The Rudolf Steiner Archive

Yesterday we tried to get to know more precisely the world that surrounds us in such a way that we share it with those who have passed through the gate of death and that we also share it with those spiritual and soul beings that we count among the beings of the higher hierarchies. In this way, we have devoted ourselves to a contemplation that is suitable for opening up to us a part of that reality that plays a part in human life, without man, with his sensory perception and also with his mind tied to sensory perception, being able to know anything about it in his ordinary waking consciousness. Since this world is a reality, a reality that plays a part in the shaping of human life, it is understandable that in the time in which we live, in which man is called more and more, take the general destiny of human development into his own hands, as we have often said, that in such a time a knowledge of these supersensible things also sinks into the human soul. Yesterday we ended our meditation, which, as a meditation on the life of the so-called dead, must be deeply penetrating for each individual human soul, with the suggestion that this is particularly necessary in our time. On the other hand, however, there must also be an urgent need to reflect more closely on such things, such as those we touched on in our meditation yesterday. For in our time even half-awake people, dreaming people, should suspect that extraordinarily important decisions are being formed.

In the course of our discussions, I have repeatedly given hints here and there about what can be said from the sources of spiritual research about the character of modern times, the character of our time itself and the near future. Such things could only be given to present-day humanity, and more or less to anthroposophically minded humanity, in a very cautious way. Just see how much of this can be found in the lectures given in Kristiania many years before these catastrophic events, for the understanding of precisely these difficult, catastrophic times. And perhaps it may also be recalled that at a time when it would have been necessary to point out, in one way or another, the seriousness of the impulses at hand, in the lecture cycle that was held in Vienna in the early spring of 1914 – that is, before the outbreak of our present world catastrophe -–, the way in which social life, the way in which human coexistence in our time is spoken of, I chose a sharp, a strong expression: I spoke at the time in these lectures, which were essentially also about the life of man between death and a new birth, of the fact that something is happening in the moral and social life of the present that can be described as a social carcinoma, as a terrible social cancer. Perhaps one or the other at that time found this to be a strong expression. But perhaps one or the other has since been able to convince himself that the facts speak for it, that such a strong expression was allowed to be chosen at the time.

However, what I already hinted at yesterday is correct and should give us much food for thought: despite all this, despite the fact that it can easily be surmised what serious impulses lie in the lap of our time, humanity today is little inclined to really grasp the seriousness of the phenomena. Today, humanity is far too comfortable for that, far too happy to indulge in those comfortable concepts that can be found in the scientific world view today, because these concepts can be gained from the handrails of external experience, because they do not require much inner effort of the mind and yet they flatter people's vanity so much. But what is necessary is that humanity should wake up, really wake up, to much of what the times demand of us today. This awakening will only be possible if certain underlying facts are no longer regarded as fantasies or dreams but as realities that play a part in our times. And so I have often hinted during our discussions that a significant change has occurred to humanity, particularly in the last third of the 19th century. I have also hinted at these things here in Stuttgart. Today, we want to once again call them to mind from a certain point of view.

I have indicated the fall of 1879 as the turning point in the development of humanity in modern times. If we want to understand this development of humanity in modern times more precisely, we must say that what happened in the last third of the 19th century is only the effect of something that happened in the spiritual world before. It began in the spiritual world in the 1840s. And the time from the forties to the end of the seventies of the 19th century is an important and essential, a significant time. What happened then did not happen on the physical plane; but in the year 1879 the repercussions descended on to the physical plane, and since that time these repercussions have been taking place on the physical plane. They are a kind of reflection of what happened before in the spiritual world. If one is to describe what underlies this, one can say that in a particular field in a particular sphere it is the manifestation of what otherwise happens more often in the development of humanity, and what has always been described by those who were still able to observe such things as a struggle between Michael and the dragon. In the most diverse fields, such struggles of normally progressing spiritual beings of the higher hierarchies against spirits of hindrance and obstruction have taken place. For the cultural development of humanity, such a struggle has taken place in spiritual realms, and in those spiritual realms that are directly adjacent to the earth, in the decades from the 1840s to the end of the 1870s. At that time, in 1879, this battle ended with a victory, if one may say so, of the good powers against certain spirits of obstruction, which at that time - one can put it that way - were thrown down from the spiritual worlds into earthly conditions, so that since then they have been working and weaving in earthly conditions. Within that which is developing in the spiritual evolution of humanity, there are spirits of hindrance that were only overthrown at the end of the 1970s and hurled down into the lower world for the upper world, and now rule in people.

If we look at these spirits of hindrance, these spirits of an Ahrimanic nature, with which the spirits that we can call Michaelic spirits have fought a fierce battle, we have to say that these Ahrimanic spirits had a good significance in past periods of human development, they had their tasks in past periods of spiritual development. These tasks were carried out in such a way that they were guided by good higher spirits. We must not imagine the so-called evil spirits in such a way that we think we just have to flee from them in order to get rid of them if possible. That is namely the best way to attach them to oneself if one wants to get rid of them in an egoistic way; rather, one has to imagine that these so-called evil spirits are also in the service of the wise world order. If they are only placed in their right position, they will perform services that are necessary for the wise world order. And so we can say that for centuries, even for millennia, these ahrimanic spirits have performed the task of dividing human beings into those community contexts that have to do with blood ties. People are connected in their earthly associations in such a way that the bonds of blood also trigger and bring about certain bonds of love. People organize themselves into family, tribal, ethnic and racial contexts. All these things are subject to certain laws of the times. These are directed by beings from the higher worlds. That which humanity has specialized, that which humanity has structured in such a way that this structure is based on blood, was guided by these Ahrimanic spirits, but under the guidance of good spirits.

But now a different era was to begin. As long as human beings were guided by blood, so to speak, they could not take their destiny into their own hands in the way that has been suggested several times. For this it was necessary that the service of these Ahrimanic spirits, as it was, be eliminated from the spiritual world. These spirits initially wanted to continue their activity of dividing people according to blood from the spiritual world; but humanity was to be driven to a more general conception of its entire spirit. What is often said in our field, that humanity is to be understood as a whole on earth, is truly not a cliché, but a modern necessity. And this is based on the fact that a strong, intense struggle has taken place between the Michaelic spirits and the spirits of Ahrimanic nature, which in the past differentiated people according to blood.

This battle has ended with the Ahrimanic entities being pushed down and now prevailing among people. They will cause confusion among people, because that is their intention after this defeat: to cause confusion with everything that can be drawn from all kinds of concepts and ideas related to blood ties and blood relationships. It is particularly important to realize that since the last third of the nineteenth century, these impulses have been active in everything that human beings can achieve here on the physical plane through their thoughts and feelings, and that reality cannot be understood without taking these impulses into account. The way in which certain international relationships and the like are discussed today has been confused by these Ahrimanic spirits, who have been defeated by the spirit of Michael.

I have often mentioned that we can say that we have been in the so-called Michaelic Age since the end of the 1970s. Michael can be seen as the Zeitgeist, which has replaced Gabriel as the Zeitgeist. This means a great deal: Michael as the spirit of the age! The spirits of the age that were present in earlier centuries worked differently than this spirit of the age. The other spirits of the age that influenced the development of humanity in earlier centuries did so more or less in the subconscious. The task of the Michaelic Zeitgeist, which has been working in human affairs since the last third of the nineteenth century, is this: to release more and more in human consciousness itself that which is to take place in the evolution of the earth. This Michaelic Zeitgeist has actually descended and is working on the physical plane of the earth.

There is something connected with all this for our time that is extremely easy to misunderstand. Ours is a very, very ambivalent time. If you describe it so superficially, you could easily call our time merely materialistic. But that is not all; the matter is much more complicated. On the whole, one can say that these more recent times are, in their fundamental character, extraordinarily spiritual, extraordinarily spiritual indeed. And there have never been more spiritual concepts and ideas than those that have been brought to the surface by modern science in the development of humanity. But these concepts, if I may express myself in this way, are abstract. In themselves, in their substance, they are thoroughly spiritual; but they are not suited, as they appear, if they are not properly treated, to express spiritual realities. These concepts of natural science, which are being instilled into all education today, are a very double-edged sword, if I may use this paradoxical simile. They can be used as they are applied by academic science today. In that case they are spiritual, but only in so far as they are applied to the external material world; their spirituality is denied. But these scientific concepts can also be applied in such a way that they serve as material for meditation, that one meditates on them. Then they will most surely lead into the spiritual world. If those who today have a scientific world-picture would not be too lazy to apply their concepts in meditation, then these people with a scientific world-picture would very soon enter into spiritual science. It is not the content of the scientific concepts that is at fault, but the way they are treated. The concepts are subtle and intimate, but people apply them in a materialistic sense. It is not so easy to make this clear in all its details, but we must communicate with each other; therefore we must let many such truths approach us only by reflection, as it were.

Thus people live in concepts, in ideas that are thin, that are, I might say, pure distilled spirit, so that one needs only to apply a strong force to arrive at spiritual science; and these concepts are the ones that are to enter the human development precisely through the Michaelic Age. But they are also the ones who are most confused by the indicated, one can already say, from heaven to earth pushed, in heaven overcome ahrimanic spirits of obstacles. They arise in so many areas where man today believes he is thinking and reasoning quite correctly, but where he is exposed to the confusion of these spirits to a high degree.

It is precisely when considering such a matter that it becomes clear how development actually takes place, let us first stay with humanity. We must bring before our soul a significant law of development, which we have also to consider from other points of view. It is, of course, an extremely superficial way of looking at things to think that events in historical life simply arise from one another in such a way that what happens in 1918 is a consequence of 1917, 1916 and so on. That is a superficial way of looking at it. Things happen quite differently; they happen in such a way that what has happened in the spiritual realm continues to have an effect in the following periods, but in a certain way. You can take any year, let us say for example 1879. Then something happens in 1880 that is determined by the fact that what happened in 1878 is repeated retrogressively. In 1881, in a certain respect, what happened in 1877 is repeated retrogressively, and so on. One can start from any point in the development of humanity, as contradictory as this may seem; one will always find that earlier annual cycles show up in later ones as important impulses. One can therefore expect that, especially in an important period of time, this law will also intervene in the development of humanity with particular clarity and importance.

I have often hinted at this, and have often spoken before these catastrophic events of the important period of 1879, and that it is only the effect of what has been taking place in the spiritual world since the forties. If we now apply this law, which I have just mentioned, we can say the following: 1879 is an important period of time; certain spirits were pushed down who had previously worked in the spiritual world as spirits of hindrance, and from then on worked here on the physical plane among people in a hindering and confusing way. What happened in 1879 is, so to speak, the conclusion of an earlier event that began between 1841 and 1844 and has been taking effect over the decades. If we now take the year 1841, we have the period of struggle in the spiritual world from 1841 to 1879. Those entities, which are under the rule of the spirit, who is called Michael – one could also describe him with another name – they prepared themselves in 1841 to take up the strong, intensive fight in the spiritual world, which then found its conclusion for the spiritual world in 1879. It lasted for thirty-eight years. Now I said: That which happens retrogressively has a retroactive effect in the following period. — Now continue calculating from 1879 for another thirty-eight years: 1917. Just as in 1880 what happened in 1878 repeats itself, and in 1881 what happened in 1877, so in a certain way what took place in the spiritual world in 1841 is repeated in the physical world in 1917 as one of the most important struggles. It is indeed the case that the year 1879 marks a turning point, which shows very energetic impulses forward and backward in the observation. And in a certain way, on the physical plane of 1917, 1918, those things are now repeating themselves that had to take place in the spiritual world in the forties, and which can be described as a struggle of normal, forward-driving spirits against certain spirits of obstruction. This is not a calculation that I have only just made today; rather, many of you know that these events have always been referred to, and that from the point of view of these events, the year 1917 must be seen as an important starting point for subsequent events.

Of course, things must not be viewed in such a way that one says: Well, we have experienced the year 1917. Certainly, one has experienced it; but what the events actually were that took place in that year, only a few people have experienced, since few people are inclined to evaluate them in their waking consciousness. That is what it is all about.

Now, through all these things I wanted to point out that we are indeed living in an important moment in the evolution of humanity, and that it is necessary to take some things more seriously at this point in time than they are taken by the present humanity in its masses. I have already pointed out how particularly necessary it is not to ignore the normal spiritual impulses in our time. As this newer time has developed, what has actually become predominant in it? What has really gained influence in this newer time? What is radiated, I might say, into the whole of general education? Basically, only that which has grown on the coarsest field of the scientific world view. But this coarsest field of the scientific world view has only the power to grasp the dead, the inanimate, never the living, which would be so infinitely necessary in this scientific age. Even today, people still do not want to see the connection between such things and general world events. They do not want to see that the more humanity endeavors to develop only concepts that relate to the dead, they are also destroying social and community life from within. It is necessary to bring scientific concepts into flux and to enliven them in such a way that they can actually be applied to human coexistence, that they are, so to speak, suitable for explaining human coexistence.

The course of development has been this way in these newer, in these most recent times: in what has been accepted as actual science, only those concepts have been formed with which one can comprehend external, dead nature. These concepts were quite unsuitable for grasping human life. But they wanted to use them to grasp human life. And so the official scientists applied these concepts to history, to social science, to social policy, and so on. But these concepts are not useful there, and so there is no useful concept for social life at all. As a result, the social life of the earth has become too much for people to handle, has become what it has become over the past four years. People will have to learn to condense their concepts and also to vitalize them.

What the natural scientists themselves develop is certainly ingenious, useful, and conscientiously methodical, but only for the external world. Today, everyone works in their own field and does not extend the concepts that are developed in any field to the totality of the human world view. Take just one example, and you will immediately understand what I actually mean. The ordinary school physicist who today looks at the magnet needle pointing with one end to the north and with the other to the south, explains to his boys that this constant pointing of the magnet needle to the north and to the south comes from the earth's magnetism, that the earth is also a great magnet; and it would be ridiculous if this school physicist were to seek in the magnet needle itself the forces that cause the needle to point in these directions. He tries to explain it in terms of the properties of the earth; he seeks the cause outside in the cosmos. In this purely dead area, the scientific concepts are still of some use, and one or other of them may still be discovered. Therefore, it does not occur to anyone to say of the magnetic needle that it has the inherent power to always point in one direction. One assumes directional forces from the magnetic north and south poles of the earth. The biologist no longer does this. It does not occur to him to develop a similar concept. The biologist sees the chicken in which the egg is formed. It does not occur to him to ask the same question as the physicist asks about the magnetic needle. The biologist simply says: When the egg is formed in the hen, the cause of the egg formation lies in the hen. If he were to proceed as the physicist does with the magnet needle, he would say: Although the hen is the place where the egg is formed, the cosmic forces are involved in the same way as the cosmos is involved in the magnet needle when the egg is formed. I must go beyond the narrow confines of nature and take what is outside to help. In the chicken there is the place where the egg develops, but the forces come from the cosmos, just as they give direction to the magnet needle from the cosmos.

It is urgently necessary to develop such a concept and to implement it methodically. But in the eyes of the official science of biology it is foolish, fantastic, it is ridiculous, because it has completely lost its way into a blind alley of the dead. This official science cannot even apply the comprehensive concepts to such things, much less can it say anything about how people could live together politically or socially in the right way. How can one hope that something so necessary for humanity could come out of this mere natural scientific world view, namely a revival, a refreshing of these concepts? Especially in the important area of human life, this cannot be. Let us make this clear by looking at a concept that we want to grasp spiritually.

Even the mere observation of the human skeleton shows something extraordinarily important, something, I would say, magnificent. When you look at the human skeleton, you see the head, which is actually only placed on the rest of the trunk skeleton; it is a world of its own. The other part of the skeleton is formed quite differently. If we apply Goethe's theory of metamorphosis, we do indeed get the transformation of the trunk into the main skeleton, but the main skeleton is formed spherically, the head is a reflection of the whole sphere of the world. The other is formed more like a moon. This is something extraordinarily significant and indicates to us that if we want to gain fruitful insights into the human being from his form alone, we must look at something that is already indicated in the form. Our natural science is indeed magnificent, but it is illiterate when it comes to knowledge of the world. It proceeds as someone who does not read the pages of a book but writes on them: A is like this, B is like that — that is, not reading but merely describing the letters. But one must proceed to reading, one must understand, describe the forms of nature not merely as science does, but interpret them in their relationships, in their transitions. Then one comes from reading the forms of nature and natural phenomena to unraveling the meaning of the world. Of course, people who hear something like this today and who, with their thick heads, are completely stuck in illiteracy, find such a thing, when it is said, quite dreadful. Good examples could be given of how something is found to be dreadful that is so far-fetched from the human skeleton, but which can be extended to the whole human organism. Man is a dual nature, and this dual nature is already expressed in the fundamental contrast between the head and the rest of the organism.

If one now, through spiritual science, engages with these two aspects of the dual nature – one could specify further aspects, but that is not the point today – then one can already read something tremendously significant from the mere shape of the human being, if one really engages with it. From a spiritual scientific point of view, it can be seen that this human head undergoes a development from birth through physical life on earth, which now differs from the development of the rest of the organism just as the head already differs in form from the rest of the organism. It is very interesting to observe that this head develops three to four times faster than the rest of the organism. If you look at the rest of the organism, you can call it by a common name, in that it is mainly organized by the heart, so that you then get an opposite between the head organism and the heart organism. This heart organism really develops three to four times slower than the head organism. If we were only heads, we would be old people by the age of twenty-seven or twenty-eight, getting ready to die because the head develops so quickly. The rest of the organism develops four times more slowly, and so we live well into our seventies and eighties. But that does not change the fact that we actually have a head development and a heart development, that we carry these two natures within us. Our head development is also usually fully completed by the age of twenty-eight; the head no longer develops. What then develops is the rest of the organism. It also sends the developmental rays into the head of its own accord. If you are able to observe the shape, the characteristic development of the shape, you could come across confirmation even from external things, even if you cannot come across the thing itself. However, you have to have spiritual knowledge to come across this. But look, who has not looked at a small child and said to themselves when they see it again later: This child only later became so similar to so and so. — This is connected with the fact that the forces of heredity are actually in the rest of the organism. The head is formed entirely out of the cosmos; and only when the forces of heredity work out of the rest of the organism, which happens more slowly, does the physiognomy of the head also resemble the rest of the organism. This is just one example of how external facts can confirm what spiritual science finds. It is important to note that the head develops much faster than the rest of the organism.

You see, knowing this was not so important in the early days when people were more unfree, more directed. In those days, the good spiritual powers took care of things. They effectively established harmony between the pace of head development and the pace of the rest of development. Now the time is coming when people themselves must ensure that such things are harmonized. Therefore, people must be able to understand such things correctly, must be able to deal with them, and they sin against development if they cannot do so. And we have an important area of human life where these things are terribly sinned against. This sin is sporadically expressed today because we have been in it since the last third of the 19th century. It will be expressed in a terrible way if people cannot understand the spiritual impulses. Today they initially express themselves in the following way: No consideration is given to the fact that if a person is to develop normally, something must be given to him that takes into account the fact that his brain development is three to four times faster than that of the rest of the organism. And one area in which this is particularly damaging is that of education and teaching, for the following reasons: Under the influence of the scientific world view, concepts have been developed that have gradually become mere concepts for the development of the head, that do not contribute to the rest of the development, concepts that are acquired at the same pace as the head develops, that cannot be absorbed at the same pace as the rest of the organism develops.

This means an extraordinary amount. Time has gradually developed louder ideas that occupy the head, leaving the heart cool and empty. They come sporadically today, as I said, but the things will increasingly take hold. You can do the test if you can observe life. Because of the dichotomy of the way the head and heart develop, the human being depends on not just developing intellectually in his youth. In youth, the head is the main focus because the other aspects develop more slowly. If we wanted to educate people for the rest of their lives as well as for the head, we would have to keep them in school their whole lives. We can only address the head in school education. But today the head is treated in such a way that it cannot give anything back to the rest of the organism in spiritual and soul terms. The rest of the organism does, of course, give its inherited impulses to the head throughout life, otherwise we would die at twenty-seven, because the head is predisposed to do so. But in return, the head should also give what is cultivated in it. You can see for yourself that today's education does not do this. To prove it, ask yourself: Is it not true that people who receive a school education today only remember what they feel in later life? — Most of the time they do not even do that, but are happy to be able to quickly forget everything. This only means that the rest of the organism observes the formation of the head. If the rest of the organism received from the head the life essence it needs, then one would not only remember in terms of memory, but one would look back on what one's teacher gave one, as on a paradise, to which one thinks back with heartfelt contentment and attachment every hour in later life, into which one plunges again and again and in which one has a source of rejuvenation. It would be a source of rejuvenation if it included education of the heart, not just of the head. Then, throughout his or her life, a person would have something from childhood teaching, from school, for the rest of the organism, which develops four times more slowly, and this would also have an effect on the organism. Today it is only just beginning, and it will get worse and worse. People will become prematurely aged because they will only remember what they have absorbed into their heads, and what has meaning only up to the age of twenty-seven. After that, it remains as useless, remembered memory; and the person ages. He ages inwardly, spiritually, early on, because the formation of the head is not suited to overflow into the four times slower development of the heart.

These things must be taken into account. But if they are to be taken into account, then our school education must become a totally different one, then it must have living concepts instead of the dead concepts that prevail everywhere today. When it comes to a Kant-Laplacean theory, people will always remember it in such a way that they grow old. What is real: the spiritual and soul starting point of our universe, from which the physical has only developed, will, if it is properly incorporated into the teaching material, be a lifelong source of rejuvenation. And it is possible to shape the subject matter, not just by using a methodical approach, but by completely reworking it in the anthroposophical sense, so that throughout one's entire life, there is something that one can recall not just in thought, but that is a lifelong source of continuous rejuvenation. We must consciously work to ensure that people are not old when they are barely fifty years old, but that they can still draw inwardly, spiritually, from what they have taken in during their youth; that they can have a source of refreshment, a refreshing drink from what they have taken in as a child. But then it must be given in such a way that it is not only suitable for the development of the head, but that it is suitable for the development of the whole human organism, which proceeds three to four times more slowly than the development of the head.

To understand such things means to bring to life what are dead concepts for the natural scientist and therefore also for our general education. Do not underestimate the great social significance of what is said here. You might think that this is only important where science in the narrower sense is effective. That is not true. Science has an effect on all of today's education, on the whole breadth of today's human development. These scientific concepts extend even into the Sunday newspapers; and even those who only absorb everything that constitutes their faith today, the real and true faith, from their Sunday newspaper, which they pretend to have towards their church or their office, are infected by science, which can only deliver dead matter, even if this dead matter may be considered in the most spiritual way. These things must be clearly seen through.

So you see: Anthroposophically oriented spiritual science is truly not just something that can satisfy subjective curiosity, but something that has to deeply affect our entire development in time. And again, this intervention in our development in time depends, for our consciousness, which can be trained in anthroposophy, on the recognition of what took place in human development from 1841 to 1879 and to 1917, both supersensibly and sensibly, above and on the physical plane. These things cannot be taken seriously enough. For much, very much, has not been taken seriously in recent times. And the recovery of humanity will have to consist in people again being willing to accept perceptions, ideas, feelings about world development. Just reflect on these things!

If you look back over the past few decades, what has the world's ruling class, with the exception of a few individuals, actually done in terms of world views, major world views? At most, it has allowed natural scientific concepts to be popularized in some way, and has used these natural scientific concepts, which it has allowed to be popularized, to demonstrate all kinds of illustrative things using the means of modern times. If you could somehow announce that something from the natural sciences would be demonstrated with slides, you would attract a great deal of attention and popularity. What has the leading social class actually done with questions of world view in modern times? People were very interested if someone could tell what they experienced as a North Pole traveler or as a Brazilian explorer. It is not to be criticized that one is interested in this. When someone talks about the fact that he has somehow been able to unravel the secrets of the egg germ of the May beetle, one has felt the necessity of listening to such lectures as a well-educated bourgeois of modern times, even if one has dozed off after five minutes, unless a slide has awakened one. But where is the real will to elevate the human idea to a worldview? Where it was present, and it is very characteristic, and everyone is actually forced to reflect on it today, where have there been the most lively worldview debates, the most lively interests in worldview questions for decades? There, where the Social Democrats had their meetings. There, worldviews were formed. This is only unknown in other social classes because they guard against really getting to know human life as much as possible.

But what kind of worldview do the Social Democrats teach? One that only works with the same concepts that are enshrined in the machines; a worldview that only develops views of the world in the mechanical sense: historical materialism, materialist conception of history, materialist conception of human coexistence. You can read about these concepts in every socialist magazine. Most people don't do that, but it would be quite useful to get informed. Those people who have been pushed into the machines, who have nothing to do from morning till night but work, and who, when they come away from the machines in the evening, have to deal with a social institution that is actually a copy of the machine, they have a world view that sees the world as if it were a machine. They have developed a world view that takes no account of individuality and organizes everything around the balancing concept of the dead. There is a very good saying: Death makes everything equal; but one could also say: A worldview that only deals with the mechanical, the dead, also makes everything equal, extinguishes all individual existence, all life. — So all individual existence, all life would be extinguished by the worldview that takes its ideal from the machine. As long as the matter was not serious, one allowed these things to befall one while dreaming, while sleeping, and one behaved in such a way that one rejected all questions of world view and gradually lost touch with all the impulses that can permeate human community life, human educational life in an understanding way. And basically, in more recent times, work has only been done in matters of world view where mechanical concepts were used. Even science, after all, only produced mechanical concepts. If you take Theodor Ziehen's book, which is a model for modern science, and read the final chapters, you will see that he is also one of those who say that natural science cannot come up with concepts that ethics, morality and aesthetics provide; but afterwards concepts are developed which state that everything that is not natural science is only dreamed up. Between the lines, everything that is not natural science is defamed. At the end, Theodor Ziehen says graciously: Concepts such as freedom, ethics, morality and so on must come from other fields; only the concept of responsibility should actually be rejected by real science. Man cannot be responsible any more than a flower can be blamed for its ugliness. — From a scientific point of view, this is absolutely correct if you are one-sidedly grounded in natural science, if you apply mere concepts of the dead. But then you are applying concepts that do not even come to the living, and certainly not to the I.

It is interesting to see how Theodor Ziehen talks about the I. In these lectures, which were written down and then printed so that they capture the tone of the lecture, he says about the I: “Gentlemen, it is a complicated concept, the I; when you think about what you actually think when you hear the little word ‘I’, what do you come up with?

you come? First of all, you think of your corporeality. Then you think of your family relationships. Then you think of your property relationships. Then you think of your name and title - he leaves out the medals - then... well, you think of nothing but such things. And what some psychologists have developed, he says, is just a fiction. Yes, the natural scientist, when speaking about the ego, can also come to nothing but what no human being actually thinks about when they seriously consider the matter, when they consider the ego. But the matter is serious, in that the concepts that have been developed out of the dead must also lead to the killing, the destruction, and the devastation of life. A theory that has been made out of the dead machine as a social world-view theory has a destructive rather than a constructive effect when it is introduced into life. Humanity has not decided to grasp this; therefore, it must experience it in the most extreme way. For what has happened? In the area where sources of tremendous future impulses will once arise, in the East, the theory of the dead, the continuation of the mechanistic world view in social views, in Leninism and Trotskyism, is having a destructive effect.

Consider the matter only very seriously. He who recognizes only the dead, and in man also recognizes only the dead, may he be as great a scholar as Theodor Ziehen, when he speaks about the ego, about responsibility, as Theodor Ziehen does, then his true social interpreter is not he himself — who does not dare to do so — but Lenin and Trotsky are the ones who draw the right conclusion for human society. What Lenin and Trotsky carry out are the consequences of that which is already cultivated by the purely scientific world view. But because this scientific world view makes compromises with that which is not the consequence of this world view, only because of this does it, precisely because it does not draw the conclusion, become not Leninism and Trotskyism.

It is also important, however, that things be taken in the sense of reality. What is not true has an objective effect. Thoughts are realities, not mere concepts. You cannot just say: Even if no one knows about a lie, it still works as a power. That is true, but something else is also true: If a lie exists that is not recognized as a lie, that does not change its effect; it works in the real world as a lie. And no matter how well it is meant, it still works as a lie.

There are already works today - I may have mentioned them here already - which treat the question of Christ Jesus from the standpoint of the correct present-day natural science. Very interesting books, because they proceed uncompromisingly. Above all, a Danish book. There are also others who really express what the present-day psychologist, the present-day psychiatrist, who thinks scientifically, must think about Christ Jesus. What does Christ Jesus become? He becomes an epileptic, a pathological person, a person with a morbid disposition. And the Gospels are interpreted in such a way that one sees in every chapter: they are case histories. Of course, all this is nonsense; but to say that it is nonsense, today only the one has the right to do so who sees through the matter spiritually. The one who accepts today's scientific psychology and psychiatry, from his point of view, this Christ teaching is the right one, because it draws the right conclusion there. And a person who speaks as a modern psychiatrist is still a better person, a truer, a more honest person than the one who accepts today's psychiatry and yet thinks differently about Christ, in the sense of those pastors or priests who also accept science in its entirety and yet make compromises.

A lie has an effect, however piously it is dressed up, for it is a real power. Above all, what is needed today is not to cover up life with compromises, but to face squarely what needs to be faced from certain presuppositions. If today's psychiatrist does not want to see Christ as an epileptic, as a lunatic, which according to today's psychiatry he would be, then he must give up psychiatry as it is developed today; then he must place himself on the ground of spiritual science. If people today were able to place themselves squarely on the foundations of that which can be known, then we would, with what can be known, have the right impulses for what must continue to work.

Recently, a note was slipped into my hand about a book that I was already familiar with, which had, in any case, caused the horror of the lady – because it was probably a lady. The note tells me what Alexander Moszkowski has written. I don't have the book here, but you can see from the slip what the book is about: “Anyone who has ever sat on the benches of a grammar school will find the hours unforgettable when, in Plato, he ‘enjoyed’ the conversations between Socrates and his friends, unforgettable because of the incredible boredom that emanates from these conversations. And one might remember that one actually found the conversations of Socrates heartily stupid; but of course one did not dare to express this view, because after all the man in question was Socrates, the “Greek philosopher”. The book “Sokrates der Idiot” (Socrates the Idiot) by Alexander Moszkowski (Verlag Dr. Eysler & Co. Berlin) does away with this unjustified overestimation of the good Athenian. In this small, entertainingly written work, the polymath Moszkowski undertakes nothing less than to strip Socrates of his philosophical dignity almost completely. The title “Socrates – the Idiot” is meant literally. One would not be mistaken in assuming that the book will still be the subject of scholarly debate.

Of course, today's compromisers will say: Well, we have learned enough that Socrates is a great man, and not an idiot; now Moszkowski comes along and says such a thing! But today it is necessary to have a completely different idea about such a thing. Those who know Moszkowski are aware that he stands on the ground of the scientific world view in the fullest sense of the word, right up to the quantum theory, and that he is therefore on the outermost wing of today's scientific world view. And it must be said that this Moszkowski is a much more honest man than the others, who also believe that they stand on the standpoint of the natural-scientific world-view and yet do not think that they should regard Socrates as a fool who has nothing to say on the concepts important for the world-view; who nevertheless make compromises, depict Socrates as a great man.

The fact is that today things cannot be put right for the simple reason that people do not have the sense of truth to face up to the consequences uncompromisingly in every respect. And anyone who wants to accept Socrates today must not accept the conditions that Moszkowski sets.

But that is difficult today, has been difficult for three to four centuries. Therefore, the matter was left alone until it had developed into what it has become in the last three to four years. Things must be approached at their soul-spiritual core, where their truly deeper impulses lie. It must be faced, which is particularly necessary today, to face the fact that truth and the sense of truth must enter into the souls of human beings! Then the things that are brought into the light of this sense of truth, that are illuminated by the light of this sense of truth, will be able to show their true face. Then one will be compelled to come to spiritual science simply because one sees the true face of things. For the present speaks a lot and speaks urgently, and things can be learned, such as how educational issues and questions of teaching must be studied by spiritual science today. Just as the question of the different pace of head and heart education is important for teaching and education, so there are many questions that are fundamental, important and significant for social life, for historical life, for legal life. We just have to get out of what we have dug ourselves into, out of the terrible belief in authority regarding what the scientific world view alone provides. This is necessary for our time. What the scientific world view calls 'real' provides concepts that can never reach into the realm of human coexistence. Humanity lives under this error today. If you look at things more deeply, you can see this.

That is what I wanted to say to you today. Now, let each one of you draw the conclusion from this that it is important to open our eyes and to illuminate things with the light that we can find from the light of spiritual science itself.

Yesterday I spoke about how our development appears to the Oriental. In many respects, the Oriental sees precisely what is compromising and inconsistent with his naive, intuitive spiritual faculty. And right now there are critical views among outstanding Orientals that are significant and interesting to follow. More and more views are emerging in the Asian East that the Orient must take the further development of humanity into its own hands. These views could be undone if there were more sense for what is proclaimed here as spiritual science! But then this sense must also be a living one; one must not only want to have something interesting in spiritual science, from which one prepares an inner soul voluptuousness, but one must want to have something that permeates one's whole life. And one must be able to see that it is only through the insights of spiritual science that social, moral and legal concepts can truly be grasped. What humanity has conceived under the influence of the scientific world view over the decades has not grown with the spirit that reigns in reality. No, it is at best comparable to those views that today educate people who want to spiritually kill the whole world because they only take their concepts from the world of the dead. Future times, when people will think more objectively about these things again, when the passions that so often guide and direct judgments today will have died down, future times – I am fully convinced that it can be so — will say: One of the most important characteristics of the period around 1917 was that the Weltanschhauung, which is only intended for the head and actually drives people into old age, has become a school-like Weltanschhauung. In the future, perhaps in a distant future, it will be called Wilsonism, in reference to the great schoolmaster from whom a large part of humanity wants to have a socio-political worldview impressed upon them. It is no mere accident that mere school-knowledge, which has nothing to do with the spiritual, has now become one of the most important political factors in the form of Wilsonism. This is an important and tremendously significant symptom of our time. It is just not possible to talk about these things today in a really thorough and comprehensive way that takes everything into account. But from my present allusions you will have gathered how important it actually is to try to understand these things thoroughly, how infinitely important it is to face up to these things not only out of affect, out of emotion, but out of knowledge.

I may have mentioned it here before, but I mention it again because it is important: now it is not difficult to speak out against Wilson within Central Europe; but I can point out how, in a cycle that was held long before these events, when the whole world, including Central Europe, still admired Wilson, I characterized him exactly the same way as I do now. The point is that one approaches the impulses that dominate the present time, which also dominate the present time as errors, from much deeper sources. In our anthroposophical field, our friends had the opportunity to see how, long before there was any external compulsion to see things in the right light, the right thing was pointed out again and again. May these things be better understood in the future than we have decided to understand them in the past! And I would especially urge you to bear this in mind: much of what is coming to light in the field of our anthroposophical science is infinitely better understood than we have so far chosen to understand it. It can penetrate even deeper into the hearts and souls of human beings and be awakened to a more intense life than has happened so far. May it happen! For what happens through it will already be connected with much that can truly be done, not to bring about disaster, but for the good of the future development of humanity, that can be done to make good much that has been neglected and that might perhaps be neglected further if one only listens to that which can be gained outside of spiritual science. Among our friends, too, many have a double bookkeeping of their lives. They have one in anthroposophical studies and books, for the private nourishment of their hearts and souls. The other bookkeeping is for their life outside, where they rely solely on the authority of the natural sciences. Often one does not realize that this is the case; but it is good to be a little conscientious in consulting with one's soul about these things, so that there may be harmony between these two accounts.

Man's life can only be administered in one sense. The spirit must also penetrate the scientific world view. And religious life must also be imbued with the light that can be gained from spiritual science. Take such things as were said and meant here today, and which seemingly lead the considerations of time up to supersensible heights, as they can be grasped in your presentations. Then you will see that anthroposophical education is not only education of the head, that it can also educate the heart for humanity. It is already education of the heart. It already serves all humanity, not just the humanity that might actually die at twenty-seven. It already serves to make people courageous and capable throughout their entire life. Education that fails to take into account the different pace of the development of head and heart will make him old, nervous, disharmonious and torn. Look at life, you will find this confirmed, because life can be a great teacher with regard to the confirmation of what anthroposophically oriented spiritual science brings down from the spiritual heights. Take everything that has been said, especially when it is spoken from such points of view as today, as spoken to your hearts, my dear friends, for the education of our hearts by the spirit of the world; and hold together that which should be the bond that links us together as members of our movement. Let us work together and plan to continue working, each in our own place and to the best of our ability.

First of all, I would like to remind you of something we discussed yesterday, so that we can then proceed to further considerations. Yesterday, I essentially explained that one cannot gain insight into the relationship between the ideal or spiritual and the material in the world, or into the purely causal natural order, without taking into account the nature of human sleep.

We started from St. Augustine's thought that he wanted to experience true certainty about the world in his inner experience. I said that we can no longer base ourselves on this thought for the simple reason that we have to know today that every human sleep refutes this thought. For we could never somehow hold on to the idea that what a person experiences within himself is preserved post mortem, after death, and that what a person experiences within himself is truly eternal, if we had to look at it from the point of view of the time from falling asleep to waking up, as ordinary consciousness today looks at it. The ordinary consciousness of today sees how, during sleep, what is experienced within the human being dawns. But now we said that as soon as a person completes the first step of looking into the spiritual world, he realizes that from the moment of falling asleep to the moment of waking up, what we call the human being's ego and its astral body – that is to say, the human being's actual spirit-soul nature – is so connected from within with the nature of the angels, archangels and archai, as the human being is otherwise connected here during waking life with the animal, plant and mineral kingdoms. Only because man's consciousness is dulled during sleep by the powers opposed to the world is he not aware that during sleep he is connected to the hierarchy of angels, archangels and archai, that they imbue his ego and his astral body with their own being, that they hold and carry his astral body and his ego. And we have explained how three things arise from this connection between human beings and spiritual beings: Firstly, that we have the feeling of personality more or less clearly even in our ordinary consciousness. We know ourselves as an ego. We would never know ourselves as an ego with only what is available to us during waking hours. The feeling of free personality that continues during the day, while we are awake, is a kind of after-effect of what we experience during sleep. This comes from the fact that from the moment we fall asleep until we wake up, we are connected with the angelic being from the spiritual world to which we belong. But the archangelic being, or actually a series of archangelic beings, is also connected with our spiritual soul being. And this is the reason why, when we are awake, we know ourselves as members of the whole of humanity, that we recognize ourselves as human beings on earth.

Every human being actually has an awareness of their free personality, even if it is not entirely clear. The awareness that one is a human being in general is already more shadowy in the background. Yes, certain philosophers, like Fewerbach or even Auguste Comte, have argued that it is a significant discovery for a person to come to feel that they are a human being in general, a member of the whole of humanity. And yesterday we heard Auguste Comte speak of the Great Being; by this he means nothing other than the human being. But Comte speaks from the standpoint of ordinary materialistic science; he does not know what underlies spiritually this consciousness that one is human, which lies in the background of our soul life. One would have no inkling of being a human being if that which is separated from our physical and etheric bodies during sleep were not imbued with the nature of the archangels.

And again, we are imbued with the nature of the archai from the hierarchy of the so-called Zeitgeist (the spirit of the age). But what comes from this remains a rather dark, shadowy consciousness. Indeed, today's humanity does not have it at all if it does not feel part of history, of historical life. The oriental world view has not penetrated to this consciousness of living as an earthly human being at all. This has been the particular task of Western culture: to feel like a historical being, as a being – let us say for ourselves – who belongs to the 19th, 20th century. But the present materialistic consciousness of humanity knows little more than the date and some other external historical data – we will hear shortly how little these actually have any significance for real life. For only spiritual science leads us to recognize how the human soul changes from millennium to millennium, how human beings become different, and how we now look back to ancient times and know that the people of the third post-Atlantic period, the Egyptian-Chaldean peoples, had a very different soul and human condition than we do today. This sense of being at home in the whole development of humanity is an echo of our connection with the archetype, with the arche, during the time from falling asleep to waking up. So that we should know that we are connected with this third spiritual hierarchy from the moment we fall asleep until we wake up. Now, how does our life differ from the moment we fall asleep until we wake up, that is, every day, from the life between death and a new birth? Every evening when we fall asleep, we lay aside, I would say provisionally, our physical and etheric bodies. These remain with us. There we are connected with these entities of the third hierarchy; when we wake up, we return to our physical and etheric bodies. It is different when we can no longer return, when we have died. Then our physical and etheric bodies are apparently handed over to the driving forces of that which is becoming earthly. We know that this is only apparent, as we have recently discussed; but for our experience, our physical and etheric bodies are handed over to the spaces of earth and heaven. During this time between death and a new birth, we not only come into contact with the beings of the third hierarchy, as we do in sleep, but we also come into equally intimate contact with the beings of the second hierarchy, with the exusiai, that is, the Spirits of Form, with the Dynameis, the Spirits of Movement, with the Spirits of Wisdom, Kyriotetes, and also with the beings of the first hierarchy, with the Seraphim, Cherubim, Thrones. Just as we, here in our human existence, focus on the world and, in the surrounding world, everything that is contained in the realms of nature appears to us, so we become aware, now not externally but internally, of the intervention of the higher hierarchies between death and a new birth. From a certain point of view, this is essentially the difference between sleep and death in a human being: that during sleep we are actually only indirectly connected with the beings of the third hierarchy, but after death we are connected with the beings of all three hierarchies, up to the highest spiritual beings.

Now, if you hold on to this, you will be able to see how man is placed in the whole universe, how man, as a microcosm, is connected to the whole universe, to the macrocosm. Let us visualize what I have said schematically. Let us say, then, that after death our spirit is inwardly connected with the beings of the third hierarchy, with the beings of the second hierarchy, with the beings of the first hierarchy, just as it is outwardly connected here with the animal, plant and mineral kingdoms, from which it is built. But there is another connection. When you get to know all the things that the beings of the third hierarchy initially work on – they also have other tasks, but we are only ever talking about things in parts, aren't we? The beings of the third hierarchy are individual beings that work individually and also through their work together through their effects, which bring forth something, create something. If you visualize what these entities of the third hierarchy work, it is first of all everything, I say, that happens in the historical life of humanity (see drawing on page 57). You can also grasp the thought in this way: No one knows anything of the reality of the historical life of humanity without having an inkling that what actually constitutes history is not made by human beings, but by the beings of the third hierarchy. The beings of the third hierarchy – angels, archangels, archai – actually make history, and man participates in the work of this third hierarchy by having his consciousness as a personality, his consciousness as a human being, as a historical being on earth, in the characterized way. So that man stands in the world is because these entities make up historical life, and man, in turn, has what he is inwardly and through which he is inwardly connected to historical life from these entities. The external historical life, which is recorded in popular history, which is essentially a fable convenante, is only a reflection of the inner historical life that is created in his development by the beings of the third hierarchy.

Now we may ask: What is the similar task of the beings of the second and first hierarchy, that is, the Exusiai, Dynameis, Kyriotetes, the form spirits, the movement spirits, the wisdom spirits? Yes, they have a much more comprehensive task. We will initially disregard their relationship to humans. You can best imagine this task in front of the soul when you focus on your etheric body. Right, when you start from your self and go inward, you come to your astral body. Through your astral body, you are connected to the historical life of humanity. In turn, the beings of the third hierarchy, who make up the historical life of people, have an effect on the historical life of humanity. But if you go further, if you go down to the etheric body, this etheric body is a very complicated entity. In today's consciousness, man is not aware of much of the complexity that underlies this human etheric body. But you do get a certain idea of what has to work in this ether body when you study “Occult Science in Outline”; there you are shown, in the succession of Saturn, Sun and Moon time, that is, the successive embodiments of our Earth, how this ether body develops from the entire cosmos, and how the beings of the higher hierarchies participate. If we express this in a vivid formula, we can say from a certain point of view: Everything in the becoming of the world that is now more comprehensive, with which our etheric body is just as connected as our astral body is with the historical life of humanity, is created and formed by the beings of the second hierarchy, by the Exusiai, Dynameis, Kyriotetes. So, to illustrate this, I will say: The beings of the second hierarchy create everything that has an effect on the human etheric body.

But this in turn gives rise to something else. When you wake up in the morning and immerse yourself in your etheric body, you actually plunge into the creature of the beings of the second hierarchy. And you also submerge into your physical body. Of this physical body, which is why the being of mystery calls it the temple of man, what the external anatomy and physiology reveal is really only the very, very outermost shell. One can only grasp this tremendous, wondrous structure of the human physical body if one knows that it is the creature of the interaction of the beings of the first hierarchy. When you descend into your physical body upon waking in the morning, you actually descend into the work of the highest hierarchies. So think about how things are distributed in life: here between birth and death, when we are awake, we first descend into our astral body, in which the historical life of humanity is effective. But we also dive into our etheric body, the creature of the second hierarchy, in which much of the cosmos is effective, the etheric life of the cosmos. And we dive into our physical body, which is the creation of the beings of the first hierarchy. And when we live between death and a new birth, we do not live with the creature, but with the creators themselves.

Now you have one of the considerable differences in the life between birth and death and the life between death and a new birth. Here you descend by immersing yourself in your physicality, in all that is a creature of the higher hierarchies. When you die, you descend into the hierarchies themselves. You go from the creature to the creators. That is how things are connected.

And now, looking at what we have just discussed, let us ask: What exactly is our Earth? What geology and other sciences usually explore of our Earth is, after all, only the outer shell. What exactly is our Earth? As you know, we have our physical body in common with the entire mineral kingdom. Because we share our physical body with the entire mineral kingdom, we stand in it in a part of the earth when we are awake. We share our etheric body with the entire plant kingdom, standing in a second link of our earth. We share our astral body with the animal kingdom. We have the I for ourselves. There we stand in the three kingdoms of the earth, and our whole earth actually consists of the three kingdoms. This is the ground, so to speak, on which we stand, not physically, but with our human nature. But this cannot be seen, it remains supersensible. By standing on this ground, its lowest link is the mineral kingdom.

Now you remember from the “Geheimwissenschaft” that the mineral kingdom was not present during the earlier embodiments of our earth; the moon did not yet have a mineral kingdom, nor did the old sun, nor did Saturn. You only need to read about it in the “Geheimwissenschaft”. It was only on the earth, during the fourth embodiment of our earth, that the mineral kingdom came into being. I ask you to take careful note of this. It is a difficult matter, but it is an extraordinarily important one. In a sense, three formations had to precede it before the mineral earth could develop. We call these three formations the three elemental realms; the mineral realm is the fourth. We could also speak in these terms about the earlier embodiments: During the Saturn embodiment of our Earth: first elementary realm; during the Sun embodiment of our Earth: second elementary realm - the beings that were in the mineral realm at that time were earlier in the elementary realm -; during the Moon time - not the present time, the old Moon time -: third elementary realm. As we progress to Earth, the mineral realm arises as the fourth realm. Man carries this within himself.

To stand in the mineral kingdom is to stand in the fourth formation. We carry this mineral kingdom within us; only through this are we actually visible beings. But this mineral kingdom is also the only closed one in us. Only when the earth will have reached its end, when it will have entered into a different embodiment, will man be just as closed in the plant kingdom as he is today in the mineral kingdom. Then he would stand in the fifth formation. So the Earth will come to an end state and will arise anew: Jupiter time; man will then have his relationship to the plant kingdom as he has his relationship to the mineral kingdom today. He will stand in the fifth formation. To stand in the plant kingdom means to stand in the fifth formation.

There will come a new incarnation of our Earth, we call it the Venus incarnation, the Venusian age. Man will then stand for himself in the animal kingdom, not be an animal, but stand in the animal kingdom; as you know, this is different from being an animal. But to stand in the animal kingdom means to stand in the sixth formation. And then comes the conclusion, I would say, the seventh of all becoming. We call it the volcanic embodiment of the earth. Man has then reached the highest level of his education, only then has he become fully human. To stand in the human kingdom means to be in the seventh education, to stand in the seventh education. And in seven educations the life of man is complete.

Let us take a look at the human being today. He stands, as we do, in the mineral kingdom; he does not yet stand in the plant kingdom. When man stands in the plant kingdom, his whole life will be different. He will not feel as a personality, but as he feels today as a personality, he will feel as a human being, he will feel as a member of the whole of humanity. He will, for example, when he once stands in the plant kingdom, find it unbearable that he has a certain degree of happiness when someone next to him is surrounded by misfortune. Today, the human being feels as if he is closed off from other people by a partition. It must be so, otherwise man would never be able to develop his personality. But in the future kingdom of Jupiter, where man will be in the fifth education, it will be different; then it will be an absolutely unbearable thought that one can be happy and the other unhappy next to him, because people do not feel like an organism, as one says in abstracto. Now they do not feel as an organism: but that is an untruth, a deception, a maja. But the time will come when man will stand in the plant kingdom, where he will not find individual happiness tolerable when there is unhappiness next to him.

This thought underlies those spiritualists of whom I spoke to you yesterday. I told you: in the future, the English spiritualists will have to fight a great battle against the entire English popular culture. The flower of this popular culture is utilitarianism; and what this utilitarianism has driven out in Bentbam is essentially the principle that was called the maximation of happiness. This utilitarianism will increasingly fill their thinking. Therefore, only the opposition of the spiritually minded will enable this thinking to become spiritualized. That is the perspective for the future: the spiritually minded will have to overcome popular culture, to overcome it to the point of annihilation. That is why I was able to quote to you that Bentham, who, starting from popular culture, came to the principle that the good on earth consists in the happiness of the greatest number of people, has his most fierce opponents in the spiritually minded people of his own country, who tell him: That is a purely devilish definition, because this definition can only be made if you consider nothing but the mere present. If you think a little about the future of development, you know that the thought is quite unbearable: the happiness of the greatest number, because the opposite would be the unhappiness of the least number, and that would have to be evil. But evil and bliss have nothing to do with each other; for in the future, when man feels that he is in the plant kingdom, he feels that he is a member of the whole of humanity, and this opposite will be an impossibility. Just as today an important organic limb cannot simply be cut out of a human being without the whole human organism perishing, so in the future, when the earth is in the plant kingdom, not one particular group of people will be able to suffer without the whole suffering. That is a certain state of development that is coming. And because Bentham's definition of happiness has no future, only the present, it must be fought against, especially by those who aspire to spirituality.

Yes, why should it be a contradiction when it is said that good is defined by Bentham as the happiness of the greatest number, and evil is defined as the happiness of the least number? It is not an abstract contradiction for the rational mind, but the spiritualist does not think abstractly; the spiritualist thinks concretely. He does not think: What is the opposite of the other? but he thinks of the real that develops and that mostly does not agree with the mere thoughts of people.

And in an even higher degree the individual human being will participate in the whole when he is in the sixth education. And then especially when he is a full human being, a completely spiritualized human being, in the seventh education.

Yes, but we have seen from this that, as we now stand on the firm ground of the earth, we as human beings, insofar as we are creatures, actually only come to the fourth education. We have the mineral kingdom, that is finished. The other kingdoms, as they exist today, will partly perish, and man will develop them in a different way: the plant kingdom, as I have described it. We will not describe the animal and human kingdoms today, but next time.

