The Rudolf Steiner Archive

We have spoken recently of many things concerning the existence of hidden soul depths, and it will be well in any case to continue to occupy ourselves with various details of this subject which it may be useful for an anthroposophist to know. Generally speaking, it must be said that a complete clarification of these things is possible only if it can be worked out on the basis of anthroposophical knowledge.

We have considered what may be called the human organization from the most diverse viewpoints. Therefore, when we wish to point out something in hidden soul depths, it will be easy for each one to relate it correctly to what was shown regarding the human structure as we know it from the more or less elementary presentations of the anthroposophical world-conception.

It has been repeated that everything included in our visualizations and percepts, our impulses of will, our feelings, in short, all that goes on in our souls under normal conditions between awaking in the morning and falling asleep at night, may be called the activities, peculiarities, and powers of the ordinary consciousness. Now we shall indicate by a diagram all that falls within this ordinary human consciousness, all that is known and felt and willed between waking and sleeping, within these two parallel lines (a–b).

In this section (a–b) belong, in addition to our visualizations, every sort of percept. Thus, if we put ourselves into correspondence with the outer world through our senses, and procure thereby in every possible sense-impression a picture of this world, remaining in connection, in touch with it, then that belongs also to our ordinary consciousness. But since all our feelings and impulses of will belong to it as well, one might say that in the area indicated by the parallel lines (a–b) everything belongs of which our normal soul activities give us information in everyday life.

The point is for us to know with certainty that to this so-called soul life the physical body is assigned as an instrument, including the senses and the nervous system. If we add two more to these parallel lines we may indicate the physical sense organs and the nervous system, which we may call the tools of this consciousness—the sense organs chiefly, but also to a certain extent the nervous system.

Below the threshold of this ordinary consciousness lies everything which we may describe as the hidden aspects of soul-life, or the subconscious. (See diagram, b–c.) We shall get a good idea of all that is, so to speak, embedded in this subconsciousness if we remember having heard that the human being, through spiritual training, attains to imagination, inspiration, and intuition; [These three terms as used by Rudolf Steiner denote three super-sensible faculties. (Tr.)] so we must substitute for the thoughts, feelings and impulses of will belonging to the surface consciousness, the imagination, inspiration, and intuition of the subconsciousness. We know, however, also that the subconscious activity is not aroused by spiritual training alone, but that it may exist as inheritance of an old, primitive atavistic state of the human mind. Under these conditions there arise what we define as visions, and visions of this naive consciousness would correspond to imaginations gained through training. Premonitions arise; and these might be primitive inspirations. We can show at once the difference between an inspiration and a premonition by a significant example.

We have already mentioned that in the course of the 20th century there will occur in human evolution what may be called a sort of spiritual return of Christ, and that there will be a number of persons who experience this working of Christ from the astral plane into our world in an etheric form. We may acquire knowledge of this event by authentic training, recognizing the trend of evolution, and also that this must come about in the 20th century. It may, however, happen, as it often does at the present time, that individuals here and there are gifted with a natural, primitive, clairvoyance which is, so to speak, a kind of obscure inspiration which we may call a premonition of the approach of Christ. Perhaps such people might not have accurate knowledge of the matter involved, but even such an important inspiration may arise as a premonition, though in the case of a primitive consciousness it may not retain its premonitory or visionary character. The vision constitutes some sort of picture of a spiritual event. Let us say, for example, that someone has lost a friend whose ego has passed through the gate of death. This friend now dwells in the spiritual world, and a kind of bond establishes itself between this person and the one still living in this world. It may be that the person in this world cannot rightly understand what the deceased desires and has a false idea of what is being experienced by the departed. The fact that such a condition exists presents itself in a vision which, as a picture, may be false though founded upon the fact that the dead is really trying to establish a bond with the living, and this gives weight to the presentiment so that the living person who experiences it knows certain things, either about the past or future, which are inaccessible to normal consciousness. If the human soul acquires, however, a definite perception, not a vision which may, under the circumstances, be false, but a factual perception—an occurrence, let us say, of the sense world, but in this case in a sphere invisible to the physical senses, or an incident in the super-sensible world—it is called in occultism deuteroscopy, or second sight. With all this I have described to you only what takes place although subconsciously, within the human soul, whether developed by correct training or appearing as a natural clairvoyance.

The phenomena enumerated when contrasting the subconscious with the ordinary consciousness, differ considerably from those confined to the conscious mind. The relation of this ordinary consciousness to the underlying causes of its activities has already been described in one aspect by this phrase: the impotence of ordinary consciousness. The eye sees a rose, but this eye, which is so constituted that in our consciousness the image of the rose arises has, like the consciousness itself, no power over the blooming, growth and fading of the rose in spite of its perception and the resultant image. The rose blooms and fades through the activity of the forces of nature and neither the eye nor the consciousness has any control beyond the sphere which is accessible to their perception.

This is not the case regarding subconscious happenings. We must hold fast to this fact, for it is extraordinarily important. When we perceive something through the use of our eyes in normal sight, pictures in color or anything else, we can alter nothing in the objective facts by mere perception. If nothing happens to harm our eyes they remain unchanged by the mere act of seeing; only by crossing the boundary between normal and blinding light do we injure our eyes. Thus it may be said that if we confine ourselves to the facts of the normal consciousness, we do not react upon ourselves. Our organism is so constituted that changes are not ordinarily induced in us by this consciousness.

It is quite otherwise with that which appears in the subconscious. Let us assume that we are forming an imagination, or that we have a vision which may be the response of a good being. This good being is not in the physical, but in the super-sensible world, and let us imagine this world where such beings exist and which we perceive, perchance, through an imagination or a vision, to be between these lines (b–c). In that world we have to seek all objects of subconscious perception. But if we identify anything in that other world as an evil or demonic being, either through an imaginary image or a vision, we are not, in regard to this being as powerless as we are with the eye in regard to the rose. If in a super-sensible imagination or vision of an evil being we develop a strong feeling that it must depart, it is bound to feel as if it were powerfully thrust from us. It is the same when we form an imagination or vision of a good being. If in this case we develop a sympathetic feeling, the being feels impelled to approach and to connect itself with us. All beings who in one way or another inhabit that world feel, when we form visions of them, our attracting or repelling forces. With our subconsciousness we are in a position resembling somewhat that of the eye if with it we were able not only to see a rose, but by means of simple sight could arouse a desire that the rose approach and could draw it toward us or, if the eye, seeing something disgusting, could not only form such a judgment but could remove this object by mere antipathy. The subconscious is in touch with a world in which the sympathy and antipathy which are present in the human soul can take effect. It is necessary for us to impress this upon our minds.

Sympathy and antipathy, and in general all subconscious impulses, act in the manner described not only upon their own world, but above all upon what is within ourselves; and not only upon a part of the etheric body, but upon certain forces of the physical body. We must consider here as enclosed between these lines (b–c) that living force within the human being which, pulsing in his blood, can be called the blood warming power and, also, the force residing in our healthy or unhealthy breathing power, conditioned more or less by our whole organism. (See diagram b–c.) To all this, upon which the subconscious works within us, there belongs in addition a large part of what is called the human etheric body. The subconscious or hidden soul powers work within us so as to affect our blood heat upon which depend the pulsation, the liveliness or sluggishness of our circulation. It may thus be comprehended that our subconsciousness is directly connected with the circulation of our blood. A slower or a more rapid circulation depends primarily upon the subconscious powers of the individual.

An influence upon the demonic or beneficent beings inhabiting the outer world can only be exerted if the human being has visions, imaginations, or some other sort of subconscious perception of a certain clarity. That is to say, if they really stand before him; only then can his sympathy or antipathy set in motion subconscious powers that act like magic in this outer world. This distinct standing-before-the-soul in the subconsciousness is not necessary for the effect upon our own inner organism as described above. (See diagram b–c). Whether the person in question knows or does not know which imaginations correspond to a certain sympathy, this sympathy nevertheless affects the circulation of his blood, his breathing system, and his etheric body.

Let us assume that during a certain period of his life someone has a tendency to have feelings of nausea. If he were subject to visions or had imaginative sight, he would recognize these visions and imaginations as perceptions of his own being; they would appear projected into space, but would, nevertheless, belong to his own inner world. They would represent the sort of inner forces that produced the feelings of nausea. But even if he could not practice this kind of self-knowledge and were simply nauseated, these inner forces would act upon him nevertheless. They would influence the warmth of his blood and his forces of breathing. It is actually the case that a human being possesses more or less healthy breathing and circulation, according to the character of his subconscious feelings. The activity of his etheric body and, indeed, all his functions, are dependent upon the world of feelings existing within him.

When, however, the facts of the subconscious mind are really experienced by the soul, it is shown not only that this connection exists, but that because of it a continuous effect is produced upon the general human organism. There are certain feelings, certain states of mind, that work down into the subconscious and, because they call forth definite conditions of blood, of the breathing power, and of the etheric body, affect the organism beneficially, or obstruct the entire life. Thus, as a result of what works down into the subconscious, something is always arising or subsiding. The human being either deprives himself of his life forces, or adds to them through what he sends over from his state of consciousness into the subconscious conditions. If he takes pleasure in a lie he has told, if he is not horrified at it—this being the normal feeling about lies—if instead he feels indulgence, or even satisfaction, then what he feels about it is sent down into his subconscious. This injures the circulation, breathing, and the forces of the etheric body. The result is that when this human being goes through the gate of death he will have become stunted, poorer in forces, something will have died in him which would have lived had he felt the normal horror and disgust at his lie. In the latter case, his disgust would have worked against the lie, transformed itself into the forces here indicated (see diagram), and he would have succeeded in sending something enlivening, creative, into his organism.

We see from the fact that forces are continually transferred from the conscious to the subconscious, that the human being contributes from this subconscious to his own invigoration or deterioration. True, he is not yet strong enough in his present state to spoil out of his soul, so to speak, any other parts of his organism except the circulation of his blood, his breathing system, and etheric body. He cannot injure the coarser and more solid portions, but is able to affect detrimentally one part only of his organism. What he has injured is most distinctly visible when what remains of the etheric body has been influenced in this way; for the etheric body is in constant connection with the warmth of the blood and the constitution of the breath. It is impaired by evil feelings. Through good, normal, and sincere feelings it gains, however, fertilizing, strengthening and maturing powers. We may say, therefore, that a human being, through his subconscious activities works directly, creating or depleting, upon the factual reality of his organism by descending from the level of his powerless surface-consciousness, into the region where something arises or perishes within his own soul, and thereby in his entire organism.

We have seen because the subconscious may be experienced more or less consciously by the soul and something may be known about it, that it achieves an influence in a sphere which we may describe by an expression used throughout the Middle Ages as the elemental world. A human being cannot enter directly into any kind of connection with this elemental world; he can do so only indirectly through those experiences within himself which are effects of the subconsciousness upon the organism. But when he has for a time learned to know himself so as to be able to say: if you feel this, and send down this or that emanation from your conduct into your subconsciousness, you destroy certain things or cripple them; if you have other experiences and send down a different sort of reaction you improve yourself,—if a human being for a time observes within himself this ebb and flow of destructive and beneficent forces, he will become ever riper in self-knowledge. This is the genuine form of self-knowledge.

Self-knowledge gained in this manner is as definite in its effect as would be a scorpion's sting on our toe every time we felt in the physical world the impulse to lie or were tolerant of lying. We may be sure that one observing such an immediate result would cease to lie. If the direct physical effect upon us should be a more or less serious mutilation it would resemble what actually happens, although unperceived, through what is sent down into the subconscious mind from these daily experiences. What is sent down because of our tolerant attitude toward a lie is such that it does bite off and take away from us something the loss of which injures us and which through our future karma we must regain. If we send down a right feeling into the subconscious mind—there is naturally an almost endless scale of feeling which may descend—we grow within ourselves, create new life forces in our organism. Such an observation of our own up-building or deterioration is an immediate result of true self-knowledge.

It has been recently reported that many do not understand how to distinguish a genuine vision or imagination [This term as used by Rudolf Steiner, denotes a super-sensible faculty (Tr.)] belonging to something objective from that which appears in space but is the creation of our own subjective nature. Well, it cannot be said: write down this or that and you will then be able to make the distinction. There are no such rules. One learns gradually through development; and the ability rightly to distinguish that which belongs to ourselves alone from that which, as outer vision, belongs to a genuine entity can be attained only when we have endured the continual gnawing of deadly subconscious activities. We are then equipped with a certain assurance. Then also the condition arises in which a human being, confronting a vision or imagination may ask himself: Can you penetrate it through the power of your spiritual sight? If the vision persists when this active force is turned upon it then it is an objective fact, but if this concentrated gaze extinguishes the vision it is proved to be only his own creation. Anyone who, in this respect, does not take precautions may have before him thousands of pictures from the Akashic Record; if he does not test them to see whether or not they can be extinguished by a resolutely active gaze, the akashic pictures which may give so much information, count only as images developed by his own inner nature. It could happen, for example, that such a person sees nothing beyond himself, externalizing himself in quite dramatic images which he believes to extend throughout the entire Atlantean world, throughout generations of human evolution—but which may be, in spite of such apparent objectivity, nothing but the projection of his own inner self.

When the human being has passed through the gate of death the obstructions no longer exist by which something within himself becomes an objective vision. In ordinary life of the present day what is subconsciously experienced, sent down by the individual human being into his subconscious mind, does not always become vision and imagination. It becomes imagination through correct training, and vision in the case of atavistic clairvoyance. When the human being has passed through the gate of death his collective inner self becomes at once an objective world. It is there confronting him, Kamaloca [Region of Burning Desire, or of Cleansing Fire; also Purgatory.] being in essence nothing but a world built up around us out of that which is experienced within our own soul. This condition is reversed only in Devachan. [Devachan = Heaven]

Thus we can easily comprehend what has been said regarding the effect of sympathy or antipathy present in visions, imaginations, inspirations and premonitions: that these act in all cases upon the objective elemental world. Upon this point it has been stated that in the physically incarnate personality only that which he has developed into vision and imagination acts upon this elemental world. In the case of the dead the forces affect the elemental world which were present in the subconscious mind, and which are always taken along when a human being passes through the gate of death, so that everything experienced after death influences in reality the elemental world. As surely as waves are aroused in a stream by whipping it do the subconscious experiences transmit themselves after death to the elemental world; as certainly as waves that are whipped extend in flattening circles, or a current of air passes undeterred on its way, do these forces spread over the elemental world. Therefore this world is constantly filled with that which is aroused by the content of the subconscious mind which mortals take with them through the gate of death. The point concerning us here is that we gain the ability to bring about the conditions necessary for sight in the elemental world. One need not wonder at the clairvoyant when he recognizes quite correctly that occurrences in that world are activities of the dead. It is even possible, as you will see, to follow the effects of these after-death experiences into the physical world—of course under certain conditions. When the clairvoyant has gone through all that has been described, and acquired the ability to perceive the elemental world, he reaches then after a time a point where he may have strange experiences.

Let us suppose that a clairvoyant looks at a rose with his physical eyes, and receives a sense impression. Let us further suppose that he has trained himself so that the color red gives him a definite shade of feeling. This is necessary, for without it the process goes no further. Unless colors and tones produce definite nuances of feeling when clairvoyance is directed at an outside object, the sight progresses no further. Suppose that he gives the rose away. Then, if he is not clairvoyant, what he felt would have sunk into his subconscious mind, and would be working, either beneficially or detrimentally, upon his health, and so on. But if he is clairvoyant, he would perceive just how the image of the rose acts in his subconscious mind. That is to say, he would have a visionary picture, an imagination of the rose. He would perceive at the same time—as has been explained—how his feeling about the rose affected, either beneficially or detrimentally, his etheric or his physical body. He would observe the action of all this upon his own organism. When he has this image before himself he will be able by its means to exert an attractive force upon the being which we may call the group-soul of the rose and which underlies its existence. He will be looking into the elemental world, seeing the rose's group-soul in so far as it dwells there.

If the clairvoyant goes still further, has emerged from perception of the rose, has given it away, has followed his own inner procedure in concentrating upon the rose and its results, and has reached the point of seeing something of it in the elemental world—then there appears in place of the rose a wonderful shining image belonging to the elemental world. Then, if the procedure has been followed up to this point, something special happens. The clairvoyant can now disregard what is before him. He can then give the command to himself: Do not look with your inner sight at what seems to be a living etheric being going out into the world. Do not regard it! Then, strangely, the clairvoyant sees something which, passing through his eye, shows him how the forces act which form it, how they issue from the human etheric body and build up the eye. He sees the formative forces belonging to his own physical body. He sees his own physical eye as he ordinarily sees an external object. That is in fact something which may occur. A way may be followed from the outer object up to the point where, in absolute inner darkness—no other sense impressions being admitted—what the eye looks like is seen in a spiritual picture. The human being sees his own inner organ. He has entered the region (see diagram), which is really formative in the physical world: the creative physical world. It is first perceived by the clairvoyant in observing his own physical organization. Thus he follows the way back to himself. What sent such forces into our eye that we see it giving out rays of light which really express the essential nature of sight? Then we see the eye surrounded by a sort of yellow glow; we see it enclosed within us. This was brought fourth by the entire process that brought the human being finally up to this point.

The forces that may issue from a dead person follow the same course. The human being takes with him the contents of his subconscious mind into the world that he inhabits after he passes through the gate of death. Just as we enter our own physical eye, do the forces sent out by the dead from the elemental world reenter the physical world. The deceased has perhaps an especial longing for someone whom he has left behind. This longing, at the time lying in the subconscious, becomes at once a living vision and in this way affects the elemental world. What was only a vision in the physical world becomes a power in the elemental world. This power follows the way indicated through the longing for the one who is living and, if the conditions permit, it may create some disturbance in the physical world near the living, who may notice rapping sounds or something of the kind. These are heard just like any physical sounds. Occurrences of this kind, originating in this way, would be noticed more frequently than is usually the case were people more observant of the times favorable to such activities. The times of gradual going to sleep and of similar awaking are the most favorable, but no attention is paid to them; yet there are few, if any, who have never received during such moments of transition what were really manifestations of the super-sensible world, ranging all the way from disturbing noises to audible words.

All this has been pointed out today in order to show both the reality and the nature of the connection between human beings and the world. Impressions of an objective sense-world, received by the ordinary consciousness, are powerless and without any real relation—even to that world; but as soon as the human experience descends into the subconscious the relation with realities is established. The helplessness of the former consciousness passes over into a delicate magic, and when the human being has passed through the gate of death and is released from the physical body, his experiences are such that they are effective both in the elemental world and, under favorable circumstances, even upon the physical plane where they may be observed by the ordinary consciousness.

In describing what may take place, only the simplest example has been used, because it is best to begin with the simplest case. Of course we shall—since we have left ourselves time for it—work out also what we need to know in order to proceed to more complicated matters which may lead us into the more intimate relations between the world and humanity.

Today I shall have something to add to what was stated yesterday. I am reminding you of something which most of you have already heard from me. When the human being passes through death the physical body remains behind within the earth-forces, the etheric body dissolves within the cosmic forces, and the human being finds his continuing life, his existence, throughout the realms which lie between death and a new birth. I said that we can follow up the formative forces within the human being himself which project from one life into the other.

We know that man is in essence a threefold being, with three independent members; I mean, in regard to the formative forces of the physical body, the physical organization. We have the system of the nerves and senses, which naturally is spread over the whole body, but is located primarily in the head; we have the rhythmic system, including the rhythm of the breath, circulation, and other rhythms; then we have the metabolic and limb organization, which we consider as one because man's movements are intimately and organically connected with his metabolism.

You know that each human being has a differently, an individually shaped head. If we consider the forces which shape the human head—of course you must not think of the physical substances, but of the formative forces, of that which gives to the head its physiognomy, its entire character, its phrenological expression—if we consider these forces, we find them to be those of the metabolic and limb system belonging to the previous incarnation which have now become form. Thus we have in the head the transformation of the earlier metabolic organism, and if we consider what we possess as a metabolic and limb system in this present incarnation, these formative forces are found to be undergoing a metamorphosis and shaping the head for our next incarnation. Therefore, if we understand the building of the human form we can, as it were, look back, through a corresponding development of the idea of metamorphosis, from the human head of today to the metabolic system of the previous incarnation; and we can look from the present metabolic system forward to the head formation of the next incarnation. [See: Guenther Wachsmuth, Reincarnation as a Phenomenon of Metamorphosis, Anthroposophie Press, New York, Rudolf Steiner Publishing Co., London.]

This conception, which in our spiritual science and in the spiritual science of all ages plays a certain role, these truths concerning repeated earth lives remain by no means without substantiation, for whoever understands the human organism can read them directly from it. But the present trend of natural science is as far removed as possible from embarking upon the sort of investigation which would be necessary in this case. Of course one cannot escape, through the study of anatomy and physiology alone, the foolish conclusion that the liver and lungs may be investigated by the same method. One lays the liver beside the lungs upon the dissecting table and regards them as organs of equal value, since both consist of cells, and so on. In such a way one can obtain no knowledge of these things, and two organic systems which are as different from one another as the lungs and liver cannot be studied by an external comparison of their cellular configuration, as they must be according to present ideas.

If we really wish to discover the pertinent details, methods must be employed through which a conception of these things may be gained. If the methods which I have described in Knowledge of the Higher Worlds and Its Attainment are sufficiently developed, then the human power of cognition is greatly strengthened. I am repeating here certain statements that I have already explained in lectures given last autumn in the Goetheanum building: Our ordinary cognition is strengthened, through which we look out with our senses at our environment, and through which we also examine our inner life, where we meet primarily our thinking, feeling, and willing. And if we broaden our knowledge to the degree possible through these exercises which have been often described, then our view of the outer world changes, and in such a way that as a first result we realize the absolute folly of speaking of atoms in the manner of present world-conceptions. What is behind sense perception, behind its qualities, behind yellow and red, behind C sharp, g, and so forth, is not vibration but spiritual essentiality. The outer world becomes ever more spiritual the further we press forward in cognition, so that we really cease to take seriously all those constructions derived from chemical or other ideas. All atomism is thoroughly driven from our minds when we broaden our knowledge of the outer world. Behind the phenomena of the senses there is a spiritual world.

If, on the other hand, through such an enlarged vision we look more deeply into our inner life there arises—not that confused mysticism which forms a justifiable transition, pointed out and explained yesterday—but there arises instead, when inner cognition is developed, a psychic knowledge of the organs. We learn really to recognize our inner organization. While our outer perception is more and more spiritualized, our inner perception is, first of all, more and more materialized. Working in this inner direction, not the nebulous mystic but the real spiritual researcher will become acquainted with each single organ. He learns to know the differentiated human organism. We attain to the spiritual world in no other manner than by this detour through the observation of our own inner materiality. Unless we learn to know lungs, liver, and so forth, we do not gain on this detour through our inner being any kind of spiritual enthusiasm which, freed of the confusion of mysticism, works towards a concrete knowledge of the inner organs.

At all events, we gain a more exact knowledge of the configuration of the soul. To begin with, we learn to give up the preconceived idea that our psychic constitution is merely an adjunct of the sensory and nervous system. Only the world of representations is correlated to the nervous system, the world of feeling not at all. The world of feeling is connected directly with the rhythmic organization; and the world of will is adjusted to the metabolic and limb system. If I will something, a corresponding activity is induced in my metabolic and limb system, the nervous system being there only in order that concepts may be formed in regard to what takes place in the will. There are no nerves of will, as I have often stated; the division of nerves into sensory nerves and nerves of will is absurd. The nerves are all of one kind, and the so-called nerves of will exist for no other purpose than the inner observation of the processes of will. They too are sensory nerves.

If we study this thoroughly we come at last to consider the human organism in its entirety. Take the lung organism, the liver organism, and so forth. Looking at them within, you reach a point when you survey, as it were, the surface of the several organs, naturally by means of spiritual sight. What exactly is this surface of the organs? It is nothing less than a reflecting apparatus for the soul life. Our perceptions, and also what we elaborate in thought are reflected upon the surface of all our inner organs; and this reflection makes known our recollections, our memory during life. Thus, after we have perceived and digested something in thought, it is mirrored upon the surface of our heart, liver, spleen, and so forth, and what is thus thrown back constitutes our memories. And with a not very extensive training you may notice how certain thoughts shine back in memory from the whole organism. Very different organs take part in this. If it is a question of remembering, let us say, very abstract conceptions, then the lung surface participates strongly. If it is a question of thoughts colored by feeling, of thoughts which have a nuance of feeling, then the surface of the liver is concerned. Thus we can describe very well, and in detail, how the various organs take part in this reflection which makes its appearance as recollection, as the power of memory.

When we concentrate upon the whole soul nature we must not say: In the nervous system alone we have the organic correlate of the soul life, for the entire human organism is the correlated organization for the life of the soul.

In this connection much knowledge, once present as instinct, has simply been lost sight of. It still exists in certain words, but people no longer realize how wisdom is preserved in words. For example, if anyone in the time of the ancient Greeks had a tendency to depression when forming his recollections, they called it hypochondria, meaning a process of cartilage-formation or ossification of the abdomen where, as a result of this rigidity, reflection was brought about in such a way as to make memory a source of depression. The entire organism is involved in these things. That is something which must be kept in our minds.

When speaking of the power of memory, I drew attention to the surface of the organs. In a certain sense everything experienced strikes the surfaces, is reflected, and that leads to recollections. But something enters the organism at the same time. In ordinary life this is transmuted, undergoes a metamorphosis, so that the organ produces a secretion. The organs having this function are mostly glandular. They have an inner secretion, which during life is changed into force. But not everything is thus transformed into organic metabolism, etc. Certain organs take up instead something which becomes latent within them, and constitutes an inner force; for example, all thoughts connected mainly with our perception of the outer world through which we form images of outer objects. The forces developed in these thoughts are, in a certain manner, stored up within the lungs.

You know that the inside of the lungs comes into activity through the metabolism, the movement of the limbs, and these forces are so transmuted that during the life between birth and death our lungs are somewhat of a reservoir of forces which are continually influenced by the metabolic-and-limb system. We find that at the time of death such forces have been stored up. The physical matter naturally falls away, but these forces are not wasted. They accompany us through death, and throughout the entire life between death and a new birth. And when we enter a new incarnation these forces which were in the lungs form our head outwardly, stamp upon it its physiognomy. That which the phrenologist, the craniologist study in the outer form of the skull would be found forecast within the lungs during the previous incarnation.

You see how definitely, from life to life, the transmutation of forces may be followed up. When this is done reincarnation will no longer be an abstract truth alone, but will be studied concretely, as one can study physical things. And spiritual science becomes valuable only when in this way we penetrate into concrete facts. If we speak only in generalities of repeated earth lives, and so forth, then these are mere words. They have meaning only if we can enter upon the single concrete facts.

If that which has been stored in the lungs is not controlled in the right way it is squeezed out, as I said yesterday, much in the same way as a sponge is squeezed out, and then, from that which should form the head only in the next incarnation, there arise mainly abnormal phenomena which are usually called coercive thoughts, or described by some other term as illusions. It is an interesting chapter of a higher physiology to study in lung cases the strange notions which arise in the patient in the advanced stages of the disease. This is connected with what I have just explained to you, with the abnormal pressing out of thoughts.

You will see undoubtedly that the thoughts which are pressed out under these conditions are coercive because they already contain the formative forces. The thoughts which we ought normally to have in consciousness should be pictures only, they must not contain a formative force, and should not coerce us. Throughout the long period between death and rebirth these thoughts do coerce us; then they are causative, formative. During earth life they must not overwhelm us; they should use their power only during the transition from one life to another. This is the point to be considered.

If you now study the liver in the manner I have just explained in regard to the lungs, you will discover that there are concentrated in the same way within the liver all the forces which in the next incarnation determine the inner disposition of the brain. Again by a detour through the metabolic organism of the present life, the forces of the liver pass over, this time not into the shape of the head, but into the inner disposition of the brain. Whether or not someone is to be an acute thinker in the next incarnation depends upon how he behaves in the present one, in order that thus, upon the detour through the metabolism there may arise within the liver definite powers. But if these are ejected during the present incarnation they lead to hallucinations or to powerful visions.

