The Rudolf Steiner Archive

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Now I must apologize again on the other side!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The contemplation of the world of dreams, as we did yesterday, has drawn our attention to the fact that in the moment when we enter from the world that is spread out before our senses as the world of natural laws into another world, the natural laws actually cease. I would like to say that they cease gradually, they cease little by little. In dreams, one can still clearly see how they are still based, on the one hand, on what is natural and lawful, but how, on the other hand, moral and ethical connections play into the dream, how one thing is connected to another in such a way that something is expressed in the context, such as, let us say, the moral value of the dreamer or the like. The dream is just a gentle transition from the physical-sensual world into completely different worlds, into worlds that then have nothing at all to do with the merely natural-law contexts.

Now, however, through such ideas and feelings, as they can be aroused by directing one's soul towards such transitions as are given in dreams, a, I would say, human understanding of world connections must be brought about, which otherwise should simply stand before the human soul as unrevealed secrets. You will soon feel what I actually mean. What matters is not intellectual comprehension of these things. What matters is to gain a totally human understanding, to gain a human relationship to the things with which man is connected, connected in his whole life and through the fact that he belongs to humanity. And it is impossible to say or present something about certain things in life if you have not allowed your feelings to be touched by something like what was discussed yesterday about 'Iraum. The things that depend on this coloring that the feeling gets as a result. And so today, in response to what was said yesterday about dreams and the strange utterances of the experimental magician, I want to put forward something that is linked to phenomena of life that should actually be felt as much greater mysteries than is usually the case. In connection with yesterday's considerations, such people, who from a certain point of view, bear the collective name “somnambulists”, people who show all kinds of deviations in their lives, which, for my sake, even go so far as to get up from their beds at night, climb around on roofs without falling off, and so on, that is, those people who are somnambulistic.

And secondly, from a certain point of view, I would like to discuss an appearance today that we have already discussed several times from other points of view, an appearance like that of Jakob Böhme or, for that matter, Paracelsus. And thirdly, in connection with this, I would like to discuss the appearance of Swedenborg. It can be said that today's humanity has become indifferent to everything, because the kind of interest that I would call a feuilletonistic one has spread so tremendously. Basically, phenomena such as somnambulists, Jakob Böhme or Swedenborg should be eating at people's souls, for they are quite different human phenomena that are placed in human life than ordinary citizens are.

Let us now try to understand such phenomena. Take the ordinary somnambulists. You know that in a certain way what they represent is connected with the manifestations of the moon. We have just recently spoken about the significance of the moon in the universe, and therefore this belongs in this context. I have told you that those beings who once were on Earth and brought man the original wisdom, which gradually faded away but which we find when we go back in history, that these entities have withdrawn to the Moon, as it were, to a kind of world colony, and that they populate the Moon internally. It is really the case that only the last remnants of what is characteristic of these beings have remained on earth in a coarser form. People were quite different back then, when these present-day moon beings were still on earth as the great teachers or guides of earthly humanity.

What these entities have left behind on earth are physical phenomena, the facts of reproductive life. These facts of reproductive life in its present form were not present on earth at the time when these entities gave people the original wisdom. Just as when you have dissolved any substance in a liquid, the liquid can look quite pure and even, but when the substance turns out to be sediment, then the substance is coarse and the liquid is even finer than it used to be – that is roughly what I mean here. What lives on earth today as the reproductive life is coarse in relation to what it once was. And what these beings have taken with them into the sphere of the moon is infinitely refined, has become infinitely more spiritual. But both belong together, both have been differentiated from each other. And what the moon really exerts on the earth as a force, what still works on the earth today as lunar force, is, as I told you when I discussed the position of the moon in the cosmos, that the moon actually reflects everything that is in the cosmos, not just the light of the sun, but actually reflects everything. So that we have two things in the moon: the interior of the moon, which is not currently emerging to the outside, but has closed itself off and been given a different task in the world, and that which is reflected back.

Now, in relation to his physical body, man is subject to the most powerful earthly force, gravity, in the way he moves, and also, incidentally, in the way he sits. It is always gravity that he appeals to. If he did not succumb to gravity with his physical body, he would not have these different states of equilibrium when walking, sitting, standing, and so on.

But with his etheric body, man is not so exposed to the earth force, but to the moon force. He is exposed to this force radiated back from the universe, and it pulls him out. While the force of gravity on earth pulls him down, this lunar force pulls him out into the cosmos. And this lunar force is temporarily predominantly active in somnambulant personalities. For moments, the lunar force overcomes the earthly force, and these personalities behave as if they had only an etheric body with which they can freely follow the lunar force. They drag their physical body along with them, and, as I said, climb around in the most daring way possible, as only the etheric body can, as the physical body cannot at all, but it is dragged along in such moments. So it is essentially, I would say, a breaking in of special lunar effects that occur in these somnambulistic personalities.

But now we must ask further, because everything is part of the great cosmic context, which ultimately leads back to nothing but beings. For the phenomena outside of the beings are only apparent, only the beings in the universe are truly real. So the beings in the mineral kingdom, in the plant kingdom, in the animal kingdom, are truly real, as are the human beings, the angels, the archangels and so on. These are the realities; individualized beings are the realities. The other is something that takes place between beings, the other is an appearance, it is not a reality. So when we speak of realities, we are dealing with beings.

Now, when such beings appear, individualized human beings, that is, sleepwalkers, how does the appearance of such sleepwalkers fit into the whole of the universe? How is it that there are sleepwalkers at all in the context of the universe?

Now you really must grasp what I am about to say not in a logical, intellectual context, but in an emotional one, for that is the right logic in this field. Try to penetrate your feeling with the idea that one must go, I would say, from the world of natural law, beyond the currents of the dream-like into quite different worlds where natural laws no longer apply but where other connections prevail. Try to really feel your way into it, then you will also feel that one can speak of it: what is it like for those people who, in some earth life, appear as somnambulists, with what is not of this earth life, let us say, in the pre-earthly existence or in the post-earthly existence?

Surely, we could point out all the shortcomings and dark sides of the somnambulist, and even include the mediumistic aspect, but you know all that already, or at least you can know it. They behave differently in life, they act differently, they are different. Now, if they are different in earthly life, then one would have to ask, if one were to reach the spiritual world with its feelings in this way, I would like to say, quite literally through dreams: Are they perhaps also different in the neighboring extraterrestrial life, in the pre-earthly existence? What are they like there?

You see, it is evident from such entities, which are somnambulists in earthly incarnation, that in their pre-earthly existence they were actually extremely hostile in the spiritual world towards all spiritual beings.

If we use the means that already exist and that I have often spoken to you about, to investigate a somnambulant to find out what it was like in the pre-earthly existence – since the French Course we have often spoken of this pre-earthly existence in its concrete details – if we now investigate: What were such somnambulants like before they descended to their earthly existence? As grotesque as it may seem, it must be said: they were quite out of place in their pre-earthly existence – but they were materialists in the spiritual world in their pre-earthly existence.

Of course, one is not so materialistic there as to develop theoretical views about materialism. One moves, after all, first in the world of sympathies and antipathies; not in the world of concepts and judgments, but in the world of sympathies and antipathies. These somnambulists lived in the spiritual world, but most of what they experienced in the spiritual world was unpleasant to them. Everywhere they encountered spiritual beings they felt a sense of hatred for them. And so, when they descended to earthly existence, they could not anchor their astral body in the right way within themselves. One must indeed consolidate the astral body when one descends into earthly life. This consolidation suffers from the fact that these beings have constantly taken up these forces of antipathy towards the spiritual. And then the karma, which I would call cosmically directed, arises, that these entities, in their earthly life, because they have a physical body, must be connected to this physical body in just the way that a not quite consolidated astral body must be connected to the physical body.

Now I have also shown you how one passes through the sphere of the moon when descending back to earth, how one absorbs the lunar forces. Such beings have too little independence in relation to the lunar forces. They are not sufficiently consolidated in themselves, so that a relationship with the lunar forces remains in them when they enter their physical body. The result of this is that such beings actually show less consideration for their physical body than the average person shows for his physical body. And it is this, that they remain subject to the lunar sphere, the means of education in the entire plan of the world, to cure these people of their hostile attitude towards the spiritual. So that one stands with the moon-sick before people who, in this earthly life, are to be educated to get rid of their hostility towards the spiritual by being moon-sick. Through this non-grasping of the physical body, they experience the spiritual on earth, while in the spiritual world itself they have not sufficiently experienced the spiritual.

The normal citizen, who is now firmly seated in his physical body, is much more firmly seated in it today than is desirable for the good of humanity; he is terribly stuck in it. But the somnambulists pay very little attention to this physical body. Therefore, under certain constellations, they may experience moments when they are more given to the forces of the moon than to the forces of the earth.

Let us now move on from these personalities to one who, I would say, stood there in a certain greatness in Jakob Böhme or Paracelsus. Of course, such personalities also appear in history in a less grandiose way, not now in the present time, but it is not so long ago that such personalities were around. I would say there have always been more or less little Jakob Böhmes. Until a few decades ago, you could still find such little Jakob Böhmes, these personalities who, when you look at them so outwardly in ordinary life, are distinguished by the fact that they look into nature in a different way than is the case with the average citizen.

Take a characteristic manifestation in the case of Jakob Böhme. What was in his whole human character was already manifested in his youth. Take the characteristic manifestation: he tends animals like others do, when suddenly he has the urge to leave the animals, the herd and the others who are there, and to go to a place up in the mountains. Driven by instinct, he looks at a particular place. There he finds a hole in the ground, the earth is open. He looks down and finds a treasure down there. It shines up at him. He is amazed by this apparition, but he goes away in prayer. It does not even occur to him to take any of it. He often went back to look again. The hole was no longer there, the treasure must have been covered, and so on. He should have thoroughly convinced himself that what he had seen did not exist in the physical world, but of course, given his whole spiritual makeup, he never came to believe that he had not seen something after all.

Thus, what later emerged as his special way of thinking was prepared in him: to see into the borderline processes of things, the essence of things, everywhere. Anyone who reads Jakob Böhme's writings with even a little understanding will notice that the man saw salt and sulfur differently than a normal chemist of the time, of course. He speaks out of completely different insights. He even speaks out of insights that are not quite so familiar to him, so that language everywhere meets what he sees, because language is really sometimes confused and chaotic, and you have to live in it if you want to understand what this Jakob Böhme actually saw.

Now, to help you visualize the whole phenomenon of Jakob Böhme, I remind you of what I told you about the Druids. They dimmed the physical sunlight with their cromlechs, looked into the shadows, and in the shadows they saw the spiritual that radiates from the sun. For other people, shadows are just shadows, they are not light, they are something negative. For the Druids, however, it was something very real. And the shadow was not only different in its direction, depending on whether it appeared in March or October, but also in its inner attitude, in its coloring, in its coloring, but also in particular in the spiritual that it contained. If you push back the physical rays of the sun, so to speak, then the spiritual that the sun radiates appears precisely in the shadow. But for Jakob Böhme, this was what followed from his entire human essence. I would say that when he gave himself an inward jolt in a certain direction – it's a rough way of speaking, but that's how it is – when he gave himself an inward jolt, he could extinguish the physical sunlight and actually see into the darkness.

And what happens when you look through something where you don't follow the light, so to speak, but where you have something like a boundary in front of you? Something like a mirror appears. But when you look, let's say, like this - I'm drawing the physical eye, but it's not so much the physical eye that matters - there is light everywhere. Well, then you just see the physical things. But when you can extinguish this physical sunlight through your own power, then looking into the darkness actually occurs in the back. You don't even need the shadow, looking into the darkness occurs. But when this looking into the darkness occurs, then it has the effect of a mirror. And because Jacob Böhme could see like this, he saw things as if they were reflected in the darkness, and they gave back to his soul's eye what they had inwardly spiritually. So he saw the most ordinary objects when he tuned into them, especially the characteristic objects he speaks of, salt, sulfur, mercury and so on, not as one sees them when looking at them under ordinary circumstances, but he saw their essence, that which underlies them spiritually, mirrored in the darkness.

This was the special way in which he saw: He saw what underlies things spiritually, mirrored in the darkness. He saw them in the glow of the sun's effects, but excluding the physical effects of light and heat. While the somnambulists bring their will into the lunar effects and are thus less subject to the gravity of the earth for moments, and are more exposed to the lunar effects, while the ordinary somnambulists follow the lunar effects with their organs of will, Böhme was able to follow the solar effects with his organ of knowledge, and was thus a solar man, so to speak, a solar addict in contrast to the lunar addicts. And in such people, as Jakob Böhme was in his particularly characteristic greatness, we again have human individualities that stand out from ordinary humanity through a special relationship to the spiritual: sun people.

Again, with these sun people, we must ask: What were they like in their pre-earthly existence? Yes, you see, the pre-earthly existence of such people is actually extremely interesting. I have often reminded you that in the early days of human development, people always looked back to their pre-earthly existence. Something occurred in their consciousness that allowed them to have a kind of memory of their pre-earthly existence. They knew: I descended from spiritual worlds into the earthly world.

Something like this, not like a personal looking back, but a looking back on the way one looked at the spiritual world before one's earthly existence, emerged atavistically in Jakob Böhme and Paracelsus. As a result, such people have more of a connection to the elemental spirits of nature than to what natural things outwardly represent on their surface. They see more the spiritual entities that are within nature. For example, what is called sulfur on earth is not seen in the pre-earthly existence, but, if I may express it this way, the elemental spirit that underlies sulfur is seen. This is seen in the pre-earthly existence.

The yellow sulfur or sulfur of a different color – this concept does not exist in the pre-earthly existence. For the pre-earthly existence, there is not even an idea of the “sulfur” that people on earth talk about. There is absolutely nothing of the physical sulfur, but there is an idea in the pre-earthly existence of the very different spiritual essence that underlies the sulfur. These are the qualities that people like Jakob Böhme and Paracelsus possess.

As a result, they have precisely the power to exclude physical sunlight and, in physical darkness – I cannot say to see the spiritual effects of the sun, just as one does not see light or color, and so not see the spiritual effects of the sun either – I would say that with the vision, one encounters this physical darkness, but in spiritual elevation, which then reflects the spiritual that is present in the nature beings and natural forces. |

And basically it is actually like this: if there were not occasionally people who provide such inspiration – the channels through which such inspiration enters humanity are usually not taken into account – people would not know much about nature at all, because these inspirations are also necessary for even the most abstract knowledge of nature. The others then put everything into intellectual terms. But this looking into the living nature of things comes from such sun people.

