The Rudolf Steiner Archive

I want to speak to-day¹ about a certain aspect of the Mystery of Golgotha of which I have often spoken before in more intimate anthroposophical gatherings. What there is to be said about the Mystery of Golgotha is so extensive in range, so rich in content and of such significance, that new light needs constantly to be shed upon it before any real approach can be made to this greatest of all Mysteries in the evolution of the earth and of humanity.

The importance of the Mystery of Golgotha can be rightly assessed only when we envisage two streams of evolution in man's earthly existence: the stream which preceded the Mystery of Golgotha and the stream which, following it, will continue for the rest of the earth's existence.

In speaking of the very early period in earth-evolution when thinking of a certain kind—dream-like, imaginative, but still, thinking—was already active, we must be quite clear that in those times men possessed faculties whereby—if I may so express it—they were able to commune with Beings of a higher cosmic order. From the book Occult Science and other works of mine, you know something of these Beings of the higher Hierarchies. In his ordinary consciousness to-day man knows little of these Beings, for his intercourse with them has, as it were, been broken off. In earlier periods of human evolution it was different. To imagine that coming into contact with a Being of the higher Hierarchies in those ancient times in any way resembled the meeting between two men incarnate in physical bodies to-day would of course be a wrong conclusion. Such intercourse had quite a different character. What these Beings communicated to man in the original, primeval language of the earth could be apprehended only by spiritual organs. Momentous secrets of existence were communicated by these Beings, secrets which flowed into the human heart and awakened the consciousness that above and on all sides—where we to-day see only clouds and stars—earthly existence is connected with divine worlds. Super-earthly Beings belonging to these worlds came down in a spiritual manner to the men of earth, revealing themselves in such a way that through them men received what we may call the primal wisdom. The revelations proceeding from these Beings contained an abundance of wisdom which in their earthly life men could not have discovered themselves. For at the beginning of earth-evolution—the period of which I am now speaking—men could discover little through their own faculties. Whatever vision, whatever perceptive knowledge they possessed was received from their divine Teachers. These divine teachings were infinitely rich in content, but one thing they did not include—a thing which it was unnecessary for men of those times to know, but which for the present-day humanity is essential. The divine Teachers imparted many aspects of knowledge, truths in profusion, but they never spoke of the two fundamental boundaries of man's earthly life; they never spoke of birth and death.

Needless to say, in this short hour I cannot attempt to speak of everything that was communicated to the human race in those ancient times by the divine Teachers. A great deal is already known to you. But I want now to stress the point that among all those teachings there were none concerning birth and death. The reason for this was that for the men of those times—and for a considerable period after them—it was unnecessary to have knowledge of the facts of birth and death. The whole consciousness of mankind has changed in the course of earth-evolution. The animal consciousness of to-day, even that of the higher animals, must never be compared with human consciousness, even as it was in those ages of primitive antiquity. Yet we may perhaps find a point of approach by considering the life of the animal to-day. This lies at a level below the human, whereas the earliest form of the life of primitive man lay, in a certain respect, above the present level of the human, in spite of having certain animal-like characteristics. If you think, without preconceived ideas, about the animal to-day, you will say that the animal is unconcerned with birth and death because its existence is wholly passed in the state of life between them. Disregarding birth—although here too, of course, it is an obvious fact—we need think only of the carefree lack of concern with which the animal lives on towards death. The animal accepts death. It is simply transformation of its existence, a transition from individual to group-soul existence. The animal does not experience any such deep incision into life as is the case with the human being.

Now as I said, the primeval man of earth—in spite of his animal-like organisation—was at a higher level than the animal; he possessed an instinctive clairvoyance which enabled him to commune, to have intercourse with, his divine Teachers. But, like the animal of to-day, he was unconcerned with the approach of death. It never occurred to him, if I may so express it, to pay any particular attention to death. And why? With his instinctive clairvoyance, the primeval man was clearly aware of what was still his nature even after his descent through birth from the spiritual world into the physical world. He knew that his own essential being had entered into a physical body; and because he could say with certain knowledge, ‘An immortal, eternal being lives in me,’ the transformation taking place at death was not a matter of interest or concern to him. At most the process was like that experienced by a snake when it sheds its skin and has it replaced by another. The impression of birth and death was taken much more as a matter of course; birth and death were far less drastic incisions in human existence. Men still had clear vision of the life of the soul; to-day they have no such vision.

Even in dreams the transition from the sleeping to the waking state is hardly perceptible and the dream, with its pictures, is regarded as part of the sleeping state, as itself a semi-sleep. But what came to primeval man in his dream-pictures belonged, in reality, to a waking state, not yet fully awake. He knew that what he received in these dream-pictures was reality. In this way he felt and experienced his life of soul. Therefore questions about birth and death could not seem to him as crucial as they must inevitably be to-day.

This condition was very marked in the earliest epochs of human evolution on the earth, but it faded gradually away. As men began more and more to be aware that death makes a drastic incision not only into earthly physical life, but into the life of the soul as well, their attention was inevitably drawn to the fact of birth. On account of this change in human consciousness, earthly life assumed a character of increasing importance for men; and because experience of the life of soul was also growing dim, they felt themselves more and more removed during their sojourn on earth from an existence of soul-and-spirit. This condition became more and more marked as the time of the Mystery of Golgotha approached. Even among the Greeks it had reached the point where they felt life outside the physical body to be a shadow-existence, and regarded death as an event fraught with tragedy. The knowledge received by men from their earliest, divine Teachers did not cover the facts of birth and death. Hence before the Mystery of Golgotha took place, men were exposed to the danger of having to face experiences in their earthly life that would be unknown and incomprehensible to their earthly consciousness—namely, the experiences of birth and death.

Now let us imagine that those early, divine Teachers of humanity had descended to the earthly realm at the time of the Mystery of Golgotha. They might have been able, through the Mysteries, to reveal themselves to a few specially prepared pupils or men of knowledge, to communicate to priests trained in the Mysteries the wealth of the ancient, divine wisdom; but in the whole range of these teachings there would have been nothing concerning birth and death. The riddle of death would not have been presented to man through the revelations of this divine wisdom, not even within the Mysteries; and in their outer life on earth men would have observed facts of vital importance and interest to them—namely the facts of birth and death—of which the gods had said nothing! And why?

You must approach this matter with a certain freedom from bias, laying aside many of the conceptions that have become part of traditional religion to-day, and be clear about the following. The Beings of the higher Hierarchies who were the divine Teachers of primeval humanity had never experienced birth and death in their own realms. For birth and death, in the form in which they are experienced on the earth, are experienced only on the earth, and, again, only by human beings on the earth. The death of an animal and the dying of a plant are altogether different matters from the death of a human being. And in the divine worlds where dwelt the first great Teachers of mankind there is no birth or death, but only transformation, metamorphosis from one state of existence into another. These divine Teachers, therefore, had no inner understanding of the facts of dying and being-born.

Now to these divine Teachers belongs the host of beings connected with Jahve, with the Bodhisattvas, with the early interpreters of the world to humanity. Just think how in the Old Testament, for example, the mystery of death as it confronts men, comes to be fraught with an increasing sense of tragedy, and how, in fact, none of the teaching conveyed by the Old Testament gives any adequate or revealing illumination on the subject of death. If, therefore, at the time of the Mystery of Golgotha there had happened nothing that differed from what had already happened in the realm of the earth, and in the higher worlds connected with the earth, men would have faced a terrible situation in their earthly evolution. On the earth they would have lived through the experiences of birth and death, which now confronted them, not as simple metamorphoses but as drastic transitions in their whole human existence, and they could have learnt nothing of the significance and purpose of death and of birth in the earthly life of the human being. In order that there might gradually be imparted to mankind teaching concerning birth and death, it was necessary for the Being we call the Christ to enter the realm of earthly life, the Christ Who indeed belongs to those worlds whence the ancient Teachers too had come, but Who in accordance with a decision taken in these divine worlds, accepted for Himself a destiny different from that of the other Beings of the divine Hierarchies connected with the earth. He lent Himself to the divine decree of higher worlds that He should incarnate in an earthly body and with His own divine soul pass through birth and death on earth.²

You see, therefore, that what came to pass in the Mystery of Golgotha is not merely an inner affair of men or of the earth, but is equally an affair of the gods. Through the Event on Golgotha, the gods themselves for the first time acquired inner knowledge of the mystery of death and of birth on the earth, for they had previously had no part in either. Therefore we have this momentous fact before us: a divine Being resolved to pass through human destiny on the earth in order to undergo the same fate, the same experiences in earthly existence, as are the lot of man.

Many things concerning the Mystery of Golgotha have become known to mankind. A tradition exists, the Gospels exists, the whole New Testament exists, and modern humanity approaches the Mystery of Golgotha for the most part by way of the New Testament and such interpretation of it as is possible to-day. But very little real insight into the Mystery of Golgotha is to be gained from the interpretations of the New Testament current at the present time. It is inevitable that modern humanity should pass through the stage of acquiring knowledge in this external way, but knowledge so gained is itself external. There is no realisation to-day of how differently men in the first Christian centuries looked back to the Mystery of Golgotha; how differently—in a way that became impossible later on—it was regarded by those who understood its import. The reason is that at the time of the Mystery of Golgotha, although the change I have described was beginning to take place, vestiges of ancient, instinctive clairvoyance still survived in certain individuals. They were no more than vestiges, it is true, but they enabled men, until the fourth century A.D., to look back to the Mystery of Golgotha in a quite different way from that which was possible later on. It is not without meaning that at that time—and some confirmation of this, although in very many respects wanting, can be found in the historical traditions emanating from the earliest Church Fathers and other Christian teachers—those who came forward as teachers valued more highly than any written traditions the fact that they had received information concerning Christ Jesus from direct eye-witnesses, or from those who had been pupils of the Apostles themselves or again pupils of pupils of the Apostles, and so on. This continued until the fourth century A.D., so that a living connection was still claimed for those who were teaching at that time. As I have said, by far the greater part of the historical records have been destroyed, but those who study attentively what is left, can still discover by these external means what value was placed upon the testimony: I have had a teacher, he too had a teacher ... until at the end of the line was an Apostle who had seen the Saviour face to face.

Even of this tradition a great deal has been lost. But still more has been lost of the genuine esoteric wisdom surviving during the first four centuries of Christendom thanks to the remaining vestiges of the old clairvoyant insight. External tradition had lost wellnigh everything that was known in those days about the Risen Christ, the Christ Who had passed through the Mystery of Golgotha and then, in a spirit-body, like the early teachers of primeval humanity, had taught certain chosen disciples after His Resurrection.³ In the story, for example, of Christ meeting the disciples who had gone out to seek Him there are indications in the New Testament—but scanty indications even there—of the significance of the teachings given by the Risen Christ to His disciples.⁴ And Paul himself regards his experience at Damascus as a teaching which, given by the Risen Christ, made the man Saul into Paul.

In those early times there was full realisation that Christ Jesus, the Risen One, had secrets of a very special kind to impart to men. The fact that later on they were unable to receive these communications was due entirely to their own human evolution. For it was necessary that man should begin to unfold those forces of soul which, later, were to operate in the exercise of human freedom and of the human intellect. Evidence of this is clear from the fifteenth century onwards, but its beginnings can be traced to the fourth century.

The question naturally arises: What was the content and substance of the teachings which could be given by the Risen Christ to His chosen disciples?—He had appeared to them in the same manner in which the divine Teachers had appeared to primeval humanity. But now, if I may so express it, He was able to tell them out of divine wisdom what He had experienced and other divine Beings had not. From His own divine vantage-point He was able to explain to them the mystery of birth and death. He was able to convey to them the knowledge that in the future there would arise in the men of earth a day-consciousness, unable to have direct perception of the immortal element in human life, a consciousness that is extinguished in sleep, so that in sleep too the immortal element is invisible even to the eyes of the soul.

But He was also able to make them aware that it is possible for the Mystery of Golgotha to be drawn into the field of man's understanding. He was able to make clear to them what I will try to express in the following words. They can only be feeble, stammering words because human language has no others to offer, but I will try to express it in these halting words:—

The human body,” He taught, “has gradually become so dense, the death-forces in it so powerful that, although man will now be able to develop his intellect and his own inner freedom, he can do this only in a life that definitely experiences death, a life into which death makes a marked incision, a life from which vision of the immortal soul is obliterated during waking consciousness. But,”—so Christ taught His initiated disciples,—“you can receive into your souls a certain wisdom. It is the wisdom which through the Mystery of Golgotha, my own being has made possible for you, something with which you your selves can be filled if only you can attain the insight that Christ came down from spheres beyond the earth to the men of earth; if only you can come to realise that here on the earth there is something which cannot be perceived by earthly means, but only by means higher than those of the earth; if you can behold the Mystery of Golgotha as a Divine Event set into earthly life; if you can apprehend that a god has passed through the Mystery of Golgotha. Through everything else that comes to fulfilment on earth you can acquire earthly wisdom, but in order to understand the significance of death to humanity it would avail you nothing. Earthly wisdom would suffice you only if you, like the men of earlier times, could feel no intense interest in death. But since you must needs be concerned with death, you must strengthen your perceptive faculty by drawing into it a force stronger than all earthly forces of perception, a force so strong that you can realise that in the Mystery of Golgotha there came to pass something to which all earthly laws of nature are inapplicable. If you can include in your beliefs only the laws of earthly nature, you will, it is true, be able to observe death, but you will never discover its significance for human life. But if you can attain the insight that the earth has now for the first time received its true meaning and purpose, that at this middle point of earth-evolution a Divine Event has taken place in the Mystery of Golgotha, an Event beyond the comprehension of earthly means of perception, then you are preparing a special power of wisdom.”

This power of wisdom is the same as the power of faith; it is a special power of Spirit-Wisdom, a power of faith born of wisdom. Strength of soul is expressed when a man says: “I believe! I know through faith what I can never know by earthly means. This is a stronger force in me than when I claim to have knowledge of what can be fathomed merely by earthly means.” A man is lacking, even were he to possess all the science known on earth, if his wisdom is able to embrace only what can be grasped by earthly means. To perceive the reality of the super-earthly within the earthly, a far greater inner activity must be unfolded.

Contemplation of the Mystery of Golgotha gives a stimulus to unfold such inner activity. And in ever new variations, this teaching that a god had lived through a human destiny and had thereby united Himself with the destiny of the earth—an experience hitherto unknown to the gods in their own realm—was proclaimed over and over again by the Risen Christ to His disciples. And it worked with stupendous power. Try to realise the power of it by thinking of the conditions prevailing to-day. Less is demanded of a man who can grasp what his thinking has extracted from earthly concepts and also out of the generally acknowledged, traditional tenets of religion than of one who is required to attain understanding of the fact that there were some among the gods who, until the Mystery of Golgotha, possessed no wisdom concerning birth and death and then for the first time acquired this wisdom for the salvation of mankind. To penetrate into the realm of divine wisdom needs a very definite strength. No particular strength is required to repeat from some catechism, ‘God is all-knowing, all-powerful, all-divine,’ and so forth. One needs only to use the prefix ‘all’ and there is the definition of the Divine—ready-made, but utterly nebulous. People do not muster the courage to-day to penetrate into the wisdom of the gods. But this must happen. The divine Beings themselves added this wisdom which the gods acquired through the fact that One from among them passed through human birth and human death.

That this secret should have been entrusted to Christ's first disciples after His Resurrection is a fact of supreme moment, and so was the sequel to it, that through this knowledge they were brought to realise clearly that man once possessed the power to behold and understand the eternal nature of his own soul. This understanding, this insight into the eternal nature of the human soul can never be acquired through brain-knowledge, that is, through the intellectual, cogitated knowledge which uses the brain as its instrument. It can never in any real sense be acquired unless, as in earlier times, nature comes to the help of man, through the kind of knowledge that may still be attained through a particular development of the human rhythmic system. Yoga achieved much while the old instinctive clairvoyance could still come to its aid, while the last possessors of instinctive clairvoyance were still practising yoga. But it is a long time since the modern Oriental, the Indian—about whom many Westerners weave such fantastic ideas to-day—has attained any real vision of the eternal essence of the human soul when he engages in his exercises. He lives for the most part in illusions, in that he has a fleeting experience belonging to some elemental reality of earthly life, and then reads into the experience something from his sacred books. Real and fundamental knowledge of the divine nature of the human soul has been possible for humanity only in two ways: either as primeval humanity attained it, or as man can again attain it to-day, in a much more spiritual way, through Intuitive cognition, through cognition which, rising to Imaginative knowledge, and then to knowledge through Inspiration, finally becomes Intuition.

Now during earthly life the thinking part of the soul has poured itself into the human nervous system; it has built up this plastic structure and in it no longer has a separate existence. In the rhythmic system it is only partially absorbed. We can say of this is that there remains here some possibility of independent thought-activity. But the really eternal element of the human soul is hidden in the metabolic system, in the system which, for earthly life, has the most material function of all. Outwardly it is indeed the most material, but just because of this, the spiritual remains separate from it. The spiritual is drawn into, absorbed by the other material parts of the organism, by the brain and the rhythmic system, and is no longer there independently. In the crude materiality, the spiritual is present in itself. But to use it, a man must be able to see, to perceive, by means of the crude outer materiality. This was a possibility in primeval humanity and, although it is not a condition to be striven after, it may still occur to-day in pathological states. It is known by very few, for example, that the secret of Nietzsche's style in Thus Spake Zarathustra lies in the fact that he imbibed certain poisonous substances which brought into play within him a particular rhythm, which is the distinctive style of this work. In Nietzsche, it was a definitely material substratum that was really doing the thinking. This, needless to say, is a pathological condition, although in a certain respect again there is a kind of grandeur in it. If we are to understand these things we must no longer have false ideas, either about them, or about Intuition and the like, which lie at the opposite pole. We must understand what it means that Nietzsche should have imbibed certain poisons—a procedure not to be imitated—which substances work in such a way that they lead to an etherisation, an etherealised mode of experience in the human organism. This irradiates the thinking and produces what we find in Thus Spake Zarathustra. Intuition, on the other hand, is able to perceive the spirit-and-soul as such, separated from matter. Nothing of a material nature is at work in Intuition as described in the books Knowledge of the Higher Worlds and Its Attainment or in An Outline of Occult Science. Here we have two opposite poles of spiritual knowledge.

But in the Mysteries into which Christ sent His message, it was still known that men once possessed a sublime knowledge born of the working of material substances, born of metabolism. No attempt was made to awaken the old matter-born knowledge of spirit-reality in the manner in which this had been done in primeval humanity, nor in the degenerate way subsequently pursued by hashish-eaters and others with similar habits in order to acquire, through the workings of matter, knowledge not otherwise accessible. An attempt was made in quite another way to awaken this matter-born knowledge, namely, by clothing the Mystery of Golgotha in ritual, in mantric formulae, above all in the whole structure of the Mystery as Revelation, Offering, Transubstantiation, Communion, in the administration of the sacrament of the Eucharist in bread and wine. It was not poisons, therefore, but the Lord's Supper, clothed in what arises from the mantric formulae of the Mass, and from its fourfold membering: Gospel, Offering, Transubstantiation, Communion. For the intention was that after the fourth part of the Mass, the Communion, actual communion among the faithful should take place, with the aim of giving an intimation, at least, that thereby a knowledge leading to what was once achieved instinctively by the old metabolism-born knowledge, must be re-acquired.

It is difficult for men to-day to form any conception of this metabolism-born knowledge, because they have no inkling of how much more a bird knows than a man—although not in the intellectual, abstract sense—how much more even a camel, an animal wholly given up to the process of metabolism, knows than a man. It is, of course, a dim knowledge, a dream-knowledge, for degeneration has entered to-day into what was contained in the metabolic process of primeval man. But on the basis of the earliest Christian teachings, the sacrament at the altar was conceived as a means of pointing to the need to re-acquire a knowledge of the eternal nature of the human soul.

At the time when the Risen Christ was teaching His initiated disciples it was beyond men's power to acquire such knowledge by themselves. It was taught them by Christ. And until the fourth century of Christendom this knowledge was in a certain sense still alive. Then it ossified in the Western Catholic Church, because, although the Mass was retained, the Church could no longer interpret it. The Mass, conceived merely as a continuation of the Lord's Supper described in the Bible, can obviously have no meaning unless meaning is imbued into it. The establishment of the Mass with its wonderful ritual, its reproduction of the four stages of the Mysteries, stems from the fact that the Risen Christ was also the Teacher of those who were able to receive these teachings in a higher, esoteric sense. In the centuries following there remained only an elementary kind of instruction about the Mystery of Golgotha. A faculty was developing in man whereby, to begin with, this knowledge concerning the Mystery of Golgotha was veiled, concealed. Men had first to become firmly rooted in what is connected with death. This is the stage of early medieval civilisation.

Traditions have been preserved. The rituals of many secret societies existing at the present time contain formulae which, for those who understand and recognise them, are unmistakably reminiscent of the teachings given by the Risen Christ to His initiated disciples. But the individuals who come together in all kinds of masonic and other secret societies do not understand what their ritual contains, have not the remotest inkling of it. It would be possible to learn a great deal from these rituals because they contain much wisdom, even if it be in dead letters,—but this does not happen. Now that mankind has passed through that period in evolution which as it were shed darkness over the Mystery of Golgotha, the time has come when human longings are reaching out for a deeper knowledge of the Mystery of Golgotha. And that longing can be satisfied only through spiritual science, only through the advent of a new knowledge which works in a spiritual way. The full significance for humanity of the Mystery of Golgotha will then again be acquired. Then men will again come to realise that the most important teachings of all were given, not by the Christ Who until the Mystery of Golgotha lived in a physical body, but by the Risen Christ after the Mystery of Golgotha. Men will acquire a new understanding for words of an Initiate such as Paul: “If Christ be not risen, then is your faith vain.” After the event at Damascus, Paul knew that everything depended upon grasping the reality of the Risen Christ, upon the power of the Risen Christ being united with the human being in such a way that he can affirm: “Not I, but Christ in me.”

It is an all too characteristic contrast to this that there should have arisen in the 19th century a kind of theology which has really no desire to know anything about the reality of the Risen Christ. It is also a significant symptom of our times that a tutor of theology in Basle—Overbeck, a friend of Nietzsche—should have written a book about the Christianity of modern theology, in which he sets out to prove that this modern theology is no longer Christian. He concedes that there may still be a great deal in the world that is Christian, but he declares that the theology taught by Christian theologians is not Christian. That, in effect, is the view of Overbeck, himself a Christian theologian. And this view is brilliantly substantiated in his book. In respect of the understanding of the Mystery of Golgotha, mankind has come to a point where those officially appointed by their Church to tell men something of the Mystery of Golgotha are least of all capable of doing so. As a result of this there is springing up the human longing to learn something about the need for Christ that every individual may experience in his heart.

I have often made it evident that Anthroposophy has many services to render to humanity to-day. One significant service will be that rendered to the religious life.—This is in no sense the founding of a new religion. With the Event of a god passing through the human destiny of birth and death, the earth received its meaning and purpose in such completeness that this Event can never be surpassed. To one who understands the nature of its founding it is quite evident that there can be no question of inaugurating a new religion after Christianity. To believe such a thing possible would be to have a false idea of Christianity. But as men themselves make strides in super-sensible knowledge, the Mystery of Golgotha, and together with it the Christ Being Himself, will be more and more deeply understood. Anthroposophy would fain contribute to this understanding what perhaps it alone, at the present time, is able to contribute. For it is hardly possible anywhere else to hear about the divine Teachers of primeval humanity who spoke of all things, save only of birth and death—of which they had had no experience—and about that Teacher Who appeared to His initiated disciples in the same manner as that in which the divine primeval Teachers had appeared, but Whose momentous teachings included the crucial one of how a god shared the human destiny of birth and death. This revelation was intended to give men the power to regard death—which from that time must inevitably be a matter of concern to them—in such a way that they would realise: “Death indeed there is, but the soul is beyond its reach! The fact that men can assert this is due to the Mystery of Golgotha.”

Paul knew that if the Mystery of Golgotha had not taken place, if Christ had not risen, the soul would be involved in the destiny of the body, that is to say in the dispersion of the elements of the body into the elements of the earth. Had Christ not risen, had he not united Himself with earthly forces, the human soul would unite with the body between birth and death in such a way that the soul would be united, too, with all the molecules which become part of the earth through cremation or decomposition. It would have come about that at the end of earth-evolution, human souls would go the way of earthly matter. But in that Christ has passed through the Mystery of Golgotha, He wrests this fate away from the human soul. The earth will go her way in the universe, but just as the human soul can emerge from the single human body, so will all human souls be able to free themselves from the earth and go forward to a new cosmic existence. Christ is thus intimately united with earth-existence. But the union can be understood only if the mystery is approached in the way indicated.

To one or another the thought may occur: “What, then, of those who cannot believe in Christ?” Here let me give you reassurance. Christ died for all men, for those, too, who to-day cannot unite with Him. The Mystery of Golgotha is an objective fact, unaffected by human knowledge. Human knowledge, however, strengthens the inner forces of the soul. All the means, therefore, at the disposal of human knowledge, human feelings, and human will, must be applied, in order that in the further course of earth-evolution the presence of Christ in this earth-evolution shall be an experienced reality, through direct knowledge.

• 1. See also: Exoteric and Esoteric Christianity. Lecture given at Dornach, 22nd April, 1922. Anthroposophical Publishing Company.
• 2. Cp. Epistle to the Hebrews II, 14, 15.
• 3. “Not baptism alone sets us free, but knowledge (Gnosis): who we are, what we have become, where we were, whither we have sunk, whither we hasten; whence we are redeemed, what is birth, and what is re-birth.”
  Fragment from the Eastern School of Valentinus, copied by his pupil Theodotus.
• 4. See Acts, I, 3.

We stand today, as it were, at the starting-point of the foundation of the Anthroposophical Society in the narrower sense, and we should take this opportunity of once more reminding ourselves of the importance and significance of our cause. It is true that what the Anthroposophical Society wishes to be for the newer culture should not in principle differentiate it from that which we have always carried on in our circle under the name of theosophy. But perhaps this giving of a new name may nevertheless remind us of the earnestness and dignity with which we intend to work in our spiritual movement, and it is with this point in view that I have chosen the title of this course of lectures. At the very outset of our anthroposophical cause we shall speak on a subject which is capable of indicating in manifold ways the remarkable importance of our spiritual movement for the civilisation of the present day.

Many people might be surprised to find two such apparently widely different spiritual streams brought together, as the great Eastern poem of the Bhagavad Gita and the Epistles of one who was so closely connected with the founding of Christianity, the Apostle Paul. We can best recognise the nearness of these two spiritual streams to one another if, by way of introduction, we indicate how at the present day, is to be found, on the one hand, that which appertains to the great Bhagavad Gita poem, and on the other the Paulinism which originated with the beginning of Christianity.

Certainly much in the spiritual life of our present time differs from what it was even a comparatively short time ago, but it is just that very difference that makes a spiritual movement such as Anthroposophy so necessary.

Let us reflect how a comparatively short time ago if a man concerned himself with the spiritual life of his own times he had in reality, as I have shown in my Basle and Munich courses, to study three periods of a thousand years each; one pre-Christian period of a thousand years, and two other millennia, the sum of which is not yet quite completed; two thousand years permeated and saturated with the spiritual stream of Christianity. What might such a man have said only a short time ago when contemplating the spiritual life of mankind when, as we have said, there was no question of a theosophical, or anthroposophical movement as we now understand it? He might have said: “At the present time something is making itself prominently felt which can only be sought for in the thousand years preceding the Christian era.” For only during the last thousand years before the Christian era does one find individual men of personal importance in spiritual life. However great and powerful and mighty much in the spiritual streams of earlier times may appear to us, yet persons and individuals do not stand out from that which underlies those streams. Let us just glance back at what we reckon in not too restricted a sense, as the last thousand years before the Christian era. Let us glance back at the old Egyptian or the Chaldean-Babylonian spiritual stream; there we survey a continuity so to speak, a connected spiritual life. Only in the Greek spiritual life do we find individuals as such standing out as entirely spiritual and living. Great, mighty teachings, a mighty outlook into the space of the Cosmos; all this we find in the old Egyptian and Chaldean-Babylonian times, but only in Greece do we begin to look to separate personalities, to a Socrates or Pericles, a Phidias, a Plato, an Aristotle. Personality, as such, begins to be marked. That is the peculiarity of the spiritual life of the last three thousand years; and I do not only mean the remarkable personalities themselves, but rather the impression made by the spiritual life upon each separate individuality, upon each personality. In these last three thousand years it has become a question of personality, if we may say so; and the fact that separate individuals now feel the need of taking part in the spiritual life, find inner comfort, hope, peace, inward bliss and security, in the various spiritual movements, gives these their significance. And since, until a comparatively short time ago, we were only interested in history inasmuch as it proceeded from one personality to another, we got no really clear understanding of what occurred before the last three thousand years. The history, for which alone we had, till recently, any understanding, began with Greece, and during the transition from the first to the second thousand years, occurred what is connected with the great Being, Christ Jesus. During the first thousand years that which we owe to Greece is predominant, and those Grecian times tower forth in a particular way. At the beginning of them stand the Mysteries. That which flowed forth from these, as we have often described, passed over into the Greek poets, philosophers and artists in every domain. For if we wish rightly to understand AEschylus, Sophocles, Euripides we must seek the source for such understanding in that which flowed out of the Mysteries. If we wish to understand Socrates, Plato and Aristotle, we must seek the source of their philosophies in the Mysteries, not to speak of such a towering figure as that of Heraclitus. You may read of him in my book, Christianity as Mystical Fact, how entirely he depended upon the Mysteries.

Then in the second thousand years we see the Christian impulse pouring into spiritual development, gradually absorbing the Greek and uniting itself with it. The whole of the second thousand years passed in such a way that the powerful Christ-impulse united itself with all that came over from Greece as living tradition and life. So we see Greek wisdom, Greek feeling, and Greek art slowly and gradually uniting organically with the Christ-impulse. Thus the second thousand years ran its course. Then in the third thousand years begins the cultivation of the personality. We may say that we can see in the third thousand years how differently the Greek influence is felt. We see it when we consider such artists as Raphael, Michael Angelo and Leonardo da Vinci. No longer does the Greek influence work on together with Christianity in the third thousand years, as it did in the culture of the second; not as something historically great, not as something contemplated externally was Greek influence felt during the second thousand years. But in the third thousand we have to turn of set purpose to the Greek. We see how Leonardo da Vinci, Michael Angelo and Raphael allowed themselves to be influenced by the great works of art then being discovered; we see the Greek influence being more and more consciously absorbed. It was absorbed unconsciously during the second thousand years, but in the third millennium it was taken up more and more consciously. An example of how consciously this Greek influence was being recognised in the eyes of the world is to be found in the figure of the philosopher, Thomas Aquinas; and how he was compelled to unite what flowed out from Christian philosophy with the philosophy of Aristotle. Here the Greek influence was absorbed consciously and united with Christianity in a philosophic form; as in the case of Raphael, Michael Angelo and Leonardo da Vinci, in the form of art. This whole train of thought rises higher through spiritual life, and even takes the form of a certain religious opposition in the cases of Giordano Bruno and Galileo. Notwithstanding all this, we find everywhere Greek ideas and conceptions, especially about nature, cropping up again; there is a conscious absorption of the Greek influence, but this does not go back beyond the Greek age. In every soul, not only in the more learned or more highly educated, but in every soul down to the simplest, a spiritual life is spread abroad and lives in them, in which the Greek and Christian influences are consciously united. From the University down to the peasant's cottage Greek ideas are to be found united with Christianity.

