by such Luciferic spirits. There is a real background to this. It is truly a truth of physiognomy and the cosmos, and one is quite right when one says of someone who carries his nose up: Well, Lucifer is in his neck! That is absolutely true. Therefore, it is infinitely important for life to really know these cosmic relationships.

If we take the human outer limbs – arms and legs – the legs are limbs that belong directly to the development of the earth and are completely aligned with the earth. However, the arms are developed in such a way that if a person had only followed the development of the earth, they could only lower their arms downwards. But since he can also raise them upwards, he can direct them at will towards the lunar evolution, that is to say, with each raising of the arms he gives them a Luciferic character. Therefore, anyone with a fine intuitive perception will feel that every arm movement performed in this way (arms raised forward and upward) has a Luciferic character. Let us bear this in mind and now imagine a person who simultaneously bows his head and raises his hand, but in such a way that these two movements are captured in a human gesture: the person bows his head and raises his arm. This bowing of the head is a counteraction against the luciferianity of the head. The raising of the arm is a bringing of a luciferian element into the arm. But now it is so: by letting Lucifer enter into the arm, and supporting the bowed head with the forehead on the arm, one redeems the Luciferic power flowing through the arm through the counteraction of the Christ-power in the head. One redeems, as it were, Lucifer in the arm through Christ in the head.

Paint the human figure with the correct gesture, the head resting on the arm, and you have expressed it in this gesture. Man forms a gesture that expresses: Lucifer is redeemed by Christ! - And if you add a bending of the knees, you have intensified this gesture. Raise both arms up and suppress the force of the lifting, as happens when folding the hands (so the arms are raised with folded hands), and then try to lead the Christ force with the folded hands to the Luciferic force streaming upwards, by paralyzing it, as it were.

Human gestures become an expression of the whole life of the world, of the spiritual life of the world. One must feel how such knowledge of the secrets of the cosmos can deepen the ordering of the human form in art! But you can also ask yourself: What actually happened when the upward orientation of the head, which can be compared to the Luciferic, was turned forward, and the human being stands on the earth with the head turned forward? He thereby became an earthly being! That which is not an earthly being cannot have legs and feet in the human sense. Man does not get his head, and with it his countenance, from the earth, but from the cosmos; but it comes into being in its form through turning to the earth. If we take other genii, other spirits, we cannot possibly make them with human legs. To make genii, who do not belong to earthly existence, with human legs is simply wrong, is actually wrong. This can really be seen from spiritual scientific knowledge. And our art in our building should take full account of these perceptions that come from spiritual scientific knowledge.

You can see, therefore, that a new impulse can really be given in relation to artistic design. When spiritual science is no longer understood as a gray theory, but as something that will enter into people as perception and feeling, then it will be recognized that it can have a fruitful effect on all endeavors of human cultural development. A small beginning is to be made with this in our building.

Translated by Alice Wulsin

Anyone who follows the evolution of the human spirit over the course of centuries, or perhaps millennia, will come to feel that this human spirit moves on to ever new achievements in the realm of knowing and in the realm of doing. There is no need to place too much emphasis on the word progress, for in the dismal time that has now befallen humanity this might call forth bitter doubt in many. If we observe this evolution of the human spirit, however, something else makes a clear impression on us, namely, that the forms and configurations taken by man's striving spirit vary essentially from century to century. And since today in our studies we are chiefly concerned with a striving for knowledge that wishes to penetrate humanity's evolution in a new way, we need only bear in mind, by way of example, how such conceptions, which are to some extent in conflict with the old ones, have difficulty gaining access to evolving humanity.

We should continually recall, for example, how difficult it was to bring the Copernican world view into people's habits of thought, habits of feeling—indeed, in certain realms this took centuries. This Copernican world view had broken with what people for a long time believed necessary to maintain as the truth about the structure of the universe on the basis of their sense perception. Then came the time when a person could no longer rely on what the eye saw as the rising and setting of the sun, as the sun's movement. He had to accept that, contrary to the visual appearance, the sun in a certain way, at least in its relation to the earth, stands still. Human habits of thought and feeling did not easily accommodate themselves to such sudden reversals of knowledge.

In the anthroposophically oriented spiritual science to which our considerations this evening are devoted, we have to do with an even greater reversal of this kind. Those who believe themselves convinced on firm scientific grounds of the content of this spiritual science also believe it necessary for it to have a decisive influence now and in the further evolution of human thinking, sensing, and feeling. It could also be said, if you will allow me these few introductory words, that the introduction of something like the Copernican world view was a matter of dealing with countless prejudices, with traditional opinions. People believed that if anything else were to supersede these it would upset all kinds of religious conceptions and things of that kind.

Many other objections concerning what we are to discuss this evening get in the way. Here the problem is not simply the prejudices such as those that confronted the Copernican theory, for example. In this case there is also the problem that in our time many people, indeed the majority of those considering themselves enlightened and cultured, not only bring with them their prejudices and preconceptions; they are actually ashamed of having to take seriously the realm about which anthroposophy has to speak. Such an individual feels he has to apologize not only to the world in general but to himself if he admits that it is possible to know about the things that are to be spoken of today in as thoroughly scientific a way as about the outer structure of nature. He believes that he has to regard himself as foolish or childish.

These things must be considered if we are to speak today about an anthroposophically oriented spiritual science. Anyone speaking out of knowledge of this science knows the objections that must arise today by the hundreds and thousands. He already knows these objections, because doubt is felt today not only concerning the specific truths and results of this spiritual science; there is also doubt that knowledge of any kind can be acquired concerning the realm with which anthroposophy occupies itself. The possibility of developing conceptual beliefs in the soul, general conceptual beliefs about the realm of the eternal, is certainly still acknowledged as justified by many today; but it is generally considered something dreamy or sentimental to believe that a really factual knowledge can be developed about the facts that can be drawn from the sense world concerning the immortal and eternal in the nature of the human being. This is particularly the case among those who believe themselves to be forming their judgments out of the presently recognized mode of scientific conception.

This evening we will have nothing to do with the dreamy and sentimental. We will rather be dealing with a realm in which you could say that the student, particularly the scientific student, shrinks from its first conditions. I would like to touch very briefly on the fact that this anthroposophically oriented spiritual science has no wish to be sectarian. It is completely misunderstood by anyone who believes that it wishes to arise in the way some new kind of religious faith is founded. It has no such wish. It wishes to arise today as a necessary result of the world view brought by natural scientific development, a general, publicly accepted conception among the widest circles of humanity. This natural scientific development today supplies so many concepts, which are in their turn the source of feelings and sensations. It provides the concepts for the most widely held world view. This natural scientific mode of observation sets itself the task of examining and explaining what is yielded to the outer senses, of examining what is accessible to human understanding by way of the natural laws about facts given to the outer senses.

If only one takes a quick look at what is living, it is possible to see how everywhere today natural science must consider origins, going back to what the construction of the seed reveals concerning growing, becoming, flourishing. (Though this is more prevalent in other realms, it is most clearly apparent in the realm of the living.) If the natural scientist wishes to explain animal life or human life in this sense, he goes back to birth, he studies embryology, he studies that from which growing and becoming evolve. The natural scientist returns to birth, to the beginning of what unfolds before the senses. And when natural science seeks an explanation for the world, it goes back with various hypotheses—with the foundations laid by geology, paleontology, with what the individual branches of natural science can reveal—forming conceptions out of this about the birth of the universe's structure, you could say. Even if one or another may have doubts about the justification for such a way of thinking, it is always being striven for.

The thoughts are well known that people have presented in order to fathom, if not the beginning of earthly evolution, at least far distant epochs (those epochs, for example, before the human being walked the earth) in order to explain in some way out of what went before, out of what lay in a germinal state, what follows, the consequences that the human being takes in of his surroundings through his senses. The whole Darwinian theory, or, if one wishes to leave that aside, the theory of evolution, is based on the search for origins, looking for the emergence of something out of something else, I would say that everywhere we find this thought of going back to youth and birth for explanations.

Spiritual science in the anthroposophical sense finds itself in another position. And by its point of departure it calls forth a vague opposition. Opposition without people being conscious of it; one could say that it calls forth an unconscious opposition, an instinctive opposition. Such opposition is often much more effective than the opposition that is clearly recognized, clearly thought through. In order to arrive at conceptions at all, an anthroposophically oriented spiritual science must not begin now with general, hazy concepts of spirit; to arrive at spiritual facts, it must make death its starting point. It thereby stands from the outset, you could say, in fundamental opposition to what is preferred today, namely to proceeding from birth, youth, growth, and the progress of development. Death encroaches upon life. And if you keep in touch with contemporary scientific literature, you can find everywhere that the conscientious scientist holds the view that death as such cannot be inserted in the series of natural scientific concepts in the same sense as other concepts.

The spiritual scientist must make death his actual starting point, death, the cessation, actually the opposite of birth. How death and all that is related to it encroaches upon life in the widest sense is the basic question. Death terminates what is perceptible to the senses; death dissolves what is becoming, what is developing before the senses. By the way that death encroaches on life, it can be conceived of as having no part in what is working and flourishing here in the sense world, springing forth and producing life. This is what yields the opinion that nothing can be known about what is concealed by death, as it were, cloaked by death. (Within certain limits this opinion is perfectly comprehensible, though totally unjustifiable.) And it is actually from this corner of human feeling that the objections rear up their heads, objections that obviously can be brought up against things that are the results of a science still in its youth today. For spiritual science is young, and for precisely these reasons just referred to, the spiritual scientist is in quite a different position from that of the natural scientist, even when speaking about things in the sphere of his own research. The spiritual scientist cannot proceed in exactly the same way as the natural scientist, who poses some fact and then proves it on grounds by which everyone is convinced: that it can be seen. The spiritual scientist, however, speaks about what cannot be perceived by the senses. Hence, in speaking about the results of his research, he is always obliged to indicate how such results can be reached.

There is a rich literature concerning the realm about which I will be speaking with you this evening. Believing themselves called upon to do so, critics constantly raise the objection when reading my writings, for example, that the spiritual scientist maintains such and such a thing but gives no proof, although this actually shows only how superficially things are read! He does offer proof, but in a different way. To begin with, he tells how he arrived at his results; he must first indicate the path into the realm of facts. This path is generally unknown, because it is not the customary one for today's habits of thinking and feeling. It must first be said that the spiritual investigator is forced by his investigation to conclude that with the methods and procedures by which the ordinary scientist comes to his brilliant results (not rejected by the spiritual scientist but admired) we do not arrive at the super-sensible. It is precisely this experience, namely, the very limitations of the methods of natural scientific thinking, from which the spiritual scientist makes his start. This is not done, however, in the way so prevalent today, which is to declare that certain things, beyond which the ordinary scientist does not go, are the limits of human cognition. No, it is done in such a way that an attempt is made to come to definite experiences that can be attained only at these limits. I have spoken about these boundaries to human cognition particularly in my most recent written work, Riddles of the Soul.

Those people who have not taken knowledge as something that falls into their laps from outside, those who have wrestled with knowledge, wrestled with truth, have always at least certain experiences at these limits of human cognition. Here it must be noted that times change, that the evolution of humanity undergoes changes. Not so very long ago, the most outstanding thinkers and those struggling for knowledge, when they stood before boundaries of this kind, thought that one cannot go beyond these boundaries, that one must remain there. Those of you in the audience who have often heard me speak here know how little it is my habit to touch on personal matters. When the personal has a connection in any way with the question under consideration, however, one may venture to refer to it briefly. I may say that what I have to say about experiences of this sort at the boundaries of cognition is the result of more than thirty years of spiritual research. And it was more than thirty years ago that these very problems, these tasks, these riddles that arise at the boundaries of cognition, made a significant impression on me.

From the many examples that can be cited about such boundaries, I would like to take one that has been referred to by a real wrestler with knowledge, Friedrich Theodor Vischer, the famous aesthetician who was also a philosopher of distinction, though perhaps little known during his lifetime and soon forgotten. A decade or so ago Friedrich Theodor Vischer wrote a very interesting treatise about a book, also very interesting, written by Volkelt concerning dream fantasies. Friedrich Theodor Vischer, in the course of this treatise, touched on a variety of subjects of no further interest to us here. But I would like to quote one sentence, a sentence that may perhaps be passed over in reading but a sentence that can pierce like lightning into the human heart and soul when these are permeated by a striving for knowledge, a true inner striving for knowledge. It is the sentence that burst upon Vischer when he was reflecting, meditating upon the nature of the human soul. Out of what he had gleaned about the human being from contemporary natural science, he deduced that the human soul cannot be merely in the body; this much is clear; but it is just as clear that it cannot be outside the body.

Here we have a complete contradiction, a contradiction that cannot easily be resolved. It is a contradiction that poses itself with immutable necessity if an individual is wrestling for knowledge in all earnest. Vischer was not yet able for the time was not sufficiently ripe—to press on from what we might call his position in knowledge, at these boundaries of knowledge, to press on from cognition in the ordinary sense of the word to inward experience of a contradiction of this kind. Yet from all directions today, from the most knowledgeable people, we hear a particular conclusion when they come up against such a contradiction. (There are indeed hundreds and hundreds of such contradictions du Bois-Reymond a physiologist of great intelligence, has spoken about only seven world riddles, but these seven can be multiplied by hundreds.) Our contemporary man of knowledge says that from this point on human cognition is able to go no further. He says this for the simple reason that at the boundaries of human cognition he cannot determine to go on from mere thinking, from mere mental activity, to experience.

It is necessary to begin at a place where such a contradiction obstructs the way, a contradiction not ingeniously thought out but one that is revealed by the riddle of the world; we must seek to live with such a contradiction again and again, to wrestle with it in everyday life, to immerse the soul in it entirely. We must have no fear while immersing ourselves in this contradiction (and a certain inner courage of thought is part of this), we must have no fear that this contradiction will be able to split asunder the conceptual powers of the soul, or that the soul will not be able to penetrate through it, and so on. I have described this very struggle at such boundaries in detail in my book, Riddles of the Soul.

When an individual comes to such a boundary with his whole soul, instead of with mere mental images, with mere clever thinking and mental strategies, he progresses further. He does not go further on a purely logical path, however, but on the path of living knowledge. I would like to describe what he experiences by means of a comparison, for the paths of the spiritual investigator are really experiences of knowledge, facts of knowledge. Language today has not yet acquired many words for these things, because words have been coined for what is acquired by outer sense perception. Hence what stands clearly before the eye of the spirit can often be expressed only by means of comparison. When we live into such contradictions, we feel as if we were at the border where the spiritual world breaks in; this is not to be found in sense-perceptible reality, where indeed it breaks in but does so from outside, as it were.

Now, whether or not this image is well-founded from a natural scientific point of view is not important here, for it can still be used by way of comparison. It is as if one of the lower forms of life had not yet developed the sense of touch but experienced only inwardly, experienced itself inwardly in constant stirrings of movement, in this way experiencing the borders of the physical world, the surfaces of single objects. A being that has not yet developed the sense of touch and experiences only the surfaces of sense-perceptible objects remains entirely shut within itself, unable as yet to feel, to touch, what is there outside it by way of sense impressions.

In the same way, a person struggling with knowledge feels himself purely soul-spiritually (we should not think here of anything material) when he comes to the kind of place I have just described. In the case of our rudimentary animal, the organism breaks through to the outer, sense-perceptible world by its impact with it, differentiating itself through the sense of touch, by which surfaces are touched and knowledge gained as to their roughness or smoothness, their warmth or cold. In the same way, when what has lived only inwardly opens itself to what is outside, the possibility is acquired to break through, as it were, just at the places we have described and to acquire a spiritual sense of touch. Only when a person has wrestled perhaps for years at these boundaries of cognition, struggling to break through into the spiritual world, can he first acquire real spiritual organs. I am speaking only in an elementary way of how this sense of touch is developed. To use these terms in a more definite way, however, we can say that by ever greater application of inner work, working away from being enclosed within oneself, spiritual eyes, spiritual ears develop. To many people today it still seems absurd to say that at first the soul is just as undifferentiated an organ as the organism of a lower animal, forming its senses out of its own substance and out of this substance developing soul concepts, spiritual organs differentiated as to their soul qualities, which then bring an individual face to face with the spiritual world.

It may be said that a systematically presented spiritual science, which is fully entitled to be called scientific, is something new in the progress of knowledge in human evolution. It is not new, however, in every respect. The struggle for it, the striving after it, is to be seen in the outstanding individuals of knowledge from the past. I have referred to one of these when I mentioned Friedrich Theodor Vischer. I would like to show from his own comments how he stood at such a border of knowledge, how he remained there, never making the transition from being inwardly stirred to actually breaking through the boundary to the spiritual sense of touch. Here I would simply like to read you a passage from Friedrich Theodor Vischer's works, in which he describes how he came to such a boundary where the spirit breaks through into the human soul in the course of his wrestling with natural scientific knowledge. This was at the time in which materialistically directed natural science posed many riddles for those struggling for knowledge in real earnest. Countless people claimed that the soul cannot be said to be anything but a product of material activity.

Here are his words: “No spirit where there is no nerve center, where there is no brain—so say our opponents. We reply: There would be no nerve center, no brain had they not been prepared for by countless stages from below upward; it is easy to speak mockingly of those who say that there is an echo of the spirit in granite and limestone. This is no harder than it would be for us to ask sarcastically how the protein in the brain rises to the level of ideas. Human knowledge cannot discriminate between stages. It will remain a mystery how it comes about that nature, beneath which the spirit must be slumbering, stands there as such a perfect counter-blow of the spirit that we bruise ourselves against it.”

Please take note of how this wrestler for knowledge describes how we bruise ourselves! Here you have the inner experience of bumping against something by one who wrestles for knowledge: “It is a forcible separation with the appearance of such absoluteness that with Hegel's ‘differentiation’ and ‘non-differentiation’ (ingenious as this formula is, though it says as good as nothing) the steepness of the apparent dividing wall is concealed. One finds the right appreciation of the cutting edge and the impact of this counter-blow in Fichte, but no explanation for it,”

Here we have a man's description of his struggle for knowledge in the time before there could be a decision, a spiritual scientific decision, not merely to come to this blow and counter-blow but to break through the dividing wall into the spiritual world. I can speak about these things only in principle here; you will find them described in detail in my books. Particularly in Knowledge of the Higher Worlds and in the second part of my Occult Science, you will find all the details concerning what the soul must take upon itself in the way of inner activity and inner exercise (if I may use the expression) in order really to transform what is undifferentiated in the soul into spiritual organs able to behold the spiritual world.

A great deal is necessary, however, if an individual really wishes to make investigations on this path. So much is necessary just because in our age, due to the habits cultivated in the natural scientific sphere, in the sphere of the natural scientific world view, habits that are perfectly justified in their own field, a particular way of thinking has taken root in human life, a way that is opposed to the one leading to the spiritual world. Thus it goes without saying that from the side of natural science things are heard that demonstrate an utter lack of desire to know the actual facts about the spiritual world.

I will give just one example (as I have said, you can find more exact information in the books I have mentioned) of how the human being has to make every effort to acquire a totally different way of conceiving things. In ordinary life people are satisfied with concepts, with mental images of which it may be said that these concepts, these mental images are such that they offer a likeness to some external fact or object. This cannot satisfy the spiritual investigator. Even mental images, concepts, become something totally different in his soul from what they are due to modern habits of thinking. If I may use another comparison, I would like to show how the spiritual investigator stands today in relation to the world. Those who are materialists, spiritualists, pantheists, individualists, or monadists, and so on, all believe that in some way they can penetrate the world riddle. They try with definite mental images, concepts, to reach a picture of world processes. The spiritual investigator is totally unable to look on concepts in this way; his attitude toward them must be such that he is always clearly conscious of how, in a concept, in a mental image, he has nothing beyond what can be had in the outer sense world when, for example, one particular side of a tree or some other object is photographed and then another picture is taken from another side, from a third side, a fourth side, and so on. The pictures are different from one another. If combined mentally, they together present the tree as a formed mental image. But it can easily be said that one picture contradicts another.

Just consider how completely different an object looks when photographed from one side or another. The spiritual I investigator looks at the conceptions of pantheism, monadism, and so on as if they were simply different ways of looking at reality. Spiritual reality does not actually reveal itself at all to the life of mental images, the life of concepts, in such a way that it is possible to say that any one concept is a faithful image. We must always go all around the matter, forming manifold concepts from various sides. By this means we become capable of developing a much more flexible inner soul life than we are accustomed to when regarding the outer sense world. By doing this it becomes necessary to make our concepts far more alive. They are no longer simply images, but by being experienced they become much more alive than they are in ordinary life and for the things of ordinary life.

Perhaps you will understand me better if I describe it in the following way. Suppose you have a rose cut from the rose bush; you form your mental image of it. You are able to form this mental image yourself. You will often have the feeling about this mental image that it expresses something real for you, that the rose is something real. The spiritual investigator can never make any progress if he is satisfied with the mental image that the rose is something real. Pictured as a blossom on a short stalk, the rose is not real in itself. It can be real only when on the rose bush. The rose bush is something real. And the spiritual investigator must accustom himself to regarding every individual thing, to remaining conscious in what limited sense an issue is something real. People form mental images of these things, believing them to be something real. When the rose is in front of him on its stalk, the spiritual investigator must feel that it is not real; he must have a feeling for, an experience of, the degree of unreality contained in this rose as mere blossom.

By extending this to our observation of the whole world, however, the conceptual life itself is renewed, and we do not thereby get the crippled, dead mental images with which the modern natural scientific world view is satisfied; we get mental images that are living with the objects. It is true that in proceeding from the present habits of thinking, we at first experience a great deal of disappointment, disappointment that arises because what is experienced in this way differs a great deal from present habits of thinking. When speaking out of knowledge acquired in the spiritual world, much has to be said that seems paradoxical when compared with what is generally said and believed today.

A person today may be very learned in the sphere of physics, let us say; he may be an exceptionally learned person who quite rightly excites admiration by his erudition; but such an individual may work with clear concepts that have not been produced nor worked upon in accordance with what I have described, that is, without endowing the conceptual world with life. I have said something quite elementary, but this elementary statement must in the case of the spiritual investigator be extended over the whole observation of the world. I will offer an example. At the beginning of the century, Professor Dewar delivered a very important lecture in London. This lecture could be said to show in every sentence the great modern scholar who was as well acquainted with the conceptions of physics as a modern physicist can be. From his modern conceptions of physics, this scholar seeks to speak about the final condition of the Earth and about some future condition in which much of what is present with us today will have died away. He describes this correctly, because he bases his lecture on really well-founded hypotheses: he describes how one day after millions of years a condition of the earth will have to arise in which a great drop in temperature will occur; this can be well calculated, and this drop in temperature will bring about changes in certain substances. This can be calculated, and he describes how milk, for example, will not be able to maintain its fluid condition but will become solid; how the white of an egg smeared on a wall will become so luminous that people will be able to read a newspaper by its light alone, since so much light will come from the white of an egg; and many other such details are described. The consistency of things that can sustain hardly any weight today will be materially strengthened so that hundreds of pounds will be able to be supported by them. In short, Professor Dewar gives an imposing picture of the future condition of the earth. From the standpoint of physics there is nothing at all to be said against it, but for anyone who has taken living thinking into his soul, the matter has another aspect. When he turns to the conceptual forms of the kind given by the Professor, an example enters his mind that in its methods and manner of approach is very similar to the Professor's deductions and way of thinking.

Suppose, for example, we were to take a man of twenty-five and observe exactly how certain organs, the stomach for example, change from year to year in the course of two, three, four, five years (today such an observation can be managed; I need only remind you of X-rays). They take on different configurations. We can describe this in the same way that the physicist does when he compares successive conditions of the earth and then calculates what the earth will look like after millions of years. This can also be done in the case of the human being. The changes in the stomach or heart, for example, are observed, and a calculation then made of how this man will look after perhaps 200 years according to these alterations. We get just as well-founded a result if it is calculated what this man will look like after 200 years by taking into account all the individual perceptions. The only thing is that the man will have died long before this! He will no longer be there.

You see what I mean. What is important here is that in a particular case we know from direct experience that calculations of this kind do not correspond with reality, because, when 200 years have passed, the human body with its transformations will no longer be there; yet this same kind of calculation is made in connection with the earth. No heed is paid to the fact that after two million years the earth as a physical being will have been dead for a long time, will no longer be there. Thus the whole learned calculation about this condition has no value at all as a reality, because the reality it is applied to will no longer be there.

These matters are very far-reaching. In the case of the human being you can just as well calculate backward as forward; you might, in accordance with the small changes taking place in two years, calculate how a man looked 200 years ago, but he was not there then either! With this same method, however, the Kant-LaPlace theory was formulated. This theory assumes that there was once a condition of fog, a calculation that was based on our present condition. The calculation is entirely correct, the perceptions are good enough; it is just that the spiritual investigator becomes aware that at the time this primeval fog was supposed to be there, the earth was not yet born. The entire solar system did not yet exist.

I wanted to bring these calculations to your notice to show you how the entire inner life of soul must be raised out of abstractions, how it must immerse itself in a living reality, how mental images themselves must be living. In my book, The Riddle of Human Being, I have made a distinction between conceptions corresponding to reality and those corresponding to unreality. To put the matter briefly, the spiritual investigator must point out that his path is such that the means of knowledge that he uses must first be awakened, that he must transform his soul before being able to look into the spiritual world. Then the results take on a form enabling one to see that the spiritual investigator is not speculating as to the immortality of the soul or whether the soul goes through birth and death. His path of investigation leads him to the eternal in the human soul, to what goes through birth and death; the path shows him what lives as the eternal in the human being. He therefore seeks out the object, the thing, the being itself. If we reach the being, we can recognize its characteristics just as we recognize the color of a rose.

Hence it often appears as if the spiritual investigator were asserting that such-and-such is so. For when he presents evidence he must always indicate by what path he arrived at these things. He has to begin where the other science ends. Then, however, a real penetration is possible into spheres that may be said to take death as their starting point, just as natural scientific spheres take their start from birth and youth. We must simply be clear that this death is in no way merely the final event, as it is ordinarily regarded from the viewpoint of outer sense perception. It is rather something that has its part in existence in the same way that the forces called into life with birth have their part in existence. We do not meet death only through its taking hold of us as a one-time event; we carry the forces of death in us—destructive forces, forces that are continually destroying—just as we carry in us the forces of birth, the constructive forces that are given to us at birth.

To have real insight into this we have to be able to pursue research at a boundary between natural science and spiritual science. Today I am only able to cite the results of such research, of course; I only wish to arouse your interest. Were I to go into all the details of what I am suggesting, I would have to offer many lectures. If an individual is to pursue what has been suggested here, he must approach a boundary between natural science and spiritual science. It is widely believed today, and has been believed for some time, that the human nervous system, the human nerve apparatus, is simply an instrument of thinking, feeling, and willing, in short, an instrument for soul experiences, (Science today has for the most part gone beyond this belief, but the world view of the general public usually remains at the standpoint abandoned by science some decades before.) An individual who develops the soul organs—the eyes of the spirit, the ears of the spirit—as I have described at least in principle, comes to recognize the life of the soul.

Whoever really discovers this soul life knows that to call the brain an instrument of our thinking is much the same as to maintain the following. Let us say that I am walking over ground that has become sodden, and in it I leave my footprints. These footprints are found by someone else, who then wishes to explain them. How does he do this? He assumes that underneath in the earth all kinds of forces are surging up and down, and because they surge in this way they produce these footprints. Of course the forces in the earth have nothing to do with the fact that these footprints have been produced, for I myself left them there, but the traces I left can now be reflected upon. This is the way that physiologists today explain what goes on in the brain, what originates in the brain, because all thinking, all mental activity and feeling correspond to something in the nervous system. Just as my tracks correspond with my footsteps, so something actually in the brain corresponds with the impressions of the soul; but the soul has first to leave its imprint there. The earth is just as little an organ for my walking or footprints as the brain is the organ for processes of thinking or mental activity. And just as I cannot walk around without firm ground (I cannot walk on air, I need ground if I want to walk) so the brain is necessary; this is not, however, because it calls forth the soul element but because the soul element needs ground and footing upon which it expresses itself during the time that the human being is living in the body between birth and death. It therefore has nothing to do with all that.

The brilliantly intellectual natural science of today will come to full clarity when this revolution in thinking comes about to which I have referred here. This revolution is more radical than the transition to the Copernican world view from the world view held previously. In face of the real world view, however, it is as justifiable as the Copernican world view was in relation to what preceded it. When we have pressed forward on the path of investigation of the soul, we will find that the processes in the brain, in the nervous system, that correspond to the soul life are not constructive. They are not there so that the productive, growing, flourishing activity is present in the nervous system as it is in the rest of the organism. No! What the soul brings about in the nervous system is a destructive activity. During our waking consciousness outside sleep it is a destructive activity.

Only by virtue of the fact that our nervous system is inserted within us in such a way that it receives constant refreshment from the rest of the organism can there be constant compensation for the destructive, dissolving, disintegrating activity introduced into our nervous system by thinking. Destructive activity is there, activity qualitatively of the same nature as what the human being goes through when he dies, when the organism is completely dissolved. In our mental activity death is living in us continually. You might say that death lives in us continually, distributed atomistically, and that the one-time death that lays hold of us at the end of life is only the summation of what is continually working in us destructively. It is true that this is compensated for, but the compensation is such that in the end spontaneous death is evoked.

