The Rudolf Steiner Archive

If there is a sphere in the human soul that really constitutes a kind of triad, which, in the case of modern man, is, as it were, covered by his ordinary consciousness, we should also be able to find in evolution a stage that reveals this outwardly; that is to say, a stage in which the soul really feels its threefold nature and in which the three members of the soul appear separately. In other words: A nation must once have existed that felt these soul-parts separately, in such a way that the “one-ness” was, after all, felt within the soul far less than the “threefold-ness”, and so that this threefold nature of the soul was still thought of in connection with the cosmos.

Such a nation really existed in Europe and it left behind an important monument of culture, concerning which I have already spoken to you. This nation once experienced within the soul the soul's threefold character—and just there, where it should exist—and this was the Finnish nation. This stage of culture is expressed in the epic poem “Kalevala”. What is set forth in “Kalevala”, contains a clear consciousness of the soul’s threefold nature. Thus, the ancient seers, upon whose visionary power the “Kalevala” is based, felt: “The world contains an inspiring element and one of the members of my soul is connected with it; my sentient soul receives its impulses from there.” This nation, or these ancient seers, experienced the inspiring element of the sentient soul almost as a human-divine, or a human-heroic essence, and they called it “Wainamoinen”. This is nothing but the inspiring element of the sentient soul, inspiring it from out [of] the cosmos, and all the destinies of Wainamoinen, described in “Kalevala”, express the fact that this form of consciousness once existed in a nation that was widely spread in the north-eastern territory of Europe, a nation that experienced the three parts of the soul separately and felt that the sentient soul was inspired by Wainamoinen.

In the same way, this nation, or these ancient seers, felt that the understanding soul was, as it were, a special member of the soul, that receives its forging impulses—or that which forges within the soul and builds it up—from another Being, called Ilmarinen. Just as in the Kalevala Wainamoinen corresponds to the sentient soul, so Ilmarinen corresponds to the understanding soul. If you read my lecture on “Kalevala”, you will find in it all these explanations.

In the same way, that nation, or those ancient seers (but we must bear in mind the fact that the consciousness-soul was, at that time, experienced as something that enabled the human being to be a conqueror upon the physical plane) experienced that Lemminkainen was a Being connected with the powers of the physical plane, an elemental, heroic Being, the inspirator of the consciousness-soul. Thus, if we speak in accordance with other epic poems, we may say that these three heroic characters come from the Finnish nation and inspire the threefold nature of the soul.

Wonderful is the relationship between Ilmarinen and what is being forged there. I have already pointed out that in “Kalevala” the human being is forged out of the various elements of Nature. In “Kalevala”, this Being, forged, as it were, out of all the atoms of Nature, the Being that is pulverised, and then forged together, is described in a marvellous picture as the forging of Sampo. The fact that once upon a time the human being was really formed out of these three soul-parts and then passed over, as it were, into a “pralaya”, in order to emerge again later on, all this is described in “Kalevala” in the part where Sampo is lost and found again: it is, as it were, the re-discovery of something over which the darkness of consciousness was first spread out.

Let us now imagine that in the south, or rather in the southeast, another nation faces the Finnish nation, one that developed in ancient times the soul-qualities mentioned to you: a uniform character of the soul, a soul-element expressing this uniform character in the qualities of its character, feeling and temperament. This nation is a Slav nation, influenced by Scythianos, who lived in the remote past for some time in the environment of the ancient Scythian nation. However, a nation living in the neighbourhood of a centre of initiation need not at all be a highly developed nation, but instead, the necessary things must take place in the course of evolution. With the penetration of the Graeco-Byzantine culture into Slavism, a particular form of the Mystery of Golgotha also penetrated into it. What I have indicated, here, as the centre of the Graeco-Byzantine culture, may be taken, if you like, as Constantinople on the map of Europe, for it is, after all, Constantinople.

Thus we have before us souls impregnated with a fundamentally Slav type, souls that are, on the one hand, connected with something that can lead, through the Mystery of Golgotha, to a uniform soul-essence and may thus prepare these souls having a uniform character for Christianity, and on the other hand, these souls take up the Mystery of Golgotha in a very definite form, resembling an inspiration or an influence coming from the Mystery of Golgotha, in the form in which it went out of the Graeco-Byzantine culture.

But something else must now take place. The following thing must, as it were, come from a certain point.—The separation that existed in the Finnish nation, the division of the three soul-parts, set forth so wonderfully in “Kalevala”, must now be obliterated. This can only be obliterated through an influence from outside; it can only be obliterated through the circumstance of an advancing nation, or part of nation, predisposed from the very outset to experience within the soul its “one-ness”, not its “threefold-ness”, but this “one-ness” is not the one obtained through the Mystery of Golgotha, but a kind that this nation possessed through its own nature. If we study the Finnish nation, we shall find that it is particularly disposed to develop the consciousness of the soul’s threefold character; this threefold character and its connection with the cosmos cannot be expressed more significantly than it has been expressed in “Kalevala”. But in the north, this had to be whitewashed, it had to be clouded over, as it were, by something that obliterates the consciousness of the soul’s threefold nature. And so a race descends, that bears within its soul, in a natural form, the strivings after unity, in the manner in which they existed at that time—expressed in an entirely different way and on an entirely different stage in “Faust”, in Goethe's “Faust”, and in the character of Faust, in general—it bears within its soul something that entirely ignores the soul’s threefold nature, striving after the unity of the Ego. At this still primitive stage, it has a destructive effect upon the three soul-members.

But the Finnish nation was of such a kind that it could still feel in a natural way the streaming forces that penetrated into the soul’s “threefoldness”, obliterating it. (Otherwise it would not have been able to experience these three members of the soul). This streaming-element, forcing its way into the soul, was experienced as a threefold R, as RRR. And just because it was experienced as something which in occult language is best of all expressed in the letters, or in the sound “UUO”, inducing one to say, it comes along, and one should really be afraid of it—it now streams along as a breath in the sound “RRRUUO” and becomes, rooted in what is always experienced through the “TAO” (T), when it penetrates into the human soul. In the case of the ancient divinity Jehova, the penetration into the human soul was expressed with the sound “S”, or the Hebrew “Shin”, and the penetrating element in general is expressed, with the “S” sound. This is connected with the element that penetrates into the soul. What takes root in the soul, tends towards the sound “I”, (pronounced EE), whose significance is well known. Consequently, the Finnish nation experienced this in the sound “RUOTSI”, and for this reason it called the descending nations the “RUTSI” (Ruotsi). The Slavs then gradually adopted this name, and because they connected themselves with that element, penetrating, as the Finns called it, downwards from above, they also called themselves “Rutsi”, which afterwards became the name of the “Russians”.

Thus you may see that the external events described in history had to take place. The fact that the nations that were settled down here, below, called in the Warager tribes—in reality, they were Norman-German tribes who had to connect themselves with the Slav tribes—is entirely connected with something that had to take place; it had to occur, in accordance with the constitution of the human soul. In the East of Europe thus arose later on that element which penetrated into the nations of Europe as the Russian element, the Russian nation. The Russian element therefore contains all those things which I mentioned: it contains, above all, a Norman-German element, and this lives in the name from which the name “Russians” descends, for it has arisen in the way described just now.

The “Kalevala” expresses in a deep way that the greatness of the Finnish nation is based on the fact that it really prepares the “one-ness”, or the unity within the triad; by obliterating the soul’s threefold character it prepares the acceptance of that unity which is no longer a purely human unity, but a divine one, in which dwells the godly hero of the Mystery of Golgotha.

In order that a group of men may take up what comes towards it, it must first be prepared for this. We may, thus, gain an impression of all that had to occur inwardly, in order that the things, which we then encounter inwardly, may arise in the course of development. I explained to you that “Kalevala” expresses in a wonderful way the truth that the Finnish nation had to supply this preparation, in view of the fact that the Mystery of Golgotha is introduced in a strange way at the end of the poem. Christ appears at the end of “Kalevala”, but because he throws his impulse into Finnish life, Wainamoinen abandons the country, and this expresses that the originally great and significant element that penetrated into Europe through the Finnish element, was a preparatory stage for Christianity and took up Christianity like a message from outside.

Just as an individual human being must be prepared in an extraordinarily complicated manner, as it were, so that his soul may find from various sides what it requires, in order to live within a definite incarnation, so it is also the case with nations. A nation is not an entirely uniform, homogeneous element, but something in which many elements flow together. All manner of things have flown together in the nation that lived yonder in the East. Indeed, we may say that everything of an inwardly spiritual character is, at the same time, indicated outwardly, even though it is only indicated slightly. I said that in this nation we must look out for a soul-tribe leading upwards from below; respectively, also downwards from above, in the case of a connecting soul-tribe. This was actually the case, for a powerful stream, a great road went from the Black Sea to the Finnish Bay and along this road an exchange took place between the Graeco-Byzantine element and that which constituted the natural element of the “Rutsi”.

Last time I told you that Europe’s Eastern culture was preceded, let us say, by a cultural stratum in which the human beings were constituted in such a way that they still possessed in their souls something that has more withdrawn into subconscious spheres in the case of modern man, and that they experienced in their ordinary life something like a division of the soul into sentient soul, understanding soul and consciousness-soul.

I explained to you that the men belonging to the once great Finnish nation (the present one is only a remnant of the formerly great and widely spread nation) had souls that possessed, in addition to a certain ancient form of clairvoyance, in their immediate daytime experience, something like a scission of the soul into sentient soul, understanding soul and consciousness-soul.

I told you that in the magnificent epic poem “Kalevala” the three characters Wainamoinen, Ilmarinen and Lemminkainen express how this threefold soul is structured and guided from out the cosmos.

How could such a thing take place? How was it possible that a great nation could develop at a certain place in Europe, a nation whose soul was of the kind described to you?

That the human being develops his true Ego, the gift of the earth, depends upon the fact that the spirits of the earth influence him from below, through the Maya of earthly substance. The spirits of the earth work from below, through the solid earth, as it were, and in our time these spirits of the earth are essentially used for the purpose of calling forth in the human being his Ego-nature.

When something that lies below the Ego-nature rays into a nation such as the old Finnish nation, something more spiritual than the Ego-nature and more strongly connected with the divine forces, (for, if the soul feels itself split into three, it is more strongly connected with the divine powers than if this is not the case) then not only the earthly element, with its elemental spirits, can, in a certain way, ray into man’s earthly part from below, but something else must ray into this earthly element, another elemental influence must ray into it.

Just as man’s physical existence is intimately connected with the spirit of the earth—in so far as this existence is an earthly one and in so far as he develops his Ego within it—that is to say, with the spirits working upwards from below, from the earth itself, so man’s soul-element, revealing itself as an existence connected with his nature, temperament, character and soul, is related with everything that lives upon the earth in the form of watery element, of liquid, element.

Consequently, these souls that are split into three parts must be influenced by spirits pertaining to the watery, to the liquid element. The essential element of our time is the earthly element, the Ego-forming element. When another element penetrates into us, for instance the watery element, then it penetrates more from out the spiritual world. It is not contained in the human being himself. It must, as it were, penetrate into man as a spiritual being, so that man’s earthly nature may obtain something that leads him into the spiritual world.

Suppose that the surface of this blackboard represents that out of which come the elemental forces of the earth; in that case, a spiritual element that seeks to penetrate in there, must come out of the organism of the earth itself out of something that is, in itself, spiritual: a Being must be there, a real Being, that is not the human being, but inspires the human being, as it were, to experience the threefold split of his soul. Consequently, a being must be there that influences the soul from out [of] the spirituality of Nature in such a way that the sentient soul, the understanding soul and the consciousness-soul separate and so that the souls are really able to say: My sentient soul is influenced from out Nature by a force resembling Wainamoinen; it streams towards me like a being of Nature and endows me with the force of the sentient soul. But that is still another influence, resembling Ilmarinen, that endows me with the forces of the understanding-soul, and there is moreover something that resembles Lemminkainen, endowing me with the forces of the consciousness-soul. If HERE, at this place, *) we have a being stretching out, as it were, its feelers into Nature, almost through a kind of neck, if a being that has, as it were, its chief group-body HERE, at this place, and that stretches out its feelers in such a way that we have one of them here, together with the sentient soul, a second feeler there, and a third one there, then this being of Nature would have a body and its soul-part would penetrate, as if with soul-feelers, into these places, in order to exercise an inspiring influence—and there, etheric bodies can arise, that enable the soul to feel itself split into three.

