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After explaining that there are no German verbal forms equivalent in meaning to the noun “Reason,” which correspond to the Latin intelligere, intellectualis, intelligens, and intelligibilis, etc., and that therefore he has retained the Latin words, he proceeds:

In a Chapter of the Summa Theologica, “Concerning the gift of Intellect”—that is, concerning the strengthening of the normal human reason up to the point of vision (through the gift of the Holy Ghost) Thomas clearly defines the place in which man stands as a learning being.

The word “intellectus” contains in itself a certain inner perception: for “intelligere” means at the same time “to read inwardly.” And this is quite clear if one considers the difference between intellect and sense: for perception by the senses is occupied (note the passive form!) with external sensible qualities; but perception by the intellect penetrates (note the active form!) to the essence of things. For the object of the intellects is: what something is, as Aristotle puts it in the third book Concerning the Soul.

But that which is hidden internally is of manifold kinds, that to which man's perception must penetrate, so to say, to the inner side. For under the accidental qualities lies hid the real nature of the thing; behind the words lies their meaning; under similarities and figures lies the truth which is represented—for intelligible things are, as it were, internal, compared with the things that are perceived by the senses, which are thus externally perceived—and in causes lie hid the effects and vice versa. Therefore the word “inward reading” (intellectus) can be used in respect of all this.

Since man's acquisition of knowledge begins from the senses, that is, from outside, it is clear that the stronger the light of the intellect is, the deeper it can penetrate into the innermost things. But the natural light of our intellects is of limited power; and therefore it can advance only to a certain limit. In order to penetrate further, in order to gain knowledge of something which cannot be gained by the natural light, man requires a supernatural light. And this supernatural light given to man, is called “The gift of the Intellect.” (Summa Theologie a, II, 2. Quaestio VIII. Art. 1.)

The central question for Thomas, “What reality have these abstract conceptions?” which man thus “reads inwardly,” leads to the very heart of Thomism [p. 67-69].

Since things are the creations of God—as a house would be the creation of the architect, if he had also shaped all the building material from complete formlessness—their nature, their “substance” is implanted in them—as “universalia in rebus”—and can be “read inwardly” in them by men through the “natural light”—the light of understanding; and they can become the possession of the soul as “universalia post res.” But beforehand the nature of things rested in God, who saw it in self-reading through the “lumen gloriae” the light of glory (the whole and each part in one glance, so that the difference between universal and special form as yet did not exist). At the time of transition of the plan of creation to the realm of the middle light, of the “lumen gratiae” of the Light of Grace, that was poured on to the Hierarchies there arises the division into “morning knowledge” and “evening knowledge.” of which the former proceeds from the universal to the particular, and the latter goes backwards from the particular to the universal.

Thus the quality “inteiligere” is attributed to:—

1. God in the light of glory, of “doxa,” of essential revelation.

2. The Angels, in the light of grace, of “gratia,” because God “has created in the angelic intelligence everything he has created in the nature of separate things,” as “universalia ante res” and

3. Men, who must laboriously collect their knowledge of separate things in “Natural Light”—since the loss of Paradise.

But just as not only an eye but also a legible book is necessary for outward reading, so also inward reading can only take place if something “readable” (intelligible), something knowable is visible, that is, a spiritual substance illuminated by one of the three kinds of knowledge light.

And a third condition of achieving knowledge in reality, is that the “Eye of inward reading”—the “intellectus” is not too weak to grasp the fullness of the splendour which emanates from a spiritual substance.

A thing is capable of being understood, in so far as it is in a condition of actuality. Therefore, God, who is pure actuality with no admixture of potentiality, is above all things capable of being understood. But what is supremely capable of being understood is not so by any intellect, on account of the excess of the intelligible over the intellect. As the sun, which is visible in the highest degree, cannot be seen by the bat, because of the excess of its light.

As Faust says to the sunrise: “It rises! and blinded I turn away my eyes, pierced by pain.” By “excess of light,” says Faust:

“So let the sun stay behind me, we live by the coloured reflection.”

And Thomas says:—

So far we may say that we see everything in God and judge everything according to Him, just as we know and judge everything by participation in His light. For the natural light of reason is also a certain participation in the divine light; as one may also say that we see and judge everything physical in the sun, that is, through the sun's light ...

But as it is not necessary to see the substance of the sun in order to see something physically, so it is not necessary, in order to see something with the intellect, that the essence of God be seen. (S. Theol. I. Quaestio XII, Art. XI).

The light of reason, the natural light innate in man, is participation in the divine light—like the “coloured reflection” from the “excess of flame” of the sun. This “intellectualism” of Thomas—often criticized—is the deepest well of his mighty thought-power. As thinker he knows himself also to be God-protected—attached to heaven by the thread of light. His thought is full of the attitude of prayer.

And the consummation of this attitude in his thought are Thomas^' proofs of the existence of God. They do not overstep the realm of the “lumen natural,” but push thought to the very source of this light [pp. 69, 70].

... our natural knowledge proceeds from the senses. Wherefore our natural knowledge can reach as far as the point to which the senses can lead it. But our intellect cannot stretch beyond the realm of the senses so as to behold the divine Essence; for creatures that are dependent on the senses are the productions of God, which do not equal the virtue of their cause. Therefore, the whole virtue of God cannot be known from the knowledge of the sense world, and accordingly also His essence cannot be seen. But since effects depend upon cause, we can be brought by them to know if He exists, and to know of Him what attributes He necessarily has is the First Cause of All, which transcends all. {Summa Theologie a, I. Quaestio XII, Art. XII.)

This is just the personal experience of this age—we cannot penetrate by vision into the spiritual world [p. 70].

... and God in His Essence cannot be seen in vision by the pure man, unless he be separated from this mortal life. For the reason that the manner of acquiring the knowledge follows the manner of existence of the being concerned. But as long as we are in this life, our soul has its existence in corporeal matter, and therefore it gains knowledge naturally of nothing which has not its form in matter, or which cannot be known through matter ...

But this modesty in the sphere of earthly thinking is not a lack of will-power. As the gold heavens of early Christian art disappeared behind the blue curtain, there grew out of humanity the heaven-assaulting Gothic. And as Plotinism dried up, there arose the “gothic” thought-technique of High Scholasticism.

The “Sun behind” is only a temporary condition. In the transfigured body we shall one day see God in His Essence.

As man's highest bliss consists in his most sublime activity, mainly in the operation of the intellect, either man would never attain this bliss, or it would consist of something other than God, if the created Intellects were never to behold the Essence of God—which is contradictory to faith. For in that which is the origin of his existence lies the final completion of the rational creature; and a thing is so far complete as it attains to its origin. But it contradicts Reason also. In man there is natural desire to know the cause when he sees the effect, and from this arises wonder in men. If the intellect of the rational creature were not to reach the first cause of things, this desire of nature would have to remain in vain. Therefore, it must be unconditionally granted that the Blessed behold God's Essence.

This “natural desire for the origin,” is the primary urge of Scholasticism, comparable with the plant-like heavenward urge of Gothic art. As in early Gothic there was no remission of tenseness, so Thomas never allows a “piousness”—of whatever kind—the power to dispense the intellect from activity.

For Thomas the act of thought leads always upward, never to a lying-down to rest. His praying has nothing to do with beds and cushions.

... God is not called incomprehensible because He has some quality which is not seen; but because it is not seen so perfectly as it can be ...

... What is perfectly known, is comprehended, and that which is known as deeply as it can be, is perfectly known. Thus, if something, which is capable of being known by empiric science, is held by one opinion, which originates from some reason of probability, that thing is not comprehended. If, for instance, someone knows by demonstration the proposition that the sum of the angles of a triangle equal two right angles, he comprehends it. But if someone assumes the opinion on the score of probability, because the learned say so, or the majority, he does not comprehend it, because he does not attain to that complete manner of knowing it, in which it is capable of being known. But no created intellect can reach up to knowing the divine Essence, in that perfect manner in which it is capable of being known ... For there is no limit to the knowledge of God. No created intellect can have a limitless knowledge of God. Now, a created intellect knows the Divine Essence more or less perfectly in proportion as it is fathomed by a greater or less Light of Glory. (S. Theol. Q,. XII. Art. VII.)

The deepest work-impulse of Thomas is to limit as far as possible the share of tradition—based on outer authority and therefore probability—in the faith-content of the Church, in favour of what can be gained “per demonstrationem.” He wanted to lead with the Gothic technique of his concept-temple those concepts “which can come only from ourselves and our individuality” far into the kingdom of faith-contents [pp. 41, 42.] To open up faith-content to the understanding—also in order to defend it against unbelievers—was the “main problem in front of Albertus and Thomas,” [p. 72.]

This use of the intellect in the “natural light” supplies therefore on the one hand, weapons for the fight of the “Ecclesia militans”—and from this point of view Thomas writes his “Summa contra Gentiles” (against the “Heathen”—i.e., the Arabs)—on the other hand, it supplies foundations, on which the “Ecclesia Triumphans” can be built up—which is the object of the Summa Theologica.

For through grace—after death or even beforehand, through a miracle (as in the case of Moses or Paul)—the natural light can receive a lifting-up to the power of vision.

When something is raised to a degree which transcends its nature, it must be given a disposition which is above its nature. If, for instance, air is to receive the form of fire, it must be disposed to this form by means of a certain faculty. But when a created intellect beholds God in His Essence, God's Essence itself becomes the intelligible form of the intellect. Wherefore a supernatural disposition must be added to it, so as to raise it to such sublimity. For as the natural power of the created intellect is not sufficient to see God's Essence, it is necessary that by Divine Grace a power of intelligence should be added to it. For this reason, we call the increase of the power of intelligence the “illumination” of the intellect; and this is the illumination of which it is said in the Apocalypse xxi, 28, that “the light of God will illumine them,” namely, the society of the Blessed who see God. [Summa Theologica, I. Quaestio XII, Art. V.)

Of those who behold God in His Essence, one will behold Him more perfectly than another ... because the intellect of one will have more power or ability to see God than that of the other. The capacity to see God, however, does not belong to the created intellect according to its nature, but through Glory and Light ... Therefore the intellect which has a greater share of glory and light will see God more perfectly; and he will have this greater share who has more of Charity, for where there is more charity there is more desire, and desire makes him who desires in some manner apt and prepared for the reception of the objects desired. Whoever therefore shall have more Charity will see God more perfectly, and be more blessed. {Summa Theologica, I. Quaestio XII. Art. VI.)

But the inner drama of the Aristotelian-Thomasian doctrine of knowledge not only runs along an abstract line of development from the less perfect to the more perfect, but already assigns its quite special and distinguishing share to the lower steps of learning.

According to the Platonists' supposition (that the soul carries all knowledge in itself but has forgotten it on account of its conjunction with the body, that all learning is a remembering and that the turning towards the world of the senses is mere imperfection) the soul is not united to the body for its betterment, for because of this union it is less intelligent than when separate, but this union is solely for the betterment of the body, which is against reason, for matter exists for the sake of form, not vice versa.

But one might object that if a thing is always ordained towards betterment (and the direct turning towards the intelligible is a better kind of intellectual activity than the turning towards phantasms) God might have arranged the nature of the soul in such a manner as to make the nobler kind of intellectual activity come naturally to it and so that it would not have to be united to the body for the purpose.

It must be noted that even if the application of the intellect to higher things is more perfect than its application to physical images, still, the former mode was less perfect, if one considers how it would have been possible to the soul; which is made clear in the following thoughts: In every intellectual substance intellectual power exists through the influence of the Divine Light. This is in its first principle one and simple but divided and diversified in proportion as creatures are further removed from the Source, as is the case with lines which radiate from a central point. Thus it follows that God knows all things through His one Essence. And if the higher intellectual substances exercise their intellects through more than form, still it is through less numerous and more universal forms (than the lower substances) owing to the efficacy of the intellectual virtue that is in them. But in the lower substances there are forms, less universal and less efficacious in comprehending, in proportion to their disparity in intellectual virtue from the higher. Now if the lower substances had the forms in that degree of universality in which the higher have them, they would not gain through these forms a perfect knowledge of things, because they cannot develop such an intellectual power, but only a general and confused knowledge. This applies correspondingly to men. For those furnished with weaker intellects do not gain a complete knowledge through the universal concepts of the more intelligent, unless the details are specially explained to them. It is obvious that among the intellectual substances according to the arrangement of Nature, human souls are the lowest. But the perfection of the whole demands that there should be different grades in the world. Thus if God had so arranged human souls that they understood in the same manner as the separate substances can, they would not be capable of a complete knowledge, but in general a confused one. But that they might have a complete proportionate knowledge of things, human souls are so made that they are united with bodies and thus gain a proportionate knowledge from physical things, just as uneducated people can be taught only through concrete examples. Wherefore it is clear that it is for the soul's good to be bound to the body, and to understand by turning to phantasms.

Thus the Thomistic doctrine of knowledge leads from God, who comprehends everything in one intellectual act, through the separate substances, which need ever weaker “universals,” to man, who must study the universals from below, by releasing the phantasms from things through the senses, and from these the species through the “active intellect”, and from the species the universal conceptions through the “possible intellect.” With these by thought, not by vision, he builds up his temple of knowledge through the kingdom of the spirits, to heaven.

As a background to the magnificent summary of Thomas' doctrine of knowledge in the second of Rudolf Steiner's Addresses [pp. 59 et seq.], we will translate the short chapters of the Compendium Theologiae, in which Thomas gave his brother Reginald in compressed completeness the quintessence of his doctrine.

Chapter 78.—That Man's Intellectual Substance is the lowest of the Species.

As it is not the property of things to stretch into eternity, there must be among the intellectual substances not only a highest which reaches nearest to God, but also a lowest, which is nearest bodily matter. And this can be seen in the following manner: Intellectual activity is the faculty of man above the other animals; for it is clear that man reviews the universals, the qualities of things and immaterial things, all of which are comprehended only through intelligence. Now it is impossible that this intellectual activity is carried out by means of a bodily organ, as seeing is through the eye. For every instrument of cognitive power must necessarily itself be void of that kind of matter which is known through it, as the pupil of the eye by nature is void of the colours. For the colours are known by reason of the fact that the species of the colours are taken up in the pupil; but that which takes up must be void of what is taken up. But the intellect is in a position to learn with regard to all physical nature. Thus if it were to acquire knowledge through a bodily organ, this organ would have to be void of all physical nature—which is impossible.

Further: every cognitive instrument is itself known in the manner according to which the species of the object known lies in it; for this is for it the principle of knowledge. But the intellect knows things immaterially, even those which in their own nature are material, because it withdraws the universal form from the material conditions which create the separation. It is therefore impossible that the species of the thing known is in the intellect materially; and it is not received in a bodily organ, for every bodily organ is material.

Equally is it plain that the sense is weakened and destroyed by exaggerated sense-qualities—as the hearing is by loud sounds and the sight by blinding light; and this happens because the harmony of the organ is destroyed. But the intellect is rather strengthened through the exaggeration of the intelligible qualities, for whoever uses his intellect for higher things is able to understand the others not less well, but better. Thus if man is discovered as an intellectual being and his process of knowing does not take place through a bodily organ there must necessarily be some kind of incorporeal substance through which man comprehends.

For anything that can itself be active without body does not depend on the body according to its substance; and all powers and forms which cannot exist without body can also have no effectiveness without body. Thus warmth does not engender warmth by itself but a body engenders warmth by means of warmth.

This incorporeal substance therefore through which man comprehends is the lowest in the order of intellectual substances and that which stands next to matter.

Chapter 79.—Of the Difference of the Intellect and of the Mode of its Activity

Since the intellectual Being is higher than the sensual, as the Intellect is higher than the senses, and since the lower by nature imitates as much as possible the higher, so bodies that are subject to growth and decay imitate to a certain extent the revolutions of the heavenly bodies, it must be presumed that the sensory qualities in their way resemble the intellectual; and thus we can in some manner acquire knowledge of the intellectual from the likeness to it of the sensual. Now in the sensory we find a “highest” as it were, namely actuality, or form, and a “lowest” potentiality, or matter, and a “middle,” namely, that which is composed of matter and form. Similarly, we must differentiate in the intellectual Being; for the highest intellectual, God, is pure actuality, the other intellectual substances have something of actuality and something of potentiality according to their intellectual nature; but the lowest intellectual substance by which man uses his intellect, is in the intellectual realm only in the condition of potentiality. This strengthens the idea that originally man was made intellectual only as a potentiality, and subsequently by degrees was brought to actuality. Wherefore the intellectual substance of man is called the “intellectus possibilis,” or potential intellect.

Chapter 80.—That Maris Intellectus Possibilis evolves the Intellectual Forms from Sensory Things

Now since, as already stated, the higher an intellectual substance is, the more universal are its intellectual forms, it follows that the human intellect, which we called “possibilis,” has, among the other intellectual substances, less universal forms; and here is the reason why it evolves the intellectual forms from sensory things.

This can also throw light on another consideration. The form must be proportionate to that which is to be comprehended through it. Therefore, as the human intellectus possibilis among all intellectual substances lies nearest to bodily matter, its intellectual forms must also necessarily be nearest to material things.

Chapter 81.—That Man needs the Powers of the Senses for Intellectual Activity

It is to be remarked that the forms in bodily things are composed of separate particles and are material, but in the Intellect they are universal and immaterial, which the mode of our intellectual activity establishes, for we use our intellects “universally” and “immaterially.” But this mode must necessarily correspond with the intellectual form and species, by means of which our intellects act. Therefore, since we go from one extreme to another only by way of a mean, forms proceed from bodily things to the intellect through certain media. Of this kind are the sense-powers, which comprehend the forms of material things apart from matter—we see, for instance, the particular form of the stone with the eye but not its matter—and on the other hand they comprehend the forms of things in a particular way—for the senses only comprehend the differentiated particles. Senses therefore, were necessary to man for intellectual activity; and this is confirmed by the fact that if anyone is bereft of one sense, he loses also the knowledge which is dependent on that sense, like a man born blind, who can have no knowledge of colours.

Chapter 82.—That it is necessary to assume an “Intellectus Agens”

It becomes clear, therefore, that knowledge concerning things is not caused in our intellect through a participation in some kind of actual intellectual forms, that exist in and for themselves, or through their influence, as the Platonists and others who followed them, supposed. Rather the intellect extracts this knowledge from physical things through the mediation of the senses. But because, as already stated, the forms of things are particularized in the sense-powers, they are comprehensible not according to reality, but only to potentiality. For the intellect works only universally. Now something which is in the potential state can be transferred to that of actuality only by means of some active agent. There must therefore exist an “agent” which makes the particularized forms which lie in the sense-powers comprehensible in reality. But the “intellectus possibilis” cannot bring this about: for it is itself more in a state of potentiality with respect to the comprehending qualities, than active in them. Another intellect must therefore be postulated, which makes particularized forms which are comprehensible in potentiality comprehensible in reality, as light causes potentially visible colours to be actually visible. And we call this the “Intellectus Agens”—which we need not postulate, if the forms of things were comprehensible in reality, as the Platonists assumed.

... The “intellectus possibilis” is receptive of the comprehensible particularized forms ... the “intellectus agens” makes them actually comprehensible.

Chapter 83.—That the Human Soul is Indestructible

“In this way the great logical questions of the universals join up with the questions which concern the world-destiny of each individual,” says Rudolf Steiner [p. 73]: How this chapter 83 joins up with the preceding chapter!

In accordance with what has been said, the intellect, with which man comprehends must be indestructible. Every Being is active in proportion to its nature. But the intellect has an activity independent of the body, as has been shown—from which it follows that it is active of its own accord. Therefore, it is a substance which subsists by itself. But it was shown above that intellectual substances are indestructible. Thus man's intellect is also indestructible.

Moreover, the real basis of growth and decay is matter, and a thing is therefore as far removed from decay as it is from matter. Things composed of matter and form are intrinsically destructible; material forms are destructible through that which is bound up with them and not through themselves; but the immaterial forms which transcend the measure of matter are definitely indestructible. The intellect is by its nature exalted above matter, which is shown by its function: for we comprehend nothing through something else, without separating it from matter. Thus the intellect is, in accordance with its nature, indestructible.

This confutes also Averroës, who supposed “there is no immortality in the sense of an individual continuance after death.” In the connection of problems as shown by Rudolf Steiner, Thomas in the subsequent chapters of the Compendium Theologiae collects together all the principal arguments of his powerful battery against the Arabic antagonism to individuality, by proving “that there is not one intellectus possibilis only among all men” (Chapter 84); “that the intellectus agens in all men is not a single one” (Chapter 85); but “that the intellectus possibilis and the intellectus agens are founded in the essence of the individual soul.” (Chapter 86.)

The Fight against Averroës

For the fight against the denial of the individual by the Arab doctor and philosopher, Averroës (1126-1198), Thomas filled an arsenal with marvellously made and sharpened logical weapons. From this armoury let us take one argument—with which Thomas closes the terrific 73rd chapter of the Second Book of the Summa contra Gentiles.

Averroës' standpoint is: “Each of us has his own body, but not his own understanding.”

Thomas replies:—

If the intellectus possibilis is translated, through its having taken up a particularized form, into a condition of real intellectual activity, it can remain real of its own accord, as Aristotle says in the third book Of the Soul. Therefore, it is in our power to reconsider something of which we have once acquired knowledge, if we only wish it, without being impeded on account of the phantasms—i.e., through a failure to receive these “images” by means of the senses. For we have the power to form such images, which are proportionate to the desired consideration, unless there is some impediment on the part of the organ in question; as in the case of imbeciles and those who cannot keep awake, for they have not the free use of imagination and memory. Thus Aristotle says in the Eighth Book of the Physics that the man who already has the endurance to acquire knowledge, if he is in a condition to be able to undertake contemplation, need not be translated from this condition into that of real contemplation by means of an external mover, apart from overcoming an impediment, but that he can, if he wills it, pass to the act of contemplation himself. But if the comprehensible particularized forms of all sciences lie in the intellectus possibilis (N.B.—which one must assume if one regards it, like Averroës, as One and Everlasting), the role of the phantasms with respect to the intellectus possibilis must always be of such a kind as the case with the man who has already mastered a science, and in consequence can formulate considerations of which without such images he would be incapable (N.B.—by calling them up out of his memory). But since man employs intellectual activity through the intellectus possibilis in so far as this is through particularized forms, translated into the condition of real intellectual activity, every man could, if he but wished, command the knowledge of all sciences. But this is obviously not so, for then no one would require a teacher in order to learn a science. It follows therefore that the intellectus possibilis is not One and Everlasting.

The “doctor angelicus,” the greatest theological teacher in Christian history throws his personal destiny—his spiritual profession of teaching—in the scales against Arabism. For Thomas wanted not to contradict Averroës only, but to smash him (as Dr. Carl Unger said in the last lecture of his life in the Goetheanum). [Esotericism by Carl Unger, published by Percy Lund, Humphries & Go. Ltd., 3, Amen Corner, London, E.C. 4. Price 2s.] He fought with the whole force of his being for “the acceptance of the Word through the power of the Son,” (Unger). The acquisition of knowledge—to which the teacher should guide—is for Thomas not a breaking into a treasure-cave, where the “knowledge of all sciences” lies ready for him who knows the “Open, Sesame!” but a nursing of spiritual seed, which is scattered in the earth, and must be tended with hard work, “in the sweat of his brow.” Thomas takes his metaphors from the realm of plant-life and light in order to make clear the relationship of the teacher to the seed in the pupils' souls; as for example in the chapter on “The Teacher” in the great treatise on “Truth.”

There pre-exist in us seeds of knowledge, as the first conceptions, as it were, of the intellect, which are at once recognized in the light of the “intellectus agens,” through the medium of the particularized forms which are derived from the memory qualities ... Every principle is included in these universal principles. Now if the mind is led out of this universal knowledge, so that it recognizes the particularized parts actually, which had hitherto been recognized only potentially, and, as it were, in general, then one says of someone that he acquires knowledge.

To pre-exist is understood by Thomas not—as by the Platonists—that “original concepts” are incorporated in man already before birth, so that his knowledge is a recollection of something pre-natal, but in the sense that before the process of acquiring knowledge begins there is created in us by God a seed of light, a seed of functional power, a “lumen creatum” and this is educated or brought out in the knowledge-acquiring process.

That every soul harbours in itself its own seed of light, which is brought to life by the “Teacher,” is the thesis that is upheld against Arabism.

But Thomas overthrows Averroës not only on his own ground—that of the teacher—but also on that of the “medicus,” the medical doctor, by an intensely fruitful combination of the problems of teaching and healing. In it he appears to be a forerunner of the splendid revival of Healing which in our day the greatest teacher of intellectual activity, Rudolf Steiner, perfected by the “strengthening of thought-power.” (Cf. Chapter I. “True Knowledge of Human Nature as the Basis of Medical Art,” in the book Foundations for an Extension of the Art of Healing according to Spiritual Science Knowledge.) Rudolf Steiner overthrows the materialistic remains of the Arab treasure-hunt that lie underneath the weak-minded modern empiricism. (One digs for the treasures of knowledge to-day in “Handbooks.”)

… Learning is produced in the pupil by the teacher, not like heat in wood by the fire, but like health in the invalid by the doctor ... (Treatise Of Spiritual Creatures. Art IX. in conjunction with a polemic against Averroës).

In healing, the doctor is the helper of Nature, the chief agent, since he strengthens Nature and adds medicines which Nature uses like instruments in healing.

Just as a man can be healed in two ways—first through the sole agency of Nature, and secondly, by Nature together with a small dose of medicine—so there are also two ways of acquiring knowledge: first, when the seed of reason implanted by Nature in one comes of its own accord to the knowledge of something previously unknown, one speaks of “invention”; and secondly, when the implanted reason is given doses by someone outside, one speaks of “learning” ... And one says also that one man teaches another if he explains to him by signs the forward steps which the reason implanted in him enables him to take. As one says of a doctor, that he produces health in the invalid in the realm of Nature, so one says also of a man that he produces learning in another in the realm of his implanted reason. And this is called “teaching.” And in this sense one can say that a man teaches another and is his teacher. But the light of this reason, through which these primary concepts are known is given us by God (is the “intellectus possibilis”); as also a likeness to uncreated wisdom (to “Sophia” as the likeness of which on earth the “intellectus possibilis” gleams in the human soul). Now since no human teaching can have any effectiveness in us, but for the power of this light, it is quite certain that it is God alone who originally implants learning in us, just as Nature originally produces the healing power in us.

In this “Doctrine of Teaching,” in opposition to Arabism, Thomas opens up for a man a Holy of Holies, where he is in direct communion with the Creator: he fights “for the reception of the word through the power of the Son” (Unger); in each individual God speaks as “Verbum cordis,” the heart^'s word. There is no space to reproduce the “Word-doctrine” of Thomas, as it developed especially in the “Tractatus de verba.” Here only a few sentences are set out, in which shines that atmosphere of light, which is the greatest contribution—so often misunderstood—of Thomas to the history of Western spiritual thought.

…As one says of the doctor, he makes health, although he works from outside and Nature alone from the inside, so one says also of a man that he teaches truth, if he only enunciates it from outside, but inside it is God who teaches.

…The words of the teacher, either heard or read, in the education of knowledge in the intellect, play the role of things which are outside the soul ...

…Conclusions are reached with certainty if they are referable to the primary concepts. Hence what someone knows with certainty comes from the inwardly created light of reason, through which God speaks in us, and not from man, who teaches from the outside ...

…The teacher does not produce truth in the pupil, but knowledge of the truth. For the subjects which are taught are true before they are known: because truth does not depend on our knowledge of it, but on the essence of things ...

…if one says: nothing can form the mind of man but God, it applies to its highest form, without which it would be formless, whatever other forms it might have. But this is that form by which the mind is turned to the WORD, and inheres in it.

Thus, intelligent man is “turned to the WORD” through his highest form. From the philosophy of learning and teaching which he developed in the war against Arabism, Thomas passes on to the question: “How is thought made Christ-like?” [p. 76.]

But he finds no answer to this question for the man who lives in the earthly body, but only for the man to whom—after the day of Judgment—through God's grace the earthly body, transfigured into the spirit body, will be restored [vide infra p. 180].

Rudolf Steiner has given the answer in our time: Anthroposophy, in which created man through the evolution of creative thought is joined with uncreated Wisdom—sapientia increate—that is the Anthropos with the Sophia.

In this talk, I would like to give a picture of that what anthroposophy has to say about the most different areas of life and to start from some of its most significant results for the knowledge of the human soul life and its relation to the bodily life.

It seems that this psychology has to deliver the bases of the most important questions of life, of the boundary questions of existence. Since, nevertheless, one cannot deny that the present cultural life only accepts scientifically established knowledge. If one deals with the big riddles of the soul life today, one does not only ask this or that denomination, but approaches the world riddles also scientifically. That is why one will also ask psychology: what has psychology to say about birth and death of the human being? What has it to say about the relation of the transient to the everlasting of the human being?

However, one has to say,: when soul science which is acknowledged even today by tradition has turned to the modern thinking, this modern soul science got more or less into cloudy waters. If one speaks of modern psychology, one has to remind of a psychologist, the late Franz Brentano (1838-1917) who wanted to dedicate his life and investigations to the knowledge of the soul life in the last third of the nineteenth century. When he published the first volume of his Psychology from an Empirical Standpoint, he said something strange. He said that one has to take a new way with reference to the soul knowledge which can justify itself towards natural sciences. Tomorrow should be talk of the fact that the way which is discussed here in this talk can justify itself towards natural sciences.

Franz Brentano attempted to approach the soul life with the same methods and way of thinking which one uses in natural sciences. Then he said, in course of time the soul science has solely considered imagining, feeling, willing, memory, attention, love, hatred, and the like. Modern natural sciences have brought to light all sorts of things, but it seems as if by the scientific way of thinking and methods psychology does not get to the big hopes—as Franz Brentano says—which already Plato and Aristotle had: the hope to gain a view of the everlasting of the human being by psychology.

That is why Franz Brentano means: if one can give ever so precise information how mental pictures follow each other how they associate in the soul with each other how they associate with feelings and will impulses, nevertheless, it is impossible to get to the real boundary questions of the soul life. Nevertheless, Franz Brentano still hoped in those days to be able to get to a psychology finally by applying scientific-methodical research that grants views into these boundary questions of existence.

The noteworthy fact is that Franz Brentano, when he published the first volume of his Psychology from an Empirical Standpoint, which was intended for three to four volumes, the next volume should already appear in the autumn of the same year and the following volumes should be published within a short time. However, nothing appeared. I have told this fact already here.

That who gets involved with the special course of development of Brentano will discover that this serious researcher could not continue this work not for outer reasons but for inner reasons. That who pursues his following articles and books will realise how this man did attempts repeatedly to penetrate deeper into the soul life, and how they failed repeatedly. Somebody who looks for an answer from the different experiences which one can do, if one approaches modern psychology, finds that Franz Brentano, as well as his whole school and almost all the other psychologies shy away from entering into a real spiritual science.

Just in scientific circles, one shrinks from giving psychology a quite different face if it should be effective again for the human being. You receive a feeling if you open yourself to the psychological literature today that in this psychology even today always mental pictures prevail, as they were used since centuries.

Psychology has not changed much of these mental pictures. In the area of natural sciences, however, something has changed, and psychology has not kept abreast of this development up to now. Only a superficial consideration of this development can ignore the most essential that quite different thoughts and ideas prevailed. One does not want to admit this. One does not want to realise even today that concepts and ideas have changed thoroughly. However, the change has only taken place in the scientific area up to now.