We must understand death as a force working in the organism, just as we understand the life forces. Look today at natural science, so thoroughly justified in its own sphere, and you will find that it looks only for the constructive forces; what is destructive eludes it. Hence external natural science is unable to observe what arises anew out of the destruction, not in this case of the body, for the bodily nature is destroyed, but of a soul and spiritual nature, now constructive. This aspect is always lost to observation, being accessible only to the kind of observation I have previously described. Then it becomes evident that, having meanwhile brought our life to this point, the whole activity of our soul does not work only in conjunction with the ground on which it has to develop and which, indeed, it acts upon destructively (in so far as the soul forms mental images, in so far as it is active); instead, the whole of our soul activity is attuned to a spiritual world always around us, in which we stand with our soul-spiritual element just as we stand in the physical, sense-perceptible world with our physical body. Spiritual science is thus striving for a real connection of the human being to the spiritual world that permeates everything physical to the actual, concrete, real spiritual world.

Then the possibility truly arises for a more far-reaching observation of how what is working and weaving within us as soul, working destructively within the limits I described, is a homogeneous whole. What I have called the development of the soul presses on from ordinary consciousness to clairvoyant consciousness. I have spoken about this in my book, The Riddle of Human Being. This clairvoyant consciousness creates the possibility of possessing Imaginative knowledge. This Imaginative knowledge does not yield what belongs to the outwardly perceptible; it yields to the human being himself (I would like to look away from the other world for the moment) what is not perceptible to his senses. To avoid misunderstanding I recently called what can be perceived at first by an awakened knowledge of this kind the body of formative forces. This is the super-sensible body of the human being, which is active throughout the whole course of our life, from birth, or let us say, conception, until our physical death. It also bears our memories, yet it stands in connection with a super-sensible entity, with a super-sensible outer world.

Thus, our sense life with the rest of its consciousness is there as a mere island, but around this island and even permeating it we have the relationship of the human body of formative forces to the super-sensible outer world. Here, it is true, we reach the point of bringing the whole conceptual world (not any different now from the way I have described it) into connection with the physical brain that provides the ground for all this; but we arrive at the insight that the body of formative forces is the carrier of human thoughts, that thoughts develop in this body of formative forces and that in thinking the human being lives in this body of formative forces.

It is different if we go on to another experience of the soul, namely to feeling. Our feeling, our emotions, our passions, stand in a different relationship to our life of soul from that of our thinking. The spiritual investigator finds that the thoughts we usually have are bound up with the body of formative forces. This does not apply, however, to our feelings, our emotions. Feelings and emotions live in us in a much more subconscious way. Thus they are connected with something far more all-encompassing than our life between birth and death. It is not as though the human being is without thoughts in the part of his life about which I am now speaking; all feelings are permeated by thoughts. But the thoughts by which feelings are permeated do not, as a rule, enter man's ordinary consciousness. They remain beneath the threshold of this consciousness. What surges up as feeling is penetrated by thoughts, but these thoughts are more far-reaching, for they are found only when an individual progresses in clairvoyant cognition, when he progresses to what I call the Inspired consciousness (I am not thinking of superstitious conceptions here). You may study the particulars of this in my books.

If we go deeply into what is actually sleeping in regard to ordinary Consciousness (in the same way that from going to sleep to awaking a person sleeps in regard to the ordinary images of the senses) we see that it surges up just as dreams surge up into our sleep. Feelings actually surge up from the innermost depths of the soul; it sounds strange, but it is so. But this deeper region of the soul that is accessible to Inspired knowledge is what lives between death and a new birth. It is what enters into connection with the physical through our being conceived or born, what goes through the portal of death and has a spiritual existence among other conditions until the human being is reborn. Whoever really looks into what is living in the world of feeling with Inspired knowledge sees the human being not only between birth and death but also during the time the soul undergoes between death and a new birth.

The matter is not quite so simple as this, however; it is indeed like this, but it is also shown how forces arise in the soul that make it possible to look upon the feelings, emotions, passions, that make it possible to live in them. Just as in the plant we see what has arisen through the forces of the seed, so we see something that has not arisen with our birth or conception but that has emerged from a spiritual world.

I know very well how many objections can be made to a conception of this kind by those who accept the natural scientific world view. Those who are familiar with this world view will find it easy to say, “Here he comes and like a dilettante describes how the aspects of the soul he wishes to encompass come from a spiritual world; he even describes their special configurations, the colors of the feelings and so on, as if, on the one hand, there were hints in these feelings concerning our life before birth and, on the other hand, something in these feelings that is like the seed of the plant, which will become the plant of the next year. Doesn't this man know,” people will say, “about the wonderful laws of heredity presented by natural science? Is he ignorant of everything that those who created the science of hereditary characteristics have brought about?”

Even if the facts indicated by natural science are entirely correct, it is nevertheless the case that concealed in the emergence of heredity are the forces through which we have been preparing ourselves for centuries and which we ourselves send down. From grandparents and parents, constellations are built up that finally lead to the material result with which we then sheathe ourselves when we leave the spiritual world to descend into the physical. Whoever really keeps in mind the wonderful results of modern research into heredity will find that what spiritual science finds out about the soul (yet in a quite different way, it might be said, in the entirely opposite way) will be fully confirmed by natural science, whereas what natural science itself says is definitely not confirmed in the least by natural science. I can only suggest this here. When we then enter the sphere referred to as that of the will, this totally eludes the contents of man's ordinary consciousness. What does a person know about the processes going on in him when the thought, I want something, shapes itself into a movement of the hand? The actual process of willing is asleep in the human being. Regarding the feelings and emotions it could at least be said that the human being dreams within the human being. This is the reason that the question of freedom is so difficult, because the will is sleeping in relation to the higher consciousness. We come to knowledge about what is going on in the will in clairvoyant consciousness only by reaching the stage of actual Intuitive consciousness. By this I do not mean the vague, everyday consciousness called intuitive, but rather what I refer to in my writings as one of the three stages: Imaginative, Inspired, and Intuitive cognition.

Here we come into the sphere of the will, into the realm that is supposed to live and work within us. This must first be drawn out of the deep regions of the soul. Then we find, however, that this element of the will is also permeated by thoughts, by the spiritual (in addition, the ordinary thought stands by itself). But in bearing the will within us, there works into this will something in addition to what we have experienced in the spiritual world in our feelings, working between death and a new birth. Something is active there that we have experienced in the preceding life on earth. The impulses of earlier earthly lives work into the will nature of the human being. In what we develop or what we cultivate in our present willing live the impulses for our lives on earth to come. For real spiritual science, then, the whole of human life separates into the lives lying between birth and death and those which, because all physical existence has to be built up out of the world, are experienced in far longer periods in the spiritual world. Out of such lives, out of repeated earthly lives, repeated spiritual lives, the complete human life is composed. This is not some fantasy, it is not a capricious thought, but rather something we find when we learn to turn the eye of the spirit to the eternal, the imperishable, in the human soul.

These things do not preclude human freedom. If I build a house this year in which I will live for the next two years, I will be a free man in this house despite having built it for myself. Human freedom is not precluded by this. One earthly life determines the other that follows. Only through a lack of understanding could this be represented as an infringement on the idea of human freedom.

Thus, in spiritual investigation by making death our point of departure, we gradually arrive at the spiritual facts. If in spiritual investigation one makes death the foundation, just as physical investigation is based on birth and embryonic life, this observation reveals the most varied things in individual detail. I will point to something specific here, because I would not like to remain with the indefinite but rather to quote concrete results of anthroposophical research. In the ordinary life of the spirit we are able to differentiate between the forcible entry of death due to an external cause and death that comes from within through illness or by reason of old age. We are therefore able to distinguish two different kinds of death.

Spiritual investigation that goes concretely into the nature of death discovers the following. Let us take as an example the entrance into life of violent death, be it through accident or some other cause. The entrance of such an event brings about an end to life in this earthly existence. The development of spirit consciousness for the spiritual world after death depends on this one-time entrance of death, just as the consciousness we are able to develop in life depends on the forces given us at birth (in the way that I have described). The Consciousness we develop after death is of a different kind. The consciousness developed here on earth stands on the ground of the nervous system, just as when I walk around on the ground my foundation is the ground. In the spiritual world the consciousness after death has different foundations, but it is definitely a consciousness. If a man dies a violent death this is not something that merely lays hold of his mental images. The mental activity of ordinary consciousness ceases with death, and another Consciousness begins, but this lays hold of his will which, as we have seen, passes over into the next earthly life. The spiritual investigator possesses the means to investigate what can arise in an earthly life if, in a previous earthly life, there has been a violent death.

Now when we speak of such things today, people will obviously condemn this way of speaking as foolish, childish, fantastic. Yet the results are attained just as scientifically (and it is only such results that I present) as the results of natural science. If a violent death intervenes in a life, it shows itself in the following life on earth, where its effect produces some kind of change of direction at a definite period in that life. Research is now being done concerning the soul life, but as a rule only the most external things are taken into consideration. In many human lives, at a particular moment, something enters that changes a person's whole destiny, bringing him into a different path in life in response to inner demands. In America they call these things “conversions,” wanting to have a name for such events, but we do not always need to think in terms of religion. A person on another path of life may be forced into a permanent change of the direction of his will. Such a radical change of the direction of his will has its origin in the violent death of his previous life. Concrete investigation reveals the tremendous importance of what happens at death for the middle of the next life. If death comes spontaneously from within through illness or old age, then it has more significance for the life between death and a new birth than for the next earthly life.

I would like to offer the following example so that you may see that I am not speaking about anything vague here. In fact, I am speaking about details arising in life's conditions that can be gained by definite perceptions. Spiritual investigation, which is something new even for those convinced of the immortality of the human soul, makes us aware that we must not speak in merely a general way about immortality. Instead, by grasping the eternal in the human soul, human life as such becomes comprehensible. All the strange processes that are observable if we have a sense for the course taken by the soul life, for the course of the soul life in the human being, all the wonderful events find their place if we know we are dealing with repeated earthly lives and repeated spiritual lives. In the spiritual world (I say this merely parenthetically) the human being lives with spiritual beings—not only other human beings who are closely connected with him by destiny and have also passed through the portal of death, but with other spiritual beings to whom he is related in the same way that on earth the human being is related to three kingdoms: the mineral, plant, and animal kingdoms. The spiritual investigator speaks of particular individual spirits, particular individual spiritual beings, belonging to a concrete, individualized spiritual world, just as here we speak of individualized plant beings, animal beings, and human beings, in so far as they are physical beings between birth and death. It can be shattering to people when knowledge itself approaches the human soul in a totally different way. It is difficult to speak about these things so that they arise out of the dim depths of the spirit in a new way.

From what I have said you will have seen that knowledge about the spiritual world can be acquired. This knowledge has profound significance for the human soul; it makes the soul something different, as it were. It lays hold of the life of the soul, regardless of whether one is a spiritual investigator or has merely heard and understood the results of spiritual investigation and has absorbed them. It is of no importance whether or not one does the research oneself; the result can be comprehensible just the same. Everything can be understood if we penetrate it with sufficient depth. We only need to have absorbed it. Then, however, when we have grasped it in its full essence, it enters the human soul life in such a way that one day it becomes more significant than all the other events of life.

A person may have difficulties, sorrows, that have shattered him, or joy that has elevated him, or some truly sublime experience. It is not necessary to be indifferent to such experiences to be a spiritual investigator, someone who knows the spirit; one can participate as fully with the feelings as other people do who are not investigators of the spirit. But when someone penetrates with his essential being into what is given the soul by spirit knowledge, and when he becomes capable of answering the question, “What are the effects upon the soul of these spiritual results?”—when a full answer is given to the question of what the soul has become through this spiritual knowledge, then this event becomes more important than anything else in destiny, more important than any of the other experiences of destiny that approach the human being. Not that the others become less significant, but this one becomes greater than the others. Knowledge itself then enters through the human soul life in accordance with destiny. If knowledge thus enters through the human soul life, he begins to understand human destiny as such. From this knowledge comes the light that illumines human destiny.

From this moment on, an individual can say this: that if one has this experience of destiny so purely in the spiritual in this way, it becomes clear how one is placed into life in accordance with destiny, how our destiny hangs on threads spun out of previous lives, previous earthly lives and lives between death and a new birth, which again spin themselves out of this life and into a following life. Such an individual goes on to say that ordinary consciousness only dreams through its destiny; ordinary consciousness endures its destiny without understanding it, just as one endures a dream. Clairvoyant consciousness to which one awakes, just as we awake from a dream to ordinary consciousness, acquires a new relationship to destiny. Destiny is recognized as taking part in all that our life embraces, in the life that goes through all our births and deaths.

This matter should not be grasped in a trivial way, as if the spiritual investigator were to say, “You yourself are the cause of your own misfortune.” That would simply betray a misunderstanding and would even be a slander of spiritual investigation. A misfortune may not have its source at all in the previous life. It may arise spontaneously and have its consequences only in the life to follow and also in the life between earthly lives. We can see again and again that out of misfortune, out of pain and suffering, emerges a consciousness of a very different form in the spiritual world, Meaning enters the whole of our life, however, when we learn to understand our destiny, which otherwise we only dream our way through.

One thing particularly stands out when we bear in mind this knowledge of the spirit. We can no longer say, “If, after death, the soul enters another life, we can wait until this happens. Here we take life as it is offered us in the physical body; we can wait for what comes after death.” The matter is a question of consciousness. We may be sure that what happens after death is connected with the life we undergo in the body. Just as in a certain sense we have the Consciousness of our ordinary waking condition by means of our body, so after death we have a Consciousness that is no longer spatial, no longer built up out of the nervous system, but built up out of what has to do with time, built up out of looking backward.

Just as our nervous system in a way is the buttress and counterpart to our ordinary consciousness between birth and death, so our consciousness in the spiritual world between death and a new birth is founded on what takes place here in our consciousness. Just as here we have the world around us, so when we are dead we have before us our life as the significant organ. Hence, a great deal depends upon our consciousness in the physical body, which is able to extend into the consciousness we have after death. An individual may be occupied exclusively with physical conceptions grasped by the senses, as often happens in the habitual thinking of the present time; he may take into his consciousness and also in his capacity of memory, in everything playing itself out in his soul, concerns exclusively having to do with ordinary life. Such an individual, however, is also building up a world for himself after death! The environment there is built out of what a person is inwardly. A person born physically in Europe cannot see America around him, and just as he receives what he is born into physically as his environment, so to a certain extent he determines the environment, the place of his existence, through what he has built up in his body.

Let us take an extreme case, though one unlikely to happen. Let us take the case of someone who fights against all super-sensible conceptions, who has become an atheist, someone who doesn't even have any inclination to occupy himself with religion. Now I know that I am saying something paradoxical here, but it is based on good foundations anthroposophically: such an individual condemns himself to remaining in the earthly sphere with his consciousness, whereas another individual who has absorbed spiritual conceptions is transposed to a spiritual environment. The one who has absorbed only sense-perceptible conceptions condemns himself to remaining in the sense-perceptible environment.

Now we can work properly in the physical body because our physical body is, as it were, a sheath protecting us against the environment. And though we can thus work properly in the physical body when we are present in the physical world, we cannot do so if we hold to the physical world after death. We become destructive if we have physical conceptions in our consciousness after death. In speaking of the problem of heredity, I intimated how, when the human being is in the spiritual world, his forces lay hold of the physical world. Whoever condemns himself, by reason of his merely physical consciousness, to hold to the physical world becomes the center of destructive forces that lay hold of what is happening in human life and in the rest of universal life. As long as we are in the body, we are only able to have thoughts based on the sense-perceptible, we are able to have only materialistic thoughts: the body is a defense.

But how much greater a defense than we imagine! It seems strange, but to anyone who perceives the spiritual world in all its connections, one thing is clear: if an individual were not shut off from the surrounding world by his senses, if the senses were not curbed so that in ordinary consciousness he is incapable of taking up living concepts but takes up only those that are lifeless and designed to prevent him from penetrating into the spiritual environment, if an individual were able to make his conceptions active directly and did not have them merely within him after things have already passed through the senses, then even here in the physical world, if he were to develop his conceptual life, his conceptions would have crippling, deadening effects. For these conceptions are in a certain way destructive of everything they lay hold of. Only because they are held back in us are those conceptions kept from being destructive. They destroy only when they come to expression in machines, in tools, which are also something dead taken from living nature. This indeed is only a picture, but one corresponding with a reality. If an individual enters the spiritual world with merely physical conceptions, he becomes a center of destruction.

Thus I have to bring a conception to your attention as an example of many others: we should not say that we can wait until after death, because it depends on a person's nature whether he develops conceptions of the sense world or of the super-sensible world, whether he prepares for his next life in this way or that. The next life is indeed a very different one, but it is evolved from our life here. This is the essential thing that has to be comprehended. In spiritual science, we encounter something different from what is surmised. For this reason I must still make a few remarks in closing.

The belief might easily arise that anyone now entering the spiritual world must unconditionally become a spiritual investigator himself. This is not necessarily so, although in my book, Knowledge of the Higher Worlds, I have described much of how the soul must transform itself in order really to be able to enter. And to a certain degree, everyone is able to do this today, but it need not be everyone. What a person develops regarding the soul element is a purely intimate concern; what arises from it, however, is the formation of concepts of the investigated truths. What the spiritual investigator can give is clothed in conceptions such as I have developed today. Then it can be shared. For what a person needs, it is quite immaterial whether things are investigated by himself or whether he accepts them from some other credible source. I am speaking here from a law of spiritual investigation. It is not important to investigate the things oneself. What is important is for us to have them within us, for us to have developed them within. Hence, we are in error if we believe that everyone has to become a spiritual investigator.

Today, however, the spiritual investigator has the obligation (as I myself have had the obligation) to render an account, as it were, of his path of research. This is due not only to the fact that everyone today can, to a certain extent, follow the path I have described without harm, but it is also because everyone is justified in asking, “How have you arrived at these results?” This is why I have described these things. I believe that even those who have no wish to become spiritual investigators will at least want to be convinced of how spiritual investigators arrive at the results that everyone needs today, the results of those who wish to lay the foundation for the life which must develop in human souls for human evolution today.

The time is now over during which, in ancient times, so much was held back regarding spiritual research that brought about the evolution of the soul. In those ancient times, to impart what was hidden was strictly forbidden. Even today, those who know of these mysteries of life (of which there are not just a few) still hold these things back. Whoever has learned about these things merely as a student from another teacher does not under any circumstances do well to pass them on. Today it is advisable to pass on only what an individual himself has discovered, the results only of his own investigations. These, however, can and must be put at the service of the rest of humanity.

Already from the few brief indications I was able to give today it can become evident what spiritual investigation can mean for the individual human being, but it is not only significant for the individual. And in order to address this other aspect in closing with at least a few words I would like to point to something that is taken into consideration only a little today. There is a curious phenomenon to which I would like to direct your attention in the following way. In the second half of the nineteenth century we have seen the rise of a certain natural scientific orientation: the explanation of living beings connected with the name Darwin. Enthusiastic scholarly investigators, enthusiastic students have carried these things through the second half of the nineteenth century. Maybe I have already remarked upon the occurrence of a curious fact. Already in the 1860's, under the guidance of Haeckel, there developed a powerful movement based on a world view. This movement wanted to overthrow everything old and to restructure the entire world view in accordance with Darwinistic concepts. Today there are still numerous people who emphasize how great and significant it would be if there were no longer a wisdom-filled world-guidance but instead if the evolution of everything could be explained out of mechanical forces in the sense of Darwinism.

In 1867 Eduard von Hartmann published his Philosophy of the Unconscious (Philosophie des Unbewussten) and turned against the purely external view of the world represented by Darwinism. He pointed to the necessity of inner forces, although he did so in an inadequate way, in a philosophical way (he did not yet have spiritual science). Naturally those who were enthusiastic about the rise of Darwinism were ready to say, “That philosopher is simply a dilettante; we don't need to pay any attention to him.” Counterattacks appeared in which the “dilettante” Eduard von Hartmann was ridiculed and which asserted that the true, educated natural scientist need not pay any attention to such things.

Then there appeared a publication by Anonymous, which brilliantly argued against the publication of Eduard von Hartmann. The natural scientists who all thought as they did were in full agreement with this publication because Eduard von Hartmann was completely contradicted in it. Everything that could possibly be gathered from the basis of natural science was there used by the anonymous author against Eduard von Hartmann just as today so much is brought up against spiritual science. This publication was received very favorably. Haeckel said, “For once a real natural scientist has written against this dilettante, Eduard von Hartmann; here one can see what a natural scientist is able to do. I myself could write no better. Let him identify himself and we will consider him as one of us.” To state it briefly, the natural scientists spread a lot of propaganda in relation to this publication, which they welcomed highly because it solidified their position. The publication was very soon sold out, and a second edition became necessary. There the author revealed himself: it was Eduard von Hartmann!

In that instance someone taught the world a necessary lesson. Whoever writes about spiritual science today and reads what is written against it could without much effort invent everything that is brought against spiritual science. Eduard von Hartmann was able himself to make all the objections that the natural scientists made against him—and he did so.

But I mention this only in introduction to my main point. Oskar Hertwig is one of the most important students of Haeckel who entered upon the industrious, reliable, and great path of natural scientific investigation. Last year Hertwig published a very beautiful book, The Evolution of the Organism. A Rebuttal to Darwin's Theory of Chance (Das Werden der Organismen. Eine Widerlegung von Darwins Zufallstheorie). In this book he points to issues that were already raised by Eduard von Hartmann. Such a matter is pretty much without precedent: already the generation immediately following, which still grew up under the master, had to get away from something that had been believed could build a whole world view; it had even been believed that it could provide elucidation of the spiritual world. A good Darwinist contradicts Darwinism! But he does still more, and that is what is actually important to me.

Oskar Hertwig writes at the conclusion of his superb and beautiful book that the kind of world view that Darwinism represented does not stand there merely as a theoretical edifice; rather it intervenes in the totality of life, encompassing also what people do, will, feel, and think. He says, “The interpretation of Darwin's teaching, which because of its vagueness can have such varied meanings, permitted also a very varied application to other realms of economic, social, and political life. It was possible, just as it was from the Delphic Oracles, to use what was said as desired for specific applications to social, political, health-related, medical, and other questions and to support one's own assertions by basing them on the Darwinistically restructured biology with its immutable natural laws. If these supposed laws are not actually laws, however, could there not exist social dangers—because of their many-sided application in other realms? We had better not believe that human society can for centuries use expressions like, ‘a struggle for existence,’ ‘survival of the fittest,’ ‘the most suitable,’ ‘the most useful,’ ‘perfection by selection,’ etc., applying them to the most varied realms of life, using these expressions like daily bread, without influencing in a deep and lasting way the entire direction of idea formation! The proof for this assertion could easily be demonstrated in many contemporary phenomena. For this very reason the decision concerning the truth or error of Darwinism reaches far beyond the confines of the biological sciences.”

What arises in such a theory shows itself everywhere in life. Then a question arises from the realm of spiritual science that also intervenes in life. We live today in a sad time, in a tragic time for humanity. It is a time that has developed out of human conceptions, out of human ideas. Whoever studies interrelationships with the help of spiritual science knows about the connection of what we encounter externally today with what humanity is now tragically experiencing. A great deal is being experienced; people believe that they can encompass reality with their concepts, but they do not encompass it. And because they do not encompass it, because with natural scientific concepts reality can never be encompassed, reality grows over their head and shows them that human beings can take part in such events but that the result is the chaos by which we are surrounded today.

Spiritual science does not arise only through an inner necessity, though this is also true. It would have arisen through this inner necessity even if the outer events did not stand there as a mighty, powerful sign. Such signs are there, however, from the other side: that the old world views are great in the natural sciences but can never intervene formatively in the social, legislative, political spheres in the world, that reality grows beyond human beings, if that is what they want. These mighty signs point to the need for spiritual science, which seeks concepts that correspond with reality, concepts derived from reality and that are therefore also capable of carrying the world in the social and political realms. No matter how much one believes that the concepts customary outside spiritual science today will enable us to emerge out of the chaos, it will not happen; for within the reality the spirit prevails. And because the human being himself intervenes with his actions in this reality, in the social, in the political life, he requires the conceptions, the feelings, the will impulses that are drawn from the spirit in order to come to fruitful concepts in these realms. In the future politics and social science will need something for which only spiritual science can provide the foundation. This is what is particularly important for contemporary history.

In this lecture, which has already been long enough, I can only hope to offer a few impulses. I only wish to point out that what appears today as spiritual science in a systematic order is wanted by the best. If it were only up to me, I would not give a special name to this spiritual science. For more than thirty years I have been working on the greater and greater elaboration of the conceptions regarding reality that Goethe acquired in his magnificent theory of metamorphosis, in which he had already attempted to make the concept living as opposed to dead. At that time this was only possible in an elementary way. If one does not consider Goethe simply as a historical figure, however, if one considers him still as a contemporary, then today the Goethean teaching of metamorphosis transforms itself into what I call living concepts, which then find their way into spiritual science. Goetheanism is the term I would most like to use for what I mean by spiritual scientific investigation, because it is based on sound foundations of a grasp of reality as Goethe wanted it.

And the building in Dornach that is to be dedicated to this spiritual investigation, and through which this spiritual investigation has become more well known than it would have without the building, I would like most to call the Goetheanum, so that one would see that what arises as spiritual investigation today stands fully in the midst of the healthy process of the evolution of humanity. Certainly many today who wish to acknowledge the Goethean way of looking at the world will still say that Goethe was one who recognized nature as the highest above all and who also permitted the spirit to emerge out of nature. Already as a very young man, Goethe said, “Gedacht hat sie und sinnt beständig” (“She did think and ponders incessantly”), ponders incessantly although not as man but as nature. Even if one is a spiritual investigator one can agree with the kind of naturalism that, like Goethe, thinks of nature as permeated by spirit. And those who always believe that one must stop at the boundaries of knowledge, that one can't get any further there, can be repudiated with Goethe's words. Permit me, therefore, as I conclude here, to add the words that Goethe used concerning another accomplished investigator who represented the later Kantian view:

Into the inner being of nature—
No created spirit penetrates.
Blissful those to whom she only
Reveals the outer shell!

Ins Innere der Natur—
Dringt kein erschaffner Geist
Glueckselig, wem sie nur
Die aeussere Schale weist!

Next to these words Goethe placed others that show how well Goethe knew that when the human being awakes the spirit within himself, he also finds the spirit in the world and himself as spirit:

Into the inner being of nature—
No created spirit penetrates.
Blissful those to whom she only
Reveals the outer shell!
This I hear repeated for sixty years
And damn it but secretly—
Nature has neither core nor shell,
She is everything at once.
Above all simply examine yourself
To see whether you yourself are core or shell!

Ins Innere der Natur—
Dringt kein erschaffner Geist.
Glueckselig, wem sie nur
Die aeussere Schale weist!—
So hoer ich schon an die sechzig Jahre wiederholen
Und fluche darauf—aber verstojileri,—
Natur hat weder Kern noch Schale,
A lies ist sie mit einemmale,
Dich pruefe du nur zu allermeist,
Ob du selbst Kern oder Schale seist!

Spiritual science wishes to work toward the human being learning to examine himself as to whether he is core or shell. And he is core if he grasps himself in his full reality. If he grasps himself as core, then he also penetrates to the spirit of nature. Then in the evolution of humanity in relation to spiritual science something occurs that is similar to when Copernicus pointed from the visible to the invisible, even of this visible itself.

For the super-sensible, however, humanity will have to stir itself to grasp this super-sensible within itself. To do this one does not need to become a spiritual investigator. One needs, however, to remove all prejudices that place themselves before the soul if one wishes to understand what spiritual science intends to say out of such a Goethean attitude.

I wished to offer today only a few impulses to stimulate you further. From this point of view it is always possible at least to stimulate something, but if one wanted to go into all the details, many lectures would be needed. But I believe these few comments will have sufficed to show that something needs to be drawn out of the evolutionary process of humanity, something that will first awaken the soul to full life. No one needs to believe that this will shrivel the soul, that it will kill off anything, not even the religious life. As Goethe said:

Whoever possesses Science and Art,
Has also Religion,
Whoever possesses neither of the two,
Had better have Religion!

Wer Wissenschaft und Kunst besitzt
Hat auch Religion,
Werjene beiden nicht besitzt,
Der habe Religion!

So one can say, as the modern way of thinking is evolving, whoever finds spiritual scientific paths will also find the way to true religious life; whoever does not find the spiritual scientific path will be in danger of losing also the religious path so necessary for the future of humanity!

Even more than on the last occasion when I spoke to you about our building am I reminded to-day of the attitude we must have to this edifice, dedicated as it is to the cause of Spiritual Science. The sacrifices of those who have befriended the cause of Anthroposophy call for a sense of great responsibility. To-day is a splendid occasion for reminding ourselves of this responsibility, for the first of our auxiliary buildings is to be given over to its own tasks. We can be reminded of this responsibility by studies that arise naturally out of the tasks before us and the goal we are striving to attain.

The immediate use to which these rooms will be put is the production of the glass windows for our building, and we cannot help being moved by the thought that our human faculties are not really mature enough as yet to accomplish the full task before us. I think it is healthy and good that all our work should be permeated by the feeling that we have not as yet grown equal to our task, for only this can enable us to accomplish the highest that lies within our power. We shall be able to create the first beginnings of an artistic vesture for Spiritual Science—to the extent to which our epoch and our means allow—if we are always pervaded by the feeling that we are, in truth, little qualified for the full task. The site on which our building stands is pervaded by an atmosphere which seems to say: “Do the very utmost of which your powers and faculties are capable, for you cannot do nearly enough in comparison with what ought to be achieved; and even when you have done your very utmost, it will not by any means suffice.”

When we look at the site of our building we should be pervaded by an indefinable feeling—a presentiment that a mighty task is hovering before us. And more particularly should this be the case to-day when we are handing over this auxiliary building to our friend Rychter and his workers, in order that they may create something that in the fairest sense may be a living member in the whole organism of our building.