The ancient Finnish population used to say: We live here, yet we feel something resembling three powerful beings, that do not belong to the physical plane, but are beings of Nature. They reveal themselves, coming from the West; they are three parts, almost organs of one might being, whose body lives yonder, but that stretches out its feelers in this direction. (Wainamoinen, Ilmarinen, Lemminkainen.) A powerful OCEAN-BEING spreads from west to east; it stretches out its feelers and endows this nation with that which constitutes the threefold soul.

The nations who still experienced this, felt and spoke in this way, and also “Kalevala” speaks in this manner, as explained just now. Modern man, who merely lives upon the physical plane, says that the western sea stretches out as far as this place: Here is the Gulf of Bothnia, the Finnish Gulf and the Gulf of Riga. But in trying to gain an insight into the spiritual essence of the external physical aspect, we simply take together what appears to us like a transverse section of Nature: we take together the following things and say: There is still a great quantity of water, there below; beyond there is the air; man breathes in the air, and this ocean world is a great powerful being that is simply structured in a different way than the one to which we are accustomed. What is spread out over there is a powerful being, and the human beings belonging to that older race were connected with it in a very marked, and distinctly outlined way. And when we speak of Folk-Souls, these Folk-Souls have in the elemental spirits that exist in countless of these soul-expressions, the instruments through which they can work. They organise, as it were, an army in order to penetrate with their influence as far as the etheric body, and to mould man, through the etheric body, in such away that his physical body becomes an instrument for that which is to be his particular and special mission upon the earth.

We can understand culture, even in its relation to man, only if we can contemplate the forms that we encounter in Nature as an expression of the spirit, we can understand it, if we do not contemplate the sea and land boundaries in the usual thoughtless manner, but if we are able to understand what these forms express. Someone who sees the face of a person might say, for instance: The face has certain definite forms; flesh and air contact one another. But if he describes it in this way, it will be difficult to know what the face was really like. We can only understand it if we consider it as the expression, as the countenance of the human being. Similarly, in the above-mentioned case, we can only grasp things if we consider them as the physiognomy of a powerful being that stretches certain parts of its principal body out of the ocean that stretches out this part of its physiognomy.

Indeed, many things occur below the threshold of consciousness and the Spirits of Form have not in vain set definite forms into Nature. It is possible to grasp the meaning of these forms. They are the expression of an inner being. And if we become the pupils of the Spirits of Form, we ourselves can create forms expressing that which lives in the inner being of Nature and of the Spirit.

I explained to you that there is a certain relationship in which East and West work together, in which the liquid element leans towards the East, as if it were a powerful Being and, as an expression of the threefold nature of the soul, it leans over in the three great Bays, that were still experienced by the more spiritual nations of ancient Finland as Wainamoinen, Ilmarinen and Lemminkainen, and are to-day designated so prosaically as the Finnish, the Bothnian and the Riga Bays. What comes out of the liquid and out of the solid elements, worked together in the Finnish nation. Within it were united the element that moulds more the etheric part of man and refines his physical part, namely, the liquid element, and the element of the earth, or that which comes out of the earth and forms the physical part of man.

We might now ask: What significance has the fact that a nation that fulfilled so eminent a mission in the course of the earth’s evolution as that of the great Finnish nation, should still exist after having accomplished its task? The fact that such a nation remains, that it does not disappear after having fulfilled its mission, has its meaning within the whole progress of evolution. Just as a human being preserves in his living memory, for his subsequent life, the thoughts which he formed at some earlier time of life, so the nations of a past time must remain, almost like a conscience, like a living memory that continues to be active in the face of what happens later—LIKE A CONSCIENCE.

Now we might say: The conscience of Eastern Europe is the force that preserved the Finnish nation. But a time must come when the understanding for the tasks of evolution will take hold of human hearts, when the ideas of “Kalevala” will begin to blossom from out the midst of the Finnish nation itself, when this wonderful epic poem will be spiritualised and permeated with modern anthroposophical ideas, so that it will once more reach, in all its depth, the consciousness of the whole of Europe.

The European nations revered Homer’s epic poems. Yet the “Kalevala” streamed out of still deeper sources of the soul’s life. This cannot as yet be grasped. But it will be grasped, when the teachings of Anthroposophy will be used in a corresponding way, in order to explain the spiritual phenomena of the evolution of the earth. An epic poem such as “Kalevala”, cannot be preserved unless it is preserved in a living form of existence; it cannot be preserved without souls that dwell in human bodies, souls that are related with the creative forces of “Kalevala.” “Kalevala” remains as a living conscience. Its influence can continue, because, not the words, but that which lives in the poem itself, continues to live. Its influence can continue through the fact that a centre exists, from which it may ray out. The essential thing is that this centre should be there, in the same way in which the thoughts that we have had at some earlier time of our life, still exist later on in life.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Baron Sternthal enters.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

But the “Enfant terrible” then says:

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

(General amusement in the assembly).

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

For them

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

In this last lecture, I shall try as far as possible to complete what I have already said, and to bring forward certain practical considerations. In the ensuing discussion, I shall make such additions as may prove necessary.

The practical hints I propose to deal with to-day are not such as can be embodied in general formulae, but need to be greatly modified according to the particular situation and the persons applying them. For this very reason, it is necessary that we should gain Spiritual-Scientific insight into this sphere, which will enable you intelligently to adapt to the individual case the various steps to be taken. I would ask you to consider how little insight there is into that most important matter, the feeding of our farm animals. Merely to indicate new methods of feeding is not sufficient.

How, then, ought our farm animals to be fed? In my opinion, improvement will certainly come if, in the teaching of agriculture, an insight is gained into the essential meaning of feeding as such. This is what I shall try to do today. Completely wrong ideas prevail as to what nutrition signifies both for man and beast. It is not merely the crude process of taking in foodstuffs and after certain changes, of storing these up in the organism, excreting what is not needed. This view carries with it the idea, for instance, that the animal should not be overfed, that its food should be as nourishing as possible and thus the bulk of it be utilised. And if we are of a materialistic turn of mind, we like to distinguish between actual food-stuffs and such substances as promote what is called combustion in the organism. We then build up all sorts of theories and put them into practice, finding, as always, that some work and some do not_? or that they only work for a time, having to be modified in one way or another.

What else indeed could we expect? We speak of processes of combustion in the organism. But no such thing takes place there. The combination of any substance whatever with oxygen in the organism means something quite different from a process of combustion. Combustion is a process which takes place in mineral, inanimate nature, and gust as a living organism is something different from a quartz crystal, so what is called “combustion” in a living organism is not the same as the “dead” process of burning, but something which is living and even sentient. The mere fact of using words in this way has directed our thoughts along certain channels and has done great mischief. To speak of “combustion” in the organism is to speak in a slipshod way. This does not matter if, by instinct or tradition, we still retain a right view of the facts. But if these slip-shod expressions are subjected to an attack of “psychopathia Professoralis,” then clever theories begin to be built upon them. If we depend upon these theories, what we do will be hopelessly wide of the mark, for such theories no longer cover the facts of the case. This is characteristic of our times. We are always doing something which does not fit in with what is going on in Nature. In this matter of nourishment, therefore, it is important to learn with what we are really dealing.

Let us recall what I said yesterday about the plant as having a physical and etheric body and being more or less surrounded from above by the astral element. The plant does not reach the astral element but is surrounded by it. If the plant enters into a special relation with the astral element, as in the case or the formation of edible fruits, a kind of food is produced which will strengthen the astral element in the animal and human organism. If one can look into this process, the very “habitus” of a plant and so on reveals whether or not it is capable of promoting some process in the animal organism. But we must also consider the opposite pole. Here something of great importance takes place. I have touched on this before, but now that the general principles of nutrition are being established, I must emphasise it still more definitely.

Since we are dealing with feeding, let us start from the animal. In the animal, the threefold organism is not so sharply defined as it is in man. The animal has a system of nerve and senses and a metabolic and limb system. These are clearly divided, the one from the other. But in many animals the limits of intermediate rhythmic system are indefinite; both nerves and senses system and metabolic system trespass upon the limits of the rhythmic system. We should therefore choose other terms when we speak of animals. In man one is quite right in speaking of a three-fold organism: but in the case of animals one ought to speak of the nerve and senses system as being localised primarily in the head, and of the metabolic and limb system as being in the hind quarters and limbs but at the same time diffused throughout the whole body. In the middle of the body the metabolism becomes more rhythmical as does also the nervous system, and there both flow into one another. The rhythmic system has a less independent existence in the animal. Rather the opposite poles become indistinct as they merge into one another. (Drawing 15.) We should therefore speak of the animal organism as being twofold, the extremes interpenetrating at the middle. In this way, the animal organization arises.

Mow all the substances contained in the head system—I am speaking of animals, but the same is true of man—are of earthly matter. Even in the embryo, earthly matter is led into the head system. The embryo must be so organised that its head receives its matter from the earth. In the head, therefore, we have earthly matter. But the substances which we bear in the metabolic and limb, organisation, those which permeate our intestines, our limbs, our muscles and bones, etc., these substances do not come from the earth, but from what has been absorbed from the air and warmth above the earth. It is cosmic substantiality. This is important. “When you see an animal's claw, you must not think of it as having been formed by the food which the animal has eaten and which has gone to the claw and been deposited there. This is not the case. It is cosmic matter taken up through the senses and the breathing. What the animal eats serves only to stimulate its powers of movement so that the cosmic matter can be driven into the metabolic and limb organisation, can be driven into the claw and similarly distributed, throughout the whole organism.

With forces (as opposed to substances) it is the other way around. Because the senses are centred in the head and take in impressions from the cosmos, the forces in the head are cosmic in nature. To understand what happens in the metabolic and limb organisation, you need only think of walking, which means that the limbs are permeated with earthly gravity: the forces are earthly ones. Thus, the limb system contains cosmic substances permeated by earthly forces.

It is extremely important that the cow or the ox, if used for working, should be fed so as to absorb the greatest possible amount of cosmic substance and that the rood which enters its stomach should produce the necessary strength to lead this cosmic substance into its limbs, muscles and “bones. It is equally important to realise that the (earthly) substances in the head have to be drawn from the food which has been worked upon in the stomach and is led into the head. In this sense, the head relies upon the stomach in a way in which the big toe does not, and we must realise quite clearly that the head can only work upon this nourishment which comes to it from the metabolism, if it can at the same time draw in sufficient cosmic forces. If, therefore, animals instead of being left in stuffy stables where no cosmic forces can reach them, are led into meadows and given every opportunity of entering into relation with their environment through the perceptions of their senses, then we may see results such as appear in the following examples.

Imagine an animal standing in a dark and stuffy stable before its manger, the contents of which have been measured out by human “wisdom”„ Unless its diet is varied, as it only can be out-of-doors, this animal will show a very great contrast to one which seeks out its food with its sense of smell, guided by this organ in its search for cosmic forces, seeking and finding its nourishment by itself and developing its whole activity in doing so. An animal that is red from a manger will not show immediately how devoid it is of cosmic forces, for it has inherited a certain amount of them. But it will breed descendants to whom these cosmic forces are no longer transmitted. Such an animal will become weak, beginning from the head, i.e. it will not be able to nourish its body because it cannot take in the necessary cosmic substances which should come in. This will show you that it is not enough simply to say: “This kind of fodder for one case, that for another.” Bather one must have a clear idea of the value for the animal's whole organisation that such and such methods of feeding have.

