The Rudolf Steiner Archive

To what I was able to say to you here, a year ago, more has doubtless been added for all of you, by a very forceful teacher—I mean, as the latest great teacher, those significant events which have taken place since last we gathered here. Those events spoke to you all the more forcibly because they were the fulfillment of what many of you had believed for a long time would come to pass. Truly it is a long way in content, though, seemingly short in time, back to those first days of August 1914, when amid countless hopes, and even more illusions, Germany suddenly marched out with an army that was not yet on a war-footing, that did not yet have its mobilization-order, and accomplished the siege of Louvain; a long way back to those days when because of various illusions people had already grown accustomed to think and to repeat in speech what certain sides were commanding to be thought. It is even a long way back to those days last autumn when the army outside the German boundaries was in danger of being cut off within a few days from all home supplies, a possibility which immediately led through the well-known events to something that, to you at least, is of greatest importance. All this is a long way back, in significance, even though the time embraces only a few years. And for men of deep vision there is the added disillusionment, that not only Germany's external military capitulation but her spiritual capitulation also was brought about by the very man to whom many looked in the autumn of 1918 as a last hope. The events that took place in that autumn of 1918 were very fitting proofs indeed of all those things which in so many connections could only be indicated between the lines, things which in recent years, as you well know, it was quite impossible to express openly inside the boundaries of what was then the German Empire.

Now, my dear friends,—and this must be said today and to you especially in the sense in which it has often been said here—we are confronted, as it were, by a trial that we must undergo, a test of that which has been developed among us and which I should like to call by an expression that sounds strange, perhaps,—“our Anthroposophical conviction”. Again and again, throughout the last year especially, I have emphasized the fact that this Anthroposophical conviction of ours must not confine itself to the taking in of ideas, in order merely to enjoy a kind of mystic feeling of inner well-being: and that is precisely what the present state of affairs teaches us so loudly and so eloquently. Many of us have been content to find in Anthroposophy something that will answer certain soul-questions for us—which, to be sure, is one's privilege. But truly, it is not without reason that the fact has been emphasized again and again in the last year, that our anthroposophical conviction must lead us further; it must lead us to a better understanding of immediate practical life, which for a thoughtful person is penetrated by the spirit; it must lead as to a better understanding than is possible when one does not have the background of this anthroposophical conviction. It is not for nothing that those persona who have been privileged to permeate themselves with an Anthroposophical conviction have been called to think-through the great problem which mankind faces. Now in a certain sense we face a test of whether that which we have been able to assimilate, which as a matter of fact has often accomplished nothing more than the uncovering of a superior kind of egoism,—whether that can really penetrate our understanding, our feelings, our hearts, so thoroughly that we will awake to the tasks of ever greater magnitude which we are bound to encounter in the immediate future. For much that is now crowding down upon us is just in its infancy. We face the beginnings, my dear friends, of many things. We must learn the lessons that events teach. Only think how the whole of life converged in these events. Think now those men who often seemed of all people the most practical, who regarded Spiritual-Science as a frightful whim, turned out, with all their practicalness, to be hardly awake to what came bursting upon mankind with overpowering elemental force. One must recall today the way in which those persons to whom the earthly destinies of mankind were entrusted, spoke immediately before the great world-war catastrophe. Years ago, in this place, I remarked upon the manner in which they spoke. Today I will only recall to your minds those critical sessions of the German Reichstag, when the minister responsible at that time for Germany's foreign policy could say: “The general political expansion has recently gone forward in a gratifying manner”. And in the same speech he could say: “Our relations with Russia are all that could be desired; the cabinet at Petrograd is not troubled by the press agitation, and we will be able to continue our friendly, neighborly, relations.” He could say in the same speech: “Most gratifying negotiations have been entered into with England, which will be consummated in the near future in the interest of world peace; upon the whole the two governments [he meant the English and the German] so stand that relations between them will become ever firmer and firmer”.

Notice, my dear friends, that those things were said by persons who were looked up to as directors of the destinies of mankind. They made those statements at the same time that I was compelled to say what I have since repeated many times—it was in my lecture in Vienna in the spring of 1914: “The tendencies of life prevailing in the present day will become stronger and stronger until finally they will destroy themselves by their own force. He who penetrates social life with spiritual vision sees how everywhere the conditions exist from which are bound to spring frightful social abscesses: that is the great anxiety regarding civilization that one who penetrates into existence must feel. That is the dread that is so oppressive, and that has compelled one to speak of the means that can be employed toward a solution, so that one would like to shout it aloud to the world. If the social organism develops any further in the direction it has been taking up to the present time, then sores will break out in civilization which will be the same for the social organism as cancers are for the human physical organism”.One spoke thus in that spring of 1914, and was regarded by' the so-called practical people as a dreamer. That general expansion of which Herr von Jagow spoke at that time before the enlightened assembly of the German Reichstag,—before men who should have had some judgment, but who heard everything tranquilly and believed that expansion went forward in such a direction that the following year at least ten to twelve million men were killed, and three times as many were crippled. My dear friends, I say this emphatically because it must be said today: It is essential that one gain an insight into human affairs through quite a different kind of thinking than that to which the leading circles were accustomed. It is essential today that one understand over better and more thoroughly what flowed out of the old world-conception. Such old thinking is worthless even for practical life, because practical life produced more and more the most impossible thoughts, which necessarily led to catastrophe. It is not a question of manufacturing thoughts about readjustment, but,of this: of realizing that humanity must learn new lessons in regard to its deepest thinking. That is the reason why one spoke so seriously of the necessity of renewing one's whole conception of the universe, the need for all of mankind to turn to the sources of reality, that lie in the spiritual life alone. For finally it all comes down to this: the necessity of realizing that we do not merely need organizations in this or that field, altered in this or that way, but that above all we need something quite different for the future, and for the very nearest future: what we need is heads in which something quite different pulsates than pulsated in those heads that were shaped by the influence of a worn-out conception of the universe. Before all things we need a new organizing, a new building of thoughts in men's heads. That is what one has wanted to work for during the last twenty years, for the work had become necessary. Heads are what we need, constructed differently from those which plunged mankind into disaster.

So long as this is not realized thoroughly, and so long as it is not realized that the light from Spiritual Science alone can illumine these beclouded heads: so long, whether people think as Conservatives or Radicals or however they think, no improvement of any kind can come about. With any of the trifling means that issue from the old thoughts there will be no salvation insured to mankind. New thoughts above all things are needed, new thoughts that can only spring up from the ground of what has been talked of in this place for years as the greatest need for the present age and for the immediate future.

You are acquainted, my dear friends, with the so-called Appeal to the German People and to the Civilized World which arose out of the necessity of the time: in which is represented quite openly what in recent years I have taken pains to express in narrow circles, where to be sure it found no response, where the desire was only to hear the thunder of cannons, not the Voice of the Spirit. You know that in this Appeal the demand is made definitely for that which lies in the impulse actually present at this time in human evolution itself. For, my dear friends, he who can see the forces that are active in the world of men considers as the greatest unhealthiness those abstract, so-called immortal, ideals which come not out of a real spiritual life but only out of its reflected images, human concepts and ideas that have no reality out are only images in a mirror. One must be especially conscious of that in the present day. Also in the present day there will be countless men who believe they are saying something full of significance when they tell how mankind can be made everlastingly happy, when they talk of ideal conditions that must be gained for mankind. My dear friends, such ideas of everlastingness and such ideal conditions for mankind are not in the thoughts of one who derives his knowledge from actual spiritual spiritual life. As I have always explained it here, evolution has been like this: one definite epoch has peen followed by another; and above all for each big epoch of post-Atlantean time a single concrete Ideal has been present, just as also for our time and the immediate future. It is not a question of creating a government that will last for a thousand years in a chiliastic manner; but of what the spiritual world desires to bring to realization for a short space of time,—and that, one can only see if one really devotes oneself to Spiritual Science. Our time is in serious need of that which the Appeal presented as its fundamental demand: the threefolding of the social organism. The social organism can only become healthy by means of this threefolding, of which you have read in the Appeal, and as you will find it in my book The Threefold Commonwealth Life Necessities of the Present and Future. The present cycle of humanity demands this threefolding.

Think, my dear friends,—all would have been quite different if in the middle of 1917, or even as late as the autumn of 1917, an important nation, either Germany or Austria, had advocated this threefolding as manifesting the impulse of Middle Europe, in contrast to the so-called Fourteen Points of Woodrow Wilson drawn up from an American point of view. At that time it was an historic necessity. I said to Kühlmann then, “You have a choice: one alternative is to listen sensibly to what is proclaiming itself now in the evolution of humanity as something which is to happen for what I am setting forth is not some program, as there are so many today, but something that is read out of the evolution of mankind and that quite certainly will be realized in the next fifteen, twenty, or twenty-five years, but which above all must be realized in Middle Europe. You have these alternatives: either to listen to reason and accomplish sensibly what wants to be accomplished; or else go straight into revolutions and cataclysms.” Instead of listening to reason we got the peace, the so-called peace, of Brest-Litowsk. Think what it would have been (this can be said without boasting) if at that time amid the thunder of cannons, in contrast to the Fourteen Points, the voice of the Spirit could have been heard. All of Eastern Europe would have had an understanding for the threefold social organism in the place of Tsarism (anyone knows this who is acquainted with the forces in Eastern Europe). For that would really have been only what was really obliged to come about.

Those who were sympathetic at the time to the ideas of the Threefold Commonwealth at the most offered their opinion that they should be published in a brochure. Now think what folly that would have been then. It would have remained as literature among all the other things that were not read then. Times change. Today, with the days of October and November 1918 lying between then and now, everything has to be given out wholesale; today the proper way is to adopt a wide publicity about these things. Those people are the greatest menaces to mankind who think that if a thing is right for practical life it must be right at all times in the same way. Things have to be judged at different times from entirely different standpoints.

My dear friends, one must look more deeply into human evolution if one would appreciate the complete far-reaching practicalness of what lies at the foundation of the Threefold Commonwealth. This threefolding—I must emphasize it again and again—is not something that can abruptly come into being. It is what the Spirit of the Time and of the Present demands unconditionally from man, what the Spirit of the Time desires to realize; it is what the Spirit of the Time (and when you hear what follows you will understand this statement which I can now give out) is actually subjectively bringing to pass. And chaos results precisely from the fact that men think and, especially, act differently from the way the Spirit of the Time thinks and acts. As a matter of fact what is contained in this threefolding has been coming into being since the sixtieth year of the 19th century; only, men have talked and maintained an attitude in violent opposition to all that came into existence through events. You know, it is a question of dividing the social organism into three parts—a spiritual part, a real state or political part, and an economic part. I should like to insist before going further that the truth of this fundamental conception can be grasped by mere healthy human understanding, as can everything that is won through Spiritual Science. But I do not believe one can come to it in the right way through present-day thinking—(I beg you not to forget I said: in the right way). There are men who have reached something similar, but the essential thing is that one should accept it on a real, practical basis—a basis that takes into consideration that which is struggling to come into existence in our time, and which actually is beginning to work itself out.

Today let us consider—as a prelude, I might say—just one instance that can help us to a conception of what an exhaustive study of the time reveals in regard to this threefolding. You see, my dear friends, when recently, in the last four centuries, what one calls today the capitalistic economic order and the modern technical order swept over mankind, a new habit of thought, a new conception of the world, came too. If the so-called History in the schools were not a fable convenue then one would learn from history how radically the habits of thought of the entire civilized world changed from the 13th, 14th 15th centuries on into the following centuries. That that has all evolved slowly is a superficial view; for in historical development there are really great and sudden changes. Just such a change lies behind the whole development during, the last 3 or 4 centuries of the spiritual life-habits and thought-habits of mankind. I should like to mention especially something that appeared under our very eyes. I mean always soul-eyes, but which really has hardly been estimated at its true value. It was allowed to go to waste. What small roles in the life of humanity, especially among the Germans, have so-called spiritual personalities really played: How little in the last few centuries has the general schooling at the Universities helped to draw what has unfolded in single spiritual individualities into the general cultural wealth. Take instance of Goethe which I have often mentioned here. Goethe had a great comprehensive conception of the universe; something colossal for the evolution of mankind was taking place during the years from 1749 when Goethe was born to 1832 when he died. Enormous spiritual impulses lay in this Goethe. But let us see what impression Goethe's world-conception, Goetheanism, made on the German people: we obtain an appallingly sad picture. Those very persons who think they know something about Goethe know nothing at all of the deepest impulses of his spiritual being. And perhaps in a still higher degree one could speak in the same way of many others. One must say, my dear friends, that since the spread of technical science and capitalism the spiritual life of single personalities, which was important precisely because of its general human quality, became—one cannot say it in any other way—a parasite, a parasitic growth on the ordinary body of culture. It existed, but fundamentally it existed for naught. As if to prove just that: that the spiritual life of Goethe, for instance, was for naught—that it was thrown back, not absorbed, but merely flirted with theatrically: as if to prove that, we see the Goethe Society itself, which regards itself as the official custodian of Goetheanism, asking from an impulse that became more and more customary—Whom shall we choose as president for our Goethe Society? And the thought was not, who best understands Goetheanism?—but, who can do the best bowing and scraping if the G. S. has to appear at court? And then a minister of finance was chosen as the first president of the Goethe society in Weimar, a man whose spiritual path had never led to Goethe. What might show one the hollowness of the whole thing was the gentleman's surname: Kreutzwendedich von Rheinbaben (English: “Turn thou, oh Cross”). Kreutzwendedich von Rheinbaben was chosen then as by an irony of fate to be the president of the Goethe Society. These seem to be unimportant facts; out just the fact that they can be regarded as unimportant, when in truth they are symptoms of the deepest feelings: that is the horrible thing. Whoever does not comprehend these facts as important symptoms revealing inmost thoughts and feelings shows himself in agreement truly with all that has led mankind into such dire calamity. Now compare this parasitism of the spiritual life, this lack of connection between what is produced on the heights of humanity, and the general life of the people—compare this with earlier ages. It could not have been thought of in earlier ages. Just think what impression a Buddha had, for example, on the general life of the later Indian people. Compare this popularity of Buddha with the popularity that a Goethe had. Perhaps you will say: But by the side of Goethe are so many other spiritual heroes; Buddha was only one. Whoever makes that objection shows that he does no understand anything of the fundamental conditions of the evolution of mankind. For that is the great misfortune, that through natural conditions there has come to be a frightful overproduction of such spiritual persons, such spiritual individualities. So that those who are part of the general working community do not know at all how to find their way about: for look you, there is not merely Goethe but also Herder and Schelling and Schlegel; and not only these but one should read Mabel too, and Wildenbruch. And that's only the beginning; there is every other possible field, and one should concern oneself with everything that belongs to the general world of culture: And then one must think of international figures, etc… Yes, what lies at the bottom of that is of very deep import, something extraordinarily significant. There is a great difference between the men who figure thus next to one another in the history of literature.

But in the course of the last centuries men have lost their reverence for the spiritual life. That fact confronts one in single instances. One must be able to view the evolution of mankind symptomatically, then one finds from the symptoms—what really pulses underground! Look, my dear friends, I spoke once at the beginning of 1890 to a small circle of people who were members of the school examination board. One especially esteemed member of the board, also spoke on that occasion. We remarked how significant it is that so dreadfully little takes place in the school of the present day that will foster the general growth of spiritual impulses, so dreadfully little reaches the young people who are trained spiritually in these places from their tenth to their eighteenth year. Then the examining officer said: “Yes, when we see these camels that we must send out to teach the young, then we cannot nope for anything healthy to come of it.” You see, that is a symptom. Persons such as he, who in recent years were responsible for the spiritual life of the minority, the upper classes, esteemed it of so little worth that they regarded as a matter of course their examining school teachers and then letting them loose like camels among the young. They were convinced that those who handed in the best examinations were the greatest camels. Ah! but men's thoughts, my dear friends, men's thought-habits! everything depends upon them, in spite of all opinions to the contrary. In the end we find that mankind's real happiness and misfortune depend upon these thought-habits; they accumulate finally in such world catastrophes as we have just lived through. One must see into the small things, for they are symptoms of what is taking place in the subconscious sphere, which remains unaccounted for while one is pointing with pride to technical developments, capitalism, etc..

So slightly, then, has the spiritual life been valued that in reality it has become a luxury; men in the most different branches of life could only experience it really as a luxury. But they love this luxury. One might point to many spheres of life where this luxury has taken the place of the spirit. Let as take just one: landscape painting as it has developed in the last century. Do you believe, my dear friends, that outside of a few men who are educated to it, the broad masses of humanity can really have an open heart and taste for this landscape painting? Do you believe, for instance, that the laborer who is enmeshed by the capitalistic order of economic life and technical industry in a truly desperate labyrinth of life,—do you believe that if you throw down to him all the crumbs that you can find in the way of popular lectures, peoples' courses, centres, exhibitions where you show him pictures, do you believe that he can truly with his inmost soul respond to it? Landscape painting—just think—he who is not educated up to it, says: “Ach, why do they paint that? It is much more beautiful outside. Why, honestly, do they paint that?” When you hold popular courses for a palliative, you can persuade him that it is real,—but it does not enter into his subconsciousness. His subconsciousness keeps on saying: Why do they paint that? One shouldn't waste human forces on such nonsense,—And finally from out of these feelings there accumulates that which bursts out today in such eloquent events. That is the crux of the mater. For what, indeed, has not one heard continually in the last ten years, about the noble progress we have made, now human thought speeds like lightning over the widest stretches of country, how we can travel so easily, how spiritual culture has spread, etc. But all that, that has been praised so extravagantly was only possible because under it was a foundation of millions of men who were not able to share in it. None of you would be able to travel by rail, to telephone, to send thoughts out over wide stretches of country, if countless men were not denied the privilege of sharing in any of this culture, if this culture had not meant hunger and need for the body and soul of millions and millions of men. My dear friends, let us look for a moment at a definite point of time, the middle of the 19th century for it was then approximately that what one calls the social question really began. Look at the upper class that gradually arose out of that atmosphere which one cannot otherwise characterise than by pointing to the parasitic condition of the true and good spiritual life—the spiritual life that became parasitic because it was not absorbed; it was meant to penetrate the general culture of the people, but nothing was done about accepting it, the cross had not yet turned. Now look, the people of this upper class were gradually inspired with the idea of getting something for their souls. How often have I remarked what unnatural roads this longing of every soul takes. One could see how the people finally became theosophists in well-heated rooms, as the last rung of the Bourgoisie-ladder, how (and this was the very last phase) they talked about brotherliness, human love, noble ethical ideals, etc. But, my dear friends, in what rooms did these things happen? In what manner of places did all this come about? (I speak of the middle of the 19th century; later it became a little but not much better, and then not by any merit of the upper class.) All this went on in places heated with coal, about which the British government had already in 1840 confirmed the report that 9, 11, and 13 year old children were working in the coal mines, and were not seeing sunlight except on Sunday, for the reason that they were taken into the shafts before the sun rose, and came out again after sundown. Ah, it was easy to speak of love of neighbor, brotherliness, love for all mankind, when one was warmed by coal acquired through such “brotherliness”. It was easy also to talk about improving men's moral sense, when one was kept warm by coal brought out of shafts where, as the British inquiry reported, men and women had to work together the entire day, naked; pregnant women half-naked, men entirely naked; for in the mines it is very hot, etc., etc. I mention these things—they could be added to a hundredfold—in order to show you a picture of what all this is about: a picture of the culture of the last century, the Luxury-culture, a culture that already smelt of decay; and underneath, the foundation without which this culture would not have been possible, millions and millions of men who could not share in it. How people were gradually aroused to improve this 16 hour work in the mines was also reported by the Inquiry. But what was the characteristic of the last half of the century? Thoughtlessness. Preeminently, it was thoughtlessness. And this thoughtlessness is what must be recognized above all things if any improvement is to be worked for. Instead of saying so easily: “Dear stove, fulfil your stove-duty, make the room warm”, one should take wood and make a fire, and stop preaching. There has been so much preaching done, in priest and atheist circles alike: And what has been neglected is thinking: thinking according to reality. It all comes down to that. It is that above all things that must be made clear to the man of today, the fact that it is precisely in the spiritual life that a great change must come about.

The spiritual life cannot flourish unless it is free to manifest itself every day anew. But that will only be possible if it is placed on its own basis. From the lowest school position to the highest, from the established branch of science to creative work in art, in order to endure it must be free, because it can only build on its own strength. He who is acquainted with the spiritual life of mankind knows what unhealthiness has entered into it in the last four centuries through the State, because of the fact that the State spread its wings over this spiritual life, so that all spiritual life should gradually become politicalized, with the exception of some few branches that still remained free and for which also there was danger of subjection. For if affairs had gone any further even free these last branches of free spiritual life would have been politicalized. But men's thought-habits today are not yet broad enough for them to realize that the frightful subjection of the spiritual life to the political state-life must be undone, and that this spiritual life must be sat free. The very goal that men still work toward is this curbing of the freedom of spiritual life and the politicalizing of it, even when so many states have already shown just how state-absorbtion of spiritual life has worked out. It is still very difficult for people to extricate themselves from the great illusion about state-life. I was recently In Berne where the so-called “Peoples' Union” was holding a conference. The people spoke about everything under the sun in the same style as formerly—in May 1914—Herr von Jagow had talked about the future. Just as that which actually came to pass was entirely different from what he expressed by his phrase “the general expansion is making progress”, so is there a difference between that which will actually come to pass and what has been said in Bern. People do not stand at all on the ground of reality. Men who give lectures, who write in German newspapers, made speeches telling what should happen in order to guarantee this Peoples' Union a prosperous existence. How a parliament should be formed, that would now embrace all state relations. The gentleman in question also could not resist saying: “A super-parliament must be created, a super-state”. In a lecture that I was giving at the same time I said that it would be more pertinent to consider what the states ought to leave undone than what they ought to do, in order not to increase further that which led us into the world-catastrophe. The only question one hears is, what should the state do?—in the sense of the old state. One has not learnt from the times to ask: What should the states stop doing? They should before all things stop mixing themselves up in spiritual and economic life. One should hardly be thinking of creating super-parliaments and super-states, when the sub-parliaments and sub-states have had such poor results. Today the question cannot be: What should the State do? but: What should the State give up doing? Only that is appropriate for the present time.

But one must have the courage in one's thinking to look at these things frankly. To see the connection between this spiritual life and what is now going on in the other branches of the social organism, will not be possible to one unless one has filled one's head with something evolved from the thoughts contained in Spiritual Science. Why is Spiritual Science such a horror today to many people? Just because it demands that one think differently from other people. But events have taught us that we can go no further with the thoughts in which mankind has been stuck. Men cannot realize that thy must change their way of thinking, for they cannot see the events. Men find it so difficult today to understand the Threefold Commonwealth because they have not wished to see what has actually occurred.

The evolution of mankind has already brought about a great piece of threefolding in events which escape men's gaze; only men are not aware of the accomplishment. I will give you one instance: if we go pack to 1869 we find the steel-industry in Germany developed to such a point that about 799,000 tons of iron had to be extracted: more than 20,000.were needed to extract these 799,000 tons. By the end of 1880, through the expansion of the industry, through the great demands created on the one hand by the increased railroad trade, and on the other by the great war armament programs—it later rose immeasurably higher, but already at the end of 1880 it had so increased that no longer was it 799,000 tons of raw iron but now 4,500,000 tons were necessary. Now, my dear friends, you can ask: How many workers were needed now? I said, something over 20,000 workers were necessary to extract 799,000 tons. Then there were 4,500,000 tons at the end of 1880. And for that, only 21,300 men were necessary. Now please let these figures speak to you—not as statistics, but comprehend these figures: something over 20,000 men extracted 799,000 tons at the beginning of 1860; 21,000 men, or thereabouts, extracted 4,500,000 tons at the end of 1880. How is that possible? You must indeed ask, How is that possible? It only became possible through enormously fine technical improvements; only because the most inconceivable, immeasurable technical improvements were made, by which it was possible for one man to extract so much more iron. Thus for all the progress that was made in this industry—and one could give similar details for 25 or 30 first-grade industries—for all that developed in them such improvements are the explanation. What does that mean? That is the significance, if just this number of men, because of purely technical improvements, produced that much more? Do you think that has no consequence? Naturally; when the number of workers was not increased much, and production itself was increased to such an enormous extent, the entire economic world that had any connection therewith was revolutionized. Just think what that means for the third part of the decentralized threefold organism. In all the rights-relations, and in all spiritual relations, nothing needed to change; there has only been a change in economic relations. For the change all came to expression in the price of steel and all that is connected with that. It is nothing less an event than this: That independently of the spiritual evolution, of the rights-evolution (for you need no other right, unless you look at the whole) independently of them, the economic life got itself free and transformed itself without men having a hand in the transformation. The things themselves did it, and men took no notice of it. That may be a proof to you that in actual events the threefolding was accomplished. The true economic teaching has progressed far, altogether b: itself; and men did not follow after; they directed their intelligence not to the possibility of following it up, out of staying behind in the old relationships. One may be ever so enthusiastic about the great talent that went into the improvement; that is all right, but for today it is not a question of that. Today the point is, that the economic life has emancipated itself. In the making of prices, and all that is connected with the establishment of prices and values, the economic life has taken its own course. That is the point. The three branches have practically emancipated themselves, and men have artificially welded them together, and have insisted upon welding them together ever more and more closely. That is how we got into the world-catastrophe. The facts lie under the surface of what men want to think today. One must look deep into the relations of things if one wants to judge what the reality is.

I chose such an instance so that one might see how foolish it is to judge the Threefold Commonwealth as senseless. The Threefold Commonwealth has been taken out of existing circumstances, while the men to whom the fate of mankind has been entrusted in the last ten years have altogether failed to adapt themselves to existing circumstances. You can easily prove through a healthy human understanding that this Threefold Commonwealth is the only thing to work for in order to bring about healthy development of the social organism. It does no good today merely to think one should maintain present conditions because this or that cannot be dispensed with. On that score the strangest objections are raised. All kinds of quite crooked e thinking are demonstrated. For instance, lately I was lecturing in Basel on the Threefold Commonwealth. In the discussion that followed, a very clever man got up and said: “Many admirable things have been said about this Threefold Commonwealth and yet one cannot comprehend it, because justice would be maintained by the political state only, thus by only a third of the social organism; and yet justice must exist also in the economic and spiritual life”. I had to reply with a picture. I said: “Now let us take any family in the country, consisting of man and wife, two children, manservants, maidservants, and three cows. The entire family needs milk, just as all three members of the social organism need justice. But is it necessary for all members of the family to give milk? Certainly not, for they will all be well supplied if the three cows provide it. So it is with the threefolding of the social organism. It is essential that all three members have justice. But they will only have it if it is created by the state-organism, the central member, as the milk is provided by the cows.” So crooked is men's thinking that they must needs turn out the wisest sophistries about the simplest conceptions.

Certainly, people are not stupid when they make such objections. One can never say that people are stupid. People who make objections today are, I consider, often very clever. I do not wish to dispute peoples' cleverness but I should like to paraphrase Shakespeare's line: “Honourable men are they all”: and say, Clever people are the: all, all, all—the essential thing however, is not merely to find clever thoughts out to find correct thoughts, that can actually be applied and used. And one comes to a healthy thinking in Spiritual Science, a thinking that can really penetrate to reality. You can have the most distorted thoughts in regard to outer physical affairs, and at the same time with a little elementary mathematics and technical knowledge you can prove that for instance if someone builds a railroad bridge badly, perhaps by the time the third train travels over it the bridge will collapse. But you cannot prove, for instance, let us say out of medical science: if so and so many people are well, and so and so many people die, just what medical science had to do with it. There the facts are not so obvious. And with respect to the social organism, the facts are not obvious at all. There the wildest charlatanism can prevail. There, one cannot help but feel that what was once ridiculed as an old superstition has come right down into recent times, in another field. You all know the place in the second part of Faust where the Middle Age idea of the Homunculus is dealt with. Today many people think it is a superstition, this wanting to construct an homunculus. But it is just as much a superstition to think of creating something out of mere intellectualizing. People do not realize that they have only transplanted the superstition to another field. The social theories of today want to produce a social Homunculus; they want to construct something artificially out of mere intellect. The Threefold Commonwealth is just the opposite of that. It seeks, not to set up an artificial program, but to find how men must meet one another in the three folded organism in order to find out or themselves what is necessary. It goes straight to reality, to the reality in which men stand in the social organism. Because it differs in this way from that Homunculus-idea of which men have become accustomed to think in the last ten years, for that reason it is so difficult to grasp today. For that reason one finds it so incomprehensible, in spite of the fact that it contains not one incomprehensible sentence, or indeed, not one sentence that is not quite easy to understand. It is because men have forgotten how to think accurately; they are satisfied everywhere to think around the edges. They are only content if they can think around the edges, or if they can think what they are told to think by one of the many sides.

It must not be overlooked, however, that the fundamental principles of the Threefold Commonwealth embrace a great many of the one-sided ideas that nave come up here and there. One cannot say that fruitful social ideas nave not also arisen in many heads; but for the most part they are one-sided. I must therefore say: I am for the most part in agreement with the people who have offered me some objection or other, but they are not in agreement with me. What they advance is right from their one-sided point of view, but one does not get a step forward by it, because with one-sided points of view one would accomplish something that then causes mischief on the other side. It is important today that we meet facts in a comprehensive way. That for instance, we do not ask: What should we do with the gold? This question and all others dealing with money standards will be settled within the independent economic life. This is the important point, that one grasp the reality of it. We do not need programs for single cases, programs spun out of the intellect; we need impulses that are related to reality; then, whatever one touches, one will come into contact with the practical. Only, those theorizers who consider themselves practical men are so made that they want to have definite programs everywhere for actual life. It cannot be a question of programs.

That which lies at the bottom, at the foundation, of the Appeal, and of the book elaborating it, is fundamental. It is developed out of that which alone can exist as tie real impulses of social life. In order to make myself better understood I will make a comparison: It has often been said that if one man were to grow up from childhood on an island he would never learn to speak. One learns to speak only in human society. That is correct, speech is a social phenomenon, man speaks because society is necessary to him. That is also true in regard to social impulses in a larger sense. Only within the social organism itself can a man's social life evolve. One man can never set up a social program, for inner individual life goes in quite a different direction from the setting up of social programs. One can only say: Thus and thus must men stand, thus must men be orientated in the field of the+ spiritual life, thus in the political field, and thus in respect to the economic life. Then what is necessary will result. That is the essential. For if a man applies his individuality today in the age of the consciousness soul to develop a social program, when everything is built on individuality, what comes of it? I should like to give you an example: They talk today about Bolshevism, of Lenin and Trotsky; now, I cite a third for you, who by the side of these is a thorough Bolshevist,—only people have not noticed it: Johann Gottlieb Fichte. Fichte, whom we recognize as an ideal thinker, a noble thinker. Read the Self-contained Commonwealth. What Fichte develops as a program is so little different from the Bolshevik program that you could quite easily ascribe Fichte 's Self-contained Commonwealth to Trotsky. How does this happen? That happens when a single man today makes a social program—which is what Fichte did. Only Fichte was still in an age when such a thing as the Self-contained Commonwealth could not yet be comprehended. The war catastrophe had to lead up to it. You see, it will be like that if one man wants to create out of himself a comprehensive social program. Fichte is a proof of it. There will be no social program, any more than the single man on an island will learn to speak. The essential thing therefore is this, that one find the tendencies, the inherent structure of the social organism.

It is not a matter of setting up programs, but of finding the way in which men must live together in order to discover what social impulses they may have. That stands on reality which concerns itself with society and not with the individual. How often in the last few weeks have I had said to me: “Yes, this man and that man are presenting definite programs that regulate the social life in every single point”. But that is of no avail; people nave always done that. Just look how countless the Utopias are. But there should be no Utopia, there should be something that is rooted in practical life. One should have a feeling for this comparison: I have often said: He who does not see the spiritual impulses in outer reality seems to me like someone who has a raw piece of iron. Someone says to him: That is a magnet that attracts other steel. But he says: Ha! that isn't a magnet, that is what one shoes horses with. Which is also true. The relation between them is not that one is right and the other wrong; but he is more deeply right who knows that it is a magnet, and that also it can be used for horseshoes. So it is with reality. They are right who speak of materialism, but the spirit too makes the complete reality.

Therefore it is a question now of coming back to the spirit. But truly, it must not remain a thing of phrases. Nowadays there are all kinds of preachers going about the world. They are like those people who sat in mirrored salons or in well-heated rooms and talked about love or neighbor and brotherliness. As I remarked just now, “stove fulfil thy stove-duty” is what they say. And preachers go about the world saying: Calamity has come to mankind through materialism, men must turn again to the spirit. Yes, the reproach was even made in regard to this Appeal that it contained too little spirit, it devoted too much attention to material life. It is not essential that we do a lot of talking about the spirit, but it is essential that we know how to bring the spirit into actual life. That man is not really standing firmly on the ground of spiritual knowledge who always only talking spirit, spirit, spirit—but he who receives the spirit so deeply into himself that it is able actually to solve the problems of life. That is the point. One could do without men's exhortations to turn again to the spirit. The important thing is that one should strive today to make the spirit living and active in oneself.

But men have gradually forgotten how to do that, precisely because the state has become something to them—what, forsooth? In Faust there is this line—as instruction to a girl, and the philosophers of course have misunderstood it and have sought a deep subtlety therein: “The All-embracer, All-sustainer, Holds and sustains the not thee, me, himself?” That is the way men came gradually to talk spout the State, especially during the war. “The All-embracer, All-sustainer, Holds and sustains the not thee, me, himself?” In the subconscious of people who give such instruction the “me” naturally is emphasized. For they have laid great stress on the fact that they had a somewhat superior, out—characteristically of them—not a very active inner relation to the spirit. What kind of relation have men had to the spirit? They have endeavored to comply for a certain number of years to the state regulations and then have been made into theologists, jurists, or some other kind of person. They have been supposed to grow up in the State, and to do everything that the State desired, and to be specially trained just for that. But where was any inner activity, where was any intense participation in the whole world process—which is the heart of Spiritual Science—where was that? They have said: I want to hold my position in the State for a certain number of years, and then I want the pension that is guaranteed me; in other words, I will work for the State as long as the State prescribes, then the State must see to it that I have a pension the rest of my life. And then at the end of their life they found no active relation to the spirit either, but a passive one—for then the Church was supposed to see about the eternal life of their soul. As a passive man one was, of course, very well taken care of: laid at birth in the State's lap, educated according to its ideas, then working for it, then cared for by it until death; and then after that the Church looked after one's soul without oneself having to make any effort about eternity. One could hardly ask for a more noble life! A life without one's having anything to do about it: that became more and more men's ideal at the end of the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th. But the possibility for that kind of thinking only existed because of the foundation structure of which I have spoken, where people were not taken care of at all until their death—and even then most insufficiently, through diverse insurance systems. And therefore when it was no longer possible for Rights to blossom out of the world conception of the upper class, the people also lost faith in that after-death age- and invalid-Insurance which the Church distributed for the immortality of the soul.

You see, that is what one must grasp today. But one only grasps some measure of reality if one is able to think practically about what is presented in the Threefold Commonwealth.

Our spiritual-scientific world view may not only turn to the development and advance of the individual souls, but above all it has also to help really to gain additional points of view for the observation of life. In our time it has to suggest itself to us in particular to gain such additional points of view for the judgement of life. Indeed, it is a big and also important task for the individual human being to help himself by that which he can gain as the fruit of the spiritual-scientific self-education. Only because the individual human beings really help themselves, can they co-operate in the development of humankind generally. But our attention should be directed not only to that, but we really should be able to feel as supporters of the anthroposophical world view the big events of our time from a high point of view, from a really spiritual point of view. We should be able to transport ourselves to a higher standpoint judging the events. Today some points of view just with reference to the big events of our time may be given, because our present meeting takes place in these destiny-burdened times.

We start from something that is near to us as human beings. Human beings have illnesses at certain times. One considers illnesses normally as that which damages our organism which penetrates our organism like an enemy. Such a general point of view is not always justified. Indeed, there are symptoms which must be judged from this point of view where as it were the illness comes like an enemy into our organism. But that is not always the case. In most cases, the illness is something completely different. The illness is not the enemy in most cases, but just the friend of the organism. That what is the enemy of the organism precedes the illness in most cases, it develops in the human being, before the externally visible illness breaks out. There are forces opposing each other in the organism, and the illness, which breaks out at any time, is the attempt of the organism to save itself from the forces opposing each other which were not noticed before.

Illness is often the beginning work of the organism to induce the healing. The illness is that which the organism undertakes to fight against the hostile influence which precedes the illness. The illness is the last form of the process, but it signifies the battle of the good juices of the organism against that which is lurking there at the bottom. Only if we look at the most illnesses in such a way, do we get the correct understanding of the illness process. Hence, the illness points to the fact that something has taken action, before the illness broke out, that should come out of the organism. If some phenomena of life are seen in the right light, you understand quite easily what I said. The causes may be in the most different areas. What it concerns, this is that which I have just suggested: the fact that we have to look at the illnesses as something that the organism defends itself against things which should be driven out.

I do not believe that there is a comparison which holds really as true as the comparison of such a sum of significant, deeply intervening events, as we experience them now since the beginning of August 1914 over a big part of the earth, with an illness process of the human evolution. Just this must strike us that these military events are actually an illness process. But wrong would it be to believe that we cope with it if we simply understand this illness process in the wrong sense as just many an illness process is understood: as if it is the enemy of the organism. The cause goes ahead of the illness process. It can strike us in our time particularly how little people are inclined in the present to take into consideration such a truth which must prove itself as immediately clear to somebody who takes up the spiritual-scientific world view not only in his reason, but also in his feeling.

We had to experience a lot of infinitely painful things just in the course of the last nine months—painful concerning the human ability of judgement. Is it not that way, actually, if one reads the literature, which is read mostly and is spread by the most different countries of the earth, is it not as if the people who judge about these events suppose that in July 1914, actually, history has begun? This was the saddest experience in which we had to take part beside all the other painful things that the people, setting the tone or rather giving articles, and making the public opinion, know basically nothing about the origin of the events and look only at the nearest. The infinite discussions, these invalid discussions came into being from that. Where is the cause of the present military conflicts? Over and over again one has asked: does this have the guilt? Does that have the guilt?—And so on. Always one hardly went back further than up to July, at most June 1914. I mention that because it is a characteristic feature of our materialistic time. One thinks usually that materialism only manages a materialistic way of thinking, a materialistic world view. This is not the case. Materialism manages not only this, but it also manages shortsightedness; materialism manages mental laziness, manages lack of insight. The materialistic way of thinking leads to the fact that one can prove everything and believe everything. It really belongs to that self-education which anthroposophy must give us to see that somebody who stops in the area of materialism can prove everything and believe everything.

I take a simple example. When one had something to say about the spiritual-scientific world view during the last years, somebody here or there believed to have to assert his view compared to the spiritual-scientific world view. One could often hear: Kant has already proved by his philosophy that the human being has limits of knowledge, and that one cannot get where the spiritual-scientific world view wants to attain knowledge.—Then the very interesting matters were stated by which Kant should have proved that one cannot penetrate to the spiritual world with human cognition. If one still went on representing spiritual science, then the people came and believed: he denies everything that Kant has proved. Of course, such a thing contained a little bit of the assertion: this man must be an especially foolish person, because he strictly denies proven matters.

It is not that way at all. The spiritual scientist does not deny at all that this is absolutely right what Kant has proved, it is clear that this is proved quite well. However, assume once that somebody would have strictly proved in the time in which the microscope was not yet invented, that there would be the smallest cells in the plant, but one could never find these because the human eyes were not able to see them. This could have been strictly proved, and the proof would be absolutely right, because the human eye, as well as it is arranged, could never penetrate to the organism of the plant up to these smallest cells. That is an absolutely right proof which can never be upset. However, life has developed this way that the microscope was invented, and that in spite of the strict proof people got the knowledge of the smallest cells. Only if once anyone understands that proofs are worthless for gaining the truth that proofs can be correct, but mean basically nothing special for the progress of the knowledge of truth, only then will one stand on the right ground. Then one knows: the proofs can be good, of course, but the proofs do not have the task to lead really to truth. Think only once of the comparison I have given, then you see that also, as absolutely strict the proof may be that the human visual ability does not reach to the cell, as strict can be the proof that human knowledge, as Kant says, does not reach to supersensible worlds.

The proofs were absolutely correct, but life goes beyond proofs. This is also something that is given to somebody on the path of spiritual research that he extends his ken and is really able to appeal to something different than to the human reason and its proofs. Who limits himself to materialistic ideas is really led to an uncontrollable confidence in proofs. If he has a proof in the pocket, he is generally convinced of the truth.

Spiritual research will just show us that anyone can prove the one and the other matter rather well that, however, proofs by reason have no significance for gaining real truth. That is why it is a concomitant of our materialistic time that people are enslaved by mental shortsightedness. If this mental shortsightedness is still infiltrated with passions, it comes about that we see today not only the European peoples fighting with arms, but feuding with each other. There anyone has to say all possible matters, and you cannot expect basically that one is able to persuade the other, not only during the war. If anybody believed that one day a neutral state could possibly choose between the allegations of two hostile states, he would have a naive confidence. Of course, one side can have its opinion and substantiates it by all kinds of proofs, but the other side will do the same. One gets insight only if one is involved in the deeper bases of the whole human evolution.

I tried already some years before the outbreak of this war to throw some light on it in the series of talks about the individual folk-souls and their effects on the individual human beings in the different European regions, how the individual nations face each other and that there really different forces hold sway over the different peoples. Today we want to complete that with a few other viewpoints.

Our materialistic time thinks too much in the abstract. Such a thing is not taken into consideration in our materialistic time at all that there is a real development in the life that the human being has to allow to be ripe that what is in him develops gradually to the real judgment. The human being—we know this and it is shown in detail in my essay Education of the Child in the Light of Spiritual Science—experiences such a development that during the first seven years his physical body, from the seventh up to the fourteenth years the etheric body develops in particular et cetera. This advancing development of the individual human being is taken into consideration a little, the parallel phenomenon, the synonymous phenomenon much less. The processes which take place within the individual nation's connections are directed and led—we all know this from spiritual science—by beings of the higher hierarchies. We speak of folk-souls, of folk-spirits in the true sense of the word. We know that, for example, the folk-soul of the Italian people inspires the sentient soul; the French folk-soul inspires the intellectual soul or mind-soul, that the inhabitants of the British islands are inspired by the consciousness-soul; in Central Europe the ego is inspired. I do not pass any value judgment on the individual nations, but I may only say that this is that way. The fact that, for example, an inspiration of the people that inhabit the British islands is based on the fact that it brings as nation everything into the world that is caused by inspiration of the consciousness-soul from the folk-soul. It is strange to which extent people become nervous in this field. When I emphasised here or there during the war what I had expressed in the mentioned series of talks, there were people who almost understood it like a kind of abuse of the British people that I said that it would have the task to inspire the consciousness-soul, while the German folk-soul has to inspire the human ego. As if one understood it as an insult when one says: salt is white, paprika is red.—It is a simple characterisation, the representation of a truth which exists, and one has to accept this as such a truth first of all. One manages that much better which prevails between the individual members of humankind if one looks at the characteristics of the individual peoples, and not, if one confuses everything, as the modern materialistic view does it.