Thus, today, when man regards himself as a creature standing among other creatures, he stands in the fourth formation. But he extends into the other formations, for we have seen that even in sleep man is under the influence of the third hierarchy. This hierarchy is further than he is, and is already in the fifth formation today, and the other beings are further still. So he extends into the higher levels of formation. I ask you to have the patience to really think through these subtle thoughts, because you now have to make the distinction between thinking of yourself as a creature and thinking of yourself as an independent spiritual being, which you are, for example, in sleep or between death and a new birth. Insofar as you think of yourself here in your physical, in your etheric body, astral body and I, insofar as you think of yourself as a creature on earth, you are in the fourth formation; but you reach into the fifth, sixth and seventh formations. By not living only in your body, but also outside of your body, in sleep or in death, you reach into the other hierarchies, and these other hierarchies are further. We can therefore say: If we regard the earth, with everything on and in it, as a created being, then it has reached the fourth level as a created being, and we have also reached the fourth level with it. But we rise up into the other spheres, into the other elements of formation, because we feel that we are independent personalities, that we feel that we are human, that we feel that we are members of the evolution of the earth, that we know that our etheric body is a creature of the second hierarchy, our physical body is a creature of the first hierarchy.

But the seventh education is not the end. Evolution continues, and by projecting into the higher forms of education, we also project into an eighth form of education, the famous eighth sphere. We can safely say: in a sense, by reaching up to highly developed levels of higher entities, we reach into the eighth sphere of education by standing in the pool of God or the spirit realm – as you like. But we reach into this eighth sphere of education with the finest components of our spiritual being. This reaching into the eighth education is a great secret, but we can still get an idea of a, I would say, very slight, not very intensive reaching into the eighth education, if we imagine the following.

We know that at the center of the earth stands the Mystery of Golgotha. If we look back at this Mystery of Golgotha, as it took place from the year 1 to 33 of our era, in the 747th year since the founding of Rome, it is in the first third of the fourth post-Atlantic period. We speak of the cultural development of humanity into which the Mystery of Golgotha fell, as of the fourth post-Atlantic cultural level. We know that the third post-Atlantean cultural stage was preceded by the Greco-Latin cultural epoch. We are now in the fifth, because the fourth, into which the Mystery of Golgotha fell, ended in the 15th century AD. So we are in the first third of the fifth post-Atlantean cultural period. Now, the human being develops through the cultural periods, but when we describe these cultural periods, we are actually describing something that the human being does not fully experience. You were all embodied in the old Egyptian-Chaldean period, which is the third post-Atlantic period, then again in the Greek-Latin cultural period and in the present one; but you only ever experience the successive time – if things go well, don't they, even if someone lives to be eighty – just eighty years, and in between lies the much longer time that passes between death and a new birth. So of what we describe by describing the successive developmental periods of the earth, the human being only experiences a part.

You could, of course, say: Well, man only experiences a part here in the physical body; but he truly does not live in vain in the physical body: he experiences the world from the point of view of the physical body because he could not experience what he experiences from the physical body between death and a new birth. Whether what a person experiences in the pure spiritual realm between death and a new birth is valued more highly or less highly is not what we wish to discuss today. But it is different from what a person experiences here through his body, and it is very important to take this into account. And it is truly not in vain that man is placed in the world through his body; for he could not experience through his body in the world, always in episodes of the development of humanity as a whole, if he did not have the development of the body. It is a thoroughly false idea to have an ascetic attitude towards the development of the physical body on earth, regarding it merely as the enemy of the higher human being. In truth it is not that, but that which gives man something that he could not attain in any other way. And the man is very much mistaken who despises the life in the body, who regards the body as something low, for it means just a highest, an most important, a most meaningful in the whole life of man. And spiritual science can least of all follow that mysticism or that wrong direction of Christianity – not the right direction, but the wrong one – which despises what it calls the earthly world. Between death and a new birth, the human being experiences the world from a different perspective; he experiences it as he can experience it: now it is not the creatures that affect him through the physical body and etheric body, but the creators themselves. There he experiences something different.

This is why we have the task during our earthly career not only to get to know the world of the senses, but also the supersensible. For the historical life of humanity, which is a result of the third hierarchy, we cannot get to know from the perspective of earthly life. And for our time – I ask you to pay attention to the fact that I say: for our time, because it was not so in the pre-Christian era – for our time it is essential that the human being becomes aware: he must, while he lives here on earth between birth and death, also get to know, if he wants to get to know himself as a historical being, what angels, archangels and archai work as historical life. If we only get to know the world in the way that today's scientists want to know it, if we only get to know the world as history describes it, as if history were made by human beings alone and not by the beings of the third hierarchy, then we only get to know the outermost layers of historical development. Only he gets to know history who is aware that he must, so to speak, contemplate here in the physical body what the beings on earth do between death and a new birth in a completely different way - if I may use the expression, which is only used comparatively - which he gets to know personally, individually, in their heavenly deeds. He must get to know it in its effects on earth in historical life.

'But it was not always like that; that is how it is in the time in which we now live. Above all, it was not like that in the third post-Atlantean period, before the year 747, in the Egyptian-Chaldean period. We know that the whole spiritual life, the whole state of mind of people was different then. Then the supermundane life radiated into the ordinary human life, then man knew, even if he interpreted it differently than we now interpret it in the mythologies: the entities of the third hierarchy worked into his ego and his astral body. He meant the beings of the third hierarchy, called them Osiris or Zeus or Apollo or Minerva or whatever, but he knew: these beings, which he only invented and interpreted in this way – but the invention and interpretation related to these beings – they have an effect. Even if he had not wanted to see them, he would have seen them inwardly, for in those ancient times there was not the same delusion of consciousness as there is today; but there was only the delusion of life, which, as one says, anthropomorphized these figures. But one knew about these figures.

This is also one of the points through which the whole life of people has changed. Today, people in their ordinary consciousness do not know what is playing into their lives. Man was born as a soul being in this third post-Atlantean time, was born again in the fourth post-Atlantean time, and was born again in our time. He does not see what the beings of the third hierarchy bring about as historical life, but he should get to know it, he should really get to know it! Not in its true form, but in mythological form, did the old man get to know it.

Now put yourself in the shoes of such a human soul – there are more incarnations, as you know, but let us consider three consecutive ones: one Egyptian, one Greek, one from the fifth post-Atlantean cultural period – let us put ourselves in the shoes of such a human soul. During the third, during the Egyptian-Chaldean cultural period, it experiences what it could experience through the fact that the entities of the third hierarchy played into life. This had gradually dawned. Some had still experienced it in the fourth, in the Greco-Latin period; many people had still experienced it in an orderly way until the year 333 after the Mystery of Golgotha, then it gradually disappeared; then people had to more and more confine themselves to what is present in the external sense world, if they did not develop inwardly in such a way that they could get to know the spiritual world again in a different way and thus ascend to the entities of the third hierarchy.

And now, when we look at such a soul that is returning, it comes with all that it has absorbed in the third post-Atlantean period, in the Egyptian-Chaldean cultural period. It comes with all that, but let us assume that such a soul refuse to look at the deeds of the third hierarchy in the historical life of humanity in the present incarnation and say to herself: What do I care what the angels, archangels and archai have done; for me, history is what human beings have ever done here on earth. Such a soul does not take into account that in everything that human beings have done on earth, the deeds of the third hierarchy are involved. Let us now assume for the sake of clarity – for some souls it also applies to the fourth, the Greco-Latin period, up to the year 333 – but let us assume for the sake of clarity that such a soul comes over from the Egyptian-Chaldean, from the third post-Atlantean period , from the third post-Atlantean period, it would not need to make any effort to know about the deeds of the third hierarchy, because that came into human life by itself; that is what this soul still carries within it. So we say that this soul was able to process back then, and that is what it carries within it. One could not have said to an ancient Egyptian – he had no real concept of historical life, but he did look to historical life – but one could not have said to him about this historical life: people make history. He would only have laughed, because he saw that the entities of the third hierarchy made history, even if he also presented them in a sensuous way in his own way.

All this is within the present-day human being, but unconsciously, of course; it has descended into the subconscious. Now they believe that history is something that people on earth have made. This gives rise to a strange state of mind, which I ask you to consider very carefully. If we were to look at such a soul in the present, we would say that this soul refuses to place itself in the historical life of humanity in reality; it says: I want to know nothing of the deeds of the archai, the archangels, the angels; I only want to know from external testimonies what people have done since those ancient times. But in this way such a soul cannot develop further; in reality such a soul remains at the point of view at which it stood in the old Egyptian times; it only has the maturity of a soul of the old Egyptian times, it does not allow itself to grasp reality. The angels, archangels and archai have developed further, they have done what could be experienced by humanity since then. Such a soul says: What the hierarchies have already done up there in the spiritual world, I will not get involved in that; I will only get involved in my own abilities. But the abilities are none other than those which she already had during the ancient Egyptian times.

Numerous such souls live in the present, and think of the peculiar situation of such a soul! Until the year 333, a soul could not yet come into this situation, because the spiritual world still extended into it by itself; but now, since that time, souls can be in a strange position: they cannot resist reality, in reality they are naturally in it, in what the angels, archangels and archai do, but they deny this with their consciousness, they only take up in their consciousness that which has been brought about here on earth by people themselves.

This is a case where people as creatures are in the fourth formation, because the fourth stage of formation is everything that happens in a creaturely way. So what men on Earth have done since Egyptian times belongs to the fourth education, but man himself rises above that, and due to the fact that since the year 333 he cannot consciously reach into it at all with his whole being, into what he actually reaches, due to that he even stands with his nature above the seventh level of education, he stands in the eighth level of education. So that today there is the possibility that souls are in fact in the eighth stage of education, but do not recognize it because they do not recognize the activity of the historical life of men through the angels, archangels and archai, but only recognize the fourth stage, so that the eighth sphere remains unconscious in them. This is an extraordinarily important fact.

If a world view arises from this state of mind, what then arises? Man ignores his own reality, he does not admit that he extends into a high spiritual realm, although he really does extend into it, but he only admits that he is in the human realm. This state of mind has only clearly come to light in what I have called the industrial age in recent days. Only the fact that people are immersed in the whole of industrial life has led them to completely ignore the fact that man reaches up into the spiritual world within a world view and only to take into account the external deeds of men. That is something significant. One cannot understand the present if one does not know that there are numerous people today who, with their world view, reach into the eighth sphere, and ignore this fact, that is to say, they bring all the damage to earth that reaching into a sphere of the world brings when one denies its existence. For by denying that he is projecting into the eighth sphere, into the eighth stage of education, he shuts himself out from the good beings of that stage of education and delivers himself into the hands of the Ahrimanic spirit of that stage of education. His thinking becomes, instead of divine or spiritual, Ahrimanic.

When speaking in spiritual scientific terms, one must point to the facts of this world in their truth. And the truth is, for example, that something like the materialistic historical view of Karl Marx, who lived from 1818 to 1883, that Karl Marx's world view is a purely Ahrimanic one. Its secret is based on the fact that only what is materially occurring on earth is recognized, that the way in which the human being's spirituality reaches up into the supersensible worlds is ignored, and that as a result of this ignorance, the human being falls prey to the Ahrimanic powers. For as soon as man excludes his consciousness from the worlds into which he reaches up, he falls prey to the ahrimanic or luciferic, in this case the ahrimanic, powers.

Now, we are faced with the fact that numerous people today advocate a purely Ahrimanic world view, fight for this purely Ahrimanic world view, and thereby also conjure up over the earth all that must come when the Ahrimanic order spreads over the earth instead of the divine order. Bentham's philosophy, of which I spoke to you yesterday, is in the first place an external theoretical expression of this Ahrimanic view of life. Marxism is such an expression, which is also already creative, which is formative, which has an enormous influence. And the indolence of bourgeois life knows nothing about it and has not cared for decades what elements of such world views have developed in the sphere of social life. Marxism is an extreme expression of this. It will continue to have an effect. What at first was only meant to be knowledge will become an event, will actually become reality. Only insight into these things, which in turn forms the will, can help in these matters.

Such truths are drastic, such truths are truly not suitable for mere Sunday sensationalism; such truths are that which is most intimately connected with the whole cultural life of the present day. And much will depend on people's willingness to recognize that which lives in their thoughts in connection with the whole order of the world. For in our time we have entered the cycle of time in which we cannot advance without falling into terrible catastrophes if we do not understand how what takes place in the human being relates to the evolution of the whole cosmos.

Such truths, when they are discovered in the search for truth – you can take my word for it – are initially disturbing. If you have a feeling for the impact of the great truths in the world, you also know the feeling of being disturbed by these great truths. It is not easy to live in the life of truth. Only the superficial might think that it is not disturbing to have to say to oneself: people, a great number of whom believed – and that is also true! – that they honestly strove for the truth, are permeated by the spirit of Ahriman! It strikes at the heart, my dear friends! Therefore, when such truths arise, one tries to come to terms with them. These truths are not there to be let in at one ear and out at the other. Nor are they there to be found in one's lonely meditation and accepted as sensations. These truths are not there for that. One must come to terms with them. One must be able to find how what one knows as world evolution, what is all around one, also agrees with what people judge, that something like that is there.

Anyone who, like me, has seen how many people there are today - now people can see for themselves through external facts - who live by Marxism or Marxism-like views, is faced with the necessity of taking a closer look at these things. One often says to oneself: Perhaps you are an illusionist after all! Of course one need not immediately doubt the whole spiritual world, but with regard to such concrete truths one often says to oneself: Perhaps you are succumbing to illusions after all! — The deep sense of responsibility towards the truth must arise precisely in the face of spiritual truths. Then one seeks to dig deeper and deeper. But there is indeed not a little, but a great deal, a great deal, which provides terrible confirmation of what I have just explained to you as the ahrimanic character of, for example, Marxism or similar world views.

When I spoke here some time ago, I made a certain demand of you. I spoke about the fact that the time as we experience it is actually an illusion, that time is in reality something quite different from how man experiences it, because man does not take time perspectively, I said at the time. Man experiences space perspectively; he sees the more distant trees smaller than the nearby trees. In reality, time is also to be seen perspectively. Events that lie far apart in time are to be seen differently than those that lie close together in time. But this is only the basis for time really being what the researchers of all times have regarded it as: time is the most important medium of human deception. We imagine, for example, that the beings of the higher hierarchies also flow through time as our own soul life flows through time: there is no truth in this. In reality, the essence of the higher hierarchies lies in elapsed times, but they work across from the elapsed times, as one can work across in space from a distant place, for example, through light signals or something similar, to beings in a nearby place in space. Time is not what people see it as, nor is time what philosophers like Kant see it as, but time in its reality is something completely different. And what man sees as reality is also a maja, a great deception. Above all, what we believe to be past remains, because we live in time as a deception. But it remains there; time really becomes something like space. And one looks at past events in the same way that one looks at distant objects in space, if one truly sees. Time is an illusion.

And further, spiritual science knows that the sources of other great illusions in human worldviews arise from the fact that man succumbs to deception with regard to time. If there were many physicists among you, I could express myself here in purely physical terms. I could show you with the help of physical formulas that just as the physicist introduces time - t, as he merely calls it - into the physical formulas, this time is only a number, and thus something quite unknown, not a reality but pure appearance. The only thing that is real is the speed, but the physicist regards this as a consequence of time. Since you are not physicists and probably will not get involved in understanding the matter, I will not go into it further either.

Time is an illusion, that is a profound truth, because time as an illusion underlies many other illusions of life. For example, if you apply time incorrectly in the course of history, you see everything in the wrong light. People in the first three Christian centuries thought that certain things that had happened were over and done with. In reality, they should have thought: the archangel or being from the hierarchy of archai who guided the events of that time is still there; it continues to have an effect in a different way. The past is only an illusion. It is very important for people to realize that time has a perspective character for spiritual reality, that they must be just as mistaken about events in the course of time – while they do not believe this – as they are about events in space if they do not allow for perspective. Consider how great the deception would be if you did not allow for perspective, if you regarded what is far away in space as having the same effect as what is close by. You are looking at a distant mountain. Your health depends to a great extent on the air around you; the air on the distant mountain does not, because if you want it to be beneficial to your health, you have to go there. As soon as we are dealing with reality in life, reality is essentially connected with perspective. But it is the same with regard to time. We live in the present when we do not believe that the more distant events of the past can be weighed as much as the near events. If we look at the Egyptian-Chaldean period in the third post-Atlantic period and only consider what the documents provide and register them as Torengeschichte registers, the fable convenue, which today calls itself history, then we make the perspective mistake. For what people did outwardly during the Egyptian period has no significance at all for today's life, but what the angels and archangels and archai did has significance; but this only emerges in the perspective formed by observation. Therefore, it is a principle, and not only today, when we all have to rediscover these things on the basis of anthroposophy, but in all times it was a principle for all spiritual researchers, that time as such is an illusion, and never was time counted in such a way by a real knower of reality that it was thought to be a truth, that it itself would have been thought of as a true reality.

Now the strange thing came to light, this Karl Marx of whom I have spoken to you, to whom millions swear today, albeit more or less in shades, more or less in formulas - but that's not what . Those who know these things know that thousands of people swear by him, or if they do not swear consciously outwardly, they do so subconsciously. This Karl Marx tried to answer the question: what are the true goods of humanity? What is it really that is achieved in humanity? — He answers the question in an extraordinarily original way, for it has never been answered before; human goods have always been considered in some other way than Karl Marx considers them. What human goods are was considered, let us say, for example, in terms of whether it had to be brought from afar, whether a lot of understanding was needed to find it, or the like. I once tried to make this clear to you by saying: Human labor must also be considered qualitatively; one must generally get involved in the concrete. We consider the elaborate Gotthard Tunnel. No one today who builds something like the Gotthard Tunnel is unfamiliar with differential and integral calculus, and differential and integral calculus is a Leibniz or, if it is better liked in England, a Newtonian - the two were arguing about the honor - invention. So one can say that Newton or Leibniz helped to create the Gotthard Tunnel. Yes, without them it would certainly not have been built! Now, the work of Newton or Leibniz must be evaluated in a completely different way than the work of someone who lays one stone on top of another in the Gotthard Tunnel. This is one way of evaluating human goods, human labor. The theory of the value of human labor, of human life, has taken various forms. Labor, goods of life, have been evaluated from the most diverse points of view, but never as Marx evaluated them. Karl Marx takes up a single element in his theory of value. For him, everything that has value in human life is only valuable because it is condensed time, namely condensed working time. Whether something can be produced in three hours, six hours, or twelve hours is the measure of its economic and global economic value. A large part of Marx's theory, which is so common today that it is possible to see it when someone from the so-called higher classes talks about work from his point of view, is based on this. A real socialist, a worker, stands up and says: “Please look it up in Karl Marx – of course he doesn't have the book with him – please, page 374, you will find this or that there.

One must really know life in order to be able to judge life, otherwise one will be amazed everywhere that this or that happens here or there. What happens happens out of the impulses of the human soul. But if one cares as little as people on earth have cared in recent decades about what has actually been going on at the bottom of the human soul, then one should not be at all surprised when the whole thing finally collapses catastrophically. But I have explained this for a special reason. It is the first time that the original has occurred, that what is only the source of deception has been made the standard of all economic values: time in the form of working hours.

So take this from a higher perspective. People who understand reality have always known that time is an illusion. Now someone comes along and says: But what has value in the world has only as much value as condensed working time is contained in it. Does that not mean in other words that your reality is an illusion and only that which is condensed time has real value? The deception is made into reality right down to the form of time by those who want to be completely materialistic, who want to stand only on the ground of reality, and reality is overlooked.

This is just one example. I could show you numerous things that comfort when one is dismayed by truths that, if one has a heart for the life of humanity, thunder into the mind. But when one then studies the matter in detail, when one looks at the hand of someone like Karl Marx, whose spirit is known to be Ahrimanic, and asks him: How do you proceed in detail? — then it is indeed the case that one comes across the Ahrimanic, and one feels: You may admit such truths to yourself. — I just wanted to give you one example here. It is not easy to have to say: Everything that protrudes into the world anachronistically today does so because people have left the spiritual world, which thus becomes their eighth sphere, and they only perceive the world in material terms. If you take this, then you will feel with all its weight what it means when I repeatedly emphasize: Today it does not matter at all whether a person says something beautiful, something that can be admitted, but what really matters is what comes from what one says or does. I must tell again and again how I have been repeatedly tested – you know I am not saying this out of some silly vanity – to draw attention to the fact that it does not matter what one thinks, but that one sees what effect one's thoughts have. You can have a thought that is absolutely wonderful. But if you have no idea how this thought will work in reality, it can have the opposite effect. I have been trying to make such things clear in various examples for years. For example, at the beginning of the 20th century, I once gave a lecture in which I said – I will now summarize much of what was discussed at the time in a few words, because I just want to illustrate –: Today there are more people who are programmatic pacifists, talking very nicely about the leadership of humanity from their pacifist point of view. Pacifism has never actually assumed such proportions as in this time – so I spoke at the beginning of the century. And that is, I said, a clear sign that we are facing the greatest war of humanity. For people in the past did not think about human interrelations in such an unrealistic way as they have done within these circles, they only went so far as the content of their thoughts, and had so little awareness of the real effectiveness of what lives in the soul that one can only recognize it through the whole world perspective. This is only done in the age in which all the things we have been talking about have been spreading.

How is it that something that is no more than a train of thought, and a very unreal one at that, can set the tone for many people, a thought that can never have anything to do with what is happening? This is Woodrow Wilson's train of thought, Wilsonian train of thought, which is nothing more than Egyptian-Chaldean train of thought, which does not care that there is a spiritual reality in history, but only adds abstract thoughts to each other. It comes from all these peculiarities of our age. A future historiography will have to baptize everything that our time has produced in terms of unreal thoughts that bring about the opposite, in the name of Woodrow Wilson.

That is what is decisive in our world view, what must be decisive, and what must be considered not from today to tomorrow, but from the point of view of the whole of cosmology, from the point of view of being placed in it. He who answers such questions from the point of view that arises out of a complete world-view judges such people as Woodrow Wilson is, not from sympathies or antipathies, but judges as one judges objectively about something. But that is the anachronism, that very many people today cannot get involved in it, because it is uncomfortable to look things in the face. You cannot look things in the face if you do not research them in depth. This must be said of such souls, who today have no connection to historical life: they are souls who ignore what real history has been through the third hierarchy and therefore do not deal with the real impulses when they speak, but basically only with empty words.

This is a fundamental requirement of our time: that we come to terms with it and realize that, even if we have the most beautiful concepts that the human mind can grasp, the most beautiful concepts that are quite sufficient to explore the nature that is spread around us, we will never understand anything about history. For history does not unfold as natural life unfolds; history unfolds as the deeds of spiritual entities. This is what must be added to the other world views. From theocracy, as I described to you yesterday, people emerged by still remembering the old theocratic order during the time of theocracy; then the metaphysical time came, which essentially developed the civil service throughout the world; then the purely materialistic time came, the time of industrialists. This would lead completely into the unreal in relation to the spiritual, if it were not for the counterweight of working one's way back into the real, into the actual, which, however, can only be observed if one can ascend to that which is veiled for man in ordinary life in the present time cycle. We must learn again to speak of supersensible things if we want to speak of history. In the nineteenth century people often spoke of historical ideas. Everyone knows that you can't chop down a tree with ideas, but the followers of Ranke and similar historians believe that the historical life of humanity is brought about by ideas. We must realize that this time, the mere metaphysical time, must also be overcome, otherwise that world view, which is purely limited to the sensual, will become overgrown. Mankind must work towards the spiritual. It can only do so if it first works its way through the field of history, from the apparent succession of events in time to the real event, which, I might say, is so tangible behind the external sensory reality, especially in the case of history. Then, however, one will no longer create social or similar programs based on ideas that relate only to the external life, but one will proclaim one's social programs again based on the revelations of the spiritual world. But the programs that people create today are very, very different from these revelations from the spiritual world.

We will discuss this next time. I will continue these reflections next Friday; they cannot be concluded so quickly.

The times in which we live will be able to suggest to us very clearly how urgently it is necessary for people in our present time to explore the meaning of life. And the meaning of life on earth can never become clear to us if we merely turn our gaze to that which takes place in the world of the senses. For everything that takes place in the world of the senses acquires its deeper meaning only through the fact that the spiritual in this sensual also comes to expression. Our time is a difficult time of trial. And those who are willing to remain loyal and firm to our cause must understand in particular how this time of ours is a difficult time of trial, and how it will only be able to reveal its meaning - again its meaning! - to our soul if we rise to that which expresses itself spiritually even in such difficult events that take place on the physical plane.

In view of the fact that we are looking at fields where the gate of death rises up in countless cases, and in view of the thought that many of our friends have already left the physical plane in large numbers, we would perhaps do well today to turn our attention to what can be said about the world into which a person passes when he passes through the gate of death here. From this point of view — and you know that there are many, many points of view from which we can start our observations — we want to consider life between death and a new birth today.

In our spiritual science, we first try to recognize the human being as he stands before us: we know that he stands in such a way that he unfolds his physical and spiritual sides before us. We know that these spiritual aspects remain supersensible for the physical plane; the spiritual can only reveal itself, announce itself through the physical. And when we look at the human being here on the physical plane in order to understand him in the sense of our spiritual science, we say: First of all, as you know from my book Theosophy, the four main aspects of the human being reveal themselves to us: the physical body, the etheric body, the astral body and the I. From the etheric body upwards, the aspects of human nature are supersensible to physical observation. But we do experience our I and our astral body. We experience them inwardly. We experience them through the fact that we are able to know ourselves as I, even if this I remains invisible and supersensible. In short, one can understand, even if one remains with what only the physical world reveals, why we consider the human being in terms of these four aspects.

Now let us imagine that we can also look at the human being who lives between death and a new birth in a similar way, that it is also possible to speak of members of the human being who is in the process of life between death and a new birth. You know that we hand over the physical body to the elements, to the substances of the earth; the ether body is handed over to the general ether world; after some time, that which is mainly in our astral body, but of which the earthly human being knows nothing, that also dissolves to a certain extent, and the I then goes its way through the world that we are currently experiencing between death and a new birth.

Now we should not believe that the human being who stands between death and a new birth is not an equally differentiated, an equally structured being as the human being here in the physical world. We can also speak of members of human nature between death and a new birth; only then we will have to speak in the following way.

Here, when we look at the human being on the physical plane, the ego appears to us as that which comes to us first, if we may use the expression, as the highest. The physical body is shared with all minerals, the etheric body with all plants, and the astral body with all animals. The I is unique to us. In the spiritual world, the I, which appears to us here as the highest link in human nature, is the lowest link in human nature in the world between death and rebirth. Just as we begin here with the physical body, so in the spiritual world one must begin with the ego, which is shrouded, as if in a mist of the astral, only during the time when the human being passes through the soul world, but which is nevertheless the lowest link of the human being between death and a new birth. And just as we envelop ourselves here when we enter the physical world from the spiritual world through birth or through conception, we also envelop ourselves in the spiritual world, one might say with spirit members. We actually already know the names for these members of the spirit. We just look at them a little from a different angle. When we have passed through the gate of death, we envelop ourselves in the spirit self. This is, of course, a member of human nature that the human being will develop in the future during the Jupiter evolution. What I now call the spiritual self for the world between death and a new birth is not exactly the same as what will develop when the human being progresses from the earth to Jupiter; rather, what the human being will develop on Jupiter will be a kind of external image, a kind of counter-image for the senses of the spiritual essence in which the human being envelops himself when he passes through the time between death and a new birth. It is indeed the case that this link, in which the human being envelops himself when he passes through the time between death and a new birth, can also be described as a spirit self.

In the further course, man then envelops himself in that limb, which can be described as the spirit of life, which in turn is a spiritual counterpart to something that will only arise in the physical process during the development of Venus. And the actual spiritual man is that which develops in man as the spiritual counter-image of that which, in the physical image, man will have in the highest sphere, to which we can still look today, during the volcanic development, in his physical development. So that we can say: As man here envelops himself in the astral, etheric and physical body, so he envelops himself by growing into the spiritual world, into spirit-self, life-spirit, spiritual man.

Now I would like to describe to you in more detail how things turn out from the initiated knowledge, as one might say. You already know half of these things. When a person has passed through the gate of death here, his physical body is given back to the elements of the earth. This release of the physical body is an extremely important one for the life between death and a new birth. Of course, it seems trivial to say that death is actually birth for the spiritual world; but nevertheless it is also a justified word. We just have to get used to making our concepts somewhat flexible, so that we do not cling to our concepts directly to what the earth presents to us. We are accustomed to forming our concepts only according to what the earth presents to us. We must be able to change our concepts. Life in the spiritual world is completely different from life on earth. The spiritual experience that a person has in the spiritual world when he passes through the gate of death is that the physical body falls away from him. This is a momentous, an enormously momentous experience! And the first thing to be said about this experience is that it is completely contrary to the beginning of the spiritual life after death, as the birth of man is to our physical life between birth and death. No man can, after all, look at his birth with the physical power of knowledge of the earth. Man does not experience birth with his physical powers of knowledge here on earth. Just as we do not experience the physical birth, as the human being has no memory – this only begins later – of the events of his birth and how this is right for life on earth and must be so, so it is the opposite for the life between death and a new birth. Because the moment, the instant of, I cannot say dying, but of having died, remains as something that man can look at again and again during the whole process of life between death and a new birth. Just as we never remember the events of our birth in our physical life, just as clearly we have our entire lifetime between death and a new birth in front of us, the moment of death, but from the other side, from the side of spiritual experience, so to speak from the other shore. For the earthly human being, death can, with a certain justification, be a frightening thing. It represents the decay of the physical earthly human being. The opposite is the case when the human being looks back on having died between death and a new birth: Then it always represents the victory of the spirit over the physical, then death represents the most beautiful, the greatest, the most glorious, the most sublime that can be experienced at all. And because a person is able to look at their mortality between death and a new birth, this reflection on mortality is what gives us consciousness after death, so that we know: we have shed our physical body. And that we experience this, that we always have this before us, is given to us by our self-awareness after death, just as we attain our self-awareness here in the physical world by having our physical body.

When we are outside the physical body with our astral body and I from falling asleep to waking up, we have no consciousness of the physical world. When we wake up, we have to physically push into ourselves, and then the consciousness of self can flourish again. Every time we look at death after death, when the whole event, this - speaking from the other side - sublime, beautiful event stands before our soul, then after death the consciousness ignites again and again. It depends entirely on the constant contemplation of this moment. And there is something else connected with this. It is somewhat difficult to talk about these things, because, as I said, there are no corresponding experiences here in the physical world, but one must try to characterize these things as they are. When we look beyond our continued existence after death and consider our dying, then we have above all the feeling, the impression, that where we died, now that we have died, there is nothing, not even space. It is, as I said, difficult to describe, but that is how it is: there is nothing there. And in the external sense: The thing appears magnificent and sublime for the reason that everywhere else a new world is opening up for us. The flooding spiritual world presses in from all sides, but there is nothing there from which we have died out.

Theoretically described, the matter may have something terrible about it, but in the sensation after death it is not terrible. In the sensation after death, it allows a deep satisfaction to well up in the soul. One learns, as it were, to expand into the whole world and to look at something that is like an emptiness in the world. And from this arises the feeling: That is your place in the world, the place that is out of all the vastness, and that is yours. And you get the feeling, precisely from this emptiness, that you have a purpose for the whole world, that every single human existence - you get it initially, of course, as an explanation for yourself - must be there. This place would always be empty if I were not there - so every soul says to itself. That everyone, everyone as a human being, has been assigned a place in the universe, this feeling, this incredibly inwardly warming feeling, arises from this contemplation: that the whole world is there, and that this whole world has been driven out as if from a symphony the single note that one is, and that must be there, otherwise the world would not be there. This feeling arises from looking back at the experience of death. It remains, because it is what primarily gives the sense of self, self-awareness, between death and a new birth.

Then, for a relatively short time — but that is enough — there is still a union with the etheric body. Everything one has experienced in life, even the smallest events, suddenly stand there as in a large life tableau, for days; they remain for days. One has the very intense feeling: the earth on which one has stood so far moves on, but one remains behind, one begins to stand still. One does not go along with the spatial movement of the earth. And in doing so, the life tableau expands.

One does not actually speak when one speaks of a memory of life, because one has memories in such a way that one looks back in time. But that is not the case; it is simultaneous; it is a tableau, it is a moving tableau. Even, as I said, the smallest events extend to that.

Then one separates from this ethereal experience. Then, as one is accustomed to saying, the disengagement of the etheric body takes place. That with which one was connected as the etheric body, one has it, while one previously addressed it as one's inner being, now externally, and it becomes ever larger and weaves itself into - that is actually the correct expression - the spiritual world, into which one has now entered. Only in this spiritual world is the empty space that I have spoken of; that remains empty. And the etheric body weaves itself in all around on the outside, becoming bigger and bigger.

Now, we must be very clear that it would be a mistaken idea – I must confess, I have been convinced in all cases in which I have been able to study this fact, which I am now talking about, intensively, that it would be a mistake – to believe that we would not see what we have woven into the general spiritual world as our etheric body in the time between death and a new birth. We see it forever. We always look at it, it belongs to our outer world. What previously belonged to our inner world in our etheric body now belongs to our outer world. We look at that. And it is important that we can look at it, because through it so much of the spiritual outer world becomes understandable to us as a relationship exists between what we have interwoven and the entire spiritual outer world.

You may remember from the lectures I once gave in Vienna about the time between death and a new birth that I said: First of all, the human being is interwoven in a world that is full of wisdom. While he searches for wisdom here with effort, he is completely immersed in the light of wisdom. And this wisdom, in which he is immersed, overwhelms him. And it would overwhelm him further if he could not weave into it that which he has woven into the wisdom of his etheric body during his lifetime, if he could not weave that into the world. In this way, the tremendous abundance of light in the general world ether is attenuated for him, and he begins to understand what it is that interweaves, ensouls and spiritualizes the world in the general world ether.

Thus we have that which, as it were, falls away from the human being when the human being is taken up into the spiritual world. For of the earthly members of human nature, essentially only the ego and the astral body remain. The physical body has fallen away. What remains is what I have called “the void.” The etheric body becomes subject to the general world ether. The human being continues on his path. For what he now gives up to the cosmic ether as his etheric body, for that he envelops himself in what we have called the spirit self. This is, so to speak, now an outer member. Indefinite ether approaches him; this envelops him with a kind of spirit self.

It is good if we now pause for a moment to consider what remains behind, I would say, in the immediate future: the concept of the human being. We need not speak of this emptiness, because it is of the greatest importance above all for the person himself who has died, who has the experiences I have described. But with the etheric body it is something else. The etheric body itself is objectively woven into what is the general world ether. It is then in this, this etheric body of man.

Now you will find it understandable that, to a certain extent, the etheric body of a person who dies at a young age is somewhat different in the world outside than the etheric body of a person who, so to speak, reaches the normal age limit. Every etheric body naturally has its task, and it cannot arise from what I am about to say that any wish to die early or late can arise from it; that would be a very distorted and false, the most false conception of the matter. But nevertheless, what is to be said now is valid.

When a person dies at a young age, they have an etheric body that could perhaps have still cared for the physical body for decades, could have worked in the physical body. Now, just as little energy is lost in the spiritual world as in the physical world. This means that in the etheric body, which the human being leaves after death, the power is present that could perhaps have supplied the physical body of the human being for decades if the person were in their twenties or thirties. It is no longer in a physical human body; it is out in the world. This can perhaps be most vividly brought home to our souls by an example.

We had a little boy at the building site in Dornach – I have already spoken to some of our friends about this matter – who died in the seventh year of his life due to a tragic circumstance. The boy had fetched food supplies from our canteen that evening, which is located near the Dornach building site, and a strange chain of circumstances resulted in the boy walking out of the canteen and through a reed bed that was next to a path that a fully loaded furniture van was just driving along. And the fully loaded furniture van was knocked over and crushed the boy. It was a very painful thing. Just after the lecture evening, after ten o'clock, we received the news that the boy was not there. There was nothing to be done but to see what had happened to the furniture van. The circumstances were also quite strange. The boy wanted to leave a quarter of an hour earlier and was held back by someone who wanted to go with him. He wanted to go out through a different door; then he would have passed the furniture truck on the right, whereas he was crushed on the left. He had been told to go out through this door, so he was literally sent out. Besides, it is a road where a furniture truck may not have gone for years, and perhaps none will go for years. It was a furniture truck that was exceptionally delivering furniture to one of our members. So they looked for the boy. The furniture van was so heavily loaded and unfortunately tilted that it could not be lifted immediately, because the people who were driving the furniture van had not brought anything with them and simply walked away. They did not want to lift the furniture van until the next day. But now, of course, it had to be lifted during the night, and they found the dead baby underneath.

This little boy had been in the atmosphere of the building for some time. It is true that since that time, soon after that death, the etheric body of that little boy has been woven into the aura of the building. And the person who – and it is certainly not immodest to say this – is involved in the artistic side of the building, as I am, notices how the fertilization comes from the unspent etheric power of the etheric body, which is needed to artistically integrate this or that into the building.

Of course, human selfishness would perhaps prefer to attribute all this only to one's own genius. But it is absolutely the case that even what comes to us from within comes from external spiritual influences. And we can prove these spiritual influences in detail. We are dealing here with the etheric body of a boy who has turned seven years old, who could therefore have still supplied the physical body for another six to seven decades, who, with the tremendously wise building power that is necessary to form the physical human body in an appropriate way, is in the etheric aura of the Dornach building.

And I dare say, with complete certainty, even to artists: the art needed to form the physical body out of the etheric body is much greater than any art that man practices on earth. Man is already the greatest work of art. And all the impulses for forming the physical human body are contained in the etheric body. The artist also brings them out of his etheric body when he creates artistically.

This is just one example; others could be cited in which the capacity of the unspent etheric bodies can be seen. Just this year, dear friends of ours, some of them quite young, have also passed through the gateway of death. And so we see how, especially now, in this time, countless people are passing through the gate of death, in the vigorous age, leaving behind their etheric bodies, which could all have worked on the physical body for decades to come. These etheric bodies, which are still strengthened and invigorated by the fact that they have gone through sacrificial deaths, are present and will be present. And those people who will be in a position in the future, when different things are happening on the European continent than in the present events, who will then live on the European continent, they will live in a spiritual, in an etheric atmosphere in which these unused etheric bodies can be found. And when souls are found here on earth that will have understanding for that which will live spiritually not just as an abstract memory but as real etheric powers – this understanding can only be gained from spiritual science – they will well sense the inspiring powers of these etheric bodies.

And that is one of the feelings that now weigh heavily on our hearts, heavily for the reason that on the one hand we have to look at the enormity that could happen if quite a lot of people could become aware of what is sown by the deaths that are now happening around us due to the great events of the time, while on the other hand the handful of people who can understand these things is still so small. And it could easily happen because of people's lack of understanding of spiritual science due to the materialism that fills all of humanity, that in the future people could continue to live without any trace of an inkling of what arises from death.

We should not allow such a sentence to live in our hearts in any other way than by allowing ourselves, as far as it depends on us, to be completely imbued with such an awareness, to fully absorb this awareness and to do what we can to understand such a thing. I would like to say that we should not just worry about how much materialism there is. We should indeed recognize how much materialism there is on earth, but we should not close ourselves off from the ever-increasing materialistic worldview, but rather do all the more what is incumbent upon us.

So much for what can be said about the etheric-physical. Then the human being progresses further. He has first enveloped himself in a kind of spiritual self that is formed in a slightly different way than everything that is formed when we live here on earth. One could say that the spiritual self is something that comes to us from all sides, and in the midst of which we feel ourselves. Then the human being continues to live in the other covers by simultaneously experiencing, as I have often described, a kind of spiritual regression, by experiencing - but now in a different way than through the mere tableau that has been described - that which acts as a kind of opposite to earthly life. One can realize how the following time passes, after the etheric body has been discarded and we live on with our astral body and with our I, wrapped in the spirit self. This spirit self is a kind of driving force. It leads us back, so that we relive, really go backwards, our last life on earth from death to birth. If, for example, we have said something to someone here on earth that has caused them suffering, we experience such an event from our point of view here on earth in our physical body. We cannot experience it from the point of view of the other person. We would not be able to live in the physical body at all if we wanted to live differently than to experience everything from our own point of view. But let us take the extreme case: we have hurt someone very much with a word that we said out of revenge. What he feels, what he experiences, we do not experience here. In the regression that I am now describing, we always experience what the other person feels as the effect of what we have done. So we live inside the world of effects. We experience what others have gone through with us during our physical life, until we get to the point where we have reached our birth. Then we envelop ourselves with what could be called the spiritual counter-image of what will develop on Venus: we envelop ourselves with the spirit of life.

And our further life is now determined by this spirit of life, which I have described several times. You will find it described from a wide variety of perspectives in the lecture cycle in Vienna on life between death and a new birth. I will describe it here again from a different perspective.

We are thus enveloped, as it were, by the spirit of life. This expresses itself in a certain way, and it is essential that we understand this. The spirit-self first guides us back; the spirit-self is mainly concerned with our being, with our individuality, and it then also leads us further. After it has brought us to our birth, it guides us further along the paths we have to take in the spiritual world.

It is different with what the next shell, the life spirit, now does to us. Here in the physical body we are permeated by the etheric body, which also contains the life ether and everything that gives us life. We are, so to speak, permeated by the etheric body, and we live through this etheric body. Those who have no etheric body cannot live on the physical plane.

When we have discarded our astral body, we know that we are enveloped by this spirit of life. Now we also realize that we were enveloped the whole time while our spirit self was guiding us back. But now we only realize it. We only realize it afterwards, when we have gone through the whole thing, which is called the Kamaloka time. And now we become aware of something very strange: it is only because we are enveloped by this spirit of life that our life between death and a new birth is possible. Because here in the physical body we have to live, I would say within our skin. We cannot do that between death and a new birth in the spiritual world. If we only wanted to live in the spiritual world within ourselves, so to speak, only in a single place in the spiritual world, then we would have to die continuously and would not be able to live. Rather, we have to live with the whole universe. We have to have the whole universe as one great living thing and have to live with it.

Now this could happen in two ways. We could flow out into the whole universe. But if we were to flow out all at once, the consciousness that we have, that I have described, this self-awareness, would also flow out into the nebulous. Rather, we must be moved around in the great, living cosmic organism. Here in our physical body, a limb of ours, let's say the hand, is in a certain place. In the spiritual world, we must always be led around. We must always be carried from one place to another. The spirit of life does that. In this way we leave one place and arrive at the other. This is done rhythmically, so that we always come back to the same place. But we have to be led around in the world. An eventful, a spiritually eventful life arises for us. Here, as physical human beings, we are confined to a single place, with certain exceptions. However, the spiritual is always carried into the physical, and this is how we can move around in the physical plan. This is essentially an Ahrimanic effect, since the spiritual is brought into the physical by Ahriman. But in the spiritual, it is right that we are guided by the entire associated world organism. And in this way we settle in, just as we settle in here on earth in one place, I would say in the whole environment of earthly life. And as we are led from spiritual place to spiritual place in it – you can find more details in my Vienna Cycle – at the same time, the forces we need to prepare our new life on earth are implanted in us, in order to be drawn to earthly life again. For the time between death and a new birth passes in the first half in such a way that we find our way out of earthly life; in the second half we find ourselves again preparing for a new earthly life.

You see, materialism today basically turns everything into its opposite. It will lead people into the most serious errors, and into ones that are not only credible but almost taken for granted. When a personality appears who is as ingenious as Goethe, for example, people take it quite materialistically. A very thick book has been written and published about Goethe, in which all his ancestors that can be found are examined in a materialistic sense, physically and spiritually - but the materialist only assumes bodies - and then it is shown how Goethe got one thing from one ancestor and another from another. Goethe himself said ironically: From my father I have the stature, from my mother the cheerful nature - and so on. Here in Kassel, in a lecture series, I once developed how people take this quite materially by showing how we have inherited everything through the physical inheritance current, especially genius. And I have often said: the matter is absurd, ridiculously foolish, and yet again so credible, because it makes immediate sense to the materialist that certain qualities are enhanced through many generations, so that they then appear to be inherited in the case of genius. The materialist even believes that he is expressing an experience. But he does not express any other experience than that of someone who falls into the water and is pulled out is wet. Of course, the soul passes through all its ancestors in a certain way, and as a result it inherits everything it has drawn out of its ancestors. Just as someone who has fallen into the water is wet, so the person also has the qualities of his ancestors as he passes through the generations. It would be different if the opposite were to be proven, if it were to be proven that the genius that is present is inherited by the descendants: But it is not. People should prove that! But they will probably leave it alone. You examine Goethe's ancestors; but you leave it pretty to go to your son or your grandchildren! Just see if the qualities of genius are inherited by the descendants! There may be cases where the matter is concealed, but there can be no question of an inheritance of qualities of genius to the descendants. If there were, it would be known. But there is no such inheritance of qualities of genius.

But something else is the case. If one tries to trace back a human individuality that enters a physical body at a certain point in time further back - it comes out of the spiritual world, after all - it is the same individuality that now brings together father and mother, that contributes to the fact that father and mother come together to produce it. Indeed, it is already involved further back. It works, so to speak, the whole succession of generations in such an order that in the end two people find each other through whom this one individuality can find its embodiment. The individuality is already involved in what takes place over centuries from ancestors to descendants. However strange it may sound, that is how it is. Goethe had a father and a mother, a grandfather and a grandmother and so on. If we go back centuries, we see that this individuality of Goethe's from the spiritual world already works in such a way that those who ultimately yielded the old Kaspar Goethe and Mrs. Aja always come together. Through the centuries, individuality is already working from the spiritual world; it works into the succession of generations.

It is just the opposite of what is assumed. Man does not inherit what he carries in his soul from his ancestors in the physical sense. Rather, he compiles his ancestors from the spiritual world, from world midnight, which lies in the middle between death and a new birth, so that he can then find those through whom he makes his way into earthly life. That is the mystery that emerges. This is something tremendously significant, and basically actually harrowing. And we see through this that there really is an intimate connection between what happens in the spiritual world and what happens further down in the physical world. And at the same time we see how strangely intertwined our spiritual and soul life is with what happens here, which is just not noticed.

One speaks of the spirit in modern philosophy in a very strange way. There was a professor in Halle who is now regarded as a very important light in the field of philosophy. He published a book, “The Philosophy of the As If,” in which he attempts to prove that such concepts as spirit and soul do not represent reality, but that they are nevertheless useful in man's contemplation of the world. One should not look at a person and say that he has a soul. But now, he moves his hands and speaks, so that one can say: one regards him as if he had a soul. Otherwise, one leaves the soul as a soul. One denies it; one does not care about it; but one regards it as if the person had a soul, as if the soul wanted to achieve all this.

It is a comfortable philosophy, but also a terribly thoughtless one. However, anyone who tries to apply this philosophy in concrete life sees that this “as-if philosophy” is of little use, even as a method. And a person like Fritz Mauthner, who has written a philosophy of language and who traces everything back to language, should actually be viewed from the point of view of this “as-if philosophy”: as if such a person could also have spirit. But if you make this attempt, then this method is not good. You cannot show that he can be viewed as if he had spirit; it cannot be applied. Where there is no mind, it cannot be applied. You know, of course, what I mean. But I only cite this Fritz Mauthner because he is one of those who deny the whole meaning of history altogether and who have most clearly stated, from the standpoint of present-day materialism, that history can never be a science. He says: When a raindrop falls on the earth, we can find the laws of the raindrop scientifically, because many raindrops fall according to the same laws. Then you can compare the individual cases with each other, and you can find the laws. That is what philosophers today believe: that observing many cases and always finding the same thing leads to the individual laws. But in history, things only happen once, the Thirty Years War only once and so on; and therefore the whole of history is only a succession of coincidences for Fritz Mauthner. People in the present day must come to such assertions if they deny the spirit in reality; for history would also be only a sequence of coincidences if that which we have now shown, which works out of the spiritual world and in which people work between death and a new birth, did not have the very effect of what we have now shown, which works out of the spiritual world and in which people work between death and a new birth. We are weaving, so to speak, on what happens here on earth between death and a new birth. We weave only according to those impulses that then come to us from the spiritual world.

It can truly be said: One should not believe that any serious objection to spiritual science can come from any scientific side; because if one compares what today's science can really achieve with spiritual science, then today's science is the best support for spiritual science. One must only approach the matter in the right way.

If we pick up any book today in which a materialistically minded person expresses himself half in terms of psychology, that is, the soul, and half in terms of the body, we find the following. These people seek, as man presents himself, to visualize himself by showing the thinking apparatus - nervous life, brain life. They examine the thinking apparatus and can then really show that when any idea takes hold in us, a brain process occurs. So they say: You see, we can prove to you that without a brain process a thought, an idea, could not be conceived at all; so what do you want with an independent soul? After all, only the thinking apparatus is present!

But they come to something else, these materialistically minded people. If you look through the textbooks in use, you will find that these people point out the thinking apparatus and link all thinking and imagining to the mechanical processes in the brain and nervous system; but they have to deny feeling and will. Feeling and will cannot be explained by physical processes. Therefore, this is simply eliminated. And today, if you open the books, you can find everywhere: People have indeed assumed a will and a feeling from their prejudices, but this is actually a nothing, it does not even exist.

So the natural scientist stops just before feeling and will. Now that we know that thoughts separate from us with our etheric body, it is explained to us that this separated part, which leaves us with our etheric body, also works on our exterior here on earth, the thinking apparatus first sets itself up, and when the thinking apparatus is formed, then thinking comes with the help of the thinking apparatus formed by thinking itself. Feeling and will remain with us in the astral body and in the ego. We carry these into the spiritual world. Not one science forces materialism, on the contrary, real science today justifies our spiritual science everywhere. Today's materialism is entirely dependent on the fact that people have no urge for spiritual life, that they want no sense for spiritual life. Understanding would not be lacking either. For truly, if one opens oneself to what the spiritual researcher is able to give from the spiritual world, even for such chapters as we have allowed to arise before our soul today for the life between death and a new birth: it can be understood, one needs only a finer, more subtle understanding than the rough understanding that today's man often wants to apply to the outer world. But we also live in a time when materialism has reached its peak. The spiritual researcher can even state exactly that the year in which materialism reached a peak was around 1840/41. Since then, it has even been declining somewhat; but the after-effects are, of course, great. But what does materialism mean for the conception of physical human life? The most astute minds of the present are leading people astray into a state that is to be deeply regretted under the influence of materialism.

There is a truly astute man, a criminal anthropologist by profession. He has examined the brains of many criminals. He was the first to find a famous, significant sentence about the brains of criminals, the sentence that in the criminal brain, in the vast majority of cases, the posterior lobe covering the cerebellum is underdeveloped, as is also the case in monkeys. The monkey is distinguished precisely by the fact that it also has a small occipital lobe. This was, of course, a godsend, because it meant that one could say: Aha, this is a throwback to the nature of the ape when a person is criminal; he is born with a too-small occipital lobe!