At first, I would like to characterise this change in such a way: one had certain mental pictures once by which one could enclose the soul life and the physical life outdoors, so that they satisfied the demands of that time. One applied the same mental pictures that one applied to the phenomena of nature also to the human soul life. Soul life and physical life were not yet so separated as they are today by the advanced natural sciences. Natural sciences themselves have sorted things out in their area. They have demanded new mental pictures by strictly scientific observation methods, in particular by art of experimenting.

Psychology has stopped mostly at the old mental pictures. That is why that which psychology offers today is strictly speaking not after something objective, but appears only as word. Mental pictures, feelings, will impulses, memory, attention, even love and hatred: indeed, one can feel that they are realities in our soul life. However, in the scientific psychology one has empty phrases for it that do no longer correspond to that which must be demanded from true science today.

Just as natural sciences had to advance to new concepts and ideas for three to four centuries, and in particular, in the nineteenth century, psychology has to advance if it does not want to remain infertile. It has to take the plunge to new starting points.

I do not want to keep up you to show how just with that what one calls thinking, feeling, and willing in psychological books does not give you anything real. I want to point to the fact only that just thereby psychology has missed its real vocation.

You all probably know that if the human being looks at those big boundary questions of existence he seldom observes the academic psychology that should give some indication of that. He does not find anything in it. He finds all sorts of, I would like to say, little portrayals, how a mental picture associates with another mental picture, how mental pictures evoke other mental pictures et cetera, but he does not find what interests him, actually. One does not want to admit in this area that just the scientific thinking if it gets along with itself does not get further in psychology that it reaches an impasse, it gets to mere empty phrases.

However, this would be the first negative step so to speak to get to a real psychology. Spiritual science follows this way. It tries to get things straight concerning the kind of the scientific mental pictures. While it positions itself positively to the scientific research, it becomes able to recognise that that research breaks off as it were if one wants to grasp the soul life. One can grasp this soul life only if one resorts to a completely transformed thinking, generally to a transformed inside. Maybe it will still last long, until in more human beings this internal boldness awakes to prepare their whole inside in order to behold into the soul. Nevertheless, if soul science should originate again in a promising and fertile way for the human beings, this step is necessary.

I will explain the details of the spiritual-scientific soul research in the tomorrow's talk. Today I want to mention only how from two sides spiritual science tries to prepare the inside of the human being in such a way that it can really behold into the soul life. One side is a special development of thinking, of imagining. One forms a quite wrong idea of spiritual science if one believes that it deals with any spiritistic or mystic method. This spiritual science will prove to be the clearest which someone can find in science today who really wants to penetrate into it. Above all it concerns of strengthening the imagining, the thinking. It concerns that we only carry out the thinking as it were as a concomitant of life and research in the usual life and in the usual science.

We open ourselves to everything in the outer life that works on the senses. We also open ourselves to that in science, which enables us to observe by experiments. We let the thoughts be inspired which lead us to the physical principles. The thoughts that originate as it were only accompanied by the outer life in the soul just prove to be insufficient if you want to behold into the soul life. They lead to nothing.

You have to experience that at first. Hence, it concerns of projecting yourself in the imagining life in such a way that you imagine solely, so that you find out internally how it is, actually, if you only think, only imagine. It is completely irrelevant what you imagine. It concerns only that—tomorrow I speak about the further details—you do this imagining and this thinking in such a way that you dedicate yourself to it meditatively. So that you just experience in this thinking what you cannot experience, otherwise, that the inside of the human being attunes itself if it follows a bare thought, if it is an imagination thought, if it is a thought taken from without.

If you really experience the thinking internally as methodically as you experience, otherwise, the outer phenomena which present themselves, then you experience something that must touch a modern human being in strange way, just if you have tried to deal with the psychological views which have come down.

Someone who settles in the meditative thinking comes into conflict with the most approved views that originated from Augustinism at first, that have gone over then to Descartes that also haunt in the present soul anew and that have slipped in any thinking which approaches the soul with old methods, with old thinking.

A proposition goes like a motto through the entire modern philosophy. This is the proposition by Descartes “cogito, ergo sum.” “I think, therefore I am.” Augustine said this already. It is that to which the thinkers have come who said to themselves: well, if the outer world presents itself to us, maybe it deceives us, maybe everything is illusionary that eyes and ears manifest to us, which cause them. There is one certainty, Augustin already said which is directly experienced, and this is the fact that I think. Since if I also doubt everything that the world manifests to me, nevertheless, I must just doubt, that is I think. Hence, I am in my thinking myself. If I doubt, I think; therefore I am, cogito, ergo sum.

I do not say all that because I possibly believe that philosophical views control the thinking of many persons or because I believe that that which the modern human being thinks about the soul is an outflow of that what these philosophers said. No, but because that what these philosophers have said is just a reflection of that what humanity has thought through centuries. Not that the human beings have learnt to think from the philosophers, but the philosophers have used concepts that the human beings knew that are to be driven from the field by the methods to which modern spiritual science has to point. This modern spiritual science, while it urges the human being to experience the thinking independently makes him realise: the more one thinks, the more one continues that with the mere thinking what one has, otherwise, only as a concomitant of the outer life, the more one comes just into unreality; not into the reality of the inner life. Before one does not acknowledge the proposition “I think, therefore I am not,” one will not get to real psychology.

It is necessary to take the step to a real psychology in such radical way that one puts an end to the view: “I think, therefore I am”—and can bring himself to realise, if we start with the thinking lively internally, we go away from the real being: I think, therefore I am not. You learn to recognise that if you put yourself more and more in the thinking; while you just strengthen the thinking, you find out: while I think, I cease being.

Actually, sleep would already disprove the proposition I think, therefore I am. Since in sleep we do not think in the sense of Augustine or Descartes, also not in the sense of Bergson or similar philosophers. Well, this is the first: taking the step to realise the unreality of the inner experience with thinking.

The second is that it is something dreadful, actually, for every human being who takes these things seriously that, while he wants to advance to the so-called self-knowledge, thinking just leads him to nothingness. Then from the second side one has to support the spiritual-scientific method. While the meditative life cultivates the thinking, the will must be cultivated on the other side. We recognise the will, actually, if we get any relation to the outside world. As well as we have the thinking more or less as a concomitant of the outer observation or of the scientific researching, we have the will as a concomitant of our acting: we experience it if we are active outside. Besides, something escapes from our observation where the will plays a quite significant role. We live in time. We all look back to the time of our birth and know that it last some time until death. We live in time. However, we live not only in time; we develop in time. That who can eye his inside calmly knows that with the help of his body, with the help of education and other means he himself works on his transformation, on his development.

We are different in every period of life, and we always work on our changing. This inner work is necessary to practise self-discipline. That means that self-education does not only take place unconsciously, but that one has to work with those methods consciously on his transformation. Thereby you recognise that this conscious transformation is a quite essential work in the will. You get to know, actually, the will if you take charge of your self-discipline.

However, this gives the soul life certain forces from two sides with which you can gain quite different starting points of a psychology than they exist generally up to now. Above all: someone who has sharpened his thinking in such a way as it is meant with these methods can consider the whole course of life different. Then only he is able to observe the former soul life really which accompanies us always. Then he can understand certain moments in this soul life and focus on them really, what, otherwise, you do not manage with any concept but with those mental pictures and soul impulses that one develops in such a way as I have stated. They can reach the inner soul life. While all the other concepts try in vain to grasp the mental.

Then one also acknowledges the unreality of our being while imagining. This is the first step that one knows that imagining is not real. As much as modern psychology may collect with the old means from the mental pictures, as much as it wants to rest upon the proposition “I think, therefore I am,” it never gets any mental reality from the thinking because we do not exist while we think because we can find that only in the thinking, which is not real with us. The unreality of thinking is the first that the human being recognises if he is able to strengthen his thinking if he wants to discipline his will.

If one looks at the feeling which psychology wants to observe, one is not able to do it. Why is that?—Just someone can answer that question who has investigated the imagining and willing as I have described. He learns to recognise that the feeling, observed with usual means, appears confused. There the unreality of thinking, here the confusion of feeling.

A third one is particularly clear if one takes such ways as I have described them: the incomprehensibility of the will. Unreality of thinking, confusion of feeling, incomprehensibility of willing.

You need only to take such books like that by Theodor Ziehen (1862-1950, neurologist, psychiatrist, Guide to Physiological Psychology. 1891), then you realise that just those who rest upon present scientific mental pictures in psychology can be blinded, isn't that so? At least they believe that one can understand something of thinking. Feeling is to them only nuancing the thinking. But the will escapes them completely. One realises that one acts. One assumes that something takes place. However, the usual concepts cannot look into that which the will really is.

One has to apply those forces that one has obtained with the mentioned methods also to the soul life. It is good to take the starting point from the feeling, not from the thinking, also not from the will. There it becomes obvious that you cannot understand the feeling if you envisage one single moment of the human life only. One can never understand that which I feel now if one considers this present feeling only. One can understand it only if one considers the Before and the After. Let me start from a concrete case.

Somebody sets himself the task to understand Goethe's feeling, for example, in 1790. One struggles, while one tries first to visualise how Goethe felt in 1790. How were his sensations nuanced to the world et cetera? If one has got ideas of it, one puts the question to himself: yes, how does this feeling of 1790 relate to his feeling 15 years ago, to his feeling after the next fifteen years?—One is urged to the right thing by the method that I have described. Finally, one is urged to look at his whole life. Psychology has to consider biographies from such a viewpoint, as I characterised it. Goethe's feeling in 1790 would have been generally incomprehensible, even to Goethe, in 1790. We only start understanding it, while we face his whole life.

If we study that carefully what manifested of Goethe's being between 1790 and 1832, we study that what worked on Goethe from his birth, in 1749 until 1790, and we try to consider Goethe's life in its effectiveness after 1790 in such a way as we are accustomed to refer scientific things to each other, to that what he experienced before 1790, then the special feeling nuance of 1790 arises. Everything that we feel at a point is an effect of our own future on our own past. One will study biographies this way in future! One will also face the single human being this way.

One will say to himself, it is strange that in that which expresses itself in the feeling already shows not only the impact of the future life, but also that of the whole past life. However, one will get the experience with such studies that some determination is necessary for such studies. Since it will belong to these methods, for example, to ask himself, how does develop the emotional life of those human beings who very soon died after that time at which one looks? There arises something very interesting for a study of the emotional life.

One will find out that that which lives in a human being in the immediate present is the pressure of his future on his past. We also have the confusion of the emotional life, the mysterious of the feeling life because we have kept the past in mind and the future is shrouded in darkness. If we deeper investigate the human being, then the next step is possibly that one also tries to familiarise himself with the imagining life. One asks himself, what imagines in the human being so that he imagines that he can resolve to have thoughts about this and that?—Nobody can answer that question who cannot observe the moment of awakening appropriately.

Just as a future psychology will not start from all sounding phrases which you now find about the feeling in the textbooks of psychology, just as a future psychology will also not start from the so-called observation of imagining, but will feel pressured into going back to a reality which is over for the usual life: the awakening. The awakening happens for the usual life at one moment. The human being goes from sleep to the wake life, and he seldom finds opportunity to bethink himself, in the jumbled way of awakening, how he has woken. However, even if he found it, he could not at all understand this with the usual imagining. He can understand it only if he soars such an image as I have described it as a result of the meditative thinking.

However, the human being stands there, I would like to say, at the abyss that he must realise something unreal in the imagining. On the other hand, this imagining is refined and strengthened. With it, the human being is only able to observe the moment of awakening.

The method, which spiritual science has in this area, enables the researcher to face such a moment in such a way as the naturalist faces the electrostatic generator or another apparatus or a phenomenon of nature. Then the moment of awakening appears to the strengthened or transformed imagining in such a way that one looks into it immediately and can say to himself, you emerge from a world that was interspersed with thoughts from falling asleep until awakening as your day life is interspersed with thoughts.

This is the great discovery that you can do. Indeed, you find tips with single psychologists everywhere that one says, even if one does not know that one dreams perpetually, one dreams perpetually. However, one not only dreams—this is the discovery, which the strengthened thinking accomplishes—, but one also learns to recognise that the wake consciousness is something else than to be filled with thoughts. This is looking at the thoughts that you have by day. You cannot look only at the thoughts that fulfil you from falling asleep until awakening because you forget that which you have experienced in sleep at the moment of awakening.

This is just an important moment where you start realising that you emerge from a life of thoughts that remains unaware to the usual consciousness, you emerge from a true sea of thoughts. Then another observation is connected with it.

Only if you can look at that sea of thoughts that also penetrate the soul if it does not have the day consciousness, you recognise why you know nothing of these thoughts in your day consciousness. Since you notice: at the moment of awakening you cannot take everything in the body what you have experienced in sleep. However, the body is the only tool of thinking. You must use the body. You cannot draw in what pervades your soul as night thoughts. The body is inappropriate to take them in.

If one has recognised which real process forms the basis there that one lives, indeed, during sleep in a spiritual world which cannot enter into the body which exists for itself—. it is just the typical that this world cannot enter—, then one can find the transition from this experience to the usual imagining and thinking.

Since the same takes place, only in pictorial way, if you get to a mental picture while you are dozing or observing the outside world. Thinking and imagining is nothing but a decreased awakening in relation to reality. We wake up if we grasp any thought. It will be the important of the new psychology that it realises that awakening not only exists if we rub our eyes in the morning from sleep, but we are awaking perpetually. Nevertheless, the force that controls our whole life just appears especially strong at the moment of awakening, in so far as we grasp mental pictures or thoughts. Thus, that force penetrates us perpetually which manifests in the awakening, in grasping thoughts.

However, thereby we also know that this grasping thoughts is correspondent to a world which cannot enter into the human organism. While we think, however, we have to reduce reality to pictures because our body urges us. Reality is not admitted at the moment of awakening. However, we also learn to recognise that we could not have these pictures of imagining unless in our body the spiritual reality existed. From there you gain the possibility, while you have progressed on one side by the awakening to the imagining, of going back from the awakening to an important moment of life, to birth, or we say, to conception. You have gained the possibility because you have awoken in yourself that soul force, which reveals that imagining is a perpetual awakening. If you have this soul force, it enables you to look back from the observation of awakening to that what one may call: entering into the physical-sensory world. About that, I want to speak more exactly in the third talk.

You learn from this fact that modern spiritual-scientific psychology is based on real observation that, however, it does not cause this observation with those observations that you already have, but with those concepts, which you have to form first. Besides, the important thing is just to acknowledge that we have pictorial existence in the imagining only and that the imagining must accept this pictorial character because the bodily life cannot directly accept the reality of the mental.

You learn to recognise that in the imagining the pictures of the whole antenatal spiritual-mental life take place, as well as at the moment of awakening the contents of thoughts appear to the soul which we have experienced from falling asleep until awakening. If we continue the observations methodically, the spiritual-mental experience appears independently which has combined with the bodily at the entry of the human being into this bodily life. There is on one side just a straight progress from the understanding of the moment of awakening to imagining. On the other side, you thereby get the ability to proceed from observing the awakening to the entry of the human being in the earthly life.

Of course, the modern human being says that he cannot realise those things that he cannot imagine them.—However, this is why it concerns just that you cannot familiarise yourself with these things with the usual imagining. This is the first great discovery that you have. You can observe the spiritual-mental life before birth or conception only if you appropriate other forces than those are which you already have.

You can recognise only by such a way, as I have indicated it, that the imagining is rooted in the spiritual. On the other side, this way also enables you to delve into the will. The will must be developed by self-discipline to another level than it has in the usual life. However, thereby something else comes about than by that which I have described up to now. Up to now, I have described the way to the mental pictures that extended the view beyond birth or conception, which leads on the other hand into the unreal of the imagining life. We get the certainty of the independence of that which reveals itself in imagining in the suggested way.

The matter becomes different if we more exactly get to know the will by self-discipline. In the meditative imagining, we make ourselves independent of the physical body. We notice this independence by the fact that the night thoughts, which the body cannot accept, transition into the consciousness that you behold how you emerge from a sea of thoughts.

Because you take charge of the will discipline, you feel more and more depending on the body. You get more and more into the body. You get to that which the outer science can never reach. It can only externally investigate the appearance of the inside, while it goes forward anatomical-physiologically. In internal way, you learn to recognise what goes forward, actually, in the body if anyhow a will impulse gains ground. It sounds extremely weird, but you get to know this bodily life in the will in such a way that you have the same experiences, which you, otherwise, only know possibly with hunger and thirst, with immediate feelings that are connected with the bodily activity.

Whereas the picture of imagining makes us more and more independent from the bodily life, the cultivation of the will induces you to experience the will really in such a way as you experience hunger and thirst. You get to the most significant feelings associated with the bodily life.

In particular, you learn to recognise how the thought that transitions in the will impulse cannot help expressing itself as something emotional with that who has developed the will as the inside expresses itself if you are hungry. As paradoxical it sounds: you experience a will thought with developed will by a feeling of hunger or thirst; you may call it as you want.

It concerns of realising the big difference between the development of the imagining life that makes us more and more independent from the nature of the bodily life, and the development of the will life that shows us, how we are connected in the usual existence just by the will with our bodily life.

But it also becomes obvious if this observation of the will really becomes internal experience like hunger and thirst that in this will something is that proves every time when a will impulse is grasped to be very similar to the moment of falling asleep. Now you learn also to recognise the secret of falling asleep, this peculiar transition to the unaware state. This is parallel for the observation with letting an impulse of thought in the will. The will decision which one grasps proves to be a kind of falling asleep that is started and not finished.

Now you get to know the opposite of that which you got to know with the development of imagining. With imagining, you find out that the spiritual-mental that you experience from falling asleep until awakening is not able to enter. That spiritual-mental which expresses itself in the will cannot leave the body with the usual waking state; it is stopped. This stopping expresses itself as the will power. If the body no longer keeps it, the moment of falling asleep occurs.

This will be the other starting point for the modern psychology: to find the coherence of will and falling asleep, of the inability to retain the spiritual-mental which then unites with the general universe by the human body, and falling asleep, as we have found the coherence of forming of mental pictures and the awakening in other way.

If you learn to recognise how falling asleep is intimately related to every will impulse, you get by the line which one has drawn in research between falling asleep and willing the internal mental force to continue the line to the other side. Because you have investigated the imagining, you got the possibility to look at the mental-spiritual beyond birth or conception. Thus you can investigate the other line in the oppose direction. You pursue the line of falling asleep up to the will. You find the relationship of the will impulse with falling asleep. Then you pursue the soul life after falling asleep with the inner power that you have thereby appropriated, and then the other side of the human existence, death, appears. Since then the intimate relationship of the will with death appears.

Natural sciences will make this important discovery in not too distant future; they will prove that what spiritual science has to ascertain from the other side. Since natural sciences will show that everything that is associated with the will impulses is associated with the formation of certain poisons, with everything that leads the human being into the same direction in which he is led if he walks towards death.

Those forces that enable the human being to unfold his will impulse are heading to death. How are they heading to death? If the imagining is a bare picture of its true reality, the will is something embryonic. We can will because we can keep a certain force in an embryonic condition.

If you imagine the seed of a plant and then the whole plant, you have the picture that you can apply to what spiritual research shows with reference to the will. Since the will is an embryonic death. Even as we awake perpetually, we are born perpetually if we think; we die perpetually if we activate our will. The force of death is in us, we lower it by the nature of our bodily life, we dismiss it for a short time while falling asleep, and the body can recover again. However, the force that we carry in us because we can unfold will impulses is the embryo of that force with which the soul walks through the gate of death.

Thus, the big boundary questions of life join the most usual mental pictures of imagining and willing. We look beyond the bodily life if we learn to understand imagining and willing. Imagining, feeling and willing have become empty phrases—about other concepts I speak in the following talk—because one does not get around to applying the real way of thinking of natural sciences, the way of observation, to the soul life.

About other things, I have to speak in the third talk. However, such mental pictures arise, which show that the feeling is a result of the whole life between birth and death, which show that imagining is a result of the life beyond birth or conception, which show that the will is the embryonic of that which we carry beyond death.

One gets to no real concept of imagining, feeling and willing if one does not start considering the whole life in such a way as I have described it today by which one gets beyond awakening and falling asleep to birth and death. However, I have to say that that thinking which is necessary to familiarise yourself with these things must have the courage to break with many things.

However, do not believe that someone who has come to such things which must rightly seem to be paradoxical, maybe foolish, to the human being of the present, especially to the scientist of the present, has not taken the matter seriously, if he experienced everything that the others also know who doubt it. Disproving this thing is easy.

I have attempted once in Prague with two public talks to disprove spiritual science at first and then to found it. Of course, disproving is much easier than founding. However, something else is much more significant. One would have to say to himself, actually, in particular in view of some things that have taken place in the very last time: spiritual science must retrain concerning many things, and not few people have forced themselves to retrain the one or the other in the last time. Must the outer compulsion induce people to retrain? Indeed, many people will retrain repeatedly by outer compulsion. However, it is a time today where it is necessary to practise a kind of self-reflection, which makes you realise that that which originates from scientific or other present mental pictures leads into the unreal in the soul. Only such an investigating of the soul forces as I have described it today can lead into the soul. You can get around to attaining that strength for this research from yourself only. On the other hand, just modern natural sciences will automatically lead somebody to spiritual science who understands the essence of natural sciences. Tomorrow I would just like to show this.

The spiritual-scientific psychology leads from the temporal of the human being to the everlasting of his soul. It will show that in future if people do not force themselves to walk on the intimated way no psychology will be there or only such a psychology that gives useless food to the soul. Energy and courage belong to this new psychology. Our time already points to the fact that now the treasures of the human inside cannot be won—while it puts the human being in an outer existence to which one will need some courage—by mere letting himself go but only by courageous advancing with such methods, which one has to search, which did not already exist.

Our contemporaries assess the anthroposophically oriented spiritual science mostly cursorily. One says that it offends the serious, conscientious method, the research way of the scientific worldview.

Indeed if spiritual science were not able to justify itself to the scientific worldview, one would have to condemn it. That is why this is one of the questions which must come up for discussion here today: how can the spiritual-scientific worldview be justified towards the present natural sciences?

Another similar prejudice that is connected, actually, intimately with the just mentioned one is that spiritual science leads to a dark mystic spiritual condition and worldview. From the today's considerations should arise that both prejudices are unfounded.

The whole way, which that research has to go through which leads to spiritual science, has to pass through two gates of knowledge above all. One cannot get into that what I mean here if one has not passed these two gates. One gate is that the spiritual researcher must really have experienced the complete scientific mindset and that he has had important experiences with this research. To most people who deal with natural sciences they are something that one has as knowledge with which one believes to be able to penetrate into these or those areas of existence.

For the spiritual researcher knowledge of nature must not remain this. For him it concerns that he has tried internally: which suitable or useless instruments are the scientific mental pictures if one wants to penetrate into the undergrounds of existence? He must have learnt as it were the handling of the scientific thinking and must have tried to apply this scientific thinking conscientiously in the most different directions whether it is good or not for penetrating into the outer nature.

Now one may say that in the area of natural sciences are personalities who dealt more or less consciously with the question: how far does the scientific research lead the human being with reference to the big riddles of knowledge?—I had repeatedly to remind of the famous speech of the great naturalist Du Bois-Reymond, to the famous speech about the limits of the knowledge of nature which he held in the seventies years and by which he wanted to demonstrate that just knowledge of nature must arrive at a certain border. Du Bois-Reymond explained in those days that, indeed, natural sciences can summarise the natural phenomena in certain laws and can find connections in the atomistic world behind these laws that, however, even if one imagined the ideal of this physical knowledge as fulfilled, one could never answer two boundary questions with it: what is matter?—and the other: what is even the simplest sensation, the simplest soul experience?

At these two questions, Du Bois-Reymond meant in those days, scientific consideration has to stop. Because he was of the view that scientific consideration is the only real academic one, he thought that the human being can never get to any knowledge concerning both questions, so also not to a knowledge of the human soul life and about that what is, actually, behind nature, that there are not only limits of the knowledge of nature but also limits of the human knowledge generally.

That what formed as judgement with Du Bois-Reymond and many others from a certain logical speculation the spiritual researcher has to transfer to life. The spiritual researcher must have experienced, as it were, all hopes and disappointments with the knowledge of nature. He must have opened himself to the knowledge of nature so that he attempted to overcome the obstacles of spiritual striving with it. He must have gone through the bitter experience that one just approaches, as strict and as conscientious this research is, certain points beyond which this knowledge of nature does not get. This experience must exist in the soul of the spiritual researcher.

He must have learnt to stumble against certain cornerstones with the scientific concepts that exist in nature. I could bring in many of such cornerstones. I could say the same what can be said about the concepts of energy and matter, for example. One recognises that one does not penetrate with the same methods, with the same way of thinking with which one penetrates successfully into the chemical side of nature into that which as matter and energy causes the phenomena and processes of nature. One stumbles, so to speak, against energy and matter. Finally, one has to confess: the more suitable the scientific mental pictures are in the accessible areas, the more they become unsuitable for these cornerstones.

I would like to say if one has experienced enough with these attempts, one gets to a certain questioning. Then one asks himself, why do you get to such cornerstones with the knowledge of nature?—There arises that the basic condition of stumbling against such cornerstones is located in the human organisation, in the human being himself. One notices at last: nature does not allow solving certain riddles because we ourselves have to be different if we should deserve such solutions. The line of thought that I develop here is quite different from the Kantian one. It would lead too far if I explained this difference in detail, I refer only to my Philosophy of Freedom in this context.

The spiritual researcher wants to recognise by real introspection what prevents us in the human organisation to pass those cornerstones. The same force that prevents the human being from passing these cornerstones is the force that enables us to love. This is the significant discovery, which one does on such ways, as I have characterised them yesterday. As spiritual researcher, one has to put the question hypothetically: how would a being have to be constituted—it would not be a human being—that developed such scientific views that these cornerstones would become transparent as it were to the imagining?

Such a human being would have to have a mental organisation that would not be penetrated with the force of love. Since if one investigates this peculiar soul force of love, its character is just that it suppresses the active imagining, at first instinctively, in the human being that must appear in the observation of natural phenomena or in the arrangement of experiments.

Love and scientific research must be two oppose activities of the soul life. However, the ability of loving must be in the human nature. He cannot put aside as it were the ability of loving while he is scientifically active. He can form scientific mental pictures on one side. However, that what enables him to love is also in him. It is that which reduces the imagining activity at those cornerstones as it were.

This is the first significant experience that the spiritual researcher has to get on his way. Indeed, one may say, prove this logically.—This question immediately suggests itself. The reflection, in which cases one can put such a question, actually, is less obvious. You can also not ask, why does the bull have horns or the fish fins for logical reasons? These things are still results of observation at first. The spiritual researcher can also point only to the observation that arises on the suggested way from the experiences of scientific research.

One may say, I do not want to develop my spiritual condition in such a way that I get to such experiences.—Well, you can refrain from this, of course. However, then you cannot arrogate for yourself that you have to decide anything in the area of truth. Since somebody can penetrate into truth only who has really found such cliffs and has circumnavigated them.

One has the second experience that leads to the second inner spiritual-scientific discovery if one has attained, for example, the result that I have just explained. Indeed, one does not express that on another field what I have outlined now as modern spiritual science does it in such a way. Nevertheless, people have instinctively found out for themselves that the view of nature is a useless instrument as it were to penetrate into the secrets of existence. Then they have attempted to investigate these secrets in another way, namely in the mystic way, on the way of self-experience.

Just as the spiritual researcher has well to know that which one can experience with scientific view, he has to know that well which arises from mystic contemplation. He must also have tried there whether it is possible to reach the origins of existence mystically. Those origins with which, nevertheless, the human being must be connected in any way if they concern him generally. The spiritual researcher will also experience hopes and disappointments and gets, finally, to the important result that one can attain the secrets of existence just as little on this mystic way, as on the way of the outer view of nature. He also stumbles there against a wall that is in his inside, in the mental. Again, he has the task to investigate why one does not reach the origins of existence with mystic contemplation.

To get to clearness in this area, one has to apply scientific disposition wholeheartedly. It does not come easy to anybody who strives for clearness to investigate this inside of the human being. Since this inside of the human being often proves to be rather complex to the own view. I would like to bring in an example from the scientific literature that may show this.

I would like to bring in the book The Subconscious Ego, Its Relationship to Health and Education by Louis Waldstein (1853-1915, American pathologist). This example shows like many others, how much you have to take care if you want to investigate the own soul life, and how easily you deceive yourself in this area of research.

The author tells the following. One day he stood before a bookstore. His glance fell on a book about mollusks. While reading the title, he must smile and even laugh. He has no notion at first, why. Nevertheless, this is strange that a serious naturalist sees a scientific book in a bookstore—and must laugh. Lo and behold, it comes into his head: maybe I get on why I laugh if I close my eyes.—He closes his eyes and listens. Far away, he hears quite soft tones of a melody that he had heard before decades and with which he learnt dancing.

He has not heard these tones since decades. He did also not perceive them consciously, while reading the title; but they passed his soul as it were and made him to smile. In subconscious way, his soul was induced to cherish the impressions that he had decades ago and that were rather indistinct. Since he has to admit to himself that he paid more attention at that time to the fact that he did his steps correctly while learning dancing, than that he took care of the melody itself. His thoughts were still directed upon something unimportant because he had a partner. However, all that had a lasting effect in the subconscious, and he had to smile.

However, now we take the example seriously. It is determinative of countless experiences which show how little, actually, the human being is connected in his consciousness with that what proceeds below in the soul life, how things which were forgotten for a long time sound from below but also things which one had not consciously perceived. We do not need to have looked at that what was there and still it did a certain impression and comes up at the right moment!

The conscientious spiritual researcher develops the way that is indicated here with a first step. He investigates what exists in the depths of the soul life, and then he recognises that credulous, naive mystics often fall victim to such things. These are engrossed in their inside, bring up from their inside all kinds of what they call a feeling of being one with the primeval origin of existence, but maybe these are only the transformed tones of a barrel organ! Nevertheless, maybe it comes about on the same way, as that about which I have spoken. Since the peculiar appears in the soul life that such things, which have made impressions once and continue to have an effect then, not only come up as those but in changed form as something different. Still they are nothing but a pictorial fact of that what we have experienced in such a way.

Some people believe to be able to hand down deep mysticism from their introspection, but one deals only with transformed youth impressions or as the case may be. Just in this way, spiritual science has to go forward most carefully because it should be just the clearest and not the most confused. I have already noted this repeatedly.

Thus, the spiritual researcher gets around to studying just that in the soul by which that what one has in the usual fully conscious reminiscent life is associated with all kinds of subconscious memories, transformed recollections et cetera. While the spiritual researcher advances with scientific disposition on this way, he gets to the answer of the second question: how is the mystic experience? Why does one get to something unsatisfactory only on the way of the usual mysticism?

There it becomes obvious that anything must be in the human being: as well as the force of loving must be there which delivers the scientific border, there must be something that prevents the human being from submerging in the undergrounds of his being, as the mystic wants it, with the usual consciousness. If the human being had the ability to descend completely, to pursue everything that is to be found on the way about which I have spoken, and what the mystic believes to be able to find in the human inside, then the human being would not need the other ability for life: the power of memory. The impressions, the mental pictures of life have to accumulate as it were. They are not allowed to penetrate into our core. We must have the veil before our inside which works like a mirror and from which our experiences are reflected as memories. As little as we see if we stand before a mirror what is behind the mirror, as little we see the human inside that is behind that mirror which gives rise, actually, to our memories. Thus, someone who has this second experience recognises at last that the spiritual researcher cannot use what one can attain with the usual mysticism because it proves to be transformed memories in any way if it is processed only in the usual consciousness.