Of course, the individual human being rises up above that which he gets from his folk-soul, and this is just the task of our anthroposophical society that it raises the individual human being out of the group-soul and raises him to the general humankind. But it remains that the individual human being, in so far as he stands in a people, is inspired by his folk-soul, that, for example, the Italian folk-soul speaks to the sentient soul, the French folk-soul to the intellectual soul or mind-soul, the British folk-soul to the consciousness-soul. We have to imagine that as it were the folk-soul is hovering over that which the individual human beings do in the single nations. But as we see that the human being develops already as we can say: the ego experiences a particular development in a certain time of life; we can also speak of a development of the folk-soul in relation to its people. Only this development is somewhat different from that of the individual human being.

We take, for example, the Italian people. There we have this people and the folk-soul belonging to this people. The folk-soul is a being of the supersensible world; it is affiliated to the world of the higher hierarchies. It inspires the sentient soul, and this always happens, as long as the people live, the Italian people, because we speak of this people, but it inspires the sentient soul in the different times in the most different way. There are times in which the folk-souls inspire the members of the single nations, so that this inspiration happens as it were on the level of the soul. The folk-soul floats in higher regions of spirit and its inspiration happens in such a way that it inspires the soul qualities only. Then there are times when the folk-souls float further down and make stronger demands on the single members of the peoples when they inspire them so strongly that not only the human being gets them in his soul qualities, but where they work so effectively that the human being becomes dependent on the folk-soul concerning his bodily qualities. As long as people are influenced by the folk-soul in such a way that it inspires the psycho-spiritual qualities, the type of the people is not coined so deeply. The forces of the folk-soul do not work there, so that the whole human being is seized up to the blood. Then a time comes when one can infer already from the kind how the human being looks out of his eyes, from the facial features how the folk-soul is working. It is revealed that the folk-soul has sunk deeply; it makes forceful demands on the whole human being.

Such a deep impression took place with the Italian people approximately in the middle of the 16th century, about 1550. Then again the folk-soul floated back as it were, and thenceforward that is passed on the descendants. You can say: the most intensive being together of the Italian people with their folk-soul was about 1550. At this time, the Italian folk-soul sank the deepest, this people of the Italian peninsula got their most distinctive character. If we go back to the time before 1550, we see that their character is not as strongly coined as from 1550 on. Then only the typical begins what we know as Italianità. The Italian folk-soul, so to speak, entered into marriage with the sentient soul of the individual human being, who belongs to the Italian people.

For the French people—I do not talk about the single human being who can rise up above the people—the similar point in time entered when the folk-soul sank the deepest and penetrated the people completely, about 1600, in the beginning of the 17th century. At this time, the folk-soul completely seized the intellectual soul or mind-soul.

For the British people the point in time entered in the middle of the 17th century, about 1650. Only then the British people got their exterior British expression.

If you know such matters, something will be explicable to you, because you can now put the question differently: how is it with Shakespeare in England?—Shakespeare worked in England, before the British folk-soul worked most intensively on the English people. That is why he is not understood in England substantially. As everybody knows, there are issues in which everything that does not correspond completely to the taste of the governesses is eradicated. Very often Shakespeare is extremely moralised. We know that the deepest understanding of Shakespeare was caused not in England, but in the Central European spiritual development.

Now you will ask: when did the folk-soul touch the members of the Central European people?—However, the case is somewhat different, because this folk-soul descends and ascends repeatedly. And thus we have in the time, when the boon legend world of Parzival, of the Grail originated, such a descent of the folk-soul which combines with the individual souls, then it ascends again and after that a next descending takes place in the time between 1750 and 1830. The Central European life is then touched by its folk-soul the deepest. Since that time the folk-soul is ascending. Thus you see that it is quite comprehensible that Jacob Böhme (1575–1624) lived in a time in which he could get little from the German folk-soul. There was not the time when the folk-soul combined with the individual souls of the people. Hence, Jacob Böhme is, although he is called the “Teutonic philosopher.” a person who is chronologically independent of his folk-soul; he stands as it were like an uprooted human being there, like an everlasting phenomenon within his time. If we take Lessing, Schiller, Goethe, these are also German philosophers, they are completely rooted in the German folk-soul. This is just the typical feature of these philosophers living in the time between 1750 and 1830 that they are completely rooted in the folk-soul.

You see that it does not depend only on the fact that one knows: with the Italian people the folk-soul works on the sentient soul, with the French people the folk-soul works on the intellectual soul, with the British people the folk-soul works on the consciousness-soul, with the Central European nation the folk-soul works on the ego. One has also to know that this happens at certain points in time. The events which happen become historically explicable only if one knows such matters really. That nonsense which is done as science where one gets the documents and enumerates the events successively and says that one has to derive one matter from the other, however, this nonsense of the historians does not lead to a real history, to an understanding of the human evolution, but just only, so to speak, to a falsification of that which exists and works in human history.

If one sees how differently that works on the individual peoples—I could still characterise other peoples—which forces drive these peoples, then one sees the conflicting matters which are there. And one sees that the events of today really did not happen only during the last years, but were prepared for centuries.

We look at the East, at the area of the Russian culture. The characteristic of the Russian culture is that it can develop when once the point in time can enter when the Russian folk-soul combines with the spirit-self—I already expressed this in the mentioned series of talks. A time has to come in which this characteristic of the European East is only revealed. This will be completely different from the development in the West or in the middle of Europe. Provisionally, however, it is quite explicable that that which is allotted to the Russian culture is not there at all, but that the Russian culture has such a relationship—like the individual human being—to the spirit-self that it turns always upwards. The single member of the Russian people and even profound Russian philosophers do not speak as one speaks of the biggest matters in Central Europe, but they speak quite differently.

We find something tremendously typical. What is the most characteristic of this Central European cultural life? You all know that there was a time of the great mystics in which Master Eckhart, John Tauler and others worked. They all sought for the divine in the human souls. They tried to find the God in their chests, in their souls, “the little spark in the soul,” as Master Eckhart expressed it. They said: therein something must be where the divinity is immediately present. Thus that striving originated through which the ego wanted to be united with its divinity in itself. This divinity wanted to be won by hard efforts; the divinity wanted to be won by the developing human being. This runs as a trait through the whole Central European being. Imagine which infinitely deep emotion it is when Angelus Silesius (1624–1677) who, I may say, stands internationally on the ground of the Central European culture and cultural life, says in one of his nice sayings The Cherubinic Wanderer: if I die, not I die, but God dies in me.—Imagine how infinitely deep this is. For he, who said this, seized the idea of immortality vividly, because he felt: if death happens in the individual human being,—because the human being is filled with God—this phenomenon of death is no phenomenon of the human being, but of God, and because God cannot die, death can be only a delusion. Death cannot mean destruction of life. He knows that an immortal soul exists and says: if I die, not I die, but God dies in me.—It is a tremendously deep sensation which lives in Angelus Silesius. This is a result of the fact that the inspiration takes place in the ego.

If the inspiration takes place in the sentient soul, it can happen what took place by Giordano Bruno. The monk got into the spirit with everything what he found with Copernicus, felt the whole world animated. Read a line of Giordano Bruno, and you find verified that he, in so far as he has grown out of the Italian people, just proves the fact that there the folk-soul inspires the sentient soul.

Cartesius, Descartes (1596–1650), is born almost in the characterised point of the French development, when the French folk-soul combined so surely with the French people. Read a page by Cartesius, the French philosopher, you find that he confirms on each page what spiritual science finds: the fact that there the inspiration of the folk-soul works on the intellectual soul.

Read Locke (1632–1704) or Hume (1711–1776) or another English philosopher, up to Mill (John Stuart Mill, 1806–1873) and Spencer (Herbert Spencer, 1820–1903), everywhere inspiration of the consciousness-soul.

Read Fichte (Johann Gottlieb Fichte, 1762–1814) in his struggle in the ego itself, then you have the inspiration of the ego by the folk-soul. This is just the characteristic that this Central European folk-soul is experienced in the ego, and that, hence, the ego is the actually striving force, this ego with all its power, with all its mistakes, with all its wrong tracks and also with all its conscious efforts. If this Central European human being should find the way to Christ, he wants to bear Him in his own soul.

Try once to look for the idea to experience the Christ or a God internally in the Russian cultural life, if it is not taken over externally by the west-European civilisation. You cannot find it at all. There one expects everywhere that a historical event happens really, so that it takes place, as Solovyov (Vladimir Solovyov, 1853–1900) says, as a “miracle.” The Russian cultural life is very much inclined to behold the resurrection of Christ in the supersensible realm, to revere the working of an inspiring power externally, as if the human being is beneath it, as if the inspiration moves over humankind like a cloud, not as if it enters into the human ego. This intimate being together of the ego with its God, or also, if it concerns Christ, with Christ, this desire that Christ is born in the soul is to be found only in Central Europe. If once the East-European culture develops as it is commensurate, again a kind of group-soul will appear because that culture will be founded which floats above the human beings. This kind of group-soul is only on a higher level than the old group-soul was. At the time being, we must find it quite natural that one speaks everywhere in that way, as the Russian philosopher does, about something that floats like the spiritual world above the human world. However, he can never approach that world as intimately as the Central European human being wants to approach with his ego the divine that flows and weaves through the world.

When I often spoke of the fact that the divinity flows through the world and weaves and surges, then that is out of the sentient world of the Central European human being and would not at all be understood by any other European people in the same way as it can be taken up by the Central European feeling nature. This is the typical, the characteristic of the Central European people.

These are the forces which live there in the individual peoples facing each other, which time and again are in competition, which must discharge by force as clouds discharge and cause flashes and thunderstorms.

Do we not hear, one could say now, a word sounding in the East of Europe which was as it were something like a slogan and should work thus, as if the culture of Eastern Europe should begin now to extend over the little valuable Western Europe, to overflow it? Do we not see that the Pan Slavists, the Pan-Slavism¹ appeared, especially also appeared in spirits like Dostoyevsky (Fyodor Mikailovitch Dostoyevsky, 1821–1881) and similar people, with the particular points of his program as there was said: you West-Europeans altogether, you have a decadent culture that must be replaced by East Europe.—Then a whole theory was built up, a theory which culminated above all in the fact that one said: in the West everything has become decadent; this must be replaced by the fresh forces of the East. We have the really orthodox religion against which we do not fight, but we have just accepted it like the cloud of the folk-soul floating above the human beings et cetera. Then sagacious theories were built up, very sagacious theories, which the principles, which the intentions of the old Slavism could already be, that from the East the truth must now spread out over Central Europe and Western Europe.

I said that the single human being can rise up above his people. Such an individual being was Solovyov in a certain field, the great Russian philosopher. Although one also notices with him in each line that he writes as a Russian, nevertheless, he rises up above his people. In the first time of his life, Solovyov was a Pan-Slavist. But he has more exactly concerned himself with that which the Pan-Slavists and Slavophils² put up as a kind of national philosophy, national world view. What did Solovyov, the Russian, find? He asked himself: is there already the real Russian being in the present? May it be included already in those who represent Pan-Slavism and Slavophilism?—And lo and behold, he did not rest, until he came on the right thing. What did he find? He checked the statements of the Slavophils to whom he had belonged before, he tackled them, and there he found that a big part of the forms of thinking, the statements, the intentions is got from the French philosopher de Maistre³ friendly to the Jesuits, who was the great teacher of the Slavophils concerning their world view. Solovyov himself proved that Slavophilism does not grow on own ground, but originates from de Maistre. He proved even more. He discovered a German book of the 19th century which was forgotten for long time and which nobody knows in Germany. The Slavophils copied whole parts of that book in their literature. What a peculiar phenomenon appeared? One believes that something comes from the East, whereas it is a purely western import. It came over from the West and was then sent back to the western people again. The western people were confronted with their own thought-forms because own thought-forms do not yet exist in the East.

If anyone tackles the matters exactly, it is confirmed everywhere what spiritual science has to say. So that one already deals with something while rolling from the East that is still elementary, with something that will find its development when it takes up that as affectionately which has developed in Central Europe as this Central Europe took up the Greek and Latin cultural achievements from the South. Because development of humankind takes place, so that the following condition takes up the previous one. What I could characterise in the public lecture as the Faustic way of thinking of Central Europe by the words: there was a year 1770—Goethe felt it as a Faustic striving when he said:

I've studied, to my regret,
Philosophy, Law, Medicine,
and—what is worst—Theology
from end to end with diligence.
Yet here I am, a wretched fool
and still no wiser than before

Faust I, verses 354–359

There a very rich German cultural life came about, a most intensive striving. But if Goethe had written his Faust forty years later, indeed he would not have started: “I've studied now, to my regret, Philosophy ...” et cetera, and I have now become a wise man,—but he would have written exactly his Faust like in 1770. This vivid striving comes from the inspiration of the folk-soul in the ego, from that intimate being together of the ego with the folk-soul. This is a basic characteristic of the Central European spiritual culture. And the East European culture has to combine with it affectionately, it must take up it. What had to flow into Central Europe was received once from the southern culture, was taken up. Now, however, it is not different when from the East the elementary wave of development rolls, as if the pupil is furious with his teacher because he should learn something from him and wants to thrash him, therefore. It is a somewhat trivial comparison, but, nevertheless, it is a comparison which exactly applies to the matter. Human masses of quite different internal forces of development live in Europe together. These different forces of development must compete with each other; they must assert themselves in different way. The reluctant forces developed for a long time. If one looks at the details, one finds that they express everywhere what spiritual science has to say.

Is it not expressed so wonderfully, does not the wave of the European development crowd together in such a way that it is put symbolically before the whole humankind that in Central Europe the intimate living together of the ego with the spiritual world must be felt? That God is to be experienced in the “little spark in the soul,” that Christ is to be experienced in the “little spark in the soul?” Christ Himself must come to life in the human ego efficiently. That is why the whole development in Central Europe tends to the ego as in no other European language. “Ich” (ego) is “I-C-H.” Like a mighty symbol in the intimate interaction of that what can be the holiest to the soul stands there in Central Europe: I = I-CH—Jesus Christ. Christ Jesus and at the same time the human ego! The folk-soul is working that way, inspiring the people to express in typical words what the underlying facts are. I know very well that people laugh at such a thing, when I express that the folk-soul worked for centuries, so that the term “ich” has come about which is so typical, so symbolical. However, we let people laugh. Only few decades, and they will no longer laugh, but then they will regard it as more significant than what people call physical laws today.

What had an effect as a wave of development worked rather typically. Sometimes, the consciousness expresses a very small part of the truth only; but what works in the subconscious depths expresses itself much truer. We speak, for example, of “Germans” (Teutons, Germanic people). Words are formed by the active genius of language. A part of the inhabitants of Central Europe is called “Germans.” If a German speaks of “Germanic people” (Teutons), he counts the inhabitants of Germany, Austria, Holland, Scandinavia, but also the inhabitants of the British islands to them. He expands the word “German” about a wide area. However, the inhabitant of the British islands rejects this. He calls the German “German” only. He does not have the word German for himself. The German language embraces a much bigger circle. It is inclined to put the word into the service of selflessness; he not only is called “German,” he also encloses the others. The other, the Briton, rejects this. If you are once grasped by the creative genius of language, then you see something really wonderful in it. What people have in consciousness becomes maya, the big delusion. What exists in subconscious depths has a much truer effect. Something tremendously significant and deep expresses itself therein.

Compare now the rude way to look at the relations of the European peoples today with the way one has to go to work intimately to understand the European interplay of forces. Then only will you be able to see the devastation that the materialistic age caused in the human power of judgment. The fact that one started to think that matter carries and holds everything is not yet the worst, but that one has become shortsighted that one cannot look at the central issue, even does not do a step behind the veil which is woven as a maya over the truth, this is the actually bad.

Materialism well prepared what it intended. Also there the genius worked, only the genius who caused materialism as the highest leader is Ahriman. He had a powerful influence during the last centuries. I may still point briefly to a chapter to which one does not point with pleasure today. If it happens, one looks at it as a particular madness. One influences the human being the easiest, if one instills to him in his youth in his powers of imagination, in his soul what should grow up then in him. In the later life one cannot teach human beings anything thoroughly. Hence, Ahriman never would have, actually, better prospects to make the souls really materialistic, than when he instills in the youthful childish souls already that which works on in the subconsciousness. If in the time when the human being does not yet think intellectually already the materialistic forms of thinking are taken up, then people will learn to think thoroughly materialistically if materialism is already instilled in the children's souls. Ahriman did this in such a way that he inspired a writer of the materialistic age⁴ with the idea of Robinson Crusoe. Who allows to take in Robinson sees the materialistic ideas of Robinson thoroughly working. It does not seem so, but the whole—as Robinson is constructed as he is driven in this adventurer's life in the external experience to everything, until even the religion grows up finally like cabbages on the fields—all that prepares the child's soul very well to the materialistic thinking. If you imagine that there were in a certain time—in the 16th, 17th, and 18th centuries—Bohemian, Portuguese, Hungarian versions of Robinson et cetera as imitations of Robinson Crusoe, one must say: the job was performed thoroughly, and the portion that the Robinson reading had in the education of materialism is enormous.

Compared with such a phenomenon one has to point to something different that the children should take up in their understandings for their later lives. These are the fairy tales which live in Central Europe, and particularly the fairy tales which the brothers Grimm⁵ collected. This is a much better literature for the children than Robinson. And if one understands that which now happens between the European peoples in such a frightful, such a grievous and destiny-burdened way as an admonition to look at the way a little more exactly that developed in the subsoil of the events, at that which extends to himself in the present, then one will know above all, that it does not depend really on whether now a few German scholars send back their medals and certificates to England. If the admonition of the time is so strong that one recognises the materialistically inspired consciousness-soul of the British people in its significance, one also understands the significance of the Robinson reading and eradicates the whole Robinson once. Much more thoroughly, much more radically one will have to set to work if one is able to take into consideration the admonitions of our time correctly one day.

Thirty-five years have now passed since I started interpreting Goethe, just in his spiritual-scientific task. I tried to show that in Goethe's theory of evolution a really great, spiritual theory of evolution is given. The time must come when that is seen in wider circles. For Goethe gave a great, tremendous and spiritual theory of evolution. This was hard to understand for the people. Then Darwin could work better in the materialistic age who gave that in a coarsened, materialistic way which Goethe gave in a fine, spiritual way as a theory of evolution. It was a thorough Anglicisation which seized Central Europe. Now imagine the tragedy which lies, actually, in the fact that the most English naturalist in Germany, Ernst Haeckel, who swore completely on Darwin, had to appear with his furious hatred about the English. When this war broke out, he was one of the first who sent back the received medals and certificates to England. To send back the English coloured Darwinism, he is probably too old, however, that would be the essential, the more important action.

The concerning matters are tremendously deep and important, and they are connected with the necessary spiritual deepening of our time. If one sees once that the Goethean theory of colours is infinitely deeper than the Newtonian theory of colours that the Goethean theory of evolution is infinitely deeper than Darwin's theory of evolution, then one finally becomes aware of that which the Central European cultural life involves, also with regard to such highest fields.

I will only arouse a sensation in your souls which admonitions the present grievous, destiny-burdened events must be to us. An admonition to work which should induce us to reflect that which is there in the Central European cultural life and which is as it were an obligation to get it out. I also meant this when I spoke yesterday in the public lecture⁶ about the fact that this Central European cultural life contains germs which must produce blossoms and fruits.

When we say time and again: the conscious soul-life takes place on the surface; however, beneath it there is something about which we have spoken during these days. Then we are also allowed to direct our thoughts to the fact that in the impulses of numerous human beings also in the present something lives that is quite different from that they are aware of. Do not believe that the human beings fight in the West and the East who have to defend the big Central European fortress only for that they are aware of in their consciousness. Look at the impulses above all which are unaware to many human beings who go through blood and death today. However, the impulses exist, and we should be able to get the sensation from spiritual science,—looking to the East and to the West—that in the impulses of those, who sacrifice their lives, something lives that the future has to bear only for the external experience, even if the fighters possibly have no premonition in their consciousness. Considering these events that way we can penetrate ourselves with the right feeling.

Take into account that many souls have gone through blood and death during these military events which cannot be compared with that which took place in the conscious history of humankind, and we imagine that these souls will look down on the death which was imposed to them by the big events of time. Imagine that for the purposes of what I said the day before yesterday the youthful etheric bodies permeate the spiritual atmosphere. Imagine that not only the souls, the individualities, are in the spiritual world, but that something useful of their young etheric bodies penetrates the spiritual atmosphere. Let us try to look at the admonitions which people should have, who are left here on the earth. Yes, the individual human being who has gone through the gate of death reminds us of the big tasks which are to be carried out in the European culture.

These admonitions must be heard. And people must be inclined to get recognising sensations of our conditions from the depth of the cultural life. If one feels once that way that everybody who remains today in the blossom of his years on the battlefield stands as an admonisher calling for the spiritualisation of humankind in the European culture, one will have properly understood it. One wants not only that from such sites as ours the abstract knowledge goes out: the human being consists of physical body, etheric body, astral body and ego, the human being goes through many incarnations, the human being has a karma and so on,—but one would want that the souls who take part in our spiritual-scientific life are roused in their internal depths to the sentient life which has just been suggested, to experience also that which the admonitions of the early deceased are in the next future. The nicest we can acquire to us as supporters of spiritual science is the vivid life which should go like a breath through those who count themselves to us. Not the knowledge, not the knowledge only, but this life, this life becoming reality.

In the last times, several members left us from the physical plane. Also a young co-worker, our dear Fritz Mitscher, died. I had, arranged by karma, the task to speak at the cremation in Basel. I had to speak certain words to the disappearing soul. Among various matters, I spoke to the soul that we are aware of the fact that he also remains as a co-worker, after he has gone through the gate of death. I had to speak this out of the consciousness that what invigorates us is not only a theory, but that it must fill our souls completely with life. Then, however, we must behave to those who have gone through the gate of death like to those who are here still in life. We must not be waiting to say to ourselves: human beings living in physical bodies are prevented by the most manifold circumstances from fully realising the spiritual life. Which inhibitions can we notice in this physical life on earth with the human beings if the really big tasks of development are involved—and have to be fulfilled then. But we can rely on the dead often better. This feeling that they are among us that a special mission can be transferred to them allowed me to speak the obituary for our friend Fritz Mitscher appropriately who has gone as an early deceased through the gate of death. What was said for him concerns many others who have gone through the gate of death. We regard them as our most important co-workers, and it will not be misunderstood if I say: even more than on the living we can rely on the dead with our spiritual work.

But that we can generally express such a thing, we have to stand quite vividly in that which our spiritual movement can give us. I rely on the fact that just the dead are now the most important co-workers for the spiritualisation of the future human culture on the external field in our destiny-burdened time. For this death is a great master at which those look back who have gone through the gate of death. Some people need a stronger teacher than life can be today. You can see this at various examples.

I would like to give an example—some other could be given. A spectacular article⁷, opposing against spiritual science, represented by me, appeared several years ago in a magazine which is published in South Germany, in the Hochland. This article caused a great sensation. It has made sense to many people because it was written by a quite famous philosopher. The editor of that magazine Hochland accepted this article. He supported, actually, as he thinks, such a view on this tricky spiritual science.

It does not depend really on defending oneself with external means against it. It is absolutely comprehensible that the quite clever people of the present consider spiritual science to be something foolish. But after the war had broken out, something different occurred. The editor of the mentioned magazine is a good German, a man feeling very German. Now the man whose article he accepted in those days has written letters to him, and this editor also has printed them, I may say, in his especially gifted “innocence” in the South German Monthly Magazine. Try once to read them, you will see that same philosopher venting his rage against the Central European spiritual culture so that the editor of the Hochland feels compelled to say: one can only find somebody, who thinks such matters, in madhouses in Central Europe. What an infinitely significant criticism. There is an editor of a South German magazine. This editor accepts an article which he considers to be authoritative to destroy spiritual science of which he says: this is a good article about spiritual science by a famous philosopher.—After some time the editor gets letters from the same man, who should be in a madhouse, as he says. So would one not have to continue, with the logic of life, and say: if the man is now a fool, he once was a fool, too, and the dear editor did only not realise in those days that he deals with a fool when he wrote against spiritual science.—This is logic of life. You cannot sometimes wait, until such logic of life works, but it already exists in our life. Thus you can sometimes experience something according to this prescription. In those days, the article appeared just against my spiritual science. People read him. People said: this is a famous philosopher and Platonist, he is especially clever.—The editor said to himself: if anybody who is so clever writes about spiritual science, this is a significant article.—Some time passes, and the same editor says: the man is a fool.—But he needed the proof in the just cited way. Such matters take place with the living human beings. Such people who have so little steady ground under their feet like that editor of the South German magazine need that they are taught by events which are given in much deeper sense by the life of the last times from the spiritual world than it is convenient.

Thus you understand when I return to that which I said just now: our time had many reluctant forces, and if we call the war an illness—we can do this,—this is an illness which was caused by something that took place long ago, and it is there to the recovery, so that something is eradicated that had to lead to the damage of the life of the whole culture gradually. If we call it illness in this sense, if we look at the illness as a defence, we understand this war and the destiny-burdened events of the present, understand it also in its significant hints and admonitions. We then experience it with all internal forces of our souls, so that we can surely take notice of those who have gone through the gate of death and look at the next future and really have learnt what they can inspire in the souls which they want to hear. That spiritual deepening which is necessary for the human welfare and progress in the next future must come into them.

If your souls can rightly take up that which I would like to say with these words, you are supporters of our spiritual-scientific world view in the right sense only now. If your souls can make the decision to become such souls which turn their attention to that which is murmured down from those who have gone through the gate of death because of the destiny-burdened events.

A connecting bridge between the living and the dead should be built by spiritual science just for the next future, a connecting line by which the inspiring elemental forces of those who have made the big sacrifices in our time are able to find their way to us.

That is why I wanted to stimulate sensations during these days, teaching to your souls. These sensations should be like sensations expecting that which is said to the souls by the effects of our destiny-burdened time. In this sense, I may close today again with the words that I already spoke here the day before yesterday that should have an effect like a mantram in our souls, so that our souls expect the inspiration which will come there from the dead who become particularly living in spirit:

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

• 1. was originally a scientific term for the relationship of the Slavic languages. The idea of nationality of the Slavophils led to the demand to unite all the Slavic peoples under Russian dominion.
• 2. several Russian philosophers of the 19th century who stood up for the emancipation of the Russian culture in contrast to the “Westernisers.”
• 3. Joseph-Marie Comte de Maistre (1753–1821) stood up for absolutism and the feudal form of society. He regarded Catholicism and the papal primacy as foundations of the national and social life
• 4. Daniel Defoe (1660–1731) wrote The Life and Strange Surprising Adventures of Robinson Crusoe of York (1719)
• 5. Jacob Grimm (1785–1863) and Wilhelm Grimm (1786–1859) published their collection of fairy tales in 1810 for the first time.
• 6. The Human Destiny Seen in the Light of Spiritual Knowledge, Vienna, 8th May 1915, not yet published.
• 7. Wincenty Lutoslawski Rudolf Steiner's so-called Occult Science in Hochland October 1910

Today I shall give neither a lecture nor a lecture, but rather discuss some things in the way that I believe is still missing in our branches. I will tie in with the brochure “Science and Theosophy” by F. vor Wrangell, published in Leipzig by Max Altmann in 1914. In doing so, I would like to show in particular how one can tie into such a writing can be linked to such a writing.¹

The title 'Science and Theosophy' obviously touches on an issue that it is important for us to consider, because we will very often be confronted with the objection that our movement is not scientific or that scientists do not know what to do with it. In short, it will certainly be necessary for one or other of us to deal with science in some way, because he will have to face this objection and perhaps also be pointed to some individual points in doing so. Therefore, it will be good to start by considering the views of a man who believes that he is fully immersed in the scientific spirit of the present day, and of whom, having read his booklet, one can readily can say that he deals with the relationship between science and theosophy in a very astute way, and in such a way that he creates a relationship that many will try to create who are involved in the scientific work of our time. And with such people, who want to create a relationship between science and theosophy, we, or at least a certain number of us, must be able to think along the same lines.

Furthermore, since the brochure is written favorably for Theosophy, we are not so much compelled to fall back on polemics and criticism, but can tie in with some of the author's thoughts, which arise from the specifics of our spiritual striving. Of course, if some of us were to write such a brochure, we might even avoid the title “Theosophy” after the various experiences we have had in such a debate. This is a question that may perhaps be examined in more detail in the course of reading the brochure itself.

The brochure is divided into individual, easy-to-follow chapters and bears as its motto a saying of Kant's, which reads:

“It is not correct to always speak in the lecture halls of wisdom that in the metaphysical sense no more than one single world can exist.” Kant.

Taken out of context, there is certainly not much to be gleaned from this saying of Kant's. However, the author of this paper wants to refer to Kant in the opinion that Kant wanted to say with this saying that the world view that external science creates need not be seen as the only possible one. Here, perhaps, the author of this paper has not quite accurately captured Kant's opinion, because Kant basically means something different in the context of his saying. Kant means: When man reflects, metaphysically reflects, he can think of various real worlds, and then the question is, why of these various conceivable possible worlds, the one in which we live exists for us, while for the author of the booklet the question is: Is it possible to have other world views besides the materialistic one? Of course, he is of the opinion that precisely another, a spiritual world view must also relate to this world of ours.

Then the writing begins with its first essay, which bears the title:

Introductory

A powerful spiritual movement has taken hold of European culture at the present time, in contrast to the materialistic current of thought that prevailed in the leading intellectual circles around the middle of the 19th century.

The author thus looks, as it were, at the hustle and bustle of intellectual work around him and finds that things have changed from the mid-19th century; that in the mid-19th century, scientific salvation was found in materialism, whereas now - in the time when this booklet was published, 1914 - a powerful spiritual movement has taken hold of European culture.

Now he continues:

What are the inner reasons for this counter-current? It seems to me that they lie not only in people's metaphysical need, but also, at least in part, in the widely awakened awareness of the danger to human civilization that is associated with the domination of a materialistic world view.

Thus the author of this booklet is one of those who not only believe that a metaphysical need of humanity has awakened in the 20th century, but also believe that there is a certain moral danger in the minds of people being seized by the materialistic world view.

With increasing speed, the materialistic intellectual current pours through numerous channels from the intellectual heights into the lowlands of human society, displacing the religious convictions based on reverence, which provided a firm hold for the moral life of the masses. It is becoming increasingly clear to many that the victory of a materialistic worldview inevitably leads to a materialistic outlook on life and a corresponding lifestyle, which sees the only reasonable degree of life in exploiting the short lifespan for as much enjoyment as possible.

In earlier times, too, when a solid edifice of morals based on tradition and authority succumbed to corrosive intellectual criticism, humanity was seized by a craving for raw sensual pleasure and led down disastrous paths that took it away from what we feel is its most intrinsic destiny.

This is not contradicted by the fact that among those men who, inspired by an unconditional love of truth, communicate the results of their research and thinking to their fellow men, without regard to the consequences might ensue that many, if not most, of these men stand at a high level of moral greatness and are moved by noble, unselfish motives, in the full conviction that they are thus serving humanity.

So here the author points out that certain dangers for the moral life of human beings must arise as a consequence of a materialistic world view, and he says: This danger cannot be countered solely with the objection that those people who theoretically recognize a materialistic world view as theirs and as the right one themselves stand on a high level of moral conduct.

The author touches here, from his own observations, on a point to which I have repeatedly referred in our spiritual science, I may well say, from a higher point of view. For if one says that a spirit such as Haeckel, who works in such an eminently theoretical and materialistic way, stands on the ground of high moral ideals and also shows a higher moral conception of life in his own conduct, and that therefore the materialistic world-view does not necessarily lead to a materialistic way of life, one forgets one thing – and I have pointed this out in various lectures that I have given – namely, one forgets that in the development of mankind, feelings and thoughts move at different speeds.

If you look at just a short piece of human development, you will find that thoughts move relatively quickly. From the 15th and 16th centuries onwards, materialistic thinking, the living out of human theorizing in materialistic thought, has developed rapidly and all sciences have gradually been permeated theoretically by materialistic thought forms. Moral life, which is expressed in feelings, has developed less rapidly. At least people still show in their old feelings and emotions that feeling has not progressed as quickly. Therefore, people today still live in terms of the moral feelings that arose from the previous worldview, and that is why there is a dichotomy today between materialistic thinking and a non-materialistic life and a non-materialistic way of life that is still in the old sense. But the time is approaching when the consequences will be drawn from the materialistic-theoretical world view, so that what can be called is just around the corner: the moral life will be flooded by the consequence of the materialistic world view. One can therefore deepen one's understanding of the different speeds that feelings and thoughts have when viewed from a spiritual science perspective.

Now it says further:

But if the final result of this mental work is one that seems to contradict the destiny of man, the question is justified as to whether there is not a fundamental error in the seemingly so solid structure of the critical train of thought.

The author is therefore convinced that immoral consequences must follow from theoretical materialism, and that he can only expect salvation for humanity from morality. And so he wonders whether a materialistic world view, which must necessarily lead to immorality, not only shows errors, but has errors in itself when viewed critically. And so he continues:

Is this error only felt in one's feelings, or can it also be discovered intellectually? I have also been concerned with this question, and in the following I will attempt to clarify it for myself. I hope that my train of thought will also interest some readers who, like me, are convinced that it is more effective to fight an error with its own weapons than to merely call it into question. To indicate my scientific standpoint, I would mention that I am an astronomer by training, that my independent work lies in the fields of theoretical meteorology and physical geography, and that from early youth I have moved almost exclusively in academic circles, and respect for strict science based on critical thinking has become second nature to me, so to speak.

This does, however, justify the author's claim to have something to say about the relationship between science and Theosophy, because he shows that he is familiar with science on a certain point and that his judgment must therefore be infinitely more valuable than the judgment of someone who, for example, reads Kant and says, that is all nonsense, we Theosophists do not need to read Kant, and who thus only reveals that he himself has perhaps not seriously read and thought through five lines of Kant. It continues:

I am firmly convinced that a Weltanschhauung which cannot stand up to a strict critique of reason cannot endure, however much it appeals to the emotions. These introductory words should inform the reader of the task I have set myself in this essay and the point of view from which I intended to treat it.

The next essay describes in a few sentences what a materialistic-mechanical worldview is, the worldview that developed in the second half of the 19th century in such a way that there were and still are many who consider what the author describes here in a few sentences to be the only scientifically possible worldview. Let us consider what the author writes:

The basic assumptions of the materialistic-mechanical worldview

Let us first consider the most important basic assumptions of a materialistic-mechanical worldview. They can be summarized in the following teachings:

1. All events that we observe through our senses and perceive mentally follow a law, i.e. every state of the cosmos is necessarily determined by the temporally preceding state and also necessarily results in the subsequent states. All changes, i.e. all events, are inevitable consequences of the forces present in the cosmos.

Now, what the author is trying to analyze here as the basic assumption of the materialistic-mechanical world view has often been said in the course of our lectures. But if you compare what the author says here with the way it is said in our lectures, you will notice the difference. And for those who want to familiarize themselves with our spiritual-scientific consciousness, it is good to become aware of this difference.

Anyone who reads this first point, in which the materialistic-mechanical world view is characterized in a beautiful, astute and scientifically knowledgeable way, will see: that is very good; that hits the mark of the materialistic-mechanical world view. But when we try to give such a characterization in the lectures that are held for the purpose of our movement, it is attempted in just the opposite way, and it would be good if one would reflect on how differently we proceed in such matters.

Herr von Wrangell, on the other hand, presents what might be called a materialistic-mechanical world view. He speaks a few sentences from his own perspective, summarizing the impressions he has gained from the matter. You will have noticed – if you are at all inclined to notice such things – that I usually do not proceed in this way, but quite differently. I usually start from something that is there, that is there as a result of a historical process. And so, if I wanted to characterize this point, I did not simply say such sentences about myself, but I chose one of the essential, and indeed good, authors to express in the words and manner of such an author what the matter in question is.

Thus, I have often linked to the name Du» Bors-Reymond that which could serve as a basis for my lectures. As a result, you may often have gained the impression, if you do not see the whole in context, that I wanted to criticize Du Bois-Reymond. But I never want to criticize, I just want to pick out a representative characteristic example so that it is he who speaks, not I. This is what one might call the sense for facts that is necessary for us, the sense that we do not make assertions but let the facts speak. I have often related that Du Bois-Reymond gave a speech on the recognition of nature at the Leipzig Natural Science Convention in 1872. He also spoke about the way in which he had come to his view of the world through his scientific research.

Du Bois-Reymond is a physiologist in his specific field of research. His main work is in the field of nerve physiology. He has often spoken in elegant terms about the world view of the natural scientists. At the Leipzig Naturalists' Assembly in 1872, for example, he spoke about the limits of the scientific world view, about the limits of natural knowledge, and in doing so he also spoke of Laplacean minds. What is that? Du Bois-Reymond characterized it at the time. This Laplacian mind is that of someone who is well versed in mathematics, physics, biology, chemistry, and so on in the present day and forms a world view out of these sciences. Such a Laplacian mind thus comes to form a world view that starts from so-called astronomical knowledge of reality.

What is astronomical knowledge of reality, we might ask; what is astronomical knowledge? We can explain it in a few words.

The astronomer visualizes: the sun, the planets, the moon, the earth; he visualizes the planets orbiting around the sun or moving in ellipses around it, he visualizes the force of attraction, the gravitation, acting on the planets, he visualizes an inertia, and from this inertia he visualizes that the planets orbit around the sun.

Thus, the astronomer has in mind that he can follow what is going on around him in the universe as the great events; that he can follow them from the material entities that can be seen in space and from the forces that they exert on each other in space. The fact that the entities exert material forces on one another sets things in motion; that is, things come into motion when one imagines the solar system in this way and looks at it in this way. One has a picture of the things that are spread out in space and of the events that take place over time.

Now, anyone who wants to form a world view that is in line with the times, in the sense of Du Bois-Reymonds, says the following. We have to assume that all matter consists of the smallest parts, of atoms. Just as a solar system consists of the sun, the moon and the planets, so does the smallest piece of matter consist of something similar to the sun with the planets. And just as the sun exerts forces and the planets exert forces on each other, so do the forces between the individual atoms. This sets the atoms in motion. So we have motion inside every material particle. The atoms, like the sun and the planets, are in motion. These movements are small, but they are such that we can compare them with the great movements performed by the heavenly bodies out in space, so that if we take the smallest piece of matter that we can see, something is going on inside it, like what the astronomer imagines out in space. And now natural science came to imagine everything in such a way that wherever something is really in motion, it stems from the fact that the atoms are guided by their forces.

In the second half of the 19th century, especially the science of heat, as it was founded by Julius Robert Mayer, Joule, Tyndall and Helmholtz, and further developed by C. ausius and others, contributed to the formation of this world view. So, when you touch a body and feel warmth, you say: what you feel as the sensation of warmth is only an appearance. What really exists outside is that the smallest parts, the atoms of the substance in question, are in motion; and you know a state of warmth when you know how the atoms are in motion, when you have an astronomical knowledge of it, to use the words of Du Bois-Reymond. The ideal of the Laplacian mind is to be able to say: What do I care about heat? My world view depends on my being able to find out the motion of the atoms, which through their motion cause all that we have in the way of heat, light, etc. This Laplacian mind thus forms a world view that consists of space, matter with its effective forces, and motion. In the lecture he gave at the Leipzig Naturalists' Assembly on the limits of natural knowledge, Du Bois-Reymond posits this ideal of the Laplacian mind and asks: what would such a Laplacian mind be capable of?

You see, his ideal is astronomical knowledge of the world. If a mathematician takes the image of our solar system as it is at any given point in time, he only needs to insert certain numbers into his formula and he gets an image of what it was like an hour, three hours, ten years, centuries ago. How does one go about calculating whether a solar or lunar eclipse took place at a certain time in the first decade of our era? In this case, we have well-developed formulas based on the current state of science. All you need to do is insert the corresponding numbers into the formula to calculate each individual state. You can calculate when a solar eclipse will occur, let's say in 1970 or in 2728. In short, you can calculate every state that precedes or follows in time. And now Laplace's mind should have the formula that encompasses this entire solar system. So anyone with Laplace's mind, which included the atoms in space and all their states of motion, could - and Du Bois-Reymond says the same thing - calculate today, for example, when Caesar crossed the Rubicon from the world formula that he has of the atoms and their present states of motion. He would only have to insert the necessary information into the formula. It would only depend on the position of the atoms at that time, and the fact would have to follow: Caesar crosses the Rubicon. - If you insert certain values into the formula, a certain picture of the current state of the atoms should result, and then, for example, you would be able to recognize the Battle of Salamis. One would only need to proceed from differential to differential and one would be able to reconstruct the entire Battle of Salamis. That is the ideal of Laplace's mind: a knowledge of the world, which is called astronomical. Occasionally something more can be added about these things. Now I will only mention a small experience for those who are attentive to it. As a boy, I once came across a school program. Such school programs are printed, after all. They usually contain an essay written by one of the teachers. At the time, this essay was not that easy for me to understand, because it was titled “The force of attraction considered as an effect of motion”. Even then, I was dealing with an author who, so to speak, had also set himself the ideal of Laplace's mind; and he had expounded many other things in the same direction.

If you take all this together, you will see that I did not try to speak of an astronomical-materialistic world view as a mere idea, but to let the facts and the personalities speak for themselves. In a sense, then, I did strive to cultivate a style of presentation that excludes the personal. For if I were to relate what Du Bois-Reymond said on a particular occasion, I would let him speak for himself and not myself. My task is only to follow up what the personalities have said; I try to let the world speak. This is the attempt to exclude oneself, not to relate one's own views, but facts. When reading this point by Wrangell, one should be aware that our spiritual science already strives for the sense of fact in the way it presents the facts, the sense not merely to suckle at the objective, but the sense to immerse oneself in the facts, to really sink into them.

Now you will recognize what I have peeled out of the facts if you let the following lines of the booklet sink in again: “All events that we observe through our senses and perceive mentally proceed according to the laws of nature, that is, every state of the cosmos is necessarily conditioned by the temporally preceding state and just as necessarily results in the states that follow it. All changes, i.e. all events, are inevitable consequences of the forces present in the cosmos.

And now it says:

It does not affect the essence of the question whether one - for the sake of better clarity - calls the carrier of the forces “matter” or, according to the monists, imagines the concept “energy” as the only effective thing that, although it presents different forms of appearance to the human senses, basically represents an unchangeable sum of latent or current possibilities for movement.

I would only use such a sentence in the rarest of cases, and only when something else has already been summarized. Remember that I once spoke of what is expressed in this sentence. It says: “It does not affect the essence of the question whether, for the sake of better clarity, one calls the carrier of the forces ‘Stofb’ or, according to the process of the monists, conceives of the concept ‘energy’ as the only effective thing...”. I would not put it that way, but would point out that Haeckel's and Büchner's students, above all, look at the material that is spread out in space. According to the Swabian Vischer, they were the “Stoffhuber,” the “material boosters.”

Then came the man who is now the president of the Monistenbund: Ostwald. At a meeting of natural scientists, I believe it was the one in Kiel - I have spoken of it before - he gave a lecture on the overcoming of materialism through energetics, through energism. There he pointed out that it was not the matter that mattered, but the force. He thus replaced matter with force. Do you remember how I quoted his own words at the time? He said, in essence: when one person receives a slap in the face from another, it is not the matter of the substance that is dealt a blow, but the force with which the slap is dealt. Nowhere do we perceive the substance, but the force. And so, in place of substance, we find force, or, with a certain not merely descriptive but transformational meaning, energy. But this energism, which now calls itself monism, is nothing but a masked materialism. Again I have tried to show you by way of example how there really was a time when the “energy grabbers” took the place of the “substance grabbers”. I did not attempt to present a theoretical sentence, but tried to characterize from the real. And that must be our endeavor in any case. For it is only by having a sense for the real in the physical that we develop a sense for the real in the spiritual, and do not just mumble our own assertions.

