The Rudolf Steiner Archive

As the result of an impulse which I have lately had, let us consider one of the most important subjects in Anthroposophy. Anthroposophists are often reproached for their inclination towards the study of far-distant cosmic developments; and it is said that they lift themselves into spiritual worlds, too frequently only considering the far-distant events of the past and the far-reaching perspective of the future, disregarding a sphere which is of more immediate interest—the sphere of human morals and human ethics.

It is true that this, the realm of human morals, must be looked upon as the most essential of all. But what must be said in answer to the reproach that we are less concerned with this important field of man's soul-life and social life than with more distant spheres, is that when we realise the significance and range of anthroposophical life and feeling we are only able to approach this subject with the deepest reverence, for it concerns man very closely indeed; and we realise that, if it is to be considered in the right way, it requires the most earnest and serious preparation. The above reproach might perhaps be stated in the following words: What is the use of making deep studies of the universe? Why talk about numerous reincarnations, or the complicated conditions of karma, when surely the most important thing in life is what a certain wise man after he had attained the summit of this life, and when after a life of rich wisdom he had grown so weak and ill that he had to be carried about, repeated again and again to his followers: “Children, love one another!”

These words were uttered by John the Evangelist when he was an old man, and it has often been said that in these four words, “Children, love one another!” is contained the extract of the deepest and most practical moral wisdom. Hence many might say: “What more is wanted, provided these good, sublime and moral ideals can be so simply fulfilled as in the sense of the words of the Evangelist John?”

When to the above statement one adds that it is sufficient for people to know that they ought to love one another, one thing is lost sight of, namely, the circumstance that he who uttered these words did so at the close of a long life of wisdom, a life which included the writing of the most profound and important of the Gospels. A man is only justified in saying anything so simple at the end of a rich life of wisdom. But one who is not in that position must first, by going deeply into the foundations of the secrets of the world, earn the right to utter the highest moral truths in such a simple manner.

Trivial as is the oft-repeated assertion, “If the same thing is said by two persons it never is the same,” it is especially applicable to the words we have quoted. When someone who simply declines to know or understand anything about the mysteries of the Cosmos says: “It is quite a simple matter to describe the highest moral life,” and uses the words: “Children, love one another,” it is quite different from when the evangelist John utters these words, at the close of such a rich life of wisdom. For this reason, he who understands these words of St. John ought to draw from them quite a different conclusion from that usually drawn. The conclusion should be that one has first of all to be silent about such profoundly significant words, and that they may only be uttered when one has gone through the necessary preparation and reached the necessary maturity.

Now after we have made this statement—which it is quite certain many will take earnestly to heart—something quite different, which is of the deepest importance will come to our mind. Someone might say: ‘It may be the case that the deep significance of moral principles can only be understood when the goal of all wisdom is reached, man uses them, nevertheless, all the time. How could some moral community or social work be carried on if one had to wait for a knowledge of the highest moral principles till the end of a life of striving for wisdom? Morals are most necessary for human social life; and now it is asserted that moral principles can only be obtained at the end of long striving after wisdom.’ A person might therefore reasonably say that he would doubt the wise arrangement of the world if this were so; if that which is most necessary could only be gained after the goal of human effort had been attained.

Life itself gives us, the true answer to what has just been said. You need only compare two facts which, in one form or another, are no doubt well known to you and you will at once perceive that the one can be right as well as the other; firstly, that we attain to the, highest moral principles and their understanding only at the conclusion of the effort after wisdom, and secondly, that moral and social communities and activities cannot exist without ethics or morals. You see this at once if you bear in mind two facts with which you are most certainly acquainted in one form or another. You may have known a man who was highly developed intellectually, he may have possessed not only a clear intellectual grasp of natural science, but he may also have understood many occult and spiritual truths both theoretically and practically and yet you may have known that such a person was not particularly moral. Who has not seen people clever and highly intellectual, going morally astray? And who has not also experienced the other fact, from which much may be learned! You, doubtless have known someone with a very restricted outlook, with limited intellect and knowing but little, who being in service brought up not her own but other people's children. From their earliest days she has probably assisted with their education and development and perhaps to the day of her death sacrificed to these children all she had in a selfless loving way and with the utmost devotion; yet if one had brought to her the moral principles that one had gained from the highest sources of wisdom, she would not, in all probability, have been particularly interested; she would probably have found them useless and incomprehensible. On the other hand her moral actions had accomplished more than mere recognition of moral principles. In such cases we feel that we must bow in reverence before that which streams out of the heart into life and creates an infinite amount of good.

Facts of such a nature often answer the riddles of life far more clearly than theoretical explanations, for we say to ourselves that a wise Providence, in order to impart to the world moral actions, moral activities, has not waited until people have discovered moral principles. There is in fact, to begin with—if we disregard immoral actions, the basis of which we shall get to know in these lectures—something contained in the human soul as a divine heritage, something given to us as original morality which may be called “instinctive morality” and it is this which makes it possible for humanity to wait until it can fathom moral principles.

But perhaps it is quite unnecessary to trouble much about investigating moral principles! Might it not be said that it is best if people trust to their original moral instincts and do not perplex themselves with theoretical explanations about morals? These lectures are to show that this is not the case. They are to show that, at least in the present epoch of humanity, we must seek for anthroposophical morals and that these morals must be exercised as a duty which comes as the fruit of all our anthroposophical science and practice.

The philosopher, Schopenhauer, in spite of much that is entirely erroneous in his philosophy, made this very true statement regarding the principles of morality. “To preach morals is easy, but to give them a foundation is difficult.” This statement is very true, for there is scarcely anything easier than to pronounce in a manner appealing to the commonest principles of human feeling and perception, what a person ought to do or leave undone in order that he may be a good man. Many people no doubt are offended when it is asserted that this is easy, but it is easy, and one who knows life, and knows the world, will not doubt that scarcely anything has been spoken about so much as the right principles of ethical action, and the man who speaks upon general ethical principles meets with almost universal approval. One might say it pleases listening minds, for they feel they can agree in an unqualified manner with what the speaker says when he discourses on the very commonest principles of human morality.

Notwithstanding this, morals are certainly not established by ethical teachings or moral sermons. Truly not. If morals could thus be founded there would be no immorality at the present day, for one might say that the whole of humanity would be overflowing with moral activities. For undoubtedly everyone has the opportunity of hearing the finest moral principles, since people are so fond of preaching them. But to know what one ought to do and what is morally right is of least importance compared with the fact that there should be within us impulses which, through their inward strength, their inward power, are themselves converted into moral actions, and thus express themselves externally. It is well known that ethical sermons do not produce this result. A moral foundation is laid when a man is guided to the source whence he must draw the impulses which shall supply him with forces leading to ethical activity.

How difficult these forces are to find, is shown by the simple fact that innumerable attempts have been made, for example, from the philosophic side, to found a system of ethics, a code of morals. How many different answers exist in the world to the questions: “What is goodness?” -- “What is virtue?” Put together what the philosophers have said, beginning with Plato and Aristotle, and passing on through the Epicureans, the Stoics, the NeoPlatonists, the whole series down to modern philosophical opinions; put together all that has been said from Plato to Herbert Spencer upon the nature of Goodness and Virtue and you will see how many different attempts have been made to penetrate to the sources of moral life and impulse.

I hope in these lectures to show that it is only by delving into the occult secrets of life that it becomes possible, to penetrate not only to moral teachings, but to moral impulses, to the moral sources of life itself.

A single glance will show us that this moral principle in the world is by no means such a simple matter as might be supposed from a certain convenient standpoint. Let us for the moment take no notice of what is usually spoken of as “moral,” but consider certain spheres of human life from which we may perhaps be able to obtain a great deal towards a moral conception of life.

Not the least among the many things learned from spiritual science is the knowledge that most manifold conceptions and impulses have held good among various peoples in different parts of the earth. In comparing two sections of humanity which at first seem separated, one can consider the sacred life of ancient India, and observe how it has gradually developed up to the present day. One knows that what was characteristic of the India of primeval times is still true at the present day. The feelings, the thoughts and conceptions have been maintained that we find in this region in ancient times. It is remarkable that in these civilisations there has been preserved an image of primeval times, and when we consider what has been maintained up to our own day we are looking, so to say, at the same time into the remote past.

Now we do not progress very far in our understanding of the different peoples on earth if we begin by only applying our own moral standards. For this reason let us for the moment exclude what might be said about the moral things of those times and only inquire: What has developed from these characteristics of venerable ancient Indian civilisation?

We find, to begin with, that what was most highly honoured and held sacred may be described as “devotion to the spiritual”. This devotion to the spiritual was the more highly valued and counted sacred, the more the human being was able to sink into himself, to live quietly within himself, and, apart from all that man can attain on the physical plane—to direct the best in him to the spiritual worlds. We find this cultivation, this dedication of the soul to the foundations of existence as the highest duty of those who belonged or belong to the highest caste of Indian life, the Brahmins.

Nothing impresses the moral feelings of the Indian people more than this turning to the Divine-Spiritual with a devotion which forgets everything physical; an intensely deep introspection and renunciation of self. The moral life of this people is permeated by a devotion which controls every thought and action. This is apparent from the fact that those who belonged to other castes looked upon it as natural, especially in ancient times, that the caste of religious life and devotion and the life of ritual should be considered as something apart and worthy of reverence. That which underlies this cannot be understood by means of the common principles of morality laid down by philosophy, for at the period when these feelings and impulses developed in ancient India they were impossible among other peoples. In order that these tendencies could develop with such intensity both the temperament and fundamental character of the Indian people were required. As civilisation proceeded, emanating from India they spread abroad over the rest of the earth. If we wish to understand what is meant by the Divine-Spiritual we must go to this original source.

Let us now turn our attention away from this people and direct it towards Europe. Let us consider the peoples of Europe before Christianity had affected European culture very much, when it had only begun to spread in the West. You all know that Christianity spreading into Europe from the East and South was confronted by the peoples of Europe, who possessed certain tendencies, a definite inner worth and definite forces. One who studies with spiritual means the history of the introduction of Christianity into Central Europe and also here in the North, knows at what cost the balance was struck between this or that Christian impulse and what was brought to meet it from Northern and Central Europe.

And now let us inquire—as we have already done in the case of the Indian people—“What were the most characteristic moral forces brought to Christianity as a moral possession, a moral heritage, by the peoples whose successors form the present European population, especially the population of the North, Central Europe and England?” We need only mention a single one of the principal virtues, and we know at once that we are expressing something which is truly characteristic of these Northern and Mid-European peoples.—With the word “valour,” or “bravery,” we have named the chief virtue brought by the Europeans to Christianity; and the whole of the personal human force was exercised in order to actualise in the physical world what the human being intends from his innermost impulse. Intrinsically the further we go back to ancient times the more we find this to be the case—the other virtues are consequent upon this.

If we examine real valour in its fundamental quality, we find that it consists of an inner fullness of life which is practically inexhaustible, and this fullness of life was the most salient characteristic among the ancient peoples of Europe. Ancient Europeans possessed within them more valour than they could use for themselves. Quite instinctively, they followed the impulse to spend that of which they had a superabundance. One might even say that they were wasteful in pouring out their moral wealth, their fitness, and ability into the physical world. It was really as if among the ancient people of Northern Europe each one had brought with him a superfluity of force which was more than he needed for his own personal use; this he was therefore able to pour forth in an excess of prodigality and to use it for his warlike deeds. Modern ideas now consider these self-same warlike deeds, which were the outcome of ancient virtue, to be a relic of the past, and in fact they are classed as vices; but the man of ancient Europe used them in a chivalrous, magnanimous manner. Generous actions were characteristic of the peoples of ancient Europe, just as actions springing from devotion were characteristic of the people of ancient India.

Principles, theoretical moral axioms, would have been useless to the peoples of ancient Europe, for they would have evinced little understanding for them. Preaching moral sermons to a man of ancient Europe would have been like giving one who does not like reckoning, the advice that he ought to write down his receipts and expenditures with great accuracy. If he does not like this, the simple fact remains that he need not keep accounts, for he possesses enough for his expenditure, and can do without careful book-keeping if he has an inexhaustible supply. This circumstance is not unimportant. Theoretically it holds good with regard to what the human being considers of value in life, regarding personal energy and ability, and it also applies to the moral feelings of the inhabitants of ancient Europe. Each one had brought with him a divine legacy, as it were; he felt himself to be full of it, and spent it in the service of his family, his clan or his people. That was their mode of active trading and working.

We have now characterised two great sections of humanity which, were quite different from one another, for the feeling of contemplation natural to the Indians did not exist among Europeans. For, this reason it was difficult for Christianity to bring a feeling of devotion to the latter people, for their character and predispositions were entirely different. And now after considering these things—putting aside all the objections which might be raised from the standpoint of a moral concept—let us enquire into the moral effect. It does not require much reflection to know that this moral effect was extremely great when these two ways of looking at the world, these two trends of feeling met in their purest form. The world has gained infinitely much by that which could only be obtained through the existence of a people like the ancient Indians, among whom all feeling was directed to devotion to the Highest. Infinitely much it has also gained from the valiant deeds, of the European peoples of early pre-Christian times. Both these qualities had to co-operate, and together they yielded a certain moral effect. We shall see how the effect of the ancient Indian virtue as well as that of the ancient Germanic peoples can still be found to-day; how it has benefited not only a part but the whole of humanity, and we shall see how it still exists in all that men look up to as the highest.

So without further discussion, we may assert that something which produces this moral effect for humanity is good. Doubtless, in both streams of civilisation it must be so. But if, we were to ask: what is “goodness”? we are confronted once more by a puzzling question. What is the “good” which has been active in each of these cases? I do not wish to give you moral sermons, for this I do not consider my task. It is much more my task to bring before you the facts which lead us to an anthroposophical morality. For this reason I have thus far brought before you two systems of known facts, concerning which I ask nothing except that you should note that the fact of devotion and the fact of bravery produce definite moral effects in the evolution of humanity.

Let us now turn our attention to other ages. If you look at the life of the present day with its moral impulses you will naturally say: “We cannot practise to-day—at least not in Europe—what the purest ideal of India demands, for European civilisation cannot be carried on with Indian devotionalism”; but just as 1ittle would it be possible to attain to our present civilisation, with the ancient praiseworthy valour of the people of Europe. It at once becomes evident that deep in the innermost part of the ethical, feelings of the European peoples there is something else. We must therefore search out that something more in order to be able to answer the question: What is goodness? What is virtue?

I have often pointed out that we have to distinguish between the period we call the Graeco-Latin or fourth post-Atlantean age of civilisation and the one we call the fifth, in which we live at the present time. What I have now to say regarding the nature of morality is really intended to characterise the origin of the fifth post-Atlantean age. Let us begin with something which, as it is taken from poetry and legend you may consider open to dispute; but still it is significant of the way in which fresh moral impulses became active and how they flowed into mankind when the development of the fifth age gradually set in.

There was a poet who lived at the end of the 12th century and beginning of 13th century. He died in the year 1213, and was called Hartmann von Aue. He wrote his most important poem, entitled “Poor Henry,” in accordance with the way of thinking and feeling prevalent in his day. This poem particularly addresses what was thought about certain moral impulses among certain peoples in certain circles. Its substance is as follows:—Poor Henry once lived as a rich knight—for originally he was not poor Henry but a duly installed knight—who did not take into account that the things of the physical world decay and are temporary; he lived only for the day and thereby rapidly produced bad karma. He was thus stricken with a form of leprosy; he went to the most celebrated physicians in the world but none of them could help him, so considering his life at an end he sold all his worldly possessions; His disease preventing intercourse with his fellows he lived apart on a solitary farm, well taken care of by an old devoted servant and daughter. One day the daughter and the whole household heard that one thing alone could help the knight who had this destiny. No physician, no medicines could help him, only when a pure virgin out of pure love sacrificed her life for him would his health be restored. In spite of all the exhortations of her parents and of the knight Henry himself, something came over the daughter which made her feel that it was imperative she should sacrifice herself. She went with the knight to Salerno, the most celebrated school of medicine of the day. She did not fear what the physicians required of her; she was ready to sacrifice her life. But at the last moment the knight refused to allow it, he prevented it and returned home with her. The poem then tells us that when the knight returned home, he actually began. to recover and that he lived for a long time and spent a happy old age with the one who had determined to save him.

