The Rudolf Steiner Archive

In the lecture yesterday I spoke of how man ascends after death into the super-sensible world and then lives through the experiences connected with the first decades of his post-mortem existence. I said that he spends a certain number of years in the Moon-sphere, coming into contact there with Beings who once lived on the Earth, not in physical but in etheric bodies. These Beings were the Teachers of primeval humanity, inspiring men with the profound wisdom that once existed on Earth and gradually faded away. When the physical Moon separated from the Earth, these Beings went with it; their existence has continued on the Moon and man encounters them there after his death when he is looking back upon his earthly life and living through its experiences.

I have already said that when a man has lived long enough in the Moon region, he passes into the Mercury region. Here he encounters Beings who lead him into a part of the Universe where the Beings are completely different from those on Earth. To this region, however, man belongs between death and a new birth just as surely as during his earthly life he belonged to the Earth.

Let me now add something to the brief sketch given yesterday.—When a man passes through death—this actually takes very little time—he begins his existence in the elements of earth, water, fire and air. Substances that are differentiated on Earth—metals and all other substances—are no longer differentiated when death has actually taken place. All solid substances are ‘earth,' all fluids are ‘water,' all gaseous substances are ‘air,' and everything that radiates warmth is ‘fire' (or ‘warmth'). At the moment of death man is living in this fourfold differentiation of substance. He passes then into the region of cosmic Intelligence. Cosmic thoughts live and weave through this region in which he remains for a few days. Then he reaches the Moon region which I have already described, and from there passes into the Mercury region.

Let me repeat the sequence: man passes first into the region of the Elements, then into the region of cosmic Intelligence, then into the region of the Stars—first the Moon region, then the Mercury region.

We will now consider how a man's life in the Moon region can have a determining effect upon his karma. Before his death he has pursued this or that course in his earthly life, has done good or evil. And with all this behind him he appears before the Moon Beings. These Moon Beings pronounce stern judgment, a cosmic verdict, upon the value or the reverse of good or bad actions for the Universe. A man must then leave behind him in the Moon region the results of his evil actions, everything whereby he has done harm to the Universe. In so doing he leaves a part of himself behind. We must realise more strongly than is usual that man and his deeds and achievements form a unity, that his whole being is bound up with a good or with a bad deed. So that if we have to leave behind us the evil we have wrought, we have to leave part of ourselves behind. In point of fact we pass from this Moon region with only the good we have achieved for the Universe and we are, therefore, mutilated in a certain sense, the extent or degree of mutilation depending upon how far we have allowed evil thoughts to become part of our own being. Everything by which we have injured the Cosmos must be left behind in the Moon region.

If we wish to study man's further progress between death and a new birth, the following facts must be remembered. Man on the Earth is a being whose members are clearly distinguishable from each other. The head takes shape in the embryo and is the most highly developed member; the rest of man's bodily makeup was still unfinished during embryonic. life. In a certain sense this remains the case through the whole of life. The head is the most highly elaborated part of man. After death, however, it is precisely the spiritual part of the head that passes away most rapidly in the spiritual world; it disappears almost entirely during the passage through the Moon region. You must of course understand me correctly: the physical substance falls away with the corpse, but in the head there is not only physical substance, there are forces—super-sensible forces—which form and imbue man's physical body with life. These forces pass through the gate of death and are recognised by Imaginative cognition as the spirit form of man; the head of this spirit form, however, is seen to be steadily disappearing. What actually remains, and can be mutilated, is the rest of the body apart from the head. If a man has in the main been a good man, this part of him can enter the Mercury-sphere more or less complete, whereas if he has been a bad character it will enter that sphere greatly mutilated. With these forces enveloping the soul we pass into our further life between death and a new birth, and it is from these forces that we have to build up the whole of our life during that period.

The spiritual Beings of the Mercury-sphere, who have never assumed human form and in whose environment we now find ourselves, have an important task. From the being who now appears as a headless man—if I may use the expression—all moral blemish has been removed in the Moon-sphere, but not the outcome of the health or illness undergone during earthly life. This is important, for it is both significant and surprising that although a man lays aside his moral blemishes in the Moon region, the spiritual effects of whatever has befallen him in the shape of illness can only be removed in the Mercury region, by those Beings who have never been men.

It is very important to pay attention to the fact that the spiritual consequences of illnesses are taken away from men in the Mercury region. From this we realise that in the world of stars—which is actually the world of the Gods—the physical and the moral interweave. A moral blemish cannot enter the spiritual world; it remains behind in the Moon region, the inhabitants of which are Beings especially concerned with men, because at one time they lived among them. The Beings indwelling Mercury were never inhabitants of the Earth. It is these Beings who take away from man the consequences of illnesses. The illnesses are seen streaming out as it were into cosmic space; their spiritual consequences are absorbed into the spiritual cosmos and the process is actually fraught with a kind of satisfaction. For the man who experiences this between death and a new birth it will be the first impression, a purely spiritual one, and yet as real to him as anything in earthly existence. Just as here on Earth we experience the wind, the lightning, the flow of water, so, when we have passed through the gate of death and entered the Mercury region, do we experience the departure of the spiritual effects of illnesses. We see how they are absorbed by the spiritual Beings and we are left with the impression: Now be propitiated, O ye Gods!—I can only touch on this to-day; tomorrow we shall be able to go more deeply into this experience of how the Gods are propitiated for the evil done on Earth—propitiated as a result of the effects of illnesses streaming out into the wide Universe.

These important facts of life between death and a new birth were once known to men, in the days when the Beings who afterwards became Moon dwellers—the great primeval Teachers—were at hand to instruct them. Then, too, men recognised that the truth concerning the nature of illnesses can be known only when the truth comes from the Mercury Beings; hence all medical knowledge, all knowledge of healing, was the secret of the Mercury Mysteries. In such Mysteries a man was not in the same position as he is in the universities of to-day. Higher Beings from the regions of the stars actually worked through the rites enacted in these Mysteries. In those ancient days the Gods themselves were men's teachers, and medicine was the wisdom transmitted to them directly by the Mercury Beings in the Mysteries; hence this ancient medicine was regarded by men as a gift of the Gods. Fundamentally speaking, whatever is effective in medicine to-day either originates from olden times, as an aftermath of what men learnt from the Mercury Gods, or it must be rediscovered through those methods which enable men eventually to have converse with the Gods, to learn from them. The stream of ancient wisdom has run dry, has disappeared; a new wisdom, based once again upon intercourse with the Gods, must be found. This is the mission of Anthroposophy in all the different domains.

From the Mercury region man comes into the region of the Venus-existence. The Beings who inhabit Venus and are far more remote from earthly beings than the inhabitants of Mercury, will change what he brings with him into this region in such a way that it can advance to further stages in the spiritual world. This, however, is possible only because on passing into the Venus region, man enters into a new element. While we are living here on Earth, much depends upon our having thoughts, concepts, ideas. For what would a man be on Earth without them? Thoughts are useful, and we as human beings are intelligent because we have thoughts that have some value. Especially at the present time it is very important that man should be intelligent. Nearly everyone is intelligent nowadays; it was not always so but to-day it certainly is. And after all, the whole of earthly life depends upon the fact that men have thoughts. The splendid achievements of technology have all sprung from human thoughts; everything good or bad that man brings about on Earth has sprung ultimately from his thoughts. And in the Moon region thoughts are still an important factor, for the judgment of the Beings in that region is based upon how the good or bad deeds have arisen from thoughts. The Beings in the Mercury region too, still judge the illnesses from which they must liberate men, according to the thoughts. But here, in a certain sense, is the boundary up to which thought—anything that recalls human intelligence—has significance, for the Venus region into which man now passes, is ruled by what is known to us on Earth, in its reflection, as love. Here, love takes the place of wisdom; we enter the region of love. Man can pass into the Sun-existence only when love leads him into it out of the sphere of wisdom.

The following question may suggest itself to you: How does a man actually experience these things of which he becomes aware through spiritual perception?—You will no doubt have read what I have written about exercises for the soul in the book, Knowledge of the Higher Worlds and its Attainment, and will know that a man may gradually develop this perception through such exercises. When he succeeds in developing Imaginative consciousness he first experiences his whole life back to his birth, presented in one great spiritual tableau. What is experienced in a natural way after death is experienced through Initiation at any moment of life. When this experience reaches the stage of Inspiration, however, it reveals something that shines through this tableau of human life. Now this is the significant point: we cannot speak truly about the concatenation of the secrets underlying these things until we have reached a certain age. This has always been so. A man may be initiated at any time of life, but it is only at a certain age that through his own perception of these things he is able to have an all embracing survey of cosmic secrets.

The reason is that when a man looks back over his life tableau it presents itself in sections or phases of seven years: a first section from birth to approximately the seventh year, a second from the seventh to the fourteenth year, again from the fourteenth to the twenty-first year, then a section which includes the years from the twenty-first to the forty-second, then a section from the forty-second to the forty-ninth year, another from the forty-ninth to the fifty-sixth year and from the fifty-sixth to the sixty-third year. These sections of life are surveyed one after the other. In the first section of the retrospect, everything up to the change of teeth is seen simultaneously. The secrets of the Cosmos appear throughout as if seen through a mist. In the first section, from birth to the seventh year, the mysteries of the Moon are revealed as though the Sun were shining through a mist; the man is surveying them through his own etheric body. What I have told you to-day about his faults and ill doings being left behind, and what I have told you about the Moon Beings—all this stands written in the first section of this book of life.

Looking back over his life with Imagination, Inspiration and Intuition, it becomes clear to a man that this life has one, two, three, up to seven, chapters. In the first chapter, which comprises early childhood, are the Moon mysteries. In the second chapter, comprising the period between the change of teeth and puberty, are the Mercury mysteries. Doctors know well that this is the age when children's ailments are prevalent, but for all that it, is the healthiest age in human life; taking into consideration mankind as a whole, the rate of morality is relatively lowest in this period. The Mercury mysteries are revealed behind this age of life, so that in the unlikely event of someone being initiated already at the age, say, of eighteen, he would be able to survey the Moon mysteries and the Mercury mysteries. If in later life a man looks back on the next section, from the fourteenth to the twenty-first year, everything in the Universe connected with the Venus mysteries is revealed. In this period, when physical love arises in human life, the mysteries of the Venus-existence in the Universe are spiritually inscribed in the book of life. The period from the twenty-first to the forty-second year needs a survey three times more comprehensive than before, because here all the Beings of the Sun mysteries are revealed. To be able to look back, we must be over the age of forty-two and then, in this section of life, we see in retrospect the Sun mysteries. And when we are old enough to look back on the section of life from the forty-second to the forty-ninth year, the Mars mysteries are revealed. But to penetrate the Mars mysteries we must have passed the age of forty-nine. A man may be initiated, but to penetrate into the Mars mysteries through his own power of vision, he must be able to look back upon the section of life between the forty-second and forty-ninth years. After the age of forty-nine he can look back upon the Jupiter mysteries; and—I am myself now able to speak of this—after his sixty-third year he is allowed by decree of the Gods, to speak of the Saturn mysteries too.

In this life between death and rebirth man passes farther and farther away from conditions surrounding him on Earth and enters into quite different ones. Having passed through the Venus region, he experiences the realities of the Sun-sphere. And now, having described how these truths are revealed through Initiation, I can continue the study of man's existence between death and a new birth.

As we find our way into the spirit world we are brought nearer and nearer to Beings of a higher rank than man. In the Moon region we are still among Beings who, in the main, have lived with men on Earth, but here we already perceive those Beings who lead us on Earth from one life to another. These are the Beings I have called in my books—in accordance with ancient Christian usage—the Hierarchy of Angels. Looking back to early childhood with the Initiation knowledge of which I have spoken, we see at the same time what has been wrought in man by the world of the Angels. Think of the wonderful beauty of some of the conceptions which exist in the simple hearts of men and are actually confirmed by the higher wisdom of Initiation. We speak of how the activities of the Angels weave through a child's first years of life; and when we look back in order to study the Moon region we actually see our childhood and with it the weaving work of the Angels. Then, when stronger forces begin to operate in the human being, when he reaches the school age, we perceive the work of the Archangels. They are important for us when we are studying the Mercury-existence, for then we are in the world of the Archangels.—There follows the age of puberty and the period from approximately the fourteenth to the twenty-first year. The Venus mysteries are now seen in retrospect, shining through the tableau of the course of life. At the same time we learn that the Hierarchy of the Archai, the Primal Forces, are the Beings specially associated with the Venus-existence. And here we realise a significant truth—again something that is particularly striking—namely, that the Beings associated with the Venus-existence after the age of puberty are those who, as Primal Forces, were concerned with the genesis of the world itself, and in their reflection are again active in the formation of physical man in the sequence of the generations. The relation between the Cosmos and human life is revealed in this way.

We gaze then into the mysteries of the Sun-existence. What is the nature of the Sun according to modern physicists? An incandescent globe of gas, where burning gases diffuse light and heat. For the eyes of spirit this is a thoroughly childish conception! The truth is that if the physicists could organise an expedition to the Sun, they would be astonished to find everything entirely different from what they imagined. There are no cosmic gases there; human beings would not be consumed by flames if they could travel to the Sun. But if they came into the Sun region they would be torn asunder—destroyed in that way. What, then, is the Sun, in reality?

When you walk about a room there may be people in it, or chairs which you knock against. Here (drawing on blackboard) are objects, and between them is empty space through which you walk. In the area in which we are at present, certain portions of space are filled by chairs or by yourselves; other portions are empty. If I take the chairs away and you come in, you will find only an empty space. Empty space is far more prevalent in the Cosmos. Here on Earth we do not know what has to be known in the Cosmos. In the Cosmos, space can even be empty of itself, so that at some points there is no space. In soda water there are little bubbles, less dense than the water; these you can see—it is the bubbles you see, not the water. In the same way, when you look out into space, you may see nothing; but where the Sun is, there is even less than space. Suppose that here is the empty space of the Universe, and that in this empty space there is nothing, not even space, so that if you went there you would be sucked up and disappear. There is nothing there at all, nothing physical, not even space. It is the site of all that is spiritual. This is the nature of the Sun-existence about which the physicists would be so astonished. Only at the edge of this empty space is there something that begins to be as the physicists suppose. In the corona of the Sun there are incandescent gases, but within this empty space there is nothing physical, not even space! It is all purely spiritual. Within this sphere there are Beings of three ranks: Exusiai, Dynamis and Kyriotetes. Into this region we enter when we have passed through the Venus-existence during the further period between death and a new birth. Then, when we look back—only we must have been more than forty-two years old—we see the reflection, as it were, of the Sun nature. The greater part of a man's life between death and a new birth is spent among the Exusiai, Dynamis and Kyriotetes.

Now when, during this period between death and a new birth, man actually penetrates into the Sun region, there is no similarity whatever with anything to which we are accustomed in the physical, earthly world. In this latter world we may have good intentions; but there may be someone near us whose intentions are the very reverse. We try to perform good actions but are only to some extent successful; in the case of the other person, however, everything succeeds. Looking back over our life after years or decades have passed, we come all too easily to the conclusion that in the physical, earthly course of things, it is not the case that good intentions or good deeds also have good consequences. For instance, on Earth we see the good punished and the bad rewarded, for the good may be unfortunate and the bad fortunate. There seems to be no connection between moral life and physical actuality. On the other hand, everything physical has its necessary consequences; magnetic force must attract iron, for example. Physical relationships alone are realised on Earth in our life between birth and death. In the Sun-existence there are no such relationships; there are only moral relationships. Everything moral in that sphere has the power of coming to realisation in an appropriate way. Goodness produces phenomena which bring blessing to men, whereas evil brings the opposite. Here on Earth, moral relationship is only ideal, and can be established as ideal only in an external, inadequate way, inasmuch as jurisprudence sees to it that evil is punished. In the Sun region, moral relationships become reality. In this region man's every good intention, however feeble the thought, begins to be reality—a reality perceived by the Exusiai, Dynamis and Kyriotetes. Man is regarded by the Beings of the Sun region according to the goodness he has in him, according to the way he was able to think and feel and experience. I cannot, therefore, describe the Sun region to you theoretically but only in a living way. It is not easy to give a definition of the effect of this or that goodness in the Sun region; one can only try to make it clear to the listeners by saying: If, as man in the Earth region you have had a good thought, in the Sun region between death and a new birth you will have converse with Exusiai, Dynamis and Kyriotetes. You will be able to lead a spiritual life in community with these Beings. If, however, you have had evil thoughts, though you have left them behind you in the Moon region, you will be a lonely soul, abandoned by Exusiai, Dynamis and Kyriotetes. Thus in the Sun region it is through our community with these Beings that goodness becomes reality. If our thoughts have not been good, we do not understand their language; if we have accomplished nothing good we cannot appear before them. The effect of our goodness is all reality in the Sun region.

This study will be continued in the lecture tomorrow.

You can be sure of this: anyone who is free from prejudice takes the youth movement of today very seriously indeed. If you look around, not among your contemporaries, but among the older people of today, it may seem to you that the youth movement is not taken seriously, but it is quite certainly taken seriously by those who attempt real spiritual development.

Several years have passed since a small group of young people entered the Anthroposophical Society: they did not want simply to participate as hearers of what the Society gives, but brought to it those thoughts and feelings which young people today regard as characteristic of their age. This small group, which met in Stuttgart a few years ago, put before the anthroposophical movement the question: “How can you give us a place in this movement?” I believe that from my side this question was really understood at that time. It is not always easy to understand the question which a genuinely seeking human being puts to his time; and young people now have a number of questions, entirely justified, which cannot be expressed quite clearly.

At the time when the youth movement and the anthroposophical movement first came into contact, it really seemed to me as if they were being led together by a kind of destiny, a kind of Karma. I must still look on it in this way; the youth movement and the anthroposophical movement have by an inner destiny to take each other into account. When I call up all that I have experienced through many decades in the endeavour to bring about a community among human beings who wish to seek for the spirit, and relate this to what has developed as a youth movement since about the turn of the century, I have to say that what was felt by a very small number forty years ago, and was then hardly noticed, because so few were concerned, is felt today within a youth movement which is becoming more and more widespread. In your words of greeting it was well expressed—how difficult it really is becoming for a young human being to live.

Although at other times there has always been a kind of youth movement, it was different from what it is today. If one talks to older people about the youth movement, they often say, “Oh well, young people always felt different from the elderly, always wanted something different. That wears off, balances itself out. The youth movement of today need not be regarded differently from the opposition brought by the younger generation against older generations at all times in the past.”

From many sides I have heard this answer to the burning question of the youth movement of today. Nevertheless this answer is entirely wrong; and herein lies an immense difficulty. Always in the past there was something among younger people, however radical they appeared, which could be called a certain recognition for the institutions and methods of life founded by older people. The young could regard it as an ideal to grow into the things passed down from older times, step by step. It is no longer so today. It is not just a question of involvement in academic life, but of the fact that the young human being, if he intends to go on living, has to grow into the institutions brought about by the older people, and here the young feel themselves strangers; they are met by what they have to regard as a kind of death. They see the whole way in which older people behave within these institutions as something masked. The young feel their own inner human character as alive, and around they see nothing but masked faces. This is something that can bring the young to despair—that they do not find human beings among older people, but for the most part only masks. It is really so that men come to meet one like imprints, forms stamped in wax, representing classes, callings, or even ideals—but they do not meet one as full, living human beings.

Though it may sound rather abstract, it is a very real fact in human feeling that we are standing at a turning-point of time, as mankind has not stood through all history or indeed through most of pre-history. I do not like speaking about times of transition; there is always a transition from what went before to what is coming; all that matters is the specific change that is going on. But it is a fact that mankind stands today at a turning-point as never before, in historic or in prehistoric times. Significant things are going on in the depths of the human soul, not so much in consciousness as in the depths—and these are really processes of the spiritual world, not limited to the physical world.

We hear it said that at the turning-point from the nineteenth to the twentieth century, the so-called Dark Age came to an end, and a new Age of Light has begun. Anyone who can look into the spiritual world knows quite certainly that this is so. The fact that not much light has yet appeared does not disprove it; men are accustomed to the old darkness, and—just as a ball which has been thrown goes on rolling—this too rolls on, through inertia. Our civilisation today goes rolling on through inertia, and when we look at the effects of this in the world around us, we feel it all has something in common. To describe these dead things in a living way is not easy, but for everything nowadays—one might say—documentary proof is required. Nothing is held to be justified in the eyes of our modern civilisation unless documentary evidence for it can be produced. For every scientific fact, for every assertion, and even for every human being, there must be documentary evidence. Before he can enter any profession or calling, he must have a certificate. In scientific life everything has to be proved. Anything not proved does not count, cannot even be understood.

I could say a lot about this certification, this having to be proved. It appears sometimes in grotesque forms. I will tell you of a little event connected with this. When I was young, though not very young, I edited a periodical, and was involved in a lawsuit over a small matter. There was not much in it: I went myself, and won my case in the first court. The plaintiff was not satisfied, so he appealed. I went again, and the opposing counsel said to me: “We do not need you at all, only your solicitor, where is he?” I said I had not brought one, I thought it was my own affair. That was no good. I had to use my ingenuity to get the case adjourned; and I was told that next time my presence would be useless; I had to send a solicitor. For in an appeal case it was not the custom for someone to represent himself.

I went away very much amused. And I forgot the whole thing until the day before the case was to continue. I went into the town and thought: I cannot let myself be told again tomorrow that I am unnecessary. As I went along the street I saw a solicitor's brass plate and went in. I did not know him, or anything about him. He said: “Who recommended me to you?” I said: “Nobody.” I had thought somebody else would not do it any better, and took the first I saw. He said: “Write out on a piece of paper what I should say tomorrow.” I wrote it for him and stayed away, according to custom. A few days later he wrote that I had won the case.

I could tell you a hundred things like this out of my own life. It is everywhere regarded as irrelevant to have an actual human being present; the important thing is that accepted procedures should be followed. Young people feel this. They do not want documentary proof for everything, but something different. Instead of proofs, they would put experience. Older people do not understand this word, “experience.” It is not in their dictionaries and can appear quite horrible to them; to speak of spiritual experience is horrible for many people. This is what we find at the transition from a dark age to an age of light; it signifies a radical turning-point.

It is quite natural that this transition should present itself in two streams, so to speak. The anthroposophical movement and the youth movement have by destiny a certain connection. The anthroposophical movement unites people of every class, occupation and age, who felt at the turning-point from the 19th to the 20th century that man has to place himself into the whole cosmos in a quite different way. For him it is no longer simply a question of something being confirmed by evidence or proved—he must be able to experience it. Hence it appeared to me quite in accordance with Karma that the two movements were led together. And so a kind of youth movement developed within the anthroposophical movement. And finally, when the anthroposophical movement was refounded at Christmas at the Goetheanum, this soon led to the institution of a youth section, which was to take care of the concerns that arise in the feelings of young people in a most sincere and genuine way.

An immensely encouraging beginning was made by our anthroposophical youth movement in the first months of this year. There are reasons for a certain stagnation at present; they lie in the difficulties of the youth movement. These difficulties arise because it is so hard to give something form out of the existing chaos, in particular the present spiritual chaos. To give something form is much more difficult than ever before. The strangest things happen to one today. Those who know me will know that I am not at all inclined to boast. But when I heard Rector Bartsch speak yesterday in such a warm and friendly way, saying that when I come to the anthroposophical society here I am welcomed like a father, I had to say, yes, there is something in it. So I am addressed as a father—and fathers are old; they can no longer be quite young. In Dornach, when we began the youth section, I suggested that the young people should speak out clearly and frankly. A number of young people spoke well and honestly. Then I spoke. Afterwards, when it was all over, somebody who knows me well said, after he had listened to everything: “All the same, you are the youngest among the young people.” This can happen today; in one place one is addressed as an old father, in another as the youngest among the young. Ideas no longer have to be quite fixed. But if you climb up and down the steps of the ladder, sometimes as the little old father, sometimes as the youngest of all, you have a good opportunity to catch a glimpse of what is living in people's feelings.

I said that the youth section was stagnating. This will pass. It has happened, because it is, to begin with, extremely difficult for a young mind to think its way into something which it feels quite clearly. Our civilisation, in losing the spirit, has lost the human being! If I now speak more from the background of existence, I see that young people who have come down recently from the spiritual world into physical existence have come with demands on life quite different from the demands brought by those who came down earlier. Why is this so? You do not need to believe me. But for me this is knowledge, not merely belief. Before one comes down to physical earthly existence one passes through much in the spiritual world which is fuller of meaning and mightier as an experience than anything passed through on earth. Earthly life should not be undervalued. Without earthly life, freedom could never be developed. But the life between death and rebirth is on a grander scale. The souls who came down are the souls which are in you, my dear friends. These souls were able to behold an immensely significant spiritual movement taking its course behind physical existence in regions above the earth—the movement which I call within our anthroposophical society the Michael movement.

This is so. Whether the materialistic man of today' is prepared to believe it or not, it is so! The leading power for our present time, who could be named in a different way, but whom I call the Michael power, is trying to achieve, within the spiritual leadership of the earth and of mankind, a transformation of all soul-life upon the earth. Men who became so very clever during the 19th century have no inkling of the fact that the attitude of soul which developed during the 19th century as the most enlightened attitude has been given up by the spiritual world. An end to it has been ordained, and a Michael community of beings, who never walk upon earth, but lead humanity, seeks to bring about among men a new attitude of soul. The death of the old civilisation has come.

When the Threefold Commonwealth movement, which failed through the death of the old civilisation, was going on, I often said: “We have today no threefold membering in public life according to the spirit, according to law and so on, and according to economic life—but we have a threefold membering in terms of phrases, conventions and routines. Instead of spiritual life, there are phrases; and routine dominates economic life, instead of goodwill towards men, love for men, which should be ruling there.”

This condition of soul, in which people are stuck fast, should be replaced by another, which arises from man himself and is experienced in man himself. That is the endeavour of spiritual beings who have taken over the leadership of our age and can be recognised in the signs of the times. The souls which have descended to the earth in your bodies saw this Michael movement and came down under this impression. And here they grew up in the midst of a humanity which really excludes man, which makes man into a mask. The youth movement is thus a wonderful memory of experience before birth, of most significant impressions gathered during this pre-earthly life. And if someone has these indefinite unconscious memories of pre-earthly life, of the endeavour to achieve a transformation of man's mood of soul—he will find nothing of it here on earth. That is what is going on today in the feelings of young people.

The anthroposophical movement springs from the revelation of the Michael movement; and has the purpose of bringing the intentions of the Michael movement into the midst of human life. The anthroposophical movement seeks to look up from the earth to the Michael movement. Young people bring with them a memory of pre-earthly existence. So the youth movement and the anthroposophical movement are brought together by destiny. And everything that has happened through the interplay between these two movements appeared to me to come about in a quite inward way, not through earthly circumstances, but through spiritual circumstances, inasmuch as these are connected with man. Thus I regard this youth movement as something which can awaken unlimited hopes for the future of all that can be felt rightly as anthroposophical.

Of course we encounter things which are bound to arise from the fact that the anthroposophical movement and the youth movement are both at their beginnings. We have seen the Free Anthroposophical Society founded side by side with the Anthroposophical Society in Germany. This Free Anthroposophical Society had—again inevitably—a governing committee that was chosen or elected. I think this committee had seven members—somebody says there were nine—very well, nine; there were nine, but one after the other was politely discharged from office, until three were left. All very comprehensible. The Free Anthroposophical Society had the essential intention of understanding the experience of youth. Now a discussion on this subject developed. One after another the committee members had their capacity to experience youth in the right way disputed. Three remained, and of course they discussed with one another whether all of them had the experience of youth. Something quite remarkable arose, pointing to a link of destiny between the youth movement and the anthroposophical movement. It seems ridiculous, but is very serious. For when one investigates the great questions of destiny, one finds very significant things, and the greatness of destiny is often indicated in symptoms. When we had founded the Anthroposophical Society, we also had committee members who quarrelled terribly, and it was evident to me that eventually very few would remain, after they had politely dismissed the others. But to prevent it from ending there, the left side of a person would start quarrelling with the right side over which side really had the experience of youth. That sounds like irony, but is not. For it indicates that what can be called the experience of youth today lies deep within the soul, and the significant thing is that this experience cannot necessarily be expressed in clear words. In the age of cleverness so many clear words have been spoken! What matters is that we should reach experiences. And then this inability to find clear forms of expression should be recognised as unavoidable. The right to continue in a state of vagueness is in fact claimed. But something else is needed: a refusal to separate from one another because an impression of unclarity is given, and a willingness to come together and talk.

Above all I would like to express to you, my young friends who are sitting here today, the wish that all of you, whatever you may feel and think, may hold together with an iron will, truly hold together. This is what we need most of all, if we want to achieve something in approaching the great questions of today. We cannot always be asking whether someone else has a rather different opinion from one's own. It is really a question of finding one another, even in the greatest differences of feeling. This will perhaps be the finest achievement, that those who are young understand how to keep together in spite of differences in feeling. It is a fact that what young people miss most of all today is the finding of other human beings. Wherever they go, they find, not human beings, for the human beings have died, but masks, everywhere masks! This has had a natural consequence: a search by human beings for one another. And that is very moving; for all the various “scout” movements, the Wandervogel movements and so on, are all a search for the human being. Young people want to join with others; they are looking in others for the human being. This is quite comprehensible. Because the human being was no longer there spiritually, each one said to himself: “But I feel, all the same, that the human being must be there.” And they looked for the human being, looked for him in community. But we should not forget that this has something immensely tragic about it.

Many young people have experienced this tragedy. They joined together and believed they were finding the human being. But nothing of what they were seeking came to fill their community; and they became even lonelier than before. These two phases of the youth movement are evident: the phase of community, the phase of great loneliness. How many young people there are today who go in loneliness through the world, conscious that nowhere have they been understood.

Now the truth is that one cannot find the human being in another person unless one knows how to look for him in a spiritual way—for man is in fact a spiritual being, and if one approached a man only externally, he cannot be found, even if he is there. It is indeed lamentable today, how people pass each other by. Certainly, earlier times can be rightly criticised. Much was barbaric then. But there was something: a man could find the human being in another man. He cannot do this now. Grown men all pass each other by. No one knows the other. He cannot even live with the other, because no one listens to the other. Everyone shouts in the other's ear his own opinion, and says: “That is my opinion, that is my point of view ”. You have merely points of view, nothing more. For what is asserted from one point of view or another makes no difference. These things murmur among young people, perceived by the heart, not by the mind.

You can be sure it must be right to feel a connection of destiny between the youth movement and the anthroposophical movement. Young people did not come to Anthroposophy just because they wanted to try out this as well, after they had tried out many other things—they came to it from destiny. And this gives me the certainty that we shall be able to work together. We shall find our way to one another, and, however things turn out, they must above all develop in such a way that those human qualities in the widest sense which live among young people are taken into account. Otherwise, if real spirit does not spring forth from youth, something utterly different will come about. For youthful life is certainly there, and one will be able to feel it; but this condition of youth, if it is not filled with spirit, ceases early in the twenties. We cannot preserve youth physiologically. We have to grow old, but we must be able to carry something from youth into old age. We must understand the condition of youth in such a way that we can rightly grow old with it. Unless spirit touches the soul, the deepest soul, the years between twenty and thirty cannot be lived through without coming into grey misery of soul. And this is my greatest anxiety. How can we work together in such a way that our young people will be able to cross the abyss between the twenties and the thirties without losing their vital spirit, without falling into grey misery of soul? I have known human beings who in their mid-twenties fell into this grey misery of soul. For, to speak fundamentally, that which lives in the depths of young souls after the end of the Kali Yuga is a cry for the spirit.

Over a period of three hours I shall have the opportunity of speaking to you about the building idea of Dornach. In this first lecture, it is my task to characterize how this building idea emerged from the anthroposophically oriented spiritual movement, and then, over eight days and in a fortnight, to go into more detail about the style and the whole formal language of this our building, the framework and the external representative of our spiritual scientific movement. By speaking about the genesis of the Dornach building, I would like to perhaps touch on something personal by way of introduction.

I spent the 1880s in Vienna. It was the Vienna in which the ideas were developed that could then be seen in the Votivkirche, in the Vienna City Hall, in the Hansen Building of the Austrian Parliament, in the museums, in the Burgtheater building, that is to say in those monumental buildings that were created in Vienna in the second half of the last century and which, to a certain extent, represent the most mature products of the architecture of the past era of human development. I would like to say that I heard the words of one of the architects involved in these buildings resound from the views from which these monumental buildings were created. When I was studying at the Vienna Technical University, Heinrich Ferstel, the architect of the Votivkirche, had just taken up his post as rector. In his inaugural address, he said something that I would like to say still echoes in my mind today, and it has echoed throughout my subsequent life. Ferstel said something at the time that summarized the most diverse views that had emerged in art at the time, especially in the art of architecture. He said: architectural styles are not invented, architectural styles are born out of the overall views, out of the overall development of the time and the emotional soulfulness of entire peoples and eras.

On the one hand, such a sentence is extremely correct, and on the other hand, it is extremely inflammatory for the human mind. And anyone who has ever immersed themselves with artistic sensibility in the whole world of vision from which this remarkable Gothic structure of the Votive Church in Vienna, translated into miniature, was created by Ferstel himself, anyone who has felt the Vienna City Hall by Schmidt, anyone who has felt the Austrian Parliament in particular, which, through Hansen's genius, has achieved a certain freedom of style, at the time when this same view had not yet been spoiled by the hideous female figure that was later placed on the ramp. Those who had experienced the artistic heyday of Gottfried Semper's mature architecture at the Vienna Burgtheater could truly feel the background from which such an artistic view emerged as that of Heinrich Ferstel, which has just been characterized. In all that was built, one sees ripe fruits, but basically one sees only the renewal of the styles of past epochs of humanity.

And I was able to feel this, I would like to say, inwardly inciting fact, for example, when I heard the lectures of the excellent esthete Joseph Bayer, who, out of the same spirit that Ferstel, Hansen, cathedral architect Schmidt, but especially Gottfried Semper, created with, tried to illustrate the forms of architectural art, the forms of ceramics, and so on.

Such a fact, such a world of ideas, is inspiring for the human mind, I say this because perhaps, when faced with such an idea, “architectural styles are not invented, but born out of an overall spiritual life” in the human mind - when one sees: this view has achieved something magnificent and powerful, but from a mere renewal, from a renaissance of old architectural styles, old artistic perceptions, so to speak - because then the question arises before the soul: Are we perhaps such a barren time after all that we cannot give birth to something new in this sense from our overall view, from the scope of our world view?

At the same time as all that could so richly fill the souls from these buildings when they immersed themselves in these views, from which the buildings arose, something else, though characteristic of the time, was concentrated in Vienna. In its soul body, Vienna had at that time also absorbed a certain height of precisely the newer medical progress. Skoda, Oppolzer and others represented a flowering of the development of medical science in the second half of the 19th century. At that time, especially if you lived among those who had to deal with such things, you could often hear a saying – and this saying also stayed with me: We live in a time in which medical nihilism has developed.

This medical nihilism, which had emerged precisely in the heyday of pathology, actually culminated in the fact that the great physicians mainly studied those forms of disease that could be observed in their course merely through pathology, in which nature's healing process only needed to be helped along by all sorts of measures, but in which little could be done for the patient by taking remedies. Thus, precisely out of this medical school arose a disbelief in therapy, a skepticism about therapy. And when pathology had developed to its highest peak that it could reach at that time, people actually despaired of the possibility of real healing and, especially in initiated circles, spoke of medical nihilism. That is what one could feel. Our world view, where it was to prove fruitful in a certain area of practical life, led to nihilism and a certain powerlessness in the face of that practical life.

Anyone with the ability to feel and perceive these things will, in the subsequent period of European civilization, be able to fully sense how, basically, those impulses, which on the one hand found expression in the fact that an architect as important as Heinrich Ferstel had to say, “Architectural styles are not invented, but are born out of the overall development of the time,” and yet still built in the sense of an old architectural style, on the other hand, expressed itself in the fact that in a practical area of life, people's views have led to nihilism.

What developed from this in the period that followed was basically a continuation of what had been expressed in this way. Through the most diverse circumstances, seemingly, but probably through a necessary connection, I was confronted with the necessity of setting up impulses of a new spiritual life everywhere in the face of the appearance of what lay in the lines of development I have indicated. This new spiritual life would in turn draw from such original sources of human thought , human feeling and human will, as they repeatedly existed in the epochs of human development and as they proved fruitful in order to give rise to the artistic, the religious and the cognitive.

If we want to feel in an even deeper way what the human mind was actually like at a time when, in art, only a kind of renaissance was living in the highest expressions of the artistic, and when, even in practical areas, views have led to a kind of nihilism When we delve into what was actually taking place in the soul and spirit during this time, we have to say that the spiritual matters that directly concern the human being, the scientific, and even to a high degree the religious life, had taken on an abstract, intellectual character. Man had come to cultivate less that which can arise from his entire human essence, his powers and impulses. In this most recent period, he had come to establish a mere head culture, a mere intellectualistic culture, to live in abstractions.

This is something that occurs as a parallel phenomenon in the materialistic age: on the one hand, people believe that they can completely immerse themselves in the workings of material processes; but on the other hand, precisely because of this striving for immersion in a tendency towards abstraction, a tendency towards mere intellectualism, a tendency through which the urge to shape something that can directly reach into the full reality of existence fades from the most intimate affairs of the human soul. One withdraws into an abstract corner of one's soul life, leaving one's religious feelings to take place there. They withdraw into the closed rooms of the laboratory and the observatory, and devote themselves to specialized investigations in these fields, but in so doing they distance themselves from a truly living understanding of the totality of the world. One withdraws as a human being from real cooperation with practical life, and as a result one arrives at a closed intellectuality. And finally, everything that we see emerging in the fields of philosophy or world view in this period bears a distinctly abstract, a distinctly intellectual character.