So the author of the booklet says: “It does not affect the essence of the question whether one calls the carrier of the forces ‘matter’ for the sake of better clarity, or, according to the process of the monists, imagines the concept of energy as the only effective thing...

What the author means here by the expression “latent or actual possibilities of movement” can be explained as follows: Imagine some kind of counterweight here, and on top of it a tube, a glass tube, with water inside. This water presses on the floor here. In the moment when I pull away the counterweight, the water runs down. In the latter case, we are dealing with a current movement; before I pulled the support away, the same force was there, only it was not current, but at rest. Everything that then flowed down from the water and became current was previously latent, not current.

The course of all events is irrevocably predetermined, and man, in his thinking, feeling and willing, is just as unfree as, for example, a stone is in its fall.

That is the necessary consequence of the Laplacian world view. The Laplacian brain concludes that if I put my hand there, that is an image of the moving atoms, and if the Laplacian brain can still calculate the image, as I have indicated, then this excludes the freedom of man, that is, the Laplacian brain excludes the freedom of man.

This is the first point that Mr. von Wrangell makes on the basis of the materialistic-mechanical world view. The second point is as follows:

2. The inner experiences that take place in a person's consciousness (his feelings, thoughts, volitional impulses) are not essentially different from other processes in nature that a person observes through his senses. These inner experiences are only side effects of material processes within the human brain and nervous system.

This second point expresses that when I think, feel and will, it is only a concomitant of the inner processes that the Laplacian mind selects. We are therefore not dealing with independent thoughts, feelings and impulses of the will, but only with accompanying phenomena. If you follow what I said, for example, in the lecture 'The Legacy of the 19th Century' and in similar other lectures, if you study some of the material contained in 'Riddles of Philosophy', you will see how many minds in the second half of the 19th century, this view was taken for granted, that man is actually nothing more than the structure of material processes and their energies, and that thoughts, feelings and will impulses are only accompanying phenomena.

As the third point of the materialistic-mechanical world view, Mr. von Wrangell states the following:

3. After the physical death of man, the existence of the human individual finally ceases, because the so-called spiritual life of man is bound to his physicality and cannot exist without it.

This point can be understood by everyone as a consequence of the first point. The first point is the one that matters. The second and third are necessary consequences.

In the next essay, Mr. von Wrangell discusses what he calls:

examining these basic assumptions

What are the basic assumptions of the materialistic world view based on? Are they indisputably proven facts or only more or less probable hypotheses? The first of the three aforementioned assumptions, that all events are necessarily bound to follow a certain course, is the most important and has the most far-reaching consequences. It is not only regarded as beyond doubt by materialists, but also by many spiritualists, who, while accepting the independent existence of spiritual entities and believing in the continued existence of the spiritual being of man, their “soul”, after physical death, assume that there is an unalterable law within the spiritual world as well as within the sensory world. First of all, it should be noted that this idea of the absolute, unexceptional lawfulness, i.e. necessity of all events, also in the spiritual realm, excludes the concept of morality, of good and evil, because to act morally means to choose the good, when evil could be chosen.

In this chapter, Mr. von Wrangell tries to make it clear to himself that there can be no morality if the materialistic-mechanical world view is the only correct one. Because if I have to do every moment of my life what is only a by-product of atoms, then there can be no question of freedom, nor of morality, because everything is done out of necessity. Just as one cannot say that a stone that falls to the earth is good and one that does not fall to the earth is not good, so one cannot say that people's actions are good or not good. In the case of a criminal, everything happens out of necessity; in the case of a good person, everything happens out of necessity. Therefore there is something correct in the sentence: “First of all, it should be noted that this idea of the unconditional, unexceptional lawfulness, i.e. necessity of all events, also in the spiritual realm, excludes the concept of morality, of good and evil; because to act morally means to choose the good, when evil could be chosen.” But one cannot choose when everything is constrained by material necessity.

The next chapter is headed:

Freedom and Morality

As soon as there is no freedom of decision, there can be no question of morality in the sense in which this concept is understood by people and corresponds to our inner feelings. We can certainly speak of more or less useful, unfree actions and impulses, but a moral judgment of unfree actions or feelings has no justification, no sense. With the elimination of freedom, responsibility also ceases to exist. This undoubted connection between freedom and morality cannot be used as an argument against the concept of lawfulness; it is merely intended to remind us of the logical consequences associated with the assumption of absolute necessity.

So Mr. von Wrangell is trying to make it clear here that it absolutely follows from the materialistic-mechanical world view that one cannot actually speak of freedom and morality.

Now he is a scientific mind, and a scientific mind is accustomed to honestly and sincerely drawing the consequences of assumptions. Our time misses much that would immediately seem absurd to it if it had really already taken on the scientific conscience, if it did not stir and throw together all kinds of things without a scientific conscience. Mr. von Wrangell does not do that, but says: If we accept the materialistic world view, we can no longer speak of freedom and morality; because either the materialistic world view is correct, and then it is nonsense to speak of freedom and morality, or one speaks of freedom and morality, and then there is no sense in speaking of the materialistic-mechanical world view.

But since Hetr von Wrangell is a scientist who is already accustomed to drawing the consequences of his assumptions – that is an important fact – he is not accustomed to having things so sloppy in his thinking; because it is a sloppiness of thinking when someone says, “I am a materialist” and does not at the same time deny morality. He does not want to be guilty of this sloppiness of thinking. On the other hand, he also has the habit that one has when one has become a scientist, namely to say: May the world go to pieces, what I have scientifically recognized must be true! Therefore, one cannot simply discard the materialistic view, but if the materialistic world view is true, then it must be accepted and then one is faced with the sad necessity of having to throw morality overboard. So it is not just a matter of asking: where does morality take us? – he says that is not enough – but the materialistic world view must be examined, quite apart from the consequences this has for morality. So we have to tackle a different kind of materialistic world view.

The next chapter is called:

The World Enigma

Yes, one can say that the question of whether man is responsible for his actions, i.e., whether he has the possibility of regulating his volitional impulses according to motives that are unambiguously determined by his bodily organization, includes the whole world riddle for us humans, the question of freedom or unfreedom of will. For if this question is answered in the sense of the absolute necessity of all happenings in the whole universe, without exception, then materialism is the only correct view and the world, with all its agony and suffering, is a mechanism that runs to no purpose, without a recognizable beginning, but with the eternal death of the whole as its final goal.

When we started our spiritual science movement, I had occasion to read some poems by the poet Marie Eugenie delle Grazie, who, one might say, has come to terms with a materialistic-mechanical world view and even as a poet really draws the consequences from it. That is why she formed poems like “A dirty whirlwind is existence.” — One must come to that conclusion if one is not sloppy in one's thinking, if one lets one's thinking affect one's feelings. And only because people are so sloppy and cowardly in their thinking do they not ask themselves: What becomes of life under the influence of the materialistic-mechanical worldview? But it must be shown that it is inherently false, otherwise one would simply have accepted the consequence of delle Grazie.

Mr. von Wrangell continues:

The greatest minds and deepest thinkers have endeavored to solve this most important of all questions, and it seems presumptuous to want to say something new. However, it cannot be a matter of a generally valid answer here, but at most a reference to the train of thought that led to a subjective solution to the puzzle. Such a reference can sometimes be of help to a similarly minded soul.

Mr. von Wrangell thus points out that the greatest minds, poets and thinkers have endeavored to solve this question, and that it is unnecessary to say anything new about it. At most, it could be a hint at the train of thought that led to a subjective solution of this puzzle; that is, a hint at his own train of thought.

In the next chapter, he examines where the idea comes from that what precedes always follows what comes after in a lawful manner. It is called:

The origin of the law

From this point of view, it seems justified to raise the question: Where do we get the idea of the absolute lawfulness of all events? Is it perhaps an intuitive truth that underlies all thinking, or has humanity only gradually, through long and arduous mental work, come to this idea; an idea that now appears to the Europeans, who live off the cultural achievements of the past, as a self-evident truth?

So Mr. von Wrangell is asking here: Did man always believe in this unconditional law, or did people only come to it over time? Only then can one recognize the validity of this idea; for if man has always believed in it, then there must be something true about it that can be taken for granted; but if people have only just come to it, then one can examine how they have arrived at this idea. In this way one can form an opinion about its validity. He says further:

The latter is the case. This is an acquired, not an original insight. On the contrary, man's original, direct consciousness gives him the idea of inner freedom limited by external circumstances, of arbitrariness in his volitional decisions. The idea of conformity to law is only gradually being derived from experience.

Now, as you can see from my countless lectures, it is clear how slowly people have come to this idea of conformity to law, from the old clairvoyance to the time when the idea of conformity to law has come. In truth, the idea of conformity to law is only four centuries old, because it basically comes from Galileo. I have often discussed this. If you go back before Galileo, there is no idea at all that everything is permeated by such a law.

Mr. von Wrangell says: “This is an acquired, not an original insight... The idea of lawfulness has only gradually been taken from experience.” Now, I would like to know whether the child is compelled by its inner astral circumstances to reach for the sugar, that is, whether it is natural for it to do so, or whether the child thinks it already has a choice. I have told something like an anecdote before, which I would like to mention here as well. It was during my studies; I used to pace up and down in the lobby of Vienna's Südbahnhof with a fellow student. He was a hardened materialist and firmly held the view that all thinking is just a process in the brain, like the hands on a clock moving forward. And just as one cannot say that this is something special, but is connected with the mechanical substances and forces present in it, so he thought that the brain also makes these astronomical movements. That was a Laplacian head; we were eighteen to nineteen years old at the time. So I said to him once: But you never say “my brain thinks,” you say “I think.” Why do you keep lying then? Why do you always say “I think” and not “my brain thinks?” - Now, this fellow student had taken his knowledge, the ideas of volition and conformity to law, not from experience, but from complicated theories. He did not believe in inner arbitrariness, but he said “I think” and not “my brain thinks”. So he was in constant contradiction to himself.

The next chapter is called:

Freedom of the will cannot be proved by experience.

Can this contradiction be resolved rationally? It is obvious that an experience-based proof of the freedom of the will of people or other beings cannot be provided.

Mr. von Wrangell says that the truth of the freedom of the will of people cannot be proven by external experience, because one can only make one's own decision.

Mr. von Wrangell says, then, that one cannot prove the truth of the freedom of human will through external experience, because one can only make one decision. If one wanted to prove it, then one would have to be able to make two decisions. Now, I have already mentioned that one does not refer to experience at all in this question, but rather constructs an experience. For example, they once imagined a donkey with a bundle of hay on each side, the same tasty, equally sized bundle of hay. The donkey, which is getting hungrier and hungrier, is now supposed to decide whether to eat from one or the other bundle of hay, because one is as tasty as the other and as large as the other. And so he does not know whether he should turn this way or that. In short, the donkey could not come to a proper decision and had to starve between the two bundles of hay. Such things have been constructed because it was felt that one cannot get there experientially by observing freedom. Mr. von Wrangell draws attention to this and then asks the question:

But can the freedom of the will be refuted by experience? To answer this question, let us first recall some epistemological truths!

To answer this question, Mr. von Wrangell now speaks of some epistemological truths in the next chapter. This chapter is called:

Epistemological Retrospection

Man has direct awareness only of himself. He feels desires, which he seeks to satisfy and which trigger impulses of will in him; he receives impressions, of which he soon becomes convinced that they are dependent on certain sense organs of his body. When he closes his eyes, he receives no impressions of light and color; when he plugs his ears, he weakens his sound sensations or loses them altogether. Likewise, experience shows that the nose conveys the sense of smell and the mouth, in the parts covered by mucous membranes, conveys the sense of taste. Only the sense of touch seems to be tied to no particular part of the body, but can be exercised through the entire skin. The normal healthy person has five different senses in an awake state, each conveying its specific type of impression.

In this, Mr. von Wrangell is influenced by popular knowledge of the senses. Those who once listened to a small lecture cycle that I then titled “Anthroposophy” will have seen that one cannot get by with five senses, but rather has to assume twelve senses. Among these twelve senses is also the sense for the thinking of another person, for the other I. Therefore, anyone who has followed our spiritual scientific movement correctly can recognize the inadequacy of Wrangell's assertions. They are not incorrect, but they are only partially correct. We cannot say, “Man has direct consciousness only of himself.” That is incorrect. For then we could never perceive other I's.

In recent times, however, there has been a very complicated view, which is held by all sorts of people. Perhaps the philosopher and psychologist Lipps could be cited as a characteristic personality among those who hold it. They are not aware when a person confronts them that they have a direct impression of his ego, but they say: When I confront a person, he has a face; it makes certain movements, and he says certain things, and from what he says and does, one should be able to conclude that there is an ego behind it. So the ego is something inferred, not something directly perceived. A new school of philosophy, however, which has Max Scheler as its most prominent representative, takes a different view. It has already made the observation that one can have an immediate impression of the ego of another person. And what has been written about the ego, more rigorously scientifically by Husserl, the philosopher, and then somewhat more popularly, especially in his more recent essays, by Scheler, shows that more recent philosophy is on the way to recognizing that direct consciousness can also know something of another consciousness. — One can therefore say that Mr. von Wrangell has been infected by popular epistemology when he says: “Man has direct awareness only of himself.” And further: “He feels desires, which he seeks to satisfy and which trigger impulses of will in him.” And then he describes how man perceives the world through his senses.

I have already written about this sense physiology. Read in “Lucifer-Gnosis” and you will see that I tried to explain the impossibility of this sense physiology with the simple comparison of the seals. I said at the time: This sense physiology is materialistic from the very beginning. It proceeds from the assumption that nothing can enter into us from the outside, because it secretly conceives of the outside as materialistic. But it is the same as with the seal and the sealing wax: the seal always remains outside the sealing wax; nothing passes from the material of the seal into the sealing wax. But the name “Miller” engraved on it passes completely from the seal to the sealing wax. If we now place the main emphasis on what is spiritually expressed in the name Miller, and not on the material, of which nothing passes over, we can see that what is presented from the point of view of sensory physiology says nothing. But these are such horrible doctrines that have been hammered into people's brains that most people just don't follow them up, even if they want to become spiritualists. You can read more about this in my book “The Riddles of Philosophy”, in the chapter “The World as Illusion”.

Then Mr. von Wrangell continues:

Since man cannot imagine that an existing state can change without a cause, he assumes that the sensory impressions he feels are caused by forces that he locates outside of his own directly felt self. He calls these external causes of his internal sensory impressions “things” and, in their totality, “the world” or - epistemologically - the “not-me”, in contrast to the directly perceived “me”.

That's clear, you just have to get used to the fact that there is a bit of epistemological talk.

A thousandfold experience and the corresponding agreement with beings that he recognizes as being the same as himself - his fellow human beings - teach him that these “things,” this “not-I,” can exist independently of his consciousness.

Otherwise, man would have to believe that if he turns his eye away not only from living but also from inanimate things, things cease to exist.

If, for example, he loses consciousness during sleep, he finds upon awakening that things persist in their “reality,” that is, in their ability to evoke sensations in him. Man also recognizes his own body as belonging in some respects to the world “outside him.”

This is good to emphasize, because we not only have things that are inside, but also things that are outside.

He can receive sensory impressions from his limbs, as from other things; for example, he can see, touch, etc. his hands, and here too he distinguishes between the inner process of his sensory impressions and their outer cause, which in this case he recognizes as one of his body parts. He soon becomes convinced that it is his body, that is, that this thing has a very special connection to his “I,” to that which feels and thinks, especially through the sense of touch, which shows him that when he brings his own body parts into contact with other things, he feels the contact directly, but he does not feel it directly when other objects are brought into contact with each other.” ²

It is very good to be made aware of something like this. So this is how Mr. von Wrangell answers the question of how it comes about that a person recognizes his own body among the things that are outside in a certain thing. Those who think sloppily simply say: thinking about something like this is nonsense; these people who think about something like this want to be scientists. But Wrangell says: When these two pieces of chalk collide, it doesn't hurt, but when I bump into something with my body, it hurts. That's the difference. And because one hurts and the other doesn't, I label the one as belonging to me and the other as not belonging to me. It is good to know that we have nothing but the consequence of this consciousness.

Now, you see, my dear friends, I had intended to finish discussing this brochure today. But we have only got as far as page 10. An attempt should be made to find the connection between what is written in the world and what, in the strict sense, belongs to our spiritual science. But the next chapters are still too interesting: the formation of concepts, ideas of space and time; the principle of causality; the application of the idea of arbitrariness to the environment; observation of phenomena that occur uniformly; the essence of all science; astronomy, the oldest science; uniform motion; measurement; the principle underlying clocks. It is so interesting that perhaps we will continue the discussion tomorrow at seven o'clock.

• 1. The quotations in this and the following lectures reflect the entire text of the Wrangell brochure.
• 2. In the brochure itself, the following footnote appears: “The ‘elimination of sensitivity in sensitives’ observed by de Rochas is a particular abnormal phenomenon that deserves in-depth study.”

We have devoted the recent lectures to considering from a certain point of view the life which runs its course behind the ordinary life which in normal circumstances, or to ordinary science, is embraced by our physical consciousness. Fundamentally all our considerations are directed to that life, which transpires beneath the threshold of ordinary consciousness. And we seek to characterise it from the most varied sides, as must be done in Spiritual Science.

A certain security is connected with the external physical perceptible reality, in that one beholds it. But physically, even for those who do not undergo the necessary training whereby they can themselves rise into the spiritual worlds, yet through illuminating these worlds from different sides which harmonise, a certain wisdom is created, and this may create a feeling of security.

Especial attention is drawn to the fact that man is not only in the world which he beholds with ordinary consciousness. Beneath the threshold of ordinary consciousness a life takes place which, unless one goes through the Portal of Initiation, is not grasped by the consciousness. This remains unknown to ordinary human life. Much takes place in the world with reference to the whole entity that comprises a human being; that which man knows while living in the physical body is merely one part of what really occurs; and all the efforts made to get into touch with the spiritual world, consist in trying to see something of the life which transpires beneath the threshold of ordinary consciousness. By means of a widening of this consciousness we try to cross the threshold and perceive that in which we really live, but which is not perceptible to our ordinary consciousness. As I have said, a certain adjustable threshold exists between the ordinary consciousness and that of which—and this expression has a certain meaning for us—we are unconsciously conscious.

In the last lecture I gave a very pointed example. A man proposes early in the morning to accomplish something that night. He lives, as it were, in the thought, that he will carry out his plan during the evening. At mid-day something occurs which prevents him from fulfilling his intention. To the ordinary consciousness this occurrence would seem to be an accident. But if one looks deeper into human life, one discovers wisdom in the so-called accident, but a wisdom that lies beneath the threshold of consciousness. One cannot really perceive this wisdom with the ordinary consciousness, but one very frequently discovers in such cases that if hindrance had not occurred at mid-day the man would perhaps have been brought into some disastrous situation through undertaking the proposed project during the evening. As I said, he might perhaps have broken his leg. But when one knows the connection, one discovers that wisdom lies in the entire occurrence: that the soul herself sought the obstacle and put it in the way, but with intentions lying beneath the threshold of consciousness. Now that is something which is still close to the ordinary consciousness, but it points below to a region to which man belongs; to which he belongs with the concealed parts of his being, those parts which, after he lays aside the physical body, go through the gate of death. This region belongs to that ruling consciousness, of which we spoke in the public lecture, as the beholder of the actions of our will. This spectator is really always present. He guides and conducts us, but the ordinary consciousness knows nothing of him, A great deal goes on in the intervals between the events which we perceive. In all this, especially in what takes place between the events of life, and in what transpires beneath the threshold of consciousness, there is prepared, as the living being is prepared in the egg, that which we shall be after we have passed through the gate of death. And now something on which we dwelt in our last consideration, must be brought into connection with much that should be well known to us from earlier lectures.

I have often pointed out how important and essential memory is for man, in so far as he stands here in physical consciousness, and that this memory should not be severed. We must remember back to a certain point in our physical experience, or at least have the power of tracing the continuity of our life. If this connecting thread is sundered, if we cannot remember definite events, so that at least we have the consciousness that we were in existence when these events took place, then a serious psychic illness appears, to which I have referred in a recent lecture. This memory forms part of our experience here in physical consciousness. But it is also, in a certain sense, a veil; it hides from us those events to which I am now referring, which lie behind the ordinary consciousness, and especially behind that veil woven by our continuous memory. Just think: we are first infants; then we traverse a period of consciousness which we do not recollect. Next comes the time to which we can always remember back in later life. This begins a continuous series of memories. At a certain time, either in the second, third, fourth year of life, or even later with some people, we must recollect becoming aware of the individual self, the Ego. When we thus look back into ourselves, our soul gaze meets this memory, and in so far as we are physical men here, we really live inwardly in these memories. We could not speak of ourselves as ‘I,’ unless we did retain this memory. Anyone who observes himself, recognises this. When he looks into himself, he really looks into the region of his memory. He regards, as it were, the tableau of his memories. Even although all we have experienced may not arise in our memory, yet we know that memories might arise, as far back as that point already described. We must presuppose that we have been consciously present with our Ego in all these memories, and have been able to retain them. If that were not so, the continuity of our Ego would be disturbed, and a soul disease would appear. But behind what we notice in memory there lies that which is seen with spiritual eyes and heard with spiritual ears. So that what I have already explained in public lectures is absolutely correct. When we look into the spiritual world, we use the same force which we otherwise employ in memory. That does not mean that we necessarily lose our memory on acquiring spiritual sight, but it does mean as already characterised in a public lecture, that it is not always possible to remember what we perceive spiritually, we cannot always take it in, for it to live in the memory; for we must always behold it over and over again and always behold it afresh. I have often said, for example, that if one gives a lecture on what one really sees in the spiritual world, one cannot do this from memory in the same way as one can speak of ordinary things, for one must bring it ever again out of the spiritual world. That which lives in the thought must be produced anew. Both the soul and the spirit must be active in such a case and must bring forth the things afresh. When the spiritual seer really looks into the spiritual world that which is usually the veil of memory becomes transparent, and he uses it to look through. He looks, as it were, through the force which otherwise fashions his memory, and looks into the spiritual world. If a student performs his occult exercises with strength and energy, he notices that in ordinary life he uses his power of thought to gain knowledge of the things and events of the world, with the support of the body as a physical instrument which enables him to form real conceptions of these things. The concept supported there by the activity of the physical body remains in us as a memory. When, however, we enter the spiritual world we must be continually active in order to call forth the concepts anew. When we reach the point which I characterised in the public lecture, where one can do nothing but wait until the secrets of the spiritual world reveal themselves—a ceaseless activity begins. But one must participate in this. Just as when drawing one has to be continually active, if one wishes to express anything through the drawing, similarly, when the spiritual world reveals itself, the imagination must actively co-operate. What it produces arises from the objective reality, but man must take part in this production of concepts. In this way we contact something which is continually active in man—in the two-fold man, of which I have already spoken—but which is concealed in us, which lives within our physical covering beneath the threshold of our ordinary physical consciousness. One connects oneself with this being. Then one notices the following: here in the physical world one is so united with it that one stands on a firm basis. One sees other things in the outer world and moves about among them. One enters into certain relations with other men, to whom one does this or that and from whom one suffers this or that. We spend the life which we embrace with the ordinary consciousness in the continuous comprehension of what we develop in this way, but behind it there lies another, a life following definite laws, which we do not perceive with the ordinary consciousness; in this life we share, when, between going to sleep and waking, we live in the astral body and Ego. Our consciousness is, however, then so lowered that we cannot perceive with ordinary senses what position we occupy in a spiritual world which pursues its own course, which continually lives around us, and while yet being super-sensible and invisible weaves itself into the sensible and visible.

Above all we must understand this world as spiritual, and not think of it as a duplicate, a simply more refined physical sensible world; we must conceive of it as spiritual. I have often drawn attention to the reason why just in our time there must be produced from out the fountain of all human knowledge, that which, as carried on by us, relates to the spiritual world. For truly, not only because of the facts which present themselves to the spiritual investigators who have to impart truths concerning the spiritual world, but from the whole course of our civilisation (I have drawn attention to this from various standpoints), it is evident that in humanity a certain longing is arising to open the soul to the hidden side of human life, and to learn something of it. I have already brought forward phenomena in scientific life and elsewhere, which show how this longing lives at the present time.

To-day I should like to add to our considerations a quite special example, from which we can see that already in our day there are people who to a certain extent touch on these secrets of existence. They divine and know something of these mysteries of existence, but for reasons which we shall presently examine closer, they do not wish to approach them in the manner practised by Spiritual Science. The easiest way to bring these things before people is to leave them more or less undecided, leaving, as it were, the door open, by saying: ‘You need not believe these things. You need not think of that world as real.’ In our time there are plenty of examples of this. I have given instances. I shall bring forward an especial case to-day in reference to this point. I shall introduce into our considerations a few remarks about a really extraordinary and significant novel of modern German literature. I might call it a pearl among German novels. It is called Hofrat Eysenhardt. It is really one of the best novels to be found in the more recent literature of Germany and in it, in a really wonderful manner, only one single individual is depicted: namely, Hofrat Eysenhardt himself. He lived in Vienna and became a lawyer, and later President of the local court. He became one of the greatest lawyers of his country. He was feared by all those who had anything to do with the law, and beloved by those associated with him, for he was a most distinguished criminologist. His eloquence was such that he could get anyone convicted who came within his clutches; during the trial he subjected him to a crossfire, and with a certain indifference to human life he was able so to harass his victim (one can use this expression here) that whatever happened, he was trapped. Thus this Hofrat Eysenhardt was, in his external life, a very remarkable man. He had not much talent for entering into psychic relations with other men. He was a kind of hermit with regard to human life; he laid great stress on being correct and blameless in external life; with his subordinates he exchanged but few words, but with his superiors he was not only friendly, but deeply courteous. I could bring forward many more characteristics; he was a model advocate. We need not enter now into his other qualities, they are wonderfully brought out in the novel, reflected in the statement of a subordinate, but we may go to the occasion when he was once chosen to conduct an important case against a notorious man named Markus Freund. This Markus Freund had already suffered punishment in a lesser degree for offences similar to the one of which he was now accused. But it never occurred to the examining magistrate who made the enquiry, that there was any possibility of bringing about a conviction on this occasion. Yet Hofrat Eysenhardt obtained one. And in a document which the Hofrat himself then drew up for a purpose which we shall presently disclose, he himself describes the manner in which Markus Freund behaved during and especially after his conviction. Let me read the passage: ‘This man, who possessed the strong family affections so characteristic of his race, had a special tenderness for a young grand-daughter, of whom he was never tired of speaking with his fellow prisoners. He could hardly await his release, which he confidently anticipated in spite of the severe suspicions laid on him, so much did he long to see the child again. Markus Freund obstinately denied everything, and in the preliminary trial before the magistrate was so well able to explain away each of the suspicious circumstances with a sagacity truly astounding, that the magistrate, a very efficient, although excessively soft-hearted man, was firmly convinced of Freund's innocence until the closing proceedings began, presided over by the person to whom this information refers.’ (Hofrat Eysenhardt writes that himself, he writes of himself in the third person.) Although Markus Freund even in the final trial exerted his sagacity to the utmost, and his advocate made a very beautiful and touching speech (of merit even according to the newspapers) yet the verdict was exactly the opposite to that expected by the magistrate, and perhaps by the defendant himself. Markus Freund was unanimously convicted by the jury and, as there were many previous convictions and aggravating conditions in his past, he was condemned to the severest penalty, twenty years' imprisonment. The person concerned (none other than Hofrat Eysenhardt himself) might well without presumption, regard this verdict as one of the greatest triumphs of his many years of criminal practice. For the jury would have been deceived by the truly bewildering sophistry of Markus Freund—although public feeling at that time was not favourable to men of his race—had not the President been able, by his superior eloquence to crumple this sophistry into nothing. ‘The effect of the verdict on the defendant was such’ (the Hofrat himself is still relating this) ‘that it required hardened nerves, accustomed to such outbreaks, not to be shaken as to the truth and justice of the sentence. First Markus Freund stammered a few incomprehensible words, probably in Hebrew. Then this bowed man, of barely middle height, drew himself up to his full height, so that he appeared huge, and lifted the heavy lids which usually almost covered his eyes—showing the blood-shot whites of his rolling eyes. And from his distorted mouth he rapidly hissed forth a stream of bitter curses and threats directed against the President. To repeat them here in the offensive jargon in which they were poured forth, would hardly harmonise with the respect due to the law. Only the first sentence may be quoted: “Mr. President! You know as well as I do myself that I am innocent;” and the last, “This shall be repaid to you. An eye for an eye, it shall be paid back to you. You shall see!” The rest of his speech was entirely fantastic and appeared, in so far as it had any sense at all, to amount to this: he, Markus Freund, had probed the noble President with his eyes to the very depths and discovered, that even though noble, the President was not aware of it, he was nevertheless of the same sort as himself; he the down-trodden, but this time, innocent Markus Freund. The officers immediately did their duty and seized the offender, to whom the President immediately awarded disciplinary punishment for his outburst. While the soldiers, each holding one of his waving arms, led the accused away, his fury broke out in weeping and sobbing. Even in the corridor one heard his dull moaning: my poor, poor little girl, you will never see your grandfather again. The jury were greatly distressed at this incident, and questioned the President through their foreman as to whether it would not be possible to try the case again immediately. Through their insufficient knowledge of the law they had not enough experience to know that outbursts of this kind occur more often with very hardened blameworthy criminals, than with innocent defendants, who really are much scarcer than the sensational minds of the public imagine. Less excusable was the fact that the above-mentioned soft-hearted Vice-President, who was present at the pronouncement of the sentence and its disagreeable sequel, took upon himself to say to the prosecutor, gently shaking his head, “Mr. President, I do not envy you your talent!”’

‘So Markus Freund was now imprisoned and the Hofrat lived on. But how he lived and what now happened he relates in his statement. We must presuppose that some considerable time has elapsed, and the accused had been a long time in prison. Now the following occurred: ‘Just as the person in question’ (the Hofrat relates this of himself) ‘had seen him at the moment when he uttered those threats and curses against him, with a face distorted with fury, precisely so did the long-forgotten Markus Freund come before his mind in the night between the 18th and 19th March, at 2 o'clock, when he suddenly awoke without cause.

‘Thus the Hofrat suddenly wakes up in the night between the 18th and 19th of March, at 2 o'clock, and has the impression in his mind that Markus Freund was standing before him.

‘And while he lay motionless, as in a trance, the above-mentioned events recapitulated themselves in imagination with lightning speed. He was not clearly conscious whether in the intervening years he had thought much about the occurrence or not. Both alternatives appeared equally correct to him at that moment, for horror weakened his power of thought.

‘Thus Hofrat Eysenhardt woke up in the middle of sleep, was forced to think of Markus Freund and to recapitulate what had happened, but he did not know whether he had previously often thought of it or not. ‘While he lay thus with throbbing heart, an impulse arose immediately to light the candle on the table, but he could not. (He could not move his hands). It was as if something gently tapped at the bedroom door, or rather a timorous scratching, as if a little dog was begging to be let in. Involuntarily the question formed itself: “Who is there?” There was no answer, nor did the door open, but nevertheless he had a feeling that something slipped in. The floor creaked slightly, the sound passing across the room from the door to the bed, as if this invisible something came nearer, and finally stood close to him. Anyhow he had the indescribable feeling of a strange presence, and not of an indefinite, unknown presence, but it seemed to him as if this “something” must be that Markus Freund, the sudden recollection of whom had roused him out of a deep sleep. He even felt as if this invisible presence bent over his face. Now, whether he fell asleep again without being aware of it and dreamed, and—as you know—the dreams and the people of whom one dreams are frequently confused with one another, or whether certain exaggerated ideas of Schopenhauer as to the secret identity of all individuals stirred in him as the after effects of what he had been reading during the last few days, at any rate the senseless thought flashed through his mind that he and Markus Freund were fundamentally one and the same person. And as if in confirmation of this idea, silly as it was and contrary to all logic, he repeated, whether merely inwardly, or outwardly and audibly, he knew not, the above-mentioned curses and threats of Markus Freund as far as he could remember them, and indeed with the horror-struck feeling that each curse was now beginning to fulfil itself. Now whether, as was not impossible, he had fallen asleep and dreamed, certain it is that he awoke with this terrible impression and lit the candle. The clock registered ten minutes past two. Everything in the room was as before, although furniture, walls, and pictures appeared strange to him, and he had to drink a glass of water and wait a little while to recover himself and realise where he was.’

He relates all this himself and says, that first he had this vision, as we may call it. Now, this made such an impression on him that he was driven to go immediately—though still somewhat shaken—to the Court, and look up the documents relating to Markus Freund. But he was not able to do so; something else occurred—Hofrat Eysenhardt had always been a quiet, open-minded man, and he merely relates what happened to him. We shall shortly see why he relates it. Indeed, he considers himself somewhat ridiculous and unworthy to have yielded to it.

‘In vain did he tell himself how absurd and ridiculous his conduct was. His former iron will was in this respect weakened, and remained so. It barely sufficed to conceal from his colleagues the inner torments which were always present with him. One morning, passing a group of legal officials who were engaged in heated conversation in a dark corridor, he thought he heard the name of Markus Freund.’

One day when he went to the Court-house, he really lacked the courage to again take up these documents, but in passing a corridor where several people were conversing he heard the name of Markus Freund.

‘Now, as this man and his name had gradually become a fixed idea in his mind, and never gave him any rest, he regarded a self-deception as not unlikely, and he stopped and asked the gentleman of whom they had been speaking? “Of Markus Freund, of your Markus Freund, Herr Hofrat, don't you remember him?” answered one of the gentlemen, who happened to be the soft-hearted magistrate who at the time had made that rash remark. “Of Markus Freund? Why? What has happened to him?” He could hardly breathe. “Why he is dead. By the grace of God the poor devil is now free,” the soft-hearted one answered. “Dead? When?” “Oh, he died in the night between the 18th and 19th of March, at 2 o'clock.”’

Thus the story relates that Hofrat Eysenhardt had convicted Markus Freund, who was imprisoned for a long time. During the night between the 18th and 19th of March, Eysenhardt wakes up, sees Freund in his thoughts, and then has a vision of his appearance. He is terribly frightened, wants to look up the documents, but allows several weeks to pass. Finally, he overhears a conversation, whereby he learns that Markus Freund died at the very time he appeared to him, creeping into his room like a little dog.

Now, in order to understand all that has been related, the conclusion of the novel is necessary. For this shows that the Hofrat was now urged by circumstances, and indeed by such circumstances that one could not have supposed would have this effect upon him. As President of an especially important trial of a case of espionage he was necessarily brought in connection with certain people. Now, in his connection with them and guided by a dim instinct, he is led to commit the very same offence of which he had convicted Markus Freund. And later, after he had been dragged by passion into crime, he had occasion to remember in a quite special manner the words spoken by Markus Freund after his trial: ‘This shall be repaid to you. An eye for an eye, you shall see.’ Thus something had lived beneath the threshold of the Hofrat's consciousness which was definitely connected with his previous deeds, and which was also connected in a remarkable and mysterious way with the fulfilment of what the dead man had threatened him with. Indeed, there is an even deeper connection. The author of the novel wrote in the first person, as though many of the things about Hofrat Eysenhardt had been related to him personally, and he writes that he had a conversation with one of his subordinates (this conversation occurs in the novel). And this subordinate, who was an extraordinary sagacious, philosophically inclined man, said: ‘This Hofrat was specially gifted with the power to penetrate to the depths of these things because he had a strong disposition towards them himself. And so he penetrates deepest into the cases which appeal to him most.’ That is related in the novel. Now, it is interesting that in the night of the 18th to the 18th of March, at 2 o'clock, the thought arises in the Hofrat, ‘You and this Markus Freund are practically identical.’ This unity, this uniting of the consciousness appears evident to his soul; he has an insight into a connection which lies beneath the threshold of ordinary life. This is revealed to him. Naturally it is not revealed to him in the same way as to others, for cases vary, but this disclosure comes to him. Now, it is interesting that the author of this novel has brought together all the materials possible to make the event comprehensible. And we must also recollect what this author mentions as preceding the vision which the Hofrat had during the night. The Hofrat was really a robust man; as has been said, many characteristics could be brought forward which show him to be a man who did not go soulfully through life, but was one who pursues his way with a sort of brutality, caused by a certain inner robustness. Only, as it were, through an outer symptom could this man, who had never been led astray and who was always sure of himself, become a wrong doer. The outer cause was this: he discovered a tooth had become loose and that he could easily remove it with his fingers. The thought then flashed through his head, ‘my life is now on the wane. Something has begun to decay.’ He could not get the thought out of his head: ‘In this way I shall lose my health, little by little.’ That would not have been so bad, the worst was that from that moment (only he did not notice it, but ruminated over his own decay, as he himself shows in his letters, wherein he describes himself in the third person), from that moment his memory began to fail. His memory was such a help in all his professional work that he develops a certain anxiety about life. He noticed that he could no longer remember certain things which formerly could be recalled so easily. Just consider how interesting it is that the novelist brings forward the possibility of developing a partial clairvoyance as the memory begins to decline. Then his memory becomes better again. He decides to record this, and remembers what his state had been. He, as a freethinker, cannot suppose otherwise than that all this was a part of a diseased condition. And he reflects: ‘thus I am really in danger of going mad.’ That conclusion would be natural in a freethinker. He is ashamed to seek advice and therefore he takes advantage of his position to write in the third person. He then places the document before a physician for mental diseases, as the case of some unknown person, and in that way he hoped to get medical advice. Thereby it happens that the novelist uses this document to impart something of the psychic life of this man.

You see that we have here a really beautiful work of art, which indeed points to those elements of which we have to speak in Spiritual Science, just those elements of which one speaks when dealing with the connection between the power of memory and the perception into the spiritual worlds. The novelist accomplishes that beautifully by causing the memory to fail the moment certain ‘shreds’ of these secret connections become evident to the person in question. And the whole narrative is very extraordinary, for it is so constructed in its various parts that one sees that the author realises that there are such connections behind life. Only he clothes the knowledge in the form of a novel. The novel is very cleverly written, and could only be written by a philosophical mind. It is written by one who was for many years the Manager of the Hamburg Theatre, and who later became Manager of the Vienna Burg-Theatre. This novel is really not only one of the best he has written, but is one of the pearls of German fiction. Naturally I do not say this because it is written around a subject deeply interesting to us, but because none but a man of very fine perception could have such delicate observation in an apparently abnormal matter. What I have said as to the merit of this book is purely from an artistic standpoint. It is really so written that the reader has the consciousness: the author has written a novel, but he might just as well have written a biography of Hofrat Eysenhardt, so realistically does he write. And we see in such a novel that Berger must have known a man who really had such experiences in the course of his life. One cannot help saying: how natural it would be for such a man as Alfred Freiherr von Berger to approach the spiritual world so that through Spiritual Science he might learn to know the real connections. How infinitely important would it be for Berger to have studied Spiritual Science, so that he would have been able to say, for example, ‘What will Hofrat Eysenhardt have to experience in the time which immediately follows the passage through the gates of death, in what we have always called Kamaloka, after having caused an innocent man to be convicted?’ As I have told you: man then has to experience the effects of his deeds, and the significance which his deeds have for others in connection with whom they were committed. What the Hofrat had done at the trial afforded him a tremendous satisfaction at the time, especially his great power of oratory. He had great satisfaction, which he expressed by saying: ‘He regarded it as meritorious that he prevailed against the sophistry of the prisoner, and delivered a speech which urged the jury to convict him, although they regretted it immediately afterwards, when they saw the effect of their verdict on the accused.’ That is the thing as seen from this side of the Hofrat. From the side of Markus Freund it is a very different matter, here we see the effect of the sentence upon him. The effect of this on his soul the Hofrat has to experience in Kamaloka. And a reflection, a picture of this reveals itself in the very moment when Markus Freund himself goes through the gates of death. This so discloses itself to him that he now sees himself as identical, as one with this Markus Freund. He sees himself in Markus Freund. He feels himself also within him. We see that the Hofrat had a foretaste of Kamaloka. This is so powerful that he not only experiences what had happened previously, but something which is intimately connected with the whole matter transpires further in him beneath the threshold of his consciousness. Each single detail is of importance. I told you that he had lost his memory for a while, during which this part of the spiritual world unveiled itself to him. But now comes a time when he is endowed anew with a great natural power of memory. Memory reinstates itself in him again, when he tried the case of espionage. But in the course of this very trial he is driven to commit the same offence for which through his eloquence he had caused Markus Freund to be convicted. The force which formerly proceeded from memory was transformed into the force of instinct, and this drives him. He does not now see the connection which was subconsciously working between what he was now himself doing, and what he had ascribed to Markus Freund. This leads to the following: Hofrat Eysenhardt, when he sees what has happened to him, the very evening preceding the conclusion of the law suit in which he was to accomplish his greatest triumph, goes into his office ...'

Having entered his once, the key of which he had with him, he lit the two candles on the writing table, washed his hands, face, and hair; then changed his civilian attire for his uniform, and for a long time paced up and down. Then he opened the top drawer of his writing table and took from a parcel a new revolver and a packet of cartridges which he had probably bought at the worst time of his nervous breakdown. He carefully loaded every chamber, then took from the paper-rack a sheet of official paper and wrote the following:

“In the name of His Majesty the Kaiser! I have committed a serious offence and feel myself unworthy to exercise my office further, or to live any longer. I have condemned myself to the severest punishment, and in the next few minutes shall execute the same with my own hand. EYSENHARDT. Vienna, 10th June, 1901.”

Neither writing nor signature betrayed a trace of even the slightest nervousness. Next morning he was found dead.

A quite remarkable connection is described in this novel, and we must say that the author was well qualified to see the connection existing between that which transpires here in the ordinary consciousness and that which happens beneath the threshold of consciousness, that is, he could see the spiritual events in which man is entangled. Exoterically one only sees the happenings of the physical world: that the judge convicted Markus Freund, and so on. If that had not happened just at that time when the lawyer became confused and lost his memory, he would not have seen these threads of the spiritual world. They would not have revealed themselves to him; and all this would have remained subconscious. A novel such as this is sent out into the world from the following standpoint, so to speak. ‘There is certainly something behind life, which in certain special cases cannot but be recognised. But if one speaks of this people do not like it. It is uncomfortable to approach such realities. So it is related as a novel and then nobody need believe it; if it merely amuses people that is all right.’