Entering the room through this door, our feeling will be that we are indeed blessed, as individuals, in having the opportunity to co-operate in work like this. And when we think of the functions of the windows in the building, an atmosphere of the soul and spirit will hover around us, whispering of the deep spirituality which we pray may flow like purifying waves of healing through this room.

When the building is once ready we shall again and again be conscious of a feeling which I may perhaps express as follows: ‘How infinitely necessary it is to grow beyond everything personal, if the forms of this framework for our Spiritual Science are to have real meaning for us.’ This again is, in a certain sense, the satisfying element in our building. Our architects, engineers, and all the other workers may well derive strength from the comforting feeling that apart from all the cares and troubles which the building involves, it can itself be for us a wonderful education—an education leading us above everything personal. The building demands a great deal more than the expression of any personal element. As we set about our work, and permeate the single forms with thought and feeling, we become conscious of new tasks of which we previously had no inkling. We feel that a mystery is there around us, calling out to the highest forces of soul, heart and mind to create something that transcends personality. This building can teach us how to fulfil the tasks which arise every day. It brings home to us a feeling that can ring in such sacred tones in the soul: How infinitely greater are the potentialities of the Universe than insignificant human beings! The highest we can create must be infinitely greater if it is to prove equal to the tasks before us in the objective world.' All that can ever be enclosed within the limits of the personal self must be transcended. The building itself, and the auxiliary house we have been able to open to-day can be a means of education for us. Indeed, the more they become a means of education, the greater understanding we shall have. Already now, as we look at the incomplete building and at this house, we cannot help thinking of what our feeling should be as we enter. How often we shall feel, ‘Ah, if only all human beings could be led here!’ Do we really deserve so sacred a framework—a framework we ourselves have helped to create—if we have any desire to exclude other human beings? Shall it not rather be our dearest wish to bring all men into the building? This will certainly be our desire if we realise the mission that such buildings will have to humanity, if they find imitators and followers?

Think for a moment of many buildings erected in our times by clever architects. Some of them, although they show no signs of a new style and are not permeated with any new spirituality, are really creations of architectural genius. Yet they all have one thing in common. We may admire them from outside and think them beautiful inside, but they do not make us feel, as our building will do, that we are enclosed as if by organs of sense. The reason for this is that these other buildings are dumb—they do not speak. This is the thought that I would like to press home to you this evening.

Let us think of buildings which express all the characteristics of our times. People pass in and out without in any way growing into their architecture, forms or art. Everywhere we feel that what ought to be expressed through the forms of art has to-day to be communicated to humanity by other means. In the present age man is more and more compelled to bring about order, stability, peace and harmony by means of external laws, decrees or institutions, definitions in words. This implies no syllable or thought of criticism, for it must be so in our age. But something must be added to this—something that signifies the onward evolution of humanity in a different sense. It is probable that our building will not be able fully to attain its goal—indeed we are only aiming at a primitive beginning. Yet if human culture is able to take what is expressed in our building (in so far as we fulfil the tasks set us by the higher Spirits) and develop it; if the ideas underlying such works of art find followers—then people who allow themselves to be impressed by these works of art and who have learnt to understand their language, will never do wrong to their fellow men either in heart or intellect, because the forms of art will teach them how to love; they will learn to live in harmony and peace with their fellow beings. Peace and harmony will pour into all hearts through these forms; such buildings will be ‘Lawgivers’ and their forms will be able to achieve what external institutions can never achieve.

However much study may be given to the elimination of crime and wrong-doing from the world, true redemption, the turning of evil into good, will in future depend upon whether true art is able to pour a spiritual fluid into the hearts and souls of men. When men's hearts and souls are surrounded by the achievements of true architecture, sculpture and the like, they will cease to lie if it happens they are untruthfully inclined; they will cease to disturb the peace of their fellow men if this is their tendency. Edifices and buildings will begin to speak, and in a language of which people to-day have no sort of inkling.

Human beings are wont to gather together in Congresses to-day for the purpose of putting their affairs in order, for they imagine that what passes from mouth to ear can create peace and harmony. But peace and harmony, and man's rightful position can only be established when the Gods speak to us. When will the Gods speak to us?

Now when does a human being speak to us?—When he possesses a larynx. He would never be able to speak to us if he had no larynx. The spirits of nature have given us the larynx and we make this gift an organic part of the whole cosmos when we find the true forms of art, for they become instruments through which the Gods speak to us. We must, however, first learn how to make ourselves part of the great cosmos, and then our desire to lead all mankind through these doors will be the stronger. Out of this desire—for its fulfilment is not yet—the longing will develop to work so intensely for our spiritual movement that this aim may gradually be attained. Art is the creation of an organ through which the Gods are able to speak to mankind .... I have already spoken of many things in this connection. I have spoken of the Greek Temple and have shown how all its forms express the fact it is a dwelling place of the God. To-day I want to add something to this. If we try to understand the basic nature of the Greek art of building we shall realise that the very being and essence of the fourth Post-Atlantean epoch flowed into the Greeks' mode of perception and thence into their art of building.

What is the basis of Greek perception and feeling? It is, of course, a wide subject, but I will only speak of one aspect.

Here (see diagram) we have the wall surrounding the Greek Temple, with the horizontal structure resting upon it. When anything rises above the horizontal it is so constructed that it is upheld by its own forces which balance each other; just as when, in building, we place two beams together.

The presupposition here is that the earth with its gravity lies beneath. And translating this feeling into words, we may say: ‘In the fourth Post-Atlantean epoch man felt that the site of the earth was a gift of the God; it was as though Divine power overflowed into the creations of art.’ Therefore, by means of the forces in the earth given to man by the Gods, it was felt that gravity could be overcome. In the Greek Temple man controls the force of gravity and thereby creates a dwelling place for the God who has given him the earth.

Neither this “dwelling-place of the God” nor the later Roman Temples can be thought of apart from the surrounding land. The land is part of the Temple itself. A Greek Temple is complete in itself even if nobody is within it, for its whole conception is that of the dwelling-place of the God; it is the sanctuary of the God. Human beings may live for miles around in the district; if nobody enters the Temple, it stands there, none the less, complete in itself—a dwelling-place of the God. In every detail we see how man expresses in the decorative forms of these dwelling- places of the Gods all that his feeling of veneration makes him feel he ought to do for the Gods. In the last lecture I tried to show you that the motif on the capitals has its origin in a dance motif—a dance that was performed as homage to the Gods of nature. And now let us pass on to the forms of the earliest Christian architecture. One thought in particular arises within us when we pass from the Greek Temple to the Church of Christendom. The Greek Temple stands within its surrounding territory, belongs to the territory. Human beings are not necessarily within the Temple; they live around it, outside it. The Temple belongs to the surrounding territory, is thought of as the altar of the land around it. The Temple hallows everything, even the trivial daily occupations of the human beings who live on the land. Service rendered to the earth becomes a divine office because the God stands or is enthroned as Lord and participates in the work on the land and in the pursuits of human beings living around the Temple. Man feels himself united with the God as he works on the land. Worship of the God is not yet separated from service to the earth. The Temple grows out of the human element, sometimes indeed out of the ‘all-too-human,’ and hallows everything around it. ‘Earth, be thou strong!’—This is the prevailing mood of the fourth Post-Atlatean epoch, when human beings are still at one with the earth which the Gods have given into their charge, when the Ego is still slumbering in a kind of dream consciousness, when man still feels himself connected with the Group-Soul of the whole of humanity. Then man grows out of this Group-Soul, becomes more and more individual, and he separates from the land, from daily life and activity, the worship he performs in his spiritual life.

In the early days of Christianity the feelings of men were no longer the same as in the Greek age. Looking into the soul of the Greek, we see him sowing his fields and working at his industrial pursuits, pervaded by this unshakable feeling: There stands the Temple with the in-dwelling God and I am near. I may be carrying out my pursuits and working on the land but all the while the God is dwelling there within the Temple. Then man grows more individual, a strong sense of Ego, of “I” arises within him, and Christendom represents the emergence of something that had been prepared through the course of long ages by the ancient Hebrew civilisation. Out of the human soul arises the need to separate off from the affairs of everyday life the worship that is offered to the God. The building is separated from the land and the Church of Christendom comes into being. The land becomes independent; the building becomes an entity independent of the territory; it is an ‘individuality’ complete in itself. The Greek Temple was still a kind of altar for the whole territory, whereas the walls of the Christian Church now form a space set apart for those who are to worship. The forms of the Churches of Christendom and also of Roman architecture gradually come to express this individual, spiritual need of man, and they can only be understood in this sense. The place of the Greek within earthly existence was such that he said to himself: ‘I can remain here with my flocks, carrying out my occupations, doing my work on the land, for the Temple stands there like an altar for the whole countryside: the God is dwelling within it.’ In Christendom, man says: ‘I must leave my work and repair to this building, for there I must seek for the Spirit.’ The service of earth and the service of heaven are separated and the Christian Church more and more assumes a form where Greek and Roman architecture would no longer be suitable. It is a form which reveals that the community belongs to the church; the church is intended to enclose the community. Then, once again set apart from the community, we find the house of the priests, of those who teach. An image of the universe comes into being; the Spirit speaks to those who seek for the spirit, in precincts where they are enclosed within walls. The whole world was felt by the Greeks and Romans in former times in the same way in which the Christians afterwards felt the precincts of the Church with its enclosing walls.

And what the Greek Temple itself had been now became the chancel. Men sought now for a distinct image of the world whereas formerly they had taken the world itself and only placed within it, visible to outer senses, the Temple as the dwelling-place of God. Gothic architecture is really only a branch of what was already being prepared. The essential feature of Gothic architecture is that the weight is taken away from the walls and placed upon the pillars. What is the origin of this whole mode of construction, where the weight rests on pillars, which are so moulded that they are able to bear it? It is based on a quite different conception from that of the Greek Temple. When we pass to the pillars of Gothic architecture which take away the weight from the walls, we are no longer concerned with the pure force of gravity. Here, man himself is working. In the Greek Temple it is as though he frees himself from the earth's gravity and having gained knowledge of it within the earthly realm, now rises above it. In that man makes use of the force of gravity, he overcomes it. In the weight-bearing Gothic pillars we are no longer concerned with the pure working of the force of gravity; in the Gothic building the art of handicraft is necessary, of higher and lower handicraft. The need for the creation of precincts which enclose the community also gives rise, in Gothic architecture, to the need for something wherein the activity of the community plays a part. In the single forms we see a continuation, as it were, of what the people have learnt. The art of the hand-workers flows into the forms, and in studying these forms we see the art of human beings who have contributed their share, who have worked together. The old Roman Churches are still edifices which enclose the God. The Gothic Church is an edifice built by the community to enclose the God but one where the people have contributed their own handicraft. They do not only enter the Churches but they themselves work at the building as a community. In Gothic architecture this labour of human beings unites itself with the Divine. The souls of men no longer receive the Divine as a matter of course; they do not only come together and listen to the word of the Spirit proceeding from the chancel, but they gather around the God in their labours. Gothic Churches are really crystallised handicraft.

We can quickly pass over what came next, for it really amounted to a revival of classic architecture. In this connection it is not necessary to speak of the Renaissance; we will speak of what the fifth Post-Atlantean epoch demands of us.

Let us consider the element of weight and support, following it to the point where it becomes crystallised handicraft in Gothic architecture.

If we penetrate this with artistic feeling we realise that here is something at rest within itself, at rest within the earthly forces. All the forces of these edifices rest within the earthly element. The Greek Temple everywhere indicates the force of gravity and its own union with the earth. In the Greek Temple we can everywhere observe some manifestation of the force of gravity. Its very forms reveal a union with the earth.

And now let us compare the basic form in our building that will confront everyone even from the outside. I will make a rough diagram of it. What is the characteristic of this motif? If you compare it with the Greek Temple you will discover the difference. The Greek motif is complete in itself. This other motif, when it is a wall—for instance the separate perpendicular wall—only has meaning when it is not merely wall, but when it grows out of the whole. The wall is not merely wall, it is living, just like a living organism that allows elevations and depressions to grow out of itself. The wall lives—that is the difference. Think of a Greek Temple. Although there are many columns, the whole is none the less governed by gravity. In our building, however, nothing is mere wall. The forms grow out of the wall. That is the essential thing. And when we pass around inside our building we shall find one plastic form, a continuous relief sculpture on the capitals, plinths, architraves. They grow out of the wall, and the wall is their basis, their soil, without which they could not exist. There will be a great deal of relief carving in wood in the interior of the building, and forms which, although they are not to be found elsewhere in the physical world, represent an onward flowing evolution. Beginning between the Saturn columns at the back, there will be a kind of symphonic progression to the culmination in the East. But the forms are no more present in the outer physical world than melodies are present there. These forms are walls that have become living. Physical walls do not live, but etheric walls, spiritual walls are indeed living.

I should have to speak for a long time if I wanted to show that this is how the art of relief first assumes its real meaning, but I will only give you an indication of what I really have in mind. A certain eminent artist of modern times has spoken a great deal about the art of relief and has said some clever things. He tells us to think of two panes of glass standing parallel to each other and between them an intersected figure. We should then be looking in the direction of the arrow through the panes of glass at the figure ... (Dr. Steiner here read a passage from a book) ... The author is trying to form a conception of what relief really is. But the conception is built up simply from what the eye perceives, as he plainly shows when he says that the relief is produced when one thinks of the background as a pane of glass and that which lies in front of the pane as shut off by another pane of glass. He therefore bases his conception of relief on the eye and in order to make it clear he uses the two panes of glass on which the whole figure is projected. As against this conception we have our own which passes over from what is made visible by glass and projection to that which lives. We want to make relief a living thing. Relief has no meaning when one simply designs figures on a wall. It only has meaning when it calls forth the intuition that the wall itself is living and can bring forth the figures.

Now there is in the world a relief which is full of meaning, only we pay no proper attention to it. There is a certain relief that has been created in accordance with the true idea—it is the earth with her plant kingdom. We must, however, pass away from the surface of the earth into cosmic space before we can study this relief. The earth is the living surface which brings forth its creatures from its own being. Our own art of relief must be based upon the conception that the wall is a living thing even as the earth brings forth her plants. This is how a true art of relief is attained. To go beyond this principle is to sin against the essence of the art of relief. When we look down upon the great relief of the earth, we see human beings and animals moving upon it, but they do not belong to the relief. They can be introduced into the relief, of course, because the arts can be developed in all directions, but this is no longer the pure essence of the art of relief.

Our building must speak through the forms in its interior, but the speech must be that of the Gods. Think for a moment of the life of human beings on the earth, that is to say, immediately on the surface of the earth. Here we need not draw directly on our teachings—we need only turn to the Paradise Legend. If man had remained in Paradise he would have looked upon the wonderful relief of the earth with her plant kingdom from outside. He himself, however, was transplanted, as it were, into this relief. He could not observe it from outside for he was taken out of Paradise. The speech of the Gods cannot ascend from the earth to men for the speech of the earth drowns the speech of the Gods. If we pay heed to the organs of the Gods which they themselves created when, as the Elohim, they gave the earth to man, if we pay heed to the etheric forms of the plants and mould in accordance with them, we are creating in the same way as nature created the larynx in man in order that he might speak—we are indeed creating a larynx through which the Gods may speak to us. If we hearken to the music of the forms on our walls which are the larynx for the speech of the Gods, we are seeking the way back to Paradise. I will speak of painting in another lecture. To-day I want to speak of the relief work and sculpture which will be produced in this house we have opened to-day. I have tried to explain how relief may become an organ for the speech of the Gods and on some future occasion we will speak of how colours become soul-organs for the speech of the Gods. Our age has little understanding for the kind of conceptions that must inspire us if we are really to fulfil our task. The Greek Temple was the dwelling place of the God, the Church of Christendom the framework around the community who would fain be united with the Spirit. What is our building to be? This is already revealed in its ground-plan and rounded form. The building is bipartite but the architectural forms of the two sections have equal importance. There is no difference as in the case of the chancel and the space for the congregation in a Christian Church. The difference in the dimensions of the two sections of our building merely signifies that in the large cupola the physical preponderates and that in the small cupola we have tried to make the spiritual predominate. This very form expresses aspiration to the Spirit. Every single detail must express this aspiration to the Spirit, inasmuch as we are striving to create an organ for the speech of the Gods. I have said that those who really understand our building fully will put away lying and unrighteousness; the building may indeed become a ‘Lawgiver,’ and the truth of this can be studied in the different forms and in the architraves. Everything in the building will have an inner value. Every part of the larynx has inner value; no words could be uttered if the larynx did not contain a a particular form at the right place. If, for instance, we were to make an indention here (see diagram) and think of a kind of roofing over it, the whole form expresses the fact that this building must be filled with the feeling of hearts striving together in love.

Nothing in this architecture is there for its own sake alone. The one form leads over into the other; or, if the forms have a threefold character, the central form is the bridge between the other two. Here we have a rough sketch of the forms of the doors and windows.

Now all that lives in the sculptured forms is three dimensional; relief is a conquest of the second dimension, surface, which is then brought into the third dimension. This is not realised if we merely take the standpoint of an observer or spectator: for we need a living feeling of how the earth allows the plants to grow out of her being.

When I come to speak of the real nature of painting we shall understand the significance of the connection between colour and the inner element of soul in the universe. There would be no sense in painting with colours if colour were not something quite different from what physics imagines it to be. The principles of colour as the speech of the soul of nature, of the soul of the universe, will be the subject of a later lecture.

I will now indicate how our glass windows are to represent the union of the outer with the inner. They will each in themselves be of one single colour, but different colours will be used at the various positions in the building. This expresses the spiritual, musical harmony of the outer with the inner world. And the single coloured window will only express this harmony in the thicker and thinner strata of the glass. That is to say, we shall have surfaces where the glass is thicker, more solid, and surfaces where the glass is thinner. The light will shine more strongly through the thinner places in the windows; it will shine less strongly, and produce darker colours, through the places where the glass is thicker. The connection between spirit and matter will be expressed in the glass windows; but the whole interior will strive to be an organ for the speech of the Gods. The larynx makes it possible for man to speak, and in the same way the whole of our relief-moulding is an organ for the Gods who should speak to us from all sides of the universe. So that when we make an aperture for the windows in the walls which allow the Gods to speak to us, we are seeking the path to the Spirits of the cosmos. These windows are intended to signify in their coloured shadings: ‘Thus, O man, thou findest the path to the Spirit.’ We shall see how the soul is connected with the spiritual world when it sleeps during the night and is living outside the body. We shall see the way in which the soul is connected with the spiritual world between death and a new birth in the disembodied state. The windows will show us how, when man approaches the threshold, he becomes aware of the abyss; the stations on the path to the spiritual world will be revealed. They will arise as light formations from the West, revealing to us the mysteries of Initiation. We are trying to create walls, the forms of which make the wall themselves seem to pass away. The designs must express how we pierce the walls, showing us how we find the path to the spiritual worlds, or traverse these worlds unconsciously, showing us what our relation to the spiritual worlds must be.

The Greek Temple, the dwelling place of the God, and the later edifice, which was built for the community desiring to be united with their God, were building-sheaths which enclosed and shut off. Our building must not shut off anything in the universe; its walls must live, but live in accordance with truth itself. Truth flows into the beauty of our relief-moulding. If we had not been driven out of Paradise we should be conscious of the ' speaking ' relief proceeding from the earth herself in the plant forms, which grow even above the geological formations of the mountains and only allow these strata to be bare in places where it is right that they should be bare. The moment however when we find in our perceptual life the transition from the 'repose' where the Gods speak to us, from that ‘repose’ to our own activity, to what we must do in order to find the way to the Gods—in that moment we must have movement, inner movement; we must pierce the wall. We must have these windows which call to our souls to tread the path to those regions whence the words expressed by the forms of the walls have proceeded. Then each one of us will sit within the building and we shall say to ourselves: “The organs of the great Spirits themselves are round about us; it is for us to understand the language spoken though these forms.” But we must understand it in the heart and not merely be able to grasp it intellectually.

Those who begin to, explain' the meaning of these forms are on the wrong track. They stand on the same ground as those who interpret the old myths symbolically and allegorically, and imagine for instance, that they are advancing the cause of Theosophy. A man who tries to ‘interpret’ the myths and explain external forms may be clever and ingenious but he is like one who tries to look under his chin to explain the symbolism of his larynx. We understand the speech of the Gods by learning how to listen with our hearts, not by using intellectual agility and giving symbolic or allegorical meanings to myths and artistic forms. ‘Here you sit and the Spirits of the Universe are speaking to you’—this must become a living feeling within us. When this becomes a living perception of what the soul must do if it is to find the way to those regions whence the speech of the Spirits proceeds, we shall direct our gaze to where the walls are pierced by the windows; and at those places there will be revealed to us the mysteries enacted in man as he consciously or unconsciously treads the path from the physical to the spiritual.

I have tried to express the feelings of our hearts and souls to-day when this house is being given over to the charge of our friend Rychter and his colleagues for their work. May they feel, as they receive it, the sacred nature of their task and something of the holiness of which I have spoken. Up on the hill itself we are still working at the building which will reveal, to those who seek, organs through which the Gods may speak to them. But there must arise in these seekers a holy longing to find the ways and paths to the realms of the Gods. The work of Rychter and his colleagues in the rooms of this house will be taken up the hill and placed in the positions where the walls are pierced. It will move the souls of those gathered together in the building at the top of the hill and show them the path to the Spirit.

May this holy mood pervade this house; may each drilling in the glass be carried out with the feeling: ‘Here I have to mould something that will lead to the realms of the Spirits those who see it up there in the building. My creations must make the soul's perception so living that the shadings in the coloured glass will represent the channels by which the spiritual worlds are speaking through the forms in the interior.’ The difficulties may be very great, indeed there may be only partial success in many cases and in other cases total failure, but the attitude I have described will be an unfailing help.

I did not intend to-night merely to speak of matters which may help to make art more intelligible. I have spoken as I have because I pray that something of what I feel may flow from my heart to yours. I want your hearts to be livingly permeated with a feeling inwardly vibrant with the sense of the holiness of this work. We dedicate this house of labour most fitly if as we leave the doors we concentrate with all the forces of our hearts on love for the world of man and of spirit, to the end that the way to the Spirit may be found through what is accomplished here—to the Spirit whence peace and harmony can flow among men on the earth. If all our labours are made living by the Spirit, if all the work on this hill is filled with the Spirit of Love—which is at the same time the Spirit of true art—then from our building there will flow out over the earth the spirit of Peace, of Harmony, of Love. The possibility will be created for the work on this hill to find successors; many such centres of earthly and spiritual peace, harmony and love may thus spring up in the world. Let us realise the living nature of our work in this mood of peace and loving harmony, knowing that our labours flow from the Spirit of Life itself. There have been dwelling-places of the Gods, sanctuaries of the community, and there yet will be an organ of speech for the Spirit, a building which points out the way to the Spirit. The God dwelt in the Greek Temple; the spirit of the community may dwell within the Roman or Gothic edifice; but the world of the Spirit itself must speak through the building of the future. We have seen the house of earthly forces and forms arise and pass away in the course of human evolution; we have seen the house of the union of human souls arise and pass away in the spiritual evolution of the earth. It is for us to build the house of speech out of our love for true art, which is at the same time love for true spirituality and for all mankind.

To-day we will continue our study of subjects connected with art. The lectures are meant to help us in regard to the kind of thoughts which should permeate the work before us. If we would couple right thoughts with the task which we are here beginning in a primitive fashion, the necessity arises to bring before the soul many things that impress us when we study man's achievements in art and their connection with human civilisation.

Herman Grimm, the very intuitive student of art in the nineteenth century, made a certain apparently radical statement about Goethe. He spoke of the date at which humanity would first have developed a real understanding of Goethe, placing it about the year 2000. According to Grimm's idea, therefore, a long time will have to elapse before mankind will have developed to the point of understanding the real significance of Goethe. And, indeed, when one observes the present age, one does not feel inclined to contradict such a statement. To Grimm, Goethe's greatest significance does not lie in the fact that he was a poet, that he had created this or that particular work of art, but that he always created from a full and complete manhood—the impulse of this full manhood lies behind every detail of his creative activity. Our age is very far from understanding this full manhood that lived, for instance, in Goethe. In saying this I have naturally no wish to speak derogatively of the specialisation that has entered into the study of science, which is indeed often deplored—for from one point of view this specialisation is a necessity. Much more significant than the specialisation in science is that which has crept into modern life itself, for, as a result of this, the individual soul, enclosed within some particular sphere of specialised conceptions or ideas, grows less and less capable of understanding other souls who specialise in a different sphere. In a certain sense all human beings are “specialists” to-day so far as their souls are concerned. More particularly are we struck with this specialised mode of perception when we study the development of art in humanity. And for this very reason it is necessary—although it can only be a primitive beginning—that there shall again come into existence a comprehensive understanding of spiritual life in its totality. True form in art will arise from this comprehensive understanding of spiritual life. We need not enter upon a very far-reaching study in order to prove the truth of this. We shall come to a better understanding if we start from something near at hand, and I will therefore speak of one small point in the numerous irrelevant and often ridiculous attacks made against our spiritual movement at the present time.

It is so cheap for people to try, by means of pure fabrications, to slander us in the eyes of the world, saying, for instance, that we are on the wrong track because here or there we have given to our buildings a form that we consider suitable to our work. We are reproached for having coloured walls in certain of our meeting rooms and we are already tired of hearing about the ‘sensationalism’ in our building—which is said to be quite unnecessary for true ‘Theosophy’—that is how people express it. In certain circles ‘true Theosophy’ is thought to be a kind of psychic hotch-potch, teeming with obscure sensations, glorying to some extent in the fact that the soul can unfold a higher ego within. This, however, is really nothing but egotism. From the point of view of this obscure psychic hotch-potch people think it superfluous for a spiritual current to be expressed in any outer form, although this outer form, it is true, can only be a primitive beginning. Such people think themselves justified in chattering about these psychic matters no matter where they may be. Why, then—so they think—is it necessary to express anything in definite forms? We really cannot expect to find any capacity of real thought in people who hurl this kind of reproach at us—in fact we can expect it from very few people at the present time—but, nevertheless, we must be clear in our own minds on many points if we are to be able at least to give the right answers to questions that arise in our own souls.

I want to draw your attention to Carstens, an artist who made his mark in the sphere of art at the end of the eighteenth century as a designer and painter of decided talent. I do not propose in any way to speak of the value of Carstens' art, nor to describe his work—neither am I going to give you a biographical sketch of his life. I only want to call your attention to the fact that he certainly possessed great talent for design, if not for painting. In the soul of Carstens we find a certain artistic longing, but we can also see what was lacking in him. He wanted to draw ideas, to embody them in painting, but he was not in the position of men like Raphael or Leonardo da Vinci—or to take an example from poetry—of Dante. Raphael, Leonardo and Dante lived within a culture that teemed with import—a culture that penetrated into and at the same time surrounded the soul of man. When Raphael painted his Madonnas they were living in men's hearts and souls and in the very highest sense something streamed from the soul of the public in response to the creations of this great artist. When Dante set out to transport the soul into spiritual realms he had only to draw his material, his substance, from something that was resounding, as it were, in every human soul. These artists possessed in their own souls the substance of the general culture of the age. In any work of the scientific culture of that time—however much it may have fallen into disuse—we shall find connecting links with an element that was living in all human souls, even down to the humblest circles. The learned men of the spheres of culture where Raphael created his Madonnas were fully cognisant of the idea at the back of the figures of the Madonna, nay more, the idea was a living thing within their souls. Thus artistic creations seem to be expressions of a general, uniform spiritual life. This quality came to light again in Goethe as a single individual, in the way that was possible at the turn of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. So little is this understood in our times, that, in Herman Grimm's opinion, as I have already said, it will be necessary to wait until the year 2000 before the world will again reveal such understanding.

Let us turn again to Carstens. He takes the Iliad of Homer, and he impresses into his penciled forms the processes and events of which he reads. What a different relationship there is to the Homeric figures in the eighteenth and the beginning of the nineteenth century from the relationship that existed between the soul of Raphael and the figures of the Madonna and other motifs of that age! In the greatest epochs the content of art was immediately perceptible because it flowed from something that moved the innermost being of man. In the nineteenth century’ it began to be necessary for artists to seek for the content of their creations by dint of effort and we soon find that the artist becomes a kind of ‘cultural hermit,’ one who is only concerned with himself and of whom people ask, ‘What relationship is there between himself and his own particular world of form?’ A study of the history of art in the nineteenth century would reveal the true state of affairs in this connection.

Thus there gradually arose, not only the indifferent attitude to art, but the cold one that exists nowadays. Think of someone in a modern city walking through a picture gallery or exhibition of pictures. The soul is not moved by what is seen, no inner confidence is felt in it. The person is faced by what really amounts to a multitude of riddles—to use a radical expression—riddles which can only be solved if to some extent penetration is made into the particular relationship of this or that artist to nature, or to other things. The soul is faced with purely individual problems or riddles, and the significant thing is, that although people believe they are solving the problems of art, they are, in the vast majority of cases, trying to solve problems not really connected with art itself—to wit, psychological problems. Such problems as: How does this or that artist look on nature—are problems of philosophy or the like and are of no importance when we really penetrate into the great epochs of art. On the contrary, when this penetration is undertaken, the problems that emerge not only for the artist but for the contemplator of the works of art, are truly artistic, truly aesthetic ones. For it is the manner that really concerns the creative artists, while the mere matter, the mere substance, is only the element that flows around him, in which he is immersed. We might even put it thus: our artists are no longer artists. They are contemplators of the world, each from a certain point of view and what they see, what strikes them in the world, this they contrive to shape. But these are theory, problems of history and so forth, while on the other hand our age has almost altogether lost the power—or indeed the heart—to perceive art in its essence, to perceive the manner, not the mere matter.

