The Rudolf Steiner Archive

When it comes to the life of mind and spirit, people often think they can learn something from philosophers. Richard Wahle, an official representative of modern philosophy, has said something rather strange about philosophy, and not only modern philosophy but also the philosophy of earlier times. He said that earlier philosophers were like people owning restaurants where various chefs and waiters produced and presented unwholesome dishes. Modern philosophy, he said, was like a restaurant where chefs and waiters were standing about uselessly and no longer producing anything useful at all.⁹⁶ By ‘chefs and waiters’ Richard Wahle meant philosophers.

This is certainly a strange thing to say. In a sense, however, it was made in the state of mind which exists in our present time. Of course, we don’t have to be so naive as to think that the public at large would always follow or listen to the views of isolated prophets and reflective philosophers. The significance of what philosophers are telling us lies in another area. We must take what they say as symptomatic. In a sense, though in a special sense, it arises from the general state of mind in a given age. And the impulses that are behind their statements lie in the subconscious souls of people in any given time period. Their philosophies develop on this basis.

In our present enquiry into the life which we live in mind and spirit it should also be possible to look at things differently from the way one would from certain natural scientific points of view. We should be under no illusion in this respect. The situation is that everything newly discovered, or of which people think that it might be found in the great philosophical questions, is considered from the natural scientific point of view by the world at large, at least at the sentient level. Even the things that well forth from the deepest depths of humanity’s ethical and religious life have to have their own justification, as it were, before the natural scientific way of thinking today. In a philosophy where insights are sought beyond the sphere of the senses we must therefore above all always consider the scientific requirements of natural science as it is today. But it is exactly here that confusion and misunderstanding arise only too easily, we might even say naturally, with regard to what is meant here by a science of the spirit with anthroposophical orientation.

I would therefore like to begin this course of lectures by attempting to present the scientific foundations—at least in general terms—for the higher insights sought in this anthroposophy. I am afraid I have to ask your forgiveness especially for today’s lecture which will of necessity be less popular than the three that are to follow. Some of the things I’ll have to say today may sound rather abstract, although they are perfectly real experiences for anyone who works with this particular science of the spirit. Nor will it be possible to characterize every detail of the way in which proofs that will stand up to natural scientific scrutiny have to be found in the present time. The lectures that follow will have to provide individual evidence, especially also with reference to the element of proof in the science of spirit.

Misunderstanding arises above all because investigators and thinkers committed to natural science, and people who imagine they are creating a philosophy based on natural science for themselves in a popular way, tend to think that anthroposophy is in opposition to natural science. I will try and show that the science of the spirit which is meant here is not only not in opposition to natural science but rather pursues the aims of natural science itself, right to its ultimate consequences, taking the spirit of the method of proving things that is used in natural science further than people do in natural science itself.

Another objection that may easily come up, again is, I would say, the objection people will naturally raise when they confuse higher perceptive vision with all kinds of old-established traditions. This tends to come from people who only learn about these things superficially and from the outside, indeed from a long way outside. People will say that what one has in the science of the spirit are all sorts of mystic, that is—to their thinking—dark and unclear, notions and ideas that do not come from the part of the inner life where mature scientific thinking has its foundation. This is another objection which I need not deal with directly. It will have to disappear of its own accord when I am going to show where the starting point for the spiritual investigations under discussion lies, initially in the full inner life.

Spiritual science with an anthroposophical orientation must start from two things that need to be deeply rooted in the inner life. The first is a living experience that we can have especially in the study of nature, the rightly understood observation of nature. If you enter closely into the living inner experiences which the observation of nature engenders in the human being, and the simple demands it makes, you will find that on the one hand it makes good sense to talk about limits set to all insight into nature, whilst on the other hand it loses itself completely in misunderstandings. If we approach modern scientific thinking in a non-theoretical way, not with a belief in specific dogmas but in a state of soul that is really sound, if we come alive in our scientific thinking as we observe nature, with direct perception of natural phenomena and objects, we will realize that this modern science, and indeed any insight into nature, must come up against particular limits. The question merely is if these limits to scientific insights are also limits to human knowledge and insight altogether. Anyone who does not see things rightly on this point will be able to raise all kinds of objections, especially to spiritual investigation.

The task I want to set myself today is to show that although this spiritual science is intended to be the basis for a popular philosophy for everyone, whatever their level of education, it was necessary, before it was established, to give serious consideration to all questions concerning the limits of philosophy and natural science. Having set this task for myself, as I said, I must also specifically consider the questions as to the limits of scientific knowledge that arise in direct living experience when working with natural science, doing so in a seemingly abstract way.

Observing nature we arrive at certain assumptions and these evoke ideas where we have to say: Here are the corner posts of natural scientific investigation; here we can go no further, here we cannot enter wholly into the phenomena with our thinking, here limits are indeed set to our insight. I could mention many natural scientific concepts that mark the boundaries of knowledge. However, we merely need to take the most commonplace natural scientific ideas and we will find that they are too dense, as it were, so that the questing human mind is unable to penetrate directly into what we have there. We need take only two ideas, for instance—the idea of energy and the idea of matter. We look in vain for clear mathematical concepts concerning the nature of energy and above all also of matter if we base ourselves strictly on observation of the natural world. When we come up against obstacles such as energy and matter, for instance, as we study and observe nature, we get the impression—though in a somewhat different way, in fact a radically different way from that of Kantianism—that such obstacles are met due to our human nature itself. We feel inclined not to investigate the world outside but above all to ask, with regard to these questions: How is the human being constituted? How does it come to be due to our human nature itself that we have to come up against such obstacles when observing nature?

We then investigate—as I said, I am characterizing the route taken for conclusive evidence—what it is in the human soul that makes us come up against such limits. And you will find that there are indeed powers in the soul which prevent us from entering wholly into energy and matter, for instance, when seeking insight through thinking. The moment we truly want to enter wholly into them, the constitution of our own psyche prevents us from going all the way in our thinking. We need other powers of soul to take in such things as energy and matter and to unite with them. We need to bring in our sentient faculties, views, something related to feeling that cannot be reached in the immediate light of thought in our thinking. You then feel, in an immediate and living way, that this transition from thinking to dim feeling sets the limits for gaining ideas in natural science.

We ask ourselves: How do those powers of soul benefit us by preventing us, as human beings who want to live in a healthy way in our human existence from birth to death, from going beyond the limits set in natural science?

When we consider the character of those powers of soul we gain the impression that they are truly important and significant. Anyone wishing to be a spiritual investigator must get accustomed to making observations in the inner soul. With immediate observation in the soul we can perceive that the powers that do not allow us to penetrate energy and matter are powers that give us human beings the capacity to love others in the world.

Let us consider the nature of love. Let us try and penetrate the constitution of the psyche so that we may come to know the powers that give us the capacity for love. We find them to be the powers that do not allow us to enter fully with mere thinking, with cold observation, into comer posts of natural scientific investigation such as energy, matter and many other things. We would need to be very differently constituted than the way we are as human beings. We would be bound, as human beings, to have no ability to develop love for other human beings, for other entities, if it were not for those limits set to natural science. It is because of our capacity for love that we must inevitably reach our limits in natural science. Someone with insight can see this immediately in connection with natural science.

Then an epistemology arises which is much more alive than the abstract Kantian epistemology. Having gained this insight we look at the world and human insight into nature in a new and different way. We then say to ourselves: What would become of human beings if they did not have limits set to their natural science? They would be cold and without love! This is the first living experience that has to come for the spiritual investigator.

A second one must come with regard to mysticism. Just as on the one hand he turns to natural science in order to pursue natural science and the observation of nature in the right sense, and comes to realize why this observation of nature has limits, so he turns on the other hand to mysticism, not to make biased judgements about it but to gain living experience from it and to be able to ask himself in a truly living way: Is it perhaps possible gain through mysticism what cannot be gained through natural science—a sphere that lies beyond the limits of sensory observation? Can we enter wholly into our own selves—which is the way of mysticism—and come closer to the riddles of non-physical existence?

The spiritual investigator then discovers that there, too, a significant limit is set to human insight and perception. The inner way which exists to take human beings into the depths of the psyche does offer beatitudes; it also offers something like a prospect of uniting with the spiritual powers of cosmic existence. A spiritual investigator must, however, follow mystic experiences without bias. He will then find that his way cannot be that of ordinary mysticism, for above all such mysticism does not provide enlightenment on the essential nature of the human being as such. Why not? Entering wholly into our own inner life in the mystic way we find that certain powers strike back, I would say. We cannot go down. And someone who pursues observation in the psyche as seriously as one does in the science of the spirit of which we are speaking will be more critical in his approach than is the ordinary mystic. An ordinary mystic will very often believe that when he goes down into the depths of the soul he will find something that shines into those depths from a higher world, just like that, as one follows the way of ordinary mystic clairvoyance. A spiritual investigator who has developed a critical approach will know how memories, events that we recall, are always transformed in the ordinary life of the mind, and that these things are active and alive. People think that this element which bubbles up from remembrance of events is something that is not our own, something that takes us into a higher world as we pursue the mystic way. Spiritual research teaches us to perceive very well that essentially everything we meet as we go down there is our own life and activity. This has, however, had to go through many changes, so that we do not recognize things we have lived through years earlier. They appear in a different form. People imagine them to be original events. The potential for self deception in this area is enormous.

When a true spiritual scientist investigates this approach he finds that he recognizes and respects limits in the mystic approach just as much as in the natural scientific approach. And again he would ask himself: What prevents us from going down into the depths of our own souls, making us unable to gain insight into ourselves by using the mystic approach? One finds that if we were able to gain such insight with this approach, if ordinary mysticism was not almost always delusion, if we were to find our own eternal nature by using the approach of ordinary mysticism, we would not have the human capacity for remembering things. The element in us which enables us to remember things, something with a certain power of striking back in us which holds the memories of past events, prevents us from penetrating to those depths with the powers of a mystic. We need the ability to remember for a healthy life on this earth, from birth to death, and mysticism therefore cannot be the true approach to investigation in the search for self knowledge.

The spiritual investigator must therefore find the limits set in mysticism, and these exist in the place where human powers of memory well up. Just as it is true that we would not be human without the ability to remember and the ability to love, so it is true that, our organization being the way it is, we cannot find the supersensible that lies beyond the limit set to natural science in our ordinary conscious state of mind, nor can we find it by entering deeply into our own nature in the way of a mystic.

In the spiritual investigation with anthroposophical orientation of which we are speaking, we therefore look for the way that shows itself when we have lived through everything we are able to gain for the soul’s constitution from these two experiences. These spur us on, and when they enter into the soul they urge it to observe. Initially the discovery made in the direction of insight into the natural world makes us ask ourselves: What is the situation in our dealings with nature? What is the essential nature of our insight into nature? Anyone who gains a clear, unbiased picture of this insight into nature will find that it arises when in our thinking we perceive what our senses are sending out in a living way towards existing nature. Wanting to gain insight we do not simply take existing nature as it is but penetrate it with our thoughts. We have a feeling of immediate justification in thus summing up our insights into nature in our thinking because the laws that govern events in nature shine out for us. We then have an immediate justifiable awareness that we are in a world that somehow is. In our perceptions we feel ourselves, too, to be entities that are in existence.

Philosophically speaking, it would be possible to raise many objections to this statement. However, it is not meant to apply beyond wider limits than those which arise if one wants to say nothing more than what a person experiences as he perceives nature in a thinking way.

The situation changes when we move away from sensory perception. It is something we do as human beings. We do not only perceive things through the senses but sometimes leave sensory perception aside. We are then reflecting, as we put it, taking our thoughts further. We live in an age where taking our thoughts further in this way, thinking without sensory perception, cannot be specifically developed on the basis of the kind of thinking that we can discipline ourselves to develop in the strict way of natural science. I am now speaking especially of a reflective way of thinking that has not arisen in an arbitrary way but arises exactly for someone who has accustomed himself to strict natural scientific observation of nature and to thinking those observations through. I am speaking of the kind of thinking in which we can train ourselves by means of natural scientific observation which is then taken further in reflection. It is a thinking that comes when we withdraw from observation but do so in full conscious awareness, and then also again look at whatever observation of the natural world gives us. This is the kind of thinking I mean. When you really enter into the nature of spiritual investigation with this way of thinking—in spiritual science everything is based on observation—an experience comes of which nothing less can be said but that people have had the wrong idea about it for centuries. An erroneous and therefore disastrous view about the experience one has to establish in the more recent spiritual science has arisen particularly among the most outstanding and astute philosophical minds.

To show what I mean let me refer to a philosopher of glorious eminence, Descartes,⁹⁷ the founder of modern philosophy. His philosophy had the same basis as that of Augustine.⁹⁸ Both thinkers found thinking itself to be the great riddle of existence. The world perceived by the senses was full of uncertainties to them, but they believed that if they saw themselves immediately as souls, as human beings, in thinking, there could be no uncertainty in what arose in their thinking. If one saw oneself as thinking, even if doubting everything, if thinking was nothing but doubt and one had to say: I doubt in my thinking—then the philosophers thought, one is in that doubt. And they established the thesis which shines out like a beacon, I would say, through the ages: ‘I think, therefore I am.’

In the light of the immediate experience of genuine thinking which has been developed in the natural scientific discipline, nothing can be further from the truth than this. Anyone using the strictest form of thinking learned in natural science has to arrive at a different thesis: ‘I think’—and this refers specifically to thinking where one has withdrawn from the outside world—‘and therefore I am not.’ Any genuine position taken with regard to the spiritual world begins with realization of the truth that we get to know our non-existence as soul entities, the essential nature of our self, in so far as soon as we move to a thinking that is wholly abstracted we are not.

The spiritual science of which I am speaking has a problem in finding its way to human hearts and minds because it does make strange demands on people. If one were to ask people to continue along familiar lines, saying that awakening could come if one continued in the way that one had started, that riddles of supersensible insight would be solved—if that were the prospect offered, then things would be easy, considering the thinking habits of many people today. But this science of the spirit demands a change to a wholly scientific approach, and this would arise from the immediate living experience gained in an unbiased state of mind.

We now need to consider how the thesis ‘I think, therefore I am not’ can be established. For this, we energetically pursue in the science of the spirit the kind of thinking that leads to the erroneous thesis ‘I think, therefore I am’ (cogito, ergo sum). It would be as if we were attaining to thought and then not going any further. In the science of the spirit we cannot simply stop at thinking. Our thinking must be strengthened; we have to apply an inner activity to our thinking which may be called ‘meditation’.

What is this meditation? It is a strengthening rather than a deepening of our thinking. Certain thoughts are brought to mind again and again until they have given our thinking so much inner density that thinking is not just thinking but becomes an event we experience like any other living experience that is more powerful than mere abstract thinking. That is meditation. Meditation calls for considerable effort. Depending on their individual disposition, people have to make great efforts, more or less, for months, years or even longer. The living experience of which I am speaking can, however, arise for everyone. It should provide the basis for spiritual investigation. It is not something arising from the living experience of the chosen few but something everyone can achieve. If we strengthen thinking in isolation, abstracted from sensory perception, it comes alive as much as do the events that happen in metabolism, for example.

Again we have a surprising result, but a result that can present itself to the soul in sensory experience as clearly as do the plant cells which a botanist sees so clearly as he studies them under the microscope. It is, however, an unusual experience which we then have in our thinking. This inner experience, the inner state of soul which we gain when we strengthen our thinking, can only be compared to the sensation of hunger. This may sound strange and surprising, but it may be compared to a feeling of hunger, though it does not show itself in the way hunger does when we are in need of nourishment. It is a feeling which is above all limited to the human head organization. But it is only this which will show us how the human bodily organization relates to thinking. Anyone who does not have this experience may have all kinds of strange ideas about the way human thinking relates to the human body. Someone who does have it will never say: ‘This human body produces thinking,’ for—and the fact is evident—this human body does not have the impulses in its generative powers that give rise to thinking. Destructive processes happen in the body when we think, as destructive, I would say, as those which happen when we get hungry and body substance is broken down and destroyed. It has thus been rather strange that people whose thinking is more or less materialistic or mechanistic have arrived at the idea that the body gives rise to our thinking. It no more gives rise to it than do the powers that are its generative powers, powers that constitute the human being. If thinking is to happen, therefore, destruction must happen, as in the case of hunger.

We must come to this surprising experience and only then will we essentially know what thinking is. We then know that thinking is not the unfolding of a reality of soul that may be compared with the outer reality perceived by the senses but that on entering into our own organization in our thinking we are entering into its non-real aspect and we cease to be as we enter into our thinking.

Then the big, anxious question arises: How do we go on from here? The science of the spirit does not give you theoretical points in investigation but points of living experience, points that challenge you to continue your investigations with all the strength of living experience. No one will be able to penetrate into the world of the spirit in the right sense who has not had the living experience of which I have been speaking and who has not convinced himself that in thinking we enter into non-being: ‘I think, therefore I am not.’

Gaining insight into the world of nature thus has a remarkable result. We are unable to gain such insight without thinking. And so it is that something which presents itself to us as being in existence in a truly robust way, I might say, tells us of the non-existence of this, our own soul nature. When I come to speak of psychology the day after tomorrow, this line of thought will be taken further in a popular form. At present I have to refer to something that shows the same thing from the other side: I am not and I perceive that when I am thinking I am not in my thinking, that another experience is coming to meet this experience from a completely different side in the human soul. It comes to meet it in so far as something exists for the unbiased observer of soul that is not accessible to any form of thinking. Anyone who considers the history of philosophy with sound common sense, considering those who have seriously taken up the enigmas of human insight and life, will find that there is always and everywhere something in the life of the human soul where one has to say to oneself: However great your acuity may be as you apply perceptiveness trained in the natural scientific discipline, you cannot gain insight into anything that lies in your will.

The enigma to which I am referring is usually hidden because people will enumerate all the problems connected with the idea of free will. Schopenhauer, who showed great acuity in some respects but always went only halfway or just a quarter of the way, pushed the forming of ideas, which has to do with thinking, to one side and the will to the other. He failed to give sufficient consideration to the experience which the human psyche has with the will, for our thinking always fights shy of the will. We simply cannot get to it. There is, however, one thing in human life—this is apparent if we are wholly objective and unbiased in observing the psyche—where the will impulses rush up into the life of the psyche exactly at a time when it has nothing to do with the kind of thinking that develops in observing the natural world. We might say that the thinking gained from observing the natural world and the thinking that comes from the will cannot come together in the ordinary life of the mind; the chemistry is wrong. These two avoid one another—thinking in terms of the natural world and everything that comes from the will.

Because of this we perceive two completely separate spheres in the psyche—on the one hand our thinking, and especially reflective thinking in full conscious awareness; on the other hand the billows that rise up into the life of the psyche from unknown depths, coming from the will. We’ll consider those depths shortly. The billows that come up when the fully conscious thinking gained from the study of nature fades away play into our inner life in form of dreams when we are asleep. We discover that the dream images that rise up in the inner life and truly have nothing to do with the conscious mind, creating images as if by magic that exclude fully conscious thinking, come from the regions where the will, which also cannot be grasped, rises in depths where the human being lives together with nature.

You might well say: You want to take us into the realm of dreams in a highly unsatisfactory way, Mr Spiritual Scientist! Yes, the sphere of dreams in indeed mysterious, and anyone who approaches it in a truly sound spirit of investigation will find vast numbers of things. Yet it is also a sphere which attracts people who want to find their way to the higher world as charlatans or in a superstitious way. Caution is therefore indicated. Above all it has to be said that anyone investigating the world of dreams with reference to the content of dreams is going in entirely the wrong direction. Many people are doing this today. Whole trends in science have thus been developed using inadequate means. If you study the life of dreams with reference to their content, careful observation must inevitably show that something happens between going to sleep and waking up, when fully conscious thinking falls silent. We cannot say if it is in the human being or in the world outside, but something happens and this rises up in dreams. People cannot, however, immediately say what it is that is happening. Sometimes it does not even come to conscious awareness. Without knowing it, you clothe something that does not come to conscious awareness in memories, reminiscences from everyday life in the conscious mind, memory images you can always find if you look with sufficient care and attention. Someone who wants to gain something from the content of dreams, either by wishing for a dream or by recall, is therefore always following the wrong track. It cannot be a matter of wanting to investigate something that corresponds to the content of dreams. The content of dreams really tells us no more about dreams than a child tells us when he wants to say something about the natural world. Just as we do not turn to a child’s mind when we want to find the explanation for something in nature, so we also cannot turn to what dreams tell us if we want to explore the region that is active and coming into its own beneath the surface of the dream.

Approaches to gaining knowledge existed in earlier times of human evolution that can no longer be considered valid in the present age of natural science, possibilities of learning something of the world’s secrets from the content of dream life. Those times have passed, however. I will have something to say about this in the later lectures. Today, someone who has disciplined his thinking by the methods used to observe nature will specifically need to bring the kind of inner experience to mind which we have in our dreams.

Just as enlightenment on reflective thinking can only be gained by meditation, so this enlightenment on the state of soul in which we are in our dreams is only gained by means of a specific activity in spiritual investigation. Just as we may call the other method meditation, so we may call this one contemplation. It is important to ignore all content of dream life, but try and experience inwardly how we are in the life of our dreams, how we then relate to the senses and their development, having on the one hand come free of the senses, but still having a specific connection with life in the senses, and how there is a specific connection with the whole of our inner organic nature. This strange activity and life of dreams can only be experienced if we try, privily, to go consciously in our mind through something that otherwise happens unconsciously in our dreams.

The question now arises as to why so little of this happens in the ordinary life of the conscious mind. There human beings do not give themselves to such an experience of dream life. Quite the contrary, with the aid of subconscious powers they erroneously cover their dream experience over with all kinds of reminiscences and memories of life. If we begin to enter truly into the subtle activity in which we find ourselves when we dream, doing so contemplatively and in conscious awareness, we find ourselves in a different life experience. This is much lighter, not as heavy as our experience when we move and act in the natural world around us. Getting to know this life, we also learn to answer the question as to why human beings cover dream life over with all kinds of images taken from life, why they make wrong interpretations, and would rather accept wrong ideas about dreams than truly enter into the activity of dreams. We come to realize that in this dream life the whole constitution of our life relates to sleep, and this is in exactly the same way as with meditation we have come to know what happens in the organism when we are thinking.

You come to realize that the human being does not want an unconscious feeling of antipathy to come up from certain subterranean depths with which he is connected. The dream impulse impinges on our soul nature and in doing so induces a subconscious feeling of antipathy in the soul. We might say that initially this is a feeling—this may sound strange but it is true—of surfeit which may be compared to the repugnance one has when there is a surfeit. People will not allow certain unconscious impulses of such antipathy to come up, suppressing them with images which they take from their own inner life and use to cover up their dream level of consciousness. We can only overcome the element which initially makes itself known there in feelings of antipathy, we can only learn to find the right attitude to this, if we use the state of soul which we have brought about by meditation on the one hand and by the contemplation I have just described on the other, to connect our thinking, of which we have truly perceived that it takes us into nothingness, with the element against which we first of all have that unconscious antipathy. These two things can be linked—thinking of which we have to say: ‘I think, therefore I am not’ which cannot enter into an inner soul experience that would be similar to the outside world perceived through the senses; this enters into the inner experience we gain when we first of all learn to overcome the antipathy I have described. Someone able to connect these two things—the antipathy which is felt and therefore covered over with dreams, and the element experienced in a hunger, a subconscious sympathy with something which we shall not get to know unless we get to know contemplation—is in the supersensible world. He will find the supersensible world through thinking, a thinking that initially took him to fearful cliffs, seeming to cast him down to the abyss of nonexistence, with the thinking in full conscious awareness which has been developed in modern science itself, and in the forming of ideas from which human beings shy away so much that they will cover them up with dreams. The way into the supersensible world is thus closely connected, as you can see, with inner experiences of the soul that we merely have to look for in the nature of the human organization itself. You see, they do seem to be far removed from what one would usually expect today. Think of the disappointments people have to go through especially in our present time with regard to their expectations. Who would have expected before 1914 the events which now affect the whole world?

The science of the spirit calls for a degree of inner courage, of the will to have a change of heart, to consider something which addresses powers of soul that go deeper than we are used to in modern thinking. These powers will, however, fully meet the demands of modern science and do anything but take us into nebulous mysticism. If human beings learn truly to use the fully conscious thinking trained through modern science and enter into the world of which I have now been speaking, a world that is alive and active beneath the world of dreams, they will find it possible to gain a view—not a concept, but a view—of the will, free will. One must have wrestled with the problem of free will—I have shown this in my Philosophy of Spiritual Activity—and have been looking for immediate living experience of the way that hides so mysteriously behind a sphere in our inner life into which our thinking is quite evidently unable to penetrate. Having wrestled with this, you also find the way to a vision of free will. You then find the way into the world of the spirit. For the fully conscious thinking of which we speak in the science of the spirit makes it possible not to weave those childlike, erroneous images, making them into dreams that cover up an unknown reality. This thinking enters into the spiritual reality, the world of images, that lies beneath.

Images then arise that are true reflections of the supersensible world of the spirit. Dreams cast shadows from the supersensible world into the world that has nothing to do with thinking. If we penetrate a little bit below the surface we can bring the reality which truly is there beneath the surface together with fully conscious thinking. Images then arise, but these are images of supersensible reality. And our thinking, which was already threatening to take us into non-being, arises again in the supersensible world through imaginative insight into the world of the spirit as I have called it in my book Knowledge of the Higher Worlds and also in my Occult Science.

This image-based insight, which initially provides images of a supersensible world, images of the spirits and powers that are behind the world perceived through the senses—this image-based thinking is no dream. You can see that fully conscious thinking shines through it, thinking of such power that initially it admits to itself: ‘I think, therefore I am not.’

In choosing to make this transition, our thinking comes from the experience of non-existence to supersensible experience of existence in the spirit. This shows itself first of all in images, or imaginations, because we go down into the will. Because we then truly get to know the world which otherwise remains subconscious, we also penetrate beyond the images. We learn to manage the images in the way in which we otherwise learn to manage our inner life. Living in mere images then opens out into a form of life which I may called inspired insight. The term may meet with objections, because people connect it with all kinds of ideas from earlier times, though, as I have shown in Knowledge of the Higher Worlds, it has nothing to do with these. The true nature of the spiritual world begins to speak in the imagination, making itself known in its immediate reality. The imaginations are first of all images; but the human soul penetrates thinking, which was just about to founder in non-existence, with will experience. Ultimately we encounter the will. In the supersensible sphere, our supersensible will comes up against the supersensible will of the spiritual worlds and entities. Inspiration, inspired insight, comes. And the whole progression of imagination and inspiration can then also come to conscious awareness. I call the raising of imagination and inspiration to conscious awareness ‘true intuition'. It is not the nebulous intuition of which people tend to speak in everyday awareness, but true intuition, when one is right inside the world of the spirit.

The later lectures will be about the different things we feel with regard to the human soul, with regard to the spirits and powers that are behind the natural world, behind our social, religious and historical life. Today I would still like to answer the question as to why this science of the spirit, which according to what has been said works with the kind of proofs that demand the best possible training in modern science, proofs that are entirely on the pattern of modern science—why is it so difficult for this science of the spirit to find a home in the minds of modern people.

We have to investigate the obstacles to the science of the spirit. If we do this, we shall discover why the following question is not considered: ‘How does the science of the spirit actually provide proof of supersensible insights?’ You see, the way I have described the path to you, spiritual scientific investigation provides proof firstly on the basis of serious scientific thinking, and then also by a route that is wholly in continuation of the modern scientific way. In spite of this, people will find all kinds of logical reasons that sound very good indeed when they first get to know spiritual scientific investigation of the kind we are speaking of here. Especially as a spiritual investigator, you often feel real respect for the reasons given by your opponents. These opponents are not considered the least bit silly by a spiritual investigator. Nor does one in the usual sense answer those attacks with any degree of fanaticism. We respect our opponents for we often find their reasons not silly but on the contrary, perfectly intelligent. On the other hand conventional scientists may again and again raise the objection against the spiritual investigation of which we are speaking that there simply are limits set to spiritual investigation.

We have seen why there have to be limits. It is because human beings need to be capable of love and memory. Just as we alternate between waking and sleeping in life, and the one cannot exist without the other, so spiritual investigation may take its place beside natural science, beside a life that needs to have the capacity for memory and love. The reason is that firstly, spiritual investigation makes no claim on anything that can be recalled—the day after tomorrow, when we will be talking about spiritual scientific psychology, we shall see what the situation truly is with regard to memory. The discoveries made in spiritual scientific research are the only thing the human soul is able to live in without a claim being made on something that otherwise is so essential in life—the power to remember. On the other hand we have to say with regard to the capacity for love that we increase our power of love by entering more deeply into the element which otherwise rises from the subconscious rather like antipathy, and that spiritual investigation therefore does not destroy the capacity for love but rather increases it. Just as waking and sleeping can exist side by side to maintain human health, so spiritual science may take its place by the side of natural science, for the reasons I have given. In spite of this, natural scientists or people who believe in gaining their popular view of the world on the basis of natural science will always point out, as clear proof, why there have to be those limits to natural scientific insight.

We are considering the objections that are meant to defeat spiritual science as a supersensible science. When the spiritual investigator himself uses the observation of soul which is necessary in order to become aware of all the things which have been said today, when he enters into the human inner life with this self observation he will find the following. Firstly, because thinking tends to cast the human being into the abyss of non-existence—initially non-existence in relation to the outside world perceived with the senses—and because human beings have a certain horror, if I may use the term, of thus entering into thinking, in so far as this thinking gains its true form when truly entered into, people have no desire to enter truly into the nature of reflective thinking with the aid of spiritual science. They shy away from thus entering into the nature of reflective thinking. They fail to realize, however, why they shy away from it. They do so from a subconscious feeling that is no less active and which one is unable to control exactly because it is subconscious. It is a certain feeling of fear, a subconscious fear of starting from such non-existence. At its opposite pole this subconscious fear generates lack of interest in natural phenomena in its spiritual depths. People do not want to look at natural phenomena in all the places where they evidently cannot be explained out of themselves. One has to go further and find their complement in quite a different direction. Lack of interest, stopping where one should really go deeper—that is the opposite pole of the fear. Again it is a subconscious lack of interest. This, ladies and gentlemen, is the one side of it.

On the other side there is this. How should one enter into that world where one feels one is losing oneself, into the subtle activity and essence which otherwise exists in sleep, in dreams? It is a world where we are no longer standing robustly in outside nature, no longer have the robust feeling of existence which we create for ourselves in the outside world perceived through the senses. You think you are losing your equilibrium, the firm ground under your feet. You no longer have the feeling that you had in relation to the world you perceived through the senses. In some way, if one is not prepared to move on, one gets into a state of weightlessness. One feels one is losing the ground under one’s feet.

Again unconscious fear arises, and this is all the more effective because people do not have conscious awareness of it. The subconscious content assumes the form of moving images, ideas, masking itself. Just as in natural life the subconscious life of the mind masks itself in dreams, so do the subconscious fear and the subconscious lack of interest mask themselves. What is there in all truth in the so-called natural scientific view of the world when people reject spiritual investigation? In truth it is a subconscious lack of interest in nature itself. This assumes the mask of all kinds of excellent hypotheses, good logical reasons, speaking of limits of knowledge; only with all this one usually fails to note the real limits to knowledge, limits that have been presented to you today. The limits of knowledge often used as reasons, wrongly, in those views, are masking a subconscious lack of interest. And the good logical reasons, which, as I said, actually have to be respected by the spiritual investigator, because everything human can indeed be understood by him; these good logical reasons which actually always show a certain acuity of intellect—they too, are masks. People need something to suppress the subconscious, so that they will not feel or sense it—fear of the element into which the science of the spirit leads, though this alone holds the truth in it; this fear prevents people from penetrating to the grounds of existence with the science of the spirit. And this fear puts on the mask in human minds of logical reasons. The best possible logical reasons are produced. We cannot say anything against their logic; they are but mask for subconscious fear.

Anyone able to see through the way in which truly excellent highly respectable logical reasons come up, the outcome in people’s minds of subconscious fear, with highly respectable reasons coming up for the limits of knowledge that are said to make spiritual investigation impossible, will see the great scheme of things differently. He will see above all the problems that must arise for a spiritual investigation where the aim is something which every human being is looking for at a deeply subconscious level, as we shall see in the later lectures. The science of the spirit is already presenting this to humanity in a view of the world that can be understood and will truly satisfy humanity for the future. Problems are still arising because people persuade themselves that they have good reasons to be against the science of the spirit, because they do not admit to their fear. They say there are good reasons why limits should not be exceeded in supersensible insight, and this is because they do not admit to their lack of interest in the actual phenomena of nature.

Someone who sees through the veil that shrouds the truth will see the world in a different way. He will also see this human life in a different way. But just as it is true that at a certain time the Copernican view of the world had to take the place of an earlier one, for evolution demanded this, so must the spiritual scientific view of the world come to the fore now and for the future. It will come to the fore, in spite of the obstacles which I have characterized in depth; it will be possible for it to enter into human hearts and minds, in spite of all obstacles, as happened also with the Copernican view of the world. This is because of two evident facts which apply at the present time. On the one hand there is the fact that we have entered into the age of natural science. We shall see in the third lecture that it is exactly the more exact our knowledge of nature is and the less we limit ourselves arbitrarily to a biased view, the more will it be possible to penetrate into supersensible science. The more natural science advances beyond the limits that are still set for it today, moving towards its ideals, the more will it open for itself the gates to supersensible insight. This is the one thing.

On the other hand we only have to look at the realities of life on earth today. We only have to consider the many surprises that recent times have brought for humanity to see what the present and the future demand of the human being in so far as he wants to be simply a human being on this earth. Human beings will have to rely on their own self in a much more intensive way, seeking much more intensively to find their inner equilibrium. This inner equilibrium has much in common in the soul with the equilibrium that has to be found when thinking enters into the world from which dreams will otherwise billow up—the supersensible world. Future humanity will need much more courage, much greater fearlessness also in the social sphere, in the general life of the world. At present humanity has gone asleep in a comfortable but biased way of thinking, forming ideas and developing feelings exactly on the basis of the great advances made in technology. There is hope that the time is not far off when many hearts and minds will find the strength and ability to focus on the inner life through the science of the spirit.

The science of the spirit is not based on theories, nor on abstract ideas. It does not rest on fantasies but always on facts. Even when its prospects are considered we base ourselves on facts. Convinced that this science has evolved from a serious approach to natural science, one feels certain that the progress of natural science will make human minds appreciate spiritual science in due course. The intention is to let it grow out of life, the most inward and powerful life. This gives one the certainty that the science of the spirit will be increasingly called for by human beings who in life—the life of the present and also of the future—will find a real need for the powers to be gained by it and that this science must enable them to enter into such life.

Questions and answers

Following the lecture given in Zurich on 8 October 1918

Question. Would it possible to give an idea as to how matter and energy’ appear when seen from the spiritual world?

We have only been given until 10 o’clock and I’ll therefore first of all speak about the first of the two, which is matter. If we apply the approach I have been characterizing today and this method of research to something such as matter, we find that human beings are always really between two submerged rocks—I have been characterizing these rocks in various ways today—two rocks where their whole relationship to the world is concerned. On the one people always feel the need to think of events and things in an anthropomorphic way, in human terms, applying their own inner experiences, and so on, to something outside them; or they feel the need to stay strictly with mere observation and not develop ideas at all. Most of you, ladies and gentlemen, will know how much these two rocks have challenged humanity with regard to human thinking through the ages. Especially when we come to something like matter and energy, we find that our usual views cannot get us past those rocks. You may imagine that when we approach these things, with the scientific approach completely changed, some things will prove to be exactly the opposite of the usual view.

To approach the concept of matter in the spiritual scientific sense, we will do best, first of all, to get a picture of what it is. It will merely serve to illustrate. If we have a bottle of soda water with carbon dioxide bubbles in it, we see above all the bubbles. The carbon dioxide is really much thinner than the surrounding water, and the bubbles are embedded in the water. One would like to say, relatively speaking, of course: They are carbon dioxide, but there’s relatively less, compared to the water. So we really see an embedded nothing.

We now have to take a big leap. The same thing happens with matter when we look at the world in terms of spiritual science. The senses see something which occupies spaces, and this we call matter. The mind realizes that where the senses see matter, they are in the same position as we are with the carbon dioxide. We actually see something that has been cut out of the spiritual world. This something, cut out from the spiritual world, so that it lives in the spiritual world the way these carbon dioxide bubbles do in water—this we call matter. We really have to say therefore: What we sense when we come upon matter is fundamentally the perception that this is where the spirit ends. In the terms of spiritual science, we therefore do not have to consider this to be the most important thing but only the fact that where the senses tell us that we have come up against matter, this is where the spirit ends. Matter—surprising though this may be—should be described as the hollow spaces in the spiritual element.

Anyone who takes the analogy to its conclusion will know that hollow spaces also have an influence. One would not assume anything that is not filled out and therefore hollow, to have no effect. As you know, if the air is withdrawn from the recipient of an air pump, the vacuum has an effect on the surrounding air, which will whistle as it rushes in. In the sphere of things, therefore, being hollow does not mean being without effect. We need not be surprised then if we stub our toe against a stone, for in its materiality the stone is a hollow space in the spirituality that fills the world. So much to give an indication. It does not enlighten us about matter, but it shows the road we must follow to gain such enlightenment.

Question. How does the principle which you called ‘will’ tonight relate to Bergson’s elan vital?" How does it relate intuitively to the methods of insight in spiritual science?

What I called ‘will’ today is nothing but the principle which many people deny, though everyone knows it from direct observation. It can never be grasped by thinking about it, however.

Psychologists who must be taken seriously, particularly because they are natural scientists—take Ziehen, for instance, or Wahle, or whoever you will—find it possible to show a degree of relationship between the structure of thinking and the structure of the nerves, the brain, and the like. You always see a degree of satisfaction when people succeed in expressing something which is spiritual in the structure of thinking in terms of organic structures, especially in scientific psychology. They are always wrong, of course. The day after tomorrow we’ll see how strange it is for people to believe that the life of the soul comes from the brain. It is just as if one were to believe—if this is a mirror and you go over there and think that the individual who is coming towards us—which is our own image—must be coming from behind the mirror. It depends on the nature of the mirror—if it is level or curved—what kind of image comes to meet us. Still, there’s nothing behind the mirror. Someone looking for something behind the limits set for us by nature, and behind the human brain, which merely mirrors the inner life, is just like the person who smashes the mirror in order to find the reason for the image that comes to meet him in it.

I have thus called ‘will’ what we experience in our ordinary inner life; it is an inner perception, but is more and more considered to be beyond comprehension. ‘Scientific’ psychologists find that the forming of ideas, thinking, has a structure that relates to organic nature. However, as soon they move on from thinking and go just as far as feeling and then to the will, they will say: ‘Here we can at best speak of will or feeling as nuances’—Theodor Ziehen speaks of emotive colouring, ideal colouring—‘for here nothing can be found that might be analogous to sensory perception.’ The will is thus beyond comprehension, though it evidently exists. It is denied only by people who do not go by reality but by the things which they say they are able to grasp scientifically. Only causality has validity in natural science, and as the will does not function causally they will say it does not exist. Something is there, however, and does not go by what can be comprehended. That is merely human prejudice.

I thus call ‘will’ a very real experience and have merely shown that something we know at the most common, everyday level can only be grasped if we use meditative thinking to go down into the world from which usually only dreams, which are remote from us, arise. Here a natural scientific method has merely been transferred to the spiritual sphere, but it does need to be understood in a different way from a mere fact perceptible to the senses. Bergson’s elan vital is mere fantasy, mere abstraction. Taking the sequence of phenomena, thinking is applied to what is happening. We do, of course, have many reasons to think our way into what is happening, but that is not the way of a true science of the spirit. That way is one where facts, even if only spiritual facts, everywhere point to where we can find something, where something lies. It is not a matter of taking hypotheses, things one has merely thought up, into the world of phenomena.

Bergson’s intuition is essentially nothing but a special case of the way which I have firmly rejected today as not being fruitful in spiritual scientific terms. I characterized how the spiritual investigator will know the mystic way, and have the mystic experience, but will show that the mystic way cannot guide him to true insight. Bergson only uses thinking, on the one hand, though it is evident that this does not penetrate to true reality. He gives an extensive description, characterizing it in every respect. He then abandons this thinking. In the science of the spirit we do not abandon this thinking but experience, in all intensity, an abyss into which this thinking appears to lead. We do not deny this thinking, which is what Bergson ultimately does, but look for another way. This is the way of getting out of the abyss which I have characterized, the way to rise again in a spiritual, a supersensible reality. Bergson simply says that thinking does not take us to the reality. He therefore continues his search by pursuing a special mystic way through inward experience.

The intuition at which Bergson arrives essentially does not lead to anything which is real. Today I have only been able to characterize the way of spiritual science. In the next three lectures I am going to characterize definite results, specific results that one gets, results that serve life and the whole of our humanity. Bergson keeps revolving around this: We cannot think, we must grasp the world inwardly. He keeps referring to intuition. But nothing enters into this intuition; it remains an indefinite, darkly mystical experience.

Many people are comfortable with this today, for it means they do not have to undergo what I said was exactly what is demanded for the science of the spirit—a truly radical change of mind, where one does not just want to indulge oneself mystically, but seeks to penetrate in all seriousness into everything of which people are afraid in their minds, because of certain premises, and in which they are not interested, which is all subconscious. Essentially Bergson does not even overcome his lack of interest but actually encourages it. Nor does he let go of his fear. For these intuitions do not lead to real understanding of the spiritual world; they do not go beyond an inward experience.

• 96. Wahle, Richard (1857–1935). Ueber den Mechanismus des geistigen Lebens, Wien und Leipzig 1906, S. 92 (1. Buch, Kap. 4).
• 97. Descartes, Rene (1596–1650), French mathematician and philosopher. ‘Cogito ergo sum’—see Discours de la methode (1637) I, 7, and (not in the exact words) Meditationes de prima Philosophia (1641), 2nd meditation.
• 98. Augustine of Hippo, St (354–430), Numibian Christian, one of the four Latin Doctors of the Church. ‘I think, therefore 1 am’—.see Soliloquia II, 1; De ver. relig. 72f.; De trinit. X, 14.

Today it seems appropriate to mention certain thoughts on the meaning and nature of our spiritual Movement—anthroposophical spiritual science, as we call it. To do so will necessitate references to some events which have occurred over a period of time and which have contributed to the preparation and unfolding of this Movement. If, in the course of these remarks, one or another of them should seem somewhat more personal—it would, at any rate, only seem to be so—this will not be for personal reasons but because what is more personal can be a starting point for something more objective. The need for a spiritual movement which makes known to people the deeper sources of existence, especially human existence, can be easily recognized by the way in which today's civilization has developed along lines which are becoming increasingly absurd. No one, after serious thought, will describe today's events as anything other than an absurd exaggeration of what has been living in more recent evolution.

From what you have come to know in spiritual science, you will have gained the feeling that everything, even what is apparently only external, has its foundation in the thoughts of human beings. Deeds which are done, events which take place in material life—all these are the consequence of what human beings think and imagine. And the view of the external world, which is gaining ground among human beings today, gives us an indication of some very inadequate thought forces. I have already put into words the fact that events have grown beyond human beings, have got out of hand, because their thinking has become attenuated and is no longer strong enough to govern reality. Concepts such as that of maya, the external semblance which governs the things of the physical plane, ought to be taken far more seriously by those familiar with them than they, in fact, often are. They ought to be profoundly imprinted on current consciousness as a whole. This alone might lead to the healing of the damage which—with a certain amount of justification—has come upon mankind. Those who strive to understand the functioning of man's deeds—that is, the way the reflections of man's thoughts function—will recognize the inner need for a comprehension of the human soul which can be brought about by stronger, more realistic thoughts.

In fact, our whole Movement is founded on the task of giving human souls thoughts more appropriate to reality, thoughts more immersed in reality, than are the abstract concept patterns of today. It cannot be pointed out often enough how very much mankind today is in love with the abstract, having no desire to realize that shadowy concepts cannot, in reality, make any impact on the fabric of existence. This has been most clearly expressed in the fourteen-, fifteen-year history of our Anthroposophical Movement. Now it is becoming all the more important for our friends to take into themselves what specifically belongs to this Anthroposophical Movement. You know how often people stressed that they would so much like to give the beautiful word ‘theosophy’ the honour it deserves, and how much they resisted having to give it up as the key word of the Movement. But you also know the situation which made this necessary.

It is good to be thoroughly aware in one's soul about this. You know—indeed, many of you shared—the goodwill with which we linked our work with that of the Theosophical Movement in the way it had been founded by Blavatsky, and how this then continued with Besant's and Sinnett's efforts, and so on. It is indeed not unnecessary for our members, in face of all the ill-meant misrepresentations heaped upon us from outside, to persist in pointing out that our Anthroposophical Movement had an independent starting-point and that what now exists has grown out of the seeds of those lectures I gave in Berlin which were later published in the book on the mysticism of the Middle Ages. We must stress ever and again that in connection with this book it was the Theosophical Movement who approached us, not vice versa. This Theosophical Movement, in whose wake it was our destiny to ride during those early years, was not without its connections to other occult streams of the nineteenth century, and in lectures given here I have pointed to these connections. But we should look at what is characteristic for that Movement.

If I were asked to point factually to one rather characteristic feature, I would choose one I have mentioned a number of times, which is connected with the period when I was writing in the journal Lucifer-Gnosis what was later given the title Cosmic Memory. A representative of the Theosophical Society, who read this, asked me by what method these things were garnered from the spiritual world. Further conversation made it obvious that he wanted to know what more-or-less mediumistic methods were used for this. Members of those circles find it impossible to imagine any method other than that of people with mediumistic gifts, who lower their consciousness and write down what comes from the subconscious.

What underlies this attitude? Even though he is a very competent and exceptionally cultured representative of the Theosophical Movement, the man who spoke to me on this was incapable of imagining that it is possible to investigate such things in full consciousness. Many members of that Movement had the same problem because they shared something which is present to the highest degree in today's spiritual life, namely, a certain mistrust in the individual's capacity for knowledge. People do not trust the inherent capacity for knowledge, they do not believe that the individual can have the strength to penetrate truly to the essential core of things. They consider that the human capacity for knowledge is limited; they find that intellectual understanding gets in the way if one wants to penetrate to the core of things and that it is therefore better to damp it down and push forward to the core of things without bringing it into play. This is indeed what mediums do; for them, to mistrust human understanding is a basic impulse. They endeavour, purely experimentally, to let the spirit speak while excluding active understanding.