Now, that which holds people off from the spiritual world is something of which they are not aware. The way into the spiritual world goes, as it were, in two directions. In the first we push aside the veil of nature and investigate that which lies behind the phenomena of external nature. In the second we push through the veil of our own soul life, and seek what lies behind that. The ordinary philosophers also seek to probe behind the basis of existence; they seek to solve the Cosmic riddle. But note—how do they do this? They either observe nature directly, or through experiments, and then think it over afterwards. But while one puzzles out these ideas acquired through the knowledge of nature, turning them over and over again in one's mind, and interlacing them, one does certainly arrive at a philosophy, but not at anything really connected with the true outer reality. We can never get behind the veil of existence by reflecting on that which presents itself in outer nature. I expressed this as follows, in a public lecture: ‘That which causes our eternal forces is active, in that it first produces in us the instrument with which we approach our ordinary consciousness.’ But if we are to build up our ordinary consciousness, we must use this instrument. When we enter the experience of ordinary consciousness, everything which the eternal forces make in us is already completed. Hence when through meditation we reach this stage we notice that we cannot penetrate the secrets of nature by means of reflection, but by quite different means. If, as I have described in my public lectures, we strengthen our thought through meditation, and the revelation of the spiritual world comes to us through grace, we then behold nature quite differently. Even human life itself has a different aspect then. We then approach nature, and while taking in any process or object or event that meets us, we have at the same time the consciousness, ‘Before you really see a rose, something else takes place.’ True, you first see the perception, the realisation; but that perception has first fashioned itself. Into the perception is inserted the spiritual; therein lies the memory, the memory of the previous thought. To get behind the secret in this way through spiritual research, that is the secret. The philosopher beholds the rose and then philosophises about it in his rejections. But he who wants to get behind the secret of the rose may not reflect, for if he does, nothing happens. He must behold the rose and be aware, that before it comes through to his sense consciousness, some process has already taken place. It appears to him as a memory which preceded the perception. The whole matter turns on this; that something like a memory transpires, which tells us: ‘I did this before I reached the sensible perception; so that as regards external nature a previous thinking has taken place although it remains subconscious, and then it is brought to the surface as a memory.’ One cannot penetrate the secrets of nature through afterthought, but through forethought. Just as little can one penetrate the secrets of that which fills the soul, in any other way than by really approaching that spectator, of whom I have often spoken. Note well, these are the ways by which we can enter the spiritual world to-day.

You will remember that in the novel a shred of the spiritual world reaches the perception of Hofrat Eysenhardt after he realised the processes of decay in himself, and this is a peculiar illustration of what I have brought forward in my lectures. When our thinking is so strengthened by our exercises that we can see the spiritual world, we are immediately confronted with the process of destruction, with that which is connected with death. The Mystics of all ages have expressed this by the phrase: ‘To approach the Gate of Death,’ that is, all that manifests as destruction in human life. And if we have really carried our meditation to that point where we attain the experience of Initiation, we experience this: ‘I stand at the Gate of Death. I know there is something in me which has prevailed since my birth or conception, which then concentrates itself and becomes the phenomenon of death, the confiscation of the physical body.’ One then makes reply: ‘But all that leads to death has come from the spiritual world. That which has come from the spiritual world has united itself with that which arises from the hereditary substance.’ We see a man standing here in the physical world and we say: ‘That which confronts us is his countenance, which speaks to us through his words, everything he does as physical man is the expression of what prepared itself in the spiritual world through his last death and birth. His soul being lives in this.’ And from the whole bearing of these considerations we can conclude: that part of the human soul which lives between death and rebirth attracts the forces out of the spiritual world in order to fashion man in this incarnation between birth and death, in order to build something which is just the man himself. And then it is really the case, that through meditating on the Will, there is evolved the germ which again goes through the gate of death, to prepare itself in the spiritual world for a next incarnation. Thus in man there lies this eternal process of growth. The psychic spiritual descends from the spiritual world and forms a man here, in whom arises, at first as a mere speck, that which now originates here in life as the germ, and this again goes through the gates of death in order to continue its evolution. So that when we have a man here, it is really evident that as he stands before us, he as man has been created from out of the spiritual world. With that provided by the parents there unites itself that which descends from the spiritual world. While he was in the spiritual world he was among the spiritual powers, just as here in the physical body he is among the forces of nature. He was among the spiritual forces, and with their help he prepared himself for this incarnation. When we see a man incarnate before us, it truly is as I have represented in the second Mystery Play, The Soul's Probation, that whole worlds of divine beings work in order to produce man. Between death and rebirth spiritual forces are operative in order to maintain man. Man here is the goal of certain spiritual forces which are active between death and rebirth. Now note: this leads to Spiritual Science, but it has always been known and brought to expression; for example, a man of note expressed what I have said over and over again, by saying: ‘Life in the human body is the ultimate aim of the Path of the Gods.’ He meant that when we are in the spiritual world, woven into the world of the Gods between death and rebirth, we prepare ourselves for our incarnation, for our body. That is the object of the Divine Path. He was unable, however to add the other sentence: ‘In the body a new beginning is prepared, which then again goes through death and leads to a new incarnation.’ This phrase, ‘The life in the body is the ultimate aim of the Divine Path,’ forms to a certain extent the leading motive of all the works written by Christoph Oetinger, a very noted man nearly a hundred years ago. He drew attention continually to the path that human knowledge and perception must take if it is to recognise these spiritual connections. What Anthroposophy really desires can already be found in the older Theosophists. But Oetinger wishes to present it in his own way. His editor uttered some beautiful words at the end of his preface, in 1847. He wanted to express that in former times men sought the spiritual path, but in their own way; but that the time would come, and was not far distant, in which that which one had really always sought, would be grasped with full scientific consciousness. His editor says: ‘The essential point is that when Theosophy becomes a real science and brings forth definite results, these will gradually become the universal conviction of humanity. Yet this rests in the bosom of the future, which we do not wish to anticipate.’ Thus spake Richard Rothe, the Heidelberg professor, in referring to the Theosophist, Christoph Oetinger, in November, 1847. What Spiritual Science strives for has already existed, but in another form. To-day it is necessary to find it in just the form most appropriate for our time. And as I have often said, ‘the thought of Natural Science has to-day reached a standpoint from which, out of the method of that science herself, the right scientific form must be sought for what lived in Theosophy of all times.’ And when Rothe, as the editor of Oetinger, says that what the latter implies ‘rests in the bosom of the future,’ we must remember that what in 1847 was the future has certainly matured into the present of our time. We are confronting time when we can prove—for it was but one example which I have brought before you to-day in the novel Hofrat Eysenhardt, by Alfred von Berger—that human souls are really ripe to approach the spiritual truths, but that they morally lack the courage to grasp them in reality.

I said that in two directions lies the path to the spiritual world, in which one can see behind the veil of nature. For those who are accustomed to think scientifically, and who merely have to raise their scientific thought to an inner instrument in the way described, why is it so difficult to make progress? Why? They say that there are limits to human knowledge! Ignorabimus! And why do they not wish to enter the spiritual world? Well, the reason for that lies beneath the threshold of their consciousness.

Within the sphere of consciousness so-called logical reasons are brought forward as to why man cannot enter the spiritual world. These arguments have long been known. But beneath these logical reasons is to be found the true inner reason: the fear of the spiritual world. This fear of the spiritual world holds people back, but they are not aware of it. If they could only acquaint themselves with the existence of this unconscious fear, and how everything that is brought forward in opposition is merely a mask, hiding the fear in its reality, they would become aware of many things. That is the one thing. The other is this: directly a man enters the spiritual world he is seized upon, just as we can grasp his thoughts here—he is seized by the Beings of the Higher Hierarchies. Man becomes, as it were, a thought in the spiritual world. Against this the soul inwardly struggles. It is frightened, terrified, and shrinks from being taken possession of by the spiritual world. Again a question of fear, a powerless terror of allowing itself to be laid hold of by the spiritual world, in the way in which at birth one is laid hold of by the physical forces. Thus, outer fear, and dread of a certain powerlessness to resist being seized by the spiritual world, this it is which holds men back from it. That is why they so often wish, as the author in this novel, to splash in the waves of the spiritual world, without—as I might say—binding themselves in any way. That is why they have not really the courage to draw too near to the spiritual world lest it should lay hold of them, as may truly happen through the inner experiments often described, just as the apprehension of the secrets of nature may come about through external experiments.

If to what has been said you apply what was brought forward in one of the public lectures concerning this connection between the forces of genius which appear in life, and premature death, brought about by man's body being taken from him, through a shell or some other cause on the battlefield—if, in connection with what has been said you remember that the forces of genius or of invention appear in man as the effect of those processes which occurred when he was deprived of his physical body, then there also you have something remaining beneath the threshold of consciousness. But in his courage, in the whole way in which a man offers himself up for some great event of the time, there lies an instinctive expression of something resting beneath the threshold of consciousness, and which is unable to reach his consciousness in its full significance. Nevertheless, in our time there is in human evolution an impulse to carry up to the threshold of consciousness what lies beneath it, so that man may know something of it. And when I point to the fact that even in the great events of our time, in all that transpires in full consciousness, especially in the events of this epoch, there lie significant subconscious processes—I mean this to be taken in the above-mentioned sense, for that which these events are inserting into the great connection of human will never be included in what the external historian can grasp of these present events. More than ever before does the subconscious play a part in the present happenings. And therefore the spiritual investigator is allowed to indicate that a time will come in the future when, in order to behold the present significant historical events in the right light of their Cosmic connections, we shall point to their spiritual background. With this in view the words with which we now always conclude will be more and more present to our souls:—

From the fighters' courage,
From the blood of battles,
From the mourners' suffering,
From the people's sacrifice,
There will ripen fruits of Spirit
If with consciousness the soul
Turns her thought to Spirit Realms.

It must be emphasized again and again that the most essential point of our spiritual scientific endeavor is that which shows us how mere knowledge, mere knowledge living in ideas and conceptions, must increasingly and how we must seek a knowledge, a sum of ideas and perceptions, of feelings and will impulses, that becomes real life for us, that makes us alive in the most eminent sense of the word. It is necessary that we occasionally direct our contemplation, our meditation, to this cardinal point of our striving. For the light that can radiate from this point can only fully illuminate our souls if we return to it again and again in faithful contemplation. It must be a matter of heartfelt need for us, who want to profess spiritual scientific striving with our soul and heart in these serious times, to translate into real life, into the direct life of the soul, that which we can become through knowledge. We must do something to ensure that everything that is mere theoretical insight, that is, mere scientific endeavor, is gradually transformed into experience, so that it is enriched from the spiritual world by that through which it can become experience. Otherwise we are heading for a time of spiritual aridity; for theories, mere scientific convictions, are apt to dry up the human soul and human life in general. But deeply, deeply rooted in our time is the belief that one must get along in life with a conviction organized according to the pattern of scientific knowledge.

The great events that are taking place in our time should be a particular challenge to those souls inclined towards spiritual science to really come to terms with the difference between life and mere knowledge, between life and mere conviction formed according to a scientific pattern. We must try to arrive at a kind of self-knowledge, at purely human self-knowledge; we must try to consult ourselves about how much the demon of theoretical conviction lives in human hearts. We must clearly focus our soul's eye on how this demon of theoretical conviction wants to take root. And we will not make our innermost experience of what anthroposophy is meant to be for us if we do not try to do so, if we do not turn our eyes to facts that can also surprise the anthroposophist, so to speak, in his own soul life, that point out how far one stands from the direct experience of the spiritual when one is so devoted to modern soul life, and how close one stands to the search for a theoretical conviction. One must face such facts quite impartially.

I have been able – and what I am about to say is only meant as an example – to speak in various places in the German-speaking world about experiences related to our difficult times since serious events befell Europe and the world. I was also able to do so here in Stuttgart. I have spoken about such experiences here and there. What were some of the consequences of discussing such experiences? One of the consequences was that members of other spiritual realms came with the request that what had been spoken within our language area should also be brought to them. This was often demanded under the well-intentioned premise that the truth is the same for all people, of course, and that such a carrying over of what is spoken in one place to another place could readily serve to clarify the truth in our difficult time. It has become fashionable within our school of thought to write down everything that is said, including what is said out of the immediate impulse not only of the time, but also of the place and the people to whom it is spoken, and to have the belief that this must serve everyone in the same way because one makes the theoretical assumption that truth can only be formulated in one single way. Now, my dear friends, this nonsense, which consists of writing down the spoken word in a precise way and believing that it still has the content when it is now read out or spoken again as a written word, would become monstrous if one could believe what has just been suggested.

If the things that people in Europe and the world are currently facing could be defined by words, then the immense rivers of blood that must flow today from the eternal necessities of earthly development would not have to flow. If it were possible for souls to understand each other through national aspirations, then they would not have to confront each other with cannons. We must prove ourselves with the character of the experience that has been given, we must prove ourselves with spiritual-scientific knowledge, especially where it is important to face the great seriousness. Using occult truths in a playful way for everyday soul needs cannot be the task of our spiritual-scientific endeavor. As long as we are not able to understand that spiritual powers are really active in the world phenomena that confront us on the physical plane, and that we need spiritual science to assess and see through the value and inner truth of these spiritual powers, as long as we are not able to do this, we do not yet have the right relationship to our spiritual science.

We must be clear about this: when we are working on purely anthroposophical ground, when we are developing the high truths for our soul that touch on the highest essence of man, then we are on ground that is beyond nationality, even beyond racial differences. When we are standing firmly on the ground of what we can gain about the human being from spiritual knowledge, then the same truths apply throughout the world, and even within certain horizons for other planets in our solar system. As soon as we stand on this ground, as soon as the highest thoughts concerning the human being come into consideration for us. It is different when things come into consideration that speak and must speak of something other than this highest human essence: When nations face each other, we are not dealing with that which in the nature of man reaches beyond all the differentiations of humanity. When nations face each other, it is not just people who face each other, but spiritual worlds; it is such entities in spiritual worlds that are active through people and live in people. And to believe that what must apply to people must also apply to that complicated world of demons and spirits that works through people when nations fight with each other, to believe that one could determine something through simple human logic about what drives the demons against each other, that is to say, not yet to have found faith in a concrete spiritual world.

What do I mean by that? — It is true that when we look at what is happening in the outside world, we find — I will now completely disregard the actual painful events of the war — that people of different nationalities are facing each other. We find that one nationality sometimes overwhelms the other with its hatred in the most terrible way. Then people try to cope with it, that is, they ask themselves which nation has more right to hate, this nation or that nation, or which one should hate more than another. One also thinks about which nation is particularly to blame for this war. One reflects on these matters in much the same way as one would reflect during a court case, where one weighs up the various circumstances. But what are you really doing when you do what has just been characterized and what dominates the current literature? One thereby denies all spiritual life, even if one did not want to admit it, because one professes the dogma that those demons, for example, which have come over from the East and have brought discord into European life, are to be judged according to the pattern of the intellect, let us say, of understanding, that man has. For one does not believe that there is another mind, another power of judgment, than that which man has. All that is judged from the merely human point of view in the face of such events that stir up evolution is a denial of spiritual-scientific life. We profess a genuine spiritual-scientific life only when we realize that spiritual causes are being realized in physical events, causes that necessitate a different power of judgment than that of the physical plane. When people with different views fight each other on the physical plane, then one can perhaps decide according to human judgment. But this is not possible when nations fight each other, because invisible powers express themselves through the life of nations. Invisible powers also express themselves in man, but in such a way that they fit into human judgment. But they do not do that in the life of nations. There it is precisely a matter of our proving ourselves in the recognition of the concrete spiritual life and realizing that there are many other impulses speaking in the human soul than those that can be mastered with the earthly mind when such great events take place.

If one reads this or that today, which is said and which is also repeated abundantly by those who have received an impulse from spiritual science, then one finds that much of it is written or spoken as if the world's development had only begun on July 20, 1914. Even when seeking the causes of the present complications, people speak as if they had begun last year. One of the practical results of spiritual science, in addition to many others, must be that people will want to learn something, that they will want to form an opinion not from the immediate day, but from the larger context. That will be the most elementary thing; the further development will consist in examining the judgment against what spiritual science is able to give. Let us look at an example to see how this spiritual science must be applied when it comes to contrasting our understanding with our experience and then making our experience our own.

We have always emphasized that the development of the world, the evolution of the earth, proceeds in distinctly different cultural periods in the post-Atlantic era. We have enumerated these cultural periods: the ancient Indian cultural period, the Persian, the Egyptian-Chaldean, the Greek-Latin, then the one that is our own in the present; then we pointed out that a sixth, a seventh epoch will have to follow ours. But we were not satisfied with simply schematically presenting the succession of these cultural periods; we tried to characterize what is peculiar to the individual cultural periods. And in doing so, we tried to gain an understanding of our own time, of the transitional impulses that live in our time, in our fifth post-Atlantic epoch. And we have also realized that by no means can anything schematic be meant by such characterizations, for example, that one cannot say that the peculiarity of this cultural epoch extends over the whole earth. It occurs in certain places, other places on earth, other territories, lag behind. They need not necessarily lag behind, but they do lag behind with old forces, in order that these old forces may later be appropriately related to another cultural epoch in a different cultural epoch, as evolution progresses. We need not even think in terms of values, but only in terms of character peculiarities. How could it fail to strike people as profoundly different when it comes to the spiritual culture, say, of the European and Asian peoples? How could one not notice the difference in the skin coloration! If we look at the European-American being and the Asian being – leaving aside any value judgments for the moment – we have to face the fact that the Asian peoples have retained certain cultural impulses from past eras, while the European-American peoples have moved beyond these cultural impulses. Only if one is caught in an unhealthy soul life can one be particularly impressed by what oriental mysticism has preserved for oriental humanity from ancient times, when people necessarily had to live with lower powers of vision. Europe has indeed been seized by such an unhealthy spiritual life in many ways; people believed that they had to learn the way to the spiritual worlds through Asian yogism and the like. However, this tendency proves nothing more than an unhealthy soul life. A healthy soul life must be built upon the assimilation of the experiences of the fifth post-Atlantean cultural epoch into spiritual life and spiritual knowledge, and not upon the practice of bringing up something in humanity that is quite interesting to study scientifically, so to speak, but which must not be renewed for European humanity without its falling back into times that are not appropriate for it. But other times will come about the development of the earth, following times. In these following times, outdated forces will have to join with advanced forces again. Therefore, they must remain in some place in order to be there, in order to be able to connect with the advanced forces. A sixth will follow the fifth cultural epoch. Abstract thinking, that terrible abstract thinking, which is a daughter of purely theoretical-scientific conviction, cannot but esteem the sixth age higher than the fifth, because the sixth is a later development. But we should realize that there are periods of decline as well as periods of rise. We should be fully aware that the sixth age, which follows the fifth in the post-Atlantean period, must of necessity belong to the decline and that what has developed in the fifth post-Atlantean epoch must be the germ for the following earth time of the seventh cultural epoch. One must look at things so vividly, not abstractly or theoretically, so that one lets the sixth age follow the fifth as a more perfect one.

In Atlantean times, the fourth epoch was the one in which the seeds for our present time lay. In our time, it is the fifth cultural epoch that contains the seeds for what must follow the post-Atlantean period. And what is the characteristic that must develop in this fifth cultural epoch in particular? This is the characteristic that has been particularly fanned by the Mystery of Golgotha: that the spiritual impulses have been led down into the immediate physical-human, that, as it were, the flesh must be seized by the spirit.

"It has not yet happened. It will only have happened when spiritual science has a firmer earthly footing and many more people express it in their immediate lives, when the spirit is in every hand movement, in every finger movement, one might say, when it is expressed in the most everyday actions. But it was for the sake of this carrying down of spiritual impulses that the Christ became incarnate in a human body. And this carrying down, this permeation of the flesh with the spirit, that is the characteristic of the mission, the mission of white humanity in general. People have their white skin color because the spirit works in the skin when it wants to descend to the physical plane. The task of our fifth cultural epoch, which has been prepared by the other four cultural epochs, is to make that which is the outer physical body a housing for the spirit. And our task must be to familiarize ourselves with those cultural impulses that show the tendency to introduce the spirit into the flesh, to introduce the spirit into everyday life. When we fully recognize this, then we will also be clear about the fact that where the spirit is still to work as spirit, where it is to remain in a certain way in its development — because in our time it has the task of descending into the flesh —, that where it lags behind, where it takes on a demonic character, the spirit does not completely penetrate the flesh, that the white skin coloration does not occur because atavistic forces are present that do not allow the spirit to fully harmonize with the flesh.

In the sixth cultural epoch of the post-Atlantean period, the task will be to recognize the spirit more in the elemental world than directly in itself, to recognize the spirit more in the elemental world, because this sixth cultural epoch has the task of preparing the recognition of the spirit in the physical environment. This cannot be achieved without difficulty if ancient atavistic forces are not preserved that recognize the spirit in its purely elementary life. But these things do not happen in the world without the most fierce struggles. White humanity is still on the path of absorbing the spirit deeper and deeper into its own being. The yellow race is on the way to preserving those ages in which the spirit is kept far from the body, in which the spirit is sought outside of the human physical organization, only there. But this must lead to the fact that the transition from the fifth cultural epoch into the sixth cultural epoch cannot take place otherwise than as a fierce struggle between the white race and the colored race in the most diverse fields. And what precedes these struggles, which will take place between the white and the colored humanity, will occupy world history until the great struggles between the white and the colored humanity are fought out. Future events are reflected in multiple ways in previous events. When we look at what we have acquired through the most diverse considerations in a spiritual-scientific sense, we are faced with something colossal that we can see as necessarily taking place in the future.

On the one hand, we have a part of humanity with the mission of introducing the spirit into physical life in such a way that the spirit permeates everything in physical life. And on the other hand, we have a part of humanity with the necessity of now, so to speak, taking over the descending development. This cannot happen otherwise than through that which truly professes to permeate the physical with the spiritual, to bring forth cultural impulses, to bring forth living impulses that are lasting for the earth, that cannot disappear from the earth again. For what follows as the sixth, as the seventh cultural epoch, must live spiritually from the creations of the fifth, must absorb the creations of the fifth cultural epoch. The fifth cultural epoch has the task of deepening the external idealistic life into a spiritual life. But that which is thus conquered as a spiritual life by idealism must be accepted later, must live on. For in the East there will not be the strength to productively create one's own spiritual life, but only to absorb what has been created. Thus, history must unfold in such a way that a spiritual culture is created by present-day humanity, which carries the actual cultural impulses within itself. This spiritual culture is the actual historical successor to the fifth culture, and it will be assimilated by what follows.

Let us try to understand objectively and without prejudice the difference between these two currents of humanity. Try to realize how, since the entry of that part of humanity called the Germanic peoples, there has been a struggle to permeate the external physical with the spiritual, and how the depths of Christianity have been embraced. One started from the external physical, from that which, as it were, contained the germ of a physical-spiritual. We may look back to the summer sacrifice, to the sacrifice at the summer solstice of the god Baldur. The true and deeper meaning of this was lost in early times, but what is the true and deeper meaning? It can only be grasped by directing our attention to the fact that, as the spring sun rises, in the light and warmth, spiritual powers also rise, as the god Lenz rises, and that, by lighting of the St. John's fire, man tends to connect with the spring forces that prevail in the forces of nature, and he lights a fire to symbolize that he connects his understanding with the death of the god of spring at the summer solstice. This is the Baldur saga: the god Lenz is burnt in the summer solstice fire because people sensed the fertility and germination in nature, in the outer physical world, because they loved the god Lenz and followed him into his death. But because in the outer physical world they had the model of the Christ, who does not die at the summer solstice but is born at the winter solstice — note this contrast between the physical and the spiritual —, because they had the summer solstice god as an example for the winter solstice god, because they had the reverse of the physical for the spiritual, and so they penetrated each other with what was related and yet opposite. If the god Baldur is the god of spring who dies during the summer solstice, then the Christian god is the one who is born during the winter solstice. The one and the other interpenetrate each other as it happens in the outer physical body, interpenetrating with the spiritual, which is veiled by the darkness of the body, by the winter darkness. The winter spirit permeates the summer body. And how do these things interpenetrate? In the immediate personal struggle of the cultural impulses. What is the history of Central Europe if not a continuous struggle for the awakening of the divine spark in the personal soul, for the spiritual to arise in the physical? One can disregard everything else, but one must see through the truth, recognize the characteristic of this Central European nature.

And take the other part of humanity. How far removed it is, fundamentally, from this personal impulse of the spiritual striving upward in the physical! One would like to say: “From the point of view of natural history” it is extremely interesting to observe how Chinese culture has preserved its Tao and Confucian religions, and how Asian religions in general have preserved the most ancient forms, the most abstract forms, those forms in which the theoretical mind feels so at home, but which are rigidity in the face of personal experience, which do not allow personal experience to come into play, because this personal experience is to be preserved until the time when the achievements of human culture are incorporated in such a way that they can be assimilated. In the fifth cultural epoch, something spiritual must be attained by one's own efforts; in the sixth cultural epoch, people will come and accept what has been worked out and achieved as their outlook, as their experience, but as something that they have not achieved themselves. It will be preserved in the forces that do not struggle, but accept the spiritual as something external and self-evident. And the prelude to that much more far-reaching struggle is the one that must gradually develop as the struggle between the Germanic and the Slavic world. One should only consider that the Slavic world is in a sense an outpost for that which is the sixth cultural epoch, indeed that in it lies the actual germ of the sixth cultural epoch. Consider this in a true, genuine, spiritual-scientific sense. Then you will realize that in this Slavic element there must be something receptive, something that has nothing to do with this struggle, that almost rejects one's own struggle. You can feel it with your hands. While in Central Europe the souls have fought, have fought with their inner selves, in order to grasp God through personal striving, the Slavonic element preserves religion, the grasp of God, the cultus, which is just there; it preserves, it does not make the spirit inwardly alive, but lets the spirit pass over it like a cloud and lives in this cloud, remaining alien to the spirit with the personality.

Central Europe could not stop at some old form of external Christianity because it had to struggle. The East has stopped, and even its cult forms have become rigid and abstract because it is to prepare itself to receive externally, to accept what the West acquires through personal struggle, because it is not prepared to receive things through personal struggle, this East. And how can we bring about mutual understanding between two such different spiritual impulses, when the model is purely theoretical? How can we possibly arbitrate between two different spiritual currents that behave as differentiated currents must behave? Do not misunderstand the comparison: How can one, I might say, distinguish the lion's custom from the elephant's custom? But events develop out of eternal necessities and proceed as the eternal necessities flow. The East had to struggle against what was and is becoming more and more necessary for it: the connection with the West and its culture. For basically, before its maturation, it could not be given the right understanding. And an outward expression is the conflict between what is called Germanic and what is called Slavic, that which is basically only just being prepared and will hover as a long concern over European life: the conflict between the Germanic and the Slavic. One could say that just as a child resists learning the achievements of the ancients, so the East resists the achievements of the West, resists them, resists them to such an extent that it hates them, even if it feels compelled to accept their achievements from time to time. To shine the light of truth on these things requires something different from what one loves today; although one sometimes senses this other thing, one is reluctant to turn one's eyes to these things and really understand them from their innermost impulses. Because if one is only slightly touched by these innermost impulses, much of the chatter will soon cease, and much of what is done must cease, which arises from confusion, the confusion that wants to remain in the external Maja.

What will be understood by the sixth cultural epoch? It will be understood as a cultural epoch in which a large part of the Eastern people will have sacrificed their humanity to that which has been achieved in popular culture, in that, like the feminine, the Eastern will have allowed itself to be fertilized by the masculine Western. That which will live in the souls of the sixth cultural epoch will be the same as that which has been achieved by the souls of the fifth cultural epoch. This means that from the East, immaturity and that which has not yet matured will surge forward and resist what must happen anyway. Just as the Greek-Roman once had to defend itself against the Germanic, so the Slavic must defend itself against the Germanic; but just as in the transition from the Greek-Roman to the Germanic in the ascending development, so in the transition from the Germanic to the Slavic in the descending one. By the Germanic element having taken over the actual mission of the fifth cultural epoch, it was this Germanic element that had to and will continue to have to insert the actual understanding of Christianity into the inner struggle of earthly evolution for this fifth cultural epoch. And the greatest misfortune would have occurred if the Germanic element had been defeated by the Roman element in the long run, because then what has happened through the fifth cultural epoch could not have happened: this Germanic element had to live through the personal struggle. And it would be the greatest misfortune if the Slavic element ever defeated the Germanic element. Note the difference. It would be the most dismal, most abstract schematism if one were to describe it as an misfortune in the transition from the fifth to the sixth cultural epoch, which one would have to describe as an misfortune in the transition from the fourth to the fifth cultural epoch. The victory of the Romans would have meant the impossibility of the mission of the fifth cultural epoch; the victory of the Slavic element would have meant the same impossibility for the sixth cultural epoch. For only in passively accepting what the fifth cultural epoch produces can the meaning of the sixth exist.

One must feel what follows quite independently of ambitions, of national aspirations, from these realizations, when these realizations become life. But one must also be clear about how difficult it becomes for people to understand when the truth contradicts their passions, when the truth contradicts their aspirations. If someone tries to convince a Western European or an Englishman from Central Europe, for example, using human reason, then one is doing something that should be recognized as unsuccessful, especially when it comes to national antagonisms. On purely humanistic ground, we understand each other as human beings. But if we leave this ground and enter into the struggles of nations, we should be clear about the difficulties standing in the way of mutual understanding. There is only one way to gain understanding, for example, in the French West of Europe, for what one is actually doing. It is the path that will one day arise from the realization of what unnaturalness it actually is to let oneself be pushed forward in the French west by the hand of the European east. Only the realization of what one has done oneself will bring some understanding of the matter, but not the word that comes from others, that comes from those who stand on a different national soil. Such things are sometimes sensed and sensed for, but then forgotten again. Because the most characteristic things that happen are usually forgotten. If only it had been possible, over the last forty years, to repeatedly print that meaningful correspondence that once took place between Ernest Renan, the Frenchman, and David Friedrich Strauß, the Württemberg German! It would have been useful if the decisive letters that were exchanged had been brought to people's attention once every four weeks, so to speak: then they would have sensed something of what was to come. One need only point out the one passage in Renan's letter where he expresses the desire to work together with Central Europe for Western European culture: this was an impulse flowing from the eternal forces. But then Renan immediately adds: “But that contradicts my patriotism.” Because if Alsace-Lorraine is taken from the French, then as a Frenchman I can only be in favor of Western culture being protected against the East. Everything that came later is already in the making in such a statement; that is the seed of what will happen later. It shows that even an enlightened spirit basically admitted: Yes, I can see where the path lies that is predetermined by eternal necessity, but I do not want to follow it because I want to be more French than human. I say one has felt, sensed, how things lie in the sense of eternal necessity; but one must gradually learn through spiritual science to follow one's intuitions, one's feelings with one's judgment. One must learn to arrive at the real facts by means of judgment. And one cannot grasp the real facts without understanding the spiritual world. It is impossible to do so without resorting to that which gives the facts their evolutionary impulses from the spiritual world.

We see how fruitful for us can be what comes out of spiritual science, how we can illuminate life in its most serious events when we unite with our minds what follows from real spiritual-scientific knowledge, for example, about the post-Atlantic cultural epochs. There we gain an objective standard, there we gain the possibility of rising above personal aspirations, even on the delicate ground of national experience. And that is the peculiar thing about the Central European experience, that this Central European experience really gives people the opportunity to rise above what is merely national. Just try to realize how, in the successive cultural epochs, Central Europe in particular — in that struggle of the human soul in Central Europe — overcomes the personal at the same time, where it is not based on passions and immediate instinctual impulses.

What beauty is, other peoples have surely felt as well. Only in Central Europe, however, has beauty and its place in human experience been so deeply reflected upon as in Schiller's “Aesthetic Letters”. Other nations have also fought battles, and will do so: but only in Central Europe have they intervened in a battle in such a way that it has invoked the deepest philosophical impulses in order to inspire the battle with these impulses, as Fichte did in his “Speeches to the German Nation”. Religious struggles were also fought elsewhere: nowhere in the world were they as closely connected with all branches of human experience as they were in Central Europe.

And take our Anthroposophical Society itself, take it as we have developed it among ourselves, how we have struggled, fought and also suffered in it, at least a number of us, in recent years. We were connected for a time with the Theosophical Society of English coloration. What then was the deep impulse that did not allow this connection with that theosophical movement to continue? Let us be clear about this, my dear friends, what was the deep impulse? Just look at the movement. What could lead to the absurdity of Krishnamurti and similar follies? It led to the conviction of spiritual life being attached to the rest of the culture as an external element. There are two things: the external and philosophical view of life in England, and then, attached to it, without the two having much to do with each other, a spiritual conviction. There is no need to interweave the two. Here we feel that we can only arrive at a spiritual conviction when it grows out of our body, as it were, out of everything that was driven by Johannes Tauler, Meister Eckhart, Angelus Silesius iles in the mysticism of the Middle Ages, what has gone through German philosophy, through German poetry in spiritual preparation, when what we want and must want necessarily grows out of it like a new organic limb. We cannot attach the spiritual life to the rest; we need a living organism, not a living mechanism. One can realize such things without falling into arrogance, because one needs clarity about how the spiritual must be in life, and how one can grasp the rest of life through the spiritual. We, as confessors of the spiritual-scientific world view, must be able to become souls that want what must be in the sense of the just given characteristic in Central European spiritual life. Of course, this is also a struggle; the real issue is that one might say: the truth must first be achieved by pushing the errors to both sides of the road. - How difficult it is sometimes to recognize that one must push the errors to both sides of the road! One could have tragic experiences in the last decades.

I would like to paint a vivid picture for you. It has a certain significance, especially now, to show how the natural connection between the two Central European countries has come about in our time. — In Austria, in the second half of the 19th century, lived one of the most German poets, Robert Hamerling. He was also German in that he truly sought to give birth to the whole world in his own soul. In his novel “Ahasver in Rome” he traces the wandering human soul back to Cain, and in the confrontation between Ahasver and Nero he attempts to solve the profound riddle of the human soul. In his Aspasia he tried to bring Greek cultural life back to life from the German soul. He tried to solve the riddle of life for himself by delving into the religious life, which had been sought at a certain time, in his Anabaptist epic, The King of Sion. In his drama “Danton and Robespierre” he tried to understand the driving impulses of the French Revolution. And finally, in his “Homunculus” he tried to explain the impulses that reach into the future and overwhelm the spiritual. But I could cite many more examples to show how truly Central European, how truly German Robert Hamerling's spirit was. This Robert Hamerling spent a large part of his life in bed; for the last three decades he was almost always ill. He wrote his greatest works in bed, in pain. But no one would guess from these works that they were written by a seriously ill man. Everything is sound; one can judge it as one likes, but everything is sound. Certainly, the works have been reprinted in larger numbers; but in the eighties — I could say that it became vividly clear to me, as if in a symbol, what such a spirit could have become for a part of humanity in Central Europe if its impulses had flowed into the souls. Once, when such things as those brought about by Robert Hamerling in the development of the spirit were being discussed in a society, a man came in who was accustomed to hearing mainly himself and not paying much attention to what others say - there are such people who like to hear themselves. As if he had been hit by a bombshell, he declared that the greatest thing to happen to humanity was Dostoyevsky's “Raskolnikov”! Of course, one does not need to ignore the unique greatness of Dostoyevsky's Raskolnikov, but the attachment to the material, to the soul that is stuck in the material and leaves the spiritual outside, contrasts tremendously with the interpenetration of the spiritual and the material that Hamerling sought. It may certainly be more interesting and sensational to look at the soul that does not want to emerge from the material and which Dostoyevsky describes so magnificently, but for the Central European human being, the recognition of the interpenetration of the spiritual and the physical means a recognition of his entire being and his entire task. There too, there is a struggle.

The inner struggle will be added to the outer struggle, that inner struggle against the opposing forces that rebel against recognizing the spiritual. We are already experiencing the strangest facts: from one side we are warned not to pay too much attention to how the spiritual powers in Europe are now juxtaposed; because if the purely German element were to prevail – we have been warned from the German side! then one would indeed have to fear a revival of the kind of ideas that a Hegel, Fichte, Schelling, Goethe produced: one would have to fear a metaphysical dreaming. It is a peculiar fear that is being talked about; but this fear could grow ever greater, and those who have this fear will indeed not be able to accept the spiritual. But in truth it must be realized that the idealism of Central Europe, just as the child does to the man, must develop into spiritualism; for this idealism of Central Europe is the child of spiritualism, the child that should become spiritualism. When Fichte spoke, he still spoke only of idealism, but of such an idealism that strives towards spiritualism. This impulse of spiritualism must not be allowed to disappear from the evolution of the earth.

Much of the meaning of the time can be expressed in these simple words. Individual human beings have indeed sensed and felt such things. But these intuitions pass by without being taken in their depth, without the main emphasis being seen in them. One fails to link the unimportant to the important. And that is why it is important not to lose sight of the big picture, to really see what is essential in the currents that flow over the development of the earth. And we come to the most essential when we allow ourselves to be taught by what this development of the earth shows us in spiritual light. In the particular case, if we really take seriously the teaching of the successive post-Atlantean cultural epochs - it must be said again and again - people should rise above that narrow point of view that cannot see the main thing.

Let me give you an example. Among ourselves, it is necessary to point out such things. Suppose someone were to say the following today, and then let us try to consider the idea that someone would say this today: As far as I am concerned, I am in no doubt for a moment that a conflict between the Germanic and Slavic world is imminent, that it will be ignited either by the Orient, especially Turkey, or by the nationality dispute in Austria, perhaps by both, and that Russia will take the lead in the same on one side. This power is already preparing for the eventuality; the Russian national press is spitting fire and flame against Germany. The German press is already sounding its warning cry. A long time has passed since Russia gathered after the Crimean War, and it seems that it is now considered appropriate in St. Petersburg to take up the Oriental question again.

If the Mediterranean Sea is to become, according to the more pompous than true expression, “a French lake”, then Russia has the even more positive intention of turning the Black Sea into a “Russian lake” and the Sea of Marmara into a “Russian pond”. That Constantinople must become a Russian city and Greece a direct vassal state of Russia is a fixed goal of Russian policy, which finds its lever of support in the common religion and in Pan-Slavism. The Danube would then be closed at the Iron Gate by the Russian turnpike. —

Let us assume that someone would speak in this way. One could then say: Well, now he has been taught a lesson by what has happened – and those who emphatically preach that the war was only wanted by Central Europe and did not necessarily develop from the East could be right after all. But this was written in 1870! And in any case, not a year went by without something like this being written. How foolish it is to believe that the cause of what is happening today is not to be found in the forces that have been building up and playing out over long periods of time! These words were written in 1870, during the Franco-Prussian War. To believe that the events need not have occurred and to believe that all impulses did not come from the East is, to put it mildly, inconsistent and a failure to recognize the true effective forces. It must not be allowed to happen, and must be prevented by spiritual science, that people, including journalists, repeatedly judge as if the beginnings of the events that are now unfolding only formed five or six months ago! When people are trained through spiritual science to know that the great is prepared in the small, and that only from the great can the small be judged, then something will be gained for ordinary life from spiritual science, then in this ordinary life that which spiritual science makes us experience will be prepared.

I wanted to speak, indeed I could say I had to speak to you in this introductory lecture today again from a certain point of view, which is prompted by the experiences of the time. I had to speak of what spiritual science is to become for us in judging the world and our position in the world. I have had to speak of it. Basically, we must allow ourselves to be admonished again and again to take seriously, very seriously, what spiritual science wants to give us, and not to want to live two lives, so to speak: one life in which we explain things of the world in a spiritual-scientific sense, and the other life in which we are absorbed in everyday matters and do as other people do. But it is not so much through words as through the way I have dealt with things here in this narrower circle that I would like to evoke in you the feeling and the sensation that these words really do not want to be anything other than eternal truths in the sense that eternal truths are also the most individual. These words are spoken to you, my dear friends, with your feelings here in southern Germany, with the emotional nuance that these words deserve here. And if it were enough to simply write down these words and read them aloud everywhere to people with different life contexts, then it might also be enough if I just wrote down my words and did not travel around. That the words must be spoken out of the context of feelings and sensations, because wherever people come together there is a common human aura out of which one must speak, we must finally recognize this in spiritual life. What matters is that we bring things into life, not that we make the phrase that we have to bring things into life, but that we really bring them into life. And to do that, we have to take them individually. Things happen individually because they have to happen individually. And it is an abstract belief to assume, for example, that what I will say the day after tomorrow in the public lecture in that house, which is located across from the house with the Hegel memorial plaque, that what is contained in the living, individual, and immediate, that which is abstractly spoken for all nuances of feeling, as it were, for the conversion of the whole world. One must also realize that what one person can grasp, another cannot grasp. And if the anthroposophical lectures must bear a certain individual character here and there, then this is even more the case when one is confronted with such serious matters as we are now. But only if one takes the truth seriously and does not believe that that which is alive can be grasped with words that are lifeless and motionless and can therefore be applied anywhere, only then will one understand that which is universally valid in the most individual way. I would like you to reflect on this side of life as well. It will be a way to bring to life in your own soul and in your own way what I have to bring from the spiritual world in my own way, so that it is not just a repetition of what has to come through me in my own way. Just as sunlight is reflected differently in each little stone and yet is always the same sunlight because it is imbued with life, so spiritual science must become something that lives differently in each individual and yet is always and forever the same. Spiritual science cannot live in the Englishman, Frenchman, Russian, German in one way when national matters are concerned, and the other cannot be converted by that by which the feeling of the one is most fruitfully enlivened. Such a proselytizing urge arises from the theoretical bent of our time. What external, purely material science can do, namely, to categorize everything, cannot be the case with spiritual science, because it is a living thing, and because I must speak to you not as an abstract scientific spirit demands of me, but as it comes to life in me as I stand here before you. For it is not from my heart, but from your heart, that I do it as well as I can. And I would like to serve the spiritual scientific impulse, which instructs the one who can look up to the spiritual world to tune out and express what lies in the depths of the souls of those who are listening. In a sense, it may be said that What is expressed in this or that meditation arises from the depths of the souls of the listeners. Think about that too! We have to take spiritual science as something that is experienced and not as something abstract. What is abstract appeals to our pride, appeals to our stubbornness, which likes to indulge in persuasion. What is spiritual simply wants to be communicated. And what I have to communicate wants to be communicated, even if there is not a single person here who believes a single word I say. If we go to the other person with the intention of wanting to persuade him, with the opinion that he should accept our opinion, then we are not really experiencing the spiritual. And this experience, this direct grasp of the spiritual world, will produce the aura that humanity must have in the future.

It must be said again and again: What we are now experiencing under rivers of blood will only mean for humanity what it is meant to mean when something completely new also shows itself in culture, in humanity. But this new thing will sprout when there are people from whose souls spiritual thoughts arise; these thoughts are powers. And into the atmosphere that will be created when the twilight of war has passed and the sun of peace shines again, the thoughts that pour into the spiritual horizon must flow. Then those whose souls look down, those who had to leave their bodies prematurely on the battlefields, will know what they actually fell for on the battlefields. And the anthroposophist must say to himself that he is only living through this time in the right way if he takes in the living spirit of spiritual scientific striving. When certain souls in the consciousness of the spirit send their meaning into the spiritual realm, then a horizon of light will truly arise from our blood horizon for the future development of humanity.

We will continue this discussion tomorrow, when we will also discuss a specific topic. But today we want to bring to mind the thoughts that bring us together with the serious events of the time:

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

I should like today to introduce a sort of historical survey into this series of lectures, not so much for the purpose of making this an historical lecture, as of drawing attention to various matters concerning the Spiritual attitude of the present day, by which we are immediately surrounded.