You see now concretely what I pointed out yesterday more theoretically: that these things arise, having been squeezed out of the organs, then force their way into consciousness. Out of the general hallucinatory life, which should extend from the end of one incarnation into the next, they assert themselves within a single incarnation and, in this way, make their abnormal appearance.

If you study in the same manner all that is connected with the kidneys and excretory system you will discover that they concentrate within themselves the forces which, in the following incarnation, influence the head organization preferably in the field of affective emotions. The kidneys, the organs of excretion, bring forth in preparation for the next incarnation essentially that which has to do with the temperamental tendencies in the broadest sense, but by a detour through the head organization.

If these forces are squeezed out during the present incarnation they display all the nervous symptoms connected with over-excitement of the human being, inner excitement specifically, hypochondriacal symptoms, depression, in short all the conditions connected particularly with this aspect of the metabolism.

In reality everything remembered with a strong ingredient of feeling or passion is also connected with what is reflected from the kidneys. If we consider lung or liver reflections we find them to be more often memory ideas, the memories proper. If we turn to the kidney system we see what sort of lasting habits we have in this incarnation; and within the kidney system are being prepared already the temperamental tendencies in the broadest sense which, by a detour through the head organization, are intended for our next incarnation.

Let us study the heart with the same idea. For spiritual-scientific research, the heart is an extraordinarily interesting organ. You know that our trivial science is inclined to treat knowledge of the heart rather lightly. It looks upon the heart as a pump which pumps the blood through the body. Nothing more absurd can be believed, for the heart has nothing to do with pumping the blood. The blood is set in motion by the full agility of the astral body and ego, and the heart's movement is only the reflex of these activities. The movement of the blood is autonomous, and the heart only brings to expression the movement caused by these forces. The heart is in fact only the organ that manifests the movement of the blood, the heart itself having no activity in relation to this blood movement. The present natural scientists become very angry if you speak of this. Many years ago, I think in 1904 or 1905, on a journey to Stockholm I explained this to a scientist, a medical man, and he was furious about the idea that the heart should not be regarded as a pump, that the blood comes into movement through its own vitality, that the heart is simply inserted in the general blood movement, participates with its beat, and so on.

Well, something is reflected from the surface of the heart which is not a matter of memory or of habit. The life processes become spiritualized when they reach the outer surface of the heart. For what is thrown back from the heart are the pangs of conscience. That is to be taken simply, entirely as the physical aspect. The pangs of conscience which radiate into our consciousness are that ingredient in our experiences which is reflected from the heart. Spiritual cognition of the heart teaches us this.

But if we look into its interior we see gathered there forces which again stem from the entire metabolic and limb organism, and because everything connected with the heart forces is spiritualized that is also spiritualized within it which has to do with our outer life and deeds. And however strange and paradoxical it may sound to anyone clever in the modern sense, the fact remains that what is thus prepared within the heart are the karmic propensities, the tendencies of our karma. It is revoltingly foolish to speak of the heart as a mere pumping mechanism, for the heart is the organ which, through mediation of the limb and metabolic system, carries what we understand as karma into the next incarnation.

You see, if we learn to know this organization we learn to differentiate and recognize its connection with the complete life extending beyond birth and death. We look then into the whole structure of the human being. We cannot speak of the head in relation to metamorphoses, for the head is simply cast off, its forces having completed their activity in the present incarnation. That which, however, exists in these four main systems, in lung, kidney, liver, and heart, after making a detour through the metabolic and limb system, passes over forming our head with all its predispositions and tendencies in the next incarnation. We must seek within the organs of our body the forces which will carry over into the next incarnation what we are now experiencing.

The human metabolism is by no means a mere simmering and seething of chemicals in a retort which modern physiology describes. You need only to take a step in walking and a certain metabolic effect is produced. The metabolism then taking place is not simply the chemical process which may be examined by means of physiology and chemistry, but bears within it at the same time a nuance of morality. And this moral nuance is in fact stored up in the heart and carried over as karmic force into the next incarnation. To study the human being in his entirety means to find in him the forces which reach over beyond earth life. Our head itself is a sphere, and this form is modified only because the rest of the organism is attached to it. Our head is formed out of the cosmos. When we go through death we must, with the spiritual and soul organization which remains to us, adapt ourselves to the whole cosmos. The whole cosmos then receives us. Up to the middle of the period between two incarnations—I have called it in one of my Mystery Dramas the Midnight of Existence—up to this time, if I may so express myself, we continue to spread out into our environment and what thus goes out from us into the surrounding world gives the astral and etheric configuration for the next incarnation.

All this, coming in essence from the cosmos, is determined by the mother. Through the father and impregnation comes that which is formed in the physical body and in the ego. This ego, as it is then, after the Midnight Hour of Being, passes over into an entirely different world. It goes over into the world from which it can then follow the path through the paternal nature. This is an extremely important process. The period up to the Midnight Hour and the period from the Midnight Hour on—both between death and rebirth—are really very different from each other. In my Vienna lecture cycle in 1914 I pictured these experiences in their inner aspect.¹ If we look at them more from the outside, we must say: The ego is more cosmic in the first half, up to the Midnight Hour, and prepares within the cosmos that which then enters the next incarnation indirectly through the mother. From the Midnight Hour of Existence on up to the next birth, the ego passes over into what the old Mysteries called the netherworld; and on the detour through this netherworld it passes through impregnation. There the two poles of humanity meet as it were, through mother and father, from the upper world and from the netherworld.

What I am now saying was an intrinsic portion of the Egyptian Mysteries which came out of the old instinctive knowledge, at least so far as is known to me. The Egyptian Mysteries led particularly to knowledge of what they then called the upper and the lower gods, the upper and the underworld of gods; and it may be said that in the act of impregnation a polar equilibrium of the upper and the underworld of gods is brought about. The ego between death and rebirth goes first through the upper and then through the lower world. In olden times there was not the strange nuance which many connect today with upper and netherworld. People of today nearly always look upon the upper as the good and the netherworld as the bad. This nuance was not originally connected with these worlds; they were simply the two polarities which had to participate in the general world creation. Humanity in the direct experience of the upper world, viewed it more as the world of light, the netherworld more as the world of gravity. Gravity and light were the two polarities when expressed exoterically, and thus you see that such things may be described concretely.

In regard to the other organs I have told you that the overflowing of organic forces may become hallucinatory life, especially that which is squeezed from the liver system. But if the heart squeezes out its contents it is really the collected forces, ejected and brought into consciousness, which call forth in the next incarnation that strange urge to live out one's karma. If we observe how karma works, it may be said that a figurative description from the human side might represent it as a kind of hunger and its assuagement.

That must be understood as follows: Let us proceed first from the standpoint of ordinary life. Let us take a striking case: A woman meets a man and begins to love him. As that is usually regarded, it is somewhat as though you were to cut out a small piece from the Sistine Madonna, for example, a little finger from the Jesus boy and gaze at it. You have a piece of the Sistine Madonna, but you do not see anything. Neither do you see anything if you merely consider the fact that a woman meets a man and begins to love him. The matter is not like that. You must trace it backwards. Before the woman met the man she had been in other places in the world; before that she had been somewhere else, and still earlier somewhere else again. You can find all sorts of reasons why the woman went from one place to another. There is sense in it and, although it is naturally hidden in the subconscious, there is a connection throughout, and we can, by going back into childhood, follow the way. The woman in question—and this is directed at no one in particular—follows the path from the beginning which culminates in the event under discussion. The human being at birth hungers to do what he does, and he does not give up until he satisfies this hunger. The pressing forward to a karmic event is the result of such an indescript spiritual feeling of hunger. One is driven to it, as it were, by the whole self. The human being has forces within him which lead to later events, in spite of the freedom which nevertheless exists, but acts in a different field. Well, the forces which manifest in this way as hunger, leading to karmic satisfaction, are concentrated in the heart; and when they are pressed out prematurely and enter the consciousness during the present incarnation, they may create pictures which produce a stimulus, and then frenzy results.

Frenzy is nothing but the outburst in this incarnation of a karmic force intended for the subsequent incarnation. Think how differently we must accustom ourselves to look upon world events, having understood these connections. People put questions such as: Why did God create frenzy? Frenzy has plenty of good reasons for existence, but everything working in this world may appear at the wrong time, and the displaced manifestation, due in this case to Luciferic forces—everything premature in the world is brought about by Luciferic forces—this precipitate appearance of karmic forces intended for a later incarnation produces frenzy.

You see, what is to be carried over and continued in later incarnations may really be studied in the abnormalities of the present life. You may easily imagine what an important difference exists between what remains in our heart throughout our entire incarnation, and the condition it will be in after it has gone through the long development between death and rebirth, to appear then in a new life in the outer behavior of a human being.

However, if you look into your own hearts you can see pretty clearly, though of course only in latency, not in a finished picture, what you will do in your next life. We need not confine ourselves to the general statement: what will take effect karmically in the next life is prepared in this one, but we can point directly to the receptacle in which the karma of subsequent incarnations is stored. These are the things which must be concretely regarded if we wish to practice genuine spiritual science.

You may imagine what enormous importance these things will attain when they are studied and made a part of the general education. What does present medicine know of the possibility of a liver or heart disease when it does not recognize the most important fact of all, that is, the actual purpose of these organs! And it does not know that. It does not even discover a correct connection between excitement hallucinations and the kidney system, nor of the quiet hallucinations, those which simply appear and are present as I have just explained, and are, so to say, liver hallucinations. Hallucinations which appear as though crawling on a human being so that the victim wants to brush them off come from the kidney system. These are the excitement hallucinations which have to do with the emotions and temperament. From such symptoms a much more exact diagnosis can be made than by the means in ordinary use today. And diagnoses based upon purely external evidence are very uncertain in comparison with what they would be were these things studied with the above-mentioned symptoms in mind.

Now all these things are connected with the outer world. The lungs, as an inner organ or organic system, contain the compressed coercive thoughts with all that we receive and concentrate in that organ through perception of outer objects. The liver has an entirely different relation to the outer world. Because the lungs preserve the thought material they are quite differently shaped. They are more closely connected with the earth element. The liver, which conceals in particular the quietly appearing hallucinations, is connected with the element of water; and the kidney system, paradoxical as it sounds, belongs to the element of air. One thinks naturally that this ought to be the case with the lungs, but the lungs as organs are connected with the earth element, though not with it alone. On the other hand, the kidney system—as an organ -—belongs to the element of air, and the heart system to that of warmth, being entirely formed out of that element. Hence, this element which is the spiritual one is also the one which takes up the predisposition of our karma into the delicate warmth structures of the warmth organism.

Since the human being as a whole stands in a relation with the outer world, you can readily realize that the lungs have a particular relation to the outer world in connection with the earth element, and the liver in regard to the watery element. If you examine the earthly qualities of plants you will find in them the remedies for diseases which originate in the lungs. (This is of course to be considered in its broadest implications.) If you take what circulates in the plant, its circulation of juices, you will have the remedy for all disturbances connected with the liver. Thus a study of the reciprocal relation of the organs with the outer world offers in fact the foundation for a rational therapy.

Our present therapy is a jumble of empiric notes. One can reach a really rational therapy only by studying in this way the reciprocal relations between the domain of the human organs and the outer world. Of course the voluptuous longing for subjective mysticism must then be overcome. If the aim is to reach no farther than the well-known “little divine flame” of Meister Eckhardt, and so on; if only the outpouring of inner delight is the aim, and the beholding of beautiful images without penetrating this element to the definite configuration of the inner organs, then important therapeutic knowledge cannot be acquired. For this knowledge is gained upon the path of genuine mysticism which advances to the concrete reality of the inner human organism.

We learn, by the detour through this inner knowledge, to discern the passage through the incarnations. In just the same way, when we regard the outer world, in penetrating this carpet of the sense impressions, we attain to the spiritual. We rise into the world of the spiritual hierarchies, which we did not reach through the detour of inner mysticism. The hierarchies are found through a more profound contemplation of the outer world. Upon this path there follow results which may be first expressed by analogies; yet they are not mere analogies, for there exist deeper connections and relations.

We breathe, do we not? And I recently reckoned for you the number of inhalations during twenty-four hours. If we count eighteen breaths to the minute we have in an hour 60 x 18, and in twenty-four hours 25920 inhalations in a day and night.

Let us take another rhythm in the human being, the rhythm of day and night. When you awake in the morning you draw into your physical and etheric bodies the astral body and ego. This is also breathing. In the morning you inhale the astral body and ego, and when you fall asleep at night you exhale them again; thus one complete breath in 24 hours, in one day. That is 365 such breaths in a year. And take the average age of a human being, 72 years, and you have approximately the same result. If I had not started with 72, but somewhat lower, I should have reached the same figure. That is to say, if you take the entire earthly life of a human being, and count each single day, each falling asleep and awakening, as one breath, you have then in an entire life as many inhalations and exhalations of the astral body and ego as you have in and out breathings in 24 hours. You make in the course of your life as many in and out breathings of the astral body and ego as you make daily in your in and out breathing of air. These rhythms correspond absolutely, and show us how man is fitted into the cosmos. The life of one day from sunrise to sunset, as a single circuit, corresponds with an inner sunrise and sunset that lasts from birth to death.

You see the human being becomes a part of the whole world organism; and I should like to close these considerations by pointing out to you an idea, asking you to think about it rather thoroughly, and to make it a subject of meditation. Science today postulates a cosmic process, and within this cosmic process the earth once arose. In the end the earth, when the entropy is fulfilled, will be consumed in cosmic heat. If today we form for ourselves a concept such as the Copernican, or any modification of it, then we take into consideration only the forces which formed the earth out of the primeval nebula, and human life really becomes a sort of fifth wheel on the wagon; for the geologist and the astronomer do not consider mankind. It does not occur to them to seek in any sense within mankind itself the cause of a future world organism. The human being is everywhere present in this cosmic process, but he is the fifth wheel on the wagon. The world process takes its course, but he has nothing to do with it. Consider it in this way: the world process comes to an end, ceases, is dispersed in space. It stops, and the causes of what ensues are always within the human being himself, inside his skin; there they find their continuation.

The inception of what is now the world lies far back within man of primeval ages. It is thus in reality. The books of ancient wisdom tell us this in their own language, and the saying of Christ-Jesus points to these things: Heaven and earth shall pass away, but my words shall not pass away. All that constitutes the material world is dissolved, but that which issues from the spirit and soul and is expressed in words survives the destruction of the earth and lives on into the future. The causes of the future exist within us, and need not be investigated by geologists. We should seek them among the inner forces of our organism which pass over into our next earth-life first, but then continue into other metamorphoses. Hence when you search for the future of the world you must look within man. Everything external perishes utterly.

The nineteenth century erected a barrier against this knowledge, and this barrier is called: the law of the conservation of energy. This law carries forward the forces of man's environment; but all these will dissolve and disappear. Only that which arises within humanity itself can create the future. The law of the conservation of energy is the most false imaginable. In reality its result is simply to make mankind a fifth wheel in the creative process of the cosmos. Not the statement of the law of the conservation of energy is correct, but that other saying: Heaven and earth shall pass away, but my words shall not pass away. These two are in diametrical contrast; and it is simply thoughtlessness when today certain members of this or that positive denomination wish to be believers in the Bible and, at the same time, adherents of the theories of modern physics. This is sheer dishonesty which claims today to be something culturally creative. This dishonesty must be driven from the field of creative culture—which it actually opposes—if we are to emerge from these forces of decline into ascending powers.

• 1. Rudolf Steiner, Inner Nature of Man, Vienna, Easter 1914, six lectures.

Today I would like to look at something from a completely different perspective that has occupied us a great deal here in recent times. I would like to look at the fact, from an historical perspective, that in the last third of the 19th century there was indeed a decisive turning point for human spiritual life. This decisive turning point was expressed in the most diverse facts. And these facts are essentially the underlying causes of all, I might say, the misery that befell humanity in the 20th century, for the underlying causes of all this misery nevertheless lie in the spiritual.

But now I would like to give a brief description of the actual nature of the spiritual crisis of the last third of the 19th century. It was indeed the case during this time that on the one hand there was materialism, the materialism of external life, and behind it the materialism of world view. And one would like to say how bashfully and gradually idealism as a world view completely abandoned its position. I have just tried to point out this contrast between materialism, which often did not want to be one and yet was one, and idealism in the penultimate issue of the “Goetheanum”. There I sketched out how idealistic spirits, certain spirits who continued the idealism of the first half of the 19th century, extended into this last third of the 19th century, but how these spirits, these thinkers, precisely because they only knew the spiritual life in the could not penetrate against everything that could assert itself on that basis, which natural science, so to speak, sovereignly explained, which natural science, against which nothing can be objected, led beyond its scope, as if all world affairs could be decided by pure natural science. This natural science had its great successes in the characterized time, successes in relation to knowledge, successes in relation to the outward practical-technical life. Those who wanted to reject everything that did not follow from the results of this natural science could point to these successes.

And so, I might say, the successful ones who confidently declared natural science and who, after all, represented nothing else and to this day represent nothing else but materialism, were confronted by those thinkers who wanted to be the guardians of idealism. But they knew the spiritual life only in ideas. They saw, so to speak, only ideas behind the material essence of the world, and behind the ideas nothing further, no active spirit. Ideas were the end, the last thing they could arrive at. But these ideas are abstract. They were cultivated as such by these thinkers in the first half of the nineteenth century, and remained abstract, even when they were further developed by idealists in the last third of the nineteenth century. And so these idealists could not, with the abstract ideas, which for them was the only spirit, keep up with the, I would say, tangible results of the natural scientific world view.

That is the external history. But the inner history that lies behind it is something else. That is that materialism, if it remains consistent and has spirit - even if it denies spirit, materialism can have a great deal of spirit - is actually not refutable. Materialism cannot be refuted. It is completely in vain to believe that materialism is a worldview that can be refuted. There are no reasons with which one can prove that materialism is incorrect. Hence the completely superfluous talk of those who always want to refute materialism with some theoretical reasons.

Why can't materialism be refuted? Well, you see, it can't be refuted for the following reason. Let us take that part of matter which provides the basis for spiritual activity in man himself, let us take the brain or, in a broader sense, the nervous system. This brain, in the broader sense the nervous system, is truly a reflection of the mind. Everything that occurs in the human spirit can also be demonstrated in some form or other, in some process of the brain or nervous system. So everything that can be cited spiritually as an expression of the human being can simply be found in its material counterpart in the brain, in the nervous system.

So how could someone who points to this nervous system not be able to say: Now you see, everything you say about the soul, everything you say about the spirit, is contained in the nervous system. If someone were to look at a portrait and say: This is the only thing about the person that is depicted, there is no original at all – and one could not find the person of whom the portrait is, one could perhaps not prove that there is an original. You cannot prove that the original exists from the portrait. Nor can you prove that there is a spirit from the material reproduction of the spiritual world. There is no refutation of materialism. There is only one way to point to the will, how to find the spirit as such. You have to find the spirit quite independently of the material, then you will indeed also find it creatively active in the material. But it is never possible to draw conclusions about the spirit through any descriptions of the material, through any conclusions drawn from the material, because everything that is in the spirit is in the material only as an image.

That is the secret of why, in a time like the last third of the 19th century, when people did not have direct access to the spirit, materialism stood there unrefuted, irrefutable, and why those idealistic thinkers could not arise in this time against the materialistic thinkers. The dispute could not take place in proof and counter-proof. It took place, so to speak, under the influence of the opposing greater or lesser power of the contending parties. And in the last third of the 19th century, those who were able to point to the easily understandable, because tangible, progress and successes of natural science and its technical results had the greater power.

Of course, those people who, as idealists, as idealistic thinkers, as I characterized them in the penultimate issue of the “Goetheanum”, preserved the traditions of the first half of the 19th They were the ones whose ideas could touch people much more than the materialists' ideas; but the materialists were the more powerful. And the dispute was not decided by evidence; at that time it was decided as a question of power. We must face this quite disillusioned. One must be clear about the fact that to reach the spirit presupposes the necessity of directly seeking a way to it, not to open it up, to want to prove it from material phenomena. Because everything that is in the spirit is also found in matter. So if someone has no direct path to the spiritual, then he finds everything he can observe in the world somewhere in matter.

Since even the noblest minds in the last third of the 19th century could not open up access to the spirit, they came, because the needs and longings for the spiritual still lived in them, almost into an insecurity of the whole human soul condition. And behind many a truly extraordinary personality of the last third of the 19th century stands, like a background, a sense of instability. People who, despite being extraordinarily intellectual, are often extraordinarily emotional, said to themselves: Yes, there is the material world, there are the ideas. The ideas are the only thing that can be found behind the phenomena of nature and humanity, behind nature and history. But then these people felt that ideas are something abstract, something dead. And so they came to feel insecure and unstable.

I would like to recommend an example to you, an actually quite significant personality, so that you can see in detail what this development of the human spirit, which finally led to our present time, actually was. Today I would like to draw your attention to the so-called Swabian Vischer, also called V-Vischer because he writes his name that way, in contrast to the other learned fishermen. Today I would like to point out the Swabian Vischer, the esthete.

You see, he had completely outgrown the idealism of the first half of the 19th century. He could not profess crude materialism. He saw ideas everywhere behind material entities and behind material processes, and basically also saw a sum of ideas in the moral world order. He was particularly concerned with finding the essence of beauty. In the Hegelian sense, he sought the essence of beauty in the emergence of the idea from sensual matter.

When an artist takes any material and shapes it in such a way that an idea appears through this form, that one is not just looking at a product of nature that does not reveal an idea, but when the artist arranges the material, be it the material of the ore, or the matter of musical tones, or the matter of words, so that one senses an ideal through his arrangement, then it is the appearance of the idea in a sensual form, in a sensual shape, and that is the beauty. It may be that the idea is so powerful that one perceives the sensual appearance as too weak to express the greatness of the idea. If, for example, the sculptor has something so powerful in his idea that no sensual material is sufficient to shape the idea, so that one can only sense the idea as something immeasurably great behind the material, then the beautiful becomes the sublime. If the idea is small, so that one can play with the material, and the idea is expressed in an amiable way throughout the playful treatment of the material, then the beautiful becomes the graceful.

Thus the charming and the sublime are different forms of beauty. Then, when man senses the harmony of the world in what is artistically created, he can turn either to the sublime or to the charming, depending on how the artist presents it. But then one can see, as happened so very often with Jean Paul, for example, how world events are presented in such a way that one never sees harmony, that one only sees contradictions everywhere in the world, that harmony is actually something unattainable that lies behind everything, but that world phenomena appear to one as the nearest thing. For example, you see how, let's say, there is a small schoolmaster who has an extremely idealistic mind, who has a great longing for knowledge, but has no money to buy books, and instead of books, only gets book catalogs from the antiquarian bookshops, and at least now has the book titles instead of the books. He can still buy white paper, and he now writes the books himself for all these titles that he has in the antiquarian bookshop catalog. Yes, but then he notices that there is still harmony in the material that the poet deals with. It is beautifully harmonious, how he balances out the disharmony that money introduces. And then again, the books he writes for himself are not as clever as those in the catalogs. The contradiction remains. You are tossed back and forth between what should be and what is and what should not be.

If you can come to terms with this contradiction in your mind, which cannot be resolved, wherever one contradiction replaces another, where you would not get beyond the contradiction at all, but would have to dissolve into dust yourself , if one nevertheless knows how to calm one's mind, then that is the mood of that beauty that one enjoys in humor.

Yes, it was precisely the case with the Swabian Vischer, the V-Vischer, that he virtually glorified humor as an esthete, that he, because he lived in the age when one was at a loss contradictions, the contradiction between mind and matter, because there was no actual penetration of the world harmonies for human understanding as something achievable, he wanted to help himself through humor over all of this. And so he glorified humor. But again, it is the case with humor that behind it, nevertheless, there must be a harmonization somewhere, otherwise humor does not come about, otherwise one sees in the end that one calms oneself through the mind with something, whereby one should not actually calm oneself if one does not want to become a wishy-washy person. And so, behind all this, there is the striving of the Swabian Vischer to enjoy the world – he is, after all, a leading figure for the second half of the 19th century – behind all this there is a striving, because one cannot enter into the spiritual world, but only into ideas, a striving that in turn has something terribly philistine about it. A laughing humor, but behind which is not really the balance of the mind, but something convulsive, a humor that easily, when it explores the contradictions in the world, instead of humorous balance, only finds the foolish juxtaposition.

All this is connected with the fact that the more noble minds in this second half of the 19th century could not find what was actually behind the world spiritually, that they therefore looked for means of information that ultimately led them into a certain lack of direction, into something convulsive. And yet, out of these convulsions of the last third of the 19th century, only the tragic and the unhealthy of the beginning, of the first half of the 20th century could emerge.

Now, when this Swabian Vischer, one might say, although he resisted it, wanted to present his own self – it is his own self, after all – to the world in this way, he wrote the novel “Auch Einer” (Another One). One can say that the “hero” of this novel, as one would say in philistine aesthetics, or as it is scientifically called, the hero of this novel - in reality his name is Albert Einhart, but V-Vischer abbreviates it: A. E., calls him “Auch Einer” (just “one of many”), and that is also the title of the novel - well, this “Auch Einer”, there is something in him. He would like to be a one as a human being, a real one. He would like to be a “one,” such an individuality, who is something in himself. But now, despite his magnificent, powerful talents, he becomes only “one of the ones,” not “one,” but “one of the ones,” perhaps not exactly twelve, but of which there are still a considerable number in a dozen! Yes, as I said, Vischer resisted the idea that “Auch Einer” is a portrait of his own character. He is not that either, but nevertheless Vischer has mysteriously incorporated into this “Auch Einer” that which lived in him as inner disharmony. At the same time, there are the discrepancies of the soul from the last third of the 19th century.

This novel “Auch Einer” actually consists of three parts. The first describes how V-Vischer becomes acquainted with Albert Einhart, with the “Auch Einer”. It is an interesting travel acquaintance, not exactly an everyday occurrence.

You see, V-Vischer, too, in the end, could see in the approach of the Mystery of Golgotha to earthly evolution nothing but the evolution of an idea. For him, the Christ was actually an abstract idea that has permeated the evolution of mankind. And at Golgotha, in the body of Jesus of Nazareth, an abstract idea — Christ — was actually crucified. It does not breathe much reality. It leads back to the time of David Friedrich Strauss and so on, where the actual content of religion was only understood as if religion only contained images for something that is actually meant ideally, abstractly. Thus Christ and the story of Christ could only be understood as images, the absorption of the highest ideas into earthly development, the crucifixion only as the appearance of the idea in a particularly outstanding sensual human form, and so on. All this has indeed been the subject of great intellectual efforts in the 19th century and has been the subject of bitter disappointments for the deeper minds in this 19th century, because behind all this idealism a real spirituality could not be found. And of course people thirst for the spiritual, as they always thirst for the spiritual, and most of all when they do not have it. And those thinkers thirst for it most who believe they can prove that there is no such thing as a spiritual reality, only matter or only ideas. One could say: at the end of the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th century, the more outstanding minds had actually already grown tired of this intellectualist quest for an answer to the question: how do ideas actually work in nature? How do abstractions actually work in history? Only at most such mercurial flatworms as Arthur Drews, have again brought forth that which had long been somewhat dismissed among those who could really think. Therefore, in the personality of this mercurial non-thinker, something of this still extends into the 20th century: an idea was crucified, not a real spiritual being.

But from what I say, you can see that ultimately, even for a thinker like Schwaben-Vischer, everything that was spiritual dissolved into ideas. In the end, it was the ideas, in their abstract form, that were the thing that worked through the world as a web. And everything that was told in the mythologies, in the religions up to and including the Christian religion, was, only clothed in material, something that was at most an image for the idea. And ultimately, from this striving to see only the idea in the sensual image, people had to realize that it does not really matter in which sensual image one expresses the weaving and spinning of the idea in matter.

