The Rudolf Steiner Archive

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.

I have spoken to you of our wish to look further into the history connected with the study of the world that we have undertaken. You have seen how the human race has gradually built itself up from the rest of great Nature. It was only when conditions on the earth were such that men were able to live upon it, that is, when the earth had perished, no longer had its own life, only then could human and animal life develop on the earth in the way I have pictured.

We have also seen that to begin with, human life was actually quite different from what it is today, and its field of action was where the Atlantic Ocean is now. We have to imagine that where today the Atlantic Ocean is, there was formerly solid ground. I will make a rough sketch of this. Today we come to Asia over there, this is the Black Sea, below is Africa, this is Russia, and there we find Asia. Here would be England, Ireland, yonder America; formerly all this was land and very little water, but 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 here, on this side there was sea too. Below where India is today—that is Indo-China—the land was appearing a little above the sea. Thus we actually have some land here, and here again land. Where today we find the Asian peoples, the inhabitants of the Near East and those of Europe, there was sea—the land rising up only later. This land, here, went much further, continuing right on to the Pacific Ocean where today there are so many islands, Java, Sumatra, and so on, which are all portions 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.

Now the first peoples we are able to follow up have remained in this region, where the land has been preserved. When we look around us in Europe we can really say: ten, twelve, or fifteen thousand years ago the earth became sufficiently firm for men to dwell upon it. Before this only marine animals were there which developed out of the sea. If at that time you had looked for man, it would have been where the Atlantic Ocean is today. Already fifteen thousand years ago, however, in Asia, in Eastern Asia, there were also men. These men have naturally left descendants, and their descendants are very interesting on account of their culture, the most ancient on earth. These are the peoples referred to today as Mongolians; they include the Japanese and Chinese. They are interesting as being the remnants—the remaining traces—of the oldest inhabitants of the earth.

As you have seen, there was a much older population on the earth, who, however, have been entirely wiped out. They were the peoples who lived in ancient Atlantis, of whom nothing remains. For in this case even if any remains did exist we should have to dig down into the bed of the Atlantic Ocean to find them. We should have to get down to this bed—a more difficult thing to do than people imagine—and dig there to find in all probability nothing, for as I said those people had soft bodies. The culture resulting from what they did is impossible to unearth because it is no longer in existence. Thus, what was there long before the Japanese and Chinese is not accessible to ordinary science; we must have some knowledge of spiritual science if we want to make such discoveries.

What has remained of the Japanese and Chinese peoples, however, is very interesting. You see, the Chinese and older Japanese—not those of today, about whom I shall be speaking presently—these Chinese and Japanese have a culture quite different from ours. We should have a better idea of this had not our good Europeans in recent centuries extended their domination over these spheres, bringing about a complete change. In the case of Japan, this change has been very effective. Although Japan has preserved its name, it has become entirely Europeanized, its people have gradually absorbed everything from the Europeans, and what remains to them 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 domination is not actively established there, but in these 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 has, however, to be mentioned.

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

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

Anthroposophy no longer does this; anthroposophy no longer represents 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 but say: what is here on the earth differs according to climate, according to the nature of the soil where one is. You see, China in the most ancient times was already a big country and is still bigger than Europe today; it is, as you will admit, a gigantic country, has always been gigantic, and has had a tremendously big, 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 also 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 towards the Pacific Ocean. If that is taken into account, the population of the earth cannot be said to have grown.

Thus we find a culture that is quite ancient, and today this culture can still be observed as it actually existed ten thousand, eight thousand, years age. These Chinese said: above in the north the climate is different, the soil is different, from what they are further down; 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 on from warm regions to those where it is cold, and so on. Thus these people said: on earth diversity prevails, but the sun makes everything equal. Hence they saw in the sun a fructifying, levelling 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 of “Son of the Sun.” He was called upon to reign over 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 Son of the Sun. For they took the word son essentially to imply “belonging to something.”

Everything, then, was 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 and so on are the helpers of the sun. They organized everything on earth in accordance to what appeared overhead in the stars. All this was done without prayer, for the Chinese did not know the meaning of it. It was all done without their actually having what later constituted a cult. In what might be called their kingdom, everything was organized in such a way that it was an image of the heavens. It had not yet reached the point of being a state—that is an infliction of modern man; they appointed all their earthly affairs in the image of what appeared to them in the stars above.

Now something came about through this—naturally quite different from what happened later—a man became the citizen of a kingdom. He did not profess any particular creed but felt himself just as member of a kingdom. Originally the Chinese had no gods of any kind; when later they had them, these gods were taken over from the Indians. To begin with, they did not have gods, but all their connection with the super-sensible worlds found expression in the essential nature of their kingdom and its institutions. Hence these institutions had a family quality. The Son of the Sun was at the same time father to all other Chinese and these were at his bidding. Even if it was a kingdom, it partook as a whole of the nature of a family.

All this is possible only for men whose thinking has no resemblance to that of later comers; and the thinking of the Chinese at that time did not at all resemble that of later men. What we think today would have been quite foreign to the Chinese. We think, for example, animal; we think men; we think scales or table. The Chinese did not speak in this way, but they knew: there is a lion, there a tiger, there a bear—not there is an animal. They knew: my neighbour has a table with corners; someone else has a less angular table, a table that is rounder. They gave names to single things, but what a table is never entered their head; the table as such—of that they had no knowledge. They were aware: there stands a man with a bigger head, 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. The Chinese thought in a quite 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, everything with them savouring more of the family. In the family, when a son or a daughter wants to do anything there is no thought of any law of obligation. Today if anyone wants to do anything in Switzerland, the law of obligation, marriage laws, and so on, all come in. This is implicit and has to be applied individually.

Inasmuch as human beings still retain something of the Chinese within them—and there always remains a little—they do not know what to make of the law and must have recourse to a lawyer. They are at sea, too, 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 the individual man could see in each individual case.

Now, to continue. The whole Chinese language, for instance, is influenced by this. 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 like a table. Were anyone to tell me a chair was a table, I should say: a table? How foolish you are; that's no table; it's a chair. And if someone else came along and called the blackboard a table, we should tell him he was even more foolish; it was not a table at all but a blackboard. In accordance with the character of our language we have to call each thing by its special name.

That is not so in the case of the Chinese. I will put this to you hypothetically; it will not give you an exact picture, but you will gather some idea of it. Say, then, that the Chinese has the sound OA, IOA, TAO,¹ and so on. He has perhaps 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 flint. Then he has another sound, let us suppose, that can mean star, as well as table, and bench. (I don't mean that this actually is so in the Chinese language but it is the way the language is built up.) Now the Chinese knows: there are two sounds here, for example LAO and BAO, each meaning some things that are quite different but both signifying brook as well. So he puts them together—BAOLAO. In this way he builds up his language. He does not build it up upon names given to single things, but according to the various meanings of the various sounds. A sound may signify tree but it may also signify brook. When a Chinese therefore combines two sounds which, besides many other things, signify 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.

Indeed, a great deal follows from this. It follows that with them, it is not so easy as with us to learn to read and write—nor even to speak. With us, reading and writing can really be called quite simple; indeed we are disappointed when our children do not learn to read and write—so it must be simple enough for them. In the case of the Chinese this is not so; in China one grows quite old before one can write or in any way master the language. Hence you can imagine that the ordinary people are not able to do all this, and only those who can go on learning up to a great age can at last become proficient, In China, therefore, spiritual nobility is conferred as a matter of course on those who are cultured, and this spiritual nobility is called into being by the nature of the language and of the script. Here again it is not the same as in the West where some degree of nobility having been conferred, it can be passed on from generation to generation. In China it was possible to acquire rank only by being learned.

It is strange that if we are willing to judge superficially, at this point we are emphatic: then we do not want to be Chinese! But you must not understand me to say that we ought to become Chinese or for that matter particularly to admire China—although that is what some people may easily say afterwards. When two years ago we had a congress in Vienna, one of us spoke of how some things in China were managed even today more wisely than with us. Immediately the newspapers were saying that we wanted Chinese culture in Europe! But that is not what was meant. In describing Chinese culture, in a certain way—but only in a certain way—praise must be given for what it has of spiritual content. It is primitive, however, and of a kind that can no longer be adopted by us. So you must not think I am looking for another China in Europe. I am simply wishing to describe this most ancient of human cultures as it actually existed.

Now—to proceed. What I have said here is connected with the whole manner of Chinese thinking and feeling. Indeed the Chinese, and the Japanese of more ancient times as well, occupied themselves a great deal, a very great deal, with a kind of art—they painted, for instance. Now when we paint, it is quite a different affair from the Chinese painting. I will show you this as simply as possible: when we paint a ball, for example, if the light falls in this way, the ball is bright here, and there dark 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; and here we have to paint 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 (a drawing is made), and over here we make it dark. When we paint the whole man, if we paint rightly, we put shadow in the same way falling on the ground. But besides all this we must pay attention to something else in our picture. Suppose I am standing there and want to paint; I see Mr. A. sitting in front; there behind, Mr. M., and the two other gentlemen sitting right at the back—I must paint these too. Mr. A. will be quite big and the two gentlemen right at the back quite small. Were I to photograph them, in the photograph also they would come out quite small. When I paint I do it in such a way that the gentlemen sitting in the front row are represented as being quite big, the next behind smaller, the next again still smaller and the one sitting right at the back has a tiny little head, a tiny little face. There you see we have to paint in accordance with perspective. This too has to be done with us. We have to paint in accordance with the light and shade and also with perspective. This is inherent in the very way we think.

Now the Chinese in their painting recognized neither light nor shadow, nor did they recognize perspective, because they did not see at all in the we do. They took no notice of light and shade or perspective, for this is what they would have said: A. is certainly not a giant any more than M. is a diminutive 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 would not be the truth! This is the way they thought about everything, and they painted as they thought. When they learn to paint, the Japanese and the Chinese do not learn by looking at objects from the outside, they think themselves right into the objects; they paint everything from within outwards in the way they have to imagine it to themselves. This 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 China at that time thought in their own way in pictures; they did not form general concepts like table and so on, but what they saw they apprehended inwardly. This is nothing to wonder at, for the Chinese descended from a culture during which seeing was different. Today we see in the way we do because there is air between us and the object. This air was indeed not there (this is no longer so in modern China. I am speaking of 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 more ancient times it would have been nonsense to speak of light and shade, for there was not yet any such thing in the density of the air. Thus with the Chinese it is a case of their having no light and shade in what they paint—nor do they have perspective. That only comes later. From this you see how the Chinese inwardly think in a quite different way; they do not think like the men who came later.

All this, however, did not in the least hinder the Chinese from going very far where cleverness in outward affairs is concerned. When I was young—it is rather different now—we learned at school that Berthold Schwarz invented gunpowder, and this was said as if there had never been gunpowder before. Berthold Schwarz, when making alchemistic experiments, produced gunpowder out of sulphur, nitre, and carbon. But the Chinese had made gunpowder thousands of years before!

At school we were taught that Guttenberg discovered how to print. We learned many things that are quite correct, but it always looked as if formerly there had been no knowledge of printing. Thousands of years ago the Chinese already possessed this knowledge, just as they had the art of woodcarving—knew how to cut the most wonderful things out of wood. In these outward affairs, the Chinese have had an advanced culture. This culture was in its turn the last remnant of a former culture still more advanced, for one recognizes in this Chinese art that it goes back to something even higher.