I believed that anthroposophically oriented spiritual science had to be placed in this current. It was not surprising that this spiritual science, when it was first placed in an intellectualist age, when it had to speak to people who, in the broadest sense, were fundamentally oriented towards intellectualist abstraction, initially had to appear as a worldview as if it itself had arisen only from abstraction, from mere thinking. And so it was that in our work for our anthroposophically oriented spiritual science, that phase arose which filled the first decade of the twentieth century and of which I would like to say: it was inevitable that our anthroposophically oriented world view should take on a certain intellectual character through the very nature of the people who were inclined towards it. It had to speak to people who, above all, believed that if you wanted to ascend to the spiritual and divine, you had to do so completely detached from the lower reality, you even had to arm yourself with a certain world-contempt, with a certain unreality of life. This was already an attitude that was alive in those who, out of their inclinations, had found their way into the current of anthroposophically oriented spiritual science.

And on the other hand, the world's judgment of this anthroposophically oriented spiritual science arose: Oh, they are dreamers, they are visionaries, they are people who are not relevant to practical life. This judgment arose - such things are very difficult to destroy - and still lives on today in most people who want to judge anthroposophically oriented spiritual science. Of course, people saw that something different was alive in what appeared at that time as this anthroposophically oriented spiritual science than in their theories, in their world-view ideas. And since they regarded what they had sucked out of their bloodless abstractions from their materialistic orientation as the only spiritual reality to be attained by man himself, what the anthroposophically oriented spiritual science spoke to the world from completely different foundations seemed to them to be something fanciful, something fantastic.

But a quite different phenomenon was involved. What was spoken at that time out of truly shaped spiritual science oriented to anthroposophy is not the speech of fantasy or enthusiasm. It is the speech of spiritual research that can give an account of the nature of its research to the most exacting mathematician, as I said at another time. But it is true: what has been spoken here out of spiritual realities sounded different from the bloodless world views of modern times. It sounded different, not because it was more abstract, or because it ascended to regions of the spirit more bloodless and frozen than those which have given rise to the theories developed out of the modern way of thinking, but it sounded different because it proceeded from spiritual realities, because it proceeded from those regions of man where one not only thinks, where one feels and wills, but does not feel and will in a dark way, not in the way that modern psychology considers to be the only one because it only knows this; not out of dark feeling, but out of feeling that is just as bright, as bright as the purest thinking itself. And the words were spoken out of a will that is suffused with a light that is striven for as the bright clarity of pure thoughts is striven for, and these thoughts are grasped when we seek to comprehend reality. Thus, in this anthroposophically oriented spiritual science, there lived that which wanted to come from the whole person, which therefore also wanted to take hold of the whole person, to take hold of the thinking, feeling and willing human being.

When one was able to speak in this way from the innermost being of the whole person, one often felt the inadequacy of even modern modes of expression. Anyone who has felt this way knows how to speak about it. One felt that modern times had also brought something into external language that leads words into abstract regions, and that speaking in the way language has now become itself invites abstraction. And one experiences, I would say, the inwardly tragic phenomenon of carrying within oneself something that one would like to express in broad content and sharp contours and developed with inner life, but that one is then rejected back to what modern language, which is coming out of an age of abstraction and is theoretical, alone knows how to say. And then one feels the urge for other means of expression. One feels the urge to express oneself more fully about what one actually carries within oneself than can be done through the theoretical debates in which modern humanity has been trained for three to four centuries, the theoretical debates that have shaped our concepts, our words, in which even our lyricists, our playwrights, our epic poets live more than they realize. One feels the necessity for a fuller, more vivid presentation.

Out of such feelings, the need arose for me to say what was said in the first phase of our anthroposophical movement, which was clothed in more intellectual forms, through my mystery festival plays. I tried to present, in a theatrical way, in scenes and images that were to embrace the whole of human life, the physical, soul and spiritual life, what can be seen in the course of the world, what is contained in the course of the world as a partial solution to our great world riddles, but which can never be expressed in the abstract formulas into which the laws of nature can be expressed. This is how that which I then tried to depict in my mystery dramas came about. I had to resort to images to depict what comes from the whole human being. For only from the human being in his head comes what modern language has created for our science and our popular literature, and what today's people, if you listen to them, are able to understand. You have to touch the deeper sides of their minds if you want to speak to them what anthroposophical spiritual science actually has to say.

This is how the need for these mystery dramas arose. These mystery dramas were first performed in Munich, in the surroundings, in the setting of ordinary theaters. Just as it literally blew apart the inside of the soul when one had to express the anthroposophically oriented spiritual science in the formulas of modern philosophy or world view, so it blew apart one's aesthetic sensation when one had to present in an ordinary theater, in an ordinary stage space, what was now to be depicted in a pictorial way: the spiritual content of the anthroposophical worldview and world feeling, of the anthroposophical world will. And when we worked in Munich on the theatrical presentation of these mystery plays in ordinary theaters, the idea arose to create a space of our own, to perform a building of our own, in which there would no longer be the sense of confinement that one in the manner just described for anthroposophically oriented spiritual science, but in which there is a framework that is itself the expression of what lives in anthroposophically oriented spiritual science.

Therefore, this building was not created in the sense of an old architectural style, where one would have gone to any architect and had a house created for what anthroposophically oriented spiritual science is to work out, but rather it had to arise from the innermost being of anthroposophically oriented spiritual science, because it did not merely work out of thinking and feeling, but out of the will itself, a structure had to arise out of this living existence of anthroposophically oriented spiritual science as a framework, which, as a style, as a formal language, gives the same as the spiritual-soul gives the spoken word of anthroposophically oriented spiritual science. A unity had to be created between the building as an art form and the living element present in this spiritual science.

But if there is such a living element, if there is a living element that is not merely theoretical and abstract, if there is a truly living spiritual element, then it creates its own framework, because with such a spiritual element one lives within the creative forces of nature, within the creative forces of the soul, within the creative forces of the spiritual. And just as the shell of the nut is formed out of the same creative forces as the inside, which we then consume as a nut, just as the nutshell cannot be other than it is because it follows the laws the nut kernel comes into being, so this structure here in all its individual forms is such that it cannot be otherwise, because it is nothing other than a shell that has come into being, been formed, created according to the same laws as spiritual science itself.

If I may express myself hyperbolically, it seems to me that at the end of my life I would not have been haunted by Heinrich Ferstel's thought that “architectural styles cannot be invented” if the truth contained in it had not been clearly reckoned with. Yes, architectural styles cannot be invented, they must arise out of an overall spiritual life. But if such a spiritual life as a whole exists, then it may dare, even if in a modest way, even with weak forces, to also gain an art style from the same spirituality from which this spirituality itself is created.

I believe that I know better than anyone else what the faults of this building are, and I can assure you that I do not think immodestly about what has been created. I know everything I would do differently if I were to build such a structure again. I know how much this building is a beginning, how much of what is intended by it in the sense of its style may have to be realized quite differently. In any case, I do not want to think immodestly about this building. But with regard to what is intended by it, it may be pointed out how it wants to prove that architectural styles cannot be invented, but that they can be born if, instead of the nihilism of world view, a spiritual positivism is set, if, instead of the decadent decline of old world views, new sources of world view are sought. This building has therefore been created with a certain inner necessity. Just as feeling led us to present our world view in the mystery plays, as if feeling were to be taken into account in addition to thinking, so should the will, which is inherent in anthroposophically oriented spiritual science, first express itself artistically in this building.

The fact that there is life in this spiritual science should, however, be shown in an equally modest way, just as a beginning – I always have to emphasize this – by the fact that we do not want to use this building to shut ourselves away and, as it were, strive for a higher world view as if it were a satisfaction of our inner soulful desires. No, in the next lectures on this building I will show you how all the building forms here live in such a way that they basically do not represent walls, but something artistically transparent. This is how the wall, which is designed here, differs from the walls that one is accustomed to in other architectural walls. The latter are final; one knows oneself inside a space that is limited in a certain way. Here, however, everything is shaped in such a way that, by looking at the frame, one can get the feeling, if one feels the thing in the right way, of how everything cancels itself out. Just as glass physically negates itself and becomes transparent, so the artistic forms of the walls are meant to negate themselves in order to become transparent; so painting and sculpture are meant to negate themselves in order to become transparent, so as not to lock up the soul in a room, but to lead the soul out into the world. And out of this tendency there also arose the impulse, still modest, which I call the social impulse and which in my book The Core of the Social Question should be presented to the world, not as a theory but as a call to action.

Spiritual science could not remain with intellectuality. In its first phase it had to take human habits into account, had to speak to those people who were still educated entirely in abstract intellectualism. But it had to progress from thinking to feeling in order to present to the world what was to be expressed not only through the abstract word, but also through the dramatic play, the dramatic action, the dramatic image. But this spiritual science could not stop at mere feeling. It had to progress to the realm of will. It had to overcome and shape matter, it had to give form and life to matter. Therefore, a new framework, a new formal language, indeed a new architectural style, had to be sought for the mystery plays and for everything that wants to express itself through them, including the living anthroposophically oriented spiritual science itself. In order to affirm what lives as the deepest impulse in this anthroposophically oriented spiritual science, the social impulse also arose quite naturally in the time when adversity taught people to replace the tendency of decline with the tendency of ascent. We wanted to gain through this building, even through its style, that state of mind through which the human being goes out to experience all of social existence, goes out to be able to participate in the necessary social reconstruction of our time with living soul content.

Thus, I believe, this structure can be seen as standing within what reveals itself as the deepest needs of our time, which in turn want to lead people out of mere abstractness and the materialism associated with it, out of mere thinking and into living feeling, and into active will. And we believe that in this way we also have what must be the substance, as it were, for what is so urgently demanded of us today, for what we know: If we humans are unable to accomplish it, the slide into barbarism will continue. A worldview that encompasses the whole person, the thinking, feeling and willing human being, must also be able to provide the state of mind that enables people to work together on what is a vital necessity of the present and the near future: social action.

What we have really been endeavouring to do in our talks together here is to delve a little more deeply into Waldorf School pedagogy, in order to find in that pedagogy the kind of education with which we can approach the so-called abnormal child. It will have been clear to you from our discussions that, if you want to educate an abnormal child in the right manner, you will have to form your judgement and estimation of him in quite another way than you do for the so-called normal child—and of course differently again from the way he is regarded in ordinary lay circles, where people are for the most part content merely to specify the abnormality and not trouble themselves to look further and enquire into the causes of it. For there is no denying it, the man of today is not nearly so far on (in his study, for example, of the human being), as Goethe was in his study of the growth and nature of the plant. (And, as we saw, Goethe's work in this direction was a beginning, it was still in its elementary stage.) For Goethe took a special delight in the malformations that can occur in plants; and the passages where he deals with such are among the most interesting in all his writings. He describes, for example, how some organ in a plant, which one is accustomed to find in a certain so-called normal form, may either grow to excess, becoming abnormally large, or may insert itself into the plant in an abnormal manner, sometimes even going so far as to produce from itself organs that would normally be situated in quite another part of the plant. In the very fact that the plant is able to express itself in such malformations, Goethe sees a favourable starting point for setting out to discover the true “idea” of the archetypal plant. For he knows that the idea which lies hidden behind the plant manifests quite particularly in these malformations; so that if we were to carry out a whole series of observations—it would of course be necessary to make the observations over a wide range of plants—if we were to observe first how the root can suffer malformation, then again how the leaf, the stem, the flower, and even the fruit can become deformed, we would be able, by looking upon all these malformations together, to arrive at an apperception of the archetypal plant.

And it is fundamentally the same with all living entities—even with beings who live in the spirit. More and more does our observation of the human race lead us to perceive this truth—that where we have abnormalities in man, it is the spirituality in him which is finding expression in these abnormalities.

When once we begin to look at the phenomena of life from this aspect, it will at the same time give us insight into the way men thought about life in olden times; and we shall understand how it was that education was regarded as having an extremely close affinity with healing. For in healing men saw a process whereby that in man which has received Ahrimanic or Luciferic form and configuration is made to come nearer to that in him which, in the sense of good spiritual progress, holds a middle course between the two extremes. Healing was, in effect, the establishment of a right balance in the human being between the Ahrimanic and the Luciferic. And then, having a more intimate and deep perception of how it is only in the course of life that man comes into this condition of balance, of how he needs indeed to be brought into it by means of education, these men of an older time saw that there is something definitely abnormal about a child as such, something in every child that is in a certain respect ill and requires to be healed. Hence the primeval words for “healing” and “educating” have the very same significance. Education heals the so-called normal human being, and healing is a specialised form of education for the so-called abnormal human being.

If it has become clear to us that the foregoing is a true and fundamental perception, we can do no other than carry our enquiry further along the same road. All the illnesses that originate within the human being have, in reality, to do with the spiritual in him, and ultimately even the illnesses that arise in him in response to an injury from without; for when you break your leg, the condition that presents itself is really the reaction that arises within you to the blow from without—and surgery could certainly learn something by looking at the matter in this light. Starting therefore from this fundamental perception, we find ourselves ready to approach in a much deeper and more intimate manner the question: How are we to deal with children, having regard to the whole relationship of their physical nature to their soul and spirit?

In the very young child, physical and spiritual are intimately bound up together, and we must not assume—as people generally do today—that when some medicament or other is given to a child, it takes effect physically alone. The spiritual influence of a substance is actually greater in the case of a very little child than it is with a grown person. The virtue for the child of the mother's milk, for example, lies in the fact that there lives in it what was called in the archaic language of an earlier way of thought the “good mummy” in contrast to the “bad mummy” that lives in other products of excretion. The whole mother lives in the mother's milk. Mother's milk is permeated with forces that have, as it were, only changed their field of action within the organisation. For up to the time of birth, these forces are active in the region that belongs in the main to the system of metabolism and limbs, while after birth they are chiefly active in the region of the rhythmic system. Thus they migrate within the human organisation, moving up a stage higher. In doing so, the forces lose their I content, which was specifically active during the embryonic time, but still retain their astral content. If the same forces that work in the mother's milk were to rise a stage higher still—moving, that is, to the head—they would lose also their astral content and have active within them only the physical and etheric organisation. Hence the harmful effect upon the mother, if these forces do rise a stage higher and we have all the abnormal phenomena that can then show themselves in a nursing mother.

In mother's milk we still have therefore astral formative forces that work spiritually; and we must realise what a responsibility rests upon us when the time comes to let the little child make the transition to receiving his nourishment directly for himself. The responsibility is particularly great for us today, since there is now no longer any consciousness of how the spiritual is active everywhere in the external world, and of how the plant, as it ascends from root up to flower and finally to fruit, becomes gradually more and more spiritual—in its own nature and also in its activity and influence. Taking first the root, we have there something that works least spiritually of all; in comparison with the rest of the plant, the root has a strongly physical and etheric relation to the environment. In the flower however begins a life which reaches out, in a kind of longing, to the astral. In a word, the plant spiritualises, as it grows upwards.

Then we must carry our study a stage further, and enquire into the place of the root within the whole cosmic connection. Its part and place within the cosmos is expressed in the fact that the root has grown into the soil of the Earth, has embedded itself right into the light. The truth is that the root of the plant has grown into the soil in the same way as we have grown with our head into the free expanse of air and into the light. We can therefore say that here below

we have that which in man is of the head nature and has to do with perception; while here above we have the part of the plant that in man has to do with digestion, with nourishment. The upper part of the plant contains the spirituality that we long for in our metabolism-and-limbs system, and is on this account related to that system in us. One who is able with occult perception to regard first the mother's milk, and then the astral which hovers over the plant and for which the plant longs and yearns, can behold—not indeed a perfect similarity, but an extraordinarily close relationship between the astrality that comes from the mother with the mother's milk, and the astrality that comes from the cosmos and hovers over the blossoms of the plants.

These things are said, not in order that you may possess them as theoretical knowledge, but in order that you may come to cherish the right feeling towards what is in a human being's environment and enters thence into the sphere of his deeds and actions. As you see, we shall have to take care that we find the right way to accustom the little child—gradually—to external nourishment, stimulating him with the fruiting part of the plant, fortifying his metabolic system with the flowering part, and coming to the help of what has to be done by the head by means of a gentle admixture of root substance in his food. The theoretical mastery of these relationships will serve merely to start you off in the right direction; what should then happen is that in the practice of life the knowledge of them flows into all your care for the child, not as theory but more in a spiritual way.

In this connection we cannot but recognise how extraordinarily difficult it is in our day to “behold” a human being as he really is. Again and again, in every field of knowledge into which we enter, our attention is drawn away from that which is essential in man as man. Modern education and instruction is not calculated to enable us to see man in his true being. For it is a fact that in the course of the first half of the nineteenth century the power to behold what is essential in man died right away. Up to that time, and even still during that time, an idea was current which survives now only in certain words that have remained in use—lives on, here and there, so to speak, in the genius of language. We might describe this idea in the following way.

Surveying the whole human race, we find it subject to all manner of diseases. We could, if we chose to be abstract, write these all down. We could take some plane surface and write upon it the names of the various illnesses in such a way as to make a kind of map of them. In one corner, for instance, we might write illnesses that are inter-related one with the other; in another corner, illnesses that are fatal. In short, we could classify them all so nicely as to produce in the end a regular chart or map, and then it would not be difficult to find the place on the map where a child with a particular organisation belonged. One could imagine how some special pre-disposition in regard to illness could be shown in a kind of diagram on transparent paper and then the name of the child be written in on the region of the map where he belonged. Let us suppose, then, that you regarded illnesses in this way and made such a map as I have described. In the first half of the nineteenth century people still had the idea that whenever the name of an illness had to be written in, they could always write in, for that illness, the name of some animal. They still believed that the animal kingdom inscribes into Nature all possible diseases, and that each single animal, rightly understood, signifies an illness. For the animal itself the illness is, so to speak, quite healthy. If however this same animal enters into man, so that a human being, instead of having the organisation that properly belongs to him, is organised on the pattern of that animal, then that human being is ill.

It was not superstitious people alone who continued to hold such conceptions in the first half of the nineteenth century; this idea of the nature of disease in man was held, for example, by Hegel—and a very fruitful and productive idea it was. Think what a light can be thrown upon the nature and character of a particular human being if one can say: he “takes after” the lion, or the eagle, or the ox; or again, he gives evidence of being wrenched away in the direction of the spiritual—the spiritual works too powerfully in him. Or, let us say, carrying the idea a step further, suppose the ether body of a certain human being is too soft and flabby and shows obvious affinity to physical substance, then that would be for one an indication of a type of organisation that generally occurs only in the lower animal kingdom. These are fundamental conceptions of a kind that it is important for you to acquire.

And now I would like to go on to speak of what you as educators must undertake for your own self-education. You can take your start from certain given meditations. A meditation that is particularly effective for a teacher is the one I gave here two days ago. Meditating upon it inwardly with the right orientation of heart and mind, it will in time bear fruit within you. For you will discover that as you are carried along in your feeling on the waves of an astral sea, borne hence away from the body, you will begin to find yourself in a world—you can liken it only to a world of gently surging billows—where you are given the possibility to see around you the very things that provide answers to your questions.

But here, I must warn you that if you desire really to make your way through to the place where such things are possible, you must comply with the conditions—I do not mean merely knowing them in theory, I mean faithfully fulfilling in real earnest the conditions that are necessary for development on the path of meditation, and that are described in the book Knowledge of the Higher Worlds and Its Attainment. [Now published by the Rudolf Steiner Press as Knowledge of Higher Worlds—how is it achieved? ] You will remember how mention is made there of egoism as a hindrance on the path of development—egoism in the sense that man centres his attention upon his own I, values his I too highly. What does it mean when we hold our I in such high esteem?

We have, as you know, to begin with, our physical body, which derives from Saturn times and has been gradually formed and completed with such wonderful artistic power in four majestic stages of development. Then we have the etheric body, which has undergone three stages of development. And we have besides the astral body, which has undergone only two. These three members of man's being do not fall within the field of Earth consciousness; the I alone does so. Yet it is really no more than the semblance of the I that falls within the field of Earth consciousness; the true I can be seen only by looking back into an earlier incarnation. The I that we have now is in process of becoming; not until our next incarnation will it be a reality. The I is no more than a baby. And if we are able to see through what shows on the surface, then, when we look at someone who is sailing through life on the sea of his own egoism, we shall have before us the Imagination of a fond foster-mother or nurse, whose heart is filled with rapturous devotion to the baby in her arms. In her case the rapture is justified, for the child in her arms is other than herself; but we have a spectacle merely of egoism when we behold man fondling so tenderly the baby in him. And you can indeed see people going about like that today. If you were to paint a picture of them as they are in the astral, you would have to paint them carrying each his child on his arm. The Egyptians, when they moulded the scarab, could at least still show the I carried by the head organisation; but the man of our time carries his I, his Ego, in his arms, fondling it and caressing it tenderly. And now, if the teacher will constantly compare this picture with his own daily actions and conduct, once more he will be provided with a most fruitful theme for meditation. And he will find that he is guided into the state I described as swimming in a surging sea of spirit.

Whether we are able to get in this realm the answers to our questions will depend upon whether we have in our soul the inner peace and quiet which we must seek to preserve in such moments. If someone complains that things are constantly happening that prevent him from meditating, the complaint will of itself afford a pretty sure indication as to whether or not he is in a fair way to make progress in this direction. For you will never find that one who is genuinely undergoing development will complain that this or that hinders him from meditating. In point of fact we are not really hindered by these things that seem to come in our way. On the contrary, it should be perfectly possible to carry out a most powerful meditation immediately before taking some decisive step, before doing a deed of cardinal importance—or, on the other hand, to carry out the meditation after the deed, in entire forgetfulness of what has been experienced in the performance of the deed. Everything depends, you see, upon having it in our power to wrest ourselves away from the one world and live for the time being completely within the other world; and whenever we want to summon up our inner spiritual powers, right at the very beginning must come the ability to do this.

Watch for yourselves and observe the difference—first, when you approach a child more or less indifferently, and then again when you approach him with real love. As soon as ever you approach him with love, and cease to believe that you can do more with technical dodges than you can with love, at once your educating becomes effective, becomes a thing of power. And this is more than ever true when you are having to do with abnormal children.

Wherever people have the right feeling about their activities, these activities do work together in the right way. Just as in the physical organism heart and kidneys must work together if the organism as a whole is to have unity, so must the Constituents work together for the great end they all have in view, while each of them fosters within itself that element in the whole for which it is in particular responsible. And anyone who then sets out to undertake some new task in the world, must bring what he is doing into co-ordination with what emanates from the Constituents.

Suppose you have the intention of undertaking work with backward children. The first thing you have to do is to study and observe the pedagogy that is followed in the anthroposophical movement. That whole living stream of activity must flow into all that you do and undertake. For within this educational stream is contained that which can heal the typical human being, and enable him to take his place rightly in the world. And then you will find that the Medical Section is able to give you what you need in order that you may deepen this pedagogy and adapt it to the abnormality of the individual in question. If you set out in all earnestness to accomplish this, yon will soon realise that there can be no question of expecting simply to be told: This is good for this, that is good for that. No, what is wanted is a continual living intercourse and connection between your own work and all that is done and given in the educational and in the medical work of the [Dynamic] movement. No break in this living connection must ever be permitted. Egoism must not be allowed to creep in and assert itself in some special and individual activity; rather must there always be the longing on the part of each participant to take his right place within the work as a whole.

Curative Eurythmy having come in to collaborate with Curative Education, the latter is thereby brought into relation also with the whole art of Eurythmy. Here too it should be evident that you must look for a living connection. This will mean that anyone who practises Curative Eurythmy must have gone some way towards mastering the fundamental principles of Eurythmy as an art. Curative Eurythmy has to grow out of a general knowledge of Speech Eurythmy and Tone Eurythmy—although the knowledge will not necessarily have been carried to the point of full artistic development. Nor must we lose sight of the importance before all else of human contacts. If Curative Eurythmy is being given, the one who is giving it must on no account omit to seek contact with the doctor. When Curative Eurythmy was first begun, the condition was laid down that it should not be given without consultation with the doctor. You see from all this how closely, how livingly interlinked the different activities have to be in Anthroposophy.

It will thus be necessary to take care that the work you are initiating at Lauenstein—a work, let me say, that I regard as full of hope and promise—is carried on in entire harmony with the whole Anthroposophical Movement. You can rest assured that the Anthroposophical Movement is ready to foster and encourage any plans with which it has expressed agreement—naturally through the channels that have been provided in accordance with the Christmas Foundation Meeting. And conversely you should keep constantly in mind that whatever you, as a limb or member of the movement, accomplish—you do it for the strengthening of the whole Anthroposophical Movement, for the enhancement of its work and influence in the world.

This then, my dear friends, is the message I would leave with you. Receive it into your hearts, as a message that comes verily from the heart; may it go with you, and may its impulse continue to work on into the future.

If we who are in this spiritual movement are constantly thinking: how can this spiritual movement be made fruitful for practical life?—then will the world not fail to see that it is verily a movement that is alive.

And so, my dear friends, let me wish you all strength and good guidance for the right working out of your will.

In my last lecture, I said that one root of the scientific world conception lay in the fact that John Locke and other thinkers of like mind distinguished between the primary and secondary qualities of things in the surrounding world. Locke called primary everything that pertains to shape, to geometrical and numerical characteristics, to motion and to size. From these he distinguished what he called the secondary qualities, such as color, sound, and warmth. He assigned the primary qualities to the things themselves, assuming that spatial corporeal things actually existed and possessed properties such as form, motion and geometrical qualities; and he further assumed that all secondary qualities such as color, sound, etc. are only effects on the human being. Only the primary qualities are supposed to be in the external things. Something out there has size, form and motion, but is dark, silent and cold. This produces some sort of effect that expresses itself in man's experiences of sound, color and warmth.

I have also pointed out how, in this scientific age, space became an abstraction in relation to the dimensions. Man was no longer aware that the three dimensions—up-down, right-left, front-back—were concretely experienced within himself. In the scientific age, he no longer took this reality of the three dimensions into consideration. AS far as he was concerned, they arose in total abstraction. He no longer sought the intersecting point of the three dimensions where it is in fact experienced; namely, within man's own being. Instead, he looked for it somewhere in external space, wherever it might be. Thenceforth, this space framework of the three dimensions had an independent existence, but only an abstract thought-out one. This empty thought was no longer experienced as belonging to the external world as well as to man; whereas an earlier age experienced the three spatial dimensions in such a way that man knew he was experiencing them not only in himself but together with the nature of physical corporeality.

The dimensions of space had, as it were, already been abstracted and ejected from man. They had acquired a quite abstract, inanimate character. Man had forgotten that he experiences the dimensions of space in his own being together with the external world; and the same applied to everything concerned with geometry, number, weight, etc. He no longer knew that in order to experience them in their full living reality, he had to look into his own inner being. A man like John Locke transferred the primary qualities—which are of like kind with the three dimensions of space, the latter being a sort of form or shape—into the external world only because the connection of these qualities with man's inner being was no longer known.

The others, the secondary qualities, which were actually experienced qualitatively (as color, tone, warmth, smell or taste,) now were viewed as merely the effects of the things upon man, as inward experiences. But I have pointed out that inside the physical man as well as inside the etheric man these secondary qualities can no longer be found, so that they became free-floating in a certain respect. They were no longer sought in the outer world; they were relocated into man's inner being. It was felt that so long as man did not listen to the world, did not look at it, did not direct his sense of warmth to it, the world was silent. It had primary qualities, vibrations that were formed in a certain way, but no sound; it had processes of some kind in the ether, but no color; it had some sort of processes in ponderable matter (matter that has weight)—but it had no quality of warmth. As to these experienced qualities, the scientific age was really saying that it did not know what to do with them. It did not want to look for them in the world, admitting that it was powerless to do so. They were sought for within man, but only because nobody had any better ideas. To a certain extent science investigates man's inner nature, but it does not (and perhaps cannot) go very far with this, hence it really does not take into consideration that these secondary qualities cannot be found in this inner nature. Therefore it has no pigeonhole for them. Why is this so?

Let us recall that if we really want to focus correctly on something that is related to form, space, geometry or arithmetic, we have to turn our attention to the inward life-filled activity whereby we build up the spatial element within our own organism, as we do with above-below, back-front, left-right. Therefore, we must say that if we want to discover the nature of geometry and space, if we want to get to the essence of Locke's primary qualities of corporeal things, we must look within ourselves. Otherwise, we only attain to abstractions.

In the case of the secondary qualities such as sound, color, warmth, smell and taste, man has to remember that his ego and astral body normally dwell within his physical and etheric bodies but during sleep they can also be outside the physical and etheric bodies. Just as man experiences the primary qualities, such as the three dimensions, not outside but within himself during full wakefulness, so, when he succeeds (whether through instinct or through spiritual-scientific training) in really inwardly experiencing what is to be found outside the physical and etheric bodies from the moment of falling asleep to waking up, he knows that he is really experiencing the true essence of sound, color, smell, taste, and warmth in the external world outside his own body. When, during the waking condition, man is only within himself, he cannot experience anything but picture-images of the true realities of tone, color, warmth, smell and taste. But these images correspond to soul-spirit realities, not physical-etheric ones. In spite of the fact that what we experience as sound seems to be connected with certain forms of air vibrations, just as color is connected with certain processes in the colorless external world, it still has to be recognized that both are pictures, not of anything corporeal, but of the soul-spirit element contained in the external world.

We must be able to tell ourselves: When we experience a sound, a color, a degree of warmth, we experience an image of them. But we experience them as reality, when we are outside our physical body. We can portray the facts in a drawing as follows: Man experiences the primary qualities within himself when fully awake, and projects them as images into the outer world. If he only knows them in the outer world, he has the primary qualities only in images (arrow in sketch). These images are the mathematical geometrical, and arithmetical qualities of things.

It is different in the case of the secondary qualities. (The horizontal lines stand for the physical and etheric body of man, the red shaded area for the soul-spirit aspect, the ego and astral body.) Man experiences them outside his physical and etheric body,⁵³ and projects only the images into himself. Because the scientific age no longer saw through this, mathematical forms and numbers became something that man looked for abstractly in the outer world. The secondary qualities became something that man looked for only in himself. But because they are only images in himself, man lost them altogether as realities.

As few isolated thinkers, who still retained traditions of earlier views concerning the outer world, struggled to form conceptions that were truer to reality than those that, in the course of the scientific age, gradually emerged as the official views. Aside from Paracelsus,⁵⁴ there was, for example, van Helmont,⁵⁵ who was well aware that man's spiritual element is active when color, tone, and so forth are experienced. During the waking state, however, the spiritual is active only with the aid of the physical body. Hence it produces only an image of what is really contained in sound or color. This leads to a false description of external reality; namely, that purely mathematical-mechanistic form of motion for what is supposed to be experienced as secondary qualities in man's inner being, whereas, in accordance with their reality, their true nature, they can only be experienced outside the body. We should not be told that if we wish to comprehend the true nature of sound, for example, we ought to conduct physical experiments as to what happens in the air that carries us to the sound that we hear. Instead, we should be told that if we want to acquaint ourselves with the true nature of sound, we have to form an idea of how we really experience sound outside our physical and etheric bodies. But these are thoughts that never occurred to the men of the scientific age. They had no inclination to consider the totality of human nature, the true being of man. Therefore they did not find either mathematics or the primary qualities in this unknown human nature; and they did not find the secondary qualities in the external world, because they did not know that man belongs to it also.

I do not say that one has to be clairvoyant in order to gain the right insight into these matters, although a clairvoyant approach would certainly produce more penetrating perceptions in this area. But I do say that a healthy and open mind would lead one to place the primary qualities, everything mathematical-mechanical, into man's inner being, and to place the secondary qualities into the outer world. The thinkers no longer understand human nature. They did not know how man's corporeality is filled with spirit, or how this spirit, when it is awake in a person, must forget itself and devote itself to the body if it is to comprehend mathematics. Nor was it known that this same spirituality must take complete hold of itself and live independently of the body, outside the body, in order to come to the secondary qualities. Concerning all these matters, I say that clairvoyant perception can give greater insight, but it is not indispensable. A healthy and open mind can feel that mathematics belongs inside, while sound, color, etc. are something external.

In my notes on Goethe's scientific works⁵⁶ in the 1880's, I set forth what healthy feeling can do in this direction. I never mentioned clairvoyant knowledge, but I did show to what extent man can acknowledge the reality of color, tone, etc. without any clairvoyant perception. This has not yet been understood. The scientific age is still too deeply entangled in Locke's manner of thinking. I set it forth again, in philosophic terms, in 1911 at the Philosophic Congress in Bologna.⁵⁷ And again it was not understood. I tried to show how man's soul—spirit organization does indeed indwell and permeate the physical and etheric body during the waking state, but still remains inwardly independent. If one senses this inward independence of the soul and spirit, then on also has a feeling for what the soul and spirit have experienced during sleep about the reality of green and yellow, G and C-sharp, warm and cold, sour or sweet. But the scientific age was unwilling to go into a true knowledge of man.

This description of the primary and secondary qualities shows quite clearly how man got away from the correct feeling about himself and his connection to the world. The same thing comes out in other connections. Failing to grasp how the mathematical with its three-dimensional character dwells in man, the thinkers likewise could not understand man's spirituality. They would have had to see how man is in a position to comprehend right-left by means of the symmetrical movements of his arms and hands and other symmetrical movements. Through sensing the course taken, for example, by his food, he can experience front-back. He experiences up-down as he coordinates himself in this direction in his earliest years. If we discern this, we see how man inwardly unfolds the activity that produces the three dimensions of space. Let me point out also that the animal does not have the vertical direction in the same way as man does, since its main axis is horizontal, which is what man can experience as front-back. The abstract space framework could no longer produce anything other than mathematical, mechanistic, abstract relationships in inorganic nature. It could not develop an inward awareness of space in the animal or in man.

Thus no correct opinion could be reached in this scientific age concerning the question: How does man relate to the animal, the animal to man? What distinguishes them from one another? It was still dimly felt that there was a difference between the two, hence one looked for the distinguishing features. But nothing could be found in either man or animal that was decisive and consistent. Here is a famous example: It was asserted that man's upper jawbone, in which the upper teeth are located, was in one piece, whereas in the animal, the front teeth were located in a separate one, the inter-maxillary bone, with the actual upper jawbone on either side of them. Man, it was thought, did not possess this inter-maxillary bone. Since one could no longer find the relationship of man to animal by inner soul-spirit means, one looked for it in such external features and said that the animal had an inter-maxillary bone and man did not.

Goethe could not put into words what I have said today concerning primary and secondary qualities. But he had a healthy feeling about all these matters. He knew instinctively that the difference between man and animals must lie in the human form as a whole, not in any single feature. This is why Goethe opposed the idea that the inter-maxillary bone is missing in man. As a young man, he wrote an important article suggesting that there is an inter-maxillary bone in man as well as in the animal. He was able to prove this by showing that in the embryo the inter-maxillary bone is still clearly evident in man although in early childhood this bone fuses with the upper jaw, whereas it remains separate in the animal. Goethe did all this out of a certain instinct, and this instinct led him to say that one must not seek the difference between man and animal in details of this kind; instead, it must be sought for in the whole relation of man's form, soul, and spirit to the world.

By opposing the naturalists who held that man lacks the inter-maxillary bone Goethe brought man close to the animal. But he did this in order to bring out the true difference as regards man's essential nature. Goethe's approach out of instinctive knowledge put him in opposition to the views of orthodox science, and this opposition has remained to this day. This is why Goethe really found no successors in the scientific world. On the contrary, as a consequence of all that had developed since the Fifteenth Century in the scientific field, in the Nineteenth Century the tendency grew stronger to approximate man to the animal. The search for a difference in external details diminished with the increasing effort to equate man as nearly as possible with the animal. This tendency is reflected in what arose later on as the Darwinian idea of evolution. This found followers, while Goethe's conception did not. Some have treated Goethe as a kind of Darwinist, because all they see in him is that, through his work on the inter-maxillary bone,⁵⁸ he brought man nearer to the animal. But they fail to realize that he did this because he wanted to point out (he himself did not say so in so many words, but it is implicit in his work) that the difference between man and animal cannot be found in these external details.

Since one no longer knew anything about man, one searched for man's traits in the animal. The conclusion was that the animal traits are simply a little more developed in man. As time went by, there was no longer any inkling that even in regard to space man had a completely different position. Basically, all views of evolution that originated during the scientific age were formulated without any true knowledge of man. One did not know what to make of man, so he was simply represented as the culmination of the animal series. It was a though one said: Here are the animals; they build up to a final degree of perfection, a perfect animal; and this perfect animal is man.

My dear friends, I want to draw your attention to how matters have proceeded with a certain inner consistency in the various branches of scientific thinking since its first beginnings in the Fifteenth Century; how we picture our relation to the world on the basis of physics, of physiology, by saying: Out there is a silent and colorless world. It affects us. We fashion the colors and sounds in ourselves as experiences of the effects of the outer world.

At the same time we believe that the three dimensions of space exist outside of us in the external world. We do this, because we have lost the ability to comprehend man as a whole. We do this because our theories of animal and man do not penetrate the true nature of man. Therefore, in spite of its great achievements we can say that science owes its greatness to the fact that it has completely missed the essential nature of man. We were not really aware of the extent to which science was missing this. A few especially enthusiastic materialistic thinkers in the Nineteenth Century asserted that man cannot rightly lay claim to anything like soul and spirit because what appears as soul and spirit is only the effect of something taking place outside us in time and space. Such enthusiasts describe how light works on us; how something etheric (according to their theory) works into us through vibrations along our nerves; how the external air also continues on in breathing, etc. Summing it all up, they said that man is dependent on every rise and fall of temperature, on any malformation of his nervous system, etc. Their conclusion was that man is a creature pitifully dependent on every draft or change of pressure.