Our conception of the world—theoretical from its very foundations—is a good deal to blame for this. Practical as men have become in technical, industrial and commercial affairs, they have become eminently theoretical so far as their thinking is concerned. The endeavour to build a bridge between modern science and the conception of the world held by the artist is not only fraught with difficulty, but with the fact that so few people feel there is any need to build it. Words like those of Goethe: “Art is the manifestation of secret laws of nature without which they could never find expression” are wholly unintelligible to our age, although here and there people think they understand them. Our age holds fast to the most external, the most abstract natural laws—laws which are themselves based on utterly abstract mathematical principles—and it will not admit the validity of any penetration into reality which transcends all abstract mathematics or systems of that kind. No wonder our age has lost the living element of soul which feels the working of the very substance of world connections—the substance that must indeed well up from these world connections before art can come into being. The thoughts and ideas evolved by the modern age in regard to the universe are inartistic in their very nature—nay more, they even strive to be so. Colours—what have they become according to modern scientific opinion? Vibrations of the most abstract substance in the ether, etheric vibrations of so many wave lengths. These waves of vibrating ether sought by modern science, how remote they are from the direct, living essence of colour! What else is possible than that man is led wholly to ignore the living essence of colour? I have already told you that this element of colour is, in its very being, fluidic and alive—an element moreover in which our soul lives. And a time will come—as I have also indicated—when man will again perceive the living connection of the flowing sea of colour with the colours of creatures and objects manifested in the external world.

This is difficult for man because, since he has to develop his ego during earthly evolution, he has risen out of this flowing sea of colour to a mode of contemplation that proceeds purely from the ego. With his ego, man rises out of the sea of colour; the animal lives wholly within it and the fact that certain animals have feathers or skins of particular colours is connected with the whole relationship existing between the souls of these animals and the flowing sea of colour. The animal perceives objects with its astral body (as we perceive them with the ego) and into the astral body flow the forces living in the group-soul of the animal. It is nonsense to imagine that animals, even higher animals, behold the world as man beholds it. At the present time there is no understanding of these things. Man imagines that if he is standing near a horse, the horse sees him in exactly the same way as he sees the horse. What is more natural than to think that since the horse has eyes it sees him just as he sees it? This, however, is absolute nonsense. Without a certain clairvoyance a horse would no more see a human being than a human being, being without problems of psychological clairvoyance, would see an angel, for the man simply does not exist for the horse as a physical being, but only as a spiritual being. The horse is possessed of a certain order of clairvoyance and what the horse sees in man is quite different from what man sees in the horse: as we go about we are spectral beings to the horse. If animals could speak in their own language—not in the way they are sometimes made to ‘speak’ nowadays, but in their own language—man would realise that it never by any chance occurs to the animals to contemplate him as a being of similar order but as one who stands higher than themselves—a spectral, ghostlike being. Even if the animals assume their own body to consist of flesh and blood, they certainly have a different conception of the body of man. To the modern mind this of course sounds the purest nonsense—so far is the present age removed from truth!

As a result of the relation between astral body and group-soul, a receptivity to the living, creative power of colour flows into the animal. Just as we may see an object that rouses desire in us and we stretch out towards it by movement of the hand, an impression is made in the whole animal organism by the direct creative power in the colour; this impression flows into the feathers or skin and gives the animal its colour. I have already said that our age cannot understand why it is that the polar bear is white; the white colour is the effect produced by the environment and when the polar bear ‘whitens’ itself, this, at a different level, is practically the same thing as when man stretches out with a movement of his hand to pick a rose in response to a desire. The living creative effects of the environment work upon the polar bear in such a way that an impulse is released within it and it ‘whitens’ itself.

In man, this living weaving and moving in the element of colour has passed into the substrata of his being because he would never have been able to develop his ego if he had remained wholly immersed within the sea of colour and were, for instance, in response to an impression of a rosy hue of dawn to feel the impulse to impress these tints through creative imagination into certain parts of his skin. During the ancient moon period these conditions still obtained. The contemplation of scenes in nature like that of a rosy dawn worked upon man as he then was; this impression was reflected back, as it were, into his own colouring; it penetrated into the being of man in those times and was then outwardly expressed in certain areas of his body. During the earth period, this living bodily existence in the flowing sea of colour had to cease in order that man might be able to evolve his own conception of the world in his ego. So far as his form was concerned he had to become neutral to this sea of colour. The tint of the human skin as it appears in the temperate zones is essentially the expression of the ego, of absolute neutrality in face of the outer waves of colour; it denotes man's ascent above the flowing sea of colour. But even the most elementary facts of Spiritual Science remind us that it is man's task to find the path of return.

Physical body, etheric body, astral body—these were developed during the periods of Saturn, Sun and Moon; the ego has to develop during the earth period. Man must find the ways and means to spiritualise his astral body once again, to permeate it with all that the ego has won for itself. And as he spiritualises his astral body and so discovers the path of return, he must again find the flowing, surging waves of colour out of which he arose in order that his ego might develop—just as a man who rises from the sea only sees what is over the sea. We are indeed already living in an age when this penetration into the spiritual flow of the powers of of nature—that is to say of the spiritual powers behind nature—must begin. It must again be possible for us not merely to look at colours, to reproduce them outwardly here or 'there, but to live with colour, to experience the inner life-force of colour. This cannot be done by merely studying in painting, for instance, the effects of the colours and their interplay as we look at them. It can only be done if once again we sink our soul in the flow of red or blue, for instance, if the flow of the colour really lives—if we are able to ensoul the essence of colour that instead of evolving any kind of colour symbolism (which would of course be the very opposite way of going to work) we really discover what is already living in colour just as the power of laughter exists in a man who laughs. Hence we must seek out the paths of return to the flowing world of colour, for as I have already said, man has risen above it with his ego. If he has no other perception save ‘here is red, here is blue’—which is often the case to-day—he can never press onwards to living experience of the real essence of colour. Still less is this possible when he gives an intellectualistic garb to this inner essence and perceives red as a symbol, blue as another, and so forth. This will never lead to real experience of colour. We must know how to surrender the whole soul to what speaks to us from out of colour. Then, when we are confronted with red we have a sense of attack, aggression—this comes to us from the red. If ladies were all to go about dressed in red, a man possessed of a delicate sense for colour would silently imagine, simply on account of their clothing, that they might at any moment set about him vigourously! In red, then, there is a quality of aggression, something that comes towards us. Blue has an element that seems to pass away from us, to leave us, something after which we gaze with a certain wistfulness, with yearning.

How far the present age is removed from any such living understanding of colour may be realised from what I have already said about Hildebrand, an excellent artist, who expressly states that a colour on a surface is simply that and nothing more; the surface is there, overlaid with colour—that is all—though to be sure it is not quite the same in the case of form which expresses distance, for example. Colour expresses more than mere distance and we cannot help finding it deeply symptomatic of the whole nature of the present age that this is not perceived, even by an artist like Hildebrand. It is impossible to live into the essence of colour if one cannot immediately pass over from repose into movement, realising that a red disc approaches us, and that a blue disc, on the other hand, withdraws. These colours move in opposite directions. When we penetrate deeply into this living essence of colour we are led further and further. We begin to realise—if we really believe in colour—that we simply could not picture two coloured discs of this kind remaining there at rest. To picture such a thing would be to deaden all living feeling, for living feeling immediately changes into the realisation that the red and the blue discs are revolving round each other, the one towards the spectator, the other away from him. The relation between the red that is painted on a figure, in contrast to the blue, is such that the figure takes on life and movement through the very colour itself. The figure is caught up into the universe of life because this is shining in the colours. Form is of course the element that is at rest, stationary; but the moment the form has colour, the inner movement in the colour rises out of the form, and the whirl of the cosmos, the whirl of spirituality passes through the form. If you colour a form you endow it with the soul element of the universe, with cosmic soul, because colour is not only a part of form; the colour you give to a particular form places this form into the whole concatenation of its environment and indeed into the whole universe. In colouring a form we should feel: ‘Now we are endowing form with soul.’ We breathe soul into dead form when, through colour, we make it living.

We need only draw a little nearer to this inner living weaving of colours and we shall feel as if we are not confronting them on a level but as if we were standing either above or below them—again it is as if the colour becomes inwardly alive. To a lover of abstractions, to one who merely gazes at the colours and does not livingly penetrate into them, a red sphere may indeed seem to move around a blue, but he does not feel the need to vary the movement in any sense. He may be a great mathematician, or a great metaphysician, but he does not know how to live with colour because it seems to pass like a dead thing from one place to another. This is not so in reality; colour radiates, changes within itself, and if red moves it will send on before it a kind of orange aura, a yellow aura, a green aura. If blue moves it will send something different on before it.

We have, then, a play of colours as it were. Something actually happens when we experience in colour; thus red seems to attack, blue to pass away. We feel red as something which we want to ward off, blue as something we would pursue as if with longing. And if we could feel in colour in such a way that red and blue really live and move, we should indeed inwardly flow with the surging sea of colour, our souls would feel the eddying vortex of attacks and longings, the sense of flight and the prayer of surrender that intermingle with one another. And if we were to express this in some form, artistically of course, this form, which in itself is at rest, we should tear away from rest and repose. The moment we have a form which we paint, we have, instead of the form which is at rest, living movement that does not only belong to the form but to the forces and weaving being round about the form. Thus through a life of soul we wrest the material form away from its mere repose, from its mere quality of rigid form. Something like this must surely once be painted into this world by the creative elemental powers of the universe. [Note 1] For all that man is destined to receive by way of powers of longing—all this is something that could find expression in the blue. This on the one hand man must bear as a forming, shaping principle in his head, while all that finds expression in the red he must bear within him in a form that rushes upward from the rest of the body to the brain. Two such currents are indeed active in the structure of the human brain. Around man externally is the world—all that for which he longs—and this is perpetually being flooded over by that which surges upward from his own body. By day it happens that all which the blue half contains flows more intensely than the red and yellow: by night, so far as the physical human organism is concerned it is the opposite. And what we are wont to called the two-petalled lotus flower [Note 2] is indeed a true image of what I have here portrayed, for this two-petalled lotus flower does indeed reveal to the seer just such colours and movements. Nobody will really be able to fathom what lives in the world of form as the creative element, as the upper part of the human head, if he is not able to follow this flow of colour that in man is indeed a “hidden” flow of colour.

It must be the endeavour of art again to dive down into the life of the elements. Art has observed and studied nature long enough, has tried long enough to solve all the riddles of nature and to express in another form all that can be observed by this penetration into nature. What lives in the elements is, however, dead so far as modern art is concerned. Air, water, light—all are dead as they are painted to-day; form is dead as is expressed in modern sculpture. A new art will arise when the human soul learns to penetrate to the depths of the elemental world, for this world is living. People may rail against this; they may think that it ought not to be, but such raillery is only the outcome of human inertia. Unless man enters with his whole being into the world of the elements, and absorbs into himself the spirit and soul of the external world art will more and more become a work of the human soul in isolation. This of course may bring many interesting things to light in regard to the psychology of certain souls, but it will never achieve that which art alone can achieve. These things belong to the far, far future but we must go forward to meet this future with eyes that have been opened by Spiritual Science—otherwise we can see in that future nothing but death and paralysis.

This is why we must seek for inner connection between all our forms and colours here and the spiritual knowledge that moves innermost depths of the soul; we must seek that which lives in the Spirit in the same way as the Madonnas lived in Raphael, so lived in him that he was able to paint them as he did. The Madonnas were living in Raphael's very being, just as they were living in the learned men, the labourers in the fields and the craftsmen of his time. That is why he was the true artist of the Madonna. Only when we succeed in bringing into our forms in a purely artistic sense, without symbolism or allegory, all that lives in our idea of the world—not as abstract thought, dead knowledge or science, but as living substance of the soul—only then do we divine something of what the future holds in store.

Thus there must be unity between what is created externally and all that permeates the soul in the innermost depths of her being—a unity that was present in Goethe as the result of a special karma. Bridges must be built between what is still to many people so much abstract conception in Spiritual Science and what arises from hand, chisel and paint brush. To-day the building of these bridges is hindered by a cultural life that is in many respects superficial and abstract, and will not allow life to flow into action. This explains the appearance of the wholly groundless idea that spiritual knowledge might cause the death of art. In many instances of course a paralysing effect has been evident, for instance in all the allegorising and symbolising that goes on, in the perpetual questioning, ‘what does this mean?’ ‘what does that mean?’ I have already said that we should not always be asking what things ‘mean.’ We should not think of asking about the ‘meaning’ of the larynx, for instance. The larynx does not ‘mean’ anything, for it is the living organ of human speech and this is the sense in which we must look at all that lives in forms and colours when they are living organs of the spiritual world. So long as we have not ceased asking about allegorical or symbolical meanings, so long as we interpret myths and sagas allegorically and symbolically instead of feeling the living breath of the Spirit pervading the cosmos, realising how the cosmos lives in the figures of the world of myths and fairy stories—so long have we not attained to real spiritual knowledge.

A beginning, however, must be made, imperfect though it will be. No one should imagine that we take this beginning to be the perfect thing; but like many other objections to our spiritual movement made by the modern age, it is nonsense to say that our building is not an essential part of this spiritual movement. We ourselves are already aware of the facts which people may bring forward. We realise also that all the foolish chatter about the ‘higher self,’ all the rhapsodies in regard to the ‘divinity of the soul of man’ can also be expressed in outer forms of the present age; and of course we know that it is everywhere possible for man to promote Spiritual Science in its mental and intellectual aspects. But over and above this merely intellectual aspect we feel that if Spiritual Science is to pour life into the souls of men it demands a vesture of a different kind from any that may be a product of the dying culture of our day. It is not at all necessary for the outer world to remind us of the cheap truth that Spiritual Science can also be studied in its mental aspect in surroundings of a different kind from those which are made living by our forms. The ideal which Spiritual Science must pour into our souls must be earnest and grow ever more earnest. A great many things are still necessary before this earnestness, this inner driving force of the soul can become part of our very being. It is quite easy to speak of Spiritual Science and its expression in the outer world in such way that its core and nerve are wholly lacking. The form taken by the most vigorous attacks levelled against our spiritual movement creates a strange impression. Those who read some of these attacks will, if they are in their right minds, wonder what on earth they are driving at. They describe all manner of fantastic nonsense which has not the remotest connection with us, and then the opposition is levelled against these absurdities! The world is so little capable of absorbing new spiritual leaven that it invents a wholly grotesque caricature and then sets to work to fight against that. There are even people who think that the whole movement should be done away with. Attack of course is always possible but it is a reductio ab absurdum to do away with an invention that has no resemblance of any kind to what it sets out to depict. It behooves us, however, to realise what kind of sense for truth underlies these things, for this will make us strong to receive all that must flow to us from Spiritual Science, and, made living by this Spiritual Science, shine into material existence. That the world has not grown in tolerance or understanding is shown by the attitude adopted towards Spiritual Science. The world has not grown in either of these qualities.

We can celebrate the inner confluence of the soul with Spiritual Science in no better way than by deepening ourselves in problems like that of the nature and being of colour, for in experience of the living flow of colour we transcend the measure of our own stature and live in cosmic life. Colour is the soul of nature and of the whole cosmos and we partake of this soul as we experience colour.

This was what I wanted to indicate to-day, in order next time to penetrate still more deeply into the nature of the world of colour and the essence of painting.

I could not help interspersing these remarks with references to the attacks that are being made upon us from all sides—attacks emanating from a world incapable of understanding the aims of our Anthroposophical Movement. One can only hope that those within our Movement will be able, by a deepening of their being, to understand something truly symptomatic of our times, the falsehood and untruth that is creeping into man's conception of what is striving to find its place within the spiritual world. We of course have no wish to seclude our spiritual stream, to shut it off from the world; as much as the world is willing to receive, that it can have. But one thing the world must accept if it is to understand us, and that is the unity of the whole nature of man—the unity which makes every human achievement the outcome of this full and complete ‘manhood.’

These words are not meant to be an attack on the present age. I speak them with a certain sense of pain, because the more our will and our efforts increase in this Movement of ours, the more malicious—perhaps not consciously, but more or less unconsciously malicious—do the opposing forces become. I have, moreover, spoken thus because the way in which these things must be looked at is not yet fully understood even among ourselves. The unshakable standpoint must be that something new, a new beginning, is at least intended in our Movement. What lies beyond this ‘intention’ has of course yet to come. We with our building can still do no more than ‘intend.’ Those who can do more than intend—they will come, even though it be not before the time Herman Grimm thinks must elapse before there will be a complete understanding of Goethe. A certain humility is bound up with the understanding of this and there is little humility in modern spiritual life. Spiritual Science is well suited to give this humility and at the same time to bring the soul to a realisation of the gravity of these things.

A painful impression is caused by the opposition arising on all sides against our spiritual Movement, now that the world is now beginning to see real results. So long as the Movement was merely there in a spiritual sense the world could see nothing. Now that it does, and it cannot understand what it sees, dissonant voices are beginning to sound from every side. This opposition will grow stronger and stronger. When we realise its existence we shall naturally at first be filled with a certain sorrow, but an inner power will make us able to intercede on behalf of what is to us not merely conviction, but life itself. The soul will be pervaded by an ethereal, living activity, filled with something more than the theoretical convictions of which modern man is so proud. This earnest mood of soul will bring in its train the sure confidence that the foundations of our world and our existence as human beings are able to sustain us, if we seek for them in the spiritual world. Sometimes we need this confidence more, sometimes less. If we speak of sorrow caused by the echo which our spiritual Movement finds in the world—this mood of sorrow must give birth to the mood of power derived from the knowledge that the roots of man's life are in the Spirit and that the Spirit of man will lead him out beyond all the disharmony that can only cause him pain. Strength will flow into man from this mood of power.

If in these very days one cannot help speaking of things spiritual with a sorrow even greater than that caused by the discrepancy between what we desire in our spiritual Movement and the echo it finds in the world—yet it must be said that the world's disharmonies will take a different course when men realise how human hearts can be kindled by the spiritual light for which we strive in anthroposophy. The sorrow connected with our Movement seems only slight when we look at all the sadness lying in the destiny of Europe. The words I have spoken to you are pervaded with sorrow, but they are spoken with the living conviction that whatever pain may await European humanity in a sear or distant future there may, none the less, live within us a confidence born from the knowledge that the Spirit will lead man victoriously through every wilderness. Even in these days of sorrow, in hours fraught with such gravity, we may in very truth, indeed we must, speak of the holy things of Spiritual Science, for we may believe that however dimly the sun of Spiritual Science is shining to-day, its radiance will ever increase until it is a sun of peace, of love and of harmony among men.

Grave though these words may be, they justify us in thinking of the narrower affairs of Spiritual Science with all the powers of heart and soul, when hours of ordeal are being made manifest through the windows of the world.

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Notes:

Note 1. Translator's Note. Presumably Dr. Steiner was here drawing on the blackboard while he was speaking. The expressions used in the German seem to indicate this.

Note 2. See ‘Knowledge of the Higher Worlds and its Attainment,’ by Rudolf Steiner. Anthrosophical Publishing Co.

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Emil Bock opened the discussion hour and formulated the following questions:

1. Out of the previous lecture this morning, how can we take the power of formative speech to which we still need to gain access, and accomplish a new speech technique, perhaps new forms and a new gestural technique?
2. How do we actually now really speak of a new understanding of the Bible, of a new Bible text? Furthermore, we ask Dr Steiner on occasion to discuss in more detail the two chapters from the synoptic Gospels, Matthew 13 and Mark 13.
3. What is the reality behind the Apostolic succession, the tradition and the ordination of priests in the technical sense, and how can such a reality be made more accessible again in the future?

Rudolf Steiner: With regards to the first question: You would already have seen, my dear friends, that out of what I said this morning, that in the illustration, the soul contents related to the supersensible and also what leads to the power of formative speech, must be searched for. Regarding the power of speech formation: we actually have no direct understanding of sound anymore today; we basically have no more understanding for words, so our words remain signs. Naturally our starting point needs to be out of the spiritual milieu of our time. Man must be responsible for these intimate things out of what currently is available. Precisely such a question brings us naturally into the area of the purely technical. First of all one has to make the understanding for the sound active again, within oneself. One doesn't easily manage the free use of speech when one isn't able to allow the sound as such, to stir within oneself. I would like to continue in such a way that I first draw your attention to certain examples.

You see, when we say "head" (Kopf) in German, we hardly have anything else in mind than the total perception of what reaches us through the ear, which indicates the head. When we say "foot" (Fuss) it is hardly any different to what we experience in the tonality and sound content in relation to some foot. Now we only need, for instance, to refer to the Romance languages where head is testa, tête, foot is pedum, pied, and we get the feeling at the same time that the term is taken from something completely different. When we say the word Kopf in German, the term has come out of the form, from looking at the form. We are not aware of this any longer, yet it is so. When we say Fuss, it is taken from walking where furrows are drawn in the ground. Thus, it has come into existence out of a certain soul content and coined in a word. When we take a word formation like, let's say, "testament" and all other word formations which refer in Romance language terms to head, testa, then we will feel that the term Kopf in the Romantic languages originate through the substantiation and thus not out of the form, but through the human soul with the help of the head, and particularly activating the mouth organs. Pied didn't originate from walking or drawing furrows but from standing, pressing down while standing. Today we no longer question the motives which have come out of the soul and into speech formation. We can only discover what can be called, in the real sense, a feeling for the language when we follow the route of making language far more representational than it is currently, abstraction at most. When someone uses a Latin expression in terminology, some Latin expressions are even more representational, but some people use them to denote even more. For example, today one can hardly find the connection between "substance" and "subsist" while the concept of "subsist" has basically been lost. Someone who still has the original feeling for substance and subsistence would say of the Father-God, not that He "exists" but that he "subsists."

Researching language in this way and in another way which I want to mention right now, in order to develop a lively feeling for language again, leads then to something I would like to call a linguistic conscience (Sprachgewissen). We need a linguistic conscience. We speak really so directly these days because as human beings we act more as automatons towards language than we do as living beings. Until we are capable of connecting language in a living way to ourselves, like our skin is connected to us, we will not come to the right symbolization. The skin experiences pain when it is pricked. Language even tolerates being maltreated. One must develop a feeling regarding language that it can be maltreated because it is a closed organism, just like our skin. We can gain much in this area, when we have a lively experience in some or other dialect.

Consider how often we have performed the Christmas Plays, and in these plays there is a sentence spoken by one or more of the innkeepers. When Joseph and Mary come to Bethlehem in search of lodging, they are refused by three innkeepers. Each one of the three innkeepers says: Ich als a wirt von meiner gstalt, hab in mein haus und ligament gwalt.—Just imagine what this means to a person today. He could hear: "I as a host of my stature ..."—and think that what the host is saying means he is an attractive man, or something like that, or a strong man who has stature within his hostel, in his house. This is certainly not meant. If we want to translate that into High German we'll have to say: "I as a host, who is placed in such a way as to have abundant comfort, I am not dependent on such poor people finding lodgings within, with me." This means: "I as a host in my social position, in my disposition." This shows them it is necessary not only to listen to him—words one often enough hears in speech—but to enter into the spirit of the language. We say Blitz" (lightening) in High German. In Styria a certain form of lightening is called 'heaven's lashers' (Himmlatzer). In the word "Blitz" there is quite another meaning than in the word Himmlatzer.

So we start becoming aware of different things when we approach the sense of speech. You see, such an acquisition of the sense of language sometimes leads to something extraordinarily important. Goethe once uttered a sentence, when already in his late life, to the Chancellor von Müller, a statement which has often been quoted and is often used, to understand the entire way in which Faust, written by Goethe, originated. Goethe said that for him the conception of Faust had for 60 years been clear "from the beginning" (von vornherein); the other parts less extensively. Now commentary upon commentary have been written and this sentence was nearly always recalled, because it is psychologically extraordinarily important, and the commentators have it always understood like this: Goethe had a plan from the beginning for his Faust and in the 60 years of his life—since he was twenty or about eighteen—he used this plan, he had "from the start," to work from.

In Weimar I met August Fresenius who bemoaned the fact that it was a great misfortune, if I could use such an expression, which had entered into the entire Goethe research, and at the time I had urged an unusually thoughtful and slow philologist to publish this thing as soon as possible in order that it doesn't continue, otherwise one would have a few dozen more such Goethe commentaries. It is important to note that Goethe used the expression "from the start" in no other way than in a descriptive way, not in the sense of a priori but "from the beginning" in a very descriptive manner so that in the strictest sense one could refer to Goethe not having an overall plan, but that "at the beginning" he only wrote down the first pages (i.e. to begin with) and of the further sections, only single sentences. There can be no argument of an overall plan. It very much depends on how one really experiences words. Many people have, when they hear the word vornherein totally have no conscience that it has a vorn (in front) and a herein (in) and that one sees something spiritual when one pronounces it. This simple dismissal of a word without contemplation is something upon which a tremendous amount depends, if one wants to attain a symbolic manner of speech. Precisely about this direction there would be extraordinarily much to say.

You see, we have the remarkable appearance of the Fritz Mauthner speaking technique where all knowledge and all wisdom is questioned, because all knowledge and wisdom is expressed though speech, and so Fritz Mauthner finds nothing expressed in speech because it does not point to some or other reality. How harsh my little publication "The spiritual guidance of man and of mankind" has been judged in which I mention that in earlier times, all vowel formation expressed people's inner experiences, and all consonant unfolding comes from outer observed or seen events. All that man perceives is expressed in consonants, while vowels are formed by inner experiences, feelings, emotions and so on. With this is connected the peculiar manner in which the consonants are written differently to the vowels in Hebrew. This is also connected to areas where more primitive people used to dwell, where they have not strongly developed their inner life, so predominantly consonant languages occur, not languages based on vowels. This extends very far, this kind of in-consonant-action of language. Only think what African languages have from consonants to click sounds.

So you see, in this way we gain an understanding for what sounds within language. One would be brought beyond the mere sign, which the word is today. Only with today's feeling for language which Fritz Mauthner believes in, can you believe that all knowledge actually depends on language and that language has no connection to some or other reality. A great deal can be accomplished when one enters into one's mother tongue and try to go back into the vernacular. In the vernacular one finds much, very much if you really behave like a human being, that is, respond to what you feel connected to the language. In the vernacular one has the rich opportunity to feel in speech and experience in sound, but also the tendency towards the descriptive, and you have to push it so far that you really, one could say, get into a kind of state of renunciation in regard to expressions that are supposed to phrase something completely separate from human experiences.

Something which thoroughly ruins our sense of language is physics, and in physics, as it is today, it only aspires to study objective processes and refrains from all subjective experience, there it should no longer be spoken at all. According to physics, when one body presses (stoßen) against another, for example in the theory of elasticity, then you are anthropomorphising, because the experience of pressure as soon as you sense sound, means you're only affected by the same kind of pressure as the pressure your own hand makes. Above all, one gets the feeling with the S-sound that nothing other can be described as something like this (a waved line is drawn on the blackboard). The word Stoß" (push/impacts—ß is the symbol for ss—translator) has two s's, at the end and beginning; it gives the entire word its colouring; so when the word Stoß or stoßen (to push/thrust) is pronounced one actually can feel how, when your ether body would move, it would not only move but be shoved forwards and continuously be kept up.

Thus, there are already methods through which one comes to the power of speech formation, which is then no longer far from symbolizing, for the symbolum must be hacked out of the way so that one experiences language as a living organism, because much is to be experienced within language. Someone recently told me that there are certain things in language which only need to be pronounced and one is surprised at how they reveal themselves as self-evident.

The Greeks recited in hexameter. Why? Well, hexameter is an experience. A person produces speech, as I've already said, in his breathing. However, breathing is closely connected to other elements of rhythm in the human being; with the pulse, with blood circulation. On average, obviously not precisely, we have 18 breaths and 72 heat beats; 72 equals 4 times 18. Four times 18 heart beats gives a rhythm, a collective inner beat. In a time when man sensed in a more primordial and more elementary way according to what was taking place within him, man experienced, when he could, in uttering the relationship of the heart beat to the breathing, bring the totality of himself into expression. This relationship, not precisely according to time, this relationship can be brought to bear; you only have to add the turning point as the fourth foot (reference plate 3 ... not available In German text) then you have a Greek hexameter half-line, in the ration of 4 to 1 as a pulse beat to breathing rhythm. The hexameter was born out of the human structure, and other measures of verse were all born out of the rhythmic system of the human being. You can already feel, when you treat language artistically, how, in the process of treating human speech in an artistic way, language is alive. This makes it possible to acquire a far more inner relationship to language, yet also far more objectivity. The most varied chauvinistic feelings in relation to language stops, because the configurations of different languages stop, and one acquires an ear for the general sound. There are such things which are found on the way to gaining the power of creative speech. It does finally lead to listening to oneself when one speaks. In a certain way it's actually difficult but it can be supported. For various reasons it seems to me that for those who are affected by it, it is also necessary not to treat the Scripture in the way many people treat it today. You will soon see why I say these things.