It is characteristic of the Chinese, then, to think not in concepts but in pictures, also to project themselves right inside objects. Thus they have been able to make all those things which depend upon outer invention—that is, when it is not a matter of steam engines or anything of that kind. So the present condition of the Chinese, which we may say is degenerate and uncultivated, has actually arisen as the result of years of ill-treatment at the hands of Europeans.

Thus you see that here we have a culture which in a certain sense is really spiritual—a culture which is quite ancient and goes back ten thousand years before our time. Comparatively late, in the millennium preceding Christianity, people like Lao Tse and Confucius made the first written record of knowledge possessed by the Chinese. Those old masters simply wrote down what had arisen out of the family intercourse in this old kingdom. They were not conscious of inventing rules of a moral or ethical nature, but merely recorded their experience of Chinese conduct. Previously this had been done by word of mouth. Thus everything at that time was basically different.

This is something that may to a certain extent still be perceived in the Chinese—hardly in the Japanese any longer because in everything they follow European culture. That this culture has not developed out of themselves can be seen in their inability to discover on their own initiative what is purely European. For example, the following once really happened. The Japanese were to have steamships and saw no reason why they would not be able to manage them perfectly well. They covertly made a study of how to turn the ship, to manipulate the screw, and so on. They then had instructors, Europeans, to work with them for a time until one day the Japanese said with pride: Now we can manage on our own, appoint our own captain! So the European instructors were put ashore and off steamed the Japanese to the high seas. Wanting then to try revolving the ship they turned the screw, when lo and behold, the ship twisted round—but no one knew what to do next, and there was the ship whirling round and round on the sea, puffing out smoke and just turning and turning. The European instructors watching from the shore had to take a boat and bring the revolving ship to a standstill. You remember perhaps Goethe's poem called “The Magician's Apprentice”—we have performed it in eurythmy—where the apprentice listens to the spells of the old master- magician. As a result, to save himself the trouble of fetching water, by mean? of a magic formula he converts a broom into a water-carrier. One day when the old magician is out, the apprentice decides to put this idea into practice, and remembers the words to start the broom working. The broom gets down to the business of fetching water, of bringing more and always more water. Now the apprentice forgets how to stop it, 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 comes back and says the right words to make the broom become a broom again.

Well, the same kind of thing happened with the Japanese; they did not know how the screw had to be manipulated, and so the ship continued to go round and round. A regular ship's dance went on out there until the instructor-; on land could get a boat and come to the rescue.

It becomes clear from this that the invention of European things is an impossibility for both the Chinese and the Japanese. But where the invention of older affairs is concerned, such as gunpowder, printing, and so forth, they had already got as far as that in much more ancient times. You see, the Chinese is much more interested in the world around him, in the world of the stars as well as in the outside world generally.

Another people who point us back to ancient days are the Indians, but they do not go as far back as the Chinese. The Indian people also have an old culture. This old culture, however, might be said to have arisen from the sea later than the Chinese. The people in India who were the later Indian people came more from the north, settling down here as the land became free of water.

Now whereas the Chinese interested themselves in what was in the world outside, could project themselves into anything, these 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 went deeper. In the most remote times Indian culture was still free of religion; only later did religion enter into what at first was still without it. Man was their principal object of study, but this study was of an inward kind.

In this case, too, I can best explain matters by the way in which the Indians used to draw and paint. The Chinese, looking at a man, painted him simply by entering into him with their own thinking—without light, shade, or perspective. That is really the way they painted him. Thus, if a Chinese had wanted to paint Mr. B., he would have thought his way in to him; he would not have made him dark there and light here, as we would do today; he would not have painted light and shade because they did not yet exist for him. Neither would he have made the hands bigger in comparison because of being in front. But if our Chinese had painted Mr. B., then Mr. B. 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 heads. They too, had no such thing as perspective. But they would at once have had the idea that the head might possibly be different, so they straightway made another, then a third again different, and a fourth, a fifth. In this way, they would gradually have had 20 or 30 heads side by side! All these would have been suggested to them by the one head. Or in the case of a plant, if they were painting a plant, they imagined at once that this might be different, and 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 right into this in thought. The Indians had this powerful imagination.

But you see those heads are not there; if you look at Mr. B. you see only one head; hence if you were painting him it is only one head that you can paint. You are, therefore, not painting what is outwardly real if you paint 20 or 30 heads; you are painting something merely thought-out in your mind. The whole Indian culture took on that character; it was a quite inward culture of the mind, of the spirit. Hence when you see the spiritual beings of the Indians, as the Indians have thought of them, they have been represented with numbers of heads, numbers of arms, or in such a way that what is of an animal nature in the body is made manifest.

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 gradually to turn their culture 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 the Chinese having a religion, but the Chinese themselves do not admit it. They say: You in Europe have a religion; the Indians have a religion; we, say the Chinese, have nothing resembling your religion. This tendency was possible, however, in the Indians only because they had particular knowledge of something of which the Chinese were ignorant—namely, the human body. The Chinese knew well how to put themselves into anything external to them. Now when there are vinegar, salt and pepper on our dinner table and we want to know what they taste like, we have first to sample the pepper, salt, vinegar on our tongue. In the case of a Chinese in olden times, this was not necessary. He tasted things that were still outside him; he could really put himself into things and was quite familiar with what was external to him. Hence he had certain expressions showing that he took part in the outside world. We no longer have such expressions, or at most they signify for us something of a figurative nature. For the Chinese, they signified a reality. When, on getting to know someone, I say of him: what a sour fellow he is!—we mean it figuratively; we do not imagine him really to be sour in the way vinegar is sour. But for a Chinese this meant that the man actually evoked in him a sour taste.

It was not so with the Indians; the Indians for their part 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 that we can feel anything there. If every time we have had a meal, this meal 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 gall, we feel pain on the right side of our body—then we get a liver complaint. When our lungs exude too freely, secrete too much so that they become more full of mucous that they should be, then we feel that there is something wrong with our lungs, that they are out of order. Human beings today are conscious of their bodies only in those organs that are sick. Those men of more ancient times, the Indians, felt when a man's organs were sound; they knew how the stomach or the liver felt. When today anyone wants to know this, he has to take a corpse and dissect it; he then examines the condition of the separate 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 thought man from within and would have been able to draw all his organs. In the case of an Indian, however, who had been asked to feel the liver and to draw what he felt, he would have said: Liver—well, here is another liver, another and yet another, and he would have drawn 20 or 30 livers side-by-side.

But you have there a different story. If I give a complete man 20 heads, I have a fanciful picture. But if I draw the human liver with 20 or 30 others beside it, I am drawing something not wholly fantastic; it would have been possible for these 20 or 30 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. Hence 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.

Indians thought it very important that learning should actually be acquired in accordance with this; hence, to become an educated man was a lengthy affair. For, as you can imagine, it was not just a matter of a man going deeply into himself and 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, write, and so on, in this way imparting to them something from outside. But this was not so in the case of the Indians. When they wanted to teach anyone, they showed him how to withdraw into his inner depths; he had indeed to turn his attention as far as possible away from the world 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 did something different. 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, the European will say: How terrible to train people to be always contemplating the tip of their nose. True, for the European there is something terrible in it; it is impossible for him to do the same. 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, into what was within—for the tip of the nose is the same in the first hour as it is in the second, and nothing particular 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. This 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 feel ourselves to be upright men when walking on our feet. This was discouraged for those in India who were to learn something. While learning they had to have one leg like this and to sit on it, while the other leg was in this position. Thus they sat, gazing fixedly at the tip of their noses, so that they became quite unaccustomed to stand and had the feeling they were no longer upstanding men but crumpled up like an embryo in the 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 them, 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 us, we are conscious of our paltry thinking, learn something of our feeling but almost nothing of our willing. The Indians felt a whole world in the human being. Naturally you can imagine what different men they were from those who came later. Then, as you know, they developed those tremendous powers of imagination expressed in poetical form in their books of wisdom—later, in the Vedas and in the Vedantic philosophy, which still fill us with admiration. It figured in all their legends concerning super-sensible things—even today objects of wonder.

Now look what a contrast! Here were the Indians, here the Chinese, and the Chinese were a prosaic people, interested in what was outside, a people who did not live from within. The Indians were a people who looked entirely inwards, actually contemplating within them the spiritual nature of the physical body.

I have begun by telling you something about the most ancient inhabitants of the earth. Next time I shall be continuing, so that in our historical survey we shall finally arrive at the actual time in which we are living.

• 1. The German pronunciation of the vowel sounds has been used:
  German a, English ah (as in father)
  German i, English ee (as in feet)

Today, we will begin by talking about the intentions of the personalities participating in this course and how to develop an attitude towards our tasks.

If you want to fulfill the intentions associated with this course, you will go out in the near future to work for the impulse of threefolding in the world. This work is eminently necessary in our time. And we must start from this conviction that it is a necessity. We must be clear about the fact that it is basically high time to work for this impulse of threefolding, which we must consider as the unconditional demand of the civilization of the present.

We must, however, from the outset, take a position that excludes any kind of scepticism in our hearts towards the impulse of threefolding, while we are informing ourselves about the conditions of this work during these days. Because you will not be able to work if you are still somehow sceptical about the matter today. In the course of this course, we will be able to see how not only what we say or do has an effect in the world, but how certain imponderables, unspoken things, must accompany our speaking and our actions if we want to have an effect.

Furthermore, we must be clear about the fact that all the old forces of civilization, which are in a state of decline, are revolting against this impulse of threefolding, developing antagonisms, and that we have a great deal to struggle with if we want to bring this impulse of threefolding to bear with our strength. And we will have all the more to struggle with the more we have a certain success on the other side. Such success does not make the struggle any less, but sharpens it more and more. And you will have to arm yourselves against the very thing that asserts itself as struggle. Of course, I do not mean to say that we should prepare ourselves for struggle to any great extent; that is not what could advance us. But we must be aware of how strongly this fight will unfold in the near future, especially if we manage to get through it.

What I would like to say today will, so to speak, be individual psychological starting points. Of course, the only thing to be discussed here is to characterize the factual basis for your work. I would like to emphasize from the outset that this cannot be a guide to political-social or other oratory, but rather to creating the positive foundations for working in the spirit of the impulse of the threefold social organism. And here you may initially feel that I am putting it in rather general terms, if I start with some very general rules, which, however, will be of extraordinary importance for us if we think them through in a very concrete way.

You will only succeed in what you want to achieve if you act from two basic forces in your soul, and since today it is an extraordinarily serious matter that must permeate our cause and inspire our work , then we must first become fully aware, fully conscious, that we will not get ahead without developing these two basic powers of our soul: first, to speak out of a real love for the cause, and second, out of an insightful love for our fellow human beings. Be clear about this: if these two conditions are not present or if they are replaced by others, say by ambition or vanity, then no matter how logical your judgments are, you will be unable to achieve anything. The conditions for working through the word are basically not something that lies in the formation, in the shaping of the word alone. You need only start from the way in which effects are most often achieved by the word in our present day, and you will understand what I have told you.

Just imagine: two speakers appear before an audience. One of them is an unknown person with extraordinary insights, with a penetrating power of speech, and with full justification of the matter, and another speaker would appear before the same audience, as things are now, and he has held some public position for a long time, be it as the representative NN, the statesman NN, the well-known industrialist NN or the scholar NN. He will work with far less urgent motives, with a cause that is far less justified. What makes an impact is something that is added to the content of the spoken word. But we cannot base our work on such things as I have just characterized them.

