The Rudolf Steiner Archive

Also known as: A Picture of the Earth's Future Development Lecture 14 of 17 from the lecture series: Perspectives on Humanity's Development.

This is a time when a great deal of attention, ranging from serious science to science-fiction, is being devoted to “outer space.” There is speculation on various levels about visitants from other worlds. Behind it all there may be an instinctive feeling—true in itself though often distorted in expression—that the apparent isolation of man on earth is not final; that man is not alone in the universe. We are therefore reprinting here a lecture (first published in English in the quarterly, “Anthroposophy,” for Easter, 1933, and long out of print) in which Rudolf Steiner spoke, briefly and enigmatically, of the need to recognise and welcome certain beings, “not of the human order,” who since the seventies of the last century have been descending from cosmic spheres into the realm of earth-existence, bringing with them “the substance and content of Spiritual Science.”—The Editors.

This unmistakably indicates that it is high time for man to discover how he can receive new impulses into his life of soul, and we will turn our attention today to certain great cosmic events with which we are already familiar from other points of view.

Most of you will have read the book An Outline of Occult Science, and will have realised that one of the great events in earthly evolution was the separation of the moon from the earth. The moon as we see today, shining towards us from cosmic space, was once united with the earth. It then separated from the earth and now circles around it as its satellite. We know what incisive changes in the whole sweep of evolution are connected with this separation of the moon from the earth. We must go far back in time, before the Atlantean deluge, to find the epoch when the moon departed from the body of the earth.

Today we will confine our attention to what came to pass on earth in connection with the being of man, and with the kingdoms of Nature around him, as a consequence of the separation of the moon from the earth. From the lectures on colours we have learnt that minerals—that is to say, the coloured mineral substances—actually derive their different hues from this relationship of the moon to the earth. Recognition of this fact enables us to make these cosmic events part of an artistic conception of existence. But other matters of the greatest significance come into consideration here. Man's being is the product of preceding metamorphoses of earth-existence—namely, the Saturn, Sun and Moon periods of evolution, during which no mineral kingdom existed. The mineral kingdom as we know it today came into being for the first time during the Earth period. Mineral substance, therefore, became part of man's being only during this Earth period. During the stages of Saturn, old Sun and old Moon, man had nothing mineral within him at all. Nor was his constitution adapted for existence upon the earth. By his very nature he was a being of the cosmos. Before the separation of the moon, and before the mineral substances with their many colours came into being, man was not adapted for earthly existence.

Let me put it in this way. It was a very real question for the Spiritual Beings who guide earthly evolution as to what must happen to man. Should he be sent down to the earth or be left to pass his existence in a realm beyond the earth? It can be said with truth that the separation of the moon, with the consequent changes in the earth and in the being of man, was the outcome of a decision on the part of the Spiritual Beings who guide and direct the evolution of humanity. It was because this coarse moon-substance was sent out of the earth that man's organism developed in such a way as to make it possible for him to become an earthly being. Through this event—through the separation of the moon and the incorporation of the mineral kingdom into the earth—man has become an earthly being, existing in the sphere of earthly gravity. Without earthly gravity, he could never have become a being capable of freedom. Before the separation of the moon he was not, in the real sense a personality. He was able to become a personality because of the concentration of the forces that were to build his body. And this concentration of forces was the result of the separation of the moon and the incorporation of the mineral kingdom into earthly existence. Man became a personality, and freedom was henceforward placed within his reach.

The evolution of man upon the earth since the separation of the moon has proceeded through many different stages. And we may say that if nothing else had happened except this departure of the moon from the earth, it would still have been possible for man to draw out of his organism, out of his body and soul, pictures such as arose in ancient, clairvoyant vision. Nor was man deprived of this faculty by the separation of the moon. He still envisaged the world in pictures, and if nothing else had happened, he would be living in a world of pictures to this day. But evolution went on. Man did not remain fettered to the earth. He received an impulse for evolution in the other direction—an impulse which actually reached its climax in the nineteenth century.

Even when long ages ago the human being, as ‘metabolic man,’ became subject to the force of earthly gravity, he was adapted as ‘head man’ for a cosmic existence. In effect, the intellect began to evolve. The old clairvoyant pictures densified into the forms of intellectual consciousness, as it was until the epoch of the fourth century after Christ. It was then for the first time that the human intellect began to grow shadowy. This process has been increasingly rapid since the fifteenth century, and today, although the intellect is an altogether spiritual faculty in man, its existence is not rooted in reality. It has only a picture-existence. When the man of today thinks merely with his intellect and faculty of reason, his thoughts are not rooted in reality at all. More and more they move about in a shadowy existence which reached its climax during the nineteenth century. And today man is altogether devoid of the sense for reality. He lives within a spiritual element, but is at the same time a materialist. His thoughts—which are spiritual but yet merely shadow-thoughts—are directed entirely to material existence.

Thus the second great process or event was that man became more spiritual. But the spiritual substance once derived from matter no longer ensouls him. His nature has become more spiritual, but with his spiritual faculties he thinks only about material existence.

You know that the moon will one day reunite with the earth. By the astronomers and geologists, who live in a world of abstractions, this reunion of the moon with the earth is placed thousands and thousands of years ahead. But this is mere illusion. In reality it is by no means so very far distant. Humanity as such is becoming younger and younger. Human beings are coming to a point when their development of body and soul will proceed only up to a certain age in life. At the time of the death of Christ, of the Event of Golgotha, human beings in general were capable of development in body and in soul until the 33rd year of life. Today this development is possible until the 27th year. In the fourth millennium a time will come when men will be capable of development only until the 21st year. In the seventh millennium the bodily nature will be capable of development only until the 14th year of life. Women will then become barren. An entirely different form of earthly life will ensue. This is the epoch when the moon will again approach the earth and become part of it.

It is high time for man to turn his attention to such mighty events of the realm of existence beyond the earth. He must not go on dreaming, vaguely and in the abstract, of some form of Divinity, but he must begin to be alive to the great happenings that are connected with his evolution. He must know what it means to say that the moon once left the earth and will enter the earth again.

Just as the separation of the moon was a decisive event, so too will be its re-entry. It is true that as human beings we shall still be inhabiting the earth, although birth will no longer take place in the ordinary way. We shall be connected with the earth by other means than through birth. We shall, however, have evolved in a certain respect by that time. And we must learn to connect what is happening today—I mean the fact that the intellect is becoming more and more shadowy—with what will one day be a great event in earthly evolution—the re-entry of the moon into the substance of the earth.

If the intellect continues to become even more spectral than it is already, if men never resolve to receive into their being what can now flow to them from spiritual worlds, then they will inevitably be absorbed into the shadowy grey-ness of their intellectual life.

What is this shadowy intellect? It cannot understand the real nature and being of man. The mineral world is the only realm which the shadowy human intellect is to a certain degree capable of understanding. Even the life of the plant remains enigmatical; still more so the life of the animal; while human life is altogether beyond the grasp of the mind. And so man goes on his way, evolving pictures of existence which in reality are nothing but a great world-question. His intellect cannot begin to grasp the real nature of plant or animal, and least of all that of the human being. This state of things will continue if man fails to listen to what is being given to him in the form of new Imaginations, in which cosmic existence is pictured to him. The living wisdom that Spiritual Science is able to impart must be received into his shadowy, intellectual concepts and thoughts, for only so can the shadow-pictures of the intellect be quickened to life.

This quickening to life of the shadow-pictures of the intellect is not only a human but a cosmic event. You will remember the passage in the book Occult Science dealing with the time when the human souls ascended to the planets and afterwards descended once more to earth-existence. I spoke of how the Mars-men, the Jupiter-men and the others descended again to earth. Now an event of great significance came to pass at the end of the seventies of last century. It is an event that can be described only in the light of facts which are revealed to us in the spiritual world. Whereas in the days of old Atlantis human beings came down to the earth from Saturn, Jupiter, Mars, and so on—that is to say, beings of soul were drawn into the realm of earth-existence—since the end of the seventies of last century, other Beings—not of the human order—have been descending to the earth for the purposes of their further development. From cosmic realms beyond the earth they come down to the earth and enter into a definite relationship with human beings. Since the eighties of the nineteenth century, super-earthly Beings have been seeking to enter the sphere of earth-existence. Just as the Vulcan-men were the last to come down to the earth so now Vulcan Beings are actually coming into the realm of earthly existence. Super-earthly Beings are already here, and the fact that we are able to have a connected body of Spiritual Science at all today is due to the circumstance that Beings from beyond the earth are bringing the messages from the spiritual world down into earth-existence.

But, speaking generally, what is the attitude adopted by the human race? The human race is behaving, if I may put it so very shabbily to these Beings who are appearing from the cosmos and coming down—slowly and by degrees, it is true—to the earth. The human race does not concern itself with them; it ignores their existence. And it is this which will plunge the earth into tragic conditions, for in the course of the next centuries more and more Spiritual Beings will be among us—Beings whose language we ought to understand. And this is possible only if we try to grasp what comes from them: namely, the substance and content of Spiritual Science. They want to give it to us and they want us to act in the sense of Spiritual Science. Their desire is that Spiritual Science shall be translated into social behaviour and action on the earth.

I repeat, then, that since the last third of the nineteenth century Spiritual Beings from the cosmos have been coming into our own sphere of existence. Their home is the sphere lying between the moon and Mercury, but they are already pressing forward into the realm of earth-existence and seeking to gain a foothold there. And they will be able to find it if human beings are imbued with the thought of their existence. This can also be expressed as I expressed it just now, by saying that our shadowy intellect must be quickened to life by the pictures of Spiritual Science. We are speaking of concrete fact when we say: Spiritual Beings are seeking to come down into earth-existence and ought to be willingly received. Catastrophe after catastrophe must ensue, and earthly life will fall at length into social chaos, if opposition is maintained in human existence to the advent of these Beings. They desire nothing else than to be the advance-guards of what will happen to earth-existence when the moon is once again united with the earth.

Today people may consider it comparatively harmless to elaborate only those automatic, lifeless thoughts which arise in connection with the mineral world and the mineral nature of plant, animal and man. Materialists revel in such thoughts which are—well—thoughts and nothing more. But try to imagine what will happen if men go on unfolding no other kinds of thoughts until the time is reached in the eighth millennium for the moon-existence to unite again with the earth. These Beings of whom I have spoken will gradually come down to the earth. Vulcan Beings, ‘Supermen’ of Vulcan, ‘Supermen’ of Venus, of Mercury, of the Sun, will unite with this earth-existence. But if human beings persist in nothing but opposition to them, earth-existence will pass over into chaos in the course of the next few thousand years.

It will be quite possible for the men of earth, if they so wish, to develop a more and more automatic form of intellect—but that can also happen amid conditions of barbarism. Full and complete manhood, however, cannot come to expression in such a form of intellect, and men will have no relationship to the Beings who would fain come towards them in earth-existence. And all those Beings of whom men have such an erroneous conception because the shadowy intellect can only grasp the mineral nature, the crudely material nature in the minerals, plants and animals, nay even in the human kingdom itself—all these thoughts which have no reality will in a trice become substantial realities when the moon unites again with the earth. And from the earth there will spring forth a terrible brood of beings, a brood of automata of an order of existence lying between the mineral and the plant kingdoms, and possessed of an overwhelming power of intellect.

This swarm will seize upon the earth, will spread over the earth like a network of ghastly, spider-like creatures, of an order lower than that of plant-existence, but possessed of overpowering wisdom. These spidery creatures will be all interlocked with one another, and in their outward movements they will imitate the thoughts that men have spun out of the shadowy intellect that has not allowed itself to be quickened by the new form of Imaginative Knowledge by Spiritual Science. All the thoughts that lack substance and reality will then be endowed with being.

The earth will be surrounded—as it is now with air and as it sometimes is with swarms of locusts—with a brood of terrible spider-like creatures, half-mineral, half-plant, interweaving with masterly intelligence, it is true, but with intensely evil intent. And in so far as man has not allowed his shadowy intellectual concepts to be quickened to life, his existence will be united not with the Beings who have been trying to descend since the last third of the nineteenth century, but with this ghastly brood of half-mineral, half-plantlike creatures. He will have to live together with these spider-like creatures and to continue his cosmic existence within the order of evolution into which this brood will then enter.

This is a destiny that is very emphatically part of human evolution upon the earth, and it is quite well known today by many of those who try to hold humanity back from the knowledge of Spiritual Science. For there are men who are actually conscious allies of this process of the entanglement of earth-existence. We must no longer allow ourselves to be shocked by descriptions of this kind. Such facts are the background of what is often said today by people who out of old traditions still have some consciousness of these things and who then see fit to surround them with a veil of mystery. But it is not right any longer for the process of the earthly evolution of humanity to be veiled in mystery. However great the resistance, these things must be said, for, as I constantly repeat, the acceptance or rejection of spiritual-scientific knowledge is a grave matter for all mankind.

I have been speaking today of a matter upon which we cannot form a lukewarm judgment, for it is part and parcel of the very texture of cosmic existence. The issue at stake is whether human beings will resolve in the present epoch to make themselves worthy to receive what the good Spirits who want to unite with men are bringing down from the cosmos, or whether men intend to seek their future cosmic existence within the tangled, spider-brood of their own shadowy thoughts. It is not enough today to speak in abstract terms of the need for Spiritual Science. The only thing to do is actually to show how thoughts become realities. Dreadfully abstract theories are hurled at men today, such, for example, as “Thoughts become things,” or similar phrases. Abstract statements of this kind altogether fail to convey the full and concrete reality. And the concrete reality is that the intellectual thoughts evolved inwardly by men today will in time to come creep over the earth like a spider's web wherein human beings will be enmeshed, if they will not reach out to a world lying beyond and above their shadowy thoughts and concepts.

We must learn to take in deepest earnestness such matters as were indicated at the conclusion of my lectures on the nature of colours, when I said that the science of colour must be lifted out of the realm of abstract physics into a region where the creative fantasy and feeling of the artist who understands the real nature of colour go hand-in-hand with a perception of the world illumined by Spiritual Science. We have seen how the nature of colour can be understood, how that which modern physics, with its unimaginative charts, casts down into the Ahrimanic world, can be lifted into the sphere of art, so that there can be established a theory of colours—remote, it is true, from the tenets of modern science, but able to provide a true foundation for artistic creation, if man will only receive it into his being.

And there is another thought, too, that must be taken very seriously. What do we find today all over the civilised world? Young students go into the hospitals or to universities to study science, and the constitution of the human being is explained to them. By studying the corpse they learn about the bones and the rest of the organism. By a series of abstract thoughts they are supposed to be able to acquaint themselves with the nature of man's being. But in this way it is only possible to learn something about the mineral part of the human organism. With this kind of science we can only learn about the part of man's being which has a significance from the time of the separation of the moon until its return, when the shadowy thoughts of modern times will become spidery creatures having a concrete existence.

A form of knowledge must develop which produces quite a different conception of the being of man, and it can be developed only by raising science to the level of artistic perception. We shall realise then that science as it is today is capable of grasping only the mineral nature, whether in the mineral kingdom itself or in the kingdoms of plant, animal and man. Even when applied to the plant kingdom, science must become a form of art, and still more so in the case of the animal kingdom. To think that the form and structure of an animal can be understood by the means employed by anatomists and physiologists is nonsense. And so long as we fail to realise that it is nonsense, the shadowy intellect cannot be transformed into a living, spiritual comprehension of the world. What is taught to young students today in so abstract a form in the universities must be transformed and must lead to a really artistic conception of the world. For the world of Nature itself creates as an artist. And until we realise that Nature is a world of creative art which can be understood only through artistic feeling, no healing will come into our picture of the world.

In the torture-chambers of mediaeval castles, people were shut into what was called the ‘iron virgin,’ where they were slowly spiked with iron teeth. This was a physical and more tangible procedure than that to which students in our day have to submit when they are taught anatomy and physiology and are told that in this way they are acquiring knowledge of the nature of man—but fundamentally it is the same kind of procedure. All that can be understood of the nature of man by such methods derives from an attitude of mind which is not unlike the attitude of those who were not averse from applying tortures in the Middle Ages. Students learn about the human being as he is when he has been dismembered—they are taught only about the mineral structure in man, about that part of his being which will one day be woven into the network of spider-like creatures extending over the earth.

It is a hard destiny that power should lie in the hands of men who regard the truest thoughts as absurdities and who scorn the impulses that are most inwardly and intimately bound up with the well-being of human evolution, with the whole mission of humanity in the world. It is a tragic state of things and we dare not shut our eyes to it. For it is only by realising the depth of such a tragedy that men will be brought to the point of resolving, each in his own place, to help the shadowy intellect to admit the spiritual world that is coming down from above in order that this intellect may be made fit for the conditions of future times. It is not right for the shadowy intellect to be driven down into an order of existence lower than that of the plants, into the brood of spidery creatures that will spread over the earth. Man's being needs to have reached a higher level of existence when, in the eighth millennium, women will become barren and the moon will unite once again with the earth. The earthly must then remain behind, with man directing and controlling it from outside like an object which he need not carry over with him into cosmic existence. Man must so prepare himself that he need not be involved in what must inevitably develop upon the surface of the earth in this way.

From pre-earthly existence man has descended to this earthly life. His birth from woman began with the departure of the moon, but this physical form of birth is only a passing episode in the great sweep of cosmic evolution and will be replaced by another. It is the phase which was destined to bring to man the feeling and consciousness of freedom, the self-completeness of individuality and personality. It is a phase by no means to be undervalued. It was necessary in the whole cosmic process, but it must not remain forever unchanged. Man must not give way to the easy course of assuming the existence of an abstract God, but bring himself to look concretely at things that are connected with his evolution. For his being of soul-and-spirit can only be inwardly stimulated when he really understands the nature of the concrete realities connected with the great epoch towards which his successive earthly lives are leading him.

That is what a true Spiritual Science tells us today. The human will is threatened with being deprived of spiritual impulses and with becoming involved in the spidery web that will creep over the earth. There are men in existence who imagine that they will gain their ends by promoting their own spiritual development and leaving the rest of their fellow-beings in a state of ignorance. But the vast majority live in complete unawareness of the terrible destiny that awaits them if they lend themselves to what an ancient form of spiritual knowledge called the “sixteen paths to corruption.” For just as there are many ways in which the shadowy intellect may be directed to the impulses and knowledge coming from the spiritual world, so naturally there are many ways in which varieties of the shadowy intellect will be able to unite with the spider-beings who will spin their web over the earth in times to come. Intellect will then be objectivised in the very limbs and tentacles of these spidery creatures, who in all their wonderful inter-weavings and caduceus-like convolutions will present an amazing network of intricate forms.

It is only by developing an inner understanding for what is truly artistic that man will be able to understand the realm that is higher than mineral existence—that realm of which we see an expression in the actual shaping and form of the surfaces of things in the world.

Goethe's theory of metamorphosis was a most significant discovery. The pedants of his day regarded it as dilettantism, and the same opinion prevails today. But in Goethe, clarity of insight and intelligence was combined with a faculty of vision which perceived Nature herself as an active expression of artistic creation. In connection with the animal world, Goethe only reached the point of applying this principle of metamorphosis to the forms of the vertebras and cranial bones. But the process whereby the forms of a previous existence are transformed, whereby the body of the earlier life is transformed into the head of the subsequent life—it is only by an inner understanding of this wonderfully artistic transformation of the radial bones into the spherical that we can truly perceive the difference between the head and the rest of the human structure. Without this insight we cannot perceive the inner, organic connection between the head and the rest of the human body.

But this is a form of art which is at the same time science. Whenever science fails to become art, it degenerates into sophistry a form of knowledge that hurls mankind into calamity so far as his cosmic existence is concerned. We see, therefore, how a true Spiritual Science points to the necessity for artistic insight and perception. This faculty was already alive in Goethe's soul and comes to expression in his hymn in prose, entitled Nature, written about the year 1780, and beginning: “Nature! We are surrounded and embraced by her ...” The ideas are woven together so wonderfully that the hymn is like the expression of a yearning to receive the Spirit from the cosmic All.

It can be said with truth that the development of the thoughts contained in Goethe's hymn to Nature would provide a dwelling-place for the Beings who would fain come down from the cosmos to the earth. But the barren conceptions of physiology and biology, the systematising of plant-life and the theories that were evolved during the nineteenth century—all the thoughts which, as I showed in the lectures on colour, have really nothing to do with the true nature of the plants—can awaken no real knowledge, nor can they get anywhere near the being of man. Hence the body of knowledge that is regarded today as science is essentially a product of Ahriman, leading man on towards earthly destruction and preventing him from entering the sphere which the Beings from beyond the earth have been trying to place within his reach since the last third of the nineteenth century.

To cultivate Spiritual Science is no abstract pursuit. To cultivate Spiritual Science means to open the doors to those influences from beyond the earth which have been seeking to come down to the earth since the last third of the nineteenth century. The cultivation of Spiritual Science is in very truth a cosmic event of which we ought to be fully conscious.

And so we survey the whole span of time from the separation until the return of the moon. The moon which, as we say, reflects the sunlight back to us, is in truth deeply connected with our existence. It separated itself from the earth in order that man might become a free being. But this period of time must be utilised by man in such a way that he does not prepare the material which, with the re-entry of the moon into the earth-sphere, would combine with the moon-substance to produce that new kingdom of which I have tried to give you a graphic picture.

Now and then there arises in human beings of our time a kind of foreboding of what will come about in the future. I do not know what meaning has been read into the chapter in Thus Spake Zarathustra, where Nietzsche writes of the ‘ugliest man’ in the ‘valley of death.’ It is a tragic and moving passage. Nietzsche, of course, had no concrete perception of the valley of death into which existence will be transformed when the spidery brood of which I have spoken spreads over the earth. Nevertheless, in the picture of this valley of death in Nietzsche's imagination there was a subconscious vision of the future, and within this valley of death he placed the figure of the ‘ugliest man.’ It was a kind of foreboding of what will happen if men continue to cultivate shadowy thoughts. For their destiny then will be that in hideous shape they will be caught up by the forces of the moon-existence as it comes down into the sphere of the earth and will become one with the brood of spidery creatures of which I have been speaking.

What purpose would be served by keeping these things secret today, as many people desire? To keep them secret would be to throw sand into the eyes of men. Much of what is spread over the world today under the name of spiritual teaching is nothing but a process of throwing sand into men's eyes so that no single event in history can be understood for what it really is. How many people realise today that events of fundamental and incisive importance are taking place? I have already spoken of these things. But how few are prepared really to enter into them! People prefer to shut their eyes to what is happening and to think that, after all, the events are not really of such great significance. Nevertheless, the signs of the times are unmistakable and must be understood.

This was what I wished to say in regard to the way in which the being of man upon the earth is connected with the cosmos.

• 1. Three lectures on Das Wesen der Farben, given at Dornach on May 6 – 8, 1921. Published in English as a book entitled “Colour” (new edition in preparation).

In the lectures of last week I pointed out how with the aid of the science of initiation one must strive to press forward from the apparent reality, that is actually around us continually, to the true reality. And I pointed out that the effort which is agreeable to most people, the effort to find a single rational theory of the universe precisely diverts from reality, leads precisely to delusion. I said that much rather must one strive to distinguish two currents of reality, in regard to human knowledge as well, and then in a living manner unite with each other what can be found in these two currents.

Let us briefly recapitulate what we have realised with regard to these two currents in human knowledge and let us then seek to create the necessary requirements for a conception of reality on this foundation. You will remember that I said: The course of human life is actually one in which man can only comprehend in the second half of life what he has thought, what his soul on the whole has gone through in the first half. I said that natural intelligence is active in us from birth to the change of teeth, the intelligent element prevails. What prevails as intelligence and also what we learn in these first years of life, is not yet grasped through our own human forces if we look only at the one current of which we have to speak. If man were simply thrown on his own resources as earthly man, then only in later life at the end of the fifties, the beginning of the sixties, would be able to understand what he thought, felt and willed as a child up to the change of teeth. Thus it is only in later years that one becomes mature, as it were, to self-knowledge of the intimate life of childhood. The forces in man that can grasp what one went through intelligently in the first years of childhood are in fact only born as late as that in human life.

Then we have a second life-period that dates from the change of teeth to puberty. Only think (it is shown in the booklet Education of the Child in the Light of Anthroposophy what the child goes through in thought, feeling, willing, up to puberty, Through his own human earthly forces man would be able to grasp what he goes through then only at the end of the forties, the beginning of, the fifties

And again what we live through from puberty into the twenties: we should only grasp this through our own human forces at the end of our thirties and beginning of our forties. What we devise and develop as ideals we should only grasp in its importance, its value to life, in our thirties if we were left to our human life forces. Only what we experience between the ages of 28 and 35 stands for itself and can be approximately grasped at the time. This middle member of man's lifetime has a certain equilibrium, there we can at the same time develop our thought and comprehend it, but not in the other years of life.

You get a grasp of man's development in a lifetime if you reflect upon what has been brought forward, you see how man evolves as earthly man in time. In so far as we are bound to time, self-knowledge would only be possible if we waited until the right time of life arrived for a comprehension of what we had thought in an earlier period of life. The total human life is interconnected. If we were only earthly man in time we should, as personality, know nothing at all of ourselves, if we did not in age look back to what developed in us in youth.

Now that is the one aspect of man, the one current of human life. As regards this stream man is entirely subjected to time, he can do nothing but wait till the time is ripe. But I have already pointed out to you that the way life is lived through in our maya-existence, is not the true face of human life, it is merely its appearance when we regard it as taking place in time. Yet what one specifies in this way about the time-course of human life is entirely real. For what we normally experience between birth and death—with this, as I have said, we can if necessary, and if one is content to stay on the surface, live, but with it one cannot die. For all our normal knowledge, what we learn from the instruction of others, what one learns from the store acquired through the course of history, in short, what as temporal man one learns in any other way than by looking back in age at youth—that perishes at death, that we do not carry from the one current through the gate of death. Only what we have acquired in conformity with this correspondence do we carry through the portal of death. And do not imagine that you don't do what I have described! Each of you who has come to a later age of life looks back in his subconsciousness to the earlier years of his life. What I have described most definitely takes place, even if it takes place subconsciously. And you would carry nothing from the external temporal course of life through death if it did not so take place. In the age of materialism, however, men pay little heed to this, yet all that the materialistic age can bring to man cannot be taken with him through the gate of death. That alone has significance for the world which you pass through in the sense that you grasp in age what has taken Place in your whole nature in youth. That is the one stream.

The other stream arises through the fact that man is not merely soul and body. As a being of soul and body his existence takes its course in time as we have again shown. But man is also a being of spirit and soul. And through his soul-spirit nature he is not merely in the realm of time which has just been characterised but in the realm of duration. And there again he is very different from what he thinks. There he goes through no development, he is the same being from birth to death, but his thinking, feeling and willing are something very different from how they appear to him. His thinking and also a part of his feeling is a transposing of himself into cosmic regions where the conflict of gods takes place (I described this in a recent lecture [ 15th September 1918 (not translated). ]), and again willing and a part of feeling is the transposing of oneself into another region of the cosmos where the conflict of gods takes place I said to you that to reflect and ponder means transposing oneself into a certain region of spirituality and taking part in certain conflicts of one order of spirits with another; similarly willing means taking part in certain conflicts—even though in one or another case these conflicts may have come to a standstill. It is a profound truth presented in one of the Mystery Dramas, The Portal of Initiation, that while processes of soul and spirit are enacted in us great cosmic events are happening Just as man in the age of materialism will have no notion of his soul-body nature that runs its course in time, so will man know nothing of this spirit-soul element that acts in the realm of duration, but appears quite different from his thinking, feeling, willing in ordinary life and seen in ito reality, takes place as spirit-conflicts, However paradoxical it may sound to the materialistic thinker, when you form a thought it is very different from what it appears to you in maya. Let us suppose that you form a thought, let us say a thought on what we considered in the last lecture—a thought on space. The moment you think about space, even in the abstractness of the modern concept of space, the moment your spirit fills itself with the space-thought, you transpose your soul into a spiritual region where Ahriman is engaged in a mighty fight against hierarchies of a different nature. You could not have the thought of space without living in a region where Ahriman fights against other hierarchies. And when you develop a desire, if you say, for instance, I will go for a walk, even when it is such an insignificant determination as this, as soon as you set this will in action, you place yourself spiritually in a region where the Luciferic spirits fight against spirits of other hierarchies. Seen from the aspect of initiation-science, what takes place in the world is essentially different from its shadowy reflection, which we know in our maya-existence, between birth and death. For, my dear friends, what we perceive thus as maya is nothing more than something that can be compared with the wave-ripples on the surface of the sea. I put the picture before you in the last lecture: the ripples of the waves on the surface of the sea would not be there without the sea beneath and the air above. The forces that produce the ripples of the waves are in the sea, in the air, and the rippled waves are only the image of the forces striking together from above and below, So is our life in maya between birth and death nothing else than a striking together of two forces. On the one hand the spiritual conflicts which in truth take place in the realm of duration when we think, feel, will; on the other hand the course of evolution in time which consists in our comprehending only in later years the thinking life of youth. Our life in fact is a nothingness if we do not look on it from the confluence and conjunction of these two true realities. Behind our life are these two true realties.