Well, to begin with, you may say that this is a poem, and we need not take literally the things here spoken of. But the matter becomes different when we compare what Hartmann von Aue, the poet of the Middle Ages, wrote at that time in his Poor Henry" with something that really happened, as is well known. We may compare what Hartmann wrote with the life of Francis of Assisi, who was born in the year 1182 and lived in Italy.

In order to describe, the moral nature contained in the personality of Francis of Assisi, let us consider the matter as it appears to the spiritual investigator or occultist, even though we may be looked upon as foolish and superstitious. These things must be taken seriously, because at that period of transition they were producing such momentous effects.

We know that Francis of Assisi was the son of the Italian merchant Bernardone, and his wife. Bernardone travelled a great deal in France, where he carried on his business. We also know that the father of Francis of Assisi was a man who set great store on outer appearances. His mother was a woman possessing the virtue of piety, having fine qualities of heart, and living devoutly according to her religious feelings. Now the things recounted in the form of legends about the birth and life of Francis of Assisi are entirely in agreement with occult facts. Although occult facts are frequently hidden by history in pictures and legends, these legends still correspond with them. Thus it is quite true that before the birth of Francis of Assisi quite a number of persons knew through revelation that an important personality was about to be born. Historical records show that one of the many people who dreamt—that is, who saw in prophetic vision—that an important personality was about to be born, was Saint Hildegarde. At this point I must emphasise once more the truth of these facts, which can be corroborated by investigations into the Akashic Record. She dreamt that there appeared to her a woman whose face was smeared and covered with blood, and this woman said to her: “The birds have their nests here upon earth, the foxes too have their holes, but at the present time I have nothing, not even a stick upon which I can lean.” When Hildegarde awakened from this dream, she knew this personality represented the true form of Christianity. And many other persons dreamt in a similar manner. From the knowledge at their disposal they saw that the outer order and institution of the church was unfitted to be a receptacle, a covering, for the true Christianity.

One day, while Francis of Assisi's father was on business in France—this, again, is a fact—a pilgrim went to Pica's house, to the mother of Francis of Assisi, and said to her: “The child you are expecting must not be brought into the world in this house, where there is abundance; you must bring him to birth in the stable, for he must lie upon straw and so follow after his Master!” This was actually said to the mother of Francis of Assisi; and it is not legend but truth that as the father was in France on business the mother was able to carry this out, so that the birth of Francis of Assisi actually took place in a stable and upon straw.

Another thing is also true: Some time after the child was born a remarkable man came into the little town, a man who had never been seen in that neighbourhood before and was never seen there again. He went through the streets again and again saying “An important person has been born in this town.” And those whose visionary life was still active also heard the ringing of bells at the time of the birth of Francis of Assisi.

Besides these few details a whole series of phenomena might be adduced, but we shall content ourselves with the above, which are only mentioned in order to show how significantly everything was concentrated from the spiritual world, regarding the advent of a single personality in that age.

All this becomes especially interesting when in addition we consider something else. The mother had the peculiar impression that the child ought to be called “John” and he was therefore given this name. However, when the father returned from France where he had done good business, he changed it and gave his son the name of Francis, as he wished to commemorate his successful journey. But originally the child was called John.

Now we need only draw attention to a few details from the life of this, remarkable man, especially from his youth. What sort of a person was Francis of Assisi as a youth? He was one who conducted himself like a descendant of the old Germanic knights, and this need not appear remarkable when we consider how peoples had intermingled after the immigrations from the North. Brave, warlike, filled with the ideal of winning honour and fame with the weapons of war; it was this which existed as a heritage, as a racial characteristic in the personality of Francis of Assisi.

There appeared in him more externally, one might say, the qualities which existed more as an inward quality of soul in the ancient Germans, for Francis of Assisi was a “spendthrift.” He squandered the possessions of his father, who was at that time a rich man. He gave freely to all his comrades and playfellows. No wonder that on all the childish warlike expeditions he was chosen as leader by his comrades, and that he was looked upon as a truly warlike boy, for he was known as such throughout the whole town. Now there were all sorts of quarrels between the youths of the towns of Assisi and Perugia; he also took part in these and it came about that on one occasion he and his comrades were taken prisoners. He not only bore his captivity patiently and in a knightly way, but he encouraged all the others to do the same until a year later they were able to return home.

Afterwards, when in the service of chivalry, a necessary expedition was going to be undertaken against Naples, he had a vision in a dream. He saw a great palace and everywhere weapons and shields. Up to the time of his dream he had only seen all kinds of cloth in his father's house and place of business. So he said to himself, this is a summons for me to become a soldier, and he thereupon decided to join the expedition. On the way there and still more distinctly after he had joined the expedition, he had spiritual impressions. He heard something like a voice which said “Go no further, you have wrongly interpreted the dream picture which is very important to you. Go back to Assisi and you shall there hear the right interpretation!”

He obeyed these words, went back to Assisi, and behold, he had something like an inner dialogue with a being who spoke to him spiritually and said, “Not in external service have you to seek your knighthood. You are destined to transform all the forces at your disposal into powers of the soul, into weapons forged for your use. All the weapons you saw in the palace signify the spiritual weapons of mercy, compassion and love. The shields signify the reasoning powers which you have to exercise to stand firmly in the trials of a life spent in deeds of mercy, compassion and love.” Then followed a short though dangerous illness, from which, however, he recovered. After that he passed through something like a retrospection of the whole of his life and in this he lived, for several days. The young knight who in his boldest dreams had only longed to become a great warrior was transformed into a man who now most earnestly sought all the impulses of mercy, compassion and love. All the forces he had thought of using in the service of the physical world were transformed into moral impulses of the inner life.

Here we see how a moral impulse evolves in a single personality. It is important that we should study a great moral impulse, for though the individual cannot always raise himself to the greatest ethical heights, yet he can only learn of them where he sees them most radically expressed and acting with the greatest forcefulness. It is precisely by turning our attention to the greatest and most characteristic manifestations of moral impulses, and then by considering the lesser ones in their light that we can attain to a correct view of moral impulses active in life.

But what happened next to Francis of Assisi? It is not necessary to describe the disputes with his father when he became prodigal in an entirely different manner. His father's home was well known for its lavish hospitality and wastefulness—for that reason his father could understand his son's extravagance, but he could not understand him after the radical change he had undergone, when he laid aside his best clothes and even his necessities and gave them to those in need. Nor could he understand his son's frame of mind, when he said, “How remarkable it is that those through whom in the West Christianity has received so much are so little respected,” and then Francis of Assisi made a pilgrimage to Rome and laid a large sum of money on the graves of the Apostles Peter and Paul. These things his father did not understand. I need not describe the discussions which then took place; I need only point out that in them were concentrated all the moral impulses of Francis of Assisi. These concentrated impulses had then transformed his bravery into soul-forces, they had developed in such a manner that in his meditations they produced a special conception, and appeared to him as the Cross and upon it the Saviour. Under these conditions he felt an inner personal relationship to the Cross and the Christ, and from this there came to him the forces through which he could immeasurably increase the moral impulses which now flowed through him.

He found a remarkable use for that which now developed in him. At that time the horrors of leprosy had invaded many parts of Europe. The church had discovered a strange cure for these lepers who were then so numerous. The priests would call the lepers and say to them: “ You are stricken with this disease in this life, but inasmuch as you are lost to this life, you have been won for God, you are dedicated to God.” And the lepers were then sent away to places far removed from mankind, where, lonely and shunned, they had to spend the remainder of their lives.

I do not blame this kind of cure. They knew no better. But Francis of Assisi knew a better one. I mention this, because from actual experience it will lead us to moral sources. You will see in our next lectures why we are now mentioning these things. These moral impulses led Francis of Assisi to search out lepers everywhere, and not to be afraid of going about among them. And actually the leprosy which none of the remedial agents at that time could cure, which made it necessary that these people should be thrust out of human society, this leprosy was healed in numberless cases by Francis of Assisi, because he went to these people with the power which he possessed through moral impulses, which made him fear nothing; it rather gave him courage not only carefully to cleanse their wounds, but to live with the lepers, to nurse them conscientiously, yea, to kiss them and permeate them with his love.

The healing of Poor Henry by the daughter of his faithful servant, is not merely a poetic story, it expresses what actually occurred in a great number of cases at that time through the historically well-known personality of Francis of Assisi. Observe what really took place. In a human being, in Francis of Assisi, there was a tremendous store of psychic life, in the shape of something which we have found in the ancient peoples of Europe as bravery and valour, which had been transformed into soul and spirit, and afterwards acted psychically and spiritually. Just as in ancient times that which had expressed itself as courage and valour led to personal expenditure of force, and manifested itself in Francis of Assisi in his younger days as extravagance, so it now led him to become prodigal of moral forces. He was full to overflowing with moral force, and this actually passed over to those to whom he turned his love.

Now try to realise that this moral force is a reality, just as much a reality as the air we breathe and without which we cannot live. It is a reality which flooded the whole being of Francis of Assisi, and streamed from him into all hearts to which he dedicated himself, for Francis of Assisi was prodigal of abundance of force which streamed forth from him, and this is something which has streamed into and intermingled with the whole of the mature life of Europe, which has changed into a soul force, and thus worked, as it were, in the world of external reality.

Try to reflect upon these facts which at first may apparently have nothing to do with the actual question of morality; try to grasp what is contained in the devotion of the Indian and the valour of the Norseman; reflect upon the healing effect of such moral forces as were exercised by Francis of Assisi and then in our next lecture we shall be able to speak about real, moral impulses and we shall see that it is not merely words which give rise to morality, but realities working in the soul.

Mankind is always in need of truths which cannot, in every age, be wholly understood. The assimilation of truths is not significant only for our knowledge; truths themselves contain life-force. By permeating ourselves with truth we permeate our soul-nature with an element drawn from the objective world, just as we must permeate our physical being with air taken from outside in order to live. Deep truths are indeed expressed in great religious revelations, but in such a form that their real inner meaning is often not understood until much, much later.

The New Testament has been written; the New Testament stands there as a record for humanity—but the whole future course of the Earth's evolution will be required for a full understanding of the New Testament to be reached. In the future, men will acquire much knowledge of the external world and of the spiritual world also; and if taken in the right sense it will all contribute to an understanding of the New Testament. The understanding comes about gradually, but the New Testament is written in a simple form so that it can be absorbed and, later, gradually understood. To permeate ourselves with the truth that resides in the New Testament is not without significance, even if we cannot yet understand the truth in its deepest inwardness. Later on, truth becomes cognitional force, but it is already life-force, in so far as it is imbibed in a more or less childlike form. And if the questions we began to consider yesterday are to be understood in the sense in which they are imparted in the New Testament, we need knowledge of greater depth, greater insight into the spiritual world and its mysteries.

If we are to carry further the studies we began yesterday, we must again examine some occult mysteries, for they will be able to guide us to a further understanding of the riddle of guilt and sin, and from this point of view throw light on the relation of Christ to the human soul.

In the course of our anthroposophical work we have often been faced with a point of view which may be put as a question, a question often asked: Why did Christ die in a human body? Here indeed is a fundamental question concerning the Mystery of Golgotha. Why did Christ die, why did the God die, in a human body?

The God died because the evolution of the universe made it necessary that He should be able to enter into humanity; it was necessary that a God of the upper worlds should become the leader of the Earth-evolution. For this reason Christ had to become related to death. Related to death! One could wish that this expression will come to be deeply understood by the soul of man.

As a rule a man encounters death only when he sees another person die, or in other phenomena akin to death which are to be found in the world, or in the certainty that he must himself pass through the gate of death when his present incarnation is over. But that is only the external aspect of death. Death is present in a quite different form in the world in which we live, and attention must be drawn to this. Let us start from a quite ordinary, everyday phenomenon. We breathe the air in and we breathe it out again; but the air undergoes a change. When the air is exhaled it is dead air; as exhaled air it cannot be inhaled again, for exhaled air is deadly. I indicate this only in order that you may understand the meaning of the occult saying: “When the air enters into men, it dies.” The living element in the air does indeed die when it enters into man. That, however, is only one phenomenon. The ray of light which penetrates our eye must likewise die, and we should gain nothing from the rays of light if our eye did not set itself up against the ray of light, as our lungs do against the air. The light that enters into our eye dies in our eye; and through the death of the light in our eye it comes about that we see. We are filled with much that has to die in us in order that we may have our Earth-consciousness. Corporeally we kill the air; we kill also the rays of light which penetrate us, and so we kill in many ways.

When we call spiritual science to our aid, we distinguish four grades of substance—earth, water, air and warmth. We then enter the realm where we speak of warmth-ether, of light-ether. As far up as the light-ether we kill that which penetrates us; we slay it unceasingly in order that we may have our Earth-consciousness. But there is something we cannot kill by our Earth-existence. We know that above the light-ether there is the so-called chemical ether, and then there comes the life-ether. These are the two kinds of ether that we cannot kill. But because of this, they have no special participation in us. If we were able to kill the chemical ether, the waves of the Harmony of the Spheres would sound perpetually into our physical body, and we should perpetually destroy these waves with our physical life. And if we would also kill the life-ether, we should destroy and continuously kill within ourselves the cosmic life that streams down to the Earth. In earthly sound we are given a substitute, but it is not to be compared with what we should hear if the chemical ether were audible to us as physical human beings. For physical sound is a product of the air and is not the spiritual sound; it is only a substitute for the spiritual sound.

When the Luciferic temptation came, the progressive gods were obliged to place man in a sphere where, from the life-ether downwards, death lives in his physical body. But at that time the progressive gods said—and the words are there in the Bible—”Man has come to know the distinction between Good and Evil, but Life he is not to have. Of the Tree of Life he shall not eat.” In occultism, we can continue the sentence, “Of the Tree of Life man shall not eat”, by adding the words, “and the Spirit of Matter he shall not hear.” Of the Tree of Life man shall not eat and the Spirit of Matter he shall not hear! These are the regions which were closed to man. Only through a certain procedure in the old Mysteries were the tones of the Sphere-Music and the Cosmic Life, pulsating through the universe, revealed to those who were to be initiated when it was given them, outside the body, to see the Christ in advance. Hence it is that the old philosophers speak of the Music of the Spheres.

In drawing attention to this, we indicate at the same time those regions from which the Christ came to us at the time of the Baptism by John in the Jordan. Whence did Christ come? He came from those regions which had been closed to man as a result of the Luciferic temptation—from the region of the Music of the Spheres and from the region of Cosmic Life. These regions had to be forgotten by man because of the Luciferic temptation at the beginning of Earth-evolution. At the baptism by John in the Jordan, Christ entered into a human body, and that which permeated this human body was the spiritual essence of the Harmony of the Spheres, the spiritual essence of the Cosmic Life—the element that still belonged to the human soul during the first phase of its time on Earth, but from which the human soul had to be shut out as a result of the Luciferic temptation. In this sense also man is related to spirit. With his soul he really belongs to the region of the Music of the Spheres and to the region of the Word, of the living Cosmic Ether. But he was cast out from those regions. They were to be restored to him in order that he might gradually be permeated again by the spiritual elements from which he had been exiled. So it is that from the standpoint of spiritual science the words of St. John's Gospel touch us so deeply: In the primal beginning, when man was not yet subject to temptation, was the Logos. Man belonged to the Logos ... the Logos was with God, and man was with the Logos, with God. And through the Baptism by John in the Jordan the Logos entered into human evolution—He became Man.

Here we have the all-important connection. Let us leave this truth as it stands there, and approach the question from another side. Life as a whole shows itself to us only from the external side. Otherwise man would know all the time how he absorbs the corpse of the light into his eye when he sees.