But there are also other things that must characterize our speech, and these are precisely the two soul qualities of which I spoke: real love for the cause, which alone can carry inner conviction, and love for humanity. Of course, these two soul forces cannot replace what the content of the spoken word is. The content of the spoken word must, of course, be unimpeachable. But it has no effect if it is not supported by the two soul forces that I have mentioned. Therefore, today, when we are more inclined to dismiss, I would say, the formalities, it must be said that we must bear in mind the extent to which we have these two forces present in our souls. If we come to the conclusion that we do not have them, then it might be better not to participate in the important action that is to be undertaken, because it would be wasted strength, wasted labor. And one would be convinced that the effect of something that arises from other impulses could not be great, while the effect of something that arises from love for the cause that carries the conviction and from love of humanity may initially be directly small, but it will nevertheless be there.

My dear friends, the truth chooses all manner of paths, which are unobservable at first, in order to come among people, and it just so happens that where the two imponderables, love for the cause and love for humanity, are present, there must also be an effect, even if it does not initially come to light. We can be sure of that.

But other things must be added. There must be full insight into what we are speaking about today when we present such a matter as the impulse of threefolding to the public. We must not have any illusions about the state of mind of the people to whom we are speaking, about the conditions that are given by the fact that we have to speak to the people of the present. Among these people of the present age there are by no means a few who are quite capable of absorbing what we have to say to them. But it is particularly true of the majority of the leading personalities of the present age that the forces of those people who would be capable of absorbing the impulse of threefolding are initially suppressed, and quite brutally at that.

Let us dwell as little as possible on generalities and go straight to the details. The most common thing people say when you approach them with something like the impulse of threefolding is something like this: Yes, especially in Central Europe, the need and misery are there first. We have to fight for the dry crust. It is the economic interests that we must take into account first. What use are lofty ideals? What use is what is presented from spiritual backgrounds? You will hear this objection in all keys. And one cannot deny that it arises from the oppressed souls of the present. At first glance, it has a certain justification. But if we let the most important questions of the present, which could become the foundations for our work, pass before our souls, we will see that this view, that today it can only be about solving economic questions, is based on a complete illusion. For it assumes another question, or rather the answer to another question, as if it were self-evident; but it is not self-evident. The starting point, namely, is the assumption - and we shall be discussing this matter in great detail shortly - that it is not the fault of human beings, not this or that human being, but of human beings in general, that the civilized world has ended up in its present situation.

When we consider the world economy spread across the whole earth – and it must be considered today – then we have to say to ourselves: nature gives us no less today than at any other time, if we can properly wrest its results from it and if we can distribute these results in the right way among people – as a whole of humanity, of course. That people today are in a greater state of emergency than they were before is not caused by physical factors, but is caused precisely by the spirit of people. If people are in need today, it is because of wrong spirituality, wrong thinking. Therefore, there can be no other way out of this emergency than to replace wrong thinking with right thinking. It is not nature, nor some unknown forces that have brought humanity to its present situation, but it is people themselves who have brought these things about. When there is hardship, it is people who have brought about this hardship; when people have nothing to eat, it is people who do not let this food reach them. Therefore, it is important not to start from the wrong premise: some unknown forces have caused the hardship, and one must first remove this hardship before one can start thinking in the right way – but to make it clear: because the hardship is caused by people's wrong thinking, only right thinking can remove this hardship.

We must look at this superstition from every conceivable angle. It says that we can provide bread for humanity, and then, when they have enough bread, they will also come to better thinking. This is a terrible superstition. And nothing beneficial will ever be able to penetrate into today's civilization unless people decide to discard it and replace it with the right faith, which consists of a reversal, a re-education of thinking about the things of this world itself. This is also what must gradually enter a sufficiently large number of human minds.

But we shall only find the opportunity to speak to these people if we first rid ourselves of any illusions about two things. The first is the fact that at present there is, to a great extent, no sense of the productivity of intellectual life. The silliness with which, not so long ago, the phrase “the road to success is open to the brave” was coined – not the word, but the way the word was coined – was a silliness that should be thoroughly eradicated from people's minds in view of the facts that prevail in today's civilization. For the facts of today's civilization are such that they, by their very nature, always carry a selection, a selection of the unfit, to the top.

We live today in a time that particularly favors the unfit. We will also talk about this in detail and will have to seek the forces that lead to this selection of the unfit in particular in our time. Today, I would like to start by saying just one thing. But I do ask that we take into account the following: we must stand firm from the outset here, in that we are aware that we are talking among ourselves and creating the conditions for our work, we must stand firm from the outset here, in that we are aware that we are talking among ourselves and creating the conditions for our work, we must stand firm from the outset here, in that we are aware that we are talking among ourselves and creating the conditions for our work, we must stand firm from the outset here, in that we are aware that we are talking among ourselves and creating the conditions for our work, we must stand firm from the outset here, in that we are aware that we are talking among ourselves and creating the conditions for our work, we must stand firm from the outset here, in that we are aware that we are talking among ourselves and creating the conditions for our work, we must stand firm from the outset here, in that we are aware that we are talking among ourselves and creating the conditions for our work, we must stand firm from the By standing on this ground, we will be able to see what I am about to say now not as an immodesty or the like, but as something that is factually related to the conditions of our work in general.

Take the “Key Points of the Social Question”. Consider the way in which it is often understood today, look at the things that are put forward by the opponents, and then try to judge what the opponents are saying from. You will only be able to get to the bottom of these issues through a psychological approach, through psychological observation. The opponents usually talk past the content of these “key points” – I am of course referring to the book. As a rule, there is hardly any reference in what they talk about to what the content of the “key points” actually is. For example, I recently discussed the content of the “key points” in Bern. Afterwards, the economist from the university spoke for three quarters of an hour. In not a single sentence did he succeed in addressing the content of the “key points” themselves. This can be proven. And he certainly did not address the content of the lecture. He was completely unprepared because he did not know the “key points”, did he?

So what do people feel when they approach the ideas of the threefold social order? Why do they form things out of the depths of their souls that don't fit at all? Because they feel something very special. They sense, without being aware of it, what is active in them. They sense that if the impulse for threefolding, as set forth in the Key Points, were to take root in the world, it would bring about a selection of the able, and the unworthy would be pushed down from their pedestal. For the impulse that lies in the threefold social organism is one that takes effect in the most real way as soon as it is carried into humanity in some way. But it works unconditionally to exclude the incapable from being effective. This is what people feel in the subconscious. Of course, they cannot say this, so they come to what they do say. If a psychologist makes an effort to understand what people are saying, especially if he makes an effort to analyze the way they work, then he will certainly come to a confirmation of what I have just said. And in the end, all this is based on the fact that in the present day there is actually no sense of spiritual productivity. People have become too accustomed to letting the spiritual be carried by the impersonal or by the personal, which is not itself spiritual: by the state or by state personalities who do not primarily have the living spirit as such in mind.

You only have to look at things in detail, you only have to ask yourself: What do the theological faculties want? Today, in the theological faculties, the aim is much less to get behind the secret of the spiritual primal forces of the world than to create useful religious officials in the service of the state or the denominations. In jurisprudence, the aim is not to seek the reasons and essence of the law, but to teach people what is customary in a particular state, what has been established by those who did not want to create the essence of the law either, but who, out of some interest, made this or that into a law. And so one could go through all the things that ultimately become leading in spiritual life, and one would see everywhere that there is hardly any sense in the present for the productive element of the spirit, which must actually carry civilization, for the living influence of the spirit into human souls.

People have gradually been educated to a lameness of intellect, to mere thinking without this thinking being imbued with the will. People are absorbed in a merely contemplative thinking. You will see this first hand as an experience when you give your lectures. You will be able to experience it again and again, that the people who listen may even be satisfied by one or the other thing they hear; the words rush to the ear, enter the soul; people have a certain voluptuousness about the thoughts; they feel satisfied in them; they would most like to hear just that which fills them with a certain inner voluptuousness. But inwardly they are always somewhat annoyed when one expects of them that the words should not remain words, but that the whole person should be filled with them and energetically, from the point of view that the words open up, must now intervene in life, if the words are to have any consequence. For centuries people have been accustomed to a certain way of receiving the word. When they listened to the preacher in the pulpit, they sat in the pew, and the sermon should be “beautiful,” should draw them inward with a certain warmth, though it was usually a philistine warmth. They wanted to feel a certain inner voluptuousness, and also have a certain inner yearning of the soul satisfied, so that the satisfaction comes from outside. But then, when you had left the sermon, you didn't want what was offered in the sermon to really penetrate your life. Of course, people said that often enough, but basically it never happened for a long time. You are well aware of how things stand today in this regard with other things that are said. It cannot be said that in most cases young people today enter the university doors with a certain inner passion to go through their hours, that they have an enormous inner warmth and cannot wait to hear what the teacher will say tomorrow based on what he said today. There seem to be more cases where people just sit out their hours because it's their duty to do so – or maybe many don't even sit them – and where they are then glad to have crammed in what is necessary for the exam, which which really does not determine whether one is an able and capable person, but rather whether one has what it takes to become a good theological or legal official, that is, to fit into any state structure in an appropriate way.

Under these conditions, we shall see what factors were at work in the last centuries, but especially in the 19th century, the sense of the living work of the spirit in humanity was gradually lost. Think what truly effective religions would have become if they had not proceeded from this sense of the living spirit. All religions that have become religions at all did not start from what our present-day intellectual life starts from, namely, that everything we carry in our minds is basically just an ideology, a sum of abstractions. Rather, the religions started from the premise that the objective spirit present in the world has revealed itself through certain personalities, that it has worked as such, that the spirit is something real, a real power. Most people who are involved in today's spiritual life hardly understand anything about this.

Recently, I was extremely interested to learn the following. Based on the idea expressed in the first chapter of my book Kernpunkte, I said that, from the spiritual side, an essential part of the proletarian question is that the modern proletariat regards all spiritual life, customs, law, art, religion, science, and so forth, as an ideology, and that it is this conception of the spiritual life as an ideology that forms the basis for the desolation of souls, which then, by virtue of their instincts, arrive at what in many respects is today the social movement. I have explained this in my “Key Points”. I recently hinted at it in a lecture, and a professorial debater understood the matter so well that he said, roughly: Yes, it was stated that the proletariat lives in a kind of ideology in spiritual terms; but that cannot be stated, because all classes, all estates, all of humanity lives in ideology all the time; it is quite natural that everyone lives in ideology! The good man has absolutely no concept of what is meant here, because he has completely lost the concept of the reality of spiritual life. It was a matter of course for him that what fills our spirit and our soul is an ideology. As a good bourgeois, he could not grasp anything other than that one lives quite justifiably within the ideology; so if the proletariat lives in it, that cannot be the reason for the social impulses of the present!

You see, these things are so thoroughly ingrained in those who are “the educated” today that one must speak of it: people have no sense of the productivity of the spiritual life. We must give the people of the present age a concept of this productivity of the spiritual life, of the creative spirit, of the power of the spirit. That is the first thing that is needed. This is the one thing about which we must have no illusions, for otherwise we would not know how to speak to the people of the present age.

The second issue is that, basically, the sense of the needs of other human beings has been lost due to the particular form of social life that has emerged in recent centuries. But without this sense of the needs of other human beings, there can be no shaping of economic life at all. Economic life can only be shaped by people who, in their thoughts about economic life, can initially disregard their own needs and who have a feeling for the needs of some other people and thus learn to feel for humanity. What is needed in economic life is insightful understanding of what can be called the consumption of humanity.