Now in the nineteenth century something peculiar appeared, something which requires Anthroposophy to explain it. There we see in one single example what mighty forces are at play. When the wonderful poem of the Bhagavad Gita first became known in Europe, certain important thinkers were enraptured by the greatness of the poem, by its profound contents; and it should never be forgotten that such a thoughtful spirit as William von Humboldt, when he became acquainted with it, said that it was the most profoundly philosophical poem that had ever come under his notice; and he made the beautiful remark, that it was worth while to have been allowed to grow as old as he to be enabled to become acquainted with the Bhagavad Gita, the great spiritual song that sounds forth from the primeval holy times of Eastern antiquity. What a wonderful thing it is that slowly, although perhaps not attractive as yet to large circles, so much of Eastern antiquity was poured out into the nineteenth century by means of the Bhagavad Gita. For this is not like other writings that came over from the ancient East which ever proclaim Eastern thoughts and feelings from this or that standpoint. In the Bhagavad Gita we are confronted with something of which we may say that it is the united flow of all the different points of view of Eastern thought, feeling and perception. That is what makes it of such significance.

Now let us turn back to old India. Apart from other less important things, we find there, in the first place, three shades, if we may so call them, of spiritual streams flowing forth from the old Indian pre-historic times. That spiritual stream which we meet with in the earliest Vedas and which developed further in the later Vedantic poems, is one quite definite one—we will describe it presently—it is, if we may say so, a one-sided yet quite distinct spiritual stream. We then meet with a second spiritual stream in the Sankhya philosophy, which again goes in a definite spiritual direction; and, lastly, we meet a third shade of the Eastern spiritual stream in Yoga. Here we have the three most remarkable oriental spiritual streams placed before our souls. The Vedas, Sankhya, and Yoga.

The Sankhya system of Kapila, the Yoga philosophy of Patanjali and the Vedas are spiritual streams of definite colouring, which, because of this definite colouring, are to a certain extent one-sided, and which are great because of their one-sidedness. In the Bhagavad Gita we have the harmonious inter-penetration of all three spiritual streams. What the Veda philosophy has to give is to be found shining forth in the Bhagavad Gita; what the Yoga of Patanjali has to give mankind we find again in the Bhagavad Gita; and what the Sankhya of Kapila has to give we find there too. Moreover, we do not find these as a conglomeration, but as three parts flowing harmoniously into one organism, as if they originally belonged together. The greatness of the Bhagavad Gita lies in the comprehensiveness of its description of how this oriental spiritual life receives its tributaries from the Vedas on the one side, on another from the Sankhya philosophy of Kapila, and again on a third side from the Yoga of Patanjali.

We shall now briefly characterise what each of these spiritual streams has to give us.

The Veda stream is most emphatically a philosophy of unity, it is the most spiritual monism that could be thought of; the Veda philosophy which is consolidated in the Vedanta is a spiritual monism. If we wish to understand the Veda philosophy, we must, in the first place, keep clearly before our souls the fact that this philosophy is based upon the thought that man can find something deeper within his own self, and that what he first realises in ordinary life is a kind of expression or imprint of this self of his; that man can develop, and that his development will draw up the depths of the actual self more and more from the foundations of his soul. A higher self rests as though asleep in man, and this higher self is not that of which the present-day man is directly aware, but that which works within him, and to which he must develop himself. When man some day attains to that which lives within him as “self,” he will then realise, according to the Veda-philosophy, that this “self” is one with the all-embracing self of the world, that he does not only rest with his self within the all-embracing World-Self, but that he himself is one with it. So much is he one with this World-Self that he is in two-fold manner related to it. In some way similar to our physical in-breathing and out-breathing does the Vedantist picture the relationship of the human self to the World-Self Just as one draws in a breath and breathes it out again, while outside there is the universal air and within us only the small portion of it that we have drawn in so outside us we have the universal, all-embracing, all-pervading Self that lives and moves in all things, and this we breathe in when we yield ourselves to the contemplation of the spiritual Self of the World. Spiritually one breathes it in with every perception that one gets of this Self, one breathes it in with all that one draws into one's soul. All knowledge, all thinking, all perception is spiritual breathing; and that which we, as a portion of the world-Self, draw into our souls (which portion remains organically united to the whole), that is Atman, the Breath, which, as regards ourselves, is as the portion of air that we breathe in, which cannot be distinguished from the general atmosphere. So is Atman in us, which cannot be distinguished from that which is the all-ruling Self of the World. Just as we breathe out physically, so there is a devotion of the soul through which the best that is in it goes forth in the form of prayer and sacrifice to this Self. Brahman is like the spiritual out-breathing. Atman and Brahman, like in-breathing and out-breathing, make us sharers in the all-ruling World-Self. What we find in the Vedantas is a monistic spiritual philosophy, which is at the same time a religion; and the blossom and fruit of Vedantism lie in that which so blesses man, that most complete and in the highest degree satisfying feeling of unity with the universal Self powerfully weaving through the world. Vedantism treats of this connection of mankind with the unity of the world, of the fact of man's being within a part of the whole great spiritual cosmos. We cannot say the Veda-Word, because Veda means Word, but the Word-Veda as given is itself breathed forth, according to the Vedantic conception, from the all-ruling unitary Being, and the human soul can take it into itself as the highest expression of knowledge. In accepting the Veda-Word the best part of the all-mighty “Self” is taken in, the consciousness of the connection between the individual human self and this all-mighty World-Self is attained. What the Veda speaks is the God-Word which is creative, and this is born again in human knowledge, and so leads it side by side with the creative principle which lives and weaves throughout the world. Therefore, that which was written in the Vedas was valued as the Divine Word, and he who succeeded in mastering them was considered as being a possessor of the Divine Word. The Divine Word had come spiritually into the world and was to be found in the Veda-Books; those who mastered these books took part in the creative principle of the World.

Sankhya philosophy is different. When one first meets with this, as it has come down to us through tradition, we find in it exactly the opposite of the teaching of the Unity. If we wish to compare the Sankhya philosophy to anything, we may compare it to the philosophy of Leibnitz. It is a pluralistic philosophy. The several souls mentioned therein—human souls and the souls of Gods—are not traced back by the Sankhya philosophy to unitary source, but are taken as single souls existing, so to speak, from Eternity; or, at any rate, their origin is not traced back to Unity. The plurality of souls is what we find in the Sankhya philosophy. The independence of each individual soul carrying on its development in the world enclosed within its own being, is sharply accentuated; and in contrast to the plurality of souls is that which in the Sankhya philosophy is called the Prakriti element. We cannot well describe this by the modern word “matter,” for that has a materialistic meaning. But in Sankhya philosophy we do not mean to convey this with the “substantial” which is in contrast to the multiplicity of souls, and which again is not derived from a common source. In the first place, we have multiplicity of souls, and then that which we may call the material basis, which, like a primeval flood, streams through the world, through space and time, and out of which souls take the elements for their outer existence. Souls must clothe themselves in this material element, which, again, is not to be traced back to unity with the souls themselves. And so it is in the Sankhya philosophy that we principally find this material element, carefully studied. Attention is not so much directed to the individual soul; this is taken as something real that is there, confined in and united with this material basis, and which takes the most varied forms within it, and thus shows itself outwardly in many different forms. A soul clothes itself with this original material element, that may be thought of like the individual soul itself as coming from Eternity. The soul nature expresses itself through this material basic element, and in so doing it takes on many different forms, and it is in particular the study of these material forms that we find in the Sankhya philosophy. Here we have, in the first place, so to speak, the original form of this material element as a sort of spiritual primeval stream, into which the soul is first immersed. Thus if we were to glance back at the first stages of evolution, we should find there the undifferentiated material elements and immersed therein, the plurality of the souls which are to evolve further. What, therefore, we first find as Form, as yet undifferentiated from the unity of the primal stream, is the spiritual substance itself that lies at the starting-point of evolution. The first thing that then emerges, with which the soul can as yet clothe itself individually, is Budhi. So that when we picture to ourselves a soul clothed with the primal flood-substance, externally this soul is not to be distinguished from the universal moving and weaving element of the primeval flood. Inasmuch as the soul does not only enwrap itself in this first being of the universal billowing primal flood but also in that which first proceeds from this, in so far does it clothe itself in Budhi. The third element that forms itself out of the whole and through which the soul can then become more and more individual, is Ahamkara. This consists of lower and lower forms of the primeval substance. So that we have the primeval substance, the first form of which is Budhi, and its second form which is Ahamkara. The next form to that is Manas, then comes the form which consists of the organs of the senses; this is followed by the form of the finer elements, and the last form consists of the elements of the substances which we have in our physical surroundings. This is the line of evolution according to Sankhya philosophy. Above is the most super-sensible element, a primeval spiritual flow, which, growing ever denser and denser, descends to that which surrounds us in the coarser elements out of which the coarse human body is also constructed. Between these are the substances of which, for instance, our sense organs are woven, and the finer elements of which is woven our etheric or life-body. It must be carefully noticed that according to the Sankhya philosophy, all these are sheaths of the soul. Even that which springs from the first primeval flood is a sheath for the soul; the soul is at first within that; and when the Sankhya philosopher studies Budhi, Ahamkara, Manas, the senses, the finer and the coarser elements, he understands thereby the increasingly dense sheaths within which the soul expresses itself.

We must clearly understand that the manner in which the philosophy of the Vedas and the Sankhya philosophy are presented to us is only possible because they were composed in that ancient time when an old clairvoyance still existed, at any rate, to a certain extent. The Vedas and the contents of the Sankhya philosophy came into existence in different ways. The Vedas depend throughout on a primeval inspiration which was still a natural possession of primeval man; they were given to man, so to speak, without his having done anything to deserve them, except that with his whole being he prepared himself to receive into his inner depths that divine inspiration that came of itself to him, and to receive it quietly and calmly. Sankhya philosophy was formed in a different way. That process was something like the learning of our present day, only that this is not permeated by clairvoyance as the former then was. The Veda philosophy consisted of clairvoyant knowledge, inspiration given as by grace from above. Sankhya philosophy consisted of knowledge sought for as we seek it now, but sought for by people to whom clairvoyance was still accessible. This is why the Sankhya philosophy leaves the actual soul-element undisturbed, so to say. It admits that souls can impress themselves in that which one can study as the super-sensible outer forms, but it particularly studies the outer forms, which appear as the clothing of those souls. Hence we find a complete system of the forms we meet with in the world, just as in our own science we find a number of facts about nature; only that in Sankhya philosophy observation extends to a clairvoyant observation of facts. Sankhya philosophy is a science, which although obtained by clairvoyance, is nevertheless a science of outer forms that does not extend into the sphere of the soul: the soul-nature remains in a sense undisturbed by these studies. He who devotes himself to the Vedas feels absolutely that his religious life is one with the life of wisdom; but Sankhya philosophy is a science, it is a perception of the forms into which the soul impresses itself. Nevertheless, it is quite possible for the disciples of the Sankhya philosophy to feel a religious devotion of the soul for their philosophy. The way in which the soul element is organised into forms-not the soul element itself, but the form it takes-is followed up in the Sankhya philosophy. It defines the way in which the soul, more or less, preserves its individuality or else is more immersed in the material. It has to do with the soul element which is, it is true, beneath the surface, but which, within the material forms, still preserves itself as soul. A soul element thus disguised in outer form, but which reveals itself as soul, dwells in the Sattva element. A soul element immersed in form, but which is, so to say, entangled in it and cannot emerge from it, dwells in the Tamas-element; and that in which, more or less, the soul element and its outer expression in form, are, to a certain extent, balanced, dwells in the Rajas-element. Sattva, Rajas, Tamas, the three Gunas, pertain to the essential characteristics of what we know as Sankhya philosophy.

Quite different, again, is that spiritual stream which comes down to us as Yoga. That appeals directly to the soul-element itself and seeks ways and means of grasping the human soul in direct spiritual life, so that it rises from the point which it has attained in the world to higher and higher stages of soul-being. Thus Sankhya is a contemplation of the sheaths of the soul, and Yoga the guidance of the soul to higher and ever higher stages of inner experience. To devote oneself to Yoga means a gradual awakening of the higher forces of the soul so that it experiences something not to be found in everyday life, which opens the door to higher and higher stages of existence.

Yoga is therefore the path to the spiritual worlds, the path to the liberation of the soul from outer forms, the path to an independent life of the soul within itself. Yoga is the other side of the Sankhya philosophy. Yoga acquired its great importance when that inspiration, which was given as a blessing from above and which inspired the Vedas, was no longer able to come down. Yoga had to be made use of by those souls who, belonging to a later epoch of mankind, could no longer receive anything by direct revelation, but were obliged to work their way up to the heights of spiritual existence from the lower stages. Thus in the old primal Indian times we have three sharply-defined streams, the Vedas, the Sankhaya, and the Yoga, and today we are called upon once more to unite these spiritual streams, so to say, by bringing them to the surface in the way proper for our own age, from the foundations of the soul and from the depths of the Cosmos.

You may find all three streams again in our Spiritual Science. If you read what I have tried to place before you in the first chapters of my Occult Science about the human constitution, about sleeping and waking, life and death, you will find there what in our present-day sense we may call Sankhya philosophy. Then read what is there said about the evolution of the world from Saturn down to our own time, and you have the Veda-philosophy expressed for our own age; while, if you read the last chapters, which deal with human evolution, you have Yoga expressed for our own age. Our age must in an organised way unite that which radiates across to us in three so sharply-defined spiritual streams from old India in the Veda-philosophy, the Sankhya philosophy, and Yoga. For that reason our age must study the wonderful poem of the Bhagavad Gita, which, in a deeply poetical manner, represents, as it were, a union of these three streams; our own age must be deeply moved by the Bhagavad Gita. We should seek something akin to our own spiritual strivings in the deeper contents of the Bhagavad Gita. Our spiritual streams do not only concern themselves with the older ones as a whole, but also in detail. You will have recognised that in my Occult Science an attempt has been made to produce the things out of themselves. Nowhere do we depend on history. Nowhere can one who really understands what is said find in any assertion about Saturn, Sun, and Moon, that things are related from historical sources; they are simply drawn forth from the matter itself. Yet, strange to say, that which bears the stamp of our own time corresponds in striking places with what resounds down to us out of the old ages. Only one little proof shall be given. We read in the Vedas in a particular place, about cosmic development, which can be expressed in words somewhat like the following: “Darkness was enwrapt in darkness in the primal beginning, all was indistinguishable flood-essence. Then arose a mighty void, that was everywhere permeated with warmth.” I now ask you to remember the result of our study of the evolution of Saturn, in which the substance of Saturn is spoken of as a warmth-substance, and you will feel the harmony between the so-called “Newest thing in Occult Science,” and what is said in the Vedas. The next passage runs: “Then first arose the Will, the first seed of Thought, the connection between the Existent and the Non-existent, ... and this connection was found in the Will ...” And remember what was said in the new mode of expression about the Spirits of Will. In all we have to say at the present time, we are not seeking to prove a concord with the old; the harmony comes of itself, because truth was sought for there and is again being sought for on our own ground

Now in the Bhagavad Gita we find, as it were, the poetical glorification of the three spiritual streams just described. The great teachings that Krishna himself communicated to Arjuna are brought to our notice at an important moment of the world's history—of importance for that far-distant age. The moment is significant, because it is the time when the old blood-ties were loosening. In all that is to be said in these lectures about the Bhagavad Gita you must remember what has again and again been emphasised: that ties of blood, racial attachment and kinship, were of quite special significance in primeval times, and only grew less strong by degrees. Remember all that is said in my pamphlet, The Occult Significance of Blood. When these blood-ties begin to loosen, on account of that loosening, the great struggle began which is described in the Mahabharata, and of which the Bhagavad Gita is an episode. We see there how the descendants of two brothers, and hence, blood relations, separate on account of their spiritual tendencies how that which, through the blood, would formerly have given them the same points of view, now takes different paths; and how, therefore, the conflict then arises, for conflict must arise when the ties of blood also lose their significance as a help for clairvoyant perception; and with this separation begins the later spiritual development.. For those to whom the old blood-ties no longer were of significance, Krishna came as a great teacher. He was to be the teacher of the new age lifted out of the old blood-ties. How he became the teacher we shall describe tomorrow; but it may now be said, as the whole Bhagavad Gita shows us, that Krishna absorbed the three spiritual streams into his teaching and communicated them to his pupil as an organised unity.

How must this pupil appear to us? He looks up on the one side to his father, and on the other side to his father's brother the children of the two brothers are now no longer to be together, they are to separate now a different spiritual stream is to take possession of the one line and the other. Arjuna's soul is filled with the question: how will it be when that which was held together by the ties of blood is no longer there? How can the soul take part in spiritual life if that life no longer flows as it formerly did under the influence of the old blood-tie? It seems to Arjuna as if everything must come to an end. The purport of the great teachings of Krishna, however, is to show that this will not be the case, that it all will be different. Krishna now shows his pupil—who is to live through the time of transition from one epoch to another, that the soul, if it is to become harmonious, must take in something of all these three spiritual streams. We find the Vedistic unity interpreted in the right way in the teachings of Krishna, as well as the principles of the Sankhya teaching and the principles of Yoga. For what is it that actually lies behind all that we are about to learn from the Bhagavad Gita? The revelations of Krishna are somewhat to this effect: There is a creative Cosmic Word, itself containing the creative principle. As the sound produced by man when he speaks undulates and moves and lives through the air, so does the Word surge and weave and live in all things, and create and order all existence. Thus the Veda principle breathes through all things. This can be taken up by human perception into the human soul-life. There is a supreme, weaving Creative-Word, and there is an echo of this supreme, weaving Creative-Word in the Vedistic documents. The Word is the creative principle of the World; in the Vedas it is revealed. That is one part of the Krishna teaching. The human soul is capable of understanding how the Word lives on, in the different forms of existence. Human knowledge learns the laws of existence by grasping how the separate forms of being express, with the regularity of a fixed law, that which is soul and spirit. The teachings about the forms in the world, of the laws which shape existence, of cosmic laws and their manner of working, is the Sankhya philosophy, the other side of the Krishna teaching. Just as Krishna made clear to his pupil that behind all existence is the creative cosmic Word, so also he made clear to him that human knowledge can recognise the separate forms, and therefore can grasp the cosmic laws. The cosmic Word, the cosmic laws as echoed in the Vedas, and in Sankhya, were revealed by Krishna to his pupil. And he also spoke to him about the path that leads the individual pupil to the heights where he can once again share in the knowledge of the cosmic Word. Thus Krishna also spoke of Yoga. Threefold is the teaching of Krishna: it teaches of the Word, of the Law and of reverent devotion to the Spirit.

The Word, the Law, and Devotion are the three streams by means of which the soul can carry out its development.

These three streams will for ever work upon the human soul in some way or another. Have we not just seen that modern Spiritual Science must seek for new expression of these three streams? But the ages differ one from the other, and in many different ways will that which is the threefold comprehension of the World be brought to human souls. Krishna speaks of the Cosmic Word, of the Creative Word, of the fashioning of existence, of the devotional deepening of the soul,—of Yoga. The same trinity meets us again in another form, only in a more concrete, more living way—in a Being who is Himself to be thought of as walking the Earth—the Incarnation of the Divine Creative Word! The Vedas came to mankind in an abstract form. The Divine Logos, of whom the Gospel of St. John speaks is the Living and Creative Word Itself! That which we find in the Sankhya philosophy, as the law to which the cosmic forms are subject, that, historically transposed into the old Hebrew revelation, is what St. Paul calls the Law. The third stream we find in St. Paul as Faith in the risen Christ. That which was Yoga in Krishna, in St. Paul was Faith, only in a more concrete form—Faith, that was to replace the Law. So the trinity, Veda, Sankhya and Yoga were as the redness of the dawn of that which later rose as sun. Veda appears again in the actual Being of Christ Himself now entering in a concrete, living way into historical evolution, not pouring Himself out abstractly into space and the distances of time, but living as a single Individual, as the Living Word. The Law meets us in the Sankhya philosophy, in that which shows us how the material basis, Prakriti, is developed even down to coarse substance. The Law reveals how the world came into existence, and how individual man develops within it. That is expressed in the old Hebrew revelation of the Law, in the dispensation of Moses. Inasmuch as St. Paul, on the one hand, refers to this Law of the old Hebrews, he is referring to the Sankhya philosophy; inasmuch as he refers to faith in the Risen One, he refers to the Sun of which the rosy dawn appeared in Yoga. Thus arises in a, special way that of which we find the first elements in Veda, Sankhya and Yoga. What we find in the Vedas appears in a new but now concrete form as the Living Word by Whom all things were made and without Whom nothing is made that was made, and Who, nevertheless, in the course of time, has become Flesh. Sankhya appears as the historical representation based on Law of how out of the world of the Elohim, emerged the world of phenomena, the world of coarse substances. Yoga transformed itself into that which, according to St. Paul, is expressed in the words; “Not I, but Christ in me,” that is to say when the Christ-force penetrates the soul and absorbs it, man rises to the heights of the divine.

Thus we see how, in a preparatory form, the coherent plan is present in world-history, how the Eastern teaching was a preparation, how it gives in more abstract form, as it were, that which, in a concrete form, we find so marvelously contained in the Pauline Christianity. We shall see that precisely by grasping the connection between the great poem of the Bhagavad Gita and the Epistles of St. Paul, the very deepest mysteries will reveal themselves concerning what we may call the ruling of the spiritual in the collective education of the human race. As something so new must also be felt in the new age, this newer age must extend beyond the time of Greece and must develop understanding for that which lies behind the thousand years immediately before Christ—for that which we find in the Vedas, Sankhya and Yoga. Just as Raphael in his art and Thomas Aquinas in his philosophy had to turn back to Greece, so shall we see how in our time, a conscious balance must be established between that which the present time is trying to acquire and that which lies further back than the Greek age, and stretches back to the depths of oriental antiquity. We can allow these depths of oriental antiquity to flow into our souls if we ponder over these different spiritual streams which are to be found within that wonderfully harmonious unity which Humboldt calls the greatest philosophical poem the Bhagavad Gita.

Even within the limits enjoined upon us by discretion at the present time when one speaks of these matters, one cannot discuss the Mystery of Evil without profound emotion. For here we touch upon one of the deepest mysteries of the fifth post-Atlantean epoch, upon something which meets with little understanding today. Man's sensitivity to these things is but little developed as yet. Nonetheless, in all the so-called secret societies of recent times repeated attempts have been made to give certain indications, in the form of symbols, of the Mystery of Evil and the Mystery of Death which is related to it. But since the last third of the nineteenth century these symbolical representations have seldom been treated seriously, even in the Masonic communities, or have been treated in the manner I indicated here two years ago with reference to important events of the present day.^T1

The indications I gave on that occasion were not without a deeper motive, for he who understands these things knows what unplumbed depths of human nature we touch upon here. There is ample evidence that in reality the will to understand these things scarcely exists today. But the will to understand will assuredly come with time and we must ensure by every means at our command that it is awakened. When speaking of these matters one must sometimes give the impression of wanting to criticize certain aspects of the contemporary scene. Even what I said yesterday, for example on the subject of the ideological aspirations of the bourgeoisie since the last third of the nineteenth century can also be regarded as a criticism if taken superficially. Nothing of what is said here is intended as a criticism; I simply wish to characterize, so that we are aware of what forces and impulses have been operative. From a certain point of view it was necessary that these impulses should predominate. One could show that it was a historical necessity that the Bourgeoisie of Europe should remain asleep from the forties to the end of the seventies. Nonetheless the knowledge of this ‘cultural sleep’ ought to have a positive effect; it ought to awaken today certain impulses of cognition and volition which will prepare the ground for the future.

In the present epoch of the Consciousness Soul two mysteries (as I have already indicated, I can only speak of them within certain limits) are of particular importance for the evolution of mankind—the Mystery of Death and the Mystery of Evil. From a certain angle the Mystery of Death which is related to the Mystery of Evil during the present epoch, immediately raises the vital question: what is the meaning of death for human evolution?

I recently said once again that what passes for science today takes the line of least resistance in these questions. For most scientists death is simply cessation of life, irrespective of whether it is the death of a plant, animal or human being. Spiritual science however cannot take the easy road by treating everything alike. Otherwise the death of a man could be equated with the end of a watch, the death of a watch. For man death is something totally different from the socalled death of other beings. We can only understand the phenomenon of death against the background of those forces which are operative in the universe and which, when they lay hold of man, are responsible for his physical death. Certain forces, certain impulses are active in the universe: but for them man could not suffer death. Man is part of the universe; these forces also permeate man and when they are active in man they cause his death. The question now arises; what do these forces which are active in the universe accomplish apart from bringing death to man? It would be a mistake to imagine that their sole purpose is to bring death to man; that is only a secondary effect. It would never occur to anyone to say: the function of a railway engine is to wear down the rails. Yet that is what actually happens; the engine gradually wears down the rails, it cannot do otherwise. But that is not its function—it is designed for a different purpose. If one were to define a locomotive as a machine whose function is to wear down the rails, one would obviously be talking nonsense. Nonetheless there is no denying the fact that there is a connection between the wearing down of the track and the nature of the locomotive. It would be equally mistaken to say that the forces in the universe which bring death to man exist for this sole purpose. This is only a secondary effect. Their real function is to endow man with the capacity to develop the Consciousness Soul. You see how close is the connection between the Mystery of Death and the evolution of the fifth post-Atlantean epoch, and how important it is that in this fifth post-Atlantean epoch the Mystery of Death should be revealed to all. For the task of the forces which as a secondary effect bring death to man is to implant in him, in the course of his evolution, not the Consciousness Soul, but the capacity to develop the Consciousness Soul.

This leads not only to an understanding of the Mystery of Death, but also encourages us to think precisely in matters of importance. In many respects modern thinking—and again this is not intended as a criticism, I merely wish to characterize—is, if I may use the familiar expression which is much to the point, simply ‘sloppy’ (schlampig). The thinking current in modern science is almost without exception typical of the kind of thinking that says: the function of the locomotive is to wear down the rails. Most scientific pronouncements today are on this level. Such thinking will prove to be inadequate if we wish to create in the future a state of affairs beneficial to mankind. And in the epoch of the Consciousness Soul this can only be achieved in full consciousness.

I must constantly remind you that this is a truth of profound importance for our time. We frequently hear of people who, drawing upon a seeming fund of wisdom, suggest various social and economic measures, in the belief that it is still possible today to make these recommendations without the help of spiritual science. Only those who think in contemporary terms, in conformity with the needs of the time, realize that all proposals for a future structure of society which are not grounded in spiritual science are a snare and delusion. Only those who are fully aware of this think in conformity with the needs of the time. Those who still listen to the various learned discourses on political economy which are devoid of spiritual content are asleep to the demands of our time.

These forces, which must be described as the forces of death, took possession of man's corporeal nature in earlier times—how, you will find in my book Occult Science. They first penetrated into his soul life at that time. For the remainder of his earth evolution man must assimilate these forces of death, and in the course of the present epoch their influence upon him will be such that he brings to full expression in himself the faculty of the Consciousness Soul.

The method I adopted when enquiring into the Mystery of Death, i.e. into the forces which are active in the universe and bring death to man, is equally valid for indicating the forces of evil. Even the forces of evil are not designed to promote evil actions within the human order—that again is only a secondary effect. If these forces did not exist in the universe man could not develop the Consciousness Soul; he would be unable to receive as he should in the course of his future evolution the forces of the Spirit Self, the Life Spirit and the Spirit Man. He must first pass through the stage of the Consciousness Soul if he wishes to receive after his own fashion the forces of the Spirit Seif, the Life Spirit and the Spirit Man. And to this end he must, in the course of the fifth post-Atlantean epoch, i.e. up to the middle of the fourth millennium, fully unite his being with the forces of death. This lies within his power. But he cannot unite his own being with the forces of evil in the same way. The forces of evil in the cosmos are such that only in the Jupiter epoch will he be able to assimilate them as he now assimilates the forces of death. One can say therefore that the forces of evil act upon man with less intensity, they take possession of only a part of his being. In order to understand the nature of these forces of evil we must not look to their external effects, but must look for evil where it reveals its true nature, where it acts as it must of necessity act, because the forces which appear as evil in the universe also play into man. And here we touch upon something that can be spoken of only with deep emotion, something we can only express if we assume at the same time that it will be received with the greatest seriousness. If we wish to enquire into evil in man we must not look for it in the evil actions of society, but in evil tendencies. We must first of all ignore completely the consequences of these tendencies which are manifested more or less in a particular individual and turn our attention to the evil tendencies themselves. The question then arises: in which men are evil tendencies active in our present fifth post-Atlantean epoch, those tendencies which, in their secondary effects, are so clearly manifested in evil actions? Which men are subject to these evil tendencies?

We receive the answer to our question when we attempt to cross what is called the ‘threshold of the Guardian’ and to acquire a real understanding of the being of man. And the answer is this: since the beginning of the fifth post-Atlantean epoch, evil tendencies are subconsciously present in all men. It is precisely this influx of evil tendencies into men that marks his entrance into the fifth post-Atlantean epoch. Expressed somewhat radically one could say with every justification: he who crosses the threshold of the spiritual world discovers that there is not a crime in the calendar to which every man, in so far as he belongs to the fifth post-Atlantean epoch, is not subconsciously prone. Whether in a particular case this tendency leads to an evil action depends upon wholly different circumstances and not upon the tendency itself. If we are to tell mankind the plain unvarnished truth today, we cannot escape unpalatable facts.

The pressing question then arises: what is the purpose of these forces which induce evil tendencies in man, what is the purpose of these forces in the universe when they first infiltrate man's being? They are certainly not present in the universe in order to provoke evil acts in human society. (The reason why they promote evil acts will be discussed later.) These forces of evil do not exist in the universe for the sole purpose of inducing man to commit criminal acts any more than the forces of death exist simply to bring death to man; their function is to awaken in man, when he is called upon to develop the Consciousness Soul, the tendency to open himself to the life of the spirit, as I described yesterday.

Man must assimilate these forces of evil which are operative in the universe. By so doing he implants in his being the seed which enables him to experience consciously the life of the spirit. The purpose of these forces of evil which are perverted by the social order is to enable man to break through to the life of the spirit at the level of the Consciousness Soul. If he did not open himself to these tendencies to evil he would not succeed in developing consciously the impulse to receive from the universe the spirit which henceforth must fertilize the whole sphere of cultural life if it is not to perish. Our best course is to consider first of all what is to become of those forces of which the evil actions of men are a caricature and to ask ourselves what is destined to happen in the course of the evolution of mankind under the influence of these forces which, at the same time, are the source of evil tendencies.

When one speaks of these things one must touch upon the very core of human evolution. At the same time they are related to the calamities that have overtaken mankind at the present time and will still befall it. For those disasters, like flashes of summer lightning, are harbingers of quite other things that are destined to overtake mankind—lightning flashes that today often reveal the reverse of what is destined to happen. These observations are not a reason for pessimism, but rather should serve to arouse us and stimulate us to action.

Perhaps we shall best achieve our purpose if we start from a concrete phenomenon. I spoke yesterday of an important impulse in the epoch of the Consciousness Soul—the development of an active concern on the part of every man for his neighbour. This mutual concern for each other must grow and develop in the course of man's subsequent evolution on earth, especially in four domains. First, as man prepares his future development, he will see his fellow man in a progressively different light. Today, when a little over a fifth of the epoch of the Consciousness Soul has run its course, man still shows little inclination to see his fellow man as he will have to learn to see him in the course of the epoch of the Consciousness Soul, up to the fourth millennium. Men still ignore the most important element in others, they have no real understanding of their neighbour. In this connection they have not taken full advantage of what art has implanted in their souls in the course of their different incarnations. Much can be learned by studying the development of art and on different occasions I have given many an indication of what can be learned from the evolution of art. If one observes the symptoms, as I have urged in these lectures, it is undeniable that in almost every branch of art artistic creation and appreciation are at a low ebb. Everything that has been undertaken in the field of art in recent decades clearly demonstrates that art is passing through a period of decadence. The most important contribution of art to the evolution of mankind is the training it provides for an understanding of future problems.