What was it that the Christ had to undertake in order that the fulfillment of St. Paul's saying, “Not I, but Christ in me”, might be made possible? It had to be possible that Christ should permeate the nature of man; but the nature of man is filled with what is slain by human nature in Earth-existence, from the light-ether downwards—the light-ether that dies in the human eye. The nature of man is filled with death; but the life-element in the two highest kinds of ether was withdrawn in order that human nature might not be laden with their death also. In order that Christ might dwell in us, He had therefore to become related to death, related to all the death that is spread out in the world, from the light down to the depths of materiality. Christ had to be able to pass into all that we bear within us as the corpse of the light, of the warmth, of the air, and so on. It was only because He was able to become related to death that He could become related to man. And we must feel in our souls that the God had to die so that he might be able to enfill us, we who had acquired death as a result of the Luciferic temptation, so that we might be able to say: “Christ in us.”

Many other things are hidden for man behind sense-existence. He turns his gaze upon the plant-world; he sees how the light of the Sun conjures the plants out of the soil. Science teaches us that light is necessary for the growth of plants, but that is only half the truth. Anyone who looks at the plants with clairvoyant sight sees living spiritual elements rising out of them. The light dips down into the plants and rises again out of them as a living spiritual element. In the animals it is the chemical ether that enters, and this chemical ether is not perceptible to man; if he could be aware of it, it would sound forth spiritually. The animals transform this ether into water-spirits. The plants transform light into air-spirits; animals transform the spirit active in the chemical ether into water-spirits. Finally, the cosmic ether, or life-ether, which man is prevented from killing and without which he could not live at all—he transforms the life-ether into Earth-spirits.

In a course of lectures given in Karlsruhe, From Jesus to Christ, I once spoke of the human “phantom”. This is not the time for drawing the connecting thread between what is to be said here and what was said then about the human “phantom”, but such connecting threads do exist and you will perhaps find them for yourself. Today I have to present the matter from another side.

There is perpetually engendered in man something that is also spiritual—the life in him. This is forever passing out into the world. Man projects an aura around him, an aura of rays whereby he continually enriches the earthly-spiritual element of the Earth. This earthly-spiritual element of the Earth, however, contains all the qualities, moral or otherwise, that man has acquired and bears within himself, for he sends it all out into his earthly environment. This is absolutely true. Clairvoyant sight perceives how man sends out his moral, intellectual and aesthetic aura into the world, and how this aura continues to live as earthly spirit in the spirituality of the Earth. As a comet draws its tail through the Cosmos, so does man draw through the whole of earthly life the spiritual aura which he projects. This spiritual aura is held together, phantom-like, during a man's life, but at the same time it rays out into the world his moral and intellectual properties of soul.

When in our occult studies we go back to the times before the Mystery of Golgotha, we find that the men of those days simply radiated this phantom-like entity, which contained their moral qualities, into the external world, into the external spiritual aura of the Earth. But humanity developed in the course of the Earth's existence, and just at the epoch where the Mystery of Golgotha came to pass, a certain stage had been reached in the evolution of this phantom-like entity. In earlier times it was much more evanescent; by the time of the Mystery of Golgotha it had become denser, had more form; and into this phantom-like entity there was now mingled, as a fundamental characteristic, the death which man develops in himself by killing the ray of light that enters into his eye, and so on, as I have explained. These Earth-spirit entities which radiate from man are like a stillborn child, because he imparts his death to them. If Christ had not come upon Earth, then, during the sojourn of their souls in earthly bodies, human beings could have continuously rayed out entities with the impress of death upon them. And with this impress of death there would have been bound up the moral qualities of man of which we spoke yesterday; objective guilt and objective sin. They would have lain within it.

Let us suppose that the Christ had not come. What would have happened in the evolution of the Earth? From the time in which the Mystery of Golgotha would otherwise have taken place, men would have spiritually created dense forms to which they had imparted death. And these dense forms would have become the very things that had to pass over to the Jupiter stage with the Earth. Man would have imparted death to the Earth. A dead Earth would have given birth to a dead Jupiter.

It could not have been otherwise, because if the Mystery of Golgotha had not come about, man would not have been able to permeate the radiations he gives out with the essences of the Music of the Spheres and the Cosmic Life. These essences would not have been there; they would not have flowed into the human radiations; but Christ brought them back through the Mystery of Golgotha. And when there is a fulfillment of the words, “Not I, but Christ in me”, when we bring about a relationship to Christ within ourselves, that which rays out from us and would otherwise be dead, is made living. Because we bear death within us, the living Christ has to permeate us, in order that He may give life to the spiritual Earth-being that we leave behind us. Christ the living Logos, permeates and gives life to the objective guilt and sin which detaches itself from us and is not carried further in our Karma, and because He gives it life, a living Earth will evolve into a living Jupiter. This is the outcome of the Mystery of Golgotha.

The soul, if it reflects, can receive Christ in the following way. It can realize that there was once a time when man was within the bosom of the divine Logos. But man had to succumb to the temptation of Lucifer. He took death into himself; into him there passed the germ by which he would have brought a dead Earth to birth as a dead Jupiter. The endowment which, before the temptation, the human soul had been destined to receive for its Earth-existence was left behind. With Christ it entered again into man's Earth-existence.

When man takes Christ into himself, so as to feel permeated with Christ, he is able to say to himself: “The endowment which the gods had allocated to me before the Luciferic temptation, but which owing to the temptation by Lucifer had to remain behind in the Cosmos, enters into my soul with the Christ. The soul becomes whole again for the first time by taking the Christ into itself. Only then am I fully soul; only then am I again all that the gods intended me to be from the very beginning of the Earth.” “Am I really a soul without Christ?” man asks himself, and he feels that it is through Christ that he first becomes the soul that the guiding divine Beings meant him to be. This is the wonderful feeling of “home” that souls can have with Christ; for out of the primal cosmic home of the soul of man the Christ descended, in order to give back to the soul of man that which had to be lost on Earth as a result of the temptation by Lucifer. The Christ leads the soul up again to its primordial home, the home allotted to it by the gods.

That is the bliss and the blessing in the actual experience of Christ in the human soul. It was this that gave such bliss to certain Christian mystics in the Middle Ages. They may have written much which in itself seems to be too strongly colored by the senses, but fundamentally it was spiritual. Such Christian mystics as those who joined Bernard of Clairvaux, and others, felt that the human soul was as a bride who had lost her bridegroom at the primal beginning of the Earth; and when Christ entered into their souls, filling them with life and soul and spirit, they experienced Christ as the soul-bridegroom who united Himself with the soul; the bridegroom who had been lost when the soul forsook her original home in order to follow Lucifer along the path of freedom, the path of differentiation between good and evil.

When the soul of man really lives into Christ, feeling that Christ is the living Being who from the death on Golgotha flowed out into the atmosphere of the Earth and can flow into the soul, it feels itself inwardly vivified through the Christ. The soul feels a transition from death into life.

So long as we have to live out our earthly existence in human bodies—and this will continue far into a remote future—we cannot hear directly the Music of the Spheres or have direct experience of the Cosmic Life. But we can experience the incoming of the Christ, and so we can receive, by proxy as it were, that which would otherwise come to us from the Music of the Spheres and the Cosmic Life.

Pythagoras, an Initiate of the ancient Mysteries, spoke of the Music of the Spheres. He had gone through the process whereby the soul passes out of the body, and he could then be carried away into the spiritual worlds. There he saw the Christ who was later to come to the Earth. Since the Mystery of Golgotha we cannot speak of the Music of the Spheres as did Pythagoras, but we can speak of it in another way. An Initiate might even today speak as Pythagoras did; but the ordinary inhabitant of the Earth in his physical body can speak of the Music of the Spheres and of the Cosmic Life only when he experiences in his soul, “Not I, but Christ in me”, for the Christ within him has lived in the Music of the Spheres and in the Cosmic Life. But we must go through this experience in ourselves; we must really receive the Christ into our souls.

Let us suppose that a man were to fight against this, that he did not wish to receive Christ into his soul. Then he would come to the end of the Earth period, and in the nebulous spirit-structure that had then taken shape out of the Earth-spirits arising in the course of human evolution, he would have all the phantom-like beings which had issued from him in former incarnations. They would all be there. The tendency indicated here would lead to a dead Earth, and this would pass over, dead, to Jupiter. At the end of the Earth period a man might have carried through and completely absolved his Karma; he might have made personal compensation for all his imperfect deeds; he might have become whole in his soul-being, in his ego, but the objective sin and guilt would remain. That is an absolute truth, for we do not live only for ourselves, so that by adjusting our Karma we may become egotistically more nearly perfect; we live for the world, and at the end of the ages the remains of our Earth incarnations will stand there like a mighty tableau if we have not taken into us the living Christ.

When we connect what was said yesterday with what is being said today (and it is really the same, only seen from two sides) we understand how Christ takes upon Himself the guilt and sin of Earth humanity, in so far as these are objective guilt and sin. And if we have inwardly realized this “Not I, but Christ in me”, the Christ in us, then He takes over the objective remains of our incarnations, and they stand there vivified by Christ, irradiated by Christ and permeated by His life. Yes, the remains of our incarnations stand there, and what do they come to, taken as a whole?

Because Christ unites them all—Christ who belongs to all mankind in the present and in the future—the remains of the single incarnations are all compressed together. Every human soul lives in successive incarnations. From each incarnation certain relics or remains are left, as we have described. Further incarnations will leave other remains, and so on, up to the end of the Earth period. If these relics are permeated by Christ, they are compressed together. Compress what is rarefied and you will get density. Spirit also becomes dense, and so our collective Earth-incarnations are united into a spiritual body. This body belongs to us; we need it because we evolve onwards to Jupiter, and it will be the starting-point of our embodiment on Jupiter. At the end of the Earth period we shall stand there with the soul—whatever the particular karma of the soul may be—and we shall stand there before our earthly relics which have been gathered together by Christ, and we shall have to unite with them in order to pass over with them to Jupiter.

We shall rise again in the body, in the earthly body that has condensed out of the separate incarnations. Truly, my dear friends, from a heart profoundly moved I utter these words: “In the body we shall rise again!”

In these days, young people of sixteen and even less are beginning to claim a creed of their own, and to talk of having happily grown beyond such nonsense as the “Resurrection of the Body”. But those who seek to deepen their occult knowledge of the mysteries of the universe strive gradually to rise to an understanding of what has been said to mankind, because—as I explained at the beginning of the lecture—it had first of all to be said, in order that men might grasp it as life-truth and come to understand it later. The resurrection of the body is a reality, but our soul must feel that it will rise again with the earthly relics that have been collected, brought together by Christ, by the spiritual body that is permeated with Christ. This is what our soul must learn to understand. For let us suppose that, because of our not having received into ourselves the living Christ, we could not approach this Earth-body, with its sin and guilt, and unite with it. If we had rejected the Christ, the relics of our various incarnations would be scattered at the end of the Earth period; they would have remained, but they would not have been gathered together by the Christ, who spiritualizes the whole of humanity. We should stand there as souls at the end of the Earth period and we should be bound to the Earth, to that part of the Earth which remains dead in our relics. Certainly our souls would be free in the spirit in an egotistic sense, but we would be unable to approach our bodily relics. Such souls are the booty of Lucifer, for he strives to thwart the true goal of the Earth; he tries to prevent souls from reaching their Earth-goal, to hold them back in the spiritual world. And in the Jupiter period Lucifer will send over what has remained of scattered Earth-relics as a dead content of Jupiter. It will not, as Moon, separate from Jupiter, but will be within Jupiter, and it will be continually thrusting up these Earth-relics. And these Earth-relics will have to be animated as species-souls by the souls above.

And now you will remember what I have told you some years ago: that the human race on Jupiter will divide itself into those souls who have attained their Earth-goal, who will have attained the goal of Jupiter, and into those souls who will form a middle kingdom between the human kingdom and the animal kingdom on Jupiter. These latter will be Luciferic souls—Luciferic, merely spiritual. They will have their body below, and it will be a direct expression of their whole inner being, but they will be able to direct it only from outside. Two races, the good and the bad, will differentiate themselves from one another on Jupiter. This was stated years ago; today we wish to consider it more deeply.

A Venus-existence will follow that of Jupiter, and again there will be an adjustment through the further evolution of the Christ; but it is on Jupiter that man will realize what it means to be perfected only in his own ego, instead of making the whole Earth his concern. That is something he will have to experience through the whole course of the Jupiter cycle, for everything he has not permeated with Christ during his earthly existence may then appear before his spiritual sight.

Let us reflect from this point of view upon the words of Christ with which He sent His disciples out into the world to proclaim His Name, and in His Name to forgive sins. Why to forgive sins in His Name? Because the forgiveness of sins is connected with His Name. Sins can be blotted out and transformed into living life only if Christ can be united with our Earth-relics, if during our Earth-existence He is within us in the sense of the Pauline saying: “Not I, but Christ in me”.

And wherever any religious denomination associates itself in its outer observances with this saying of Christ, in order to bring home to souls, again and again, all that is connected with Christ, we must seek this deeper meaning in it. When, in any religious denomination, one of Christ's servants speaks of the forgiveness of sins, as though by Christ's command, it means that with his words he forms a connection with the forgiveness of sins through Christ, and to the soul in need of comfort he says, in effect: “I have seen that you have developed a living relationship to Christ. You are uniting the objective sin and guilt, and the objective sin and guilt that will enter into your Earth-relics, with everything that Christ is for you. Because I have recognized that you have permeated yourself with Christ—therefore I dare say to you: your sins are forgiven.”

Such words always mean that he who in any religious denomination speaks of the forgiveness of sins is convinced that the person in question has found a connection with Christ, that he wants to bear Christ in his heart and in his soul. Because of this he can properly give comfort when the other person comes to him conscious of guilt. “Christ will forgive you, and I am permitted to say to you that in His Name your sins are forgiven.” Christ is the only forgiver of sins because He is the bearer of sins. He is the Being who gives life to human Earth-relics, and a wonderful link with Him is created when those who want to serve Him can give comfort in the words, “Your sins are forgiven”, to those who show that in their inner being they feel a union with Christ. For it is like a fresh strengthening of the relationship to Christ when the soul realizes: “I have understood my guilt and sins in such a way that it can permissibly be said to me that Christ takes them upon himself, works through them with His being.” If the expression “the forgiveness of sins” is to be an expression of the truth, it must always carry an undertone which reminds the sinner of his bond with Christ, even if he does not form it anew. Between the soul and Christ there must be a bond so intense that the soul cannot be reminded of it often enough. And because the Christ is bound up with the objective sin and guilt of the human soul, the soul can best remind itself in daily life of its relationship to Christ by always remembering, at the moment of the forgiveness of sins, the presence of the Cosmic Christ in the Earth's existence.

Those who join Anthroposophy in the right spirit, and not merely in an external sense, can most assuredly become their own father confessors. Most assuredly through Spiritual Science they can learn to know Christ so intimately, and feel themselves so closely connected with Him, that they can be directly conscious of His spiritual presence. And when they have solemnly vowed themselves to Him as the Cosmic Principle, they can in spirit direct their confusion to Him and in their silent meditation ask from Him the forgiveness of sins. But as long as men have not yet permeated themselves with spiritual science in this deep spiritual sense, we must look with understanding at what the “forgiveness of sins” signifies in the various religious observances of the world. Men will become spiritually freer and freer, and in this greater spiritual freedom their communion with Christ will become more and more a direct experience.

And there must be tolerance! A person who believes that through the deep inward understanding he has of the Spirit of the Mystery of Golgotha, the Christ, he can hold direct intercourse with the Christ, must look with understanding upon those who need the positive declarations of a confession of faith, and a minister of Christ to give them comfort with words, “Your sins are forgiven”. On the other hand, there should be tolerance on the part of those who see that there are men who can be independent. In earthly life this may be all an ideal, but the anthroposophist may at least look up to such an ideal.