Economic life consists of production, circulation of commodities, and consumption. But it is not primarily the business of economic life to control production and to ensure that the right amount of energy goes into production. You can see this from the “key points”: capital is first put into circulation by the spiritual member of the social organism. The way in which one produces is a purely spiritual question. The question of consumption is essentially an economic question. Of course, those who are members of economic associations must have the opportunity to control and organize production on the basis of intellectual life; but one only learns about the intensity of production, the nature of production, if one has a sense for the needs of other people and not only for one's own, not even as a group.

But what has emerged in more recent times? In those talking shops that we call parliaments – it is, after all, a literal translation, and a very apt one at that – the custom of forming interest groups has become widespread. Federation of Industrialists, Federation of Farmers, and so on. In the Austria that was the basis for the outbreak, there were initially four economic interest groups at the starting point of chatterism. So, just the opposite of what leads to real economic understanding has actually been at work recently. Interest groups, that is, people were there who said from the outset: I decide what I think is right, depending on whether I am interested in the matter. However, in economic life, decisions can only be made if one can abstract from one's own interests and has a sense of the interests of others.

I had already expressed this years ago in a series of articles entitled “Theosophy and the Social Question”. There I formulated with a certain certainty what I am saying now. But you see, with such things I always meant something that should not just be talked about, otherwise one could also say it in parliament, in the chatterbox, but with such a thing I always meant something that concerns all of humanity, that should evoke a response. I stopped doing it back then because no one cared about it. Of course, theoretically some people may have taken an interest. But for a long time now, it is no longer enough to be interested only in theory. For the social forces that arose in humanity in earlier centuries have passed away. Today we need words that can also have an immediate social impact. What I mean by this may become clear to you if I say the following. Take the most radical socialists, the communists, the Leninists, the Trotskyists and so on, take them all. Do they start from a fundamental principle of social life? No, they take a framework, something that is already there. Even Lenin and Trotsky do not take something objective as a basis, but the existing state, from which they start. So the Communists do not take some objective thing either, some territory with a coherent economic life and the like, but they take existing frameworks and start from them because they do not dare, however radical they may otherwise be, to create frameworks first. They do not dare to start from the beginning.

Look around you in another area: today, even the educated flock to Roman Catholicism in droves. A Young Catholic Party is now being formed, which will probably take on very strong dimensions. Why? Because people today do not dare to search for the beginnings of an intellectual life in their souls, because they do not dare to start from something original. They want to lean on something that already exists. They want to run into what is already there. Because people do not want strong inner activity that draws from the original. They do not dare to do that. But that is precisely what we need. To achieve this, we have to awaken a sense of purpose in people. And that is what we need now. It is high time that European civilization came to an understanding in a sufficiently large number of people. That is what we need: to start from principles of origin, and not to lose ourselves in abstractions.

In that essay, “Theosophy and the Social Question,” I said that social life can only become healthy through people who start from the interests of others. In response to this, the abstract thinkers usually say something like, “That's nothing new, it's been said long ago.” If you then ask them where it was said, you learn: by Schopenhauer. He said quite correctly: “It is easy to preach morals; it is difficult to establish morals”; namely, morals must be based on compassion. Yes, you see, there you have the abstraction! In Schopenhauer you find an empty abstraction, which as such is quite correct. Because if you want to be abstract, you can say: to have a sense of the interests of others is to have compassion. But you have transformed the concrete fact that leads you to intervene in life into a shadowy abstraction. And with these shadowy abstractions, something is given with which people are very satisfied. If you come to people with something very concrete, as has just been attempted in the literature of threefold social order, then the opponents come and say: Yes, that is all already there! If you then look into what they mean, they mean some shadowy abstraction. One person finds that everything I have just pointed out is already contained in Schopenhauer's doctrine of compassion, another perhaps even in Kant's categorical imperative, and so on. This is a point to which we must look very carefully so that we can find the possibility of taking up the essential.

And so it is necessary that we do not speak out of some prejudice about what is right, but that we constantly let ourselves be dictated to by what we notice around us, that we let ourselves be taught by what people have and, above all, by what they do not have. But for that we need to really familiarize ourselves with what is happening in the present.

You see, it is of course right to defend oneself against the attacks that are now coming from all sides against anthroposophy and also against the threefold social order. But defense alone is not enough. We must be fully aware of that. No matter how well we defend ourselves against certain currents in the present day from which the personalities who attack us come, there is not much that can be done with defense. Take, for example, the type of religious Dadaist who recently wrote in the “Tat”, his name is Michel. A real religious Dadaist, that is what actually characterizes him. And no matter how much you defend him, you cannot deal with such a person. You will never be able to deal with him. Because what emanates from anthroposophy, what emanates from the threefold social order, he does not understand even in a subordinate clause. Such a person has the feeling, for example, that he should only write nouns when he writes. Although he is always speaking of “grace” and of what Catholicism has given him, in his feelings and in his way of perceiving things, which of course comes from the standpoint of a religious Dadaism, he is quite materialistic in his outlook. If he senses that in order to think spiritually about the spiritual, one must dissolve the nouns, then he calls it a “lack of style”. From his point of view this is quite understandable. But naturally you will never be finished discussing or defending it. Of course one can point out such impurities, that is all well and good, but one cannot achieve anything through these defensive measures alone.

And we must become fully aware of this if we want to be effective: today it cannot be a matter of merely defending ourselves against the attacks. That may be necessary sometimes. But what is at issue is that we get to know the currents of the time, the directions that are there, and characterize them ruthlessly before the world. It is not really about the spirit of Michel or something similar, but about this particular kind of religious Dadaism. It must be characterized before the world. It is not Mr. Michel who is of interest, but this particular kind of religious impotence, which is becoming a current. We must present it in such a way that, as it were, from the mirror in which we show such currents to people, those people who are also there and still have a healthy feeling can see what it is about. Of course, this is much more difficult than mere dialectical defense. But this is especially necessary. We must familiarize ourselves with what is in the undercurrents of our contemporary civilization. Then we will grasp it at the root and place it before the present.

In this respect, a great deal is contained in the material that is simply available from the lectures I have given since April 1919. In these lectures, I have always tried to point out the so-called intellectual and economic currents at work in the present day, and to characterize individual personalities as they had to be characterized. But most of these things have been buried. They lie there. They have certainly been read. But further work must be done. The ideas must be taken up and developed.

That is what is at stake. Then, gradually – now we no longer have much time to do so, the “gradually” could take a long time – then, gradually, something will emerge in our movement for the threefold social order that is a positive, fruitful critique of contemporary civilization as a whole. And it is on the foundation of a thorough critique of contemporary civilization that we must build up the positive ideas that are to enter into hearts and minds. People must realize how fragmented what is present in the current trends is, and that much of it is only a rehashing of something old. For when they see how it is splitting up, they will be inclined to accept the positive things we have to say, because the leading personalities are actually living in illusions everywhere. Until something catastrophic comes from one corner or another, people will continue to deny any danger. That is the characteristic of the present time.

So every day we have to make a new effort to show people how the illusions they are shrouded in must shatter. From this point of view, it is extremely interesting to study how the fear of the leading personalities initially worked when we started our threefolding movement in 1919. At first, for a few weeks, there was still a general atmosphere of fear. In the first few weeks, one could see quite clearly how, among certain industrial and commercial people, the question arose, half grudgingly and half reluctantly, which they naturally understood in their own way: How are we to get along with the Socialists? How are we to do this or that? And they deigned to talk about such things, even if they mostly did so with caricatures of socialization issues. Then a few weeks passed, the socialists did one foolish thing after another, and then the leading personalities of the old days were back on top.

This is an interesting movement that could be observed, because it showed how strong the tendency is not to simply move on to inner activity, but to devote oneself to what already exists, to work from what already exists and not to realize at all that one is basically dancing on a volcano. Even now, it is quite true that people are unsuspecting. It is therefore necessary to create understanding in the broadest circles for the fragmentation of our civilization in all areas. In these lectures, we will discuss how one finds this. Today, I wanted to emphasize the formal aspects and show where we should focus our thoughts first. After all, these days you cannot effectively represent a cause through external things alone.

For a long time, the education of humanity was entirely theoretical. And today, every person – especially the so-called practitioners, whose practice is basically just routine – has the theorist breathing down their neck. They have some theoretical phrases that they “implement in reality”. This is why so-called reality, so-called practice, is so unreal today. It is indeed completely unreal because people are educated to be theorists. Our entire school system was designed to intellectualize people, to turn them into theorists. And that is what we must come to: that we stop representing anything theoretically, — that every word is an inner deed,

It is extremely interesting, for example, to study the debates that have taken place in political economy regarding the idea that only physical labor productively creates goods, but that intellectual labor does not, that intellectual labor is unproductive. In the literature on political economy you will find extensive discussions of this. And two of the most important leading figures in political economy in the 19th century, in particular, started from this principle as from an axiom: Karl Marx and Rodbertus. Both take the view that intellectual work does not create goods, that only physical labor creates goods. This view is to be understood historically. But the way it is put forward is based on the idea that, for example, manual labor exhausts a person when it is performed, and the exhausted strength must then be compensated and replaced by nutrition; but an idea does not exhaust itself when something has been invented, when thousands and thousands of things are imitated according to the template. This is an argument that has been put forward very often. But it is nonsense. If one were to calculate how much energy is needed to find an idea, one would see that the energy expended on ideas, which must be replaced, is by no means less than that expended in physical labor, because what is done in thinking is just as much dependent on the will as what is done with the hand. You can't separate them at all. It is the greatest nonsense to distinguish between mental and manual labor in reality. But things have gradually become a cliché because there has been a tendency, especially in recent decades, to create clichés out of what used to be actual reality.

If you have experience in these matters, you can follow this step by step. I remember, for example, hearing a lecture that the socialist leader Paul Singer gave to proletarians. There were some among them who began to speak disparagingly of the “souls of writers”. They should have seen how the old Singer, in all his corpulence, protested and argued that he would not put up with it, that if you do intellectual work, it should not be treated the same as any other kind of work. But that was back in the early 1890s. Since then, one could clearly observe the process of becoming a cliché in the socialist world as well.

Such observations are important to find our way into life and to speak out of life. Of course, this cannot be done to a great extent overnight. But one must have a sense for it. And if one has the sense, then certain imponderables come into our speech. And then our speech will be such that it bears fruit.

That is what I wanted to say to you at first, as a formal introduction.

Good morning, gentlemen! Now let us try to finish, at least for the time being, what we have begun to consider. You see, an understanding of life comes only from the fact that one begins to observe the sleep of man, as I have already mentioned to you several times. When one is immersed in life from morning to evening, one usually has the opinion that sleep gives one strength, removes fatigue and so on. But sleep actually does much more. You just need to think about it. Think back to your life, the dreams you have had in your sleep, you don't always remember them. Dreams are something you soon forget, as you all know. Only at most you may remember that you had a dream here or there that you often told. Then you remember it by telling it. But the dreams that you don't tell are quickly forgotten. If you remember your life back to your childhood, you will remember some memories from your childhood up to later in life. But these memories are always interrupted. When you think back today, there is the time during which you slept. That is a break, and you do not remember it. The memory starts again only yesterday evening and goes until yesterday morning. Then there is another break. So that actually, when you remember back, you do not have your whole life, but in this remembering back, what is in the night is actually always left out. If you draw a line of retrospection, a period of time flows from evening to morning without retrospection, then again from morning to evening, then again a pause from evening to morning, and so on. We actually only remember our lives in such a way that we do not remember a whole part of our lives at all. That is quite clear. That is the time that we have slept through.

