The Rudolf Steiner Archive

Dornach, June 2, 1921

In the past few weeks, I have repeatedly spoken of the great change that took place in Western civilization during the fourth century A.D. When such a matter is discussed, one is obliged to point out one thing again and again, that has already been the subject of discussion here many times. Yet it is necessary to focus on it time and again. I am referring to the metamorphoses of human development, markedly differing from each other on the soul level. When speaking of such a major point in human evolution as the one in the fourth century, one has to pay heed to the fact that the soul life of humanity changed in a sense with one great leap.

This view is not prevalent today. The prevailing opinion holds that the human race has undergone a certain history. This history is traced back to about the third or fourth millennium along the lines of the most recent documented records. Then, going back further, there is nothing for a long time; finally, one arrives at animalistic-human conditions. But in regard to the duration of the historical development, it is assumed that human beings have in the main always thought and felt the way they do today; at most, they formerly adhered to a somewhat more childish stage of scientific pursuit. Finally, however, human beings have struggled upward to the level of which we say today that it is splendid how far we have come in the comprehension of the world. To be sure, a reasonably unbiased consideration of human life arrives at the opposite view. I have had to indicate to you the presence of a mighty transition in the fourth Christian century; I outlined the other change in the whole human soul life at the beginning of the fifteenth century. Finally, I described how a turning point in human soul life occurred also during the nineteenth century.

Today, we shall consider one detail in this whole development. I would like to place before you a personality who illustrates particularly well that human beings in the relatively recent past thought completely differently from the way we think today. The personality, who has been mentioned also in earlier lectures, is John Scotus Erigena,¹ who lived in the ninth century A.D. at the court of Charles the Bald in France.² Erigena, whose home was across the Channel, who was born approximately in the year 815 and lived well into the second half of the ninth century, is truly a representative of the more intimate Christian mode of thinking of the ninth century A.D. It is, however, a manner of thinking that is still completely under the influence of the first Christian centuries. John Scotus Erigena apparently was intent on immersing himself in the prevalent scholarly and theological culture of his time. In his age, scholarly and theological knowledge were one and the same. And such learning was most readily acquired across the British Channel, particularly in the Irish institutions where Christianity was cultivated in a certain esoteric manner. The Franconian kings then had ways of attracting such personalities to their courts. The Christian knowledge permeating the Franconian kingdom, even spreading from there further east into western Germany, was mainly influenced by those who had been attracted from across the Channel by these Franconian kings.

John Scotus Erigena also immersed himself into the contents of the writings by the Greek Church Fathers, studying also the texts of a certain problematic nature within Western civilization, namely, the texts by Dionysius the Areopagite.³ As you know, the latter is considered by some to be a direct pupil of Paul. Yet, these texts only surfaced in the sixth century, and many scholars therefore refer to them as pseudo-Dionysian writings composed in the sixth century by an unknown person, which were then accredited to Paul's disciple.

People who say that are ignorant of the way spiritual knowledge was passed on in those early centuries. A school like the one in which Paul himself taught in Athens possessed insights that initially were taught only orally. Handed down from generation to generation, they were finally written down much, much later on. What was thus recorded at a later time, was not necessarily anything less than genuine for that reason; it could preserve to some extent the identity of something that was centuries old. Furthermore, the great value that we place on personality today was certainly not attached to personality in those earlier ages. Perhaps we will be able to touch upon a circumstance in this lecture that must be discussed in connection with Erigena, namely, why people did not place much value on personality in that age.

There is no doubt about one thing: The teachings recorded in the name of Dionysius the Areopagite were considered especially worthy of being written down in the sixth century. They were considered the substance of what had been left from the early Christian times, which were now in particular need of being recorded. We should consider this fact as such to be significant. In the times prior to the fourth century, people simply had more confidence in memory working from generation to generation than they had in later periods. In earlier ages, people were not so eager to write everything down. They were aware, however, that the time was approaching when it would become increasingly necessary to write down things that earlier had been passed on by word of mouth with great ease; for the things that were then recorded in the writings of Dionysius were of a subtle nature.

Now, what John Scotus Erigena was able to study in these writings was certainly apt to make an extraordinarily profound impression on him. For the mode of thinking found in this Dionysius was approximately as follows. With the concepts we from and the perceptions we acquire, we human beings can comprehend the physical sensory world. We can then draw our conclusions from the facts and beings of this sensory world by means of reasoning. We work our way upward, as it were, to a rational content that is then no longer visually perceptible but is experienced in ideas and concepts. Once we have developed our concepts and thoughts from the sensory facts and beings, we have the urge to move upward with them to the supersensory, to the spiritual and divine.

Now, Dionysius does not proceed by saying that we learn this or that from the sensory things; he does not say that our intellect acquires its concepts and then goes on to deduce a deity, a spiritual world. No, Dionysius says, the concepts we acquire from the things of the senses are all unsuitable to express the deity. No matter how subtle the concepts we form of sensory things, we simply cannot express what constitutes divinity with the aid of these concepts. We must therefore resort to negative concepts rather than positive ones. When we encounter our fellowmen, for example, we speak of personality. According to this Dionysian view, when we speak of God, we should not speak of personality, for the concept of personality is much too small and too lowly to designate the deity. Rather we should speak of super-personality. When referring to God, we should not even speak of being, of existence. We say, a man is, an animal, a plant is. We should not ascribe existence to God in the same sense as we attribute existence to us, the animals, and the plants; to Him, we ought to ascribe a super-existence. Thus, according to Dionysius, we should try to rise from the sensory world to certain concepts but then we should turn them upside down, as it were, allowing them to pass over into the negative. We should rise from the sense world to positive theology but then turn upside down and establish negative theology. This negative theology would actually be so sublime, so permeated by God and divine thinking that it can only be expressed in negative predicates, in negations of what human beings can picture of the sensory world.

Dionysius the Areopagite believed he could penetrate into the divine spiritual world by leaving behind, so to speak, all that can be encompassed by the intellect and thus finding the way into a world transcending reason.

If we consider Dionysius a disciple of Paul, then he lived from the end of the first Christian century into the second one. This means that he lived a few centuries prior to the decisive fourth century A.D. He sensed what was approaching: The culmination point of the development of human reason. With a part of his being, Dionysius looked back into the days of antiquity. As you know, prior to the eighth century B.C., human beings did not speak of the intellect in the way they did after the eighth century. Reason, or the rational soul was not born until the eigth century B.C., and from the birth of the rational soul originated the Greek and Roman cultures. These then reached their highest point of development in the fourth century A.D. Prior to this eighth century B.C. people did not perceive the world through the intellect at all; they perceived it directly, through contemplation. The early Egyptian and Chaldean insights were attained through contemplation; they were attained in the same manner in which we acquire our external sensory insights, despite the fact that these pre-Christian insights were spiritual insights. The spirit was perceived just as we today perceive the sensory world and as the Greeks already perceived the sensory world. Therefore, in Dionysius the Areopagite, something like a yearning held sway for a kind of perception lying beyond human reason.

Now, in his mind, Dionysius confronted the mighty Mystery of Golgotha. He dwelled in the intellectual culture of his time. Anybody studying the writings of Dionysius sees—regardless of who Dionysius was—how immersed this man was in all that the intellectual culture of his time had produced. He was a well educated Greek but at the same time a man whose whole personality was imbued with the magnitude of the Mystery of Golgotha. He was a man who realized that regardless of how much we strain our intellect, we cannot comprehend the Mystery of Golgotha and what stands behind it. We must transcend the intellect. We have to evolve from positive theology to negative theology.

When John Scotus Erigena read the writings of this Dionysius the Areopagite, they made a profound impression on him even in the ninth century. For what followed upon the fourth Christian century had more of an Augustine character and developed only slowly in the way I described in the earlier lectures. The mind of such a person, particularly of one of those who had trained themselves in the schools of wisdom over in Ireland, still dwelled in the first Christian centuries; he clung with all the fibers of his soul to what is written in the texts of Dionysius the Areopagite. Yet, at the same time, John Scotus Erigena also had the powerful urge to establish by means of reason, by what the human being can attain through his intellect, a kind of positive theology, which, to him, was philosophy. He therefore diligently studied the Greek Church Fathers in particular. We discover in him a thorough knowledge, for example of Origen,⁴ who lived from the second to the third century A.D.

When we study Origen, we actually discover a world view completely different from the Christian view, that is from what appeared later as the Christian view. Origen definitely still holds the opinion that one has to penetrate theology with philosophy. He believes that it is only possible to examine the human being and his nature only if he is considered as an emanation of the deity, as having had his origin in God. Then, however, man lowered himself increasingly; yet through the Mystery of Golgotha, he has gained the possibility of ascending once again to the deity in order once more to unite with God. From God into the world and back to God—this is how one could describe the path that Origen perceived as his own. Basically, something like this also underlies the Dionysian writings, and then was passed on to such personalities as John Scotus Erigena. But there were many others like him.

One could say that it is a sort of historical miracle that posterity came to know the writings of John Scotus Erigena at all. In contrast to other texts of a similar nature from the first centuries that have been completely lost, Erigena's writings were preserved until the eleventh, twelfth, a few even until the thirteenth century. At that time, they were declared heretical by the Pope; the order was given to find and burn all copies. Only much later, manuscripts from the eleventh and thirteenth century were rediscovered in some obscure monastery. In the fourteenth, fifteenth, sixteenth, and seventeenth centuries, people knew nothing of John Scotus Erigena. His writings had been burned like so many other manuscripts⁵ of a similar content from that period. From Rome's point of view the search was more successful in the case of other manuscripts: all copies were fed to the flames. Yet, of Erigena's works, a few copies remained.

Now, considering the ninth century and also taking into account that in John Scotus Erigena we have an expert in the wisdom and insights of the first Christian centuries, we must conclude the following. He is a characteristic representative of what extended form an earlier age, from the time preceding the fourth century, into later periods. One could say that in these later times, all knowledge had ossified in the dead Latin language. All the wisdom of the spiritual world that had been alive earlier became ossified, dogmatized, rigid, and intellectualized. Yet, in people like Erigena lived something of the ancient aliveness of direct spiritual knowledge that had existed in the first Christian centuries and was utilized by the most enlightened minds to comprehend the Mystery of Golgotha.

For a time, this wisdom had to die out in order for the intellect of man to be cultivated from the first third of the fifteenth century until our era. While the intellect as such is a spiritual achievement of the human being, initially it turned only to the material realm. The ancient wealth of wisdom had to die so that the intellect in its shadowy nature could be born. If, instead of immersing ourselves in a scholarly, pedantic manner into his writings, we do so with our whole being, we will notice that through Scotus Erigena something had spoken out of soul depths other than those from which people spoke later on. There, the human being had still spoken out of mental depths that subsequently could no longer be reached by human soul life. Everything was more spiritual, and if human beings spoke intellectually at all, they spoke of matters in the spiritual realm.

It is extremely important for one to scrutinize carefully what the structure of Erigena's knowledge was like. In his mighty work on the divisions of nature that has come down to posterity in the manner I described, he divided what he had to say concerning the world in four chapters. In the first, he initially speaks of the uncreated and the created world (see outline below). In the way Erigena believed himself able to do it, the first chapter describes God and the way He was prior to His approaching something like the creation of the world.

Ancient Legacy

The Human Being

John Scotus Erigena clearly describes this in the way he learned through the writings of Dionysius. He describes by means of developing the most refined intellectual concepts. At the same time, he is aware that with them he only reaches up to a certain limit beyond which lies negative theology. He therefore merely approaches the actual true being of the spirit, of the divine. Among other topics, we find in this chapter the beautiful discourse about the Trinity, instructive even for our age. He states that when we view the things around us, we initially discover existence as an overall spiritual quality (see above). Existence embraces everything. Now, we should not attribute existence as possessed by things to God. Yet, looking upward to existence transcending existence, we cannot but speak summarily of the deity's existence.

Likewise, we find that things in the world are illuminated and permeated by wisdom. To God, we should not merely ascribe wisdom but wisdom beyond wisdom. But when we proceed from things, we arrive at the limit of wisdom-filled things. Now, there is not only wisdom in all things. They live; there is life in all things. Therefore, when Erigena calls to mind the world, he says: I see existence, wisdom, life in the world. The world appears to me in these aspects as an existing, wisdom-filled, living world. To him, these are three veils, so to speak, that the intellect fashions when it surveys all things. One would have to see through these veils, then, to see into the divine-spiritual realm. To begin with, Erigena describes these veils: When I look upon existence, this represents the Father to me; when I look upon wisdom, it represents the Son to me; when I look upon life, it represents the Holy Spirit in the universe.

As you can see, John Scotus Erigena certainly proceeds from philosophical concepts and then makes his way up to the Christian Trinity. Inwardly, proceeding from the comprehensible, he still experiences the path from there to the so-called incomprehensible. Indeed, of this he is convinced. Yet, from the way he speaks and presents his insights we can see that he has learned from Dionysius. Precisely when he arrives at existence, wisdom, and life, which to him represent the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit, he would really like to have these concepts dissolve in a general spiritual element into which the human being would then have to rise by transcending concepts. However, he does not credit the human being with the faculty of arriving at a state of mind that goes beyond the conceptual.

In this, John Scotus Erigena was a product of the age that developed the intellect. Indeed, if this age had understood itself correctly, it would have had to admit that it could not enter into the realm transcending the conceptual level.

The second chapter then describes something like a second sphere of world existence, the created and the creating world (see above). It is the world of the spiritual beings where we find the angels, the archangels, the Archai, and so on. This world of spiritual beings, mentioned already in the writings of Dionysius the Areopagite. is creative everywhere in the world. Yet this hierarchical world is itself created; it is begun, hence created, by the highest being and in turn is active creatively in all details of existence surrounding us.

In the third chapter, Erigena then describes as a third world the created world that is noncreating. This is the world we perceive around us with our senses. It is the world of animals, plants, and minerals, the stars, and so on. In this chapter, Erigena deals with almost everything we would designate as cosmology, anthropology, and so forth, all that we would call the realm of science.

In the fourth chapter, Erigena deals with the world that has not been created and does not create. This is again the deity, but the way it will be when all creatures, particularly all human beings, will have returned to it. It is the Godhead when it will no longer be creating, when, in blissful tranquility—this is how John Scotus Erigena imagines it—it will have reabsorbed all the beings that have emerged from it.

Now, in surveying these four chapters, we find contained in them something like a compendium of all traditional knowledge of the schools of wisdom from which Scotus Erigena had come. When we consider what he describes in the first chapter, we deal with something that can be called theology in his sense, the actual doctrine of the divine.