In relation to writing, there are two kinds of people. The majority learn to write as if it's a habit of staking out words. People are used to move their hands in a certain way and write like this: in the majority. The writing lesson is very often given in such a way that one just comes to it. The minority actually don't write in the sense of reality, but they draw (a word is written on the blackboard: Kann [meaning can; be able to]). They look at the signs of the letters simultaneously as being written, and as an artistic treatment of writing, it is far more an intimate involvement. I have met people who have been formally trained to write. For instance, once there was a writing method which consisted in people being trained to make circles and curves, to turn them and thus acquire a feeling of connecting them and so form letters out of them. Only in this way, out of these curves, could the letters come about. With a large number of them I have seen that they, before they start writing, make movements in the air with their pen. This is what brings writing into the unconsciousness of the body. However, our language comes out of the totality of the human being and when one spoils oneself by writing you also spoil yourself for the language. Precisely the one who is dependent on handling the language needs to get used to the meditation that writing should not be allowed to just flow out of his hand, but he should look at it, really look at what he is writing, when he writes.

My dear friends, this is something which is extraordinarily important in our current culture, because we are on our way to dehumanizing ourselves. I have already received a large number of letters which have not been written with a pen but with the typewriter. Now you can imagine the difference between a letter written with a typewriter or written with a pen. I'm not campaigning against the typewriter, I consider it as an obvious necessity in civilization, but we do also need the counter pole. By us dehumanizing ourselves in this way, by us changing our relationship towards the outer world in an absolute mechanistic and dead manner, we need in turn to take up strong vital forces again. Today we need far greater vital forces than in the time in which man knew nothing yet about the typewriter.

Therefore, for someone who handles words, he must also acquire an understanding for the continuous observation, while he is writing, that what he is writing pleases him, that he gets the impression that something hasn't just flowed out of a subject but that, by looking simultaneously at it, this thing lives as a totality in him. Mostly, the thing that is needed for the development of some capability is not arrived at in a direct but in an indirect way. I must explain this route because I have been asked how one establishes the power for speech formation. This is the way, as I have mentioned, which comes first of all. As an aside I stress that language originates in the totality of mankind, and the more mankind still senses the language, so much more will there be movement in his speech. It is extraordinary, how for instance in England, where the process of withdrawal of a connection with the surroundings is most advanced, it is regarded as a good custom to speak with their hands in their trouser pockets, held firmly inside so they don't enter the danger of movement. I have seen many English people talk in this way. Since then I've never had my pockets made in front again, but always at the back, for I have developed such disgust from this quite inhuman non-participation in what is being said. It is simply a materialistic criticism that speech only comes from the head; it originates out of the entire human being, above all from the arms, and we are—I say it here in one sentence which is obviously restricted—we are on this basis no ape or animal which needs its hands to climb or hold on to something, but we have them as free because with these free hands and arms we handle speech.

In grasping with our arms, creating with our fingers, we express something we need in order to model language. So it has a certain justification to return mankind to its connection with language, bringing the whole person into it, to train Eurythmy properly, which really exists in drawing out of the human organism what is not fulfilled in the human body, but is however fulfilled in the ether body, when we speak. The entire human being is in movement and we are simply transposing though the eurhythmic movements, the etheric body on to the physical body. That is the principle. It is really the eurythmization of something like a necessity which needs to be regularly brought out of the human being, like the spoken language itself. It must stand as a kind of opposite pole against all which rises in the present and alienate people towards the outer world, allowing no relationship to be possible between people and the outer world any more. The eurythmization enables people in any case to return to being present in the language and is on this basis, as I've often suggested, even an art. Well, if you take into account the things I've just proposed, then you arrive at the now commonplace speech technique basically under the scheme of pedantry.

The great importance given to teaching through recitation and that kind of thing, only supports the element of a materialistic world view. You see, just as one would in a school for sculpture or a school of painting not really get instructions of the hand movements but corrects them by life forces coming into them, so speech techniques must not be pedantically taught with all kinds of nose-, chest- and stomach resonances. These things may only be developed though living speech. When a person speaks, he might at most be made aware of one or the other element. In this respect extraordinary atrocities are being committed today and the various vocal and language schools can actually be disgusting, because it shows how little lives within the human being. The formation of speech happens when those things are considered which I mentioned. Now if the question needs to be answered even more precisely, I ask you to please call my attention to it.

Now there is a question about new commentary regarding the Bible, in fact, how one can arrive at a new Bible text.

You see, the thing is like this, one will first have to penetrate into an understanding of the Bible. Much needs to precede this. If you take everything which I have said about language, and then consider that the Bible text has originated out of quite another kind of experience of language than we have today, and also as it was experienced centuries before in Luther's time, you can hardly hope to somehow discover an understanding of the Bible through some small outer adjustment. To understand the Bible, a real penetration of Christianity is needed above all, and actually this can only emerge from a Bible text as something similar for us as the Gospels had once appeared for the first Christians. In the time of the first Christians one certainly had the feeling of sound and some of what can be experienced in the words in the beginning of St John's Gospel which was of course experienced quite differently in the first Christian centuries as one would be able to do today. "In the primal beginnings was the Word"—you see, today there doesn't seem to be much more than a sign in this line, I'd say. We come closer to an understanding when we substitute "Word," which is very obscure and abstract, with "Verb" and also really develop our sense of the verb as opposed to the noun. In the ancient beginnings it was a verb and not the noun. I would like to say something about this abstraction.

The verb is quite rightly related to time, to activity, and it is absurd to think of including a noun in the area which has been described as in "the primal beginning." It has sense to insert a verb, a word related to activity. What lies within the sentence regarding the primal origins is however not an activity brought about by human gestures or actions, because it is the activity which streams out of the verb, the active word. We are not transported back into the ancient mists of the nebular hypothesis by the Kant-Laplace theory, but we will be led back to the sound and loud prehistoric power. This returning into a prehistoric power is something which was experienced powerfully in the first Christian centuries, and it was also strongly felt that it deals with a verb, because it is an absurdity to say: In the prehistoric times there was a noun.—We call it "Word" which can be any part of speech. Of course, it can't be so in the case of St John's Gospel.

In even further times in the past, things were even more different. They were so that for certain beings, for certain perceptions of beings one had the feeling that they should be treated with holy reserve, one couldn't just put them in your mouth and say them. For this reason, a different way had to be found regarding expression, and this detour I can express by saying something like the following. Think about a group of children living with their parents somewhere in an isolated house. Every couple of weeks the uncle comes, but the children don't say the uncle comes, but the "man" comes. They mean it is the uncle, but they generalise and say it is "the man." The father is not the "man"; they know him too well to call him "man." In this way earlier religious use of language hid some things which they didn't want to express outwardly because one had the inner reaction of profanity, and so it was stated as a generalization, like also in the first line of St John's Gospel, "in the beginning was the Word." However, one doesn't mean the word which actually stands there but one calls it something which has been picked out, a singular "Word." It was after all something extraordinary, this "Word." There are as many words as there are men, but children said, "the man," and so one didn't say what was meant in St John's Gospel, but instead one said, "the Word." The word in this case was Jahveh, so that St John's Gospel would say: "In the primal beginnings was Jahveh," so one doesn't say "God," but "the Word."

Such things must be acquired again by living within Christianity and what Christianity has derived from the ritual practice of the Old Testament. There is no shortcut to understanding the Gospels; a lively participation in the ancient Christian times is necessary for Gospel understanding. Basically, this is what has again become enlivened through Anthroposophy, while such things have in fact only risen out of Anthroposophic research. We then have the following: In the primordial times was he word—in primordial time was Jahveh—and the word was with God—and Jahveh was with God. In the third line: And Jahveh was one of the Elohim.—This is actually the origin, the start of the St John Gospel which refers to the multiplicity of the Elohim, and Jahveh as one of them—in fact there were seven—as lifted out of the row of the Elohim. Further to this lies the basis of the relationship between Christ and Jahveh.

Take sunlight—moonlight is the same, it is also sunlight but only reflected by the moon—it doesn't come from some ancient being, it is a reflection. In primordial Christianity an understanding existed for the Christ-word, where Christ refers to his own being by saying: "Before Abraham was, I am" and many others. There certainly was an understanding for the following: Just as the sunlight streams out of itself and the moon reflects it back, so the Christ-being who only appeared later, streamed out in the Jahveh being. We have a fulfilment in the Jahveh-being preceding the Christ-being in time. Through this St John's Gospel becomes deepened through feeling from the first line to the line which says: "And the Word became flesh and lived among us." Even today we don't believe a childlike understanding suffices for the words of the Bible, when we research the Bible by translating it out of an ancient language until we penetrate what lies in the words. Of course, one can say, only through long, very long spiritual scientific studies can one approach the Bible text. That finally, is also my conviction.

Basically, the Bible no longer exists; we have a derivative which we have put together more and more from our abstract language. We need a new starting point in order to try and find what really, in an enlivened way, is in the Bible. For this I have suggested an approach which I will speak about tomorrow, in the interpretation of Mathew 13 and Mark 13. You will have to state in any case that even commenting on the Bible makes it necessary to deal with the Bible impartially. If it is stated that something is mentioned which had only taken place in the year 70, therefore the relevant place could not have been mentioned before other than what had happened after this event, this could be said only if it is announced at the beginning of the Bible explanation that the Bible will be explained completely from a materialistic point of view; then it may be done like this. The Bible itself does not follow the idea that it should be explained materialistically. The Bible itself makes it necessary that the foreseeing of coming events is first and foremost ascribed to Christ Jesus himself, and also ascribed to the apostles. Thus, as I've said, this outlook is what I want to enter into tomorrow on the basis of Mathew 13 and Mark 13, by giving a little interpretation as it has been asked for.

Another question asks about the reality behind the apostolic succession and the priest ordination. This question can hardly be answered briefly because it relates deeply to the abyss which exists between today's evangelist-protestant religious understanding and all nuances of Catholic understanding. It is important that in the moment when these things are spoken about, one must try to acquire a real understanding beyond the rational or rationalistic and beyond the intellectualistic. This is acquired even by those who have little right to live in the sense of such an understanding. In the past I have become acquainted with a large number of outstanding theosophical luminaries, Leadbeater also among them, about whom you would have heard, and some other people, who worked in the Theosophical Society. I have recently had the opportunity—otherwise I would not have worried about it again—to experience, that some of these people are Catholic bishops; it struck me as extraordinary that a part of them were Catholic priests. Leadbeater in any case had, after various things became known about him, not exactly the qualification to become a Catholic bishop. Still this interested me about how people become Catholic priests. One thing is observed with utmost severity, which is the succession. In order for me to see which people have the right to be Catholic bishops, I was given a document which revealed that in a certain year a Catholic bishop left the Catholic church, but one who was ordained, and he then ordained others—right up to Mr Leadbeater—and ordination proceeds in an actual continuation, in an absolutely correct progress; they actually have created a "family tree" by it. I don't want to talk about the start of the "family tree" but you must accept that if it would be a natural progression that there once was an ordained bishop in Rome who dropped away, who then however ordained all the others, so all these Theosophical luminaries would refer back to a real descent of their priesthood to that which once existed. Therefore, awareness of this succession is everywhere present and such things are, according to their understanding, taken completely as the reality.

Something like this must be taken as a reality within the Roman Catholic Church. The old Catholic church more or less didn't have the feeling—but within the Roman Catholic church it is certain accepted this way—that the moment the priest crosses the stole he no longer represents a single personality or attitude but he is then only a member of the church and speaks as a representative, as a member of the church. The Roman Catholic Church considered itself certainly as a closed organism, where the individual loses his individuality through ordination; they see it this way increasingly.

Now something else is in contrast to this. You may think about what I've said as you wish, but I can only speak from my point of view, from the viewpoint of my experience. I have seen much within the transubstantiation. Today in the Catholic Church there is quite a strict difference according to which priest would perform the transubstantiation, yet I have always seen how during the transformation, during the transubstantiation, the host takes on an aura. Therefore, I have come to recognise within the objective process, that when it is worthily accomplished, it is certainly fulfilled. I said, you may think about this as you wish, I say it to you as something which can be looked at from one hand, and on the other hand also as a basic conviction of the church being valid while it was still Catholic, when the evangelist church hadn't become a splintering off. We very soon come back to reality when we look at these things and it must even be said within the sacrament of mass being celebrated there is something like a true activity, which is not merely an outer sign but a real act. If you now take all the sacraments of mass together which had been celebrated, you will create an entirety, a whole, and this is something which stands there as a fact. It is something which certainly touches things, where the evangelical mind would say: Yes, there is something magical in the Catholic Mass.—This it does contain. It also contained within it the magical part, one can experience in the evangelist mind as something perhaps heathen. Good, talk to one another about this. In any case this underscores it as being a reality, which one can't without further ado, without approaching the bearer of this reality, celebrate a mass. I say celebrate; it can be demonstrated, one can show everything possible, but one can't celebrate with the claim that through the mass what should happen at the altar will only happen when it is read without any personal imprint, in absolute application.

You see, it is ever present there where one works with the mysteries; it is simply so, when one works with the mysteries. Just as no Masonic ceremony may be carried out by a non-Mason in the consciousness of the Freemason, nor may a non-ordained person in true Catholicism work from out of Catholicism and perform with full validity the ceremony in consciousness.

This is where we are being directed and must consult. I want you to take note that in this case the Catholic rules were actually very strict. Please don't take things up in such a way as if I am saying this towards pro-Catholicism; I only want to point out the situation. It isn't important for us to be for, or opposed, to Catholicism, because it's about something quite different. Particular customs were very strictly adhered to in the Catholic Church—not at all what is today in Rome's mood and procedure. If a priest became so unworthy as to be excommunicated, then his skin would be ripped off, scraped off from his fingers where he had held the sacred host in his hands. His skin would be scraped off. Sometimes such things are referred to but legally it is so, and I know such processes quite well, that after the priest's excommunication the skin of the fingers which touched the host, were scraped off. You can certainly set the objective instead of the succession that goes from the apostles through the priesthood to the priest celebrating today. You can set that which goes through consecration and through the sacraments themselves. You can exclude priesthood, but you can only exclude that by taking things objectively, right to a certain degree, objectively, that the priest no longer may have skin on his fingers when he is no longer authorised to celebrate the sacrificial mass.

Isn't it true, if you have Catholic feeling, it is something as definite to you as two plus two making four? It is something definite according to religious feeling. When you don't have that then you as modern people must have a certain piety, which says to you the Catholic church has also just preserved the celebration of mass and if this is carried outside the circle to which it had been entrusted—other circles have not preserved the sacrifice of mass—if it is being performed in other circles it is pure theft. Real theft. These things must also be understood from such concepts. I believe to some it appears very difficult to understand what I am saying but in conclusion it has as such a certain validity which needs to be achieved through understanding. We don't have to worry about it here because you can experience the mass according to what there is to experience. As far as the training of a new ritual is concerned, it would not be disturbed at all by this, that the Catholic mass regards the mass to be something so real that it may certainly not to be removed from the field of Catholicism.

This is firstly something which I wanted to say during our limited time. When I speak about the mass itself, and I will do so, I will still have a few things to add.

Emil Bock: I would like to introduce today's discussion hour and assume I have your understanding when I ask that yesterday's questions which have remained open, will, where possible, be considered again today. I believe I have your support for this. If you want me to clarify this request on your behalf, it will be to deal with the complex of questions regarding the apostolic succession coming into the question in future, where the need for the establishment of a new tradition must be expected, so to speak. In relation to this the question is important, how we, who are mostly Protestants, would relate to the work and personality of Luther, and go back to Luther's stance on the sacraments and to the whole Mystery content of Christianity. If I'm properly informed, that was the question which now appears to us as the next one, and I would very much like Doctor Steiner to enter into these questions as far as he considers possible.

Rudolf Steiner: My dear friends! I will try to continue with what was implied in this relationship started here yesterday in such a way that the many questions, which actually have to come out of such an examination, from the most varied sides, can then be considered further, because for this program of the Dornach course, it would be of the utmost necessity that as far as possible, no doubt and uncertainties would remain.

I would endeavour to go into the actual complex of questions and through this we will perhaps reach what underlies them, for further discussion. In fact, everything that licentiate Bock has just said is actually connected, so I may say it is important what opinions rise up among you now, regarding the position of Protestantism and Catholicism. I believe I can accept that you have come here from quite a positive foundation, namely to find a way out of today's religious turmoil. I myself don't want to say that it is obviously my wish to influence this towards the one or other side. Indeed, it doesn't concern some or other knowledge, but is about decisions of will, and these must rise out of inner convictions, being able of course to be motivated in the most varied ways, so we must actually discuss the possible motivation of their willed decisions. For example, a lot will depend upon your decisions of intent with regard the abyss that gapes between Catholicism and evangelical Christianity, between Protestantism and so on. Isn't it true, your resolution will be substantially different—I am now referring to the resolution of the majority of those present here—if you take into account that the Christian impulse, considered as widely as possible, in for example community building, can become that which the Christ wills for the world. However, regarding Catholicism—where I now separate Catholicism strictly from the Roman—Catholic Church—you could not find in Catholicism a possibility to bridge the abyss to the evangelistic side, if you don't gain a mutual understanding about the sacramentalism anchored in the Catholic world.

Naturally you could also be of the opinion: we are not concerned at all, we want to create a life-filled church-based movement and then show how this viable church movement asserts itself in the world.—You could also take on this point of view: that doesn't require such a strict understanding of Catholicism as such. However, you could only gain support in the judgement regarding this direction, after you have found clarity in some historic foundations about the basis for the opening of this abyss. Today the situation is actually like this; if a person has remained within Catholicism, is standing within practical Catholicism, then he actually can't understand the evangelical mind. Neither will someone who has grown up in the evangelical-protestant tradition, who is really connected to the various nuances in modern views anchored in the Protestant churches, be able to find the way over the abyss easily. It is precisely the reason for this question that must be understood before a decision can be reached.

Catholicism carries within it that view which has disappeared from modern consciousness, actual modern consciousness from which has disappeared, one could say if you want to be precise, since the 15th century. It was quite appropriate—but again connected with Roman political impulses, which then allowed the appropriate background to come in—it was quite appropriate, in a certain way, to keep Catholicism in mind and make it a duty for the Catholic clerics to return to the philosophy of Thomas Aquinas, in other words, the philosophy promoting the culmination of philosophical thinking before the 15th century. One can say that to live without this philosophy, one can actually find no theory of knowledge for the justification of sacramentalism, as practiced in the Catholic Church. By contrast the protestant-evangelical consciousness lies within this development which was only imposed after the 15th century. If you want to live through the wrestling of these two currents you can look at the work of Nicolaus Cusanus, who already in the 15th century, one might say, with all intensity, raised the question for itself: How does the past and the future stand beside one another in my soul? Cusanus, by going back to certain soul experiences, connected with the name of Dionysius Areopagita, and was able to build a bridge for himself.

I said yesterday that the Protestant quite rightly sees something magical in the way the Catholic performs Mass, and that is certainly correct. Because of our adaptation of the modern-day educational material, we are incapable of admitting to this magic. If you come with a modern consciousness you would not be able to find any difference between a sacrificial Mass as presented in the continuity of Christian evolution and a sacrificial Mass which is simply presented in words, symbols and gestures, perceptible by outer senses, as taking place in the Mass. Beyond the understanding of the content lies the understanding of that which is the sacrifice of Mass for the Catholic; this is connected with the unifying understanding of the world which has got lost for modern humanity, the unified understanding of the world which is understood on the one side by the spirit and on the other side from nature. I could say the route of knowledge has turned more to the side of nature while insight into the spiritual world has disappeared, and as a result of this, the possibilities to perceive certain mysteries. With this I don't want to say that in the consciousness of every Catholic priest there is also a substantial content about the sacrifice of the Mass. Still, in the Catholic community there is an awareness of this substantial content of the sacrifice of Mass to such a degree that one can still speak about the reality of it in the present.

I can't make anything presented here, clearer to you in any other way, than through the view of knowledge. Everything, my dear friends, which is woven into our discussions during these days, what is presented in the Elaborat of Dr Rittelmeyer and the Elaborat of Dr Schairer, regarding the determination of the religious and the differentiation of the religious point of view from the point of view of knowledge, all this is incomprehensible to the Catholic. It basically doesn't exist for him. When he considers it as a modernist or someone like that, then he is basically already accepted by Protestantism even within Catholicism. For the Catholics none of these things give rise to some or other question; for them you can't formulate questions in this way. For true Catholicism, the assumption is that there should be a mere emotional human relationship to God, without a religious dogmatic content, something quite incomprehensible; the religious dogma should connect itself with the supersensible world. Certainly, you could say, the Scholastics do this, making a differentiation, as Protestantism adopts in a different way, regarding what one can know and what one should purely believe. However, the Scholastics don't make this differentiation in the same way. For the scholastic the difference lies between truths, acquired simply through human reason, and those truths which lie at the basis of revelation, basically only relate to the various ways people come to the content; but it is still not a fundamental difference. For scholasticism it is true that the Preambuli fidei are certainly there, acquired through ordinary reason, above which lies the truth of revelation, but the truth of revelation also has a real content with which one can have a thinking relationship, like the scientific truths, which also promote a relationship through thinking. Therefore, one's relationship to the revelations is the same kind of relationship one has to scientific truths. There is only a difference in relation to the way people arrive at the truth, not a fundamental difference as we have been discussing here, these days. There is something extraordinarily important here, and from it comes the basis of the abyss.

You see, in order to clarify the sacramental and mass aspects to you here, I have to approach through the content of knowledge. If you look today at the two outer poles of human existence, the birth with the embryo and conception—I want to place these three in a unified term of "birth"—with birth on the one side and death on the other, so you understand what happens for the physical human being, even according to the order of scientific events. Today's human being, even if he is a theologian, speaks about birth and death as if they are scientific facts, involving physical man. That's exactly why in this day and age the wall between faith and knowledge has been so ruggedly erected, because one wants to keep something which has been taken away through purely scientific knowledge about birth and death, as one admittedly doesn't want for religion, to classify it in terms of knowledge.

How does a person regard birth today? It must seem a peculiar thing that I speak to you about birth, when I want to speak about Mass, but I would not be able to speak about Mass, without also speaking about birth. People see birth according to the study of embryology and ask: What happens to the embryonic germ through the fructification?—Then they ask: How is the male and how is the female substance of inheritance absorbed, and what actually goes on there, scientifically observable, from the forefathers to the child?—Today's man must, with all the antecedents of his scientific education, certainly take this point of view. This point of view exercises such a colossal suggestive view on modern man, that if this point of view is not according to science, it is regarded as nonsense. Everything which is brought up in the human being and is thereby entangled with his thinking habits, leads the human being to phrase his question in this way. Then he can, when he says: 'This question can be answered by science'—at least add: 'Faith remains the way in which the body and the soul may unite.' Yet, it is actually not so. Here lies one of the points where you can make yourself quite demonstrative; for Anthroposophy it is quite important to connect with science and develop it further. Through anthroposophic research it is shown that the concept of matter, as it exists in the human organism, becomes fully disabled in its mode of action. If one looks at a fertilized female egg and its further development, one actually is looking at something which through conception, has excluded itself from all possible earthly events. In the fertilized egg a chaos is created in which all processes available to science, are initially excluded. If I present it schematically it will end here. (A drawing is made on the blackboard.)

Through the fertilization, as far as it happens in the human being, a place is created within earth's processes, where everything stops which could be accessible to natural science. Through this exclusion the possibility is created, at this point, for cosmic activity to take place, peripheral cosmic processes. Within this place something happens which is not accessible to material science.

Here I'm drawing the earth, here is the realm of human beings, this is the periphery beyond which you can go, far beyond measure. While most of us, actually in the realm human beings have the earth's processes, also with the father and mother, we have here—in this circle which I'm drawing—effects from the periphery, from the immeasurable expanse, so that, what is happening here, may be transferred and enter into the scientifically given world. It is an imagination which is quite far away from modern man, because it has been lost since the 15th century.

When you are in the proximity of Nepal and walk over the earth, you only need to put a flame to a piece of paper and light it, to see how it smokes out of the earth. Those of you who have travelled in Italy would have seen this: it smokes out of the earth. Why does this happen? It is because what would rise from within the earth is usually held by the air pressure; by lighting a piece of paper the air pressure is reduced and what is below, in the earth, now pushes out.

Through the fertilization the earth processes are excluded, and this enables the heavenly processes to be active. The reverse is what you can demonstrate with a volcanic vent. While we just examine earthly phenomena we have mainly to do with centralized processes, in other words that which rays out from the earth's centre, basically in the direction of gravity, whereas when we consider embryonic processes it is in relation to peripheral processes, which to some extent come from out of immeasurable widths, working in towards the centre. They become effective the moment the earth's effectiveness is excluded. If we go into what is taking place here, then with human embryonic development we need to examine what the participation of the entire cosmos has in the origins of mankind, and not look at precursors which are earthly. Secondly it happens—and it happens further along the embryonic development—that it enters into a relationship with physical matter. Thirdly, what happens is that which has come to the human beings out of the spiritual world and entered the physical world and all that can be in its emerging, everything which had come from the cosmos as periphery-central, in contrast with central-peripheral, now comes into the centre. Through all of this, only now earthly processes come about, man's utilisation of the earthly. The fourth event, the last one, is the preparation for inner human love which only appears when the individual has learnt to speak. So we can say that the precursors which take place through birth are the following: the human being's descent from the spiritual community: if you like the word, it could be "excommunication," meaning the descent, the coming down. (He writes on the blackboard.)

1. Descent.
   The second is the entering of the relationship with matter. (Writes on the blackboard:)
2. Relationship with matter.
   The third is entitlement to the centralising forces of the earth: adaptation to the earthly. (Writes on the blackboard:)
3. Adaptation to the earth
   And the fourth is perceptibility, the ability to speak which however only emerges after the birth, to the extent of what embryonic activity took place. (Writes on the blackboard:)
4. Ability to speak.
   We come closer to the mystery of birth in quite another way if we look at it like this, my dear friends. How can we come closer to the mystery of death which is the other pole of human life? If we now go in reverse, and we begin with the Ability to Speak (Writes on the blackboard:)

Gospel 1.

Then we create in contrast to the entitlement of the centralising earthly forces, the resurrection, the re-adaptation of the periphery: this happens in the sacrifice of smoke. The opposite of "three" is what we are doing by taking what we receive and adapting it to the earth, to the smoke counteracting the earth's centralizing forces. (Writes on the blackboard:)

Offering 2.

In other words, what are we doing here? We first speak the Word in the Gospel, and we become conscious that we express this Word in such a way that it is not our word in the sense as I've said yesterday, but that it goes over into objectivity. We relinquish the Word to the smoke—smoke which is capable of adapting the form of the words. Certainly you may say it is suggestive, but still, only suggestive. The Offering consists in the expressed word, which creates waves, being trusted to the smoke, carried up in the smoke. Our word itself becomes carried up. If we turn the relationship to matter around, then we arrive at the dematerialization in the transubstantiation, in the transformation. (Writes on the blackboard:)

Transubstantiation 3.

In our becoming a child out of the periphery of the cosmos and drawing in our 'I,' in death we withdraw, and we have for this the sign of the transubstantiation, the de-materialization. Where does this power come from? See, just as the peripheral forces work towards the centre when we speak about birth, these forces which we have called up in the offering, work outwards into the world. They work because we have entrusted our words into the smoke. They now work from out of the centre and they carry the dematerialised words through the power of the speaker and in this way, we come into the position, to fulfil the fourth, the opposite of the descent, the merging with the Above, the communion. (Writes on the blackboard:)

Communion 4.

Now, however my dear friends, we are not only born in the beginning of our lives but forces active at birth continue to work in us. These forces, however, do decrease when we are separated from our mother's body into the outer air. They become subdued but continue working to a lesser extent. The most obvious continuation lies in the creation of languages from the embryonic forces, also in relation to the rest of the organism. Besides the forces creating language, embryonic forces continue to work and do so most strongly from the moment of going to sleep to that of waking up. Thus, embryonic forces work more strongly during sleep than when people are awake. It is only an extract which had been working during the time of being an embryo, yet during hours of restful sleep these embryonic forces continue to work. Forces of death also work in us continuously. Every moment we are born, and we die. Death forces are working. The reverse processes which had descended to work in the development of language continue to work in us; this process works in us, which come from the Gospel through to communion, from the speech up to the union with the Divine-spiritual. However, that which is a sacrament in the Mass, is fulfilled in an outer process which continuously counteracts what is being born in us. This is what amounts to the continuous perpetual forces of death in us.

----------------

You see, this sacramental process would have been fulfilled in the old Mysteries. Why could they have been accomplished in the old Mysteries? They could have been fulfilled because a certain inherited spiritual perceptivity was available for them. The very moment when a person who lived before the Mystery of Golgotha, pronounced the corresponding words, therefore expressing what we have in the Gospels today, these words were taken into account by the Divine-spiritual. With the ceremony the people surrendered their continuous dying process to the Divine-spiritual forces. These Divine-spiritual forces left the earth during the time of the Mystery of Golgotha. It is only a historical prejudice to believe that the earth is in a continuous development. This is not so; it is certainly not. If the Mystery of Golgotha had not been fulfilled then we could not fulfil such a ceremony, then what dies is given over to the etheric and astral worlds and not, however, to the world where our 'I' belongs. It was not like that before the Mystery of Golgotha.

Here we touch on something, dear friends, which people with their intellectual education can't believe at all because they don't have the antecedents to it. They can't believe that fire, air, water and earth since the time of the Mystery of Golgotha are different from before. It only appears as determined by a time, not that the following could be answered: What would have happened to the earth if the Mystery of Golgotha had not taken place?—So let's just switch the Mystery of Golgotha off, and we can ask ourselves: What would have become of this ceremony if the event of the Mystery of Golgotha had not happened?