Now behind our life there is not only on the one hand the time-course which would cause us to wait and wait in order to grasp something that we conceived formerly, nor is there only the processes in duration that take place our whole life through in a similar way between birth and death but we ourselves stand within this reality, and this too appears to us only in its reflected image. Our whole relation to the world appears to us only in its reflection. To know the truth always demands our strengthening ourselves to know it; truth does not come to us if we want merely to remain passive. To know the truth means that one knows oneself to be standing in the two currents that I have indicated, in the realm of time and the realm of duration. And while we stand within these two realms, and a life goes on which has no other significance with regard to the true forces than has the rippled sea with regard to the storming air and the flood beneath surging up and down, we pass our life between death and birth and then again also between birth, and death. The forces and powers occupy themselves with us while we so pass our life. For mighty forces are ever at hand which endeavour to tear us away from the ordinary earthly life as it takes its course in maya, and similarly other forces are there which are at pains to tear us away from the realm of duration. On the one hand (let us hold fast to this) we have our course of life in time, where we only become mature at a late period to grasp what goes on in us in the future; there are forces and powers which would confine us to what we are as man, which would like to mould us as human beings so that this takes place. That means, however: there are forces and powers that want our earthly life to run its course in maya, so that we experience this or that in childhood, but grasp nothing of it, lead a sort of sleep-life up to the age of 28, then begin somewhat to comprehend the present, and then after the age of 35 begin to comprehend the earlier. There are forces and powers which would like to make us mere temporal beings, beings who for the first half of life would lead more or less a sleeping plant-life and in the second half would look back and understand what took place during this sleep. There are forces and powers which would like to make man for the first half of his life, a dreamer, and in the second half a being who remembers these dreams and thus comes to self-consciousness. If these forces and powers should alone work upon us it would practically mean that our soul would not be born till the beginning of our thirties, or at earliest in our twenty-eighth year. Before that we should go about on earth drunken with sleep.

If that were so, we should become torn free from our whole cosmic past. Our present existence rests upon the fact that we have gone through a cosmic past, through the Saturn, Sun, Moon evolution, as I have shown it in Occult Science. During the passage through the Saturn, Sun, Moon periods, Beings of the higher Hierarchies who have a special interest that human beings should arise in the cosmos. Beings who are the creators of mankind, developed us and established us in earthly existence. In earth-existence we are now such men according to the one stream as I have described. Forces and powers are present which would shape us only as such earthmen; should they conquer, they would tear us away from our Saturn, Sun, Moon past. They would conserve us in earth-life, make us purely men of earth. That is what certain powers are striving for; they are the Ahrimanic powers. Ahriman strives to make us purely temporal men, to loosen our earth-life from our cosmic past. He strives to make the earth utterly and entirely a self-contained entity, to make us entirely telluric, earthly with the earth.

There are other forces and powers which strive for the exact opposite, to tear us from this time-life, to endow us with a thinking, feeling and willing that trickles in, as it were, solely from the region of duration. These beings strive to fill us from childhood on, and with no effort of our own, with a certain quantum of thinking, feeling and willing and then to conserve it for us throughout the whole course of life. Should they conquer, our whole temporal life would dry up. We should finally,—indeed quite soon, it would have happened long ago if these beings had conquered,—lay aside the physical corporeality, the bodily spirit-being, and become pure spirits. But our task, in so far as it comes from our earth-existence, would not have been fulfilled. We should be drawn away from earth-existence. To these beings the earth is too evil, they hate the earth, they would like to get rid of it. They would like to lift man from the earth and give him an existence purely in the realm of duration; they would like him to discard all that takes its course in time in the way I have described. These are the Luciferic beings. They strive for just the opposite of what the Ahrimanic beings desire. The Ahrimanic beings seek to free man together with the whole of earth-existence from the cosmic past and to conserve the earthly. The Luciferic beings strive to thrust away the earth, thrust away from man everything earthly and spiritualize him entirely, so that the forces of the earth cannot work upon him. They would like man to be purely a cosmic being, and would like the earth to fall away from evolution and be cast out into the universe. Whereas Ahriman wants the earth to become an independent entity and man's whole world, the Luciferic beings strive towards the opposite goal. They want the earth to be thrust away from humanity and humanity to be lifted into that realm where they themselves have their existence, the pure world of duration. In order to attain this object the Luciferic beings seek perpetually to make the human intelligence automatic, they endeavour to crush down man's free will. Should intelligence become purely automatic and the free will crushed, then with automatic intelligence and not with our own will, but the will of the gods, we should be able to accomplish what it fell to us to perform. We should become entirely cosmic beings. That is the goal towards which the Luciferic beings strive. They endeavour to make us pure spirits, such as have cosmic intelligence in place of their own, spirits who have no free will, and whose thinking and acting run their course automatically, as among the Hierarchy of the Angels and to a great extent in the hierarchy of the Luciferic beings—but here in another respect. They wish to make us pure spirits and to cast away the earthly impulse. Moreover they want to create an intelligence for us which is entirely uninfluenced by any kind of brain and absolutely untouched by the interweaving of free will.

The beings who flock round Ahriman, the Ahrimanic beings, want on the contrary to cultivate most specially human intellect, to cultivate it to the extent of being increasingly dependent on the whole earth-existence. They want, moreover, to develop intensively man's individual will—that is, precisely all that the Luciferic beings wish to repress. The Ahrimanic beings, or, expressed better, the spirits serving Ahriman, want to develop fully precisely this—we must take that definitely into account. The human being in this way would come to a sort of self-sufficiency. He would, it is true, be a dreamer in his youth, and in later years be extremely clever and understand many things through his own practical experience, yet he would receive nothing as a revelation from the spiritual worlds. Do not let us deceive ourselves about that. Everything through which one is clever in youth has arisen only from revelation, one's own experience enters only in later years. The Ahrimanic beings want to limit us to this personal experience. We should be beings of independent will, but as beings of soul and spirit we should have at most to be born in our 28th year. Just consider: we as human beings, are actually standing in between these two conflicting aims of the spiritual worlds. And in a certain sense we have the task as man so to live our life in the world that we follow neither Ahriman nor Lucifer but find an equilibrium between the two currents.

One can imagine that it is gruesome even to our materialistic age for men to hear what actually takes place at the foundation of human nature. Because it is gruesome it was so arranged in the world-order that in ancient times divine teachers imparted to men a supersensible knowledge, so that they did not themselves need to face this spirit-conflict. The initiates could be silent about the spirit-conflict to the outer world. There have always been men who know, knew, of this spirit-conflict which is enacted in every human being behind the scenes of life. There were always men who had convinced themselves that life is a struggle through a conflict, that it encloses a danger in itself. But the principle also existed not to lead men to the threshold of the spiritual world, not to lead them to the Guardian of the Threshold, so that (forgive the expression but it fits)—so that they did not get the horrors. But the times have passed in which that is possible. For the time will come in future earthly evolution when the separation must take place between the children of Lucifer and the children of Ahriman, either the one or the other. But to know that one stands within it, and in this standing within one must guide one's life with knowledge, that must be said today as a necessity of life for man's future, and it must be understood. There can be no mere science of silence for the future.

Anyone who wishes to get a true knowledge of life must develop cosmic sensitivity. What does that mean? It means that he must learn to look at the world somewhat differently from the customary way of seeing it from the standpoint of maya. When one goes through the world with the science of initiation then feelings arise which are not there as long as one remains merely in the knowledge of maya. Feelings arise which the ordinary person looks on not merely as paradoxical, but as foolish and fantastic, yet which have every possible justification as regards true reality. One who possesses the science of initiation and meets with a human being hovers to and fro between two perceptions. You man (he thinks to himself), you oscillate between two possibilities. Either you fall a prey entirely to the temporal, you become mineralised and stiffened inasmuch as you become solely earth-man and lose your past, or else you evaporate in the spirit to a spiritual automaton, you do not reach your goal as human being in spite of being spirit.—It might be said that in confronting a man there really always come towards one two men, the one who is in danger of petrifying in his form, becoming dense and rigid and growing together with the earth; and the other who is in danger of thrusting out all that tends to the mineralising and the hardening process, and is in danger of becoming quite soft, jelly-like, and finally of dissolving as spiritual automaton in the All. These two beings actually meet those who observe a man through the means furnished by the science of initiation. One always feels anxiety, so to say (one must choose such words as language provides, thus many things sound a paradox when one points to the realm of reality)—one has ever anxiety lest the men who confront one suddenly all become like those remarkable figures sometimes seen on the face of a rocky cliff: a knight on horseback, or other figures in the mountains, sleeping maidens, and so on. Men could become something like this and unite with the rock of the earth and only live on as mineralised form. On the other hand, however, they could thrust out all that leads them to mineralisation and could become jelly-like: those organs that have contracted could swell out the ears, could become gigantic and include the throat, wing-like organs could grow out of the shoulders combined with all this; all as soft as a jellyfish but dissolving as if out of its own surging wave formation.

And such perception, such cosmic sensitivity, so to say, arises not only when one confronts a human being with initiation knowledge, but ultimately one carries over to everything what one receives through this cosmic sensitivity. You have assuredly remarked that the tendency to rigidify, to become rock-like; comes from Ahriman; the tendency to volatilize, become first jelly-like, then dissolving: comes from Lucifer. But this is not confined to man himself, it extends over all the abstraction that one meets. One learns to perceive all straight lines as Ahrimanic; all curved lines as Luciferic. The circle is the symbol of Lucifer; the straight line the symbol of Ahriman. The human head with its tendency (one can see it in the skeleton) to petrify, to ossify in the form given it by the earth and to remain hard, is Ahrimanic formation. If forces that work in the human head were active in the whole man he would acquire the figure of Ahriman as you have him over there in our Group. He would be entirely permeated by headness—so to say he would be entirely his own intelligence; but egotistic intelligence; and entirely his own will so that the will comes to expression in the form itself.

If we look at the rest of man, not the head-man, but the extremities, man in the broader sense; we have the idea: If the forces working in the rest of man worked through man as a whole he would then be formed like the figure of Lucifer in the Group. And wherever we look; whether in the life of nature or in social life, we can look into the Ahrimanic or the Luciferic if we are equipped with the science of initiation. We must only perceive it and to develop this sensitive perception is a necessity in man's future evolution. Man must learn to feel that the Lucifer character prevails throughout the world, it prevails too through man's social life. It wants above all to get rid of everything that pertains to rule and order in the world and the laws that men have established. In man's social life there is nothing, so much hated by Lucifer as anything that smells at all of law.

Ahriman would like to have laws; inscribe laws everywhere. And again human community-life is interwoven with the hatred of Lucifer against law and Ahriman's sympathy for it—and one does not understand life if one does not understand it as a dualism. Ahriman likes all that is outer form, that can stiffen; Lucifer likes—the Luciferic beings like—all that is formless, that dissolves form, becomes fluid and flexible. By life itself one must learn to create the balance between the wanting to stiffen and the becoming fluid.

Look at the forms of our Bau [ The first Goetheanum, destroyed by fire December 31, 1922. ], the straight line led over everywhere into the curved, equilibrium sought; everywhere an endeavour to dissolve the fixed again in the fluid, everywhere rest produced in the movement, but the rest transposed again into movement. That is the whole spiritual element in our Bau. As men of the future we must try to shape something in art and life knowing that there below is Ahriman who would let everything grow rigid, there above is Lucifer who wishes to spiritualize everything; both, however, must remain invisible, for in the world of maya only the wave-ripples may appear. Woe if Ahriman or Lucifer should themselves press into what desires to be life! And so our Bau has become what it is: a state of balance in the universe which is wrested, lifted out, of the realm of Ahriman and the realm of Lucifer. Everything culminates in the central figure of our Group, in this Representative of mankind, in whom the whole Luciferic and Ahrimanic element is to be blotted out. And the fact that this is so, that all is lifted out of what is to remain purely spiritual, comes to expression in the Group, where the Luciferic and Ahrimanic elements are set visibly in balance to each other so that men learn to understand it.

That is the perspective which one must place before men today, so that they may learn to grasp how they must find the state of equilibrium between the Ahrimanic and the Luciferic. The Ahrimanic regulates us always—even in soul and spirit—rectilinearly; the Luciferic brings us always into curving or circular movement and diversifies us. If we have a one-sided tendency to monotheism, if we strive to the whole world as a unity, then Ahriman tugs us by one ear; if we become monadists, one-sided monadists, explaining the world out of many, many atoms or monads only, without unity, then Lucifer is tugging us by the other ear.—In fact, to one who has insight things are like this: when monists dispute with pluralists, monadists, then the man who is actually disputing is generally quite guiltless, for behind him, if he is a monist. Ahriman is pulling him by the ear and whispering all the fine reasons the self-believed logic which he presents for his monism; and if he is a follower of Leibniz or some other monadist,—Lucifer is there and whispers all the fine reasons for the manifoldness of spiritual beings. What must be sought is the state of equilibrium, unity in multiplicity, multiplicity in unity. However, that is less easy and convenient than to seek either the unity or the multiplicity; as it is altogether less comfortable to seek a state of equilibrium than something where one can just rest in laziness. Men become either sceptics or mystics, The sceptics feel that they have fine minds that can doubt everything, the mystics feel that they are permeated by the divine and that with love and knowledge they can embrace all things in their own inner being. The Sceptics are in fact but pupils of Ahriman and the mystics but pupils of Lucifer. For what mankind must strive towards is the state of balance; mystic experience in scepticism, scepticism in mystic experience. It is not the point whether one is Montaigne or Augustine, the point is that what Montaigne represents is illumined through Augustine and what Augustine represents is illumined through Montaigne. One-sidednesses mislead men in the direction of the one or the other stream. What is actually the meaning of “towards the Luciferic”? The Luciferic is really there to make us headless, to take away our own intelligence and free-will. The Luciferic spirits (it is better to say “Luciferic spirits” and to say “Ahriman”, for although there are hosts in the following of Ahriman, Ahriman stands out as a unity, because he strives for unity, and the Luciferic element shows itself as plurality, because it strives for plurality—therefore one expresses it as I have already done in the course of today's lecture)—the Luciferic element really wants us to die at 28, it does not want us to grow old. And if things went entirely according to this Luciferic element we should become children, young men and women, would receive good knowledge trickled in from duration, but at approximately the age of 28 we should get sclerosis and rapidly become cretins. Thus what we could develop as human comprehension would be thrust out just as sclerosis would be thrust out and what we receive in youth could be made automatic and spiritualised. The Luciferic spirits would like to take us at once and not let us first go through the Jupiter, Venus, Vulcan evolution in order then only to become cosmic beings. They do not consider that necessary but strive to take man away from the earth with what he has already evolved through the Saturn, Sun, Moon existence. That is the one stream which wants to hurry on with man as quickly as possible, it is a premature stream. The Luciferic spirits would like to storm in and lead us as quickly as possible into cosmic reality. The Ahrimanic spirits would like to root out our past and make the earth our starting point; they would like to wipe out our past, conserve us on the earth and then set us back to where we were as Saturn-beings. It is a retrograde, retarding movement. Life is ultimately compounded out of a premature and a retrograde movement and the state of equilibrium between them must be found.

Do not say, my dear friends, that these things are difficult, for that is not at all the point. I spoke yesterday of how in early times men had the experience of space and time, of how they experienced them concretely, while we experience them so abstractly. We must learn so to look at our environment that everywhere we experience in balance this interplay of stiffening and evaporating, of deserting and thrusting back, of straight line and curve line. One can sleep with what simply looks at the world. If one looks at it awake, then it threatens to rigidify or evaporate in its whole nature as soon as it comes out of the state of equilibrium. We must develop this feeling and it must become as alive in the men of the future as was the ancient feeling for space and time in the men of the past.

One can have a sensitive perception concerning much in our Group. One can feel in the centre the Representative of humanity with its lines and planes and forms, where everything Luciferic and Ahrimanic is obliterated. The forms are there, but as far as it allows in the human figure the Luciferic and Ahrimanic is rooted out. One can find Lucifer and Ahriman held fast in their forms; one can feel the contrast between the central human being and Lucifer and Ahriman, and can go through the world with this feeling and find its correspondence everywhere. One who is able to assimilate what lives in the feelings that are brought forth by this trinity will absorb much for a certain autopsy of life. Much will be revealed by the world when one contemplates it with the feelings resulting out of the trinity: the central human being or Representative of mankind, Ahriman, Lucifer, And as to the ancient space-feeling the three-foldness was revealed, and to the ancient time-feeling the oneness of the Divine, so must one of the loftiest world-mysteries be revealed to the humanity of the future, in that it is in the position to grasp concretely the stiffening, the evaporating, the deserting, the thrusting back, the straight-lined, the curve, the law-loving, the law-hating, and so on. The recognition of the state of oscillation everywhere in life—that is what matters. For life is not possible unless there is such a state of oscillation, If you have a clock with a pendulum you can of course want to avoid the swinging to and fro and make the pendulum stand still, but the clock will be of no use to you, the pendulum must swing. In life there must be this pendulum condition. That must be noted everywhere.

It is the 1st of 13 lectures given by Rudolf Steiner at Dornach, Switzerland in June and July of 1922. The series of lectures is entitled Human Questions and Cosmic Answers.

My dear Friends,

The things I shall have to explain to-day may be apparently a little far removed from our more concrete studies of Anthroposophy. They are however a necessary foundation for many other perceptions which we need—a foundation on which we shall afterwards have to build in our more intimate considerations.

There is a certain inherent difficulty for our human power of knowledge and understanding when we speak of the physical bodily nature of man on the one hand, and the soul-and-spirit on the other. Man can gain ideas about the physical and bodily with comparative ease, for it is given to him through the senses. It comes out to meet him, as it were, from his environment on all sides, without his having to do very much for it himself—at any rate so far as his consciousness is concerned. But it is very different when we come to speak of the soul-and-spirit. True, if he is open-minded enough, man is distinctly aware of the fact that such a thing exists. Men have always received into their language designations, words and phrases referring to the soul-and-spirit. The very existence of such words and phrases shews after all, for an open-minded consciousness, that something does exist to draw man's attention to the reality of soul-and-spirit.

But the difficulties begin at once when man endeavours to relate the world of things physical and bodily with the world of soul and spirit. Indeed for those who try to grapple with such questions philosophically, shall we say, the search for this relationship gives rise to the greatest imaginable difficulties. They know that the physical and bodily is extended in space. They can even represent it spatially. Man forms his ideas of it comparatively easily. He can use all that space with its three dimensions gives to him, in forming his ideas about things physical and bodily. But the spiritual as such is nowhere to be found in space.

Some people, who imagine they are not materialistically minded—though in reality they are all the more so—try to conceive the things of the soul and spirit in the world of space. Thus they are led to the well-known spiritualistic aberrations. These aberrations are in reality materialistic, for they are an effort to bring the soul and spirit perforce into space.

But quite apart from all that, the fact is that man is conscious of his own soul-and-spirit. He is well aware of how it works, for he is aware that when he resolves to move about in space his thought is translated into movement through his will. The movement is in space, but of the thought no open-minded, unbiased thinking person can assert that it is in space. In this way the greatest difficulties have arisen, especially for philosophic thinking.

People ask: How can the soul-and-spirit in man—to which the Ego itself belongs—work upon the physical and bodily which is in space? How can something essentially unspatial work upon something spatial?

Diverse theories have arisen on this point, but they all of them labour more or less under the difficulty of bringing the soul-and-spirit, which is unspatial, into relation with the physical and bodily, which is spatial. Some people say: In the will, the soul-and-spirit works upon the bodily nature. But in the first place, with ordinary consciousness, no one can say how the thought flows into the will, or how it can be that the will, which is itself a kind of spiritual essence, manifests itself in outer forms of movement, in outer activities.

On the other hand the processes which are called forth by the physical world in our senses—i.e., in the bodily nature—are also processes extended in space. Yet inasmuch as they become an experience in soul and spirit, they are transformed into something non-spatial. Man cannot say out of his ordinary consciousness, how the physical and spatial process which takes place in sense-perception can influence the non-spatial, the soul-and-spirit.

In recent times, it is true, men have sought refuge in the conception, to which I have often referred, of ‘psychophysical parallelism.’ It really amounts to a confession that we can say nothing of the relation of the physical and bodily to the soul-and-spirit. It says, for example: The human being walks, he moves his legs, he changes his position in external space. This is a spatial, a physical-bodily process. Simultaneously, while this is taking place in his body, a process of soul-and-spirit is enacted—a process of thought, feeling and will. All that we know is that when the physical and bodily process takes place in space and time, the process of soul and spirit also takes place. But we have no concrete idea of how the one works upon the other. We have psycho-physical parallelism: a psychical process takes its course simultaneously with the bodily process. But we still do not get behind the secret—whose existence is thus expressed—that the two processes run parallel to one another. We gain no notion of how they work on one another. And so it is invariably, when men try to form a conception of the existence of the soul-and-spirit.

In the 19th Century, when the ideas of men were so thoroughly saturated with materialism, even this question could arise:—Where do the souls sojourn in universal space when they have left the body? There were even men who tried to refute spiritualism by proving that when so and so many men are dying and so and so many are already dead, there can be no room in the whole world of space for all these souls to find a place of abode! This absurd line of thought actually arose more than once during the 19th Century. People said, Man cannot be immortal, for all the spaces of the world would already have been filled with their immortal souls.

All these things indicate what difficulties arise when we seek the relation between the bodily and physical, clearly spread out as it is in space, and the soul and spirit which we cannot in the first place assign to the spatial universe.

Things have gradually come to this pass; our purely intellectualistic thinking has placed the bodily-physical and the soul-and-spirit sharply and crudely side by side. For the modern consciousness they stand side by side, without any intermediary. Nor is there any possibility of finding a relation on the lines along which people think of them to-day. The man of to-day conceives the spatial and physical in such a way that the soul has no conceivable place in it. Again, he is driven to conceive the soul-qualities so sharply separated from the physical and bodily, that the absolutely unspatial soul-and-spirit, as he conceives it, cannot possibly impinge at any point upon the physical. ...

This sharp contrast and division was however only developed in the course of time. We must now begin again from an altogether different angle of approach, which is only made possible once more by taking our start from what anthroposophical spiritual science has to say.

In the first place, anthroposophical science must consider the nature of the will. To begin with, straightforward observation shews undoubtedly that the will of man follows his movements everywhere. Moreover, the movements man accomplishes externally in space when he moves about, and those too which take place within him in the fulfilment of his everyday functions of life, in a word, all the activities of man in the physical world-are in the three dimensions of space. Hence the will must also go everywhere, wherever the three dimensions extend. Of this there can be no doubt.

Thus if we are speaking of the will as of an element of soul-and-spirit, there can be no question but that the will—albeit a thing of soul and spirit—is three-dimensional. It has a three-dimensional configuration.

We cannot but think of it in this way:—When we carry out a movement through our will, the will adapts itself and enters into all the spatial positions which are traced, for example, by the arm and hand. The will goes with it everywhere, wherever the movement of a limb takes place. Thus after all we must speak of the will as of a quality of soul which can assume a three-dimensional configuration.

Now the question is, do all the soul-qualities assume this three-dimensional configuration? Let us pass from the Will to the world of Feeling. To begin with, we can make the same kind of observation. Considering the matter with the ordinary everyday consciousness, man will say to himself, for example: ‘If I am pricked by a needle on the right-hand side of my head, I feel it; if I am pricked on the left-hand side I feel it also.’ In the everyday consciousness he can, therefore, be of opinion that his Feeling is spread out over his whole body. He will then speak of Feeling as having a three-dimensional configuration in the same sense as the Will. But in so doing he gives himself up to an illusion. It is not really so. The fact is, at this point there are certain experiences which every man can have in his own nature, and from these we must take our start today. Our considerations will have to be somewhat subtle, but spiritual science cannot really be understood without subtlety of thought.

Consider for a moment what it is like when you touch your own left hand with your right. You have a perception of yourself thereby. Just as in other cases you perceive an outer object, so do you perceive yourself when you touch your right hand with your left hand-say with the several fingers one by one.

The fact to which I am referring appears still more distinctly when you consider that you have two eyes. To focus an object with both eyes you have to exert your will to some extent. We often do not think of this exertion of the will. It comes out more strongly when you try to focus a very near object. You then endeavour to turn your left eye towards the right and your right eye towards the left. You focus an object by bringing the lines of vision into contact, just as you bring your right and left hands into contact when you touch yourself. From these examples you can see that it is of some importance for man, with respect to his orientation in the world, to bring his left and right into a certain mutual relation. By the contact of the hands or the crossing of the lines of vision we can thus become aware of an underlying fact which is of deep significance. Though the everyday consciousness does not generally go farther than this, it is possible to continue very much farther along this line of study.

Suppose we are pricked by a needle on the right-hand side of our body. We feel the prick. But we cannot really say so simply ‘where’ we feel the prick-meaning by ‘where’ some portion of the surface of our body. For unless the several members of our organism stood in a living mutual relationship to one-another,—unless they were working one upon the other—our human nature, body and soul together, would not be what it is. Even when our body is pricked, let us say, on the right-hand side, there is always a connection established from the right-hand side to the central plane of symmetry. For any feeling or sensation to be brought about, the left half of the body must always enter into relation with the right.

It is comparatively easy to realise—if this be the plane of symmetry, seen from in front—that when the right hand touches the left the mutual feeling of the two hands is brought about in the plane of symmetry. It is comparatively easy to speak of the crossing of the lines of vision from the two eyes. But there is always a connecting line in every case—whenever we are pricked, for example, on the right-hand side;—the left half of the body crosses with the connecting line from the right. Without this process, the sensation would never come about. In all the surging waves of feeling and sensation, the fact that we have a right and a left half of the body—the fact that we are built symmetrically—plays an immense part. We always relate to the left-hand side what happens to us on the right. In a vague groping way something reaches over in us from the left, to cross with what is flowing from the right.

Only so does Feeling come about. Feeling never comes about in space, but only in the plane. Thus the world of Feeling is in reality spread out, not three-dimensionally, but two-dimensionally. Man experiences it only in the plane which as a plane of section would divide him into two symmetrical halves.

The life of Feeling is really like a painting on a canvas—but we are painting it not only from the one side but from both. Imagine that I here erect a canvas, which I paint from right to left and from left to right, and observe the interweaving of what I have painted from the one side and the other. The picture is only in two dimensions. Everything three-dimensionalis projected, so to speak, into the two dimensions.

You can arrive at the same idea in a somewhat different way. Suppose you were able to project on to a flat surface shadow-pictures of objects on the right-hand side and on the left. On the flat expanded wall you then have shadows of left- and right-hand objects. So it is with our world of Feeling. It is two-dimensional, not three-dimensional. Man is a painter working from two sides. He does not simply feel his way into space. Through his three-dimensional will he projects on to a plane in shadow-forms, in pictures, the influences of feeling which meet him in the world of space. In his life of feeling, man lives in a picture drawn two-dimensionally through his body-only it is for ever being painted from both sides. Thus if we would seek the transition from Will to Feeling in ourselves—as human beings in the life of soul—we must pass from the three-dimensional into the two-dimensional.

But this will already give you a different spatial relationship of the soul-quality which is expressed in feeling, than if you merely say of the soul-life that it is unspatial. The plane has two dimensions, but it has no ‘space.’ Take any plane in the outer world—the blackboard for example. In reality it is a solid body, it has a certain thickness. But an actual plane, though it is in space, is not in itself spatial. ‘Space’ must always be of three dimensions; and only our Will enters into this three-dimensional space. Feeling does not enter into the three dimensions of space. Feeling is two-dimensional. Nevertheless it has its own relations to space, just as a shadow-picture has. In saying this, I am drawing your attention at the same time to a fact of very great importance, which is not at all easy to penetrate with clear perception, because with his everyday consciousness man has little inclination as a rule to perceive the peculiar nature of his world of Feeling.

The fact is that the world of Feeling is always permeated by the Will. Think only for a moment of this: If you really receive on the right-hand side of your body the prick or sting of which we spoke just now, you do not immediately sever the Feeling from the Will. You will certainly not patiently receive the sting. Quite apart from the fact that you will probably reach out in a very tangible way, striking out pretty intensely with your Will into the three dimensions of space ; inwardly too there will be a defensive movement which does not appear externally but shews itself in all manner of delicate disturbances of the blood and the breathing. The defensive movement which we make, when, stung by a gnat, we reach out with our hand, is only the crudest and most external aspect. Of the finer aspect—the inner defensive movement which we perform in the motion of the blood and breathing and many another inward process—we are generally unaware. Hence we do not distinguish what the Will contributes from the content of Feeling as such.

The real content of Feeling is in fact far too shy, far too elusive. We can only get at it by very careful meditation. If however you can exclude, from the Feeling as such, all that belongs to the Will, then as it were you shrink together from the right and left and you become the plane in the middle. And when you are the central plane, and like a conscious painter you record your inner experiences on this plane, then you begin to understand why the real world of Feeling is so very different from our ordinary, everyday experience.

We can indeed experience this plane-quality, this surface-quality of Feeling. But it needs to be experienced meditatively. We must feel all the shadow-likeness of our feelings as against the robust outer experiences in three-dimensional space. We must first prepare ourselves for this experience, but if we do so we can really have it, and then we gradually come near the truth that Feeling takes its course in two dimensions.

How shall we characterise Thinking? To begin with we must admit with open and unbiased mind how impossible it is to speak of a thought as if it were in space. A thought is really nowhere there in space. Nevertheless the thought must have some relation to space, for undoubtedly the brain—if not the instrument—is at least the foundation of our Thinking. Without the brain we cannot think. Thus our Thinking takes its course in connection with the activity of the brain. If Thinking had nothing to do with space, we should get the following curious result: If you were able to think well as a child of 12, your head having now grown beyond the position in which it was when you were 12 years old, you would have grown out of your Thinking. But that is not the case. As we grow up, we do not leave our Thinking behind. The very fact of growth will serve to indicate that even with our Thinking we are somehow in the world of Space.

The fact is this. Just as we can separate out the world of Feeling—the world of inner experience of our Feelings—by learning gradually to perceive our plane of symmetry, so too we can learn to experience our Thinking meditatively, as something that only has extension upward and downward. Thinking is one-dimensional. It takes its course in man in the line.

In a word, we must say: The Will takes on a three-dimensional configuration, the Feeling a two-dimensional and the Thinking a one-dimensional configuration.

When we make these inner differentiations of space, we do not arrive at the same hard-and-fast transition as the mere intellect. We are led to perceive a gradual transition. The mere intellect says : The physical is three-dimensional, spatially extended. The soul-and-Spirit has no extension at all. From this point of view no relationship can be discovered between them. For it goes without saying, there is no relationship between that which has extension and that which has none. But when once we perceive that the Will has a three-dimensional configuration, then indeed we find that the Will pours itself out everywhere into the three-dimensional world. And again, when once we know that Feeling has a two-dimensional configuration, then we must pass from the three dimensions to the two, and as we do so we are led to something which still has a relationship to space, though it is no longer spatial in itself. For the mere plane—the two-dimensional—is not spatial, but the two dimensions are there in space; they are not entirely apart from space. Lastly, when we pass from Feeling to Thinking we pass from the two dimensions to the one. Thus we still do not go right out of space. We pass over gradually from the spatial to the unspatial.