Considering the second chapter, we find in it what he calls in terms of our present-day language the ideal world. The ideal is pictured, however, as existing. For he does not describe abstract ideas but angels, archangels, and so forth. He pictures the whole intelligible world, as it was called. Yet it was unlike our modern intelligible world; instead it was a world filled with living beings, with living, intelligible entities.

As I said, in the third chapter Erigena describes what we would term science today, but he does so in a different way. Since the days of Galileo and Copernicus, who, after all, lived later, we no longer possess what was called cosmology or anthropology in Scotus Erigena's age. Cosmology was still described from the spiritual standpoint. It depicted how spiritual beings direct and also inhabit the stars, how the elements, fire, water, air, and earth are permeated by spiritual beings. What was described as cosmology, was indeed something different. The materialistic way of viewing things that has arisen since the middle of the fifteenth century did not yet exist in Erigena's time, and his form of anthropology also differed completely from what we call anthropology in our materialistic age.

Here, I can point out something extraordinarily characteristic for what anthropology is to John Scotus Erigena. He looks at the human being and says: First, man bears existence within himself. Hence, he is a mineral being, for he contains within himself a mineral nature (see outline above). Secondly, man lives and thrives like a plant. Third, man feels as does the animal. Fourth, man judges and draws conclusions as man. Fifth, man perceives as an angel.

It goes without saying that in our age this would be an unheard-of statement! When John Scotus Erigena speaks of judgment and conclusions, something that is done, for instance, in a legal court where one pronounces judgment over somebody—then, so he says, human beings do this as human beings. But when they perceive, when they penetrate the world in perception then human beings do not behave as human beings but as angels! The reason for pointing this out is that I am trying to show you that for that period anthropology was something different from what it is for our present age. For it is true that you could hardly hear anywhere, not even in a theological seminar, that human beings perceive as angels. Therefore, one is forced to conclude that our science no longer resembles what Erigena describes in the third chapter. It has turned into something different. If we wanted to call Erigena's science by a word that is no longer applicable to anything existing today, we would have to say that it was a spiritual doctrine of the universe and man, pneumatology.

Now to the fourth chapter: This contains, first of all, Erigena's teaching of the Mystery of Golgotha and the doctrine concerning what the human being has to expect in the future, namely, entrance into the divine-spiritual world, hence, what in modern usage would be called soteriology. “Soter,” after all, means savior; the teaching of the future is eschatology. We find that Erigena here deals with the concepts of the Crucifixion and Resurrection, the emanation of Divine Grace, man's path into the divine-spiritual, world, and so on.

There is one thing that truly holds our attention, if we study attentively a work such as the De divisione naturae by John Scotus Erigena about the divisions of nature. The world is definitely discussed as something that is perceived in spiritual qualities. He speaks of something spiritual as he observes the world. But what is not contained in this work? We have to pay attention, after all, to what is not included in a universal science such as Erigena is trying to establish there.

In John Scotus Erigena's work, you discover as good as nothing of what we call sociology today, social science, and things of that kind. One is almost inclined to say it appears from the way Erigena pictures human beings that he did not wish to give mankind social sciences, no more so than any animal species, say the lion, the tiger, or any bird species, would come out with a sociology if it produced some sort of science. For a lion would not talk about the way it ought to live together with the other lions or how it ought to acquire its food and so on; this is something that comes instinctively. Just as little could we imagine a sociology of sparrows. Surely sparrows could reveal any number of the most interesting cosmic secrets from their viewpoint, but they would never produce any teaching about economics, for sparrows would consider this a subject that goes without saying, something they do because their instinct tells them to do it.

This is what is remarkable: Because we discover as yet nothing like this in Erigena's writings, we realize that he still viewed human society as if it produced the social elements out of its instincts. With his special kind of insight, he points to what still lived in the human being in the form of instincts and drives, namely, the impulses of social living. What he describes transcends this social aspect. He describes how the human being had emerged from the divine, and what sort of beings exist beyond the sense world. Then, in a form of pneumatology, he shows how the spirit pervades the sensory world, and he presents the spiritual element that penetrated into the world of the senses in his fourth chapter on soteriology and eschatology. Nowhere is there a description, however, of how human beings ought to live together. I should say, everything is elevated above the sensory world. It was generally a characteristic of this ancient science that everything was elevated beyond the sense world.

Now, if we contemplate writings such as John Scotus Erigena's teaching in a spiritual scientific sense, we discover that he did not think at all with the same organs humanity thinks with today. We simply do not understand him if we try to understand him with the thinking employed by mankind today. We understand him only when, through spiritual science, we have acquired an idea of how to think with the etheric body, the body that, as a more refined body, underlies the coarse sensory corporeality.

Thus Erigena did not think with the brain but with the etheric body. In him, we simply have a mind which did not yet think with the brain. Everything he wrote down came into being as a result of thinking with the etheric body. Fundamentally speaking, it was only subsequent to his age that human beings began to think with the physical body, and only since the beginning of the fifteenth century did people think totally with the physical body. It is normally not recognized that during this period the human soul life has truly changed, and that if we go back into the thirteenth, twelfth, and eleventh centuries, we encounter a form of thinking that was not yet carried out with the physical but with the etheric body. This thinking with the etheric body was not supposed to extend into later ages when, dialectically and scholastically, people discussed rigid concepts. This former thinking with the etheric body, which certainly was the form of thinking employed during the first Christian centuries, was declared to be heretical. This was the reason for burning Erigena's writings. Now, the actual soul condition of a thinker in that age becomes comprehensible.

Going back to earlier times, we find a certain form of clairvoyance in all people. Human beings did not think at all with their physical body. In past ages, they thought with their etheric body and carried on their soul life even with the astral body. There, we should not speak of thinking at all, since the intellect only originated in the eighth century B.C., as I have pointed out. However, certain remnants of this ancient clairvoyance were retained, and it is particularly true of the most outstanding minds that with the intellect, which had already come into being, they tried to penetrate into the knowledge that had been handed down through tradition from former ages. People tried to comprehend what had been viewed in a completely different manner in past times. They tried to understand, but now had to have the support of abstract concepts such as existence, wisdom, life. I would say that these individuals still knew something of an earlier spirit-permeated insight and at the same time felt quite at home within the purely intellectual perception.

Later on, when the intellectual perception had turned into a shadow, this was not felt anymore. Earlier, however, people felt that in past ages insights had existed that permeated human beings in a living way out of spiritual worlds, it was not something merely thought up. Erigena lived in such a divided state. He was only capable of thinking, but when this thinking arrived at perception, he sensed that there was something of the ancient powers that had permeated the human being in the ancient manner of perception. Erigena felt the angel, the angelos, within himself. This is why he said that human beings perceive as angels. It was a legacy from ancient times, extending into his age of intellectual knowledge, that made it possible for a mind like Scotus Erigena's to say that man perceives like an angel. In the days of the Egyptian, Chaldean, and the early ages of the Hebrew civilization, nobody would have said anything else but: The angel perceives within me; as a human being, I share in the knowledge of the angel. The angel dwells within me, he cognizes, and I take part in what he perceives.

This was true of the era when reason did not yet exist. When the intellect had appeared, it became necessary to penetrate this older knowledge with reason. In Scotus Erigena, however, there still existed an awareness of this state of permeation with the angel nature.

Now, it is a strange experience to become involved in this work of Erigena's and to try and understand it completely. You finally arrive at a feeling of having read something most significant, something that still dwells very much in spiritual regions and speaks of the world as something spiritual. But then, in turn, the feeling arises that everything is basically mixed up. You realize that with this text you find yourself in the ninth century when the intellect had already brought much confusion. And this is truly the case. For if you read the first chapter, you are dealing with theology. But it is a theology that is certainly secondary even for John Scotus Erigena, a theology which evidently points back to something greater and more direct. I shall now speak as if all these matters were hypotheses, but what I now develop as a hypothesis can be established by spiritual science as a fact. A condition must once have existed, and we look back on it, when as yet theology was not addressed in such an intellectual manner but was considered to be something one delved into in a living way. Without doubt, it was that kind of theology the Egyptians spoke of, those Egyptians of whom the Greeks—I mentioned it above—report that Egyptian sages told them: You Greeks are like children;⁶ you have no knowledge of the world's origin, we do possess this sacred knowledge of the world's beginnings.

Obviously, the Greeks were being referred to an ancient, living theology. Thus, we have to say: During the time of the third post-Atlantean period, which begins in the fourth millennium and ends in the first millennium B.C. in the eighth pre-Christian century, approximately in the year 747 B.C., there existed a living theology. It now needed to be penetrated by Erigena's intellect. It was obviously present in a much more vital form to the personality who must be recognized as Dionysius the Areopagite. Dionysius had a much more intense feeling for this ancient theology. He felt that it was something that existed but could no longer be approached, that becomes negative as one tries to approach it. Based on the intellect, so he thought, one can only arrive at positive theology. Yet, with the term, negative theology, he was really referring to an ancient theology that had disappeared.

Again, when we consider what appears in the second chapter as the ideal world, we could believe that it is something modern. That, however, is not the case, That ideal world actually is identical with a true idea of what appears in the ancient Persian epoch, just as I described it in my Occult Science, hence in the second post-Atlantean period. Among Plato and the Platonists, this ancient Persian living world of angels, the world of the Amshaspands, and so on, had already paled into the world of ideals and ideas due to a later development. Yet, what is actually contained in this ideal world and is clearly discernible in Scotus Erigena goes back to this second ancient Persian age.

What appears in Erigena's book as pneumatology, as a kind of pantheism is not vague and nebulous such as is frequently the case today, but a pantheism that is alive and spiritual, though dimmed in Erigena's writing. This pneumatology is the last remnant, the very last vestige filtered out of the first post-Atlantean, ancient Indian period.

And what about the fourth chapter? Well, it contains Erigena's living perception of the Mystery of Golgotha and the future of humanity. We hardly speak of this anymore today. As an ancient tradition, it is still mentioned by theologians, but they know of it only in rigidified dogmas. They even deny that man could attain such insight through living knowledge. But it did originate from what was thus cultivated as soteriology and eschatology. You see, the theology of former times was handed over, as it were, to the councils; there, it was frozen into dogmas and incorporated into Christology. It was not to be touched anymore. It was viewed as impenetrable to perception. It was removed, so to speak, from what was carried out in schools by means of knowledge. As it was, exoteric matters were already being preserved like nebulous formations from ancient times. But at least the activities in schools were to be linked with thoughts that emerged in the age of thinking. They were to be connected, after all, with the Mystery of Golgotha and the future of mankind. There, one spoke of the Christ being's rule among human beings; one spoke of a future day of judgment. The concepts that people could come up with were used for that.

Thus, we see that Scotus Erigena actually records the first three chapters as though they had been handed down to him. Finally, he applies his own intellect to the fourth chapter but in such a manner that he speaks of things that far surpass the physical, sensory world, yet have something to do with this world. We realize that he took pains to apply the intellect to eschatology and soteriology. After all, we know the kind of scholarly disputes and discussions Scotus Erigena was involved in. For example, he was involved in discussions of the question whether in Communion, that is, in something that was related to the Mystery of Golgotha, human beings confront the actual blood and the actual body of Christ. He took part in all the discussions of human will, its freedom and lack of freedom in connection with divine grace. Hence, he honed and schooled his intellect in regard to everything that was the subject of his fourth chapter. This is what people discussed then.

We could say that the content of the first three chapters was an ancient tradition. One did not change it much but simply communicated it. The fourth chapter, on the other hand, was a living striving; there, the intellect was applied and schooled.

What became of this intellect that was schooled there? What happened to the concepts of soteriology and eschatology arrived at by people like Scotus Erigena in the ninth century? You see, my dear friends, since the middle of the fifteenth century this has become our science, the basis of the perception of nature. Once, people employed the intellect in order to consider whether bread and wine in the Sacrament are transformed into the body and blood of Christ. They pondered whether grace is bestowed on man in one way or another. This same intellect was later used to consider whether the molecule consists of atoms and whether the sun's body consists of one form of substance or another, and so on. It is the continuation of the theological intellect that inhabits natural science today. Precisely the same intellect that stimulated Scotus and the others who were involved with him in the dispute over Communion—and the discussions were indeed very lively in those days—survived in the teachings of Galileo and Copernicus. It survived in Darwinism, even, say, in Strauss's materialism. It has lived on in a straight line. You know that the old is always preserved alongside the new. Therefore, the same intellect that in David Friedrich Strauss hatched the book The Old and the New Faith, which preaches total atheism, occupied itself in those days, with soteriology and eschatology; it continues in a straight line.

We could therefore say that if this book had to be written today based as much on modern conditions as Scotus Erigena based what he wrote on the conditions of his age, then, here (referring to outline above), total atheism would not appear, but rather our natural science. For, naturally, complete atheism would contradict the first chapter. In the ninth century soteriology and eschatology still appeared there, for then the intellect was applied to other things. But here, (see p. 281), materialistic science would emerge today. History reveals to us nothing else but this. Now, we can perhaps see what becomes evident from the whole conception of this work.

Basically, what is listed here (outline above) would have to appear in a different sequence. The third chapter would have to read: world view of the first post-Atlantean age. The second chapter, would have to read: world view of the second post-Atlantean age, and the first chapter: world view of the third post-Atlantean age. In the sense of Scotus Erigena—who lived in the fourth post-Atlantean age that only came to an end in the fifteenth century—the last chapter applies to the fourth post-Atlantean epoch. The sequence (in the outline) would therefore have to be: III, II, I, IV. This is what I meant when I said earlier that one receives the impression that things are actually mixed up. Scotus Erigena simply possessed bits of the ancient legacy but he did not list them in accordance with their sequence in time. They were part of the knowledge of his age, and he mentioned them in the order in which they were most familiar to him. He listed the nearest at hand as the highest; the others appeared so nebulous to him that he considered them to be inferior.

Yet, the fourth chapter is nevertheless most remarkable. Let us try to understand from a certain viewpoint what it should actually be. Let us go back into pre-Christian times. If we were to seek among the Egyptians a representative mind such as Scotus Erigena was for the ninth century, such a person would still have known something concerning theology in a most lively way. He would have had even more alive concepts of the ideal or angelic world, of the sphere that illuminates and permeates the whole world with spirit. He would still have known all that and would have said: In the very first age, there once existed a human world view that beheld the spirit in all things. But then, the spirit was abstractly lifted up into the heights. It became the ideal world, finally the divine world. Then, the fourth epoch arrived. It was supposed to be even more spiritualized than the theological epoch. This Greco-Latin period was really supposed to be more spiritualized than the third epoch. And above all, the fifth which then followed, namely our time, would have to be an even more spiritualized era, for with materialistic science in place of soteriology or eschatology it would have to be listed in fourth place, or we would have to add a fifth listing with our natural science, and the latter would have to be the most spiritual view.