You see, it became more and more difficult to express such things in the world the closer we came to the 20th century. Most of you know the biography of Jakob Böhme. You know how he was persecuted. If he had appeared in the last third of the 19th century, or if someone like Jakob Böhme, with the particular way he spoke, had appeared in the last third of the 19th century, he would probably have been locked up in an asylum. He would have fared much worse than he did in his environment at the time, but it was difficult even then to appear. After all, Jakob Böhme had, in a sense, still been able to feel the benefit of that time, and this benefit consisted, for example, in the fact that he was not maltreated with what we already have to learn in schools today. School education, elementary school education, was not so advanced. Please do not think that I am speaking against elementary education, but it must be said that things must also be judged from a different point of view. Perhaps not many of you have lived in such places where some retired shoemaker was a teacher. In such places, children have not learned all that much wisdom in the time that people in the present day have been able to live through in their youth; they remained much more untouched. But what one is exposed to in today's normal school not only trains something, but also kills something. Jakob Böhme had the good fortune not to have been subjected to such a school education, and therefore what was in him as a sun-person could push its way to the surface.

Yes, it is already there in the person; but sometimes it has to come out in a completely different way. I could quote you some compositions from the last third of the 19th century in which I could show you how people, because they went through school education from the end of the 19th century, naturally could not speak like Jakob Böhme - but in some musical compositions it comes out anyway. There is also a keynote and a basic mood as in the writings of Jakob Böhme. It breaks through somewhere, especially in music, but not in what has particularly reached the heights. Don't think that I would have to talk to you about a Wagnerian composition, nor about “Hänsel and Gretel”, of course, when I tell you these things. I would have to mention completely different compositions. But there are such musical achievements where something like this breaks through. Now, as I said, it is precisely such impulses, which are then realized, that have a certain significance for earthly life.

Now we can consider the third type, which has emerged so characteristically in Swedenborg. Swedenborg looks quite peculiar when you look at the externals. Swedenborg had already ascended to the forties of his life on earth; he was a recognized great scholar of his time, encompassing the entire science of his time, as much as one could possibly encompass this science of his time. There are works of his that have been published. But there are an enormous number of manuscripts that were written entirely outside the science of the time, that were written so strongly outside the science of the time – they then remained manuscripts – that a Swedish society of the greatest Swedish scholars has now been formed to publish those works of Swedenborg's that he wrote in the sense of normal science until well into the 1740s.

But then something like this begins with Swedenborg, where people say: He has gone mad. He has just gone mad! — One publishes his works as those of one of the greatest men of his time and explains that not just anyone is good enough to publish them, but that today entire academies are needed to make Swedenborg accessible to the world up to the age of forty-four or something like that. The future is not taken into account! But it is important that Swedenborg lived to a certain age in the intellectual and scholarly environment of his time, which was already so intellectual and scholarly, and that a certain spiritual insight then dawned on him.

Such a spiritual view, as it specifically occurred in Swedenborg, has very special characteristics. It is like this: If you imagine a human being and what the human being has as a brain, then, in a certain way, for the normal person, the etheric body fills the brain. What I have indicated here in red would be the physical brain. The etheric body fills the physical brain and extends somewhat beyond it.

Now, in the normal way, in the right, I could also say bourgeois way, his etheric body was formed, his brain, his head constitution was formed so normally by Swedenborg until he was in his forties. Then a force overcame him that contracted this etheric body somewhat, not behind the skin, of course, but contracted somewhat, into itself, so that it became denser, thereby also becoming more independent of the brain, but still retaining all the cleverness. Because it is not true that he then became more foolish; he was just as clever as before.

When you walk around as a sleepwalker, your astral body is so strongly subject to the power of the moon. The organs of will then often adjust to the power of the moon. When you are like Jakob Böhme, your cognitive faculty is aligned with the powers of the sun, and it repels the physical effects of the sun. When one becomes like Swedenborg, when there is such a contraction of the etheric body, there is the power that causes it, the Saturn power, that power of Saturn – I described it to you cosmically a short time ago – in which there is actually something like a kind of inwardness of our entire planetary system, as one can also say, Saturn contains the powers of the memory of our planetary system. What had been passed on to Swedenborg was precisely this Saturn force, this inwardness of the entire planetary system. This is how he was able to see things in such visions as he just described them. He saw angels, archangels, processes between angels and archangels, as he just described them. But what was it actually? What did he enter through this contraction of the etheric body of his head? He did not succeed in seeing the real processes in the hierarchies. You have to imagine what he saw like this: if this is the Earth, then we are drawing the Earth's ether sphere. This now extends into the cosmic expanse, about which I told you yesterday that we would encounter the Orion Nebula and so on, that there is a lawfulness, not a natural lawfulness, but a lawfulness, as it is in a dream. Where space would end, we would only encounter the processes in the hierarchies. Swedenborg did not see into this with his ability to see, but all the processes that really take place outside the ether sphere are not merely reflected in the ether, but they call forth, I would say, real image processes in the ether. So that something is going on up there in the hierarchies that should be described quite differently, but which has an effect on the ether sphere of the earth, so that the ether forms act in the earth's ether. Figures are acting around us, these are not the real angels, these are the ether figures, the figures formed out of the ether, but which now also implement their deeds in such a way that they are understandable to man.

These – one cannot call them reflections, but perhaps real reflections – these real reflections of the higher hierarchies in the earth's ether were seen by Swedenborg. He did not see what angels were doing, but he saw what one can see when one is up there in the angelic deeds, not seeing them as such, but seeing what is going on down there in the earth's ether in the sphere of men. What the angels do up there cannot have a direct effect on people on earth; it is precisely these real reflections that then have an effect among people. The reflections in the ether have an effect among people, they walk among us. Swedenborg saw them, he became aware of them.

So if those people we call moonstruck cause us to look at their pre-earthly existence, if, when we look at people like Jakob Böhme or Paracelsus, we look at their present earthly existence, then we have every reason to look at the post-earthly existence of people like Swedenborg. Our earthly existence only makes sense when we look forward to the afterlife. For it is these people in particular who are still able, after death, to have an instructive effect on others who have passed through the gate of death, to tell them much of what must remain incomprehensible in the higher worlds if one has not already become acquainted with something of the higher worlds in the earthly world.

And one would like to say: It is so in the general spiritual plan of the world that human personalities of the kind of Swedenborg are introduced here on earth into the real shadows, real mirror images of the processes in the higher hierarchies, so that they are well prepared when they go up there, because they will need it precisely in the post-mortal existence. While the earth-lives of somnambulists, because of their condition, have something of the character of a reformatory in relation to the spiritual worlds, the lives of personalities such as Swedenborg have something preparatory for the achievements they have to accomplish after death. And so we can say that people are different in their individualities, and especially in those who are very different from the others, it can be shown how man can only be understood if we not only consider his relationship to the earthly environment, but if we know that he also has a relationship to the spiritual worlds in every moment of his life, even here in earthly existence has a relationship to the spiritual worlds. Everything that happens here in earthly existence, even in people in whom it manifests itself as strikingly as in Böhme and the others, has a connection to the pre-earthly existence, to the spirit that also lives in earthly existence, or to the post-earthly existence. Only in these special types, somnambulists, the Jakob Böhme type, the Swedenborg type, do we notice very strongly what is present to some extent in every human being: a being of earthly existence in relation to the pre-earthly existence or to the simultaneous earthly spiritual existence or to the post-earthly spiritual existence. In particular, those beings who, I might say, behave in the cosmos as I described to you at the time, that is, the moon beings, sun beings, Saturn beings, they need the forces that play in particular human beings to carry out their tasks.

And that is where a perspective can open up to us, which I will mention only at the end of these reflections. What this perspective opens up, I will talk about when I give the next lecture here. But a very specific perspective can open up for us. We really have to consider that the human interior, even the physical human interior, the ordinary physical human interior, which lies within the human skin, actually falls outside of what we usually call the cosmos.

We can, roughly speaking, say the following: if we have the earth here, then the mineral, plant, animal, physical-human effects and so on happen on it, and so what can be observed with the senses and combined with the mind happens on it. Then there are people on this earth on it. But there is also a world inside people, it is not the same world as outside. I could do it like this: I could draw many people schematically, always showing the inside of the people. What is going on inside the people could be the red, and the white around it could be the natural effects that can be seen with the senses and so on. Now you can make an abstraction. Do you think I will now erase everything that is there in the way of natural effects, I will only leave the red, I will erase everything so that only the inner being of people remains and everything else is gone. So imagine that I would first remove all the minerals from the earth, remove all the plants and remove all the animals, everything else that would be there in the way of natural effects – but if you remove the three natural kingdoms , everything is gone, and then there are the skins, so that you then have the physical skin gone, but not only the skins, but also all the physical matter that you have within you. I would take all that away, then something would remain of the whole globe: these are divine effects. We would still have the hierarchies in it, angels, archangels and so on. We would actually only then have taken away the earth and kept heaven.

And if you follow this sensation, then you come to adjust the human interior in the right way to the actual spiritual supersensible world and to imagine in a comprehensive way where that is that could be called heaven. It is actually in the person, in that which remains when all that is gone that I have described.

If you describe sleepwalkers, Jakob Böhme, Swedenborg as I have today, who are you actually talking about? Then you are not on earth, but in the cosmos. It is necessary in our time that we no longer talk about the human being as if he were a connection between the laws and effects of nature that are outside, as has been the case in the last few centuries. Instead, we must today become aware of what would be there if we were to remove everything – I do not want to repeat the horrible image again repeat the ghastly image — if one were to remove all that I have just said would be removed, and leave only the inner man, then one would not only come upon the spiritual world in a general, vague, abstract-pantheistic sense, but one would come upon the concrete spiritual world of supersensible entities. They have their dwellings in man. And humanity must gradually become aware of this again, that the human body is indeed the dwelling of the gods.

Only when this is taken up in our time consciousness is the right ingredient in this time consciousness, whereby culture, instead of going down, can go up. This is a truth that can be expressed from a variety of perspectives. Today I wanted to present it to you as a link to what I said yesterday about dreams and today about these so-called abnormal states of mind.

On last Wednesday I had the opportunity to explain to you how a super-sensible knowledge may come into existence out of the further development of those capacities of the human soul which belong to our every-day life, and which are recognized also in science when methodically applied. I undertook to show how a systematic further development of these capacities of the soul actually brings about for the human being a form of perception whereby he can become aware of a super-sensible world just as he becomes aware of the physical sensible world environing him by means of his physical senses. Through such vision we penetrate upward not only to an abstract sort of conviction that, in addition to the world of the senses, there exists also a world of the spirit, but to acquisition of real knowledge, to a real experience, of spiritual beings, which constitute the environment of man himself to the extent that he lifts himself up into a condition of spirituality, just as plants and animals constitute his environment in the physical world.

Such a super-sensible knowledge is something different in its entire nature from that which we designate as knowledge in ordinary life and for our every-day consciousness, as well as in ordinary science.

In this ordinary knowledge we come into possession, in a certain sense, of ideas—for example such ideas as embrace the laws of nature. But this possession of ideas does not really penetrate into the soul in such a way as to become an immediate power of the soul, comparable as a spiritual power to muscular force as this passes over into activity. Thoughts remain rather shadowy, and every one knows through immediate experiences how indifferent, in a certain sense, is the reaction of the human heart to thoughts when we are dealing with matters which affect the human heart in the profoundest degree.

Now, I think I have shown already in the first lecture that, when a human being actually penetrates into the spiritual world by means of such a perception as we have in mind here, he then becomes aware of his super-sensible being as it was before it descended to the earthly existence. And the fact that he achieves for himself something of this kind as regards his own self in its relationship to the spiritual world, does not leave his heart, the needs of his profoundest sensibilities, to the same extent unaffected, as in the case of abstract forms of knowledge. It is certainly true that one who has himself led a life devoted to the acquisition of knowledge does not undervalue all the inner drama of the soul associated with the struggle for knowledge even in the ordinarily recognized sense, yet the knowledge that we thus acquire remains, nevertheless, mere pictures of the external world. Indeed, if we are scientifically educated at the present time, we are generally proud of the fact that these pictures merely reflect, in a certain sense, quite objectively the external world and do not dart with such inner force through the life of the soul as, in the case of the physical body, the circulating blood drives its pulsing waves through man's being. The fact is that what is here meant by super-sensible knowledge is something which acts upon the human being in a manner entirely unlike that of ordinary knowledge. And, in order that I may make myself perfectly clear precisely in reference to this point, I should like to begin with a comparison—which is, however, something more than a comparison, something that fits the matter completely in its reality.

I should like to begin with the fact that the human being, even in ordinary life, lives in two states of consciousness—we might say three states, but let us consider sleeping and dreaming as constituting a single state of consciousness—that he is separated completely from the external world during sleep, and that a world existent only within him, reveals its effects in dreams in a grotesque and often chaotic manner. Even though we are in the same space with many other persons, our dream world belongs to us alone; we do not share it with the other persons. And a profounder reflection upon the world of dreams is the very thing that may show us that what we have to consider as our own inner human nature is connected with this dream world. Even the corporeal nature of man is reflected in a remarkable way in dreams: it is mirrored in fantastic pictures. One condition or another affecting an organ, a condition of illness or of excitation, may emerge in a special symbol during a dream; or some noise occurring near us may appear in a dream in a very dramatic symbolism. The dream creates pictures out of our own inner nature and out of the external world. But all of this is intimately connected, in turn, with the whole course of our life upon earth. From the most remote epochs of this life the dream draws the shadows of experiences into its chaotic but always dramatic course. And, the more deeply we penetrate into all this, the more are we led to the conclusion that the innermost being of man is connected, even though in an instinctive and unconscious manner, with that which flows and weaves in dreams.