I have spoken to you of spiritual secrets which make it possible for men—even those who have absorbed much anthroposophical teaching—to look still more deeply into the whole nature of our being. I have spoken to you of the overcoming of human egoism, and of those things we must understand before we can have a right understanding of Karma. I have spoken to you of man in so far as he is not only an “I” being, but belongs to the whole Earth-existence and is thereby called to help forward the attainment of the divine aim appointed for the Earth. The Christ did not come into the world and pass through the Mystery of Golgotha in order that He might be something to each one of us in our egoism. It would be terrible if Christ were to be so understood that the words of Paul, “Not I, but Christ in me” served only to encourage a higher egoism. Christ died for the whole of humanity, for the humanity of the Earth. Christ became the central spirit of the Earth, who has to save for the Earth the spiritual-earthly elements that flow out from man.

Nowadays one can read theological works—and those who have read them will bear me out—which assure us that certain theologians of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries have at last disposed of the popular medieval belief that Christ came to Earth in order to snatch the Earth from the devil, to snatch the Earth from Lucifer. Within modern theology there is an “enlightened” materialism which will not recognize itself as such but on the contrary imagines itself to be specially enlightened. It says: “In the dark Middle Ages people said that Christ appeared in the world because He had to snatch the Earth away from the devil.” But the true explanation leads us back to this simple, popular belief. For everything on the Earth that is not set free by Christ belongs to Lucifer. All that is human in us, all that is more than what is merely confined in our ego, is ennobled, is made fruitful for the whole of humanity, when it is permeated with Christ.

And now, at the end of our considerations during the last few days, I would not like to conclude without saying those further words to each single one of the souls who are gathered together here:

Hope and confidence in the future of our work can dwell in our hearts, because we have endeavored, from the very beginning, to fill what we had to say with the will of Christ. And this hope and confidence may allow us to say that our teaching is itself what Christ has wished to say to us, in fulfillment of His words: “I am with you always, even to the end of the Earth ages.” We have wished to be mindful only of what comes from Him. And all that He has inspired us with, according to His promise, we want to take into our souls as our spiritual science. It is not because we feel our spiritual science to be imbued with any sort of Christian dogmatism that we regard it as Christian, but because, having Christ within us, we look on it as a revelation of the Christ in ourselves. I am therefore also convinced that the springing up of true spiritual science in those souls who want to receive, with us, our Christ-filled spiritual science will be fruitful for the whole of humanity, and especially for those who welcome these fruits.

Clairvoyant observation shows that much of what is good, spiritually good, in our Movement proceeds from those who have taken our Christian spiritual science into themselves, and then, having passed through the gate of death, send down to us the fruits of this Christian spiritual science. The Christian spiritual science which those souls have taken into themselves and are now sending down to us from the spiritual worlds is already living in us. For they do not keep it in their own karmic stream for the sake of their own perfecting; they can let it stream into those who want to receive it. Comfort and hope arise for our spiritual science when we know that our so-called “dead” are working with us.

In the second lecture we spoke about these things in a certain connection. But today, when we have come to the close of the course, I should like to add a personal word.

While I have been speaking to the Norrköping Branch of our society, I could not be other than conscious always of the spirit of one who was so closely connected with us here. The spirit of Frau Danielsen looks down like a good angel on all that this Branch wants to undertake. Hers also was a Christian spirit in the sense described, and the souls who knew her will never feel themselves separated from her. May that spirit hover as guardian-spirit over this Branch! Most willingly and surely will it do so if the souls who work in this Branch receive it. With these words, spoken from the depths of my heart, I close these lectures, and I hope that we shall continue to work together on the spiritual path we have embraced.

[ 1 ] If we reflect upon ourselves, we soon come to realize that, in addition to the self we encompass with our thoughts, feelings, and fully conscious impulses of will, we bear in ourselves a second, more powerful self. We become aware that we subordinate ourselves to this second self as to a higher power. At first, this second self seems to us a lower being when compared to the one we encompass with our clear, fully conscious soul and its natural inclination toward the good and the true. And so, initially, we may strive to overcome this seemingly lower self.

A closer self-examination, however, can teach us something else about this second self. If periodically we look back on what we have experienced or done in life, we make a strange discovery, one that becomes more meaningful for us the older we become. Whenever we think about what we did or said at some time in the past, it turns out that we did a great many things we actually understood only at a later date. When we think of things we did seven or eight years ago—or perhaps even twenty years ago—we realize that only now, after a long time, is our mind sufficiently developed to understand what we did or said then.

Of course, there are people who do not make such self-discoveries because they do not try to. Nevertheless, this sort of soul-searching is extraordinarily fruitful. For in such moments as we become aware that we are only now beginning to understand something we did in our earlier years-that in the past our minds were not mature enough to understand what we did or said then-a new feeling emerges in our soul. We feel ourselves as if sheltered by a benevolent power presiding in the depths of our own being. We begin to trust more and more that, in the highest sense of the word, we are not alone in the world and that whatever we can understand or do consciously is fundamentally only a small part of what we accomplish in the world.

[ 2 ] After we have gone through this process of discovery a number of times, an insight that is theoretically easy to understand can become part of our practical lives. We know, in theory at any rate, that we would not get very far in life if we had to do everything in full consciousness, rationally understanding all the circumstances and ramifications in every case. To see that this is so we need only consider how and when we accomplish those acts that are the wisest and most important for our existence. A moment's thought will reveal that we act most wisely in the time between birth and the moment at which memory, that first moment we can remember when in later years we try to recall our early life, begins.

This is to say that, as we think back to what we did three, four, or five and more years ago, we reach a certain point in childhood beyond which our memory does not extend. Our memory does not go back any further. Parents or other people can tell us what happened before that time, but our own memory does not go back beyond a certain point. This is the point in our lives when we first began to perceive ourselves as an I. People whose memory is intact can usually remember back to, but not earlier than, this moment.

Our souls, however, have already performed their wisest deeds before this time. Never again in later life, after we have attained full consciousness, will we be able to accomplish such splendid and tremendous deeds as those we accomplished out of the unconscious depths of our souls in the first years of childhood. As we know, we bring the fruits of earlier lives on earth with us into the physical world at birth. For example, at birth our physical brain is still an incomplete and unfinished instrument. The soul must then work on it, adding the finer, detailed structures that make it the medium of all the soul's faculties. In fact, before the soul is fully conscious, it works on the brain to transform it into an instrument to express all the capacities, aptitudes, characteristics, and so on, that it has as a consequence of earlier lives. This work on our own body is guided from a perspective that is wiser than anything we can achieve later with our full consciousness. Moreover, during this time when the brain is being transformed, we must also acquire the three most important capacities for life on earth.

[ 3 ] The first capacity we must learn is to orient our body in space. People today do not realize what this means and that it touches on the most essential differences between human beings and animals. Animals are destined from the beginning to achieve their equilibrium in a certain way: one is destined to be a climber, another a swimmer, and so on. Animals are so constituted that from the outset they can orient themselves in space correctly. This is true even of primates. If zoologists were aware of this, they would put less emphasis on the number of similar bones, muscles, and so forth that human beings and animals have. After all, this is not nearly as important as the fact that human beings are not given an innate way to achieve equilibrium in space but must develop it out of their total being.¹

It is significant that we must work on ourselves to develop from beings that cannot walk into ones that walk upright. We achieve our vertical position, our position of equilibrium in space, by ourselves. In other words, we establish our own relationship to gravity. Those who do not wish to consider the question deeply will, of course, easily dispute our explanation on apparently good grounds. They may claim, for example, that we are just as well constituted for walking upright as climbing animals are for climbing. Upon closer examination, however, we find that animals' orientation in space is determined by their physical organization. In human beings, however, it is the soul that establishes the relationship to space and shapes the organization.

[ 4 ] The second capacity we learn out of ourselves from our essential being—which remains the same through successive incarnations—is language. This allows us to relate to our fellow human beings and makes us bearers of the spiritual life that permeates the physical world primarily by means of human beings. It has often been emphasized, and with good reason, that someone stranded on a desert island who had had no contact with other human beings before learning to speak would never learn to do so. What we receive through heredity, on the other hand, what is implanted in us for development in later years, does not depend on our interactions with other human beings. For example, we are predisposed by heredity to change teeth in our seventh year. Even on a desert island our second set of teeth would grow if we reached that age. But if our soul being, the part of us that continues from one life to the next, is not stimulated we will not learn to speak. In a sense, we must sow the seed for the development of the larynx in the time before our earliest memory-before we attain full I-consciousness-so that the larynx can then become an organ of speech.

[ 5 ] There is still a third, even less well known, capacity that we learn on our own through what we bear within us through successive incarnations. I am referring here to our ability to live within the world of thoughts and ideas, the world of thought itself. Our brain is formed and worked on because it is the tool of thinking. At the beginning of life, the brain is still malleable because we must shape it ourselves to make it an instrument for the thinking appropriate to our essential being. The brain at birth is the result of the work of forces inherited from our parents, grandparents, and so on. It is in our thinking that we bring to expression what we are as individuals in conformity with our former earthly lives. Therefore, after birth, when we have become physically independent of our parents and ancestors, we must transform the brain we have inherited.

[ 6 ] Clearly, then, we accomplish significant steps in the early years of life. We work on ourselves in accordance with the highest wisdom. In fact, if we had to rely on our own intelligence, we could not achieve what we must accomplish without our intelligence in the first few years of our lives. Why is this so? Why must all these things be accomplished from soul depths that lie outside our consciousness? Because, in the first years of our lives, our souls, as well as our whole being, are much more closely connected with the spiritual worlds of the higher hierarchies than is the case later.

Clairvoyants, who can trace the spiritual processes involved because they have undergone spiritual training, discover that something tremendously significant happens at the moment when we achieve I-consciousness, that is, at the moment of our earliest memory. They can see that, during the early years of childhood, an aura hovers about us like a wonderful human-superhuman power. This aura, which is actually our higher part, extends everywhere into the spiritual world. But at the earliest moment we can remember,² We can experience ourselves as a coherent I from this point on because what had previously been connected to the higher worlds then entered the I. Thereafter, our consciousness establishes its own relationship to the outer world.

This conscious relationship to the outer world does not yet exist in early childhood. In childhood, a dream world still seems to hover about us. We work on ourselves with a wisdom that is not in us, a wisdom that is more powerful and comprehensive than all the conscious wisdom we acquire later. This higher wisdom works from the spiritual world deep into the body; it enables us to form the brain out of the spirit. We can rightly say, then, that even the wisest person can learn from a child. For the wisdom at work in children does not become part of our consciousness in later life. It is obscured and exchanged for consciousness.

In the first years of life, however, this higher wisdom functions like a “telephone connection” to the spiritual beings in whose world we find ourselves between death and rebirth. Something from this world still flows into our aura during childhood. As individuals we are then directly subject to the guidance of the entire spiritual world to which we belong. When we are children—up to the moment of our earliest memory—the spiritual forces from this world flow into us, enabling us to develop our particular relationship to gravity. At the same time, the same forces also form our larynx and shape our brain into living organs for the expression of thought, feeling, and will.

[ 7 ] During childhood, then, we work out of a self that is still in direct contact with the higher worlds. Indeed, to a certain degree, we can still do this even in later life, although conditions change. Whenever we feel that we did or said something in earlier years that we are only now coming to understand, we have an indication that we were guided by a higher wisdom at that earlier time. Only years later do we manage to gain insight into the motives of our past conduct. All this indicates that at birth we did not entirely leave behind the world we lived in before entering into our new, physical existence. In fact, we never leave it behind completely. What we have as our part of higher spirituality enters our physical life and remains with us. Thus, what we bear within us is not a higher self that has to be developed gradually, but one that already exists and that often leads us to rise above ourselves.

[ 8 ] All that we can produce in the way of ideals and artistic creativity—as also the natural healing forces in our body, which continuously compensate for the injuries life inflicts—originate not in our ordinary, rational minds but in the deeper forces that work in our early years on our orientation in space, on the formation of the larynx, and on the development of the brain. These same forces are still present in us later. People often say of the damages and injuries we sustain in life that external forces will not be of any help and that our organism must develop its own inherent healing powers. What they are talking about is a wise, benevolent influence working upon us. From this same source also arise the best forces that enable us to perceive the spiritual world—that is, to have true clairvoyance.

[ 9 ] We can now ask why the higher powers work on us only in the early years of childhood. [ 10 ] It is easy to answer one half of this question, for if these higher forces continued to work on us in the same way into later life, we would always remain children and could never achieve full I-consciousness. What worked previously from without must be transferred into our own being.

But there is a more significant reason, one that can tell us more about the mysteries of human life. Spiritual science teaches that we have to consider the human body at the present stage of the earth's evolution as having developed from earlier conditions. People familiar with spiritual science know that in the course of this evolution various forces have worked on our whole being—some on the physical body, others on the etheric body, and others again on the astral body.³ We have evolved to our present condition because beings we call luciferic and ahrimanic have affected us. Through their forces, our essential being became worse than it would have been if only the forces of the spiritual guides of the world, those who want to advance our development in a straight line, had worked on us. Indeed, suffering, disease, and death can be traced to the fact that, in addition to the beings who advance our development in a straight line, luciferic and ahrimanic beings are also at work and continuously thwart our progress.

What we bring with us at birth contains something that is better than anything we can make of it in later life. [ 11 ] In early childhood, the luciferic and ahrimanic forces have only a limited influence on our being. Essentially, they are active only in what we make of ourselves through our conscious life. If we retained the best part of ourselves in its full force beyond the first phase of childhood, its influence would be too much for us because the luciferic and ahrimanic forces opposing the part of ourselves that is better than the rest would weaken our whole being. Our constitution as human beings in the physical world is such that, once we are no longer soft and malleable as children, we can no longer stand to have the forces of the spiritual world continue to affect us directly. The forces that underlie our orientation in space and the formation of the larynx and the brain would shatter us if they continued to influence us directly in later life. These forces are so powerful that our organism would waste away beneath their holiness if they continued to work on us. However, for the activity that brings us into conscious contact with the supersensible world, we have to call upon these forces again.

[ 12 ] This leads us to a realization that is very significant if we understand it rightly. In the New Testament it is put thus: “Unless you turn and become like children, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven.” (Matthew 18:3) What then seems to be the highest ideal for a human being if the above statement is correctly understood? Surely that our ideal must be to approach ever closer a conscious relationship with the forces that worked on us, without our awareness, in the first years of childhood. At the same time, we must realize that we would collapse under the power of these forces if they were immediately and too easily to affect our conscious life. That is why a careful preparation is necessary to achieve the capacities that lead to a perception of supersensible worlds. The goal of this preparation is to enable us to bear what we simply cannot bear in ordinary life.

[ 13 ] Our passing through successive incarnations is significant for the overall evolution of our essential being, which has undergone successive past lives and will continue to go through future lives. The evolution of the earth runs parallel to our own. At some point in the future, the earth will have reached the end of its course; then the planet earth, as a physical entity, will have to separate from the totality of human souls—just as when we die the body separates from the spirit, and the soul, in order to live on, enters the spiritual realm between death and rebirth.⁴ From this point of view, our highest ideal must be the striving to make all the fruits to be gained in earthly life truly our own before we die.

[ 14 ] The forces that make us too weak to bear those forces that work on us in childhood originate in the organism of the earth. By the time this separates from humanity, we must have advanced to the point of giving over our whole being to the forces that presently work on us only in childhood. Only when we have reached this level can we claim to have attained our goal. Thus, through successive earthly lives, we must gradually make our entire being, including our consciousness, an expression of the forces that work on us under the guidance of the spiritual world in early childhood. This is the purpose of evolution.