It can be said that this mood was particularly prevalent in the Theosophical Movement as it existed at the beginning of the century. It could be felt when one tried to penetrate certain things, certain opinions and views, which had come to live in the Theosophical Movement. You know that in the nineties of the nineteenth century and subsequently in the twentieth century, Mrs Besant played an important part in the Theosophical Movement. Her opinion counted. Her lectures formed the centrepiece of theosophical work both in London and in India. And yet it was strange to hear what people around Mrs Besant said about her. I noticed this strongly as early as 1902. In many ways, especially among the scholarly men around her, she was regarded as a quite unacademic woman. Yet, while on the one hand people stressed how unacademic she was, on the other hand they regarded the partly mediumistic method she was famous for, untrammelled as it was by scientific ideas, as a channel for achieving knowledge. I could say that these people did not themselves have the courage to aim for knowledge. Neither had they any confidence in Mrs Besant's waking consciousness. But because she had not been made fully awake as a result of any scientific training, they saw her to some extent as a means by which knowledge from the spiritual world could be brought into the physical world. This attitude was extraordinarily prevalent among those immediately surrounding her. People spoke about her at the beginning of the twentieth century as if she were some kind of modern sibyl. Those closest to her formed derogatory opinions about her academic aptitude and maintained that she had no critical ability to judge her inner experiences. This was certainly the mood around her, though it was carefully hidden—I will not say kept secret—from the wider circle of theosophical leaders.

In addition to what came to light in a sibylline way through Mrs Besant, and through Blavatsky's The Secret Doctrine, the Theosophical Movement at the end of the nineteenth century also had Sinnett's book or, rather, books. The manner in which people spoke about these in private was, equally, hardly an appeal to man's own power of knowledge. Much was made in private about the fact that in what Sinnett had published there was nothing which he had contributed out of his own experience. The value of a book such as his Esoteric Buddhism was seen to lie particularly in the fact that the whole of the content had come to him in the form of ‘magical letters’, precipitated—no one knew whence—into the physical plane—one could almost say, thrown down to the physical plane—which he then worked into the book Esoteric Buddhism.

All these things led to a mood among the wider circles of the theosophical leaders which was sentimental and devotional in the highest degree. They looked up, in a way, to a wisdom which had fallen from heaven, and—humanly, quite understandable—this devotion was transferred to individual personalities. However, this became the incentive for a high level of insincerity which was easy to discern in a number of phenomena.

Thus, for instance, even in 1902 I heard in the more private gatherings in London that Sinnett was, in fact, an inferior spirit. One of the leading personalities said to me at that time: Sinnett could be compared with a journalist—say, of the Frankfurter Zeitung—who has been dispatched to India; he is a journalistic spirit who simply had the good fortune to receive the ‘Master's letters’ and make use of them in his book in a journalistic way which is in keeping with modern mankind!

You know, though, that all this is only one aspect of a wide spectrum of literature. For in the final decades of the nineteenth century and the first decades of the twentieth, there appeared—if not a Biblical deluge, then certainly a flood of—written material which was intended to lead mankind in one way or another to the spiritual world. Some of this material harked back directly to ancient traditions which have been preserved by all kinds of secret brotherhoods. It is most interesting to follow the development of this tradition.

I have often pointed out how, in the second half of the eighteenth century, old traditions could be found in the circle led by Saint-Martin, the philosophe inconnu. In Saint-Martin's writings, especially Des erreurs et de la vérité, there is a very great deal of what came from ancient traditions, clothed in a more recent form. If we follow these traditions further back, we do indeed come to ideas which can conquer concrete situations, which can influence reality. By the time they had come down to Saint-Martin, these concepts had already become exceedingly shadowy, but they were nevertheless shadows of concepts which had once been very much alive; ancient traditions were living one last time in a shadowy form. So in Saint-Martin's work we find the healthiest concepts clothed in a form which is a final glimmer. It is particularly interesting to see how Saint-Martin fights against the concept of matter, which had already come to the fore. What did this concept of matter gradually become? It became a view in which the world is seen as a fog made up of atoms moving about and bumping into one another and forming configurations which are at the root of all things taking shape around us. In theory materialism reached its zenith at the point when the existence of everything except the atom was denied. Saint-Martin still maintained the view that the whole science of atoms, and indeed the whole belief that matter was something real, was nonsense; which indeed it is. If we delve into all that is around us, chemically, physically, we come in the final analysis not to atoms, not to anything material, but to spiritual beings. The concept of matter is an aid; but it corresponds to nothing that is real. Wherever—to use a phrase coined by du Bois-Reymond—‘matter floats about in space like a ghost’: there may be found the spirit. The only way to speak of an atom is to speak of a little thrust of spirit, albeit ahrimanic spirit. It was a healthy idea of Saint-Martin to do battle against the concept of matter.

Another immensely healthy idea of Saint-Martin was the living way in which he pointed to the fact that all separate, concrete human languages are founded on a single universal language. This was easier to do in his day than it is now, because in his time there was still a more living relationship to the Hebrew language which, among all modern languages, is the one closest to the archetypal universal language. It was still possible to feel at that time the way in which spirit flowed through the Hebrew language, giving the very words something genuinely ideal and spiritual. So we find in Saint-Martin's work an indication, concrete and spiritual, of the meaning of the word ‘the Hebrew’. In the whole way he conceived of this we find a living consciousness of a relationship of the human being with the spiritual world. This word ‘the Hebrew’ is connected with ‘to journey’. A Hebrew is one who makes a journey through life, one who gathers experiences as on a journey. Standing in the world in a living way—this is the foundation of this word and of all other words in the Hebrew language if they are sensed in their reality.

However, in his own time Saint-Martin was no longer able to find ideas which could point more precisely, more strongly, to what belonged to the archetypal language. These will have to be rediscovered by spiritual science. But he had before his soul a profound notion of what the archetypal language had been. Because of this his concept of the unity of the human race was more concrete and less abstract than that which the nineteenth century made for itself. This concrete concept of the unity of the human race made it possible for him, at least within his own circle, to bring fully to life certain spiritual truths, for instance, the truth that the human being, if only he so desires, really can enter into a relationship with spiritual beings of higher hierarchies. It is one of his cardinal principles, which states that every human being is capable of entering into a relationship with spiritual beings of higher hierarchies. Because of this there still lived in him something of that ancient, genuine mystic mood which knew that knowledge, if it is to be true knowledge, cannot be absorbed in a conceptual form only, but must be absorbed in a particular mood of soul—that is after a certain preparation of the soul. Then it becomes part of the soul's spiritual life.

Hand in hand with this, however, went a certain sum of expectations, of evolutionary expectations directed to those human souls who desired to claim a right to participate in some way in evolution. From this point of view it is most interesting to see how Saint-Martin makes the transition from what he has won through knowledge, through science—which is spiritual in his case—to politics, how he arrives at political concepts. For here he states a precise requirement, saying that every ruler ought to be a kind of Melchizedek, a kind of priest-king.

Just imagine if this requirement, put forward in a relatively small circle before the outbreak of the French Revolution, had been a dawn instead of a dusk; just imagine if this idea—that those whose concepts and forces were to influence human destiny must fundamentally have the characteristics of a Melchizedek—had been absorbed, even partially, into the consciousness of the time, how much would have been different in the nineteenth century! For the nineteenth century was, in truth, as distant as it could possibly be from this concept. The demand that politicians should first undertake to study at the school of Melchizedek would, of course, have been dismissed with a shrug.

Saint-Martin has to be pointed out because he bears within him something which is a last glimmer of the wisdom that has come down from ancient times. It has had to die away because mankind in the future must ascend to spirituat life in a new way. Mankind must ascend in a new way because a merely traditional continuation of old ideas never has been in keeping with the germinating forces of the human soul. These underdeveloped forces of the human soul will tend, during the course of the twentieth century, in a considerable number of individuals—this has been said often enough—to lead to true insight into etheric processes. The first third of the twentieth century can be seen as a critical period during which a goodly number of human beings ought to be made aware of the fact that events must be observed in the etheric world which lives all around us, just as much as does the air. We have pointed emphatically to one particular event which must be seen in the etheric world if mankind is not to fall into decadence, and that is the appearance of the Etheric Christ. This is a necessity. Mankind must definitely prepare not to let wither those forces which are already sprouting.

These forces must not be allowed to wither for, if they did, what would happen? In the forties and fifties of the twentieth century the human soul would assume exceedingly odd characteristics in the widest circles. Concepts would arise in the human soul which would have an oppressive effect. If materialism were the only thing to continue, concepts which exist in the human soul would arise, but they would rise up out of the unconscious in a way which people would not understand. A waking nightmare, a kind of general state of neurasthenia, would afflict a huge number of people. They would find themselves having to think things without understanding why they were thinking them.

The only antidote to this is to plant, in human souls, concepts which stem from spiritual science. Without these, the forces of insight into those concepts which will rise up, into those ideas which will make their appearance, will be paralysed. Then, not the Christ alone, but also other phenomena in the etheric world, which human beings ought to see, will withdraw from man, will go past unnoticed. Not only will this be a great loss, but human beings will also have to develop pathological substitute forces for those which ought to have developed in a healthy way.

It was out of an instinctive need in wide circles of mankind that the endeavours arose which expressed themselves in that flood of literature and written material mentioned earlier. Now, because of a peculiar phenomenon, the Anthroposophical Movement of Central Europe was in a peculiar position relative to the Theosophical Movement—particularly to the Theosophical Society—as well as to that other flood of written material about spiritual matters. Because of the evolutionary situation in the nineteenth century and at the beginning of the twentieth century, it was possible for a great number of people to find spiritual nourishment in all this literature; and it was also possible for a great number of people to be utterly astounded by what came to light through Sinnett and Blavatsky. However, all this was not quite in harmony with Central European consciousness. Those who are familiar with Central European literature are in no doubt that it is not necessarily possible to live in the element of this Central European literature while at the same time taking up the attitude of so many others to that flood. This is because Central European literature encompasses immeasurably much of what the seeker for the spirit longs for—only it is hidden behind the peculiar language which so many people would rather have nothing to do with.

We have often spoken about one of those spirits who prove that spiritual life works and weaves in artistic literature, in belletristic literature: Novalis. For more prosaic moods we might equally well have mentioned Friedrich Schlegel, who wrote about the wisdom of ancient India in a way which did not merely reproduce that wisdom but brought it to a fresh birth out of the western cultural spirit. There is much we could have pointed to that has nothing to do with that flood of written material, but which I have sketched historically in my book Vom Menschenrätsel. People like Steffens, like Schubert, like Troxler, wrote about all these things far more precisely and at a much more modern level than anything found in that flood of literature which welled up during the last decades of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth century. You have to admit that, compared with the profundity of Goethe, Schlegel, Schelling, those things which are held to be so marvellously wise are nothing more than trivia, utter trivia. Someone who has absorbed the spirit of Goethe can regard even a work like such as Light on the Path as no more than commonplace. This ought not to be forgotten. To those who have absorbed the inspiration of Novalis or Friedrich Schlegel, or enjoyed Schelling's Bruno, all this theosophical literature can seem no more than vulgar and ordinary. Hence the peculiar phenomenon that there were many people who had the earnest, honest desire to reach a spiritual life but who, because of their mental make-up were, in the end, to some degree satisfied with the superficial literature described.

On the other hand, the nineteenth century had developed in such a way that those who were scientifically educated had become—for reasons I have often discussed—materialistic thinkers about whom nothing could be done. However, in order to work one's way competently through what came to light at the turn of the eighteenth to the nineteenth century through Schelling, Schlegel, Fichte, one does need at least some scientific concepts. There is no way of proceeding without them. The consequence was this peculiar phenomenon: It was not possible to bring about a situation—which would have been desirable—in which a number of scientifically educated people, however small, could have worked out their scientific concepts in such a way that they could have made a bridge to spiritual science. No such people were to be found. This is a difficulty that still exists and of which we must be very much aware.

Supposing we were to approach those who have undergone a scientific education, with the intention of introducing them to Anthroposophy: lawyers, doctors, philologists—not to mention theologians—when they have finished their academic education and reached a certain stage in life at which it is necessary for them, in accordance with life's demands, to make use of what they have absorbed, not to say, have learnt. They then no longer have either the inclination or the mobility to extricate themselves from their concepts and to seek for others. That is why scientifically-educated people are the most inclined to reject Anthroposophy, although it would only be a small step for a modern scientist to build a bridge. But he does not want to do so. It confuses him. What does he need it for? He has learnt what life demands of him and, so he believes, he does not want things which only serve to confuse him and undermine his confidence. It is going to take some considerable time before these people who have gone through the education of their day start to build bridges in any great numbers. We shall have to be patient. It will not come about easily, especially in certain fields. And when the building of bridges is seriously tackled in a particular field, great obstacles and hindrances will be encountered. It will be necessary above all to build bridges in the fields encompassed by the various faculties, with the exception of theology.

In the field of law the concepts being worked out are becoming more and more stereotyped and quite unsuitable for the regulation of real life. But they do regulate it because life on the physical plane is maya; if it were not maya, they would be incapable of regulating it. As it is, their application is bringing more and more confusion into the world. The application of today's jurisprudence, especially in civil law, does nothing but bring confusion into the situation. But this is not clearly seen. Indeed, how should it be seen? No one follows up the consequences of applying stereotyped concepts to reality. People study law, they become solicitors or judges, they absorb the concepts and apply them. What happens as a consequence of their application is of no interest. Or life is seen as it is—despite the existence of the law, which is a very difficult subject to study for many reasons, not least because law students tend to waste the first few terms—life is seen as it is; we see that everything is in a muddle and do no more than complain.

In the field of medicine the situation is more serious. If medicine continues to develop in the wake of materialism as it has been doing since the second third of the nineteenth century, it will eventually reach an utterly nonsensical situation, for it will end up in absurd medical specializations. The situation is more serious here because this tendency was, in fact, necessary and a good thing. But now it is time for it to be overcome. The materialistic tendency in medicine meant that surgery has reached a high degree of specialization, which was only possible because of this one-sided tendency. But medicine as such has suffered as a result. So now it needs to turn around completely and look towards a real spirituality—but the resistance to this is enormous.

Education is the field which, more than any other, needs to be permeated with spirituality, as we have said often enough. Bridges need to be built everywhere.

In technology—although it may appear to be furthest away from the spirit—it is above all necessary that bridges should be built to the life of the spirit, out of direct practical life. The fifth post-Atlantean period is the one which is concerned with the development of the material world, and if the human being is not to degenerate totally into a mere accomplice of machines—which would make him into nothing more than an animal—then a path must be found which leads from these very machines to the life of the spirit. The priority for those working practically with machines is that they take spiritual impulses into their own soul. This will come about the moment students of technology are taught to think just a little more than is the case at present; the moment they are taught to think in such a way that they see the connections between the different things they learn. As yet they are unable to do this. They attend lectures on mathematics, on descriptive geometry, even on topology sometimes; on pure mechanics, analytical mechanics, industrial mechanics, and also all the various more practical subjects. But it does not even occur to them to look for a connection between all these different things. As soon as people are obliged to apply their own common sense to things, they will be forced—simply on account of the stage of development these various subjects have reached—to push forward into the nature of these things and then on into the spiritual realm. From machines, in particular, a path will truly have to be found into the spiritual world.

I am saying all this in order to point out what difficulties today face the spiritual-scientific Movement, because so far there are no individuals to be found who might be capable of generating an atmosphere of taking things seriously. This Movement suffers most of all from a lack of being taken seriously. It is remarkable how this comes to the fore in all kinds of details. Much of what we have published would have been taken seriously, would have been seen in quite a different light, if it had not been made known that it stemmed from someone belonging to the Theosophical Movement. Simply because the person concerned was in the Theosophical Movement, his work was stamped as something not to be taken seriously. It is most important to realize this, and it is just these trifling details which make it plain. Not out of any foolish vanity but just so that you know what I mean, let me give you an example of one of these trifles which I came across only the other day.

In my book Vom Menschenrätsel I wrote about Karl Christian Planck as one of those spirits who, out of certain inner foundations, worked towards the spiritual realm, even though only in an abstract way. I have not only written about him in this book, but also—over the past few winters—spoken about him in some detail in a number of cities, showing how he went unrecognized, or was misunderstood, and referring especially to ane particular circumstance. This was the fact that, in the eighties, seventies, sixties, fifties, this man had ideas and thoughts in connection with industrial and social life which ought to have been put into practice. If only there had been someone at that time with the capacity of employing in social life the great ideas this man had, ideas truly compatible with reality, then—and I am not exaggerating—mankind would probably not now be suffering all that is going on today which, for the greater part, is a consequence of the totally wrong social structure in which we are living.

I have told you that it is a real duty not to let human beings come to a pass such as that reached by Karl Christian Planck, who finally came to be utterly devoid of any love for the world of external physical reality. He was a Swabian living in Stuttgart. He was refused a place in the philosophy department of Tübingen University, where he would have had the opportunity to put forward some of his ideas. I entirely intentionally mentioned the fact that, when he wrote the foreword to his book Testament of a German, he felt moved to say, ‘Not even my bones shall rest in the soil of my ungrateful fatherland’. Hard words. Words such as people today can be driven to utter when faced with the stupidity of their fellow human beings, who refuse to see the point about what is really compatible with reality. In Stuttgart I purposely quoted these words about his bones, for Stuttgart is Planck's fatherland in the narrower sense. There was little reaction, despite the fact that events had already reached a stage when there would have been every reason to understand the things he had said.

Now, however, a year-and-a-half later, the following notice may be found in the Swabian newspapers:

‘Karl Christian Planck. More than one far-seeing spirit foretold the present World War. But none anticipated its scale nor understood its causes and effects as clearly as did our Swabian countryman Planck.’

I said in my lecture that Karl Christian Planck had foreseen the present World War, and that he even expressly stated that Italy would not be on the side of the Central Powers, even though he was speaking at the time when the alliance had not yet been concluded, but was only in the making.

‘To him this war seemed to be the unavoidable goal toward which political and economic developments had been inexorably moving for the last fifty years.’

This is indeed the case!

‘Just as he revealed the damage being done in his day, so he also pointed the way which can lead us to other situations.’

This is the important point. But nobody listened!

‘By him we are told the deeper reasons underlying war profiteering and other black marks which mar so many good and pleasing aspects of the life of the nation today. He knows where the deeper, more inward forces of the nation lie and can tell us how to release them so that the moral and social renewal longed for by the best amongst us can come about. Despite all the painful disappointments meted out to him by his contemporaries, he continued to believe in these forces and their triumphant emergence.’

Nevertheless, he was driven to utter the words I have quoted!

‘The news will therefore be widely welcomed that the philosopher's daughter is about to give an introduction to Planck's social and political thinking in a number of public lectures.’

It is interesting that a year-and-a-half later his daughter should be putting in an appearance. This notice appeared in a Stuttgart newspaper. But a year-and-a-half ago, when I drew attention as plainly as possible in Stuttgart to the the philosopher Karl Christian Planck, no one took the slightest notice, and no one felt moved to make known what I had said. Now his daughter puts in an appearance. Her father died in 1880, and presumably she had been born by then. Yet she has waited all this time before standing up for him by giving public lectures.

This example could be multiplied not tenfold, but a hundredfold. It shows once again how difficult it is to bring together the all-embracing aspect of spiritual science with everyday practical details, despite the fact that it is absolutely essential that this should be done. Only through the all-embracing nature of spiritual science—this must be understood—can healing come about for what lives in the culture of today.

That is why it has been essential to keep steering what we call anthroposophical spiritual science, in whatever way possible, along the more serious channels which have been increasingly deserted by the Theosophical Movement. The spirit that was even known to the ancient Greek philosophers had to be allowed to come through, although this has led to the opinion that what is written in consequence is difficult to read. It has often not been easy. Especially within the Movement it met with the greatest difficulties. And one of the greatest difficulties has been the fact that it really has taken well over a decade to overcome one fundamental abstraction. Laborious and patient work has been necessary to overcome this fundamental abstraction which has been one of the most damaging things for our Movement. This basic abstraction consisted simply in the insistence on clinging to the word ‘theosophy’, regardless of whether whatever was said to be ‘theosophical’ referred to something filled with the spirituality of modern life, or to no more than some rubbish published by Rohm or anyone else. Anything ‘theosophical’ had equal justification, for this prompted ‘theosophical tolerance’.

Only very gradually has it been possible to work against these things. They could not be pointed out directly at the beginning, because that would have seemed arrogant. Only gradually has it been possible to awaken a feeling for the fact that differences do exist, and that tolerance used in this connection is nothing more than an expression of a total lack of character on which to base judgements. What matters now is to work towards knowledge of a kind which can cope with reality, which can tackle the demands of reality. Only a spiritual science that works with the concepts of our time can tackle the demands of reality. Not living in comfortable theosophical ideas but wrestling for spiritual reality—this must be the direction of our endeavour.

Some people still have no idea what is meant by wrestling for reality, for they are fighting shy of understanding clearly how threadbare are the concepts with which they work today. Let me give you a small example, from a seemingly unrelated subject, of what it means to wrestle for reality in concepts. I shall be brief, so please be patient while I explain something that might seem rather far-fetched.

There were always isolated individuals in the nineteenth century who were prepared to take up the question of reality. For reality was then supposed to burst in on mankind with entirely fresh ideas about life, not only the unimportant aspects but especially the basic practical aspects of life. Thus at a certain point in the nineteenth century Euclid's postulate of parallels was challenged. When are two lines parallel? Who could have failed to agree that two lines are parallel if they never meet, however long they are! For that is the definition: That two straight lines are parallel if they never meet, whatever the distance to which they are extended. In the nineteenth century there were individuals who devoted their whole life to achieving clarity about this concept, for it does not stand up to exact thinking. In order to show you what it means to wrestle for concepts, let me read you a letter written by Wolfgang Bolyai. The mathematician Gauss had begun to realize that the definition of two straight lines being parallel if they meet at infinity, or not at all, was no more than empty words and meant nothing. The older Bolyai, the father, was a friend and pupil of Gauss, who also stimulated the younger Bolyai, the son. And the father wrote to the son:

‘Do not look for the parallels in that direction. I have trodden that path to its end; I have traversed bottomless night in which every light, every joy of my life has been extinguished. By God I implore you to leave the postulate of the parallels alone! Shun it as you would a dissolute association, for it can rob you of all your leisure, your health, your peace of mind and every pleasure in life. It will never grow light on earth and the unfortunate human race will never gain anything perfectly pure, not even geometry itself. In my soul there is a deep and eternal wound. May God save you from being eaten away by another such. It robs me of my delight in geometry, and indeed of life on earth. I had resolved to sacrifice myself for the truth. I would have been prepared for martyrdom if only I could have handed geometry back to mankind purified of this blemish. I have accomplished awful, gigantic works, have achieved far more than ever before, but never found total satisfaction. Si paullum a summo discessit, vergit ad imum. When I saw that the foundation of this night cannot be reached from the earth I returned, comfortless, sorrowing for my self and the human race. Learn from my example. Desiring to know the parallels, I have remained without knowledge. And they have robbed me of all the flowers of my life and time. They have become the root of all my subsequent failures, and much rain has fallen on them from our lowering domestic clouds. If I could have discovered the parallels I would have become an angel, even if none had ever known of my discovery.

... Do not attempt it ... It is a labyrinth that forever blocks your path. If you enter you will grow poor, like a treasure hunter, and your ignorance will not cease. Should you arrive at whatever absurd discovery, it will be for naught, untenable as an axiom ...

... The pillars of Hercules are situated in this region. Go not a step further, or you will be lost.’

Nevertheless, the younger Bolyai did go further, even more so than his father, and devoted his whole life to the search for a concrete concept in a field where such a concept seemed to exist, but which was, however, empty words. He wanted to discover whether there really was such a thing as two straight lines which did not meet, even in infinity. No one has ever paced out this infinite distance, for that would take an infinite time, but this time has not yet run its course. It is nothing more than words. Such empty words, such conceptual shadows, are to be found behind all kinds of concepts. I simply wanted to point out to you how even the most thorough spirits of the nineteenth century suffered because of the abstractness of these concepts! It is interesting to see that while children are taught in every school that parallel lines are those which never meet, however long they are, there have been individual spirits for whom working with such concepts became a hell, because they were seeking to push through to a real concept instead of a stereotyped concept.

Wrestling with reality—this is what matters, yet this is the very thing our contemporaries shun, more or less, because they ‘realize’, or imagine they realize, that they have ‘high ideals’! It is not ideals that matter, but impulses which work with reality. Imagine someone were to make a beautiful statement such as: At long last a time must come when those who are most capable are accorded the consideration due to them. What a lovely programme! Whole societies could be established in accordance with this programme. Even political sciences could be founded on this basis. But it is not the statement that counts. What counts is the degree to which it is permeated by reality. For what is the use—however valid the statement, and however many societies choose it for the prime point in their programmes—if those in power happen to see only their nephews as being the most capable? It is not a matter of establishing the validity of the statement that the most capable should be given their due. The important thing is to have the capacity to find those who are the most capable, whether they are one's nephews or not! We must learn to understand that abstract concepts always fall through the cracks of life, and that they never mean anything, and that all our time is wasted on all these beautiful concepts. I have no objection to their beauty, but what matters is our grasp and knowledge of reality.

Suppose the lion were to found a social order for the animals, dividing up the kingdom of the earth in a just way. What would he do? I do not believe it would occur to him to push for a situation in which the small animals of the desert, usually eaten by the lion, would have the possibility of not being eaten by the lion! He would consider it his lion's right to eat the small animals he meets in the desert. It is conceivable, though, that for the ocean he would find it just and proper to forbid the sharks to eat the little fishes. This might very well happen. The lion might establish a tremendously just social order in the oceans, at the North Pole or wherever else he himself is not at home, giving all the animals their freedom. But whether he would be pleased to establish such an order in his own region is a question indeed. He knows very well what justice is in the social order, and he will put it into practice efficiently in the kingdom of the sharks.

Let us now turn from lions to Hungaricus. I told you two days ago about his small pamphlet Conditions de Paix de l'Allemagne. This pamphlet swims entirely with the stream of that map of Europe which was first mentioned in the famous note from the Entente to Wilson about the partition of Austria. We have spoken about it. With the exception of Switzerland, Hungaricus is quite satisfied with this map. He begins by talking very wisely—just as most people today talk very wisely—about the rights of nations, even the rights of small nations, and about the right of the state to be coincident with the power of the nation, and so on. This is all very nice, in the same way that the statement, about the most capable being given his due, is nice. As long as the concepts remain shadowy we can, if we are idealists, be delighted when we read Hungaricus. For the Swiss, the pamphlet is even nicer than the map, for rather than wiping Switzerland off the map, Hungaricus adds the Vorarlberg and the Tyrol. So I recommend the Swiss to read the pamphlet rather than look at the map. But now Hungaricus proceeds to divide up the rest of the world. In his own way he accords to every nation, even the smallest, the absolute right to develop freely—as long as he considers he is not causing offence to the Entente. He trims his words a little, of course, saying ‘independence’ when referring to Bohemia, and obviously ‘autonomy’ with regard to Ireland. Well, this is the done thing, is it not! It is quite acceptable to dress things up a little. He divides up the world of Europe quite nicely, so that apart from the things I have mentioned—which are to avoid causing offence—he really endeavours to apportion the smallest nations to those states to which the representatives of the Entente believe they belong. It is not so much a question of whether these small territories are really inhabited by those nationalities, but of whether the Entente actually believes this to be the case. He makes every effort to divide up the world nicely, with the exception of the desert—oh, pardon me—with the exception of Hungary, which is where he practises his lion's right! Perfect freedom is laid down for the kingdom of the sharks. But the Magyar nation is his nation, and this is to comprise not only what it comprises today—though without it only a minority of the population would be Magyar, the majority being others—but other territories as well. Here he well and truly acts the part of the lion.

Here we see how concepts are formulated nowadays and how people think nowadays. It gives us an opportunity to study how urgent it is to find the transition to a thinking which is permeated with reality. For this, concepts such as those I have been giving you are necessary. I want to show you—indeed, I must show you—how spiritual thinking leads to ideas which are compatible with reality. One must always combine the correct thought with the object; then one can recognize whether that object corresponds to reality or not.

Take Wilson's note to the Senate. As a sample it could even have certain effects in some respects. But this is not what matters. What matters is that it contains ‘shadowy concepts’. If it nevertheless has an effect, this is due to the vexatious nature of our time which can be influenced by vexatious means. Look at this matter objectively and try to form a concept against which you can measure the reality, the real content with which this shadowy concept could be linked. You need only ask one question: Could this note not just as well have been written in 1913? The idealistic nothings it contains could just as easily have been expressed in 1913! You see, a thinking which believes in the absolute is not based on reality. It is unrealistic to think that something ‘absolute’ will result every time. The present age has no talent for seeing through the lack of reality in thinking because it is always out for what is ‘right’ rather than for what is in keeping with reality.

That is why in my book Vom Menschenrätsel I emphasized so heavily the importance not only of what is logical but also of what is in keeping with reality. A single decision that took account of the facts as they are at this precise moment would be worth more than all the empty phrases put together. Historical documents are perhaps the best means of showing that what I am saying has to do with reality, for as time has gone on the only people to come to the surface are those who want to rule the world with abstractions, and this is what has led to the plight of the world today. Proper thinking, which takes account of things as they are, will discover the realities wherever they are. Indeed, they are so close at hand! Take the real concept which I introduced from another point of view the other day: Out of what later became Italy in the South there arose the priestly cultic element which created as its opposition the Protestantism of Central Europe; from the West was formed the diplomatic, political element which also created an opposition for itself; and from the North-west was formed the mercantile element which again created for itself an opposition; and in Central Europe an opposition coming out of the general, human element will of necessity arise. Let us look once more at the way these things stream outwards. (See diagram.)

Even for the fourth post-Atlantean period—proceeding on from the old fourfold classification in which one spoke of castes—we can begin to describe this structure in a somewhat different way: Plato spoke of ‘guardian-rulers’; this is the realm for which Rome—priestly, papal Rome—seized the monopoly, achieving a situation in which she alone was allowed to establish doctrinal truths. She was to be the only source of all doctrine, even the highest.

In a different realm, the political, diplomatic element is nothing other than Plato's ‘guardian-auxiliaries’. I have shown you that, regardless of what people call Prussian militarism, the real military element was formed with France as its starting point, after the first foundations had been laid in Switzerland. That is where the military element began, but of course it created an opposition for itself by withholding from others what it considered to be its own prerogative. It wants to dominate the world in a soldierly way, so that when something soldierly comes to meet it from elsewhere it finds this quite unjustified, just as Rome finds it unjustified if something comes towards her which is to do with the great truths of the universe.

And here, instead of mercantilism, we might just as well write ‘the industrial and agricultural class’. Think on this, meditate on it, and you will come to understand that this third factor corresponds to the provision of material needs. So what is being withheld? Foodstuffs, of course!

If you apply Plato's concepts appropriately, in accordance with reality, then you will find reality everywhere, for with these concepts you will be able fully to enter into reality. Starting from the concept, you must find the way to reality, and the concept will be able to plunge down into the most concrete parts of reality. Shadowy concepts, on the other hand, never find reality, but they do lend themselves exceptionally well to idealistic chatter. With real concepts, though, you can work you way through to an understanding of reality in every detail. Here lies the task of spiritual science. Spiritual science leads to concepts through which you can really discover life, which of course is created by the spirit, and through which you will be able to join in a constructive way at working on the formation of this life.

One concept, in particular, requires realistic thinking, owing to the terrible destiny at present weighing down on mankind, for the corresponding unreal concept is especially persistent in this connection. Those who speak in the most unrealistic way of all, these days, are the clergymen. What they express about Christianity or the awareness of God, apropos of the war, is enough to send anyone up the wall, as they say. They distort things so frightfully. Of course things in other connections are distorted too, but in this realm the degree of absurdity is even greater.

Look at the sermons or tracts at present stemming from that source; apply your good common sense to them. Of course it is understandable that they should ask: Does mankind have to be subjected to this terrible, painful destiny? Could not the divine forces of God intervene on behalf of mankind to bring about salvation? The justification for speaking in this way does indeed seem absolute. But there is no real concept behind it. It does not apply to the reality of the situation. Let me use a comparison to show you what I mean.

Human beings have a certain physical constitution. They take in food which is of a kind which enables them to go on living. If they were to refuse food, they would grow thin, become ill, and finally starve to death. Now is it natural to complain that if human beings refuse to eat it is a weakness or malevolence on the part of God to let them starve? Indeed it is not a weakness on the part of God. He created the food; human beings only need to eat it. The wisdom of God is revealed in the way the food maintains the human beings. If they refuse to eat it, they cannot turn round and accuse God of letting them starve.

Now apply this to what I was saying. Mankind must regard spiritual life as a food. It is given by the gods, but it has to be taken in by man. To say that the gods ought to intervene directly is tantamount to saying that if I refuse to eat God ought to satisfy my hunger in some other way. The wisdom-filled order of the universe ensures that what is needed for salvation is always available, but it is up to human beings to make a relationship with it. So the spiritual life necessary for the twentieth century will not enter human beings of itself. They must strive for it and take it into themselves. If they fail to take it in, times will grow more and more dismal. What takes place on the surface is only maya. What is happening inwardly, is that an older age is wrestling with a new one. The general, human element is rising up everywhere in opposition to the specialized elements. It is maya to believe that nation is fighting against nation—and I have spoken about this maya in other connections too. The battle of nation with nation only comes about because things group themselves in certain ways but, in reality, the inward forces opposing one another are something quite different. The opposition is between the old and the new. The laws now fighting to come into play are quite different from those which have traditionally ruled over the world.

And again it was maya—that is, something appearing under a false guise—to say that those other laws were rising up on behalf of socialism. Socialism is not something connected with truth; above all it is not connected with spiritual life, for what it wants is to connect itself with materialism. What really wants to wrestle its way into existence is the many-sided, harmonious element of mankind, in opposition to the one-sided priestly, political or mercantile elements. This battle will rage for a long time, but it can be conducted in all kinds of different ways. If a healthy way of leading life, such as that described by Planck in the nineteenth century, had been adopted, then the bloody conduct of the first third of the twentieth century would, at least, have been ameliorated. Idealisms do not lead to amelioration, but realistic thinking does, and realistic thinking also always means spiritual thinking.

Equally, we can say that whatever has to happen will happen. Whatever it is that is wrestling its way out, must needs go through all these experiences in order to reach a stage at which spirituality can be united with the soul, so that man can grow up spiritually. Today's tragic destiny of mankind is that in striving upwards today, human beings are endeavouring to do so not under the sign of spirituality but under the sign of materialism. This in the first instance is what brought them into conflict with those brotherhoods who want to develop the impulses of the mercantile element, commerce and industry, in a materialistic way on a grand scale. This is today's main conflict. All other things are side issues, often terrible side issues. This shows us how terrible maya can be. But it is possible to strive for things in different ways. If others had been in power instead of the agents of those brotherhoods, then we would, today, be busy with peace negotiations, and the Christmas call for peace would not have been shouted down!

It is going to be immensely difficult to find clear and realistic concepts and ideas in respect of certain things; but we must all seek to find them in our own areas. Those who enter a little into the meaning of spiritual science, and compare this spiritual science with other things making an appearance just now, will see that this spiritual science is the only path that can lead to concepts which are filled with reality.

I wanted to say this very seriously to you at this time. Despite the fact that the task of spiritual science can only be comprehended out of the spirit itself, out of knowledge, and not out of what we have been discussing today, I wanted to show you the significance, the essential nature, of spiritual science for the present time. I wanted to show you how urgent it is for everything possible to be done to make spiritual science more widely known. It is so necessary in these difficult times for us to take spiritual science not only into our heads but really into our warm hearts. Only if we take it into the warmth of our hearts will we be capable of generating the strength needed by the present time.

None of us should allow ourselves to think that we are perhaps not in a suitable position, or not strong enough, to do what it is essential for us to do. Karma is sure to give every one of us, whatever our position, the opportunity to put the right questions to destiny at the right moment. Even if this right moment is neither today nor tomorrow, it is sure to come eventually. So once we have understood the impulses of this spiritual Movement we must stand firmly and steadfastly behind them. Today it is particularly necessary to set ourselves the aim of firmness and steadfastness. For either something important must come from one side or another—although this cannot be counted upon—in the very near future, or all conditions of life will become increasingly difficult. It would be utterly thoughtless to refuse to be clear about this. For two-and-a-half years it has been possible for what we now call war to carry on, while conditions remained as bearable as they now are. But this cannot go on for another year. Movements such as ours will be put te a severe test. There will be no question of asking when we shall next meet, or why do we not meet, or why this or that is not being published. No, indeed. It will be a question of bearing in our hearts, even through long periods of danger, a steadfast sense of belonging.

I wanted to say this to you today because it could be possible in the not too distant future that there will be no means of transport which will enable us to come together again; I am not speaking only of travel permits but of actual means of transport. In the long run, it will not be possible to keep the things going which constitute our modern civilization, if something breaks in on this civilization which, although it has arisen out of it, is nevertheless in absolute opposition to it. This is how absurd the situation is: Life itself is bringing forth things which are absolutely opposed to it.

So we must accept that difficult times may be in store for our Movement too. But we shall not be led astray if we have taken into ourselves the inner steadfastness, clarity and right feeling for the importance and nature of our Movement, and if in these serious times we can see beyond our petty differences. This, our Movement ought to be able to achieve; we ought to be able to look beyond our petty differences to the greater affairs of mankind, which are now at stake. The greatest of these is to reach an understanding of what it means to base thinking on reality. Wherever we look we are confronted with the impossibility of finding a thinking which accords with reality. We shall have to enter heart and soul into this search in order not to be led astray by all kinds of egoistic distractions.

This is what I wanted to say to you as my farewell today, since we are about to take leave of one another for some time. Make yourselves so strong—even if it should turn out to be unnecessary—that, even in loneliness of soul, your hearts will carry the pulse of spiritual science with which we are here concerned. Even the thought that we shall be steadfast will help a very great deal; for thoughts are realities. Many potential difficulties can still be swept away if we maintain an honest, serious quest in the direction we have here discussed so often.

Now that we have to depart for a while we shall not allow ourselves to flag, but shall make sure that we return if it is possible. But even if it should take a long time as a result of circumstances outside our control, we shall never lose the thought from our hearts and souls that this is the place—where our Movement has even brought forth a visible building—where the most intense requirement exists to bear this Movement so positively, so concretely, so energetically, that together we can carry it through, come what may. So wherever we are, let us stand together in thought, faithfully, energetically, cordially, and let us hear one another, even though this will not be possible with our physical ears. But we shall only hear one another if we listen with strong thoughts and without sentimentality, for the times are now unsuitable for sentimentality.

In this sense, I say farewell to you. My words are also a greeting, for in the days to come we shall meet again, though more in the spirit than on the physical plane. Let us hope that the latter, too, will be possible once more in the not too distant future.

In our previous meetings I have tried to direct you into what we understand as knowledge of the human being. Some of what is still missing will surely find its way into our further considerations during this conference. I have also told you that this knowledge of the human being is not the kind that will lead to theories, but one that can become human instinct, ensouled and spiritual instinct that, when translated into actions, can lead to living educational principles and practice. Of course, you must realize that in giving lectures of this kind, it is only possible to point the way, in the form of indications, to what such knowledge of the human being can do for the furtherance of practical teaching. But just because our primary goal is toward practical application, I can give only broad outlines, something that is very unpopular these days. Few people are sufficiently aware that anything expressed in words can, at best, be only a hint, a mere indication of what is far more complex and multifarious in actual life.

If we remember that young children are essentially ensouled sense organs, entirely given over in a bodily-religious way to what comes toward them from the surrounding world, we shall see to it that, until the change of teeth, everything within their vicinity is suitable to be received through their senses, thereafter to be worked on inwardly. Most of all, we have to be aware that whenever the child perceives with the senses, at the same time the child also absorbs the inherent moral element of what is perceived through the soul and spirit. This means that at the approach of the change of teeth, we have already set the scene for the most important impulses of later life, and that when the child enters school, we are no longer faced with a blank page but with one already full of content.

And now that we are moving more toward the practical aspects of education, we have to consider that between the change of teeth and puberty nothing entirely original can be initiated in the child. Instead, it is the teacher's task to recognize the impulses already implanted during the first seven years. They have to direct these impulses toward what is likely to be demanded of the pupils in their later lives. This is why it is of such importance for teachers to be able to perceive what is stirring within their pupils; for there is more here than meets the eye in these life-stirrings when children enter school. Teachers must not simply decide what they are going to do, or which method is right or wrong. It is far more important for them to recognize what is inwardly stirring and moving in these children—in order to guide and develop them further.

Naturally, this is bound to raise a question, which we have thus far been unable to answer in the Waldorf school since it has not yet become practical to open a kindergarten. The work entailed in bringing up and educating children from birth until the change of teeth is certainly most important. But since in the Waldorf school we are already facing great difficulties in coping with the demands involved in teaching children of official school age, we cannot possibly think of opening a kindergarten, because every year we also have to open a new class for our oldest pupils.¹ So far we have started with an eight-year course in the Waldorf school. At present we could not possibly entertain the idea of also opening a kindergarten, or something similar, as a preparatory step for our first grade. People who take a somewhat lighthearted view of these things may be of the opinion that the only thing needed is to begin with a nursery or kindergarten, and the rest will surely follow. But things are not that simple. A fully comprehensive, yet detailed program is needed that covers both the pedagogical and practical aspects of teaching in a nursery class. To devote oneself to such a task is impossible as long as a new class has to be added every year.

The seriousness and responsibility involved in the so-called movements for school reform is recognized by far too few people. To unprofessional, although well-meaning persons, it seems enough to voice demands, which are easy enough to make. In our day, when everybody is so clever—I am not being sarcastic, I am quite serious—nothing is easier than to formulate demands. All that is needed in our society, which is simply bursting with cleverness, is for eleven or twelve people—even three or four would be brainy enough—to come together to work out a perfect program for school reform, listing their requirements in order of priority. I have no doubt that such theoretical demands would be highly impressive. These programs, compiled in the abstract today in many places, are very cleverly conceived. Because people have become so intellectual, they excel in achievements of an external and abstract kind.

But if one judges these matters out of real life experience and not intellectually, the situation is not unlike one where a number of people have come together to discuss and decide what the performance of an efficient stove should be. Obviously they would come up with a whole list of “categorical imperatives,” such as that the stove must be capable of heating the room adequately, it must not emit smoke, and so on. But, though the various points made may be convincing enough, knowledge of them alone would hardly result in the necessary know-how to light it, keep it going, and control its heat. To be able to do this one has to learn other things as well. In any case, depending on the location of the room, the condition of the chimney and possibly on other factors as well, it may not even be possible to fulfill the conditions so competently set forth.

But this is how most of the programs for school reform are arrived at today—more or less in an equally abstract manner as the requirements for the hypothetical stove. This is the reason why one cannot contravene them, for they no doubt contain much that is correct. But to cope with the practical needs of an existing school is something very different from making demands that, ideally speaking, are justified. Here one does not have to deal with how things ought to be, but with a number of actual pupils. Here one has to deal—allow me to mention it, for it is all part of school life—with a definite number of teachers of varying gifts and abilities. All this has to be reckoned with. There is no problem in planning a program for school reform in the abstract. But the concrete reality is that only a certain number of gifted teachers are available and it may not even be possible for them to fulfill the demands agreed upon in theory.

This fundamental difference between life as it is and an intellectual approach to it is something our present society is no longer able to appreciate. Because it has become so accustomed to an intellectual interpretation of life, it can no longer perceive this quality, least of all where it is most patently present. Anyone who is aware of the great difference between theory and practice will detect the worst excesses of impractical theories in our present business life. In reality the structure of today's business life has become as theoretical as can be. Those in control grasp power with robust hands. They use their elbows and often brutally push through their theoretical policies. This goes on until the business is ruined. In the economic sphere it is possible to proceed intellectually. But in a situation where one meets life in the raw, such as in a school (where it is not simply a case of helping oneself, but where existing impulses have to be worked on) even the most beautiful theories are of little use unless they offer the possibility of working pragmatically and out of a truly individual knowledge of what the human being is. This is the reason why teachers whose heads are full of pedagogical theories are usually least fit for practical classroom situations. More capable by far are those who still teach out of a certain instinct, teachers who, out of their natural love for children, are able to recognize and to meet them. But today it is no longer possible to rely on instinct, unless it is backed by spiritual knowledge. Modern life has become too complex for such a way of life, which would be possible only under more primitive conditions, under conditions almost bordering on the level of animal life.

All this has to be considered if one wishes to see what is being presented here in the right light, as a really practical form of pedagogy. Generally speaking, education has followed in the footsteps of our modern civilization, which has gradually become more and more materialistic. A symptom of this is the frequent use of mechanical methods in preference to organic methods, and this just during the early years of childhood up to the change of teeth, which is the most impressionable and important time of life. We must not lose sight of the fact that up to the second dentition the child lives by imitation. The serious side of life, with all its demands in daily work, is re-enacted in deep earnestness by the child in its play, as I mentioned yesterday. The difference between a child's play and an adult's work is that an adult's contribution to society is governed by a sense of purpose and has to fit into outer demands, whereas the child wants to be active simply out of an inborn and natural impulse. Play activity streams outward from within. Adult work takes the opposite direction, namely inwards from the periphery. The significant and most important task for grade school consists in just this gradual progression from play to work. And if one is able to answer in practical terms the great question of how a child's play can gradually be transformed into work, one has solved the fundamental problem during those middle years from seven to fourteen.

In their play, children mirror what happens around them; they want to imitate. But because the key to childhood has been lost through inadequate knowledge of the human being, all kinds of artificial play activities for children of kindergarten age have been intellectually contrived by adults. Since children want to imitate the work of the adults, special games have been invented for their benefit, such as “Lay the Little Sticks,” or whatever else these things are called. These artificial activities actually deflect the child's inner forces from flowing out of the organism as a living stream that finds a natural outlet in the child's desire to imitate those who are older. Through all kinds of mechanical manipulations children are encouraged to do things not at all suitable to their age. Particularly during the nineteenth century, programs for preschool education were determined that entailed activities a child should not really do; for the entire life of a preschool class revolves around the children adapting to the few people in charge, who should behave naturally so that the children feel stimulated to imitate whatever their teachers do.

It is unnecessary for preschool staff to go from one child to another and show each one what to do. Children do not yet want to follow given instructions. All they want is to copy what the adult does, so the task of a kindergarten teacher is to adjust the work taken from daily life so that it becomes suitable for the children's play activities. There is no need to devise occupations like those adults meet in life—except under special circumstances—such as work that requires specialized skills. For example, children of preschool age are told to make parallel cuts in strips of paper and then to push multi-colored paper strips through the slits so that a woven colored pattern finally emerges. This kind of mechanical process in a kindergarten actually prevents children from engaging in normal or congenial activities. It would be better to give them some very simple sewing or embroidery to do. Whatever a young child is told to do should not be artificially contrived by adults who are comfortable in our intellectual culture, but should arise from the tasks of ordinary life. The whole point of a preschool is to give young children the opportunity to imitate life in a simple and wholesome way.