Hence, there are two starting points, two experiences that must be gone through if one wants to be a spiritual researcher: the experience with the view of nature and the experience with the memories, with the transformed memories. From these experiences, one receives a certain way of knowledge. If these experiences are done seriously with all disappointments that are connected with both experiences, then such experience stands for the production of an inner force at the same time. Someone gets this force to pursue the path of knowledge in another way than one pursues it with the usual consciousness. What I have just explained is the base on which the spiritual researcher goes on working in order to develop another consciousness and to penetrate with it into the supersensible world.

I have just indicated here that it is necessary to get to another state of consciousness beyond the consciousness of the usual life and science. However, most people shrink from this demand. They prefer considering this demand as something fantastic, as something enthusiastic, and, hence, they reject the possibility of the knowledge of the higher truth or they want to approach it with the usual consciousness. It is clear from the said that one cannot arrive at any goal on both ways.

Now the nature of the way that one has to take will result from these experiences. What does one prevent from descending with the usual consciousness to the own inside? It is the memory; it is the power of memory. If one investigates everything that forms the basis of the ability to remember something, then one finds that the ability of memory is bound to the physical body.

It is a gigantic error of Bergson (Henri B., 1859-1942, French philosopher) that he means that memory, at least a part of memory, is not engaged in the human organism. Spiritual science just shows that the process of sense perception that we penetrate with thinking is integrated into the physiological so that it pushes to memory. The fact that we can remember is already in the process of sense perception that is penetrated with thinking.

However, not everything that tends to memory, to the view of nature can lead into the human inside. The question arises: is it possible to develop such an inner soul activity of imagining which does not deal with memory, which is lifted out as it were from the everyday scientific life?

Maybe because here the personal, subjective may have an objective value, I would like to interpose how I was led to the first most elementary steps some decades ago which induced me to investigate the nature of memory spiritual-scientifically.

This experience of my childhood may appear to you very insignificant. I had to observe at myself during the school hours that I did the very best progress in mathematics or geometry that I had, however, no talent to keep mathematical formulae in mind. I could also say, it was not because I could not have kept them in mind, but I had no tendency to appropriate them. If, for example, an algebra exam was done, the others did their calculations with the mathematical formulae that they had kept in mind. Against it, I had to develop these mathematical formulae ad hoc from the basic principle. That means I had always to deduce the formulae completely, and then I calculated with the formulae. Because I could not keep the formulae in mind, I had always to keep the mental pictures in mind that led to the formula so to develop something in the mental pictures that did not appeal to memory.

This was to me the starting point on that way which must induce every spiritual researcher to cultivate such inner soul work that leads then really to a changed state of consciousness, to contemplative meditation to remaining in the imagining. However, this imagining work must be in such a way that if the same should appear again it originates from the same impulse, does not repeat memories.

Perhaps you know that I hold ten, twenty, thirty talks about the same subjects sometimes at different places, but I could never hold a talk in the same way. Every talk is different because I do not keep something in mind, but because when I speak about the things they generate themselves. I do not reflect on my memory.

Do not misunderstand me; it does not come into my mind to state that spiritual research wants to blank out memories. One would make the human being useless for life of course if one removed his memory from him. One does also not remove anything from him if he develops his thinking in such a way that he carries out such a soul activity that must be generated repeatedly anew, and that does not reflect on the power of memory.

I have explained this in details in my book How Does One Attain Knowledge of Higher Worlds?, in my Occult Science. An Outline and in other books. However, it always results in the following: to that thinking which accompanies, actually, the outer view and must lead then to memory something else is added that does not intend to produce memories but such a thinking, which must always be produced anew.

The human being thereby associates himself emotionally with another element, than if he accepts memories only. He thereby develops an imagining activity gradually which is now really not only a concomitant of the usual life or the usual science, but is strengthened gradually by practising such mental pictures in such a way, as usually only our soul life is if we have sense-percepts.

You get to a mere imagining which is as powerful, as usually only the soul life is if it faces the outer sense-perceptible world: a thinking that is like looking, an internally produced looking that is like thinking. This can only inform you about the nature of the human life. Since now if you can have such vivid imagining, you can only compare this imagining to the usual imagining.

Then you recognise only which nature the latter has. Then you get on to say to yourself, natural sciences use such mental pictures only which are organised by their own being towards memory; they never use those mental pictures which are developed in such a way in the human being as I have characterised it.

However, if you develop such vivid thinking, you also get to that experience which breaks through as it were the mirror of which I have comparatively spoken just now, which really penetrates behind the memory and can penetrate into the human inside.

However, there it becomes obvious: if you get to that region which the mirror of memory blankets, otherwise, then you face something that affects the unprepared consciousness strangely at first. You go through an experience that you can only compare with the experience of oversaturation. You recognise that in the human being something lives that you can find only on the intimated way, which gives him an unaware antipathy to himself. Repelling forces must be there as the reflecting mirror coating reflects light. You can compare the mirror coating as it were with that subconscious antipathy or sensation of oversaturation. You do not notice that with the usual consciousness because you experience that in memory that has been reflected.

With the new developed imagining life, you penetrate down, and you have to overcome that antipathy behind the mirror of memory. You overcome it only if you still add other experiences if you not only try to develop such imagining in yourself which does not use the memory, but if you try to develop that power in yourself which exists as something useless. I mean the dreams. The spiritual researcher has to study the dreams very intensely, because the soul lives also in dreams, in an unreality, of course. Dreams have always caused the human beings to put certain questions of life.

The spiritual researcher cannot investigate the dreams as one did once after the pattern of dream books or as the modern psychoanalysis does because both do not lead to the cognition of that force which is, actually, behind the dream. If you can pursue the dreams, it always becomes obvious that the inside of the human body is involved in every dream. Anyhow, these are always bodily processes that are associated with the dreams that in a way exceed the quiet sleeping life, and express themselves in any pictorial ambiguity.

The spiritual researcher does not at all regard these dreams as they present themselves in their pictures. A psychoanalyst said to me once after a talk, anthroposophy looks at the dreams with reference to their immediate contents. We psychoanalysts take the dreams, while we want to investigate from their pictures what rumbles about there in the subconscious.—Well, I do not want to explain the thing further, but one has to answer: as the psychoanalyst does not take the dreams immediately in their pictorial nature, but wants to investigate something behind them, the spiritual researcher does it all the more, but not with inadequate means. He is clear in his mind that the same what goes forward in the soul inside can dress in quite different visions. I want to say, one climbs up a mountain in a dream and falls down on the other side, the same could happen if you dream, you have a paper before yourself in which you make a hole. The pictures that appear in the dream are only an outer disguise. Someone who looks for the picture contents of the dream will never discover the secret of that force in the human soul, which is contained in the dream.

Only somebody can figure the force out which is in the dreams who can pursue the dream how tension and relaxation or persisting tensions appear in the soul life. Then they can dress in the most different pictures. Only such a thinking, as I have described it, can penetrate into those regions of the soul life from which the confused dreams enter into the usual consciousness. Since the dreams which are behind the mirror belong to that region in the human organisation.

One submerges in the area which is behind the mirror if one submerges with the developed imagining which does not appeal to memories in the human inside. Since there you encounter the force which is, otherwise, only embryonic or imperfect in dreams in its true figure. However, the subconscious nature of the human being is something that appears in the consciousness as unaware antipathy and just causes the reflection of the memory.

Now one submerges. Only that which I have described and not the mental pictures that are associated with memories can submerge in such a way that the antipathy is overcome. The antipathy weakens our consciousness towards our inside that prevents us from crushing the mirror and from penetrating into a region that turns out, otherwise, to be unaware antipathy.

Thereby we develop a force that exists in other ways as well in life. I have already called it the capacity for love today. We learn this ability to recognise in its rudiments how it expresses itself in the usual life. If we penetrate, however, on the intimated way down into our own inside, just the force of the capacity for love increases. This is the second side of the soul life that the spiritual researcher has to develop.

He gets to the first force while he develops an imagining which is not based on memory. The other is that he develops such an inner life—and it soon appears as a will life which increases the capacity for love. While one must almost exclude the memory in the area in which one wants to investigate the spirit, the capacity for love must be increased to such a degrees about which the usual consciousness does not have any idea because it only develops love to outer beings and things as a rule but not to the spiritual that is found on the way which leads into the human inside by breaking the human memory .

Thus, the paradoxical appearing fact comes to light that that which is inevitable for the usual naturalist and the usual life, the ability of memory and the capacity for love, develops on the way of spiritual research in such a way that on the one side the imagining has to discharge into a region where it cannot count on memory, the will life, however, must discharge into a region where the capacity for love is increased.

The human being thereby penetrates into those areas that are, otherwise, behind the scientific limits. If he develops that of which I have spoken just to two sides of the human nature, he gets beyond those cliffs that exist at the cornerstones.

That what only appears, otherwise, as phenomena of nature is figured out as it were. Then, however, one does not get to atoms, to the hypothetical matter, but to the supersensible, to the spirit. You get to the spirit, which lives behind nature and in nature because one wakes up as it were. Since it is an awakening with reference to the usual consciousness what I have described.

In particular, with reference to one thing I would like to extend the comparison. Everybody with a healthy consciousness considers the dream as a sum of pictures and he knows: while he enters into the usual reality from his dreams, he leaves the imagery of dreams and enters into the sphere of existence. Thus, the spiritual researcher starts facing the world that he experiences in the supersensible consciousness. He knows: this usual sense-perceptible world becomes an imagery of the supersensible experience. The whole nature becomes an imagery of the supersensible experience as the dream world, otherwise, is an imagery of the usual sensory existence. There it becomes obvious that, actually, the development of the recent natural sciences with all their great achievements has become great only because they confined themselves to giving pictures and do not want to penetrate with their means into that what is as a secret behind the pictures.

I would like to illustrate again with a simple comparison how you get to that will which is an increased capacity for love. Then, however, one can develop this comparison further. One normally does not know that writing contains two quite different activities. Only very few people do such subtler psychological observations. If one writes, this writing does not need to be completely the same after its inner nature with reference to a certain point as with another human being. There are in particular—and this applies to the most people—such persons who write, while they form the letters in such a way that the letter is completely formed from the wrist. He has his writing this way, but it is in his organisation, it does not break away from his organisation.

I know other people who write in such a way that their writing breaks away from their organisation; they paint as it were. It is very interesting if one finds out for himself that there are such persons who paint, actually, while they write who have, actually, always a view of the letter form who draw it who live much more objectively in the letter. They do not have the forms of writing in the wrist but they draw the letters.

Usually they are such people who displayed a big capacity for love in their youth and have shown the characteristic: if they had once seen a person whom they estimated, they have also written as he did, have copied his writing. If they have started cherishing another person, they copied his writing. Thus, this ability remained to them for life that writing is, actually, like painting.

There one notices that another elementary activity of the human being can break away from him, can penetrate more into the object, and that this penetrating is just associated with the capacity for love. One will find that the capacity for love of which I have spoken just now as a development of the will for the spirit is mainly developed with such persons who have, actually, no writing conditioned by their organisation who can always write, as they want who can form the letters one way or the other. This is connected with the ability of submerging affectionately in the objective world.

Well, that what I have explained here about the elementary activity of writing can become for the human being in such a way that it also leads to higher activities. This is on the way that I have meant, while I showed that to the imagining which does not appeal to the memories those will impulses must be added which as it were grow together with the outer objectivity. That is again something that the spiritual researcher has to develop to a high degree. Then the world becomes picture to him which works otherwise robustly on the usual consciousness, while it manifests its truth, and then he breaks through to the supersensible.

Thus, something arises that I would like to characterise in the following way: there is a philosopher today whom I estimate very much from a certain side, although I can agree, actually, with nothing that he says. However, this philosopher has dealt intensely with the question, what can the scientific attitude know about the world?—He has answered this question from the most different sides. He is the philosopher Richard Wahle (1857-1937, Austrian philosopher and psychologist). He is a representative not only how many people think but also of the way to which generally the thinking of our time tends.

Richard Wahle tried to ask the modern worldviews: what can one learn from them about reality?—He got around to saying, if we look at the world after scientific pattern, we can nowhere recognise the powerful what causes the processes; but we learn only to recognise the succession of processes, one process emerging from the other. However, one does not get to know that what comes together in an event, so that the other can originate, the powerful, the primal factors, as Wahle calls them. Thus, Richard Wahle gets to the view that this modern view of nature gives no true picture of the outer world but a ghostly one. The more the ideal of natural sciences is fulfilled, the mare ghostly that becomes which exists now in the picture of nature. Richard Wahle says in his book On the Mechanism of the Spiritual Life (1906) that one can generally get to nothing but to such ghostly view.

Well, this induces him to condemn almost any philosophical pursuit. He is a philosopher, and he has a peculiar judgement not only of the present philosophy but also of the past one. However, it is a strange fact that the official representative of philosophy at a university gets to the judgement that I immediately want to state.

Richard Wahle considers what philosophy what he himself has performed in the philosophical area, and says approximately, once philosophy resembled a restaurant in which cooks and waiters dished up inedible dishes to the guests; and now philosophy is a restaurant in which cooks and waiters stand around and generally have nothing to do.—He refers to these waiters, I will say to the philosophers, in this strange restaurant of the present, and takes his starting point from the question: what can natural sciences do?—He realises the borders of natural sciences, while he looks at their ghostly being that must stick to the outside only.

He recognises the pictorial nature of any knowledge of nature. This is generally a significant phenomenon in the present spiritual life. Natural sciences are inclined to recognise more and more that they deliver, actually, pictures only that that which they call nature is only picture of something.

A conscientious scientific thinker does not get to the brainless monism, but he has to acknowledge the pictorial nature of nature. One could bring in countless documents, while one takes those considerations that try to answer the question: to what extent natural sciences are a suited instrument to recognise truth and reality.—There it is on one side in such a way that natural sciences get to their borders. The more they develop, the more their ideal is fulfilled, the more they will get just by themselves to acknowledging its pictorial nature.

From other side we have the course of spiritual research that wants to develop such a cognition, which enters the reality beyond the picture. Natural sciences show, what you can find is picture.—Spiritual science shows: while you develop a higher consciousness, you show that that what exists for the usual consciousness and for the usual science has picture nature and that you only find reality if you take your starting point from the picture nature.

How could one justify spiritual science better towards natural sciences than by the fact that spiritual science moves the human development of its own accord to acknowledge that what natural sciences have to find as result on their own terms.

Not the words, but the facts which spiritual science produces in the human soul will comply with that what originates from natural sciences. Spiritual science will thereby be justified completely while co-operating with natural sciences.

Today I just wanted to indicate this with some explanations and considerations: That which justifies spiritual science towards natural sciences is the well understood natural sciences themselves. If natural sciences get themselves right, they discharge into a point where they have to say to themselves, here we are at our borders, here something else is demanded.

Well, spiritual science will give this something else. With it, it will be justified not of its own accord, but by natural sciences towards natural sciences.

If I speak about death and immortality today, it may seem, as if at first such a consideration is caused in the personal needs of the human soul, which have little do with knowledge, with science. If you survey the series of spiritual-scientific talks that I have held, you yet realise that I applied a scientific standard to the considered objects already, even if a spiritual-scientific standard. Hence, the today's consideration does also not start from that what we find within our emotional life, within our longings and wishes towards a life that exceeds the life of the physical body. It will rather concern this: how has human knowledge to position itself to the questions of death and immortality completely in the sense, as this knowledge positions itself to other objects of our knowledge? Since if we abstain from the longing for a life which exceeds the bodily if we abstain from that what is to be understood possibly in the sense of concepts like fear of death and the like, we have the question of the nature of our whole human individuality in it as something that remains for the human knowledge regarding death and immortality.

But it may seem today, as if in case of all considerations of spiritual life these important questions of death and immortality are disregarded. Since if one takes one of the official psychologies, you find, indeed, the phenomena of the soul life discussed in detail. However, as far as they face us in the everyday life, for example, the question of the development of concepts, the question of memory, of perception, of attention and the like, but you will look in vain for a discussion about the real being of our soul life. Yes, you can find the prejudice just in most scientific circles this soul life that someone must be a dilettante who wants to put these questions as scientific ones.

But this scientific thinking has now to turn to roads different from the usual ones if it wants to consider issues like death and immortality. There that psychology is no longer enough which one calls “psychology without soul,” a psychology with which only the phenomena of the soul life should be considered, without looking at the real being of that what rests in our own individuality and whose expression the phenomena of the soul experiences are. Now spiritual science or anthroposophy is an unusual point of view regarding these as well as other questions.

Indeed, the questions of death and immortality have emerged like from dark depths of spirit already since more than one century from the Western cultural life. One has interpreted it always as a dream of single persons if it appeared with a great spirit, as for example with Lessing. One regarded it as a meaningless dream if it appeared with such men whose names are called less within the cultural life of the last decades. Concerning the questions of death and immortality spiritual science is also not in any opposition to natural sciences. Only the opinion is often spread, as if natural sciences must reject what spiritual science has to say for its part. Thus, we can experience that whenever something new appears, as it happened, for example, in the last decade with the problems of life, one points to the fact that the assumption of a real spiritual life that exceeds the only bodily, material life must be overcome gradually and completely. Spiritual science is not forced at all to deny something that appears, for example, in such discussions like in that by Jacques Loeb (1859–1924, German-American biologist) at the First Monists' Congress (Hamburg, 1911) about the problem of life. However, spiritual science has to hear repeatedly, as well as at that time, that it is over now with a spiritual-scientific consideration. For one can hope that one will succeed, finally, in the laboratory in producing life under outer material conditions.

Compared to all such matters I would like to remind you of one thing. There were times when one did not doubt really that one could once create life in the laboratory. People who have thought something to themselves with the representation of the Homunculus in the second part of Goethe's Faust and have remembered that this representation of Homunculus was really a kind of dream of the physical research of the Middle Ages and earlier times. That means that the creation not only of subordinated living beings, but also of the highest, the human being in the laboratory was a dream of the naturalists once. People who cherished this dream intended by no means that then the spirit had to be abolished from any consideration of humanity and the world.

No spiritual consideration of life contradicts the hope of producing life from the composition of outer substances. No, only the direction of the habitual ways of thinking matters. The habitual ways of thinking that develop with someone who immerses himself more and more in spiritual science show a view of a certain factor exceeding the material in the development of the human being and humanity.

The purely materialistic view of the human life says: there we see a human being entering the earthly existence, and we observe how the material processes happen this and that way, and we see the human being gradually growing up from a clumsy being to a human being who familiarises himself with life, can accomplish tasks of life. Moreover, we see descending processes after ascending ones as it were which lead gradually to the dissolution of the physical body or to death.

This materialistic consideration of life turns its attention solely to what one can reach with the senses and with methods of thinking and researching which are based on sensory views. There one is probably forced to exceed that what is given with the moment of birth or conception, because one cannot explain everything that appears in the human being if one pays attention only to those factors that prevail between birth or conception and death. Then one speaks of hereditary factors. However, as far as one remains within the purely material approach, one believes that all factors, all elements that should explain the human life consist only of that what one can observe between birth and death, or what comes into the human life by the inherited qualities of the parents or other ancestors.

However, as soon as people investigate this heredity, they realise that it is rather superstitious to lead back everything that the human being can realise in his life possibly to hereditary factors. Just in the last decade a brilliant historian, Ottokar Lorenz (1832–1904), tried once to examine families whose descent relations were known to what extent the qualities of the parents, grandparents and so on can be recognised in the lives of the descendants. However, he could get on this way of the purely experiential observation to nothing but to say, if one looks up in the line of ancestors, one finds that among the twenty to thirty ancestors whom everybody can count upwards human beings are who were either genii or idiots, wise men or fools, musicians or other artists, so that one can find all qualities, which are found with any human being, and that one does not come far in the reality if one clings to the prejudices of scientific theories if one wants to explain these or those hereditary factors, this or that expression of the human character, this or that quality.

Spiritual science adds a spiritual core to that what one can find in the line of heredity as conditions of the human life, which we cannot find in that which we search with the parents, grandparents and so on, but which we have to search within a supersensible spiritual world. So that in the course of the incarnation process something combines with the physical factors that is not physical that is of spiritual kind. This spiritual that one cannot see with physical eyes is that being that we carry in us as the result of our former lives on earth as one says. As it is true that we lead back our physical origin to our ancestors, we have to lead back a spiritual origin to a spiritual lineage, that means, to ourselves. Spiritual science is just forced to speak not only of one life on earth of the human being, but of repeated lives on earth. Indeed, one has to go far back for reasons that may become obvious in the course of these talks if we want to search our being in our previous life. So we say in the spiritual-scientific sense: we bring our essence with us from a former life, we have experienced this former life, and we have gone through death and then through a life between death and our appearance in this life.

Spiritual science is also forced to imagine this essence going through death and a supersensible life between death and a new life on earth. This essence is not a product of the material existence, but collects and forms the matter as it were, so that we receive this physical corporeality. Hence, we speak in spiritual science of repeated lives on earth. This idea of the repeated lives on earth faces us necessarily from the Western thinking first with Lessing (Gotthold Ephraim L., 1729–1781) in the work which he left as his testament, in the Education of the Human Race. There he says about this teaching: “even if it is the oldest one what the human beings have confessed to, must it not appear again at the summit of the human development?” In his Education of the Human Race Lessing also answers to some questions that can be objected the repeated lives on earth. Indeed, if such things appear with an excellent person, then people who judge this excellent spirit normally say: he performed great achievements, but later he became addicted to this strange dream of the repeated lives on earth, and one has to grant the great Lessing that he could also commit this strange mistake.—Thus, every little spirit feels called to condemn the great spirits with their “terrible mistakes.” Nevertheless, this idea did not let single persons of the nineteenth century rest, and even before the recent Darwinist natural sciences approached, the idea of the repeated lives on earth appears as a necessity of the human thinking again. Thus, it faces us in a book by Drossbach (Maximilian D., 1810–1884) about human rebirth, a somewhat confused book from our standpoint, but an attempt that allows itself just compared with scientific thinking to represent this idea. Soon afterwards, a little community was to be found which put a prize on the best writing about the immortality of the soul, and the prize winning writing by Widemann (Gustav W., 1812–1876) which was published in 1851 dealt with the problem of immortality from the standpoint of reincarnation. Thus, I could still state many a thing how the thinking has gradually induced many persons to consider this idea of reincarnation.

Then the scientific view of the human being came that was based on Darwin. At first, it considered the human being materialistically, and it will consider it still this way for a long. But if you take my book Theosophy or other books which are written in the spirit of spiritual science and natural sciences at the same time, you will realise that the scientific thinking—thought through to the end—imposes the necessity to the human being to think of the idea of incarnation. Nevertheless, it is not only this. I would like to show not only a logical consequence, but also that, indeed, the human being must come to the idea of reincarnation on basis of the same principle which prevails in natural sciences, namely of the principle of experience. However, another question arises there, is anybody able to collect experiences of that what should come in from supersensible worlds what should produce the human body and leave this body at death again?

One can realise cursorily still without spiritual-scientific foundations that something mental works on the outer body of the human being; but one does not like such considerations particularly today. If the human beings looked more exactly at the physiognomy of the human being in its different sculptural forms if one also looked at the facial play, at the gestures, which are individual with every human being, at the creative spirit, one would soon get a sensation how the spirit is internally working on the body.

Observe a human being who has been working on the big questions of life for about ten years, namely in such a way, as one does it in the outer science or philosophy where one reflects on these matters without having to say a lot. On the other side, observe a human being who has dealt with these issues so that they have become inner problems to him, so that they have taken him in states of the highest bliss, but also to the highest pains and the deepest tragedy. Consider a human being who deals with the questions of knowledge, and look at him, after he has led such a soul life for ten years, and you will realise how this work expresses itself in his physiognomy, how, indeed, the humanely mental works into the forms of the body. May one pursue now by certain methods such working on the outer physical body further to that point where not only certain forms of our face are changed in such a way that into them the character of the soul life is pressed, but where the indefinite form which the human being has at first becomes his completely elaborated figure?

It is necessary that the human being leads his soul life beyond the point where it is in the everyday life today. He has to learn to seize the supersensible in himself, that which is accessible to no outer observation. Then every human being can find both points by mere reflection, so to speak, where our life directly finds the supersensible.

These two points are the transitions from the wake state to sleep and again from sleep to the wake state. Since nobody should think so illogically that the human soul life stops with falling asleep and comes again into being with awakening. Our soul life must be in any state of existence in sleep, it must be somewhere to put it another way. The big question emerges which maybe the child puts that is justified for someone who gets involved with the questions of knowledge, namely the question: where does the soul go when the human being falls asleep? We see also other processes stopping, we see, for example, a burning candle going out. May one also ask there, where to does the fire go? Then we say, the fire is a process that stops if the candle goes out, and which begins again if it is kindled again.—May we compare the bodily process of the human being to the candle and say: the soul life is a process that goes out if the human being falls asleep in the evening, and is kindled in the morning when he awakes again? It seems perhaps to be in such a way, as if one could use this comparison. However, this comparison becomes impossible if, indeed, one could prove that not for the usual perception or sensation, but for a sensation to be attained by careful soul preparation that can face us which leaves our body with falling asleep and visits us with awakening again. If this is in such a way that while falling asleep not only a process takes place like a going out flame, but if we can pursue what leaves the body in the evening while falling asleep and visits it in the morning again if we can prove this process in its reality, then a supersensible inside the human being exists. Then one asks us this supersensible: how does it work within the body?

Even the famous naturalist Du Bois-Reymond (Emil Du B.-R., 1818–1896) pronounced the thought that one can understand the sleeping human being from the standpoint of natural sciences, but not the waking one in whom impulses, instincts, passions and so on surge up and down. You can read that what I have outlined today only briefly, more in detail in my writing How Does One Attain Knowledge of the Higher Worlds

I have described the methods there which we want to touch now briefly by which the human being gets around to getting to know the reality of that what leaves the body in sleep, and what with the awakening goes into him again. At first, we want to ask attentive soul viewers who have got a certain ability to listen to these important moments like falling asleep and awakening.

There we hear them saying what spiritual science can confirm absolutely that at first that changes what exists with sharp contours in the surroundings into something nebulous, into blurred forms. Then the falling asleep feels, as if his whole inner being is extended and does no longer depend on the forms of his skin; this is connected with a certain feeling of bliss. Then a strange moment occurs in which the human being can feel everything like in a brief vision that he has accomplished as satisfying moral things; this faces him vividly, and he knows that these are contents of his soul, he feels being in them. Then a jerk happens as it were, and the human being still feels: oh, this moment could last forever!—Some people just have this sensation who pay attention to the moment of falling asleep. The consciousness has disappeared.

The human being goes over to an inner essentiality at such a moment where the outer body plays no role, because the daily strain tires him. One feels as if the reality of the mental is scurrying. All methods of spiritual science which we can call experimental ones spiritual-scientifically consist in nothing but that the human being receives the inner power to keep that which is disappearing so that he can experience the moment of falling asleep completely consciously. The consciousness is kept. Since why does the consciousness dwindle while falling asleep? Because the human being cannot unfold that inner strength and willpower in the usual life to experience something else when the outer senses leave him. Let us ask ourselves, how much we experience in the usual life within the soul what is not stimulated by the outer impressions? There is a little left with most human beings surely. No wonder that the inner strength does not exist which can penetrate the soul-life and that is left by any outer experience at the moment, when it steps out while falling asleep. Any spiritual development is based on the penetration of our soul with the strength that the soul needs to receive the consciousness unless it receives it from the body. Meditation, concentration, and contemplation are experimental means to advance farther with the soul life than one can come in the usual life. I would like to bring in one example only.

Assuming that a human being can put a thought of benevolence or of something else in the centre of his experience and can exclude all the other thoughts, also those which one can get with the senses, to hold on this one thought only. Since the thoughts fly to the human being at such a moment as the bees fly to the flowers if one stands within the usual life. However, if one can have the strength to exercise concentration of thinking repeatedly, to practice meditative immersion, as soon as one can become free of the mere outer impressions, and delves repeatedly into pictorial thoughts which express something allegorically, then such a thought can startle the human soul-life, so that it becomes a stronger force than the human being normally has. Then such a human being falls asleep consciously, that means he experiences consciously that he grows with his soul life into a spiritual world. This is no dream, also no self-deception or self-suggestion, but something that is accessible, indeed, to every human being, but is to be reached only with care and energy. The human being can free himself completely from his physical corporeality. As he frees himself, otherwise, in sleep unconsciously from it, and as every human being is in sleep beyond the physical body, he will consciously live by such exercises in that what exists usually unconsciously beyond the human being. Briefly, the human being can experience a relief of his soul from the physical corporeality with soul exercises.

Indeed, one can always hold against such a representation that is based on inner experience: this is based on deceit! Nevertheless, whether it is based on deceit or on reality, this can be decided only by experience. Hence, I have to say repeatedly: what the human being believes to experience this way can absolutely be self-suggestion, for how far does the human being go self-deception! He can go so far that if he thinks, for example, only of a soda he already has its taste on the tongue. Something may well give the impression, as if it were perception of a spiritual world, but still it can be self-deceit. Hence, someone who does such exercises and makes his soul the experimenter must take all means to eliminate illusions. Nevertheless, in the end only the experience decides. Certainly, somebody can suggest the taste of a soft drink to himself, but it is another question whether he can quench his thirst with it.

There is the possibility to experience as reality what is in sleep beyond the physical body. How does one experience it? So that the human being makes his soul more and more independent and gets to know a quite new supersensible world. Indeed, he starts getting to know a world of spiritual light. Then something particular turns out there. The human being who otherwise does not consider his thoughts and mental pictures as realities takes them along when he leaves his body with his soul really. He loosens his conceptual life from all materiality, and this conceptual life experiences a transformation when the human being becomes free of his physical body. What I say now appears to materialistic minded people like daydreaming, even so it is reality. Our mere thoughts change into a world which we can compare—but only compare, it is different—with a propagating light with which we find the underlying cause of the things. So you get to the world in which you detach the thinking that is bound, otherwise, to the tool of the brain and submerge with your thinking in a newly appearing world. This expresses itself in the way that you feel more and more enlarged. You get to know a world of which the outer physical-sensory world is only a revelation. Spiritual beings, not atoms, form the basis of the outer sensory world, and we can penetrate as human beings into this spiritual world. So we are accepted by such a spiritual world as it were if we carry out this self-experiment in our soul.

We only attain a complete knowledge of the relation of this spiritual world to us human beings if we can also spiritually experience the moment of awakening. This is possible when the human being contemplates a lot about his inner life in meditation and concentration. For example, he can review that pictorially every morning or evening what he has experienced during the day or the day before to consider it contemplating or he contemplates his moral impulses and takes stock of himself. Then the human being gets around to experiencing the reverse moment consciously by such exercises where we submerge in our bodies that we experience, otherwise, unconsciously while awakening.

Then he experiences something that I can characterise only in the following way. You all may know that a healthy quiet sleep depends on our emotions. If the human being has thought ever so much, has exerted itself ever so much in his thinking, he falls easily asleep. But if anger, shame, remorse, and in particular a troubled conscience gnaw at him, he tosses and turns sleepless in bed. Not our thinking which we can carry over to the big spiritual world but our emotions can drive away the sleep.