One who has the capacity, for example, for observing the moment of waking and, from this point on, fixing the eye of the mind upon the ordinary daily life, not in the superficial way in which this usually occurs, but in a deeper fashion, will come to see that this waking life of day is characterized by the fact that what we experience in a wholly isolated manner during sleep and during dreams, in a manner that we can share with other persons at most only in special instances,—that this soul-spiritual element sinks down into our corporeal being, inserts itself in a way into the will, and thereby also into the forces of thought and the sense forces permeated by the will, and thus enters indirectly, through the body, into a relationship with the external world. Thus does the act of waking constitute a transition to an entirely different state of consciousness from that which we have in dreams. We are inserted into the external course of events through the fact that we participate, with our soul element, in the occurrences of our own organisms, which are connected, in turn, with external occurrences. Evidences of the fact that I am really describing the process in a wholly objective way can, naturally, not be obtained by the manner of abstract calculation, nor in an experimental way; but they are revealed to one who is able to observe in this field—particularly one who is able to observe how there is something like a “dreaming while awake,” a subconscious imagining, a living in pictures, which is always in process at the bottom of the dry, matter-of-fact life of the soul, of the intellect. The situation is such that, just as we may dive down from the surface of a stream of water into its profounder depths, so may we penetrate from our intellectual life into the deeper regions of the soul. There we enter into something which concerns us more intimately than the intellectual life, even though its connection with the external world is less exact. There we come also upon everything which stimulates the intellectual life to its independent, inventive power, which stimulates this life of the intellect when it passes over into artistic creation, which stimulates this intellectual life even—as I shall have to show later—when the human heart turns away from the ordinary reflections about the universe and surrenders itself to a reverent and religious veneration for the spiritual essence of the world.

In the act of waking in the ordinary life the situation is really such that, through the insertion of our soul being into the organs of our body, we enter into such a connection with the external world that we can entrust, not to the dream, but only to the waking life of day, responsibility for the judgment which is to be passed upon the nature of the dream, upon its rightness and wrongness, its truth and untruth. It would be psychopathic for any one to suppose that, in the chaotic, though dramatic, processes of the dream something “higher” is to be seen than that which his waking experience defines as the significance of this life of dreams.

In this waking experience do we remain also—at about the same level of experience—when we devote ourselves to the intellectual life, to the ordinary life of science, to every-day knowledge. By means of that absorption, immersion, and I might say strengthening of the soul about which I spoke on the previous occasion, the human being exercises consciously at a higher level for the life of his soul something similar to what he exercises unconsciously through his bodily organization for the ordinary act of waking. And the immersion in a super-sensible form of knowledge is a higher awaking. Just as we relate any sort of dream picture to our waking life of day, through the help of our memory and other forces of our soul, in order to connect this dream picture, let us say, with some bodily excitation or external experience, and thus to fit it into the course of reality, so do we arrive by means of such a super-sensible cognition as I have described at the point where we may rightly fit what we have in our ordinary sensible environment, what we fix by means of observation and experiment, into a higher world, into a spiritual world in which we ourselves are made participants by means of those exercises of which I spoke, just as we have been made participants in the corporeal world in the ordinary waking by means of our own organism. Thus super-sensible knowledge really constitutes the dawn of a new world, a real awaking to a new world, an awaking at a higher level. And this awaking compels him who has awaked to judge the whole sensible-physical world, in turn, from the point of view of this experience, just as he judges the dream life from the point of view of the waking life. What I do here during my earthly life, what appears to me by means of my physical knowledge, I then learn to relate to the processes through which I have passed as a spirit-soul being in a purely spiritual world before my descent into the earthly world, just as I connect the dream with the waking life. I learn to relate everything that exists in physical nature, not “in general” to a fantastic world of spirit, but to a concrete spiritual world, to a spiritual world which is complete in its content, which becomes a visible environment of the human being by reason of the powers of knowledge I have described as Imagination, Inspiration, and Intuition.

But, just as a person feels himself in ordinary life to be in different states of soul when awake and when dreaming, so does the whole state of soul become different when one arrives at this higher awaking. For this reason, in describing super-sensible knowledge in the manner that I have employed here, we do not describe merely the formal taking of pictures of the super-sensible world, but the transition of a person from one state of consciousness into another, from one condition of soul into another. In this process, however, even those contents of the soul in which one is absorbed in ordinary life become something entirely different. Just as one becomes a different person in ordinary life through awaking, so does one become, in a certain sense, a different human being through this super-sensible knowledge. The concepts and ideas that we have had in ordinary consciousness are transformed. There occurs not only a conceptual revolution in a person consisting in the fact that he understands more, but also a revolution in his life. This penetrates into the profoundest human conceptions. It is precisely in the profoundest human conceptions, I wish to say, in the very roots of the soul being, that a person is transformed through the fact that he is able to enter into the sphere of this super-sensible knowledge—something which happens, of course, only for momentary periods in one's life.

Here I must call your attention to two conceptions that play the greatest imaginable role in every-day life. These are conceptions completely and profoundly valid in ordinary life which take on an utterly different form the moment one ascends into the super-sensible world. These are the two concepts on the basis of which we form our judgments in the world: the concepts true and false, right and wrong. I beg you not to imagine that in this explanation I intend, through a frivolous handling of the problem of knowledge, to undermine the validity of the concepts true and false, right and wrong. To undermine something which is wholesome in ordinary life is by no means in keeping with a genuine super-sensible knowledge. This higher knowledge enables us to acquire something in addition for ordinary life, but never subtracts from it. Those persons who—whether really or in sentimentality—become untrue in their ordinary lives, unpractically mystical for this aspect of life, are also unsuited for a genuine super-sensible knowledge. A genuine super-sensible knowledge is not born out of fantastic persons, dreamers, but out of those very persons who are able to take their places in their full humanity in the earthly existence, as persons capable in real life. In other words, it is not our purpose to undermine what we experience in our every-day lives, and what is bound up in its very depths with the concepts true and false, right and wrong; on the contrary, truthfulness in this sphere, I should like to emphasize, is strengthened in one's feelings by that very thing which now comes about in connection with a higher knowledge by reason of a metamorphosis, a transformation of the concepts true and false, right and wrong.

When we have really entered into this higher, super-sensible world, we do not any longer say in such an abstract way that a thing is true or false, that it is right or wrong, but the concept of the true and the right passes over into a concept with which we are familiar in ordinary life, though in a more instinctive way; only, this concept belonging to the ordinary life is transmuted into a spiritual form. True and right pass over into the concept healthy; false and wrong pass over into the concept diseased. In other words, when we reflect about something in ordinary life—feel, sense, or will something—we say: “This is right, that is wrong.” But, when we are in the realm of super-sensible knowledge, we do not arrive at this impression of right or wrong but we actually reach the impression that something is healthy, something else is diseased.

You will say that healthy and ill are concepts to which a certain indefiniteness is attached. But this is attached to them only in the ordinary life or the ordinary state of consciousness.

The indefiniteness ceases when the higher knowledge is sought for in so exact a manner as I have explained in the first lecture. Precision then enters also into what we experience in this realm of higher knowledge. Healthy and ill,—these are the terms we apply to what we experience in association with the beings of the super-sensible world of whom we become aware through such a form of knowledge.

Just think how deeply that which becomes an object of super-sensible knowledge may affect us: it affects us as intimately as health and illness of the body. In regard to one thing that is experienced in the super-sensible, we may say: “I enter livingly into it. It benefits and stimulates my life; it elevates my life. I become through it in a certain way more ‘real.’ It is healthful.” In regard to something else I say: “It paralyzes—indeed, it kills—my own life. Thereby do I recognize that it is something diseased.” And just as we help ourselves onward in the ordinary world through right and wrong, just as we place our own human nature in the moral and the social life, so do we place ourselves rightly in the super-sensible world through healthy and ill. But we are thus fitted into this super-sensible world with our whole being in a manner far more real than that in which we are fitted into the sense world. In the sense world we separate ourselves from things in this element of the right or the wrong. I mean to say that right does not benefit us very intensely and wrong does not cause us much distress—especially in the case of many persons. In the super-sensible world it is by no means possible that experiences shall touch us in this way. There our whole existence, our whole reality, enters into the manner in which we experience this super-sensible world. For this realm, therefore, all conflict of opinion ceases as to whether things are reality or mere phenomena; whether they manifest to us merely the effects produced upon our own sense organs; and the like—questions about which I do not wish to speak here because the time would not suffice. But everything about which people can argue in this way in relation to the physical reality,—to carry on such discussion with reference to the spiritual world really has no significance whatever for the spiritual, super-sensible world. For we test its reality or unreality through the fact that we can say: “One thing affects me wholesomely, another thing in an ill way—causing injury,” I mean to say, taking the word in its full meaning and weight. The moment a person ascends to the super-sensible world, he observes at once that what was previously knowledge void of power becomes an inner power of the human soul itself. We permeate the soul with this super-sensible knowledge as we permeate our bodies with blood. Thus we learn also in such knowledge the whole relationship of the soul and the spirit to the human body; we learn to see how the spirit-soul being of man descends out of a super-sensible prenatal existence and unites with the inherited body. In order to see into this, it is necessary first to learn to know the spirit-soul element so truly that through this reality, as healthy or diseased, we experience the actuality in our own—I cannot say body here, but in our own soul.

Supersensible knowledge, therefore—although we make such a statement reluctantly, because one seems at once to fall into sentimentality—is really not a mere understanding but an ensouling of the human being. It is soul itself, soul content, which enters into us when we penetrate to this super-sensible knowledge. We become aware of our eternity, our immortality, by no means through the solution of a philosophical problem; we become aware of them through immediate experience, just as we become aware of external things in immediate experience through our senses.

What I have thus described is exposed, of course, to the objection: “To be sure, one may speak in this way, perhaps, who participates in such super-sensible knowledge; but what shall any one say to these things who is himself not as yet a participant in this super-sensible knowledge?” Now, one of the most beautiful ways in which human beings can live together is that in which one person develops through contact with the other, when one goes through the process of becoming, in his soul nature, through the help of the other. This is precisely the way in which the human community is most wonderfully established. Thus we may say that, just as it is not possible for all persons to become astronomers or botanists and yet the results of astronomy and botany may possess importance and significance for all persons—at least, their primary results—and can be taken in by means of the insight possessed by a sound human intellect, it is likewise possible that a sound human mind and heart can directly grasp and assimilate what is presented by a spiritual-scientist who is able to penetrate into the super-sensible world. For the human being is born, not for untruth, but for truth! And what the spiritual-scientist has to say will always be clothed, of course, in such words and combinations of words that it diverges, even in its formulation, from what we are accustomed to receive as pictures out of the sensible-physical world. Therefore, as the spiritual-scientist lays open what he has beheld, this may work in such a way upon the whole human being, upon the simple, wholesome human mind, that this wholesome human mind is awakened—so awakened that it actually discovers itself to be in that state of waking of which I have spoken today. I must repeat again and again, therefore, that, although I have certainly undertaken to explain in such books as Occult Science—an Outline, and Knowledge of the Higher Worlds and Its Attainment, and in other volumes, how it is possible to arrive through systematic exercises at what I must designate as “looking into the spiritual world,” so that every one possesses the possibility today, up to a certain degree, of becoming a spiritual-scientist, yet it is not necessary to do this. For a sound human constitution of soul is such that what the spiritual-scientist has to say can be received when it comes into contact with the human soul—provided only that the soul is sufficiently unprejudiced—as something long known. For this is precisely the peculiar characteristic of this spiritual research, this super-sensible knowledge to which we are referring: that it brings nothing which is not subconsciously present already in every human being. Thus every one can feel: “I already knew that; it is within me. If only I had not permitted myself to be rendered unreceptive through the authoritarian and other preconceptions of natural science, I should already have grasped, through one experience or another, some part of what this spiritual research is able to present as a connected whole.”

But the fact of such a thing as this transformation of the concepts true and false into the healthy and the diseased renders the inner experience of the soul more and more intense. At a higher level man places himself more intensely within a reality than he places himself in the physical reality through the ordinary waking of the daily life. In this way, feelings, sentiments, experiences of the soul are generated in relationship to these items of knowledge, which are altogether exact, just as they are generated through our being confronted by external things. That which the super-sensible knowledge can bestow lays hold upon the whole human being whereas it is really only the head that is laid hold of by what the knowledge of the senses can bestow. I trust you will permit me to visualize this relationship of super-sensible knowledge to the complete human being by referring to something personal, although the personal in this realm is also factual, for the facts are intensely bound up with the personal.

In order to render it clear that super-sensible knowledge cannot really be a mere head-knowledge, but lays hold upon the human being in a vastly more living and intense way than head-knowledge, I should like to mention the following. Whoever is accustomed to a living participation in ordinary knowledge—as every true super-sensible knower should really be—knows that the head participates in this ordinary knowledge. If he then ascends, especially if he has been active through his entire life in the ordinary knowledge, to super-sensible knowledge, the situation becomes such that he must exert all his powers in order to keep firm hold upon this super-sensible knowledge which comes upon him, which manifests itself to him. He observes that the power by means of which one holds fast to an idea about nature, to a law of nature, to the course of an experiment or of a clinical observation, is very slight in comparison with the inner force of soul which must be unfolded in order to hold fast to the perception of a super-sensible being. And here I have always found it necessary not only, so to speak, to employ the head in order to hold firmly to these items of super-sensible knowledge, but to support the force which the head can employ by means of other organs—for example by means of the hand. If we sketch in a few strokes something that we have reached through super-sensible research, if we fix it in brief characteristic sentences or even in mere words, then this thing—which we have brought into existence not merely by means of a force evoked through the nerve system applied in ordinary cognition, but have brought into existence by means of a force drawing upon a wide expanse of the organism as a support for our cognition,—this thing becomes something which produces the result that we possess these items of super-sensible knowledge not as something momentary, that they do not fall away from us like dreams, but that we are able to retain them. I may disclose to you, therefore, that I really find it necessary to work in general always in this way, and that I have thus produced wagon-loads of notebooks in my lifetime which I have never again looked into. For the necessary thing here lies in the activity; and the result of the activity is that one retains in spirit what has sought to manifest itself, not that one must read these notes again. Obviously, this writing or sketching is nothing automatic, mediumistic, but just as conscious as that which one employs in connection with scientific work or any other kind of work. And its only reason for existence lies in the fact that what presses upon us in the form of super-sensible knowledge must be grasped with one's whole being. But the result of this is that it affects, in turn, the whole human being, grasps the whole person, is not limited to an impression upon the head, goes further to produce impressions upon the whole human life in heart and mind. What we experience otherwise while the earthly life passes by us, the joy we have experienced in connection with one thing or another, joy in all its inner living quality, the pain we have experienced in lesser or deeper measure, what we have experienced through the external world of the senses, through association with other persons, in connection with the falling and rising tides of life,—all this appears again at a higher level, at a soul-spiritual level, when we ascend into those regions of the super-sensible where we can no longer speak of the true and the false but must speak of the healthy and the diseased.