And for a crank like Albert Einhart, who is “just one of those people,” matter asserts itself in a very strange way. It so happens that Albert Einhart wants to ascend to the sublime at every possible opportunity. When he wants to ascend to the highest heights of the spiritual, which for him is only the ideal, then he gets a cold, then he has to sneeze terribly, or he has to clear his throat terribly. That's when matter asserts itself, isn't it, that's matter. He doesn't usually feel matter so strongly as when he gets a cold or when he has a corn. After all, if you are a thinker from the second half of the 19th century, you don't know which end to grasp materialism, which just reflects ideas. It is best to grasp it where matter asserts itself the most, where it always appears in such a way that it even conquers the spirit. And in the end, like Albert Einhart, “one of them”, you even become a critic of what is already there.

For Albert Einhart does eventually come up with the idea that those who have approached the subject in a more neutral way have actually succumbed to an error. Schiller presented Tell completely wrongly, because it cannot be like that; the subject is grasped at a much too high level. You have to go deeper. You have to go into the catarrhal stage if you want to really grasp the subject. And so the correct composition of Tell should be that when he pushes off with the little boat, he doesn't just get across, but capsizes, falls out and is caught by Gesler's men, who give him a good thrashing, but he escapes again, falls into the water a second time and catches a cold. Now he gets a terrible cold, and just as he is about to draw the crossbow, he has to sneeze. And the bailiff cannot say: That is Tell's arrow – but: That is Tell's sneeze! That is how Tell should be, says Albert Einhart, the “Auch Einer” (the “Also Einer” is a play on words with “Auch einer” meaning “another one” and “einer” meaning “one”). No, you have to go deeper, more thoroughly into materialism, if you want to be consistent.

There have been all kinds of interpretations and explanations for Othello, psychological explanations; but one should see, says Einhart, that Othello is constantly trying to get a handkerchief, that he has a bad cold that drives him so crazy that he ends up strangling Desdemona. Nothing but a cold! One must go deeper into the matter, into the actual material. One must find it at the right point.

That is what Vischer seeks through his cozy, humorous approach. He cannot get beyond materialism. He cannot prove it away, and so he wants to at least rise above it in his mind. He cannot humorously ignore hydrogen and oxygen; well, one must humorously ignore catarrh. And that is precisely one point of view that one can take vis-à-vis materiality.

The matter has also led to Vischer being able to point out how he actually makes the acquaintance of this peculiar character. He is staying in a hotel, which – given the various circumstances, one can assume – must not be too far from here, albeit in the High Mountains, and because he already has a cold, he gets into an argument with the hotel servant, becomes somewhat violent, and so all the scruples of life come to his mind from this material affair. And it comes to such a pass that he even wants to end his own life. He throws himself down. But on this occasion the Swabian-Vischer sees him and prepares to save him, and in doing so tumbles down over the precipice. The other man sees this again, and forgets that he actually wanted to commit suicide himself, and comes to the aid of the Swabian-Vischer. That is how they make their acquaintance. It is not an everyday acquaintance. So they both roll down. And there you can still hear the curses of this “one too,” who is now expressing his worldview. You don't really hear it because there is a roar from all possible waters; it is not quiet, only individual parts can be heard like: World – a cold of the absolute – in solitude – spat out and the world was – the world coughed up by the eternal, coughed up – disgraceful jelly – breeding ground of the devil – and so on, you hear it all through. He will have said much more, of course!

Now they have made each other's acquaintance in this way, Vischer the Swabian and “Another One”. But they can't communicate right away because they both get a cold and have to sneeze terribly. And so it takes a little longer to communicate. The first part is about how you make a travel acquaintance in a not-quite-ordinary, everyday way. The second part is a work by “Auch Einer” that is inserted, a pile village story. It describes the life and activities in a pile village. One could talk at length about the age in which this pile village existed and so on, but there is also some information from which one can deduce that the pile village of “Auch Einer” is near the city of Turik. This city is nearby. And about the time – well, the pile-dwellers have to call in a bard boy from Turik. And this bard boy from Turik is called Guffrud Kullur. Yes, you can't really discuss the time in which this pile-dwelling existed.

The details of this pile-dwelling story are now developed in the narrative of “Auch Einer” (Another One), and we are introduced to the way in which, for example, the pile-dwellers take care of their religious needs. This is precisely what Swabian Vischer and his counterpart Albert Einhart describe in their study of religions: This has been the material-figurative expression of the rule of ideas everywhere. And so this religion of the pile dwellers is one that they adopted in a time when no one could catch a cold. It was a completely paradisiacal time when no one could catch a cold. But these paradise pile dwellers were not so comfortable. They felt somewhat irritated by this cold-free, catarrhal time, and so they fell for the temptation of the great god Grippo. This Grippo, who actually dwells in the cold west, but works and creates through fire, through heating. And so it came about that they, the people of the paradise on stilts, succumbed to the temptation of the god Grippo! And they caught cold, had to sneeze all the time, and so they surrendered to the weaver of worlds, who often appears to people as a white cow. They see: material-pictorial expression, elaboration of the spiritual. The World Spinner advises them to found their village on the lake, but the lake sends forth a constant cold, damp fog. The sniffles are properly expelled. The results of the god Grippo come out and are finally cured. This can only happen in pile villages.

Then a kind of heretic also comes to this pile village. But the pile villagers are led in an extraordinarily good way by a druid. A druid who is actually not much smarter than the other pile villagers, but who has learned to properly teach the catarrhal religion, completely dominates these pile villagers. And there is only one thing: The Druids must live celibate, so he does not have a wife, but a mistress, Urhixidur, who again rules him and from whom a lot emanates in this pile village. So now a heretic comes along who wants to teach the pile villagers a kind of enlightened religion, a religion without God. But the stake villagers have not only come to know the good gods, but also the Grippo and all sorts of other things. And the druid, egged on by the Urhixidur, sets up a heretic's court. The stake villagers become a little bit mad at the druid, because they dig up a deeper stake village, and now he can't explain that. And now they call Guffrud Kullur and another scholar, Feridan Kallar, from the neighboring city. But the strange thing is that when pile villages were excavated in a Swiss town other than Turik, one of the experts was Ferdinand Keller, who was not appointed by a town with a present-day name, but by Turik, just as, of course, the reference is not to Gottfried Keller, but to Guffrud Kullur. Well, the battles are taking place between the people with an original religion, with the religion of catarrhal conditions, and a heretic who now wants to teach a religion without God, a religion of the moral world order. They are interesting struggles. They come to a head in particular when the pile dwellers celebrate a festival that corresponds to Catholic confirmation and Protestant confirmation, namely the festival of investiture. This is when children are introduced to the community. But of course, in keeping with the events, they receive a handkerchief, not the things that usually happen at confirmation, but they have to get a proper handkerchief for the road through life.

All kinds of cultural struggles are still taking place there. It seems to “Auch Einer” that the cultural struggles were not only visible in the world during this time, but they also seem to have taken place in the pile villages.

Yes, I would say, the Swabian Vischer develops a humor to represent the inability to come to terms with materialism in this oddball. Whether one finally takes – this is probably what the Swabian Vischer meant in his heart – the concepts that start from the materialist art historians, who tie in with such neutral material, or others that show the material more clearly: perhaps it just depends on whether one takes the clearer concepts.

A man like Gottfried Semper, for example, asserts the working of stone and the workability of wood when explaining this or that architectural style. Yes, but why talk about the extent to which wood or stone can be worked? Why start from this side of the material? It is much more sensible to examine how people were affected by the different architectural styles, and then you have the connection between these architectural styles and the human being and human development. With the Greeks, it will have been the case that their style of building was open on all sides, so that if you spent a good deal of time in the buildings, you would catch a good, strong cold. These are the purely catarrhal architectural styles, the ancient architectural styles. And the Gothic architectural styles, there you were more protected, you only caught a cold now and then when you opened the windows: these are the mixed-catarrhal architectural styles. And the ideal is only in the distant future: these are the buildings in which you don't catch a cold at all. We can make a very nice distinction – and this is how it is done in scholarly writings – between architectural style A: purely catarrhal, architectural style B: mixed catarrhal, and architectural style C: where you no longer catch a cold. This is the classification of architectural styles by “Auch Einer”.

You see, V-Vischer didn't know how to approach materialism. He wanted to approach it humorously, and so he took this side of materialism where man feels matter in him in one way or another. That is, after all, what really underlies this novel, “Auch Einer”.

In a third part, there are also Albert Einhart's aphorisms. You get to know him better, so to speak. You get to know his struggle against nature, his struggle with the spirit, with the moral world order, with pure idealism; very witty remarks that are presented in aphorisms. Sometimes you get the feeling that the somewhat philistine Swabian Vischer has already anticipated the witty ideas of Friedrich Nietzsche. There is really something extraordinarily ingenious in this third part of Albert Einhart's aphorisms.

And Albert Einhart is also a very original personality. When you meet him in the novel, he is retired, of course, because he was something of a police director, but even then he was actually already an important personality. So the Swabian Vischer obviously wants to suggest that this in itself must be taken with humor: an important police director. But because he was important, he was also elected as a member of parliament, and there he gave an extraordinarily important speech. In this important speech, one sentence had a rousing effect, then a second sentence had a rousing effect again. But the second inspiring sentence had the same effect on the first as if the first had been poured over with horribly cold water. It is strange that the inspiring effect was as if the first flame of fire were to be extinguished: Now there are people again who belong to the old terrible, barbaric times and would like to introduce corporal punishment in the most diverse forms in the military and in schools. This is something that leads us in the most blatant form to the time when there was no idealism yet, when people did not yet live in pictorial religions, when they still had a purely moral view, religion without God. We must not expose ourselves to this in our time. In our time, there must be no beating, beating must be thoroughly eradicated. In our time, many other damages must be eradicated. We see how much barbarism still extends into our time. For example, we see how animals are tortured on the street by rough people, how these poor horses, who are not designed for it, are beaten with whips. Or we see how dogs, which have other organs on their feet than hooves and are not suited to pulling carts, have to pull carts. In short, we see how the animals are tortured, and I would like to make a motion here in the chamber that all animal abusers be publicly flogged!

These are the things, again, that one can only get over with a certain sense of humor when the second spark of fire pours out like a cold jet of water on the first. Yes, this Albert Einhart, this “Auch Einer,” is really a true creature of the last third of the 19th century! And much of what Vischer felt in terms of his own psychological discrepancies, he brought to light in this “Auch Einer”. But one must not identify Vischer with “Auch Einer”, nor with the person who had come to the village as a heretic and was tried as such, otherwise one would come to strange conclusions.

Not true, the Schwaben-Vischer has, though not in Turik, but in another city, for a time provided a kind of heretic protectorate, and it has done him badly. But it would be taking an overly humorous view of V-Vischer himself to interpret such things. For V-Vischer did not even want to accept the second part of Goethe's “Faust” and ridiculed the commentators and interpreters by calling himself in a third part of “Faust” that he wrote, with allusions to all those who find so many witty things in the second part of “Faust”, Deutobold Allegoriowitsch Mystifizinsky all those who find so much ingenious things in the second part of “Faust”, Deutobold Allegoriowitsch Mystifizinsky; Deutobold Symbolizetti Allegoriowitsch Mystifizinsky and so on he called himself. And as such he wrote the third part of Goethe's “Faust” to mock the commentaries that wanted to see a deeper wisdom in Goethe's “Faust”. One does not want to become an allegoriovitch like that, and since the Swabian Vischer's own fates are expressed or somehow hinted at in his “Auch Einer”.

One would like to say that it is remarkable how, in this last third of the 19th century, on the one hand there is Nietzsche, who is to be taken so deeply tragically, who perished because of the discrepancies that took place in his soul , and this Swabian Vischer, who could not help but express the groundlessness of the worldviews of his time in such a way as he did in the novel “Auch Einer” (Another One). One can only say that there is a certain unity even in this novel, as there is a certain unity in certain natural scientific materialistic views. After all, if you look at hydrogen, look at oxygen, look at zinc, look at gold, they are so different things, but together you find the one atomic unity everywhere. The atoms are everywhere, they are just a little differently collated, so that they look a little different. And here in this novel there is also a very strange unity.

For example, the “Auch Einer” finds the personality, the female personality, that really instilled a great respect in him in life, now as a widow again. It is a great moment for him. He is deeply indebted to the man who died. He finds the personality he deeply admires as a widow in a hotel. She enters into a conversation with him. And this conversation is interrupted because the “one too” is seized by a terrible sneezing fit. This conversation does not end. It is always matter that has a devastating effect, that rebels in this search for a worldview, for the spirit; it is always matter that intervenes and ultimately makes everything material. One can't do anything but ascribe everything to materialism when one wants to express the most sublime revelations of the human soul, and now, isn't it true, not even the word “ideal” comes about, but “ide-” and then comes a long sneeze! One sees how matter asserts itself everywhere and how the ideal simply disappears in the face of matter.

It is an extraordinarily significant cultural-historical phenomenon, this novel “Auch Einer” (i.e., “Just Another”) by Schwaben-Vischer, even though one must also say that there is a lot of philistinism in it. But that is precisely what makes it a particular expression of the time. And it expresses the fact that, as a spiritually minded person, one could no longer find one's way in what had become of spirit and matter, so that one could, like “Auch Einer”, come up with the most abstract ideas with the mind, which killed each other as much as the abolition of corporal punishment and the public flogging of those who tortured animals. So one idea kills the other. And if you turned to matter, you got matter where it was most perceptible to you: in the nasal mucus.

That was not exactly fine, one might say, but the Swabian Vischer also wrote a very interesting book about frivolity and cynicism. He never wanted to be frivolous, hated the ladies' narrow waists, but he found something extraordinarily right in cynicism, which one must apply everywhere if one wants to present this or that properly. And that is why he did not shrink back, one might say, not frivolously, but sometimes somewhat unsavory, from presenting world events in a materialistic sense, but humorously, as he thought.

You have to grasp what is alive in the times not only through abstract thoughts and not only through sentimentality, but you have to grasp it in moods. And I really think that something of the mood of the last third of the 19th century lay in those feelings that permeated this Swabian soul, the Vischersche, when he wrote the novel “Auch Einer” (Another One).

When we consider an appearance such as the one we were talking about yesterday, it becomes as clear as possible that not only did materialism arise in the last third of the 19th century in the spiritual development of humanity, but something that is fundamentally even worse than materialism: a certain insecurity and lack of stability has arisen, especially among those minds and thinkers who could not unconditionally go along with materialism. In this last third of the 19th century, we actually find the following situation. We find that the actual materialistically minded and attuned people at that time already had a certain inner security. One need only take a look at all those people who, out of their, one might say, power of knowledge, declared the scientific results to be sovereign and, from there, founded a world view. They appeared with a certain tremendous self-assurance. And it was not so much the content of what they gave as the certainty of their appearance that produced the numerous materialistic followers at that time. On the other hand, all those who, as I discussed yesterday, only held to the spirit with the abstract ideas, felt more or less as uncertain as the Swabian Vischer, of whom I spoke yesterday. They could only hold on to the spirit by saying: There are ideas at work behind the phenomena of the external sense world. But they could only present these ideas in the abstract. They could not bring a real spiritual life behind these ideas to the people's attention. They could not speak of a real spiritual life. Therefore, the abstract ideas did not have a guiding power for them. And so, by the 1890s, there was actually nothing left in public life of that idealism that had still been valid in the first half of the 19th century, which was then represented by isolated people, as I indicated in the penultimate issue of the “Goetheanum”, but which had just dried up by the turn of the century.

It is characteristic that the last third of the 19th century was introduced by a very effective book, the “History of Materialism” by Friedrich Albert Lange. This “History of Materialism” made an extraordinarily deep impression. It was first published in 1866, so it actually marks the beginning of the last third of the 19th century. This “History of Materialism” can be seen as a symptom of the state of mind that humanity was now approaching. For what exactly does this “History of Materialism” contain?

Friedrich Albert Lange presents the idea that man could not arrive at any other rational worldview than materialism, that he could not actually do otherwise if he did not want to indulge in illusions, than to declare atomistically arranged matter to be the starting point for a knowledge of the world. So one must take this world of material atoms filling space as the basis for reality.

Friedrich Albert Lange, of course, noticed that one had to form concepts about this world and that these concepts, ideas, were nevertheless something other than that which lives in atoms. But he said: Well, the concepts are just a fiction. - He actually coined the term “conceptual poetry”. And so man fashions his concepts for himself. Only the extraordinary fact arises that not every man fashions his own concepts; but, to understand each other a little, it comes about that people fashion common concepts. But the concepts are fictions. Real is only the atomic matter scattered in space.

You see, that would be crass materialism, which explains everything that goes beyond materialism as fiction. And one could say: at least it is a consistent point of view! But that is not the case in Friedrich Albert Lange's book. If he only went as far as I have told you so far, he would be a consistent materialist. Fine. I told you yesterday that consistent materialism cannot be refuted. And if someone has no access to the spiritual world – Friedrich Albert Lange certainly had none – then he can actually do nothing but posit materialism as the only valid world view.

But that is not what he does. Instead, Friedrich Albert Lange says something else that, I would say, runs like a red thread through all the arguments in his book. He says: It is true that one can only assume the material world of atoms to be real. But if one assumes that, if one now goes and says that the material world of atoms is at work in space, arranged in hydrogen and nitrogen in such and such a way, interacting in such and such a way, if ideas are boiled down in the brain, and so on – if one assumes all this, then in the end it is also just a construct of concepts. So materialism, which one is forced to profess, is itself actually only idealism, because one is again only inventing the world of atoms.

There is a much simpler image to express what Friedrich Albert Lange expressed in his world-famous book; with regard to logical form, there is a much simpler image. It is the famous Munchausen personality, which grasps its own hair and pulls itself up. The idealist takes the idealistic hair and pulls himself into materialism.

We see that one of the world's most famous works, written at the beginning of the last third of the 19th century, is actually nothing more than quite ordinary nonsense. It cannot be said otherwise. It is actually quite ordinary nonsense. If it were materialism, this “History of Materialism,” then at least it would be new. But that it is a materialistic materialism, a fabricated materialism, yes, that is pure nonsense. But what happened in this last third of the 19th century, which was so successful scientifically? This historical fact must be brought to mind. What happened? Friedrich Albert Lange's book became world-famous, because it was translated into almost all the cultural languages, and the most outstanding, enlightened minds regarded it as a redemptive act.

You are familiar with the matter that has now been performed so often in eurythmy: “Bim, Bam, Bum”, where the one tone, Bam, flies past the tone Bim; but Bim has surrendered to Bum:

“He is also a good Christian,
but that is just it”.

I have to remind you: All those who then drew their wisdom from Friedrich Albert Lange and who in turn formed the starting points for the fact that basically all our public thinking is permeated by this, were all enlightened minds – but that is just it: for the last third of the 19th century! And those who were merely the audience didn't notice any of this. And so, with regard to the most profound issues of human interest, a state of intense sleep has indeed descended.

You will say: these things are exaggerated. — They are not exaggerated! Only the depth of the sleep that has befallen humanity with regard to the greatest questions of spiritual life, the depth of this sleep is understated, not what I have said is exaggerated, but the general view of these things is understated. And if a healthy foundation is to be created for a future spiritual life, this whole serious fact, as I have just characterized it, must be brought to mind, brought to mind with all intensity. For it is just this that has excluded the interest of humanity in the spiritual world from the development of this humanity. And gradually it became the case that the less someone touched on spiritual problems at all, the more he was considered a great scientist. That was the situation at the turn of the century.

It was into this situation that Anthroposophy was to be introduced. And this is how, if I may put it, the task of Anthroposophy must be conceived. It must be conceived in such a way that it must actually work from the foundations, and must not tie in with this or that that already exists in one direction or another. There is simply nothing there, and one must understand the essence of anthroposophy from the foundations. Then, when one understands the essence of anthroposophy from the foundations, one will find that the facts that are currently available through the natural sciences are highly useful for anthroposophical research in all areas and that these facts of natural science can only be properly illuminated through anthroposophical research. This is how the situation must be understood. But for this to happen, it is necessary that a certain part of humanity really decides to lead intellectualism into the spiritual.

Of course, the people who join the anthroposophical movement are all deeply imbued with a certain urge and inclination towards the spiritual world. But very few people love to lead the world of ideas of the present into the spiritual. They would like to take in Anthroposophy as a kind of comfort for the soul, so to speak, by excluding the world of ideas. But that will not suffice to give Anthroposophy its impulsive power in spiritual life. You see, what is involved here must really be grasped in the individual, concrete fact, and today I want to present you with just such a single concrete example.

I have often told you that what you have put on as a head today is the transformed organism from your previous life. But you have to imagine the head as being separate from this organism from your previous life on earth. It really is like that. In the previous life on earth, you had to think away the head, it dissolved in the universe. But what was the rest of the organism, that now becomes the head of the next life on earth. And this organism in turn becomes the head of the next life on earth, and so on. That is how it is.

Now someone might say: But not only my head was buried in my previous life, but also the rest of my organism. It has not had the opportunity to transform into the head of my present life. — Yes, that is a very superficial view. You do not look at your head and the rest of your organism, but at the physical matter that fills your head today. Yes, that also changes about every seven years during your life on earth. What you carry within you today as matter, you did not have eight years ago. That which goes through the earth life is the invisible, supersensible form.

The matter that fills your head you have, of course, only taken up in this life. But the form, the supersensible forces that today round the eyes and turn up the nose, are the same forces that in the previous life formed arms and legs and the rest of the organism. That you can be seen by other people with physical senses is due to the fact that completely formless matter fills your form. It is not matter that gives you form. If you eat salt, the salt wants to be cubic, it does not want to be nose-shaped, nor eye-shaped, it wants to be cubic and so on. You do not owe the form in which you appear as a human being to the matter that is the basis of your physical visibility; but the form of your present head has really gone through metamorphoses, through the form of your organism, except for the head of the previous earth life. But that is why your head was really in an extraordinarily favorable situation. Because it has been so well treated in the universe, it is also the first to appear as a properly formed head in embryonic life. Just think, the head is very beautifully formed at first, while the other organs in the first embryonic life are really only attached to it as secondary organs. It must first be formed from the outside, and actually looks terrible in relation to the human form when you look at it, while the head is actually very beautifully formed from the very beginning. Of course, for someone who only recognizes the fully grown human being, the embryo's head will also have something unappealing about it, but actually it is already beautifully formed. This is because it brings its formative forces with it from the previous life.

This head has actually been worked on between death and the present birth, as I described in the lectures on cosmology, religion and philosophy, which I gave some time ago at the Goetheanum. This work between death and a new birth relates precisely to the development of the formative forces of the human head.

But that is why the human head is something extraordinarily perfect in relation to the cosmos. The human head actually contains the material image of the human spirit, soul and body. So when you look at the head, you have spirit, soul and body working together in a material way, in that they appear in shaped matter. One could say: for the human head, spirit, soul and body are still bodily. You see, that is the secret of the human head, that the spirit appears in a bodily way, that we can show materially in the miracle of the brain: this miracle is an image of the spirit. Just as sealing wax expresses what is on the seal, so through the head we have materially given spirit, soul and body.

In the case of the metabolism-limbs-human being, you can say: Actually, everything is more or less physically present. The legs, these two pillars, have not yet received anything of the miracle of the human head. They will undergo a metamorphosis. The lower jaw, with its wonderful function and mobility, will appear in the next life on earth, while the arms, after transformation, will be incorporated into the upper jaw in the next life, and so on. So that one can say: In the movement system - it is true that the arms are somewhat transformed after man has acquired his upright gait - the opposite is essentially the case, there spirit, soul and body are actually spiritual. There spirit, soul and body are thoroughly spiritual.

One would like to say that the way a person looks materially in terms of his legs and everything that is attached to them is not true. It will only show itself in its true material form in the next life on earth, when it has become a head. Now it is at the very beginning, and is actually quite insignificant in what it appears materially. The essential thing about it is what it first becomes through the will: the movement, the dynamics, the statics, everything that the human being transfers from his system of movement into the will. Thus, what is spiritually intangible, what is spiritually supersensible, is what this remaining human being is. So while the head of every material being is an image of the spirit and the spirit itself appears bodily, the bodily system of the body is hardly bodily. If one wants to find meaning in the whole bodily system at all, one must look everywhere: to what extent is the bodily suitable for the spiritual, for the spiritual revelation of the human being? So that one can say: This is the great mystery of the head, that spirit, soul and body are physical. That spirit, soul and body are spiritual, that is the great mystery of the lower human being.

You see, the Old Testament knew much more about these things from instinctive clairvoyance than today's man. Today's man actually overestimates the head. I have already discussed this from various points of view. In the Old Testament you will never find the illusion presented as if the brain concocted dreams! It says: “Yahweh tormented the man in his sleep in relation to his kidneys.” They knew that what is represented in dreams lies in the metabolic system. They did not attribute everything to the head. Why do we attribute everything to the head today? I'll tell you why: we don't believe in the spirit, so we don't look at the part of the human being where even the body is still spiritual. We don't really look at the lower human being, we are not proud of it. But we look at where even the spirit is physical and material, at the head: we are proud of that because that is where the spirit becomes material and bodily.

So, overrating the head, that is materialism. One wants only matter and also wants to have the spirit only as matter. That is why today in our physiological, in our scientific representations, the head is described as it is described, because one wants to have the spirit only materially. That is what it is, but in the head. Of course, no one knows that before this head could bring the spirit down to the physical, that is, material pictoriality, it had to go through the whole life between death and a new birth. That this material image of the human spirit could arise in the head at all had to be preceded by a long spiritual development. This material miracle of the development of the human brain is the conclusion of a wonderful spiritual development. But people only want to look at the material side and only want to accept the spirit in its material form.

Now, let us try to pay attention, my dear friends. Even if you are over fourteen years old, you can still pay attention. Isn't there a region in man that is entirely physical, and a region in man that is entirely spiritual? Yes, must there not be an intermediate point that is neither entirely physical nor entirely spiritual, that is both, and therefore neither of the two? There must therefore be a neutral point in the middle, where the spiritual passes into the physical and the physical into the spiritual, where neither of the two is present, where man is dependent neither on above nor below, where he is independent of both. That must exist somewhere in the middle.

Let us try to understand the significance of this point, which must therefore lie in the middle man, in the chest man. Imagine you have a scale here. Imagine a load here, and weights on the other side; now you create a balance. I must not give an excess weight here, otherwise it will go down; I must not give an excess weight there either, otherwise it will go down; I must not take anything away either, otherwise the whole thing will move. But look, here is a point, a neutral point. You could add as much as you wanted to this point, nothing would change in the balance of the scales. You could also take the scales there, and if you avoid creating an excess weight somewhere by any swing or something like that, you can move the scales all around, the balance remains the same. You can carry out the weighing correctly during the movement. This is a point that is not at all concerned with the whole system of the scales, an equilibrium point. You can do whatever you want with it, and nothing will change for the rest of the balance. For example, someone has a load on one side and weights on the other. Now he realizes: the balance beam is made of iron, I don't like that, I'll make it out of gold. Now all he has to do is enlarge the center point a little, because actually the point of rest is a mathematical point, but it will be possible to enlarge it a little. You can bring gold into this point of rest quite well: the balance will not be changed. If you put the gold somewhere else – outside the center – then the balance will change immediately. But if someone wants to create a hollow space there and put flesh in it, they can do that too, it won't change the balance. Another person puts butter in there: the butter melts in the sun, the balance of the scales does not change. In short, there is a point here, quite independent of the whole system of the scales, where you can do whatever you want.

In the same situation is the point that lies between the physical and the spiritual as a point of balance. It is not dependent on either the physical or the spiritual. Man can do whatever he wants with this point.