Our emotions are associated with our soul life in the narrower sense. We share our thoughts with the world. The way in which our emotions just affect us is something intimately connected with what we ourselves are. Somebody who has learnt now in such a way to free his soul consciously from his body, also gets clear from immediate observation how he carries his emotions into the world into which he enters if he has become free of body. As blissful it makes us on one side to submerge in a world of spiritual light, free of the body, as much we feel chained in this world to our emotions gnawing at us. With it then we go into the spiritual world and have to carry it again into our body. However, by the mentioned exercises we find our emotional world again while submerging in our bodies. It faces us as something strange. We get to know ourselves submerging in our emotional world, and thereby we get to know, while we pursue it now consciously, what works in truth killing on our organism. I note here that I speak about death in a later talk that has a quite different meaning considering it with plants or animals than with the human being. Spiritual science does not take the easy way out to find these phenomena identical in the three realms if we pursue that consciously what has become the possession of our soul that it settles in our physical body and can work destroying in it. Then we get to know how our innermost being really forms the body while it combines with that what comes from father and mother and from the other ancestors as hereditary factors. There we see the human being entering in the physical life, we see him entering clumsily at first. He cannot yet speak; then we see the forms becoming more and more certain and see him becoming an active human being gradually.

Considering the whole development of the human being spiritual-scientifically, we realise how an inner essence develops and this forms the human being working on the body from the spiritual from birth or conception on. We find the same essence that works creatively on the body if we can pursue how it leaves the body and penetrates into a spiritual world. There we find two things: an element that enables us to pour out our own being like in a spiritual world of light; but we also find something in this essence that we must bring into this spiritual world, namely our emotional world, that is everything that we have got to know in life. In these two things we have on one side what is creative in the human being what leaves the body as our spiritual essence, goes through death and appears again in a new body after an interim and on the other side we have our emotions which we get to know by the spiritual-scientific view as a real being as that what destroys our body and leads to death.

Therefore, we realise how our spiritual essence enters in existence, builds up the body gradually, and we see this essence working the strongest in the first months where we do not yet have an inner soul life where we do not yet think. There we see the human being entering existence sleeping as it were. If we try to remember, we can come back to a certain point, not farther. We have slept into existence as it were. Only from the third, fourth years on the human being can feel as an ego. The reason is that the spiritual essence of the human being is busy forming the body at first. Then he comes to a point where the body has to grow only, and from then on the human being can use what flowed once in his body for his soul life which works within the physical body constantly in such a way that we take up the necessity of death at that time, where we start saying “I” to ourselves, up to which we can remember later where we begin an inner life.

What do we receive with this necessity of death? We receive the possibility to take up the outer world, to enrich our inside being perpetually, so that we become richer in life every day. In that part of our being that we carry in sleep into the spiritual world that forms our soul being everything is contained that we get as joys and sorrows, as pleasure and pain. While we live and develop a consciousness, we have the possibility for our inner essence to enrich it perpetually. We take this enrichment along if we go through death, but we can have it only because we had to destroy our bodies throughout life. Our body is built as it has developed from the preceding life. However, we absorb something new perpetually that enriches our soul life. Nevertheless, this new can no longer penetrate completely into our physical body, but only up to a certain degree. That expresses itself by the fact that we feel the fatigue of yesterday removed; but it cannot completely penetrate into our body. What penetrates into our body cannot develop completely in the bodily.

We take the former example once again. A human being works on questions of knowledge for ten years. Thus, his physiognomy has changed after ten years if this activity has been a matter of his heart. However, his body limits this change. The desire to develop internally further may still exist; but, the later absorbed can no longer work into the body. Hence, we see, because the body puts a border, the richer inner life beginning when the soul has poured forth into the body. First, we see the physiognomy of such a human being changing—of a thinker, poet or artist; then only we see the rich spiritual life developing. Not before our outside world limits us, we develop so surely, but we can no longer carry into our physical bodies what we develop in ourselves because our body is built up according to that what we have got in a former life on earth. Therefore, we have to carry through death what we still get internally. This helps us to build up the next body, so that we have built only in a body of the next life what must destroy our present body.

A view presents itself there that fits into the scientific thinking, a view of what death and immortality means what the repeated lives on earth mean. There we realise if we change our physiognomy how the human being has built that into his body what he has got in former lives on earth. We see the results of our former lives in the developing body, and we see in that what we get now what stands in the way of our bodily, so to speak, as a spiritual, the developing elements of our future life.

Spiritual science regards the earthly life as something that is between something former and something following. The later considerations will show how our perspective increases to the times of our existence which the human being spends free of body in the supersensible worlds. In order that such matters would not remain pipe dreams, it is necessary that we look at the methods that enable the soul to perceive even if it lacks the physical brain. Only because the human being enables the soul to perceive that in the supersensible what must remain, otherwise, a mere assertion it becomes a proven reality.

Today we stand strictly speaking only at the beginning of a science that deals with such matters. Just many people consider themselves as the best experts of the matters, as the most enlightened ones and regard these matters as fantasies. I would not be surprised if anybody said, this is daydreaming that completely contradicts any scientific truth!—Nobody will find it more comprehensible than I do if anybody says this. But while the human beings become engrossed more and more in spiritual science, they realise that we can prepare our souls by meditation so that it can know about itself, can develop inner forces by which it can still know, can still perceive if it leaves the body and can no longer perceive with the organs of the body. This has to be found experimentally—one may say, it is to be found spiritual-experimentally—that the soul is something that one can experience if it can no longer use the bodily organs. It goes through births and deaths and works in such a way that it builds up the body that goes through death and collects new forces to build the body during the earthly existence. With the questions of the nature of the human being, you attain answers to the questions of death and immortality at the same time.

Goethe said once in an essay that nature invented death to have much life. Spiritual-scientific research proves such a notion to be true saying, in any life, the human being enriches his soul life; he must die because his respective body is built as an effect of his former lives on earth. While killing his body, he creates the possibility to work into in a new body what now he cannot work into his body and into the world.

Such a worldview influences our lives deeply. If it penetrates our whole being if it remains not only a theory, we feel such a truth only as a truth of life. Since we say to ourselves when we have crossed the middle of our lives when our hairs begin becoming grey and our faces get wrinkles: life is going downhill!—Why is it going downhill? Because that what the soul has got cannot be brought into the body. However, what we have gained internally, and what must destroy our present bodies is worked into a new body. Someone can argue easily: you spiritual researchers state that the human being becomes weak in old age, so you say that just with the body the mind dwindles away!—As this objection is a given, it is a given that one only admits that such a man does not think about that: from what is our present brain built?—It is built from our former lives! We must destroy our bodies and our brains with our thoughts. But the thoughts, which kill the bodies, are those, which use the brain. It is obvious that something must stop that is bound to a tool like the brain. However, our spiritual being does not stop with it. That is why it occurs that we do no longer find the tools in ourselves to realise what we have appropriated in the present life if the human being moves in downward direction. Then this yet works in a soul life which is not bound to the brain, and which cannot be expressed by cerebral thoughts. This prepares itself to act creatively in the next life. One says it not only in Goethe's sense that nature invented death to have much life—but we have also to say, death is there to work out that in new forms what we acquire internally in life. In this sense, we can say if we see the age approaching: thank God, that life can go downward, that death can be! Since if it did not exist, we could not take up what flows towards us from the world in such a way that it forms us. We need death, so that we can make that what we experience the contents of our own being. Hence, we regard death as that by which just life can advance. Hence, there is no better adviser than spiritual science; it is not only a comforter towards the fear of death, but it gives us strength, while we are walking towards death and see the outside dying. Since we know that then the inside grows. Spiritual science will raise the whole life to a higher level at which life seems meaningful and reasonable.

From the following talks will arise that life does not proceed endlessly forward and backward, but that also reincarnation has a beginning and an end. Now I would only like to point to it. From that which spiritual science has to say about death and immortality arises that we have the effects of our present life in a following life.

The complete human existence disintegrates into the existence between birth and death and into that between death and a new birth. There we see what Goethe felt in terms of the simple life extended to the whole life while we look back not only at the little yesterday, but also at the big yesterday where we made our present life. We look there at the joys or pains of life and feel: joy strengthens us for the future; we must experience grief for overcoming obstacles to strengthen ourselves also for the future. There we see a big contrast expanding in the future life and think of the Goethe's verses:

If yesterday is clear and accessible,
If today you work freely and strongly,
Then you can hope for a tomorrow
That is also fortunate.

Happiness and optimism flow to us from the internally conceived spiritual science showing us: indeed, the spirit forms the material and survives while the material life is destroyed to reveal itself always anew, and which applies the newly acquired. I would like to summarise this for the purposes of the today's evening with the words:

While living the spirit shows
Always its power only,
Dying, however, the spirit shows,
How through all deaths
It always survives to higher life.

We describe the features of the earth in accordance with the principles of physical geography. In the same way, the spiritual impulses at work on earth (and already briefly characterized in these lectures) can be described by a kind of spiritual geography—especially the interplay of Eastern and Western impulses in human life, with all their various differences. What I have to say today in this direction is bound to remain rather sketchy; but it is more important to find a specific point of view for looking at much that I have already outlined than to give a detailed description.

The relationship of East and West is often expressed symbolically by saying that light comes from the East. Looking at the East, Western man—the man of recent civilization in general—receives the impression of a dream-like spiritual life. Modern spiritual life is used to sharply delineated concepts, closely linked to external observation; in contrast, the notions of the Orient—shifting, fluctuating, less closely and less sharply linked to externals—show up as dream-like. Admittedly, from this dream-like spiritual life, embodied in the most splendid poems, the Vedas, there did of course then develop the clear-cut concepts of a comprehensive philosophy—Vedanta, for example. These concepts were not gained by examining external data, that is analytically, but emerged from an inwardly experienced and apprehended spiritual life.

When this dream-like spiritual life works on us, however, and we lovingly submit to it without at first noticing how much it differs from our own, it has a curious effect. Once we allow its various configurations to affect our soul, we cannot stop there. We cannot merely take over its concepts and ideas. In absorbing them, whether from the literature or the philosophy (including such forms of these as have survived in the East down to the present), we feel a spiritual need to go beyond these images, ideas and concepts. When an Oriental idea, such as that of man's relation to the secrets and the mysterious workings of nature and the world, affects us, it is often accompanied in our mind by something that symbolizes it for the Orient too: the flower of the lotus, as it folds its petals about what must remain mysteriously hidden. We may immerse ourselves lovingly in shifting concepts that are more fitted gently to touch external phenomena and surround them with a mist, than to perceive them in sharp contours, and we may enter their intertwining branches; and if we do, there will inevitably appear to us all the intertwining, branching vegetation of the East and, with it, all that the human hand, the human spirit and civilization have produced from stone and other materials in line with these flowing, branching concepts. We may say: in immersing itself in these concepts, our soul inevitably sees before it a nature similar in its life, diversity and imaginative working to the soul's experience of the concepts themselves.

There appears to be no objective reason for man to abandon this Oriental spiritual activity in favour of a “faithful observation of nature;” indeed, it seems to me rather that there is in the Oriental concepts themselves an incentive not merely to accept them, but to apply them to the outside world. Europeans may feel that such things cannot be applied to the outside world, because of their vagueness, their (to them) fantastic character. If so, we may ask: How, then, can we track, with sharply delineated concepts, the shapes of clouds, fluctuating and rapidly changing as they are? Yet track them we must, if we wish to observe nature's workings in immediate revelation, as they appear to the human senses and the human soul.

Why is this so? It seems to me that there can be only one reason: that in what reaches us from this Eastern spiritual activity, there survives an element from which it was once directly created.

At the time when the Oriental was developing the finest part of his philosophy of life (which has since come down to his descendants in a partially decadent condition), the East created everything with devoted love. Love lives in each of its ideas, concepts and images and in them we perceive love. The love seeks to flow out into objects. And it flows out according to its nature, and conjures up before our soul the symbols that the Oriental established, with an inner understanding of much that functions supersensibly, in seeking to establish what he perceived as the spiritual dement in things. Of course, this is not to assert that this configuration of spirit, if extended over all the earth, would be an unmixed blessing for the development of the world. But once it has appeared on earth, and exerted its influence over other regions, it must be considered objectively, especially at a time when we need to foster understanding between men.

Against it, we may set the particular outlook that has developed, certainly with no less justification, but in a quite different form, further West—and in this respect we ourselves belong in many ways to the West. Here, we find, it is regarded as an ideal to stand back from what the senses observe directly, what extends in space and time, and to test what nature offers, and what should lead us to the world's secret, for position, motion, dimensions and weight. What presents itself directly to the eye is dissected and placed under a microscope, and gives rise to notions that could only emerge under a microscope.

Let us imagine for a moment that we are in the laboratory: how heavily equipped we are with these concepts, so remote from direct observation! Look how we regard the light flooding through the world! How we regard it by means of abstract concepts! We need them, if we are to reach understanding. But how remote are the observations we record on light and colour from what we encounter in wood and meadow, cloud-shape and sun! We may say: what we formulate in our sharply delineated concepts—with the balance, the measuring-rod, the most varied counting devices—takes us into some of nature's shallows and solves some riddles, but it does not take us to direct observation of nature. It is all very well to say: direct your attention to sensory observation and then try to derive your philosophy of life from it. But this is not what happens at all! The scientific view of life we establish is far removed from what the senses observe.

What we ought to say is this: if we establish our knowledge by using the equipment of learning with which we have harvested perhaps the finest fruits of present-day natural science, we shall have to retune our soul before we can approach nature again. If as botanists we have used the microscope extensively and learnt about cell-life, and formed concepts in the atomistic manner of today, we shall have to retune our soul before we can recapture a love of the immediate world of plants as it grows and flowers. If we have formed a scientific concept of the structure of animal and man, again we shall have to retune if we want to move on to direct observation of the animal's shape and actions, and to enjoy the way it plays in the meadow or turns its melancholy or unmoving gaze upon us or looks at us confidingly. Equally, we shall have to retune our soul to share in what the eye can see when it looks at the human shape, tracing its planes with an artistic eye. The Oriental has no retuning to do. Since what he called his science was shot through with love, it led him out to immediate observation. And this was a direct echo of what he experienced in his soul.

These are differences of temper in the attitude to life of East and West. And these different tempers multifariously combine in the man of the region between. In what we experience scientifically, artistically and religiously, there flows much of the temper I have just been characterizing as the one that comes to us from the Orient. In other respects again, we are moved by something of the way of experiencing the world kindled by that scientific attitude which the West has developed—by youthful science and knowledge, so to speak, as against the old-established ones of the East. And in every soul in the civilization that lies between, these two currents flow together. In the last analysis, the life that surrounds us in Europe is a fusion—and one whose component currents we really need to understand.

The contact between the tempers of East and West in our present spiritual life can be characterized in another way.

From what I have just said of the East, one thing is clear about the Oriental. In growing into his spiritual life, he experiences it as immediate reality; he bears it with him in his soul as the reality self-evident to him. External nature, and indeed the entire external world right up to the constellations, seems to him an echo which is, however, fundamentally the same as what he bears within him. Yet he cannot regard as reality what strikes him as an echo, what seems to him a reflection, as he can regard as reality what he experiences directly in his soul. He is closely linked with what he experiences in the spiritual sphere and can say “It is,” because he feels its existence as if it were his own, and in this way understands its mode of being. When he looks out at the reflection of this existence, he knows that it is not reality in the same sense. If he did not illuminate it with the light that streams from within him, it would be dumb and dark. And in becoming more and more aware of this, he arrives at a temper of soul that says: truth and reality reside in what the soul experiences directly. What is reflected to it from without is illusion, maya, incomplete reality, becoming reality only when it is touched by what must first reveal itself through the human soul.

Thus we see how the East developed the view that the spiritual world is reality, and the outside world, that of the senses, is semblance, the great illusion, maya. It would, however, be wrong to believe on this account that, in the pre-Buddhist period for example, the Oriental averted his glance completely from the outside world. He accepts) it, even if in a higher sense he must admit that in what extends in space and time he is dealing not with complete reality but with an illusion, the great non-being, maya. But this in turn gives a particular temper to the life of the soul in the East: the soul feels a close link with the spiritual world and sees, in all that exists in the external world of the senses, a replica of the original shape of the world as it exists in the spirit. And in the end this grows into the view that one's own human sensuous substance is a replica of a human being whose true existence is in the spiritual world. And here I would say: the Oriental, quite consistently, regards the world as made up of replicas of a spiritual world, just as he regards himself as a replica of what he was before he descended into the physical and sensuous world. From his standpoint, the view of man and the view of nature are in complete harmony.

This harmony is possible; though no longer consonant with our views, it does indeed express a truth, if somewhat one-sidedly, as we can see once again if, with the research methods of spiritual science, which I have been describing in the last few days, we ourselves take a look at this Oriental mode of knowledge.

As I have shown, by awakening powers dormant in the soul we can attain a view of the spiritual world that yet suits modern man; we can look once more into a spiritual world; and find this spiritual world unfolding before our “mind's eye” just as the physical and sensuous world unfolds before our physical eye. When we develop this vision, however, the spiritual world does not remain a mere pantheistic and nebulous embodiment of universal spirituality; it becomes just as concrete in its individual forms as the world of the senses in those of the realms of nature. There will then follow a view of man that I should now like to characterize.

Let us start with something familiar to us at every moment in our lives: an experience of the outside world. We have entered into this external experience through our sensory perception and perhaps also through setting our will in motion in some activity. We live in conjunction with the data of the outside world. For us, this is an immediate experience. In the last analysis, human existence on earth is composed of such experiences. From them, we retain thought-images, which become our memories. We can look back on our experiences through bearing within us faded, shadowy and, in fact, mental images of them.

Let us be quite honest with ourselves and consider whether, at any moment in life, our consciousness contains very much more than memories of external, factual, sensory experiences. Of course, many a nebulous mystic believes that he can summon up eternal things from the depths of his soul. If he looked more closely and could really test the structures he summons from his soul, he would discover that as a rule they are no more than transformed external perceptions. Within man, memories are not only faithfully preserved; they are also transformed in many ways, and man then fails to recognize them. He thinks that he is acting as a mystic and summoning something from the depths of his soul, when he has only called up from his memory a transformed external experience. Of course, we need only think of mathematical truths to realize that all kinds of mental structures do establish themselves in the life of the soul. But as a rule it is not these structures that the mystic seeks.

However, anyone who simply wishes to accept the everyday life of the soul, as it appears in ordinary consciousness, must say: This life is made up of images that are the remains of our experiences gained-through perceptions, and of other experiences within the external sensuous world. When we look at our soul and at the spiritual element that permeates it, as we have it in physical life on earth, we can therefore say: outside is the physical world extending in space, the world that unfolds its causes and effects in time, the world, that is, of facts. Here within is the world of shadows in the soul; we do indeed experience it in general as something spiritual and vital, but its content we experience only as a replica of the world of facts and of the senses. Now, paradoxical as the outlook of today may find it, for the attitude that I have been expounding in the last few days, the reverse comes about: in empty consciousness, as a result of meditation, the spiritual in the world, the spiritual within natural phenomena, is really experienced; it is observed also as the soul-spiritual element in man himself, as he is before he descends into his physical existence from a spiritual world; the spiritual is observed concretely by the spirit-organ we have developed; the world about us becomes spiritual, just as to our senses it is sensuous and physical. And when all this happens, we begin to perceive—as if in recollection of the times when we lived as spiritual beings in purely spiritual worlds—how in its particulars our physical organism is a replica of the spiritual world that surrounds us. With physiology and anatomy we can observe our lungs, heart and other organs only as outer objects; but when we can see the spiritual world about us, then the lungs and heart as they really are within us will become for us a replica in the physical sphere of what is spiritually prefigured. Just as in our ordinary consciousness the world outside is physical, and our soul creates replicas as its experiences; so now we learn that there is a spiritual world outside and that the replicas of this spiritual world exist in our own organs. We come to know man's structure only in coming to know the spiritual world. What is usually called matter then ceases to have the significance it has assumed in recent civilization, just as spirit ceases to have the significance of something abstract that it has had in recent civilization. We can thus see that in our organic functioning there is in fact a replica of what we were before we descended into our earthly existence.

At this stage, we need no longer be frightened even by materialism, in so far as there is justification for it—and even materialism has done some good and brought us countless discoveries. We look at the human brain and the human nervous system in its physical operation. Of course, we agree that ordinary, everyday thinking is a function of these physical organs. We are entirely in agreement with what exact science must hold about these matters today. But on the other hand we know that the material forms operating within us are themselves simply a transformed reflection of the spiritual sphere. For this reason, the material is acceptable, and because, in transforming itself into mortal man, the spiritual has sought out the capacity of brain and nerves to achieve in a material replica what is spiritually prefigured.

Modern man can see this in his “mind's eye” by developing the powers of cognition of which I have been speaking in the last few days. Yet there is a dream-like anticipation of it, I would say, in the Oriental philosophy of life I have outlined. This philosophy has become old and senile, but certain of its features still work effectively in our heart and soul. In its instinctive clairvoyance, the ancient Orient sensed that the spiritual world is a reality with which it felt closely linked, and that nature, and the natural element in man himself, is a replica of the spiritual; it provides an external garment for the revelation of what is inwardly spiritual.

Yet it would be wrong to say that the Oriental did not observe nature. His organs were finely attuned to its observation. For him, however, from everything that he faithfully observed and lovingly honoured as a replica, something of the spirit shone. Nature revealed spirit to him, shone spirit upon him at every turn. And this spirit was his reality. What lay before him outside was maya.

Even in Buddhism, which gained a far greater influence on Oriental life than we usually think—since it later assumed the most varied forms—we can see how the sense of inhabiting a spiritual world paled as man and world developed. The gaze was increasingly directed upon what was maya, and experience of the great illusion, the great non-being, maya, gradually became predominant. There thus arose an awareness of the need for redemption from what can be experienced within maya—experienced, that is, in the manner of Buddha, who regarded our direct experiences of this maya as a crowd of sorrows that flow in on man.

But it faded, this sense of inhabiting a spiritual world; and this is what justifies us in considering the early Oriental philosophy of life as something instinctive and even partial: if we do return to something like it, we must do so with complete self-possession and lucid consciousness. The impairment of human activity relative to the demands of the physical, external world must not occur a second time in the world's development. Man must never again escape into spiritual activity and so prevent himself from devoting his full strength to earthly tasks—which are what the Oriental perceives as maya, even if in deference to modern concepts he does not say so; whereas he perceives as reality what reveals itself within him. He has within him a light that is a direct reflection of the divine and spiritual elements in the world.

Against what I have thus described as the spiritual geography influencing our modern life, I should now like to set another illustration from the development of the human spirit and the world, but this time from the immediate present. Our civilization, which even in Europe is now of some antiquity, is subject to pressures from certain spheres, whence arise social longings and also social conflicts. Anyone who has moved in these spheres will have come across the phenomenon I am about to describe.

Although no one could properly accuse me of Socialist opinions, I was for some long time a teacher in Socialist circles. My intention was to do something for which in fact the time had not yet come (it is more than twenty years ago now): to propagate a spiritual life that could lead to theories that are in closer accord with reality than those derived from abstract or modified Marxism, which in many respects indeed are not realistic at all. There exists in these circles a basic attitude—something we can recognize as a first step, yet which is as deeply rooted in the soul as was the sense of maya at which the Oriental finally arrived. And in observing this attitude, we are profoundly struck by a word that expresses many unconscious feelings, unconscious ideas and concepts, unconscious longings too, a word that we hear again and again and must recognize as having characterized wide circles of humanity for centuries. Encompassing millions of people is a mood that this word expresses. The word is “ideology,” by which is meant “idealistic theorizing.” It derives from an attitude that the proletarian class in particular has absorbed into its education. The scientific method, with its increasing emphasis on matter, has given rise to the view that historical reality consists simply of economic struggles, economic patterns, class struggles, in short of the immediate material elements, externally sensuous and physical, in human life and history; and that therefore economic forces are the true reality.

This economic materialism, which is far more widespread than many upper-class people today believe, is a consequence of the general materialistic outlook. Nowadays, this is taken to be overcome even in science; yet it has a wide following particularly in the West.

And what is this “ideology?” It is law, morality, the realm of the beautiful, religious concepts, political theory, in short everything that makes up spiritual life. These things are not true reality, but bubbles and baubles arising from true reality, which resides in material struggles and patterns. “Ideology” is a way of indicating that what man experiences within himself—whether it is art or science or law or maxims of state or religious impulses—is maya, to use the Oriental term.

If we do not just take it at its face value, but can feel what millions of people are thinking, then the word “ideology” points to something that must inevitably assume the most formidable dimensions unless it can be set on the right course in good time. What the soul experiences and shapes within is not reality: true reality is only what exists externally in tangible facts.

Inside Western civilization, therefore, there has developed an outlook diametrically opposed to that which long ruled the Orient and still survives even today as a kind of antiquated trimming. There, true reality is what is experienced in the spirit, and maya what proceeds outside in physical actuality; here, maya or “ideology” (which is indeed a translation of the word “maya,” but applied to the spiritual sphere) is what is experienced in the spirit, and reality what is tangibly displayed, palpably there in the world.

In its development, the world aims at complete realization of its various potentialities. Just as the one extreme developed, in the Orient, so too the other was bound in its turn to take hold of humanity. To bring about a fruitful development of man and world, however, and to change the forces of decline into constructive ones, we must understand the significance of this mood, this “ideology.” It is recent and therefore a first step.

Let us look once more at what modern spiritual science can tell us. In the Orient, there was a dreamy, dark, instinctive knowledge that there exists a spiritual reality, with a sensory replica here in the physical realm. Because the soul's attention was devoted primarily to this spiritual reality, sensory reality came to be regarded as unreality, external appearance, maya. Yet this maya is important in more than one way. Although the world may be maya, our efforts, which are a reality for us, must still be applied to it in the first instance. But it is important also for the precept “Know thyself,” for a truly human attitude. Why? Well, it is true that we can now elevate ourselves to a life in the spiritual world, as I have described; that we can see by means of sharply delineated concepts and thus understand what appeared to the Orient like a dream. But the experience of such a world would never have created in human development the impulse to freedom.

When man feels closely linked to the spiritual world, he feels at the same time inwardly determined by and dependent on it. Therefore he and his consciousness had to move out of it and, for a passing phase of history (in which we now are), to turn to a world of mere fact. Confronted with this external actuality, the life of man's soul becomes an image of it. The spirit informing this life turns into abstract concepts and gradually becomes a mere image, to be recognized as a replica.

I have already suggested that, by having images within us, we can be free. Mirror-images do not determine our actions. If we wish to conform to mirror-images, which in themselves are powerless, the impulse to do so must come from us. The same is true of abstract concepts. And in making its appearance in pure thinking, our noblest feature, the moral and religious element, becomes for us an impulse of freedom. It is a most valuable component of human life. But in a period when man finds himself confronted with physical actuality, it makes its appearance in abstract thinking.

At the moment when the moral element, in the shape of moral intuition, makes its appearance in pure thinking, the task of the epoch is fulfilled. The epoch has developed from spirit-reality to the spirit as abstraction and (I would say, exaggerating a little) it now interprets everything spiritual as maya, as mere illusion, as “ideology.” We have a certain right to interpret as “ideology” everything that is a reflection of external natural existence. At the moment when the moral element, in the shape of intuition, enters this maya-thinking, this “ideology,” we reach the first stage at which we can recognize once more that we must awaken this “ideology,” which we experience as mere semblance, to inner life by energizing ourselves and allowing the life that is hidden within us to stream forth. The meaning of the world had to become “ideology” for humanity in order that man himself could infuse it with his own reality.

This was necessary for man's experience of freedom, which is something that has only been attained in the West and in recent civilization. It was necessary that man should first feel himself to be in a sphere of unreality when in contact with everything that is most valuable to him—his art, his science, his moral concepts, in short his entire spiritual life—and that everything transitory that shone on him should appear to be the only reality. For this reality, rightly contemplated, cannot in any way impair his freedom—the freedom that depends on his being himself a spiritual being who creates in physical and sensuous actuality only a replica of the spirit.

We see, therefore, that “ideology” represents in an extreme form an attitude that we really need in face of such concepts of nature as position, motion, dimensions and numbers. If nature were to provide us with anything other than concepts, it would never make us free. Only if we rise to concepts that will then appear as mere “ideology” to someone who is still stranded at the previous stage, can a new and spiritually real form of the higher world infuse these initially unreal concepts. This is the first step, from which must emerge for man a new form of the spiritual world. And when we encounter the exaggerated notion of “ideology,” those of us who are not bogged down in the immediate opinions of the day but can see beyond them to the world's development, must conclude: it was necessary for man to reach a stage of development at which, looking at only one side of the world and himself, he could speak of “ideology;” it is equally necessary now for him to attain the decision, conviction, power and courage to infuse into this “ideology” a spiritually perceived and experienced world. Otherwise, although perhaps it may be discussed philosophically, the “ideology” will remain merely “ideology.” And as we shall see in the second part of these lectures, which will be devoted to Anthroposophy and Sociology, in that case the forces of decline will quite definitely proliferate.

Before us, then, are two pictures: spiritual world as reality and world of the senses as maya—world of the senses as reality and spiritual world as maya. We need a philosophy of life that is capable of injecting the spiritual world, regarded as “ideology,” with spiritual intuition, spiritual imagination and inspiration, so that what today appears unutterably empty is filled once more with spiritual meaning. At the same time, it must be able to perceive that what the Orient regards as illusion and maya is a reality in the sense that it is a true and faithful replica, a transformation of the spiritual world, which was necessary for the development of humanity in freedom. If we are to reach an understanding of these two diametrically opposed world-pictures, we need a philosophy that can combine them and not just add them together mechanically, one that will develop through its own inner life, not from the one or the other, but in a spiritual progression from human substance itself.

And these world-pictures do ultimately affect everything that we experience spiritually. They certainly condition individual features of life and of human attitudes. As a Central European here in Central Europe, I would rather not give my own opinion on this particular point. I prefer to pass on the opinion expressed some years ago by an Englishman who compared Western and

Central Europe in relation to a certain aspect of spiritual life. This Englishman wanted to exemplify the way in which spiritual life has revealed itself in particular phenomena. He referred to the appearance, at the end of the fifties and beginning of the sixties of the last century, of Buckle's important work, The History of Civilization. Buckle, he noted, views history mainly—if not so exclusively as do the Marxists, for example—in terms of economic drives, so that ultimately spiritual life is taken to arise from the action and interaction of economic forces. We do not always have to condemn a view of this kind; we can take a positive attitude, and say: since man is in part an economic being, a historical consideration of human life from this standpoint also was needed at a certain stage in human development. The Englishman then refers to another book that was produced in Central Europe at the same time as Buckle wrote his History of Civilization—Jacob Burckhardt's Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy. The Englishman himself observes that a quite different spirit prevails here; Burckhardt describes how men feel, what their attitude to one another is, and how through the opinions they have of each other they enter into certain relationships, which in turn determine other events occurring among them. And the Englishman finally sums up—I am simply quoting his opinion here—by saying that Buckle describes man as he eats and drinks, whilst Burckhardt describes man as he thinks and feels.

And if I may now add something myself: if, as we have heard, the West looks at eternal actuality and derives spiritual life from it, and the Central European looks at what inhabits the realm of the soul, but the soul in its earthly existence, then one would have to add, thirdly, that Eastern man (and in many respects even the East European) describes man as he preaches and sacrifices.