Anyone who reads such descriptions with an open mind will notice that, instead of dealing with the true nature of man, they are describing something that turns man into a nervous wreck. The right reply to such descriptions is that a man so dependent on every little draft of air is not a normal person but a neurasthenic. But they spoke of this neurasthenic as if he were typical. They left out his real nature, recognizing only what might make him into a neurasthenic. Through the peculiar character of this kind of thinking about nature, all understanding was gradually lost. This is what Goethe revolted against, though he was unable to express his insights in clearly formulated sentences.

Matters such as these must be seen as part of the great change in scientific thinking since the Fifteenth Century. Then they will throw light on what is essential in this development. I would like to put it like this: Goethe in his youth took a keen interest in what science had produced in its various domains. He studied it, he let it stimulate him, but he never agreed with everything that confronted him, because in all of it he sensed that man was left out of consideration. He had an intense feeling for man as a whole. This is why he revolted in a variety of areas against the scientific views that he saw around him. It is important to see this scientific development since the Fifteenth Century against the background of Goethe's world conception. Proceeding from a strictly historical standpoint, one can clearly perceive how the real being of man is missing in the scientific approach, missing in the physical sciences as well as in the biological.

This is a description of the scientific view, not a criticism. Let us assume that somebody says: “Here I have water. I cannot use it in this state. I separate the oxygen from hydrogen, because I need the hydrogen.” He then proceeds to do so. If I then say what he has done, this is not criticism of his conduct. I have no business to tell him he is doing something wrong and should leave the water alone. Nor is it criticism, when I saw that since the Fifteenth Century science has taken the world of living beings and separated from it the true nature of man, discarding it and retaining what this age required. It then led this dehumanized science to the triumphs that have been achieved.

It is not a criticism if something like this is said; it is only a description. The scientist of modern times needed a dehumanized nature, just as chemist needs deoxygenized hydrogen and therefore has to split water into its two components. The point is to understand that we must not constantly fall into the error of looking to science for an understanding of man.

• 53. One can find the basic reality explained in the chapter “Sleep and Death” in An Outline Of Occult Science and in Knowledge of the Higher Worlds and Its Attainment (Spring Valley, NY: Anthroposophic Press, 1983).
• 54. Paracelsus, Theophrastus von Hohenheim: Einsiedein, Kanton Schwytz 1493–1541 Salzburg, Md. Ferrara, Professor in Basel. Accomplished physician, scientist, and philosopher. Wrote about chemistry, medical science, biology, astronomy, astrology, alchemy, and theology. The myths about Paracelsus as goldmaker, magician, or charlatan were made up after his death and distorted the picture of his character. Most complete work published by Karl Sudhoff (fourteen volumes). See Riddles of Philosophy.
• 55. Helmont, Johann Baptist van: Brussels 1577–1644. Physician and iatrochemist. He managed the differentiation and separation of gases (hydrogen, carbon). He coined the name “gas” for the airy state.
• 56. See Steiner, Goethe the Scientist. Especially see Chapters 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 15.
• 57. Lecture of April 8, 1911, at the 9th International Philosophical Congress, “The Psychological Foundations of Anthroposophy,” in Rudolf Steiner, Esoteric Development, Spring Valley, NY: 1982), pp. 25–55.
• 58. See Steiner, Goethe the Scientist.

I have often characterized spiritual science, as it is meant here, in these lectures. It seeks to be a true continuation of the natural scientific world view, indeed of natural scientific research in general, in that it adds to those forces of the human soul that are used when man faces the external sensory world and uses his senses and mind to explore it, which is connected to the brain, that it adds to these forces, which are also used by all external science, those forces that lie dormant in the soul in ordinary life and in the work of ordinary science, but can be brought out of this soul, can be developed and thus enable the human being to relate in a living way to what, as spiritual laws and spiritual entities, interweaves and permeates the world, and to which man, with his innermost being, also belongs, belongs through those powers of his being that pass through birth and death, that are the eternal powers of his being. In its entire attitude, in its scientific attitude, this spiritual science wants to be a true successor of natural science. And that which distinguishes it from natural science and which has just been characterized must be present in it for the reason that, if one wants to penetrate into the spiritual world, one needs other powers for the spiritual world in the same way that natural science penetrates into the natural world. One needs the exposure of the cognitive faculty in the human soul, of cognitive powers attuned to the spiritual world.

Today, I want to show in particular that this spiritual science, as it is presented today as a starting point for the spiritual development of people in the future, is not brought out of spiritual life or placed in spiritual life by mere arbitrariness, but is firmly anchored in the most significant endeavors of German spiritual life, even if they have perhaps been forgotten due to the circumstances of modern times. And here we shall repeatedly and repeatedly encounter – and they must also be mentioned today, although I have repeatedly presented them in the lectures I have given here last winter and this winter – when we speak of the German people's greatest intellectual upsurge, of the actual summit of their intellectual life, we must repeatedly and repeatedly encounter the three figures: Fichte, Schelling and Hegel.

I took the liberty of characterizing Fichte, as he is firmly rooted in German intellectual life, in a special lecture in December. Today I would like to draw particular attention to the fact that Fichte, in his constant search for a fixed point within his own human interior, for a living center of human existence, is in a certain sense a starting point for endeavors in spiritual science. And at the same time — as was mentioned in particular in the Fichte lecture here — he is the spirit who, I might say, felt from a deep sense of what he had to say, as if through a dialogue with the German national spirit. I have pointed out how Fichte, in contrast to Western philosophy, for example, to the Western world view, is above all concerned with attaining a higher human conception of the world by revealing the human inner powers, the human soul powers. For Fichte, the human ego, the center of the human soul, is something that is constantly being created within the human being, so that it can never be lost to the human being, because the human being not only shares in the existence of this center of the human being, but also shares in the creative powers of this human being. And how does Fichte imagine that this creativity in man is anchored in the all-creative of the world? As the highest that man can attain to when he tries to immerse himself in that which weaves and lives in the world as the Divine-Spiritual. As such supreme spiritual-divine, Fichte recognizes that which is volitional, which, as world-will permeated by world-duty, pulses through and permeates everything, and with its current permeates the own human soul, but in this own human soul is now grasped not as being, but as creativity. So that when man expresses his ego, he can know himself to be one with the world-will at work in the world. The divine-spiritual, which the world, external nature, has placed before man, wants, as it were, to enter into the center of the human being. And man becomes aware of this inner volition, speaks of it as his self, as his ego.

And so Fichte felt himself to be at rest with his self, but at the same time, in this rest, extremely moved in the creative will of the world. From this he then draws the strength that he has applied throughout his life. From this he also draws the strength to regard all that is external and sensual, as he says, as a mere materialized tool for the duty of the human being that pulsates in his will. Thus, for Fichte, the truly spiritual is what flows into the human soul as volition. For him, the external world is the sensitized material of duty. And so we see him, how he wants to point out to people again and again throughout his life, to the source, to the living source of their own inner being.

In the Fichte lecture, I pointed out how Fichte stood before his audience, for example in Jena, and tried to touch each individual listener in their soul, so that they would become aware of how the All-Creative lives spiritually within. So he said to his listeners: “Imagine the wall!” Then the listeners looked at the wall and could think the wall. After they had thought the wall for a while, he said: “Now think of the one who thought the wall.” At first the listeners were somewhat perplexed. They were to grasp inwardly, spiritually, each within themselves. But at the same time, it was the way to point each individual to his own self, to point out to him that he can only grasp the world if he finds himself in his deepest inner being and there discovers how what the world wills flows into him and what rises in his own will as the source of his own being. Above all, one sees (and I do not wish to repeat myself today with regard to the lecture I gave here in December) how Fichte lives a world view of power. Therefore, those who listened to him — and many spoke in a similar way — could say: His words rushed “like a thunderstorm that discharges its fire in individual strikes”. And Fichte, by directly grasping the soul, wanted to bring the divine spiritual will that permeates the world, not just good will, to the soul; he wanted to educate great people. And so he lived in a living together of his soul with the world soul and regarded this precisely as the result of a dialogue with the German national spirit, and it was out of this consciousness that he found those powerful words with which he encouraged and strengthened his people in one of Germany's most difficult times. It was precisely out of this consciousness that he found the power to work as he was able to do in the “Speeches to the German Nation,” inspiring his people to a great extent.

Like Fichte's follower, Schelling stands there, especially in his best pages, one could say, like Fichte, more or less forgotten. If Fichte stands more as the man who wants to grasp the will, the will of the world, and let the will of the world roll forth in his own words, if this Fichte stands as the man who, so to speak, commands the concepts and ideas, then Schelling stands before us as he stood before his enthusiastic audiences – and there were many such, I myself knew people who knew the aged Schelling very well – he stands before us, not like Fichte, the commander of the world view, he stands before us as the seer, from whose eyes sparkled what he had to communicate enthusiastically in words about nature and spirit. He stood before his audience in Jena in the 1790s, at what was then the center of learning for the German people. He stood in Munich and Erlangen and Berlin in the 1840s. Everywhere he went, he radiated something of a seer, as if he were surrounded by spirituality and spoke from the realm of the spiritual.

To give you an idea of how such a figure stood in the former heyday of German intellectual life in front of people who had a sense for it, I would like to bring you some words about the lecture, which were written down by an audience member, by a loyal audience member because he met Schelling again and again: Gotthilf Heinrich Schubert. I would like to read to you the words that Schubert wrote about the way Schelling stood before his audience, “already as a young man among young men,” back in the 1790s in Jena. About this, Schubert, who was himself a deeply spiritual person, writes of a person who has wonderfully immersed himself in the secrets of nature, who tried to follow the mysterious weaving of the human soul into the dream world and into the abnormal phenomena of mental life, but who was also able to ascend to the highest heights of human intellectual life. This Schubert writes about Schelling:

Two things stand out in these words of the deep and spirited Schubert. The first is that he felt - and we know that it was the same with others who heard Schelling - that this man speaks from direct spiritual experience, he shapes his words by looking into a spiritual world and thus shapes a wisdom from direct spiritual experience that deals with this spiritual world.

That is the significance, the infinitely significant thing about this great period of German idealism, that countless people then standing on the outside of life heard personalities such as Fichte, such as Schelling and, as we shall see in a moment, Hegel, and from the words of these personalities heard the spirit speak, looked into the realm of these geniuses of the German people. Anyone who is familiar with the intellectual history of humanity knows that such a relationship between the spirit and the age existed only within the German people and could only exist within the German people because of the nature of the German people. This is a special result that is deeply rooted in the very foundations of the German character. That is one thing that can be seen from this.

The other thing is that, in this period, people were formed who, like Schubert, were able to ignite their own relationship to the spiritual world through these great, significant, impressive personalities. From such a state of soul, Schelling developed a thinking about nature and a thinking about soul and spirit that, one might say, bore the character of the most intimate life, but also bore the character of which one might say shows how man is prepared, with his soul, to descend into all being and, in all being, first of all into nature, and then into the spirit, to seek life, the direct life. Under the influence of this way of thinking, knowledge becomes something very special: knowledge becomes inner experience, becoming part of the experience of things.

I have said it again and again: It is not important to place oneself today in some dogmatic way on the ground of what these spirits have said in terms of content. One does not even have to agree with what they said in terms of content. What matters is the way of striving, the way in which they seek the paths into the spiritual world. Schelling felt so intimately connected — even if he expressed it one-sidedly — with what lives and moves in nature that he could once utter the saying, “To know nature is to create nature.” Certainly, in the face of such a saying, the shallow superficial will always be right in comparison to the genius who, like Schelling, utters such a saying from the depths of his being. Let us give the shallow superficialist the right, but let us be clear: even if nature can only be recreated in the human soul, in Schelling's saying, “To recognize nature is to create nature,” means an intimate interweaving of the whole human personality with natural existence. And for Schelling this becomes the one revelation of the divine-spiritual, and the soul of man the other revelation. They confront each other, they correspond to each other. The spirit first created itself in soulless nature, which gradually became ensouled from the plant kingdom to the animal kingdom and to man, as it were, creating the soil in which the soul can then flourish. The soul experiences the spiritual directly in itself, experiences it in direct reality.

How different it appears, when rightly understood, from the spiritual knowledge of nature which is striven for as the outcome, let us say, of Romance popularism. In the development of the German spirit there is no need to descend to the level of tone which the enemies of Germany have now reached when they wish to characterize the relation of the German spiritual life to other spiritual lives in Europe. One can remain entirely on the ground of fact. Therefore, what is to be said now is not said out of narrow national feelings, but out of fact itself. Compare such a desire to penetrate nature, as present in Schelling, where nature is to be grasped in such a way that the soul's own life is submerged in that which lives and moves outside. Compare this with what is characteristic of the Western world view, which reached its highest level with Descartes, Cartesius, at the beginning of the seventeenth century, but has been continued into our days and is just as characteristic of Western culture as Fichte's and Schelling's striving is for German culture. Like Fichte and Schelling later on, Cartesius also takes up a position in relation to the world of nature. He starts by taking the standpoint of doubt. He also seeks within himself a central point through which he can arrive at a certainty about the existence of the world and of life. His famous “Cogito, ergo sum” is well known: “I think, therefore I am.” What does he rely on? Not, like Fichte, on the living ego, from which one cannot take away its existence, because it is continually creating itself out of the world-will. He relies on thinking, which is supposed to be there already, on that which already lives in man: I think, therefore I am — which can easily be refuted with every night's sleep of man, because one can just as well say: I do not think, therefore I am not. Nothing fruitful follows from Descartes' “I think, therefore I am”. But how little this world view is suited to submerging into nature with one's own soul essence can best be seen from a single external characteristic. Descartes tried to characterize the nature surrounding the soul. And he himself sought to address the animals as moving machines, as soulless machines. Only man himself, he thought, could speak of himself as if he had a soul. The animals are moving machines, are soulless machines.

So little is the soul out of this folklore placed in the possibility of immersing itself in the inner life of the external thing that it cannot find inspiration within the animal world. No wonder that this continued until the materialism of the eighteenth century and continued - as we will mention today - until our own days, as in that materialism of the eighteenth century, in that material ism that conceived of the whole world only as a mechanism, and which finally realized, especially in de Lamettrie in his book “L'homme-machine”, even came to understand man himself only as a moving machine. All this is already present in germinal form in Cartesius.

Goethe, out of his German consciousness, became acquainted with this Western world view, and he spoke out of his German consciousness: They offer us a world of moving atoms that push and pull each other. If they then at least wanted to derive the manifold, the beautiful, the great, the sublime phenomena of the world from these atoms that push and pull each other. But after they have presented this bleak, desolate image of the world, they let it be presented and do nothing to show how the world emerges from these accumulations of atoms.

The third thinker who should be mentioned among those minds that, as it were, form the background of the world view from which everything that the German mind has achieved in that time through Goethe, Schiller, Herder, Lessing and so on has sprung, is Hegel. In him we see the third aspect of the German mind embodied at the same time. In him we see a third way of finding the point in the soul through which this human soul can feel directly one with the whole world, with that which, in a divine-spiritual way, pulses, weaves and permeates the world. If in Fichte we see the will grasping directly in the innermost part of man, and in Schelling, I might say, the mind, then in Hegel we see the human thought grasped. But in that Hegel attempts to grasp the thought not merely as human, but in its purity, detached from all sensual sensations and perceptions, directly in the soul, Hegel feels as if, in living in the living and breathing and becoming of pure thought, he also lives in the thought that not only lives in the soul, but that is only meant to appear in the soul, because it reveals itself in it, as divine-spiritual thinking permeating all of the world. Just as the divine spiritual beings scatter their thoughts throughout the world, as it were, thinking the world and continually fashioning it in thought, so it is revealed when the thinker, alone with himself, gives rise to pure thinking, thinking that is not borrowed from the external world of the senses but that the human being finds as thinking that springs up within him when he gives himself to his inner being. Basically, what Hegel wants, if one may say so, is a mystical will. But it is not an unclear, dark or nebulous mysticism. The dark, unclear or nebulous mysticism wants to unite with the world ground in the darkest feelings possible. Hegel also wants the soul to unite with the ground of the world, but he seeks this in crystal clarity, in the transparency of thinking; he seeks it in inner experience, he seeks it in the world of thoughts. In perfect clarity, he seeks for the soul that which is otherwise only believed in unclear mysticism.

All this shows how these three important minds are endeavoring from three different sides to bring the human soul to experience the totality of reality by devotion to the totality of reality, how they are convinced that something can be found in the soul that experiences the world in its depths and thus yields a satisfying world view.

Fichte speaks to his Berlin students in 1811 and 1813 about attaining such a world picture in such a way that it is clear that he is well aware that one must strive for certain powers of knowledge that lie dormant in the soul. Fichte then says to his Berlin students in the years mentioned: If one really wants to have that which must be striven for in order to truly and inwardly grasp the world spiritually, then it is necessary that the human being finds and awakens a slumbering sense, a new sense, a new sense organ, within himself. Just as the eye is formed in the physical body, so a new sense organ must be developed out of the soul in Fichte's sense, if we are to look into the spiritual world. That is why Fichte boldly says to his listeners in these years, when, as far as he could achieve it in his relatively short life, his world view has reached the highest peak: What I have to say to you is like a single seeing person entering a world of blind people. What he has to say to them about the world of light, the world of colors, initially affects them, and at first they will say it is nonsense because they cannot sense anything.

And Schelling - we can already see it in the saying that Schubert made about him - has drawn attention to intellectual intuition. What he coined in his words, for which he coined a wisdom, he sought to explore in the world by developing the organ within him into an “intellectual intuition”. From this intellectual intuition, Schelling speaks in such a way that he could have the effect that has just been characterized.

From his point of view, Hegel then opposed this intellectual view. He believed that to assert this intellectual view was to characterize individual exceptional people, people who, through a higher disposition, had become capable of looking into the spiritual world. Hegel, on the contrary, was thoroughly convinced that every human being is capable of looking into the spiritual world, and he wanted to emphasize this thoroughly.

Thus these minds were opposed to each other not only in the content of what they said, but they were also opposed to each other in such profound views. But that is not the point, but rather the fact that they all basically strive for what can truly be called spiritual science: the experience of the world through that which sits in the deepest part of man. And in this they are united with the greatest spirit who created out of German folkhood, with Goethe, as Fichte, Hegel and Schelling have often said.

Goethe speaks of this contemplative power of judgment in a beautiful little essay entitled “Contemplative Power of Judgment”. What does Goethe mean by this contemplative power of judgment? The senses initially observe the external physical world. The mind combines what this external physical world presents to it. When the senses observe the external physical world, they do not see the essence of things, says Goethe; this must be observed spiritually. In this process, the power of judgment must not merely combine; the concepts and ideas that arise must not merely arise in such a way that they seek to depict something else; something of the world spirit itself must live in the power that forms concepts and ideas. The power of judgment must not merely think; the power of judgment must look at, look spiritually, as the senses otherwise look. Goethe is completely at one with those who have, as it were, provided the background for the world view, just as they feel at one with him. Just as Fichte, for example, when he published the first edition of his seemingly so abstract Theory of Science, sent it to Goethe in sheets and wrote to him: “The pure spirituality of feeling that one sees in you must also be the touchstone for what we create.

A wonderful relationship of a spiritual kind exists between the three world-view personalities mentioned and minds such as Goethe; we could also cite Schiller, we could also cite Herder, we could cite them all, who in such great times drew directly from the depths of German national character.

It must be said that all that was created in Fichte, Schelling, Hegel, and in the others, contains something that is not fully expressed in any of them: Fichte seeks to recognize the spiritual world by experiencing the will as it flows into the soul; Schelling turns more to the mind, Hegel to the thought content of the world, others to other things. Above all of them, as it were, like the unity that expresses itself in three or so many different ways, hovers that which one can truly call the striving of the German national spirit itself, which cannot be fully expressed by any single personality, but which expresses itself as in three shades, for example, in relation to a world view in Fichte, Schelling and Hegel. Those who do not stand as dogmatic followers or opponents to these personalities – one could be beyond such childishness today, that one wants to be a follower or opponent of a spirit if one wants to understand it in its greatness – but have a heart and a mind and an open feeling for their striving, will discern everywhere, in all their expressions, something like the German national soul itself, so that what they say is always more powerful than what is directly expressed. That is the strange and mysterious thing about these minds. And that is why later, far less important personalities than these great, ingenious ones, were even able to arrive at more significant, more penetrating spiritual truths than these leading and dominant minds themselves. That is the significant thing: through these minds something is expressed that is more than these minds, that is the central German national spirit itself, which continues to work, so that lesser minds, far less talented minds, could come, and in these far less talented minds the same spirit is expressed, but even in a more spiritual scientific way than in Fichte, Schelling, Hegel themselves. They were the ones who first, I might say, set the tone and for the first time communicated something to the world, drawing it from the source of spiritual life. Even for geniuses, this is difficult. But once the great, powerful stimulus had been provided, lesser minds followed. And it must be said that these lesser minds in some cases captured the path into the spiritual worlds even more profoundly and meaningfully than those on whom they depended, who were their teachers.

Thus we see in Immanuel Hermann Fichte, the son of the great Johann Gottlieb Fichte, how he strives in his own way for a spiritual science, and in such a way that he seeks a higher human being in the sensual human being who stands before us, who is grasped by the outer senses and outer science , whom he calls an etheric human being, and in whom lie the formative forces for this physical human being, which are built up before the physical body receives its hereditary substance from the parents, and which are maintained as the sum of the formative forces when the physical body passes through the gate of death. Immanuel Hermann Fichte speaks of an ethereal human being, of an ethereal human being who is inwardly strengthened and filled with strength, who belongs to the eternal forces of the universe just as the human being here belongs to the physical forces of the hereditary current as a physical human being, probably because of his association with his father, who was a good educator for him.

And one would like to say: How carried to higher heights we find the Fichtean, the Schellingian striving in a man who has become little known, who almost belongs to the forgotten spirits of German intellectual life, but in whom is deeply rooted precisely what is the essence of the German national spirit - in Troxler. Troxler - who knows Troxler? And yet, what do we know of this Troxler? Under the influence of Schelling, in particular, he wrote his profound > Blicke in das Wesen des Menschen in 1811 and then gave his lectures on philosophy in 1834. These lectures are certainly not written in a piquant way, to use the foreign word for something foreign, but they are written in such a way that they show us: A person is speaking who does not just want to approach the world with the intellect, with which one can only grasp the finite, but one who wants to give the whole personality of the human being with all its powers to the world, so that this personality, when it immerses itself in the world's phenomena, brings with it a knowledge that is fertilized by the co-experience, by the most intimate co-experience with the being of the world. And Troxler knows something about the fact that among those powers of the soul that are initially turned towards external nature and its sensuality, higher spiritual powers live. And in a strange way, Troxler now seeks to elevate the spirit above itself. He speaks of a super-spiritual sense that can be awakened in man, of a super-spiritual sense that slumbers in man. What does Troxler mean by that? He means: The human spirit otherwise thinks only in abstract concepts and ideas that are dry and empty, mere images of the external world; but in the same force that lives in these abstract concepts and ideas, there also lives something that can be awakened by man as a spiritual being. Then he sees in supersensible images the way one can see external reality with the eyes. In ordinary cognition, the sensory image is present first, and the thought, which is not sensory-pictorial, is added in the process of cognition. In the spiritual process of cognition, the supersensible experience is present; this could not be seen as such if it did not pour itself through a power that is natural to the spirit into the image, which brings it to a spiritual-descriptive sensualization. For Troxler, such knowledge is that of the super-spiritual sense. And what this super-spiritual sense bypasses, Troxler calls the supersensible spirit, the spirit that rises above mere observation of the sensual, and which, as spirit, experiences what is out there in the world. How could I fail to mention to those esteemed listeners who heard a lecture like the one I gave on Friday two weeks ago that in this supersensible sense and supersensible spirit of Troxler, the germs — if only the germs, but nevertheless the germs — lie in what I had to characterize as the two paths into spiritual science,

But there is another way in which Troxler expresses it wonderfully. He says: When the human being is first placed in his physical body with his soul, with his eternal self, when he stands face to face with the moral, the religious, but also with the outer, immediate reality, then he develops three forces: faith, hope and love. These three forces, which he continues to develop, he develops in life within the physical-sensual body. It simply belongs to the human being, as he stands in the physical-sensual world, that he lives in faith, in love, in hope. But Troxler says: That which is proper to the soul of man here within the physical body as faith, as justified belief, is, so to speak, the outer expression of a deeper power that is within the soul, which, through this faith, shines into the physical world as a divine power. But behind this power of faith, which, in order to unfold, absolutely requires the physical body, lies supersensible hearing. This means that faith is, in a sense, what a person makes out of supersensible hearing. By making use of the sensory instrument for supersensible hearing, he believes. But if he frees himself from his sensory body and experiences himself in the soul, then the same power that becomes faith in the sensory life gives him supersensible hearing, through which he can delve into a world of spiritual sound phenomena through which spiritual entities and spiritual facts speak to him.

And the love that a person develops here in the physical body, which is the flowering of human life on earth, is the outer expression of a power that lies behind it: for spiritual feeling or touching, says Troxler. And when a person delves deeper into this same power, which lives here as the blossom of the moral earthly existence, of the religious earthly existence, when he delves deeper into this love, when he goes to the foundations of this love, then he discovers within himself that the spiritual man has organs of feeling through which he can touch spiritual beings and spiritual facts just as he can touch physical facts with his sensory organs of feeling or touching. Behind love lies spiritual feeling or touching, as behind faith lies spiritual hearing.

And behind the hope that a person has in this or that form lies spiritual vision, the insight through the spiritual sense of seeing into the spiritual world.

Thus, behind what a person experiences as the power of faith, love and hope, Troxler sees only the outer expression of higher powers: for spiritual hearing, for spiritual feeling, for spiritual beholding or seeing. And then he says: When a person can give himself to the world in such a way that he gives himself with his spiritual hearing, spiritual feeling, spiritual seeing, then not only do thoughts come to life in him that so externally and abstractly reflect the external world, but, as Tro “sensible thoughts”, thoughts that can be felt themselves, that is, that are living beings, and ‘intelligent feelings’, that is, not just dark feelings in which one feels one's own existence in the world, but something through which the feelings themselves become intelligent. We know from the lecture just mentioned that it is actually the will, not the feelings; but in Troxler there is definitely the germ of everything that can be presented in spiritual science today. When a person awakens to this seeing, to this hearing and sensing of the spiritual world, when in this feeling a life of thought awakens through which the person can connect with the living thought that weaves and lives in the spiritual world, just as thought lives in us essentially, not just abstractly. Troxler feels his striving for spiritual science so deeply. And I would like to read a passage from Troxler from which you can see just how profound this striving was for Troxler. He once said:

"In the past, philosophers distinguished a fine, noble soul body from the coarser body, or assumed that the soul was a kind of covering for the face within this body, that the soul had an image of the body, which they called a schema, and that the soul was the higher inner man... In more recent times, even Kant in Dreams of a Spirit-Seer seriously dreams, in jest, an entire inward, spiritual man who carries all the limbs of the outward on his spirit body."

Troxler then draws attention to others who have more or less sensed this other side of the nature of the world from the depths of German spiritual endeavor. Troxler continues:

"Lavater writes and thinks in the same way, and even when Jean Paul makes humorous jokes about Bonnet's undergarment and Platner's soul corset, which are said to be , we also hear him asking: What is the purpose and origin of these extraordinary talents and desires within us, which, like swallowed diamonds, slowly cut our earthly shell? Why was I stuck to this dirty lump of earth, a creature with useless wings of light, when I was supposed to rot back into the birth clod without ever wriggling free with ethereal wings?"

Troxler draws attention to such currents in German intellectual life. And then he comes up with the idea that a special science could now arise from this, a science that is a science but that has something in common with poetry, for example, in that it arises from the human soul, in that not a single power of the soul, but the whole human soul, surrenders itself in order to experience the world together with others.

If you look at people from the outside, Troxler says, you get to know anthropology. Anthropology is what arises when you examine with the senses and with the mind what the human being presents and what is revealed in the human being. But with this one does not find the full essence of the human being. What Troxler calls in the characterized sense, spiritual hearing, spiritual feeling, spiritual seeing, what he calls supersensible spirit, superspiritual sense, that is part of it, in order to see something higher in the human being. A science stands before his soul, which does not arise out of the senses, not out of mere intellect, but out of this higher faculty of knowledge in the human being. And Troxler speaks very characteristically about this science in the following way. He says - Troxler's following words were written in 1835 -:

"If it is highly gratifying that the newest philosophy, which we have long recognized as the one that founds all living religion and must reveal itself in every anthroposophy, thus in poetry as well as in history, is now making headway, it cannot be overlooked, that this idea cannot be a true fruit of speculation, and that the true personality or individuality of man must not be confused either with what it sets up as subjective spirit or finite ego, nor with what it confronts with as absolute spirit or absolute personality.

In the 1830s, Troxler became aware of the idea of anthroposophy, a science that seeks to be a spiritual science based on human power in the truest sense of the word. Spiritual science can, if it is able to correctly understand the germs that come from the continuous flow of German intellectual life, say: Among Western peoples, for example, something comparable to spiritual science, something comparable to anthroposophy, can indeed arise; but there it will always arise in such a way that it runs alongside the continuous stream of the world view, alongside what is there science, and therefore very, very easily becomes a sect or a sectarianism. , but it will always arise in such a way that it runs alongside the continuous stream of world view, alongside what is science there, and therefore very, very easily tends towards sectarianism or dilettantism. In German spiritual life — and in this respect German spiritual life stands alone — spiritual science arises as something that naturally emerges from the deepest impulses, from the deepest forces of this German spiritual life. Even when this German spiritual life becomes scientific with regard to the spiritual world and develops a striving for spiritual knowledge, the seeds of what must become spiritual science already lie in this striving. Therefore, we never see what flows through German intellectual life in this way die away.

Or is it not almost wonderful that in 1856 a little book was published by a pastor from Waldeck? He was a pastor in Sachsenberg in Waldeck. In this little book – as I said, the content is not important, but the striving – an attempt is made, in a way that is completely opposed to Hegel, to find something for the human soul, through which this human soul, by awakening the power slumbering in it, can join the whole lofty awakening spiritual world. And this is admirably shown by the simple pastor Rocholl in Sachsenberg in the Principality of Waldeck in his little book: 'Contributions to the History of German Theosophy' — a small booklet, but full of real inner spiritual life, of a spiritual life in which one can see that one who has sought it in his solitude finds everywhere the possibility of rising from the lonely inner experience of the soul to broad views of the world that are hidden behind the sensual one and yet always carry this sensual one, so that one has only one side of the world when one looks at this sensual life. One does not know what one should admire first in such a little book, which must certainly make a fantastic impression today – but that is not the point; whether one should admire more the fact that the simple country pastor found his way into the deepest depths of spiritual endeavor, or whether one should admire the foundations of the continuous flow of German intellectual life, which can produce such blossoms even in the simplest person. And if we had time, I could give you hundreds and hundreds of examples from which you would see how, admittedly not in the field of outwardly recognized, but more in the field of forgotten spiritual tones, but nevertheless vividly surviving spiritual tones, are present everywhere in such people who carry forward to our days what can be called a spiritual-scientific striving within the development of German thought.

As early as the first edition of my World and Life Views, which appeared more than a year and a half ago under the title of Riddles of Philosophy, I called attention to a little-known thinker, Karl Christian Planck. But what good did it do to call attention to such spirits, at least initially? Such spirits are more tangible as an expression, as a revelation of what is now alive, what is not expressed in the scientific activity in question, but nevertheless supports and sustains this scientific activity in many ways. Such spirits arise precisely from the deepest depths of the German character, of which Karl Christian Planck is one. Planck has written a book entitled 'Truth and shallowness of Darwinism', a very important book. He has also written a book about the knowledge of nature. I will mention only the following from this book, although basically every page is interesting:

When people talk about the earth today, they talk, I would say, in a geological sense. The earth is a mineral body to them, and man walks on it as an alien being. For Planck, the Earth, with everything that grows on it and including man, is a great spiritual-soul organism, and man belongs to it. One has simply not understood the Earth if one has not shown how, in the whole organism of the Earth, the physical human being must be present in that his soul is outwardly embodied. The earth is seen as a whole, all its forces, from the most physical to the most spiritual, are grasped as a unity. Planck wants to establish a unified world picture, which is spiritual, to use Goethe's expression. But Planck is aware – in this respect he is one of the most characteristic thinkers of the nineteenth century – of how what he is able to create really does emerge from the very depths of the German national spirit. He expresses this in the following beautiful words in his essay 'Grundlinien einer Wissenschaft der Natur' (Foundations of a Science of Nature), which appeared in 1864:

“He is fully aware of the power of deeply rooted prejudices against his writing, stemming from previous views. But just as the work itself, despite all the unfavorable circumstances that arose from the author's overall situation and professional position,” namely, he was a simple high school teacher, not a university professor — “a work of this kind was opposed, but its realization and its way into the public has fought, then he is also certain that what must now first fight for its recognition will appear as the simplest and most self-evident truth, and that in it not only his cause, but the truly German view of things, will triumph over all still unworthy external and un-German views of nature and spirit.

What our medieval poetry has already unconsciously and profoundly foreshadowed will finally be fulfilled in our nation in the maturity of the times. The impractical inwardness of the German spirit, which has been afflicted with harm and ridicule (as Wolfram von Eschenbach describes it in his “Parzival”)” - this was written in 1864, long before Wagner's ‘Parsifal’! “Finally, in the strength of its unceasing striving, it attains the highest, it gets to the bottom of the last simple laws of things and of human existence itself; and what poetry has symbolized in a fantastically medieval way in the wonders of the Grail, the mastery of which is attained by its hero, conversely receives its purely natural fulfillment and reality in the lasting knowledge of nature and of spirit itself.

Thus speaks he who then gave the summary of his world picture under the title “The Will of a German”, in which an attempt is really made, again at a higher level than was possible for Schelling, to penetrate nature and spirit. In 1912, this “The Will of a German” was published in a new edition. I do not think that many people have studied it. Those who deal with such things professionally had other things to do: the books by Bergson, by that Bergson — his name is still Bergson! who has used the present time not only to revile but also to slander in the truest sense what has emerged from German intellectual life; who has managed to describe the entire current intellectual culture of the Germans as mechanistic. I have said here before: when he wrote that the Germans have descended from the heights on which they stood under Goethe, Schiller, Herder, Schelling and Hegel, and that now they are creating a mechanical culture, he probably believed that the Germans, when they march up with cannons, would declaim Novalis or Goethe's poems to their opponents! But from the fact that he now only sees—or probably does not see—guns and rifles, he makes German culture into a completely mechanistic one.

Now, just as the other things I have been saying during this period have been said again and again in the years before the war, and also to members of other nations – so that they must not be understood as having been prompted by the situation of war – I tried to present Bergson's philosophy in the book that was completed at the beginning of the war, the second edition of my “Weltund Lebensanschauungen” (World and Life Views). And in the same book I pointed out how, I might say, one of the most brilliant ideas in Bergson's work, infinitely greater, more incisive and profound — here again we have such a forgotten 'tone of German intellectual life' — had already appeared in 1882 in the little-known Wilhelm Heinrich Preuss. At one point in his books, Bergson draws attention to the fact that when considering the world, one should not start with the mineral kingdom and then the plant and animal kingdoms, and only then include man in them, but rather start with man; how man is the is original and the other entities in the continuous flow, in which he developed while he was the first, has rejected the less perfect, so that the other natural kingdoms have developed out of the human kingdom.

In my book Rätseln der Philosophie (Mysteries of Philosophy), I pointed out how the lonely, deep thinker, but also energetic and powerful thinker, Wilhelm Heinrich Preuss, in his book Geist und Stoff (Mind and Matter), and basically in fact, even earlier than 1882, this idea in a powerful, courageous way, - the idea that one cannot get along with Darwinism understood in a purely Western sense, but that one has to imagine: if you go back in the world, you first have the human being. The human being is the original, and as the human being develops further, he expels certain entities, first the animals, then the plants, then the minerals. That is the reverse course of development.

I cannot go into this in detail today – I have even dealt with this idea several times in lectures from previous years – but I would like to mention today that this spiritual worldview is fully represented in the German spiritual movement of the 1880s in the book by Preuss, 'Geist und Stoff' (Spirit and Matter). I would like to read to you a key passage from my book “The Riddles of Philosophy” so that you can see how a powerful world view, which is part of the whole current that I have characterized for you today, flows into the spiritual life of humanity in weighty words. Preuss says:

The center of this new doctrine is man, the only species on our planet that recurs: Homo sapiens. It is strange that the older observers started with natural objects and then went so astray that they could not find the way to man, which Darwin only managed in the most miserable and thoroughly unsatisfactory way by seeking the progenitor of the Lord of Creation among the animals, while the naturalist should start with himself as a human being, and thus gradually return to humanity through the whole realm of being and thinking! It was not by chance that human nature emerged from the evolution of all earthly things, but by necessity. Man is the goal of all telluric processes, and every other form emerging alongside him has borrowed its traits from his. Man is the first-born being of the whole cosmos... When his germs had emerged, the remaining organic residue no longer had the necessary strength to produce further human germs. What emerged was animal or plant...