It would be a procedure that, driven by the process of death, would only have conserved our being up to our astral body. The physical body would lose itself into the earth, the ether body would become indistinct in the etheric seas, and the astral body would enter into the astral world, but the I would be corrupted; the I would have to reach its end in some or other incorporation; the I could not go through the portal of death. That is the secret of earth evolution, that, before our time calculation began, the human being retained something which could have been redeemed by going through the gate of death, and which could be made clear through this ceremony. This ceremony, had the Mystery of Golgotha not intervened, would have become what it could have, if the last of the spiritual beings who still had a relationship to the human I, had departed from warmth, air, water, earth, and as in warmth, air, water and air only those beings remained, which still had a connection to our etheric, who have a further relationship to our astral, but no more with our human I.

This, my dear friends, was the huge fear for the demons when they recognised Christ, who had descended on to the earth. They believed they could now take on the control and eradicate the human I from earth. It is clearly expressed in the Gospels, how the demons behaved when they recognised who had arrived. They knew their plan for the world was crossed out, they had hoped—from out of the spheres where they had originated, they could hope for it—to take the earth's rulership into their own hands. Christ stepped on to the earth and that which the Christ had brought down from the spiritual worlds into earthly events, gave the ceremony its new content, and in this ceremony the presence of the Christ Being took place.

This is something which certainly can be accessed through spiritual science. You really need to take this up in yourselves, what I have, in a way, only drawn in threads, sketched, as if given in a little drawing. The human being needs to start arriving at a real understanding for the mystery of birth, which appears in nature as a sacrament itself, because it is supernatural, and an understanding must be created for the sacrament within the sacrifice of Mass, which becomes supernatural through the presence of Christ. For those who can't reason, as I've just spoken, for those who can't understand the actual process in the outcry of the lower demons when they saw the deeds of Christ, and only regard this outcry of the demons as a comparison, taking it as something exhausted in the meaning of words, don't understand anything about sacramental deeds, and in particular, the central sacramental ritual of the sacrifice of Mass.

Unfortunately, humanity has forgotten that they could speak about these things since the first third of the 15th century. Today we are confronted with not only what is customary in the country, but also what has become customary on earth, to appear like a maniac when words are uttered considering the outcry of the demons as a real event when they saw the Christ. We often have the experience: What is wisdom before God, has become foolishness to the world. Then again what is foolishness before the world, in present times is so often wisdom before the gods.

So the time has arrived when the sacramental element is not at all able to penetrate, because intellectualism is seizing all circles with such power—it works firstly on our religious and scientific areas—that it also seizes the religious and above all, things concerning theology. It's connected to external events, my dear friends, that took place, and you can see it resulted in what had actually developed out of church schools as a teaching for humanity, first preserved in the universities. If you want to continue taking this further you can study the way universities continued from the 14th century onwards, where the spiritual evolution gradually became removed from human evolution, how they gradually became secularized and how in due course what was within the spiritual led to the worldly. Make a study of how state waged war with the church, and how the state—because the church insisted on it—at most left the teaching content within it as an enclave but otherwise the spiritual has been taken out of humanity's evolution. This historical evolution you have to experience, you must even be able to feel it. We stand today in the presence of many cold hearts in historical development. We have completely stopped feeling religious at least as far as historical development is concerned. How can we gain from the Gospels at all, while they have emerged out of quite other states of evolution, when we have stopped feeling religious towards historical evolution?

You see, here you have a real transition from out of the earthly life, into the spiritual life. Through birth a person descends in four steps into the earthly existence until the moment of speech, through the death process he ascends from speech up to communion. He would have died today, also his I, if he had not taken up what lies up to communion in the whole ceremonial process, if he has not taken up Christ, who redeemed from within the physical, the etheric, astral and conserving the I, so that he can retain his I even after death.

With the sacrifice of Mass people are snatched away from the power of the demons, from that power which entangles us in contradictions which are primarily shaped by intellectual concepts with sharp outlines. However, life is not made up of sharp outlines, life can only live within our consciousness in a conceptual way, if a concept organically evolves into another concept. With the inorganic, where we have detached concepts, they are merely clothed as dead in our consciousness. We need concepts which can evolve from one into another, which are alive and capable of metamorphosis; only these concept are not pushed away when we take them up inwardly, these concepts would be propagated and would be capable, through the offering, through transubstantiation up to communion, to become re-united with the Divine, through which we are released here on earth.

Whoever adapts the standpoint of modern consciousness, my dear friends, takes on the standpoint which had to be accepted on the one side from the 15th century, if one goes with the progress of the human race. One actually has to simply go with progress; it gives a certain viewpoint of consciousness, by which we can't remain standing still. Even if we are to fall into an abyss, we would have to go with the progress of the human race, but we must simply find the possibility to return from the other side of the abyss so we may continue. What has been happening since the 15th century has of course been necessary. The evangelistic-protestant consciousness has permeated what had been necessary in the evolution of humanity since the 15th century. You can see how, as the point of this development approached humanity, the most varied discussions regarding the transubstantiation and the Last Supper came to the fore. As long as one takes the point of view of the sacramental, such discussions won't arise, because such discussions stem from the invasion of intellectualism in the sacramental way of thinking. From before the 15th century, we in Europe were at the same standpoint on which Hinduism stands today. When a Hindu participates in intellectual development, he is in this intellectual development as free as possible, in as far as he remains a true Brahman. The Hindu participates in the ceremony, in the ritual; it connects everyone, and those who participate in the ritual is a true Hindu believer; he can think about it as he wishes, in it he remains completely free. Dogma, which is captured by thoughts, or a content of teaching, basically doesn't exist. Schools can emerge that interpret things in a hundred different ways. All of this can exist in orthodox Hinduism, if only the ceremonies are recorded as something actual and real.

Humanity in Europe also reached this standpoint before, around the time of the 15th century. At that time the invasion of intellectualism, which promoted sharp, outlined concepts, would simply not comply with sacramentalism, because with the commencement of discussions there was actually nothing to discuss. If there had been such a person as Scotus Eriugena, in other words a person who stood amidst the conception of the first Christian centuries presenting the discussion of later—one could even say that they were in front of him in a certain sense, it works that way ahead, it is after all in the others ...—(gap in notes). If you study this in Scotus Eriugena you could say he spoke out of the fullness of life, by contrast the later discussions can be compared to my experience with a school friend who had quite radically wriggled himself into materialism, and during our dialogue about one thing and another, he became quite angry and interrupted with the words: It is nonsense to speak about something other than brain processes, to say anything other than what moves in the brain are mere molecules and brain atoms, because those are the only things that happen in thinking and feeling.—So I answered: So, tell me, why are you lying? You are continuously lying when you say, "I feel" and "I think" and so on; you will have to say, "my brain feels," "my brain thinks"; in order for you to be correct, you have to say it like that.—Because he had developed completely into materialism, he criticized people one day in their very foundations. He said: A human being is a being who, instead of standing properly on a surface, moves by oscillating on two legs in a constant search for a position of equilibrium: it is simply nonsense to regard the way he moves, in any other way.—From his point of view, he spoke correctly because he criticized the living from the point of view of intellectualism. Somewhat in this way it would appear to an old confessor of sacramentalism, if one spoke from an intellectual critical viewpoint about sacramentalism and criticized religious life in this way. Since the 15th century it has become a matter of course and all of what is modern religious consciousness doesn't know just how much it has become entangled in it.

So one can say: we have on the one side the Catholic Church, which, if it feels its living nerve rightly, does not allow intellectualism to enter into it, and we have on the other side the evangelist-protestant consciousness having developed in a cultural milieu which no longer experiences the reality of sacramentalism, as I've indicated today. That's why the abyss is so enormous. The Catholic has stopped in the human evolution presented in the impulses of the 15th century; he developed his religion only up to this point. Cardinal Newman's connection to Catholicism therefore was so difficult, because his approach was out of modern consciousness. For the Catholic, religious life has come to one side, while modern science took the outer side. You can't read a scientific work that has emerged from Catholicism without experiencing how the most learned priests and most learned Catholics work with science in such a way that it is regarded as outer phenomena, and only that which they bring in feeling, in fervour from their Catholicism, can give them strength. However, science is a different matter to what is done within the religious, and the scholasticism of Thomas Aquinas was the last product of intellectual development in that it still included the philosophy as organic in its world view. As a result, it basically had to be discussed again for the philosophical fortification of Catholicism. The Protestant consciousness felt obliged to take up intellectualism, to process intellectualism. Thus, they became alienated from sacramentalism; as a result, it became necessary to take on an ethical character, it was necessary to relinquish everything which somehow formed foundations of knowledge for the religious life. It was for instance necessary to insist that, instead of adding a mystery to birth, to substitute it with the scientific mystery of birth which meant connecting the soul with the body, achieved without an opinion possibly gained from it. The Mass, the inverse ceremony of birth processes, which are dying processes, would be mindlessly given over to historical development, and abandoned. This all relates to the time of intellectualism when the human being could no longer directly find the spiritual within the physical. So it can be seen, that if religious content is to be saved at all, it would be to formulate it in such a way that it has nothing connecting it to a content of knowledge. This will always stand as a gaping contradiction for anyone who does not, in theory, want to ignore the practical impulses of the soul's life.

However, humanity could never have entered into the age of experiencing freedom without having participated what had been brought to fruition in the 15th century, because freedom can only be gained within the culture of intellectualism. Only intellectually are we able to depend so much on ourselves that we may have the inner experience, which I have portrayed in my book The Philosophy of Freedom (later translations called The Philosophy of Spiritual Activity) regarding the experience of pure thinking as the foundation of freedom. All discussions prior to this regarding freedom, are only preparatory, because freedom is not to be discovered within a view which basically only contained necessity, like the view which had remained before the 15th century. So let's pose the fundamental question which can be solved in the present: How do we, despite recognising the blessings of intellectualism, rediscover the sacramental out of freedom?

Without a deep grasp on this question, we will not be able to understand it. The help of historical evolution needs to be taken into account in order to understand these things. If you can't let go of what I've now come to terms with, if you don't understand Luther's soul struggle inwardly either, but only in a certain sense only outwardly, intellectually, you will see in the next few days that we have already, with what has been said today, started moving the building blocks together for the understanding of Luther's soul's struggle. With this I want to close today.

(Afterwards Rudolf Steiner admitted he would be willing to enter into eventual questions and Licentiate Bock asked him to shortly clarify again the connection between Mass and birth.)

Rudolf Steiner: It concerns the ability of speech, therefore life through words, which is the last capability given through the powers of birth, come to the fore in this direction (reference to table 5—see outline below). Now, we develop the ability for language which we receive here, in the most comprehensive sense, which we apply in the Gospels, in that we proclaim the words of God, so that we are carried from birth up to the words which turn back again. So the way goes from "descent" up to the words, Logos, and then back again. I only wrote "Gospel" on the blackboard, to place the Mass as a reverse ritual in the ceremonial process. When we look at the sacrifice of Mass—I'm letting go of the introductory processes, they are all preparatory—so the first real action is reading the Gospel, the sounding out of words, that means all which is directed towards birth, we allow to sound initially in the sacrifice of Mass. The Gospel which is read, is actually the first process of the Mass, and sounds out as word. Now, after intermediate processes here again, which do not represent the essential, the offering begins. The altar is smoked. This has the meaning that the word, which is sounded, unites with the smoke and rises from the altar. Then a time follows in which the offering continues up to the transubstantiation, when we also come back to the final material. Finally, there's the communion, which is the reverse of the descent, which is to be taken upwards. If we have understood the totality of the processes, then we first have the word, then the offering with smoke, then the word is carried into it through the power of dematerialization in the transformation and to the unification through communion. Yes, so be it.

1. Descent—Communion 4.
2. Relationship with matter—Transubstantiation 3.
3. Adaptation to earth—Offering 2.
4. Ability to speak—Gospel 1.

My dear friends! Yesterday we started by addressing a wish which licentiate Bock had expressed at the beginning of our course and we find that what we need to build on to what I said yesterday afternoon about sacramentalism relevant to today, can be discovered if we link the possible reflections, which are necessary, to the 13th chapter of the Gospel of St Mark. It is important for us to certainly try again, in all seriousness, to derive specific meaning from what is expressed in living words. To me it is impossible that pastoral care can be developed in the future, without yourself developing the application of living words and even experiencing living words. However, it is impossible for current mankind which is so strongly gripped by materialism, to be able to handle the living Word in itself, without a historical deepening. It is simply so, that in dealing with intellectualistic concepts and ideas we are only dealing with dead words, with the corpse of the Logos. We will only deal with the living Word when we penetrate through the layer in which man lives today, only, and alone, by penetrating through the layer of the dead, the corpse-like words.

My dear friends, the Catholic Church has to a certain degree understood very well how to misplace and obstruct access to these living words for those who, in their opinion, should be the true believers. In pastoral care the Catholic Church in a certain sense considers these enlivening words already, but in an outward sense. All these things will only become understood when we take what I presented yesterday and think them through deeply, and, if we can still penetrate them further, to yield clarity. I'm saying that the Catholic Church understood very clearly in this regard, to exterminate the life of the Word, because it belonged to one of the most significant epochs of all human development, and which had contributed briefly before and some three centuries after the Mystery of Golgotha, just to the civilized part of humanity.

When we ask our contemporaries about the essence of the Gnosis, for example the essence of the Montanistic heresy, then with the current soul constitution you basically can't understand anything correctly relating to it. That which would outwardly be informative in the becoming church has been carefully eradicated and the things that archaeologists, philosophers, researchers of antiquity discover from this characterised epoch, will indeed be deciphered word for word, but the decipherment does not mean reaching an understanding. All of this must actually be read differently, in order to enter the real soul content of olden times. It is for instance possible for modern humanity, to take the Deussen translation, which has exterminated all real meaning of the Orient, and, while thinking these translations are great, while mankind can't eradicate all understanding for what Deussen translated, devote yourself to such a Deussen translation. In order to understand, you need to penetrate the meaning of the first Christian centuries, more specifically the centuries before the Mystery of Golgotha happened.

I would like to give you access, somewhat in the way I have out of Anthroposophy, by means of a presentation, which you can visualise as symptomatic of what history brings. One of the most extinct things belonging in the first Christian centuries was referred to as the Pistis, placed in contrast to the Gnosis. The Gnosis can't be understood if one doesn't know that in that time epoch, in which, let's say, you appeared in the form of a Basilides or Valentinus, people who lived in the spirituality of that time, were fighting a very terrible battle, which can be characterised by them asking a question: What do we poor people have to do on the one hand with the spirit that juts in our souls, and on the other hand our physical body into which our soul likewise juts into? In a terrifying manner this question played out in the soul battle among religious people. The two opposite poles, to a certain extent, of this battle was the Gnosis and Montanism sect.

The Gnosis was, for people who wanted to become Gnostics, being aware that within a person, where the soul resides, the spirit can only be reached through knowledge, through clear, lucid, light-filled knowledge. However, it was already during a time in which intellectualism was being prepared in the dark, in a time when intellectualism was regarded as the enemy of the human soul's relation to the spirit. To a certain extent people prophetically saw how intellectualism would push in, in the future; this arrival of intellectualism was seen as stripping the world of spirituality, wanting to completely make the world void of the Divine, like I have characterised for you yesterday. People saw this and people experienced intellectualism as a danger. People wanted to hold on to something spiritual which didn't come from intellectualism. That's roughly the soul battle Basilides fought, the Gnostic who wanted to stick to what was revealed in the course of the year. He said to himself: When a person submits himself to his forthcoming intellect, then he separates himself from the Divine spirituality of the cosmos; he must connect to what lies in his environment, which has come into being through the Divine spiritual cosmos; he must adhere to that which has the venerable image of cosmic creation in the circling of the world and thus the Divine process in matter; he must adhere to the course of the year.—Basilides did the following: He looked up - but with him it was actually still only tradition, so no longer an inner imaginative perception as in older times, which I characterised as the reading of the movement of the stars—he looked up and said: Last but not least, the spiritual gaze is lost; when we feel, that when we become aware the spiritual gaze is lost, then we talk about the unknown God, the God who can't be grasped in words and concepts, from whom the fist aeon this unknown God manifests himself, revealing himself—this concept of manifestation which later unified things as with Basilides, will be totally misunderstood if compared with what we understand today under "manifestation"; one should not say "it manifests itself" but "it is formed out of," it is individually shaped—out of the unknown God is formed the Nous, which also appeared with Anaxagoras as the first creation of the unknown God.

That is the first principle, which exists in people as a copy, when the human mind, not the intellectual mind but the lively mind I've characterised for you during these days, still existed within Greek philosophy (up to Plato), and which then appeared in a weaker form still in Aristotle.

What comes next is the Logos, in which from the Nous we descend further down. In human beings it is expressed by perceiving sound and tone. In the neck area we find five other principles which we need not characterise in detail now. With this we have what was first called the holy days of the year, which gives people, when they read the cosmos, an understanding of the human body, leading to the human head organisation.

Besides these principles we find others in the human organization, 364 in total, which gives 364 + 1=365, the outer symbol which is expressed as the 365 days of the year. The word Day (Tag) originally was inwardly connected to God, so what Basilides, by speaking about 365 days, spoke about 365 gods which all partake in the creation of the human organism. As the last one of the gods—i.e. if you take one plus 364, and then take the last day of the year as a symbol for one God—Basilides saw the God who was worshipped by the Jews in the Old Testament. You see, this is what is extraordinary in the Gnosis, that it is in such a relationship to Jahve, the Jewish God, that he is not the unknown God connected to the Nous and Logos but with the Jewish God as the 365, as the last day of the year.

By understanding the Gnosis in this way, the experience of the soul was to be permeated spiritually. If I were to give you a characteristic aspect of the Gnosis, in relation to inner human experience it is this: that the Gnostic aspired in everything to penetrate the Highest with knowledge, so that his gaze rose above the Logos up to the Nous. The Gnostic says: In Christ and in the Mystery of Golgotha the Nous is embodied in the human being; not the Logos, the Nous is embodied. This, my dear friends, if it is grasped in a lively way, has a distinct result for our inner soul life. If you consider these things abstractly, as is in our intellectual time presented to many people, well, then it is heard that people in olden times didn't speak about the Logos in which Jesus became flesh, but of the Nous, which became the flesh of Jesus. That's the thing then, if you have pegged such a term. For a person who spiritually lives within a lively experience of concepts, he would not be able to do otherwise, than to grasp such a soul's content, as to imagine sculpturally what the Nous becoming flesh is. The Nous having become flesh however, can't speak; this can't be the Christ, can't go through death and resurrection. The Christ of the Gnostic, which is actually the Nous, could only come as far as being embodied in people; it could not die or accomplish resurrection.

For Basilides, this darkened his observation. His gaze becomes clouded the moment he approaches the last acts of the Mystery of Golgotha with his inner gaze; it clouds his gaze when it comes to dying and resurrection. His gaze is drawn to the route towards Crucifixion, the route to Golgotha of Jesus Christ, but he couldn't accomplish, out of a lively imagination, that the Christ carried the cross to Golgotha, was killed on the cross and resurrected. He regards it in such a way that Simon of Cyrene took the cross from the Christ, that he carried it up to Golgotha, and instead of Christ, that Simon of Cyrene is crucified. This is the Christ imagination of the Gnostic in as far as the image of Basilides appears and is basically the historical expression of the Gnosis.

So we see how the Christ in his final deed, is omitted by the Gnostic, how the Gnostic can't grasp the final result of Golgotha, how in their imagination the Christ is merely accomplished through the Nous, how it ends at the moment the Christ gives the cross away to Simon of Cyrene. On the one hand we have Gnosis, which is so strongly afraid of intellectualism that it did not let the legitimate power of intellectualism into human vision and as a result could not enter into the last act of the Mystery of Golgotha.

What did the Gnosis do? It stood in quite a lively way, I could say, in relation to the most extraordinary and powerful question of that current age: How does one penetrate the supersensible spirit from which the soul originated?—The Gnostic pointed away from that which somehow wanted to flow in from intellectualism and result in the image of Christ up to the point when he hands the cross to Simon of Cyrene. This is the one side of the human battle which at the time had the result of creating the influence of the great question, which I have set before you. What comes forth from this wrestling?

From all this wrestling another great question arises which became the crux for the Christian Gnostics. My dear friends, because the Gnostics regarded 365 as the Divine god of the Jews, they experienced the Fatherly and the Divine at the end of this row. When the Jews worshiped their god, they experienced it as Fatherly, while what later appeared as the Holy Ghost, they experienced the opposite pole, in the Nous. As a result, the Gnostics gave an answer to the primordial question in the first Christian centuries, an answer which is no longer valid today. Their answer was: The Christ is a far higher creation than the Father; the Christ is essentially equal to the Father. The Father, who finds his most outward, extreme expression in the Jewish god, is the creator of the world, but as the world creator he has, out of its foundations allowed things to be created simultaneously, the good and evil, the good and bad, simultaneously health and illness, the divine and the devilish. This world, which was not made out of love, because it contains evil, the Gnostics contrasted with the more elevated divine nature of the Christ who came from above, downward, carrying the Nous within, who can redeem this world that the creator had to leave un-liberated.

Christ is not essentially the Father, said the Gnostics, the Father essentially stood lower than the Son; the Son as Christ stood higher. This is the fundamental feeling permeating the Gnosis: however, it has been completely obstructed by what later occurred in the Roman Catholic continuation. Basically, we can't look back at what the big question was: How does one relate to the greater Christ in contrast to the less perfect Father? The Gnostic actually saw things in such a way that the Father of the worlds was still imperfect, and only by bringing forth his Son, he created perfection; that through the propagation of his Son, the act of procreation of his Son, He would complete the development of the world.

In all these things you see exactly what lived in the Gnosis. If we now look at the opposite side, which comes into the strongest expression with Monatunus, already weaker but still clearly with Tertullian, then we look over to those who said to themselves: If we want to reach into the Gnosis, everything disappears; we can't through the outer world, not through the contemplation of the seasons, not through reading the stars, reach the divine, we must enter into man, we must immerse ourselves in man.—

While the Gnosis directed its gaze to the macrocosm, so Mantanismus dived into the microcosm, in the human being himself. Intellectualistic concepts were at that time only in its infancy and could not yet be fully expressed; theology in today's sense did not arise in this way. What existed in all the exercises, in particular those prescribed by Mantanus for his students, were inner stories, something which was enlivened within the students as visions. These atavistic visions for the Montanists were particularly indigenous. All those who were to separate themselves from belonging to the mere pastoral care of the Montanists were allowed to practice, and all of them were allowed to practice to the extent that they could answer the question: how does the soul-spiritual in man, in the microcosm, relate to the physical-bodily aspect?

During ancient times, long before the Mystery of Golgotha, what I've just said was something obvious; had a self-evident answer. For those who lived in the time epoch of the Mystery of Golgotha, such an obvious answer didn't exist. People first had to dive into physicality. Because a fear existed of bringing intellectualism into this physicality, one entered the corporality with the power of the imagination and we get to know the descriptions of the forming of Montanist visions, which have also disappeared. In descriptions of Montanist visions—and this is characteristic—we always find the repetitive idea of the Christ soon returning in a physical body to the earth. One can't think of Montanism without thinking of the imminent return of the Christ to earthly corporeality. While the Montanist was familiar with the idea of finding the returning Christ, he strongly set before his soul what happened at the cross, what was accomplished through the death on the cross, what is involved in dying, what is involved in resurrection. The re-descent of the Christ, the physical-bodily immersion that takes place, was tinged by materialistic feelings in this view of the Montanists; they lived in the idea that Christ would come again and live in time and space. This was pronounced and those who believed this in the schools were only those who responded to the belief of the imminent coming of Christ Jesus to the earth, where he would stride along as if he is in a physical body.

This is in contrast to the Gnosis, this is the other pole: it had a different danger, the danger that all historic development of humanity is to be imagined in space and time. The urge to imagine such an idea of the world is what Augustinus for instance experienced in his exchange with the Bishop Faustus. Through Faustus a method of imagination is introduced which is completely tinged with the senses as images presented to Augustinus, and this became a materialistic experience of the world for Augustinus, from where he approached the world. Augustinus' words are gripping: I search for God in the stars, and do not find Him. I search for God in the sun, in the moon, and don't find Him. I search for God in all the plants, in all the animals, and don't find Him. I search for God on the mountains, in the rivers; I don't find Him.—

He means that in all the images there is no inner experience of the Divine, as it is with the Montanists. Through this Augustinus learnt, as it happened in his exchange with Faustus, to recognise materialism. This created his soul battle, which he overcomes by turning to himself, to faith, towards believing what he doesn't know.

We must let this rise out of history because the important things do not happen in a way, we can control it, by taking a document in hand which has lain in the archives, or by looking at the entire history of these fore-mentioned men from outside—that is an outer assessment of history. The most important part of history takes place in the human soul, in human hearts. We need to look into the soul of Basilides, into the soul of Montanus, into the soul of Faustus, into the soul of Augustinus, if we want to look into what really happened in the historic fields which one then can develop into what actually became a covering of Christianity in the Church of Constantine. The Constantine Church took on the outer life of worldly realms in which the spiritual no longer lived—in the sense of the 13th Chapter of the Mark Gospel—depicted as an already un-deified earth, a perished earth, into which the divine kingdom must again live as brought by him in its real spiritual soul form.

You see, in the course of both these viewpoints, one on the side the Gnosis which only came up to the Nous, and on the other side Montanism, which remained stuck in a materialistic conception, you see, how in these contrasts present during the first Christian century, the writer of the St John Gospel was situated. He looked on one side to the Gnosis, which he recognised from his view as an error, because it said: In the primordial beginnings was the Nous and the Nous was with God, and God was the Nous, and the Nous became flesh and lived among us; and Simon of Cyrene took the cross from Christ and thus accomplished a human image of what happened on Golgotha, after Christ only went up to carrying the cross and then disappeared from the earthly plane.—For the gaze of the Gnostic Christ disappeared the moment Simon of Cyrene took over the cross. That was a mistake.

Where do you arrive if you succumb to all thought being human and having nothing to do with the spirit? No, this is not the way the writer of John's Gospel experienced it. It was not the Nous which was at the primordial beginnings, not the Nous with God and a veil covering everything which is related to the Christian Mystery, but: In the primordial beginnings was the Logos, and the Logos was with God, and a God was the Logos and the Logos became flesh and lived among us.—So the first actions are connected to the final actions: a unity comes about when we understand it with the spirit. We wish for something which doesn't lift us above human heights, to where we must find the Nous, because that is only one perspective of the spiritual.

Just as much spirit is needed for the spiritual orientation to let people form the idea that Jesus and the Christ God is one, so much spirituality exists in the Logos. When we hold on to the Nous, we only reach Christ; when we hold on to a Montanistic vision we only reach Jesus who in an unbelievable way returns as Christ, but then again only as a physical Jesus. No, we should not turn ourselves to the Nous coming from humanity, we must turn to the Logos, in which the Christ became man and walked among us.

The origin of the St John Gospel has really come about through an immense spiritual time context. I can't do otherwise, my dear friends, than to make a personal remark here, that I need to experience it as the greatest tragedy of our time, that theologians do not experience the majesty of the John Gospel at all, that out of a deep struggle preceding it, out of a struggle, the big question arose: How can mankind manage to, on the one hand, find a way to his soul-spiritual in the spiritual-supersensible where his own soul-spiritual nature originated from? On the other hand, how can mankind reach an understanding for how his soul is within the physical-bodily nature?

On the one hand the question could be answered by the Gnosis, and on the other hand it could be answered by an imagination towards the Pistis, which then came to Montanism in a visionary manner. The writer of the St John's Gospel was continuously placed in the middle, between these two, and we feel every word, every sentence only intimately if we do it in such a way as it flowed out of the course of the times, and in such a way that you feel the course of time during the Mystery of Golgotha as if it can be experienced forever in the human soul. With an anthroposophic gaze we can look back at the turning point in time, to the most important turning point in the earth, when one wanted to have this experience of adoration of the St John's Gospel. The day before yesterday I said to you, one has, and must, have an experience when one reads the Gospels with an anthroposophical approach, by reading them time and time again. This admiration of the reader is always renewed with each reading by the conviction that one can never learn everything from the Gospels because they go into immeasurable depths. In Gnosis, my dear friends, you can learn everything because it adheres to outer nature and cosmic symbols. In Montanism one can learn all about it because everyone who is familiar with such things knows what a tremendous suggestive persuasiveness all this has, that can be experienced through microcosmic visions, stronger than any outer impression. You must first learn, my dear friends, in order to be able to talk someone out of a vision, you first need to learn how to do it. You could, if you want to convince a person religiously, rather talk him out of what he has experienced with his outer senses, than anything he has experienced as visions, as atavistic clairvoyance, because atavistic visions are far deeper in a person. By allowing atavistic visions into a person, he is far more connected to them than to his sense impressions. It is far easier to determine an error in sense impressions than an error related to visions. Visions are deeply imbedded in the microcosm. Out of such depths everything originated which the writer of John's Gospel saw from the other side, the side of the Montanists.

Montanism was the side of the Charybdis while the Gnosis was the side of the Scylla. He had to get past them both. I feel it at once, as our current tragedy, that our time has been forced—really out of the very superficial honesty, which prevail in such areas—that the Gospel of St John has been completely eliminated and only the Synoptics accepted. If you experience the Gospels through ever greater wonderment at each renewed reading, and when you manage to delve ever deeper and deeper into the Gospels, then it gives you a harmony of the Gospels. You only reach the harmony of the Gospels when you have penetrated St John's Gospel because all together, they don't form a threefold but a fourfold harmony. You won't accomplish, my dear friends, what you have chosen to do in these meetings for the renewal of religion in present time, if you haven't managed to experience the entire depths, the immeasurable depths of the St John's Gospel. Out of the harmony of John's Gospel with the so-called synoptic Gospels something else must come about as had been established by theology. What can really be experienced inwardly as a harmony in the four Gospels must come about in a living way, as the living truth and therefore just life itself. Out of the experience, out of every experience which is deepened and warmed by the history of the origin of Christianity, out of this experience must flow the religious renewal. It can't be a result out of the intellect, nor theoretical exchanges about belief and knowledge, but only from the deepening of the felt, sensed, content which is able to be deepened in such a way as it was able to truly live in the souls of the first Christians.