But we must go a step further. What is actually contained in the head? Earthly substance. If you take out the brain, the noblest part of an animal, you will have before you a piece of earthly substance. The human brain also contains earthly substance. But in both the forces are cosmic. What is the human brain for? It serves as a support for the ego. The animal, let it be remembered, has as yet no ego; its brain is only on the way to ego-formation. In man, it goes on and on to the complete forming of the ego. How then did the animal's brain come into existence? Let us look at the whole organic process. All that which eventually manifests in the brain as earthly matter has simply been “excreted,” (deposited), from tne organic process. Earthly matter has been excreted in order to serve as a base for the ego. Now the process of the working-up of the food in the digestive tract and metabolic and limb system produces a certain quantity of earthly matter which is able to enter into the head and to be finally deposited as earthly-matter in the brain. But a portion of the food stuff is eliminated in the intestine before it reaches the brain. This part cannot be further transformed and is deposited in the intestine for ultimate excretion.

We come here upon a parallel which will strike you as being very paradoxical but which must not be overlooked if we wish to understand the animal and human organisations. What is brain matter? It is simply the contents of the intestines brought to the last stage of completion. Incomplete (premature) brain-excretion passes out through the intestines. The contents of the intestines are in their processes closely akin to the contents of the brain. One could put it somewhat grotesquely by saying that that which spreads itself out in the brain is a highly-advanced dung-heap. And yet the statement is essentially correct. By a peculiar organic process, dung is transformed into the noble matter of the brain, there to become the foundation for the development of the ego. in man the greatest possible quantity of intestinal dung is transformed into cerebral excrement because man bears his ego on the earth. In animals, the quantity is less. Hence there remain more forces in the intestinal excrement of an animal which we can use for manuring. In animal manure, there is therefore more of the potential ego element, since the animal itself does not reach ego-hood. For this reason, animal dung and human dung are completely different. Animal dung still contains ego-potentiality. In manuring a plant, we bring this ego-potentiality into contact with the plant's root. Let us draw the plant in its entirety (Diagram 16). Down here you have the root? up there the unfolding leaves and blossoms. And just as above, in the leaves and blossoms, the astral element is acquired from contact with the air, so the ego-potentiality develops below in the root through contact with the manure.

The farm is truly an organism. The astral element is developed above, and the presence of orchard and forest assists in collecting it. If animals feed in the right way on the things that grow above the earth, then they will develop the right ego-potentiality in the manure they produce, and this ego-potentiality, working on the plant from the root, will cause it to grow upwards from the root in the right way according to the forces of gravity. It is a wonderful interplay, but in order to understand it one must proceed step by step.

From this you can see that a farm is a kind of individuality, and that both animals and plants should be retained within this mutual interplay. If, therefore, instead of using the manure supplied by the animals belonging to the farm, we sell off these animals and obtain manure from Chili, we are in a sense doing harm to Nature. In doing this we trespass the bounds of that which is a closed circuit, of that which should be self-sufficient. Of course, things must be ordered in such a way that the circuit really is self-contained. One need only have on the farm as many animals and of such kinds as will supply sufficient and appropriate manures. And one must also see to it that the animals have such plants to eat as they like and seek instinctively.

At this point experiments tend to become complicated because every case is different. But the main thing is to know the directions which the experiments should take. Practical rules will be found, but they should all proceed from the principle that a farm should be, as far as possible, self-contained. I say as far as possible because Spiritual Science takes a practical not a fanatical view of things. Under our present economic order this cannot be fully attained; but the ideal is one which we should make every effort to reach.

On this basis, then, we can find concrete instances of the relation between the organism formed by the livestock and the plant or “fodder organism.” Let us first consider this relation on broad general lines.

To begin with the root. The root generally develops in the soil and through the manure it becomes permeated with ego-potentiality which it absorbs. This absorption is determined and aided if the root can find in the right quantities salts in the soil around it. Let us assume that we are considering the nature of these roots merely from the point of view of the foregoing reflections. Then we shall suggest that roots are the food which, when it is absorbed into the human organism, will find its way most easily to the head by way of the digestive process. We shall therefore provide a diet of roots where we require to give the head material substances to enable the cosmic forces which work through the head to exercise their plastic activity. Mow imagine someone saying to himself: “I must give roots to this animal which requires earthly substance in its head in order to stimulate its sense-connections with its environment, i.e. with the cosmic environment.” Does not this immediately suggest the calf and the carrot? A calf eating carrots portrays this whole process. The moment something like this is put forward and you know how things really are and their true connections, you will know immediately what is to be done. It is simply a matter of realising how this mutual process arises.

But let us proceed to the next stage. Once the calf has eaten the carrot, once the substance really has been introduced into the head, the converse process must be able to begin, i.e. the head, on its part_? must begin to work with forces of volition, thus begetting within the organism forces which can be worked into it. It is not enough for the “carrot dung” to be deposited in the head; from what is deposited and in the course of disintegration, streams of force must come which will enter the rest of the organism. In short, there must be a second food substance which will enable one part of the body which has already been fed (in this case the head) to work in the right way on the rest of the organism.

Well, I have given the animal the carrot fodder. And now I want the animal's body to be permeated with the forces which are developed from the head. For this, as a second fodder, we need a plant with a spindly structure, the seed of which will have gathered into itself these “spindly” forces. We immediately think of flaxseed (linseed) or something similar. If you feed young cattle on carrots and linseed—or carrots and fresh hay (which is equally suitable)—this will bring into full operation the forces already latent in the animals. We should therefore try to give young cattle food which promotes, on the one hand, the forces of ego-potentiality, and, on the other, the complementary streams of astral force working from above downwards. For the latter purpose, those plants are especially suitable which have long, spindly stems and as such have been turned into hay. (Diagram 17.) Just as we have looked into this concrete case_? so we must approach Agriculture as a whole: of every single thing, we must know what happens to it when it passes either from the animal into the soil, or from the plant into the animal.

Let us pursue the subject yet further. Let us take the case of an animal' which should become particularly strong in the middle region (where the head or nervous organisation tends to develop in the direction of breathing and the metabolic organisation tends to have a rhythmic character). Which animals have to be strong in this particular region? They are the milch animals. The secretion of milk shows that the animal in question is strong in this region. The point to observe here is that the right co-operation should take place between the current going from the head backwards (mainly a streaming of forces) and the current going from the animal's hindquarters forward (mainly a streaming of substance). If these two currents co-operate and intermingle in the right way, the result will be an abundant supply of rich milk. For good milk contains substances prepared in the metabolic system and which, without having entered into the sexual system, have become akin to it. It.is a sexual process within the metabolic system. Milk is simply a sexual secretion on another level. It is a substance, which, on its way to becoming sexual secretion, is penetrated and transformed by the forces working from the head. The whole process can be seen quite clearly.

Now for processes which should arise in this way, we must choose a diet which will work less powerfully towards the head than do roots which contain ego-potentiality; neither may the diet, since it is to be connected with the sexual system, contain too much of the astral element, i.e. of that which goes towards the blossom and fruit of the plant. In short, if we wish to find a diet that will produce milk, we must choose the part of the plant which lies between blossom and root, i.e. the green and leafy part. (Diagram 18.) If we wish to bring about an increase in the milk supply of. an animal whose milk production we have reason to believe could be increased we shall certainly reach the desired end if we proceed as follows:

Suppose I have a cow and feed it with green fodder. I take plants in which the process of fruit-formation has been developed within the process of leaf-formation. Such, for example, are the pod-bearing or leguminous plants and especially the clovers. In clover, the would-be fruit develops as leaf and foliage. A cow that is fed in this way will perhaps not show much result of it; but when the cow comes to calve, the calf will grow into a cow that yields good milk. The effects of reformed foddering usually need a generation in which to show themselves.

There is however one point to be borne in mind. As we know, modern doctors go on using certain traditional remedies without knowing why they do so, except that the remedies have continued to prove effectual. The same thing happens in farming. People go on using traditional methods without knowing why they do so, and m addition to this they make experiments and tests, try to ascertain exactly the quantity of food that should be given for fattening cattle, milch cows, etc. But here again we have what always arises in haphazard experimenting. You know what happens when you have a sore throat and go and see your friends. They will all offer you some cure or other and in half-an-hour you will have collected a whole chemist's shop. If you were to take all these remedies, they would cancel each other out, and certainly ruin your stomach, and your sore throat would not be any better. Because of the circumstances, something which ought to be quite simple has been made extremely complicated. Something similar to this happens when one experiments with fodder for cattle. For it means, does it not, that one is using a food which suits the case 'in one particular but is ineffective in another direction. Then a second food is added to the first and finally one has a mixture of foods, each of which has a special significance for young cattle perhaps or for fattening stock. But the whole thing has become so complicated that one loses one's grasp of it all, because one loses sight of the interplay of forces involved. Or perhaps the different ingredients cancel each other in their effects. This is what often happens and especially with the modern college-trained student-farmer. Such a person looks things up in a book or tries to remember what he may have learned somewhere; “Young cattle must be fed in this way, and cattle for fattening in that.” But this does not help, because the fodder recommended by the book may well conflict with the fodder one i-s already giving.

The proper way to proceed is to start from the basis of thought which I have mentioned and which simplifies cattle-feeding so that it may be taken in at a glance. I really mean at a glance, as we saw in the case of the carrots and linseed. We can easily survey this. Think how one can then stand livingly in the midst of the farm, acting consciously and with deliberation. This knowledge leads not to a complication but to a simplification of methods of feeding. Much that has been discovered by experiment is right, but it is unsystematic and inexact. Or rather it has the sort of exactness which is really inexact because things are muddled up and cannot be seen through. Whereas what I have recommended is simple and its effects can be followed up into the animal organism.

Suppose now that we wish to consider the flowering and fruiting part of the plant. And we must go further, and observe what is fruit-like in the rest of the plant. This recalls a feature of plant-life that always delighted Goethe, namely the fact that the plant has throughout its whole body the tendency towards what is normally specialised at certain parts. With most plants, we take the seed which has formed from the blossom and place it in the earth in order to produce more plants. But we do not do this in the case of the potato. Here we use the eyes of the tubers. This is the fruiting part of the potato plant, but like many processes in Nature, it is not carried out to the end. We can, however, heighten its activity by a procedure which bears an external resemblance to combustion. For instance, if you “cossette” (chop up into thin straws) roots or tubers and dry the “cossettes” for fodder, the stuff will be enormously strengthened in its activity and brought a stage nearer to the fruit stage if you spread it out in the sun and allow it to steam a little.

Practices like this are based upon a deep and wonderful instinct. We can ask: how did men first come to cook their food? Men began to cook their food because they gradually discovered that what develops during fruit formation is mainly due to processes akin to cooking, viz. burning, warming, drying and evaporating. All these processes tend to make the fruit and seed and indirectly the other parts of the plant, especially the higher parts, more fitted to develop the forces that are necessary to the metabolic and limb system in the animal. Even uncooked the blossom and fruit of a plant work on the animal's metabolic and digestive system and primarily through the forces they develop, not through their substance«, For it is the forces of the earth which are needed by the metabolic and limb system, and in the measure in which it needs them, it must receive them. Take the case of the animals which pasture on steep mountain sides. Unlike those in the plains, they climb about under difficult conditions owing to the fact that the ground is not level. There is all the difference for those animals between level and slanting ground. They require food that will develop those forces in limb and muscle which are energised by the will. Otherwise they would not be good for either labour, milking or fattening. It is therefore important that they should eat plenty of those aromatic mountain plants in which blossom and fruit have undergone an additional treatment by the sun, resembling a process of natural cooking.