Especially when we have passed through all that I described the last time, especially that feeling of intense pain at a certain level on the way to the super-sensible, do we then progress to a level of experience where we pass through this inner living dramatic crisis as super-sensible experiences and items of knowledge confront us: where knowledge can bestow upon us joy and pleasure as these are possible otherwise only in the physical life; or where knowledge may cause the profoundest pain; where we have the whole life of the soul renewed, as it were, at a higher level with all the inner coloring, with all the inner nuances of color, with all the intimate inwardness of the life of the soul and the mind that one enjoys through being rooted together with the corporeal organization in every-day existence. And it is here that the higher knowledge, the super-sensible experience comes into contact with that which plays its role in the ordinary life as the moral existence of the human being; this moral existence of the human being with everything connected with it, with the religious sentiment, with the consciousness of freedom.

At the moment when we ascend to a direct experience of the health-giving or the disease-bringing spiritual life, we come into contact with the very roots of the moral life of man, the roots of the whole moral existence. We come into contact with these roots of the moral existence only when we have reached the perception that the physical life of the senses and that which flows out of the human being is really, from the point of view of a higher life, a kind of dream, related to this higher life as the dream is related to the ordinary life. And that which we sense out of the indefinite depths of our human nature as conscience, which enables us to conduct our ordinary life, which determines whether we are helpful or harmful for our fellow men, that which shines upward from the very bottom of our human nature, stimulating us morally or immorally, becomes luminous; it is linked up in a reality just as the dream is linked up in a reality when we wake. We learn to recognize the conscience as something existing in man as a dimly mirrored gleam of the sense and significance of the spiritual world—of that super-sensible world to which we human beings belong, after all, in the depths of our nature. We now understand why it is necessary to take what the knowledge of the sense world can offer us as a point of departure and to proceed from this to a super-sensible knowledge, when we are considering the moral order of the world and desire to arrive at the reality of this moral world order.

This is what I endeavored to set forth thirty years ago as an ethical problem, merely as a moral world riddle, in my Philosophy of Spiritual Activity. Without taking into account super-sensible knowledge, I sought by simply following out the moral impulses of the human being to establish the fact that the ethical arises in every instance, not out of the kind of thinking which simply absorbs external things, external occurrences or the occurrences of one's own body, but out of that thinking life of the soul which lays hold upon the heart and the will and yet in its very foundation is, none the less, a thinking soul life, resting upon its own foundations, rooted in the spiritual nature of the world. I was compelled to seek at that time in my Philosophy of Spiritual Activity for a life of the soul independent of the corporeal being of man, a life that seems, indeed, a shadowy unreality in comparison with the solid reality of the external world of the senses, but which is rooted in its true nature in the very spiritual foundations of the universe. And the fact that the ethical impulses proceed from this kind of thinking, purified from the external world of the senses but wholly alive within man, gives to the human being his ethical character. When we learn to see now through super-sensible knowledge that what is rooted in us as our conscience is, in its essence, the mirroring within our inner being of the real spiritual world which weaves and breathes throughout the world of the senses, we then learn to recognize the moral nature of man as that which forever unites us without our knowing this, even when we sense it only as a still small voice within us, with that spiritual world which can be laid open to us through super-sensible knowledge.

But let no one say that this super-sensible knowledge is meaningless, therefore, for our moral life for the very reason that we have the voice of conscience, for the reason that we possess the practical intentions of life for its individual situations. Especially will one who sees that the ancient spiritual traditions, super-sensible knowledge handed down from primeval times and continuing until now, have faded away and continue their existence today as pale religious creeds, will be able to see that man stands in need of a new stimulus in this very sphere. Indeed, many persons are the victims of a great delusion in this field. We can see that scientific knowledge, which is considered by many today as the only valid knowledge—that the form which this scientific knowledge has taken on, with its Ignorabimus, “We cannot know”—has caused many persons to doubt all knowledge, in that they say that moral impulses, religious intentions, cannot be gained out of any knowledge whatever, but that these ethical-religious impulses in the conduct of life must be developed out of special endowments belonging to man, independent of all knowledge. This has gone so far, indeed, that knowledge is declared not to possess any capacity for setting in motion in the human being such impulses as to enrich him in his moral-religious existence through the fact that he takes in his own spiritual being—for this is really what he does take in with super-sensible knowledge. It has gone so far that people doubt this possibility! On the other hand, however, especially if one is not such a practical person as the so-called practical persons of our present-day life, who merely follow a routine, if one takes the whole world into account, on the contrary, as a genuinely practical person—the world consisting of body, soul, and spirit—one will certainly see that, in the individual life situations for which we may be permeated in actual existence with moral-religious content, more is needed than the faded traditions, which cannot really any longer inspire the human being in a completely moral sense. One recognizes something of this sort.

Permit me to introduce here a special example.

Out of everything that fails to satisfy us in that which confronts us today also in the educational life, what concerned us when the Waldorf School was to be founded in Stuttgart on the initiative of Emil Molt was to answer the question how a human being ought really to be educated. In approaching this task, we addressed this question to the super-sensible world of which I am here speaking. I will mention only briefly what sort of purposes had then to be made basic.

First of all, the question had to be raised: “How is a child educated so that he becomes a real human being, bearing his whole being within himself but also manifesting his whole being in the ethical-religious conduct of life?” A genuine knowledge of man in body, soul, and spirit was necessary for this. But such a knowledge of man in body, soul, and spirit is entirely impossible today on the basis of what is considered valid—most of all such a knowledge as may become actually practical so that it enables one to lay hold upon the manifold duties of life. In connection with this let me discuss the question by pointing out to you very briefly that what we so generally feel today to be a just ground for our pride—external science, dealing through observation and experimentation with material substance—is not qualified to penetrate into the secrets of the material itself. What I shall introduce here now will be stated very briefly, but we can find it set forth with all necessary proofs in my writings, especially in the volume Riddles of the Soul [Von Seelenratseln—not yet translated.] When we pay attention nowadays to ordinary science, we receive the conception, for example, that the human heart is a kind of pump, which drives the blood through the organs like a pumping machine. Spirit-science, such as we have in mind, which introduces us to a view of what constitutes not only the physical body of the human being, but his spirit-soul nature, shows us how this spirit-soul nature permeates the corporeal nature, how the blood is driven through the human being, not as if by the action of the “heart pumping machine,” but through the direct action of the spirit-soul nature itself; how this spirit-soul nature so lays hold upon the circulation of the blood that it is this spirit-soul element which constitutes the force that causes the blood to pulse through our organism. But the heart is then looked upon as something like a sense organ. As I consciously perceive the external world with my eyes, and through my concepts make this something of my own, thus do I likewise perceive through this inner sense organ of the heart—again, in an unconscious way—that which I develop unconsciously through my spirit-soul forces as the pulsation in my blood. The heart is no pump; the heart is the inner sense organ through which we perceive what the spirit-soul nature develops inwardly in connection with our blood, just as we perceive through the external senses the external world. The moment that we pass over from an intellectual analysis of the human organism to a vision of the whole human being, the heart reveals itself in its true essence, in its true significance—as an inner sense organ. In the heart the effects of the circulation of human blood, with its life impulses, are manifest; the heart is not the instrument causing this pulsation.

This is an example of the tragic fact that the very science bearing a materialistic coloring is not able to penetrate into the secrets of the material life; an example of the fact that we do not penetrate into the secrets of the material life until we do this by observing the spirit in its true work, in its creative work upon matter.

When we become aware through such super-sensible knowledge, on the one hand, of the creative spirit in the very course of material occurrences, we become aware on the other hand of the power-filled spirit—not merely of the abstractly thinking spirit—of the real spirit in its essence. Then only does there result a genuine knowledge of man, such a knowledge as is needed if we wish to develop in the growing child that which can live and breathe in the human being until death, full of power, suited to life, corresponding with reality. Such an intensive vitalizing of the knowledge of man causes the educator to see the child as something fundamentally different from what he is to the merely external observer. In a fundamental sense, from the very first moment of the earthly life, the growing child is the most wonderful earthly phenomenon. The emergence out of the profoundest inner nature, at first mysteriously indeterminate, of something that renders the indeterminate features more and more determinate, changing the countenance, at first so expressionless, into an expressive physiognomy, the manner in which the vague, unskillful movements of the limbs come to correspond to purpose and objective,—all this is something wonderful to behold. And a great sense of responsibility is necessary in bringing this to development. If we stand in the presence of the developing human being in such a way that we say, with all the inner fervor associated with super-sensible knowledge: “In this child there is manifest that which lived as spirit and soul in the pre-earthly existence in super-sensible beauty, that which has left behind, in a certain sense, its super-sensible beauty, has submerged itself in the particular body that could be given to it in the course of physical heredity; but you, as a teacher, must release that which rests in the human body as a gift of the gods, in order that it may lay hold year by year, month by month, week by week upon the physical body, may permeate this, may be able to mold it plastically into a likeness of the soul, you have to awaken still further in the human being that which is manifest in him,”—if we stand thus before the child, we then confront the task of educating the child, not with intellectual principles, but with our whole human nature, with the fullness of our human heart and mind, with a comprehensive sense of human responsibility in confronting the problem of education. We then gradually come to know that we do not have to observe only the child if we wish to know what we must do with him at any particular time, but that we must survey the whole human being. This observation is not convenient. But it is true that what is manifest in a person under certain circumstances in the period of tenderest childhood, let us say, first becomes manifest in a special form as either health-giving or disease-bringing only in high old age after it has long remained hidden in the inner being. As educators, we hold in our hands not only the immediate age of childhood but the whole earthly life of the human being. Persons who frequently say from a superficial pedagogical point of view that we must present to the child only what it can already understand make a very serious mistake. Such persons live in the moment, and not in the observation of the whole human life. For there is a period of childhood, from the change of teeth until adolescence, when it is exceedingly beneficial to a child to receive something that it does not yet understand, something that cannot yet be made clear to it, on the authority of a beloved teacher—to the greatest blessing for this human life, because, when the child sees in the self-evident authority of a teacher and educator the embodiment of truth, beauty, and goodness, in a certain sense, when it sees the world embodied in the teacher, the effect of this is the awaking of the forces of life. This is not something which contradicts human freedom; it is something which appeals to self-evident authority, which in its further development becomes a fountainhead of strength for the whole life. If, at the age of 35 years, we bring something into our heart and mind which is suited by its nature only now to be understood by us as mature persons, but which we took into our hearts upon the authority of a beloved teacher personality even in our eighth year,—if we bring that up into consciousness which we have already possessed, which lived in us because of love and now for the first time at a mature age is understood by us, this understanding of what was present in us in germ is the fountain for an inner enrichment of life. This inner enrichment of life is taken away from the human being when, in a manner reducing things to trivialities, only that is introduced to the child which it can already understand. We view the mode of a child's experience in the right way only when we are able to enter into the whole human being and, most of all, into that which enters as yet primarily into the human heart.

For example, we become acquainted with persons who radiate a blessing when they enter the company of other persons. Their influence is quieting, bestowing peace even upon excited persons whose tempers clash with one another. When we are really able to look back—as I said, this is not convenient—and see how such persons, apart from their innate qualities, have developed such a quality also through education, we often go back into a very tender age of the life where certain teacher personalities have stood very close to these children in their inner heart life, so that they learned to look up with reverence to these personalities. This looking up, this capacity for reverence, is like a mountain brook which flows into a crevice in the rock and only later appears again on the surface. What the soul acquired then in childhood exerts its influence below in its depths, manifesting itself only in high old age, when it becomes a power that radiates blessing.

What I have just introduced to you might be indicated in a picture if we say that, in relationship to the universe as well, the human being may be so educated that he may transmute into forces of blessing in high old age the forces of reverence of his tender childhood. Permit me to indicate in a picture what I mean. No one will be able to open his hands in blessing in old age who has not learned in tender childhood to fold his hands in reverent prayer.

This may indicate to us that in such a special case a life task, education, may lead to an ethical-religious attitude of mind; may indicate how that which our hearts and minds, and our wills, become as a result of entering livingly into spirit-knowledge may enter with vital reality into our conduct of life, so that what we develop otherwise, perhaps, only in an external and technical way shall become a component part of our moral-religious conduct of life. The fact, however, that instruction and education in the Stuttgart Waldorf School, and in the other schools which have arisen as its offshoots, have been brought into such an atmosphere does not by any means result in a lack of attention to the factual, the purely pedagogical; on the contrary, these are given full consideration. But the task of education has really become something here which, together with all its technique of teaching, its practice of instruction and everything methodical, at the same time radiates an ethical-religious atmosphere over the child. Educational acts become ethical-religious acts, because what is done springs from the profoundest moral impulses. Since the practice of teaching flows from a teacher-conscience, since the God-given soul nature is seen in the developing human being, educational action becomes religious in its nature. And this does not necessarily have any sentimental meaning but the meaning may be precisely what is especially necessary for our life, which has become so prosaic: that life may become in a wholly unsentimental sense a form of divine service to the world, as in the single example we have given of education, by reason of the fact that spiritual science becomes a light illuminating the actions of our life, the whole conduct of life. Since super-sensible knowledge leads us, not to abstractions, but to human powers, when these forms of knowledge gained through super-sensible cognition simply become immediate forces of life, they can flow over, therefore, into our whole conduct of life, permeating this with that which lifts the human being above his own level—out of the sensible into the super-sensible—elevating him to the level of a moral being. They may bring him to the stage where he becomes in consecrated love one with the Spirit of the World, thus arriving at truly religious piety.