Then, my dear friends, we see how Christianity was submerged by all that Christ experienced in Romanism—as I've presented to you—in the downfall of the world. Those who still understand Christ today will have to feel that the downfall is contained in all that is held by the powers of Romanism. By allowing the powers of Romanism to be preserved by the peoples who lived in this Romanism—the Roman written language, the Latin language had long been active—by our preservation of Roman Law, in our conservation of the outer forms of the Roman State, by our even uprooting the northern regions which contained the most elementary Germanic feelings experienced out of quite a different social community, in the Roman State outstripping all that is from the north, we live right up to our present days in a Roman world of decay because in Christendom, as it was considered in the vicinity of Christ Jesus himself, no other site could be found. This is because the Christianity of Constantine, which found such a meaningful symbol in the crowning of Constantine the Great in Rome, was a Christianity which expressed itself in outer worldliness, in Roman legalities. Augustinus already experienced, as I characterised yesterday and today, the feeling in his soul: Oh, what will it be then, if that gets a grip on the world, that which streams out of godless intellectualism, out of godless Romanism into the world? The principle of civil government will become something terrible; the Civitas of people will be opposed by the Civitas Dei, the God State.—So we notice the rise—earlier the indications had already been there, my dear friends—we see an interest emerging that was just seized in the following times in its fullest power in religious fields, that a light is cast on all later religious battles in the soul, which has just felt these religious battles most deeply.

Already with Augustinus this question emerged: How do we save the morality in the face of outward forces of law? How can we save morality, the divinely permeated morality? Into Romanism it can't spread.—This is the striving for internalization we find in the commitments and confessions of Augustinus, if we penetrate them correctly.

This occurs in the later striving in the most diverse forms. It appears in the tendency towards outer moral stateliness, which had to be developed according to Roman forms of the Roman Papal church, develop through the coronation of the kings becoming Roman emperors, in which the kings were accepted as instruments of the Roman Papal church, which itself was only fashioned out of ungodly Romanism. I speak in the Christian sense, in the sense of the first Christianity, which experienced Romanism as an enemy. How could one escape this which was being prepared? The first way one could get out was to not allow the internalised Christ to submit to the nationalization of morality, as it had evolved in the Roman Papal church. The nationalization, the outer national administration of morality was what Augustinus still accepted on the one hand, while, however, in the depths of his soul there were forces which he rebelled against.

We see in this rebellion, one could call it, the tendency of morality to withdraw within, at least to save the divinity within morality, according to what one had lost in outer worldliness. We see this morality being turned inward, being searched for as the "little spark" mentioned by Meister Eckhard, by Tauler, by Suso and so on, and how in particular it profoundly, intimately appears in the booklet Theologia Deutch. This, my dear friends is the battle for the moral, which now came to the fore, not to be lost within the divine spirituality, when it has already been lost in outer world knowledge and administration of the world. However, for a long time one was not ready to use such force like Suso regarding morality and seize the divine to penetrate the moral.

At first it was a question of arranging the whole in a kind of vague form, always envisioning the side of the outside world, for there had to be someone like a Carolus Magnus, who on the one hand was a worldly administrator, and who could transfer the state administration of morality to the crown of the emperor as an outward gesture, while the church worked in the background. It was imagined in such a way, I could say, that it became a kind of moral dilemma, a conscience that has become historical. This started in the 9th, 10th centuries and this inner conscience steered towards people looking at the world, and that man, because he stood in the middle of the search for the divine in the moral, didn't manage it in the world and searched for the enemies in the world which he felt within. Man looked in the world to find enemies. This resulted in the danger of Christians looking for enemies in the outer world, this led, my dear friends, to the mood of the crusades.

The crusade mood stands in the middle of the quests for internalization, yet people still didn't reach that place within themselves where the divine was grasped through the moral. The crusade mood lived in two forms; it lived above all in the moral impact of Godfrey of Bouillon and his comrades. From them the call went out against Rome: Jerusalem against Rome! To Jerusalem! We want to replace Rome with Jerusalem because in Rome we have become acquainted with outwardness, and in Jerusalem we will perhaps find inwardness, when we relive the Mystery of Golgotha in its holy places.—This is how the imagination came to Godfrey of Bouillon who we may think of as finding the enemy inwardly, even though he still looked for it outwardly, looking for it in the Turks. The striving to turn more inward and there find the ruler of the world, but at the same time to crown a king of Jerusalem, all this expressed itself in the historic mood of the 10th, 11th, and 12th centuries. All this lived in the people. For once try to place yourself, in both the worldly and the spiritual reasons of the crusades and you will discover this historical mood everywhere.

Rome saw this. Rome felt it indeed, something was happening in the north: Jerusalem against Rome. In Rome one felt the externalization, but Rome was careful. Rome already had its prophets; it was careful and looked into the future, seeing what people wanted: Jerusalem against Rome. So it did something which often happens in such cases, it introduced in its own way what the others first wanted, and the Pope allowed his creatures, Peter of Amiens and his supporters, to preach about the crusade in order to carry out from Rome what actually went against it. Study the history with understanding; take it as an impulse and you will see that already the first steps of the crusades took place in what Rome had anticipated and that which Godfrey of Bouillon and his supporters strived for.

So we see in the historic mood how outer actions were searching for what lay within. I could say we can understand this historic mood in a spiritual way when we see how the Order of the Temple has grown out of the crusades, orders which are already further in their turning within. As a result of the crusades it brought an inwardness with it. It only takes things in such a way that it knows that one does not actually internalize them if one does not penetrate the exterior at the same time, when one doesn't, in order to save the moral, see it as an enemy in an exterior way. As paradoxical as this might appear, my dear friends, what Godfrey of Bouillon saw outwardly in the realm of the Turks, this is like Luther's battle at Wartburg Castle with its devils as an inner power. The struggle is directed inward.

If you now look at all of this, what appears in programs about such people as Johannes Valentin Andrea, Comenius, what lives in the Bohemian brothers, then you will understand how in the later centuries of the crusades the pursuit of internalization has gone. I must at least mention the most symptomatic picture seemed to me always to be in a single place when I looked at this lonely thinker who lived in Bohemia, the contemporary of Leibniz, Franziskus Josephus von Hoditz und Wolframitz. For the first time, in all clarity—we don't only know this today—he stripped morality of legality. Everywhere in the early days of writing in the Roman spirit, the legal was bound to the moral. What lived in a religious way in most people, lived in a philosophic way in the contemporaries of Leibniz. He wanted the moral element to be purely philosophic. Just like Luther wanted to get the inner justification, because in his time it was no longer possible to get justification in the outer world, so Franziskus Josephus von Hoditz und Wolframitz as a lonely thinker, saw the task: How do I save, purely conceptually, morality from the encirclement and transformation of legality, with those poor philosophic concepts? How do I save the purely human-moral?—He didn't deepen the question religiously. The question was not one-sidedly, intellectually posed by Hoditz—Wolframitz. However, just because it is put philosophically, one notices how he struggles philosophically in the pure shaping of the substantial moral content living in the consciousness.

In order to understand these times which after all form the foundation of ours, in which the feelings of our contemporaries live—without knowing it—you should, my dear friends, always look back at the deep soul battles experienced in the past, also when a modern person feels that he has "brought it so delightfully far"; by looking back at this time of the most terrible human soul battles, only one period of superstition is seen.

So, I could say, the historic development of the struggle for morality came about. What was being experienced in this struggle shows up right into our present day, and it can be imposed on the spiritual search into religion, for religious behaviour, even into aberrations. Still, no balance has been found between Pistis and Sophia, between Pistis and Gnosis. This abyss is still gaping in contrast to the writer of the Gospel of St John who had infinite courage to stand above it and find the truth in between it all.

This summoning of strength in the search for the moral, in the will to save the divine, by applying it only to the moral, was felt in their simple, deep but imperfect way by those southern German religious people who are regarded as sectarians today, the Theosophists, who we find on the one hand in Bengel, and on the other, in Oetinger, but who are far more numerous than only in these two. They use all their might to strive, in complete earnestness, for attaining the divine in the moral, yet by trying to attain the divine in morality they realise: We need an eschatology, we need a prophecy, we need foresight into the course of the world's unfolding. This is still the unfulfilled striving of the Theosophists in the first half of the 19th century, started at the end of the 18th century when we must see the dawn of that which was completely buried at the end of the 19th and the beginning of the 20th century, and which must, from all those who experience the necessity for religious renewal, be seen.

For this reason, my answers to your wishes which are in pursuit of such religious renewal, can't turn out in any other way than they do. I would quite like to give you what I must believe you are actually looking for.

If I speak about death and immortality today, it may seem, as if at first such a consideration is caused in the personal needs of the human soul, which have little do with knowledge, with science. If you survey the series of spiritual-scientific talks that I have held, you yet realise that I applied a scientific standard to the considered objects already, even if a spiritual-scientific standard. Hence, the today's consideration does also not start from that what we find within our emotional life, within our longings and wishes towards a life that exceeds the life of the physical body. It will rather concern this: how has human knowledge to position itself to the questions of death and immortality completely in the sense, as this knowledge positions itself to other objects of our knowledge? Since if we abstain from the longing for a life which exceeds the bodily if we abstain from that what is to be understood possibly in the sense of concepts like fear of death and the like, we have the question of the nature of our whole human individuality in it as something that remains for the human knowledge regarding death and immortality.

But it may seem today, as if in case of all considerations of spiritual life these important questions of death and immortality are disregarded. Since if one takes one of the official psychologies, you find, indeed, the phenomena of the soul life discussed in detail. However, as far as they face us in the everyday life, for example, the question of the development of concepts, the question of memory, of perception, of attention and the like, but you will look in vain for a discussion about the real being of our soul life. Yes, you can find the prejudice just in most scientific circles this soul life that someone must be a dilettante who wants to put these questions as scientific ones.

But this scientific thinking has now to turn to roads different from the usual ones if it wants to consider issues like death and immortality. There that psychology is no longer enough which one calls “psychology without soul,” a psychology with which only the phenomena of the soul life should be considered, without looking at the real being of that what rests in our own individuality and whose expression the phenomena of the soul experiences are. Now spiritual science or anthroposophy is an unusual point of view regarding these as well as other questions.

Indeed, the questions of death and immortality have emerged like from dark depths of spirit already since more than one century from the Western cultural life. One has interpreted it always as a dream of single persons if it appeared with a great spirit, as for example with Lessing. One regarded it as a meaningless dream if it appeared with such men whose names are called less within the cultural life of the last decades. Concerning the questions of death and immortality spiritual science is also not in any opposition to natural sciences. Only the opinion is often spread, as if natural sciences must reject what spiritual science has to say for its part. Thus, we can experience that whenever something new appears, as it happened, for example, in the last decade with the problems of life, one points to the fact that the assumption of a real spiritual life that exceeds the only bodily, material life must be overcome gradually and completely. Spiritual science is not forced at all to deny something that appears, for example, in such discussions like in that by Jacques Loeb (1859–1924, German-American biologist) at the First Monists' Congress (Hamburg, 1911) about the problem of life. However, spiritual science has to hear repeatedly, as well as at that time, that it is over now with a spiritual-scientific consideration. For one can hope that one will succeed, finally, in the laboratory in producing life under outer material conditions.

Compared to all such matters I would like to remind you of one thing. There were times when one did not doubt really that one could once create life in the laboratory. People who have thought something to themselves with the representation of the Homunculus in the second part of Goethe's Faust and have remembered that this representation of Homunculus was really a kind of dream of the physical research of the Middle Ages and earlier times. That means that the creation not only of subordinated living beings, but also of the highest, the human being in the laboratory was a dream of the naturalists once. People who cherished this dream intended by no means that then the spirit had to be abolished from any consideration of humanity and the world.

No spiritual consideration of life contradicts the hope of producing life from the composition of outer substances. No, only the direction of the habitual ways of thinking matters. The habitual ways of thinking that develop with someone who immerses himself more and more in spiritual science show a view of a certain factor exceeding the material in the development of the human being and humanity.

The purely materialistic view of the human life says: there we see a human being entering the earthly existence, and we observe how the material processes happen this and that way, and we see the human being gradually growing up from a clumsy being to a human being who familiarises himself with life, can accomplish tasks of life. Moreover, we see descending processes after ascending ones as it were which lead gradually to the dissolution of the physical body or to death.

This materialistic consideration of life turns its attention solely to what one can reach with the senses and with methods of thinking and researching which are based on sensory views. There one is probably forced to exceed that what is given with the moment of birth or conception, because one cannot explain everything that appears in the human being if one pays attention only to those factors that prevail between birth or conception and death. Then one speaks of hereditary factors. However, as far as one remains within the purely material approach, one believes that all factors, all elements that should explain the human life consist only of that what one can observe between birth and death, or what comes into the human life by the inherited qualities of the parents or other ancestors.

However, as soon as people investigate this heredity, they realise that it is rather superstitious to lead back everything that the human being can realise in his life possibly to hereditary factors. Just in the last decade a brilliant historian, Ottokar Lorenz (1832–1904), tried once to examine families whose descent relations were known to what extent the qualities of the parents, grandparents and so on can be recognised in the lives of the descendants. However, he could get on this way of the purely experiential observation to nothing but to say, if one looks up in the line of ancestors, one finds that among the twenty to thirty ancestors whom everybody can count upwards human beings are who were either genii or idiots, wise men or fools, musicians or other artists, so that one can find all qualities, which are found with any human being, and that one does not come far in the reality if one clings to the prejudices of scientific theories if one wants to explain these or those hereditary factors, this or that expression of the human character, this or that quality.

Spiritual science adds a spiritual core to that what one can find in the line of heredity as conditions of the human life, which we cannot find in that which we search with the parents, grandparents and so on, but which we have to search within a supersensible spiritual world. So that in the course of the incarnation process something combines with the physical factors that is not physical that is of spiritual kind. This spiritual that one cannot see with physical eyes is that being that we carry in us as the result of our former lives on earth as one says. As it is true that we lead back our physical origin to our ancestors, we have to lead back a spiritual origin to a spiritual lineage, that means, to ourselves. Spiritual science is just forced to speak not only of one life on earth of the human being, but of repeated lives on earth. Indeed, one has to go far back for reasons that may become obvious in the course of these talks if we want to search our being in our previous life. So we say in the spiritual-scientific sense: we bring our essence with us from a former life, we have experienced this former life, and we have gone through death and then through a life between death and our appearance in this life.

Spiritual science is also forced to imagine this essence going through death and a supersensible life between death and a new life on earth. This essence is not a product of the material existence, but collects and forms the matter as it were, so that we receive this physical corporeality. Hence, we speak in spiritual science of repeated lives on earth. This idea of the repeated lives on earth faces us necessarily from the Western thinking first with Lessing (Gotthold Ephraim L., 1729–1781) in the work which he left as his testament, in the Education of the Human Race. There he says about this teaching: “even if it is the oldest one what the human beings have confessed to, must it not appear again at the summit of the human development?” In his Education of the Human Race Lessing also answers to some questions that can be objected the repeated lives on earth. Indeed, if such things appear with an excellent person, then people who judge this excellent spirit normally say: he performed great achievements, but later he became addicted to this strange dream of the repeated lives on earth, and one has to grant the great Lessing that he could also commit this strange mistake.—Thus, every little spirit feels called to condemn the great spirits with their “terrible mistakes.” Nevertheless, this idea did not let single persons of the nineteenth century rest, and even before the recent Darwinist natural sciences approached, the idea of the repeated lives on earth appears as a necessity of the human thinking again. Thus, it faces us in a book by Drossbach (Maximilian D., 1810–1884) about human rebirth, a somewhat confused book from our standpoint, but an attempt that allows itself just compared with scientific thinking to represent this idea. Soon afterwards, a little community was to be found which put a prize on the best writing about the immortality of the soul, and the prize winning writing by Widemann (Gustav W., 1812–1876) which was published in 1851 dealt with the problem of immortality from the standpoint of reincarnation. Thus, I could still state many a thing how the thinking has gradually induced many persons to consider this idea of reincarnation.

Then the scientific view of the human being came that was based on Darwin. At first, it considered the human being materialistically, and it will consider it still this way for a long. But if you take my book Theosophy or other books which are written in the spirit of spiritual science and natural sciences at the same time, you will realise that the scientific thinking—thought through to the end—imposes the necessity to the human being to think of the idea of incarnation. Nevertheless, it is not only this. I would like to show not only a logical consequence, but also that, indeed, the human being must come to the idea of reincarnation on basis of the same principle which prevails in natural sciences, namely of the principle of experience. However, another question arises there, is anybody able to collect experiences of that what should come in from supersensible worlds what should produce the human body and leave this body at death again?

One can realise cursorily still without spiritual-scientific foundations that something mental works on the outer body of the human being; but one does not like such considerations particularly today. If the human beings looked more exactly at the physiognomy of the human being in its different sculptural forms if one also looked at the facial play, at the gestures, which are individual with every human being, at the creative spirit, one would soon get a sensation how the spirit is internally working on the body.

Observe a human being who has been working on the big questions of life for about ten years, namely in such a way, as one does it in the outer science or philosophy where one reflects on these matters without having to say a lot. On the other side, observe a human being who has dealt with these issues so that they have become inner problems to him, so that they have taken him in states of the highest bliss, but also to the highest pains and the deepest tragedy. Consider a human being who deals with the questions of knowledge, and look at him, after he has led such a soul life for ten years, and you will realise how this work expresses itself in his physiognomy, how, indeed, the humanely mental works into the forms of the body. May one pursue now by certain methods such working on the outer physical body further to that point where not only certain forms of our face are changed in such a way that into them the character of the soul life is pressed, but where the indefinite form which the human being has at first becomes his completely elaborated figure?

It is necessary that the human being leads his soul life beyond the point where it is in the everyday life today. He has to learn to seize the supersensible in himself, that which is accessible to no outer observation. Then every human being can find both points by mere reflection, so to speak, where our life directly finds the supersensible.

These two points are the transitions from the wake state to sleep and again from sleep to the wake state. Since nobody should think so illogically that the human soul life stops with falling asleep and comes again into being with awakening. Our soul life must be in any state of existence in sleep, it must be somewhere to put it another way. The big question emerges which maybe the child puts that is justified for someone who gets involved with the questions of knowledge, namely the question: where does the soul go when the human being falls asleep? We see also other processes stopping, we see, for example, a burning candle going out. May one also ask there, where to does the fire go? Then we say, the fire is a process that stops if the candle goes out, and which begins again if it is kindled again.—May we compare the bodily process of the human being to the candle and say: the soul life is a process that goes out if the human being falls asleep in the evening, and is kindled in the morning when he awakes again? It seems perhaps to be in such a way, as if one could use this comparison. However, this comparison becomes impossible if, indeed, one could prove that not for the usual perception or sensation, but for a sensation to be attained by careful soul preparation that can face us which leaves our body with falling asleep and visits us with awakening again. If this is in such a way that while falling asleep not only a process takes place like a going out flame, but if we can pursue what leaves the body in the evening while falling asleep and visits it in the morning again if we can prove this process in its reality, then a supersensible inside the human being exists. Then one asks us this supersensible: how does it work within the body?

Even the famous naturalist Du Bois-Reymond (Emil Du B.-R., 1818–1896) pronounced the thought that one can understand the sleeping human being from the standpoint of natural sciences, but not the waking one in whom impulses, instincts, passions and so on surge up and down. You can read that what I have outlined today only briefly, more in detail in my writing How Does One Attain Knowledge of the Higher Worlds

I have described the methods there which we want to touch now briefly by which the human being gets around to getting to know the reality of that what leaves the body in sleep, and what with the awakening goes into him again. At first, we want to ask attentive soul viewers who have got a certain ability to listen to these important moments like falling asleep and awakening.

There we hear them saying what spiritual science can confirm absolutely that at first that changes what exists with sharp contours in the surroundings into something nebulous, into blurred forms. Then the falling asleep feels, as if his whole inner being is extended and does no longer depend on the forms of his skin; this is connected with a certain feeling of bliss. Then a strange moment occurs in which the human being can feel everything like in a brief vision that he has accomplished as satisfying moral things; this faces him vividly, and he knows that these are contents of his soul, he feels being in them. Then a jerk happens as it were, and the human being still feels: oh, this moment could last forever!—Some people just have this sensation who pay attention to the moment of falling asleep. The consciousness has disappeared.

The human being goes over to an inner essentiality at such a moment where the outer body plays no role, because the daily strain tires him. One feels as if the reality of the mental is scurrying. All methods of spiritual science which we can call experimental ones spiritual-scientifically consist in nothing but that the human being receives the inner power to keep that which is disappearing so that he can experience the moment of falling asleep completely consciously. The consciousness is kept. Since why does the consciousness dwindle while falling asleep? Because the human being cannot unfold that inner strength and willpower in the usual life to experience something else when the outer senses leave him. Let us ask ourselves, how much we experience in the usual life within the soul what is not stimulated by the outer impressions? There is a little left with most human beings surely. No wonder that the inner strength does not exist which can penetrate the soul-life and that is left by any outer experience at the moment, when it steps out while falling asleep. Any spiritual development is based on the penetration of our soul with the strength that the soul needs to receive the consciousness unless it receives it from the body. Meditation, concentration, and contemplation are experimental means to advance farther with the soul life than one can come in the usual life. I would like to bring in one example only.

Assuming that a human being can put a thought of benevolence or of something else in the centre of his experience and can exclude all the other thoughts, also those which one can get with the senses, to hold on this one thought only. Since the thoughts fly to the human being at such a moment as the bees fly to the flowers if one stands within the usual life. However, if one can have the strength to exercise concentration of thinking repeatedly, to practice meditative immersion, as soon as one can become free of the mere outer impressions, and delves repeatedly into pictorial thoughts which express something allegorically, then such a thought can startle the human soul-life, so that it becomes a stronger force than the human being normally has. Then such a human being falls asleep consciously, that means he experiences consciously that he grows with his soul life into a spiritual world. This is no dream, also no self-deception or self-suggestion, but something that is accessible, indeed, to every human being, but is to be reached only with care and energy. The human being can free himself completely from his physical corporeality. As he frees himself, otherwise, in sleep unconsciously from it, and as every human being is in sleep beyond the physical body, he will consciously live by such exercises in that what exists usually unconsciously beyond the human being. Briefly, the human being can experience a relief of his soul from the physical corporeality with soul exercises.

Indeed, one can always hold against such a representation that is based on inner experience: this is based on deceit! Nevertheless, whether it is based on deceit or on reality, this can be decided only by experience. Hence, I have to say repeatedly: what the human being believes to experience this way can absolutely be self-suggestion, for how far does the human being go self-deception! He can go so far that if he thinks, for example, only of a soda he already has its taste on the tongue. Something may well give the impression, as if it were perception of a spiritual world, but still it can be self-deceit. Hence, someone who does such exercises and makes his soul the experimenter must take all means to eliminate illusions. Nevertheless, in the end only the experience decides. Certainly, somebody can suggest the taste of a soft drink to himself, but it is another question whether he can quench his thirst with it.

There is the possibility to experience as reality what is in sleep beyond the physical body. How does one experience it? So that the human being makes his soul more and more independent and gets to know a quite new supersensible world. Indeed, he starts getting to know a world of spiritual light. Then something particular turns out there. The human being who otherwise does not consider his thoughts and mental pictures as realities takes them along when he leaves his body with his soul really. He loosens his conceptual life from all materiality, and this conceptual life experiences a transformation when the human being becomes free of his physical body. What I say now appears to materialistic minded people like daydreaming, even so it is reality. Our mere thoughts change into a world which we can compare—but only compare, it is different—with a propagating light with which we find the underlying cause of the things. So you get to the world in which you detach the thinking that is bound, otherwise, to the tool of the brain and submerge with your thinking in a newly appearing world. This expresses itself in the way that you feel more and more enlarged. You get to know a world of which the outer physical-sensory world is only a revelation. Spiritual beings, not atoms, form the basis of the outer sensory world, and we can penetrate as human beings into this spiritual world. So we are accepted by such a spiritual world as it were if we carry out this self-experiment in our soul.

We only attain a complete knowledge of the relation of this spiritual world to us human beings if we can also spiritually experience the moment of awakening. This is possible when the human being contemplates a lot about his inner life in meditation and concentration. For example, he can review that pictorially every morning or evening what he has experienced during the day or the day before to consider it contemplating or he contemplates his moral impulses and takes stock of himself. Then the human being gets around to experiencing the reverse moment consciously by such exercises where we submerge in our bodies that we experience, otherwise, unconsciously while awakening.

Then he experiences something that I can characterise only in the following way. You all may know that a healthy quiet sleep depends on our emotions. If the human being has thought ever so much, has exerted itself ever so much in his thinking, he falls easily asleep. But if anger, shame, remorse, and in particular a troubled conscience gnaw at him, he tosses and turns sleepless in bed. Not our thinking which we can carry over to the big spiritual world but our emotions can drive away the sleep.

Our emotions are associated with our soul life in the narrower sense. We share our thoughts with the world. The way in which our emotions just affect us is something intimately connected with what we ourselves are. Somebody who has learnt now in such a way to free his soul consciously from his body, also gets clear from immediate observation how he carries his emotions into the world into which he enters if he has become free of body. As blissful it makes us on one side to submerge in a world of spiritual light, free of the body, as much we feel chained in this world to our emotions gnawing at us. With it then we go into the spiritual world and have to carry it again into our body. However, by the mentioned exercises we find our emotional world again while submerging in our bodies. It faces us as something strange. We get to know ourselves submerging in our emotional world, and thereby we get to know, while we pursue it now consciously, what works in truth killing on our organism. I note here that I speak about death in a later talk that has a quite different meaning considering it with plants or animals than with the human being. Spiritual science does not take the easy way out to find these phenomena identical in the three realms if we pursue that consciously what has become the possession of our soul that it settles in our physical body and can work destroying in it. Then we get to know how our innermost being really forms the body while it combines with that what comes from father and mother and from the other ancestors as hereditary factors. There we see the human being entering in the physical life, we see him entering clumsily at first. He cannot yet speak; then we see the forms becoming more and more certain and see him becoming an active human being gradually.

Considering the whole development of the human being spiritual-scientifically, we realise how an inner essence develops and this forms the human being working on the body from the spiritual from birth or conception on. We find the same essence that works creatively on the body if we can pursue how it leaves the body and penetrates into a spiritual world. There we find two things: an element that enables us to pour out our own being like in a spiritual world of light; but we also find something in this essence that we must bring into this spiritual world, namely our emotional world, that is everything that we have got to know in life. In these two things we have on one side what is creative in the human being what leaves the body as our spiritual essence, goes through death and appears again in a new body after an interim and on the other side we have our emotions which we get to know by the spiritual-scientific view as a real being as that what destroys our body and leads to death.

Therefore, we realise how our spiritual essence enters in existence, builds up the body gradually, and we see this essence working the strongest in the first months where we do not yet have an inner soul life where we do not yet think. There we see the human being entering existence sleeping as it were. If we try to remember, we can come back to a certain point, not farther. We have slept into existence as it were. Only from the third, fourth years on the human being can feel as an ego. The reason is that the spiritual essence of the human being is busy forming the body at first. Then he comes to a point where the body has to grow only, and from then on the human being can use what flowed once in his body for his soul life which works within the physical body constantly in such a way that we take up the necessity of death at that time, where we start saying “I” to ourselves, up to which we can remember later where we begin an inner life.

What do we receive with this necessity of death? We receive the possibility to take up the outer world, to enrich our inside being perpetually, so that we become richer in life every day. In that part of our being that we carry in sleep into the spiritual world that forms our soul being everything is contained that we get as joys and sorrows, as pleasure and pain. While we live and develop a consciousness, we have the possibility for our inner essence to enrich it perpetually. We take this enrichment along if we go through death, but we can have it only because we had to destroy our bodies throughout life. Our body is built as it has developed from the preceding life. However, we absorb something new perpetually that enriches our soul life. Nevertheless, this new can no longer penetrate completely into our physical body, but only up to a certain degree. That expresses itself by the fact that we feel the fatigue of yesterday removed; but it cannot completely penetrate into our body. What penetrates into our body cannot develop completely in the bodily.

We take the former example once again. A human being works on questions of knowledge for ten years. Thus, his physiognomy has changed after ten years if this activity has been a matter of his heart. However, his body limits this change. The desire to develop internally further may still exist; but, the later absorbed can no longer work into the body. Hence, we see, because the body puts a border, the richer inner life beginning when the soul has poured forth into the body. First, we see the physiognomy of such a human being changing—of a thinker, poet or artist; then only we see the rich spiritual life developing. Not before our outside world limits us, we develop so surely, but we can no longer carry into our physical bodies what we develop in ourselves because our body is built up according to that what we have got in a former life on earth. Therefore, we have to carry through death what we still get internally. This helps us to build up the next body, so that we have built only in a body of the next life what must destroy our present body.

A view presents itself there that fits into the scientific thinking, a view of what death and immortality means what the repeated lives on earth mean. There we realise if we change our physiognomy how the human being has built that into his body what he has got in former lives on earth. We see the results of our former lives in the developing body, and we see in that what we get now what stands in the way of our bodily, so to speak, as a spiritual, the developing elements of our future life.