And so we might say, supplementing the Englishman's verdict: in the West, man is described as he eats and drinks (I say this in no pejorative sense); in the Middle region, as he thinks and feels; in the East, as he preaches and sacrifices. In this preaching and sacrificing is operative what I have described as the attitude of the East. Similarly, in the view of history that has become generally familiar today and that is also reflected in the notion of “ideology,” there operates what I have described as the attitude of the West. But we also need to see how in the mode attributed to the Centre, where man is presented as he thinks and feels, the two currents meet. We are called upon today to understand this confluence correctly, by taking a first step that will gradually lead us onward to spirituality.

I will try to sum up in a single image the two attitudes I have sought to represent, in order to show where understanding is really needed between East and West. To do so, I should like to recall that, at a time when the physical and sensuous world, and human existence also, was already felt as maya in the East, he who is called the Buddha encountered in his wanderings the most varied manifestations of human suffering on earth. Among these manifestations was a corpse; death confronted the Buddha, and through contemplation of death he reached his conclusion: Life is Suffering.

This was the tenor of Oriental civilization six hundred years before the establishment of Christianity. Six hundred years later, Christianity was founded, and henceforward we have a significant symbol: the crucifix, the raised cross with the Redeemer, the human body on it. In the West, countless men look at this body, at the image of it; just as countless men, who have become disciples of Buddha, have looked at the body from which Buddha drew his teaching. The East acknowledged: Life is suffering, we long for redemption. Western men, in looking at the image of the dead body, however, did not simply say: Life is suffering! For them, the sight of death became a symbol of resurrection, resurrection of the spirit through inner human power. It became a symbol of the fact that suffering can be redeemed by overcoming the physical; that it is overcome, not by turning away from it in asceticism, but by keeping it in full view, not regarding it as maya, and overcoming it through work, activity, and the vigour of the will. Out of the introspective life of the East arose a contemplation of the dead body, with the conclusion: Life is suffering, man must be redeemed from life. Out of the life of the West, attempting always activity, there arose, at the sight of the body, the view: Life must develop power within itself, so that even the forces of death can be overcome, and human work can do its task in the development of the world.

The one philosophy is old and jaded. Yet it contains things of such great value that, even though we may treat it as senile, we still approach it as something venerable. We honour an old man without expecting him to profess the views of youth. What we encounter in the West, however, has the character of a first step. We have shown what the “ideology” in its attitude must become. It is young, it must develop youthful power in itself so that it may attain spiritual meaning in its own way, just as the Orient did.

In honouring the Orient for its spirituality, there is something we still need to be clear about: we must build up our own spirituality from the first step we have taken here in the West. We must so shape it, however, that we can achieve an understanding with any view that may exist on earth, especially old and venerable ones. This will be possible if, as Central and Western men, we come to understand that, although our philosophy of life has faults, they are the faults of youth.

If we do understand this, it is a summons to have the courage to be strong. If for all our respect, love and admiration for its spirituality, we take what we need from the East, not with passive receptivity, but with a busy activity rooted in what, today, is still perhaps unspiritual in the West, yet contains the germ of spirituality—if we add strength to respect, then we shall do the right thing for human development.

Yesterday I tried to characterize the nature of the moment in human evolution at which we find ourselves. I tried to show you how, in the course of human evolution, humanity has now arrived at a point where it is absolutely dependent on what we call the science of initiation. This means that it is necessary, firstly, for the branches of knowledge of human cultural life to be permeated by this science of initiation, but secondly also for social thinking and social feeling to be permeated by those feelings and perceptions that result for the human soul from consciousness: there is a spiritual revelation, a supersensible revelation – one need only turn to it.

One can be convinced that many people come and say: Yes, but history has been conscientiously studied, and what is supposed to result from spiritual science about the character of the present period, and how it has developed from the preceding ones, is not spoken of in history.

Yes, it does not speak of it because, uninfluenced by real spiritual knowledge, it does not ask about its real impulses and forces. In order to know what speaks through history, one must first understand how to ask history in the right way.

Now, the three successive post-Atlantean periods, the primeval Indian, the primeval Persian, the Egyptian-Chaldean, are such that, in the sense sense, humanity has become younger and younger, that is to say, in the second period it did not remain capable of development into those years in which it was still capable of development in the first period, and so on. In the Graeco-Latin period, that is to say, in the period that began in the 8th century BC and ended in the 15th century, it was the case that human beings remained capable of development until the beginning of their thirties. When this period closed in the 15th century, human beings were clearly capable of development until well beyond the twenty-eighth year. Today, as we have emphasized, the ability to develop only extends to the twenty-seventh year and will descend more and more.

Now, simply due to their physical and bodily constitution, human beings can only come into contact with the spiritual world from their thirties onwards. Do not misunderstand me! Of course, if he turns to spiritual science, he can come into contact with the spiritual world earlier, even today; but if man, through his own development, which is bound to the physical body, is to receive spiritual forces from the universe, this can only happen if he remains capable of development well into his thirties. He does not. Therefore, from our point of view, there can be no question of human development progressing by natural means. It can only progress if humanity is fertilized by the science of initiation.

Now, as I have already indicated in one of the previous lectures, there are initiates in areas of Western civilization, especially in Anglo-American areas. But the peculiar thing about these initiates is that, from their point of view, they only intend to promote as a science of initiation that which British-American world domination can gradually bring about on earth. However strange it may sound, it is so. And it may be said that every single assertion that comes from this side bears a stamp that the knowledgeable person can recognize as being true. Above all, the various ways in which the science of initiation is handled in Western countries point to all these things.

You have seen that, within certain limits, certain truths of initiation are not withheld here. And if you look through what has been presented to you over the years, you will find in it, if you really follow things unsleeping, a whole series of important initiatory truths that are suitable for bringing not just a part of humanity, but all of humanity across the earth, beyond the current crisis and towards a real further development. But you will always find people, especially among Western initiates, who disapprove of and condemn the fact that so much of what has been communicated here is being made public today. This is due to a distorted conception of the science of initiation. In order to make you understand this distorted conception, I must first say the following.

The science of initiation always addresses the individual human being. Even if it speaks to a group of people, it is in reality addressing the individual human being. One cannot present the true science of initiation in the way it used to be presented to people in the past. The Catholic Church, for example, transplanted this kind of thing into the present day, and not only the Catholic Church, but certain political parties also still use the same method today. The way they worked was to use, if I may put it this way, the mass psyche, to appeal to what is instilled in a community of people in a certain, I would say hypnotic, way. You know that, as a rule, if you only use the appropriate means, you can teach a crowd things more easily than you can teach each individual to whom you wanted to speak. There is some truth to such mass hypnosis.

These methods, which are quite effective, cannot be used by a true wisdom of initiation. It must speak as though addressing each individual person and appeal to the powers of persuasion of each individual person. The way of speaking which the science of initiation, which today stands at the height of human development, must make use of, has not yet existed. Therefore, the way in which, for example, I speak here and in my books is still an abomination to some people today, because the way of speaking strictly adheres to the rule of appealing only to the power of persuasion of the individual individuality.

This also gives us an important social principle, which I have already mentioned in another context in recent days and which you will find systematically and in principle implemented in my book “The Philosophy of Freedom”. If you only want to appeal to the individual with ethical, moral impulses, then you cannot want to organize from general abstractions, then you cannot group people together like herd animals in order to give them some kind of common directive, but then one can only appeal to the individual and then wait for the right thing to happen in the whole, because each individual, in his standing in the whole, wants the right thing.

The social morality of the future cannot be based on any other principle than this principle of general human behavior. When I published my “Philosophy of Freedom”, for example, a review appeared in the “Athenaeum” in which it was said that such a view leads to a theoretical anarchism. But it only leads to anarchism if we do not succeed in making people into real people, that is, if people absolutely want to be subhuman, if they absolutely want to be kept together under such aspects as the members of a group of animals are kept together. Lions are held together as lions by their very shape, hyenas too, dogs too; but the development of humanity is such that in the future groups of people should not be organized either by blood ties or by ideological ties like flocks of sheep, but that what arises from the interaction of people should actually happen out of the power of individualities.

A few days ago I used a comparison here that may sound a little grotesque, but which I believe can shed light on the whole matter. I do not know whether there are not also people who would find it particularly liberating if they saw inscriptions everywhere: Decree of such and such an authority: The one who walks in this direction must give way to the other who walks in the other direction. Even in populous cities, people generally still get along with each other on the street, they pass each other; out of their reason, out of what they have as an impulse within them, they do not constantly push each other away. Humanity is moving towards this ideal. That it does not recognize this is its misfortune. It is important to have the directives of one's actions within oneself, even in important matters, so that the other can rely on them, without a common law that trains them to behave in such a way that the other can exist alongside them.

This work towards individuality is what is connected with the most important impulses of human development. Human individuality can never be brought to bear on something like this if it can only be conveyed through the current knowledge of nature or the current social science or the current social motives. Man only comes to such an individuality as I have just spoken of when a mass of thoughts is awakened in him that comes from the science of initiation. Only through his relation to the supersensible is man imbued with such thoughts as will make him a free individuality, but which can also function in the social order with the greatest possible freedom. Everything depends on humanity opening its heart and mind to what comes from the science of initiation.

Great trust must become the most important social motive of the future. People must be able to rely on each other. Otherwise things will not move forward. What I have told you now seems obvious to anyone who is serious about the whole of humanity, if they are sufficiently initiated into supersensible things, to the extent that they must say: either this happens or humanity goes into the abyss. There is no third way.

You can say that you cannot imagine that a social order is based on general trust. To that one can only answer: Fine, if you cannot imagine it, then you just have to imagine: Humanity must go into the swamp. – These things are serious, and they must be taken seriously as such.

To a certain degree of abstraction, the initiates of Western countries also know this. But they say the following: We have the science of initiation to a certain degree, we could publish it. They would, however, only publish a science of initiation that leads to the goals I have indicated; we are also now moving in an area that is just as applicable to the true science of initiation as it is to the one-sided one. The initiates of Western countries can therefore say: We have the science of initiation; we can publish it, but the fact is that it is only addressed to the individual. Now the great fear begins for these people, the terrible fear. They say, 'Yes, if we only speak to individuals in the future, then we will unleash a fight of everyone against everyone, because then people are not organized, then we rely on general trust, then people will enter into the fight of everyone against everyone. This fear stands before people. Therefore, they want to keep the most important truths of initiation, I would say, in the darkroom and let humanity walk towards the future in an apparent light, but asleep.

These things are indeed very topical, since the mid-19th century, when the peak of materialism in modern civilization was reached and since then people have had to ask themselves: How far do we go with the science of initiation? — They have not dared to communicate a real science of initiation to humanity beyond certain smaller circles until now.

Now, a certain education that humanity has undergone must not be allowed to break down, but it is already breaking down today thanks to a completely misguided theology. You can follow this education if you do not study that fable convenue which is usually called “history”, but if you study real history. Today, people do not really know how what is designated by certain words has changed over time. People talk about Catholicism, about emperorship, about aristocracy, about bourgeoisie, and believe that if they find the same words in the fourteenth century, they mean approximately the same thing, perhaps only a little nuance is different. As long as we do not realize that what Catholicism, emperorship, bourgeoisie and aristocracy meant in the 14th century has nothing at all in common with what we mean by these words today, we do not understand history. We must be quite clear about how the state of mind of human beings has really changed a great deal over the course of a few centuries.

What was it, then, that, until the 15th century, and in its after-effects even further, was the basis of what worked from general human education into the consciousness of the souls of the civilized world? All this was based on the fact that, during these centuries, human beings were able to assimilate supersensuous knowledge into their imaginative life, not in the way it is to be assimilated now through spiritual science, but in the way they were able to assimilate it at that time, according to their still atavistic states of consciousness. A fundamental fact filled human souls. It was the fundamental fact that is connected with the Mystery of Golgotha. In the way people thought at that time, they knew that the Christ-Being had descended from supermundane heights, had been embodied in the man Jesus of Nazareth, and that something had happened in the Mystery of Golgotha that could not have happened according to ordinary laws discoverable by the knowledge of nature. The concepts and ideas that people had of the Mystery of Golgotha had such ideas and such conceptions that went beyond the earthly sphere.

Such conceptions create very different thought forms than the ideas that the average person has today. The thoughts that people have today do not extend into the supersensible life at all. Thoughts that people formed with such a connection to the mystery of Golgotha, as I have just characterized it, were suitable for evoking thought forms that had a reality in the supersensible. Therefore, one can also characterize the present moment in time by saying that humanity has gradually lost the ability to form such thought forms that have a meaning in the supersensible. Thus, one cannot create social orders on Earth that will advance it. Therefore, everything that has been introduced into humanity in the way of social ideas since about the sixteenth century bears the character that can be described as follows: We encounter social institutions according to the thought forms that are the thought forms of modern times. All such social institutions are destined to break down. They have no inner power of further development. That is even the secret of the newer development. No matter how willingly people may create social institutions on the basis of the external world-building that has taken place since the 16th century, all these social institutions carry the seed of death within them as they arise, because they are not connected to thought-forms that have a reality in the supersensible. As long as there are no people in the present who understand this, there is no point in talking about social progress at all. It is not a matter of deriving social ideas in an abstract way, perhaps out of some spiritual web of thought. That is not important at all. In my “Key Points of the Social Question”, for example, there is no long chapter about spiritual science from which social laws are then deduced, but reality itself draws attention to what has to happen. What matters is not that one deduces the social life from some spiritual web or other, but that one is oneself imbued with such thoughts, which are rooted in the supersensible. For it is this state of being imbued that makes it possible for everything one thinks to have a reality in the supersensible.

It is a paradox, but the following is quite true: Imagine a person, I will say a “statesman” - a word that is currently said in quotation marks - who says all sorts of clever things, that is, things that people today call clever, but has never established a connection with the supersensible world. What he says, if realized in reality, would bear the germ of death. Another speaks. If one does not know that he is engaged in spiritual science, one does not even need to notice it from his speech; he just talks about things in a slightly different way. From what he says about social issues, for example, one does not even need to notice that he is engaged in spiritual science, but the fact that he is engaged in spiritual science gives his ideas the real impulse.

So the point is that today it is not enough to have an abstract logic, but that one must speak reality. Because today we are already at a stage in the development of humanity that, let's say, a journalist can write the most beautiful things that people admire because they say: Yes, when I read this, it is pure spiritual science! That is not the point! Today it is no longer about the wording, but about the basis of the soul, from which something like this comes. It is about what the human being carries within himself as substance!

If I am to draw a comparison from a completely different field, then let it be the one I have often used before: there are poets today who write poetry with extraordinary ease, who make beautiful verses that one can admire. Nevertheless, the same also applies: today, ninety-nine percent of poetry is overdone. But there are others whose verses are like a stammer; but these verses, which sound like a stammer, can come from a genuine human, that is, spiritual, source, while those that one admires because the languages are so simple that any fool can create something admirable out of language can be worthless sound.

Today it is absolutely necessary to go beyond the mere wording to the motive, that is, not to remain in the abstract, not to read according to the wording, but to place oneself in full life and judge the phenomena from the standpoint of life. And so it is a matter of spiritual science, as it is meant here, above all, having to have a fertilizing effect on the various branches of life, otherwise what must happen will not happen.

When two people talk to each other, they communicate through language. But in relatively recent times, language was quite different from what it is today. Today, when we communicate through language, we actually become more or less a slave to language. In the past, people learned a great deal through the genius of language, and they did not actually think very much themselves; they let language do the thinking for them. This only worked until the period I described to you yesterday. Today, people only get ahead if they can emancipate themselves from language with their thinking and feeling. Language today runs, as it were, like a mechanism in which we stand, and instead of us, Ahriman actually lives more and more in the development of language. Ahriman actually speaks today when people speak. And little by little people have to get used to understanding each other from something quite different than from the mere wording of languages. One must go much deeper into life in order to understand another person today than in the age when the wings of language still contained what people had exchanged with each other. Today this is no longer contained in the wings of language. Today one can basically be a person completely empty of real knowledge. But the fact that language – every civilized language today – has gradually developed sentence forms, sentences, and even entire theories that already lie in the language, you just need to change what is in the language a little, then you have something seemingly created by itself, in reality you have basically just mixed up a little what was already there.

It would be very easy today, as grotesque as it may sound to you, to do the following experiment. Take the pronouncements of good bourgeois professors, philosophy professors, natural science professors and the like, who are only slightly inclined towards materialism, towards one side or the other, take what these people have said over the past few decades, in the second half of the 19th century, and with a little rethinking, the following can be easily achieved. Take, I mean, any concoction of a fairly brave philosopher, a brave dozen philosophers from the second half of the 19th century, who has expressed himself on this or that social thing, you can now take away certain adjectives and replace them with others that are in another sentence. You can turn things around a bit – and out of it comes the life philosophy of Mr. Trotsky! In order to be a Trotskyist with a Weltanschauung today, one does not need to be able to think for oneself at all, but only to let language think within oneself in the way I have just described. But because language has emancipated itself from them in a certain way, it is not people who are at work here, but Ahrimanic powers in human culture.

What I have told you now can be experienced. One only has to have the inner soul eyes open to such things. For those who work not with words but with thoughts, language today is a truly dreadful instrument. It is indeed not easy for those who work with thoughts to write today. Because if you want to write a sentence, it will not do so because so and so many people have written similar sentences. The sentence always wants to form itself out of the collective psyche, but you must first become its enemy in order to truly shape what is in your soul into a sentence. Anyone who works for the public today and cannot feel this hostility of language always runs the risk of abandoning themselves to the thinking of language and devising beautiful programs out of language.

The necessity of enforcing one's thoughts must begin today with the struggle against language. Nothing is more dangerous than for a person to allow themselves to be carried by language, in the sense of: This is how you express it, that is how you express it. — Because by having a stereotyped way of expressing things, by being able to say: you can only say it that way – you actually go with the usual flow of speech and do not work from the original thought.

Our schools are terrible in this respect. The schoolmasters, who actually correct every seemingly clumsy but at least original thought in terms of convention, commit great crimes in school. One should search for every awkward but substantially individual sentence that any boy or girl writes at school. One should use it to start discussions at school and not use the cursed red ink to replace what comes out of youthful individuality with convention. For today it is most important to look at what comes out of youthful individualities. Perhaps it will reveal itself in a way that we do not always find comfortable, that we easily see as flawed. If one wanted to correct Goethe's youthful letters with the eye of a high school teacher, then many things would have to be corrected! The Austrian poet Robert Hamerling received the worst grade in the “German essay” in his teaching examination! And there is still some truth to what Hebbel wrote in his diary, as I have often mentioned: he wanted to write a drama with the motif that a high school teacher of the higher grades in particular has a student who is the reincarnation of Plato, with whom he reads Plato in class; then the teacher finds that this “reincarnation of Plato” does not understand the slightest thing about Plato! The poet Friedrich Hebbel noted down this motif for a drama that was then not carried out. But there is some truth to it.

Now we must be clear about the fact that at all times, seduced by the remaining Luciferic and Ahrimanic powers, people have resisted the normal progress of humanity. Today we are faced with the necessity of having to seek something completely new from spiritual life in order to save humanity. It is no wonder that people are violently opposed to all kinds of logical absurdities and immorality. And so, for a long time now, I have always had to talk about my own situation as a kind of prologue to our reflections.

About a week ago I told you about the defamatory and mean way in which a large number of German newspapers are currently reporting things that are known to be their source, but which could turn against everything that comes from anthroposophically oriented spiritual science and the related social issues. It is a very direct example, I might say, of what is happening “at the house” itself, how strongly the opposing forces are stirring. But there is a certain reason why I would like to characterize this matter for you in somewhat more detail today. To this end, I would like to draw attention once more to what has happened. It has come about that a defamatory report suddenly appeared in a number of German newspapers, which can be summarized in the following sentences. I have already read these sentences. However, we should bear them in mind once more, for they are actually worthy of being remembered as a characteristic example of certain cultural phenomena of the present day:

"Rudolf Steiner as political informer. The well-known Theosophical charlatan Dr. Rudolf Steiner, who influences millions of men and women, founded a league for the threefold social organism in Stuttgart in the spring of 1919, which was originally supposed to be only a religious-communist community, but then came into political contact with the Bolsheviks and communists and is now engaged in a very strange and repulsive political agitation. We learn the following about this from Dresden: “It is unequivocally clear from authentic reports” – please note this sentence, “it is unequivocally clear from authentic reports” – “that the League for Threefold Order is determining the names of all officers allegedly active in a reactionary sense and collecting evidence against them of acts contrary to international law based on witness statements, which is then to be sent to the Entente for extradition. Mr. Steiner and his comrades are completely unconcerned about the accuracy of such accusations, and the fact that they do not even shrink from deliberately false statements is proved by the passage of a letter which says: “Accusations of theft are to be avoided because it is easier to prove that they are untrue. Similarly, one should not make incredible accusations such as the mutilation of children.”

Now, of course, this most slanderous and most mendacious story, sentence by sentence, is going through a series of German newspapers! One can be amazed at the most diverse things in it, but let us single out one fact. There is talk of letters that are said to have been written and that are referred to as authentic documents. In the issue of “Dreigliederung” that has not yet appeared, I expressly pointed out that I am well aware of the dubious sources from which such things originate. Now, however, I will read you a charming document from which you will see what the authentic foundations are for those people who spread such things into the world.

After this flood of meanness had subsided, and after I had received confirmation from various other sides of what I had known anyway about the murky sources, I received the following letter from a friend. This letter only reached me now, but it was written – I ask you to bear this in mind – before these newspaper articles appeared. So what this letter contains has been established before the newspaper articles appeared. I ask you to bear this fact in mind. This letter states:

So you see, there are factories for forging letters! These letters really do circulate. It continues:

"The second letter makes the following suggestion: Since there are still many officers in the army who are monarchists, it would be absolutely necessary to neutralize them by the following shameless means. The members of the troop to which the officer in question belonged during the campaign should be searched for people who, under oath, are to testify to as many of the person's crimes as possible. It is also stated in more detail that these would only have to be credible offenses, not rape, infanticide, and similar things. This record of sins should then be transmitted by a Mr. Grelling” - that is the only name mentioned in the letter - ‘to the Entente, and they would then demand the immediate extradition of the persons concerned.’

Both letters were read by the person concerned with his own eyes.

So this is the letter referred to in the newspaper article, the letter that is probably circulating in countless copies and that is addressed to this and that office in Berlin! So first the letters are forged, fabricated, then the newspaper articles are made up. This is the method of fighting!

I would like to know if other things are needed to make it clear that it is necessary to wake up today! — From what has happened in recent years, a moral ground for humanity has emerged, which was rooted in the impossibilities that had already preceded it, and which is producing such flowers.

It is no longer acceptable to continue sleeping when we know the depths of the swamp we are in. It could easily be, if these things were not talked about openly, that there would still be people in our ranks who would say, for example: Shouldn't we rather write to all the fine gentlemen who forge letters and then use the forged letters to fabricate newspaper articles in order to change their minds? Today it is really a matter of opening our eyes and seeing what kind of people are walking around among us, people whom we would soil ourselves if we got seriously involved with them. These things must not be overlooked; this must be said again and again. The connections must be pointed out. Do you think that it can be with impunity that, for example, in those Jesuit publications, in which the false statements that I have already mentioned to you are printed, the story has been circulated for years that I am a runaway priest, and then simply to take back such a thing with the words: This is something that one heard, “but which could not be substantiated”? Do you think that one has the right to say to such a Jesuit priest: You have taken back what you spread? No, one has to say to him: You have violated your duty in the most irresponsible way by spreading a thing unchecked, and your retraction means nothing at all. Today, morality must be taken seriously by those people who still understand something about morality. During the past five years, we have heard almost nothing but lies from all over the civilized world, and we are still living under the effects of the lie. It is necessary to face these things seriously.

Here you can clearly see an example of how things are. When things are not brought home to us through karma, so that the individual is at the same time completely decisive for the general, then there will always be people who want to vote for compromises, who, for example, treat a Ferriere still as a human being, with whom one engages on equal terms, while he belongs to the scum of the human race, by writing something unscrupulously, which he accepts without verification. These things are no longer acceptable today for a person who wants to stand on sound ground.

If I did not have this example of the origin of a matter at hand, it would not be so easy to believe me that there are now factories for forging letters, on the basis of which “they” then treat people in public as they did in this newspaper article.

But that happens today over and over again, and a large part of what you read consists of nothing other than the blossoms of this moral swamp. Today it is simply part of a healthy, serious and honest world view to know these things and to treat them accordingly. Today people are not allowed to make compromises with people who work with defamation in this way. For it cannot be justified by saying: One must be benevolent towards all people — love towards all people! — Love towards such people means extreme unkindness towards those who are slandered, who are distorted. It is a matter of knowing where to direct one's love. For loving the crime can never lead to the recovery of humanity. That such things would come could be foreseen. But it could be foreseen not only from the way certain quarters have been working. You only have to open the Jesuit literature that has been unleashed since the Church's condemnation of the anthroposophical writings in July 1919. You only have to look at the people who write and examine their approach to the truth, and you will naturally see everything that ultimately leads into such swamps. I do not want to talk today about the very murky sources, which I know very well and through whose acquaintance I also know how all these things are connected and how they are just the beginning.

I only wish that as few people as possible would be naive enough to believe that refutations could achieve anything. For these people, it is not about asserting this or that, but only about asserting something juicy, whereby they disparage others. These people could not care less about what they assert.

But not only that we have to take into account the fact that today we have numerous such people among us who work in this way, but also that we have to take into account the fact that for decades now, due to drowsiness, we have had a broad tolerance among the general public for this kind of thing, a reluctance to look at how public opinion is actually made today. But that is the most important part of what can lead to improvement. As long as people of the caliber of the Jesuit Zimmermann or the university professor Dessoir are not treated in the appropriate way, there can be no recovery. The people who stand opposite them and do not give them the right treatment are even more guilty than these individuals. For these individuals conduct their business in these matters, albeit in such a dirty way as Professor Dessoir. I characterized this to you some time ago. But it is a matter of finally waking up. Because a Dessoir book or a Zimmermann critique leads straight to these swamps, which I was able to characterize for you. I had to mention this not only with the intention of showing the symptoms of the forces that are effective in our time to suppress every legitimate spiritual aspiration, And so I would also like to mention the fact that I was recently given an article here that was supposedly intended for the Brockhaus Conversations Encyclopedia, for which the infamous Dessoir — infamous only with us! — was supposed to write articles about anthroposophy; at the same time that he had these articles of mine written by an intermediary, he was writing his book, this disgrace. But now consider the case that this article would lie here in our local archives! It would later be found there as an article that is said to come from me. So someone might say: Yes, Steiner copied the article in the archives from Dessoir's article in the encyclopedia and claimed it for himself! - Such blossoms can be driven when one is not awake! First one's things can be stolen by literary thieves, and then they can appear in such a way somewhere that not the one who made them but the one who stole them is considered the author and the one who is the author is considered the thief!

The moral question must be approached today from many sides; but it will not be approached profitably by anyone who does not stand on the ground of a sound spiritual science. That is what I wanted to share with you in the appendix to today's lecture, based on contemporary history.

The challenges presented by our age really have to be faced by every individual human being today. I have made it quite clear on a number of occasions that to understand the way individuals need to face those challenges we must be aware of how human evolution progresses all over the globe. The whole course of human evolution can only be clearly understood if we gain more profound insight into the powers that intervene in the course of earth evolution as a whole and also in human lives.

I have used a number of different approaches to show that as human beings we are part of an ongoing evolution that may be said to be taking its normal course. Spiritual science enables us to follow its progress over extended periods of time. I have also pointed out that there are certain powers that have different goals for mankind than the powers who desire to guide humankind in the normal course of evolution, a course during which the earth repeatedly comes to physical manifestation. Some of those powers we would call luciferic, others ahrimanic. I have spoken of this a number of times. It is necessary to take a very serious view of these things today, but our hearts and minds cannot really achieve this serious mood unless we pay proper attention to the way these luciferic and ahrimanic powers intervene directly in human lives.

As you know, a new era in human evolution started during the 15th century, very different from anything that went before. Thinking of this you will want to be aware of the many ways in which life is different in the present age, which had its beginning in the 15th century, if we compare it to the preceding age. We may say that one particular feature of the present age is that intellectual thinking has developed since the middle of the 15th century. Humankind has to undergo a major process of education in the course of Earth evolution. Part of it is this training of the intellect. Human beings had to find out, as it were, how human life can be lived when the emphasis is on intellectual thinking. They could never have been raised to be truly free individuals if the intellectual principle had not become part of them. We have no clear idea today of the extent to which people differed from us before the middle of the 15th century, particularly in this respect. We tend to take the things we are given for granted, without giving them much thought. We are now generally dealing with the peoples of civilized countries who are inclined to think with the intellect, and we have come to believe that people have always been thinking like this. That is not the case, however, Before the middle of the 15th century people were thinking in a different way. They simply did not think in the abstract terms in which we think today. Their thinking was very much more vivid and concrete, immediately bound up with the objects of the world around them. They were much more bound up with the feelings and will impulses that can be experienced in the human soul. We are living very much in our thoughts, though we are not sufficiently aware of this. We are not even aware of the source from which this way of thinking, the intellectual approach which we take so much for granted, has evolved. We shall have to go a long way back in human evolution to get a real understanding of the origins of this way of thinking, this intellectualism. Another question we must ask ourselves is whether anything still remains of the human activity out of which our thinking has evolved.

You know that older evolutionary forces persist into later ages and continue to be present side by side with those that are normal to the age in question. This also applies to our thinking. Reminders, echoes of thinking, of an activity similar to our thinking are experienced in our dreams, when a whole world of images emerges from our night time sleep. Experience teaches us to distinguish between the world of thoughts we evolve between waking up and going to sleep and the world of dream images which we experience in an entirely passive way. If we go back to earlier times in human evolution we find that the further back we go the more does the life of the soul during waking hours come to resemble the mental activity we know in our dreams today. Present-day thinking is the fruit of later stages of evolution. During earlier stages along this path the human soul developed activities more akin to dreaming. If we follow this dreamlike activity of the human soul a long way back we find ourselves going beyond Earth evolution as we know it. We come to a time when the earth had taken a physical form in the cosmos that preceded the present one. We have got used to calling it the Old Moon evolution. Human beings were part of this as well, but in an entirely different form. During that Moon evolution, i.e. the time when the earth materialized in a form that preceded the present one, the human being, the true ancestor of modern man, was still completely etheric. His soul became active in a way that was definitely dreamlike, consisting of dream images. The peculiar thing about this was that it related to the outer world in a way that is quite different from the soul activity we know as thinking. I would say that when our soul is active in thought we find ourselves rather isolated within the world. The world is outside us, it has its own processes. We reflect on those processes in our minds, but just when we think we are reflecting most profoundly on those external processes we actually feel ourselves entirely outside them. Indeed we often feel that we are best able to think about those external processes if we keep ourselves well isolated from them, withdrawing into ourselves. The human ancestor who was dreamy in his thinking, if I may put it like this, did not have that feeling. Developing in his way in his dreams what we develop in our way when we are thinking, he knew himself to be intimately bound up in everything he experienced with what went on in the world. We see the clouds, we think about them, but we do not feel that the powers alive in the clouds are also alive in our thinking. Our human ancestor did have the feeling that the powers alive in a cloud were also alive in his thinking. This ancestor said—and I must translate what he said into our language, for his language was a silent one compared to ours: The powers that are alive and active in the cloud out there produce images in my mind. He saw himself no more isolated from the great universe in which the cloud revealed its essential nature than my little finger is able to think itself isolated from the rest of me. If I were to cut it off it would wither; it would no longer be my finger. The human ancestor felt that he could not exist apart from the universe that belonged to him. My little finger might well say: The blood which pulses through the whole of the body also pulses within me; the whole of my organic life is governed by the same laws as the organic life of the rest of the body. The human ancestor said: I am part of the universe; the power that pulses within me as I evolve images is the same as the power that is alive and active in the forming of clouds. That is how the human ancestor felt himself to be closely related, intimately bound up, with the whole world.