As I have often said, it is the tragedy of materialism that it fails to understand the material-the material even in its three-dimensional extension. Materialism imagines that it understands the material, substantial world, but that is precisely what it does not understand. Many things of real historic importance emerged in the 19th century, which still present an unsolved riddle to the ordinary consciousness. Think only of the great impression which Schopenhauer's philosophic system, The World as Will and Idea, made on so many thinking people. There is something unreal in the Idea, says Schopenhauer. The Will alone has reality. Why did Schopenhauer arrive at the idea that the world only consists of Will? Because even he was infected with materialism. Into the world in which matter is extended three-dimensionally, only the Will pours itself out. To place the Feelings too into this world, we must look for the relationship which obtains between the three-dimensional object and the two-dimensional image on the screen. Whatever we experience in our Feelings is a shadow-picture of something in which our Will too is living in its three-dimensional configuration. And what we experience in our Thinking consists of one-dimensional configurations. Only when we go right out of the dimensions—that is to say, when we pass to the dimensionless point,—only then do we arrive at our I or Ego. Our Ego has no extension at all. It is purely point-like, ‘punctual.’

So we may say, we pass from the three-dimensional to the two-dimensional, to the one-dimensional and to the ‘punctual.’ So long as we remain within the three-dimensional, there is our Will in the three dimensions. Our Feeling and our Thinking are also there within them, only they are not extended three-dimensionally. If we leave out the third dimension and come down to the two dimensions, we only have the shadow of outward existence, but in the shadow is extended that element of soul-and-spirit which lives in our Feeling. We are already getting more away from space. Then, when we go on to Thinking, we come away from space still more. And lastly when we pass on to the Ego, we go right out of space.

Thus we are led out of space, as it were piece by piece. Now we see that it is meaningless merely to speak of the contrast between the soul-and-spirit, and the physical and bodily. It is meaningless, for if we wish to discover the relation between the soul-and-spirit and the physical and bodily, we must ask: How are things which are extended in three-dimensional space (our own body, for example) related to the soul as a being of Will? How is the bodily and physical in man related to the soul as a being of Feeling? The bodily and physical is related to the soul as a being of Will in such a way that one would say, it is saturated by the Will on all sides, in all dimensions, just like the sponge is saturated by water. Again, the bodily and physical is related to the Feeling, like objects whose shadows are thrown upon the screen. And when we pass from Feeling to the quality of Thought, then we must indeed become strange painters—for we must paint on to a line what is otherwise existing in the two dimensions of the picture.

Ask yourselves the following question. (It will indeed make some demands on your imagination.) Suppose that you are standing face to face with the ‘Last Supper’ by Leonardo da Vinci. You have it before you in the surface. The whole thing is two-dimensional—for we need not take into account the thickness of the colours. The picture which you have before you is essentially two-dimensional.

But now imagine to yourselves a line, drawn through the middle from top to bottom of the picture. This line shall represent a one-dimensional being. Imagine that this one-dimensional being has the peculiar quality that Judas, let us say, is not indifferent to him. He feels Judas in a certain way. He feels him more where Judas inclines his head in that direction, and where Judas turns away he feels him less. Likewise this one-dimensional being feels all the other figures. He senses them differently according as the one figure is in blue and the other in a yellow colour. He feels all that is there, to the left and to the right of him. All that is present in the picture is livingly felt by this one-dimensional being.

Such in reality is our Thinking within us. Our Thinking is a one-dimensional being of this kind, and only partakes in the life of the remainder of our human being inasmuch as it is related to the picture which divides us into the left- and right-hand man. Via this two-dimensional picture, our Thinking stands in relation to the world of Will with its threefold configuration.

If we wish to gain an idea of our being of soul-and-spirit (to begin with without the Ego; only in so far as it is willing, feeling and thinking) we must conceive it not as a mere nebulous cloud. We must regard the soul and spirit, as it were diagramatically. There it appears, to begin with, as a cloud, but that is only the being of Will. It has the constant tendency to become pressed together; thereby it becomes a being of Feeling. First we see a cloud of light. Then we see the cloud of light creating itself in the centre as a plane, whereby it feels itself. And the plane in turn strives to become a line. We must conceive this constant process—cloud, plane and line as an inwardly living form. It constantly tends to be a cloud, and then to squeeze together from the cloud into the plane, and then to elongate into the line. Imagine the plane that becomes a line and then a plane again and then again a cloud in three dimensions. Cloud, plane line; line, plane, cloud, and so on. Only so can you imagine graphically what your soul is in its inner being, its inner nature and essence. An idea that remains at rest will not suffice. No idea that remains at rest within itself can reproduce the essence of the soul. You need an idea with an inner activity of its own. The soul itself, as it conceives itself, plays with the dimension of space. Letting the third dimension vanish, it loses the Will. Letting the second dimension vanish, it loses the Feeling. And the Thinking is only lost when we let the first dimension vanish. Then we arrive at the point, and then only do we pass over to the Ego.

Hence all the difficulty in gaining a knowledge of the soul. People are accustomed only to form spatial ideas. Hence they would like to have spatial ideas—however diluted—of the soul's nature. But in this form they only have the element of Will.

Unless we make our thinking inwardly alive and mobile we can reach no conception of the soul-and-spirit. If we wish to conceive a quality of soul-and-spirit, and our conception is the same in two successive instants, we shall at most have conceived a quality of Will. We must not conceive the soul-and-spirit in the same form in two successive moments. We must become alive and mobile-not by moving from one point in space to another, but rather by passing from one dimension to another. This is difficult for the modern consciousness. Hence even the most well-meaning people—well-meaning for the conception of spiritual things—have tried to escape from Space by transcending the three dimensions. They come to a fourth dimension. They pass from the three-dimensional to the four-dimensional. So long as we remain within the mathematical domain, the thoughts which we arrive at in this way are quite in order. It is all perfectly correct. But it is no longer correct when we relate it to the reality. For the peculiar thing is, that when we think the fourth dimension in its reality, it eliminates the third. Through the fourth dimension the third dimension vanishes. Moreover, through the fifth dimension the second vanishes, and through the sixth the first vanishes, and we arrive at length at the point.

When we pass in reality from the third to the fourth dimension, we come into the Spiritual. We eliminate the dimensions one by one, we do not add them, and in this way we enter more and more into the Spiritual.

Through such ideas we gain a deeper insight too into the human form and figure. For a more artistic way of feeling is it not rather crude how we generally observe a human being, as he places himself with his three dimensions into the world? That after all is not the only thing. Even in ordinary life we have a feeling for the essential symmetry between the left and right halves of the body. And when we thus comprise the human being in his central plane, we are already led beyond the three dimensions. We pass into the plane itself. And only thereafter do we gain a clear conception of the one dimension in which he grows. Artistically we do already make use of this transition, from three to two and on to one dimension. If we cultivated more intensely this artistic perception of the human form, we should find more easily the transition to the soul's life. For you would never be able to feel a being, unsymmetrically formed, as a being of united and harmonious Feeling.

Look at the star-fish. It has not this symmetrical form. It has five rays. Of course you can pass it by without any inner feeling. But if you perceive it feelingly, you could never say that the star-fish has a united feeling-life. The star-fish cannot possibly relate a right-hand to a left-hand side, or grasp a right-hand with a left-hand member. The star-fish must continually relate the one ray to one or two or three, or even to all four remaining rays. What we know as Feeling cannot live in the star-fish at all.

I beg you to follow me along this intimate line of thought. What we know as Feeling comes from the right and from the left, and finds itself at rest in the middle. We go through the world by placing ourselves with our Feeling restfully into the world. The star-fish cannot do so. Whatever the star-fish has, as influence of the world upon itself, it cannot relate it symmetrically to another side. It can only relate it to one, or two, or to the third or fourth ray. But the first influence will always be more powerful. Thus the star-fish has no Feeling-life at rest within itself. When, as it were, it turns its attention to the one side, then by the whole arrangement of its form it will experience: ‘You are raying out in that direction, thither you are sending forth a ray.’ The star-fish has no restfulness in feeling. It has the feeling of shooting forth out of itself. It feels itself as raying forth in the world.

If you develop your feelings in a more intimate way, you will be able to experience this even as you contemplate the star-fish. Observing the end-point of any one ray and relating it to the creature as a whole, in your imagination the star-fish will begin to move in the direction of this ray, as it were a streaming, wandering light. And so it is with all the other animals which are not symmetrically built, which have no real access of symmetry.

If man would only enter into this more intimate way of Feeling—instead of giving himself up entirely to the intellectual, merely because in the course of time he had to become an intellectual being,—then indeed he would find his way far more intimately into the world.

It is so also in a certain sense for the plant world, and for all things that surround us. True self-knowledge takes us ever farther and farther into the inwardness of things.

The exercises I have described for attaining inspiration are actually only preliminary exercises for further supersensible cognition. Through them a person is indeed able to view the course of his life in the way I have characterized it; he is able to see the etheric world of facts unfolding in the expanse of earth existence behind man's thinking, feeling and willing. By discarding the picture images achieved in meditation, or in the consciousness following meditation, he also becomes acquainted through this empty consciousness with the etheric substance of the cosmos and the manifestations of the spiritual beings who rule there. When, however, a person becomes familiar in this way with human soul life, the astral organization of man, he realizes first of all how much the physical organism of man owes to hereditary development, that is to say what are the persistent factors in his physical body that have been inherited from his ancestors. Man also gains a glimpse of how the cosmos is active within the etheric organism, and he sees as a consequence what is not subject to heredity but breaks away from it and is responsible for man's individuality. He sees what it is that within his etheric and astral organizations sets him free from his inheritance and ancestors who gave him his physical body.

It is extremely important to distinguish clearly in this way between what is passed on in the continuing stream of physical inheritance from ancestors to descendants, and what, by contrast, is given to individual man by the etheric, cosmic world, for it is this whereby he becomes personalized and individualized and frees himself from his inherited characteristics. It is especially important in education, in pedagogy, to see clearly into these distinctions. Precisely such knowledge as is indicated here can provide teachers with some fundamental principles. I may perhaps refer here to the booklet, which contains a summary by Albert Steffen of the Pedagogical Course that I gave here in Dornach at Christmas a year ago, also to what is contained in the last issue of the English magazine Anthroposophy, (July/August), which contains interesting educational material.

The inspired knowledge developed by means of the exercises I have described only acquaints man with the astral organism within the framework of earth life. He learns to know what he is as a soul-spiritual being developing from birth to the present time. But this insight does not yet enable him to say that his soul-spiritual being begins with earthly life and ends with it. He arrives at the soul-spiritual element in his earth life but does not come so far as to perceive this soul-spiritual element as something eternal, as the eternal core of man's being. For that it is necessary to continue and broaden the exercises for eliminating the meditative pictures from consciousness so much that in doing so the soul becomes ever stronger and more energetic. Progress here really consists in nothing else but continued energetic training. One must struggle again and again with all the strength one can muster to remove from consciousness the pictures produced or created by imagination, so that it becomes empty. Gradually then, through practicing the elimination of the images, the soul's strength increases so much that finally it is powerful enough so that one is able to obliterate the overall picture of the course of one's life since birth, as it has been brought before the soul through imagination.

Mark well, it is possible to continue the exercises for eliminating a content of soul and producing empty consciousness, carrying them so far that the soul becomes strong enough to leave out the course of its own life. At the moment, when one is strong enough to do this, one lives in a consciousness that no longer has before it the physical organism, nor the etheric organism; moreover, one no longer confronts anything of the world absorbed through the physical and etheric organisms. For this consciousness, the sense world with all its sense impressions is no longer present, neither is the sum of all the etheric happenings in the cosmos that one had first gained through imaginative cognition. Everything of this kind has been removed. Thereby a higher degree of inspiration is brought about within the human soul.

What appears then by means of this higher level of inspiration is the condition of soul as it existed in a soul-spiritual world before it descended into a human physical organism through conception, embryonic life and birth. In this way one attains a perception of the soul's pre-earthly existence. One looks into those worlds where the soul existed before it received on earth, I may say, the first atom of physical substance transmitted to it with conception. One looks back into the development of the soul in the soul-spiritual world and learns to know its pre-existent life. Through this experience, a person has grasped one side of the eternal nature of the human soul's essence. When he has done that, he has, in fact, recognized for the first time the true nature of the human ego, of spirit man. This latter is accessible only to this form of inspiration that is capable of disregarding not only its own physical body and its impressions, but also its own etheric body and the latter's impressions as manifested in the course of life.

When one has advanced to this knowledge of the human soul as it existed before birth in its pure soul-spiritual existence, then one can also gain a conception of what thinking, what the forming of concepts really is, as we human beings experience it in the ordinary consciousness of our earth life. Even with the most careful self-examination of which the soul is capable we cannot, by using only the capacities and powers of our ordinary consciousness, grasp the real nature of thinking and the formation of ideas.

If now I am to make clear how the real nature of man's earthly concepts appears to inspired consciousness, I must make use of a picture, but this picture expresses complete reality. Bring to mind a human corpse; it still has the form that the man had in life. All the organs are still shaped the way they were when the person was alive. Even so, in looking at the corpse, we must admit that it is only the remains of what the living man was. When we now make a study of its essential nature, we must conclude that the corpse as it now lies before us can have no original, independent reality. It cannot be thought of as something that comes into being in the same condition as it is as a corpse; it can exist only as the remains of a living organism. The living organism must have been there first. The forms of the corpse, its members, point not only to the corpse itself but to what brought it into being. Anyone who rightly views a corpse in the context of life is directed by it to the living man who produced it. Nature, to which we surrender the corpse, can only destroy it; it cannot build it up as such. If we wish to see the upbuilding forces in the corpse, we must look upon the living man.

On another level, in a similar way, there is revealed to inspired consciousness the essential nature of the thinking or mental picturing that we have in ordinary consciousness. It is actually a corpse; at least, it is something which during earthly life is continually passing over into the corpse-like element of soul. Living thought was present before man came into earth-existence, but instead was a soul-spiritual being in the soul-spiritual world. There, this thinking and conceiving were something quite different; they were living elements within spiritual activities. What we have as our ordinary power of thinking is a remnant of that living spiritual entity that we were before we descended to the earth. It has remained just as a corpse remains of the living physical man. As we are referred back to the living man when we see a corpse, so, if we now look through inspired knowledge at the dying or already dead thoughts or concepts of the soul, we realize that we must treat this thinking as a corpse of the true “thought being,” we see how we must trace this earthly thinking back to a supersensible, life-filled thinking.

It is this that also reveals qualitatively the relationship of a part of our soul life to our purely soul-spiritual existence before birth. Through this, we really learn to know what our ordinary concepts and thinking signify, if we trace them back to their living nature, which is to be found nowhere within earth existence. On earth, it is only expressed in a reflection. This reflection is our ordinary thinking and forming of ideas. Therefore, the abstract character of this ordinary thinking is fundamentally remote from reality, as a corpse is remote from the true human reality. When we speak of the abstractness, of the merely intellectual aspect of thinking, we vaguely feel that the way it appears in ordinary consciousness is not what it should be, that it has its source in something else, which is its true nature. This is what is so very important, namely, that a true knowledge is able, not only in general phrases but in concrete pictures, to relate what man experiences here in his physical body to the eternal core of his being, as it was just done with the thinking and conceiving of ordinary consciousness. Then only will the significance of imagination and inspiration be seen in the right light. For then we comprehend that the dead or dying thinking is basically brought to life again through the exercises undertaken to achieve inspiration; brought to life within physical earth-existence. To acquire inspired knowledge is fundamentally to bring dying thoughts to life again.

Thereby we are not completely transposed into prenatal existence, but rather, through the soul's perception, we gain a true picture of this prenatal existence, of which we know that it did not originate here on earth but that it radiates out of a pre-earthly human existence into man's existence here on earth. We recognize through the picture's nature that it is cognitive evidence of the state of the human soul in pre-earthly existence.

What significance this has for philosophical knowledge will be discussed next.

Just as we are in a position in this way to investigate the true nature of our ordinary thinking, we can also, by means of the supersensible cognition referred to here, bring into view the essential being concealed behind the will. But for this, not only is the higher cognition of inspiration required, but also that of intuition which I described yesterday, when I said that in order to develop it, certain exercises of the will are necessary. If man carries these out, he becomes capable of releasing his own soul-spiritual nature from his physical as well as his etheric organism. He carries it out into the spiritual world itself. It is the ego and the astral organization, his own being, that he carries into the spiritual world. In this way, he learns to know what it signifies to live outside his physical and etheric organisms. He comes to perceive the state the human soul finds itself in when it has cast these aside. But that means nothing less than gaining a preview of what happens to man when he goes through death.

Through death, the physical and etheric organisms are cast off. Thus, laid aside, they can no longer form the covering for man as they have done during earth life. What happens then to the actual core of man's being is something one learns through a preview in intuitive knowledge, when, with one's spirit being, one is outside in the world of spiritual beings instead of within one's physical body. Man actually finds himself in such a condition. Through intuitive knowledge he is in a position to be within other spiritual beings, as otherwise here in earth life he is within his physical and etheric bodies. What he receives through intuition is an experience in a picture of what he has to go through when he passes through the event of death. Only in this way is it possible to gain actual insight into what underlies the idea of the immortal human soul. This human soul—inspired knowledge already teaches this—is on the one side unborn. On the other side, it is undying. Intuition teaches this.

Having thus come to know the true nature of the eternal core of man's being—insofar as it is to lead a life after physical death—one also learns to perceive what lies behind human will. We have just characterized what lies behind human thinking; that is discernible through inspiration. What is concealed behind human willing becomes perceptible, if, through exercises of the will, one brings about intuition. Then the will reveals itself so as to show that behind it something quite different is concealed, of which the will of ordinary consciousness is merely the reflection. It becomes evident that behind willing there is something that in a certain sense is a younger member of the human soul. If we speak of the thinking and forming of ideas as of something that is dying, indeed as something that is already dead, and we view it as the older part of the human soul, then, by contrast, we must speak of willing as the younger part. We can say that willing, that is, the actual soul element behind the will, is related to thinking as a young child is to an old man, except that in man's constitution old age comes after childhood, while in the soul the two exist side by side. The soul bears continually in itself both its old age and its youth—in fact, both its death and its birth.

In contrast to such a knowledge of the soul based on inspiration and intuition, which is quite definite, what one calls philosophy today is something extremely abstract, for this simply describes thinking and willing. Actual knowledge of the soul, on the other hand, reveals that when willing turns old it becomes thinking, and thinking that has become old—indeed that has died—has developed out of will. Thus, one truly becomes acquainted with this life of the soul; one learns to perceive the fact that what is revealed in this earth life as thinking was willing in an earlier earth life, and what is now willing, something still young in the soul, will become thinking in the following earth life.

So, in this way one learns to see into the soul and for the first time to know it as it really is. The will part of the human soul is revealed as something that leads an embryonic life. When we pass over into the spiritual world with what we harbor within ourselves as willing, we have a young soul, which by its own character teaches us that it is actually a child. Even as little as we can assume that a child does not grow on into old age unless it is sick, so little can we assume that what we perceive as a young soul—initiation reveals this to us—dissolves at death, for it has only just reached its embryonic life. Through intuition we learn to know how, in the moment of death, it goes forth into the spiritual world.

That means actually perceiving the eternal core of man's being according to its unbornness and its immortality. By contrast, modern philosophy works only with ideas taken from ordinary consciousness. But what does that mean? As we can see from what has been said, it means that these ideas are dead soul entities.

When philosophy, working with the ideas of ordinary consciousness, wants to consider the thinking part of the soul correctly in order to reach results, it will say, if it is sufficiently free of prejudice to investigate what is actually present in the thinking of ordinary consciousness, that thought cannot of itself explain its own existence, just as it must be said of a corpse that it cannot come from a corpse but must have come from something else. Physiology indicates this through observation. Philosophy, from what comes to light here out of intuition, should draw the conclusion that just because ordinary thinking and the forming of ideas have a dying character it is permitted to deduce from this fact that something else existed earlier. What inspiration discovers through contemplation, philosophy can find through logical conclusions, through dialectics, that is, through an indirect kind of proof.

What would philosophy have to do then if it were to choose to remain within ordinary consciousness? It would have to say, “If I will not lift myself up to some kind of supersensible knowledge I must at least analyze the facts of my ordinary consciousness.” If it does so without prejudice it fords that the thinking and ideas of ordinary consciousness are corpse-like in character. It would have to say, “Because that is something that does not explain its own nature out of itself, I may conclude that its real nature comes earlier.” Of course, this requires an unbiased attitude in analyzing the soul so that thinking may be recognized as possessing something corpse-like. But this impartial attitude is possible. For only a biased attitude discerns something alive in the thinking of ordinary consciousness. Freedom from bias reveals this thinking as something that in its very nature has withered away. This is why I said in the previous lecture that it is quite feasible to grasp the content of natural science with this deadened thinking. That is one side of the matter.

Intellectualized philosophy therefore can only come indirectly to a knowledge of man's eternal essence and indeed, only through recognizing what, in regard to earth life, must be viewed as preceding it. If then such a philosophy not only inquires into thinking, if it desires not only to be intellectual but also includes in its research the inner experience of the will and the other soul forces, which, in the cosmic scheme of things, are younger than thinking, then it can succeed in picturing to itself the kind of interplay through which thinking is linked to willing. Then it can come on one hand to the logical deduction: dying thinking is connected to pre-earthly soul existence. Even though philosophy cannot look upon such an existence and cannot perceive its nature, it can infer that something, although inaccessible and unknown, does exist.

When, on the other hand, philosophy centers its attention on willing or the feelings, and experiences the interplay between thinking and feeling, it will eventually discover not only something dying but incipient in willing. This you can find even in Bergson's philosophy, if you put what he says impartially into the appropriate words. You notice the impulse he himself feels in the way he speaks, the way he philosophizes, and sensing this impulse he attains an awareness of the eternal core of the human soul. But since Bergson refuses to take supersensible knowledge into consideration, he reaches only a knowledge of the soul's essence insofar as it reveals itself in earthly life. Out of his philosophy he cannot derive convincing indications of unbornness and immortality. Yet, on one side, he does characterize thinking—although he gives it a different name—as something old which superimposes itself over sense perceptions as a corpse-like element. On the other side he feels—because of the living way in which he characterizes it—the incipient, “embryonic” quality of the will. He can vividly enter into this and he senses that something eternal is contained within. Nevertheless, in this manner he arrives only at the characteristic of the soul-spiritual core of man in earth life, not at anything beyond.

Thus, we can say that, if they are unbiased, all philosophies using ideas based merely on ordinary consciousness can, through analyzing thought and will, come indirectly to the conclusion that the soul is a being unborn and immortal, but they cannot come to a direct perception of it. This direct perception, which would bring the philosophies of ideas to fulfillment, this perception of the real, eternal being of the soul, can be achieved only through imagination, inspiration and intuition as has been described here. As a consequence, although the subject is still discussed as part of philosophy, it remains true that anything really substantial concerning the soul's eternal nature must rely only on tradition that rests upon the dreamlike knowledge of the past. Philosophers often do not know this and believe that they produce it out of themselves. This content can be permeated by logic and dialectic. But a true renewal of philosophical life depends on the acknowledgment by our present spiritual culture of the existence of a fully conscious imagination, a fully conscious inspiration and a fully conscious intuition, and not only acknowledging the methods for attaining these capacities but putting their results to use in philosophical life. I will try to explain in the next two parts of my lecture how this relates to cosmology and religion.

When you consider that only through a higher form of inspiration can one arrive at the perception of the eternal core of man's being and how it lives in extra-terrestrial existence, then you will say that only through this higher inspiration and through initiation (as I have described it) can the human being really know himself. What plays into his own being out of the cosmos, he can know only through higher inspiration and intuition. Since this is the case, a genuine cosmology, that is, a picture of the cosmos that includes man's total being, can arise only on the level of inspired and intuitive perception. Only then does man gain insight into what is also working in his physical and etheric bodies during earth life.

In these organisms, the soul-spiritual nature of man is not merely hidden; during earth existence, it is actually transformed, metamorphosed in regard to waking, everyday life. As little as a root can reflect the exact form of the plant, so little can an observation of man's physical and etheric organisms reveal the eternal part of him. This is attained only when we look into what lives in man before birth and after death. Only then are we able to relate man's true being, which must be observed outside of earth existence, to the cosmos. This is why modern culture had no way of arriving at a cosmology that includes man during the period when it rejected any kind of clairvoyance. This I have indicated before, but it becomes especially clear from what I have described today. Nevertheless, in earlier times, even as late as the beginning of the last century, but chiefly at the end of the eighteenth century, a “rational cosmology,” as it was called, was developed from the philosophical direction as a part of philosophy.

This rational cosmology, which was supposed to be a part of philosophy, was also formed by philosophers with the aid of nothing but ordinary consciousness. But, if, with ordinary philosophy, one already had the above described difficulties in penetrating to the true nature of the soul, you will understand that it is quite impossible to gain a real content for a cosmology that includes man if one merely wants to stay within the ideas of ordinary consciousness. The contents of rational cosmology that the philosophers have developed even up to recent times, lived therefore in fact on the traditional cosmological ideas attained by humanity when a dreamlike clairvoyance still existed. These ideas can be renewed only by means of what has been described here as exact clairvoyance. In this sphere also, philosophers have not known that they actually borrowed from the old cosmology. Certain ideas occurred to them. They absorbed them from the history of cosmology and believed they had produced them out of themselves. But what they brought forth were merely logical connections, by means of which they assembled the old ideas and produced a new system. In such a way cosmologies arose in earlier times as a part of philosophy. But since one no longer had a living relationship to what one thus absorbed as ideas taken over from ancient clairvoyance, the ideas of the cosmologies became more and more abstract.

Just take a look at the chapters on cosmology in the philosophical books of earlier times and you will find how abstract and basically empty those ideas are that were developed on the subjects of the origin and end of the world, and so on. It is correct to say that they were all brought across from ancient times when they were alive, because man had a living relationship to what these ideas expressed. Gradually they had become unsubstantial and abstract, and people outlined only superficially what a cosmology should contain, a cosmology which extends not only to outer nature but can encompass the whole being of man, reaching to the soul-spiritual nature of the cosmos. In this connection, the extraordinary brilliant Emile Boutroux¹ gave significant indications of how to arrive at a cosmology.

But since he also wanted to build only upon what ordinary consciousness could encompass, he too only arrived at an abstract cosmology.

Thus, cosmologies became more and more devoid of real content, becoming merely a sum of abstract ideas and characteristics. No wonder then that gradually this rational cosmology was discredited. The natural scientists appeared who could investigate nature in the manner that led in recent times to so many scientific triumphs. They could formulate natural laws, postulating an inner ordering of nature from observation and experiment, and from this they put together a naturalistic cosmology. What was thus assembled from the ideas concerning outer nature as a naturalistic cosmology, had, to be sure, a content, the external sensory content. In the face of this, the empty, rational cosmology constructed by the philosophers could not maintain itself. It fell into disrepute and was gradually abandoned. One therefore no longer speaks of a rational cosmology, arrived at merely by logic; one is satisfied now with naturalistic cosmology, which, however, does not encompass man. One can say, then, that it is cosmology in particular that teaches, more than ordinary philosophy, how one must have recourse again to imagination, inspiration and intuition.

Philosophy can at least observe the human soul, and, through unbiased observation of thinking whose dying nature refers to something other than its present state, it discovers that something lies outside all human existence on earth that includes man inwardly; in the same way, philosophy can point beyond death. Therefore, out of conclusions drawn from the soul's rich life of thinking, feeling and will, philosophy can at least make its abstractions rich and varied. This is still possible. But cosmology as a spiritual science can only be established if it is given its content also from spiritual perception. Here one can no longer arrive at a content by deduction. To attain a content, one must borrow it from the old clairvoyant perceptions, as was the case in the ideas adopted from tradition, or one must attain it again by a new method such as has now been presented.

If, therefore, philosophy is still in a position to carry on in accordance with logic, cosmology can no longer do so. As a rational cosmology based only on ordinary consciousness, it has therefore lost its content and with it its standing. If we wish to advance beyond a naturalistic cosmology to a new one that embraces man's totality, we must learn to perceive with the aid of inspiration and intuition that element in man in which the spiritual cosmos is reflected. In other words, cosmology even more than philosophy is dependent upon the acknowledgement by modern culture of the methods employed by spiritual science for attaining fully conscious imagination, inspiration and intuition—and not only acknowledging them but making use of their results to construct with their aid a genuinely real cosmology. What can be said concerning religion from this standpoint will be described in conclusion.

If our religious life is to be founded on knowledge the experience of the spiritual human being among other spirit beings must be brought back to earth and described. In these experiences we are dealing with something that is entirely unlike life on earth; it is utterly different. In them man stands wholly outside this life; therefore, these experiences can only be undergone by those human powers that are entirely independent of his physical and etheric organisms and for this reason certainly cannot lie within ordinary consciousness. Only when this ordinary consciousness advances and develops clairvoyant capacities can it give descriptions of those experiences that a human being has in the purely spiritual world. Therefore, a “rational theology,” a theology that wants to rely upon ordinary consciousness, is in an even worse position than a “rational cosmology.”

Rational cosmology still possesses something, after all, that at least sheds a certain amount of light on man's earthly existence. The reason for this is that in a round-about way, to be sure, the form and life of physical and etheric man are to an extent brought about by spiritual beings. But the experiences that the human being has in the purely spiritual worlds and which exact intuition gets to know, can in no way be discovered with the ordinary consciousness, as is the case of philosophy. They cannot even be guessed at. Today, when people want to arrive at all human knowledge by means of ordinary consciousness, these experiences can only be adopted—this is even more true than in the case of cosmological ideas—from ancient traditions dating from those times when men found their way in dreamlike clairvoyance into the spiritual worlds and carried across into the earthly world what they experienced.