If you simply imagine that a person is a physical being and that everything is connected one-sidedly according to cause and effect, then you will not find this point. If you imagine that a person is only a spiritual being and that everything is determined from above by divine worlds, then again nothing can be done, because then a person must carry out what is determined by the gods. But if you know that there is a point of equilibrium, where man is determined by God upwards and by matter downwards, and with the one point, which can now be demonstrated in his middle-stage human existence, he can begin in the world whatever he wants to begin out of himself – if you have this threefold constitution of man, then you will find in the middle part, scientifically and strictly demonstrable, the fact of human freedom. You can say that, it is as scientific as any quadratic equation can be solved or a differential quotient can be sought or anything. It is something that can be treated according to the strict rules of science. So freedom is the result of a real knowledge of the human constitution, because there is a point in man that is as independent upwards and downwards as the fulcrum of the scales is independent of the load on the right and left. You can carry the scales around with you everywhere, you can replace this point, as I have told you, with whatever you want. In this way, you can also find a point in a person where natural causality, the connections between cause and effect, end, where the connections from above also end, the determination by the spiritual world, where the two maintain a balance. There, in this hypomochlion of human nature, human freedom is guaranteed. And it can be rigorously proven scientifically if one has a true physiology and a true psychology, not what one has today and which, as I have already shown you, adds up to amateurism squared in psychoanalysis.

These are the things that should make people who learn about them think, bearing the following in mind. You can take all of literature and philosophy, you can read about the problem of freedom everywhere – no one can cope with the problem of freedom. Why? Because they have no real view of the human being. Today, this does not exist except in anthroposophy. And the fact that one cannot cope with the problem of freedom points, in turn, to the other fact that I tried to shed light on yesterday, albeit with a humorous tone. But what I tried to characterize humorously yesterday, from an at least supposedly humorous creation, can also be presented in all seriousness.

And these things must be treated seriously if one is to profess Anthroposophy in earnest. Then it is really a matter of getting at the real realities and using them in the appropriate way. Not if one is not quite sure: should one profess spirit because one only knows spirit in abstract ideas, or should one profess materialism, yes, then one becomes a humorist like the Swabian Vischer, then, as a humorist, one devises a humoristic world system that, I might say, is not for a finer taste, the catarrhal world system. Of course, one can laugh about it, but one cannot say with absolute certainty that the world did not come into being through a “sneeze of the Absolute.” Once again, a material is not used in the right way. It is only a matter of always using the material in the right way. Whether you just want to recognize it or actually want to use it, you have to use this material in the right way. Yesterday I gave you an example of this, I presented the view of the Swabian fisherman, how he actually creates an entire world system out of catarrh as a compelling, overwhelming reality. Yes, in the field of anthroposophy we do not do that! There I also have a catarrh like I had yesterday, but I have only used it from time to time for illustration: now and then the catarrhal, the coughing came out; that was only used for illustration, not to somehow gain the basis for a worldview, but only to provide illustrative instruction.

Not true, if you stagger so aimlessly between the catarrhal matter and the merely ideal spirit, then you come to speak of the seduction and temptation by the god Grippo. That is no longer possible on the basis of anthroposophy. There you propagate a flu remedy precisely in order not to be exposed to the temptation of linking a whole myth of the Fall to the god Grippo! It is a matter of grasping the material at the right corner and putting it in its right place.

So things have to change significantly. If you were a person of the mindset of Vischer in the last third of the 19th century, you would get annoyed and spit and clear your throat and finally come up with the farce of the god Grippo. If you are an anthroposophist, you try to fight the flu with our very effective flu medicine! These are the things that point to the right difference in how one treats the material out of the spirit.

Just by looking at the way the human head is viewed epistemologically today, one can see that the entire contemporary worldview has a deep sympathy for materialism. And the fact that we are at a loss when faced with the problem of freedom is expressed by the fact that we simply do not know that two very different world impulses are at work in the upper human being and in the lower human being. And those who, in ancient times, only looked at the upper human being, found that man cannot be free because he is determined everywhere from the spiritual world. Those who look at the human being today simply ascribe a natural causality to everything that manifests itself in the human being. From both points of view, the human being cannot be free. But spiritual causality applies to the head, natural causality applies to the metabolism-limb-human being. In between lies the rhythmic organization, which is rhythmic precisely because things within it balance each other out rhythmically. In the rhythmic organization there is something that is neither determined in the spiritual nor in the material sense, that is neither determined nor causalized, that represents the point from which the impulse of freedom comes in the human being.

You see, at such specific points one can show how anthroposophy can shed light on the deepest problems of human existence. The moment the threefold human nature was presented in my book 'Von Seelenrätseln': the nerve-sense human being, the rhythmic human being, and the metabolic-limb human being, the same moment was reflected back to the 'Philosophy of Freedom', in which freedom was simply presented as a fact. It was illuminated by this fact of freedom, so that one could say: If you consider the human being in terms of his true essence as such a threefold organization, then you can arrive at a completely scientifically exact representation of freedom in the human being, just as one arrives at the representation of the hypomochlion in the case of the scales, or at some point in a system of forces, at the representation of a point of equilibrium, which is then there, independent of the rest of the interplay of the forces in question in the system. But you will also see from this how you can actually look everywhere today: Nowhere will you find the truth about these things. And from those inadequate concepts, which are very far removed from the true organization of the human being, people are educated today, forming moral systems, religious systems, and especially social systems. Yes, it is no wonder that these social systems reveal themselves in such aberrations of thought, as is so clearly evident from the example recently given by Leinhas in the “Goetheanum”, where one has to admit that the views that tie in with Marxism have been refuted by life itself, that life shows that they cannot apply. But that is not decisive; one must first wait until someone scientifically proves that they are invalid. One can actually, as it has been done by Leinhas, only quote such things in quotation marks with the authority's own words, because if one wants to repeat them, one thinks one's head will burst. Not only does a mill wheel turn in one's head, but one generally thinks one's head will burst if one is only to think about such things.

It is necessary not just to move within the anthroposophical movement and let everything go straight and crooked outside, but to take an interest first in how chaotic our knowledge and that which has been drawn from this knowledge in the world is gradually becoming.

Today's lecture is intended to be just one episode in the series of lectures I have given, an insertion, in fact, for the reason that it is necessary for anthroposophists to be alert people, that is, to form an opinion by looking at the world in a certain way. And so it is necessary from time to time to insert one or other of these into lectures that otherwise deal with anthroposophical material, in order to open up a view of the other events, of the other state of our civilization. And today I would like to expand on what I briefly mentioned in the last article in the “Goetheanum”, where I talked about a publication that has just been released: “Decay and Rebuilding of Culture” by Albert Schweitzer. It describes itself as the first part of a philosophy of culture and is essentially concerned with a kind of critique of contemporary culture. However, in order to support some of the characteristics that Albert Schweitzer gives of the present, I would like to start by presenting the existence of the culture that Albert Schweitzer wants to address through a single, but perhaps characteristic example. I could have chosen thousands. You can only pick and choose from the full cultural life of the present, but rather from the full cultural death of the present, and you will always find enough. That is precisely the point, as I also noted in the pedagogical lectures yesterday and today, that we are getting used to looking at such things with an honestly alert eye. And so, to establish a kind of foundation, I have selected something from the series that can always be considered a representation of contemporary intellectual culture. I have chosen a rector's speech that was delivered in Berlin on October 15, 1910. I chose this speech because it was given by a medical doctor, a person who is not one-sidedly immersed in some kind of philosophical cultural observation, but who, from a scientific point of view, wanted to give a kind of contemporary tableau.

Now I do not want to trouble you with the first part of this rectorate speech, which is mainly about the Berlin University, but I would like to familiarize you more with the general world view that the physician Rubner – because that is who it is – expressed on a solemn occasion at the time. It is perhaps a characteristic example because it dates back to 1910, when everyone in Europe and far beyond was optimistically convinced that there was a tremendous intellectual upturn and that great things had been achieved. The passage I want to select is a kind of apostrophe to the student body, but one that allows us to see into the heart of a representative figure of the present age and understand what is really going on there. First of all, the student body is addressed as follows: “We all have to learn. We bring nothing into the world but our instrument for intellectual work, a blank page, the brain, differently predisposed, differently capable of development; we receive everything from the outside world.”

Well, if you have gone through this materialistic culture of the present day, you can indeed have this view. There is no need to be narrow-minded. You have to be clear about the power that materialistic culture exerts on contemporary personalities, and then you can understand when someone says that you come into the world with a blank sheet, the brain, and that you receive everything from the outside world. But let us continue to listen to what this address to students has to say. It begins by explaining, apparently somewhat more clearly, how we are a blank slate, how the child of the most important mathematician must learn the multiplication table again, because, unfortunately, he has not inherited advanced mathematics from his father, how the child of the greatest linguist must learn his mother tongue again, and so on. No brain can grasp everything that its ancestors have experienced and learned. But now these brains are being advised what they, as completely blank slates, should do in the world in order to be written on. It goes on to say: “What billions of brains have considered and matured in the course of human history, what our spiritual heroes have helped create...” — not true, that is said for two pages in a row, it is inculcated into people: they are born with their brains as a blank slate and should just be careful to absorb what the spiritual heroes have created.

Yes, if these intellectual heroes were all blank slates, where did it all come from, what they created, and what the other blank slates are supposed to absorb? A strange train of thought, isn't it! - So: “What our spiritual heroes have helped to create is received” by this blank sheet of brain “in short sentences through education, and from this its uniqueness and individual life can now unfold.”

On the next page, these blank pages, these brains, are now presented with a strange sentence: “What has been learned provides the basic material for productive thinking.” So now, all at once, productive thinking appears on the blank pages, these brains. It would be natural, though, for someone who speaks of brains as blank pages not to speak of productive thinking.

Now a sentence that shows quite clearly how solidly materialistic the best of them gradually came to think. For Rubner is not one of the worst. He is a physician and has even read the philosopher Zeller, which is saying something. So he is not narrow-minded at all, you see. But how does he think? He wants to present the refreshing side of life, so he says: “But there is always something refreshing about working in a new, previously untilled field of the brain.” So when a student has studied something for a while and now moves on to a different subject, it means that he is now tilling a new field of the brain. As you can see, the thought patterns have gradually taken on a very characteristic materialistic note. “Because,” he continues, “some fields of the brain only yield results when they are repeatedly plowed, but eventually bear the same good fruit as others that open up more effortlessly.”

It is extremely difficult to follow this train of thought, because the brain is supposed to be a blank slate, and now it is supposed to learn everything from the written pages, which must also have been blank when they were born. Now this brain is supposed to be plowed. But now at least one farmer should be there. The more one would go into such completely incredible, impossible thinking, the more confused one would become. But Max Rubner is very concerned about his students, and so he advises them to work the brain properly. So they should work the brain. Now he cannot help but say that thinking works the brain. But now he wants to recommend thinking. His materialistic way of thinking strikes him in the neck again, and then he comes up with an extraordinarily pretty sentence: “Thinking strengthens the brain, the latter increases in performance through exercise just like any other organ, like our muscle strength through work and sport. Studying is brain sport.

Well, now the Berlin students in 1910 knew what to think: “Thinking is brain sport.” Yes, it does not occur to the representative personality of the present what is much more interesting in sport than what is happening externally. What is actually going on in the limbs of the human being during the various sporting movements, what inner processes are taking place, would be much more interesting to consider in sport. Then one would even come across something very interesting. If one were to consider this interesting aspect of sport, one would come to the conclusion that sport is one of those activities that belong to the human being with limbs, the human being with a metabolism. Thinking belongs to the nervous-sensory human being. There the relationship is reversed. What is turned inward in the human being, the processes within the human being, come to the outside in thinking. And what comes to the outside in sport comes to the inside. So one would have to consider the more interesting thing in thinking. But the representative personality has simply forgotten how to think, cannot bring any thought to an end at all.

Our entire modern culture has emerged from such thinking, which is actually incomplete in itself and always remains incomplete. You only catch a glimpse of the thinking that has produced our culture on such representative occasions. You catch it, as it were. But unfortunately, those who make such discoveries are not all that common. Because in a Berlin rectorate speech, a university speech on a festive occasion: “Our goals for the future” - if you are a real person of the present, you are taken seriously. That's what science says, that's what the invincible authority of science says, it knows everything. And if it is proven that thinking is brain sport, well, then you just have to accept it; then after millennia and millennia, people have become so clever that they have finally come to the conclusion that thinking is brain sport.

I could continue these reflections now into the most diverse areas, and we would see everywhere that I cannot say the same spirit, that the same evil spirit prevails, but that it is naturally admired. Well, some insightful people saw what had become of it even before the outwardly visible decline occurred. And one must say, for example: Albert Schweitzer, the excellent author of the book “History of Life-Jesus Research, from Reimarus to Wrede,” who, after all, was able to advance in life-Jesus research to the apocalyptic through careful, thorough, penetrating and sharp thinking, could be trusted to also get a clear view of the symptoms of decay in contemporary culture. Now he assured us that this writing of his, “Decay and Rebuilding of Culture,” was not written after the war, but that the first draft was conceived as early as 1900, and that it was then elaborated from 1914 to 1917. Now it has been published. And it must be said that here is someone who sees the decline of culture with open eyes. And it is interesting to visualize what such an observer of the decline of culture has to say about what has been wrought on this culture, as if with sharp critical knives. The phrases with which contemporary culture is characterized come across like cutting knives. Let us let a few of these phrases sink in. The first sentence of the book is: “We are in the throes of the decline of culture. The war did not create this situation. It is only one manifestation of it. What was given spiritually has been transformed into facts, which in turn now have a deteriorating effect on the spiritual in every respect.” - “We lost our culture because there was no reflection on culture among us.” — “So we crossed the threshold of the century with unshakable illusions about ourselves.” — “Now it is obvious to everyone that the self-destruction of culture is underway.”

Albert Schweitzer also sees it in his own way – I would say, somewhat forcefully – that this decline of culture began around the middle of the 19th century, around that middle of the 19th century that I have so often referred to here as an important point in time that must be considered if one wants to understand the present in some kind of awareness. Schweitzer says about this: “But around the middle of the 19th century, this confrontation between ethical ideals of reason and reality began to decline. In the course of the following decades, it came more and more to a standstill. The abdication of culture took place without a fight and without a sound. Its thoughts lagged behind the times, as if they were too exhausted to keep pace with it.” - And Schweitzer brings up something else that is actually surprising, but which we can understand well because it has been discussed here often in a much deeper sense than Schweitzer is able to present. He is clear about one thing: in earlier times there was a total worldview. All phenomena of life, from the stone below to the highest human ideals, were a totality of life. In this totality of life, the divine-spiritual being was at work. If one wanted to know how the laws of nature work in nature, one turned to the divine-spiritual being. If one wanted to know how the moral laws worked, how religious impulses worked, one turned to the divine-spiritual being. There was a total world view that had anchored morality in objectivity just as the laws of nature are anchored in objectivity. The last world view that emerged and still had some knowledge of such a total world view was the Enlightenment, which wanted to get everything out of the intellect, but which still brought the moral world into a certain inner connection with what the natural world is.

Consider how often I have said it here: If someone today honestly believes in the laws of nature as they are presented, they can only believe in a beginning of the world, similar to how the Kant-Laplacean theory presents it, and an end of the world, as it will one day be in the heat death. But then one must imagine that all moral ideals have been boiled out of the swirling particles of the cosmic fog, which have gradually coalesced into crystals and organisms and finally into humans, and out of humans the idealistic ethical view swirls. But these ethical ideals, being only illusions, born out of the swirling atoms of man, will have vanished when the earth has disappeared in heat death. That is to say, a world view has emerged that refers only to the natural and has not anchored moral ideals in it. And only because the man of the present is dishonest and does not admit it to himself, does not want to look at these facts, does he believe that the moral ideals are still somehow anchored. But anyone who believes in today's natural science and is honest must not believe in the eternity of moral ideals. He does it out of cowardly dishonesty if he does. We must look into the present with this seriousness.

And Albert Schweitzer also sees this in his own way, and he seeks to find out where the blame lies for this state of affairs. He says: “The decisive factor was the failure of philosophy.” Now one can have one's own particular thoughts about this matter. One can believe that philosophers are the hermits of the world, that other people have nothing to do with philosophers. But Albert Schweitzer says quite correctly at a later point in his writing: “Kant and Hegel ruled millions who never read a line of theirs and did not even know that they obeyed them.” The paths that the world's thoughts take are not at all as one usually imagines. I know very well, because I have often experienced it, that until the end of the 19th century the most important works of Hegel lay in the libraries and were not even cut open. They were not studied. But the few copies that were studied by a few have passed into the whole of educational life. And there is hardly a single one of you whose thinking does not involve Kant and Hegel, because the paths are, I would say, mysterious. And if people in the most remote mountain villages have come to read newspapers, it also applies to them, to these people in the mountain villages, that they are dominated by Kant and Hegel, not only to this illustrious and enlightened society sitting here in the hall.

So you can say, like Albert Schweitzer: “The decisive factor was the failure of philosophy.” In the 18th and early 19th centuries, philosophy was the leader of public opinion. She had dealt with the questions that arose for people and the time, and kept a reflection on them alive in the sense of culture. In philosophy at that time, there was an elementary philosophizing about man, society, people, humanity and culture, which naturally produced a lively popular philosophy that often dominated opinion and maintained cultural enthusiasm.

And now Albert Schweitzer comments on the further progress: “It was not clear to philosophy that the energy of the cultural ideas entrusted to it was beginning to be questioned. At the end of one of the most outstanding works on the history of philosophy published at the end of the 19th century, the same work that I once criticized in a public lecture, this work on the history of philosophy, “this is defined as the process in which,” and now he quotes the other historian of philosophy, ”with ever clearer and more certain consciousness, the reflection on cultural values has taken place, the universality of which is the subject of philosophy itself.” Schweitzer now says: “In doing so, the author forgot the essential point: that in the past, philosophy not only reflected on cultural values, but also allowed them to emerge as active ideas in public opinion, whereas from the second half of the 19th century onwards they increasingly became a guarded, unproductive capital for it.”

People have not realized what has actually happened to the thinking of humanity. Just read most of these century reflections that appeared at the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries. If one did it differently, as I did in my book, which was later called “The Riddles of Philosophy”, then of course it was considered unhistorical. And one of these noble philosophers reproached me because the book was then called “World and Life Views in the 19th Century” for saying nothing about Bismarck in it. Yes, a philosopher reproached this book for that. Many other similar accusations have been made against this book because it tried to extract from the past that which has an effect on the future. But what did these critics usually do? They reflected. They reflected on what culture is, on what already exists. These thinkers no longer had any idea that earlier centuries had created culture.

But now Albert Schweitzer comes along and I would like to say that he seems to have resigned himself to the future of philosophy. He says: It is actually not the fault of philosophy that it no longer plays an actual productive role in thinking. It was more the fate of philosophy. For the world in general has forgotten how to think, and philosophy has forgotten it along with the rest. In a certain respect, Schweitzer is even very indulgent, because one could also think: If the whole world has forgotten how to think, then at least the philosophers could have maintained it. But Schweitzer finds it quite natural that the philosophers have simply forgotten how to think along with all the other people. He says: “That thinking did not manage to create a world view of an optimistic-ethical character and to base the ideals that make up culture in such a world view was not the fault of philosophy, but a fact that arose in the development of thought.” - So that was the case with all people. —- “But philosophy was guilty of our world because it did not admit the fact and remained in the illusion that it really maintained a progress of culture.”

So, with the other people, the philosophers have, as Albert Schweitzer says with his razor-sharp criticism, forgotten how to think; but that is not really their fault, that is just a fact, they have just forgotten how to think with the other people. But their real fault is that they haven't even noticed that. They should have noticed it at least and should have talked about it. That is the only thing Schweitzer accuses the philosophers of. “According to its ultimate destiny, philosophy is the leader and guardian of general reason. It would have been its duty to admit to our world that the ethical ideals of reason no longer found support in a total world view, as they used to, but were left to their own devices for the time being and had to assert themselves in the world through their inner strength alone.” And then he concludes this first chapter by saying: “So little philosophy was made about culture that it did not even notice how it itself, and the times with it, became more and more cultureless. In the hour of danger, the guard who was supposed to keep us awake slept. So it happened that we did not struggle for our culture.”

Now, however, I ask you not to do this with these sentences of Albert Schweitzer, for example, by saying to yourself or a part of you: Well, that is just a criticism of German culture, and it does not apply to England, to America, and least of all to France, of course! Albert Schweitzer has written a great number of works. Among these are the following, written in English: “The Mystery of the Kingdom of God”; then another work: “The Question of the Historical Jesus”; then a third; and he has written some others in French. So the man is international and certainly does not just speak of German culture, but of the culture of the present day. Therefore it would not be very nice if this view were to be treated the way we experienced something in Berlin once. We had an anthroposophical meeting and there was a member who had a dog. I always had to explain that people have repeated lives on earth, reincarnation, but not animals, because it is the generic souls, the group souls, that are in the same stage, not the individual animal. But this personality loved her dog so much that she thought, even though she admitted that other animals, even other dogs, do not have repeated lives, her dog does have repeated lives, she knows that for sure. There was a little discussion about this matter – discussions are sometimes stimulating, as you know, and one could now think that this personality could never be convinced and that the others were convinced. This also became clear immediately when we were sitting in a coffee house. This other member said that it was actually terribly foolish of this personality to think that her dog had repeated earthly lives; she had realized this immediately, it was quite clear from anthroposophy that this was an impossibility. Yes, if it were my parrot! That's what it applies to! — I would not want that this thought form would be transferred by the different nationalities in such a way that they say: Yes, for the people for whom Albert Schweitzer speaks, it is true that culture is in decline, that philosophers have not realized it themselves, but — our parrot has repeated lives on earth!

In the second chapter, Albert Schweitzer talks about “circumstances that inhibit culture in our economic and intellectual life,” and here, too, he is extremely sharp. Of course, there are also trivialities, I would say, of what is quite obvious. But then Albert Schweitzer sees through a shortcoming of modern man, this cultureless modern man, by finding that modern man, because he has lost his culture, has become unfree, and is unsettled. Well, I have read sentences to you by Max Rubner – they do not, however, indicate a strong collection of thoughts. The representative modern man is unsettled.

Then Albert Schweitzer adds a cute epithet to this modern man. He is, in addition to being unfree and uncollected, also “incomplete”. Now imagine that these modern people all believe that they are walking around the world as complete specimens of humanity. But Albert Schweitzer believes that today, due to modern education, everyone is put into a very one-sided professional life, developing only one side of their abilities while allowing the others to wither away, and thus becoming an incomplete human being in reality. And in connection with this lack of freedom, incompleteness and lack of focus in modern man, Albert Schweitzer asserts that modern man is becoming somewhat inhumane: “In fact, thoughts of complete inhumanity have been moving among us with the ugly clarity of words and the authority of logical principles for two generations. A mentality has emerged in society that alienates individuals from humanity. The courtesy of natural feeling is fading.” - I recall the Annual General Meeting we had here, where courtesy was discussed! — ”In its place comes behavior of absolute indifference, with more or less formality. The aloofness and apathy emphasized in every way possible towards strangers is no longer felt as inner coarseness at all, but is considered to be a sign of sophistication. Our society has also ceased to recognize all people as having human value and dignity. Parts of humanity have become human material and human things for us. If for decades it has been possible to talk about war and conquest among us with increasing carelessness, as if it were a matter of operating on a chessboard, this was only possible because an overall attitude had been created in which the fate of the individual was no longer imagined, but only present as figures and objects. When war came, the inhumanity that was in us had free rein. And what fine and coarse rudeness has appeared in our colonial literature and in our parliaments over the past decades as a rational truth about people of color, and passed into public opinion! Twenty years ago, in one of the parliaments of continental Europe, it was even accepted that, with regard to deported blacks who had been left to die of hunger and disease, it was said from the rostrum that they had “died as if they were animals.

Now Albert Schweitzer also discusses the role of over-organization in our cultural decline. He believes that public conditions also have a culture-inhibiting effect due to the fact that over-organization is occurring everywhere. After all, organizing decrees, ordinances, laws are being created everywhere today. You are in an organization for everything. People experience this thoughtlessly. They also act thoughtlessly. They are always organized in something, so Albert Schweitzer finds that this “over-organization” has also had a culture-inhibiting effect.

“The terrible truth that with the progress of history and economic development, culture does not become easier, but more difficult, was not addressed.” — “The bankruptcy of the cultural state, which is becoming more apparent from decade to decade, is destroying modern man. The demoralization of the individual by the whole is in full swing.

A person who is unfree, uncollected, incomplete, and lost in a lack of humanity, who has surrendered his intellectual independence and moral judgment to organized society, and who experiences inhibitions of cultural awareness in every respect: this is how modern man trod his dark path in dark times. Philosophy had no understanding for the danger in which he found himself. So she made no attempt to help him. Not even to reflect on what was happening to him did she stop him."

In the third chapter, Albert Schweitzer then talks about how a real culture would have to have an ethical character. Earlier worldviews gave birth to ethical values; since the mid-19th century, people have continued to live with the old ethical values without somehow anchoring them in a total worldview, and they didn't even notice: “They in the situation created by the ethical cultural movement, without realizing that it had now become untenable, and without looking ahead to what was preparing between and within nations. So our time, thoughtless as it was, came to the conclusion that culture consists primarily of scientific, technical and artistic achievements and can do without ethics or with a minimum of ethics. This externalized conception of culture gained authority in public opinion in that it was universally held even by persons whose social position and scientific education seemed to indicate that they were competent in matters of intellectual life.” — ”Our sense of reality, then, consists in our allowing the next most obvious fact to arise from one fact through passions and short-sighted considerations of utility, and so on and on. Since we lack the purposeful intention of a whole to be realized, our activity falls under the concept of natural events.

And Albert Schweitzer also sees with full clarity that because people no longer had anything creative, they turned to nationalism.

"It was characteristic of the morbid nature of the realpolitik of nationalism that it sought in every way to adorn itself with the trappings of the ideal. The struggle for power became the struggle for law and culture. The selfish communities of interests that nations entered into with each other against others presented themselves as friendships and affinities. As such, they were backdated to the past, even when history knew more of hereditary enmity than of inner kinship.

Ultimately, it was not enough for nationalism to set aside any intention of realizing a cultural humanity in its politics. It even destroyed the very notion of culture by proclaiming national culture.

You see, Albert Schweitzer sees quite clearly in the most diverse areas of life, it must be said. And he finds words to express this negative aspect of our time. So, I would say, it is also quite clear to him what our time has become through the great influence of science. But since he also realizes that our time is incapable of thinking – I have shown you this with the example of Max Rubner – Albert Schweitzer also knows that science has become thoughtless and therefore cannot have the vocation to lead humanity in culture in our time.

"Today, thinking has nothing more to do with science because science has become independent and indifferent to it. The most advanced knowledge now goes hand in hand with the most thoughtless world view. It claims to deal only with individual findings, since only these preserve objective science. It is not its business to summarize knowledge and assert its consequences for world view. In the past, every scientific person was, as Albert Schweitzer says, at the same time a thinker who meant something in the general intellectual life of his generation. Our time has arrived at the ability to distinguish between science and thinking. That is why we still have freedom of science, but almost no thinking science anymore.

You see, Schweitzer sees the negative side extremely clearly, and he also knows how to say what is important: that it is important to bring the spirit back into culture. He knows that culture has become spiritless. But this morning in my lecture on education I explained how only the words remain of what people knew about the soul in earlier times. People talk about the soul in words, but they no longer associate anything real with those words. And so it is with the spirit. That is why there is no awareness of the spirit today. One has only the word. And then, when someone has so astutely characterized the negative of modern culture, then at most he can still come to it, according to certain traditional feelings that one has when one speaks of spirit today – but because no one knows anything about spirit – then at most one can come to say: the spirit is necessary.