Spiritual science regards the earthly life as something that is between something former and something following. The later considerations will show how our perspective increases to the times of our existence which the human being spends free of body in the supersensible worlds. In order that such matters would not remain pipe dreams, it is necessary that we look at the methods that enable the soul to perceive even if it lacks the physical brain. Only because the human being enables the soul to perceive that in the supersensible what must remain, otherwise, a mere assertion it becomes a proven reality.

Today we stand strictly speaking only at the beginning of a science that deals with such matters. Just many people consider themselves as the best experts of the matters, as the most enlightened ones and regard these matters as fantasies. I would not be surprised if anybody said, this is daydreaming that completely contradicts any scientific truth!—Nobody will find it more comprehensible than I do if anybody says this. But while the human beings become engrossed more and more in spiritual science, they realise that we can prepare our souls by meditation so that it can know about itself, can develop inner forces by which it can still know, can still perceive if it leaves the body and can no longer perceive with the organs of the body. This has to be found experimentally—one may say, it is to be found spiritual-experimentally—that the soul is something that one can experience if it can no longer use the bodily organs. It goes through births and deaths and works in such a way that it builds up the body that goes through death and collects new forces to build the body during the earthly existence. With the questions of the nature of the human being, you attain answers to the questions of death and immortality at the same time.

Goethe said once in an essay that nature invented death to have much life. Spiritual-scientific research proves such a notion to be true saying, in any life, the human being enriches his soul life; he must die because his respective body is built as an effect of his former lives on earth. While killing his body, he creates the possibility to work into in a new body what now he cannot work into his body and into the world.

Such a worldview influences our lives deeply. If it penetrates our whole being if it remains not only a theory, we feel such a truth only as a truth of life. Since we say to ourselves when we have crossed the middle of our lives when our hairs begin becoming grey and our faces get wrinkles: life is going downhill!—Why is it going downhill? Because that what the soul has got cannot be brought into the body. However, what we have gained internally, and what must destroy our present bodies is worked into a new body. Someone can argue easily: you spiritual researchers state that the human being becomes weak in old age, so you say that just with the body the mind dwindles away!—As this objection is a given, it is a given that one only admits that such a man does not think about that: from what is our present brain built?—It is built from our former lives! We must destroy our bodies and our brains with our thoughts. But the thoughts, which kill the bodies, are those, which use the brain. It is obvious that something must stop that is bound to a tool like the brain. However, our spiritual being does not stop with it. That is why it occurs that we do no longer find the tools in ourselves to realise what we have appropriated in the present life if the human being moves in downward direction. Then this yet works in a soul life which is not bound to the brain, and which cannot be expressed by cerebral thoughts. This prepares itself to act creatively in the next life. One says it not only in Goethe's sense that nature invented death to have much life—but we have also to say, death is there to work out that in new forms what we acquire internally in life. In this sense, we can say if we see the age approaching: thank God, that life can go downward, that death can be! Since if it did not exist, we could not take up what flows towards us from the world in such a way that it forms us. We need death, so that we can make that what we experience the contents of our own being. Hence, we regard death as that by which just life can advance. Hence, there is no better adviser than spiritual science; it is not only a comforter towards the fear of death, but it gives us strength, while we are walking towards death and see the outside dying. Since we know that then the inside grows. Spiritual science will raise the whole life to a higher level at which life seems meaningful and reasonable.

From the following talks will arise that life does not proceed endlessly forward and backward, but that also reincarnation has a beginning and an end. Now I would only like to point to it. From that which spiritual science has to say about death and immortality arises that we have the effects of our present life in a following life.

The complete human existence disintegrates into the existence between birth and death and into that between death and a new birth. There we see what Goethe felt in terms of the simple life extended to the whole life while we look back not only at the little yesterday, but also at the big yesterday where we made our present life. We look there at the joys or pains of life and feel: joy strengthens us for the future; we must experience grief for overcoming obstacles to strengthen ourselves also for the future. There we see a big contrast expanding in the future life and think of the Goethe's verses:

If yesterday is clear and accessible,
If today you work freely and strongly,
Then you can hope for a tomorrow
That is also fortunate.

Happiness and optimism flow to us from the internally conceived spiritual science showing us: indeed, the spirit forms the material and survives while the material life is destroyed to reveal itself always anew, and which applies the newly acquired. I would like to summarise this for the purposes of the today's evening with the words:

While living the spirit shows
Always its power only,
Dying, however, the spirit shows,
How through all deaths
It always survives to higher life.

I am delighted to see you again after such a long time—the branch members and those of you who have joined the meetings in the course of the year. Let us hope that the winter which lies ahead will take our work and our spiritual movement some way forward again, and that we'll gain a little more depth in finding our way to the world of the spirit and living in it.

We have not seen one another for a long time but in a way this period is like all those other times when we were not together in outer terms. For the members of this branch are deeply and most eminently concerned to see this spiritual movement spread in the world as well as letting it enter into their own hearts. All our seeking in theosophy would be just a refined form of egoism if we were not also interested in having other people in this world hear of the movement and take an interest in it, just as we ourselves love being part of it.

The speaker has been able to talk to wider audiences and all kinds of different people in recent times, and it is good to know that people from all levels of society and of all classes have a longing for the world of the spirit, something which is also evident in the fact that the theosophical movement exists.

Perhaps we may just make a brief review of those wider audiences as we start our winter studies. The tour I was able to undertake to make the theosophical movement more widely known took me to Leipzig, Stuttgart, Baden-Baden, Alsace, Switzerland and Bavaria. I was able to speak in Leipzig, Stuttgart, Baden-Baden, Colmar, Strasbourg, Freiburg im Breisgau, Heidelberg, Basel, Bern, St. Gallen, Regensburg, Nurnberg and Weimar. In some places I gave lecture courses. The course in Leipzig consisted of fourteen lectures, the one in Stuttgart took more than a fortnight,³⁰ during which time people interested in the theosophical movement had to meet daily. Such courses are probably the most effective way of helping the theosophical movement gain deeper entry into our time. It is not so easy to spread the theosophical movement with sufficient intensity if one can only give one or two lectures and arouse initial interest But when people are given an introduction to life in the spirit for a whole two weeks, they can begin to realize that a new world can open up for them.

There are, of course, infinitely many obstacles that prevent people from getting closer to the science of the spirit and from living with it One does have to go more deeply into the approach we have come to call theosophy, for only then will hearts and minds begin to get an idea, a feeling, that this higher world is something very real. Initially everything they hear is taken to be not only incomprehensible but also pure fantasy. People do not find it easy to let go of the accepted view that the things we speak of in theosophy are mere dreams and fantasies and to realize now that our spiritual movement is concerned with something that in a most profound sense is the very basis of the real world. Many think that people who talk of these things are remote from the realities of life. However one gradually comes to see the point of view that can be gained, and realize that this is something down-to-earth, not living in cloud-cuckoo-land, but is at deeper levels, giving us strength, insight and truth. It enables us to find genuine ways of achieving the great tasks humanity has been given in this world. It is prejudice to say that theosophy is inimical to life, that it denies life. One hears people say: ‘Theosophy presents the world in a very nice light, offering great ideals, but it deflects people from life itself, from the true enjoyment of and pleasure in life.’ It has even been said that theosophists may have nice things to tell, but that these are not wholesome.

This kind of prejudice will probably take longest to disappear. It will always be possible to find people who understand the things presented in theosophical literature and lectures. It will be harder for them to find their way out of the kind of inner responses and feelings that are part of their upbringing and acquired prejudices. Inner responses and feelings are harder to overcome than are thoughts that need to be discarded. You may even hear someone say: ‘Yes, of course, we want to devote ourselves to theosophy, but we also don't want to spoil things for people who want to make the most of life.’ They'll say that we must remember that young people should enjoy life. It is a question, of course, of what we take pleasure in, and the issue must really go deeper. For it is possible to look for better and more noble objects of pleasure and to work with these to take life to a nobler level. We can give life a new content and there is no need to spoil young people's pleasure in life, for we shall give them new kinds of pleasure and enjoyment. People often find it hard to understand that one may find the things others consider entertaining rather uninteresting—going to the cinema, and spending one's time talking about things that have nothing to do with the reality of life. Perhaps a day will come when we speak of today's popular amusements as of a cloud-cuckoo-land.

It probably does not happen very often that someone envies someone else the inability to enjoy things, but it does happen. We have a small theosophical group in one particular city. One of our theosophists, who takes a tremendous interest in the science of the spirit and has also adopted a certain theosophical life style, is living with someone else who is also interested in the science of the spirit but cannot yet give up his predilection for roast suckling pig, that is, he really loves to eat roast suckling pig. Sitting there eating his suckling pig he then gets pangs of conscience because he is still much given to this enjoyment. And he thinks the other individual is lucky because he no longer has a taste for suckling pig. The point is that the other individual has developed different needs. And the day may well come when people who are no longer looking for common amusements will be considered true examples, and people will look to them for the good.

Much deeper down lie the prejudices that come from learning and intelligence and prove an obstacle to humanity's progress. You can find an article in a journal about national epidemics. A well-known academic³¹ who works in the field of psychiatry and deals with issues that lie between psychology and psychiatry, writes about mass epidemics. He refers to a phenomenon that existed for 200 years, to the end of the Middle Ages, with excessive asceticism widely practised as a ritual, with people throwing themselves to the ground, scourging and torturing themselves, their fantasies going to extremes and leading to strange excesses. This may be seen as a disease. The psychiatrist calls it hysteria of epidemic proportions. He goes on to say that hysterics of that type are often open to suggestions that cannot be evaluated by thinking. When a person sees someone else who has hurt his arm, he'll feel compassion and do what he can to help. We need not go into the things that go on in normal people's minds. But there are others who feel the pain in their own arm, abnormally so, when someone gets hurt. This is due to suggestion. It can reach such levels that the individual is completely out of control, his inner life lacking all order and given up to all impressions coming from outside.

When a materialistic soul expert speaks of such a phenomenon affecting whole populations, he is referring to public suggestion coming from particular groups—in medieval times from the monasteries—and becoming widespread. A kind of ‘disease of the age’ develops. People are not inclined to ask what they should think about such a thing when it comes up. They are wholly caught up in the suggestion. Such an expert will speak of the matter in all seriousness, but he fails to notice one thing, which is that an independent person who is capable of insight into himself will be able to recognize and clearly distinguish another kind of epidemic among the masses. This has reached many social groups today, even highly educated people. It consists in people living under the influence of specific suggestions, both positive and negative. If you speak of the truths to be found in the science of the spirit to such people, the truths will act as a negative suggestion on them. Such people cannot understand them; they will find them intolerable. Many materialistic prejudices that are widespread today act as positive suggestions. What do you find in medical, theological and law faculties? Suggestion that influences specific social groups and goes so far that one is perfectly justified in calling them a kind of disease, just like the kind of mass epidemic of which I spoke.

A well-known biologist has written something rather strange in a widely-read journal.³² It is strange—perhaps not so much for someone who only reads a bit here and a bit there, but for someone who studies the whole it is something he finds in 95% of the whole academic world. He will find that in future it will be possible to speak of a kind of academic madness, academic feeble-mindedness just as we now speak of hysteria. In the essay it says: ‘If a rolling billiard ball strikes another and makes it move, I cannot imagine that nothing passes from the one to the other.’ The scientist calls the peculiar spectre which emerges from the first billiard ball, creeping into the second one and setting it in motion under the influence of the first ball, the materia movens. He thinks he is enormously clever but is in fact only under the influence of materialistic suggestion, which affects him just as mass hysteria influenced people in the 16th century. Now just think how the suggestions to which a person is subject are apt to live around him. Their number is infinite. If they occur in large numbers—and it is possible to list a great many of them—they may be brought together in a picture that would be a disease picture of modern academic knowledge like that of dementia precox, which we keep hearing so much about.³³

There you see the unfreedom of those who are governed by suggestion. A little bit has changed since the Middle Ages. Only a theosophist is able to realize this. In medieval times people would speak of possession when something spoke out of a human being which was not that person himself. Today people laugh at the idea of possession and speak of an illness instead. This kind of possession, which existed in medieval times, has grown a little less today. It only shows itself in particular circles today. Another kind of possession, real and genuine possession, is however widespread today. The medieval kind of possession was astral by nature, today it is mental. The spirits to be found in academics today, spirits that possess them, are on the mental, the devachanic plane. In the world which is considered to be the only real world they come to expression as thoughts and are therefore also said to exist as thoughts. Just as the world of human feelings, inner responses, passions, drives and desires is not merely something arising from existence in a body, but is something independent, true and real in its own right, so the world of thoughts, too, is a distinct entity. It is just that the thoughts which human beings have are not real. These human thoughts are but shadow images of the real thoughts, just as human passions and feelings are only shadow images of something completely different. We have often spoken about the way these things are connected. We know that things we are able to observe in human beings through the physical senses are indeed the physical body, which is only part of the whole human being. We know that muscles and nerves, bones and blood are only part of the whole human being. These things, which we call the parts, the elements, of the human body, are part of the physical world. In the same way, however, human feelings and thoughts belong to another world, the astral world.

This is where modern logic takes the strangest leaps. People do not realize at all today that their own thinking, their own logic, should really tell them how impossible the conclusions are which they are drawing all the time, and that they are including things in their trains of thought that are obvious suggestions. It is terribly easy and it only needs some very commonplace ideas for an audience to accept what one is saying if for five minutes one presents them with an inevitable sequence of conclusions. They fail to realize that the debris of old life and of old ways of seeing things covers it all. That is the way it is with 'inevitable conclusions'.

Someone who was born blind and might be among us would be quite right in thinking we were indulging in fantasies when speaking of light and colour. This has never been a truth to him. He'll object that things can only be known by touch. He need not believe what we tell him, but he would nevertheless be wrong. What matters here is not that he is wrong but that he does not have the organ to perceive light and colour. The moment he is given that organ a new world will exist around him. True theosophy will never assume another world; it will merely approach it in a different way. The higher worlds of the theosophists are here around us, just as the world of colours is around the blind person. Someone born blind whose condition is operable may regain the use of his physical eye. We are saying no more than this in theosophy when we say that it is possible to develop the inner eyes. Just as it has been possible to achieve the physical eye, made with such art, so it is also possible to create organs out of the passions, instincts and feelings that live in us, organs of perception that will truly open up new worlds around the human being. It is thus possible to help human beings to achieve and develop this, so that they will be able to look into these other worlds just as they otherwise do into the physical world. This is the astral world of which we speak in theosophy. Within the outside world it is as real as is the world of colour within the world given by the sense of touch.

Someone who knows nothing of these worlds should not raise objections to them. It should be a general principle for everyone that we may only speak of things that we know something about and should never make statements about things about which we know nothing. All opinions about the science of the spirit based on the idea that those worlds must remain unknown to us are therefore a logical monstrosity that does no good at all. No one should ever say: ‘Any world I do not know about does not exist for me.’

So much to characterize the prejudices we meet. These are the suggestions made in today's academic world. And many, many people are subject to these suggestions. A lecture based on the science of the spirit is heard once, after which people continue to hear hundreds and thousands of things said to be highly significant, but they always involve elements that come not from materialistic science but from the materialistic interpretation of science.

It is hard to combat these suggestions with good sense, and this is something only someone able to see more deeply into the intellectual life of today is able to know. Popular science, busy as it is, has an extremely harmful effect because it is presented with an air of authoritative infallibility which can only be shown in its true light at some future date. People today have no idea how much they are subject to suggestion presented with an authoritative air. Take what I am saying merely as a characterization and consider how odd it is that nations struggle to rid themselves of one authority yet at the same time fall prey to new ones.

In the past, people would fall for suggestion, with their I given up to something that was active in them, but someone able to look into the higher worlds would see real entities. Human thoughts relate to certain spirits in the ‘devachanic’ world the way shadows do to the actual objects. The thought images you have are shadows cast by spirits in the devachanic or mental world. The thought that lives in you is but such a shadow image, all by itself. Someone with vision, someone who has developed his higher sense organs, will see it in connection with a spirit. If you see a shadow cast on a wall you can only understand it if you relate it to the object which cast it. It is the same with your thoughts. Without anything to relate them to, your thoughts are shadows. They relate to spirits that are as real in a higher world as this hand of mine is here. Just as my hand casts a shadow on the wall, so do the higher spirits cast their shadows in this our world. And these shadows are your thoughts.

The human being, as we see him before us, is really the scene of events that take place beyond the physical world. As a physical entity, man is in the first place complete in himself, and as such he lives in a physical world that is complete in itself. To understand the human being as a physical entity we have to remain in the physical world. To investigate and understand blood as a physical substance, for instance, you have to remain in the physical world. To understand the nature of feelings, inner responses and passions, you will either have to use empty phrases or relate these things to spirits that are behind the physical world, to a world that relates to this one as the world of colour does to the world of touch. Also you have to use a similar approach to understanding the world of thought.

So you see that man has a share in the higher worlds, that the astral body extends into those worlds, and that the devachanic world for its part casts a kind of shadow into this world. Someone who knows nothing of those higher worlds is subject to them like a slave, powerless against powers that control the chains. Just as the physical person can only be free if able to develop the will to face another person in freedom, so can the astral nature of man only be free if it recognizes its connection with the whole astral world. For as long as people live only in their ordinary inner feelings, their astral nature has them on leading strings, as it were. They are always possessed by it. They come free when they recognize it. Just as we perceive and know the physical world around us, so we must face those spirits, spiritual eye to spiritual eye, and know who we are dealing with. It is the same for the world of human thoughts. This is the way to real freedom, seeing through the world around us. To gain the right measure of understanding we have to consider what lies behind the physical aspect. A beginning has to be made and you need to study these things; the world must study these things.

There is some justification for the following objection, which is also raised by many people: What good it is to us to hear someone tell us of worlds which we ourselves are unable to see? You see, it is the first step towards being able to see into those worlds oneself. Why is it the first step? Because the physical world appears in a somewhat different light to someone who has gained insight than it does to materialistic minds. A comparison may show the different standpoint a theosophist should gain in relation to the physical world. We may take our example from ordinary writing. Someone unable to read may look at it and so may someone who is able to read. They both see the same thing; there is no difference in what they actually see. The person who is unable to read will say: I see lines going down and up, longer and shorter lines. He'll be able to describe them. Someone who is able to read however will find that the lines have meaning. He'll not describe the shape of the letters but find meaning in them.

That is how it is with the whole world when it is seen from the spiritual scientific point of view. Compared to this, take our modern conventional science. Here the world is described in the way someone who has not learned to read describes the letters. For the other person all things in the world become letters; they gain significance and he learns to read them. When someone unable to read describes the shapes of the letters, this cannot be said to be wrong. Many people say our ideas are divorced from reality when we say that the word or the world also holds a specific meaning. You cannot say anything against this objection; it is the everyday view of things. But there is another way of looking at things where every flower becomes a letter, every plant species a word, and the world a great book.

The world holds something within it that goes beyond its physical aspects. The signs for this have no lips, however, and therefore meaning has to be given to them. A completely new world opens up in the devachan for someone able to read the writing of the plants. You can also think of every animal in the world as a letter, and you will gradually be able to decipher these letters. If you understand what comes to expression in animal lives you will relate to them as someone able to read and not as someone who merely describes the letters, which is the way of modern conventional science. Learning to recognize the word that lies in the animal you are able to see another, completely different world behind the physical world—the astral world. Learning to see the plant world as letters you gain the ability to see into the mental world. This is not something divorced from reality. Quite the contrary, it is something firmly based on reality that teaches us to see the abundant meaning of life.

It truly is the case that we only perceive the true significance of spiritual insight into the world if we compare it with reading. What would be the point if I were to draw something on the board here and describe it if there was no meaning to it? It gains meaning in that we perceive its significance. And that is how it is with the world. We gradually come to realize why the world exists, what it can mean to human beings and what human beings themselves are within the world.

Telling you all this, I did not mean to present something new. Those of you who have heard about theosophy on several occasions will know it all. I have been telling it to you to give you a means of rebutting the statement that theosophy is unscientific, to arm you against objections reputed to be logical. Only someone using a shortsighted logic has objections to raise against the science of the spirit. A logic that explores every nook and cranny will show that no objection can be raised but that it is absolutely sensible. It has to be understood therefore that people who base themselves on a scientific point of view in their attacks on theosophy are doing so not for logical reasons but on the basis of suggestion. When you are free of such suggestion and know that thoughts are but the shadows cast by devachanic spirits, and if you then hear a professor who is under the influence of the mental world say that a billiard ball is moved by materia movens, which transfers to a second billiard ball—you can see behind the scenes and see that he is influenced by other spirits.

The earth is atremble, in a way. It presents us with major tasks. Questions arise from the serious challenges of our time. It will not be possible to solve the social question, which has already caused so much bloodshed, with the suggestions people are making at present. The political parties seeking to solve the social question are also under the influence of such suggestions. Someone able to see behind the physical aspects sees the demon who stands behind many a party supporter. It can never be otherwise than it was in the case of Robert Owen,³⁴ a noble and caring person with good knowledge of social conditions in England. He wanted to create an example of an economy where he asked good and bad workers to join him in establishing a social community. He based himself on the understandable prejudice that people are essentially good and one only needed to put them in a situation where they had a chance to earn a proper living. In such a situation, he believed, they would be able to have the kind of life they desired. But this philanthropist finally had to admit that it was not possible to start with practical measures in one’s efforts for social progress but that one had to teach people first, addressing their understanding.

Someone able to see into the world of the spirit perceives what lies behind the physical plane. He will see how people live together, some in the greatest misery, poor and oppressed by labour and need, and others indulging in superabundance, enjoying all kinds of things. If one does not go beyond the physical plane it will be easy to imagine how the situation can be changed. This is what most people do when they feel they are called to be reformers today. They do not find themselves in the same situation as someone who was born blind and after a successful operation suddenly sees the world around him to be full of colour. For then they would see all kinds of different spirits behind everything physical. When they try to bring their well-meant plans for reform to realization but take no heed of the spirits behind it all, the situation will be much worse fifty years later than it has ever been. All the social ideals of today would go grotesquely against the astral world unless this astral world of human passions, desires and wishes were to change as well. General misery, a terrible ferment in the world, a dreadful struggle for existence would then take the place of today's struggle which is terrible enough as it is.

You need only look a little bit into the world of the spirit and you can see the situation. Human beings are not just bodies to be provided with food; human beings are also spirits, and they are in touch with other spirits. The task of those able to see the occult world is to make them aware of being comrades, members, of higher worlds. Imagine a human being, and a few beetles crawling around on this human being. The beetles can have no idea that this human being, this spiritual entity, is something different from themselves. They will describe the shape, e.g. of the nose. That is how human beings describe the heavens, Mars, the Sun, Mercury and the other stars. A modern astronomer is just like a beetle which has no idea that the nose belongs to a soul when he describes Mercury, Mars, the Sun. He describes them just the way he sees them, like a beetle crawling around in the cosmos. We shall only know how to describe the reality of things when we realize that the stars have souls, that spirit is present everywhere, that the whole universe is ensouled. That and nothing else is the aim with the science of the spirit. It is as logical as that. Prejudices, being sheer suggestion, make it difficult to make people aware of what this spiritual view of the world is really about.

The aim of this introductory lecture has been to show the resistance met by people who think in terms of the science of the spirit and who in the eyes of the world represent this science. Each of you may find yourself in a position where you have to show firmness in the face of views presented to you from the outside. It is part of the work in our groups to help members to stand firm. They should be sufficiently sure inwardly that in spite of everything they come up against in the world they have a living inner certainty of the world of the spirit and are thus armed against any objection that may be raised. It is not the amount of theosophical knowledge we have but our inner awareness, inner life and inner certainty that matter. Many people who represent other approaches want to enter into discussion with us, wanting to offer wisdom which theosophy already has. They keep saying things which a theosophist has long since left behind. He will characterize but not criticize. He will not make propaganda in the usual sense, for that cannot be our task. People must come of their own free will if they are to join our ranks. To make propaganda and agitate is not the theosophists' task. It therefore also is not for them to refute others. One seeks to characterize the standpoint of spiritual science itself. The other person has to enter into the spirit of it. Agitation—if a public lecture may be said to be such—consists in telling people: theosophy has this and that to offer. Anyone destined to come to it will come to it. A theosophist does not have to offer views and opinions. He speaks of realities in a higher world, and realities, facts, are beyond dispute. A theosophist presenting the spiritual scientific point of view will stop himself from presenting his own opinions. As theosophists we speak of ancient wisdom that has always been known to wise people. You'll never have two people having different opinions once they have entered the higher realm. At most it may be the case that one of them has not penetrated far enough. This is the kind of attitude a theosophist can develop. He should not impose himself on others, but he should be sure in his heart and sure of himself in presenting theosophy to the world. Someone who knows will also be able to find words for the knowledge he has in him.

This, then, is the way the theosophical approach, and other approaches which are in opposition to it, should be characterized and not criticized. If we develop this attitude more and more, we'll have the best possible means of being active theosophists in the world. We shall understand the world around us more and more and investigate it in the spirit. That is the theosophical way of doing things.

In conclusion one more example, one of those that will shock people when it is referred to in public. These things are simply true and can be found with the means of our spiritual research. I would like to describe a phenomenon of our time to you, and you'll see how we come to understand the world around us if we really penetrate the things which the science of the spirit has to offer. Please do not take my words amiss, for one will have to get used to the fact that there are things of which we do not yet have the least idea. Who would have thought fifty years ago that there is a substance where it just needs a tiny granule to damage our health? Fifty years ago no one knew anything about it. There are things that have an effect before people know about them and understand them. This substance is called radium. In this case, people did not yet have the physical instruments to understand it. When it comes to things of the spirit, people lack the spiritual instruments.

There are members of the socialist movement who are extraordinarily radical and would really like to hit out and destroy everything. Other members are to some extent conservative in their views. You find all kinds of different trends among them. One group within the socialist movement is a closed group with a remarkably homogeneous, like-minded view and the same way of doing things. They have been the least radical people. Basically this is the trade, the occupational group, which gave rise to the socialist union movement—the printers.³⁵ They were the first to develop a more formal set of rules within the social movement. Rates of pay were agreed on for the relationship between workers and employers. It has even gone so far that a newspaper is produced for the printing trade the editor of which is not a socialist at all, having been thrown out of the socialist party. This shows how moderate the group is.

Now it is possible to ask if we can investigate the spiritual causes of these things just as we can physically investigate the actions of radium. Yes, we can. Do not be too surprised at the answer given in the science of the spirit to the question as to why there is such a group within the socialist movement. It is due to the action of lead on the human soul. All things in the world around us, be they small or large, are the physical bodies of spiritual principles. Gold, silver, copper, everything that lives around us is body for a spiritual principle. Lead, too, is the visible body of a particular spirit. And anyone working with lead is dealing with the metal not just in its chemical sense but also in its spiritual nature. Lead not only affects the lungs; it also has quite a specific effect on the rest of the human being. So there you have the source of the unusual views held in this occupational group.

Now something else—something that happened to me just a few days ago. Someone I know well came to me who cannot explain why he is able to find analogies and see connections in his scientific work with a facility that is unusual even among academics. Such an ability is due to a highly mobile mental body. I thought I’d find out how this phenomenon comes about. After a time I was able to tell the man that he probably had a lot to do with copper. This proved to be true, for he plays the French horn. The small amount of copper in it had such an effect on him.

Now just think. Without knowing it, people are subject to all kinds of influences. I spoke of suggestion earlier. We now see the influence of the whole world of the spirit that is around the human being. And what is theosophy? It is a way of penetrating into the world of the spirit and its laws. And what does this mean? It means freedom, for only insight will give freedom. When we know something we can relate to it in the right way. Gaining insight in the spirit is therefore the greatest process of liberation we can ever possibly have. True development and progress lie in the things the science of the spirit can teach us. People will only come to the search for truth in the spirit when they want to be free. However, today they will not gain knowledge of the spirit, and we can see that it is impossible for them to do so, if they want to be free not only of social prejudices but also of everything else, including things they do not yet have the power of mind to understand. People who still depend on fashion and so on, will not be greatly inclined to consider the influence of the metals that exist around them. But a beginning must be made, a small beginning for something that is large, very large. What I wanted to do today was to take just a bit of a look at something in which the science of the spirit can hope to be a beginning.

• 30. ‘Populärer Okkultismus’, Leipzig 28 June–11 July 1906 (notes from members of the audience in GA 94). At the Gates of Spiritual Science 14 lectures, Stuttgart 22 Aug.–4 Sept. 1906 (GA 95). Tr. E.H. Goddard, C. Davy. London: Rudolf Steiner Press 1976.
• 31. Möbius, Paul Julius (1853–1907), neurologist and lecturer in Leipzig. Über den Begriff der Hysterie und andere Vorwürfe vorwiegend psychologischer Art, Neurologische Beiträge 1. Heft, Leipzig 1894. See also Nachrichten der Rudolf Steiner Nachlassverwaltung Nr 22 (Michaeli 1968) S. 30f.
• 32. Has not so far been identified.
• 33. Dementia precox is an earlier term for schizophrenia.
• 34. Owen, Robert (1771–1858), Welsh social and educational reformer. The community he established at New Lanark in Scotland did not prove viable (it has now been restored by the New Lanark Conservation Trust). In 1833 Owen organized the Grand National Consolidated Trades Union. See also Anthroposophy and the Social Question, essay first published in Lucifer-Gnosis 1906-1908 (in GA 34). Tr. H. Collison. 2nd edition Spring Valley: Mercury Press 1982. Also in Reincarnation and Immortality, Tr. M. & E. Tapp. New York: Multimedia Publishing Corp. 1974.
• 35. The German Printers Association was the first socialist union to be established in Germany in 1866.