But just think what an enormous significance this has for the moral life if one is only willing to admit that the human being has a physical body. He must then say: What are you talking about when you speak of responsibility, what are you talking about when you say that you want to improve people morally through this or that education? That is all nonsense. Those who are born with a occipital lobe that is too small, which of course cannot be changed during this life, become criminals; they become criminals out of necessity. And if materialism were true, then this must also be true: we would then not hang people because they have murdered another, but because they have too small occipital lobes! One would only have to admit this: we cannot live in the world at all if we did not admit such things. One cannot be materialistic in this sense if one would not admit: people are hanged because they have too small occipital lobes. Anything else would only be a concealment of the truth.

But is it the truth? We have to speak of the etheric body in the sense that we have done today, that it is still present, that it even increases in size after death and is woven into the general cosmic ether. If we now have a young person who has a occipital lobe that is too small, we cannot make it grow; no physical science will ever achieve that. But we can organize the education in the appropriate way by saying to ourselves: There is also an etheric body present, and a part of the etheric body etheric body that corresponds to the occipital lobe, and through appropriate education we train the etheric body of the occipital lobe, and it is just as effective in life, perhaps even more effective in a certain sense than the physical occipital lobe, because it has to overcome a certain force. And then we derive comfort from our knowledge that the physical shape of our occipital lobe is not the determining factor, but that we can then develop the etheric lobe accordingly in the person whose occipital lobe is too small, by evoking these or those feelings in him when we notice that he has these or those tendencies towards wrongdoing. Then we will be able to save him.

You see, that is the truth. That is the moral side of spiritual science! It is also present. Desolation and bleakness, especially in the moral and ethical sphere, if one only wanted to be true, one would see emerging from the materialistic world view. A consoling possibility to actively intervene in what people become can be seen from what spiritual science can give us. If we only recognize certain tendencies in a person at the right moment, which could lead to criminal acts, then we can use a certain type of education to develop what has a particularly strong effect on this occipital lobe in the ether strongly, and thus weave into the person the power that will continue to live with him between death and a new birth and, especially in the physical, particularly well develops the occipital lobe in the next incarnation. Not only do we help him for this incarnation; we also set the stage for a particularly well-developed brain, which he can then carry through the life between death and a new birth for inclusion in his next physical incarnation.

So spiritual science now practically places us in life. Only it will have to do what goes beyond what is done today. Today, people still think that they have done enough with spiritual science if they have listened for a while and believe that it has had a favorable, uplifting effect on our soul. That is not enough! Spiritual science must enter into all branches of life in practical activity. The fruits of spiritual science must show themselves in all branches of life. Education, which is particularly bleak today because it only starts from what the human being has physically, must be particularly fertilized by spiritual science.

Today there may still be many people who say: You can tell us a lot about spiritual science, but why should we believe in what you are telling us? We can't see it for ourselves. At most, it could be seen by someone who finds their way into the spiritual worlds in a certain way, as described in “How to Know Higher Worlds”. If you say: Above all, I want to see something practically – and in doing so, you think that you can bring the spiritual into the physical world in this way, to see the spirit externally as you see the physical, because you are too lazy to seek the spirit in a spiritual way, then that is a very selfish point of view. And if materialism today is connected with selfishness – it is a world view, after all! – then materialistic spiritism is even more selfish. For materialism at least merely aims to accept only the physical world and then also to satisfy this physical world. But spiritualism wants, first of all, a sensual view of the spiritual world, and secondly, I might say, constant satisfaction, and that in a physical way. But in its lack of clarity it still imagines this physical way as spiritual. In short, it wants to remain in the physical world and yet have something spiritual! It is actually lamentable that our materialism has reached such a level of development as to give rise to the popular belief in spiritualism, which is particularly rife in America. This tendency is to reduce the spiritual to a material level and to view the spiritual and spiritual processes in material terms.

But there are many other ways to recognize that which is on the physical plane as an imprint of the spiritual world. And one of the ways – of course not all of them can be listed now – is to seek the spiritual where it is effective, for example in children, where it is to develop. And that is where education must be enriched. Education will only come to fruition when people develop a sense, a feeling for the spiritual, so that the teacher not only teaches according to all kinds of instructions, but above all starts from observing the developing individuality, seeing what wants to develop out of it. This must be achieved, or rather, must be achieved! And it is good if we remind ourselves, so that we can believe in this struggle, that people in the present are actually terribly short-sighted. They believe that we have come a long way in our time, that we have finally cast off all the childishness of earlier centuries. But it is not true that we have cast off prejudices. All that had to be discarded in order to see the physical plane clearly and to gain freedom was the old atavistic clairvoyance, and that was discarded in its last vestiges not so long ago. The day before yesterday I was able to speak to our dear friends in Hamburg about a special example of this clairvoyance. If you had the opportunity to walk around here, you might be able to find such an example. But I will tell you the Hamburg example; perhaps you can look for a similar one for Kassel yourself.

If the Fall of Man in Paradise, that powerful image that stands in the Bible for the Luciferic seduction of man, is depicted by the painter today, Adam and Eve and the snake are depicted realistically, with the usual snake head. Now we know from our spiritual science that this snake is Lucifer. The physical snake on earth can at most be a kind of symbol for Lucifer, but this physical snake is not Lucifer, nor is the great snake that is coiled around a tree and has an ordinary, common snake head at the top, is not Lucifer. Lucifer is a being that has remained on the moon, a being that naturally cannot be seen with the senses. On the moon, one did not see with the senses; only the earth has produced this sensuality. The earth snake can be seen with the senses. Lucifer, of course, cannot be seen with the senses, he must be seen inwardly. When one looks inwardly, it is an inner feeling. And one senses: Aha, that is the one that in its upper part resembles the human head; after all, it has driven out the eyes: “Your eyes will be opened, you will see,” it is inside the head and still fills the nervous system down into the spinal cord, -— a human head that continues in the snake's body, but all this only conceived ethereally. It would therefore have to be perceived from within. If one wanted to paint Lucifer according to the Bible, one would have to paint the etheric for the spinal cord, and at the top something that is also still etheric, which is not yet physical, the human head. That would be the teaching, if it were put into the picture, of what we have today.

In Hamburg, one can see biblical pictures by the master Bertram, and, as I have just described, the Fall of Man: not an ordinary snake, but a snake with the usual shape, but with a human head. In the 14th and 15th centuries, in the middle of the Middle Ages, the painter painted it that way, that is, they still knew it back then. So you have tangibly proven what the matter is! The painter did not go and paint an ordinary snake, but in those days they still could, because atavistic clairvoyance was still present. It is only in the last few centuries that this has completely disappeared, and it must be regained. There is no other way to regain it than by preparing ourselves to understand the spiritual world through spiritual science.

Those who are wholeheartedly devoted to our spiritual science take it in such a way that they see: It is the most important task of our time that people learn to understand what is in the spiritual world, in order to prepare themselves to be able to look into the spiritual world again, into that which is part of the world around us. How differently we as human beings will go through the world when we know that not only air surrounds us, but that this air is permeated by the weaving not only of the visible world - after all, light is not visible otherwise, but colors are visible - but in the light the dead etheric bodies weave. Natural science and spiritual science will combine in a beautiful way, only spiritual science will be there for all people, since it will bring something to all people.

I believe that in our time it is especially necessary that we urgently feel obliged to let such truths as those we have been able to experience today for the life between death and a new birth enter into our meditation quite often. This too is good material for meditation when we let the beginning of life between death and a new birth, this emptiness that assigns us our place in the world, this instruction of the etheric world, the interweaving of our own etheric body into the etheric world, come before our soul quite often in meditation. This stimulates what lives in us to grow more and more into the direct experience of the spiritual world. And this is already necessary for humanity in the present. One could feel, when one looks at the events of the time, how necessary this living in the spiritual world is for present-day humanity. The present time of trial will only be able to be gone through in the right way if a number of people can feel it faithfully and humanly, what lives in spiritual science and how this spiritual science must prepare the human future.

These are serious signs of the times, and the seriousness is revealed when we reflect on many things that are so close to us. Think, we speak of what should permeate our path with a serious principle: seeking the same in all human souls and through all nations and races. We are right to regard this as a lofty ideal of humanity, but we must not hide from ourselves the tremendous contrast between the life of present-day Europe and this ideal. Can we say that European humanity today is in any way remotely close to this ideal in what it expresses? How far removed it is! And may we – may, I say – regard this ideal as one that we can apply so directly today? Are we not obliged, as Germans, not to deceive ourselves, to be clear about the fact that we cannot even remotely think of realizing such an ideal due to European circumstances? We would do a poor job of fulfilling the mission specifically imposed on us as Germans if we were to simply become absorbed in general, vague ideals today. Time obliges us to develop the specific nature of our Central European character. And with that we may already look at the karma that has grown on us, I might say, in particular.

Just think, when you look at world events today, we have not been managed badly in the sense of these great world events. Karma has brought it about that our movement first belonged to the general theosophical movement. Long before this war showed what it can show to the Germans today, our German movement had completely separated itself from the theosophical one and emphasized how necessary it is that the spiritual movement arises out of the very substance of the German people, a spiritual movement that can carry us and that the other world will also have to carry. We can say that we, as the anthroposophical movement, have felt the English hatred in our particular field for many years before. It has now only increased, because one cannot remain silent there; what has been written about us in recent times by so-called English Theosophists exceeds anything that can somehow still be justified. We may say, therefore, that when we survey the course of our movement, we find our karma also running through our movement in such a way that it is in full agreement with what the great movement in the world indicates to us even today. That our karma led us early enough to emphasize German intellectual life, we may, in all modesty, present as a favorable karma for us, and that anthroposophy has found its center in German intellectual life, we may regard as a kind of shining morning star for our karmic currents. And since, I would like to say, the omens for what is happening in the world have already shown themselves much earlier with us, we can already deduce from this single fact the belief that there is something in our movement of a power for the great general human movement.

Let us learn, my dear friends, to trust the spiritual power that lies at the heart of our movement, trusting that it is one of the best to which our soul can possibly attach itself. Let us live through the full weight and the full significance of thought and feeling and will impulse, the full weight and the full significance of what it means: there must be individual souls who, in the face of the great demands of our time, understand how the spiritual impulses must interact with what must take place in future history here on earth. Let us learn to understand, not only in the abstract, but also in the concrete sense, what the countless deaths that are now flooding the earth mean. Let us learn to understand how faithfully our souls must remain loyal to our movement so that there may be people who can look up in the right way to the sphere where the etheric bodies and the individualities that have made the sacrifices for our time on the great historical field will continue to work and will work together with those who will later tread the earth in times of peace. Let us learn to understand what it means to find the right sense for the fact that a spirituality also permeates that which takes place on the physical plane today, that the confessors of spiritual science are there to turn their minds to that which arises spiritually from the courage and sacrifice of our time. Let us learn to understand in the right sense the words with which we want to conclude our reflections:

From the courage of the fighters,
From the blood of the battles,
From the suffering of the abandoned,
From the people's sacrificial deeds
Will grow spiritual fruit —
Guiding souls, spiritually aware,
Their minds into the spiritual realm.

Compiled by

PAUL M. ALLEN

1.David Friedrich Strauss, Der alte und neue Glaube, The Old and New Faith, publ. 1872. Born in 1808, appointed professor at the University of Zurich, Strauss became a center of controversy, the intensity of which has been likened to that of the Thirty Years' War. This began with the appearance of his Life of Jesus (1835), in which he questioned the sources of the New Testament, and continued with his Doctrine of the Christian Faith (1840). From this time until his death in 1874, Strauss became world-famous as one of the most frank critics of Christianity.

2.Herbert Spencer, The Principles of Psychology, Part IV, Chapter ix, par. 219. Rudolf Steiner consulted the German edition, translated by Dr. B. Vetter and published at Stuttgart, 1882. Spencer, born 1820, an engineer by training, sought to explain “the phenomena of life, mind, and society in terms of matter, motion, and force.” At first strongly influenced by Coleridge, Spencer placed evolution as the first and most universal principle, influencing all the sciences. To him, evolution was synonymous with progress. In his later development, Spencer championed rugged individualism, and became an outspoken opponent of socialism, upholding what he considered the absolute rights of private enterprise against any form of governmental control. Before his death in 1903, Spencer's optimistic view of human progress collapsed, and he fell prey to marked pessimism regarding the future of mankind.

3.Benedictus de Spinoza (Baruch de Spinoza), born 1632 in Holland of a Jewish family that had been exiled from Spain and Portugal. He early showed great powers as a student, and in 1656 was banned by the Jewish community at Amsterdam because of his views. His chief work, which had a lasting influence upon future generations of thinkers, long after the author's death in 1677, is The Ethics, which has recently appeared in a new edition titled The Road to Inner Freedom, New York, 1957.

4.Eduard von Hartmann, Phänomenologie des sittlichen Bewusstseins, Phenomenology of Moral Consciousness, German ed. p. 451. Born 1842, von Hartmann was originally an officer in the Prussian army. Because of an illness, he retired from military service and took up an intensive study of philosophy. In 1869 his Philosophie des Unbewussten (Philosophy of the Unconscious) appeared, and made him famous almost overnight. Of the many other works he wrote, this book remained his most famous. Rudolf Steiner describes a personal impression of von Hartmann, whom he visited in Berlin in 1888 following a philosophical correspondence with him over some years. This account may be found in Chapter IX of Steiner's autobiography. Steiner's Wahrheit und Wissenschaft (Truth and Knowledge), published in this present volume, was dedicated to von Hartmann. The latter died in 1906.

5.In his Atomistik des Willens, Atomic Theory of Will, Ger. ed., Hamburg, 1891, 2 vols. p. 213. Robert Hamerling, the Austrian poet-philosopher was born March 24, 1830. He early showed ability in poetry, and although from poor parentage, the generosity of friends enabled him to attend the gymnasium in Vienna, and afterward the University there. In the revolutionary movements which swept Europe in 1848, Hamerling joined the student legion in the Vienna revolt. The collapse of the uprising in 1849 made it necessary for him to hide for a long time in order to escape arrest. Later he studied natural science and philosophy. In 1855 he was appointed master at the gymnasium in Trieste. Many years of ill health caused him finally to retire on a government pension in 1866. In comparatively comfortable circumstances, Hamerling spent the remainder of his life in his home near Gratz, devoting himself to writing until his death on July 13, 1889. He is referred to as “one of the most remarkable poets of the Austrian school; his poems are full of life and color.” His most popular work was Ahasver in Rom, Ahasver in Rome (1866), with Nero as principal character. Der König von Sion, The King of Zion, (1869) is generally considered to be his masterpiece. In 1888 his Homunculus appeared, and was reviewed with extensive comment by Rudolf Steiner. His Amor und Psyche was published in 1882; his novel Aspasia (1876), described Greek life in the age of Pericles. In 1870 his drama concerning the French Revolution, Danton und Robespierre, was published. Rudolf Steiner commented on this drama in his Speech and Drama Course given in 1924, and in fact, many references to Hamerling and his work appear in books and lectures by Rudolf Steiner, including the latter's autobiography.

6.Die Illusion der Willensfreiheit, The Illusion of the Freedom of the Will, by Paul Rée, publ. 1885, p. 5. Paul Rée (1849–1901) was a German positivist philosopher, known widely as an editor of the writings of Friedrich Nietzsche. Rée met Nietzsche in 1876, as Rudolf Steiner relates in his Friedrich Nietzsche, Fighter for Freedom, p. 159–60. Steiner refers to Rée in the preface to this book, written in Weimar, 1895: “Such an average brain as that of Paul Rée could make no important impression on Nietzsche.” (op. cit. p. 40).

7.Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770–1831). A voluminous literature on Hegel and Hegelian thought exists in English, including biographical studies, translations, and commentaries on his writings. Consult any standard encyclopedia for details.

8.Goethe's Faust, Part I,—

Zwei Seelen wohnen, ach! in meiner Burst,
Die eine will sich von der andern trennen;
Die eine halt, in derber Liebeslust,
Sich an die Welt mit klammernden Organen;
Die andere hebt gewaltsam sich vom Dust
Zul den Gefilden hoher Ahnen.

(Lines 1112–1117)

The translation is that by George Madison Priest: Faust, Parts One and Two, publ. Alfred Knopf, New York, 1941, one of the best of all English translations of this work.

9.monism: the teaching of one ultimate substance or principle, as mind (idealism) or matter (materialism), or of something which is neither of these, but is the foundation of both; the point of view that there is but one reality.

10.dualism: from a philosophical point of view, the theory which maintains that there are but two fundamental and irreducible principles, for example, mind and body.

11.Here Rudolf Steiner speaks of spiritualism in a philosophical sense, and not in the sense of any relationship or communication with the dead as in mediumism, etc.

12.materialism: the philosophical teaching which sees the entire universe, all creation and its activities, including the human mind, as the result of material causes and powers.

13.Johann Gottlieb Fichte. Born in 1762, Fichte studied at Meissen, Pforta, Jena, and Leipzig with the intention of becoming a clergyman. After a teaching position in Switzerland, and enroute to another in Poland, he met Kant, under whose influence he wrote his Study for a Critique of All Revelation. The printer neglected to place his name on the title-page, and people thought the work had been written by Kant. When the true identity of the author became known, Fichte was hailed as a philosopher of outstanding merit. He lectured at Jena, Berlin and Erlangen. In 1807 he was made Rector of the University of Berlin. His death in 1814 occurred when he was at the height of his fame. Rudolf Steiner made extensive reference to Fichte, basing his doctoral thesis (published in enlarged form in the present volume as Truth and Knowledge) on Fichte's scientific teachings, but perhaps his most memorable study of Fichte's life and thought was contained in a public lecture given in Berlin on December 16, 1915: The Spirit of Fichte Present in Our Midst. See also note 77, below.

14.Friedrich Albert Lange (1828–1875), author of Geschichte des Materialismus, History of Materialism, publ. Iserlohn, 1873–5. When professor at the University of Marburg, 1865, Lange issued his study on the workers' question. This made him famous in the circle of students of social problems in Germany at that time. A friend of the working classes, Lange strove for social justice, betterment of labor conditions, and for universal education. His life, marked by his utter sincerity and devotion to his ideals, is an outstanding example of selfless dedication to the well-being of mankind.

15.Karl Friedrich Hieronymous, Baron von Münchhausen (1720–97). In 1785 a little book of 49 pages appeared in London, titled Baron Munchausen's Narrative of his Marvelous Travels and Campaigns in Russia, and an enlarged edition appeared in 1786. A translation into German by G. A. Bürger was published at Göttingen, 1786. Many editions followed in English, and the book was published in numerous languages, illustrated by a number of famous artists. For some time the identity of the author was unknown, but finally it was established that the book was written by Rudolf Erich Raspe (1737–1794), traveler, scholar and professor at Cassel. While at Göttingen, where he was secretary of the university library (1764–7) he made the acquaintance of Freiherr von Münchhausen of Bodenwerder in Hanover. The latter had been in the Russian service, had fought against the Turks, and finally had retired to his estate in 1760, where he became famous for his “tall stories.” Later, Raspe, in poverty in London, recalled the Baron's tales, and wrote the book in English, which appeared in 1785. Tall tales from other sources were added by publishers of later editions, so that the stories as we have them today are really a composite work, for which, however, Raspe provided the original nucleus from his memory of the evenings spent with his erstwhile friend.

16.Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, born Frankfurt a.M., August 28, 1749. Poet, dramatist, scientist, traveler, state minister, etc., author of Faust, Wilhelm Meister, and many other works. Died in Weimar, March 22, 1832. In August 1781 the Grand Duchess Amalia of Saxe-Weimar founded the Tiefurter Journal, the Journal of Tiefurt, to which Goethe contributed at her invitation. When Rudolf Steiner was active as editor of the natural scientific writings of Goethe at the Goethe-Schiller Archives in Weimar, he published proof that the Fragment über die Natur, The Fragment concerning Nature, which had appeared in the Journal of Tiefurt was definitely to be attributed to Goethe (Schriften der Goethe-Gesellschaft, Publications of the Goethe Society, ed. by Bernhard Suphan, Weimar, Vol. VII, 1892, article by Rudolf Steiner). Thus, just 110 years after the Fragment had appeared, Rudolf Steiner showed its importance and its relationship to Goethe's work. In the edition of Goethe's works published by Prof. Joseph Kürschner (1853–1902) (the volumes of Goethe's natural scientific writings edited by Rudolf Steiner), the Fragment appears at the beginning of the essays “On Natural Science in General,” Vol. XXXIV, p. 1. The Fragment appeared in an English translation with notes by George Adams under the title, Nature—An Essay in Aphorisms, Anthroposophical Quarterly, London, Vol. VII, No. 1, Easter, 1932, pp. 2–5. In his Goethe's Conception of the World, Rudolf Steiner describes this Fragment as “the essay in which the seeds of the later Goethean world-conception are already to be found. What is here expressed as dim feeling, later developed into clear, definite thought.” In similar vein, George Witkowski in his well-known biography of Goethe (Leipzig, 1899) describes this Fragment as “the seed from which came all of Goethe's great thoughts about nature.”

17.See Ziehen, Theodore, Leitfaden der Physiologischen Psychologie, Guide to Physiological Psychology, Jena, 1893, p. 171 of the Ger. ed.

18.Pierre Jean George Cabanis (1757–1808), French physiologist. A precocious child, Cabanis was enrolled at the age of 10 in the College of Brives. Later studied in Paris, afterward traveled widely in Poland and Germany. In 1789 he was appointed administrator of hospitals for Paris, and in 1795 became professor of hygiene and history of medicine in the medical school of that city. In 1799 he was made professor of legal medicine and history of medicine. He was an intimate friend of Mirabeau, and attended him as physician in his last illness. He had a deep interest in medical and psychological problems. Active in the cause of the French Revolution, Cabanis was a member of the Council of Five Hundred. Though Napoleon Bonaparte repeatedly offered him governmental positions, Cabanis declined them, since he was a foe of the former's policies. Cabanis died at Meulan on May 5, 1808, principally honored for his contributions to medical science, and especially for his main work, Rapports du physique et du moral de l'homme, a series of papers read to the Institute in 1796–97. The sentence quoted is probably from Cabanis' book, written in 1802, translated into German, 2 vols., 1808, under the title, Verhältnis der Seele zum Körper, Relationship of the Soul to the Body. The thought has also been paraphrased: “Just as the stomach and intestines receive food and digest it, so the brain receives impressions, digests them, and has as its organic secretion, thought.”

19.Renatus Cartesius, Rene Descartes (1596–1650). The father of modern rationalism, soldier of fortune, scholar, pilgrim, traveler, and firm adherent of the Roman Catholic faith. His philosophical work, which has often been summed up in his words, J pense, donc je suis (Cogito ergo sum), “I think, therefore I am,” was given significant impulse by a dream he had on November 10, 1619. This revealed to him the method of philosophical speculation he was to follow, and his subsequent work is said to have stemmed from this experience. An extensive literature on Descartes and his teachings exists in English translation. See any standard encyclopedia for further details.

20.Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph von Schelling (1775–1854). Often referred to as the Proteus among philosophers, Schelling was noted for his ever-changing alertness and brightness of mind and expression. Goethe (see note 16, above) had a very high regard for him, and spoke of him as “the most congenial philosopher I know.” Schelling had a profound influence among the thinkers of his time, including philosophers of France and England. His last years were dedicated to what he termed “positive philosophy,” radically different from the philosophy of identity, the transcendental idealism, and the pantheistic tendencies of his earlier time. Rudolf Steiner made extensive reference to Schelling in his writings and lectures, on various occasions praising that philosopher's “important inspirations and suggestions for what must afterwards be said by Anthroposophy, directly out of spiritual vision, on many points of Christianity.” Steiner further spoke of Schelling, “who really always made a significant impression whenever he appeared in public—the short, thick-set man, with the extremely impressive head, and eyes which even in extreme old age were sparkling with fire, for from his eyes there spoke the fire of Truth, the fire of Knowledge.” (From a lecture given at Dornach, Switzerland, Sept. 16, 1924) Perhaps Steiner's greatest study of Schelling is to be found in his Die Rätsel der Philosophie, The Riddles of Philosophy, Vol. I, Ch. 7. For English translations of Schelling and further details on his life, see any standard encyclopedia.

21.Blaise Pascal (1623–1662). Known as one of the greatest of mathematicians and physicists, Pascal's tame long ago spread far beyond the confines of his native France. His contributions to the establishment of the mathematical theory of probability, to the science of hydrodynamics, to the study of gravity and the vacuum, and his elaboration of the theory of conic sections have given Pascal a lasting place among the great men of science. As a Christian thinker, his devotion to truth and piety, and his acceptance of mystical experience have made his name revered. His philosophical speculations and deep psychological insight, as well as his remarkable gifts as a writer of French prose have secured him a leading position among philosophers and literary historians. Pascal's Pensées, Thoughts, is one of the great books of the world. For details on Pascal's very eventful and highly interesting life, as well as an account of his fundamental ideas, see any standard encyclopedia.

22.Archimedes (c 287–212 B.C.) Greek mathematician and inventor. He was born at Syracuse in Sicily, and studied at the famous university in Alexandria. Archimedes spent the remainder of his life at Syracuse, where he engaged in constant mathematical research. He is noted for his many mechanical inventions, but his first love was mathematics. His work as a pioneer in mechanics is illustrated by his famous remark, “Give me a place to stand, and I will move the earth!” During the sack of Syracuse by the army of the Roman general, Marcellus, Archimedes was discovered drawing a mathematical figure in the sand beside his garden bench. Deep in meditation upon the problem before him, Archimedes was instantly killed when he was run through the body by a sword in the hand of a Roman infantryman. For details on the life of Archimedes, see Plutarch's Life of Marcellus. A complete, standard edition of the Works of Archimedes with valuable notes by T. L. Heath was issued by Cambridge University Press, 1897.

23.See note 2, above.

24.Spencer, First Principles, Part I, Par. 23.

25.Note by the Translator: Just as in English one generally means by “perception” not only the perceived object but also the act of perceiving it, so too, in German the word Wahrnehmung covers both these meanings. Rudolf Steiner, however, as stated in the text, uses this word in the specific sense of meaning the object that has been perceived, and NOT the process of perceiving it. When he refers to the activity, the word used in the original is Wahrnehmen, here translated as perceiving.

25a.Johann Christoph August Franz, M.D., eye surgeon, born 1807, took his medical training at the University of Leipzig. From Germany he emigrated to England, establishing his practice at Brighton, where he worked for some 30 years. He was the author of writings on medicine, particularly on the use of baths in treatment of illness. Two of his works were written for the public: The Eye and a Critique on the Art of Preserving the Organ, London, 1839, and Memoirs of the Case of a Gentleman Born Blind and Successfully Operated at the Eighteenth Year of His Age. Physiological Observations and Experiments. The latter appeared in Philosophical Transactions, Vol. VI, 1841, pp. 59–68. It is probable that Rudolf Steiner's reference to the man who had been born blind is taken from this second work of Dr. Franz.

26.George Berkeley, (1685–1753), Irish bishop and philosopher. Made a Fellow of Trinity College, Dublin, 1707, he was strongly influenced by the philosophical writings of Descartes, Newton, and Locke. In 1709 his New Theory of Vision appeared, and in 1710 his great work. The Principles of Human Knowledge, was published. In 1712 he visited England and the following year was presented at court by Dean Swift, shortly before the publication of his most popular work, The Dialogues of Hylas and Philonous. Berkeley's literary fame rests upon this latter work, which has been described as “among the finest philosophical writings in the English language” on the basis of its “exquisite facility of style.” In 1728 he emigrated to America, where he lived in Rhode Island for three years, hoping for a government grant of funds for the establishment of a college in Bermuda. His hopes disappointed, he returned to Ireland and shortly afterward was raised to the bishopric of Cloyne. In 1752 he moved with his family to Oxford, where he died suddenly in January of the following year, and was buried in Christ Church.

The reference quoted by Steiner is from Berkeley's Principles of Human Knowledge, Part I, sec. 6.

27.Immanuel Kant, German philosopher, was born in Königsburg April 22, 1724. He entered the university there in 1740, enrolled for the study of mathematics and physics. His studies were interrupted by the death of his father, which left him in poverty. After he supported himself by tutoring for 9 years, the kindness of a friend enabled him to resume his studies, to graduate as a doctor and to qualify as a privatdocent. He occupied this position for 15 years. His lectures widened from physics to include much philosophy. Finally, after unsuccessful attempts, in 1770 he was given the chair of logic and metaphysics at Königsburg. In 1781 his Kritik der reinen Vernunft, Critique of Pure Reason appeared, and in 1783, his Prolegomena. After the appearance of the 2nd edition of the Kritik in 1787, Kant became famous everywhere in German intellectual circles, and his views were regarded as those of an oracle. From 1792–97 he was engaged in a struggle with the government concerning his religious views. In 1794 he withdrew from society, and gave up all teaching except for one public lecture course on logic. In 1797 Kant terminated a teaching activity that had extended over 42 years. He died in Königsburg on February 12, 1804 near the end of his 80th year. Little more than five feet tall, deformed in his right shoulder, his chest almost concave, Kant had a weak constitution. He never married, and followed an unchanging program of activities from youth to old age. For example, he never failed to rise at 5 o'clock, studied for 2 hours, lectured for 2 more, and spent the rest of the morning at his desk. He dined at a restaurant and spent the afternoon in conversation with friends. He then walked for about an hour—a walk which for years followed exactly the same course—studied for 2 hours more, and retired between 9 and 10. He was a prolific reader, especially in history, science, travel, and philosophy. He knew English history and literature intimately, especially in the period of Queen Anne. He read little of Goethe or Schiller, but often re-read Voltaire and Rousseau. He had little interest in nature, and in 80 years never traveled more than 40 miles from his native Königsburg. For further biographical details, works and translations, consult any standard encyclopedia.

28.Otto Liebmann, Zur Analysis der Wirklichkeit, Contribution to the Analysis of Reality, Strassburg, 1880, p. 28. Otto Liebmann (1840–1912) was well known for his writings on Kant's philosophical world-view.

29.Johannes Volkelt (1848–1930), Immanuel Kant’s Erkenntnistheorie, Immanuel Kant's Theory of Cognition, Hamburg, 1879.

30.See note 4, above.

31.Hartmann, Das Grundproblem der Erkenntnistheorie, The Fundamental Problem of a Theory of Cognition, Leipzig, 1889, p. 16–40.

32.Johannes Peter Müller, German physiologist and comparative anatomist, born in Coblentz, July 14, 1801. He studied at the University of Bonn, and was appointed to a professorship in physiology there in 1826. In 1843 he accepted the call to the chair of anatomy and physiology at Berlin University, which position he held with great honor until his death, April 28, 1858. He did much research in physiology, particularly in relation to human speech and hearing. His great work was the Handbuch der Physiologie des Menschen, 1833–40. (The English translation was made by Dr. William Baly, publ. London 1842). This work opened a new period in the study of physiology, and Müller is considered the main figure in the developments in this field in the mid-19th century. In his Handbuch Müller developed an entirely new principle which he called “the law of specific energy of sense substances.” This he expressed as follows: “The kind of sensation following stimulation of a sensory nerve does not depend on the mode of stimulation, but upon the nature of the sense organ. Thus, light, pressure, or mechanical stimulation acting on the retina and optic nerve invariably produces luminous impressions.” It is to this law that Steiner refers at this point.

33.Hartmann, Das Grundproblem, p. 37.

34.Arthur Schopenhauer (1788–1860), Die Welt als Wille und Vorstellung The World as Will and Representation, Four Books, publ. 1819 by Brockhaus, Leipzig. (English translation by Haldane & Kemp, 1883) Ref. Book I, par. 1, Ger. ed. Biographical data and translations of Schopenhauer's works, as well as extensive commentaries on his ideas have been published in English translation. Consult any standard encyclopedia for details. Rudolf Steiner edited a collected edition of the writings of Schopenhauer, 12 vols. with introduction by Steiner, publ. 1894.

35.J. G. Fichte, Die Bestimmung des Menschen, The Vocation of Man, Berlin, 1800, “a book which for richness of content, beauty of style, elevation of thought reminds one of Descartes' Meditations.” (For data on Fichte, see note 13, above.)

36.Note by Rudolf Steiner: Transcendental knowledge, in the sense of this world-view, is a knowledge by means of which—although no direct insight into the thing-in-itself is believed to be attainable—indirect inferences are drawn from the subjective which is known, to the unknown which lies beyond the subjective (Transcendental). The thing-in-itself, according to this view, is beyond the sphere of the directly recognizable world, that is, it is transcendent. However, our world can be transcendentally related to the transcendent. Hartmann's view is called realism because it goes beyond the subjective, the ideal, to the transcendent, the real.

37.See Weygandt, Entstehung der Träume, Appearance of Dreams, 1893. (Reference given by Rudolf Steiner.)

38.See note 34, above.

39.Schopenhauer, op. cit. supra, Book II, par. 18.

40.Note by Translator: The reader's attention is called to the fact that the word Erfahrung is in this context translated as “practical experience” to emphasize the activity of thinking implicit in it, as distinct from the word erleben which also is usually rendered as “experience.”

41.See note 27, above, on Kant.

42.Emil DuBois-Reymond, German physiologist and educator. Born Berlin, November 7th, 1818, in 1836 he entered the University of Berlin, where his teacher was Johannes Müller, above). In 1840 he became the latter's assistant in physiology. His great work was the study of animal electricity, and his famous book was Researches on Animal Electricity, 1848–84. For many years he exerted great influence as a teacher. In 1858, upon the death of Müller, he was appointed to the latter's chair in physiology. In 1851 he had been admitted to the Academy of Sciences in Berlin; in 1867 he became its permanent secretary. His closest friend after Müller's death was von Helmholtz, who also had been a student of Müller. DuBois-Reymond died in Berlin on November 26, 1896. Rudolf Steiner makes many references to his work in lectures and writings.

43.Note by Translator: The reader's attention is drawn to the fact that the word experience, in relation to the kind of mysticism and philosophy of will referred to in this chapter, is translated from the word erleben (as distinct from Erfahrung, see note 40, above) Therefore, what the mystic experiences in feeling and the philosopher of will in the will-element, are experiences which have not been formed into clear representations by the activity of thinking.

44.Thelism—Voluntarism, i.e., any theory which conceives will to be the dominant factor in experience or in the constitution of the world.

44a.Ger. Erlebnisse.—Tr.

44b.Note by Rudolf Steiner: The passage from page 161 to this point was added, or rewritten for the Revised Edition, 1918.

45.See note 4—on von Hartmann.

46.The German text here reads Faktor der Erfahrungen.—Tr.

46a.Note by Rudolf Steiner: A complete catalogue of the principles of morality (from the point of view of metaphysical realism) may be found in Eduard von Hartmann's Phänomenologie des sittlichen Bewusstseins, Phenomenology of Moral Consciousness.

47.Ger. Welterfahrung.—Tr.

48.Immanuel Kant: Theory of Ethics, transl. by Abbott, p. 180. The Critique of Practical Reason, Ch. III. On Kant, see note 27, above.

49.Note by Rudolf Steiner: Ziehen, Theodore, Leitfaden der Physiologischen Psychologie, Guide to Physiological Psychology, 1st ed., p. 207 f.

Concerning the way “materialism” is spoken of here, and the justification for doing so, see the Addition at the end of the chapter.

50.Hartmann, Phänomenologie des sittlichen Bewusstseins, Phenomenology of Moral Consciousness, p. 871.

50a.Hamerling, Atomistik des Willens, Atomic Theory of Will, Vol. II, p. 201. On Hamerling, see note 5, above.

51.Paulsen, System der Ethik, System of Ethics, 1889, partial English transl. 1899. Friedrich Paulsen (1846–1908), German philosopher and educator. Educated at Erlangen, Bonn, and Berlin, where he was made extraordinary professor of philosophy and pedagogy, 1878. In 1896 he followed Zeller as professor of moral philosophy at Berlin. He was a pupil of G. T. Fechner, developing his teaching of panpsychism in his Einleitung in die Philosophie, Introduction to Philosophy, 1892, English transl. 1895. His German Education, Past and Present (English transl. 1907) is well known, as are his writings relative to the philosophy of Kant.

51a.Note by Rudolf Steiner: When Paulsen (p. 15 of his System of Ethics) says, “Different natural dispositions and different conditions of life demand not only different bodily diet but also a different spiritual-moral diet,” he is very near recognition of the truth, but misses the decisive point. Insofar as I am an individual, I need no diet. Dietetic means the art of bringing a particular example of the species into harmony with the general laws. But as an individual I am not an example of a species.

52.proto-amniotes: The original form of the innermost of the embryonic or fetal membranes of reptiles, insects, birds, and mammals. This membrane forms a closed sac surrounding the embryo and contains the amniotic fluid.

53.The Kant-Laplace primordial nebula. Pierre Simon Marquis de Laplace (1749–1827), was a French mathematician and astronomer who, at the age of 24 was named “the Newton of France” for certain of his discoveries. In the years 1799–1825 his great work, the Mécanique céleste, which, as its author stated, “offers a complete solution of the great mechanical problem presented by the solar system,” appeared in 5 volumes, published in Paris. In his second great work, the Exposition du système du monde, Paris, 1796, appeared his statement of his famous “nebular hypothesis,” the origins of which he seems to attribute to Buffon, apparently unaware that Immanuel Kant had at least partially anticipated him in his Allgemeine Naturgeschichte, General History of Nature, published in 1755. Rudolf Steiner's criticism of the Kant-Laplace theory of the primordial nebula may be found in various places in his lectures and writings.

54.Ernst Heinrich Haeckel (1834–1919), German biologist, originally a physician in Berlin, became Privatdozent at Jena, afterward extraordinary professor of comparative anatomy, later professor of zoology, a chair established for him at Jena. This position he occupied for 43 years with intervals for zoological travels to various parts of the world. When Darwin's Origin of the Species appeared in 1859, Haeckel was deeply influenced by it, so that he became “the apostle of Darwinism in Germany.” Among Haeckel's famous books are his General Morphology (1866), Natural History of Creation (1867) and Die Weltraetsel (1899), English title, The Riddle of the Universe, publ. 1901. By his 60th birthday Haeckel had published 42 works of some 13,000 pages, plus many monographs. Rudolf Steiner knew Haeckel personally, and in his autobiography. Chapter 15, Steiner recorded a very interesting and perceptive impression of the great scientist. The “genealogical tree” of Haeckel to which Steiner refers is set forth in its original form in Haeckel's General Morphology and developed in his later writings.

55.Charles Robert Darwin (1809–1882), English naturalist, whose voyage on the Beagle to the Southern Seas, recorded in his Journal of a Naturalist (1837) prepared the way for his famous work On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favored Races in the Struggle for Life, published November 24, 1859. Next in importance among his books. The Variation of Animals and Plants under Domestication, appeared in 1868. The Descent of Man, published in 1871, dealt with “the origin of man and his history” in the light of The Origin of the Species.

56.Anthony Ashley Cooper, Third Earl of Shaftesbury (1671–1713) and Gottfried Wilhelm von Leibnitz (1646–1716). For data on their lives and philosophical ideas, consult any standard encyclopedia.

57.For data on Schopenhauer, see note 34, above; on von Hartmann, see note 4, above.

58.See von Hartmann's Phänomenologie des sittlichen Bewusstseins. The Phenomenology of Moral Consciousness, p. 866 f. of the German edition.

59.See von Hartmann's Philosophie des Unbewussten, Philosophy of the Unconscious, 7th German ed., Vol. II, p. 290.

60.Hartmann, op. cit. supra. Vol. II, p. 332.

61.Eudaemonism, derived from a Greek word which indicates the condition of being under the protection of a benign spirit, or a “good genius.” In ethics, this name is applied to those theories of morality according to which the main good of man is to be found in some form of happiness. Eudaemonia was one of the keywords in the ethical teachings of Aristotle.

62.German, Erfahrung.

63.Die letzten Fragen der Erkenntnistheorie und Metaphysik, Ultimate Problems of Epistemology and Metaphysics, publ. in Vol. 108, pp. 55 seq. of the Zeitschrift für Philosophie und philosophische Kritik, the Periodical for Philosophy and Philosophical Criticism.

64.For data on Hegel's “universal panlogism,” see any standard encyclopedia.

65.David Hume (1711–1776), Scottish philosopher and historian. Albert Einstein wrote, “If one reads Hume's books, one is amazed that many sometimes highly esteemed philosophers after him have been able to write so much obscure stuff and even to find grateful readers for it. Hume has permanently influenced the development of the best philosophers who came after him.” Among those influenced by Hume may be numbered Immanuel Kant, William James, George Santayana, and Bertrand Russell. Hume's writings and biographical and critical works concerning him and his ideas can be located by consulting any standard encyclopedia.

66.A note on page 71 of the Zeitschrift für Philosophie (Periodical for Philosophy) Vol. 108.

67.Johannes Rehmke, 1848–1930, philosopher. His principal works are Logik oder Philosophie als Wissenslehre (Logic or Philosophy as Theory of Knowledge) and Die Welt als Wahrnehmung und Begriff (The World as Percept and Concept), Berlin, 1880.

68.Karl Julius Schröer was born in Pressburg in 1825. In 1867 he was made professor of Literature in the Technical College of Vienna. In addition to his lectures on the history of German poetry as such, he lectured on Goethe and Schiller, on Walther von der Vogelweide, on German Grammar and Speech, etc. Rudolf Steiner was a pupil of Schröer, and refers to him in detail in his autobiography and in lectures. It was Schröer who recommended Steiner to Prof. Kürschner for the position of editor of Goethe's natural scientific writings. (See note 16, above) Schröer died in Vienna in 1900, and Rudolf Steiner has left an unforgettable word portrait and estimate of him in his Vom Menschenrätsel, Riddles of Man, publ. Berlin, 1916.

69.From July 1884 to September 1890, Rudolf Steiner was active as tutor in the home of Ladislaus (1834–1905) and Pauline (1846–1916) Specht at Kolingasse 19, Vienna IX. He taught their four sons, Richard, Arthur, Otto, and Ernst. Richard Specht (1870–1932) became a well-known author of many works including biographical studies of Gustav Mahler, Richard Strauss, Franz Werfel, Brahms, and Beethoven. Steiner gives details of this pedagogical activity in his autobiography. Chapter VI.

70.Rosa Mayreder (1858–1938), Austrian writer, also known as a painter. Her entire life was passed in Vienna and surroundings. She was the author of a number of popular novels. In addition, she was active in the movement for woman suffrage in Austria, at one time sharing in the direction of the movement itself, and editing its periodical. She wrote the libretto for Hugo Wolf's only opera, Der Corregidor (1896). Rudolf Steiner refers to Rosa Mayreder in his autobiography. Chapter IX.

71.See Johannes Volkelt's Erfahrung und Denken. Kritische Grundlegung der Erkenntnistheorie, Experience and Thinking. Critical Foundation for a Theory of Cognition. Hamburg and Leipzig, 1886. (Johannes Volkelt 1848–1930, philosopher, professor at Leipzig.) See also note 29, above.

72.Grundlinien einer Erkenntnistheorie der Goetheschen Weltanschauung, mit besonderer Rücksicht auf Schiller, publ. in English translation by Olin D. Wannamaker, New York, 1950, under the title, “The Theory of Knowledge Implicit in Goethe's World Conception—Fundamental Outlines with Special Reference to Schiller.” The first German edition published Berlin and Stuttgart, 1886, revised ed., Stuttgart, 1924, with new Foreword by the author. Other editions: Dornach, 1924; Dresden, 1936; Freiburg i. Br., 1949; Dornach, 1960.

73.Aristotle (384–322 B.C.): Physica Auscultatio, On Nature as Cause and Change, and the General Principles of Natural Science.

74.Raimon Lull (Raymond Lully), (0.1235–1315) Catalan author, mystic and missionary. Born Majorca. In 1266 a series of visions led to a marked change in his life and purpose. Spent 9 years studying Arabic in order to refute the heretical teachings current in his time. At Ronda he wrote his famous Ars Major and Ars Generalis. He made many journeys in France, Italy, North Africa in a burning crusade against the teachings of Mohammedanism. At Bougie, North Africa he was stoned outside the city walls and died on June 29, 1315.

75.biogenesis, the teaching that living organisms come from other living organisms, as opposed to abiogenesis. The author of the modern formulation of “the fundamental law of biogenesis” was Fritz Müller (1864). Haeckel (see note 54, above) called Müller's formulation “the biogenetic fundamental law,” which can be stated briefly as the teaching that in its development from the egg to adult stage, the animal tends to pass through a series of stages which recapitulate the stages through which its ancestry passed in the development of the species from a primitive form. In other words, the development of the individual is a condensed expression of the development of the race.

76.The earliest statement of the law of mechanical theory of heat was formulated by the French physicist, Sadi Nicholas Lèonhard Carnot (1796–1832) in notes written about 1830, published by his brother in the latter's Life of Sadi Carnot, Paris, 1878. Further work in this direction was done by Ségun, Paris, 1839, by Julius Robert Mayer, c. 1842, and by J. P. Joule, who (1840–43) placed the mechanical theory of heat on a sound experimental basis.

Julius Robert Mayer (1814–1878), German physician and physicist, is the discoverer of the law of conservation of energy, which—within limits of the data he obtained from experiments and reasoning—he applied “with great power and insight to the explanation of numerous physical phenomena.”

77.On Fichte, see note 13, above. Rudolf Steiner's Inaugural Dissertation for his doctoral degree before the Faculty of Philosophy at the University of Rostock (Defense, beginning of May, 1891; Promotion, October 26, 1891) was titled Die Grundfrage der Erkenntnistheorie mit besonderer Rücksicht auf Fichtes Wissenschaftslehre, usw., The Fundamentals of a Theory of Cognition with Special Reference to Fichte's Scientific Teaching. When the thesis was published in book form, as it appears here in English translation, a Foreword and one chapter were added to the original by Rudolf Steiner. These latter are included in the present translation.

78.John Locke (1632–1704), English philosopher, scholar, chemist, student of meteorology, practicing physician, political advisor, traveler, and author. For details on his life and thought, consult any standard encyclopedia.

79.see reference to Volkelt's book in note 71, above, (p. 20)

80.see note 27, on Kant, above.

81.p. 61 ff. of Kirchmann's German edition of Kant's Kritik. See Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, Introd. to 2nd edition. Sec. vi.

82.Kant, Prolegomena, Sec. v.

83.Kant, Kritik, p. 53 f. of the German ed. Introduction, Sec. iv.

84.Rehmke, Johannes: Die Welt als Wahrnehmung und Begriff, usw., The World as Percept and Concept, etc., Berlin, 1880, p. 161 ff. of the German ed.

85.Refer to title given in note 28, above.

86.Note by Rudolf Steiner: This attempt, incidentally, is one which the objections of Robert Zimmermann (Uber Kant's mathematisches Vorurteil und dessen Folgen, On Kant's Mathematical Notions and their Results) show to be, if not altogether in error, at least highly questionable. (Robert Zimmermann, 1824–1898, was Professor of Philosophy in the University of Vienna, 1861–95. His book on Aesthetics was published in 2 volumes, Vienna, 1870. Rudolf Steiner attended lectures by Zimmermann on fundamentals of ethics at the University of Vienna. Steiner's impressions of this great interpreter of Herbart's aesthetics are contained in the 3rd chapter of the former's autobiography.)

87.Kant, Kritik, Introduction to 2nd edition. Sec. ii.

88.See Kant's Theorie der Erfahrung, Theory of Experience, pp. 90, ff. of the German ed.

89.Kant, Kritik, p. 58, Sec. v.

90.Hermann Cohen (1842–1918), Kants Theorie der Erfahrung, Kant's Theory of Experience, Berlin, 1871, pp. 90 ff. of the German ed.

91.August Stadler (1850–1910), Die Grundsätze der reinen Erkenntnistheorie in der Kantschen Philosophie, The Principles of the Pure Theory of Cognition in the Philosophy of Kant, Leipzig, 1876, p. 76 f. of the German ed.

92.Volkelt, op. cit., p. 21, see note 71, above.

93.Otto Liebmann (1840–1912), Analysis, 1880, p. an ff. (see note 28, above); A. Holder, Kantischen Erkenntnistheorie, Kant's Theory of Cognition, Tübingen, 1874, p. 14 ff.; Wilhelm Windelband (1848–1915) Phasen der Kantschen Lehre, Phases of Kant's Theory, p. 239; F. Ueberweg, System der Logik, System of Logic, p. 380 f.; Eduard v. Hartmann (1842–1906), Kritische Grundlegung, Berlin, 1875, p. 142–172 of the 2nd German ed. (see note 4, above).

94.Note by Rudolf Steiner: Geschichte der neueren Philosophie, History of More Recent Philosophy, 1860, Vol. 5, p. 60. Volkelt is mistaken about Fischer when he says (Kant's Erkenntnistheorie, Kant's Theory of Cognition, p. 198 f.) that “it is not clear from the account by K. Fischer whether, in his opinion, Kant takes for granted only the psychological fact of the occurrence of universal and necessary judgments, but also their objective validity and truth.” For, in the passage cited above, Fischer says that the main difficulty of the Critique of Pure Reason is to be found in the fact that “its basic points rest on certain presuppositions,” which “must be allowed if the remainder is to be valid.” For Fischer, these presuppositions consist in that “first the fact of knowledge is affirmed,” and then analysis reveals the cognitive faculties “by means of which the fact itself is explained.”

95.Gottlob Ernst Schulze (1761–1833), Aenesidemus, Helmstädt, 1792.

96.On Schopenhauer, see note 34, above.

97.On von Hartmann, see note 4, above.

98.Kritische Grundlegung, by Hartmann, Berlin 1875, Foreword, p. 10 of the German ed.

99.Liebmann, Zur Analysis, p. 28 ff. of the German ed. See note 28, above.

100.Kant's Erkenntnistheorie, Theory of Knowledge, Sec. 1.

101.A. Dorner, Das menschliche Erkennen, usw., Human Cognition, Berlin, 1887.

102.Julius Heinrich v. Kirchmann (1802–1884), Die Lehre vom Wissen, The Theory of Knowledge, Berlin, 1868.

103.E. L. Fischer, Die Grundfragen der Erkenntnistheorie, Basic Questions of the Theory of Cognition, Mainz 1887, p. 385.

104.C. Göring, System der kritischen Philosophie, System of Critical Philosophy, Leipzig, 1874, Part I, p. 257.

105.Johannes Müller (1801–1858), see note 32, above.

106.Hartmann's Grundproblem, p. 37 (see note 4, above).

107.A. Döring, article in Philosophische Monatshefte, Vol. XXVI, 1890, p. 390. publ. Heidelberg. Philosophical Monthly.

108.Hartmann, Grundproblem, p. 1. See note 4, above.

109.John Stewart Mill (1806–1873). A stern parent, James Mill taught his son Greek at the age of three, and at seven he studied Plato's dialogues. When he was eight he had to teach his sister Latin. His introduction to the utilitarian teachings of Bentham (the greatest happiness to the greatest number) at the age of fifteen was decisive for his life. His great work, System of Logic, 1843, is the analysis of inductive proof. He was a great champion of human rights, and in the second half of the i9th century his influence throughout Europe was very great. Today it is recognized that—to use Mill's description of Bentham—“He was not a great philosopher but a great reformer in philosophy.” For details on Mill's life and thought, consult any standard encyclopedia.