In 1775 a very remarkable book appeared in Lyons, which even as early as the year 1782, found its way into certain circles of German Spiritual life, and the effects of which were much greater than is generally supposed. Above all, the result was such that it had to be more or less suppressed by that which was the principal impulse of the nineteenth century. This book is of the very greatest interest, more especially to those who in the interests of Spiritual Science wish to inform themselves as to what happened from the earliest times down to our own—I allude to Concerning Error and Truth, by Louis Claude de Saint-Martin (b. 18th January, 1743; d. 23rd October, 1803.). Anyone taking up this book today, whether in its own original language or in the careful German edition by Matthias Claudius, with its beautiful preface,—will find it extremely difficult to understand. Matthias Claudius himself admits this, even at the end of the eighteenth century. In his fine preface, he says: ‘Most people will not understand this book; I do not understand it myself. But what it contains has sunk so deeply into my heart, that I think it must be admitted into the widest circles.’ Least of all will those be able to make anything of this book whose knowledge is based upon those physical, chemical, and similar conceptions of the world taught today in the schools or acquired as ordinary education, and who have not even a smattering of real knowledge of these things. Neither will those understand this book, who base their present views of the times—we will not use the word ‘Politics’—on what they glean from the ordinary newspaper, or from what is reflected from those newspapers into the magazines of the day. There are several reasons why I should refer to this book today, after the two public lectures I gave last week. In these I spoke of ‘The nature and the principles of man,’ and ‘The connection between the human soul and the human body,’ and referred to the way in which we shall some day speak of those connections, when the knowledge which can now be gained by Natural Science but cannot be utilised, is viewed in the right way. One who has a thorough knowledge of Spiritual Science cannot but be convinced that when the knowledge of Natural Science is rightly appreciated, it will no longer be possible to speak today, of the relation of the life of imagination, of feeling and of will to the human organism. It may be that in these two lectures a beginning has been made of what must come, though it may perhaps be postponed for a long time by the great resistance made in the external world, not by science but by the scientists themselves. However long a time it may take, it must eventually come about that people win consider the relation between man's soul and body in the manner outlined in those two lectures.

In those two lectures I spoke of these things as it is necessary to speak of them in the year 1917; I mean, taking all the investigations of Natural Science and other experiences of man into consideration. One could not have spoken in that way in the eighteenth century, for example. Such things would have been spoken of in a very different way at that time. The enormous significance of the fact which I have repeatedly alluded to is not sufficiently realised—that somewhere about the end of the first third of the nineteenth century, in the thirties or forties, a crisis of exceptional magnitude occurred in the development of European humanity, from the Spiritual aspect. I have often mentioned this, saying that the tide of materialism then reached its height. I have also frequently drawn attention to the frivolous way in which our own time is often called ‘period of transition.’ Of course, every time is a period of transition, and it is absolutely correct to say so of our own. The point, however, is not so much to declare that any particular time is a period of transition as to establish in what this transition consists. One will then certainly come upon certain turning-points which represent deep incisive moments of transition in the development of man; and one such, although it passes unnoticed today, occurred at the time mentioned. Hence it is easy to understand that we must speak in quite a different way about the riddles with which man is confronted now; we must use quite different expressions and study the subject from quite a different aspect than would have been the case in the eighteenth century. Perhaps no man in the eighteenth century spoke with such intensity as de Saint-Martin, calling the attention of the Natural Science of that day to problems similar to those we discuss here. In all that he said, de Saint-Martin stood in the fading light of the old age, and not as we do, in the glimmering light of a new age. Unless we consider the point of view of which I am about to speak, it might seem a matter of indifference whether one studied de Saint-Martin at all, whether one absorbed or did not absorb the peculiar form of ideas aroused in him by Jacob Böhme. Unless a very different, much more significant standpoint were in question, to which I am about to allude today, this might indeed be a matter of indifference.

Let us quote a concrete case. In endeavouring to point out the errors into which man may fall in his philosophy of life as well as to point out the road to truth, de Saint-Martin, in his book: Des erreurs et de la virite—uses in the most practical and objective way the ideas and conceptions current in certain circles up to and into the eighteenth century. By the way he writes it can be seen that he is thoroughly accustomed to make use of them. We find, for instance, that in trying to explain the relation of man to the whole cosmos and to ethical life, de Saint-Martin employs the three principal ideas which play so great a part with Jacob Böhme and Paracelsus: Mercury, Sulphur and Salt, the three chief conceptions by which people tried at that time to grasp the sense world and also man. In these three elements it was sought to find the key to the understanding of external nature and of man. Modern man, speaking in the sense of the Natural Science of today, (as one must and should speak) can no longer use these expressions in the same way; for it is now quite impossible to think in the same way of Mercury, Sulphur and Salt, as did a man in the eighteenth century. In speaking of these, a three-fold nature was in view, which a man of the present day, could only represent according to Natural Science by dividing man as I have done, into the metabolic man, the rhythmic man, and the nerve-man, of which three the whole man is composed; for every part of him belongs to these three. If one supposes that any one part does not belong to these three, as one might of the bones, the discrepancy would only be apparent, not real. A man of the eighteenth century knew that the whole complexity of a human being could be understood if one acquired a comprehensive grasp of Mercury, Sulphur and Salt. Now of course, when the ordinary man speaks of salt today, he refers to the white substance he has on his dinner table, or if he be a chemist, to the salts with which he works in his laboratory. In speaking of sulphur the ordinary man thinks of matches and the chemist thinks of all the many experiments he has tried in his retort for the transmutation of sulphur. As to mercury, one at once thinks of quicksilver and so on.

The men of the eighteenth century did not think in this way. Indeed it is today very difficult to imagine what lived in the souls of that time when they spoke of ‘Mercury, Sulphur and Salt.’ De Saint-Martin put the question to himself in his own way; Into what parts must I divide man, if I take his body as image of his soul? And he replied: First I must consider in man the instruments or organs of his thought. (De Saint-Martin puts this rather differently but we must translate a little, for the exposition would otherwise be too lengthy). I must first study man with respect to the organ of his head; what is the principal thing therein? What comes into consideration there? What is the really active agent in the head? (or as we today should say: in the nervous system? ) He replies: Salt. And by this he does not understand the white table salt, nor what the chemist understands by salt, but the totality of forces at work in the human head, when a man forms ideas. Everything in the nature of the external working of salt, he only regards as manifestation, as an external manifestation of the same forces as work in the human head. He then asks: What is the element that chiefly works in the human breast? According to the division of man I gave in the lecture last Thursday we should put the question thus: What works in the Breathing-Man? De Saint-Martin replies, Sulphur. So that according to him, everything connected with the functions of the chest is governed by those actions which have their origin in Sulphur, or that which is of the nature of Sulphur. He then goes on to ask: What is at work in the rest of man? (We today should say: in the metabolic man.) He replies: There Mercury works. Thus, in his own way, does de Saint-Martin compose the whole human being. By the way he throws things together, from time to time, disjointedly, we can see that he stands in the fading evening twilight of that whole system of thought. On the other hand we see that standing thus in the twilight, he was still able to grasp an enormous number of gigantic truths which could still be understood then, but are now lost. These he expressed by making use of the three conceptions of Mercury, Sulphur and Salt. Thus, in the book Des erreurs et de la verite there is a very fine treatise (which to the modern physicist is of course utter nonsense) on thunder-storms, on thunder and lightning; in which he shows how on the one hand one may use Mercury, Sulphur and Salt to explain the bodily nature of man, and on the other to explain atmospherical disturbances; at one time they are working together within man, at another time in the world outside. In man they engender what may perhaps spring up as a thought or an impulse of will, while outside in the world the same elements engender, for instance, lightning and thunder. As we have said, what is thus expounded by de Saint-Martin could well be understood in the eighteenth century; it belonged to the mode of thought of that time. To the present-day physicist it would be utter nonsense. But precisely as to thunder and lightning, there is a flaw in modern physics, which is obliged to be rather easy-going with respect to these. It teaches that when the clouds in close vicinity—the one charged with positive, and the other with negative electricity—discharge their electricity, a thunderstorm is the result. Any school boy a little brighter than his fellows would notice that before the teacher starts making electrical experiments, he carefully wipes any traces of damp from the instruments, for nothing can be done with electricity where damp is present. He may ask the teacher: ‘Are not clouds damp? How then can electricity be at work in these, as you say?’ The teacher probably replies; ‘You are a silly boy, you don't understand!’ He would hardly be able to give any other answer today. De Saint-Martin tried to explain how through the Salt in the air, Mercury and Sulphur may be connected in a special way, in a similar way to that in which saltpetre and sulphur are united in gunpowder through charcoal; so through a particular transmutation of the elements of Mercury and Sulphur by means of Salt, explosions can occur. This exposition, considering the laws of that time, is extraordinarily clever. I cannot now go into it more deeply; let us rather consider the question more historically. De Saint-Martin particularly proves in a very fine way that in certain properties of the clouds which lead to thunderstorms, one can verify the relation of lightning to salt, or what he called salt. In short, he fights in his own way the materialism which was then beginning to dawn, for he had behind him the basis of a traditional wisdom, which found in him an industrious worker. In so doing he strove to find an explanation of the world in general, and after having made the above-mentioned explanations in which he makes use of the elements, he passes on to an explanation of the origin of the earth. In this he is not so foolish as those born after him, who believe in a mist or nebula as the origin of all things and who think they can find the beginning of the world by means of physical conceptions. He starts straight away by using his imagination, whereby to explain the origin of the world. In the afore-mentioned book when he speaks on this subject we find a wonderful wealth of imaginative ideas, of true imaginations, which, like his physical ideas, can only be understood in connection with the age in which he lived. We could not make use of them today, but they show that beyond a given point he tried to grasp things by means of imaginative cognition. Then, having tried this, he passes on to the comprehension of the historical life of man. Here, he tries to establish how that can only be understood by allowing for the real Spiritual impulses from the Spiritual world which from time to time found their way into the physical plane. He then tries to apply all this to the deeper nature of man, by showing how what the Bible story relates of the Fall in Paradise, rests, according to his imaginative cognition, on definite facts, how man passed over from an original condition into his existing one. He then tries to understand the historical phenomena of his own time and of all the time embraced by history, in the light of the fall from Spiritual life into matter. I am not upholding this, but it must be mentioned; naturally I do not wish to put the doctrine of de Saint-Martin in the place of Spiritual Science, or our Anthroposophy: I am only relating history, to show how far he was in advance of his times. As one reads the book Des erreurs et de la virite, chapter after chapter, we come upon one notable remark. One sees that he speaks from a rich fullness of knowledge, and that what he gives out is but the outer rind of the knowledge that lives in his soul. This is indicated in various passages in which he says somewhat as follows: ‘If I were to go deeper into this, I should be giving out truths that I may not express.’ In one place he even goes so far as to say: ‘If I were to say all that could be said on this subject, I should have to give out certain truths which, as far as most people are concerned, are better left veiled in the profoundest darkness of night.’ A true Spiritual Scientist can read a great deal between the lines in these passages; he knows why these remarks appear at certain parts of certain chapters. There are certain things which cannot be spoken of by means of assumption. It will only be possible to speak of such things when the impulses given by Spiritual Science have grown into moral, ethical impulses,—when men have acquired a certain lofty-mindedness through Spiritual Science, which will enable them to speak in a different way about certain questions than can be done in an age in which such remarkable scientific figures as those of Freud and Konsirt live and move. But the day will come when it will be possible.

In the last third of his book de Saint-Martin passes on to certain political subjects. It is hardly possible at the present day to do more than indicate how the mode of thought here employed by him can be brought into relation with the way men ‘think’ as they call it, today; that is a forbidden subject. I can only say that his whole attitude throughout the last third of his book is very remarkable. If we read this chapter today—we must do so while bearing clearly in mind that the book was published in 1775, and that the French Revolution took place subsequently. This chapter must be thought of in connection with the French Revolution, one must read a great deal between the lines in this particular chapter. De Saint-Martin proceeds as an occultist, I might say. Anyone lacking the organ of perception for the profound impulses to be found in this chapter, would probably be quite satisfied with its introduction. For here de Saint-Martin says: ‘Let no one connected with the ruling powers of the earth, or connected in any way with the government, believe that I am trying to stand well with him. I am the friend of all and everyone.’ After having thus excused himself, he goes on to say things, compared with which Rousseau's remarks are mere child's play. But I cannot say any more about this.

In short, we must realise the deep incisive significance of this man, who had a school behind him, and without whom Herder, Goethe, Schiller and the German Romanticists cannot be imagined, as he himself cannot be thought of without Jacob Böhme. And yet, when one reads de Saint-Martin to day, allowing oneself to be influenced by what he says, one feels, as I have just said: that there would not be the smallest use in putting what one has to say to the public in the form in which de Saint-Martin put it. That would be no use now, when I try to give a picture of the world, as I did in the last two public lectures and shall again in the next, which must on the one side be correct on the basis of Spiritual Science, and on the other fully justified according to the most minute discoveries of Natural Science today. The mode of forming ideas which de Saint-Martin employed is no longer suited to the way in which men must think today, nor to the way in which they must, and rightly so, formulate their thoughts. Just as in travelling, when we pass from the domain of one language into that of another, in that moment we can no longer speak the language of the first, so would it be foolish today to use the form of thought of de Saint-Martin; more especially would it be foolish, because that mighty dividing line in Spiritual evolution which falls in the year 1842 (in the first third of the nineteenth century) lies between us.

By this you see, my dear friends, that it is possible in the Spiritual development of man, for a certain mode of thought to pass into the twilight. But in studying de Saint-Martin, one does not feel that what he says has an been exhausted. On the contrary one feels that there is in his works an enormous amount of still undiscovered wisdom, and that much might still be brought out of it. Yet on the other hand it was necessary in the Spiritual development of mankind that that way of thinking should cease, and another way of thinking should begin. This had to be. In the former the external world was only just beginning, it had only then reached its most external phases of materialism, Therefore we can only rightly understand what really happened, by surveying longer periods of time and applying to greater epochs what Spiritual Science wishes to stimulate in us; for of course what de Saint-Martin gave out at the end of the eighteenth century, being then but in its dawn, subsequently took a different form.

At that time something came to an end on the earth. Not only in a comparatively short time did the ideas ruling Jacob Böhme, Paracelsus, de Saint-Martin and others descend into the twilight, it being impossible to carry them on further; but a very curious change also took place in the manner of feeling. While in de Saint-Martin we see this phenomenon of the twilight of the human mind as regards the study of nature, the same phenomenon can also be traced in another way if we direct our attention to the almost parallel decline of theosophy, to the dimming and damping down of the theosophical philosophy of life.

True, de Saint-Martin is generally called a theosophist; but in speaking of him and describing him, I am thinking rather of a theosophy directed to Natural Science, a more religious form of theosophy then prevalent which was called by that name. Theosophy in the particular form in which it then reached a climax, ruled, I was going to say, in South Germany, though perhaps it would be more accurate to say in Schwabia. There, although it was then already on the decline, it had reached a certain maturity; and among its most prominent followers stand out the figures of Bengel and Ötinger, who were surrounded by many others. I will simply name those whom I know best: Friederick Daniel Schubart; Hahn, the mathematician; Steinhofer; the schoolmaster Hartmann, who had a great influence on Jung Stilling and even a certain influence on Goethe and knew him personally; and Johann Jacob Moser. A goodly number of remarkable minds in comparatively humble circumstances, who did not even form a connected circle, but who all lived at the time when Ötinger's star shone in the firmament. Ötinger lived almost through the whole of the eighteenth century; he was born in l702, and died in l782, as Prelate in Murrhard. A very remarkable personality, in whom was concentrated in a sense, all that the whole circle contained. It was an echo of this Theosophy of the eighteenth century which influenced Richard Rothe, Professor at the University of Heidelberg and other Universities. He wrote a fine preface to a book edited by Carl August Auberlen on the Theosophy of Frederick Christopher Ötinger. In this preface Richard Rothe, who represents a traditional echo of that circle, reminds us in his convinced acceptance of Theosophy, of those great Theosophists just mentioned; while on the other hand we can clearly see in the way he speaks of Ötinger in this preface, that he feels himself standing behind a period of twilight, even as regards those secrets of life with which he as theologist was concerned. The preface was written in 1847. I should like to quote some of it here, that you may see how in Richard Rothe (who was then in Heidelberg) lived one who looked back in thought to Ötinger, and saw in him a man who above all, in his own fashion, strove to decipher the Old and the New Testament; who tried to read them with theosophical understanding of the world. Richard Rothe looked back at that method of reading the Scriptures and compared it with the way he had been taught to read them, and which was then customary. (He only died in the sixties and was himself but an echo).

He compared the then manner of reading the Scriptures with the methods of Bengel, Ötinger, Steinhofer and the mathematician Hahn.

With respect to this Richard Rothe says something very remarkable: ‘Among the men of this school, to which Bengel with his Apokalyptica belongs, Ötinger occupies a foremost place. Not satisfied with the theology of the schools of his day, he thirsted after a richer and fuller and at the same time a purer understanding of Christian truth, The orthodox theology did not suffice him, it seemed to him but shallow; he wanted more than that; not that it asked too much of his faith, but that the deeper spirit within him wanted more than that. He did not object to the super-naturalism of the orthodox theology of his time, but considered rather that the latter did not take the supernatural seriously enough. His innermost soul rebelled against the spiritualism which reduced the realities of the world of Christian faith to mere abstractions, to mere thought-pictures. Hence his fiery zeal against all forms of idealism.’ ... Such a saying might appear strange, but it has to be understood. By idealism the German understands a system which only lives in ideas, whereas Ötinger as well as Rothe, strove for true Spiritual life. True Spirits were they, who pushed history forward, not like what Ranke and others with their pallid notions, have described as the so-called ideas of history. As though it were possible for mere ideas—one really does not know what word to use in speaking reality—possible for mere ideas to wander through history and carry the whole thing on further. The followers of Ötinger wished to put the living in the place of the abstract and dead. Hence Ötinger's fiery zeal against any idealism; hence too his realism, which, although that was not his intention, did actually, in his energetic search for ‘massive’ conceptions, tend towards materialism.

The conceptions he was trying to find were such as really grasped the Spiritual, not merely talking of an ideal archetype at the back of things, but real, solid (massive) thoughts and ideas, such as look for the Spirits behind created things.

Rothe continues: ‘His leaning to nature and Natural Science is intimately connected with this fundamental scientific tendency. The lack of appreciation, the tendency of the idealist to despise the world of Nature, were foreign to him; he felt that behind rude matter there was a very real existence; he was profoundly permeated by the conviction that without the world of sense there could be no real true existence, either divine or creative. This is a startling and new legitimisation of the authority of history, and we see not only in Ötinger but in the earlier contemporaneous Theosophists and especially in the philosophical writings of Jacob Böhme, the original scientific tendency of the time of the Reformation breaking through again, as shown in this thirst after a true understanding of the world of Nature.’ The kind of realism for which Ötinger longed, comes to ‘life in its innermost being in Christianity,’ (so says Richard Rothe)—‘if transplanted into any other Spiritual movement it must become weaker, more especially as regards its own peculiar doctrine. It is capable of bearing a completely different, richer, Christian world of wonder than that of this idealism to which we have all been accustomed from childhood, which is governed by a fear of believing too strongly in the actuality of Divine things and of taking the word of God too literally. Indeed, this Christian realism demands just such a wonder-world as is unfolded in the doctrine of the Last Things. It cannot therefore, be led astray in its eschatological hopes by the compassionate shaking of the head of those who believe themselves alone to be in the right. For to Christian realism it does not seem possible to arrive at a thoughtful understanding of created things and their history, without clear and definite thinking as to the final result of the development of the world, which is the object and aim of Creation, for only thus can light and meaning come into men's conceptions. This Christian realism does not shrink from the thought of a real, bodily and, therefore, truly living spirit-world, and a real contact of that world with man, even in his present state. The reader admits how true this all seems in the pages of Ötinger.

This refers to a time in which men did not seek for the ideas of the world of nature, but for a living world of Spirit, and indeed Ötinger tried to bring all the treasures of knowledge then accessible to man to his assistance, for the purpose of establishing a living contact with the Spiritual world. What stood behind such a man as this? He was not like a man of the present day, who has above all the task of showing that modern Natural Science must allow itself to be corrected by Spiritual Science, for true knowledge to be attained. Ötinger strove for something different. He strove to prove that the Spiritual world must be contacted in order to attain an understanding of the Bible, of the Scriptures, and especially of the New Testament. Richard Rothe puts it beautifully:

‘In order to understand this, a man must assume that frame of mind (which was that of Ötinger) which admits in its whole consciousness, that, as regards the Holy Scriptures a full, complete and, therefore, real understanding of them is still lacking, that the explanations given by the Churches do not contain it.’ Rothe goes on to say: ‘Perhaps I can best make this clear by relating what has been my own experience for more than thirty years of the Bible and more particularly of the New Testament—and of the words of the Saviour and the Epistles of Paul. The more I study the Scriptures, with the help of the Commentaries, the more I am impressed with a lively sense of their exuberant fulness, not only because of the inexhaustible ocean of feeling which surges through them, but no less by the thoughts contained in the words that I encounter. I stand before them with a key put in my hand by the Church, which has tested it for many a century. I cannot exactly say that it does not fit, still less can I say that it is the right one. It has effected an opening, but only with the help of the power I use in the unlocking. Our traditional exegesis—I do not refer to the neological one—gives me some understanding of the Scriptures, but does not suffice for a full and complete understanding. It is certainly able to draw forth the general content of the thoughts, but cannot give any reason for the peculiar form in which the thoughts appear. It seems to me that there is a blossom flowering above and beyond the exposition given. This remains as an unexplained residue left behind the written word, and this puts the Bible Commentators and those to whom they refer in a very awkward position, however well they may have accomplished their task in other respects. As a matter of fact they have only allowed the Lord and His Apostles to say precisely what the Commentators wish them to say, and this they have done in so clumsy, or perhaps we should say in so wonderful a way that for those who read them, things are made unnecessarily difficult to understand. The very large number of books comprising our exegetic literature deserve a serious reproach, in that they speak with so little clarity and polish concerning such incomparably important things, and such an incomparably important object. Who does not feel that this blame is deserved? The true Bible-reader receives an unequivocal impression that the words are right, just as they are,—that this is no meaningless scroll, from which our commentators must first cut away the wild branches before being able to penetrate the power of the thoughts contained therein. He feels that the accustomed methods of these gentlemen, of sweeping away the dust from these documents on account of their great age before they interpret them, only tends to brush away the imperishable spring-like brilliance which has shone in eternal youth for thousands of years. Let the masters of the Bible commentaries laugh as much as they will, it still remains a fact that there is something written between the lines of the Bible text which, with all their art, they are not able to decipher; yet that is above all what we ought to be able to read, if we wish to understand the altogether peculiar setting in which, in the Holy Scriptures alone, the now familiar thoughts of Divine manifested truth are to be found, in characteristic contra distinction to anything else of the kind. Our interpreters merely point out the figures standing in the foreground of the Scripture pictures; they completely leave out of account the background, with its wonderfully formed mountains in the far distance, and its brilliant dark-blue sky flecked with clouds. Yet from this falls on each one of us that quite unique and magic light which gives illumination, when we have understood what to us is truly an enigma. The peculiar basic thoughts and conceptions which, in the Scriptures, underlie the unexpressed assumptions, are lacking; and at the time there is a lack of soul, of the inner connection of the separate element of the Bible thoughts, which should organically bind them together. No wonder then that there are hundreds of passages in our Bible which thus remain un-interpreted and which are never properly understood, not understood completely in all the minute details of their features. No wonder there are so many passages of which a host of different interpretations have been given, and which have been ceaselessly in dispute for countless ages. No wonder at all; for they are certainly all wrong, because they are all inexact, only approximate, only giving the meaning as a whole, not in detail. We approach the Bible text with the alphabet of our own conceptions of God and the world, in all good faith, as though it was so obvious that it could not be otherwise: we take it, for granted that the Bible Commentator, who, as a silent observer is at the back of all he thinks and writes and illuminates, is of the same opinion. That is, however, an unfortunate illusion, of which we ought to have been cured by experiences long ago. Our key does not unlock, the right key had been lost, and until we find it again our investigations will find no green branch. We lack a fundamental conception of the Bible not expressly given in the text itself, but as long as we make researches without the system which can be found therein and which is not in our schools, the Bible must remain a half-closed book. We should study it with different fundamental conceptions from those we now cultivate as the only ones possible. No matter what these are, or where they are discovered, one thing is very certain from the whole concord of the melody of the Bible in its natural fulness, these conceptions must be more realistic and more “massive.” This is my own individual opinion, and while far from wishing to force it on those to whom it is foreign, I cannot but believe that Ötinger would understand me and assure me it was the same with him. Among all the many protestations that will be raised against me, I can still reckon one, if not many of my contemporaries, who will stand by me in this; I refer to the celebrated Dr. Beek of Tübingen.’

Ötinger hoped to be able to reach an understanding of the Bible on trying to arouse conceptions of a still living nature in the twilight days in which he and de Saint-Martin also lived: he hoped to make these living to himself, that he might enter into a living connection with the Spiritual World, and would then be able to understand the true language of the Bible. His assumption was practically this—that with mere abstract intellectual ideas it was impossible to understand the most important things in the Bible and especially in the New Testament. He believed that one can only hope to understand the Now Testament if one realises that it has proceeded from a direct vision of the Spiritual world itself, that no commentaries or exegesis are necessary; but that above all one ought to learn to read the New Testament. With this object he sought for a Philosophia Sacra. He did not mean this philosophy to be of the pattern of those that came after, but one in which was inscribed what a man may really experience, if he lives in contact with the Spiritual world.

Just as today, we who wish to throw the light of Natural Science on the researches of Spiritual Science, can no longer speak like de Saint-Martin; neither can we speak of the Gospels as did Ötinger or still less like Bengel. The edition of the New Testament brought out by Bengel will still be of use; but for the Apocalyptics of which he thought so much, a man of our day has no use at all. In this, Bengel laid great stress on calculation; he reckoned out the periods of history by this means. One number he held of special importance. This alone of course is sufficient to make the man of modern ideas look upon Bengel as a lunatic, a fantastic or a fool; for according to his reckoning, the year 1836 was to be of special importance in the development of humanity! He made profound calculations! He lived in the first half of the eighteenth century, so that he was a century removed from 1836. He reckoned this out in his own way by considering things historically. But if one goes more deeply, into things and is not so ‘clever’ as the modern mind, one knows that our good Bengel was only six years out in his reckoning. His error was caused by a false rendering of the year of the founding of Rome, and this can easily be proved. What he had meant to arrive at with his calculation was the year 1842, the year we have given for the materialistic crisis. Bengel, the teacher of Ötinger, referred to that profound incision in time; but, because in his search for massive conceptions he went too far and thought too massively, he reckoned that in the course of external history -something very special would take place, something like a last day. It was only the last day of the ancient wisdom

Thus, my dear friends, we see at no very distant date from our own times, the decline of a theosophical age; yet today, if an historian or philosopher writes about these persons at all, he devotes at most a couple of lines to them, and these as a rule tell one very little. None the less these persons had in their day a very far reaching, profound influence. If today anyone tries to disclose the meaning of the second part of Faust and finds it as given in the many commentaries, we cannot be surprised that:

‘He who clings to shallow things alone
Must find his hopes all disappear,
He digs with eager hands for treasure
But only finds the poor earth-worms.’

In this second part of Faust there is an enormous amount of occult wisdom and rendering of occult facts, though expressed in truly German poetic form. All this would be inconceivable if it had not been preceded by that world of which I have given you only the two principal examples. The man of today has no idea of how much was still known of the Spiritual world but a short while ago, comparatively speaking, and of how much of this belief has been shed only in the last few decades. It is certainly extremely important once in a way to fix our attention on these facts, because we, who learn to read the gospels now with the help of what Spiritual Science can give us, are only just beginning to learn over again to read the Scriptures. There is a very remarkable sentence in Ötinger. In his writings we find it quoted over and over again, though never understood. This sentence alone should suffice to make a man who has insight say: Ötinger is one of the greatest spirits of mankind. That sentence is: ‘Die Materie ist das Ende der Wege Gottes.’ (Matter is the end of Gods path). It was only possible for a very highly-developed soul to have given such a definition of matter, corresponding so clearly to what the Spiritual Scientist also knows; such a definition was only possible from one who was in a position to understand how the Divine Spiritual creative-forces work and concentrate to bring about a material structure such as man, who in his form is the expression of an enormous concentration of forces. If you read what takes place at the beginning of the conversation between Capesius and Benedictus in the second Mystery Play, and how the relation of the Macrocosm to man is there developed, which causes Capesius to fall ill, you will be able to form an idea of how these things can be expressed according to our present Spiritual Science, translated into our words. This is the same as Ötinger expressed in his significant saying, which can only be understood when we rediscover it: ‘Matter is the end of God's path.’ Even here it is the case, as in the words of de Saint-Martin, that we can no longer speak in such words today. Anyone using them must be fond of preserving that which today can no longer be understood.

Not only have our conceptions undergone a great transformation, but our feelings too have very greatly changed. Just think of a typical man of modern times, one who is really a practical example of his age, and imagine what his impressions would be were he to take up de Saint-Martin's: Des erreurs et de la liberte and come upon the following sentence. ‘Man is preserved from knowing the principle of his external corporeality; for if he were to become acquainted with it, he could never for very shame look at an uncovered human being.’ In an age in which the culture of the nude is even encouraged on the stage, as is done by the most modern people, one could, of course, make nothing of such a sentence. Yet just think: a great philosopher, de Saint-Martin, understanding the world, tells us that a higher feeling of shame would make one blush to gaze upon a human form—to de Saint-Martin this seemed absolutely comprehensible. You will have observed that I wanted first of all to call your attention today to something extremely significant, which has now disappeared. Besides that, I wanted to call to your notice the fact that at that time a different language was spoken from the one we now speak. We are obliged to speak differently. The possibility of thinking in the way corresponding to that language has vanished. Both in Ötinger and de Saint-Martin we find that things were not thought out to their end; but they could be thought out further. They can be further discussed; though not with a modern thinker. I might go even farther, and say: We need not go into these things today when studying the Riddles of the world, for we must understand ourselves through the conceptions of our own day, not through former ones. For that reason I always lay so much stress on the necessity of connecting all our Spiritual scientific work with modern ideas. It is a remarkable phenomenon, that no matter how much we now try to fall back into those former ideas, yet they are not played out; they show in themselves that a vast deal more could be arrived at by thinking further along those lines. Because we today hold the curious belief that people have always thought just as we do today, we have no conception how closely those conceptions were connected with universal consciousness. The typical man, to whom I have already referred, thinks as follows: ‘I call the white powdered particles in the salt-cellar, salt.’ Now this man is wen aware that salt is called by a different name in different languages, but he assumes that it has always represented what we see it to be today. That, however, is not the case, even the most uneducated peasant in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and much later still, had a much more comprehensive conception of ‘Salt;’ he had a conception of which de Saint-Martin's was but a more concentrated form; he had not the present materialistic idea, and when he spoke of Salt he meant something connected with the Spiritual life. Words were even then not so material as they are today, they did not refer to a direct, separate substance.

Now, read in the Gospels how Christ says to His Disciples: ‘Ye are the salt of the Earth.’ Well now, if these words are read with the present meaning, we do not get the words spoken by Christ, for the word ‘Salt’ was then quite naturally understood as referring to the whole configuration of the soul A man may have a very broad mind on the subject, but that is not enough. To call forth in a man of today a like feeling, ‘Salt’ must be differently translated, This applies to many of the old records, but above all to the Scriptures. Many mistakes have been made in this very respect. So it is not difficult to understand why Ötinger made many historical studies, trying to get at what was concealed behind the value of words, and to get at the right feeling for them. Of course, at the present day a mind like his would be considered mad! He shut himself up in his laboratory, not merely for weeks but for whole months, making alchemical experiments and studying Cabalistic books, simply to find out how the words in a given sentence were to be understood; for all his strivings were directed to the meaning of the words of holy writ.

I have spoken of these things today to show that we must now speak in a different way, for we are standing at the dawn, as they then stood in the evening twilight; and I also want to approach them now from yet another standpoint. I should like to go back to the strange fact that according to the modern view of things, from which Spiritual Science as it develops must set itself free, it would appear useless to enter deeply into the nature of the ideas of the time of Bengel, Ötinger, de Saint-Martin, and others. For when we speak to educated people today we must speak of the metabolic body, of the rhythmic body, of the nervous system; we can no longer speak of the mercurial-body, of the sulphur-body and of the salt-body. For these conceptions, comprehensible to the age of Paracelsus, of Jacob Böhme, de Saint-Martin and Ötinger, would no longer be understood today. And yet it is not without value to study these things—and would not be so even if it were quite impossible to speak to the cultured today through these methods. I am willing to admit that it would not be wise to throw the old ideas of Mercury, Sulphur, and Salt into modern thought; it would not be well to do so, nor right. A man who can feel the pulse of his time would not fall into the error of wishing to restore those old conceptions, as is done in certain so-called occult societies which attach great weight to decorating themselves with old vignettes. Yet, none the less, it is of immense significance to re-acquire the language that is no longer spoken now; for de Saint-Martin, Ötinger, and in more ancient times Paracelsus and Jacob Böhme by no means exhausted it.

Why is this? Yes, why? The men of today no longer speak in that way; that language could fall into disuse and at the most one could study the historical phenomenon of how it was possible for an historic period not to live out its full life. How comes it about that there is still something remaining which might be carried further, but which has yet come to a standstill? How does this come about? What is the underlying cause? It might well be that if we could learn all there is to be learnt, even without including these conceptions, nobody would be able to understand us! Here, however, something comes to light which is of enormous significance. The living no longer speak of these conceptions and do not require to use them; but for the dead, for those who have passed through the portals of death, the language of these ideas is of all the more importance. If we have occasion to make ourselves understood by the dead or by certain other Spirits of the Spiritual world, we come to recognise that in a certain respect we need to learn that unexhausted language, which has now died out as regards the earthly physical life of the physical plane, It is just among those who have passed through the portal of death that what lives and stirs in these conceptions will become a living language, the current language for which they are seeking. The more we have tried to realise what was once thought, felt and understood in these conceptions, the better we are able to make ourselves understood to the Spirits who have passed the portals of death. It is then easier to have mutual understanding.

Thus then the peculiar and remarkable secret is disclosed: that a certain form of thought lives on this earth only up to a given point; it does not then develop further on the earth, but attains a further stage of perfection among those who pass into the intermediate life, between death and rebirth. Let no one suppose that all that is necessary is to learn what we can today about the formation of Sulphur, Quicksilver, (mercury is not Quicksilver) and Salt; these conceptions alone would not suffice for coming into relation with the dead through their language. But if we can take in these thoughts as did Paracelsus, Jacob Böhme, and especially the almost super-abundant fruitfulness of de Saint-Martin, Ötinger and Bengel, one perceives that a bridge is established between this world and that other. However much people may laugh at Bengel's calculations, which, of course, are of no tangible value to the external physical life,—to those living between death and rebirth they are of very great significance and meaning. For incisions in time such as that of which Bengel tried to calculate the date, and in which he was only six years out, are in that other world of very profound significance.

You see that the world here on the physical plane and the world of the Spirit are not so connected that one can form a bridge between them by means of abstract formulae; they hang together in a concrete way. That which in a sense, loses its meaning here, rises into the Spiritual world and lives on there together with the dead, while with the living it has to be succeeded by a different phase.

It might seem at first sight that in the centuries immediately following the Mystery of Golgotha mankind had not been touched by the light of spiritual illumination; that this was the normal condition of mankind and increasingly so up to the present day. This is not so, however. If we wish to see these things in perspective we must distinguish between the prevailing spirit of mankind and that which occurs here and there in the life of mankind and may play a decisive part in the different spheres of life. It would be most discouraging for many today to be told of the existence of a spiritual world, but that the doors to this world were closed to them. And there are many at the present time who have come to this depressing conclusion. The reason for this is not far to seek. Where there is a clear possibility of gaining insight into the spiritual world they refuse to commit themselves unreservedly. Nor have they the courage to pass an objective judgement on this issue. It may seem therefore—but in reality it is only apparently so—that today we are far removed from those early times when the spiritual world was revealed to the whole of mankind through atavistic clairvoyance, or from the later times when the few could find access to the spirit through initiation into the Mysteries. We must draw together certain strands which link early periods of human evolution with the present if we wish to arrive at a full understanding of the mystery of man's destiny and especially of those phenomena we have discussed in these lectures in connection with the nature of the Mysteries. I should like to select an example from recent times which is accessible to all and which will lend encouragement to those who are faced with the decision of choosing paths leading to the spiritual world. From the many examples at our disposal I would like to take an example which demonstrates at the same time how these phenomena are none the less misjudged from the materialistic point of view of the present day—and will also be misjudged in the immediate future.

No doubt you have all heard of Otto Ludwig (note 1) who was born in 1813, in the same year as Hebbel and Richard Wagner. Otto Ludwig was not only a poet—some may feel perhaps that he was not in the front rank of poets, but that does not concern us at the moment—but he was a man given to introspection, who sought self-knowledge and who succeeded in penetrating into the inner life which is veiled from the majority today. Otto Ludwig describes very beautifully what he experiences in the process of poetic composition or when he reads the poetry of others and surrenders to its appeal. He then realizes that he does not read or compose like other men, but that an extraordinary ferment is set up within him. And Otto Ludwig gives a beautiful description of this in a passage I will now read to you because it reveals a piece of self-knowledge of a typically modern man who, in the course of this self-revelation, speaks of things which our present materialistic age regards as the wildest fantasy. But Otto Ludwig was no visionary or idle dreamer. By nature he was perhaps introspective, but if we take into consideration the information we have about his life, we shall find that alongside this introspective tendency there was something eminently sane and balanced in his make-up. He describes his own creative experience and his response to the poetry of others in these words:

“I experience first of all a musical impression which is transformed into colour (note 2). Then I see one or more figures in various postures executing formalized gestures, singly or facing each other, the whole resembling a copper engraving on parchment, coloured paper or, more precisely, like a marble statue or sculptural group on which the sun falls through a veil of that colour. I experience this colour phenomenon after reading poetry which has stirred me deeply. If I put myself in the mood which Goethe's poetry evokes I see a deep golden yellow passing over into golden brown. When I read Schiller I experience a brilliant crimson; with Shakespeare every scene is a particular nuance of the particular colour I associate with the whole drama. Strangely enough the image or the group evoked is not usually a representation of the denouement, sometimes it is only a characteristic figure in some moving posture which is immediately joined by a succession of other figures. At first I know nothing of the plot or content of the drama, but ever fresh miming figures, seemingly three-dimensional, are rapidly added, now from the beginning, now from the end of the initial dramatic situation until I experience the whole drama complete with all its scenes. The whole passes before me in rapid succession; meanwhile I remain passive and a kind of physical anxiety grips me. I can then reproduce at will the content of the individual scenes as they unfold; but I find it impossible to condense the narrative content into a brief account. Next the gestures are accompanied by speech. I write down what I can recall, but, once the mood forsakes me, what I have noted down becomes a dead letter. Then I proceed to fill in the gaps in the dialogue, but for this purpose I must cast a critical eye over what I have written.”

Here then we have the remarkable case of a man who experiences crimson-red on reading Schiller, or golden yellow passing over into golden brown on reading the dramas or poems of Goethe, who experiences a colour sensation with every drama of Shakespeare; who, when he composes or reads a poem sees figures like those of a copper engraving printed on a parchment-coloured background, or three-dimensional miming figures on which the sun falls through a veil which diffuses the light that evokes the total mood.

Now we must understand this experience in the correct way. It is not yet a clairvoyant perception, but it is a step towards spiritual vision. In order to have a right understanding of this mood from the standpoint of Spiritual Science we must realize that Otto Ludwig was no stranger to spiritual vision. For if he were to advance further along this path he would not only experience these visions, but, just as physical objects are visible to the physical eye, spiritual beings would be visible to his spiritual eye and he would know them as an inner experience. Just as we see scattered light when we gently rub our eyes in the dark, light that seemingly radiates from the eye and fills the room, so from his inner life Ludwig radiates impressions of colour and tone. As he rightly says, he experiences them first as musical impressions. He does not exploit them in order to gain spiritual insight; but we perceive that he is mature enough spiritually to embark on the path leading to the spiritual world.

It is no longer possible to deny that there exist people who are aware that “spiritual vision” is a reality, the vision that the neophytes learned to develop in the Mysteries in the way described in earlier lectures. For the real purpose of these ceremonies was primarily to call attention to the eye of the soul, to awaken man to the fact of its existence. That the phenomena which I have just described to you are not rightly understood today is evident from the observations of Gustav Freytag (note 3). When speaking of Otto Ludwig, he says:

“The work of this writer and indeed his whole makeup, was akin to that of an epic poet of the time when, in the early dawn of nations, the poetic figures were visioned by the poet as living Imaginations imbued with colour and sound.”

This statement is perfectly correct, but has nothing to do with poetic composition. For the experiences of Otto Ludwig were not only shared by poets in ancient times, but by all men, and were shared in later times by those who had been initiated into the Mysteries irrespective of whether they were poets or not. These experiences have therefore no connection with poetic invention. Behind the barrier which the materialist of today has erected in his own soul there is to be found that which Otto Ludwig describes. It is found not only in the poet, but in every man today. The fact that he was a poet has nothing to do with the phenomenon of poetic vision, but is something that accompanies it. One may be a far greater poet than Otto Ludwig and that which one is able to describe may remain entirely in the subconscious. It is present in the substratum of the subconscious, but need not manifest itself. For poetry, indeed art as a whole today, is something other than the conscious fashioning of clairvoyant impressions.

I quote the case of Otto Ludwig as an example of a man—and men of his type are by no means rare today—who stands on the threshold of the spiritual world. If one practises the exercises given in my book, Knowledge of the Higher Worlds, that which already exists in the soul is raised into consciousness, so that one learns to use it or to apply it consciously. It is important to bear this in mind. The problem is not so much that it is difficult to reach the hidden depths of the soul, but that people today lack the courage to embark upon a spiritual training; and that for the most part those who would willingly do so from a heartfelt need to know and to understand, none the less feel constrained to admit this need, albeit somewhat shamefacedly in their own intimate circle, but conceal it when they later find themselves in the company of contemporary intellectuals. What we should characterize today as the right path, perhaps because we live in the Michael Age since 1879, need not of necessity be regarded as the only right path. Looking back over the recent past it is possible that many may have attained a high degree of clairvoyance, genuine clairvoyance; there is no need for us therefore either to recognize fully or to accept this clairvoyance unreservedly, nor to regard it as something dangerous and to be rejected.

There are certainly many factors which for some time have undermined our courage to accept the validity of clairvoyance, and for this reason the assessment of Swedenborg (who has often been mentioned in your circle) has been so strange. He could act as a stimulus to many, in that people might see in him an individuality who had lifted to some extent the veils that concealed the spiritual world. Swedenborg had developed a high degree of Imaginative cognition which is a necessity for all who would penetrate to the spiritual world. It was indispensable to him; it was simply a kind of transition to higher stages of knowledge. And it was especially his clairvoyant sense for Imaginative cognition that he had developed. But precisely because this Imaginative cognition was stirring and pulsating in him he was able to make observations about the relations between the spiritual world and the phenomenal world, observations which are highly significant for those who seek to clarify their ideas about clairvoyance by studying the development of particular personalities. I should like to take Swedenborg as an example in order to illustrate how he came to self-understanding, how he thought and felt in order to keep his inner life attuned to the spiritual world. He was not motivated by egoism in his search for the spirit. He was already fifty-five years old when the doors of the spiritual world were opened to him (note 4). He was therefore a man of ripe experience; he had received a sound scientific training and had long been active in this field. The most important scientific works of Swedenborg have just been published in many volumes by the Stockholm Academy of Sciences and they contain material that may well determine the course of science for many years to come. But people today have learned the trick of recognizing a man such as Swedenborg (who was the leading scientist of his day) only in so far as they agree with him; otherwise they label him a fool. And they perform this trick with consummate skill. They attach no importance to the fact that from the age of fifty-five Swedenborg bears witness to the reality of the spiritual world—a man whose scientific achievement not only compares favourably with that of others—in itself no mean feat—but who, as a scientist, stood head and shoulders above his contemporaries.