This adjustment to adult life is an immensely important pedagogical task until kindergarten age, with all its purposefulness, so that what is done there will satisfy the child's natural and inborn need for activity. To contrive little stick games or design paper weaving cards is simple enough. It is a tremendously important and necessary task to whittle down our complicated forms of life, such as a child does when, for example, a little boy plays with a spade or some other tool, or when a girl plays with a doll; in this way children transform adult occupations into child's play, including the more complicated activities of the adult world. It is time-consuming work for which hardly any previous “spade-work” has thus far been done. One needs to recognize that in children's imitation, in all their sense-directed activities, moral and spiritual forces are working—artistic impulses that allow the child to respond in an entirely individual way.

Give a child a handkerchief or a piece of cloth, knot it so that a head appears above and two legs below, and you have made a doll or a kind of clown. With a few ink stains you can give it eyes, nose, and mouth, or even better, allow the child to do it, and with such a doll, you will see a healthy child have great joy. Now the child can add many other features belonging to a doll, through imagination and imitation within the soul. It is far better if you make a doll out of a linen rag than if you give the child one of those perfect dolls, possibly with highly colored cheeks and smartly dressed, a doll that even closes its eyes when put down horizontally, and so on. What are you doing if you give the child such a doll? You are preventing the unfolding of the child's own soul activity. Every time a completely finished object catches its eye, the child has to suppress an innate desire for soul activity, the unfolding of a wonderfully delicate, awakening fantasy. You thus separate children from life, because you hold them back from their own inner activity. So much for the child until the change of teeth.

When children enter school, we are very likely to meet a certain inner opposition, mainly toward reading and writing, as mentioned yesterday. Try to see the situation through a child's eyes. There stands a man. He has black or blond hair. He has a forehead, nose, eyes. He has legs. He walks, and he holds something in his hands. He says something. He has his own thought-life. This is father. And now the child is supposed to accept that this sign, FATHER represents an actual father. There is not the slightest reason why a child should do so.

Children bring formative forces with them, forces eager to flow out of the organism. Previously, these forces were instrumental in effecting the wonderful formation of the brain with its attendant nervous system. They accomplished the wonderful formation of the second teeth. One should become modest and ask how one could possibly create, out of one's own resources, these second teeth on the basis of the first baby teeth; what sublime powers of wisdom, of which we are totally unaware, work in all these forces! The child was entirely surrendered to this unconscious wisdom weaving through the formative forces. Children live in space and time, and now, suddenly, they are supposed to make sense of everything that is imposed on them by learning to read and write.

It is not proper to lead children directly into the final stages of our advanced culture. We must lead them in harmony with what wants to flow from their own being. The right way of introducing the child to reading and writing is to allow the formative forces—which up to its seventh year have been working upon the physical organization and which now are being released for outer soul activities—to become actively engaged.

For example, instead of presenting the child directly with letters or even complete words, you draw something looking like this:

In this way, by appealing to the formative forces in its soul, you will find that now the child can remember something that has actual meaning, something already grasped by the child's formative forces. Such a child will tell you, “That is a mouth.” And now you can ask it to say, “Mmmouth.” Then you ask it to leave out the end part of the word, gradually getting the child to pronounce “Mmm.” Next you can say, “Let us paint what you have just said.” We have left something out, therefore this is what we paint:

And now let us make it even simpler:

It has become the letter M.

Or we might draw something looking like this.

The child will say, “Fish.” The teacher responds, “Let's make this fish simpler.” Again one will ask the child to sound only the first letter, in this way obtaining the letter F. And so, from these pictures, we lead to abstract letter forms.

There is no need to go back into history to show how contemporary writing evolved from ancient pictography. For our pedagogical purposes it is really unnecessary to delve into the history of civilization. All we have to do is find our way—helped along by wings of fantasy—into this method, and then, no matter what language we speak, choose some characteristic words that we then transform into pictures and finally derive the actual letters from them. In this way we work together with what the child wants inwardly during and immediately after the change of teeth. From this you will understand that, after having introduced writing by drawing a painting and by painting a drawing (it is good for children to use color immediately because they live in color, as everyone who deals with them knows), one can then progress to reading. This is because the entire human being is active in writing. The hand is needed, and the whole body has to adapt itself—even if only to a slight degree; the entire person is involved. Writing, when evolved through painting-drawing, is still more concrete than reading. When reading—well, one just sits, one has already become like a timid mouse, because only the head has to work. Reading has already become abstract. It should be evolved by degrees as part of the whole process.

But if one adopts this method in order to work harmoniously with human nature, it can become extraordinarily difficult to withstand modern prejudices. Naturally, pupils will learn to read a little later than expected today, and if they have to change schools they appear less capable than the other students in their new class. Yet, is it really justified that we cater to the views of a materialistic culture with its demands concerning what an eight-year-old child should know? The real point is that it may not be beneficial at all for such a child to learn to read too early. By doing so, something is being blocked for life. If children learn to read too early, they are led prematurely into abstractions. If reading were taught a little later, countless potential sclerotics could lead happier lives. Such hardening of the entire human organism—to give it a simpler name—manifests in the most diverse forms of sclerosis later in life, and can be traced back to a faulty method of introducing reading to a child. Of course, such symptoms can result from many other causes as well, but the point is that the effects of soul and spirit on a person's physical constitution are enhanced hygienically if the teaching at school is attuned to human nature. If you know how to form your lessons properly, you will be able to give your students the best foundation for health. And you can be sure that, if the methods of modern educational systems were healthier, far fewer men would be walking around with bald heads!

People with a materialistic outlook give too little attention to the mutual interaction between the soul-spiritual nature and the physical body. Again and again I want to point out that the tragedy of the current materialistic attitude is that it no longer understands the material processes—which it observes only externally—and that it no longer recognizes how a moral element enters the physical. Already the way the human being is treated—one could almost say mistreated—by our natural science is likely to lead to misconceptions about what a human being is. You need only think of the usual kinds of illustrations found in contemporary textbooks on physiology or anatomy, where you see pictures of the skeleton, the nervous system, and the blood circulation. The way these are drawn is very suggestive, implying that they are a true representation of reality. And yet, they do not convey the actual facts at all—or at best, only ten percent of them, because ninety percent of the human body consists of liquid substances that constantly flow and, consequently, cannot be drawn in fixed outlines. Now you may say, “Physiologists know that!” True, but this knowledge remains within the circle of physiologists. It does not enter society as a whole, particularly because of the strongly suggestive influence of these illustrations.

People are even less aware of something else. Not only does solid matter make up the smallest portion of our physical body, while the largest part by far is liquid, but we are also creatures of air every moment of our lives. One moment the air around us is inside us, and in the next, the air within our body is outside again. We are part of the surrounding air that is constantly fluctuating within us. And what about the conditions of warmth? In reality we have to discriminate between our solid, liquid, gaseous, and warmth organizations. These distinctions could be extended further, but for now we will stop here.

It will become evident that meaningless and erroneous ideas are maintained about these matters when we consider the following: If these illustrations of the skeleton, the nervous system, and so on, really represented the true situation—always implying that the human being is a solid organism—if this were really the whole truth, then it would be little wonder if the moral element, the life of the soul, could not penetrate this solid bone matter or this apparently rigid blood circulation. The physical and moral life would require separate existences. But if you include the liquid, gaseous, and warmth organizations in your picture of the individual, then you have a fine agent, a refined entity—for example, in the varying states of warmth—that allows the existing moral constitution to extend also into the physical processes of warmth. If your picture is based on reality, you will come to find this unity between what has physical nature and what has moral nature. This is what you have to remember when working with the growing human being. It is essential to have this awareness.

And so it is very important for us to look at the totality of the human being and find our way, unimpeded by generally accepted physiological-psychological attitudes. It will enable us to know how to treat the child who will otherwise develop inner opposition toward what must be learned. It should be our aim to allow our young students to grow gradually and naturally into their subjects, because then they will also love what they have to learn. But this will happen only if their inner forces become involved fully in these new activities.

The most damaging effects, just during the age of seven to nine, are caused by one-sided illusions, by fixed ideas about how certain things should be taught. For example, the nineteenth century—but this was already prepared for in the eighteenth century—was tremendously proud of the new phonetic method of teaching reading that superseded the old method of making words by adding single letters—a method that was again replaced by the whole-word method. And because today people are too embarrassed to openly respect old ways, one will hardly find anyone prepared to defend the old spelling method. According to present opinion, such a person would be considered an old crank, because enthusiasm about an old-fashioned spelling method is simply not appropriate. The phonetic and the whole-word method carry the day. One feels very proud of the phonetic method, teaching the child to develop a feeling for the quality of sounds. No longer do young pupils learn to identify separate letters, such as P, N, or R; they are taught to pronounce the letters as they sound in a word.

There is nothing wrong with that. The whole-word method is also good, and it sometimes even begins by analyzing a complete sentence, from which the teacher progresses to separate words and then to single sounds. It is bad, however, when these things become fads. The ideas that underlie all three methods are good—there is no denying that each has its merits. But what is it that makes this so? Imagine that you know a person only from a photograph showing a front view. The picture will have created a certain image within you of that person. Now imagine that another picture falls into your hands, and someone tells you that this is the same person. The second picture shows a side view and creates such a different impression that you may be convinced that it could not be the same person. Yet in reality both photographs show the same individual, but from different angles. And this is how it always is in life: everything has to be considered from different angles. It is easy to fall in love with one's own particular perspective because it appears to be so convincing. And so one might, with good reasons, defend the spelling method, the phonetic method, or the whole-word method to the extent that anyone else with an opposite opinion could not refute one's arguments. Yet even the best of reasons may prove to be only one-sided. In real life, everything has to be considered from the most varied angles.

If the letter forms have been gained through painting drawings and drawing paintings, and if one has gone on to a kind of phonetic or whole-word method—which is now appropriate because it leads the child to an appreciation of a wholeness, and prevents it from becoming too fixed in details—if all this has been done, there is still something else that has been overlooked in our materialistic climate. It is this: the single sound, by itself, the separate M or P, this also represents a reality. And it is important to see that, when a sound is part of a word, it has already entered the external world, already passed into the material and physical world. What we have in our soul are the sounds as such, and these depend largely on our soul nature. When we pronounce letters, such as the letter M, for example, we actually say “em.” Ancient Greeks did not do this; they pronounced it “mu.” In other words, they pronounced the auxiliary vowel after the consonant, whereas we put it before the consonant. In Middle Europe today, we make the sound of a letter by proceeding from the vowel to the consonant, but in ancient Greece only the reverse path was taken.² This indicates the underlying soul condition of the people concerned.

Here we have a significant and important phenomenon. If you look at language, not just from an external or utilitarian perspective (since language today has become primarily a way of transmitting thoughts or messages, and words are hardly more than symbols of outer things), and if you return to the soul element living in the word—living in language as a whole—you will find the way back to the true nature of the so-called sound; every sound with a quality of the consonant has an entirely different character from a vowel sound.

As you know, there are many different theories explaining the origin of language. (This is a situation similar to photographs taken from different angles.) Among others, there is the so-called bow-wow theory, which represents the view that words imitate sounds that come from different beings or objects. According to this theory, when people first began to speak, they imitated characteristic external sounds. For example, they heard a dog barking, “bow-wow.” If they wanted to express a similar soul mood they produced a similar sound. No one can refute such an idea. On the contrary, there are many valid reasons to support the bow-wow theory. As long as one argues only from this particular premise, it is indisputable. But life does not consist of proofs and refutations; life is full of living movement, transformation, living metamorphosis. What is correct in one particular situation can be wrong in another, and vice versa. Life has to be comprehended in all its mobility.

As you may know, there is another theory, called the ding-dong theory, whose adherents strongly oppose the bow-wow theory. According to this second theory, the origin of language is explained in the following way: When a bell is struck, the ensuing sound is caused by the specific constitution of its metal. A similar mutual relationship between object and sound is also ascribed to human speech. The ding-dong theory represents more of a feeling into the materiality of things, rather than an imitation of external sounds.

Again, this theory is really correct in certain respects. Much could be said for either of these theories. In reality, however, language did not arise exclusively according to the ding-dong theory nor the bow-wow theory, although both theories have elements of truth. Many other related factors would also have to be considered, but each theory, in isolation, gives only a one-sided perspective. There are many instances in our language that exemplify the ding-dong theory, and many others where sound represents an imitation, as in “bow-wow,” or in the “moo” of lowing cattle. The fact is, both theories are correct, and many others as well. What is important is to get hold of life as it actually is; and if one does this, one will find that the bow-wow theory is more related to vowels, and the ding-dong theory related more to consonants. Again, not entirely, however; such a statement would also be one-sided, because eventually one will see that the consonants are formed as a kind of reflection of events or shapes in our environment, as I have indicated already in the little book The Spiritual Guidance of the Individual and Humanity.³ Thus the letter F is formed as a likeness of the fish, M as a likeness of the mouth, or L like leaping, and so on.

To a certain extent, the origin of the consonants could be explained by the ding-dong theory, except that it would have to be worked out in finer detail. The vowels, on the other hand, are a way of expressing and revealing a person's inner nature. The forms of the letters that express vowel sounds do not imitate external things at all, but express human feelings of sympathy and antipathy. Feelings of joy or curiosity are expressed, therefore, by the sound EE; amazement or wonder; “I am astonished!” is expressed by AH; A (as in path) expresses “I want to get rid of something that irritates me.” U (as in you) expresses “I am frightened.” I (as in kind) conveys “I like you.”

Vowels reveal directly feelings of sympathy and antipathy. Far from being the result of imitation, they enable human beings to communicate likes and dislikes. When hearing a dog's threatening bark, human beings—if their feelings are like those of the dog—adapt their own experiences to the bow-wow sound of the dog, and so on. Vocalizing leads outward from within, whereas forming consonants represents a movement inward from outside. Consonants reproduce outer things. Simply by making these sounds, one is copying outer nature. You can confirm this for yourselves if you go into further detail.

Since all of this applies only to sounds rather than words, however, you can appreciate that, when using the analytic method, one is actually going from the whole word to the original soul condition. In general, we must always try to recognize what the child at each stage is requesting inwardly; then we can proceed in freedom—just as a good photographer does when asking clients to look in many different directions in order to capture their personalities while taking their pictures (and thereby making these sessions so tedious!). Similarly, a complete view is essential if one wants to comprehend the human being in depth.

With the whole-word method one gains only the physical aspect. With the phonetic method one approaches the soul realm. And—no matter how absurd this may sound—with the spelling method one actually enters the realm of the soul. Today this last method is, of course, seen as a form of idiocy; without a doubt, however, it is more closely related to the soul than the other methods. It must not be applied directly, but needs to be introduced with a certain pedagogical skill and artistry that avoids an overly one-sided exercise in conventional pronunciation of the letters. Instead, the child will gain some experience of how letters came about, and this is something that can live within the formative forces, something real for the child. This is the core of the matter. And if young pupils have been taught in this way they will be able to read in due time—perhaps a few months after the ninth year. It doesn't really matter if they cannot read earlier, because they have learned it naturally and in a wholesome way. Depending on the various children's responses, this stage may occur a little earlier or later.

The ninth year marks the beginning of a smaller life cycle—the larger ones have already been spoken of several times. They are: from birth to the change of teeth; from the change of teeth to puberty; and from then into the twenties. These days, however, by the time young people have reached their twenties, one no longer dares speak to them of another developmental phase, which will peak after the age of twenty-one. This would be considered a pure insult! At that age they feel fully mature—they already publish their own articles in newspapers and magazines. And so one has to exercise great discretion in speaking about life's later stages of development. But it is important for the educator to know about the larger life periods and also about the smaller ones contained in them. Between the ninth and the tenth years, but closer to the ninth, one of the smaller periods begins, when a child gradually awakens to the difference between self and the surrounding world. Only then does a child become aware of being a separate I. All teaching before this stage should therefore make the child feel at one with the surroundings.

The most peculiar ideas have been expressed to explain this phenomenon. For example, you may have heard people say, “When a young child gets hurt by running into a corner, the reaction is to hit the corner.” An intellectual interpretation of this phenomenon would be that one hits back only if one has consciously received a hurt or an injury consciously inflicted. And this is how the child's response in hitting a table or other object is explained. This kind of definition always tempts one to quote the Greek example of a definition of the human being—that is, a human being is a living creature who has two legs but no feathers. As far as definitions go, this is actually correct. It leads us back into the times of ancient Greece. I won't go into details to show that present definitions in physics are often not much better, because there children are also taught frequently that a human being is a creature that walks on two legs and has no feathers. A boy who was a bit brighter than the rest thought about this definition. He caught a cockerel, plucked its feathers, and took it to school. He presented the plucked bird, saying, “This is a human being! It is a creature that walks on two legs and has no feathers.” Well, definitions may have their uses, but they are almost always one-sided.

The important thing is to find one's way into life as it really is—something I have to repeat time and again. The point is that before the ninth year a child does not yet distinguish between self and surroundings. Therefore one cannot say that a little child, when hitting the table that caused it pain, imagines the table to be a living thing. It would never occur to a child to think so. This so-called animism, the bestowal of a soul on an inanimate object—an idea that has already crept into our history of civilization—is something that simply does not exist. The fantastic theories of some of our erudite scholars, who believe they have discovered that human beings endow inanimate objects with a soul, are truly astonishing. Whole mythologies have been explained away in light of this theory. It strikes one that people who spread such ideas have never met a primitive person. For example, it would never occur to a simple peasant who has remained untouched by our sophisticated ways of life to endow natural phenomena with a soul quality. Concepts such as ensouling or animation of dead objects simply do not exist for the child. The child feels alive, and consequently everything around the child must also be alive. But even such a primitive idea does not enter children's dim and dreamy consciousness. This is why, when teaching pupils under nine, you must not let the children's environment and all that it contains appear as something separate from them. You must allow plants to come to life—indeed, everything must live and speak to children, because they do not yet distinguish between themselves and the world as a whole.

It is obvious from this that, before the ninth year, you cannot reach children with any kind of intellectual descriptions. Everything has to be transformed into pictures, into fresh and living pictures. As soon as you go on to a more direct description, you will not achieve anything during the eighth to ninth year. This approach becomes possible only later. One has to find the way into each specific life period. Until the ninth year children only understand a pictorial presentation. Anything else bypasses them, just as sound bypasses the eye. But between the ninth and tenth years, as children gradually become more aware of their own identity, you can begin to present more factual descriptions of plants. However, it is not yet possible to describe anything that belongs to the mineral kingdom, because the children's newly evolving capacity to differentiate between self and world is not yet strong enough to allow them to comprehend the significant difference between what is inherently alive and what belongs to the dead mineral world. Children at this stage can only appreciate the difference between themselves and a plant. Thereafter you can gradually progress to a description of animals. But again this has to be done so that the introduction to the animal world remains real for the child.

Today there is an established form of botany, and along with that a tendency to introduce this subject just as it is in the lower grades. This is done out of a kind of laziness, but it really is an appalling thing to present the botany of adults to younger classes. What is this botany of ours in actuality? It is made up of a systematic classification of plants, arranged according to certain accepted principles. First come the fungi, then algae, ranunculaceae, and so on—one family placed neatly next to another. But if such a branch of science (which itself may be quite acceptable) is taught to young children in schools, it is almost like arranging different kinds of hairs, plucked from a human body, and classifying them systematically according to where they grew—behind the ears, on the head, on the legs, and so on. Following this method, you might manage to build up a very impressive system, but it would not help you understand the true nature of hair. And because it seems almost too obvious, one might easily neglect to relate the various types of hair to the human being as an entity. The plant world does not have its own separate existence either, because it is part of Earth. You may think that you know the laburnum from what you find about it in a botany book. I have no objections to its botanical classification. But to understand why its blossoms are yellow, you have to see it on a sunny slope, and you have to include in your observation the various layers of soil from which it grows. Only then can you realize that its yellow color is connected with the colors of the soil from which it grows! But in this situation you look at this plant as you would look at hair growing out of a human body. Earth and plants—as far as the child knows them already—remain one. You must not teach adult botany in the lower grades, and this means you cannot describe a plant without, at the same time, also talking about the Sun shining on it, about climatic conditions and the configuration of the soil—in a manner appropriate to the age of the child, of course.

To teach botany as this is done in demonstrations—taking isolated plants, one next to another, violates the child's nature. Even in demonstrations everything depends on the choice of object to be studied. The child has an instinctive feeling for what is living and for what is truly real. If you bring something dead, you wound what is alive in the child, you attack a child's sense of truth and reality. But these days there is little awareness of the subtle differences in these qualities. Imagine contemporary philosophers pondering the concept of being, of existence. It would make very little difference to them whether they chose a crystal or a blossom as an object of contemplation, because both of them are. One can place them both on a table, and both things exist. But this is not the truth at all! In regard to their being, they are not homogeneous. You can pick up the rock crystal again after three years; it is by the power of its own existence. But the blossom is not as it appears at all. A blossom, taken by itself, is a falsehood in nature. In order to assign existence or being to the blossom, one has to describe the entire plant. By itself, the blossom is an abstraction in the world of matter. This is not true of the rock crystal. But people today have lost the sense for such differentiations within the reality of things.

Children, however, still have this feeling by instinct. If you bring something to children that is not a whole, they experience a strange feeling, which can follow them into later life. Otherwise Tagore would not have described the sinister impression that the amputated leg had on him in his childhood. A human leg in itself does not represent reality, it has nothing to do with reality. For a leg is only a leg as long as it is part of a whole organism. If cut off, it ceases to be a leg.

Such things have to become flesh and blood again so that, by progressing from the whole to the parts, we comprehend reality. It can happen all too easily that we treat a separate part in a completely wrong way if we isolate it. In the case of botany in the lower grades, therefore, we must start with the Earth as a whole and look at the plants as if they were the hair growing out of it.

With regard to the animal world, children cannot relate properly to the animal at all if you follow the common method of classification. Since animal study is introduced only in the tenth or eleventh year, you can then expect a little more from the children. But to teach the study of animals according to the usual classification has little real meaning for students of that age, even if this method is scientifically justified. The reality is that the entire animal kingdom represents a human being that is spread out. Take a lion, for example; there you see a onesided development of the chest organization. Take the elephant; here the entire organization is oriented toward a lengthening of the upper lip. In the case of the giraffe, the entire organization strives toward a longer neck. If you can thus see a one-sided development of a human organic system in each animal, and survey the entire animal kingdom all the way down to the insect (one could go even further, down to the “geological” animals, though Terebratulida are not really geological animals any more) then you will realize that the entire animal kingdom is a “human being,” spread out like an opened fan, and the human physical organization makes up the entire animal kingdom, folded together like a closed fan. This is how one can bring the mutual relationship between the human being and the animal into proper perspective. Putting all this into such few words is making it into an abstraction, of course. You will have to transform it into living substance until you can describe each animal-form in terms of a one-sided development of a specific human organic system. If you can find the necessary strength to give your pupils a lively description of animals in this sense, you will soon see how they respond. For this is what they want to hear.

And so the plants are linked to the Earth as if they were the hair of the Earth. The animal is linked to the human being and seen as a one-sided development of various human organic systems. It is as if human arms or legs—and in other instances, the human nose or trunk, and so on—had grown into separate existences in order to live as animals on Earth. This is how pupils can understand the animal-forms. It will enable the teacher to form lessons that are attuned to what lives in the growing human being, in the children themselves.

A question is asked concerning religious instruction.

RUDOLF STEINER: A misunderstanding has arisen from my preliminary remarks about child development and religious impulses. So far nothing has been said in my lectures about religious instruction itself, because I began to talk only today about the practical application of the Waldorf way of teaching. I told you that there is a kind of physical-religious relationship (I called it bodily-religious) between children and their environment. Furthermore, I said that what young children exercised—simply because of their organism—entered the sphere of thinking only after puberty, after approximately the fourteenth or fifteenth year. What manifests at first in a physical-spiritual way, continues in a hidden existence, and re-emerges in the thinking realm in approximately the fifteenth year; I compared that with an underground stream surfacing again on lower ground. For an adult, religion is closely linked to the thinking sphere. If teaching, however, is to be in line with the child's natural development, what will emerge later must already be carefully prepared for during an earlier stage. And thus the question arises: Bearing these laws of human development in mind, how should the religion lessons be planned for the students between the ages of six and fourteen? This is one of the questions that will be addressed in coming lectures.

In anticipation, however, I would like to say that we must be clear that the religious element is simply inborn in the child, that it is part of the child's being. This is revealed particularly clearly through the child's religious orientation until the change of teeth, as I have already described it. What has eventually become religion in our general civilization—taken in an adult sense—belongs naturally to the world of ideas, or at least depends on ideation for its substance, which, true enough, lives primarily in the adult's feeling realm. Only after the fourteenth year is the adolescent mature enough to appreciate the ideal quality and substance of religion. For the class teacher (grades one through eight) the important question thus arises: How should we arrange our religion lessons? Or, more precisely: What part of the child must we appeal to through religion lessons during the time between the seventh and fourteenth years?

During the first life period, until the change of teeth, we directly affect the child's physical organization through an educational influence. After puberty, fundamentally speaking, we work on the powers of judgment and on the adolescent's mental imagery. During the intervening years we work upon the child's feeling life. This is why we should lead the child into this period with a pictorial approach, because pictures work directly in soul life (Gemüt).⁴ The powers of mental imagery mature only gradually, and they have to be prepared well before their proper time. What we now have to do in religion lessons is appeal, above all, to the children's soul life, as I will describe it in regard to other subjects tomorrow. The question is: How do we do it?

We work on the children's soul life by allowing them to experience feelings of sympathy and antipathy. This means that we act properly by developing the kind of sympathies and antipathies between the seventh and fourteenth years that will lead finally to proper judgments in the religious sphere. And so we avoid Thou shalt or Thou shalt not attitudes in our religion lessons, because it has little value for teaching a child of this age. Instead we arrange lessons so that feelings of sympathy are induced for what the child is meant to do. We do not explain our real aims to children. Using the pictorial element as medium, we present children with what fills them with feelings of sympathy in a heightened sense, as well as in a religious sense. Likewise, we try to induce feelings of antipathy toward what they are not meant to do.

In this way, on the strength of feelings of right or wrong, and always through the pictorial element, we try to direct the young students gradually from the divine-spiritual in nature, through the divine-spiritual in the human being, toward having children make the divine-spiritual their own. This has to all reach the child through the life of soul, however, certainly until eighth grade. We must avoid a dogmatic approach and setting up moral commandments. We must do all we can to prepare the child's soul for what should develop later on as the adult faculty of forming sound judgments. In this way we will do far more for the child's future religious orientation than by presenting religious commandments or fixed articles of faith at an age when children are not yet ready for them. By clothing our subject in images, thus preparing the ground for what in later life will emerge as religious judgment, we prepare our students for the possibility of comprehending through their own spirituality what they are meant to grasp as their own innermost being—that is, their religious orientation. Through appealing to the children's soul-life in religion lessons—that is, by presenting our subject pictorially rather than through articles of faith or in the form of moral commandments—we grant them the freedom to find their own religious orientation later in life. It is extremely important for young people, from puberty right into their twenties, to have the opportunity to lift, by their own strength, what they first received through their soul life—given with a certain breadth from many perspectives—into conscious individual judgments. It will enable them to find their own way to the divine world.

It makes all the difference whether children, during the age of authority, are brought up in a particular religious belief, or whether, by witnessing the teacher's underlying religious attitude, they are enabled “to pull themselves up like a plant on its tendrils,” and thus develop their own morality later in life. Having first found pleasure or displeasure in what was finally condensed into an attitude of Thou shalt or Thou shalt not, and having learned to recognize, through a pictorial contemplation of nature, how the human soul becomes free through an inner picture of a divine-spiritual weaving in nature and in history, a new stage is reached where young people's own images and ideas can be formed. In this way the possibility is given of receiving religious education out of the center of life itself. It is something that becomes possible only after puberty has been reached.

The point is that future stages have to be prepared for properly—that is, based on the correct insight into human nature. In my lectures I have used the comparison of the river that disappears underground and resurfaces at a lower level. During the first seven years the children have an inborn religious attitude. This now enters the depths of their souls, becoming part of them, and does not resurface in the form of thinking until the arrival of puberty. During the second life period we must work into the depths of the students' souls through what is revealed to our individual insights. In this way we prepare them to grow into religious adults. We impede this process if we do not offer our students the possibility to find their own religious orientation later on. In every human being there is an individual orientation toward religion, which, after the fifteenth year, has to be gradually won. Our task is to prepare the ground so that this can happen properly. That is why, at this age, we have to treat the religion lessons just as we do the lessons in the other subjects. They must all work on the child's soul through the power of imagery; the child's soul life has to be stimulated. It is possible to introduce a religious element into every subject, even into math lessons. Anyone who has some knowledge of Waldorf teaching will know that this statement is true. A Christian element pervades every subject, even mathematics. This fundamental religious current flows through all of education.

Because of prevailing circumstances, however, we have felt it necessary to come to the following arrangement regarding religious instruction. I would like to point out once more that Waldorf schools are not ideological but pedagogical schools, where the basic demand is that our teaching methods be in harmony with the child's nature. Thus we neither wish nor intend to teach our students to become anthroposophists. We have chosen anthroposophy to be the foundation simply because we believe that a true method of teaching can flow from it. Our Catholic students are taught by visiting Catholic priests, and our Protestant students by visiting Protestant ministers. Waldorf students, whose parents are free-thinkers, and who otherwise would not receive any religious instruction at all, are given religion lessons by our own teachers. The surprising fact has emerged, however, that nearly all of our Waldorf students now attend the religion lessons presented by Waldorf teachers. They have all flocked to the so-called “free” religion lessons, lessons that, in their own way, comprise what permeates all of our teaching.⁵

These free religion lessons have certainly caused us a great deal of concern. Our relationship to the school is very unusual regarding these lessons. We consider all the other subjects as necessary and intrinsic to our education from the point of view of the principles and methods resulting from anthroposophical research. But, regarding the free religion lessons, we feel that we are on the same footing as the visiting Catholic or Protestant teachers. In this sense, Waldorf teachers who give religion lessons are also “outsiders.” We do not want to have an ideological or confessional school, not even in an anthroposophical sense. Nevertheless, anthroposophical methods have proven to be very fertile ground for just these free religion lessons, in which we do not teach anthroposophy, but in which we build up and form according to the methods already characterized.

Many objections have been raised against these free religion lessons, not least because so many children have changed over from the denominational to the free religion lessons. This has brought many other difficulties with it, for, despite our shortage of teachers, we had to find among our existing staff one new religion teacher after another. It is hardly our fault if pupils desert their denominational religion lessons because they wish to join the free religion lessons. The obvious reason is that the visiting religion teachers do not apply Waldorf methods, and the right methods are always the decisive factor, in religious instruction as well.

A further question is asked about religious lessons.

RUDOLF STEINER: The characteristic mark of Waldorf education should be that all educational questions and problems are considered only from the pedagogical angle, and religion lessons are no exception. The Reverend Mr. X would certainly acknowledge that the two directions mentioned, namely the possibility of replacing religion lessons by moral instruction on the one hand, and that of denominational schools on the other, have been raised from very different viewpoints. The suggestion of replacing religious instruction with lessons in moral conduct is usually presented by those who want to eliminate religion altogether, and who maintain the opinion that religion has become more or less superfluous. On the other hand, a tendency toward religious dogma can easily cause a longing for denominational schools. Neither of these are pedagogical points of view.

In order to link them a little more precisely to the aspect of teaching method, I would like to ask: What constitutes the pedagogical point of view? Surely it is the assumption that a human being is not yet complete during the stage of childhood or youth—something very obvious. A child has to grow gradually into a full human individual, which will be achieved only during the course of life. This implies that all potential and dormant faculties in the child should be educated—and here we have the pedagogical point of view in its most abstract form.

If someone who represents the purely pedagogical outlook that results from insight into human nature were to now declare that a child comes into the world with an inborn kinship to the religious element, and that during the first seven years the child's corporeality is steeped in religion, only to hear a call for replacing religion lessons by lessons in ethics, it must strike such a person as if those who hold such an idea would be unwilling to exercise a human limb, say a leg, because they had concluded that the human being needs to be trained in every respect except in the use of legs! To call for the exclusion of an essential part of the human being can only stem from a fanatical attitude, but never from a real pedagogy. Insofar as only pedagogical principles are being defended and pedagogical impulses scrutinized here, the necessity of religious teaching certainly follows from the pedagogical point of view. This is why we have established the free religion lessons for those children who, according to the regulations of the school authorities, would otherwise have been deprived of religious instruction, as already stated. Through this arrangement, and because all the children belonging to this category are attending the free religion lessons, there is no student in the Waldorf school who does not have religious instruction. This procedure has made it possible for us to bring back the religious life into the entire school.

To speak of the proper cultivation of the religious life at school, and to counter the effects of the so-called “religion-free enlightenment,” by appealing to the inborn religious disposition in the young, may be the best way forward to a religious renewal. I consider it a certain success for the Waldorf school to have brought religion to the children of religious dissidents. The Catholic and Protestant children would have received religious instruction in any case, but it really was not at all easy to find the appropriate form that would enable us to open this subject to all our children. It was strived for only from the pedagogical point of view.

• 1. The first kindergarten in the Waldorf School was opened a short time later under Steiner's direction.
• 2. In several European languages the vowel sound added to a consonantal letter is pronounced either before or after the consonant (that is, em, but dee). It is conceivable that here the stenographer may have omitted the word “often,” and the text may have read “In Middle Europe today we often make the sound of a letter by proceeding from the vowel to the consonant ...”—Translator.
• 3. Rudolf Steiner, The Spiritual Guidance of the Individual and Humanity, Anthroposophic Press, Hudson, NY, 1992.
• 4. Gemüt is virtually untranslatable. Rudolf Steiner said “this Gemüt lives in the center of soul life.” A dictionary defines it as “heart, soul, or mind.” But these must be considered as one rather than as three separate things. Thus, one can read Gem¼t as “soul,” that is, heart and mind together.
• 5. Free, as used here means “nonsectarian.”

When we look over the history of the last few years and ask ourselves how the social problems and needs occupying the public mind for more than half a century have been dealt with, we can find only one answer. Although in the greater part of the civilized world, opportunity to carry out in practice their ideas of reconstructing social life was given to people who, after their own fashion, had devoted themselves for decades to the study of social problems, yet it must be regarded as extremely characteristic of the age that all the theories and all the views which are the result of half a century of social work from every quarter have shown themselves powerless to reconstruct the present social conditions.

Of late years, much has been destroyed and, in the eyes of all observant persons, little, or probably nothing, built up. Does not the question force itself here upon the human soul: What is the cause of this impotence of so-called advanced views, in the face of some positive task? Shortly before the great catastrophe of the World-War, in the spring of 1914, I ventured to answer this question in a short series of lectures which I delivered in Vienna before a small audience. A larger number of hearers would probably have treated what was said with ridicule. In regard to all the assumptions of the so-called experts in practical affairs as to the immediate future, I ventured to say that an exact observer of the inner life of humanity could see in the social conditions prevailing all over the civilized world something like an abscess, like a social disease, a kind of cancerous growth, which must inevitably very soon break out in a terrible manner over this world. Those practical statesmen, who were then talking of the “improvement in political relations” and the like, looked upon this as the pessimism of an idealist. But that was the utterance of a conviction gained by a study of human evolution from the point of view of spiritual science, which I will describe to you this evening. To this kind of research the building known as the Dornach Building, the Goetheanum, is dedicated. Situated in the corner of the northwest of Switzerland, this building is the outer representative of the movement whose object is the study of the spiritual science of which I speak. You will hear and read all kinds of assertions about the aims and object of this building and the meaning of the movement which it is intended to represent. And it may be said in most cases that the gossip about these things is the very opposite of the truth; mysterious nonsense, false and senseless mysticism, many varieties of obscure nonsense are attached to the work attempted by this movement in the building at Dornach representing it. It cannot be expected that anything but misunderstandings without number should still exist regarding this movement of spiritual life. In reality, the meaning of the movement is to be found in its striving with set purpose to bring about a renewal of our whole civilization, as it is expressed in art, religion, science, education, and other human activities; in fact, it may truly be said that a renewal is sorely needed from the very foundations of social life upwards. This stream of spiritual life leads us to the conviction, already indicated by me. in these lectures, that it is no longer of any use to devise net schemes for world-improvement; from its very nature, human evolution demands a transformation of thoughts and ideas, of the most intimate life of feeling of humanity itself. Such a transformation is the aim of spiritual science, as it is represented in this movement. Spiritual science stimulates the belief that the views of society, of which we have just spoken, proceed from the old habits of thought which have not kept pace with the evolution of humanity and are no longer suited to its present life. These views have been clearly proved useless in aiding the reconstruction of social life.

What we need is understanding. What is really the meaning of all the subconscious yearnings, of the demands, which have not yet penetrated into the conscious thought of our present humanity? What do they mean, above all things, with regard to art, with regard to science, religion, and education? Let us look at the new directions followed by art, especially of late! I know well that in giving the following little sketch of the development of art, I must inevitably give offence to many; indeed, what I am going to say will be taken by many as a proof of the most complete lack of understanding of the later schools of art.

If we except a few isolated, very commendable efforts of recent years, the chief characteristic in the development of modern art is that it has lost that inner impulse which should drive it to place before the world that which is felt by humanity as a pressing need. The opinion has grown more and more common that, in contemplating a work of art. we must ask: How much of the spirit and significance of outer reality does it express? How far is external nature or human life reflected in art? One need only ask, what meaning has such a criterion with respect to a “Raphael”, or a “Leonardo”, or to any other real work of art? Do we not see in such great works of art that the resemblance to the outer reality surrounding us is by no means the measure of their greatness? Do we not see the measure of their greatness in the creation of something from within that is far removed from the immediate outer reality? What worlds are those that unroll before us as we gaze at the now almost effaced picture at Milan, Leonardo's Last Supper, or when we stand before a “Raphael”? Is it not a matter of secondary importance that those painters have succeeded more or less well in depicting the laws of nature in their work? Is it not their chief aim to tell us something of a, world which we do not see when we only use our eyes, when, we perceive only with our outer senses? And do we not find more and more that the only criterion now applied in judging a, work of art, or in judging anything artistic, is whether the thing is really true, and “true” here is to be understood in the ordinary naturalistic sense of the word. Let us ask ourselves—strange as the question may appear to the holders of certain artistic views—what does an art confer on life, actually on social life, what is an art, which aspires to nothing higher, than the reproduction of a part of external reality?

At the time in which modern capitalism and modern technical science became a power, landscape painting began to be developed in the world of art. I know, of course, that landscape painting is justified, fully justified from an artistic point of view. But it is also true, that no artistically perfect landscape painting, however perfect, equals in any sense the scene lying before me, as I stand on a mountain side and contemplate Nature's: own landscape. Precisely the rise of landscape painting shows to what an extent art has taken refuge in the mere imitation of nature, which it can never equal. Art turned to landscape painting because it had lost touch with the spiritual world; it could no longer create out of the spiritual and super-sensible world., What will be the future of art, if it is inspired only by the recent impulses toward naturalistic art? Art such as this can never grow out of life, as a flower grows from its roots; it will be a luxury outside life, an object of desire for those only for whom life has no cares. Is it not comprehensible that people who are absorbed in the pressing cares of life from morning till evening, who are shut off from all culture, the object of which is the understanding of art, should feel themselves separated as by an abyss from art? Though one hardly dare to put the sentiment into words now-a-days, because to many it would stamp the speaker as a philistine, it is distinctly evident in social life that great numbers of people look on art as something remote, and unconsciously feel it to be a luxury of life, something that does not belong to every human life, and to every existence worthy of a human being, although, in truth, it brings completion to every human life worthy of the name.

Naturalistic art will always be in one sense a luxury for those whose lives are free from care, and who are able to educate themselves in that art. I felt this when I was teaching for some years in a working-men's college, where I had the opportunity of addressing the workers themselves directly in order to help them understand the socialist theories which were being instilled into their minds, to their ruin, by those who called themselves “leaders of the people.” I learnt to understand—forgive the personal remark—what it means to bring scientific knowledge from a purely human standpoint⁷ within reach of those unspoiled minds. From a longing to know something also about modern art a request was made by my students that I take them through the museums and picture galleries on Sundays. Though it was possible, of course, to explain a great deal to them, since they had themselves the desire to be educated, I knew quite well that what I said did not at all make the same impression on these minds as did the things that I had told them from the standpoint of universal humanity. I felt that it would be a cultural untruth to tell them about the luxury art of the later naturalistic school, so far removed from actual life. This on the one hand.

On the other hand, do we not see, how art has lost its connection with life? Here, too, praiseworthy endeavors have come to light in the last few decades; but these have been by no means decided enough, though much has been done in the direction of industrial art. We see how inartistic our everyday surroundings have become. Art has made an illusory progress. All the buildings around us with which we come in contact in our daily routine are as devoid of artistic beauty as possible. Practical life cannot be raised to artistic form, because art has separated itself from life. Art which merely imitates nature cannot design tables and chairs and other articles of utility in such a manner that when we see them, we at once have the feeling of something artistic. These objects must transcend nature as human life transcends itself. If art merely imitates, it fails in the shaping of practical life, and practical life thereby becomes prosaic, uninteresting and dry, because we are unable to give it an artistic form and to surround ourselves with beautiful objects in our everyday lives.

This might be further amplified. I shall only indicate the decided direction which the evolution of our art has nevertheless taken. In like manner we have moved in other domains of modern civilization. Have we not seen that science has gradually ceased to proclaim to us the foundation which lies at the base of all sense-life? Little wonder that art has not found the way out of the world of sense since science itself has lost that way. By degrees science has come to the point of merely registering the outer facts of the senses, or at most to comprise them in natural laws. Intellectualism of the most pronounced type has over-spread all modern scientific activity to an ever increasing degree, and a terrible fear prevails among scientists lest they should be unable to exclude everything but intellectualism in their research, lest something like imaginative or artistic intuitions should perchance find their way into science. It is easy to see by what is said and written on this subject by scientists themselves how great is the terror they experience at the thought that any other means than the dry, sober intellect and the investigation by sense-perception should find entrance into scientific research. In every activity which does not keep strictly to intellectual thought men do not get far enough away from cuter reality to judge it correctly. Thus the modern researcher, the modern scientist, strives to carry on his work by intellectualism only; because he believes he can by this means get away far enough from the reality to judge it, as he says, quite objectively. Here the question might perhaps be asked: Is it not possible through intellectualism to get so far away from reality that we can no longer experience it? And it is this intellectualism, above all, which has made it impossible for us to conquer reality by science, as I have already indicated in these lectures and into which I will enter more fully today.

Turning to the religious life: with what mistrust and disapproval is every attempt to penetrate into the spiritual world by means of spiritual science received by the religious communities! On what grounds? People are quite ignorant of the reason of their disapproval. From official quarters we learn of a science which is determined to keep to the mere world of the senses, and we hear that in these official quarters the claim is apparently allowed that it is only in this way that strict and true scientific knowledge can be attained. But the student of historical evolution does not view the matter in this light. To him it appears that for the last few centuries the religious bodies have more and more laid claim to he the only authority in matters relating to the spirit and soul, and have recognized as valid only those opinions which they themselves permit the people to hold. Under the influence of this claim to the monopoly of knowledge by the Church, the sciences have neglected the study of everything except the outer sense-perceptions, or at most they have attempted to penetrate into the higher regions with a few abstract conceptions. They believe they are doing this purely in the interests of exact science, and do not dream that they are influenced by the Church's pretension to the monopoly of knowledge, the knowledge of the spirit and the soul as contained in their religious creeds. What has been forbidden to the sciences for centuries, the sciences themselves now declare to be an absolute condition for the exactness of their research, for the objective truth of their work. Thus it has happened that the religious communities having failed to develop their insight into the world of soul and spirit, and having preserved the old traditions, now see in the new methods of spiritual research, in the new paths of approach to the soul and spirit, an enemy to all religion, whereas they ought to recognize in these new methods the very best friends of religion.

We shall now speak of these three regions of culture, art, science, and religion. For it is the mission of Anthroposophy or spiritual science to build up a new structure in these three regions of culture. To explain what I mean, I must indicate in a few words the vital point of spiritual science. Its premises are very different from those of science as it is commonly known today. It fully recognizes the methods of modern science, fully recognizes also the triumphs of modern science. But because spiritual science believes it understands the methods of research of modern science better than the scientists themselves, it feels compelled to take other ways for the attainment of knowledge regarding spirit and soul than those which are still regarded by large numbers of people as the only right ones. In consequence of the enormous prejudice entertained against all research into the higher worlds, great errors and misunderstandings have been spread abroad regarding the aims of the Dornach movement. That here is truly no false mysticism, nothing in any way obscure in this movement, is plainly evident in my endeavors in the beginning of the 'nineties, which formed the starting-point for the spiritual-scientific movement to which I allude, and of which the Building at Dornach is the representative. At that time I collected the material which seemed to me then most necessary for the social enlightenment of today in my Philosophy of Spiritual Activity. Whoever reads that book will hardly accuse the spiritual science of which I speak of false mysticism; but he may see what a difference there is between the idea of human freedom contained in my book and the idea of freedom as an impulse prevalent in our modern civilization.

As an example of the latter, I might give Woodrow Wilson's idea of freedom; an extraordinary one, but very characteristic of the culture, the civilization of our age. He is honest in his demand for freedom for the political life of the present day. But what does he mean by freedom? We arrive at an understanding of his meaning when we read words like the following: ‘A ship moves freely,’ he says, ‘when it is adapted to all the forces which act upon it from the wind, from the waves, and so on. When its construction is exactly adapted to its environment, no hindrance to its progress can arise through the forces of wind or wave. Man must also he able to motive freely through life, by adapting himself to the forces with which he comes in contact in life, so that no hindrance may ever come to him from any direction.’ He also compares the life of a free human being with a part of a machine, saying: ‘We say of a part, built into a machine, that it can move freely when it has no connection with anything anywhere; and when the rest of the machine is so constructed that this part runs freely within it.’ I have just one thing to say to this; we can only speak of freedom with regard to the human being when we see in it the very opposite of such an adaptation to the environment, we can only speak of human freedom when we compare it, not with the freedom of a ship on the sea, perfectly adapted to the forces of wind and weather, but when we compare it with the freedom of a ship that can stop and turn against wind and weather, and can do so without regarding the forces to which it is adapted. That is to say, at the bottom of such an idea of freedom as this lies the whole mechanical conception of the world, yet at the present day it is considered to be the only possible one. This world-conception is the result of the mere intellectualism of modern times. In my Philosophy of Spiritual Activity I have felt compelled to take a stand against views of this kind. I know very well—forgive another personal remark—that this book has fragments of the European philosophical conception of the world, out of which it is born, still clinging to it, as a chicken sometimes retains fragments of the eggshell from which it has emerged. For the book has. of course, grown out of European philosophical world-conceptions. It was necessary to show in that book the erroneous thought in those world-conceptions. For this reason the book may appear to some to be pedantic, though this was by no means my intention. The contents are intended to work as an impulse in the immediate practice of life, so that, through the ideas developed in that book, the impulse thus generated in the human will may flow directly into human life.