In 1882, what the human soul can experience spiritually, presented within German intellectual life! Then Bergson comes along and by no means presents the thought in such a powerful, penetrating way, connected with the innermost life of the soul, but, one might say, in a slightly pursed, mincing, more and more indeterminate way. And people are overwhelmed by Bergson and do not want to know about Preuss. And Bergson apparently knows nothing about Preuss. But that is about as bad for someone who writes about worldviews as it would be if he knew about it and did not say anything. But we do not want to examine whether Bergson knew and did not say, or whether he did not know, now that it has been sufficiently proven that Bergson not only borrowed ideas from Schopenhauer and expressed them in his own words, but also took ideas from the entire philosophy of German idealism, for example Schelling and Fichte, and seems to consider himself their creator. It is indeed a special method of characterizing the relationship of one people to another, as Bergson now continually does to his French counterparts, by presenting German science and German knowledge as something particularly mechanical, after he has previously endeavored - which is probably not a very mechanical activity - to describe these German world-view personalities over pages. After a while, one realizes that Bergson could have kept silent altogether if he had not built his world view on the foundations of the German world view personalities, which is basically nothing more than a Cartesian mechanism, the mechanism of the eighteenth century, warmed up by a somewhat romantically understood Schellingianism and Schopenhauerianism.

As I said, one must characterize things appropriately; for it must be clear to our minds that when we speak of the relationship of the German character in the overall development of humanity, we do not need to adopt the same method of disparaging other nationalities that is so thoroughly used by our opponents today. The German is in a position to point out the facts, and he will now also gain strength from the difficult trials of the present time to delve into the German soul, where he has not yet succeeded. The forgotten sides of the striving for spiritual science will be remembered again. I may say this again and again, after having endeavored for more than thirty years to emphasize another side of the forgotten striving of German knowledge.

From what has emerged entirely from the British essence of knowing directed only at the outside world, we have the so-called Newtonian color theory. And the power of the British essence, not only externally but also internally, spiritually, is so great that this Newtonian color theory has taken hold of all minds that think about such things. Only Goethe, out of that nature which can be won from German nationality, has rebelled against Newton's theory of colours in the physical field. Certainly, Newton's theory of colours is, I might say, in one particular chapter, what de Lamettrie's L'Homme-Machine can be for all shallow superficial people in the world. Only the case with the theory of colours is particularly tragic. For 35 years, as I said, I have been trying to show the full significance of Goethe's Theory of Colours, the whole struggle of the German world-view, as it appears in Goethe with regard to the world of colour, against the mechanistic view rooted in British folklore with Newton. The chapter 'Goethe versus Newton' will also come into its own when that which lives on in a living, active way, even if not always consciously, comes more and more to the fore and can be seen by anyone who wants to see. And it will come to the fore, precisely as a result of the trials of our time, the most intimate awareness of the German of the depth of his striving for knowledge.

It is almost taken for granted, and therefore as easy to grasp as all superficially taken for granted things, when people today say: science is of course international. The moon is also international! Nevertheless, what individuals have to say about the moon is not at all international. When Goethe traveled, he wrote back to his German friends: “After what I have seen of plants and fish near Naples and in Sicily, I would be very tempted, if I were ten years younger, to make a journey to India, not to discover anything new, but to look at what has been discovered in my way.” Of course, science is international. It is not easy to refute the corresponding statements, because they are self-evident, as everything superficial is self-evident. But as I said, it is also international like the moon. But what the individual nations have to say about what is international from the depths, from the roots of their national character, that is what is significant and also what is effective in furthering the development of humanity from the way in which the character of each individual nation relates to what can be recognized internationally. That is what matters.

To this day, however, it cannot be said that precisely that which, in the deepest sense, represents the German character has made a significant impression on the path of knowledge in the period that followed. Within the German character itself, Fichte, Schelling and Hegel initially had such a great effect that posterity was stunned and that it initially produced only one or the other, one or the other side, that even un-German materialism was able to gain a foothold within the German spiritual life. But it is particularly instructive to see how that which is primordially German works in other nationalities when it is absorbed into them. And Schelling, for example, is primordially German. Schelling has had a great effect, for example within Russian spiritual life. Within Russian spiritual life, we see how Schelling is received, how his powerful views of nature, but especially of history – the Russian has little sense of the view of nature – are received. But we also see how precisely the essentials, what matters, cannot be understood at all in the east of Europe. Yes, it is particularly interesting – and you can read more about this in my writing “Thoughts During the Time of War” – how this eastern part of Europe in the nineteenth century gradually developed a complete rejection of precisely the intellectual life not only of Central Europe, but even of Western Europe. And one gets an impression of German intellectual life when one sees how this essential, which I have tried to bring out today, this living with the soul in the development of nature and the spirit, cannot be understood in the East, where things are accepted externally. In the course of the nineteenth century, consciousness has swollen terribly in the East, especially among intellectuals – not among the peasants, of course, who know little about war even when they are waging it. The intellectual life of the East is, however, a strange matter. I have already explained it: Slavophilism appears in the first half of the nineteenth century, in the 1830s, precisely fertilized by Fichte, Schelling and Hegel; but it appears in such a way that Fichte, Schelling and Hegel are only taken superficially , quite superficially, so that one has no inkling of how Fichte, Schelling and Hegel — the tools of the will, of the soul, of thinking — actually live objectively together with what outwardly interweaves and lives through the world. And so it could come about that this Russian element, which in terms of its sense of knowledge still lived deeply in medieval feeling, took up Fichte, Schelling and Hegel in such a way that an almost megalomaniacal view of the nineteenth century, which in literary and epistemological terms is really a kind of realization of Peter the Great's Political Testament, whether falsified or not.

What did they know about the German world view over there! In one of my recent lectures, I showed how Goethe's “Faust” truly grows out of what we, once again, can allow to affect our souls as a German world view. But we have only to hear Pissarew — who as a Russian spirit is deeply influenced by Goethe — speak about Goethe's Faust, and we shall see how it is impossible not to understand what is most characteristic and most essential to the German national soul. Pissarew says, for example: “The small thoughts and the small feelings had to be made into pearls of creation” - in “Faust he means the small thoughts, the human feelings that only concern people! “Goethe accomplished this feat, and similar feats are still considered the greatest victory of art; but such hocus-pocus is done not only in the sphere of art, but also in all other spheres of human activity."

It is an interesting chapter in the history of ideas that in the case of minds such as Ivan Vasilyevich Kireevsky or Khomyakov, for example, precisely that which lives great and significant as inwardness, but as clear inwardness, dark and nebulous sentimentalism, has continued to live in such minds and we could cite a long line right up to the present day, precisely from Russian ideological minds - how in this Russian ideological mind the conviction has generally formed: that which lives to the west of us is an aged culture, a culture that has outlived itself; it is ripe for extinction. The Russian essence is there, that must replace what is in Central Europe and they also meant Western Europe in the nineteenth century, especially England - what is in England.

This is not something I have picked out at one point or another, but it is a consistent feature of Russian intellectual life, which characterizes those who matter, who set the tone. In Kireyevsky's work, this intensifies around 1829 to a saying that I will read in a moment, and one will see from such a saying that what is heard today from the East did not just arise today, but that it is deeply rooted in what has gradually accumulated in this East.

But before that, I want to cite something else. The whole thing starts with Slavophilism, with a seemingly scientific and theoretical focus on the importance of the Russian people, who must replace an old and decrepit Europe, degenerating into nothing but abstract concepts and cold utilitarian ideas. Yes, as I said, this is something that is found again and again in Russian intellectual life. But where does this Slavophilism actually come from? How did these people in the East become aware of what they later repeated in all its variations: the people in Central and Western Europe have become depraved, are decrepit; they have managed to eliminate all love, all feeling from the heart and to live only in the mind, which leads to war and hatred between the individual peoples. In the Russian Empire, love lives, peace lives, and so does a science that arises from love and peace. Where do these people get it from? From the German Weltanschauung they have it! Herder is basically the first Slavophile. Herder first expressed this, which was justified in his time, which is also justified when one looks at the depth of the national character, which truly has nothing to do with today's war and with all that has led to this war. But one can point out that which has led to the megalomania among the so-called intellectuals: We stand there in the East, everything over there is old, everything is decrepit, all of it must be exterminated, and in its place must come the world view of the East.

Let us take to heart the words of Kirejewski. He says in 1829: “The fate of every European state depends on the union of all the others; the fate of Russia depends on Russia alone. But the fate of Russia is decided in its formation: this is the condition and source of all goods. As soon as all these goods will be ours, we will share them with the rest of Europe, and we will repay all our debts to it a hundredfold.”

Here we have a leading man, a man repeatedly lionized by the very minds that have more often than not rejected the ongoing development of Russian intellectual life. Here we have it stated: Europe is ripe for destruction, and Russian culture must replace it. Russian culture contains everything that is guaranteed to last. Therefore, we are appropriating everything. And when we have everything, well then we will be benevolent, then we will share with the others in a corresponding manner. That is the literary program, already established in 1829 within Russian humanity by a spirit, in whose immaturity, in whose sentimentality even Fichte, Schelling and Hegel have worked.

There is a remarkable conception in the East in general. Let me explain this in conclusion. For example, in 1885 an extraordinary book was published by Sergius Jushakow, an extraordinary book, as I said. Jushakow finds that Russia has a great task. In 1885, he finds this task even more directed towards Asia. Over there in Asia, he believes, live the descendants of the ancient Iranians – to which he also counts the Indians, the Persians – and the ancient Turanians. They have a long cultural life behind them, have brought it to what is evident in them today. In 1885, Yushakov said that Westerners had intervened in this long cultural life, intervening with what they could become from their basic feelings and from their worldview. But Russia must intervene in the right way.

A strange Pan-Asiaticism, expressed by Yushakov in a thick book in 1885 as part of his program! He says: “These Asiatic peoples have presented their destiny in a beautiful myth—which is, however, true. There are the Iranian peoples over there who fought against Ahriman, as Jusakhov says, against the evil spirit Ahriman, who causes infertility and drought and immorality, everything that disturbs human culture. They joined forces with the good spirit Ormuzd, the god of light, the spirit that gives everything that promotes people. But after the Asians had received the blessings of Ormuzd within their spiritual life for a while, Ahriman became more powerful. But what did the European peoples of the West bring to the Asians, according to Jushakow? And that is quite interesting. Yushakov argues that the peoples of the West, with their cultural life, which in his view is degenerate and decrepit, have crossed over to Asia to the Indians and the Persians, and have taken from them everything that Ormuzd, the good Ormuzd, has fought for. That is what the peoples of the West were there for. Russia will now cross over to Asia – it is not I who say this, but the Russian Yushakov – because in Russia, rooted in a deep culture, is the alliance between the all-fertility-developing peasant and the all-chivalry-bearing — as I said, it is not I who say it, Yushakov says it — and from the alliance of the peasant and the Cossack, which will move into Asia, something else will arise than what the Western peoples have been able to bring to the Asians. The Western peoples have taken the Ormuzd culture from the Asians; but the Russians, that is, the peasants and the Cossacks, will join forces with poor Asia, which has been enslaved by the Westerners, and will fight with it against Ahriman and will unite completely with it. For what the Asians, under the leadership of Ormuzd, have acquired as a coming together with nature itself, the Russians will not take away from them, but will join with them to fight against Ahriman once more.

And in 1885, this man describes in more detail how these Western peoples actually behaved towards the Asian people plagued by Ahriman. He does not describe the Germans, for which he would have had little reason at the time, but he, Yushakov, the Russian, describes the English. And he says of the English that, after all they have been through, they believe that the Asian peoples are only there to clothe themselves in English fabrics, fight among themselves with English weapons, work with English tools, eat from English vessels and play with English baubles. And further, in 1885, Yushakov said: “England exploits millions of Hindus, but its very existence depends on the obedience of the various peoples who inhabit the rich peninsula; I do not wish anything similar for my fatherland – I can only rejoice that it is sufficiently far removed from this state of affairs, which is as glorious as it is sad.”

It is likely that these sentiments, which were not only expressed by Jushakow in 1885, but also by many others, led to Russia initially not allying itself with the Asians to help them against Ahr Ahriman, but that it first allied itself with the “so brilliant as it is sad state” of England in order to trample the “aged”, “marshy” Europe into the ground.

What world history will one day see in this ring closing around Central Europe can be expressed quite simply. One need only mention a few figures. These few figures are extremely instructive because they are reality. One day, history will raise the question, quite apart from the fact that this present struggle is the most difficult, the most significant, the greatest that has occurred in the development of human history, quite apart from the fact that it is merely a matter of the circumstances of the figures: How will it be judged in the future that 777 million people are closing in on 150 million people? 777 million people in the so-called Entente are closing in on 150 million people and are not even expecting the decision to come from military valor, but from starvation. That is probably the better part of valor according to the views of 777 million people! There is no need to be envious about the soil in which a spiritual life developed as we have described it, because the figures speak for themselves. The 777 million people live on 68 million square kilometers, compared to 6 million square kilometers on which 150 million people live. History will one day take note of the fact that 777 million people live on 68 million square kilometers, ring-shaped against 150 million people on 6 million square kilometers. The German only needs to let this fact speak in this as well as in other areas, which prevents one from falling into one-sided national shouting and ranting and hate-filled speech, into which Germany's enemies fall.

I do not want to talk now about those areas that do not belong here and that will be decided by weapons. But we see all too clearly how, today, what one wants to cherish and carry as German culture is really enclosed, lifted up above the battlefield of weapons, enclosed by hatred and slander, by real slander , not only hatred; how our sad time of trial is used to vilify and condemn precisely that which has to be placed in world history, in the overall development of mankind, in this way. For what is it, actually, that confronts us in this German intellectual life with all its conscious and forgotten tones? It is great because it is the second great flowering of insight and the second great flowering of art in the history of humanity. The first great flowering of art was Greek culture. At the turn of the eighteenth to the nineteenth century, the development of Germany produced a flowering of which even a mind like Renan said, when, after absorbing everything else, he became acquainted with the development of Germany in Goethe and Herder: “I felt as if I were entering a temple, and from that moment everything that I had previously considered worthy of the divinity seemed to me no more than withered and yellowed paper flowers.” What German intellectual life has achieved, says Renan, comparing it with the other, is like differential calculus compared to elementary mathematics. Nevertheless, on the same page on which he wrote these words to David Friedrich Strauß, Renan points to that current in France which, in the event of the loss of Alsace-Lorraine, called for a “destructive struggle against the Germanic race”. This letter was written in 1870.

This German intellectual life has been recognized time and again. But today it must be misunderstood. For how else could the words be found that are spoken in the ring that surrounds us!

If we look across, not with Yushakov's eyes, but with unbiased eyes, to Asia, we see a human culture that has grown old, that also strove for knowledge, but that strove for knowledge according to an old, pre-Christian way. There, the ego is sought to be subdued in order to merge into the universe, into Brahman or Atman, with the extinction of the ego. This is no longer possible. Now that the greatest impulse in human history, the Christ impulse, has become established in human history, the ego itself must be elevated, strengthened, not subdued as in Oriental spiritual life, but on the contrary, strengthened in order to connect as an ego with the spiritual-divine in the world, which pulsates and weaves and lives through the world. That is the significant thing, how this is again shining forth in the German spiritual striving. And this, which is unique and which must be incorporated as one of the most essential tones in the overall development of humanity, is what is coming to life in the 6 million square kilometers, compared to the 68 million square kilometers. This fact must be obscured from those who, as I said, do not fight with weapons, but who fight with words and slander this Central European spiritual life. They must cover this fact with fog. They must not see it. But we must admit it to ourselves, we must try to explain to ourselves how it is possible that these people can be so blinded as to fail to recognize the very depth of this connection of one's own soul with the spiritual life outside in the world.

Boutroux, who traveled around here in Germany for a short time before the war and even spoke at universities about the spiritual brotherhood of Germany and France, now tells his French audience how the Germans want to grasp everything inwardly. He even makes a joke: if a Frenchman wants to get to know a lion or a hyena, he goes to the menagerie. If an Englishman wants to get to know a lion or a hyena, he goes on a world tour and studies all the things related to the lion or the hyena on the spot. The German neither goes to the menagerie nor on a journey, but withdraws into his room, goes into his inner self, and from that inner self he creates the lion or the hyena. That is how he conceives of inwardness. It is a joke. One must even say that it is perhaps a good joke. The French have always made good jokes. It's just a shame that this joke is by Heinrich Heine, and Boutroux has only repeated it.

But now, when you see how these people want to cloud their minds, you come up with a few things. You wonder: How do these people, according to their nationality, seek to delude themselves about what German nature actually is? For the Russians, it must always be a new mission. I have also described this in my booklet: “Thoughts during the time of war”. They must be given the opportunity to replace Western European culture, Central European culture, because it is the destiny of the Russian people – so they say in the East, anyway – to replace the abstract, purely intellectual culture built on war with a Russian culture built on the heart, on peace, on the soul. That is the mission.

The English – one would not want to do them an injustice, truly, one would like to remain completely objective, because it really does not befit the Germans to speak in a one-sided way based solely on national feelings. That should not happen at all; but when one hears, as in the very latest times in England, declaiming that the Germans live by the word: “might is right,” then one must still remind them that there is a philosophy by Thomas Hobbes, an English philosophy, in which it is first proved in all its breadth that law has no meaning if it does not arise from power. Power is the source of law. That is the whole meaning of Hobbes's doctrine. After it has been said from an authorized position - there is also an unauthorized authorized position, but it is still an authorized position in the outside world - that the Germans live by the rule “might makes right”, that they have have come far by acting according to the principle “might is right,” I do not believe that one is being subjective when one objects that this is precisely an English principle that has become deeply ingrained in the Englishman. Yes, one can well say: they need a new lie. And that will hardly be anything other than a terminus technicus.

The French – what are they deluding themselves with? They are the ones we would least like to wrong. And so let us take the word of one of their own poets, Edmond Rostand. The cock, the crowing cock, plays a major role in Edmond Rostand's play. He crows when the sun rises in the morning. Gradually, he begins to imagine that the sun could not rise if it were not for him crowing, causing the sun to rise. One has become accustomed – and that is probably also Rostand's idea – to the fact that nothing can happen in the world without France. One has only to recall the age of Louis XIV and all that was French until Lessing, Goethe, Schiller and others emancipated themselves from it, and one can already imagine how the conceit arises: Ah, the sun cannot rise if I do not crow for it. Now, one needs a new conceit.

Italy – I heard a not insignificant Italian politician say before the war: Yes, our people have basically reached a point, so relaxed, so rotten, that we need a refresher, we need something to invigorate us. A new sensation, then! This is expressed in the fact that the Italians, in order to dull their senses, have invented something particularly new and unprecedented: a new saint, namely, Sacro Egoismo, Holy Egoism. How often has it been invoked before Italy was driven into the war, holy egoism! So, a new saint, and his hierophant: Gabriele d'Annunzio. Today, no one can yet gauge how this new saint, Sacro Egoismo and its hierophant, its high priest, Gabriele d'Annunzio, will live on in history!

On the other hand, we can remain within the German spirit and consider what is truly interwoven with this German spirit and what was unanimously felt by the Germans of Austria and Germany, on this side and on the other side of the Erz Mountains, as the German people's – not in the Russian sense of mission, but in the very ordinary sense – world-historical mission. And here I may well conclude with the words to which I have already drawn attention when, speaking of the commonality of Austrian intellectual culture with German, I also spoke of Robert Hamerling. In 1862, when he wrote his “Germanenzug”, the future of the German people lay before Robert Hamerling, the German poet of Austria, which he wanted to express by having the genius of the German people express it, when the Germanic people move over from Asia as the forerunners of the Germans. They settle on the border between Asia and Europe. Robert Hamerling describes the scene beautifully: the setting sun, the rising moon. The Teutons are encamped. Only one man is awake, the blond youth Teut. A genius appears to him. This genius speaks to Teut, in whom Robert Hamerling seeks to capture the representative of the later Germans. Beautifully he expresses:

To whom will the word break out of the depths of the soul
As your people, so rich, so delicate, so powerful?
Who breathes so solemnly into the strings
His innermost being? To whom do the senses draw so magnificently
Into the blue of heaven, granite hieroglyphics
Of the soul's upsurge and the narrowness of life?
Who finally ties the strands
of the searching thought to the stars
so boldly and strives and fights on all paths?
Whom leads so high, so deep his urge, his foreboding?
Who grasps the near and the far so faithfully?
Where does every earthly and heavenly zone
reflect itself as in your thinking, O Teuton?

And what once lived over there in Asia, what the Germans brought with them from Asia like ancestral heritage, it stands before Robert Hamerling's soul. It stands before his soul, what was there like a looking into the world in such a way that the ego is subdued, the corporeality is subdued, in order to see what the world is living through and weaving through, but what must emerge in a new form in the post-Christian era, in the form that it speaks out of the fully conscious ego, out of the fully conscious soul. This connection with the ancient times in the striving of the German people for the spirit, how beautifully Robert Hamerling expresses it:

But however proudly you aspire, high above other swarms, you will always keep the ancient, sacred fire: the dream-filled, drunken rapture of God, the blessed warmth of heart of the ancient Asian homeland. This holy ray, a temple fire of This holy ray, a temple fire
Of humanity, free of smoke, with pure flame
Glow away in your chest and soul mate
You remain and pilot your rudder!
You only strive because you love: your boldest thinking
Will be devotion that wants to sink into God.

Thus the German-Austrian poet connects the distant past with the immediate present. And indeed, it has emerged from this beautiful striving of the German soul, which we have tried to characterize today, that all knowledge, all striving wanted to be what one can call: a sacrificial service before the Divine-Spiritual. Even science, even the recognition of the spiritual, should have the effect of a sacrificial service, should work in such a way that Jakob Böhme could say: When one searches spiritually, it is so that one must bring it to go its way:

Walking in God – And striving in God –
And dying in God – And being buried in God.

Hamerling expresses this by having the German Genius say to Teut:

You strive only because you love: your most daring thought
will be devotion, sinking into God.

The affinity of the German soul with God is so beautifully expressed here. This shows us how deeply rooted true spiritual striving is in the German national character. But this also clearly gives rise to the thought in our soul, the powerful thought, that one can ally oneself with this German national spirit, for in that which it has brought forth in spiritual achievements - one current guides the other - this German national spirit is at work. It finds expression in the great, immortal deeds that are being accomplished in the present. In conclusion, let me summarize in the four lines of the German-Austrian Robert Hamerling what emerges as German faith, German love, German hope of the past, present and future, when the German unites with what is the deepest essence of his people. Let me summarize what is there as a force – as a force that has confidence that, where such seeds are, blossoms and fruits must develop powerfully in the German national character despite all enemies, in the German national character – let me summarize what is there as a force in his soul, in the words of the German-Austrian poet Robert Hamerling:

And if ever the German name
should prove a hostile day,
From ocean to ocean will run
The course of the German spirit!

In recent years, anthroposophical spiritual science has found an external center for its work in Dornach, near Basel. The creation of this center, called the Goetheanum, the School of Spiritual Science, was the result of the expansion of anthroposophical spiritual science. After many years of me and others spreading this spiritual science in the most diverse states and places, initially in an ideal form through lectures or similar, around 1909 or 1910 the inner necessity arose to bring to the souls of our fellow human beings what is meant by this spiritual science by means of other means of revelation and communication than those of mere thoughts and words. And so it came about that a series of mystery dramas were performed, initially in Munich. These were written by me and were intended to present in pictorial, scenic form the subject matter that anthroposophical spiritual science must speak of in its entirety.

We have been accustomed throughout the entire course of education in the civilized world over the last three to four centuries to seek knowledge primarily through external sensory observation and by applying the human intellect to this external sensory observation. And basically, all our newer sciences, insofar as they are still viable today, have come about through the effects of the results of sensory observation with intellectual work. After all, the historical sciences do not come about in any other way today either. Intellectualism is the one thing the modern world has confidence in when it comes to knowledge. Intellectualism is the one thing that people have become more and more accustomed to.

And so, of course, people have increasingly come to believe that all the results of knowledge that come before the world can be completely revealed through intellectual communication. Indeed, there are epistemological and other scientific disputes in which it is apparently proven that something can only be valid before the cognitive conscience of contemporary people if it can be justified intellectually. That which cannot be clothed in logical-ideational intellectual forms is not accepted as knowledge. Spiritual science, which really did not want to stop at what is rightly asserted in science as the limits of scientific knowledge, and which wants to penetrate beyond these limits of knowledge, had to become more and more aware that the intellectual way of communicating could not be the only way. For one can prove for a long time with all possible sham reasons that one must imprint all knowledge in intellectual form if it is to satisfy people; one can prove this for a long time

prove it and back it up with spurious reasons – if the world is such that it cannot be expressed in mere concepts or ideas, that it must be expressed through images, for example, if you want to know the laws of human development, then you have to get at something other than the presentation through the word in the theoretical lecture; you have to move on to other forms of presentation than the presentation in intellectual forms.

And so I felt the necessity to express that which is fully alive, namely in the development of humanity, not only in theory through the word, but also through the scenic image. And so my four mystery dramas came into being, which were initially performed in ordinary theaters. This was, so to speak, the first step towards a broader presentation of that which actually wants to reveal itself through this anthroposophical spiritual science, as it is meant here, through the cause of spiritual science itself.

Not in my own case – I may say that without hesitation – but in the case of friends of our cause, the idea arose in the course of this development, which made an external, theatrical presentation necessary, to prepare a place of our own for the work of this spiritual science. And after many attempts to found such a place here and there, we finally ended up on the Dornach hill near Basel, where we received a piece of land for this purpose from our friend Dr. Emil Grosheintz, and we were able to build this ach Hill, we were able to establish this School of Spiritual Science, which is also intended to be a house for presenting the other types of revelation of what is to come to light through this spiritual science; this School of Spiritual Science, which we call the “Goetheanum” today.

Now, if some association or other had set about creating such a framework, such a house, such an architecture, prompted by the circumstances, what would have happened? They would have turned to this or that architect, who might then, without feeling or sensing anything very intensely and without recognizing the content of our spiritual science, have erected a building in the antique or Gothic or Renaissance style or in some other style, and they would have handed down in such a building, which would have been built out of quite different cultural presuppositions, the content of spiritual science in the most diverse fields. This could well have happened with many other endeavors of the present time and would undoubtedly have happened. However, this could not happen with anthroposophically oriented spiritual science.

When we opened our first series of courses on a wide range of subjects at the School of Spiritual Science in Dornach last year, I was able to speak of how, through this anthroposophically oriented spiritual science, not only what is science in the narrower sense is to come before humanity, how this spiritual not only draws from the achievements of human sensory observation and the human intellect, but draws from the whole, from the fullness of humanity, and draws from the sources from which religion on the one hand and art on the other also emerge.

This spiritual science does not want to create an abstract, symbolic or a straw-like allegorical art, which merely forces the didactic into external forms. No, that is absolutely not the case. Rather, what is expressed through this spiritual science can work through the word, can shape itself through the word. Spiritual processes and spiritual beings in the supersensible world can be spoken of by resorting to ideas and the means of expressing ideas, to words. But that which stands behind it, which wants to reveal itself in this way, is much richer than what can enter into the word, into the idea, pushes into the form, into the image, becomes art by itself, real art, not an allegorical or symbolic expression. This is not what is meant when we speak of Dornach art.

When Dornach art is mentioned, it is first of all a reference to the original source from which human existence and world existence bubble forth. What one experiences in this original source, when one gains access to it in the way often described here, can be clothed in words, shaped into ideas, but it can also be allowed to flow directly into artistic expression, without expressing these ideas allegorically or symbolically. That which can live in art or, as I could expand on but need not today, in religion, is an entirely identical expression of that which can be given in an idealized representation. This anthroposophically oriented spiritual science is thus predisposed from the outset to flow as a stream from a source from which art and religion can also flow in their original form. What we mean in Dornach when we speak of religious feeling is not just a science made into a religion, but the source of elementary religious power, and what we mean by art is, in turn, also an elementary artistic creation.

Therefore, when some visitors to the Goetheanum or especially those who only hear about it defame our Dornach building and say that one finds this or that allegorical, symbolic representation there, it is simply defamation. There is not a single symbol in the entire Dornach building. Everything that is depicted has been incorporated into the artistic form, is directly sensed. And basically, I always feel somewhat as if I am merely presenting a surrogate when I am expected to explain the Dornach building in words. Of course, if one speaks outside of Dornach, one can make statements about it as one might speak about chapters of art history, for example. But when one sees the building in Dornach itself, I always feel that it is something surrogate-like, if one is also supposed to explain it. This explanation is actually only necessary to convey to people the special kind of language of world view, but the Dornach building has flowed out of it just as, let us say, the Sistine Madonna has flowed out of the Christian world view, without anything being symbolized, but only in such a way that the artist has truly lived in accordance with his feelings, his ideas.

Hamerling, the Austrian poet, was also reproached for using symbolism after he wrote his “Ahasver”. He then rightly replied to his critics: What else can one do when one portrays Nero quite vividly, as a fully-fledged human being, rather than as the symbol of cruelty! For history itself has portrayed Nero as a symbol of cruelty, and there is no mistake in giving the impression of the true, real symbol of cruelty when Nero is portrayed as a living being. At most, there could be an artistic defect in presenting some straw allegory instead of a living entity. Even if the world depicted in Dornach is the supersensible world, it is the supersensible reality that is portrayed. It is not something that seeks to symbolically or allegorically implement concepts. This is the underlying reality, and at the same time it indicates why a house could not be placed here in any old way for this anthroposophically oriented spiritual science. Any architectural style would have been something external to it, because it is not mere theory, it is life in all fields and was able to create its own architectural style.

Of course, one can perhaps draw a historical line retrospectively by characterizing the essence of ancient architecture in terms of its load-bearing and supporting function, then moving on to the Gothic period and showing how architecture there moves beyond mere load-bearing and supporting, and how the buttress is freed from mere load-bearing and supporting by the pointed arch and the cross-ribbed vault, how a kind of transition to the living is found. In Dornach, however, an attempt has been made to develop this life to such an extent that the pure dynamic, metric and symmetrical of earlier forms of building have been truly transferred into the organic.

I am well aware of how much can be written from the point of view of ancient architecture against this allowing of the geometric, metric, symmetrical forms to be transformed into organic forms, into forms that are otherwise found in organic beings. But nothing is naturalistically modeled on any organisms; rather, it is only an attempt to immerse oneself in the organically creative principle of nature. Just as one can become familiarized with the bearing and supporting when the columns are covered by the crossbeams, and with the entire configuration of the Gothic style in the buttresses, in the ribbed vaulting and so on, so one can also familiarize oneself with the inner forms, the forming of nature that is present in the creation of the organic. If one can find one's way into this, then one does not arrive at a naturalistic reproduction of this or that surface form found in the organic, but one arrives at finding surfaces from what one has directly represented architecturally, which are integrated into the whole structure in the same way that, say, the individual surface on a finger is integrated into the whole human organism.

This is therefore the basic feeling that can be gained from the Dornach building, to the extent that this has been achieved in the first attempt at this new architectural style. What has been striven for is perhaps best expressed as follows: In relation to the smallest detail, the greatest formal context is conceived in such a way that each thing is, at the place where it is situated, as it must be. You need only think, for example, of the earlobe on your own body. This earlobe is a very small organ. If you understand the whole organism, you will say to yourself: the earlobe could not be any different than it is; the earlobe cannot be a little toe, it cannot be a right thumb, but in the organism, everything is in its place, and everything in its place is as it emerges from this organism.

This has been attempted in Dornach. The entire structure, the entire architecture, is conceived as part of a whole, and each individual part is formed in its own place in such a way that it is exactly what is needed at that place. Although there are many objections that could be raised, the attempt has been made, as I said, to make the transition from mere geometric-mechanical construction to building in organic forms. As I said, this architectural style could be incorporated into other architectural styles, but that doesn't really get you anywhere. In particular, the creator doesn't get anywhere with it. Something like this simply has to arise from the naive, from the elementary. Therefore, when I am asked how the individual form is conceived from the whole, I can only give the following answer. I can only say: look at a nut, for example. The nut has a shell. This nut shell is formed according to the same laws around the nut, around the nut kernel, according to which the nut itself, the nut kernel has come into being, and you cannot imagine the shell differently than it is, once the nut kernel is as it is.

Now one knows spiritual science. One presents spiritual science out of its inner impulse. One forms it into ideas, one brings them together in ideas. So you live in the whole inner being of this spiritual science. Forgive me, it is a trivial comparison, but it is a comparison that illustrates how you have to create out of naivety if you want to create something like the building in Dornach: you stand inside it as if in the nut kernel and have within you the laws by which you have to execute the shell, the building.

I often used to make another comparison. You see, in Austria we have a special kind of cake called 'Gugelhupf'. I don't know if that expression is also used here. And I said that one should imagine that anthroposophical spiritual science is the Gugelhupf and the Dornach building is the Gugelhupf pan in which it is baked. The cake and the pan must harmonize with each other. It is right when both harmonize, that is, when they are according to the same laws as nut and nut shell.

Because Anthroposophical spiritual science creates out of the whole, out of the fullness of humanity, it could not have the discrepancy within itself of taking an arbitrary architectural style for its construction and speaking into it. It is more than mere theory; it is life. Therefore, it had to provide not only the core but also the shell in the individual forms. It had to be built according to the same innermost laws by which one speaks, by which mysteries are presented, by which eurythmy is now presented. Everything that is presented in words, that is seen performed in eurythmy, that is seen performed in mystery plays, that is otherwise presented, must resound and be seen throughout the hall in such a way that the walls with their forms, that the paintings that are there, say yes to it as a matter of course; that the eyes, so to speak, absorb them like something in which they directly participate. Each column should speak in the same way as the mouth speaks, proclaiming anthroposophically oriented spiritual science. Precisely because it is science, art and religion at the same time, anthroposophically oriented spiritual science had to establish its own architectural style, disregarding all conventional architectural styles. Of course, one can criticize this to no end; but everything that appears for the first time is imperfect at first, and I can perhaps assure you that I know all the mistakes best and that I am the one who says: if I were to rebuild the building a second time, it would be based on the same spirit, on the same laws, but it would be completely different in most details and perhaps even as a whole. But if anything is to be tackled, it must be tackled once, as well as one can at that particular moment. It is only by carrying out such a work that one really learns to know the actual laws of one's being. These are the laws of destiny of spiritual life and spiritual progress, and these have not been violated in the erection of the building at Dornach.

Now the building rises up on the Dornach hill (Fig. 1). Its basic forms had to be sensed first, emerging from the Dornach hill. That is why the lower part is a concrete structure (Fig. 4). I tried to create artistic forms out of this brittle material, and yet some have felt how these forms connect to the rock formations, how nature merges with the building forms with a certain matter-of-factness. Then, on the horizontal terrace, up to which the concrete structure extends, the wooden structure rises. This wooden structure consists of two interlocking cylinders, which are closed off by two incomplete hemispheres that are, as it were, interlocked in a circle, so that two hemispheres, two consecutive hemispheres, enclose the two cylindrical spaces as if they were placed one inside the other. A larger room, the auditorium, a smaller room, the one from which eurythmy is performed, mysteries are played and so on. Between the two rooms is the speaker's podium. This is initially the main building.

Of course, I must not fail to mention that in recent years numerous friends, particularly from this or that scientific field, have now found each other from almost all scientific fields, who have seen through and recognized how natural science, mathematics, history, medicine, jurisprudence, sociology, and the most diverse fields can be fertilized by anthroposophical spiritual science. So that a real Universitas must attach itself to Dornach, and for this the building, for which we have been able to provide for the time being, is nothing more than a large lecture hall, with the possibility of working in this lecture hall, which is intended for about a thousand people, in other ways than through the mere word.

That the building has this dualistic form, I would say, consisting of two cylinders crowned by hemispheres, can be sensed from the whole task that spiritual science, as we understand it in Dornach, must set itself. After all, this is based on what is called inner human development. One does not arrive at this anthroposophical spiritual science by merely using one's ordinary everyday power of judgment - although, of course, full reliance is placed on this - or by using the ordinary rules of research; but rather by

you must bring to the surface the powers slumbering in the soul, as described in my book “How to Know Higher Worlds”, and really ascend to that region where the supersensible powers and entities of existence reveal themselves to you. This revealing of the supersensible world to the sensory world, which expresses itself in the fact that the thousand listeners or spectators sit there and on the other side exactly that which gives knowledge of supersensible worlds is communicated, this whole thing, transformed into feeling, expresses itself in the double-dome building in Dornach. It is not meant to be symbolic in any way. That is why I can also say: Of course one could also express this thought differently, but that is how the artistic expression of this basic thought presented itself to me at the time when it was needed.

In a sense, by approaching it from the environment, in the external form of the wooden structure growing out of the concrete, which is a double dome, one sees in the configuration, in the design of the surfaces, what is actually meant by anthroposophically oriented spiritual science. The fact that they really tried not to calculate with abstract concepts, but with artistic perception, may become clear to you from the fact that - in the time when it was still possible before the war - Norwegian slate was obtained with all possible efforts to cover the two domes. Once, when I was on a lecture tour in 1913 between Christiania and Bergen, I saw the wonderful Voss slate. And this Voss slate now shines in the sunshine from the double domes, so that one actually has the feeling: this greenish-greyish shine of the sun, which reflects itself there, actually belongs in this whole landscape. It seemed to me that the care that had been taken to bring out the shine of the sun in the right way in such a landscape was something that showed that account had been taken to present something worthy in this place, which, as a place, as a locality, has something extraordinary about it.

I will now take the liberty of showing you a series of slides of what has been created as this Goetheanum in Dornach. They are intended to show in detail how what I have just explained, how the Dornach building idea has actually been realized. The Dornach building idea should present the same thing to the beholder in the outer spatial form in the picture, as it unfolds to the listener through the word, so that what one hears in Dornach is the same as what one sees in Dornach. But because it should really present a renewal out of spiritual life, a renewal of everything scientific, it also needed, in a sense, a new art.