After such considerations, the realization that we are not alone takes hold of our soul. This realization imbues us with humility, but also with a proper consciousness of our human dignity. We realize at the same time that something lives in us that can prove at all times that we can rise above ourselves to a self that is already surpassing us and will continue to do so from one life to the next. As this realization assumes a more and more definite form, it can have a very soothing, heartwarming effect and, at the same time, imbue the soul with the appropriate humility and modesty. What lives within us is truly a higher, divine human being, and we can feel ourselves pervaded by this being as by a living presence of whom we can say, This is my inner guide in me.

[ 15 ] Given this, the thought easily arises that we should strive in every way possible to achieve harmony with that part in us that is wiser than our conscious intelligence. Thereafter, our attention will no longer be directed to the conscious self but will be focused instead on an expanded self, and from this perspective we can then combat and eradicate all our false pride and arrogance. From this feeling we will gradually come to a right understanding of our present incompleteness. We shall come to see that we will become complete when the comprehensive spirituality at work in us has the same relationship to our adult consciousness that it had to our unconscious soul life in early childhood.

[ 16 ] Even though we may not remember anything from our first four years of life, we can safely say that the active influence of the higher spiritual realms lasts for about the first three years. By the end of this period we have become able to connect the impressions from the outer world with our I-concept. To be sure, this coherent I-concept cannot be traced back beyond the first moment we can remember. This is a moment that is difficult to locate, for with the awakening of distinct I-consciousness, our memory may be so weak that it cannot be recovered later. Nevertheless, we may say that people generally remember as far back as the beginning of the fourth year. In other words, we are justified in saying that the higher forces that have a decisive influence on us in childhood can work on us for three years. It follows that our constitution in the present, middle phase of the earth's evolution enables us to absorb these higher forces for only three years.

[ 17 ] Now if, through some special cosmic powers, we could somehow remove the ordinary I from a person—if the ordinary I that has accompanied a person through successive incarnations could be separated from that person's physical, etheric, and astral bodies—and we could then replace the ordinary I with an I that is connected with the spiritual worlds—what would happen? After three years this person's body would fall apart! If such a thing were to happen, world karma would have to do something to prevent the spiritual being connected to the higher worlds from living in this body for more than three years. [During the transition from childhood to the following stages, our organism retains its viability because it can still change during this period. In later life it can no longer change, and therefore cannot survive with the self connected directly to the spiritual worlds.] Only at the conclusion of our earthy lives will we be able to retain the forces within ourselves that allow us to live with that spiritual being for more than three years. Then we will be able to say, Not I but this higher self in me, which has been there all along, is now at work in me. Until then, we will not be able to experience this. At most, we will be able to feel the presence of this higher self, but our actual, real human I will not yet be able to bring the higher self fully to life.

[ 18 ] Let us now assume that a human organism were to enter the world at some moment in the middle of the earth's lifetime, and that, at a certain point by means of certain cosmic powers, this organism was freed of its I and received in its stead the I that is usually active only in the first three years of childhood—the I that is connected to the spiritual worlds we live in between death and rebirth. How long would such a person be able to live in an earthly body? Such a person would be able to survive in this earthy body only for about three years. After three years, world karma would have to intervene and destroy this human organism.

[ 19 ] What we have assumed here did actually occur at one time in history. When the human organism known as Jesus stood on the banks of the Jordan to be baptized by John, his I left his physical, etheric, and astral bodies. But after the Baptism, that organism bore within itself the higher self of humanity in fully conscious form. The self that works on us with cosmic wisdom in childhood, before we are conscious of it, was then fully conscious in Jesus of Nazareth. And by this very fact, this self, which was connected to the higher spiritual world, could live in this human body for only three years. Events then had to follow a course that brought an end to Jesus' physical life three years after the Baptism.

[ 20 ] Indeed, we have to understand the external events in the life of Jesus Christ as resulting from the inner causes discussed above. They are the outer expression of these causes. [ 21 ] This reveals the deeper connection between the guide in us—which radiates into our childhood as into a dark room and always works under the surface of our consciousness as our best self—and what once entered into human history to live for three years in a human sheath.

[ 22 ] This “higher” I, which is connected to the spiritual hierarchies, entered history in the person of Jesus of Nazareth—an event that is symbolized by the spirit descending in the form of a dove, saying: “This is my well beloved Son, today I have begotten him” (Matthew 3: 17). (Such is the original meaning of the words). What is revealed here? If we hold this image of the Baptism before our eyes, we have before us the highest human ideal. That is what is meant when the gospels tell us that Christ can be seen and known in every person. Even if there were no gospels and no tradition to report that a Christ once lived, our knowledge of the nature of the human being would tell us that Christ is alive in us.

[ 23 ] To know the forces at work in childhood is to know the Christ in us. The question then arises whether this realization also leads us to acknowledge that Christ at one time really lived on earth in a human body? We can answer “yes” to this without requiring any documents, because true clairvoyant self-knowledge convinces people in our time that there are forces in the human soul that come from Christ.

In the first three years of childhood these forces are active without any effort on our part. They can also work on us in our later life—if we seek Christ in ourselves through contemplation. It was not always possible to find the Christ within; indeed, as clairvoyant perception reveals, prior to Christ's life on earth, there were times when no amount of contemplation would have helped people to find the Christ. Clairvoyant cognition teaches us that this is so. Between the time when Christ could not be found within and the present, when he can be found in this way, lies Christ's life on earth. It is because Christ lived on the earth that we can now find him within, in the way I have indicated. Thus, for clairvoyant perception, the fact that Christ lived on the earth is proven without recourse to any historical documentation.

[ 24 ] It is as if Christ had said: Human beings, I want to be an ideal for you that presents to you on a higher, spiritual level what is fulfilled in the body. In the early years of life we learn out of the spirit, first, to walk—that is, we learn, under the guidance of the spirit, to find our way in earthly life. Then we learn to speak—to formulate the truth—out of the spirit. In other words, we develop the essence of truth out of speech sounds. Finally, we also develop the organ for our life as earthly I-beings. Thus, in the first three years of life, we learn three things. We learn to find the “way,” that is, to walk; we learn to represent the “truth” with our organism, and we learn to express “life” in our body through the spirit. There is no more meaningful paraphrase imaginable of the words “Unless you turn and become like children, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven.” (Matthew 18:3)

Most meaningfully, therefore, the I-being of Christ is expressed in the words: “I am the Way, the Truth, and the Life!” The higher spiritual forces form our organism in childhood—though we are not conscious of this—so that our body becomes the expression of the way, the truth, and the life. Similarly, the human spirit gradually becomes the conscious bearer of the way, the truth, and the life by permeating itself with Christ. Thereby we transform ourselves in the course of our earthly life into the power at work in us in childhood.

[ 25 ] Words such as these about the way, the truth, and the life can open the doors of eternity for us. Once our self-knowledge has become true and substantial, these words will resound for us from the depths of our soul.

[ 26 ] What I have presented here opens up a twofold perspective on the spiritual guidance of the individual and of humanity as a whole. First, as individuals, we find the Christ, the guide in us, through self-knowledge. We can always find Christ in this way because, since his life on earth, he is always present in us. Second, when we apply the knowledge we have gained without the help of historical documents to these documents, we begin to understand their true nature. They are the historical expression of something that has revealed itself in the depths of the soul. Therefore, historical documents should be regarded as part of that guidance of humanity that is intended to lead the soul to itself.

[ 27 ] If we understand the eternal spirit of the words “I am the Way, the Truth, and the Life” in this way, we do not need to ask why we have to enter life as children even after having passed through many incarnations. For we realize that this apparent imperfection is a perpetual reminder of the highest that lives in us. We cannot be reminded often enough—we need to be reminded at least at the beginning of each new life – of the great truth of what we really are in our innermost essential being, that underlies all our earthly lives but remains untouched by the imperfections of earthly existence.

[ 28 ] It is best not to present too many definitions or concepts when talking about spiritual science or theosophy [anthroposophy] or about occultism in general. It is better to describe things and to try to convey an idea of what they really are like. That is why I have tried here to give you a sense of what is characteristic of the first three years of life and of how this relates to the light that radiates from the cross on Golgotha. The description I have given bespeaks an impulse in human evolution that will make St. Paul's words “Not I, but Christ in me” come true. All we need to know is what as human beings we really are; on the basis of this knowledge we can then gain insight into the being of Christ. Only after we have arrived at this Christ-idea through a real understanding of humanity, and after we have understood that to find Christ we must seek him in ourselves, will turning to the Bible be useful for us. No one has a greater or more conscious appreciation of the Bible than those who have found Christ in this way.

Imagine that a Martian who had never heard anything about Christ and his works, came down to earth. This Martian would not understand much of what happened here, and much of what interests people today would not interest this visitor. However, this Martian would be interested in what is the central impulse of earthy evolution, namely, the Christ-idea as expressed in human nature. Once we understand this, we will for the first time be able to read the Bible correctly, for we will then see that it expresses in a wonderful way what we have first perceived within ourselves. You see, we do not need to be taught a particular appreciation of the gospels. When we read the gospels as fully conscious individuals, what we have learned through spiritual science enables us to fully realize their greatness.

[ 29 ] I am hardly exaggerating when I claim that there will come a time when the general opinion will be that people who have learned to understand and appreciate the content of the gospels through spiritual science will see them as scriptures intended for the guidance of humanity and that their understanding will do the Bible more justice than anything else has so far. It is only through understanding our own inner being that we can come to see what lies hidden in these profound scriptures. Now, if we find in the gospels what is so completely part of our own being, it follows that it must have entered the scriptures through the people who wrote them. Thus, what we have to admit concerning ourselves—and the older we get, the more often we have to admit it—namely, that we do many things we don't understand fully until many years later: this must also be true for the writers of the gospels. They wrote out of the higher self that works on all of us in childhood. Thus, the gospels originate in the same wisdom that forms us. The spirit is revealed physically in the human body as well as in the writing of the gospels.

[ 30 ] In this context, the concept of inspiration becomes meaningful once again in a positive sense. Just as higher forces work on the brain in the first three years of childhood, so the spiritual worlds imbued the writers of the gospels with the forces out of which they wrote their gospels. These facts reveal the spiritual guidance of humanity. After all, if there are people in the human race who write documents out of the same forces that wisely shape human beings, then humanity as a whole is truly being guided. And just as individuals say or do things they understand only at a later age, so humanity as a whole produced evangelists as mediators who provided revelations that can be understood only gradually. These scriptures will be understood more and more as humanity progresses. As individuals, we can feel a spiritual guidance within us; humanity as a whole can feel it in persons who work as the gospel writers did.

[ 31 ] The concept of the guidance of humanity we have just established can now be expanded in many ways. Let us assume a person has found students or disciples, that is, people who declare their faith in him and become his loyal followers. Such a person out of genuine self-knowledge will easily realize that having found students gives him the feeling that what he has to say does not originate within him. Instead, spiritual forces from higher worlds want to communicate with the students and find in the teacher a suitable instrument for revealing themselves.

[ 32 ] Such a teacher may then reason as follows: When I was a child, I worked on myself by means of forces that came from the spiritual world. The best I can now contribute here must also come from higher worlds. I must not consider it as part of my ordinary consciousness. Indeed, such an individual may feel that something like a daemon—the word daemon here refers to a benevolent spiritual power—works from the spiritual world through him on the students.

According to Plato, Socrates felt something like this when he spoke of his daemon as something that guided and directed him.⁵ Many attempts have been made to explain Socrates' daemon. However, to explain it we must accept the idea that Socrates could feel something akin to what emerges from the above considerations. Based on this, we then realize that during the three or four centuries when the Socratic principle prevailed in Greece, Socrates introduced a mood into the Greek world that served as preparation for another great event. The mood I am referring to accompanied the realization that what we perceive of an individual does not comprise the whole of what enters this world from the higher one. This mood continued to prevail long after Socrates' death. The best people who had this feeling later also best understood the words “Not I, but the Christ in me.” They realized that Socrates had to speak of a daemon-like force working out of the higher worlds, but through the ideal of Christ it became clear what Socrates had really meant. Of course, Socrates could not yet speak of Christ because in his time people could not yet find the Christ-being within.

[ 33 ] Here again we feel something of a spiritual guidance of humanity; nothing can enter the world without preparation. Why did Paul find his best followers in Greece? Because Socratism had prepared the ground there. That is, more recent events in the development of humanity can be traced back to earlier events that prepared people to allow the later events to work upon them. This gives us an idea of how far the guiding impulse of human evolution reaches; it puts the right people at the right time in the place where they are needed for our development. In facts such as these the guidance of humanity is evident in a general way.

[ 34 missing ]

• 1. For a further description of the essential differences between human beings and animals, see Wolfgang Schad, Man and Mammals, (Garden City, NY: Waldorf Press, 1977) and Rudolf Steiner, Study of Man, (London: Rudolf Steiner Press, 1966).
• 2. Steiner describes the aura in Theosophy, 140–153.
• 3. The physical body is the corporeal aspect of the human being, related to the mineral kingdom. The etheric body, or body of formative forces through which life unfolds, is related to the plant kingdom. The astral body bears desires, pleasure and pain, and the qualitative world of emotions, and is related to the animal kingdom. See Occult Science, 21–28.
• 4. For a description of earth evolution, see Occult Science, chap. 2.
• 5. Socrates, 470–399 B.C., Greek philosopher and teacher. Plato, 427–347 B.C., Greek philosopher, the most famous student of Socrates.

When we consider how Karma works,¹ we always have to bear in mind that the human Ego, which is the essential being, the inmost being, of man, has as it were three instruments through which it is able to live and express itself in the world. These are the physical body, the etheric body and the astral body. Man really carries the physical, etheric and astral bodies with him through the world, but he himself is not in any one of these bodies. In the truest sense he is the Ego; and it is the Ego which both suffers and creates Karma.

Now the point is to gain an understanding of the relationship between man as the Ego-being and these three instrumental forms—if I may call them so—the physical, etheric and astral bodies. This will give us the foundation for an understanding of the essence of Karma. We shall gain a fruitful point of view for the study of the physical, the etheric and the astral in man in relation to Karma, if we consider the following.

The physical as we behold it in the mineral kingdom, the etheric as we find it working in the plant kingdom, and the astral as we find it working in the animal kingdom—all these are to be found in the environment of man here on Earth. In the Cosmos surrounding the Earth we have that Universe into which, if I may so describe it, the Earth extends on all sides. Man can feel a certain relationship between what takes place on the Earth and what takes place in the cosmic environment. But when we come to Spiritual Science we have to ask: Is this relationship really so commonplace as the present-day scientific conception of the world imagines? This modern scientific conception of the world examines the physical qualities of everything on the Earth, living and lifeless. It also investigates the stars, the sun, the moon, etc.; and it discovers—indeed it is particularly proud of the discovery—that these heavenly bodies are fundamentally of the same nature as the Earth.

Such a conception can only result from a form of knowledge which at no point comes to a real grasp of man himself—a knowledge which takes hold only of what is external to man. The moment, however, we really take hold of Man as he stands within the Universe, we become able to discover the relationships between the several instrumental members of man's nature, the physical body, the etheric body, and the astral body and the corresponding entities, the corresponding realities of Being, in the Cosmos.

In regard to the etheric body of man, we find spread out in the Cosmos the universal Ether. The etheric body of man has a definite human shape, definite forms of movement within it, and so on. These, it is true, are different in the cosmic Ether. Nevertheless the cosmic Ether is fundamentally of like nature with what we find in the human etheric body. In the same way we can speak of a similarity between what is found in the human astral body and a certain astral principle that works through all things and all beings out in the far-spread Universe.

Here we come to something of extraordinary importance, something which in its true nature is quite foreign to the human being of to-day. Let us take our start from this. (A drawing is made on the blackboard). We have, first, the Earth; and on the Earth we have Man, with his etheric body. Then in the Earth's environment we have the cosmic Ether—the cosmic Ether which is of the same nature as the etheric in man. In man we also have the astral body. In the cosmic environment too there is Astrality. Where are we to find this cosmic Astrality? Where is it? It is indeed to be found, but we must first discover—what it is in the Cosmos that betrays the presence of cosmic Astrality; what it is that reveals it. Somewhere or other is the Astrality. Is this Astrality in the Cosmos quite invisible and imperceptible, or is it, after all, in some way perceptible to us?