If someone fancies that he could state something about man's experiences in the divine world in the form of ideas based only on ordinary consciousness, he is very much mistaken. Therefore, theology has come increasingly to a point of forming a kind of historic theology, adopting, even more than does cosmology, merely the old ideas of the kingdom of God acquired in earlier clairvoyant vision. These ideas then are made into a system by logic and dialectic. Men believe that here they have something fundamental and original, whereas it is only a subjective system of those who worked on this theology. It is a product of history, poured at times into new forms. But everything that is of real content is borrowed—by those who want only to draw from ordinary consciousness—from tradition, or from history. But for this reason, the formulations of various philosophers—who in earlier times created a rational cosmology and wanted to create a rational theology as well—were through this procedure discredited more than ever. On the one hand, rational cosmology as against naturalistic cosmology fell into discredit. On the other, in the field of religion, rational theology as against purely historic theology was discredited—the historic theology that renounced pure reality—both the direct formulation of ideas about the spiritual world and the experience of it.

This direct relationship, these living connections with experience in the spiritual world, vanished for more recent humanity when, in the Middle Ages, the question arose of proof for the existence of God. As long as a direct relation to experience of the kingdom of God existed, one did not speak of dialectic or logical proofs for divinity. Such proofs, when they were put forward, were in themselves proof that the living relationship to the kingdom of God had died away. Fundamentally, what Scholastic theology said was correct: ordinary reason is not in a position to make pronouncements about the kingdom of God. It can only elucidate the ideas already there, systematize them. It can contribute only something toward making doctrine readily acceptable.

We can observe how in recent times this incapacity of ordinary consciousness to determine anything about the kingdom of God has given rise to two errors. On the one side are the scientists who want to talk about religion, about God, but feel the incapacity of their ordinary consciousness and so formulate merely a history of religion. A religious content cannot at the present time be obtained in this way. Therefore, the existing, or once existing religions are considered historically. What is in fact considered? It is the religious content once provided by the old dreamlike, intuitive clairvoyance. Or, people consider that aspect of the religious life of the present time that has survived as a residue of the old clairvoyant state. This is then called “History of Religion,” and people do completely without producing any genuinely religious life of their own.

Still other people realize that man's clear day consciousness is powerless to determine anything about experiences in the purely spiritual kingdom of God. Therefore, they turn to the more subconscious regions of the human soul, to the world of feeling, to certain mystical faculties, and speak of an immediate, elemental experience of God. This is quite widespread today. It is just the advocates of this kind of experience who are especially characteristic of the spiritual state of mind at the present time. With all their might they shun the possibility of bringing their awareness of God into clear ideas that are logically formed. They give long explanations as to why this instinctive experience of God which, according to their interpretation, is the true religious experience, cannot be logically proved. They conclude therefore that the idea of expressing any religious content in intellectual form must be abandoned. But it must be said that these proponents of a direct awareness of God are the victims of illusions, because what is experienced in any region of the soul can in fact also be expressed in clear ideas. If we were to follow their example and put forward the theory that the religious content is weakened when it is expressed in clear ideas, this would prove nothing but that we should have abandoned all our truly substantial ideas in favor of a series of dreamed-up notions. It is a characteristic feature of present-day religious life that people rely on something which, as soon as it has to be made clear, at once falls into error.

From this it is quite evident that we can succeed in renewing religious life on a basis of knowledge only if we do not reject a method of cognition that can guide us into having a living experience of the spiritual human being and other spiritual beings. We have special need of this method of cognition precisely so that religious knowledge can be placed on a firm foundation. In the realm of religion, ordinary consciousness can at most systematize perceptions, clarify them, or formulate them into a doctrine, but it cannot find them. Without these perceptions, religion is limited to the traditional acceptance of what is derived from quite different soul conditions of humanity in earlier times. It is therefore limited to what would never satisfy a mind trained in modern science.

Therefore, if we are to base our religion upon knowledge, I must repeat for the third time something that I have already expressed today in regard to other areas of culture, but that must be expressed specifically for each separate area. If, out of the spiritual needs of the present time, religious life is to be renewed and undergo vital stimulation, the spiritual life of our age must acknowledge fully conscious imaginative, inspired, and intuitive cognition. Especially for the religious area must this not only be acknowledged but, for a living religious content, our modern spiritual life must also apply these spiritual-scientific results in appropriate ways.

• 1. Emile Boutroux, 1845-1921; especially in his De la Contingence des Lois de la Nature (Concerning the Contingency of Natural Laws).

A lecture delivered by Rudolf Steiner at Dornach on the 5th of August, 1921. From stenographic notes, unrevised by the lecturer. Lecture 4 of 11 from the volume: Human Evolution, Cosmic Soul, Cosmic Spirit – II The volume of the Complete Edition of the works of Rudolf Steiner containing the original text of the this lecture, among eleven others, is entitled: Menschenwerden, Weltenseele und Wetlgeist. Zweiter Teil. Der Mensch als geistiges Wesen im historischen Werdegang. Der Mensch in seinem Zusammenhang mit dem Kosmos. (No. 206 in the Bibliographical Survey, 1961). Published in Anthroposophic News Sheet 1939, Supplement No. 1

During my recent lectures I have brought forward a few things with the view of explaining the modern life of the spirit and its possibilities of development for the future. I have said that we should observe the events which have taken place in the course of human evolution, events that have led up to a soul-constitution which characterises the modern life of the spirit.

Let us once more bear in mind a few things which characterise this modern life of the spirit. By departing from various standpoints, we have gradually struggled through to the conclusion that the fundamental note of this modern life of the spirit is intellectualism, the intellectual, understanding attitude towards the world and man. This does not contradict the fact that in our times the essential character of a world-conception is sought in the observation and elaboration of external phenomena which can be observed through the senses. This, in particular, will be unfolded in the next few days. We may say that intellectualism, as such, has made its first appearance in the course of human evolution during the time comprised within the 300 years prior to the Mystery of Golgotha, and then it has gradually developed to a height which has not been surpassed during the three centuries subsequent to the Mystery of Golgotha. We may say that in the course of about six centuries, humanity has been trained to take up intellectualism. Intellectualism developed from out a spiritual world-conception, which began to ebb at that time, in the course of those six centuries. External documents (I have already called attention to this fact) hardly enable us to study the ebb of this world-conception, because the spreading of Christianity did its utmost to destroy, with but a few exceptions, every gnostic document.

Within the evolution of human world-conceptions, these gnostic documents represent that particular element which has, on the one hand, taken up something from older traditions, from what existed in Asia, Africa and southern Europe in the form of an ancient wisdom, from what could still be reached in these later times, in accordance with the faculties of human beings who were no longer able to rise to great heights of super-sensible vision. This older form of wisdom, the last echoes of which may still be found in the pre-Socratic philosophers and which contains last, pale gleams of Plato's arguments, this world-conception did not work with intellectual forces; essentially speaking, its contents were obtained through super-sensible vision, even if this was instinctive. At the same time, this super-sensible vision supplied what may be designated as an inner logical system. If we have within us the contents of super-sensible vision, no intellectual elaboration is needed, for the human being already possesses a logical structure through his own nature. Thus we may say that in the course of human evolution intellectualism has, in a certain respect, risen out of Gnosticism. It has risen out of super-sensible, spiritual contents. The spiritual contents have dried up and the intellectual element has remained.

A man with a preeminently leading spirit, who at that time already made use of the intellect (in Plato, this was not evident as yet) and who clearly evinced that the older form of spirituality had ceased to exist and that the human being now sought to gain a world-conception through inner intellectual work, this preeminently leading spirit was Aristotle. Aristotle is, as it were, the first man in human evolution who works in a truly intellectual way. In Aristotle, we continually come across statements showing that the recollection of an old wisdom, gained through super-sensible means, is still alive in a traditional form. Aristotle is aware of this older form of wisdom; he alludes to it whenever he speaks of his predecessors, but he can no longer connect his statements with any contents which are really his own inner experience.

Aristotle evinces in a high degree that things which were vividly experienced in the past, have now become mere words for him. But on the other hand, he is eminently intellectual in his way of working.

Owing to the special configuration of Greek culture, Aristotle is not a Gnostic. The gnosis of that time, with its still ample store of wisdom, which continued to exist even in the post-Christian centuries, had an intellectual way of grasping the old spiritual contents. These can no longer be experienced. What the Gnostics set forth, contains, as it were, a shadow-outline of the old spiritual wisdom. We can see that humanity gradually loses altogether the possibility of connecting a meaning with what had once been given to man in a super-sensible form. This stage, of not being able to connect any meaning with the old spiritual wisdom, reaches its climax in the fourth century of our era. Particularly a man like Augustine clearly reveals the struggle after a world-conception from out the very depths of the human soul, but it is impossible for him to reach a world-conception which is based on spirituality, so that he finally accepts what the Catholic Church presents to him in the form of dogmas.

The spiritual life of the Occident (and this is, to begin with, our present subject of study) obtained its contents above all during the centuries which followed the first four hundred years after the Mystery of Golgotha. It obtained its contents through what had been handed down traditionally from a Christian direction and had gradually acquired the form of dogmas, that is to say, of intellectual forms of thought. Nevertheless these dogmas were connected with contents which had once been experienced in super-sensible vision and which now existed merely in the form of memories. It was no longer possible to gain an insight into man's connections with these super-sensible contents; that is to say, it was not in any way possible to convey to the human beings the significance of these super-sensible contents. For this reason, the education of humanity took on an essentially intellectual character in the following centuries, up to the fifteenth century.

The spiritual life of the fourth and fifth centuries of our era, up to the fifteenth century, with all the experiences connected with that time—starting with the first Fathers of the Church up to Duns Scotus and then Thomas Aquinas and Albertus Magnus—the spiritual life of those centuries and all the experiences connected with that time, arouse our interest not so much in view of the contents which have been transmitted to us, as in view of the thoroughly significant training through which the human beings had to pass, so that their soul-constitution was directed towards intellectualism. In regard to intellectual matters, in regard to the elaboration of conceptual matters, the Christian philosophers have reached the very climax. We may say, on the one hand, that intellectualism was fully born at the end of the fourth century of our era, but we may also say that intellectualism, as a technique, as a technical method of thinking, evolved up to the fifteenth century. That human beings were at all able to grasp this intellectual element, is a fact which took place in the fourth century. But to begin with, intellectualism had to be elaborated inwardly, and what was achieved in this direction, up to the time of high Scholasticism, is truly admirable.

Modern thinkers could really learn a great deal in this connection, if they would train their capacity of forming concepts by studying the conceptual technique which was unfolded by the scholastic thinkers of the Catholic Church. If we observe the disorderly way of thinking which is customary in modern science, if we observe how certain ideas which are indispensable for the attainment of a world-conception (for instance, the idea of subsistence in connection with existence) have altogether disappeared, particularly in regard to their inner character, if we observe how concepts such as “hypothesis” have acquired an entirely indistinct character, whereas for the scholastics it was a conceptual form with clearly defined outlines, if we observe many other things which could be adduced in this direction, we shall realise that the ordinary modern life of the spirit does not possess a real technique of thinking. How many things could be learnt if we would once more become acquainted with what has been developed up to the fifteenth century as a technique of thinking, that is to say, as a technique of intellectualism! Thinkers who have had a training in this sphere are so superior to the modern philosophers because they have taken up within them the scholastic element.

Indeed, after the disorderly thoughts contained in modern scientific writings, it does one good to take hold of a book such as Willmann's “History of Idealism”. Of course, at the present time we cannot agree with the contents of Willmann's book, for it contains things which we cannot accept, nevertheless it reveals a thinking activity which gives us, as such, a feeling of well-being, in comparison with what has just been characterised. Otto Willmann's “History of Idealism” should also be read by those who adopt an entirely different standpoint. The way in which he deals with the problems from the time of Plato onwards, his complete mastery of the scholastic activity of thought, can, to say the least, exercise an extraordinary influence upon modern human beings and discipline their thoughts.

Essentially speaking, the task of the time which lies between the fourth and the fifteenth century was, therefore, the development of a technique of thinking. This thinking activity has now adopted a definite attitude in regard to man's cognitive faculty towards the contents of the world. We may say: Spirits such as Albertus Magnus and Thomas Aquinas have set forth the position of man's thinking activity towards the contents of the world in a manner which was, at that time, quite incontestable.

How do their descriptions appear to us?

Thinkers such as Albertus Magnus and Thomas Aquinas had dogmatically preserved truths which originated from old traditions, but their meaning could no longer be grasped. To begin with, these truths had to be protected as contents of a supernatural revelation, which at that time was more or less equivalent to a super-sensible revelation. The Church preserved these revelations through its authority and teachings, and people thought that the dogmas of the Church contained the revelations connected with the super-sensible worlds. They were to accept what was offered in these dogmas, they were to accept it as a revelation which could not be touched by human reason, that is to say, by the human intellect.

In the Middle Ages it was, on the one hand, quite natural to apply the intellectual technique, which had reached such a high degree of development, but on the other hand, it was evident that the intellect was not allowed to determine anything in connection with the contents of these dogmas. The highest truths required by the human beings were sought within the dogmas. They had to be presented by theology, which was supernatural, and contained the essence of everything relating to the higher destinies of man's soul-life. The conceptions of that time were, on the other hand. permeated by the idea that Nature could be grasped and explained by the unfolding intellect, and that ratio, that is to say, the intellect, enabled one to grasp in a certain abstract manner the beginning and the end of the world, that it enabled one to grasp even the existence of God, etc. etc. These things were altogether considered as forming part—although in a certain abstract manner—of the truths which could still be reached through the intellectual technique. Human cognition was thus divided into two spheres: The sphere of the super-sensible, which could only become accessible to man through revelation and was preserved within the Christian dogmas, and the other sphere, which contained a knowledge of Nature, to the extent in which this was possible at that time, and which could only be reached, in its whole extent through an intellectual technique.

If we wish to grasp the spiritual development of our modern times, we must penetrate into this dual character of cognition during the Middle Ages. New spheres of knowledge slowly begin to appear from the fifteenth century onwards, and then more and more quickly; new spheres of knowledge, which then became the contents of the modern scientific world-conception. Up to the fifteenth century, the intellect, as such, had developed, its technique had gradually unfolded, but throughout that time it had not enriched itself with contents of a natural-scientific character. The knowledge of Nature which existed up to that time, was an old traditional knowledge which could no longer be grasped to its full extent: the intellect had. as it were, not been tested by contents of an immediate and elemental kind.

This only took place when the deeds of Galilei, Copernicus and so forth, began to penetrate into the modern development of science, and it occurred at a time when the intellect did not merely unfold its technique, but when it began to tackle the external world. Particularly in a man such as Galilei we can see that he uses his highly developed technique of thinking in order to approach with it the contents of a world which appears to the external observation through the senses. In the centuries which followed, up to the nineteenth century, those who were striving after knowledge were occupied above all with this: their intellect was grappling with Nature, it was seeking to gain a knowledge of Nature.

What lived in this struggle of the intellect that was seeking to gain a knowledge of Nature? In order to grasp this, we should not follow preconceived ideas, but psychological and historical facts.

We should clearly realise that humanity does not only carry over theories from one epoch to the other, and that the Christian development of philosophy has produced in an extraordinarily strong way the tendency to apply the intellectual faculties merely to the world of the senses, without touching the super-sensible world. If those who were striving after knowledge had touched the super-sensible sphere with their intellectual forces, this would have been considered a sin. Such an attitude gave rise to certain habits, and these habits continued. Even if the human beings are no longer fully conscious of them, they nevertheless act under the influence of these habits. In the centuries which preceded the nineteenth century, one of these habits, that is to say, a habit which arose under the influence of Christian dogmatism, produced the tendency to use the intellectual faculties merely for an external observation through the senses. In the same way in which the universities were, generally speaking, the continuation of schools which had been founded by the Church, so the sciences which were taught at these universities in connection with a knowledge of Nature were fundamentally a continuation of what the Church acknowledged to be right in the sphere of natural science. The tendency to include in knowledge nothing but an empiricism based on the observation through the senses is, in every respect, the echo of a soul-habit which has risen out of Christian dogmatism.

This way of directing the intellect towards the external world of the senses was more and more accompanied by the fact that the forces which the soul itself directed towards the contents of super-sensible dogmas gradually paled and died. The possibility of an independent investigation had once more arisen, and although the contents which the intellect thus obtained were of a purely sensory kind, they were nevertheless the contents of knowledge.

The dogmatic contents gradually paled under the influence of contents which were gained through a knowledge of the sensory world. This knowledge was acquiring a more and more positive character. It was no longer possible to adopt towards these super-sensible contents a soul-attitude which still existed after the fourth century of our era as a recollection of something which humanity had experienced in very ancient times. What was connected with the super-sensible worlds gradually disappeared completely, and what lies before us in the spiritual development of the last three or four centuries merely represents an artificial way of preserving these super-sensible contents.

The contents which have been taken from the world of the senses and which have been elaborated by the intellect grow more and more abundant. They permeate the human soul. The habit of calling attention to the super-sensible contents gradually pales and disappears. Also this fact is unquestionably a result of the Christian dogmatic development.

Then came the nineteenth century; the human soul had completely lost its elementary connection with what was contained in the super-sensible world, and it became more and more necessary for the human beings to convince themselves, one might say, artificially, that it is, after all, significant to accept the existence of a super-sensible world. So we may see, particularly in the nineteenth century, the development of a doctrine which had been well prepared in advance, the doctrine of the two paths of cognition: the path of knowledge and the path of faith. A cognition of faith, based upon an entirely subjective conviction, was still supposed to uphold what had been preserved traditionally from the old dogmas. In addition to this fact, the human beings were more and more overcome, I might say, by the knowledge which the world of the senses offered to them. Fundamentally speaking, just about the middle of, the nineteenth century, the evolution of the spiritual world of Europe had reached the following point: An abundant knowledge flowed out of the world of the senses, whereas the attitude towards the super-sensible world was problematic. When the human beings investigated the sensory world, they always felt that they had a firm ground under their feet and the facts resulting from an external observation could always be pointed out and summed up in a kind of world-picture, which naturally contained nothing but sensory facts, but which grew more and more perfect in regard to these sensory contents. On the other hand, they were striving in an almost cramped and desperate manner to maintain a survey of the super-sensible world through faith. Particularly significant in this connection is the development of theology, especially of Christology, for it shows us how the super-sensible contents of the Christ-idea were gradually lost, so that finally nothing remained of this idea except the existence of Jesus of Nazareth within the world of the senses; he was, therefore, looked upon as a member of human evolution within the ordinary and intellectual life of the senses. [See Rudolf Steiner's, “Et incarnatus est ...”.] Attempts were made to uphold Christianity even in the face of the enlightened and scientific mentality of modern times, but it was submitted to criticism and dissolved through this critical examination; the contents of the gospels were sieved and thus a definition was construed, as it were, which justified to a certain extent at least the right to point out that the super-sensible world must be the subject of faith, of belief.

It is strange to see the form which this development took on just about the middle of the nineteenth century. Those who study modern spiritual science should not overlook this stage in the development of human knowledge. Men who have spoken extensively of the spirit and of the spiritual life of the present, have treated in an amateurish way what has arisen as materialism in the middle of the nineteenth century within the evolution of mankind. Of course, it would be superficial to remain by this materialism. But it is far more superficial to take up an amateurish attitude towards materialism. It is comparatively easy to acquire a few concepts which are connected with the spirit and with spiritual life, and then to pass sentence over what has arisen through the materialism of the nineteenth century; but we should observe this from a different standpoint.

It is, for instance, a fact that a thinker such as Heinrich Czolbe, and he is perhaps one of the most significant materialistic thinkers, has given a real definition of sensualism in his book, “An Outline of Sensualism”, which was published in 1855. He states that sensualism implies a cognitive striving which excludes the super-sensible from the very beginning. Czolbe's system of sensualism gives us something which seeks to explain, the world and man only with the aid of what may be obtained through sensory observation.

We might say that this system of sensualism is, on the one hand, superficial, but, on the other hand, it is extraordinarily sharp. For it really attempts to observe everything, from perception to politics, in the light of sensualism and to describe it in such a way that an explanation can only be given through what the senses are able to observe and the intellect is able to combine through these sensory observations. This book was published in 1855, when a clearly defined Darwinism did not as yet exist, for Darwin's first epoch-making book only appeared in 1858.

Generally speaking, the year 1858 was very trenchant in the more recent spiritual evolution. Darwin's “Origin of the Species” appeared at that time. Spectral analysis also arose at that time within the evolution of humanity, and this has given rise to the conception that the universe consists of the same material substances as those of terrestrial existence. In that year the first attempt was made to deal with the aesthetic sphere in an external, empiric manner, a subject which in the past had always been treated in a spiritual-intellectual manner. Gustav Theodor Fechner's “Introduction to Aesthetics” was published in 1858. Finally, the attempt was made to apply this manner of thinking, which is contained in all the above examples, to social life. The first more important economic book of Carl Marx also appeared in that year. This fourth phenomenon of the modern materialistic life of the spirit thus appears not only in the same period, but in the same year of that period. As stated, certain things have preceded all this, for instance, Czolbe's “Sensualism”.

Afterwards, the attempt was made to permeate with materialistic world-conceptions the many facts which were discovered at that time in regard to the external life of the senses and we may say: The materialistic world-conception has not been created by Darwinism, or by spectral analysis, but the facts which Darwin had so carefully collected, the facts which could be detected to a certain extent in spectral analysis, and all that could be discovered in connection with certain things which were once investigated in an entirely different manner (this may be seen, for instance, in Fechner's “Introduction to Aesthetics”), all this was immersed in the already extant conception of sensualism. Fundamentally speaking, materialism already existed; it had its origin in the propagation of that habit of thinking which was, in reality, an offspring of the scholastic manner of thinking. We do not grasp the modern development of the spirit, we do not grasp materialism, unless we realise that it is nothing but the continuation of medieval thinking, with the omission of the idea that it is necessary to rise from thinking to the super-sensible with the aid, not of human reason and human observation, but with the aid of the revelations contained in the dogmas.

This second element has simply been omitted. But the fundamental conviction relating to one side of cognition, to that side which refers to the world of the senses, this fundamental conviction has been maintained. What had thus developed in the course of the nineteenth century, then changed in such a way that it appeared, for instance, in the famous Ignorabimus of du Bois-Reymond, in the early seventies. The scholastic thinkers used to say: Human cognition, which is permeated by the intellect, is only connected with the external world of the senses, and everything that the human being is supposed to know in regard to the super-sensible world must be given through the revelation which is preserved in the dogmas.—The revelation which the dogmas have preserved has paled, but the other fundamental conviction has been retained. This is what du Bois-Reymond states incisively, in a modern garment, to be sure. du Bois-Reymond applied what Scholasticism used to voice in the manner which I have just described, in such a way that he said: It is only possible to gain a knowledge of sensory things; we should only gain a knowledge of sensory things, for a knowledge of the super-sensible world does not exist.

Fundamentally speaking, there is no difference whatever between one of the two spheres of knowledge in Scholasticism and what has arisen, in a modern garment, among the modern natural scientists, and du Bois-Reymond was undoubtedly one of the most modern scientists. It is really very important to contemplate earnestly and carefully how the modern conception of Nature has risen out of Scholasticism, for it is generally believed that modern natural science has arisen in contrast to Scholasticism. Just as the modern universities cannot deny that in their structure they originate from the Christian schools of the Middle Ages, so the structure of modern scientific thought cannot deny its origin from Scholasticism, except that it has stripped off, as I have explained before, the scholastic elaboration of concepts and the scholastic technique of thinking, which are worthy of the greatest respect and appreciation.

This technique of thinking has also been lost; and for this reason certain questions, which are evident and which do not satisfy a real thinker, have simply been overlooked with elegance in the modern scientific manner of considering things. The spirit and the meaning contained within this modern science of Nature, are, however, the very offspring of Scholasticism.

But the human beings acquired the habit of restricting themselves to the world of the senses. This habit, to be sure, also produced excellent things, for the human beings acquired the tendency to become thoroughly absorbed in the facts of the sensory world. It suffices to consider that spiritual science, the spiritual science which is orientated towards Anthroposophy, sees in the sensory world an image of the super-sensible world; what we encounter in the sensory world really contains the images of the super-sensible world. If we consider this, we shall be able to appreciate fully the importance of penetrating into the sensory material world. We must emphasize again and again and we should continually lay stress upon the fact that the other form of materialism which has come to the fore in spiritism, which seeks to cognise the spirit in a materialistic manner, is unfruitful, because the spirit can, of course, never be seen through the senses. and the whole method of spiritism is, therefore, a humbug. On the other hand, we should realise that what we observe through our ordinary, normal senses and what we elaborate from out this sensory observation, with the aid of the intellect which has developed in the course of human evolution, is in every way an image of the super-sensible world, and consequently the study of this image can, in a certain way, lead us into the super-sensible world far better than, for instance, spiritism. In earlier times, I have often expressed this by saying: Some people are sitting around a table in order to “summon spirits”; yet, they completely overlook the fact that there are so and so many spirits sitting around the table! They should be conscious of their own spirit. Undoubtedly this spirit sets forth what they should seek; but owing to the fact that they forget their own spirit, that they are unwilling to grasp their own spirit, they seek the spirit in a materialistic, external manner, in spiritistic experiments which ape and imitate the experiments made in laboratories. Materialism, which works within the images of the super-sensible world, without being aware of the fact that it is dealing with images of the super-sensible world, this materialism has, after all, achieved great things through its methods of investigation, it has achieved great and mighty things.

Of course, and in Czolbe we may see this quite clearly, the real sensualists and materialists have never sought a connection between that which they obtained through their senses and the super-sensible; they merely sought to recognise the sensory world as such, its structure and its laws. This forms part of what has been achieved from 1840 onwards. When Darwinism brought forward its great standpoint, Darwinism, which had brought about the circumstance that through Darwin's person a wealth of facts had been collected from certain standpoints, when Darwinism made its appearance, it presented, to begin with, a principle of research, a method of investigation.

The nineteenth century had a few accurate natural scientists, such as Gegenbauer. Gegenbauer never became a Darwinist in Haeckel's meaning. Gegenbauer, who continued Goethe's work in connection with the metamorphosis of the vertebrae and the cranium, particularly emphasized this: No matter how the truth, the absolute truth of Darwinism may stand, it has given rise to a method which has enabled us to align phenomena and to compare them in such a manner that we have actually noticed things which we would not have noticed without this method, without the existence of Darwinism.

Gegenbauer meant to say more or less the following: Even though everything which is contained in the Darwin Theory were to disappear, the fact would remain that the Darwin Theory has given rise to a definite way of handling research, so that facts could be discovered which would otherwise not have been found. It was, to be sure, a certain “practical application of the ‘as-if principle’.” But this practical application of the “as-if principle” is not so stupid as the philosophical establishment of the “as-if principle”, in the form which it took on in a later epoch.

Thus it came about that a peculiar structure of spiritual life arose in the second half of the nineteenth century. In more recent times, and these do not lie so far back, philosophy has, after all, always developed out of a theological element. Those who fail to see the theological element in Hume and in Kant are simply unable to have an insight into such things. Philosophical thought has arisen altogether out of theological thought and, in a certain way, it has elaborated certain things in the form of intellectual concepts and these things had almost a super-sensible colouring. In view of the fact that the things which were dealt with in philosophy always had a super-sensible colouring, natural science began to oppose it more and more, ever since the middle of the nineteenth century, for the tendency towards these super-sensible contents of human knowledge had gradually disappeared. Natural science contained something, and it compelled one to have confidence in it, because the contents of natural science were substantial. The philosophical development was powerless in the face of what was flowing into natural science more and more abundantly, developing as far as Oken's problems, which were grasped philosophically. It is interesting to see that the most penetrative philosophy of the second half of the nineteenth century calls attention to the unconscious, and no longer to the conscious. Eduard von Hartmann's philosophy was discarded by the intellect, because it insisted upon its right of existence as a philosophy. The more the nineteenth century drew towards its close, the more we watch the strange spectacle of a philosophy which is gradually losing its contents and is gradually adopting the attitude of having to justify its existence. The most acute philosophers, such as Otto Liebmann, strive, above all, to justify the existence of philosophy.

There is a real relationship between a philosopher of Otto Liebmann's stamp, who still tries to justify the existence of philosophy, and a philosopher such as Richard Wahle, who wrote the book, “Philosophy as a Whole and Its End”. Richard Wahle very incisively set himself the task of demonstrating that philosophy cannot exist, and thereupon obtained a chair of philosophy at an Austrian university, for a branch of knowledge which, according to his demonstrations, could not exist!

In the nineties of the nineteenth century we may then observe a strange stage in these results of the modern development of thought-cognition. On the one hand, we have the natural-scientific efforts of advancing to an encompassing world-conception and of rejecting everything connected with revelation and the super-sensible world, and on the other hand, we have a powerless philosophy.

This came to the fore, one might say, particularly clearly in the nineties of the nineteenth century, but it appears as a necessary result of the preceding course of development. To-morrow we shall continue to examine the course of this development. I would only like you to hold fast in particular, that modern materialism should be considered from the following standpoint. The things which appear in material life are an image of the super-sensible. Man himself, in the form in which he appears between birth and death, is an image of what he has experienced supersensibly between his last death and his birth. These who seek the soul within material existence, seek it in the wrong direction.

The fundamental problem in the face of the materialism of the nineteenth century, if we wish to grasp it historically, is: To what extent was it justified? We grasp its historical evolution, not by opposing it, but by trying to understand what it lacked, indeed, but what it had to lack, owing to the fact that, during the time which immediately preceded it, the soul-spiritual element was sought in the wrong place. People believed that they could find the soul-spiritual by seeking it in the ordinary way within the sensory world, through reflections of one or the other kind, and so forth. But this is not possible. It can only be found if we go beyond the world of the senses. Sensualism and materialism were neither willing nor able to go beyond the world of the senses. They remained at a standstill by the image, they thought that this image was the reality. This is the essence, of materialism.