Yet, in fact, my dear friends, matters are buried. We hear Scotus Erigena saying that man exists as a mineral being, lives and thrives as a plant, feels as an animal, judges and draws conclusions as a human being, perceives as an angel—something Erigena still knew from ancient traditions. Now, we who aspire to spirit knowledge would have to go even further. We would have to say: Right, human beings exist as mineral beings, live and thrive as plants, feel as animals, judge and draw conclusions as human beings, perceive as angels and, sixth, human beings behold—namely, imaginatively, the spiritual world—as archangels. When we speak of the human being since the first third of the fifteenth century, we would have to ascribe to ourselves the following. We perceive as angels and develop the consciousness soul by means of soul faculties of vision—to begin with, unconsciously, but yet as consciousness soul—as archangels.

Thus, we face the paradox that in the materialistic age human beings actually live in the spiritual world, dwelling on a higher spiritual level than they did in earlier times. We can actually say: Yes, Scotus Erigena is right, the angel experience is awakening in man, but the archangel experience is also awakening since the first third of the fifteenth century. We should rightfully be in a spiritual world.

In realizing this, we could really look back also to a passage in the Gospels that is always interpreted in a most trivial way, namely, the one saying: The end of the world is near and the kingdoms of heaven are at hand. Yes, my dear friends, when we have to say of ourselves that in us the archangel is developing vision so that we can receive the consciousness soul, then there results a strange view of this approach of the heavens. It appears that it is necessary to revise such conceptions of the New Testament once more from the standpoint of spiritual science. These views are very much in need of revision, and we really have two tasks: First, to understand whether our age is not actually meant to to be different than the age when Christ walked on earth and whether the end of the world of which Christ spoke might not be something we have behind us already? This is the one task we confront. And if it is true that we have the so-called end of the world behind us and we therefore already face the spiritual world, then we would have to explain why it has such an unspiritual appearance, why it has become so material, arriving finally at that terrible, astounding life that characterizes the first third of the twentieth century? Two mighty and overwhelming questions place themselves before our soul. We shall continue speaking about that tomorrow.

• 1. Johannes Scotus Erigena, 810–877, Irish philosopher of scholasticism in Paris.
• 2. Charles the Bald, 828–877, king of the Franconians, emperor from 875–877.
• 3. Dionysius the Areopagite: connected Christianity with neo-Platonic philosophy. Had strong influence on medieval mysticism.
• 4. Origen, around 185–254, Greek Church Father in Alexandria, later presbyter in Caesarea; basis of his philosophical theology: De principiis (“Peri archon”). Under Justinian I, during the fifth ecumenical council in Constantinople in 553, his teachings were condemned as heretical.
• 5. After the Church had forbidden the reading of Scotus Erigena's texts, all editions were ordered burned in 1225.
• 6. These words are reported by Plato in Timaios, 22 B.C.

Yesterday, we concluded with two significant questions resulting from considering the position of a personality such as John Scotus Erigena. In him, we discover a world view, dating from the first centuries of Christianity that throws its light into the ninth century. Based on everything we have learned recently, we can say that the manner of perception, the whole way of thinking, differed in the first centuries A.D. from what it was later on. As we already know, a great change occurred in the fourth Christian century. From the middle of that century onward, people simply thought much more rationally than they had done earlier. One could say that until that time all perception, all forming of concepts had sprung far more from a form of inspiration than later on when human beings became increasingly conscious of the fact that they themselves were working with thoughts. What we have found to be the consciousness of human beings prior to the fourth century A.D. is still echoed in statements such as that by Scotus Erigena that man makes judgments and draws conclusions as a human being but perceives as an angel. This idea Scotus Erigena brings up as an ancient legacy, as a kind of reminiscence, was acknowledged by anyone who thought at all prior to the fourth century A.D. It never occurred to people in those days to attribute to the human being thoughts that transmit knowledge or perception. They ascribed those to the angel working within man. An angel inhabited the body of human beings; the angel perceived, and human beings shared in this knowledge.

Such a direct consciousness had faded away altogether after the fourth century. In men like Scotus Erigena it emerged once again, drawn forth from the soul with effort, as it were. This proves that the whole way of looking at the world had changed in the course of these centuries. That is why it is so difficult for people today to turn their minds back to the mode of thinking and conceiving prevalent in the first centuries after Christ. Only with the help of spiritual science can this be done again. We have to arrive once more at views that will truly correspond to what was thought in the first centuries A.D.

Already in the days of John Scotus Erigena controversies such as the one over Communion and man's predestination began. These were unmistakable indications of the fact that what was earlier more like an inspiration people did not argue about had now moved to the level of human debate. This came about because, as time went on, many things were simply no longer understood at all.

Among the things that were no longer understood, for example, is the beginning of the Gospel of St. John in the form generally known. If we take this beginning of the Gospel of John seriously, it actually states something that is no longer present in subsequent centuries in the general consciousness of those who profess Christianity. Consider that this Gospel starts with the words: “In the beginning was the Word”—and then it says further that through the Logos all things were made, that is, everything came into being that belongs among created things, and nothing was created except through the Logos.

If we take these words seriously, we have to admit: They signify that all visible things, all the things of the world, came into being through the Logos and that the Logos is therefore the actual creator of all things. In the Christian thinking after the fourth century A.D. the Logos, rightly identified with Christ in the sense of the Gospel of John, was certainly not regarded as the creator of all visible things. Instead, Christ is contrasted with the Creator as the Father, as God the Father. The Logos is designated as the Son, but the Son is not considered the Creator; it is the Father Who is made into the Creator. This doctrine has persisted through the centuries and completely contradicts the Gospel of St. John. You cannot take this Gospel seriously and not regard Christ as the Creator of all things visible, and instead view the Father God as the Creator. You can see, my dear friends, how little this Gospel was taken seriously in later Christian times.

In our mind, we have to place ourselves in the whole mode of thinking of the first Christian centuries, which, as I have said, experienced a change at the point in time indicated above. This way of thinking was in turn structured on the basis of insights into the spiritual world left behind from ancient pagan times. In particular, we have to understand clearly how people viewed the Last Supper, which then continued in the Christian Sacrifice of the Mass. We have to understand the view concerning Communion, the main content of which is contained in the words: “This is my body”—pointing to the bread—and “This is my blood”—pointing to the wine. This content of Communion was truly comprehended during the first Christian centuries; it was even understood by people who were by no means educated but simply gathered together in remembrance of Christ in the Sacrament of Communion. But what did people actually mean by that? They referred to the following.

Throughout antiquity, people were in possession of a religious doctrine of wisdom. Fundamentally speaking, the further back we go in time, the more we find this religious teaching of wisdom based on the being of the Father God. When we consider the religions of very ancient times, preserved in decadent form in later religious faiths, they exhibit in all instances a certain worship of what had remained behind from the ancestor of a tribe or a people. In a sense, human beings worshiped the ancestral father of a tribe. You know from Tacitus' Germania¹ how even those tribes who then invaded the Roman empire and made possible the new civilization, definitely retained such memories of tribal deities although in many cases they had already changed to a different form of worship, namely, to that of local gods—something I have mentioned in the public lectures of the last course.² They believed that while generation after generation had passed since a certain ancient ancestor had lived who had established the tribe or nation, the soul, the soul-spiritual element of this tribal father, still held sway in the most recent generations.

This presence was believed to be connected with the physical community of the bodies in the tribe. After all, these bodies were all related to each other. They all had the same ancestry. The common blood flowed through their veins. The body and the blood were one. As people looked up in religious devotion to the soul-spiritual element of the tribal father, they also experienced the presence of the deity to whom the tribal father had returned, the god through whom this ancestral father now affected the whole tribe or nation by means of his soul-spiritual nature. The rule of this deity was seen in the bodies, in the blood that ran down through the generations. A profound mystery was sensed in the mysterious forces of the body and the blood.

In those ancient pagan times, people actually beheld the forces of the deity in what held sway in the body and circulated in the blood. Therefore, it is possible to say that when a follower of such an ancient world view saw an animal's blood or, what was more, human blood run out, he beheld in this blood the corporeality of the deity. In the bodies of his race or tribe, which were built up by the blood, he beheld the forms, the image, of the deity. People today no longer have any idea of how the divine-spiritual was worshiped then at the same time as the material substance.

Truly, through the blood of the generations flowed the power of the deity; through the bodies of the generations the deity formed its image. The soul and spirit of the ancestor rose up to this deity and hence worked upon the descendants with divine power and was worshiped as the ancestral god. Not only in regard to these ancient beliefs, but above all in regard to actual truth, the elements working in the human body depend on the forces of the earth. As you know, the body's origins lie in much more ancient times but the forces of the earth are active in the human body as it is today—containing the mineral kingdom—and in the blood.

In the human blood, for example, not only those forces are active that enter the human being through foods but also those that are effective in the whole planet earth. For instance, due to the fact that a person lives in a region rich in red soil, hence a region possessing certain geological characteristics and certain metallic inclusions in the soil, an effect proceeds from the earth to the blood. In turn, the formation, the body, of man is dependent on the earth. The body develops one way in warmer, another way in colder regions of the earth. The corporeality and the elements active in the blood depend on the forces working in the earth. This truth, which we are approaching once again today through spiritual scientific research, was immediately clear to people in antiquity due to their instinctive perception. They know that the earth forces pulsate in the blood.

Today we say that when we connect a telegraph machine in station A by wire to one in station B, we connect the machines one-sidedly. We transmit the electrical current through the wire but the circuit must be closed. It is closed when we make the so-called ground connection. You probably know that if we have a telegraph machine at one station, we guide the wire over the telegraph poles. Yet the circuit is then not closed and it must be closed. We transmit the current into the plate sunk into the ground at one station and do the same at the other station but do nothing more. We could run a different wire there, but we do not do that; we mount an earth-wire plate on both ends of the wire, and the earth takes care of the rest. We know this today as a result of science. We have to presume that electricity, the electric current, works within the earth.

Now people in antiquity knew nothing of electricity and electric currents. Instead, they know something about their blood. They stood on the earth and knew that something was in the earth that also lived in the blood. They looked at the matter differently; they did not speak of electricity but of an earthly element that dwelled in their blood. We no longer know that the earth's electricity lives in the blood. We only speak out of attempts to grasp the matter outwardly through mathematical and mechanistic conceptions. This is why human beings linked their conception of God to the earth's body as such. They realized that the divine element worked in the blood and in the body through the earth. This was what appeared in the concept of the Father God because people considered the primal ancestor, the father, of the tribe or their folk as the point of departure for the influence of the divine element. The primal ancestor was believed to be working through the earth as his means, and the effects of the earth in the blood and the whole human body were seen to be the effects of the divine.

Now these people of old had still another conception. They said, The human being is not only affected by the earthly element. It would be fine if only the earth influenced mankind, but that is not the case. The neighbor of the earth, the moon, works together with the earth's forces. Therefore, they said, it really is not the earth alone but earth and moon together that are effective. With this combination of earth and moon forces, they now linked conceptions of not only one uniform deity of the earth, but many subordinate deities who were then present in the pagan world. All the conceptions that existed of the deity, the elements that affected the human being through the body and blood, all these were the primal source that fed any view of God in this ancient period.

It is not surprising that all search for insight turned in antiquity to the earth, the moon, and the earth's influences and therefore people had to figure out what affected the earth. Thus, a most sophisticated form of science was developed. An echo of this science of the Father God still influenced the first three books by John Scotus Erigena I spoke about yesterday. Basically though, he was not really familiar any more with this primal wisdom, for he lived as late as the ninth century, but bits of this science had been handed down and been preserved. They referred to the insight that the Father God, Who was not created but creates, dwells in everything surrounding the human being on earth, that the other deities, who have been created but also create, live in it as well. They are then the various entities of the hierarchies. Furthermore, the visible world is spread out around man, the created as well as the noncreating. Finally, human beings are to await the world in which the deity as a noncreating and not created, hence, as a resting divinity, holds sway and receives all else into its bosom. This is what is contained in Scotus Erigena's fourth book.

As I have told you, this fourth book deals mainly with soteriology and eschatology. It presents the history of Christ Jesus, the Resurrection and the gifts of grace, but also the end of the world and the entering into the resting Godhead. The first three chapters of the great book by Scotus Erigena clearly show us a reflection of ancient world views, for basically only the fourth chapter is really Christian. The first three chapters are permeated with a number of Christian concepts but what predominates in them really dates from ancient pagan times. We also find this unchanged pagan wisdom in the Church Fathers of the first Christian centuries. We can say that through nature, through what the human being saw in the creatures surrounding him, he beheld the region of the Father God. He saw a world of ideals behind nature; he saw certain forces in nature. He also saw the rule of the Father God in the sequence of generation, in the development of mankind in individual tribes and nations.

In the first Christian centuries, another insight had joined this knowledge, which has been almost completely lost. The first Christian Church Fathers referred to something their later critics thoroughly eradicated. They said it was true that the Father God worked in the element flowing in the blood through the generations and expressed in the bodies, but He did so in constant conflict and together with His opponent powers, the nature spirits. This was a particularly vivid conception in the first Christian centuries, namely, that the Father God had never been quite successful in exerting His influence exclusively. Rather, He was waging a constant battle with the nature spirits who rule in any number of things in the outer world. Therefore, these first Christian Church Fathers said, The ancients of pre-Christian times believed in the Father God, but they really could not distinguish Him from the nature spirits, they actually believed in a kingdom of the Father God that included the domain of nature. They believed that the whole visible world has its source in it. This, however, is not true, so they said. All these spiritual beings, these various nature deities, do work together in nature, but first of all they crept into the things of the earth. Now, these earthly things we see around us with our senses, the things that have come about on earth, neither originate from these nature spirits nor from the Father God Who actually expressed His creative being only in the metamorphoses preceding the earth. What we see as earth does not originate from the Father God nor from the nature spirits. It comes from the Son, from the Logos, whom the Father God let spring forth from Himself so that the earth might be created by the Logos. And the Gospel of St. John, a mighty, significant monument was written in order to indicate: No, it is not as the people of old believed; the earth was not created by the Father God. The Father God made the Son come forth from Him; and the Son is the creator of the earth.