110.Fichte, Sämtliche Werke, Collected Works, Berlin, 1845, Vol. I, P. 71.

111.For fundamentals of the scientific teaching of Fichte, see his Collected Works, Berlin, 1845, Vol. I, p. 97.

112.Ibid. Vol. I, p. 91.

113.Ibid. Vol. I, p. 178.

114.Ibid. Vol. I, p. 91.

115.Eduard Zeller (1814–1908), Geschichte der deutschen Philosophie seit Leibnitz, History of German Philosophy Since Leibnitz, Munich, 1871–75, p. 605. Eduard Zeller studied and taught at Tübingen, later (1847) becoming professor of Theology at Bern, later (1849) professor of Theology, afterward of Philosophy at Marburg. In 1862 he was made professor of Philosophy at Heidelberg, afterward at Berlin to his retirement in 1895. His masterwork is the Philosophie der Greichen, Philosophy of the Greeks, 1844–52. He was recognized throughout the academic world for his learning and contributions to scholarship, and received many distinctions and honors. His Philosophie der Greichen has been transl. into English by S. F. Alleyne, 2 vols. 1881. In addition, an abridged version prepared by Zeller (1883) also appeared in English in 1896, as did a number of his other writings.

116.Fichte, Sämtliche Werke, Collected Works, Berlin, 1845, Vol. I, p. 94.

117.Ibid. Vol. I, p. 98.

118.Ibid. Vol. I, p. 422.

119.J. G. Fichtes nachgelassene Werke, J. G. Fichte's Posthumous Works, Edited by J. H. Fichte, Vol. I, Bonn, 1834, p. 4 and 16. (Einleitungsvorlesungen in die Wissenschaftslehre, Introductory Studies in the Scientific Teachings.)

120.Note by Rudolf Steiner: See his Christliche Dogmatik, Christian Dogmatics, and edition, 1884–85, the epistemological arguments, Vol. 1. A complete discussion of his point of view has been provided by Eduard von Hartmann; see Kritische Wanderungen durch die Philosophie der Gegenwart, Critical Survey of Contemporary Philosophy, p. 200 ff.

121.opus cit., see note 120, above.

Before I start with today’s topic, I would like to make you aware that today’s discussions are the beginning of a whole series of such discussions, and that basically all subsequent topics this winter could have precisely the same title as today’s topic. The path a human being must take if he wants to attain knowledge of the spiritual world will be explored in the course of the next lectures in relation to the most diverse phenomena of human and scientific life in general and to various cultural personalities of mankind.

Allow me to start with something personal, although this topic, this contemplation, must head, so to speak, in the direction of the most impersonal, most objective Spiritual Science. Yet the path into the spiritual world is such that it must lead through the most personal to the impersonal. Thus in spite of the impersonal, the personal will often be a symbolic feature of this path, and one gains the opportunity to point out many important things just by starting, so to speak, from the more intimate immediate experience. To the observer of the spiritual world many things in life will be symbolically more important than they initially seem to be. Much that might otherwise pass by the human eye, without particularly attracting attention, can appear to be deeply important to someone who wants to study intensely an observation such as the one that forms the basis for today’s examinations. And I can say that the following—which may at first seem like a trifle of life to you—belongs for me to the many unforgettable things on my path of life that on the one hand marked the longing of today’s human beings to truly ascend to the spiritual world. Yet on the other hand, they marked a more or less admitted impossibility of somehow gaining access to the spiritual world by means, that were not only provided by the present, but were also available in the past centuries, insofar as they were externally accessible to man.

I once sat in the cosy home of Herman Grimm. Those of you who are somewhat familiar with German intellectual life will associate much with the name of Herman Grimm. Perhaps you will know the spirited, important biographer of Michaelangelo and Raffael, and might also know, as it were, that the sum of education of our time, or at least of Central Europe, or let’s say it even more narrowly, of Germany, was united in the soul of Herman Grimm. During a conversation with him about Goethe, who was so close to his heart, and about Goethe’s view of the world, a small thing happened that belongs to the most unforgettable things on my path of life. In response to a remark I made—and we will see later how exactly this remark can be of importance in relation to the ascent of man into the spiritual world—Herman Grimm answered with a dismissive movement of his left hand. What lay in that gesture is what I consider, as it were, to be one of the unforgettable experiences on the path of my life. It was supposed to be in relation to Goethe, how Goethe wanted to find the way into the spiritual world in his own way.

In the course of these lectures we will have another talk about Goethe’s path into the spiritual world. Herman Grimm willingly followed Goethe’s pathways into the spiritual world, but in his own manner.

It was far from his mind to enter into a conversation about Goethe, in which Goethe would be seen as the representative of a human being who had really brought down spiritual realities—also as an artist— from the spiritual world and then undertook to embody them in his works of art. For Herman Grimm, it was much more obvious to say to himself: Alas, with the means that we as human beings have nowadays, we can only ascend to this spiritual world by way of fantasy. Although fantasy offers things that are beautiful, great and magnificent and are able to fill the human heart with warmth; but Knowledge, well-founded knowledge was not something that Herman Grimm, the intimate observer of Goethe, wanted to find in Goethe either. And when I said that Goethe’s whole fundamental nature is based on his willingness to embody the true in the beautiful, in the art, and then attempted to show that there are ways outside of fantasy, ways into the spiritual world that will lead you on more solid and firmer ground than fantasy—then it was not the rejection by someone who would not have liked to follow such a path. Herman Grimm did not use this gesture to express his rejection of such a path, but—in a way only those who knew him better would understand—he laid in it roughly the following: There may well be such a path, but we human beings cannot feel a calling to find out anything about it!

As I said, I do not wish to present this here as a personal matter in an importune way, yet it seems to me that just in such a gesture the position of the best human beings of our age towards the spiritual world is epitomised. Because later I had a long conversation with the same Hermann Grimm on a journey that led us both from Weimar to Tiefurt. There he explained how he had freed himself entirely of a purely materialistic view on world events, from the opinion that the human spirit, in the successive epochs, would produce out of itself that which constitutes the real soul-wealth of man. At that earlier time Herman Grimm talked about a great plan that was part of a piece of work that was never realised. Those of you who have occupied themselves with Herman Grimm will know that he intended to write a ‘History of the German fantasy’. He had envisaged the forces of fantasy to be like those of a goddess in the spiritual world who brings forth out of herself that which human beings create for the benefit of world progress. I would like to say: In that lovely region between Weimar and Tiefurt, when I heard these words from a man, whom I, after all, acknowledge as one of the greatest minds of our time, I had a feeling that I would like to express in these words; ‘Today, many people say to themselves: One must be deeply dissatisfied with everything that external science is able to say about the sources of life, about the secret of existence, about world riddles—but the possibility to step powerfully into another world is missing.’

There is a lack of intensity of willingness to realise that this world of spiritual life is different from what man imagines in his fantasy. Many enjoy going into the realm of fantasy, because for them it is the only spiritual realm that exists. About 17 years ago, on the journey to Tiefurt, I met Herman Grimm, who already through his scriptures and many, many other things, had made an impression on me. Facing this personality I remembered just then that, 30 years ago, I had glanced at just the passage in one of Grimm’s Goethe lectures,¹ which he had held in the winter of 1874/75 in Berlin, and where, with reference to Goethe, he spoke of the kind of impression that a purely external study of nature, devoid of spirit, must make on a spirit like his own. Already 30 years earlier Herman Grimm appeared to me to be the kind of human being whom all feelings and emotions urge upwards into the spiritual world, but who, unable to find the spiritual world as a reality, can only perceive it in its weaving and workings as a fantasy. And on the other hand—just because he was like this—he did not want to acknowledge that Goethe himself searched for the sources and riddles of existence in a different realm, not just in the realm of fantasy, but in the realm of spiritual reality.

There is a passage where Herman Grimm speaks about something that must affect our souls today, at the beginning of our contemplations. This passage refers to something which, as I have already indicated, and although its importance cannot be denied by Spiritual Science, is regarded as an impossibility by natural science—or by a worldview that claims to stand on the firm ground of natural science. It is an impossibility not only for feeling and emotion but also for a realisation that truly understands itself. What I mean is the Kant-Laplace theory that explains our solar system as if it were made up only of lifeless, inorganic substances and forces, and as if it had clenched itself out of a giant gas ball. I would like to read to you the passage from Herman Grimm’s Goethe lectures that shows you what this world-view, which is so fascinating, so deeply impressive today, meant for a spirit like Herman Grimm’s:

As much as Goethe here prohibits reason to accept as truth more than one can indeed grasp with the five fingers of a hand, the more he grants license to the poet’s fantasy, to create out of an unconscious, dreaming force pictures of what the spirit wishes to behold. However, he sharply upholds the boundaries between both of these activities. A long time ago, already in his youth, the great Kant-Laplace fantasy about the origin and the future downfall of the globe, had gained ground. Out of the primeval, cosmic, in itself rotating world-nebula—the children learn this at school already—the central drop of gaseous matter forms itself, which later becomes the Earth and, as a solidifying ball in incomprehensible periods of time, goes through all phases including the episode of mankind’s habitation. This ball will finally crash back into the sun as burnt out slag: This is a long, but completely comprehensible process for the audience, that does not require any further external intervention for its implementation apart from the endeavour by some outside power to maintain a constant heating temperature on the Sun.

There cannot be imagined a more futile perspective for the future than the one that is being imposed on us today in this expectation as a scientific necessity. A carrion bone, around which a hungry dog made a detour, would be a more refreshing appetising piece in comparison to this latests excrement of creation—the form in which our Earth would finally pass to the Sun again. The inquisitiveness with which our generation embraces such things and thinks it believes them, is a sign of a sick imagination. Scientists of future epochs will use a lot of astuteness to explain it as a historical phenomenon of the time.

I felt it was necessary to point out such a quote, as basically it is rarely done these days. Today, when the concepts of these world-views have such a fascinating effect, and when they seem to be based so solidly on natural science, little reference is made to the fact that there are, after all, spirits who are deeply connected to the cultural life of our time, and yet relate in such a way out of their whole soul make-up to something about which countless people now say: It is obvious that things are like that, and anyone who does not concede that they are like that is really a simpleton! Yes, already today we see many people who feel the deepest longing to forge links between the soul of man and the spiritual world. But on the other side, we see only a few outside of those circles that are more deeply engaged with what we call Spiritual Science, who are busying themselves with means that could lead the human soul to what could after all be called the land of its longings.

Therefore, when we speak today about ways that are to lead man into the spiritual world, and speak so that what we say applies not only to a tight circle, but is addressed to all those who are equipped with a contemporary education, we still encounter strong resistance in a certain respect. Not only is it possible that what will be presented is regarded as daydreaming and fantasy, but it may also easily annoy many people of the present. It can actually be an annoyance to them because it deviates so much from those ideas that are currently considered valid in the widest circles, and which are the suggestive and fascinating imaginations of people who consider themselves to be the most educated.

In the first lecture it was already hinted at that the ascent into the spiritual world is basically an intimate affair of the soul and is in stark contrast to what is common for the imaginative and emotional life both in popular and scientific circles. Namely a scientist easily makes the demand that to be valid as science today, something has to be verifiable at any time and for anyone. And he will then also refer to his external experiment that can be proven anytime to anyone. It goes without saying that this demand can not be met by Spiritual Science. We are about to see why not. Spiritual Science here means a science that does not speak about the spirit as a sum of abstract terms and concepts, but as something real and of real entities. Spiritual Science therefore must contravene the methodical demands that are currently so easily established by science and world-views: to be verifiable anywhere and at all times by anyone. Spiritual Science very often encounters resistance in popular circles for the reason that in our time, even where there is an inner longing to ascend to the spiritual world, feelings and emotions are penetrated and permeated by a materialistic view.

Even with the best intentions, even if one yearns for the spiritual world, one cannot help but imagine the spirit as in some way material again, or at least imagine the ascent into the spiritual world as somehow connected to something material. That is why most people may prefer that you talk to them about purely external matters, like what they should eat or drink or shouldn’t eat and drink, or what else they should undertake purely externally in the material world. They would much rather do this than be asked to introduce intimate moments of development into their souls. But that is exactly what ascending into the spiritual world is all about.

We now want to try to map out—entirely in line with Spiritual Science’s own view—how this ascent of a human soul into the spiritual world can happen. The starting point must always be a person’s current life situation. A human being, as he is placed in our present world, lives completely and firmly in the external sensory world. Let’s try to become clear about how much would remain in a human soul, if one would disregard the concepts that the outer sense perceptions of the physical world have ignited within us, and that which has entered into us through the outer physical experiences, through eyes and ears and the other senses. And disregard that which is stimulated of sufferings and joys, of pleasure and pain within us through our eyes and ears, and what our rational mind has then combined from these impressions of the sensory world. Try to eliminate all of this from the soul, imagine it away, and then ponder what would be left behind. People who honestly undertake this simple self-observation will find that extremely little will remain, especially in the souls of people of the present time. And it is just so that initially the ascent into the spiritual world cannot proceed from something that is given to us by the external sensory world—it has to be undertaken so that a human being develops forces within his soul, which ordinarily lie dormant in it. It is, so to speak, a basic element for all possibilities of ascent into the Spiritual world, that a person becomes aware that he is capable of inner development, that there is something else in him than what he is initially able to survey with his consciousness.

Today, this is actually an annoying concept for many people. Let’s take a very special person with a contemporary education, for example, what does a philosopher nowadays do, when he wants to establish the full meaning and the nature of Knowledge? Someone like this will say: ‘I will try to establish how far in general we can get with our thinking, with our human soul forces, what we can comprehend of this world.’ He is attempting in his own way—depending on what is momentarily possible for him—to comprehend a world view and to place it before him, and usually he will then say, ‘We simply cannot know anything else, because it is beyond the limits of human knowledge.’ Really this is the most widespread phrase that can be found in today’s literature: ‘We cannot know this!’

However, there is a another standpoint that works in a completely different way from the one just described, by saying: ‘Certainly, with the forces I have now in my soul, which are now probably the normal human soul forces, I can recognise this or that, but here in this soul is a being capable of development. This soul may have forces within it that I first have to extrapolate. I first have to lead it along certain pathways, must lead it beyond its current point of view, and then I will see whether it could have been my fault when I said that this or that is beyond the limit of our knowledge. Perhaps I just need to go a little further in the development of my soul, and then the boundaries will expand and I will be able to penetrate more deeply into things.

In making judgments, one does not always take logic seriously, otherwise one would say: ‘What we can recognise depends on our organs.’ For this reason, someone who is born blind cannot judge colours. He would only be able to do so, if through a fortunate operation he were to become capable of seeing colours.

Likewise it may be possible—I do not wish to speak of a sixth sense here, but of something that can be brought forth from the soul in a purely spiritual way—that spirit eyes and spirit ears can be brought forth from our soul. Then the great event could happen for us—which occurs at a lower level when the one born blind is so lucky to be operated on—so that then for us the initial assumption could become a truth: Around us is a spiritual world, but to be able to look into it, we first have to awaken the organs within us. This would be the only logical thing to do. But, as I said, we do not always take logic very seriously, because people in our time have very different needs than finding their way into the spiritual world when they hear about it. I have already told you that once, when I had to give a lecture in a city in southern Germany, a courageous person, who wrote feature articles, opened his article with the words; ‘The most obvious thing about theosophy is its incomprehensibility.’ We like to believe this man that for him theosophy’s most outstanding characteristic is its incomprehensibility. But is this in any way a criterion? Let’s apply this example to mathematics about which someone would say: ‘What I notice most about mathematics is its incomprehensibility.’ Then everyone would say: ‘Quite certainly, this is possible, but then, if he wants to write feature articles, he should be so good and learn something first!’ Often it would be better to transfer what is valid for one particular subject and apply it correctly to another.

So people have nothing left to do than either to deny that there is a development of the soul—and they can only do this by speaking a word of power—namely, when they refuse to go through such a development, or, alternatively they can immerse themselves into the development of their soul. Then the spiritual world becomes for them an observation, reality, truth. But in order to ascend into the spiritual world, the soul must become capable—not for physical life, but for the realisation of the spiritual world—of completely transforming itself in a certain relation to the form it initially has, and in a certain way becoming a different being.

This could already make us aware of something that has been emphasised repeatedly here, namely, that someone who feels the urge to ascend into the spiritual world, must first and foremost make it clear for himself time and again whether he has gained a firm foothold in this world of physical reality and whether he is able to stand firm here. We have to maintain certainty, volition and sentience in all circumstances that take place in the physical world. We must not lose the ground beneath our feet if we want to ascend from this world into the spiritual one. Doing anything that can lead our character to stand firm in the physical world is a preliminary stage. Then it is a matter of bringing the soul to a different kind of feeling and willing for the spiritual world, than the feeling and willing in the soul normally are. The soul must become, as it were, inwardly a different feeling and willing organism than it is in normal life. This brings us to that which can, on the one hand, initially really place Spiritual Science in a kind of opposition to what is recognised as ‘science’ today. On the other hand, it places Spiritual Science yet again directly next to this science with the same validity that external science has. When it is said that everything that is supposed to be science, needs to be at any time and by anyone verifiable, then, what is meant by this is that what is deemed to be science must not be dependent on our subjectivity, on our subjective feelings, on any decisions of will, will impulses, feelings and emotions that we only carry individually within ourselves. Now, someone who wants to ascend into the spiritual world, must first take a detour through his innermost soul, must reorganise his soul; at first he must completely turn his gaze away from what is outside in the physical world. Normally, a human being only turns away from looking at what is within the physical world when he is asleep. Then he does not let anything enter into his soul through his eyes, his ears, nor through the entire organisation of his senses. But for that he also becomes unconscious and is not able to live consciously in a spiritual world.

It has now been said that it is one of the basic elements of spiritual realisation for a human being to find within oneself the possibility to go beyond oneself. However, this means nothing else than to first let the spirit become effective within oneself. In today’s ordinary human life we all know only one kind of turning away from the physical world, namely when we enter into the unconsciousness of sleep. The contemplation of The Nature of Sleep ² has shown us that a human being is in a real spiritual world during sleep, even if he knows nothing about it. For it would be absurd to believe that a person’s soul-centre and spirit-centre disappears in the evening and newly comes into being in the morning. No, in reality, it outlasts the stages from falling asleep to awakening. However, what for a normal person today is the inner strength to be conscious—even if there is no stimulation of consciousness through sense impressions or through the work of the rational mind —is missing in sleep. The soul life is so turned down during sleep, that the person is unable to kindle or awaken what allows the soul to experience itself inwardly. When the human being wakes up again, events from the outside enter. And because a soul content is gifted to the human being in this way, he becomes conscious of himself by means of this soul content. He is not able to become conscious of himself if he is not stimulated externally, because his human strength is too weak for this, when he is left to himself in his sleep.

Hence the ascent into the spiritual world means an arousal of such forces within our soul that enable it, as it were, to truly live consciously within itself, when it becomes, in relation to the external world like a human being who is asleep. Basically, the ascent into the spiritual worlds demands a spurring on of internal energies, an extraction of forces that are otherwise asleep, that are, as it were, paralysed within the soul, so that man cannot handle them at all. All those intimate experiences that a spiritual researcher must experience in his soul, ultimately aim at what has just been characterised. And today, I would like to summarise something for you about the path that leads upwards into the spiritual world. This has been presented in detail by element, so to speak, by their rudiments, in my book published under the title: How to attain Knowledge of the Higher Worlds? ³ But today, I do not want to repeat myself by just presenting you an excerpt from this book. Instead, I wish to approach the issue from a different side, that is what the soul must do with itself to rise up to the spiritual world. One who is interested in this more deeply, can read the details in the book mentioned above. However, no one should think that what was presented in detail there can be summarised here in the same words and sentences. Those who are familiar with the book will not find that it is a summary of what has been said there, but a description of the topic from a different angle.

For a spiritual researcher who wants to direct his steps into the spiritual world, it is extremely important that much of what would lead other people directly to a realisation and a goal becomes for him simply a means of education, an intimate means of education of the soul. Let me illustrate this with an example. Many years ago I wrote a book, The Philosophy of Freedom. As it is out of stock since years, it is currently not available, but hopefully a second edition will appear in the near future.⁴ This Philosophy of Freedom was conceived in such a way that it is quite different from other philosophical books of the present time, which more or less aim by what is written to share something about how things are in the world or how they must be according to the ideas of the authors. However, this is not the immediate aim of this book. Rather, it is intended to give someone who engages with the thoughts presented there a kind of workout for his thoughts, so that the kind of thinking, the special way to devoting oneself to these thoughts is one in which the emotions and feelings of the soul are set in motion—just as in gymnastics the limbs are exercised, if I may use this comparison. What is otherwise only a method of gaining insight, is in this book at the same time a means of spiritual-soul self-education. This is extraordinarily important. Of course this is annoying for many philosophers of the present time, who associate something quite different with philosophy than that which may help a human being to progress a little further—because, if possible, he should remain as he is, with his normal innate capacity to gain knowledge. Therefore, in regard to this book it is not so important to be able to argue about this or that, or if something can be understood one way or another, but what really matters is that the thoughts which are connected as one organism, are able to school our soul and help it to make a bit of progress.

This is also the case with my book Truth and Science. And so it is with many things that are initially supposed to be basic elements to train the soul to rise up into the spiritual world. Mathematics and geometry teach man knowledge of triangles, quadrangles and other figures. But why do they teach all this? So that man can gain knowledge about how things are within space, which laws they are subject to and so on. Essentially, the spiritual ascent to the higher worlds works with similar figures as symbols. For instance, it places the symbol of a triangle, a quadrangle or another symbolic figure before a student, but not so that he will win immediate insights through them, as he can acquire these also by other means. Instead, with the symbols he receives the opportunity to train his spiritual abilities so that the spirit, supported by the impression he gains from the symbolic pictures, ascends into a Higher World. Thus it is about mental training, or, do not misunderstand me, it is about mental gymnastics. Therefore, much of what is dry external science, dry external philosophy, what is mathematics or geometry, becomes a living symbol for the spiritual training that leads us upwards into the spiritual world. If we have let this affect our soul, then we will learn to understand what basically no external science understands, that the ancient Pythagoreans, under the influence of their great teacher Pythagoras, spoke of the universe being made up of numbers because they focussed on the inner laws of numbers. Now let us look at how we encounter numbers everywhere in the world. Nothing is easier than to refute Spiritual Science or Anthroposophy, because from a standpoint, imagined to be superior, one can easily say: There are these Spiritual Scientists again, coming out of their mystic ⁵ darkness with numerical symbolism and say that there is an inner regularity of numbers, and, for example, one has to consider the true foundation of human nature according to the number seven. But something similar was meant also by Pythagoras and his students, when they talked about the inner regularity of numbers. If we allow those marvellous connections, which lie in the relationships between numbers, to affect our spirit then we can train it in such a way that it wakes up when it would otherwise be asleep and develops stronger forces within itself to penetrate into the spiritual world.

Thus it is a schooling through another kind of science. It is also what is actually called the study of someone, who wants to enter deeply into the spiritual world. And for someone like this, gradually everything that for other people is a harsh reality, becomes more or less an external allegory, a symbol. If a human being is able to let these symbols have an effect on him, then he is not only freeing his spirit from the outer physical world, but also imbues his spirit with strong forces, so that the soul can be conscious of itself, even when there is no external stimulation. I have already mentioned that if someone lets a symbol like the Rosy Cross affect him, he can feel an impulse to ascend into the spiritual world. We imagine a Rosy Cross as a simple black cross with seven red roses attached in a circle at the crossing of the beams.

What should it tell us? One who allows it to have an effect on his soul in the right way will imagine: For example, I look at a plant; I say of this plant that it is an imperfect being. Next to it I place a human being, who in his nature is a more perfect being, but even only in his nature. For if I look at the plant, I have to say: In it I encounter a material being which is not permeated by passions, desires, instincts, that bring it down from the height where it otherwise could stand. The plant has its innate laws, which it follows from leaf to flower to fruit; it stands there without desires, chaste.

Beside him lives the human being, who certainly by his nature is a higher being, but who is permeated by desires, instincts, passions through which he can stray from his strict regularity. He first has to overcome something within himself, if he wants to follow his own inner laws as a plant follows its innate laws. Now the human being can say to himself; The expression of desires, of instincts in me is the red blood. In a certain way, I can compare it with chlorophyll, the chaste plant sap in the red rose, and can say: If man becomes so strong within himself that the red blood is no longer an expression of what pushes him down below himself, but of what lifts him above himself—when it becomes the expression of such a chaste being like the plant sap, which has turned into the red of a rose, or in other words; when the red of the rose expresses the pure inwardness, the purified nature of a human being in his blood, then I have before me the ideal of what man, by overcoming the outer nature, can achieve and which presents itself to me under the symbol of the black cross, the charred wood. And the red of the rose symbolises the higher life that awakens when the red blood has become the chaste expression of the purified, instinctive nature of man, which has overcome itself.

If one does not let what is depicted be an abstract concept, then it becomes a vividly felt evolutionary idea. Then a whole world of feelings and emotions comes to life within us; we will feel within ourselves a development from an imperfect to a more perfect state. We sense that development is something quite different from the abstract thing that external science provides us with in the sense of a purely external Darwinism. Here, development becomes something that cuts deep into our heart, that pervades us with warmth, with soul-warmth—it becomes a force within us that carries and holds us. It is only through such inner experiences that the soul becomes capable of developing strong forces within itself, so that it can illuminate itself with consciousness in its innermost being—in the being that otherwise becomes unconscious when it withdraws from the external world.

It is of course child’s play to say; ‘Then you recommend an idea of something completely imaginary, of something entirely made up. But only those concepts which are reproductions of external ideas are valuable, and an idea of the Rose Cross has no external counter-image.’ But the point is not that the concepts we use to school our souls are reflections of an external reality, instead it is about concepts that are strength-awakening for our soul and that draw out of the soul what lies hidden within it.

When the human soul is dedicated to such pictorial ideas, when, so to speak, everything that it normally values as reality now becomes a cause for pictures that are not arbitrarily retrieved from fantasy, but are inspired by reality, just like the symbol of the Rosy Cross, then we say: The human being makes an effort to move upwards to the first stage of knowledge of the spiritual world. This is the stage of ‘Imaginative Knowledge’ that leads us above and beyond what is immediately concerned with the physical world only.

Hence, a human being who wishes to ascend into the spiritual world works in his soul with very particular concepts in a precisely determined way, to let the otherwise external reality affect him. He works in this soul itself. When the human being has worked in this way for some time, then it will be so that the external scientists can tell him: This has only a subjective, only an individual value for you. But this external scientist does not know that when the soul undergoes such a serious, regular training, there exists a stage of inner development when the possibility for the soul to express subjective feelings and emotions ceases completely. Then the soul arrives at a point where it must tell itself: Now concepts arise within me that I encounter like I normally meet trees and rock, rivers and mountains, plants and animals of the outer world that are as real as otherwise only external physical things are, and to which my subjectivity can neither add anything to them nor can it take anything away from them.

So there actually exists an intermediate state for everyone who wants to ascend into the spiritual world, where man is subject to the danger of carrying his subjectivity, which is only valid for himself, into the spiritual world. But man must pass through this intermediate state, for then he reaches a stage where what the soul is experiencing becomes as objectively verifiable—to anyone with the ability to do so—as all things in the outer physical reality. Because, after all, the principle that applies to external science—for something to be regarded as scientifically valid it must be verifiable at any time by anyone—also applies only to one who is sufficiently prepared for this. Or do you believe that you would be able to teach ‘the law of corresponding boiling temperatures’ to an eight-year-old child? I doubt it. You will not even be able to teach him the theorem of Pythagoras. Thus it is already bound to the basic principle that the human soul must be appropriately prepared if one wants to prove something to it.

And just as one must be prepared to understand the theorem of Pythagoras—even though it is possible for everyone to understand it—one must be prepared through a certain soul exercise if one wants to experience or realise this or that in the spiritual world. However, what can be realised, can then be experienced and observed in the same way by anyone who is appropriately prepared. Or, when messages are conveyed from observations of Spiritual Science by those who have prepared their soul for this, such as, that a particular man is able to look back on repeated Earth lives so that these become a fact for him, then it is likely that people will come and say; ‘There he brings us some dogmas again and demands that we should believe in these!’ Yet a spiritual researcher does not approach his contemporaries with his realisations so that people should believe them.

People who believe that we speak about dogmas, should ask themselves, is the fact that a whale exists a dogma for someone who has never seen one? Certainly, it is explainable in this way: A whale is a dogma for someone who has never seen one. Yet spiritual research does not approach the world with messages alone. Neither does it do so when it understands itself; instead it clothes what it brings down from the higher worlds in logical forms. These are exactly the same logical forms with which the other sciences are permeated. Then anyone will be able to verify, by applying a healthy sense of truth and unbiased logic, whether what the spiritual researcher has said is right. It has always been said that a schooling of the soul is necessary for someone wanting to explore spiritual facts by self-searching, whereby the soul must have gone through what is now being described here. But to understand what is being communicated, all you need is a healthy sense of truth and unbiased logic.

Now, if the spiritual researcher has allowed such symbolic terms and pictures to affect his soul for a while, he will notice that his feeling and emotional life becomes completely different from what it was before.

What is the feeling and emotional life of man in the ordinary world like? Nowadays it actually has become somewhat trivial to use the expression ‘egoistic’ everywhere, and to say that people in their normal life are egoistic. I do not want to express it in this way, but prefer to say: In their normal lives people are at first closely tied to their human personality, for example, when something pleases us, yes, especially in relation to things which we enjoy of the noblest spiritual creations, things of art and beauty. The saying, there is no accounting for taste, already expresses that much is connected to our personality and depends upon our subjective stance towards things. Check how everything that can please you is related to your upbringing, in which place in the world, in which profession your personality is placed, and so on, in order to see how feelings and emotions are closely connected to our personality. But when one does exercises of the soul, like the ones described, one notices how feelings and emotions will become completely impersonal. It is a great and tremendous experience when the moment arrives in which our feeling and our emotional life becomes, so to speak, impersonal. This moment comes, it certainly comes, when a human being on his spiritual path, inspired by those who undertake his spiritual guidance, allows the following things to really affect his soul. I will now list some of these things that will affect our whole feeling and emotional life in an educational way if someone allows them to work on his soul for weeks, or months.

The following can be considered. We focus our attention on what we find at the centre of philosophical observations, on the spiritual centre of the human being, the Ego—if we have learned to rise to the concept of Ego—which accompanies all our ideas, the mysterious centre of all experience. And if we continue to further the respect, this reverence and this devotion, which can connect to the fact, that for many is certainly not a fact but a figment of the imagination,—that there is an Ego living within us!—if this becomes the greatest, the most momentous experience to keep telling yourself that this ‘I am’ is the most essential of the human soul, then mighty, strong feelings develop in relation to the ‘I am’, which are impersonal. These lead directly to an insight into how all of the world’s secrets and mysteries that float around us are concentrated, as it were, in a single point—the Ego-point— to comprehend the human being from this Ego-point. For example, the poet Jean Paul ⁶ talks about becoming conscious of the Ego in his biography:

“I will never forget what manifested in me, which I have never told anyone about, whereby I stood at the birth of my self-consciousness, and of which I can tell at which place and at what time it happened. One morning, when I was a very young child, I stood under the front entrance and looked left at the woodshed, when suddenly the inner vision—I am an I—flashed before me like a bolt of lightning from the sky and since then has remained shining; there my Ego had seen itself for the first time and forever. Memory errors are hardly imaginable here, and since there was no extraneous retelling, nothing could be added and mixed into the narrative about an occurrence which took place only within the veiled inner sanctum of a human being—only the novelty lent permanence to these everyday, incidental circumstances.

It is already quite a lot to feel the devotion for the concentrated crowdedness of the world-being at one point, with all the shivers of awe and with all the feelings for the greatness of this fact. Yet, when a human being feels this time after time and allows it to affect him—although it will not enlighten him in regard to all the riddles of the world—it can give him a direction entirely focussed on the impersonal and the innermost human nature.

Thus we educate our emotional and our feeling life by relating it to our Ego-beingness. And when we have done this for a while, then we can focus our feelings and emotions in a different direction and can tell ourselves; this Ego within us is connected to everything we think, feel and perceive, with our entire soul life, it glows and shines through our soul life. We can then study human nature with the Ego as the centre point of thinking, feeling and willing, without taking ourselves into consideration or getting personal. The human being becomes a mystery to us, not we to ourselves, and our feelings expand from the Ego across to the soul. We can then transition to a different kind of feeling. In particular, we can acquire this beautiful feeling without which we are not able to lead our soul further into spiritual knowledge—this is what one would like to call it: The feeling that in each thing we encounter, as it were, an access to something infinite opens up for us. If we let this appear before our soul again and again, then it is the most wonderful feeling. It can be there when we go outside and look at a wonderful nature spectacle: cloud-covered mountains with thunder and lightning. This works greatly and forcefully on our soul. But then we must learn not only to see what is great and powerful there, but we may take a single leaf, look at it carefully with all its ribs and all the wonderful things that are part of it, and we will be able to perceive the greatness and might that reveals itself as something infinite in the smallest leaf, and we will hear and feel as if we were at the greatest spectacle of nature. It may appear to be strange, yet there is something to it, and afterwards one must express oneself grotesquely; it may make a great impression when a human being witnesses a glowing lava flow ejected from the Earth. But then, let us imagine someone looks at warm milk or the most ordinary coffee, and sees there how small crater-like structures form and a similar scenario unfolds on a small scale. Everywhere, in the smallest and in the greatest is access to an infinity.

And if we steadily keep researching, even if so much has been revealed to us, there is still something more under the cover, which perhaps we may have explored on the surface. So right now we are sensing what may result in a revelation of something intensely infinite at any point in the universe.

This imbues our soul with feelings and emotions that are necessary for us, if we want to attain what Goethe has called ‘spirit eyes’ and ‘spirit ears’.⁷ In short, it is a realisation of our feeling life, which is usually the most subjective to the point where we feel ourselves as if we were merely a setting where something is happening—where we no longer consider our feelings to be part of us. Our personality has been silenced. It is almost as if we were painters and stretching a canvas and painting a picture on it. Hence, when we train ourselves in this way, we stretch our soul and allow the spiritual world to paint on it. One feels this from a certain point in time onwards. Then it is only necessary to understand oneself, and in order to recognise what the world essentially is, it is necessary to consider a particular stage in the life of the soul as solely and only decisive.

So indeed what a human being acquires in ardent soul striving becomes the deciding of truth. It is in the soul itself where the decision must be made if something is true or not. Nothing external can decide, but the human being, by going beyond himself, must find within himself the authority to behold or discover the truth. Yes, basically we can say; in this regard we cannot be entirely different from all other human beings. Other people search for objective criteria, for something that provides us with a confirmation of truth from the outside. Yet a spiritual researcher searches within for confirmation of the truth. Thus he does the opposite. If this were the case, one could say in pretence; ‘Things are not looking too good when Spiritual Scientists in their confusion want to turn the world on its head.’ Yet in reality natural scientists and philosophers don’t do anything different from what spiritual researchers are doing, they only do not know that they are doing it. I will provide you with proof of this, taken from the immediate present.

At the last conference of natural scientists, Oswald Külpe ⁸ gave a talk about the relationship of natural science to philosophy. There he came up with the idea that the human being, by looking into the sensory world and perceiving it as sound, colour, warmth and so forth, only has subjective qualities. This is only a slightly different slant from what Schopenhauer said; ‘The world is our conception.’ But Oswald Külpe points out that what we perceive with our external senses, in short, everything that appears to be pictorial is subjective. And in contrast to this, what physics and chemistry say—pressure, the forces of attraction and repulsion, resistance and so on—must be characterised as objective. So in this way we partly have to deal with something purely subjective in our world-views, and partly with something that is objective such as pressure, forces of attraction and repulsion.

I do not want to go further into the criticism that has been voiced, but only want to address the mindset. It seems so terribly easy for a contemporary epistemologist to prove that because we cannot see without our eyes, light could only be something produced by our eyes. But what happens in the external world, it is said, when one ball hits another, those forces which cause resistance, pressure and so on, must be shifted into the outer world, into space. Why do people think that? At a particular point Oswald Külpe gives this away very clearly when he speaks about sensory perceptions—because he regards these as pictures, he says; ‘They cannot push or attract each other, neither can they pressure nor warm each other. They cannot have such and such large distance in space that would allow them to send light through space at such and such speed, nor can they be arranged as a chemist would arrange elements. Why does he say this of sensory perceptions? Because he sees sensory perceptions as pictures that are brought about solely by our senses.

Now I want to present a simple thought to you, to illustrate that the pictorial nature does not change anything. Things do push against or attract one another. When Mr Külpe now observes the sensory perceptions, this world—which supposedly could neither attract nor repel—simply does not face Mr Oswald Külpe as reality, but as a mirror image. Then he really has pictures in front of him. But push, pressure, resistance and anything that is placed into this world as different from sensory perceptions, will in no other way be objectively explained than through the pictorial nature of the sense perceptions. Why is this so? Because when the human being perceives pressure, push and so on, he turns what lives within the things, into sensations of the things. Man should study, for example, that when he says that one billiard ball hits another, what he experiences as the impact force is what he himself puts into these things! And someone who is standing on the ground of Spiritual Science, is not doing anything else. He makes what lives in the soul the criterion for expressing the world. There is no other principle of knowledge than that which can be found through the development of the soul itself. So the others do the same as the spiritual research. But only spiritual research is aware of this. The others do it unconsciously, they have no idea that they do the same at an elementary level. They just remain standing on the very first level and deny what they themselves are doing. Therefore we are allowed to say, Spiritual Science is in no way contrary to other research on the truth: the other researchers do the same, yet they take the first step without knowing about it, while spiritual research consciously takes the steps as far as a particular human soul can take according to its level of development.

Once it has been achieved that our feelings have, in a certain way, become objective, then, what I have already indicated will even more certainly come about, as it is a necessary pre-requisite for progress into the spiritual worlds. This is that man learns to comprehend how to live in the world in such a way that the weaving and living of an all-encompassing spiritual regularity within the spiritual world is presupposed. In daily life man is far removed from such a way of thinking. He gets angry when something happens to him that he doesn’t like. This is quite understandable as a different standpoint must be hard won. This other standpoint consists in saying; we have come from a former life, we have placed ourselves into the situation in which we are now, and have led ourselves to what is now facing us out of the lap of the future. What approaches us there corresponds to a strictly objective spiritual regularity. We accept it, because it would be an absurdity not to accept it. What approaches us from the lap of the spiritual worlds, whether the world admonishes us or praises us, whether joyful or tragic things happen to us, we will accept it as wisdom-filled experience and interweaving of the world. This is something that slowly and gradually must become once more the whole basic principle of our being. When it does, our will begins to be schooled. Whereas prior to this our feelings needed to be reorganised, now our will is transformed, becomes independent of our personality and thereby turns into an organ of perception of spiritual facts.

After the stage of ‘Imaginative Knowledge’, there occurs for man what can genuinely and truly be called inspiration, the fulfilment through spiritual facts. We must always be clear that man can attain the training of his will at a particular stage only, when his feelings are in a certain way already purified. Then his will can connect with the lawfulness of the world and he will exist as a human being only so that those facts and entities which want to appear to him, can erect a wall before him in his will, on which they can depict themselves for him, so that they can exist for him.

I could only describe for you some of what the soul must go through in silent, patient devotion, if it wants to ascend into the higher worlds. In the following lectures I will have much to describe of the evolution of the world history that the soul must experience to rise up into the spiritual worlds. So consider what has been said today as an introduction only, so that through such schooling our feeling and willing life and our complete imaginative life will develop to become bearers of new worlds, so that we will actually step into a world that we recognise as reality, just as we recognise the physical world as a reality of its own kind.

At a different occasion I have already mentioned that when people say,‘You only imagine what you believe to see,’ then it must be replied, that only the experience, the observation can yield the difference between reality and appearance, between reality and fantasy, just as this is also the case in the physical world. You must win the difference by relating to reality. For example, someone who approaches reality with a healthy thinking can distinguish a red-hot iron in reality from one that only exists in imagination—and no matter how many ‘Schopenhauerians’ may come—he will be able to tell both apart, he will know what is truth and what is imagination. Hence, man can orientate himself on reality. Even about the spiritual world he can only orientate himself on reality. Someone once said that if a person only thought about drinking a lemonade, he could also perceive the lemon taste on his tongue. I answered him, ‘imagination can be so strong that someone who has no lemonade in front of him, could perhaps feel the taste on his tongue through the lively imagination of a lemonade. But I would like to see, if someone has ever quenched his thirst with an imaginary lemonade only. Then the criterion begins to become more real. Thus it is also with the inner development of a human being. Not only does he learn to know a new soul-life, new concepts, but in his soul he collides with another world and knows: you are now facing a world that you can describe just as you can describe the outside world. This is not mere speculation, which could be compared with a thought development only, instead it is about the forming of new organs of perception and the unlocking of new worlds that truly stand before us just as real as our external, physical world.

What has been hinted at today is that contemporary circumstances made it necessary to point out that spiritual research is possible. This is not to say that everyone should immediately become a spiritual researcher. For it must always be emphasised that when a human being with a healthy sense of truth and unprejudiced logic allows the information from Spiritual Science to approach him—even if he himself is not able to look into the spiritual worlds—yet all that which arises from such messages can turn into energy and feelings of strength for his soul, even if he at first believes in Haeckelianism or Darwinism. What the spiritual researcher has to say, is suitable to speak more and more to man’s healthy sense of truth, all the more so, as it is connected to the deepest interests of every human being. There may be people who do not consider it necessary for their salvation to know how amphibians and mammals relate to each other, or something like this. But all people must warm up to what can be said on the sure basis of spiritual research: that the soul belongs to the sphere of eternity—insofar as it belongs to the spiritual world, descends at birth into the sensory existence and enters again into the spiritual realm through the gate of death. It has to be for all human beings of profound interest, that the strength, which sinks more and more into the soul, is of a quality that the soul can gain certainty from it to stand in its place in life. A soul that does not know what it is and what it wants, what the essence of its nature is, can become hopeless, can ultimately despair and feel dreary and desolate. Yet a soul that allows itself to be filled by the spiritual achievements of Spiritual Science cannot remain empty and desolate if only it does not accept the messages of Spiritual Science as dogmas, but as a living life that streams through our soul and warms it. This provides comfort for all the suffering in life, when we are being led upwards from all temporal suffering to that which can become comfort for the soul from the share of the temporal in the eternal. In short: Spiritual Science can give man what he needs today in the loneliest and most work-intensive hours of his life due to the intensified circumstances of our time —or, if the strength would want to leave him, Spiritual Science can give him what he needs to look into the future and go energetically towards it.

Hence, Spiritual Science—as it arises from spiritual research, from those who want to undertake steps into the spiritual world—can forever confirm what we want to summarise in a few words that express with sensitivity the characteristics of the path into the spiritual world and its significance for the people of the present. What we want to summarise in this way is not supposed to be a contemplation on the theories of life, but one on remedies, means of strengths, tonics for life:

The Spirit World remains shut to you
Unaware of the spirit in yourself
That shines in your soul
And can uphold light for you
In world depths, on world heights! ⁹

• 1. Herman Grimm: Goethe-Lectures, Berlin 1877, 23rd Lecture, Pages 215 et seq.
• 2. Lecture GA 60 #5, The Nature of Sleep, Berlin, 24 November 1910
• 3. Now published under the title - How to Know Higher Worlds, GA 10.
• 4. The Second Edition of the The Philosophy of Freedom was published not until 1918. At this occasion Rudolf Steiner gave a lecture about the genesis of this book, which is featuring as the sixth lecture of the cycle Historical Symptomatology, Dornach 1942. Newly published in Rudolf Steiner's Letters, Volume 2, Dornach 1953
• 5. This was mentioned in the earlier lecture What is Mysticism?, given on 10 February 1910, as part of The Architect House Lecture Series, 1909/1910, and was printed as part of Paths of Soul Experiences, GA59
• 6. The Works of Jean Paul, Berlin 1865, Volume 16, Page 26 et seq.
• 7. For example in Goethe’s Colour Theory, Goethean Science, edited by Rudolf Steiner, Volume 1, Bern 1947, Pages 107 and 262.
• 8. Oswald Külpe, 1862-1915, Philosopher and Psychologist, Epistemology and Natural Sciences, Lecture given on 19 September 1910 at the 82nd Assembly of German Natural Scientists and Medical Doctors, Leipzig 1910.
• 9. Poem translated by Norbert Mulholland.

This single lecture is the 7th of 11 lectures in the lecture series entitled, Spiritual Science as a Treasure for Life, published in German as, Geisteswissenschaft als Lebensgut. It is also known as, The Evil, and, Evil in the Light of Anthroposophy.

Basically, what we have to deal with today is an ancient issue for mankind: the issue of the origin of wickedness and of evil in the world. And though in our time many people are of the view that, fundamentally, this question cannot be defined any further, yet the human soul feels compelled to bring it up time and again. For this question is indeed not one that rises up to our soul just from theoretical or scientific viewpoints; it is far more of a question that human souls are confronted with step after step in life, because their lives are embedded in goodness, in doing good, but also in evil and wickedness. On the one hand, one might say, the whole history of human thinking and reflection unfolds, in order to fully persuade us that our questions have always been issues for the deeper spirits in human development. On the other hand, we can study significant and prominent thinkers of the nineteenth century and of our time, and we will find that even with these prominent thinkers a halt was called to all philosophy, to all striving towards knowledge, precisely when faced with this issue. So today, we wish to try and consider what arose from the lecture cycle this winter about Spiritual Science, as the basis from which perhaps we can approach some way to finding an answer to the riddle of evil and wickedness. I say advisedly “we can approach,” since I have often expressed that this significant question must be addressed in a wholly particular way: Spiritual Science does not only open that existence to our sight which cannot be reached by external science, but in a certain way it also makes it decisive. And we may perhaps be able to feel about such a question, that it is one that easily throws up the highest questions, as they are usually thrown up, when one is at the start of striving for knowledge in a certain way. That leads to real striving for knowledge, and often it only shows the initial steps on the path, through which one can gradually approach a solution to the major riddles of life.

First of all, permit me to raise one point in advance, that should make clear how deeply this question has occupied the hearts and souls of significant thinkers throughout long ages. We can go far back into human development; but first we would like to refer to thinkers in the last centuries before the foundation of Christianity in Greece: to the Stoics, that group of remarkable thinkers which, following the views of Socrates and Plato, tried to answer this question: how should human beings behave, so that their behaviour corresponds to their deepest being, to their previously prescribed and recognisable purpose? This can be designated as the fundamental question for the Stoics. And as an ideal for humanity, that strove to insert its purpose in the universe accordingly, the ideal of the wise surfaced before the soul vision of the Stoics.—It would take us too far, if we were to exhaustively portray the ideals of the Stoics, and how this all is connected with the general stoical world view. But one point at least must be raised, that in Stoicism an awareness came into play, that human development was going towards an ever clearer and clearer self-aware human being, in order to work upon the human consciousness of the I. This was said in the stoic manner: this I, through which humanity is enabled to insert itself in full clarity in the world, this I, can be darkened, and can at the same time deaden itself; and this deadening happens if a human being allows feeling life to enter too strongly into the surging wave-play of imagination and perception. To the Stoics, if a human being were to allow the clarity of the I to be submerged, to be befogged by the being of pain and emotion, this seemed a kind of spiritual impotence. For this reason, for the Stoics, holding back the pain and emotion within the human soul, and striving for peace and equilibrium, led to freedom from the spiritual impotence of the soul.

We can see what must often be raised here, as the first step on the path to knowledge of the spiritual world, which also consists of this: that the wild waves of the being of pain and emotion, that at the same time create a spiritual impotence, are held back, so that the clarity of soul vision is extracted from the full experiences of the soul. What is here set out as the first steps on the path that leads into spiritual vision, all that swirled around before the Stoics. As regards Stoicism, I have tried to bring to the fore precisely this side of Stoic being in the new edition of my “World and Life Views in the Nineteenth Century,” since it is still only little worked upon in the history of philosophy. In the matter just described, conquering pain, conquering sentiment appeared as an ideal before Stoicism. And that which inserts itself as wisdom in the development of the world, recognises in the meaning of Stoicism, that the development of the world was able to take it up. That world development was also shot through with wisdom, so its wisdom must also reach up into the flowing of cosmic wisdom.

Always, when the question surfaces: how does the human self position itself in the whole structure of the cosmic order?—Another question then arises: how does the cosmic order permit wisdom, (which humanity must assume, if it wants to embed itself into the cosmic order) to unite firstly with that which rules as evil in the widths of world experience, and secondly with what wickedness has set up in opposition to human striving for wisdom in the world?

Now, before the soul vision of the Stoics stood what was later called divine providence. How did a Stoic find himself then, with regard to this assumption of evil and wickedness? Something had already surfaced within Stoics, which even today can be put forward as a kind of justification of evil and wickedness, (if we do not want to penetrate into spiritual science itself, but only go up to the doors to the same). This arose before the Stoics as the need for human freedom. And now they could say to themselves: if a human should strive through his/her freedom towards the ideal of wisdom, the possibility must be offered to him/her also not to strive.

Freedom must reside in striving for the ideal of wisdom. But with this it must be allowed, that one can also remain behind with those features, from which one strives upwards; it must be granted that at the same time one can plunge into the being of sentiment and pain. Then, as the Stoics thought, they plunge down into a kingdom that is not their own human kingdom, but really a kingdom below their true humanity. And to want to reject the wise cosmic order, so that a human can plunge down into such a kingdom that is beneath him/her: doing that is so clever, as if one were to reject the wise cosmic order, since under humanity there is a kingdom of animal, plants and minerals. The Stoics knew that there is a kingdom into which a human being can plunge down, from which his wisdom is far removed: but if he/she can drag himself out of it, but it must be from his/her own free choice, his/her wisdom.

We can see: the concept that many people have who stand before the door to the answers laid out by Spiritual Science about the meaning of evil, already resided in ancient Stoic wisdom; and one cannot say that the grasp of evil as such has shown any real progress in later centuries. At the same time this can emphasise for us, how to go out and encounter a spirit, who was otherwise an exceptionally significant spirit, who lived in the time since the foundation of Christianity and who had a major influence on the forming of Western Christianity: to Augustine. Augustine too had to think over and research the meaning of evil in the world; and he came to a singular expression: that evil and real wickedness hardly exist, but they are simply something negative in that they are the negation of good. So Augustine said to himself: goodness is something positive; but in the end a human being in his/her weakness is not always able to perform it, so that goodness is limited. This limited goodness needs to be explained as something positive, as little as the shadows that are cast forth by the light, need to be explained as something positive. If one were to hear the Church Father Augustine speak about evil, so one might perhaps find such an answer naïve compared with what one might imagine is thinking that has progressed for a few centuries. But how things truly stand with regard to the question of the meaning of evil, can be set out before us, through the answer an erudite man gave precisely the same answer in our time: Campbell, who described the so-called “New Theology” and whose works in certain circles had created a great sensation. He too believes, that one cannot enquire about evil and wickedness, because they show nothing positive, but are simply something negative. We do not wish to get involved in hair-splitting philosophical deductions to refute the viewpoint of Augustine—Campbell. Since, for anyone who can think with an open mind free of prejudice, this response about the simple negativity of evil stands on the same ground as the answer someone might make and says: What then is cold? Cold is only something negative, namely the absence of heat. Therefore, one cannot speak of it as something positive. But if one turns around when it is cold, with no furs or winter clothes on, so one will then feel this negative as something very positive! This image should make it fully clear, how little one straightens things out with this answer that truly does not go beneath the surface, and which indeed even major philosophers of the nineteenth century have given: that with regard to evil and wickedness we have nothing to do with anything positive. It may be that in this regard, we have nothing to do with anything positive; but this “not positive” is precisely as negative as cold is compared with heat.