For this reason, however, I was obliged to state the problem of human freedom quite differently from the usual manner of doing so wherever we turn, throughout the centuries of human evolution, the question regarding the freedom of human will and of the human being has been: Is man free, or is he not free? I was under the necessity of showing that the question in this form was wrongly framed and must be put from a different standpoint. For if we take that which modern science and modern human consciousness look upon as the real self, but which ought to be regarded as the natural self, then, certainly, that being can never he free. That self must act of inner necessity. Were man only that which he is held to be by modern science, then his idea of freedom would be the same as that of Woodrow Wilson's. But this would be no real freedom; it would be only what might be called with every single action the inevitable result of natural causes. But modern human consciousness is not much aware of the other self within the human being where the problem regarding freedom really begins. Modern human consciousness is only aware of the natural self in man; it regards him as a being subject to natural causality. But those who penetrate more deeply into the human being must reflect that man can become something more in the course of his life than that with which nature has endowed him. We first discover what the human being really is, when we recognize that one part of him is that with which he is born, and all that which he has inherited; the other part is that which he does not owe to his bodily nature, but which he can make of himself by awakening the real self slumbering within him. Because these things are true I have not asked: Is man free or not free? I have stated the question in the following way: Can man become a free being through inner development, or can he not? And the answer is: He can become free if he develops within himself that which otherwise slumbers, but can be awakened; he can only then become free. Man's freedom is not a gift of nature. Freedom belongs to that part of man which he can, and must, awaken within himself. But if the ideas contained in my Philosophy of Spiritual Activity are to be further developed and applied to external social life, so that these truths may become clear to a larger circle of people, it will be necessary to build a superstructure of the truths of spiritual science on the foundation of that philosophy. It had to be shown that by taking his evolution into his own hands, man is really able to awaken a slumbering being within him. I endeavored to do this in my book, Knowledge of the Higher Worlds, and in the other books which I have contributed to the literature of spiritual science. In these books I tried to show that the human being can indeed take his own evolution in hand and that only by so doing, and thus making of it something different from that to which he is born, can he rise to a real knowledge of soul and spirit. It is true that this view is considered by a large part of humanity at the present day to be a most unattractive one. For what does it presuppose? It presupposes that we attain to something like intellectual humility. But few desire this today. I will explain what I mean by this quality of intellectual humility, to which we must attain.

Suppose we give a volume of Goethe's lyric poems to a child of five. The child will certainly not treat the book as it deserves; he will tear it to pieces, or spoil it in some other way. In any case he does not know how to value such a book. But suppose the child to have grown ten or twelve years older, that he has been taught. and trained; then he will treat Goethe's lyric poems in a different manner. And yet there is no great difference externally between a child of five and one of twelve or fourteen with a book of Goethe's poems before him. The difference lies within the child. He has developed so that he knows what to do with such a volume. As the child feels towards the volume of Goethe's lyrics, so must the man feel towards nature, the cosmos, the whole universe, when he begins to think seriously of soul and spirit. He must acknowledge to himself that, in order to read and understand what is written in the book of nature and the universe, he must do his utmost to develop his inner self, just as the five-year-old child must be taught in order to understand Goethe's lyric poems. We must acknowledge with intellectual humility our impotence to penetrate the universe with understanding by means of the natural gifts with which we are born; and we must then admit that there may be ways of self-development and of unfolding the inner powers of our being to see in that which lies spread out before the senses the living spirit and the living soul. My writings to which I have referred show that it is possible to put this in practice. This must be said, because intellectualism, the fruit of evolution of the last few centuries, is no longer able to solve the riddles of life. Into one region of life, that of inanimate nature, it is able to penetrate, but it is compelled to halt before human reality, more especially social reality.

That quality which I have called intellectual humility must be the groundwork of every true modern conception of the impulse towards freedom. It must also be the groundwork of all real insight into the transformation necessary in art, religion, and science. Here intellectuality has plainly, only too plainly, shown that it can attain no real knowledge which truly perceives and attains to the things of the soul and spirit. As I leave already pointed out, it has confined itself to the outer world of the senses and to the combining and systematizing of perceptions Hence it has been unable to prevail against the pretensions of the religious bodies, which have also not attained to a new knowledge of matters pertaining to the soul and spirit, but have on this account carried into modern times an antiquated view, unsuited to the age. But one thing must be conquered, that is the fear I have already described, the fear that we might become too much involved in the objects of the senses, in our endeavors to gain a spiritual knowledge of them. It is so easy to call oneself a follower of intellectualism, because, when we occupy ourselves merely with abstract ideas, even of modern science, we are so far removed from the reality that we only view it in perspective, and there is no danger of our being in any way influenced by the reality. But with the knowledge that is meant here, which we gain for ourselves when we take our own evolution in hand, with such knowledge we must descend into the realities of life, we must plunge into the profoundest depths of our own nature, deeper than those reached by mere self-training in intellectualism. Within the bounds of intellectualism, we only reach the upper strata of our own life. If with the help of the knowledge here spoken of, we descend into the depths of our own inner nature, we find there not only thoughts and feelings, a mere reflection of the outer world, we find there happenings, facts of our inner being, from which the merely intellectual thinker would recoil in horror; but which are of the same kind as those within nature herself, of the same kind as those which happen in the world. Then, within our own nature, we learn to know the nature of the world. We cannot learn to know that life of the world if we go no further than mere abstract conceptions or the laws of nature. We must penetrate so far that our own inmost being becomes one with reality. We must not fear to approach reality; our inner development must carry us so far that we can stand firm in the presence of reality, without being consumed, or scorched, or suffocated. When we stand in the presence of reality, no longer held at a distance by the intellect, we are able to grasp the truth of things. Thus we find described in my book, Knowledge of the Higher Worlds, the inner development of the human being to the stage of spiritual knowledge at which he becomes one with reality, but in such wise that, being merged in reality, he can imbibe from it knowledge which is not a distant perception by means of the intellect, but is instead saturated with reality itself and for this reason can merge with it.

You will find that one characteristic feature of the spiritual science which occupies us here is that it can plunge into reality, that it does not merely speak of an abstract spirit, but of the real, tangible spirit, living in our environment surrounding us just as the things of the sense-world surround us. Abstract observations are the fruit of modern intellectualism. Take up any new work, with the exception of pure natural science or pure philosophy, and you will find the conception of life it contains, often a would-be philosophical view, is far removed from actual life or from a real knowledge of things. Read what is said about the will in one of the newer books on psychology, and you will find that there is no profound meaning underlying the words. The ideas of those who devote themselves to such studies have not the power actually to penetrate to the core, even of nature herself. To them matter is a thing outside, because they cannot penetrate it in spirit. I should like to elucidate this by an example.

In one of my last books, Riddles of the Soul, Von Seelenraetseln, I have shown how an opinion of long standing, prevailing in natural science, must be overcome by modern spiritual science. I know how very paradoxical my words must sound to many. But it is just those truths which are able to satisfy the demands—already making themselves heard and becoming more and more insistent as time goes on—for a new kind of thought which will often appear paradoxical, when compared with all that is still looked upon as authoritative. Every modern scientist who has occupied himself with the subject maintains that there are two kinds of nerves⁸ in human and animal life (we are now only concerned with human life, one set, leading from the sense organs to the central organ, is the sensory nerves, which are stimulated by sense-perceptions, the stimulus communicating itself to the nerve center. The second kind of nerves, the so-called motor nerves, pass from the center out to the limbs. These motor-nerves enable us to use our limbs. They are said to be the nerves of volition, while the others are called the sensory nerves.

Now I have shown in my book, Riddles of the Soul, though only in outline, that there is no fundamental difference between the sensory and the so-called motor nerves or nerves of volition, and that the latter are not subject to the will. The instances brought forward to support the statement that these nerves are obedient to the will as is shown by the terrible disease of locomotor ataxia really prove the exact opposite, which can easily be shown. They, indeed, prove the truth of my contention. These so-called voluntary nerves are also sensitive nerves. While the other sensitive nerves pass from the sense organs to the central organ, so that the outer sense-perceptions may be transmitted to it, the voluntary nerves, as they are called, which do not differ from the other set, perceive that which is movement within ourselves. They are endowed with the perception of movement. There are no voluntary nerves. The will is of a purely spiritual nature, purely spirit and soul, and functions directly as spirit and soul. We use the so-called voluntary nerves, because they are the sensory nerves for the limb which is going to move and must be perceived if the will is to move it. For what reason do I give this example? Because countless treatises on the will exist at the present day, or may be read and heard, in which the will is dealt with. But the ideas developed have not the impelling power to advance to real knowledge, to press forward to the sight of will in its working. Such knowledge remains abstract and foreign to life. While such ideas are current, modern science will continue to tell us of motor nerves, of nerves of volition. Spiritual science evolves ideas regarding the will which at the same time show us the nature of the physical human nervous system. Spiritual science will penetrate the phenomena and facts of nature. Instead of remaining in regions foreign to life, it will find its way into reality. It will have the courage to permeate material things with the spirit, not to leave them outside as things apart. For spiritual science everything is spiritual. Spiritual science will be able to pierce the surface and penetrate into the social order, and will work for a reality in social life, which baffles our abstract, intellectual natural science. And thus, spiritual science will again proclaim a spiritual knowledge, a new way of penetrating into the psychic and the spiritual in the universe. It will proclaim boldly that those spiritual worlds, represented in pictures envisioned by artists such as Raphael, Michelangelo, and Leonardo da Vinci, can no longer suffice for us. In accordance with the progress of human evolution, we must find a new way into the spiritual world. But if we learn to understand the spiritual world anew, if we penetrate into that world, not in the nebulous manner of pantheism, by a continual repetition of the word “spirit”, a universal, abstract, vague spirit which “must he there”: if we pierce through to the real phenomena of the spiritual world not by spiritualism, but by the development of the human forces of spirit and soul in the manner described above, then again we shall know of a spiritual world in the only way adapted to the present development of humanity. Then the mysteries of the spiritual world will reveal themselves to us, and then something will happen of which Goethe spoke. Although he was only a beginner in the things which modern spiritual science goes on developing in accordance with his own spirit, but of which he had a premonition, Goethe beautifully expressed that which will happen in the words: “He to whom nature begins to reveal her open secrets, experiences a profound longing for her worthiest exponent—art.” Once more will the artist receive a revelation from the spiritual world; he will then no longer be led astray in the belief that his portrayal of spiritual things in a material picture is an abstract, symbolic, lifeless allegory; he will know the living spirit and will be able to express that living spirit through material means. No longer will the perfect imitation of nature be considered the best part of a work of art, but the manifestation of that which the spirit has revealed to the artist. Once more an art will arise, filled with spirit, an art which is in no way symbolical, in no way allegorical, which also does not betray its luxurious character by attempting to rival nature, to the perfection of which it can never attain. It demonstrates its necessity, its justification, in human life by proclaiming the existence of something of which the ordinary, direct beholding of nature, naturalism, can give us no information. And even if the artist's attempt to give expression to something spiritual be but a clumsy effort, he is giving form to something which has a significance, apart from nature, because it transcends nature. He makes no bungling attempts at that which nature can do better than he. A way opens here to that art in which a beginning has been made in the external structure and the external decoration of the Goetheanum at Dornach.

The attempt has been made there to create a University of Spiritual Science for the work to be carried on within it. In all the paintings on the ceilings, the wood carvings, etc., an attempt has been made to give form to all that spiritual science reveals in that building. Hence the building itself is a natural development. No old architectural style could be followed here, because the spirit will be spoken of in a new way within it. Let us look at nature and consider the shell of a nut; the kernel within determines the form of it; in nature every sheath is formed in accordance with the requirements of the inner core. So the whole of the building at Dornach is formed in consonance with that which as music will one day resound within it; with those mystery dramas which will one day be presented there; with those revelations of spiritual science which will one day be uttered within its walls. Everything described here will echo in the wood carvings, in the pillars, and in the capitals. An art as yet only in its beginnings, which is really horn of a new spirit, altogether born of the spirit, is there represented. The artists who are working there are themselves their own severest critics. In such an undertaking one is, of course, exposed to misunderstandings; this is only natural. Objections are raised against the Dornach Building by visitors, who say: “These anthroposophists have filled their building with symbols and allegories.” Other visitors who increase in number from day to day, understand what they see here.

Now the characteristic of the building is that it does not contain a single symbol or allegory; in the work attempted here the spirit has flowed into the immediate artistic form. That which is expressed here has nothing of symbolism, nothing of allegory, but everything is something in its own form. Up to the present we have only been able to build a covering for a spiritual center of work; for external social conditions do not yet permit us to erect a railway station or even a bank building. For reasons, which may perhaps be easily comprehensible to you, we have not yet been able to find the style of a modern bank or of a modern department store; but they must also he found. Above all things, the way must be found along these lines to an artistic shaping of actual practical life.

Just think of the social importance of art, even for our daily bread; for the preparation of bread depends on the manner in which people think and feel.

It is a matter of great and social significance to men, that everything by which they are immediately surrounded in life should take on an artistic form; that every spoon, every glass, should have a form well adapted to its use, instead of a form chosen at random to serve the purpose; that one should see at a glance, from its form, what service a thing performs in life, and at the same time recognize its beauty. Then for the first time large numbers of people will feel spiritual life to be a vital necessity, when spiritual life and practical life are brought into direct connection with each other. As spiritual science is able to throw light on the nature of matter, as I have shown in the example of the sensory and motor nerves, so will art, born of spiritual science, attain to the power of giving direct form to every chair, every table, to every man-created object.

Since it is plainly evident that the gravest prejudices and misunderstandings come from the churches, we may ask: What is the position finally reached by the religious creeds? If they have any justification at all, they must have a connection by their very nature with the spiritual world. But they have preserved into our period of time old traditions of these worlds, grown out of very different conditions of the human soul. Spiritual science strives to advance to the spiritual world, in accordance with the new mode of thought, with the new life of the soul. Should this be condemned by the religious sentiment of humanity, if it understands itself aright? Is such a thing possible? Never! What is the real aim of religious sentiment and of all religious work? Certainly not the proclamation of theories and dogmas pertaining to the higher worlds. The aim of all religious work should be to give all men an opportunity to look up with reverence to higher worlds. The work of religion is to inculcate reverence for the super-sensible. Human nature needs this reverence. It needs to look up in reverence to the sublime in the spiritual worlds. If human nature is denied the present mode of entrance, then, of course, the old way must still be kept open. But since this way is no longer suited to the thoughts of our day, it must be enforced, its recognition must be imposed by authority. Hence the external character of religious teaching as applied to modern human nature. An antiquated outlook on the higher worlds is imposed by the religious teachers.

Let us suppose that there are communities in which an understanding exists of the true nature of religion consisting in reverence for spiritual things. Must it not be to the highest interest of, such communities that their members should develop a living knowledge of the unseen world? Will not those whose souls contain a vision of the super-sensible, whose knowledge gives them a familiarity with those worlds be the most likely to reverence them? Since the middle of the fifteenth century human evolution has taken the line of development of the individuality, of the personality. To expect of anyone today that he should attain a vision or an understanding of the higher worlds on authority, or in any other way than by the force of his own individuality or personality, is to expect of him something which is against his nature. If he is allowed freedom of thought with respect to his knowledge of the super-sensible he will unite with his fellow-men in order that reverence for the spiritual world, which everyone recognizes in his own personal way, may be encouraged in the community. When men have attained freedom of thought to approach knowledge of the spiritual world through their own individuality, then the common service of the higher worlds, true religion, will flourish.

This will show itself especially in the conception of the Christ Himself. This conception was very different in earlier centuries from that even of many theologians of the later centuries, especially of the nineteenth. How greatly has humanity fallen away from the perception of the true super-sensible nature of the Christ, who lived in the man Jesus! How far is it removed from the understanding of that union of a super-sensible being with a human body, through the Mystery of Golgotha, in order that the earth in its development might have a deeper meaning! That union of the super-sensible with the things of the senses, which was consummated in the Mystery of Golgotha, how little has it been understood even by theologians of a certain type in recent times! The man of Nazareth has been designated “the simple man of Nazareth”, the conception of religion has become more and more materialistic. Since no one was able to find a way into the higher worlds, suited to modern humanity, the super-sensible path to the Christ-Being was lost. Many who now believe that they are in communion with the Christ, only believe this. They do not dream how little their thought of Christ and their words concerning Him correspond to the experiences of those who draw near to the great Mystery of Humanity with a spiritual knowledge that is suited to our time.

It must be said that spiritual science makes absolutely no pretension of founding a new religion. It is a science, a source of knowledge; but we ought to recognize in it the means for a rejuvenescence of the religious life of humanity. As it can rejuvenate science and art, so can it also renew religious life, the very great importance of which must lie apparent to anyone who can appreciate the extreme gravity of the social future. Much, very much has been said recently on the subject of education, yet it must be acknowledged that a large part of the discussion does not touch the chief problem. I endeavored to deal with this problem in a series of educational lectures which I was asked to deliver to the teachers who are to form the staff of the Waldorf School in Stuttgart, which was founded last September [1919], in conformity with ideas underlying the Threefold Social Order.

At the foundation of the school I not only endeavored to give shape to externals, corresponding to the requirements and the impulse of the Threefold Order; I also strove to present pedagogy and didactics to the teaching-staff of this new kind of school in such a light that the human being would be educated to face life and be able to bring about a social future in accordance with certain unconquerable instincts in human nature. It is evident that the old-fashioned system of normal training, with its stereotyped rules and methods of teaching, must be superseded. It is true nowadays that many people agree that the individuality of the pupil ought to be taken into account in teaching. All sorts of rules are produced for the proper consideration of the child's individuality. But the pedagogy of the future will not be a normal science; it will be a true art, the art of developing the human being. It will rest upon a knowledge of the whole man. The teacher of the future will know that in the human being before him, who carries on development from birth through all the years of life, a spirit and soul element is working through the organs out to the surface. From the first year of school, he will see how every year new forces evolve from the depths of the child's nature. No abstract normal training can confirm this sight; only a living perception of human nature itself. Much has been said of late on the subject of instruction through observation and, within certain limits, this kind of tuition is justified. But there are things which cannot be communicated through external observation, yet which must be communicated to the growing child; but they can only be so communicated when the teacher, the educator, is animated by a true understanding of the growing human being, when he is able to see the inner growth of the child as it changes with every succeeding year; when he knows what the inner nature of the human being requires in the seventh, ninth, and twelfth years of his life. For only when education is carried on in accordance with nature, can the child grow strong for the battle of life. One comes in contact with many shattered lives at the present day, many who do not know what to make of life, to whom it has nothing to offer. There are many more people who suffer from such disrupted lives than is commonly known. What is the reason.? It is because the teacher is unable to take note of important laws of the evolving human being. I will give only one instance of what I mean. How very often do we hear well-meaning teachers say emphatically that one should develop in the child a clear understanding of what is being offered him as mental food. The result of this method in practice is banality, triviality! The teacher descends artificially to the understanding of the child, and that manner of teaching has already become instinctive. If it is persisted in, and the child is trained in this false clarity of understanding, what is overlooked? A teacher of this kind does not know what it means to a man, say thirty-five years of age, who looks back to his childhood and remembers: “My teacher told me such and such a thing when I was nine or ten years old; I believed it because I looked up with reverence to the authority of my teacher, and because there was a living force in his personality through which I was impressed by his words. Now, looking back, I find that his words have lived on in me; now I can understand them.” A marvellous light is shed on life by such an event, when through inner development we can look back in our thirty-fifth year at the lessons we have learnt out of love for our teacher which we could not understand at the time. That light, which is a force in life, is lost when the teacher descends to the banality of the object-lesson, which is praised as an ideal method. The teacher must know what forces should be developed in the child, in order that the forces which are already in his nature, may remain with him throughout his life. Then the child need not merely recall to memory what he learnt between his seventh and fifteenth years; what he then learnt is renewed again and again, and wears a new aspect in each successive stage of life. What the child learnt is renewed at every later epoch of life.

The foregoing is an effort to place before you an idea of the fundamental character of a system of pedagogy which, if followed, may truly grow into an art; by its practice the human being may take his place in life and find himself equal to all the demands of the social future. However much people may vaunt their social ideals, there are few who are at all capable of surveying life as a whole. But in the carrying out of social ideals, a wide outlook on life is indispensable. People speak, for instance, of transferring the means of production to the ownership of the community and believe that by withdrawing them from the administration of the individual human being, much would be accomplished. I have already spoken on this point, and will go into the subject again more thoroughly in the following lectures. But assuming for a moment that it is possible to transfer the means of production to the ownership of the community at once, do you suppose that the community of the next generation would still own them? No! For even if the means of production were transmitted to the next generation, it would be done without taking into account the fact that this next generation would develop new and fruitful forces, which would transform the whole system of production, and thus render the old means useless. If we have any idea of molding social life. we must take part in life in its fullness, in all its phases. From a conception of man as a being composed of body, soul, and spirit, and from a real understanding of body, soul, and spirit, a new art of education will arise, an art which may truly be regarded as a necessity in social life.

Arising from this way of thinking, something has developed within the spiritual movement, centered at Dornach, which has to a great extent met with misunderstanding. There are a number of persons who have learnt in the course of years to think not unfavorably of our spiritual-scientific movement. But when we recently began, in Zurich and elsewhere, to give representations of the art known as eurythmy, an art springing naturally out of spiritual science itself, but, as we are fully aware, as yet only in its infancy, people began to exclaim that after all, spiritual science cannot be worth much, for to introduce such antics as an accompaniment to spiritual science only shows that the latter is completely crazy. In such a matter as this, people do not consider how paradoxical anything must appear which works towards reconstituting the world on the basis of spiritual science. This art of eurythmy is a social art in the best sense; for its aim is, above all things, to communicate to us the mysteries of human nature. It uses the capacities for movement latent in the human being, bringing to expression these movements in a manner to be explained at the next representation of the eurythmic art. I will only mention here that eurythmy is a true art; for it reveals the deepest secrets of human art itself by bringing to evidence a true speech, a visible speech expressed by the whole human being. But beside the mere movements of the body, founder on physiological science and a study of the structure of the human form, eurythmy presents to us at the same time a capacity of movement through which man, ensouled and inspired, yields himself up to movement. The purely physiological, gymnastic exercises of our materialistic age may also be taught to children, and they are now taught in the Waldorf School of which I have spoken. Ensouled movement, however, actually employs the whole being, while gymnastics on physiological, merely material lines employs only a part of the whole nature of the human being, and therefore, unless supplemented by eurythmy, allows much to degenerate in the growing human being Out of the depths of human nature spiritual life in a new form must enter into the most important branches of life.

It will be my task in the next few days to show how external life may really be given a new form in the present and for the future, when the impulse for the change comes from such a new spirit. Many people of all sorts, noteworthy people, feel today the necessity of understanding spiritually the modern pressing demands of social life. It is painful to see the number of people who are still asleep as regards these demands, and the many others who approach them in a confused way as agitators. We find faint indications of a feeling that none of the mere superficial programs can be of any use without a change of thought, of ideas, a new mode of learning from the spirit. But in many cases how superficial is the expression of that longing for a new spirit! We may say that the yearning for a new spirit is dimly and imperceptibly felt here and there in remarkable men, who most certainly have no idea of that which the Dornach Building represents in the outer world. But the expression of a longing for this new spirit can be heard. I will give one out of many examples of this.

In addition to the numerous memoirs published in connection with the disaster of the World War just ended, those of the Austrian Statesman, Czernin, will soon appear. This book promises to be extremely interesting. It is difficult to express what I wish to say without the risk of being misunderstood; I mean that it is interesting, because Czernin was a good deal less pretentious than the others who up to now have given expression to their opinions on the War, and he should therefore be leniently judged. In this book of Czernin's we may read something like the following passage:

‘The War continues, though in another form. I believe that coming generations will not call this great drama which has held the world in thrall for five years, the World-War; they will call it the world-revolution and they will know that the world-revolution only began with the World-War. Neither the Peace of Versailles nor that of St. Germain will create a lasting effect. This peace contains within it the destructive germ of death. The conflicts which shake Europe are not yet on the wane. As in a mighty earthquake, the subterranean rumbling still goes on. Now here, now there, the earth will continue to open and hurl fire towards heaven. Again and again events of elemental vehemence will sweep over the lands, bringing destruction in their train, till everything has been swept away, reminiscent of the madness of this War. Slowly, out of: unspeakable sacrifice, a new world will be born. Coming generations will look back to our times as to a long, terrible dream. But the darkest night is followed by the dawn. Generations have sunk into graves, murdered, starved, victims of disease. Millions have died in the effort to annihilate, to destroy, their hearts filled, with hatred and murder. But other generations will arise, and with them a new spirit. They will build up, what war and revolution have destroyed. Every winter is followed by spring. It is an eternal law in the circuit of life that resurrection follows death. Happy those who are called upon to cooperate as soldiers of labor in the work of rebuilding the world.’

Even this man speaks of a new spirit, but this new spirit is only a shadowy conception, a dim presentiment in heads like his. In order that this new spirit may take hold of the hearts, of the minds, of the souls of men in a really concrete form, the spiritual science and the art of education of which I wished to speak today in connection with human evolution, will labor for the social future of humanity.

• 7. or a deeper understanding of this, the reader is referred to Rudolf Steiner's The Story of My Life, page 274:
  
  “It is my impression that if the workers' movement had been followed with interest by a greater number of unprejudiced persons, and if the proletariat had been dealt with understandingly, this movement would have developed quite differently. But we have left the people to live in their own class, and we have lived in ours. The conceptions of each class of men held by the others were merely theoretical. There was discussion of wages when strikes and the like forced it; and all sorts of welfare movements were established. These latter were exceedingly creditable.
  
  “But the submerging of these world-stirring questions into a spiritual sphere was wholly lacking. And yet only this could have taken from the movement its destructive forces.”
  
  >We offer this quotation in order to show that the many remarks made by Rudolf Steiner in these lectures, characterizing the proletarian movement and its Marxian ideology, should not give the impression that he was hostile toward the proletariat. Quite the contrary was the case. His untiring efforts in 1919 and later were deeply concerned with the need of establishing a mutual understanding between the two classes—the bourgeoisie and the proletariat—which were fighting one another for political power.
  
  In 1919, when the workers were in power in Central Europe—in Russia since 1917—Rudolf Steiner continued this effort by offering a cultural, instead of a political-economic viewpoint. In doing this, he found it necessary for an understanding of the problem to make clear to the proletariat the nature of the destructive forces at work in their midst, embodied in an erroneous materialistic ideology. It must be emphatically stressed, too, that Rudolf Steiner made it clear that the same destructive forces were at work with an equal degree of fatality in the egotistic and unintelligent attitude of the members of the other class—the bourgeoisie—toward life and its world problems.
• 8. The original statement about the nature of the nerves can be found in the appendix of Rudolf Steiner's previously mentioned book, The Riddles of the Soul, (Von Seelenraetseln, Riddle of the Soul (1996).
  
  This most important statement shows how Anthroposophy solves the crucial problem of modern physiology and psychology, that is to say, it explains the relation between body and soul. The reader will learn that the human body functions in a threefold way, or one may say, there are three systems of organic activity: (a) the nervous system, including the senses; (b) the metabolic system, in connection with the limb-system; and (c) the rhythmic system, i. e., blood circulation and breathing.
  
  The important discovery made by Rudolf Steiner reveals the fact that the human soul in her entirety is not limited to a mere relationship with the nervous system, for this is only one of her several special functions, manifest in thinking, in so far as this activity depends on sense perception. Another function of the soul—feeling—is supported by the bodily rhythmic system, and a third soul function—willing—finds its bodily counterpart in the metabolic system. All this means that the human soul, as a whole, with her three functions is connected with the bodily organism as a whole. She functions through three systems which are intimately interwoven and mutually interplaying.
  
  Rudolf Steiner's statement shows further that by devoting herself to a certain training, the soul is able to detach herself, bond by bond, from the connection with the body and to turn her perceptions with transformed thinking, feeling, and willing toward the spiritual world.
  
  It must be emphasized, however, that the discovery of the threefold physiological and mental organism of man did not lead Rudolf Steiner to develop forthwith the idea of the three-fold social organism. The threefold structure of the body-social was discovered by him through independent research without taking the human organism into account. To quote the words of Rudolf Steiner:
  
  “The present comparison is not an attempt to take some natural science truth and transplant it into the social system. Its object is quite different: namely, to use the human body as an object lesson for training human thought and feeling to a sense of what organic life requires, and then to apply this perceptive sense to the body social.” (The Threefold Commonwealth.)
  
  >Bernhard Behrens.

Distinguished attendees! There is no doubt that, under the influence of the war catastrophe that has touched humanity so deeply, and the outcome of which is by no means already clear, many circles have already come to the conclusion that the tasks that have arisen from the development of humanity can by no means be solved with small means; above all, it cannot be solved with the means by which one believed, in the various fields of public life, one could cope before this catastrophe, which devastated civilization so much.

Among the victors, however, there still prevails today, I might say, an understandable mood that does not make it seem necessary to move from old habits of thought, from old feelings and will impulses to new ones. And basically there are very few personalities, especially in the victorious countries, who are already somehow willing to depart from the old habits of thinking and feeling about the public affairs of humanity. One would like to say, like a white raven, the man who was present at these important negotiations for part of the time during the negotiations in Versailles, John Maynard Keynes. This John Maynard Keynes has just gained an impression from the negotiations in Versailles that no possible outcome for the shaping of the present civilized world can emerge from the attitudes and schools of thought that prevailed there.

In his introduction today, I would like to mention a very vivid picture painted by John Maynard Keynes of the personalities who were so decisive for the fate of Europe at that time. He points to the one who has long been regarded as a kind of political savior by a large part of the world, whose abstract, unrealistic 14 points were recognized for a short time in Germany as a basis for peace. Keynes points out how this man, when he arrived in Versailles, under triumph that was actually meant for the image that had been made of him, proved to be completely out of touch with the current situation in Europe, as he had absolutely no capacity to engage with what was put to him. It is fair to say – and this is entirely fitting for Keynes's comments, who after all witnessed it all – that he allowed himself to be taken in by those who were so significant for the future of Europe at the time, by Clemenceau and Lloyd George. Woodrow Wilson was seen as a savior of the world. John Maynard Keynes, who left the negotiations in Versailles early despite being an English member of parliament because of the hopelessness of the negotiations, characterizes Wilson as a man whose intentions were not at all suited to providing any kind of impetus for reality. He characterizes Clemenceau as a man who had actually overslept the whole of more recent developments since 1871, who was only still filled with the moods that one had in France at the time, and who, with a wild rage, did everything he could to shape Europe as he had to imagine it according to his old habits of thought, actually national habits.

And Keynes characterized Lloyd George, his own Prime Minister, as follows: Despite his ability to intuitively perceive the thoughts of others, he was only looking for results with which he could shine for a few weeks in England, in London.

Then Keynes wrote his book about the economic consequences of this ill-fated peace treaty. And this book seems to me to be a remarkable symptom of the state of mind, the whole way of thinking and feeling, that is present in our current public life. For this book, if you have carefully gone through it, you get the feeling that it should actually be twice as thick as it is, because the most important thing is only pointed out on the last page, and basically, any elaboration is missing for these references.

John Maynard Keynes is an economic politician. He is well aware that the design of Europe - and this is certainly proven by current events - that the design of Europe, which one imagined in Versailles to be able to achieve, is not lasting at all. He calculates this, so to speak, from the economic measures that were taken in Versailles. And it is remarkable, ladies and gentlemen, that he calculates all this as an Englishman, as an English-thinking person. And then he says something very strange at the end: All signs indicate that if a broad reflection does not occur, we will be led into barbarism within the modern European civilized world. And he says nothing less than this: The affairs of the near future will not be determined by the actions of statesmen, but by currents of thought and feeling and will beneath the surface of what is usually called “public life.” Yes, he says much more. He says: If we do not develop completely new powers of perception and, as he puts it, imagination with regard to public affairs – he means visualizing certain images that we need to shape the future – we cannot move forward. This is how this manifesto of a significant statesman and thinker of the present day concludes. And yet one has to ask the question: Yes, but how is humanity supposed to develop within these intimate currents hinted at by Keynes? Where are they supposed to come from? Where are new forces of knowledge, where are new forces of imagination about the shaping of our economic conditions supposed to come from?

This book concludes with a huge question mark regarding the great tasks of the present day, but so do all the negotiations that have been conducted so far after the provisional outcome of the great world catastrophe in 1918. And only because it has taken on a different form are people calming down a little about it for the time being.

You see, my esteemed audience, the great questions of the present will naturally have to arise in those areas that were actually the basic areas of all public and community life for humanity. They will have to arise in the areas of intellectual life, of state and legal life, and in the area of economic life. Admittedly, we have to say that a large number of people today only see the great tasks of the time in the area of economic life. But anyone who, I might say, with the same objective but somewhat deeper than Keynes, is able to see through public affairs, cannot help but say to himself: the great tasks of the time are not being solved today with what one has been accustomed to thinking, which has led to the catastrophe. Completely new impulses are needed. And these new impulses, where must they come from?

I believe, esteemed attendees, that we will not arrive at an answer to this question if we do not look at it from a certain point of view, which I would like to suggest here, if we do not observe how thinking and feeling and looking at the world has developed in recent times, since the last three to four centuries, especially within Europe, but also within its offshoot, America. We must look at human thinking. Most people in the present still do not want to think about this, that ultimately everything in the state and ultimately everything in economic conditions ultimately comes from human thinking.

If we look a little deeper again, without prejudice, and look at the European situation in particular, we clearly see a kind of declining life, and on the other hand a kind of rising life. The declining life, viewed spiritually, is actually still a kind of inheritance from ancient human cultures. In Europe, we have impulses of world view that express themselves in philosophies, religious beliefs and other things. Today, however, we do not ask ourselves thoroughly enough where these ideological impulses actually come from. We will think more freely about these ideological impulses, which are also present in our economic life, when we are clear about what has actually only been clearly drawn from Western culture into this ancient oriental heritage of a world view culture since the last three to four centuries. Has it not been emphasized often enough – and from a certain point of view one is quite right to do so – that the greatest source of pride in modern times should be the spirit of science that has emerged in the last three to four centuries? Of course, old beliefs and the like are still deeply ingrained in a large part of the population of the civilized world today. These should not be spoken of in a critical way; their value should be fully recognized. But what could be called the greatest authority in the life of thought, feeling and perception in modern times is indisputably that which has emerged as the spirit of science.

When speaking of this scientific spirit, one must not only look at what lives in an upper class, where science as such is practised. The scientific spirit can also mean something else. Today, in an age when popular literature and newspapers reach even the seemingly uneducated, one can speak of the fact that perhaps not the scientific results and insights as such, but their offshoots, that which arises from them as a way of feeling, penetrates into the widest circles. Today, one can be a good Catholic or a good Protestant in one's inner life and in terms of one's religious confession; but when it comes to judging what is immediate reality, what surrounds one in life, then one regards the modern spirit of science as the actual authority. And this spirit of science is, after all, what we can follow in the social views of the present. We can trace it in the social views that have gradually developed among the proletariat throughout Europe since the mid-nineteenth century. Within this social view, people have always been proud of the fact that what they imagined as a social organization should be carried by the spirit of modern “unbiased science”. And to this day, one will find that even such destroyers of public life as appear in Eastern Europe, that even Trotsky and Lenin, when they want to talk about the foundations of their social thinking, then assert this spirit of science. So that one can say: in these social utopias, which, however, gain a very unfortunate reality, this spirit of science wants to be shaped.

This spirit of science has its clearest form in all that has emerged in recent times in the Western, more materialistic way of thinking and looking at things. It is not so much rooted in the Central European way of thinking, because, my dear attendees, if you take such characteristic personalities of Central Europe as Herder, Goethe, Fichte, Schiller, and also the German philosophers, you will find something quite different in their way of thinking from that of an Adam Smith or an English philosopher like Spencer or Darwin. On the other hand, it can be said that the spirit of science, which spread across the civilized world from the west, gradually engulfed the very different ideas that the personalities just mentioned sought to assert in Central Europe. And if we want to grasp what has asserted itself as modern science, then we have to juxtapose this scientific approach with the greatest question that exists for human beings, the greatest question that arises from our desire for knowledge as well as from his longing to gain enlightenment about his place in the world, to gain impetus for his social action, yes, which is also the most significant question when it is about the origin of the noblest in community life, about the activity of love among people. And the most important question is that concerning the essence of the human being itself. Recognizing the human being, understanding the human being, getting along with the human being, being able to live together with people – that is ultimately what all human thought must tend towards if the human being is not to lose the ground from under his feet.

And just look at how little, in the field of knowledge, what can be called the modern spirit of science has actually come to terms with.

It is not at all the intention of anthroposophically oriented spiritual science to belittle what the spirit of natural science or any other scientific spirit has achieved in modern times. No, my dear ladies and gentlemen, with regard to the recognition of the great triumphs and the full significance of modern science for life, I am at least in full agreement with all the eulogists of this spirit of science. That much should be acknowledged from the outset, and I agree from the outset with all those who speak of the importance of this spirit of science. But something else must be said if the highest goal of human beings, as just characterized – knowledge of the human being, insight into the human essence, seeing through to the very foundations of love – if that is to be placed alongside this spirit of science.

Let us take the field of knowledge first. Here we see – let me pick out an example that is well known in the widest circles – here we see how magnificently this science was able to pursue, out of the Darwinian-Spencerian spirit, which was then perfected in a somewhat different way by the German Haeckel, how this scientific spirit was able to follow the whole series of organisms in their development. To follow how that which appears to us as perfect emerges from the imperfect and how, at the pinnacle of this development, humans stand as physical beings. But one should just try to gain an unbiased view of what is actually presented.

How do we understand the human being from this point of view? Well, we follow everything that is found in the human being, in his organization, even in his soul life, through the entire series of animals. Again, with a certain right from one point of view, and by having become acquainted with everything that is organization, with everything that is the condition of organic life, by having become acquainted with this through the series of animals up to man, one understands him as a more perfect animal, but one must actually stop at that. By applying everything we have learned about the non-human world to humans, we can say that humans are at the top of the animal kingdom, but we only characterize them based on what we have learned about the world outside of humans, and we are left powerless in the face of the big question: What is a human being? One is satisfied with this, because one cannot recognize the human being from the human being, but only from the extra-human.

Whoever visualizes the full tragedy of this modern scientific spirit, which by its very nature must stop at nothing, will understand how perhaps today in the subconscious depths of the soul of the majority of humanity, precisely the question of the nature of the human being is gnawing away, and how it works as a longing for something other than what this modern scientific spirit can give.

How do we see this scientific spirit at work, my dear audience, in the field of knowledge? How do we see it at work within social feeling? Within the view of social conditions?

We have to go back a little further, because what is still alive in the present is actually, in this respect, the result of what has developed over a long period of time within the European world. We must bear in mind that our European state structures, which are now crumbling, emerged from the remnants of what I would call “the ancient oriental heritage” in terms of world view. The spirit of science that asserted itself in the West is entirely different from the oriental spirit, which still asserts itself in the Christian creeds – not in Christianity, I will come back to that in a moment.

For this oriental spirit, the question of the essence of man is at the forefront. He does not know the same extent as the Western world, what I just mentioned before as the extra-human. This oriental spirit, which we find today in the Orient only in decadence, in decline, which in older times developed into its special greatness, it thought little of external experience. He did not think much of what we today rightly know as observation of nature and methodically base our world view on. He drew what he wanted to know about man, what he also wanted to implant in social life, from inner human enlightenment, from inner human imagination. If we want to characterize the difference between this oriental spirit and the spirit of western science, we have to say: this oriental spirit actually has a worldview through direct human intuition without science. That is the remarkable thing, and it can still be observed today in the Christian faiths. In later centuries, in medieval centuries, people no longer understood in the right way how the ancient oriental people came to this worldview without a spirit of science; but they took its content, the content they gave to the world, the content of enlightenment, of inner imagination. It has become grafted into European spiritual life. It could not be recognized as coming from there because the spiritual abilities that existed in the ancient Orient were no longer present.

And so the following came about as a development of humanity: let us look at what, for the spiritual researcher, is at the center of all of humanity's development on earth; let us look at the event of Golgotha, at the founding of Christianity. It arose out of spiritual foundations. I will only hint at this today, as I have discussed it in numerous writings, especially in the book 'Christianity as a Mystical Fact'. But the event of Golgotha is one thing as a fact, as something that happened; the way in which this event of Golgotha was understood at the time it happened and in the centuries immediately following is something else. It was understood through what had been handed down from ancient Oriental wisdom, without any spirit of science, from Asia through Greece and Rome. Understanding the mystery of Golgotha is, after all, different from the event of Golgotha itself. People wanted to understand the event of Golgotha with ancient Oriental worldviews, and they understood it for a long time.

And in the Middle Ages, what came into effect then? We see a strange clash between the ancient oriental in the human disposition and that which is already emerging as the dawn of the modern age. We see two powers established in the human soul in the Middle Ages, precisely in the Catholic spirit. We see references to the Revelation, which is said to come to man from transcendental heights, without seeking a human origin for it. And on the other hand, we see what human reason, human experience itself, is supposed to encompass. Both are given equal validity in this period. As newer human development emerges, that which is called revelation, but which is actually only the inheritance of the old, oriental spirit of world view, is increasingly being undermined. This no longer applies to actual public thinking and feeling [as an authority], even if it still asserts its authority within certain limits. And the other authority, which was to some extent only placed alongside the authority of revelation in the Middle Ages, namely the authority of reason, develops into the modern spirit of science. This modern spirit of science – what has it not yet achieved today?

Well, we have seen in the field of knowledge: it fails when it comes from the extra-human to the human. It knows nothing to counter the human yearning for knowledge of the human being. But it also knew nothing of the essence of the human being to bring into human vision in the social field. This development of European science without a worldview, it is basically extremely interesting. It presents itself in such a way that one sees: As the final product of that which basically comes from the ancient Orient, via the detour through the Arabs, and other detours, what then remains as something certain, as something authoritative, which also has an oriental origin , such as the creeds based on revelation, but which are not recognized as such, but are instead attributed to the character of science - what is that?

Dear attendees, that is the content of all mathematics. Just as its confession, the European human being has received his mathematics and the mechanical thinking related to it, which then lived out in the materialism of science, from the Orient, albeit very filtered. And in Europe, that which is, so to speak, the final product of the ancient oriental worldview, that which can arise out of the human being alone, for mathematics cannot be experienced externally, it must arise out of the human being, just like the ancient oriental worldview. And what has come to the European people is recognized by Galileo, by Newton, by the whole Western scientific spirit. It is one wing of the being that flies through the development of modern humanity, carrying the spirit of science to its highest heights. We see the mathematical spirit emerging, penetrating even the atoms with mathematics. The mathematical spirit is one side of modern science. And the other side, the other wing of this creature, which I have symbolically indicated, is what we can call the observation of the external world, the external observation of man himself.

This faithful observation of the external world was unknown to the Oriental. It is therefore not preserved in what remains of the old oriental world view, nor in the creeds. But it was revived within the European spirit of science. It is the other side of this spirit of science. This spirit of science grows out of two things: out of what arises from within the human being as mathematical thinking and observing, and out of what comes from observation. That which has been drawn into the soul of the European human being, especially the Western human being, has now also become decisive for social thinking. Anyone who, for example, can follow Adam Smith, Ricardo, all social thinkers up to Marx, up to the present ones, with an unprejudiced mind, will see that these two elements, which first entered into the scientific spirit, continue to be effective in social thinking as well. One need only survey with an unbiased mind what Adam Smith, and later Marx and others, have expounded, and one will find the thinking of Newton on the one hand, and the thinking of a mind like Spencer on the other, everywhere. And that which inspired Darwin to his theory of evolution can be found everywhere. But just as this spirit of science stopped in its tracks when it came to knowledge, and could not become a worldview in the field of knowledge, it could not become world-shaping in the social field. And so we see how this spirit, which has only been realized in these outstanding personalities, but which is basically inherent in all of European humanity, moves into a practical life that is increasingly becoming a true reflection of this spirit. Just as knowledge stops at the human being, so too does social life, in principle, stop at the human being.

What has this modern scientific spirit, which has educated and trained the leading minds, actually been able to achieve? Well, my dear audience, it has been able to achieve the magnificent modern technology. On the one hand, it introduced mathematical thinking into machines, into modern industrialism, into the modern monetary system, and even into the social organization of modern humanity. In this, this spirit has been great.

We can say that everything that is numerically recorded in the books of modern industry, of modern practice in general, is an image of this spirit that has become technology out of mathematics.

By contrast, little of the other, which is only just beginning to emerge, has been able to penetrate into the human being himself: observation, which is only now taking place on a large scale in the natural sciences. The fact that it has not been possible to penetrate to the human being with knowledge shows that it has not been possible to develop the strength to approach the human being in such a way as to understand the innermost part of the human being. What exists as a mere spirit of science in Adam Smith, in Ricardo and others, is evident in the whole of modern thinking, in that practice has become uninspired, that it has become a mere routine, that great in it is only the technique ; that great in it is everything that can come to the foothills of this technique, that can be great only in the work on the machine, but stops there, like knowledge before the human being, before all practical life, before social life. On the one hand, it stops short of man in knowledge; on the other hand, it stops short of man in social life. A person who today manages a factory, who is involved in a commercial enterprise or some other branch of modern practical life, cannot receive any education from what our scientific spirit in the West is, other than one that allows him to think right down to the very fibers of the technical, but which stops him as a foreman in front of the one who does the work.

It stops before man. It is terribly painful to follow this halting with inner understanding. Whoever looks into the human fabric of the present day sees how the leading and guiding circles, for whom the spirit of science has become authority, stop at nothing. They can enter everything that comes from the mathematical wing into their books, but how the education that comes from it as a people's education, as an education of the spirit, leaves no understanding for the human being as such. And so there is a boundary between people and people. And this boundary has become the terrible fate of modern civilization. Because that which could not be written in any head or cash book, where only the technical outflows are written, right down to the treatment of people, that arose in modern times with the demands of a humane existence, with other demands. And basically, even today there is no understanding to be found for the language that another class speaks in each case, for one class. People have lost their understanding for one another when they are in different classes, because the deeper understanding for the human being with the knowledge-understanding, also with the understanding, with the interest in practical life, has been lost. Today, the practitioner is a routinier, he is not informed by ideas. Why? Because the education that the modern spirit of science has brought with it does not allow him to bring ideas into actual social life at all, but has to stop at technical life.