Every branch of culture, of course, has many ramifications and consequently all kinds of secondary effects, but art by its very nature embodies something that leads to a deeper and more concrete understanding of man. He who makes a thorough study of the artistic forms in painting and sculpture, or of the nature of the inner rhythms in music and poetryand the artists themselves often fail to do this today—he who has a deep inner experience of art is imbued with something which enables him to understand the human being in his picture-nature. In the epoch of the Consciousness Soul mankind must develop the capacity to comprehend man symbolically. You are already familiar with some of the basic principles of this symbolical understanding. When we look at the human head we are reminded of man's earliest beginnings. Just as a dream is seen as a memory of the sensible world and thereby receives its characteristic stamp, so for those who understand reality everything pertaining to the sensible world is an image of the spiritual. We must learn to perceive the spiritual archetype of man through his picture-nature. In future man will become to some extent transparent to his fellow man. The form of his head, his gait, will awaken in us an inner sympathy and understanding of a different nature from what we find in human tendencies today. For we shall only know man as an ego being when we have this conception of his picture-nature, when we can approach him with the fundamental feeling that what the physical eyes perceive of man bears the same relation to the true super-sensible reality of man as the picture painted on canvas bears to the reality which it depicts. We must develop this fundamental feeling in ourselves. We must approach man in such a way that we no longer see him as a combination of bones, muscles, blood, etcetera, but as the image of his eternal, spiritual being. Supposing a man walks past us; we would not recognize him if he did not awaken in us the realization of what he is as an eternal spiritual super-sensible being. This is how we shall see man and this is how we shall be able to see him in the future. When we perceive human forms and movements and all that is associated with them as an image of the eternal, we shall feel warmth or coldness and of necessity will gradually be filled with inner warmth or coldness. As we go through life we shall come to know man very intimately; towards some we shall feel warm, towards others cold. Worst of all will be the situation of those who evoke neither warmth nor coldness. We shall have an inner experience of others in the warmth ether that penetrates our etheric body; this will be the reaction of the enhanced interest that must be developed between men.

A second factor must provoke even more paradoxical emotions in contemporary man who has not the slightest desire to accept these new ideas. But perhaps in the not too far distant future this antipathy will be transformed into sympathy for the right understanding of man. This second phase of future development will bring a totally different understanding between men. In order to achieve this the two millennia from now until the end of the fifth postAtlantean epoch will not suffice; a longer period will be necessary, reaching into the sixth epoch. Then, to the knowledge of the ego will be added a special capacity, the capacity to feel, to sense in our neighbour when we approach him his relationship to the third Hierarchy, to the angels, archangels and archai. And this will be developed through an increasing recognition that man's response to language will be different from that of the present day. The evolution of language has already passed its zenith. In reality language has already become abstract.^T2 At the present time a wave of profound untruthfulness is sweeping over the world in that attempts are being made to create institutions on a linguistic basis. Men no longer have the relationship to language which reveals through language the being of man.

I have quoted on various occasions an example which may serve as a first step towards an understanding of this matter.^T3 I cited it again in a public lecture which I gave in Zürich because it is important to draw the attention of the public to these things. I pointed out in this lecture that a surprise awaits us when we compare the articles of Herman Grimm on the methodology of history (for he was a typical representative of Central European culture) with those of Woodrow Wilson. I carried out this comparative study most conscientiously and showed that it is possible to substitute certain passages of Woodrow Wilson for passages in Hermann Grimm, for the wording is almost identical. Equally one could exchange whole passages of Grimm on historical methodology for those of Wilson on the same subject. And yet there is a radical difference between the two which we perceive when we read them without concern for the content (for the content as such, taken literally, will have increasingly less importance for mankind in the course of their future evolution). The difference is this: in Grimm, everything, even the passages with which one may not agree, are the fruit of personal endeavour; he has wrestled with them sentence by sentence, step by step. In Wilson everything seems to be prompted by his own inner daimon which subconsciously possesses him. What is important is the source, the origin of these writings: in the one case it is directly at the threshold of consciousness, in the other case in the daimonic promptings which find their way from the subconscious into consciousness ... so that one can say: the writings of Wilson are in part the product of possession.

I quote this example in order to show you that it is no longer of significance today that the words should be identical. I always feel extremely sad when friends of our movement bring me articles of some pastor or professor and say: Do look at this, it sounds quite anthroposophical! Now in our present cultural epoch even a professor who dabbles in politics may well write things which, taken literally, of course are in keeping with the realities of our time. It is not the exact words that matter, but the region of the soul whence these things arise. It is important to discover behind the words their spiritual source. All that I have said here does not spring from a desire to lay down definite principles. It is the ‘how’ that matters. It is important that these words should be permeated by that Force which derives directly from the spirit. He who finds a verbal similarity between the articles of the pastor or professor and what I have said here without feeling that my words spring from a spiritual source and are imbued with spiritual substance because they reflect the totality of the anthroposophical Weltanschauung, he who ignores this ‘how,’ fails to understand me if he does not distinguish between modern opinions that smack of Anthroposophy and Anthroposophy itself.

It is of course not very pleasant to point to examples of this kind because the tendency today is often to take the opposite course. But when we speak in earnest, if our words are not intended simply as an anodyne, a kind of cultural soporific, it is a duty, it is a necessity even, not to shrink from selecting such examples, though they may be distasteful to many. For those who are in earnest about the future must be prepared to face the consequences for everyone if they ignore the fact that the world may be fated to have its organization determined by a half-baked American Professor. It is not easy to speak of realities today because many are satisfied with the life of illusion. Nonetheless one speaks of realities in those spheres where it is absolutely necessary, and where it is important, or at least should be important, for man to hear of them.

Men must learn to see through words; they will have to acquire the capacity to grasp the gesture in language. Before this epoch, before this fourth millennium has run its course, men will have learnt to listen to one another differently from the way they do at the present moment; they will find in language an external expression of man's relation to the third Hierarchy, to the angels, archangels and archai, a means whereby he can attain to the super-sensible, to the spirit.

And thus the soul of man will be heard through language and this will lead to a totally different community life. And a large part of the so-called forces of evil must be transformed so that it will be possible by listening to what a man says to hear the soul through the words. Then when the soul is heard through the words people will experience a peculiar sensation of colour and through this sensation of colour arising from language men of all nations will learn to understand one another. A particular sound will evoke the same sensation as the perception of the colour blue or of a blue surface. Another sound will evoke the same sensation as the perception of the colour red. The normal sensation of warmth we feel when we look at a man becomes to some extent colour when we listen to him. And we shall have to experience in ourselves what echoes from human lips to human ears on the wings of sounds. This will be experienced by man in the future.

Thirdly, men will experience inwardly the emotional reactions of others. In this respect language will play an important role—and not only language. When one man confronts another he will experience in his own respiration the emotional configuration of the other. In future time respiration will adapt itself to the affective life of the person who confronts us. In the presence of one man we shall breathe more rapidly, in the presence of another we shall breathe more slowly. According to the changing rhythm of our respiration we shall feel the kind of man with whom we are dealing. Think how the social life of the community will be cemented, how intimate corporate life will become! It will be a long time, no doubt, before this goal is achieved. It will take the whole of the sixth postAtlantean epoch and the early years of the seventh epoch before respiration is adapted to the life of the soul. And in the seventh epoch, a part of what is now the fourth stage of development will be realized. That is, when men belong to a community of their own volition, they will have to ‘digest’ one another, if you will pardon this crude expression. When we are compelled to will this or that in common with another, or will to want it, we shall have inner experiences akin to those which we have in a primitive form today when we consume a certain food. In the sphere of will men will have to ‘digest’ one another, in the sphere of feeling to ‘breathe’ one another; in the sphere of understanding through language they will have to experience one another through sensations of colour. And men will come to know one another as ego-beings when they learn to see each other as they really are.

But all these forces will be more inward, more related to the life of the soul. They will be fully developed only in the course of the Jupiter, Venus and Vulcan epochs. The earth evolution of mankind already demands psychic and spiritual indications of this development. The present age with its strange and calamitous development is the revolt of mankind against what is destined to follow from these developments which I have just described. Because in future all particularist tendencies in society must be abandoned, mankind rebels, and the trivial doctrine of national self determination is noised abroad. What we are witnessing today is a revolt against the divinely ordered course of evolution, a struggle to resist the inevitable. We must be aware of these things if we are to lay a firm foundation for an understanding of the Mystery of Evil. For evil is often a secondary effect of the force that must intervene in human evolution. When a locomotive that has to cover a long distance strikes a bad section of the track, it destroys the rails and comes to a halt. In its evolution mankind is moving towards the goals I have described to you. And it is the task of the Consciousness Soul to recognize that mankind must press forward consciously to these goals. But the present lines are badly laid and it will be some time before better lines are in position, for often people proceed to replace the old lines by others which are not a whit better.

But, as you see, spiritual science has no wish to be pessimistic. It sets out to show man where he really stands in evolution today. But it demands nonetheless that, at least for certain solemn moments of recollection, he can renounce certain current tendencies. And because men find it so difficult to make this sacrifice, because, in spite of everything, everyone immediately reverts to his old routine, it is extremely difficult to speak frankly on these matters today. For we touch upon here—and this is characteristic of our time—problems of the nature of evil which threaten to destroy mankind today and one must constantly exhort men to wake up.

Indeed, many things can only be discussed within certain limits and in consequence much will be omitted entirely or deferred to another occasion. Let us take an example that concerns us closely and do not take it amiss if I present it in the following way. A week ago I was asked to say something on the subject of the symptomatology of Swiss history. I have given the matter most careful thought from every angle. But if I, as a foreigner, were to embark upon the symptomatology of Swiss history from the fifteenth century until the present day in the presence of Swiss nationals here in Dornach, I would find myself in a very strange situation. Let me illustrate the problem from another angle. Suppose that in July of this year (1918) someone in Germany or even in Austria had described the events and personalities as people do today, imagine what an outburst there would have been if he had portrayed five, fifteen or thirty years ago, for example, the conditions in Austria today! I am aware, therefore, that I would cause grave offence if I were to speak of Swiss history as the Swiss will speak of it here in Switzerland twenty years hence. For people cannot do otherwise, given their innate conservatism, than close their ears to what must be said from the standpoint of the future. It is true that in many spheres ordinary people—and after all we must count ourselves amongst them—especially in spheres that touch them closely, are unwilling to hear the truth. They prefer an anodyne. I assure you that I would give offence if I did not temper to some extent the subject on which I have been asked to speak. In the light of further reflection I think it is best to leave matters alone for the present. For judgements which are passed now—and from which one would dissent to some extent—are reminders that, if we wish to portray certain events today, we should do as I did yesterday. When one criticizes the Russian revolution and when one describes the relationship of the bourgeoisie to the broad masses and to the more radical elements of the extreme left, any such criticism is regarded here in Switzerland as relatively harmless, as an edifying Sunday afternoon sermon and is tolerated. And then one can abandon oneself, I will not say to the illusion, but to the pious hope that what I have said will penetrate into a few souls and will prove more efficacious than the normal Sunday afternoon sermons ... although even in matters of moment, the experience of recent years has often demonstrated the contrary. But to comment on the immediate situation is not the task of one, who not being a Swiss national, would speak to the Swiss of their own history. When I gave a general survey of recent history in a public lecture in Zürich^T4 I had of course to speak with a certain reserve, although I did not hesitate to indicate the radical consequences which must be drawn from the facts. It is extremely convenient for the majority of people today to look upon Woodrow Wilson as a great man, as a benefactor of mankind. But if one denies this and speaks the truth, the truth is found to be unpalatable and one is regarded as a mischief-maker! And this has always been the case with those truths which are drawn from the well-spring of the super-sensible. But today we are living in the epoch of the Consciousness Soul and it is necessary that mankind should be aware of certain truths.

There is really no point in continually repeating the obvious—that people today are not receptive to spiritual ideas. The question is not whether people are receptive or not, but whether we ourselves take the necessary steps in order to bring before mankind the necessary truths when the opportunity arises. And in addition we should harbour no illusions about the receptivity of mankind to truths. We must be quite clear that, today especially, men are seldom receptive to what is vitally necessary for them ... and that they insist upon ordering the world in a way that does not correspond with the true evolutionary impulse of our epoch. Indeed one experiences the bitterest disappointments in this domain. But one accepts them without resentment, in order to learn from them what we are to do under certain circumstances.

I will speak later of these matters in greater detail. It would have been a splendid thing if only a few people could have been found in Central Europe who, from an understanding of certain Masonic impulses, could have realized the significance of what I said here two years ago on the subject of secret societies. But, inevitably, there was no response. One cannot imagine a more sterile attitude than that of Central European Masonry in recent decades. This is shown by the fact, frequently mentioned, that one meets with resistance when one refuses to amalgamate in any way the teachings of spiritual science with the Freemasonry of Central Europe. On the other hand when a super windbag, the so-called Nietzsche specialist, Horneifer, appeared and talked solemn nonsense about symbolism and the like, he was taken seriously in many quarters. The deeper reason for all this is that certain demands are made upon those who wish to take up spiritual science, and this is by no means easy! One finds today advocates of a renewal of the spirit who explain to people that they need only lie down on a couch and relax and the higher ego, God, and heaven knows what else will awaken in them and then there will be no need to wrestle with these terrible concepts of anthroposophically orientated spiritual science. One need only listen to one's inner voice, surrender passively, then the higher mystical ego will manifest itself and one will feel and experience the presence of God in oneself.

I have known statesmen who prefer to listen to these ‘pundits’ who recommend them to take the easy path to the higher ego rather than listen to the teachings of spiritual science. A friend told me recently that one of these pundits had said to him when he was still one of his disciples: you have no idea how stupid I am! Yet this very man who confessed to his stupidity in order to show that intelligence is not needed in order to introduce men to the primal sources of wisdom, this man has a large following everywhere. People prefer to listen to such men rather than to those who speak of the thorny path ahead if man is to understand the task of the Consciousness Soul, who tell us of four aspects of evolution or that men must experience one another through warmth, through a sensation of colour, through respiration, that they must ‘digest’ one another. In order to arrive at an understanding of this, one must swallow a whole library of books—a most unpleasant prospect! But people find this prospect unpalatable, most unpalatable! But if people find this prospect unpalatable, that is due to the impulse which is impelling our age towards catastrophe, to the tragedy of our time. This situation, however, is no cause for pessimism; rather is it a call to energetic action, to translate our knowledge into deeds. And this cannot be repeated too often.

I mentioned yesterday the problem of suction and pressure in connection with the Russian revolution. I leave it to each of you to ask yourselves if this problem after all is not a matter deserving of careful reflection. Otherwise people might say: It is true that in Russia the bourgeoisie failed to unite with the peasants, but here in Germany we are more fortunate, bourgeoisie and peasants will join forces and then socialism will come into its own. But they forget that many people in Russia said the same and it is precisely because people held this view that Russia collapsed.
We will continue our discussion tomorrow.

• T1. Kosmische und menschliche Geschichte, Vol II and Vol III (Bibl. Nrs. 171 and 172).
• T2. See Die Wissenschaft vom Werden des Menschen, August–September, 1918 (Bibl. Nr. 183).
• T3. 14th March, 1918, Das geschichtliche Leben der Menschheit und seine Rätsel (in Bibl. Nr. 67) and 30th March, 1918, Anthroposophischer Lebensgaben (in Bibl. Nr. 181).
• T4. Die Geschichte der Neuzeit im Lichte geisteswissenschaftlicher Forschung, 17th October, 1918 (included in Bibl. Nr. 73).

If we are to continue in the right way today, we must consider something of the nature of the human being and how human beings are part of historical evolution. First of all we consider the fact that human beings have the power, or the gift, of the intellect. What does this mean? It means that we are able to form ideas. For the moment we need not reflect on where these ideas come from. The life of thought is with us wherever we are in waking consciousness. And we also feel, for instance, that when we walk, stand or do anything else, we are guided by our thoughts, by something which exists first of all in the mind. Later on we shall discuss if this really is the case. For the moment I merely want to establish what fills the conscious mind in everyday life. It is our thoughts. But when it comes to the world of thought as such, the matter is really quite different. And we shall not understand how human beings really relate to their thoughts unless we first consider the true nature of the world of thought.

In reality we are always, wherever we are—whether sitting, standing or lying down—not only in the world of air and light and so on, but also in a world of surging thoughts. You will find it easiest to get an idea of this if you look at it like this: When you walk on earth as an ordinary physical human being you are also a breathing human being, walking in a space filled with air. And in more or less the same way you move in a space filled with thoughts. Thought-substance fills the space around you. It is not a vague ocean of thoughts, nor the kind of nebulous ether people sometimes like to imagine. No, this thought-substance is actually what we call the elemental world. When we speak of entities which are part of the elemental world in the widest sense of the word, they consist of thought-substance, actual thought-substance. There is, however, a difference between the thoughts flitting around out there, which really are living entities, and the thoughts we have in our minds. I have spoken of this difference on a number of occasions. In my book due to be published shortly, and which I mentioned yesterday,¹ you will find further references to this difference.

You may well ask yourself: If there is such an elemental principle out there in thought-space and if I, too, have thoughts in my head—what is the relationship between the two? To get the right idea of how your own thoughts relate to the thought-entities out there you have to visualize the difference between a human corpse which has been left behind when someone has died and a living person who is walking about. The kind of thoughts you have to consider in this respect are the kind you gain from the world you perceive with the senses when in waking consciousness. Our own thoughts are actually thought-corpses. This is the essential point. The thoughts coming from the world we perceive with the senses and drag around with us when in waking consciousness are thought-corpses—thoughts that have been killed. Outside us they are alive, which is the difference.

We are part of the elemental world of thought in so far as we kill its living thoughts when we develop ideas on the basis of what our senses have perceived in the world around us. Our thinking consists in having those corpses of thoughts inside us, and this makes our thoughts abstract. We have abstract thoughts because we kill living thoughts. It is really true that in our state of consciousness we walk around bearing thought corpses which we call our thoughts and ideas. This is the reality.

The living thoughts in the outside world are certainly not unrelated to us; there is a living relationship. I can demonstrate this to you, but do not be frightened by the grotesque nature of this unaccustomed idea. Imagine you are lying in bed and it is morning. You can get up in two different ways. Ordinarily, you are not aware of the difference between them because you are not in the habit of making the distinction, and anyway you do not pay attention to this particular moment of getting up. Nevertheless, you can get up out of habit, without thinking about it, or you can actually produce the thought: I am now going to get up. There are people, however, who get themselves up out of sheer habit, and yet there is just a touch of the idea: I am going to get up now. To repeat, many people do not make the distinction, but it can be made in the abstract, and the difference is enormous. If you get up without giving it a thought, out of sheer habit and training, you are following impulses given by the Spirits of Form, the Elohim, when they created human beings as dwellers on earth at the beginning of earth evolution. So you see, if you switch off your own thinking and always get up like a machine, you are not getting up without thought having gone into it, but it is not your own thought. The form of movement involved in getting up involves thoughts—objective, not subjective, inner thoughts; these are not your thoughts but those of the Spirits of Form.

If you were a terribly lazy person who really did not want to get up at all, if it really was not in your nature to get up and you would only get up on reflection, against your nature, out of purely subjective thought, you'd be following ahrimanic tendencies; you would be following only your head, and therefore Ahriman. As I said, the distinction is not made in ordinary life. And everything else we do is really done in the same way as our getting up. Human beings truly are made up of two entities which can be outwardly distinguished as the head and the rest of the body. The human head is an extraordinarily significant instrument and much older than the rest of the body. The construction of the human head is such—I spoke about this last year²—that the basic shape arose during Moon evolution, though the head has, in fact, come down through Saturn, Sun and Moon evolution. Humans would look quite different if they still had the shape they had during Moon evolution.

In very general terms we might say people would look like spectres, with only the form of the head emerging somewhat more clearly, which was the original intent. The rest of the body was not meant to be as visible as it is now. These things have to be considered, otherwise we cannot really understand human evolution on earth. The rest of the body was meant to be purely elemental by nature. In the head, everything would come into effect which has come down as Moon existence transformed by earth; let us call it ‘a’. But this inherited Moon existence transformed by earth is the actual human being, for the human being is really a head with only a very insignificant attachment.

The rest of the human being—let us call it ‘b’ and to begin with let us simply consider it to be this elemental, airy principle—is a manifestation of the higher hierarchies, from the Spirits of Form downwards. The right and only way of seeing the human being is to realize that everything shown here as ‘b’ has been created by the cosmic hierarchies. The human being which has evolved from the time of Saturn emerged against the background of the cosmic hierarchies. If you visualize the essential nature of the parts of the human being which are not head—you must think of it as all spirit, or at least all air—then you have the body of cosmic hierarchies (drawing on the board).

However, luciferic seduction entered into the whole process of evolution. The outcome was that this whole, more elemental, body condensed to become the rest of the human body, which of course also had an effect on the head. This will give you an idea of the true nature of the human being. Apart from the head, which is their own, having come from earlier evolution, human beings would be an outward manifestation of the Elohim if their bodies had not become sensuous flesh. It is entirely due to the temptations of Lucifer that this outward manifestation of the Elohim has condensed to become flesh.

Something very strange has arisen as a result, an important secret to which I have referred a number of times. What has happened is that the human being has become the image of the gods in the very organs which are normally called the organs of his lower nature. This image of the gods has been debased in human beings as they are on earth. The highest principle in human beings, the spiritual principle coming from the cosmos, has become their lower nature. Please, do not forget that this is an important secret of human nature. Our lower nature, which is due to Lucifer's influence, was actually destined to be our higher nature. This is the contradictory element in human nature. Rightly understood, it will solve countless riddles in the world and in life.

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We are thus able to say: In the course of human evolution man has, thanks to the luciferic element, made the part of him that should be constantly emerging from the cosmos into his lower nature. Many historical phenomena will find their explanation if you consider that this was known to the leaders of the ancient Mysteries, people who were not as facetious, cynical and narrow-minded as people are today. Certain symbols taken from the lower nature and used in the past, symbols that today are merely seen as sexual symbols, are explained by the fact that the priests who used them in the ancient Mysteries did so in order to give expression to the higher reality of the lower nature of man.

You can see how sensitive we have to be in dealing with these things if we are not to be facetious. Modern people slip easily into facetiousness, because they cannot even imagine that there is more to human beings than mere sensuality—which, in fact, is the luciferic element in our higher nature. Thus historical symbols are easily given entirely the wrong interpretation. It takes some nobility of spirit not to interpret the old symbols in a lower sense, even though they often can be interpreted in that way.

With this, you will also begin to realize that if thoughts from the elemental world come to us—they are living thoughts, not abstract, dead ones that come from the head—they must be coming out of the whole human being. Mere reflection will not achieve this. Today the idea is that we only arrive at our thoughts by reflection. Today the idea is: If human beings will just reflect, they can think about anything, providing the things they want to think about are accessible. This is nonsense, however. The truth is that the human race is in a process of evolution, and the thoughts developed by Copernicus, for example, or Galileo, at a particular time could not be reached by mere reflection before that time. You see, people fabricate the thoughts they have in their heads. But when a thought which marks a real change arises in world history, this thought is given by the gods and through the whole human being. It flows through the human being, overcoming the luciferic element, and only reaches the head out of the whole human being. I think this is something you can understand. In certain ages, particular thoughts just have to be waited for and expected; then human beings are not merely reflecting, nor is something conveyed through their eyes or ears, but inspiration comes from the world of the hierarchies and it comes through the whole essential human being, which is the image of the hierarchies.

If you consider this, some of the things I said yesterday can also tell you great deal. In the present age, from the fifth post-Atlantean age, we are living much more inwardly than before—in ancient Greek times, for example, when the outer environment provided much more that was spiritual. This inwardness of life relates to the process in which thoughts come up through the whole human being. In earlier times, in the fourth post-Atlantean age, the relationship between human beings and the gods was much more of an exterior thing; today it has become much more intimate. Human beings are always associating with the gods; their heads do not normally know anything about this, however, because they only hold human thoughts, or rather the corpses of thoughts.

Human beings always associate with the gods as whole human beings, and this association is more intimate today than it was in the past. Even the nature of clairvoyance is such that the relationship to the gods and to disembodied spirits is altogether different from what it was before. When a human soul associates with spirits or with the dead, the association is a very subtle one. It is more or less similar to the way in which our own thoughts associate with our own will in the soul. It is very intimate, and this intimacy belongs to the present age. It corresponds to the essential nature of human beings here on earth and also to that of the dead, of those who are going through the gate of death to enter the world of the spirit at this time. This intimate association has become possible because in some ways the relationship between man and cosmos has changed. If the relationship which some human beings have to the world of the spirit comes to conscious awareness, it shows itself to be a much more intimate one, even today, than it was before.

Certain abilities had to be lost, so that this intimate association with the gods could develop. During the times of ancient Greece and Rome and after, right into the Middle Ages, people still had direct perception of spiritual elements in the world around them; as I said, they did not merely see physical colours in the way we do today, or hear physical sounds, but perceived spiritual elements in colours and sounds. They were also able to use the element which for us has turned into chaotic dreams as a means of entering into the world of the spirit and they did so in a way that was much less subtle than is possible today. It was relatively easy to approach the Spirits and the dead in the past. Today our ordinary dreams no longer have the same quality, though this did continue well into the Middle Ages. Some people still had it for a long time afterwards. Those earlier people also perceived as in a dream all that happened around them in the elemental thought-world of which I have spoken. They were not yet cut off from that surrounding world, and their own essential nature still extended into it. People were aware of this and acted and behaved accordingly.

Today these things are, of course, considered to be an old superstition. Yet when something significant occurs in connection with this ‘old superstition’, modern science does not know what to do with it. Let me give you just one example: Cimon, a well-known historical figure, had a friend called Astyphilos who knew how to interpret dreams. Astyphilos was able to interpret dreams intellectually. When Cimon had dreamed of a vicious, yapping dog before the Egyptian campaign, Astyphilos forecast his death, saying: ‘You have dreamt of a vicious, yapping dog; you will die in this campaign.’ The story was told by Horace.³

A modern sage who has written about dreams, though in materialistic terms, does of course believe that Cimon had an ordinary dream and Astyphilos was a mountebank who interpreted dreams. Yet he also makes a strange comment: ‘Chance willed it, however, that his prophesy came true.’ I could show you books which give irrefutable evidence of prophesies which have come true,⁴ but people will say: ‘Chance willed it.’ This is one of many examples. People imagine that the inner life has always been the same as it is today and that there has been no development in the inner life of man.

Thus the outer senses perceived more of the spiritual, and at the same time the relationship with the surrounding elemental thought-world was, in a way, based more on images. Dreams still had the quality of images which pointed to the future. Just as memory relates to the past, so the images pointed to the future, though not in the same way, of course. The constitution of the human soul was therefore entirely different in the past. Blurred dream images came into everyday sensory perception, images which nevertheless related to real happenings in the elemental world. We might put it like this: The physical world of sensory perception had not yet condensed and become solid and mineral in quality. Everywhere colour and sound still sparkled with spiritual qualities. At the same time people still had the ability to live in waking dreams, and these were reality in the elemental, objective world of thought. Then humanity was deprived of this relationship with the outside world in order to establish and strengthen human freedom; the inner life became more intimate in the way I have described.

There is something we must consider which is most important. We can use the powers of the normal intellect to reflect on the phenomena belonging to the world of nature, but we cannot use this intellect to reflect on social phenomena. People believe that the way of thinking which enables them to reflect on the events of the physical world can also be used to establish social laws and political impulses. They are actually doing so now, but the laws and impulses are of correspondingly poor quality. The kind of thing you find in Roman history, and you would also find it in later history if it had not all been turned into romance—for instance, that Numa Pompilius took his inspiration from a nymph called Egeria in certain matters of state⁵—indicates that in those days people appealed to the gods when matters of state had to be dealt with. They would not have thought it possible to create political structures merely by thinking about them. Today the idea is that individuals are not able to do this, but if you multiply the individual by so and so many times, then it can be done. So if you have a modern democracy and an enlightened parliament, three hundred heads are able to achieve by reflection what a single head cannot do, of course. This goes against one of Rosegger's statements which I have quoted a number of times: ‘One's a human being; if there are several, you've people; if you have lots of them, they're beasts!’⁶—but surely it is not what you would do in practice! And just imagine what the whole enlightened modern world would say if news were to get around—not in the old form but in a new one—that Woodrow Wilson had taken his inspiration for some decree or other from a nymph.

These things have changed, even if they are not exactly more intelligent. It will, of course, be difficult to grasp, but it is something we have to realize, that real and appropriate ideas concerning social structures will only come when people appeal again to the spirit. They are not forced to do so, and the form will be different, but this appeal to the spirit must be made again. Otherwise, everything people produce by way of political principles, social structures and ideas will be mere nothingness. There has to be living awareness of the fact that we live in the world of elemental thought and have to take our inspiration from it.

People are still able to laugh about such things today. But humanity will have to struggle through pain and suffering to gain awareness of inspiration in the creative sphere of the social order. Here we have an even more subtle indication of something that will become more and more necessary for humanity.

People will have to realize that they must now prepare themselves to make a connection again with the world of the spirit, so that they may bring into the kingdom of this world a kingdom which is not of this world but is present everywhere in the kingdom of this world. Only then will salvation come for a social sphere where chaos now reigns.

It will, however, be necessary for people to overcome the unease and reluctance they feel about concerning themselves with the intimate relationship between man and world. In the more important fields of human activity, people will have to go more deeply into the nature of this relationship as it was in the fourth post-Atlantean age. This will give them the necessary orientation so that they can really see how human beings related differently to the world around them than they do now. It is possible to study this, but we must overcome this mythology—mythology in the bad sense—we call the study of history today. We need to consider historical reality, going back at least as far as the Mystery of Golgotha, and this will be possible if the study of external history is enriched by the study of spiritual science. People will simply have to make the effort to enter into a study of spiritual science. The whole way of thinking, of course, is such nowadays that people often feel everything to be utterly grotesque when they begin to enter into the world of the spirit; people instinctively think that things will look just the same there as they do in the physical world. All they are prepared to accept is that they will find a more refined, subtle form of this world, and they fail to understand that they will find it completely different, so much so that even the smallest detail will come as a surprise.

Let us assume a modern philosopher, your normal kind of university professor, were to have some kind of Inspiration⁷—it would be a small miracle, but let us assume such a miracle were to happen—so that for five minutes he were in a position to ask the world of the spirit if he was a true philosopher with a true inner vocation. What do you think the answer would be? He would be given an image; this would be the right answer, only it would need to be correctly interpreted. This is really true; I am telling you something which has happened innumerable times. The answer would be that the philosopher is given ass's ears. And the interpretation of this would be: ‘I am indeed a real philosopher.’ This is not a joke. The point is that some ideas mean one thing in the physical world and exactly the opposite in the spiritual world. In the physical world it is not a distinction to have ass's ears; in the spiritual world, having ass's ears as an image is worth much, much more than the highest distinction ever awarded to a professor of philosophy. But imagine someone who is only used to the physical world and who suddenly—as I said, by a miracle—becomes clairvoyant and sees himself wearing ass's ears. He would think he was being made a fool of, that he was being taken in. And he would immediately call this an illusion. Things are different in the world of the spirit, down to the last detail, and it is necessary to translate everything we meet there, in order to find the right correspondence and interpretation in the physical world. I was not simply telling a joke when I spoke of those ass's ears. If you read the writings of ancient times you will find the dreams dreamt by philosophers to convince them of their inner vocation. The dream I have described is quite typical of that kind of thing. Philosophers had to see themselves with ass's ears to be convinced of their vocation.

People will inevitably be surprised and taken aback when they want to get acquainted again with the specific nature of the spiritual world. Reading The Chymical Wedding of Christian Rosenkreutz Anno 1459,⁸ you will sometimes feel that the grotesque things said in it are enough to make you laugh. Yet they are deeply significant, for the path to which the work refers should not be considered in a sentimental way, but with a certain superior humour.