But if you are supposed to say how the spirit is to enter into culture, then it becomes so - forgive me: when I was a very young boy, I lived near a village, and chickens were stolen from a person who was one of the village's most important residents. Now it came to a lawsuit. It came to a court hearing. The judge wanted to gauge how severe the punishment should be, and to do that it was necessary to get an idea of what kind of chickens they were. So he asked the village dignitary to describe the chickens. “Tell us something more about what kind of chickens they were. Describe them to us a little!” Yes, Mr. Judge, they were beautiful chickens. — You can't do anything with that if you can't tell us anything more precise! You had these chickens, describe these chickens to us a little. — Yes, Mr. Judge, they were just beautiful chickens! - And so this personality continued. Nothing more could be brought out of her than: They were beautiful chickens.

And you see, in the next chapter Albert Schweitzer also comes to the point of saying how he thinks a total world view should be: “But what kind of thinking world view must there be for cultural ideas and cultural attitudes to be grounded in it?” He says, “Optimistic and ethical.” They were just beautiful chickens! It must be optimistic and ethical. Yes, but how should it be? Just imagine that an architect is building a house for someone and wants to find out what the house should be like. The person in question simply replies: “The house should be solid, weatherproof, beautiful, and it should be pleasant to live in.” Now you can make the plan and know how he wants it! But that is exactly what happens when someone tells you that a worldview should be optimistic and ethical. If you want to build a house, you have to design the plan; it has to be a concretely designed plan. But the ever-so-shrewd Albert Schweitzer has nothing to say except: “There were just beautiful chickens.” Or: “The house should be beautiful, that is, it should be optimistic and ethical.

He even goes a little further, but it doesn't come out much differently than the beautiful chickens. He says, for example, that because thinking has gone so much out of fashion, because thinking is no longer possible at all and the philosophers themselves do not notice that it is no longer there, but still believe that they can think, so many people have come to mysticism who want to work free of thought, who want to arrive at a world view without thinking. Now he says: Yes, but why should one not enter mysticism with thinking? So the worldview that is to come must enter mysticism with thinking. Yes, but what will it be like then? The house should be solid, weatherproof, beautiful and so that one can live comfortably inside. The worldview should be such that it enters mysticism through thinking. That is exactly the same. A real content is not even hinted at anywhere. It does not exist.

So how does anthroposophy differ from such cultural criticism? It can certainly agree with the negative aspects, but it is not satisfied with describing the house in terms of what it should be: solid and weatherproof and beautiful and such that it is comfortable to live in. Instead, it draws up plans for the house, it really sketches out the image of a culture. Now, Albert Schweitzer does object to this to some extent, saying, “The great revision of the convictions and ideals in and for which we live cannot be achieved by talking other, better thoughts into the people of our time than those they already have. It can only be achieved by the many reflecting on the meaning of life...” So that's not possible, talking better thoughts into the people of our time than those they already have, that's not possible! Yes, what should one do then in the sense of Albert Schweitzer? He admonishes people to go within themselves, to get out of themselves what they have out of themselves, so that one does not need to talk into them thoughts that are somehow different from those they already have.

Yes, but by searching within themselves for what they already have, people have brought about the situation that we are now in: “We are in the throes of the decline of civilization.” “We lost our way culturally because there was no thinking about culture among us,” and so on. Yes, all this has come about - and this is what Schweitzer hits so hard and with such intense thinking - because people have neglected any real, concrete planning of culture. And now he says: It is not enough for people to absorb something; they have to go within themselves. You see, you can say that not only Max Rubner, who cannot cope with his thinking everywhere, but even a thinker as sharp as Albert Schweitzer is not able to make the transition from a negative critique of culture to an acknowledgment of what must enter this culture as a new spiritual life. Anthroposophy has been around for just as long as Albert Schweitzer, who admittedly wrote this book from 1900 onwards. But he failed to notice that Anthroposophy positively seeks to achieve what he merely criticizes in negative terms: to bring spirit into culture. In this regard, he even gets very facetious. Because towards the end of the last part of his writing he says:

“In itself, reflecting on the meaning of life has a significance. If such reflection arises again among us” – it is the conditional sentence, only worsened, because it should actually read: If such reflection arose again among us! - “then the ideals of vanity and passion, which now proliferate like evil weeds in the convictions of the masses, will wither away without hope. How much would be gained for today's conditions if we all just spent three minutes each evening looking up thoughtfully at the infinite worlds of the starry sky...” he comes to the conclusion that it would be good for people if they looked up at the starry sky for three minutes every evening! If you tell them so, they will certainly not do it; but read how these things should be done in my book “How to Know Higher Worlds”. One does not understand why the step from the negative to the positive cannot be taken here, one does not understand it! “and when attending a funeral, we would devote ourselves to the riddle of life and death, instead of walking thoughtlessly behind the coffin in conversation.”

You see, when you are so negative, you conclude such a reflection on culture in such a way that you say: “Previous thinking thought to understand the meaning of life from the meaning of the world. It may be that we have to resign ourselves to leaving the meaning of the world open to question and to give our lives a meaning from the will to live, as it is in us. Even if the paths by which we have to strive towards the goal still lie in darkness, the direction in which we have to go is clear.

As clear as it was that his chickens were beautiful chickens, and as clear as it is that someone says about the plan of his house: The house should be solid, weatherproof, and beautiful. Most people in the present see it as clear when they characterize something in this way, and do not even notice how unclear it is.

"We have to think about the meaning of life together, to struggle together to arrive at a world- and life-affirming worldview in which our drive, which we experience as necessary and valuable, finds justification, orientation, clarification, deepening, moralization and strengthening... ” - The house should be beautiful and solid and weatherproof and in such a way that one can live well in it. In regard to a house one says so, in regard to a Weltanschhauung one says: The Weltanschhauung should be such that it can work justification, orientation, clarification, deepening, moralization and strengthening! - “and thereupon become capable of setting up and realizing definite cultural ideals inspired by the spirit of true humanity.”

Now we have it. The sharpest, fully recognizable thinking about the negative, absolute powerlessness to see anything positive. Those people who deserve the most praise today – and Albert Schweitzer is one of them – are in such a position. Anthroposophists in particular should develop a keen awareness of this, so that they know what to expect when one of those who are “philosophers” in the sense of this astute Albert Schweitzer comes along, for example a neo-Kantian, as these people call themselves, and who now do not even realize that they have not only overslept thinking, but that they have not even noticed how they have overslept thinking. Of course, one cannot expect them to understand anthroposophy. But one should still keep a watchful eye on the way in which such people, who are rightly described by Schweitzer as the sleepy philosophers of the 19th and 20th centuries, now speak of anthroposophy. We should look into the present with an alert eye on all sides.

A newspaper article begins by saying how ineffective Bergson seems in comparison to Kant. But then it goes on to say: Steiner's wild speculations and great spiritual tirades stand even less up to an epistemological test based on Kant. Steiner also believes that he can go beyond Kant and the neo-Kantians to higher insights. In fact, he falls far short of them and, as can easily be proven from his writings, has misunderstood them completely at crucial points.

This is of course trumpeted out without any justification whatsoever in the world's newspapers. And then these people, who can think in this way, or who are far from being able to think the way Rubner can, say: You only have to ask contemporary science and you know very well what these supposed insights - these brain bubbles, as he calls them - actually mean.

We have to pay attention to these things, and we must not oversleep them. Because this - as Albert Schweitzer calls it - thoughtless science can assert itself, it can assert itself in the world, and for the time being it has power. Today many people say that one should not look at power but at the law; but unfortunately they then call the power they have the law. Well, I will spare you the rest of the gibberish he presents, because it now goes into spiritual phenomena, which must also be examined by science today, and so on.

But if the poor students do get hold of anthroposophy and absorb the “brain bubbles”, then Max Rubner gives them this advice: “But there is always something refreshing about working in a new, previously untilled field of the brain.” Some fields have been plowed over and over again! Now, when the poor students in anthroposophy get “brain bubbles” and then plow these brains, the bubbles in front of the plowshare will certainly disappear. So in this respect, the story is true again. To understand that which wants to enter our culture, which, according to the best minds, is admittedly disintegrating, indeed has already disintegrated, that is not really given to the best minds of the present either, insofar as they are involved in the present cultural industry. So it remains the case that when they are supposed to say what the house should be like, they do not take the pencil or the model substance to design the house – which is what anthroposophy does – but then they say: The house should be beautiful and strong and weatherproof and so that one can live comfortably in it. With the house one says so. With a worldview, one says that it should be optimistic, it should be ethical, one should be able to orient oneself in it, and now how all the things have been called, but which mean nothing other than what I have told you.

You can see that it is necessary – and you will recognize it from the matter itself that this is necessary – to sometimes go a little beyond what is happening in civilization. That is why I have presented today's episodic reflection. Next Friday we want to talk further about these things, not say any more that the house should be beautiful and firm and weatherproof and so that one can live comfortably in it, the world view should be optimistic and ethical and so that one can orient oneself in it, and so on, but we really want to point to the real anthroposophy, to the spiritual life that our culture needs.

Today I would like to reflect on the past century. In a rather superficial way, the fact that the action of a very important novel by the French writer George Sand, 'Le compagnon du tour de France', is set in 1823, a hundred years before our present time, could be the reason for such a reflection. It is therefore possible for some to gain inspiration from this novel in particular, because with a fantasy as expansive and vivid as George Sand's, more is actually achieved for the characterization of an era than through so-called scientific historical observation. It can be said that this writer has used her real vividness to make the time around 1823 – and especially for the French west of Europe – the background of a significant novel.

Now, I will not keep to the style that is used in this novel, but I will try to give the social background from the intellectual foundations for the time indicated. George Sand has drawn a number of characters who belong to the lower-middle-class artisan class, and then the experiences of aristocratic family life also play into the lives of these members of the lower-middle-class artisan class. But what is magnificently portrayed in this novel is precisely the social life of the artisan class. And one can say: with the difference, with the distinction that must exist according to popularity, George Sand has described the human being's being placed in the social conditions of this age, which we can count further back, count back by decades, I would like to say, just as far back for France as the social conditions from which Goethe created his “Wilhelm Meister” go back. So with that difference, which must be given by the popularity, we see how the social conditions are vividly described as the background of the novel, how man grows out of the social conditions, how he shows his own personality in a certain nuance by growing out of these social conditions.

You know, of course, that Goethe's Wilhelm Meister characters also grow out of these social conditions. As early as the first half of the 19th century, various personalities drew a kind of parallel between the social background of George Sand's novel and Goethe's “Wilhelm Meister”. Of course, as I said, the differences that arise from the popular nature must be taken into account. Goethe's novel is thoroughly cosmopolitan, has nothing of a national character, and also has nothing of a political character. Sand's novel is thoroughly national, thoroughly political. We must of course assume this when the otherwise justified comparison between the two novels is made.

Now, these circumstances, which serve as the social background, are truly extraordinarily characteristic of the whole way in which the modern human being has worked its way up from certain backgrounds to the surface of human existence in the course of the last decades of the 18th century and the first half of the 19th century. Today, it is not easy for people to imagine what things were like a century ago, because today the human personality actually stands isolated within the social order. Even those who have professional or family ties are gradually shaping their lives in such a way that they come out of these ties, out of social bonds, to become a certain individuality.

In this respect, an enormous change has taken place in the development of European humanity in the 19th century, and the inner state of mind with regard to social ties or lack of ties is quite different in the second half of the 19th century than in the first half. In the first half of the 19th century, people – and today we want to disregard the different circumstances, to focus primarily on the Western European circumstances – people in those days positively sought to place themselves in a social context. He sought to join those personalities who had common interests with him, common interests that were, so to speak, composed of the interests of the class on the one hand and the interests of the profession on the other.

For the rural population, who in those days were even more bound to the soil, the bond through the earth is taken into account. But for those who, through their craftsmanship, grew out of this rural state of mind and achieved a certain liberation from the soil, it is very important that they sought socialization in society in this period, one might say quite convulsively. And the remarkable thing about this first half of the nineteenth century, the only period for which we can make a century-long observation, is that despite class and caste contexts and professional contexts, which form the external cement for such socializations, there was everywhere a spiritual, a specifically spiritual background to these socializations.

In the French, however, everything converges with the national. If we were to consider the same conditions for the German character, we would have to point out from the outset that, for example, the German apprentice also migrated outside the country during his period of travel, that he took no account of political boundaries when it came to seeking out the kind of socialization I have indicated. The thoroughly national character of the Frenchman also caused the craftsman to travel only within the borders of France.

But there, within the borders of France, there arose just such connections between classes and occupations that were sought frantically and in which, in the background, the effect of spiritual impulses can be seen, which penetrated into the souls of men. These craftsmen, when they journeyed from town to town, felt that they were in a kind of spiritual home because in every town they found the community to which they belonged. They were accepted into a community in some town or other, and the community extended throughout the whole of France. As I said, that was still the case a century ago. When the apprentice craftsman travelled, he found the same association in the town where he wanted to continue his craft. He did not bring any written documents with him, but he did bring a sign of recognition, a certain handshake or other identifying mark. When he asserted this sign of recognition, it was known that he belonged to this association, which had branches in all cities.

Now such associations were everywhere - I must keep emphasizing this - connected with a spiritual background, and if one seriously and honestly wants to investigate these things, it can actually cause one some difficulties to find out what this spiritual background is like.

So there were in France around the time indicated essentially two such craft associations. One association was called “Loups Dévorants” or “Loups garous”. That was one. The other was called “Gavots”. And the two were constituted as I have described, and both had, in the times when they could devote themselves to such a matter, gatherings that took place in the same way in different cities. At these gatherings, there was, first of all, careful practice of the identifying signs; but then there were festivities during which people spoke in symbols and had decorated the festival hall with symbols. There were festivities during which legends were told that traced such associations far back in history. For example, the “Dévorants,” the “Loups garous” — if I wanted to use a German word, I would have to say “werewolves” — traced the entire history of this association back to King Solomon and told a legend that led back to King Solomon. In the case of the Gavots, the legend, which was told in many different ways, went back to the Phrygian master builder Hieram Abiff. These associations differed in many ways. And only by carefully examining the practices could one gradually arrive at the spiritual background of which the members were well aware.

Thus, one important difference between the two was related to the admission process or to the fact that, let's say, both associations were in some city. There were both Dévorants and Gavots in a wide variety of cities. Now, it was a strict rule that no one could be assigned to a trade – they were very careful about this – unless it was through one of these associations. So there were members who were éevorants with one association, and members who were gavots with the other. Each turned to his association when he came to a city, and the association then provided him with the relevant position in his profession, after he had identified himself in the prescribed manner, so that it was known that one was dealing with one of those who belonged.

Now it happened, of course, that sometimes, let's say, many more people traveled to a city than there were positions to be filled. Now the leaders of the two associations did not know how to help each other from the outset. Now the question was: should the Dévorants win this race for jobs, that is, should the Dévorants accommodate the majority of those who have arrived, or should the Gavots win, should more of them be accommodated?

Now it is characteristic that there was usually fierce antagonism between the associations as such, and just as today there are all sorts of much more trivial but more brutal, I would say, confrontations between the various leaders of the unions and so on, there were also measures that were supposed to decide whether one party or the other should win in such cases. The Dévorants usually did not suggest anything special, but they would gather in the public squares and beat the Gavots. The Gavots, on the other hand, suggested that a prize should be awarded, and then the judges from both parties should decide together whether the Dévorant or the Gavot had performed better. That is a very significant difference. The Dévorants were essentially inclined to bring about the decision through fighting and outward appearances, the Gavots through more spiritual things, and so it was that sometimes the custom of one, sometimes that of the other, carried the victory. This is the kind of difference that indicates the spiritual underpinnings.

Another difference that allows us to see inside is the way each of the two parties buried their dead. The Gavots buried their dead so that they walked silently behind the coffin. The coffin was silently lowered into the grave. To the left and right of the grave stood prominent members of the respective association, and they spoke over the grave, lisping certain mysterious words to one another. And then they formed a kind of circle and spoke again in mysterious words.

The Dövorants, on the other hand, accompanied their dead with an extremely powerful voice. Let me put it this way: if you were standing in the distance and heard a funeral procession walking, and especially when it reached the grave and the earth was thrown onto the coffin, it sounded like the howling of wolves from a distance. But it was the way the members of this association conducted the solemn funeral service. They were of the opinion, which they traced back to ancient traditions, that the human being must amplify his voice and nuance it in such a way that the sounds resound in a powerful, wild manner, as if from the world that the dead immediately enter, these sounds resound into the physical world.

This already gives you an indication of how traditions were present in these associations from ancient times, which originated from ancient knowledge. The funeral rites of the Dévorants were such that they took into account what ancient beliefs knew about, say, Purgatory, as it is also called, about Kamaloka and the like. But the expression “wolves, loups” itself points to what was actually meant. In many secret teachings, these words, or at least the idea that can be expressed by this word, was used to describe what is active in the human astral body when the intelligence is gone, when the regulator of the brain is missing. What asserts itself there in a passionate, emotional way from the depths of human nature, what asserts itself in particular in the desire to be with other people in such a way that, as the legend says, one even craves their blood, was described in many secret teachings with wolf. So that one can say, if one wants to look at things quite honestly and correctly, these Dévorants actually thought that they should behave as if they had left their physical body, that is to say, their brain, on such an occasion as at a funeral.

And so were the festivities. While the festivities of the Gavots were quiet and gentle, the festivities of the Dévorants were loud and stormy. It was like an unleashing of the astral world, which came to life during these festivities. The symbols, which played a major role in these festivities, the composition of the legends, all this showed that what was once different in ancient times was actually brought to bear in a wild way on these occasions.

On the other hand, it is significant that the other party is called “Gavots”. This comes from “gave”. These are the name of very small spirits who come down from the slopes of the Pyrenees covered with dense forest, who do not make themselves known, but who nevertheless come down from the heights of the Pyrenees, one might say, like very small elemental spirits, acting as representatives of the Grail knights who otherwise come down from the heights of the Spanish mountains. So the relatives of this other party, the “Gavots”, felt they were the little spirits who nevertheless belonged to the army of the Grail knights.

So while the one party, the Dévorants, wanted to emphasize more what lives in human astrality, the Gavots wanted to emphasize more what, according to the then prevailing view, lay in the ego. Thus, the antagonism between these two parties is really based on the antagonism between human astrality, the astral body and the human ego. And that is the striking, the tremendously interesting thing, that even in the first half of the 19th century we have associations that exert a tremendous influence and power within the class and profession, where it is customary to join them, and that are firmly rooted in such spiritual foundations.

It is absolutely the case that people want to shape their social relationships in the external world according to profession and class, because life makes it necessary. Therefore, such associations take this as their cement: profession and class. But such associations would still have found it inconceivable in the first half of the 19th century to be mere trade unions, professional associations. They were professional associations externally, just as a human being has a physical body externally. Internally, however, they were constituted in soul and spirit, placed an enormous value on their identifying marks, on their symbols, lived in these and saw to it that the pure character of the association was preserved through these symbols.

Note the enormous difference between that time and ours. You only have to consider what people in those days still learned in school. It was extraordinarily little, and the spiritual education that these people had did not come to them through the school system. Through the school system, they learned to read and write poorly and to do a little arithmetic. Everything else was only introduced later in the school system for the general population. Nevertheless, these broad masses of the population were not ignorant in those times. And that is the sad thing about our view of history, that actually history is only ever built on the basis of such documents that can be found in the state or city or other archives. But that is not the full living history at all. We can only find it if we are able to look at what lives in the soul, in the spirit of a human being of any time, in any profession, in any class.

Now, the people who were actually extremely influential for general professional life drew what the spiritual content of their soul was from these gatherings at their associations. Therefore, they did not have a scholastic, abstract education. For that is the peculiar thing: when education became scholastic, it took on an intellectualistic-abstract character. In all these associations, education did not have an intellectualistic-abstract character, but a pictorial-symbolizing character, something that wanted to grasp the world in images. Man spoke in pictures when he spoke about the world, and he got the pictures from these associations. And he watched over the pictures that he received in one or other association, because he knew that in knowing and using such pictures through closed societies, the will is brought in a certain direction, but above all to a certain strength. While abstract education leaves the will completely unaffected, these people, who received their education in this way, were gripped in their entirety. They were, so to speak, always representatives of what lived spiritually in these associations as a whole human being.

And so, in the world, one really had to deal with these associations. And we will only have a social history of the 19th century when we can correctly determine the following, when we can say: In such associations, the spiritual currents lived that were in all the artisans, that is, in everything that was in the middle between the peasantry and the nobility, that lived in all these souls. What lived in the souls of these people cannot be learned from today's history, because these things are not dealt with at all.

And when we then enter the mid-19th century, ideas suddenly emerge. All kinds of ideas arise in the political parties that form around the mid-19th century, and all kinds of ideas arise in the politically-minded poets. What are these ideas? Anyone who knows history, the real history, knows that these ideas live in such associations, where they are not written down. But then there are people who take advantage of the fact that everything is written down, that everything is printed. That breaks in, that breaks down right around the middle of the 19th century. The members of such associations would have been grateful if some journalistic way of thinking had asserted itself within their midst. They would very soon have resorted to asking the gentleman concerned to shut the door from the outside! Everything was bound up in the living human being.

Such people, who no longer had any feeling for this living humanity, carried this into poetry, journalism and all the other things that began to dominate the world around the middle of the 19th century. There it flows from bottom to top, but often it drives very cloudy bubbles at the top, and then these cloudy bubbles are told in the story. This history is not genuine, because this history does not know where the origins of such things are; this history fades everything and caricatures it, degrades it, trivializes it. In such connections, there were many things that had a character of tremendous depth, which were later completely trivialized. In fact, these connections gave the members a certain inclination of their souls towards the spiritual world in all its breadth.

Now you have to bear in mind that 1823 is a good year to illustrate this, because by then the levelling, the equalization of the French Revolution, had been behind us for so many years. But these things had been preserved in full vitality beyond the French Revolution. People talked about the ideas of the French Revolution; action with regard to the way one got a permanent position, how one came into contact with another person when one moved from one city to another, that happened according to the practices that were in these societies. People also felt rooted in social life by feeling that they were members of such a society.

Consider this: modern life, which, on the one hand, justifiably leads to individuality and freedom, begins, as I have often stated, in the 15th century. The old bonds and ties no longer hold people together. The further west you go, the less these old ties hold people together. Blood ties play an increasingly important role the further east you go, because there the old customs have been preserved. But the further west you go, the more people become isolated, the more the social fabric is individualized. But people feel that they cannot yet be fully self-sufficient, because it will take two millennia from the 15th century to become fully self-sufficient, and we are only in the first millennium now. There has certainly been a tremendous change, especially in the 19th century. But if you disregard the — what do you often call it? — of the upper crust, whether it be the upper crust of the outward-facing aristocracy or the spiritual aristocracy, if one disregards these and looks at the broad masses of humanity, then one must say: they are resisting being individualized. Now, those who are seized by the individualization also resist it. The nobility, the clergy, can hold together, they have bonds; the artisan class is torn out of its bonds. What these associations seek is precisely a frantic search for bonds that are no longer there historically, that have to be created.

And so we see from the 15th, 16th century onwards, in such associations that hold together through intellectual means, precisely among those who, as craftsmen, stand out from the rural occupation and do not make it either to the nobility or to the intellectual upper classes, the priesthood, the scribes and so on – how in all of them there is precisely this striving to be held together. And it is great and powerful to see how the cohesion is not yet sought in the same profession, but - nevertheless one closes oneself off in the profession, nevertheless the profession forms the framework - how it is sought in the spiritual, in the soul, how one only feel like a human being when, on the one hand, you have your work, but on the other hand, you have the freedom in your work to be able to integrate into a pictorial conception of life and the world, when you can thus incorporate this into your humanity. That is precisely the hallmark of the great change in the 19th century: that this inclination towards the spiritual is lost, that it is indeed preserved in the frippery of all kinds of secret societies, but that these secret societies no longer have any connection with the real world. They are the freemasonic and other secret societies that ape what has been cultivated in such outwardly professional societies, but inwardly held together by spiritual bonds. And if we add to this the fact that these two shades, Dévorants and Gavots, even lead to a greater cultivation of the astral in man, to a greater cultivation of what is appropriate to the ego in man, then we have a testimony to how something works in the history of mankind that can be recognized as the impulses in the structure of the human being.

If we look at the geography, we see that although there were actually devorants and gavots throughout France, the devorants were more prevalent in the cities of northern France and the gavots in those of southern France. This is connected with the fact that in fact that fine nuance between the warmer, more southern climate and the colder, more northern climate asserts itself there, that the colder climate develops more the astral, the warmer climate more the I-nature of the human being. Therefore, the further we come into hot zones, the more we see how

the difference in blood color between arteries and veins is less pronounced, while in the north people have sharply defined red and blue blood veins. The difference between red and blue blood vessels disappears more and more the further one gets into hot zones. The less differentiated the human being is between these two types, arterial blood and venous blood, the deeper their astral body and thus the present ego configuration is immersed in their ego; the more we find the ego the more we get into hotter climates. It is interesting that the outer geographical spread is also connected with what, simply out of geography, makes people more of an ego or more of an astral body.

And so we see that if we follow history, we can only recognize the external forces of history if we know that in one group of people the astral is more active, and in another group of people the I-being is more active. Only when one knows the astral being and the I-being can one actually follow the driving forces of history, while what is written in the history books today is as if an ignorant servant somewhere in a telegraph office writes a book about electric telegraphy based on his knowledge because he says to himself: I can do it better than those who have been trained in it because I have always been involved. That is more or less how historians living in the present day approach the facts. Only those who know the inner effective forces are involved in the facts of history. But these can only be drawn from the inner knowledge of the human being. And this is the only way to learn about geography. Geography shows us that people of different races are spread across the different areas of the earth. Yes, the races differ not only in hair color and nose configuration, but they differ in the way in which etheric, astral and I-being are integrated in the human being. All this comes from the spiritual.

And in the times of which I have spoken, in order to make a century-long observation, people also followed the spiritual impulses that were effective in the different regions when they formed associations arbitrarily. In northern France, people seek what works more out of the astral, in southern France, rather what works more out of the ego.

But for humanity to become one whole across the earth, these differences must in turn be blended. And so we see that the longer these associations exist, the more the community's contrasts are smoothed out and these members mingle with each other. At the end of the 18th century or before the French Revolution, we find that some people belong to their associations with tremendous enthusiasm and true rage and emotion, putting all their ambition into it, if they are “Gavot”, to win in a spiritual way, if they are “D&vorant”, to win with the cudgel in their hands. But the whole of humanity is used to stand in a dignified and right way in such a self-made union. These associations take into account what is spread over the earth in a spiritual way in the form of impulses.

Such things show us how quickly the human soul changes over time. People live so blindly, actually believing that their fathers lived as they do. This may still be true for the present times, although anyone who knows children today knows very well that their souls are not shaped as the fathers were when they were the same age and so on. But if we go back a century, just to the point where that tremendous change took place around the middle of the 19th century, we find that there has been an enormous difference in the configuration of human social bonds.

And this transformation of the social being, that is history, not what can be found in archives. And you can really learn an extraordinary amount of history from the simple booklet that a carpenter's apprentice, I think in 1821, wrote as a kind of catechism for his traveling journeymen, where only the outward appearance is mentioned how one should travel and the like. One can learn an extraordinary amount of history from this simple booklet if one is able to deduce the historical background from the external events.

You see, even in the details, things are presented in such a way that history in reality can only be brought to life through spiritual science. And that is why spiritual science is not an increase in knowledge, not something that would form a straight continuation of what one is accustomed to learning in schools today, but spiritual science can only be compared to a waking up to the world, to an awakening. The other science, and we can regard this as our secret, can be compared more to a donning of a nightcap that extends well down over the ears. But anthroposophy should be a real awakening. Therefore, it also awakens people to historical circumstances.