This, ladies and gentlemen, points to one of the greatest tasks of the present day, because if nothing could be contributed to the solution of this greatest task, then such a fate would have to be fulfilled by modern humanity, as Oswald Spengler, with an ingenious eye but an all the more ingenious error, developed from an insight into almost all of the sciences of the present day. It is painful enough that today we not only see this decline happening, but also that there are brilliant scholars, but also brilliant aberrations, who prove with the same rigorous scientific method that the development will lead to barbarism, just as any historical or scientific thing is rigorously proven today.

My dear attendees, it was the insight into these circumstances that led to what I have been calling for two decades “anthroposophically oriented spiritual science” receiving its special tasks from the catastrophic events of recent times, which have grown together with the great tasks of the present. I may refer to a few specific examples.

In the last few weeks of September and the first of October, we were able to hold a series of university courses at the School of Spiritual Science in Dornach. Thirty lecturers were involved in these university courses, thirty people who have emerged from modern specialized science. Lecturers who worked in the fields of mathematics, linguistics, history, law, psychology, philosophy, economics, practical life – I could list many more areas – and also in the most important areas of medicine, healing and so on. What should these university courses, which differ radically from everything else that is currently presented to the world as intellectual life, seek to demonstrate?

Yes, let us start from what many well-meaning people today have already formed as their view. They think it necessary to renew modern human consciousness out of the spirit; we cannot try to do it with economic and state matters alone. We must take hold of the thinking of humanity, we must take hold of the world view.

Yes, but what do they actually want? They want to take what has been cultivated in modern educational institutions, through popular educational institutions, through adult education centers, and through popular educational associations, and bring it to the broadest sections of the population. They want to be progressive in almost all areas, while remaining conservative in the actual field of ideas. For it is believed that what we have as a modern scientific spirit is good enough. But anyone who looks impartially at modern life must say to themselves: the circles in which this life, this modern scientific spirit, with all its results, even for the practical routine – for that is what it has become under its influence – has affected, they have also sailed into the modern world catastrophe. Do we believe that that which it did not protect from this catastrophe should now be blessed by spreading it throughout the world? The same spirit that caused harm, that was bound to cause harm among a few, would cause even greater harm among many. Therefore, in Dornach, within the spirit of this School of Spiritual Science, on an anthroposophical basis, we do not stand on the conservative ground that the spiritual life that exists in our educational institutions should simply be carried out into the world, but that out of a new spirit, out of a renewal of the spiritual life, the necessary spirit, the spirit of the future, should first be carried into the educational institutions themselves – only then will it be able to take hold of the people.

Now I can well understand how one can be skeptical about what underlies this consideration, what underlay the Dornach college courses: anthroposophically oriented spiritual science. But I believe that a large proportion of those who listened – and there were very many of them, especially from the German student body – that those who listened got the impression: This anthroposophically oriented spiritual science is not something that floats in a cloud cuckoo land of abstract ideas, but something that can have an effect on all branches of scientific, but also on all branches of practical life, which can transform the routine precisely in the field of practical life into reality imbued with ideas. One wants practical spirit in the spiritual life that is at stake.

Now it may seem absurd to modern people – I can understand that quite well, that it seems absurd to the old way of thinking – that something as intimate as anthroposophically oriented spiritual science, which I will describe in its basic features in a moment, should improve the impracticality of more recent times. People have simply become too accustomed to being caught up in routine, in uninspired practice. And they have become accustomed to letting theory be theory, because they basically only knew this theory as a sum of abstractions, and because they could not bring much more into practical life from what remained of the old Oriente as a worldview life than the first page in the account books, where it says “with God”. Whether there is a great deal of this attitude on the other pages, I leave to my contemporaries to judge more precisely.

What is anthroposophically oriented spiritual science? My dear attendees, first of all, it should be mentioned that this anthroposophically oriented spiritual science does not want to abandon the strictly scientific spirit that has asserted itself within modern civilization, but that, on the contrary, it wants to fully develop it. It is no coincidence that the name of the School of Spiritual Science in Dornach is the Goetheanum. The Goethean attitude is to be cultivated, developed, formed further. Goethe already had many elements of this modern anthroposophical spirit. However, he had a feeling that whatever he asserted in the field of science, that everything one says and scientifically means about living beings, for example, must be justifiable before the strictest mathematical spirit; only someone who can conscientiously justify himself before the strictest mathematician can be considered a scientist. That is precisely what this spiritual science wants. But it wants to let that which otherwise only comes to light in mathematics as the last remnant of the ancient oriental world view arise from the human being in a more lively way. There are methods – you can find more details in my “Occult Science”, in “How to Know Higher Worlds” and other writings – there are methods by which the inner human soul life can be treated in such a way that it develops. I would like to illustrate this with the following:

Let us turn our attention to a child who is still imperfect, to a five-year-old child. We put a volume of lyrical poems by Goethe in front of this child. What will he do with it? It will probably tear up the booklet if it is a healthy child. It will have no relationship to what the little book actually means. Ten years later or fifteen years later, the child will already have a different relationship; it will be able to immerse itself in what the little book actually means. It is the same with people in later years of life. However, one must penetrate to an intellectual modesty if one wants to approach anthroposophically oriented spiritual science. Intellectual modesty recognizes that, however old a person has become, they came to methodically develop their inner soul abilities. As I said, I have described the methods in the books mentioned and would just like to indicate that one can, through a particular deepening of the life of the imagination, through such a deepening of the life of the imagination, which, above all, arises from the will in the soul through meditation, that through such a treatment of the life of imagination, which I cannot describe in detail here, one can come to deepen certain forces in the human being that can otherwise be developed through ordinary education. And what I mean by intellectual modesty leads one to the conclusion that through what one develops simply through ordinary education, the world of one's surroundings and the world of the human being itself lies before one, as the Goethe book lies before the five-year-old child. One must develop the inner soul power to a higher level, then one learns to read the book of nature in a different way. Then one approaches this book of nature with different powers of the human soul.

What are these human soul abilities that one develops? In ordinary consciousness, as everyone knows, what we call memory plays an enormous role. We need this ability to remember. If it becomes even slightly ill, if only a small part of what we have in our memory is erased in the human soul, if there is a discontinuity of memory, then the soul suffers shipwreck. The illnesses that can occur as a result of this memory disorder are terrible. Memory is a force for normal theoretical and practical human life, but it can be further developed.

What is it, then, in our ordinary consciousness that makes us who we are in the present moment, in our very soul? After all, we are fundamentally what we are in every age of our lives through our memory. What we have experienced in life since childhood, what has settled in our innermost being, sometimes in the subconscious of our soul life, is what actually makes up our being in the present moment. And we look at this being by looking back from what we are at the present time, remembering what we have experienced since childhood. It is precisely this power, ladies and gentlemen, that can be developed to a higher level of knowledge.

Even today, very few people believe this. In this field, it is just as it was at the time of Copernicus, for example, when very few people believed what Copernicus said about world phenomena. Today, very few people still believe that by immersing oneself in certain ideas through meditation, by not surrendering, as is usually the case in the outer life, to the ordinary course of ideas, but by immersing oneself in ideas that one has first formed or that one has transmitted from a teacher, to remain absorbed in such ideas for years through strict, inwardly regulated exercises, exercises that are regulated like the laws of calculation, mathematics, geometry – few people believe that this can be achieved by strictly scientific methods, just as strictly scientific as work in a chemical laboratory. But it is possible that we can further develop the human capacity for memory through this; develop it in such a way that not only our present mental life appears to us as a result of our experiences and what we have experienced since our birth, but that our whole being appears to us, how it stands with its physical body in the world, how he has entered it through heredity with his physical body at birth, or rather at conception, into this physical world, is the result of events that preceded his conception, not only in the merely human, but within the whole cosmos. Just as one looks back through one's ordinary memory to one's life since childhood, so one learns to look back to something that lies outside this life between birth or conception and death. One learns to look back on what the human being was spiritually before he became physical. One gets to know the reality of spiritual life. One gets to know what the human being still carries within him today as something eternal, from which his cognitive, community and social life radiates, in his experience of a life before birth or conception. And one learns to answer a significant question: Why does such an insight into prenatal life, into the life of a human being in the spirit, appear so absurd to today's Western humanity? And one learns to recognize that the eternal part of the human being has only been cultivated on the other side through centuries, even millennia.

This was not the case during the heyday of worldviews in the Orient. This is how it became in the West. People wanted to speak to the soul life with human selfishness. And human egoism also influenced what was developed as a view of the eternal in man. As a result, no belief, no knowledge, no insight into the eternal was gained, because only the end of life that passes through the gate of death was considered. This is even expressed in outward appearances. We have a word “immortality”, we use it to point to what lies beyond death. But in our present language we have no word that expresses that this eternal was there before birth or conception, we have no word, such as unbirthliness, being unborn or the like as an ordinary word. We have no word that corresponds to the word immortality as the other side of life.

But then, when we use strict methods to develop that which in ordinary life only lives as memory into a [higher] faculty of knowledge, then knowledge becomes not mere belief, but insight, that which the human being has experienced before he was taken up into the hereditary stream of physical life through conception. This will one day become true science, as the Copernican and Keplerian worldviews became true science. But it will become science; it will not be mere belief. For belief arose precisely because people only looked at the afterlife, not at the prenatal life.

In order to be able to look at the prenatal, one cannot remain with the soul life as before; one must develop other powers. Knowledge of the higher worlds is not given as a grace; it is only attained through inner effort. But then what has been discovered about the eternal nature of man spreads like a light, and also to the natural world around us. Then all the laws of nature that we learn about will be imbued with spirit. Then we will no longer speak of a materialistic world of atoms, but of a spirit that also underlies nature and from which we are born.

So you see, in the field of knowledge, anthroposophically oriented spiritual science opens up a perspective on the question: What is the human being? It does not stop at the human being. It goes right to the heart of what is man's deepest yearning for knowledge in relation to his own nature. And that which has been drawn into the modern world as an observing spirit must, so to speak, deepen of its own accord when a person undergoes such inner soul exercises. When a person truly develops within themselves a higher faculty of knowledge that can look beyond birth into the spiritual world, their approach to external observation becomes quite different from that of mere natural science. In this natural science, we are proud, and I emphasize again: with full justification, to observe that in which we have as little human part as possible, where the human interior is not involved. But, my dear audience, anyone who, through the power of imagination, works on their soul in such a way that their ability to remember reaches a higher level, will also be directly encouraged to further develop the other powers of the soul, especially the will. If he does this, if he also develops the will higher under the constant onslaught of the cognitive faculty, as I have just shown in its higher development, then the relationship that we otherwise have to external nature becomes one of inner devotion. Then one does not remain on the surface and merely state material atoms that one invents and that are not found, but one grows together with what is inside things. Only now do we begin to understand Goethe's view, which he wanted to express when he used the words against Haller, which you are well aware of. Haller had said:

No created spirit can penetrate into the innermost part of nature.

Happy he to whom she only shows the outer shell.

And Goethe replied:

“Into the innermost part of nature” - Oh, you philistines —
“No created spirit can penetrate,"
you may mention such a word
only not to me and my brothers and sisters
. We think: place by place
we are within.
“Happy the one who sees
only the outer shell!"
I hear that repeated for sixty years,
I curse it, but furtively,
Tell me a thousand, a thousand times:
She gives everything abundantly and gladly,
Nature has neither core nor
Shell,
She is everything at once;
She only tests you, most of all,
Whether you are core or shell.

This does not come naturally to man either. He must develop his will to a higher level. He must, so to speak, develop in his inner soul being that which is otherwise expressed as will emotions in his outer life. I can express myself in the following way: Our knowledge, namely our knowledge of nature, usually remains what we call objective, impersonal. But when we are in the midst of our ordinary lives, when we are with our friends, when we are dealing with our own destiny, with what we have to do in life, then we are bound to our surroundings with interest. Then our personal life wells up within us. Then we experience joy and pain, pleasure and suffering; in exaltation and in what we feel as depression, as despair, we experience something inwardly. On a higher level, just as objectively as anything else becomes objective in science, one can, if one [develops the will] through the methods I have described in “How to Know Higher Worlds”, delve into the essence of things. With the innermost human being, one is, as it were, immersed in the interior of natural things. One does not, however, discover atoms, but spiritual realities, that which underlies natural phenomena as a spiritual, humanly related supporting force. And one now makes a special discovery in relation to cognition and willful penetration into nature. If one has trained one's memory to look at prenatal life, one notices that everything becomes dark and silent, unclear and uncomfortable if one does not stand on the same strict spirit of science as the external science.

My dear attendees, with mystical ramblings, with all that is expressed in popular theosophy, with all this enthusiasm and all this fantasy, one does not get along with what true spiritual research is. All this rambling mysticism only descends into ambiguity. With the spirit that one has first been educated in modern science, one must seek this development of the soul, as I have indicated. Only then does one understand how science continues into the human being.

But then, when one wants to enter into the inner being of nature through the development of willpower, one then realizes what one is missing if one does not develop it ever further and further. What is so very beautiful in ordinary life, but is influenced by selfishness, must be had; it must be had in the fullest sense if one wants to immerse oneself in the beings of the world through willpower. One must have love for all the beings around one. Anyone who cannot develop love, completely selfless love, the only passion of the human being that is free of selfishness – many a great mind has expressed itself precisely in relation to love – anyone who does not have this true love in their personality will notice how darkness and coldness confront them when they want to immerse themselves, to give themselves to the outer world, to outer nature, when they want to find the spirit in the external world. In this way, through the cultivation of the will, observation can be fathomed, which, due to the modern spirit of science, only remains on the surface. And when one fathoms observation by penetrating into what is to be observed, one learns to recognize yet another.

In the same way that the spirit of knowledge allows us to look at prenatal life, we now learn to look with a new spirit at what has developed since birth as our soul life. At first it takes on abstract forms, just as it appears to ordinary introspection, self-knowledge. But when we develop what I have characterized as immersion in the external world, as a deepened sense of observation, then we come to know what we are in every moment of our lives, what we are at the present moment, as the spiritual soul germ of the future. Then belief in immortality is transformed into the realization of immortality.

But what must be brought to the people if he is to develop this kind of knowledge? I have said that on the one hand, on the side of knowledge, the right spirit of science must be developed. But it does not stop, it does not stop at the human being. This spirit of science becomes a worldview. And we have to establish a science for the future that can be a worldview, just as the old orientalism had a worldview that was free of science. And we have to grasp anew from this science, which can be a worldview again, an experienced worldview, what the mystery of Golgotha, the mystery of Christianity, is. (This mystery of Golgotha is a fact.) It is a calumny when it is said here or there that anthroposophical spiritual science disregards Christianity. No, it is precisely cowardice when one wants to claim that Christianity has something to lose when a new spiritual stage of human development approaches this Christianity, approaches the facts of Christianity. Christianity is so great that it can endure all discoveries in the material and spiritual realms until the end of earthly days. And just as it was once believed that the Copernican spirit could put an end to Christianity, and just as they wanted to eradicate it, so too is this spiritual science being treated today. It is being vilified and they want to wipe it out. But it will not contribute to the belittlement of Christianity, but to its exaltation, in that it will make Christianity, the Mystery of Golgotha, comprehensible again to the modern spirit, to modern striving, as a spiritual event that gives meaning to the evolution of the earth. - That according to the side of knowledge.

And on the practical side of life, if we want to penetrate into observation that does not merely want to remain an observation of nature, we must develop the spirit of love. If we do not have love, it is not possible to deepen our external observation. We educate our scientific spirit by educating ourselves at the same time to become a spirit of love. This, however, gives us the opportunity to connect with things. That was the terribly tragic thing about the modern development of humanity: that in the modern spirit of science, man lived alienated from humanity on abstract heights, that he could not penetrate into practical life because he was also far removed from the spirit of nature itself. By penetrating into the spirit of nature and combining with scientific knowledge in the field of cognition, anthroposophically oriented spiritual science prepares for the coexistence with the reality of outer human life, the human community: the spiritual life of humanity, the legal or state life of humanity, the economic life of humanity. From the way we live with the objects of science, we learn to approach even the most practical external things, right down to the dexterity of the hand. From the routine workers, who only had the spirit of the educational institutions alongside them, which could not be practical because the modern spirit of science was just as I have explained it, a spirit-filled life practice will develop from this kind of modern routine. Then people will no longer say that spiritual life can only be an ideology, a construction based on economic processes, but will recognize how man has always been and must be, who also carries his spiritual life into his social community, who can only shape economic life if he has first educated himself in his spiritual life in such a way that he knows how to live together with reality.

This is what will be recognized more and more: that spiritual science is practical because it helps people to grow together with reality. Therefore, as a practitioner, as an economic practitioner, he will be immersed in reality. Just as one should not stop in the sense of this spiritual science before recognizing the human being, so too should one not, with this attitude, which cannot develop without spiritual science, stand before humanity as a labor leader or as a laborer in social life if one only understands the fundamentals.

People like Keynes demand that we do more than merely carry out the actions of statesmen. On the last pages of his book, this man, despairing of the present, says: What do we have to do in the near future? Spread the truth, destroy illusions, disperse hatred, educate people to live together. - Yes, my dear attendees, how do we do that? But this question cannot be answered by external measures, but only by pointing to the foundation of human life itself and its transformation in the present. What thoughts should we spread? Not those that led to the catastrophe. We should spread those thoughts that do not stop at the human being in the life of knowledge and in the social life. We will not destroy illusions if people [believe] that they can prove these illusions, especially those of social life, from the spirit of modern science. How are we to destroy the illusion that we are sailing into barbarism when someone like Spengler, who is truly brilliant, wants to prove that humanity will inevitably sail into barbarism in the third millennium? How are we to [disperse] hatred if we do not create the bridge, create the bridge in love between person and person, between all people, but in a love that is not preached but that is educated by the intellectual forces?

If science is only cold sobriety, only a cold spirit of science, and love is not also educated, then it will not be able to penetrate public life through any socialist theories, which are only the children of this spirit of science.

The fact that this modern anthroposophically oriented spiritual science does not want to stop at what is theory is shown, first of all, in the one area where the great question of the time, the great task of the present, confronts us: in the field of education. The independent Waldorf School in Stuttgart was founded in response to an impulse from Mr. Emil Molt, and is based on the spirit of anthroposophical spiritual science. It was founded not so much in order that the spirit of some abstract worldview might bring a new religious belief into this school, so that children might be educated in anthroposophy, as it were. Not at all. But something else is the case. Those who take up anthroposophy as a living reality in their soul life develop from it the practical tools of education and teaching; they develop a pedagogical art that is no longer connected with what led us into the catastrophe, but with what is longed for as the spirit of the future.

In the field of intellectual life, thanks to Emil Molt's creation, you have something that wants to develop the art of education out of the human being; out of that knowledge of the human being that can only flow from the soil of such a science, which does not stop short of recognizing and willing before the human being. In this way, what grows in the child from week to week can be developed in such a way that the human being presents himself as a being who can truly shape social life in love in practice, that routine is eradicated; that spirit-filled reality and spirit-filled practice are substituted for routine.

And, my dear attendees, when we see today what even well-meaning people intend to do in public life in the face of the great challenges of the time, well, on the one hand there is the revival of parliamentary life – this is not meant as a criticism of parliamentary life, which has its justification – but of that which has borne such fruit, of that economic life which has basically emerged only from the malformation of modern times. We see today how labor participation is introduced in the formation of large trusts, but this will lead to nothing different than national education would lead if it only came from today's educational institutions, where what is left of the old is proclaimed as a new gospel.

Just as I was driving to this lecture, I was given an essay by an English educator who had recently visited the Waldorf School in Stuttgart and become acquainted with what it aims to achieve. Strangely enough, he says: This Waldorf School does not present in its educational system the results of what has been called modern education up to now, but it presents a completely new educational art to the world. Through direct observation, this writer, who is himself an English lecturer, gained the following insight: he says: What is lived out in spiritual science, not in theories but through the art of education itself, shows that this spiritual science is not a confluence of abstract “pathways” — as he puts it — but it is that which, as a living thing, can flow into the shaping of humanity, into direct practical life.

Thus, with our Waldorf School, we have sought to achieve something practical in the spiritual realm, the one realm of the threefold social organism we are striving for, based on the spirit of anthroposophical spiritual science. And what has been achieved in one year, because the Waldorf School has only existed for so long, can of course only be a beginning. But you see, one recognizes in this beginning a new educational spirit, an educational spirit of the future.

Starting from this, this same man says: What is the essential thing here? The essential thing in this Waldorf School is that one cannot say - and he says that the teachers themselves, with whom he has spoken, admit this - that this is an ideal for all time that one only has to imitate. No, what comes from there can only come from spiritual science; it must always flow out of spiritual science in practical ways. And the man looked around further. He saw what other practical things had been dealt with. And it is a lot when it is said from this side of the world: spiritual science gives so many impulses that practical people can be educated for a very practical life in the future.

Spiritual science does not want to go crazy in some unrealistic cloud cuckoo land, but the great tasks of the present are such that they directly approach our most ordinary life. But spiritual science can also deal with this most ordinary life practice, even though it rises to the highest spiritual heights. And we may cherish the hope that what is already being seen in the spiritual realm by those who want to see it will also prove valid in some practical areas, and can prove valid more and more.

That is why the courses at the School of Spiritual Science in Dornach were held on the subject of reforming all of scientific life, because a transformation of thinking, of the whole world view, must be the starting point for anything that can contribute to solving the great questions posed by the present day.

And one will admit from the example that I have just given, but which could be multiplied by numerous others, that it means something when something is recognized by this spirit from abroad in today's world that we are doing in the middle of Germany.

My dear attendees, we must not forget the memory, the living and active memory of that which lived in Goethe and Schiller, the great Germans. We must develop it further. It was with this in mind that we built the Goetheanum in this border area that opens up to the West, to the victors in Switzerland, because we wanted to express the spirit in which even the most practical things should be created. And if we imbibe this attitude, then there will be more examples of the recognition of our achievements from the old German spirit, despite the spirit of the present civilization lying outside of Germany. Outwardly, we could be defeated. But what we will achieve if we remain true to the German spirit, to what is greatest in the German people, will be recognized. And spiritual science can already point to examples of how what is brought before the world today out of the truly German spirit is, after all, recognized.

In this way, spiritual science can also play a practical role in the recovery of national and international life, because it wants to be realistic in relation to all areas and therefore practical in the truest sense of life; it wants to be practical because it does not develop a practice that denies the spirit, does not strive for a spirit that is alien to reality, but because it strives for a true, genuine, eternal spirit, which, however, is not there merely for theoretical or confessional contemplation, but which is able to have an active influence on matter. A material life that does not deny the spirit, a spirit that does not feel too proud to conquer material life - that is what is connected with the great tasks of the present and the future. Thus we will have to solve the great tasks of the present and the near future in the sense of reconciling the true spirit with the material, also with the practical, with the economic life.

Dear attendees! When I published my “Key Points of the Social Question in the Necessities of Life in the Present and the Near Future” in the spring of 1919, the public life of the West was somewhat different from what it is today. It should actually be made perfectly clear how fast the pace of current events is. We should realize how much the configuration of Western civilization has changed again in the last two years. In the spring of 1919, there was sufficient reason to hope that a sufficiently large number of people would unite in the belief that spiritual impulses could counteract the forces of social decline. The terrible experiences of the war years lay behind the Western world's humanity. These terrible experiences, which at the time many people felt were incomparable in the historical life of humanity. And from these terrible experiences had emerged the opinion that something very drastic had to be done, something that had to be brought about from the depths of intellectual life, so that the forces of decline could be paralyzed in an appropriate way and humanity could be brought out of the rising forces through work.

One would like to say: After only a few months, one could see that this opinion, which was very much present in the broadest circles, had actually receded considerably. Therefore, in February, March, April and May of 1919, one could have believed that by asserting such ideas, as they were presented in my “Key Points of the Social Question” and as they were summarized in my appeal “To the German People and to the World of Culture,” one could have believed that by putting forward such ideas one could reach those people who held the opinion just characterized. It was not necessary to cherish the arrogant opinion that the right ideas had been hit upon if they were put forward in this way. It was enough to believe that the ideas had been honestly drawn from the depths of existence, from the legitimate depths of of existence, such ideas had been brought up, and then one could believe that from the experiences that had just arisen, a sufficiently large number of people would be found to support the whole ductus, the whole will of such ideas, with understanding and energy.

One could see how very soon people again believed that humanity would be helped by first gluing together these or those old impulses that had been torn apart. One could see how the energy that had been noticeable for a while back then was gradually paralyzed and so on. At that time, in the spring of 1919, what I called “The Threefold Social Organism” had to be thrown into the situation, as it were. As I said, it might need to be corrected, as always, but it had to be thrown into the situation because it arose out of two presuppositions.

The first prerequisite is an historical one, a spiritual-historical one, one that is gained from observing the course of human development as it emerges from the spiritual-historical observation that is carried out here as anthroposophical.

The other prerequisite arose from decades of observation of the impulses that were striving from the undergrounds of spiritual, state-political and economic life everywhere towards the surface. The second prerequisite arose from the observation of what actually wanted to be realized, to which one should only help to realize, from this observation, from the directly practical observation of the three different formations of life. The first premise was not theoretical either. The purpose of spiritual science, as it is here, is to lead to full reality. Therefore, all its considerations, including those on the development of humanity, are imbued with a sense of reality. Who could not recognize the democratic principle by an unbiased observation of that which has asserted itself more and more intensely in the emergence of modern humanity?

I do not need to define this democratic principle. Of course, one person understands one thing by it and another person something else. But in general, one has a sense of what has been emerging in recent history as the democratic principle, the principle that man, simply by being man, must assert within the social community, that as much as the judgment of the individual human being is worth, this judgment must also mean in social events. This urge for democracy had been there for a long time, expressed through the most diverse movements and convulsions of the newer historical life of Western humanity, with its American offshoot.

But on the other hand, it could be seen that this democratic life cannot actually be realized in all respects. And it becomes apparent to the unbiased observer of human society that there is only one area of social life that can truly become democratic, and that is the political-state area. But the political-state area, if it wants to become democratic, can only include those matters on which every person who has come of age is capable of judgment. And if you think practically, you can clearly define the area of social life that can be subject to the judgment of every person who has come of age. On the other hand, there are two areas that simply cannot be democratized because they can only develop if they develop in terms of the expertise and specialist knowledge of the people, of the individual human individuality. This is, on the one hand, the entire area of intellectual life, namely that area of intellectual life that is actually public, the area of teaching and education, and, on the other hand, that of economic life.

Spiritual life and its main component, the system of teaching and education, can only develop properly if it arises from the professional judgment and expertise of the individuals active in this field and is also administered, administered in complete independence. Not every person who has come of age can judge in this area. Therefore, in this area there can be no such thing as a democratic constitution and democratic administration. Nor can there be democratic constitution and democratic administration in the field of economic life.

In this connection I should like to call attention to a fact which may be multiplied a hundredfold or a thousandfold by the experiences of life, a fact which has taken place in modern times. About the middle of the nineteenth century and towards the last third of it, the question of the gold standard, the actual gold standard, became particularly pressing, I might say. And one can make a very interesting observation if one considers everything that was said for and against the gold standard by very clever people in parliaments, trading companies, associations of entrepreneurs, industrial associations of entrepreneurs, and so on, up to the second half of the nineteenth century and towards the last third of it. I do not mean any irony when I say that in those days a huge amount of cleverness was raised for and against the gold standard. And in particular, a conclusion-type played a major role back then, namely that if one really came to this unified gold currency, then the pursuit of free trade and the realization of free trade would prevail everywhere. Free trade will finally triumph.

You can tell, my dear audience, when you read what was said at the time, what was said at the time, it is really clever, it was not said by stupid people, but it was said by extraordinarily clever people. But reality soon said the opposite. Reality has shown that everywhere the gold standard has led to efforts to establish protective tariff systems and to close the individual national borders. That is to say, the cleverest people, those people who, out of their industrial cleverness, said the most sensible things, had to be taught by reality that, in line with reality, the opposite should have been said! As I said, I am not being ironic when I speak of “cleverness”; I mean it quite seriously. For this fact - and it could be multiplied a hundredfold - points us in many directions. What does it point us to? That in the economic field the individual cannot be decisive at all, that he can only be decisive if his judgment coincides with that of others who, in turn, are experienced and skilled in another area of economic life, that is to say, that the individual with his judgment has only one value within the association.

And so we have two areas: the spiritual area of teaching and education, which must be placed in the power of the individual human individuality; and the economic area, which must be placed in the power of the association, the association of the appropriate cooperation of the individual economic sectors, of production, consumption, and the circulation of goods. The proper form of interaction that results from all of this, from the judgment within the associations, must shape economic life. So that we have three links, not parts; by speaking of the tripartite division of the social organism, one has given rise to many misunderstandings; one cannot speak of the three-part human being either, one cannot divide the human being into head, trunk, limbs and metabolism, whereas the human being really consists of these three parts; so one cannot speak of the three of the social organism, but only of the threefold social organism, because these three members should not go their own way, as it were, the head, the circulation system - the rhythmic one - and the metabolism system can go their own way, but precisely because of their relative independence, they also work together in the most economical and rational way. If you take this threefold social order seriously, you can be honest as a democrat, because then you can really implement democracy in the area where it should be implemented, in the area of state and political affairs, where the mature human being faces the mature human being, and where only that which can be judged by a mature human being is decided and administered. It is entirely possible to find the detailed, concrete form of how to work towards this threefold social organism.

However, you see, conditions have become so unnatural in this respect that sometimes, even back in the spring of 1919, when the threefold social organism was taken much more seriously than it is today, sometimes you had to give strange answers. In one country, for example, where a so-called Ministry of Labor had been set up, I was asked by the Minister of Labor: “Yes, but if the social organism is to be threefolded, where do I actually belong?” He meant as Minister of Labor. Well, if you think about the necessities very concretely, the Ministry of Labor is a hybrid between economic life and political life. That is why I said to the minister in question: Yes, unfortunately for you, you have to be cut in half. - Like the brave Swabian who was not afraid and cut the Turk in half, so a half labor minister should have fallen out of our unnatural present circumstances on both the left and the right. But it is precisely these things that prove how things are, and how everything is mixed up, confounded.

And so we have to say: the necessity of the threefold social order arose out of the historical, spiritual-scientific observation of the emergence of democracy. If we observe the quite radical change that occurred in the second decade of the twentieth century, we can also see that that experiences are now possible that could lead people to take such a thing seriously and understand it. One could also say that it was basically only the final consequence of what had already emerged at the end of the eighteenth century in the call for liberty, equality and fraternity. This appeal for liberty, equality and fraternity, which emerged from the French Revolution, is such that it cuts deep into the hearts of all unbiased people, that it must be taken for granted, that it must be striven for. But anyone who is even slightly familiar with the cultural-political literature of the nineteenth century knows how much has been said – and again not by stupid people, but by very clever ones – against these three ideas of liberty, equality, fraternity.

Just read the extraordinary multi-volume work of the very talented Magyar [Eötvös] from the 1850s, and you will see how it is proved in a very subtle philosophical that the idea of equality cannot be realized alongside [the idea of] freedom, and that, in turn, the idea of fraternity cannot be realized alongside the idea of absolute equality, and so on. It must be said: what is being put forward here is clever. One sees at last that these very ideas, in the course of the historical development of mankind, well up from the underground to the surface as something quite justified, but that nevertheless the whole of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth century were still under the sway of the suggestion of the unitary state. This suggestion of the unitary state was so great that people worked more and more, especially in Central Europe and also over Western Europe, with the exception of England, to shape the unitary state more and more intensively in terms of its agents. One was under the suggestion of the omnipotence of the unitary state, which had to extend over everything. And into that one could not then fit the ideas of liberty, equality, fraternity.

If we recognize that this unified state is striving towards threefold order, then we also very soon realize that spiritual life is striving towards freedom, state and political life towards equality of all mature human beings, and economic life towards true brotherhood in associations, and from there out into all of life.

As soon as one has the idea of threefolding, one also has the agent for realizing freedom, equality and fraternity. Now, of course, there have been many people, my dear audience, who, when they heard something like the threefolding of the social organism, spoke of utopia. But it is not utopian. Just as it emerged from a spiritual-scientific-historical observation, on the other hand, it emerged from a practical observation of life itself, and it is simply not true that this threefold social order would be about imposing over humanity, which has become somewhat chaotic, but rather it is a matter of the fact that for the person who understands this threefold social order, it can be tackled from every single point of life. You can start anywhere, and then the individual beginnings will flow together into a whole by themselves. This is how we started with the threefold social order in the realm of spiritual life.

We started at our Stuttgart Waldorf School, because it is just a school like any other, but a school that has been created out of a truly free spiritual life, I want to mention it first. However, it is difficult to get through today, especially with views on the school system. In this regard, one also experiences strange things. I recently read an article in a magazine that was somewhat critical of the 'National Assembly' that took place in the city of Goethe and Schiller, Weimar, after the so-called German Revolution; of course I have nothing against criticizing this National Assembly, because basically one can say: it is really hardly an exaggeration to describe this national chatter – parliamentarism always has something to do with a chattering association or talkativeness, doesn't it, the special way of talking together! I have nothing against holding up a proper image of this National Assembly. But something strange was said. It was said that this Weimar National Assembly had actually only caused havoc in all areas of public life – with the exception of a single area where it had delivered something useful, namely in the area of schools, through the creation of the so-called primary school, the so-called unified school, and so on.

Now, this essay is based on nothing more than the fact that it is easier to see what nonsense the “Weimar National Assembly” has inaugurated in other areas of life than in the field of education, where everyone can prattle on for a very long time before the nonsense is noticed.

Now, when our “Freie Waldorfschule” was founded in Stuttgart, it was important that the spiritual life itself should be the foundation and soil with its own requirements, from which teaching and education are derived here. Of course, anthroposophical spiritual science is the source of the pedagogy and didactics of the Waldorf School. I gave the seminar course for the teachers of this Waldorf School based on anthroposophical spiritual science before the opening of the Waldorf School. But this Waldorf School was not misused to instill dogmatic anthroposophy into children in a school of world view. The founding of the Waldorf School was quite the opposite of this. The aim of the Waldorf School was to apply a pedagogy and didactics in which anthroposophical spiritual science can be practically demonstrated right down to the skill of the fingers; from the application of pedagogy and didactics and from what one did, one wanted to show the fruits of anthroposophical feeling and thinking, not by instilling any dogmas. That is why they almost, I would even say radically, refrained from making the Waldorf school a school of world view. That is why religious education was separated from the other subjects. Religious education for Catholic children was entrusted to the Catholic priest, and for Protestant children to the Protestant pastor.

And then, in the course of the school's effectiveness, it became apparent that there was a large number of children, dissident children, who did not attend any lessons, neither Catholic nor Protestant. What should be done with these children?

Initially, the children's group at the Waldorf School was made up of the children of workers at the Waldorf-Astoria cigarette factory; after all, it was our friend Emil Molt in Stuttgart who founded this Waldorf School, and initially the children were “the children of workers” at the Waldorf-Astoria cigarette factory. Now, there were a great many parents who did not want to send their children to any of the religious lessons; but they felt that their children should not grow up without religion, without being introduced to spiritual things. And so we were obliged to set up a kind of anthroposophical free religious education alongside the other lessons, which we then also developed in terms of pedagogy and didactics, and which now stands as a third one, on an equal footing with the other two.

The Protestant religion teachers in particular had to state that they feared that the children would run away from them and run over to the anthroposophical religious education, didn't they? But as I said, it was precisely in this treatment of the religious education questions that it should be shown how far the Waldorf School is from wanting to be a school of world view.

On the other hand, anthroposophical spiritual science is able to answer the question: What are the forces that have taken on physical form in the child after it has descended from the spiritual world, and what are the forces that are particularly active in the child up to the year in which the teeth change, around the age of seven?

They are mainly powers of imitation, and everything that is to be brought to the child at this age must be achieved through a certain study of these childlike powers of imitation.

Other powers then emerge from the background of the child's mind around the seventh year. One has to take these powers into account. One then sees how one has to approach reading, writing and so on; from what one knew from anthroposophically oriented spiritual science, a pedagogy and didactics were formed, a real art of education that works towards not introducing reading and writing to children in an abstract way, but in such a way that reading and writing are brought out of a certain artistic, holistic humanity.

Between the ages of six, seven and nine, teaching is such that nothing abstract, nothing that engages the mere head, the mere intellect, is presented to the child. Our mere numbers and letter signs engage the mere intellect if they are not taken from the full activity of the human being. And so it was particularly important for this childhood age to have a great deal of light shed on it through anthroposophical observation of human development. The corresponding pedagogy and didactics were based on this.

Between the ages of nine and ten, there is an important point in a child's development that must be taken into account by educators and teachers. Something occurs that usually goes unnoticed. Before that, the child hardly differs from his or her surroundings. It is best to teach the child in a way that appeals as little as possible to its sense of self. But between the ages of nine and ten, something breaks into the child's mind, the main development of which lasts only a short time. One must be grown to observe what is happening in the child's development, because sometimes it depends on a few days to find the right words, the right encouragement for the child, to bring the right thing forward in the right way.

And so it is important to know what human nature wants every year, every week. And so you bring the child up, and we have developed this pedagogy and didactics to bring the child up to the age of 13, 14, 15, where something completely different occurs in child development.

Eight days ago, I was obliged to ensure in an evening course for teachers that our so-called tenth class could now be opened in the appropriate way. This is the class that children enter when they have reached sexual maturity, or, as we say in anthroposophical spiritual science, at the age when the childlike astrality, the astral body, as we say, the actual spiritual-soul body, is born. This requires a very special deepening into this important age. And in opening this class, the pedagogical-didactic maxim had to be found again to guide young people into this age.

You see, you have to feel the full weight of the age on your soul in a certain way if you really want to practice contemporary pedagogy and didactics in this way. Because you have seen it: in the last few decades – I would say it is an international affair – the so-called youth movement has emerged in the most diverse forms. What did this youth movement mean? The young suddenly demanded something completely new and were aware that the old could not give them what they were demanding. The wanderer instinct and so on, as they are all called, have become known to people.

Now this youth movement has clearly shown that the old were no longer able to be the right authority for the young. The young no longer expected what had previously been expected of the young by the old, and a terrible yearning went through the young. I would like to say: In this yearning, however mistaken and nebulous it was in certain respects, the call for a new pedagogy and didactics is clearly expressed. There is no need to [see] whether something that comes up with such elementary power from the depths of life, whether it is more or less right or wrong, but you only have to look at it in its actuality, then it can already prove this or that to you. In particular, anyone who has seen the latest phase of these youth movements, which have only emerged in recent years, must admit that this youth movement first expressed itself in such a way that the nebulous, chaotic urge of one person to join another emerged. I would like to say – the young lived out their lives in packs, in cliques. Then suddenly a strange turn occurred, only in the last few years and especially among the best members of this youth movement a colossal turn occurred. They got tired of connecting one to the other in small cliques. And those who had previously had a strong urge to join one another in small cliques began to feel a kind of disgust for being together. A certain hermit-like behavior asserted itself, youthful hermit-like behavior. They closed themselves off, they encapsulated themselves, the young people. A complete turnaround has taken place. This is also deeply significant. And again, it is not a Central European, but an international issue that has taken hold of all possible youth groups in the civilized world today. It is a matter of the necessity today to provide for spiritual life from the very depths of all of life.

Something like this should be created by the Waldorf School in Stuttgart, which, I would like to say, was also created out of social circumstances. All the blustering about the unified school, which arises from all kinds of enmity and antipathy and sympathy, is of course immediately lost in the objective when one teaches and educates out of the nature of the human being. There, of course, people are taught and educated uniformly. But the matter is brought into being appropriately, not out of political proposals or antipathies and ranklings and räsonnements. The fruitful further development of humanity depends on this, that out of the factual the factual be founded.

But to achieve something like this, to really have teachers who can approach young people in such a way with such a pedagogy and didactics, you need a free spiritual life, because you have to be able to use the full power of the teachers. My dear attendees, many a person has thought for a long time, especially in times of liberal ideas, when freedom has been so greatly undermined, many a person has thought: we need programs, we need comprehensive ideas. Many programs have been devised about the best way to teach, especially about curricula.

Now, ladies and gentlemen, when you put five, six, twelve not particularly clever people together – forgive this somewhat delicate or undelicate allusion – when so and so many people sit down and let their abstract minds , then they come up with the most ideal programs, all of it perfect; Clause I, the teacher has to teach this in class, Clause II, the teacher has to treat the students in such and such a way, Clause III, this or that has to happen. For the eighth year, this is how it has to be done, and so on. In the greatest perfection, paragraph I to x, everything can be presented in this way, and you can get an ideal program out of it, with the average intellectual predisposition of the twelve people who sat down together. Not much is needed to define anything in abstracto. Only because these people have the urge to disagree, we have received not one, but many programs. There are programs and cleverness buzzing through the world. When would there have been more programs and cleverness – whereby the word “cleverness” is not even used ironically – buzzing through the world than precisely in the nineteenth century.

But you see, that is not what matters, what matters is what happens in reality. What matters is real, practical life. Well, we have indeed gradually entered into strange realms of abstraction. Today, people even think about very strange theories in theory. For example, they think about the fact that if they travel from point A to point B at ordinary speed, and a cannon is fired at point A and another cannon is fired at point B, they will hear the cannon that was fired later than the one that was fired earlier. But if they move faster and faster, the interval changes; and then they work out that if they move at the speed of sound, they even hear the one cannon that is fired later at the same time. And if they move faster than the speed of sound, they even hear the cannon that is fired later earlier than the one that is fired earlier!

Now, you see, that may seem quite correct in theory, and there is nothing to be said against it. But someone who thinks in a spiritual sense, thinks realistically, not just logically, has something to object to, because that is only one way to get to the truth, and he wants to think realistically, and then he also has to imagine what such a person would look like who would now move faster than sound. Einstein even calculated what a clock would look like if it were to fly out into space at the speed of light and then come back again. Theoretically, all this can be done, and of course it is all theoretically correct. It has been much admired. But just imagine what the clock would look like when it comes back, or what a person would look like if he were to move at the speed of sound! One thing is certain: one would not be able to judge the differences in the speed of sound, because the human being would have to become sound himself. This would lead one to the conclusion that one cannot help but let concrete reality flow into one's soul, not abstract theory. Only then are we on the right path to truth. But then we also realize that a dozen people can work out very beautiful programs. But a dozen teachers can only realize what lies within the power of these teachers. And the most beautiful ideals have no value at all compared to what really lives in people. Therefore, what is to be achieved must be taken from the reality of the human being. You simply have to create this school republic out of the individual personalities of the teachers, you must not want more than the teachers can achieve, who you can put in their place. You have to take the specific teachers into account, and the school program emerges from this specific teaching staff. But this is only possible in a free spiritual life, in a spiritual life such as is striven for in the threefold social organism, where the individual human being is actually directly confronted with the spiritual world, and feels responsible for what he has to achieve in the field of spiritual life, directly responsible to the spiritual world, not to the school inspector, or through him to the minister of education and so on, but directly to the powers of the spiritual world. For an education and training system such as I have just described can only be developed if one does not merely have an abstract, intellectual spiritual life, but a real spiritual life, when it is the spirit itself that reigns on earth through the deeds of men, when one appeals to the living spirit, not merely to concepts and ideas, not merely to the intellectual and the intellectualizing. But you can only bring it out, bring it forth, this living spiritual life, this active spirit, from the individual human personalities themselves. From the teacher of the lowest elementary school class up to the teacher of the highest school system, each one is integrated into the independent spiritual organism, so that each one can only follow himself, and has so much teaching to do that he still has time to perform administrative tasks, so that everything that is administered is done by those who are still teaching, who really still teach, not by those who have retired or been taken out of the school system. The administration of the school system is the responsibility of those who are still actively teaching. There would be no authority, people say. No, that is precisely where the true authority of spiritual life would be found, namely, the self-evident authority. In no other field can authority arise except that which arises of its own accord. I would like to know how authority can fail to arise when someone really has the will to do something beneficial and knows that someone else can give them advice, then it will come, and then the one who can give the advice will have the self-evident authority.

I have the task of running the Waldorf School in Stuttgart. Each teacher is independent in his or her class. The person who does something in class does so on his or her own initiative. The opinion has never been expressed that I have ever ordered anyone to do anything at the Waldorf School. On the other hand, everyone seeks advice on all kinds of matters, and there is a unified spirit in this Waldorf School. The authority is there, as a matter of course. And one could see it grow, this self-evident authority, on the spirit of the Waldorf School in the last two years since this Waldorf School has existed. One could start in this school, which started two years ago with not quite 200 children, which now has over 500 children, who are once again facing difficulties because they do not want to increase the size of the classes, the lower four classes, there should only be as many children admitted as were there before the Elementary School Law was passed. Recently, however, it has become clear that parents will not put up with this. Now, [in] this Waldorf School, there is a place where you can actually realize in a certain area what you can know from the free spiritual life. Sometimes one has strange experiences there, which I perhaps, for easily understandable reasons, in so far as they arise from the interaction, in the social interaction that we do not, however, let into the teaching, with the official life, about which I I prefer not to make any comments on now; but it is already possible to see how the individual things that lie in this threefolding of the social organism can be tackled from the practical, concrete point of view, and how one does not have to deal with some utopia.

Likewise, this can be done in other areas of spiritual life. And in fact, the anthroposophical worldview will not impose itself dogmatically, but will prove its right to exist through its viability. Because, my dear audience, one should not believe at all that someone who writes something like 'The Key Points of the Social Question' from such a basis, from a realistic basis, is thinking of anything utopian. There is no question of that, not even in the choice of expressions: threefold social order. In recent years, when many people have made the threefold order into a sect, which of course it was certainly not meant to be by me, I have had to experience it again and again, especially in Germany: how is it to be organized? How this, how that? It is really quite bad when, even in the post-war period, you are always confronted with the word “organize,” and especially when you call something you would like to see realized an organism, and you still hear the words: “organize, organize”; you organize where there is something mechanical; an organism is precisely there so that you cannot organize it. You cannot organize the organic. That must appear as an organism. Where you want to organize something, you only have the [inorganic] at hand. You cannot organize an organism. You have to let it become.

You can see the thoroughly misunderstood nature of things when such things occur. And so the threefold structure of the social organism is based on the fact that things must form, that one only has to develop the formative forces, that the threefold social organism must arise. Therefore, it cannot be described in the abstract. Especially those who have spoken of utopia would actually always like to have utopias. When speaking of such things, one can hear it asked, well: what then will be the position regarding ownership of a sewing machine in the threefolded social organism? This question has been asked here at this place, and so on.

Now, my dear attendees, a free spiritual life is only possible under the condition of a real spiritual life. Once, when I was talking about such things in a Swiss city, a university teacher replied to me: Yes, but we already have the freedom of the spiritual life, because in all state constitutions it says: Science and its teaching are free. But, ladies and gentlemen, the point is that science, which is free, should only be there as a free science. If, from the outset, science is raised in such a way that people are trained who are suitable for this or that office, and who are taught the program of their office, then you can safely decree that science and its teaching are free. If science itself is enslaved, then enslaved science naturally feels very free when it is allowed to develop as a slave.