As I have said, later times also have events analogous to Numa Pompilius receiving instruction from Egeria. These things are no longer made known, which is, of course, the reason why history has become mere conventional fiction. Consider, it was as late as the end of the sixteenth and beginning of the seventeenth century when Jacob Boehme⁹ had his profound Intuitions; truly great, tremendous grand visions which contained Intuitions from an earlier time. His followers included many people who lived in later times. One of the last to be consciously a follower of Jacob Boehme was Saint-Martin.¹⁰ He based himself entirely on Jacob Boehme, especially in his book Des erreurs et de la vrit, though it is a somewhat dematerialized Boehme. Still, he had enough of what had come through from older times to realize: If one wants to have ideas concerning social structures, if one wants to have real, effective political ideas, these must not merely be thought up, they must have come from the spiritual world. In his book, Saint-Martin presents not merely ideas concerning the world of nature and its progress, and of history and its progress, but also quite specific political ideas. Today, when states are the only kind of political structure, one would call them ideas on the political state. His discussions do, however, include one idea of special significance, and it is characteristic that this is in the forefront of his political ideas. Saint-Martin refers to ‘original human adultery’, which he says took place at a time when sexual relations did not yet exist between male and female on earth. He is therefore not referring to adultery in the usual sense. He means something quite different, something he keeps deeply veiled, and to which The Bible refers with the words: ‘The sons of the gods saw how beautiful these daughters were and they took for themselves such women as they chose.’¹¹ This event brought chaos to the world of Atlantis; there is also a mysterious connection between this and the way in which human beings had made their elemental spiritual nature sensual. All one can do is hint at the event which Saint-Martin calls ‘original adultery’; he, too, was merely hinting at it.

It is evident that Saint-Martin realized that to consider politics, one must not merely take account of outer human situations, as people do today, but find a way of going back to earlier times when one had to go beyond the world of the senses and into the world of the spirit if one wanted to know anything about the human being. The principles of political thinking must be evolved out of the world of the spirit. Saint-Martin still knew this at the end of the eighteenth century—he only died in 1804, and what he said in Des erreurs et de la vrit has also been translated into German. It is not without interest to say this, because a certain cleric who is against we who want to serve the life of the spirit here in Dornach—he lives quite near to here¹²—has said that in the face of all this folly people should remember plain, simple Matthias Claudius, and he quoted a verse by Claudius in his support.¹³ It was Matthias Claudius, however, who translated Saint-Martin's Des erreurs et de la vrit in order to make the spiritual science of that time accessible to his people. The gentleman in question therefore demonstrated his colossal ignorance where Matthias Claudius is concerned, quite apart from the fact that he quoted only one verse; if he had quoted the preceding verse he would have contradicted himself. Still, he was satisfied with the one verse which he thought suited his purpose, which was to quote something against anthroposophy.

As late as the eighteenth century, Saint-Martin knew that if we are to have fruitful political ideas there has to be a bridge between human thoughts and the spiritual influences which come from higher worlds. No previous century has been as godforsaken, really, as the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth century. It is important to realize this. Nor was any earlier century so vain and so proud of being godforsaken. Still, if people were to read about the statesmanship advocated by Saint-Martin—I think all those clever people who now get together and want to guide the destinies of the world would feel their stomachs turn. For it is the tendency today to get to know as little as possible about the real world around us. It is, of course, possible to erase from our minds the thoughts which come from the living spirit, and we can decide to work only with thought-corpses. People's actions do not relate to this, however, but become part of a web of living thought. And when people with thought-corpses refuse to enter into those living thoughts, the outcome will be chaos. This chaos has to be overcome, which calls for the clear insights of which I have spoken before, as well as in these lectures. It does, however, require a complete change of direction from what is considered to be right today and the absolute ideal.

Above all, this change of direction will have to come soon. And it would be best if it were to come right now and be as widespread as possible in the field where educators are appointed for both young and old. There is no other field where humanity has entered as deeply into materialism as it has in education.

Let me conclude by presenting a thought which will be occupying us in the days ahead, for it is very interesting and very important for all humanity. I would like to present it in such a way, however, that you will be able to turn it over in your own inner mind for a few days. You will then be better prepared to consider this thought.

The children who are born today—we must consider them in the knowledge that the outer form is withering and splitting up, as I have shown in these days. But deep inside is the true human being. This no longer comes to outward expression in the way it did until the fifteenth century. We will have to get more and more used to the thought that, especially in the case of children, the inward human being cannot be fully revealed by the way people present themselves, nor by the way they think and the gestures they make. In many respects these children are something quite different from what comes to outward expression. We even know extreme cases. Children may appear to be the worst of rascals and yet there is so much good in them that they will later be the most valuable of human beings. But you will also find many children who are very good and not the least bit bad, never putting a finger in their mouths nor thumbing their noses at people. They will study well, perhaps be good bank managers one day, or good schoolteachers according to present-day ideas, and indeed good lawyers. But—forgive these harsh words—they will not be good people, because they cannot achieve inner harmony between themselves and the true world around them. It is specifically in the field of education and training where the principle must be established that people are very different inside today from what they appear to be. It will therefore be necessary in future to appoint teachers on entirely different principles. To be able to see into something which is inside and does not come to expression on the outside requires something of a prophetic gift. Examinations for prospective teachers must therefore be organized in such a way that candidates with intuitive and prophetic gifts do particularly well. Candidates who do not have such gifts must be made to fail their exams, however great their knowledge.

The last thing we do today is to consider the prophetic gifts of people who are to become teachers. We still have a long way to go with regard to many things that will have to be done. Yet the course of human evolution will eventually force people to accept such principles. Many of the materialists of our age would, of course, consider it a crazy notion to say that teachers should be prophets. But it will not be for ever. Humanity will be forced to recognize these things.

• 1. Riddles of the Soul. See Note 1 of lecture 5.
• 2. In a lecture given in Dornach on 21 October 1916, for example. (GA 171. Not available in English.)
• 3. Plutarch also teils the story in his Life of Cimon.
• 4. For example, Rudolf Steiner's library in Dornach includes a book by Max Kernmerich called Prophezeiungen, alter Aberglaube oder neue Wahrheit (translates as: “Prophesies, an old superstition or a new truth”), Munich 1911; it includes prophesies which have since come true.
• 5. Numa Pompilius (probably 715–673 BC) succeeded Romulus as King of Rome. See Livy's History of Rome, Book 1, Chapter 19.
• 6. Peter Rosegger (1843–1918), Austrian poet and novelist. Some of his works were in the Styrian dialect, which also applies to the quoted sentences.
• 7. Rudolf Steiner generally made careful distinction between ‘imagination’ in the ordinary sense, using the ordinary German terms for this, and ‘Imagination’ as the ability to see images of spiritual realities, which is generally achieved in the course of initiation. The same applies to the terms ‘Intuition’ and ‘Inspiration’. The three should be treated as technical terms in the field of anthroposophy. The convention in English versions of his works has become to use capitals for the higher faculties described by these words.
  
  In this text, capital first letters are put where Steiner is using them as technical terms.
• 8. See Note 3, lecture 3.
• 9. See Note 2, lecture 3.
• 10. Louis Claude de Saint-Martin (1743–1803) took up German at the age of 49 so that he might translate Jacob Boehme's writings into French. His Des erreurs et de la vrit ou les hommes rappels au principe universel de la science par un Ph(ilosophe) inc(onnu) of 1775 was translated into German by Matthias Claudius in 1782. A new edition of the translation was published by Der Kommende Tag in Stuttgart in 1925.
• 11. Genesis 6:2. Revised English Bible.
• 12. This was the parish priest at Arlesheim, which is next to Dornach. For further details see Necessity and Freedom (GA 166), translated by P. Wehrte, the lecture given in Berlin on 25 January 1916, Anthroposophic Press N.Y.; and ‘Things of the Present and of the Past in the Spirit of Man’ (GA 167), MS translation C42, Rudolf Steiner House Library, London.
• 13. Matthias Claudius (1740–1815), German poet and writer. The ‘verses’ in question are the third and fourth verses of his evening hymn Der Mond ist aufgegangen.

Today I would like to add a somewhat more extensive consideration about cosmic observation to our reflections. We, as human beings, must be thoroughly aware that we live on earth in the time that passes between birth and death, and that we consider everything that makes an impression on us, in the narrower and broader sense, with our senses and also with our intellect, but only from the point of view of our earthly residence. We often become aware of how much we are bound to this earthly abode by our external physical body. We learn already in school that a human being can only live if he breathes the air that surrounds him and that consists of a certain mixture of oxygen and nitrogen. Man is completely dependent on this air for his vital functions. We only need to consider how different our physical life would be if, for example, there were more oxygen in the air around us than there actually is. Let us assume that there were more oxygen in the air, then we would live faster, that is, we would have a much shorter lifespan on earth calculated by years. Time would be compressed, so to speak, and our lifespan would have to be shorter. This is basically just a very rough approximation. We can imagine that our entire human organism would be different if every single thing in our environment that has an influence on us were to be changed just a little. Such a consideration is indeed often made today. People are becoming aware of their physical dependence on their environment. However, at most one is only very clearly aware in the abstract that man also has a soul-spiritual being, and basically one never has such precise ideas about this spiritual-soul being as one has about the physical-bodily being. The physical-corporal aspect of our organization is so well known that one can say how differently abundant oxygen in the air would affect a person. Regarding the spiritual-soul being, one does not think so much, thoughts that would go something like this: If this spiritual-soul being were different from what it is, could it then be on earth between birth and death?

Just as our body is adapted to the amount of oxygen in the air, and how many other things in our body are adapted to the conditions that are just near the earth's surface, so too is our soul and spirit perfectly adapted between birth and death to what is immediately at the earth's surface. And when one becomes fully aware of this, then one will also be able to say: Just as the human being could not live as an earthly human being out there, just a few miles from the earth's surface, so too would the human soul, with its thinking, feeling and willing, not be able to live in a different way in other than earthly conditions, just as it lives in the earth's environment. Elsewhere, in a different position to the earth, it would have to be organized differently again as a spiritual-mental being. Just as the human body would derive no benefit from its lungs, once they were organized, if they were miles away from the earth's surface, so the human soul, with its thinking, feeling and willing, as it develops in earthly life, would be unable to function under other than earthly conditions.

One could not get any clear idea of these things at all if it were not possible for those people who seek an inner soul development to come to different soul experiences than are the case in ordinary thinking, feeling and willing. You all know from the descriptions in my book 'How to Know Higher Worlds' that one can arrive at quite different soul moods and dispositions, that one can arrive at a quite different soul content. One can arrive at a soul content that not only has ordinary thinking but also imagination, that lives in pictures instead of thoughts. One can go further and arrive at inspiration. Just as our lungs, with the air, perform their inhalation in relation to the physicality of the air, so too can one, so to speak, inspire and breathe in the spiritual and soul substance of the spiritual and soul substance spread throughout the world. And just as the lungs, when they inhale oxygen, draw their life from this oxygen, as the whole human body draws its life from this oxygen, so too the human soul draws its life from the inspirations that take place when such higher knowledge is acquired. And it is the same with the further level of knowledge, with intuition.

Then the soul rises to a completely different inner content. Then it experiences something essentially different. But this different experience is connected, as you know, with what can be called a soul-like going out of the body. We no longer feel so within our body when we ascend to imagination, inspiration and intuition as we feel when we are in ordinary earthly life. It is then with the spiritual-soul being just as if, for example, the lungs were transformed into an organ that breathes light instead of air. Then it could indeed live a few miles outside the earthly with the organism to which the lungs belong. Now, in the physical that is not possible at first, at least not for a human being, but it is possible for the spiritual and soul in us when we leave our body and then experience imagination, inspiration and intuition in our soul, we actually leave the earthly point of view, we already come to the point of view that we had before we descended into a physical body. We come through the fact that we ascend to imagination, inspiration and intuition, actually from an earthly view of the world to a cosmic view of the world. We are just simply no longer on earth, but we look at the earthly from a different point of view.

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This is not of great significance when it comes to observing human souls. However, it is of great significance when it comes to getting to know the spiritual in the cosmos itself. I will make this clear to you in a schematic drawing. Imagine that here is the earth, the human being on earth. Man sees the elements in his earthly surroundings. We can call them solid, liquid and gaseous. He perceives the fiery, the warm. But then what immediately belongs to the earth's surface ceases. By perceiving the fiery, the warm, man already rises to the perception of the earth's surroundings. He enters the light-filled realm, into that which we call the light ether. It is indeed our special characteristic that we can perceive the light ether through our looking, our seeing. But when imaginative perception occurs in a person, then he does not feel standing here on earth and letting his gaze wander out into the light ether, but then he actually feels as if he were perceiving and looking at the whole from the outside (drawing, red).

Particularly in relation to what I am discussing here, it is possible to speak quite definitely about how this happens. If you are standing on the earth and let your gaze wander freely into the cosmos, then by day you are looking into the light everywhere. By night you look up at the starry sky. There you make use, if I may say so, of the perceiving power of your eye. But the power of will is also constantly directed at this perceiving power of your eye. You actually use this power of will in earthly seeing only for the adjustment of the eye. But when you ascend to imaginative cognition, this willpower is trained more and more, especially for the individual senses. You feel how you, as it were, step out into space through your eyes and increasingly come to look at the cosmos from the outside.

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You do not have to believe that what I am describing here consists of your eye becoming huge, and then growing all the way over, and that you then look at the cosmos from the outside as you now look at the cosmos from the inside. You do not achieve this through the power of perception, but precisely through the will becoming clairvoyant. It is an experience in which the will expands, but in which you yourself are present. In this case you also look at the stars from the outside, as a person, when he is in the spiritual world as a soul, also looks at the stars from the outside, from where there are no more stars, not from the etheric region, but from the astral region, from which one can say that there is still space, and from which one can also say that there is no more space. It does not make much sense to speak of what I have just indicated as if there were still space. But one feels as if one had space within oneself. But then you do not see any stars. You know you are looking at the stars, but you do not see any stars, you see images. You actually see images everywhere within the stellar space. It suddenly becomes clear to you why in the old days, when people depicted spheres, they didn't just paint stars, but pictures.

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But now imagine looking through these pictures. Then you become aware that forces radiate down to Earth from all these pictures; only that these forces radiate together. If you look at a radiant star from here, from the Earth, you have the feeling that the rays diverge. If you look at it from outside, you have the feeling that the rays, the light effects that emanate from the pictures, are not only light effects but also power effects, and that they go together. These power effects go as far as the earth. And what do they do there? Yes, you see, they form the shape of the plants, for example. And the one who looks imaginatively says: the lily is a plant form on earth that was created in this form and shape by this group of stars. Another, a tulip shape, was created by another group of stars.

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And so you see what is on earth as plant cover (green), as if it were really painted by the starry sky. It is actually the case that the form of the plant body is determined, created, by the cosmos. And now you can easily understand: if you look further in, if you see the fixed stars out there, then closer to the earth you see the planets Saturn, Jupiter, Mars and so on. They are moving. The fixed stars show you the constellations at rest, which give the plants their shape. But the moving planets send down forces of movement. It is these that the plants first draw out of the root, then make them grow higher and higher, and so on. Just as the shape of the plants is formed from the fixed starry sky, so the movement is formed from the movement of the celestial bodies closer to the earth. Only what takes place in the plant itself, this metabolism, that, for example, the plant absorbs carbonic acid, assimilates it, as they say, and secretes the carbon, so that it forms its carbon body, that is from the forces of the earth itself. We can therefore say: When we look at the plant in its entirety, its form is from the starry sky, its growth is from the planetary movement, and its metabolism is from the earth.

These are things that are regarded as foolishness by those who call themselves true scientific minds today, but they are the very reality. For he who regards the plant in its growth and form as it is done today, resembles one — I must here use a simile that I have often applied — who looks at a magnetic needle that points with one side to the north, with the other side to the south, and who now says: This is due to the magnetic needle, that one point points to the north, the other to the south. It is not due to the magnetic needle, but natural science naturally assumes that the whole earth is a great magnet, that it attracts the one point to the north and the other to the south. In natural science, the whole earth is used to explain the direction of the magnetic needle. But in the same way, if you want to explain the whole form of the plant, you have to use the whole universe. The plant is formed out of the whole universe. It is simply an awful absurdity that the same people who, for example, use the whole earth to explain the direction of the magnetic needle, want to explain the plant only in terms of its cells and their forces. Just as the magnet needle can only be understood when it is placed in the whole magnetic context of the earth, so can plants only be understood when they are placed in the whole cosmic context, when one comes to say: Here I am walking across a region, let us say, of central Europe; for this central Europe, during the time of flower growth, these constellations have a particular significance; hence the plants of this area grow here, because the heavens cause certain plants to grow on the earth in a particular area.

If we wish to observe plants from this point of view, if we go as far as the form, then we must actually take the whole Cosmos to help us. With the animals we need go only as far as the constellations of the zodiac. I have already spoken about this. The stars outside the zodiac have no influence on animals. The animal has thus already become more independent, no longer depends in its organic formation on the whole cosmos, but only on what is in and under the zodiac.

Man has become even more independent, because only the planets influence him, not in so far as he is a soul, but in so far as he is a physical organism. Only where it passes over into the moral, into the soul, must we go beyond the planetary influence, as was done in the older, really good views of astrology, not in today's lay and amateurish ones, which are still behind. But from all this you can see that one must say, in a certain way, but always only to the extent that one takes the external into account: this applies to the plant. For the animal, the form is connected with the zodiac, the growth with the planetary movement and the metabolism with the earth.

If we go up to the human being, then we can no longer ascribe his form to any constellation, but only to the whole universe as such; we can only say: the sphere; not to the individual constellations, but to the whole sphere. I have therefore said on one occasion – and it has already been printed – that in a certain sense the human brain is a reflection of the whole starry sky, not of a single group of stars. Thus, the sphere for form. For growth, in a certain sense, planetary motion too, but now the entire planetary motion, not individual planets, as it is for the plant, for the animal; and for metabolism, again, the earth.

Plant:

Form, starry sky
growth, planets
metabolism, earth

Animal:

Form, zodiac
growth, planets
metabolism, earth

Human being:

form, sphere
growth, planet
metabolism, earth

What was the progress in the development of knowledge? Basically, until the time of the Mystery of Golgotha, no one who came into consideration with regard to knowledge doubted the things I have just discussed. Even if this ancient knowledge was not the fully conscious knowledge that we are striving for today through anthroposophy, for example, there was still a kind of dream-like but clairvoyant knowledge in those ancient times, at least up to the Mystery of Golgotha. And those people who were recognized as knowing something about the world had no doubt at all that when they looked at a plant blossom, they had to relate it to some configurations in the starry sky. And so with other things.

Then this knowledge increasingly disappeared during the first four centuries after the Mystery of Golgotha. After the great eradication of ancient knowledge - I have often described this eradication - only those insights remained that were handed down into the Middle Ages, were often distorted, and are now recorded in old books and are still enjoyed by some people who do not want to take refuge in the new knowledge but always want to look back to the old.

The realization that we are now consciously embracing, the cosmic realization of everything that appears here on our earth as a form, this cosmic realization that we are striving for today, was not present in conscious clairvoyance, but it was present in a certain way. It dawned on people more and more. And then, after man had devoted himself for some time to the artistic shaping of the word in drama, to the thought in dialectics, to the sound and word connection in rhetoric, to the contemplation of number in arithmetic, to the contemplation of form in geometry, after man had devoted himself to this artistic training of the human soul forces for several centuries, the world view emerged that no longer searches out there in the universe, that no longer asks: What is out there that a lily blossom or a tulip blossom can arise on earth? Instead, a worldview emerged that only calculates the present position of the stars, the size of the stars, which only mathematics can explain, which at most accepts mechanics and physics as astrophysics when the stellar world, when the extraterrestrial comes into consideration.

If there is the earth here and a mole in the earth here, the mole has a certain view of the world. But there is not much of the sun in this world view. In more recent times, people have lost the opportunity to look up from the lily blossom, from the tulip blossom into the starry sky, just as the mole does not have the opportunity to look up beyond the darkness of the earth. And there, human beings are stuck in the earth, water, air and fire. At most, they look out into the light like an earthworm does when it comes out during a rain shower and perhaps perceives something of the scant light out there. With regard to the spiritual world, humanity has gradually become entangled in a kind of mole existence. For only what man can find in his own inner being, the mathematical connections, he seeks outside in the cosmos; but he does not seek the concrete and spiritually real outside in the cosmos. One could say that the experience of freedom could only come to man through leading this mole-like existence for a while, through looking at the lily and no longer knowing that a picture of heaven is reflected in the lily; through looking at the tulip and no longer knowing that a picture of heaven is reflected in the tulip. In this way he has turned his powers more inward, and has attained the experience of freedom. But today we have reached the point where we must again grasp the spiritual universe in the eye of our soul. That which for centuries appeared only as the mathematical, mechanical structure of space must again appear to the soul's eye as a spiritualized cosmos. One can truly say: For centuries, humanity in the civilized world has led a spiritual life of privation, albeit for the purpose of cultivating human freedom; for everything that is experienced in the progress of humanity has meaning. But one must see through this meaning, one must not stop at one stage of development, but one must go along with the development and must be clear today: Now that humanity has developed the experience of freedom in its earthly mole-like existence, it must turn again to the contemplation of the spiritual, the spiritual world, not only the mathematical world.

But try to imagine vividly what I am dealing with now. It is really as if it had become dark in the soul in relation to the first four centuries after Christ, as if people had previously looked out and seen the light of the Spirit in the cosmos, figuratively speaking. There was just enough time, because this vision of the soul lasted for another four centuries after the Mystery of Golgotha, even if it became increasingly duller and duller, for the event of Golgotha, the Christ event, to still be viewed spiritually in the first centuries. Only the literature that refers to this spiritual view of the Christ event has also been eradicated. After all, there is nothing of this literature left except what the opponents wrote. Man faces the Mystery of Golgotha in such a way that, apart from the simple, seemingly simple accounts of the Gospels, he does not have the great accounts that the spiritualists of the first four centuries still gave. He has only the accounts of the opponents. We have about as much of the greatest portrayals of the mystery of Golgotha as posterity would have of anthroposophy if it only read the writings of Kal/ly. I think one would not get a very adequate picture. You always have to bear in mind how these first four centuries worked to eradicate precisely the most intense insights that were still available when one looked out into the cosmos and knew that the Christ came to earth from a spiritual cosmos. One had to understand the spiritual cosmos in order to be able to understand how the Christ came to earth from the spiritual world and embodied himself in a human being. Then nothing remained, because humanity immersed itself only in the earthly, as the memories of the Mystery of Golgotha. The memories were passed down from generation to generation. And what was passed down as a memory was called a revelation, and it was sought to comprehend it with the intellectualism that was emerging more and more.

What is it then that is our task today in the face of these things? It is our task to learn to look out into the universe again and to be able to see spirit everywhere, not just by immersing ourselves in ourselves and wanting to experience the spiritual there, but by being able to experience the spirit in all the forms of the cosmos outside of us. That is our right, that must happen again. We must again penetrate into the luminous spirit of the whole cosmos, then we will also see the Mystery of Golgotha in a new light.

I have shown you how, in the last third of the nineteenth century, this merely confessional adherence to the Mystery of Golgotha was actually no longer present. I have told you that a spirit like Kar} Julius Schröer said as early as the beginning of the seventies: The religious issues are actually an anachronism. He believed that people are already striving for something completely different, for a different kind of piety, for a different kind of connection with the spiritual world. But it has essentially taken these last fifty years for only weak attempts to be made, such as the one I mentioned in Werfel's “Mirror Man.” But now one sees that individual people are drawn to rediscover their connection with the spiritual world. But do not think that this connection with the spiritual world can be easily found. It cannot be easily found for the reason that today what is called science has acquired terrible authority, and is practised everywhere as official science. But it has emerged from these secret activities. I do not mean this in a derogatory sense. Please do not think that I am criticizing the times by speaking of 'moles'. I am just trying to characterize. I really do not want to say anything derogatory, because basically, since the 15th century, great things have been achieved by these cosmic moles, who are called human beings.

If you do not believe this, then study the geography of moles or earthworms from a spiritual scientific point of view. This is a dream-like geography, but it is magnificent; it is just not suited to man. And if you were to study the geography of plants! The plant does not even dream in its etheric body, but what can be discovered in the etheric body is truly more magnificent than what can be learned at a faculty today. So, I do not mean any disrespect when I say: a mole existence, because I value it highly.

But the world is evolving, and now is the time for us to reconnect with spiritual perception, with spiritual insight. People cannot continue to live without immersing themselves in this spiritual insight. And now one must become quite clear how these things have actually worked in the last fifty years. And here I would again like to present a characteristic personality. Sometimes one can study personalities much more precisely than one can describe more impersonal and abstract, in terms of how things develop in relation to human cultures and their progress.

In these past reflections, I have referred you to Brentano and Nietzsche in order to show you, by way of what human souls have gone through, how evolution actually was. Today I would like to show you something more from the other side, how a person has been understood by his fellow human beings.

In the 1820s, on July 22, 1822, a certain Gregor Mendel was born (we are celebrating his 100th birthday today). I mentioned him the other day when I said that, while we were in Vienna, articles about Gregor Mendel appeared everywhere because his 100th birthday is approaching. This Gregor Mendel was born the son of a farmer in a Silesian village, studied with great difficulty and very good progress, and was ordained a priest in Moravia at the age of twenty-four. He thus became a Catholic priest. Gregor Mendel was an exceptionally good student, as they say, both as a grammar school student and even at the seminary. It was common practice in Austria at the time – it was in the forties or fifties of the last century – for particularly well-behaved, hard-working students to be given scholarships by their convents. They were then sent to university to be trained as secondary school teachers, because almost all positions in the grammar and secondary modern schools - I also mentioned this recently when I described our trip to Vienna - were filled by monks or priests. In Austria, priests taught at the schools that are called secondary schools here, up to and including university.

He was sent to Vienna to study mathematics and the exact natural sciences. After three years of study, you then had to take the teaching examination at that time. Mendel registered for the teaching examination, apparently thinking that because he had always received such excellent grades, it would be just as easy to pass the examination. He failed the teacher training examination, had to repeat it, and failed again, so that he could not repeat it a third time; because if you fail twice in such an important matter, you cannot continue.

Through all kinds of circumstances, as it once was in old Austria, a school principal somewhere in Moravia once said: Well, we don't have anyone else who has come through and gotten a good report card; but we need a teacher, so we'll just hire Gregor Mendel. And so he became a secondary school teacher for fifteen years. There is no denying that he nevertheless became one of those secondary school teachers who were sent to these higher schools as priests.

But then he particularly indulged his love of science, conducting a large number of experiments on the way inheritance occurs, especially in plants. He collected plants, planted plants, those, let's say, that have a reddish flower, and those that have whitish flowers. Then he allowed those that had reddish flowers to fertilize those that had whitish flowers, and then he got plants with nothing but reddish flowers, which were daughter plants. But in the second generation it was different. There was a certain number of reddish flowers, whitish flowers, mottled flowers, and so on. In short, Gregor Mendel said to himself: I must seek the atoms, the actual atomistic in the plant world, in the organic world in general. Those who are familiar with the development of intellectual life know how much thought was given to inheritance in those days. There are an enormous number of inheritance theories. But Gregor Mendel did not pay much attention to these inheritance theories. Instead, he planted his pea plants and observed how inheritance takes place when he allows a white pea to be fertilized by a reddish one. He to see if he got a red, white or mottled pea, and in this way he determined over generations how, for example, the color is formed, how inheritance is formed at all under different conditions, proportions and the like in peas.

Yesterday I described the time – it was in the 1960s – when all of this came about, which I have described, which worked in Herman Grimm's “Unüberwindlichen Mächten”, in Paul Heyses “Kinder der Welt”, in Du Bois-Reymonds “Grenzen des Naturerkennens” and so on from the most diverse sides. In Mendel's case, it worked in such a way that he established the conditions of inheritance.

The examiners at the two teaching exams were at least concerned enough about Gregor Mendel to fail him twice, and to give him the certificate: Completely unsuitable to teach any science to high school or secondary school students! — The other people, the later ones, were no longer concerned about Gregor Mendel at all. The books he wrote about the laws of inheritance are pretty much gathering dust in the libraries. Nobody cared about them anymore.

But for about twenty or twenty-five years, you can find that people cared more and more about Gregor Mendel. They dug up his laws of inheritance. Because now we are facing a very special phase of science. In the epoch in which Herman Grimm wanted to show how human intellect cannot overcome class prejudices because it is not powerful, in the epoch in which Du Bois-Reymond pronounced his “Ignorabimus”, in which Paul Heyse wrote his “Children of the World”, thus in the epoch in which reason, intellect, has become increasingly powerless and sapless, but where there was nevertheless a tendency towards a new piety among non-denominational people, which has now lasted for fifty years. At the same time, efforts were being made everywhere to develop atomism to de-soul science, and Gregor Mendel also endeavored to discover botanical and zoological atomism. He tried to compose each plant according to its inheritance from red and white flowers, from large and small, from thick and thin flowers, to see how thick and thin, red and white flowers, once they are there, remain as unchanging as atoms remain unchanging. Back then, people said, for example: in carbonic acid we have coal and in hydrocarbon we have coal. Hydrocarbon is something completely different from carbonic acid, but in both there is coal. The atoms that are there as coal are the same in carbonic acid and in hydrocarbon.

Mendel said: I have a red pea flower, and I have a white pea flower. Now the children that are born may be red. But now the children in turn have children, some of whom are red, some of whom are white, and some are mottled, speckled with red and white. And now it continues again: they have children, and among these there are again red, white and mottled ones, and so on. - Now we have the atomistic approach in relation to plants. If we look only at the color, red and white, then where the peas are red, only the white is hidden; it is also inside, only hidden. But with the further children, there it comes out again, just as the carbon is in the carbonic acid and in the hydrocarbon, in substances that are quite different from each other. That is the essential thing in the atoms, the carbon is here and is there; that is the same everywhere, the solid, the eternal atoms. The eternal atoms in plants, which are passed on by inheritance, are the colors, but also, for example, whether the plant is thick or thin, large or small; but the white is preserved, it is only sometimes hidden. Just as oxygen is present in water, so here the white is hidden in the red children and comes to light again when it has the opportunity.

Gregor Mendel was truly a great man, because he sought out what was then considered appropriate for the time, atomism for the inanimate world, in the right place, for the plant world, in line with the thinking of his time. He also made very interesting observations about the animal world, although he failed his teaching exams twice. He did all that, but at the time, no one paid any attention.

Then came the time when the discovery of radium and so on blew apart the atomism in the inanimate world. Recently, a rectorate speech was given in Berlin that seems to have dealt with this very nicely: you can't stick to the old atomism anymore. But people can't catch their breath quickly. Now they are losing their breath when they no longer have atomism. It no longer works in physics, and it doesn't really work in chemistry either. So, after Gregor Mendel had been gathering dust for a long time, his laws of inheritance were excavated, and today you can find everywhere that people are talking about Mendelism, that Mendelism is mentioned as something of the very first rank in the theory of inheritance, one hundred years after his birthday. The centenary of Gregor Mendel is now being celebrated in learned academies everywhere.

It is an interesting life: the priest, who remained unnoticed during his lifetime and who failed his teaching exams twice, has nevertheless achieved something that a large number of academies around the world are celebrating as a very first intellectual accomplishment. In the case of Brentano, I have shown you the man from within, how he viewed the world, how he felt about the Vatican Council and the dogma of infallibility. In the case of Nietzsche, I have tried to show you something similar. In the case of Gregor Mendel, I wanted to show you more how others viewed him. Because it is, after all, interesting that the learned body twice failed him in his teaching exams, that he then remained completely unnoticed and now rules the world in terms of the so-called laws of inheritance. What is that? Basically, it is nothing more than the emergence of the last phase of intellectualism and, indeed, something else, which I would like to talk about tomorrow. But the emergence of intellectualism, the last gasps of intellectualism, which is so closely linked to atomism, can be seen in the relationship between the world and Gregor Mendel and also the world and Mendel today.