Now we could put forward a whole group of other thinkers, who through the preparation of their own soul life, one would like to say, came close to what Spiritual Science now has to state. For an example of such, one could put forward Plotinus, the Neo-Platonist, who lived in post-Christian times and still followed the principles of Plato; and with him also put forward at the same time a large number of other thinkers who have thought about evil and wickedness in the world. They tried to make the following clear: that a human being is put together from a spiritual and a material-bodily nature. By plunging down into the bodily, a human being shares in the characteristics of matter, which from the outset creates obstacles and limitations in opposition to the activity of the spirit. In this plunging down of the spirit into matter lies the very origin of evil in human life; but therein also lies the origin of evil in the outer world.

That such a view has not just been considered simply in the heads of individual thinkers as a satisfactory answer to this major question about the significance of evil and wickedness in the world, even though it is greatly widespread, can explain a comment that I will not suppress, because maybe it will make our situation more precisely clear. I will refer to a thinker from an entirely different region: to the significant Japanese thinker, who was a pupil of the Chinese thinker Wang Yang Ming: namely Nakae Toju. For him everything that constitutes experience of the world, consists of two things, of two entities on could say. For him, one entity is this, that he looks up to as to the spiritual, and it permits the human soul to take part in the spiritual: this entity he called Ri. Then he looked at what bodily forms a human being, and which permits the bodily to take part in everything through which is it constructed from matter: and that entity he called Ki. And from the particular juxtaposition of Ri and Ki all beings arose, according to him. For this thinker from the East, who lived in the first half of the seventeenth century, mankind is partly made of Ri and of Ki. But, because the human soul must plunge down with its Ri into Ki in its experience, from Ki the will streams out against it—and with will comes desire. Thus, the human soul in its life is involved in willing and desiring, and so it stands before the possibility of evil.

This thinker from the East, who lived a reasonably short time before us, as was said, in the first half of the seventeenth century, is not far removed from what in Western lands, at the time of Neo-Platonism, of Plotinus for example, one tried to set forth as the origin of evil: humanity's involvement in matter. We shall see later that it is important to refer to this in this way, in order to answer the question of the origin of evil with the involvement of humanity in matter. Precisely this comes to meet us in the most remote circles of human thinking. A thinker of the nineteenth century, who truly was one of its most significant ones, tried to examine evil and wickedness, and I would like to briefly portray the main points of his thinking. He saw in the world around him, part evil, part human wickedness, and he stood before evil and wickedness as a philosopher, who had trained himself in depth about the characteristics of human nature in particular: Hermann Lotze, one of the most significant thinkers of the nineteenth century, whose very significant Microcosm for example, amongst others, described meaningful philosophical works for the nineteenth century. Let us try to call up others before our souls, from amongst our most significant contemporaries, who like Hermann Lotze stood before the issue of evil. He said to himself: evil does not try to deny its existence. How have we attempted to answer the question of evil? For example, it has been said, that evil and wickedness must be there in life; since only through learning how the human soul struggles out of evil, can we be educated. Now Lotze was no atheist, but one who assumed God as living and weaving throughout the world, so he said: how should one then put the idea of education about evil and wickedness? One must assume that God has used evil and wickedness, in order to develop humanity and to elevate it to the free use of its soul. That could only happen, if humans were to organise this inner working for themselves, that is organise our working the way out of evil, and only through this, then learn to recognise one's own true being and its true worth.

Against this Lotze objected at the same time: whoever gives such an answer, does not take account of the animal kingdom first of all, into which in truth not only evil but also wickedness have entered comprehensively. How does cruelty rise up to meet us in the animal kingdom, how does everything, that is taken up in human life, and which can become the most fearsome burden, come to meet us everywhere in the animal kingdom! But whoever wants to lead us to the animal kingdom in this field as regards education, can they not also run into the same animal kingdom issues? So Lotze turned away from the idea of education. In particular he drew attention to the fact that omnipotence of God would contradict this idea of education; since it was only possible then, Lotze thought, to extract the best in a being from the worst: once the worst had been given. But that would contradict the omnipotence of God: first we must work our way out of the worst, at the same time as preparing to be able to build goodness thereupon. So Lotze turns around to say: maybe one should consider more like someone who says that whatever is evil, what is bad, is wickedness. This arises not through the omnipotence of God, nor through the will of any conscious being; but evil is connected with that which exists in the world, in the way for example that the three angles of a triangle that add up together to 180º, are related to a triangle. So, if God wanted to create a world, he must conform to that which is true without him. So any world that he wanted to create is perforce connected with wickedness and evil. So, he must, if he wanted to create a world, prepare evil and wickedness along with it.—Against this Lotze objected: but then we limit what we can properly assume is the working and weaving of a divine being through the world. Since, when one observes the world, then one must say: according to general laws, according to which the appearances of the world can be thought through, it is very likely that it could be thought of without evil and wickedness. If we observe the world, we must say at once, that wickedness contravenes real freedom; so it must be from arbitrariness that freedom was called into being by the divine being.

We could add still other matters that Lotze and other thinkers have said on the problem and riddle of evil—Lotze is mentioned here only as being typical. I will only draw your attention to that to which Lotze came to in the end, because that will be important for us later. So Lotze turned against the German Philosopher Leibnitz, who had written a “Theodysee,” that was a justification of God against evil, and had come to the view that this world, even if it also contained much evil, was still the best possible of all worlds. Because if it was not the best one possible, Leibnitz thought, then either God did not know the best possible world—and that conflicts with his all- knowingness; or else he must not have wanted to create it, which conflicts with his all-goodness; or he must not have been able to do so—and that conflicts with his omnipotence. Now, Leibniz says, since in thought one cannot conflict with these three principles of God, one must assume that the world is the best one possible.—Now against this Lotze objected: in any case one cannot speak of an omnipotence of God, since in the world, where evil exists and the wicked reigns, this would be held to be outflowing from God. Therefore, one must say, as Lotze thought, Leibnitz has limited the omnipotence of God and by doing so won for himself the teaching of the best of all possible worlds.

Now, Lotze thought, there is still a way out. One must say: in general, when we observe the cosmos one can see overall order and harmony; evil and wickedness can only be seen in the details. So Lotze said: but what can a viewpoint give, which depends solely from the vision of humanity? Since about a world, where in general and as a whole, order and harmony command, so as to be able to astound us, and where in details evil and wickedness show themselves as black spots, one could also use the expression: what does it say, when in general and as a whole, order and harmony command in a world, and in details everywhere evil and wickedness is to be found? Here Lotze thought—and this was the culmination of his experience to which we wanted to refer-, one should rather say this one thing: evil and wickedness are indeed in the world. It must be wise that wickedness is there alongside excellence, and evil alongside good; it is just that we cannot see this wisdom. And so we are obliged to accept evil and wickedness beyond the boundaries of our knowledge. It must indeed be wisdom, which is not human wisdom Lotze thought: wisdom we cannot reach and which justifies evil. So Lotze transposed the wise concepts of evil and wickedness into an unknown world of wisdom.

At least I have expressly made these arguments, which for many will seem more or less pedantic, because they show us with what weapons humanity tried to approach the concept of evil and wickedness in philosophical thought, and how here we have found this confession time and again: these weapons have proven themselves to be completely blunt against such an enigma, which we come up against step by step in life; and even as Lotze says, they are completely unsuitable.

Now there is also another thinker, who tried to explore even further than Plotinus did into this, that is, in fact into the underground of being, which can only be reached after a certain development of the soul aimed at uplifting it to higher faculties of knowledge. Such a thinker was Jakob Böhme. And if one approaches Jakob Böhme, one approaches certainly a spirit of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, into which not many nowadays even wish to penetrate, since today he is seen more as a kind of curiosity. Jakob Böhme tried to penetrate into the depths of the world and its appearance up to the point where he felt something like a kind of Theosophy rising up in himself, as a kind of vision of God in his own inner being; and he now tried to make clear to himself, how wickedness and evil are to be pursued into the deepest underground of the world, and how evil and wickedness are not something simply negative, but are in a certain way rooted in the underground of the world and of human existence. Jakob Böhme saw the divine being as something, that in him, as he said—we must first of all become accustomed to his way of expressing himself—one must enter “amicably.” A being that allows its activity to flow out into the world at the same time, could never manage to grasp its own self. This activity must, one would like to say, hit up against something. Basically, each morning in waking up we perceive this to a small degree, and that is what Jakob Böhme put into his imagination. When we wake up, we are in a position so to speak, to unfold our soul-spiritual being to an unlimited extent from our soul-spiritual activity. There we hit up against our environment with our soul- spiritual activity. Through this, that we hit up against our surroundings, we become aware of ourselves. In general, a human being is only self-aware in the physical world, in that he hits up against things. The divine being cannot be such that it hits up against others. It must set up its adversary, or as Jakob Böhme stated in several expressions, its “no” against its “yes” for itself. It must limit its endlessly out-flowing activity in itself. That is…it must “amicably” distinguish, it must at the same time at a certain point create its own opposite on the surrounding circle of its activity; so for Jakob Böhme it was necessary for the divine being, in order to become self-aware, for it to create its own adversary. Now through taking part in the being of a creature, Jakob Böhme thought, not only that which streams out of the diving being, but from what the divine being had to create necessarily as its adversary, wickedness arises: evil above all arose in the world. The divine being set itself up against its own adversary, in order to become self- aware. Therefore, we cannot speak of evil and wickedness, but only of the necessary conditions of the divinity for becoming self-aware. But since creatures arose, and those creatures are not simply embedded in out-flowing life, but take part in the adversary, evil and wickedness have arisen.

Certainly, such an answer cannot be satisfactory to those who attempt to penetrate through spiritual science into the secrets of existence. This is set out here solely in order to show to what depths a sensible thinker goes, if he researches the source of evil in the world. And accordingly, I could also add much that could show us more than what we have found shining back from the world as an answer, when we try and draw close to enigmas, amongst which are wickedness and evil. If we now try and relate to what at the same time arises before us as a confession of one of the most prominent thinkers of the nineteenth century, as a confession by Lotze, we can say something like the following. Lotze is of the view, that there must be such wisdom somewhere, which justifies evil and wickedness. But mankind is limited in its capacity for knowledge; it cannot penetrate to that wisdom.—Are we not standing before, what we have often been forced to mention: that it is a beloved prejudice of our own time, to take our capacity for knowledge as it once was, and to hardly to reflect upon the fact that something could come out of the objects which are in our daily lives; something that could rise above itself, in order to have insight into other worlds, more than the simple world of the senses and the understanding related to the senses? Maybe it has already arisen before us, so that we are unable to find the answers to significant questions such as the origin of evil, because with regard to knowledge that turns to the senses and to the understanding that is related to the sense world, it spirals upwards above and away from this knowledge towards another knowledge. Along the path a way must be found, of which I have often spoken here, a way along which the human soul triumphs over that which is our everyday and usual scientific viewpoint. We have often spoken of the possibility that the human soul struggles to release itself from its bodily nature, that it really can perform a spiritual chemistry, that even releases the soul-spiritual element in mankind from the bodily, just as in outer chemistry, hydrogen is released from water. We have spoken of this: when a human being so releases his/her soul-spiritual nature from the bodily-corporeal one, so that it can rise up to the spiritual and that its bodily nature stands over against the soul-spiritual, so when the soul-spiritual is outside the body and is able to perceive in a spiritual world, then it can see into the depths of the world through direct experience, not within but outside of its body, as far as this knowledge is accessible to him/her. Maybe we should ask ourselves here: what then comes to meet us, when we truly try to walk along this path of spiritual research, the path that has often been described here, and which is set out extensively in my book “How does One Achieve Knowledge of the Higher Worlds?” What are the experiences one arrives at, when one really follows this path, in order to become a participant in super-sensible worlds? Now it will specially interest us, how what we usually call evil in everyday life positions itself on this path. We only need to look somewhat into everyday evil, what people call evil in everyday life. There it emerges, when a spirit researcher begins on his/her path, in order to rise up to soul-spiritual worlds, in order to truly come out of the bodily with his/her soul-spiritual being and to perceive free of the body, that everything that he/she must look back upon as evil, yes even upon imperfection in life, sets the hardest obstacles on his/her path. The most difficult hindrances come from that which one must look back upon as something imperfect. With this I do not want to say that the arrogant teaching follows logically: that anyone who achieves vision in the spiritual world as a spiritual researcher must be called a perfect human being. This should not be understood at all through saying this. But it should be repeated, what was once very forcefully emphasised: that the path to spiritual research is martyrdom in a certain sense, and it is so precisely on the basis that in the moment in which one comes out into the soul-spiritual from the bodily and takes part in the spiritual world, one looks back upon one's life with its imperfections and now knows: you bear these imperfections with you as a comet bears its tail. You bore them in yourself in other lives and must compensate for them in later lives. What you have stepped over until now, without having an awareness of it, now you can see.—This tragic insight into that which we are in everyday life depends on how a human being seeks out the way upwards to the spirit world. If it does not depend upon this, then it is not the true path to the spirit world. Of this act one must say: a certain seriousness of life starts, when one steps up into the spirit world. And if man gains nothing else, at least one conquers this one thing: that one can see one's own evil and one's own imperfections with endless clarity. So, one might say: one conquers an experiential knowledge of evil and imperfection with the very first steps that one takes upwards into the spirit world.

Where does this come from? When we look closer to see where it comes from, we find in this the essential feature of all human evil, so to speak. In my last book “The Threshold of the Spiritual World” I tried to refer to precisely this essential feature of evil, as far as it proceeds outwards from mankind. The common essential feature of all evil is none other than selfishness.—If I wanted to prove this in detail, what I will now set out here, I should have to speak for several hours; but I will only set this out and each person may then follow up for themselves with the further run of thoughts that follow as a consequence. They will also be followed up on in the next lectures, where we shall speak of the “Moral Basis of Human Life.” Basically, all human evil comes forth from what we call selfishness. We shall go and follow through from the smallest details, which we regard as human slip-ups, to the strongest crimes, that are human imperfections and human evil, regardless of whether they are portrayed to us as apparently arising more from the soul or apparently more from the bodily: the common essential feature, that comes from selfishness is universally present. We find the true meaning of evil, when we think of it as bound up with human selfishness; and we find all striving outwards and over imperfections and evil, when we see this striving upwards in the struggle against what we call selfishness. A great deal of careful thinking has been done over some ethical principle or another, over some moral basis or another; but the deeper we plunge into ethical principles and moral foundations, precisely this shows us that selfishness is the common root of all human evil. And so we might say: the more a human being works him/herself free of evil here in the physical world, the more he/she overcomes selfishness.

Now this result leads to another one just behind it; and it is so made one might say, that it is almost oppressive in spiritual investigation, truly oppressive. So what should one then develop, when one seeks to find the way up to the spiritual worlds, to those worlds, that one must look at with the soul- spiritual outside of the body?

When you take this all together, with what I have referred to as soul exercises in the run of these lectures, and which must be used in order to penetrate into the spiritual world, you will find that they run on, in order to strengthen certain soul characteristics, which the soul has in the sense-world, that make the soul stronger and more powerful, so it can set itself up more and more independently. Now what comes out in the physical-sense world as selfishness, that must be strengthened, must be made more intensive when a human being steps up and into the spiritual world. Since only in a strengthened soul, which strengthens those powers in itself that are its very own, which are in its Ego, and are rooted in its I, only such a soul can rise up to the spiritual world. Precisely that which a human must set aside, who wants to appropriate moral principles for the physical world, must be strengthened on the way to the spirit world. A significant mystic made the following statement:

When a rose decorates itself,
It also decorates the garden.

This is certainly true up to certain limits. But in human life selfishness also goes forth, if the human soul is only seen as a “rose” that decorates itself. But for the spirit world, that is perfectly valid. In the spirit world what lies in the expression: “When a rose decorates itself, it also decorates the garden” is present to a higher degree. If the soul rises up to the spirit world, and there it is all the more a useful tool, the more it has been strengthened in itself and has worked outwards on what lies in its inner fullness. Just as one cannot use an instrument that is imperfect, so can the soul itself not use what it has not fully driven out: what lies in it from its I, from its ego.

From this comparison, which takes us away from all facile phrases and leads us into the actual facts that should not be concealed, we now see that this spiritual world stands in relation to the physical sense-world: that the latter must make the former its own task completely. If a human being could only live in the spirit world, then he/she would only be able to develop inner faculties because of the law which must be valid: “When a rose decorates itself, It also decorates the garden”; he/she could not develop those faculties that would bring him/her together with other people, and with the whole world as a benefactor. We must find our abode in the physical world that enables us to overcome selfishness. Otherwise we have no duty to be benefactors in the world, except when we fundamentally educate ourselves away from selfishness, if I may use a trivial expression.

Now the same thing that a spiritual researcher finds to be definitive, namely the strengthening of his/her soul in order to rise up to the spiritual world, that same thing is equally definitive when a human being goes through the gate of death in a natural way, and goes into that world that lies between death and a new birth. There we transpose ourselves into a world, which a spiritual researcher has also reached through his/her soul development. There we must bring the characteristics that the soul has allowed to become strong in itself, which make the sentence true within the soul that runs: “When a rose decorates itself, it also decorates the garden.” In the instant in which we go through the gate of death, we enter into a world, in which our I comes to its highest elevation and strengthening. What we have to do in that world, we will hear in the lecture: “Between Human Death and Rebirth.” Now reference should only be made to this, that in this spiritual world, in essence only that which the soul has itself sent in arrives into this spiritual world, in accordance with what it has experienced in previous earthly lives, in order to structure the following. It must, to the extent that it corresponds to its destiny, primarily be concerned with itself, in the spiritual world between death and a new birth.

When we observe the human soul in this way, then the following appears to us from two different viewpoints. The way how selfishness can be transformed into becoming a benefactor appears in its meaning for the physical-sense world, since this is the large training ground, where the one must come out from the other, so that it may be something of value for the larger circles of existence. And the world between death and rebirth appears to us as that in which the soul must live with more power, and for which the soul would immediately be useless, it were to enter into this world weak and not empowered in this way.

What follows thereupon, that the soul has these two characteristics?

It follows from this, that a human must in fact protect him or herself from that which in one field, in one world is excellent, namely the lifting up of the inner soul into another world so as to somehow use it at the highest level to achieve the spiritual world; but that must be stricken by evil and by the worst, if a human permits him or herself be penetrated by what he/she must live out of as his/her being in the physical-sense world: what is useful to him/her as worthy preparation for the kingdom of the spirit. Thus we must precisely be strong in the spirit between death and new birth, in the strengthening and empowering of our I, with which we can prepare for ourselves such a physical sense being, so that in outer existence, in the acts and thoughts of the physical world we can be as unselfish as possible. We must use our selfishness before our birth in the spiritual world to work upon ourselves; we must look upon ourselves in such a way that we can become unselfish in the physical world, that is to say, moral.

Here, at this point lies everything that one could name as the most valuable for a person who wants to penetrate into the spiritual world. In fact, one must be clear, that one sees one's own evil and imperfection not otherwise than as a shadowy outline, when one is in the spiritual world. That is what shows us, that we must remain connected to the sense world, and how our karma, our destiny must bind us to the sense world, until we have broken through into the spiritual worlds so far that we are able to live not only with ourselves alone, but with the whole world. It shows as if on a screen, how things stand with evil, what is essential in spiritual progress, namely self- perfecting: that must be used on the things of outer life. Trying to make spiritual progress is not something we can allow to cease. That is our duty, far more. And that duty is development for humanity, which is the law for all other living beings. But evil is using directly in outer life, that which is fitting for spiritual development. These two, outer physical life with its morality must necessarily place a second adjacent world, next to that towards which the soul strives inwardly, if we wish to approach the spiritual world.

Now there is something present however, that could appear to be a contradiction. But one would like to say, the world lives in such living paradoxes. It must be said: one must strengthen oneself in the soul; precisely the ego, the I must become stronger in order to penetrate into the spiritual world. But if a spiritual step up were only to develop selfishness, then it would not get very far. But what does that mean? It means: one must enter into the spirit world without selfishness; or rather that one cannot enter without selfishness—which each of us who enters into the spiritual world must painfully acknowledge, so one must have all selfishness so objectively before one, that one sees one's own selfishness, to which one is bound in the outer world. One must also consider how to become an unselfish person using the means of the physical life, because one no longer has the opportunity in the spiritual world to become unselfish, because there one arrives at the strengthening of the soul life. That is only an apparent contradiction. Even when we enter the spiritual world, even when we go through the gate of death into the spiritual world, we must live there with what is present as strength in our inner being. But we cannot achieve this, if we cannot achieve this through selfless life in the physical world. Selflessness in the physical worlds is mirrored as the correct selfishness that raises value in the spiritual world. We can see how difficult the concepts become, as we near the spiritual world. But now one sees at the same time, what human life can involve. So now let us assume that a human being comes through birth into physical being. In that case, it means, that if that being that was in the spirit world before birth or conception, between the last death and the present birth, is clothed in the physical body, then the possibility is present that the person with this, which must at the same time be the life force of the spirit world, pulls through to its physical body unjustifiably; that the soul strays into the bodily, in that it brings down into the physical world that which is good in the spirit world. Then, what is good in the spirit world becomes evil, becomes wickedness in the physical world! That is a significant secret of existence, that a human can bring down what it necessarily needs in order to be a spiritual being, what in a certain sense can be portrayed as its highest being for its spiritual being, into the physical world, and that its highest and best spiritual nature can become the deepest error in the physical sense world.

Through what does evil enter life? Through what is so-called crime in the world?

It is present through the fact that a human being permits his/her better nature, not the worse one, to plunge down into the physical-body, which as such cannot be evil, and to develop those features there, which do not belong in the physical and bodily but belong precisely in the spiritual. Why can we humans be evil? Because we should be spiritual beings! Because we must come into the position, as soon as we live our way into the spirit world, to develop those features, which become bad, if we use them in the life of the physical sense world. If you allow those features which are lived out in the physical world as cruelty, malice for its own sake and others, to be taken out of the physical sense world, and let the soul be penetrated by them and live them out in the spirit world instead of the physical sense world, then there they will take us further, towards perfecting characteristics. That a human being uses the spiritual in the opposite way in the sense world, that leads to its evil. And if he/she could not be evil, he/she could not be a spiritual being. Since the characteristics that can make him/her evil, he/she must have; otherwise he/she could never rise up to the spiritual world.

Perfection lies herein, that a human being learns to penetrate himself/herself through and through with the insight: you should not use the features that make you into an evil human being in physical life, not in this physical life; since as much as you use them here, so much you take away from the empowering characteristics of the soul for the spiritual, so much you need to awaken yourself to the spiritual world. There these characteristics are in their correct place. So we see, as spiritual science shows, that evil and wickedness through their own nature indicate that we must assume a soul-spirit world alongside the physical world. Then why do the human faculties of knowledge of someone like Lotze or other thinkers freeze, when they observe the sense world and say: we cannot penetrate into the origin of evil and wickedness? Because of what is present—a capacity for knowledge that cannot penetrate to the spiritual world—, because it cannot enlighten evil starting from the physical world, because it is a misuse of powers that belong in the spirit world! No wonder also, that no philosopher, who has a viewpoint from the spirit world, can find the essence of evil in the physical sense world! And if one has a tendency to penetrate from here into a further world, in order to find the origin of evil, then also does one not come to any knowledge of outer evil, of that which we encounter as badness and imperfect in the outer world, such as for example in the animal world. So, we must be clear, that evil in human behaviour arises from this, that what for a human being is great and perfect in one world, as soon as it is uprooted into another world, it is changed over into its opposite. But when one considers evil independently of humanity in the world, the evil that flows through the animal world, then one has to say: we must then be clear upon this, that not only beings like humans are present, who through their life, bring down what belongs in the spirit world and there is great, and bear them into another world where it is out of place. Other beings must also exist—and a glance onto the animal world shows us also, that apart from humanity other beings must exist, which in the region, where humanity cannot take its evil, now bear their wickedness and so create evil. That means, that we are led by the knowledge of where the source of wickedness lies, at the same time to recognise that not only can humanity insert itself as imperfect in the world, but also that other beings are there, which can bring imperfections into the world. And so we say that it is no longer incomprehensible, when a spiritual researcher says: the world of animals is basically an outer formation of an invisible spirit; but in that spirit world beings are there, which have done before humanity itself, what mankind now does, in that it inserts the spiritual unjustifiably into the physical world. From this all the evil in the animal world has arisen.

It should be stated today, that people are wrong if they believe one can ascribe the impulse for evil to this involvement in matter, based upon material existence, because the soul is involved in a material existence. No, evil arises precisely thought the spiritual characteristics and through the spiritual possibilities of activity of humanity. And we must say to ourselves: where lies the wisdom in the world order, that wished to limit mankind to this, to only unfold goodness in the sense world—and not evil, as we see through it, as we have seen, that it necessarily must take power in order to go forward in the spirit world? Through the fact that we are a being that belongs both to the physical world and to the spiritual world, and that in us not the imperfection, but the perfection of spiritual law lies, we are placed in a position, like a pendulum, that can swing out to one side; and we are placed in the position to swing out to the other side, because we are spirit beings, which can bear the spiritual into the physical world, in order to realize evil there, as others, beings who perhaps higher than mankind are able to realize evil, which they have borne into the sense world, and which should belong solely in the spirit world.

I know very well that in such a portrayal of the origin of wickedness and evil something has been said today, which can only be enlightening to a small number of human beings, but who live ever more and more into the human soul life. For one will find that resolving the problems of the world overall is only possible, when we think of our world as one with a spiritual basis. Humanity may one day finish with the perfection of the sense world—there is also an illusion about such things; but with the imperfections, with wickedness and evil, it will never come to an end, if it does not want to seek, to what extent this wickedness and evil must be in the world. And one has insight, that it must be in this world, if one says to oneself: evil is only displaced into the physical world. If the characteristics which mankind uses unjustifiably in the physical world, and which there establish evil, were used in the spirit world, so mankind would go forward there.

I have no need to say that it would be entire nonsense, if someone were to draw conclusions from what has just been said: that you portray that only villains move forward in the spiritual world. It would be a complete travesty of what has been said. This is because these characteristics only become evil through their being used in the sense world, and they undergo a kind of immediate metamorphosis if they are used in the spirit world. Whoever wishes to raise such an objection, resembles someone who says: so you maintain that it is entirely good, if a human being has the strength to smash a watch? Certainly it is good if he has that strength; but he does not need to use that strength to smash the watch. If it is used to cure humanity, then it is a good power. And in this sense, one must say: the powers that a human being allows to flow into evil, are only evil in that place; used right in the right place, are they good powers.

It must lead us deep into the secrets of human existence, if one can say: through what is mankind evil? Through its using the powers granted to it for its perfection, in the incorrect place! Through what is wickedness, is evil in the world? Through humans using forces that are lent to them in an unsuitable world.

In our present time one could say at once: for the underlying soul there is a distinct tendency present to incline towards the spirit world. A more precise intimate glance onto the nineteenth century and on up to our present time could teach us this. Against this in the nineteenth century amongst the philosophers there also came into play what has been called pessimism, a world view that immediately looks at the wicked and to the evil present in the world, and draws the conclusion some individuals have already drawn it—, that this world cannot be seen as good overall, that something other is required of mankind, than being led to its end. I will only refer to Schopenhauer or to Eduard von Hartmann, who both saw the solution for mankind, in that they said: an individual can only find his/her salvation in the rise of world processes, but not in a personally satisfying conscious purpose. But I would like to refer to something else: that the soul in the age of matter is imprisoned in materialism, and that in this time the strongest hopelessness must arise towards the world's evils, towards the wicked; since materialism rejects a spiritual world, out of which light shines upon us, to give its meaning to evil and to the wicked. If this world is rejected, it is entirely necessary that this world is hopelessly covered in filth by evil and wickedness in their purposelessness.—I will not refer to Nietzsche today, but to another spirit of the nineteenth century. From a certain viewpoint I also wish to refer to a tragic thinker of the nineteenth century: from the viewpoint that a human being must necessarily live with their time, in that he/she is inserted into their own time. That is a property of our being, that our being finds itself together with the being of our time. So it was only natural that in the latest times, that deeply formed spirits, yes, precisely those who had an open heart for what took place in their surroundings, we deeply gripped by that world description, which only wants to see the outermost appearance of the alpha and omega of world existence. But such spirits can often give in to an illusion, that one can go through the world inconsolably, if one must look into that world existence which must be portrayed as evil—and cannot look up to a spiritual world, in which evil is justified, as we have seen.

A spirit who, I would like to say, went through the entire tragedy of materialism, even though he was not a materialist himself, was Philipp Mainländer, born in 1841. One could call him a follower of Schopenhauer, if one observes things outwardly. In a certain sense he was a deep spirit, but a child of his time, so that he could only look upward to what the material world exposes. Now materialism worked indeed, enormously to imprison precisely the very best souls: we should not be deceived about this. Yes, the humans, who are not concerned with what is around them, what the times and their spirit offer, and who live selfishly in a religious confession that they have once found pleasant, the “most religious” people are sometimes in this point the most selfish of all; they reject any rising above the things which they love, and do not concern themselves about anything else, other than what they know. One can find this answer again and again, if one refers to the tragedy of numberless human beings: yes, cannot old Christianity satisfy souls much more than your spiritual science? Such questions are put by spirits who do not go along with the times and intolerantly reject everything that should penetrate into cultural development for the salvation of mankind.

Philipp Mainländer looked around him, at what outer science, what our time was able to tell him from its materialistic viewpoint, and there he could only find a world filled with evil and mankind involved in wickedness. He could not deny it, since the pressure of this new world view was so strong that it hindered the soul from looking up to a spiritual world. So let us not try and conceal from ourselves here: why do so few people come to spiritual science? That is because, since the pressure of the prejudice of materialism, or as it is called more nobly, of monism is so powerful, it darkens the soul and prevents its penetrating into the spirit world. If the soul is left independent and to itself and is not dulled by materialist prejudice, then it will surely come to spiritual science. But the pressure is large, and from our time on, one can say: it is connected to the epoch, in which one can represent spiritual science before humanity with a few perspectives, because the desire of souls has become so strong, that spiritual science must find an echo in souls. In the second and third thirds of the nineteenth century that echo was unable to be present. Then the pressure of materialism was so strong, that even a soul striving towards the spirit such as that of Philipp Mainländer was held back. And so he came to a unique view: to the view that nothing spiritual can be found in the current world. We have in Mainländer in the nineteenth century a spirit before us, who only did not make a major impression on his contemporaries, because the spirit of the nineteenth century, despite its major progress in material areas, was a superficial spirit. But what a soul must feel in the nineteenth century, that Mainländer felt, even when he stood alone, because in a certain way he felt a kind of spiritual impotence regarding the removal of that which must leave one dissatisfied with a materialistic or monistic world view. One does not need to pick up and read the somewhat thick volume of Mainländer's “Philosophy of Salvation,” but only the reasonably small booklet by Max Seiling, in order to make a judgement about what I am saying now.

Philipp Mainländer looked out into the world, and he could only see under the pressure of materialism, what the senses and understanding portray. But he must assume a spirit world. But it is not there, he told himself; the sense world must be illuminated from itself. And now he came to the view that the spirit world of our ancestors was real, that once there was a divine spirit existence, that our soul was within a divine- spiritual existence, and that the divine existence from a former being has gone over into us, and that our world can only be there, because God had died before that spirit world died before us. So Mainländer sees a spirit world, but not in our world; but in our world he only sees a cadaver loaded with evil and wickedness, which can only be there, so that its destruction can be overcome, so that what led to God and his spirit world to die, should not enter into the destruction of the cadaver into nothingness.—Monists or other thinkers may laugh more or less at this; whoever better understands the human soul and knows how a world view can become the inner destiny of a soul, how the entire soul can adopt the nuances of a world view. He/she knows what a human being must experience, who, like Mainländer, was forced to transpose the spirit world into past times and was only able to see the material cadaver of the same left behind in the current world. In order to resolve the evils of this world, Mainländer had taken up this kind of world view. That he was more deeply involved in his world view than Schopenhauer or Nietzsche, than Bahnsen or Eduard von Hartmann, we can see from that fact that, at the time of finishing his “Philosophy of Salvation” in his fifty-third year, the thought came to him: your strength has been used lovelessly, since you more quickly offer what appears as your salvation of humanity, than when you still used it after the middle of the life in the body. That Mainländer thought with his world view with the deepest sincerity is shown from the fact that he, when he came to this thought: you now use more strength, when you pour out your power into the world and do not concentrate on the body. He really drew the conclusion, which Schopenhauer and the others did not draw, and died through suicide, and that is, a suicide through conviction.

Philosophers and others may look away from such a human destiny: for our time however, such a human destiny is endlessly significant, because it shows us how the soul must live, which can really pierce down into its depths, to that which as longing can resurrect in our time—how the soul can live and confront the problem of wickedness and evil in the world, and have not any vision into the world where spiritual light spreads out and illuminates the sense of wickedness and of evil. It was necessary that the human soul should develop the materialistic capacities for a period. One can also position in a certain future of spiritual life, I would like to say, under a “psycho-biological viewpoint,” a point of view of the soul life, and make clear to oneself, that only when lifted up to the spiritual, does what appears in a physical image, for example in animal beings, become valid for human beings. Certain animals can go hungry for a long time and also are hungry for a long time. Tadpoles for example, can bring about their rapid transformation into frogs through long hunger. Similar behaviour is also shown in certain fishes with long hunger, because back-bone building processes come into play, that make it possible to perform what they have to perform; they are hungry because they hold back the forces, they otherwise take in through taking in nourishment, in order to force a way into another form. That is an image that is suitable for use for the human soul: through centuries it has lived through people constantly talking about the “boundaries of human knowledge”; and even many who believe that they think spiritually, are nonetheless entirely devoted to materialistic imaginations—which are willingly called monistic today because people are ashamed of them—, and even philosophers are devoted to the maxim: human knowledge can do no more than make a halt, when it stands before the greatest riddles. The capacities that led them to everything, had to be trained for a period: that is to say that humanity must undergo a period of spiritual starvation. This was the time of the arising of materialism. But the powers that were held back in souls through this, they will now lead human souls to seek for the way into the spirit world in accordance with a psycho- biological law. Certainly one will find that human pondering had to take the form that we meet up with in Mainländer, who could no longer find the spirit world in the physical world, because materialism had taken him. He was forced to remain before the physical world: there he only had the power to visualise errors, and not that which underlies our world, that indeed gives us the possibility in find something out in our souls, that refers to the future just as the outer world refers to the past. It cannot be denied, that in a certain sense Mainländer was correct: what our world sets out all around us, are the remains of original development. Even present-day geologists have to admit today, that we, in that we wander across the earth, are walking away a cadaver. But what Mainländer could not show, that is, that we, to the extent that we are walking over a dead body, at the same time are developing something in our inner being, which is precisely a seed for the future, as that which is all around us is a bequest from the past. And to the extent that we look into this, what spiritual science is for individual souls, it can resurrect in us, that which Mainländer was not yet able to see, and therefore was forced to doubt.

So we stand at the watershed between two epochs: the epoch of materialism and that of spiritual science. And maybe nothing can prove it to us in such a popular form, as when we, if we correctly understand our soul, must live up against the spiritual epoch, as considering evil and wickedness, when we are able to lift up our sight to the illuminated heights of the spirit world. I have often said, that with such considerations one feels oneself in harmony with the best spirits of all ages, who have longed, as mankind must live in an ever-clearer manner as against the future. If one such spirit, with whom one feels in full harmony, made a remark about the outer sense world, that is like a call for spiritual knowledge, so we should also put together what today has been able to enter into our souls, and this should spark off a kind of transformation of such a remark.

Goethe let something be said in his Faust, that shows how a human being can lose their way away from the spirit. Mankind's distance from the spirit world is set out paradigmatically in a beautiful sentence with the words:

Whoever wants to know and describe the living,
Tries first of all to drive out the spirit,
Then he has the parts in his hand,
Except, sadly! only their spiritual bond is missing.

So, this is how things lie in a certain way for all knowledge of the world. It was the destiny of mankind, to devote itself to parts for a few centuries. But ever more and more one will perceive the absence of the spiritual bond as not only a theoretical deficiency, but as a tragedy of the soul. Therefore, spiritual researchers must today look into the soul overall, which the majority of souls do not know how to do themselves: and catch sight of the longing for the spirit world. And if we set our eyes upon something, such as illuminating the nature of evil and of wickedness, then perhaps we may extend Goethe's remark, in that we take the following as a summary of what was said.

Goethe thought that whoever wants to strive for a world view, should not stop at parts alone, but must see the spiritual bond above all. But whoever approaches as significant a life question as the riddle of evil and wickedness, he should say based on spiritual-scientific foundations, as a summary of his/her persuasion in accordance with his findings:

Whoever does not solve the soul riddle,
Remains in the simple light of the senses;
Whoever wants to understand life
Must strive towards spirit heights!

Anthroposophically orientated spiritual science, which I had occasion to speak of here last week and this week, is pretty well none of the things which people who do not know it believe it to be. This may already have been apparent from the two previous lectures. Above all you will hear people who have only superficially considered this spiritual scientific approach say that the results, or let us say, for the moment, the results that have been referred to, of this approach have to be completely ignored in the light of present-day natural scientific insights.

You may also hear it said that in the light of the most significant, major and crucial issues in our present time—all of them more or less in the social sphere—something said to have been brought down from the spiritual world, said to be the result of supersensible insight, proves impractical and without significance. Finally there are a third group of people who will keep stressing that this spiritual science serves to draw people away from genuine, well-founded religious responses and feelings, that it contributes to the lack of religion in our time, and that it does in fact present considerable dangers in this respect.

Today I want to speak mainly about these three misconceptions concerning anthroposophically orientated spiritual science. The day after tomorrow I’ll then attempt to present a picture of historical development in more recent times from the point of view of this supersensible science.

To enter more deeply into the whole configuration of people’s thinking in our time, we simply must look at everything which in the course of the last three or four centuries, and especially the 19th century, has given natural scientific thinking the radical significance of which I have spoken sufficiently, I think, in the earlier lectures. We need to look at this origin of natural-scientific thinking because people think in this way not only in the natural sciences. All over the world any question is—quite justifiably—considered in some way in the light of natural science. So we may indeed say that in so far as we see that the historical development of recent times has in a wholly elementary way given people’s inner life a natural-scientific orientation, this orientation has its justification. On the other hand we may also say that spiritual science would immediately give itself bad marks if it were to enter into any kind of conflict with the natural-scientific thinking of recent times. It does not get into conflict, however; quite the contrary—natural-scientific thinking and hence the whole orientation of present-day thinking, in every aspect of life, will only gain a solid foundation if those taking the natural-scientific approach are prepared to base themselves on spiritual science, making it their foundation.

Wanting to consider this question, initially I would say in a negative way, we have to take a bit of a look at how not modern natural science, but the specific way of modern thinking in natural science has arisen. And we have to say that anyone who considers history not in an outer, superficial way but by asking himself: How did the most profound abilities humanity has, also in the soul, develop through the ages? Just as an individual person develops and we cannot say that he is inwardly the same at 30, 40 or 50—how did humanity develop its ideas, its whole way of thinking, until they finally came to the ideas that tend to be dominant at the present time? Studying the evolution of the human mind without prejudice, one will find that in earlier times, and we may say until the 17th century, this humanity had different ideas on the inner life of man, on the divine principle in the world, and on nature. Going into this development more deeply we will also find confirmation in outer ways. Go back to earlier times and you’ll never find people looking at the outer world perceived through the senses, the natural world outside, and the ‘nature of the human soul’ as they called it, as separate from each other. Even in the 16th and on into the 17th century, writings on the natural order of things would always also include what people had to say about the nature of the human soul at the time. Indeed, in those days they had not only the teachings of theology that came through revelation but also a theologia naturalist¹⁰⁷ a theology that wanted to derive its teachings, its view of life, from the nature of the human soul.

This is an outward sign of a significant fact. In earlier times, before the scientific thinking of more recent times arose, people had the ideas which at one and the same time could give a satisfactory explanation of the natural world and also say something about the inner life of human beings. Concepts of soul and spirit were not as separate then from those of nature and world as has been the case from the 17th and 18th centuries onwards, when modern scientific thinking came fully into its own. And those different concepts—this is the important point—were not established in an arbitrary way in those days and changed at will. The fact that concepts changed has to do with human powers of evolution that are a necessity in the course of that evolution as is the change in body and soul constitution in the process of individual human development as we grow older, moving on from childhood to old age.

The situation is that today we have arrived at concepts, through natural science, that will no longer serve if we want to use them directly to explain the life of the human psyche. This we have seen last week. Someone who is able to think in terms of modern science, doing so in a straight and honest way, accepting the inevitable consequences, must ask himself: If we gain insight into nature, what significance does this have for the evolution of modern humanity?

A satisfactory answer to this question can only be found if one is able to investigate natural science and establish its essential nature. If you base yourself from the beginning on the belief that natural science is all and everything when it comes to explaining the world, you will not find a satisfactory answer to this question. You need to be able to ask yourself: How does natural science relate to the whole of human evolution? Only this will give a clear idea of what natural science is able to achieve.

We need to be able, as it were, to study natural science itself in a natural scientific way. And here we may well point out that significantly, even great minds who considered the matter have come to the conclusion that natural science has natural limits, as it were, limits of which we spoke in the first lecture. Thoughtful people of our present age do feel that when they try to gain an overview of what natural science registers in its different fields, they have to say to themselves: With all these ideas, all the concepts which natural science provides on the basis of the strict methods of investigation we have, we do not really get to the natural need for insight that we have in our souls. They feel, in a way, that natural science exists and cannot be other than it is—leaving aside errors and exceptions, of course—but that exactly when it meets its ideal it cannot satisfy the most profound need for insight that human beings have with regard to the world of nature.

Perhaps I may put their feelings in the following paradoxical way. People are agreed—developments have gone that way in more recent times—that our ancestors were at a childlike level of knowledge until the more recent natural science brought a change. The ancients developed ideas out of a soul quality that was more or less given to fantasy. They had ideas in which they assumed all kinds of spiritual elements in the natural world, and they also developed their concepts in accord with this. It has been said that they looked for the forces that lay behind natural phenomena. But the ideas of the ancients were childlike, so that they did not find forces but only spectres of nature. And people who are proud of the achievements of modern science were to some extent arrogant when they looked back to those earlier thinkers, people of an earlier time on earth who sought to discover what lay behind the visible world of nature. And instead of the actual forces of nature, which are at last being discovered today, those ancients were looking for all kinds of spectres, spirits that had personal qualities and the like and were behind the phenomena of nature, spirits of which in the age of natural science one could only think that they have absolutely nothing to do with the natural order but arose from a power in the human soul that was unable to penetrate to the reality of nature, and therefore developed all kinds of ideas about the natural world.

Until quite recently this was a dogma which everyone thinking in terms of natural science would consider quite natural. Today, however, some individuals, whose views are certainly worth noting, are coming to realize: If we take a real look at our concepts of nature, not given to the prejudiced idea that we are able to grasp the essential nature of the natural world with those concepts of nature, but taking these concepts of nature as they are and waiting to see how they relate to what we really experience with regard to nature when we bring the whole human being into play and not only the intellect and skills of experimentation, then these concepts of nature are like those ancient spectres when compared to unbiased insight. There are people without prejudice today who say: The ancients thought up spectres out of their inner state of soul; but we are not really doing anything different, especially if we are real natural scientists. For the ideas of nature we imagine we have in our heads are just as unreal in relation to nature as the old spectres which natural scientists believed to be unreal.

This insight has its justification. And you find the justification by asking: How does the human being gain insight into nature? Initially we are at most observing nature, having no insight. And as we observe nature what we see has a very different kind of life to it than the life of the image we are able to have in our scientific ideas. If we meet the world of nature with eyes and ears, as whole human beings, which also includes the thinking mind, and do not only think in natural laws or do experiments in laboratories; if we observe nature as it presents, and think through the observations we make, then we live with nature. And when we begin to investigate nature, we cannot take the life from nature with us. Being unable to take the life from nature with us because as living beings at one with nature we are only in immediate living experience in our observation, we really make nature poorer when we try to grasp it with natural science, sucking it in, as it were. And when we want to gain real natural scientific insight, we make nature into a spectre in doing so. This is simply a fact and can be observed just as anything else is observed.

It is important, however, to have the courage to admit that this is the case and that in gaining insight into nature we really come to a kind of view that takes the image gained of nature as a spectre. We come to put this truth to our souls, saying that insight into nature is therefore something that takes us into something ghostly. In the hither and thither of gaining scientific insight into nature the human being behaves in such a way that he moves away from nature, from the observation of nature, and nurtures a ghost of nature.

There has been someone in more recent human history who has said what I have just been saying in a less open and therefore also less paradoxical way, but who had a profound feeling for this. This was Goethe. He already knew how to approach nature in this way, a way that was in harmony with itself. He was misunderstood as a result and considered an amateur in the field of science. Even today, it takes a lot of effort—I am allowed to say this because I have been trying for decades to get people of our time to develop an understanding of Goethe in this direction—to understand Goethe’s way of looking at nature.

What way is this? This way, which will be developed more and more and which may indeed still have been amateurish or imperfect in Goethe’s case, needs to be developed further in a truly scientific way. It will then lead to genuine insight into nature in all spheres. What is it? It is that we can approach the gaining of insight, in so far it moves away from nature itself and is more reflective—I spoke of this last week, but from a different point of view—in such a way that we use this reflection not only to give nature opportunity to present the human mind with its ghostly nature. Goethe did not seek to establish natural laws. These are always abstractions, something dead compared to living nature. Goethe sought to find pure phenomena, or archetypal phenomena, as he called them. He wanted to use human thinking not as something that might provide explanations for nature, discovering laws such as the conservation of energy or of matter, which are entirely thought up. No, Goethe sought to use thought to bring phenomena together in such a way that nothing of the human being himself would speak any more through these natural phenomena but the phenomena would speak purely out of themselves.

If we now progress from the instinctive quality of Goethe’s thought to gaining insight in full conscious awareness, in a reflective way, where does this take us? We will then answer the question in a way which is only possible with perception that goes beyond the senses. We will ask: What is it, really, which we observe in the natural world when we use our senses? It is a spectre of the kind I mentioned, a making ghostly. It is, of course, already there in the natural world, for we suck it out of it. But what else is there in the world of nature, apart from this, when we are in lively interchange with it, using our eyes and ears, giving ourselves up directly to the impressions gained through the senses?

Someone who trains his power to form ideas on the one hand and his powers of will on the other to develop supersensible perceptiveness will reach a point where he says to himself: ‘The supersensible is actually therein anything the senses perceive in the natural world around us.’ It is merely that we leave the supersensible aside, and indeed have to leave it aside when we seek insight into the natural world. Why? Because we human beings, being organized in our physical bodies the way we are whilst here on earth between birth and death, have transformed our own spiritual and eternal aspect into a body that is perceptible to the senses. We are not human by virtue of dwelling in a house of the supersensible that lives in us but by virtue of having entered, through birth or conception, from a supersensible world into the sensual sphere. The supersensible element which before this lived in a purely spiritual sphere has changed into a sensual body that lives to the full as something sensual and on death returns to the supersensible, as I have shown in the previous lecture.

Being human and therefore organized for the senses, observation of nature has to move away from the supersensible in us when it becomes scientific insight into nature. A truly supersensible way of thinking will thus tell us the following here. We come to realize that when we have nature before us in all the rich variety of light and colours, in many shades, and all the other phenomena perceived through the senses, something supersensible is revealed that is not separated from what we perceive through the senses; it is a supersensible element within the sensual. Yet when we look at it as human beings and seek to explain, we can only take from nature what we human beings—being sensual creatures that belong to sensuality between birth and death and not to the supersensible that comes to revelation in the sensual—are able to digest. Being organized in that way, we make our science of nature into a mere image of the sensual because of our own sensual nature. This image of the sensual must be a spectre, for the world of nature that surrounds us also has the supersensible within it.

Someone who truly develops the ability to observe the supersensible—you will also find the way described in my Occult Science or Knowledge of the Higher Worlds (How to Know Higher Worlds)—will say to himself: Supersensible aspects exist for everything in the universe outside. And if we go beyond the spectre which we have to create for ourselves in the image we have of nature, we come not to dead atoms, nor to energy or matter, but to a supersensible, spiritual aspect. This can and must make it possible for us to find a way of gaining supersensible insight.

Someone who gains insight into the way human beings relate to nature around them will not look for dead atoms, nor molecules, nor for something that is super-sensibly sensual, but for the truly supersensible. Supersensible investigation does not provide material bases for the colours and sounds that surround us. Instead you find spiritual, supersensible entities that are present everywhere in the natural world. If the study of nature is taken in the right sense, which is when it purely seeks to consider phenomena inwardly, in the Goethean way, you do not have something dead with regard to the truths that lie beyond the phenomena, but something that is alive and spiritual. It is particularly if you investigate the natural world honestly and consistently, if rational thinking and experimentation skills do not lead you to think that you can discern something relating to nature, but if you know that you can do no other but let nature become phenomenon, letting it express itself, then you will know that with these phenomena, which Goethe called ‘archetypal phenomena’, you have the supersensible immediately before you. It will then not be necessary to use laws of energy and matter to explain things. Instead you will find it becomes necessary to explain things out of the spiritual aspect. Essentially this leads to a view that is genuinely objective and unbiased, I would say a natural scientific study of the process of gaining insight into nature itself.

How does the science of the spirit, which seeks supersensible insight of its own accord, relate to this? If you follow the way to supersensible perception which I characterized for you last week, you will say: When a person transforms his ability to form ideas and powers of will and truly becomes able to perceive the supersensible in the way we see colours with our eyes and hear sounds with our ears; when a person sees this supersensible element the way he normally sees the sensual sphere in life, this transition to supersensible vision is truly like an awakening in the inner experience of the soul. And the spiritual investigator does indeed go through this living experience. We may say that just as in ordinary life someone wakes from the life of sleep and dreams and realizes that during his sleep and in the life of dreams he lived merely in images, and then knows how to connect his will with outward reality, the person with spiritual perception who advances to supersensible investigation will awaken from the world in which we are in our ordinary waking state. He will have another world before him that relates to the everyday world of the senses the way this everyday world of the senses relates to the world of dream images. It is an awakening. This can come to life in the soul.