And so it was often replied: In such and such a country, the state does not interfere in schools at all. That is the worst thing to say, because then you no longer notice it, and that is much worse than when you notice it and rebel against it, than when you no longer even notice how what flows in is only based on state principles arising without factual or specialized knowledge from the incorrect democratic, when one no longer even notices what should arise from the abilities for each new generation, what the human being still brings with him from the spiritual world by entering into physical existence through birth. We simply need teachers and educators who stand with holy reverence before the child and say to themselves: something from the spiritual world has been entrusted to me in this child, which I have to fathom and solve as a mystery. I must inquire what message from the spiritual world they have given him. Knowledge of the spiritual world must be alive in teaching and education; this spiritual world must be real in teaching and education. When the coming generation is tyrannized by that which is already there, by the living generation, then the spiritual life is made unfree. And to a large extent, the question of teaching and education in a free spiritual life is a question of teachers, the question of finding the right teachers, those who stand before the growing children as I have just characterized it.

Dear Ladies and Gentlemen, I wanted to use a few strokes, which of course must always remain fragmentary, to point out how the free spiritual life is to be thought of in the threefold social organism. As I said at the beginning of my talk, today we are actually facing a different time from that in the spring, in the spring of 1919. At that time one could believe that there would really be a sufficiently large number of people who would support the realization of the threefold social order. Today one would be out of touch with the times if one had the same faith as one had then. Threefolding must not become a sect either, something that one can believe in and advocate everywhere and at all times, theoretically as one's opinion. Today it is quite clear, however heavy-heartedly one has to admit it, that within European civilization the people who actually do the economic work have no sense of progress, no insight into real needs, that one is preaching to deaf ears if one wants to work into economic life with reasonable foundations. Today it is clear that one can present individual productive examples to the world, as we tried to do in “The Coming Day” and “Futurum”. These examples will exist as individual white ravens, they will be careful to survive, and they will fulfill the expectations placed on them, at least as individuals. But today we cannot speak of the fact that one comes across an insight in general economic life in order to be able to grasp such things with such ideas, as one could still believe in the first urge of human experiences and results in 1919. In the meantime, people have become accustomed to glossing over the old declining forces. They are still downward forces, after all, and the collapse is still coming. They have only decided to delay the collapse a little, to let everything slide, so that they do not have to expend the energy to move forward to new ideas. And humanity is largely asleep and does not notice how the downward forces are actually raging, and how, with each quarter, civilized humanity is drawing closer to this decline. People would much rather face the convulsions and terrible upheavals that lie in wait for the future in the present if they cannot warm to ideas in the immediate present that could be properly extracted from reality in a calm development, which will nevertheless be needed in the future.

And so we can say that there is little hope to be placed in economic life today. People will have to be forced to take up the new ideas, through their own need, through the effect of the forces of decline. But in the spiritual life we must work unstintingly to develop the free spiritual life as a member of the threefold organism. This is what must not flag, what must be cultivated unconditionally, because the time in which we live is such that people's souls are becoming emptier and emptier, more and more desolate. They are too lazy to admit this to themselves today, but we are heading for terrible times in terms of people's mental state, which will also be reflected in their physical condition.

I have spoken of this often, including in public lectures. The spiritual life must save us through to the times when reasonable people will also see something on the economic front. It is necessary that this spiritual life be cultivated in its freedom wherever it can be cultivated. Anthroposophical soil is the best soil imaginable for this, because then work must be done out of complete freedom. For what needs to be worked out is not yet there. And since it is spirit, it can only be worked out through freedom. And so, especially in the near future, anthroposophical striving and true social striving will increasingly coincide. And we will have to face the souls with the fact that the economic will have to lag behind, that the spiritual simply has to go ahead today.

This is also shown by the qualities of our opponents; in Central Europe, a strange, well-organized opposition is now asserting itself. This well-organized opposition had already worked its way up to the point that at the time, on printed slips of paper distributed to all the people in this packed, largest Stuttgart hall, it was written, not only in allusions, but quite clearly, that it was actually my fault that the Battle of Marnesch was lost in 1914, and that Minister Simons in England has done poorly in recent times. It was not just in innuendo, but it was written on the slips of paper in a very crude way! You could see how it is here with widely extended parties that do not want to admit what has actually happened, that need scapegoats because it no longer works to say that the stab in the back, with which one first wanted to cover up a really eminently lost war, a war that was lost by every trick in the book, they wanted to cover that up with the 'stab in the back'; now they wanted to cover up the absolute incompetence of anyone who has ever led an army, of Ludendorffism, that's what they want to cover up. Today they want to make great geniuses out of people who are quite incapable. A cultural life steeped in lies is a cultural life in decline.

And the situation is no different in the West, no different in America. There, everything is a little more pronounced, where defeat makes things stand out more sharply. Everywhere we need to extract a real, a true, a free spiritual life from the corruption of humanity, which is suffocating in lies and untruthfulness today. For this is identical with truth, and this is at the same time identical with a striving that is in keeping with reality. Therefore, even if there is little prospect of success today, we may still believe that a sufficiently large number of people can warm to a full understanding of the idea of threefolding. Those who can muster the necessary enthusiasm and courage for a free spiritual life will help the threefold social organism to get back on its feet. Then a truly free spiritual life will become a reality. If it becomes a reality in people's hearts, in their powers and in their actions, then the threefold social organism will most certainly follow of its own accord out of the necessity, out of the need of the time. (Lively applause!)

Discussion

Question: How can an ordinary person, who has no influence on public institutions, work in the spirit of threefolding? Rudolf Steiner: The question that was asked here first is: How can an ordinary person, who has no influence on public institutions, work in the spirit of threefolding? Well, firstly, it is not quite clear to me how someone can be without influence on public institutions. Unless he is in prison or in some other place where he can hardly move, he is actually always subject to a certain influence on public institutions. The outside world ensures that one is never completely without influence on public institutions; one has to pay taxes and so on, so one always has some influence on public institutions. So the question cannot really be put that way.

But then, if perhaps what is meant is: How can one work in the sense of the threefold social order, when one perhaps does not have the opportunity to speak, to speak freely somehow, when one does not have the opportunity to be, let's say, a member of parliament or something similar, how can one work in the sense of the threefold social order of the social organism? Then you have to say: Well, this impulse for threefolding is something very concrete. And that is why you can actually only talk about it in concrete examples. You see, I want to say the following, for example. There are institutions everywhere in the sense of nationalization, partial or more or less extensive nationalization - let's say, of medical matters, of nursing. Now, it has happened time and again that good people – who, in their own opinion, are “good” followers of our philosophy – come and say that they would like to have this or that remedy, and so on! So they would actually like to encourage quackery and to violate the law! They can be won over for that, those people! They don't need to have any influence on public institutions, but when they lack something, they don't recognize - perhaps with more or less justification - the state-recognized doctor and want to cure somehow from behind. I have even known ministers who appeared in public parliament to speak out against quackery and for the protection of the medical profession by law, and afterwards, when they themselves became ill, or anyone else became ill, they turned to someone who was not a state-recognized doctor! It is terribly difficult to persuade people to really join those movements that simply correspond to the introduction of such institutions, which are necessary if one wants to have a free spiritual life, or in general, if one wants that which one professes! Many such examples could be cited, where everyone, in their place, by not being afraid to speak out wherever it is possible for them, takes a stand against what they recognize as evil. If you recognize the state protection of medicine as an absurdity, then speak up for it! Or, ladies and gentlemen, is it not an absurdity that over there, across the border, at Leopoldshöhe, there must be a different art of healing than here just a few steps away? But a doctor who is licensed over there is not allowed to help here. If you give in to reason, you will immediately see the matter as an absurdity. But if, let us say, for example, you are a member of the Federal Council or something similar, then you do not see this absurdity! And if you do see it, then you do not find it opportune to represent it. But if one person finds another, there will eventually be enough people to really come to reason. And instead of asking: How can an ordinary person, who has no part in public affairs, become active in the spirit of threefolding, do what one finds in every step and turn of life, in order to carry it out in the spirit of threefolding. Then one will see that every hour, every day, one finds opportunities to become active in the spirit of threefolding.

Question: In Holland, the constitutional ban on official Catholic processions is now to be lifted, which is causing quite a stir. Would this actually be a question of the free spiritual life or also of the public legal life? Rudolf Steiner: With some questions it is so with the threefold social organism, although the idea is quite right, of course: How does the blood of the chest or the head come to play this or that role in the migraine? The blood simply circulates, and so one cannot say that the blood of the chest organism is different from the blood of the head, but one can only speak of the blood in general. And so it is not easy to categorize things again. The threefold social organism is precisely manifested in the fact that things cannot be categorized. However, one does experience very strange things. In recent years I have always had to speak of the three-part human organism, the sensory organism, the rhythmic organism and the metabolic-limb organism, and in recent years a great deal has been done by myself and our medical and scientific friends to develop this idea of the three-part human being. But recently a book was written by someone called Kurt Leese, I believe. He has now, because I said that things should not be put together in boxes, but that the whole human being is head, nevertheless the human being is mainly head in the head, the whole human being is head. Things go into each other. The head is also taken care of and dependent on the limbs. Things all go into each other. Kurt Leese can no longer think this. He can only think of three if it is nicely next to each other, but he cannot think it when it goes into each other. He says: It's a shocking idea.

But we will have to get used to such shocks, even in the tripartite social organism, if we are to imagine, through the effect of abstractions, what a clock looks like when it flies away at the speed of sunlight and returns after years, is difficult to verify for a variety of reasons: firstly, because of the nature of the clock; secondly, because of the person who would then have to check it when the clock returns, and so on. So the present is not shocked at all by such ideas of the abstract. But it is shocked when something that is in line with reality is placed before it. So it is necessary not to press things so much that one now asks: Is this a matter of the free spiritual life or of the legal life? One can say: If one begins to prohibit any expressions or revelations of the spiritual life at all, to make legal provisions about it, then one is on a slippery slope with regard to the spiritual life. I must say, you see, with regard to those institutions, that I once showed you here – those who were there – a peculiar document, the document that was once issued as a patent in 1847, I believe, in Switzerland, where it says: It was through the power of the Almighty that the brave Swiss general Dufour succeeded in expelling the Jesuits from the country. Then it is explained in more detail. Today, in free Switzerland, it seems a little strange that the eradication of the Jesuits is attributed to the grace of God and the power that God has given! But it is preserved that way; I had the document photographed because it is so beautiful. I will show the photograph again on occasion. It is, after all, quite good to occasionally bring things home to people face to face. But even with regard to Jesuitism, I am not in favor of combating it by law. Those who want to fight it should fight it with intellectual weapons. One should not spare oneself the inconvenience of having to fight against everything intellectual with intellectual weapons, not by making laws. Laws can be made with majority decisions. One does not need to say that the majority is always nonsense, because then reality, social reality, would always be nonsense. Now, as I said, one does not need to go that far, but in any case one cannot say that the majority is always wisdom. And laws can be made in a democratic state, especially with majority decisions. But certain things just cannot be done by majority vote. They have to live out. And so everything that is regarded as the erring spiritual must also live out. Therefore, one must say: It is a matter of freedom and not of compulsion when efforts are made to reintroduce the banned Catholic processions and to lift the bans against Catholic processions. The only remedy is to show that these processions are not reasonable, and to educate people to this effect, so that they do not take part in them; then they will stop of their own accord! This is the only remedy in spiritual life, just as one can teach a person good taste and he will do the right thing of his own accord, but not by passing laws against it.

That is what a free spiritual life must demand. The one who has to resort to laws in the spiritual realm is on the path that I once described in Nuremberg in 1908 in a lecture cycle, where I said - it is not said without significance, using strong inks, but these strong inks should characterize adequately – I said at the time: Actually, today's humanity no longer strives to go out on the street without a doctor on the right and a police officer on the left, the doctor for physical protection, the police officer, well, for protection in materialistic times, yes, for physicality too! That has gradually become the ideal. I have heard many things in my life, but time and again I had to shrink back a little inside when I heard, with increasing frequency, over and over again: “That should be prohibited by law.” That had gradually become an awfully common saying – instead of taking the trouble to teach people good taste themselves, so that these things would stop of themselves – 'it should be banned by law', 'by majority decision' or something like that should be done. That is the one thing that must be asserted in principle. Therefore, all prohibitions against processions and the like should be lifted, and things should be allowed to run their course. Then spiritual life will also be able to express itself freely

It is absolutely essential that stupidity, folly and evil be conquered by cleverness and kindness, that ugliness be conquered by beauty, and that nothing be legally eradicated in the realm of spiritual life.

Question of the youth movement: The speaker explains that the individual members of the youth movements want and need to experience truth and reality; the economic sphere seems to them to be the area where everyone has a say, where everyone should be active and engaged. Later, the individual often withdraws again to reflect or simply to get away from society. It is almost impossible to reach a solution. Soon it is the economic that provides a value system; there is no recognition of the state or the political, but everything is conditioned by the economic. Individuals are diverted from their spiritual nature by economic life - or they withdraw into solitude].

Rudolf Steiner: In essence, the Lord has characterized what I have already said in the lecture: the phenomena of the youth movements of recent decades. But it would not be entirely correct to stop at this phenomenon of the youth movement. I have already found some understanding among members of this youth movement when I have struck what lives in the deeper foundations of the whole development of time. I had to say to some members of the youth movement, to which you yourself seem to belong and know very well: Yes, the year 1899, for example, is an extraordinarily important one for the development of humanity as a whole, and in particular for the development of Western civilization. And anyone who has an eye for such things knows how fundamentally different those people are who either lived through their childhood before 1899 was around, so they were a few years or ten years old, or those people who, let's say, were even born later, so they are hardly in their twenties now, and those people who were born before 90 and so on. At the bottom of their souls, very important things were going on, I would say, from the very source of existence, and that is connected with the fact that at the end of the nineteenth century, gates to the supersensible world were opened for the first time in the Western world. It was no longer possible, let us say, in the 1880s, to lead a different life, even with a powerful urge for the spiritual life; the Nietzschean life is more or less that life, which one must present as one that has become ill from the decline of Western culture because it could not find what it was looking for: the spiritual basis in everything phenomenal, in everything external, in everything sensual. The life of Nietzsche is therefore extraordinarily interesting to study from this point of view. He participates in Schopenhauerism, becomes ill from Schopenhauerism; he participates in historicism, becomes ill from historicism; he participates in Wagnerism, becomes ill from Wagnerism. He participates in naturalism, in positivism, becomes ill from it. He participates in the Darwinian molding of the idea of humanity, becomes ill from it, and so on, and so on. Instead of the idea of repeated earthly lives, he comes to the idea of the return of the same, becomes ill from it. Nietzsche could not help but fall ill from his urge for the supernatural world. It was simply not possible to achieve this directly and fundamentally at the end of the nineteenth century or before the end of the nineteenth century. The gates have opened, and today we cannot help but turn to the revelations of the spiritual world if we want to achieve an inwardly satisfied existence. Speaking of nature in the way that was justified in the 1880s is no longer justified today. Today we can point out how there was a current of opinion favoring an 'ignorabimus', how a naturalist, Du Bois-Reymond, spoke of 'ignorabimus', how Ranke, the historian, by seeking to present history as an event with the exception of the Christ event; that this comes from the primal forces, that history does not belong there - so 'ignorabimus'. Today we cannot do that. Today we are on the threshold of the supersensible world wanting to enter, and it is only the dull reluctance that is still bracing itself against the acceptance of a spiritual world view. And what is rumbling in the youth, that is the deeper thing, that is rumbling inside. And therefore, no matter how much individual members of the youth movement may say, “We do not want the abstract, we want the emotional,” they will still have to realize: What spiritual science in anthroposophy wants to be is precisely not something abstract, it is the full human being, it is what comes out of the whole human being, it is what expresses itself as art and as religion and as science, and it is the point at which the whole, full human being can come to his inner realization. And today we are only suffering from the fact that economic routine does not want to take leave of economic reason and that we must first begin to work on the recovery of spiritual life, until the unreasonableness of economic life must follow through necessity. And I am convinced that something good and right will come out of the youth movement, just as I do not despair when people keep saying, for my sake, that they cannot distinguish between expressionism and a windmill, a towel just pulled out of the water and hung up to dry, or a human portrait, say, for example, a boot heel. Of course, sometimes you can't distinguish that with the expressionists, but nevertheless, there are approaches to something in it, which, if it is refined in the most diverse places where it appears, will lead to that in which spiritual science, as it is represented here, only wants to be a guide and a leader and to work from the very most elementary.

But of course, sometimes you experience the fact that, despite the fact that you mean it to be so concrete, the opposite is held against you. I just want to say that last as a joke. The day before yesterday I had a lecture in Zurich. I spoke with slides about this building here. Then afterwards, one of the audience stood up and said: Yes, why do we need such a building, why do we need a Christ's head and Christ at all, why do we need it today? I was walking on the street this afternoon, there was a very drunk person, I followed him, and I joined him. This is a temple of God, this is a real temple and we do not need built temples. — On this occasion, I only regretted that no friendly spirit was found to find the right door with the person in question. But in view of the unnatural conditions of the present time, one may meet people who do not mean, as I say, that we should not build temples, but who mean that we should follow drunkards. They really want to work from the elementary, and they deserve, so to speak, to have spiritual science brought to their full understanding, because they can understand it. For the youth movement is connected with a very great change that occurred at the end of the nineteenth century and that is actually based not only on superficial historical forces but on profound cosmic forces.

It is an oft-repeated and a justifiable opinion, with regard to all the realms of human spiritual life, that man's greatest riddle here in our physical life is man himself. And we may truly say that a large part of our scientific activity, of our reflection, and of much besides in man's life of thought, is applied to the solving of this human riddle, to discerning a little wherein the essence of human nature consists. Natural science and spiritual science try to solve from different sides this great riddle comprised in the word Man. In the main, all the more profound natural scientific research seeks to attain its final goal by bringing together all the processes of nature, and so forth, in order to comprehend the external laws. And all spiritual science seeks the sources of existence for the sake of comprehending, of fathoming, man's being and destiny. If then, on the one hand, it is unquestioned that in general man's greatest riddle is man himself, we may say that in relation to life this expression may have a still deeper significance, in that it is necessary on the other hand to emphasize what each of us feels upon meeting another person: namely, that fundamentally each single person is in turn an enigma for others and for himself because of his special nature and being. Ordinarily, when we speak of this human enigma, we have in mind man in general, man without distinction regarding this or that individuality; and certainly many problems appear for us when we wish to understand human nature in general. But today we have not to do with the general riddles of existence, but rather with that enigma, not less significant for life, which each person we meet presents to us. For how endlessly varied are human beings in their deepest individual essence!

When we survey human life we shall have to be especially attentive to this riddle which each person presents, for our entire social life, our relation of man to man, must depend more upon how in individual cases we are able to approach with our feeling, with our sensibility, rather than merely with our intelligence, that individual human enigma which stands before us so often each day, with which we have to deal so often. How difficult it is regarding the people we meet to come to a clear knowledge of the various sides of their nature, and how much depends in life upon our coming to such clear knowledge regarding those people with whom we come in touch. We can of course only approach quite gradually the solution of the whole riddle of the human individual, of which each person presents a special phase, for there is a great gap between what is called human nature in general and that which confronts us in each human individual.

Spiritual science, or as we call it more recently, Anthroposophy, will have a special task precisely regarding this individual enigma—man. Not only must it give us information about what man is in general, but it must be, as you know, a knowledge which flows directly into our daily life, into all our sensibilities and feelings. Since our feelings and sensibilities are unfolded in the most beautiful way in our attitude toward our fellow men, the fruit of spiritual science, of spiritual scientific knowledge, will be revealed the most beautifully in the view we take of our fellow men because of this knowledge.

When in life a person stands before us, we must always, in the sense of this spiritual science, or Anthroposophy, take into consideration that what we perceive outwardly of the person is only one part, only one member, of the human being. To be sure, an outer material view of man regards as the whole man what this outer perception and the intellect connected with it are able to give us. Spiritual science shows us, however, that the human being is something very, very complicated. And often, when one goes more deeply into this complexity of human nature, the individual is then also seen in the right light. Spiritual science has the task of showing us what the innermost kernel of the human being is; what we can see with the eyes and grasp with the hands is only the outer expression, the outer shell. And we may hope to come to an understanding of the external also if we are able to penetrate into the spiritual inner part.

In the great gap between what we may call human nature in general and what confronts us in each individual, we see nevertheless many homogeneous characteristics in whole human groups. To these belong those human qualities which today form the subject of our consideration, and which we usually call the temperament. We need only utter the word ‘temperament’ to see that there are as many riddles as men. Within the basic types, the basic colorings, we have such a multiplicity and variety among individuals that we can indeed say that the real enigma, of existence is expressed in the peculiar basic disposition of the human being which we call temperament. And when the riddles intervene directly in practical life, the basic coloring of the human being plays a role. When a person stands before us, we feel that we are confronted by something of this basic disposition. Therefore it is to be hoped that spiritual science is able to give also the necessary information about the nature of the temperaments. For though we must admit that the temperaments spring from within, they nevertheless express themselves in the whole external appearance of the individual. By means of an external observation of nature, however, the riddle of man is not to be solved; we can approach the characteristic coloring of the human being only when we learn what spiritual science has to say about him.

It is of course true that each person confronts us with his own temperament, but we can still distinguish certain groups of temperaments. We speak chiefly of four types, as you know: the sanguine, the choleric, the phlegmatic, and the melancholic temperament. And even though this classification is not entirely correct in so far as we apply it to individuals—in individuals the temperaments are mixed in the most diverse way, so we can only say that one temperament or another predominates in certain traits—still we shall in general classify people in four groups according to their temperaments.

The fact that the temperament is revealed on the one side as something which inclines toward the individual, which makes people different, and on the other side joins them again to groups, proves to us that the temperament must on the one side have something to do with the innermost essence of the human being, and on the other must belong to universal human nature. Man's temperament, then, is something which points in two directions; and therefore it will be necessary, if we wish to solve the mystery, to ask on the one hand: In how far does the temperament point to what belongs to universal human nature? and then again on the other: How does it point to the essential kernel, to the actual inner being of the individual?

If we put the question, it is natural that spiritual science seems called upon to give enlightenment, for spiritual science must lead us to the innermost essential kernel of the human being. As he confronts us on earth, he appears to be placed in a universality, and again on the other side he appears as an independent entity. In the light of spiritual science man stands within two life streams which meet when he enters earth existence. And here we are at the focal point of the consideration of human nature according to the methods of spiritual science. We learn that we have in the human being, first of all, that which places him in his line of heredity. The one stream leads us from the individual man back to his parents, grandparents, and further ancestors. He shows the characteristics inherited from father, mother, grandparents, and all preceding ancestors farther and farther back. And these attributes he transmits again to his descendants. That which flows down from ancestors to the individual man we designate in life and in science as inherited attributes and characteristics. A man is placed in this way within what we may call the line of heredity; and it is known that an individual bears within him, even in the very kernel of his being, qualities which we must certainly trace back to heredity. Very much about an individual is explicable if we know his ancestry, so to speak. How deeply true are the words uttered with regard to his own personality by Goethe, who had such a deep knowledge of the soul:

My father gave my build to me,
Toward life my solemn bearing,
From mother comes my gayety
And my delight in yarning.

Here we see how this great knower of human nature has to point even to moral qualities when he wishes to refer to inherited characteristics. Everything we find as transmitted from ancestors to descendants interprets for us the individual person in a certain respect, but only in a certain respect; for what he has inherited from his ancestors gives us only one side of the human being. Of course the present-day materialistic conception would like to seek in the line of ancestry for everything under the sun, would like even to trace back a man's spiritual being (his spiritual qualities) to ancestry; and it never wearies of declaring that even a man's qualities of genius are explicable if we find signs, indications, of such characteristics in this or that ancestor. Those who hold such a view would like to compile the human personality, so to speak, from what is found scattered among the ancestors. Anyone who penetrates more deeply into human nature will of course be struck by the fact that beside these inherited attributes, in each man something confronts us which we cannot characterize otherwise than by saying: That is his very own; we cannot say, as a result of close observation, that it is transmitted from this or that ancestor. Spiritual science comes in here and tells us what it has to say about it. Today we are able to present only sketchily what is involved in these questions, to indicate only sketchily the findings of spiritual science.

Spiritual science tells us: Certainly it is true that the human being is placed in the stream which we may call the stream of heredity, the stream of inherited attributes. Besides that, however, something else appears in an individual, namely, the innermost spiritual kernel of his being. In this are united what the individual brings with him from the spiritual world and what the father and mother, the ancestors, are able to give to him. With that which flows down in the stream of the generations is united something else which has its origin, not in the immediate ancestors, the parents, and not in the grandparents, but which comes from quite other realms, something which passes from one existence to another. On the one side we may say: A man has this or that from his ancestors. But if we watch an individual develop from childhood on, we see how from the center of his nature something evolves which is the fruit of foregoing lives, something he never can have inherited from his ancestors.

What we see in the individual, when we penetrate to the depths of his soul, we can only explain to ourselves when we know a great comprehensive law, which is really only the consequence of many natural laws. It is the law of repeated earth lives, so greatly tabooed at the present time. This law of re-embodiment, the succession of earth lives, is only a specific case of a general cosmic law.

It will not appear so paradoxical to us when we think the matter over. Let us observe a lifeless mineral, a rock crystal. It has a regular form. If it is destroyed, nothing of its form remains which could pass over to other rock crystals. The new rock crystal receives nothing of its form. Now if we rise from the world of minerals to the world of plants, it becomes clear to us that a plant cannot originate according to the same law as a rock crystal. A plant can originate only when it is derived from the parent plant. Here the form is maintained and passes over to the other entity. If we rise to the animal world, we find that a development of species takes place. We see that the 19th century considered this discovery of the development of the species as among its greatest results. Not only does one form proceed from another, but each animal in the body of the mother repeats the earlier forms, the lower evolutionary phases of his ancestors. Among the animals we have a rising gradation of species. Among human beings, however, we have not only a gradation of species, a development of kinds, but we have a development of the individual. What a man acquires in the course of his life through education, through experience, is just as little lost as the animal's succession of ancestors.

A time will come when a man's essential core is traced back to a previous existence. It will be recognized that the human being is a fruit of an earlier existence. This law will have a peculiar destiny in the world, a destiny similar to that of another law. The opposition against which this teaching has to assert itself will be overcome, just as the opinion of the scientists of earlier centuries was overcome: that the living can originate from the lifeless. Even into the 17th century the learned and the unlearned had no doubt whatever that from ordinary lifeless things not only lower animals could be evolved, but that earthworms, even fish, could originate from ordinary river slime. The first who declared energetically that the living can originate only from the living was the great Italian natural scientist, Francesco Redi (1627 to 1697), who showed that the living derives only from the living. That is a law which is only the forerunner of another: namely, that the soul-spiritual derives from the soul-spiritual. On account of this teaching he was attacked, and only with difficulty escaped the fate of Giordano Bruno. Today burning is no longer the custom; but anyone who appears with a new truth today, for instance, anyone who wishes to trace back the soul-spiritual element to the soul-spiritual, would not be burned, to be sure, but would be looked upon as a fool. A time will come when it will be considered nonsense to think that a man lives only once, that there is not something permanent which unites itself with his inherited characteristics.

Spiritual science shows how that which is our own nature unites with what is given to us by heredity. That is the other stream into which the individual is placed, the stream with which the present civilization does not wish to have anything to do. Spiritual science leads us to the great facts of so-called re-embodiment, of reincarnation, and of karma. It shows us that we have to take into consideration the innermost essential kernel of man as that which descends from the spiritual world and unites with something which is given by the line of heredity, unites with what it is possible for the father and mother to give to the individual. For the spiritual scientist that which originates from the line of heredity envelops this essential kernel with outer sheaths. And as we must go back to father and mother and other ancestors for what we see in the physical man as form and stature, and so forth, for the characteristics which belong to his outer being, so we must go back to something entirely different, to an earlier life, if we wish to comprehend a man's innermost being; perhaps far, far back, beyond all hereditary transmission, we may have to seek the human being's spiritual kernel which has existed for thousands of years, and which during these thousands of years has entered again and again into existence, again and again has led an earth-life, and now in the present existence has united itself again to what it is possible for father and mother to give. Every single human being, when he enters into physical life, has a succession of lives behind him. And this has nothing to do with what belongs to the line of heredity. We should have to go back more than centuries if we wished to investigate what was his former life when he passed through the gate of death. After he has passed through the gate of death he lives in other forms of existence in the spiritual world. And when again the time comes to experience a life in the physical world, he seeks his parents. Thus we must go back to the spirit of man and his earlier incarnations, if we wish to explain what in him confronts us now as the soul-spiritual part. We must go back to his earlier incarnations, to what he acquired in course of them. We have to consider how he lived at that time, what he brought with him, as the causes of what the individual possesses today in the new life as tendencies, dispositions, abilities for this or that. For each person brings with him from his former life certain qualities of his life. Certain qualities and his destiny he brings with him to a certain degree. According as he has performed this or that deed, he calls forth the reaction, and feels himself thus to be surrounded by the new life. So he brings with him from earlier incarnations the inner kernel of his being and envelops it with what is given him by heredity.

Certainly this one thing should be mentioned, because it is important, since actually our present time has little inclination to recognize this inner kernel of being, or to look upon the idea of reincarnation as anything but a fantastic thought. It is considered today to be poor logic, and we shall hear materialistic thinkers objecting over and over again that what is in man arises entirely through heredity. Just look at the ancestors, he says, and you will discover that this or that trait, this or that peculiarity, existed in some ancestor, that all the individual traits and qualities can be explained by tracing them in the ancestors. The spiritual scientist can also point to that fact, and he has done so. For example, in a musical family musical talent is inherited, etc. That is all supposed to support the theory of heredity. Indeed, the law is expressed point blank, that seldom does genius appear at the beginning of a generation; genius stands at the end of a line of heredity. And that is supposed to be a proof that genius is inherited. Here one proceeds from the standpoint that some person has a definite characteristic—he is a genius. Someone traces back the peculiar abilities of the genius, seeks in the past among his ancestors, finds in some ancestor signs of a similar characteristic, picks out something here and there, finds this quality in one, that in another, and then shows how they finally flowed together in the genius who appeared at the end of the generation; and he infers from it that genius is transmitted. For anyone whose thinking is direct and logical that could at best prove the opposite. If finding qualities of genius among the ancestors proves anything, what does it prove? Surely nothing else than that man's essential being is able to express itself in life according to the instrument of the body. It proves nothing more than that a man comes out wet if he falls into the water. Really it is no more intelligent than if some one wishes to call our special attention to the fact that if a man falls into the water he gets wet. It is only natural that he takes up something of the element into which he is placed. Surely it is quite self-evident that the qualities of the ancestors would be carried by that which has flowed down through the line of heredity, and has finally been given through father and mother to the particular human being who has descended from the spiritual world. The individual clothes himself in the sheaths which are given to him by his ancestors. What is intended to be presented as proof of heredity could much better be looked upon as proof that it is not heredity. For if genius were inherited, it would have to appear at the beginning of the generations and not stand at the end of a line of heredity. If anyone were to show that a genius has sons and grandchildren to whom the qualities of genius are transmitted, then he would be able to prove that genius is inherited; but that is just not the case. It is limping logic which wishes to trace back man's spiritual qualities to the succession of ancestors. We must trace back spiritual qualities to that which a man has brought with him from his earlier incarnations.

If now we consider the one stream, that which lives in the line of heredity, we find that there the individual is drawn into a stream of existence through which he gets certain qualities: We have before us some one possessing the qualities of his family, his people, his race. The various children of the same parents have characteristics conditioned in this way. If we consider the true individual nature of a human being, we must say that the soul-spiritual essential kernel is born into the family, the people, the race; it envelops itself with what is given by the ancestors, but it brings with it purely individual characteristics. So we must ask ourselves: How is harmony established between a human essence which perhaps has acquired centuries earlier this or that quality and the outer covering with which it is now to envelop itself, and which bears the characteristics of family, people, race, and so forth? Is it possible for harmony to exist here? Is it not something in the highest sense individual which is thus brought into earth life, and is not the inherited part at variance with it? Thus the great question arises: How can that which has its origin in quite other worlds, which must seek father and mother for itself, unite with the physical body? How can it clothe itself with the physical attributes through which the human being is placed within the line of heredity?

We see then in a person confronting us the flowing together of two streams; of these two streams each human being is composed. In him we see on the one side what comes to him from his family, and on the other what has developed from the individual's innermost being; namely, a number of predispositions, characteristics, inner capacities and outer destiny. An agreement must be effected. We find that a man must adapt himself to this union, in accordance with his innermost being on the one side, and on the other in accordance with that which is brought to him from the line of heredity. We see how a man bears to a great degree the physiognomy of his ancestors; we could put him together, so to speak, from the sum of his various ancestors. Since at first the inner essential kernel has nothing to do with what is inherited, but must merely adapt itself to what is most suitable to it, we shall see that it is necessary for a certain mediation to exist for that which has lived perhaps for centuries in an entirely different world and is again transplanted into another world; the spirit being of man must have something here below to which it is related; there must be a bond, a connecting link, between the special individual human being and humanity in general, into which he is born through family, people, race.

Between these two, namely what we bring with us from our earlier life and what our family, ancestors and race imprint upon us, there is a mediation, something which bears more general characteristics, but at the same time is capable of being individualized. That which occupies this position between the line of heredity and the line which represents our individuality is expressed by the word TEMPERAMENT. In that which confronts us in the temperament of a person we have something in a certain way like a physiognomy of his innermost individuality. We understand thus how the individuality colors, by means of the qualities of temperament, the attributes inherited in the succession of generations. Temperament stands right in the middle between what we bring with us as individuals and what originates from the line of heredity. When the two streams unite, the one stream colors the other. They color each other reciprocally. Just as blue and yellow, let us say, unite in green, so do the two streams in man unite in what we call temperament. That which mediates between all inner characteristics which he brings with him from his earlier incarnation, on the one side, and on the other what the line of heredity brings to him, comes under the concept temperament. It now takes its place between the inherited characteristics and what he has absorbed into his inner essential being. It is as if upon its descent to earth this kernel of being were to envelop itself with a spiritual nuance of that which awaits it here below, so that in proportion as this kernel of being is able best to adapt itself to this covering for the human being, the kernel of being colors itself according to that into which it is born and to a quality which it brings with it. Here shine forth the soul qualities of man and his natural inherited attributes. Between the two is the temperament—between that by which a man is connected with his ancestors and that which he brings with him from his earlier incarnations. The temperament balances the eternal with the transitory.

This balancing occurs through the fact that what we have learned to call the members of human nature come into relation with one another in a quite definite way. We understand this in detail, however, only when we place before our mind's eye the complete human nature in the sense of spiritual science. Only from spiritual science is the mystery of the human temperament to be discovered.

This human being as he confronts us in life, formed by the flowing together of these two streams, we know as a four-membered being. So we shall be able to say when we consider the entire individual: This complete human being consists of the physical body, the etheric body or body of formative forces, the astral body, and the ego.

In that part of man perceptible to the outer senses, which is all that materialistic thought is willing to recognize, we have first, according to spiritual science, only a single member of the human being, the physical body, which man has in common with the mineral world. That part which is subject to physical laws, which man has in common with all environing outer nature, the sum of chemical and physical laws, we designate in spiritual science as the physical body.

Beyond this, however, we recognize higher super-sensible members of human nature which are as actual and essential as the outer physical body. As first super-sensible member, man has the etheric body, which becomes part of his organism and remains united with the physical body throughout the entire life; only at death does a separation of the two take place. Even this first super-sensible member of human nature—in spiritual science called the etheric or life body; we might also call it the glandular body—is no more visible to our outer eyes than are colors to those born blind. But it exists, actually and perceptibly exists, for that which Goethe calls the eyes of the spirit, and it is even more real than the outer physical body, for it is the builder, the moulder, of the physical body. During the entire time between birth and death this etheric or life body continuously combats the disintegration of the physical body. Any kind of mineral product of nature—a crystal, for example—is so constituted that it is permanently held together by its own forces, by the forces of its own substance. That is not the case with the physical body of a living being; here the physical forces work in such a way that they destroy the form of life, as we are able to observe after death, when the physical forces destroy the life-form. That this destruction does not occur during life, that the physical body does not conform to the physical and chemical forces and laws, is due to the fact that the etheric or life-body is ceaselessly combating these forces.

The third member of the human being we recognize in the bearer of all pleasure and suffering, joy and pain, instincts, impulses, passions, desires, and all that surges to and fro as sensations and ideas, even all concepts of what we designate as moral ideals, and so on. That we call the astral body. Do not take exception to this expression. We could also call it the “nerve-body.” Spiritual science sees in it something real, and knows indeed that this body of impulses and desires is not an effect of the physical body, but the cause of this body. It knows that the soul-spiritual part has built up for itself the physical body.

Thus we already have three members of the human being, and as man's highest member we recognize that by means of which he towers above all other beings, by means of which he is the crown of earth's creation: namely, the bearer of the human ego, which gives him in such a mysterious, but also in such a manifest way, the power of self-consciousness.

Man has the physical body in common with his entire visible environment, the etheric body in common with the plants and animals, the astral body with the animals. The fourth member, however, the ego, he has for himself alone; and by means of it he towers above the other visible creatures. We recognize this fourth member as the ego-bearer, as that in human nature by means of which man is able to say “I” to himself, to come to independence.

Now what we see physically, and what the intellect which is bound to the physical senses can know, is only an expression of these four members of the human being. Thus, the expression of the ego, of the actual ego-bearer, is the blood in its circulation. This “quite special fluid” is the expression of the ego. The physical sense expression of the astral body in man is, for example, among other things, the nervous system. The expression of the etheric body, or a part of this expression, is the glandular system; and the physical body expresses itself in the sense organs.

These four members confront us in the human being. So we shall be able to say, when we observe the complete human being, that he consists of physical body, etheric body, astral body, and ego. That which is primarily physical body, which the human being carries in such a way that it is visible to physical eyes, clearly bears, first of all, when viewed from without, the marks of heredity. Also those characteristics which live in man's etheric body, in that fighter against the disintegration of the physical body, are in the line of heredity. Then we come to his astral body, which in its characteristics is much more closely bound to the essential kernel of the human being. If we turn to this innermost kernel, to the actual ego, we find what passes from incarnation to incarnation, and appears as an inner mediator, which rays forth its essential qualities.

Now in the whole human nature all the separate members work into each other; they act reciprocally. Because two streams flow together in man when he enters the physical world, there arises a varied mixture of man's four members, and one, so to speak, gets the mastery over the others, and impresses its color upon them. Now according as one or another of these members comes especially into prominence, the individual confronts us with this or that temperament. The particular coloring of human nature, what we call the actual shade of the temperament, depends upon whether the forces, the different means of power, of one member or of another predominate, have a preponderance over the others. Man's eternal being, that which goes from incarnation to incarnation, so expresses itself in each new embodiment that it calls forth a certain reciprocal action among the four members of human nature: ego, astral body, etheric body and physical body; and from the interaction of these four members arises the nuance of human nature which we characterize as temperament.

When the essential being has tinged the physical and etheric bodies, that which arises because of the coloring thus given will act upon each of the other members; so that the way an individual appears to us with his characteristics depends upon whether the inner kernel acts more strongly upon the physical body, or whether the physical body acts more strongly upon it. According to his nature the human being is able to influence one of the four members, and through the reaction upon the other members the temperament originates. The human essential kernel, when it comes into re-embodiment, is able through this peculiarity to introduce into one or another of its members a certain surplus of activity. Thus it can give to the ego a certain surplus strength; or again, the individual can influence his other members because of having had certain experiences in his former life.

When the ego of the individual has become so strong through its destiny that its forces are noticeably dominant in the fourfold human nature, and it dominates the other members, then the choleric temperament results. If the person is especially subject to the influence of the forces of the astral body, then we attribute to him a sanguine temperament. If the etheric or life-body acts excessively upon the other members, and especially impresses its nature upon the person, the phlegmatic temperament arises. And when the physical body with its laws is especially predominant in the human nature, so that the spiritual essence of being is not able to overcome a certain hardness in the physical body, then we have to do with a melancholic temperament. Just as the eternal and the transitory intermingle, so does the relation of the members to one another appear.

I have already told you how the four members express themselves outwardly in the physical body. Thus, a large part of the physical body is the direct expression of the physical life principle of man. The physical body as such comes to expression only in the physical body; hence it is the physical body which gives the keynote in a melancholic.

We must regard the glandular system as the physical expression of the etheric body. The etheric body expresses itself physically in the glandular system. Hence in a phlegmatic person the glandular system gives the keynote in the physical body.

The nervous system and, of course, what occurs through it we must regard as the physical expression of the astral body. The astral body finds its physical expression in the nervous system; therefore in a sanguine person the nervous system gives the keynote to the physical body.

The blood in its circulation, the force of the pulsation of the blood, is the expression of the actual ego. The ego expresses itself in the circulation of the blood, in the predominating activity of the blood; it shows itself especially in the fiery vehement blood. One must try to penetrate more subtly into the connection which exists between the ego and the other members of the human being. Suppose, for example, that the ego exerts a peculiar force in the life of sensations, ideas, and the nervous system; suppose that in the case of a certain person everything arises from his ego, everything that he feels he feels strongly, because his ego is strong—we call that the choleric temperament. That which has received its character from the ego will make itself felt as the predominating quality. Hence, in a choleric the blood system is predominant.

The choleric temperament will show itself as active in a strongly pulsating blood; in this the element of force in the individual makes its appearance, in the fact that he has a special influence upon his blood. In such a person, in whom spiritually the ego, physically the blood, is particularly active, we see the innermost force vigorously keeping the organization fit. And as he thus confronts the outer world, the force of his ego will wish to make itself felt. That is the effect of this ego. By reason of this, the choleric appears as one who wishes to assert his ego in all circumstances. All the aggressiveness of the choleric, everything connected with his strong will-nature, may be ascribed to the circulation of the blood.

When the astral body predominates in an individual, the physical expression will lie in the functions of the nervous system, that instrument of the rising and falling waves of sensation; and that which the astral body accomplishes is the life of thoughts, of images, so that the person who is gifted with the sanguine temperament will have the predisposition to live in the surging sensations and feelings and in the images of his life of ideas.

We must understand clearly the relation of the astral body to the ego. The astral body functions between the nervous system and the blood system. So it is perfectly clear what this relation is. If only the sanguine temperament were present, if only the nervous system were active, being quite especially prominent as the expression of the astral body, then the person would have a life of shifting images and ideas; in this way a chaos of images would come and go. He would be given over to all the restless flux from sensation to sensation, from image to image, from idea to idea. Something of that sort appears if the astral body predominates, that is, in a sanguine person, who in a certain sense is given over to the tide of sensations, images, etc., since in him the astral body and the nervous system predominate. It is the forces of the ego which prevent the images from darting about in a fantastic way. Only because these images are controlled by the ego does harmony and order enter in. Were man not to check them with his ego, they would surge up and down without any evidence of control by the individual.

In the physical body it is the blood which principally limits, so to speak, the activity of the nervous system. Man's blood circulation, the blood flowing in man, is that which lays fetters, so to speak, upon what has its expression in the nervous system; it is the restrainer of the surging feelings and sensations; it is the tamer of the nerve-life. It would lead too far if I were to show you in all its details how the nervous system and the blood are related, and how the blood is the restrainer of this life of ideas. What occurs if the tamer is not present, if a man is deficient in red blood, is anemic? Well, even if we do not go into the more minute psychological details, from the simple fact that when a person's blood becomes too thin, that is, has a deficiency of red corpuscles, he is easily given over to the unrestrained surging back and forth of all kinds of fantastic images, even to illusion and hallucination—you can still conclude from this simple fact that the blood is the restrainer of the nerve-system. A balance must exist between the ego and the astral body—or speaking physiologically, between the blood and the nervous system—so that one may not become a slave of his nervous system, that is, to the surging life of sensation and feeling.

If now the astral body has a certain excess of activity, if there is a predominance of the astral body and its expression, the nerve-system, which the blood restrains to be sure, but is not completely able to bring to a condition of absolute balance, then that peculiar condition arises in which human life easily arouses the individual's interest in a subject, but he soon drops it and quickly passes to another one; such a person cannot hold himself to an idea, and in consequence his interest can be immediately kindled in everything which meets him in the outer world, but the restraint is not applied to make it inwardly enduring; the interest which has been kindled quickly evaporates. In this quick kindling of interest and quick passing from one subject to another we see the expression of the predominating astral element, the sanguine temperament. The sanguine person cannot linger with an impression, he cannot hold fast to an image, cannot fix his attention upon one subject. He hurries from one life impression to another, from perception to perception, from idea to idea; he shows a fickle disposition. That can be especially observed with sanguine children, and in this case it may cause one anxiety. Interest is easily aroused, a picture begins easily to have an effect, quickly makes an impression, but the impression soon vanishes again.

When there is a strong predominance in an individual of the etheric or life-body—that which inwardly regulates the processes of man's life and growth—and the expression of this etheric body—that system which brings about the feeling of inner well-being or of discomfort—then such a person will be tempted to wish just to remain in this feeling of inner comfort. The etheric body is a body which leads a sort of inner life, while the astral body expresses itself in outer interests, and the ego is the bearer of our activity and will, directed outward. If then this etheric body, which acts as life-body, and maintains the separate functions in equilibrium, an equilibrium which expresses itself in the feeling of life's general comfort—when this self-sustained inner life, which chiefly causes the sense of inner comfort, predominates, then it may occur that an individual lives chiefly in this feeling of inner comfort, that he has such a feeling of well-being, when everything in his organism is in order, that he feels little urgency to direct his inner being toward the outer world, is little inclined to develop a strong will. The more inwardly comfortable he feels, the more harmony will he create between the inner and outer. When this is the case, when it is even carried to excess, we have to do with a phlegmatic person.

In a melancholic we have seen that the physical body, that is, the densest member of the human being, rules the others. A man must be master of his physical body, as he must be master of a machine if he wishes to use it. But when this densest part rules, the person always feels that he is not master of it, that he cannot manage it. For the physical body is the instrument which he should rule completely through his higher members. But now this physical body has dominion and sets up opposition to the others. In this case the person is not able to use his instrument perfectly, so that the other principles experience repression because of it, and disharmony exists between the physical body and the other members. This is the way the hardened physical system appears when it is in excess. The person is not able to bring about flexibility where it should exist. The inner man has no power over his physical system; he feels inner obstacles. They show themselves through the fact that the person is compelled to direct his strength upon these inner obstacles. What cannot be overcome is what causes sorrow and pain; and these make it impossible for the individual to look out upon his contemporary world in an unprejudiced way. This constraint becomes a source of inner grief, which is felt as pain and listlessness, as a sad mood. It is very easy to feel that life is filled with pain and sorrow. Certain thoughts and ideas begin to be enduring; the person becomes gloomy, melancholic. There is a constant arising of pain. This mood is caused by nothing else than that the physical body sets up opposition to the inner ease of the etheric body, to the mobility of the astral body, and to the ego's certainty of its goal.