Now let us consider a person who cannot sleep. You know, some people complain that they cannot sleep. But many of these complaints should not be taken so seriously, because some people tell you that they never sleep at all during the night. And when you ask them how long they have not slept at night, they say: Yes, not for ten years already. Well, anyone who couldn't sleep for so long would have been dead long ago. People do sleep, but because they have such vivid dreams while sleeping, it seems to them as if they had been awake. You should tell such a person: just lie down for once, you don't need to sleep; just lie down. He is already asleep, and even if he is not aware of it, he is asleep. I just wanted to tell you this so that you can see that a person really does need sleep for life. Sleep is more necessary for life than food. And those who cannot sleep cannot live.

Now, how much of our lives between birth and death do we oversleep? Yes, gentlemen, you see, this oversleeping lasts longest in very young children. When a child is born, it is almost always asleep. Then gradually the time spent awake decreases, and sleeping becomes less and less. And when you get a little older, if you count back, you have to say that you have actually slept a third of your life. That is also healthy. You have actually slept a third of your life.

This has been known for quite a long time. But today people don't like to remember such things that have been known for a long time. Even in the 19th century, at the very beginning, people who wrote about this said: Man should work for 8 hours, be alone for 8 hours and sleep for 8 hours. That leaves 16 hours of wakefulness and 8 hours of sleep, so 3 times 8 = 24 hours.

So that gives us a third of 24 hours for the time of sleeping. That was also a very correct observation. A person needs a third of his entire life to sleep. Now, people don't care about how important sleep is for life because today they don't care at all about what soul and spirit are. They only care about what the person experiences with his body when he is awake, but not what soul and spirit are. That is just how people often say in their daily lives today: God, yes, sleeping, that's all very well, but you don't need more than the necessary heaviness in bed. And so they drink so and so much beer in the evening so that they can sleep. But what matters is not having the necessary heaviness in bed, but realizing the great importance of sleep.

And now let us try to understand what sleep actually means. You see, gentlemen, basically people like themselves very much. This is particularly evident in the case of sick people. Sick people show how much they like themselves, because when something hurts them, they take terrible care of themselves and so on. That is all very well, but it shows that people like themselves very much. What does a person actually like when he likes himself? Yes, he likes his body. And that is the great secret of life, I would say, that a person likes his body. And the love that a person has for his body shows when that body is not quite right.

But there are also snags with this love of the body. The body moves all day long. The body works hard all day long. And the soul and spirit within it, without the person knowing it, grows less and less fond of the body as the day progresses. That is the strange thing, and one must know that. While the human being lives in the day and must constantly be active, the soul-spiritual aspect grows less and less fond of the body. That is why a child sleeps so much. It loves its body very much and always wants to enjoy its body. When you see a child, you can always see how it enjoys its body. Just think about what it is like when the child has drunk its milk and falls asleep. In this sleep, the child has the pleasant feeling of digestion. It enjoys what is going on in its body. And only when it gets hungry does it wake up. Because what happens when it is hungry, it likes less. Then it wakes up again. So you see, the child still wants to enjoy its body even during sleep. You can make the most beautiful observations. Only the scholars do not do that because they do not have the ability to do so.

Observe a herd of cows in a meadow, eating and then lying down comfortably, enjoying their digestion. They enjoy what is happening in their body.

That is what you need to know: that a person actually wants to enjoy his body. But in humans it is somewhat different than in cows, and in the adult human it is somewhat different than in the child. The little child does not work yet, so he enjoys his body while sleeping. The cows do everything out of instinct, so they also enjoy their digestion while sleeping. The human being does not even get to enjoy his digestion. A person actually becomes so that when he uses his body all day, by evening he is no longer sympathetic to his body. He no longer loves it. And you see, that's why he sleeps. He sleeps because he no longer likes his body. The antipathy that a person develops towards his body throughout the day makes him fall asleep at night, and he sleeps until he has overcome this antipathy in his soul, and he wakes up again when he feels sympathy for his body again. This must be understood first of all, that waking up depends on the person developing sympathy for his body again. And this sympathy exists for all the individual organs of the body. Therefore, when a person wakes up, he slips into his organs, so to speak.

Just think of how dreams are when you wake up. When you wake up, you dream of snakes, for example. You slip into your intestines and dream of snakes. The snakes represent the intestines.

So when a person wakes up, they slip into their body out of sympathy with their body and their soul and spirit. People have to have this sympathy, otherwise they would always want to leave their body.

And now imagine: the person has died, he has laid down his body; the body is no longer with the person. The first thing that happens, I have told you, is that the person has his thoughts as a memory of his whole life. And these are then lost after a few days already. They are scattered all over the world. But then he is left with the sympathy for what his body has experienced. And this sympathy with what his body has experienced, he must now gradually lose. This is what we first go through after death, that we must lose our sympathy with our body.

How long does it take to restore this sympathy with the body if we live one day? It takes a third of the day. Therefore, the loss of sympathy after death also takes a third of a lifetime. If a person has, let's say, reached the age of thirty, it takes about ten years for him to get rid of the whole body, to have no more sympathies with the world and life at all - this is, of course, an approximation. So that after death a person first has a few days when he has a memory back, and then he has this breaking off, I would say, of memory back, which takes a third of the whole life he has spent on earth. Now, that is true on average for the individual person, but it is longer for one person and shorter for another because one person has more sympathy for his body, likes himself more, the other likes himself less and so on. So after death we go through something that could be called: the human being gets used to all the things that hold him together with his body.

But now you may say: What you are telling us is still somewhat theoretical. How can you know that a person still has something to him when he has discarded his physical body? How can you know that? — Yes, for that, gentlemen, you have to study how a person develops in life.

There is the first period of life in which the human being develops, the first period of life; this is until the human being gets the second teeth. First he has the milk teeth, then he gets the second teeth. Yes, you see, you can say that the human being has the milk teeth from heredity. But the second teeth, he no longer has them from heredity. The second teeth come from his ether body. The ether body is active in him and gives him the second teeth. So we have the physical body, as I already wrote to you the other day; it gives the first teeth. Then there is the ether body; it gives the human being the second teeth, the teeth that then remain.

Now one must just acquire the ability to see — today people only acquire the ability to think abstractly, to develop theories, but not to see what I have just described in my book “How to Know Higher Worlds”. If you really look at the child as it gradually gets its second teeth, you can see this supersensible work of the etheric body. And this is the same body that a person retains when they die, retains for a few days, and then disperses throughout the world. So if you study what gives a person their second teeth, you find out that after death, a person still has their etheric body for a few days and then throws it away a few days later, that is, it disperses throughout the world.

Now he still has his astral body and his ego. This astral body is what always craves the physical body. With the ego inside, it always craves the physical body. So we can say: the human being develops - I have already told you this recently - the need in his astral body. The astral body develops all needs. The needs are not in the physical body. When the physical body is a corpse, it no longer has any needs.

So we can say: What gives the human being false teeth is also gone a few days after death. What remains now? Here one must again study what now begins to be particularly active in man from the moment he has his second teeth until the moment he becomes sexually mature. That is again an important period of human life. Our present-day science cannot study such things because it does not pay any attention to them at all.

You see, from the moment the child gets its second teeth until the moment it reaches sexual maturity, something supersensory is at work in the child. And what does this supersensory element want? This supersensory element wants to gradually take hold of the whole body. It is not yet inside when the child has its second teeth and begins to get this astral body into its whole body so that it permeates it. Then the child becomes more and more mature. And when the astral body is completely inside the body, then the child is sexually mature. That is the important thing to know: the astral body is the one that brings sexual maturity to the child.

Of course, these things cannot be studied in the way that today's scholars would like to study them. Today's scholars only want to study what is tangible. They do not observe human life. But anyone who has really learned to observe what it is that works its way into the body from the second teeth to sexual maturity knows that this is the astral body. It is the source of all needs. Of course, a child already has needs before the second teeth come in, because the astral body is present in the head; but later it spreads throughout the entire body. You can see this very clearly in boys, how the astral body spreads. The boy changes his voice, and with that he also becomes sexually mature. This is the penetration of the astral body into the whole physical body. In the case of a woman, you can observe it by the development of the secondary organs of sexual life, the breasts and so on. This is the penetration of the astral body. And this astral body the person retains after death if he has already discarded the etheric body.

You see, it is this astral body that wants to enter the physical body again every morning. Because while a person sleeps, he has no needs, neither sexual nor other needs. These arise when he is awake. They arise when the astral body wants to enter the physical body in the morning. And so, in life, this astral body is always striving to enter the physical body every morning. Of course, it wants to do the same after death, and it must first unlearn this habit.

If someone is thirty years old, how long has he been in his physical body? He has been in it for twenty years, he has not been in it for ten years. The ten years that he was not in his physical body, he slept through, and after death he wants to be in it again. And that is why he works in his astral body for a third of his life after his death, which he has gone through here on earth. After this time the astral body is satisfied. Then the human being only lives in his ego. So that after spending about a third of his lifetime after death, the human being only continues to live in his ego.

But this ego, this actual spiritual part of man, needs an enormous amount if it is to continue to live. You see, it is not without reason that I have been telling you that reason, the intellect, thoughts about the world are actually spread out. I have told you how everything in the world, when properly studied, is actually intelligently arranged. I have made it clear to you in the animal world. This whole world is such that we should not believe that our mind is the only one, but the mind that we have is only as if scooped out of the mind spread throughout the world. Mind is everywhere. And the one who believes that his mind is the only one is as foolish as the one who believes: “I have a glass of water here, this glass of water was empty at first, then it became full, that is, the water grew out of the glass.” - One must first draw the water from the well, from the whole body of water. And so one must also first bring the mind that one has out of the whole world mind.

We just don't realize any of this during our lifetime. Why not? Because our body does it. Gentlemen, if you should ever know – I have made this clear to you – what your body does with a very small piece of sugar that you have swallowed, how this small piece of sugar is not only dissolved in the body but also transformed into all kinds of other substances, if you knew what is going on there, then you would be amazed. You are amazed after I have told you only the very basics of what goes on in the human body. But no matter how much of what goes on in the human body is observed, it is always only a small part. You breathe in. The breath you inhale must be used throughout your entire body. Just think, you breathe in about eighteen times a minute. What you breathe in must be used throughout your whole body. This requires a tremendous amount of reason, a truly tremendous amount of reason.

Well, our body does all that. Our body, it really works for us with tremendous cleverness. It is quite admirable what one must feel when one realizes what the human body actually accomplishes in terms of cleverness. It is quite enormous. So it takes a lot out of us during our lifetime.

But now, after death, we no longer have it. Now we no longer even have the etheric body. We do not have the astral body, not even a longing for the physical body. So we only have the ego at all, and the ego now realizes that it does not have the body and now begins to familiarize itself with everything that is necessary for the body.

And that is where the mighty thing that must be understood begins. Today's science makes it particularly easy for itself. Today's science says: Where does man come from? Well, man comes from what has arisen as fertilization, as a fertilized germ in the mother. So science says: There is the fertilized germ, and in there, well, somehow man is already predisposed. If you don't know anything, you say: there is a predisposition; that's where the whole person comes from. Yes, you see, people have been aware of this for a long time, but in their own way, that is, they have been unclear about it.

Just imagine that this is the mother egg (it is drawn) from which you yourself emerged. So you would have been inside it, would have been inside it, so to speak, as a small human being. But this mother egg was in turn born of a mother egg. So the little human being must have been in the womb again, and the mother egg, that is, the mother, must have been in the grandmother again, and further up to the great-grandmother, great-great-grandmother, to Eve. And you come to the strangeness that in the great-mother Eve, the whole of humanity was inside, but so nested. Mr. Miller, he was inside the egg, which in turn was inside the egg with all the other human eggs, it was just nested that way. The whole human race was in the original mother Eve. This theory, which was also called the theory of evolution back then, later became known as the nesting theory.