Swedenborg was particularly interested in the question of the interaction of soul and body. After his spiritual enlightenment he wrote a superb treatise on this subject. The content was approximately as follows: In considering the interrelation of body and soul there are three possibilities. First, the body is the decisive factor; sense-impressions are mediated by the body and react upon the soul. The soul therefore is to some extent dependent upon the body. The second possibility is that the body is dependent upon the soul which is the source of the spiritual impulses. The soul fashions the body and makes use of the body during its lifetime. In this case one must speak not of a physical influence, but of a psychic influence. The third possibility is as follows: body and soul are contiguous, but do not interact; a higher power brings about a harmony or agreement between them just as two clocks which are independent of each other agree when they show the time. When therefore an external impression is made upon the senses, a thought process is set up within the soul, but both are unrelated; a corresponding impression is made upon the soul from within by a higher power, just as an impression is made upon the soul through the senses from without. Swedenborg points out that the first and third possibilities are impossible for those who are able to see into the spiritual world, that it is evident to the spiritually enlightened that the soul by virtue of its inner forces is related to a spiritual sun in the same way as the (physical) body is related to the physical sun. And he also shows that everything of a physical nature is dependent upon soul and spirit. He throws fresh light upon what we called the Sun mystery (when speaking of the Mysteries), that mystery of which Julian the Apostate had a dim recollection when he spoke of the sun as a spiritual being. It was this which was the cause of his hostility to Christianity because the Christianity of his day sought to deny Christ's relation to the sun. Through Imaginative cognition Swedenborg restored the Sun mystery as far as was possible for his time.

I have placed these facts before you in order to show what Swedenborg experienced inwardly in the course of developing his spiritual knowledge. His reflections upon the question I have just touched upon were embodied in a kind of philosophical treatise—the kind of treatise written by one who has insight into the spiritual world, not the kind of treatise written by the academic philosopher who is devoid of spiritual vision. At the conclusion of his treatise Swedenborg speaks of what he calls a “vision”. And by this vision he does not imply something he has conjured up, but something he has actually perceived with the eye of the spirit. Swedenborg is not afraid to speak of his spiritual visions. Furthermore he recounts what a particular angel said to him because he is certain of the fact. He no more doubts it than another doubts what a fellow human being has told him. He said: “I was once ‘in the spirit’; three Schoolmen appeared to me, disciples of Aristotle, advocates of his doctrine that attributes a physical influence to all that streams into the soul from without. They appeared on the one side. On the other side appeared three disciples of Descartes who spoke of spiritual influences upon the soul, albeit somewhat inadequately. And behind them appeared three disciples of Leibnitz who spoke of the pre-established harmony, i.e. of the independence of body and soul, of dissimilar monads existing and moving together in a state of absolute harmony pre-established by God. And I perceived nine figures who surrounded me. And the leaders of each group of the three figures were Leibnitz, Descartes and Aristotle, suffused in light”. Swedenborg spoke of this vision as one speaks of an event in everyday life. Then, he said, from out of the abyss there rose up a spirit with a torch in his right hand and as he swung the torch in front of the figures they immediately began to dispute amongst themselves. The Aristotelians defended, from their standpoint, the primacy of physical influences, the Cartesians defended spiritual impulses, and likewise the Leibnitzians defended, with the support of Leibnitz himself, the idea of preestablished harmony. Such visions may describe even the smallest details. Swedenborg tells us that Leibnitz appeared dressed in a kind of toga and the lappets were held by his disciple Wolf. Such details always accompany these visions in which such peculiarities are very characteristic. These figures, then, began to dispute amongst themselves. They all had a good case—and any and every case can be defended. Thereupon, after prolonged conflict, the spirit appeared a second time. He carried the torch in his left hand and lit up their heads from behind. Then the battle of words was really joined. They said: “We cannot distinguish which is our body and which is our soul.” And so they agreed to cast three slips of paper into a box. On the one slip was written “physical influence”, on the second, “spiritual influence” and on the third, “pre-established harmony”. Then they drew lots and drew out “spiritual influence” and said: “Let us agree to recognize spiritual influence.” At that moment an angel descended from the upper world and said: “It is not fortuitous that you drew out the slip of paper labelled ‘spiritual influence’; that choice had already been anticipated by the powers who in their wisdom guide the world because it accords with the truth.”

This is the vision described by Swedenborg. It is open to anyone to regard this vision as of no importance, perhaps even as naive. The salient question however is not whether it is naive or not, but that he experienced it. And that which at first sight seems perhaps extremely naive has profound implications. For that which in the phenomenal world appears to be arbitrary, the vagary of chance, is something totally different when seen symbolically from the spiritual angle. It is difficult to come to an understanding of chance, because chance is only a shadow-image of higher necessities. Swedenborg wishes to indicate something of special importance, namely that it is not he who wills it, but “it” is willed in him. This vision arises because “it” is willed in him. And this is an accurate description of the way in which he arrived at his truths, an accurate description of the spirit in which the treatise was written. How did the Cartesians react? They sought to demonstrate the idea of spiritual influence on purely human and rational grounds. It is possible to arrive at the spirit in this way but that seldom happens. The Aristotelians were no better than the Cartesians; they defended the idea of the spiritual influence, again on human grounds. The Leibnitzians were certainly no better than the other two for they defended the idea of “pre-established harmony”. Swedenborg rejected these paths to the spirit; he did everything possible to prepare himself to receive the truth. And this waiting upon truth, not the determination of truth, this passive acceptance of truth was his aim and was symbolized by the drawing of the slips of paper from the box. This is of vital importance.

We do not appreciate these things at their true worth when we approach them intellectually. We only appreciate them in the right way when they are presented symbolically, even though intelligent people may regard the symbol as naive. Our response to symbols is different from our response to abstract ideas. The symbol prepares our soul to receive the truth from the spiritual world. That is the essential. And if we give serious attention to these things we shall gradually understand and develop ideas and concepts which are necessary for mankind today, ideas which they must acquire by effort and which appear to be inaccessible today simply because people are antipathetic towards them—and for no other reason—an antipathy that springs from materialism.

The whole purpose of our investigations was to study the course of human evolution, first of all up to a decisive turning-point—and this turning-point was the Mystery of Golgotha. Then evolution continues and takes on a new course. These two courses are radically different from each other. I have already described in what respects they differed from each other. In order fully to understand this difference let us recall once again the following: in ancient times it was always possible for man without special training of his psychic life (in the Mysteries this was connected with external ceremonies and cult acts) to be convinced of the reality of the spiritual world through the performance of these rites and ceremonies and thereby of his own immortality, because this certainty of immortality was still latent in his corporeal nature. After the Mystery of Golgotha it was no longer possible for the physical body to “distil” out of itself the conviction of immortality; it could no longer “press” out of itself, so to speak, the perception of immortality. This had been prepared in the centuries before the Mystery of Golgotha. It is most interesting to see how Aristotle, this giant among philosophers, made every effort a few centuries before the Mystery of Golgotha to grasp the idea of the immortality of the soul; but the idea of immortality he arrived at was a most remarkable conception. Man, in Aristotle's opinion, is only a complete man when he possesses a physical body. And Franz Brentano, one of the best Aristotelians of recent time, says in his study of Aristotle that man is no longer a complete man if some member is lacking; how can he be a complete man when he lacks the whole body? Therefore, to Aristotle, when the soul passes through the gates of death it is of less significance than it was when in the body here on Earth. This shows that he had lost the capacity still to perceive the soul, whilst on the other hand the original capacity to accept the immortality of the soul still persisted. Now, strange to relate, Aristotle was the leading philosopher throughout the Middle Ages. All that can be known, said the Schoolmen, is known to Aristotle and as philosophers we have no choice but to rely upon him and follow in his footsteps. They had no intention of developing spiritual powers or capacities beyond the limits set by Aristotelianism. And this is very significant, for it explains clearly why Julian the Apostate rejected the Christianity that was practised by the Church during the age of Constantine. One must really see these things from a higher perspective. Apart from Franz Brentano, one of the leading Aristotelians of our time, I was personally acquainted with Vincenz Knauer, a Benedictine monk, whose relationship to Aristotle as a Roman Catholic was identical with that of the Schoolmen. In speaking of Aristotle he sought to discover at the same time what could be known of the immortality of the soul by purely human knowledge. And Knauer gave the following interesting summary of his opinion:

“The soul, that is, in this connection, the departed spirit—i.e. the soul of man that has passed through the gates of death—finds itself, according to Aristotle, not in a more perfect state, but in a highly imperfect state, inappropriate to its destiny. The image of the soul is by no means that which is often employed, namely, the image of a butterfly which after shedding its chrysalis takes wing. Rather does the soul resemble a butterfly whose wings have been torn off by a cruel hand and now crawls helplessly in the dust in the form of a miserable worm.”

It is very significant that those who are well versed in Aristotle admit that human knowledge could arrive at no other conclusion. And a certain effort therefore is demanded of us to resist the consequences of this attitude of mind. The materialism of the present time is unwittingly influenced by the Conciliar decree of 869 which abolished the spirit and declared that man consisted of body and soul only.

Modern materialism goes even further; it proposes to abolish the soul as well. That of course is the logical sequel. We need therefore both courage and determination in order to find our way back again to the spirit in the right way. Now Julian the Apostate who had been initiated into the Eleusinian Mysteries was aware that a specific spiritual training could lead to the realization that the soul is immortal. This Sun mystery was known to him. And he now became aware of something that filled him with alarm. He was unable to grasp the fact that what he feared so much was a necessity. When he looked back to ancient times he realized that directly or indirectly through the Mysteries man was guided by Cosmic Powers, Beings and Forces. He realized that this may happen on the physical plane, that it is ordained from spiritual spheres because men have insight into these spiritual spheres. In Constantinism he saw a form of Christianity emerge which modelled Christian society and the organization of Christianity on the original principles of the Roman empire. He saw that Christianity had infiltrated into that which the Roman empire had intended for the external social order only. And he saw that the divine-spiritual had been harnessed to the Imperium Romanum. And this appalled him; he was unable to bring himself to admit that this was a necessity for a brief period. He realized that there was wide disparity between the mighty impulses of human evolution and what happened historically. I have often called attention to the need to bear in mind the golden age of the rise of Christianity before the era of Constantine. For at that time powerful spiritual impulses were at work which had been obscured solely because man's independent search for knowledge which he owed to the Christ Impulse had been harnessed to the Conciliar decrees.

If we look back to Origen and to Clement of Alexandria we find men who were open-minded, men still imbued with the Greek spirit: yet they were also conscious of the significance of what had been accomplished through the Mystery of Golgotha. Their conception of this Mystery and of the crucified Christ is considered to be pure heresy in the eyes of all denominations today. In reality the great Church Fathers of the pre-Constantine age who are recognized by the Church are the worst heretics of all. Though they were aware of the significance of the Mystery of Golgotha for the evolution of the Earth, they gave no indication of wishing to suppress the path to the Mystery of Golgotha, the gate to the Mysteries or the path of the old clairvoyance, which had been the aim of the Christianity of Constantine. In Clement of Alexandria especially we see that his works are shot through with great mysteries, mysteries which are so veiled that it is even difficult for contemporary man to make head or tail of them. Clement speaks of the Logos for example, of the wisdom that streams through and permeates the Universe. He pictures the Logos as music of the spheres fraught with meaning, and the visible world as the expression of the music of the spheres, just as the visible vibration of the strings of a musical instrument is the expression of the sound waves. Thus, in the eyes of Clement, the human form is made in the image of the Logos; that is, to Clement the Logos is a reality and he sees the human form as a fusion of tones from the music of the spheres. Man, he says, is made in the image of the Logos. And in many of Clement's utterances we find traces of that supernal wisdom that dwelt in him, a wisdom illuminated by the Christ Impulse. If you compare these utterances of Clement of Alexandria with the prevailing attitude today then the claim to recognize a man such as Clement of Alexandria without understanding him will appear as more than passing strange.

When it is said that the aim of Spiritual Science is to follow in the main stream of Christianity, to be a new flowering of Christianity to meet the needs of our time, then the cry is raised—the ancient Gnosis is being revived! And at the mention of Gnosis many professing Christians today begin to cross themselves as if faced by the devil incarnate. Gnosis for today is Spiritual Science; but the more developed gnosis of the present time is different from the gnosis known to Clement of Alexandria. What were the views of Clement of Alexandria who lived in the latter half of the second century? Faith, he says, is our starting-point—the orthodox Christian of today is satisfied with faith alone and asks no more. Faith, according to Clement, is already knowledge, but concise knowledge of what is needed; gnosis however confirms and reinforces what we believe, is founded on faith through the teaching of Our Lord and so leads to a faith that is scientifically acceptable and irrefutable. In these words Clement of Alexandria expresses for his time what we must realize today. Christianity therefore demands that gnosis, the Spiritual Science of today, must actively participate in the development of Christianity. But the modern philistine protests: “We must distinguish between science (which he would limit to sense experience) and faith. Faith must have no part in science.” Clement of Alexandria however says: To faith is added gnosis, to gnosis love, and to love the “Kingdom”. This is one of the most profound utterances of the human spirit because it bears witness to an intimate union with the life of the spirit. First we are nourished in faith; but to faith is added gnosis, that is, knowledge or understanding. Out of this living knowledge, i.e. when we penetrate deeply into things, there is first born genuine love through which our Divine inheritance operates. Mankind can only be the vehicle of the influx of the Divine as it was in the “beginning” if to faith is added gnosis, to gnosis love and to love the “Kingdom”. We must look upon these utterances as bearing witness to the deep spirituality of Clement.

Difficult as it may seem we must make the true form of Christian life once again accessible to mankind today. It is important to see certain things for what they are today and we shall then know where to look for the real cause of our present tribulations (i.e. the War of 1914). The effect of these calamities is such that, as a rule, no attempt is made to discover what really lies behind them. When, for example, an Alpine village is buried beneath an avalanche, everyone sees the avalanche crash down; but if we want to discover the cause of the avalanche we must look for it perhaps in an ice-crystal where the snow-slip began. It is easy enough to observe the destruction of the village by the avalanche, but it is not so easy to provide tangible evidence that the disaster was caused by an ice-crystal. And so it is with the great events of history! It is evident that mankind is now caught up in a terrible catastrophe; this is the conflagration that has overwhelmed us. We have to look for the sparks—and they are many—which first set the conflagration alight. But we do not pursue our enquiries far enough in order to ascertain where the conflagration first began. Today we are afraid to see things for what they are.

Let us assume that we wish to form an opinion about a certain field of science. Usually we rely upon the opinion of the specialist in that particular field. Why is his opinion accepted as authoritative? Simply because he is an expert in this field. Generally speaking it is the specialist or university professor who determines what is accepted as scientific today. Let us take a concrete case. I am well aware that it does not make for popularity to call a spade a spade, but that is no matter. But unless an increasing number of people is prepared to get to the root of things today we shall not overcome our present tribulations. Let us assume that a leading authority says the following: people are always talking about man in terms of body and soul. This idea of the dualism of body and soul is fundamentally unsatisfactory. That we still speak of body and soul today is due to the fact that we are dependent on a language that is already outmoded, which we have inherited from an earlier epoch when people were far more stupid than today. These people were so foolish as to believe that the body and soul were separate entities. When we speak of these matters today we are compelled to make use of these terms; we are victims of a language which belongs to the past. And our authority continues: we have to accept body and soul as separate entities, but this is quite unjustified. Anyone speaking from the present standpoint and wholly uninfluenced by the views of ancient times would perhaps say: let us assume here is a flower and here is a man. I see his form and complexion, his external aspect, just as I see that of the flower. The rest must be inferred.—Now someone might come along and object: that is true, but the man in question also sees the flower in his soul. But that is pure illusion. What I really receive from the perception of a flower or a stone is a sense-impression and the same is true of the man in question. The idea that an inner image persists in the soul is pure illusion. The only things we know are external relationships.

You will say that you can make nothing of this argument! And a good thing too, because it is a farrago of nonsense, it is the acme of stupidity. This crass stupidity is supported by all kinds of careful laboratory investigations into the human brain and sundry clinical findings and so on. In short the man is a fool. He is in a position to provide good clinical results because laboratories are at his disposal; but the conclusions which he draws from these findings are pure nonsense. Men of this type are a commonplace today. To say these things does not make for popularity. The cycle of lectures which has appeared in book form by the man I am referring to—strangely enough his name is Verworn, [original note 1] I take this to be pure coincidence—is called “The Mechanism of the Spiritual Life”. It would be about as sensible to write about the “ligneousness of iron” as about “the mechanism of spiritual life”.

Now if this is typical of the intellectual acumen of our most enlightened minds it is not in the least surprising that if those disciplines which are far from being accurate at least in relation to external facts—and in this respect Verworn is capable of accurate observation because he describes what he sees, but unfortunately muddies everything with his own foolish ideas—that if those disciplines which are unsupported by external evidence such as political science, for example, are exposed to the scientific mode of thinking, then the greatest nonsense results. Political science should be supported by thoughts that are rooted in reality, but lacks these thoughts for reasons I have indicated in my last lecture. And people are forcibly reminded of this fact.

I referred earlier in this lecture to Kjellén, one of the leading Swedish thinkers. His book The State as Organism is ingenious; towards the end of the book he puts forward a remarkable idea, but neither he, nor others today, can make anything of it. He quotes a certain Fustel de Coulanges (note 5), author of La Cité antique, who showed that when we analyse pre-Christian political and social institutions we find that they are entirely founded on religious rites and observances; the entire State has a social and spiritual foundation. Thus people are willy-nilly brought face to face with the facts, for I pointed out in my last lecture that the social order stemmed from the Mysteries and had a spiritual origin. In studying the body politic or political science people are faced with these questions but are at a loss to understand them. They can make nothing of what even history reports when they can no longer rely upon documents.

And still less can they make anything of the other idea which I indicated as a new path to the Christ. This idea which we find especially in the Mysteries and in Plato's writings, that remarkable echo of the Mystery teachings must arise once again. The central figure of Plato's dialogues is Socrates surrounded by his disciples. In the debate between Socrates and his disciples Plato unfolds his teachings. In his writings Plato was in communion with Socrates after the latter's death. Now this is something more than a literary device. It is the continuation, the echo of what was practised in the Mysteries where the neophytes were gradually prepared for communion with the souls of the dead who continue to direct the sensible world from the spiritual world. Plato's philosophy is developed out of his communion with Socrates, after the death of Socrates. This idea must be revived again and I have already indicated what form it must take. We must get beyond the dry bones of history, beyond the mere recording of external events. We must be able to commune with the dead, to let the thoughts of the dead arise in us once again. It is in this sense that we must be able to take seriously the idea of resurrection. It is through personal inner experience that Christ reveals Himself to mankind. It is by following this path that the truth of the Christ can be demonstrated. But this path demands of us that we develop the will in our thinking. If we can develop only such thoughts as are suited to the observation of the external world we cannot arrive at those thoughts which are really in touch with the dead. We must acquire the capacity to draw thoughts from the well of our inmost being. Our will must be prepared to unite with reality, and then the will which is thus spiritualised by its incorporation in our thinking will encounter spiritual beings, just as the hand encounters a physical object in the external world. And the first spiritual beings we encounter will, as a rule, be the dead with whom we are in some way karmically connected. You must not expect to find guidance in these abstruse matters from a set of written instructions which can be carried about in one's waistcoat pocket. Things are not as simple as that. One encounters well-intentioned people who ask: How do I distinguish between dream and reality, between phantasy and reality? In the individual case one should not attempt to distinguish between them in accordance with a fixed rule. The whole soul must be gradually attuned so that it can pass judgement in the individual case, just as in the external world we seek to pass judgement irrespective of the individual case. We must develop a wider perspective in order to form a judgement about the particular case. The dream may be a close approximation to reality, but it is not possible in the individual case to state categorically: this is the right and proper way to distinguish a mere dream from reality. Indeed what I am saying at the moment may not apply in specific cases, because other points of view must be taken into consideration. It is important to develop in ourselves the power to discriminate in spiritual matters.

Let us take the familiar case of a person who is dreaming or who imagines he is dreaming. Now it is not easy to distinguish between dream and reality. People who study dreams today follow in the footsteps of Herr Verworn. He says that one can undertake an interesting experiment. He quotes the following example. Someone taps with a pin on the window of a house where the occupant is asleep. He is dreaming at the time, wakes up and says he had heard rifle-fire. The dream, according to Verworn, exaggerates. The tappings of the pin on the window-pane have become rifle-shots. Verworn explains this in the following way: we assume that in waking consciousness the brain is fully active. In dream consciousness the brain activity is diminished; only the peripheral consciousness is active. Normally the brain plays no part; its activity is diminished. That is why the dream is so bizarre and why, therefore, the tappings of the pin turn into rifle-fire. Now the public is highly credulous. They are first told in the relevant passage in Verworn's book that the dream exaggerates and then, later on, they are told (not precisely in the words I have used) that the brain is less active and therefore the dream appears bizarre. The reader has meanwhile already forgotten what was told in the first place. He is unable to relate the two statements and simply says: the State has appointed an expert in these matters and so we must accept his word. Now, as you know, belief in authority is taboo today. He who does not hold these views about the dream may none the less feel that the following way of thinking might well be the right approach. Let us assume you are dreaming of a friend who is dead. You dream, or believe you are dreaming that you are sharing some situation in common with him—and then you wake up. Your first thought on awakening is of course: but he died some time ago! But in the dream it never occurred to you that he was dead. Now you can find many ingenious explanations of this dream if you refer to Verworn's book, The Mechanism of the Spirit. But if this is a dream, and a dream is only a memory of everyday life, you will have difficulty in understanding why the foremost thought in your mind, namely the death of your friend, plays no part in the dream when you have just experienced a situation which you know for certain you could not have shared with him when alive. You are then justified in saying: I have now experienced with X something I could not have experienced in life, something that I have not only not experienced, but which would have been impossible in our normal relationship. Assuming that the soul of X, the real soul, which has passed through the gates of death is behind this dream-picture, is it not self-evident that you do not share his death experience? There is no reason why X's soul should appear to be dead since it still lives on. If you take these two factors into consideration—perhaps in conjunction with other factors—you will conclude: my dream-picture veils a real meeting with the soul of X. The thought of death never occurs to me because the dream is not a memory of everyday life: in the dream I receive an authentic visitation from the deceased (i.e. X). I now experience the visitation in the form of a dream-picture, a situation which could not have arisen under the normal circumstances of everyday life. Furthermore the thought of death never occurs to me because the soul of the deceased persists. And then you have every reason for saying: when I experience this apparent dream I inhabit a realm where physical memory does not operate—and what I am about to say is most important—for it is characteristic of our physical life that our physical memory remains unimpaired. This memory does not exist to the same extent, nor is it of the same nature in the world of spirit which we enter at death. The memory which we need for the world of the spirit we must first develop in ourselves. The physical memory is tied to the physical body. Therefore anyone who is familiar with the super-sensible realm knows that the physical memory cannot enter there. It is not surprising that we have no memory of the deceased; but we are aware that we are in communion with the living soul of X.

Those who are acquainted with this fact maintain that what we call memory in the physical life is something totally different in the spiritual life. Anyone who has succumbed to the impact of Dante's great work, the “Divine Comedy” will never doubt, if he has spiritual discernment, that Dante experienced spiritual visions, that he had insight into the world of the spirit. He who comprehends the language of those who were familiar with the world of the spirit will find convincing proof of this in Dante's introduction to the “Divine Comedy”. Dante was well versed in spiritual knowledge; he was no dilettante in matters of the spirit; he was, so to speak, an expert in this field. He was aware that normal memory does not operate in the realm where we are in communion with the dead. He often speaks of the dead, of how the dead dwell in the “Light”. In the “Divine Comedy” you will find these beautiful lines on the theme of memory:

“O Light supreme, by mortal thought unscanned,
Grant that Thy former aspect may return,
Once more a little of Thyself relend.

Make strong my tongue that in its words may burn
One single spark of all Thy glory's light
For future generations to discern.

For if my memory but glimpse the sight
Whereof these lines would now a little say,
Men may the better estimate Thy might.”

(Paradiso. Canto XXXIII) [original note 2]

Thus Dante was aware that it is impossible with normal memory to grasp that which could originate in the spiritual world. There are many today who ask: why should we aspire to the spiritual world when we have enough to contend with in the physical world; the ordinary man seeks a practical answer to the problems of this life!—But have these people any reason to believe that those who were initiated into the Mysteries in ancient times were any less concerned with the physical world? The initiates knew that the spiritual world permeates the physical world, that the dead are unquestionably active amongst us even though people deny it. And they knew that this denial merely creates confusion. He who denies that those who have passed through the gates of death exercise an influence on this world resembles the man who says: “Nonsense! I don't believe a word you say”—and then proceeds to behave as if he did believe it. It is not so easy, of course, to give direct proof of the havoc that is wrought when the influx of the spiritual world into the physical world is not taken into account, when people act on the assumption that this interaction can be ignored. Our epoch shows little inclination to bridge the gap that separates us from the kingdom where the dead and the higher Beings dwell. In many respects our present epoch harbours a veritable antipathy towards the world of the spirit. And it is the duty of the spiritual scientist who is really honest and sincere to be aware of the forces that are hostile to the development of Anthroposophy. For there are deep underlying reasons for this hostility and they stem from the same sources which are responsible for all the forces which are today in active opposition to the true progress of mankind.

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Original Notes:

Note 1. In the German text there is a play upon the word. If pronounced with an open “0” and a rolled “R” it gives the word verworren, i.e. muddle-headed or confused.

Note 2. Translation by Dorothy L. Sayers and Barbara Reynolds, Penguin Classics, 1962.

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NOTES BY TRANSLATOR

Note 1. Otto Ludwig (1813–65). Best known for his realist novels Der Erbförster and Zwischen Himmel and Erde, genre painting with careful observation of detail. He coined the term “poetischer Realismus”. His “Shakespeare Studien” showed preoccupation with dramatic theory. During his process of poetic creation he experienced a spectrum of colours and forms, known as “synaesthesia”.

Note 2. “Synaesthesia” had first been foreshadowed by E. P. A. Hoffman in Kreisleriana. The hearing of a word or sound evokes a sensation of colour varying in accordance with the quality of the sound (cf. Baudelaire's sonnet “Correspondances”—“les parfums, les couleurs et les sons se repondent” and Rimbaud's sonnet “Voyelles” in which a definite colour-value is ascribed to each of the five vowels). F. W. H. Myers described synaesthesia as follows: “When the hearing of an external sound carries with it, by some arbitrary association of ideas, the seeing of some form or colour.”

Note 3. Freytag (1816–95). Author of realistic novels which extolled the virtues of the German middle class—Soll and Haben, Die Ahnen.

Note 4. Swedenborg (1688–1772), engineer, scientist, philosopher and theologian. In his Arcana Caelestia he wrote: “... it has been granted me now for some years to be constantly and continuously in the company of spirits and angels, hearing them speak and speaking with them in turn. It has been given to me to hear and see the wonderful things which are in the other life ... I have been instructed there in regard to different kinds of spirits; the state of souls after death ... and especially concerning the doctrine of faith which is acknowledged in the universal Heaven.”

Note 5. Fustel de Coulanges (1830–89). Originator of the scientific approach to history. His Cité antique showed that ancient institutions derived from religious beliefs common to primitive peoples. It was a study of the part played by religion in the political and social evolution of Greece and Rome.

As you may have realized, a basic feature of the various considerations in which we have been engaged in recent weeks is the effort to gather material that will help us understand the difficult times we live in. Such understanding can only come about through a completely new way of looking at things. It cannot be sufficiently emphasized that a healthy development of mankind's future depends upon a new understanding taking hold in a sufficiently large number of human beings.

I should like these discussions to be as concrete as possible, in the sense in which the word, the concept “concrete,” has been used in the lectures of past weeks. Great impulses at work in mankind's evolution at any given time take effect through this or that personality. Thus it becomes evident in certain human beings just how strong such impulses are at a particular time. Or, one could also say that it becomes evident to what extent there is the opportunity for certain impulses to be effective.

In order to describe certain characteristic aspects of our time I have here and elsewhere drawn attention to a man who died recently. Today I would like once more to speak about the philosopher Franz Brentano who died a short time ago in Zürich.¹ He was certainly not a philosopher in a narrow or pedantic sense. Those who knew him, even if only through his work, saw him as representing modern man, struggling with the riddle of the universe. Nor was Brentano a one-sided philosopher; what concerned him were the wider aspects of essential human issues. It could be said that there is hardly a problem, no matter how enigmatic, to which he did not try to find a solution. What interested him was the whole range of man's world views. He was reticent about his work and very little has been published. His literary remains are bound to be considerable and will in due course reveal the results of his inner struggles, though perhaps for someone who understands not only what Franz Brentano expressed in words but also the issues that caused him such inner battles, nothing actually new will emerge.

I would like to bring before you what in our problematic times a great personality like Franz Brentano found particularly problematic. He was not the kind of philosopher one usually meets nowadays; unlike modern philosophers he was first and foremost a thinker, a thinker who did not allow his thinking to wander at random. He sought to establish it on the firm foundation of the evolution of thought itself. This led to his first publication, a book dealing with Aristotle's psychology, the so-called “nus poetikos.”² This book by Brentano, which is long out of print, is a magnificent achievement in detailed inquiry. It reveals him as a man capable of real thinking; that is, he has the ability to formulate and elaborate concepts that have content. We find Franz Brentano, more especially in the second half of his book about Aristotle's psychology, engaged in a process of thinking of a subtlety not encountered nowadays, and indeed seldom at the time the book was written. What is especially significant is the fact that Franz Brentano's ideas still had the strength to capture and leave their mark in human souls. When people nowadays discuss things connected with the inner life, they generally express themselves in empty words, devoid of any real content. The words are used because historically they have become part of the language, and this gives the illusion that they contain thought, but thinking is not in fact involved.

Considering that everywhere in Aristotle one finds a distinct flaring up of the ancient knowledge so often described by us as having its origin in atavistic clairvoyance, it is rather odd that people who profess to read Aristotle today should ignore spiritual science so completely. When we speak today about ether body, sentient body, sentient soul, intellectual soul, consciousness soul, these terms are coined to express the life of soul and spirit in its reality, of which man must again become conscious.

Many of the expressions used by Aristotle are no longer understood. However, they are reminders that there was a time when the individual members of man's soul being were known; not until Aristotle did they become abstractions. Franz Brentano made great efforts to understand these members of man's soul precisely through that thinker of antiquity, Aristotle. It must be said, however, that it was just through Aristotle that their meaning began to fade from mankind's historical evolution. Aristotle distinguishes in man the vegetative soul, by which he means approximately what we call ether body, then the aesthetikon or sensitive soul, which we call the sentient or astral body. Next, he speaks of orektikon which corresponds to the sentient soul, then comes kinetikon corresponding to the intellectual soul, and he uses the term dianoetikon for the consciousness soul. Aristotle was fully aware of the meaning of these concepts, but he lacked direct perception of the reality. This caused a certain unclarity and abstraction in his works, and that applies also to the book I mentioned by Franz Brentano. Nevertheless, real thinking holds sway in Brentano's book. And when someone devotes himself to the power of thinking the way he did, it is no longer possible to entertain the foolish notion that man's soul and spirit are mere by-products arising from the physical-bodily nature. The concepts formulated by Brentano on the basis of Aristotle's work were too substantial, so to speak, to allow him to succumb to the mischief of modern materialism.

Franz Brentano's main aim was to attain insight into the general working of the human soul; he wanted to carry out psychological research. But he was also concerned with an all-encompassing view of the world based on psychology. I have already drawn your attention to the fact that Franz Brentano himself estimated that his work on psychology would fill five volumes, but only the first volume was published. It is fully understandable to someone who knew him well why no subsequent volumes appeared. The deeper reason lies in the fact that Brentano would not—indeed according to his whole disposition, he could not—turn to spiritual science. Yet in order to find answers to the questions facing him after the completion of the first volume of his Psychology he needed spiritual knowledge. But spiritual science he could not accept and, as he was above all an honest man, he abandoned writing the subsequent volumes. The venture came to a full stop and thus remains a fragment.

I would like to draw attention to two aspects of the problem in Brentano's mind. It is a problem which today every thinking person must consciously strive to solve. In fact, the whole of mankind, insofar as people do not live in animal-like obtuseness, is striving, albeit unconsciously, to solve this problem. People in general are either laboring in one direction or another for a plausible solution, or else suffering psychologically because of their inability to get anywhere near the root of the problem. Franz Brentano investigated and pondered deeply the human soul. However, when this is done along the lines of modern science one arrives at the point that leads from the human soul to the spirit. And there one may remain at the obvious, and recognize the human soul's activity to be threefold in that it thinks; i.e., forms mental pictures, it feels and it wills. Thinking, feeling and willing are indeed the three members of the human soul. However, no satisfactory insight into them is possible unless through spiritual knowledge a path is found to the spiritual reality with which the human soul is connected. If one does not find that path—and Franz Brentano could not find it—then one feels oneself with one's thinking, feeling and willing completely isolated within the soul. Thinking at best provides images of the external, spatial, purely material reality. Feeling at best takes pleasure or displeasure in what occurs in the spatial physical reality. Through the will, man's physical nature may appease its cravings or aversions. Without spiritual insight man does not experience through his thinking, feeling and willing any relationship with a reality in which he feels secure, to which he feels he belongs. That was why Brentano said: To differentiate thinking, feeling and willing in the human soul does not help one to understand it, as in doing so one remains within the soul itself. He therefore divided the soul in another way, and how he did it is characteristic. He still sees the soul as threefold but not according to forming mental pictures of thinking, feeling and willing. He differentiates instead between forming mental pictures, judging or assessing, and the inner world of fluctuating moods and feelings. Thus, according to Brentano, the life of the soul is divided into forming mental pictures, judgments, and fluctuating moods and feelings.

Mental pictures do not, to begin with, lead us out beyond the soul. When we form mental pictures of something, the images remain within the soul. We believe that they refer to something real, but that is by no means established. As long as we do not go beyond the mental picture, we have to concede that something merely imagined is also a mental picture. Thus, a mental picture as such may refer to something real or to something merely imagined. Even when we relate mental pictures to one another, we still have no guarantee of reality. A tree is a mental picture; green is a mental picture. To say, The tree is green, is to combine two mental pictures, but that in itself is no guarantee of dealing with reality, for my mental picture “green tree” could be a product of my fantasy.

Nevertheless, Brentano says: When I judge or make assessments I stand within reality, and I am already making a judgment, even if a veiled one, when I combine mental pictures as I do when I say, The tree is green. In so doing I indicate not only that I combine the two concepts “tree” and “green,” but that a green tree exists. Thus I am not remaining within the mental pictures, I go across to existence. There is a difference, says Brentano, between being aware of a green tree and being conscious that “this tree is green.” The former is a mere formulation of mental pictures, the latter has a basis within the soul consisting of acceptance or rejection. In the activity of merely forming mental pictures one remains within the soul, whereas passing judgment is an activity of soul which relates one to the environment in that one either accepts or rejects it. In saying, a green tree exists, I acknowledge not merely that I am forming mental pictures, but that the tree exists quite apart from my mental picture. In saying, centaurs do not exist, I also pass judgment by rejecting as unreal the mental picture of half-horse, half-man. Thus according to Brentano, passing judgment is the second activity of the human soul.

Brentano saw the third element within the human soul as that of fluctuating moods and feelings. Just as he regards judgment of reality to consist of acknowledgments or rejections, so he sees moods and feelings as fluctuating between love and hate, likes and dislikes. Man is either attracted or repelled by things. Brentano does not regard the element of will to be a separate function of the soul. He sees it as part of the realm of moods and feelings. The fact that he regards the will in this way is very characteristic of Brentano and points to a deeply rooted aspect of his makeup. It would lead too far to go into that now; all that concerns us at the moment is that Brentano did not differentiate will impulses from mere feelings of like or dislike. He saw all these elements as weaving into one another. When examining a will impulse to action, Brentano would be concerned only with one's love for it. Again, if the will impulse was against an action, he would examine one's dislike for it. Thus for him the life of soul consists of love and hate, acknowledgment and rejection, and forming mental pictures.

Starting from these premises Brentano did his utmost to find solutions to the two greatest riddles of the human soul, the riddle of truth, and the riddle of good. What is true (or real)? What is good? If one is seeking to justify the judgment of thinking about reality or unreality, the question arises, Why do we acknowledge certain things and reject others? Those we acknowledge we regard as truth; those we reject we regard as untruth. And that brings us straight to the heart of the problem: What is truth? The heart of the other problem concerning good and evil, good and bad, we encounter when we turn to the realm of fluctuating moods and feelings. According to Brentano, love is what prompts us to acknowledge an action as good, while hate is the rejection of an action as evil. Thus ethics, morality, and what we understand by rights, all these things are a province of the realm of moods and feelings. The question of good and evil was very much in Brentano's mind as he pondered the nature of man's life of feelings fluctuating between love and hate.

It is indeed extremely interesting to follow the struggle of a man like Brentano, a struggle lasting for decades, to find answers to questions such as What right has man to assess things, judging them true or false, acknowledge or reject them? Even if you examine all Brentano's published writings—and I am convinced that his as yet unpublished work will give the same result—nowhere will you find him giving any other answer to the question What is true? In other words: What justifies man to judge things except what he calls the “evidence,” the “visible proof”? He naturally means an inner visible proof. Thus Brentano's answer amounts to this: I attain truth if I am not inwardly blind, but able to bring my experiences before my inner eye in such a way that I can survey them clearly, and accept them, or by closer scrutiny perhaps reject them. Franz Brentano did not get beyond this view. It is significant indeed that a man who was an eminent thinker—which cannot be said about many—struggled for decades to answer the question What gives me the right to acknowledge or reject something, to regard it as true or false? All he reached was what he termed the evidence, the inner visible proof.

Brentano lectured for many years in Vienna on what in Austrian universities was known as practical philosophy, which really means ethics or moral philosophy. Just as Brentano was obliged to give these lectures, so the law students were obliged to attend them, as they were prescribed, compulsory courses. However, during his courses Brentano did not so much lecture on “practical philosophy,” as he did on the question How does one come to accept something as good or put something down as bad? Due to his original views, Franz Brentano did not by any means have an easy task. As you know, the problem of good is always being debated in philosophy. Attempts are made to answer the question: Have we any right to regard one thing as good and another as bad? Or the question may be formulated differently: Where does the good originate, where is its source, and what is the source of the bad or evil? This question is approached in all manner of ways. But all around Brentano, at the time when he attempted to discover the criterion of good, a peculiar moral philosophy was gaining ground, that of Herbart, one of the successors of Kant's.³ Herbart's view of ethics, which others have advocated too but none more emphatically than he himself, was the view that moral behavior, in the last resort, depends upon the fact that certain relationships in life please us, whereas others displease us. Those that please us are good, those that displease us are bad. Man as it were is supposed to have an inborn natural ability to take pleasure in the good and displeasure in the bad. Herbart says, for example: Inner freedom is something which always, in every instance, pleases us. And what is inner freedom? Well, he says, man is inwardly free when his thinking and actions are in harmony. This would mean, crudely put, that if A thinks B an awful fellow but instead of saying so flatters him, then that is not an expression of inner freedom. Thinking and action are not in the harmony on which the ethical view of inner freedom is based. Another view on ethics is based on perfection. We are displeased when we do something we could have done better, whereas we are pleased when we have done something so well that the result is better, more perfect than it would have been through any other action. Herbart differentiates five such ethical concepts. However, all that interests us at the moment is that he based morality on the soul's immediate pleasure or displeasure.

Yet another principle of ethics is Kant's so-called categorical imperative, according to which an action is good if it is based on principles that could be the basis for a law applying to all.⁴ Nothing could be more contrary to morality! Even the example Kant himself puts forward clearly shows his categorical imperative to be void of moral value. He says: Suppose you were given something for safekeeping, but instead you appropriated it. Such an action, says Kant, cannot be a basic principle for all to follow, for if everybody simply took possession of things entrusted to them, an orderly human society would be an impossibility. It is not difficult to see that in such a case, whether the action is good or bad cannot be judged on whether things entrusted to one are returned or not. Quite different issues come into question.

All the modern views on ethics are contrary to that of Franz Brentano. He sought deeper reasons. Pleasure and displeasure, he said, merely confirm that an ethical judgment has been made. As far as the beautiful is concerned, we are justified in saying that beauty is a source of pleasure, ugliness of displeasure. However, we should be aware that what determines us when it is a question of ethics, of morality, is a much deeper impulse than the one that influences us in assessing the beautiful. That was Brentano's view of ethics, and each year he sought to reaffirm it to the law students. He also spoke of his principle of ethics in his beautiful public lecture entitled “Natural Sanction of Law and Morality.”⁵ The circumstances that led Franz Brentano to give this lecture are interesting. The famous legislator Ihering had spoken at a meeting about legal concepts being fluid, by which he meant that concepts of law and rights cannot be understood in an absolute sense because their meaning continually changes in the course of time.⁶ They can be understood only if viewed historically. In other words, if we look back to the time when cannibalism was customary, we have no right to say that one ought not to eat people. We have no right to say that our concepts of morals should have prevailed, for our concepts would at that time have been wrong. Cannibalism was right then; it is only in the course of time that our view of it has changed. Our sympathy must therefore lie with the cannibals, not with those who refrained from the practice! That is, of course, an extreme example, but it does illustrate the essence of Ihering's view. The important point to him was that concepts of law and morality have changed in the course of human evolution which proves that they are in a state of flux.

This view Brentano could not possibly accept. He wanted to discover a definite, absolute source of morality. In regard to truth he had produced “the evidence” that what lights up in the soul as immediate recognition is true, i.e., what is correctly judged is true. To the other question, what is good, Brentano, again after decades of struggle, found an equally abstract answer. He said: Good and bad have their source in human feelings fluctuating between love and hate. What man genuinely loves is good; i.e., what is worthy of love is good. He attempted to show instances of how human beings can love rightly. Just as man in regard to truth should judge rightly, so in regard to the good he should love rightly.

I shall not go into details; I mainly want to emphasize that Brentano, after decades of struggle, had reached an abstraction, the simple formula that good is that which is worthy of love. Instead, it has to be said that Brentano's greatness does not lie in the results he achieved. You will no doubt agree that it is a somewhat meager conclusion to say, Truth is what follows from the evidence of correct judgment; the good is what is rightly loved. These are indeed meager results, but what is outstanding, what is characteristic of Brentano, is the energy, the earnestness of his striving. In no other philosopher will you find such Aristotelean sagacity and at the same time such deep inner involvement with the argument. The meager results gain their value when one follows the struggle it cost to reach them. It is precisely his inner struggles that make Franz Brentano such an outstanding example of spiritual striving. One could mention many people, including philosophers, who have in our time tried to find answers to the questions, What is truth? What is the good? But you will find their answers, especially those given by the more popular philosophers, far more superficial than those given by Brentano. That does not alter the fact that Brentano's answers must naturally seem meager fare to those who have for years been occupied with spiritual science. However, Brentano had also to suffer the destiny of modern striving man, lack of understanding; his struggles were little understood.

A closer look at Brentano's intensive search for answers to the questions, What is true? What is good? reveals a clarity and comprehensiveness in outlook seldom found in those who refuse spiritual science. What makes him exceptional is that without spiritual science no one has come as far as he did. Nowhere will you find within the whole range of modern philosophical striving any real answers concerning what truth is or what the good is. What you will find is confusion aplenty, albeit at times interesting confusion, for example in Windelband.⁷ Professor Windelband, who taught for years at Heidelberg and Freiburg, could discover nothing in the human soul to cause man to accept certain things as true and reject others as false. So he based truth on assent, that is, to some extent on love. If according to our judgment of something we can love it, then it is true; conversely, if we must hate it, then it is untrue. Truth and untruth contain hidden love and hate. Herbartians, too, judge things to be morally good or morally bad according to whether they please or displease, a judgment which Brentano considered to be applicable only to what is beautiful or ugly.