In itself, of course, the Ether too is imperceptible for our physical senses. If I may put it so, when you are looking at a small fragment of Ether, you see nothing with your physical senses, you simply see through it. The Ether is like an empty nothingness to you. But when you regard the etheric environment as a totality, you behold the blue sky, of which we also say that it is not really there but that you are gazing into empty space. Now the reason why you see the blue of the sky is that you are actually perceiving the end of the Ether. Thus you behold the Ether as the blue of the heavens. The perception of the blue sky is really and truly a perception of the Ether. We may therefore say: In that we perceive the blue of the sky we are perceiving the universal Ether that surrounds us.

At first contact, we see through the Ether. It allows us to do so; and yet, it makes itself perceptible in the blue heavens. Hence the existence for human perception of the blue of the sky is expressed in that we say: The Ether itself, though imperceptible, yet rises to the level of perceptibility by reason of the great majesty with which it stands there in the Universe, revealing its presence, making itself known in the blue of the vast expanse.

Physical science theorises materialistically about the blue of the sky; and for physical science it is indeed very difficult to reach any intelligent conclusion on this point, for the simple reason that it is bound to admit that where we see the blue of the sky there is nothing physical. Nevertheless men spin out the most elaborate theories to explain how the rays of light are reflected and refracted in a peculiar way so as to call forth this blue of the sky. In reality, it is here that the super-sensible world begins already to hold sway. In the Cosmos the Supersensible does indeed become visible to us. We have only to discover where and how it becomes visible. The Ether becomes perceptible to us through the blue of the sky.

But now, somewhere there is also present the astral element of the Cosmos. In the blue sky the Ether peers through, as it were, into the realms of sense. Where then does the Astrality in the Cosmos peer through into the realms of perceptibility? The answer, my dear friends, is this.

Every star that we see glittering in the heavens is in reality a gate of entry for the Astral. Wherever the stars are twinkling and glittering in towards us, there glitters and shines the Astral. Look at the starry heavens in their manifold variety; in one part the stars are gathered into heaps and clusters, or in another they are scattered far apart. In all this wonderful configuration of radiant light, the invisible and super-sensible astral body of the Cosmos makes itself visible to us.

For this reason we must not consider the world of stars unspiritually. To look up to the world of stars and speak of worlds of burning gases is just as though—forgive the apparent absurdity of the comparison, but it is precisely true—it is just as though someone who loves you were gently stroking you, holding the fingers a little apart, and you were then to say that it feels like so many little ribbons being drawn across your cheek. It is no more untrue that little ribbons are laid across your cheek when someone strokes you, than that there exist up there in the heavens those material entities of which modern physics tells. It is the astral body of the Universe which is perpetually wielding its influences—like the gently stroking fingers—on the etheric organism of the Cosmos. The etheric Cosmos is organised for very long duration; it is for this reason that a star has its quality of fixity, representing a perpetual influence on the cosmic Ether by the astral Universe. It lasts far longer than the stroking of your cheek. But in the Cosmos things do last longer, for there we are dealing with gigantic measures. Thus in the starry heavens that we perceive, we actually behold an expression of the soul-life of the cosmic astral world.

In this way, an immense, unfathomable life, yet, at the same time, a soul-life, a real and actual life of the soul, is brought into the Cosmos. Think how dead the Cosmos appears to us when we look into the far spaces and see nothing but burning gaseous bodies. Think how living it all becomes when we know that the stars are an expression of the love with which the astral Cosmos works upon the etheric Cosmos—for this is to express it with perfect truth. Think then of those mysterious processes when certain stars suddenly light up at certain times,—processes which have only been explained to us by means of physical hypotheses that do not lead to any real understanding. Stars that were not there before, light up for a time, and disappear again. Thus in the Cosmos too there is a “stroking” of shorter duration. For it is true indeed that in epochs when divine Beings desire to work in an especial way from the astral world into the etheric, we behold new stars light up and fade away again.

We ourselves in our own astral body have feelings of delight and comfort in the most varied ways. In like manner in the Cosmos, through the cosmic astral body, we have the varied configuration of the starry heavens. No wonder that an ancient science, instinctively clairvoyant, describes this third member of our human organism as the “astral” or “starry” body, seeing that it is of like nature with that which reveals itself to us in the stars.

It is only the Ego that we do not find revealed in the cosmic environment. Why is this? We shall find the reason if we consider how this human Ego manifests here on the Earth, in a world that is in reality threefold,—physical, etheric and astral. The Ego of man, as it appears within the Universe, is ever and again a repetition of former lives on Earth; and again and again it finds itself in the life between death and a new birth. But when we observe the Ego in its life between death and a new birth, we perceive that the Etheric which we have here in the cosmic environment of the Earth has no significance for the human Ego. The etheric body is laid aside soon after death. It is only the astral world, that shines in towards us through the stars that has significance for the Ego in the life between death and a new birth. And in that world which glistens in towards us through the stars, in that world there live the Beings of the Higher Hierarchies with whom man forms his Karma between death and a new birth.

Indeed, when we follow this Ego in its successive evolutions through lives between birth and death and between death and a new birth, we cannot remain within the world of Space at all. For two successive earthly lives cannot be within the same space. They cannot be within that Universe which is dependent on spatial co-existence. Here therefore we go right out of Space and enter into Time. This is actually so. We go out of Space and come into the pure flow of Time when we contemplate the Ego in its successive lives on Earth.

Now consider this, my dear friends. In Space, Time is still present, of course, but within this world of Space we have no means of experiencing Time in itself. We always have to experience Time through Space and spatial processes. For example, if you wish to experience Time, you look at the clock, or, if you will, at the course of the sun. What do you see? You see the various positions of the hands of the clock or of the sun. You see something that is spatial. Through the fact that the positions of the hand or of the sun are changed, through the fact that spatial things are present to you as changing, you gain some idea of Time. But of Time itself there is really nothing in this spatial perception. There are only varied spatial configurations, varied positions of the hands of the clock, varied positions of the sun. You only experience Time itself when you come into the sphere of the soul's experience. There you do really experience Time, but there you also go out of Space. There, Time is a reality, but within the earthly world of Space, Time is no reality. What, then, must happen to us, if we would go out of the Space in which we live between birth and death and enter into the spacelessness in which we live between death and a new birth? What must we do? The answer is this: We must die!

We must take these words in their exact and deep meaning. On Earth we experience Time only through Space—through points in Space, through the positions of spatial things. On Earth we do not experience Time in its reality at all. Once you grasp this, you will say: “Really to enter into Time we must go out of Space, we must put away all things spatial.” You can also express it in other words, for it is really nothing else than—to die. It means, in very deed and truth: to die.

Let us now turn our eyes to this cosmic world that encircles the Earth—this cosmic world to which we are akin both through our etheric body, and also through our astral body—and let us look at the spiritual in this cosmic world. There have indeed been nations and human societies who have had regard only to the spiritual that is to be found within our earthly world of Space. Such peoples were unable to have any thoughts about repeated lives on Earth. Thoughts about repeated lives on Earth were possessed only by those human beings and groups that were able to conceive Time in its pure essence, Time in its spaceless character. But if we consider this earthly world together with its cosmic environment, or, to put it briefly, all that we speak of as the Cosmos, the Universe; and if we behold the spiritual manifest in it, we are then apprehending something of which it can be said that it had to be present in order that we might enter into our existence as earthly human beings; it had to be there.

Unfathomable depths are really contained in this simple conception,—that all that to which I have just referred, had to exist in order that we as earthly human beings might enter this earthly life. Infinite depths are revealed when we really grasp the spiritual aspect of all that is thus put before us. If we conceive this Spiritual in its completeness as a self-contained whole, if we consider it in its own purity and essence, then we have a conception of what was called “God” by those peoples who limited their outlook to the world of space alone.

These peoples—at any rate in their Wisdom-teachings—had come to feel: The Cosmos is woven through and through by a Divine element that is at work in it, and we can distinguish from this Divine element in the Cosmos that which is present, on the Earth in our immediate environment, as the physical world. We can also distinguish that which, in this cosmic, divine-spiritual world reveals itself as the Etheric, namely that which gazes down upon us in the blue of the sky. We can distinguish as the Astral in this divine world, that which gazes down upon us in the configuration of the starry heavens.

If we enter as fully as possible into the situation as we stand here, within the Universe, as human beings on this Earth, we shall say to ourselves: “We as human beings have a physical body: where, then, is the Physical in the Universe?” Here I am returning to something which I have already pointed out. The physical science of to-day expects to find everything which is on the Earth existing also in the Universe. But the physical organisation itself is not to be found in the Universe at all. Man has in the first place his physical organisation: then in addition he has the etheric and the astral. The Universe on the other hand begins with the Etheric. Out there in the Cosmos the Physical is nowhere to be found. The Physical exists only on the Earth, and it is but empty fancy and imagination to speak of anything physical in the far Universe. In the Universe there is the Etheric and the Astral. There is also a third element within the Universe which we have yet to speak about in this present lecture, for the Cosmos too is threefold. But the threefoldness of the Cosmos, apart from the Earth, is different from the threefoldness of the Cosmos in which we include the Earth.

Let these feelings enter into our earthly consciousness, the perceiving of the Physical in our immediate earthly dwelling-place; the feeling of the Etheric, which is both on the Earth and in the Universe; the beholding of the Astral, glistening down to the Earth from the stars, and most intensely of all from the Sun-star. Then, when we consider all these things and place before our souls the majesty of this world-conception, we can well understand how in ancient times, when with the old instinctive clairvoyance men did not think so abstractly, but were still able to feel the majesty of a great conception, they were led to realise: “A thought so majestic as this cannot be conceived perpetually in all its fullness. We must take hold of it at one special time, allowing it to work on the soul in its full, unfathomable glory. It will then work on in the inner depths of our human being, without being spoilt and corrupted by our surface consciousness.”—If we consider by what means the old instinctive clairvoyance gave expression to such a feeling, then out of all that combined to give truth to this thought in mankind in olden time, there remains to us to-day the institution of the Christmas Festival.

On Christmas Night, man, as he stands here upon the Earth with his physical, his etheric and his astral bodies, feels himself to be related to the threefold Cosmos, which appears to him in its Etheric nature, shining so majestically, and with the magic wonder of the night in the blue of the heavens; while face to face with him is the Astral of the Universe, in the stars that glitter in towards the Earth. As he realises how the holiness of this cosmic environment is related to that which is on the Earth itself, he feels that he himself with his own Ego has been transplanted from the Cosmos into this world of Space. And now he may gaze upon the Christmas Mystery—the new-born Child, the Representative of Humanity on Earth, who, inasmuch as he is entering into childhood, is born into this world of Space. In the fullness and majesty of this Christmas thought, as he gazes on the Child that is born on Christmas Night, he exclaims: “Ex Deo Nascimur—I am born out of the Divine, the Divine that weaves and surges through the world of Space.”

When a man has felt this, when he has permeated himself through and through with it, then he may also recall what Anthroposophy has revealed to us about the meaning of the Earth. The Child on whom we are gazing is the outer sheath of That which is now born into Space. But whence is He born, that He might be brought to birth in the world of Space? According to what we have explained to-day, it can only be from Time. From out of Time the Child is born.

If we then follow out the life of this Child and His permeation by the Spirit of the Christ-Being, we come to realise that this Being, this Christ-Being, comes from the Sun. Then we shall look up to the Sun, and say to ourselves: “As I look up to the Sun, I must behold in the sunshine that Time, which in the world of Space is hidden. Within the Sun is Time, and from out of the Time that weaves and works within the Sun, Christ came forth, came out into Space, on to the Earth.”

What have we then in Christ on Earth? In Christ on Earth we have That, which coming from beyond Space, from outside of Space, unites with the Earth.

I want you to realise how our conception of the Universe changes, in comparison with the ordinary present-day conception, when we really enter into all that has come before our souls this evening. There in the Universe we have the Sun, with all that there appears to us to be immediately connected with it—all that is contained in the blue of the heavens, in the world of the stars. At another point in the Universe we have the Earth with humanity. When we look up from the Earth to the Sun, we are at the same time looking into the flow of Time.

Now from this there follows something of great significance. Man only looks up to the Sun in the right way (even if it be but in his mind) when, as he gazes upwards, he forgets Space and considers Time alone. For in truth, the Sun does not only radiate light, it radiates Space itself, and when we are looking into the Sun we are looking out of Space into the world of Time. The Sun is the unique star that it is because when we gaze into the Sun we are looking out of Space. And from that world, outside of Space, Christ came to men. At the time when Christianity was founded by Christ on Earth, man had been all too long restricted to the mere Ex Deo Nascimur, he had become altogether bound up in it, he had become a Space-being pure and simple. The reason why it is so hard for us to understand the traditions of primeval epochs, when we go back to them with the consciousness of present-day civilisation, is that they always had in mind [Space], and not the world of [Time]. They regarded the world of [Time] only as an appendage of the world of [Space].²

Christ came to bring the element of Time again to men, and when the human heart, the human soul, the human spirit, unite themselves with Christ, then man receives once more the stream of Time that flows from Eternity to Eternity. What else can we human beings do when we die, i.e. when we go out of the world of Space, than hold fast to Him who gives Time back to us again? At the Mystery of Golgotha man had become to so great an extent a being of Space that Time was lost to him. Christ brought Time back again to men.

If, then, in going forth from the world of Space, men would not die in their souls as well as in their bodies, they must die in Christ, We can still be human beings of Space, and say: Ex Deo Nascimur, and we can look to the Child who comes forth from Time into Space, that he may unite Christ with humanity. But since the Mystery of Golgotha we cannot conceive of death, the bound of our earthly life, without this thought: “We must die in Christ.” Otherwise we shall pay for our loss of Time with the loss of Christ Himself, and, banished from Him, remain held spell-bound. We must fill ourselves with the Mystery of Golgotha. In addition to the Ex Deo Nascimur, we must find the In Christo Morimur. We must bring forth the Easter thought in addition to the Christmas thought. Thus the Ex Deo Nascimur lets the Christmas thought appear before our souls, and in the In Christo Morimur the Easter thought.

We can now say: On the Earth man has his three bodies, the physical, the etheric and the astral. The Etheric and Astral are also out there in the Cosmos, but the Physical is only to be found on the Earth. Out in the Cosmos there is no Physical. Thus we must say: On the Earth—physical, etheric, astral. In the Cosmos—no physical, but only the etheric and the astral.

Yet the Cosmos too is threefold, for what the Cosmos lacks at the lowest level, it adds above. In the Cosmos the Etheric is the lowest: on the Earth the Physical is the lowest. On Earth the Astral is the highest; in the Cosmos the highest is that of which man has to-day only the beginnings—that out of which his Spirit-Self will one day be woven. We may therefore say: In the Cosmos there is, as the third, the highest element, the Spirit-Selfhood.

Now we see the stars as expressions of something real. I compared their action to a gentle stroking. The Spirit-Selfhood that is behind them is indeed the Being that lovingly strokes,—only in this case it is not a single Being but the whole world of the Hierarchies. I gaze upon a man and see his form; I look at his eyes and see them shining towards me; I hear his voice; it is the utterance of the human being. In the same way I gaze up into the far Spaces of the world, I look upon the stars. They are the utterance of the Hierarchies,—the living utterance of the Hierarchies, kindling astral feeling. I gaze into the blue depths of the firmament and, perceive in it the outward revelation of the etheric body which is the lowest member of the whole world of the Hierarchies.

Now we may draw near to a still further realisation. We look out into the far Cosmos which goes out beyond earthly reality, even as the Earth with its physical substance and forces goes down beneath cosmic reality. As in the Physical the Earth has a sub-cosmic element, so in Spirit-Selfhood the Cosmos has a super-earthly element.