We need to feel isolated from everything that goes on outside us in our thinking, as though the umbilical cord has been cut and we are separate from the essential origins and causes of the existing world. In ordinary life we are not aware of the pulses beating throughout the universe. Our thinking has grown abstract. Our thinking tells us nothing, as it were, of what is alive and active within it. This provides the actual potential for the freedom of human beings, a freedom where we do not feel that something is thinking in us but that we ourselves do the thinking.

The human ancestor was unable to form ideas independently of the universe as a whole. The human ancestor felt himself to be bound up with the existing world; he knew that this existing world contained more than just abstract forces of nature. He knew that power was also wielded by entities that differed from human beings, entities that did not have a physical body such as the human body, though human beings might feel that they had citizenry of the universe in common with them. The ancestor was not aware of ‘forces of nature’; he felt himself to be in communion with nature spirits. Today we may say that everything that happens in nature follows the laws of nature, and we are part of that nature. For the human ancestor who lived in a far distant past it was natural to say that everything that happened in nature outside himself happened out of will impulses of the spirits of nature. We say the earth attracts the bodies that are on it due to gravity, and according to the law of gravity the gravitational pull decreases at a rate that is proportional to the square of the distance between the two objects. We call this a special case of a law of nature. When we speak of nature we base ourselves on such abstract notions. The human ancestor knew that an essential spiritual element was present in the phenomenon we have made into an abstract gravitational force.

Certain spiritual powers who may be said to be involved in human evolution thus developed a relationship to human beings. This would normally cease the moment Earth evolution proper began for the human being. At that point human beings would be released from the tutelage of those spiritual powers, powers they had felt to be flowing and floating into them during the Old Moon stage. So we must ask ourselves what it was that made human beings grow independent of the guidance of spirits with whom they had felt at one, however dimly. It happened when the mineral kingdom became part of human nature. In those far distant times of which I have just spoken, human beings did not yet have the mineral kingdom within them. Their organization would not have been perceptible to our present-day sense organs, for it did not yet include mineral elements.

To grasp this without getting caught up in preconceived notions we need to consider what it truly means when an organism includes the mineral kingdom. People tend to be superficial in their thinking about such things. We look at a mineral, a stone, and quite rightly consider it to be the way it presents itself to our observation. Then, however, we look at a plant in exactly the same way we look at a stone. In reality it is not the actual plant we see. A plant is really something entirely beyond sensory perception. Consider a system of forces that in a sense has the qualities of an image. Its relationship to the mineral kingdom is that this otherwise invisible organization soaks up the mineral kingdom and the forces that are active between individual component elements in the kingdom. I have a plant before me. It is an invisible system of forces that absorbs mineral principles from the mineral kingdom. The result is that the mineral aspect occupies the space also occupied by the invisible system of forces. I see this mineral aspect, though it is merely something the plant, which is not perceptible to the senses, has absorbed. That is how it is even with a plant. When we talk about plants today we are really talking only of the minerals contained within them and not about the plants themselves. It is important that we clearly understand this in the case of a plant, for it also applies to animals and humans, only more so.

During the Old Moon stage, then, human beings did not have this mineral inclusion. Human beings living on the present earth have been made in such a way that they need the mineral kingdom, having absorbed the mineral kingdom and its forces into them, as it were. What significance does this have for human nature? In the first place human beings acquired a mineral body for thinking in images the way they did at the earlier stage. As evolution progressed the mineral human body provided the basis for intellectual thinking. This happened at a relatively late state, from the middle of the 15th century onwards, having been a long time in preparation.

Modern intellectual thinking is based on the fact that human beings have received a mineral body into them. As human beings we need a mineral body first and foremost to be able to think. The older form of thinking in images had been based on what we call the third elemental kingdom. The mineral kingdom had the function to transform this pre-earthly form of thinking into our earthly way of forming ideas on the basis of thought. Within the great scheme of things the spirits with whom human beings had to feel themselves connected, in forming those ideas that were images in the distant past, were then relieved of their function. We will have to picture those spirits rather differently from the way we are accustomed to picture non-human entities. People, even people of good will who may admit that there is more to life than is apparent to the senses, tend to stick too close to the human form. This anthropomorphism takes over whenever people try and create an image in their minds of anything that is above the human sphere. It is easy to accuse Feuerbach and Buechner¹ of being anthropomorphists. We have seen more than enough of this kind of thing. We have seen the legal way of thinking evolve in the Western world, with earthly misdeeds and crimes judged by earthly judges who impose penalties, and so on. The rewards and punishment meted out for sins, i.e. for something belonging to a sphere beyond this earth and seen more as imperfections in the Christian faith, have gradually come to look more like the proceedings in an earthly court of law. The religious ideas of the West have a great deal of human jurisprudence in them. We let the gods mete out punishments of the kind we know earthly courts of law impose. If we truly wish to get beyond the merely human we must firmly decide not to think in entirely human terms. We must think beyond anything anthropomorphic, and that indeed is what really matters in human life. That is the approach we must use if we want to see clearly that the spirits who influenced the thinking in images which human beings had at the time of the Old Moon lost that function in the normal progress of human evolution but are not prepared to accept this with good grace. We might ask why they do not submit to the will of the gods who guide normal progress. They simply do not. We have to accept that as a fact. The original intention was that they should only influence dreams within the human sphere and everything related to dreaming. In the context of today's lecture we refer to them as luciferic spirits. Their proper sphere would be everything that has to do with dreaming and anything related to this. They are not satisfied with this, however. They haunt the human way of thinking that has evolved out of their own sphere, human thinking now bound to the mineral sphere. When we allow anything that normally rules our dreams, the life of the imagination, to enter into our thinking we fall prey in our thinking to luciferic nature, to the influence of spirits that should only have influenced the old form of thinking in images that belonged to the human ancestors. They have retained their power and instead of limiting themselves to our dreaming, our life of the imagination, our creative artistic work, they are constantly trying to influence our thoughts and make them dependent on impulses similar to those that existed in pre-earthly times. Our thinking is still greatly influenced by elements coming from this source, by the luciferic principle.

It is justifiable to ask in all seriousness what powers are these that have such an influence on our thinking. These influences arise from the sphere where we human beings are still rightfully dreaming and rightfully asleep above all else. They come from the sphere of our feelings and emotions. We experience our feelings the way we normally experience dreams and we experience our will the way we experience sleep. There we are still rightly cocooned in a world which becomes a luciferic world as soon as it evolves in our thinking. We therefore will not manage our evolution as human beings properly unless we make the effort to evolve other thoughts as well, thoughts increasingly independent of mere feelings and emotions, of anything arising in us out of dreamlike inner experience even when we are fully awake. Theoretical principles will not help us achieve this, only life itself can do so. We find, however, that the mental habits humankind has acquired put up great resistance to the cultivation of mind and soul that is needed. We must be on the lookout for this resistance. We find that in the present time in particular people are not prepared to listen to anything that does not arise from their own inner prejudices, their feeling of how things should go, their personal preferences. They are not in the habit of listening to anything which in a way has been decided independently of human beings, requiring merely their consent. I should like to give you a brief example which I used on one occasion to explain to someone that there is an important difference with regard to what human beings are thinking.

Many years ago I gave a lecture in a town in southern Germany—today it is no longer in southern Germany—on the wisdom taught in the Christian faith.² —As you know, it is always necessary to limit the subject matter presented in a particular lecture and one can only speak within that context. When people hear just a single lecture, such a single lecture will impress one person in one way and another in a different way, particularly if one has been objective and dispassionate in presenting the subject. It certainly would not be possible for anyone to get an idea concerning the total philosophy that lies behind a single lecture if they just listened to that one lecture. If the wisdom taught within the Christian faith is the subject for example, it will of course be impossible to conclude from the contents of the lecture what the speaker thinks about the connection between light and electricity, say. It is therefore possible for something to happen the way it did on that occasion. I spoke about the wisdom taught within the Christian faith and two Roman Catholic priests were in the audience. They came up to me afterwards and said: ‘No objection can be raised to what you have been saying’—this by the way was many years ago now—‘but we have to say that whilst it is true that we say the same thing we do say it in such a way the everybody can understand it’. My reply was: ‘Reverend fathers, surely it is like this: You or I may have some kind of inner feeling that we are speaking for everybody, but that is not the point, for that is a subjective feeling. After all it is perfectly natural—if we go entirely by our feeling I, too, must believe that I am speaking for everybody, just as you think you do; that is self-evident; otherwise we would do it differently. But we are now living in an age when our belief that something is justifiable does not count. We need to let the facts speak for themselves. We must learn to look to the facts. Subjectively you believe you are speaking for everybody. But now let me ask you about the facts. Does everybody still come to your church? That would show that you are speaking for everybody. You see, I speak to those who do not come to your church to hear you speak. My words are for those who also have the right to hear of the wisdom taught in Christianity.’ That is how we must take our orientation from what the facts have to tell.

It is necessary for us to tear ourselves away from our subjective feelings. If we do not do so the luciferic element will enter into our thinking. We would not have gone through the truly dreadful campaign of untruthfulness that has gone around the world in the last five years, the final consequence of something that has long been in preparation, if people had learned to pay rightful attention to what the facts have to tell and not to their emotions, with nationalists the worst in stirring up such emotions.

On the one hand there is the absolute necessity today to do something about our thinking and to comply even if something goes against the grain. On the other hand people dislike having to be so true to reality that one looks to the facts for guidance.

We shall not be able to attain to the higher worlds and the knowledge to be gained there if we do no train ourselves in rigid adherence to the facts of the external world. Once you have got at least to some extent into the habit of liking to hear the facts you will often suffer tortures when people of the present age want to tell you something. Very often the kind of thing you hear people say is: ‘Oh, someone said something and that was frightful, quite terrible!’ Terrible in what way? You say is was terrible but that only tells me how you felt about it. I really want to hear exactly what it was. ‘Well, it really was terrible what was said there…’ And these people simply do not understand. All the time they want to describe their subjective feelings concerning the matter, whilst you want to hear an objective report of what they actually saw. It is especially when people tell you something someone else has told them, that it is quite impossible to tell if they are simply passing on what they have heard or if they have actually looked into the matter they are talking about. This is an area where one has to remind people again and again that truthfulness concerning the knowledge to be found in supersensible spheres can only be achieved if we train ourselves as far as possible to adhere closely to the facts in the sense-perceptible world. That is the only way in which human beings can overcome the luciferic elements that stream into their thoughts—by learning to base ourselves on the facts.

On the one hand mankind is open to luciferic influences, on the other to ahrimanic influences. It had to be said that thinking here on earth evolved from earlier stages of human soul life when human beings absorbed a mineral body, as it were. This mineral body is indeed the organ for the earthly way of thinking. It does however bring it predominantly into the sphere of the powers we call ahrimanic.

We can of course become aware of the need to base ourselves on the facts, on a real world that will get us out of the habit of being swayed by our subjective emotions. We must not, however, fall prey to the kind of thinking that is nothing but an inner activity arising from the mineral body. Here we come upon a truth that many people find highly unpalatable.

You know how some are idealists or spiritualists and others are materialists. There is plenty of discussion in the world as to which is the right approach, spiritualism or materialism. All these debates are of no value whatsoever for certain regions of the human organization. Human beings can develop in two ways. We can use the mineral body we have absorbed into ourselves as the instrument for our thinking, and indeed we have to use it, otherwise we would merely be dreaming. But we can also rise beyond this instrument in our thoughts; we can develop a spiritual point of view, spiritual vision. If we do this we will of course have been thinking with the aid of our material organization, but we will have used this to reach a further stage of human development, ascending to the world of the spirit as a result. On the other hand we can stop at the point where as earth beings we let our mineral body do the thinking. It is perfectly able to do so. That in fact is the danger, and materialism cannot be said to be wrong in its views, particularly where thinking is concerned. This mineral body is no mere photographic print. It is able to think for itself, though its thinking is subject to the limits of life on earth. We need to raise the experience our mineral body is able to give us into the spheres that lie beyond sensory perception.

It is therefore possible to say that it may indeed be true that human thoughts are merely something exuded by the human mineral organization. That may indeed be right, but human beings must first do it right.

Human beings have the freedom to develop on earth in such a way that they are merely the product of matter. Animals cannot do this; they do not get to the point where mineral inclusion leads to the development of thinking activity. Animals cannot choose to prove the truth of the materialistic point of view. Human beings are at liberty to prove the truth of the materialistic point of view; all it needs is the will to do so out of a materialistic attitude to life.

Human freedom is such that people are indeed free to make materialism come true for the human kingdom, that is, they can take a course that will lead to human beings on earth concerning themselves only with material things. Fundamentally speaking, therefore, it is a matter of choice if we become materialists. If we are strong enough to bring to realization what people are told is a materialistic attitude then this attitude will be made to come true by human beings.

This influence on human beings comes from ahrimanic powers. They want to keep everything connected with Earth evolution at the point which has been reached for human beings by that very Earth evolution—that is the point of having a mineral organization. They want to make human beings perfect, but only as far as their mineral organization is concerned. The luciferic powers want to keep human beings, who now have acquired a mineral organization, at the earlier stage that was right for them before they acquired a mineral organization. So we have two powers pulling at the traces, luciferic and ahrimanic powers. The luciferic spirits want to get human beings to a point where they finally cast off their mineralized bodies and go through an evolution that has no relevance in earth life and has merely been an episode in earth life. The luciferic spirits aim for the gradual elimination of everything relating to the earth from the whole evolution of mankind. The ahrimanic spirits aim to take firm hold of this earthly, mineral aspect of human beings, isolate it from progressive evolution and let it stand on its own. That is how luciferic and ahrimanic spirits are pulling in different directions.

It is absolutely vital that having presented the large outline we now come to apply this to ordinary everyday life. We do not consider a U-shaped bar of iron to be a horse-shoe when it is in fact a magnet. In the same way we really should not consider human life to be entirely the way it may appear on the outside. If you shoe a horse with magnets you fail to realize that a magnet has more to it than a horse-shoe. Yet it happens quite often nowadays that people speak of human life exactly like someone who shoes his horse with magnets rather than with horse-shoes. People have no hesitation in speaking of positive and negative electricity in the inorganic sphere, or of positive and negative magnetism, yet they hesitate to speak of luciferic and ahrimanic elements in human life. These are just as effective in human life as positive and negative magnetism are in the inorganic sphere. It is just that the idea of positive and negative magnetism is more easily understood. It does not take as much effort to grasp it as it does to grasp the idea that there are luciferic and ahrimanic elements. That is also the reason why we shall only learn to deal with the empty talk one hears today, empty talk that turns into lies, by knowing that it is luciferic by nature.

Similarly we shall only learn to deal with everything that shows itself here and there as the materialistic point of view by knowing that it is ahrimanic by nature. In future mere external characterization will not get us anywhere when we want to understand human life; all we would be doing is talk around the subject and commit the most stupid of errors when we try and apply such ideas to real life. One thing we would not be doing is to see human life in such a way that social impulses can be gained from our knowledge of human institutions. This has a very much to do with the utter seriousness required when looking at everything connected with evolutionary trends where humankind is concerned. We cannot gain understanding of the life we are now living unless we raise our vision from earthly concerns to spheres beyond this earth. There is a particular point to this.

Looking back into earlier stages of human evolution—though not as far back as those I have spoken of earlier—people generally base themselves on such historical documents as are available. There are historians—well-known names—who say that the history of humankind is made up of everything to be found in the written records. If you start from such a definition of history, like the historian Leopold von Ranke, you will obviously arrive at a particular kind of history. The art of writing is itself part of history, however, it has evolved from something else, and in real terms one cannot do anything with this kind of definition.

We need only go back as far as Chaldean-Babylonian times, to ancient Egyptian times, and we shall find that at that period of human evolution human beings still related to the cosmos in a very different way. People today have no real idea of what it meant to connect one's life to the course of the stars, the planets, and their position relative to the fixed stars of the zodiac. These things have become an empty abstraction nowadays. Do you think a modern astrologer delving into ancient astrological writings to compile his horoscopes—if at least he does search through the old writings, and does not produce new ones; the new ones are terrible!—has even the slightest idea of the living connection which the ancient Egyptians and Chaldeans felt to exist between human beings and the movements and positions of the stars viewed from the earth? Everything is different today. It has to be said that an important part of human evolution since those times has been the narrowing down of human awareness to the physical world. What did those Egyptians know of the earth? It was the ground under their feet. They knew more about the heavens. They moved in the vertical in gaining their experience. The ancient Greeks did not yet go into the horizontal either; they, too, gained their experience by going vertically. The vertical came to be reduced as the horizontal started to spread. The maximum limitation human beings experienced in their knowledge of the heavens came with the great increase in knowledge of the earth that came when men sailed around the globe and found that having sailed away to the west they would return from the east. It was necessary for human understanding in the vertical direction to become obscured. Human beings had to be isolated from the universe so that they could find within themselves the only power that can lead to human freedom. Moral impulses will arise out of this human freedom in their turn.

Human beings therefore no longer relate to the spheres beyond the earth in the vertical fashion the ancient Greeks and Chaldeans did. We have had the training that only a horizontal surface can give and must now ascend again in moral, ethical terms. We must learn how human life is influenced by powers that do not show themselves in the course taken by the world that exists outside us. Those are the luciferic and ahrimanic powers.

People tend to put their minds to other things, however, and sometimes I also have to tell you something relating to our spiritual movement that takes its orientation in anthroposophy. This has accepted the task of working out of the full seriousness the time demands and listening to the language spoken from the cosmos beyond this earth, as it were, a language which tells us that we must once again come to see the way the human being is connected with the whole cosmos. Again and again, however, things make themselves heard in this work—please forgive the abrupt change of subject—which even today draw attention to some very peculiar points of view taken by people who oppose our aims of furthering the progress of mankind. Let me read you a passage from a letter that is really typical. As I said, please forgive the abrupt change of subject but we are obliged to inform you of all kinds of things that are going on at the present time with the purpose of undermining and destroying this movement which endeavours to take up the challenge of the present age.

There is someone in Norway³ who had made it his task to destroy our movement. To assure himself that he has a right to do so, this man is writing to leading figures—that is how one does these things nowadays. He wrote to a publication called Politisch-anthropologische Monatsschrift [Political Anthropological Monthly]. This journal sent him the following information: ‘Dr Steiner is a Jew of the purest water. He is connected with the Zionists, indeed associated with them, and works for the Entente.’ The editor added that they—i.e. people of this kind—'have had their eye on him for some time.’

I just wanted to tell you this in conclusion, as yet another case among the many one gets today, with a new one coming up almost daily. That is the attitude anthropologists are now taking to the efforts being made in the anthroposophical field.

• 1 . Ludwig Andreas Feuerbach, German philosopher. Referring to Feuerbach's anthropomorphism, Rudolf Steiner repeatedly quoted from his book Das Wesen des Christentums (1841), e.g. in a lecture given in Dornach on 15 October 1921 (Anthroposophie als Kosmosophie, GA 207, English title Cosmosophy).
  
  Ludwig Buechner, German physician and materialist philosopher.
• 2 . ‘Die Weisheitslehren des Christentums in Lichte der Theosophie’ (The wisdom taught in the Christian faith in the light of Theosophy),Colmar, 21 November 1905 (no written record in existence).
• 3 . Details not known.

Quite a number of lectures have now been given by me on the changes that must necessarily take place in our whole civilization. First and foremost, what was said in this connection was expressed in such a way as to appeal to the will of men. We now live in a cycle of humanity's evolution in which people have to discover inner activity in order to contribute their share towards the necessary change. For human soul substance will have to stream into external life, into the objectivity of external life, and human beings themselves will have to bring about what should appear. In the present cycle of human development it is no longer possible to wait passively for divine powers, far removed from man, to step in and to do something for human evolution, without the participation of man himself.

The essential thing is to be in a position to understand such things by observing the individual phenomena of social life and the life of nature, but today, certain phenomena of social life shall be our topic. I would like to start with a quite definite fact. Let us suppose that someone announces himself; he may, for example, send his business card with the name “Edmund Miller” printed on it. Yet, on seeing this card with the name “Edmund Miller,” it would be foolish to assume that a miller was coming, a man who grinds corn. For the person announcing himself by this name may be a contractor, or a professor, or a court advisor, and so on. It would not be justified in such a case to deduce anything from the name “Miller.” Initially, it would perhaps be better to form no thoughts whatever, but just to wait and see what kind of a person conceals himself behind the name. Or, through certain other circumstances, we may already know something about the actual person, the real living entity concealed behind this name, “Miller.”

It is clear to us in this case that it would be quite wrong to infer from his name anything about the character of the approaching individual. If a person named “Smith” announces himself we would not think that he is a smith. This shows that in regard to those words we consider proper names, we feel the need to discover, by means of something that is not inferred from the name, what or whom we are dealing with.

Well, in this respect, even proper names have undergone a certain history. A person bearing the name Smith today no longer has anything to do with a real smith; a person called Miller has nothing to do with a miller. Yet these names originally arose at a time when name-giving such as is customary today did not exist, when people in a village would remark, “The smith said,—the miller said this or did that,”—or, “I saw the miller,”—and referred to the actual smith or miller. One who has lived in villages knows that people frequently do not refer to each other by proper names but say instead that they saw the smith, or the mason, or somebody else. Therefore, the name itself originally caused people to infer from the words what lay behind them.

All words, the whole language, will undergo the same development in the-course of evolution from the fifth to the sixth post-Atlantean epoch that proper names have undergone, a development which in their case we can clearly survey. Nevertheless, human beings today are still almost completely caught up in the whole of language; we basically acquire all our knowledge out of language. In actual fact, the general attitude towards nearly the whole compass of language is to infer the things from their words. Now, it is convenient to do so, but human evolution follows a different course, and in regard to such things we must have the same attitude that we adopt in regard to natural phenomena. They contain objective necessity. Objective necessity also exists where the causality of nature holds sway in the sphere of life, something that is experienced by many people with abstract superficiality. It happens frequently—I have often pointed this out—that people will say, “I never intended to do or say this; I meant it quite differently; I had this or that intention with regard to this matter.” But regardless of how pronounced the child's intention is not to get burned, when it reaches into fire, it will burn itself. Concerning the things of life, intentions that do not delve into life are not decisive; at most, only those intentions that do delve into life, or, certainly, facts, and the relationships of these facts that follow natural laws, are decisive.

People must become used to this way of thinking; based on spiritual science, this is, above all, necessary in the most eminent sense. And one must also get used to the thought: “As pleasant as it might be if one could just take words as they are, it is nevertheless a fact that the objective course and laws of human evolution point in a different direction.” They indicate that man's whole conception, his whole soul life, is becoming emancipated from words. Words are gradually becoming mere gestures that simply indicate the being or thing in question, no longer designating and explaining anything fully. If spiritual-scientific descriptions are to be taken seriously, for example, then something must come about for which people are often annoyed with me, namely, that one can no longer use words in the manner that words and sentences are customarily used at present. For if one sets forth spiritual-scientific facts, one is above all presenting facts of the future; something is represented that in future time will have to become the possession of mankind. In a certain sense, one has to anticipate something that is supposed to occur in the future. What is to happen in the future must be received into one's will. Therefore, one is obliged to give spiritual-scientific descriptions in such a way that even the words point like gestures to the essential reality lying behind them. Since our ideal today concerning the reconstruction of the social order will have to be born out of spiritual science, as I explained yesterday, it is necessary that, particularly in matters of social reconstruction, we speak from the above-mentioned viewpoint. This is precisely what people did not at all wish to comprehend, for instance, in my book, Towards Social Renewal. They absolutely wanted matters presented to them in the old style, matters that cannot be described in the old style since they are part of the future. And basically, what one is being faced with here can best be made evident by the fact that almost all the questions that, up to now, have been connected by one side or another to the expositions in Towards Social Renewal always proceed totally out of the old manner of thinking. No attempt is made to find one's way into the transformed new way of thinking.

Thus we may say that, particularly in the descriptions of social relationships of the future, it must become evident that we have to develop an emancipated soul life that no longer clings merely to words. One who follows my descriptions in the various fields of spiritual science, including the recent ones into the field of social life, will find that I am always at pains to describe a matter from many different sides. As a rule, I use two sentences instead of one, because the first sentence indicates the matter from one side, the other one from the other side. This is then supposed to call forth a desire in the listener or reader to approach the matter by transcending the words and sentences, as it were. This is what must be mentioned in reference to human soul life as far as the transformation of the meaning of human language is concerned. This is an important matter. It is important for the reason that the greatest part of what occurs today in regard to confusion of one's manner of thinking and conceptions comes about for no other reason than the fact that the objective laws and impulses of human evolution already demand that we free ourselves from language. Because of their easy-going habits of thinking, however, human beings do not wish to give up clinging to language. When such a phenomenon is clearly understood, it leads to a deeper insight into the whole course of human development. Indeed, from this transformation of our language or languages, we can actually build a bridge to profound spiritual facts. Naturally, this is more the case in one language than in another. But this is then a matter of the specific treatment of a language, of the meaning of words in a language in the individualized differentiated regions of human civilization, as I have pointed out.

We now live in the fifth post-Atlantean epoch of human civilization and are approaching the sixth condition of development. These evolutionary conditions are not of such a nature that a clear line could be drawn between one and the other epochs; instead, one epoch, bearing its own peculiarities, passes over into the next; and long before it arises, the future one casts its shadows—one could also say its lights—into the present. One must take hold of these lights if one wishes to participate in the evolution of humanity with one's soul.

Let us try and connect what might be termed the “suprahistorical” fact, namely, that we are supposed to work our way towards the sixth post-Atlantean epoch, with another fact known to all of us. It is this: With his spirit-soul entity, the human being descends out of a spiritual world to earthly incarnation through birth or conception. On earth, he then experiences the life between birth and death; then, he passes through the gate of death, and in so doing bears his soul-spiritual being once again into that environment of life which is definitely of a spiritual and soul nature.

Now we must clearly understand—and the significance of this for the art of education, for example, has also been outlined here recently—that we bring down from the spiritual world, at least in the form of effects, what we have experienced in this spiritual world. When we move in ordinary life from one locality to another, we take with us not only our clothes but also our soul-spiritual belongings. In like manner, one brings along into this world through conception and birth the consequences and effects of what has been undergone in the spiritual world. In the period that mankind has presently lived through, concerning which we know that it began around the middle of the fifteenth century A.D., man, through his spirit-soul entity, brought along forces of the soul life devoid of images, forces containing no pictures. It is for this reason that, above all, the intellectual life has arisen and has flourished. During this period, prior to descending through conception and birth into physical existence, the human being was endowed in a sense with something lacking in capacities, lacking in images. This explains the slight inclination mankind had for developing original creations of fantasy since the middle of the fifteenth century. Human fantasy is, in truth, only a terrestrial reflection of super-earthly imagination. The Renaissance does not contradict this, for just the fact that one had to resort to a “renaissance,” not a “naissance,” clearly shows that original forces of imagination were not present, only a fantasy that required fructification from earlier periods. In short, the fact is that the human soul was permeated in a certain sense with forces that are devoid of images.

Now begins the age—and in many respects, this is the real reason for the stormy character of our times—in which the souls who descend through conception and birth into earthly life bring along for themselves images from the spiritual world. When pictures are brought along out of spiritual existence into physical life, and if salvation is to arise for the human being and his social life, they must under all circumstances be united with the astral body, whereas the element lacking images only unites with the ego. It is predominantly the unfolding of the ego which has blossomed in humanity since the fifteenth century.

Now, however, the time is beginning when man has to feel: Within me there live pictures from my prenatal existence; during my earthly life, I have to make them come alive. I cannot accomplish this merely with my ego; I must work deeper into myself, and this must reach as far as my astral body.

Now, it is generally true that humanity resists the images indwelling in the astral body, images experienced prior to conception. In a way, human beings repel what is supposed to find its way out of the depths of their being into the astral body. The dry, prosaic attitude of the present time is one of its fundamental characteristics, and there are many broadly based movements that oppose an education whose concern it would be that the forces arising from the soul and trying to make themselves felt in the astral body will actually assert themselves. There are insipid, dry people who would really like to exclude any education by means of fairy tales, legends and anything illuminated by imagination. In our Waldorf School system, we have made it our priority that the lessons and instruction of the children entering primary education will proceed from pictorial descriptions, from the life-filled presentation of images, from elements taken from legends and fairy tales. Even what the children are initially supposed to learn about the nature and processes of the animal kingdom, the plant and the mineral kingdoms, is not supposed to be expressed in a dry, matter-of-fact manner; it is supposed to be clothed in imaginative, legendary, fairy tale-like elements. For what is seated deep within the child's soul are the imaginations that have been received in the spiritual world. They seek to come to the surface. The teacher or the educator adopts the right attitude towards the child if he confronts the child with pictures. By placing images before the child's soul, there flash up from its soul those images, or, strictly speaking, those forces of pictorialized representation which have been received before birth or, let us say, prior to conception.

If these forces are suppressed, if the dry, prosaic person guides the education of the child today, he confronts the child from earliest childhood with something that is actually not at all related to the child, namely, the letters of the alphabet. For our present letters have nothing to do anymore with the letters of earlier pictorial scripts. They are really something that is alien to the child; a letter should first be drawn out of a picture, as we try to do it in the Waldorf School. The child is confronted today with something devoid of a pictorial element; the young person, on the other hand, possesses forces in his body—naturally, I am referring to the soul when I am now speaking of “body,” for after all, we also speak of the “astral body”—forces seated in his body that will burst out elsewhere if they are not brought to the surface in pictorial representation. What will be the result of modern mistaken education? These forces do not become lost; they spread out, gain existential ground, and invade the thoughts, feelings and impulses of the will after all. And what kind of people will come into being from that? They will be rebels, revolutionaries, dissatisfied people; people who do not know what they want, because they want something that one cannot know. This is because they want something that is incompatible with any possible social order; something that they only picture to themselves, that should have entered their fantasy but did not; instead, it entered into their agitated social activities.

Therefore, we can say that people who, in an occult sense, do not have honest intentions in regard to their fellowmen, do not have the courage to admit to themselves: “If the world is in a state of revolt today, it is really heaven that is revolting.” It means the heaven that is held back in the souls of men, which then comes to the fore, not in its own form, but in its opposite—in strife and bloodshed instead of imaginations. No wonder that the individuals who destroy the social fabric actually have the feeling that they are doing good. For what do they sense in themselves? They feel heaven within themselves; only it assumes the form of a caricature in their soul.

This is how serious the truths are that we must comprehend today! To acknowledge the truths that matter today should be no child's play; such acknowledgment should be pervaded by the greatest earnestness. In general, it is no light task today to describe such things, for, in the first place, people do not care for them; secondly, they cling to words. Indeed, one who states that heaven is revolting in human souls is naturally taken literally by his words; people do not notice how he is trying to show that additional facts must be known, whereby the word “heaven” is related to something more than they are in the habit of connecting with the term. This is the same as not thinking of a miller who grinds corn when a “Mr. Miller” announces himself. The emancipation from language is definitely required in individual concrete cases if, in the sense that the laws of human evolution demand it, we wish truly to make progress.