So at the beginning of the 19th century, people came to the conclusion that the story of the egg containing the whole human race, with each individual contained within the next, and then so many of them, was not acceptable. And so they adopted another theory. They then said: No, in the egg there is actually nothing yet; but when this egg is fertilized, all the external conditions, wind and weather and sun and light and everything possible, can get to it. And from the influence of all of nature on this egg, man comes into being.

Yes, gentlemen, that is something that does materialism a great deal of good, if it can imagine something like that. But it does not stand up to closer scrutiny. Because just think what we become when the whole of nature is constantly working on us. We become what people today call nervous. Those who are sensitive to every breath of air and every ray of light do not become real people, but rather a bundle of nerves. We become just that from the surrounding nature. So that can't be it either.

A proper study shows us something completely different. A proper study shows that there is absolutely nothing inside this egg. Before it is fertilized, it is still, I would say, halfway so that you can see all kinds of things inside. It has a shape. So in the unfertilized egg, you can still see all kinds of threads and so on. But when the egg is fertilized, those threads are destroyed and the whole egg is nothing but a real 'mess', if I may express myself so. In more scientific terms, it is a chaos. It is a completely disordered substance.

You see, such a substance, which is completely disordered, is not found anywhere else in the world. All substances are in some way internally ordered, arranged. If you take the most arbitrary substance, if you just take a grain of dust and look at it through the microscope, you will see how finely and artfully it is constructed inside. The only thing that is completely chaotic inside is the fertilized egg. And the substance must first become completely chaotic; it must no longer be anything in itself if a human being is to develop from it. People are always thinking about the egg white, for example. They always want to study how the egg white is formed internally. Yes, the egg white is internally configured as long as it is not fertilized. When it is fertilized, it is just what I have called a “mess”, that is, a chaos, an absolutely disordered substance. And out of this comes the human being. Even in the Primordial Mother Eve, if she existed at all, the whole human race was not present, nor somehow in an egg germ that was later fertilized, but the egg germ is completely chaotic, disorderly, and was also disorderly in the Primordial Mother Eve. And if a human being is to arise out of this egg germ, then this must be brought about from outside, that is, the human being must enter into this egg germ. A proper scientific study shows, in turn, that the human being must enter this egg germ from the outside. That is to say, the human being comes from the spiritual world. He does not come from the material. The material must first be destroyed.

This is already the case with plants. In plants, you have the earth and in the earth the plant germ. Now, people are not properly studying what happens to the plant germ in the earth. It must first be destroyed, and then the new spring causes the new plant to arise from the destroyed material from outside in a spiritual way. This is how it is with animals, and especially with humans. It is only that it is easier for the plant. The whole universe forms its shape. In the case of the human being, the whole universe does not initially form his shape. He must actually form it himself. The human being must actually enter into this destroyed matter, otherwise no human being could arise from this destroyed matter. The human being must therefore first come from the spiritual world and enter into this destroyed matter. The whole process of fertilization is only there to ensure that the human being, who wants to enter the world, is confronted with a destroyed substance, that he has a destroyed substance. He could not do anything with an undestroyed substance. He cannot enter the world like a plant, because then he could only become a plant. He must really form the whole universe within himself. And he does form it. It is truly wonderful how man forms the universe within this destroyed substance.

I will show you an example of how the human being now forms the universe into this destroyed substance. If you have the earth's surface here (it is drawn), then we can just show it, because if you just look at a piece of earth, it looks even. The sun comes up in the morning, goes up to a certain height, then goes down again. That is a certain angle up to which the sun rises. It is very interesting that the sun always rises up to a certain angle and then goes down again. The angle is of course a little higher in summer than in winter, but up to a certain angle the sun rises. This angle is therefore an inclination of the sun to the earth.

We find this angle elsewhere, too. You see, when light enters our eye, where the optic nerve enters from the brain into the eye – I have drawn the eye for you – there is what is known as the blind spot. You cannot see there. You see most clearly only at points that are somewhat away from this blind spot, where the optic nerve enters. And that is where the interesting thing is: the same inclination that the sun has to the earth in its orbit, this point, where we perceive most brightly in our inner being, has the same inclination to the blind spot.

And something else. If you take the heart, it is also slightly tilted. It has the same inclination as the sun to the earth. I could show you countless such things, from which you would see: Everything that is out there in the universe, we somehow carry it within us. We carry the inclination of the sun in the inclination of our eye and in the inclination of our heart. We are formed entirely out of the reason of the universe.

Oh, gentlemen, that is where you start, when you gradually get some knowledge, to really tell yourself how actually man is a whole small world. Everything in the world outside is recreated in man. Center Just imagine if you were given this “mess”, this destroyed matter, and you were supposed to recreate it inside! You would not be able to do that. You see, when the ego is alone after death, it has to learn from the whole world how to recreate the whole world. So that after the person has shed the sympathy with the body during this third of the previous life, he now begins to learn from the whole universe how to become a human being again. And that takes longer than life on earth lasts, because on earth, things are such that one can learn a lot or a little. Actually, most people today learn very little. And however strange it may seem, scholars learn the least of all, because what they learn is all useless. It is only good for understanding what a corpse looks like, but not how a living body is affected. But the ego must learn this after death. It must learn the secrets of how a body is built from the whole world. And one can point to this time, which the ego now spends learning from the whole world how a person works and lives internally.

You see, when a person, through the exercises I have described in the book “How to Know Higher Worlds”, brings themselves to remember the time when one would otherwise not remember, when one was a very small child, then one comes to understand what this actually consists of, this life of the infant, who as yet knows nothing of the world, who only uses his body, only wriggles, only lives in his eyes, lives in his ears, but does not yet understand anything of all this. In ordinary life, a person does not think of looking back. They say: Oh, what do I care about my childhood; I'm here now. But if you look back into this short time, which you otherwise do not remember, in terms of knowledge, you realize what you actually did there. Yes, you actually get a terribly uncomfortable feeling when you think about it. Because this fidgeting of the very young child consists of trying to forget all this knowledge of the universe. You give it to the body, and it knows it afterwards. Therefore, it can take it over during life.

The small child gives the body the whole wisdom of the world. It is so terribly painful, so terribly sad that today's science has no idea of what is going on in life, how the small child gives the body the wisdom of the world that it has acquired, how it gradually grows into the eyes, into the hands. Gradually it grows into it, giving all the wisdom of the ego to the body, while the ego actually used to possess all the wisdom of the world.

It may seem strange to you, but it is actually true: if you really have mastered anthroposophy, how can you tell people something about the universe? You can tell something about the universe simply because you remember back to the first days of childhood, when you still knew everything from the experiences you had before you entered the body. And anthroposophy actually consists of the fact that you gradually get all this world wisdom out of the body that you gave up to the body.

Yes, gentlemen, for that, ordinary science today gives no guidance. It gives no instruction at all on how to find the knowledge that one has put into the body oneself. It leads people to experiment, and they should only learn what they experience externally; whereas the right thing would be to guide people into the living body. Our students are guided to the dead body, which is already a corpse, and learn nothing about the living human being. That would admittedly be a more difficult study, because there the human being must practice self-knowledge, must look into himself, because there the human being is to become more perfect. But that is precisely what the modern person does not want: he does not want to become more perfect, he wants the school to train him a little, and then he wants to stop there, does not want to become more perfect. Man does not want this because, in the education he enjoys today, I would say he is already far too proud to somehow admit that he should perfect himself.

Well, with that I have, I would say, told you a little bit about the self. But we will talk about these things more in the coming hours, so you will hear much more and gradually find everything more understandable.

You see, I have told you a little about what the self has to do during the time until the human being comes down to earth again. But there are people who say: Oh, I'm not interested in what the self has to do afterwards! You can wait until after you die and then you'll see.

Yes, gentlemen, that would be just as if the germ, after it has emerged and been fertilized, and the human being has hatched, would say in the mother's body: Oh, I don't like living in the mother's body, I'll leave sooner. — Yes, but if he doesn't want to live his proper nine months in the mother's body, he cannot become a human being. He must go through with it first. Nor can the ego experience anything after death if it does not live here in such a way that it is stimulated to do so. Therefore it is quite wrong when someone says: I'll wait until death has occurred, then I'll see if I am something or nothing, and so on. People are not very logical. People today are actually as logical as the one who swore that he did not recognize any God, and he swore: “As surely as there is a God in heaven, I am an atheist!” That's more or less how people are today. They repeat the old sayings. Quite unconsciously they repeat the sayings, even when they contradict them. And so people believe: You can wait, then you will see whether I am still something or nothing. Isn't it true that people say to themselves: Do I believe in immortality, or do I not believe in immortality? Yes, if I don't believe in immortality and there is one after all, then I could be in a bad way. But if I believe in immortality and there is none, then it doesn't do any harm. So in any case it is better if I believe in immortality.

But, you are not supposed to play with the idea, instead it is important to really become clear about the facts. And so one must say: Here on earth, man must receive the stimulus that his ego can truly penetrate into the world after death. And today's science thoroughly dispels this stimulus, if at all, when people are no longer made aware of the facts. It is not admitted, but actually today it is in the interest of keeping people as stupid as possible, so that after death they sleep and have no idea how to penetrate the secrets of the whole universe in order to become truly human again.

You see, gentlemen, if humanity continues to live as it does today, merely concerning itself with outward things, then in the future people will be born who will no longer be able to lift a finger because they have not learned anything until the next life.

We will come back to how lives repeat themselves. Today I just wanted to give you some ideas so that you can see that it is not just a careless assertion about what the ego is like after death, but that one can point out from knowledge itself that the human being in turn descends and has to form his life from the confused material. This is really recognized on the basis of objective facts.

That is what this is about. It is just not going so fast, but I will answer the question in full when one takes together what is known about the end of human life, how man gradually loses his etheric body and his astral body, and how then the ego must descend to form its astral body and so on. Then one comes to understand how man repeatedly descends. And then, in the course of time, one also comes to understand when man will be liberated from his entire earthly life, when he will no longer have to descend. The question of when he once began will also be answered then. He must once have begun as a kind of plant. For that he does not need to be human. I have also described to you how the earth was once a large plant, and we will see how the earth will once again become a plant, and man will then be freed from his humanity.

I will then deal with the whole question again from a different angle. You will, of course, have to have the patience not to say after the first few lessons: I can't go along with this. You will see that the more detailed it becomes, the more it will seem plausible to you.

Question regarding earthquakes.

Dr. Steiner: You probably mean the earthquakes that are happening in America now? Of particular importance with regard to such questions are always those volcanic phenomena that, I might say, do not occur so intensely, not so powerfully at the same time, but which show in detail that something is happening over time in the earth's environment. And here I would like to draw your attention to something else, which is perhaps less noticeable, but which many people can relate to more than these individual phenomena, which of course had a terrible effect on those who were nearby, but which are of less significance for the greater part of humanity. And then you just remember that in the last few years people could talk about the fact that extraordinary weather conditions prevail. We cannot deny that in recent years there have not been any really proper, lasting summers, especially not in our areas. But that is spreading across a large part of Europe and further afield.

Now, when something like this is mentioned, people usually talk about how large icebergs float in the northern seas and how so-called cold spells then emanate from these mighty floating icebergs. You may also remember that during last year's so-called cold spell, it was reported by ships that if they took even a slight northerly course, these huge floating icebergs could be found everywhere in the Atlantic Ocean.