Indeed, this is especially manifest also in education. If we observe the child up to his seventh year, we see that he is wholly given over, in a physical sense, to his environment. He is an imitator, an imitative being even in his speech. And when we observe this physical devotion, when we observe what constitutes a natural environment of the child, and remains such a natural environment because the soul is not yet awake, then we feel inclined to say that what confronts us in a natural way in the child is the natural form of the state of religious consecration to the world. The reason why the child learns so much is that it is consecrated to the world in a natural-religious way. Then the human being separates himself from the world; and, from the seventh year on, it is his educational environment which gives a different, dimly sensed guidance to his soul. At the period of adolescence he arrives at the stage of independent judgment; then does he become a being who determines his own direction and goal from within himself. Blessed is he if now, when freed from his sensuous organism, he can follow the guidance of thought, of the spirit, and grow into the spiritual just as he lived in a natural way while a child in the world,—if he can return as an adult in relationship to the spirit to the naturalness of the child's feeling for the world! If our spirit can live in the spirit of the world at the period of adolescence as the body of a child lives in the world of nature, then do we enter into the spirit of the world in true religious devotion to the innermost depths of our human nature: we become religious human beings.

We must willingly accept the necessity of transforming ordinary concepts into living forces if we wish to grasp the real nature, the central nerve, of super-sensible knowledge. So is it, likewise, when we view the human being by means of what I described the last time as super-sensible knowledge in Imagination. When we become aware that what lives in him is not only this physical body which we study in physiology, which we dissect in the medical laboratory and thereby develop the science of physiology, when we see that a super-sensible being lives in him which is beheld in the manner I have described, we then come to know that this super-sensible being is a sculptor that works upon the physical body itself. But it is necessary then to possess the capacity of going over from the ordinary abstract concepts which afford us only the laws of nature to an artistic conception of the human being. The system of laws under which we ordinarily conceive the human physical form must be changed into molded contents; science must pass over into art. The super-sensible human being can not be grasped by means of abstract science. We gain a knowledge of the super-sensible being only by means of a perception which leads scientific knowledge wholly over into an artistic experience. It must not be said that science must remain something logical, experimental. Of course, such a demand can be set up; but what does the world care about what we set up as “demands!” If we wish to gain a grasp of the world, our process must be determined in accordance with the world, not in accordance with our demands or even with our logical thoughts; for the world might itself pass over from mere logical thoughts into that which is artistic. And it actually does this. For this reason, only he arrives at a true conception of life who—by means of “perceptive power of thought” to use the expression so beautifully coined by Goethe—can guide that which confronts us in the form of logically conceived laws of nature into plastically molded laws of nature. We then ascend through art—in Schiller's expression “through the morning glow of the beautiful”—upwards into the land of knowledge, but also the land of reverent devotion, the land of the religious.

We then learn to know—permit me to say this in conclusion—what a state of things we really have with all the doubts that come over a human being when he says that knowledge can never bestow upon us religious and ethical impulses, but that these require special forces far removed from those of knowledge. I, likewise, shall never maintain, on the basis of super-sensible knowledge, that any kind of knowledge as such can guide a human being into a moral and religious conduct of life. But that which really brings the human being into a moral and religious conduct of life does not belong in the realm of the senses: it can be investigated only in the realm of the super-sensible. For this reason a true knowledge of human freedom can be gained only when we penetrate into the super-sensible. So likewise do we gain real knowledge of the human conscience only when we advance to the sphere of the super-sensible. For we arrive in this way at that spiritual element which does not compel the human being as he is compelled by natural laws, but permits him to work as a free being, and yet at the same time permeates him and streams through him with those impulses which are manifest in the conscience. Thus, however, is manifested to man that which he vaguely senses as the divine element in the world, in his innocent faith as a naive human being imbued with religious piety.

It is certainly true that one does not stand in immediate need of knowledge such as I have described in order to be a religious and pious person; it is possible to be such a person in complete naiveté. But that is not the state of the case, as history proves. One who asserts that the religious and ethical life of man must come to flower out of a different root from that of knowledge does not realize on the basis of historical evolution that all religious movements of liberation—naturally, the religious aptitudes always exist in the human being—have had their source in the sphere of knowledge as super-sensible sources of knowledge existed in the prehistorical epochs. There is no such thing as a content of morality or religion that has not grown out of the roots of knowledge. At the present time the roots of knowledge have given birth to scientific thinking, which is incapable, however, of reaching to the spirit. As regards the religious conduct of life, many people cling instead to traditions, believing that what exists in traditions is a revelation coming out of something like a “religious genius.” As a matter of fact, these are the atavistic, inherited traditions. But they are at the present time so faded out that we need a new impulse of knowledge, not working abstractly, but constituting a force for knowledge, in order that what exists in knowledge may give to the human being the impulse to enter even into the conduct of the practical life with ethical-religious motives in all their primal quality.

This we need. And, if it is maintained on the one hand—assuredly, with a certain measure of justification—that the human being does not need knowledge as such in order to develop an ethical-religious conduct of life, yet it must be maintained, on the other hand, as history teaches in this respect also, that knowledge need not confuse the human being in his religious and his ethical thinking. It must be possible for him to gain the loftiest stages of knowledge, and with this knowledge—such, naturally, as it is possible for him to attain, for there will always remain very much beyond this—to arrive at the home in which he dwelt by the will of God and under the guidance of God before he had attained to knowledge. That which existed as a dim premonition, and which had its justification as premonition, must be found again even when our striving is toward the loftiest light of knowledge. It will be possible then for knowledge to be something whose influence does not work destructively upon the moral conduct of life; it may be only the influence which kindles and permeates the whole moral-religious conduct of life. Through such knowledge, however, the human being will become aware of the profounder meaning of life—about which it is permissible, after all, to speak: he will become aware that, through the dispensation of the mysteries of the universe, of the whole cosmic guidance, he is a being willed by the Spirit, as he deeply senses; that he can develop further as a being willed by the Spirit; that, whereas external knowledge brings him only to what is indefinite, where he is led into doubt and where the unity which lived within him while he possessed only naive intimations is torn apart, he returns to what is God-given and permeated of spirit within himself if he awakens out of the ordinary knowledge to super-sensible knowledge.

Only thus can that which is so greatly needed by our sorely tested time really be furthered—a new impulse in the ethical-religious conduct of life: in that, just as knowledge has advanced up to the present time from the knowledge of vague premonition and dream to the wakeful clarity of our times, we shall advance from this wakeful clarity to a higher form of waking, to a state of union with the super-sensible world. Thus, likewise, will that impulse be bestowed upon the human being which he so imperatively requires especially for the renewal of his social existence at this time of bitter testing for humanity in all parts of the world—indeed, we may say, for all social thinking of the present time. As the very root of an ethical-religious conduct of life understanding must awaken for the fact that the human being must pass from the ordinary knowledge to an artistic and super-sensible awaking and enter into a religious-ethical conduct of life, into a true piety, free from all sentimentality, in which service to life becomes, so to speak, service to the spirit. He must enter there in that his knowledge strives for the light of the super-sensible, so that this light of the super-sensible causes him to awaken in a super-sensible world wherein alone he may feel himself to be a free soul in relationship to the laws of nature, wherein alone he may dwell in a true piety and a genuine inwardness and true religiousness as a spirit man in the spirit world.

If we pause at times in the midst of our anthroposophical considerations and then ask ourselves: What leads us into a spiritual movement such as our anthroposophical movement? ... we may of course answer a similar question from many different stand-points. One of the standpoints (although it is not the only one, it is nevertheless the most important one) which is able more than any other to supply a satisfactory answer is the contemplation of the course of life which the human soul experiences in feelings between death and a new birth. Indeed, the events which take place during the long span of life between death and a new birth are not less important or detailed than the events which take place between birth and death; yet we are only able to single out a few of the important things which we must experience. We may say, however, that whenever and at whatever point we observe the life between death and a new birth it always convinces us that humanity must prepare itself for a time when it will know and feel something concerning the super-sensible worlds.

Let us now penetrate at once into definite and concrete facts. If a clairvoyant who is able to contemplate life between death and a new birth perceives what will be described below, this sight may indeed induce him to consider it as an urgent task to spread the knowledge of the spiritual world! Let us take the case of a man who has died. The clairvoyant seeks him, he tries to see him some time after the person in question has passed through the portal of death. In the manner in which it is possible to communicate with the dead, he may hear the following words spoken by the departed one. (This is a concrete case.) The departed one will speak to him as follows: “I have left my wife behind; I know that she is still dwelling in the physical world.” (Of course, the dead man does not express himself with physical words.) “While I was living with her in the physical world, and while I attended to my work at the office from morning to night, she has always been the sunshine of my life. Every one of her words filled me with happiness; indeed, my life was so that I could not imagine it without the sunshine shed over it by the partner of my life. I then passed through the portal of death and left her behind. Now I am longing to be back again, I feel how I miss everything and my longing soul seeks to find a path leading to the companion of my life. But I cannot find this soul, I cannot penetrate to where she is dwelling, it is just as if she were no longer there. And if at times I have an inkling of her presence and feel as if she were there, as if I were in her neighbourhood, she is dumb, so that I only compare this with the case of two people, one of whom is filled with the desire that the other one speak a few words to him, while the other silent and cannot speak. Thus the soul that has filled me with bliss for such a long time during my physical life has now grown silent”.

You see, if we investigate what may be the cause of all this we obtain the answer: there is no language in common between the departed and the living who have remained behind. Nothing fills the soul with a substance which would continue to render it perceptible. Because a language in common is lacking, two souls feel separated.

This was not always the case. If we go back further into human evolution we find that the souls possessed a certain spiritual inheritance, a spirituality rendered them perceptible to one another not only upon the physical plane, but also when one of them dwelt in the physical and the other in the spiritual world. But the old heirloom of spiritual inwardness has been used up and to-day it exists no longer, so that the distressing case may really arise that one soul who has been loved by the other as dearly as I have just described, cannot be found beyond death by the soul, because nothing of what can be perceived by the departed soul lives within the soul who has remained upon the earth. What can be perceived by the departed soul is spiritual knowledge and spiritual feelings: this is the link which connects the soul upon the earth with the spiritual world. If here upon the earth a soul who has remained behind has fostered the knowledge of spiritual world, and if thoughts connected with the spiritual world have passed through this soul, these thoughts may be perceived by the departed soul, even the old religious feelings suffice to give soul something which may be perceived by the other soul. If it were possible to trace this case still further, the seer would discover that even when both souls have passed through death the departed souls are only able to perceive one another dimly; they are quite unable to establish a reciprocal connection, or they have the greatest difficulty in doing this, because they have no language in common. Clairvoyance reveals the deeper meaning of Anthroposophy: it is the language which will gradually be spoken both by the living and by the dead, by those who dwell in the physical world and by those who live between death and a new birth. The souls who have remained behind and who have taken up within them thoughts concerning the super-sensible worlds become visible to the souls of the departed. If they have strewn out love before death, they will do this also after death. This may convince us that Anthroposophy is a language which renders perceptible to the super-sensible world what takes place in the world of physical events. Indeed, the danger threatening humanity upon the earth is that the souls will become more and more estranged from one another and will be unable to build a connecting bridge, if spiritual ideas do not enable them to find the thread which links up souls. This is the reality of Anthroposophy, for it is not a mere theory. Theoretical knowledge is the very least; what we take up within us is a real soul-elixir, real substance. This substance enables the soul who has passed through death to see the soul who has remained behind. We may say that the seer who has an insight into these things, who has once perceived a soul filled with longing to see what it has left behind upon the earth, but unable to see it because its family has not yet found Anthroposophy—the seer who has perceived how the souls suffer under similar privations, knows that he cannot do otherwise than to speak to his fellow-beings about spiritual wisdom, and to consider that the time has come when spiritual wisdom must enter the hearts of men. We may say that those whose mission is based upon the knowledge of the super-sensible worlds feel that it is an urgent necessity to speak about the super-sensible worlds, a necessity which cannot be overlooked, for this would be the greatest sin of all. Thus they feel the necessity of proclaiming anthroposophical truths, of making revelations concerning the super-sensible worlds.

What has just been said may show you the tremendous earnestness connected with the necessity of revealing spiritual truths. But there is still another aspect of the communication between the living and the dead. We have not advanced very far in this direction, but we shall gradually progress. In order to understand how the living will gradually be able to establish a kind of communication with those who have departed, we must bear in mind the following things. Very little indeed is known concerning the physical world. For how is this knowledge of the physical world acquired? By using the senses and applying thought, by feeling what comes toward us from the world outside. But this is only the very least part of what is contained in the world outside. It contains still other things. I would like you to have some idea of the fact that there are still other things in the world which are far more important than what is real in a physical sense. I do not mean the super-sensible world, but something else. Imagine, for instance, that you are accustomed to go to your office every day at 8 a.m. One day you discover that on that particular morning you are three minutes late, and you happen to cross a certain square where you would have been obliged to pass through a kind of garage with a roof supported by columns. On that particular day on which you cross the square three minutes later than usual you realise that had you been punctual—that is to say, had you not been three minutes late—you would have been killed by the collapsing roof. Try to imagine this quite vividly You may also take the case of a man who misses a train which is afterwards wrecked in a collision; he would have been killed had he left by that train! All these are things which have not taken place, and this is why people do not notice them. But if something similar faces you, so that you must hit upon it, it will undoubtedly make an impression upon you. The day's course from morning to night always contains things which have not occurred to you. These are beyond your range of sight, things which may perhaps seem “invented”, yet they belong to the most important ingredients of life. You will have an inkling of these facts if you consider, for instance, the case of certain man in Berlin who had booked a berth on the Titanic. He met an acquaintance who told him: “I wish you would not leave on the Titanic!” He actually succeeded in persuading him to postpone his departure. The Titanic was sunk, and so this man escaped death. This undoubtedly made an indelible impression upon him. This is a special case, yet similar cases continually occur unnoticed: if they are noticed, they make a deep impression upon the human soul.

Let us now observe things from another aspect: How many impressions and feelings escape our attention because we are unable to perceive the dangers from which we have been preserved!