But similar results can be achieved and strength given to muscle and limb by artificial methods—roasting and boiling, etc. Flower and fruit are most suitable for this, especially of those plants which from the beginning develop towards fruiting and do not waste their time, as it were, in growing foliage. People should take careful note of these things, especially those who are on the dangerous slope that leads to laziness and inertia. An instance of this is the man who wants to be a mystic-. “But how,” he asks, “can I become a mystic if I am working with my hands all day? I ought to be completely at rest and not be constantly stirred to activity by something outside or inside me. If I no longer waste my forces by fussing about all day, I shall become a real mystic. I must therefore order my diet in such a way as to become a mystic.” And he goes in for a diet of raw food and ceases to cook for himself. But the matter is not so easy as all this. For a man of weak physical constitution who takes to a diet of raw food when he is already on the downward path that leads to mysticism, will naturally accelerate the process; he will become more and more “mystical”—that is more and more inert', (and what happens here to a man can be applied to the animal and can teach us how to stir it to greater) activity). But the opposite may also occur. We may have the case of a man of strong constitution who nevertheless has developed the queer idea of becoming a mystic. In this case his own inherent forces and those absorbed through the raw food will continue to develop and to work in him, and the diet may not do him much harm. And if, by this means, he stirs up the forces which generally remain below and produce gout and rheumatism if; he stirs these up, and transforms them, then his raw diet will make mm stronger. There are two sides to every question. No general rule can be laid down, but we must know how these principles work in individual cases. The advantage of vegetarianism is that it calls forth out of the organism forces which were lying fallow and which produce gout, rheumatism, diabetes, etc. where only vegetable food is taken, these forces serve to make it ripe for human assimilation* But where animal food is consumed, these same forces are deposited in the organism and remain unused, or rather they begin to work from out of, themselves, depositing the products of metabolism in various parts of the body, or, as in diabetes, they lay claim for their own use to substances which should remain spread out over all the organs. We only understand these matters when we look more deeply.

This brings us to the question of the fattening of animals. Here we must say we should regard the animal as a kind of sack to be filled as full as possible with cosmic substance. A fat pig is really a most heavenly animal'. Its fat body, apart from its system of nerves-and-senses, is made up entirely of cosmic, not of earthly substance. The pig needs the food which it enjoys so much in order to fill itself with cosmic substance, which it absorbs on all sides and then distributes throughout its body. It must take in this substance which has to be drawn from the cosmos, and distribute it. And the same is true of all fattened animals. lou will find that animals will fatten best on the part of the plant which tends towards fruit-formation, and has been heightened in its activity by cooking or steaming. Or, if you give them something which has in it an enhanced fruit-process, for instance turnip, which belongs to a species in which this process has been enhanced and which has become larger through long cultivation. In general, the best kind of food for fattening cattle is that which will at least help to distribute the cosmic substance, i.e. the part of the plant which tends to fruit-formation—and which has in addition received the proper treatment. These conditions are in the main fulfilled by certain kinds of oil cakes and the like. But we must also see to it that the animal's head is not entirely neglected and that in this fattening treatment a certain amount of earthly substance is introduced there. The fodder just mentioned needs to be complemented by something for the head, though a smaller quantity, as the head does not require so much. In fattening an animal, we should therefore add a small quantity of roots.

Now there is a substance which as substance has no particular function in the organism. In general, one can say that roots have a function in connection with the head, blossoms in connection with the metabolic and limb system, and leaf and stem in connection with the rhythmic system within the human organism. There is, now, a substance that can aid the whole animal organism, because it is related to all its members. This substance is salt. And as of all the ingredients in the food of both man and animals, salt is the least in quantity, we can see it is not how much we take which matters, but what we take. Even small quantities of substance will fulfil their purpose if they are of the right kind.

This brings us to a very important point and one on which I should like to see very accurate experiments made. These could be extended to the observation of human beings who use the article of food I am now going to deal with. As you know, the introduction of the tomato as a food is of comparatively recent date. It is very popular as a food and also extremely valuable as an object of study. One can learn a very great deal both from growing tomatoes and from eating them. Those who give the matter some thought—and there are some such nowadays—are of the opinion and rightly so, that the consumption of the tomato by man is of great significance. And it can well be extended to the animal; it would be quite possible to accustom animals to tomatoes. It is, in fact, of great significance for all that in the body which—while in the organism.—tends to fall out of the organism and to form an organisation of its own« We have the statement made by an American that in some circumstances the use of tomatoes can act as a dietetic means of correcting an unhealthy tendency of the liver. The liver is the most independent organ in the human organism, and diseases of the liver (and especially those of the animal liver) can in general be combated by a diet of tomatoes. Once again, we are gaining insight into the connection between plant and animal. Anyone suffering from cancer, I say this in parenthesis, i.e. from a disease which tends to make one organ in the body independent from the rest, ought at once to be forbidden tomatoes.

Why does the tomato have a special effect upon the parts of the organism which tend to be independent and specialised in their function? This is connected with the conditions which the tomato requires for its own growth. During its growth, the tomato feels happiest in the vicinity of manure which retains the form it had when it separated from the animal. Manure composed of a haphazard collection of all kinds of refuse, not worked upon in any way, will ensure the growing of very fine tomatoes. And if compost heaps could be made of tomato stalks and leaves i.e. of the tomato's own refuse, the result would be quite brilliant. The tomato does not wish to go beyond its own boundaries. It would rather remain within its own strong vitality, it is the most unsocial being in the plant kingdom. It does not wish to admit anything strange to its own nature and especially anything which has already been through the rotting process. And this is connected with the fact that this plant has a special effect on any independent organisation within the animal and human bodies.

In this respect, the tomato bears a certain resemblance to the potato, also a very independent plant in its effects—so much so indeed that after passing very easily through the digestive system, it penetrates into the brain and makes that organ independent even of the workings of the rest of the organs'. And among the factors which have led men and animals to become more materialistic in Europe, we must certainly reckon the excessive consumption of potatoes. The consumption of potatoes should serve only to stimulate the brain and head-system. But it should not go beyond this. These are the things that show in an objective way the intimate connection between agriculture and social life. It is infinitely important that agriculture should be so related to the social life.

I have only indicated these matters on general lines and, for some time to come, these should serve as the foundation for the most varied experiments, such as should lead to most striking results. From this you will be able to understand how the contents of these lectures should be treated. I am thoroughly in agreement with the decision which has been come to by the agriculturalists who have attended this course, namely, that what has been said at these lectures should for the present remain within this circle and be developed by actual experiment and research. This same circle should decide when in their opinion these experiments have been carried sufficiently far for the matter to be made public. A number of persons not directly connected with farming, but whose presence has been permitted through the organisers' tolerance because of their interest in the subject, nave also attended this course. They will, like the character in the well-known opera, be required to put a padlock on their mouths and not; fall into the common Anthroposophical mistake of spreading things as far and wide as possible. For what has so often done us harm is the talk of the individual, dictated not by a desire to convey real information but simply by a desire to repeat what has been heard. It makes all the difference whether these things are said by a farmer or by a layman. Suppose these things are repeated by laymen as an interesting new chapter of Anthroposophical teaching. What will happen? Exactly the same as has happened in the case of other Lecture Cycles. People on all sides, including farmers, will hear it ... But there are different ways of hearing. A farmer hearing these things from another farmer will think at first: “What a pity. The poor fellow has gone crazy.” He will say this the first and even the second time. But when finally a farmer sees something with his own eyes, then it is hardly wise for him to dismiss it as nonsense. But if he has only heard of a new method from people who are not professionally concerned with it but only interested in the subject, then naturally it all comes to nothing and the whole thing will lose its effect: it will be discredited from the start. Therefore, those friends who have been present and are not members of the Agricultural Circle must exercise restraint and not repeat what' they have heard wherever they go, as is so often done in Anthroposophy. This course has been decided on by the Agricultural Circle and the decision announced by our esteemed Count Keyserlingk, and I entirely agree with it.

And now that we have come to the end of this Course, I should like to express my pleasure at your having come to hear what was said, and at the prospect of your taking part in all the developments which will take place in the future. I think you will agree with me when I say that what we have been doing is useful work, and as such possesses a deep inner value.

There are, however, two things to which I would draw your attention. The first is the trouble that has been taken by Count and Countess Keyserlingk and all their household to make this course the success it has been.

This required energy, self-sacrifice, consciousness of the end in view, a sense of Anthroposophical values, a real identification with the cause of Anthroposophy. And this is why the work we have all been engaged upon, a work which will undoubtedly be of service to the whole of humanity, has seemed to take the form of a wonderful festival, for which we give our heartfelt thanks to Count and Countess Keyserlingk.

Discussion

QUESTION: Has liquid manure the same force of ego-organisation as dung?

ANSWER: Of course, liquid manure and dung should be used in union with each other and both should contribute to the same force of organisation of the soil. The connection with the Ego to which I referred holds good particularly for the dung, but does not hold good xn general for the liquid manure. For every Ego, even in the rudimentary form in which it appears in manure, must work in conjunction with some astral element, and the dung would have no astrality unless the liquid manure were there. The liquid is strong is astrality, the dung in ego-force. The manure may be regarded as “grey matter,” while the liquid is the cerebral fluid.

QUESTION: Could we be given the correct astronomical data for those preparations which must be burnt?

ANSWER: (by Dr. Vreede): The exact data cannot be supplied at present. There are calculations still required which cannot be made at the moment. In general, the period for burning the insects is from the beginning of February on into August. With regard to the destruction of field-mice, the period this year (1924)—it shifts from year to year—would be from the second half of November to the first half of December.

DR. STEINER: The principles laid down (in 1912) for the Anthroposophical Calendar ought to be worked out more precisely. Then one could go by it exactly.

QUESTION: In speaking of Full Moon and New Moon do you mean the one day on which the moon is full or new, or does it include the period shortly before and after it?

ANSWER: One reckons the new moon from the moment when the thin sickle (Diagram 22) of the old moon is still there and disappears. Full moon is reckoned from the moment when this other picture appears (again Diagram 22). Both phases cover from twelve to fourteen days.

ANSWER: We shall give the times for making the preparations, but the insects can be kept until then.

QUESTION: Has the burning of the weed seeds to take place in summer, or at any time?

ANSWER: Not too long after they have been gathered

QUESTION: How can this insect-pepper which has “been scattered over the soil' affect the living insects which never come into contact with the soil?

ANSWER: What matters here is not the physical contact but a certain quality coming from this homoeopathic dose. The insect has its own kind of sensitiveness, and it will flee from what has been scattered over the ground without having to come in contact with it. That the insect does not come into direct contact with the earth makes no difference at all.

QUESTION: What is the nature of the harm done by frost in agriculture and in the case of tomatoes in particular? In what sense is frost connected with cosmic forces?

. ANSWER: To have fine and large tomatoes you must keep them warm. They suffer from frost. With regard to frost in general, you must realise what it is t-hat is active in the effects of frost. Frost means that the cosmic influence which is active in the earth has been essentially strengthened. Now this cosmic influence has a normal mean between certain degrees of temperature. When the temperature is at a certain point, this cosmic influence is exactly what the plant requires. If, however, the frost is intense, lasts too long and strikes too deeply, the influence of the heavens upon the earth is too strong and the plant tends to become stalkified and thin throughout and in this attenuated state it falls an easy prey to the frost and is destroyed. Frost which is too intense is therefore extremely harmful to the growth of plants because it is a sign that too much of the heavens has entered into the earth.

QUESTION: Should the burnt remains of Horse-fly be used to treat the bodies of animals, or be scattered over the meadows and pastures?

ANSWER: Scatter it where the animals feed. It is to be regarded as additional to the manure.

QUESTION: What is the best way of combating couch-grass? Is it not very difficult to obtain the seeds?

ANSWER: This difficulty really solves itself. When it grows underground and rampant one can fight it. You need very little seed and you will be able to get this. Why, one can even find four-leaved clover!

QUESTION: Is it permissible to preserve bales of fodder by means of an electric current?

ANSWER: What would be your object in doing this? It is necessary at this point to consider the part played by electricity in Nature. Now it is comforting to note that in America, where people are more observant than they are over here, voices are heard to say that man cannot go on developing in the same way in an atmosphere which is continuously “being pierced “by electrical currents and waves; it has an influence on the whole development of man. Man's inner life will become different if these things are carried further and further. It makes a difference to a district whether it is provided with steam trains or electric trains. The action of steam is more conscious: the action of electricity is extremely unconscious, so that people simply do not know how certain things happen. .