And if we thus comprehend the nature of the temperaments through sound knowledge, many a thing in life will become clear to us; but it will also become possible to handle in a practical way what we otherwise could not do. Look at much which directly confronts us in life! What we see there as the mixture of the four members of human nature meets us clearly and significantly in the outer picture. We need only observe how the temperament comes to expression externally.

Let us, for instance, take the choleric person, who has a strong firm center in his inner being. If the ego predominates, the person will assert himself against all outer oppositions; he wants to be in evidence. This ego is the restrainer. Those pictures are consciousness-pictures. The physical body is formed according to its etheric body, the etheric body according to its astral body. This astral body would fashion man, so to speak, in the most varied way. But because growth is opposed by the ego in its blood forces, the balance is maintained between abundance and variety of growth. So when there is a surplus of ego, growth can be retarded. It positively retards the growth of the other members; it does not allow the astral body and the etheric body their full rights. In the choleric temperament you are able to recognize clearly in the outer growth, in all that confronts us outwardly, the expression of what is inwardly active, the actual deep inner force-nature of the man, of the complete ego. Choleric persons appear as a rule as if growth had been retarded. You can find in life example after example; for instance, from spiritual history the philosopher, Johann Gottlieb Fichte, the German choleric. Even in external appearance he is recognizable as such, since in his outer form he gave the impression of being retarded in growth. Thereby he reveals clearly that the other members of his being have been held back by the excess of ego. Not the astral body with its forming capacity is the predominant member, but the ego rules, the restrainer, the limiter of the formative forces. Hence we see as a rule in those who are preeminently men of strong will, where the ego restrains the free formative force of the astral body, a small compact figure. Take another classical example of the choleric: Napoleon, the “little General,” who remained so small because the ego held back the other members of his being. There you have the type of the retarded growth of the choleric. There you can see how this force of the ego works out of the spirit, so that the innermost being is manifest in the outer form. Observe the physiognomy of the choleric! Take in comparison the phlegmatic person! How indefinite are his features; how little reason you have to say that such a form of forehead is suited to the choleric. In one organ it is shown especially clearly whether the astral body or the ego works formatively, that is in the eye, in the steady, assured aspect of the eye of the choleric. As a rule we see how this strongly-kindled inner light, which turns everything luminously inward, sometimes is expressed in a black, a coal-black eye, because, according to a certain law, the choleric does not permit the astral body to color that very thing which his ego-force draws inward, that which is colored in another person. Observe such an individual in his whole bearing. One who is experienced can almost tell from the rear view whether a certain person is a choleric. The firm walk proclaims the choleric, so to speak. Even in the step we see the expression of strong ego-force. In the choleric child we already notice the firm tread; when he walks on the ground, he not only sets his foot on it, but he treads as if he wanted to go a little bit farther, into the ground.

The complete human individual is a copy of this innermost being, which declares itself to us in such a way. But naturally, it is not a question of my maintaining that the choleric person is short and the sanguine tall. We may compare the form of a person only with his own growth. It depends upon the relation of the growth to the entire form.

Notice the sanguine person! Observe what a strange glance even the sanguine child has; it quickly lights upon something, but just as quickly turns to something else; it is a merry glance; an inner joy and gaiety shine in it; in it is expressed what comes from the depths of the human nature, from the mobile astral body, which predominates in the sanguine person. In its mobile inner life this astral body will work upon the members; and it will also make the person's external appearance as flexible as possible. Indeed, we are able to recognize the entire outer physiognomy, the permanent form and also the gestures, as the expression of the mobile, volatile, fluidic astral body. The astral body has the tendency to fashion, to form. The inner reveals itself outwardly; hence the sanguine person is slender and supple. Even in the slender form, the bony structure; we see the inner mobility of the astral body in the whole person. It comes to expression for example in the slim muscles. It is also to be seen in his external expression. Even one who is not clairvoyant can recognize from the rear whether a person is of sanguine or choleric temperament; and to be able to do this one need not be a spiritual scientist. In a sanguine person we have an elastic and springing walk. In the hopping, dancing walk of the sanguine child we see the expression of the mobile astral body. The sanguine temperament manifests itself especially strongly in childhood. See how the formative tendency is expressed there; and even more delicate attributes are to be found in the outer form. If in the choleric person we have sharply-cut facial features, in the sanguine they are mobile, expressive, changeable. And likewise there appears in the sanguine child a certain inner possibility to alter his countenance. Even to the color of the eyes we could confirm the expression of the sanguine person. The inwardness of the ego-nature, the self-sufficient inwardness of the choleric, meets us in his black eye. Look at the sanguine person in whom the ego-nature is not so deep-rooted, in whom the astral body pours forth all its mobility—there the blue eye is predominant. These blue eyes are closely connected with the individual's invisible inner light, the light of the astral body.

Thus many attributes could be pointed out which reveal the temperament in the external appearance. Through the four-membered human nature we learn to understand clearly this soul riddle of the temperaments. And indeed, a knowledge of the four temperaments, springing from a profound perception of human nature, has been handed down to us from ancient times. If we thus understand human nature, and know that the external is only the expression of the spiritual, then we learn to understand man in his relation even to the externalities, to understand him in his whole process of becoming; and we learn to recognize what we must do concerning ourself and the child with regard to temperament. In education especially notice must be taken of the kind of temperament that tends to develop in the child. For life's wisdom, as for pedagogy, an actual living knowledge of the nature of the temperaments is indispensable, and both would profit infinitely from it.

And now let us go further. Again we see how the phlegmatic temperament also is brought to expression in the outer form. In this temperament there predominates the activity of the etheric body, which has its physical expression in the glandular system and its soul expression in a feeling of ease, in inner balance. If in such a person everything is not only normally in order within, but if, beyond this normality, these inner formative forces of ease are especially active, then their products are added to the human body; it becomes corpulent, it expands. In the largeness of the body, in the development of the fatty parts, we see that which the inner formative forces of the etheric body are especially working on. The inner sense of ease of the phlegmatic person meets us in all that. And who would not recognize in this lack of reciprocal action between the inner and the outer the cause of the ofttimes slovenly, dragging gait of the phlegmatic person, whose step will often not adapt itself to the ground; he does not step properly, so to speak; does not put himself in relation to things. That he has little control over the forms of his inner being you can observe in the whole man. The phlegmatic temperament confronts one in the immobile, indifferent countenance, even in the peculiarly dull, colorless appearance of the eye. While the eye of the choleric is fiery and sparkling, we can recognize in that of the phlegmatic the expression of the etheric body, focused only upon inner ease.

The melancholic is one who cannot completely attain mastery over the physical instrument, one to whom the physical instrument offers resistance, one who cannot cope with the use of this instrument. Look at the melancholic, how he generally has a drooping head, has not the force in himself to stiffen his neck. The bowed head shows that the inner forces which adjust the head perpendicularly are never able to unfold freely. The glance is downward, the eye sad, unlike the black gleam of the choleric eye. We see in the peculiar appearance of the eye that the physical instrument makes difficulties for him. The walk, to be sure, is measured, firm, but not like the walk of the choleric, the firm tread of the choleric; it has a certain kind of dragging firmness.

All this can be only indicated here; but the life of the human being will be much, much more understandable to us if we work in this way, if we see the spirit activating the forms in such a way that the external part of the individual can become an expression of his inner being. So you see how significantly spiritual science can contribute to the solution of this riddle; but only if you face the whole reality, to which the spiritual also belongs, and do not stop merely with the physical reality, can this knowledge be practically applied in life. Therefore only from spiritual science can this knowledge flow in such a way as to benefit the whole of humanity as well as the individual.

Now if we know all that, we can also learn to apply it. Particularly it must be of interest to learn how we can handle the temperaments pedagogically in childhood. For in education the kind of temperament must be very carefully observed; with children it is especially important to be able to guide and direct the developing temperament. But later also it is still important, for anyone in self-education. For the person who wishes to train himself it is invaluable that he observe what is expressed in his temperament.

I have pointed out to you here the fundamental types, but naturally in life they do not often appear thus pure. Each person has only the fundamental tone of a temperament, besides which he has something of the others. Napoleon, for example, had in him much of the phlegmatic temperament, although he was a choleric. If we would govern life practically, it is important to be able to allow that which expresses itself physically to work upon our soul.

How important this is we can see best of all if we consider that the temperaments can degenerate, that what may appear to us as one-sidedness can also degenerate. What would the world be without the temperaments—if people had only one temperament? The most tiresome place you could imagine! The world would be dreary without the temperaments, not only in the physical, but also in the higher sense. All variety, beauty, and all the richness of life are possible only through the temperaments. Do we not see how everything great in life can be brought about just through the one-sidedness of the temperaments, but also how these can degenerate in their one-sidedness? Are we not troubled about the child because we see that the choleric temperament can degenerate to malice, the sanguine to fickleness, the melancholic to gloom, etc.?

In the question of education in particular, and also in self-education, will not the knowledge and estimation of the temperaments be of essential value to the educator? We must not be misled into depreciating the value of the temperament because it is a one-sided characteristic. In education the important thing is not to equalize the temperaments, to level them, but to bring them into the right track. We must clearly understand that the temperament leads to one-sidedness, that the most radical phase of the melancholic temperament is madness; of the phlegmatic, imbecility; of the sanguine, insanity; of the choleric, all those explosions of diseased human nature which result in frenzy, and so forth. Much beautiful variety results from the temperaments, because opposites attract each other; nevertheless, the deification of the one-sidedness of temperament very easily causes harm between birth and death. In each temperament there exists a small and a great danger of degeneracy. With the choleric person there is the danger that in youth his ego will be determined by his irascibility, by his lack of self-control. That is the small danger. The great danger is the folly which wishes to pursue, from the impulse of his ego, some kind of individual goal. In the sanguine temperament the small danger is that the person will lapse into fickleness. The great danger is that the rising and falling tide of sensations may result in insanity. The small danger for the phlegmatic is lack of interest in the outer world; the great danger is stupidity or idiocy. The small danger in the melancholic is gloominess, the possibility that he may not be able to extricate himself from what rises up within him. The great danger is madness.

When we contemplate all that, we shall see that a tremendously significant task in practical life lies in the directing and guiding of the temperaments. It is important for the educator to be able to say to himself: What will you do, for example, in the case of a sanguine child? Here one must try to learn from the knowledge of the entire nature of the sanguine temperament how to proceed. If other points of view must be considered concerning the education of the child, it is also necessary that temperament, as a subject in itself, be taken into account. But in order to guide the temperaments the principle to be observed is that we must always reckon with what is there and not with what is not there.

We have a child of sanguine temperament before us, which could easily degenerate into fickleness, lack of interest in important things, and, instead, become quickly interested in other things. The sanguine child is the quickly comprehending, but also the quickly forgetting child, whose interest it is difficult to hold upon anything whatever, just because interest in one subject is quickly lost and passes over to another. This can grow into the most frightful one-sidedness, and it is possible to notice the danger if we look into the depths of human nature. In the case of such a child a material-minded person will immediately come forward with a prescription and say: If you have a sanguine child to bring up, you must bring it into reciprocal activity with other children. But a person who thinks realistically in the right sense says: If you begin with the sanguine child by working upon forces which it does not at all possess, you will accomplish nothing with it. You could exert your powers ever so seriously to develop the other members of human nature, but these simply do not predominate in this child. If a child has a sanguine temperament, we cannot help him along in development by trying to beat interests into him; we cannot pound in something different from what his sanguine temperament is. We should not ask, What does the child lack? What are we to beat into him? But we should ask, What as a rule does a sanguine child possess? And that is what we must reckon with. Then we shall say to ourselves: We do not alter these characteristics by trying to induce any sort of opposite quality in this child. With regard to these things which are rooted in the innermost nature of man we must take into consideration that we can only bend them. Thus we shall not be building upon what the child does not possess, but upon what he does possess. We shall build exactly upon that sanguine nature, upon that mobility of the astral body, and not try to beat into him what belongs to another member of human nature. With a sanguine child who has become one-sided we must just appeal to his sanguine temperament.

If we wish to have the right relation with this child, we must take special notice of something. For from the first it becomes evident to the expert that if the child is ever so sanguine, there is still something or other in which he is interested, that there is one interest, one genuine interest for each sanguine child. It will generally be easy to arouse interest in this or that subject, but it will quickly be lost again. There is one interest, however, which can be enduring even for the sanguine child. Experience shows this; only it must be discovered. And that which is found to hold a special interest must be kept in mind. And whatever it is that the child does not pass by with fickle interest we must try to bring before him as a special fact, so that his temperament extends to something which is not a matter of indifference to him. Whatever he delights in, we must try to place in a special light; the child must learn to use his sanguineness. We can work in such a way that we begin first of all with the one thing that can always be found, with the forces which the child has. He will not be able to become lastingly interested in anything through punishment and remonstrance. For things, subjects, events, he will not easily show anything but a passing, changeable interest; but for one personality, especially suited to a sanguine child—experience will show this—there will be a permanent, continuous interest, even though the child is ever so fickle. If only we are the right personality, or if we are able to bring him into association with the right personality, the interest will appear. It is only necessary to search in the right way. Only by the indirect way of love for one personality, is it possible for interest to appear in the sanguine child. But if that interest, love for one person, is kindled in him, then through this love straightway a miracle happens. This love can cure a child's one-sided temperament. More than any other temperament, the sanguine child needs love for one personality. Everything must be done to awaken love in such a child. Love is the magic word. All education of the sanguine child must take this indirect path of attachment to a certain personality. Therefore parents and teachers must heed the fact that an enduring interest in things cannot be awakened by drumming it into the sanguine child, but they must see to it that this interest is won by the roundabout way of attachment to a personality. The child must develop this personal attachment; one must make himself lovable to the child; that is one's duty to the sanguine child. It is the responsibility of the teacher that such a child shall learn to love the personality.

We can still further build up the education upon the child's sanguine nature itself. The sanguine nature reveals itself, you know, in the inability to find any interest which is lasting. We must observe what is there. We must see that all kinds of things are brought into the environment of the child in which he has shown more than the ordinary interest. We should keep the sanguine child busy at regular intervals with such subjects as warrant a passing interest, concerning which he is permitted to be sanguine, so to speak, subjects not worthy of sustained interest. These things must be permitted to affect the sanguine nature, permitted to work upon the child; then they must be removed so that he will desire them again, and they may again be given to him. We must cause these things to work upon the child as the objects of the ordinary world work upon the temperament. In other words, it is important to seek out for a sanguine child those objects toward which he is permitted to be sanguine.

If we thus appeal to what exists rather than to something which does not exist, we shall see—and practical experience will prove it—that as matter of fact the sanguine force, if it becomes one-sided, actually permits itself to be captured by serious subjects. That is attained as by an indirect path. It is good if the temperament is developed in the right way during childhood, but often the adult himself has to take his education in hand later in life. As long, indeed, as the temperaments are held in normal bounds, they represent that which makes life beautiful, varied, and great. How dull would life be if all people were alike with regard to temperament. But in order to equalize a one-sidedness of temperament, a man must often take his self-education in hand in later life. Here again one should not insist upon pounding into oneself, as it were, a lasting interest in any sort of thing; but he must say to himself: According to my nature I am sanguine; I will now seek subjects in life which my interest may pass over quickly, in which it is right that the interest should not be lasting, and I will just occupy myself with that in which I may with complete justification lose interest in the very next moment.

Let us suppose that a parent should fear that in his child the choleric temperament would express itself in a one-sided way. The same treatment cannot be prescribed as for the sanguine child; the choleric will not be able easily to acquire love for a personality. He must be reached through something else in the influence of person upon person. But in the case of the choleric child also there is an indirect way by which the development may always be guided. What will guide the education here with certainty is: Respect and esteem for an authority. For the choleric child one must be thoroughly worthy of esteem and respect in the highest sense of the word. Here it is not a question of making oneself loved through the personal qualities, as with the sanguine child, but the important thing is that the choleric child shall always have the belief that the teacher understands the matter in hand. The latter must show that he is well informed about the things that take place in the child's environment; he must not show a weak point. He must endeavor never to let the choleric child notice that he might be unable to give information or advice concerning what is to be done. The teacher must see to it that he holds the firm reins of authority in his hands, and never betray the fact that he is perhaps at his wits' end. The child must always keep the belief that the teacher knows. Otherwise he has lost the game. If love for the personality is the magic word for the sanguine child, then respect and esteem for the worth of a person is the magic word for the choleric.

If we have a choleric child to train we must see to it before everything else that this child shall unfold, bring to development, his strong inner forces. It is necessary to acquaint him with what may present difficulties in the outer life. For the choleric child who threatens to degenerate into one-sidedness, it is especially necessary to introduce into the education that which is difficult to overcome, so as to call attention to the difficulties of life by producing serious obstacles for the child. Especially must such things be put in his way as will present opposition to him. Oppositions, difficulties, must be placed in the path of the choleric child. The effort must be put forth not to make life altogether easy for him. Hindrances must be created so that the choleric temperament is not repressed, but is obliged to come to expression through the very fact that certain difficulties are presented which the child must overcome. The teacher must not beat out, educate out, so to speak, a child's choleric temperament, but he must put before him just those things upon which he must use his strength, things in connection with which the choleric temperament is justified. The choleric child must of inner necessity learn to battle with the objective world. The teacher will therefore seek to arrange the environment in such a way that this choleric temperament can work itself out in overcoming obstacles; and it will be especially good if these obstacles pertain to little things, to trifles; if the child is made to do something on which he must expend tremendous strength, so that the choleric temperament is strongly expressed, but actually the facts are victorious, the strength employed is frittered away. In this way the child gains respect for the power of facts which oppose what is expressed in the choleric temperament.

Here again there is another indirect way in which the choleric temperament can be trained. Here it is necessary first of all to awaken reverence, the feeling of awe, to approach the child in such a way as actually to arouse such respect, by showing him that we can overcome difficulties which he himself cannot yet overcome; reverence, esteem, particularly for what the teacher can accomplish, for his ability to overcome objective difficulties. That is the proper means: Respect for the ability of the teacher is the way by which the choleric child in particular may be reached in education.

It is also very difficult to manage the melancholic child. What must we do if we fear the threatened one-sidedness of the melancholic temperament of the child, since we cannot cram in what he does not possess? We must reckon with the fact that it is just repressions and resistance that he has power within himself to cling to. If we wish to turn this peculiarity of his temperament in the right direction, we must divert this force from subjective to objective activity. Here it is of very special importance that we do not build upon the possibility, let us say, of being able to talk him out of his grief and pain, or otherwise educate them out of him; for the child has the tendency to this excessive reserve because the physical instrument presents hindrances. We must particularly build upon what is there, we must cultivate what exists. With the melancholic child it will be especially necessary for the teacher to attach great importance to showing him that there is suffering in the world. If we wish to approach this child as a teacher, we must find here also the point of contact. The melancholic child is capable of suffering, of moroseness; these qualities exist in him and we cannot flog them out, but we can divert them.

For this temperament too there is one important point: Above all we must show the melancholic child how people can suffer. We must cause him to experience justifiable pain and suffering in external life, in order that he may come to know that there are things concerning which he can experience pain. That is the important thing. If you try to entertain him, you drive him back into his own corner. Whatever you do, you must not think you have to entertain such a child, to try to cheer him up. You should not divert him; in that way you harden the gloominess, the inner pain. If you take him where he can find pleasure, he will only become more and more shut up within himself. It is always good if you try to cure the young melancholic, not by giving him gay companionship, but by causing him to experience justifiable pain. Divert his attention from himself by showing him that sorrow exists. He must see that there are things in life which cause suffering. Although it must not be carried too far, the important point is to arouse pain in connection with external things in order to divert him.

The melancholic child is not easy to guide; but here again there is a magic means. As with the sanguine child the magic word is love for a personality, with the choleric, esteem and respect for the worth of the teacher, so with the melancholic child the important thing is for the teachers to be personalities who in some way have been tried by life, who act and speak from a life of trial. The child must feel that the teacher has really experienced suffering. Bring to his attention in all the manifold occurrences of life the trials of your own destiny. Most fortunate is the melancholic child who can grow up beside a person who has much to give because of his own hard experiences; in such a case soul works upon soul in the most fortunate way. If therefore at the side of the melancholic child there stands a person who, in contrast to the child's merely subjective, sorrowful tendencies, knows how to tell in a legitimate way of pain and suffering that the outer world has brought him, then such a child is aroused by this shared experience, this sympathy with justified pain. A person who can show in the tone and feeling of his narration that he has been tried by destiny, is a blessing to such a melancholic child.

Even in arranging the melancholic child's environment, so to speak, we should not leave his predispositions unconsidered. Hence, it is even advantageous if—strange as it may sound—we build up for the child actual hindrances, obstructions, so that he can experience legitimate suffering and pain with regard to certain things. It is the best education for such a child if the existing tendency to subjective suffering and grief can be diverted by being directed to outer hindrances and obstructions. Then the child, the soul of the child, will gradually take a different direction.

In self-education also we can again use this method: we must always allow the existing tendencies, the forces present in us, to work themselves out, and not artificially repress them. If the choleric temperament, for example, expresses itself so strongly in us that it is a hindrance, we must permit this existing inner force to work itself out by seeking those things upon which we can in a certain sense shatter our force, dissipate our forces, preferably upon insignificant, unimportant things. If on the other hand we are melancholic, we shall do well to seek out justifiable pain and suffering in external life, in order that we may have opportunity to work out our melancholy in the external world; then we shall set ourselves right.

Let us pass on to the phlegmatic temperament. With the phlegmatic child it will be very difficult for us if his education presents us with the task of conducting ourselves in an appropriate way toward him. It is difficult to gain any influence over a phlegmatic person. But there is one way in which an indirect approach may be made. Here again it would be wrong, very wrong indeed, if we insisted upon shaking up a person so inwardly at ease, if we thought we could pound in some kind of interests then and there. Again we must take account of what he has.

There is something in each case which will hold the attention of the phlegmatic person, especially the phlegmatic child. If only through wise education we build up around him what he needs, we shall be able to accomplish much. It is necessary for the phlegmatic child to have much association with other children. If it is good for the others also to have playmates, it is especially so for the phlegmatic. He must have playmates with the most varied interests. There is nothing to appeal to in the phlegmatic child. He will not interest himself easily in objects and events. One must therefore bring this child into association with children of like age. He can be trained through the sharing of the interests—as many as possible—of other personalities. If he is indifferent to his environment, his interest can be kindled by the effect upon him of the interests of his playmates. Only by means of that peculiar suggestive effect, only through the interests of others, is it possible to arouse his interest. An awakening of the interest of the phlegmatic child will result through the incidental experiencing of the interest of others, the sharing of the interests of his playmates, just as sympathy, sharing of the experience of another human destiny, is effective for the melancholic. Once more: To be stimulated by the interest of others is the correct means of education for the phlegmatic. As the sanguine child must have attachment for one personality, so must the phlegmatic child have friendship, association with as many children as possible of his own age. That is the only way the slumbering force in him can be aroused. Things as such do not affect the phlegmatic. With a subject connected with the tasks of school and home you will not be able to interest the little phlegmatic; but indirectly, by way of the interests of other souls of similar age you can bring it about. If things are reflected in this way in others, these interests are reflected in the soul of the phlegmatic child.

Then also we should particularly see to it that we surround him with things and cause events to occur near him concerning which apathy is appropriate. One must direct the apathy to the right objects, those toward which one may rightly be phlegmatic. In this way quite wonderful things can sometimes be accomplished in the young child. But also one's self-education may be taken in hand in the same way in later life, if it is noticed that apathy tends to express itself in a one-sided way; that is, by trying to observe people and their interests. One thing more can also be done, so long as we are still in a position to employ intelligence and reason at all: we can seek out the very subjects and events which are of the greatest indifference to us, toward which it is justifiable for us to be phlegmatic.

We have now seen again how, in the methods of education based upon spiritual science, we build upon what one has and not upon what is lacking.

So we may say that it is best for the sanguine child if he may grow up guided by a firm hand, if some one can show him externally aspects of character through which he is able to develop personal love. Love for a personality is the best remedy for the sanguine child. Not merely love, but respect and esteem for what a personality can accomplish is the best for the choleric child. A melancholic child may be considered fortunate if he can grow up beside some one who has a bitter destiny. In the corresponding contrast produced by the new insight, by the sympathy which arises for the person of authority, and in the sharing of the justifiably painful destiny,—in this consists what the melancholic needs. They develop well if they can indulge less in attachment to a personality, less in respect and esteem for the accomplishment of a personality, but can reach out in sympathy with suffering and justifiably painful destinies. The phlegmatic is reached best if we produce in him an inclination towards the interests of other personalities, if he can be stirred by the interests of others.

The sanguine should be able to develop love and attachment for one personality.

The choleric should be able to develop esteem and respect for the accomplishments of the personality.

The melancholic should be able to develop a heartfelt sympathy with another's destiny.

The phlegmatic child should be led to the sharing of the interests of others.

Thus do we see in these principles of education how spiritual science goes right into the practical questions of life; and when we come to speak about the intimate aspects of life, spiritual science shows just in these very things how it works in practice, shows here its eminently practical side. Infinitely much could we possess of the art of living, if we would adopt this realistic knowledge of spiritual science. When it is a case of mastering life, we must listen for life's secrets, and these lie behind the sense perceptible. Only real spiritual science can explain such a thing as the human temperaments, and so thoroughly fathom them that we are able to make this spiritual science serve as a benefit and actual blessing of life, whether in youth or in age.

We can also take self-education in hand here; for when it is a question of self-education, the temperaments can be particularly useful to us. We become aware with our intellect that our sanguineness is playing us all kinds of tricks, and threatens to degenerate to an unstable way of life; we hurry from subject to subject. This condition can be countered if only we go about it in the right way. The sanguine person will not, however, reach his goal by saying to himself: You have a sanguine temperament and you must break yourself of it. The intellect applied directly is often a hindrance in this realm. On the other hand, used indirectly it can accomplish much. Here the intellect is the weakest soul-force of all. In presence of the stronger soul-forces, such as the temperaments, the intellect can do very little; it can work only indirectly. If some one exhorts himself ever so often: “For once now hold fast to one thing”—then the sanguine temperament will again and again play him bad tricks. He can reckon only with a force which he has. Behind the intellect there must be other forces. Can a sanguine person count upon anything at all but his sanguine temperament? And in self-education too it is necessary to try to do also what the intellect can do directly. A man must reckon with his sanguineness; self-exhortations are fruitless. The important thing is to show sanguineness in the right place. One must try to have no interest in certain things in which he is interested. We can with the intellect provide experiences for which the brief interest of the sanguine person is justified. Let him try to place himself artificially in such situations; to put in his way as much as possible what is of no interest to him. If then we bring about such situations in ever such small matters, concerning which a brief interest is warranted, it will call forth what is necessary. Then it will be noticed, if only one works at it long enough, that this temperament develops the force to change itself.

The choleric can likewise cure himself in a particular way, if we consider the matter from the point of view of spiritual science. For the choleric temperament it is good to choose such subjects, to bring about through the intellect such conditions as are not changed if we rage, conditions in which we reduce ourselves ad absurdum by our raging. When the choleric notices that his fuming inner being wishes to express itself, he must try to find as many things as possible which require little force to be overcome; he must try to bring about easily superable outer facts, and must always try to bring his force to expression in the strongest way upon insignificant events and facts. If he thus seeks out insignificant things which offer him no resistance, then he will bring his one-sided choleric temperament again into the right course.

If it is noticed that melancholia is producing one-sidedness, one must try directly to create for himself legitimate outer obstacles, and then will to examine these legitimate outer obstacles in their entire aspect, so that what one possesses of pain and the capacity for suffering is diverted to outer objects. The intellect can accomplish this. Thus the melancholic temperament must not pass by the pain and suffering of life, but must actually seek them, must experience sympathy, in order that his pain may be diverted to the right objects and events.

If we are phlegmatic, have no interests, then it is good for us to occupy ourselves as much as possible with quite uninteresting things, to surround ourselves with many sources of ennui, so that we are thoroughly bored. Then we shall completely cure ourselves of our apathy, completely break ourselves of it. The phlegmatic person therefore does well to decide with his intellect that he must take interest in a certain thing, that he must search for things which are really only worthy to be ignored. He must seek occupations in which apathy is justified, in which he can work out his apathy. In this way he conquers it, even when it threatens to degenerate into one-sidedness.

Thus we reckon with what is there and not with what is lacking. Those however who call themselves realists believe, for example, that the best thing for a melancholic is to produce conditions that are opposed to his temperament. But anyone who actually thinks realistically will appeal to what is already in him.

So you see spiritual science does not divert us from reality and from actual life; but it will illuminate every step of the way to the truth; and it can also guide us everywhere in life to take reality into consideration. For those people are deluded who think they can stick to external sense appearance. We must go deeper if we wish to enter into this reality; and we shall acquire an understanding for the variety of life if we engage in such considerations.

Our sense for the practical will become more and more individual if we are not impelled to apply a general prescription: namely, you must not drive out fickleness with seriousness, but see what kind of characteristics the person has which are to be stimulated. If then man is life's greatest riddle, and if we have hope that this riddle will be solved for us, we must turn to this spiritual science, which alone can solve it for us. Not only is man in general a riddle to us, but each single person who confronts us in life, each new individuality, presents a new riddle, which of course we cannot fathom by considering it with the intellect. We must penetrate to the individuality. And here too we can allow spiritual science to work out of the innermost center of our being; we can make spiritual science the greatest impulse of life. So long as it remains only theory, it is worthless. It must be applied in the life of the human being. The way to this goal is possible, but it is long. It becomes illuminated for us if it leads to reality. Then we become aware that our views are transformed. Knowledge is transformed. It is prejudice to believe that knowledge must remain abstract; on the contrary, when it enters the spiritual realm it permeates our whole life's work; our entire life becomes permeated by it. Then we face life in such a way that we have discernment for the individuality, which enters even into feeling and sensation and expresses itself in these, and which possesses great reverence and esteem. Patterns are easy to recognize; and to wish to govern life according to patterns is easy; but life does not permit itself to be treated as a pattern. Only insight will suffice, insight which is transformed into a feeling one must have toward the individuality of man, toward the individuality in the whole of life. Then will our conscientious spiritual knowledge flow into our feeling, so to speak, in such a way that we shall be able to estimate correctly the riddle which confronts us in each separate human being.

How do we solve the riddle which each individual presents to us? We solve it by approaching each person in such a way that harmony results between him and us. If we thus permeate ourselves with life's wisdom, we shall be able to solve the fundamental riddle of life which is the individual man. It is not solved by setting up abstract ideas and concepts. The general human riddle can be solved in pictures; this individual riddle, however, is not to be solved by this setting up of abstract ideas and concepts; but rather must we approach each individual person in such a way that we bring to him direct understanding.

That is possible, however, only when we know what lies in the depths of the soul. Spiritual science is something which slowly and gradually pours itself into our entire soul so that it renders the soul receptive not only to the large relations but also to the finer details. In spiritual science it is a fact that, when one soul approaches another, and this other requires love, love is given. If it requires something else, that will be given. Thus by means of such true life wisdom we create social foundations, and that means at each moment to solve a riddle. Anthroposophy works not by means of preaching, exhortation, harping on morals, but by creating a social basis on which one man is able to understand another.

Spiritual science is thus the sub-soil of life, and love is the blossom and fruit of such a life, stimulated by spiritual science. Therefore spiritual science may claim that it is establishing something which will provide a base for the most beautiful goal of the mission of man: genuine, true, human love. In our sympathy, in our love, in the manner in which we approach the individual human being, in our conduct, we should learn the art of living through spiritual science. If we would permit life and love to stream into feeling and sensibility, human life would be a beautiful expression of the fruit of this spiritual science.

We learn to know the individual human being in every respect when we perceive him in the light of spiritual science. We learn to perceive even the child in this way; we learn little by little to respect, to value, in the child the peculiarity, the enigmatic quality of the individuality, and we learn also how we must treat this individual in life, because spiritual science gives to us, so to speak, not merely general, theoretical directions, but it guides us in our relation to the individual in the solving of the riddles which are there to be solved: namely, to love him as we must love him if we not merely fathom him with the mind, but let him work upon us completely, let our spiritual scientific insight give wings to our feelings, our love. That is the only proper soil which can yield true, fruitful, genuine human love; and this is the basis from which we discover what we have to seek as the innermost essential kernel in each individual. And if we permeate ourselves thus with spiritual knowledge, our social life will be regulated in such a way that each single person, when he approaches any other in esteem and respect and understanding of the riddle “man,” will learn how to find and to regulate his relation to the individual. Only one who lives in abstractions as a matter of course can speak from prosaic concepts, but he who strives for genuine knowledge will find it, and will find the way to other people; he will find the solution of the riddle of the other person in his own attitude, in his own conduct.

Thus we solve the individual riddle according as we relate ourselves to others. We find the essential being of another only with a view of life which comes from the spirit. Spiritual science must be a life-practice, a spiritual life-factor, entirely practical, entirely living, and not vague theory.

This is knowledge which can work into all the fibers of man's being, which can rule each single act in life. Thus only does spiritual science become the true art of living—and that could be particularly shown in the consideration of those intimate peculiarities of man, the temperaments. Thus the finest relation is engendered between man and man when we look a person in the face and understand not only how to fathom the riddle, but how to love, that is, to let love flow from individuality to individuality. Spiritual science needs no theoretical proofs; life brings the proofs. Spiritual science knows that something can be said “for” and “against” everything, but the true proofs are those which life brings; and only step by step can life show the truth of what we think when we consider the human being in the light of spiritual-scientific knowledge; for this truth exists as a harmonious, life-inspired insight which penetrates into the deepest mysteries of life.

In dealing with the human senses in our first lecture we merely enumerated them, though in a manner gleaned from the human being himself. We did not confuse and jumble them, as inevitably occurs in the external physiology of the senses where their relationships are not known, but rather, we enumerated them all in the order that accords with the nature of man. Today it shall be our task to examine the realm of the human senses more closely, as this is most important for a deeper fathoming of the human being.

We began with the sense we called the sense of life—the feeling of life, the vital sense. What is this sense based upon, in the true spirit of the word? In order to visualize its source we must delve rather deep down into the subconscious mind, into the substrata of the human organism. This method of spiritual-scientific research discloses first a peculiar co-operation of the physical and etheric bodies. The lowest member of the human being, the physical body, and the second, the etheric body, enter a certain mutual relationship whereby something new occurs in the etheric body. Something that is different permeates and flows through the etheric body, and actually, men of our time don't in the least know in a conscious way what this “something” is. It saturates the etheric body as water does a sponge. Spiritual science can tell us what it is that acts thus in the etheric body. It is what corresponds today to what men will develop in a far distant future as spirit man, or atma. At present, man does not possess this atma as his own. It is bestowed upon him, so to speak, by the surrounding outer spiritual world, without his being able to participate in it. Later on, in the distant future, he will himself have developed it within him. That which saturates the etheric body, then, is spirit man, or atma, and at the present stage of human evolution it is in a sense a superhuman being.

This superhuman atma, or spirit man, expresses itself by contracting the etheric body—cramping it, as it were. Using an analogy from the sense world, we can compare the effect to that of frost, which cramps and contracts the physical body. Man is as yet not ripe for what one day will be his most precious possession, and therefore, in a sense, it destroys him. The result of the contraction described is that the astral element is pressed out, squeezed out. In proportion as the etheric body is pressed together the physical body as well undergoes tension, whereby the astral body makes room for itself. You can visualize it approximately by imagining a sponge being squeezed out. Now, the activities in the astral body are all emotional experiences—pleasure, distaste, joy, sorrow—and this process of being squeezed out communicates itself to sentience as the sense of life. This is the process that takes place in the astral body, and it expresses itself as a feeling of freedom, of strength, of lassitude, etc.

Now let us ascend a bit. As the second sense, we listed the sense of our own movements. In this case, again, an extraneous principle is at work in the etheric body, and again it is one not yet indigenous in man. He has not achieved it through his own efforts; it flows into him out of the spiritual world, and, as with atma, the etheric body is saturated with it as a sponge with water. It is the life spirit, or buddhi, which in time will permeate him, but which for the present he holds as a gift, as it were, from the life spirit of the world. Its action is different from that of atma. As water seeks its level, so buddhi effects proportion, equilibrium, in the etheric and physical bodies, and hence in the astral body as well. This condition operates in such a way that when the balance is disturbed it can re-establish itself automatically. If we stretch out an arm, for example, destroying the balance through this change of position, the balance is immediately restored because the astral body is in a state of equilibrium. In proportion as we stretch out an arm the astral current streams in the opposite direction, thereby re-adjusting the balance. With every physical change of position, even merely blinking, the astral current in the organism moves in the opposite direction. In this inner experience of a process of equalization the sense of movement manifests itself.

We come now to a third element that can permeate man's etheric body, and this, too, is something that has entered human consciousness only to a negligible extent: manas, or spirit self. But inasmuch as precisely at this period it is incumbent upon man to develop manas, this being his earth task, manas acts differently upon the etheric body than do atma and buddhi, which are to be developed in the distant future. Its action is to expand the etheric body, effecting the opposite of what was designated “frost” in connection with the sense of life. This activity could be compared with a pouring, a streaming, of warmth into space, and this expands the elastic etheric body. We have something like streaming warmth when this semi-conscious expansion of the etheric body occurs. The consequence of this elastic expansion of the etheric body is a corresponding rarefaction of the astral body, which can thus expand as well. It need not be pressed out; by having more room it can remain in the expanding etheric body. While the sense of life becomes conscious through the contraction of the astral body, the static sensation results from the expansion of the etheric body, which thus makes more room for the astral body. In the way of a comparison it can be said that the texture of the astral body becomes rarefied, less dense. This thinning of the etheric and the astral bodies offers the possibility for the physical body to expand as well—in a sense, to extend itself.

Through the action of atma the physical body is contracted, through the action of buddhi it is stabilized, through the action of manas it is unburdened. The result is that at certain points it pushes out tiny particles, and this occurs in those three marvelous organs, the semi-circular canals of the ear. Such spreading out of physical matter does not arise from a forcing from within, but from a cessation or diminution of pressure from without, through the unburdening of the physical matter in question. This in turn enables the astral body to expand more and more. It makes contact with the outer world and must achieve equilibrium with it, for when this is not the case we cannot stand upright; we even fall over. If we would move in space we must take our bearings, and for this reason those three little canals are arranged in the three dimensions of space at right angles to each other. If these canals are injured we lose our sense of balance, we feel dizzy, we faint.

In the animal kingdom we find that everything of the kind in question results from the animal's premature descent into physical matter. A certain hardening is the consequence. We even find little stone formations in them, the so-called otoliths, that lie in such a way as to indicate the measure of balance.

A study of these three senses shows us clearly the difference between the factual results of spiritual-scientific research and the opinions held by the present-day inadequate thinking of the savant group soul, which clings to externals. Thus far we have considered three senses, passing outward from within, and the last of them lies close to the boundary line between what we experience within us and what must be experienced without if we are to identify ourselves with the outer world. We must distinguish clearly between facts and the inadequate thinking of the savant group soul. Just here, for example, the latter has shown us how we must not think. Quite recently, special events have brought external science face-to-face with the necessity for at last recognizing these three sense regions, but its failure to do so has proved how badly it must stray without the right guiding thread. These formations that signify a human sense organ were promptly compared with certain organs in the plant kingdom; in certain plants there appear formations that up to a point can be compared with the semi-circular canals in the human ear. Modern thinking, which as a rule is abandoned by logic precisely at the moment when adequate judgment is called for, infers from the appearance of these similar formations in plants that the latter, too, have a sense of equilibrium. It is not difficult to carry such logic ad absurdum. If you maintain that a plant has a sense on the grounds that it purposefully rolls up its leaves, a sense that goes so far as to entice and snap up its nourishment by means of certain contrivances, I can suggest a being that can do all that just as efficiently, that is, a mousetrap. What science has put forth concerning the human sense organs can be applied quite as logically to the mousetrap as to the plant. With equal propriety it could be maintained that scales have a sense of equilibrium. Mental derailments of this type derive from an inflexible sort of thinking that cannot really penetrate into the nature of things.

Until modern science learns to illuminate the edifice of the human organism with the light of theosophy, it will not be able to master the nature of these three senses. Theosophy enables us to understand the entire structure of the human organism anthroposophically. By means of spiritual-scientific observation, man in his entirety must be comprehended through his own inner nature.

We pass to the sense of smell. The reason for not occupying ourselves particularly with what science calls the sense of touch has already been indicated. As generally described, it is a mere figment of the imagination, an invention of physiology, hence we will disregard it. Because I can give but four lectures at this time I must pass rapidly over certain matters and utter many a paradox. In dealing with a number of senses we can speak of touch sensations, but not of a special touch sense in the way modern physiology does. All that takes place when we touch something is wholly comprised in the concept “sense of equilibrium.” If we press down on a table, stroke a velvet surface, pull a cord, everything that there manifests itself in pressure, stroking and pulling as a process of touch is nothing but a change of equilibrium within ourselves. While all this can be found in the sense of touch, the sense of touch proper must be sought higher up in the sense of equilibrium—there where this sense comes to fullest expression. An unimpaired sense of equilibrium provides the sense of touch. In science the most distressing theories prevail concerning this sense of touch.

Pressure is something that does not interest the ordinary human being. He speaks of “pressing,” but does not enquire further into the nature of the phenomenon. But from the spiritual-scientific point of view the question must arise. What takes place in pressing? What occurs in the sense of equilibrium? What compensation is effected by the astral body? The extent of misconception connected with the sensation of being pressed is revealed in physics. Physics talks of atmospheric pressure, and when some alert boy asks his teacher how we can stand the high atmospheric pressure without being squeezed to death, he receives the answer that pressure and counter-pressure are always equal; we are filled with air, so the outer pressure is canceled. But if the boy is bright enough he will object that he has often sat in the bathtub, completely surrounded by water, and although he was not filled with water he wasn't squeezed to death.

If the state of affairs were as represented by the physicists, an enormous atmospheric pressure would be exerted on the body's surface, and they explain our unawareness of it by the counter-pressure, by our being filled with air. This is one of the absurdities resulting from purely materialistic explanations. No, what we have to deal with here is an eminently spiritual process. The human being is so strong that he can push the astral body into the constricted portions and thereby re-establish equilibrium. When pressure is exerted, a little lump, as we may call it, always results, and this effect is so strong in the astral body that the latter, from within, overcomes the whole pressure of the outer air. In this realm the spirit is literally tangible.

After this short digression we will now return to the sense of smell. Here the human organism is taken in hand and affected by something other than was the case in the senses just dealt with, something less remote from human consciousness, that is, by the consciousness soul itself, which comes into action in the process of smelling. We shall see why all such things are accomplished by means of special organs. The consciousness soul not only effects an expansion and rarefaction at a certain place in the organism, but causes the astral body to extend its impulses beyond the organism. In proportion as the gaseous substance penetrates the mucous membrane of the nose, the astral substance presses outward, leaves the organism, penetrates the gaseous substance, and experiences something in it, not only in itself but in the substance. What it thus experiences it calls aroma, pleasant or unpleasant scent, etc., as the case may be. It is an antenna of the consciousness soul, projected by the latter through the agency of the astral body.

In the fifth sense, taste, the mental soul is active. It pours its astral currents outward through the organ of taste, sending the astral substance to meet whatever matter comes in contact with the tongue. The resulting process in the astral body is of a special nature. Let us first recall and examine the sense of smell. What is the nature of the stream emanating from the astral body in smelling? It is none other than the nature of will. The impulse of will that you feel within you streams forth to meet the inflowing matter. The process of smelling is one of resistance, an impulse to force back the instreaming matter. Spiritual science can tell you that this substance flowing in is but maya; it is external will. Your inner and your outer will attack each other and fight. Smelling is a conflict of will forces. Schopenhauer, who had an inkling that the interior and the exterior wills hinder and obstruct each other in the activity of the senses, built a philosophy of will upon it. But that is unsound metaphysics because this interplay of the two wills actually occurs only in smelling. In the other cases it is merely read into the processes.

Now, while in the sense of smell the outgoing stream is of the nature of will, it pertains to feeling when the current results from tasty food. What enters as food is also mere maya, an external image that is experienced as feeling. In the process of tasting, the interplay is between feeling and feeling. That is the real process of tasting; the rest is merely an outward image, and we shall see that the tongue is formed accordingly. For this reason this sense of taste is a sense of touch [TRANSLATOR'S NOTE: It is perhaps not without significance that Gefühl can mean “touch” as well as “feeling.” With this in mind let the student now read the sentence as follows: “For this reason the sense of taste is a Gefühlssinn.” It is most suggestive but unfortunately untranslatable, a sort of higher play on words. Cf. also footnote on p. 16.], notably of feeling, agreeable or disagreeable, repulsive, and the like. The point, however, does not center in feeling as such, but in the clash of feelings and their interaction.

In the sixth sense, sight, it is the sentient soul that works on the etheric body and flows into it, but strange to say, this effect partakes of the nature of thought. It represents a mental principle, and the thoughts constitute the subconscious element of the process. The sentient soul subconsciously bears within it what the consciousness soul then raises to consciousness as thought. What flows out of the eyes is a thinking in the sentient soul. Real thought substance streams out of the eyes from the sentient soul. This thought substance has far greater elasticity than the other substances that flow out when the sense of smell or of taste is active. It can reach out much farther toward its objects—indeed, it is a fact that something of an astral substance streams forth from men to far distant objects, unchecked until some other astral element offers resistance.

The scientific explanation that in seeing, ether waves enter the eye and the latter then projects the image outward, can mean nothing to sound thinking. Somebody would have to be inside to work the projecting business, wouldn't he? What a horribly superstitious notion, this “Something that busily projects!” When in trouble, science, so proud of its “naturalism,” does not disdain the assistance of that “imagination” it professes to scorn.

It is something astral, then, thought substance, that flows toward the object. An astral element leaves the body, streams toward the object, and continues onward until opposed by another astral element. The conflict between these two astral elements engenders color, which we sense as pertaining to objects. Actually, the genesis of color occurs at the boundary of objects, where the astral element emanating from the human being collides with that of the object. Color comes into being where the inner and the outer astral elements meet.