I truly have no desire to take anything away from Gregor Mendel's fame. On the contrary, I have taken this opportunity today to introduce you to a truly great man, so that you will think of this great man here too. He is a great man. But it is precisely by studying the inner and outer destinies of great men that we can study the further development of humanity. It is not the small men, but the great ones, with whom one must study this, and Gregor Mendel is a great man, and you can be assured that I am more pleased that he is being celebrated today in all kinds of scientific academies than that I am pleased that he failed twice. You can believe that. But the fate of Gregor Mendel is extremely interesting. And I would like to say: this current clinging to atomism in the organic world is extremely characteristic of our time and actually belongs to all the phenomena that I wanted to describe to you in these days, which I examined yesterday from a different point of view and which I presented to you today from the point of view of Mendelism, for the centenary of Johann Gregor Mendel.

Dr. Steiner: I have a few things to add to what I recently said. The question concerns pictures in the music rooms. Clearly, we cannot decorate music rooms with paintings of figures. A music room is best decorated with sculpture or, if you have to use paintings, use ones with harmonious colors, paintings that are effective through pure colors. In other words, paintings in which pure colors are active.

Then, we also need to consider the pictures for the eurythmy room. I differentiate them from the music rooms, although there may be conflicts in our case. Under certain circumstances, we may teach music in the eurythmy room, but that would be only temporary. We should decorate the eurythmy room with themes that form the dynamic of the human being, including the dynamics of the soul. The pictures should present the expressive human being in an artistic way.

It is important that we carry that over into the gymnasium, but direct it more toward the world. For eurythmy, it is important to find an artistic way to express the dynamics of the soul, but in gymnastics we should connect more with the human being’s relationship to the world of balance and movement. You could, for example, have a picture of someone valiantly poised at the edge of a cliff, or such things. In the gymnasium, pictures should depict the relationship to the world.

For the handwork rooms, you should use pictures of interiors that particularly express feeling.

Now, that leaves only the shop. As much as possible, we should fill that with themes of practical life and possibly crafts, so that what hangs on the walls reflects what we do in the rooms.

I think we should decorate the faculty room in a way that is harmonious with the soul of the teacher. So, we would not have any particular rules for the faculty room, but would reflect our tastes in agreement with the teachers themselves. It should reflect the particularly intimate connections, but in an artistic way. In spinning, the same applies as for shop.

For music, it is better to leave the room quite plain than to add pictures that have no psychological connection with the essence of music.

The frames should fit the pictures. The color of the frames should be some color in the picture and the picture should also determine the form.

A teacher asks about the room for the Sunday services.

Dr. Steiner: I will give another service, and the pictures should be appropriate to that.

We should also decorate the remedial classroom, but we can discuss that at our next meeting.

We should place the eurythmy figures in a glass case in the eurythmy hall. In the hallways you should see to it that you place something similar to what is in the class to the left and right of the door. That is, something connected with the classroom.

A teacher asks about the physics and chemistry rooms.

Dr. Steiner: We have such major problems there that I cannot answer that today. Next time, we also want to begin discussing medical aspects, something we have long wanted to do.

Let’s turn our attention to creating an administrative committee.

A teacher: The committee we elected last meeting proposes three teachers. They would take over some of the administration previously done by the school administrator. They would be responsible for representing the school internally and to the outside world, with the exception of the custodial work, business, and finance.

In connection with school functions, they would do the following things:

1) Preparation and minute taking for the faculty meetings;
2) Naming specific faculty for specific areas, for example, the question of student boarding or decorations in the classrooms;
3) Prepare and oversee a yard duty schedule;
4) Assigning classrooms;
5) Supervise the use of school rooms for events from outside.

They would also take over the following things related to the outside:

1) Correspondence and communication with school officials, initialing all communications to the Department of Education;
2) Everything connected with enrollment (introductions and tests) and leaving school (school reports);
3) Yearly reports;
4) Visitors;
5) Public relations, in particular, working with the Union for Independent Cultural Life in the struggle against the Elementary School Law;
6) Gathering information about salaries and administering specific gifts.

Those are all the specific areas that we can remove from the present administrator and that a group can accomplish.

Dr. Steiner: First, we want to discuss this in principle. I would like you to say whether you are in agreement or not, or to speak in general about what has been presented.

The present administrator: It seemed to me that we should give this committee everything I did that should involve the entire faculty, and that all the economic and technical things would remain with me. We would thus rest secure that the work would be done to the satisfaction of the whole faculty. Those were my basic thoughts.

A teacher: I would like to propose Mr. L. as an additional member of the administrative committee.

Another teacher: We should use Mr. L. for more artistic work and not include him in the administration.

Dr. Steiner: The committee proposed three members, and now we have a proposal for a fourth.

A teacher: If he agrees that he would like to work with it, there should be no problem.

Mr. L.: I would be happy to do that if it would be useful.

Dr. Steiner: If I understand things correctly, we designated a preparatory committee. We cannot leave everything in the air. This committee proposed an administrative committee of three people. And now Mr. Y. is proposing that Mr. L. be included. The preparatory committee, though, proposed three people. Something official needs to move along with some precision. If you are proposing that Mr. L. join as a fourth member, what we have is that the recently elected preparatory committee proposed three and Mr. Y. makes a counterproposal to include a fourth person. Who wishes to say something further?

A teacher: I would like to give my support to that proposal.

Dr. Steiner: Does someone from the committee have something to say?

One of the three teachers proposed: I would like to say that we would be happy to work with Mr. L.

Dr. Steiner: The first question is the creation of the administrative committee. The proposal of the preparatory committee was three men. Then we have here from the faculty those three men and, in addition, Mr. L.

A teacher: I don’t see why we shouldn’t add an additional person to the committee.

Dr. Steiner: If we had only the proposal of the committee, we would need only to agree to or reject that proposal. Now we have two proposals, and we will have to have a debate about them. If there is another proposal, it should also be made. We created this preliminary committee with a great deal of pain. We believe it made its proposal only after mature consideration. Taking our trust in them into account, we now need to either verify or reject the proposal. The question is whether someone has something to say that is germane to the proposal. Is there perhaps a third proposal? Now the question is whether there is something to be added or whether a third proposal will be made.

A teacher supports the addition of Mr. L. because of his nature.

Dr. Steiner: Does anyone else have something to say?

A teacher: I would like to ask Mr. L. himself what he thinks about it.

Dr. Steiner: The question is whether you would accept the position.

Mr. L.: I would if people think it is appropriate.

Dr. Steiner: The situation is thus: The administrative body should arise from the faculty, taking into consideration what we recently discussed. Recently I said that I could, according the way we created the Waldorf School, name the members of the committee myself, but I do not want to do that because of past experiences. Rather, I want the administrative body to arise from the will of the faculty. We have given the responsibility of preparing a proposal to the committee because we assumed that a preparatory committee could make better proposals than those who simply speak off the top of their heads. We must learn to become accustomed to saying things with some responsibility. Recently, we elected the members of this committee, and we now need to assume that the committee made proposals only after due consideration and in recognition of their responsibility. That is the basis of this discussion. At present, there are two proposals.

This could be very depressing. It is important that we do not work with illusions. What is happening now is very depressing. We have agreed that a committee should present us with some proposals, and we certainly do not want to simply throw those out the window. We would do that if a counterproposal is made now and the faculty gives a vote of distrust. If Y.’s suggestion is accepted, that would be a vote of no confidence against the committee. I’m telling you that the acceptance of Y.’s counterproposal means a vote of no confidence. There have been some sharp words used about the administrative body in the last days. All of those expressions could be used against the faculty if you think a vote of no confidence regarding an elected committee has no significance.

I have asked for honesty in the discussion. I have repeatedly requested your comments and have delayed closing this discussion in order to enable a discussion of the counterproposal. I once again request that you say what you have to say about this question.

The following remarks were not recorded.

Dr. Steiner: Mr. Y., do not interpret the words I have said in leading the discussion. I cannot say I am presenting a counterproposal at the same time I declare that I agree with the first proposal. I would request that you suppress nothing. If you do not agree with something, please admit that, but this system of hiding things cannot continue.

At present we have three proposals: The proposal from the committee, the proposal by Mr. Y., and a third proposal by B. and S. to skip Y.’s proposal and go on to the agenda. The proposal from B. and S. is more extreme, since it would skip Y.’s proposal and simply go on to the agenda.

Mr. Y.: I support the suggestion from B. and S.

Dr. Steiner: This is where understanding simply stops. Either you have a reason to make a counterproposal, or you do not. If the committee presents a proposal, and you suggest a counterproposal, then I cannot see any degree of seriousness in your proposal if you yourself are in favor of skipping the proposal and going on to the agenda. If we continue on in this way about important things.... Simply because we need to decide the matter....

Marie Steiner: Mr. Y. had suggested L. because of his good nature.

Dr. Steiner: But that can only mean complete distrust.

A teacher: I understood Y.’s proposal as the beginning of a debate.

Dr. Steiner: The work of the committee ends today. Of course, a counterproposal can be made, but distrust arises because of the desire to vote for the four by acclamation without further ado. It would, of course, show no distrust in the committee if the four were chosen. However, the way things are going now, it would be a vote of distrust if the committee’s proposal was simply thrown out without any further discussion. The distrust arises because we formed a committee with the assumption that they would check into everything and make a proposal in full awareness of their responsibility. Then, a counterproposal was made. Now, we are voting on all four people. What that means is that we take one of our own actions with very little seriousness. To be rid of the matter, we simply vote for all four, and that constitutes a distrust in the committee. To handle the matter so that we can create an illusion that we are harmonious and united constitutes a distrust in the committee.

We need to honestly speak our minds. It is important that everyone has their own well-founded opinion. The way the Waldorf School was founded, it was based upon the blood of our hearts, and now so much is moving toward this terrible system of not taking matters seriously. That is even coming into the faculty. It is significant whether the faculty is united in accepting a proposal or not. That is something that goes straight to our hearts. I would like to emphasize that we may not take such matters lightly. I have no illusions about the fact that there are things in the background here. When such proposals are made, then something is playing in the background. In the realm of anthroposophy, honesty, not intransigence, should rule. That is what I am asking you to do, at least here at the seat of the Waldorf School, to begin for once to seriously stand upright, so that we do not fall into an atmosphere where we shut our eyes to the disharmony, but, instead, honestly say what we have to say.

Is it so impossible that people say they have one thing or another against you, but that they nevertheless still like you and are still ready to work together? Why couldn’t you say the truth in private and, in spite of that, still respect and value one another? Difficult things need to be done when there is reason for doing them. Now that there are two proposals, we first have to vote on the third proposal, or we would have to handle the two proposals in parallel.

The fact is that you demanded to be included in the discussions with the committee. I found that to be a first vote of distrust.

A teacher: I would like to ask if Mr. Y. could give his reasons.

Dr. Steiner: I also think that when a counterproposal is made, there should be reasons given.

Y. attempts to give his reasons.

Dr. Steiner: I can assure you that I do not allow anything that goes through my hands to be in any way imprecise. I do not skip over a situation when one arises. We have before us the proposal of the committee, and separate from that, a proposal by Mr. Y. They represent two opinions. Now that we have these two opinions, and the committee has come here with the intention of proposing a threeman group, after they had already decided not to propose a fourman group, there is an even greater contradiction when Mr. Y. proposes that. It is not our problem that Mr. Y. did not hear the matter. There is, in any event, a precise fact before us that the committee did not think they should propose a four-man group. Mr. Y.’s proposal is significantly different from that of the committee.

The debate we now have concerns the proposal of B. and S. to skip Y.’s proposal and to go on to the agenda.

The motion has been made to skip Y.’s proposal and to go on to the agenda.

Who is in favor of concluding the debate…. The discussion is closed.... We now come to the proposal that three men are to form the administrative committee. We now come to a vote about that motion. Now that the motion is before us, I would like to ask you formally whether you desire to vote on the motion by acclamation or by secret ballot.

A teacher: I suggest by acclamation.

Dr. Steiner: Does anyone wish to speak to the motion to vote by acclamation? No one wishes to speak, so we can now vote on whether to accept the motion to decide by acclamation.... I request that those in favor of creating the administrative committee with these three men, raise their hands.

I have always attempted to maintain a friendly tone, and it may be that we can return to that again. However, these kinds of discrepancies that are not said aloud cannot remain. Aside from that, it is not bad if we occasionally use parliamentary procedures so that we gain some precision in our work. That is something we must have here.

We now come to the other proposals of the committee. The committee proposed that the administrative committee should take over certain areas of representing the school. The proposal was to leave certain tasks with Mr. Y. and remove others. What we are dealing with here is that the following things should be removed from the administrator: First, the preparation and minute taking of the faculty meetings. Second, requesting colleagues to take over certain areas of work, the yard-duty plan, the distribution of the classrooms, usage of schoolrooms by people outside the school. These are the things connected with the inner administration of the school.

I would ask you to say what you have to say regarding these points. Do you agree that the administrative committee take over these areas? Those in agreement, please raise your hands. It is accepted.

In regard to the external representation of the school, the committee would take over correspondence and communications with the authorities as proposed, and, aside from Mr. Y., the member of the committee who is active at the time would countersign. A teacher: Requiring a countersignature makes things more difficult than they were. It would cause delays.

Dr. Steiner: If a member of the committee assumes that it cannot always be done, then I would like to know why we have the committee in the first place. We must always be able to do this. There can be no question of a difficulty. A bureaucracy depends upon attitude, not upon authority. If you imagine you can fight bureaucracy by installing chaos in its place, you have an incorrect picture, and that, of course, cannot be done.

A teacher moves to close the debate.

Dr. Steiner: Does anyone want to say something about the motion to close the debate? Then I ask those who are in favor of closing the debate… . The motion is accepted.

We now need to vote on whether the administrative committee should take on the activities of interaction with the officials, countersigning documents and so forth. I ask those who are in favor to raise their hands.

Dr. Steiner then asks for discussion about each of the various points concerning external representation of the school, and a vote is taken upon each point.

Dr. Steiner: You have all agreed to each of the specific points. I would now like to have a vote on the question as a whole with the exception of the public relations work and the relationship to the Waldorf School Association. I want you to vote on the question as a whole, that is, about all the areas we have discussed. Passed. Dr. Steiner now enumerates all the individual functions for which the present school administrator will continue to be responsible.

Dr. Steiner: Now that you have heard all these points, is there anything you would like to say?

A teacher asks about enrolling students.

Dr. Steiner: We have decided that that will be done by the administrative committee. If what we are doing is to have any meaning at all, then we cannot remove such an important matter from the administrative committee. We need to eliminate this bureaucratic way of thinking. If you think we should remove important discussions with parents from the administrative committee, then you are thinking bureaucratically. The administrative committee should participate from the very beginning, from the beginning of the enrollment of the student. The administrative committee should also be aware that it cannot let its duties slowly slide.

A teacher: I wanted to ask you to speak about the whole thing so that it will become clearer for us.

Dr. Steiner: The situation is that over time I have been made aware of things from many different people, that the faculty wanted such a group. From my perspective, I could answer such questions by saying that I thought it was necessary. I have a certain satisfaction in knowing it is now happening, but I also think it should happen with all seriousness. Is there still some argument about the matter?

I could ask, perhaps, that this committee include what we have voted upon as a kind of addition to our by-laws exactly how we will divide the agenda, then we can make a final decision about that at our next meeting. The activities we have now decided upon should be taken up as quickly as possible.

I would now like to ask for some discussion about how long the members of the committee should be in office, and about the rotation.

A teacher proposes a longer period of rotation, two to three months, otherwise the continuity would be continually disrupted.

Dr. Steiner: What you mentioned, that a person does not receive a reply, could also happen with a longer period of rotation. In any event, an orderly transfer of activities is necessary. I think a period of two months would be appropriate. We need to be careful that the work does not become a burden, and it seems to me that a period of two months would be appropriate.

A teacher: I would like to ask if the current executive would work alone or whether all three would work together.

Dr. Steiner: When not actually in the executive position, the activities of the others would be advisory. That is clear from the situation itself. However, the executive should ask the advice of the other committee members. What we are now deciding is something else. What we now need to decide is the relationship of the faculty to the administrative committee. I think two months would be the right amount of time. Would you like to have that extended or shortened? Is anyone against two months? Then we will do it that way. The administrative committee will begin tomorrow and the first period of rotation would be February and March, that is, two months. In what order should the members rotate?

A teacher: I would suggest alphabetical order.

Dr. Steiner: We can now go on to the question of public relations and our relationship to the Waldorf School Association.

Concerning public relations, you have made a connection with the Union for Independent Cultural Life, namely, a fight against the Elementary School Law. The way the situation is, I do not think it is a good idea if the Waldorf School as such takes a position for or against normal public questions, as they are generally trivial. We can move forward much better when we energetically work upon our own concerns and positively present what we are doing with Waldorf pedagogy. We should not involve ourselves with questions formulated from outside. I often had a bitter taste in my mouth when one of us gave a lecture about the Elementary School Law. We should be involved in the situation. The things we should present should represent our own concerns. In that way we can accomplish much more than when people who want to learn about the Elementary School Law ask us about our position. Of course, we are against it, but we should not be involved in discussions about mundane daily questions.

How do you envision working against the Elementary School Law? Certainly, we must handle these things practically—I usually say “real” instead of “practical.” The world should have the impression that people from the Waldorf School handle such questions practically.

If you look at the essays that have been published as weekly reports in Anthroposophy, they certainly look as though they were written without any understanding of the relationship between the parliament and the executive and the bureaucracy and so forth. The way they are written, those people active in everyday life will have a feeling that they are impractical, and then that opinion is hung around the neck of an Independent Spiritual Life or the Movement for Threefolding. By doing that, we increasingly foster the opinion that we are an impractical group of people. That is something that must cease. I am not speaking about our opponents, but about those insightful people who stand with us in the Threefold Social Movement.

If we include the Union for Independent Cultural Life in our work here at the Waldorf School, it is important that we do not fall prey to the same error the union itself does, namely, that we don’t fall into a kind of theorizing. What I mean is that it is important that any work we do in public relations stand upon a sound foundation. Certainly, we can work with the union, but when we do something, we should be aware that it must be practical, for instance, when we present the Waldorf School pedagogy as a contrast to the Elementary School Law. The more widespread the Waldorf School pedagogy becomes, the less possible such terrible laws will be. We don’t need to base our work upon the politics of the beer hall. All this is a question of tact. We should actually not participate. That is something we should never have done. That is the main problem with the Movement for Threefolding, we should never have become involved in mundane daily questions.

I have given special consideration to this area because I think it is particularly important that we take a higher position. For years I tried to form a World School Association that would not work toward handling pedagogical questions in some mundane manner, but would try to present them to the public from a higher position. That would be the difficult task of such a world school association.

A teacher: Couldn’t we have some evenings for discussing pedagogical questions to which we can invite some people, and also officials?

Another teacher: It is apparent that some leading school officials would like to know more, but are afraid to take the first step.

Still another teacher: Perhaps we could create something here at school so that we co

Dr. Steiner: That would make sense only if such meetings with people from outside were the result of public announcements in which we invited others to attend. It would make sense only if the Waldorf School started such things and then people came to us with their requests. Otherwise, all we would have would be the normal blather.

A teacher: I am thinking about the question of final examinations, that will certainly be important a year from this Easter.

Dr. Steiner: That is, of course, a task that does not actually belong in the school administration, but is more connected with the work of the Waldorf School. As soon as we would want to decide about such things, nothing would happen. That is a question that belongs among the general tasks of the Anthroposophical Society and is the task of everyone who is in any way concerned about the flourishing of the Waldorf School pedagogy. Actually, the answer should be apparent from the question itself. It is difficult to arrange anything in that regard because it needs to be handled individually so that we can take everything into account. We should take every opportunity to put the Waldorf School in the best light. On the other hand, we need to say that those who want to learn could also learn in England if they were there. So, it should really not be so difficult for someone who wants to learn about the Waldorf School to find out about it.

A teacher says something.

Dr. Steiner: What you just said is not serious. People are not happy about things, but as soon as you go beyond the general level of dissatisfaction and want to say something particular, they turn away. What ruins things is our participation, in any degree, in that turning away. We need to stand upright upon our foundation. We need to do everything that properly represents the Waldorf School pedagogy and not allow ourselves to make compromises. Such illusions are most detrimental to our goals. From what I have heard about these things, and such opinions come up all the time, we should have no illusions about them. We need to follow our own path and not treat these cases bureaucratically. If each of us recognizes our responsibility to do what we can, it may be better to teach these officials than to arrange things so that people could attend who would prefer to enter unseen through the back door. We went through all this when the union was formed in July 1919. There, we discussed pedagogical things. We held meetings where it was dark but nothing came out of it because people did not stay, not even the teachers. At the moment when things become serious—remember how people said they are dissatisfied, but that they have a wife and child. Do not misunderstand me. Work as uprightly as possible and use each individual connection, but do not believe that if you hold a meeting you can expect something from it.

We can best resolve the question of final examinations if we attempt to prepare the students as well as possible and then go to the examiners in question. The others will have forgotten it by then. In general, personal discussions are useful, but it depends upon how. We certainly cannot treat questions in the way you did today at the beginning, by deciding to allow the nicest person to take care of some particular problem. If that would work, then I would suggest that those people who are less gracious should take lessons from the others.

Marie Steiner: You prefer the Austrian form of charm.

Dr. Steiner: I would like to ask you to be personally involved. That is certainly something we need. I would certainly offer to fail every professor of botany in botany if that is what it took.

If you have some old connections and you could find out a little from those who have more experience, then your old connections would be more useful than if you brought others without such connections. The other thing is that you are a woman, and these are male examiners. If it is a female examiner, then see to it that you bring a man. Things need to be done individually. You should not believe that the impression you make will continue when you drag other people in.

The relationship to the Waldorf School Association does not seem to me to be resolvable except by a change in the statutes of the association. Of course, it should not be that the person who is the executive should not have a seat and a voice in the Waldorf School Association.

A teacher: Now, every teacher is a regular member of the Waldorf School Association.

Dr. Steiner: That does not fit with these regulations. This regulation requires that the faculty send a representative who will have that position for five years. We must clearly express that the person taking care of the administration here will also sit in the Waldorf School Association for two months. The by-laws have been changed so often that we can easily do that. That is something the Waldorf School Association must do. Is that all right with you? Thus, the current administrator would be our representative for two months and would sit in the council of the Waldorf School Association and have a vote. That person would not simply be one of the members, but would be on the council, and, in that way, the relationship would be self-regulating. So now we have taken care of this question. The necessary change in the by-laws should be made at the next meeting of the Waldorf School Association. Of course, for the time being, the representative of the faculty could be at the next meeting of the association. Are there any other remarks?

A teacher: Should we send a donation to the people in the Rhineland? It would be important for us if you could give us some information about the situation.

Dr. Steiner: It is not so easy to discuss the general situation now because the situation is as I described it quite clearly while I was giving the lectures about threefolding here, namely, that something needs to be done before it is too late. Today, it is too late to accomplish anything in the area of what people have called European politics. The only suggestion I made was to transform the old Threefold Association into the Union for Independent Cultural Life. I made that suggestion out of the recognition that we could do something for the future of Europe and for present Western civilization by supporting cultural life as such. That is where everything else must begin. The economic things that have been done by the present government as well as all political impulses are useless now. It is only possible to support spiritual life and hope that something will happen. What is important is to collect everything we are doing in that direction under one roof. At one time I quoted something Nietzsche said in one of his letters from 1871 about the fact that the German spirit has been exterminated in favor of the German empire. Today, it is important to achieve the opposite, namely, to restore the German spirit in spite of the decay of all political institutions. In that way, we can move forward, but we must stand firmly upon that basis. Everything else needs to be decided case by case.

The Rhineland occupation should be handled from the perspective that it is being done by a drowning man. A hysterical policy is being created from the drowning and thrashing. The tragedy is that the death throes are causing so much suffering. For that reason, I favor sending a donation if possible. It is a humanitarian deed. We can neglect all the nationalism and consider the question from a purely human perspective. I am in favor of all such things to the extent that they are purely human situations.

Today, we stand before the abyss of European culture, and we must prepare to jump over that abyss. I have long since stopped writing articles about it. I wrote the last one at the time of the Genoa conference, drawing attention once again to the whole situation. When I give lectures to the workers in Dornach, they no longer want to hear anything about politics. They are interested in things about science because they understand that all political talk today no longer has any sense to it.

If you think you could make a collection, you should probably be aware that it will not be much. It could be very little.

A teacher: I have divided the 8b class into two groups.

Dr. Steiner: I will have to agree to that until I can see it.

A teacher: The Latin class is a double period. I have the impression it is not very good.

Dr. Steiner: It is difficult to discuss such questions without having a meeting about purely pedagogical questions that could perhaps provide an ideal toward which we can work. Today, I have heard quite a bit about your class. Normally, I try to look at a number of things. Recently, I have been paying more attention to the question of the extent to which individual students have reached the learning goals and how many are falling behind. I cannot say I am convinced there are greater differences in the students you had today than in those in the geography class.

We will need to take care of this in the next meeting when we will be able to handle pedagogical questions more completely, because I noticed that the differences in ability and capability are quite large in that class.

(Speaking to another teacher) In contrast, I noticed when I taught the class myself that your class was much more homogenous. The differences are not so large. That is how the classes differ. We will discuss such questions and how to proceed at another time.

If I were asked to map out a course of medical study for people who would want to approach this study immediately and finish it in a certain period of time, I would begin—after the necessary natural scientific background had been acquired—with a discussion of the various functions in the human organism. I would feel bound to begin with a kind of anatomical-physiological study of the foodstuffs as they are worked through from the stage where they are worked upon by the ptyalin to that of being worked on by the pepsin and then taken up into the blood. Then, after considering the general act of digestion in the narrower sense, I would pass on to discussion of the system of heart and lungs and all that is connected with it. I would then discuss everything connected with the human kidney system. The kidney system must then be discussed in relation to the entire nerve-sense apparatus—a relationship not recognized at all today. Then I would lead on to the system of liver, gall, and spleen, and this cycle of study would gradually open up a vista of how things are arranged in the human organism, a vista that would be needed in order to build up the knowledge that it is the task of an anthroposophical spiritual science to develop. Then, with the light that would have been shed upon the results of sense-perceptible empirical research, it would be possible to pass on to therapy.

In the few days at our disposal, it is only possible, of course, for me to give a few hints about this wide and all embracing domain. A great deal of what I have to say, therefore, will be based upon a treatment of empirical evidence that is not customary today, but I think it will be quite accessible to anyone who possesses the requisite physiological and therapeutic knowledge. I shall have to speak differently from the way people are accustomed to, but I will really present nothing that cannot in some way be brought into harmony with the data of modern sense-oriented empirical knowledge, if these data are studied in all their connections.

Everything I say will be aphoristic, merely hinting at ultimate conclusions. Our starting point, however, must be the sense-perceptible empirical investigations of modern times, and the intermediate stages will have to be mastered by the work of doctors everywhere. This intermediate path is exceedingly long, but it is absolutely essential because, as things are today, nothing of what I present to you will be fully acknowledged if these intermediate steps are not taken—at least in relation to the most important phenomena. I do not believe that this will prove as difficult as it appears at present, if people will only submit to bringing the preliminary work that has already been done into line with the general conceptions I am trying to indicate here. This preliminary work is excellent in many respects, but its goal still lies ahead.

In the last lecture I tried to show you how broadening ordinary knowledge can give us insight into the human being. And now, bearing in mind what I have just said, let me add the following. To begin with you may find it offensive to hear it said in anthroposophy that the human being, as he stands before us in the physical world, consists of a physically organized system, an etherically organized system, an astrally organized system, and what characterizes him as an ego organization. You do not need to take offense at these expressions. They are used merely because some kind of terminology is necessary. By virtue of this ego system, the human being is able to develop that inner soul cohesion, the inward soul life, that cannot be found in animals. This cohesion reveals itself on the one hand in the fact that the human being can unify his inner experience in an ego-point, if I may use that expression, from which all his general organic activity rays out in a certain sense, at least in the conscious state. It reveals itself on the other hand in the fact that during his earthly evolution the human being has a different relationship to sexual development from that of the animal organization. Though of course there are exceptions, the animal organization is such that sexual maturity represents a certain point of culmination. After this, deterioration sets in. This organic deterioration may not begin in a very radical sense after the first stage of sexual maturity, but there is a certain organic culmination. On the other hand, the physical development of the human being receives a certain impetus at puberty. Even in the outer empirical sense, then, if we take all the factors into account, there is already a difference between the human being and the animal.

You may say that it is really an abstract method of classification to speak of physical, etheric, astral, and ego organizations. This objection has been made by many people, especially from the side of philosophy. We take the functions of the human organism and differentiate them, and—since differentiations do not necessarily point back to any objective causes—people think that it is all an abstraction. This is not so. In the course of these lectures we will see what really lies behind this classification and division, but I assure you they are not merely the outcome of a desire to divide things into categories.

When we speak of man's physical organization, this encompasses everything in the human organism that can be dealt with by the same methods we adopt when we are doing experiments and investigations in the laboratory. We encompass all this when we speak about the physical organization of the human being.

Regarding the human etheric organization, however, which is incorporated into the physical, our mode of thinking can no longer confine itself to the ideas and laws that apply when we are doing experiments and making observations in the laboratory. Whatever we may think of the etheric organization of the human being as revealed by super-sensible knowledge—without needing to enter into mechanistic or vitalistic methods in any way—it is apparent to direct perception (and this is a question that would be the subject of lengthy study in the curriculum that I sketched earlier) that the etheric organization as a whole is involved in the fluid nature within the human organization. You need only think of this as a structure of functions that can be grasped directly in this fluid nature. The purely physical mode of thinking, therefore, must confine itself to what is solid in the human organization, to the solid state of aggregation. We understand the human organization properly only when we conceive of what is fluid in this organization as being permeated through and through with life, as living fluids—not merely as the fluids we have in outer, inorganic nature. This is the sense in which we say that the human being has an etheric body.

We do not need to enter into hypotheses about the nature of life but merely to understand what is implied, for example, by saying that the cell is permeated with life. Whatever views we may hold—mechanistic, idealistic, spiritualistic, or the like—when we say that the cell is permeated with life, as the crass empiricist also says, then what is revealed to direct perception yielded by the methods I have referred to here shows that the fluid nature in the human being is likewise permeated with life. But this is the same as saying that the human being has an etheric body. We must think of everything solid as being embedded in the fluid, and here we already have a contrast: we apply all the ideas and laws derived in the inorganic world to the solid parts of man's being, whereas we think not only of the cells—the smallest organisms present in the human being—as living but of the fluid nature in its totality as permeated with life.

Furthermore, when we come to the airy nature of the human being, it appears that the gases filling his being are in a state of perpetual interchange with each other. In the course of these lectures we shall have to show that this is neither an inorganic interchange nor merely a process of interchange mediated by the solid organs, but that an individual lawfulness controls the inner interchange of the gases in the human being, the vortex formed with the interworkings of the gases. Just as there is an inner lawfulness in the solid substances, expressing itself, among other things, in the relationship between the kidneys and the heart, so we must postulate the existence of a lawfulness within the airy or gaseous organism—if I may use this expression—a lawfulness that is not confined to the physical, solid organs. Anthroposophy designates this lawfulness that directly underlies the airy or gaseous organism as the astral lawfulness, the astral organization. This lawfulness would not be there in the human being if his airy organization had not permeated the solid and fluid organizations. The astral organization does not penetrate directly into the solid and the fluid. It does, however, directly lay hold of the airy organization. This airy organization directly takes hold of the solid and fluid, so that in the airy human being there is now an organized astral organization by which this airy organization has a definite inner form, which is naturally fluctuating.