No doubt there is a development going on which must be reckoned with because electricity is being used above the surface of the soil as radiant electricity (wireless) and also as conducted electricity (cables) for transmitting news as quickly as possible from one place to another. The result of this will be that men and women living in the field especially of the radiant electricity can no longer “take in” the news they obtain. The electric radiations used to ensure quick transmissions tend to blot out the capacity for understanding. This can already be observed. People have far more difficulty in taking in what comes to them than they had several decades ago. It is a comfort to find that a glimpse of the truth of this matter is beginning to dawn at least from America.

Whenever anything new appears, it is usually regarded at first as “a remedy.” Then the prophets come in and use the thing. It is strange how, when something new appears, clairvoyant perception is so often brought down to the human level. For instance, a man who had never before thought about it, begins to prophesy wildly regarding the healing power of electricity, and the idea is taken up not merely because electricity is there, but because it is in the fashion. Electricity in the form of radiations is no more a remedy than pricking with small thin needles can be a remedy. It is not the electricity which heals but the shock it produces.

It must not be forgotten, however, that, electricity has a particularly powerful effect upon the higher organisation in living beings, i.e. upon the head in men and animals and upon the root in plants. An animal that eats food that has been preserved through electrification will therefore gradually tend to grow sclerotic. The process will be slow and will not be noticed at first. All that will be noticed, is that in one way or another these animals die too soon. No one will attribute this to the electricity: all sorts of other reasons will be found. I cannot help it, but electricity is the last thing in the world which ought to be introduced into a living being to promote its life! It cannot promote life. Electricity is at one level lower than life, and the higher the level reached “by life, the more it tends to rid itself of electricity; and if you induce the living organism to take repulsive measures when there is nothing to be repelled, the organism becomes nervous and fidgety and gradually sclerotic.

QUESTION: What does Spiritual Science say on the subject of preserving food-stuffs by acidification in general?

ANSWER: If we use salt-like materials at all in this process it does not make much difference whether the salt is added at the moment of eating, or whether it is used in the preparation of the fodder. In the case of fodder that contains too little salt to carry the food stuffs to those parts of the organism where they should work, souring is the right procedure to adopt. Take the case of turnips. These, as we saw, are particularly fitted to work upon the head-organisation. They are, therefore, an excellent food for certain animals, especially for young cattle. If, however, it be noticed that the young animals shed their hair too soon and too much, their fodder should be salted because this means that the food is not being deposited in sufficient quantities in those parts of the organism where it is needed. Salt is tremendously effective in carrying food to the part of the organism where it is needed and will work.

QUESTION: What view does Spiritual Science take on the subject of souring of the leaves of sugar-beet and other green plants?

ANSWER: The great thing here is to find a certain optimum and not go beyond it by adding too much salt, because salt is the part of food which more than any other remains what it is once it is inside the organism. The organism in general, in the case of animals- and even more so of human beings, is so constructed as to submit everything it absorbs to the most varied changes. It is an error to think that the albumen which goes into our stomachs remains the same as it was before we ate it. It must first be changed into a completely lifeless substance and then changed back again by means of the etheric body into specifically human (or in the case of animals specifically animal) albumen.

Everything that enters into an organism must be changed. This applies even to warmth. Suppose that this (see Diagram 23, Part I) is a living organism and this the warmth in the environment. Now assume you have a piece of dead wood (Diagram 23, Part II) which, it is true, comes from a living organism but is already dead. It is likewise surrounded by warmth. Now when the warmth enters into the living organism, it does not simply go a little way in and remain what it is; the organism immediately transforms it into a warmth of its own, and it could not do otherwise. Whereas when the warmth penetrates into the dead wood it remains exactly the same kind of warmth as exists outside in the mineral earth. The moment warmth penetrates into us unchanged as it does into the piece of wood, we catch cold. Nothing that comes into the living organism from outside may remain what it is; it must immediately he changed into something else. This process takes place to the least extent m salt. No great harm, therefore, will he done by using salt for the preserving of food-stuffs so long as you do it carefully and do not put in too much. The mere sense of taste will reject it. If it is necessary for the preservation of food-stuffs this shows that up to a point it is the right process to adopt.

QUESTION: Do you recommend souring fodder without salt?

ANSWER: That is too advanced a process. It is a super-organic process (self-fermentation) and can in certain circumstances be extremely harmful.

QUESTION: Is Spanish Chalk, sometimes used to mitigate the effects of souring, bad for the animals?

ANSWER: Some animals cannot stand it at all; they become ill. Some can. I cannot say at the moment which are those that can stand it. On the whole, it does not do the animals much good and is apt to make them ill.

QUESTION: I suppose that the gastric juice will be dulled by the Spanish chalk?

ANSWER: Yes. The gastric juice becomes useless.

QUESTION: I would like to ask whether the inner attitude with which one sets to work is not of great importance in these matters? There is surely a great difference between sowing seed and scattering what is destined to work destruction. The attitude of mind must count. Does it not have an immensely greater karmic effect to work against insects in this way than to kill them in single instances by mechanical means?

ANSWER: The main thing about an inner attitude is whether it is a good or a bad attitude. What do you mean by “destruction?” Now consider how one must think about these things. In my lecture to-day I pointed out that we can know something and then actually see it before us. We can look at a linseed plant or a carrot and actually see (because we know) the course it takes and the process it undergoes when it enters the body of an animal. If we can really attain to this objective vision and make it a reality, then it is inconceivable

that we should not at the same time be penetrated by certain feelings of piety. And we shall gain the impulse to do this in the service of mankind, in the service of the Universe. The only way in which our state of mind could bring harm would be if we did our work from bad motives. I do not see, therefore, since these methods work on the whole for good, that they can in any way do harm. You seem to think that it would not be so bad just to run after the animal and kill it?

QUESTION: I wanted to know if there was a difference between the two ways of destruction—mechanical and cosmic?

ANSWER: This question raises very complicated issues which can only be understood if we have gained insight -into the wider connections that exist between things. Suppose you draw a fish out of the sea and kill it. Then you have killed something. You have carried out a process on a definite level. But suppose that for some reason or other you take a whole pail full of water containing quantities of fish-spawn, thus destroying a vast amount of life. This is something quite different from killing one fish. The process has been carried out on quite a different level. If something in Nature passes on towards a full-grown fish, it has travelled along a certain path. If you cut the fish off at this point, you cause a certain disorder in Nature. But it is quite a different matter to arrest a process which has not been completed or which has not ended in the blind alley of a fully-grown organism. Your question, therefore, boils down to this: What wrong am I doing in making this pepper? What I destroy with the pepper does not really come into consideration as it moves on another level of existence. All we need ask is: What must I have in order to make this pepper? And in most cases, it turns out that in making it I shall destroy far fewer animals than if I have to collect them in some other way and then kill them. I think that if you look at the question in a practical way and less from an abstract point of view you will find that it is not so very appalling.

QUESTION: Can human faeces be used for manuring, and how should they be treated before use?

ANSWER: They should be used as little as possible. For they achieve very little in the way of manuring and they can do more harm than any other kind of manure. If, however, you want to use them the normal amount that is to be had on a farm or estate will be amply sufficient. If one knows that a given number of human beings are working on an estate, then if the human manure be added to what already comes from the animals on the estate and from other sources, clearly this will make up the maximum that can he used without doing harm. It is the greatest mistake to use human manure in the neighbourhood of large towns, because the amount supplied by a large town would suffice for an estate of gigantic size. No one would have such a crazy notion as to use on a small piece of land the human manure supplied, say by the whole of Berlin. You need only try eating some of the plants that grow in the neighbourhood of big cities. Take asparagus or any other plant which still manages to grow fairly true to its nature and upright, and you will see what happens.

Again, if you use human manure for plants that are eaten by animals, you will have the most harmful results., For then much of what is eaten and goes through the animal's organism remains at the same stage as that at which the asparagus is arrested when it goes through the human organism. In this connection, it is the grossest ignorance which has caused the greatest mischief in this field.

QUESTION: Is there any remedy for red murrain (Erysipelas) in swine?

ANSWER: This is really a veterinary question. I have never gone into the matter, as I have never been asked for advice about it, but I rather think the best thing to do is to rub in a certain dose of antimony. This is a therapeutic question as it deals with a real disease.

QUESTION: Can one combat Wild Radish, which is a bastard species, with these peppers?

ANSWER: The peppers of which I have told you only affect the plants from which they were made. Plants which arise from symbiosis or the crossing of one plant with another cannot therefore be affected by pepper made from one of them.

QUESTION: What are your views on green manuring?

ANSWER: It has its uses, especially in connection with fruit-growing. One cannot generalise on such matters. It should be used if a powerful development of the leafy part of the plant is required. For such a purpose, it can well supplement other manures.

Dear attendees! When you look at all the circumstances of the present, at the hardship, misery, and hopelessness, and when you look at the causes from which all this has emerged, then, in my opinion, an unbiased view of life suggests itself that the first riddle of our present time is, so to speak, the most urgent riddle: How can humanity unite the paths of the soul with the paths of life so as to work together constructively on building our social and other relationships in the future?

Since I intend to provide an addition to some of the things that I have said from the point of view of anthroposophically oriented spiritual science here in Stuttgart for years, you will forgive me if I take up one or the other in a historical way today and thus perhaps give the impression that these links are sometimes more personal than what I have presented here over the course of many years. But that will only appear to be the case.

The starting point of my talk today is that I would like to point out how this very question: How can present-day humanity harmonize the paths of the soul with the paths of life? – how this question was in my mind when, at the end of the 1880s and beginning of the 1890s, I was working on my Philosophy of Freedom, published in 1894, as the basis of the world view that emerged for me over many years. For basically, the way it was presented by me at the time, this “Philosophy of Freedom” should already answer the fateful question of humanity posed at the beginning of our deliberations today. I do not intend to talk about the content of this “Philosophy of Freedom” today, but I would like to touch on the intentions underlying this writing with a few introductory words.

The underlying intention was to answer the question: How can a person, placed in the present, come to terms with the most important feeling, the most important longing of modern times, with the feeling of freedom, the longing for freedom, in the face of the great social demands of the present? And it is indeed essential, especially in this consideration of the nature of freedom, that we break with the whole way in which we have always asked about the justification of the idea of freedom, of the impulse for freedom. We have asked: Is man a free being by nature, or is he not? — This way of asking the question seems to me to have been superseded by the whole development of modern humanity for our time. Today, after what humanity has been through in the last three to four centuries, we can really only ask: Is man capable of founding a social order such that, as he develops from childhood to adulthood, he can find in it that which he is justified to call the freedom of his being? The question in the Philosophy of Freedom is not whether man is born free, but rather, in this writing, the question is whether it is possible for man to find something in the depths of his being that he can bring up from subconscious or unconscious depths into full, clear, bright consciousness, and whether he can cultivate a free being within himself through this bringing up. And this consideration led me to the conclusion that this most essential element in the development of humanity in modern times could only be based on two things: firstly, on what I then called intuitive thinking, and secondly, on what I then called social trust. And since I did not use these two words to describe something abstract or theoretical, but rather things of reality, things of life, what was meant in my writing was understood very, very slowly, because we live in a time of abstractions, as I have often stated here. We live in the age of theorizing. And when someone asserts something that comes only from a sense of reality and this assertion is then formulated as an idea, people confuse what has been taken from reality and clearly appears in the form of an idea with what lives in them as abstract ideas that have nothing to do with reality. And then they look at what can actually work in people as a real impulse, as something utopian or the like - especially those people who themselves only have utopian ideas in their heads, they see something like this as utopian.

What was the idea behind this striving for a universal education of humanity in the sense of the “Philosophy of Freedom”? It was this: that man can never become free if he only takes into his consciousness those ideas that have come to him for three to four centuries from the scientific world view, if he only fills himself with what can be learned from nature. Now, ladies and gentlemen, I have often said here that the objection is raised: But how many people today absorb into their consciousness those ideas that are borrowed from the observation of nature? People think that only a few individuals study natural science and that perhaps those who learn something from natural science recruit others who establish a monistic – or as it is otherwise called – world view, but that this still has no decisive influence on the broad masses of humanity today.