If we could observe everything that is so closely connected with these things and that escapes notice, we would pass through the world with entirely different feelings. The seer discovers the following possibility: Let us suppose, that the above-mentioned example is true. You actually cross that square three minutes later than usual. The moment in which you cross the square is the most appropriate one in which to hear a dead person who wishes to be perceived by you, who wishes to speak within you. You may then think or feel: Whence do the feelings come which now arise within my soul? This is not necessarily restricted to these particular cases, it may occur in many ways. Men will begin to feel these things if they observe also the world of possible events, not only the world of physical happenings. Real are, for instance, a great number of herrings in the sea; but they are possible only because an infinite quantity of eggs has been laid. Thus an infinite wealth of possibilities lies concealed within the depths of life. What is real, is related to the example of the herrings in the same way as the life destroyed within the eggs. This is what makes such an infinitely significant impression upon the seer who reaches the boundary line separating the two worlds. The seer may there obtain the following impression: “How infinitely great and full of contents are, events which take place in the super-sensible world, yet only a small part of all this becomes real in our world of the senses!” If this has been experienced, also the following may be felt: “Infinite things lie concealed within the depths of life.“ This feeling will develop with the aid of anthroposophical thoughts. We shall be able to feel that every point containing something which is real in the physical meaning, conceals something within it. Behind every flower, every breath of air, little stone and crystal lie infinite possibilities. Anthroposophists will gradually develop this feeling, so that reverence and devotion for what lies concealed within things will gradually unfold. If human beings gradually develop this feeling they will discover quite independently that during moments such as those which have just been described they will enter into a relationship with those who are dead as far as earthly life is concerned. The dead will begin to speak. In the future, men will experience as something quite normal that a dead person is speaking within their soul. They will gradually learn to know the source of these communications; that is to say, they will recognise who is speaking to them. Only because to-day men pass by so carelessly before the infinite world of the dead and the infinite depth of what is possible, only because of this they do not hear what the dead wish to speak within the hearts of the living.

The twofold aspect of the things which I have just explained to you, namely, that through the living souls, through the thoughts of anthroposophists, something is formed here which can be perceived by the dead—and that the dead will be able to speak to the hearts that have found their way into anthroposophical feelings—may show you the transformation which can take place for the whole of humanity through the spreading of Anthroposophy. A bridge will be built uniting these worlds with the worlds beyond. And it is a fact that the life between death and a new birth will change. It will not merely be a theory, it will become a reality, so that communication will be established between the so-called living and the dead, who are, however, more alive than we. The souls upon the earth will then also be able to feel what can be so fruitful for the dead. For if we do not feel how beneficial it is for the dead, if we reach out to them, we cannot do this in the right way.

Let us now take an extreme case. You may experience it if you are an anthroposophist and live with someone else as brother or sister, father or mother, husband or wife. Whereas one of the two feels attracted by Anthroposophy, the other one may be filled with hatred while the former is approaching Anthroposophy! How often we come across this! It may indeed take on this form in the sphere of consciousness, but not within the soul. Something else may take place there. In the astral body there is the sub-consciousness. Whereas someone may be raging violently against Anthroposophy, his sub-consciousness may be filled with an intense desire to know something about Anthroposophy. The more someone inveighs against Anthroposophy, the more he will have in his sub-consciousness the longing and the impulse to know something about Anthroposophy. When we cross the threshold of death, things take on their true aspect and nothing can be masked. Here upon the earth we may tell lies and pretend to be different from what we really are; but after death everything becomes true and shows its real countenance. If during our life on earth we have inveighed strongly against Anthroposophy, a longing for Anthroposophy will arise after death, and we shall suffer torments because this longing cannot be satisfied. A person who is still alive could, for instance, imagine that he is sitting in front of a departed one; he should then harbour anthroposophical thoughts, for the departed soul will understand these thoughts, even if he has not been an anthroposophist during his lifetime. If the living person is an anthroposophist, the departed one will in that case be able to perceive him.

What we may call, a certain inclination toward the language spoken during life, this is a fact which should be borne in mind, because soon after death the dead person still has a certain connection with the language which he has spoken during his life. For this reason, we should clothe our thoughts in the language which the dead person was accustomed to speak; after five, six, eight years, however—in some cases even sooner—it is evident that the language of the Spirit is able to overcome the obstacles arising out of the external form of speech, and the deceased can understand anthroposophical thoughts even if he has spoken another language during his lifetime. In any case, it has proved to be something very beautiful if an anthroposophist has read to a departed friend, particularly to one who has not been an anthroposophist during his lifetime. This has proved to be an enormous benefit to the dead, one of the greatest services of love. We do not merely wish to spread Anthroposophy as a teaching—this should be done, of course, for it is necessary—but Anthroposophy should also be active within the soul in a far more unobtrusive way. Spiritual tasks, even spiritual offices, may, as it were, develop and be of great help to the souls in their development after death. And this is what we should strive after more and more: to help the souls who live between death and a new birth to overcome a great difficulty, consisting therein that the old spiritual inheritance does not exist any longer, for a time has come in which it is very difficult for the souls to find the right direction after death, in which it is almost impossible for the souls who dwell between death and a new birth to find their way about.

The seer may then discover that, between death and a new birth, there are souls who are forced to undertake certain tasks, which they do not, however, understand. This, for instance, is a fact: The seer who directs his clairvoyant gaze toward the life between death and a new birth may discern souls who are obliged to fulfil definite tasks. For a certain length of time they must be the servants of powers who are known to us as the spirits of death and illness. We must here speak of a death which does not occur as a regular phenomenon, but takes hold of men before their time, so that they die in the flower of their life. When illnesses arise, these are physical events, but they are caused by forces coming from the super-sensible worlds. The deeds of super-sensible beings lie at the foundation of illnesses which spread rapidly. It is the task of certain spirits to bring premature death. That this is nevertheless rooted in wisdom, is a fact which we cannot consider just now; but it is essential to observe that we come across souls who are under the yoke of these beings. And although the seer must have grown accustomed to a certain composure and calmness, it is nevertheless painful and distressing to watch these souls labouring under a yoke, who are obliged to bring illness and death to the human beings upon the earth. And if the seer tries to retrace the path of these souls until he comes to their preceding life upon the earth, he will discover why these souls are now condemned to be the servants of the spirits of illness and death. The cause lies in the unscrupulousness which these souls have unfolded during their physical life. To the extent in which they have been unscrupulous during their life upon the earth, they now condemn themselves to be the servants of these evil beings. Just as cause and effect are connected when two balls collide, so must unscrupulous people become the servants of these evil powers. This is a deeply moving fact! There is still another thing which the seer perceives: there are souls who are under the yoke of ahrimanic spirits; they must prepare the spiritual causes of everything which occurs here in the form of obstacles and hindrances to our actions. Ahriman also has this task. All the obstacles which arise here, are the result of influences emanating from the spiritual world. Servants of Ahriman do this. Why are these souls compelled to perform these services? Because they were addicted to a comfortable, indolent way of living during their existence between birth and death. And if you consider how many people are indolent and lazy, you will find that Ahriman may expect a very great number of recruits! It is this lazy indolence which influences human life to a great extent. Even modern political economists now take into account not only human egoism and competition, but also this inclination toward a comfortable life. Comfort has become a life-factor.

It is another matter, however, if we have these experiences so that we are able to find our way about and know why we must experience them, or whether we experience them unconsciously, without knowing why we must serve these spirits. If we know why we are under the yoke of the evil spirits who bring epidemic diseases, we also know what good qualities will be required in our next life in order to bring about a cosmic adjustment annulling the evil influences. If we cannot understand these experiences, we do indeed form the same karma, but we create something which will be adjusted only in the second incarnation, so that we retard our real progress. For this reason, it is important to learn to know these things here upon the earth, for after death we shall experience them. We must learn something about them here upon the earth. Also this shows us how urgently necessary it is to render this new knowledge accessible to men by spreading spiritual truths, because the old form of knowledge no longer exists. The question, “Why are we anthroposophists?” should be answered by the spiritual facts themselves, which appeal profoundly not only to our understanding, but also to our feelings. Thus we gradually learn to consider Anthroposophy as a universal language enabling us to break down the barrier between the worlds in which our soul alternately dwells within a physical body and outside a physical body. The dividing wall hiding the super-sensible world from our sight will fall if spiritual science really penetrates into the souls of men. We must feel this, and then we shall have a true, inward enthusiasm for Anthroposophy.

Let me speak of still another phenomenon. The seer will experience that a special moment enters the life of the souls between death and a new birth, a moment which has an enormous influence upon the seer, and also upon those who are passing through it. This moment will lie further back in the case of some souls, and in the case of others it will appear sooner. If we observe sleep with a clairvoyant eye, when the human being is outside his physical body with his astral body and his Ego and looks back upon the physical and etheric bodies, we shall generally gain the impression that the physical body appears to be slowly dying. Only during earliest childhood, until the child acquires an understanding and his memory begins, the sleep in the child's body appears as something which blossoms and flourishes; but very soon, and in a way which is clearly evident to the seer, the body begins to wither away soon after it has entered physical life; death is merely the last stage of this process of decadence. Sleep exists in order that the used-up forces may become regenerated. But this regeneration is incomplete. The unregenerated part which remains behind is always, to a small extent, a cause of death. If these unregenerated parts accumulate, so that the forces of regeneration can no longer assert themselves, the human being falls a prey to physical death. Thus, if we observe the human body, we see that death is a gradual process. We really die slowly and gradually from the moment of birth onward. This makes a very profound impression upon us when we first become aware of it.

Between death and a new birth the soul is faced by a moment in which it begins to develop forces enabling it to enter the next existence. Let me indicate an example showing you what I really mean: To-day there are already quite a number of books dealing with Goethe's character and natural dispositions. Scientists endeavour to discover the ancestors from whom Goethe may have inherited this or that capacity. The source and cause of spiritual capacities are therefore sought in the physical line of heredity. I do not wish to contest this, but if one follows the path of the soul between death and a new birth, the following fact may be discovered: Let us take Goethe's soul. Long, long before it is born, it already exercises an influence upon its' ancestors from the super-sensible worlds, and it is already connected with the ancestors through forces living within it. Its influence is even of such a kind that it brings together in an appropriate way the men and women who are able to supply, after a long time, the qualities required by the soul. This is not an easy task, for many souls are involved in it. If you bear in mind the fact that men of the 18th century descend from souls of the 16th century, and that all these souls have been working together, you will realise that such an understanding is most important. Souls who are born in the 18th or 19th century must come to an understanding with other souls already during the 16th century in order to arrange the whole net of relationships. A great deal of work must be done between death and a new birth. We do not only work in an objective way by filling up one part of our time with services rendered to the spirits of hindrance, and so forth, as explained above—but we must also develop forces which render it possible for us to reincarnate. It then appears that we must prepare our form in a primal image. This makes the very opposite impression of what the seer perceives when he looks clairvoyantly upon the sleeping physical body and the etheric body. During sleep, the physical and etheric body appear to be withering away; but what is formed there as a primal image which gradually penetrates into physical Nature gives us the impression of something which blossoms and flourishes.

An important moment, therefore, appears between death and a new birth: it lies between the recollection of the preceding life and the transition to the next existence, when the human being begins to build up his physical organism. If you imagine physical death and compare it with this moment, you will find that it is the exact opposite of physical death. Physical death is the transition from physical existence to a non-existence; the moment described above is the transition from non-existence to a growing existence. If we are able to understand this moment, we experience it in an entirely different way than if we do not understand it.

A thought such as this one, dealing with the opposite aspect of death and with what occurs between death and a new birth, should really become a feeling within the soul of an anthroposophist. It should not merely be grasped with the intellect, but should be felt and permeated with feeling. Then we shall be able to experience how much richer our life becomes if the soul takes up similar ideas. Something else will then arise: namely, that, generally speaking, the soul will gradually acquire a feeling for the many things which exist in the world. If we walk through a wood in the spring and have first meditated upon the idea which I have described above, we shall not be far—if we really notice these things—from perceiving the spirits that weave and work in between the physical things. The perception of the spiritual world would really not be so difficult if the human beings themselves would not render it so difficult. If we try to permeate our feelings with what we have taken up in our thoughts, if we try to awaken them inwardly to life, this striving will open our spiritual eyes. Things such as those which have been explained to-day are intended as a help, so that anthroposophical striving may acquire life. The description of similar things always makes us feel that it is like a stammering, because our language is adapted only for the physical world, and it requires a great effort in order to produce at least a faint idea of the reality of these things; in fact, special means of description must come to our aid. But just this way of speaking about these things may awaken within our hearts what we may designate anthroposophically as a substance of feeling.

Anthroposophy should become for us a substance of feeling and a life-substance, so that we may not look upon the acquisition of anthroposophical ideas as something insignificant, but gladly take hold of them, and attribute the chief importance not to the thoughts themselves, but to what Anthroposophy makes of us.

[ 1 ] If one observes how, up to the present time, the philosophical world conceptions take form, one can see undercurrents in the search and endeavor of the various thinkers, of which they themselves are not aware but by which they are instinctively moved. In these currents there are forces at work that give direction and often specific form to the ideas expressed by these thinkers. Although they do not want to focus their attention on the forces directly, what they have to say often appears as if driven by hidden forces, which they are unwilling to acknowledge and from which they recoil. Forces of this kind live in the thought worlds of Dilthey, Eucken and Cohen. They are led by cognitive powers by which they are unconsciously dominated but that do not find a conscious development within their thought structures.

[ 2 ] Security and certainty of knowledge is being sought in many philosophical systems, and Kant's ideas are more or less taken as its point of departure. The outlook of natural science determines, consciously or unconsciously, the process of thought formation. But it is dimly felt by many that the source of knowledge of the external world must be sought in the self-conscious soul. Almost all of these thinkers are dominated by the question: How can the self-conscious soul be led to regard its inner experiences as a true manifestation of reality? The ordinary world of sense perception has become “illusion” because the self-conscious ego has, in the course of philosophical development, found itself more and more isolated with its subjective experiences. It has arrived at the point where it regards even sense perception merely as inner experience that is powerless to assure being and permanence for them in the world of reality. It is felt how much depends on finding a point of support within the self-conscious ego. But the search stimulated by this feeling only leads to conceptions that do not provide the means of submerging with the ego into a world that provides satisfactory support for existence.