This is what the Gospel of John was supposed to state. This was basically what the Church Fathers of the first Christian centuries struggled for. This then became so hard to grasp for the developing human intellect that Dionysius the Areopagite preferred to say: Everything the intellect creates is positive theology and does not penetrate into the regions containing the actual mysteries of the universe. We can enter into them only if we negate all predicates, if we do not speak of the existence of God but of God's existence transcending existence, if we do not refer to the personality but the personality transcending personality. Hence, human beings only enter into them if they transpose everything into its negative. Then, through negative theology, he takes hold of the actual secret of existence. So Dionysius and his successors, such as John Scotus Erigena, who was already completely imbued with the intellect, did not believe that the human being was at all capable of explaining these mysteries of the universe with human intellect.

Now, what is implied by saying that the Logos is the creator of everything? We need to recall what was present in all the ancient pre-Christian times and endured in diminished form until the time of the Mystery of Golgotha. People believed that the deity works through the blood and through the body. This led them to believe that when the blood flows through the veins of the human being or the animals, it is really taken away from the gods. It is the rightful possession of the gods. Therefore, human beings can approach the gods if they return blood to them. The gods really wish to keep the blood for themselves; humans have taken possession of it. In turn, human beings must give the blood back to the gods, hence the blood sacrifice of ancient times.

Then came Christ and said: This is not what counts; this is not the way to approach earthly things. They do not originate from those gods who desire the blood. Look upon what works in the human being prior to the earth's influence on him; take bread, something that nourishes human beings, and look at how they initially partake of it. They partake of it by means of the sense of taste. The food in human beings goes to a certain point before it is transformed into blood. For it is only changed into blood after having passed through the walls of the intestines into the organism. Only there does the earth's influence begin; as long as the food has not been taken hold of by the blood, the earth's influence has not yet begun. Therefore, do not view blood as something corresponding to the god; behold that in the bread before it turns into blood and in the wine before it enters the blood. There is the divine element; there is the incarnation of the Logos. Do not look upon the element that flows in the blood, for that is an ancient legacy from the Moon age, the pre-earthly time. Before it turns into blood, food has to do with what is earthly in the human being. Therefore, do away with the conceptions of blood, body, and flesh. Instead, turn your thinking to what has not yet become blood nor flesh; direct your minds to what is prepared out there on earth, to what is of the earth without the moon having had an influence on it, to what comes from the sun's influence. For we behold the things through the light of the sun; we eat bread and drink wine, and in them we eat and drink the force of the sun. The visible things have not come about through the Father God, they have come into being through the Logos.

With this, the whole realm of human thought was directed to something that could not be attained from the whole of nature in the way people in the past had done. It could be attained only by looking upon what the sun lets shine forth upon the earth. Human thinking had been turned to something purely spiritual. Human beings were not supposed to extract the divine element from the physical things of the earth; they were supposed to behold this divine element in the purely spiritual, the Logos. The Logos was contrasted to the ancient conceptions of God the Father. That is, people's minds were directed toward a purely spiritual element. In pre-Christian times, people beheld the deity only through what was in a manner of speaking, organically brewed up in them and then arose within them somewhat like a vision. They did indeed behold the divine arising out of the blood. Now they sought to grasp it in the purely spiritual element. They were to view the visible things around them as a result of the Logos and not of what had only slipped into them, as the result of a god who had been creative in pre-earthly times.

Only by thinking in this manner do we actually approach the concepts of the first Christian centuries. Human beings had been told not to use any force other than that of their consciousness to attain the concepts with which to arrive at the comprehension of the deity. Human beings were being directed toward the spirit. Therefore, what could be said to them? They could be told: Formerly, the earth was so powerful that it bestowed upon you the concepts of the divine. That has ceased. The earth no longer gives you anything. Through your own efforts you must come to the Logos and to the creative principle. Up to now, you have basically worshipped something that was creative in pre-earthly conditions; now you must revere the creative principle in the earthly realm. But you can grasp this only through the power of your I, your spirit.

The first Christians expressed this by saying: The end of the world is near. They meant the end of the earth condition that bestows insights on man without his working on these insights with his consciousness. In fact, a profound truth is expressed in these words concerning the end of the world, for human beings had formerly been children of the earth. They had given themselves up to the forces of the earth. They had relied on their blood to give them their knowledge. This, however, was no longer possible, The kingdoms of the heavens drew near, the kingdoms of the earth ceased to be. Henceforth, man can no longer be a son of the earth. He has to turn into the companion of a spiritual being, a being that has come down to earth from the spiritual world, the Logos, the Christ.

The end of the world was prophesied for the fourth century A.D.: the end of the earth, the beginning of a new kingdom, the dawn of that age when man is to experience himself living as spirit among spirits. This is probably the most difficult to picture for people of our present age, namely, that our present manner of dwelling as human beings would not have been considered by people of the early Christian centuries as living in an earthly manner. It would have been seen as life in the spirit realm, after the destruction of the earth as it was when it still bestowed faculties upon the human being. If we properly understood the first Christians' way of thinking, we would not say that they superstitiously believed in the end of the world, which did not take place. As the first Christians saw it, this end did occur in the fourth century A.D.

The way we live today would have been considered by the first Christians as the New Jerusalem, the kingdom where the human being lives as spirit among spirits. However, they would have said: According to our view, the human being has actually entered heaven, but he is so worthless that he does not realize it. He believes that in heaven everything overflows with milk and honey, that there are no evil spirits against whom he has to defend himself. The first Christians would have said: Formerly, these evil spirits were contained in the things of nature; now they have been let loose, flit about invisibly, and human beings must withstand them.

Hence, in the sense of the first Christian centuries, the end of the world definitely did occur, but people simply did not comprehend this. It was not understood that instead of the god dwelling in the earth, a god whose presence is announced through events on the earth, now the supersensory Logos was present who must be recognized in the supersensory realm and to whom human beings must adhere by means of super-sensory faculties. Now, assuming this, we can comprehend why in the ninth, tenth, and eleventh centuries, a feeling of the end of the world was present again in civilized Europe. Again, people awaited the world's end. They did not know what the first Christians had meant by it. Out of this frame of mind of anticipating the end of the world, which spread over all of civilized Europe during these centuries, something developed that caused people to seek Christ in a more physical manner than they ought to have looked for him. People should realize that we are to find the Logos in the spirit, not based on nature's phenomena. This search for the Logos in the spirit is something that these people, who once again were in a mood of expecting the end of the world, did not understand. Instead, they set about this search in a more materialistic way. Thus, this mood gave rise to the Crusades, the material quest for Christ in his tomb in the Orient. People adhered to Christ in this mood of the world's end, in the misunderstood mood of the end of the world.

However, Christ was not found in the Orient. People received approximately the same answer his disciples had received when they sought him tangibly in his tomb—He whom you seek is no longer here—for He must be sought in the spirit.

Now, in the twentieth century, once again a mood of the world's end prevails—and these phenomena will increase—although people have become so lethargic and indifferent that they do not even notice this anticipation of the end of the world. But the man who did speak of this mood of the world's end in his Decline of the West³ made a significant and noticeable impression, and this frame of mind will become increasingly prevalent.

Actually, we do not need to speak of the end of the world. It has already ended in the sense that humanity can no longer find the spirit based on nature; it is a matter of realizing that we live in a spiritual world. Humanity's error of not knowing that we live in a spiritual world has brought misfortune over us. It causes wars to be bloodier and bloodier. It is becoming increasingly evident that human beings act as if possessed. Indeed, they are possessed by the evil forces who confuse them, for their speech no longer expressed the inherent content of their I. They are as though possessed by a psychosis. This psychosis is much talked about but little understood.

What the first Christians meant by the end of the world, and what they understood by it, did take place. The new age is here, but it must be recognized. People must realize that when the human being perceives, he does perceive as an angel, and when he becomes conscious of his own self, he becomes self-aware as an archangel. The significant point is that the spiritual world has already descended and human beings must become conscious of it. Many have thought that they take the Gospel seriously. Yet, although the Gospels clearly say that all things that were made, hence, all things under consideration should not be explained based on their earthly forces but originated through the Logos, people professed the Father God. He should be acknowledged as one with the Christ but as that aspect of the Trinity that was active until the earth was formed, whereas the actual ruler of the earth is the Christ, the Logos.

These matters could hardly be comprehended anymore in the ninth century when Scotus Erigena was active. This is why, on the one hand, his book about the divisions of nature is so great and significant. On the other hand, as I told you yesterday, this is why it is chaotic as well. This is why you only begin to find your way in it when you view it from the spiritual scientific viewpoint as we have done yesterday and today.

Well, as I said, in the fourth chapter, Erigena speaks of the uncreated entity that is not creating. If we understand the true meaning of what Scotus Erigena describes here, namely, the resting deity in which everything unites, then the necessary step has been taken. The world that is described in the preceding three chapters has come to an end. The world of the resting Godhead, the noncreated and noncreating being, is here.

Insofar as it is nature, the earth is declining. I have often called attention to the fact that this is the case by indicating that even geologists say nowadays that by and large, nothing new originates anymore on the earth. Certainly, as an aftereffect, plants develop, and so forth, plants, animals, and human propagate. But the earth as a whole has turned into something other than what it was. It is becoming fragmentized; it is splitting. The earth as a whole is already in a state of disintegration as far as its mineral kingdom is concerned.

The great geologist, Suess,⁴ expressed this in his work The Countenance of the Earth (Das Antlitz der Erde) by saying that we walk around on the corroding crust of the earth. He points to certain regions on earth where this corrosion is evident. He stresses that in the past this was different. This is what the world view and conception of life in the first Christian centuries referred to, though not based on facts of nature but on the moral facts of humanity's evolution.

Indeed, it is true that since the beginning of the fifteenth century we live even more in the resting Godhead than did Scotus Erigena. This Godhead awaits our attainment of Imagination and Inspiration through our own efforts. Then we will be able to recognize the world around us as a spiritual world. We will perceive that we are indeed in a spiritual world that has thrown off the earthly one. This deity awaits our realization that we are living after the end of the world and that we have arrived in the New Jerusalem.

It is indeed a strange spiritual destiny for human beings that they dwell in the spiritual world and neither know it nor wish to know it. There is no substance in any of the interpretations aiming at representing true Christianity as mixed up with some half-baked conceptions of an end of the world, which, after all, did not occur and was only meant symbolically, and so on. What we find in the writings of Christianity must be comprehended in its true meaning. It must be grasped in the right way. There must be clarity concerning the fact that the early Christian views referred to a world that had already changed after the fourth century A.D.

The teachings in the first Christian centuries stood in awe of the abundant wisdom of paganism, and the Christian Church Fathers attempted to connect it with the secret of Golgotha. Matters were actually viewed the way I described it today. Yet, it was not believed that mankind could understand them offhand. This is why the secrets of ancient time were preserved in dogmas meant only to be believed, not to be understood. The dogmas are by no means superstition or untruth. The dogmas are true, but they must be comprehended in the right way. They can only be understood, however, if this comprehension is sought for with the faculty that has developed since the beginning of the fifteenth century.

When Scotus Erigena lived, human reason was still a force. Scotus Erigena still sensed that the angel within him comprehended. After all, this human intellect was still a force in the best minds of that period. Since the middle of the fifteenth century, we have only the shadow of this reason, this intellect. Since that time, we have developed the consciousness soul. Yet we still retain the shadow of the intellect. When a person develops his concepts today, he is indeed far from having any idea that an angel is comprehending something within him. He simply thinks: I am figuring something out concerning the things I have experienced. He certainly does not talk about the presence of a spiritual being that is perceiving, much less of a still higher spiritual being, which he is by virtue of his self-awareness. The faculty with which we try to know things is only the shadow of the intellect that had developed for the Greeks, for example for Plato and Aristotle, and even for the Romans and that had still been alive for Scotus Erigena in the ninth century A.D.

But this is the point, my dear friends. We no longer need to be misled by the intellect; this insight can help us to progress. Today, people follow a shadow, the reasoning or intellect within them. They allow themselves to be misled by it instead of striving for Imagination, Inspiration, and Intuition, which in turn would lead once again into the spiritual world that actually surrounds us. It is really beneficial that the intellect has become like a shadow. Initially, we established external natural science with this shadowlike intellect. On the basis of this intellect we have to work further, and God rests so as to allow us to work. The fourth stage is completely here today. We just have to become conscious of it. If we do not become aware of this fact, nothing can develop further on earth. For what the earth has received as a legacy is gone; it is no more. New things must be inaugurated.

An individual such as Spengler beholds the fragments of the old civilizations. After all, they were prepared in sufficient numbers. In the ninth, tenth, and eleventh centuries, the mood of the imminent end of the world prevailed. Then came the Crusades. They really accomplished nothing new, for people sought in the material realm something that should have been sought in the spirit. Now, because the Crusades had brought no results, the Renaissance came, so to speak, to the rescue of mankind. Greek culture was again disseminated in what prevails today as education. Greek culture was present again but not as something new. The mathematical and mechanistic concepts of external nature developed since the beginning of the fifteenth century were the only new elements. But the ruins of antiquity were there, too, and they are crammed into our young people in the secondary schools. They then form the basis of civilization. Oswald Spengler encountered these fragments of the Renaissance. Like erratic blocks, they float on the sea that is intent on producing something more. Yet if you merely look upon these floating ice blocks, you behold the decline. For what has been retained from the past is characterized by a mood of decline, and nobody can galvanize our modern education. It is perishing. Out of the spirit, through primal creation, a different civilization must be created for the fourth stage is here.

This is how Scotus Erigena must be understood, who brought along his wisdom—already difficult to understand for him, I would say—from the Irish isle, from the mysteries that had been cultivated in Ireland. This is how we must interpret Scotus Erigena's work. Thus, not only the primal knowledge that can be attained through spiritual science, but also the documents of former times express this meaning if we are willing really to understand them, if we are willing finally to free ourselves from the Alexandrianism of the modern philosophic science that calls itself philology. For we must admit that the way things are handled today, we do not see much of either philology or philosophy. If we observe the methods of cramming and the way examinations are conducted in our educational institutions, very little is present of philo, of love. That has to emerge from a different direction, but we are in need of it once again.

It was my intention, first of all, to present the figure of Scotus Erigena to you. Secondly, I wanted to point out that the ways to properly grasp the buried primordial wisdom have yet to be sought. Nowadays people pay no attention to the fact that the Gospel of St. John clearly states that the Logos is the creative principle, not the Father God.