Thus there is plenty of confusion, and not the slightest possibility of reaching insight into the soul's essential nature. All that is left is despair, which is so often all there is left after one has studied the works of modern philosophers. Naturally they do pose questions and often believe to have come up with answers. Unfortunately that is just when things go wrong; one soon sees that the answers, whether positive or negative, are no answers at all.

What is so interesting about Brentano is that, if only he had continued a little further beyond the point he had reached, he would have entered a region where the solutions are to be found. Whoever cannot get beyond the view ordinarily held of man will not be able to answer the questions What is true? What is false? It is simply not possible, on the one hand to regard man's being as it is regarded today, and on the other to answer such questions as What is the meaning of truth in relation to man? Nor is it possible to answer the question What is the good? You will soon see why this is so. But first I must draw your attention to something in regard to which mistaken views are held both ways, that is the question concerning the beautiful.

According to Herbart and his followers, good is merely a subdivision of beauty, more particularly beauty attributed to human action. Any questions concerning what is beautiful immediately reveal it to be a very subjective issue. Nothing is more disputed than beauty; what one person finds beautiful another does not. In fact, the most curious views are voiced in quarrels over the beautiful and the ugly, over what is artistically justified and what is not. In the last resort the whole argument as to whether something is beautiful or ugly, artistic or not, rests on man's individual nature. No general law concerning beauty will ever be discovered, nor should it be; nothing would be more meaningless. One may not like a certain work of art, but there is always the possibility of entering into what the artist had in mind and thus coming to see aspects not recognized before. In this way, one may come to realize that it was lack of understanding which prevented one from recognizing its beauty. Such aesthetic judgment, such aesthetic acceptance or rejection, is really something which, though subjective, is justified.

To confirm in detail what I have just said would take too long. However, you all know that the saying “taste cannot be disputed” has a certain justification. Taste for certain things one either has or has not; either the taste has been acquired already or not yet. We may ask, why? The answer is that every time we apply an aesthetic evaluation to something we have a twofold perception. That is an important fact discovered through spiritual investigation. Whenever you are inclined to apply the criterion of beauty to something, your perception of the object is twofold. Such an object is perceived in the first place because of its influence on the physical and ether bodies. This is a current that streams, so to speak, from the beautiful object to the onlooker, affecting his physical and ether bodies regardless whether a painting, a sculpture or anything else is observed. What exists out there in the external world is experienced in the physical and ether bodies, but apart from that it is experienced also in the I and astral body. However, the latter experience does not coincide with the former; you have in fact two perceptions. An impression is made on the one hand on the physical and etheric bodies and on the other an impression is also made on the I and astral body. You therefore have a twofold perception.

Whether a person regards an object as beautiful or ugly will depend upon his ability to bring the two impressions into accord or discord. If the two experiences cannot be made to harmonize, it means that the work of art in question is not understood; in consequence, it is regarded as not beautiful. For beauty to be experienced the I and astral body on the one hand, and the physical and ether body on the other must be able to vibrate in unison, must be in agreement. An inner process must take place for beauty to be experienced; if it does not, the possibility for beauty to be experienced is not present. Just think of all the possibilities that exist, in the experience of beauty, for agreement or disagreement. So you see that to experience beauty is a very inward and subjective process.

On the other hand what is truth? Truth is also something that meets us face to face. Truth, to begin with, makes an impression on the physical and ether bodies and you, on your part, must perceive that effect on those bodies. Please note the difference: Faced with an object of beauty your perception is twofold. Beauty affects your physical and ether bodies and also your I and astral body; you must inwardly bring about harmony between the two impressions. Concerning truth the whole effect is on the physical and ether bodies and you must perceive that effect inwardly. In the case of beauty, the effect it has on the physical and ether bodies remains unconscious; you do not perceive it. On the other hand, in the case of truth, you do not bring the effect it has on the I and astral body down into consciousness; it vibrates unconsciously. What must happen in this case is that you devote yourself to the impression made on the physical and ether bodies, and find its reflection in the I and astral body. Thus, in the case of truth or reality you have the same content in the I and astral body as in the physical and ether bodies, whereas in the case of beauty you have two different contents.

Thus the question of truth is connected with man's being insofar as it consists of the lowest members, the physical and ether bodies. Through the physical body we participate only in the external material world, the world of mere appearance. Through the ether body we participate solely in what results from its harmony with the whole cosmos. Truth, reality, is anchored in the ether body, and someone who does not recognize the existence of the ether body cannot answer the question Where is truth established? All he can answer is the question Where is that established which the senses reflect of the external world; where is the world of appearance? What the senses reflect in the physical body only becomes full reality, only becomes truth, when assimilated by the ether body. Thus the question concerning truth can only be answered by someone who recognizes the total effect of external objects on man's physical and ether bodies.

If Franz Brentano wanted to answer the question What is truth? he would have been obliged to investigate the way man's being is related to the whole world through his ether body. That he could not do as he did not acknowledge its existence. All he could find was the meager answer he termed “the evidence.” To explain truth is to explain the human ether body's relation to the cosmos. We are connected with the cosmos when we express truth. That is why we must continue to experience the ether body for several days after death. If we did not we would lose the sense for the truth, for the reality of the time between death and new birth. We live on earth in order to foster our union with truth, with reality. We take our experience of truth with us, as it were, in that we live for several days after death with the great tableau of the ether body. One can arrive at an answer to the question What is truth? only by investigating the human ether body.

The other question which Franz Brentano wanted to answer was What is the good? Just as the external physical object can become truth or reality for man only if it acts on his physical and etheric bodies, so must what becomes an impulse towards good or evil influence man's I and astral body. In the I and astral body it does not as yet become formulated into concept, into mental picture; for that to happen it must be reflected in the physical and etheric bodies. We have mental pictures of good and evil only when what is formless in the I and astral body is mirrored in the physical and ether bodies. However, what expresses itself externally as good or evil stems from what occurs in the I and astral body. Someone who does not recognize the I and astral body can know nothing about where in man the impulse to good or evil is active. All he can say is that good is what is rightly loved; but love occurs in the astral body. Only by investigating what actually happens in the astral body and I is it possible to attain concrete insight into good and evil. At the present stage of evolution the I only brings to expression what lives in the astral body as instincts and emotions. As you know, the human “I” is as yet not very far in its development. The astral body is further, but man is more conscious of what occurs in his I than he is of his astral body. As a consequence man is not very conscious of moral impulses, or, put differently, he does not benefit from them unless the astral impulses enter his consciousness. As far as the man of today is concerned, the original, primordial moral impetus is situated in his astral body, just as the forces of truth are situated in his ether body. Through his astral body man is connected with the spiritual world, and in that world are the impulses of good. In the spiritual world also holds sway what for man is good and evil; but we only know its reflection in the ether and physical bodies.

So you see it is only possible to attain concepts of truth, goodness and beauty when account is taken of all the members of man's being. To attain a concept of truth the ether body must be understood. Unless one knows that in the experience of beauty the ether and astral bodies distinctively vibrate in unison—the I and physical body do too, but to a lesser degree—it cannot be understood. A proper concept of the good cannot be attained without the knowledge that it basically represents active forces in the astral body.

Thus Franz Brentano actually came as far as the portal leading to the knowledge he sought. His answers appear so meager because they can be properly understood only if they are related to insight of a higher order. When he says of truth that it must light up and become directly visible to the eye of the soul, he should have been able to say more; namely, that to perceive truth rightly one must succeed in taking hold of it independently of the physical body. The ether body must be loosened from the physical body. This is because the first clairvoyant experience is that of pure thinking. You will know that I have always upheld the view, which indeed every true scientist of the spirit must uphold, that he who grasps a pure-thought is already clairvoyant. However, man's ordinary thinking is not a pure thinking, it is filled either with mental pictures or with fantasy. Only in the ether body can a pure thought be grasped, consequently whoever does so is clairvoyant. And to understand goodness one must be aware that it is part and parcel of what lives in the human astral body and in the I.

Especially when he spoke about the origin of good, Franz Brentano had an ingenious way of pointing to significant things; for example, that Aristotle had basically said that one can lecture on goodness only to those who are already habitually good. If this were true, it would be dreadful, for whoever is already in the habit of being good does not need lectures on it. There is no need to instruct him in what he already possesses. Moreover, if those words of Aristotle's were true, it follows that the converse is true also, that those not habitually good could not be helped by hearing about it. All talk about goodness would be meaningless; attempts to establish ethics would be futile. This is also a problem to which no satisfactory solution can be found unless sought in the light of spiritual science.

In general it cannot be said that our actions spring from pure concepts and ideas. But, as those who have studied The Philosophy of Freedom will realize, only an action that springs from a pure concept, a pure idea, can be said to be a free action, a truly independent action.⁸ Our actions are usually based on instincts, passions or emotions, only seldom if ever on pure concepts. More is said about these matters in the booklet Education of the Child in the Light of Spiritual Science.⁹ I have also elaborated on it in other lectures.

In the first two seven-year periods of life—the first lasting up to the change of teeth, to about the seventh year, the second lasting till puberty—a human being's actions are predominantly influenced by instincts, emotions and the like. Not till the onset of puberty does he become capable of absorbing thoughts concerning good and evil. So we have to admit that Aristotle was right up to a point. He was right in the sense that the instincts towards good and evil that are in us already during the first two periods of life, up to the age of 14, tend to dominate us throughout life. We may modify them, suppress them, but they are still there for the whole of our life. The question is, Does it help that with puberty we begin to understand moral principles, and become able to rationalize our instincts? It helps in a twofold manner, and if you have a feeling and sense for these things, you will soon see how essential it is that this whole issue is understood in our time.

Consider the following example: Let us say a human being has inherited good tendencies, and up to the age of puberty he develops them into excellent and noble inclinations. He becomes what is called a good person. At the moment I do not want to go into why he becomes a good person, but to examine more external aspects. His parents we must visualize as good, kind people and so, too, his grandparents. All this has the effect that he develops tendencies that are noble and kind, and he instinctively does what is right and good. But let us now assume that he shows no sign, after having reached puberty, of wanting to rationalize his natural good instincts; he has no inclination to think about them. The reason for this we shall leave aside for the moment. So up to the age of 14 he develops good instincts but later shows no inclination to rationalize them. He has a propensity for doing good and hardly any for doing bad. If his attention is drawn to the fact that certain actions can be either good or bad he will say, It does not concern me. He is not interested in any discussions about it; he does not want to lift the issue into the sphere of the intellect. As a grown man he has children—whether the person is man or woman makes of course no difference—and the children will not inherit his good instincts if he has not thought about them. The children will soon show uncertainty in regard to their instinctive life. That is what is so significant.

Thus, such a person may get on well enough with his own instincts, but if he has never consciously concerned himself about good and evil, he will not pass on effective instincts to his children. Furthermore, already in his next life he will not bring with him any decisive instincts concerning good and evil. It is really like a plant which may be an attractive and excellent herb, but if it is prevented from flowering no further plants can arise from it. As single plant it may be useful, but if the future is to benefit from further plants, it must reach the stages of flower and fruit. Similarly a human being's instincts may, unaltered, serve him well enough in his own life, but if he leaves them at the level of mere instincts, he sins against posterity in the physical as well as spiritual sense. You will realize that these are matters of extreme importance. And, as with the other issues, only spiritual science can enlighten us about them.

In certain quarters it may well be maintained that goodness is due solely to instincts; indeed, that can even be proved. But anyone who wants to do away with the necessity for thoughtful understanding of moral issues on this basis is comparable to a farmer who says: I shall certainly cultivate my fields, but I see no point in retaining grains for next year's sowing—why not let the whole harvest be used as foodstuff? No farmer speaks like that because in this realm the link between past and future is too obvious. Unfortunately, in regard to spiritual issues, in regard to man's own evolution, people do speak like that. In this area great misconceptions continuously arise because people are unwilling to consider an issue from many aspects. They arrive at a onesided view and disregard all others. One can naturally prove that good impulses are based on instinct. That is not disputed, but there are other aspects to the matter. Impulses for the good are instincts active in the I and astral body; as such they are forces acting across from the previous life. Consequently one cannot, without spiritual knowledge, come to any insight concerning the way human lives are linked together either now or in the course of man's evolution.

If we now pass from these more elementary aspects to some on a higher level, we may consider the following: On the average, people living today are in their second incarnation since the Christian chronology began. In their first life it was sufficient if they received the Christ impulse from their immediate environment in whatever way possible. In their present, or second incarnation that is no longer enough; that is why people are gradually losing the Christ impulse. Were people now living to return in their next incarnation without having received the Christ impulse anew they would have lost it altogether. That is why it is essential that the impulse of Christ find entry into human souls in the form presented by spiritual science. Spiritual science does not have to resort to historical evidence but is able to relate the Christ impulse directly to the kinds of issues we are continually discussing in our circles. This enables it to be connected with the human soul in ways that ensure it is carried over into future ages when the souls incarnate once more. We are now too far removed from the historical event to absorb the Christ impulse the way we did in our first incarnation after the Christ event. That is why we are going not only through an external crisis, but also an inner crisis in regard to the Christ impulse. Traditions no longer suffice. People are honest who say that there is no proof of historical Christ. But spiritual knowledge enables man to discover the Christ impulse once more as a living reality in human evolution. The course of external events shows the necessity for the Christ impulse to arise anew on the foundation of spiritual science.

We have been witnessing so very many ideals on which people have built their lives for centuries suffering shipwreck in the last three years. We all suffer, especially the more we are aware of all that has been endured these last three years. If the question is asked, What has suffered the greatest shipwreck? there is only one answer: Christianity. Strange as it may seem to many, the greatest loss has been to Christianity. Wherever you look you see a denial of Christianity. Most things that are done are a direct mockery of Christianity, though the courage to admit this fact is lacking. For example, a view widely expressed today is that each nation should manage its own affairs. This is advocated by most people, in fact by the largest and most valuable part of mankind. Can that really be said to be a Christian view? I shall say nothing about its justification or otherwise, but simply whether the idea is Christian or not. And is it Christian? Most emphatically it is not. A view based on Christianity would be that nations should come to agreement through human beings' understanding of one another. Nothing could be more unchristian than what is said about the alleged freedom, the alleged independence—which in any case is unrealizable—of individual nations. Christianity means to understand people all over the earth. It means understanding even human beings who are in realms other than the earth. Yet since the Mystery of Golgotha not even people who call themselves Christian have been able to agree with one another even superficially. And that is a dreadful blow, especially in regard to feeling for and understanding of Christianity. This lack has led to grotesque incidents like the one I mentioned, of someone speaking about German religion, German piety, which has as much sense as speaking about a German sun or a German moon.

These things are in reality connected with far-reaching misconceptions about social affairs. I have spoken about the fact that nowadays no proper concept of a state exists. When people who should know discuss what a state is or should be, they speak about it as if it were an organism in which the human beings are the cells. That such comparisons can be made shows how little real understanding there is. As I have often pointed out, what is lacking, what we need more than anything else, are concepts and views that are real and concrete, concepts that penetrate to the reality of things. The chaos all about us has been caused because we live in abstractions, in concepts and views that are alien to the reality. How can it be otherwise when we are so estranged from the spiritual aspect of reality that we deny it altogether? True concepts of reality will be attained only when the spirit in all its weaving life is acknowledged.

There was something tragic in Franz Brentano's destiny right up to his death—tragic, because he did have a feeling for the direction modern man's spiritual striving should take. Yet, had he been presented with spiritual science he would have rejected it, just as he rejected the works of Plotinus as utter folly, as quite unscientific.¹⁰ There are, of course, many in the same situation; their spirit's flight is inhibited through the fact that they live in physical bodies belonging to the end of the 19th and beginning of the 20th centuries. This provokes the crisis we must overcome. Such things do, of course, have their positive side; to overcome something is to become stronger.

Not till the concrete concepts of spiritual science are understood and applied can things be done that are necessary for a complete revision of our understanding of law and morality, of social and political matters. It is precisely spirits like Brentano that bring home the fact that the whole question of jurisprudence hangs in the air. Without knowing the super-sensible aspect of man's being, such as the nature of the astral body, it is impossible to say what law is or what morality is. That applies also to religion and politics. If wrong, unrealistic ideas are applied to external, material reality, their flaws soon become apparent. No one would tolerate bridges that collapse because the engineer based his constructions on wrong concepts. In the sphere of morality, in social or political issues wrong concepts are not spotted so easily, and when they are discovered, people do not recognize the connection. We are suffering this moment from the aftereffect of wrong ideas, but do people see the connection? They are very far from doing so. And that is the most painful aspect of witnessing these difficult times. Every moment seems wasted unless devoted to the difficulties; at the same time one comes to realize how little people are inclined nowadays to enter into the reality of the situation. However, unless one concerns oneself with the things that really matter, no remedy will be found. It is essential to recognize that there is a connection between the events taking place now and the unreal concepts and views mankind has cultivated for so long. We are living in such chaotic times because for centuries the concepts of spiritual life that were at work in social affairs have been as unrealistic as those of an engineer who builds bridges that collapse. If only people would develop a feeling for how essential it is, when dealing with social or political issues, indeed with all aspects of cultural life, to find true concepts, reality-permeated concepts! If we simply continue with the same jurisprudence, the same social sciences, the same politics, and fill human souls with the same religious views as those customary before the year 1914, then nothing significant or valuable will be achieved. Unless the approach to all these things is completely changed, it will soon be apparent that no progress is being made. What is so necessary, what must come about is the will to learn afresh, to adjust one's ideas, but that is what there is so little inclination to do.

You must regard everything I have said about Franz Brentano as an expression of my genuine admiration for this exceptional personality. Such individuals demonstrate how hard one must struggle especially when it concerns an impulse to be carried over into mankind's future. Franz Brentano is an extremely interesting personality, but he did not achieve the kind of concepts, ideas, feelings or impulses that work across into future ages. Yet it is interesting that only a few weeks before his death he is said to have given assurances that he would succeed in proving that God exists. To do so was the goal of his lifelong scientific striving. Brentano would not have succeeded, for to prove the existence of God he would have needed spiritual science.

Before the Mystery of Golgotha, before mankind's age had receded to the age of 33, it was still possible to prove that God exists. Since then mankind's age has dropped to 32, then 31, later 30 and by now to 27. Man can no longer through his ordinary powers of thinking prove that God exists; such proof can be discovered only through spiritual knowledge. Saying that spiritual science is an absolute necessity cannot be compared to a movement advocating its policies. The necessity for spiritual science is an objective fact of human evolution.

Today I wanted to draw your attention once more to the absolute necessity for spiritual science and related philosophical questions. However, it will be fruitful only if you are prepared to enter into such questions. What mankind is strongly in need of at the present time is the ability to enter into exact, clear-cut concepts and ideas. If you want to pursue the science of the spirit, anthroposophy, theosophy—call it what you will—only with the unclear, confused concepts with which so much is pursued nowadays, then you may go a long way in satisfying egoistical longings, gratifying personal wishes. You will not, however, be striving in the way the present difficult times demand. What one should strive for, especially in regard to spiritual science, is to collaborate, particularly in the spiritual sense, to bring about what mankind most sorely needs. Whenever possible turn your thoughts, as strongly as you are able, to the question: What are human beings most in need of, what are the thoughts that ought to hold sway among men to bring about improvement and end the chaos? Do not say that others, better qualified, will do that. The best qualified are those who stand on the firm foundation of the science of the spirit. What must occupy us most of all is how conditions can be brought about so that human beings can live together in a civilized manner.

We shall discuss these things further next time.

• 1 . Franz Brentano, see note 2 to Lecture I.
• 2 . Franz Brentano, Die Psychologie des Aristoteles, in particular his ideas of “nus poetikos.” “The nus poetikos is the light that illuminates phantasms, and makes the spiritual within the empirical visible for our spiritual eyes,” from a supplement on the “Activity of the Aristotelian God”; Mainz, 1867, p. 172.
• 3 . Johann Friedrich Herbart, 1776–1841, German philosopher.
• 4 . Immanuel Kant, 1725–1804, Critique of Pure Reason, Critique of Practical Reason, and Critique of Judgment, available in various editions and translations in English.—from Critique of Practical Reason, Part 1, section 7, the Categorical Imperative: “Act so that the principles underlying your will at any time could also be a principle for a universal law.” Compare also his Foundation for a Metaphysics of Morals, second section.
• 5 . Franz Brentano, Vom Ursprung sittlicher Erkenntnis, a lecture held on January 23, 1889, at the Vienna Law Society; published in Leipzig, 1889.
• 6 . Rudolf von Ihering, 1818–1892, jurist. His views were expressed in a lecture “Über die Entstehung des Rechtsgefuhls,” given several years before Brentano's (see above note) at the Vienna Law Society.
• 7 . Wilhelm Windelband, 1848–1915, German philosopher.
• 8 . Rudolf Steiner, The Philosophy of Freedom (Anthroposophic Press, Spring Valley, NY, 1964).
• 9 . Rudolf Steiner, Education of the Child (Rudolf Steiner Press, London, 1965).
• 10. Plotinus, 204-270, neo-Platonic philosopher.

Arising out of yesterday's lecture a further question has been put to me in connection with our subject and I should like to deal with it here. The question is this: “With reference to the law of imitation in a child's movements I regard as important an explanation of the following fact. My grandfather died when my father was between eighteen months and two years old. When he was about forty-five my father visited one of my grandfather's friends who was astonished at the similarity of all my father's movements and gestures with those of my grandfather. What was the cause of this, seeing that owing to my grandfather's early death there could hardly be any question of imitation!”

So a man died when his son was between eighteen months and two years old and long afterwards, when the latter was in his 45th year, he heard from this friend, who was in a position to know, that as late as his 45th year he still imitated, or rather had the same gestures as his father.

Of course we are dealing here with matters of such a nature that it is scarcely possible to do more than give certain guiding lines, omitting detailed explanations. Unfortunately our courses of lectures are short, and the theme, if it were to be gone into fully, would need many lectures and ample time, six months for instance, or even a whole year. Very many questions are therefore likely to arise, and it may well be possible to answer these if they are brought forward. I must however point out that owing to the limited time at our disposal a certain lack of clarity will inevitably arise and this could only be cleared up if it were possible to enter fully into every detail. With reference to the question which has been put I should like to interpolate the following remarks.

If we take the first epoch of a child's life, that is, the time between birth and the change of teeth, the organisation of the child is working and developing in such a way that those predispositions are incorporated into the organism which I described yesterday as consisting of walking, which includes the general orientation of the human being, of speaking and thirdly of thinking.

Now this is how things follow one another. Between the first and seventh year of life the child is so organised that he is mainly concerned with gesture; between approximately the seventh and fourteenth year he is concerned with speech, as I explained yesterday; and, again speaking approximately, between his fourteenth and twenty-first year he is so organised that he is mainly concerned with thinking. What thus makes its appearance in the course of twenty-one years is however already taking shape as predisposition in the first period of life, between birth and the change of teeth. In so far as the assimilation of gesture is concerned, and this includes walking freely in space without need of support, so that the arms and also the muscles of the face can move in an expressive way—in other words a general orientation, finding a living relationship with gesture and movement—all this is developed mainly in the first third of these years, that is to say in the first 2⅓ years. The main development of the child during this time lies in the unfolding and building up of gesture. The gestures then continue to develop, but in addition something more intimate and inward is now impressed into the speech organism. Although the child has already uttered a few words nevertheless the experience of speech as predisposition takes place after 2⅓ years. The actual experience and feeling for speech is fully developed between the seventh and fourteenth year, but as predisposition it is there between 2⅓ and 4⅔ years old. Naturally all this must be taken as an average. From then on the child develops the faculty of experiencing inwardly the first beginnings of thought. What unfolds and blossoms later, between the 14th and 21st year is already developing germinally between 4⅔ and 7 years old. The forming of gestures continues of course throughout these years, but other faculties enter in. We see therefore that in the main we have to place the time for the unfolding and forming of gestures right back to the first 2½ years. What is gained during this time lies deepest. This is only natural, for we can well imagine how fundamentally the principle of imitation works in the very first years of life.

If you take all this together you will no longer find anything astonishing in what gave rise to the question that has been put here. The grandfather died when the father was between 1½ and 2 years old. Now this is precisely the time in which the forming of gesture is working most deeply. If the grandfather died then, the gestures the child imitated from him made by far the deepest impression. That is in no way altered by what may have been imitated later from other people. So just this particular case is extraordinarily significant when we consider it in detail.

We tried yesterday to explain how in the second period of life, between the change of teeth and puberty, the child in the course of his development experiences everything that finds its expression through speech, in which the self-understood authority of the teacher and educator must play its part. The intercourse between teacher and child must be of such a kind that it works in a pictorial, imaginative way. And I pointed out how at this age one cannot approach the child with moral precepts but can only work effectively on his moral nature by awakening in him such feelings as can be awakened by pictures: so that the child receives pictures described by his teacher and educator, who is also his model. These work in such a way that what is good pleases him and what is bad gives him a feeling of distaste. Therefore at this preparatory or elementary school age morality must be instilled in pictorial form by way of the feelings.

I explained further how writing must be brought to the child in a pictorial way and I showed how the forms of the letters must be developed out of the drawing-painting and the painting-drawing. Of all the arts this must be cultivated first, for it leads the child into civilisation. Everything which introduces the child at the very outset into the forms of the letters, which are completely strange to him, is quite wrong from an educational point of view; for the finished forms of the letters used in our present day civilisation work on the child like little demons.

Now in an education built up on a knowledge of man, learning to write must precede learning to read. If you want to come near to a child of this age, immediately after the change of teeth, you must as far as possible approach the whole being of the child. The child when occupied in writing does at least bring the whole of the upper part of the body into activity; there is an inner mobility which is quite different from when only the head is kept busy learning the forms of the letters. The emancipated, independent faculties of the head can only be made use of at a later age. For this reason we can make a transition by allowing the child also to read what he has written. In this way an impression is made on him.

By carrying out our teaching in this way at the Waldorf School it transpired that our children learn to read somewhat later than others; they even learn to write the letters a little later than children in other schools. It is necessary however, before forming a judgment in regard to this to be able really to enter into the nature of man with understanding. With the limited perception and feeling for a knowledge of man usual at the present day, people do not notice at all how detrimental it is for the general development of the human being if, as a child, he learns too early things so remote from him as reading and writing. Certainly nobody will experience any deficiency in his capacity to read and write, whose proficiency in these arts is attained somewhat later than others; on the other hand everyone who learns to read and write too early will suffer in this very respect. An education based on a knowledge of man must from the very beginning, proceed out of this ability to read human evolution and by understanding the conditions of life help the child in furthering the development of his own nature. This is the one and only way to a really health-giving education.

To gain deeper insight we must enter somewhat into the being of man. In man we have in the first place his physical body which is most intensively developed in the first epoch of life. In the second epoch the higher, finer body, the etheric body, develops predominantly. Now it is a matter of great importance that in this study of man we should proceed in a truly scientific way, and we must conjure up the same courage as is shown today in other branches of science. A substance showing a definite degree of warmth, can be brought into a condition in which that warmth, hitherto bound up with substance, becomes freed. It is liberated and then becomes “free” warmth. In the case of mineral substances we have the courage to speak scientifically when we say that there is “bound” warmth and “free” warmth. We must acquire the same courage when we study the world as a whole. If we have this courage then the following reveals itself to us in regard to man.

We can ask: Where are the forces of the etheric body in the first epoch of life? During this time they are bound up with the physical body and are active in its nourishment and growth. In this first epoch the child is different from what he becomes later. The entire forces of the etheric body are at first bound up with the physical body. At the end of the first epoch they are freed to some extent, just as warmth becomes free from the substances with which it was formerly bound up. What takes place now? Only a part of the etheric body is working after the change of teeth in the forces of growth and nourishment; the freed part becomes the bearer of the more intensive development of the memory, of qualities of soul. We must learn to speak of a soul that is “bound” during the first seven years of life and of a soul that has become free after the 7th year. For it is so. What we use as forces of the soul in the second seven years of life is imperceptibly bound up with the physical body during the first seven years; this is why nothing of a psychic nature becomes body free. A knowledge of how the soul works in the first seven years of life must be gained from observation of the body. And only after the change of teeth can any direct approach be made to what is purely of a soul nature.

This is a way of looking at things which leads directly from the physical to the psychological. Just think of the many different approaches to psychology today. They are based on speculation pure and simple. People think things over and discover that on the one hand we have the soul and on the other hand the body. Now the following question arises: Does the body work on the soul as its original cause, or is it the other way round? If they get no further either way, they discover something so extraordinarily grotesque as psychophysical parallelism, the idea of which is that both manifestations run parallel, side by side. In this way no explanation is given for the interaction of one with the other, but one speaks only of parallelism. This is a sign that nothing is known about these things out of experience. Out of experience one would have to say: In the first seven years of a child's life one perceives the soul working in the body. How it works must be learned through observation, not through mere speculation. Anthroposophy as a means of knowledge rejects all speculation and proceeds everywhere from experience, but of course from physical and spiritual experience.

So in the second period of life, in the time between the change of teeth and puberty the etheric body of man is our chief concern in education. Both teacher and child need above all those forces which are working in the etheric body, for these release the feeling life of the child, not yet judgment and thought. Deeply embedded in the nature of the child between the change of teeth and puberty is the third member of the human being, the astral body, which is the bearer of all feeling life and sensation. During this second period of life the astral body is still deeply embedded in the etheric body. Therefore, because the etheric body is now relatively free, we have the task to develop it in such a way that it can follow its own tendencies, helped and not hindered by education. When can it be so helped? This can happen when in the widest possible sense we teach and educate the child by means of pictures, when we build up imaginatively and pictorially everything that we wish him to absorb. For the etheric body is the body of formative forces; it models the wonderful forms of the organs, heart, lungs, liver and so on. The physical body which we inherit acts only as a model; after the first seven years, after the change of teeth, it is laid aside, and the second physical body is fashioned by the etheric body. This is why at this age we must educate in a way that is adapted to the plastic formative forces of the etheric body.

Now, just as we teach the child by means of pictures, just as, among other things, he learns to write by a kind of painting-drawing—and we cannot introduce the child too early to what is artistic, for our entire teaching must be permeated with artistic feeling—so must we also bear the following in mind. Just as the etheric body is inseparably associated with what is formative and pictorial, so the astral body, which underlies the life of feeling and sensation, tends in its organisation towards the musical nature of man. To what then must we look when we observe the child? Because the astral body between the change of teeth and puberty is still embedded in the physical and etheric bodies every child whose soul life is healthy is inwardly deeply musical. Every healthy child is inwardly deeply musical. We have only to call up this musicality by making use of the child's natural liveliness and sense of movement. Artistic teaching therefore must, from the very beginning of school life, make use both of the plastic and pictorial arts and also of the art of music. Nothing abstract must be allowed to dominate; it is the artistic approach which is all-important, and out of what is artistic the child must be led to a comprehension of the world.

But now we must proceed in such a way that the child learns gradually to find his own orientation in the world. I have already said that it is most repugnant to me if I see scientific text books brought into school and the teaching carried out along those lines. For today in our scientific work, which I fully recognise, we have deviated in many respects from a conception of the world which is in accordance with nature. We will now ask ourselves the following question, bearing in mind that in the course of discussion other things may have to be added. At about what age can one begin to teach children about the plant world?

This must be done neither too late nor too early. We must be aware that a very important stage in a child's development is reached between the 9th and 10th year. Those who see with the eye of a teacher observe this in every child. There comes a time in which the child, although he does not usually express it in words, nevertheless shows in his whole behaviour that he has a question, or a number of questions, which betray an inner crisis in his life. This is an exceptionally delicate experience in the child and an exceptionally delicate sense for these things is necessary if one is to perceive it. But it is there and it must be observed. At this age the child learns quite instinctively to differentiate himself from the outer world. Up to this time the “I” and the outer world interpenetrate each other, and it is therefore possible to tell the child stories about animals, plants and stones in which they all behave as though they were human beings. Indeed this is the best approach, for we should appeal to the child's pictorial, imaginative sense, and this we do if we speak about the kingdoms of nature in this way. Between the 9th and 10th year however the child learns to say “I” in full consciousness. He learns this earlier of course, but now he does so consciously. These years, therefore, when the consciousness of the child is no longer merged with the outer world, but when he learns to differentiate himself from it, are the time when we can begin, without immediately renouncing the pictorial element, to lead the child to an understanding of the plant world, but to an understanding imbued with feeling.

Today we are accustomed to look at one plant alongside of another, we know their names and so on; we do this as though the single plant was there for itself. But when we study the plant in this way, it is just as if you were to pull out a hair, and forgetting that it was on your head examine it for itself, in the belief that you can know something about its nature and life-conditions without considering it as growing out of your head. The hair only has meaning when it is growing on the head; it cannot be studied for itself. It is the same with the plant. One cannot pull it up and study it separately, but one must consider the whole earth as an organism to which the plants belong. This is actually what it is. The plants belong to the entire growth of the earth, in the same way as the hairs belong to our head. Plants can never be studied in an isolated way, but only in connection with the whole nature of the earth. The earth and the world of plants belong together.

Let us suppose that you have a herbaceous plant, an annual, which is growing out of the root, shooting up into stalk, leaves and flowers, and developing the fruit which is sown again in the following year. Then you have the earth underneath, in which the plant is growing. But now, think of a tree. The tree lives longer, it is not an annual. It develops around itself the mineralised bark which is of such a nature that pieces of it can be broken off. What is this in reality? The process is as follows: If you were to pile up around a plant the surrounding earth with its inherent forces, if you were more or less to cover it with earth, then you would bring this about in an external, mechanical way, through human activity. Nature however does the same thing by wrapping the tree round with the bark; only in this case it is not completely earth. In the bark there is a kind of hill of earth, the earth heaps itself up. We can see the earth flourishing and growing when we see the growing tree. This is why what surrounds the root of the plant must most certainly be reckoned as belonging to it. We must regard the soil as belonging to the plant.

Anyone who has trained himself to observe such things and happens to travel in a district where he notices many plants with yellow flowers will at once look to see what kind of soil it is. In such a case, where specifically many yellow flowers are to be seen, one is likely to find, for instance, a soil which is somewhat red in colour. You will never be able to think about the plant without taking into consideration the earth in which it grows. Both belong together. And one should lose no time in accustoming oneself to this; as otherwise one destroys in oneself a sense for realities.

A deep impression was made on me recently, when at the request of certain farmers, I gave an agricultural course, at the end of which a farmer said: Today everybody knows that our vegetables are dying out, are becoming decadent and this with alarming rapidity. Why is this? It is because people no longer understand, as they understood in bygone days, as the peasants understood, that earth and plants are bound together and must be so considered. If we want to foster the well-being of our vegetables so that they flourish again we must understand how to treat them in the right way, in other words, we must give them the right kind of manure. We must give the earth the possibility of living rightly in the environment of the plant roots. Today, after the failure of agricultural methods of development, we need a new impulse in agriculture based on Spiritual Science. This will enable us to make use of manure in such a way that the growth of plants does not degenerate. Anyone as old as I am can say: I know how potatoes looked 50 years ago in Europe—and how they look today! Today we have not only the decline of the West in regard to its cultural life, but this decline penetrates deeply also into the kingdoms of nature, for example, in regard to agriculture.

It really amounts to this, that the sense for the connection between the plant and its environment should not be destroyed, that on school outings and similar occasions die plants should not be uprooted and put into specimen containers and then brought into the classroom in the belief that thereby something has been achieved. For the uprooted plant can never exist just for itself. Today people indulge in totally unreal ideas. For instance they look upon a piece of chalk and a flower as having reality in the same sense. But what nonsense this is! The mineral can exist for itself, it can really do this. So the plant also (they say) should have an independent existence;

but it cannot, it ceases to be when it is uprooted from the ground. It only has earthly existence when it is attached to something other than itself, and that other only has existence in so far as it is part of the whole earth. We must study things as they are in their totality, not tear them out of it.

Almost all our knowledge based on observation teems with unrealities of this kind. This is why Nature Study has become completely abstract, although this is partly justified, as with the theory of relativity. Anyone, however, who can think in a realistic way cannot allow abstract concepts to run on and on, but notices when they cease to have any relationship with what is real. This is something he finds painful. Naturally you can follow the laws of acoustics and say: When I make a sound, the transmission of this sound has a definite speed. When I hear a sound anywhere, at any particular place, I can calculate the exact time its transmission will take. If now I move, no matter at what speed, in the direction the sound is travelling, I shall hear it later. Should my speed exceed the speed of the sound I shall not hear it at all; but if I move towards the sound I shall hear it earlier. The theory of relativity has its definite justification. According to this, however, we can also come to the following conclusion: If I now move towards the sound more quickly than the sound travels, I shall finally go beyond it, so that I shall hear the sound before it is made! This is obvious to anyone able to think realistically. Such a person also knows that logically it is absolutely correct, wonderfully thought out, to say that a clock (to take the famous comparison of Einstein) thrown with the speed of light into universal space and returning from thence, will not have changed in any respect. This can be wonderfully thought out. But for a realistic thinker the question must necessarily arise: What will the clock look like on its return? for he does not separate his thinking from reality, he remains always in the sphere of reality.

This is the essential characteristic of Spiritual Science. It never demands a merely logical approach, but one in accordance with reality. That is why people today, who carry abstractions even to the splitting of hairs, reproach us anthroposophists with being abstract, just because our way of thinking seeks everywhere the absolute reality, never losing the connection with reality, although here certainly the spiritual reality has to be included and understood. This is why it is possible to perceive so clearly how unnatural it is to connect plant study with specimens in a container.

It is therefore important when introducing the child to plant study that we consider the actual face of the earth and deal with the soil and plant growth as a whole, so that the child will never think of the plant as something detached and separate. This can be unpleasant for the teacher, for now he cannot take the usual botany books into class with him, have a quick glance at them during the lesson and behave as though he knew it all perfectly. I have already said that today there are no suitable botany text-books. But this sort of teaching takes on another aspect when one knows the effect of the imponderable and when one considers that in the child the subconscious works still more strongly than in older people. This subconscious is terribly clever and anyone able to perceive the spiritual life of the child knows that when a class is seated facing the teacher and he walks up and down with his notes and wants to impart the content of these notes to the children, they always form a judgment and think; Well, why should I know that? He doesn't even know it himself! This disturbs the lesson tremendously, for these feelings rise up out of the subconscious and nothing can be expected of a class which is taught by someone with notes in his hand.

We must always look into the spiritual side of things. This is particularly necessary when developing the art of education, for by doing so we can create in the child a feeling of standing firmly and safely in the world. For (in lessons on the plant) he gradually grasps the idea that the earth is an organism. And this it actually is and when it begins to become lifeless we must help it by making the right use of manure. For instance, it is not true that the water contained in the air is the same as that in the earth below. The water below has a certain vitality; the water above loses this vitality and only regains it when it descends. All these things are real, absolutely real. If we do not grasp them we do not unite ourselves with the world in a real way. This then is what I wished to say in regard to the teaching about the world of plants.

Now we come to the animal world and we cannot consider the animals as belonging to the earth in the same way. This is apparent from the mere fact that the animals can move about; in this respect they are independent. But when we compare the animals with man we find something very characteristic in their formation. This has always been indicated in an older, instinctive science, the after-effects of which still remained in the first third of the 19th century. When however a modern man with his way of looking at things reads the opinions expressed by those philosophers of nature who, following old traditions, still regarded the animal world in its relation to the human world, these strike him as being utterly foolish. I know that people have hardly been able to contain their laughter when in a study circle, during the reading from the nature philosopher, Oken, the following sentence occurred: “The human tongue is a cuttlefish.” Whatever could he have meant? Of course in actual fact this statement of Oken's can no longer be regarded as correct, but it contains an underlying principle which must be taken into account. When we observe the different animal forms, from the smallest protozoa up to the fully developed apes, we find that every animal form represents some part of the human being, a human organ, or an organic system, which is developed in a one-sided way. You need only look at these things quite crudely. Imagine that the human forehead were to recede enormously that the jaw were to jut right out, that the eyes were to look upwards instead of forwards, that the teeth and their whole nexus were also to be formed in a completely one-sided way. By imagining such an exaggerated, one-sided development you could get a picture of a great variety of mammals. By leaving out this or that in the human form you can change it into the form of an ox, a sheep and so on. And when you take the inner organs, for instance those which are connected with reproduction, you come into the region of the lower animals. The human being is a synthesis, a putting together of the single animal forms, which becomes softer, gentler, when they are united. The human being is made up of all the animal forms moulded into one harmonious structure. Thus when I trace back to their original forms all that in man is merged together I find the whole animal world. Man is a contraction of the whole animal world.

This way of looking at things places us with our soul life once more in a right relationship to the animal world. This has been forgotten, but it is nevertheless true; and as it belongs fundamentally to the principles of evolution it must again be brought to life. And, after having shown the child how the plant belongs to the earth, we must, in so far as it is possible today, proceed at about the nth year to a consideration of the animal world; and we must do this in such a way that we realise that in its various forms the animal world belongs, strictly speaking, to man himself. Think how the young human being will then stand in his relation to animal and plant. The plants go to the earth, become one with the earth; the animals become one with him! This gives the basis for a true relationship to the world; it places man in a real relationship to the world. This can always be brought to the child in connection with the teaching matter. And if this is done artistically, if we approach the subject in a living way, so that it corresponds with what the child in his inner being is able to grasp, then we give him living forces with which to establish a relationship to life. Otherwise we may easily destroy this relationship. But we must look deeply into the whole human being.

What really is the etheric body? Well, if it were possible to lift it out of the physical body and so impregnate it that its form were to become visible—then there would be no greater work of art than this. For the human etheric body through its own nature and through what man creates within it, is at one and the same time both work of art and artist. And when we introduce the formative element into the child's artistic work, when we let him model in the free way I described yesterday, we bring to him something that is deeply related to the etheric body. This enables the child to take hold of his own inner being and thereby place himself as man in a right relationship to the world.

By introducing the child to music we form the astral body. But when we put two things together, when we lead what is plastic over into movement, and when we form movements that are plastic, then we have eurythmy, which follows exactly the relationship of the child's etheric body to his astral body. And so now the child learns eurythmy, speech revealing itself in articulated gestures, just as he learned to speak quite naturally in his earlier years. A healthy child will find no difficulty in learning eurythmy, for in eurythmy he simply expresses his own being, he has the impulses to make his own being a reality. This is why, in addition to gymnastics, eurythmy is incorporated into the curriculum as an obligatory subject from the first school years right up into the highest classes.

So you see, eurythmy has arisen out of the whole human being, physical body, etheric body and astral body; it can only be studied by means of an anthroposophical knowledge of man. Gymnastics today are directed physiologically in a one-sided way towards the physical body; and because physiology cannot do otherwise, certain principles based on life-giving processes are introduced. By means of gymnastics, however, we do not educate the complete human being, but only part of him. By saying this nothing is implied against gymnastics, only in these days their importance is over-estimated. Therefore in education today eurythmy should stand side by side with gymnastics. I would not go as far as a famous physiologist did, who once happened to be in the audience when I was speaking about eurythmy. On that occasion I said that as a means of education gymnastics are over-rated at the present time, and that a form of gymnastics calling on the forces of soul and spirit, such as is practised in eurythmy side by side with the study of eurythmy as an art, must be introduced in addition to gymnastics as usually understood. At the end of my lecture the famous physiologist came up to me and said: Do you say that gymnastics may have their justification as a means of education because physiologists say so? I, as a physiologist, must say that gymnastics as a means of education are nothing less than barbarism! You would certainly be very astonished if I were to tell you the name of this physiologist. At the present time such things are already apparent to people who have some right to speak; and we must be careful not to advocate certain things in a fanatical way without a full knowledge of what is involved. To stand up fanatically for certain things is utterly out of place in connection with the art of education, because here we are dealing with the manifold aspects of life.