The phenomena we have all around us in the world then become images relating to the higher, supersensible world, just as someone thinking in a healthy way will take dream images to be images of what we have in the world of the senses. Let me give an example to indicate how the everyday world perceived through the senses changes into a world of images for someone with spiritual perception. These things just have to be rightly understood, not in some kind of mystic dream, nor in any kind of nebulous way. In ordinary natural science the way of looking at the human being is to attach equal value to the head, the trunk, the extremities—with the part that continues in an inward direction, I mean now, so that from the morphological point of view everything sexual also belongs to the extremities. From the usual point of view, these three parts of human nature are something absolute, I would say, something of equal value. From the spiritual point of view, the human being who is before us as a creature perceived through the senses becomes the image of his higher, supersensible nature, just as everyday experiences turn into images when we dream of them. And when we thus consider the human being in the light of his eternal supersensible nature, our understanding of the human being will also change.

Bringing image nature into our search for insight completely changes human perceptiveness. Head and—to take just these two parts of human nature—extremities nature are then no longer equal in value, for in the configuration of the head, if studied exactly, you see something which in it forms resembles the life in the spirit that preceded the individual’s entrance into the world of the senses. And in the nature of the extremities you see what is there already as potential—embryonic as yet, but it will develop—for what the individual will be in the future, above all when he goes through the gate of death to enter into the supersensible world. It may still sound strange today, but this is what will develop from Goethe’s theory of metamorphosis if it is taken up in a truly spiritual-scientific way.

Goethe considered the changing form of an individual plant, the changing form of an individual animal or human being to be like images of a basic configuration. In a comprehensive spiritual theory of metamorphosis, the head will be seen as a metamorphosis of the person’s extremities, but in such a way that the one refers to the past, the other to the future. The human being’s external configuration will then be the image of what he is in spirit. And everything then becomes image of the supersensible, just as a dream becomes image when we enter into sleep. The human being’s reality in the supersensible sphere becomes image of this supersensible whilst he is awake in the sensual sphere, just as the sensual becomes image when he falls asleep. This is an immediate finding made in the supersensible, something I may call an empirical finding.

Let us now compare what this supersensible perception gains out of itself concerning the nature of the world and indeed the human being when it seeks to penetrate the nature of the human being. The human being and the whole of nature becomes image and this needs to be related to a supersensible reality. This does not entirely agree with anything a thinking modern natural scientist finds in final conclusion. He finds that his natural phenomenon turns into a spectre, an image. Supersensible insight shows that everything we perceive in the sphere of the senses must turn into image and needs to be related to something that is supersensible. In short, nothing brings us as much to a harmonious concept of the world as the discoveries made not as a modern natural scientist adhering to dogma but as a thinking natural scientist, someone who is able to observe his natural science itself in a natural scientific way. His findings will agree with anything the spiritual scientist has to say about the natural world in so far as it is open to observation. This is something that must come for humanity.

People need to be in a position where they can truly see how the way to the supersensible and the way to the sensual which is penetrated with thought come together. This alone will give a total image of the world that makes us not merely possessors of a ghostly reflection of nature but lets us realize, lets us admit that using the ordinary way of explaining nature we had to create such a ghostly reflection, yet at the same time shows us how we can go beyond this image of nature and enter into the supersensible realm of the spirit. This is the way in which natural-scientific thinking will also have to go if it is to go beyond the sphere into which it has to take itself of necessity, especially when meeting its own ideal. Contradictions arise when we believe we have grasped nature in the study of it but have really only taken hold of something that will not allow us to look down on the old ‘spectres’, for it is but spectre itself, and the spiritual reality must be sought behind it.

Insight in the spirit, of the kind which is meant here, thus is not in opposition to natural science. Quite the contrary, it provides natural science with the element that it must find to understand itself; it provides something which unconsciously is the goal of every true natural scientist’s search; it provides the element which alone can give satisfaction, for natural scientific investigation must by its very nature inevitably lead to dissatisfaction, especially if done in the accepted way.

If people will gradually perceive the true nature of supersensible insight they will find that natural science of the more recent kind can only survive if they complement it with the science of the spirit. People working in the field must themselves desire to have supersensible insight. This alone will bring true insight into nature, that is, access to the supersensible realm.

I only wanted to mention this briefly. One could give many lectures and show that the very idea of natural science demands a science of the spirit if it is not to come to nothing, with misunderstanding arising about the findings made in natural science. I just wanted to show that natural scientists must themselves look for this science of the spirit. Great triumphs have been celebrated in natural science, and tremendous advances have been made on the human road to knowledge. But if natural science continues along the way it is going now, it will go beyond itself and take us to the spirit. Today the situation is that only people who are able to think scientifically themselves should take a critical attitude to natural science, not taking a negative stance from either ignorance or antipathy, but a positive one. If I may make a personal remark, which I am only doing because it is perhaps connected with the factual situation, it is this. Many people have accused me of publishing some works in which intense efforts were made to justify 19th-century natural science, so that they are wholly based on natural science—as far as this is possible when using the natural scientific way of thinking. However, I would not be entitled to say a single word to you today or to other audiences where I take the direction I have taken today if I could not also say that I knew how to be very positive, wholly in agreement in so far as agreement is justifiable, with natural science. I think you have to know natural science and appreciate its achievements before you are allowed to speak about it. All the talk about natural science by ‘mystics’ or theosophists who know nothing about it is wholly inappropriate.

This, I think, will suffice to refer briefly to the first misapprehension suffered by people who know nothing about anthroposophically orientated spiritual science but who talk about it.

The second misapprehension is that people consider anything that goes in the direction of supersensible insight to be impractical and of no use in everyday life. A negative view is taken of this especially in the present time because present-day people are truly, in the fullest sense of the word, compelled to throw themselves into practical life. Well, let us consider this from just one aspect, though it is an important one, and that is the view taken of human social life. Scientific and other views of this have in fact become slogans and major themes in more recent times. Essentially the things that have happened in this field are also wholly in accord with the natural-scientific way of thinking. In my view it is not helpful for the people who want to be sociologists, being such in the right sense of the word for our time and wanting to establish a science of sociology, to try more and more to adopt ideas and concepts from natural science, applying them to human social life. I would actually consider this to be a great deal less helpful because theories really have very little significance when it comes to practical life in the real sense, something which is particularly evident from the supersensible point of view.

Think of everything Lasalle was thinking of when he developed the approach which he then presented in his famous lecture on science and the workers.¹⁰⁸ His ideal was that human social life would need to be taken out of the instinctive sphere into a scientific approach, exactly through modern socialism. He believed that the proletariat needed to learn to think in scientific terms and that this would bring about a new age. We then saw how in Marxism, with its materialistic view of history, and with a thinking that was deliberately scientific, people tried to establish an approach on the basis of a theory that was to be taken up into human minds and would lead to social structures for the world. Well, people who today, when the last four years have swept across the world, are still unable to see that human minds will be little influenced by anything based on such theories, will no doubt come to see it in the decades which lie ahead. Theories really count for little when it comes to what we should really be considering here, and that is social community life, structuring it out of the human impulses in the most comprehensive sense possible. A great deal lies in these few words ‘structuring social relationships out of the human impulses.’

Again one might say a lot about the many attempts made to structure this social life in a way that would be worthy of humanity as it is now. I do, however, consider this less important. I would consider it much more important to consider that life has indeed taken on a structure, though this has led to the terrible world disaster we have seen evolve over the last four years. At least some of the causes that led to this terrible world disaster must be sought in the very real contradiction and opposition among the impulses into which human social life has driven itself in every part of the world.

People have rightly said that in earlier times—the very times when natural scientific thinking did not yet have the modern form I have been characterizing for you—life was corporate. They had trade and craft guilds, and a wide variety of ways that brought people together.

Then came the age of modern individualism with its ideal of human freedom. People felt they owed it to this ideal of freedom, to this impulse of individualism, to dissolve the old corporations. If you look at history you’ll find that they were gradually dissolved. You could see how economic life progressed, and how in recent times corporations have arisen again in life. I can’t and won’t go into detail, for otherwise one would have to show how step by step on the one hand corporate associations or unions such as consumer associations arose, and how people tried to cope with life partly by the old style of community life persisting or coming alive again. The old corporations have not returned, but new ones have arisen and are part of our social structure, including the trusts that have formed. I would attach much more value to this practical configuration of social life, as it has arisen, rather than to theories that people have developed on the subject.

However, the way it all came to be configured, even if we have to take account of a wide variety of interests coming into it, and other impulses in modern life, we nevertheless have to say that the modern corporation has evolved in many different spheres; something belonging to earlier times persists because it is still in accord with human instincts and will impulses. And the inmost impulse in the way people have configured the world—‘configured’ is the operative word here, for it is not what people thought about it but how they have configured the world, creating communities, relating person to person, though unconsciously so—has again been the natural scientific thinking of more recent times, but in a quite specific way.

Looking back with understanding on what brought people together in the past, when they lived in trade and craft guilds—I do not, of course, defend them, knowing that it was right to get rid of them—and how they lived in those communities, we see a considerable difference from the element which brings them together today. A most outstanding characteristic—everyone who knows about these things has to admit this—of the old communities was that people understood one another both within such communities and from community to community. Of course, everything always only goes to a certain point in the world; but the people understood one another. Masters and journeymen understood one another, for the master knew what lived in the journeyman’s soul. They had a positive attitude to each other. Why? Because the instincts and impulses of will from which those communities arose still had a spiritual and soul element in them, a spiritual and soul element that was connected with the bodily element.

The element which brought it about in earlier times that people were able to look not only at the natural world with the ideas which they then had but also at the soul, with ideas that lived instinctively, unconsciously in human beings and made the natural world and the inner life into one, also lived in the instincts and brought it about that people were close through the blood—son connected with father, daughter with mother, or as a member of a nation or a guild—if there was a blood connection or some other interest, this meant that people demanded community out of their instincts, yet those instincts had inborn impulses of spirit and soul in them.

Then came the thinking that goes with natural scientific culture. Our more recent times have not been configured in their actual structure where human beings are concerned by anything but exactly the thinking that goes with natural science. It is because people came to think about nature in a way where they presented the phenomena in such a way, even if they did not admit to this, that with their ghostly content they no longer had anything to do with the human being. Because of this, the human being stands on his own. Earlier peoples were connected with the natural world. Lightning would flash out there, and thunder roll, with rain coming from the clouds. People of old would see a force of nature reflected in this. They would be aware of one drive or another within themselves and instinctively see such drives reflecting also the same as such a force of nature. They would act out of nature, as it were, for their perception of nature was such that they had not yet set themselves apart from it.

In the last few centuries, the human being was set apart from nature by the very fact of progressing to the pure natural phenomena. Perception of nature will finds its proper mission in the progress of human evolution when it does not provide absolute knowledge—which is today’s superstition, the natural-scientific superstition—but makes human beings free. We will only understand the mission which natural science has in the progress of human evolution when we see that it is nature’s task to teach us freedom.

In the more recent natural science, the human being has to set the natural phenomena apart, making himself remote from nature, and he therefore stands on his own as an individual. Before coming to the supersensible world by taking the supersensible way to which I have been referring so that he would relate to the world again—super-sensibly now, as he had done in a natural way in earlier times—before the human being entered on the road which he will have to take for the future, he was, as it were, poised wholly on the point of his individual person. Natural science placed him on the needle point of his individual nature. Natural science has determined the state of the human soul. It had taken up his instincts. Because of this modern people relate to one another not like the people of earlier times, through blood or guild, but as individuals, as persons. They have to find their associations and social communities in freedom. Initially they thus found them only from instinct, but their instincts in this direction were contradictory, because the time for instincts had passed. On the one hand people can no longer think in terms of instincts but must think consciously, letting natural science educate them in this. On the other hand people did not yet have the opportunity to make themselves part of the world again through supersensible perception. They thus became part of a new world, which they thought about, and related to the old world in a way in which they no longer thought about it. They transplanted the old instincts into a world which thanks to modern natural-scientific thinking was no longer present in their minds. It was because of this that the schism and contradiction arose in modern social life which we perceive if we see what lives at a deeper level of the soul for the humanity of more recent times.

Socialism, distinctly an ideal of humanity, was established with inadequate means. Why? Insight into nature does not place human beings in the world but sets them apart, with awareness of being an individual person growing all the time. Because of this, they can only form communities out of selfish instincts. Their thinking is different from anything created by instinct in communities. Disharmony results, with the consequence that a disharmonious social order must arise if you only have natural science and apply only natural-scientific concepts to the structuring of social life. A contradiction must arise, a living inner objection, and this will continue until humanity finally decides to say: In modern life in particular people inevitably create disharmony in establishing social order unless they bring supersensible insight into social community life, supersensible sentience and purpose. For as long as we do not relate person to person in such a way that we see in the other individual the image, the phenomenon, of the immortal human being, for as long as we do not see in every individual with whom we live in a social context an individual who does reflect a supersensible reality, for as long as we are not willing to add to the knowledge natural science can provide for sociology and social impulses, the insights gained from spiritual insight, modern social thinking, and above all modern social structures, with concepts applied in practice, will result in a life that must dissolve itself and lead to strife and disharmony.

Anyone who understands this inner connection will know how much the situation I have just outlined has influenced events in the last four years. I would not say that it was the only cause, but it did play quite a considerable, and indeed a very major role. Anyone who wants and seeks socialism, honestly so, must guide humanity to concepts that are not merely natural-scientific, for the element that lives and has its being in life from person to person is different from anything that can be found with the natural-scientific approach.

This is apparent in that there is a specific ideal in natural science, an ideal that is indeed justifiable. It is to do more and more experiments, with less and less description and observation. What is an experiment? Initially it is something made up by the rational mind, which actually takes us away from nature and—as I have shown in last week’s lecture—into the nothingness of person. Anything we show experimentally essentially only appears to have to do with the life of nature. In reality it has to do with the element in nature that is dying. This is evident if we try and apply anything gained in the experimental way of thinking to the configuration of social life. Anyone who wants to bring purely natural-scientific concepts, utterly honest, straight and indeed ideal natural-scientific concepts, into social life, brings something into life that does not lead to ascent, to life, but to social death. If humanity is not prepared to bring supersensible elements as well as natural-scientific knowledge to social life it will be found that with all social purpose, with all socialism, the structures created would bring disorder and decline.

A socialism that directs people away from the supersensible will create social structures of destruction, social structures that direct us elsewhere. At most people will use old things and bring out-of-date ideas to realization. For what has happened until now, not through social theories but through practical socialism? Has socialism led to a radical configuring of the world? Then people would not have accepted the old forms, which is what they have in fact been doing until now. Socialism in those old forms is rather like someone who disapproves of the crinoline, yet does not try and get beyond it but puts padding into it instead. And so we see people keeping the old forms, padding them out, in the social thinking of more recent times. For what do most of the leaders of our more recent socialism want? To gain power where others gained power, taking over power rather than giving it a new form.

I would say that this, too, is experimental proof, only in another aspect, that we can only speak of socialism if we also have the will to take humanity to the realm of the supersensible, to the impulses that we must give to modern humanity if they are to get out of the tendency to create the disasters to which purely natural-scientific impulses have taken them. In social life in particular, those impulses must be supersensible ones.

Spiritual science truly is not impractical in this field. For the time being one can only express regret that there are many people who deem themselves really practical, terribly practical, feel really pleased about their own life practice, and look down on the impractical people who want to introduce something to the world out of ideas, out of the spirit. Well, we know this element of middle-class thinking which today considers itself to be great in practical life and brutally rejects anything that might come from the spirit. This life practice will reduce itself to absurdity, to impossibility. For to be truly practical, we have to go for the whole of reality, not half or a quarter of it. If you have a horseshoe magnet and someone comes and says: ‘You can use it to attract other iron; it’s a magnet’ and you then say: ‘Oh no, the shape shows me it’s a horseshoe for shoeing a horse’, you are like someone who wants to organize social life only according to concepts that leave aside anything not perceptible to the senses. Someone who knows that for a true life practice you need the whole of reality and that includes the supersensible, is like someone who does not misuse a horseshoe magnet to shoe a horse but uses it as a magnet. This, then, is the second misapprehension of which I wanted to speak today, again just referring to it briefly.

The third concerns something that is entirely part of the inner life, having to do with the element which in many respects must be most sacred to people—religious life.

Very many people in that field speak ill of anthroposophically orientated spiritual science, among them above all official representatives, and also non-official representatives, of one positive religious confession or another, people who, of course, do not indulge in the authority principle, as people put it politely today. They speak ill of this spiritual science as something that would take people into irreligiosity, giving them apparent insight into the spirit rather than the element that will directly show the way by which they can come into the supersensible, religious sphere on the basis of their own essential nature. It would be tempting, but time is short and there are also other things to be considered, so I won’t talk about any particular religious confession but about inner religious feeling as such.

If we consider the true nature of gaining insight in the spirit as it is meant here, we will, I believe, very soon find that just as it is not impractical nor antisocial nor unscientific, so, too, it is not irreligious and not in the least liable to deflect anyone from profoundly religious feeling. Considering what has been said so far, we have to ask what the essence is of the newer form of supersensible insight which we seek to find through anthroposophy.

The essence is that the way that leads to supersensible investigation must ultimately reach an impersonal sphere. Just consider how radical I had to be last week in saying that the things human beings see by way of spirit lie before birth or after death, and that the essence of life between birth and death is that the human being has assumed material form. We may say that spiritual science, which through supersensible insight takes us to the truly immortal aspect, the indisputably immortal aspect of the human soul, can actually be in agreement with materialism in this area. In spiritual science we know that the material human being is a metamorphosis, a transformation of the spiritual, and that the spiritual gains from going down into the material abyss where it can develop freedom by the very fact of gaining insight into nature.

It is not a precondition that in doing their investigations human beings must move from the personal, from immediate experience here in the body, to the impersonal. Supersensible insight presupposes an inner state of mind that progressively enters into the impersonal in spirit, just as in earlier times human beings who did not yet have insight into nature were physically—physically in general terms—in the supersensible sphere.

We must make spiritual investigations in an impersonal way if we want the light of the spirit to shine into matter and substance. However, the more we make this supersensible way of investigation our own and the further we go with this method of investigation which demands an impersonal approach, the more do we feel something flowing out as if from the other pole of the human being, the will pole, and this is an immediate religious response. This immediate inner response also seeks to go towards the supersensible, but in such a way that our individual nature is not lost and that everything directly connected with our individual nature between birth and death can unite with the supersensible element.

If we know the right way of going into the supersensible through science, then an inner power, which makes itself known above all as a need to venerate the spiritual, points the way for us to the religious element. The true evolution on the way into the spiritual world through supersensible perception is that we feel driven more and more to deepen our religious life and actually come to understand what the religious life means to us. The science of the spirit inevitably takes us from the personal to the impersonal so that the light of the spirit may once again shine into the sensual world.

Religious life will thus inevitably be deepened if we approach the spirit in this way, for it is a deep-down part of our human nature that we not merely behold the spiritual as it shines out, full of wisdom, but venerate it. This veneration must come from our individual, personal nature, however. Anything seen in the spirit cannot enter into this region of human experience as it is but has to go through renewal, metamorphosis; it needs to change, to be transformed into something personal. When the human being is on the one side receiving the light of the spirit, he must go and venerate this spiritual principle and search for the place where he can find religious life, religious deepening.

On the other side, the side of representatives of religious life, it will also be necessary to see things in the right light. In early times it was said by people who professed themselves religious, and it is still being said to this day, that the old pagan approach had consisted in wanting to find the way to the divine through mere wisdom. Again and again we may, however, repeat, with full justification that wisdom does not reveal the divine in the world—not the divine, but certainly the supersensible element in which human beings have their immortality. The divine cannot, however, be recognized in its divine nature, for it needs to meet with an inner response of veneration. The spiritual must first find its way to the personal, a way to where the human being is an individual person. There he either comes to serve Jehovah by taking the route of studying nature—so that he perceives the spirit which from generation to generation is active as a supersensible principle in the blood—or he looks to the spirit which relates to his soul as the redeemer, and that is Christ Jesus ... [record of the lecture incomplete at this point].

Human beings must find the way to the sensual world, where they are in their individual nature. On the other hand they need the kind of understanding that not only says that wisdom will not reveal the divine because this needs veneration, but that the supersensible cannot be perceived out of wisdom alone, nor from religion alone. Religion must be complemented with vision of the supersensible, otherwise it will only appear to be adequate in a natural-scientific age, at the same time persisting with old views and turning against new ones. Religion, taken in the right way, is not threatened by the emergence of new truths, including those that are supersensible.

Many other misapprehensions exist. If religious people believe that supersensible perception could in some way be harmful, going against their own, justifiable endeavours, anyone who believes this is not taking account of the progressive evolution of humanity. Being part of modern evolution, where on the one hand we do not have any opportunity for finding the right kind of social life unless the way to the supersensible is taken, have we not also seen how this very natural-scientific thinking has made people abandon religion, so that taking up the natural-scientific approach made the individual go towards irreligiosity? [Part of lecture not taken down.] Present-day spiritual science addresses human nature more powerfully so that religious veneration may develop, unless people want to turn away from this, like some who are superficial in their natural science. Supersensible life must address the soul more strongly today, for the soul has gained greater conscious awareness and individuality. The power of religious life needs to be stronger if it wants to develop in its old form.

Another misapprehension in this particular field is that people think the science of the spirit, as it is meant here, would serve to create a sect or establish a religion. In the science of the spirit, one sees human evolution far too clearly for this. One knows that effective principles come into play consecutively in human evolution just as they do in the life of the individual. People cannot have the same inner attitudes when they are 40 as they had when they were 20. In the same way, humanity cannot have the same inner attitude in the 20th century as in earlier centuries and millennia.

In spiritual science one always considers reality and does not judge it by thought-up concepts. Because of this, one does not talk the way some people do today who want to establish a religion of the future in a scientific way; instead one knows that the time for creating religions has passed; it came to an end exactly when Christianity arose. The inner attitude in which humanity could be taken hold of by a religious inner experience which then had to be propagated was closely bound up with the state of the world as it was in earlier times. Today we, as humanity, have entered into an inner attitude that truly had to be developed by means of natural science, and in which one also seeks to penetrate into the supersensible sphere, using the approach of natural science, and in gaining this supersensible knowledge seeks to gain ever greater clarity concerning the principle which in religious ages came to revelation in a religious way, but can now no longer found religions itself. A true science of the spirit will help us to gain increasing insight into what was given to humanity by way of religion; it will also free this religious element from the bonds created by people who in their desire for power and other things took it in the wrong direction. I can only refer to this briefly, for it would take us too far to go into detail here.

With these brief references I merely wanted to indicate that spiritual science by its very nature can neither make people irreligious, nor can it found any kind of new religion or the like. All these things come up because people are not fully considering what the science of the spirit which is meant here is really intended for, yet people will insist on their views. We may thus also say that the attacks that are currently raining down on this anthroposophically orientated spiritual science, coming also from representatives of religious confessions, are due to misapprehensions and misinterpretations, which sometimes are quite deliberate. People who are serious about the religious life of humanity would have least reason to cast aspersions on the science of the spirit. For this will take humanity back to true religiosity, whereas the age of natural science on its own and merely positive religion that seeks to preserve traditions must inevitably take humanity away from true religion. Positive religion comes from a time when human beings related differently to the world. But people will not let themselves be pushed back, just as a 40-year-old cannot be 20 again.

A religious confession that resists supersensible insight of the recent kind will thus dig its own grave, however great the desire to consolidate by means of external power. Again and again I have to remind you, as I also did here in Zurich last year, that the Roman Catholic priest who gave his inaugural lecture as rector of a university on the subject of Galileo,¹⁰⁹ drawing attention to the fact that the Roman Catholic Church, his own Church, went against Galileo in the past, continuing to do so until 1822,¹¹⁰ was a much better representative of theology and religion. This was Professor Muellner, Roman Catholic theologian and philosopher. Beginning his rectorate at Vienna University, he had to stress that true religiosity, and indeed also true Roman Catholicism, should not go against advances in human knowledge, since every further advance in human knowledge only showed the marvels of the divine in the world in an even more magnificent and glorious light. That is a truly religious and also truly Christian way of thinking.

Just as some who have a true feeling for the religious element do not need to feel that external natural-scientific knowledge goes against this, so there is no need for them to feel this about insight into spheres beyond that of the senses, which actually and inevitably must take human beings straight back to religiosity, though this would be an independent religiosity that is anchored in the individual nature of a person. It would be reasonable to say, therefore, that one should take a very good look exactly at the attacks made on anthroposophical spiritual science from this direction; for they really and truly do not come from where people pretend they come from. They arise from the fear and from lack of interest which I have characterized as a general human attitude to the science of the spirit in the first of these lectures. One only has to read aright what is said in this respect. However, it will not be possible to get the people who write these things to change their minds, and we should not be so naive as to think that one can make them change their minds. Refutation would not help at all. What is more, it will be equally impossible to get the people for whom these things are usually written to see how wrong they are. Yet the progress of human evolution will not be held up for people who have an honest feeling for the things that the powers behind developments in more recent times have brought to human souls.

In today’s lecture—the day after tomorrow I will round it off with another, again very positive look at recent history considered in the light of spiritual science, which will take us directly into human life today and to the most burning questions we have today—I believe I have shown that the search for supersensible insight, which is the endeavour in the science of the spirit, is neither inimical to natural science nor impractical in social terms, let alone a danger to religious life. On the contrary, I believe I have shown that for those who are able to see clearly the powers which our present time must bring to the human soul, and especially the powers which the future will bring, will understand that spiritual-scientific knowledge is important for three burning questions of our time and the immediate future.

For centuries, and especially also today and even more so in future, science has been and will be at the heart of human endeavour. The question will arise as to what science can do for the extreme human need to find the supersensible world. The answer can only be given by a science that does not leave spiritual science aside.

Another burning question of today and the immediate future will be: How do we find the impulses that can configure our social life? The answer will have to be: Only insights gained through the science of the spirit go through the metamorphosis when they enter into human life that will enable them to lead to an immediately conscious social life from person to person and hence also to the social configuration of the human race around the globe.

And the third burning question will be: How can the inmost need, the need in the human soul to revere the divine in an age that through science has taken us to individual and personal awareness, be met by means of greater powers than those which people have been able to have in earlier times? Again the answer must be: This needs the supersensible vision which when it comes to the human individual in a living way, metamorphoses into the individual human nature, becoming personal within it. Such powers can only come from the supersensible through the science of the spirit, through supersensible perception that gives the knowledge and vision which modern religiosity needs. This should truly meet the deepest needs of the soul, indeed the very depths of soul for human beings in our present time and in the future.

• 107. Theologia naturalis, also called ‘natural theology’—understanding God on the basis of the natural world, the existence and nature of this world and of the human being; an important element in Greek philosophy, with Thomas Aquinas and in Enlightenment.
• 108. Lasalle, Ferdinand (1825–1864). Die Wissenschaft und die Arbeiter. Eine Verteidigungsrede vor dem Berliner Kriminalgericht gegen die Anklage, die besitzlosen Klassen zum Hass und zur Verachtung gegen die Besitzenden öffentlich aufgereizt zu haben. (Speech in defence made at the Berlin Criminal Law Court to counter the accusation of having publicly incited the unpropertied classes against property-owning people). Zurich 1863.
• 109. Laurenz Müllner, Die Bedeutung Galileis für die Philosophie, Inaugurationsrede gehalten am 8. November 1894 an der k. k. Universität Wien, Wien 1894. Reprinted in Anthroposophie, Zeitschrift für freies Geistesleben, vereinigt mit der Monatsschrift Die Drei, 16. Jg., 1. Buch, Okt.-Dez. 1933, S. 29-57; dort auch eine kleine Zusammenstellung ‘Rudolf Steiner über Laurenz Muellner’ (S. 25-28) und eine Photographic Muellners.
• 110. See note 38.

If we were not a society whose task it is to observe all things from the point of view of deeper knowledge, indeed of profound spiritual knowledge, I would obviously now bring to a close the discussions we have been having and which were requested from so many different quarters. If it were a matter of anything other than deeper knowledge, then these discussions would of course have to be suspended until such time as the results of the important events now taking place were available.

It is, I believe, without question that every soul who is earnestly and honestly concerned with the welfare of mankind is awaiting with bated breath the outcome of the next few days. The facts will show whether certain sources from what we have called the periphery, the circumference, are capable of coming to their senses sufficiently. If they are not, then the whole of mankind—in the future, too—will be expected to believe that one fights for peace by turning down and excluding the possibility of a relatively early achievement of peace. If matters go in the direction that various voices in the press seem to assume—though no serious observer would still consider such an assumption—then no one would be obliged even to pretend any longer to believe that there is one jot of sincerity in all those declamations which proclaim peace or even the rights of nations. In the near future the world will have the opportunity to decide with full consciousness whether to see the declamations of the will to peace as wrong and untruthful and yet still continue to find them significant, or whether to turn to the truth.

We, however, do stand on the foundation of deeper knowledge, and so there is no need for us to interrupt our observations. We are seeking for the truth, and truth must be found at all costs. For the truth can never be seriously harmful or work harmfully.

Today I intend to put before your soul certain matters which give us the opportunity to make our judgement justifiable in a number of directions. In no way do I want to influence anyone's standpoint, nor their judgement; for we are concerned with looking the facts of the physical plane, as well as the facts and impulses of the spiritual world, calmly in the eye. Some time ago I said that the question of necessity in world events would have to be scrutinized, even in the face of the most painful happenings. But Anthroposophy will never make us into fatalists, in the sense that we speak of necessities as a fate to which we have to resign ourselves. It is justifiable to ask: Did these painful events have to take place? But even if we feel obliged to answer in the affirmative, there is still no question of bowing down to these necessities in a fatalistic way. I should like to start by illustrating what I mean by a comparison.

Let us suppose that two people are arguing about how good the harvest will be next year in a certain area. The one says: The harvest will depend on the constraints laid down by nature. He lists all the constraints—the weather, and all the other conditions that are more or less independent of the will of man. The other, however, might object: You are right, all that exists; but what we ought to do is look at the practical question of how much of a contribution we ourselves can make. Then it is much less a matter of the weather and other things over which I have no influence; my main concern, then, is that I want to play my part in next year's harvest, so on my section of the land I will sow the best quality seed I can find. Whatever the other factors may be, it is my duty to sow the best possible seed, and I will make every effort to do so. The first man may be a fatalist; the second may not deny the reasons for the fatalism of the first, but he will do his best to sow the best quality seed. In the same way, for every person who desires to be prudent it is a matter, above all, of finding out how he can sow the best possible seed.

Of course, for the spiritual development of mankind the expression ‘to sow the proper seed’ means something vastly more complicated than is the case in the comparison I have just cited. It does not mean the application of a few abstract principles. It means taking the demands of mankind's evolution and recognizing correctly what is needed at the present moment for this evolution of mankind. For whatever next year's weather may be like and whatever other hindrances or unfavourable circumstances may apply, if the second person does not sow good seed the harvest will certainly be bad! So it is most important to recognize that at present the salvation of mankind's development demands certain conditions which, at the moment, by far the greatest portion of mankind is resisting. These are conditions which must be incorporated in human development so that a thriving and healthy development can take place in the future. And it must also be realized that man finds himself at present in a phase of development in which, within certain limits, it is up to him to cope with his mistakes.

In earlier times this was not the case. Before the fifth post-Atlantean period, before at least a large part of earthly mankind had come to the full realization of their freedom, divine spiritual powers intervened in earthly development, and it can be clearly perceived that this intervention by divine spiritual powers was sensed by human beings. Today, what matters is to show mankind how it is possible to reach certain insights and, above all, how to form a healthy judgement which coincides with the conditions demanded for man's development. The fact that there is a resistance to this judgement is one of the deeper causes of the present painful events.

Another question we shall have to consider over the next few days is why human beings did not turn to more spiritual inclinations a century ago. For had they done so today's painful situation would surely not have arisen. Let us postpone this a little longer and come to it perhaps tomorrow or the next day. Above all, let us hold to the knowledge that the painful events have come about chiefly as a result of this rejection of man's links with the spiritual world. Present events might therefore be described as a karma of materialism. But this phrase ‘karma of materialism’ must not be taken as an empty phrase; it must be understood in the right way.

Insights that are so deeply necessary have surfaced only sporadically during the years spanned by our lives—the final decades of the nineteenth and the first decades of the twentieth century. Certainly some insights—and much depends on insights—have been cast amongst mankind. Moreover, the attempt was made to cast them in such a way that a considerable number of people might have been included. But, at the moment, for reasons which will be mentioned later, people are still tremendously resistant to any kind of higher, spiritually grounded insight.

I now want to mention a book which appeared years ago. You might of course say: Many books are published, so why is this one so significant? At most, a book can only give people some theoretical instruction, and the salvation of the world is certainly not going to depend on whether they read it or not. Let me tell you that more is at stake than might be expected if certain ideas and insights are disseminated. Look in your soul once more at what I have told you during the last two or three lectures and you will be able to admit that this is so.

The book I mean was published in America and the author is Brooks Adams. When it appeared all those years ago it seemed to me to be one of the most important manifestations of new human insight. Even though the way it was presented to the world was spoilt by the fact that it included a foreword by ex-President Roosevelt, one of the greatest phrasemongers of today, nevertheless the ideas in this book by Brooks Adams could have brought enlightenment in the widest sense of the word. Another factor to be considered in connection with European cultural life was that the German translation of this book was brought out by a publisher of whom it was known that he serves quite particular spiritual streams, streams which are definitely hostile and detrimental, for instance to our Anthroposophical Movement. This is not what matters, however. What always matters is to have a sense for the fact that it is significant if certain ideas are presented to the world under an appropriate flag of this kind. It is quite different if a book is published by, let us say, the Cotta'sche Verlag, a distinguished publishing house which simply publishes books or, as in the case of the book in question, by a publisher who brings out books which serve the purposes of a particular society. There is a great difference between dealing simply with literature and dealing with certain definite impulses!

What is in this book by Brooks Adams? Let me first unfold only the main ideas which are brought forward, I must say, quite generally and abstractly in the most amateurish way and only in so far as their significance could be recognized in America. Yet it is important to know that a bird such as this flies up from this particular spot. Brooks Adams says in effect: There are in the world various nations who have been developing slowly for long ages. In the development of these peoples it is possible to detect both rise and fall: they are born, they pass through infancy, youth, maturity and old age, and then they perish.

This is, to start with, no profound truth but merely a framework. However, what Brooks Adams then develops in connection with the evolution of these peoples in the way of developmental laws certainly has some significance. It can be observed, he says, that in the period of their youth these peoples necessarily develop two tendencies which belong together. To enter properly into ideas such as these of Brooks Adams we must, of course, distinguish strictly between a people as such and the individual human beings; neither must we confuse the concept of a state with the concept of a people. So, Brooks Adams ascribes certain characteristics to a particular developmental period of a people and he also considers that these characteristics belong together. According to him some peoples, in the period of their youth, have the capacity for imagination, that is the capacity to form mental images which are, in the main, drawn from within. They owe their origin to the productive imagination and not to considerations such as those of what we today call science; they are drawn from the creative inner powers of the human being. This characteristic of creative imagination is, according to Brooks Adams, necessarily connected with another: these peoples are warlike. The two characteristics of creative imagination and a warlike disposition are inseparably linked in these peoples. Brooks Adams considers this to be a natural law in the spiritual life of these peoples. Peoples who are both imaginative and warlike are, as it were, a particular type.

In contrast to those peoples who belong to the imaginative and warlike type there are, says Brooks Adams, peoples who belong to another type. Here, creative imagination is no longer predominant, for it has developed into something we can call sober scientific judgement. Peoples who possess this characteristic of sober scientific judgement are not warlike by nature; they are industrial and commercial. These two characteristics—we are speaking of peoples, not individuals—belong together: the scientific and the commercial (for industry is simply a basis for commerce). Thus, there are peoples who are scientific and commercial, and peoples who are imaginative and warlike.

For the moment I do not want to criticize these ideas but merely mention that an opinion is asserting itself, though in a rather dilettante fashion, which years ago fluttered up, as it were, from American soil: Take care not to believe that the whole of mankind can be measured by the same yardstick! Do not imagine that the same ideals can be set for every nation! Note that consideration can only be given to what is founded in evolution, which means that you cannot expect a people like the Slavs, whose character is imaginative, to be unwarlike! Those of you who read Brooks Adams' book attentively, please note this latter example particularly. Judgement must be based, not on external appearances but on inner values, inner affinities.

The book is superficial if only for the reason that such knowledge, if it is expressed at all, should be expressed on the basis of spiritual insights alone. So long as there is a lack of spiritual insights, judgements about the evolution of mankind—which is of course affected by the working of spiritual powers—cannot but be one-sided. Above all, a great truth is omitted: On the physical plane we stand within the realm of maya regarding events as well as the will of human beings. As soon as maya is treated, not as maya but as reality, we must fall into error. And as soon as we fail to pay proper attention to developments within maya and to what resembles development within maya, we are already treating maya as reality.

If it were not nonsensical it would be very nice, for instance, to live in a season of permanent springtime, to be surrounded forever by blossoming, sprouting, burgeoning life. Why did the creators of the universe not arrange things so that we have sprouting, burgeoning life forever? Why do the beautiful tulips, lilies and roses have to fade and decay? The answer is quite simple: they have to fade and decay so that they can bloom again! In so far as we stand on the physical plane it must be clear to us that the one cannot be without the other—indeed, that the one is there for the sake of the other; and there is profound truth in Goethe's saying that nature created death in order to have much life. Since the physical world is maya there is no balance so long as we are in the physical world; a balancing can only come about if we can raise ourselves from the physical to the spiritual world. However, this balance is different from the balance we would expect so long as we hold the physical world to be a reality. So it is necessary to come to know the laws of maya, and to learn that within maya a balance can never be found, either by man or by any other being, if maya is not interwoven with something which lies outside maya but inside spiritual reality.

So, above all, it is always important to come to know maya as maya, to come to understand what it means when sprouting and burgeoning have to be accompanied by decay. In the case of nature it is easy to admit, since we see before our very eyes the facts we have to recognize. It will be easy to make anyone understand that in the summer and autumn of 1917 the fruits will ripen which were sown in the previous year's sowing season. If bad seeds were sown, then of course bad fruits will be harvested. So we will tend to pay attention to the quality of the seed and not allow ourselves to be so easily deceived by maya, as we are in other areas of human life where matters are rather more obscure.

Someone who points in a similar way, in connection with the life of nations, to the effect a bad sowing has on the quality of the ripening fruit, will immediately be met with prejudices. These may, for instance, be expressed as follows: I might suggest to someone that he should not be surprised at his bad harvest since his seed was poor when it was sown; he might then retort that it was his seed and that I am hurting his feelings by saying bad things about it. But I have no intention of hurting his feelings, for the poor quality of his seed might not be his fault at all. It is not a question of hurting a person's feelings but rather of stating an objective fact. It is not for me a matter of judging the connection between him and his seed-corn; that is his affair and I leave it to him entirely. But to know the objective facts it is necessary to inspect the seed-corn very closely and face up to what is really at the bottom of events. If, in doing so, we can maintain a proper objectivity, this might even be beneficial to the sower. Indeed, the benefit to him might be considerable if we succeed in making clear to him the connection between the harvest and the sowing. What I want to make clear to you is the importance of putting forward the thoughts in the right direction, and of seeking them in the right way.

After this prelude, I now want to go back some way in history. The reasons for this will soon be clear to you. I have already drawn your attention during lectures here to a king of England who played an important part for England in the realm of maya, in relation to religious development: Henry VIII. As you know, he was rather good at getting rid of his wives, of whom he had quite a number. He also had—well—let us say, the pluck to break with the Pope who did not want to dissolve one of his marriages. This refusal by the Pope gave Henry VIII the courage to bring about a new religion for the whole of England, inasmuch as it depended on him. We have spoken about this on another occasion.

During the reign of Henry VIII lived the great and eminent Thomas More. He was a man of sublime spirituality, indeed of a spirituality equal, for instance, to that of another great man, Pico della Mirandola, as well as other eminent personalities of that era. Thomas More was an enlightened spirit, even though, despite his enlightened insight, he became Henry VIII's Lord Chancellor and did not despise Henry himself. I shall prove to you in a moment that he did not despise Henry VIII. He was a spirit whose illuminated instinct enabled him to accept maya as maya. Yet, like Pico della Mirandola, he was also a pious man. He was not pious after the manner of Henry VIII, nor after the manner of the Pope; he was a sincere, earnestly pious man and from his point of view rejected all the impulses and attempts at reformation which were already beginning to flicker during his time.

In a certain respect Thomas More was a faithful son of the Catholic church; and although Henry VIII, whose Lord Chancellor he already was, would have loaded him with every honour if he had complied with his wishes, he remained disinclined to turn to a new religion simply because Henry desired to take a new wife. For this he was not only deprived of his position, he was condemned to death, and the record of the court proceedings which culminated in his condemnation is extraordinarily interesting and very characteristic of that time. The wording of the sentence which condemned Thomas More to death is quite remarkable.

Most of you know, since it has long been published in secular books, that in Freemasonry the ascent through the various degrees is connected with certain formulations which also include the manner of death awaiting those who fail to keep the secrets of a particular degree. It is stated that under certain circumstances the candidate will have to die a terrible death; for instance, in the case of one of the degrees, his body shall be cut open and his ashes strewn to the four winds of the earth. These things, as I just said, are now the subject of numerous secular writings. Now the sentence passed on Thomas More coincides exactly with the formulation in respect of a particular degree of Freemasonry: he was to be brought from life to death by a most inhuman method. Yet this alone was not enough. His body was to be divided into as many segments as there are compass points and the pieces were to be scattered in all these directions. Part of this sentence was indeed carried out in this very manner.

Consider that this event took place at the beginning of the fifth post-Atlantean period. Thomas More was born in the second half of the fifteenth century and died in the first half of the sixteenth century. We may well ask whether all he did was to refuse the king the oath of supremacy—that is, refuse to recognize that the English church was independent of the Pope and commanded instead by the King of England. Is this really all he did?

Let us now turn to the most important thing he did, namely something which, even today, can have the utmost significance for anyone who looks at it squarely. Thomas More wrote the book Utopia. On the Best Form of the State and the New Island of Utopia. The main part of this book deals with the institutions of the island of Utopia, which means ‘not place’, or ‘no place’. If we take the book in the sense intended by Thomas More, we discover that Utopia means much more to him than some imaginary land in the external physical world. We should not be so foolish, however, as to assume that More wrote the book simply as an imaginary story. Thomas More cannot be counted among the Utopians. He did not want to present people with some imaginary tale; he wanted to say far more than this, in so far as this was possible in his day.

The main part of the book deals with Utopia, but it also has a very detailed introduction. This explains to us why More wrote the book. There is an important passage I want to bring to your attention, so that you can see that he did not despise Henry VIII. It begins as follows:

‘There was recently a rather serious difference of opinion between that great expert in the art of government, His Invincible Majesty, King Henry the Eighth of England, and His Serene Highness, Prince Charles of Castile. His Majesty sent me to Flanders to discuss and settle the matter.’

While in Flanders as an ambassador for Henry VIII, whom he calls an enlightened and great king, he meets a man he regards as exceptionally intelligent—spiritually, exceptionally important. So he asks him: Since you know so much and can assess matters so correctly, why do you not place your insights at the disposal of some prince? For More considers that most people in the service of princes are not very inspired, and that much that is good and favourable could ensue for the world if such inspired people were to place themselves at the service of the princes. The other now replies: It would be to no avail, for were I to express my views within some ministry or other, I should render the others no cleverer; instead they would very soon throw me out. In order to stress that this man, with whom he himself cannot agree, did actually exist, Thomas More adds: I met this man in the most varied company and he told us how he had once attempted to put forward his views in another company.

This is not merely an introduction to Utopia; Thomas More means something further. We have the curious situation in which Thomas More wishes to express criticism of the England of that time, the England of the turn of the fifteenth to the sixteenth century; the Lord Chancellor wants to criticize England. It goes without saying that someone who thinks as Thomas More does would not embark on a criticism of something abstract. In speaking of England he knows that the English people are not identical with what is meant by the configuration of the English state. He knows this very well and he also knows that the state is not something abstract but that it is made by individuals, and that the English people are not included in any criticism that might be expressed about the actions of these individuals on whom all the more important aspects of the English state depend. So Thomas More seizes on the best possible starting point for a concrete discussion, for it is certainly not concrete, but mere nonsense, to say: England is like this, Germany like that, Italy like the other—and so on; to say this is to say nothing at all.

Now, within the framework of a larger company, More brings this intelligent, enlightened man into contact with someone who is an excellent lawyer, someone whom the world considers to be ‘an excellent lawyer’, and so these two—the intelligent man and the excellent lawyer in the eyes of the world—enter into a discussion of English jurisprudence. English jurisprudence was then of course not as it is today, but no matter: the fifth post-Atlantean period was just beginning. The intelligent and enlightened man thought that it was extraordinarily stupid to proceed against thieves in the way considered proper in the England of that time. This man, who has seen Utopia and later describes it, thought that the whole way in which robbery and other matters were considered was not at all clever. He thought that the deeper reasons for such behaviour should be investigated. Thus he came to reject all the views of that time concerning people's attitude to thieves. The excellent lawyer, of course, could not understand him at all. Let us now occupy ourselves a little with the arguments of the intelligent man—not those of the excellent lawyer. He says:

‘I once happened to be dining with the Cardinal when a certain English lawyer was there. I forget how the subject came up, but he was speaking with great enthusiasm about the stern measures that were then being taken against thieves. “We're hanging them all over the place,” he said, “I've seen as many as twenty on a single gallows. And that's what I find so odd. Considering how few of them get away with it, why are we still plagued with so many robbers?” “What's odd about it?” I asked—for I never hesitated to speak freely in front of the Cardinal.’

Now let us hear the intelligent man speak!

‘ “This method of dealing with thieves is both unjust and socially undesirable: As a punishment it's too severe, and as a deterrent it's quite ineffective. Petty larceny isn't bad enough to deserve the death penalty, and no penalty on earth will stop people from stealing, if it's their only way of getting food. In this respect you English, like most other nations, remind me of incompetent schoolmasters, who prefer caning their pupils to teaching them. Instead of inflicting these horrible punishments, it would be far more to the point to provide everyone with some means of livelihood, so that nobody's under the frightful necessity of becoming a thief and then a corpse.” “There's adequate provision for that already,” replied the lawyer. “There are plenty of trades open to them. There's always work on the land. They could easily earn an honest living if they wanted to, but they deliberately choose to be criminals.” “You can't get out of it like that”, I said.’

This is the intelligent man once again.

‘ “Let's ignore, for the sake of argument, the case of the disabled soldier, who has lost a limb in the service of King and Country, either at home or abroad—perhaps in that battle with the Cornish rebels, or perhaps during the fighting in France, not so long ago. When he comes home, he finds he's physically incapable of practising his former trade, and too old to learn a new one. But as I say, let's forget about him, since war is only an intermittent phenomenon. Let's stick to the type of thing that happens every day.

Well, first of all there are lots of noblemen who live like drones on the labour of other people, in other words, of their tenants, and keep bleeding them white by constantly raising their rents. For that's their only idea of practical economy—otherwise they'd soon be ruined by their extravagance. But not content with remaining idle themselves, they take round with them vast numbers of equally idle retainers, who have never been taught any method of earning a living.

The moment their master dies, or they themselves fall ill, they're promptly given the sack—for these noblemen are far more sympathetic towards idleness than illness, and their heirs often can't afford to keep up such large establishments.

Now a sacked retainer is apt to get violently hungry, if he doesn't resort to violence. For what's the alternative? He can, of course, wander around until his clothes and his body are both worn out, and he's nothing but a mass of rags and sores. But in that state no gentleman will condescend to employ him, and no farmer can risk doing so—for who could be less likely to serve a poor man faithfully, sweating away with mattock and hoe for a beggarly wage and barely adequate diet, than a man who has been brought up in the lap of luxury, and is used to swaggering about in military uniform, looking down his nose at everyone else in the neighbourhood?”

“But that's exactly the kind of person we need to encourage,” retorted the lawyer. “In wartime he forms the backbone of the army, simply because he has more spirit and self-respect than an ordinary tradesman or farm-hand.”

“You might as well say,” I answered,’

Now the intelligent man speaks again.

‘ “that for the purposes of war you have to encourage theft. Well, you'll certainly never run short of thieves, so long as you have people like that about. And, of course, you're perfectly right thieves do make quite efficient soldiers, and soldiers make quite enterprising thieves. The two professions have a good deal in common. However, the trouble is not confined to England, although you've got it pretty badly. It's practically a world-wide epidemic.

France, for instance, is suffering from an even more virulent form of it. There the whole country is overrun even in peacetime—if you can call it that—by mercenaries who have been brought in for much the same reasons as you gave for supporting idle retainers. You see, the experts decided, in the interests of public safety, that they must have a powerful standing army, consisting mostly of veterans—for they put so little faith in raw recruits that they deliberately start wars to give their soldiers practice, and make them cut throats just to keep their hands in, as Sallust rather nicely puts it.

So France has learnt by bitter experience how dangerous it is to keep these savage pets, but there are plenty of similar object-lessons in the history of Rome, Carthage, Syria, and many other countries. Again and again standing armies have seized some opportunity of overthrowing the government that employed them, devastating its territory, and destroying its towns. And yet it's quite unnecessary. That's obvious enough from the fact that for all their intensive military training the French can't often claim to have beaten your wartime conscripts—I won't put it more strongly than that, for fear of seeming to flatter present company.” ’

Thus says the Lord Chancellor, Thomas More. We need hardly do more than copy down what he said then about the poor people of France. You could use these words to formulate the most beautiful sentences to present to the English ministers so that they can fulminate againt ‘Prussian militarism’. But these things were said at the beginning of the fifth post-Atlantean period, and possibly the juxtaposition of today's chatter with what lay at the beginning of it all might cause hurt feelings in some quarters.

You see, Thomas More lets us listen to the words of a person who endeavours to get to the bottom of things, and, moreover, in a way which could be disagreeable to some, even if matters are only touched upon quite superficially. He continues:

‘ “In any case I don't see how it can possibly be in the public interest to prepare for a war, which you needn't have unless you want to, by maintaining innumerable disturbers of the peace—when peace is so infinitely more important.

But that's not the only thing that compels people to steal. There are other factors at work which must, I think, be peculiar to your country.” ’

Thus speaks the man who has come back from Utopia.

‘ “And what are they?” asked the Cardinal.’

A new participant in the conversation.