Now the first picture (Fig. 4): You see here the building, the dome is somewhat covered here, here the concrete substructure. When one approaches via a path that leads from the northwest towards the west gate, one has this view. This is therefore the concrete substructure with the entrance; here one goes in first. Further back in this concrete building are the storage rooms. After you have taken your things off, you go up the stairs that lead through this room, to the left and right, and first come to a vestibule – which you can also enter from the terrace through the main gate – and from there to the auditorium. Here you see, starting from this terrace and going up, the wooden structure covered with Nordic slate (Fig. 10). You can see from the shape above the main entrance in the west that an attempt has been made to incorporate something here that really does look like an organic form growing out of the whole of the building. It is not some random thing found in the organic world, copied from nature, but an attempt to explore organic creation itself. The aim is to devote oneself to organic creation in nature in order to have the possibility of forming such organic forms oneself and to shape the whole into an organic form without violating the dynamic laws. I would like to emphasize: without violating the dynamic or mechanical laws.

Anyone who studies interior architecture with us in Dornach will see everywhere that, despite the fact that columns, pillars and so on are organically designed, it is precisely in this organic design that what is properly supported and properly weighted is expressed, without it being expressed in the thickness of the columns or in the heaviness of any load. The correct distribution of load and support is achieved without the aid of organic forms, so that one has the feeling, as it were, that The building feels both the load and the support at the same time. It is this transition to the appearance of consciousness, as it is in the organic, that had to be striven for in this building, out of the anthroposophical-spiritual-scientific will. So without in any way violating the mechanical, geometric, symmetrical laws of architecture, the form should be transformed into the organic.

The next picture (Fig. 5): Here you see the concrete structure from a slightly further point and more from the west front; here the terrace, then the main entrance. The same motif appears here. The second dome, the smaller one, which is for the stage, is covered here; on the other hand, you can see, as it were, what is adjacent to it. Where the two domed structures connect, there are transverse structures on the left and right with dressing rooms for the actors in mystery plays or eurythmy performances, or offices and the like. These are therefore ancillary buildings here. We will see in a moment in the floor plan how these ancillary buildings fit into the overall building concept.

The next picture (Fig. 7): Here you see the building from the southwest side: again the West Gate, the great dome, another tiny bit of the small dome, to the south the southern porch; here the whole front between west and south.

The next picture (Fig. 3): Here you see the two domed rooms, the auditorium, from the other side, from the northeast, one of the transverse buildings from the front, here the small domed room and here the storage rooms that adjoin the small domed room to the east; furthermore, the terrace, and below the concrete building. This is the porch that leads to the west gate, which you have just seen.

The next picture (Fig. 2): This is the strange building that is particularly heavily contested. This is what you see when you look at the building from the northeast side: you then see this heating and lighting house. It is also the case that one was obliged to form something out of the brittle concrete material, and that one said to oneself, out of artistic laws, out of artistic feelings: There I am given everything that is necessary as a lighting machinery, as a heating machinery: that is the nut kernel to me, around which I have to form the nutshell, to form the necessary for the smoke outlet. It is, if I may express myself in such a trivial way, this principle of the formation of the nutshell is fully implemented. And anyone who complains about something like that should consider what would be there if this experiment had not been carried out, which may still have been imperfectly successful today. There would be a red chimney here! A utilitarian building should be created in such a way that one first acquires the necessary sense of material and then finds the framing from the determination.

The next picture (Fig. 20): Here I take the liberty of showing the layout of the whole. The main entrance from the west: you enter the auditorium through a few vestibules. This auditorium holds chairs for nine hundred to a thousand listeners or spectators. Here you can see a gallery that is closed inwards by seven columns on each side. Only one thing is symmetrical here: namely, in relation to the west-east axis. This is the only axis of symmetry. The building's motifs are only designed symmetrically in relation to this axis of symmetry, the east-west axis; otherwise there is no repetition. Therefore, the columns are decorated with capital and base motifs that are not the same, but are in progressive development. I will show this in detail later. So if you have a first column on the left and right, a second column on the left and right, the capital and base are always the same as those of the right column when viewed from the left, but the following columns always have different capitals, different bases and different architrave motifs above them (Figs. 33-54).

This is absolutely the case, and it has emerged as a necessity from organic building. And this is based on an artistic interpretation of Goethe's principle of metamorphosis. Goethe has indeed developed this metamorphosis theory - which, in my firm conviction, will still play a major role in the science of the living - in an ingenious way. Anyone who still reads his simply written booklet “Attempt to Explain the Metamorphosis of the Plant” from 1790 has before them a grandiose scientific treatise that, according to today's prejudices, simply cannot be sufficiently appreciated. If one wants to express it simply, one must say: Goethe sees the plant as a complicated leaf. He now begins with the lowest leaf, which is closest to the ground, follows the leaves upwards to the heart leaves, which are shaped quite differently than the foliage leaves, then the petals, which are even colored quite differently, then the stamens and pistils, which are shaped quite differently. Goethe says: “Everything that appears in such seemingly different metamorphoses in the leaves of the plant is such that it can be traced back to an ideal similarity and only appears in different metamorphoses for the external sense impression. Basically, the plant leaf always repeats the same basic form; only in the external sensual perception is the ideal similarity differently formed, metamorphosed.

Now, of course, people come and see seven columns – deep mysticism! Yes, there are definitely members of the Anthroposophical Society who, in all sorts of dark, mysterious allusions, talk about the deep mysticism of these seven columns and so on. But there is nothing in it but artistic feeling. When you arrive at the seventh column, this motif of the seventh column is exactly the same as that of the first column – if you really create as nature has created – as the seventh is to the first. And just as the first motif is repeated in the octave, the seventh, you would have to repeat the first motif if you were to move on to the eighth.

Here you can see the boundary between the large and small domes; there is the lectern, which can be retracted because it has to be removed when the theater is in use. Here again there are twelve columns in the perimeter, here the boundary of the small domed room, here the two transverse buildings for dressing rooms and so on.

The next picture (Fig. 21): Here I have made a section through the middle. One enters from the west through the vestibules. Here is the stage area, and rising up from here is the auditorium, the rows of seats, again the seven columns, and here the great dome is connected to the small one by a particularly complicated mechanical structure. Here are the storerooms, the concrete substructure, the dressing rooms for taking off clothes. Here you go in, and then there are the stairs; here you come up and there is the main gate through which you enter.

The next picture (Fig. 22): Here I have taken the liberty of presenting my original model in cross-section. The whole building was originally modeled by me in 1913. Here you see the auditorium with its seven columns, the vestibules, here only hinted at the interior of the great dome, which was then painted; here in the small dome room, the capitals everywhere – I will show them in detail in a moment – here the architrave motifs above them; here the plinth motifs, always emerging metamorphically from one another. So, as I said, it is 'only' a line of symmetry, the central axis of the building. Otherwise, no repetitions can be found, except for what is located on the left and right.

The next picture (Fig. 10): seen from the terrace, the view of the West Gate, the main entrance gate, with two wings, which are necessary [gap in shorthand].

The next picture (Fig. 12): there is such a wing structure, the northern one [seen from the northeast]. Dr. Großheintz's house is also located here, an entire concrete building with about 15 rooms, a family house where I tried to create a residential house out of the concrete material by integrating it into this concrete material. It is near the Goetheanum and was built for the person who donated the land. You can see here how I tried to metamorphose the motif. Everything about this building emerges from the other, like a plant leaf, so to speak, in its form from the other form: it is entirely in the artistic sense the work of metamorphosis.

Next image (Fig. 14): This is one of the side wings, the south wing. Here you can see how the motif above the west entrance appears in a completely different form. It is the same idea, but completely different in form. It is just as, say, the dyed flower petal is the same idea as the lowest green leaf of the plant, and yet in external metamorphosis it is something completely different. In this way, one can indeed sense this organic building-thought by living and finding one's way into the metamorphic by giving oneself up to it, but understanding it in a feeling-based way, not in an abstract, intellectual way. This should not actually be explained, but everything should be given by the sight itself.

Once the building is finished, those who are familiar with the anthroposophical attitude and feeling will not perceive the building as symbolic at all, but as something that flows from this overall attitude. Of course one would say that it should flow out of the “generally human”; but this generally human is only a foggy and fanciful construct, a fantasy. The human is always the concrete. Someone who has never heard of Christianity naturally does not understand the Sistine Madonna either. And someone who has no sense of Christianity would never understand the Last Supper in Milan in the church of Santa Maria delle Grazie. It is certainly possible to use language to imagine what was given, but apart from that, there is nothing symbolic about the entire structure; all the forms are metamorphosed variations of one another.

Next picture (Fig. 11): Here you see such a lateral transverse structure, viewed from the front, that is, here from the south side. Up here in a substantially modified metamorphosis is the motif that is also above the west entrance. All these motifs are in various metamorphoses, so that the whole architectural idea is carried out organically. Likewise, if you were to study the columns, you would find a basic form, and this is always metamorphosed, just as, in the end, the skull bones of humans are a metamorphosed transformation of the bones of the spinal cord, as everything in the organism is a metamorphosed transformation right down to the last detail.

The upper part (Fig. 14) of the southern transverse structure seen on its own; this motif, which was just a little smaller there, is now a little larger.

Next picture (Fig. 23): Here you can see part of the staircase. You would enter through the main entrance below, into the concrete building, and go up these stairs. Here you can see the banister and here a pillar. On this pillar you can see how the attempt is made to shape the supporting pillar in an organic form, how the attempt is made to give the pillar the form that it must have after the opposite exit, because there is little to carry; the form that it must have where it is braced, where the entire weight of the staircase lies. Of course, something like this can only be formed geometrically. But here, for once, an attempt should be made to shape the whole thing as if it were alive, so that, as it were, the glow of consciousness of bearing and burdening lies within; with every curve, everything is precisely and intuitively measured for the place in the building where it is located.

Especially if you look at this motif here (Fig. 24): there are three half-circular channels on top of each other. Believe it or not, but it is true: when someone goes up there and enters the auditorium, they must have a certain feeling. I said to myself, the one who goes up there must have the feeling: in there, I will be sheltered with my soul, there is peace of mind to absorb the highest truths that man can aspire to next. That is why, based on my intuitive perception, I designed these three semicircular channels in the three perpendicular spatial directions. If you now go up these stairs, you can experience this feeling of calm. It is not modeled on it – it is not that at all – but only later did I remember that the three semicircular channels in the ear also stand in these three directions perpendicular to each other. If they are violated, a person will faint: they are therefore connected with the laws of equilibrium. It was not created out of a naturalistic desire for imitation, but out of the same desire, which is modeled on the way the channels are arranged in the ear.

You enter from the west side, go up the stairs, here are the three perpendicular semicircular canals, and here again these pillars. Of course, it often happens in life – I have experienced it many times – that when people in a city have seen an actor or actress in certain roles, and later another actor or actress has come along who could be good, better, more interesting or different, they judge them based on the earlier ones. If they did everything exactly like the earlier ones, they were good; if they did it differently, they were bad, no matter how good they might be in themselves. And so, of course, people judge such a thing according to what they are accustomed to, and do not know that when something like this is erected, every effort is made to make it look as if it were supported in different ways on different sides, and that this is derived from the overall organic structure of the building. Some found it thin and called it rachitic, others thought it resembled an elephant foot, but could not call it an elephant foot either, and so someone came up with the name “rachitic elephant foot” based on their own intuitive feeling. This is what happens so often today when some attempt is made to bring something new out of the elementary.

Next image (Fig. 27): If you go up the stairs, you will come to the vestibule before entering the large domed room. Here you can already see the beginning of the timber construction. At this height, there would be a concrete terrace, with the concrete structure below. You can see from this column how the capital, with all its curves, is precisely adapted to the location, not just schematically in space, but dynamically. The curves at the exit have to express a different form of support than those on the opposite side of the building, where the columns have to brace against them. That is why all these wooden forms, column capitals, architraves and so on had to be made by our friends from the Anthroposophical Society over many years of work. All this is handcrafted, including, for example, the ceiling, which does not have just any schematic form, but is individually designed on all sides in its curves and surfaces, hollowed out differently in one spatial direction than in the other spatial direction. And all this according to the law, just as the ear is hollowed out differently at the front than at the back, and so on.

Next picture (Fig. 30): Now we have entered and are standing in the room that is the auditorium. If we turn around and look backwards, we see the organ room here, which you can see in more detail in other pictures. But here you only have the model, not as it can be seen now in the building, where a lot has been added. I have tried to integrate this organ in such a way that one does not have the feeling that something has been built into the rest of the space, but rather that at this point what is presented here as the organ case and the organ itself has literally grown out of the whole. That is why the architecture and sculpture are adapted to the lines created by the rest, i.e. the organ pipes and so on.

Next image (Fig. 28): You are now, so to speak, in the auditorium, looking from the auditorium at the columns. Here is the organ motif, here are the first two columns with their capitals. We then come to the altered, metamorphosed capitals of the second, third, fourth columns and so on – I will show this in detail in a moment – above them always the architrave motif and below the base motif. Next image (Fig. 29): The pictures were taken at different times. The construction has been going on since 1913, when the foundation stone was laid, and the pictures show it in various stages. Here again, if you turn around in the auditorium and look to the west, the upper part, the organ motif; the first and second columns with capitals on the left and right, the capitals and the architraves above them are quite simply designed. In the following, I will show one column and the one that follows, and then each column with the column capital on its own, so that you can see how the following column capital always emerges metamorphosically from the preceding one. This particularly emphasizes the fact that, basically, the individual column cannot be judged on its own, but only the entire sequence of columns in their successive form can be judged.

Next image (Fig. 34): Here you see the first column by itself, simply from bottom to top in the forms, simply from top to bottom. You see a very simple motif.

Next image (Fig. 35): Here you see the first motif, the first capital with the architrave above it; here the second, emerging organically from the first. The motif, which goes from top to bottom, grows; in growing, it metamorphoses, and so does the motif from bottom to top. To a certain extent, one has to feel one's way into the forces that are at work when an upper plant leaf is created in its form, metamorphosed compared to the lower one; in the same way, this first simple plant motif develops into a more complicated one. What matters is that you take the whole sequence of motifs, because each one always belongs with the other; in fact, all seven belong together and form a whole.

Next image (Fig. 36): Here you see the second column by itself. The next motif always emerges metamorphically from the previous one. I will now show the second and third columns.

Next picture (Fig. 37): the second and third columns, again the third capital motif with the architrave motif above it is more complicated, so that you really get this complicated form in your feeling if you do not want to explain it symbolically or approach it with some intellectual things, but with feeling. Then you will see the emergence of one from the other.

Next image (Fig. 38): The third column by itself.

Next image (Fig. 39): The third and fourth columns, that is, the capitals of these with the architrave motif. Here one could believe that the search was for this architrave motif to form a kind of caduceus. But it was not sought, it is simply sensed, as these meeting forms, when they continue to grow, continue to complicate, as they become there, and then the sensation of this motif, which resembles the caduceus, arises by itself. Likewise, as if this continues to grow: from bottom to top, things simplify, from top to bottom they complicate; then this form arises, which I will now show again in isolation.

Next image (Fig. 40): The fourth column.

Next image (Fig. 41): The fourth and fifth column. As can be seen from this, if you imagine it growing downwards, this form emerges, and it becomes simpler from the bottom up, and I would say that it grows in a more complex form upwards. That is the strange thing! When you think of development, you believe, from a certain false idea of development that has gradually formed, that development proceeds in such a way that you first have a simple thing, then a more complicated one, and then an increasingly complicated one, and that the most perfect thing is the most complicated. If you now put yourself in the right place in the developmental impulses with artistic perception, you see that this is not the case at all; that you must indeed advance from the simple to the more complicated; but then you arrive at the most complicated in the middle of the development, and then it becomes simpler as it approaches the more perfect.

That was, my dear attendees, while I was working on the models for these things, an extraordinary surprise for me. I had to go from the simple to the complicated - you see, we are here at the fourth and fifth pillars, so roughly in the middle of the seven pillar forms - and I had to have the most complicated thing in the middle and then go back to the simpler. And if I go back, as nature itself creates, I also find the human eye, but the human eye, although it is the most perfect, is not the most complicated. In the eye of certain lower animal forms, for example, we have the fan, the xiphoid process. The eye of certain lower animal forms is more complicated in some respects than the perfect human eye. In nature, too, it does not happen that one goes from the simpler to the more complicated and then further to the most complicated, but by observing things further, one comes back to the simpler. The more perfect is simpler again. And that turns out to be an artistic necessity in such a creative process.

Next image (Fig. 42): The fifth column in itself.

Next image (Fig. 43): Now the fifth and sixth columns. You can see that here the capital of the fifth column is still relatively complicated; if it continues to grow, it becomes simpler again: so that this sixth column, although more perfect in its design, is nobler, is simpler again. The same applies to the architrave motif.

Next image (Fig. 44): This sixth column stands alone.

Next image (Fig. 45): Sixth and seventh column, considerably simplified again. Next image (Fig. 46): The seventh column on its own, again simplified.

Next image (Fig. 47): This is the seventh column, the architrave motif; here is the gap between the large and small domed rooms; here is the curtain. Then the first column of the small domed room, and here we enter the small domed room.

Now that we have gone through the orders of the columns in the large domed room, I will show you the figures on the pedestals, which have also grown out of each other in a metamorphosing organic way. I will show them in quick succession.

Next image (Fig. 48): Here I show the figures on the pedestals in succession. First pedestal.

Next image (Fig. 49): Each one always emerges metamorphically from the other: Second plinth.

Next image (Fig. 50): If you now imagine the changes, this is what happens: Third base.

Next image (Fig. 51): Fourth pedestal, again more complicated. And now the simplifications begin with the pedestal figures, in order to arrive at perfection.

Next image (Fig. 52): Fifth pedestal. Next image (Fig. 53): Sixth pedestal. Next image (Fig. 54): This seventh pedestal figure is relatively simple again.

Next image (Fig. 55): Now, here you can see into the small dome room from the auditorium. You can still see the last column of the auditorium, then the columns and architraves of the small dome room. That is the end of the large dome room, here the center of the small dome room. Here, a kind of architrave is formed between the two central columns of the small dome, but [above it] is not some kind of symbolic figure. If you want to see a pentagram in it, you can see it in every five-petalled flower. We have [below] synthetically summarized all the lines and curves that are distributed on the individual columns. Above, the small dome is then painted. I will have more to say about this coloring.

The next picture (Fig. 56): individual columns of the small domed room. Here the gap [for the curtain]. It is seen here on the left when entering from west to east. Here is the architrave of the small domed room. Here, as you can see, the capitals of the large domed room are not repeated, they correspond to the overall architectural concept. Since the small dome room is smaller and every organ that is smaller in the organic context also has different forms, this is also clearly evident here in the formation of the whole.

The next picture (Fig. 64): Here again is the view into the small domed room, the last two columns of the large domed room; the same motif that you have just seen in a different aspect, and here the small dome. Of course, nothing of the paintings can be seen here, only the situation could be hinted at. The bases of the small columns have been converted into seats.

The next picture (Fig. 67): Here the orders of columns continue to the left and right; this is in the middle in the east, directly under the small domed room, where all the lines and curves found elsewhere are synthetically summarized in the most diverse forms. This is a kind of architrave, a central architrave; below it is the group I will talk about, a nine-and-a-half-meter-high wooden group, the central figure of which represents a kind of human being. Above it is the small domed room.

The next picture (Fig. 69): We now come to the painting of the small domed room. Now, by speaking to you about the painting of the small domed room, I can only show you the pictures of this small domed room. In the painting of the large domed room, I have not yet fully succeeded in doing this, but in the painting of the small domed room, I have tried to realize to a certain extent what I had a character in my mystery dramas express about the new painting: that the forms of color should be the work, that is, that one should really pull oneself together to fully perceive the world of color as such.

Dear attendees! If you look at the world of colors, it is indeed a kind of totality, a world of its own. And if you feel very vividly into the colorful, then I would say red and blue and yellow speak to each other. You get a completely lively feeling within the world of colors and you get to know, so to speak, a world of colors as an essential one at the same time. Then drawing stops, because in the end you perceive drawing as something insincere. What then is the horizon line? If I draw it with a pencil, I am actually drawing an untruth. Below is the green surface of the sea, above is the blue surface of the vault of heaven, and when I put these down as color, the form arises, the line arises as the boundary of the color.

And so you can create everything out of the colored that you essentially want to bring onto the wall as painting – be it the wall of the spheres as here or the other wall. Do not be deceived because there are motifs, because there are all kinds of figures on it, even figures of cultural history. When I painted this small dome, it was not important to me to draw these or those motifs, to put them on the wall; what was important to me was that, for example, there is an orange spot here in different shades of orange: the figure of the child emerged from these color nuances. And here it was important to me that the blue was adjacent: the figure emerged, which you will see in a moment. It is definitely the figure, the essence, drawn entirely from the color. So here we have a flying child in orange tones, here would be the gap between the large and small domed rooms, and the child is, so to speak, the first thing painted on the surface of the small dome. But by seeing these motifs, you will best understand the matter if you say to yourself: I can't actually see anything in it, I have to see it in color. Because it is felt and thought and painted entirely out of color.

The next picture (Fig. 70): Here you see the only word that appears in the whole structure. There is no other inscription to be found anywhere; everything is meant to be developed into art, into form. But here you will find the “I”. Out of the blue, a kind of fist figure has emerged, that is, the 16th-century human being. The whole cognitive problem of modern man has really emerged from the perception of color before the soul. This cognitive problem of modern man can only be perceived in the abstract, if one perceives as it is often portrayed today; it is different from what we can grasp of natural laws today.

It [the problem of knowledge] intrudes into our soul when we do not merely view things scholastically as abstractions, but when we strive with our whole being to immerse ourselves in the riddles and secrets of the world, as we must in order to be fully human, in order to become aware of our human dignity. Then it places itself beside the striving human being, the one striving for knowledge, who in Faust really, I would say, strives out of the mysterious, mystical blue, strives for the fully conscious I that speaks. The older languages have the I in the verb; for this epoch one is justified in letting a word appear; otherwise there is no word, no inscription or the like in the whole structure, everything is expressed in artistic forms. But the child and birth, and the other end of life, death, are placed alongside the person striving for knowledge. Above it would be the Faust figure you have just seen, below it Death, and further over towards us this flying child. This skeleton here (Fig. 71) in brownish black, in the Faust book in blue, the child (Fig. 72) in various shades of orange and yellow.

The next picture (Fig. 73): Here you see a compilation: below the skeleton, here Faust, here this child, whom you saw individually, above it a kind of inspirer, an angel-like figure, which I will show as an individual, then other figures join here. As I said, the necessity arose for me to depict the striving of the people of the last centuries from the color surfaces that I wanted to place in just that position. Here then is the striving of the Greeks. You will see it in detail.

The next picture (Fig. 74): the genius in blue-yellow, who is above the fist-shape, as if inspiring the fist-shape from above. We would then come across the striving child. The next picture (Fig. 75): then a kind of Athena figure, taken out of a brownish-orange with light yellow. It is the way in which Greek thinking has become part of the whole world of knowledge and feeling. This figure that we have here is inspired by a kind of Apollo figure, just as Faust was previously inspired by his angel (Fig. 76); this brings us back to Greek thinking.

The next picture (Fig. 76): The inspiring Apollon. Particular care has been taken here with the bright yellow, through which this Apollo figure has been created out of color. I tried to give this bright yellow a certain radiance through the type of technical treatment.

The next picture (Fig. 77): Here you see two figures, which now inspire the Egyptian initiate, who recognizes the tables and feels the world. The man on the right is depicted in a somewhat darker color, I would say a reddish brown, and the Egyptian initiate, who is below him, is also depicted in this way.

The next picture (Fig. 78): The Egyptian knower, that is, the counter-image for those ancient times, which in our case is Faust, who strives for knowledge.

The next picture (Fig. 79): Here you see two figures that I am obliged to always assign certain names to in spiritual science because they keep recurring. One should not think of nebulous mysticism here, but only of the necessity of having a terminology; just as one speaks of north and south magnetism, so I speak of the Luciferic and the Ahrimanic. When we stand face to face with a human being, we cannot grasp his whole being at once, nor with all the powers of knowledge. He has within him two opposing polarities: that which in him constantly strives towards the rapturously false mysticism, false theosophy, that which always seeks to rise above itself towards the unreal , the unfounded, the nebulous - the Luciferic - and that which makes him a Philistine, that which predisposes him to the spirit of heaviness - the Ahrimanic, which is painted here with its shadow. The Luciferic is painted in the yellow-reddish color, the Ahrimanic in the yellow-brownish. It is the dualism of human nature. We can have it physically, physiologically: Then the Ahrimanic in man is everything that ages him, that brings him to sclerosis, to calcification, that makes him ossify; the Luciferic is everything that, when it develops pathologically, brings one to fever, to pleurisy, that thus develops one towards warmth. Man is always the balance between these two. We do not understand the human being if we do not see in him the balance between these two, the Luciferic and the Ahrimanic.

In particular, however, the Germanic-Central European culture that came over Persia is confronted with this duality in its knowledge. Hence the recognizing Central European, who has the child here (Fig. 82) – we will see him in more detail – is inspired by this duality of the Luciferic-Ahrimanic, with which he must come to terms through his inner tragic destiny of knowledge. Here this kind of dualism is seen again in the smaller figure, shaped like a centaur. I painted this during the war, and one sometimes has one's private ideas; the ill-fated fabric of Woodrow Wilson's fourteen points grew out of the abstract transformation of dualism. Here in Switzerland, too, I have repeatedly spoken of the world-destroying nature of these fourteen points: Therefore, I took the private pleasure of immortalizing Mr. and Mrs. Wilson in these figures. But, as I said, this is of little importance.

The next picture (Fig. 81): Here you see the Ahrimanic figure brought out and the shadow above it. In spiritual terms, this is everything that drives man to materialism, to philistinism, to pedantry, what he becomes when – be it expressed in the extreme – he has only intellect and no heart, when all his powers, his soul powers, are directed by the intellect. And if man did not have the good fortune that his outer body is more in balance, his outer body would actually be determined by the soul, he would be an exact expression of the soul: All those people who feel materialistically, feel pedantically, who are almost completely absorbed in the intellect, would look like that on the outside. Of course, they are protected from this by the fact that their body does not always follow the soul, but the soul then looks like this when you see it, when you feel it physically.

Next image (Fig. 80): The Luciferic, worked out of the yellow, worked out of the yellow into the bright. This is what a person develops when he shapes himself one-sidedly according to the visionary, one-sidedly according to the theosophical, when he grows beyond his head; one often finds it developed in some members of other movements who always grow half a meter with their astral head above their physical head so that they can look down on all people. This is the other extreme, the other pole of man.

Here at the bottom, so to speak, is the Germanic initiate (Fig. 82), the Germanic knower in his tragedy, which lies in the fact that duality has a particularly strong effect on him: the Luciferic and the Ahrimanic; as an addition, again, the naivety of the child. This is what emerged for the artistic sensibility. It was worked out of the brown-yellow; the child is kept in the light yellow.

Next picture (Fig. 83): Here we are already approaching the center of the domed room. This man would stand here with the child, and further towards the center are these two figures, which are one. Of course, this does not refer to the current Russian culture or lack of culture, which is corrupting people and the world, but rather the Russian culture actually contains the seed for something future. At present it is overshadowed by what has been imported from the West, by what should indeed disappear from the earth as soon as possible if it does not want to drag the whole of Europe with it into the abyss. But at the bottom of Russian nationality lies something that is guaranteed a future. It should be expressed through this figure, which has its double only here. That which lives in Russian nationality always has something of a double about it. Every Russian carries his shadow around with him. When you see a Russian, you are actually seeing two people: the Russian, who dreams and who is always flying a meter above the ground, and his shadow. All of this holds future possibilities. Hence this characteristic angel figure, painted out of the blue, out of the various shades of blue. Above it, a kind of centaur, a kind of aerial centaur. Here this figure, everything in the indefinite, even the starry sky above this Russian man, who carries his doppelganger with him.

Next image (Fig. 85): We have now passed the center here. This is the same centaur figure – when facing east, located on the left – as the earlier one on the right of the center. This angel figure is the symmetrical one to the one you have just seen. This one, however, is painted in a yellowish orange, and below it would now be the Russian with his doppelganger, but symmetrical to what was shown before.

Next image (Fig. 86): Now we are standing in the middle of the small domed room. Once again, on the other side, the Russian motif. Here, you can see the figure of Ahriman lying in a cave; and here, at the top, the representative of humanity. One can imagine him as the Christ. I have formed him out of my own vision as a Christ-figure. Lightning flashes come out of his right hand and surround Ahriman like the coils of a snake. His arm and hand go up to Lucifer, who is painted emerging from the reddish-yellow.

Next image (Fig. 87): Here you can see the figure of Lucifer a little more clearly. Below would be the figure of Christ, reaching up with his arm; this is the face, painted in yellow-red. So it is the Luciferic in man that strives beyond his head, the enthusiastic, that which alienates us from our actual humanity by making us alien to the world, bottomless.

Next image (Fig. 88): Ahriman in the cave. His head is surrounded by lightning serpents that emanate from the hand of Christ, who is standing above them. Here the wing, the brownish yellow, is painted more in the brownish direction, in places descending into the blackish blue.

Next picture (Fig. 89): Here I am now showing you my first sketch for the plastic figure of Christ. You see, I tried to make Christ beardless, but Christ pictures have only had a beard since the end of the fifth or sixth century. Of course, no one has to believe me. It is the Christ as he presented himself to me in spiritual vision, and there he must be depicted beardless.

Next image (Fig. 90): The painted head of Christ between Ahriman and Lucifer, the images that I have just shown. Painted in the dome room above is Christ between Ahriman and Lucifer, and below it will later be – it is still far from finished – the nine-and-a-half-meter-high wooden group (Fig. 93), in the middle of which is the representative of humanity, the Christ, with his right arm lowered and his left arm raised, in such a way that this position, like embodied love, is placed between Ahrimanic and Luciferic forces.

Next picture (Fig. 92): This is the first model, made in plasticine, for the Christ, en face, that is, for the representative of humanity, who is to stand in the middle of the wooden group (Fig. 93). But I would like to explicitly note that it will not be somehow obvious that this is the Christ; rather, one will have to feel it from the forms, from the artistic aspect. Nothing, absolutely no inscription, except for the “I” that I mentioned earlier, can be found in the entire structure.

Next image (Fig. 98): This is from the left side of this group of woodcuts [taken from the execution model]: Here is Lucifer striving upwards, and above him a rock creature emerging from the rock, so to speak, the rock transformed into an organ. Here is Lucifer; here Christ would stand; here is the other Lucifer, and that is such a rock creature. It is a risk to make it completely asymmetrical, as asymmetries in general play a certain role in these figures, because here the composition is not conceived in such a way that one takes figures, puts them together and makes a whole – no, the whole is conceived first and the individual is extracted. Therefore, a face at the top left must have a different asymmetry than one at the top right. It is a daring thing to work with such asymmetries, but I hope that it will be felt to be artistically justified if one ever fully comprehends the overall architectural idea.

Next image (Fig. 99): Here you can see the model of the Ahriman head. It is the original wax model that I made in 1915. It is an attempt to shape the human face as if the only things present in the human being were the aging, sclerotizing, calcifying forces, or, in the soul, that which makes the human being a philistine, pedant, materialist, which lies in him by being an intellectualizing being. If he had no heart at all for his soul life, but only reason, then he would present this physiognomy. We do not get to know the nature of a human being by merely describing it in the way that ordinary physiology and anatomy do. This one-sided approach provides only a limited insight into the human being. We must move on to an artistic appreciation of form, and only then do we get to know what lives and breathes in a person, what is truly there. You can never get to know the human being, as is attempted in the academies, anatomically or physiologically; you have to ascend to the artistic – that is part of artistic recognition – and must recognize, as Goethe says: “When nature begins to reveal her secrets to him who is open to them, he feels the deepest yearning for her most worthy interpreter, art.” Not only the abstract word, not only the abstract idea and the abstract thought, but also the image gives something of what the forces of nature are, what is really contained in the secrets of nature. One must ascend to the artistic, otherwise one cannot recognize nature. The building may rightly call itself the “Goetheanum” for the reason that precisely such a Goethean understanding of nature also strives for an understanding of the world. Goethe says: Art is a special way of revealing the secrets of nature, which could never be revealed without art.

Next image (Fig. 101): The figure of Lucifer above, here the chest, wing-like. It is the case that one really has to immerse oneself in all of nature's creativity if one wants to give plastic form to something like this figure of Lucifer. Nothing can be symbolized, nothing can be allegorized, nothing can be thought and the thought put into earlier forms, but one must really delve into how nature creates, one must know the nature of the human rib cage, the lungs, one must know the organ of hearing, then the atrophied flight tools that the human being has in his two shoulder blades. All of this must be brought into context, because a person would look quite different if they were not intellectually developed, if the heart did not hypertrophy and overgrow everything: The heart, the hearing organs, wing-like organs, everything would be one. Those who do not merely accept the naturalistic, but also what is ideal, spiritual in the beings, will see in such art only that which reveals the secrets of the world and of existence in the Goethean sense. Up there you can see the hands of this asymmetrical rock creature.

Next image (Fig. 103): Here you can see a building in the vicinity of the Goetheanum. It was originally built to carry out a kind of glass etching. Now it serves as a kind of office space, and eurythmy rehearsals and eurythmy lessons are also given there. In the wooden wall of the large domed room, there are glass windows between every two columns, and these glass windows are not made in the old glass window art, but in a special art, which I would call glass etching. Panes of glass of the same color are engraved with a diamond-tipped stylus that is clamped into an electric machine, and the artist actually works here as an etcher on glass, as he otherwise works as an etcher on a plate, only on a larger scale. So that you scratch out in the monochrome glass plate, thus working the motif in question into the light. This is how we got these glass windows, which have different glass colors, so that there is a harmonious effect. When you enter the building, you first come to one glass color, then to the other, to certain color harmonies. These glass windows had to be ground here; accordingly, this house was built, which, except for the gate and the staircase, is individually designed in every detail. Here we do not have the earlier castles that are otherwise present, but a special form of castle has been used (Fig. 105). So it is individually designed down to the last detail. Next picture (Fig. 104): The gate to this house just shown; below the concrete staircase.

Next image (Fig. 110): Here you see one of these glass windows, which is executed in green. The motifs here are created out of green panes of the same color. The etching is actually only, I would say, a kind of score. This is then a work of art when it is in its place and the sun shines through. So the artist does not finish the work of art, but only a kind of score: when the sun shines through, this etching achieves what, together with the sunbeam shining through, actually creates the work of art. This again marks something that emerges from the whole building idea of Dornach and is physically expressed here.

The Dornach building is built on a fundamentally different architectural idea from other buildings. The walls of the previous buildings are closing walls, artistically also conceived as closing walls. No wall in Dornach is conceived in this way; the walls in Dornach are designed in such a way that they are artistically transparent, so that one does not feel closed in when one is inside the building. All the walls, so to speak, open up through the artistic motifs to the whole great world, and one enters this building with the awareness that one is not in a building but in the world: the walls are transparent. And this is carried out in these glass windows right down to the physical: they are only a work of art when the sun shines through them. Only together with the sunbeam does what the artist has created become artistic.

Next picture (Fig. 113): Another window sample, taken from the same-colored glass pane. The fact that these windows are there means that the room is again illuminated with the harmoniously interwoven rays, and one can, especially when one enters the room in the morning hours, when it is full of sunshine, really feel something through the light effects in the interior, which cannot be called nebulous, but in the best sense inwardness, an impression, an image of the inwardness of the existence of the world and of human beings. For just as, for example, in Greek temple architecture there stands a house that can only be conceived as the house that no human being actually enters, at most the forecourt as a hall of sacrifice, but which is the dwelling place of the god, just as the Gothic building, regardless of whether it is a secular or a church building, is conceived as that which is not complete in itself, but which is complete when it has become a hall for assembly and the community is within it, the whole building idea of Dornach, as I have developed it here in its details, should work so that when a person enters this space, they are just as tempted to be in the space with other people who will look at what is presented and listen to what is sung, played or recited.

Man will be tempted, on the one hand, to feel sympathy with those who are gathered, but the question or the challenge that is as old as Western culture will also arise: know thyself! And he will sense something like an answer to this in the building around him: know thyself. The attempt has been made to express in the building forms, in an artistic and non-symbolic way, that which the human being can inwardly experience.

We have already experienced it: when, for example, an attempt was made to recite - to eurythmy or to recite to oneself - the space that I showed you as the organ room, when an attempt was made to recite into it, or when an attempt was made to speak of the intermediate space between the two dome spaces, the whole room took these things in as a matter of course. Every form is adapted to the word, which wants to unfold recitatively or in discussion and explanation. And music in particular spreads out in these plastic-musical formal elements, which the building idea of Dornach is meant to represent.

In conclusion, I would just like to say, my dear attendees: With these details, which I have tried to make clear to some extent through the pictures, I wanted to present to your souls what the building idea of Dornach should be: a thought that dissolves the mechanical, the geometric, into the organic, into that which itself presents the appearance of consciousness, so that this consciously appearing element willingly accepts that which arises from the depths of human consciousness.

However, this means that something has been created that differs from previous building practices and customs, but in the same way that spiritual science oriented towards anthroposophy also wants to place itself in the civilization of the present day: as something that feels related to the emerging forces of the rising sun, and at the same time wants to strongly oppose the terribly devastating forces of decline of our time. Thus, that which wants to live in the teaching of anthroposophy, the whole world view of anthroposophy, also wants to express itself through the building forms. What is to be heard in Dornach through the spoken word should also be seen in the forms. Therefore, no arbitrary architectural style was to be used, no arbitrary building constructed: it had to grow out of the same spiritual and intellectual background from which the words spoken in Dornach arise. The whole idea behind the building, the whole of the Dornach building, is not to be a temple building, but a building in which people come together to receive supersensible knowledge.