Yesterday I spoke of how we find within the human being a kind of source of destruction. I showed that as long as we remain within ordinary consciousness we retain memories only of the impressions of the world. We gain experience of the world, and we have our experiences through the senses, through the intellect, through the effects generally upon our life of soul. Later we are able to call up again our memory of the afterimage of what we have experienced. We carry as our inner life these afterimages of sense experiences.

It is indeed as though we had within us a mirror, but one that works differently from the ordinary spatial mirror. An ordinary mirror reflects what is in front of it, whereas the living mirror we carry within us reflects in quite another way. It reflects in the course of time the sense impressions we receive, causing one or another impression to be reflected back again into consciousness, and so we have a memory of a past experience.

If we break a spatial mirror, we see behind the mirror; we see into a realm we do not see when the mirror is intact. Correspondingly, if we carry out inner exercises of the soul, we come, as I have often suggested, to something like a breaking of the inner mirror. The memories can, as it were, cease for a brief time—for how long a time depends upon our free will—and we can see more deeply into our inner being. As we look more deeply into our inner being behind the memory-mirror, then what I characterized yesterday as a kind of source of destruction meets our gaze.

There must be such a source of destruction within us, for only in such a source can the I of man solidify itself. It is actually a source for the solidification and hardening of the I. As I said yesterday, if this hardening of the I, if this egoity, is carried out into social life, evil arises, evil in the life and actions of human beings.

You may see from this how truly complicated is the life into which man is placed. What within the human being has a good purpose, without which we could not cultivate our I, must never be allowed outside. The evil man carries it into the outer world; the good man keeps it inside him. If it miscarried outside, it becomes wrong, it becomes evil. If it is kept within, it is the very thing we need to give the human I its rightful strength.

There is really nothing in the world that would not, in its place, have a beneficial significance. We would be thoughtless and rash if we did not have this source within us, for this source manifests itself in such a way that we can experience in it something we would never be able to experience in the outer world. In the outer world we see things materially. Everything we see, we see materially, and following the custom of present-day science we speak of the conservation of matter, the indestructibility of actual matter. In this source of destruction about which I spoke yesterday matter is truly annihilated. Matter is thrown back into its nothingness, and then we can allow, within this nothingness, the good to arise. The good can arise if, instead of our instincts and impulses, which are bound to work toward the cultivation of egoity, we pour into this source of destruction, by means of a moral inclination of soul, all moral and ethical ideals.Then something new arises. Then in this very source of destruction the seeds of future worlds arise. Then we, as human beings, take part in the coming into being of worlds.

When we speak, as one can find in my Outline of Occult Science, of how our earth will one day face annihilation, and of how through all kinds of intermediate states of transformation the Jupiter existence will evolve, we must say the following. In the Jupiter existence there will be only the new creation that already is being formed today in the human being out of moral ideals, within this source of destruction. It is also formed out of his anti-moral impulses, out of what works as evil from his egoity. Hence the Jupiter existence will be a struggle between what man on earth is already bringing to birth by carrying his moral ideals into his inner chaos and what arises with the cultivation of egoity as the anti-moral. When we look into our deepest selves,therefore, we are gazing upon a region where matter is thrown back into its nothingness.

I went on to indicate how matters stand with the other side of human existence, with the side where sense phenomena are spread out around us. We behold these sense phenomena spread around us like a tapestry, and we apply our intellect to combine and relate them in order to discover within these sense phenomena laws that we then call the laws of nature. With ordinary consciousness, however, we never penetrate through this tapestry of the senses. With ordinary consciousness we penetrate the tapestry of sense impressions just as little as we penetrate with ordinary consciousness the memory-mirror within. With a developed consciousness, however, one does penetrate it, and the human beings of ancient Oriental wisdom penetrated it with a consciousness informed by instinctive vision. They beheld that world in which egoity cannot hold its own in consciousness.

We enter this world every time we go to sleep. There the egoity is dimmed, because beyond the tapestry of the senses lies the world where, to begin with, the I-power, as it develops for human existence, has no place at all. Hence the world conception of the ancient Oriental, who developed a peculiar longing to live behind the sense phenomena, used to speak of Nirvana, of the dispersing of the egoity.

Yesterday we drew attention to the great contrast between East and West. At one time the Oriental cultivated all that man longs to behold behind the sense phenomena, and he cultivated the vision into a spiritual world that is composed not of atoms and molecules but of spiritual beings. This world was present for the ancient Oriental world conception as visible reality. In our day the Oriental, particularly in Asia but also in other parts of the world, is living in the decadent stages of development of this inner yearning to reach the world behind the sense phenomena, while the human being of the West has cultivated his egoity, has cultivated all that we have characterized as the hardening and strengthening taking place within the source of destruction in man's inner being.

In saying this we are already on the way to suggesting what it is that must necessarily be absorbed into man's consciousness, now and in the near future. If the pure intellectualism that has been developing since the middle of the fifteenth century were to continue, humanity would fall entirely into decline, for with the help of intellectualism one will never penetrate beyond either the memory-mirror or the tapestry of the world of the senses spread out before us. Man must, however, acquire once more a consciousness of these worlds. He must acquire a consciousness of these worlds if Christianity is again to be able to become a truth for him, for Christianity actually is not a truth for him to-day. We can see this most clearly when we look at the modern development of the idea of Christ—if indeed modern times may be said to have any such development at all. The truth is that for modern man in the present stage of evolution it is impossible to arrive at an idea of Christ as long as he makes use only of the concepts and ideas that he has been cultivating as natural science since the fifteenth century. In the nineteenth and beginning of the twentieth centuries he has become incapable of forming a true idea of Christ.

These things must be regarded in the following way. The human being beholds the world all around and uses the combining faculty of his intellect, which he now has as his modern consciousness, to build up natural laws. Following a line of thought that is perfectly possible for the consciousness of the present day, he comes to the point at which it is possible for him to say, “This world is permeated with thought, for the laws of nature are apprehended in thoughts and are actually themselves the thoughts of the world.” If one follows the laws of nature to the stage at which one is bound to apply them to the coming into existence of man himself as physical being, one has to say, “Within that world which we survey with our ordinary consciousness, beginning with sense perception and going on as far as the memory-mirror, a spiritual element is living.” One must actually be ill, pathological, if, like the ordinary atheistic materialist, one is not willing to acknowledge this spiritual element. We live within this world that is given for ordinary consciousness; we emerge into it as physical man through physical conception and physical birth. What is observable within the physical world can only be contemplated inadequately if one fails to see as its foundation a universal spiritual element.

We are born as physical beings from physical stock. When we are born as little babies, we are actually, for outer, physical perception, quite similar to a creature of nature. Out of such a creature of nature, which is basically in a kind of sleeping condition, inner spiritual faculties gradually develop. These inner spiritual faculties will arise in the course of future evolution. If we learn to trace back these emerging spiritual faculties in the same way that we trace the gradual growth of the limbs, we find that we must look for their source beyond birth and conception. Then one comes to the point of thinking in a living and spiritual way about the world, whereas before, in one's consideration of outer nature, one built up only abstract laws. One comes, in other words, to an affirmation of what may be called the Father God.

It is very significant that scholasticism in the Middle Ages maintained that knowledge obtainable by ordinary observation of the world through ordinary human reason included knowledge of the Father God. One can even say, as I have often expressed it, that if anyone sets out to analyze this world as it is given for ordinary consciousness and does not arrive at gathering up all the natural laws in what is called the Father God, he must actually be ill, pathological in someway. To be an atheist means to be ill, as I have said here once before.

With this ordinary consciousness, however, one cannot go farther than this Father God. This far one can go with ordinary consciousness, but no further. It is characteristic of our times when such a significant theologian as Adolf von Harnack⁵ says that Christ the Son does not really belong in the Gospels, that the Gospels are the message of the Father, and that Christ Jesus actually has a place in the Gospels only insofar as He brought the message of the Father God. Here you may see quite clearly how with a certain inevitability this modern thinking leads people to recognize, even in theology, only the Father God and to understand the Gospels themselves as containing no more than the message of the Father God. In the sense of this theology, Christ has worth only insofar as He appeared in the world and brought to human beings the true teaching concerning the Father God.

Two things are implied in this. First, the belief that the message of the Father God cannot be found by an ordinary study of the world. The Scholastics still maintained that it could. They did not imagine that the Gospels were to speak of the Father God; they assumed that the Gospels were to speak of God the Son. That people can come forward with the opinion that the Gospels actually speak only of the Father God is proof that theology, too, has fallen into that way of thinking which has been cultivated as the peculiarly Western method.

In early Christian times until about the third or fourth century A.D., when there was still a good deal of Oriental wisdom in Christianity, human beings occupied themselves intently with the question of the distinction between the Father God and God the Son. One could say that these fine distinctions between the Father God and the Son God, which so engaged people's attention in the early Christian centuries, under the influence of Oriental wisdom, have long ceased to have meaning for modern man, who has been occupied in cultivating egoity under the influences I described yesterday.

A certain untruth has thus found its way into modern religious consciousness. What man experiences inwardly, through which he arrives at his analysis and synthesis of the world, is the Father God. From tradition, he has God the Son. The Gospels speak of Him, tradition speaks of Him. Man has the Christ; he wants to acknowledge Him but through inner experience no longer actually has the Christ. He therefore takes what he should apply actually only to the Father God and transfers it to the Christ God. Modern theology does not actually have the Christ at all; it has only the Father, but it calls the Father “Christ,” because at one time it received the tradition of the Christ being in history, and one wants to be Christian, of course. If one were honest, one would be unable to call oneself a Christian in modern times.

All this is altogether different when we go further East. Already in Eastern Europe it is different. Take the Russian philosopher of whom I have frequently spoken—Soloviev.⁶ You find in him an attitude of soul that has become a philosophy and speaks with full justification, with an inner justification, of a distinction between the Father and the Son. Soloviev is justified in speaking in this way, because for him both the Father and the Christ are experiences. The human being of the West makes no distinction between God the Father and Christ. If you are inwardly honest with yourselves, you will feel that the moment you wish to make a distinction between the Father God and Christ the two become confused. For Soloviev such a thing is impossible. Soloviev experiences each separately, and so he still has a sense for the battles, the spiritual battles, that were fought during the first Christian centuries in order to bring to human consciousness the distinction between the Father God and God the Son.

This, however, is the very thing to which modern man must come again. There must again be truth in calling ourselves Christians. One must not make a pretense of worshipping the Christ, attributing to Him only the qualities of the Father God. To avoid this, however, one must present truths such as I indicated yesterday. That is the only way we can come to the twofold experience, the experience of the Father and the experience of the Son.

It will be necessary to change the whole form of our consciousness. The abstract form of consciousness with which modern man is raised, and which actually does not permit the recognition of more than the Father God, will have to be replaced by a much more concrete life of consciousness. Needless to say, one cannot present such things before the world at large today in the way I have described them to you here, for people have not yet been prepared sufficiently by spiritual science and anthroposophy. There is always the possibility, however, of pointing out even to modern man how he carries in his inner being a source of destruction and how in the outer world there is something in which the I of man is, as it were, submerged, where it cannot hold itself fast—just as in earlier times people were told about the Fall of Man and similar things. One must only find the right form for these things, a form that would enable them to find their way into ordinary consciousness—even as the teaching of the Fall of Man used to give instruction concerning a spiritual foundation of the world, a form that would have a different authority from our teaching concerning the Father God.

Our modern science will have to become permeated with ways of looking such as those we have expounded here. Our science wishes to recognize in the inner being of man only the laws of nature. In this source of destruction, however, of which I have often spoken here, the laws of nature are united with the moral laws; there, natural law and moral law are one. Within our inner being matter, and with it all the laws of nature, is annihilated. Material life, together with all the laws of nature, is thrown back into chaos, and out of the chaos a new nature is able to arise, saturated with the moral impulses we ourselves lay into it. As we have said, this source of destruction is below our memory-mirror. If we let our gaze penetrate far below this memory-mirror, there at last we observe what actually is always within the human being. A human being is not changed by knowledge: he merely comes to know what he is like, what his normal condition is. Man must learn to reflect on what he is and how he lives.

When we are able to penetrate into this inner core of evil in the human being and are able also to become conscious of how into this inner evil, where matter is destroyed and thrown back into its chaos, moral impulses can find their way, then we have really found in ourselves the beginning of spiritual existence. Then we perceive the creating spirit within us, for when we behold moral laws working upon matter that has been thrown back into chaos, we are beholding a real activity of the spirit taking place within us in a natural way. We become conscious of the concrete, spiritual activity that is within us and that is the seed for future worlds.

What can we compare with what is announced in our inner being? We cannot compare it with what our senses at first convey to us of outer nature. We can compare it only with what another human being communicates when he speaks to us. Indeed, it is more than a metaphor when we say that what takes place in our inner being speaks to us when moral and anti-moral impulses unite themselves with the chaos inside us. There actually is within us something that speaks to us. There we have something that is not mere allegory or symbol but actual fact. What we can hear outwardly with our ears is a language toned down for the earthly world, but within our inner being a language is spoken that goes out beyond the earth, because it speaks out of what contains the seeds of future worlds. There we truly penetrate into what must be called “the inner word.” In the weakened words that we speak or hear in conversation with our fellow men, hearing and speaking are separate and distinct, whereas in our inner being, when we dive down below the memory-mirror into the inner chaos, we have a substantiality where speaking becomes at the same time hearing. Hearing and speaking are once more united. The inner word speaks in us, the inner word is heard in us.

We have at the same time entered a realm where it no longer makes sense to speak of subjective and objective. When you hear another human being, when he speaks words to you that you perceive with your sense of hearing, you know that this being of another person is outside you, but you must give yourself up, must surrender yourself, as it were, in order to perceive the being of another person in what you hear him saying. On the other hand, you know that the actual word, the audible word, is not merely something subjective but is something placed into the world. Hence we find that even with the toned-down words that we hear and speak in our conversation with other human beings, the distinction between subjective and objective loses meaning. We stand with our subjectivity within objectivity, and objectivity works in us and with us in that we perceive. It is the same when we dive down to the inner word. It is not merely an inner word; it is at the same time something objective. It is not our inner being that speaks: our inner being is merely the stage upon which speaks the world.

It is similar for one who has insight to see, behind the tapestry of the senses, a spiritual world, a world wherein spiritual beings of the higher hierarchies rule and weave. To begin with, he perceives these beings through an imagination; for his vision, however, they become permeated with inner life in that now he hears the Word, apparently sounding to him through himself but in reality from out of the world.

By means of love and devotion man therefore penetrates the tapestry of the senses and sees beyond; and the beings who reveal themselves to him when he thus offers up his own being in full devotion—these beings he comes to perceive with the help of what he recognizes in his inner being as inner word. We grow together with the outer world. The outer world begins to resound cosmically, as it were, when the inner word is awakened.

What I have been describing to you exists today in every human being, but he has no knowledge of it and therefore no awareness, no consciousness of it. He must first grow into such a knowledge, into such an awareness. When we learn to recognize the world with the ordinary consciousness that provides us with our intellectual concepts, we really come to recognize only the passing and the past. When we behold in the right way that with which our intellect provides us, we basically have a view back upon a world that is passing away. We can, however, find the Father God with the intellect, as I have said. What sort of consciousness,then, do we develop in relation to the Father God? The consciousness that the Father God lies at the foundation of a world revealing itself to our intellect in the course of passing away.

Yes, it is indeed so—since the middle of the fifteenth century man has developed through his intellect a special faculty for studying and observing what is perishing in the world. We analyze and test the world-corpse with our intellectual, scientific knowledge. And theologians such as Adolph Harnack, who hold to the Father God alone, are really expounders of that part of the world that is perishing and that will pass away with the earth and disappear. They are backward-pointing individuals.

How is it then, finally, for a person who has entered so much into the spirit of what from childhood has been crammed into him as the modern natural scientific way of thinking? He learns that out there in the world are outer phenomena that arise and pass away but that matter persists, matter is the indestructible thing, and that if the earth comes to an end matter will never be destroyed. Certainly, he is told, a time will come when the earth will be one vast cemetery, but this cemetery will be composed of the very same atoms and molecules, or at least the same atoms, as are already there today. One thus applies all one's attention to what is perishing, and even when studying what is unfolding, one really studies only how what is perishing plays into what is unfolding.

It would never be possible for an Oriental to participate in this; we can see this even in the European Orient, in Eastern Europe, in the subdued philosophical feeling of Soloviev. He does not bring it to expression clearly—at least as clearly as it will have to be expressed in general consciousness in the future—but it is evident that Soloviev has still enough of the Oriental in him to see everywhere, within what is perishing, crumbling, dissolving into chaos, what is unfolding anew, the birth of what shall be in the future.

If we wish to see the reality, the actuality, we must envision it in the following way. All that we see with our senses, all that we also see of other human beings with our senses, will no longer exist one day; whatever makes itself known to eye, ear, and so on, will at some time in the future cease to be. Heaven and earth will pass away, for what we see of the stars by means of our senses also belongs to the things that are transient. Heaven and earth will pass away, but the inner word that is formed in the inner chaos of the human being, in the source of destruction, will live on after heaven and earth are no longer there; it will live on just as the seed of this year's plant will live on in the plant of next year. In the inner being of man are the seeds of world-futures. And if into these seeds human beings receive the Christ, then heaven and earth may pass away, but the Logos, the Christ, cannot pass away. Man bears in his inner being what will one day exist when all he sees around him will have ceased to be.

He must be able to say to himself: I look up to the Father God. The Father God lies at the foundation of the world that I can see with my senses. The world of the senses is His revelation, but it is nonetheless a perishing world, and it will drag the human being down with it if he is completely absorbed in it, if he is able to develop a consciousness only of the Father God. Man would then return to the Father God; he would be unable to evolve any further. There is also a new world unfolding, however, and it takes its beginning from man himself. When man ennobles his ethical ideals through the Christ consciousness, through the Christ impulse, when he forms his ethical ideals as they should be formed through the fact that the Christ has come to earth, then something comes to life in the chaos within him, seed is sown for the future, which is now not a perishing but an unfolding world.

One must have a strong feeling for the perishing and the unfolding worlds. One must feel how there is in nature a perpetual dying. Nature is colored, so to speak, by this death. In contrast to this, however, there is also in nature a continual unfolding, a continual coming to birth. This does not color nature in a way visible to the senses; yet if we approach nature with open hearts it is perceptible there.

We look out into nature and see the colors, all the colors of the spectrum, from the red at one end to the violet at the other, with all the shades in between. If we were now to mix these colors in a certain way—make them “color” one another—they would receive life. They would together become the so-called flesh color [Inkarnat], the color that emanates from man. When we look at nature, we are looking in a certain sense at the outspread colors of the rainbow, the sign and symbol of the Father God. If we look at man, however, it is the flesh color that speaks out of the inner being of man, for in man all the colors interpenetrate, thus taking on life, becoming living in their interpenetration. When we turn to a corpse, however, this power to take on life is entirely absent. There, that which is man is thrown back again into the rainbow, into the creation of the Father God. For the source of what makes the rainbow into the flesh color, making it into a living unity, man must look into his inner being.

Yesterday and today I have tried to lead you, perhaps in a complicated way, to an understanding of this inner being of man in its true significance. I have shown you how outer matter is thrown back into nothingness, into chaos, so that the spirit may become newly creative. If one looks at this new creativity, one realizes that the Father God works in matter, bringing it to its completion (see drawing below, bright). Matter confronts us in the outer world in the greatest variety of ways, so that it is visible to us. Within our inner being, however, this matter is thrown back into its nothingness and then permeated with pure spiritual being, with our moral ideals or anti-moral ideas (red). There new life springs up.

The world must appear to us in its double aspect. We see first the Father God, creating what is outwardly visible; we see how what is outwardly visible comes to an end in man's inner being, where it is thrown back into chaos. We must feel intensely how this world, the world of the Father God, comes to its end; only then will we be able to reach an inner understanding of the Mystery of Golgotha. It will become clear to us through this how the very thing that comes to an end, the creation of the Father God, is endowed with life once more by God the Son; a new beginning is made.

Everywhere in the Western world it can be seen how since the fifteenth century there has been a tendency to study and investigate only the perishing, the corpse-like part of nature, which is all that is accessible to the intellect. All so-called education or culture [Bildung] has been formed under the influence of a science that concerns itself only with what is dead. This kind of culture is directly opposed to real Christianity. Real Christianity must have a feeling for what is living but must also be able to separate this feeling of what is reviving from what is passing away. Hence the most important idea that must be connected with the Mystery of Golgotha, is the idea of the Risen Christ, the Christ Who has vanquished death. What matters is to comprehend that the most important idea is that of Christ Who passes through death and rises again. Christianity is not merely a religion of salvation; the Oriental religions were also that. Christianity is a religion of resurrection, a religion that awakens again to life what would otherwise be nothing but matter crumbling away into nothingness.

Out in the cosmos we have the crumbling away of matter in the moon, and in the sun we have a perpetual coming into being, forever new and fresh. Seen spiritually, seen through spiritual vision—when we get beyond ordinary sense perception and reach the point where Imagination is active—we can see in the moon a continuous process: it is continuously splintering and scattering itself abroad. There, where the moon is situated, its matter splinters and disperses like dust into the world. The matter of the moon is perpetually being gathered from its environment and then splintered and scattered (see drawing, above). If one looks at the moon in the consciousness of Imagination, one sees a continuous convergence of matter in the place where the moon is; it gathers there, and then it splinters and is scattered like dust into the world. The moon is actually seen like-this (drawing, below): first a circle, then a smaller, narrower circle, becoming ever narrower until the circle becomes the moon itself. Then it dissolves, splinters; it is strewn out over the entire world. In the moon, matter cannot tolerate a center. Matter concentrates toward the center of the moon but cannot tolerate it;it stops short there and disperses like cosmic dust. It is only to ordinary, sensory vision that the moon appears peaceful.It is not peaceful. It is continuously gathering matter together and scattering it.

When we come to the sun, we find it is all quite different. Already in Imagination we are able to see how matter does not splinter in this way at all; true, it does approach the center, but then it begins to receive life in the rays of the sun that stream out from the center. It does not splinter and disperse; it becomes living and spreads out life from the center in every direction. Together with this life it develops astrality. In the moon there is no astrality; there the astrality is destroyed. In the sun, astrality unites itself with all that streams forth. The sun is in truth something that is permeated with inner life, where the center is not only tolerated but has a fructifying influence. In the center of the sun lives the cosmic fructifying activity. In the contrast between sun and moon we thus see a cosmic manifestation of two opposite processes: in the moon matter is thrown back into chaos, while in the sun it is perpetually unfolding, springing and welling up with renewed life.

When we dive down into our inner being, we look into our inner chaos, into our own moon nature. That is the inner moon. Matter is destroyed there, as in the outer world it is destroyed only where the moon is. Then, however, the radiance of the sun penetrates our senses; the sun's radiance enters our inner moon nature. The matter inwardly dissolving there into dust is renewed by the sun's radiance. Here, in the inner being of man, matter is continuously falling under the moon influence, and just as continuously man absorbs through his senses the radiance of the sun (see drawing, left). Such is the relationship in which we stand to the cosmos, and so one must have the capacity to perceive these two opposite activities in the cosmos: the moon nature directed toward splintering and scattering, and the quickening, life-giving radiance of the sun.

Through both these experiences one comes to behold, in what is splintering and crumbling to dust, the world of the Father God, which had to be there until such time as the world changed into the world of God the Son, which basically has its physical source in what is sun-like in the world.What is of the moon nature and the sun nature relate to one another as Father God to Son God.

During the early Christian centuries these things were seen instinctively. Now they must be known again with full presence of mind if the human being wishes to be able to say of himself in all honesty: I am a Christian. This is what I wished to present to you today.

• 5 . Adolf von Harnack, church historian, 1851–1930.
• 6 . Vladimir Soloviev, Russian philosopher, 1853–1900.

We saw yesterday how the human being in his consciousness approaches the world from two sides, as it were: when he is active from within and when he is active from without. The ordinary consciousness, however, is not able to grasp what lives within the human being, because consciousness strikes up against it. We have seen, moreover, how karma also lives in man from two sides between birth and death. On the one hand there is the moment of awaking when man plunges into his etheric body, where, while he is submerged, he can have the reminiscence of dreams in ordinary consciousness. Then he passes, as it were, the space between the etheric body and the physical body—he is in the physical body only when he has full sense perception—and there he passes through the region of the living thoughts active within him. These are the same thoughts that actually have taken part in building up his organism and that he has brought with him through birth into existence; they represent, in other words, his completed karma. On falling asleep, however, man strikes up against that which cannot become deed. What enters into deeds as our impulses of will and feeling is lived out during our lifetime. Something is always left behind, however, and this is taken by the human being into his sleep. Yet it is also present at other times. Everything in the soul life that does not pass into deed, that stops short, as it were, before the deed, is future karma, which is forming itself and which we can carry further through death.

Yesterday I sought to indicate briefly how the forces of karma live in the human being. Today we will consider something of the human environment to show how the human being actually stands within the world, in order to be able to give all this a sort of conclusion tomorrow. We tried yesterday to examine objectively the human soul life itself, and we found that thinking develops itself in that region which is in fact the objective thought region between the physical body and the etheric body. We also found that feeling develops itself between the etheric and astral bodies, and willing develops itself between the astral body and the I or ego. The actual activity of the soul thus develops itself in the spaces between—I said yesterday that this expression is not exact, yet it is comprehensible—the spaces that we must suppose are between the four members of human nature, between the physical body, etheric body, astral body, and I. If we wish to view the spaces between objectively, they are the interactions among the members of the human being.

Today we wish to look at something of the human environment. Let us bring to mind clearly how the human being is in a fully living dream life, how he has pictures sweeping through the dream life. I explained yesterday that the Imaginative consciousness can perceive how these pictures descend into the organization and how what works in these pictures brings about our feelings. Our feelings are therefore what actually would be grasped if one were to look more deeply into man's inner being as an approach to dream pictures. Feelings are the waves that mount up from the day's dream life into our consciousness. We dream continuously, as I said yesterday, beneath the surface of the conceptual life, and this dream life lives itself out in feelings.

If we now look into the environment of the human being and consider first the animal world, we find in the animal world a consciousness that does not rise to thinking, to a life of thought, but that is developed actually in a sort of living dream life. We can form a picture of what reveals itself in the soul life of the animal through a study of our own dream life. The soul life of the animal is entirely a dreaming. The animal's soul life thus is much more actively at work on the organism than the soul life of man, which is more free of the organism through the clarity of the conceptual life. The animal actually dreams. Just as our dream pictures, those dream pictures that we form during waking consciousness, stream upward as feelings, so is the soul life of the animal based mainly on feeling. The animal actually does not have a soul life penetrated by the clear light of thought. What therefore takes place in us between the etheric body and the astral body is essentially what is taking place in the animal. It forms the animal's soul life, and we can understand animal life if we can picture it as proceeding from the soul life.

It is important to form a certain image of these relationships, for then one will comprehend what actually takes place when, let us say, the animal is digesting. Just watch a herd lying in a field digesting. The whole mood of the creatures reveals the truth of what has come to light through spiritual research, namely, that the aroused activity taking place essentially between the etheric body and astral body of the animal presses upward in a living feeling and that the creature lives in this feeling. The animal experience consists essentially of an enhancement and a diminishing of this feeling, and, when the feeling is somewhat subdued, of a participation in its dream pictures, the picture taking the place of feeling. We can say, therefore, that the animal lives in a consciousness that is similar to our dream consciousness.

If we seek for the consciousness that we ourselves have as human beings here on earth, we cannot look for it within the animal; we must seek it in beings who do not come to immediate physical existence. These we call the animal species-souls, souls that as such have no physical, bodily nature but that live themselves out through the animals. We can say that all lions together have such a species-soul, which has a spiritual existence. It has a consciousness such as we human beings have, not like that of the single animal.

If we now descend to the plant world we find there not the same sort of consciousness as an animal's but a consciousness similar to the one we have between sleeping and awaking. The plant is a sleeping being. We also, however, develop this consciousness between the astral body and the I in willing. What is active in the plant world is of essentially the same nature as what lives in our willing. In our willing we actually sleep even when we are awake. The same activity that prevails in our willing actually prevails over the whole plant world. The consciousness that we develop as sleep consciousness is something that actually continues as an unconscious element inserted into our conscious element, forming gaps in our memory, as I described yesterday. Our consciousness is dull during sleep, however, indeed altogether extinguished for most people, just as is the case in plant consciousness.

If we then look in plant life for what corresponds to animal life, we cannot seek it in the individual plant but must seek it in the whole earth-soul. The whole earth-soul has a dreaming consciousness and sleeps itself into the plant consciousness. Only insofar as the earth takes part in cosmic becoming does it flicker up in such a way that it can develop a full consciousness such as we human beings have in the waking state between birth and death. This is chiefly the case, however, in the time of winter, when there is a kind of waking of the earth, whereas the dull dream consciousness exists during the warm time, in summer. I have often explained in earlier lectures that it is entirely wrong to conclude that the earth awakes in summer and sleeps in winter. The reverse is true. In the stirring vegetative activity that develops during the summer, during the warm time of the year, the earth exists in a sleeping, or rather in a dreaming, state, while the waking state exists in the cold time of the year.