But we must realize that the things that occur in this way do not come from the earth alone, but are connected with the whole evolution of the world. And here we must ask ourselves: What about the distribution of warmth and cold on our earth?

I would like to draw your attention to something that I may have mentioned before, but in a different context, which can be important for us when considering this question. You may have heard that particularly in northern Siberia, in Asia, there are very special conditions in the ground. To give you an idea, I would just like to note the following. If we have the map of Europe like this (it is drawn), here is Norway, here is the north coast of Germany, here it goes over to Holland and so on, there would be Ireland, England, and there we would come over the large peninsula to Asia. There is the border between Asia and Europe. There is Russia. Here we come over to Asia and have Siberia. Over there is the so-called Arctic Ocean. That is just drawn to help you orient yourself. Now, elephant-like animals have been found in this area of Siberia a long time ago, which no longer exist today, and which therefore existed on Earth a very, very long time ago. And you also know that elephant-like animals no longer live up there at the Arctic Ocean. Elephant-like animals belong in much warmer areas. But the strange thing is that these elephant-like animals, which are deep in the ground, in the icy ground, were so fresh that you could still have eaten the meat if you like to eat elephant meat. These animals were in the icy ground just as if someone had wanted to eat the meat and had stored the animals in the ground for that purpose. So these animals in northern Siberia were simply preserved, as they say, their meat was kept fresh, for many, many millennia.

Now, you see, gentlemen, it is impossible that this could have happened slowly over time. Because if the animals had lived up there, simply died and gone into the ground, they would have rotted away long ago, and at most you would have found the remains of bones, as you would find anywhere else. But here you find whole fresh animals. This is only possible if these animals once lived there and an ice wave came very quickly, covering these animals, sealing them in, so that they could be preserved in the same state with the fresh meat for thousands of years. So you can see: there must have been a time when a mighty blast came from the south and blew water up into the ice region. The water froze instantly, and these animals were instantly frozen in this enormous Siberian ice cellar, where they remained for thousands of years.

Now you will all admit, of course, the earth has no reason to suddenly do something like that. Because where should the forces come from in the earth itself, that it could carry out something like that? These things can only come from the extraterrestrial stellar influences. So if you imagine that there is the earth (it is drawn), “since here the southern regions are the equatorial regions – only south in relation to the north, of course – then such a stellar constellation must have existed here once, which simply threw the water up again. So, through the constellation of the stars, through the position of the heavenly bodies, this water was thrown up, immediately froze and buried these animals. You can see from such things that the constellation of the stars has a powerful influence on the distribution of land and water and ice on Earth.

Now, I recently explained to you how volcanoes also originate from that which is outside of the earth, how that which is under the earth is, so to speak, brought out from the interior of the earth. So we can also say that when, for example, the mighty Etna erupts, things are not hurled out from below; rather, a stellar constellation acts from above downwards, and this brings these fiery masses out of the interior of the earth.

From this we see that today very many things interact, and this causes, on the one hand, that we have these cold spells. The cold spells are therefore also caused by the extraterrestrial. The fact that we have these volcanic eruptions and earthquakes also stems from the extraterrestrial. But now one can never fully assess such an occurrence if one is not clear about the fact that man himself is intimately connected with all these extraterrestrial conditions.

You see, you have probably already heard of so-called haemorrhages, where a person's blood no longer takes the right path, so that it spews out of the mouth instead of being distributed throughout the body. This is called a haemorrhage. Such haemorrhages occur particularly easily when a person is at certain stages in life. We must ask ourselves: What is the actual relationship between a hemorrhage and what is happening outside? — Now, if you remember that man does not consist only of his physical body, which we can touch with our hands, but that man consists of the physical body, the etheric body, the astral body and the I-body, then you will have to say to yourself: Of course, we can shed the physical body. It is heavy, it is heavy mass, it is connected with the earth. But the etheric body is connected with the environment. And when we look at things in the human being, it is the case that the moon has a huge influence on the human being. But the moon does not have such an influence on people as it does now; rather, we are led back to very ancient times. In ancient times, the moon had an extremely strong influence on people. People had to do something specific during the waxing moon, something specific during the waning moon, and so on. And in particular, in those older times, the reproduction of the human race was entirely based on the moon. It is so interesting to see how people who still have traditions from ancient times think about these things. They definitely think that it is of great importance whether a person is conceived in the waxing moon or the waning moon, for example. This is a very important thing in ancient traditions. And the moon then also exerts its influence on the whole development of the person, but in such a way that the person carries these lunar influences within them. So it is not that it has a direct influence on the person when there is a full moon or something like that; but we see the moon waxing and waning; that once had an influence on the person, and that has remained and continues. So it is not the current phase of the moon that has a great influence, but something that is similar to the old moon phase and is an old heirloom has a great influence. And so you could say that the moon has a certain influence.

But we wouldn't have any blood in our heads at all if it weren't for the moon. We would all walk around with very pale faces, terribly pale faces, if it were not for the influence of the moon. The moon draws our blood up from our body to our head. That is the influence of the moon, that the blood is willing to go to the head at all. This is extremely interesting. The blood only goes up into the human head because of the influence of the moon. Otherwise, the blood would always go down. Now, when a person becomes so weak in his entire body that he can no longer sufficiently resist these forces of the moon that draw the blood up, the blood rushes too strongly into the human head, and that is how a hemorrhage occurs. We must always have this influence, but when it becomes too strong, the blood rushes too strongly to the human head and that is how blood comes out.

And you see, what the hemorrhage is in the individual human being is something like water bursting out [pointing to Siberia] or erupting from a volcano in the great outdoors outside. Only there it is not the influence of the moon, but the influence of the more distant stars. You must imagine that when we simply develop as human beings, we are continually exposed to other influences. I will illustrate this to you. Imagine once again, here would be the earth (it is drawn), here the moon goes around the earth. I will draw it as it looks. So the moon goes around the earth, and it has its greatest influence on people first. But outside of the moon are the other stars, Venus, Mercury, the sun, Mars, Jupiter and so on, and then the fixed stars. Now you must be aware that it is different whether, let's say, Mars is behind the Sun or whether Mars has already moved on and is already next to the Sun. When Mars is behind the Sun, it has less effect on Earth because the Sun covers its effect. When Mars is in this position [next to the Sun], it has a stronger effect on Earth. And so it always depends on the position of the stars how strongly the earth is affected. This science of the position of the stars is almost not developed at all today, and so people only look at what is happening on earth, icebergs and so on, but they do not look at the stars.

Now one cannot investigate these things from the earth either, but one must be clear about the fact that one must investigate these things from the human being. These things must be investigated from the human being.

Now I would like to tell you something: if you go through the development of humanity in modern times, you will indeed find huge changes in this development of humanity. We do not want to go back very far, but let us go back, say, six hundred years. If we go back six hundred years – today is 1923 – we come to 1323. You have to bear in mind that if you had lived then, you would not have known that there was such a thing as America or Australia. People did not know any of this, they only knew about Europe and Asia and a small part of Africa, very little of Africa. So six centuries before our time, imagine, people only knew about a small part of the world. And above this earth they saw the moon rise and set, the sun rise and set, the stars, and everything was such that all life took place only in a small space. Yes, gentlemen, in those days people knew little about the earth and had no idea about the movement of the stars. But they knew something about the spiritual influences of the stars. This is connected with the fact that people lived in small circumstances. People got their influence from these small circumstances.

Well, you know, it didn't take long: in 1492, Christopher Columbus of Genoa set out with a small number of ships, and he was of the opinion that one could travel around the world. Christopher Columbus did not want to discover America at all, but he was given the idea that the earth must be spherical. Before that, people thought the earth was flat. Now he was given the idea that the earth must be spherical. And so he equipped himself with a number of ships. There was resistance, but he still got these ships from the government, equipped them, and believed that he could sail around the world. At least that's what he thought. He said to himself: if we go from Europe over there to the east, we'll find (pointing to the drawing) Asia, down there is Hither India, there is Farther India. — So he knew that if you go over there by land, you come to India. Now he wanted to go around the globe of the earth from Spain and come to India from the other side. That was what Columbus wanted. He wanted to travel around the world because he hoped, so to speak, to make the first practical use of the roundness of the earth. He wanted to travel around and discover India from the other side. Now he set out and came across America, and thought: This is the other side of India. — That is why this area was also called the West Indies, as it is still called in part today.

So you see how, through the thinking of people, the spherical shape of the earth has actually been gradually conquered for knowledge, how it was only gradually realized that one had come to the other side of America and realized that this was not India, but a new country. So 1492, that's only 431 years ago that people discovered America at all.

But the discovery of America means something completely different. And if you want to understand what the discovery of America means, then please consider the following. You see, in 1492, I told you, Christopher Columbus set out first and discovered America. In 1543, Copernicus came on the scene and was the first to put forward the world view that the sun stands still and the earth moves around the sun like the other planets. So what every child learns at school today has only been around since that time. Do you realize how many years that is? It's only 380 years! It is only since that time that people have had any idea at all of what is already taught in elementary school today. Before that, people knew nothing about any of these things. But they thought about it all the more, about what influence the moon has on people. People knew what I have told you now, that the moon drives the blood to the head. People recognized this influence on people.

Now you have to consider what the discovery of America actually means. You see, people talk so thoughtlessly and history presents it that way: discovery of America, people have possessed genius after all! - Yes, gentlemen, but you have to imagine it quite differently. What kind of people do you think lived in America at the time when Columbus came across it? Well, not even five hundred years ago, the copper-red Indians lived over there, and these Indians did not think like you do today in Europe. They knew a lot about the influence of the stars. So there lived in all of America at the time a population that knew an extraordinary amount about the influence of the stars. They oriented themselves entirely to the influence of the stars. And then the Europeans came, civilized humanity. Now, you see, as late as the 19th century, the Indians said that the Europeans always brought something strange with them, something white, with little ghosts on it. But these were very harmful ghosts, terribly harmful ghosts, and the Europeans would use them to conjure the Americans. At least that's what the Native Americans thought. And do you know what it was that the Native Americans feared so much, what they thought made the Europeans such terrible guys who caused so much havoc? It was the books, the white sheets of paper with the letters on them! The Native Americans looked at them, thought they were magic and said: “These people are using them to cast spells on us.

And so the people came together. And then the extermination of the Indians began. But where did the people who exterminated the Indians come from? They came from Europe! And if the people who still lived in Europe in 1323 had come over there, their beliefs would have been much more similar to those of the Indians. Because these people in 1323 in Europe still knew about the influence of the stars. They could have understood each other much better. But the people who came over did not understand the Indians at all, they could only exterminate them. And on the spot where the exterminated Indians were, European humanity developed. You just have to bear in mind that the Americans who developed there are, after all, Europeans. Isn't it true that the ideas that people often have based on what they learned at school are really quite stupid sometimes.

I would just like to point out one thing to you. Today people talk so much about the French. But around Nuremberg, the people are still called Franks today. The French are just the immigrated Germanic people who then adopted the Latin language in a modified form. So everything that is talked about, when one does not know how things came about and rages because it is presented that way in history, is sometimes so boundlessly foolish, so boundlessly stupid. And so it is boundlessly stupid there too. They don't even consider that the people of Europe who migrated to America had developed in Europe over the last three hundred years. The main immigration only happened much later, in the 18th and 19th centuries. That's when America was first settled. And what kind of people came over then? Well, the illiterate ones also came over, but they didn't have much influence. Those who came over and had a great influence were those who had been educated in Europe, especially in science, who had learned the Copernican doctrine, who had completely different views about the stars.