People say that just because one is too poor to find words for the new, one often says: that is a temple building. But the whole character contradicts the old temple character. It is entirely that which is adapted in every detail to what, as spiritual science in the anthroposophical sense, wants to step out into the world. And basically, every explanation is a kind of introduction to the language, to the world view, from which the artistic concept has emerged. I believe that artistically, the building expresses its own essence and content, even if it is still often perceived today as something that is not justified in terms of what is considered acceptable in terms of architectural style, forms and artistic language. Only someone who has already absorbed the impulse, the entire civilizing character of spiritual science, will understand that a new architectural idea had to emerge from this new world view. And as badly as contemporaries sometimes take it, something like this had to be presented, just as anthroposophical spiritual science had to be talked about.

And so, in the manner of a confession, today's discussion, which sought to point to the building of Dornach and to these thoughts, may simply conclude with the words: something was ventured that had not been done before as a building idea, but it had to be ventured. If something like this had not been ventured, had not been ventured at various points in time, there would be no progress in the development of humanity. For the sake of human progress, something must be ventured first. Even if the first attempt is perhaps beset with numerous errors – that is the very first thing that the person speaking here will admit – it must nevertheless be said: something like this must always be ventured again in the service of humanity. Therefore, my dear attendees, it has been ventured out there in Dornach, near Basel.

Dear friends, once again our thoughts must first of all be for those who are at the front, having to meet the challenge of our time with their bodies and their whole being. Let us therefore direct our thoughts to the spirits who are protecting the men who are at the front.

Spirits of your souls, guardian guides,
On your wings let there be borne
The prayer of love from our souls
To those whom you guard here on earth.
Thus, united with your might,
A ray of help our prayer shall be
For the souls it seeks out there in love.

And for those who have already passed through the gate of death in the course of these events, we say:

Spirits of your souls, guardian guides,
On your wings let there be borne
The prayer of love from our souls
To those whom you guard here on earth.
Thus, united with your might,
A ray of help our prayer shall be
For the souls it seeks out there in love.

And the spirit we have sought in our endeavours for so many years, the spirit who went through the Mystery of Golgotha, the Christ spirit, the spirit of courage, the spirit of strength, the spirit of unity, the spirit of peace—may he rule over everything you are asked to do these days.

More than at other times the serious purpose of our spiritual efforts must live in our souls during these days, these weeks—a seriousness which enables us to be aware how everything we aim for in our spiritual movement has to do with all that is truly human. We are aiming for something that addresses itself not just to human existence as it is for the moment, an existence that will pass with human physical body. We are speaking of laws, of forces in soul and spirit, that directly address the higher self in man, a higher self which is more than the self that may wither away with the body and its existence. We have frequently spoken of ‘Maya’ when referring to outward appearances, and it has often been stressed that outward appearances, the processes of physical life, become Maya because man does not properly penetrate them with his mind, his perceptive faculties. He therefore does not sense, does not perceive, what is really significant; the real essence of the things perceptible to the outer senses. Man uses his perceptive faculties to draw a veil, a tissue of deception, over the events of the physical world. This makes them become Maya.

There is one particular great truth that we should have in mind these days as we look for love and understanding, for a loving comprehension of what is happening all around us—an insight that, fundamentally speaking, is at the centre of everything we aim for in spiritual science. In our day this has to present itself to our souls with the full gravity and moral weight inherent in it. It is the realization—and this has by now become the simplest and most elementary fact in our spiritual life—that life on earth recurs. The fact that in the course of time our souls progress from body to body. The part of man that is eternal hastens from body to body through man's successive incarnations on earth. On the other hand, there is the part that has to do with human existence in a physical body, the part present on the physical plane that provides the configuration. the formation, the particular stamp to human existence in an outer physical body.

One particular thing that provides the outer stamp, determining the character of a person as it were, in so far as he is living in a physical body on the physical plane, is what may collectively be referred to as nationality. This is something we should never forget, especially today. If we turn the mind's eye to what we call man's higher self, the concept of nationality loses significance. For when we pass through the gate of death everything encompassed by the term ‘nationality’ is among the things we cast off. And if we do in all seriousness want to be what we think people with spiritual aims should be, it is proper to remember that in passing through successive incarnations the human being belongs not to one but to a number of different nationalities. The part of him that links him to a particular nationality is among the things that are cast off, have to be cast off, the moment we pass through the gate of death.

Truths that belong to the realm of the eternal do not have to be easily understood. Indeed, they may well be truths which at times go against our feelings—truths we achieve with difficulty particularly in difficult times, and also find difficult to achieve and retain in their full strength and clarity in difficult times such as these. A true anthroposophist must do this, and it will be exactly in this way that he arrives at a real understanding of the physical world around him. The basic elements for such understanding have already been presented in our anthroposophical work. You will find that the lecture cycle on folk souls' in a sense contains everything needed to gain insight into the way human beings, in so far as they are in the eternal realm, are connected with their nationalities. Those lectures were of course given in peacetime when souls are more ready and prepared to accept objective, unvarnished truths. Perhaps it will be difficult to take these truths as objectively today as they could be taken in those days. Yet this is the very way in which we can prepare our souls to develop the strength they need today, if even today we are able to take these truths objectively.

Let us bring before our mind's eye the picture of a warrior going through the gate of death on the field of battle. We need to understand that this is very much a special case, to go through the gate of death like this. We need to understand that entrance is made into a world that we are seeking with every fibre of our souls in spiritual science, so that it may bring clarity even into physical life. Let us remember that death means the entrance into that spiritual world and that it is not possible to take other life impulses directly into that world, for they would bear no fruit. The only life impulses we are able to take there are those that animate the efforts of our hearts and minds and in the final instance aim to join all peoples on the earth in brotherhood. Then a simple popular saying can be seen in a new way in the light of anthroposophy. It is the proverb which says ‘Death is the grand leveller’. It makes them all equal—Frenchmen. Englishmen, Germans and Russians. That is indeed true. Considering this in relation to what is going on all around us on the physical plane today, we shall indeed become aware of the solid ground that enables us to overcome Maya in this field and look to events for their essential meaning.

Consider it in relation to the feelings of antipathy and hatred that fill the hearts of the peoples of Europe at present. Consider it in relation to all the things peoples in the different regions of European soil feel about the others, expressing it in spoken and written words. And let us also see in our mind's eye all the antipathy coming to full fruition in our time.

How should we see these things with the eye of truth? Where in this field do we find something that will take us beyond Maya, beyond the great illusion? We do not get to know about each other on earth by an approach that considers everything that is generally human as something abstract. We get to know one another by getting in a position where we are able really to understand the peculiar qualities of the peoples who are spread out over the whole earth, to understand them in concrete terms, in what they are in particular. We do not get to know a person in this life by simply saying: He is a human being like myself and must have all the same qualities that I have. No, we have to forget about ourselves and really consider the qualities of the other person.

In the lecture cycle on the folk souls I showed how the different aspects of the soul within us—the sentient soul, the intellectual or mind soul, the spiritual soul, the ego and the spirit-self—are distributed among the nations of Europe and how every nation fundamentally represents a one-sided aspect. I also said that the different nationalities will have to work together, to become the soul of Europe as a whole, just as the different aspects of our own soul need to work together. Looking at the Italian and the Iberian peninsulas we find that the national element comes to expression in the sentient soul. In France, it comes to expression as intellectual or mind soul. Moving on to the British Isles we see it coming to expression as spiritual soul. In Central Europe the national element comes to expression as ego. When we finally look to the East of Europe, that is the region where it fully emerges as spirit-self—though that is not quite the right way of putting it, as we shall see later. What comes to expression there is something that lies in the national character. But the eternal in man goes beyond what is national and this is what human beings are looking for when entering more deeply into the spirit. Compared to this, the national element is a mere garment, an outer envelope, and the more a person is able to gain insight into this the higher he will ascend. In so far as man lives in the physical world, he does live in the outward trappings of what is national and this gives his body its configuration and, fundamentally speaking, also provides the configuration for certain qualities, character traits.

Today we see the members of different nations facing one another in dislike, in hatred. I am not at this point speaking about what is going on in the combat situation. I am speaking of what is going on in the feelings, the passions, of human souls. Here we have a soul. It needs to prepare for its reception into a spiritual world through which it will now have to pass between death and its next birth, a world that will guide it towards an incarnation that will belong to quite a different nationality from the one it is now leaving. This is a fact which shows very clearly, in the best and most powerful way, how man resists the higher self that is within him. Consider some real ‘nationalist’ today, someone with national feelings who directs his antipathy very particularly against the members of another nation and, indeed, may be ranting and raving against this other nation in his own country. What is the meaning of such ranting and raving, of such antipathy? It signifies a premonition—My next incarnation will be into this nationality! The higher self has already at subconscious level established links with the other nationality. This higher self is resisted by that part of us which on the physical plane. This is man raging against his own higher self. Wherever the ranting and raving is worst, wherever the hatred felt against other nationalities is greatest and where the most lies are told about them, someone seeing things not as Maya but in truth can perceive the true reason, which is that a great many members of the nation that rages most, is most cruel in its attitudes and lies the most, will have to assume that other nationality at their next incarnation.

That is the full seriousness of what we teach, the moral greatness that lies behind it. There is much in man—very much, infinitely much—that wants to resist having to recognize his higher self, the part of him that is eternal. This is what makes it so tremendously difficult to speak objectively at the present time. It certainly is a strange phenomenon that before this war started infinitely appreciative comments reached us from England, appreciative of the German character, German competence and particularly the intellectual life in Germany. I attempted to give examples of this in my last public lecture.5 It is possible to give many more examples, and this shall also be done. What was going on there?

From the occult point of view, there had been an instinctive feeling that an element was being striven for in Central Europe that had to do with regaining youth—I spoke of the Faust type of soul in that last public lecture—a search for the spiritual, preparing for the spiritual, something the whole of Europe would one day turn to, truly turn to. This is something people were instinctively aware of in times gone by. The desire has been to understand what is going on in Central Europe. Yet being wholly bound up with the national element, we shall only be able to relate to this in full understanding in the life between death and rebirth. Then it will be possible to relate to this and understand, and the way will be found to the teachers of Central Europe. It is embarrassing to speak of this now for it may appear like boasting in someone who comes from Central Europe. Yet the objective truths must be told. So there is an instinctive feeling for something that will be looked for in the life between death and rebirth: a uniting with souls that have striven for what is altogether human—with the Goethe soul, the Schiller soul, the Fichte soul. [Johann Gottlieb Fichte, 1762–1814, German idealist philosopher.] There has been some awareness of the fact that, having passed through the gate of death, we shall look above all for the Goethe soul, the Fichte soul, the Schiller soul and other souls that had their last incarnation in Central Europe. This fact had come to expression instinctively, and now once more, for the last time, infinitely passionate nationalistic feeling is rising against it. When we realize that the words so often heard now from the west and the north west are but covering up this feeling of resistance we shall have come to understand the truth, to replace Maya, misconception. We shall then understand how earth man, having eternal man within him, does not want what the eternal man within him wants; how the love he must feel in eternity is in the temporal world transformed into hatred.

We shall find that the best way of achieving love in understanding, and understanding in love, will be to get to know the characteristics of European peoples' using the means spiritual science is able to provide. We are allowed to do so in so far as we are always addressing the higher self in man. And all who want to share in our way of thought or feeling will recognize this higher self and therefore be able to listen to everything that has to be said with regard to the outer garb, knowing that we are speaking of the outer garb.

In a certain sense every nation has its specific mission.—In due course we shall be able to enter the building in Dornach and find that the sequence of columns, their capitals and the architraves above them, express in their forms what comes to expression in the impulses we discern in Europe. But I am not going to talk about this now for it is best to talk about it when we have the building before our eyes. That is what I did there a few days ago.⁶—If we consider the impression our soul may gain even without seeing the building, we note above all that the inhabitants of the southern peninsulas—Italy and Spain—are, in a way, bringing back in their modern mission the elements that in the past had appeared in the third post-Atlantean epoch, in Egypto-Chaldean civilization. As soon as we grasp this, we gain a true insight into the soul of an Italian or Spanish national. This can be traced down to specific details. It is possible to say that we find in reality what we have previously perceived in the spirit. What were the characteristic features of Egypto-Chaldean civilization? This is something we have spoken of many times. They had a feeling for the great, cosmic astrology. Stars and constellations were not seen the way we see them today. Instead, spiritual entities were perceived and the constellations were seen as their physical exterior. The spiritual was seen in everything. If this is to be repeated as the mission of a nation in the time after the Mystery of Golgotha it has to be repeated in such a way that it now is part of the inner soul—that the great cosmic tableau seen by the Egyptians and Chaldeans now presents itself as though born anew out of the soul. This is nowhere more evident than in Dante's Divina Comedia, a work representing the high point of culture on the Italian peninsula. [Dante Alighieri, 1265-1321.] Even in details, the elements of ancient Egypto-Chaldean culture emerge again as though born out of the soul, resurrected in the inner life.

The essence of Greek culture is today found in the French nation, down to the character of their leading personalities. Voltaire [1694–1778] for instance can be understood only if one compares him to a real Greek. And if you consider the form Corneille [1606–16841] and Racine [1639–1699] gave to their works you can see how they were wrestling with the Greek form. This is of great significance in the history of civilization. The struggle with outer form, with what Aristotle [384–322 BC] established with regard to form, lives on in Racine and Corneille. If we look to French culture to find again the culture of the intellectual or mind soul that set the tone in the fourth post-Atlantean epoch, we should find what was best in that culture. With the intellectual or mind soul coming to grips with the world, we should find exactly what relates to this. The greatest poet therefore, beyond compare in that respect, will have to be one whose creative work arises out of the intellectual or mind soul. A nation achieves greatness where its incomparables are brought to the fore. And the French poet who is unsurpassable is Molière [1622-1673]. With him the French soul reached its true, characteristic height—there it is unsurpassable. An echo of this was still alive in Voltaire.

An element that repeats nothing of the past but belongs to the fifth post-Atlantean epoch, something that has come up new in this epoch as it were, is the British soul. The principal aim of the fifth post-Atlantean epoch is to develop the spiritual soul, to bring it out. The spiritual soul is particularly in evidence in the essential nature of the British folk soul. It is characteristic of the British soul that it faces events. Fourteen, fifteen years ago, when I was writing the first edition of my Riddles of Philosophy⁷ I struggled to find a term to describe the British philosophers and it then became clear to me that they are onlookers in life. They face things the way the spiritual soul faces life as an onlooker. And the greatest creative spirit in the British soul, the man who stood there and faced the British character traits giving expression to all of them, down to the very depths of the soul, was Shakespeare. There the British soul is incomparable, in the onlooker mode.

Moving on to Central Europe we find ‘...what is forever evolving, and never actually is...’ as I have already described it in the public lecture. It is the ‘I’ as such, the innermost part of man. How does this relate to the elements of man's soul? It relates individually to the sentient soul, the intellectual or mind soul and the spiritual soul, developing links with all of them. Let us consider this in the case of Goethe. We note how he longed to go to Italy. And as it was in his case so all the best minds of Central Europe always longed for Italy, to achieve fertilization of the ego and let it conceive from the sentient soul. And the ego also exchanges forces with the intellectual or mind soul. Let us try and observe how that close bond between ego and intellectual or mind soul has really always been there through the centuries. Note how Frederick the Great [1712–1786], that most German of princes, really only spoke and wrote in French, how he had a special appreciation of French culture. This is evident, for instance, from his relationship with Voltaire. We can also note how the German philosopher Leibniz [1646–1716] wrote his works in French. That is exactly how the ego relates to the intellectual or mind soul. And when the ego is from the depths of the soul seeking the thing it strives for, something pushes up from the depths of the ego, from unfathomable depths of the ego: the spiritual soul tries to grasp it. This can be seen in the case of Goethe. I have often shown how he tried to grasp the way organisms evolve one from another. He established a whole system for organisms. That arose from the depths of the ego. But it is not immediately compreshensible. People need something that is easier to understand, they need things presented the way they arise from the spiritual soul. So they did not take up what Goethe had to offer but took up Darwin [1809–1882]. We still have not reached the point today where we are able to give recognition to Goethe's Theory of Colours.⁸ Transposed into the spiritual soul in Newton's [1642–1727] work it became what is currently accepted as the science of physics.

These things indicate the way in which individual, in this case national, characters are facing one another. We rise above the outer Maya which holds men captive and come to the truth when we learn to look at things in the light of spiritual science. We come to a truth that will show us that just as individual soul forces are warring with each other in a human being so the soul forces incorporated in the folk souls are at war with each other. It is not by chance that now in our day—when the teaching I have just presented has emerged—war makes its appearance as the great teacher, telling mankind in such a bloody, such a terrible way the very thing we are also telling them in spiritual terms. It is not by chance that whilst we are able to discuss this here there rages outside what is probably one of the bloodiest struggles ever. Fundamentally speaking, it represents the same truths but we must first penetrate them in their Maya to understand them as they really are.

In speaking about these things we must for once remove from the words that are spoken every nuance of feeling, of sympathy or antipathy, and use words merely for characterization. Then we shall understand things rightly. For these are things contained within the self of man, in so far as it is wrapped in the national element. We can follow this through in detail. To begin with, to prepare for what we must come to understand, let me say the following.

Let us take a Central European living in the ego culture. In my public lecture I said that the Central European aspires to his god in such a way that he will be joined to him. He wants to be united with his god. With regard to the thinking process, we can make the I generally say: ‘Man thinks’. Yet the statement ‘Man thinks’ really says very little indeed. We need to learn to look more carefully with the aid of spiritual science. We must gradually learn not to speak thoughtlessly but instead put things in the right way. For people who do not really care about the reality of things it is, of course, all right the way one just says it, but it is right only to say: ‘the Central European or Scandinavian thinks’—with ‘thinking’ here considered an activity because it is the evolving of thought that matters. ‘The ensouled being thinks’—that is what matters in Central Europe and in the Nordic countries. Man is so bound up with thought that this thought is the product of the soul's own activity, that the soul's activity consists of nothing else but the soul being caught up in thought.

The same cannot be rightly said for the Frenchman. In that case we have to say: ‘He has thoughts’. For ‘thinking’ and ‘having thoughts’ are not the same—there is a subtle difference. My Riddles of Philosophy can help to make this clear. In Western Europe people have thoughts. Thoughts are something that comes; they are given just as sensory perceptions are given. That is how it is with thoughts. They enter into the soul, they are fully alive in it, people have them, even grow intoxicated with them, are delighted to have them. One accusation made against the Germans is that their thoughts show a certain coldness. That may well be. A German has to form them first in his individual soul. They need to be warmed through there and only stay warm for as long as they are part of the immediate activity.

So much in preparation. For, indeed, the expression of individual national characteristics will always be found to show something coming alive that has already been put forward in the principles of spiritual science, something you will find in my lectures on folk souls. Let us consider individual expressions of national character.

The Italian and the Spanish character is determined by the sentient soul. We can observe this in life down to the finer detail. Everywhere we come upon the sentient soul. (This does not, of course, refer to life in the higher self.) As soon as a native of those countries is wholly within his national element he is within the sentient soul. This is particularly attached to everything connected with home and sensitive to everything that is not home but, rather, ‘alien country’. If you try, for instance, to understand all that is part of the national element in Italy you will find that an Italian sees another person who is not Italian as a foreigner who lives abroad. All the struggles that took place in Italy during the 19th century had specifically to do with home territory. Here we have a recapitulation of Egypto-Chaldean culture.

Next let us consider the people of Western Europe, those living on French soil. (Remember, we need to rid ourselves of anything to do with sympathy and antipathy.) They are recapitulating Greek civilization. Their attitude to someone from another country will be like that of the Greeks—they will call him a barbarian. Greek civilization is recapitulated here. We can understand this even if the wildest feelings of antipathy are raging. There always is a nuance present of the way people in ancient Greece considered non-Greeks.

The English people have the specific mission to nurture the spiritual soul and this comes to full expression in materialism. Here we specially need to rid ourselves of all antipathy. The nurturing of materialism results in men being simply positioned next to each other in space. This is something that was not experienced in the past: awareness of the rival. The spiritual soul is conscious of another person as its rival in physical life.

What is the situation as regards the Central Europeans, including the Scandinavians? It would be most interesting to go into full detail of this another time. What does a German feel when face to face with another national, in the position where the Italian sees the foreigner, the Frenchman the barbarian and the Englishman his rival? One needs to find the pregnant phrase always for these things. A German faces his opponent—this may also be in a duel and may have nothing at all to do with any feeling of antipathy even—it is merely an matter of fighting for existence or for something connected with one's existence. The enemy need not be denigrated in the least. Again it is possible to observe this even in fine detail. This war in particular shows how the German national faces his enemy as though in a duel.

Let us now turn to the East. We have spoken of the sentient soul coming into its own on the two southern peninsulas, the intellectual or mind soul among the French, the spiritual soul in the British Isles. In Central Europe and up north in Scandinavia the national element comes into its own in the I, the ego. It shows differentiation between different regions but overall is experienced by what is called the ego soul. As I have said, it lives as spirit-self in the East. How do we characterize the spirit-self? It approaches man, comes down upon him. In the ego, man is striving. In the three soul aspects, man is also striving. The spirit-self on the other hand descends. It will one day descend upon the East as a true spirit-self. These things are true, as we have often said. But it needs preparation, preparation to the effect that the soul conceives, that it becomes well versed in its conceiving.

Surely the Russian people have done nothing else so far but conceived. We have had the works of Soloviev, the greatest Russian philosopher, translated within our movement.⁹ If we consider his works in depth we find that it is all Western European culture and philosophy. It is a little different because it has been born out of the Russian folk soul. What is it that is approaching in the Russian soul in contradistinction to western European culture? Italy and Spain are a recapitulation of the third post-Atlantean epoch, the French people a recapitulation of the culture of ancient Greece. The Briton shows the new element that has come in, something we very definitely acquire on the physical plane. In Central Europe it is the ego that has to emerge clearly. In Russia we have receptiveness, conception. First it was Byzantine Christianity that was received, descending like a cloud and then spreading. And western European culture was received even during the reign of Peter the Great [1672–1725]. At present, one would say, only the material basis for conception is there. What we do have there is a reflection of Western European culture, and the soul's work consists in preparing itself for conception, making itself receptive. The Russian folk-soul will only be in its right element when it realizes that Western European elements have to be received the same way as the ancient Germans, for instance, received the Christian faith, or the way the Germanic people took in Greek culture through Goethe. It will be a while yet. The physical element in the people of the East is reacting against the things that need to be taken in, and so the East is still resisting what will be coming towards it. The spirit-self has to descend.

The element coming across from the West is not the spirit-self—but the soul uses it, in a way, to prepare, to practise, receptiveness. And how does a Russian see another national? As someone who stands in opposition, someone descending upon his consciousness. And so the person who is a foreigner to the Italian, a barbarian to the Frenchman, a rival to the Briton and an opponent to the German is a heretic in Russia. That is why, fundamentally speaking, the Russians have only fought religious wars until now—all their wars have so far been religious wars. The aim was to liberate all nations or bring them to the Christian faith—the Balkan countries and so on. And even now Russian country people feel the other person to be ‘evil’ incarnate. They see the other person as a heretic and always believe they are fighting for the faith—even today! These things are true down into detail and we come to understand them if we are truly willing really to look into things. And so we may also ask what it is we see confronting us in the East of Europe.

The way he is in physical life, man is in a way unjust to his higher self. Someone living in the intellectual or mind soul, a person whose imagination is particularly well developed, will ‘have’ thoughts. The concept of how he should appear to himself, in so far as he is a particular national, presents itself before his higher self. He feels that it is his glory; a third self as it were, a national self which stands between him as a higher self and as a national person. He fights on the basis of this. After death he first of all has to be overcome this unless he has already overcome it beforehand through spiritual science. He must pass through something that first of all presents itself to his soul as the Inspiration of his own image of himself.

Someone living in the spiritual soul as a national will above all be inclined towards the things the spiritual soul has made its own in the physical world. This will be like a grievous memory in the world that lies between death and rebirth.

The Central European is a seeker. This is evident even from derogatory remarks made by his enemies who may say he is fit only to plough the fields and search among the clouds. However far he may have advanced, he is, even here, seeking the self in. spirit. In the efforts he makes during his progress on earth he will therefore, in a sense, try already get rid of whatever has to be got rid of when we go through the gate of death and enter the spiritual world.

Someone who has been in a Russian body during his last incarnation must first of all, on passing through the gate of death, assume the consciousness of an angelos, merge into the inner being of an angelos—unless he has gone through a different preparation with spiritual science—and share in all that comes down from the hierarchies above him.

All these are reasons why we may say that if we look to the West of Europe it seems natural that strife arises out of the very nature of men in so far as they are nationals, for the national element is connected with something that is an outer covering. It is quite natural for strife to arise. In the spiritual world anything that rightfully belongs there can spread without hindrance. But external means have to be used to assert the image one has of oneself. It needs to be able to spread in order to emerge. Anything looking for competition must of course be able to spread. It is perfectly understandable that strife comes from the people who represent the spiritual soul. If we are really seeking the I, the ego, in Central Europe, let us see if the qualities of the ego can already be brought to bear.

I have already stressed, for example, that the ego needs to be fanned to life again every morning. It is in an unaroused state when we enter into the sphere of sleep with it and needs to be fanned to life again every morning when we wake up. If I may refer to Austria—I heard it said even when I was young that Austria would one day fall apart when occasion arose. We knew different; it might have any amount of centrifugal force within it but it was held together from outside, it could not fall apart. Let us consider Germany. Does it show the ego character in its outer aspect, in its form? It is a fact of considerable import that for much of a century the Germans have pressed for unification. They did not achieve this from the inside. It took an external impulse, not from inside Germany but from outside, from the centre of France, to let the Germany of today come into being in accord with the ego character. We can only understand the world if we consider it in the light of spiritual science. Fundamentally speaking, the ego does not have the inclination to hit out; for the overweening forces from the physical plane would then go over into the spiritual sphere. This is something we could demonstrate over and over again in German history, in the history of Austria and the history of the Scandinavian peoples. The feeling is right, therefore, that a German, or a Central European, has to be made to come out in war. Fundamentally speaking, he is unable to start a war of his own accord. If he goes to war out of initiative, he does it the way the initiative does it in the ego, and there have of course been such wars in the interior. That is what we must feel the attitude of Central Europe to war to be.

And what emerges in the East for someone able to get a feeling for national character? For the Russian it is the most unnatural thing in the world to wage war. If he were to know himself he would feel it to be most unnatural for him to wage war. We of the West cannot become Tolstoyans, however well we understand all things Russian. But for the Russian it is unnatural to wage war. War has to be imposed on him, for it is totally against the national character. A Russian feels towards war the way he feels about religious war—it is something coming from outside. War cannot be made plausible to him for he would rather pray for what is to come to him. It is therefore quite natural to look for the motives that causes Russians to go to war not in the national character but in the motives imposed on them from outside. More than anywhere else we have to say in this case that it is not the people who make war—it is the people only in an external sense and seemingly—but rather whatever it is that they have to turn against most of all. In Russia war is always a 'Maya', illusion, in the worst sense. This is why we can state clearly and precisely what I posed as a question in my public lecture: Who could have prevented the war?—If we actually want to talk of the possibility of its being prevented.—For the French, war has been something natural since 1871 and it would not be natural to speak of their being able to prevent it. Anyone forced to fight his rivals naturally does not have the right to be indignant when neutrality has been breached in some place or other, and in this case the indignation needs to be reinterpreted into the national element. But it is natural for him to go to war. We cannot take that amiss. In that case war can no more be rejected than when, in interpreting the nature of living creatures, one has to find a different phrase out of the element of the spiritual soul than from the the standpoint of the ego and therefore speaks of the 'struggle for survival'. Goethe did not coin that phrase, because from the ego point of view it does not apply. But where it is a question of war being a falsehood, where it even has to be reinterpreted first into a religious war, there we have to say that it has risen externally and therefore could also have been prevented externally. Looking into all the depths one is able to look into—the war has indeed been a necessity but that is another thing—we have to say: It is true that Russia could have stayed an onlooker, and the war could have been prevented. If Russia had remained an onlooker the war could have been prevented. For here a war has been grafted onto a national character when basically it is something quite unnatural.

Such things, as we speak about them, come from the spiritual world. They arise from it. But it is always possible to verify them, to confirm them, in the outside world. Anything we arrive at out of the spiritual world finds confirmation in the outside world. We could say that it would be a natural gesture for the Russian national character to pray and wait for what is to come. It is very strange; even Russian intellectuals are waiting in expectancy—I have already referred to this—in the feeling that something belonging to the future has to come towards them. What will have to come for them still lies far ahead in the future and we have seen how there is refusal to accept what has to be taken up now. It is perhaps more than just an outer symbol that now, when battles are being fought on the Black Sea, the Russian still looks in that direction—to see an embodiment, as it were, of what he may expect in the spirit—pointing to the Hagia Sophia.¹⁰ Merezhkovsky [1865–1941] describes two visits he has made to the Hagia Sophia. He felt the Hagia Sophia to be the outer symbol, as it were, of something he did not know in his feelings but was expecting, and he called it the Christianity that is to come for the Russians. He would have seen it rightly if he had realized that it is a Christian faith that has gone through the Faust nature which will have to take hold of the Russian people. But that is something he does not yet know. He believes it is the Hagia Sophia which represents it. What is his attitude to the Christian faith? If we consider what Soloviev has to say on this, then I am able to say that he shows a certain understanding of it. For when problems were once again created for him by St Petersburg and the Holy Synod, he said: ‘Ah, that is how you fare when you have problems in getting them to understand what you want to say. The one side calls me a liberal Western European atheist, the other an orthodox believer, and others again even consider me a Jesuit.’ He concluded by saying: ‘Amazing what you can turn into when seen through the eyes of the Petersburg blackguards.’ These are not my words but those of a good Russian citizen, a Russian who shows us that it is not easy to rid oneself of feelings of sympathy or antipathy. But let us assume the Russian intellectual is left to himself. As I said, it is a world of expectancy, a natural mood of looking for what is to come, something not to be achieved with the sword and with cannon. That is why the Pan-Slavonic movement is such a lie. Left to himself, Merezhkovsky gave himself up to his feelings when face to face with the Hagia Sophia. He did however confuse it with the Christian faith of the Western European which has gone through the strivings of Faust. And how does he speak of it?

I have tried to find a succinct formulation for the feelings different nations may be seen to have towards war, saying that a Russian believes he is going to war for the sake of religion, an Englishman for competition, a Frenchman for the glory, an Italian or Spaniard for his homeland and a German to fight for existence. And we are therefore able to say that Italy wants to preserve the homeland; France conceives of its own idea of [glory] as the national ideal; the Englishman takes action and does business¹¹ the German aspires; the Russian prays—and that comes naturally. I am not speaking of external prayer, for it is a matter of the heart. What was it then Merezhkovsky said at the end of his book, which I mentioned the day before yesterday?¹²

The Hagia Sophia—brilliant, sad and flooded with the amber-coloured light of ultimate mystery—lifted up my soul which had fallen and was frightened. I looked up into the dome that is like the vault of heaven, and I thought: There it stands, made by the hand of man, and in it men are coming close to the triune god on earth. This close approach has been made and more still of this shall come in time to be. Surely those who believe in the Son must come to the Father who is the world. And surely those must come to the Son who love the world, which the Father also loved so much that he gave his Son for it. For they offer their souls for him and for their friends; they have the Son because they have Love, only they do not know the name.

They do not have it as a whole. And he concluded:

And I felt impelled to pray for them all, in the temple that at this hour belongs to the heathen but is the only temple for the future, to pray that my people be given that true, conquering strength: pray for conscious belief in the triune god.

So there you have the prayer. There you have the anomaly of a fight that goes from East to West.

In making this attempt to gain inner understanding of what meets us here, in attempting to escape from Maya and enter into the truth, we can indeed say to ourselves that were are not pursuing an abstract anthroposophy that is afraid to see. For it would be fear of seeing the truth if we were to shrink from seeing national characters in their true foundations, because of our ‘First Principle.’¹³ We are exactly following that Principle if we approach man as he is and endeavour really to look into his soul. Then we are most of all addressing the immortal aspect of man and we shall then also find the part of him that goes beyond the national, that goes towards the eternal, and the fine feelings that turn to the eternal in man. And then we shall find a way of bringing about what after all has to be brought about. For do you think progress and the good of mankind will not suffer if the temper now prevailing among nations is to persist? Tempers which in any case are merely born out of Maya? From the point of view of the necessity which demands that men get to understand one another again, that there shall be a continuation of what in a certain sense had already been started, arising from Central Europe, it is essential that this atmosphere we live in—a spiritual atmosphere that is one of such dreadful tumult today—receives also other elements into it and not only those of tumult. We cannot help but sense, if we have entered into spiritual life, the tumult that exists in the spiritual atmosphere today. The more deeply one has entered, the more one will be sensitive to this. Profoundly disturbing things may arise out of the spiritual life. The occultist has been able to learn much, but never has so much been experienced that was so deeply disturbing and has such impact as in the last three months.

Many is the time I have stressed the occult truth that things presenting themselves one way in the physical world are the opposite by nature in the spiritual world. Some of our friends will also be able to recall how often I have said that war was hanging in the spiritual air and was really only being held off by something which is a spiritual impulse also in physical life—by fear. Force of fear held it back for as long as it was astral by nature. Fear stopped it from breaking out earlier. Externally speaking, the war started of course with the assassination in Sarajevo. That, too, has its significance. That is what is so disturbing in this affair. We are among ourselves here, and so it must also be possible to say these things. The individual personality who was murdered on that clay [Archduke Francis Ferdinand of Austria, assassinated on 28 June 1914] and went through the gate of death afterwards presented an appearance I had never before seen myself nor heard described by others. I have on several occasions described the appearance of souls as they pass through the gate of death. This soul however showed a peculiar feature. It was like a centre of crystallisation, with everything by nature of fear elements crystallizing around it, as it were, until war broke out. Afterwards it showed itself to be something quite different. Where before it had been a great cosmic force attracting all fear, it had then become something that was the opposite. The fear which had prevailed here on the physical plane had held everybody back. But once this soul had ascended to the spiritual plane it acted in the opposite way, bringing war.

It profoundly disturbs the soul to experience such things. And there are many such things that now exist within the heaving swell of the astral impulses that rise up into the spiritual world from the hearts and minds of men. And among ourselves I am able to say that I have never experienced anything like the things I experienced in these last months, something that stirred up the waves in human souls to such a dreadful extent. From this it is of course apparent what is going on in the spiritual atmosphere. And if that which has to be in the spiritual atmosphere is indeed to come about, thoughts must enter into that atmosphere that can only arise from souls that have grasped the spiritual world. Pleading with utmost passion, therefore, your souls are asked to conceive ideas, ideas we try to stimulate with reflections like those of today or of the last occasion. These are ideas arising from spiritual insight and only souls that have gone through spiritual science are able to send such thoughts up into the spiritual world. The souls will need such thoughts now whilst war is in progress, and even more so afterwards. For thoughts are reality!

The great wish is to send the most fervent prayer into the spiritual world that whatever arises out of this war and after it may originate not from human Maya but from the truth and from spiritual reality. The more you send such thoughts up into the spiritual world the more you are doing for what shall be the fruit of these worldwide struggles, and the more you are doing for what is needed for the whole evolution of mankind.

This prayer, then, shall be the culmination of all I intended to present to your souls with these thoughts. If the questions we have considered have truly entered into our souls, if our souls, as souls that have now lived in spiritual science, allow to stream up into the spiritual world that which brings peace to man. then our spiritual science has stood the test in these fateful times. It will have stood the test to the effect that our fighters out there have not in vain given full rein to their courage; that the blood of battle has not flowed in vain. Then the suffering of those who mourn, the sacrifices which have been made, will not have been in vain in the world. Then spirit fruit will grow out of these fateful days, all the more so to the extent human beings are able to send thoughts like those I have indicated up into the spiritual world.

I want to make it clear that the words I am about to speak form a sevenfold structure, making a kind of mantram. Please note that in the last but one line the words ‘Lenken Seelen’ should be taken to mean ‘wenn Seelen lenken’ (if souls turn).

This is what I wanted to put before you: that these events, which speak so much of reality, appear in the right light to us if we rise above Maya and to the true reality. Oh, the souls will be found that are able to see our present time in that way. Souls will be found if they are found also in the sense Krishna was teaching¹⁴ with regard to warrior-souls. And if it should truly prove possible for souls that have gone through spiritual science to send thoughts to fructify the spirit up into the spiritual world in these difficult, fateful days, then the right fruit will develop out of all that is happening in those hard struggles and cruel sacrifices. And so I am able to let the things I wanted to put before your souls today culminate in what I would so much like to see as the state of consciousness, the innermost consciousness, of souls that have gone through spiritual science:

Out of courage shown in battle,
Out of the blood shed in war,
Out of the grief of those who are left,
Out of the people's deeds of sacrifice
Spirit fruits will come to grow
If souls with knowledge of the spirit
Turn their mind to spirit realms.

• 6. Rudolf Steiner, ‘Der Dornacher Bau als Wahrzeichen geschichtlichen Werdens und kiinstlerischer Umwandlungsimpulse’ (1914) Dornach 1937 (Proposed for GA 287).
• 7. Rudolf Steiner, Die Rätsel der Philosophie in ihrer Geschichte als Umriss dargestellt. (GA 18) Riddles of Philosophy. Tr. F. Koelin. Anthroposophic Press, 1973.
• 8. ‘Goethe's Theory of Colours’ in Goethes Naturwissenschaftliche Schrifien, hersg. und kommentiert von Rudolf Steiner ( GA 1c).
• 9. Soloviev, Vladimir: Gesammelte Werke (Collected Works), tr. Harry Kohler, with an introduction by Rudolf Steiner; Stuttgart 1921. Also Gedichte von Wladimir Solovjeff tr. by Marie Steiner, 2nd edn (Dornach 1949).
• 10. Santa Sophia. the Great Church of the Holy Wisdom, principal church of Constantinople, Built by Justinian in 532 –7, it was converted into a mosque when Constantinope fell to the Turks in 1453 (translator).
• 11. The German verb handeln means both ‘to act, to take action’ and ‘to trade’ (Translator).
• 12. Dmitri Merezhkovsky, Der Antnarsch des Pöbels (Tr. H. Horschelmann) Munich & Leipzig 1907.
• 13. First Principle: When he established the Anthroposophical Society in 1912/1913, Rudolf Steiner formulated the First Principle as follows: ‘The Society provides for all people to work together in brotherhood who consider the basis of their work together in love to be a common spiritual element that is in all human souls, irrespective of differences of creed, nationality, class, sex, etc.’
• 14. In the Bhagavad Gita. See also lecture of 1 September 1914.