Physical science speaks of a movement of the Sun; and it can do so, for within the spatial picture of the Cosmos which surrounds us, we perceive by certain phenomena that the Sun is in movement. But that is only an image of the true Sun-movement—an image cast into Space. If we are speaking of the real Sun it is nonsense to say that the Sun moves in Space; for Space itself is being radiated out by the Sun. The Sun not only radiates the light; the Sun creates the Space itself. And the movement of the Sun is only a spatial movement within this created Space. Outside of Space it is a movement in Time. What seems apparent to us—namely, that the Sun is speeding on towards the constellation of Hercules—is only a spatial image of the Time-evolution of the Sun-Being.

To His intimate disciples Christ spoke these words: “Behold the life of the Earth; it is related to the life of the Cosmos. When you look out on the Earth and the surrounding Cosmos, it is the Father whose life permeates this Universe.³ The Father-God is the God of Space. But I make known to you that I have come to you from the Sun, from Time—Time that receives man only when he dies. I have brought you myself from out of Time.⁴ If you receive me, you receive Time, and you will not be held spell-bound in Space. But you find the transition from the one trinity—Physical, Etheric and Astral—to the other trinity, which leads from the Etheric and Astral to Spirit-Selfhood. Spirit-Selfhood is not to be found in the earthly world, just as the Earthly-Physical is not to be found in the Cosmos. But I bring you the message of it, for I am from the Sun.”

The Sun has indeed a threefold aspect. If one lives within the Sun and looks down from the Sun to the Earth, one beholds the Physical, Etheric and Astral. One may also gaze on that which is within the Sun itself. Then one still sees the Physical so long as one remembers the Earth or gazes down towards the Earth. But if one looks away from the Earth one beholds on the other side the Spirit-Selfhood. Thus one swings backwards and forwards between the Physical and the nature of the Spirit-Self. Only the Etheric and Astral in between are permanent. As you look out into the great Universe, the Earthly vanishes away, and you have the Etheric, the Astral and the Spirit-Selfhood. This is what you behold when you come into the Sun-Time between death and a new birth.

Let us now imagine first of all the inner mood of a man's soul to be such that he shuts himself up entirely within this Earth-existence. He can still feel the Divine, for out of the Divine he is born: Ex Deo Nascimur. Then let us imagine him no longer shutting himself up within the mere world of Space, but receiving the Christ who came from the world of Time into the world of Space, who brought Time itself into the earthly Space. If a man does this, then in Death he will overcome Death. Ex Deo Nascimur. In Christo Morimur. But Christ Himself brings the message that when Space is overcome and one has learned to recognise the Sun as the creator of Space, when one feels oneself transplanted through Christ into the Sun, into the living Sun, then the earthly Physical vanishes and only the Etheric and the Astral are there. Now the Etheric comes to life, not as the blue of the sky, but as the lilac-red gleaming radiance of the Cosmos, and forth from the reddish light the stars no longer twinkle down upon us but gently touch us with their loving effluence.

If a man really enters into all this, he can have the experience of himself, standing here upon the Earth, the Physical put aside, but the Etheric still with him, streaming through and out of him in the lilac-reddish light. No longer now are the stars glimmering points of light; they are radiations of love like the caressing hand of a human being. As we feel all this—the divine within ourselves, the divine cosmic fire flaming forth from within us as the very being of man; ourselves within the Etheric world and experiencing the living expression of the Spirit in the Astral cosmic radiance, there bursts forth within us the inner awakening of the creative radiance of Spirit, which is man's high calling in the Universe.

When those to whom Christ revealed these things had let the revelation sink deep into their being, then the moment came when they experienced the working of this mighty concept, in the fiery tongues of Pentecost. At first they felt the falling away, the discarding of the earthly-Physical as death. But then the feeling came; This is not death, but in place of the physical of the Earth, there now dawns upon us the Spirit-Selfhood of the Universe. “Per Spiritum Sanctum Reviviscimus.”

Thus may we regard the threefold nature of the one half of the year. We have the Christmas thought—Ex Deo Nascimur; the Easter thought—In Christo Morimur; and the Whitsun thought—Per Spiritum Sanctum Reviviscimus.

There remains the other half of the year. If we understand that too, there dawns on us the other aspect of our human life. If we understand the relationship of the physical to the soul of man and to the superphysical—which contains the true freedom of which man is to become a partaker on the Earth,—then in the interconnection of the Christmas, Easter and Whitsun festivals we understand the human freedom on Earth. As we understand man from out of these three thoughts, the Christmas thought, the Easter thought and the Whitsun thought, and as we let this kindle in us the desire to understand the remaining portions of the year, there arises the other half of human life which I indicated when I said: “Gaze upon this human destiny; the Hierarchies appear behind it—the working and weaving of the Hierarchies.” It is wonderful to look truly into the destiny of a human being, for behind it stands the whole world of the Hierarchies.

It is indeed the language of the stars which sounds towards us from the thoughts of Christmas, Easter and Whitsuntide; from the Christmas thought, inasmuch as the Earth is a star within the Universe; from the Easter thought inasmuch as the most radiant of stars, the Sun, gives us his gifts of grace; and from the Whitsun thought inasmuch as that which lies hidden beyond the stars lights into the soul, and lights forth again from the soul in the fiery tongues of Pentecost.

Enter into all this, my dear friends! I have told you of the Father, the Bearer of the Christmas thought, who sends the Son that through him the Easter thought may be fulfilled; I have told you further how the Son brings the message of the Spirit, so that in the thought of Whitsun man's life on Earth may be completed in its threefold being. Meditate this through, ponder it well; then for all the descriptive foundations I have already given you for an understanding of Karma, you will gain a right foundation of inner feeling.

Try to let the Christmas, Easter and Whitsun thoughts, in the way I have expressed them to you to-day, work deeply and truly into your human feeling, and when we meet again after the journey which I must undertake this Whitsun-tide for the Course on Agriculture—when we come together again, bring this feeling with you, my dear friends. For this feeling should live on in you as the warm and fiery thought of Pentecost. Then we shall be able to go further in our study of Karma; your power of understanding will be fertilised by what the Whitsun thought contains.

Just as once upon a time at the first Whitsun Festival something shone forth from each one of the disciples, so the thought of Pentecost should now become alive again for our anthroposophical understanding. Something must light up and shine forth from our souls. Therefore it is as a Whitsun feeling, to prepare you for the further continuation of our thoughts on Karma, which are related to the other half of the year, that I have given you what I have said to-day about the inner connections of Christmas, Easter and Whitsuntide.

• 1. From February until September, 1924, with intervals of visits to other towns and countries, Rudolf Steiner was giving at Dornach the great series of 49 lectures on Karma, subsequently produced in four volumes now available in English translation. The present lecture was given very shortly before the Whitsun Festival and deals with its specific significance for the problem of human destiny with which the Karma lectures deal.
  
  Lecturing as he was to Anthroposophists, Dr. Steiner begins at once with the fundamental fact of the three ‘bodies’ at work in the human organism. A full exposition of this is to be found in the book Theosophy, chapter I.
• 2. The bracketed words were transposed in the translation. Error brought to our attention by to Lucas Dreier
• 3. Cp. Paul: “God that made the world and all things therein, being Lord of heaven and earth, giveth to all life and breath and all things, and is not far from each one of us, for in him we live and move and have our being.” Acts XVII, 24–28.
• 4. “Time,” as here used, is what we usually designate as “Eternity”, i.e. a continuous, unbroken time-experience. What we usually call “Time” is our spatialised concept of real Time, separate successional events, measured by spatial changes.

DR. STEINER: I should like to speak of various matters to-day which can show you once more how the earth is connected with the whole universe—in which, as you know, it exists as a spherical body. From this aspect, then, let us consider the rivers and oceans.

You are aware that only a part of the earth's surface is solid land; for the most part the earth is a water-sphere, an ocean. And of the rivers it may be said that they have their source—they rise, as one says—somewhere on the earth and then make their way to the sea.

Let us take the Danube, for instance. You know that the Danube rises in the Black Forest. Or take the Rhine which rises in the Southern Alps. The Danube flows through various valleys into the Black Sea; the Rhine flows through various valleys into the North Sea. Now when we think of rivers and seas we generally only consider their course and where they flow out into the sea. Rivers give us a good deal of pleasure but we do not reflect on the great significance that rivers and oceans really have for the whole life of the earth.

We have as a rule more knowledge about the fluids in the human body. Man, as I have told you, consists for the most part of a volume of fluid, with the blood as a special kind of fluidity running through its veins. We also know that this flowing blood is of the greatest significance for life; it forms life, it maintains life. As physical men we are entirely dependent on the blood flowing rightly through the body and, moreover, taking a definite course. Were it to deviate from this course we should not be able to live. The fact that the arrangement of rivers and seas has just as great a significance for the earth is generally not considered at all. It is not usually realised that water actually forms the blood circulation of the earth. Why is this not realised as a rule?

Well, you see, the blood makes a more striking impression. It is red, it contains all sorts of substances and people say to themselves that blood is in fact a peculiar substance. As to water, one simply thinks—Oh, well, it's just water! It makes less impression and the substances which it contains in addition to hydrogen and oxygen, are not present to the same extent as, for instance, the iron in the blood. So people don't consider the matter again. Nevertheless it is true that the entire water-circulation is of immense importance for the life of the earth. Just as little as the human organism could live without a circulation of blood, could the earth exist if it had no circulation of water.

The water-circulation has a distinct character—namely, it takes its start from something that is quite different from that into which it enters when it finds its outlet in the ocean. If you follow up the rivers you find that they contain no salt: the water in the rivers is fresh water. The sea contains salt and all that the sea brings to maturity is founded on this salt-content. That is of extraordinary importance: water begins to circulate on the earth in a fresh, salt-free condition and ends in the ocean in a salty condition.

The subject is generally dismissed by the statement that such a river as the Rhine rises somewhere or other, takes this course (a sketch was made) and then flows into the sea. That in fact is just what is seen externally. But what is not considered is that whereas the river, the Rhine, for example, flows externally like this from the Southern Alps to the North Sea, there is a kind of stream of force under the earth, returning from the mouth of the river to its source. And what happens there (above the earth) is that the river is fresh water, contains no salt; what returns there (under the earth) is all the time carrying salt into the earth in the direction of the river. The earth acquires salts which actually come out of the sea. It would have no salt if the stream of salt did not return under the earth from the river's mouth to its source. The so-called geology which investigates the interior of the earth should always bear in mind that wherever there are river-beds, somewhat deeper in the ground there are deposits of salt.

Now, if there were no salt-deposits in the earth, no plant-roots would grow. For plant-roots only grow in the soil by obtaining the salt for nourishment. The plant is most salty in the root, above it gets less and less salty and the blossom has little salt. And if one asks whence it comes that the ground can bring forth plants, it must be replied: because it has a water-circulation. Just as in us the blood arteries go out from the heart and the veins return, bringing back the blue blood, so in the earth the arteries of rivers and streams branch out on the one hand, while below the earth the veins of salt return. Thus there is a genuine circulation.

Is there then some special reason for the fact that the earth consists on the one hand of a fluid salt-body, on the other hand of dry land, and that salt is continuously brought in from the sea while there is none in the fresh water rivers that course through the land?

Yes, you see, if one really investigates sea-water, one discovers that this salty sea-water stands in but slight connection with the universe. Just as with us, for example, the stomach is but slightly connected with the outer world—in fact, merely through what it receives—so there is very little connection between the interior of the sea and the heavens. Land, on the contrary, has a strong connection with the heavens—land through which the rivers flow, where plants are brought forth through the salty deposits, particularly, however, where there are flowing waters.

If we view the matter in this way then we approach the mountain springs in quite a different spirit! We delight in the rippling of the springs, in their beautiful flow, their wonderfully clear waters and so on. Yes, but that is not the only thing! Springs are in fact the eyes of the earth! The earth does not see out into the universe through the sea, because the sea is salt and that gives it an interior character like our stomach. The springs with their fresh water are open to the universe, just as our eyes look freely out into space. We can say therefore that in countries where there are springs, the earth looks far out into the universe; the springs are the earth's sense organs, whereas in the salt ocean we have more the earth's lower body, its bowels. It is naturally not the same as in the human body; there are not such enclosed organs, organs that can be delineated. It would be possible to sketch them, but they are not so evident. However, the earth has its bowels in the sea and its sense organs in the land. And everything through which the earth stands in connection with the cosmos comes from fresh water, everything through which the earth has its intestinal character comes from salt water.

Now I will furnish you with a proof that this is so. I once told you that the reproductive process in man and animal also stands in connection with the heavens. I said that it is not merely a development of the egg in the maternal body, but that forces from the universe work in upon it and bring about its roundness. We see the movement of the universe outside us as round, and thus this little egg is an image of the universe, because the forces work in upon it from all sides. And so where the reproductive process is at work, the heavenly is actually working into the earthly. You see the same thing in the eye, it is a sphere. I described the eye recently and how it is formed from the universe inwards. Sense organs and the eye are built in from the universe. If you observe the spleen you see that it is not spherical, it is formed more by terrestrial forces, the intestinal forces of the earth. That is just the difference.

If one only pays real attention to things then they give one proofs. I will presently give you a proof taken from sea and land, but first I will interpolate something else. I have told you that recently we have been making researches in our biological laboratory on the importance of the spleen. When we cannot eat regularly—we all eat more or less irregularly—the spleen is there to balance it all out: it is the regulator. We have produced the proof of this in our laboratory and there is a little booklet by Frau Kolisko (Not published in English.) which describes it all. While this experiment was being made we were obliged by the requirements of modern science to produce a palpable and evident proof. (This will no longer be necessary when science accepts super-sensible proofs, but it is still necessary to-day.) So we took a rabbit and removed the spleen and let the rabbit go on living without its being harmed in any way. This operation can be done with all care, and it was a complete success. Later the rabbit died from an accidental chill in no way connected with the operation. Then we dissected the body and were anxious to see the effect of the removal of the spleen. The interesting thing is ... now, what must be said by Spiritual Science? What remains when one has cut out the physical spleen? Well, now, if the spleen is here (a sketch was made) and one cuts it out, removes it, on this spot there still remains the etheric body of the spleen and its astral body. The spleen is given its form by the earth which has developed it. If one removes the physical spleen, leaving the etheric spleen, as was the case with the rabbit, what must happen? The following should happen. Whereas the physical spleen is dependent on the earth, inclines to the earth, the etheric spleen, which has now become free and is no longer hampered by the physical spleen, must come again under the influence of the heavens. And lo and behold, when we dissected the rabbit there was a small, round body, formed of fine white tissue! Thus there was complete confirmation. Something appeared which according to the expectation of Spiritual Science ought to appear. In a relatively short time a small webbed body about the size of a nut had arisen. Therefore you see that one only has to go to work in the right way and one finds proofs everywhere for the statements of Spiritual Science. You can gather from this that pronouncements made out of spiritual knowledge can enter quite concretely into the physical realm, if right methods are pursued.

Now just as the white body was formed here through the surrounding influences, so are the rudiments of man and animal formed spherically in the ovum through the influence of the heavens.

This knowledge makes us realise that fish are in a special situation, for they never actually come on to the land. They can at most gasp a little on land, but they cannot live on land, they must live in the sea. Hence fish are organised in a particular way; they do not come where the earth is open to the universe. It is therefore with great difficulty that fish develop sense organs and in particular the organs of reproduction, for the formation of these is dependent on the influence of the cosmos. Fish must make careful use of whatever light and warmth falls into the sea from without in order that they may breed and develop sense organs. But nature, as we know, attends to many things. You see it with the so-called goldfish: they use their whole skin for receiving the influence of the light and hence they become so golden. Fish take every opportunity of snapping up what falls into the water from the universe. They must lay their eggs wherever some light can enter, so that they may be hatched from outside. Thus fish are organised, as it were, to live under the water; they do not come out of the water.

What I am saying does not apply so very much to freshwater fish—fresh water can be penetrated from the universe—but it applies very much to sea fish. And these show that they are organised to make use of all that enters the salt water from the universe in order to be able to breed.