• 1. Publius Cornelius Tacitus, around A.D. 55 until 120, Roman historian and consul. His work, De origine et situ germanorum, is the oldest surviving source concerning the geography and ethnography of the Germanic peoples.
• 2. Contained in Die Naturwissenschaft und die weltgeschichtliche Entwicklung der Menschheit seit dem Altertum, six lectures, 1921. GA 325, 1969.
• 3. Oswald Spengler, 1880–1936, philosopher of history and culture.
• 4. Eduard Suess, 1831–1914, geologist. Das Antlitz der Erde, 3 vol., 1885–1909.

In the course of the last few days we had occasion to refer once again to the turning point in Western civilization in the fourth century A.D. with the example of John Scotus Erigena. In the present, when so many things are supposed to change, it is particularly important to understand clearly what really happened then to the human soul constitution. For it is a fact that we too are living in an extraordinarily significant moment in humanity's evolution; it is necessary for us to pay heed to the signs of the times and to listen to the voices of the spiritual world, so that out of the chaos of the present we may find a path into the future.

In the fourth century A.D., changes took place in the souls of those belonging to the leading nations and tribes, just as in our century changes in part have begun to develop, in part will still occur. And in John Scotus Erigena we have observed a personality who in a certain way was influenced by the aftereffects of humanity's world view prior to the fourth century A.D.

We shall now call to mind other things that also make evident this change of character. As far as can be done in a more outward manner, we will consider from this standpoint how the study of nature developed, in particular people's views of health and illness. We shall confine ourselves, first of all, to historical times. When we ask what the views concerning nature, particularly human nature in connection with health and illness were, and look back into the early Egyptian period, we can for the first time speak of any similarity between these ancient views and ours now. Yet, in regard to health, illness, and their natural causes, these ancient Egyptians held opinions still differing significantly from ours. The reason was that they thought of their relationship with nature quite differently from the way we think of it today. The ancient Egyptians certainly were not fully aware that they were gradually separating from the earth. They pictured their own bodies—and they naturally started by considering what we call “body” in an intimate connection with the forces of the earth. We have already mentioned in the last lecture how such a concept arises, how it is that the human being pictures himself in a certain sense closely bound inwardly to the earth through his body. I referred to the ancient soul forces in order to illustrate this. It was altogether clear to the ancient Egyptians that they had to see themselves as part of the earth, similarly to how the plants must be seen as belonging to the earth. Just as it is possible to trace the course of the sap or at least the earth's forces in plants more or less visibly, so people in ancient Egypt experienced the working of certain forces that, at the same time, held sway in the earth. Therefore, the human body was seen as belonging to the earth.

This could only be done because a view of the earth prevailed that was quite different from the view prevalent nowadays. The ancient Egyptians would never have thought of representing the earth as a mineral body the way we do it today. In a sense, they pictured the earth as a mighty organic being, a being not organized in quite the same way as an animal or man, but still, in a certain respect, an organism; and they considered the earth's masses of rock as a skeleton of sorts. They imagined that processes took place in the earth that simply extended into the human body.

The ancient Egyptians experienced a certain sensation when they mummified the human corpse after it had been discarded by the soul, when they tried to preserve the shape of the human body by mummification. In the formative forces proceeding from the earth and forming the human body, they beheld something like the will of the earth. They were trying to give permanent expression to this will of the earth. These Egyptians held views concerning the soul that seem somewhat alien to a person of today. We shall now try to characterize them.

It must be emphasized that when we go back to early Egyptian times, and even more so to the ancient Persian and Indian epochs, we find that, based on instinctive old wisdom, the doctrine of reincarnation—the return of the essential human entity in successive earth lives—was widespread. We are mistaken, however, in assuming that these ancient people were of the opinion that what we know as soul today is what always returns. Especially the Egyptian concept demonstrates that such a view did not exist. Instead, it must be pictured like this: The soul-spiritual being of man lives in spiritual worlds between death and a new birth. When the time approaches for this being to descend to the physical earth, it works formatively in the human body, in what comes through heredity from the successive generations. On the other hand, these ancient people did not think that what they bore in their consciousness during life between birth and death was the actual psycho-spiritual being that lives between death and a new birth and then shapes the human corporeality between birth and death. No, these people of antiquity pictured things differently. They said: When I find myself in the waking state from morning until evening, I know absolutely nothing of the soul-spiritual matters that are also my own affairs as a human being. I must wait until my own true being, which worked on me when I entered into earthly existence through birth, appears to me in half-sleep or in image-filled sleep, as was the case in these ancient times.

Thus, the ancient human being was aware that in his waking state he was not meant to experience his actual soul being; instead, he was to look upon his true soul entity as upon an external picture, something that came over him when he passed into the frequently described dreamlike, clairvoyant conditions. In a certain sense, the human being in former times experienced his own being as something that appeared to him like an archangel or angel. Only beginning in ancient Egypt, people started to think of this inner human essence as belonging directly to the soul.

If we try to characterize how the ancient Egyptians pictured this, we have to say the following. They thought: In a dream image, my soul-spiritual being appears to me in its condition between death and a new birth. It shapes the body for its use. When I look at the form of the body, I see how this soul-spirit being has worked like an artist on this body. I see much more of an expression of my soul-spiritual being in my body than if I look within. For that reason I shall preserve this body. As a mummy, its form shall be retained, for in it is contained the work the soul has done on the body between the last death and this birth. That is what I retain when I embalm the body and in the mummy preserve the image on which the soul-spiritual being has worked for centuries.

By contrast, the ancient Egyptians considered the experiences of the human being in the waking state between birth and death differently: This is really like a flame kindled within me, but it has very little to do with my true I. My I remains more or less outside my soul experiences in the waking state between birth and death. These soul experiences are actually a temporal, passing flame, enkindled in my body through my higher soul being. In death, they are extinguished once again. Only then does my true soul-spirit being shine forth, and I dwell in it until the new birth.

It is true that the ancient Egyptians imagined that in the life between birth and death they did not properly attain to an experience of the soul element. They viewed it as something that stood above them, enkindled their temporal soul element and extinguished it again; they saw it as something that took from the earth the earth's dust to form the body. In the mummy, they then tried to preserve this bodily form.

The ancient Egyptians really placed no special value on the soul element that experiences itself in the waking state between birth and death, for they looked beyond this soul nature to a quite different soul-spirit essence, which ever and again forms new bodies and passes through the period between death and a new birth. Thus, they beheld the interplay of forces between the higher human element and the earth. They really directed their attention to the earth, for to them, the earth was also the house of Osiris. Inner consciousness was something they overlooked.

The development of Greek culture, which began in the eighth century B.C., consisted precisely in man's placing an ever increasing value on this soul element that lights up between birth and death, something the ancient Egyptian still viewed as enkindled and subsequently dying flame. To the Greeks, this soul element became valuable. But they still had the feeling that in death something like an extinction of this soul element took place. This gave rise to the famous Greek saying I have characterized often from this viewpoint: "Better a beggar on earth than a king in the realm of shades." This saying was coined by the Greeks as they looked upon the soul element. To them, the latter became important, whereas it had been less significant for the ancient Egyptians. This development is connected with the view of health and illness held by the ancient Egyptians.

They thought that this soul-spiritual element, which does not really enter properly into human consciousness between birth and death, builds up the human body out of the earth elements, out of the water, the air, the solid substances of the earth, and the warmth. And since the ancient Egyptians believed that this human body was formed out of the earth, they set great store by keeping it pure. During the golden age of Egyptian culture, maintaining the body in a pure state was therefore something that was especially cultivated. The Egyptians thought very highly of this body. Hence, they felt that when the body became ill, its connection with the earth was in some way disturbed, in particular its relationship to the earth's water, and this relationship had to be restored. Therefore, there were hosts of physicians in Egypt who studied the relationship of the earthly elements to the human body. Their concern was to maintain people's health and, when it was disturbed, to restore it by means of water cures and climatic treatments. Already in the heyday of Egyptian civilization, specialized physicians were at work, and their activity was principally directed at the task of bringing the human body into the proper relation with the earth's elements.

Beginning with the eighth century B.C., particularly in Greek civilization, this changed. Now, the consciously experienced soul element became really important. People did not see it anymore in as close a connection with the earth as people in ancient Egypt had done. For the ancient Egyptians, the human body was in a sense something plantlike that grew out of the earth. For the Greeks, the psycho-spiritual element was the factor that held together the earth elements; they were more concerned with the way these elements in the body were held together by man's soul and spirit. On this basis developed the scientific views of Greece. We find them especially well expressed by Hippocrates, the famous Greek physician and contemporary of Phidias, Socrates, and Plato.¹ This view of the importance of the human soul element, which becomes conscious of itself between birth and death, is already clearly developed in Hippocrates, who lived in the fourth century B.C.

We would be very much mistaken, however, if we believed that this soul-spiritual element lived in Greek consciousness in the same way we experience it in our consciousness today. Just reflect on how poor, how abstractly poor this thing is that modern man calls his soul! When people speak of thinking, feeling, and willing, they picture them as quite nebulous formations. It is something that no longer affects the human being substantially. It had a substantial effect on the Greeks, for they had an awareness that this psycho-spiritual being actually holds together the elements of the body and causes their interplay. They did not have in mind an abstract soul element as people do today. They had in mind a full, rich system of forces that gives shape above all to the fluid element, bestowing on it the human form. The Egyptians felt: The soul-spirit being that finds its way from death to a new birth gives form to this fluid element. The Greeks felt: What I experience consciously as my soul element, this is what shapes the water; it has a need for air and then develops the circulatory organs in that form. It causes the conditions of warmth in the body and also deposits salt and other earthly substances in the body.

The Greeks actually did not picture the soul separately from the body. They imagined it molding the fluid body, bringing about the presence of air through inhaling and exhaling. They pictured the soul causing the conditions of warmth in the body, the body's warming and cooling processes, the breathing and movement of the fluids, the permeation of the fluids with the solid ingredients—actually representing only about 8% of the human body. The Greeks pictured all this in full vitality. They attached special importance to the shaping of the fluids. They imagined that in turn a fourfold influence was at work in these fluids due to the forces active in the four elements, earth, water, air, and warmth. This is how the Greeks pictured it.

In winter, human beings must shut themselves off from the outer world to a certain extent, they cannot live in intimate contact with it. They must rely on themselves. In winter, above all the head and its fluids make themselves felt. There the part of the fluids that is most waterlike works inwardly in the human being. In other words, for the Greeks this was phlegm or mucus. They believed all that is mucous in the human organism to be soul-permeated and particularly active in winter. Then came spring, and the Greeks found that the blood made itself felt through greater activity; the blood received greater stimulation than in winter. This is a predominantly sanguine time for human beings, emphasis is placed on what is centralized in the arteries leading to the heart and is active in the movement of fluids. In winter, it is the movement of the phlegm in the head, hence, this is the reason why the human being is then particularly inclined to any number of diseases of the mucous fluids. In spring, the blood circulation is especially stimulated.

The Greeks pictured all this in such a way that matter was not separated from the soul aspects. In a sense, blood and phlegm were half soullike, and the soul itself with its forces was something half physical in moving the fluids.

When summer approached, the Greeks imagined that the activity of bile (they called it yellow gall), which has its center in the liver, is particularly aroused. The Greeks still had a special view of what this is like in the human being. For the most part, people have lost this view. They no longer see how, in spring, the skin is colored by the blood's stimulation. They no longer notice the peculiar yellow tinge coming from the liver where this so-called yellow bile has its center. In the rosy flush of spring and the yellowish tinge of summer, the Greeks saw activities of the soul.

When autumn came, they said: Now, the fluids having their center in the spleen, the fluids of black bile, are particularly active. In this way, the Greeks pictured in the human being movements and effects of fluids that were directly under the influence of the soul. Unlike the Egyptians, the Greeks considered the human body by itself, apart from the whole of the earth. Thus, they came closer to the inner soul configuration of the human being as it is expressed between birth and death.

As this civilization progressed further, however, particularly as the Western element, the Latin-Roman element, gained ground, this view, which we find especially in Hippocrates who based his medical science on it, was to a certain extent lost. Hippocrates held that the soul-spiritual nature of man manifesting between birth and death causes these mixtures and separations of the fluids. When these do not proceed as the soul-spiritual influence intends them to go, the human being encounters illness. The soul-spiritual element actually always strives to make the activities of the fluids run their normal course. This is why the physician has the special task of studying the soul-spirit nature and the effect of its forces on the activities of the fluids in addition to observing the illness. If the activity of the physical body somehow tends to cause an abnormal mixture of fluids, then the soul element intervenes. It intervenes to the point of a crisis, when the outcome in the struggle between corporeal and soul-spiritual elements hangs in the balance. The physician must guide matters in such a way that this crisis occurs. Then, at some point in the body it will be evident that the bad fluid combination is trying to come out, to escape. Then it is the physician's task to intervene in a proper way in this crisis, which he has introduced in the first place, by removing the fluids that have accumulated in the way described above and that are resisting the influence of the soul-spiritual element. The physician accomplishes this either by means of purging or by bloodletting at the right moment.

Hippocrates' manner of healing was of a quite special kind and connected with this view of the human being. It is interesting that such a view existed that pictured an intimate relationship between the soul-spirit element as expressed between birth and death and the system of body fluids. Things changed, however, when the Latin-Roman influence continued this development.

This Roman element had less inclination for a full comprehension of the form and the system of fluids. This can be clearly seen in the case of the physician Galen² who lived in the second century A.D. The system of fluids that Hippocrates saw was no longer so transparent to Galen. You really have to picture it like this: Today, you watch how a retort in a chemistry laboratory is heated by a flame underneath, and you see the product of the substances inside. For Hippocrates, the effect of the soul-spiritual element in the fluids of the body was just as transparent. What took place in the human being was to him visible in a sensory-supersensory way. The Romans, on the other hand, no longer had a sense for this vivid view. They no longer considered the soul-spiritual element that dwells in man in its connection to the body. They turned their glance in a more abstract, spiritual direction. They only understood how the soul-spiritual being can experience this spirit within itself between birth and death.

The Greeks looked at the body, saw the soul-spiritual in the mixing and separating of the fluids and, to them, the sensory view in its clarity and vividness was the main thing. To the Romans, the essential thing was what a man felt himself to be, the feeling of self within the soul. To the Greeks, the view of how phlegm, blood, yellow, and black bile intermingle, how they are, in a manner of speaking, an expression of the earthly elements of air, fire, water, earth in the human being became something they saw as a work of art. Whereas the Egyptians contemplated the mummy, the Greeks looked upon the living work of art. The Romans had no sense for this, but they had an awareness for taking a stand in life, for developing inner consciousness, for allowing the spirit to speak, not for looking at the body but for making the spirit speak out of the soul between birth and death.