By ascending through the aggregate states, we thus arrive at the following conclusions: when we consider the solid substances in the human being we do not need to assume anything other than a physical organization. In the case of the living fluidity that permeates the solid, physical organization, we must assume the existence of something that is not exhausted by the physical lawfulness, and here we come to the etheric organism, which is a self-contained system. In the same sense I give the name astral organization to that which does not directly lay hold of the solid and fluid but first of all penetrates the gaseous organization. I do not call this the astral lawfulness but rather the astral organism, because it is again a self-contained system.

And now we come to the ego organization, which penetrates directly only into the differentiations of warmth in the human organism. We can therefore speak of a warmth organism, a warmth man. The ego organization penetrates directly into this warmth man. The ego organization is, of course, something super-sensible and brings about the various differentiations of the warmth. In these differentiations of warmth the ego organization has its immediate life. It also has an indirect life in the rest of the organism through the warmth working upon the airy, fluid, and solid organizations.

In this way the human organism becomes more and more transparent. Everything that I have been describing expresses itself in the physical human being as he lives on the earth. What in a certain way can be called the most intangible organization of all—the ego-warmth organization—works down indirectly upon the gaseous, fluid, and solid organizations, and the same is true of the others. Thus the way in which this whole configuration penetrates the human organization, and known through sense-oriented empirical observations, will find expression in any solid system of organs verifiable by outer anatomy. Hence, taking the various organ systems, we find that only the physical organ system is directly related to its corresponding lawfulness, the physical-solid lawfulness; the fluid is less directly related, the gaseous still less directly, and the element of warmth most distantly of all, although even here there is still a certain relation through mediation.

All these things—and I can indicate them here only in the form of ultimate conclusions—can be confirmed by an extended empiricism simply from the phenomena themselves. Due to the short time at our disposal I can only give you certain ultimate conclusions.

In the anatomy and physiology of the human organization we can observe, to begin with, the course taken by food up to the point when it reaches the intestines and the other intricate organs in that region and is then absorbed into the lymph and blood. We can follow the process of digestion or nourishment in the widest sense up to this point of absorption into the blood and lymph. If we limit ourselves to this realm, we can get on quite well with the not entirely mechanistic mode of observation that is adopted by natural science today. An entirely mechanistic mode of perception will not lead to the final goal in this domain, because the lawfulness observed externally in the laboratory and characterized by natural science as inorganic lawfulness is always playing into the living organism in the digestive tract. From the outset, the whole process is involved in life, even at the stage of the ptyalin-process.

If we pay heed only to the fact that the outer, inorganic lawfulness is immersed in the life of the digestive tract, we can get on quite well, as far as this limited sphere is concerned, by confining ourselves to what can be observed merely within the physical organization of the human being. But then we must be absolutely clear that a remnant of the digestive activity still remains, that the process of nourishment is still not quite complete when the intestinal tract has been passed, and that the subsequent processes must be studied by a different means of observation. But as far as the limited sphere is concerned, the best we can do to begin with is to study all the transformations of substance by means of analogies, just as we study things in the outer world. Then we find something that modern science cannot readily acknowledge but that is nonetheless a truth, resulting indeed from modern science itself. It will be the task of our doctors to pursue these matters scientifically and then to show from the sense-perceptible empirical facts themselves that as a result of the action of the ptyalin and pepsin on the food the food is divested of every trace of its former condition in the outer world?

We take in food from the mineral kingdom—you may dispute the expression “food,” but I think we understand each other—we take in food from the mineral, plant, and animal kingdoms. What we take in as food belongs originally to the mineral, plant, and animal organizations. The substance most nearly akin to the human organization is, of course, the milk that the suckling baby receives from the mother. The child receives it as soon as it has left the human organization. The process enacted within the human organism during the absorption of nourishment is this: through the absorption of the food into the various glandular products, every trace of its origin is eliminated. It is really true to say that the human organization itself makes it possible to engage in the purely natural scientific, inorganic mode of observation. In fact, human chyle comes nearest of all to the outer physical processes in the moment when it is passing from the intestines into the lymph and bloodstream. The human being finally obliterates the external properties that the chyle still possessed until this moment. He wants to have it as similar as possible to the inorganic organization. He needs it thus, and this again distinguishes him from the animal kingdom.

The anatomy and physiology of the animal kingdom reveal that the animal does not eliminate the nature of the substances introduced to its body to the same extent; the excretory products are different for the animal. The substances that pass into the body of the animal retain a greater resemblance to the outer organization, to the vegetable and animal organizations, than is the case with the human being. They proceed on into the bloodstream still in accordance with their external form and with their own inner lawfulness. The human organization has advanced so far that when the chyle passes through the intestinal wall, it has become as close as possible to the inorganic. The purely physical human being actually exists in the region where the chyle passes from the intestines into the heart-lung organization, if I may express myself in this way.

It is at this point that our way of looking at things first becomes heretical to orthodox natural science. The entire heart-lung tract—the vascular system—is the means whereby the foods that have now become entirely inorganic so to speak, are led over into the realm of life. The human organization cannot exist without providing its own life. In a more encompassing sense, what happens here resembles the process occurring when the inorganic particles of protein, let us say, are transformed into organic; into living protein, when dead protein becomes living protein. Here again we do not need to enter into the question of the inner being of man but only into what is continually being said in physiology. Due to the shortness of time we cannot speak of the scientific theories about how the plant produces living protein, but in the human being it is the system of heart and lungs, with all that belongs to it, that is responsible for transformation of the protein into something living after the chyle has become as inorganic as possible.

We can therefore say that the system of heart and lungs is there so that the physical system may be drawn up into the etheric organization. The system of heart and lungs therefore brings about a vitalizing process whereby the inorganic is drawn into the organic, is drawn into the vital sphere through the process that takes place in the heart-lung system. (In the animal it is not quite the same, the process being less definite.) Now it would be absolutely impossible for this process to take place in our physical world if certain conditions were not fulfilled in the human organization. The chyle's being drawn into, transformed into an etheric organization could not take place within the sphere of earthly lawfulness unless other factors were present. Angels would be able to perform this, but if they did then they would fly around having merely a mouth, an esophagus, and then finally a gastrointestinal system, which would then stop and disappear into the etheric. Thus such digestive tracts would float around and would be carried by invisible etheric angel-beings.

What I am describing here could not take place in the physical world at all. That would be impossible. The process is possible in the physical world only because the whole etheric system is drawn down, as it were, into the physical, is incorporated into the physical. This happens as a result of the absorption of oxygen in the breathing. Therefore man is not an angel but can walk around physically on the earth, can walk around because his angelic aspect is physicalized through the absorption of oxygen. The entire etheric organization is projected—but projected as something real—into the physical world; the whole is then fulfilled as a physical system; that which otherwise could be only of a purely super-sensible nature comes to expression as the system of heart and lungs. And so we begin to realize that just as carbon is the basis of the animal, plant, and human organizations (though in the human organization in a less solid way than in the plant) and “fixes” the physical organization as such, so is oxygen related to the etheric organization in so far as this expresses itself in the physical domain.

Here we have the two substances of which the formed, the vitally formed protein is primarily composed. But this mode of observation can be applied equally well to the proteinaceous cell, the cell itself. We simply extend the kind of observation that is usually applied to the cell by substituting a macroscopic study for the microscopic study of the cell in the human being. We observe the processes that form the connection between the digestive tract and the heart-lung tract. We observe then in an inner sense, seeing the connection between them, perceiving how an etheric organization is drawn in and “fixed” into the physical as a result of the absorption of oxygen.

But you see, if this were all, we would have a being that existed in the physical world possessing merely a digestive organization and an organization of heart and lungs. Such a being would not yet be an ensouled being; the element of soul could occur only in the super-sensible, and it is still our task to show how what makes the human being a sentient being incorporates itself into his solid and fluid nature, permeating the solid and fluid organizations and making him a sentient being, a being of soul. Only when we are able to trace the ensouled aspect can we perceive man as an ensouled being. The entire organization in which oxygen plays a role is now within the human being due to the fact that we bind the etheric organization into the physical body by oxygen.

The ensouled organization cannot come into being unless there is a direct point of attack, as it were, for the airy man, with a further possibility of access to the physical organization. Here we have something that lies very far indeed from modern ways of thinking. I have told you that oxygen takes hold of the etheric through the organization of heart and lungs; the astral makes its way into the organization of man through another system of organs. This astral nature, too, needs a physical system of organs. I am referring here to something that does not take its start from the physical organs but from the airy nature (not only the fluid nature) that is connected with these particular organs—that is to say, from the airy organization that is bound up with these solid organs. The astral-organic forces radiate out from this gaseous organization in the human organism. Indeed, the corresponding physical organ itself is first formed by this very radiation, on its backward course. To begin with, the gaseous organization radiates out, makes man into an ensouled organism, permeates all his organs with soul, and then streams back again by an indirect path, so that a physical organ comes into being and plays its part in the physical organization of the human being. This is the kidney system, which is regarded primarily as an organ of excretion. Its excretory functions, however, are secondary. I will return to this later, for I have yet to speak of the relationship between the kidney excretions and the higher function of the kidneys. As physical organs the kidneys are excretory organs (they too, of course, have entered the sphere of vitality), but in addition to this, in their underlying airy nature, they are the radiating-organs for the astral organism which now permeates the airy nature and from there works directly into the fluids and the solids in the human organism.

The kidney system, therefore, is that which from an organic basis permeates us with sentient faculties, with qualities of soul and the like—in short it permeates us with an astral organism. Sense-perceptible, empirical science has a great deal to say about the functions of the kidneys, but if you penetrate what you can see and observe of these functions with a certain instinctive inner perception, you will be able to discover the relations between inner sentient experience and the functions of the kidneys—remembering always that the excretions are only secondary indications of that from which they have been excreted. What the kidneys excrete arises through the function of the kidneys. In so far as the functions of the kidneys underlie the sentient system, this is expressed even in the various kinds of excretions.

If you want to extend scientific knowledge in this field, I recommend that you do experiments with a more sensitive individual and try to find out the essential change that takes place in the renal excretions when he is thinking in a cold or in a hot room. Even purely empirical tests like this, suitably varied in the usual scientific way, will provide results. If you make absolutely systematic investigations, you will discover what a difference there is in the renal excretions of a person thinking either in a cold or a warm room. You can also do the experiment by asking someone to think objectively and putting a warm cloth around his head. (The conditions for the experiment must of course be prepared in an orderly way. ) Then examine the renal excretions, and examine them again when he is thinking about the same thing and cold compresses have been applied to his feet. You can conduct experiments that are entirely sense-perceptible and empirical that will provide you with evidence.

The reason that there is so little concern with such inquiries today is that people have an aversion to entering into these matters. In embryological research into cell division, the allantois and the amnion are not studied carefully. These discarded organs have been investigated, but to understand the whole process of human development the accessory organs in embryonic development must be studied much more exactly than the processes that arise from the division of the germ cell itself. Our underlying task here, therefore, is to establish starting points for rational research. This is of the greatest significance, for only in this way will we reach the point of having insight into the human being so that we have before us not a visible but an invisible giant cell.

Today we do not describe the cell as we describe the human being, because microscopy does not lead so far. The curious thing is that if one studies the realm of the microscopic with the methods I am describing here, wonderful things come to light, for instance the results achieved by the Hertwig school. The cell can be investigated up to a certain point with the microscope, but then there is no possibility of further research into the more complicated life processes. Ordinary, sense-oriented empiricism comes to a standstill here, but with spiritual science you can follow the facts further. You now look at the human being in his totality, and the tiny point represented by the cell grows out, as it were, into the whole being of man.

From this you can proceed to learn how the purely physical organization is in every way connected with the structure of the carbon, just as the transition to the etheric organization is connected with the structure of oxygen. If you now make exact investigations into the kidney system, you will find a similar connection with nitrogen. Thus you have to study carbon, oxygen, nitrogen, and in order to trace all the roles played by nitrogen in the astral permeation of the organism, you need only follow, through a series of very precise experiments, the metamorphoses of uric acid and urea. Precise study of the secondary excretions of uric acid and urea will provide definite evidence that the astral permeation of the human being proceeds from the kidney system. This will also be shown by other things connected with the activity of the kidneys, even to the point where pathological conditions play a role, for example if we find blood corpuscles in the urine. The kidney system radiates the astral organization into the human organism. Here we must not think of the physical organization but of the airy organization that is bound up with it. If nitrogen did not play a part, the whole process would remain in the domain of the super-sensible, just as we would be merely etheric beings if oxygen were not to play its part. The outcome of the nitrogen process is that the human being can live on earth as an earthly being. Nitrogen is the third element connected with this.

There is thus a continual need to widen the methods adopted in anatomy and physiology by applying the principles of spiritual science. This is not in any sense a matter of fantasy. You will see that this is so when you receive your first results. If you study the kidney system and do your experiments as accurately as you possibly can, examining the urea and uric acid excretions under different astral conditions, step by step you will find confirmation of what I have said. Only in this way will you be able to penetrate the constitution of the human organism.

We can therefore say that everything entering the human being through the absorption of food is carried into the astral organism by the kidney system. There still remains the ego organization. All this is received into the ego organization primarily as a result of the working of the liver-gall system. The warmth structure and the warmth structure in the system of liver and gall radiate out in such a way that the human being is permeated with the ego organization, and this is bound up with the differentiation of warmth in the organism as a whole.

Now it is quite possible to adapt your methods of investigation as precisely as possible to what I have said. Take certain lower animals where there is no trace at all of an ego organization in the psychological sense. With these you will not find a developed liver, and still less any bile. These things develop in the phylogeny of the animal kingdom only when the ego organization appears. The development of liver and gall runs absolutely parallel with the degree to which the ego organization unfolds in a living being. Here, too, you have an indication for a series of physiological investigations in connection with the human being, only of course they must cover the different periods of human life. You will gradually discover the connection of the ego organization to the functions of the liver in the human being.

You need only observe particular pathological conditions that are lethal—certain childhood illnesses, for example—in order to find out how certain psychological phenomena, tending not toward the life of feeling but toward the ego, are connected with the secretion of bile. This might form the basis of an exceedingly fruitful series of investigations that can be derived to some extent out of what our sense-oriented, empirical science provides. You will see that the ego organization is connected with hydrogen in the same way that the physical organization is connected with carbon, the etheric organization with oxygen, and the astral organization with nitrogen. You will be able to relate all the differentiations of warmth—I can only hint at this—to the specific function carried out in the human organism by hydrogen, in combination with other substances, of course. And so, as we ascend from the sense-perceptible to the super-sensible and make this super-sensible a concrete experience by recognizing its physical expressions, we come to the point of being able to conceive the whole human being as a highly complicated cell, a cell that is permeated with soul and spirit.

It is really only a matter of taking the trouble to examine and develop the marvelous results achieved by natural science and not simply leaving them where they are. My understanding and practical experience of life convince me that if you will set yourselves to an exhaustive study of the results of the most orthodox empirical science, if you will relate the most approachable with the most remote and really study the connections between them, you will constantly be led to what I am telling you here. I am also convinced that the so-called “occultists” of the modern type will not help you in the least. What will be of far more help is a genuine examination of the empirical data offered by orthodox natural science. Natural science itself leads you to recognize truths that can be perceived only supersensibly but that indicate, nevertheless, that the empirical data must be followed up in this or that direction. You yourselves can certainly discover the methods; they will be imposed by the facts before you. There is no need to complain that such guiding principles create prejudice or that they influence by suggestion. The conclusions arise out of the things themselves, but the facts and conditions prove to be highly complicated, and if further progress is to be made, all that has been learned in this way about the human being must now be investigated in connection with the outer world.

I want you now to follow me in a brief train of thought. I am giving it merely by way of example, but it will show you the path that must be followed. Take the annual plant that grows out of the earth in spring and passes through its yearly cycle. Now relate these phenomena that you observe in the annual plant with other things you can observe—above all the custom of peasants who, when they want to keep their potatoes through the winter, dig pits of a certain depth and put the potatoes into them so that they may keep for the following year. If the potatoes were kept in an ordinary open cellar, they would not remain fit to eat. Investigations have proven that what originates from the interplay between the sunshine and the earth is contained within the earth during the subsequent winter months. Warmth conditions and light conditions are at play dynamically under the surface of the earth during the winter, so that in winter the aftereffects of summer are actually contained within the earth. Summer surrounds us outside the earth's surface. In winter, the aftereffects of summer work under the earth's surface. And the consequence is that the plant, growing out of the earth in its yearly cycle, is impelled to grow, first and foremost, by the forces that have been poured into the earth by the sun of the previous year, for the plant derives its dynamic force from the soil. (I have to make rather large leaps, of course, but these things can all be verified easily through empirical observations.) This dynamic force that is drawn out of the soil can be traced up into the ovary and on into the developing seed. So you see, we can arrive at a botany that really corresponds to the whole physiological process only if we do not confine ourselves to the dynamic forces of warmth and light and the light conditions during the year when the plant is growing. We must rather take our start from the root, and so from the dynamic forces of light and warmth of at least the year before. These forces can be traced right up into the ovary, so that in the ovary we have something that really is brought into being by the forces of the previous year.

Now examine the leaves of a plant, and, still more, the petals. You will find that in the leaves there is a compromise between the dynamic forces of the previous year and those of the present year. The leaves contain elements that are thrust out from the earth and those that work in from the environment. It is in the petals that the forces of the present year are represented in their purest form. The coloring and so forth of the petals represents nothing that is old—it all comes from the present year.

You cannot follow the processes in an annual plant if you take only the immediate conditions into consideration. Examine the structural conditions that follow one another in two consecutive years. (What the sun imparts to the earth, however, has a much longer life.) Do a series of experiments concerning the way in which the plants continue to be relished by creatures such as the grub of the cockchafer, and you will see that what you first thought to be an element of the plant belonging to the present year must be related to the sun forces of the previous year. You know what a prolonged larval stage the cockchafer undergoes, devouring the plant the whole time.

These matters must be the subject of exact research; only the guiding principles can be given from the spiritual world. Research will show that the structure of the substances found in the petals and leaves, for instance, is of an essentially different character from the structure of the substances found in the root or even the seed itself. There is a tremendous difference, and this leads to the distinction between a tea prepared from the petals or leaves of plants and an extract of substances found in roots or seeds. You will find that this difference is the basis for the other differences, so that the effect of a tea prepared from petals or leaves upon the human digestive system is quite different from that of an extract prepared from roots or seeds. In this way you relate the organization of the human being to the surrounding world, and everything you discover can be verified through purely physical, sense-perceptible methods. You will find, for instance, that disturbances in the transition of the chyle into the etheric organization, as it is brought about by the system of heart and lungs, will be influenced by the leaves; everything connected with the digestive tract is influenced essentially by a tea derived from petals. An extract of roots and seeds influences the wider activity that works on into the vascular system and even into the nervous system. In this way you will discover rationally the connection between what is going on within the human organism and the substances from which our store of remedies may be derived.

In the next lecture I will have to continue this subject, showing you that there is an inner connection between the different structures of the plants and the human nerve-sense organization and the organization of his digestive tract.

What I have been saying about the boundaries of man's knowledge of Nature should have given some indication at least of the difference between the cognition of higher worlds, as we call it in Spiritual Science, and the cognition of which we speak in our ordinary, everyday consciousness or in ordinary science. In everyday life and in ordinary science we let our powers of cognition remain at a standstill with whatever we have acquired through the ordinary education that has brought us to a certain stage in life, and with whatever this education has enabled us to make out of inherited qualities and out of qualities possessed by mankind in general. What is called in anthroposophical Spiritual Science the knowledge of higher worlds depends upon a man himself deliberately undertaking further training and development; upon the realisation that as life continues on its course a higher form of consciousness can be attained through self-education, just as a child can advance to the stage of ordinary consciousness. And it is to this higher consciousness that there are first revealed the things we otherwise look for in vain at the two boundaries of the knowledge of Nature, at the boundary of matter and at the boundary of ordinary consciousness.

It was of consciousness enhanced in this sense, through which realities at a level beyond that of everyday reality became accessible to men, that the Eastern sages spoke in ancient times, and through methods of inner self-training suited to their racial characteristics and stage of evolution, they strove to achieve this higher development. Not until we realise what it is that is revealed to man through such higher development can the meaning of the records of ancient Eastern wisdom be discerned.

In characterising the path of development adopted by those sages, we must therefore say: It was a path leading to Inspiration. In that epoch, humanity was, so to speak, adapted by nature for Inspiration. And in order to understand these paths of development into the higher realms of knowledge, it will be a useful preparation to form a clear picture of the essentials of the path followed by the sages of the ancient East. At the very outset, however, let me emphasise that this path cannot be suitable for Western civilisation, because humanity is evolving, is advancing. And those who in their search for ways of higher development see fit to return—as many have done—to the instructions given by ancient Eastern wisdom are really trying to turn back the tide of evolution, as well as showing that they have no real understanding of human progress.

With our ordinary consciousness we live in our world of thought, in our world of feeling, in our world of will, and through acts of cognition we bring to apprehension what surges up and down in the soul as thought, feeling and will. Moreover, it is through outer perceptions, perception of the things of the physical world, that our consciousness first awakes in the real sense.

The important point is to realise that for the Eastern sages, for the so-called Initiates of the ancient East, a different procedure was necessary from that followed by man in ordinary life in regard to the manner of dealing with perceptions, and with thinking, feeling and willing.

Some understanding of the ancient path of development leading into the higher worlds can be acquired by considering the following. At certain ages of life we develop the spirit-and-soul within us to a state of greater freedom, greater independence. During the first years of infancy it works as an organising force in the body, until with the change of teeth it is liberated, becomes free in a certain sense. We then live freely with our Ego in the element of spirit-and-soul, which is now at our disposal, whereas previously it was occupied with harmonising and regulating the body inwardly. But as we grow on into life there arise those factors which in the sphere of ordinary consciousness do not, to begin with, permit the liberated spirit-and-soul to develop to the point of penetrating into the spiritual world. As men in our life between birth and death we must take the path which places us into the outer world as beings qualified and fit for life in that world. We must acquire the faculties which enable us to establish our bearings in the physical world, and also those which can make each of us a useful member in the life of social community with other men.

Three faculties come into the picture here. Three faculties bring us into the right connection and regulate our intercourse with the outer world of men: speech, the capacity to understand the thoughts of our fellow-man, and perception of the Ego of another person. In speaking of these three faculties: perception of the sounds of speech, perception of thoughts, perception of the Ego of another human being, we are expressing something that appears to be simple but is by no means found so by earnest and conscientious seekers for knowledge.

In the ordinary way we speak of five senses only, to which one or two inner senses are added by modern psychology. External science presents no complete system of the senses. I shall be speaking to you some time on this subject¹ and will now say only that it is an illusion to believe that understanding of the sounds of speech is implicit in the sense of hearing, or in the organisation which is supposed by modern physiology to account for hearing. Just as we have a sense of hearing, we have a sense of speech—a sense for the sounds of speech. By this is meant the sense which enables us to understand what is perceived in the sounds of speech, just as the auditory sense enables us to perceive tones as such. And if some day we have a really comprehensive physiology, it will be known that this sense for the sounds of speech is entirely analogous to the other, that it can rightly be called a sense on its own. It extends over a larger area within the human organism than several of the other, more localised senses, but for all that it is a definitely circumscribed sense.

We also have a sense, extending over nearly the whole of our bodily frame, for perception of the thoughts of another person. What we perceive in the word itself is not yet the thought it conveys. We need other organs, an organic apparatus different from that required for the perception of the word as such, when we want to understand through the word the thought which the other person is communicating to us.

We are also equipped with a sense that extends over the whole of our body: we can call it the sense for the perception of the Ego of another person. In this connection even philosophy has become childish in the modern age, for to-day one can, for example, often hear it argued: We meet another person; we see that he has a human form like our own, and because we know that as human beings we are endowed with an Ego, we conclude, as it were by subconscious inference, that he too must have an Ego within him. This is quite contrary to the psychological reality. A genuine observer knows that it is a direct perception, not an inference drawn from analogy, through which we perceive the Ego of the other person. There is really only one man—a friend or associate of the Göttingen school of Husserl, Max Scheeler by name—who has hit upon this direct perception of the Ego of another person.

Above and beyond the ordinary human senses, therefore, we have to distinguish three others: the sense for the sounds of speech, the sense for another person's thoughts, the sense for another person's Ego. It is primarily through these three senses that we establish intercourse with the rest of mankind. They are the means whereby we are introduced into social life among other human beings. But the path connected with the functions of these three senses was followed differently by the ancient sages, especially by the ancient Indian sages, for the purpose of attaining higher knowledge. In this quest for higher knowledge the soul of the sage did not endeavour to understand through the words the meaning of what another person was saying. The forces of his soul were not directed to the thoughts of another person in such a way as to perceive them, nor to the Ego of another in such a way as to perceive and experience this Ego. All such matters were left to everyday life. When after his efforts to attain higher knowledge the sage returned from his sojourn in spiritual worlds to everyday life, he used these three senses in the ordinary way. But when he was endeavouring to cultivate the methods for acquiring higher knowledge, he used them differently. In acts of listening, in acts of perceiving the sounds of speech, he did not allow the soul's force to penetrate through the word in order to understand what the other person was saying, but he remained with the word as such, without seeking for anything behind it. He guided the stream of soul-life only as far as the word itself. His perception of the words was thereby intensified, and he deliberately refrained from attempting to understand anything else through the word. With his whole soul he penetrated into the word as such, using the word or the sequence of words in such a way that this penetration was possible. He formulated certain aphoristic sayings, simple but impressive sentences, and tried to live entirely in the sound, in the tone and ring of the words. With his whole soul he followed the ring of the words which he repeated aloud to himself.

This practice then led to a state of complete absorption in the aphoristic sayings themselves, in the “mantras,” as they were called. The “mantric” art, the art of becoming completely absorbed in these aphoristic sayings, consisted in this. A man did not understand only the content and meaning of the words, but he experienced the sayings themselves as music, made them part of his own soul-forces, remained completely absorbed in them and by continually repeating and reciting them, enhanced the power of his soul.

Little by little this art was brought to a high stage of development and was the means of transforming into something different the faculty of soul we otherwise possess for understanding the other person through the word. Through the recitation and repetition of the mantras, a power was generated which now led—not to the other person, but into the spiritual world. And if working with the mantras had brought the soul to the point of being inwardly aware of the weaving flow of this power—which otherwise remains unconscious because attention is focussed entirely upon understanding the other person—if a man had reached the point of feeling this power to be an actual power of the soul in the same way as muscular tension is felt when the arm is being used for some purpose, then he had made himself fit to grasp what is contained in the higher power of thought. In ordinary life a man tries to find his way to the other person through the thought. But with this power he grasps the thought in quite a different way—he grasps the weaving of thought in external reality, penetrates into that external reality and rises to the level of what I have called “Inspiration.”

Along this path, instead of reaching the Ego of the other person, we reach the Egos of individual spiritual Beings who are around us just as are the beings of the material world. What I am now telling you was a matter of course for a sage of the ancient East. In his life of soul he rose to the perception of a spirit-realm. In a supreme degree he attained what can be called Inspiration and his organic constitution was suitable for this. Unlike a Western man, he had no need to fear that his Ego might in some way be lost during this flight from the body. And in later times, when owing to the advance in evolution made by humanity a man might very easily pass out of his body into the outer world without his Ego, precautionary measures were used. Care was taken to ensure that the individual who was to become a pupil of the higher wisdom should not enter this spiritual world without guidance and succumb to that pathological scepticism of which I have spoken in these lectures. In very ancient times in the East the racial character was such that this would not, in any case, have been a matter for anxiety, but it was certainly to be feared as the evolution of humanity progressed. Hence the precautionary measure that was strictly applied in the schools of Eastern Wisdom, to ensure that the pupil should rely upon an inner, not an outer, authority. (Fundamentally speaking, what we understand by “authority” today first appeared in Western civilisation.) The endeavour in the East was to develop in the pupil, through a process of natural adaptation to prevailing conditions, a feeling of dependence upon the leader, the Guru. The pupil perceived what the Guru represented, how he stood firmly within the spiritual world without scepticism, indeed without even a tendency to scepticism, and through this perception the pupil was able, on passing into the sphere of Inspiration, to maintain such a healthy attitude of soul that he was immune from any danger of pathological scepticism.

But even when the spirit-and-soul is drawn consciously out of the physical body, something else comes into consideration as well: a connection—a still more conscious connection now—must again be established with the physical body. I said in the lecture this morning that if a man comes down into his physical body imbued only with egoism and lacking in love, this is a pathological condition which must not be allowed to arise, for he will then lay hold of his physical body in a wrong way. Man lays hold of his body in the natural way by implanting the love-instinct in it between the ages of 7 and 14. But even this natural process can take a pathological course, and then there will appear afflictions which I described this morning as pathological states.²

It might also have happened to the pupils of the ancient Eastern sages that when they were outside the physical body they found it impossible to connect the spirit-and-soul with the body again in the right way. A different precautionary measure was then applied, one to which psychiatrists—some at any rate—have again had recourse when treating patients suffering from agoraphobia. This precautionary measure consisted in ablutions, washings, with cold water. Expedients of an entirely physical nature were used in such circumstances. And when you hear on the one hand that in the Mysteries of the East—the Schools of Initiation that were to lead men to Inspiration—the precautionary measure was taken of ensuring dependence on the Guru, you hear on the other hand of the use of all kind of devices—ablutions with cold water, and the like.

When human nature is understood in the way made possible by Spiritual Science, customs that otherwise seem very puzzling in these ancient Mysteries become intelligible. Man was protected from a false feeling of space, due to a faulty connection of the spirit-and-soul with the physical body—a feeling that might cause him to have a morbid dread of public places, or also to seek social intercourse with other human beings in an irregular way. This is indeed a danger, but one that every form of guidance to higher knowledge can and must avoid. It is a danger, because when a man is seeking for Inspiration in the way I have described, he does in a certain sense by-pass the paths of speech and of thinking, the path leading to the Ego of the other person, and then, if he leaves his body in an abnormal way—not with any aim of gaining higher knowledge but merely owing to pathological conditions—he may fail to cultivate the right kind of intercourse with other men.

In such a human being, a condition which through properly regulated spiritual study develops normally and profitably, may develop in an abnormal, pathological form. The connection of spirit-and-soul with the body then becomes one which causes the man to have such an intense feeling of egotism in his body—because he is too deeply immersed in it—that he reaches the point of hating all intercourse with others and becomes an utterly unsocial being. The consequences of a pathological condition of this kind can often take a truly terrible form. I myself have known a remarkable example of this type of person. He came from a family in which there was a tendency for the spirit-and-soul to be loosened from the physical body in a certain way and it included individuals—one of whom I knew very well indeed—who were seeking for the path leading to the spiritual worlds. But in a degenerate member of this family the same tendency developed in a pathological form, until he finally came to the point where he would allow nothing whatever from the outside world to contact his own body. He was naturally obliged to eat, but ... we are speaking here among grown-ups ... he washed himself with his own urine, because any water from the outside world put him into a panic. I will not describe what else he was in the habit of doing in order to shut off his body entirely from the outside world and make himself into an utterly anti-social being. He did these things because his spirit-and-soul was too deeply immersed in his body, too strongly bound up with it.

It is entirely in keeping with Goetheanism to contrast the path leading to the highest goal at present attainable by us as earthly men with the path leading to pathological phenomena. Only a slight acquaintance with Goethe's theory of metamorphoses is needed to realise this. Goethe is trying to detect how the single parts of the plant, for example, develop out of each other, and in order to recognise the process of metamorphosis he has a particular preference for observing the states arising from the degeneration of a leaf, or of a blossom, or of the stamens. Goethe realises that precisely by scrutiny of the pathological, the essence of the healthy can be revealed to a perceptive observer. And it is also true that a right path into the spiritual world can be taken only when we know where the essence of man's being really lies, and in what diverse ways this complicated inner being can come to expression.