‘ “Sheep,” I told him. “These placid creatures, which used to require so little food, have now apparently developed a raging appetite, and turned into man-eaters. Fields, houses, towns, everything goes down their throats. To put it more plainly, in those parts of the kingdom where the finest, and so the most expensive wool is produced, the nobles and gentlemen, not to mention several saintly abbots, have grown dissatisfied with the income that their predecessors got out of their estates. They're no longer content to lead lazy, comfortable lives, which do no good to society—they must actively do it harm, by enclosing all the land they can for pasture, and leaving none for cultivation. They're even tearing down houses and demolishing whole towns—except, of course, for the churches, which they preserve for use as sheepfolds. As though they didn't waste enough of your soil already on their coverts and game-preserves, these kind souls have started destroying all traces of human habitation, and turning every scrap of farmland into a wilderness. So what happens? Each greedy individual preys on his native land like a malignant growth, absorbing field after field, and enclosing thousands of acres with a single fence. Result—hundreds of farmers are evicted. They're either cheated or bullied into giving up their property, or systematically ill-treated until they're finally forced to sell. Whichever way it's done, out the poor creatures have to go, men and women, husbands and wives, widows and orphans, mothers and tiny children, together with all their employees—whose great numbers are not a sign of wealth, but simply of the fact that you can't run a farm without plenty of manpower. Out they have to go from their homes that they know so well, and they can't find anywhere else to live. Their whole stock of furniture wouldn't fetch much of a price, even if they could afford to wait for a suitable offer. But they can't, so they get very little indeed for it. By the time they've been wandering around for a bit, this little is all used up, and then what can they do but steal—and be very properly hanged?

Of course, they can always become tramps and beggars, but even then they're liable to be arrested as vagrants, and put in prison for being idle—when nobody will give them a job, however much they want one. For farm-work is what they're used to, and where there's no arable land, there's no farm-work to be done. After all, it only takes one shepherd or cowherd to graze animals over an area that would need any amount of labour to make it fit for corn production. For the same reason, corn is much dearer in many districts.

The price of wool has also risen so steeply that your poorer weavers simply can't afford to buy it, which means a lot more people thrown out of work. This is partly due to an epidemic of the rot, which destroyed vast numbers of sheep just after the conversion of arable to pasture land began. It almost looked like a judgement on the landowners for their greed—except that they ought to have caught it instead of the sheep. Not that prices would fall, however many sheep there were, for the sheep market has become, if not strictly a monopoly—for that implies only one seller—then at least an oligopoly. I mean it's almost entirely under the control of a few rich men, who don't need to sell unless they feel like it, and never do feel like it until they can get the price they want.” ’

I need read no further, but simply point out to you that in this book Thomas More, the Lord Chancellor, a man who shares the views of Pico della Mirandola, expresses bitter criticism through the mouth of a person who may indeed be fictitious and who has been in Utopia; but the criticism is levelled at something that really happened at that time. For indeed over wide areas the people who had tilled the soil with their hands were driven from their land, which was turned into grazing ground for the sheep of the landowners who sought to make profits in this way from the sale of wool.

Thomas More found it necessary to draw attention to the fact that people exist who drive the rural population from the soil they have tilled in order to turn it over to sheep. Those who are able to link effects with causes in an objective way can pursue, on the physical plane, how the structure of the English state today is intimately bound up with what happened all that time ago and was criticized in this way by Thomas More. And if one pursues the matter with the means of the spirit, which also exist, then one discovers that the English people cannot be held responsible for a great deal for which the England of politics must be held responsible. Moreover, those who are responsible for the England of politics are the heirs—in certain cases, even the actual descendants—of those who are criticized here by Thomas More. There is an unbroken evolution which can be traced back to that point. If we take such things into account we shall discover and know that in speeches such as that of Rosebery, which I quoted to you the other day, can be heard the voices of those who long ago made profits from the sale of wool in the manner described. Everywhere the objective connections must be sought. Above all one must be entitled not to be misunderstood in every possible way.

What does it mean when one is reproached and told to be more tactful because, otherwise, the English will think this or that? This is not at all what matters. What is important is that there are certain things in our life today which can be traced back to certain origins, and these origins must be sought in the proper places. There is no cause for anyone, merely because he is English, to rush to defend the impulses of the descendants of those who long ago drove the peasants from house and home, land and soil, in order to keep flocks of sheep instead of retaining arable land. It is necessary to become familiar with the laws of cause and effect, and not babble about one nation or another being to blame for this or that.

Now that I have endeavoured to demonstrate to you a characteristic link between something in the present and something in the past, let me turn to yet another point, in order once again to make a connection. I shall present you with a number of external facts which shall serve the purpose of giving you a foundation on which to build judgements.

A survey of present-day Europe, with the exception of the eastern part which is inhabited by the Slavs, reveals that for the most part it has emerged from what was the kingdom of Charlemagne in the eighth and ninth centuries. I am not concerned at the moment with Charlemagne himself, nor with the fact that there is much argument about him today. This argument about Charlemagne really has as little point as the argument of three sons about their father. If three sons quarrel amongst each other, the reason is frequently that they are all quite right to call a certain person their father. Indeed, three people would often not quarrel amongst each other were it not for the fact that they do all share the same father; and the object of their quarrel as likely as not is their inheritance!

Out of the realm of Charlemagne have come, in the main, three component parts: a western part which, after various vicissitudes, became the France of today; an eastern part which, in the main, has become today's Germany and Austria, with the exception of the Slav and Magyar regions; and a middle part which has become essentially the Italy of today. Strictly speaking, all three are equally justified in tracing themselves back to Charlemagne. Sometimes people even have strange feelings which determine whether they want to be traced back to Charlemagne or not. For instance, when you consider how many Saxons were slaughtered by Charlemagne, it is not surprising if some people attach no particular importance to being traced back to him. So, these three regions emerged from the kingdom of Charlemagne. In order to understand much of what is going on today we need to take into account that throughout the Middle Ages there existed, between the middle and the western region, certain links which were of an ideal nature, links which today no longer exist at all in such areas, apart from some empty phrases which cannot be taken seriously. For the Holy Roman Empire was to a large extent founded on ideals. If you do not wish to believe other sources which speak of these ideals, then read Dante's De Monarchia, or investigate what else Dante thought about these things. Consider, for instance, that it was Dante who reproached Rudolf of Habsburg for taking too little care of Italy, ‘the most beautiful garden in the Empire!’ Dante was, at least during that part of his life that matters most, an ardent adherent of that ideal community which had come into being and was called Germany-Italy.

Then in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries we see that the Venetian Republic began to rebel against what came down from the North. First of all Venice devoured the patriarchate of Aquileia, but the main concern of the Venetians was to gain a foothold on the Adriatic and settle along the coast there. Venice was very successful and we can see how what came from the North was indeed pushed back, particularly by the influence of the Venetian Republic. Then comes the era known as the Renaissance, which flourished in Italy and elswhere, particularly under the influence of the blossoming of the free cities. But this was followed by the Counter-Reformation and the politics emanating from the Pope and Spain, and we see that not until the eighteenth century can Italy begin to think of recovering from centuries of pain and suffering. Since you can read it up in any history book, there is no need for me to describe how the moment at last arrived when Italy found her unity, to the approval of the whole world. Those of us who are familiar with these things know that in German regions just as much enthusiasm was expressed for the unification of Italy as elsewhere.

We might ask how the modern unification of Italy came about. We should look upon the case of Italy as a particularly important example of how unified states come into being. But we must also come to understand the connections between the events in Serbia and Italy which I told you about last week. These are connections which are immensely important for an understanding of the situation today. But first one must consider for a moment how the state of Italy came into being, a state which can surely be recognized ungrudgingly.

We need go back only as far as the Battle of Solferino in which France fought alongside Italy, and where the first step was taken towards the subsequent creation of the modern state of Italy. We are in the fifties of the nineteenth century. How did it come about—for there was a great deal at stake at that time—that the first step on the path towards modern Italy could be taken at Solferino by Italy and France? Read your history books and you will find they fully bear out what I am saying: It came about solely because Prussia and Austria—Austria could only lose—could not reach any agreement!

What happened subsequently is owed to the fact that Italy had in Camillo Cavour a truly great statesman, in whose soul the idea flourished that, from this starting point, something could arise in Italy which would lead to a rebirth of the ancient Roman greatness. But matters took a different turn. Something similar, though perhaps with a very different nuance, occurred; something similar to what we saw in connection with Michael Obrenovich, Prince of Serbia, when he sacrificed his earlier idealistic views to the demands of state necessity. In a similar way the great soul of Camillo Cavour bowed before karmic necessity and made the transition from the ideal to external realism.

I can only give you an outline of these things. Italy proceeded from stage to stage. In the summer of 1871 Victor Emmanuel was able to enter Rome. How had this become possible? It was made possible by Germany's victories over France! From the statesman Francesco Crispi stem the words: Italy went to Rome thanks to the German victories, after France had taken the first initiative at Solferino. But the fact that Rome became the capital of the kingdom of Italy is due to the German victories over France.

Now a remarkable relationship develops between Italy and France. It is interesting to note how to the extent that Italy was able to consolidate her unity, she became at once an opponent and an ally of France. Another factor is that Italy's statesmen set great store by the fact that her state structure was pieced together from the outside and also that she owed to Germany the final great push towards unity. These statesmen also saw that to join forces with France in the way which would have been possible at that time could not be fruitful for her. This stream, however, was in opposition to another, which gained in force from the year 1876 onwards: that of the francophile democratic left-wing party. So now this new state vacillated between an attraction to France which was, I might say, more on the feeling level, and a more practical attraction to Central Europe. The remarkable thing was that in everything that came about at that time it always turned out that the deciding factor was the practical tendency of Central Europe.

A new turn of events came about when France took over Tunisia. It had always been taken for granted that Tunisia would fall to Italy. But now France proceeded to spread herself there. So the practical tendency in Italy began to gain the upper hand, the tendency which leaned towards Central Europe. It is interesting, for instance, that at the Berlin Congress the Italian delegate asked Bismarck, who was quite calmly suggesting that France should spread over into Africa, whether he was really intent on setting Italy and France at each other's throats. Certainly for the Italian statesmen of that time this meant that Italy must turn towards Germany. And since Bismarck had spoken the famous words: ‘The path to Germany lies via Vienna’, Italy had to turn towards Austria too. So the ancient feud, which Austria had taken on as what I would call her tragic destiny, had to be shelved. For everything the Venetian Republic had done meant, basically, that those elements which tended towards Germany had been pushed out of Italy. So Austria had to take on the role of bearing the stream which came down from the North.

As a result of France's actions in North Africa, the francophile stream in Italy had to retreat, and so the connection with Central Europe came to be taken for granted at that time. I am giving you only a sketchy outline of these things since it is, after all, not my task to teach you politics. But it is necessary to know certain things about which, unfortunately, far too little is known these days. Italy joined Central Europe in 1882 in what came to be known as the Triple Alliance. Certain people will always misjudge this Triple Alliance because they cannot accustom themselves to using the valid terms. There really are people who blame the painful events of the present war on the Triple Alliance instead of the so-called Triple Entente, which included the Entente Cordiale. You see, people do not always use the proper terms. Normally you can ask about something which is intended to lead to a particular goal whether it is really getting there and how long it remains valid. Now, it was always said by those who were a party to the Triple Alliance that its purpose was to preserve peace. And it did indeed serve this purpose for many decades; that is, for decades it served the purpose for which its participants said it was intended.

Then came the Triple Entente of which it was also said that its purpose was to preserve peace. Yet within less than a decade peace had disappeared! Anything else in the world would be judged on what it achieves. Yet precisely in this matter people do not condescend to form an objective judgement. Only five years later that secret matter was contrived which gives us the possibility of studying more closely the alchemy of those bullets which were used for the assassination at Sarajevo! The assassination of June 1914 could not possibly fail! For if those bullets had missed their target, others would have succeeded! Every precaution had been taken to ensure that if one attempt failed, the next would succeed. It was better thought out, indeed planned on a larger scale, than any other assassination in the whole of history.

In order to study what our friends have asked us to bring up here, we shall have to discover the alchemy of those bullets. I shall return to this later. For after only five years something had been mingled with the interrelationships of the Triple Entente, something which brought it about that there was a link between every event that took place in Italy and every event that took place in the Balkan countries. The aim was to let nothing happen in the Balkans without a corresponding event in Italy. The passions of the people were to be swayed in such a way that no action could be taken one-sidedly, either in the one country or the other; the people's feelings and thoughts were always to run parallel. For decades there was this intimate connection between the various impulses in the Apennine and the Balkan peninsulas. Sometimes a case of this kind stands out in an extraordinarily symbolic way. It is ‘a beauty’ in the way it conforms exactly to the theory, just as a doctor might find a serious case ‘a beauty’ if it gives him an opportunity of performing a particularly good operation—which does not mean in any way that it is something beautiful in itself.

On a visit to Italy we once called in Rome on a most charming, delightful and friendly gentleman who has since died. He conducted us into his sitting room where we found in a very prominent position the portraits, personally autographed, of Draga Masin and Alexander Obrenovich. This friendly gentleman was not only a famous professor; he was the organizer of the so-called Latin League, which was concerned with the separation of South Tyrol and Trieste from Austria in favour of Italy. Of course I do not want to draw any great conclusions from such an insignificant experience. But it is significant symbolically that somebody who organizes the Latin League—I am not judging or criticizing, merely reporting—and, in connection with this Latin League, causes the students of Innsbruck university to riot, should have in his sitting room, visible to all comers, the autographed portraits of Alexander Obrenovich and Draga Masin. Since the secret threads which link Rome and Belgrade were well known to me at the time, this experience did make an impression on me as being symptomatic in a certain way. Karma does, after all, lead us to whatever is important for us in the world, and if we are capable of seeing and understanding things in the proper way, then we realize that karma has brought us to a point where there is something to be ‘sniffed out’ in the furtherance of our knowledge.

Things now developed in such a way that in 1888, a year in which war could have broken out just as it did in 1914, the crisis was averted because Crispi remained loyal to the Triple Alliance. He remained loyal to the Triple Alliance because France was proceeding to spread herself in North Africa. France embarked at that time on a political tactic aimed at Italy, who was starting to turn away from her. The French themselves said this tactic was intended to bring about the ‘re-conquering of Italy by means of hunger’, that is, a kind of trade war was attempted against Italy, and this trade war certainly played an important role at that time. The consequence was that Italy's practical links with Central Europe were increasingly strengthened. It is perhaps just as well if I give you the opinion of a Frenchman on this, rather than that of a German. He said that modern Italy was economically a German colony.

It has often been stressed, not only by Germans but by others as well, that Italy was saved by her close economic ties with Germany from the danger of being conquered by France through hunger—not a nice prospect. All this contributed to the peaceful settlement of the crisis at the end of the eighties. It is most interesting to study this crisis in all its details. It reveals something quite special to someone who is inclined to take account of interconnections and not be deceived. I did the following: I called to mind the events of 1888 and superimposed on them the date 1914. The events are absolutely identical! Just as in 1914 the incitements in the press were started in Petersburg and then taken up in Germany, so it was in 1888. As then, so also in 1914, a conflict was to be brought about between Germany and Austria. In short, every detail is the same. It is interesting that I have read aloud to various people a speech made in 1888 in which I replaced the date 1888 by 1914. Everybody believed that the speech was made in 1914!

When such things are possible we are not inclined to speak of coincidences. We have to understand that there are driving forces and that these driving forces work in a systematic way. In 1888 the matter was averted in the manner I have described. Then the situation became more complicated. The complication arose particularly because the connection of the Apennine peninsula to Central Europe took on a most peculiar character as far as Italy was concerned. It is psychologically interesting to study these things. It really came to a point where Italy, political Italy, had to be treated like some hysterical ladies are treated. The most unbelievable things developed, particularly because the opinion grew and was propagated in Europe that Austria must break up. I am not criticizing, only reporting.

You may gain an impression of how this opinion was propagated in Europe by reading the publications of Loiseaux, Chéradame and others, all of which treat of the assumption that Austria will be divided up in the near future. Now these judgements of Loiseaux and Chéradame and the others were thrown onto what was smouldering away down in the South. Under these circumstances it was definitely not easy to carry on what is usually known as politics. For instance, Oberdank was much celebrated in Italy. He had attempted to assassinate Emperor Franz Josef. In Vienna, on the other hand, a picture in an exhibition had to be renamed for the visit of the Duke of the Abruzzi. Its title was The Naval Battle of Lissa. This battle had been won by Austria, and so as not to offend the Duke of the Abruzzi the picture had to be renamed Naval Battle. This is just one example among many. I am not criticizing, but I do wonder about the question of give and take. Would anyone in Italy have condescended to be so considerate as to omit the name of a sea battle Italy had won? In Vienna they were. Whether it is right or wrong, it does raise the question of give and take. I mention this in order to characterize the different moods somewhat. For it is these moods which matter when streams such as that of the ‘Grand Orient de France’ come into play and when occult impulses of this kind start to take a hold.

Certain things of which people have taken no note so far will have to become things of which they take a great deal of note in the future, for it is not the case that the ‘Massonieri’, as also other secret brotherhoods, do not notice what is there; rather they set themselves the task of making use of those forces which are indeed there. They know where the forces are of which they must make use. So if on the Apennine peninsula there exists a certain stream, and if on the Balkan peninsula there exists another stream, then suitable use must be made of these two streams so that, at the right moment—that is, the right moment from the point of view of these people—one thing or another can be set in motion.

Let this be a preparation for the alchemical discussion I mentioned, which will take us further along our path. Please note that, in order to meet the wishes of our friends, I cannot but mention a certain amount of what is going on at the present time. What I have to say has to be linked to certain things which do exist, even if not everybody agrees that these should be brought out into the open. I am convinced that one of the chief causes for the painful events going on in the world today is the attitude that a blind eye can be turned to certain matters while others are discussed on the basis of an entirely false premise. Even in the face of large-scale matters of this kind, each individual should start from a foundation of self-knowledge. And a portion of self-knowledge is involved if we recognize that to claim no interest in these things and to want only to hear of occult matters is, in a small way, no different from all that adds up to the events we are experiencing today. For spiritual things are not only those which have to do with higher worlds. These, to start with, are of course occult for everybody. But much of what takes place on the physical plane is also occult for many people. We can only hope that much of what is occult and hidden on this plane may be revealed! For one of the causes of today's misery is that so much remains occult for so many people, who nevertheless persist in forming judgements.

When once our construction, dedicated to spiritual science, is finished in Dornach, it contains a sculptural group at an important place. This group primarily presents three figures. In the middle of this group a figure stands as, I would like to say, the representative of the highest human which could develop on earth. Hence, one can also feel this figure of the highest human in the earth development as Christ, Who lived in the body of Jesus of Nazareth for three years within the earth development. It is the particular task to form this Christ figure in such a way that one can see, on one side, the concerning being living in a human earthly body, however, this earthly body being spiritualised in every look, in everything that is in it by Christ Who entered from cosmic, from spiritual heights in the thirtieth year of his life in this earthly body.

Then two other figures are to be found, one on the left side, the other on the right side of the Christ figure, if I am allowed to call this figure the Christ figure. This Christ figure stands there like before a rock which towers up in particular on the left side of Christ, so that its peak is above the head of the Christ figure. On top of the rock is another figure, a winged figure; but the wings are broken, and this figure falls, because it has broken wings, into the chasm. What has to be worked out artistically in particular is the way how this Christ figure raises the left arm. Because the Christ figure raises his left arm, it happens that this falling being breaks the wings. But this must not look in such a way, as if possibly Christ broke the wings of this being, but the whole must be artistically arranged so that, while Christ raises the arm, already lies in the whole movement of the hand that he has an infinite compassion, actually, also with this being. However, this being does not endure what flows up through the arm and hand and what is still visible because the fingers of the stretched hand hollowed the rock, as it were. What this being feels in itself, because it comes near to the Christ being, I would like to dress in the words: I cannot bear anything pure like that shining on me.

It is that which lives in this being and lives so substantially in this being that its wings are broken and it falls consequently into the chasm. This is one especially significant artistic task. You notice what could be missed if Christ stood there plastically and such a force were simply emitted by raising the hand, so that He breaks the wings of this being so that it falls into the chasm. Then it would be Christ who would shine on this being like with hatred and make it fall. However, this must not be shown that way, but the being should make itself fall. Since this being who is shown falling down with broken wings is Lucifer.

On the other side, toward the right side of the Christ figure where the rock has a projection the rock will be hollowed out there. In this hollow is also a winged figure. This figure turns to the rock cavity on top with his arm-like organs. You have to imagine: on the right the rock cavity and in this cavity the winged figure which has, however, quite differently formed wings than the figure on top of the rock. This figure has more aquiline wings, the figure in the cave bat-like wings. The latter figure locks itself up in the cave, you see it in chains, and you see it working there on the ground hollowing out the earth.

The Christ figure in the middle turns his right hand downwards. Whereas it turns its left hand upwards, it turns the right hand downwards. It will be a significant artistic task again not to show this in such a way, as if Christ wanted to put this figure which is Ahriman in chains, but that Christ Himself has an infinite compassion for Ahriman. However, Ahriman cannot endure this; he writhes in pains by that which the hand of Christ emits. This causes that the veins of gold, which are at the bottom in the cave, wind like strings around Ahriman's body and tie it up. Just as that which happens with Lucifer happens by himself, it also happens with Ahriman. Then we will attempt to paint the same motive above the sculptural group, but the view of the painting must be completely different from that of the sculpture. So that we have this group of three figures: Christ, Lucifer, and Ahriman as a sculpture group at the bottom and above them the same motive painted.

We put this relationship of Christ, Lucifer, and Ahriman in our Dornach building because spiritual science shows us in a certain way really that concerning the understanding of the Christ Impulse the next task is that, finally, the human being learns to know which relationship exists in the world between these three powers Christ, Lucifer, and Ahriman. Since, indeed, up to now one often talks about Christianity and the Christ Impulse, but that which has entered the world by the Christ Impulse, actually, as a result of Christ's Death and Resurrection, this has not yet become completely clear to the human beings. One speaks probably of the fact that there is Lucifer that there is Ahriman, but while one speaks of Lucifer and Ahriman, one speaks very often in such a way, as if one had to flee them, as if one had to say almost always: I want to know nothing, nothing at all about Lucifer and Ahriman.

If the divine-spiritual powers, which are found in the way, as I have described it in the public lecture yesterday, also wanted to know nothing about Lucifer and Ahriman, the world would just not be able to exist. You do not position yourselves in the correct relationship saying: Lucifer, I avoid him! Ahriman, I avoid him! You rather have to look at that which the human being has to strive for as a result of the Christ Impulse like the equilibrium position of a pendulum. The pendulum is in the middle in balance; however, it must swing to and fro. That is similar also in the earth development of the human being. The human being must tend on one side to the luciferic principle, on the other side to the ahrimanic principle, but he must learn and stand firmly on that which Paul said: “not I, but Christ in me.”

We have to understand Christ in his effectiveness absolutely as a reality. That is we must be clear to us that this really happened which flowed by Christ's Death and Resurrection in our earth development. How well or how badly people understood this up to now, it does not depend on it, but on the fact that it was there that it has worked in the human earth development. One could say a lot that people have not yet understood of the Christ Impulse. And spiritual science will contribute a little piece to the understanding of that what flowed in from spiritual heights by the Mystery of Golgotha as the Christ Impulse onto the earth development. To realise Christ's working, we want to make clear to us, as this has also happened at other places, two moments of the earth development of humankind, two moments which became important in the whole western development.

You know from history, what an important moment it was, when Constantine, the son of Constantius Chlorus, defeated Maxentius, and Christianity was introduced by Constantine externally in the western development. Constantine had to go into that important battle against Maxentius through which Constantine then made Christianity the state religion in his western empire. The whole map of Europe would have become different if in those days this battle had not taken place against Maxentius. But strategic art, that of what people were capable with their intellects in those days, did not decide this battle really, but something else.

Maxentius made read up in the so-called Sibylline Books, the prophetic books of Rome, and got the advice to lead his army out of the walls of Rome, whereas they would have been saved well within the walls. So he positioned his troops in the free field against the army of Constantine. However, Constantine had a dream before the battle which indicated to him: if you go in the sign of the Mystery of Golgotha against Maxentius, you arrive at a big goal.—And carrying the sign of the Mystery of Golgotha, the cross, Constantine went to the battle with an army about three quarters smaller than that of Maxentius. Filled with enthusiasm by the power which came from the Mystery of Golgotha, Constantine won that important battle through which Christianity was introduced externally in Europe. If we remember what people understood of the Christ Impulse with their intellects in those days, we find an endless theological quarrelling.

People quarrelled whether Christ is identical from eternity with the Father and the like more. One must say: it does not depend on that which people knew about the Christ Impulse in those days, but on the fact that it was there, the Christ Impulse, that it induced the necessary events by Constantine, by a dream of Constantine. It depends on the reality of Christ, on the real power of Christ. In our spiritual science, we only begin understanding the Christ Impulse.

Another moment was that when in the fight between France and England Europe was formed in such a way that one can say: if France had not been victorious against England in those days, all the circumstances would have become different. But how had this happened?—The Christ Impulse has just worked in the subconscious of the soul up to now, when it has to become more aware. We see then in the western spiritual development the Christ Impulse seeking for those conditions in the human souls through which it can be effective with individual human beings. Legends have preserved the way how the Christ Impulse in the western spiritual development can make itself noticeable. These legends point partly back to old pagan times, when everywhere understanding of Christianity was prepared just in paganism.

If the soul does not strive for initiation consciously in the way I have described in How Does One Attain Knowledge of the Higher Worlds?, but gets it as it were in natural way, as it was filled with the Christ Impulse by a natural initiation. The most convenient time in which this Christ Impulse is able to inspire the soul is the time of the Christmas Eve up to the Epiphany day, the time from the 25th December to the 6th January. We can understand that if we get the following clear in our mind: for the esoteric knowledge it is unambiguously evident that our earth is not only that of which the geologists talk. That is only like the skeleton of the human being. But our earth also has its own spirituality. And Christ has just entered the earth aura. This earth sleeps and wakes as we sleep and are awake in twenty-four hours. We have to realise the fact that the earth sleeps during the summertime and is awake in the wintertime. The spirit of the earth is the most awake in these twelve or thirteen nights from Christmas to Epiphany. In olden times, in which—as you know from the various representations in my lectures—the human beings had a dreamlike clairvoyance and experienced the spiritual principle of the world that way. The most convenient time was the summertime. It is quite natural that somebody who wants to rise in a more dreamlike clairvoyance to the spiritual has it easier during the sleeping time of the earth, in the summertime. Hence, it was the St. John's-tide which was the most convenient in olden times to raise the strength of the soul to the spiritual. The new, more conscious way has replaced the old way in which the spiritual was working into the earth; now it is the best time when the earth is awake.

Hence, the legends tell us that especially gifted human beings, human beings who are particularly suitable because of their karma, get a special condition of consciousness at the Yuletide which is only externally similar to sleep but inspires it internally, so that the human being was raised to the world we call the spirit-land. There is a very nice legend, the Norwegian legend of Olaf Åsteson about whom is told to us that he goes to the church at the Christmas Eve, falls into a sleep-like state and wakes up at the sixth January and can tell what he experienced in this state similar to sleep. This Norwegian legend actually explains to us that Olaf Åsteson experienced something that one feels at first like the soul-world, then something that one feels like the spirit-land, only just everything in pictures, in Imaginations.

This time was the most convenient in those epochs in which the human beings were not yet so advanced as in our time. Today, the times are over in which the Christ Impulse can flow into the souls like by a natural initiation. Today, the human beings have to ascend to initiation as consciously as it is described in How Does One Attain Knowledge of the Higher Worlds? We live in a time in which natural initiations become rarer and rarer and completely disappear, finally, so that we do not have to count any more on them. But, basically, one can call a physical initiation that through which the Christ Impulse worked on the soul of the simple farmer girl, the Maid of Orleans, who brought about the victory of the French over the English. This victory reshaped the European map wondrously. The human reason could not perform that, but that which guided the Maid of Orleans in those days and outstripped all the skill of the military leaders, by which Europe got a new figure. It was the Christ Impulse, which worked on the unconscious of a single personality, but worked so that then from this personality spread out what was efficient in history.

We would have to notice if anything similar could have taken place as a natural initiation with the Maid of Orleans if the soul of the Maid of Orleans had been inspired in the nights from the 25th December to the 6th January. In the course of life it seems that such a matter cannot be verified that the Maid of Orleans also was once during twelve or thirteen days from the 25th December to the 6th January in a sleep-like state in which the Christ Impulse would have worked on her, so that she would be able to work as a human being only like the cover of the Christ Impulse on the battlefields of France. Nevertheless, it was that way. For there is a time which—if the karma of the concerning individuality makes it possible—can be filled with such a sleep-like state. This is the time of the last days in which the human being still lives in the body of the mother, before he sees the physical earth light. The human being lives there in a dreamlike state similar to sleep. He has not yet seen anything by the senses that takes place externally in the world. If a human being were particularly suitable by his karma to take up the Christ Impulse during these last days in which he lives in the body of the mother, these days would also be days of the natural initiation. Then such a human being would open his eyes for the first time already strengthened by the Christ Impulse lying in him after the initiation, that means in this case, after his birth. And such a human being would have to be born on the 6th January. The Maid of Orleans was born on the 6th January. This is the secret of the Maid of Orleans that she was born on the 6th January that she spent the time from Christmas up to the Epiphany day in that peculiar state similar to sleep in the body of the mother and got a natural initiation. Consider the deep connections which are behind the external development which one normally calls history. What is shown externally in history with the help of documents is as a rule even the most insignificant. The simple date which is registered in our calendar that the Maid of Orleans was sent into the world on the 6th January is of authoritative historical significance. The forces work from the supersensible realm on the sensory realm that way. We have to read this occult writing which shows us the forces working from the supersensible realm on the sensory realm. So the Christ Impulse flowed into the Maid of Orleans like by a natural initiation, already before her physical birth.

I want to explain these matters to arouse a feeling in you that forces and connections unknown to the external view are effective behind that what one normally calls history. However, the Christ Impulse guides history, of the European humankind in particular, since the Mystery of Golgotha. In the East, in Asia a world view remained of which one can say: it has not yet approached the Christ Impulse in its feelings. Indeed, the European was enticed to call the Indian views particularly deep. But this is the typical of Hinduism—generally of the whole Asian religious feeling—that it stands with all its feelings before the Christ Impulse, but has preserved the state which was there in the religious feeling of the earthly humankind before the Christ Impulse. Lagging behind in the development always means taking up something luciferic. Hence, the Asian religious development carries a luciferic element in itself. If we look over at the Asian religious development, we must notice: indeed, we can see a lot in it that humankind had already once that it had to leave, however. But we have partly to purify that all in the western culture from the luciferic element, to raise it partly in such a way that the Christ-principle can flow into it.

If we go from Asia to Europe, we find in the east of Europe, in the Russian culture, the orthodox Christianity spread out which has stopped on a former level of the Christian development which did not want to go along which wanted to keep something luciferic. Briefly, we look at the East, we have what, I would like to say, the wise guidance of the world left behind in the whole development of humankind as the luciferic element.

Let us look at the West, particularly at the American civilisation, and then we have another characteristic. The typical of this American civilisation is that everything is searched for in the external. A lot of significant things are thereby produced indeed; but everything is searched for in the outside. Take an example. If we see in Europe, in particular in Central Europe, that a human being who did not have any opportunity in his life at first to turn his soul to Christ and the powers of the spiritual world and suddenly changes his life because of something, then interests us what has taken place in his soul. It does not interest us that he experienced a jump in his development, we find this everywhere.

Since most inaccurate is the saying which the external science has stamped: nature does not make jumps.¹—From the green plant leaf to the red petal is a big jump; from the petal to the chalices is again a big jump. It is an absolutely wrong saying, and the truth of the development is based just on the fact that everywhere jumps are made. The fact that a human being if he has lived for a while so externally is able to tend suddenly to spirituality induced by anything, in that we are not interested in particular. But the internal power which achieves such a conversion to spirituality interests us. We want to look into the soul of such a human being; we want to know what brought him to such a conversion. We are interested in the soul.

How does the American make it?—He makes something very peculiar. In America, one could often observe such conversions. Now, the American lets such people write letters who experienced a conversion. Then he puts all these letters together on a small heap and says: I received letters from two hundred people, more or less. Fourteen percent of those who experienced such a conversion wrote that they were suddenly attacked by fear of death or hell; five percent because of altruistic motives; seventeen percent because of striving for moral ideals; fifteen percent experienced pangs of conscience; ten percent because they observed teachings given to them; thirteen percent because they have seen that others were converted—by imitation; nineteen percent because they were forced, while they were thrashed at the suitable age, and so on. One selects the most extreme souls, sorts them and receives a result which is based on “sure data.” That is registered then in the books which one spreads as “psychology” among people. All the other documents are uncertain to these people, are only based on subjectivity, they say. There you have an example that something innermost is made superficial. That holds true in many respects in America. In the time which demands a particular spiritual deepening the most superficial spiritualism is rampant in America. One wants to have everything as something sensory.

Spiritual life is grasped materialistically that way. We could still give many such examples which would show you that the civilisation of the West is seized by Ahriman. This is the other deflection of the pendulum. If we look at the East, we have the luciferic element, if we look at the West, we have the ahrimanic element. The infinitely important task we have in Central Europe between West and East is to find the balance. Hence, we would like to put the biggest of the spiritual demands of our time in our Dornach building as a sculptural group: to find the balance between the relation to Lucifer and the relation to Ahriman. Then one will only recognise what the Christ Impulse wanted from the earth development if one puts outside Christ not so simply, but if one knows correctly that Christ is that power which shows us the relation to Lucifer and Ahriman exemplarily.

That the relation of the human being and Christ to Lucifer and Ahriman is not yet recognised clearly, this may become illustrative to you by the following. Also the greatest, which contains the greatest in one respect, is not always free of that which must still be there as an one-sidedness in time. Indeed, one cannot appreciate that picture enough which Michelangelo painted in the Sistine Chapel in Rome, The Last Judgement, this miraculous picture. Christ triumphing, directing the good human beings to one side, the bad human beings to the other. Let us look at this Christ. He does not have the features which we would like to give the Christ figure that should stand in our Dornach construction. It must become evident that Christ raises the hand in compassion, even though Lucifer is there above. Lucifer should not be brought down by the power of Christ, but he falls down because he cannot endure what shines from Christ in his nearness. Christ raises his eye and folds the forehead while raising the folded forehead to Lucifer.

Ahriman is overcome not by the hatred of Christ, but he feels that he cannot endure what flows out from Christ. However, Christ stands in the midst as somebody who introduces the Parzival element in the modern age. He has to get the others to overcome themselves not by His power, but by His existence, so that they overcome themselves and not he overcomes them. With Michelangelo, we still see Christ sending the good human beings to heaven and the bad ones to hell by His power. This is not the right Christ in future, but this is a Christ who is still very luciferic. That does not reduce our esteem of that picture. The whole significance of this picture is recognised, but one has to admit that Michelangelo could not yet paint Christ because the world development was not yet so far. It must clearly be seen that one has not only to turn the sense to Christ, but that one has to turn the sense to the threefold being: Christ, Lucifer, and Ahriman. I can only indicate that. Only in future, spiritual science finds out everything that lies in this secret: Christ in relation to Lucifer and Ahriman.

But now consider the following: if we look at the East, we look at luciferic powers even in the near East. In the West, we look at ahrimanic powers. In spiritual science, we have to get into the habit of considering the matters not with sympathy and antipathy and also the peoples and folk-souls not with sympathy and antipathy, but in such a way as they are in their characteristics. What one calls the national characteristic of a human being who stands in his people, depends—above all—on that which is effective in the physical and etheric bodies. When we live from falling asleep to waking up with our soul and mind as an astral body and ego, we live beyond the normal national element. We live only from waking up to falling asleep in our nationality when we are in our physical body. That is why the nationality is also something the human being overcomes gradually during his stay in kamaloka. The human being there strives for the generally human, while he overcomes the nationality in kamaloka to live then in the generally human for the longest time between death and new birth. It belongs to the qualities which are taken off in kamaloka, also that which makes us a national human being.

The single nationalities are very different from each other in this regard. Compare a French human being and a Russian human being. The French human being has the characteristic that he seizes that particularly which the folk-soul brings in his physical and etheric bodies during his life between birth and death that he lives particularly in it. This expresses itself in the fact that the Frenchman—not as an individual human being but as a Frenchman—has an idea of that which is a Frenchman; the fact that he puts ahead that above all which is, actually, a Frenchman. But these ideas which the French, also all the other neo-Latin peoples, have of their nationality cause that the ideas of their nationality are deeply stamped into their etheric bodies. When the Frenchman goes through the gate of death, he already detaches the etheric body after some days; then this etheric body is a clearly defined figure which exists in the etheric world for a long time. The etheric body cannot dissolve because the ideas of his nationality are deeply stamped on it; these ideas hold together the etheric body. That is why we see the field of death filled with clearly defined etheric bodies if we look westwards.

Look at the East now, at the Russian human being. It is the peculiarity of this Russian human being that he has such an etheric body in himself that it dissolves relatively quickly when the soul goes through the gate of death. This is the difference between the West and the East. The etheric bodies, which the West-European human beings take off after death, have the peculiarity that they want to be clearly defined. What the French calls “gloire” stamps itself to his etheric body firmly as national gloire, so that he is condemned to turn his spiritual view to this etheric body, to himself for long, long times after death. The Russian human being, however, looks at himself only a little after death. That is why the West-European human being is exposed to the ahrimanic influence; the materialisation of the etheric body is again exposed to the ahrimanic principle. The dissolution of the etheric body, the quick merging of the etheric body is accompanied by a feeling of lust, and this is just the peculiar, an instinctive feeling of lust in the national. How is this expressed in the East?

Central Europe does not understand that, as it also does not feel in that. If one pursues Dostoyevsky and Tolstoy or others who were setting the tone who talk always about the “Russian human being,” this is a feeling of lust in the national which cannot define itself. Even with Solovyov, we find that something sultry is living in his philosophy that is not compatible with the clearness and cleanness the Central European human being searches for. What is effective in Europe as a spiritual power is connected with all that. In Central Europe another, a middle state exists, namely something that one could explain even further than it was possible in the public lecture yesterday. I said: something exists in Central Europe that is an inner striving nature. Goethe would have written his Faust in exactly the same way in the forties of the last century: strive again and again.—But this striving is innermost nature. In Central Europe, the mystics appeared who did not only want to recognise the divine-spiritual, but wanted to experience it with their own souls. The mystics wanted to internally experience the Christ event. If one takes Solovyov, one thinks that he goes out above all from that: Christ died once historically for humankind. This is quite right, but Solovyov sees the spiritual life like a cloud outside himself, who sees that as it were everything already has happened, while the Central European human being demands that everybody experiences Christ in himself time and again. Master Eckhart would have possibly replied the following even to somebody like Solovyov. If Solovyov emphasised repeatedly that Christ must go through death, so that the human being can be a human being, Master Eckhart would say: you look at Christ as one looks at something external. It does not matter that we always look at the historical events only, but we ourselves have to experience Christ inside, we have to discover something inside that goes through such states like Christ, at least spiritually, so that Christ is experienced spiritually.

It seems tricky and fantastic indeed if anybody says to the modern humankind: the whole development, even the folk-soul worked in Central Europe, so that this connection of the ego with the Christ principle is expressed in the language: I-CH (= I) = Jesus Christ. I-CH which is composed in such a way that it means “I.” While one pronounces I (ich) in Central Europe, one pronounces the name of Christ. So near one wants to feel the ego with Christ, so intimately connected with it. One knows this intimate living together with the spiritual world, as it must be striven for in Central Europe in any spiritual field, neither in the West nor in the East. Hence, something must happen in the twentieth century, so that the Christ-principle can spread out gradually over the whole European continent in suitable way. I emphasised it often in various lecture cycles that in November 1879 that spiritual being whom we call the archangel Michael ascended to a special level of development. Michael became, so to speak, the leading spirit. Now this leading spirit prepares the event which I indicated in the first of my mystery dramas as the appearance of the etheric Christ over the earth, the event which must take place in the twentieth century. Then it will happen that single souls at first, then more and more souls know: Christ is there in reality, Christ walks again on earth, but in an etheric figure, not in a physical figure.

This must be prepared. If in the course of this twentieth century the spiritual eyes of certain souls were opened clairvoyantly—and this will happen—for the life of the etheric world, they would be disturbed by those etheric bodies which spread out from Western Europe. They would behold them first, and one would see the figure of Christ wrongly. Hence, Michael must fight a battle in Europe. He has to contribute something that these West-European clearly defined etheric bodies are dissolved in the etheric world. For that he has to take those etheric bodies which enjoy dissolving, the etheric bodies in the East, and must fight with them against the West. This causes that since 1879 a violent struggle prepares itself in the astral world between the Russian and the West-European etheric bodies, and this struggle is raging in the whole astral world. It is actually a violent struggle in the astral world, led by Michael, between Russia and France. This forms the basis of the battle in the astral world, raging in Europe.

As we are often stupefied by the fact that something that takes place here in the physical world is the opposite of that in the spiritual,² managed by Ahriman's seduction, which is based mainly on the ahrimanic element, namely on twenty billions which France gave Russia, is the physical expression of a battle that is raging between French and Russian souls, of a battle in which Central Europe is put with its striving for meeting the Christ in its innermost soul element. And Europe is enslaved by karma that one has to experience just in Central Europe tragically what the East with the West and the West with the East has to fight out. The matters which externally the German element has to fight out with the French element are to be understood only in such a way that the German is just in the middle between the East and the West and serves as an anvil for both sides. Since that which is pushed together by both sides in Germany is negotiated by these both sides in truth. This is the spiritual truth which is completely different from the external events in the physical world. Imagine how different the spiritual truth is from the external events in the physical world. Indeed, everything like that sounds absurd to the modern human beings, but it is the truth. This truth must stupefy us.

But another matter is also exceptionally significant. Indeed, it counters everything that history can show us that England, after it was always an ally of Turkey against Russia, must fight now suddenly with Russia against Turkey. One can understand this gainsay if one does the following occult observation. While here below on the physical plane England is an ally of Russia and fights against the Turkish element, the following presents to the occult observation. If one observes this struggle clairvoyantly and looks as it were from below up at the physical plane and then at the astral plane, it becomes apparent: in the North, Russia seems to be allied with England, and in the South-East Turkey seems to be allied with England. This is due to the fact that the alliance between England and Russia has significance only on the physical plane, but there is no reflection in the spiritual world, because it is completely based on material interests. From below one sees England and Russia united only on the physical plane in the North. In the South-East, one sees through the physical plane to the astral plane where the English are allies of the Turks and are fighting against Russia. On one side, England fights together with Russia on the physical plane, and on the other side Russia is combated by England. We have to look at the external events this way, in so far as they manifest themselves as external history. Since that which lies behind is something completely different.

A time will come in which the human beings talk about the present events quite differently than it happens now. One must say that the whole war literature has something rather unpleasant. Something pleasant is also said, but also a lot of unpleasant things. Above all one matter is unpleasant. It is always said: today one cannot yet speak about the question: who is responsible for the war? Et cetera.—People console themselves passing over the matters. They say: in future one finds out of the documents in the archives, who was responsible for the war.—Concerning the external events the matter, however, is not hard to be found at all if one judges without passion. Chamberlain³ is right in his “war articles” even if he is mistaken in the details, when he says that one can know the most certain just about this war. This is right that no doubt exists about that, only one has to put the right question. A question can only be answered unambiguously, for example, if it is put correctly. It is the question: who could have prevented this war?

The always returning question: who is responsible for this war? And still many other questions, are not just right. Who could have prevented the war?—No other answer can be given than: the Russian government could have prevented the war.—One will only be able to find the right definition of the impulses which work in detail. Of course, the war, intended by the East since decades, could not have come unless a certain relation had existed between England, Russia, and France, so that one can ascribe the bigger guilt also—if one wants—to England. But all these matters do not take into consideration which causes are behind that showing the whole world war as a necessity. It is naive to think that the war could have failed to come. Now the people talk, as if this war did not need to come. It is the result of the European karma.

I wanted to indicate something by the spiritual contrasts between the East and the West. It does not depend on the fact that we ask, so to speak, for the outer causes in particular, because they are not important. We must only know that this war is a historical necessity. The single causes are not important there.

But all the heterogeneous effects to which we will have to position ourselves correctly are important. One effect can appear to us as particularly important. It is a great, typical phenomenon that such a war produces many unused etheric bodies. Because this is the biggest war which humankind has waged in its conscious historical development, this characteristic also exists to a very high degree. Unused etheric bodies are produced. The etheric body can supply the human being for long, until the human being is seventy, eighty, or ninety years old. However, during the war human beings are sacrificed in the prime of life. When the human being goes through the gate of death, he takes off the etheric body, as you know, after a short time; but the etheric body of somebody who was killed in action is taken off in such a way that it could still have supplied this human life in a physical body for long, for decades.

In physics one accepts that energy does not get lost. However, that also applies to spirituality. The forces of these etheric bodies, which early go to the etheric world, remain available. Think now that countless unused etheric bodies of those are there who go as young human beings through the gate of death. Nevertheless, it is something particular with these etheric bodies. I would like to explain this at an example which is obvious to our movement and to lead then to the etheric bodies of the warriors gone through death which are contained in the etheric world in the next future.

In this autumn, we experienced the death of the little son of an anthroposophical family which is employed in the area of our Dornach construction. This boy, Theodor Faiss, was seven years old. His father once lived in Stuttgart, and then he came as a gardener to Dornach in the area of the construction and lived there with his family. He himself was soon called up to the army after outbreak of the war and was in a military hospital at the time of the accident. The little, seven-year-old Theodor was a real sunny child, a wonderful, dear boy. Now one day the following happened. We had just a lecture as I give them in Dornach after the construction work. After the lecture somebody came and reported that the little Theodor Faiss has not come back to his mother since the late afternoon. It was ten o'clock in the evening, and one could imagine nothing but that a big tragedy has happened. A removal van had arrived in this afternoon and had gone a way near the so-called canteen where it had to turn round. This carriage had reached a place in those days, in which, one is allowed to state this, no such a big carriage has gone for many decades before, generally maybe no removal van has ever gone and just as little after. Now the little Theodor, before this van had turned round, had been in the canteen. He had been detained there a little bit, otherwise he would have gone sooner with the provisions he had got in the canteen for the dinner. Then he went the way home—it is only a short distance—so that he was just at that place where the van toppled over and fell on him, the little Theodor. Nobody had noticed it, even the coachman did not. He had only got his horses to safety when the carriage toppled over, and did not know that the child was under it. When the absence of the child was reported to us, we had to try to lift the carriage. The friends got tools, and the mobilised Swiss soldiers helped us. Of course, the child was already dead since possibly a half past five o'clock in the afternoon. The removal van had crushed it straight away, it died of suffocation.

There we have such a case to which one can apply what I often tried to make clear using a comparison that one confuses cause and effect. Imagine that we see a person going along a riverbank. The person falls into the river. One runs to him and finds a stone where the person fell into the river and thinks that the person tripped, then fell in the river and died this way. One says that the person has died because he fell into the river. But if one dissects him, one maybe finds that he experienced a heart attack and fell consequently dead into the water. He did not die because he fell into the water, but he fell into the water because he died. You find such mistakes of cause and effect in the judgement of life very frequently and in the usual science even more.

The karma of the little Theodor had run off in a certain way, so that one can really say: he ordered the carriage to that place. I mention this case which is externally exceptionally tragic, because we deal with the etheric body of a child which could have supplied through the life of this child still for decades. This etheric body is passed over with its unused forces to the spiritual world, the etheric world. Where is he? What does he do?—Somebody who is obliged to work on the Dornach construction since that time with artistic intentions, generally to have thoughts in the area of the construction knows if he beholds clairvoyantly at the same time: this whole etheric body and its forces is increased in the aura of the Dornach construction. We have to distinguish: the individuality is somewhere else, it goes its own way, but the etheric body is expelled after some days and exists now in the construction. Never will I hesitate before saying that among the forces which one needs to Intuition the forces of this etheric body are, sacrificed to the construction. Behind life the connections are often completely different than anybody only suspects it. This etheric body has become protecting powers of the construction. Something great is in such a connection.

Consider now, what a big sum of strength goes up to the spiritual world in the unused etheric bodies of those who go now through the gate of death as a result of the military events.

The matters are connected differently than the human beings can imagine. The world karma takes place differently. Spiritual science must be there just to replace fantastic ideas with spiritually true ideas. We can imagine hardly—to mention only one example—something more fantastic or untrue from the spiritual point of view than something that took place in the last decades. A special “peace society”⁴ was founded to put the law at the place of the war, as one said, “the International Law.”—In no time of humankind such dreadful wars were waged as since the “peace society” exists. In the last decades, this peace movement had a monarch among its particular protectors who waged the bloodiest and cruelest wars which ever were waged in world history. So that the installation of the peace movement from the part of the czar must really appear as the biggest comedy which was played in world history, the biggest comedy and at the same time the most hideous comedy. One has to call that luciferic seduction. This can well be investigated in details. One can say, it stupefies the soul if one sees—one may look at the matters as one wants—in the beginning when these war impulses entered Europe, Central Europe, where one assembled like in the Berlin Reichstag, people talking almost about nothing. One has only spoken a little, but the matters have spoken. A lot has been spoken in the West like in the East. But one has the most stupefying impression in a certain way of that what has been spoken in the St. Petersburg Duma by the different parties. In the various way the representatives of the Duma have really brought forward nothing else than the empty phrases with the biggest fire of enthusiasm. It was stupefying. This is a luciferic seduction. However, everything shows us that the fire, which burns during this war, is a warning fire, and that the human beings have to pay attention.

Everything that happens now points to the fact that at least some souls must say to themselves: it cannot go on that way as it has gone in the world, spirituality must flow into the human development. Materialism has found its karma in this most dreadful war of all the wars. In certain respect this war is the karma of materialism. The more the human souls see this, the more they will get beyond arguing, whether this one or that one is responsible for the war, and say to themselves: this war was sent to us in world history that it is an admonisher that we should turn to a spiritual understanding of the whole human life.

Materialism makes not only the souls of the human beings materialistically minded; it also corrupts the logic and makes the feeling dull. Within Central Europe, one still has to see something that is connected with that which I have said: that one has to deal most intimately with the further development of the Christ Impulse just in Central Europe. But that belongs to it that one has to start understanding the spirits who have already laid the germs. Only one example: Goethe wrote a theory of colours. The physicists look at it as something, about which they say compassionately smiling: what has the poet understood of the colours? He was just a dilettante.—Since the eighties of the nineteenth century I try to help the Goethean theory of colours on the road to success against modern physics. This cannot be understood. Why can it not be understood? Because the materialistic principle, which came from the British folk-soul, penetrated Central Europe. Newton whom Goethe had to combat won the victory over that which issued from Goethe's spirit. Goethe also founded a theory of evolution in which is shown by grasping spiritual laws how the beings advance from the most imperfect condition to the most perfect. This was too hard to understand. When Darwin brought his theory of evolution, the people accepted it, because they could understand it easier. Darwin was victorious over Goethe. The materialistic thinker who was inspired by the British folk-soul was victorious over Goethe who got everything from the most intimate dialog with the German folk-soul.

Ernst Haeckel has experienced something tragic. He lived mentally through his whole life on that which Huxley and Darwin have given to him. The materialism of Ernst Haeckel is basically a very English product. When the war broke out, Haeckel was outraged about what happened from the British islands. He was one of the first to send back the English medals, certificates and honourings. What must be sent back, however, are not the certificates, medals and honourings, but the English coloured Darwinism and the English coloured physics. One has to call that in mind, so that one sees what can be striven for in the Central European area as an intimate being together with the laws of the world.