Imagine how this all fits together in world history. On the one hand, the spherical shape of the earth is proven by the fact that one can travel around the earth at all, and on the other hand, that it is not the sun that rises and sets, but that there is space all around and the earth goes around the sun, that the earth is not a plane, that the sun does not sink into the water in the evening, but that the earth goes around the sun.

You see, people do not think about what the actual connection is between the discovery of America, which took place in 1492, and 1543, when Copernicus came up with his new view of the stars. There is a close connection. Don't think that what happened could have happened without the influence of the stars on people. Columbus did not think: “Now I will go over to the West” without the influence of the stars. You only have to consider how foggy it was. He did not know that he was discovering America. He just wanted to sail around the world. It's like a blind hen finding a grain of corn. You can't say that it was his own mind, but that people are driven by influences. And what drives them are the stellar influences. So we also have to ask ourselves: Why did Copernicus think the way he did about the stellar influences? — then we ourselves have to look for the causes in the stellar influences.

We have a time in the Middle Ages - I told you, it was still like this six hundred years ago - when people still have concepts that relate to a very small world. Then suddenly they get concepts that go all around on the earth and all around in the sky. All concepts diverge. Yes, gentlemen, you really have to think a little deeper about what is going on in people. One must penetrate into these things with real science. One must therefore study man. Now I have already told you many things about man. I will now tell you a well-attested fact again, so that you can see how things are.

There was an Austrian poet, Robert Hamerling, who was transferred to Trieste as a secondary school teacher at a certain time, in 1855, and he took a great interest in everything that was going on. At the time, Robert Hamerling was also very interested in how all sorts of swindlers passed through Trieste, but so did some people who produced anomalies, so-called mediums. He liked to visit all such gatherings, but he was not at all superstitious. He really saw how most of these things were fraudulent. But once he thought to himself, when he saw a person with a particularly strange medium: now I want to see for myself. Now Hamerling had known a young girl in Graz, where he lived before coming to Trieste, who died very soon afterwards and from whom he had received a lock of hair. He had this lock of hair from the young girl made into a small wreath, tied it together, pinned it on a small piece of paper and then put it in a little box. He kept this as a souvenir. It had become particularly valuable to him after the person in question had died. He took it with him to Trieste among his other things. Nobody knew anything about it. He never told anybody anything about it – he remembered that very clearly – and never showed the box to anybody. Besides, the circumstances were such that he would not have liked to show it anyway. It was something that embarrassed him a great deal. So he had a secret box, so to speak, that contained this. He took it with him when he went to the meeting to see the medium. And with this medium it was the case that people gave all kinds of objects, which they put in envelopes or boxes; the medium took it in his hand, touched it and then said what was in the box. Now, such things are very often interspersed with fraud; you have to keep an open mind about these things.

For example, I was once at a meeting where a medium was brought in, and the man they call the impresario went around the audience and had all kinds of things written down on pieces of paper. He took these, but stopped walking. The medium was blindfolded. And while he was still standing there – he just said: Tell me, what do I have in my hand? – the medium immediately said what he had in his hand. So if someone wrote down his own name, he gave it to the impresario, who read it and then crumpled up the piece of paper. The medium could not see anything, but then said what was on it. Now, you see, the people at the table where I was sitting at the time were terribly curious – because the people were terribly amazed – and they said that now someone should write something down where the guy was not clever enough, where he could not communicate, because they all believed that he communicated with the medium through all kinds of signs. Well, I wrote down the name Spinoza and a work by Spinoza, the “Ethics”, because people believed that the impresario naturally did not know who Spinoza was. But he took over Spinoza and the “Ethics” just as well, and the medium answered correctly. People were terribly amazed. But, you see, the matter was very simple. The impresario was a ventriloquist and the medium only pretended to answer, while the impresario spoke from the medium's mouth. So one must not be taken in. I must always emphasize that one must not be taken in by these things. That is precisely the difference between superstitious, gullible people and those who can judge these things.

But Hamerling took the little box with him and no one knew anything about it. Then he sent this little box, the contents of which no one knew about, down among the other objects. The medium was sitting in front of a table. He sent up the box. Well, first the other things were determined. The medium did that fairly quickly. And the moment she came to his box, she took it in her hand and flung it away. Now Hamerling thought: now it is the case that this is of course agreed with all the others; with me it cannot be an agreement, the medium does not come to that and flings it away! - So he went and said that he still wanted to know what was in it. The box was picked up again. The medium flung it away again. It was picked up again. Then the medium said, very stammeringly: a lock of hair and a piece of paper! Now, of course, he was amazed. Any fraud was out of the question, absolutely out of the question. Then he asked why she kept throwing it away. She said: because it comes from a dead person. Now, that was even more surprising. So that is a case where – I am not mentioning other cases except those that you can find in the literature, otherwise I could mention hundreds of others – any deception is out of the question. And what is the underlying cause? The medium must not know what is there at that moment, but must seek it out from the unconscious. There is a very specific influence at work here.

I once told you that sometimes the influence of buckwheat groats down in the cellar can still be felt on the third floor. Do you remember how I told you that? Such an influence, which only manifests itself in the head, is the underlying cause. And the medium then says what is in there – why? Because the medium is a person in whom the blood is more subject to the influence of the moon than in other people. It does not have to be so strong as to cause a hemorrhage – it could also occur in a medium who is not subject to giddiness – but the blood is drawn to the head more than in other people. This results in a strong influence, and this kind of influence can be present.

If you consider this, you will say to yourself: Yes, the powerful influences of the stars, of course, they are constantly affecting people. And everything that Europe has experienced together with America and the whole earth for four hundred years is under the influence of the stars. But what is this star influence like? Well, gentlemen, you have to imagine the following. Imagine that here is the Earth (it is being recorded). There was the piece of earth that people used to know only. Somehow the stars are above it, I am of course only drawing it schematically for you. People are under the influence of these stars. This is the time before the discovery of America. People have firmly established ideas. If you look at the pictures and portraits of the old councilmen, you will see that people have their fixed ideas and that they stand with both feet firmly on the ground. This is because in those days there was a constellation of stars where the stars were very close together. Since then, we have had a different star constellation. When the earth is there, the stars are, so to speak, much more oblique, of course again drawn very schematically. If you were to draw it in detail, each one would naturally stand out, so to speak. You will say: But the fixed stars have not changed? — But they have changed too, although not to such an extent. So you can see from this: the spaces between them became larger in the 15th, 16th, 17th, 18th, 19th centuries. The concepts have dissolved. And now there is again a time coming when the spaces become smaller, when the stars again contract. This is only very little with the fixed stars, but it is still the case. Even when one records the fixed stars, one sees that the fixed stars have to shift. And now men are exposed to the fact that they have acquired ideas through the influence of stars that were far apart. But now they have to get concepts under the influence of the stars that are close together again. There is a completely new star constellation in the world. This can be seen if one has lived awake from the previous century into this century. You see, I was born in 1861, so I consciously experienced the time in the seventies, eighties, nineties and now the 20th century. Yes, in my childhood it was quite different from today! In my childhood people simply thought quite differently than today. Everything has changed now, and in one area in particular it has changed completely. When I was a little boy of twelve, I didn't have much money back then to buy books, but every year we were given a school program; it contained the most important physical terms of the time. Well, I spent a lot of time chewing over those. They were hard to grasp. Even back then, I had to learn differential calculus to understand the concepts. But I know what the physical concepts were back then.

But today it is quite different. When someone studies physics at university today, he learns something completely different from what we learned as boys. And from what happened then, we can see that the physical concepts have disintegrated. Today, no physicist knows which concepts to use. In the past, we spoke of space and time as two different things. Today, the physicist speaks of four dimensions, taking the first, second, and third as dimensions of space and the fourth dimension as equivalent to time. Most people have no idea what teaching is like today. People who are outside of schools still live with the concepts that I learned as a boy. But in actual physics today, they are already talking about something completely different. This shows that the concepts have become completely mixed up. Today, the physicist knows least of all what he is supposed to do. Everything has become mixed up.

Yes, gentlemen, it shows you in the human mind that there is a different star constellation. For the story is that today's people all have more blood in their heads than people through all the centuries have had in their heads, because the moon is supported by the stars, which in turn are closer together. So if you study human evolution, you find that a wave of blood has gone up to the head through the star constellation. But this wave is not only happening in man, but on the whole earth. And it is this same influence that once threw the cold from south to north and buried the mammoths, which are still fresh meat in Siberia today, as if in a large ice cream factory. Just as it was thrown up then, just as blood is driven up into the head by the moon, so today these volcanic eruptions are thrown up by the stars. Thus we have today the effect of a star constellation coming from the other side of the Earth. It passes through North America, through Greenland, and throws cold air over here, so that today, as a result of the star constellation, large masses of cold air are continually being thrown from west to east.

And now I have told you: If you go to Italy, you only need to light a piece of paper on certain parts of the ground and it will smoke from below. It is not that the earth throws up the smoke, but that I make the air above warm and thin, causing these vapors to rise. Now the star constellation throws these air masses from west to east. We are exposed to them here, which is why we now have this climate. Here it goes from west to east. But this causes the ground below to throw out its masses, its fire masses. First they were thrown out over America by the huge volcanoes and the huge earthquakes. Now it is moving further and further east. Etna and Vesuvius are all beginning to erupt because the wave is flowing over there, and down below it is becoming elastic. It is not pushed up from below, but is brought to the surface by the star constellations. In the human being, blood is pushed into the brain, and on Earth, masses of air are thrown over and fiery masses of gas are thrown out from under the Earth and transported to other places. It is the same story. It all starts with the stars.

If people understood why they think differently now, they would also understand why Etna is spitting fire. But for that to happen, the human being must first know that he is not something that can be considered in isolation, but must be considered in connection with the whole universe. That is precisely it. And people have completely forgotten how to consider things in the universe. It is really quite interesting how animals, in this respect, as I have also told you before, are much cleverer than humans. Animals usually even migrate before a volcanic eruption or something like that occurs, while people stay put. Why do animals migrate? Yes, when the other influence comes, the other star influence, then it is like this with the animal: the animal is built so that it has its legs there (see drawing $. 138), its backbone, the vertebrae, its head there. When the stars move across it, the entire spine is continuously exposed to the stars, vertebra by vertebra exposed to the stars, and they belong together, they belong so closely together that we have 28 to 31 vertebrae in our back and the moon takes 28 to 31 days to go around. It is so closely related.

But man walks upright. With him only the head, this little piece of the head, is exposed to the starry sky. He has his spine lifted out. So that with man only the blood is exposed to the influence of the stars, not the nervous system. But with animals the nervous system is exposed to the influence of the stars. That is why the animal notices the influence of the stars much sooner than man and migrates when earthquakes and volcanic eruptions occur. Man stays put. The mere fact that the animal can migrate and thus shows us that the star influence is acting on the animal, that in itself is proof that we are not dealing here with random waves coming from the earth, but that the star influence is acting from outside. That is what shows us this whole interesting connection with the whole universe. Man is not merely an earthly creature, but man is a being placed in the entire world of the stars.

Now, of course, this also leads us to understand that after people have forgotten their old knowledge of the stars, they have to get it again. So, I would like to say: It is indeed the case that with anthroposophy, we have to give humanity what it needs in a new way, otherwise humanity will remain confused. Because the stars, which are arranged more closely together, no longer fit the concepts from other times; only the concepts that anthroposophy can bring fit again.

Now I have already been given four questions today. We will see if we can make progress next time. I may have to be away on Wednesday. I will let you know when we will have the next session.

How does one come to see the spiritual world?