Here spiritual science leads us to a strange phenomenon. We learned that really a kind of thinking resides in the sentient soul, but that its first appearance is in the intellectual soul and that it only becomes conscious in the consciousness soul. In the sentient soul it is subconscious. Now, when we look at an object with both eyes, we have two impressions that in the first instance do not reach our consciousness, although they originate in an unconscious thought process. Two mental efforts must be made, because we have two eyes. If we are to become conscious of these mental efforts, however, we must travel from the sentient soul by way of the mental soul to the consciousness soul. This path can be readily visualized by means of a simple analogy from the sense world. We have two hands and we feel each one individually, but if we wish this feeling to become conscious, that each hand should feel the other, they must touch each other, cross. If the impressions gained in the sentient soul through mental effort are to enter our consciousness, they must cross. In that way you feel your own hand; you render conscious what you ordinarily do not feel. Just as you must touch an external object to become conscious of it, so contact is here necessary if objects are to enter our consciousness. That is also the reason why the two optic nerves in the physical brain are crossed. Through this crossing, an effort made subconsciously in the sentient soul is raised into the consciousness soul; one effort can be sensed by means of the other. That is an illustration of the way anthroposophy teaches us to know the human being down to the most intricate anatomical details.

Seventh among the senses is that of temperature, and again there is something in man that transmits it. It is the sentient body itself, which is of an astral nature. It transmits the sense of temperature by sending its astral substance outward. An experience of warmth or cold occurs only when the human being is really able to ray his astral substance outward, that is, when nothing prevents this. Such an experience of warmth does not occur when, for example, we sit in a bath of the same temperature as our own body, when equilibrium exists between ourselves and our surroundings. We experience temperature only when warmth or cold can flow out of or into us. When our surroundings are at a low temperature we let warmth flow into them; when our own temperature is low we let warmth flow into us. Here again it is obvious that an inflowing and outflowing takes place, and always the effects of the human sentient body are involved. If we are in contact with an object whose temperature is steadily increasing, our sentient body will stream out more and more strongly, until the limit is reached. When the object has become so hot that nothing corresponding to it can flow forth from us, then we can bear the heat no longer, and we are burned. When it is no longer possible for the sentient body to stream out, the heat becomes unendurable and we are burned. When we lack sufficient astral substance to equalize the outstreaming warmth ether, when we can send out no more sentient substance because the object cannot absorb it, it would seem as though in touching an extremely cold object we should have a burning sensation; as a matter of fact, that is exactly what occurs. In touching a very cold object we have a burning sensation that can even raise blisters.

Now we enter the realm of hearing, the eighth sense. What active principle is it, we ask, that participates in the process of hearing? The human etheric body. But this human etheric body, as constituted today, is in reality unable to serve us, as the sentient body still can, without incurring a permanent loss. Ever since the Atlantean time the etheric body has been so constituted that it cannot possibly give off anything, so that a more powerful action must be brought about by means other than through the sense of temperature. The human being can contribute nothing; he possesses nothing by means of which he might develop out of himself a sense higher than that of temperature. No higher senses, therefore, could come into being were it not that at this point something special takes place in man that provides what he lacks. Higher beings permeate him—the Angeloi, the Angels—that send their own astral substance into him. They place their own astral substance at his disposal, and what he cannot ray forth they supply for him. Essentially, then, it is foreign astral substance that permeates man and is active in him. He appropriates it and lets it stream out. The beings active here, the Angels, absolved their human existence in the past. Their astral substance enters us, and then streams forth from the sense of hearing to meet what the tone brings. On the wings of these beings we are carried into the innermost nature, the soul, of objects, so that we may know them. Beings of an order higher than man are here active, but they are of the same nature as his own astral substance.

As a still higher sense, the ninth, we mentioned the sense of speech, the word sense, the sound [TRANSLATOR'S NOTE: Throughout this exposition the term “sound” (Laut) refers to the kind of sounds of which spoken language consists, notably, but not exclusively, the vowels. Articulation in the narrower sense.] sense. To the functioning of this sense the human being can again contribute nothing by himself, can produce nothing. He has nothing to give, hence he must be entered and helped by beings of a substance similar in its nature to that of the human etheric body. These beings possess the corresponding astral substance as well, but this is forced out into the surrounding world during the process in question. They are the Archangels, who permeate the human being with their etheric bodies, which he can then pour out into his surroundings. The Archangels play a far more important role than the Angels. They enable man to hear a sound. They are in man. They enable him not only to hear a tone—say a G or a C-sharp—but to perceive a sound, like “ah,” together with its meaning. Thus we can experience the inner nature of a sound we hear. These beings are at the same time the Spirits of the several folk individualities, the Folk Spirits.

In the sense of hearing the Angels give outer expression to their activity through the medium of the air. They work with the air in the ears, and this results in external activity of the air. The Archangels, on the other hand, produce activity in the lymphatic fluids, as in a watery substance. They guide the circulation of these fluids in a certain direction, enabling us to perceive, for example, the sound “ah” in its full significance. The outer expression of this work is the forming of folk physiognomies, the creation of the particular expression of the human organism as related to a certain people. From all this we can infer that the lymphatic fluids in man flow in a different manner, that the whole organism makes a different impression, according to the way in which the Archangels of the people in question have imparted a certain sense of sound by means of the lymphatic current.

When a people designates the ego with the word Adam (irrespective of the theories it holds regarding the human ego), the Folk Spirit speaks through the two a's that succeed each other in consecutive syllables. A certain basic organization results. A member of that people must feel the nature of the ego to be such as corresponds to the two a's, to “Adam.” The consequences are different when a people expresses the ego with the word “ich.” [TRANSLATOR'S NOTE: Ich means I (or also, ego). As the vowel sounds are so important it should be kept in mind that the i in ich is pronounced as in the word “if.”] Such a people must have a different conception of the ego. A different feeling results when, in place of the two a's, the sounds “i” and “ch” are linked. A certain nuance, a certain color, is inherent in the “i,” suggesting what the Folk Spirit infuses into the individual organism in connection with the conception of the ego.

Through the sequence a-o something different is infused into a people than through the sequence i-e. The words amor and Liebe are very different things. When the Folk Spirit says amor we have one shade of feeling, and quite a different one when he says Liebe. Here we see the Folk Spirit at work, and we also see why the differentiation of sounds came into being. It is by no means immaterial, for example, that the word “Adam” was used in old Hebrew to denote the first human form, but by the ancient Persians to designate the ego. The fact shows that quite different feelings and quite definite trends of these feelings are expressed in this way.

Here we have the first hint of the mystery of speech, or rather, of its first elements. What is involved is the activity of spirits of the order of Archangels, who penetrate man with the sense of sound and vibrate in his whole watery substance. One of the greatest experiences vouchsafed him who ascends to higher cognition occurs when he begins to feel the difference between the various sounds in relation to their creative force.

Tone force manifests its pre-eminent activity in the air, sound force only in the watery element.

Here is another example. When you designate some being with the word Eva, and then wish to express something more, something that is related to this word as the spiritual is to the material, you can apply the reflected image, Ave. This sequence of syllables by which the Virgin is addressed actually affects in the human organism the exact opposite of the word Eva. Here we also find the reason for another variant of E-v-a; place a j before Ave, and you have Jave. When progressing to higher cognition, penetrating the secret of sound, you can learn to know all the connections between Jave and Eva. You will know what a higher being of the order of Archangel has inspired in man. The truth concerning the nature of speech is that it is based upon a real sense, the sense of sound.

Speech did not arise arbitrarily. It is a spiritual product, and in order to perceive it in its spiritual aspect we have the sense of sound, which in a systematic enumeration of the senses is exactly as justified as the others. There are still deeper reasons why the senses must be listed in just this manner. In the next lecture we will ascend to the sense of concept and the higher senses in order to understand the microcosm anthroposophically.

We shall begin by discussing something of a general character. And since we are a small intimate circle, we can then elaborate on any aspect that especially interests you. I would like to make some general statements about the being of man in connection with World Being, with the Macrocosm. And I will not approach it so much in the style of my book Theosophy—you can all get sufficient knowledge from that—but I invite you to consider especially man's inner nature.

If now and then we contemplate ourselves as human beings, we are immediately struck by the fact that we experience the world about us through our senses, and then think about the impressions we have received. We constantly observe these two attributes of man's being. If, for instance, we have put the light out at night and review the day's impressions before going to sleep, we are conscious that all day long the world has worked upon us. Now only the memory pictures of the day's impressions surge up and down in our souls. We know that we are thinking about them, our soul is now within the after-effects of what has taken place in us through the outer impressions. Apart from trivial matters, we call these memories of the day our own individual impressions. It is only because we are intelligent, individual human beings, beings with an intellect, that we are capable of receiving impressions of the world in this way.

Now, in our spiritual life this individual aspect is closely connected with external impressions. During the day, whilst we observe the world, our sense impressions and our thoughts intermingle. And at bedtime, when we no longer have any fresh sense impressions, but let those we have had pass through our soul, then we know very well that these are our pictures of what is outside. Our impressions of the outer world merge with what we are as individuals. They become one. Now, as we all know, one can make this inner, individual element within us more and more alive, more and more exact, by the means already known to us and described for instance in my book Knowledge of the Higher Worlds. What you can experience first of all in your inner life, is that you feel you are not absolutely dependent in your thoughts on the external world. If, for instance, someone can think about what happened on Saturn, Sun and Moon, then he has higher thoughts of this kind. For of course nobody can have external impressions of what happened on old Saturn, old Sun and old Moon. We do not even need to go so far. If we ask ourselves in a quiet moment: ‘How many of my concepts have changed since my youth?’ this in itself is taking an independent individual stand with regard to the world. When we form views about life, we feel ourselves becoming more independent in our intellect. Becoming independent in the individual element of the intellect is of great importance for the human being. For what does this mean? What does it mean for the human being to grasp general truths about life—not just in theory—but through experience, even of things that are independent of external impressions? It means that he is becoming more independent in his etheric body. That is the first step of a long process. At the beginning he does not even notice that to some extent he is lifting out his etheric body; ultimately he can make it completely independent of the physical body.

Whilst the beginning is just a tiny step towards becoming independent, the end is a total drawing out of the etheric body and a perceiving with it. We then have perceptions in the environment with this independent etheric body. We can even perceive in this way when we are not yet very advanced in inner mystical experience. We can grasp this and to a certain extent understand it if we remember what our perception is like in the physical body. With our physical body we perceive by means of our senses, which are independent. Our eyes are independent and so are our ears. We can perceive the world of colour and the world of sound independently. We can no longer do this when we perceive with our intelligence. In the case of intelligence everything is a unity, nothing is divided into separate spheres. We cannot perceive with etheric eyes and etheric ears as though they were separate sense realms, we perceive the etheric world in general. And when we begin to say something about it we can describe how etheric experience works as a comprehensive whole. I will not discuss how much further this experience can lead, but only point out that when the human being perceives how general truths are formed he can perceive something of the etheric elements.

Whoever perceives the etheric world and can gradually realise that a higher world of this kind exists, can have an inner conviction that an etheric body is the basis of the physical body. As soon as we speak of such a being as an etheric body we must take our lead from significant disclosures and from direct experience. As soon as we know that the physical body is interpenetrated by an etheric body we will readily understand the occultist describing in his way that paralysis is an abnormal occurrence of what otherwise happens through normal training. It can happen that a man's etheric body withdraws from his physical body. Then the physical body becomes independent. Paralysis could possibly result, for the physical body has been deprived of its enlivening etheric body. But we do not need to go as far as the appearance of paralysis, for we can understand its appearance in everyday life even better. For example, what is a lazy person? He is someone who has a weak etheric body from birth or who has let it grow weak through neglect. We try to correct it by relieving the physical body of its leaden heaviness and by some means making it lighter. A thorough cure, however, can only arise by way of the astral body, for it can stimulate the etheric body to fresh life. But you have to realise something else. The etheric body is actually the bearer of our whole intellect. When we go to sleep at night all our thought pictures and memories actually remain in the etheric body. The human being leaves his thoughts behind in the etheric body and does not return to them until morning. By laying aside the etheric body we lay aside the whole web of our experiences.

This etheric body, however, is constructed so that when we investigate it in a Spiritual Scientific way we can quite clearly perceive that the human being is subjected to a far greater number of changes in the course of time than we would imagine. We all know, of course, that man has passed through a series of incarnations. It is not for nothing that we are incarnated again and again. Man's vision is limited. It is a general belief that man's Organisation has always been like it is today. In fact, the human Organisation changes from one century to another, only we cannot perceive this externally. In the frontal lobe of the brain there is an organ with delicate convolutions, that has only been developed since the fourteenth to fifteenth centuries. It is an organic form for the purely intellectual life of the present centuries. We can well imagine that it is impossible for a detail of this kind to alter in the brain without in fact the whole human Organisation altering, even if only slightly. So that in very truth the human Organisation shows signs of changes as the centuries pass by. But it is only through reading the Akashic Record that these changes can be confirmed. And that is where the changes in the etheric body can be best followed up. We see that the people of ancient Greece or ancient Egypt had etheric bodies that were quite different. All the movements in them were different.

Now, in order to arrive at a thought that can be fertile for us, I would like to make a short digression and draw your attention to the fact that even in ordinary life you can assume the existence of more than one world. The human being goes to sleep without knowing that he is in another world. But the fact that he is asleep and does not know anything about it does not prove that this other world does not exist. Other worlds do impinge in a certain way. The human being perceives with his senses when he is in the physical world but not when he withdraws into himself: then he has an intellectual world which borders on the physical. And he finds within himself, in addition to the already developed intellectual element, two other elements as well that are quite different again. Can the human being develop these other elements?

A simple reflection can show that there is a more characteristic world in the inner life than that of the mere having of thoughts. It is there whenever we say to ourselves: as human beings we feel ourselves to be moral. That is the world where we connect a feeling of sympathy or antipathy with certain definite experiences. This goes beyond intellectual experience. Someone shows goodwill to another and we are pleased, or he shows ill will and we are displeased. That is something quite different from what is experienced purely intellectually. Mere reflection does not produce in us the feeling of whether a deed is moral or not. A person can be highly intelligent in an intellectual way, without feeling the repulsive nature of a purely egotistical action. That is another realm of experience, which we also become aware of when we admire what is beautiful and elevating in works of art, or are repulsed by what is ugly. What elevates us in works of art cannot be grasped by the intellect but only by our life of soul. So we can say: something comes into our life in this way which is beyond the intellect. If an occultist observes a soul at the moment when it is experiencing aversion from an immoral deed, or pleasure in a moral one, he perceives a higher level of soul life. The mere having of thoughts is on a lower level of soul life than pleasure in or aversion from moral or immoral deeds. If the human being develops a more intensified feeling in this way for what is moral or immoral in his strengthened etheric body, this can be, seen to bring not only a constant increase of strength in his etheric body but an increase of strength in his astral body too, an especial intensification of the astral forces. So that we can say: a person who has particularly sensitive feelings about moral and immoral deeds will acquire especially strong forces in his astral body, whilst a person who only improves his etheric body intellectually—with exercises, say, that strengthen the memory—can certainly develop his clairvoyance very far, but he will not get beyond the etheric-astral world, because the intellectual element alone is active within him. If we want to get beyond the astral world we must do the kind of exercises in which we develop sympathy for moral deeds and antipathy for immoral deeds. Then we do indeed ascend to a world that is behind our world in a different sense than purely astrally. We then ascend to the heavenly world. So that we can say: in the cosmic world of the invisible, the heavenly world of the macrocosm corresponds to what relates in us to impressions of morality and immorality, and the astral world of the macrocosm corresponds to what relates in us to the intellectual sense perception of the physical world. All that develops within the intellectual element corresponds to the astral world, whilst what can be developed in relation to moral or immoral deeds corresponds to the heavenly world, the world of Devachan.

Then there is yet another element in the human soul. There is a difference between feeling happy about moral deeds and feeling responsible enough to carry out what thus appeals to you, and to withstand doing what is not moral. A feeling of responsibility for his actions is the highest level a man can reach in the world today.

So the human being's soul stages can be set out like this:

1. The sense man.
2. The intellectual man, who relates to the first invisible world.
3. The aesthetic man with moral feelings, who is attracted or repelled by moral and immoral deeds. This corresponds externally to the lower Devachanic world.
4. The morally active man.

The actual carrying out of what he feels within himself to be the highest moral ideals corresponds externally to the higher Devachanic world, the world of reason, ruled by those beings who represent absolute reason in the world. When the human being can grasp that his moral impulses give a shadow picture of the highest world from which he comes, he has understood a great deal about the macrocosm.

So we have the physical world and the world of the intellect, the moral world or the heavenly world of lower Devachan, and the world of reason or higher Devachan. Cosmic worlds cast into us shadow pictures of the sense world: i.e. the intellectual world; intellectual clairvoyance; the aesthetic world; moral feeling; the world of reason; moral impulses for deeds. Through a kind of self-knowledge man can perceive these different stages within himself.

Now this whole configuration of the human being has altered in the course of time. In ancient Greek or Egyptian times the human being was not at all as he is today. In the Greek age man was so constituted that higher beings ruled over the soul element within him, and so he felt a kind of natural obligation towards those beings. We now live in the age when man is ruled by his intellect, and so he feels something like an aesthetic-moral obligation. In those olden times however, it would have been impossible for anyone to have thought it possible to act in a way contrary to a moral impulse that presented itself. In Greece they still felt pleasure and displeasure so strongly that they had to act accordingly.

Then came the modern age where men do not feel any obligation, even where the aesthetic element is concerned, as is expressed in the saying: ‘You cannot argue about tastes’—though people who have a developed taste can probably agree among themselves.

What was felt in earlier times to be a necessity in the moral and aesthetic sphere is nowadays felt to be so in the intellectual sphere: to have a certain line of conduct so that you cannot think as you like but you have to conform to the laws of logic. This brings us, however, to the lowest level of human experience. At the moment we are at the transitional level, as we can well see. For if we look at the past millennia we see the physical body of man drying up more and more, until he has become quite different. One and a half millennia ago the physical body was considerably softer and more pliable. It has become harder and harder. On the other hand something quite different has occurred in the etheric body too, something that the human being could have less experience of because this etheric body has passed through an upward development. It is significant that we stand at the important moment when the human being must grow aware that his etheric body should become different. That is the event that will take place just in this twentieth century. Whilst on the one hand an intensification of the intellectual element is making itself felt, on the other hand the etheric body will become so much more independent that human beings are bound to become aware of it. For a period of time after the Christ Event people did not think as intellectually as they do today. Strengthening the intellectual element causes the etheric body to become more and more independent, so that it can also be used as an independent instrument. And during this process it can be seen to have gone through a hidden development which makes possible the perception of the Christ in the etheric body. Just as the Christ could formerly be seen physically, He can now be seen etherically, so that in this twentieth century a beholding of the Christ will occur like a natural event, in the way Paul saw Him. A number of people will be able to see the Christ in the etheric, which means that we shall know Him even if all the Bibles are destroyed. We shall not need any records then, for we shall see Him. And that is an event equal in importance to what occurred on Golgotha. In the centuries to come a greater and greater number of people will reach the stage where they can see the Christ. The next three millennia on earth will be devoted to the kind of development whereby the etheric body becomes more and more sensitive, so that certain people will experience this and other events. I will just mention one more event: there will be more and more people who want to do something and then have an urge to hold back. Then a vision will follow, and these people will perceive increasingly clearly: that which will happen in the future is the karmic result of what I have done. A few people who are ahead of the rest already feel such things. It happens especially with children.

There is a tremendous difference between what trained clairvoyants experience and what is described here as something that will come about in the natural course of events. Since time immemorial the trained clairvoyant experienced the Christ by means of certain exercises. On the physical plane, if I meet a man, he is there is front of me; with Clairvoyant vision I can perceive him in quite different places and we do not actually meet. It has always been possible to see the Christ clairvoyantly. But to meet Him, now that He stands in a different relationship to humanity, that is, that He helps us from out of the etheric world, is something which is independent of our clairvoyant development. From the twentieth century onwards, in the next three thousand years, certain people will be able to meet Him, meet Him objectively as an etheric form. That is very different from experiencing a vision of Him through inner development.

This places the exalted Being that we call the Christ altogether in a different series of evolution from that of the Buddha. The Bodhisattva who became Buddha, was born into the royal house of Suddhodana and became Buddha in the twenty-ninth year of his life, so that he did not need to undergo further incarnations. When such a being, a Bodhisattva, becomes a Buddha or Master, this signifies a higher form of inner development that any human being can pass through. The esoteric training of a human being is a start in the direction that can lead to Buddha-hood. That has nothing to do with what happens round about us human beings. Such people appear at certain times to help the world forward. But those events are different from the Christ Event. Christ did not come from another human individuality, He came from the macrocosm, whilst all the Bodhisattvas have always been connected with the earth.

So we have to be clear that in so far as we speak about Bodhisattvas or Buddhas we do not come near to the Christ. For Christ is a macrocosmic being who became connected with the earth for the first time through the baptism by John. That was the physical manifestation. Now the etheric manifestation is coming, then will come the astral one and a higher one still after that. Human beings will first have to be far advanced before they experience this higher stage. What human beings can experience belongs to the general laws of the earth. The Being whom we call by the name of Christ or by other names will also bring about what we can describe as the saving of all the souls on earth for the Jupiter existence, whilst everything else will fall away with the earth. Anthroposophy is not something arbitrary, but something of importance that had to come into the world. The world must learn to understand the Christ Being who lived for three years on the earth. That was at the beginning of our present era.

In my book The Spiritual Guidance of Man and Humanity you will find details about the two Jesus boys. The Christ Event was prepared for by a personality connected with the sect of the Essenes, Jeshu ben Pandira, who was born a hundred years before the two Jesus boys were born in Palestine. So you have to distinguish between them and Jeshu ben Pandira, of whom Haeckel,⁸ among others, has spoken in a most derogatory way. The Matthew Gospel,⁹ in the main, originated from this most exalted person, Jeshu ben Pandira, as a preparation for what was to come.

In what way should we understand the relationship of Jeshu ben Pandira to Jesus of Nazareth?

To begin with the individualities have nothing to do with one another, except that one prepared the way for the other; as individualities they are in no way related. The facts are that in one of the Jesus boys, the one described in the Luke Gospel, we have a somewhat indefinable individuality, so far difficult to understand in that He could speak immediately after birth in such a way that His mother could understand Him. He was not intellectual, this individuality of the Luke Gospel, but tremendously vital and elemental in the realm of moral feelings. The astral body of this being was influenced by the individuality of the Buddha.

When he had reached the Buddha stage, Buddha did not need to incarnate on earth any further. As long as he was a Bodhisattva he continued to incarnate. After he had become Buddha he was active from the higher worlds, and his activity flowed through—the astral body of the Jesus of the Luke Gospel. The forces emanating from Buddha are in the astral body of this Jesus boy. Thus the Buddha stream is contained within the Jesus of Nazareth stream.

On the other hand, what is told in Eastern writings and is also known to be correct by Western occultists, is that in the moment when the Bodhisattva becomes Buddha a new Bodhisattva appears. In the moment when Gautama Buddha became Buddha this Bodhisattva individuality was taken from the earth, and a new Bodhisattva became active. He is the Bodhisattva who is to become a Buddha in due time. In fact the time is exactly determined when the successor of Gautama Buddha, Maitreya, will become a Buddha: five thousand years after the enlightenment of Buddha beneath the bodhi tree. Roughly three thousand years after our time the world will experience the Maitreya Buddha incarnation, which will be the last incarnation of Jeshu ben Pandira. This Bodhisattva, who will come as Maitreya Buddha, will also come in a physical body in our century in his reincarnation in the flesh—but not as Buddha—and he will make it his task to give humanity all the true concepts about the Christ Event.

Genuine occultists recognise the incarnations of the Bodhisattva, the Maitreya Buddha-to-be. In the same way as other human beings, this individuality will also go through a development of the etheric body. When humanity becomes more like him who is to become the Maitreya Buddha, then this individuality will go through a special development that in a certain respect in its highest stages will be something like the baptism of Jesus of Nazareth: he will undergo an exchange of individuality. In both cases another individuality comes in. They grow up as children in the world, and after a certain number of years their individuality is exchanged. It is not a continuous development, but a development that undergoes a break, as was the case with Jesus. In His case there was an exchange of individuality of this kind in the twelfth year and then again at the baptism by John. This kind of exchange occurs, too, with the Bodhisattva who is to become the Maitreya Buddha. These individualities are suddenly as it were fructified by another. The Maitreya Buddha, in particular, will live with a certain individuality until his thirtieth year, and then an exchange will occur in him, as we find with Jesus of Nazareth during the baptism in Jordan. We will always recognise the Maitreya Buddha, however, in that nothing will be known of him prior to the exchange of individuality, even though he is present. And then he will suddenly reveal himself.

The leading of an unknown life is the characteristic of all Bodhisattvas that are to become Buddhas. The human individuality in the future will have to be more and more self-reliant. It will be a characteristic of his that he will pass unknown in the world for many years, and it will only be possible to recognise him then through the fact that he works from out of his own inner strength as a self-reliant individual. For thousands of years past, and now by occultists of the present day, it is recognised as an essential that the nature of his being remain unknown throughout his youth until the time of the birth of the intellectual soul, indeed even until the birth of the consciousness soul, and that he will come into his own with the help of nobody but himself.

That is why it is so important to be to a certain degree uncompromising. Any true occultist would find it strange for a Buddha to appear in the twentieth century, as every occultist knows that he can only come five thousand years after Gautama Buddha. However a Bodhisattva can and will be incarnated.

It is part of an occultist's basic knowledge that the Maitreya Buddha will be unknown in his youth. That is why I have been emphasising for years that we should bear this principle of occultism in mind: before a certain age nobody should be given the duty from certain central places to speak about occult matters. This has been stressed for years. When younger people speak, they may do this for good reasons, but they do not do it as an occult duty.

The Maitreya Buddha will make himself known through his own power. He will appear in such a way that he can receive no help except from the power of his own soul being.

To approach true theosophy, understanding for the whole of earth development is a necessity. Those who do not develop this understanding will destroy the life in the modern theosophical movement.¹⁰

• 8. Jeshu ben Pandira, whom Haeckel, among others, has spoken of in a most derogatory way: Ernst Haeckel, 1834 – 1919, German natural scientist. His remarks about Jeshu ben Pandira are in his work ‘Die Weltratsel’ (‘World Secrets’); Bonn, 1899.
• 9. The Matthew Gospel, in the main, originated from ... Jeshu ben Pandira: Matthai was a pupil of Jeshu ben Pandira. See Rudolf Steiner's ‘The Gospel of St. Matthew’, twelve lectures; Berne, September, 1910; Rudolf Steiner Press 1965.
• 10. the modern theosophical movement: see Marie Steiner's preface, p. 1.

If we wish to pursue the studies we carried on in our lectures last year, it will be necessary to acquire still other concepts and views than those that have so far been discussed. We know that what we have to say about the Gospels and other spiritual documents of humanity would not suffice if we did not pre-suppose the evolution of our whole cosmic system, which we describe as the embodiments of our planet itself, through the Saturn-existence the Sun-existence, the Moon-existence on to our present Earth-existence. Anyone who recollects how often we have had to start from these fundamental conceptions will know how necessary they are for all occult observations of human evolution. If you now turn to the accounts given, for instance, in my Occult Science about Saturn, Sun and Moon evolution, to that of the Earth, you will admit that nothing but a sketch could be given (indeed even if it were much more amplified it would still be no more), nothing but a sketch from one side, from one point of view. For just as the Earth-existence comprises an infinite wealth of detail, it is quite obvious that the former embodiments are equally detailed, and that it would never be possible to give more than a merely rough charcoal drawing, just an outline of these. It is, however, necessary for us to describe evolution from yet another side.

If it be asked, whence arise all the accounts given here, we know that they arise from the so-called entries in the Akashic Record. We know that what has once taken place in the course of the world's evolution is in a sense to be read as though registered in a delicate spiritual substance, the Akashic substance. There is a register there of everything that has taken place, by which we can discover how things once were. Now it is natural that just as the ordinary vision, contemplating anything of our physical world, sees the details of objects in its vicinity more or less clearly, and that the further away they are the less clear do they appear, so we may also admit that those things that are near us in time, belonging to the Earth or the Moon evolutions can be more minutely observed; while on the other hand those further removed from us in time take on more or less indistinct outlines—as for instance when we look back clairvoyantly into the Saturn or Sun existence.

Why do we do this at all, why do we set value on following up an age so far behind our own? It might well be objected: for what reason do students of Spiritual Science bring up such primeval subjects for discussion at the present day? We really do not need to trouble ourselves about these ancient matters, we have quite enough to do with what is going on now in the world!

It would be wrong to speak in this way. For what has once happened is fulfilling itself continuously even at the present day. What occurred in the time of Saturn did not only take place then—it goes on even to-day; only it is covered over and made invisible by what to-day surrounds man on the physical plane. And the ancient Saturn-existence which played its part so long ago, has been made utterly invisible to us; but it still somewhat concerns man even now, this old Saturn-existence. And in order that we may form a conception of how it concerns us to-day, let us place the following before our souls.

We know that the innermost core of our being meets us in what we call our Ego. This ego, the innermost core of our being, is, in reality, for people of the present day an absolutely super-sensible and imponderable entity. This can be seen in the fact that there are to-day teachings regarding the soul, so-called official psychologies which no longer have the slightest inkling that such an ego is to be alluded to. I have often drawn your attention to the fact that in the German psychology of the nineteenth century the following expression has come into use: “Soul-teaching without soul.” In the celebrated School of Wundt, which is considered decisive not only in German countries, but everywhere where psychology is discussed, it is mentioned with great respect. This school was well known for the “soul-teaching without soul” although it did not coin the expression. This teaching insisted, without taking an independent soul-being into consideration, that all the qualities of the soul are gathered into a sort of focus—into the ego. It would be impossible to think of greater nonsense, yet the psychology of the present day is absolutely under the influence of this nonsense. This “soul-teaching without soul” is to-day famous throughout the world. Future writers on the history of civilisation will have much to do to make it appear plausible to our successors that in the nineteenth century and well on into the twentieth it was possible that such a thought could have arisen as the greatest production of the psychological field. This is only mentioned to point out how vague is official psychology respecting what we designate as the central point of the human being.

If we could have a clear grasp of the ego and place it before us like the external physical body; if we could look for the environment upon which the ego depends in the same way as the physical body is dependent upon what is seen by the eyes and perceived by the senses—if we could look for the environment of the ego in the same way as we do for that of the physical realm, in the clouds, mountains, etc., or, in the same way as the physical body does for its means of nourishment, we should come even to-day to an expression of the cosmos, to a cosmic tableau in which, as it were, our environment is imprinted invisibly and which is similar to the cosmic tableau of ancient Saturn. This means that a man who wishes to learn to know the ego in its own world must represent to himself a world such as ancient Saturn. This world is hidden; to man it is a super-sensible world. At the present stage of his evolution man could not possibly bear the perception of it. It is veiled by the Guardian of the Threshold Who conceals it from him. And it requires a certain grade of spiritual development to support such a vision. It is indeed a vision to which we must first become accustomed. And above all you must form a conception of what is necessary, to be able to feel such a cosmic tableau as reality. You must think away everything that can be perceived by the senses, you must even think away your own inner world, in so far as this consists of the wonted working of the mind. Further you must think away from everything that is in the world, all the concepts you have within you. Thus you must remove from the external world all that the senses can perceive, and from the inner world all the workings of the mind, all conceptions. And now, if you wish to form an idea of that soul-disposition which a man must have if he really holds the thought that everything is taken away and man alone remains, we cannot say otherwise than that he must learn to feel dread and fear of the infinite emptiness yawning around us. He must be able to feel, as it were, his environment tinged and saturated with that which inspires dread and fear wherever he turns, and at the same time he must be able to overcome this fear by inner firmness and certainty.

Without these two frames of mind—dread and fear of the infinite emptiness of existence and the overcoming of this fear—it is impossible to have the faintest conception of the ancient Saturn-existence underlying our own world. Neither of these feelings is much cultivated by people in themselves. Hence, even in literature we find but few descriptions of this condition. It is naturally known to those who in course of time endeavour to seek the origin of things by means of clairvoyant forces. In external literature, however, whether written or printed, you will find but few indications of man having felt anything like the dread of the infinite emptiness or the overcoming of this. In order to obtain a sort of insight into this, I have tried to investigate some of the more modern literature where the consciousness of this dread of the immeasurable emptiness might be found. The philosophers are as a rule extremely clever and speak in clear concepts—they avoid speaking of the mighty, awe-inspiring impressions; it will not be easy to find anything of the sort in their writings. Now I shall not speak of those in which I have found nothing. But I once found one small echo of these feelings, and this was in the diary of Karl Rosenkrantz, the writer on Hegel, in which he sometimes describes intimate feelings produced in him by engrossing himself in the Hegel philosophy. I came upon a remarkable passage, which is simply expressed and noted in his diary. It had become clear to Karl Rosenkrantz that this philosophy proceeds from pure being. This “pure being “of Hegel is much discussed in philosophical literature of the nineteenth century—but we must say that it was very little understood. We might almost say (though, of course, this can only be said in the most intimate circles) that the philosophy of the second half of the nineteenth century understood just as little of the “pure being “of Hegel as the ox understands of Sunday, when he has eaten grass all the week. This concept of the “pure being” of Hegel is one that has been sifted again and again (not existing but Absolute Being); it is a concept which indeed is not quite what I have described as the dreadful emptiness into which flows fear. But all space in Hegel's sense is tinged with the quality containing nothing that can be experienced by man; it is infinity filled with “being.” Karl Rosenkrantz once felt this to be as a dreadful shuddering recoil from a coldness, tinged with nothing but “being.”

In order to understand what underlies the world it does not suffice to speak of it in concepts, or to form concepts and ideas on it; it is far more necessary to call up an impression of the feeling aroused by the infinite emptiness of the ancient Saturn-existence. A feeling of horror accompanies the mere hint of it. If we wish to ascend clairvoyantly to the state of Saturn, we must prepare ourselves by acquiring a feeling, more or less known to everyone, that may be compared to the giddiness experienced on a mountain, when a man stands at the edge of an abyss and feels that he has no sure footing under him, that he cannot retain it in any place and wants to give way to forces over which he has no longer any control. But that is only the most elementary of these apprehensive feelings. For he loses not only the ground beneath him, but also what eyes can see, ears hear and hands grasp; in fact all spatial environment. And he can do no other than lose every thought that may come to him, in a sort of condition of dimness or sleep; and then he can arrive at having no perception at all. He may be so deeply absorbed in this impression that he can do no other than come to the condition of dread, which often is like a giddiness not to be overcome.

Man of to-day has two possibilities. The first is that he may have understood the Gospels, or the Mystery of Golgotha. Anyone who has really understood these in their full depths—naturally not as modern theologians speak of them, but in such a way that he has drawn from them the deepest that can be expressed in them—will take something with him into that emptiness, which seems to expand from a given point and fills emptiness with something similar to courage. It is a feeling of courage, of protection through being united with that Being Who accomplished the sacrifice on Golgotha. The other way is to penetrate into the spiritual worlds without the Gospels through a genuine true Spiritual Science or Anthroposophy. This is also possible. (You know that we emphasise the fact that we do not start from the Gospels when we consider the Mystery of Golgotha, but that we should arrive at it even if there were no Gospels at all.) That would not have been possible before the Mystery of Golgotha took place; but it is the case to-day, because something entered the world through the Mystery of Golgotha which enables a man to understand the impressions of the spiritual world directly through his own impressions. This is what we call the ruling of the Holy Spirit in the world, the ruling of cosmic thought in the world. Whether we take one or the other of these with us, we cannot lose ourselves and we cannot, so to say, fall into the bottomless abyss when we stand before the dreadful emptiness. If we now approach this dreadful emptiness with the other preparations given us by the various methods, for instance, those in my book, The Knowledge of Higher Worlds, etc., and other methods dependent on these—and enter a world born from that which can shake our minds, which can seize upon our conceptions, when we live into that world, when we place ourselves, so to say, in the Saturn-existence, then we learn to know Beings—not in the least similar to those we perceive in the animal, plant or mineral kingdoms but Beings. This is a world where there are no clouds, no light, where it is quite devoid of sound, but we become acquainted with Beings—indeed those Beings called in our terminology Spirits of Will or Thrones. We learn so to know them that it becomes a true objective reality for us—a surging sea of courage.

What at first can only be pictured in thought, becomes through clairvoyance, objective reality. Think of yourself as immersed in this sea—but now immersed as a spiritual being, feeling one with the Christ-Being, carried by the Christ-Being, swimming—though not in a sea of water but in a sea filling infinite space, a sea (there is no other description for it) of flowing courage, flowing energy. This is not simply a uniform and undifferentiated sea, but we meet here with all the possibilities and diversities of what we call a feeling of courage. We become acquainted with beings who, to be sure, consist of courage, but although they consist of courage alone, we meet them as really concrete beings. Naturally it may appear strange to say that we meet beings just as real as man who is made of flesh, and yet they are not of flesh but consist of courage. Yet such is the case. Of such a nature are the Spirits of Will. To begin with, we shall only designate as Saturn-existence what the Spirits of Will, consisting of courage, represent—and nothing else. This, in the first place is “Saturn.” It is a world of which we cannot say that it is spherical, hexagonal or square. None of these definitions of space applies to it, for there is no possibility of any end being discoverable. If we revert to the simile of swimming, we may say it is not a sea in which one would come to any surface, but on all sides and in all directions are to be found Spirits of Courage or Will.

In later lectures I shall describe how we do not at once come to this: for the present I will keep to the same order as formerly: Saturn—Sun—Moon; though it is much better to keep to the reverse direction, from Earth to Saturn. I am now describing the other way round, but it is of no importance.

When we have lifted ourselves to this vision, something meets us of which it is extremely difficult to form an idea, except for one who has taken the trouble, slowly and gradually to attain to such conceptions. For something ceases, which is more intimately connected with our ordinary human ideas than anything else: space ceases! It no longer has any meaning to say—we swim “up or “down,” “forward “or “backward,” “right or left,” these have no longer any meaning. In this respect it is everywhere the same. But the important thing is when we reach these first ages of the Saturn-existence time, too, ceases; there is no longer “earlier “or “later.” It is naturally very difficult for man to imagine this to-day, because his ideas themselves flow in time. On Saturn no thought is before or after another. This again can only be described by a feeling that time ceases. This feeling is certainly not pleasant. Imagine that your concepts are benumbed, that everything that you can remember, everything which you undertake is benumbed into a rigid rod, so that you feel yourself held in your conceptions and are no longer able to move, then you will no longer be able to say that what you formerly experienced you experienced “formerly”; you are fastened to it; it is there, but it is benumbed: time ceases to be of significance, it is absolutely no longer there. On this account it is rather foolish for anyone to say: “you describe the Saturn-existence, the Sunexistence, etc., now tell us what was before Saturn.” “Before” has no longer any meaning because time ceases to exist; we must also cease all definitions of time. In the old Saturn-existence, speaking very comparatively—the world is really boarded up, inasmuch as thought must stand absolutely still. It is the same with clairvoyance, ordinary thoughts must be left behind, they do not extend so far. By way of a comparison and expressing it in image, we must say that our brain is frozen. And when we realise this condition of rigidity, we shall have a comparative conception of the consciousness no longer enclosed in time.

Now when we have got as far as this we become aware of a remarkable alteration in the whole picture. It can now be observed that out of this rigidity, this timeless character of the infinite sea of courage with its Beings whom we call the Spirits of Will, come the Beings of other Hierarchies, as though striking into it and playing into it. We can only notice that other Beings here play into it when we become aware of the cessation of time. We notice an indefinite experience of which we cannot say that we ourselves experience it, but that it is there. We can only say that it is within the whole infinite sea of courage. We observe something passing through this like a flashing-up, like a becoming lighter, but not a real illumination, more like a glimmer. This glimmer does not give the impression of a glimmering light, but as we must understand these things in various ways and we desire to make this comprehensible, we must imagine the following: Suppose a man says something to you and you think, “how clever he is!” and as he talks on further, this feeling increases and the thought comes: “he is really wise, he must have had endless experience, to say such wise things.” ... Besides this feeling, the person makes an impression upon you like a breath of enchantment. Imagine this breath of enchantment enormously enhanced—and within it clouds, which do not flash up but glimmer; if you take this altogether you will have a conception of how Beings consisting entirely of Wisdom interact with the hierarchy of the Spirits of Will. Their Wisdom is not Wisdom alone, but streams which are actively radiant. In short, you then obtain clairvoyantly the conception of what the Cherubim are. The Cherubim play into it.

Now imagine yourself surrounded by nothing but what I have described. I have already said, and have laid certain stress upon it, that we cannot say of it: “we have it around us,” we can only say, “it is there.” We must think ourselves into this. And concerning the conception that something is there flashing up, I said it was not a flash but a glimmering. It is not as though something arose and vanished again; everything is simultaneous. Now, however, the feeling comes that there is some connection between these Spirits of Will and the Cherubim. The feeling comes to us that they have established a relationship to one another; we become conscious of this. And indeed we become conscious that the Spirits of Will or Thrones sacrifice their own being to the Cherubim. That is the last conception to which we can attain when we approach Saturn in retrospect, that of the sacrificing Spirits of Will offering their sacrifice to the Cherubim. There the world is ‘boarded up’. And inasmuch as we can experience the sacrifice that the Spirits of Will make to the Cherubim, something looses itself from our being. This we can express by saying: through the sacrifice made by the Spirits of Will to the Cherubim, time is born. But “time” here is not the abstract time of which we usually speak, but independent being. We can now first speak of something that begins. Time begins with the birth of time-beings--whose nature is pure time. Beings are born consisting only of time. These are the Spirits of Personality, known to us as Archai in the hierarchy of spiritual beings. In the Saturn-existence they are nothing but time. We have also described them as Time-Spirits, as Spirits who rule time. But there they are born as spirits, they are really beings consisting of nothing but time.

To take part in this sacrifice of the Spirits of Will to the Cherubim, and in the birth of time is something of extraordinary importance. For it is only now, when time is born, that something else appears—something that makes it possible for us to speak of the Saturn condition as having anything in the least similar to our environment. What we call the element of warmth in Saturn is, as it were, the sacrificial smoke of the Thrones giving birth to time. Hence I have always said, in describing the Saturn-condition, that it was one of warmth. Of all the elements we have around us now, the only one we can speak of as being on ancient Saturn is warmth. And this warmth arises as sacrificial heat offered by the Spirits of Will to the Cherubim. This should give us an indication of how we should really look upon fire. Where-ever we see fire, wherever we feel warmth, we should not think in so materialistic a fashion as is natural and usual to the man of to-day. But wherever we see and feel warmth appear we should feel that what is at the spiritual foundation of our life is present, though it is still invisible, namely the sacrifice of the Spirits of Will to the Cherubim. The world only acquires its truth when we know that behind every development of heat, there is sacrifice.

In Occult Science, in order not to shock people outside unduly, I have begun by describing the more external condition of ancient Saturn. They are quite shocked enough by this, and people who can only think in accordance with modern science look upon the book as pure nonsense. Just think what it would mean if we were to say, “Ancient Saturn has in its innermost being—in its very foundation—this fact, that the beings belonging to the Spirits of Will offered sacrifice to the Cherubim, that in the smoke of their sacrifice time came to birth as the sacrifice they brought to the Cherubim, and that from this have proceeded the Archai, the Time-Spirits, and that external heat is nothing but a maya as compared with the sacrifice of the Spirits of Will!” But so it is. Externally heat is really only a maya. And if we wish to speak truly we must say that wherever there is heat we have in reality sacrifice, sacrifice of the Thrones to the Cherubim.

And now an excellent “imagination” is the following: In Knowledge of Higher Worlds and elsewhere it is frequently said that the second stage of Rosicrucian initiation is the forming of imagination. The Anthroposophist must build up these imaginations from the right conceptions of the world. Thus we can think of what we have discussed to-day as transformed into an “imagination “: we can imagine the Thrones, the Spirits of Will, kneeling in absolute devotion before the Cherubim, but so that their devotion does not proceed from a feeling of littleness but from a consciousness that they have something to offer. Imagine the Thrones, with this desire of sacrifice founded upon their strength and courage as kneeling before the Cherubim and sending up their sacrifice to them. ... And they send up this sacrifice as foaming heat, so that the sacrificial smoke ascends to the winged Cherubim. So might we picture it. And proceeding from this sacrifice (just as though a word of ours spoken into the air became time—in this case it is time-beings) and emerging from this whole proceeding the Spirits of Time—Archai. This sending forth of the Archai gives a grand and powerful picture. And this picture placed before our souls is extremely impressive for certain imaginations, which can then lead us further and further into the realm of occult knowledge.

This is precisely what we have to attain; we must be able to transform the ideas we receive into imaginations, into pictures. Even if the pictures are clumsily formed, even if they are anthropomorphic, even if the beings appear as winged angels, etc., that does not signify. The rest will be given to us later; and what they ought not to have will fall away. When we yield ourselves to these pictures we penetrate into imaginative perception.

If you take what I have just endeavoured to describe you will see that the soul will soon have recourse to all kinds of pictures unconnected with intellectual ideas. These latter owe their existence to a much later period, so that we should not at first take such things intellectually. And you must comprehend what is meant when some minds describe things differently from the intellectualists; the intellectualist will never be able to understand such minds. I will give a hint to anyone who wishes for instruction on this point: take out of the public library a book—which is quite a good one—the so-called “Old Schwegler,” formerly much used by students for examinations, but now no longer applicable since the “soul” is dethroned; although this book has been mutilated by way of improvement, it is not quite spoilt. You can take old Schwegler's History of Philosophy and you will have quite a good book. If you read there about the philosophy of Hegel you will find everything splendidly described. But now read the short chapter on Jacob Boehme, and try to obtain a correct idea of how helpless a man is who writes an intellectual philosophy when confronted with a spirit such as Jacob Boehme! Paracelsus—thank goodness—he left out entirely; for concerning him he would have written completely unjustifiable things. But just read what he says about Jacob Boehme. Here Schwegler comes to a spirit to whom there objectively appeared—not the Saturn picture—but the recapitulation of the Saturn picture taking place in the Earth period; this he can only do in words and concepts that cannot be approached by the intellect. To the intellectual man all comprehension here ceases. It is not as though these things were impossible of comprehension, but they cannot be understood if the standpoint of the dry philosophic intellect is insisted upon.

You see, precisely the most important thing for us is that we lift ourselves to what the ordinary intellect is unable to grasp. Even though the ordinary intellect produces something as excellent as The History of Philosophy by Schwegler (for I have expressly called this a good book), it is still an example by which we must see how a splendid intellect is completely at a standstill before a spirit such as Jacob Boehme.

Thus to-day we have endeavoured in our consideration of ancient Saturn to penetrate more inwardly, so to say, into this old planetary embodiment of our Earth. We shall presently do the same with the Sun- and the Moon-existence. And in doing so we shall see that there too we come to ideas which perhaps may not appear less impressive than the glimpse afforded us when we look back to the old Saturn condition, and to the Thrones sacrificing to the Cherubim and resulting in the creation of the Beings of Time. For time is a result of sacrifice, and first arises as living time, as a creation of sacrifice. Then we shall see how all these things are transformed on the Sun, and other glorious events of the cosmic existence will confront us, when we pass from Saturn to the Sun, and then to the Moon-existence.