When we approach the other subjects which children have to be taught and do so from the various points of view which have here been considered, we come first to the years during which the child can only take in the pictorial through his life of feeling. History and geography, for instance, must be taught in this way. History must be described pictorially; we must paint and model with our words. This develops the child's mind. For during the first two stages of the second main epoch of life there is one thing above all to which the child has no relationship and this is what may be termed the concept of causation. Before the 7th year the child should most certainly not go to school. [i.e. to school as distinguished from a kindergarten.] If we take the time from 7 to 9⅓ years old we have the first subdivision of the second main epoch; from 9⅓ to 11⅔ years old we have the second stage and from 11⅔ until approximately the age of 14 we have the third stage. During the first stage of this second main epoch the child is so organised that he responds immediately to what is pictorial. At this age therefore we must speak as one does in fairy-tales, for everything must still be undifferentiated from the child's own nature. The plants must speak with one another, the minerals must speak with one another; the plants must kiss one another, they must have father and mother, and so on. At about 9⅓ years old the time has come which I have already characterised, when the ego begins to differentiate itself from the outer world. Then we can make a more realistic approach in our teaching about plants and animals. Always, however, in the first years of life history must be treated in fairy-tale, mythical mood. In the second subdivision of this longer epoch, that is to say, from 9⅓ until 11⅔ years old, we must speak pictorially. And only when the child approaches the age of 12 can one introduce him to the concept of causation, only then can one lead over to abstract concepts, whereby cause and effect can be allowed to enter in. Before this time the child is as inaccessible to cause and effect as anyone colour blind is to colours; and as an educator one often has absolutely no idea how unnecessary it is to speak to the child about cause and effect. It is only after the age of 12 that we can speak to him about things which today are taken for granted when looked at from a scientific point of view.

This makes it essential to wait until about the 12th year before dealing with anything that has to do with the lifeless, for this involves entering into the concept of causation. And in the teaching of history we must also wait until about this age before passing over from a pictorial presentation to one which deals with cause and effect, where the causes underlying historical events have to be sought. Before this we should only concern ourselves with what can be brought to the child as having life, soul-imbued life.

People are really very strange. For instance, in the course of cultural development a concept has arisen which goes by the name of animism. It is maintained that when a child knocks himself against a table he imagines the table to be alive and hits it. He dreams a soul into the table, and it is thought that primitive people did the same. The idea is prevalent that something very complicated takes place in the soul of the child. He is supposed to think that the table is alive, ensouled, and this is why he hits it when he bumps up against it. This is a fantastic notion. On the contrary those who study the history of culture are the ones who do actually “ensoul” something, for they “ensoul” this imaginative capacity into the child. But the soul qualities of the child are far more deeply embedded in the physical body than they are later, when they are emancipated and can work freely. When the child bumps against a table a reflex action is set up without his imagining that the table is alive. It is purely a reflex movement of will, for the child does not yet differentiate himself from the outer world. This differentiation first makes its appearance at about the 12th year when a healthy child can grasp the concept of causation. But when this concept is brought to the child too early, especially if it is done by means of crude external methods, really terrible conditions are set up in the child's development. It is all very well to say that one should take pains to make everything perfectly clear to a child. Calculating machines already exist in which little balls are pushed here and there in order to make the operations of arithmetic externally obvious. The next thing we may expect is that those of the same frame of mind will make moral concepts externally visible by means of some kind of machine in which by pushing something about one will be able to see good and evil in the same way as with the calculating machines one can see that 5 plus 7 equals 12. There are, however, undoubtedly spheres of life in which things cannot be made externally apparent and which are taken up and absorbed by the child in ways that are not at all obvious; and we greatly err if we try to make them so. Hence it is quite wrong to do as is often attempted in educational books and make externally apparent what by its very nature cannot be so treated. In this respect people often fall into really frightful trivialities.

In the years between the change of teeth and puberty we are not only concerned with the demonstrably obvious, for when we take the whole of human life into consideration the following becomes clear. At the age of 8 I take in some concept, I do not yet understand it fully; indeed I do not understand it at all as far as its abstract content is concerned. I am not yet so constituted as to make this possible. Why then do I take in the concept at all? I do so because it is my teacher who is speaking, because the authority of my teacher is self-understood and this works upon me. But today we are not supposed to do this; the child is to be shown what is visual and obvious. Now let us take a child who is taught everything in this way. In such a case what a child experiences does not grow with his growth, for by these methods he is treated as a being who does not grow. But we should not awaken in the child ideas which cannot grow with him, for then we should be doing the same thing as if we were to have a pair of shoes made for a three-year-old child and expect him to wear them when he is 12. Everything in the human being grows, including his power of comprehension; and so the concepts must grow with him. We must therefore see to it that we bring living concepts to the child, but this we can only do if there is a living relationship to the authority of the teacher. It is not achieved if the teacher is an abstract pedant who stands in front of the child and presents him with concepts which are as yet totally foreign to him. Picture two children. One has been taught in such a way that he takes in concepts and at the age of 45 he still gives things the same explanation that he learned when he was 8 years old. The concept has not grown with the child; he paid careful attention to it all, and at 45 can still explain it in the same way. Now let us take a second child who has been educated in a living way. Here we shall find that just as he no longer wears the same size shoes as he did when he was 8 years old, so at a later age he no longer carries around with him the same concepts that he learned when he was 8. On the contrary; these concepts have expanded and have become something quite different. All this reacts on the physical body. And if we look at these two people in regard to their physical fitness we find that the first man has sclerosis at the age of 45, while the second has remained mobile and is not sclerotic. How great do you think the differences are which come to light between human beings? In a certain place in Europe there were once two professors of philosophy. One was famous for his Greek philosophy; the other was an old Hegelian, an adherent of the school of Hegel, where people were still accustomed to take in living concepts, even after the age of 20. Both were lecturers at the same university. At the age of 70 the first decided to exercise his right to retire on a pension, he felt unable to continue. The second, the Hegelian professor, was 91 and said: “I cannot understand why that young fellow is settling down to retirement already.” But the conceptual life of this second professor had retained its mobility. People criticised him for this very reason and accused him of being inconsistent. The other man was consistent, but he suffered from sclerosis!

There exists a complete unity in the child between the spiritual and the bodily, and we can only deal rightly with him when we take this into consideration. Today people who do not share the views of materialists say that materialism is a bad thing. Why? Many will say that it is bad because it understands nothing of the spiritual. This, however, is not the worst, for little by little people will become aware of this lack, and as a result of the urge to get the better of it they will come to the spiritual. The worst thing about materialism is that it understands nothing of matter! Look into it yourselves and see what has become of the knowledge of the living forces of man in lung, liver and so on under the influences of materialism. Nothing is known about how these things work. A portion is removed from the lung, the liver and so forth and this is prepared and examined, but by means of present-day scientific methods nothing is learned of the spirit working actively in the human organs. Such knowledge can only be gained through spiritual science. The material reveals its nature only when studied from the aspect of spiritual science. Materialism has fallen sick, and the cause of this sickness is above all because the materialist understands nothing of matter. He wants to limit himself to what is material but he cannot penetrate to any knowledge of what is material in a real sense. In saying this I do not mean the “thought-out” material, where so and so many atoms are supposed to dance around a central nucleus: for things of this kind are not difficult to construct. In the earlier days of the Theosophical Society there were theosophists who constructed a whole system based on atoms and molecules; but it was all just thought out. What we have to do now is to approach reality once again. And if one actually does this one has a feeling of discomfort when one is supposed to grasp some concept which is entirely devoid of reality. One experiences pain when, for instance, someone propounds a theory such as this: Fundamentally it is one and the same thing whether I drive my car to a town, or whether the car stands still and the town comes to me. Certainly things of this kind are justified when looked at from a certain point of view. But drawn out to the extent that occurs today among those who hold completely abstract opinions, they impoverish the entire life of the human soul. And anyone who has a sense for such things experiences great pain in regard to much of what people think today, which works so destructively on teaching methods. For instance, I see the tendencies of certain methods applied already to little children in the kindergarten, who are given ordinary cut-out letters and then learn to pick them out of a heap and put them together to form words. By occupying the child in this way at such an early age we are bringing him something to which as yet he has absolutely no relationship. When this happens to him the effect is the same as if in real thinking one were to say: I was once a man who still had muscles, skin and so on; now I am merely a skeleton. So it is today under the influence of this propensity for abstractions in the spiritual life of mankind: one sees oneself suddenly as a skeleton. With such an outlook, however, which is the bare skeleton of reality, we cannot approach the child in education.

Because of this I wanted to show today how everything depends on the teacher approaching life in a true and living way.

In these three lectures I would like to give a kind of comprehensive picture of the will of the spiritual-scientific movement, of that will that emerges from the clearly visible tasks of the present itself and from what can be recognized as the tasks for humanity in the near future.

Today, in a kind of introduction, I would like to make some remarks about the nature of anthroposophically oriented spiritual science and about the necessity of a spiritual-scientific movement within the civilization of the present. Tomorrow, I would then like to show in particular how this spiritual science leads to a deeper knowledge, a life-filled grasp of the human soul and spirit, and from there to a deepening of moral consciousness. I would then also like to show how this spiritual science must relate to the religious beliefs of the present day, and in the third lecture I would like to show how calamity in the present arises from the psychological peculiarities of the peoples spread across the earth today, how it has arisen from the historical development of these peoples. So that I would like to proceed, so to speak, from a characteristic of spiritual science to a consideration of present-day civilization, illuminated from the spiritual-scientific point of view.

If one hears about such a thing as the spiritual movement, of which the Dornach building is the external representative, in an external, superficial way, as is the taste of many contemporaries, one immediately has the feeling that something like this can only be for Sunday, because on all weekdays people have their useful occupations, which are regulated, which may have shown great irregularities once every four or five years due to some event, but which are rebuilt when they are destroyed. One does not have the feeling that something that has to do with these everyday tasks of humanity could arise through a spiritual movement. And so the opinion has arisen that everything for which the Dornach building is the external representative is a sectarian movement, that it wants to be a kind of new religious formation, and at most leaves it to those who, with a certain fanaticism arising from one or other motivation, cling to the old, to seek all possible forms of struggle against such a movement.

Now, my dear attendees, in addition to everything else, I would like to point out right at the starting point of this reflection that the spiritual movement, which is meant here as anthroposophically oriented, has been developing very practical activities in recent weeks. As in other places, a very practical activity is also underway here, in that an attempt is being made — please bear with me, it may even sound paradoxical when one speaks in the name of a spiritual scientific movement — to counter the decline of contemporary life by setting up a 'joint-stock company for the promotion of economic and spiritual values'. Very practical activities are to be started in the near future. And there it should also be shown how what is meant by the anthroposophically oriented spiritual scientific movement is really not a sum of Sunday afternoon sermons, but something that is intimately connected with what our time needs in terms of new impulses for practical life.

Let me therefore start with a characteristic representation of practical life in a particular direction, in order to then be able to characterize more intimately the will of anthroposophically oriented spiritual science from that direction. Many people who want to reform social life today out of more or less ideology, out of utopianism, have already noticed what I am about to point out; but they have not noticed it in such a way that they have been able to look at the fundamental issues that are at stake.

If you follow the various movements of the 19th century that, since the middle of the century, had been aiming to replace the gold and silver currency, the dual currency, with the gold currency as a single currency, you can see that these supporters of, let's say, monometallism, approached the matter from a very specific point of view. They said – and this can be seen from countless parliamentary reports of the European parliaments – that free trade must develop under the influence of the unified gold standard throughout the civilized world, free trade as the real basis of unhindered economic life, free trade that is not affected by all kinds of tariff barriers, protective tariffs and so on. This idea of promoting free trade through monometallism, through the gold standard, has been discussed in all possible keys. But what has happened under the influence of the gold standard? Precisely where this gold standard has been radically introduced, the opposite of what the clever economic practitioners predicted has occurred everywhere! Everywhere the necessity has arisen to resort to protective tariffs, including the American states. That is to say, almost all those who talked about the gold standard, whether from their practical knowledge of life or from the science of political economy, were mistaken about what was rooted in reality.

Now one may say: Have all people been stupid then? Did people really have no logic? Did they understand so little about life that the opposite of what they predicted came to pass? I do not think that the people who argued in favor of free trade during the 19th century were all fools; on the contrary, I think that they were very clever people who spoke with sharp logic and yet missed the point of reality! What is not realized when such a matter is discussed today is that, in the sense of the way of thinking that has developed in the civilized world over the last three to four centuries, one can be very clever and yet one's judgment can be unrealistic; one can consider oneself a great practitioner and give the most impractical advice that is possible. And basically it was this impractical advice that, over the last few decades, has driven humanity into its terrible catastrophe. Particularly in Germany, one could see how the real mastery of the circumstances gradually changed into the judgment of the great or small industrial and commercial leaders of the state. Other people have become more or less dependent on the industrial and commercial leaders. The influence of the commercial and industrial leaders was much greater than one would actually like to think. It was only during the war that it became clear how everything actually depended on the judgments of these leaders, and how disastrous the judgments of these leaders turned out to be.

And from this one could see that the whole of public life is, so to speak, summed up in the judgments of such alleged practitioners. But it was this that brought about the fateful catastrophe that befell civilized humanity in the last five to six years and that is far from over.

The reason for anthroposophically oriented spiritual science to appear at all is the observation of this fact. That was the reason why, precisely from the side from which this anthroposophically oriented spiritual science is asserted, the practical expression of this spiritual science must be pointed out again and again. I know how it surprised individuals, even the small group here in Basel, when I pointed out many years ago that we started with a semi-practical activity, so to speak, namely, performing mystery plays. Some “mystics” have thought that this is something that should not really be done; because in that way one becomes allied in a certain direction with practical measures that one needs. But I said at the time: My ideal would be not just to stage plays, but to develop a banking activity in order to permeate the most practical aspects of life with the kind of thinking that is necessary if one wants to pursue fruitful spiritual science. From a factual basis, I was always convinced that one does not arrive at the results that spiritual science seeks through unhealthy, superficial thinking, but precisely through healthy, careful and alert thinking, and that one can learn to train one's thinking in a way that was not possible under the materialistic approach of the last few centuries; that one can become practical for life through the healthy way of thinking, which is necessary when one does spiritual science in the sense in which it is meant here. I would like to say: a healthy treatment of life comes about as a kind of by-product. If you don't want to acquire stupid, nebulous, but true insight into the nature of the world through spiritual science, you are urged not to develop a rambling, nebulous way of thinking, but a way of thinking that is much clearer than what you are used to in science today. And if one develops this thinking, if one makes an effort to understand what spiritual science wants to be understood, then one trains one's thinking in such a way that one can also think correctly and appropriately in practical areas of life and no longer predict, for example, that monometallism will develop free trade when the circumstances are such that protective tariffs are introduced under the gold standard!

It is precisely this kind of world view, called anthroposophy here, that gives rise to a way of life, a real immersion in reality, in contrast to materialism, which everywhere tends towards the intellectual, towards merely looking at the world from the outside, and remains barren, with the exception of the only area where it could be fruitful, where it has led from triumph to triumph: that of external technology. But to see clearly in this direction, it is necessary that what I have developed over the years here from the most diverse points of view about the nature of anthroposophically oriented spiritual science be touched upon again today, at least with a few words. Anthroposophically oriented spiritual science basically starts from the most intimate, innermost human soul activity. It makes this human soul activity the very method of spiritual scientific research. But in that which lies in the depths of human nature as activity, as essence, is explored by this spiritual science, at the same time the human being is pointed to the whole universe, to the natural universe and to the social universe. The human being will penetrate into the depths of the world precisely by learning to look into the depths of his own being in an appropriate way.

Spiritual science must start from two things in human experience: firstly, from a further development of the life of imagination and, secondly, from a further development of the life of the will. In a certain sense, we develop that which is imagining and thinking, either for the external practical world or for conventional science. And we develop our will insofar as we are harnessed, I might say, in instinctively brought about social conditions. Spiritual science, however, leads to the recognition that just as one can develop the still undeveloped powers of the child in such a way that it can then, as an adult, enter the world with a certain imagination, with a certain will, one can also further develop that which the human being does today out of a certain laziness, as everyday and also scientific imagining and willing. To do this, however, it is necessary to first acquire a correct knowledge of the human being in a certain sense. It is necessary to gain the ability to look at the developing human being. In any case, we will have to learn to look at the developing human being, which is a necessity for a reform of the education system. This education system will have to be reformed. It will be done when it is realized that a large part of the social confusion of today stems from the failure of education and teaching. But it will not be possible to reform the education system until we look at the developing human being with real expertise, at this developing human being who, in each individual instance, presents a puzzle that, in a sense, needs to be solved. We look at the developing child. What wonderful events we encounter when we look at the child in the first weeks, in the first months, in the first years of its growth, when we really do not look away at what happens from week to week, from month to month, from year to year, but delve into this growing human being: what wonders of the event, of world events we encounter there!

Usually, for example, one only looks at something like the change of teeth from the outside. One does not consider what happens at the same time as the change of teeth, namely a complete transformation of the entire child's mental state. Until the change of teeth, the child lives in such a way that, fundamentally, its most inner instinct is to imitate what happens in its environment through people, especially through those people with whom it has grown together through blood or upbringing. We can grasp every hand movement the child makes if we know how devoted the child is to the people around him; and basically every hand movement is an imitation, even if sometimes in such a way that the imitator conceals himself. But anyone who can observe will notice that, for example, there is also an affiliation, an imitative affiliation to the environment in the formation of speech.

Thus we see how the child is an imitator in the first years of life. And by observing the child and seeing how, from week to week, from month to month, from year to year, something grows from the innermost depths and is then transferred into form, gesture, movement and action, into sound and thoughts. If we observe this in a child, we will notice – if we cannot do it any other way, then for the sake of my argument we will start from the hypothesis – how the soul-spiritual works on the physical. And if you immerse yourself in such an observation, if you see how the soul and spirit work on the body, then you cannot help but follow this work of the soul and spirit on the body right into the innermost part. Then one will say to oneself: something significant is happening throughout the whole organism, which is fulfilled around the seventh year in the second teeth that replace the milk teeth. In a sense, this change of teeth marks a conclusion.

And what then occurs in the child when the change of teeth is complete? Everyone can clearly and distinctly observe that the child's images, which were previously somewhat fleeting, came and went, were chaotic, then form themselves into more stringent contours, so that they take shape so firmly that they crystallize, as it were, and then become lasting memories.

The ability to remember does, however, occur earlier in some people, but the clearly defined memory, the memories shaped into thoughts, that is when they occur. And anyone who then follows this series of images cannot help but say to themselves: Yes, that is the same activity; up until the change of teeth, it was a spiritual-soul activity to drive out the teeth. This mental-spiritual activity worked in the organism. Now it has completed its activity, its field. Now it appears as a mental-spiritual activity itself. The clearly defined thoughts, the thoughts that are capable of being remembered, these thoughts now occur. What did they do earlier? It was they who worked in the organism to bring out the teeth; the same activity that later lives in thinking and remembering lived in the organism, was active there to drive out the teeth. It is, so to speak, an organic activity, metamorphosed, transformed into a spiritual-soul activity. And as such a spiritual-soul activity, it now lives on in the human being.

You see, this is how anthroposophically oriented spiritual science proceeds in a strictly methodical way. It says to itself: Just try to see how strongly active in the organism during the first seven years of life is what later only works as thought work, as memory work. Now, let us say, we take up this intensified activity of thinking, of imagining, and we hold to it, not just to let the translated spiritual-mental activity of the later years work in our soul, but to let the stronger activity work, which was able not only to form thoughts into memories, but to drive out teeth. But that is only one part of the activity, the greater, more intense one, up to the seventh year. This stronger activity is tackled through what anthroposophically oriented spiritual science calls meditation. Meditation is nothing other than intensified thinking, thinking made more intense, thinking that has been trained. Meditation consists of taking a thought or a train of thoughts – what is good for one person, for another, and the more precise thing can be found in the writings: 'How to Know Higher Worlds', 'Occult Science in Outline', 'The Riddle of Man' and 'The Riddle of Souls' and so on – this meditation, which is meant here, consists of taking a thought or a train of thoughts in the center of our consciousness and then engage ourselves so intensely in this train of thoughts, that we do not just unfold the abstract, intellectual activity of thought that we have in ordinary science or in ordinary life, but that intense activity of thought that, if we were still children under seven years of age, would engage our organism, seething and boiling within the organism. But when we engage in it as a spiritual-mental activity, it carries us along, so that we learn to live with thoughts as with realities. Just look at how people live with thoughts and judgments in their everyday lives or in ordinary science; they do not disturb them. It disturbs a person when he is friends with someone who harms him, or when he is in love with someone else, or when he is hungry or thirsty, and so on. The things of the body disturb a person; thoughts do not in the same way.

In meditation, you learn to move as you move in everyday life. And gradually you realize that meditating internally gives you a jolt. While in ordinary life you have a kind of guidance in your world of thoughts through the outside world, while you surrender to the thoughts that surround us as they come through the unbridled memories, emerge, disappear again and so on, meditation consists in bringing one's thoughts into consciousness of one's own will, in handling a thought as one moves one's hand when one performs some action with it. And gradually one really gets the feeling that one learns to think as one otherwise learned to grasp or to walk: that the activity of thought arises as something separated from the human being. When one thus advances to such a thought activity, which is more intense than ordinary thought activity, to a thought activity of which one inwardly experiences: if one were still a child, this thinking, which one develops in meditation, developing in meditation, would even intervene in the growth and formation of the body. When one develops this thinking, one comes to know what it means to be free of the body in thinking and imagining and devoting oneself to an activity.

It is quite true that ordinary thinking is entirely bound to the brain. And this is precisely what one learns to recognize when one becomes acquainted with this body-free thinking, to which one can only rise through meditative development. This thinking, which is as arbitrary as hand movements or leg movements, which one can perform through exertion, under which one tires, which one must refrain from after a certain time, just as one must refrain from exertion of the external body, when one gets to know this thinking, when one gets to know it from within, only then does one have an experience of creative thinking, of creative imagination. Then one grasps a being in the human being that is ethereal-thinking and that at the same time is that which has descended from supersensible worlds through birth or, let us say, through conception, and has worked as a sculptor, as an architect, on the human body. We have grasped that which works on the human body, and we have thus vividly transported ourselves back to what we were as human beings before we descended into this physical body and accepted the body that was given to us through inheritance from father, mother and so on. We have an experience of the prenatal or pre-conception life, an experience of what our supersensible existence was before our present physical existence.

Through the development of thinking, our human life extends beyond birth and conception. What I am telling you here is just as certain a result of a strict methodical investigation, walking the paths that I have outlined here, as any chemical result. What chemistry accomplishes in the laboratory or astronomy in the observatory is no more certain than what arises from the intimacy of the developed human thought life as the knowledge of the supersensible human being before birth; it is simply further developed thinking that provides the method of penetrating into the supersensible world. This thinking also provides the possibility of saying something about this prenatal life. We will come back to this tomorrow. But now I would like to point out the other side of what must be developed in man in order to ascend from sensory knowledge to supersensible knowledge. This other side is the will. And to understand the significance of this development of the will, you need only consider how far removed what we call the content of our moral ideals, our moral impulses, is from what is an external natural event, which is also a natural event in man. That is precisely the concern of the philosophical world view, that so-called ideals cannot be brought into the natural existence. On the one hand, geologists and astronomers describe how our Earth, together with everything that belongs to our planetary system, emerged from a primeval nebula according to eternal, iron laws, how it split off, how plants developed, how animals developed up to the point of man. Then they follow this in order to hypothesize how it will all perish again. But let us consider: The world of ideals does not enter into this world, nor the world of that which we must set before us if we want to lead a dignified human existence, nor the world of that under whose influence we carry out our actions; all that speaks to our conscience does not enter into it. But, my dear audience, what significance does this have for everything that takes place as a purely natural existence? In today's world view, there is no bridge that can be built from the moral ideal to what develops naturally. The astronomer and the geologist look to a final state of the earth, when everything will either succumb to the heat death or, as others describe, will be frozen, and so on. What we now call moral ideals will be a grandiose grave. What will become of what we call moral ideals? They are, as it were, like human thought, thoughts that slip over natural existence for such a materialistic world view. Those who start from the point of view of the spiritual science meant here do not theorize about these moral ideals, but seek to deepen life in another way. Above all, he tries to introduce into human arbitrariness something that is otherwise only considered by man in such a way that he leaves himself to it in a passive way.

And again, to help us understand what I mean, if we look with an unbiased eye at the second epoch of human life, the epoch from the change of teeth to sexual maturity. We see again how certain forces gradually develop in the child from the age of seven to fourteen, culminating in the years fourteen or fifteen. We see how individual love emerges first, how everything that is connected with the reproduction of the human race emerges. But we do not usually follow how a spiritual-soul element from the age of seven to fourteen or fifteen years again works as it did in the first seven years of life and comes to a conclusion, so that it is released and, as it were, redeemed from the organic activity in the fourteen or fifteen years. If we observe the development of the boy, we find – in a somewhat different way, which need not be further discussed here, it is more soul-like in the female sex – we find the conclusion of this epoch of life in the change of the voice, in the different timbre that the voice takes on. What is it actually that has shot into speech? If we observe impartially, we find that it is the will. In the first seven years of life it was the life of imagination, which then forms into a thought capable of remembering. Now it is the will that shoots into the organism, integrates with the organism and from now on permeates speech as free will, whereas until then, up to the 14th or 15th year, the child was not free in his speech, but — this can be demonstrated — was under the influence of his surroundings. So that we can say: In the second epoch of life, that which later appears as will, is what shapes the organs. And it comes to light in adolescence, in the 17th, 18th year, and into the twenties, glowing with ideals. That which has been working on what then appears as sexual love, as human love in general, has been released. What has been released after the 14th, 15th year of life in sexual maturity has been working until the 7th year; it is the will – first the will, which is bound to the organ, then the will that is released. If one takes this up again, and in such a way that one now turns to the will and transforms what one usually passively accepts as a human being into something active, then one will see that a second, special spiritual-soul power develops in the human interior. This is achieved by observing how one can say to oneself: If you look back on your life, you have actually changed from year to year – this is less noticeable – but in any case, from decade to decade, you have become a different person. Life, external circumstances, suffering, joys, all kinds of things intervene in life. And each of you may ask yourselves whether you have not become a different person over the decades? But this is not under your control. Life grinds you down. Life makes you someone else.

The method of spiritual science consists precisely in taking the development of the soul into one's own hands in this area, in taking the moral ideals of life more seriously than one otherwise does, for example, in taking these moral ideals of life into one's own self, in examining how one can shape something that one sets out to do so that one wills it, just as one wills to eat when one is hungry. You can bring it to that. You can bring it to the point where what are otherwise only abstract moral ideals become instinct, that they become an inner urge. Then, indeed, what otherwise, as I said, hovers above nature, of which one cannot understand what its actual meaning is, then it approaches the human inner organic becoming. Yes, even if it sounds paradoxical to many, there comes a time when moral impulses have the same effect on us as food has on our taste buds. One no longer has only an abstract feeling towards something that one finds good or bad, but one gets an inner antipathy towards something morally monstrous or bad, or even just blameworthy, just as one gets an antipathy towards something that tastes bad. What otherwise floats in abstract heights, intimately approaches what otherwise lives in taste and smell. You get a feeling of it when you just raise an arm, so what you set before you is effective in the arm's metabolism. In other words, when you actively take your human development into your own hands, you get a feeling of the spiritual-soul penetrating the physical-bodily. Just as one becomes free of the bodily in thinking when one develops it, so one will, through the other development that I am now discussing, which simply takes in that which 15th year, will be so intensively absorbed by the organism that love will not only have its usual effect in social or individual life, but love will have such an effect that it first organically shapes us into a body. If one now applies this intensity of love to one's own self-education, then one acquires in the will that which is strong enough to work, even if this body is given over to the earth or the elements. Once one has realized how the will has the power to affect the body, how the will not only instills moral impulses in us in the abstract, but how the will compels us to feel the moral impulses as we otherwise feel food through taste, then one has also grasped how this will intervenes in one's own human natural existence, how it intervenes in the entire natural existence of the universe. Then, through this other side of development, one acquires the possibility of grasping what lies beyond the grave. Just as through the development of the life of ideas one grasps prenatal life as something supersensible, as something eternal, so through the development of the will one grasps life after death. What the human being experiences here in this physical world is expanded by what spiritual science brings to light, precisely beyond this physical world. However, this does not mean that one merely speculates beyond the physical world. Rather, in order to arrive at what I have just described, one must actually develop a life of thought and will that is connected to reality. One develops the life of thought so truly that one has it in one's powers, in which it shapes us ourselves, by entering into life. One grasps the life of will in such a strong reality that one has it, as it will work even when our body with all its instincts and natural drives has decayed.

Then, when this has been achieved, one has something that can take on the same role as the content of my “Occult Science”, for example. Just as one speaks of the outside of the world from an external natural science, one can speak of the inside of the world. Not everyone needs to become a spiritual scientist to be able to understand spiritual science. Unflinching human understanding leads to the ability to grasp this spiritual science. We need not discuss how many spiritual researchers there will be in the future. There may be many, there may be few. From my book “How to Know Higher Worlds” you will see that anyone can become a spiritual scientist up to a certain point, namely, if one is willing to develop one's natural gifts, one can see into the supersensible world. To become a spiritual researcher in the sense meant here is perhaps not possible for some people for the simple reason that it requires much that a person in ordinary life cannot actually strive for. Just think how much time a person who becomes a chemist must spend in the laboratory, separated from the rest of life, and how, in a certain sense, he must renounce many things in the other life. This is the case with every single human activity in life. Just consider what it means when someone has to familiarize themselves with a world that is very different from the one in which we live daily from waking up to falling asleep, with a world that has very different laws, although these laws are effective here, but in secret. This imprints something on a person that is at the same time the source of suffering and pain. And every true spiritual researcher will tell you: He gratefully accepts the joys that life has brought him and would like to thank the world powers in a humble prayer for what he has been allowed to experience in joy. But he does not really owe his knowledge to his joys, which in a certain way lull him to sleep about the actual essence of life — we owe our knowledge to suffering. And it is the intense suffering that passes through our souls when we have climbed a certain step in going out from the world of sense-activity, as I have described to you today.

Then comes the other. Just think, I said it myself, thinking becomes something like grasping or walking: it is placed at the discretion of man. Otherwise we are accustomed to think involuntarily, to let thinking run on so automatically. This thinking must be transformed in such a way – at least for the time when one is doing spiritual research – as we otherwise move our hands and legs at will. One must now learn to differentiate precisely – and one learns this carefully when one is instructed in the right way in spiritual research – one must now carefully learn to separate the life that one must lead in the physical world and the life that leads into the spiritual world. Because here in the physical world one must be able to live like another human being. Those who become estranged from life out of a certain arrogance or out of a lust of the soul, who can devote themselves mystically and thereby despise life, who perhaps isolate themselves from the rest of humanity, don all kinds of strange clothes and the like, or say, “We belong to a completely different kind of people,” are not the real spiritual researchers. Those are rather the real spiritual researchers, who are not at all noticeable because they are in the outer life just as the others are, and even more practical, because they penetrate that with the real laws of the outer life, which one cannot get to know at all in the outer world, but only from the supersensible world; for everything sensual is completely dependent on the supersensible world. That is why I have often said that this spiritual science, which is meant here, will see its ideals fulfilled most when it can work precisely in the various practical branches of life. For example, I said, it would be a very special fulfillment of this anthroposophical ideal if one could talk to a number of doctors about what spiritual science could become for a renewal of medicine. This has now already been fulfilled: A course has been held in Dornach for doctors and prospective doctors on what can be contributed to medical science by this anthroposophically oriented spiritual science.

Truly, everything is closer to this anthroposophically oriented spiritual science, which is fruitful for practical life activities, than the insubstantial arguing with those who, out of blind fanaticism or much worse, open themselves up defamatory to present this spiritual science as a religious sect because they have a general aversion to any human progress. For those who are serious about this spiritual science, it is not about arguing with creeds, but about serious work in all practical areas of life.

This is what is to be achieved above all from Dornach, and in the face of which, I would say, all the ramblings that are now arising from all sides are simply grotesque. Just try to familiarize yourself with what is really wanted and you will see that it looks quite different from what is now going through a large part of the press. That is what it is about: that in fact, through the method described, through which man penetrates more deeply into his own being, he also penetrates more deeply into the world. On the one hand, one learns to recognize the reality that brings us into existence; on the other hand, one learns to recognize the reality that carries us out of existence. But through this one also gains the possibility of looking more deeply into life itself. Today people pass each other by, not knowing what influence one person has on another, not only that which is conveyed through the outer sensual body, but how soul actually works on soul, spirit on spirit. People are almost afraid to think about these effects of soul on soul, of spirit on spirit. But until we arrive at an understanding of how human beings act upon one another as spiritual beings, we shall never gain a correct conception of what the supersensible world is.

The spiritual researcher must absolutely accustom himself to looking uninhibitedly into the supersensible world and thereby fulfill his place in the material world. This necessity of regulating one's life in the world here in a completely different, much more conscious way when one is a spiritual researcher is, among many other things, perhaps not everyone's cup of tea. But it is enough if the results that individual spiritual researchers communicate are simply taken up into common sense. Spiritual science is not concerned about not being understood by unprejudiced thinkers. No, it knows that the more unprejudiced, the more appropriate, the less dilettantish, the more scientific the approach, the more it will be understood. It positively demands to be taken as exactly and seriously as possible. Then it will be seen that one can no longer talk about it in the way one talks about it when one is only superficially acquainted with it. Common sense can certainly say yes to the results of spiritual science; but then a certain demand is made on it, a demand that people do not love today, but because they do not love it, they have brought themselves to the catastrophe that humanity has had to go through in the last five to six years.

You see, if you were to take and read my “Secret Science” with the kind of attitude that people particularly love today, then it is rubbish, and you are also entitled to grumble about it. It is not in a position to tell you as much as you are told when you sit down in a movie theater and pictures roll in front of you. You don't need to work very hard. You can be passive. If you were to sit and listen to a lecture accompanied by lantern slides, you could doze off. During the intervals you can passively devote your attention to the lantern slides. It is different with a lecture such as I am giving today. In a certain sense, one has to go along with it oneself if it is to have any meaning for the human being. But only in literature — my “occult science” has no content for anyone who does not go into it themselves. It is, so to speak, only a score, and one has to work out the content oneself through active inner work; only then does one have it. But in so doing, one acquires active thinking as an observer of what the spiritual researcher has explored. This thinking submerges into reality and connects with reality. One acquires a thinking that no longer says: If we introduce the gold standard, we will favor free trade. This thinking, standing completely outside of reality, is unreal in relation to reality. One trains oneself in a thinking that is intimately connected with reality and that can also orient itself in practical cases to reality. The other thinking is untrained. The trained thinking, which to a certain extent emerges as a by-product of spiritual scientific endeavors, has the effect that one becomes a practical person in the face of the demands that life makes today.

Therefore, this spiritual science may also claim that the apparent practitioners, the illusionary practitioners, who — well, how should I put it, I dare not say loudmouthed — who have loudly boasted that they knew everything that happens in business and other life, and have so shattered life as it has been shattered, will have to be replaced by those people who know something to say about the real course of life because they have learned to say something about life in so far as it concerns the relationship of man to the universe.

I may always refer back to the fact, which is, after all, demonstrable, that it was in the early spring of 1914, in Vienna, in the very place where the world conflagration started, that I said to a small group: We are in the midst of a social development in Europe that shows us how public life suffers as if from a social carcinoma, as if from a social cancer that must break out terribly in the near future. That was in the early spring of 1914. A little later, men who also think in terms of practicalities, for example the German Foreign Minister and the Austrian Foreign Minister, told their parliaments or delegations almost identically: the general political détente is making great progress. We are on friendly terms with Russia, and thanks to these friendly relations we will soon enter an era of European peace. In Germany, they said: We are negotiating with England, and although these negotiations have not yet been concluded, they promise to be concluded in the near future and will establish a long-lasting peaceful relationship between Germany and England. All this in May 1914! That is what the practical people said. The other one who said: We are suffering from a social carcinoma, was the dreamer, the fantasist, the crazy anthroposophist. But the practical men, the ones people listened to, said what I have mentioned to you. Their practicality was fulfilled in such a way that in the next few years ten to twelve million people were killed and three times as many were crippled!

But how these predictions have been fulfilled here, how they have been fulfilled in the field of monometallism, how the measures of these apparent practitioners, who are alien to real life, have had an effect on a small scale, has all been demonstrated in the last five to six years. Today, spiritual science asserts itself to civilization by saying how one must delve into the content of spiritual science in order to apply such thinking, which is not only logical but also realistic. I said explicitly that I do not consider the monometallists stupid, but I do consider them to be people whose thinking cannot be immersed in reality, whose thinking is unrealistic. I know how many people do not believe today that it is precisely through intellectual deepening that one can enter into real life!

This is how spiritual science relates to the spirit of our time; this is how it relates to the unspiritual in our time. How does this unspirituality express itself? Well, humanity has actually only acquired intellectualism in the last three to four centuries. It has developed out of an ancient wisdom, which was, however, more instinctive, more dream-like, and therefore had to fade away. Intellectuality had to arise. We have arrived at a point in intellectual development from which we must move away again in order to recognize spiritual things, which mere intellect can never do. Everything, including our science, medicine, jurisprudence, all the individual sciences, have become alienated from reality today, with the sole exception of the inorganic sciences and technology with their entourage. Thus intellectuality has had to develop in recent centuries. There used to be an instinctive spiritual knowledge, but it has faded for a while. A new spiritual knowledge must replace it again.

But we have the inheritance of this ancient spiritual knowledge within us, and one of the most significant parts of this inheritance is our language itself, that is, all our languages of civilization. That which lives in our language has not emerged from a world view such as that practiced in the last three to four centuries. If people had not already had the languages, out of such soul activity as led to intellectualism, people would never have developed the languages. The languages are an ancient heritage. They emerged from a time when people grasped the spiritual, even if only instinctively. What did they become in the age of intellectualism? They have become what has gradually brought our public life to a state of phraseology. We live because we have lost the old spiritual substantial content that was in the word, we live with language in the phrase and we depend on finding substantial content for our languages again through spiritual deepening. But the phrase is the sister of the lie. And ask yourself, without prejudice, how the lie has carried its triumphal march through the world in the last five to six years, how we live in the age of phrase! Our spiritual life is entirely characterized by phrase. This is the un-spirit in the spiritual life of the present: phrase-mongering. We can only escape this spirit of empty phrases, this part of the unspiritual, by filling ourselves with anthroposophical spiritual science. If we want spiritual content with spiritual substance, then our words will in turn resonate with spiritual content. Today people speak words and more words because they have lost their spiritual content. This is the one point that is pointed out from a spiritual science point of view in the idea of threefolding the social organism, that the spiritual life is dominated by empty phrases, that a way must be sought – we will have to talk about this way in the next few days – to bring substantial content back into our words from the spiritual life. That is the first task we have to accomplish in the face of the anti-spirituality of our time.

The second task is this: it has become clear that this more recent time is completely under the influence of the urge to develop democratic, truly democratic life. This has seized people as otherwise the individual human being is seized by sexual maturity or other periods of life. Since the middle of the 15th century, the call for democracy, for true democracy, has been making itself felt more and more throughout the civilized world. And what is true democracy? Honestly grasped, democracy is a coexistence of people in the social organism in such a way that every adult is equal to every other adult. This cannot be developed with regard to intellectual life; because there it depends on abilities. Spiritual life must be kept separate on its own ground. Democracy can only embrace political life. But what has become of political life? Because the urge to form democracy is there, but this urge is interrupted everywhere under the influence of modern materialistic un-spirit — what has become of this life? Instead of a legal coexistence, instead of the real legal life born out of the inner being of man, a life of convention has arisen. Just as we live in phrases in our spiritual life, so in our legal life we live in conventions, in what is set down in paragraphs. These are not things to which people belong with their souls, but which they obey because they are conventionally set down by an absolute power or, for example, a democracy. The second thing that spiritual science wants with regard to the threefold social organism is to establish real democracy in the area where democracy can be. So that convention is replaced by what must arise from the innermost part of human nature among people who have come of age with equal rights.

And in a third area, the area of economic life, we have to replace economic unity, the calculation of circumstances, with real economic judgment, which will arise in the way that I will also suggest in the next few days, but which you will also find by name in my “Key Points of the Social Question.” This economic judgment has emerged in the face of the unspirituality of modern times. Man has become a routine practitioner instead of a real economic practitioner, a routine practitioner who simply stands in the fabric into which he was born or into which other circumstances of life have placed him. Man is not a real practitioner in the field of economic life, but a routine practitioner under a compulsively shaped demon. We live under the demon of phrase, of convention, of routine. We cannot escape this if we do not fulfill both the legal, intellectual and economic life with the sense of reality and spirit that we can acquire from the practice of spiritual science.

Now, people today still overlook such things. With regard to the fact that one can point to the most important thing that is really directly involved in practical life, people often stick to the judgment that it is just a dream, a fantasy, and so on. Yes, that's just the way people are. Here in Switzerland, a man named Johannes Scherr lived in the 1870s. In many respects he was a blusterer, he poured out his scathing criticism of everything and anything, just like a blustering person. But in his blustering there is often a very sound judgment. This Johannes Scherr, out of a certain insight into what he saw in his time, said: “If this continues, if people in their knowledge merely chase after materialism, if in their external political and social lives they merely financial economy, as it is now being ignited, where everyone only considers their financial or industrial interests, pursues their selfishness, if this continues, then the time will come when man will have to say: nonsense, you have triumphed!

I would like to know who, with an unbiased mind, has not had to stand up in recent years and still does so now, when he sees what is happening here and there in the world, when he sees how the opposite of everything that could could only benefit, throughout the whole civilized world, if one has, in particular, during the ad absurdum of the present civilization in this war, placed oneself in these circumstances, how one did not have to say: Well, the time has come when one would not have to say: Nonsense, you have won, like Johannes Scherr; but: Nonsense, you have decided!

I will develop the rest in the next few days. Today I wanted to say by way of introduction that anthroposophically oriented spiritual science, as it is meant here, does not want to participate in bringing about a state in which one will have to say more and more: “Nonsense, you decided” — but rather to help bring about a state in which, out of the innermost human ability, out of the innermost real human knowledge, one will have to say: We can bring meaning back into life, constructive meaning. This is what spiritual science wants to work on.

And it draws its strength from faith, which is surely more than mere belief, from the conviction that the time will have to come when the unspiritual spirit of empty phrases, the unspiritual spirit of convention, the unspiritual spirit of routine will have to be conquered by the spirit that, out of a deeper knowledge, speaks again of the meaning of life. For spiritual science must be convinced: not the spirit of convention and routine will lead man to a salutary development of his life, but alone the spirit. Therefore, as strongly as it can, spiritual science would like to raise the call for the spirit and for its true knowledge in the face of the needs of the present day and the near future.