With this, I wanted to make a start today, in the year 1923, with a view of the century, with a view that wanted to go back in perspective to 1823, with reference to a few specific facts. George Sand's novel can only be an external reason, because she naturally had no idea of these spiritual backgrounds. But she has portrayed the year 1823, and that period in general, with a certain instinctive genius, in such a magnificent way that one feels inspired to continue the observations from 1823 to 1923.

Yesterday I tried to take a kind of century-long view by describing to you how, especially in the western European regions, people entered into social bonds that were connected with the class on the one hand and with professional life on the other, and we saw how these connections, these socializations, were based on the spiritual. Yes, we even had to penetrate to the astral and to the ego-being of man, so that we could study the two opposing professional associations, the “Dévorants” and the “Gavots”. And the peculiarity of these associations, which, as I said, belong more to the western regions of Europe and in which more recent civilization has developed mainly in the west, the essence of these associations is that man, with all his soul, feels at home in such a community and that the various identifying marks, the symbols of which I have spoken to you, the legends, have some connection with working life, even though they have a thoroughly spiritual background.

Just as I described this life for Western European countries a century ago, it would be impossible to describe the life of Central European regions, for example. Therefore, it must be understandable that when George Sand wanted to write a novel in which she addressed certain social problems, she chose this socialization as a backdrop. It can certainly be said that Goethe also strove for something similar with his “Wilhelm Meister”. He wanted to describe how the human being is connected with humanity and with the spiritual and professional life of humanity, how the individual human being develops out of humanity. Goethe attempted this in his “Wilhelm Meister”. There is no doubt that if it had been a reality for him, he would also have chosen such craftsmen's associations as George Sand. He did not do it because it was simply not possible in the circles to which Goethe belonged by virtue of his education.

That is the peculiar thing: in Central Europe, ever since the advent of what I have often referred to as intellectualism, that is, since the 15th century, human problems have been understood quite differently than in the West. Yesterday I had to describe to you how the individual craftsman makes his way through France, how he gets himself admitted to such a, one could almost say secret, society in some city, how he gets his identifying marks there, how he, when he now begins his journeyman's travels, finds a similar branch of his association in some other city: he makes himself known, he is admitted within this branch of his association. As already mentioned, this was still the case in 1823. And these associations then had a profound influence on the life of the corresponding class.

One could not describe this for Central Europe. For Central Europe, one would have to say that, since the beginning of this newer time, that is, since the 15th century, there has always been an aspiration in people to cultivate individuality, the human self. There was not such an intense connection between the individual human being and his occupation or social class as in the West. Therefore it was the case that people took their occupation, one might say, sine ira, in a more external way. They did not grow together with their occupation in this way, they did not connect their spiritual life with their occupation.

The terms and symbols were taken from the main occupations in the West. This was not the case in Central Europe. It was rather the case that the spiritual life was more separate from the occupation, and also more separate from the class. Of course, one was also part of a class of people, but when one turned to the spiritual life, this spiritual life was more set apart, both from the occupation and from the class of people. Therefore, if one wanted to devote oneself to spirituality, one lived more in such a way that one completely freed oneself in one's thoughts from one's occupational life. And therefore, in Central Europe, those branches of spirituality were particularly cultivated which had nothing to do with professional life, nothing with class life.

Man's relationship to the world was understood without regard to nation, without regard to any national context. Man as such stood in the foreground. And then, if the individual, let us say, the craftsman, wanted to devote himself to a spiritual life, he did so as an individual human being. He thought more about the tasks of life as an individual human being. At the beginning of the 19th century, he had little more of such a spiritual life from some social connections than I described yesterday. Therefore, the spiritual stimuli in Central Europe developed in a completely different way,

The individual craftsman who had a particular urge, who, to use the southern German expression, became a Sinnierer – the wonderful word Sinnierer is present – who therefore thought a lot, he became acquainted with the remnants of of the old alchemy remained in the way of knowledge, which therefore has nothing to do with any class, with any nationality or with any profession; he familiarized himself with what remained of the old astrology. And what he absorbed in this way, he carried with him like a treasure that was important and valuable to his fellow human beings. He wandered from place to place a lot. There were always only a few people, and they had no identifying marks, they had come just as a human being. At first they had strange names for such a person. These names arose in the time when it was all topsy-turvy with the views of ancient and newer times; and those who stood out from the people were not immediately accepted. Such thinkers were considered eccentrics. They were called “spur knights” when they appeared like that. And such a man first had to gain his reputation by having something to say to the people and by coming together with them. Since no permanent connections had been formed, he had to gain his reputation only when the opportunity arose, with the people with whom he came together and who wanted to know something from him. And by asserting what he had devised, he gained a certain influence. And long before one of them came, there was already talk in an unspecific way that one should come.

At first it seemed strange to people, but later, when he left the place, they thought long and hard about what such a thinker had said, such an especially clever one, who had so much knowledge in his head that you couldn't even begin to grasp that a human head could be so big that it could contain everything he had in his head.

So the whole way in which the spiritual life was handled in the human dimension was different. And that is why it had to come about that in western countries education remained much more popular, much more broad-based, because it was related to professional and class life. In Central Europe, on the other hand, there was a gradual emergence of this abyss between the educated and the masses, who could no longer keep up. Now, this is often connected with the deep tragedy of Central European life, this abyss between those who, under the demands of modern times, summarized what remained of ancient wisdom - be it alchemical or astrological - and from this point of view looked deeper into human life, and those who only stopped at the subordinate concepts of religious life.

These were the conditions Goethe faced. So that Goethe could not have described in his “Wilhelm Meister” as, for example, George Sand did in the novel “Le compagnon du tour de France”. Goethe described the individual human being, the individual human individuality, their relationship to the upper worlds, their relationship to the lower worlds. In France, we encountered, as it were, the effectiveness of the astral in the Dévorants, the effectiveness of the ego in the Gavots, which came through in the furnishings. Within Central Europe, there was a search for how man is connected to heaven on the one hand and to the earth on the other.

In a beautiful way, Goethe has – but, I would say, very much in the educational sublimation, carried into the strongly abstract – that which, basically, within Central Europe, in terms of human and human wisdom that has been lived in Central Europe since the 15th century, brought into the two figures that appear in his “Wilhelm Meister”: on the one hand, Makarie and, on the other, the metal-sensing woman.

Then this remarkable figure appears in Goethe's “Wilhelm Meister”, Makarie, a mature female personality who, due to her sickly, pathological nature, has little more in common with earthly life, who, so to speak, has completely detached herself from earthly life, who rarely moves within the earthly confines, and is revered by all those around her, by all family members in the narrower and broader sense, and who, by becoming independent of the earthly, develops a remarkable cosmic life. And this cosmic life, which Goethe describes as if Makarie lived with the peculiarities of the stars, not with the peculiarities of the earth, leads to the fact that, so to speak, all physical world observation disappears from the spirit, from the soul of Makarie, and she is completely devoted to the cosmic laws. But the more she surrenders to cosmic laws, the more the earthly laws of nature cease to have any meaning for her, and the more the laws of nature are transformed into cosmic moral laws. She becomes a moral authority for all who meet her. And she does not represent a morality based on commandments, not just any morality borrowed from this or that source, but a morality that appears to a person when he is free from the earthly, but still has it, as if it were revealed by the stars themselves in their course. And what Makarie proclaims for her surroundings in this way, through her star-gazing, is interpreted by her friend, the astronomer, who now becomes the seer's student in the cosmic realms.

Goethe only portrayed in a subtly sublimated way in a higher social class what you have to vividly imagine was still happening everywhere in the first third of the 19th century. For example, you have to imagine that during this time there were still families, albeit scattered, who had family members, female family members, who simply were no longer able to move around on earth after a certain age , who became bedridden, whose skin turned white and transparent, showing interesting blue veins running to the surface of their bodies through the white, transparent skin, who rarely spoke. But when they spoke, everyone in the vicinity listened carefully to what was said, because then these female personalities proved to be the kind of seers that Goethe only typified in his Makarie. And after all, in the first third of the 19th century, you can find circles of legends everywhere in Central Europe. They tell the story: such a seeress lies in such and such a place; she has spoken this or that from her prophetic gift. — And such things were carried far and wide. And they were carried with the poetry that was possible in the social order of humanity when there were no newspapers, for the newspapers have contributed enormously to the destruction of spiritual life.

So Goethe has such a figure appear in his Makarie. And now, at a certain point in the “Wanderjahre”, this Makarie is opposed by the metal-feeler. Her friend is Montanus. The metal-feeler also feels what is going on inside the earth, that is, I would say, the very spiritual of earthly nature. She can speak of the secrets of the metals of the earth, she can speak of how the individual metals affect people. And Montanus interprets what happens with the metal feeler in the same way that the astronomer interprets what is revealed through Makarie.

Thus Goethe juxtaposes the cosmic seer with this metal-sensing woman, who reveals the secrets of the earth through her special organization - again, a somewhat pathological organization. Goethe shows that he does not seek what makes man capable, what enables man to carry out his deeds on earth, either from those who live on one side of the cosmos or from those who live on the other side, inside the earth. He seeks that which makes man capable of earthly life, where man is unaware of either ability in his state of consciousness, where they unconsciously take effect, but where, as in the balance beam, there is a balance between the two.

Goethe does not know what is at the root of this. But he senses, from his own adherence to an old education, how these two extremes of life and of spirit interact and actually make a human being a true human being, not when one or the other is in effect, but when both disappear with their own character, but work together and bring about a balance in human nature.

Today, when we can speak from the point of view of anthroposophy, we can say: first of all, we have the upper human being, the nerve-sense human being; then we have the middle human being, the rhythmic human being; and finally we have the lower human being, the metabolic-limb human being. If the upper human being predominates in a person, and if this does not balance out with the lower human being, then, as a result of a morbid development, as in the case of Makarie, the entire metabolic-limb human being has fallen into a kind of torpor, a torpor that which does not yet take life, but which makes man incapable of moving in the earthly space, then the event in the head predominates in such a personality, then man becomes a cosmic seer. If, as in the case of the metal-sensitive person, the nerve-sense organization recedes and the metabolic-limb system develops particularly significantly, then the person lives primarily with the earthly, with the forces and effects of the metals of the earth, the minerals of the earth. And in the middle of the human being is the balance.

This is how Goethe actually wanted to imply at this point in his social novel “Wilhelm Meister's Journeyman Years” how the human was sought in Central Europe, how the human being was structured on the one hand according to the cosmos, on the other hand according to the earthly, and how the right humanity consists in the balance between the two.

Much thought was given to this balance between astrology at the top and alchemy at the bottom. And when individual figures such as Paracelsus or Faust emerged, wandering from place to place, surprising people with what they knew of these secrets through their contemplations, people pricked up their ears to hear what man could know about man. But when individual significant personalities emerged, they were not the only ones. There were little Paracelsuses, little Fausts everywhere, who just did not travel so far, who had a smaller territory. And what is being explored again today in the secrets of dowsing was something that was quite common in those days. It happened not only once that something like the following occurred.

There came such a thinker to some place and impressed the people there with what he had to say about the upper and lower worlds. And when he had impressed the people mightily, when they began to believe unconditionally in his authority, then they said at last: But Master, now you must still do something for us. You know, we need a well, and you have to tell us where the well should be built. So the man who had come as a contemplator to the villages went around with the people in the area, and in some places he stopped, went on again, stopped again, but then he finally stopped in a place where he said: “There it is! There we have it!” – That's where the well was built.

These things are not recorded in history, and they extend into the first third of the 19th century, when they became increasingly rare and scarce. But these things are real. And that is something that has been particularly cultivated in the lower classes of the people, which, so to speak, constituted the spiritual life here. The spiritual life was definitely in these things because one had the innermost urge to grasp the human as such, I would say, not only symbolically but even cosmically. One asked here less: How does man, through his class, through his occupation, relate to the outside world? That was asserted even in the times of the guild system, when people wanted to appear in public with their insignia, when they wanted to make processions and the like, but that didn't really have the same deep spiritual significance as in the West. By contrast, here, this life, stripped of the external, had its great spiritual significance.

I would like to say: In the West, the aim was to understand humanity in terms of the external forces of living together. In Central Europe, it was the human being within his skin who also wanted to experience what he experienced socially as a human being. That is what drove Central European intellectual life to a certain height, so that it could not become popular as it did in the West. And this is also what at the same time brought about the deep spiritual tragedy of Central Europe. And we are already living in a time when these things should become conscious in the broadest circles, when people in the broadest circles should wake up to these things. For it is only to be hoped that our civilization, which has become chaotic, can in turn receive new impulses, that new life forces can be supplied to it, if one can grasp the real connection with historical life in this way.

In Central Europe, people were already descending to the earth. This is particularly evident in Goethe, who wanted to strike a balance between the upper and lower human beings, juxtaposing the two extremes, the metal-sensing and the cosmic-seeing. On the one hand, people wanted to see man as a doer on the earth; but on the other hand, they wanted to look up into the region of the cosmic, and they wanted to look down into the region of the earthly, the telluric, in order to recognize man as an earthling. These are the differentiations that modern civilization has brought up from its foundations.

That is why something like Schiller's 'Aesthetic Letters', which I have mentioned several times, could only be written in Central Europe. In these letters, man is seen purely as a human being, detached from nationality, and is to be understood only as a human being. And basically it was self-evident that part of the problem - even if neither Goethe nor the period that followed provided the solutions for it - was how to get people to understand this universal humanity in the modern way.

That is why a large part of Goethe's “Wilhelm Meister” novel is the so-called pedagogical province. The education of the human being becomes a problem: a problem for which the time had not yet come at that time, for which the time has only come today, when one can search for anthroposophical knowledge of man.

In the West, I would say, people had already gone beyond the human skin. They groped their way: How do you connect with another person? How do you reveal yourself to another person? How do you take his hand? How do you speak so that he recognizes you? The signs, gestures and words that later appeared in a somewhat luxurious way in the Masonic societies were something that was practiced in the West as something vitally active until the end of the first third of the 19th century. In Central Europe, people did not have as much of an appreciation for such special symbolism, but they did have a great sense of wanting to get behind the mystery of the human being in general.

It is interesting to compare this with Eastern Europe. There, not only until the end of the first third of the 19th century, but until a much later time, people came from their inner being, I would say, not to their skin. In a certain sense, he remained in a state of soul that did not completely lift him out of the divine, did not advance him to the point of becoming human. Therefore, I would like to say: While in the West the attitude has arisen that the world is the world - at most one has to think about social utopias - the world is the world, one has to live in it, one has to have social institutions in order to live in it, or one has to regard those who are already there as if they were quite wonderful to live in – while it was the case in the West, it was the case in Central Europe that one actually demanded: Man must first become human, he must first work his way to humanity, then he will find the earth. – In the East, one was convinced: Both ideals are actually wrong. The moment man thinks of working his way up to becoming a human being, he is on the wrong track, because in so doing he actually leaves Paradise. And man should always be able to see the piece of earth on which he lives as a paradise, otherwise life becomes impossible. One must go back more to what is unconsciously within man, and not go out too strongly into life.

For this reason, although there has always been a certain tolerance in Eastern Europe towards the West and towards Central Europe, out of a certain good nature and also out of philanthropy, there are nevertheless regions where either the outer humanity of the West or the individual human individuality of Central Europe has been reckoned with, and these regions have been regarded, so to speak, as a departure from the divine human being. And when, for example, the tendency arose in the East to acquire Western views, we see that because man does not want to come out of himself, we see, as is the case with the best, a tolerance, a toleration, but no inner engagement with the rest of the world. The Russian, if he is a real Russian, does not go as far as his skin; he remains deeper within himself. It is already far too earthly to go as far as his skin; one must remain more within.

You see, that was a mood of the soul that still occurred to a great extent in Dostoyevsky. And so it is interesting, after all, to hear what Dostoyevsky, one of those who are above all representative of Eastern European life, says to people in the West.

In the latest issue of the journal “Wissen und Leben” (Knowledge and Life), which has now been published, where letters that Dostoyevsky wrote to Apollon Maikov in 1868 are printed, you can read it. But such letters could have been written if traveling had already become so common in the first third of the 19th century.

I may have to apologize to some of the people sitting here for my reading out some parts of Dostoyevsky's letter, but it is Dostoyevsky who says it, not me, and I am of course far from wanting to say anything other than letting Dostoyevsky speak. Dostoyevsky therefore feels stranded in Geneva; and the Westerners of Geneva and those who live nearby will have to excuse me if I read just a few passages from a letter from Dostoyevsky from 1868 as a way of characterizing them.

"In Geneva, we suffered most from material discomfort and cold. If only you knew how stupid, dull, insignificant and wild this people is! It is not enough to visit the country as a tourist. No, try living here for a change! But I cannot even give you a brief account of my impressions now; there are far too many of them. Bourgeois life in this republic has reached a dead end. In the government and throughout Switzerland, there is nothing but parties, incessant disputes, pauperism, and a frightening mediocrity in everything. The local worker is not worth the little finger of ours: it is laughable to look at and listen to him. The morals are wild; oh, if you only knew what is considered good and bad here. Low education: what drunkenness, what thievery, what petty swindling that has become the law in trade. There are, however, some good traits that place them immeasurably above the Germans.

Now I must apologize again on the other side!

“In Germany I was most amazed at the stupidity of the people; they are extremely stupid, they are incommensurably stupid. Even Nikolai Nikolaevich Strachov, a man of great intellect, does not want to see the truth in our country: he said, ‘The Germans are clever, they invented gunpowder.’ But that is how their lives turned out!”

So he doesn't count the fact that they invented gunpowder as something that would reduce their incommensurable stupidity. Now:

”... In Switzerland there are still enough forests, and there are incomparably more of them in the mountains than in the other countries of Europe, although they are decreasing terribly from year to year. Now imagine: for five months of the year there is terrible cold here, and on top of that the Bisen. And for three months here it is almost the same winter as with us. Everyone shivers from the cold, never taking off their flannel and cotton (and they don't have any steam baths, so you can imagine the dirt they are used to). They don't have winter clothes, they walk around in almost the same clothes as in summer (but flannel alone is not enough for such a winter), and they lack the sense to improve their homes even a little! What good is a fireplace that burns coal or wood, even if they keep it burning all day long? But keeping it burning all day costs 2 francs a day. So much forest is needlessly destroyed, but they get no warmth from it. What do you think? If only they had double windows, then you could live with the fireplaces! I'm not saying that they should install stoves. Then they could save the entire forest. In 25 years there will be no forest left. They really live like savages! They can take some of it. In my room, with the terrible heating, it is only +5 degrees R&aumur (5 degrees heat). I sat in my coat in this cold, waiting for money, moving things around and thinking about a plan for a novel - is that nice? They say that in Florence this year there were temperatures as low as -10 degrees. In Montpellier, there was a cold snap of 15 degrees Reaumur. Here in Geneva, the temperature didn't drop below -8 degrees, but it doesn't matter if the water in the rooms freezes. Recently I changed apartments and now I have nice rooms; one is always cold, but the other is warm, and in this warm room I always have +10 or +11 degrees of heat, so you can still live.” And so on and so on.

So you see: the Central and Western Europeans do not exactly come off very well in this description by one of the most outstanding Russians. And that must be attributed to the fact that a going out even to the skin of the human being is not present there. There is still the closedness in itself, and therefore the non-adaptation to the environment, but rather, I would say, the demand that everything be as one is oneself.

As I said, from a certain contemporary historical point of view, it is quite interesting to take a look at this recently published passage from the letters. That is why I have chosen this one and not, for example, one from the first third of the 19th century for this century-long consideration. Because in Russia things only emerged with such clarity later on; but they have always been there, woven into the fabric of life. And one also characterizes the time of a century ago when one considers these statements about a time that has already changed somewhat. Yes, even things that one can probably be quite astonished about in the West can be found there. If you take Western or Central European descriptions, then the following letter, which is from the same time - March 1, 1868, will be interesting to you. You will see from it that you can look at the things of the world from different points of view.

“I have formed the following opinion about our courts (based on everything I have read): the moral character of our judges” - namely the judges in Russia - “and, above all, of our jury is infinitely higher than in Europe; they regard criminals as Christians. Even the Russian traitors living abroad admit it. But one thing does not yet seem to be established: I believe that in this humane relationship to the criminals, there is still much that has been created by books, much that is liberal and not independent. This sometimes happens. Besides, I can be terribly wrong from a distance. But our basic nature is infinitely higher in this respect than that of Europe.” And so on.

So you see, the view of the courts here is also given from a different point of view than you often hear it given in Western Europe.

I would like two things to emerge from yesterday's and today's reflections: Firstly, that it is absurd to believe that today's standards can somehow be applied to living conditions even a century ago, but that one must actually look lovingly at past conditions if one wants to come to a valid judgment that takes reality into account. But even with those people who live at the same time, it is important to acquire a certain broad-mindedness of judgment. That is what we have to find today. We have to find a way to refrain from these national points of view in order to actually find a point of view of a citizen of the world.

But then it is the case that this can only come from a deeper knowledge of the human being. This deeper knowledge of the human being is something that the world could not penetrate as long as the world did not seek anthroposophy. And one might say: If you look at what was available in Europe a century ago, you can see that there was a yearning for knowledge of the human being. But with what was known about nature at the time, it was not yet possible to arrive at a knowledge of the human being in the modern sense. Then, in the second half of the nineteenth century, natural science flooded everything. And now we have to seek again what was longed for a hundred years ago, what the best in Europe longed for, and what was only temporarily submerged.

This alone will provide humanity with the strength that can somehow lead to an ascent of culture in the face of decline. It is dismal that so little history and so little geography in the sense mentioned yesterday is cultivated, that things have taken on such an external form. The point is to really seek the spirit in history, in history and across the earth in a geographical sense. History and geography in particular must undergo a spiritual metamorphosis. This is necessary.

This is something that the Goethean province of education did not yet have in “Wilhelm Meister”, but it is what the figures who appear there long for. And much of this yearning of that time must break into civilization today. Men must awaken to what was then the special yearning of their dreams, so that the dreams of that time may now, through the power of spiritual insight, become reality. For this reality is what men need for their civilization.

From the two lectures I gave yesterday and the day before yesterday, you will have seen how important it is from an anthroposophical point of view to build on what happened in Europe in the course of the 19th century in the right way. And we were indeed able to link the phenomena that we have placed before our minds to many of the things that have emerged as the actual characteristic of the modern era, which we consider to be the actual characteristic of the spiritual and other historical developments in Europe from the mid-15th century onwards.

Today, precisely because I regard yesterday and the day before as a kind of substructure, as a kind of starting point for a perspective, I would like to look a little further ahead, and also a little further back in time.

We must be clear about the fact that in the course of the 19th century, materialism emerged in European development on the one hand. And I count as materialism everything that can only turn to material phenomena if it wants to say something about the world that does not feel the need to turn to a spiritual thing when it is about that which sustains man in the world, which instructs man in the world about his path. On the other hand, added to this materialism was what may be called intellectualism, rationalism, the view of the intellect, which only, I might say, wants to live and weave in logical concepts.

Now do not take this as if I meant that this logical way of thinking should be opposed to another non-logical or even anti-logical one. Of course that does not occur to me at all. But the logical alone is to reality what the skeletal system is to the human being, and in all things the logical actually represents not the living but the dead. And so what man had naively arrived at, this mere intellectual logic that contains dead concepts, promoted materialism, which only tied in with dead substance.

Now, nothing less than a completely disillusioned looking into the true reasons that, on the one hand, brought forth materialism and, on the other, rationalism, can help us today to further develop human civilization. And here we must also reach a little further back in time, so that yesterday's and the day before yesterday's description has an even broader background.

I have often pointed out the deep rift that exists between everything that was once Greek culture – let us say, the culture that developed partly in the Greek language – and what then gradually developed to the west as Roman, as Latin culture. Attention has often been called to the view of Herman Grimm, who says: Today's man can still understand the Romans, because he basically still has the same concepts as the Romans; the Greeks appear to him like the inhabitants of a fairy-tale land. Well, I have indeed spoken about this fact in more detail in the essays that recently appeared in the “Goetheanum”.

But now we must be clear about the fact that the East of Europe, which I tried to describe yesterday, so to speak, only as an appendix and perhaps in a way that is contestable for some of those sitting here, experienced a wave of civilization that was strongly influenced by Greek in later times. In the East of Europe we find the late forms of Greek feeling, of Greek sensibility. In the west and also in central Europe, on the other hand, Latin culture is developing in a very intensive way. And the very differentiation across Europe that I have described to you over the last two days is fundamentally under the influence of what existed in the east as a continuation of Greek culture and in the west as a continuation of Latin Roman culture.

We must not forget the following. We must be clear about the fact that the West was in a very different position to digest the Latin-Roman essence inwardly, spiritually, than Central Europe. The West has absorbed the Latin within itself. Central Europe has become ill from the Latin. And only those who are able to properly consider this phenomenon, which is currently showing itself in its last stages in the most intense way imaginable, actually know how to find their way around within the current concepts of education.

Let us first look at the matter from a Central European point of view. I would like to draw attention once more to what Fritz Mauthner, who died recently, asserted from the point of view of language, from the criticism of language. Fritz Mauthner did not want to write a critique of reason, that is, actually, a critique of concepts, like Kant, but rather a critique of language. He had made the supposed discovery that when people talk about higher things, they are really only talking in words and do not realize that they are only talking in words. But if you look at how people use words, for example, God, spirit, soul, good and so on, you can see that when people use words, they believe that they are dealing with a thing, but they are just using words without pointing to a real thing.

Now, as I have already indicated, I believe that Mauthner's entire view does not apply when it comes to natural things, because then people can distinguish quite well between the word and the thing. At least I have never yet heard of anyone who, for example, had the intention of mounting not a real white horse when he wanted to ride, but merely the word “white horse”! So in relation to things of nature, people can distinguish the word and its content from reality.

But the situation changes – and this gives Fritz Mauthner a certain semblance of justification – the moment we enter the realm of the soul on the one hand and the ethical-moral realm on the other. In relation to the soul, words from ancient times have been preserved that people continue to use, but the views on the matter have not been preserved. So that people use words like soul and spirit, but do not have the view of the matter. And since Mauthner noticed this in the realm of the soul, he thought he could generalize. But in the realm of the soul, and also in the ethical-moral realm, it is the case that, for example, in the ethical-moral realm, moral impulses have gradually lost their factual content for man and actually figure today only as external commandments or even as external laws.

Thus, for a good part of the vocabulary, the view of the matter has been lost. That is why it takes so much effort today to work on the most important abilities of the human soul - thinking, feeling and willing. Because thinking, feeling and willing are things that everyone discusses today, but people do not really have a view of the corresponding things. And it is a matter of coming up with what is actually behind it.

Now we must be clear about the fact that education, which actually led to intellectual life, was carried by the Latin language for many, many centuries in the Middle Ages, and that the Latin language really became a dead language not only in the sense of an external designation, but in a very inner sense. The Latin language, which one had to acquire in the Middle Ages if one wanted to access higher education at all, became more and more a, if I may express it thus, mechanism in itself. And it became precisely the logical mechanism in itself.

This process can be easily followed if you look at history the way we did yesterday and the day before yesterday for the 19th century. If we look at the inner life in the continuation of human existence, we see that in the fourth century AD the Latin language gradually ceased to be experienced inwardly, that it no longer embodied the logos but only the shells of the logos. What then remained of the Latin language as a latecomer, the Italian language, the French language, they have indeed absorbed much of the Latin language. In this way they participated in the dying process of the Latin language. But they also took in what was transmitted by the various peoples who moved from east to west and inhabited the west. So that in Italian and French the completely different element lives on, not only in the words, but above all in the shaping of the language, in the drama of the language. In contrast, the real Latin has died out. And in this deadness, where gradually the views have fallen away, it has become the all-dominant scientific language. And one must inquire precisely about language if one wants to understand: Why did the medieval world view take the form that it did?