If we now descend to the mineral realm we must admit that the consciousness there is still deeper than that of our sleep, a consciousness that indeed lies far from our ordinary human experience, going out even beyond our willing. Nevertheless, what lives in the mineral as a state of consciousness lies far from us only apparently, only for the ordinary consciousness. In reality it does not lie far from us at all. When, for instance, we pass from willing to real action, when we perform some action, then our willing cuts itself off from us. That within which we then swim, as it were, that within which we weave and live in carrying out the deed (which, in fact, we only picture [vorstellen]—our consciousness does not penetrate the action, we only picture it) but what penetrates the deed itself, the content of the deed, is ultimately the same as what penetrates the other side of the surface of the mineral in mineral nature and that constitutes the mineral consciousness. If we could sink still deeper into unconsciousness we would actually come to where the mineral consciousness is weaving. We would find ourselves, however, in the same condition as that in which our action itself is also accomplished. The mineral consciousness thus lies for us on the other side of what we as human beings are able to experience. Our own deed, however, also lies on the other side of what we human beings can experience. Insofar, therefore, as our deed does not depend on us, does not lie in the sphere of what is encompassed within our freedom, our deed is just as much an event of the world as what takes place in the mineral kingdom. We incorporate our deed into this event and thus actually carry man's relation to his environment to the point where man with his action even comes over to the other side of his sleeping consciousness.

In becoming aware of the mineral world around him and seeing the minerals from the outside, the human being hits upon what lies beyond his experience. We could say that if this (see drawing) represents the circumference of what we see within the human realm, the animal realm, and the plant realm, and then we come here to the mineral realm, the mineral realm shows us only its outer side in its working upon our senses. On the other side, however, where we can no longer enter, the mineral realm develops—turned away from us, as it were—its consciousness (red). It is the consciousness that is developed there that is received from the inner contents of our deeds, that can work further in the course of our karma.

Now let us pass on to the beings who do not stand beneath the human being in the ranks of the realms of nature but who stand above the human being. How can we receive a certain mental image of these beings; how, for the consciousness that we must establish through spiritual research, through anthroposophy, can a mental image of such higher beings be formed? You know from the presentation in my book, Knowledge of the Higher Worlds and its Attainment, and from lectures I have given on the subject that we can ascend from the day consciousness, which we call the objective consciousness, to Imaginative consciousness. If we ascend to Imaginative consciousness in a healthy way, we first become free of our bodily nature. We weave in the ether life. Our mental images will thereby cease to have sharp contours, they will be Imaginations flowing into one another. Moreover, they will resemble the thought life that I characterized yesterday and that we find on awaking between the etheric body and the physical body. We become accustomed to such a thought life. In this thought life to which we become accustomed in Imagination, we do not link one thought to another in free will; rather, the thoughts link themselves to one another. It is a thought organism, a pictorial thought organism to which we grow accustomed. This pictorial thought organism possesses, however, the force of life. It presents itself to us as being of thought substance, but also as actually living. It has a life of its own: not the individual life possessed by physical, earthly things but a life that fundamentally lives and weaves through all things. We live into a world that lives in imagining, whose activity is imagining.

This is the world that is first experienced above the human being, this weaving world, this self-imagining world. What is woven in us between our etheric and physical bodies, which we can find on awaking and know to be identical with what enters through conception and birth into this physical world from the spiritual world, this we find only as a fragment, as something cut out of this weaving, self-imagining world. That world which is the self-imagining world finally dismisses us, and then it works still further after our birth in our physical body. There a weaving of thought takes place that is unrelated to our own subjective thought-weaving. This weaving of thought takes place in our growth. This weaving of thought is active as well in our nourishment. This weaving of thought is formed out of the universal thought-weaving of the cosmos.

We cannot understand our etheric body without understanding that we have this universal thought-weaving of the world (see drawing, bright) and that our etheric body (red) is woven, as it were, out of this thought-weaving of the world through our birth. The thought-weaving of the world weaves into us, forms the forces that underlie our etheric body and that actually manifest themselves in the space between etheric body and physical body. They are drawn in, as it were, through the physical body, separated from the outer world, and then they work in us with the help of the etheric body, the actual body of formative forces.

We thus can picture what is behind our world. The cognition next to ours is the Imaginative, and the next state of being that is in our environment is the self-imagining one, expressing itself in living pictures. Such an expression in living pictures underlies our own organization. In our etheric body we are entirely formed and fashioned out of the cosmos. As we have to ascribe to the animal in the realm below us a consciousness like our dreaming consciousness, so in rising upward we find what we then have subjectively in Imagination. What we cultivate inwardly as a web of Imaginations exists for us outwardly; we behold it, as it were, from outside. We imagine from within. The beings just above man imagine themselves from without, revealing themselves through Imagination driven outward, and we ourselves are formed out of this world through such an Imagination driven outward. Thus in fact a weaving of thoughts, a weaving of picture-thoughts, underlies our world, and when we seek the spiritual world we find a weaving of picture-thoughts.

You know that in the development of our cognitional capacities the next stage is the stage of Inspiration. We can experience Imagination from within as a process of cognition. The next world beyond the world of self-imagining, however, is one that weaves and lives in the same element we hit upon with Inspiration, only for this world it is an “exspiration,” a spreading out of oneself, as it were. We inspire ourselves with knowing. What the next world does, however, is to “exspire” itself; it drives outward what we drive inward in Inspired cognition.

By beholding from the reverse side what we experience inwardly as Inspiration, we thus arrive at the objectivity of the next higher beings, and so it is also with Intuition, with Intuitive cognition. I must first say, however, that if as human beings we were merely spun out of the thought-weaving of the world, we would not bring with us into this life the element of our soul that has gone through the life between the last death and this birth. What is spun out of the universal thought-weaving of the world has been assigned to us by the cosmos. Now, however, the soul element must enter it. The entry of the soul element is through such an activity of “exspiration,” through an activity that is the reverse of Inspiration. We are thus “exspired” from the soul-spiritual world. Inasmuch as the cosmos weaves around us with its thought-weaving, the soul-spiritual world permeates us in “exspiring” with the soul element. First, however, it must receive this soul element, and here we come to something that can be comprehended correctly only through the human being.

You see, as human beings living in the world between birth and death we continuously receive impressions of the outer world through our sense perceptions. We form mental images about these and permeate our mental images with our feelings. We pass over to our will impulses and permeate all these. This forms in us at first, however, a kind of abstract life, a kind of picture life. If you look from within, as it were, at what the sense organs have formed inwardly as soul experience of the outer world, you find, in fact, the content of your soul. It is the soul content of the human being that in the higher waking consciousness presents what the outer world gives him between birth and death. His inner being receives it, as it were. If I sketch this inner being, in perception the world as it were enters (see next below, red), becomes inwardly penetrated by the forces of feeling and will, and presses itself into the human organism. We actually bear within us a view of the world, but we bear this view of the world through the effects, the impressions, of the world pressing into us. We are not able to understand fully in our ordinary consciousness the destiny of what actually goes on in us with these impressions of the world. What presses into us and—within certain limits—what is a picture of the cosmos is not only permeated by feelings and inner will impulses, which enter us in consciousness, but is pulsed through by all that otherwise,lives within the human being. In this way it acquires a certain tendency. For as long as we live, right up until death, it is held together by the body. In penetrating the portal of death, it takes with it from the body what one can call a wish to continue what it became in the body, a wish to accept the being of man. When we carry our inner soul life through death it acquires the wish to accept the being of man.

That is what our soul life bears through death: the longing for the being of man. And this longing for the being of man is particularly strongly expressed in all that is dreaming and sleeping in the depths of our soul life, in our will. Our will, as it incorporates itself into the soul life, which arises out of the impressions of the outer world, bears within it as it goes through death into a spiritual world, into the weavings of a spiritual world, the deepest longing to become man.

Our thought world, on the other hand, that world which can be seen in our memories, for example, which is reflected from us ourselves into our consciousness, bears within it the opposite longing. It has indeed formed a relationship with our human nature. Our thoughts have a strong relationship to our human nature. They then bear in themselves, when they go through death, the most intense longing to spread out into the world—to become world (see 1st diagram this lecture).

We therefore can say that as human beings going through death our thoughts bear within them the longing to become world. The will, on the other hand, which we have developed in life, bears within it the longing to become man.

Thoughts: Longing to become world.
Will: Longing to be come man.

This is what goes with us through death. All that rules as will in the depths of our being bears in its deepest inner being the longings to become man. One can perceive this with Imaginative consciousness if one observes the sleeping human being, whose will is outside him, whose will with the I is outside him. In what is to be found outside the human body, the longing is already clearly expressed to return, to awake again, in order to take human shape within the extension of the human physical body itself. This longing, however, remains beyond death. Whatever is of a will nature desires to become man, whereas whatever is of a thought nature and must unite with the thoughts that are so near to the physical life, with the thoughts that actually form our human tissue and bear our human configuration between birth and death—that acquires the longing to be dispersed again, to disintegrate, to become world. This lasts until approximately the middle of the time that we spend between death and a new birth.

The thought element in its longing to become world then has come, as it were, to an end. It has incorporated itself into the entire cosmos. The longing to become world is achieved, and a reversal comes about. Midway between death and a new birth this longing of the thoughts to become world slowly changes into the longing to become man again, again to interweave itself so as to become the thought-web that we can perceive next to the body when we awake. We can say, therefore, that in the moment that lies midway between death and a new birth—which I called the Midnight Hour of Existence in my Mystery Dramas—we have a rhythmic reversal from the longing of our thoughts to become world, now that it has been fulfilled, into the longing to become man again, gradually to descend in order to become man again.

In the same moment that the thoughts receive the longing to become man again, the reverse appears in the will. The will at first develops the longing to become man in the spiritual element where we live between death and a new birth. It is this longing that predominantly fills the will. Out there between death and a new birth the will has experienced a spiritual image of the human being; now there arises in it the most vivid longing again to become world. The will spreads out, as it were; it becomes world, it becomes cosmos. By reason of this spreading out it extends even to the vicinity of the stream of nature that is formed through the line of heredity in the succession of generations. What works as will in the spiritual-physical cosmos and begins in the Midnight Hour of Existence to have the longing again to become world already lives in the flow of generations. When we then embody ourselves in the other stream that has the longing to become man, the will has preceded us in becoming world. It lives already in the propagation of the generations into which we then descend. In what we receive from our ancestors the will already lives, the will that wished to become world after the Midnight Hour of Existence. Through what in our thoughts has desired since the Midnight Hour of Existence to become man, we Meet with this will-desiring-to-become-world, which then incorporates itself into what we receive from our ancestors.

Thoughts: Longing to become world—longing to become man.

Will: Longing to become man—longing to become world.

You see, therefore, that when we thus follow with spiritual vision what lives on the one hand in the physical and what lives on the other hand in the spiritual, we really picture man's becoming. Since we incline downward to our physical existence through the thought-web that longs to become man, however, we are there related to all the beings who live in the sphere just above man, beings who imagine themselves. We pass through the sphere of the beings who, as it were, imagine themselves. At the very moment when this reversal takes place, our soul, permeated with the I, also finds the possibility of living on in the two streams. They diverge, it is true, but the soul lives with them, cosmically lives, until, when the longing to become man again has been fully realized, it incarnates and becomes indeed an individual human being. The life of the soul is very complex, and here in the Midnight Hour of Existence it passes over the abyss. It is inspired, breathed in, out of our own past, that past at first lying between our last death and the Midnight Hour of Existence. We pass this Midnight Hour of Existence through an activity that resembles, experienced inwardly, an inspiring, and that outwardly is an “exspiration,” proceeding from the former existence. When the soul has passed the Midnight Hour of Existence we come together with those beings who stand at the second stage above man and who live, as I have said, in “exspiration.”

The third stage in higher cognition is Intuitive cognition. If we experience it from within, we have experienced it from one side; if we experience it from without then we have an intuiting, a self-surrender, a true surrender of self. This self-surrender, this flowing forth into the outer world, is the nature of the hierarchy that stands at, the third stage above man, the “intuiting.” This intuiting is the activity through which the content of our former earthly life is surrendered to our present one, streams over, pours itself into our present life on earth. We exercise this activity continually, both on the way to the Midnight Hour of Existence and beyond it. This activity permeates all else, and through it, in going through repeated earthly lives, we participate in that world in which are the beings living in real Intuition, the self-surrendering beings. We, too, out of our former earthly life, surrender ourselves to the earthly existence that follows.

We can thus gain a picture of the course of our life between death and a new birth in the environment of these three worlds. Just as here between birth and death we live in the environment of the animal, plant, and mineral worlds, so between death and rebirth we live in that world where what we otherwise grasp in Imagination lives in pictures formed from without. Hence what we carry out of the spiritual cosmos into our bodily form we can also grasp through Imagination. Our soul element, which we carry through the Midnight Hour of Existence, which lives in us principally as the activity of feeling, though dulled into the dreamlike, we can grasp through Inspired cognition, and this is also, when it appears as our life of feeling, permeated by such beings.

In fact, we live fully as human beings only in our outer sense perception. As soon as we advance to thinking, something is objective for this thinking, which is given for Imagination in picture form. We raise into our consciousness only the abstract thoughts out of the picture-forming. Immediately behind our consciousness there lies the picture-weaving of thoughts. As human beings between birth and death, we come to freedom through the fact that we can raise the abstract thoughts out of this picture-weaving. The world of Imaginative necessity lies behind, and there we are no longer alone in the same way as we are here. There we are interwoven with beings revealing themselves through Imagination, as we are then in our feeling nature interwoven with beings revealing themselves through “exspiration,” through inspiring turned outward. In going from earthly life to earthly life we are interwoven with those beings who live by Intuition.

Our human life thus reaches downward into the three realms of nature and reaches upward into the three realms of the divine, soul-spiritual existence. This shows us that in our view of the human being here we have only man's outer side. The moment we look at his inner being he continues toward the higher worlds, he betrays to us, reveals to us his relationship to the higher worlds. We live into these worlds through Imagination, Inspiration, and Intuition.

With this we have gained some insight into the human environment. At the same time, however, we have discovered the world that stands as a world of spiritual necessities behind the world of physical necessities. We learn then to appreciate all the more what lies in the center: the world of our ordinary consciousness, through which we pass in the waking condition between birth and death. There we incorporate into our actual human nature what can live in freedom. Below us and above us there is no freedom. We bear freedom through the portal of death by taking with us the most essential content of the consciousness that we possess between birth and death. Indeed, the human being owes to earthly existence the mastery over what in him is the life of freedom. Then, at all events, it can no longer be taken from him, if he has mastered it by passing through life between birth and death. It can no longer be taken from him if he carries this life into the world of spiritual necessities. This earthly life receives its deep meaning precisely by our being able to insert it between what lies below us and above us. We thus rise to a grasp of what can be understood as the spiritual in the human being.

If we wish to know about the soul element, we must look into the spaces between physical body, etheric body, astral body, and I; we must look into what is weaving there between the members of our being. If we wish to acquaint ourselves with man as a spiritual being, we must ask what man experiences with the beings who imagine themselves, with the beings who reveal themselves outwardly through Inspiration, or actually through “exspiration,” with the beings who reveal themselves through Intuition. If we therefore wish to examine the life of the soul we must look for the interaction developed among our human members, and if we wish to study man as a spiritual being we must look for the intercourse with the beings of the hierarchies.

When we look down into nature and wish to view the human being in his entirety, then this human being unveils itself to spiritual vision the moment we can say from inner knowledge: the human being, as he is today, bears in himself physical body, etheric body, astral body, and I. One thus has learned to recognize what man is within nature. Now we become aware—at first in a subjective way through inner experience—of the weaving of the soul. We do not behold it, we stand within it. In rising to a view of the soul we must search between the members that we have discovered as the members of man's being in natural existence. What these members do with one another from within unveils itself for us as the objective view of the soul's life.

Then, however, we must go further and must now not only seek the members of man and the effect of these members upon one another, but we must take the whole human being and see him in interaction with what lives in the widest circumference of the perceptible world environment, below him and above him. Then we discover what lives beneath him, as though sleeping in relation to what is above him, and what proves itself to be the actual spirituality of the human being—spirituality as experience of our activity with the beings of the higher hierarchies. What is experienced above as the actual spirituality and what is experienced below in nature is experienced as an alternation, a rhythmic alternation between waking and sleeping. If we go from the human consciousness, which is the waking consciousness, down to the animal consciousness, which is the dreaming consciousness, down to the plant realm, the sleeping consciousness, and if we go still deeper, we find what is deeper than sleep; if we go upward we first find Imagination as reality fulfilled. Therefore there is a further awakening in relation to our ordinary consciousness, a still further awakening with the higher beings through Inspiration and a fully awakened condition in Intuition, a condition of such awakeness that it is a surrendering to the world.

Now I beg you to follow this diagram, which is of the greatest significance for understanding the world and man. Take this as the central point, as it were, of ordinary human consciousness. It first descends and finds the animal's dreaming consciousness; it descends further and finds the plant's sleeping consciousness; it descends further and finds the mineral's deeply sleeping consciousness.

Now, however, the human being rises above himself and finds the beings who reveal themselves in Imaginations; he goes further upward and finds the beings who reveal themselves in Inspirations, actually through an “exspirating” being; he finally finds the beings who reveal themselves through Intuition, who pour themselves out.

Where do they pour themselves? The highest consciousness pours itself into the deeply sleeping consciousness of the mineral realm. The mineral realm spread around us reveals one side to us. If you approached this one side and were really able to penetrate it—though not by splintering it into atoms—on the other side you would find, raying in from the opposite direction, that which, in Intuitive consciousness, streams into the deeply sleeping consciousness of the mineral realm. This process that we can fmd there in space we, as human beings, go through in time in our evolution through different earthly lives.

We will speak further about these relationships tomorrow.

Considerations such as those we embarked on yesterday are, of course, not necessarily set out for the purpose of inviting anyone to start practising what is needed for attaining super-sensible knowledge. To a certain extent this intention is, of course, also present. But the main reason is to make known what kind of higher knowledge can be attained by such means. A declaration stating that one thing or another is possible in man's development is, at the same time, a declaration about the intrinsic nature of the human being. It can be stated that the human being seeking initiation is capable of extricating his soul and spirit element from his physical body, either by the means described yesterday with reference to the ancient Mysteries, or by means suitable for today, which I am about to discuss briefly. A statement such as this shows that the element of soul and spirit is an independent entity which has its own existence over and above that of the body. So a discussion about higher knowledge is, at the same time, a revelation about the being of man; this is, in the first instance, what is important for the dissemination of anthroposophical wisdom.

Yesterday I described how in the ancient Mysteries the bodily nature of man was treated so that it became able to free its soul nature in both directions. I said that the two main aspects of this in the ancient Mysteries were, on the one hand, the draught of forgetfulness, and, on the other hand, the occasioning of states of anxiety, fear, shock. The draught of forgetfulness, I said, wiped from memory everything pertaining to ordinary earthly life. But this negative effect was not the main point. The main point was that during the process of coming to Mystery knowledge the brain was actually made physically softer, as a result of which the spiritual element which is usually held off was no longer held off by the brain but allowed through, so that the pupil became aware of his soul and spirit element and knew that this had been in him even before birth, or rather, even before conception.

The other aspect was the shock which caused the organism to become rigid. When the organism grows rigid it no longer absorbs the soul and spirit element in the way it usually does with regard to its expression in the will. On the one hand the rigid bodily organism withdraws from the element of soul and spirit, and on the other hand the element of soul and spirit becomes perceptible to the pupil. Through the softening of the brain the thought aspect of the soul became perceptible to the pupil of the ancient Mysteries, and through the rigidifying of the rest of the organism the will aspect became perceptible. In this way, initiation gave the pupil a perception, a picture of the element of soul and spirit within him. But this picture was dreamlike in character. For what was it that was freed on the one hand towards the thought aspect, and on the other hand towards the will aspect? It was that part which descends from realms of spirit and soul to unite with the physical, bodily nature of man. Only by taking possession of the body can it become capable of making use of the senses and of the intellect. It needs the body for these things. Without the use of the body these things remain dreamlike, they remain dull, twilit. So by receiving his detached soul and spirit element as a result of the processes described, the pupil received something dreamlike, which, however, also contained a thought element.

As I said yesterday, if people were to follow these procedures today, the condition induced in consequence would be a pathological condition. For since the Mystery of Golgotha human beings have progressed in such a way that their intellect has become stronger by comparison with their earlier, more instinctive manner of knowing. This strengthening of intellectual life has come over mankind particularly since the fifteenth century. It is extremely significant that throughout the Middle Ages people still knew that in order to attain higher knowledge, or indeed to lead a higher kind of life, it was necessary to extricate the soul from the body.

If Schiller had managed to write a great drama he had planned, Die Malteser (The Knights of Malta), German literature would probably have been all the richer for a work on this medieval knowledge about the super-sensible world, a work on the relationship of the Middle Ages to super-sensible matters. It is a most interesting aspect of German culture that, precisely in the years when Napoleon destroyed the Order of the Knights of Malta,¹ Schiller was planning to write a drama about them, about the siege of Malta by the Turks and its defence by the grand master of the Order, de La Valette. Schiller was obviously prevented from writing this drama. He left it on one side and wrote Wallenstein (Wallenstein's Camp) instead. The Order of the Knights of Malta originated at the time of the Crusades. Schiller's drama would have shown clearly that the members of such an Order, which had the external task of working for the community and caring for the sick, considered that they could only do such work if they at the same time strove towards the attainment of a higher life.

At the time when the Order of the Knights Templar and the Order of the Knights Hospitaller of St John—which later became the Order of the Knights of Malta—were founded, and indeed throughout the Middle Ages, people had the certain feeling that human beings must first transform themselves before they can undertake such tasks in the right way. This is a feeling about the nature of the human being which has become entirely lost in more recent times. This can be put down to the fact that the human intellect has grown so much more intense and strong, with the result that modern man is totally intellectual because the intellectual aspect predominates entirely.

Now, in our own time, there is once more a great longing amongst mankind to overcome the intellectual aspect. Though literature and, above all, journalism, still express the opposite, nevertheless amongst the broad masses of mankind there is a longing to overcome the intellectual element. One thing that shows this especially is the fact that talks about spiritual matters are extremely well received in the widest circles. Another thing, even though it is not yet fully understood, is the way our eurythmy impresses the widest circles—not intellectually, but in what comes from the imaginative foundation of human beings. This became very obvious during my more recent lecture tours and especially the recent eurythmy tour. Eurythmy makes a very strong impression, even in circles where it cannot be understood in its deepest sense when it is seen for the first time. Nevertheless, it is felt to be something which has been called up out of the profoundest foundations of human nature, something that is more than what comes out of the intellect.

Now what is this intellectual element which is so much a part of the human being today? Let me draw you another diagram. As I said yesterday, with regard to the human brain (white), we can imagine how, as a result of the draught of forgetfulness, the element of spirit and soul, which usually came to a halt before penetrating too far inwards, now penetrated the brain (red). In the pupil of the ancient Mysteries the element of spirit and soul then rose up through the brain which had been thus prepared. Compared with ancient times, let us say prior to the Mystery of Golgotha, today's intellectual faculties are as they are because the element of soul and spirit is inwardly much stronger and more intense. The people of ancient times were far less intellectual. Their soul and spirit element was not etched with such sharp lines of thought as is the case today. Intellectuals think in straight lines, which is not how people thought in more ancient times. In those days thoughts were more like pictures, they were dreamlike and softer. Now, thoughts are endowed with sharp edges, clear contours. Yet, even though the element of soul and spirit is much stronger than it used to be, human beings today are still nevertheless incapable of grasping these thoughts with their soul and spirit element.

Please do not misunderstand me, my dear friends. Human beings today are considerably stronger in their soul and spirit than were people of old. They dream less than did people of old, and their thoughts are firmer. But their thoughts would be just as dull today as they used to be, if the element of soul and spirit alone were at work in them. Even today, human beings cannot think out of their soul. It is their body which relieves them of the power of thought. Sense perceptions are received by the element of soul and spirit. But to think these sense perceptions we need the help of our body. Our body is the thinker. So nowadays the following takes place: The sense perception works on the human being; the element of soul and spirit (red, top) penetrates and mingles with the sense perception; but the body acts like a mirror and keeps on throwing back the rays of thought (arrows). By this means they become conscious. So it is the body which relieves human beings of the effort of thinking, but it does not relieve them of the effort of perceiving with their senses. So today, if human beings want to strive for initiation with regard to the thought aspect, they must turn their exercises towards strengthening their element of soul and spirit even more. We know these exercises from Knowledge of the Higher Worlds and from the second part of Occult Science. Thus will they gradually make their soul and spirit element so independent that it no longer needs the body.

So let us understand one another: When we think in ordinary life today, our element of soul and spirit does participate. Above all it takes in the sense perceptions. But it would be incapable by itself of developing the thoughts which are developed today. So the body comes along and relieves us of the effort of thinking. In ordinary life we think with our body, our body is our thinking apparatus. If we pursue the exercises described in the books mentioned, our soul will be strengthened to such an extent that it would no longer need the body for thinking but would itself be able to think. This is, basically, the first step on the path towards higher knowledge; it is the first step when the soul and spirit element begins to dismiss the body as the organ that does the thinking so far as higher knowledge is concerned. And it cannot be stressed often enough that a person who ascends to higher knowledge—that is, to Imagination—must remain at his own side with his ordinary good sense, keeping a watch on himself and being his own critic. In other words, he must remain the same person he always is in ordinary life. But out of the first person that second one develops, capable now of thinking without the help of the body, instead of with it.

The element of spirit and soul which revealed itself to the pupil of the ancient Mysteries came out of the body and penetrated through the brain, and as it oozed forth the pupil perceived it. Today what is perceived in initiation is a strengthened thinking which does not in any way make use of the brain. The pupil in ancient times drew what he saw in the way of spirit and soul out of his own bodily organization. Today the human being perceives the soul and spirit element, as far as thoughts are concerned, in such a way that they penetrate into him in the same way as sense perceptions penetrate into him. In taking this first upward step towards higher knowledge the human being must accustom himself to saying: I am beginning to perceive myself with regard to my eternal element of soul and spirit, for this comes in through my eyes, it comes in from outside in every way.

In a public lecture² in the Bernoulli Hall in Basel I said: Anthroposophical spiritual science has to regard perception through the senses as its ideal. We have to take our start from perceiving with our senses. We must not return to dreamlike perception, but have to go forward to even clearer perception than that of perceiving with our senses. Our own being must come towards us, just as colours and sounds come towards our senses.

I showed two things in the last diagram. Both this (top) and this (bottom), the element of soul and spirit, are supposed to be one and the same thing. And they are one and the same, but seen from different sides. When a human being descends from the world of spirit and soul to physical incarnation, his element of soul and spirit, in a way, dies from the point of view of the soul and spirit world. When a human being is conceived and prepares to be born he dies as regards the spiritual world. And when he dies here in the physical world and goes through the portal of death he is born in the spiritual world. These concepts are relative. We die in respect of the spiritual world when we are born. And when we die in respect of the physical world we are born in the spirit. Death in the physical world signifies spiritual birth, birth in the physical world signifies spiritual death. Birth and death, then, are relative concepts. There is something which makes its appearance when the soul is on its way to birth, something that would not be capable of surviving in the spiritual world; it would disintegrate in the spiritual world, and so it streams towards a physical body in order to preserve itself.

In a diagram it can be depicted like this: The element of spirit and soul (red coming from the left) descends from the spirit and soul world. It arrives, you might say, in a cul-de-sac; it can go no further and is forced to equip itself with physical matter (blue). But the physical matter actually only works in the way I have described—from the brain, but not from the rest of the organism. As regards the rest of the organism the spirit and soul element does indeed travel onwards, having recovered through not being allowed to pass by the brain, through finding resistance and support in the brain. It is able, after all, to come to meet itself (red, right) throughout the rest of the organism, especially the system of limbs and metabolism. This blue part in the drawing is the head organism. Here (yellow) is the system

of limbs and metabolism; under normal conditions it absorbs the element of soul and spirit, but only to a certain extent.

As we grow up from childhood our spirit and soul element keeps making an appearance. At the moment of conception, and all through the embryonic stage in the mother's womb, the element of spirit and soul descending from the spiritual world is absorbed into matter. But because it finds a support it recovers again. Because of the shape of the embryo, at first that of the head, the element of spirit and soul finds a support (see drawing). Then the rest of the organism begins to grow, and once again the element of spirit and soul oozes through, as I have shown in the diagram.

As we grow up through childhood our element of spirit and soul gradually becomes ever more independent. I have often described this in detail and also shown how at major points of transition, such as the change of teeth and puberty, the element of spirit and soul becomes increasingly independent. As we grow up our physical body recedes more and more as we attain an independent spirit and soul element. This independent element is more intense today than it was in ancient times. But it would still be incapable of thinking. As I have said, it needs the help of the body if it wants to think. If this were not there, whatever grew towards us would remain forever dreamlike.

Initiates in ancient times strove to make their brain porous, so that what was then the element of spirit and soul could ooze through as it descended; in a certain way they could still see their life before birth through their softened brain. Today initiates are not concerned with that; they are concerned with what evolves during the course of life. This awakens a higher intensity with regard to the thought aspect. Initiates in ancient times would not have been capable of this. They would have been unable to take such a firm hold of the new spirit and soul element that begins to develop in the child—to begin with in an unclear way, and which later passes through the portal of death. In a way they slew the physical aspect, they paralysed it, so that the element of spirit and soul could emerge that had existed before conception.

Today we take a firmer hold of what we develop—at first in a weak way—through childhood and into adulthood, strengthening and reinforcing the new element of spirit and soul that has been developing since birth. We endeavour to achieve independence of our spirit and soul element over against our physical body, as far as our thought life is concerned. The pupil in ancient times made manifest the element of spirit and soul belonging to him before birth by toning down his physical body. We today endeavour to make manifest that element of spirit and soul which develops more and more from birth onwards. But we do not make it manifest to a degree which would be necessary in order to be able to see independently into the spiritual world. This is the difference.