It is not so, my dear attendees, it is different. It is the case that, gradually, over the course of the last three to four centuries, we have entered into a spiritual life, into a life in general, which is essentially fed — even now, even in the outermost regions of the country, not only among city dwellers or among the so-called educated — by what flows through our journalistic, newspaper, and book literature: Without being aware of it, people absorb into their imagination what follows from fiction, popular science, and journal and newspaper literature. They fill their souls with it. They may go to church on Sundays and think they are good Catholics or good Protestants, they may indulge in the idea that they honestly believe everything that is proclaimed to them. But in what they are, so to speak, in their everyday lives, the form of their thoughts, the whole configuration of their imaginative life is shaped by what unconsciously flows in from all the sources I have just mentioned. We can determine this by a kind of crucible test:

I believe that a large number of you are of the opinion that a certain community wants to instill ancient religious ideas with very intense forces into the life of the present - ancient religious ideas. Who doubts, for example, that the members of Jesuitism are striving to instill ancient religious ideas into the life of the present? That is certainly the case when the Jesuits write about what they believe should be said on the basis of the confession, when they speak about what people should believe, when they speak about what expresses the relationship of people to the church, and so on. But when today the Jesuits write about natural objects, about objects of human nature as well, and believe they should take science into account, then what are these Jesuits? They are the most pronounced materialists. Anyone who follows what a Jesuit presents to the world as secular literature in addition to his theological and religious writing will find that the sole aim of this secular literature is to establish materialism in the broadest sense. One can even form very clear ideas about the why. From this side, efforts are made to remove everything that concerns the soul, everything that concerns spiritual life, from human research and direct human thought. People should not research these questions of the soul and these questions of life, but should devote themselves to what is traditionally available. Everything that concerns the questions of the soul and the questions of spiritual life is thereby set apart from what research is to cover. One must not look at nature, at the real, true environment of life, from the standpoint of the spirit, from the standpoint of the soul, because such research is unchristian from its point of view, is irreligious. But if one is not allowed to research life from a spiritual point of view, then research becomes materialism, because if one is not allowed to bring the spirit into research about matter, then the spirit remains outside of research about matter, and one has only the most blatant materialism at hand. Therefore, in addition to the assertion of all traditional ideas on religious or theological ground, you see the most blatant materialism when [besides theological literature] secular literature comes out of precisely this circle. Today it is of no use to indulge in delusions about these things, only an unbiased examination of them can help.

And so it can be said that even those who, so to speak, officially represent piety – how could one not believe that Jesuitism officially represents piety, of course – even those are, as a result of what has taken place in modern times, crass materialists. And so we can naturally always see that people go to church on Sundays and cling to what they do not understand, and during the week only understand that which comes from the basis of the materialistic world view. It is this state of affairs, as I have often emphasized here, that has led us into the distress of the most recent times. For it is easy to see that from such circumstances man cannot find those paths of the soul that lead him to the paths of life. From that which, on the one hand, is an uncomprehended spirit, handed down only traditionally and, to make matters worse, traditionally incorrectly, and from that which is mere materialism, the soul cannot build for itself those paths that lead it into a strong, secure movement along the ways of life.

That is why I tried in my “Philosophy of Freedom” to point out, on the one hand, how man must come to not only fill his consciousness with what he overhears from nature, what the newer natural science hands down to him in ideas and images, but it was pointed out that a source of inner life can develop in man himself. And when he grasps this source of the inner soul life, when he grasps that in the soul which does not come from outside through the observation of the senses, but what comes from the soul itself, then he educates himself through this grasping of the intuitive soul content to make free decisions, to will freely, to do freely. And in my Philosophy of Freedom I have endeavored to show that if we follow only what are called the natural impulses, we are always dependent; I have endeavored to show that we can become free only when we are able to follow what develops in the human soul itself as intuitive thinking, as intuitive, pure thinking. This reference to that which man must first conquer in his soul through self-education in order to truly partake of freedom, this reference then led me to the necessity of giving a continuation of what was indicated in The Philosophy of Freedom. I have tried to do this over the past decades through what I call anthroposophically oriented spiritual science. For if one has pointed out that man must draw the impulse of this freedom, intuitive thinking, out of the depths of his soul, then it must also be pointed out what comes out when man turns to this inner source of his soul life. And basically, the explanations in the anthroposophically written works of the following years are only a summary of everything that was pointed out in my Philosophy of Freedom. I have pointed out that there are paths to be followed in the soul to a thinking that does not merely intellectually combine the environment, but that rises from inner vision to the experience of the spirit. And I was compelled to show what one sees when one looks into the spiritual world.

However, this must be emphasized today: the nebulous mysticism that many people mean when they speak of this inner source of the soul, that unclear hovering and rambling that surrenders to inner dreams, was not meant. Therefore, however, two things emerged. One is that those people who did not want to turn to the subject of pursuing clear thinking, which is perceived as uncomfortable today, felt little attracted by precisely what lay in the direction of my “Philosophy of Freedom.” That is one thing that has emerged. The other thing that has happened is that, admittedly, a sufficiently large number of wishy-washers and windbags, who want to find everything through unclear, nebulous paths, have latched onto what should be striven for with clarity through anthroposophically oriented spiritual science. It has turned out that this attaching of themselves has brought about malicious spirits enough who today fight against that which people say with whom I have nothing to do and who, by fighting, attach to me everything that the Schwafler and Schwätzer, the nebulous mystics, pull out as their own making from what was meant as most intensely necessary for the culture of the present.

For that is what we particularly need on the one hand: clarity of inner striving – that clarity of inner striving that distinguishes the true natural scientist today in his outer striving, but a clarity of inner striving. That is what we demand on the one hand. Not darkness and twilight, not dim mysticism, but bright, clear clarity in all that thinking has to do with. That is one thing. The other thing that should be based on and what I wanted to express through my “Philosophy of Freedom” is social trust. We live in an age in which every individual must strive within his or her own consciousness for the direction of his or her own thinking, feeling and will. We no longer live in a time when people will endure being led only by authority; nor do we live in a time when people truly endure having their whole life organized. Organizing has only emerged as a kind of counterpoint.

In 1908, I tried to point out the underlying facts in the following way. I said: On the one hand, there has been a general human force for three to four centuries that people want to be more and more focused on their own individuality, that they want to find within themselves the impulses for all that they actually strive for in life.

But while this is deeply rooted in the unconsciousness of many people, something that they do not want to realize because, at heart, they are still afraid of their own innermost being, something has emerged – I would say like a shadow in a strong light – that is opposed to this striving for freedom, this striving for for the individual to live their life as they see fit, something emerged that actually worked against everything that had developed in human nature over long periods of time; something emerged in the last three to four centuries that worked against all urges of human nature, and it grew ever stronger towards the present. I said: While it is actually natural for people today to strive for individual fulfillment, one can see how, because they do not understand themselves in this most modern of pursuits, they actually set the polar opposite goal externally. I characterized it somewhat grotesquely in 1908, but I am sure that even today people will understand me as many did at the time. I said: It seems as if people were not striving for the development of individuality at all, but for such a state, social, social organization that makes nothing else possible for people than that they move in all ways and means of life in such a way that the doctor is on their left and the police - the doctor, so that he is constantly taking care of health, without the person having the slightest need to trust his own judgment about his health; the police officer, so that he ensures that the person finds the direction of life, without the person giving himself this direction of life.

Just follow what, despite all enlightenment, despite all the alleged sense of freedom, has been done in this direction in recent times, more or less unconsciously. It had to be said: If we continue in this direction, we will descend into a terrible decline. We can only ascend if we strive to cultivate in humanity that which gradually makes possible a social life together that is filled with complete mutual trust. We must regain faith in people; we must regain faith in the fact that, through appropriate education in the truly human sense, through the development of our humanity, it can become possible for us to get along with each other in the affairs of life that demand something more than just being able to pass each other on the street, and to do so in the same way that we get along with each other when we meet on the street. For when people meet on the street, one goes left and the other goes right; they pass each other without jostling. That is a matter of course. If the source in humanity that I speak of as the true intuition in my “Philosophy of Freedom” is opened, then one can found a social community in the higher matters of life on trust, just as one must ultimately found everyday life must be based on trust, because it is not acceptable for a policeman to approach two people who meet on the street and say, “You have to walk this way so that you don't bump into others.” This matter of course of everyday life can also be brought into the higher life, where the seriousness of life is present and cultivated.

Admittedly, two demands were made in that “Philosophy of Freedom” regarding the paths of the soul. One was that we should not be satisfied with the thinking that is popular today, that is popular in everyday life, that is popular in science, but that we should rise to the level of educating that in man which the new time wants: to a thinking that flows from its own source in the soul of man, to a thinking that is full of light and clarity in itself. And here I must again draw attention to the fact that traditional education leads to the opposite of what I have described as a necessary future requirement in my last lecture here.

If a person today is educated only by what comes to him from the traditions of the confessions and from the more recent world of ideas in the natural sciences, if he bases his thought forms of everyday life on nothing but on what he has absorbed from the popularized versions of the natural-scientific world view, from popular literature, from literature in general, from journalism and newspapers, then, ladies and gentlemen, then the human being becomes a materialist. Why does he become a materialist? He becomes a materialist because he does not free his thinking from the body, because he does not strive to find that source in his soul that frees the soul from the body; but by doing so, man falls into the dependency of the body in life.

Why are we materialists today? Not because we interpret life wrongly, but because we live wrongly. We live and educate our children in such a way that they do not think with their soul, but only with their brain, because the brain can become an imprint of thinking. We switch off the soul and think with the brain. No wonder that we then also speak about this thinking as if it were dependent on the brain; for the greater part of people today it is dependent on the brain. People are materialistic because they have become material with their whole life, because they do not strive to gain freedom through a thinking that breaks away from the body, that becomes free of the body - if I may use this expression today, which I have often justified. The one who wants to develop himself in the sense of today's demands must free his thinking from corporeality. He must transform his thinking into a free mobility of the soul that exists in itself. He must know what it means to think in the mere thought within, not to think in such a way that what is thought is only the result of the brain.

The question today is absurd: is thinking only a result of the brain or not? It is a result of the brain if we do not first detach it from that brain. Here I would draw attention to a whole tangle of errors in which present-day humanity is entangled, for we are now in a position, through what humanity has achieved in the course of historical development, to detach our thinking from the body with full, clear clarity. How do you detach it? Not by becoming a spiritual researcher oneself, although everyone can become one to a certain extent if they pay attention to what is written in my book “How to Know Higher Worlds,” in my “Occult Science” and other similar books. But it is not even necessary to do this. One need only accept from the spiritual researcher what he has to say to the world, just as one accepts from the astronomer, the chemist, the physicist what the astronomer, the chemist, the physicist has to say. One need only approach what is to be received with one's common sense. But then one will make a certain discovery. One will make the discovery: No matter how long you follow what the spiritual scientist says with your thinking, which has been trained only on natural science, on today's life, with your material thinking, then it seems to you to be fantasy, enthusiasm, something you have to reject. You only understand what the spiritual researcher says when you realize that thinking can be detached from the body, that you can immerse yourself in the thinking that is drawn in from spiritual worlds at birth or conception, that will be drawn into spiritual worlds when you pass through the gate of death. Detachment of thinking from the body is the first great goal on those paths that must be followed by the soul in today's life.

And another great goal is still necessary: when we train the will as spiritual science methodically describes it - it is presented in the books just mentioned - then this will take the opposite path to thinking. Thinking frees itself from the body, it breaks away from the body. But the will, precisely through the training described in these books, will take hold of the body all the more. For this is the peculiar characteristic of modern man, that he indulges in abstractions through the will, devotes himself to abstract ideals through the will, hears abstract commandments from the pulpits, but that these abstract commandments do not enter into his arm, not into his body, not into his actions. The second link in the chain of the education and development of humanity that is meant here leads to the human becoming one in what he experiences as the impulses of the will in his body itself. The spiritualization of the body with the will, the introduction of the will into everything sensual, everything physical and everything social, is what this spiritual science imparts as a second step.