The salmon, however, forms a quite remarkable exception. It has in fact an extraordinary organisation. It must live in the sea in order to develop proper muscles and to give its muscles right nourishment it needs the earth-forces found primarily in the salt of the sea. But when the salmon lives in the sea it cannot breed. Its organism shuts it off completely from the universe and salmon would have long ago died out if they had had to breed in the sea. The salmon is an exception; whereas it becomes strong in the sea and develops its muscles, it is practically blind and it cannot reproduce its species there. The reproductive organs and sense organs get weak and stunted; on the other hand, salmon in the sea get fat. Now in order not to die out—we can see this by the salmon here in the North Sea—they make a journey every year up into the Rhine, and so get the name of “Rhine salmon.” But the Rhine makes the salmon thin, it loses its muscles again; the fat it gained in the salt ocean it loses in the Rhine. Yet in the Rhine the salmon can breed, for while it gets slender, the sense organs and in particular the reproductive organs, in both male and female, become well developed. Thus every year the salmon must journey from the salt ocean to the freshwater Rhine in order to breed. Then while the old are still alive and the young ones are there, they all make the journey back again to the sea in order to get rid of their slimness and regain their fat.

You see how this is all in full accord. Where the earth is salty the earth forces are at work upon the organs that are developed by the earth. Our own muscles are developed by the earth when we move with the forces of gravity. Gravity is the earth-force and works upon everything muscular, everything bony. The earth shares its salt with us and we get strong bones and muscles. With this salt excretion of the earth, however, we could do nothing for our senses and the reproductive organs; they would wither away. These must always come under the influence of extraterrestrial forces, the forces coming from the heavens. And the salmon shows what a distinction it makes between fresh and salt water. It goes into salt water to take up earth forces and get fat.

Thus the earth can be said to have a kind of circulation with respect to animal-life as well, as for instance, in the case of salmon.

This circulation drives the salmon alternately into the sea and into the river. They go to and fro, to and fro. The whole salmon community goes to and fro. One can see so clearly from the salmon how everything alive on the earth is in movement.

If we have learnt this from the salmon, it gives us the picture of something else, something that is always before our eyes and is such a wonderful spectacle: the birds of passage. They travel to and fro in the air, the salmon travels to and fro in the water. Salmon migration in the water is the same as bird migration in the air, except that salmon go to and fro between salt water and fresh water and the birds between the colder and warmer regions that they need. In order to come into the right earth-forces of warmth, birds must go to the south and there they develop their muscles. In order to have the forces of the heavens they must come into the purer air of the north; there they mature the reproductive organs. Such creatures need the whole earth. Only the higher animals, the mammals, and man, have become more independent of the earth, have emancipated themselves and reached a greater independence in their own organisation.

This, however, is only apparently the case. In reality we human beings are at the same time actually two people. We are still more—I have told you: physical man, etheric man, etc. But even in the physical man we are really two people, a right man and a left man. The right half of the body is vastly different from the left. I think the minority of you sitting here would be able to write with the left hand; we write with the right hand. But the part of the nervous system connected with speech is situated in the left half of the brain. There are strongly marked convolutions there but none in the corresponding place at the right side. In a left-handed person this is reversed; those who are left-handed have the speech-organisation on the right—not the external organisation, but the internal, which arouses speech. In this respect man is extremely different on left and right. But this is so elsewhere too; the heart is situated more to the left, the stomach is on the left, the liver on the right. But even organs ostensibly symmetrical are not wholly so. Our lungs have (here) on the left two lobes, on the right, three. So the right side of man differs very much from the left side. What is the reason of this? Let us start from something very simple. We do not, as a rule, learn to write with the left hand but with the right hand. This is an activity which depends more on the etheric body. The physical body is heavier and is more developed on the left, the etheric body more on the right. The left forms two lobes; the right, being more active, brings more life into the lungs and forms three lobes. On the left, man is more physical, on the right, more etheric. [See Dr. Steiner's lectures entitled: Anthroposophy, Psychosophy, Pneumatosophy, found in Wisdom of Man, of the Soul, and of the Spirit ] And so too with speech. For right-handed people more nourishment is required by the left part of the brain than the right. And so every possible arrangement is made for man to contain the earth-forces on the left, and more the etheric forces of the heavens on the right.

As our modern science is only willing to recognise matter, it is just material things about which it does not know very much. In the education of children it has introduced the harmful practice of making children learn everything with the left and right hand equally. Well, but man is not in the least organised for that! If that practice is carried to excess, education will make people half insane, for the human body is organised to be more physical on the left and more etheric on the right. But what does modern science care about physical, etheric? Both are the same to the scientists—left man, right man. We must be able to penetrate these things through spiritual science if we are to know anything about them. So on the left, man is more earthly, and on the right if the word is not misunderstood—more heavenly, more cosmic.

Man has however already largely emancipated himself, as I have said. He develops this left-earthly element, this right-heavenly element in such a way as to be able to carry it about as physical man. It is no longer remarked that on the left he has a tendency to the earth and on the right to the heavens. But there are people who have a greater tendency to the earth and they generally lie on their left side for sleep. People lie on the right side either when they are tired of the left or when they occupy themselves with forces inclining more to the heavens. Such matters are naturally difficult to observe since all sorts of other things come into consideration. When a person lies on the right side it may only be because that is the dark part of the room—that too could be a reason. And although one is not by any means bound to find it so, yet on the whole people tend to sleep on their left side, since that is the earth-side. But man has really emancipated himself from the earth and is independent in what he does. It can be observed however in the animal; one sees the secrets of the world everywhere revealed in a very remarkable way.

Imagine that the surface of the sea is here (drawing on blackboard); underneath is the salt sea-water with all sorts of substances in it. Now there are certain fish which are quite remarkably organised. They are organised with a very strong inclination to earth-forces, while other fish snatch eagerly at all the light and air that come into the water. They cannot breathe in the air as they have no lungs; they collapse and die in the air, but with their gills they snap at all the air and light coming into the water. But there is a fish called halibut in the larger variety and sole or plaice in the smaller variety which is very good for food. It has great nutritive value, more perhaps than any other fish, and this shows that it inclines to the earth, since foodstuffs come from the earth. The halibut sides with the earth, so to speak. So what may one expect from these fish? We may expect them to show by their habits that they side with the earth. And so they do; they lie down on one side and this becomes pale and white. And so thoroughly do they lie on the one side that the head is twisted round and the eyes are both placed on the other side. A sole looks like this from below (sketch); there it is quite flat and white, and on the other side, above, both the eyes are set and the head is turned round, because the sole always lies on the left side. The left side produces the nourishment and is pale and white. The other side takes on colour from the heavens, etc., becomes bluish, brownish and the eyes and head are turned away from the food side. So the sole is quite lop-sided, it has all the organs on the one side while the other is flat and pale. The halibut really produces a great deal of nutritive substance because it inclines to the earth. Some become over 600 lb. in weight. Halibut therefore give a clear demonstration: they always lie on one side since it is the earth that attracts them. If a man could lie just as forcibly every night on his left side, his head would twist round and he too would always peer out from one side. But it does not get as far as this with man; he has emancipated himself, as I have said, and maintains his independence.

Still, even man can be affected. One may find, for example, a person with a remarkable complaint: he sees with the right eye, or at any rate sees with one eye somewhat better than with the other. If this is not inborn, one can generally discover by questioning that he lies on the other side for sleeping. The earth-forces are working on the side upon which one very frequently lies and the eye becomes somewhat weak-sighted. It is not affected so strongly as in the case of the halibut, but still slightly. The eye that is turned away from the earth becomes somewhat stronger. You see how remarkable these connections are. I have said that nature somewhere or other shows us with what forces she is working. When one sees a sole—the smaller ones are to be seen in any fish market, the larger ones are in the ocean—one realises that the nutritive part can only be formed just where it is, it must be separate. If these fish need anything from the heavens they must always take on that direction and the reproductive organs can be developed. These fish go about it differently from the salmon; salmon migrate, they go from the North Sea to the Rhine in order to be able to breed. Soles always lie on the one side, so that the heavens work from the other side and in this way they can develop their senses and reproductive organs.

And the earth itself, what does the earth do Well, if there were only the salt sea, the earth would long ago have perished; it cannot exist by itself alone. There are not only the salt seas but the freshwater rivers and streams, and the freshwater receives from universal spaces the reproductive forces for the earth. The salt ocean can bring in nothing from the wide universe which will give the earth continuous refreshment. When you go to a spring and the wonderfully pure water is bubbling out, you will notice how green everything is near the spring, what a wonderful scent there is. All is so fresh. Yes, and what is so fresh there by the spring refreshes the whole living earth as well. The earth opens itself there as if through the eyes and sense organs to cosmic space. And one can observe how living creatures like the salmon and the sole make their way to where they can find this. They have a kind of instinct to attach themselves to the earth. The salmon seeks the fresh waters direct, the sole turns to the light by so arranging its body. It cannot come to the springs, but the springs are where the earth turns to the light. The sole, the fish, must turn direct to the light with its own body.

These things are immensely instructive, because they show us what is still present in man, but cannot be so well observed since he has broken away from the earth. And if one is not observant of such things one has really no understanding of the whole life of the earth. Indeed, if we look at the ocean and observe the sole, we can realise: Yes, by means of the sole the ocean opens itself everywhere to the heavens! Soles are a proof that the sea is thirsty for the heavens, since its salty content turns away from the universe. One can say that soles express the thirst of the sea for light and air. And if we look at our own circulation, we too, in fact, have fine sense organs, the organs of touch, at the places where we are saltier, where the muscles are situated. Here too man makes himself open to the outer world, though not directly, as through the eyes. These places correspond as it were to the places where soles are to be found in the sea. Soles make themselves open to the heavens and this gives them an extraordinary acuteness. Just as we become skilful when we are able to make good use of our external organs of touch, so the sole becomes skilful through the sea, because it makes itself open to the heavens. Look at what is underneath in the sea—it is heavy and clumsy. Soles, oh! they get terribly cunning, they become sly creatures just by turning away from the sea on one side. Although they turn to the earth-forces as well, they feel: the earth-forces are just for themselves. They accumulate nutritive material—up to about 600 lb. as I said—but soles have these fine sense organs through which they open themselves to the heavens. They eat other fish—smaller ones. But if a sole approached, the other fish would flee away from it on all sides as if from a spectre. For other fish consider it necessary to have eyes at the sides—a sole affects them exactly as if a human being were approaching. The fish would rapidly get away and soles would have nothing to eat if they were not cleverer than the others. But the other fish, those which have an eye at either side, are in fact not so clever as they do not turn so definitely to the heavens. A sole seeks out places where the sea has a sort of little shore in the shallower parts, and there it lies down. It bores into the ground with its flat body, uses its jaws to cover itself a little with sand and then whirls up sand, but so fine that a fish can swim through. Then come the fishes and crabs, do not notice the sole, and instantly when they have passed over, it snatches and snaps at them! The sole does it very cleverly indeed! But of course only a creature could do it which is linked in a close connection with the forces of the universe.

Such a creature then has developed its physical body on one side and on the other side it develops especially powerfully the invisible etheric body. We can see just by such things that the forces of intelligence in us are not derived from earthly forces. Earthly forces makes us muscular, give us salts; forces from the heavens give us forces which are at the same time those of reproduction and of intelligence.

You see, a man in a certain way is actually a small earth-sphere. Man too consists, as I have often said, of about 90 per cent of water. Man too is a fish, for the solid part which is only 10 per cent, swims there in the water. We are really all of us fish, swimming in our own water. It is even admitted by science that in essentials we are a small ocean. And as the sea sends out rivers, so does our sea, our fluid body send out salt-free juices. We too have our freshwater streams. They lie outside the muscles and bones. On the other hand, within the muscles and bones we have the same salt deposits as the sea has. Our nourishment is actually in the bones and muscles. We are therefore, in this respect too, a small earth-sphere: we have our salt sea in us.

If the fluidity, the freshwater streams become too strong—which can easily occur in children if the milk is not rich enough in salts—then the child becomes rickety, gets the so-called “English sickness.” When a person gets too much salt he becomes too much a sea, his bones become brittle and the muscles unwieldy and clumsy. There must always be a balance between our salt consumption and what is contained in other foods.

Now what is it that lies in other foodstuffs? Look at a plant: you know now that plants grow because there are salt streams under the earth, returning from the river-mouth, which spread out and make the plants grow. So the plant finds its salt within the earth, but when it emerges from the earth it goes on growing towards the blossoms. The blossom becomes beautifully coloured because it takes up the light. There in the blossom the plant absorbs the light, in the root it absorbs the salt. There outside it becomes a light-bearer, there beneath it becomes a salt-bearer. Down below it is like the sea-part of the earth, up above it is like the heavens. The root is rich in salt, the blossom rich in light. In earlier times this was much better known and what is in the blossom was called “Phosphor.” To-day when everything is materialistic, phosphor is only a solid body. Phos = light, phor = bearer, phosphor = light-bearer; phosphor was actually that in the blossom which carried the light. The mineral “phosphorus” has received its name because of the way it gives out light when it is ignited. But the real light-bearer is the plant- blossom. The plant-blossom is phosphorus. Therefore for those organs in our human body, which as it were contain the freshwater currents, we need light; for the muscles, the bones, for that in us which ought to become salty we need precisely salt and solid ingredients in our food. Between them there must be the right balance—each must be consumed in the right quantity.

And so it is too with the earth. However far you may have travelled you will not have seen—nor has the globe-trotter, nor the genuine world traveller anywhere seen that the earth has prepared itself a meal! But nevertheless it does nourish itself, substances are continuously being exchanged, the earthly element is ascending all the time through mist and fog. And you know that the rain-water which falls is distilled; it is pure water and contains nothing else. But the sea is nourished through the salt in rarefied condition from cosmic space. There is no need to keep to meal-times! It is only we men, who have broken away from the earth, who must procure our food from it. The earth is nourished by the fine substances to be found everywhere in the universe. It is fed continuously, but one does not notice it because it is such a fine and delicate process. You see, if you look at a man quite superficially, you do not notice that he is continually absorbing oxygen. So too with the earth, one does not notice that all the time it is receiving nourishment from cosmic space.

Now we human beings keep to our meal-times. There we take our nourishment, through the stomach into the lower body. This is quite obvious, extremely obvious. But in breathing it is less obvious. It is in respect of the obvious that social questions arise. One man is better off, another worse off. Men all want to be well off—social questions arise in respect of the obvious. But social questions are not so clear in respect of the air which we all inhale. There it is not so easy to say that one man deprives another—there is a little truth in it, but not very much. In the case of our lower body we differ entirely from the earth. In the matter of breathing we are more like the earth, our breathing is performed almost unnoticed. But in fact we are all the time absorbing iron through our hearing—not only do we hear—we are absorbing iron in a very fine state. Through the eyes we absorb light and other substances too. This can be discovered from those people who are lacking in these substances. Through the nose in particular we take in an immense amount of substance without noticing it! With our lower body we have broken away from the earth and made ourselves free. So there we can only absorb foodstuffs created by the earth, baked and made more solid. We can take in the air because it is in the cosmos, and with our head and the senses we do what the earth does. There we receive nourishment out of the universe in the same way as the earth itself. The head is not formed spherically without reason; it deals with the universe just as the earth does. Only down below gravity enters, there the human body is developed according to the earth; physical hands—this gravity draws downwards. Gravity has not such an influence on the head; that remains spherical. So there we must pass from the visible to the invisible. One must say: The soles would die in spite of feeding on fish and crabs—for they only eat these for the sake of the pale, flat under-body—if they were not to take in what comes from the universe through having made themselves one-sided. These are the fine, the delicate connections through which one looks into the laws and secrets of the cosmos.

This is what Spiritual Science must call attention to again and again, namely, that one must learn to know the true laws, not through crude superficial observation but through fine and delicate perception.

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.