[ 3 ] To explain this fact, one must look at the attitude toward the reality of the external world taken by a soul that has detached itself from that reality in the course of its philosophical development. This soul feels itself surrounded by a world of which it first becomes aware through the senses. But then it also becomes conscious of its own activity, of its own inner creative experience. The soul feels, as an irrefutable truth, that no light, no color can be revealed without the eye's sensitivity for light and color. Thus, it becomes aware of something creative in this activity of the eye. But if the eye produces the color by its spontaneous creation, as it must be assumed in such a philosophy, the question arises: Where do I find something that exists in itself, that does not owe its existence to my own creative power? If even the manifestations of the senses are nothing but results of the activity of the soul, must this not be true to even a higher degree with our thinking, through which we strive for conceptions of a true reality? Is this thinking not condemned to produce pictures that spring from the character of the soul life but can never provide a sure approach to the sources of existence? Questions of this kind emerge everywhere in the development of modern philosophy.

[ 4 ] It will be impossible to find the way out of the confusion resulting from these questions as long as the belief is maintained that the world revealed by the senses constitutes a complete, finished and self-dependent reality that must be investigated in order to know its inner nature. The human soul can arrive at its insights only through a spontaneous inner creativity. This conviction has been described in a previous chapter of this book, “The World as Illusion,” and in connection with the presentation of Hamerling's thoughts. Having reached this conviction, it is difficult to overcome a certain impasse of knowledge as long as one thinks that the world of the senses contains the real basis of its existence within itself and that one therefore has to copy with the inner activity of the soul what lies outside.

[ 5 ] This impasse will be overcome only by accepting the fact that, by its very nature, sense perception does not present a finished self-contained reality, but an unfinished, incomplete reality, or a half-reality, as it were.

As soon as one presupposes that a full reality is gained through perceptions of the sensory world, one is forever prevented from finding the answer to the question: What has the creative mind to add to this reality in the act of cognition? By necessity one shall have to sustain the Kantian option: Man must consider his knowledge to be the inner product of his own mind; he cannot regard it as a process that is capable of revealing a true reality. If reality lies outside the soul, then the soul cannot produce anything that corresponds to this reality, and the result is merely a product of the soul's own organization.

[ 6 ] The situation is entirely changed as soon as it is realized that the human soul does not deviate from reality in its creative effort for knowledge, but that prior to any cognitive activity the soul conjures up a world that is not real. Man is so placed in the world that by the nature of his being he changes things from what they really are. Hamerling is partly right when he says:

Certain stimuli produce the odor within our organ of smell. The rose, therefore, has no fragrance if nobody smells it. . . . If this, dear reader, does not seem plausible to you, if your mind stirs like a shy horse when it is confronted with this fact, do not bother to read another line; leave this book and all others that deal with philosophical things unread, for you lack the ability that is necessary for this purpose, that is, to apprehend a fact without bias and to adhere to it in your thoughts. (Compare pages of this volume.)

How the sensory world appears when man is confronted with it, depends without a doubt on the nature of the soul. Does it not follow then that this appearance of the world is a product of man's soul? An unbiased observation shows, however, that the unreal character of the external sense world is caused by the fact that when man is directly confronted by things of the world, he suppresses something that really belongs to them. If he unfolds a creative inner life that lifts from the depths of his soul the forces that lie dormant in them, he adds something to the part perceived by the senses and thereby turns a half-reality to its entirety. It is due to the nature of the soul that, at its first contact with things, it extinguishes something that belongs to them. For this reason, things appear to the senses not as they are in reality but as they are modified by the soul. Their delusive character (or their mere appearance) is caused by the fact that the soul has deprived them of something that really belongs to them.

Inasmuch as man does not merely observe things, he adds something to them in the process of knowledge that reveals their full reality. The mind does not add anything to things in the process of cognition that would have to be considered as an unreal element, but prior to the process of knowledge it has deprived these things of something that belongs to their true reality. It will be the task of philosophy to realize that the world accessible to man is an “illusion” before it is approached in the process of cognition. This process, however, leads the way toward a full understanding of reality. The knowledge that man creates during the process of cognition seems to be an inner manifestation of the soul only because he must, before the act of cognition, reject what comes from the nature of things. He cannot see at first the real nature of things when he encounters them in mere observation. In the process of knowledge he unveils what was first concealed. If he regards as a reality what he had at first perceived, he will now realize that he has added the results of his cognitive activity to reality. As soon as he recognizes that what was apparently produced by himself has to be sought in the things themselves, that he merely failed to see it previously, he will then find that the process of knowing is a real process by which the soul progressively unites with world reality. Through it, it expands its inner isolated experience to the experience of the world.

[ 7 ] In a short work, Truth and Science, published in 1892, the author of the present book made a first attempt to prove philosophically what has been briefly described. Perspectives are indicated in this book that are necessary to the philosophy of the present age if it is to overcome the obstacles it has encountered in its modern development. A philosophical point of view is outlined in this essay in the following words:

The initial form in which reality confronts the ego is not its true manifestation but the final form, which the ego fashions out of it, is. The first form is altogether without significance for the objective world; it is of importance only as a basis for the processes of cognition. Therefore, it is not the form of the world that is presented by theory that must be considered subjective but the one the ego encounters initially as in mere perception.

A further exposition of this point of view is given in the author's later philosophical work, Philosophy of Freedom (1894) (translated also with the title, Philosophy of Spiritual Activity). There an attempt is made to give the philosophical foundations for a conception that was outlined in Truth and Science.

It is not due to the objects that they are given to us at first without their corresponding concept, but to our mental organization. Our whole being functions in such a way that from every real thing the relevant elements come to us from two sources, from perceiving and from thinking. The way I am organized for apprehending the things has nothing to do with the nature of the things themselves. The gap between perceiving and thinking exists only from the moment that I, as a spectator, confront the things.

And later on it is stated:

The percept is that part of reality that is given objectively; the concept the part that is given subjectively, through intuition. Our mental organization tears the reality apart into these two factors. The one factor presents itself to perception, the other to intuition. Only the union of the two, that is, the percept fitting systematically into the universe, constitutes the full reality. If we take mere percepts by themselves we have no reality but rather disconnected chaos. If we take by itself the law and order connecting the percepts then we have nothing but abstract concepts. Reality is not contained in the abstract concept. It is, however, contained in thoughtful observation, which does not one-sidedly consider either concept or percept alone, but rather the union of the two.

[ 8 ] In accepting this point of view we shall be able to think of mental life and of reality as united in the self-conscious ego. This is the conception toward which philosophical development has tended since the Greek era and that has shown its first distinctly recognizable traces in the world conception of Goethe. The awareness arises that this self-conscious ego does not experience itself as isolated and divorced from the objective world, but its detachment from this world is experienced merely as an illusion of its consciousness. This isolation can be overcome if man gains the insight that at a certain stage of his development he must give a provisional form to his ego in order to suppress from his consciousness the forces that unite him with the world. If these forces exerted their influences in his consciousness without interruption, he would never have developed a strong, independent self-consciousness. He would be incapable of experiencing himself as a self-conscious ego. The development of self-consciousness, therefore, actually depends on the fact that the mind is given the opportunity to perceive the world without that part of reality that is extinguished by the self-conscious ego prior to an act of cognition.

The world forces belonging to this part of reality withdraw into obscurity in order to allow the self-conscious ego to shine forth in full power. The ego must realize that it owes its self-knowledge to a fact that spreads a veil over the knowledge of the world. It follows that everything that stimulates the soul to a vigorous, energetic experience of the ego, conceals at the same time the deeper foundations in which this ego has its roots. All knowledge acquired by the ordinary consciousness tends to strengthen the self-conscious ego. Man feels himself as a self-conscious ego through the fact that he perceives an external world with his senses, that he experiences himself as being outside this external world and that, at a certain stage of scientific investigation, he feels himself in relation to this external world in such a way that it appears to him as “illusion.” Were it not so, the self-conscious ego would not emerge. If, therefore, in the act of knowledge one attempts merely to copy what is observed before knowledge begins, one does not arrive at a true experience of full reality, but only at an image of a “half reality.”

[ 9 ] Once this is admitted to be the situation, one can no longer look for the answer of the riddles of philosophy within the experiences of the soul that appear on the level of ordinary consciousness. It is the function of this consciousness to strengthen the self-conscious ego. To achieve this it must cast a veil over the connection of the ego with the objective world, and it therefore cannot show how the soul is connected with the true world. This explains why a method of knowledge that applies the means of the natural scientific or similar modes of conception must always arrive at a point where its efforts break down. This failing of many modern thinkers has previously been pointed out in this book, for, in the final analysis, all scientific endeavor employs the same mode of thinking that serves to detach the self-conscious ego from the true reality. The strength and greatness of modern science, especially of natural science, is based on the unrestrained application of this method.

[ 10 ] Several philosophers such as Dilthey, Eucken and others, direct philosophical investigation toward the self-observation of the soul. But what they observe are those experiences of the soul that form the basis for the self-conscious ego. Thus, they do not penetrate to the sources in which the experiences of the soul originate. These sources cannot be found where the soul first observes itself on the level of ordinary consciousness. If the soul is to reach these sources, it must go beyond this ordinary consciousness. It must experience something in itself that ordinary consciousness cannot give to it. To ordinary thinking, such an experience appears at first like sheer nonsense. The soul is to experience itself knowingly in an element without carrying its consciousness into that element. One is to transcend consciousness and yet be conscious! But in spite of all this, we shall either continue to get nowhere, or we shall have to open new aspects that will reveal the above mentioned “absurdity” to be only apparently so since it really indicates the direction in which we must look for help to solve the riddles of philosophy.

[ 11 ] One will have to recognize that the path into the “inner region of the soul” must be entirely different from the one that is taken by many philosophies of modern times. [ 12 ] As long as soul experiences are taken the way they present themselves to ordinary consciousness, one will not reach down into the depths of the soul. One will be left merely with what these depths release. Such is the case with Eucken's world conception. It is necessary to penetrate below the surface of the soul. This is, however, not possible by means of the ordinary experiences. The strength of these rests precisely in the fact that they remain in the realm of the ordinary consciousness. The means to penetrate deeper into the soul can be found if one directs one's attention to something that is, to be sure, also at work in the ordinary consciousness, but does not enter it while it is active.

[ 13 ] While man thinks, his consciousness is focused on his thoughts. He wants to conceive something by means of these thoughts; he wants to think correctly in the ordinary sense. He can, however, also direct his attention to something else. He can concentrate his attention on the activity of thinking as such. He can, for instance, place into the center of his consciousness a thought that refers to nothing external, a thought that is conceived like a symbol that has no connection to something external. It is now possible to hold onto such a thought for a certain length of time. One can be entirely absorbed by the concentration on this thought. The important thing with this exercise is not that one lives in thoughts but that one experiences the activity of thinking. In this way, the soul breaks away from an activity in which it is engaged in ordinary thinking.

If such an inner exercise is continued long enough, it will become gradually apparent to the soul that it has now become involved in experiences that will separate it from all those processes of thinking and ideation that are bound to the physical organs. A similar result can be obtained from the activities of feeling and willing and even for sensation, the perception of external things. One can only be successful with this approach if one is not afraid to admit to oneself that self-knowledge cannot be gained by mere introspection, but by concentrating on the inner life that can be revealed only through these exercises. Through continued practice of the soul, that is, by holding the attention on the inner activity of thinking, feeling and willing, it is possible for these “experiences” to become “condensed.” In this state of “condensation” they reveal their inner nature, which cannot be perceived in the ordinary consciousness. [ 14 ] It is through such exercises that one discovers how our soul forces must be so “attenuated” or weakened in producing our ordinary form of consciousness, that they become imperceptible in this state of “attenuation.” The soul exercises referred to consist in the unlimited increase of faculties that are also known to the ordinary consciousness but never reach such a state of concentration. The faculties are those of attention and of loving surrender to the content of the soul's experience. To attain the indicated aim, these abilities must be increased to such a degree that they function as entirely new soul forces.

[ 15 ] If one proceeds in this manner, one arrives at a real inner experience that by its very nature is independent of bodily conditions. This is a life of the spirit that must not be confused with what Dilthey and Eucken call the spiritual world. For what they call the spiritual world is, after all, experienced by man when he depends on his physical organs. The spiritual life that is here referred to does not exist for a soul that is bound to the body.

One of the first experiences that follows the attainment of this new spiritual life is a true insight into the nature of the ordinary mental life. This is actually not produced by the body but proceeds outside the body. When I see a color, when I hear a sound, I experience the color and the sound not as a result of my body, but I am connected with the color, with the sound, as a self-conscious ego, outside my body. My body has the task to function in a way that can be compared with the action of a mirror. If, in my ordinary consciousness, I only have a mental connection with a color, I cannot perceive it because of the nature of this consciousness, just as I cannot see my own face when I look out into space. But if I look into a mirror, I perceive this face as part of a body. Unless I stand in front of the mirror, I am the body and experience myself as such. Standing in front of the mirror, I perceive my body as a reflection. It is like this also with our sense perceptions, although we must, of course, be aware of the insufficiency of the analogy. I live with a color outside my body; through the activity of my body, that is, my eye and my nervous system, this color is transformed for me into a conscious perception. The human body is not the producer of perceptions and of mental life in general, but a mirroring device of psychic and spiritual processes that take place outside the body.

[ 16 ] Such a view places the theory of knowledge on a promising basis. In a lecture called, The Psychological Foundations and Epistemological Position of Spiritual Science, delivered before the Philosophical Congress in Bologna on April 18, 1911, the author of this book gave the following account of a view that was then forming in his mind.

On the basis of epistemology one can reach a conception of the ego only if one does not think of it as being inside the bodily organization and as receiving impression “from outside.” One should conceive this “ego” as having its being within the general order (Gesetzmässigkeit) of the things themselves, and regard the organization of the body merely as a sort of mirror through which the organic processes of the body reflect back to the ego what this ego perceives outside the physical body as it lives and weaves within the true essence of the world.