Here, we see how something that comes from the life before birth pushes into the social life. One who is familiar with these relationships knows that he has to recognize something that is actually heavenly in what appears on earth in a caricature. This is in regard to the social questions, but there is something else in addition.

During the age of intellectualism, which has developed predominantly since the middle of the fifteenth century, human beings have obtained very little from their life of sleep in the form of imaginations for their waking life. Even those who have somewhat more lively dreams tend to interpret them quite rationally and intellectually. In this direction, theosophists, for example, are rational and intellectual. I could not begin to describe in a small volume, only in a big one, how many people have come to me in the course of time and wished to have rational explanations for their dreams! What is important here is that even those imaginations that express themselves in dreams point to a deeper spiritual life. I have often said that the outward appearance of the dream does not matter at all; that has already emancipated itself from the actual content. The content which we receive and then interpret in words of a language, from which, in turn, we actually have to emancipate ourselves as well, is not the true course of the dream; it really has very little to do with the true course of the dream. The dream's content is represented in its dramatic sequence, in the way one image follows another, the way complications arise and are resolved; one can experience the same spiritual content in a number of different ways as a dream. One person comes and describes how he climbed a mountain; he ascended quite easily up to a certain point, then, he suddenly stood before an abyss and could not proceed. Another person relates that he was walking along a path; everything around him filled him with joy. Suddenly, when he reached a certain point in the road, a man with a #8224 came up 'to him and killed him. Here we have two completely different dream images. Yet the process concealed behind them may be exactly the same. It can express itself in one instance in the climb up the mountain and the feeling of confronting an abyss; in another instance, it can be expressed in a cheerful walk down a path until one confronts a person who intends to kill one. The content of the images is not important; it is the dramatic sequence of experiencing something that offers resistance. It is the dynamics behind the images that matters. The course taken by the forces can envelop itself in any number of images, indeed in hundreds of pictures!

We can only understand the spiritual world when we know that what appears in the physical world in the form of dreams, or what clothes itself in images from the spiritual world in such a manner that it resembles the physical world, is only an image. As long as one has the inclination, however, to interpret the images in a rationalistic, purely intellectual way, so long does one also occupy an intellectual standpoint in regard to the dream life of sleep. What matters here is that we understand this dream life of sleep as the expression of a deeper spiritual life. Then only do we comprehend it imaginatively; then we grasp the pictures as something that stands in place of the content.

Then we shall not turn against something that is beginning for the human being today, namely, making inner soul demands out of sleep in a manner similar to the demands made by the imaginations prior to birth or conception. For today we are beginning to sleep differently from the way sleep was experienced in the regular life of the intellectual age since the middle of the fifteenth century. Man brought along into the waking state little inclination for faculties that wish to experience, rather than interpret, the images.

We have now reached the point in human evolution where, out of sleep as well, we draw imaginations that seek to indwell not only our ego, where rationality reigns supreme, but also our astral body. If we work against this, we once more reject something that is trying to rise into consciousness out of the depths of the human soul; we also work against the whole course of mankind's evolution, and what matters here is that we do not oppose humanity's development but work in harmony with it. We do this in the first place by permeating our culture once again with as many elements as possible connected in some way with the spiritual world. Naturally, in regard to external life, it is important for us to imbue ourselves with what is grasped from the spiritual world; hence, that we also imbue ourselves with a true spiritual insight, to fill ourselves with something that in this physical world cannot be comprehended in terms of the physical world. The whole past epoch of human life was actually opposed to this. Consider a case that I have already mentioned a number of times.

It is true that Christianity confronts human beings in such a way that they can only grasp its essence, especially the nature of the Mystery of Golgotha, if they come round to a comprehension of something super-sensible. For one must envisage that Christ, a being Who formerly had not been connected with earth evolution, united with the human being, Jesus of Nazareth, and that super-sensible events took place. One must conceive of the fact that in regard to the event of Golgotha, even birth and conception differed from the way they take place in ordinary human circumstances. In short, the demand is made by Christology to understand the Mystery of Golgotha in a super-sensible sense.

There is an interesting passage in a book written by a modern naturalist⁹⁴ where fulminations are uttered against the Immaculate Conception, where it is said that it is an impertinent insult to human reason to claim that an immaculate conception can occur.

Well, a modern rationalist, a purely intellectual person, can't help feeling this way. In a certain sense, what is intended out of the spiritual life is indeed an impertinent mockery of human reason. But the point is that we now live in an age where we must gradually begin to bring into waking life what has been spiritually experienced between falling asleep and waking in such a manner that our astral body can be impregnated and permeated with a pictorial element—not merely our ego, which is the seat of rationality, of intellectualism.

It is interesting that even the theology of the nineteenth century developed in such a way that it opposed Christology with rationalism, with pure intellectualism. Increasingly, modern theology felt called upon altogether to deny Christ as such, and to describe the humble man from Nazareth, the mere Jesus, as a human personality somewhat more outstanding than other human beings. One did not wish to make the effort to comprehend something super-sensible. What is to confront the human being supersensibly, what is to awaken him to the super-sensible realm, this one tried to grasp with concepts gained here in the sensory world.

A Protestant theologian,⁹⁵ with whom I once discussed this matter, told me after we had talked about it for some time, “Yes, we modern theologians should really not call ourselves Christians any longer, for we no longer have Christ. If the name ‘Jesuit’ had not been appropriated already, we should really claim it for ourselves.” This is not something that I am saying; it is something that a Protestant theologian of the modern school said to me as a confession of his own soul.

One who has insight into the whole character of our time, however, will understand that we must advance to a comprehension of the Mystery of Golgotha. Just because it is the central manifestation of our human evolution, it will tear us away from the earthly manner of thinking, and will draw us with might and main to understand something that is incomprehensible based an the earthly sense domain. Whoever wishes in everything to remain caught in the earthly sensory sphere would say, “The Immaculate Conception is an impertinent insult against human reason.”

One who understands the task of present-day man will say: I must accustom myself to such ideas. In that case, I must emancipate myself from the customary use of words today. When somebody by the name of Smith or Miller announces himself, I must not assume that he is coming with a hammer in hand or overalls powdered with flour. I must expect something quite different from what I might deduce from the words. Thus, I have to become used to emancipating myself from what was ingrained into the words by the merely physical life of the senses.

Today, the Mystery of Golgotha is in fact the first test for us to see whether we are willing to go along with the comprehension of something that extends beyond the physical-sensory sphere. We, therefore, can no longer content ourselves with a merely traditional, historical description of Christianity, we need instead a creative understanding of the Mystery of Golgotha. Out of spiritual science, we need inner strength of soul which, in a new way, approaches the Mystery of Golgotha and is in a position to comprehend the Mystery of Golgotha as a supersensory fact. Then, having positioned the Mystery of Golgotha into the central point of human thinking and feeling, we must make a new beginning especially in regard to education, and prepare the child in such a way that it does not suppress, does not have to suppress, the imaginations that seek to arise from the depths of the soul. We must meet the imaginations halfway by making pictures of our conceptions.

This is the deeper reason why, in the last issue of Soziale Zukunft (Social Future),⁹⁶ which is a magazine dealing with education, I described education and instruction as an art in the most eminent sense. In the field of pedagogy, teachers and educators must actually proceed in the way an artist does—indeed, they must proceed in a style surpassing that of an artist. It does not do to impose abstract principles in an abstract pedagogical sense. What matters is that one penetrates the being of man, and, through this comprehension of man's nature, arrives at the point of reading from the inner human being what one has to do in each case. An artist who is creating something cannot go by abstract rules. The purpose of aesthetics is not that of establishing rules for the artists. An artist cannot even go by what he has created yesterday when he creates something today. At every moment he must endeavor to be creative and original. This is how the teacher must be, in a still higher sense. One must not say based on a certain attitude of mind: "Well, if we are looking for teachers like that, we have to wait another three to four hundred years." The only reason that we do not have such teachers as yet is because we say things like this. We can have them the very moment that we have the strong power of faith in it; but it is the strong, not the passive, power of faith that is needed here. Therefore, what is important here is that when we return from sleep, upon awakening, we truly experience in the astral body and imprint into the etheric body what the astral body experiences from the moment of falling asleep until waking up. It can only take place through pictorializing the whole cultural life.

This pictorialization of the whole life of culture, this pictorialization that is demanded by the laws of humanity's evolution, will come into being when the whole spiritual life is left to the decision of those who participate in the spiritual life; when no instructions, no school regulations are laid down by a government which by its very nature stands outside the spiritual life. It is important here that the state does not hand down pedagogical regulations, school curriculums, and such like in an abstract manner. What matters is that one has human beings in an emancipated spiritual life who act out of their own free personality, and that one accomplishes with them what one can or wishes to accomplish with them.

The fact that the human being is presently beginning to bring along through conception and birth something that differs from what he brought with him since the middle of the fifteenth century, and the fact that he also brings something different with him out of sleep, both these facts demand that careful attention be given such matters, and that one really permeates oneself with the knowledge of such decisive facts. But from where can this knowledge be gained, if not from spiritual science? The external culture, today's science, certainly does not deal in any way with these matters. It ignores them; indeed, its present methods compel it to do so. I feel obliged to say that the present situation becomes most poignant when one observes the frequent and strange discrepancy between the inner requirements of humanity's evolution and the way in which people meet them. In recent times, the need has arisen to reckon with what flows into the human being from the spiritual world. Those who were intellectual, who did not reckon with what flows out of the spiritual world, made hypotheses about atoms, molecules, and the like. It was thought that bodies possessing volume point back to an atomistic formation, and so on. Out of the root causes of mankind's evolution, the need arose to grasp spiritual facts. And this instinct to grasp the spiritual expressed itself also in something, for example, like the Theosophical Society. One of its heroes is a certain Mr. Leadbeater who wrote an occult chemistry. What did he do in this book? He did something quite horrible, for he pictures the spiritual world in an atomistic sense; meaning, the materialistic manner of thinking is carried into the spiritual world.

I have recently mentioned this whole grotesque thing. Something very clever came about in the Theosophical Society. Someone wished to prove that here is one life; there is the next one (see drawing below). Now, it is so, isn't it, that something has to pass from the preceding life to the later one. One sees the body fall into decay. A proper materialist says that the body disintegrates and it is all over with man. A theosophist, however, wants another earth life to come; so, something must pass from one life to the other! The proper materialist says that all atoms unite with the earth. The theosophist also does not think in any other way than materialistically, but at the same time he tries to think “theosophically.” He wants something to pass from the first to the next life. So he says: “Of course, the atoms become one with the earth; one atom, however, remains and it passes through the whole period of existence between death and a new birth. There it appears again. This is the permanent atom.” One atom! Oh, the theosophists were especially proud then, when they discovered this “permanent” atom! They had no inkling that in this way they were carrying materialism into the spiritual world conception! Materialism induced them to believe that something—they never said what it was—of the many atoms that sink down into the ground is saved; and this fortunate, saved, permanent atom then reappears in the next incarnation. Much has been written about this permanent atom. It is nothing more than an example of the fact that something was borne into spiritual science that people could not rise above, namely, materialism. It permeates, by the way, the whole description of man, in the way it is frequently presented in the literature of the Theosophical Society. As I have often pointed out, they present the physical body as dense, the etheric body as thinner, the astral body as still thinner. Then come degrees of thinness, where even thinking and conceptions become quite thin. Yet, one is still dealing with something substantial, like mist; hence, although Buddhi and Atma are mists, they are still tangible as mists. One does not have the will power truly to discard materialism even in one's conceptual life; to pass from concepts of matter to concepts of the spirit.

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All these things prove how closely human beings are tied to the old ways of thinking. Out of such considerations, anybody who honestly wishes to acknowledge spiritual science should take up the inner challenge to test himself as to how far he has freed himself from the old materialistic concepts; or, when he turns to something spiritual, to what extent he imagines this spiritual manner in materialistic pictures, not being aware of the fact that they are just pictures.

It is always a matter of being conscious of this. For if, say, I were to draw a picture of one of you on the blackboard, the picture could mean a lot to me, if the person in question were no longer present. But if I were then to imagine that the person in the picture would shake my hand, or would speak to me, in other words, that he would be the actual person, then I would be suffering from illusions! Therefore, one may naturally sensualize the spiritual in pictures, but one must always be aware of the fact that they are nothing but pictures.

In the case of words, too, people must realize more and more clearly that language is on the way to turning the word into a gesture, and that we should go no further than to allow the word to indicate something to us that no longer is contained in the word. All words will have to take the same direction that proper names have taken.

For philosophers, I have something even better to say. Philosophers of recent times have set up any number of theories. When I say, “The child is small,” they have a concept of “small;” they have a concept of “child.” The “is,” however, the copula of the two—what does it mean? Oh, much has been written about this copula even in the philosophical sense, not just from the grammatical or philological standpoint. Everything that has been written about it suffers from the fact that this verb, “is,” no longer has the meaning of which people speak. It has already emancipated itself from its meaning and the soul content has become a different one. Thus, people in fact philosophize about something that no longer lives in the soul in an alive sense.

This is just an incidental philosophical remark which perhaps doesn't have much significance, but it is supposed to draw your attention to the fact that something that is not noticed by the outer world is by no means noticed immediately by the philosophers. Nevertheless, it is often true that the philosophers are the last to notice the things that really occur in the world, and many of our philosophical systems lag considerably behind what exists outside of themselves!

By proceeding principally from the example of language, however, I have tried to show you quite concretely how present-day human development presents itself. What actually takes place in regard to human development can really only be seen by looking at super-sensible facts. Anthropology can no longer discover what actually takes place, only anthroposophy. This is the reason why anthroposophical cultural thinking must lie at the foundation of everything that constitutes work for the progress of mankind.

• 94 . Ernest Haeckel: Anthropogenie oder Entwicklungsgeschichte des Menschen, Leipzig, 1891, p. 871.
• 95 . Max Christlieb: 1862–1916.
• 96 . In “Soziale Zukunft,” #5–7, Dornach, 1920.

Yesterday I set about to show how far from reality present-day thinking is, when in circles working on international questions it is already forgotten that the founding of a League of Nations was, in accordance with Wilson's ideas at the time, deemed possible only if peace were concluded without victory on either side. That you may see how exactly Wilson, on 22nd January, 1917, set out these conditions for the League, I should like today to read you the relevant passage from his speech. He said: “The chief thing in what has been said is that there must be peace without victory. It is not pleasant to have to say this. I may perhaps be allowed to state my own views about it and to emphasise that no other conception has entered my mind. I am trying merely to face the facts and to do this without shielding myself by hiding anything. A victory would mean that peace would be forced upon the vanquished, that the vanquished have to bow to the conditions of their conquerors. Such conditions could be accepted only with profound humility in circumstances of necessity and with insufferable sacrifice, and there would remain a smarting wound, a feeling of resentment, a bitter memory. A peace resting on such foundations could not be lasting, it would be like the house built on sand. The only lasting peace is a peace established between equals, a peace that in its whole essence rests on equality and the common benefit derived from a common act of good-will. The right attitude, the right mood of feeling, is as necessary between the different nations for enduring peace as for the just settlement of obstinate strife over questions of countries, races or peoples.” [ Note 1 ]

At that time this was held to be the condition for the founding of a League of Nations. And if we think clearly, it must be said that the moment this peace without victory is not forthcoming, all talk at present of founding a League ought to be abandoned, for it can no longer offer any prospect of success. But this has not happened. People do not think in accordance with reality, they think abstractly, letting their thoughts run on in the way they have begun, quite indifferent as to whether these thoughts have been based on suppositions likely to come true or not.

This is simply an outstanding example of the thinking that has brought the world so much misery. And unless we see that in place of this thinking estranged from reality there must be one that can penetrate reality, the situation will certainly not change in a way that is healing for mankind. This must be understood both in the great concerns of the world and also in the ordering of everyday life. For the measures affecting the daily life of individuals are closely connected with the most important affairs of mankind. The mention, therefore, must continually come before our souls: What then, today, could produce real change?

We know that what we call men's acceptance of Spiritual Science, is not merely a question of being convinced that there is a supersensible world. That is the what. But the important thing is that whoever in the true sense takes into his thinking what today can be told in the right way about the supersensible world, out of present spiritual revelation, should arrive at a certain how in his thinking. By this his thinking should gradually be transformed, in such a way that he really gets a sense for, an interest in, what truly and actually takes place in the world. It does not merely depend on what we acknowledge through Spiritual Science, but on how through it our thinking is transformed. The question therefore must touch us particularly closely why at present there is so strong an opposition to Spiritual Science.

Now yesterday I asked you to notice how everything that can be said about this opposition has to be related at the sane time to all that can arise under the influence of the threefold social organism. I said that once it has come about that the spiritual sphere has been placed on its own feet, so that it becomes independent of the economic sphere and of the life of the State, then in a comparatively short time Spiritual Science will become widespread. But one might go deeper into the question and ask: Why are people so little inclined to recognise necessity for the proper emancipation, of the life of the spirit and for its being placed on its own foundation? The reason is that this spiritual life has in recent times taken on a certain form that holds men back from directing their gaze to the supersensible world. One might say that the present sad experiences are in a certain way a kind of punishment for the necessary misunderstanding of spiritual life which has recently arisen. It must be realised that unless future human thought is led in a social direction, man will never get anywhere. We are taught this by facts against which it is foolish to contend. On the other hand it must be realised by penetrating deeply into things that any kind of socialism that is not at the same time spiritualised will prove the undoing rather than the salvation of mankind. The best groundwork for this penetration is a thorough understanding of the fact that socialistic thinking has proceeded out of modern thinking as a whole.

I have already given indications of this. Today we will gather up many of the things we have already heard. I have pointed out that there is something lurking in spirits like Fichte, when they direct their thoughts to the social sphere, that leads to an outlook quite similar to what is found today in Bolshevism. I tried to express this by saying that Johann Gottlieb Fichte would have actually been a genuine Bolshevist had he put his social theory into practice. He himself had so much spirituality that he could let his Bolshevist ideas appear in print (Der Geschlossene Handelsstaat) without becoming dangerous for mankind.

So little inclination exists today to penetrate into the real content of things that it is never noticed how in this book Fichte is a true Bolshevist.

Nevertheless it is in Hegel that modern thinking comes to expression with its particular characteristics. And Karl Marx isis again dependent upon Hegel though in a most remarkable way. Even if it leads us into the heights of abstraction I should like just to speak of what is characteristic in Hegel's mode of thinking. In the confusion of the last four-and-a-half years many inapt things have been said about Hegel. Why should we not for once be able to go objectively into the matter of his thinking?

Now let us consider how Hegel thought about the world, how he tried to direct his gaze to the revelations of the mysteries of the world. Hegel put what he had to say about his actual fundamental being of the world quite distinctly in various places—most distinctly of all in his Encyclopedia of Philosophical Knowledge. Let us observe in a quite ordinary way what sort of world-outlook we here find expressed. Hegel's world-outlook falls into three parts. The first part he called Logic. Logic for him, however, is not the art of subjective human thinking but the sum of all ideas active in the world itself. Hegel sees indeed in these ideas not only what flits ghostlike through human heads. That for him is only the perception of the idea. Ideas for Hegel are in a way forces working in the things themselves. And for the being of things Hegel goes no farther back than to the ideas, so that he wishes in his logic as it were the sum of all ideas contained in things. The ideas not appearing creatively in nature, the ideas that do not come to reflection in man and are not recognised by man, are ideas in themselves which are working in the world as ideas. I know quite well that perhaps you may not become much wiser from what I am saying; but people have long been maintaining that they do not gain much wisdom from Hegel, for they are unable to imagine the existence of a pure tissue of ideas. In this pure tissue of ideas, however, Hegel sees God before the creation of the world. For Hegel, God is a sum, or better, an organism, of ideas in the form in which these ideas existed before nature arose and before man was evolved on the foundation of nature. Thus Hegel tried to represent ideas in pure logic—that is, God before the creation of the world. God before the creation of the world is therefore pure logic.

Now we might say that it would be very profitable for man's life were someone to set forth all the ideas there were, irrespective of whether they are ideas of a living God or ideas only hovering in the air like a spider's web—but at that time there was no such thing as a web—that this would be of great advantage to the human soul. If, however, you take this pure Hegelian logic, you again find nothing but a web of ideas; and this is the reason it is so seldom done. A beginning is made with the most meagre concept, that of pure being. Then it rises to the non-being, then to existence, and so on. You come therefore to the sum of all ideas man has had about the world, about which he does not usually reflect. He finds it tedious to place before his soul all that follows from pure being up to the appropriate building-up of the organism, apart from any external world. You then get a sum of ideas but only of abstract ideas. And man's living feeling will naturally take up a certain attitude towards this sum or this organism of abstract ideas. How anyone might protest that this is a pantheistic prejudice of Hegel's, this belief that ideas as such are there. I take up the standpoint that before the creation of the world a God would have been there who might have had these ideas and created the world in accordance with them. Try, however, for once to imagine the reason and the soul-life of a God who would have nothing in Him but these Hegelian ideas, and would have reflected only about what lived between being and suitable organisation, who would have had in Himself only ideas of the most external abstractions. What would you say on being expected thus to picture the soul-life of a God? You would never be able to understand how a God could be so poor in His divine reasoning as to think only in such abstractions! Nevertheless for Hegel the sum of these abstract ideas is God Himself, not merely God is understanding but God Himself before the creation of the world. The essential thing is that Hegel in reality never gets beyond abstract ideas, but looks upon these abstractions as divine.

Then he goes on to his second point—nature. Here too, I might give you certain opinions as a kind of definition of the way Hegel progresses from the idea, that is, God before the creation, to nature. Probably, however, you would not gain much here either, were you to keep to your ordinary way of thinking. According to Hegel, logic contains the idea in itself; nature contains the idea in its external form. What therefore you contemplate as nature is also idea, actually nothing but what is contained in logic, in the form, however, of being outside itself or having a different being. Then Hegel examines nature in its pure mechanism to the point where it displays its biological, plant, animal relations. He tries everywhere, as far as nature is an open book to man, to point to ideas in her, in the light, in warmth, and in other forces, that of gravity and so forth. Hegel makes up for the significance lost through his abstractions, by his own powers of perception and imagination. But this perception and imagination of Hegel's sometimes endanger the understanding of what he actually wanted. I once tried to vindicate Hegel to a university professor, a philosopher with whom I was an friendly terms. I defend Hegel, you know, because I count it fruitful to defend everything positive rather than always to swear by one's own opinion, roundly criticizing everything else. Anything at all good I always defend. That is the positivism of Spiritual Science. But that time, in the defence of Hegel, I went to work the wrong way. The friend in question said: “O leave me in peace about Hegel. One can't take a man seriously who has nothing to say about the comets except that they are an eruption in the sky!”—Naturally such a statement, that the comets are some sort of rash in the heavens rather like measles, must be taken in its whole context.

Now after Hegel has given a sort of catalogue of all the concepts and ideas incorporated in nature, he goes on to his third point, the spirit. In the spirit he sees the idea in its own being, that is, not only as it was before the creation of the world, not only in itself, but as it is apart from all else. The idea lives in the human soul, then objectively outside, and then for itself apart, for man. Since man is the idea because all is idea, this is the idea for itself alone. Hegel again tries to follow up the idea as it is present first in the souls of single human individuals, then—if I skip over something—in the State. In human souls the idea is inwardly active; in the State it is again objectified, living in laws and administration. In all this the idea lives, having become objective. It then goes on developing objectively in world-history, State, world-history. Thus in world-history everything is registered as ideas which brings about the further evolution of mankind on the physical plane. Nothing living as ideas in souls, in the State, in world-history, goes beyond the physical plane, nor does it make man aware of there being a spiritual world. For the spiritual world is for Hegel only the sum total of the ideas living in everything, first in the being in itself before the creation of the world., then apart in nature, and in the separateness of the human soul, in the State and in world-history.

After this the idea is developed to its greatest height, in the last moment of its development comes, as it were, to itself, in art, religion and philosophy.

I Logic: Idea in itself
II Nature: Idea in its external being
III Spirit: Idea in its separateness

Soul—State—World-history
Art—Religion—Philosophy

When the three, art, religion, and philosophy, arise in the life of man they stand above the State and world-history; nevertheless they are simply the embodiment of pure logic, the embodiment of abstract ideas. Those ideas existing before the creation of the world are represented in art in a physical image; in religion through a conception in accordance with feeling; and in philosophy the idea in its pure form appears finally in the human spirit. Man comes to fulfillment in philosophy, looks back on everything else that mankind and nature have produced in the way of ideas. He now feels himself filled with the God who is indeed the idea that looks back on the whole of its previous becoming. God sees Himself in men. Actually in man the idea is contemplating itself. Abstraction contemplates abstraction.

Nothing more ingenious can be imagined than these thoughts about human abstraction, if one bears in mind that this ingenuity is in the sphere of abstraction. And one can conceive nothing more inwardly daring than what holds good in the following—Ideas are what is highest, there is no God beyond ideas, ideas are God, and you, O soul of man, you are also an idea, only in you the idea is brought to its separateness, it contemplates itself.

Thus you see that we swim in ideas, we are ourselves ideas, everything is idea—the world in its extremest form of abstraction! It is of very great importance that just at the turn of the eighteenth century, and on into the nineteenth, there should have arisen a spirit who had the courage to say: It is only one who grasps the abstract idea who grasps reality; there is no higher reality than the abstract idea.

In the whole of Hegel's philosophy, from beginning to and, there is no path that leads into the supersensible world. For Hegel there is no such path; and if amen dies, because he is actually idea, in the sense of Hegelian philosophy he goes into the universal stream of world ideas. It is only about this stream of world ideas that anything can be said. There is no single concept that deals with the supersensible—this is just what is so great-minded about the Hegelian philosophy. Everything that meets us in Hegel's philosophy—in icy abstraction, it is true—is itself supersensible, even though abstractly supersensible. This proves itself entirely unsuited. to take up anything supersensible; it shows itself to be fitted only to enter into what is physical. The physical is spiritualised by the superphysical but only in a truly abstract form. At the same time everything supersensible is rejected because the sum of ideas given from beginning to end is related only to the physical world. Thus, I might say, the supersensible character of Hegel's ideas does not become very apparent, for this superphysical is not related to what is superphysical but only to what is physical.

I should particularly like to draw your attention to how the tendency of modern thinking is expressed. in its fundamental rejection of the supersensible; not, however, in superficial materialism but in the highest force of spiritual thinking. Hegel is therefore no materialist; he is an objective idealist. His objective idealism upholds the view that the objective idea is itself God, the founder of the world, the founder of everything.

Whoever thinks out a spiritual impulse of this kind, experiences in his thinking a certain inner satisfaction, which makes him overlook what is lacking. But what is lacking is felt all the more strongly by anyone who is not the original conceiver of the system but only reflects upon it. I have indicated this in my book Vom Menschenrätsel (The Riddle of Man).

Now imagine that a man—not like Hegel—spins thoughts in this way, with an inner supersensible impulse, but that this thinking is taken up by a different head having a sense only for the material—as was the case with Karl Marx. Then this idealistic philosophy of Hegel's becomes the motive for rejecting everything supersensible, and with it everything idealistic. And so it happened with Karl Marx. Karl Marx adopted the form of Hegel of thought. But he did not consider the idea in the reality; he considered the reality as it goes on shinning itself out as mere external material reality. He continued Hegel's impulse and materialised it. Thus the basic nerve of modern socialistic thought has its roots in the very pinnacle of modern idealistic thought. This personal contact that at the same time had to do with the history of the world, this contact of the most abstract thinker with the most material of all thinkers, was an inner necessity but also the tragedy of the nineteenth century; it has been in a certain way the change over of the spiritual life into its opposite.

Hegel continues in abstract concepts. Being is changed into non-being, cannot reconcile itself with non-being and therefore merges into becoming. Thus the concept progresses through thesis, antithesis, synthesis, to a certain inner triad, dealt with by Hegel in a grandiose way in the field of pure idea. Karl Marx carries over this inner triad, sought by Hegel for logic, nature and spirit in the inner flexibility of ideas, into outer material reality. He says, for example: Out of the modern economic and capitalistic form of human community, under private ownership, there has developed, as there developed with Hegel nothingness, non-being out of being, the formation of trusts, the capitalistic socialisation of the economy of private capital. With the increased amassing of industrial plant by the trusts, the private ownership of capital changes into its opposite. There arise associations that are the reverse of individual economy. This is a changing over into the opposite, the antithesis. Then comes synthesis. Once again the whole is changed as nothingness is changed into becoming; and the merging of private economy into the economy of trusts changes into something still greater—the trust economy ands in the communal ownership of the means of production. This purely external economic reality progresses in the triad. Here Karl Marx has been thinking exactly after Hegel's model, only Hegel in his thinking moved in an element of ideas while Marx lived in a weaving and living of external economic reality. So, side-by-side we find the extremes, one might say like being and non-being.

Now you can argue as long as you like about idealism and realism, spiritualism and materialism, but nothing comes of it, you get nowhere. What sustains man can be found only by thinking in the sense of the modern trinity, with man in the centre, the luciferic extreme on the one side, on the other the ahrimanic extreme. Ahrimanic materialism, luciferic spiritualism, as the two extremes, man keeping the balance. If you wish for the truth you can neither be idealist nor realist; you must be one just as much as the other. You must seek the spirit with such intensity that you find spirit even in the material; you must penetrate what is material so that through the material you find the spirit. That is the task of the modern age; no longer to wrangle about spiritualism and materialism but to find the balance between the two. For the two extremes of the luciferic in Hegel and the ahrimanic in Marx are outlived. They were there, they were manifested. Now there must be found what will bring agreement, and this can be done just by Spiritual Science. Here, it is true, we have to rise as did Hegel to the heights of pure thought, but this pure thought must be used for breaking through to the supersensible. We do not have to find logic, that is, an organism of ideas, which can be related only to the world of the senses; but at the point where logic has been found we must pierce through what belongs to the senses and reach the supersensible. Hegel was unable to succeed in thus breaking through, and because of this men was thrown back.

In a certain way it depends upon the heights and purity reached by modern thinking that socialism should have appeared without any reference to what is to any degree spiritual. And the present—day difficulty in adding spiritual thinking to socialistic thinking is bound up with the very ground of mankind's inner path of development. The whole connection must be seen into, however, for us to gain the strength to find the way out of the situation. The pursuit of science as it is now carried on in our universities has certainly not led to this.

Not physically, but where thinking is concerned, Hegel has squeezed out man as a lemon is squeezed till it is dry; and this squeezed out lemon of a man is then only another idea. You sit there in your chairs; in the sense of Hegel's philosophy you are pure ideas; there are not bodies sitting there, not souls, but ideas, for each of you bears en idea within him. And this was already there an abstract idea before the creation of the world. Then each one of you in yourself is body, nature—the idea outside itself is sitting there on those chairs. Then again within you is the idea in its separateness. You yourself grasp this idea that id you. Think what a shadow you are: Only think how squeezed out you are while you sit there as the idea in itself, outside itself, and apart from itself—but always just idea!

Now in the sense of Karl Marx you are quite different from ideas. Just because he has passed through Hegel's method of idealism you are for him an animal that has become two-legged, as you appear outwardly in the order of nature. The other extreme!