Dr. Steiner: Before Mr. von Rainer speaks further, I would like to mention one thing.

When the brochure “Theosophy or Anti-Theosophy?” was sent to me, I read the motto on the title page:

Anyone who feels that they can do some good must be a nuisance. They must not wait to be called upon. They must not pay attention when they are sent away. They must be what Homer praises in the heroes: like a fly that, when chased away, keeps attacking people from a different place.

“Goethe,” it says below. I have studied Goethe for a long time, and to me the words seemed quite un-Goethean; and I must confess: I could not remember how the words relate to Goethe. It did not occur to me at all where Goethe might have uttered these un-Goethean words – un-Goethean in the case that he might have used them himself. But I thought that someone who refers to me as much as Mr. Boldt does must at least have learned what I have so often pointed out: that the words spoken by characters in plays should not be applied to the poet himself; otherwise, one could quote Goethe with the words spoken by Mephistopheles in Faust. But I couldn't say anything because I didn't remember. - So I asked Dr. Reiche, who has the “German Dictionary” at hand, to look up the expression “plague ghosts” - since it is the most characteristic in this sentence - in the “German Dictionary”. And under “plague ghost” it was also revealed how these words are connected to Goethe.

Goethe wrote a little drama called “Lila”. Various characters appear in it, including a lady who is somewhat eccentric and is being treated by doctors without success. Verazio, a doctor, is called in to make her well again, and I would like to read to you the conversation that develops.

Baron Sternthal enters.

Verazio: If my presence, like my art, is repugnant to you, then please excuse me for still finding myself here. In a little while, Count Altenstein will arrive and take me back when he unfortunately sees that his recommendation has not been taken into account.

Baron: Forgive me, and the count will also forgive me. It is not ingratitude for his care, not mistrust in your art, it is mistrust in my fate. After so many failed attempts to restore her mental health, I have to believe that I am being put to the test, as I have been. Will I endure sharing her misery, since I promised myself so much happiness with her? I do not want to be unruly and expect in patience from heaven what people are not supposed to give me.

Verazio: I honor these sentiments, gracious sir, but I find it hard that you even hide the details of her illness from me, do not want to allow me to see her, and thereby cut off my way to expand my experience, and to say something specific about the help that could be done for her.

Sophie, who is something of an enfant terrible in this piece, then says:

Sophie (to the others): And he would also like to broaden his experience with our poor sister Haut. They're all the same.

Lucie: Oh yes, when they only have to dissect, enema, [electrocute], they are on hand to see what kind of face it cuts and to assure them that they would have foreseen it as in a mirror.

Baron (who has been talking to Friedrich and Verazio): You are plaguing me!

Verazio: Anyone who feels that they can do some good must be a nuisance. They don't have to wait to be called. They don't have to pay attention when they are sent away. They have to be what Homer praises in heroes: They have to be like a fly that, when shooed, keeps attacking people from a different direction.

But the “Enfant terrible” then says:

Sophie: At least he is honest; he describes the barker clearly enough.<.p>

(General amusement in the assembly).

Mr. von Rainer continued: “It could be said that we are doing everything we can to show how deeply we are imbued with the significance and seriousness of what we receive from spiritual science, and that this lives fully in our ideas and convictions.” But if you look at the facts, you might come to a different conclusion. Above all, one thing can be considered: that at the constituent assembly of the Anthroposophical Society, which took place a year ago, Dr. Steiner gave us the right word of warning. He spoke of the fact that occult research presents a difficulty for our time: to allow our idealism and enthusiasm to truly mature into action — because we all have something morbid, which we have come to know as the “Amfortas nature”, and because with all truly convinced devotion to an ideal, this sick part of our soul life always plays a role in us, and we must therefore be very vigilant. It was said at the time: We have no reason to be particularly joyful, because we have great enemies outside, and we will not be able to work without concern in our individual working groups, but will have to be watchmen, protectors of what we have received as spiritual science, and of which we increasingly recognize – I add this now – that it is what today's humanity urgently needs. And with the admonition “Watch and pray” we were dismissed at the time.

Mr. von Rainer then emphasized how important it seems to him that there be even more active participation on the part of the members in Dr. Steiner's cycles and lectures, and that by doing so they would show that they have recognized the full seriousness of the world-historical moment that is coming to light in our spiritual scientific movement. Through active participation, one should show that one is aware that a new stage in the spiritual-scientific movement is to emerge through the work of the Anthroposophical Society.

Mr. von Rainer then continued: The difficulties in a movement that is constantly changing in the means are certainly great in order to understand them. But it is not without reason that it has been pointed out again and again how, out there in the world, what is left of truthfulness and understanding of reality is perishing with a certain rapidity. And anyone who has observed in a certain respect how, in recent times, one and the same theme has been repeated by Dr. Steiner in very different ways, especially in public lectures, namely how it has been structured and developed in order to present it, anyone who has observed this , must also have realized that the means by which spiritual science is to be communicated must be changed. This is because in the outside world everything is repeatedly and repeatedly trivialized and quoted in a misleading way. The need for flexibility of mind was already recommended to us at the constituent assembly of the Anthroposophical Society. Therefore, it is necessary that we do not always get stuck on what has already been brought, but that we go along with the movement as it is necessary. The new books are not given so that they are not read, even if they are very difficult to understand. This does not mean that the old books have lost their meaning. And one could see how in 1913, Dr. Steiner always gave what could draw attention to what is actually important now. This must really be taken into account! And if one does this, one need not fear that one cannot keep up.

It is only too obvious that misunderstandings will arise in this regard, and I would like to mention one because it is symptomatic and needs to be taken into account. After Dr. Unger's lecture series in Munich, a series of lectures were given on the book “Theosophy”. An Anthroposophist who is a true and sincere admirer of Dr. Steiner's teachings, and in particular a very honest striving person who certainly did not want to do anything against Dr. Steiner, had the opportunity to hear Dr. Unger's lectures and now wanted to repeat them in our branch. I told him that I had nothing against him doing it, but I didn't think it would be right to do it on the only branch evening of the week. The Anthroposophical Society is our teacher, and the only branch evening should be devoted to the teacher's writings, because we have not yet worked through his writings sufficiently. I don't want to say anything against the good intentions of the person concerned. But as far as the teaching itself is concerned, we must concentrate on the personality who brought the teaching into the world, and we must realize that it is the spiritual impulses that make us productive in this field. We cannot say that we can achieve something in this respect, but only that we are inspired by these impulses, and that gives us some insights that we can pass on. But the one who truly leads and guides the matter must be and remain Dr. Steiner. After the Munich lectures, we had the cycle in Kristiania – one can truly say: a milestone in the development of humanity! And to personally listen to this cycle is not the same as just having it communicated through writing. If we are to get a feeling for the living force that should be in our movement, we must feel that “being there” plays a certain role. Of course, the reproduction of the cycles makes it easier to study; but on the other hand, we should say to ourselves out of our active theosophical sense of honor: We must be there personally through action! In this way we show ourselves to be truly loyal. One should not actually proceed according to numbers, but it does make a certain impression – and rightly so when such a new movement is launched – if one also shows this through the number; because it is also something that one shows on the physical plane that one is loyal to the cause as a follower.

In this brief overview of what has happened since the constituent assembly, I wanted to show that it is necessary to pay much more homage to action than to words. Words have a lot of seductive power. It was said in Helsingfors that withheld speech forces bring moral impulses to action, and if you talk about something a lot, you usually don't do it. But it is good if, through what you get into your soul from your active sense of honor towards your ideal, anthroposophy, you come to do less talking and more action.

There is nothing more absurd than being repeatedly accused of “worshipping” Dr. Steiner or when Freimark even speaks of “deceived frauds”. Dr. Steiner cannot be concerned with having admirers. What he communicates will not be changed by this. But for us, who have gained an understanding of what is necessary, what is in the teaching, and what humanity needs, it is necessarily a moral duty to hold the protective hand over the truth that is in this teaching and to reject everything that is not compatible with it.

Mr. Bauer: I would like to make a very brief comment about a correction that does not belong to the Boldt matter; but it would not have the same significance later as it does now.

Mr. von Rainer gave the example that after the last events in Munich, a member of the board or some other member wanted to repeat the lectures that Dr. Unger had given in Munich about the book 'Theosophy'. Mr. von Rainer advised this member not to do so, because it was not our task. We must place the writings of Dr. Steiner at the center of our studies, and the other does not belong to our task and would only detract from the core. I cannot let this remark go unchallenged. I do not understand the logic of this remark about what Mr. von Rainer said. I will try to illustrate it with an analogy. I assume that Dr. Steiner would have spoken here, and the hall would be much larger than it is, and there would now be someone in a corner who has not clearly understood what has been said and who is therefore turning to someone who was sitting in the middle of the hall - between him and the speaker - and who should have heard exactly what was said. Then Mr. von Rainer would have to intervene and say: “This distracts you from the right central task; you must listen only to Dr. Steiner; listening to others distracts you from Dr. Steiner!”

In Munich, Dr. Unger showed with his own loyalty how one can study a book like Theosophy over many years and always find something deeper and deeper. He demonstrated the seeds that were already in this book, and thus directed all his efforts to leading to Dr. Steiner. He, through his peculiar, not too widespread gift and through his great loyalty to the writings of Dr. Steiner, can do much more in this than many others. One can understand many things through it that one would not otherwise have understood. He can tell you many things as one who is “in between” and has heard it better. So if someone, fired up and inspired by what he has heard in Munich, comes home and says, “Now I want to show the members what can be extracted from the book if you look at it in the sense of Dr. Unger,” then he is deterred by such a strange view as that held by Mr. von Rainer; I cannot describe it any differently now. But one point is certain: I have no doubt that only a very few people could take this point of view. This point of view would coincide with what was mentioned at the board meeting on Saturday. Arenson's lecture had appeared (“On the Study of Spiritual Science”) and been sent to a lodge. However, the lodge in question sent it back with the explanation that it belonged in Stuttgart, that it was Stuttgart material! That would be more or less the same thing. I think I need say no more about it. This is just one point of view that must be described as “erroneous”. I cannot describe it differently.

Fräulein Kittel then talks about how important it is to understand the full seriousness of our time, and that our movement must be protected from everything that does not belong in it.

Mr. Walther: Dear friends! Since the Boldt matter has already been discussed at such length, I didn't really want to say anything more; but since I had initially planned to do so, I will present the little that I had planned here. In the small brochure that we have repeatedly discussed, on page 13 there is a sentence written by Mr. Boldt:

For them

that is, for the 'followers' of Dr. Steiner

even the 'Philosophy of Freedom' must, for the time being, remain purely abstract; they are not yet ready for a translation of this writing into concrete life, as I have attempted in my book!

This is the accusation that Mr. Boldt makes against us. I have now also read his book, in which he shares with us what he has gained from the “Philosophy of Freedom” and is now handing down to humanity. To put it very briefly, I will pick out a few points from the book and use them to show what Mr. Boldt regards as the content or the impulse to action that arises from the “Philosophy of Freedom.” On page 75 of his writing “Sexual Problems” he writes:

The strict moral law is certainly fully justified insofar as it can rein in the savage who lives among the stirrings of his animal nature and force him into a certain mold. Within civilization, moralism justifiably disapproves of and fights against the unbridled life of instinct; for it is civilization's task to overcome it. However, it goes wrong in its means and replaces the one, an animal compulsion acting from within, a different moral compulsion acting from without. Thus man is thrown from one bondage into another and swings back and forth between the fateful Scylla and Charybdis of life. One can therefore aptly compare the moral culture of the present day with a menagerie. The modern social man is a beast tamed and rendered harmless by the dogma of morality; his animal instincts are only gagged and put behind iron bars by morality, but not transformed and purified. The moral theologian plays the role of the animal tamer here.

Such is the judgment Mr. Boldt makes of the culture in which we live. And on page 78, he also tells us his remedy for how we can free ourselves from this “cage”:

After these explanations, it seems almost foolish to speak of the freedom of love, since freedom is already contained in love. But here it is not a matter of the inner, ideal freedom of the lovers, but also of the outer, real freedom. And since the latter is often severely endangered by social mismanagement, class prejudices and moral inquisition proceedings, it certainly makes sense to point this out again in particular.

And now he expands on the “freedom of love” in his book and then, on page 85, shows all the institutions that lock us into this menagerie or [in this] cage:

The compulsory celibacy of the church state is unnatural and therefore immoral; it must be resolved, precisely for moral reasons. If we apply this standard to the life that directly surrounds us, then out of a hundred marriages, ninety must be labeled immoral and profane.

This is what Mr. Boldt has gained from his study of the “Philosophy of Freedom.” But we can shed even more light on it if we also consider what he said on page 90:

Extraordinary people, as Goethe already emphasized as Carlos in Clavigo, are always immoral because they act in a self-aggrandizing way. They have to “rise above circumstances that would frighten a common person” Nietzsche calls “the liberation from the moral prejudices that lies in the unleashing of the great spirit, the typical immorality of genius.” - (“Will to Power,” p. 382).

I think that what we have just heard from the book could well show us that he who presumes to judge a work like “The Philosophy of Freedom” and who receives such impulses for action from this study that he lets them end in a complete self-indulgence - well, in an indulgence with “free love” - can certainly not have understood “The Philosophy of Freedom.” Truly, the Philosophy of Freedom would be a terrible work if it were to teach man such a doctrine, such volitional impulses as are found in Boldt's book. An attempt has certainly been made to show man what freedom is and how a person who understands what is given in the book can truly come to a freedom, but how this freedom is not realized by him in the sense that Boldt would like to live it in the sense of a boundless superman, in which he no longer cares about anything and only wants to live as the most perfect egoist. We know such concepts among people as they are known as “anarchism”. That is also not meant in the book “Philosophy of Freedom”. Rather, it is about strengthening the powers of the ego, which can raise our ego to a level that we place ourselves in life in such a way that we voluntarily take on what might otherwise appear to us as a compulsion in Boldt's sense. The “Philosophy of Freedom” does not teach that one should overturn all existing values of life, but that we should make ourselves available to these values of life with a strong I, so that we can reshape them – but not in the self-aggrandizing way that only the selfish personal ego knows, but in such a way that we never lose sight of the point of view of the whole, of community. So it is not a matter of us activating everything that is predisposed in our lower nature and that might arise through a misunderstood freedom of will, but of understanding and implementing the “Philosophy of Freedom” in our lives in such a way that we use the strength it can give us to work for community and for higher life goals and values. For that would not be a freedom that only served to fulfill the desires of the human being. But such a strengthened self, in the sense of the “Philosophy of Freedom”, will not, as Mr. Boldt recommends, live out in free love and advocate for such an endeavor, as free love does find its followers, even in scientific circles, and is recognized by the general public. On the contrary, it should be said: this must be opposed! It would be dangerous if we followed Mr. Boldt here and sanctioned such theosophical or anthroposophical ideals as are meant here. Never ever must we mix such things with our movement, and it would not seem good if we did not strictly reject what is meant here in the book. We must not allow our movement to be used as a cloak for the things which Mr. Boldt is trying to do and hint at here.

I would now like to suggest commenting on what Mr. Boldt is suggesting here. And even if we do not go to the extreme of expelling him, what we have to say against his writings could be communicated to him to make him aware of the consequences that it could have, so that it should cause him to change his position towards us. But it would then also have to be made clearer to him that if he wanted to continue his efforts, he should expect nothing from us, because we could never give up our movement to serve as a cover for the unbridled expression of the lower nature.

Director Sellin: Are you not at all afraid that I will add fuel to the fire and come to you with Mr. Boldt's atrocities? I am, after all, the one least competent to judge Mr. Boldt, and I must say: I am actually pleased that I lack the understanding to link philosophy with eroticism in the way Mr. Boldt does. I only asked for the floor because Mr. Boldt believes that he would be expelled from the Munich branch if I made a request to that effect. That is not the case. The matter is as follows: When the article “Theosophy or Antisophy?” was distributed eight days ago, I talked about it with Theosophical friends, and some of them said, “You are the oldest. Can't you go to the man and give him a piece of your mind?” So I agreed, went to him, gave him my opinion and gave him a piece of my mind! And Mr. Boldt was careful not to cite me as the first person to praise the excellence of his opinion. As I did then, I told him in a thoroughly fatherly manner: “What you have written is so outrageous that you cannot take responsibility for it. You have thrown dirt at the ladies, at the board of the Munich branch. You have accused the teacher of moral cowardice. But since you have no prospect of getting your point across and putting another researcher in charge, I don't see why you want to continue to belong to this, in your opinion, hopelessly run-down society. Why not withdraw your membership! You can form a new group and gather people of your kind around you. There is such great annoyance in our society about your behavior. It would be best if you withdraw your membership. If you don't, you can experience being excluded!"

Eight days later, I asked whether Mr. Boldt had responded, and was told that he had not. Only then did I feel justified in making a motion to expel Mr. Boldt from the Munich branch if he did not make amends for his wrongdoing and withdraw the offensive brochure. He has now done something quite different.

Ms. Stinde has been kind enough to postpone the decision on my motion until eight days after the general assembly. If Mr. Boldt has not taken action by then, I will have to maintain my position; because I say to myself: Then the man does not belong with us. I will continue to make the motion for expulsion.

Fräulein Scholl: With so many speakers having already addressed this matter in such detail, it is only natural that some points that one might have wanted to raise oneself have already been covered. It is therefore not necessary for me to speak at such length as would otherwise have been required, and I think we should proceed in such a way that we can deal with the matter as quickly as possible. The material has been sufficiently made known to you, and you have also become sufficiently familiar with the attitudes expressed in Mr. Boldt's brochure and book. However, perhaps another point of view may be pointed out, from which the whole matter can also be considered, and it does not seem superfluous to me to point this out.

It has already emerged from a discussion at the board meeting that Mr. Boldt did not always tell the truth during the negotiations with the Munich lodge. As Countess Kalckreuth said, there were some parts of the letters that did not always correspond to the truth. This is only mentioned because Countess Kalckreuth was about to state it here as well. Now, we may have to consider a few more points to ensure that we have covered everything, or at least the most important aspects. It should be pointed out once again, as Mr. Boldt always refers to in his writing and later in the brochure, that the whole train of thought of his ideas, what he has published in his book, is based on the teachings of Dr. Steiner and specifically on the “Philosophy of Freedom”, and he always wants to point out through the quotations and the references that he has always connected his thoughts to what Dr. Steiner gives. But if you know the teachings of Dr. Steiner and then read Mr. Boldt's writings, it is really as if pure sunlight were transformed into the cloudy light of a smoky kerosene lamp. And it should be noted: We are responsible to the rest of humanity for allowing Dr. Steiner's teachings to be distorted in this way, not only when the quotations are literally wrong, but also when they are wrongly reproduced in meaning, because then they are a lie. It is really a matter of taking a firm stand against such occurrences and not allowing this spirit of untruth to arise. Not for our own sake! We could perhaps bear Mr. Boldt quite well; even if 25 percent of Mr. Boldt's nature and character were in society, we could bear it. But we should show the rest of humanity that we do not want to endure this 25 percent — or even just one percent of this kind, that if we want to be anthroposophists, we do not want to endure this spirit of lies, wherever it appears, in the smallest or greatest things. But here we are dealing with the greatest things, in the face of which Mr. Boldt appears.

If you take such descriptions by Dr. Steiner as he has given about the Grail mystery, if you think about what has been told about the transformation of lower forces in man into higher ones, in how wonderful a way it was given, so that only feelings of reverence and devotion could flow through the listeners , and then you read how it is presented in Mr. Boldt's book – not 'dirty' because it deals with certain problems, but dirty because of the way in which he presumes to deal with the most sublime, a way that must disgust anyone who has a healthy sense: Then you can understand that the rest of humanity, when presented with this, must receive quite distorted ideas about the teachings of Dr. Steiner. Therefore, it seems especially important to me that we take strong action against these things. Other such untruths can be found in great numbers in the book. One need only point out Mr. Boldt's contradictions, for example where he says what the “Anthroposophical Society” is in his opinion, and where he says something quite the opposite about it. One time he says on pages 27-28:

The “Anthroposophical Society” does indeed represent a rock on which the Christ can build his new church, the church of the freedom of the creative spirit, the “School of Spiritual Science”.

But on pages 15-16 he has already said – he has probably forgotten this:

Can anyone seriously believe in the viability of the now 'Anthroposophical Society' if Dr. Steiner wanted to ignore this essay by Nietzsche?

And at the same time, he ascribes a peculiar character trait to Dr. Steiner:

Oh, he knows it only too well and has occasion to use it more often than one would think.

How can we understand that he says one thing on pages 27-28 and something completely different on pages 15-16? These are contradictions, and they are repeated over and over again in this little booklet. And then there is the comment as if Dr. Steiner behaved in the way attributed to him by Mr. Boldt, which has already been characterized several times. It is the most repulsive defamation that can be uttered about a person. Apart from the fact that we - each of us personally - must be horrified by the way he treats us, using Nietzsche's sayings, which he continually tears out of completely different contexts and uses only to reinforce his own thoughts, without the person who would have used the quote in this way – so, quite apart from the fact that Mr. Boldt is treating us very vilely and insultingly, it seems to me that we cannot tolerate a person in our society who acts in this way against Dr. Steiner and especially against the teaching. We know that we have only been able to receive these teachings through Dr. Steiner in our time, and that we honor Dr. Steiner's personality in this sense for the sake of the teachings that are given to us by him from the spiritual worlds. Among us, however, there are still some people who are not very mature or experienced in the field of spiritual science, those who still know too little about the whole spirit of the movement to be able to stand firm in every moment and to have the right judgment of such poisonous works as those of Mr. Boldt. But it should be sufficiently clear from the matters presented what harmful elements we are dealing with.

Therefore, my proposal – this was meant from the outset, and my judgment has not been mitigated by the milder proposals of the other speakers – is that Mr. Boldt be expelled from the Anthroposophical Society. I believe that on average we are not so well-disposed that we can say with Ernst, “Despite the fact that someone acts in this outrageous way against that which is the highest and most sacred for us, we want to keep him among us and we will love him.” — In any case, I have to say that I do not have this love so far. I move, rather, that Mr. Boldt be struck from the lists of the Anthroposophical Society — out of love for our cause and out of love for the spiritual heritage that is endangered by such tendencies as those of Mr. Boldt, and on which alone we can live!

Dr. Steiner: Before we continue, allow me a few words. It would perhaps be very appropriate to be as clear as possible in this matter and to arrive at a judgment by looking at things, I would say, soberly. Above all, let me first raise some questions that might serve us to form an opinion.

I would like to raise the question: What actually happened for Mr. Boldt to approach us in such a way at this our General Assembly? Perhaps we will find it easier to answer this question if we ask ourselves: What should have happened first so that Mr. Boldt might not have come to the decision to approach the General Assembly in this way?

If you have followed the debate, you will have seen that one of the first mistakes we made in Mr. Boldt's mind was that the two ladies of the board of the Munich Lodge I did not lay out the prospectus for Mr. Boldt's book in the Munich Lodge two years ago – approximately.

I believe there can be no doubt that the display of this brochure in one of our lodges would have been perceived as a kind of recommendation; after all, we cannot display things without being aware that we are recommending them. I don't think there would be much point in displaying it at all if we can't advocate things from some point of view or other. That is to say: Mrs. Kalckreuth and Mrs. Stinde should have endorsed the book, which has now been characterized by the various speeches, in so far as they should naturally have endorsed the wording of the “prospectus” presented to them at the time. Conscientiously, one cannot understand it any other way than that the ladies should have said, as it says in the prospectus:

This book lays for the first time the occult or spiritual foundations on which the philosopher must build if he seriously wants to solve the sexual problems that are still shrouded in darkness. Furthermore, it indicates the directions that the ethicist and pedagogue must take if they want to contribute to promoting the cultural process in a correct, contemporary way and to show humanity the way to the heights of existence.

And everything else I read to them earlier should have been acknowledged by the aforementioned ladies. That is the first question I want to raise: What should have been done to prevent Mr. Boldt from approaching us in this way?

I would like to raise a second question, which is connected to the judgment that Mr. Boldt has passed on me. This judgment, which appears at various points in his brochure, can be summarized by saying that the - I do not want to repeat the joke used yesterday - the man characterized in the well-known way is compelled by the peculiar circumstances of society to present his doctrine in a very peculiar way. One could say: This Dr. Steiner, whom Mr. Boldt indicates as a reference and on whom he wants to base his “sexual problems,” can indeed present some things to the world; but he has a society that is a minority of 25 percent, which “clenches its fists in its pockets” – as politely indicated to the other, so backward 75 percent –

... when it comes to shedding light on and eliminating abuses within the lodges, because we do not want to belong to a Salvation Army, a Catholic girls' boarding school or a convent. (p. 21)

Because society initially has this 75 percent girls' boarding school, nunnery and Salvation Army, Dr. Steiner is compelled not to tell the truth; Mr. Boldt explains how this is understandable: since society has to adhere to Nietzsche and the “falsehood of a judgment is not an objection to a judgment,” so Dr. Steiner is obliged not to present the things he believes to be the truth, but those that he considers suitable for presentation to that 75 percent. Following on from this description of “Dr. Steiner”, I would like to ask my second question. I have tried to find out from this brochure “Theosophy or Anti-Theosophy?” what exactly it is that is wrong with what I present to the 75 percent girls' boarding school, nunnery or Salvation Army from lecture to lecture, from working group meeting to working group meeting. I had to say to myself: It is somewhat difficult to find out what this wrong is supposed to be. Because if the 25 percent who do not belong to a girls' boarding school, a convent or the Salvation Army have now happily figured out that Dr. Steiner tries not to say what he thinks is right, but what he considers suitable for the 75 percent who attend girls' boarding schools and so on, can one ask what the value of this “fatal doctrine” - because it seems to me to be a fatal doctrine - should be? Because it must have some value! Because I can't help but say, based on what the brochure says: If these 25 percent don't want to withdraw from society and don't want to do without lectures and want to participate in the spiritual knowledge – that is, in the concoction that I brew for the 75 percent girls' boarding school, nunnery and Salvation Army – then these 25 percent who sit there in the strange way, with their fists clenched in their pockets, enjoy it so much and attach such importance to it that they definitely want to be there; so they appreciate a brew that is intended for girls' boarding schools, nunneries and salvation armies that they do not want to belong to. I said to myself: I won't find out what is wrong with what I am concocting for girls' boarding schools, nunneries and the Salvation Army. I tried harder to find out. Then I realized – and I don't know if the 75 percent agree: The only thing, it seems to me, that makes Mr. Boldt say that I make such a concoction is that I did not recommend his book! That seems to me to be the one that the 75 percent don't want to be in. If anyone finds something else, let me know!

But I would also like to take the liberty of saying what I have already said: that I really do not consider Mr. Boldt's book to be a very mature product of our contemporary literature.

But on the other hand, I would like to say something else. You see, I do share the opinion of the character I read to you earlier: the opinion of the enfant terrible Sophie in the little drama “Lila”, which does the saying that has already been read out, after Verazio spoke the words that Mr. Boldt used as the motto on the first page of his brochure – so they are not Goethe's words, but the words of a character in a play – and wants to apply to himself:

Everyone feels within themselves that they can do some good, must be a nuisance. They don't have to wait to be called upon. They don't have to pay attention when they are sent away. They must be what Homer praises in the heroes: They must be like a fly that, when chased away, keeps attacking people from a different place.

I am a little bit of that myself. Opinion – also with regard to the first sentence – of Sophie:

At least he is honest; he describes the barkers clearly enough!

I do not believe that Mr. Boldt is dishonest; I do not even believe that he has evil intentions, and I must therefore say: What seems to me the most distressing thing in such a matter is actually always the case; and in this “case” one can very much detest the personality and consider the case as such.

Mr. Boldt seems to me to be nothing more than one of the many victims of our time in a particular field. And it behoves us to point out that in the field of anthroposophy, we are not motivated by a nun-like, Salvation Army-like or girl's boarding school-like attitude, but by completely different reasons - reasons that not only Mr. Boldt, but also many other people do not have a proper concept of, we have to turn against such science and wisdom, as Mr. Boldt wants to bring to the man, seduced by some currents of our time, that we have to turn against such science and wisdom, against such pseudo-science and pseudo-wisdom, against such immature science and wisdom!

The first thing we have to bear in mind is that we – how often have I emphasized this, especially in the course of the last year! – have the very task of standing up for truth and truthfulness. And it is not for nothing that we decided to put the motto on our statutes ourselves: “Wisdom lies only in truth!” Seduced by many of the currents of our time, immature minds then feel that they are in the — as it seems to them — justified position of speaking of the fact that precisely the one who stands up for this sentence — “Wisdom lies only in truth” — as a motto for our Anthroposophical Society must assume masks in order to cover up the truth so that he can get rid of its followers. This is not personal audacity — it is done by the seduced immature mind, which can be forgiven personally, but which must be characterized objectively as it arises from the character of the current. One of the first things to be characterized in this trend of the times is something that has often had to be mentioned in connection with our necessary striving for truth: It is that which deeply permeates the times and is even connected with some of the conditions of life in our time: It is untruthfulness, the lack of conscientiousness, which is not only found in what Mr. Boldt produces, but also in a large part of our contemporary literature! No wonder immature minds are seduced by it! But if we have to stand up for truth and truthfulness, we have to listen to the Spirit of Truth; but not to what is in this current of untruthfulness and lack of conscientiousness. Everywhere outside, we find that what is said in some other direction is cited to defend all kinds of private matters that, in the eyes of those who want to defend them, usually have the highest value.

My dear friends, I ask you with reference to the man who wrote the book “Sexual Problems in the Light of Natural and Spiritual Science” and who wrote in this book [in footnote 12] on page 136/137:

12) To supplement this thought, read Steiner: “Die Geheimwissenschaft”, $. 65 to 75. There is talk of a “hidden spiritual”

, and so on, as it has been mentioned before:

What is said here regarding the satisfaction that the hungry being derives from ingesting food also applies to the pleasure that lovemaking gives to loving beings; for hunger and love grow on the same wood, as Schiller also indicates in his poem “The World Sages”.

Here, a certain enjoyment is clearly and explicitly mentioned! It continues:

The reader can find more details about enjoyment in “Lucifer-Gnosis”, issue 13 (“How to obtain knowledge of the higher worlds?”), as well as in “Theosophy” (“The path of knowledge”).

Imagine that someone does not have the conscientiousness to reach for issue 13 of “Lucifer - Gnosis”; then he must get the idea that is there: “there is talk about the enjoyment of love”. - Who can read anything else into it? But open “Lucifer - Gnosis”, issue 13, and try to figure out what it is about. There it says [on] $. 5:

What can be achieved through devotion becomes even more effective when another type of feeling is added. It consists of the fact that the person learns to devote himself less and less to the impressions of the outside world and instead develops an active inner life. A person who chases from one impression of the outside world to the next, who is always looking for “distraction”, will not find the way to secret science. The secret disciple should not become indifferent to the outside world; but his rich inner life should give him the direction in which he faces its impressions. When walking through a beautiful mountain landscape, a person rich in feeling and depth of feeling experiences something different than one poor in feeling. Only what we experience inwardly gives us the key to the beauties of the external world. One person sails across the sea and only a few inner experiences pass through his soul; the other feels the eternal language of the world spirit; the secret riddles of creation are revealed to him. One must have learned to deal with one's own feelings and ideas if one wants to develop a meaningful relationship with the external world. The outer world is filled with divine glory in all its phenomena; but one must first have experienced the divine in one's own soul if one wants to find it in one's surroundings. The secret disciple is advised to create moments in his life in which he quietly and lonely sinks into himself. But he should not devote himself to the affairs of his own ego in such moments. That would have the opposite effect to that intended. Rather, in such moments he should quietly reflect on what he has experienced, what the external world has told him. Every flower, every animal, every action will reveal unsuspected secrets to him in such quiet moments. And he will be prepared to see new impressions in the outside world with completely different eyes than before. Those who only want to enjoy impression after impression dull their ability to recognize. Those who, after enjoyment, allow themselves to be revealed by the enjoyment, cultivate and educate their ability to recognize. They just have to get used to not just letting the enjoyment linger, but to processing what they have enjoyed through inner activity, while renouncing further enjoyment. The danger here is very great. Instead of working within, it is easy to fall into the opposite error, and to want to fully exhaust the enjoyment only afterwards. One should not underestimate the fact that incalculable sources of error open up for the secret disciple here.

And now you are wondering whether, if you profess the views of the Anthroposophical Society, you may quote what is said here in “Lucifer - Gnosis”, issue 13, in such a way that, may one, after having previously discussed the enjoyment of love in Boldt's manner, say: “The reader can find more about enjoyment in ‘Lucifer - Gnosis, Issue 13’ and so on?”

In this context, I ask you: Is Mr. Boldt a disciple of the anthroposophical current or is he not - with regret I say: unfortunately; with reference to his weak personality, with which I have compassion - just a seduced of a current of today?

We are entitled to ask ourselves such a question; for it is not a matter of treating the “Boldt case” as the case of Mr. Boldt, but of regarding it as symptomatic of what is happening not only to Mr. Boldt but also, I would say, speaks to us from the windows everywhere, and is infinitely more important than the individual case of Boldt, which is only one form of many of the things that are happening in our time, and which we are called upon to fight.

Much to my regret, I was obliged on another occasion to point out how quotations are used today – on the occasion of Dr. Hübbe-Schleiden's “Denkschrift” (memorandum). On page 135, you will find the following about Boldt:

In his journal “Lucifer - Gnosis,” issue 23, “From the Akashic Records,” Steiner comments as follows: “His (the human being's) entire lower half – that which is often called the lower nature – has now come under the intellectually shaping influence of the higher beings (the Jehovah-Elohims). ... One can also say that those noble spiritual powers... have now descended to unfold their power in the field of reproduction. In fact, noble divine powers have a regulating and organizing effect in this area.

Here, individual sentences have been taken out of context, which reads as follows:

Man has straightened up. This is the direct consequence of the ride on the moon. And with the moon, all those forces have disappeared from the earth's body through which man, during the time of the nebula of fire, was still able to fertilize himself and bring forth beings of his own kind without external influence. His entire lower half - that which is often called the lower nature - has now come under the intellectually shaping influence of the higher beings. What these beings were previously able to regulate in man himself, due to the fact that the mass of force, now separated in the moon, was still united with the earth, they must now organize through the interaction of the two sexes. It is understandable that the moon is regarded by the initiates as the symbol of the power of reproduction. These forces are, so to speak, attached to it. And the higher beings described have a relationship with the moon; they are, so to speak, moon gods. Before the separation of the moon, they worked through its power in man; afterwards, their forces worked from the outside on man's reproduction. One can also say that those noble spiritual powers, which previously worked through the medium of the fire-mist on the still higher instincts of man, have now descended to unfold their power in the sphere of reproduction. In fact, the forces of the noble Gods work in this sphere in a regulating and organizing way. And with that, an important sentence from the Secret Doctrine is expressed, which reads: The higher, noble divine powers are related to the seemingly lower powers of human nature. The word “seemingly” must be understood here in its full meaning, because it would be a complete misunderstanding of the occult truths if one wanted to see something low in the reproductive powers themselves. Only when man misuses these powers, when he forces them into the service of his passions and instincts, is there something corruptive in these powers, but not when he ennobles them through the insight that divine spiritual power lies in them. Then he will place these powers in the service of the evolution of the earth and carry out the intentions of the higher beings who have characterized them through his powers of reproduction. The ennobling of this whole sphere and the subordination of it to divine laws is what Theosophy teaches, but not the annihilation of it. The latter can only be the result of an externalized and distorted conception of misunderstood occult principles.

Anyone who takes this as it is presented here, and the preceding and following must also be taken into account, will find that the one who wrote this considered it necessary to place these things in this overall context and not to tear them out of this context. And if Mr. Boldt is embarrassed to speak to the readers of his book about “fire fog” and “moon entities,” then let him keep his hands off it! Then it's none of his business! He has no right to tear sentences that I use only in one context out of that context in order to use them for his own private purposes.

But something else has been said here that anyone who wants to can read. And I believe that the 25 percent who do not want to be a girl's boarding school and so on could read something like that. It is said:

And the higher beings described have a relationship to the moon, are, so to speak, moon gods. Before the moon was separated from the earth, they worked through its power in man; afterwards, their powers worked from the outside on man's reproduction. One can also say that those noble spiritual forces, which previously worked through the medium of the fire nebula on the still higher instincts of man, have now descended to unfold their power in the realm of reproduction. In fact, noble divine powers have a regulating and organizing effect in this area.

Let noble divine powers work in this area! But not the dirty fantasies of our contemporary sexology. They have been described precisely in order to clarify the matter, but not to defile them with what can be said about this area from the coarse, clumsy human powers. And that was the spirit in all the explanations I have given over the course of many years for the anthroposophists.

Truly, gentlemen, I would deny those from whose heads Mr. Boldt learned the right to speak at all about these things! I could never allow the students of those whose right I deny to speak at all about this area, which is protected by the noble powers of the gods, to spread among us. This is how one quotes in our time in the broad stream of life! But those who are disciples of this quoting have, in my opinion, no place within our anthroposophical stream!