Just think that the human being was pushed into this Latin during his boyhood, so that the process was not such that he shaped the language from the living soul, but the language was poured into him as a finished logical instrument, and he learned logic, so to speak, from the way the words were grammatically connected. Logic became something that filled man from the outside.

And so the connection between the human soul and spiritual education became increasingly loose and loose, and one did not grow into education with enthusiasm from what one already had within oneself, one was absorbed by a foreign element of education, by the foreign element of education that had been perverted in Latin. It radiated out, so to speak, into the soul and drove what one originally had out of the person or deeper into the person, into such a region where one made no claim to logic.

Just think how it was for many centuries in the Middle Ages and how it was in our youth, in the youth of those who are now creatures as old as I am. It was the case that if someone had expressed something in their mother tongue and it did not appear clear in the society in which one was, one quickly translated it into Latin, because then it became clear. But it also became cold and sober. It became logical. You immediately understood when something was expressed in a Latin case; you immediately understood exactly and precisely how the matter was meant.

But that was always done through the centuries of the Middle Ages. People allowed themselves all kinds of sloppiness in the spoken language because they attributed exactness and precision to thinking in the Latin language. But that was something foreign to man. And because it was foreign and man can only come to the spirit through his soul, the Latin language became so fossilized that you could no longer use a word in any way if you did not have the thing out there in physical sensuality. With the horse, it would not have worked if you only had the word, because you could not ride on it. But with those things that are supersensible, the content gradually evaporated from the word, and people only had the word. And then later, when their mother tongue emerged, they also only said the word in the mother tongue, the simply lexicographically translated word. In doing so, they did not bring in the idea. By putting anima and soul together and anima having lost its reality as content, the content of the soul was also lost. And so it came about that the Latin language was only applicable to the external sensual.

From the language you have one of the reasons why, in the middle of the Middle Ages, theology said: One can only understand external sensual things through science, and at most their context, and one must leave supersensible things to faith. If these people had developed the full strength to express what is true, then they would have said: Man can only recognize as much of the world as can be expressed in Latin, and the rest he must leave to a not quite expressible, only felt faith.

You see, in a sense that is the truth, and the rest is just an illusion. The truth is that over the centuries the view has taken hold that only what can be expressed in Latin is scientifically true.

And only in the 18th century did the pretension of the vernacular actually come into play. But at that time, when the pretensions of the vernacular were emerging, the various regions of Europe had a very different relationship to the vernacular. Where Latin still had an effect, the vernacular was more easily combined with education. Hence we have these phenomena in Western Europe, which we described the day before yesterday, that actually the connections in social life, the social bonds, as I have called them, develop in a way that is popular, in which everyone participates, because in the West, when folklore emerged, to a certain extent this folklore snapped into a related form in Latin.

In Central Europe this was quite impossible, because there the vernacular had not adopted anything Latin. There the vernacular was something quite different from Latin. And on top of that was the layer of education, which learned Latin if it wanted to be educated. So here the difference was enormous. Yes, it is precisely from this difference that the tragedy for Central Europe, of which I spoke yesterday, stems, the tragedy that existed between the people of the broad masses, who did not learn Latin, who therefore had no science either - because science was what could be said in Latin - and those who acquired science, who simply switched over the moment they acquired it. In their everyday lives, when they ate and drank and when they were otherwise with their fellow countrymen, they were unlearned people, because they spoke the language, which did not have any learning in it at all. And when they were scholars, they were something quite different; then they donned an inner robe. So that basically a person who was educated was actually a divided person.

You see, this had a particularly profound effect on the intellectual life of Central Europe. For in the vernacular, through all kinds of circumstances, which we will also touch on one day, there was actually only what I hinted at yesterday, on the one hand as an astrological element, on the other as an alchemical element. This was already alive in the vernacular, and the vernacular actually had an inner spirituality, an inner spirituality. The vernacular had no materialism in Europe. Materialism was only imposed on the vernacular from the materialism of the Latin language, in that the Latin language, when it was no longer the language of scholars, still left the people with the airs and graces that had developed when it became the language of scholars. And so the Central European language could not find a way to balance or harmonize with what had become established in Latin as education.

This is an extremely serious matter. It can be seen in an intensive way to this day. I will give a concrete example in a moment of how intensely this can be seen. You see, so-called political economy is also taught at various universities today. This political economy has actually grown out of legal ideas, and these are entirely a child of the Latin world. To think legally is to think in Latin, even today. And the ideas of political economy – yes, in an unfortunate way for the Latins, one comes down to things. Just as you can't ride the mere word Schimmel, you can't eat the mere economic terms. You can't do business with the mere economic terms. But since science has only developed from Latin - it's just that people don't realize the context - the economic sciences of the present have no content at all. Political economy, as it is taught today, actually only understands something that no longer has anything to do with reality because it comes from Latin, but it has not found the connection to present reality at all, instead spinning everything out of concepts.

One could say that it is precisely in the field of economics that a contrast becomes apparent. Yesterday I spoke to you about the fact that in Central Europe there were people going around among the people who were called thinkers – they worked from the folk tradition, which is why they had the old astrology, the old alchemy – thinkers, that is, those who reflect. Those who then carried Latin in that sublimated form into political economy are not those who speculate, but those who spin yarns. Yes, really, I am not joking, but am quite serious, because a mere logical web, into which the Latin language has been transformed, is spun out to form what is developed as a single science.

Last fall, I taught a course in economics here. It was based on facts, not on a web of words. And because it was based on facts, because it was based on the realities of economic life, it became more and more apparent that Students of political economy cannot reconcile this with what is mere fiction! The one does not flow into the other. And now someone could suggest that a supplementary course should be held to concretize the conceptual framework of today's political economy with what has been drawn from reality. But that would be like explaining the fertility of an orange to someone looking at discarded orange peel, and that is simply not possible. When it comes to gaining knowledge from reality, you cannot draw parallels to what is mere fiction. You have to start from scratch and work from the original, elementary level if reality is to have an effect.

And because in the education of the people, which was not interspersed with Latin, even if the old celestial and terrestrial knowledge, astrology and alchemy, lived on in a form that was no longer contemporary, the feeling that knowledge is that which one can say in Latin was gradually joined by the other feeling: superstition is everything that cannot be said in Latin but must be said in the vernacular. Only people do not express it that way because they add all kinds of embellishments. But our entire education is permeated on the one hand by the sentence: everything that can be expressed in Latin sentences is scientific; and on the other hand: everything that cannot be expressed in Latin sentences but must be expressed in the vernacular is superstition.

This is something that has been experienced much less in the West, but which has been experienced in a terribly tragic way, especially in Central Europe. In the East, again, to a lesser extent. Firstly, the East had allowed Greek, which was still imbued with the juice of reality, to flow into its civilization in many ways, and secondly, it did not take to heart what became the terrible inner struggle of the soul between the lively, popular and the dead dead Latin, did not take it very much to heart, but sat down and said to himself: “Oh, come now, only people who have fallen out of paradise get into such struggles in life; but we in the East have actually remained in paradise.” It is only an outward appearance that we have fallen out of paradise; we are inward people - inward; inward people!

You see, these things must be thoroughly understood if we are to comprehend the terrible split that exists today between people who live in what has been built in the Latin way and people who, as homeless souls – I used the expression here recently – want to seek the path to the spiritual from the elementary nature of their own being. And then the tremendous authority of something that is a branch of Latin confronts them. The respect for Latin is contained in the belief in authority that is shown towards our present-day science.

Just think what it meant over the centuries when a farmer's boy went to a monastery grammar school and learned Latin there! Then he came home during the holidays and knew Latin! Nobody understood anything of what the farm boy had learned, but all the others knew, well, that one must not and cannot understand anything that leads to science, to knowledge. They knew that now. Because the peasant boy who had come to the monastery school spoke in a language in which one seeks knowledge, and the other peasant boys who were peeling potatoes – well, that was not the case in earlier times – who were, let's say, somehow working in the meadow or in the fields, they had tremendous respect.

For one does not have respect for what one knows, but for what one cannot know. And this settled as a tremendous respect for what one cannot know, where one refrains from it from the outset. Yes, that then continues, and such things take paths that one can only follow if one really has the goodwill to follow the spiritual paths of humanity. The peasant boy in the 13th, 12th century, who only held the plough outside and otherwise helped, perhaps at most helped to crush the bacon into greaves and so on, the peasant boy knew: we cannot know anything, we will never be able to know anything, because only those who learn Latin can know something. The country boy says that, and then it goes the secret ways, and then, in more recent centuries, a naturalist gives a speech before the enlightened naturalists' assembly, and it culminates in the same words that the monastery farmer's boy said in the 12th century: We will not know ignorabimus! If one had the sense today to go back over historical facts, then going back centuries, one would find the origin of the Du Bois-Reymond impulse in the farmer's boy who did not learn Latin, compared to the farmer's boy who did learn Latin.

Now, when a language becomes dead, a language that undergoes the same regression as Latin has, tends to incline towards the dead in its words as well. But the dead in the world is the material. And so the Latin language, even where it was particularly dominant, drove things towards the dead, namely towards the material. Originally, as I have already mentioned, people everywhere knew what the transformation of bread and wine into the body and blood of Christ meant because they still knew the facts from living experience. The people could have known it too, but popular alchemy was considered superstitious, it was not in Latin. But the Latin language could not capture the spiritual. And so the trivial belief arose that what was imagined under the matter of bread and wine should change, and all the discussions about the doctrine of the Lord's Supper actually arose in such a way that those who discussed it proved nothing other than that they had adopted this doctrine in Latin. But there the words had only a dead character, and one no longer understood the living, just as today's anatomists no longer understand the living person from the dead corpse.

Central Europe has gone through this in a deeply tragic way, in that its language had nothing of what the Latin language brought forth. Central Europe had a language that would have been dependent on growing into the living. But thinking was dead because, after all, this thinking was also a dependency of Latin. And so the concepts did not find the words and the words did not find the concepts.

For example, the word “soul” could have found the living just as the word “psyche” once found the living in Greek. But the previous education was in Latin, and there was no knowledge of this living, and the living that was in the folk words was also killed off. That is why it is so important today to look again at the deep rift that had occurred between Greek and Roman civilization. And this deep rift is particularly evident when we look into the mystery being.

If we go to Greece, I would like to say that the most popular mysteries are the Eleusinian Mysteries, the Mysteries of Eleusis. They were the mysteries that had, so to speak, made the path to the spiritual most popular. And those who were initiated into the Eleusinian Mysteries were the Telests; they were initiated into Eleusis. Let us first look at what is meant by the term “Eleusis” and then at what is meant by the term “Telests”.

Eleusis is only a linguistic transformation of Elosis and actually means: the place where those who are to come are, those who want to carry the future within themselves. Eleusis means: the future. And the Telests are those who are to come, the Eleusinian initiates are those who are to come. This indicates that people were aware that they are more of an imperfect being as they stand, and that they must become a coming being, one who carries the future within themselves. Telos anticipates the future, that which will only gradually be realized in the future. So that in the Eleusinian Mysteries, in the place of the coming, the coming ones, the imperfect human beings were trained to become perfect. They were telestai.

The whole meaning of this initiation was disrupted when it came to Romanism. In Greece, everything in the initiation pointed to the future, to the end of the earth. One should shape oneself with a strong inner impulse so that one would find the way after the end of the earth in the right way. Then one was a telest, one who should develop in the right way after the end of the earth.

When this came to the Romans, the expression of the Telesten gradually became that of the initiates – Initium, beginning. The goal was, so to speak, moved from the end of the earth to the beginning of the earth. The Telesten became initiates. Those who were initiated into the secrets of the future became knower of the past. The Promethean striving became Epimethean, striving for knowledge of the past. But only abstract knowledge of the past can remain; if one wants to penetrate into the future, one needs a living knowledge borne by the will, for there the will must develop itself into. The past is past. One can gain a higher knowledge by going back to the initium, to the past; but it remains knowledge; it becomes more and more abstract.

And with that, the impulse towards abstraction, that is, towards the reification that occurred from the 4th century AD and then more and more, moved into the Latin language. People wanted to return to the past, when ideas were still connected to life, because they knew that now they were no longer connected to life, that now one enters into inanimate speech when one rises to the level of ideas. And to be initiated in Greece meant to receive a higher life in one's soul. To be initiated in Roman times meant to resign oneself to a higher activity for one's life on earth and only to think about it: At the beginning of the world, man once had a higher activity, but from that he has descended; one cannot be a doer, at most a knower in relation to the higher knowledge.

You see, these are the difficulties we face today. When we use the word “initiation”, for example, it is so terribly vivid, because “initiation” is part of the whole concept: to immerse a person under water, to take them away from the sharp contours of physical life, to bring them into the liquid element of the world, so that they can move with their soul in the living, breathing, fleeting, fluid spiritual realm. To initiate is to introduce someone into the mobile, fluctuating, fluid world of life. Now this has to be translated somehow. And it is translated into the opposite. For example, one must say: initiation for the initiation.

It is necessary to know that such contradictions and difficulties are inherent in our present civilization. We must be clear about these skewers, I would say, that hurt us so much in our present civilization. Only then can that which really advances humanity come to life.

It is, of course, very far from my intention to turn these lectures into a diatribe against learning Latin. On the contrary, I would like people to learn even more Latin so that they can also come to feel that only the dead can be designated with Latin, that Latin quite rightly belongs in the dissecting room, but that if one wants to get to know what is not dead but alive, one must resort to the living element of language. Today, we cannot enter the future with some abstract intention, but only with an understanding, free of illusions, of what can again beat the life of the spirit out of the dead. And we are indeed living at a moment when the matter has actually been pushed to a decision in the spiritual life. We are living at an extremely important moment.

I don't know how many of you took seriously what I said in the last few issues of the “Goetheanum”, that only twenty, fifteen, ten years ago one could quote a person like Herman Grimm as a contemporary. Today he is a man of the past and one can only speak of him as of a man of the past. I meant what I said in these four articles in connection with Herman Grimm with immense bitterness. As you know, I myself used to quote Herman Grimm in a completely different sense than I quote him now. I quoted him where he could be used in his expression as a spirit that leads into the future. Today he is a thing of the past, belongs to history, and at most one can quote in such things, where he refers to ancient Greece and Rome, that which was still present only recently; that is already past today.

But I admit that this strange survival of a time that is quickly becoming the past demands something quite different in our time – and much of it is gently overslept! Because gently oversleeping is something that people love so much today.

But anthroposophy is the kind of knowledge that one does not merely collect in ideas, but that one should awaken to. That is why there are so many arguments, and also the one I have just given, is meant to have an awakening effect.

In the present time, when many things are being decided and very big questions are being asked of humanity, it is necessary to also raise oneself to the spiritual when considering contemporary phenomena. The spiritual is, after all, not an abstraction, but something that rises above the physical and sends its effects into the physical. And the person who sees only the physical, or even the physical permeated by the spiritual, is after all observing only a part of the world in which man, with his thinking and doing, is involved. For centuries this had a certain justification. But this is no longer the case for the present and the near future. And so you will see that today we are beginning to point out events of our present time in their direct connection with events that are taking place in the spiritual world and with the physical that is happening on earth.

Before this is possible, however, we must recall some of what was present spiritually in the development of mankind and led to the present historical moment. For a long time, in fact, only one part of world evolution was decisive for Western civilization and for everything that grew out of it. And this was justifiable. It was perfectly right that in the times when the Bible, with its Old Testament, was a necessity, the starting-point was taken from that moment in the development of the world when the creation of man was brought to mind through the intervention of Yahweh or Jehovah.

In an earlier period of human thought and world view, this moment in the development of the world, in which Yahweh or Jehovah intervened in it, was just one of many moments, not the one that was looked back on as the one that was actually decisive. In the Olden Days, what may be called the creation of the world by Jahve or Jehovah, according to the Old Testament, was preceded by a different development, one whose content was conceived much more spiritually than anything that was then presented in connection with the Bible, as it was usually understood. The moment that was grasped in the Bible, the creation of man by Jahve or Jehovah, was in fact a later moment in older times, and it was preceded by a different development that presented Jahve or Jehovah as the being that intervened in world evolution only later than other beings.

In Greece, when reflecting on the first stages of world evolution, one still pointed back to an older entity, to grasp which required something much more spiritual in cognition than is present in the Old Testament; one pointed back to the being that was understood in Greece as the actual creator of the world, as the Demiurgos. The Demiurge was imagined as a being existing in spheres of the highest spirituality, in which there was no need to think of any material existence, which can be linked to the kind of humanity that, according to the Bible, Yahweh or Jehovah is seen as the creator of.

We are therefore dealing with a very exalted being in the Demiurge, with a being as creator of the world, whose creative power essentially consists in expelling spiritual beings, if I may express it in this way, from itself. Gradually, as it were, lower and lower – the expression is certainly not quite accurate, but we have no other – gradually lower and lower were the entities that the demiurge allowed to emerge from himself; but entities that were far from being subject to earthly birth or earthly death.

In Greece, it was pointed out that they were called eons, and I would say that one distinguished between eons of the first kind, eons of the second kind, and so on (see diagram). These eons were the beings that had emerged from the Demiurge. Then, in the series of these eons, there was a relatively subordinate eon being, that is, an eon of a subordinate kind, Yahweh or Jehovah. And Jahve or Jehova united with matter – and now comes that which, for example, was presented in the first Christian centuries by the so-called Gnostics, but where there was always a gap in their understanding of what had been presented as a kind of renewal of the biblical content, but, as I said, there was always a gap in their understanding – Jahve or Jehova united with matter. And from this connection, man emerged.

So that the creation of Yahweh or Jehovah consisted - always in the sense of these thoughts, which extended into the first Christian centuries - in that He Himself, as a descendant of a lower species from the more exalted eons up to the Demiurge, united with matter and thereby brought man into being. All that now arises, so to speak, is understandable for the older humanity, but no longer for the later humanity. All this arises on the basis of that which surrounds us in earthly life, and is sensually perceived. All this was summarized under the expression Pleroma (see diagram). The pleroma is therefore a world populated by individualized beings that rises above the physical world. In a sense, man, called into existence by Jahve or Jehovah, appears on the lowest level of this pleroma world. On the lowest level of this pleroma, an entity arises that actually does not live in the individual human being, nor in a group of peoples, but in all of humanity. It is the entity Achamoth, with which the striving of humanity towards the spiritual was indicated in Greece. So that through Achamoth there is a return to the spiritual (red arrow).

Now this world of ideas was joined by the other, that the Demiurge met the striving of Achamoth and sent down a very early aeon, who united with the man Jesus so that the striving of Achamoth could be fulfilled. So that in the man Jesus there is a being from the evolution of the eons, which was conceived by a much higher spiritual being, of a higher spiritual nature than Yahweh or Jehovah (green arrow).

And in the case of those who had this idea in the first centuries of Christianity – and many people who looked up to the Mystery of Golgotha with deep fervor and sincerity had it – the idea developed in connection with this idea that a great secret surrounds the man Jesus with his indwelling of an ancient and thus primeval aeon.

The investigation of this mystery was cultivated in the most diverse ways. Today it is no longer very important to reflect in depth on the individual forms in which, in the first Christian centuries, through Greece, but especially in Asia Minor and the neighboring regions, it was imagined how this aeon being dwelled in the man Jesus. For the conceptions by which they sought to approach such a mystery in those days have long since vanished from the realm of human thought. What surrounds man sensually, what is connected with man between birth and death, lies in the realm of what man thinks today, and at most man infers from what he has around him between birth and death to what could spiritually underlie this physical-natural world. That direct relationship, that intimate relationship between the human soul and the pleroma, which once existed and was expressed in the same way as the relationship between man and the spiritual world, as the relationship between man and tree and bush, between cloud and wave, everything that was present in human conceptions in order to form an overview, a picture of the connection between man and that spiritual world, which interested man much more at that time than the physical world, all that has disappeared. The direct relationship is no longer there. And we can say: the last centuries in which such ideas could still be found in the civilization on which European, Western civilization then became dependent are the first, second, third and still a large part of the fourth century AD. Then the possibility of rising to the pleroma world disappears from what is human knowledge, and a different time begins.

The time begins that had thinkers such as Augustine, who was one of the first among them, or Scotus Erigena; the time begins that then had the scholastics, the time in which European mysticism flourished, a time in which one spoke quite differently on the basis of knowledge than in those ancient times. On the basis of knowledge, one spoke in such a way that one simply turned to the sensual-physical world and tried to extract the concepts and ideas from this physical-sensual world through a supersensible one.

But what humanity had in earlier times, the direct sense of the spiritual world, of the pleroma, was no longer there. For man was to enter a completely different stage of his development. It is not at all a matter of somehow defining the older time or the time of medieval human development according to values, but rather of recognizing what tasks humanity, insofar as it was civilized humanity, had in the different ages. One can say that the older time had indeed developed the direct relationship to the Pleroma. They had the task of developing those spiritual powers of knowledge that reside in the depths of the human soul, those powers of knowledge that go to the spirit, again.

Then, from the depths of humanity, there had to come a time - we have often spoken of it - when the pleromatic world was obscured, when man began to exercise those abilities that he did not have before, when man began to develop his own ratio, his rationalism, his thinking. In those older times, when the direct relationship to the pleroma was, one did not develop one's own thinking. Everything had been attained by way of illumination, inspiration, the instinctive supersensible attitude; the thoughts that men held were revealed thoughts. That welling up and springing forth of thought, that forming of one's own thoughts and logical connections, that only came about in later times. Aristotle had a presentiment of it, but it was only developed from the second half of the fourth century A.D. Then, during the Middle Ages, every effort was made to develop thinking as such, so to speak, and to develop everything that is connected with thinking.

In this respect, the Middle Ages, and in particular medieval scholasticism, made an enormous contribution to the overall development of humanity. It developed the practice of thinking in the formation of ideas and in the context of ideas. It developed a pure technique of thinking, a technique that has now been lost again.

What was contained in scholasticism as a thinking technique should be appropriated by people again. But in the present, people do not like to do it because in the present, everything is geared towards passively receiving knowledge, not actively acquiring it, actively conquering it. The inner activity and the urge for inner activity are missing in the present; scholasticism had this in the most magnificent way. That is why anyone who understands scholasticism is still able to think much better, much more vividly, and much more cohesively than, say, in the natural sciences today. This thinking in the natural sciences is schematic, short of breath, this thinking is incoherent.

And actually, people of the present should learn from scholasticism in this technique and practice of thinking. But it would have to be a different learning from what is loved today; it would have to be a learning by doing, by being active, and not merely consist of acquiring what has already been formed or read from the experiment. And so the Middle Ages were the time in which man was to develop inwardly, in soul and thought. One might say that the gods postponed the Pleroma, postponed their own revelation, because if they had continued to influence European humanity, this European humanity would not have developed that magnificent inner activity of thinking practice that was brought forth during the Middle Ages. And again, from this thinking practice emerged what is newer mathematics and such things, which are of direct scholastic descent.

So that one should imagine the matter thus: Through long centuries, the spiritual world, as if through a grace from above, gave humanity the revelation of the pleroma. Humanity saw this world full of light, this world revealing itself in and through light in ideas. A curtain was drawn in front of this world. In Asia, the decadent remnants of what was behind the curtain remained in human knowledge. Europe had a curtain, so to speak, that rose vertically from the earth towards the sky, which had its basis, I would say, in the Urals and the Volga, across the Black Sea to the Mediterranean. Imagine that a huge wall of wallpaper had been erected for Europe through the course I have just indicated, a wall through which one cannot see where in Asia the last decadent remnants of the pleroma developed, but in Europe nothing of it was seen and therefore the inner thinking practice was developed without any prospect of the spiritual world. Then you have an idea of the development of medieval civilization, which developed so great things out of man, but which did not see all that was behind the wall that ran along the Urals, along the Volga, along the Black Sea to the Mediterranean, which could not see through this wall and for which the East was at most a yearning, but not a reality.

They not only hinted symbolically, but quite literally, at what the European world actually was, how, as it were under the influence of a Giordano Bruno, Copernicus, Galilei, people said to themselves that they now wanted to get to know the earth, they wanted to get to know the ground, the lower regions. And then they found a science of heaven that was modeled on the science of the earth, while the old science of the earth was modeled on the science of the heavens with its pleromatic content. And so, as it were, in the darkness - for the light was blocked by the wall of the world described - the newer knowledge and the newer life of humanity arose.

It is a fact of human development that in certain epochs, when something specific is to emerge from humanity, other parts of what connects man are veiled, hidden. And basically, on the ground of the earth, behind the 'wallpaper for the earthly, only decadent Eastern culture developed. In Europe, Western culture remained stuck in its initial beginnings.

And this is basically the state of the European world still today, except that it is trying to inform itself about what, with the exclusion of all insight into the pleroma, has been acquired in the world of dark existence like a science, like a knowledge that is not, through all kinds of external, historical means. One has the opportunity to see through these things in their significance for the present when one realizes how, to a certain extent, behind the wallpaper, the earlier insight into the pleroma has become more and more decadent and regressive in the East, that a high, but instinctive, spiritual culture acquired by humanity has taken on decadent forms in Asia; that in Europe, the weaving and living of the human soul in the spirit has been pushed down into the sphere of the physical-sensual, which, for the time being, was only accessible to people in the medieval centuries. And so, beyond the wall-papered wall in the East, a culture arose that is not really a culture at all, that seeks to magically reproduce in earthly-physical forms what was to be experienced pleromatically in the weaving of the spirit. The rule and weaving of the spiritual beings in the Pleroma was to be carried down to earth in stone and wood, and their interaction was to resemble the weaving and nature of spiritual beings in the Pleroma. What gods actually do among themselves was thought to be the actions of physical, sensual idols. Idolatry took the place of divine service. And what can now be called oriental, North Asian-oriental magic, which has a bad effect, is the world of facts of the Pleroma, to which the soul's gaze was once directed, but which has been unlawfully transferred into the sensual. The magical sorcery of the shamans and its resonance in Central and North Asia (South Asia was also infected but has remained relatively freer) is the decadent form of the ancient pleroma view. Physical-sensory magic took the place of the human soul's participation in the divine realms of the pleroma. What the soul should do and had done in the past was attempted with the help of sensual-physical magic. A completely Ahrimanized pleroma activity became, so to speak, that which was practiced on earth and especially by the nearest spiritual beings bordering on the earth, but from which human beings were infected.

If we go east from the Urals and the Volga to Asia, we find, especially in the astral world adjoining the human earthly world, in the centuries of the second Middle Ages, in the centuries of the modern age, we have, to this day, an Ahrimanized magic, which is practiced by certain spiritual entities who, in their etheric-astral education, are indeed above man, but in their soul and spiritual education have remained below man. Throughout Siberia and Central Asia, and across the Caucasus, terrible ahrimanic, etheric-astral beings roam everywhere in the world immediately adjacent to the earthly, practising ahrimanic sorcery that has been lowered into the astral and earthly realms. And this has a contagious effect on people, who, after all, cannot do everything themselves, who are clumsy in these matters, but who, as I said, are infected, influenced by it and thus stand under the influence of the world bordering on the earth, immediately adjoining the astral. When something like this is described, it must be clear that what was called a myth or the like in ancient times is always based on a magnificent spiritual view of nature. And when people in Greece spoke of the fauns and satyrs, who, through their activity, interwove themselves into earthly events, they did not, as fanciful scholars of today imagine, construct beings in their fantasy, but in his spiritual nature he knew of those real beings, which populated the astral territory immediately adjacent to the earthly world everywhere as fauns and satyrs. At about the turn of the third or fourth century after Christ, all those fauns and satyrs moved over to the regions east of the Urals and the Volga, to the Caucasus. That became their homeland. There they underwent their further development. Before the carpet, before this cosmic carpet, what has emerged is that which developed out of the human soul as thinking and so on, as a certain dialectic. When people held fast to the inwardly strict and pure forms of thinking, to that which one must really develop within oneself, when one wants to develop the pure forms of scholastic thinking, then they have indeed cultivated that which was to be cultivated according to the counsel of the spirituality guiding the earthly, then they have worked in preparation for that which must come in our present time and in the near future. But this purity was not everywhere to be found. While in the East, beyond the wallpaper, if I may put it that way, the urge arose to draw down from the Pleroma the deeds of the Pleroma, to transform the happenings of the Pleroma into earthly magic and Ahrimanic magic, west of the wallpaper wall, the striving for reason, for dialectics, for logic, for the ideal understanding of the world of the earthly, all that which human feelings of pleasure signify, what human feelings of well-being signify in sensual existence. Human, earthly, luciferic drives mixed in with the pure use of reason that had been developed.