And what becomes of ideals when they are, as it were, inoculated into the body in this way, according to the method of spiritual scientific thinking? They are seized by that which would otherwise be directed out of this body only towards the ordinary world of the senses. What gradually awakens in our body during childhood, sensual love, becomes, when a person is seized by spiritual science, so that all ideals too do not remain mere abstraction, that they do not remain mere thoughts, but that they are loved, loved with the whole human being. It becomes so that one loves the spiritual that underlies our morality, our ethics, our morals, our religious impulses, as one loves a loved one, so that what would otherwise remain abstract becomes completely concrete like a being of flesh and blood.

Therefore, Kant's categorical imperative, which already disturbed Schiller, had to be overcome by the “Philosophy of Freedom.” Because this categorical imperative intrudes into human life like something to which one submits. And what Kant says, proceeding from a consciousness that must be overcome today if we want to make progress: “Duty! thou exalted, great name, thou that dost not connote anything complaisant, anything that implies ingratiation , but demands submission,” you who ‘lay down a law... before which all inclinations are silent, even if they secretly work against it’ - that must be replaced by the other: Freedom, you wonderful spiritual construct that encompasses everything, to which my humanity would like to surrender in love! Schiller was disturbed by the inhuman categorical imperative of Kant, and he said: “I am happy to serve my friends, but unfortunately I do it with inclination. And so it often bothers me that I am not virtuous.” — “There is no other advice, you must try to despise it, and then, with disgust, do as duty bids you.” Schiller sensitively saw all that was philistine and inhuman in this categorical imperative. He did not yet live in the time when it had to be pointed out — as it has in the present — that what is to be sought in spiritual science combined with the human being, and what makes what is to live spiritually in us an impulse of love, must be sought beyond all natural foundations in spiritual foundations. When such an impulse of love becomes the social driving force among people, then the social community is based on trust. Then the relationship between people is such that what happens between them happens through the experience of each individual person, not because people live like a herd of animals and everything that should be the direction, the path of their lives, is ordered and arranged for them from above by some kind of organization.

And so we can say: In the early nineties, I strongly wanted to raise the call for something with my “Philosophy of Freedom” that today is being counteracted by the terrible, murderous opposite in Eastern Europe, and from there contagiously in many other places, and across a large part of Asia.

We have just entered into social conditions in modern times that — out of perverse human instincts — sought the complete opposite of what should have been striven for out of the knowledge of the true, deeper goal of modern humanity — that is the terrible 'tragedy of the latest times. But it is also the absolute necessity of the latest times for a striving towards the future that we recognize: the social order must be built in such a way that it can only be built on free thinking, on trust, on what Goethe meant when he wanted to define duty and said: “Duty is when I love what I command myself.

Dear attendees, when an education works for the paths of life and the paths of people's souls in such a way that these people, out of a keen interest in their environment, know how they should relate to other people, in that their whole existence is imbued with human dignity, only then can the ideal of modern times be fulfilled. Not through any organization, because it takes away so much of what people today must strive for if they follow their nature, and that must lead not to freedom but to bondage and decline.

And I have never made a secret of the fact that, in advocating the 'Philosophy of Freedom' and then the anthroposophically oriented spiritual science built on it, I never made a secret of the fact that I did not care about this or that content, about this or that detail. I have always spoken with a certain irony of those for whom the main thing is to hear: How many parts does human nature consist of? What can be found in this or that region of the spiritual world? — I have always spoken with a certain irony about such endeavors. On the other hand, it was always important to me to answer the question: What happens to the whole human being, to the human attitude, soul, body and spirit, when this person strives not to think as mere science gives it today, not to will as the organizations inoculate it, but to think and will as it is in the sense of the “Philosophy of Freedom” and anthroposophically oriented spiritual science? I always pointed out that thinking, simply by absorbing this spiritual science, becomes agile, that it opens up interest widely to the affairs of the present, that it provides a free and unbiased view of what is necessary and of what is holding back our progress in human development.

That there is much that holds back our necessary progress in human development - I may say that it came to me early on, a good forty years ago, when I got to know, through a student of Gervinus, such people who, within German intellectual life, and who, under the impressions made on him by the revolutionary years around 1848, wrote his History of German Literature and his History of the German People in the 19th Century. When delving into Gervinus' history of German literature, one still says today: He actually set the guidelines that all later literary historians followed. He set the broad lines according to which German antiquity, the German Middle Ages, Minnesang and Meistersang, the early days of the German classical period are to be judged. But he also set the guidelines for a healthy assessment of the Goethe-Schiller period. Some of his views may be considered pedantic today – but those who followed him are even more pedantic. And some people today who believe themselves to be at the height of a particularly modern, expressionist era really show through their snobbery a pedanticity that is much greater than that of the old traditions, but I do not want to defend their pedanticity. But there was something strange about Gervinus, this Gervinus, who became quite bitter in the 1770s, so that – despite the fact that he was owed so much – he caused much offence to those who under the auspices of these Siebziger Jahre believed they were sailing into the golden age of Germanness and who, in any case, had no inkling of what was to come from the seeds that were already present in that age.

What did Gervinus proclaim as his own well-intentioned conclusion in his history of German literature? He proclaimed the remarkable fact that German poetry ended with Goethe's death. — Just think, my dear audience, the one who first described this German literature with such deep love, he stated at the end of his description that the German people should no longer listen to what comes from all sorts of lyricists and the like, but that they should become aware of what has emerged from the deepest essence of Germanness to the surface until 1832. Beyond that, Gervinus believes, the German people must no longer devote themselves to lyric poetry and drama, to fiction, but to politics, to practical action. The time for practical action has come. In a strange way, the first seed of this came to me; I felt it more than forty years ago, when I received the whole of Gervinus's teachings in this way from Karl Julius Schröer, my dear old friend Schröer, at the Technical University. At that time, I felt something that was a seed of another, which, I would say, is now fully developed.

There were a good number of people like Gervinus who, based on a largely justified insight, said that the time of inward contemplation, the time when one withdrew from practical life and strove for spiritual heights, was over. It was now a matter of devoting oneself to practical life. But by observing this germ one could already feel something: that all these people who spoke in this way pointed to practical life in a very abstract, unrealistic way, that they regarded the old ideals as fulfilled, so to speak, and pointed to a new, practical life, but for this practical life they had no impulsive ideas, no impulsive forces. For if one asked Gervinus, for example: What is the spiritual content of what you described so beautifully until 1832? One was given a vast, grand tableau in the presentation. If one asked: What should live in the hearts, in the souls of those people who are now to move out into practical life, who are to lead this practical life, who are to find the ways of life from the ways of the soul? There was nothing, no new ideals were there! And the thought had to arise in the soul: First of all, the world, the spiritual world, must be found, from which the new ideals for a new practice of life can be found; this spiritual world must first be scientifically fathomed, just as the natural world has been scientifically fathomed for three to four centuries.

And basically, the time has shown that the world has remained without drawing from these spiritual sources, that it wanted to establish practice, but practice without spirituality - and this desire to establish practice without spirituality has led us into today's time of decline, into a time of need, misery and hopelessness. And many a thing has been said that repeatedly points to where we are actually heading. Yes, many things have permeated the lectures that I have been privileged to give here in Stuttgart for two decades, many things that seemed necessary to me to bring to people's consciousness from anthroposophically oriented spiritual science, if there is to be an upward development – an upward development not through cannons and guns, but through a practice of life that is supported by spirituality, but by a spirituality that must first be created anew. And here today I may point out something that I have said from the most diverse points of view as belonging to our spiritual science.

I have said: if someone applies the same approach, which has come to us from natural science and which fills our thought forms with natural scientific formations, if someone applies this to history, then they see only that which leads to decline in history. For in history there are always forces that bring about decline. And if you follow history only with the methods that are common in science, as for example the English cultural historian Buckle did and those who followed him, then you see in history only that which leads to the downfall, then you see only the evening glow of history. In order to see what has brought about the ascents in history, it is necessary to look into the spiritual world. That which brings about the ascents in history are impulses that arise from the spiritual world. I have already pointed out here that, for example, through Gibbon we have an excellent history of the decadence of Romanism written in the age of natural science. But what we still lack today is a historical account of what was the impulse of Christianity in the declining Roman world. One can describe what perished in Romanism with a scientific way of thinking; but one cannot describe what arose in Christianity with a scientific way of thinking. I have pointed this out. And what follows from what I have pointed out? It may seem to follow only in ideas, only in thoughts, but in reality in terms of the ways of life? What follows from this?

This follows: If someone were to appear in our age, in which natural science has taken hold of all circles and minds, right down to the circles of the Jesuits, as I have indicated, if someone were to appear and give a life-historical account from this natural scientific spirit, what would he have to say? He can only see phenomena of decline, because he regards our Western culture from the perspective of natural science. What would such a person write if he were to write about the present from a scientific point of view? He writes: “The Decline of the West”. And have we not - in contrast to all healthy thinking in spiritual science - now also received this terrible literary product: “The Decline of the West” - a morphological historical view by Oswald Spengler. My dear audience, the only way to understand how this could be possible is to realize that those who are saturated with a purely scientific way of thinking can only see the signs of decline, so that they must prophetically predict: the whole culture must perish.

But must it not go under if all people think as this Spengler thinks? Just as one must become a materialist if one does not detach thinking from corporeality, so one must think about Western culture as Oswald Spengler thinks if one looks at this culture of the West only from a natural scientific point of view. But if everyone looks at it that way, if everyone believes that we must perish, then we will perish. That is why I call this book a terrible book. For those who are infected by these ideas, by these impulses, and who take them up in an honest way, must become bearers of decline from the deepest depths of their soul; they must enter soul paths that lead to the life paths into the abyss. From time to time we must look at such phenomena, because only they show us the depths of human life in which the phenomena of decline are present today, and the depths to which the paths of the soul are prepared that rush down into the abysses of the paths of life.

Now, anthroposophically oriented spiritual science faces such things. It keeps its gaze fixed on that which is rooted in the spiritual world by the human being. Of course, this is most attacked in itself, that it asserts that the human being can, if he only develops the powers of the soul present in him, come to the contemplation of a spiritual world. Today this is brusquely rejected from almost all sides as enthusiasm, although one could easily follow that those paths to the spiritual world - which I tried to open in my book “How to Obtain Knowledge of Higher Worlds?” and in my attempt at meditations on self-knowledge and so on - that these paths are just as safe as those that lead into the fields of mathematics with absolutely clear, sharply defined thinking. Only in this spiritual research one does not only think, but also other, more real powers of the soul than in mathematics come into consideration in this research.

There this spiritual research must indeed speak about the spiritual world; it cannot place itself on the foundation on which many traditional creeds are based today. What do these traditional creeds proclaim? One thing they proclaim, for example, is something that has been fully established by spiritual science: the indestructibility of the human soul when the body is returned to the earth, the transition of the human being into the spiritual world when the human being passes through the gate of death. But it is not enough just to come to such conclusions; it is also important how these conclusions are cultivated in the human being. And how is the idea of immortality cultivated today? By appealing to the selfish instincts of the human soul's journey. Read the countless sermons, read the countless reflections on this subject – you will find everywhere speculation that man has an egoistic interest of the most intense kind, that he does not perish with death. Basically, all talk about immortality is a concession to this egoism of the soul. The way in which the idea is presented is characterized by this. And what is sharply denied in the face of this half-immortality is the other half, the part that Origen still had expressed, although he was considered a heretic by the church: the pre-existence of the soul, to which the unbiased spiritual researcher returns. What do today's confessions have to give? The conviction that two people come together in the world, produce a child and that the soul is then newly created from the spiritual world, that every time a sensual process takes place here, a spiritual process is added from the spiritual worlds.