As regards the will, the situation is as follows. The initiate in ancient times endeavoured to paralyse his will organization. This made it possible for him to perceive the element of spirit and soul he had from before his birth and which was normally absorbed by his will organization. If the body is rigid it does not absorb the element of spirit and soul, and so it is revealed independently. As modern initiates we do not do this; we do it differently. We strengthen our will by transforming the power of will in the manner described in the books already mentioned. It would be quite wrong to bring about a cataleptic condition by means of shocks or anxiety states as was the case in the ancient Mysteries. For modern man, with his highly-developed intellect, this would be something quite pathological. This must not be allowed to happen. Instead we use retrospective exercises—remembering backwards what has happened through the day—and also other will exercises to transform our will in a way which might be described as follows:

Consider the human eye. What must be its constitution if we are to be able to see? A cataract comes about when the physical matter of the eye makes itself independent so that it dresses itself up in physical matter which is not transparent. The eye must be selfless, it must be selflessly incorporated in our organism if we are to use it for seeing; it must be transparent. Our organism is most certainly not transparent for our will. As I have often said, we can think that we want to raise our hand. We form the thought: I want to raise my hand. But what then happens in our organism as this thought slips over into it and performs the action—this is as obscure for us as are the events which take place between going to sleep and waking up. The next thing we see is our raised hand, another perception. We perceive something at the beginning and we perceive something at the end, but what lies in between is a state of sleep. Our will unfolds in the unconscious just as much as the events of sleep unfold in the unconscious. So we can rightly say that for ordinary consciousness our organism is as untransparent as regards perceiving how the will functions as is an eye afflicted with cataract.

Of course I do not mean that the human organism is ill because of this. For ordinary, everyday life it has to be untransparent. This is its normal condition. But it cannot remain so for higher knowledge; it has to become transparent, it must become transparent for soul and spirit. This is achieved by means of the will exercises. Our organism then becomes transparent. We then no longer look down into something indeterminate when our will works, for our organism becomes as selfless as the eye, which is set selflessly into our organism so that we may perceive external objects properly. Just as the eye is in itself transparent, so our organism becomes transparent with regard to the element of spirit and soul; our whole organism becomes a sense organ. Thus, with regard to the will, we perceive the spiritual beings as objectively as we perceive external physical objects through our external eyes. Our will exercises are not aimed at making our body rigid in order to free our element of spirit and soul. They are aimed at developing the element of soul and spirit to such an extent that it becomes capable of seeing through the physical body. This is the main point. We see into the spiritual world only if we look through ourselves. We see external objects with our eyes only by looking through our eyes. And we do not see into the spiritual world directly, but only by looking through ourselves.

This is the other side: development with regard to the will. The whole of evolution in recent times depends, firstly, on our developing our thinking to an extent which makes it independent of the brain, and secondly, on our developing our will to an extent that the whole human being becomes transparent. It is impossible to see into the spiritual world through a vacuum, just as it is impossible to see the world of colours without looking through the eye. We have to look through ourselves, and this is brought about by means of the will exercises.

This, then, is for modern man what can be carried out by initiation. On the one hand, with regard to thinking, the element of soul and spirit can be made independent of the body, and on the other hand the material nature of the body can be overcome so that it becomes transparent for spirit and soul. Thus the element of spirit and soul has become independent through its own strength. This is the great difference between ancient and modern initiation. Ancient initiation transformed the physical body—the brain on the one hand, and the rest of the organism on the other—and, because the body was transformed in this way, the element of soul and spirit became faintly perceptible. Modern initiation transforms the element of spirit and soul, strengthening it with regard to the thought aspect on the one hand, and the will aspect on the other; thus it becomes independent of the brain, and at the same time so strong that it can see through the rest of the organism.

What the initiate saw in olden times appeared in ghostly form. Whatever beings of the spiritual world were able to reveal themselves when the procedure had been completed, appeared in a ghostly form. I could say that the spiritual world was seen in etheric shapes. The great anxiety of the teachers in the ancient Mysteries was that the pupils, despite the fact that what they saw of the spiritual world was ghostly, would learn to disregard this ghostly aspect. Ever and again they warned their pupils: What you are seeing appears to be material, but you must regard it as a picture; these ghostly things that you are seeing are only pictures of the spiritual world; you must not imagine that what you see around you in a ghostly form is actual reality. In a similar way, when I draw on the blackboard the chalk marks are not reality but only an image. Of course this expression was not used in olden times, but in modern terms it is a good way of putting it. It was the great concern of the teachers in the ancient Mysteries that their pupils should regard as pictures what they saw in a dreamlike, ghostly form.

In modern initiation there must be anxiety on a different score. Here, knowledge of the higher worlds can only be achieved at all by means of Imagination. Here we have to live in a world of pictures; the pictures have a picture character from the start. There is no danger of mistaking them in their picture character for anything else. But we have to learn to assess them correctly. In order to know how to relate these pictures to the spiritual reality they represent, we have to apply to them the exact thought processes we have acquired as modern human beings. We really have to think within this world of pictures in the very way we have learnt to think in the ordinary physical world. Every thoughtless glance is damaging to modern initiation. All the healthy ways of thinking we have developed as modern human beings must be brought to bear on higher knowledge. Just as we can find our way about the ordinary physical world if we can think properly, so can we only find our way about in the world of the spirit—which we enter through modern initiation—if we are able to penetrate with the thinking we have gained here in the physical world into all the knowledge we attain through Imagination, Inspiration, Intuition. In my book Theosophy,³ as well as in Occult Science and Knowledge of the Higher Worlds, I have always stated categorically that this is a characteristic of modern initiation.

That is why it is so important that anyone who desires to enter into the higher worlds in a modern way should learn to think with exactitude and practise thinking with exactitude. This is not as easy as people suppose. To help you understand what I mean let me say the following: Think of something really startling: Suppose our present respected company were to be surprised tomorrow here in the Goetheanum by a visit from, say, Lloyd George⁴ of course this is only hypothetical, but I want to give an extreme example. If Lloyd George were to turn up here tomorrow you would all have certain thoughts and certain feelings. These thoughts and feelings would not be the result of simply observing all that went on from the moment of his appearance until the moment of his departure. In order to simply follow all this, you would not need to know that it was Lloyd George. If you did not know who it was, you would simply note whatever can be noted with regard to somebody who is entirely unknown to you. Until you learn to disregard everything you already know and feel from elsewhere about something you are observing, as long as you cannot simply follow what is going on without any of this, you are not thinking with exactitude. You would only be thinking with exactitude if you were capable—should Lloyd George really appear here tomorrow—of entertaining thoughts and feelings which applied solely to what actually went on from the moment you first noticed him to the moment when he disappeared from view. You would have to exclude every scrap of prior knowledge. You would have to exclude everything that had irritated you and everything that had pleased you about him and take in only whatever there was to take in at that moment. Only in this way is it possible to learn to think in accordance with reality.

Just think how far human beings are from being able to think with exactitude as regards reality! Only let something stir in your soul and you will see what feelings, living hidden and unconscious in your soul, you allow to rise up. It is extremely difficult to confine oneself solely to what one has seen. Read a description of something and then ask: Is the writer merely describing what he saw or is he not also calling up hundreds and hundreds of prejudices, both in feeling and in thinking, which are bound up with it? Only if you are capable of restricting yourself solely to what you have seen will you be in a position gradually to attain to thinking with exactitude.

It is necessary to lay aside everything we have been taught or have learned from life with regard to what we see, and follow solely what life presents to us. If you consider this and meditate on it a little you will gradually come to understand what I mean by thinking with exactitude. In ordinary life we have little opportunity under today's conditions to practise thinking with exactitude except in geometry or, over and above that, in mathematics. Here we really do restrict ourselves to what we see.

We have not many prejudices about a geometric form, a triangle for instance. Here is a triangle. Let me draw a parallel line here. This angle equals that angle, and the other one is equal to this one, and the one in the middle equals itself. This is a straight angle, so all three

angles of the triangle equal a straight angle. I am simply taking account of what I see before me, without applying the colossal prejudices I would bring to bear if Lloyd George were to arrive here tomorrow and I were to know about it in advance. In saying what I have just said, I was, of course, merely endeavouring to point out that thinking with absolute exactitude is a good preparation for seeing properly in the higher spiritual world. A kind of thinking in which you have firm control of the beginning of the thought, as well as a clear view of every step of thought along the way, is necessary in order to enter the higher worlds, that is, in order enter there with understanding. Above all a clearly-defined conscientiousness in thinking is necessary, a calling-oneself-to-account about one's thoughts. Ordinary life is very remiss in this, too. In most cases, people have no interest in thinking with exactitude; they prefer to think in a way in which they can enjoy the thought and feel comfortable with it.

For a Catholic priest, for instance, it is frightfully uncomfortable to entertain the thought that there might be something right about Anthroposophy. In such a case there can be no question of developing any exact thoughts. Instead, the matter is approached with all sorts of misconceptions and prejudices, and judgements are formed on the basis of these. Most things in life are decided on the basis of prejudices. Consider, for instance, what a strange impression is created sometimes when a simple attempt is made to describe something entirely objectively. Here we live in the Goetheanum. Nobody would consider me to be less of an admirer of Goethe than anyone else, and yet have I not said a good many things against Goethe? How often have I not attempted to describe Goethe from a narrow, overseeable point of view, whereas usually when Goethe is mentioned a whole host of prejudgements arises in response to his name alone. Merely to mention the name of Goethe sets up an excitement in the soul. It is impossible to approach any new phenomenon without prejudgement if one brings along a colossal collection of prejudices before even starting.

For the most part these things are not taken into account, and people therefore frequently say: Oh well, we can't get any further with our project of entering the spiritual worlds! Indeed, if elementary matters are not attended to first then, naturally enough, there is no way of entering those worlds. People just feel that unreasonable demands are being made of them if it is suggested that they take account of even the most elementary things.

Here is an example: In the nineties⁵ I happened to be in Jena when Bismarck gave a grand speech after his forced resignation. He appeared on the platform in the wake of Haeckel and Bardeleben and other Jena professors. Imagine the huge crowd in the market square in Jena. They were expected to follow Bismarck's speech as they would a speech made by someone they had previously never heard of! Such a thing is unthinkable under normal conditions. And yet for someone who really desires to undergo a kind of initiation it is certainly necessary to develop an impartiality which enables him to take everything he sees as something entirely new, however many prejudices his soul might previously have harboured in that respect. Everything must be treated as though it had arrived like a bolt from the blue. For it is a special characteristic of the spiritual world that we have to win it afresh at every moment if we desire to enter it. And to do this we have to prepare ourselves in a suitable way.

It can be said that the general drift of civilization indicates that mankind is indeed headed in this direction. But for the moment this still appears in a light that is not all that pleasing, namely, in opposition to any kind of authority, and to any kind of received judgement, and so on. These things will have to be ennobled. But meanwhile mankind is indeed moving in the direction of impartiality and freedom from prejudice. But, for the moment, the more negative, the uglier sides of this are more prevalent. We must, therefore, judge the evolution of civilization with regard to the future in the very manner I have just been describing.

• 1 . Order of the Knights of Malta: In 1798 Napoleon seized and occupied Malta on his way to Egypt.
• 2 . See the lecture of 2 November 1921 in Rudolf Steiner, Anthroposophie und Wissenschaft, Dornach GA 75 (not yet published).
• 3 . Rudolf Steiner Theosophy, Anthroposophic Press, New York 1986.
• 4 . David Lloyd George, 1863-1945. British Prime Minister from 1916 to 1922.
• 5 . On 16 February 1894 Ernst Haeckel celebrated his sixtieth birthday. Rudolf Steiner was one of the invited guests. Bismarck, much admired by Haeckel, was also present. He had been forced to resign his office in 1890.

The Christian consciousness of to-day is still aware—or can, at least, still be aware—of two poles, representing as it were the outermost extremes of world-outlook. The two poles to which I refer are the Christmas secret and the Easter secret. To begin with—even if you only compare them outwardly—it will strike you at once that the Christmas secret is really the secret of birth; it represents the birth of Christ Jesus, and therewithal attaches itself to the secret of birth in general, the Easter secret is connected with the secret of death, inasmuch as it is a festival associated with the death of Christ Jesus. Now birth and death are the two boundaries of human life, as it runs its course within the physical body. Thus, in truth, we may say: over against what stands before man as the visible part of his being, birth and death veil from his sight the invisible part; they are the two gateways to the invisible world.

In the festivals of Christmas and Easter, two gateways to the invisible world are thus made the basis of the Christian year; and inasmuch as this is so, the Christian world-conception is indeed connected with the Mysteries of all the World. Wherever we may look—among all peoples and in the most varied regions of the Earth, we find Mysteries everywhere associated either with the secret of birth or with the secret of death, Not that it lies so patently at hand in every case; the inner connections are not always visible at once. Thus, certain Mysteries (I am only referring now to post-Atlantean time) were connected with the secret of birth in a more indirect way. I refer to those Mysteries which place into the very centre of their life what the profane world calls the Sacred Fire; ‘Sacred Fire’ is very different from what the profane world can understand. It is essentially Man himself—the super-sensible Man who underlies the human being of the sense-world. What is it that the profane world knows as the Sacred Fire (or, as we might also call it, the Sacred Warmth)? What is it in reality, when they revere this Fire? It is a symbol of the super-sensible Man. It is that which descends through birth from spiritual heights to grow and evolve in it physical body. It is the invisible or super-sensible Man—perceptible, however, to an old atavistic clairvoyance!

This, then, is the type of the Mysteries which takes its start from the super-sensible Man who underlies the man of the sense-world—the super-sensible Man who passes through birth to clothe himself with a sensely garment. This is the type of Mystery which afterwards passed over into the secret of Christmas; it is essentially the Mystery of birth.

Less hidden, we may truly say, is the other kind of Mystery,—that which belongs to the secret of death. While the former is associated with Fire, this kind of Mystery is associated with the Light. Here too, however, as in the case of Fire, something quite different is meant by ‘the Light.’ ‘The Light’ refers to that which speaks to man at night-time when the star-lit sky sends him its language of Light. All astrological Mysteries in ancient time were in reality Mysteries of Light,—in the times, I mean, before the arrival of the Mystery of Golgotha. Only, here again we must remember that the ancient Astrology was not pursued with the abstract calculations of to-day, but with an atavistic clairvoyant power. Man did not merely observe the mineral-physical world of stars above him; in those most ancient times, he had an organ with which to behold the secret of the constellations. It was, especially, a customary art in certain Mysteries of olden time, to observe the Moon establishing its various positions through the constellations of the Zodiac. They knew that when the Moon was shining from the region of the Pleiades, or from Taurus, it signified something quite different than if it were shining from some other region of the sky. Likewise the other planets in their several constellations were brought home to the consciousness of men. It was, however, a very different consciousness from what has remained to us in this materialistic epoch. They knew, moreover, that the Mystery of human death is connected with what is thus spoken to man by the starry constellations. Throughout the ever-changing association of the fixed stars with the several planets, they saw the expression, as it were, of a language which he who sojourns in the body hears from the Earth, while at the same time the souls of the dead perceive it from the other side. They were clearly conscious of the fact that when a man gives himself up with devotion to the language of the stars, he lives in that element which receives the human being when he passes through the Gate of Death.

They looked on birth as on a Question, in those ancient times; and the old kind of Mysticism—that is, the experience in consciousness of the invisible or super-sensible Man—was intended as an answer to this question. What the stars were speaking through their constellations,—they did not regard it as a mere outer fact, to be summed-up as we are wont to do. No! in the times of the old Mysteries—the Mysteries of the Stars, the Mysteries of Light—they regarded the starry constellations as a Question, and human death as the real answer thereto. (Even as birth was associated with the super-sensible Man, so was death associated with the constellations. Hence we may truly call the ‘Mysteries of Fire’ the Mysteries of Birth, the Christmas Mysteries; and the ‘Mysteries of Light’ the Star-Mysteries—the East Mysteries, the Mysteries of Death. And we may add: those Mysteries which afterwards merged into the real secret of Christmas, are the ones which really underlie all that humanity possessed by way of Mystery secrets, before Golgotha, in ancient India and Egypt. Chaldea and Western Asia was more the soil for Easter Mysteries—that is to say, for a Science of the Stars.

In Western Asia, especially among the so-called Iranian peoples and notably in the 3rd post-Atlantean epoch, the Science of the Stars was well developed. Only we must conceive that in the earliest times man had an exact super-sensible vision of the entity which clothes itself at birth with the physical body, just as he had on the other hand a direct vision and perception of the language of the stars. As I have often said, when ancient charts depict all manner of Beings in the Heavens, such Beings are no mere figment of human fancy. They are the image of what the old atavistic clairvoyance actually saw in the starry sky; for the old atavistic consciousness did really see the human being in connection with the entire Universe. This consciousness was thoroughly aware of the truth that the cosmos is a self-contained organism—in which organism we, as Man, do live and move and have our being.

This consciousness, needless to say, has been lost. It must be regained by mankind in course of the 5th post-Atlantean epoch; and that, in all essentials, by the two streams aforesaid—the streams of Star-wisdom and of Mysticism—finding one another once more. In ancient times they could appear distinct—two separate poles, as it were. In our time it must be possible to unite the Christmas and the Easter Mystery in one; to see them as the two sides of one and the same Being.

When we transplant ourselves into ancient times of human knowledge, we find a clear awareness of the fact that the Zodiac is not only to be found up yonder in the Heavens, but that man too carries within him the same law and principle as is represented for example by the Zodiac,—that is to say, by the farthest circumference of the Universe of the fixed stars.

You know that in olden times not only certain places in the Heavens were thus named, as Aries and Taurus, Gemini, Cancer, Leo, etc., but the human being too was membered thus: head = Aries; neck = Taurus; the two sides of man in their lateral symmetry = Gemini; the chest and ribs = Cancer; the heart as Leo, and so on, Man bears microcosmically within him the several regions which are also the fundamental places of the Heavens. This connection of microcosm and macrocosm was deemed most essential in those ancient times. Man, as it were, bore within him the Heavens of the fixed stars, by virtue of the Zodiac which represents it. It was said, of old time: When a man uses his larynx in speech, there sounds forth from him the same cosmic stream which flows down to us from the cosmos when the Moon is shining from the Pleiades. They felt the kinship of the Light and of that which the Light carries down when the Moon is shining from the region of the Pleiades,—they felt the kinship of this macrocosmic stream with that which issues from man when he makes use of his larynx. So too with the Sun. So too, they felt Man penetrated with the same law and principle that works in the planetary system, yet with this difference:—They knew that the system of the fixed stars corresponds to fixed places in Man, namely, the Ram to the head, the neck to the Bull, and so on. Fixed portions of the human being were thus associated with the heaven of the fixed stars. Those organs on the other hand which represent, as it were, the mobile element in man, sending the saps and fluids throughout man's nature, were connected by them, and rightly, with the planetary system. Man is himself, as it were, a heaven of the fixed stars, and he carries a planetary system within him. Thus in the oldest Mysteries they conceived an intimate relationship as between Man and the whole cosmos.

To perceive the full scope and range of this matter, must, however, also bear the following in mind. In man we have the several constellations like fixed places—Aries the head, Taurus the neck, and so on. Thereby, man stands in a certain relation—a quite individual relation—to the starry heavens. Assume for a moment that a man is born to-day in the Spring, when the Sun rises in Pisces. Pisces will be quite especially determined by his inner system of fixed stars. Now Pisces is associated with the feet,—that is to say, with what man experiences through his feet, inasmuch as he is born in the Spring, when the Sun rises in Pisces, a man is born with that part of his being which corresponds to this particular constellation to the Sun. If he were born at another season of the year, his constellation would be less in accordance with the cosmic constellation. Nowadays, this attunement or non-attunement of the human being is determined according to certain hard-and-fast schemes. In the ancient Mysteries they felt in a very living way the peculiar unison, the sounding-together of the human constellation after birth with the heavenly constellation.

Now you will bear in mind that a very special constellation existed in the age of Aries, precisely in the Mystery of Golgotha. For at that very time the whole of mankind, with that portion of the human being which corresponds to the head, was in harmony with the constellation of Aries in the Spring. Here was another reason why those who knew the Mysteries felt something quite peculiar in this correspondence of the human constellation of the head with the constellation of the Cosmos. Man is related, through the head, not with the Earth but with the Cosmos. Through the head, therefore, he is especially adapted to receive the forces of the Cosmos. With his head—that is to say, with his Aries—he reaches out into the Cosmos. What constellation will therefore be the most favourable one, of all that can exist in the Cycle of 25,920 years in which we are now living? Precisely that, in which the constellation of the Ram is with the rising Sun in Spring. In short, I wish to indicate this fact. They studied Man in his whole being, in his attunement with the macrocosm. They studied this especially because they were well aware how much depended, even for earthly events, on this attunement of Man with the macrocosm.

They perceived the manifold secrets of these constellations of the stars; and they always knew that with every secret of a starry constellation a human secret is connected. More and more, they tried to express how each secret of the stars is connected with an inner secret of Man. It is remarkable how far they got in this direction with their ancient science. We see it in the Pyramids. Even if crudely studied, the structure of the Pyramids proves to contain all manner of secrets. Take the length of the four basic sides, forming the plan of the Pyramid; compare it with the height. It corresponds exactly to the proportion of the diameter of a circle to its circumference. It is a true correspondence to a large number of decimal places. But it not only applies to things like this. Certain sub-divisions in the Pyramids correspond to the Zodiacal sub-divisions of the macrocosm. The weight of the Pyramids—it has only been calculated approximately—is a certain fraction of the weight of the whole Earth. Certain measurements of the Pyramids, multiplied by a power of 18, give you the distance from the Earth to the Sun. In short, such are the measurements of the Pyramids that they can only be the result of a marvellous and intimate knowledge of the relationships of the stars and the Heavens.

These Pyramids were not really the work of the Egyptians, Whenever conquerors came into Egypt from Iranian countries, from Western Asia, they created Pyramidal structures, The Egyptians learned to build Pyramids from these peoples, peoples who possessed Star-Mysteries; their own Mysteries were not Star-Mysteries, but rather a kind of Christmas Mysteries.

The study of the Pyramids had led to this result, even during the 19th century. Men like Carus declared that the pure study of the Mysteries was enough to show us that there was a Science in ancient times which has since been lost, and which is calculated to make the civilisation of to-day blush for shame. These are Carus' own words, not mine. The humanity of to-day are not very prone to believe that there existed in primeval human times a science—acquired by somewhat different means, it is true—but a true science none the less, able to shed its light into deep secrets of the Cosmos.

But the most important thing is not the mere fact that the Wise Men of those Mysteries were acquainted with such distant cosmic measures or secreted them into the structure of the Pyramids. The most remarkable is quite another thing. It was by no means an abstract knowledge which they had, of man's relation to the Universe of stars. It was a very concrete knowledge—a knowledge whereby Man could feel himself within the whole Cosmos. He knew that with his head, which he turns freely to the Cosmos, he is directly related to the Heaven of the fixed stars. All that appeared to the human being as the secret of the head—the Wise Men of the Mysteries perceived it as the secrets of the heaven of the fixed stars. And it is perfectly true the human head is formed by the heaven of the fixed stars. It is but a materialistic prejudice of to-day to suppose that everything is inherited from the ancestors,—that everything comes from the germ. The germ itself—in so far as it is the germ of the head—is informed and filled with forces, within the human mother, by the heaven of the fixed stars. According to his head, Man is connected with the fixed stars. His head is an image of the whole heaven of the fixed stars. You may read of it from another point of view in my booklet, The Spiritual Guidance of Mankind, where I have also touched upon this matter. Likewise on the other side, the rest of the human organism corresponds to all that is connected with the secret of the Sun. Even in this direction, Man is really of a twofold nature; and this was well known to those Wise Men of the ancient Mysteries who were the keepers of the Star-Mysteries, or Easter Mysteries. Man is a twofold nature: his head is assigned to the heaven of the fixed stars; and the rest of his body, with the centre in the heart, to the Sun.

Now these ancient astronomers (or you may call them astrologers, if you will) knew something else as well. When we observe the stars in their relation to the Sun, we see the Sun gradually remaining behind as against the movement of the fixed stars. Thereby the vernal point keeps on appearing at a different place; the Sun is always being left behind a little. The stars seem to go a little quicker in their annual movement than the Sun. And the strange thing is (though for the old astronomers it was not strange at all—it was a deep and significant Mystery for them) that after 72 years the fixed stars in their movement have sped on exactly a day ahead of the Sun—one day in 72 years.

What does this signify, transferred to Man; For the old astronomers it was fraught with meaning, though for the clever people of to-day, no doubt, it may seem nonsense. It meant that among all other things we also have in us this twofold, fixed-star and solar nature. With our head we go quicker than with the rest of our body. And when we have lived for 72 years (these things, of course, arc only to be taken approximately), our head has gone ‘ahead’ of the rest of our body by a whole day of stars. That is why the average—as I have often explained from other points of view—human life lasts for 72 years. It can be much longer, of course, or shorter as the case may be; but on the average, the span of human life is 72 years. All this is connected with the duality between the course of life in the head, and in the rest of the human body. It corresponds exactly to the duality of the movements of the heaven of the fixed stars and of the Sun.

So does Man stand as a microcosm in the macrocosm. In those olden times, Man was indeed able to feel himself within the macrocosm, just as our little finger now feels itself to be part and parcel of the organism as a whole. Man was really able to feel himself a member of the whole.

And they considered this the most important thing: to perceive how human life is connected with the secret of the stars. Therefore especially the Mystery of death, the Easter Mystery, was associated with the Star-Mystery.

The Christian World-conception now had the task of connecting the two together. This must essentially be contained in the concrete development of Christian World-conceptions. The Mystery of birth, the Christmas Mystery, the Mystery of super-sensible Man on the side of birth, must be connected with the Mystery of death, the Easter Mystery, the Mystery of the super-sensible Man on the side of death.

That which is generally known as Science nowadays, concerns itself with birth; that which is generally known as Religion, concerns itself with death. The Religion of to-day lacks any inclination to turn to the super-sensible Man. It sounds a strange thing to say; but the mere fact that Religion still talks of the super-sensible Man does not imply that it has any strong inclination to concern itself with super-sensible Man in any real way. For we can only concern ourselves with the super-sensible Man if we take our start from what was felt most strongly in the ancient Mysteries of Christmas—that is to say, if, taking our start from birth, we find our way through birth into human pre-existence. Therefore the Mysteries of birth laid the greatest stress on the pre-existence—the existence before birth—of super-sensible Man. The other Mysteries—those that then culminated in the Easter Mysteries—laid especial stress on the post-existence, on the existence of Man beyond death. It is to this latter side that the Religions have inclined, at the same time rejecting the Science that is connected therewith, namely the wisdom of the stars. Meanwhile the Science of to-day, which concerns itself chiefly with problems of descent—with all that belongs to birth—has rejected what leads to the super-sensible Man and to the conscious experience of him, which is true Mysticism.

Thus it has come about that Science on the one hand, by rejecting the super-sensible Man, has become materialistic; while on the other hand Religion, by declining to study the super-sensible Man, has become unscientific. In our time the two are standing side by side, without any bridge between them. Those who seem to represent Religion—though in reality, broadly speaking, they only want to “guard their pounds and talents”—those who call themselves official representatives of the religious faiths, are most annoyed when you speak of the pre-existence of the soul, that is, of super-sensible Man in his reality.

Needless to say, I have been speaking of all this only in the briefest aphorisms. I only wished to emphasise how we must try once more to widen out man's vision, beyond what is immediately present in the physical world. Inasmuch as we have pointed to the two directions in the Mysteries, our outlook has indeed been widened in the two directions in which the sense world must he transcended. For on the one hand we must seek again for the true inner Man, who can only be found within us by the path described in Knowledge of the Higher Worlds and its Attainment. That is the one side; and the other is, to seek in a new form for what the stars can say to us. But we shall only find it in its new form if we are able once again to bring into direct relation to the Macrocosm what is there in Man himself. Such is the inner composition a book like Occult Science. Here the attempt is made once more to build the bridge between Man and the Macrocosm. What can be found in man himself, the evolution of man, is connected with that in the macrocosm to which man's evolution belongs. Definite stages in the evolution of man are connected with definite processes in the macrocosm. Thus, in our anthroposophical Spiritual Science we have begun again to look in both directions—to look for the super-sensible man and for the secrets of the Macrocosm. This also means the building of it bridge, once more, between Religion and Science.

Religion has become void of science. Any one who will, can see that it is so. And, that the science of to-day has become void of Religion, is still more obvious. Quite unconnectedly, the two stand side by side in the so-called civilisation of our time. In this way alone was it possible for such strange errors to arise as I described in these lectures,—errors of which the sharp-witted intellectual theories of Dupuis are a particulate example. Dupuis, as I said, considered the ancient Mysteries mere error and deceit. He believed that in those ancient Mysteries certain tales were invented merely in order to delude the people, while in reality they had nothing else in view than the mere movements of the stars. Dupuis made the simple mistake of believing that the Ancients could see nothing else in the star-lit sky than a modern astronomer can see; whereas in reality, what the modern astronomer sees in the star-lit sky is precisely equivalent to what the modern anatomist sees in the human body. Just as the corpse is not the man, so too, the content of modern Astronomy is not the real heaven of the stars. Natural-scientific Astronomy is only in its initial stages; it has experienced no more, as yet, than a mere mathematical, mechanical and summary description of what goes on in the great Universe outside us. Study what is afforded by the Astronomy of to-day; you will find mathematical and mechanical relationships; it is the mere expression of an immense celestial machinery. Meanwhile, all that takes place on Earth (with the exception of the coarsest physical processes), the scientist only seeks to investigate on the Earth itself. Wherever a plant arises, wherever a human being or an animal is born, it is all supposed to be due to “inheritance.” For it goes without saying, you can in no way apply to man what the modern astronomer finds in the stars. But in real fact there is a mutual interplay between the starry Heavens and the Earth. No seed or germ can arise on the Earth—neither the germ of a plant, nor of an animal or man—unless it be prepared and laid down by the whole macrocosm.

What does the scientist of to-day say? Here is the hen, and in the hen, the egg. It goes without saying: from the egg a new hen is derived, and from the hen an egg again, and thence again a hen. Therefore the scientist follows it up from hen to hen. Whereas the truth is: Here are the starry heavens, here is the hen. The whole of the heavens send their forces, from all the constellations, into the hen; and the germ inside the hen is an expression of the entire heaven of the stars.