One can corrupt the childish soul mostly if one already pours out in it that which develops then in only materialistic colouring. The centuries have worked towards it. Among the Britons over there, Ahriman inspired a great author, so that this author wrote a work which was completely intended to influence the soul materialistically from the childish age on in such a way that one does not notice it, because one does not consider it preparing materialism. This is Robinson Crusoe. The whole way, as Robinson is described, is so clever that these ideas of Robinson Crusoe if they are taken up prepare the mind in such a way that it can later think only materialistically. Humankind is not yet cured of inventors of such Robinsons; they always existed and exist even today. I could give many examples.

I talk about these matters not to say anything against the peoples of the West who have to be as they are, but to show how in Central Europe the human beings have to find the connection with the big, only germ-like values of the future development. The role of Austria is also significant in particular. In the last decades, one could see some spirits striving for high ideals like Hamerling⁵ in poetry, like Carneri⁶ who wanted to deepen Darwinism concerning moral, and like Bruckner⁷ and other artists in all kinds of fields. It matters such a self-reflection of the people

Now we look at the unused etheric bodies which exist there. These etheric bodies were taken off by human beings who learnt during a big event to sacrifice themselves for something that there is no longer for them, not as anything sensory at least: for the people. If somebody talks today as a spiritual scientist about the fact that there a folk-soul is as an archangel et cetera, then they laugh at him. What one calls folk-soul in materialism is only the summary of the qualities which the human beings of a people have. What the materialist calls people is only the sum of the human beings who live together and look similar in an area. We speak about a people in such a way that we know: the folk-soul exists as a real being of the archangel's rank. Even if anybody who sacrifices himself who goes through death for his people has no clear idea of a real folk-soul on the field of the events, nevertheless, he confirms by the way he goes through death that he believes in a further effectiveness after this death that he believes that there is more than that which the eyes see in the people: its connection and its keeping together with the supersensible realm.

Everybody who goes through death, whether he knows it more or less, goes through this death, confirming that there is a supersensible world; this is stamped to his etheric body. So that in future except those who will live on the physical earth when peace has taken place again, the unused etheric bodies will live for ever sending these tones to the music of the spheres: there is more in the world than that which can be seen only with physical eyes. Spiritual truth sounds into the music of the spheres by that which the dead leave behind in their etheric bodies, apart from that which they take with their individualities which they carry through the life between death and new birth.

However, one has to listen to that which will live and sound from these etheric bodies. For these etheric bodies were taken off by human beings who, confirming the truth of the spiritual world, went through death. The biggest sin of humankind will be if it does not listen to that which the dead call to it by their warning etheric bodies. How much is the view to the spiritual world enlivened if one has to imagine that the fathers and mothers, the sisters and brothers, sons and daughters, who lose dear relatives and friends, must say to themselves: what was there sacrificed, lives for the whole humankind, admonishing that which has to come.

If one relied on the events of the physical world, one could not have a lot of hope for the prosperous progress of the spiritual movement which should be cultivated in our spiritual-scientific world view. When recently a good, loyal co-worker died, in the thirtieth year of his life, there was in my words, which I directed to this soul after he has gone through the gate of death, the entreaty that he would like to co-operate as faithfully and courageously on our spiritual-scientific field as he co-operated here faithfully and devotedly, using everything that he knew. He co-operated diligently here on the physical plane, this co-worker. I gave him this as a message for his life between death and new birth that he may co-operate after death as he done it before death, because we count on these dead, the so-called dead, as on the living.

Our spiritual-scientific world view must be vivid, so that the abyss is overcome between the so-called dead and the living that we feel the dead among us like living human beings. We want not only theory, but life. That is why we also point to the fact that a living bond exists between those who live on earth when peace is again, and those who went through the gate of death. The human beings will be able to learn from the dead, will have to learn how these dead help in the big spiritual progress which must seize the earth.

Sometimes one recognises in life that the human logic does not suffice. I would like to give you an example, not for personal reasons, but to characterise the way people position themselves to our movement. Some years ago, one could read an article about our spiritual science in a South German very serious magazine written by a famous philosopher of the present. Spiritual science was treated there in such a way that it could make a certain impression on the people because the article was written by a great philosopher. The editor of the magazine prided himself in particular that he could publish an article on spiritual science by such a famous man. Of course, everything was shown badly and erroneously; a totally askew picture of spiritual science was given. What did the editor need, however, to see what a judgment about our movement he had delivered, actually, in his monthly magazine?

Then the war came. That man who had written the article wrote some letters to the editor. These letters contain the most repellent things one can generally say about the Central European culture. He ranted and sneered terribly about this Central European culture. The editor printed these letters as an example of how brainlessly one can think about this culture. Now he says: this person writes, nevertheless, as only a person can write who should be in the lunatic asylum.—The fact is that such a thing was necessary for a good editor to see that the man should be in the lunatic asylum who wrote this article about spiritual science some years ago and wreaked much havoc outwardly. If the man had to be in the lunatic asylum, he should already be there at that time. But at that time he wrote an article about spiritual science.

Such matters happen in the world. Quite different supports have to come to get a judgment than those the human being has today. However, the spiritual scientist stands firmly on the ground that shows clearly that truth finds its way. But spiritual science must have an effect on the development of humankind, so that the necessary matters take place. Like in that time, when the emperor Constantine had to complete his task, the Christ Impulse had to work from the spiritual world on the subconscious, like with the Maid of Orleans the Christ Impulse had to work, so that happened what had to happen, the Christ Impulse has to go on working, only now more in the consciousness. There must be souls in future who know: up there in the spiritual world are those who sacrificed themselves with their individualities and request us to follow them and believe in the effectiveness of spirituality they got through death. But also the forces of the unused etheric bodies call into the future what one only needs to understand to take up it in our own souls. On earth, however, must be the souls who hear this. Souls must be there who prepare themselves by the right and living understanding of our spiritual science. Our spiritual science has to create souls here on earth that are able to have premonitions of what the etheric bodies of the dead up there speak in future. The souls who know: there up are the forces which can admonish the human beings who had to be left to their own resources on earth. If here below souls aware of spirit direct their senses to the hidden tones of the spiritual world, the right fruits will originate from all the blood that flowed, from all the sacrifices that were accomplished, from all the grief that had to be endured and must still be endured. Looking at the hope which may be expressed that a lot of souls may be found by spiritual science who can hear these voices which sound from the spiritual world in particular as a result of this war, I would like to speak, to sum up, the last words of this consideration, words which should express only as a feeling what I would like to stimulate in your souls:

From the courage of the fighters,
From the blood of the battles,
From the grief of the bereaved,
From the nation's sacrifices
Will grow up the fruits of spirit
If souls aware of spirit turn
Their senses to the spirit-land.

With such emotions in the heart we always want to penetrate ourselves with the sense of the rose cross, so that this rose cross is considered rightly by us as the slogan of our working and weaving and feeling. Not the black cross only. Somebody who tears the roses from the black cross would only have the black cross, would be enslaved by Ahriman. The black cross is the life striving for the bare matter. And anybody who tears the cross from the roses and prefers only to have the roses does not find the right. Since the roses, separated from the cross, would raise us to life, but this life would strive egoistically for spirituality and not reveal something spiritual in the material. Not only the cross, not only the roses, but the roses on the cross, the cross bearing the roses, both in harmonious interaction: this is our right symbol.

• 1. Carl Linné in his Philosophia Botanica, Stockholm 1751
• 2. agreement by the French president Faure and Czar Nicholas II in 1897
• 3. Houston Stewart Chamberlain: New War Essays, Munich, 1915
• 4. peace conferences in the Hague from 1899 to 1907, convened on the initiative of Czar Nicholas II
• 5. Robert Hamerling (1830–1889), cf. The Riddle of the Human Being and Autobiography, Rudolf Steiner's Collected Works volumes 20 and 28
• 6. Bartholomäus von Carneri (1821–1909), cf. Methodical Foundations of Anthroposophy, Rudolf Steiner's Collected Works volume 30.2.29
• 7. Anton Bruckner (1824–1896), Austrian composer

In the face of facts that speak loud and clear, we do not need to prove that the social question is now one of the most burning public concerns. However, those who can observe these facts without prejudice can also see that much deeper human questions play into modern social demands than the problems usually associated with slogans. If you look beyond current academic activity and trends to social facts, you can see how deeper human questions in a certain respect spring from these social problems.

It is obvious that, for the most part, academic life stands by helplessly when confronted with these burning social demands. I need only mention two things to prove this helplessness. We know that in the course of recent cultural development, in addition to the other branches of science, a theoretical socio- or world economics has emerged. We know how the differing schools of thought have affected the area of world economics in the last centuries, particularly in the nineteenth century. We know that there was a mercantilist school, a physiocratic school and so forth, and we know how these different streams have attempted to understand social facts. They have attempted to discover how human social understanding can become a part of human willing, for example, in various governmental programs. However, we have seen that these different theoretical viewpoints have not resulted in any really thorough, fruitful social initiatives. The clearest proof of that is the form that world economic theory has taken. It has slowly withdrawn into a scientific observation of social life and world economics. It has withdrawn into a description of social facts.

Specifically, we see the newest efforts in this area developing into all manner of descriptions or statistical observations and such. However, we do not see anywhere an impulse that can really be carried into social will, that can be fruitful for the social activity of public life. The incapacity of world economic theories in this area is thus evident.

On the other hand, we see the growth of social ideas and social demands from a wide spectrum of the working class.

Certainly, we would have much to discuss if we wanted to speak about the historical development of these more-thanhalf-century-old social demands. Here we wish to take note of only one feature, of one characteristic of these demands. I wish to express it like this: There were also older efforts in this direction, efforts that did not simply rely upon theoretical contemplation, as has been done in world economics, but that were based upon the goals of people seeking a new social structure. Since the time of these efforts (we need only recall Fourier, Saint-Simon, Louis Blanc and so forth), a quite different element has entered into these contemplations. This can be characterized by a certain mistrust. Among the masses and their socialist leaders a certain antipathy is prevalent concerning everything that arises out of the spirit, out of contemplation, out of the human willing that should lead to a rejuvenation of social relationships.

Those whose feeling and thinking embody the intellectual impulses of modern times have much goodwill toward achieving social change. Regardless of that goodwill, the belief has arisen that all this has a utopian character. In spite of all the human inventiveness and goodwill, the belief has arisen that it is impossible to create impulses that will lead to practical changes in social life, to a truly practical reformation of social life. Disbelief in the human spirit and its social ideas has become the prevailing sentiment of the masses and their leaders.

Thus, something has come forth that people in these groups feel to be a foregone conclusion—so much a foregone conclusion that to fight against it is extraordinarily difficult. The conviction has arisen that on/y the means of economic production can stimulate a reformation. The conviction has arisen that, in a certain sense, the human will is powerless and must wait until the means of production themselves cause a different configuration in social life. It has become a habit to speak of everything created through thinking as an ideology, as something powerless in real life. It has also become habitual to speak as though only material relationships and changes are real, as though thinking emerges from these like a wisp of smoke. People speak of historical materialism because they see reality only in materialism, particularly in economic activity. People view what comes from the human spirit as something that rises like smoke out of what is real—in this case, economic activity—and forms a kind of ideological superstructure.

If we look at theoretical world economics, based as it is on the world view of conventional science, or at the thoughts of such thoroughly honest, creative personalities as Saint-Simon or Louis Blanc, whose work comes fully out of modern intellectual life, a question arises. We now ask, given what these two sides desire, is it so incomprehensible that a disbelief in true spiritual impulses has occurred?

No, it is not. If we look at the basic character of modern intellectual life we will find the main reason. The basic character of modern intellectual life has slowly become purely abstract, something foreign and removed from reality.

We must constantly note that attitudes arising from what intellectual life has become in the last centuries have created ethical and moral viewpoints. However, the question is, do these moral viewpoints have the power to affect outer reality? Do they have the power to be creative in outer reality?

Neither science nor moral points of view have been able to create a true bridge between what lives in people’s spirit and what lies in material or natural processes. We see that over time the concerns of the human soul, the concerns of the human spirit, have become the intellectual monopoly, the cultural monopoly, of those groups who have made this or that credo their own. Thus, scientific endeavors have slowly become unaccustomed to concerning themselves with spirit and soul. People believe they are free from prejudice, that they follow a completely unprejudiced science, when they limit scientific methods to what is sense perceptible. People believe these methods immediately go beyond the bounds of human cognition when they enter the spiritual realm, when they enter the supersensible realm. People think that they are unprejudiced when, in fact, they are only following those forces that arise out of the historical course of events.

Those religious groups who, due to historical development, have had a monopoly in creating dogmas concerning the essence of spirit and soul out of old traditions, concerning the essence of human immortality, were in a position to prevent scientific research into these things. These groups applied pressure upon research until it simply succumbed to the pressure and accepted the dictates of the credo. Slowly the sciences came to believe they followed their own lack of prejudice, their own objectivity, because they were no longer conscious that what they actually followed are the prohibitions of the Church.

This “objective” approach has limited itself completely to external, sensible reality and has not endeavored to examine spiritual life with the conscientious methods that have brought modern science such great triumphs. It has, nonetheless, been able to affect the realm of spirit and soul. Thus the realm of spirit and soul has become something foreign to life. Life, external reality, is measured with exact methods. However, what concerns spirit and soul has slowly lost all living concepts. Those of you who follow the usual, the respected, the official textbooks and lectures on psychology and such will find in them nothing sparkling with life. Spiritual life has become something disconnected from life.

The only thing that could be a basis for the spiritual attitude of such people as Saint-Simon or Fourier or Louis Blanc when they considered social questions has remained unfruitful because nowhere were the living effects of the human spirit upon social reality taken into account. People go around talking in abstractions. With normal modern intellectuality, we cannot refute the statement that social facts can be observed only through economics, that no steps can be taken to fulfill human social longings. With only these means, we can make no counter argument when people insist that nothing results from spiritual life that could lead to a true healing of social relationships, that we must leave social development to the means of production. Modern intellectual life has become abstract. In a certain sense modern intellectual life is an ideology. Thus those who are, in the widest sense, members of socialist circles believe that a//thinking must be ideological.

This is just what lies so heavily upon the souls of those who accept spiritual science. Spiritual science does not want to follow the same path taken by that burned-out academic science that has developed in modern times. Spiritual science wishes to lead people back to the true spirit. It wishes to lead people to an understanding of the true spiritual life to which they belong in just the same way that their bodies belong to physical reality, in the same way that through their material needs they are part of economic reality.

When we speak of real spirit today, when we attempt to speak of real spirit, we not only meet opposition, we meet mockery. We meet the kind of ridicule that derides all spiritual desires as pipe dreams or worse. We really meet modern disbelief when we say that what we mean as spirit cannot be comprehended with the usual powers of cognition that lead us through everyday life, through conventional science. We meet disbelief when we emphasize that to grasp and understand this spirit, it is necessary first to awaken powers of cognition that otherwise only sleep in human nature—in the same way that we awaken the usual powers of cognition in the developing child. Modern people will not admit that there could be something like an intellectual unpretentiousness, that there could be something like a further development of the inner human out of our childhood when we instinctively and dully step into life. They will not believe that we can awaken this later development to assist the normal powers of cognition, and that we can continue its development. But, it is not continued because modern intellectual life has resisted its continuance.

It is not our intent to speak in a vague way about spirit and its reality. Due to the spiritual development of the last centuries, it is easier to speak to the hearts and souls of people when we talk about spirit and spirituality in generalities instead of in a more definite manner. When people speak about spirit, they almost immediately think of spirit as an abstraction, something foreign to life. We might say that true spirit has become so foreign to them that they expect this spirit to reveal itself only in an occasional guest appearance.

Now I do not want to hold you up long with things common to the spiritualism to which modern thinking has fallen prey. In the end, however, what is this spiritualism other than the final decadent outstreaming of a desire for an abstract spiritual life! What we must understand is a true, concrete spiritual life to which human spirit can connect itself, and which we can grasp at every step in physical and cosmic reality. true spiritual life is not there to fulfill people’s desires for theatrical effects, to show itself in spiritualist seances or in other ways desired by abstract mystics. The science of the spirit cannot speak of a spirit that partakes of guest appearances that have nothing to do with external reality, and are called forth simply to convince passive people that spirit exists. The science of the spirit cannot speak of such a spirit. Spiritual science can speak only of the spirit that in truth participates in every material effect and every material event. It speaks of the spirit with which people can connect themselves in order to master external reality. Thus, I will primarily speak about the activity of the spirit we must turn toward if we wish to learn how the spirit, working through people, can have an effect in life.

We first need to look at the way the spirit gradually develops out of the growing human. The growing child presents us with one of the greatest riddles of the world—a riddle we in education continuously try to solve. People have recently brought even this amazing riddle to a particularly abstract, nebulous height. Recently, there has been much talk about recognizing the power of education. People have recently made many attempts to use various educational principles. All such attempts have failed. They will stand as evidence of the goodwill of their proponents, but in the face of the great, the intense demands of our lives, these attempts must fail if they do not arise from a recognition of human essence.

People will not recognize human essence if they attempt to understand it only through modern science, or by intellectually assimilating the observations gained through science. Human essence reveals itself only if we understand how to observe it. It shows itself only if we develop the capability to investigate that certain something that reveals itself with every day, every week, every year after human beings enter into physical existence through birth or conception. We must observe the specific stages in the life of young humans if we do not want to remain in abstractions, but instead want to understand the spiritually concrete activity in external reality.

People value these things much too little today. For the observer of human essence, the stage when children change teeth, around six or seven years of age, indicates a deep change in the totality of human nature. If you have an organ that can truly examine such things empirically, the way we can empirically observe physical experiments in laboratories or in the astronomical observatory, then you can see such things. When you examine the life of the soul before this stage, you find that during the time preceding the change of teeth, people are primarily imitators. The imitative element, a kind of intuitive dependence upon the environment, motivates their entire being until seven years of age. In the first seven years of our lives we learn everything through imitation, through the most strict conformity to what is in our environment, right down to our movements, our gestures, our intonation.

In extreme cases, we can easily observe such things. I wish to mention only one of the many cases that become obvious if you have any sense at all for such things in life. I could mention a hundred others. I knew a young child who limped. Even though there was nothing wrong, the child limped, and people could not get her to stop limping. The reason the child limped was that she had an older sibling who, due to a diseased leg, actually had cause to limp! This imitative principle that motivates people until the change of teeth is thus expressed in an extreme case.

The true observer sees that quite new forces enter into the human life of body, soul and spirit when the change of teeth is complete. Then, what children perceive in their environment does not motivate them as much. Instead, they are especially ready to believe, to accept, what they feel to be the opinion or the belief of those who, through age or bearing, they intuitively perceive as authorities.

Until the time of puberty, this acceptance, this automatic acceptance of authority, is like a law of human nature. If you wish to properly affect the human essence during this time, then you must turn to this intuitive principle of authority.

Those who, without prejudice, without some pet theory, observe the life of young people, those who work with facts, know how much it can mean for their whole life if children have someone they can look up to as an authority. You need only observe how people’s feelings about such an authority change! You need only observe what later in life results from these feelings toward authority! Everything that we develop as truly free independent democratic feelings in human social life, everything that we gain in true human understanding and human respect, is at heart a result of appropriate development under intuitive authority during the period from the change of teeth until puberty.

We should not meddle with such things through special programs. We should approach this area through purely empirical observation. Then we will discover what we need to think and feel when we receive the school child who has developed in imitation of the care—or the neglect—of the parents. We will see how we must work out of the principle of authority in school if we truly want to work appropriately. We can only be effective when we derive our pedagogical methods and develop our whole teaching activity out of a human understanding.

If you are not able to observe from year to year, from week to week how other demands develop out of the core of the child and rise to the surface, then you will not be able to work with human developmental powers, you will work against them. Educational material and methods must, in fact, meet these requirements of the developing child.

If you do not know how authority works, if you do not know the intimate interactions that exist between the authority and the growing child, then you will never be able to work positively in the education of children this age. I wish to mention a single concrete example. You know that due to certain programs and prejudices, there is now much discussion concerning visual aids. You are supposed to show the children everything. This often implies that you should teach the children only about things you can place before their eyes, or at least demonstrate to their intellect, so that they can immediately understand everything with their immature comprehension.

You need only look at the books that are to serve as guides for such teaching. Certainly, illustrative material is, within bounds, quite appropriate. But, what is appropriate within certain boundaries leads to error when we extend it beyond these boundaries. Visual aids—as I mentioned, you can see it in the guides—often lead to extremely materialistic triviality. People try to limit instruction to what children can understand, to what such people, in their simple-mindedness, believe is the maximum children can understand. However, they neglect something. They do not take into account what teaching out of authority means to human life. Individuals who are thirtyfive years old may, due to some event, suddenly remember that when they were seven, eight, nine or ten years old, they learned something in school from a highly regarded authority. They say to themselves, “I did not really understand it then. I only looked with high regard to that honored authority. When that honored authority said something, led something into my soul, I knew it instinctively. I did not know how I knew it, but I felt it was something valuable. I remembered it, perhaps only as words, but it lived in me for many years afterward. After many years, now that I have become mature, I recall what I learned long ago.” When people are mature, these recollections of things they accepted in youth upon simple authority now become a source of strength. They now know what it means that things they learned as children can first be fully understood as recollections in later life. In this way, we can give people living strength!

I wish to mention one other thing about the intimate workings between educational authority and the child. We want to teach the child certain things meant for a later period in life. Of course, the child does not understand these things. Thus, we clothe them in all kinds of allegories and pictures. Let us take a picture someone might think of, for instance, the picture of immortality. The teacher might say, “Here you have the cocoon of a butterfly. The animal is nestled within it. It will creep out, the beautiful butterfly will come out of the cocoon.” Now, the teacher might go further and say, “Just as the butterfly is in this cocoon, in the same way the immortal soul lies within your body. When you go through the gates of death, this immortal soul will appear in the spiritual world just as the butterfly will appear here. Remember how here in the physical world the beautiful butterfly comes out of the cocoon.”

You can make such a picture. It may touch the child. But, such a picture will not achieve what it should achieve if, as a teacher, you only have the consciousness that you are clever and the child is dumb, and that, therefore, you have to clothe in a picture what the child cannot yet understand. There are great intangibles in living human relationships. Regardless of what occurs between the intellect of the authority and the child’s intellect, something will happen in the child’s subconscious that comes from the discrepancy between the teacher’s disbelief in the picture and the intent to develop the child’s belief through the picture.

You need only observe how differently things occur—this is something paradoxical—when you yourself believe that the picture of the cocoon and the butterfly is not simply a picture, when you are clear that you do not make this picture, but the creative natural powers themselves make this picture. The one and only great artist, Natura, forms this picture. She carries her divinity within her in such a way that this picture expresses the same thing at a lower level as immortality expresses at a higher level. In other words, when you have complete belief in the picture, when it is not something made up for someone else, when it is your own inner belief, then something occurs in your telling of it to the child. Then, when it affects the child in the proper way, later in life the grown child’s soul will carry a true picture of immortality. Today we must not judge the things connected with the principle of authority by appearances. To really understand what occurs in people’s lives, we need, at the least, a careful study from the standpoint I will discuss in a moment. We need such a study to understand what to use in education during the period between the change of teeth and puberty.

Real capabilities of judgment, of free, independent reason, first appear in human nature after puberty. If we activate this independent reason too early, if we appeal too much to the child’s intellect before puberty, then we do not appeal to what can be given from one person to another through authority. Then we kill much of what we need to develop between the ages of six to seven and fourteen to fifteen, that is, during the time of elementary school.

Now we must ask, where will the teachers gain insight into the forces they must use, first when the child is an imitator, then when the child is between the change of teeth and puberty, and then in that stage of life after puberty? Our detractors can mock, they can ridicule what spiritual science means when it says that particular powers, higher powers of cognition, must be formed in human nature so that people can recognize the spiritual and its actions in the different ages of human life.

In my book How to Know Higher Worlds, 1 have described in detail how people can obtain these higher powers of cognition. The same thing is in the second part of my Outline of Occult Science, and in other books. I have shown how people can use common everyday cognition, common scientific cognition, as a basis to rise through three higher stages that I have called (do not be disturbed by the names, you have to use some common names) Imaginative cognition, Inspired cognition and Intuitive cognition.

We can obtain Imaginative cognition when we systematically do quite specific meditations that I describe in the abovenamed books, when we train thinking beyond the level of normal life and conventional science. Imaginative cognition first gives us the possibility of developing pictures in our soul life, pictures that are not spatial, not fantasy, but that represent spiritual reality.

People learn to recognize that, in the end, everything humans develop as ideas, as conceptions, as sense perceptions for normal life and for conventional science is connected to human physical existence. We learn to slowly disengage the life of the soul from simple bodily life as we increasingly undertake to raise our powers of thinking to a meditative activity. We rise to an Imaginative cognition that at first consists only of pictures, but that shows us reality the moment we further develop ourselves as I describe in the above-mentioned books. When the Inspiration (which we have first prepared ourselves to be capable of comprehending) enters from the spiritual world that is just as much around us as the physical world, then the effects of the spiritual world fill these pictures.

If we then rise to Intuitive cognition, we will meet spiritual beings in just the same way we meet physical beings in the physical world. Today I can merely mention this and must direct you to the books where I describe these things in detail. If we can really rise to what I call Imaginative, Inspired and Intuitive cognition, then these stages of cognition are not phantasms, are not daydreams as our contemporaries, with their lack of spirituality, call them. When they are feeling kindly, they say at best, “Well, all right, the product of a sick mind!” However, they will judge differently if we only indicate the true basis, the real source of this higher knowledge—and I will do that today by referring to a characteristic I have mentioned before. Where in human nature do these forces lie that we must develop in life so that we can look into the spiritual world?

Think for a moment. We have certain forces that make us into imitative beings until the change of teeth, forces that, in a certain sense, later recede. These forces find no further use in normal modern social life—they recede. However, they remain connected with human nature. Again, there are the forces that act between the change of teeth and puberty to stimulate the inclination toward authority out of the soul-physical realm. These forces, which I described in connection with the intangibles living between the teacher and the children, are real forces in childhood, but they, too, later recede.

Furthermore, as human beings we have forces that are active from puberty until around the age of twenty that also later recede. (Of course, now we seldom see what we call youthful idealism, youthful motivations that lead to living ideals. At one time people perceived living ideals in the same way that we perceive external life.) These are the same forces that after puberty first form the foundation of true judgment and that need to be brought to a special level of development. They also recede after the age of twenty-one or twenty-two.

In the last centuries, human life has developed such that we only cultivate intellectual capabilities, scientific capabilities, the ability to observe natural and social things. To the extent that this development has taken place, those powers active in the first three stages of life have receded. We can, however, bring them forth again. Imaginative cognition is nothing more than those forces whose spiritual activity forms the human body and soul from puberty until the age of twenty. It is nothing more than those soul forces that, under the direction of my book How To Know Higher Worlds, we can bring forth out of the depths of human nature. The spiritual researcher brings forth again what has receded. Where it otherwise remains hidden, we bring it forth again so that it enters into consciousness. Then it develops Imaginative cognition.

It is more difficult to bring forth those human forces that are active from the change of teeth until puberty but that recede later in life and lie deep in the organism. However, through such exercises as I have described in my books, we can call them, too, into consciousness. These prove to be identical with forces that are active in children, but remain unknown and unnoticed by science. We learn how to master these forces. Through an Inspired cognition, they bring into our consciousness certain spiritual secrets of our surroundings. This is not a made-up force, not something that does not already exist in life. This is something that proves itself to be active during the most important developmental years. Spiritual research brings it forth again to become the basis of insight into the spiritual world.

Because they remain hidden from observation, the most difficult forces to bring forth are those forces that are active in human nature between birth, we can even say between conception, and the change of teeth. Those forces find their conclusion in the permanent teeth and later completely withdraw into the human organic system. Nevertheless, we can bring these forces forth after we have called forth the others.

We see that we now connect ourselves with these forces when we grasp them with our full being, these forces that actually gave us the life impulse. In a certain sense, we unroll in the first seven years of our life—we bring forth out of our deepest souls the actual impulse, which we recognize as spirit, that we received in the first stage of life. When we bring into our consciousness what has receded, then we have Intuitive cognition. We do not connect ourselves only with our own being, but with something in comparison to which our normal thoughts are absurdities. We connect ourselves with something that is one and the same as the Being of the World. We then recognize the spirit in us as connected to the Spirit of the World.

You see, teachers who understand human beings through spiritual science, who have the developing human before them, look at what the spirit forms out of this developing human. The teachers meet this developing human with their educational skills. The teacher working from spiritual science does not have in mind a pedagogy used to educate children according to abstract rules, as is normal today. For this teacher, each child is a riddle. What should come to life in each child is something the teacher must solve in a living way every day, in every hour. However, when the teacher acquires the viewpoint of this living, working spirit in the living development of the child, he or she absorbs a recognition of reality that does not remain in concepts, does not remain in abstract generalities, but permeates the will with spirit. Such a teacher really becomes a pillar of knowledge, and he or she will develop a truly living pedagogy because it comes from an understanding of the human being, from a recognition of the complete, whole person.

Spiritual science is nothing other than what we can create out of the forces that are spiritually active in the stages of human development. It is not some fantasy. The source for the development of higher spiritual powers does not come from just anything that might arise in people, but from the conscious apprehension of what works in the healthiest forces of growth and life in the first three stages of human development. In that we become spiritual researchers, we raise into the consciousness of our understanding of the world and of people what really causes our growth and development as human beings.

So closely related is Anthroposophy to the spiritual sword and shield of cognition! For that reason, spiritual science is not something we can take up simply through our intellect. Since we bring it forth out of the being and growth forces of the whole human, it permeates our whole being, our feeling and will. It becomes a basic human force. Immaturity and unconsciousness are concepts that lose their relevance through the activity of the spirit in human beings. We may not say that people lose their instinctive, basic forces when they consciously develop the spirit. No, this remains. The same basic strength that is otherwise present only in instinctive actions is present when the spirit permeates people in this way. The spirit really enters into the being of the teacher, into the effectiveness of the teacher, into those who are to develop social pedagogical forces in youth. What spiritual science is comes from the same source from which people themselves grow. Self-development is only a transformation of our growth forces.

You see, these are things, at least in their underlying principles, that modern people often regard much as people once viewed the science of Copernicus and Galileo. What most people once viewed as an absurdity has now become a matter of course. In the same way, the knowledge of the three stages of life, their basic forces and their transformation into Imagination, Inspiration and Intuition through spiritual science will become a matter of course.

Our age can notice that modern intellectual life (I have shown this in two examples) has become powerless in the face of social life and social desires. When modern people see that the intellectualism developed in the last centuries (abstract, foreign and removed from life) is not the only possibility, that there is also a science that comes from the transformation of growth forces, they will develop sympathy and interest. This spiritual science can understand the living spirit that does not play guest roles in life, but is present and active in life; and the human spirit, by connecting itself with that living spirit, develops social pedagogical strength.

Why (again we put this question) are we so seldom able to transform into social will what we receive in ideas, what we develop in ideas? How is it that such disbelief has arisen that people speak only of ideology when they refer to the power of the spirit?

The period that is just behind us was a time of great triumphs for modern science. Those great scientific triumphs could arise only when people first turned away from what was within them and devoted themselves to the activities of nature and to the scientific method. Those who are spiritual researchers will certainly recognize the conscientiousness, the exactitude, of modern scientific methods, and will also recognize the fertility of these methods within their areas. They will certainly not go into a simplistic, unsympathetic criticism of limited and bounded material knowledge. However, we must be clear about one fact of experience that people do not observe today. People do not observe it because they can see, completely correctly from at least one point of view, that scientific methods are well suited to give a picture of natural phenomena. Because scientific methods work so well in this realm, people are not inclined to ask how this experience, derived in this way, affects the whole essence of humanity.

Concerning observations of nature and the recognition of natural laws, people accept only what their senses believe and their intellect can process. They consciously shut out everything that comes from their feeling and will life. What they understand about nature does not affect the will and feeling life. Thus, many people who view the entire situation without prejudice speak about modern science and its effects differently than those who simply accept all the great scientific triumphs.

If we look at the human essence, the picture we can achieve through the scientific method has something fatalistic about it—it is something that fills only our intellect, but does not touch our will. If we use the scientific method in popular or scientific thinking about social life, then social life in a sense ebbs away, falls apart. Just as something finely ground runs through a sieve, true social life slips past our observation when we approach it only with modern scientific methods. We can see how strict causal scientific thinking fails the moment it is applied to the social realm or general external society. I want to give an example of this: There is perhaps no other book in a much-debated area that so beautifully develops exact scientific thinking as Das Werden der Organismen, eine Widerlegung der Darwinschen Zufallstheorie (The development of the organism—a rebuttal of the Darwinian theory of chance), by the well-known biologist, Oskar Hertwig. We can offer only the highest praise for this book’s attempt to characterize conventional scientific insights into the theory of evolution.

A short time after Hertwig’s book appeared, he also published something about social, legal and political issues, issues concerning general society. It would be impossible to think of something more dilettantish and incompetent than this firstrate biologist’s stroll through an area generally encompassed by the concept “social life”!

There are hundreds, thousands, of such examples. They all show what we can directly observe, namely, that even the highest devotion to natural scientific knowledge causes us to fill our consciousness with ideas that are actually the content of an ideology that cannot pulse into our feeling and will. These ideas remain unfruitful in feeling and willing.

I want to expressly emphasize that in considering such things, it is not my intention to go in the reverse direction. I do not wish to contend that the way of thinking of the vast majority of modern people is simply the outcome of the scientific way of thinking. No, quite the opposite. The last centuries have brought forth a certain kind of common thinking. Those who really study history, not simply a fable convenue, a convenient story, see how human life, particularly social life right down to the peasantry, has changed in the last three or four centuries. What has come forth as natural scientific thinking is, in my opinion, only an external expression of what has generally taken hold of human soul life. I do not wish to call human thinking and feeling a product of modern scientific attitude and knowledge, but just the opposite. I see in the scientific attitude and knowledge only the external symbol, the revelation, of what is the general direction of human thinking, the general attitude toward life and external reality.

What has developed is the basis for a thinking and feeling foreign to life, for a spiritual life foreign to life. If, on the other hand, you consider what forms the basis of spiritual science (I have just shown that this spiritual science is only a transformation of the human forces of growth and development), then you can rise to see a real world in these things. Then what we take in with spiritual knowledge enters into our powers of feeling and will. This is the only healthy way for people now and in the near future to come to a truly social willing. It is necessary for the future to infuse this social willing with the knowledge that can come from the spiritual.

We would not say that everyone can effortlessly achieve the development of higher spiritual powers. We certainly do not at all contend that. Certainly, only a few people will be able to recognize the secrets of spiritual life through direct vision of the highest spiritual facts. This recognition is first connected to a certain inner courage, a certain boldness. Human will, human intellectual power, all human soul forces must develop so that they extend beyond the normal level of strength. These soul forces must grow so they can grasp the spiritual world that flits past ordinary human cognition, the spiritual world people cannot usually perceive. In a certain sense, we must reach for the finest among everyday capacities. The spirit does not come in the same way that external realities come. The spirit comes when you connect yourself with it in the same way that you feel pain, that you feel desire and distress that flood through your soul, as something very real. In this way you will feel, experience and recognize the spiritual through a flooding in your soul, only you know that it is not something simply subjective like desire and distress. It is so intimately connected with the soul, like desire and distress, joy and sorrow, yet it streams into our souls as something foreign, something spiritual. At first, it will be something unexpected. We expect something quite different in external life. Thus, we must accept this spiritual life in sorrow and pain, since we receive and perceive around us a life that we do not expect. No one comes into the spiritual world who does not struggle for this entrance, step by step, through sorrow and pain. This, though, only concerns research of the spiritual world.

In contrast, we must say that the capacities to understand what spiritual research has to say comprise only ordinary healthy common sense. For spiritual researchers, it is unimportant simply to assure others that they love truth and see what they speak of as spiritual. Rather, spiritual researchers can speak so that people with healthy common sense can understand their path of thinking. Of course, their thinking is formed from spiritual vision. However, people can recognize that it has the same inner logic they learn from external, sense-perceptible reality. Thus, if it is not limited by opposing prejudices, healthy common sense can judge whether spiritual researchers talk nonsense. Healthy common sense can judge from the way spiritual researchers speak whether the spiritual world is open to them, whether they really see into it. Thus, what individual spiritual researchers bring into social life is itself a social pedagogical force.

If people accustom themselves to acquiring understanding, to acquiring the healthy common sense to be able to perceive the convincing power of what spiritual science reveals as the true reality of human life, then they will develop another social force. This social force will lead people to one another and will bring into the structure of the social organism things that cannot come into it any other way. These things form a more intimate recognition of one person by another, an ability to accept other people, a germination of true social impulses.

This is what develops in human interactions based upon true spiritual cognition and everything connected with it. People will feel how social pedagogical forces can enter social will when they begin to extend what we can draw from human growth and development into the living social organism. Only then will they understand that human essence embodies social organs. People will be able to bring into the social organism what they understand of the spirit working in the natural organism.

People will not come to true social pedagogical strength until they are able to draw social pedagogical forces from the motives, from the impulses, of spiritual knowledge!

Where does our understanding of spiritual scientific knowledge come from? It comes from those diminished forces that made physical and spiritual adults from little children. We do not need to let those forces lie fallow, we need to use them. We need only to apply our own humanity to external social order for a true social pedagogical strength to develop in the education of children. Then, too, that indefinable but very real activity in education that lies in human relationships, in human interactions, will develop between us. If we will only understand what meets us from the personality of the whole person, if we will only understand what mysterious things lie in each person, how individuals can, in their sub- and superconsciousness, grow beyond themselves, then a social pedagogical strength will exist in human interactions. We will so interact with one another that the being of one raises and carries the being of the other. In short, social pedagogical strength flows out of spiritual recognition, not only for the education of children, but for the totality of human life.

You see, the idea of the threefold social organism does not, in truth, come from some program, like so many social ideas. It comes from a new spiritual direction for which, on the one side, modern people have only very little sympathy. But, on the other side, they yearn for it with all of their subconscious desires and instincts. They thirst for it. Much more than people consciously believe, they carry in their subconscious a thirst for the spiritual. Today we see that people clothe their social desires in all sorts of formulas, forms and demands. What is characteristic about them, if you look at what meets us from people’s well-meaning will forces, from correct rightful needs, is that they cannot generally be understood. They cannot be so understood that genuinely constructive activity could arise from them.

This is quite characteristic, and it is very remarkable the way those people who have worked for years on ideas and programs for social reform, the way all their thinking, everything they have derived from their spiritual life, fails. Recently a letter from a well-known social revolutionary appeared in the newspapers, a letter from Kropotkin to George Brandes. In it Kropotkin describes the bleak situation in eastern Europe. In his way, he really describes the whole European situation, and concludes, “Yes, the only thing we can hope for is that we are given bread and tools to produce bread.”

You see a social revolutionary, who has for years attempted to think about his ideas, has come so far as to state that the world is to be organized so that the tools to produce bread shall be properly provided, so that people can be fed. In the end, only an abstract cry for bread and tools results! Disbelief in abstract spirituality, in his own spirituality!

We have to see through the cry for bread, to see that it is nothing other than a modern cry for the spirit. Only out of an understanding of the true spirit can come the social strength of will that can properly provide tools for bread production. The point is not to cry for programs, but to turn rightly to human faculties, to turn to the strength of human activity. That means to correctly understand people, so that they find their proper place in life and can work in the most efficient way to feed their families, to work for the whole life of their fellow human beings.

We must make the social question a question of humanity in the broadest sense. Otherwise, no good will come of it. It is possible to improve things when we recognize that the social question is complete only when we perceive it out of the spirit.

What we strive for in the threefolding of the social organism arises out of a new spiritual direction, out of a recognition of the demands that are so nebulous today. Although they are correct, they are nonetheless nebulous. What we strive for arises out of the recognition that an unconscious longing for this new spirituality lives in these demands. Everything we recognize as decadence in the striving for spirituality is an expression of people’s still clumsy search for the spirit. Certainly, one of the most decadent forms of this search is spiritism, or false mystical paths. This decadent direction has come out of centuries, we can even say in this case millennia, of education through which people have not learned to search for the spirit in reality itself, in the reality to which they belong. The striving toward spirituality has been carried to such abstract heights because dogmatic monopolies wanted to usurp it.

Spiritual science wants to prove that the same powers that can grasp external nature, if we develop them further as I described today, can also penetrate spiritual life. Then people will not strive toward an abstract spirit, toward a spirit created for the occasional gratification of human consciousness, but toward a spirit that is in reality, that is ome with material life. We do not recognize the spirit when we look at matter simply as matter, and say that it is only matter and the spirit is somewhere else. No. Those who seek the spirit through abstract formulations and think they should seek it along the path of spiritism, for instance, in the dark corners of life, have not yet achieved the correct human relationship to the spirit.

We have achieved the proper human relationship to spiritual life only if we seek such a spirit as we can see in nature around us, particularly in human life itself, in the life of children, in social connections. We have achieved the correct relationship when we know that in everything around us, even in economic life, the spirit is active, and when we search in such a way that we connect this spiritual activity to ourselves. A proper seeking of the spirit exists only when people want to understand the spirit, only when they love the spirit that is active in themselves. It exists only when people can form a bridge between the spiritual reality in themselves and the spiritual reality in the world. Only through such a spirit and through the knowledge of such a spirit can we develop the social pedagogical strength that we need for human life now and in the near future.

Thus, we can only repeat time and again:

May the dark unconscious desires living in human hearts and minds flame up into the conscious life of soul, so that humanity may find, in this age when social concern has become so bright, the true spiritual power of the world with which inner spiritual powers of humans can connect.

Out of this union between the World Spirit and the human spirit will flow the best source of social pedagogical strength for human life.

After a short discussion, Dr. Steiner concluded with the following:

Now, of course, those who speak out of spiritual science will not be of the opinion that what has come forth recently as science, philosophy or art needs to be thrown away simply because it has led to the false path mentioned by the previous speaker. However, the essence of spiritual science should be that the one-sided human activities that arose in the last centuries out of modern scientific assumptions should give up their one-sidedness and merge into a general stream of all-encompassing life.

You will not expect that I am in any way against what science, philosophy or the arts have generated within their rightful boundaries, if you follow not only my spiritual scientific books but also, for example, my description of the progress of philosophy in The Riddles of Philosophy. 1f you look at the way I have interpreted the essence of art—the Goetheanum in Dornach that houses the School for Spiritual Science, which, in its external appearance, attempts to represent spiritual science—you will not see an opposition to the modern developments in science, philosophy or art, to the extent that they occur within their proper limits. The one-sidedness that has come forth in these areas seems to me even to be something necessary. Life develops in contradictions, even polar contradictions. Thus, if we introspectively consider history, we can see that periods when certain activities were one-sided alternate with periods when these activities flow into a certain universal, consonant, harmonious life activity. However, it is the fructification of modern scientific views, of philosophical considerations and modern artistic trends that spiritual science should particularly accentuate.

Let us take, for example, to use something that I could barely mention in the lecture, many of the more modern trends in art. Certainly, we can easily make fun of such trends in art. But, you see, even though certain things like expressionist art appear incomplete to our souls, nevertheless we must say that they are only a preliminary, often clumsy attempt to come to something that is really in accordance with life. In the last century, we have slipped into a kind of intellectuality. Intellectuality is unfruitful. In social life and in art, what has been the consequence? The necessary consequence has been that although people have wanted to be artistically active, they have slipped into naturalism, into the simple imitation of nature.

The simple imitation of nature can never be art in an absolute sense. I say that not in deference to the art critics, but simply because when someone so strongly imitates what they see in external nature, they will never reach nature. If you have a sense for it, you will always prefer nature over what simply imitates nature.

An outrageously inept thing often occurs (you will excuse me if I bring up this trivial example) that is the expression of outrageously bad taste. You show people, let’s say, an apple that you find particularly pleasing, beautifully polished, and so forth. Then, you say, “It’s as though it were made out of wax!” It is impossible to think of something more outrageously inept than when someone compares something from nature with an artificial thing, regardless of how good this artificial thing is! For the simple reason that we can never reach true nature in art, we must reject absolute naturalism.

It is something quite different if, in the expressionist manner, the artist wants to embody something that people experience beyond what is simply natural—even though the embodiment may be clumsy. However, to recognize that clumsy beginnings should be neither over- nor undervalued, you must be open to what is today often expressed by a slogan, but which, in connection with human life, people do not correctly understand.

The following may sound like a paradox. I certainly belong among those who have the highest admiration for Raphael. However, from my point of view the only people who have a right to admire Raphael are those who are convinced that if someone today were to paint just as Raphael painted, it would be impossible and inconsistent with modern times. It would not be art that we could accept today as contemporary art. This may sound paradoxical. However, what has occurred during human development belongs to its particular stage. You must really take this whole idea of development seriously. What developed since the middle of the fifteenth century in science, philosophy and art is completely justifiable as an educational impulse in developing humanity. However, human development has today reached a stage where it must strive for the other pole. As humans, we needed to go through a one-sided science for a time. We needed to absorb the thoughts of this science, to come to a mood of soul brought about by our noticing the powerlessness of these scientific thoughts. This powerlessness calls forth a counterforce in the active soul life, the counterforce toward spiritual recognition, toward a spiritual viewpoint.

If you take Lessing’s thoughts earnestly, that history is an education of humanity, then you can best come to grips with such things. Thus, today in certain areas people’s prejudices allow what spiritual science has to offer to enter directly into social pedagogy, that is, into external reality.

It has been possible to make artistically visible in the Dornach building what moves us inwardly, to express in forms what moves us inwardly. I might also mention that only very recently has it been possible to attempt to found a school upon real pedagogy. Our friend Emil Molt integrated the founding of the Waldorf School in Stuttgart into a modern industrial undertaking (people are beside themselves in ridicule over this), into the Waldorf cigarette factory in Stuttgart. Here we can now build a unified elementary school upon what can result for pedagogy from an understanding of the spiritual point of view. I held the pedagogical seminar for the faculty of the Waldorf School, and I must say that this belongs among the most beautiful of things I could imagine as a task for myself. There, a pedagogy was founded that does not exist to fulfill norms imagined as necessary to train people, but rather a pedagogy that results from a true understanding of the whole person, that is, the body, soul and spirit of human beings. This is a pedagogy that paradoxically makes life more difficult for the teacher than it would be with simple, normative education.

Those who believe in standardized education, who preach programs, who give educational principles, know how to instruct. However, those who teach directly from life can only receive impulses to observe what really occurs in the developing human being, from year to year, from week to week, from month to month. Even though it may be a large class, you must continuously be in living interactions. You must understand what it means not to practice a learned pedagogy from memory, but to invent at each moment the individual methods that this child needs.

What is effective in life cannot be based in memory or in habit. What we have in our memory, what we practice from memory in our human activities, what we practice out of habit is something that in all cases is simply a cliché. What results from spiritual life can never be a cliché!

There have been times, and probably still will be, when I have lectured on the same theme week after week. I do not think anyone can say I have ever spoken about the same theme in exactly the same way. When you speak from the spirit, your concern is to create something immediate. It is not at all possible in the normal sense to memorize what comes from the spirit, because it must continuously develop in direct contact with life. For those who are active out of the spirit, the simple memorization of spiritual knowledge is about the same as if someone were to say, “I am not going to eat today because I ate yesterday; why should I eat again today? My body will continue simply on the basis of what I ate yesterday.” Yes, our physical organism is such that it continuously renews itself. This is also true for the spirit. The spirit must also be within this vigorous life. The true spirit must at all times be a creator. In the same way, education carried by the spirit must be a continuously creative art.

There will be no blessing upon our elementary schools, and there will also be no healing in our school systems, until education becomes a continuously living, creating art, carried by true love and those intangibles of which I have spoken.

We can see in all areas how necessary it is in the face of the unconscious and subconscious demands of modern humanity (and in the near future it will be even more necessary) to take what people wish to make into a comfortable intellectual program and go from that to a truly productive experience of the spirit. This will be much less comfortably achieved than a great deal of what people today call spiritual life. However, this will become the social pedagogical force that we need. On the one hand, it is true that after so many years of devotion to scientific thinking the innermost souls of modern people long for a direct recognition of the spirit. It is on the other hand true that social demands cry for a spiritual deepening. It is true that the subject of my lecture is not something thought of haphazardly, but something heard from contemporary human development. However, you must first educate yourselves to it and connect yourselves with it.

In conclusion, I would like to point out one other thing that is particularly necessary now. Because everyone thinks that some fruitful philosophical life can result from subjective opinions, we must indicate how to understand questions today. I want to do that with an example.

Many years ago I held a lecture in a southern German city in which I spoke about the Christian saints. There were two priests at the lecture. Since they could say nothing against the content of the lecture, they came to me and said, “We don't have anything to say against the content of what you said today. However, we do want to say something about the fact that you claim to speak for people whose path leads them to your way of thinking. We, however, speak for all people.” This is what they said. I, of course, addressed them with their proper title. You must always be polite. I said, “You see, Reverend, you believe that you speak for all people. I find that natural and reasonable since, subjectively, that is the case. However, whether I speak, or whether you believe that you speak, for all people doesn't mean anything, particularly not in the present when individual human lives exist so much in the whole of society. Today we must learn not to define our tasks by subjective arbitrariness, but to develop them individually out of objectivity and objective facts. And so I ask you, Reverend, if you think that you speak for all people, then look at the facts. Does everyone go to church?” There they could not say yes! You see, thus speak the facts. I then said to them, “I speak for those who no longer come to you in the church.” That is what the facts teach us today.

Things do not merely guide us in the direction of an objection. Rather, we must see the facts as they are and let them form the argument. It is something quite natural that people think that they speak for everyone.

What is important today is that (although we can know that the majority of people consciously resist real spiritual scientific impulses) if we can understand the revelation, we can also know that these impulses have the effect of a subconscious cry, “Make whole again what has split into philosophy, science, art, religion and the other areas, especially the social areas, of culture!”

However, we can only make these things whole according to their own spirit. Only then do things speak to us not out of the abstract, but out of a concrete unity where the true spirit that we find in all individual things is the one spirit in everything.

However, because the unifying spirit is something concretely alive, we cannot understand it by encompassing it with abstract concepts, with ideology. We must resolve to seek the living spirit. We can only seek it, though, if, with a certain intellectual modesty, we find the bridge between the sleeping inner human forces that are of a spiritual nature, and the spirit that lives in nature, in human life, in the whole cosmos. Thus, in concluding, I wish to emphasize once again that we must take into account the longing that lives in the depths of the human soul to bind the human spirit with the Spirit of the World. Much of the solution to humanity’s burning questions lies in this bond between human spirit and World Spirit.

I do not want to arouse the belief that we can solve every problem. However, humanity is on the path to a partial resolution of riddles that have always been presented to it. In this partial resolution lies true human progress in that we recognize how the spirit lives in everything, and how this spirit can light the way if we awaken the spirit in ourselves. The greatest, most important contemporary social tasks live in this recognition, and it will lead to healing when wider and wider circles realize this.