In face of what exists in man's evolution must we not make an attempt to give him back his manhood again even in our outward view of him? This means not taking man's nature to be merely universal idea nor animal-men, but really individual man in his own envelope, man who stands at the highest point in nature, who has within him a soul-being and is the goal of a spiritual world. The conception of man must be brought back to this real man. I have tried to do this in my The Philosophy of Spiritual Activity. That is the actual historical statement of the problem which I had before me when I was constrained to write The Philosophy of Spiritual Activity. The most highly developed animal enveloping man cannot be free, neither can there be freedom for the shadowy man—the idea in itself, outside itself, the idea in its separate being, for that is built up by the necessity of logic. Neither of these is free. Only the real man is free, the man who is the balance between the idea that breaks through to the actual spirit, and external materiel reality.

Therefore in the The Philosophy of Spiritual Activity an attempt was even made to base moral life not upon any kind of abstract principle, but upon inner moral experience, which at the time I called moral imagination, that is, upon what, expressed figuratively, individual man draws from the well of intuition. Kant set up the categorical imperative that runs: Act in such a way that the maxim of your action can be a guiding line for all men: Put on a coat that will fit every man.—The maxim of the philosophy of freedom runs: Let your action be such that it flows to you in a precise concrete moment, in an individual concrete moment, out of your highest human forces, out of the spirit.

Through moral philosophy in this roundabout way we arrive at spirituality. And for modern mankind it might be a way of coming to an understanding of the spiritual world, were men first to see into something that, after all, is not hard to grasp, namely, that what is moral has no support if it is not conceived as part of the supersensible and spiritual. From beginning to end Hegel's logic is a sum of abstract ideas. But ultimately what harm is there in my looking upon the whole of nature, upon every visible thing, as simply a scheme of ideas? It becomes harmful, however, when what spurs us on as an impulse to the moral, does not come from the spiritual world. For if it does not come from the spiritual world it has no true reality and is more noise and smoke issuing from animal-man. When animal-man dies nothing is left. In Hegel's philosophy there is no single concept related to anything that would still be there for man when he has gone through the gate of death, or that could have been there before he came through the gate of birth. Hegel's philosophy is great, but great as a point of transition for the nineteenth century. To recognise Hegel in his greatness leads us to carry him further, to make a passage through what stands in our way when we come to pure thought, to pure logic, to the idea in the abstract—a passage through to the supersensible world. Being still a follower of Hegel, can only be represented as the personal enjoyment of a few twisted minds who, at the beginning of the twentieth century set out to prove their great spirituality by going as far as it was permissible to go in the first decade of the nineteenth century. For we have to learn not only to wish to live abstractly as men, but to live wholly with the times, to live in the evolution of the time. We come to what is really living by refusing, to be absolute, otherwise we cannot cooperate in the sense of human evolution. The important thing is that we should work together for human evolution.

Raphael was great. The Sistine Madonna is a very important artistic creation. Actually it could be estimated justifiably only by someone who, if a painter produced a Sistine Madonna today, would consider it a bad picture. For it is a question of not taking anything as absolute, but of understanding how to place oneself into the great association of all mankind. And the necessity lies before us today of not simply taking up an absolute attitude in the world, as might be done formerly, but of feeling ourselves consciously in the epoch into which we are placed in a certain incarnation. Strange as it may sound, a right estimation of the Sistine Madonna could be made only by someone who was able to condemn the picture out of the modern attitude of mind, had it been painted today. For nothing has an absolute value; things derive their value from the place where they stand in the world. Up to now people have been able to make do without this insight; but from now on it is essential. It is not so particularly profound. In his epoch the discoverer of the Pythagorean theorem was a great man. Today should anyone invent or discover this theorem it would be interesting but nothing more. It would also be interesting were anyone to paint the Sistine Madonna today. It is however not the time for this; it in not what must happen at the point of evolution in which we now stand.

You see what a new form thinking must take, what a socialising of thought there must be to experience jointly with other men is the important thing for today. To most people this will seem distinctly strange. Today however we find ourselves compelled to make a fundamental change in our thinking, to come to really new thoughts. We are no longer able to live with the old thoughts. If men go on spinning these old thoughts, the world will simply tumble about their ears. The salvation of mankind depends on men being able to free themselves from the old thinking and really wish for new thinking. Spiritual Science is a new thinking. The very reason it is so shunned is that fundamentally it is at variance with the old habits of thought. It is only those men who perceive the necessity for a new thinking who will be able to have a true feeling for Spiritual Science generally, and also for its revelations concerning individual spheres of the life of soul, for example, concerning the social question.

Something else is making the present age unhealthy, namely that men have come to think differently in their subconscious, but out of historic obstinacy they suppress this different thinking sitting in their subconscious, and for this they will have to suffer the consequences. Present historical evolution is in many respects the punishment for man's obstinacy in suppressing what lies in his subconscious and clinging in an artificial way to what for centuries he has maintained. We should not take those thinkers who are illogical and love the easy way, we should take the logical thinker of the epoch that is past and gone and learn from him where we have gone astray. It is not the thinker who makes concessions who is characteristic of this period that is past, but the thinker who clings fast to the standpoint of what is old. When, many years ago in the Austrian Upper Chamber, all the lovers of abstraction and the advanced Liberals were speaking of progress and liberalism, and of how religion was to be transformed to suit modern demands—when they used the cliches of all those who take up the cudgels, from Gladstone down to the valiant parliamentarians of the continent—the following rejoinder was made by Cardinal Rauscher, a Churchman keeping fast to the old, with nothing modern about him. He said: The Catholic Church knows no progress; what was once true is true for all time; nothing opposing it in the way of innovation that claims validity, has any right to it!—This was no modern spirit but a finished product of bygone times. And the same is true of Pobedonosceff (Russian Jurist and Statesmen) the only man who in an intelligent way partaking of genius has condemned the whole modern culture of the west, because in his opinion it really led to nothing. It was only possible to uphold the old order to which the bourgeoisie of today have become accustomed if people were willing to believe the world to be formed as Cardinal Rauscher, and Pobedonosceff himself, would have it. Had the world not been fed on the twaddle of Nicolas II but with the stark Principles of Pobedonosceff, it goes without saying that the present war would not have taken place. But on the other hand there is this to be said: One could no have built on Pobedonosceff's ideas, because the reality went in another direction. And now it is a question of following the reality, not by making concessions, not by behaving in the way most spirits have behaved during the second half of the nineteenth century or in the first two decades of the twentieth, but by resolving to think something as different from the earlier thought as the devastation of the world war, in its other negative side, is different from what went before. From this terrible calamity, of which it is constantly said that there has never been anything like it in the course of history, we should learn to grasp thoughts of which we can say that there has never been anything like these in the course of history.

Thus you see it is incumbent upon man to make a great resolution. What out of instinct will unconsciously bring this resolution to fruition makes itself felt as socialism. The world will never get out of chaos till a sufficient number of men combine material socialism with the socialism that is ideal and spiritual. This is the existing condition of things. Salvation cannot come to historical social evolution so long as man fails to reach the point of being able to see the immediate reality beneath his nose. This should become the inner practice, as it were, of the soul which can originate from the impulses of Spiritual Science. I should like to try to point you continually to this inner practice of the soul. The more strongly you feel the importance for our time of what I have been trying to put forward in these considerations, the more freely will you move in the spiritual stream which receives its life from the Spiritual Science of Anthroposophy.

Notes:

1. Not Wilson's original English. Translated from the German.

I want to speak today OF something that will help to deepen our understanding of truths that must now be given to humankind by anthroposophy. We have often spoken of the two poles of forces of the human being: the pole of will and the pole of intelligence. To understand the nature of the human being we must be constantly mindful of these two poles.

The human is a being of will and a being of intelligence. Between them—at any rate from birth until death—lies the element of feeling, constituting the bridge between the intelligence and the will. You know that these forces separate from each other in a certain sense when people reach what is called the threshold of the spiritual world.

Our study today will be concerned more particularly with the relationship in which humanity stands to the surrounding world, on the one side as a being of intelligence and on the other as a being of will. We shall deal with the latter first.

In the life between birth and death, human beings unfold the force of will as the impulse of their actions and activity. As it comes to expression through the human organism, the force of will is a very intricate, complicated matter. Nevertheless in one aspect, everything of the nature of human will bears a great likeness, amounting almost to identity, with certain forces of nature. It is therefore quite correct to speak of an inner relation between the forces of will in the human being and the forces of nature.

You know from earlier studies that even while people are awake, they are in a condition resembling sleep wherever their will is involved. True, we have in our consciousness the ideas lying behind what we will, but how a particular idea takes effect in the form of will—of that we know nothing. We do not know how the idea, “I move my arm,” is connected with the process leading to the actual movement of the arm. This process lies entirely in the subconscious and it may truly be said that people are no more conscious of the real process of will than they are of what takes place during sleep. But when the question arises as to the connection of human will with the surrounding world, we come to something that will strike the kind of consciousness that has developed in the course of the last three to five centuries as highly paradoxical. It is generally thought that the evolution of the earth would be the same even if human beings had no part in it at all. A typical natural scientist describes the evolution of the earth as a series, let us say, of geological, purely physical processes. And even if scientists do not expressly say so, they have in mind that from the earth's beginning until its hypothetical end, everything would go on just the same even if it were uninhabited by human beings. Why is this view held by natural science today? The reason is that when anything takes place, for example in the mineral kingdom, or the plant kingdom, let us say on November 9, 1919, people believe that its cause lies in what has happened in the mineral kingdom prior to this particular point of time. People think: the mineral kingdom takes its course and what happens at any point is the effect of what went before; the mineral effect is due to a mineral cause.

This is the way people think and you will find evidence of it in any text book of geology. Conditions obtaining at the present time are said to be the effects of the Ice Age, or of some preceding epoch but the causes are attributed entirely to what once took place in the mineral kingdom as such; the fact that humanity inhabits the earth is ignored. The belief is that even were humans not present, everything would run a similar course, that the external reality would be the same—although, in fact, humankind has always been part of this external reality. The truth is that the earth is one whole, humanity itself being one of the active factors in the earth's evolution. I will give you an example.

You know that our present epoch—thinking of it for the moment in the wider sense, as comprising the period since the great Atlantean catastrophe—was preceded by the Atlantean epoch itself, when the continents of Europe, Africa, and America in their present form were not in existence. At that time there was one main continent on the earth—Atlantis as it is called—extending over the area that is now the Atlantic Ocean. You know too that at a certain period in this Atlantean evolution, immorality of a particular kind was rampant throughout the then-Civilized world. Human beings had far greater power over the forces of nature than they later possessed and employed these forces for evil purposes. Thus we can look back to an age of widespread immorality. And then came the great Atlantean catastrophe. The orthodox geologist will naturally trace this catastrophe to processes in the mineral kingdom; indeed it is a fact that one part of the earth subsided and another arose. But it will not occur to those who base their thinking on the principles of modern natural science to say to themselves that the deeds and activities of human beings were among the contributory causes. Yet so it is. In very truth the Atlantean catastrophe was the outcome of the deeds of people on the earth.

Outer, mineral causes are not alone responsible for these great catastrophic events that break in upon earth existence. We must look for causes lying within the sphere of human actions and impulses: Humanity itself belongs to the chain of causative forces in earth existence. Nor does this apply only to an event of such magnitude but to what is happening all the time. Only the connection between what goes on within human beings and cosmic happenings which take effect in tellurian events remains hidden, to begin with. In this respect the whole of our natural science amounts to a great, all-embracing illusion. For if you want to get at the real causes you will not discover them by studying the mineral, plant, and animal kingdoms alone.

Let me give you the following illustration of what comes into consideration here. We will approach it, so to speak, from the opposite side. Here (X) is the center of the earth. When something takes place in the mineral kingdom, the plant kingdom, or the animal kingdom, it is a matter of seeking the causes. The causes lie at certain points which are to be found everywhere. You can picture what I mean by thinking of the following. In the region around Naples in Italy, you will find that the earth over a wide area will emit vapor if you take a piece of paper and set it alight. Vapors begin to rise from the ground beneath you. You will say: the force which drives up the vapors lies in the physical process generated by the lighting of the paper. In this case, the physical process is that by lighting the paper you rarify the air and because of the rarification of the air the vapors inside the earth press upward. They are kept down by the normal air-pressure and this is diminished by setting light to the paper. If I merely want to give an example of effects of a purely mineral nature—such as these vapors arising out of the earth—I could say for the sake of illustration that here, and here (points in the diagram), a piece of paper is set alight. This shows you that the causes of the rising of the vapor do not lie below the soil, but above it. Now these points in the diagram a, b, c, d, e, f—do not represent pieces of paper that have been set alight; in this instance they represent something different. Imagine, to begin with, that each point on its own has no significance but that the significance lies in the system of points as a whole. Do not think now of the pieces of lighted paper, but of something else which at the moment I will not specify. Something else is there as an active cause, above the surface of the earth; and these different causes do not work singly, but together. And now imagine that there are not six points only, but, let us say, 1,500 million points¹ all working together, producing a combined effect. These 1,500 million points are actually there. Each of you has within you what may be called the center of gravity of your own physical structure. When people are awake, this center of gravity lies just below the diaphragm; when they are asleep it lies a little lower. There are therefore some 1,500 million of these centers of gravity spread over the earth, producing a combined effect. And what issues from this combined effect is the actual cause of a great deal of what takes place in the mineral, plant, and animal kingdoms on the earth. It is a scientific fallacy to trace back to mineral causes the forces manifesting in air and water and in the mineral realm; in reality the causes are to be found within the human beings.

This is a truth of which there is scarcely an inkling today. It is known to very, very few that the causes of processes active in the mineral, plant, and animal kingdoms lie within the human organism. (This does not apply to all the forces working in these kingdoms of nature, but to a large proportion of them.) Within humankind lie the causes for what happens on earth. Therefore mineralogy, botany, zoology, cannot be cultivated truly without anthropology—without the study of the human being. Science tells us of physical, chemical, and mechanical forces. These forces are intimately connected with the human will, with the force of human will that is concentrated in our center of gravity. If we speak of the earth with an eye to the truth of these matters, we must not follow the geologist in speaking of an earth in the abstract, but humanity must be accounted an integral part of the earth. These are the truths that reveal themselves on yonder side of the threshold. Everything that can be known on this side of the threshold belongs to the realm of the illusions of knowledge, not to the realm of truth.

At this point the question arises: What relation is there between the forces of will that areconcentrated in our center of gravity, and the external, physical, and chemical forces? We are speaking, remember, of present-day humanity. In normal life, this relation takes effect in the metabolic processes. When people take into themselves the substances of the outer world, it is their will that actually digests and works upon these substances. And if nothing else were in operation, then what is taken into the organism from outside would simply be destroyed. The human will has the power to dissolve and destroy all extraneous substances and forces; and the relation between the human being and the mineral, plant, and animal kingdoms of nature today is such that our will is connected with the forces of dissolution and destruction inherent in our planet.

We could not live were this destruction not to take place—but for all that it is destruction. This must never be forgotten. And what are often described as unlawful magical practices are based essentially on the fact that certain human beings learn to employ their will wrongfully, in such a way that they do not confine the destructive forces to their normal operations within the organism but extend them over other human beings, deliberately and consciously applying the forces of destruction that are anchored in their will. That, quite obviously, is a practice that is never, under any circumstances, permissible.

Through our will we are connected with the earth's forces of decline. And if as human beings we had only our forces of will, the earth would be condemned through us, through humankind, to sheer destruction. The prospect of the future would then be far from inspiring; it would be a vista of the gradual dissolution of the earth and its ultimate dispersal in cosmic space. So much for the one pole in the human constitution.

But the human is a twofold being. One pole is, as we have seen, connected with the destructive forces of our planet; the other pole—that of intelligence—is connected with the will by the bridge of feeling. But in waking life, human intelligence is of little account as far as the planet earth is concerned. During waking life we cannot really establish a true relationship to earth existence through our intelligence. What I have told you in regard to the will happens while we are awake, although we are not conscious of it. If you see a rock crumbling away and ask where the actual causes of the crumbling lie, then you must look into the inner, organic nature of the human being. Strange as this will seem to the modern mind, it is indeed so. But as I said, the earth would face a sorry future if the other pole of human nature were not there—the pole of the up-building forces. Just as the causes of all destruction lie in the will that is concentrated in our center of gravity, so the up-building forces lie in the sphere into which we pass during sleep. From the time of falling asleep until that of waking, we are in a condition figuratively described by saying that with our “I” and astral body we are outside the physical body. But then we are entirely beings of soul and spirit, unfolding the forces that are in operation between falling asleep and waking. During this time we are connected, through these forces, with everything that builds up the earth planet, everything that adds to the forces of destruction the constructive, up-building forces. If you did not go about the earth, the destructive forces actually proceeding from your will would not be working in the mineral, plant, and animal kingdoms. If you never went to sleep, the forces whereby the earth is continually up-built would not stream out of your intelligence. The constructive, up-building forces of the planet earth also lie in humanity itself. I do not say: in the individual human being—for I have expressly said that all these single causes form a collective whole. The up-building forces lie in humankind as a whole, actually in the pole of intelligence in our being but not in our waking intelligence. Waking intelligence is really like a lifeless entity thrusting itself into earth evolution. The intelligence that works, unconsciously, during our sleep—that is what builds up the earth planet. By this I am only trying to explain that it is a fallacy to look outside the human being for the destructive and the constructive forces of our earth; you must look for them within the human being. Once you grasp this, what I am now going to say will not be unintelligible.

You look up to the stars, saying that something is streaming from them that can be perceived by human sense organs here on earth. But what you behold when you gaze at the stars is not of the same nature as what you perceive on the earth in the mineral, plant, and animal kingdoms. In reality it proceeds from beings of intelligence and will whose life is bound up with those stars. The effects appear to be physical because the stars are at a distance. They are not in reality physical at all. What you actually see are the inner activities of beings of will and intelligence in the stars. I have already spoken to you of the ingenious description of the sun given by astrophysicists. But if it were possible to journey to the sun by some means of transport invented by a Jules Verne, it would be found with amazement that nothing of what was to be expected from these physical descriptions exists. The descriptions are merely a composite picture of solar phenomena. What we see is in reality the working of will and intelligence which at a distance appears as light. If inhabitants of the moon—supposing in this sense there were such beings—were to look at the earth, they would not detect its grassy or mineral surfaces but—also perceiving it as a light effect or something similar—they would detect what takes place around the centers of gravity of human bodies and also the effects of the conditions in which human beings live between going to sleep and waking. That is what would actually be seen from the universe. Even the most perfect instrument would not enable the chairs, for instance, on which you are now sitting, to be seen; what would be seen is all that is taking place in the region of your centers of gravity and what would happen if you were suddenly to fall asleep—it is to be hoped that this would not happen in every case! But wherever it did happen, it would be perceived out in the universe.

So that to the outer universe, what takes place through human beings is the perceptible reality—not what surrounds us in earthly existence. A very common saying is that everything perceived with the senses is maya—the great illusion—no reality but simply appearance. Such an abstraction is of little account. It has meaning only when one enters into the concrete, as we have now been doing. To say glibly that the animal, plant, and mineral worlds are maya means nothing: What is of value is the realization that what you perceive outwardly depends fundamentally upon yourselves and that—not of course at each moment but in the course of human evolution—you make yourselves an integral part of the chain of causes and effects.

Even when such a shattering truth is uttered—and I think it may well be shattering—it is not always seen in the aspect where it becomes of importance in life. Such a truth assumes importance only when we perceive its consequences. We are not physical beings only; we are moral—or maybe immoral—beings in earthly existence. What we do is determined by impulses of a moral nature.

Now just think with what bitter doubt modern thought is assailed in this domain. Natural science provides a knowledge of the earthly that is confined to the connection between purely external causes and effects; and in this cycle of natural causes and effects, the human being too is involved. So it is alleged by external, abstract science which takes account of one aspect only of earthly existence.

The fact that moral impulses also light up in people is admitted but nothing is known about the connection between these moral impulses and what comes to pass in the round of external nature. Indeed the dilemma of modern philosophy is that the philosophers hear on the one hand from the scientists that everything is involved in a chain of natural causes and effects—and on the other hand have to admit that moral impulses light up in people. That is the reason why Kant wrote two “Critiques”: the Critique of Pure Reason, concerned with the relation of the human being to a purely natural course of things, and the Critique of Practical Reason where he puts forward his moral postulates—which in truth, if I may speak figuratively, hover in the air, come out of the blue and have no a priori relation with natural causes.

As long as we believe that what takes place in the external manifestations of nature can be traced only to similar manifestations, as long as we cling to this illusion, the intervention of moral impulses is something that remains separate and apart from the course of nature. Nearly everything that is discussed today lies under the shadow of this breach. In their thinking people cannot use the earthly round as such with the moral life of humanity. But as soon as you grasp something of what I have tried briefly to outline, you will be able to say: Yes, as a human being I am a unity, and moral impulses are alive within me. They live in what I am as a physical being. But as a physical human being I am fundamentally the cause—together with all humankind—of every physical happening. The moral conduct and achievements of human beings on the earth are the real causes of what comes to pass in the course of earth existence.

Natural history and natural science describe the earth in the way we find in text books of geology, botany, and so forth. What is said there seems entirely satisfactory according to the premises formed through modern education. But let us suppose that an inhabitant of Mars were to come down to the earth and observe it in the light of Martian premises. I am not saying that such a thing could happen but merely trying to illustrate what I mean. Suppose a being from Mars, having wandered dumbly about the earth were then to learn some human language, read some geology, and thus discover what kind of ideas prevail concerning the processes and happenings on the earth. This being would say: But that is not all. By far the most important factor is ignored. For example, I have noticed crowds of students loitering about in their beer houses, drinking and indulging their passions. Something is happening there: the human will is working in the metabolism. These are processes of which no mention is made in your books on physics and geology; they contain no reference to the fact that the course of earth existence is also affected by whether the students drink or do not drink. That is what a being not entirely immersed in earthly ideas and prejudices would find lacking in the descriptions given by human beings themselves of happenings on earth. For a being from Mars there would be no question but that moral impulses, pervading human deeds and the whole of human life, are part and parcel of the course of nature. According to modern preconceptions there is something inexorable in the play of nature, indeed pleasantly inexorable for materialistic thinkers. They imagine that the earth's course would be exactly the same were no human beings in existence; that whether they behave decently or not makes no fundamental difference or really alters anything. But that is not the case! The all-essential causes of what happens on the earth do not lie outside the human being; they lie within humankind. And if earthly consciousness is to expand to cosmic consciousness, humanity must realize that the earth—not over short but over long stretches of time—is made in its own likeness, in the likeness of humanity itself. There is no better means of lulling people to sleep than to impress upon them that they have no share in the course taken by earth existence. This narrows down human responsibility to the single individual, the single personality.

The truth is that the responsibility for the course of earth existence through ages of cosmic time, lies with humanity. Everyone must feel themselves to be a member of humanity, the earth itself being the body for that humanity.

Someone may say: For ten years I have given way to my passions, indulged my fancies and have thereby ruined my body. With equal conviction such a person should be able to say: If earthly humanity follows impure moral impulses, then the body of the earth will be different from what it would be were the moral impulses pure. The day-fly, because it lives for twenty-four hours only, has a view of the world differing entirely from that of human beings. The range of our vision is not wide enough to perceive that what happens externally in the course of nature is not dependent upon purely natural causes. In regard to the present configuration of Europe, it is far more important to ask what manner of life prevailed among human beings in the civilized world two thousand years ago than to investigate the external mineral and plant structure of the earth. The destiny of our physical earth planet in another two thousand years will not depend upon the present constitution of our mineral world, but upon what we do and allow to be done. With world consciousness, human responsibility widens into world responsibility. With such consciousness we feel as we look up to the starry heavens that we are responsible to this cosmic expanse, permeated and pervaded as it is by spirit—that we are responsible to this world for how we conduct the earth. We grow together with the cosmos in concrete reality when behind the phenomena we seek for the truth.

I so often tell you that we must learn to perceive the concrete realities of things for the most part taught as abstractions today. Nothing much is accomplished by adopting oriental traditions such as: the external world of the senses is maya. We must go much deeper if we are to arrive at the truth. Such abstractions do not carry us far, because in the form in which they have been handed down they are nothing but the sediment of a primeval wisdom that did not hover in abstractions but teemed with concrete realities which must be brought to light again through spiritual intuition and research. When you read in oriental literature of maya and of truth as its antithesis, do not imagine that what you read there today can be really intelligible to you. It is only a much later compilation of matters that were concrete realities to the ancient wisdom. We must get back to these concrete realities. People think today that they have some understanding of cosmic processes when they assert that the external world of sense is maya. But nothing can be understood unless one presses on to the underlying realities. The moment it is realized: we have not to ask how the present mineral world has developed out of the mineral processes of another age; we have rather to ask about what has been going on in humankind—at that moment the real meaning of the saying, “the outer world is maya,” becomes clear. Then we begin to perceive in the human being a reality far greater than is usually perceived. And then the feeling of responsibility for earth existence begins.

If you will try to get to the inner core of these things—and it must be by inward contemplation, not by means of the kind of intelligence employed in natural science—you will gradually find your way to the realization that humankind is composed of free human beings. Nature does not, in truth, counteract our freedom, for as human beings we ourselves fashion the nature immediately surrounding us. It is only in its partial manifestations that nature counteracts our freedom. Nature counteracts our freedom to an extent no greater than if—to give an example—you are stretching out your hand and someone else takes hold of it and checks the movement. You will not deny freedom of will simply because someone else checks a movement. As people of the present day we are checked in many respects because of some action of our predecessors that is only now taking effect. But at all events it was an action of human beings.—What human beings? Not anyone against whom we can turn with reproach, for we ourselves were the ones who, in earlier earthly lives, brought about the conditions obtaining today.

We must not confine ourselves to the mere mention of repeated earthly lives but think of the connection between them in such a way that even in external nature we perceive the effects of causes we ourselves laid down in earlier lives. Naturally, in reference to the single, individual human being, we must speak of contributory causes only, for in all these things, as I have said, it is a matter of the collective inter-working of human beings on the earth. None of us should, for that reason, exclude ourselves as individuals, for each of us has a share in what is brought about by humanity as a whole and then comes to expression in what constitutes the body for the whole of earthly humanity in its on-flowing life.

I have been endeavoring to give you an idea of how a spiritual scientist must regard the statements made in ordinary scientific text-books. Suppose I were to draw a series of figures:

And now suppose some creature who had never lived in our world were to crawl out of the earth and, having some rudiments of arithmetical knowledge, were to look at the figures and say: First figure, second figure, third figure. The third is the effect of the second, and the second the effect of the first. Effect of the first figure—a triangle; effect of the second circle. This creature would then be combining cause and effect. But it would be a fallacy, for I have drawn each figure separately. In reality the one is independent of the other. It only appears to be dependent to this creature who associates what comes first with what follows, as if the one were the outcome of the other. This, approximately, is how the geologist describes the process of the earth: Diluvial epoch, Tertiary epoch, Quaternary epoch, and so on. But this is no more true than the statement that the circle is the outcome, the effect of the triangle, or the triangle the effect of the rectangular figure. The configurations of the earth are brought about autonomously—through the deeds of earthly humanity, including the mysterious workings of the intelligence during the periods of sleep when human beings are outside their physical bodies.

This shows you that the descriptions given by external science are very largely illusion—maya. But merely to speak about maya is of little account. To the assertion that the external world is maya we must be able to reply by stating where the actual causes lie. These causes are hidden to a great extent from our powers of cognition. The part played by humankind in shaping earth existence cannot be fathomed by means of external science but only by an inner science. My book Knowledge of the Higher Worlds and Its Attainment speaks of the human being's inner activity between the time of going to sleep and waking. This can be revealed by knowledge that reaches down to the sphere of the will Human beings know nothing of the connection between the will and the outer world for the processes of the will are hidden and concealed. We do not know what is really going on when by lifting our hand we set in operation a process of will; nor do we know that this process continues and has an effect in the whole course of earth existence.

This is indicated in the scene in my mystery play, The Portal of Initiation, where the actions of Capesius and Strader have their outcome in cosmic manifestations—in thunder and lightning. It is, of course, a pictorial representation, but the picture contains a deeper truth; it is not fantasy but actual truth. For a fairly long period in evolution, truths of this kind have been voiced only by true poets whose fantasy must always be perception of super-sensible processes.

This is very little understood by modern people who like to relegate poetry, indeed all art, to a place separate and apart from external reality. They feel relieved not to be asked to see in poetry anything more than fantasy. True poetry, true art, is of course, no more than a reflection of super-sensible truth—but a reflection it is. Even if poets are not themselves conscious of the super-sensible happenings, if their soul is linked with the cosmos, if they have not been torn away from the cosmos by materialistic education, they give utterances to super-sensible truths, in spite of having to express them in pictures drawn from the world of sense.

Many examples of this are contained in the second part of Goethe's Faust, where as I have shown in the case of particular passages, the imagery has a direct relation with super-sensible processes.² The development of art in recent centuries affords evidence of what I have been saying. Take any picture painted by no means very long ago, and you will find that as a rule, landscape is given very secondary importance. The painting of landscape has come into prominence only since the last three to five centuries. Earlier than that you will find that landscape takes second place; it is the human world that is brought to the forefront because the consciousness still survived that in regard to objective processes of earth existence the human world is much more important than the landscape—which is but the effect of the human world. In the very birth of preference for landscape there lies, in the sphere of art, the parallel phenomenon of the birth of the materialistic trend of mind—consisting in the belief that landscape and what it represents has an existence of its own, entirely apart from humanity. But the truth is quite the reverse. Were some inhabitant of Mars to come down to the earth he would certainly be able to see meaning in Leonardo da Vinci's “Last Supper,” but not in paintings of landscapes. He would see landscapes—including painted landscapes—and the whole configuration of the earth quite differently and with his particular organ of sense could not fathom their meaning. Please remember that I am saying these things merely in order to illustrate hypothetically what I want to convey.

So you see, the saying: “the external world is maya” cannot be fully understood without entering into the concrete realities. But to do this we must relate ourselves intimately with earth existence as a whole, know ourselves to be an integral part of it. And then we must grasp the thought that there can be external and apparent realities which are not the truth, not the true realities. If you have a rose in your room, it is an apparent reality only, for the rose as it is in front of you there cannot be the reality. It can be true reality only while it is growing on the rose tree, united with the roots which in turn are united with the earth. The earth as described by the geologists is as little a true reality as a plucked rose is a reality.

Spiritual science endeavors never to halt at the untrue reality, but always to seek what must be added, in order to have the whole, true reality. The meager sense of reality prevailing in our present civilization expresses itself in the very fact that every external manifestation is taken as reality. But there is reality only in what lies before one as an integrated whole. The earth by itself, without human beings, is no more a true reality than the rose plucked from the rose tree. These things must be pondered and worked upon; they must not remain theories but pass over into our feelings. We must feel ourselves members of the whole earth. It is of importance again and again to call up the thoughts: this finger on my hand has true reality only as long as it is part of my organism; if it is cut off it no longer has true reality. Similarly, the human being has no true reality apart from the earth, nor has the earth without humankind. It is an unreal concept when modern scientific investigators think, according to their premises, that earth evolution would run the same course if humanity were not there. I recently showed you that it would not be so, by telling you that the bodies laid aside by human beings at death become a leaven in earth evolution and that if no human bodies—either by burial or cremation—became part of the earth, the whole course of physical happenings would be other than it is in consequence of these bodies having been received into the earth.

In the lecture today I wanted to speak in greater detail of the connection between the two poles of will and intelligence in human beings and their cosmic environment.

• 1. Representing, approximately, the total population of the earth.
• 2. Twenty-eight lectures given in the year 1915. Geisteswissenschaftliche Erlauterungen zu Goethe's Faust.