This is connected with the fact that at the height of Egyptian civilization, four branches of knowledge were especially cultivated in their ancient form: geometry, astrology, arithmetic, and music. In contemplating the heavenly element that formed the human body out of the earth, the Egyptians imagined that this body is molded in its spatial form according to the law of geometry; it is subject to the influences of the stars according to the laws of astrology. It is involved in activity from within according to the laws of arithmetic and is inwardly built up harmoniously according to the laws of music—music here conceived not merely as musical tone elements but as something that lives in harmonies in general. In the human being. as a product of the earth, in this mummified man, the Egyptians saw the result of geometry, astrology, arithmetic, and music. The Greeks lost sight of this. The Greeks replaced the lifeless, mummified element, which can be comprehended by means of geometry, astrology, arithmetic, and music, with the living soul element, the inner forming, the artistic self-development of the human body.

This is why we note in Greek culture a certain decline of geometry as it had existed among the Egyptians. It now became a mere science, no longer a revelation. The same happened with astrology and arithmetic. At most, the inner harmony that forms the basis of all living things remains in the Greek concept of music.

Then, when the Latin element came to the fore, the Romans, as I said, pictured this soul-spiritual being as it is between birth and death together with the inner spirit now expressing itself not as something that could inwardly be seen but inwardly experienced, taking its stand in the world through grammar, through dialectics, and through rhetoric. Therefore, during the time when Greek culture was passing over into Latin culture, these three disciplines flourished. In grammar, man was represented as spirit through the word; in rhetoric, the human being was represented through the beauty and forming of the word; in dialectics, the soul was represented through the forming of thought. Arithmetic, geometry, astrology, and music continued to exist, but only as ancient legacies turned science. These disciplines, which in ancient Egypt had been very much alive, became abstract sciences. By contrast, the arts attached to man—grammar, rhetoric, dialectics—took on new life.

There is a great difference between the way a person thought of a triangle in ancient Egypt prior to Euclid and the way people thought of it after Euclid's time. The abstract triangle was not experienced in earlier times the way it was conceived later on. Euclid signified the decadence of Egyptian arithmetic and geometry. In Egypt, people felt universal forces when they envisaged a triangle. The triangle was a being. Now, all this became science, while dialectics, grammar and rhetoric became alive.

Schools were now established in accordance with the following thinking: Those people who want to be educated have to develop the spiritual potential in their already existent soul-spiritual human nature. As the first stage of instruction, they must master grammar, rhetoric, and dialectics. Then, they have to go through what remains only as a traditional legacy but forms the subjects of higher education: geometry, astrology, arithmetic, and music. These then were the seven liberal arts, even throughout the Middle Ages: grammar, rhetoric, dialectics, geometry, astrology, arithmetic, and music. The arts that came more to the fore were grammar, rhetoric, and dialectics; the arts that were more in the background, conceived by the ancient Egyptians in a living manner as they stood on a relationship to the earth, were the subjects of higher learning.

This was the essential development between the eighth century B.C. and the fourth century A.D. Look at Greece in the fourth century or in the third or fifth centuries. Look at modern Italy. You find everywhere in full bloom this knowledge of the human being as a work of art, as a product of the soul-spiritual element, of life of the spirit through dialectics, rhetoric, and grammar. Julian Apostate³ was educated in approximately this way in the Athenian school of philosophers. This is how he saw the human being.

Into this age burst the beginning of Christianity. But by then all this knowledge was in a certain sense already fading. In the fourth century it had been in its prime, and we have heard that by John Scotus Erigena's time only a mere tradition of it existed. What lived in the Greeks based on the view I have just characterized, then was transmitted to Plato and Aristotle who expressed it philosophically. When the fourth century B.C. drew near, however, people understood Plato and Aristotle less and less. At most people could accept the logical, abstract parts of their teachings. People were engrossed in grammar, rhetoric, dialectics. Arithmetic, geometry, astrology, and music had turned into sciences. People increasingly found their way into a sort of abstract element, into an element where something that had formerly been alive was now to exist only as tradition. As the centuries passed, it became still more a tradition. Those who were educated in the Latin tongue retained in a more or less ossified state grammar, rhetoric, and dialectics. Formerly a person would have laughed if he had been asked whether his thinking referred to something real. He would have laughed, for he would have said: I engage in dialectics; I do not cultivate the art of concepts in order to engage in anything unreal. For there, the spiritual reality lives in me. As I engage in grammar, the Logos speaks in me. As I engage in rhetoric, it is the cosmic sun that sends its influences into me.

This consciousness of being connected with the world was lost more and more. Everything became abstract soul experiences, a development that was completed by Scotus Erigena's time. The ideas that had been retained from earlier times—from Plato and Aristotle—were only comprehended more or less logically. People ceased to find any living element in them.

When the Emperor Constantine⁴ made Rome the ruling power under the pretext that he wished to establish the dominion of Christianity, everything became entirely abstract. It became so abstract that a person like Julian Apostate, who had been educated in the Athenian school of philosophy, was silenced. With an aching heart, he looked at what Constantine had done in the way of ossifying concepts and ancient living ideas, and Julian Apostate resolved to preserve this life that had still been evident to him in the Athenian schools of philosophers.

Later on, Justinian ruled from Byzantium, from Constantinople, which had been founded by Constantine.⁵ He abolished the last vestiges of these Athenian philosophers' schools that still possessed an echo of living human knowledge. Therefore, the seven wise Athenians—Athenians they were not, they were a quite international group, men from Damascus, Syrians, and others gathered from all over the world—had to flee on order of Justinian. These seven wise men fled to Asia, to the king of the Persians,⁶ where philosophers had had to escape to already earlier when Zeno, the Isaurian,⁷ had dispersed a similar academy. Thus we see how this knowledge, the best of which could no longer be comprehended in Europe, the living experience that had existed in Greece, had to seek refuge in Asia.

What was later propagated in Europe as Greek culture was really only its shadow. Goethe allowed it to influence him and as a thoroughly lively human being, he was seized with such longing that he wished he could escape from what had been offered to him as the shadow of Greek culture. He traveled to the south in order to experience at least the aftereffects.

In Asia, people who were capable of doing so received of Plato and Aristotle what had been brought across to them. This is why during the sixth century Aristotle's work was translated based on the Asian-Arabic spirit. This gave Aristotle's philosophy a different form.

What had in fact been attempted here? The attempt had been made to take what the Greeks had experienced as the relationship between the soul-spiritual element and the body's system of fluids, what they had seen in full physical and soul-spiritual clarity and formative force, and to raise it up into the region where the ego could be fully comprehended. From this originated the form of science tinged with Arabism, which was especially cultivated in the academy of Gondishapur⁸ throughout the whole declining age of the fourth post-Atlantean epoch. This form of science was brought in later centuries by Avicenna⁹ and Averroes¹⁰ by way of Spain into Europe and eventually exerted a great influence on people such as Roger Bacon¹¹ and others. It was, however, a completely new element that the academy of Gondishapur meant to bestow on mankind in a manner that could not endure by way of the translation of Aristotle and certain mystery wisdom teachings, which then continued in directions of which we shall talk another time.

Through Avicenna and Averroes, something was introduced that was to enter human civilization with the beginning of the fifteenth century, namely, the struggle for the consciousness soul. After all, the Greeks had only attained to the intellectual or rational soul. What Avicenna and Averroes brought across, what Aristotelianism had turned into in Asia, so to speak, struggles with the comprehension of the human I, which, in a completely different way, has to struggle upward through the Germanic tribes from below to above—I have described this in the public lectures here during the course.¹² In Asia, on the other hand, the I was received like a revelation from above as a mystery wisdom. This gave rise to the view that for so long provoked such weighty disputes in Europe, namely, that man's ego is not actually an independent entity but is basically one with the divine universal being. The aim was to take hold of the ego. The I was supposed to be contained in what the Greek beheld as the being of body, soul, and spirit.

Yet, people could not harmonize the above with the I. This is the reason for Avicenna's conception that what constitutes the individual soul originates with birth and ends with death. As we have seen, the Greeks struggled with this idea. The Egyptians viewed it only in this way—the individual soul is enkindled at birth, extinguished at death. People were still wrestling with this conception when they considered the actual soul element between birth and death, the true soul element. The I, on the other hand, could not be transitory in this manner. Therefore, Avicenna said: Actually, the ego is the same in all human beings. It is basically a ray from the Godhead which returns again into the Godhead when the human being dies. It is real, but not individually real. A pneumatic pantheism came about, as if the ego had no independent existence but was only a ray of the deity streaming between birth and death into what the Greeks viewed as the soul-spiritual nature. In a manner of speaking, the transitory soul element of man is ensouled with the eternal element through the ray of the Godhead between birth and death. This is how people imagined it.

This shows to some extent how people of that age struggled with the approach of the I, the consciousness of the ego, the consciousness soul. This is what occurred in the span of time between the eighth century B.C. and the fifteenth century A.D., the middle of which is the fourth century A.D. People were placed in a condition where the concrete experience, which still dwelled in the mixing and the separating fluids and beheld the soul element in the corporeal being, was replaced. A purely abstract state of mind, directed more toward man's inner being, replaced this vivid element of perception.

It is indeed possible to say that until the fourth century A.D., Greek culture predominated in Romanism. Romanism only became dominant when it had already declined. In a sense, Rome was predestined to exert its activity only in its dead element, in its dead Latin language, in which it then prepared the way for what entered human evolution in the fifteenth century. This is how the course of civilization must be observed. For, once again, we are now faced with having to seek the way toward knowing of the approach of spiritual revelations from the higher worlds. Once again, we must learn to struggle, just as people struggled then.

We must be clear about the fact that what we possess as natural science came to us by way of the Arabs. The knowledge we have acquired through our sciences must be lifted up to Imagination, Inspiration, and Intuition. In a certain sense, however, we must also steel our faculties by means of observing the things of the past, so that we acquire the strength to attain what we need for the future. This is the mission of anthroposophical spiritual science. We must recall this again and again, my dear friends. We should acquire quite vivid perceptions of how differently the Greeks thought about soul and corporeal aspects. It would have sounded ridiculous to them if one had listed seventy-two or seventy-six chemical elements. They perceived the living effect of the elements outside and of the fluids within.

We live within the elements. Insofar as the body is permeated by the soul, the human being with his body lives within the four elements the Greeks spoke about. We have arrived at the point where we have lost sight of the human being, because we can no longer view him in the above manner and focus only on what chemistry teaches today in the way of abstract elements.

• 1. Hippocrates, 460–377 B.C., known already in antiquity as the greatest physician.
  
  Phidias, 500–435 B.C., Greek sculptor in Athens, master of classical style.
  
  Plato, 427–347 B.C., Greek philosopher, pupil of Socrates.
  
  Socrates, 470–399 B.C., moral philosopher in Athens, developed Socratic dialog to teach his students to think for themselves.
• 2. Galen, A.D. 129–199, outstanding physician in the days of the Roman emperors; personal physician to Marc Aurel. In his writings, he tried to compile all medical knowledge of antiquity.
• 3. Julian Apostate, A.D. 332–363, nephew of Constantine the Great, Roman emperor from A.D. 361–363.
• 4. Constantine I., the Great, A.D. 288–337, Roman Emperor from A.D. 306–337. Made Christianity the state religion in 324.
• 5. Justinian I, see note 8, Lecture IV.
• 6. “... to the king of the Persians ...”: Chosrau Nurshivan (king from A.D. 531–580) invited the sages from all over the world, particularly those versed in medicine, to Persia. He is frequently considered the founder of the academy of Gondishapur.
• 7. Zeno the Isaurian, A.D. 426–491, Byzantine emperor from A.D. 474–491, closed the school of philosophers in Edessa in 487.
• 8. Gondishapur (Djundaisabur), city founded by the king of the Sassanides, Shapur I (242–272). It was the cultural center of the kingdom for a long period.
• 9. Ibn Sina Avicenna, 980–1037, Persian philosopher and physician, author of over 100 books.
• 10. Ibn Roshd Averroes, 1126–1198, Arabian philosopher and universal scientist. Physician from Cordova. Following Aristotelianism, he attempted to combine philosophy and faith. His rational faith led to his banishment.
• 11. Roger Bacon, around 1216–1294, English Franciscan, called doctor mirabilis on account of his comprehensive knowledge. He included natural scientific perceptions in his theological manner of thought.
• 12. See note 2 to Lecture XVI.

Today and the day after tomorrow I propose to discuss a few of the more important facts relating to consciousness and to karmic connections.

If you cast even a superficial glance at that which exists in your soul from awaking in the morning to falling asleep at night—in the form of ideas, moods, impulses of will, adding of course all the impressions that approach the soul from without—then you have everything that may be called the objects of ordinary consciousness.

It must be clear to us that all these details of our conscious activity are dependent, under ordinary conditions, upon the instrumentality of the physical body. The immediate, irrefutable proof of this is that one must awake in order to live within these facts of the usual consciousness. For us this means that the human being must submerge himself in the physical body with what is outside it during sleep, and his physical body must be at his disposal with its instruments. He must be able to make use of them if the activities of the ordinary consciousness are to go on.

The following question then arises: In what way does the human being, as a soul and spiritual entity, make use of his physical instruments, his organs of sense, his nervous system? In what way does he use his bodily organs in order to exist in his ordinary consciousness? In the outer, materialistic world there is, first of all, the belief that the human being possesses in his physical instruments that which produces the facts present to consciousness. It has been frequently pointed out that this is not the case; that it is no more sensible for us to imagine that our inner corporeality, our sense organs or brain, bring forth the details of consciousness than to imagine that a candle creates the flame. The relation of what we call consciousness to the bodily mechanism is quite otherwise. We might compare it with the relation of a man to the mirror in which he sees himself. When we sleep our state of consciousness is comparable, let us say, to walking straight ahead in a certain space. If we do this we do not see ourselves, how our nose or forehead looks, and so forth. Only when someone steps forward with a mirror and holds it before us do we behold ourselves. But then we are confronted by what has always belonged to us. It is then there for us. It is the same with the facts of our ordinary consciousness. They exist continually within us, and have, as they exist there, nothing whatsoever to do with the physical body—as little as we ourselves have to do with the mirror mentioned above. The materialistic theory in this field is simply nonsense; it is not even a possible hypothesis. For the materialist in this field affirms nothing less than would be asserted were someone to declare that because he sees himself in a mirror the mirror created him.