We see from something else as well that even in the later period of antiquity men of the East were predisposed by nature to live in the word itself, not to penetrate through the word to what lies behind it. An illustration of this is afforded by the sayings of the Buddha, with their many repetitions. I have known people in the West who treasured those editions of the Buddha's sayings in which the repetitions had been eliminated and the words of a sentence left to occur only once. Such people believed that through this condensed version they would get at the essentials of what the Buddha really meant. This shows that Western civilisation has gradually lost all understanding of the nature of Eastern man. If we simply take the literal meaning of the Buddha's discourses, the meaning which we, as men of the West, chiefly value, we are not assimilating the essence of these teachings; that is possible only when we are carried along with the repetitions, when we live in the flow of the words, when we experience that strengthening of soul-force induced by the repetitions.² Unless we acquire a faculty for experiencing something from the constant repetitions and the rhythmical recurrence of certain passages, we do not get to the heart of what Buddhism really signifies.

Knowledge must be gained of the essence and inner nature of Eastern culture. Without this knowledge there can be no real understanding of the religious creeds of the West, for when all is said and done they stem from Eastern wisdom. The Christ Event itself is a different matter—it is an accomplished fact, and present as such in earth-evolution. During the first Christian centuries, however, the ways and means of understanding what came to pass through the Mystery of Golgotha were drawn entirely from Eastern wisdom. It was with this wisdom that the fundamental event of Christendom was first of all understood. But everything moves on, and what had once existed in the Eastern primeval wisdom, attained through Inspiration, spread across to Greece and can still be recognised in the achievements of Greek culture.

Greek art was, of course, bound up with experiences different from those usually connected with art to-day. Greek art was still felt to be an expression of the ideal to which Goethe was again aspiring when he spoke of the deepest urge within him in the words: He to whom Nature begins to unveil her manifest secrets, longs for her worthiest interpreter—art. The Greeks still regarded art as an initiation into the secrets of world-existence, as a manifestation not merely of human imagination but of what comes into being through interaction between this faculty and the revelations of the spiritual world received through Inspiration. But the spiritual life that still flowed through Greek art grew steadily weaker, until finally it became the content of the religious creeds of the West. Thus we must conceive the source of the primeval wisdom as a spiritual life of rich abundance which becomes impoverished as evolution proceeds, and when at last it reaches the Western world it provides the content of religious creeds. Therefore men who by then are fitted by nature for a different epoch can find in this weakened form of spiritual life only something to be viewed with scepticism. Fundamentally speaking, it is the reaction of the Western soul to the now decadent Eastern wisdom that gradually produces in the West the atheistic scepticism which is bound to become more and more widespread unless it is confronted by a different stream of spiritual life.

As little as a living being who has reached a certain stage of development—a certain age, let us say—can be made young again in every respect, as little can a form of spiritual life be made young again when it has reached old age. Out of the religious creeds of the West, which are descendants of the primeval wisdom of the East, nothing can be produced that would again be capable of satisfying Western humanity when this humanity advances beyond the knowledge acquired during the past three or four centuries from the science and observation of Nature. Scepticism on an ever-increasing scale is bound to develop. And anyone who has insight into the process of world-evolution can say with assurance that a trend of development from East to West is heading in this direction. In other words, there is moving from East to West a stream of spiritual life that must inevitably lead to scepticism in a more and more pronounced form when it is received into souls who are being imbued more deeply all the time with the fruits of Western civilisation. Scepticism is simply the outcome of the march of spiritual life from the East to the West, and it must be confronted by a different stream flowing henceforward from the West to the East. We ourselves are living at the point where this spiritual stream crosses the other, and in the further course of these studies we shall see in what sense this is so.

First and foremost, however, attention must be called to the fact that the Western soul is predisposed by nature to take a path of development to the higher worlds different from that of the Eastern soul. The Eastern soul strives primarily for Inspiration and possesses the racial qualities suitable for this; the Western soul, because of its particular qualities—they are qualities connected less with race than with the life of soul itself—strives for Imagination. To experience the musical element in mantric sayings is not the aim to which we, as men of the West, should aspire. Our aim should be different. We should not keep particularly strictly to the path that comes after the spirit-and-soul has emerged from the body, but should rather follow the later path that begins when the spirit-and-soul has again to unite consciously with the physical organism.

The corresponding natural phenomenon is to be observed in the birth of the love-instinct. Whereas the man of the East sought his wisdom more by sublimating the forces working in the human being between birth and the 7th year, the man of the West is better fitted to develop the forces at work between the time of the change of teeth and puberty, inasmuch as the being of spirit-and-soul is now led to new tasks in keeping with this epoch in the evolution of humanity. We come to this when—just as on emerging from the body we carry the Ego with us into the realm of Inspiration—we now leave the Ego outside when we plunge down again into the body; we leave it outside, but not in idleness, not forgetting or surrendering it, not suppressing it into unconsciousness, but allying it with pure thinking, with clear, keen thinking, so that finally we have this inner experience: Your Ego is charged through and through with all the clear thinking of which you have become capable. This experience of plunging into the body can be very clear and distinct. And at this point it may perhaps be permissible to speak about a personal experience, because it will help you to understand what I really mean.

I have spoken to you about the conception underlying my Philosophy of Spiritual Activity. This book is a modest but real attempt to achieve pure thinking, that pure thinking in which the Ego can live and maintain a firm footing. Then, when this pure thinking has been achieved, we can endeavour to do something else. This thinking that is now left in the power of the Ego, the Ego which now feels itself a free and independent spiritual being—this pure thinking can then be achieved from the process of perception, and whereas in ordinary life we see colour, let us say, and at the same time imbue the perception with the mental concept, we can now lift the concepts away from the process of elaborating the perceptions and draw the perceptions themselves directly into our bodily constitution.

That Goethe had already taken the first steps in this direction is shown by the last chapter of his Theory of Colours, entitled “The Sensory and Moral Effects of Colour.” With every colour-effect he experiences something that at once unites deeply, not with the faculty of perception only, but with the whole man. He experiences yellow, or scarlet, as active colours, as it were permeating him through and through, filling him with warmth: while he regards blue and violet as colours that draw one out of oneself, as cold colours.³ The whole man experiences something in acts of sense-perception. The perception, together with its content, passes down into the organism, and the Ego with its thought-content remains as it were hovering above. We detach thinking inasmuch as we take into and fill ourselves with the whole content of the perception, instead of weakening it with concepts, as we usually do. We train ourselves in a particular way to achieve this by systematically practising something that came to be practised in a decadent form by the men of the East. Instead of grasping the content of the perception in pure, strictly logical thoughts, we grasp it in symbols, in pictures, allowing it to stream into us, so that in a certain sense it by-passes our thoughts. We steep ourselves in the richness of the colours, in the richness of the tone, by learning to experience the images inwardly, not in terms of thought but as pictures, as symbols. Because we do not permeate our inner life with the thought-content, after the manner of association-psychology, but with the content of perception expressed through symbols and pictures, the living forces of our etheric and astral bodies stream out from within and we learn to know the depths of our consciousness and of our soul. It is in this way that genuine knowledge of the inner nature of man is acquired. The obscure mysticism often said by nebulous minds to be a way to the God within leads to nothing but abstraction and cannot possibly satisfy anyone who wishes to experience the fullness of his manhood.

So, you see, if it is desired to establish a true physiological science of man, thinking must be detached and the picture-forming activity sent inwards, so that the organism reacts in Imaginations. This is a path that is only just beginning in Western culture, but it is the path that must be trodden if the influence that streams over from the East, and would lead to decadence if it alone were to prevail, is to be confronted by something equal to opposing it, so that our civilisation may take a path of ascent and not of decline.

Generally speaking, however, it can be said that human language itself is not yet sufficiently developed to be able adequately to characterise the experiences that are here encountered in a man's inmost life of soul. And it is at this point that I should like to tell you of a personal experience of my own.

Many years ago I made an attempt to formulate what may be called a science of the human senses. In spoken lectures I did to some extent succeed in putting this science of the twelve senses into words, because there it is more possible to manipulate the language and ensure understanding by means of repetitions, so that the deficiency of our language—which is not yet equal to expressing these super-sensible things—is not so strongly felt. But strangely enough, when I wanted many years ago to write down what I had given in lectures as pure Anthroposophy in order to put it into a form suitable for a book, the outer experiences, on being interiorised became so delicate and sensitive that language simply failed to provide the words, and I believe the beginning of the text—several sheets of print—lay for some five or six years at the printer's. It was because I wanted to write the whole book in the style in which it began that I could not continue writing, for the simple reason that at the stage of development 1 had then reached, language refused to furnish the means for what I wished to achieve. Then came an overload of work, and I have still not been able to finish the book.

Anyone who is less conscientious about what he communicates from the spiritual world might perhaps smile at the idea of being held up in this way by a temporarily insurmountable difficulty. But one who feels a full sense of responsibility and applies it in all descriptions of the path that Western humanity must take towards Imagination knows that to find the right words entails a great deal of effort. As a path of training it is comparatively easy to describe, and this has been done in my book Knowledge of the Higher Worlds. But if one's aim is to achieve a definite result such as that of describing the essential nature of man's senses—a part, therefore, of the inner make-up and constitution of humanity—it is then that the difficulties appear, among them that of grasping Imaginations and presenting them in clear contours by means of words.

Nevertheless, this is the path that Western mankind must follow. And just as the man of the East experienced entry into the spiritual world through his mantras, so must the Westerner, leaving aside all association-psychology, learn how to penetrate into his own being by reaching the world of Imagination. Only so will he acquire a true knowledge of humanity, and this is essential for any progress. Because we in the West have to live in a much more conscious way than men of the East, we must not adopt the attitude which says: “Whether or not humanity will eventually master this world of Imagination through natural processes can be left to the future.” No—this world of Imagination, because we have passed into the stage of conscious evolution, must be striven for consciously; there must be no coming to a standstill at certain stages. For what happens then? What happens then is that the ever-increasing spread of scepticism from East to West is not met with the right counter-measures, but with measures ultimately due to the fact that the spirit-and-soul unconsciously has united too radically, too deeply, with the physical body and that too firm a connection is made between the spirit-and-soul and the physical body.

Yes, it is indeed possible for a man not only to think materialistically but to be a materialist, because the spirit-and-soul is too strongly linked with the physical body. In such a man the Ego does not live freely in the concepts of pure thinking. And when he descends into the body with perceptions that have become pictorial, he descends with the Ego together with the concepts. And when this condition spreads among men, it gives rise to the spiritual phenomenon well known to us—to dogmatism of all kinds. This dogmatism is nothing else than the translation into the domain of spirit-and-soul of a condition which at a lower stage is pathological in agoraphobia and the like, and which—because these things are related—shows itself also in something which is merely another form of fear, in superstition of every variety. An unconscious urge towards Imagination is held back through powerful agencies, and this gives rise to dogmatism of all types. These types of dogmatism must be gradually replaced by what is achieved when the world of ideas is kept firmly in the sphere of the Ego; when progress is made towards Imagination and the true nature of man becomes an inner experience.

This is the Western path into the spiritual world. It is this path through Imagination that must establish the stream of Spiritual Science, the process of spiritual evolution that must make its way from West to East if humanity is to achieve real progress. But it is supremely important at the present time for humanity to recognise what the true path of Imagination should be, what path must be taken by Western Spiritual Science if it is to be a match for the Inspiration and its fruits that were once attained by ancient Eastern wisdom in a form suited to the racial characteristics of the people concerned. Only if we are able to confront the now decadent Inspiration of the East with Imaginations which, sustained by the spirit and charged through and through with reality, have arisen along the path to a higher spiritual culture, only if we can call this culture into existence as a stream of spiritual life flowing from West to East, are we bringing to fulfilment what is actually living deep down in the impulses for which mankind is striving. It is these impulses which are to-day breaking out in cataclysms of the social life because they cannot find other expression.

In the next lecture we will speak further of the path of Imagination, and of how the way to the higher worlds is envisaged by anthroposophical Spiritual Science.

• 1. See, for example, The Study of Man (14 lectures) (Anthroposophical Publishing Co.); also Anthroposophy, Psychosophy, Pneumatosophy (in typescript only).
• 2. Dr. Steiner had referred to agoraphobia, claustrophobia, astrophobia.
• 2. From the book Knowledge of the Higher Worlds, revised edition, 1958, p. 158: “The many repetitions in the sayings of the Buddha are not comprehensible to people of our present evolutionary stage. For the esoteric student, however, they become a force on which he gladly lets his inner senses rest, for they correspond with certain rhythmic movements in the etheric body. Devotional surrender to them with perfect inner peace, creates an inner harmony with these movements, and because the latter are an image of certain cosmic rhythms which also at certain points repeat themselves and revert to former modes, the individual listening to the wisdom of the Buddha unites his life with that of the cosmic mysteries.”
• 3. See Goethe's Theory of Colours, Part VI. Translated by Charles Eastlake, F.R.S. (published by John Murray, 1840).

Yesterday I tried to show the methods used by Eastern spirituality for approaching the super-sensible world. I pointed out how anybody who wished to follow this path into the super-sensible more or less dispensed with the bridge linking him with his fellows. He preferred to avoid the communication with other human beings that is established by speaking, thinking and ego-perception. I showed how the attempt was first of all made not to hear and understand through the word what another person wished to say, but actually to live in the words themselves. This process of living-in-the-word was enhanced by forming the words into certain aphorisms. One lived in these and repeated them, so that the soul forces acquired by thus living in the words were further strengthened by repetition.

I showed how in this way a soul-condition was attained that we might call a state of Inspiration, in the sense in which I have used the word. What distinguished the sages of the ancient Eastern world was that they were true to their race; conscious individuality was far less developed with them than it came to be in later stages of human evolution. This meant that their penetration of the spiritual world was a more or less instinctive process. Because the whole thing was instinctive and to some extent the product of a healthy human impulse, it could not in ancient times lead to the pathological disturbances of which we have also spoken. In later times steps were taken by the so-called Mystery centres to guard against such disturbances as I have tried to describe to you. What I said was that those in the West, who wish to come to grips with the spiritual world, must attempt things in a different way.

Mankind has progressed since the days of which I was speaking. Other soul forces have emerged, so that it is not simply a matter of breathing new life into the ancient Eastern way of spiritual development. A reactionary harking back to the spiritual life of prehistoric times or of man's early historical development is impossible. For the Western world, the way of initiation into the super-sensible world is through Imagination. But Imagination must be integrated organically with our spiritual life as a whole. This can come about in the most varied ways: as it did, after all, in the East. There, too, the way was not determined unequivocally in advance. To-day I should like to describe a way of initiation that conforms to the needs of Western civilisation and is particularly well suited to anyone who is immersed in the scientific life of the West.

In my book, Knowledge of the Higher Worlds, I have described a sure path to the super-sensible. But this book has a fairly general appeal and is not specially suited to the requirements of someone with a definite scientific training. The path of initiation which I wish to describe to-day is specifically designed for the scientist. All my experience tells me that for such a man the way of knowledge must be based on what I have set out in The Philosophy of Spiritual Activity. I will explain what I mean by this.

This book, The Philosophy of Spiritual Activity, was not written with the objects in mind that are customary when writing books to-day. Nowadays people write simply in order to inform the reader of the subject-matter of the book, so that he learns what the book contains in accordance with his education, his scientific training or the special knowledge he already possesses. This was not basically my intention in writing The Philosophy of Spiritual Activity. For this reason it will not be popular with those who read books only to acquire information. The purpose of the book is to make the reader use his own processes of thought on every page, In a sense the book is only a kind of musical score, to be read with inward thought-activity in order to be able of oneself to advance from one thought to the next. This book constantly expects the reader to co-operate by thinking for himself.

Moreover, what happens to the soul of the reader, when he makes this effort of co-operation in thought, is also to be considered. Anybody who works through this book and brings his thought-activity to bear on it will admit to gaining a measure of self-comprehension in an element of his soul-life where this had been lacking. If he cannot do this, he is not reading The Philosophy of Spiritual Activity in the right way. He should feel how he is being lifted out of his usual concepts into thoughts which are independent of his sense-life and in which his whole existence is merged. He should be able to feel how this kind of thinking has freed him from dependence on the bodily state. Anyone who denies experiencing this has fundamentally misunderstood the book. It should be more or less possible to say: “Now I know through what I have achieved in the thought-activity of my soul what true thinking really is.”

The strange thing is that most Western philosophers utterly deny the reality of the very thing that my Philosophy of Spiritual Activity seeks to awaken in the soul of the reader. Countless philosophers have expounded the view that pure thinking does not exist, but is bound to contain traces, however diluted, of sense-perception. A strong impression is left that philosophers who maintain this have never really studied mathematics, or gone into the difference between analytical and empirical mechanics. The degree of specialisation required to-day will alone account for the fact that a great deal of philosophising goes on nowadays without the remotest understanding of mathematical thinking. Philosophy is fundamentally impossible without a grasp of at least the spirit of mathematical thinking. Goethe's attitude to this has been noticed, even though he made no claim himself to any special training in mathematics. Many would deny the existence of the very faculty which I should like readers of The Philosophy of Spiritual Activity to acquire.

Let us imagine a reader who simply sets about working through The Philosophy of Spiritual Activity within the framework of his ordinary consciousness in the way I have just described. He will not of course be able to claim that he has been transported into a super-sensible world; for I intentionally wrote this book in the way I did so as to present people with a work of pure philosophy. Just consider what advantage it would have been to anthroposophically orientated science if I had written works of spiritual science from the start. They would of course have been disregarded by all trained philosophers as the amateurish efforts of a dilettante. To begin with I had to concentrate on pure philosophy: I had to present the world with something thought out in pure philosophical terms, even though it transcended the normal bounds of philosophy.

However, at some point the transition had to be made from pure philosophy and science to writing about spiritual science. This occurred at a time when I had been asked to write about Goethe's scientific works, and this was followed by an invitation to write one particular chapter in a German biography of Goethe that was about to appear. It was in the late 1890's and the chapter was to be concerned with Goethe's scientific works. I had actually written it and sent it to the publisher when another work of mine came out, called Mysticism at the Dawn of the Modern Age. This book was a link between pure philosophy and philosophy based on Anthroposophy. When this came out, my other manuscript was returned to me. Nothing was enclosed apart from my fee, the idea being that any claim I might make had thus been met. Among the learned pedants there obviously was no interest in anything written—not even a single chapter devoted to the development of Goethe's attitude to natural science—by one who had indulged in such mysticism.

I will now assume that The Philosophy of Spiritual Activity has already been studied with one's ordinary consciousness in the way I have suggested. We are now in the right frame of mind to guide our souls in the direction briefly indicated yesterday—along the first steps of the way leading to Imagination. It is possible to pursue this path in a form consonant with Western life if we simply try to surrender ourselves completely to the world of outer phenomena, so that we absorb them without thinking about them. In ordinary waking life, you will agree, we are constantly perceiving, but in the very act of doing so we are always permeating out perceptions with concepts. Scientific thinking involves a systematic interweaving of perceptions with concepts, building up systems of concepts and so on. In acquiring a capacity for the kind of thinking that gradually results from reading The Philosophy of Spiritual Activity, we become capable of such strong inner activity that we are able to perceive without conceptualising.

There is something further we can do to strengthen our soul-forces so that we are enabled to absorb perceptions in the way I have just described: that is, by refraining from elaborating them with concepts in the very act of absorbing them. We can call up symbolic or other kinds of images—visual images, sound images, images of warmth, taste, and so on. If we thus bring our activity of perception into a state of flux, as it were, and infuse it with life and movement, not in the way we follow when forming concepts, but by working on our perceptions in an artistic or symbolising manner, we shall develop much sooner the power of allowing the percepts to permeate us in their pure essence. Simply to train ourselves rigorously in what I have called phenomenalism—that is, in elaborating the phenomena—is an excellent preparation for this kind of cognition. If we have really striven to reach the material boundaries of cognition—if we have not lazily looked beyond the veil of sense for metaphysical explanations in terms of atoms and molecules, but have used concepts to set in order the phenomena and to follow them through to their archetypes—then we have already undergone a training which can enable us to keep all conceptional activity away from the phenomena. And if at the same time we turn the phenomena into symbols and images, we shall acquire such strength of soul as to be able, one might say, to absorb the outer world free from concepts.

Obviously we cannot expect to achieve this all at once. Spiritual research demands far more of us than research in a laboratory or observatory. Above all an intense effort of will is required. For a time we should strive to concentrate on a symbolic picture, and occupy ourselves with the images that arise, leaving them undisturbed by phenomena present in the soul. Otherwise they will disappear as we hurry through life from sensation to sensation and from experience to experience. We should accustom ourselves to contemplating at least one such image—whether of our own creation or suggested by somebody else—for longer and longer periods. We should penetrate to its very core, concentrating on it beyond the possibility of being influenced by mere memory. If we do all this, and keep repeating the process, we can strengthen our soul forces and finally become aware of an inner experience, of which formerly we had not the remotest inkling.

Finally—it is important not to misunderstand what I am going to say—it is possible to form a picture of something experienced only in our inner being, if we recall especially lively dream-pictures, so long as they derive from memories and do not relate directly to anything external, and are thus a sort of reaction stemming from within ourselves. If we experience these images in their fullest depth, we have a very real experience; and the point is reached when we meet within ourselves the spiritual element which actuates the processes of growth. We meet the power of growth itself. Contact is established with a part of our human make-up which we formerly experienced only unconsciously, but which is nevertheless active within us. What do I mean by “experienced unconsciously?”

Now I have told you how from birth until the change of teeth a spiritual soul force works on and through the human being; and after this it more or less detaches itself. Later, between the change of teeth and maturity, it immerses itself, so to speak, in the physical body, awakening the erotic impulse—and much else besides. All this happens unconsciously. But if we consciously use such soul-activities as I have described in order to observe how the qualities of soul and spirit can penetrate our physical make-up, we begin to see how these processes work in a human being, and how from the time of his birth he is given over to the external world. Nowadays this relation to the outer world is regarded as amounting to nothing more than abstract perception or abstract knowledge. This is not so. We are surrounded by a world of colour, sound and warmth and by all kinds of sensory impressions. As our thinking gets to work on them, our whole being receives yet further impressions. When unconscious experiences of childhood come to be experienced consciously, we even find that, while we were absorbing colour and sound impressions unconsciously, they were working spiritually upon us. When, between the change of teeth and maturity, erotic feelings make their first impact, they do not simply grow out of our constitution but come to meet us from the cosmos in rays of colour, sound and warmth.

But warmth, light and sound are not to be understood in a merely physical sense. Through our sensory impressions we are conscious only of what I might call outer sound and outer colour. And when we thus surrender ourselves to nature, we do not encounter the ether-waves, atoms and so on which are imagined by modern physics and physiology. Spiritual forces are at work in the physical world; forces which between birth and death fashion us into the human beings we are.

When once we tread the paths of knowledge which I have described, we become aware of the fact that it is the outer world which forms us. As we become clearly conscious of spirit in the outer world, we are able to experience consciously the living forces at work in our bodies. It is phenomenology itself that reveals to us so clearly the existence of spirit in the outer world. It is the observation of phenomena, and not abstract metaphysics, that brings the spiritual to our notice, if we make a point of observing consciously what we would otherwise tend to do unconsciously; if we notice how through the sense-world spiritual powers enter into our being and work formatively upon it.

Yesterday I pointed out to you that the Eastern sage virtually ignores the significance of speech, thought and ego-perception. His attitude towards these activities is different, for speech, perception of thoughts and ego-perception tend at first to lead us away from the spiritual world into social contact with other human beings. We buy our way into social life, as it were, by exposing our thoughts, our speech and our ego-perception and making them communicable. The Eastern sage lived in the word and resigned himself to the fact that it could not be communicated. He felt the same about his thoughts; he lived in his thinking, and so on. In the West we are more inclined to cast a backward glance at humanity as we follow the path into the super-sensible world.

At this point it is well to remember that man has a certain kind of sensory organisation within him. I have already described the three inner senses through which he becomes aware of his inner being, just as he perceives what goes on around him. We have a sense of balance, which tells us of the space we occupy as human beings and within whose limits our wills can function. We have a sense of movement, which tells us, even in the dark, that we are moving. This knowledge comes from within and is not derived from contact with outside objects that we may touch in passing. We have a “sense of life,” through which we are aware of our general state of health, or, one might say, of our constantly changing inward condition.

It is just in the first seven years of our life that these three inner senses work in conjunction with the will. We are guided by our sense of balance: and a being that, to begin with, cannot move about and later on can only crawl, is transformed into one that can stand upright and walk. When we learn to walk upright, we are coming to grips with the world. This is possible only because of our sense of balance. Similarly, our sense of movement and our sense of life contribute to our development as integrated human beings.

Anybody able to apply laboratory standards of objective observation to the study of man's development—spirit-soul as well as physical—will soon discover how those forces that form the human being and are especially active in the first seven years free themselves and begin to assume a different aspect from the time of the change of teeth. By this time a person is less intimately connected with his inner life than he was as a child. A child is closely bound up inwardly with human equilibrium, movement and processes of life. As emancipation from them gradually occurs, something else is developing. A certain adjustment is taking place to the three senses of smell, taste and touch.

A detailed observation of the way a child comes to grips with life is extraordinarily interesting. This can be seen most obviously, of course, in early life, but anybody trained to do so can see it clearly enough later on as well. I refer to the process of orientation made possible by the senses of smell, of taste and of touch. The child in a manner expels from himself the forces of equilibrium, movement and life and, while he is so doing, draws into him the qualitative senses of smell, taste and touch. Over a fairly long period the former are, so to speak, being breathed out and the latter breathed in; so that the two trinities encounter each other within our organism—the forces of equilibrium, movement and life pushing their way outward from within, while smell, taste and touch, which point us to qualities, are pressing inwards from without. These two trinities of sense interpenetrate each other; and it is through this interpenetration that the human being first comes to realise himself as a true self.

Now we are cut off from outer spirituality by speech and by our faculties of perceiving the thoughts and perceiving the egos of others—and rightly so, for if it were otherwise we could never in this physical life grow into social beings. [See previous lecture.] In precisely the same way, inasmuch as the qualities of smell, taste and touch wax counter to equilibrium, movement and life, we are inwardly cut off from the last three—which would otherwise disclose themselves to us directly. One could say that the sensations of smell, taste and touch form a barricade in front of the sensations of balance, movement and life and prevent our experiencing them.

What is the result of that development towards Imagination of which I spoke? It is this. The oriental stops short at speech in order to live in it; stops at thought in order to live in it; stops at ego-perception in order to live in it; and by these means makes his way outward into the spiritual world. We, as the result of developing Imagination, do something similar when we absorb the external percept without conceptualising it. But the direction we take in doing this is the opposite to the direction taken by an oriental who practises restraint in the matter of speech, thought-perception and ego-perception. He stays still in these. He lives his way into them. The aspirant to Imagination, on the other hand, worms his way inward through smell, taste and perception; he penetrates inward and, ignoring the importunities of his sensations of smell, taste and touch, makes contact with the experiences of equilibrium, movement and life.

It is a great moment when we have penetrated the sensory trinity, as I have called it, of taste, smell and touch, and we stand naked, as it were, before essential movement, equilibrium and life.

Having thus prepared the ground, it is interesting to study what it is that Western mysticism so often has to offer. Most certainly, I am very far from decrying the elements of poetry, beauty and imaginative expression in many mystical writings. Most certainly I admire what, for instance, St. Theresa, Mechthild of Magdeburg and others have to tell us, and indeed Meister Eckhardt and Johannes Tauler; but all this reveals itself also to the true spiritual scientist. It is what arises if one follows an inward path without penetrating through the domain of smell, taste and touch. Read what has been written by individuals who have described with particular clarity what they have experienced in this way. They speak of an inner sense of taste, experienced in connection with the soul-spiritual element in man's inner being. They refer also to smell and touch in a special way. Anybody, for instance, who reads Mechthild of Magdeburg or St. Theresa rightly will see that they follow this inward path, but never penetrate right through smell, taste and touch. They use beautiful poetic imagery for their descriptions, but they are speaking only of how one can smell, taste and touch oneself inwardly.

It is indeed less agreeable to see the true nature of reality with spiritually developed senses than to read the accounts given by a sensual mysticism—the only term for it—which fundamentally gratifies only a refined inward-looking egotism of soul. As I say, much as this mysticism is to be admired—and I do admire it—the true spiritual scientist has to realise that it stops half-way. What is manifest in the splendid poetic imagery of Mechthild of Magdeburg, St. Theresa and others is really only what is smelt, tasted and touched before attaining to true inwardness.

Truth can be unpleasant, perhaps even cruel, at times. But modern man has no business to become rickety in soul through following a vague incomplete mysticism. What is required to-day is to penetrate the true mysteries of man's inner nature with all our intellectual powers—with the same powers that we have disciplined in the cause of science and used to effect in the outer world. There is no mistaking what science is. It is respected for the very method and discipline it demands. It is when we have learnt to be scientific that we appreciate the achievements of a vague mysticism at their true worth but we also discover that they are not what spiritual science has to foster. On the contrary, the task of spiritual science is to reveal clearly the true nature of man's being. This in turn makes possible a sound understanding of the outer world.

Instead of speaking in this way, as the truth demands of me, I could be claiming the support of every vague, woolly mystic, who goes in for mysticism to satisfy the inward appetite of his soul. That is not our concern here, but rather the discovery of powers that can be used for living; spiritual powers that are capable of informing our scientific and social life.

When we have come to grips with the forces that dwell in our senses of balance, life and movement, then we have reached something that is first of all experienced through its transparency as man's essential inward being. The very nature of the thing shows us clearly that we cannot penetrate any deeper. What we do find is quite enough to be going on with, for what we discover is not the stuff of vague mystical dreams but a genuine organology. Above all, we find within ourselves the true nature of balance and movement, and of the stream of life. We find this within ourselves.

When this experience is complete, something unique has taken place. In due course we discover something. An essential prerequisite is, as I have said, to have worked carefully through The Philosophy of Spiritual Activity. The Philosophy is then left, so to speak, on one side, while we pursue the inward path of contemplation and meditation. We have advanced as far as balance, movement and life. We live in this life, balance and movement. Parallel with our pursuit of the way of contemplation and meditation, but without any other activity on our part, our thinking in connection with The Philosophy of Spiritual Activity has undergone a transformation. We have been able to experience as pure thought what a philosophy such as this has to offer; but now that we have worked upon ourselves in another sphere, our inner soul life; this has turned into something quite different. It has taken on new dimensions and is now much more full of meaning. While on the one hand we have been penetrating our inward being and have deepened our power of Imagination, we have also lifted out of the ordinary level of consciousness the fruits of our thinking on The Philosophy of Spiritual Activity. Thoughts which formerly had a more or less abstract existence in the realm of pure cerebration have now become significant forces. They are now alive in our consciousness, and what was once pure thinking has become Inspiration. We have developed Imagination; and thinking has been transformed into Inspiration.

What we have attained by these two methods in our progress along this road has to be clearly differentiated. On the one hand we have gained Inspiration from what was, to begin with, pure thought. On the other hand, there is the experience that comes to us through our senses of balance, movement and life. We are now in a position to unite the two forms of experience, the outer and the inner. The fusion of Inspiration and Imagination brings us to Intuition.

What have we accomplished now? I can answer this question by approaching it from the other side. First of all I must draw attention to the steps taken by the Oriental seer, who wishes to advance further after being trained in the mantras and experiencing the living word and language. He now learns to experience not only the rhythms of language but also, and in a sense consciously, the process of breathing. He has, as it were, to undergo an artificial kind of breathing by varying it in all kinds of ways. For him this is one step up; but this is not something to be taken over in its entirety by the West.