Dear attendees, this idea is not a Christian one. This idea is an Aristotelian one. It was Aristotle who, out of the decadence of Greek thought and out of an uncomprehended Platonism, taught this coming into being of the soul with the body and thus the one-sided immortality only after death. And so the Christian denominations, by denying pre-existence, do not represent something Christian, but rather something Aristotelian, something that in its depths has absolutely nothing to do with Christianity. And when spiritual science, as it is meant here, comes along and reveals the whole state of affairs, then the “Trauben” like the pastor, the professor Traub, come along and declare that spiritual science is merely copying. No, it is not like that. In truth, with regard to certain elementary things, one agrees with old truths just as one agrees today with the old Euclid in geometry. But people like Traub are only too willing to throw mud at anything that existed in older times, because if one studies impartially, one would recognize where their own wisdom comes from. Their wisdom is borrowed from all the things they want to bury so that no one will find out about it. That is why they make people think that anthroposophy draws from gnosticism and the like, so that people think of gnosticism as something dangerous and do not look for themselves how this gnosticism has flowed not into anthroposophically oriented spiritual science, but into the modern content of creeds, by bringing into decadence what lived in gnosticism.

This spiritual science must point out precisely how man descends from the spiritual world, how it is not a whim of the physical world that causes the divine-spiritual world to create a soul for what human beings procreate on earth, but how the soul descends from the spiritual world with experiences that it has had there; it must point out precisely how physical life is a continuation of spiritual life. Spiritual science adds full, complete immortality to half immortality. If one walks this path, one recognizes how the spiritual flows from spiritual worlds into the individual human being. One also recognizes how the spiritual flows from spiritual worlds – but through the human being – into cultural advances, and how these cultural advances have very specific, distinct epochs and periods. Today we are in the period that, in terms of our conception of culture and civilization, must lead to something entirely new. That is how it is.

When you read a book like Oswald Spengler's, which is quite a thick volume, you can see how he looks at individual cultures from his scientific point of view. He says: Cultures are always developing; they have had a childhood, an adolescence, a maturity, a death. This was the case with oriental cultures. They emerged, grew, matured, and died. It was the same with Greek culture. And it is the same with our culture; and our culture is now in the process of dying. Because, he says, we are compelled to look at cultures in the same way that we look at an oak or a pine tree. An oak tree emerges, grows, matures, and dies. We look at cultures in the same way. Yes, we look at them in the same way when we are completely imbued with a purely scientific way of thinking. If we get to know the spiritual world and learn to cultivate it in the right way, then we also know how to look at cultures differently.

Then what I gave here during my last stay in Stuttgart as an outline of the historical life of mankind will come into our souls, in which I pointed out that once upon a time, in primeval times, people had an instinctive knowledge, an instinctive spiritual life, but something higher than we can achieve today with our intellectuality. Compared with what was there at the beginning from the human instincts of wisdom, we are today, however, in an epoch of decline. But if we understand, as spiritual science means, to open the source in our souls for free, enlightened thinking, for freedom, which is love at the same time, for social trust, for spiritual insight at all, then what lives in us, what penetrates through our soul, into this earthly culture, into this earthly civilization, brings about an ascent. But if we were to be satisfied with what contemplation of nature and the scientific world view can give us, if we could only believe in what is there today through this view, then there would be an inevitable decline. There will be no decline if we become aware that within us is the source of a thinking that can detach itself from the body, that within us is the source of a willing that can love the ascent into the spiritual world as much as only sexual love can love something. If we raise in freedom the wisdom that ancient humanity received in instincts and that can only be raised today because physicality no longer gives us anything, if we raise in freedom that, then we insert the impulses of ascent into what wants to descend. So the question that is put to humanity today is: Is the world not in decline? Yes, it is in decline if man wants to follow only what is given to him from outside, if he will only be harnessed in a natural or social organization given from the outside.

Decline will not occur if people build and found a new world from within themselves. The Lenins and Trotskys, who want to build a new world in every respect and only on the basis of natural science, lead most quickly and most intensely to decline. Those who want to build a new world out of the spirit lead to social advancement – but only they. For all those who still believe that the world can be cured by external institutions, by all kinds of external means, by Marxism or the like, Oswald Spengler has spoken the truth. If only these people work on the world with their powers, if only they direct world development, then Spengler's prophecy must be fulfilled. For he only drew the consequences from that, from which they must draw one, who today is only filled with a scientific world view. Today the ways of life are serious, and it is necessary that the greatest seriousness should take hold of the ways of the soul. But one must also take such great matters seriously. And one must be able to judge from symptoms.

I told you that more than forty years ago, when I, as a young man, got to know Gervinus' way of thinking through Schröer and then approached Gervinus myself, it had a profound effect on me how Gervinus demands practice but has no ideas for practice, how he wants the world in which there were still those ideas, of which he alone knows how to speak, to have ended in 1832, to have ended with the death of Goethe. It made a deep impression on me how he called on people to stop writing poetry and drama, to stop writing fiction, but to devote themselves to the practical tasks of life, how he pointed people in the direction of practicality, but had no ideas for these practical tasks of life. And so people behaved accordingly. The lyricists were only there for the school, at most for the concert hall; there they were declaimed. But what flowed from the spiritual life could not intervene in the ways of life. There was a discordance between the ways of the soul and the ways of life. And so we developed. Now people like Oswald Spengler are saying: All that Western culture and civilization have brought is finished, it is doomed! So what do we do? This is now particularly interesting, and let us consider with Spengler's own words why he actually wrote his book, for which minds he actually intended it. He says himself: “If, under the influence of this book, people of the newer generation turn to technology instead of poetry, to the navy instead of painting, to politics instead of epistemology, then they are doing what I want, and one cannot wish them anything better.

Now, my dear audience, I think that in the age in which one believes that one has made such splendid progress in practice, people have turned to technology instead of poetry, to the navy instead of painting, to politics instead of the critique of knowledge, before Spengler wrote his book – all that was truly already there; there have truly never been too few politicians. Now to prophesy the decline of Western civilization, now to have to admit that one wants to call on people to turn away from spirituality, to turn to a practice for which one does not have any ideas, indeed, does not want to have any ideas, in principle, to now prophesy the downfall of the ideas of the West because one believes them to be dying - that is speaking from the heart of the time of decline. And perhaps I may, without being immodest – for I only want to characterize a desire, an attempt, a beginning – perhaps I may point out that what has been presented here as anthroposophically oriented spiritual science and what now, out of this spirituality, wants to take on a practical form here in Stuttgart, the center of the movement, stands on the opposite point of view. We do not say to people: Turn away from all spirituality, because that is in decline, and turn to the coming day. We say to people: New spirituality must be created; we need to delve into new sources of spiritual life. We need to enter into the soul paths of a spiritual vision so that we can find precisely that practical life that is supported by realistic ideas. Without ideas we have ridden ourselves into decline; but with ideas, which cannot now be the traditional, old ones, but must be newly created, with these new ideas alone will we be able to enter the dawn. Admittedly, it seems as if it could not happen so quickly, because what can be seen on a large scale is also evident on a small scale. But I only want to speak of this symptomatically.

The way in which such a desire, as it emanates from here, is judged – it had to be characterized in issue no. 50 of our newspaper “Threefolding of the Social Organism” by Eugen Kolisko under the title “Theologians' Criticism and Conscience”. It had to be characterized once again on the basis of the book by a university professor, Dr. Philipp Bachmann, professor of theology at the University of Erlangen. This book, “Life or Death?” was published here in Stuttgart. Read the article written by Dr. Kolisko and you will see that he rightly summarizes his review at the end with the following sentences, which are a perfect description of a science that today is effective only through diplomas and external positions, but which is inwardly hollow and which always develops precisely those forces that, from the alleged spirit, must only lead into decline. Today we must have the courage to characterize the phenomena of decline not only in general and abstract terms, but to shine a bright light on how we have an alleged intellectual life today, which even in the simplest things works with an unscrupulousness that only parallels its thoughtlessness, its ignorance. This, ladies and gentlemen, must not be ignored if one wants to speak today of the harmonies between the ways of the soul and the ways of life.

Thus Dr. Kolisko had to characterize what is identified with such an insignificant little book:

It would not be necessary to concern oneself so thoroughly with this book if it had not been written by a university professor. Such a person must know what the task of an objective critic is. But the present critique is careless.

In particular, the way the train of thought of my “Secret Science” is reproduced in this book is careless.

One can only proceed in this way without prejudice in the field of theosophy. For here one is not checked when one asserts the most absurd. Anthroposophy, theosophy, spiritualism are all considered equal by many, and according to the saying that at night all cows are gray, one can with impunity combine everything and write derogatory reviews. If a critique were to be written in such a careless manner in any other scientific field, without sufficient knowledge of the criticized field, if only in one case, instead of in many places, the thoughts of a writer, ignoring the relevant literature and mixing up the opinions of different writers, would be held accountable in scientific circles and would lose his reputation and perhaps even his position. Anyone who presents to their readers the content of what is said in the book “The Occult Science” about the human constitutional elements with the words: “The physical body dies, the etheric body sleeps, the astral body forgets, the I (the sentient soul) is the memory.” He is either incapable of reproducing someone else's train of thought, or he does it to maliciously distort it. Either way, he is condemned as a critic. It is an indictment of today's education system that a university professor can produce such a work unhindered. What is to be thought of the Christianity of a theology professor who writes such criticisms is left to those who can still muster some outrage at such a frivolous and unscrupulous procedure.

That is what that Bachmann, in his “Bachmann-like manner,” discovered as the content of what is in my book “Die Geheimwissenschaft.” This is how university professors read today.

Now, my dear attendees, this is what is opposed from all corners to the will for ascent; these are the ones who do not want to let anything approach that could somehow lead to ascent. These people are present in large numbers, they educate our youth. And there are the “Spenglers” and write that we must necessarily fall into decline. Why do the “Spenglers” write like that? Because they are incapable of focusing on anything but the “Bachmanns” with their ignorance and carelessness. These things must be faced in all seriousness today. And I may, after having three lectures preceding, say at the end today: After I in my first two lectures last week tried to show something of the paths that anthroposophically oriented spiritual science wants to take in an epistemological way, in a social way — wants to go scientifically, not as the “Bachmen” and “Trauben” [a play by Max Frisch about the perversion of art for the sake of money] — after I have also spoken of what is to be artistically developed in Dornach, I may say today that those who strive for science and art in such a way can truly be reminded of a beautiful saying that extends from Goethe and will remain eternally true: ‘He who possesses science and art also has religion’. Spiritual science and its art have religion, but a religion that is not built on blind faith, but on a clear, bright, truly spirit-knowing science, on an artistic will striving for spiritual deepening. And after Goethe said, “He who possesses science and art has religion,” he continues, “He who does not possess those two, let him have religion!”

In our time, however, it may perhaps be said of spiritual science, of the representative of the idea of threefold social order, as a special, deepest matter of the heart: Yes, whoever possesses science and art also has religion. But today, religion can only lead to ascent if it draws from a living science in a living way, not from a science of the dead. It can only lead to ascent if it arises out of an artistic volition that is connected with a knowledge of the spirit such that one can say: Whoever today possesses a science rooted in spiritual insight, whoever today attempts, even if only in the weakest beginning, an art that is completely connected with this spiritual insight in its most intense will, should not be reproached for opposing the religious element in the way of life in the present. For he who seeks the spirit, who seeks to embody the spirit artistically, certainly also has the will to introduce into social life that which, connected with human worth and human dignity, truly exercises in the social community the look up to the divine guidance of the world, to the divine primal forces of life - a true look up that does not merely speculate on human egoism, but on the connection of human beings with the great eternal laws of existence. Only a religion that does not want to speculate on egoism, but points to the deepest harmony of the individual human being with the whole world, can lead to ascent.

And to the same extent that such a religion permeates the human soul through the impulse of such science and art, we will advance socially. To the same extent, despite adversity and misery — but perhaps, if the opposing forces are all too strong, through much adversity and much misery — we will not face the decline of Western culture, but the ascent of true human life: a life in which ways of the soul and the ways of life can and will be worked on religiously, scientifically, and artistically, in which the spirit, the spirit-filled art, and the spirit-filled religion will be worked out for the human present and into the human future.