If you wish to give yourself up to the illusion that the mirror creates you because you see yourself only when it is held before you, then you may also believe that parts of the brain or the sense organs produce the content of your soul-life. Both statements are equally intelligent and true. That the mirror creates the human being is just as true as that the brain produces thoughts. The facts of our consciousness persist. It is necessary for our ordinary organization that we be able to perceive these existing details of consciousness. To this end we must encounter that which reflects them—our physical body. We have thus in our physical body what we may call the reflecting apparatus for the facts of our ordinary consciousness. These facts exist in our soul and spiritual entity. We cannot perceive them psychically any more than we can perceive ourselves without a mirror. We become aware of that which lives within us and is a part of us by having held before us the mirror of our bodily nature. That is the actual state of things, except that one has not to do with a passive reflector in the case of the body, but with something that contains processes of its own. Thus it may be imagined that instead of the mirror which is silvered to produce reflection, the physical body has behind it all sorts of processes. The comparison suffices to show the relation of our spirit and soul being to the body. We will hold before our minds the fact that for all we experience in normal, everyday consciousness, the physical body is an adequate reflector. Behind or, let us say, below all the details of this usual consciousness lie the things that rise up into our ordinary soul-life, and which we must designate as facts within the hidden depths of the soul.

Some of that which exists in the hidden depths of the soul is experienced by the poet or the artist who knows—if he is a genuine poet or artist—that he does not conceive his works by means of logic or outer observation. He knows instead that they emerge from unknown depths, and are there, really there without having been gathered together by the forces of ordinary consciousness. But from these hidden depths of soul-life other things also emerge which, although in everyday life we are unaware of their origin, play a part in our everyday consciousness.

We saw yesterday that we can go down deeper, into the realm of half-consciousness, the realm of dreams, and we know that dreams lift something up out of the depths of soul-life which we cannot lift up by straining the memory in the simple usual way. When something long buried in memory stands before a human soul in a dream picture—which happens again and again—the individual in most cases could never, through recollection alone, lift these things up from the hidden depths of soul-life because the ordinary consciousness does not extend so far down. But that which is inaccessible to this surface consciousness is quite within reach of the subconsciousness, and in the half conscious dream state much that has remained or been preserved, so to say, is brought up or rises up.

Only those things strike upwards that have failed to produce their effects in the way usual to that emanation of human experience which sinks into the hidden depths of the soul. We become healthy or ill, moody or gay, not due directly to our ordinary course of life, but because a bodily condition results from that which has sunk down from our life experience. It is no longer remembered, but there below in our soul this sunken something works, and makes us what we become in the course of our lives. Many a life would be quite comprehensible to us, if we but knew what hidden elements had descended throughout its course into these subconscious depths. We should be able to understand many a man in his thirties, forties, or fifties, should know why he has this or that tendency, why he feels so deeply dissatisfied in certain connections without being able to say what causes this discomfort. We should understand a great deal if we were to follow the life of such a man back into childhood. We should be able then to see how in his early years his parents and environment had affected him, what was called forth of sorrow and joy, of pleasure or pain, perhaps entirely forgotten, but acting upon his general condition. For that which rolls down, and surges out of our consciousness into the hidden depths of soul life continues its operation there. It is a curious fact that the force, acting in this way, works primarily upon ourselves, does not leave, so to speak, the sphere of our personality. Therefore when the clairvoyant consciousness descends, (and this happens through what is called imaginative cognition), when the clairvoyant consciousness descends to the realm where, in the subconsciousness, things rule which have just been described, the seeker always finds himself. He finds that which exists and surges within him. And that is good; for in true self-knowledge the human being must learn to know himself in order that he may observe and become acquainted with all the driving forces that work within him.

If he gives no heed to these facts; if when he gains clairvoyant consciousness through exercises in imaginative cognition, and forces his way down into the subconscious—if he does not recognize that in everything working within him he finds only himself—then he is exposed to manifold errors. For he cannot become aware of this in any way comparable to the ordinary activities of consciousness. There arises for the human searcher the possibility, at one step or another, of having visions, of seeing shapes which are quite new and do not resemble those with which he has become acquainted in average experience. This may happen, but to believe that such things are part of the outer world would be a serious mistake. These phenomena of the inner life do not present themselves as in the ordinary consciousness. If one has a headache it is a fact of the ordinary consciousness. One knows it to be located in one's own head. If anyone has a stomachache he is aware of it within himself. If we descend into what we call the hidden depths of the soul, we remain absolutely within ourselves, and yet what we encounter may present itself objectively, as if it were in the outside world.

Let us consider a striking example: Let us assume that someone has a longing to be the reincarnation of Mary Magdalene. (I have already stated that I have counted during my lifetime twenty-four such Magdalenes!) Let us assume also that this wish is not as yet admitted: we do not need to admit to ourselves our own wishes, that is not necessary. But a woman reads the story of Mary Magdalene, and it pleases her exceedingly. The desire to be Mary Magdalene may arise at once in her subconscious mind while in the surface consciousness nothing is present but the attraction of this character. It pleases the person in question. In the subconsciousness, unknown to its possessor, there is a growing desire to be this Mary Magdalene. This individual goes through the world, and as long as nothing intervenes in her upper consciousness, that is to say, as far as she knows, she is simply pleased with Mary Magdalene. The ardent desire to be Mary Magdalene is in her subconscious mind, but she knows nothing about that, so it does not trouble her. She is guided by the details of the ordinary consciousness, and may go through the world as though she had no such injurious subconscious desire. But let us assume that, as a result of employing this or that occult method of reaching the subconscious, this woman succeeds in descending into herself. She might not become aware of a desire to be Mary Magdalene as she would of a headache. If she did her attitude towards her desire would be the same as towards a pain: she would just try to get rid of it. But in the case of an irregular penetration this desire presents itself as something outside the personality. The vision pretends to say: Thou art Mary Magdalene! It stands before her, projecting itself as a fact, and a human being, as evolution is today, is unable to control such a condition with the ego. With good, correct, and careful schooling this cannot happen, for then the ego goes along into every sphere; but as soon as something enters the consciousness without the accompanying presence of the ego it is produced as an objective fact. This observer believes that she recalls events surrounding Mary Magdalene, and identifies herself with her.

This is a real possibility. I emphasize this today in order that you may gather from it the fact that only careful schooling, and caution in regard to your entrance into the domain of occultism can save you from falling into error. It is to be understood that you must first see a whole world before you, must note objects around you, excluding however that which you relate to yourself, or which is within you, even though it appears as a world tableau—if you know that it is well to regard what you first see only as the projection of your own inner life, then you have a good corrective for the errors along the way. This is the best of all: regard, as a general rule, everything as phenomena emanating from yourself. Most of them arise out of our wishes, vanities, from our ambitions, in short, from characteristics relating to the egotism of humanity. These things project themselves, for the most part, outward, and you may now raise the question: How can we avoid these errors? How can we save ourselves from them?

We cannot save ourselves from these errors by the ordinary facts of consciousness. The deception arises from the fact that, although the human being is confronted in reality by a world-tableau, he cannot escape from himself, is all entangled in himself. From this you may see that it depends upon our coming, in one way or another, out of ourselves that we learn to differentiate: here you have a vision and there another. The visions are both outside ourselves; one is perhaps only the projection of a desire, the other is a fact, but they do not differ as radically as in ordinary life when someone else says he has a headache, and you have it yourself. Our own inner life is projected into space, just as the inner life of another person. How shall we learn to distinguish the one from the other?

We must undertake research within the occult field, and learn to distinguish true from false impressions, although they appear confused and all make the same claim to authenticity, as though we looked into the physical world and saw besides ordinary trees, imaginary ones. The real objective facts and those which arise from our own inner life are mixed together. How are we to learn to separate two realms which are so intermingled?

We do not learn this primarily through our consciousness. If we remain entirely within the confines of our mental life there is then no possibility of differentiation. This possibility lies only in the slow occult training of the soul. As we go on further and further we acquire real discrimination. This means that we learn to do in the occult realm what we would have to do in the physical world if trees born of phantasy and genuine trees stood side by side. If we run against phantasy-trees they let us pass through without resistance, but if we encounter real trees we bruise ourselves against them. Something similar, although of course only as a spiritual fact, must confront us in the occult field.

We can, if we go about it properly, learn in a comparatively simple way to distinguish between the true and false within this field, not however through ideas, but by resolution of will. This resolution may be brought about in the following way: If we look over our life we find in it two distinctly different groups of occurrences. We often find that this or that in which we succeed or fail is related to our abilities. That is to say, we find it comprehensible that in a certain field we do not succeed very well because in it we are not particularly bright. Where we assume on the contrary that we have ability, we find success quite natural.

Perhaps we need not always discern so distinctly the connection between what we carry out and our abilities. There is also a less definite way to realize this connection. If, for example, anyone in his later years is pursued by this or that blow of fate and, thinking back says to himself: “As a man I did little to make myself energetic”—or must say to himself: “I was always a careless fellow”—he may also say: “Well, the connection between my lack of success and my other omissions is not immediately apparent, but I do see that things cannot really succeed for a careless, lazy person to the same degree they are possible for one who is conscientious and industrious.” In short, there are successes and failures which we can comprehend and find natural, but there are others which happen in such a way that we cannot discover any connection, so that we say to ourselves: “Although in accordance with certain abilities this or that should have succeeded, it nevertheless did not succeed.” Thus there is distinctly a type of success or failure whose connection with our capacities we cannot see.

That is one thing. The other is that in regard to some things in the outside world which strike us as blows of fate, we can sometimes say: “Well yes, that appears to be just, for we furnished all the predisposing conditions;” but some other things that happen we cannot discover that we are in any position to explain. We have thus two types of experience; those whose relation to ourselves and our capacities we realize, and the other type just characterized, for which we cannot see that we are responsible. Our external experiences fall likewise into two classes: those of which we cannot say that we have produced the determining conditions, in contrast to others which we know we have brought about.

Now we may look around a little in our lives. That is a useful experiment for everyone. We could gather together all the things whose causes we cannot see, whose success led us to say “a blind chicken has found a kernel of corn”—things whose success we cannot attribute to ourselves. But we can remember and collect also failures in the same way, and those seemingly accidental outer events for which we know of no modifying influence. And now we make the following soul experiment: We imagine that we constructed for ourselves an artificial human being who, through his own abilities, brought about all our successes whose cause we do not understand. If something succeeded for us requiring wisdom just where we ourselves are stupid, then we conceive a person who is particularly clever in this field, and for whom the enterprise simply had to succeed. Or for an outer event we proceed in this way: let us say a brick falls on our head. We can see no reason, but we conceive someone who brought it about by running up to the roof and loosening the brick, so that he needed only to wait a little for it to fall. He runs down quickly, and the brick strikes him. We do this with certain events which we know have not been brought about by us in any ordinary way, and which happen very much against our will. Let us assume that at some time in our life we were struck by someone. In order that we may not find this too difficult we may place this event back in our childhood; we can pretend that then we contrived to be beaten by someone, that is, we had done everything to bring it about. In short, we construct for ourselves a human being who brings down upon himself everything for which we cannot account. You see, if progress in occultism is desired many things must be done which run contrary to ordinary events. If you do only what generally seems reasonable you get no further in occultism, for that which relates to higher worlds may seem to ordinary people quite foolish. It does no harm if the method does seem foolish to the prosaic outer man.

Well, we construct for ourselves this human being. At first it seems to us a merely grotesque performance, something the object of which we perhaps do not understand; but we shall make a discovery about ourselves, in fact everyone will who tries it, namely the astonishing discovery that he no longer wishes to detach himself from this being which he has himself built up, that it is beginning to interest him. If you try it you will see for yourself: you cannot get away from this artificial human being; it lives within you. And in a peculiar way: it not only lives within you but it transforms itself and radically. It changes so that at last it becomes something quite different from what it was originally. It becomes something of which we are forced to say “it really does exist within us.”

This is an experience which is possible to everyone. We admit that what has just been described—which is not the original self-created being of phantasy, but that which this has become—is a part of what is within us. Now this is just what has, so to speak, brought about the apparently causeless things during our lives. We find within ourselves the real cause of what is otherwise incomprehensible. That which I have described to you is, in other words, the way not only to peer into your own soul-life and find something, but it is the way out from the soul-life into the environment. For what we fail to bring off does not remain with us, but belongs to our environment. So we have taken something out of our environment which does not harmonize with the facts of our consciousness, but presents itself as if it were within us. Then we gain the feeling that we really have something to do with what seems so causeless in real life. A person acquires in this way a feeling of his connection with his destiny, with what is called Karma. Through this soul experiment a real way is opened to experience within himself, in a certain manner, his own Karma.

You may say: “Yes, but I do not understand exactly what you have said.” If you say that you do not fail to understand what you imagine, but you lack understanding for something which even a child can grasp, but about which you simply have not thought. It is impossible for anyone who has not carried out the experiment to understand these things. Only he who has done this can understand. These things are to be taken only as the description of an experiment that can be made and experienced by anyone. Each one comes to the realization that something lives within him which is connected with his Karma. If anyone knew this beforehand no rule would need be given him for the attainment of this knowledge.

It is quite in order that no one grasps this who has not yet made the experiment; it is not however a question of understanding in the ordinary sense, but an acceptance of information regarding something that our soul may undertake. If our soul follows such paths it accustoms itself not to live within itself only, in its own wishes and desires, but to relate itself to outer happenings, to consider them. Exactly the things which we ourselves have not desired, we have built into that which is here considered. And when we have come to face our Destiny so that we can calmly take it upon us, and think in regard to what we usually murmur and rebel against: “We accept it willingly, for we ourselves have decreed it,” then there arises a state of mind and heart in which, when we force our way down into the hidden depths of soul, we can distinguish with absolute certainty the true from the false. For then is shown with a wonderful clarity and assurance what is true and what false.

If you behold any sort of vision with the mental eye, and can as it were by a mere look, banish it, drive it away, simply by the use of all the inner forces with which you have become acquainted—then it is just a phantasm. But if you cannot get rid of it in this fashion, if you can banish at most that which reminds you of the outer world; if the really visionary quality, the spiritual thing remains like a solid fact—then it is true. But you cannot make this distinction until you have done what has been described. Therefore without the above-mentioned training there can be no certainty in the differentiation between the true and false upon the super-sensible plane. The essential thing in this soul experiment is that we always remain in full possession of our ordinary consciousness in regard to what we desire, and that by means of this experiment we accustom ourselves to look upon what we in our ordinary consciousness do not at all want, and is repugnant to us, as something willed into existence by us. One may in a certain sense have reached a definite degree of inner development; but unless, through such a soul experiment, we have learned to contrast all the wishes, desires, sympathy and antipathy which live in the soul with our relation to what we have not wished, then we shall make mistake after mistake.