It is strange to look into the course of evolution in this respect. A science existed, once upon a time, which might well make the people of to-day blush for shame. It has been lost and ruined. We must be conscious that we are living to this day in the age of a lost science. The first beginnings of a science have been planted again in a new form, and they must be developed. What is admired so much, in the progress of science during the last four centuries, can only justly be admired if looked upon as a beginning. It is only when the bridge is built from this beginning to the real Mysteries of Christmas and Easter—only when this bridge is built, at least for human feeling—that something real will have been achieved.

We should make this thought living in our soul, for this thought alone is prone to unite the man of to-day, in his soul, with the Universe. Every seed is united with the macrocosm; the seeds of the Spirit likewise. Man unites himself with the macrocosm when he tries to receive into his soul a macrocosmic science. To begin with at least in the idea, in the intuition thereof, this consciousness of the macrocosmic connections of Man and the Earth needs to be carried into all branches of life. Our time is far remote from such a consciousness. In this respect, our time is indeed in a certain sense in the reverse position, as compared with a certain epoch of the past. For we may ask: How could a primeval wisdom of mankind—so great and so far-reaching that this present time could blush for shame to contemplate it,—how could such a science have been lost? We need not wonder very much that it was lost. We must remember that in the evolution of humanity the positive is most certainly connected with the negative aspect. We have often spoken of the progress humanity has undergone by the spread of Christianity; let us not, however, forget that the spread of Christianity—the positive aspect—is also connected with the negative aspect of the same, namely the laying-waste of an ancient culture. Let us not forget that tens of thousands of works of ancient culture were destroyed while Christianity was being spread abroad. Thousands and thousands of symbols in which the Ancient Wisdom had been handed down, were destroyed. People to-day have little conception of the ruthless work of destruction which culminated in the third and fourth centuries of our era. Julian the Apostate still tried to some extent to stem this work of destruction; but the time was against him. He did not succeed. Humanity to-day ought to be well aware how many things were destroyed and lost and ruined in those centuries.

Precisely from such things, we can learn that evolution, so-called, is by no means simple. Suppose for a moment that Christianity had not gone on its way through the world as an appalling destroyer. Mankind would have had to remain in their old state of un-freedom. For the attainment of freedom is after all, only possible by that Impulse which is also the Impulse of the Mystery of Golgotha.

On the other hand, the negative side must not be allowed to get the upper hand. For there exists a certain spirit which has preserved far more the negative aspect of Christianity. It appears in this form to-day: it wants to destroy—this time, in the soul-life—all that arises towards the re-conquest of the Ancient Wisdom. This ought not to be allowed to happen. To-day, again and again—wherever they have the opportunity—the so-called official representatives of Christianity bring forward this idea: “At the time of Christ,” they say, “in the apostolic age, there were Revelations. To-day no such thing is permissible. Today it is sin or swindle or deceit; it is anti-Christian.” To see clearly in these matters is also one of the tasks of today, for every human being who strives for the truth. The striving for clarity is one of the essential tasks for to-day. Alas! in other matters too, clarity has grown befogged by all manner of feelings which people associate with mere empty phrases. I do believe the healthy feeling of the truth can only be sought and found again along the paths of the Spirit.

Words are terribly misused to-day. Think of all the words that are sounding through the world to-day, and taken seriously as though there were anything contained in the empty words. In this domain, Spiritual Science is no less important as an educator than by its immediate contents. If it claims to be true Spiritual Science, it can never feed men with mere words. Why not? For the very simple reason that you can talk of anything nowadays if you remain at the mere words, if you remain at the mere words, you can talk much about Natural Science. Fritz Mauthner proves, in his dictionary that Natural Science, whenever it claims to become a “Science,”—whenever it goes beyond the mere notification of facts,—becomes a science of mere words. And in the science of History there is nothing else than words, for—as I told you—everything else is passed-through by man in a dreaming condition. And so it is in other spheres. In Politics,—go to work uprightly and honestly, and you will probably find still less behind the words than in the other spheres of life. If you hold to the mere words, you can talk a lot nowadays about Nature and History and Politics and Economics. But you can not talk of the Spirit if you hold fast to the mere words for the Spirit, to-day, is nowhere contained in the words. I mean this in all earnestness. Yet the converse is also true. Namely, in compensation for this, the Spiritual Science of to-day is a real education, for men to grow beyond the prevailing attachment to words.

It is the paramount task of those who believe in Anthroposophy to go beyond the words to the real things; and—as the “thing” of Spiritual Science is the Spirit itself—this means to go beyond the words to the Spirit. This will be fruitful; this will endow us with new purposes and aims in all domains of life One fruit, above all, it will bear. It will liberate—all those who are willing to be liberated—from the belief in authority; from that credulity and superstition which is so widespread in the humanity of to-day—so widespread that they even fail to notice its existence. Alas! many a bitter experience will still be necessary for poor mankind of to-day to find its way, more or less, on to the path to which I here refer.

The poor humanity of to-day!—it prides itself on the very thing which it most lacks, namely, on freedom from faith in authority, freedom from idol-worship. In the eyes of him who knows the Spirit, many an idol of the past is worth more than the idols of the present. As to the idols of the present... The conscious man, no doubt, has fallen out of the habit of prayer; but the unconscious man prays to the idols of the present all the more fervently. For in the eyes of him who sees through the evolution of the world, the Woodrow Wilsons and the rest are far more perilous idols of superstition than any idols of the past. The humanity of to-day is far more attached to its idols and superstitions than ever primeval humanity were attached to theirs. Even the clearest signs will scarcely avail the humanity of to-day. Precisely in these things, they are extraordinarily difficult to bring on to the oaths of truth.

The earnestness of the moment does indeed require it again and again.—Even when we bring forward truths that reach out into such far and wide perspectives, we must conclude with such remarks as I have made just now. It is essential to Spiritual Science to serve real life; and that which claims to be serving life nowadays is serving it least of all.

In a recent lecture held here I spoke of the possible relations of the incarnate to the discarnate human souls—the so-called dead;—relations not only possible but which really always exist. To-day I shall add a few remarks to what I have already said.

From various facts presented to our souls by Spiritual Science, we know that in course of the earth's evolution, the spirit of man passes through an evolution of its own. We know that man can only understand himself by a fruitful consideration of the question: What is man's attitude in any one incarnation, in his present incarnation, to the spiritual world, to the spiritual realms? To what stage of evolution has mankind in general attained in the time when we ourselves live in a definite incarnation.

We know that outer observation of this general evolution of mankind allows of the opinion that in earlier times, earlier epochs, a certain ‘atavistic clairvoyance’ was poured over mankind, the human soul was then, as it were, nearer to the spiritual worlds. But it was also further from its own freedom, its own freewill, to which in our age we are nearer while more shut off from the spiritual world. Anyone who knows the real nature of man at the present time must say: in the unconscious self, in the really spiritual part of man, there is, of course, the same relation to the whole spiritual world; but in his knowledge, in his consciousness, man in general cannot realise it in the same way as was possible to him in earlier epochs, though there are exceptions. If we enquire into the reason why man cannot bring to consciousness the relation of his soul to the spiritual world,—which is, of course, as strong as ever though of a different kind—we find that it is due to the fact that we have passed the middle of the earth's evolution and are now in the ascending stream of its existence, and our physical organisation (although, of course, this is not perceptible to external anatomy and physiology) has become more ‘physical’ than it was, so that in the time we spend between birth or conception and death, we are no longer organised to bring fully to consciousness our connection with the spiritual world. We must clearly understand that no matter how materialistic we are we actually experience in the subconscious region of the soul much more than the sum of our general conscious knowledge.

This goes even further, and here we come to a very important point in the evolution of present humanity. In general, man is not able to think, perceive and feel all that could really be thought, perceived and felt within him. At the present time he is gifted for far more intensive thoughts and perceptions than are possible through the coarse material components of his organism. This has a certain consequence, namely, that at the present epoch of human evolution we are not in a position to bring our capacities to complete development in our earthly life. Whether we die young or old has very little influence upon that. For both young and old it is the rule that, on account of the coarse substance of his organism, man cannot fully attain to what would be possible were his body more finely organised. Thus, whether we pass through the gate of death old or young, there is a residue of unexercised thoughts, perceptions and feelings which, for the above reason, we could not elaborate. We all die leaving certain thoughts, feelings and perceptions unexercised. These are there, and when we pass through the gate of death, whether young or old, these occasion an intense desire to return to earthly life for further thinking, feeling and perceiving.

Let us reflect upon the bearing of this. We only become free after death to form certain thoughts, feelings and perceptions. We could do much more for the earth if we had been able to bring them to fruition during our physical life, but we cannot do this. It is actually true that every man to-day could do much more for the earth with the capacities within him than he actually does. In earlier epochs of evolution this was not so, for when the organism was finer there was a certain conscious looking into the spiritual world, and man could work from the spirit. Then he could, as a rule, accomplish all for which his gifts fitted him. Although man is now so proud of his talents, the above is true.

Because of this, we can recognise how necessary it is that what is carried through the gate of death unused should not be lost to earth-life. That can only be brought about by cultivating the union with the dead under the guidance of Spiritual Science, in the sense often described, by rightly maintaining the connection with the dead with whom we are united by karmic ties, and endeavouring to make the union a conscious, a fully conscious one. Then these unfulfilled thoughts of the dead pass through our souls into the world, and, through this transmission, we can allow these stronger thoughts—which are possible to the dead because they are free from the body—to work in our souls. Our own thoughts we cannot bring to full development, but these thoughts could work within us.

We see from this that what has brought us materialism should also show us how absolutely necessary at the present time and for the near future is the quest of a true relation to the spirits of the dead. The only question is: How can we draw these thoughts, perceptions and feelings from the realm of the dead into our own souls?

I have already given certain hints as to this, and in the last lecture spoken of the important moments which should be well observed: the moment of falling asleep and that of waking. I shall now describe with more detail a few things connected with this.

The dead cannot directly enter this world of ordinary waking life, which we outwardly perceive, in which we act through our will and which rests upon our desires. It is out of their reach, when they have passed through the gate of death; yet we can have a world in common with them if, spurred on by Spiritual Science, we make the effort—which is difficult in our present materialistic age—to discipline the world of our thinking as well as our outer life, and not to allow our thoughts the customary free course. We can develop certain faculties which introduce us to a ground in common with the spirits who have passed through the gate of death. There are, of course, at the present time a great many hindrances to finding this common ground. The first hindrance is one to which I have but little referred, but what is to be said thereon follows from other considerations already discussed here. The first hindrance is that we are, as a rule, too prodigal with our thoughts, we might even say we are dissipated in our thought-life. What, exactly, is meant by this?

The man of to-day lives almost entirely under the influence of the saying: ‘Thoughts pay no toll.’ That is, one may allow almost anything to flash at will through the mind. Just consider that speech is a reflection of our thought life; and realise what thought-life is allowed free course by the speech of most people, as they chatter and wander from subject to subject, allowing thoughts to flash up at will. This means a dissipation of the force with which our thinking is endowed! We continually indulge in prodigality, we are wholly dissipated in our thought-life. We allow our thoughts to take their own course. We desire something which occurs to us, and we drop that as something else occurs; in short, we are disinclined in some respects to keep our thought under control. How annoying it is, sometimes, for instance, when someone begins to talk; we listen to him for a minute or two, then he turns to quite a different subject, while we feel it necessary to continue the subject he began. It may be important. We must then fix our attention and ask ourselves, ‘Of what did we begin to talk?’ Such things occur every day, when subjects of real earnestness are to be brought into discussion, we have continually to keep in mind the subject begun. This prodigality, this dissipation of thought-force, hinders thoughts which, coming from the depths of our soul-being, are not our own, but which we have in common with the universal ruling spirit. This impulse to fly at will from thought to thought does not allow us to wait in the waking condition for thoughts to come from the depths of our soul-life; it does not allow us to wait for ‘inspirations,’ if we may so express it. That, however should be so cultivated—especially in our time, for the reasons given—that we actually form in our souls the disposition to wait watchfully until thoughts arise, in a sense, from the subsoil, which distinctly proclaim themselves as ‘given,’ not formed by ourselves.

We must not suppose that the formation of such a mood is able to appear on swift wings—it cannot do so. It has to be cultivated; but when it is cultivated, when we really take the trouble to be awake and, having driven out the arbitrary thoughts, wait for what can be received in the mind, this mood gradually develops. Then it becomes possible to receive thoughts from the depths of the soul, from a world wider than our ego-hood. If we really develop this, we shall soon perceive that in the world there is not only what we see, hear and perceive with our outer senses, and combine with our intellect, but there is also an objective thought-texture. Only few possess this to-day as their own innate knowledge. This experience of a universal thought-tissue, in which the soul actually exists, is not some kind of special occult experience; it is something that any man can have if he develops the aforementioned mood. From this experience he can say: In my every-day life I stand in the world which I perceive with my senses and have put together with the intellect; I now find myself in a position in which I am as though standing on the shore, I plunge into the sea and swim in the surging water; so can I, standing on the brink of sense-existence, thus plunge into the surging sea of thought. I am really as though in a surging sea. We can have the feeling of a life—or, at least, we have an inkling of a life, stronger and more intense than the mere dream-life, yet having just such a boundary between it and outer sense-reality as that between dream-life and sense-reality. We can, if we desire, speak of such experience as ‘dreams,’ but they are no dreams! For the world into which we plunge, this world of surging thoughts which are not our own, but those in which we are submerged, is the world out of which our physical sense-world arises, out of which it arises in a condensed form, as it were. Our physical world of sense is like blocks of ice floating in water: the water is there, the ice congeals and floats in it. As the ice consists of the same substance as the water, only raised to a different physical condition, so our physical world of sense arises from this surging, undulating sea of thought. That is its actual origin. Physics speaks only of ‘ether,’ of whirling atoms, because it does not know this actual primordial substance. Shakespeare was nearer to it when he makes one of his characters say: ‘The world of reality is but the fabric of a dream.’ Men lend themselves too easily to all kinds of deception in respect to such things. They wish to find a great atomic world behind physical reality; but if we wish to speak of anything at all behind physical reality, we must speak of the objective thought-tissue, the objective thought-world. We only arrive at this when, by ceasing the prodigality and dissipation of thought, we develop that mood which comes when we can wait for what is popularly called ‘inspiration.’

For those who study Spiritual Science it is not so difficult to develop the mood here described, for the method of thought necessary for the study of anthroposophical Spiritual Science trains the soul for such development. When a man seriously studies Spiritual Science he comes to the need of developing this intimate thought-tissue within. This thought-tissue provides us with the common sphere in which are present we ourselves on the one hand, and on the other hand the so-called dead. This is the common ground on which we can ‘meet with’ them. They cannot come into the world which we perceive with our senses and combine with our intellect, but they can enter the world just described.

A second thing was given in the observation of finer, more intimate life-relationships. I spoke of this last year and gave an example which can be found in psychological literature. Schubert calls attention to it; it is an example taken from old literature, but such examples can still often be found in life. A man was accustomed to take a certain walk daily. One day, when he reached a certain spot, he had a feeling to go to the side and stand still, and the thought came to him whether it was right to waste time over this walk. At that moment a boulder which had split from the rock fell on the road and would certainly have struck him if he had not turned aside from the road on account of his thought.

This is one of the crude experiences we may encounter in life, but those of a more subtle kind daily press into our ordinary life, though as a rule we do not observe them; we only reckon with what actually does happen, not with what might have happened had it not been averted. We reckon with what happens when we are kept at home a quarter of an hour longer than we intended. Often and often, if we did but reflect, we should find that something worthy of remark happened, which would have been quite different if we had not been detained.

Try to observe systematically in your own life what might have happened had you not been delayed a few minutes by somebody coming in, though, perhaps, at the time, you were very angry at being detained. Things are constantly pressed into one's life which might have been very different according to their original intention. We seek a ‘causal connection,’ between events in life. We do not reflect upon life with that subtle refinement which would he in the consideration of the breaking of a probable chain of events, so that, I might say, an atmosphere of possibilities continually surrounds us.

If we give our attention to this, and have been delayed in doing something which we have been accustomed to do at mid-day, we shall have a feeling that what we do at that time is often—it may not always be so—not under the influence of foregoing occurrences only, but also under the influence of the countless things which have not happened, from which we have been held back. By thinking of what is possible in life—not only in the outer reality of sense—we are driven to the surmise that we are so placed in life that to look for the connection of what follows with what has gone before is a very one-sided way of looking at life. If we truly ask ourselves such questions, we rouse something which in our mind would otherwise lie dormant. We come, as it were, to ‘read between the lines’ of life; we come to know it in its many-sidedness. We come to see ourselves, so to speak, in our environment, and we see how it forms us and brings us forward little by little. This we usually observe far too little. At most, we only consider the inner driving forces that lead us from stage to stage. Let us take some simple ordinary instance from which we may gather how we only bring the outer into connection with our inner being, in a very fragmentary way.

Let us turn our attention to the way we usually realise our waking in the morning. At most, we acquire a very meagre idea of how we make ourselves get up; perhaps, even the concept of this is very nebulous. Let us, however, reflect for a while upon the thought which at times drives us out of bed; let us try to make this individual, quite clear and concrete. Thus: yesterday I got up because I heard the coffee being made ready in the next room; this aroused an impulse to get up; to-day something else occurred. That is, let us be quite clear, what was the outer impelling force. Man usually forgets to seek himself in the outer world, hence he finds himself so little there. Anyone who gives even a little attention to such a thought as this will easily develop that mood of which man has a holy—nay, an unholy—terror,—the realisation that there is an undercurrent of thought which does not enter the ordinary life. A man enters a room, for instance or goes to some place, but he seldom asks himself how the place changes when he enters it. Other people have an idea of this at times, but even this notion of it from outside is not very widespread to-day. I do not know how many people have any perception of the fact that when a company is in a room, often one man is twice as strongly there as another; the one is strongly present, the other is weak. That depends on the imponderabilities. We may easily have the following experience: A man is at a meeting, he comes softly in, and glides out again; and one has the feeling that an angel has flitted in and out. Another's presence is so powerful that he is not only present with his two physical feet but, as it were, with all sorts of invisible feet. Others do not, as a rule, notice it, although it is quite perceptible; and the man himself does not notice it at all. A man does not, as a rule, hear that ‘undertone’ which arises from the change called forth by his presence; he keeps to himself, he does not enquire of his surroundings what change his presence produces. He can, however, acquire an inkling, a perception of the echo of his presence in his surroundings. Just think how our outer lives would gain in intimacy if a man not only peopled the place with his presence but had the feeling of what was brought about by his being there, making his influence felt by the change he brings.

That is only one example. Many such can be brought forward for all situations in life. In other words, it is possible in quite a sound way—not by constantly treading on his own toes—for a man so to densify the medium of life that he feels the incision he himself makes in it. In this way he learns to acquire the beginning of a sensitivity to karma; but if he were fully to perceive what comes about through his deeds or presence, if he always saw in his surroundings the reflection of his own deeds and existence, he would have a distinct feeling of his karma; for karma is woven of this joint experience. I shall now only point to the enrichment of life by the addition of such intimacies, when we can thus read between the lines, when we learn to look thus into life and become alive to the fact that we are present, when we are present with our ‘consciousness.’ By such consciousness we also help to create a sphere common to us and to the dead. When we in our consciousness are able to look up to the two pillars just described: a high-principled course of life, and an economy, not prodigality of thought,—when we develop this inner frame of mind it will be accompanied by success, the success that is necessary for the present and the future when, in the way described, we approach the dead. Then, when we form thoughts, which we connect not merely with a union in thought with one of the dead, but with a common life in interest and feeling; when we further spin such thoughts of life-situations with the dead, thoughts of our life with him, so that a tone of feeling plays between us—when we thus unite ourselves, not to a casual meeting with him but to a moment when it interested us to know how he thought, lived, acted, and when what we roused in him interested him,—we can use such moments to continue, as it were, the conversation of the thoughts. If we can then allow these thoughts to lie quiet, so that we pass into a kind of meditation, and the thoughts are, as it were, brought to the altar of the inner spiritual life, a moment comes when we receive an answer from the dead, when he can again make himself understood by us. We only need to build the bridge of what we develop towards him, by which he on his side can come to us. For this coming it will be specially useful to develop in our deepest soul an image of his entity. That is something far from the present time because, as we said, people pass one another by, often coming together in most intimate spheres of life and parting again without knowing one another. This becoming acquainted does not depend on mutual analysis. Any one who feels himself being analysed by those living with him, if he is of a finely organised soul, feels as though he received a blow. It is of no moment to analyse one another. The best knowledge of another is gained by harmony of heart; there is no need to analyse at all.

I started with the statement that cultivation of relations with the so-called dead is specially needed to-day, because not from choice but simply through the evolution of humanity, we live in an epoch of materialism. Because we are not able to mould and fashion all our capacities of thought, feeling and perception before we die, because something of it remains over when we pass through the gate of death, it is necessary for the living to maintain the right intercourse with the dead, that the ordinary life of man may be enriched thereby. If we could but bring to the heart of men to-day the fact that life is impoverished if the dead are forgotten! A right thinking of the dead can only be developed by those in some way connected with them by karma.

When we strive for a similar intercourse with the dead as with the living (as I said before, these things are generally very difficult, because we are not conscious of them, but we are not conscious of all that is true, and not everything of which we are conscious is on that account unreal)—if we cultivate intercourse with the dead in this way, the dead are really present, and their thoughts, not completed in their own life will work into this life. What has been said makes indeed a great demand on our age. Nevertheless, it is said, because we are convinced by spiritual facts, that our social life, our ethical religious life, would experience an infinite enrichment if the living allowed themselves to be ‘advised’ by the dead. To-day man is disinclined to consult even those who have come to a mature age. To-day it is regarded as right for quite a young man to take part in councils of town and state, because while young he is mature enough for everything—in his own opinion. In ages when there was a better knowledge of the being of man, he had to reach a certain age before being in any council. Now people must wait until others are dead in order to receive advice from them! Nevertheless, our age, our epoch, ought to be willing to listen to the counsel of the dead, for welfare can only come about when man is willing to listen to their advice.

Spiritual Science demands energy of man. This must be clearly understood. Spiritual Science demands a certain direction; that man should really aspire to consistency and clearness. There is need to seek for clearness in our disastrous events: the search for it is of the utmost importance. Such things as we have been discussing are connected, more than is supposed, with the great demands of our time. I have tried this winter, and many years before this world-catastrophe, in my lectures on the European Folk-Souls, to point out much which is to be found to-day in the general relations of humanity. A certain understanding of what plays its part in present events can be derived from reading the course of lectures I gave in Christiania on ‘The Mission of the Several Folk Souls.’ It is not too late, and much will still take place in the coming years for which understanding can be gained from that series of lectures.

The mutual relations of man to-day are only really comprehensible to one who can perceive the spiritual impulses. The time is gradually approaching when it will be necessary for man to ask himself: How is the perception and thought of the East related to that of Europe—especially of Mid-Europe? Again, how is this related to that of the West, of America? These questions in all their possible variations ought to arise before the souls of men. Even now man should ask himself: How does the Oriental regard Europe to-day? The Oriental who scrutinises Europe carefully, has the feeling that European civilisation leads to a deadlock, and has led to an abyss. He feels that he dare not lose what he has brought over of spirituality from ancient times when he receives what Europe can give him. He does not disdain European machines, for instance, but he says—and these are the actual words of a renowned Oriental: ‘We will accept the European machines and instruments, but we will keep them in the shops, not in our temples and homes as he does.’ He says that the European has lost the faculty to perceive the spirit in nature, to see the beauty in nature. When the Oriental looks upon what he alone can see—that the European only holds to outer mechanism, to the outer material in his action and thought—he believes that he is called upon to reawaken the old spirituality, to rescue the old spirituality of earthly humanity. The Oriental who speaks in a concrete way of spiritual things says: (as Rabindranath Tagore a short while ago) Europeans have drawn into their civilisation those impulses which could only be drawn in by harnessing Satan to their car of civilisation; they utilise the forces of Satan for progress. The Oriental is called upon—so Rabindranath Tagore believes—to cast out Satan and bring back spirituality to Europe.

This is a phenomenon which, unfortunately, is too easily overlooked. We have experienced much, but in our evolution we have left out of account much that might have been brought in if we had, for instance, a spiritual substance like that of Goethe, livingly in our civilisation. Someone might say: The Oriental can look towards Europe to-day and know that Goethe lived in European life. He can know this. Does he see it? It might be said: The Germans have founded a Society, the ‘Goethe Society’. Let us suppose the Oriental wished to be well-informed about it and to look into the facts. (The question of East and West already plays a part, it ultimately depends on spiritual impulses.) He would say to himself: Goethe worked so powerfully that even in 1879 the opportunity presented itself to make Goethe fruitful to German civilisation in an unusual way, so to say, under favourable circumstances. A Princess, the Grand Duchess Sophia of Weimar, with all those around her, in 1879 took over Goethe's library of writings in order to cultivate it as had never been done for any other writer before. That is so. Let us, however, consider the Goethe Society as an outer instrument. It, too, exists. A few years ago the post of President fell vacant. In the whole realm of intellectual life only one, a former Minister of Finance, was found to be elected as President of the Society! That is what is to be seen outwardly. Such things are more important than is usually supposed. What is more necessary is that the Oriental, aflame with spirituality and wise in it, should come to know that there is in European civilisation a Spiritual Science directed by Anthroposophy; yet he cannot know of this. It cannot reach him, because it cannot get through what exists—because the President of the Goethe Society is a retired Minister of Finance. But, of course, that is only one phenomenon symptomatic of the times.

A third demand, we might say, is an incisive thinking bound up with reality, a thinking in which man does not remain in want of clearness, in vague life-compromises. On my last journey someone put into my hand something concerning a fact with which I was already acquainted. I will only give a short extract from a cutting from a periodical:—

‘To any one who has ever sat on a school bench, the hours when he enjoyed the conversations between Socrates and his friends in “Plato” will ever be memorable; memorable on account of the prodigious tediousness of these speeches. He remembers, perhaps, that he found them absolutely idiotic, but, of course, he did not dare to express this opinion, for the man in question was indeed Socrates, the Greek Philosopher. Alexander Moszkowski's book, “Socrates the Idiot,” (publisher, Eysler and Co., Berlin), duly does away with this wholly unjustifiable estimate of the great Athenian. The multi-historian, Moszkowski, undertakes in this small, entertaining book nothing less than almost entirely to divest Socrates of his dignity as a philosopher. The title “Socrates, the Idiot,” is meant literally. One will not go astray in the assumption that scientific discussions will be attached to this work.’

The first thing which strikes a man when he is made acquainted with such a matter makes him say: How does so extraordinary a thing come about, that a person like Alexander Moszkowski should wish to furnish proof that Socrates was an idiot? This is the first impression; but that is a feeling of compromise which does not arise from a clear, incisive thinking, a confronting of actual reality.

I should like to compare this with something else. There are books written on the life of Jesus from the standpoint of psychiatry. They examine all that Jesus did from the standpoint of modern psychiatry and compare it with various abnormal actions, and the modern psychiatrist proves from the Gospels that Jesus must have been an abnormal man, an epileptic, and that the Gospels can only be understood at all from the Pauline point of view. Full particulars are given on this subject.

It is very simple to lightly overlook these things; but the matter lies somewhat deeper. If we take the stand of modern psychiatry, if we accede to it as officially recognised, on thinking over the life of Jesus, we must come to the same conclusion as the authors of these books. We could not think differently or we should be untrue; in no sense a modern psychiatrist. Nor should we be true modern psychiatrists in the sense of Alexander Moszkowski, if we did not regard Socrates as an idiot. Moszkowski only differs from those who do not regard Socrates as an idiot, in that they are untrue;—he is true—he makes no compromise. It is not possible to be true and to take up the standpoint of Alexander Moszkowski without regarding Socrates as an idiot. If a man wishes to be at the same time an adherent of the philosophy of life held by modern science and yet to esteem Socrates without regarding him as an idiot, he is untrue. So, too, is a modern psychiatrist who holds to the life of Jesus. Modern man, however, does not wish to go so far as this clear standpoint, or he would have to put the question differently. He would have to say to himself: I do not regard Socrates as an idiot, I have learned to know him better; but that demands the rejection of Moszkowski's philosophy of life; in Jesus, too, I see the greatest bearer of ideas who has at any time come in touch with earthly life; but this demands the rejection of modern psychiatry; they cannot agree!

The point in question is: clear thinking in accordance with reality, a thinking that makes none of the ordinary idle compromises which can only be removed when one understands life. It is easy to think—or be filled with indignation, if one is asked to allow that according to Moszkowski, Socrates is an idiot; yet it is consistent with the modern philosophy of life to regard Socrates as an idiot. People of this age, however, do not wish to draw these logical conclusions, they do not wish to relinquish anything like the modern philosophy of life lest they come into a still more troublesome position. One would then have to make compromises, and perhaps admit that Socrates was no idiot; but suppose it then appears that—Moszkowski is an idiot? Well, he is not a great man; but if this were applied to much greater men, many and various untoward things might happen!

To penetrate into the spiritual world, a thinking in accordance with truth is necessary. This requires, on the other hand, a clear recognition of how things stand. Thoughts are real entities, and untrue thoughts are evil, obstructing, destructive entities. To spread a veil of mist over this avails nothing, because man himself is untrue if he wishes to give to Moszkowski's philosophy of life equal weight with that of Socrates. It is an untrue thought to place the two side by side in his soul, as the modern man does.

Man is only true when he brings before his soul the fact that he either stands with Moszkowski, at the standpoint of the pure mechanism of pure natural science, regarding Socrates as an idiot, in which he is then true; or, on the other hand, he knows that Socrates was no idiot, and then in order to think clearly, the other must necessarily be firmly rejected. The ideal, which the man of to-day should set before his soul, is to be true; for thoughts are realities, and true thoughts are beneficial realities. Untrue thoughts—however well they may be enwrapped with the cloak of leniency as regards their own nature,—untrue thoughts received into man's inner being, are realities which retard the world and humanity.