What does the Eastern student of yoga attain by consciously regulating his breathing in a variety of ways? He experiences something very remarkable when he breathes in. As he does so, he is brought into contact with a quality of air that is not to be found when we experience air as a purely physical substance, but only when we unite ourselves with the air and so experience it spiritually. A genuine student of yoga, as he breathes in, experiences something that works upon his whole being, an activity that is not completed in this life and does not end with death. The spiritual quality of the outer air enters our being and engenders in us something that goes with us through the gate of death. To experience the breathing process consciously means taking part in something that continues when we have laid aside our bodies. To experience consciously the process of breathing is to experience both the reaction of our inner being to the drawing in of breath and the activities of our soul-spiritual being before birth: or let us say rather that we experience our conception and the factors that contribute to our embryonic development and work on us further within our organism as children. Breathing consciously means realising our own identity on the far side of birth and death. Advancing from the experience of the word and of language to that of breathing means penetrating further into an inspired realisation of the eternal in man. We Westerners have to experience much the same—but in a different sphere.

What in fact is the process of perception? It is only a modification of the breathing process. As we breathe in, the air presses on our diaphragm and on our whole being. Brain fluid is driven up through our spinal column into our brain. This establishes a connection between breathing and cerebral activity. Breathing, in so far as it influences the brain, works upon our sense-activity in the form of perception. Drawing in breath has various sides to it, and one of these is perception.

How is it when we breathe out? Brain fluid descends and exerts pressure on the circulation of the blood. The descent of brain fluid is bound up with the activity of will and also with breathing out. Anybody who really makes a study of The Philosophy of Spiritual Activity will discover that when we attain to pure thinking, a fusion of thinking and willing takes place. Pure thinking is fundamentally an expression of will. So it comes about that what we have characterised as pure thinking is related to what the Easterner experiences in the process of breathing out.

Pure thinking is related to breathing out, just as perception is related to breathing in. We have to go through the same process as the yogi, but in a more inward form. Yoga depends on the regulation of breathing, both in and out, and in this way comes into contact with the eternal in man. What should Western man do? He can transform into soul-experience both perception on the one hand and thinking on the other. He can unite in his inner experience perception and thinking, which would otherwise only come quietly together in a formal abstract way, so that he has the same experience inwardly in his soul and spirit as he has physically in breathing in and out. Breathing in and out are physical experiences. When they are harmonised, we experience the eternal.

We experience thought-perception in our everyday lives. As we bring movement into our soul life, we become aware of rhythm, of the swing of the pendulum, of the constant movement to and fro of perception and thinking. Higher realities are experienced in the East by breathing in and out. The Westerner develops a kind of breathing process in his soul and spirit, in place of the physical breathing of yoga, when he develops within himself, through perception, the vital process of transformed in-breathing and, through thinking, that of out-breathing; and fuses concept, thought and perception into a harmonious whole. Gradually, with the beat of this rhythmical breathing process in perception and thinking, his development advances to true spiritual reality in the form of Imagination, Inspiration and Intuition.

In my Philosophy of Spiritual Activity I indicated as a philosophical fact that reality is the product of the interpenetration of perception and thinking. Since this book was designed to deal with man's soul activity, some indication should also be given of the training that Western man needs if he is to penetrate the spiritual world. The Easterner speaks of the systole and diastole, breathing in and out. In place of these terms Western man should put perception and thinking. Where the Oriental speaks of the development of physical breathing, we in the West say: development of soul-spiritual breathing in the course of cognition through perception and thinking.

All this should perhaps be contrasted with the kind of blind alley reached by Western spiritual development. Let me explain what I mean. In 1841 Michelet, the Berlin philosopher, published Hegel's posthumous works of natural philosophy. Hegel had worked at the end of the eighteenth century, together with Schelling, at laying the foundations of a system of natural philosophy. Schelling, with the enthusiasm of youth, had built his natural philosophy in a remarkable way on what he called intellectual contemplation. But he reached a point where he could make no further progress. His immersion in mysticism produced splendid results in his work, Bruno, or concerning the Divine and Natural Principle in Things, and that fine piece of writing, Human Freedom, or the Origin of Evil. But for all this he could make no progress and began to hold back from expressing himself at all. He kept promising to follow things up with a philosophy that would reveal the true nature of those hidden forces at which his earlier natural philosophy had only hinted.

When Hegel's natural philosophy appeared in 1841, through Michelet, the position was that Schelling's expected and oft-promised philosophical revelations had still not been vouchsafed to the public. He was summoned to Berlin. But what he had to offer contained no spiritual qualities to permeate the natural philosophy he had founded. He had struggled to create an intellectual picture of the world. He stood still at this point, because he was unable to use Imagination to enter the sphere of which I have been speaking to you to-day. So there he was at a dead end.

Hegel, who had a more rational intellect, had taken over Schelling's thoughts and carried them further by applying pure thinking to the observation of nature. That was the origin of Hegel's natural philosophy. So Schelling's promise to explain nature in spiritual terms was never fulfilled, and we got Hegel's natural philosophy which was to be discarded by science in the second half of the nineteenth century. It was not understood and was bound to remain so, for there was no connection between phenomenology, or the true observation of nature, and the ideas contained in Hegel's natural philosophy. It was a strange confrontation: Schelling travelling from Munich to Berlin, where something great was expected of him, and it turned out that he had nothing to say. This was a disappointment for all those who believed that through Hegel's natural philosophy revelations about nature would emerge from pure thinking. The historical fact is that Schelling reached the stage of intellectual contemplation but not that of genuine Imagination; while Hegel showed that if pure thinking does not lead on to Imagination, it cannot lead to Inspiration and to an understanding of nature's secrets. This line of Western development had terminated in a blind alley.

There was nothing—nothing permeated with the spirit—to set against Eastern teaching, which only engendered scepticism in the West. Anyone who has lovingly immersed himself in the true Schelling and Hegel, and has thus been able to see, with love in his heart, the limitations of Western philosophy, should turn his attention to Anthroposophy. He should work to bring about an anthroposophically orientated Spiritual Science for the West, so that we come to possess something of spiritual origin to compare with what the East has created through the interaction of systole and diastole.

For us in the West, there is the spiritual-soul rhythm of perception and thinking, through which we can rise to something more than a merely abstract science. It opens the way to a living science, which on that account enables us to live in harmony with truth. After all the misfires of the Kantian, Schellingian and Hegelian philosophies, we have come to the point where we need something that can show, by revealing the way of the spirit, how truth and science are related. The truth that dwells in a spiritualised science would be a healing power in the future development of mankind.

Rudolf Steiner: Gentlemen! I mentioned our wish to look further into the history that is connected with our present study of the world. You have seen how the human race gradually built itself up out of the rest of mighty Nature. It was only when conditions on the earth were such that men were able to live upon it—when the earth had died, when it no longer had its own life—that human and animal life could develop in the way I have pictured.

Now we have also seen that in the beginning, human life was actually quite different from what it is today, and had its field of action where the Atlantic Ocean is now. We have to imagine that where the Atlantic Ocean is today, there was formerly solid ground. Today we have Asia on the one hand; there is the Black Sea, below it is Africa, then there is Russia and also Asia. On the other hand, there is England, Ireland, and over there also America. Formerly all this in between was land, and here very little land; over here in Europe at that time there was actually a really huge sea. These countries were all in the sea, and when we come up to the north, Siberia was sea too; it was still all sea. Below where India is today, the land was appearing a little above the sea. Thus we actually have some land there, and on the other side again land. Where today we find the Asian peoples, the inhabitants of the Near East and those of Europe, there was sea—the land only rising up later. The land, however, went much farther, continuing right on to the Pacific Ocean where today there are so many islands, Java, Sumatra, and so on; they were all part of the continent formerly there—all this archipelago. Thus, where now the Pacific Ocean is, there was a great deal of land with sea between the two land masses.

Now the first peoples we are able to investigate have remained in this region, here, where the land has been preserved. When we took around us in Europe we can really say: Ten, twelve or fifteen thousand years ago the earth, the ground, became sufficiently firm for men to dwell upon it. Before that, only marine animals were there which developed out of the sea, and so on. If at that time you had looked for man, he would have been where the Atlantic Ocean is today. But over there in Asia, in eastern Asia, there were also men earlier than ten thousand years ago. These men naturally left descendants, and the descendants are very interesting on account of their culture, the most ancient on earth. Today these are the peoples called the Japanese and Chinese. They are very interesting because they are the last traces, so to say, of the oldest inhabitants of the earth.

As you have heard, there was, of course, a much older population on earth that was entirely wiped out. That was the humanity who lived in ancient Atlantis, of whom nothing remains. For even if remains did exist, we would have to dig down into the bed of the Atlantic Ocean to find them. We would have to get down to that bed—a more difficult procedure than people think—and dig there, and in all probability find nothing. For, as I have said, those people had soft bodies. The culture which they created with gestures was something that one cannot dig out of the ground-because there was nothing that endured! Thus, what was there long before the Japanese and Chinese is not accessible to ordinary science; one must have some knowledge of spiritual science if one wants to make such discoveries.

However, what has remained of the Chinese and Japanese peoples is very interesting. You see, the Chinese and the older Japanese—not those of today (about whom I am just going to speak)—the Chinese and Japanese had a culture quite different from ours. We would have a much better idea of it if our good Europeans had not in recent centuries extended their domination over those spheres, bringing about a complete change. In the case of Japan this change has been very effective. Although Japan has kept its name, it has been entirely Europeanized. Its people have gradually absorbed everything from the Europeans, and what remains of their ancient culture is merely its outward form. The Chinese have preserved their identity better, but now they can no longer hold out. It is true that the European dominion is not actively established there, but in those regions what the Europeans think is becoming all-prevailing, and what once existed there has disappeared. This is no cause for regret; it is in the nature of human evolution. It must, however, be mentioned.

Now if we observe the Chinese—among them, things can be seen in a less adulterated form—we find a culture distinct from all others, for the Chinese in their old culture did not include anything that can be called religion. The Chinese culture was devoid of religion.

You must picture to yourselves, gentlemen, what is meant by a “culture without religion”. When you consider the cultures that have religion you find everywhere—in the old Indian culture, for instance—veneration for beings who are invisible but who seem to resemble human beings on earth. It is the peculiar feature of all later religions that they represent their invisible beings as manlike.

Anthroposophy does not do this. Anthroposophy does not represent the super-sensible world anthropomorphically but as it actually is. Further, it sees in the stars the expression of the super-sensible. The remarkable thing is that the Chinese have had something of the same kind. The Chinese do not venerate invisible gods. They say: What is here on earth differs according to climate, according to the nature of the soil where one lives. You see, China in the most ancient times was already a large country and is still today larger than Europe; it is a gigantic country, has always been gigantic, and has had a tremendously large, vigorous population. Now, the idea that the population of the earth increases is just superstition on the part of modern science, which always makes its calculations from data to suit itself. The truth is that even in the most ancient times there was a vast population in China, also in South America and North America. There too in those ancient times the land reached out to the Pacific Ocean. If that is taken into account the population of the earth cannot be said to have grown.

So, gentlemen, we find a culture there that is quite ancient, and today this culture can still be observed as it actually existed ten thousand, eight thousand years ago. The Chinese said: Above in the north the climate is different, the soil is different, from what they are farther south; everything is different there. The growth of the plants is different and human beings have to live in a different way. But the sun is all-pervading. The sun shines in the north and in the south; it goes on its way and moves from warm regions to cold regions. They said: On earth diversity prevails, but the sun makes everything equal. They saw in the sun a fructifying, leveling force. They went on to say, therefore: If we are to have a ruler, our ruler must be like that; individual men differ, but he must rule over them like the sun. For this reason they gave him the name “Son of the Sun.” His task was to rule on earth as the sun rules in the universe. The individual planets, Venus, Jupiter, and so on, act in their various ways; the sun as ruler over the planets makes everything equal. Thus the Chinese pictured their ruler as a son of the Sun. For they took the word “son” essentially to imply “belonging to something.”

Everything was then so arranged that the people said: The Son of the Sun is our most important man. The others are his helpers, just as the planets are the helpers of the sun. They organized everything on the earth in accordance with what appeared above in the stars. All this was done without prayer, for they did not know the meaning of prayer. It was actually all done without their having what later would constitute a cult. What might be called their kingdom was organized so as to be an image of the heavens. It could not yet be called a state. (That is a mischief that modern men perpetrate.) But they arranged their earthly affairs to be an image of what appeared to them in the stars above.

Now something came about through this circumstance that was naturally quite different from what happened later: a man became the citizen of a kingdom. He had no creed to profess; he simply felt himself to be a member of a kingdom. Originally the Chinese had no gods of any kind; when later they did have them, they were gods taken over from the Indians. Originally they had no gods, but their connection with the super-sensible worlds was expressed by the essential nature of their kingdom and its institutions. Their institutions had a family quality. The Son of the Sun was at the same time father to all the other Chinese and these served him. Although it was a kingdom, it partook of the nature of a family.

All this was only possible for men whose thinking had as yet no resemblance to that of later humanity. The thinking of the Chinese at that time was not at all like that of later men. What we think today would have been quite foreign to the Chinese. We think, for example, “animal”; we think “man”; we think “vase” or “table”. The Chinese did not think in this way, but they knew: there is a lion, there a tiger, a dog, there's a bear—not, there is an animal. They knew: my neighbor has a table with corners; someone else has a table that is rounder. They gave names to single things, but what “a table” is, never entered their head; “table” as such—of that they had no knowledge. They were aware: there stands a man with a bigger head and longer legs, there one with a smaller head, with shorter legs, and so on; there is a smaller man, here a bigger man, but “man” in general was to them an unknown factor. They thought in quite a different way, in a way impossible for man today. They had need, therefore, of other concepts. Now if you think “table,” “man,” “animal,” you can extend this to legal matters, for Jurisprudence consists solely of such concepts. But the Chinese were unable to think out any legal system; with them everything was organized as in a family. Within a family, when a son or daughter wants to do something, there is no thought of such a thing as a legal contract. But today, if someone here in Switzerland wants to do something, he consults liability laws, marriage laws, and so on. There one finds all that is needed, and the laws then have to be applied to individual cases.

Inasmuch as human beings still retain something of the Chinese in them—and there always remains a little—they don't really feel comfortable about laws and must always have recourse to a lawyer. They are even at sea sometimes with general concepts. As for the Chinese, they never had a legal code; they had nothing at all of what later took on the nature of a state. All they had was what each individual could judge in his individual situation.

So, to continue. The whole Chinese language was influenced by this fact. When we say “table,” we at once picture a flat surface with one, two or three legs, and so on, but it must be something that can stand up like a table. If anyone were to tell me a chair is a table, I would say: A table? You stupid! that's not a table, that's a chair. And if someone else came along and called the blackboard a table, I'd call him something even stronger, for it's not a table at all but a blackboard. With our language we have to call each thing by its own special name.

That is not so with Chinese. I will put this to you hypothetically; it will not be a precise picture, but you will get the idea from it. Say, then, that Chinese has the sounds OA, IOA, TAO, for instance.

It has then a certain sound for table, but this same sound signifies many other things too. Thus, let us say, such a sound might mean tree, brook, also perhaps pebble. Then it has another sound, let's say, that can mean star, as well as blackboard, and—for instance—bench. (These meanings may not be correct in detail; I mean only to show the way the Chinese language is built up.) And now the Chinese person knows: there are two sounds here, say LAO and BAO, each meaning things that are quite different but also both meaning brook. So he puts them together: BAOLAO. In this way he builds up his language. He does not build it up from names given to single things, but according to the various meanings of the various sounds. A sound may mean tree but it may also mean brook. When, therefore, he combines two sounds, both of which—beside many other things—mean brook, the other man knows that he means brook. But when he utters only one sound, no one knows what he means. In writing there are the same complications. So the Chinese have an extraordinarily complicated language and an extraordinarily complicated script.

And indeed, gentlemen, a great deal follows from this. It follows that for them it is not so easy to learn to read and write as it is for us-nor even to speak. With us, reading and writing can really be called simple; indeed, we are unhappy when our children don't learn quickly to read and write—we think it is “mere child's play.” With the Chinese this is not so; in China one grows quite old before one can write or in any way master the language. So you can easily imagine that the ordinary people are not at all able to do it, that only those who can go on learning up to a great age can at last become proficient. In China, therefore, noble rank is conferred as a matter of course from a spiritual basis on those who are cultured, and this spiritually high rank is called into being by the nature of the language and script. Here again it is not the same as in the West, where various degrees of nobility can be conferred and then passed on from one generation to another. In China rank can be attained only through education and scholarship.

It is interesting, gentlemen, is it not, that if we judge superficially we would surely say: then we don't want to be Chinese. But please don't assume that I am saying we ought to become Chinese, or even particularly to admire China. That is what some people may easily say about it. Two years ago when we had a Congress in Vienna,⁶ someone spoke of how some things in China were managed even today more wisely than we manage them—and immediately the newspapers reported that we wanted Chinese culture in Europe! That is not what was meant. In describing the Chinese culture, praise must be given in a certain way—but only in a certain way—for what it has of spiritual content. But it is a primitive culture, of a kind that can no longer be adopted by us. So you must not think I am agitating for another China in Europe! I simply wish to describe this most ancient of human cultures as it actually existed.

Now—to continue. What I have been saying is related to the whole manner of Chinese thinking and feeling. Indeed, the Chinese (and also the Japanese of more ancient times) occupied themselves a great deal, a very great deal, with art—with their kind of art. They painted, for instance. Now when we paint, it is quite a different affair from the Chinese painting. You see, when we paint (I will make this as simple as possible), when we paint a ball, for example, if the light falls on it, then the ball is bright in one part and dark over in the other, for it is in shadow; the light is falling beyond it. There again, on the light side, the ball is rather bright because there the light is reflected. Then we say: that side is in shadow, for the light is reflected on the other side; and then we have to paint also the shadow the ball throws on the ground. This is one of the characteristics of our painting: we must have light and shade on the objects. When we paint a face, we paint it bright where the light falls, and on the other side we make it dark. When we paint the whole man, if we paint properly, we put shadow in the same way falling on the ground.

But beside this we must pay attention to something else in our picture. Suppose I am standing here and want to paint. I see Herr Aisenpreis sitting in front; there behind, I see Herr Meier, and the two gentlemen at the back quite small. Were I to photograph them, in the photograph also they would come out quite small. When I paint, I paint in such a way that the gentlemen sitting in the front row are quite big, the next behind smaller, the next again still smaller and the one sitting right at the back has a really small head, a really small face. You see, when we paint we take perspective into account. We have to do it that way. We have to show light and shade and also perspective. This is inherent in the way we think.

Now the Chinese in their painting did not recognize light and shade, nor did they allow for perspective, because they did not see as we see. They took no notice of light and shade and no notice of perspective. This is what they would have said: Aisenpreis is certainly not a giant, any more than Meier is a dwarf. We can't put them together in a picture as if one were a giant and the other a dwarf, for that would be a lie, it is not the truth! That's the way they thought about things, and they painted as they thought. When the Chinese and the Japanese learn painting in their way, they do not look at objects from the outside, they think themselves right into the objects. They paint everything from within outwards as they imagine things for themselves. This, gentlemen, constitutes the very nature of Chinese and Japanese painting.

You will realize, therefore, that learning to see came only later to mankind. Human beings in that early China thought only in pictures, they did not form general concepts like “table” and so on, but what they saw they apprehended inwardly. This is not to be wondered at, for the Chinese descended from a culture during which seeing was different. Today we see as we do because there is air between us and the object. This air was simply not there in the regions where the Chinese were first established. In the times from which the Chinese have come down, people did not see in our way. In those ancient times it would have been nonsense to speak of light and shade, for there was not yet any such thing in the density the air then had. And so the Chinese still have no light and shade in their painting, and still no perspective. That came only later. From this you can see the Chinese think in quite a different way; they do not think as men do who came later.

However, this did not in the least hinder the Chinese from going very far in outer cleverness. When I was young—it is rather different now—we learned in school that Berthold Schwarz⁷ invented gunpowder, and this was told us as if there had never been gunpowder before. So Berthold Schwarz, while he was doing alchemistic experiments, produced gunpowder out of sulphur, nitre and carbon. But—the Chinese had made gunpowder thousands of years earlier!

Also we learned in school that Gutenberg⁸ invented the art of printing. We did learn many things that were correct, but in this case it looked to us as if there had formerly been no knowledge of printing. Actually, the Chinese already possessed this knowledge thousands of years earlier. They also had the art of woodcarving; they could cut the most wonderful things out of wood. In such external things the Chinese have had an advanced culture. This was in its turn the last remnant of a former culture still more advanced, for one recognizes that this Chinese art goes back to something even higher.

Thus it is characteristic of the Chinese to think not in concepts but in pictures, and to project themselves right into things. They have been able to make all those things which depend upon outer invention (except when it's a matter of steam-engines or something similar). So the present condition of the Chinese, which we may say is degenerate and uncultivated, has actually come about from centuries of ill-treatment at the hands of the Europeans.

You see that here is a culture that is really spiritual in a certain sense—and really ancient, that goes back to ten thousand years before our time. Much later, in the millennium preceding Christianity, individuals like Lao Tse⁹ and Confucius¹⁰ made the first written record of the knowledge possessed by the Chinese. Those masters simply wrote down what had arisen out of the intercourse among families in this old kingdom. They were not conscious of inventing rules of a moral or ethical nature; they were simply recording their experience of Chinese conduct. Previously, this had been done by word of mouth. Thus everything at that time was basically different. That is what can still be perceived today in the Chinese.

In contrast to this, it is hardly possible to see any longer the old culture of the Japanese people, because they have been entirely Europeanized. They follow European culture in everything. That they did not develop this culture out of themselves can be seen from their inability to discover on their own initiative what is purely European. The following, for example, really happened. The Japanese were to have steamships and saw no reason why they should not be able to manage them perfectly well themselves. They watched how to turn the ship, for instance, how to open the screw, and so on. Their instructors, the Europeans, worked with them for a time, and finally one day the Japanese said proudly: Now we can manage by ourselves, and we will appoint our own captain! So the European instructors were put ashore and off steamed the Japanese to the high seas. When they were ready to turn back, they turned the screw, and the ship turned round beautifully—but no one knew how to close the screw, and there was the ship whirling round and round on the sea, just turning and turning! The European instructors watching from the shore had to take a boat and bring the revolving ship to a standstill.

Perhaps you remember Goethe's poem, “The Magician's Apprentice” where the apprentice watches the spells of the old master-magician? And then, to save himself the trouble of fetching water, he learns a magic verse by which he will be able to make a broom into a water-carrier. One day when the old magician is out, the apprentice begins to put this magic into practice, and recites the words to start the broom working. The broom gets really down to business, and fetches water, and more water, and always more water. But the apprentice forgets how to stop it. Just imagine if you had your room flooded, and your broom went on fetching more and more water. In his desperation the apprentice chops the broom in two—then there are two water-carriers! When everything is drowned in water, the old master returns and says the right words for the broom to become a broom again.

As you know, the poem has been done in eurythmy recently, and the audience enjoyed it immensely. Well, the same kind of thing happened with the Japanese: they didn't know how to turn back the screw, and so the ship continued to go round and round. A regular ship's dance went on out there until the instructors on land could get a boat and come to the rescue.

Surely it is clear from all this that the European sort of invention is impossible for either the Chinese or the Japanese. But as to older inventions such as gunpowder, printing and so forth, they had already gone that far in much more ancient times than the Europeans. You see, the Chinese are much more interested in the world at large, in the world of the stars, in the universe as a whole.

Another people who point back to ancient days are the Indians. They do not go so far back as the Chinese, but they too have an old culture. Their culture may be said to have arisen from the sea later than the Chinese. The people who were the later Indian people came more from the north, settling down in what is now India as the land became free of water.

Now whereas the Chinese were more interested in the world outside, could project themselves into anything, the Indian people brooded more within themselves. The Chinese reflected more about the world—in their own way, but about the world; the Indians reflected chiefly about themselves, about man himself. Hence the culture that arose in India was more spiritualized. In the most remote times Indian culture was still free of religion; only later did religion enter into it. Man was their principal object of study, but their study was of an inward kind.

This too I can best make clear by describing the way the Indians used to draw and paint. The Chinese, looking at a man, painted him simply by entering into him with their thinking—without light and shade or perspective. That is really the way they painted him. Thus, if a Chinese had wanted to paint Herr Burle, he would have thought his way into him; he would not have made him dark there and light here, as we would do today, he would not have painted light and shadow, for they did not yet exist for the Chinese. Nor would he have made the hands bigger by comparison because of their being in front. But if the Chinese had painted Herr Burle, then Herr Burle would really have been there in the picture!

It was quite different with the Indians. Now just imagine the Indians were going to paint a picture: they would have started by painting a head. They too had no such thing as perspective. But they would at once have had the idea that a head could often be different, so they would make another, then a third again different, and a fourth, a fifth would have occurred to them. In this way they would gradually have had twenty or thirty heads side-by-side! These would all have been suggested to them by the one head. Or if they were painting a plant, they imagined at once that this could be different, and then there arose a number of young plants growing out of the older one. This is how it was in the case of the Indians in those very ancient times. They had tremendous powers of imagination. The Chinese had none at all and drew only the single thing, but made their way into this in thought. The Indians had a powerful imagination.

Now you see, gentlemen, those heads are not there. Really, if you look at Herr Burle, you see only one head. If you're drawing him here on the board, you can draw only one head. You are therefore not painting what is outwardly real if you paint twenty or thirty heads; you are painting something thought-out in your mind. The whole Indian culture took on that character; it was an inner culture of the mind, of the spirit. Hence when you see spiritual beings as the Indians thought of them, you see them represented with numbers of heads, numbers of arms, or in such a way that the animal nature of the body is made manifest.

You see, the Indians are quite different people from the Chinese. The Chinese lack imagination whereas the Indians have been full of it from the beginning. Hence the Indians were predisposed to turn their culture gradually into a religious one—which up to this day the Chinese have never done: there is no religion in China. Europeans, who are not given to making fine distinctions, speak of a Chinese religion, but the Chinese themselves do not acknowledge such a thing. They say: you people in Europe have a religion, the Indians have a religion, but we have nothing resembling a religion. This predisposition to religion was possible in the Indians only because they had a particular knowledge of something of which the Chinese were ignorant, namely, of the human body. The Chinese knew very well how to put themselves into something external to them. Now when there are vinegar and salt and pepper on our dinner table and we want to know how they taste, we first have to sample them on our tongue. For the Chinese in ancient times this was not necessary. They already tasted things that were still outside them. They could really feel their way into things and were quite familiar with what was external. Hence they had certain expressions showing that they took part in the outside world. We no longer have such expressions, or they signify at most something of a figurative nature. For the Chinese they signified reality. When I am becoming acquainted with someone and say of him: What a sour fellow he is!—I mean it figuratively; we do not imagine him to be really sour as vinegar is sour. But for the Chinese this meant that the man actually evoked in them a sour taste.

It was not so with the Indians; they could go much more deeply into their own bodies. If we go deeply into our own bodies, it is only when certain conditions are present—then we feel something there. Whenever we've had a meal and it remains in our stomach without being properly digested, we feel pain in our stomach. If our liver is out of order and cannot secrete sufficient bile, we feel pain on the right side of our body—then we are getting a liver complaint. When our lungs secrete too freely so that they are more full of mucus than they should be, then we feel there is something wrong with our lungs, that they are out of order. Today human beings are conscious of their bodies only in those organs that are sick. Those Indians of ancient times were conscious even of their healthy organs; they knew how the stomach, how the liver felt. When anyone wants to know this today, he has to take a corpse and dissect it; then he can examine the condition of the individual organs inside. No one today knows what a liver looks like unless they dissect it; it is only spiritual science that is able to describe it. The Indians could think of inner man; they would have been able to draw all his organs. With an Indian, however, if you had asked him to feel his liver and draw what he felt, he would have said: Liver?—well, here is one liver, here's another, and here's another, and he would have drawn twenty or thirty livers side-by-side.

So, gentlemen, you have there a different story. If I draw a complete man and give him twenty heads, I have a fanciful picture. But if I draw a human liver with twenty or thirty others beside it, I am drawing something not wholly fantastic; it would have been possible for these twenty or thirty livers really to have come into being! Every man has his distinctive form of liver, but there is no absolute necessity for that form; it could very well be different. This possibility of difference, this spiritual aspect of the matter, was far better understood by the Indians than by those who came later. The Indians said: When we draw a single object, it is not the whole truth; we have to conceive the matter spiritually. So the Indians have had a lofty spiritual culture. They have never set great store by the outer world but have had a spiritual conception of everything.

Now the Indians took it for granted that learning should be acquired in accordance with this attitude; therefore, to become an educated man was a lengthy affair. For, as you can imagine, with them it was not just a matter of going deeply into oneself and then being capable all at once of knowing everything. When we are responsible for the instruction of young people, we have first to teach them to read and write, imparting to them in this way something from outside. But this was not so in the case of the ancient Indians. When they wanted to teach someone, they showed him how to withdraw into his inner depths; he was to turn his attention away from the world entirely and to focus it upon his inner being.

Now if anyone sits and looks outwards, he sees you all sitting there and his attention is directed to the outer world. This would have been the way with the Chinese; they directed their attention outwards. The Indians taught otherwise. They said: You must learn to gaze at the tip of your nose. Then the student had to keep his eyes fixed so that he saw nothing but the tip of his nose, nothing else for hours at a time, without even moving his eyes.

Yes indeed, gentlemen, the European will say: How terrible to train people always to be contemplating the tip of their nose! True! for the European there is something terrible in it; it would be impossible for him to do such a thing. But in ancient India that was the custom. In order to learn anything an Indian did not have to write with his fingers, he had to look at the tip of his nose. But this sitting for hours gazing at the tip of his nose led him into his own inner being, led him to know his lungs, his liver, and so forth. For the tip of the nose is the same in the second hour as it is in the first; nothing special is to be seen there. From the tip of his nose, however, the student was able to behold more and more of what was within him; within him everything became brighter and brighter. That is why he had to carry out the exercise.

Now, as you know, when we walk about, we are accustomed to do so on our feet and this going about on our feet has an effect upon us. We experience ourselves as upright human beings when we walk on our feet. This was discouraged for those in India who had to learn something. While learning they had to have one leg like this and sit on it, while the other leg was in this position. Thus they sat, gazing fixedly at the tip of their nose, so that they became quite unused to standing; they had the feeling they were not upright men but crumpled up like an embryo in a mother's womb. You can see the Buddha portrayed in this way. It was thus that the Indians had to learn. Gradually they began to look within themselves, learned to know what is within man, came to have knowledge of the human physical body in an entirely spiritual way.

When we look within ourselves, we are conscious of our paltry thinking; we are slightly aware of our feeling but almost not at all of our willing. The Indians felt a whole world in the human being. You can imagine what different men they were from those who came later. They developed, as you know, a tremendous fantasy, expressed poetically in their books of wisdom—later in the Vedas and in the Vedantic philosophy, which still fill us with awe. It figured in their legends concerning super-sensible things, which still today amaze us.

And look at the contrast! Here were the Indians, there were the Chinese over there, and the Chinese were a prosaic people interested in the outer world, a people who did not live from within. The Indians were a people who looked entirely inward, contemplating within them the spiritual nature of the physical body.

So—I have begun to tell you about the most ancient inhabitants of the earth. Next time I will carry it further, so that we will finally arrive at the time we live in now.

Please continue to bring your questions. There may be details that you would like me to enlarge upon, and I can always at some following meeting answer the questions they have raised. But I can't tell you when the next session will be, because now I must go to Holland. I will send you word in ten days or so.

• 6. The Second International Congress, Vienna, June 1–12, 1922. See The Tension Between East and West.
• 7. Berthold Schwarz, Franciscan monk, Freiburg, around 1300.
• 8. Johann Gutenberg, 1394–1468.
• 9. Lao Tse, Chinese philosopher, 6th century B.C.
• 10. Confucius, 531–478 BC., Chinese ethical teacher.