The greatest mistake in the Theosophical Society was first made by H. P. Blavatsky; for although she fixed her spiritual attention upon the realm where Christ may be found, in the contents of her upper consciousness, in her wishes and desires, there was a constant antipathy, even a passion against everything Christian or Hebrew, and a preference for all other spiritual cultures on earth, and because she had never gone through what has been described today she conceived of the Christ in an entirely false way. That was quite natural. It passed over to her nearest students, and has been dragged along, although grotesquely coarsened, to the present day. These things extend to the highest spheres. One may see many things upon the occult plane, but the power of discrimination is something different from mere sight, mere perception. This must be sharply stressed.

Now the problem is this: When we sink down into our hidden soul-depths (and every clairvoyant must do this,) we first come into what is fundamentally ourselves. And we must learn to know ourselves by really making the transition, by having a world before us, of which Lucifer and Ahriman always promise to give us the kingdoms. This means that our own inner self appears before us, and the devil says: “This is the objective world.” That is the temptation that even Christ did not escape. The inner illusions of the inner world were presented, only He, through His inherent power, recognized from the very beginning that it is not a real world, but a world that is within. It is through this inner world alone, which we must separate into two parts in order to get rid of one—our own personal part—and have the other remain, that we pass through the hidden depths of our soul-life out into the objective super-sensible world. And just as our spiritual-soul kernel must make use of our physical body as a mirror for outer perception, for the facts of ordinary consciousness, so must the human being make use of his etheric body as a reflecting apparatus for the super-sensible facts which next confront him. The higher sense organs, if we may so describe them, open within the astral body, but what lives in them must be reflected by the etheric body, just as the spiritual and soul activity of which we are aware in ordinary life is reflected by the physical body. We must now learn to manage our ether body, and it is entirely natural since our etheric body is usually unknown to us, although it represents what vitalizes us, that we must become acquainted with it before we can learn to recognize that which enters us from the super-sensible objective world and may be reflected by this ether body.

You now see what we experience when we descend into the hidden depths of our soul life. It is primarily ourselves, and the projection of our wishes is very similar to what we usually call the life in Kamaloca [Region of Burning Desire, or of Cleansing Fire; also Purgatory.] It differs from it only in that when anyone in ordinary life thus pushes forward into imprisonment within himself (which is what it may be called,) he has still his physical body to which he can return. But in Kamaloca the physical body is gone, even part of the etheric body—the part which most immediately reflects for us—but the universal life-ether surrounding us serves as an instrument of reflection, and mirrors everything that is within us. Thus in the Kamaloca period our own inner world is built up about us as an objective world, all our wishes, desires, all that we feel, and to which we are inwardly attuned.

It is important to understand that the primary characteristic of the life in Kamaloca is our imprisonment within ourselves, and this prison is the more securely fastened by the fact that we cannot return to any sort of physical life to which our whole inner activity has been related. Only when we live through this Kamaloca period in such a way as to realize gradually (we do come to this gradually,) that it all may be got rid of by experiencing our-self otherwise than through mere desires and so forth, only then is our Kamaloca prison opened.

How is this meant? In the following way: Let us suppose that someone dies with a definite wish; this wish belongs to that which projects itself outward and is built up around him in some kind of imagery. Now as long as this desire lives within him it is impossible, in regard to it, to open Kamaloca with any sort of key. Only when he realizes that this wish cannot be satisfied except by discarding it, when his attitude towards it becomes the opposite to what it has been, then gradually with the wish everything that imprisons us in Kamaloca will be torn from the soul. Only then do we come into the realm between death and rebirth which has been called the devachanic [Devachan = Heaven.], and which may be entered also through clairvoyance when we have recognized that which belongs to the self alone. In clairvoyance it is reached through a definite degree of development; in Kamaloca through the passage of time, simply because time so torments us through our own desires that at last they are overcome. By this means that which has been dangled before us as if it were the world and its splendor is destroyed.

The world of super-sensible realities is what is usually called Devachan. How does this world of super-sensible facts appear before us? Here upon this earthly globe we can speak of Devachan only because in clairvoyance, when the self has been really conquered, we enter at once into the world of super-sensible facts, which are objectively present, and these facts coincide with those of Devachan.

The most important characteristic of this devachanic world is that in it moral actualities are no longer separable from the physical, that moral and physical laws are one and the same. What does that mean? Well, is it not true that in the ordinary physical world the sun shines upon the just and the unjust? Whoever commits a crime may be put in prison, but the physical sun is not darkened. That is to say: in the physical world there is a realm of moral and physical laws, leading in two very different directions. It is not so in Devachan, not at all; instead of this, everything proceeding from morality, from intelligent wisdom, from the aesthetically beautiful, and so on, leads to growth (is creative,) and that which arises from immorality, intellectual falsity, and aesthetic ugliness leads to withering and destruction. And there the laws of nature are such that the sun does not shine upon the just and the unjust alike but, if we may speak figuratively, it darkens upon the unjust; so that the just, passing through Devachan, have there the spiritual sunshine, that is to say, the influence of the fertilizing forces that bring about their forward progress in life. The spiritual forces draw back from the dishonest or ugly human being. The following is possible there which is impossible here on earth. When two people—just and unjust—walk here side by side, the sun cannot shine upon one and not upon the other; but in the spiritual world the effect of the spiritual forces depends absolutely upon the quality of the individual concerned. That is to say: the laws of nature and the spiritual laws do not follow two separate roads, but one and the same. That is the fundamental, essential truth. In the devachanic world the natural, moral, and intellectual laws act together as one.

As a result the following occurs: If a human being has entered and lives through the devachanic world he has within him what is left over from his last life of justice and injustice, good and evil, aesthetic beauty and ugliness, truth and falsehood. All this residue acts however in such a way that it takes immediate possession of the natural laws. We may compare the law there with the following in the physical world: If anyone in the physical world had stolen or lied and, seeking the sunlight, found that the sun did not shine upon him, could not find it anywhere, and thus through lack of sunshine developed a disease ... or let us rather assume as an example that someone in the physical world who was a liar had difficulty in breathing; that would be an exact parallel with what would be the case in the devachanic world. To the person who has burdened himself with this or that, something happens in his spiritual and soul nature so that the natural law at once and absolutely expresses the spiritual law. Hence, if the further development of this personality is brought about in this way, as he progresses gradually and is more fully permeated by these laws, such characteristics develop in him that he becomes an expression of the qualities which he brought over from his past life. Just let us suppose that someone has been two hundred years in Devachan, and has gone through it, having been in his last life a liar: the spirits of Truth withdraw from him. There dies in him that which in a truthful soul would be invigorated.

Or let us assume that someone with a pronounced quality of vanity which he has not given up goes through Devachan. This vanity in Devachan is an extraordinarily evil-smelling emanation, and certain spiritual beings avoid a personality who gives out the offensive evaporation of ambition or vanity. This is not a figurative statement. In Devachan vanity and ambition are extremely evil exhalations, and lead to the withdrawal of the beneficent influence of certain beings who retreat before this atmosphere. This could be compared to the placing in the cellar of a plant which thrives only in sunlight. A vain person cannot thrive. He will grow up with this characteristic. When he reincarnates he lacks the strength to build in the good influences. Instead of developing certain organs in a healthy way, he forms an unhealthy part in his organism. Thus not only our physical limitations, but our moral and intellectual ones as well show us the kind of human beings we become in life. Only when we emerge from the physical plane do natural and spiritual law go side by side. Between death and a new birth they are a single whole. And in our soul are implanted the natural forces which destroy if they are the result of the immoral deeds of past lives, but which fructify if they are the result of noble ones. This is true not only for our inner constitution, but also for that which falls upon us from without as our Karma.

In Devachan the essential fact is that no difference exists there between natural and spiritual law, and it is the same for the clairvoyant who really penetrates to the super-sensible worlds. These laws of the super-sensible worlds are radically different from those which rule upon the physical plane. It is simply impossible for the clairvoyant to differentiate in the manner of the materialistic mind when someone says: “That is only a law of objective nature.” Behind this objective natural law there exists always in reality a spiritual law. A clairvoyant cannot cross a scorched meadow, for example, or a flooded district, cannot perceive a volcanic eruption without thinking that behind the facts of nature are spiritual forces, hidden spiritual beings. For him a volcanic eruption is at the same time a moral deed, even though its morality may lie in an entirely different, undreamed-of realm. Those who always confuse the physical with the higher worlds will say: “Well, when innocent human beings are destroyed by a volcanic outbreak, how can one assume that it is a moral deed?” We do not need to worry about that. Such a judgment would be as cruelly philistine as the opposite idea: namely, to regard it as a punishment from God upon the people who are settled around the volcano. Both judgments are possible only to the narrow-minded standpoint of the physical world. Such is not the question, which may have to do with much more universal things. Those who live on the slope of a volcano, and whose property is destroyed by it, may be for this life entirely innocent. It will be made up to them later. This does not make us hardhearted and unwilling to help them (that again would be a narrow-minded interpretation of the matter). But in the case of volcanic eruptions the fact is that in the course of the earth evolution certain things happen through human deeds which retard human evolution, and just the good gods must work in a certain way for a balance which is sometimes achieved through such natural phenomena.

This application of the law is to be seen only in occult depths: that compensation is created for what is done by men themselves against the genuine development of humanity. Every event, whether a mere activity of nature or not, is at bottom something moral, and spiritual beings in the higher worlds are the bearers of the moral law behind the physical fact. If you simply conceive a world in which no separation of natural and spiritual laws can be considered, a world in which, with other words, justice rules as a natural law, you have then the devachanic world. Therefore one need not think that in this devachanic world through any sort of arbitrary decision an unworthy action has to be punished, because in that realm the immoral destroys itself as inevitably as fire consumes inflammable material, and morality is self-stimulated, and advances itself.

We thus see that the essential characteristic, the innermost nerve of existence, so to speak, is quite different for the different worlds. We gain no idea of the several worlds if we do not consider these peculiarities which differ so radically upon different levels. We may thus correctly characterize physical world, Kamaloca, and Devachan: in the physical world natural and spiritual law run side by side as two series of facts; in Kamaloca the human being is confined within himself, as if in a prison of his own being; the devachanic world is the complete opposite of the physical; there natural and spiritual law are one and the same. These are the three characteristics, and if you consider them carefully, striving sensitively to realize how very different from our own a world must be in which the moral, intellectual, even the law of beauty are at the same time natural law, then you will gain an acute impression of conditions in the devachanic world.

In our physical world when we meet an ugly or a beautiful face we have no right to treat the ugly person as if he must be psychically revolting, or the beautiful one as if he must necessarily be worthy of high esteem. In Devachan it is quite otherwise. There we meet no ugliness that is not deserved, and it will be impossible for anyone who, because of his preceding incarnation, is obliged in this one to wear an ugly face, but who strives throughout this life to be true and honorable, to meet us in Devachan with any sort of unpleasant appearance. He will have transformed his ugliness into beauty. But it is equally true that he who is untruthful, vain, or ambitious in this life will wander about in Devachan with some hideous form. And something else is also true: In ordinary physical life we do not see that an ugly face continually robs itself, nor that a beautiful one contributes something to itself, but in Devachan it is like that; ugliness is an element of progressive destruction, and we cannot perceive beauty without assuming that it is the result of an equally continuous furtherance and help.

We must feel quite otherwise towards the devachanic or mental world than towards the physical world. And this is necessary: to differentiate in these sensations, to see the essential which matters, in order that you may appropriate not only the description of these things, but that you may take away feelings, sensitivity towards that which is described in spiritual science. If you try to soar upwards to an appreciation of a world in which morality, beauty, and intellectual truth appear with the inevitability of natural law then you have the feeling of the devachanic world; and this is why we must, so to say, collect so much material and work so much, in order that the things which we work out for ourselves may at last be merged into one feeling.

It is impossible for anyone to come easily or lightly to a real knowledge of what must gradually be made clear and comprehensible to the world through spiritual science. There are many different movements that say, “Oh why must so many things be learned in spiritual science? Are we to become pupils again? Feeling is all that matters.” It does matter, but it must be the right feeling, which must first be developed! This is true of everything. It would be pleasanter, would it not, for the painter if he did not have to learn the technique of his art, if he did not have to bring out upon the canvas, at first slowly, the final result, if he needed only to exhale in order to have his finished work before him! In our world today it is a curious fact that the more the realm of the soul is in question, the harder it is for people to realize that nothing is accomplished by mere exhaling! In music it would not be admitted that one could become a composer without learning anything of composition; there it is quite obvious. This is so also with painting, though people admit it less easily, and in poetry they admit it even less, otherwise there would be in our own time fewer poets. For actually no time is as unpoetic as our own though there are so many poets. If it is not necessary to have studied poetry, but only to be able to write (which naturally has nothing to do with poetic art) and of course to spell correctly—we need only to be able to express our thoughts! And for philosophy still less is required. For today, that anyone may judge straight away anything concerning the conceptions of life and the world is regarded as a matter of course, since everyone has his own point of view. One finds again and again that no value is set by such people upon the carefully worked out personal possession of the means and methods of cognition and of research in the world, gained through every resource of inner work. Instead, it seems to them obvious that the standpoint of one who has labored long before venturing to give out even a little about world secrets has no greater value than that of the one who simply takes it upon himself to have a standpoint. Anyone can count nowadays as a man with a world conception.

This, on the contrary, is what really matters, upon which everything depends; that we labor with all our energy in order that what we work out for ourselves we may at last gather together and carry over into feelings, which through their coloring give the highest, the truest knowledge. Struggle through, by working towards a feeling, an impression of a world in which natural and spiritual law coincide. Then if you work seriously—no matter though people believe you to have learned only theoretically, although you have striven hard in working through this or that theory—you will realize that it makes an impression upon the devachanic world. If you have not simply imagined a feeling, but evolved it by years of careful work, then this feeling, these nuances of sensibility, have a strength which will bring you further than they could reach of themselves; for through earnest, eager study, they have become true. Then you are not far from the point where these nuances burst asunder, and there lies before you the reality of Devachan. For if the nuances of feeling are truly worked out they become a power of perception.

Therefore, if work along these lines is undertaken by student groups upon a basis of truth, honesty, and patient practice, outside of all sensation, their meeting places become what they should be: schools to lead men into spheres of clairvoyance. And only those who cannot wait for this, or who will not co-operate, can have an erroneous view of these matters.

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.