But as a result, alongside what developed as the pursuit of reason and ideal practice, directly adjacent to the earthly world, another astral world developed: an astral world developed that was, so to speak, in the midst of those who, as purely as Giordano Bruno or Galileo or even those who came later, strove for the development of earthly thinking, for an earthly maxim and technique of thinking. In the meantime, so to speak, the entities of an astral world arose, which now absorb all this into themselves, namely also into religious life, what sensual feelings are, to which rationalistic striving should be made subservient. And so, gradually, pure thinking acquired a sensual-physical character.

And much of what developed as such a thinking technique in the second half of the 18th century, but especially in the 19th century, is permeated and interwoven with what is present in the astral world, which now permeates this rationalistic world. The earthly desires of people, which were to be cleverly interpreted, cleverly recognized by a degenerate technique of thinking, developed in people an element that was nourishment for certain astral entities, which were out to use the thinking that was so highly developed to merely penetrate the earthly world.

Theories such as Marxism arose that limited thinking, instead of elevating it into the spiritual, to the mere weaving of sensual-physical entities and sensual-physical impulses.

This was something that made it increasingly possible for certain Luciferic entities weaving in this astral realm to intervene in human thought. Human thought was completely permeated by what certain astral entities then thought, and the Western world became just as obsessed by them as the descendants of the shamans in the East.

And so finally arose beings who were possessed by such astral beings, who introduced human desires into astutely earthly thinking. And beings arose such as those who then, from the astral plane, possessed the Lenins and their comrades.

And so we have set two worlds against each other: one east of the Urals and Volga and Caucasus, the other west of them, which, I might say, form a self-contained astral area. We have the Ural area, the adjoining Volga area, the Black Sea, where the former wallpaper wall used to be. East and west of the Urals and Volga, we have an astral territory of the earth in which, in an intensive way, beings are striving together as if in a cosmic marriage. Those beings have the luciferic thinking of the West as their life air, while those beings, east of the Urals and Volga in the adjoining astral territory, have the earthy magic of the former pleroma acts as their life element. These beings of an Ahrimanic and Luciferic nature are gathering together. And we have a very special astral territory on earth, in which people now live with the task of seeing through this. And when they fulfill this task, they fulfill something that is imposed on them in the overall development of humanity in a magnificent way. But if they turn their eyes away from it, then they will be inwardly permeated and possessed by all this in their feelings — possessed by that ardent marriage that is to be concluded in the cosmic sense by the Asian Ahrimanized entities and the European Luciferized entities, which strive towards each other with all cosmic voluptuousness and create a terribly sultry astral atmosphere and in turn make people possessed by themselves. And so, gradually, an astral region has come into being to the east and west of the Urals and Volga, rising up directly from the earth's surface, which represents the earthly astral region for entities that are the metamorphosed fauns and metamorphosed satyrs.

When we look towards this part of Eastern Europe today, we see not only people when we see the whole of reality, but we also see, so to speak, what has become a kind of paradise for fauns and satyrs in the course of the Middle Ages and modern times, who have undergone their metamorphosis, their development. And if we understand in the right way what the Greeks saw in fauns and satyrs, then we can also look at this development, at this metamorphosis that the fauns and satyrs have undergone. These beings, who, I might say, always go about among human beings and carry on their voluptuous work in the astral plane, driven by magic from Asia, which they have corrupted with Ahriman, and by European rationalism, which they have corrupted with Lucifer. But they infect human beings with it. These transformed, metamorphosed satyrs and fauns are seen in such a way that, towards the lower the lower physical form, the goat-like form has become particularly wild in them, so that they have a goat-like form that shines outwardly through the lust, while upwardly they have an extraordinarily intelligent head, a head that has a kind of radiance but that is the image of all possible Luciferian, rationalistic sophistication. Shapes between bears and rams, with a human physiognomy that is cunningly drawn into the voluptuous, but at the same time into the incredibly clever, these entities inhabit the paradise of satyrs and fauns. For this region in the astral has become a paradise for satyrs and fauns in the last centuries of the Middle Ages and the first centuries of the modern era – a paradise of transformed satyrs and fauns that inhabit it today.

I would say that, beneath all that is happening, humanity, which has been left behind, dances around with its dulled concepts and describes only the earthly, while those things that truly belong to reality no less than those that can be seen with the sensual eyes and comprehended with the sensual mind play into the earthly.

What is now developing between Asia and Europe can only be understood when it is understood in its astral-spiritual aspect, it can only be understood when one can see what has remained over there from a reality as decadent shaman ism in Central and North Asia has remained over there from a reality, what is voluptuously striving there as today's decadent magism, in order to connect, so to speak, in a cosmic marriage with what has been given the name Bolshevism for external reasons. There, east and west of the Ural and Volga region, a marriage is sought between magism and Bolshevism. What is taking place there appears so incomprehensible to humanity because it is taking place in a strange mythical form, because the Luciferic-spiritual of Bolshevism is combining with the completely decadent forms of shamanism that are approaching the Urals and Volga and crossing this area. From west to east, from east to west, events interact in this way, which are precisely the events of the paradise of satyrs and fauns. And what plays into it from the spiritual into the human world is the result of this lustful interaction of the satyrs and fauns who have migrated here from ancient times and of what the Western spirits, who only develop the intellectual, the things belonging to the head, have formed in themselves, and who then want to connect with the satyrs and fauns who have come over from Asia.

I would like to say that, outwardly, it looks as if those cloud-like spiritual forms are clumping together the further they penetrate eastward toward the Urals and the Volga, whereby the other body remains unclear remains unclear – as if these formations were clumping together into, one might say, voluptuous-looking, sophisticated-looking heads; as if they were constantly becoming heads and losing the rest of their physicality. Then, from the east, towards the Ural and Volga region, come the metamorphosed satyrs and fauns, whose nature as goats has almost become nature as bears, and the more they come from the west, the more they lose their heads. And in a kind of marriage, a cosmic marriage, such a being that loses its head meets a being coming from Europe that offers its head. And so these metamorphosed organizations, endowed with the superhuman head, come into being; so these metamorphosed satyrs and fauns arise in the astral realm. They are the inhabitants of the earth just like physical humanity. They move within the world within which physical people also move. They are the seducers and tempters of physical people because they can make people obsessed with themselves, because they not only need to convince them by talking but can make them obsessed with themselves. Then it happens that people believe that what they do is done by themselves, by their own nature, whereas in truth what people do in such a field is often only done because they are inwardly imbued with such a being, which from the East has attained the body of a goat transformed into something bear-like and the European human head metamorphosed in the West into something superhuman.

It is our task today to grasp these things with the same strength with which myths were once formed. Only by consciously entering the realm of the imagination can we understand today what we must understand if we are to and want to consciously place ourselves in the development of humanity.

If we want to categorize what we can get to know as the stages of the path into the spiritual world into what is already known from ordinary life, it is important to be able to correctly assess the three states of consciousness in which a person already finds themselves in ordinary life. We have already described these three states of consciousness: waking, dreaming and sleeping. And we also know how a person actually only experiences true waking consciousness in their thinking, in their imagining, and how feeling already works in such a way that, although it appears different in its experiences than the world of dreams, in its overall constitution, in the way it relates to the person, it is the same as the world of dreams. We experience feelings in our ordinary consciousness in an equally indeterminate way to dreams, but not only in such an indeterminate way, but also in a context similar to that of dreams.

The dream strings image to image. It does not care about the connections in the outside world as it strings image to image. It has its own connections. It is basically the same with the world of feelings. And the person who, for ordinary consciousness, would have such an emotional world as he has a world of ideas would be a terribly sobering, terribly dry, icy person. In the world of ideas, that is, in full wakefulness, one must pay attention to what is commonly called logic. It would be impossible to get on in real life if one were to feel everything as one thinks it.

And then we have mentioned several times: the will emerges from the hidden depths of human existence. It can be imagined, but its actual nature, how it works and weaves in the human organism, remains as unknown or unconscious to the human being as the experiences of sleep itself. And it would also be extremely disturbing for the human being if he were to experience what the will actually does.

The will is in reality a process of combustion, a process of consumption. And to always perceive how one consumes one's own organism in the act of willing, and then having to replace what has been consumed again and again through nourishment or sleep, would, if it accompanied the entire waking life, not be a very comfortable process for ordinary consciousness.

Now, in a sense, we can compare the world of human feelings in a waking state, so to speak waking dreams, and the world of dreams in a state of drowsiness or half-sleep, in their images, more so that the human being does not initially perceive these images as I, but as something that is the outside world. The dreaming person experiences what is happening as dream images so strongly as an external world that he can sometimes perceive himself within these dream images.

What should interest us particularly about these dream images today is this: we live through ordinary life, one experience after another. The dream shakes these experiences up. It pays little attention to the way a person in an awake state has experiences in context. It is a poet that unfolds the strangest inclinations.

A philosopher told of himself that he often dreams that he has written a book that he has not actually written, but in the dream he believes that he has written the book, a book that is better than all his other books. But at the same time he dreams that the manuscript has been lost. He can't find it, he has misplaced it. And now he rushes from drawer to drawer, searching through everything in his dream, but he can't find the manuscript. He is overcome by an incredibly uncomfortable feeling that he has lost this manuscript of his very best book and may never find it again. He then wakes up to this unease. Of course, this is quite an experience, especially for the philosopher I mean, who has written many books. They have been published in such large numbers that once, when I was visiting this philosopher, where the philosopher's wife was also present, the wife told me: Yes, my husband writes so many books that one always competes with the other.

It was actually always rather practical in this philosopher's house, so that I once, when I was visiting this philosopher with a publisher, actually got a little annoyed because I wanted to discuss epistemological problems with him. Now I had dragged the publisher along, actually he had dragged himself along, and the philosopher immediately started: Can you tell me from your expertise whether a great many copies of this or that work of mine are available from antiquarians? – So there was a very practical sense in the philosopher's house. I don't want to disparage that, I am just telling it as something characteristic. Now, someone else might have dreamed something else, which would have colored the experiences in a fantastic way as well.

Everyone can know that the dream does not proceed in the same way as the external experience, but that other connections are created in the dream. But on the other hand, everyone can also know how the dream is intimately connected with what the human being actually is. It is indeed the case that many dreams are actually reflections of even the physical human interior, and one already weaves in dreams as in something that is intimately connected with one.

Now one gradually becomes really aware of how the dream arranges the experiences in its own way. If you keep this very clearly in mind, you will gradually come to know that you do live in this dreaming after all. Only in this dreaming you live in the times when you either just go out of the physical body and the etheric body or when you return to them. It is actually in these transitions between waking and sleeping, sleeping and waking that the dream takes place. I have repeatedly given examples showing that the most important part of the dream takes place during waking and falling asleep. Among the characteristic examples, I have given this one – you remember it – in which a student dreams that two students are standing at the door of a lecture hall. One of them says something to the other that, after the thing called a comment, absolutely demands satisfaction. It comes to a duel. Everything is vividly dreamt, going out to the duel, first choosing seconds and so on, until the shooting begins. He still hears the bang, but it immediately turns into the blow that a chair, which he has knocked over at that moment, has done. So at that moment he wakes up. This fall of the chair triggered the whole dream. The dream thus fades at the moment of waking, it only appears to do so because it has its own time within it, not the time that it would last. Some dreams last so long according to their inner time that you don't sleep as long as you would have to sleep if the dream lasted the time it carries within itself. Nevertheless, a dream is intimately connected with what a person experiences inwardly, but experiences inwardly down to his physical body.

People in ancient times were well aware of such things, and for a certain kind of dream – you can read about it in the Bible yourself – the ancient Jews said: God has punished you in your kidneys. So they knew that a very specific kind of dream was connected with the function of the kidneys. On the other hand, you only need to read something like “The Seer of Prevorst” and you will find how people actually describe the damage to their organs in their dreams, people who are particularly predisposed to doing so, so that some diseased organ is symbolically visualized in powerful images, which can lead to the remedy being presented alongside this diseased organ. In ancient times this was even used to induce the patient himself, in a certain respect, to indicate his remedy from his own dream interpretation. And what was practiced in the authorized temple sleep must also be studied in this direction.

When we look at the whole relationship between dreams and external experiences, we have to say that dreams protest against the laws of nature. From waking to sleeping, we live by natural laws. Dreams pay no heed to these natural laws. In a sense, the dream turns its nose up at the laws of nature. And what is being researched as the laws of nature for the external physical world is not the lawfulness of the dream. The dream is a living protest against the laws of nature. If, on the one hand, you ask nature what is true, it answers in the laws of nature. If you ask the dream what is true, it does not answer in terms of natural laws. And the person who judges the course of a dream according to natural laws will say that the dream is lying. In this ordinary sense, it does lie. But this dream does come close to the spiritual and supersensible in man, even if the images of the dream belong to the subconscious, as one can say in the abstract, and one does not judge it correctly if one does not know that it comes close to the inner spiritual reality of the person.

Now, however, this is something that is difficult to admit in our time. One wants to abstract the dream. They want to judge it only by its fantastic nature. They do not want to see that in a dream we have something before us that is connected with the inner being of man. Is it not true that when a dream is connected with the inner being of man and protests against the laws of nature, it is a sign that the inner being of man itself is something that protests against the laws of nature.

Please understand that this is a weighty word, that when you get to the person, their inner being actually protests against the laws of nature. For what does that mean?

When today, the scientific way of thinking observes the laws of nature in a laboratory-like manner from what is outside in nature, then this scientific world view also approaches the human being and treats him as if the laws of nature were also continuing within him, in his inner being, or, to put it better, within his skin. But that is not the case at all. This inner being is much closer to the dream with its denial of natural laws than to the natural laws; the human inner being is such that it does not act and develop its activities according to natural laws. The dream, which in a certain sense is a reflection of this human inner being in its composition, is a testimony to this. And for those who understand this, it is simply the case that they have to say that it is actually absurd to believe that the same laws prevail within the heart and liver as externally in nature. Logic belongs to the external nature. The dream belongs to the inner being of man, and whoever calls the dream fantastic should also call the human inner being fantastic. He can feel that, because the way the human interior unfolds between birth and death here in earthly life, where an illness emerges from one corner and a sense of well-being from another, is much more similar to the realm of the 'I' than to external logic. But our present way of thinking completely lacks this way of approaching the human interior, because our present way of thinking is completely absorbed in what is observed in the outer nature or in the laboratory. One wants to find this in the human interior as well.

In this respect, it is really of great importance that we learn, for example, how the way in which science often deals with what plays a role in the physical aspect of human beings is treated today. We know that proteins, fats, carbohydrates and salts are essential to human life - in essence, of course. We know that. So what does science do? It analyzes the protein and finds so much oxygen, so much nitrogen, so much carbon in it, in percentage terms; it analyzes the fats, the carbohydrates, and so on. We now know how much of each is present. But you never learn from such an analysis what influence, for example, the potato has played in European culture. There is also little mention of this influence of potato food on European culture, because from this analysis, where you simply find how differently carbon, nitrogen and so on are distributed in one food and in another, you never find out why, for example, rye is preferentially digested by the forces of the lower digested by the forces of the lower abdomen, while the potato, on the other hand, requires forces up to the brain to digest it, so that when a person eats an excessive amount of potatoes, his brain has to be used to digest the potatoes, and so some of the brain power is lost for thinking.

It is precisely in such things that one notices how neither today's materialistic science nor the more theologically colored views come close to the truth. Science describes food in much the same way as if I wanted to describe a watch, and now I begin: the silver is mined in a silver mine; it is done in such and such a way. Then the silver is loaded up and shipped to the cities, and so on. But we stop at the watchmaker. We no longer look into his workshop. Then, perhaps, you describe the porcelain dial and how the porcelain is made. Again, they stop at the watchmaker's workshop. This is how today's science deals with food. It analyzes it. In doing so, it says something that actually says nothing about the importance of food in the human organism, because despite all the analysis, there is a big difference between enjoying the fruit of something, for example rye or wheat, and enjoying the tubers, as with potatoes.

Tubers fit into the human organism quite differently than fruits or seeds. So we can truly say that today's way of thinking no longer sees through material existence at all. Therefore, materialism is the world view that does not even know matter in its effects. Spiritual science must shine into it so that we can get to know matter. That is why the materialistically minded say: Anthroposophy is fantastically spiritual. And those who have theosophy or theology and want to stop at the abstracted spirit, which never comes to real work, where it never comes so far that it really shows how it intervenes as spirit in the material effects, they say that Anthroposophy is materialistic because it brings its insights to matter.

And so one is actually attacked from two fronts, both by those who treat everything ideally and abstractly and by those who treat everything materially. But those who treat everything ideally and abstractly do not get to know the spirit, and those who treat everything materially do not get to know matter. In this way, a way of thinking is developing more and more today that cannot reach people at all.

Now, however, something very strange has actually happened in our spiritual development in recent times. People can no longer help but admit at least the dark sides of spiritual life if they do not want to be completely stubborn. And it is a characteristic monument to the way in which people who are so completely immersed in science behave when they enter these dark areas of spiritual life, or something else that I will mention in a moment – but cannot deny.

A notable example of this is the book by Ludwig Staudenmaier: “Magic as an Experimental Science”. It is almost as if one were to say: “The nightingale as a machine”. But after all, this book could be written as something quite characteristic of our time.

So how does this man actually work? The strange thing about him is that his life has driven him to it, that the magical has been approached experimentally through himself. He had to start experimenting with himself one day, I would say, out of a dark destiny. After some of his experiences, he could no longer deny that, for example, there are writing mediums. You know that I don't recommend these things and always explain their dangers; but when there are writing mediums, as there are, something very strange happens, and one must very critically separate truth from error. Well, this writing of things that the person does not have in mind at the moment when he writes them, this mediumistic writing became an experimental problem for Staudenmaier, and he began to put the pencil to paper himself, and lo and behold, things came out that he had never thought of. He wrote the strangest things. Do you think it is also a surprise when someone who thinks entirely scientifically takes a pencil in his hand, makes himself the writing medium and now believes that it will not work. But now this pencil suddenly acquires power, guides the hand, writes down all kinds of things that amaze you. That happened to Staudenmaier.

And what surprised him most was that this pencil became moody – that's what people say – just as a dream becomes moody, writing completely different things than he had intended. It seems, you can tell from the context, that the pencil once exerted a compulsion on the hand: “You are a cabbage!” and to write similar nice things.

Now, these are things that the gentleman certainly did not think of himself! And after such things had accumulated, and the pencil had repeatedly written the craziest things, Staudenmaier asked: Yes, who is it actually that is writing? – Now it answered: It is spirits who are writing. That was not true in his opinion, because ghosts do not exist for a scientifically minded person. What should he say now? He can't say that the spirits have lied to him, so he says: his subconscious is constantly lying. It's a terrible story, isn't it, when the subconscious suddenly comes to the conviction in the person himself that, for example, he is a cabbage and writes it down, so that, as they say in ordinary life, it is in black and white.

But he continued to behave as if spirits were speaking. So he asked them why they didn't tell the truth. They replied: 'Yes, that is our nature, we are just the kind of spirits who have to lie to you; it is in our character, we have to lie.

That was extremely characteristic. Now, however, we are entering a realm where things really get quite tricky, because, you see, if it turns out that the truth only sits up there and lies are constantly told down there, it naturally creates an uncomfortable situation. But if you are completely caught up in a natural scientific world view, then in such a case you cannot help but come to the conclusion that there is a liar inside you.

Nevertheless, Staudenmaier comes to the conclusion that objective spiritual beings never speak, but only the subconscious. You can put everything into such general terms.

But you see, it is characteristic that these spirits did not even try to guide Staudenmaier's hand in such a way that they might have written down a new mathematical proof for him or solved a scientific problem. That is actually the most characteristic thing, that they always said something different.

There were occasions when Staudenmaier was beside himself, and then a doctor friend would advise him to go hunting. Such instructions are common in medical advice. For example, getting married is sometimes a particularly popular piece of advice in medicine. In this case, the advice was to go hunting to get out of this crazy stuff, to distract himself, so to speak.

But lo and behold, even though he went hunting magpies, as he describes in detail, always looking out for magpies, all sorts of demonic figures peered down from the trees, not magpies. There sat on some branch such things, like something that was half a cat and half an elephant, turning up its nose at him or sticking out its tongue at him. And when he looked away from the tree into the grass, he saw not hares, but also all kinds of fantastic figures, who did their juggling with him.

So not only had the pen written down all sorts of stuff, but now the higher imagination was also stimulated in such a way that not magpies appeared, but demons, all sorts of ghostly creatures, so again a lie.

In any case, we can say that this experimenter came close to a world very similar to the world of dreams, and that this world is also a protest against the whole natural-law context. For what would the natural-law context have been? Well, he would have taken his gun off his shoulder, shot a magpie, and there would have been a magpie down there. But none of that appeared, only what I have characterized to you: once again a protest against natural law, from the spiritual world of the night side, into which the man had pushed. And if the man had stopped at the subconscious, he should at least have said to himself: If all this is down there in the subconscious, then my subconscious protests against the laws of nature. - For what does this subconscious actually tell him? Yes, it conjures up all kinds of demons and the like, as I have described. That tells him something quite different from what he has imagined about himself. So he should at least conclude from this: If the world were only organized according to natural laws, then my inner self could not exist at all, then I could not exist as a human being, because when this inner self speaks, it speaks quite differently than in natural laws. So a completely different world belongs to the inner self of man than the one over which the laws of nature are spun, a world that protests in its coherence against the laws of nature.

That, after all, is the only interesting thing about this magical experimenter or experimenting magician, who has impressed so many people so extraordinarily. It is something that shows us how, in fact, man can come to perceive such a world in other ways as well, as the world of dreams, which otherwise more or less always occurs in life, is in its contexts.

And this leads to the realization, through a correct view of ordinary life, that simply because man is there, the ordinary world, interwoven with natural laws, is adjacent to another world that is not interwoven with natural laws.

If you look at these things correctly, you have to say to yourself: there is the world interwoven with natural laws, which we study. Bordering on this is another world that has nothing to do with natural laws; quite different laws prevail in it. So, by immersing oneself in a real way in the world of dreams, one arrives in a world where natural laws cease. The fact that the human being's ordinary consciousness initially perceives this world in a fantastic way is merely due to the fact that he does not have the ability to recognize the connections that confront him. He brings the fantasy with him. But that which lives and weaves there is precisely another sphere of the world, into which the human being plunges in his dreams.

This leads us directly to something else. If you talk to someone who is completely absorbed in the world view that is currently in vogue, they will say: I study the laws of falling by looking at a falling stone. I discover the laws of gravitation. Then I go out into the world and apply them to the stars as well. And then it is thought: Here is the earth, where I find the laws of nature, and there is the cosmos. I think, blackboard 10, the laws that I have found here on earth also apply to the Orion Nebula or to anything.

Now everyone knows that, for example, gravity decreases with the square of the distance, that it becomes weaker and weaker, that the light decreases, and I have already said: So the truth of our natural laws also decreases. What is true in relation to natural laws on our earth here is no longer true out there in the universe. That is only true up to a certain distance. But out there in space, outside a certain width, the same lawfulness begins that we encounter when we immerse ourselves in a dream. Therefore, people should realize that when they look out at the Orion Nebula, they should actually not think physically, using the experimental method, to understand the Orion Nebula, but rather begin to dream, because the Orion Nebula shows its lawfulness according to dreams.

One can say that people actually knew about such things at one time, and intuitions still remained for later times, especially with thinkers who were able to concentrate quite well.

One such naturalist, who did not live in the second half of the 19th century but in the first, was Johannes Müller, who was the teacher of Haeckel. He was a man who could truly concentrate at all times. He was completely absorbed in whatever he was doing. The fact that one can really live like that, concentrated in whatever one is doing, sometimes leads to more; in some respects, as I will mention in a moment, it may have downsides. Johannes Müller, for example, was once asked about something during a summer course he taught. He said, “That is something I only know during the winter lectures, not in the summer.” He was so focused on the material for his summer lectures that he freely admitted that he only knew the rest during the winter.

But this Johannes Müller, for example, once confessed the very interesting fact that he can really cut up corpses for a long time to come to something; he does not come to it, he does not get into what he actually wants to understand. But sometimes he succeeds in dreaming about what he has experimented on, and then he sees much deeper into the matter, then things open up for him. It was in the first half of the nineteenth century. Then someone could still allow himself such extravagances, even if he was a famous natural scientist.

So, man enters into a completely different world, into a completely different order of things, when he dreams. And on proper consideration, it must be assumed that actually, if one were to do as Johannes Müller did, one would not have to think about the Orion Nebula as one does in the observatories or in the astronomical institutions, but one would have to dream about it, then one would know more about it than if one thought about it. I would like to say that this is connected with the fact that in pastoral ages, when shepherds slept in the pasture at night, they actually dreamed about the stars, and they knew more than later people know. It is really true, it is so.

In short, whether we go into the depths of man and approach the world of dreams or whether we go out into the wide universe, we meet, as the ancients said, outside the zodiac a world of dreams.

And here we are at the point where we can understand what the Greeks meant when they used the term “Chaos”. I have read all kinds of explanations of Chaos, but I have always found them far from the truth. What did the Greeks mean when they spoke of Chaos? He meant the lawfulness that one gets a glimpse of when immersed in a dream, or that one must assume in the outermost circumference of this universe. This lawfulness, which is not the lawfulness of nature but something else, the Greeks attributed to chaos. Yes, they said, chaos begins where the lawfulness of nature can no longer be found, where a different lawfulness reigns. For the Greeks, the world was born out of chaos, that is, out of a context that was not yet natural law, but rather like a dream or, as it still is today, the worlds of the constellation of Orion, the hunting dog and so on. First, you enter a world that at least announces itself to man in the fantastic but vivid world of dream images.

But now it is the case that when the physical natural world lies here, we enter into a second current, so to speak, by immersing ourselves in dreams. But then we enter into a third current, which lies beyond the world of dreams and no longer has any direct relationship to the laws of nature. The world of dreams protests in its imagery against the laws of nature. In this third world, it would be quite nonsensical to say that it follows natural laws. It completely and boldly contradicts natural laws, because it also approaches people. While the dream still comes to light in the world of vivid images, this third world first comes to light through the voice of conscience in the moral world view.

When we have the world of nature on the one hand and the world of morality on the other, there is no transition. But the transition lies in the world of dreams or in the world that the experimenter has experienced in the field of magic, where things have told him something quite different from the connections of natural law.

Between the world interwoven with natural laws and the world from which our conscience speaks as it flows into us, lies the world of dreams for ordinary consciousness. But this leads directly to the fact – because this is at the same time the waking world, this the dream world, this the sleeping world – that this brings us to the idea that during sleep the gods actually speak to man of what is not natural but moral, what then remains for man as the voice of God in his inner being when he wakes up, as conscience.

In this way, the three worlds are connected, and two things can be understood: on the one hand, why the world of dreams protests against the natural context, and on the other hand, to what extent this world of dreams is a transition to a world whose reality remains hidden from ordinary consciousness, to the world from which moral views also come.

If one then finds one's way into this world, one finds there the further spiritual world, which can no longer be grasped in terms of natural laws, but in terms of spiritual laws, while in dreams natural laws mix colorfully with spiritual laws, spiritual laws with natural laws, because the dream world is a transitional current between the two worlds.

Thus we have illuminated from another side how man integrates himself into the three worlds.