And another question that I want to ask you, and which is now to be linked to what has just been said, is one that is, however, more of a logical one. In Mr. Boldt's brochure, it says on page 21:

If I, of all people, have the courage and clear conscience to give voice to this deeply felt and painful dissatisfaction, I believe that I have sufficiently proven my right, indeed my obligation to do so, through the sad experiences I have had to endure in these years. Since the lodges – that is, the sum of their members, not the boards alone – are autonomous and even Dr. Steiner – as I was assured by authoritative sources – does not have the right to interfere in their decrees, we members also want to make use of our free right of self-determination when it comes to illuminating and eliminating abuses within the lodges; because we do not want to belong to a Salvation Army, a Catholic girls' boarding school or a nunnery.

I address the question to those who present themselves in the “we”: Why don't they stay out if they don't “want to belong”? Because it does not seem logical to me if they are inside. Because the only thing that is to be held against me is that I have not praised Mr. Boldt's book and that everything I present is a concoction for girls' boarding schools, convents and salvation armies. So then the only conclusion to be drawn with respect to Mr. Boldt and the others – and here I am speaking of many people found in today's intellectual culture – is that they should view this concoction for girls' boarding schools , convents and Salvation Army from the outside – not from the inside – and that they do not let themselves be told only when their logic demands it would be illogical not to be among us!

By this I wanted to suggest that we should not concern ourselves with the “Boldt case” in such a way that we “use a sledgehammer to crack a nut”. That is not necessary. But we really want to show that we have something to say about the field in which Mr. Boldt is a student – a seduced, unfortunate student. Therefore, I would like to continue here tomorrow with what I still have to say about this, as briefly as possible.

The continuation of the “business part” is set for Tuesday, January 20, 1914, at ten o'clock in the morning. Dr. Steiner announces that he will speak about “Pseudo-Science of the Present” in relation to the matter at hand.

It gives me great satisfaction to be able to speak to you once again, to be able to speak to you in the branch of our Anthroposophical Society in which I was able to develop the main part of my work for many years. Today I would like to speak to you about a number of things that I believe are important to consider in the present day. I would like to speak to you about the relationship between the human being and the supersensible world.

This is actually the constant theme of our discussions within the anthroposophical movement. But you will already have become accustomed to the fact that the truths about the supersensible worlds can only come into the full possession of the human mind when they are viewed from the most diverse points of view, so that, as I have often said, an overall impression can arise through the assimilation of images from the most diverse sides.

You know that spiritual scientific observation shows that human life on earth falls into two parts that are separated by time: the fully conscious waking state and the sleeping state. They also know that during sleep, those parts of the human being that we call the physical body, the etheric or formative body, the astral body and the ego are separated, so that the human being, so to speak, physical body and his etheric body, and that he initially leads an unconscious existence in his astral body and in his ego-being outside of the physical body and the etheric body. When one ascends to higher knowledge, it is not the case that one gains something for the human being through this ascent itself, through the knowledge, any more than we gain something for our digestion by having theoretical knowledge about this digestion, or at least we gain nothing for the immediate nature of digestion, as it takes place in our normally organized human being. It can be said that higher knowledge brings nothing new into the human being. Everything that higher knowledge provides is already in the human being. But it is the case that what can definitely be said to bring nothing new into the human being points to what remains unknown to the human being for ordinary consciousness and what, by not only is recognized but is experienced with the full content of the soul, with all the soul's powers, it does indeed bring something higher into the human being: not knowledge as such, but the experience of this knowledge.

In saying this, I have indicated what I would like to present as a threefold aspect of anthroposophical endeavour. First of all, there is the fact that there must be individuals who acquire spiritual-scientific methods in such a way that they can bring about knowledge of the supersensible worlds through higher vision in the supersensible worlds. What one calls the acquisition of these cognitions during one's existence on earth is not so important. If one does not associate the nebulous mystical ideas that are very often associated with the term clairvoyance, then one can speak of clairvoyant knowledge. Through this, then, what must increasingly become the purpose in life in our present age comes about.

The second thing is that through the ordinary, as one says, healthy human understanding, if it is only unbiased enough, that which is revealed through clairvoyant knowledge can be understood. I have often emphasized that one does not need to be a clairvoyant oneself to understand what is revealed through clairvoyant research. But it is also important for those who come to clairvoyant insight themselves to translate what they see into ordinary human terms. For that is precisely the significance that the clairvoyant has for man in the present time of his development: that it can be translated into those terms that we have in today's civilization as the terms of man in general. Therefore, whether one is clairvoyant or not, one must understand what is revealed through clairvoyant research.

And the third thing is this: what can be translated from clairvoyant research into concepts, what can be presented from clairvoyant research, must become an inner purpose in life, must become such that the human being thereby understands: I am a being that is not only bound to earthly existence between birth and death, but I am a being for whom earthly existence is only one phase, only one temporary metamorphosis. And everything that can appeal to the human soul will enter the soul if anthroposophy becomes the purpose in life in this sense. Firstly, the human being knows that he belongs to the spiritual worlds and he also knows that his earthly existence must receive its tasks from the spiritual worlds. Secondly, however, the human being knows that he is responsible to the spiritual worlds. All this elevates him above mere earthly existence, but not in such a way that he leaves it in a rapturously mystical way and holds it in low esteem, but rather by drawing his tasks for earthly existence from the supersensible world and thereby influencing the whole character, the whole status of his earthly existence.

This is especially important for our time, that we first learn to listen to what can be said through clairvoyant research; that we then endeavor to understand the content of this research through common sense, and that we make this content our life's work, to illuminate life with tasks, to increase our responsibility in life towards the spiritual worlds. In saying this, I would like to convey the color nuance that I would like to permeate my remarks today. I would like to give you some new information about man's relationship to the supersensible world.

The human being who lives here on earth opens his senses to the physical world. By looking into himself, he perceives his thinking, feeling and willing in a certain way. What he perceives through his senses and makes the content of his soul is what he calls his earthly surroundings. Note that, as earth people in this physical environment, we are actually quite familiar with what we call the outside world, the natural outside world, as far as it lies within our horizon, but that, basically, we are quite unfamiliar with what lies within our own being, even often physically. Man does indeed learn to know his inner organs through an external science, but only when he makes these inner organs external beings on the dissecting table or the like. Man cannot get to know his lungs, his heart and so on through looking inside himself with ordinary knowledge. At most, we learn to feel our inner organs, to perceive them when they are diseased. In a healthy state, man does not really perceive his inner self. He lives in his inner being, it is active in him. But precisely because he lives in it, is in it, is himself in it, he does not perceive it as he perceives the outer world, which is not himself.

This shows us that during our time on earth we focus on the outside world and have a world with content around us, and that when we look inward, we have a general, vague feeling of an ego, of which, if we are honest with ourselves, we have to say: it is very dark and very unclear. And that we can alternate between this looking into our inner selves, in which we experience something quite unclear and dark in our soul, and the experience of the external world, which is concrete in itself, determined and full of content everywhere. We can alternate between the two with our consciousness. This is essentially our experience between birth and death.

Between death and a new birth, the experience is essentially different. Especially in those times of existence between death and a new birth, which can be compared to the middle part of our life on earth, when we are at the height of our physical strength as thirty- or forty-year-olds, just in the time that is the middle part between death and a new birth, it is the opposite of life on earth. There we look into our inner being through a different consciousness that we then have, and by looking into our inner being, we have something so concrete and so full of content as when we look into the outer world here on earth. Only when we look at the external world here on earth do we have the beings of the three or four realms around us, the beings of the mineral, plant, and animal kingdoms and of the physical human kingdom. We have them around us in that they present themselves to us as sensory content. When we look into ourselves between death and a new birth in the marked time – that is already the case – then we do not have things of nature in us, but we have a world of entities in us, a world of those entities that we describe as the entities of the higher, of the spiritual hierarchies. Here we have world perception, external perception, perception of things; in the spiritual world we have inner perception, perception of beings. We look into ourselves, but we do not find such organs as we carry in us here on earth; rather, we find the whole world of entities when we can have the right awareness for it. And he who describes these entities of the higher hierarchies actually describes nothing other than the external experience of man between death and new birth. And just as we can turn our gaze back from the external world to ourselves, now, conversely, between death and new birth, we can turn our gaze from within, where we find the beings of the higher hierarchies within us, to the outside world, and there we find ourselves. The external world is actually the internal world there, the internal being is the external being, in the way I have just explained it.

But what we see there as an inner, fully-fledged world of spiritual beings within us is presented to us here, during our earthly existence, in its image, presented to us in such a way that we see the sensual images of those beings that we otherwise perceive within us between death and new birth. However, we do not see the same beings here, but, so to speak, the dwelling places of these beings, and that is - because there are always a number of these beings in common - the world of stars around us. So what do we describe when we speak of the stars, for example of the sun, full of knowledge - not with the knowledge between birth and death that is inherent in ordinary consciousness? The sun presents a certain image to our senses: but what presents itself here as the image of the sun, we experience between death and a new birth as a realm of spiritual beings. We do not see the sun as it is here now, but as a realm of spiritual beings. From our earthly existence, we have something like a memory, which tells us that this realm of spiritual entities corresponds to the sun, as seen from Earth. And it is the same for the other stars. That is, our spiritual consciousness between death and new birth becomes a cosmic consciousness. We are not just here within our own skin; we truly are the whole world. But you must not imagine it spatially. But we are the whole world, we carry the starry sky within us. And it is like this: just as we carry our lungs, our heart, our stomach and so on within us here on earth, so we carry the sun, the moon, Saturn, the other stars within us between death and new birth as our inner organs, but they are spiritual beings. It is their spiritual correlate, their spiritual archetype, that we then carry within us.

If we were always in this state, we would never come to ourselves in the spiritual world; we would always feel at one with the world of the higher hierarchies. But that cannot be. It would be just as if we only wanted to breathe in here on earth and never breathe out. Therefore, our life between death and new birth consists of a rhythmic change: in a life in these higher hierarchies and - in cosmic consciousness - in looking out; that is, there: coming to ourselves. Just as we have inhalation and exhalation here, I could also say waking and sleeping, so we alternate there between experiencing the hierarchical spiritual world and experiencing ourselves, where we are alone in our own soul, where we come to ourselves. This is how the rhythmic change in a person's experience arises between being spread out over the whole of world existence and coming to oneself: Being spread out over the whole of world existence – coming to oneself and so on.

This life between death and new birth within the spiritual world, of which the world of the stars is a physical reflection, is truly no less rich than life on earth. But in earthly life we can only recognize the result – and in a very unclear state – of what we experience between death and new birth. Let us imagine the following: we live here on earth, one of us makes shoes, the other skirts, the third cuts people's hair, the fourth builds locomotives and so on. By doing this here on earth in our physical existence, so-called human culture, civilization, comes about. Now, imagine that all of this civilization, in its manifestations, were to be summarized from time to time in a kind of result in a completely different area, for example on the sun. Let us assume that everything that comes into being here on earth, as I have indicated, would simply produce many copies on the sun. This is in fact the reality of what we do in the context described with the beings of the higher hierarchies between death and new birth: we work there with these beings on the spiritual form of our physical earthly body. And this work that is being done, where the human being between death and new birth works together with the beings of the higher hierarchies to bring about the spirit form of the physical earthly body, this work is truly a richer, a more diverse one than what we here as cultural work in physical existence, even if the physical human body that stands before us does not immediately reveal to us that it is the result of the work of divine beings in connection with man in the time of his existence between death and new birth. But older worldviews knew what they were talking about when they called the human body a “temple of the gods.” For this human body is actually, as little as we pay attention to it with our ordinary consciousness here on earth, the most complicated thing in the universe. And what a single human body is, that is precisely the combined work of innumerable beings, to which we ourselves also belong; for we work on the body with which we clothe ourselves in an earthly incarnation, only we cannot work on it individually for ourselves, but we must work on it in community with innumerable spiritual beings of the most diverse hierarchies.

If we speak from the point of view of earthly life, we are accustomed to calling a germ that which is small at first and then grows large in the physical sense. If we call that which man develops between death and a new birth the spirit germ of the physical body, we must say that this spirit germ is as great as the universe and then, as it passes through the embryonic life of man, becomes 'small' in the physical life. The small human germ contains an image of the great spirit germ, which has been worked out by the human being in connection with the higher beings. So that, by looking into the world that the human being passes through between death and rebirth, we actually see how the microcosm, the human body, is formed in ever new specimens from the tasks of the macrocosm. And that is a more sublime task than all the cultural work that a person does between birth and death. And the life that a human being undergoes by working on the human germ from the universe is a more varied and richer life than the one we spend here on earth, for example, by making shoes, making skirts, teaching children, governing states, and so on. Anyone who wants to understand the world must realize that there is something tremendously exalted in shaping the human body, as it exists here in its physical form, out of the tasks of the universe, and that the experience of this shaping is something tremendous, in terms of sublimity, not comparable to what man accomplishes here, even if he also helps to fabricate the most valuable cultural products of physical life on earth.

Thus man actually stands between death and a new birth in the spiritual world: he has an external world, which is himself; his gaze is directed towards his future life on earth, and in the prospect of this future life on earth lies the fact that he withdraws into himself, that he comes to himself. In the moment when his consciousness is filled with looking at his future life on earth and with looking back at his earlier life on earth, he is with himself. At the moment when he works together with the beings of the higher hierarchies on the task of bringing about the complicated physical body in the spirit-germ, he is, so to speak, outside of himself, but he has become one with the spiritual being, he lives in the spiritual being outside. It is at this highpoint of experience between death and a new birth, which I have called the midnight hour of human existence in one of my Mystery Dramas, that the human being experiences inwardly what he sees here in the image of the fixed starry sky. The firmament of the fixed stars or its representative – as the old worldviews also called it – the zodiac, seen from here, is the physical image of the spiritual world in which the human being lives between death and rebirth, and which he experiences as his inner world.

This continues for some time, and then, as it were, the human being leaves this living, this active, this, from an earthly point of view, sublime direct work with the spirits of the higher hierarchies. And the next thing that is then experienced is the point of view of co-experiencing with those higher beings who are revelations of higher beings. From a certain point in time, the human being knows: Yes, direct participation with the higher beings is no longer there, but the higher beings show themselves to me in an image. Seen from the earthly point of view, one can describe this as follows: the human being finds the transition from the world of the fixed stars to the world of the planets. As man passes through the planetary sphere, moving towards an earthly existence, he no longer feels the life of the higher worlds as his inner life; before, he felt it as his inner life. Here in the physical world, we feel our blood circulation, our breathing and so on, as our inner life; there, in the life between death and a new birth, we feel the life and essence of the higher hierarchies as our inner life. We are in a spiritual reality and we participate. Now, from a certain point in time on, we say to ourselves: Now we no longer participate, now what we used to participate in appears to us as in a picture; before we were in the actuality of the spiritual world, now we are in its revelations. But that means in reality: we have passed from the sphere of the fixed stars to the planetary sphere.

There we have to overcome a certain difficulty first: that is the entry into the sphere of Saturn. Certain spiritual forces radiate from Saturn. When we have passed through death, we first enter the planetary sphere and only then come to the sphere of the fixed stars; because then we take the path that I have just described, in reverse order. So when we leave our earthly life through death, Saturn is the dwelling place of those entities that do not want to leave us on earth, that want to lift us up from the earth, want to free us from our earthly powers and want to transport us into the world of pure spirituality. In my Theosophy, I have described this experience from a different point of view than the transition from the life in the soul's realm to the spirit world. These two descriptions are related to each other in the same way that you can always photograph a tree from different sides: it is always the same, but it always looks different. So, on our return journey, towards a new life on earth, we have the influence of the Saturn beings. And those people who, through their previous life on earth, have such karma that when they return to a new life on earth the forces of Saturn have a great influence on them, easily become alienated from the earth; people who either enthuse about how earthly things are actually worthless and how one should flee into a conceptual cloud-cuckoo-land, or people who, because they only looked at human conditions superficially, develop an inclination to organize spiritualistic séances and the like, in which the most diverse spiritual entities can cavort. All this is caused by the fact that in a previous life on earth a person had acquired such karma that, on returning to the terrestrial sphere, he comes into a stronger relationship with the forces of Saturn.

But when man enters the planetary sphere and approaches the solar sphere, he also comes under the influence of the counterpart of the Saturn forces, that is, those spiritual entities that have their dwelling place in the moon. These beings have above all the task of guiding the human being back into earthly existence, so that the person who absorbs the effects of the moon's forces is indeed firmly rooted in earthly existence , although on the other hand it may of course be the lunar forces that permeate the human being all too strongly with the purely physical existence, that is to say with the preference, with the inclination for this purely physical existence.

So we can say: Here on earth we walk among trees, flowers, grasses, animals and so on, between death and a new birth we walk under stars. And it is not so unreal if you simply imagine in a comprehensive picture that you are here on earth during your life on earth, that after death you pass through the spheres of the planets, leaving the lunar sphere, losing your inclination for earthly life, being transported out through Saturn, spheres, and then return again, enter the planetary sphere, and in particular, by coming under the influence of the moon, you will be prompted to return to earthly life in the supersensible world by what the lunar forces are. It urges you to return to earthly life. Just as we are connected here on earth with what we call our sensory environment, so we are also connected with this life through the world of the stars. And all this has great significance for our work with the beings of the higher hierarchies on the spirit germ of the physical human body. For until we descend to the planetary sphere for a new life on earth, it even remains undecided in our being, which we are building for our future life on earth, whether we will become man or woman. Yes, it even remains undecided for a certain time when we are already in the planetary sphere as soul-spiritual beings. In the sphere of the fixed stars, to speak of anything similar to what we have here as man and woman would be pure nonsense. But in the picture I have now begun to paint, you can well imagine that as you move away from the earth, you first see the moon from the front, then from behind. You also see Venus, Mercury and the Sun from behind, then you see the zodiac sphere and so on. But as you pass through these spheres, what is otherwise a physical image for us here is transformed into a sum of spiritual entities that you look at. When you look at the moon from behind, you see spiritual beings, for example those spiritual beings that were of particular interest to the initiates of the Old Testament: the presence of Yahweh and the beings that belong to it. But if you now return to Earth, you can, through your past karma, approach the lunar sphere by choosing the point in time when, as seen from Earth, there is a full moon in the sky; that is, you see, as seen from Earth, a full moon, the illuminated disc of the moon, but as seen from behind, when approaching Earth, the moon looks black. Choose the time for your approach to Earth so that you are influenced by the black sphere of the moon, unaffected by the sun, when there is a full moon on Earth. If, on the other hand, you choose a time when we do not see the moon here on earth, when there is a new moon and the effects of the sun go out freely into space in all directions, then you will establish a male earthly existence. So you see, we have to derive what we are here on earth in the physical body from the experiences that we have in the stellar sphere, that is, in the spiritual sphere, as it were, from the other side, between death and new birth. These things can be traced in great detail. Just as we on earth can say what a person experiences by eating cabbage or eggs or ox meat, for example, because his physical existence on earth depends on it, so too are there corresponding relationships in the spiritual worlds, the result of which then appears in the formation and inner experience of the person on earth. Here on earth we eat ox meat or eggs; in the spiritual world, between death and a new birth, we choose, according to our karma, the new moon or full moon for the time of our transition and thus become man or woman. But the full human existence in connection with the existence of the world can only be grasped if we do not merely consider what happens here between birth and death, but if we can understand what happens in earthly life in connection with what happens between death and a new birth for man.

This is something that man today does not yet understand in its full, real significance for earthly life either. But man today actually only knows the world as a mole knows museums. The mole that digs through the soil under the museums can perhaps list its experiences about it; but there will not be much of what is above him. This is more or less the position of the world as far as the earth sciences can reveal it. The only difference is that the mole could live without a museum above it. It has little connection with the museum, but man is intimately connected with the supersensible world, with that by which he is connected. Humanity must regain an awareness of this. Once there was a dim, muffled awareness of these things, which was illuminated in the ancient mysteries, but also with the old methods. These ancient mysteries were not merely one-sided cultic places. It is only in recent times that humanity has had a need for one-sided cultic places. Modern humanity must practise separate cults because it has become egotistical and wants to have an assurance of immortality for its own self. This can be given, it is a fact. But today man is inclined to practise all this separately from one another. In Paracelsus' time it was not yet so, there healing was still divine service. We must - although we must have transitions - come again to see all earthly work as a completion of spiritual work. It is only incumbent upon man today, as it were, to go through earthly events cut off from the spiritual world during his earthly existence; otherwise he would not be able to gain his consciousness of freedom. But the time is fulfilled in which man may keep himself cut off from spiritual existence. He must again permeate his consciousness with inner enlightenment from spiritual existence, and for this he cannot use the old methods today. He must go through what can be revealed to him in this direction in the present.

For suppose that some ancient mystery center provided for the affairs of the surrounding area. The care of this mystery center extended to all the affairs of the people who lived around it, to all those affairs that could only be fulfilled and ordered through the connection of earthly life with the spiritual world. Suppose a person fell ill. In those ancient times, people did not ask: What substances have we tried that have had an effect on humans in this or that direction? — They least of all asked themselves about the effect of substances that they had tried out on animals and so on. Today, people have to go through all of this. This is not meant as a derogatory criticism of medicine, but only as a way of putting it in its proper place in the development of the earth and of humanity. But in ancient times, a sick person who was afflicted with something sought refuge in the mystery temples, for the priests were also artists and doctors. Art, religion and science were one; this was cultivated in the mysteries. In those ancient times, there was still an overall view of man. It was known that when a person is afflicted by something at a certain age, it is not only related to the chemical mixture or separation of his substances, but from a higher point of view, it is related to the experiences and adventures he has undergone when he was in the world of the stars and sought his earthly existence from there.

Let us assume, then, that such a sick person came, between the ages of fourteen and twenty-one, seeking help at a mystery center that was also a medical center. In ancient times, when only instinctive, half-dreamlike knowledge was at work in the mystery centers, when such a sick person came for treatment, the examination that was carried out with him was often nevertheless clearer than today's examinations. I have actually met physicians who, when you entered into conversation with them about the most important thing about the patient and asked, “How old is the patient?” did not know. As if one could possibly contribute to any person's health if one does not have an exact idea of his age! Because in each year of life, man must, so to speak, be cured differently, because human life is constantly changing. No one would think of taking a flower petal, for example, and planting it in the ground, and believing that a new plant would grow from it. Instead, he would take the seed from the fruit and plant it in the ground, because he knows that the development of the plant is something. And so human life must also be considered. If a sick person seeking help came to a mystery doctor between the ages of fourteen and twenty-one – these are approximate figures – the doctor knew that there are a number of illnesses that are simply related to the human being's passage through the solar sphere as he descends from the planetary world into the physical world. If the patient was between the ages of thirty-five and forty-two, the mystery priest knew which diseases had something to do with the passage of man through the sphere of Saturn in his descent. So he asked himself above all about the connection of earthly life with the experiences and adventures of man in existence between death and new birth: then he knew what is here on earth again related to the beings of the higher hierarchies, or rather their physical images, the stars. Now, certain plants on Earth have a more intimate relationship with the Sun than others, and others in turn have a more intimate relationship with Saturn and so on. You will be able to tell by healthy instinct that the sprouting flowering plants, for example, have a different relationship to the Sun than a fungus or lichen on a tree. And someone who, for example, suffers from a stomach or heart condition between the ages of fourteen and twenty-one will certainly not be cured with buckthorn tea, as the ancient mystery doctor would not have treated him with buckthorn tea, but with a sun-related plant juice; but this is based on the knowledge of the connection between human life and the universe.

These things are, so to speak, “buried” knowledge; they must be rediscovered at a higher level, illuminated by our modern intelligence, after humanity has passed through darkness for a period of time. They must be rediscovered and they can be rediscovered, and the anthroposophical world view is the beginning of this rediscovery of spiritual enlightenment for humanity in all areas of life.

I have now described this descent of the human being until he enters the planetary sphere. Then there comes a time, after the influence of the moon has already begun, when the human being loses the spirit germ of his physical body, which has already shrunk very much. The expressions are of course rough, but you will not misunderstand them. This spirit-germ of the physical body descends earlier than the human being himself. It is handed over to a pair of fallopian tubes, sinks into a fertilized human germ, and forms the element of growth there before the human being himself has descended. So there comes a time when the human being has already handed over this physical germ to earthly life, when he looks down on the earth, as it were: This is what he will become, the person to whom I will belong. But for a short time the human being still lives freely in the cosmos. Then the human being draws the forces for his etheric body from the ethereal world of the cosmos, so that he then consists of I-being, astral body and etheric body. And after he has acquired his etheric body in this way, he now unites with what has become his physical germ, which he himself first sent down.

There is an enormous amount of wisdom in this sending forward of the physical human germ and in the subsequent agglomeration, if I may call it that, of the etheric body. For suppose we kept our physical body while we collect the etheric body, and the physical body would not be permeated with physical matter, but rather the forces that could be permeated with physical matter in the womb, but suppose we did not send it ahead, but still permeate it with the etheric body before we arrived in the substance of the physical embryo and in what is offered to us there. What would happen then? Precisely because we can know what might happen, we begin to marvel at the wisdom-filled guidance of the universe. For if it were otherwise, every thought we conceive and every inclination we have for evil would constantly stand before us. There would be, as it were, a living memory of what we had done, even as the slightest evil, only in thought or in feeling on earth. We would be overrun by the contents of conscience, especially from its evil side, and we would not be able to form a neutral thought, we would not be able to come to any knowledge of nature, for example. If we were to look at plants neutrally, according to natural laws, then such thoughts would easily mix into our observation of nature: “Oh, what a bad guy you were at seventeen, what you did then!” This would become ingrained in our observation of nature, and we would never arrive at a neutral view. We are able to distinguish our simple, neutral reflection from our own moral or immoral instincts because we first send down our physical spirit germ and only then, after we have gathered the etheric body, do we connect with the physical body. In this way we keep these two so far apart that the memory can be stored in the physical body, so that it is not always there, and also leaves us free, so that not our whole, namely moral life, is always before us.

I have now described man's descent from the spiritual world to the moment when he unites with the physical substance of the earth in order to continue living on earth. What do we find out now that we have arrived here? I already said that it turns out that we have to say: When I realize that man first sends down the forces that shape his physical body and then follows, I am led to unreservedly admire the wise guidance of world affairs. If I grasp this with all my being, I cannot stand there like a blockhead who makes a machine and does not need to admire it, because I would have to be a very dry person who is revealed such tremendous wisdom of world leadership and does not have admiration for this wisdom welling up within him! And so it is with all anthroposophical insights.

In other words, the ordinary earthly knowledge that we acquire in our waking hours appeals to our intellect, but less so to our feelings. This is not the case with the knowledge that we receive from the spiritual world in our inner experience. They engage our whole being; indeed, our whole nature is organized differently when we acquire these insights. Spiritual knowledge does not want to leave us cold in our minds, as physical knowledge does, but it is no less objective knowledge. If someone were to say, for example, that knowledge that touches the mind is not objective, that it is subjective, then one need only imagine the following: If someone stands before Raphael's Sistine Madonna, then he would have to be a strange fellow if he did not feel admiration for this painting; but no one would be able to say: That is merely subjective, Raphael's Madonna is not objective. For it is not a matter of our not actively feeling forces of sympathy or antipathy in our minds when we look at something objective, but rather of not disturbing the objective through our subjectivity. Of course, if we recognize something because it suits us to take something objectively, then we are not objective, since in this case we assume something because we like it. But if something were to appear before us as objectively as such insights, and we were then to burst into admiration at it, then this admiration would certainly not impair the objectivity of the insight. That is the essential thing about anthroposophical spiritual-scientific insights: they engage not only our intellect, our head, but our whole being. And the more and more we learn about such truths that relate to the life of man between death and new birth, the more our emotional life sprouts and later our life of will. That is, the human being permeates the impulses for his deeds with what he recognizes from the spiritual worlds. He feels here on earth as a fulfiller of what he was in the spiritual life between death and new birth.

Thus, everything that comes from experienced anthroposophy has the power to fulfill the whole person of its own accord, just as the instinctive clairvoyance, that is, the instinctive connection with the spiritual world, was once present in ancient humanity through the whole person. How did we become such intellectual guys today, and why were the ancient people not? Because the ancient people also knew what the instructions from the whole human being were. Today, for example, people learn geometry; they are taught what a perpendicular is. But what a perpendicular is hovers only in the realm of ideas. You can't even say it hovers in the air; it hovers in the realm of ideas, and the connection is simply not known. Man would never have developed a feeling for the vertical if in the course of his life he had not himself become upright and thus felt in his movements what the vertical is. And what the human being experiences in this way is also experienced by his head and made into the vertical. In the same way, what a person experiences when spreading out his arms becomes an experience of the horizontal. Man, who originally was active in his soul life as a whole human being, has gradually limited himself to the head, which can only depict everything figuratively. And how does the head do it in man? Yes, when I walk, I live differently than when I drive in a car: the car goes, and I am quiet. And so it is with the head in man: it is lazy, it has its vehicle in the rest of my organism and lets itself be driven, everything comes to rest, just as when I sit in a train. Therefore everything becomes pictorial, abstract. In the course of our earthly existence, we have come to this abstractness. But we must come again to that which allows us to grasp the spiritual in existence. And this then takes hold of the whole human being. It is the reverse process of what happened with the old man, but through this reverse process we can come again to the study of the whole human being. In this way we then also come again to a culture that fulfills the whole human being.

There are people today who hear what spiritual science has to offer and then say: There are some strange people who are proclaiming a spiritual truth today and think it is necessary for humanity. We do not want to doubt that it may be true that these worlds all exist, as the spiritual scientists talk about them; but what do they have to do with us? We can just wait until we die, then we will see what it is all about. Why should we strain here to understand what it is like in the spiritual world? But it is not like that. It is actually like this: if you want to understand what spiritual knowledge means – that is, the kind of knowledge that can be acquired through common sense after a spiritual researcher has communicated with a person – then the best way to learn about it is to have a spiritual researcher explain how the first step of extrasensory knowledge, imaginative knowledge, is acquired. I will give a few examples of this.

As man usually lives, he has only a consciousness of the present. He has this consciousness through his physical body. It is in space. Space represents the present with its three dimensions. Man therefore always has only a consciousness of the present. And when he has a memory, it is a memory of the present; he does not live himself into what he experienced ten years ago, for instance, but only into the image of what he experienced at that time. This is therefore sufficiently shadowy and abstract. If one seriously practices the exercises I have described in the book “How to Know Higher Worlds” for the purpose of attaining imaginative knowledge, one comes to not only live in the present, but gradually to overcome the shadowy of memory and to live in one's own past experiences. In this way, in 1922, one can still relive one's experiences from 1911 as one experienced them in 1911. And anyone who makes a special effort to live in thoughts, not in abstractions but in a fully concrete way, will be able to grasp how the life of thoughts brings turns of fate and all sorts of , deep sympathy and antipathy, as otherwise only the rough material earth-squeezing - that also comes to experience his time body, as he experiences his space body at all through the ordinary consciousness. If, for example, I cut my big toe, it hurts, and I have not only a memory of this pain in my head, because the head is far removed from the big toe, but I have an immediately experienced sensation of pain. Of course, the head is spatially connected to the big toe, but one does not experience time in this way. When a thirty-year-old person thinks back to what they experienced as a seventeen-year-old, and has now distanced themselves from in terms of time, it seems faded. If you lost a loved one thirteen years ago, how powerful the experience of pain was at the time compared to the present memory. But anyone who, through the exercises described in “How to Know Higher Worlds,” has attained this imaginative knowledge, so that he understands how to live in thought, namely, to live in pure thoughts free of sensuality, as I have described in “Philosophy of Freedom,” lives then, as he lives here in the space body in every part, so there in every part of his time body simultaneously and in every strength. When you place yourself back in time as a fifty- or sixty-year-old person, or even as an eighty-year-old, you see not only five years back — for the present existence extends over the entire course of life —: you are immediately present in every single point. However, this presence is bought at the price of fleetingness. If you are able to have an experience in the most vivid way in your eighteenth year, it does not fade from your mind as quickly as a “dream, but you cannot hold on to it, you have to forget it. And as a spiritual researcher, for example, if there were no other aids, you could get into a very bad situation. You could establish the connections through which you can see something in the etheric world, but you immediately forget it. Therefore, you also have to resort to all kinds of aids - I have given details about this in 'How to Obtain Knowledge of the Higher Worlds' - so that what you acquire in this way as a spiritual-etheric vision does not immediately disappear again. It disappears with great certainty after a few days, and what the person still carries with him as his etheric body after death disappears just as quickly.

One gets to know the whole nature of the etheric from this experience, as I have described it. The things that are told about life after death are not constructed, but gained from a living realization. But if you want to apply such aids, mere mental activity is never enough. I am not afraid to talk about my own experiences when I noticed how fleeting such experiences are in the etheric cosmos. If you see so much, you take recourse to something else to tell your experiences to other people a week later. But these aids are not taken from the mind remedies. One remedy that was very effective was to write down the experience while it was still fresh in my mind, so that the activity was not carried out through the mind but through the writing hand. In this case it is not a matter of mediumistic writing, nor of the purpose of having written it down. Writing things down, even rewriting lectures, is something that is extremely unappealing to someone who works in the spiritual field anyway. But it helps to fix what would otherwise be fleeting by allowing the whole organism to participate, as one would when executing a drawing or a painting. It then remains in one's own organism, one does not need to appropriate it again afterwards. It is only a matter of fixing the things. But for this you cannot use head-aids. If you are a spiritual researcher, you cannot fix it by means of any head-aids; you have to fix it by something that takes up your whole being. One such means would be to write down what you have experienced. But do not take into account that you are incorporating an intellectual activity, but only the characteristic style of the writing; or you can even make a symbolic drawing, a painting, or the like.

From this you can see how intimately connected with the whole human being it is, what must be there, so that one can lead over into the ordinary conceptions, what one sees in the spiritual world. But when one leads it over, then one can communicate it to other people who cannot see spiritually themselves and who then, with their ordinary, healthy human understanding, grasp it through the same conceptions in which one transmits it to them. They then have the same ideas about what the clairvoyant presents to them. To discover spiritual truths, one needs the art of clairvoyance; to live with these truths, one does not need this art of clairvoyance, but only a healthy understanding of what is presented.

But you can see something else from what is presented here. What man is spiritually in his etheric body does not live in space, it lives in time. Now look at the physical organism, for example the eye: with it you see visible things. If you were to tear out your eye, you would no longer be able to see visible things. If you look at the spiritual human being, he is, so to speak, the whole stream that passes from life to life, living once in existence between death and a new birth, then in physical life on earth, then again in life between death and a new birth, and so on. That is a unity. People in ancient times were endowed with instinctive clairvoyance at birth, that is, a connection with the spiritual world through the forces of nature themselves, and this developed in them in such a way that they could take it with them again through death; but the knowledge of the spiritual was not allowed to cease. Nor must it disappear in the newer man. Man must acquire this knowledge of the spiritual here on earth, for he is a continuous stream on earth. If you have had an earthly life that knew nothing at all about the spiritual, then for your spiritual life it is as if you were to pluck out the eye of your physical body. For what you acquire here on earth as knowledge of the spiritual life belongs to you, it is your eye with which you later “see” between death and a new birth. And if you remain “dark” here on earth with regard to knowledge of the spiritual life, then after death you have no eye; then you walk in life between death and a new birth as if through a dark valley. For this eye you must have through what you have acquired here. You tear out the eye of the spirit by excluding knowledge of the spiritual world.

This is a realization that humanity must come to terms with. Now that the old instinctive vision of the spiritual has completely faded away, humanity must realize that organs for the spiritual life must be acquired again along the lines of the path pursued by the anthroposophical movement. It is not a matter of saying: We will wait until after death, we do not need to make an effort now to understand the spiritual worlds, because after death we will see what it is like in the spiritual worlds. Certainly, we will see it after death. But for the soul it will be like a dark dungeon if we have not opened our eyes to life in the spiritual worlds here during our life between birth and death. Therefore you can see how impossible it is when a person virtually sets up a dogma that he need not concern himself with the transcendental existence here in earthly life. For we live rather in a time when, in the true sense of the word, the one who says to himself: Here, in life between birth and death, you must acquire the eye so that it is not dark for you in the spiritual world after death, and so that you can also experience the light that is around you, is also fulfilling his supersensible duty towards the world.

When I was able to speak here in this circle some time ago, I presented man in his relationship to the spiritual world from a certain point of view and concluded by saying: It can be seen from all this how we have arrived at the point in the present age where a core of people must form who recognize the necessity of spiritual-scientific knowledge. From what I have said again today, one can see this necessity even more clearly. We live today in an age in which the spiritual world wants to show itself to us during our earthly lives. We must not close the doors and windows through which it can enter. We must let the light of the spiritual world come in, we must let it come in for the sake of life on earth, we must let it come in for the sake of the life we live between death and a new birth. Man must hear the voices that speak to man from the spiritual world in a spiritual way, and he must say to himself: It is time that man perceived the light of the spirit, that he heard the voice of the spirit. And when we have familiarized ourselves with what can be understood in this way from a spiritual-scientific point of view as the necessities of the time, then the right attitude prevails in such a working space, when one regards oneself as obliged to lead humanity to recognize that now is the time to see the light of the spirit, to hear and understand the voice of the spirit.

It is in this thought, in particular in this feeling and primarily in this attitude that we want to be together and stick together in the times when we are spatially separated again. That is what I would like to say to you as a greeting, a greeting to the effect: Let what we can say to each other when fate brings us together be the occasion for it to prevail as a thought among us, as a sense of belonging together that is there in the spiritual, even when we cannot be together in space! Nevertheless, I hope that it will soon be possible for me to speak to you in person about the continuation of what I have presented today.