[ 17 ] During sleep the mirror-like relation between body and soul is interrupted; the “ego” lives only in the sphere of the spirit. For the ordinary consciousness, however, mental life does not exist as long as the body does not reflect the experiences. Sleep, therefore, is an unconscious process. The exercises mentioned above and other similar ones establish a consciousness that differs from the ordinary consciousness. In this way, the faculty is developed not merely to have purely spiritual experiences, but to strengthen these experiences to such a degree that they become spiritually perceptible without the aid of the body, and that they become reflected within themselves. It is only in an experience of this kind that the soul can obtain true self-knowledge and become consciously aware of its own being. Real experiences that do not belong to the sense world, but to one in which the soul weaves and has its being, now rise in the manner in which memory brings back experiences of the past. It is quite natural that the followers of many modern philosophies will believe that the world that thus rises up belongs in the realms of error, illusion, hallucination, autosuggestion, etc. To this objection one can only answer that a serious spiritual endeavor, working in the indicated way, will discipline the mind to a point where it will clearly differentiate illusion from spiritual reality, just as a healthy mind can distinguish a product of fantasy from a concrete perception. It will be futile to seek theoretical proofs for this spiritual world, but such proofs also do not exist for the reality of the world of perceptions. In both cases, actual experience is the only true judge.

[ 18 ] What keeps many men from undertaking the step that, according to this view, can alone solve the riddles of philosophy, is the fear that they might be led thereby into a realm of unclear mysticism. Unless one has from the beginning an inclination toward unclear mysticism, one will, in following the described path, gain access to a world of spiritual experience that is as crystal clear as the structures of mathematical ideas. If one is, however, inclined to seek the spiritual in the “dark unknown,” in the “inexplicable,” one will get nowhere, either as an adherent or as an opponent of the views described here.

[ 19 ] One can easily understand why these views will be rejected by personalities who consider the methods used by natural science for obtaining knowledge of the sense world as the only true ones. But whoever overcomes such one-sidedness will be able to realize that the genuinely scientific way of thinking constitutes the real basis for the method that is here described. The ideas that have been shown in this book to be those of the modern scientific method, present the best subject matter for mental exercises in which the soul can immerse itself, and on which it can concentrate in order to free itself from its bondage to the body. Whoever uses these natural scientific ideas in the manner that has been outlined above, will find that the thoughts that first seem to be meant to depict only natural processes will really set the soul free from the body. Therefore, the spiritual science that is here referred to must be seen as a continuation of the scientific way of thinking provided it is inwardly experienced in the right way.

[ 20 ] The true nature of the human soul can be experienced directly if one seeks it in the characterized way. In the Greek era the development of the philosophical outlook led to the birth of thought. Later development led through the experience of thought to the experience of the self-conscious ego. Goethe strove for experiences of the self-conscious ego, which, although actively produced by the human soul, at the same time place this soul in the realm of a reality that is inaccessible to the senses. Goethe stands on this ground when he strives for an idea of the plant that cannot be perceived by the senses but that contains the supersensible nature of all plants, making it possible, with the aid of this idea, to invent new plants that would have their own life.

Hegel regarded the experience of thought as a “standing in the true essence of the world;” for him the world of thoughts became the inner essence of the world. An unbiased observation of philosophical development shows that thought experience was, to be sure, the element through which the self-conscious ego was to be placed on its own foundation. But it shows also that it is necessary to go beyond a life in mere thoughts in order to arrive at a form of inner experience that leads beyond the ordinary consciousness. For Hegel's thought experience still takes place within the field of this ordinary consciousness.

[ 21 ] In this way, a view of a reality is opened up for the soul that is inaccessible to the senses. What is experienced in the soul through the penetration into this reality, appears as the true entity of the soul. How is it related to the external world that is experienced by means of the body? The soul that has been thus freed from its body feels itself to be weaving in an element of soul and spirit. It knows that also in its ordinary life it is outside that body, which merely acts like a mirror in making its experiences perceptible. Through this experience the soul's spiritual experience is heightened to a point where the reality of a new element is revealed to the soul.

To Dilthey and Eucken the spiritual world is the sum total of the cultural experiences of humanity. If this world is seen as the only accessible spiritual world, one does not stand on a ground firm enough to be comparable to the method of natural science. For the conception of natural science, the world is so ordered that the physical human being in his individual existence appears as a unit toward which all other natural processes and beings point. The cultural world is what is created by this human being. That world, however, is not an individual entity of a higher nature than the individuality of the human being.

The spiritual science that the author of this book has in mind points to a form of experience that the soul can have independent from the body, and in this experience an individual entity is revealed. It emerges like a higher human nature for whom the physical man is like a tool. The being that feels itself as set free, through spiritual experience, from the physical body, is a spiritual human entity that is as much at home in a spiritual world as the physical body in the physical world. As the soul thus experiences its spiritual nature, it is also aware of the fact that it stands in a certain relation to the body. The body appears, on the one hand, as a cast of the spiritual entity; it can be compared to the shell of a snail that is like a counter-picture of the shape of the snail. On the other hand, the spirit-soul entity appears in the body like the sum total of the forces in the plant, which, after it has grown into leaf and blossom, contract into the seed in order to prepare a new plant. One cannot experience the inner spiritual man without knowing that he contains something that will develop into a new physical man. This new human being, while living within the physical organism, has collected forces through experience that could not unfold as long as they were encased in that organism. This body has, to be sure, enabled the soul to have experiences in connection with the external world that make the inner spiritual man different from what he was before he began life in the physical body. But this body is, as it were, too rigidly organized for being transformed by the inner spiritual man according to the pattern of the new experiences. Thus there remains hidden in the human shell a spiritual being that contains the disposition of a new man.

[ 22 ] Thoughts such as these can only be briefly indicated here. They point to a spiritual science that is essentially constructed after the model of natural science. In elaborating this spiritual science one will have to proceed more or less like the botanist when he observes a plant, the formation of its root, the growth of its stem and its leaves, and its development into blossom and fruit. In the fruit he discovers the seed of the new plant-life. As he follows the development of a plant he looks for its origin in the seed formed by the previous plant. The investigator of spiritual science will trace the process in which a human life, apart from its external manifestation, develops also an inner being. He will find that external experiences die off like the leaves and the flowers of a plant. Within the inner being, however, he will discover a spiritual kernel, which conceals within itself the potentiality of a new life. In the infant entering life through birth he will see the return of a soul that left the world previously through the gate of death. He will learn to observe that what is handed down by heredity to the individual man from his ancestors is merely the material that is worked upon by the spiritual man in order to bring into physical existence what has been prepared seedlike in a preceding life.

[ 23 ] Seen from the viewpoint of this world conception, many facts of psychology will appear in a new light. A great number of examples could be mentioned here; it will suffice to point out only one. One can observe how the human soul is transformed by experiences that represent, in a certain sense, repetitions of earlier experiences. If somebody has read an important book in his twentieth year and reads it again in his fortieth, he experiences it as if he were a different person. If he asks without bias for the reason for this fact, he will find that what he learned from his reading twenty years previous has continued to live in -him and has become a part of his nature. He has within him the forces that live in the book, and he finds them again when he rereads the book at the age of forty. The same holds true with our life experiences. They become part of man himself. They live in his “ego.” But it is also apparent that within the limits of one life this inner strengthening of the higher man must remain in the realm of his spirit and soul nature. Yet one can also find that this higher human being strives to become strong enough to find expression in his physical nature. The rigidity of the body prevents this from happening within a single life span. But in the central core of man there lives the potential predisposition that, together with the fruits of one life, will form a new human life in the same way that the seed of a new plant lives in the plant.

[ 24 ] Moreover, it must be realized that following the entry of the soul into an independent spirit world the results of this world are raised into consciousness in the same way that the past rises into memory. But these realities are seen as extending beyond the span of an individual life. The content of my present consciousness represents the results of my earlier physical experiences; so, too, a soul that has gone through the indicated exercises faces the whole of its physical experience and the particular configuration of its body as originating from the spirit-soul nature, whose existence preceded that of the body. This existence appears as a life in a purely spiritual world in which the soul lived before it could develop the germinal capacities of a preceding life into a new one. Only by closing one's mind to the obvious possibility that the faculties of the human soul are capable of development can one refuse to recognize the truthfulness of a person's testimony that shows that as a result of inner work one can really know of a spiritual world beyond the realm of ordinary consciousness. This knowledge leads to a spiritual apprehension of a world through which it becomes evident that the true being of the soul lies behind ordinary experiences. It also becomes clear that this soul being survives death just as the plant seed survives the decay of the plant. The insight is gained that the human soul goes through repeated lives on earth and that in between these earthly lives it leads a purely spiritual existence.

[ 25 ] This point of view brings reality to the assumption of a spiritual world. The human souls themselves carry into a later cultural epoch what they acquired in a former. One can readily observe how the inner dispositions of the soul develop if one refrains from arbitrarily ascribing this development merely to the laws of physical heredity. In the spiritual world of which Eucken and Dilthey speak the later phases of development always follow from the immediately preceding ones. Into this sequence of events are placed human souls who bring with them the results of their preceding lives in the form of their inner soul disposition. They must, however, acquire in a process of learning what developed in the earthly world of culture and civilization while they were in a purely spiritual state of existence.

[ 26 ] A historical account cannot do full justice to the thoughts exposed here. I would refer anyone who seeks more information to my writings on spiritual science. These writings attempted to give, in a general manner, the world conception that is outlined in the present book. Even so, I believe that it is possible to recognize from it that this world conception rests on a serious philosophical foundation. On this basis it strives to gain access to a world that opens up to sense-free observation acquired by inner work.

[ 27 ] One of the teachers of this world conception is the history of philosophy itself. It shows that the course of philosophical thought tends toward a conception that cannot be acquired in a state of ordinary consciousness. The accounts of many representative thinkers show how they attempt in various ways to comprehend the self-conscious ego with the help of the ordinary consciousness. A theoretical exposition of why the means of this ordinary consciousness must lead to unsatisfactory results does not belong to a historical account. But the historical facts show distinctly that the ordinary consciousness, however we may look at it, cannot solve the questions it nevertheless must raise. This final chapter was written to show why the ordinary consciousness and the usual scientific mind lack the means to solve such questions. This chapter was meant to describe what the characterized world conceptions were unconsciously striving for. From one certain point of view this last chapter no longer belongs to the history of philosophy, but from another point of view, its justification is quite clear. The message of this book is that a world conception based on spiritual science is virtually demanded by the development of modern philosophy as an answer to the questions it raises.

To become aware of this one must consider specific instances of this philosophical development. Franz Brentano in his Psychology points out how philosophy was deflected from the treatment of the deeper riddles of the soul (compare page of this volume). He writes, “Apparent as the necessity for a restriction of the field of investigation is in this direction, it is perhaps no more than only apparent.” David Hume was most emphatically opposed to the metaphysicists who maintained that they had found within themselves a carrier for all psychic conditions. He says:

For my part, when I enter most intimately into what I call myself, I always stumble on some particular perception or other, of heat or cold, light or shade, love or hatred, pain or pleasure. I can never catch myself at any time without a perception and never can observe anything but perceptions. When my perceptions are removed for any time, as by sound sleep, so long am I insensible of myself and may truly be said not to exist. (Treatise of Human Nature, Part IV, Sect. 6.)

Hume only knows the kind of psychological observation that would approach the soul without any inner effort. An observation of this kind simply cannot penetrate to the nature of the soul. Brentano takes up Hume's statement and says, “This same man, Hume, nevertheless, observes that all proofs for the immortality of the soul possess the same power of persuasion as the opposing traditional views.” But here we must add that only faith, and not knowledge, can support Hume's view that the soul contains nothing more than what he finds there. For how could any continuity be guaranteed for what Hume finds as the content of the soul? Brentano continues by saying:

Although it is obvious that a denial of a soul substance eliminates the possibility to speak of an immortality in the proper sense of the word, it is still not true that the question of immortality loses all meaning if a supporting substance for psychic activity is denied.

This becomes immediately evident if one considers that, with or without supporting substance, one cannot deny that our psychic life here on earth has a certain continuity. If one rejects the idea of a soul substance, one has the right to assume that this continuity does not depend on a supporting substance. The question as to whether our psychic life would continue after the destruction of our body will be no less meaningful for such a thinker than it is for others. It is really quite inconsistent if thinkers of this school reject the essential question of immortality as meaningless also in this important sense on the basis of the above-mentioned reason. It should then, however, be referred to as the immortality of life rather than that of the soul. (Brentano, Psychology from the Empirical Standpoint, Bk. I, Chap. 1.)

This opinion of Brentano's, however, is without support if the world conception outlined above is rejected. For where can we find grounds for the survival of psychic phenomena after the dissolution of the body if we want to restrict ourselves to the ordinary consciousness? This consciousness can only last as long as its reflector, the physical body, exists. What may survive the loss of the body cannot be designated as substance; it must be another form of consciousness. But this other consciousness can be discovered only through the inner activity that frees the soul from the body. This shows us that the soul can experience consciousness even without the mediation of the body. Through such activity and with the help of supersensible perception, the soul will experience the condition of the complete loss of the body. It finds that it had been the body, itself, that obscured that higher consciousness. While the soul is incarnated, the body has such a strong effect on the soul that this other consciousness cannot become active. This becomes a matter of direct experience when the soul exercises indicated in this chapter are successfully carried out. The soul must then consciously suppress the forces that originate in the body and extinguish the body-free consciousness. This extinction can no longer take place after the dissolution of the body. It is the other consciousness, therefore, that passes through successive lives and through the purely spiritual existence between death and birth. From this point of view, there is reference to a nebulous soul substance. In terms that are comparable to ideas of natural science, the soul is shown how it continues its existence because in one life the seed of the next is prepared, as the seed is prepared in the plant. The present life is shown as the reason for a future life, and the true essence of what continues when death dissolves the body is brought to light.

[ 28 ] Spiritual science as described here nowhere contradicts the methods of modern natural science. But science has to admit that with its methods one cannot gain insight into the realm of the spiritual. As soon as the existence of a consciousness other than the ordinary one is recognized, one will find that by it one is led to conceptions concerning the spiritual world that will give to it a cohesion similar to that that natural science gives to the physical world.

[ 29 ] It will be of importance to eliminate the impression that this spiritual science has borrowed its insights from any older form of religion. One is easily misled to this view because the conception of reincarnation, for instance, is a tenet of certain creeds. For the modern investigator of spiritual science, there can be no borrowing from such creeds. He finds that the devotion to the exercises described above will lead to a consciousness that enters the spiritual world. As a result of this consciousness he learns that the soul has its standing in the spiritual world in the way previously described.

A study of the history of philosophy, beginning with the awakening of thought in Greek civilization, indicates the way that leads to the conviction that the true being of the soul can be found below the surface of ordinary experience. Thinking has proved to be the educator of the soul by leading it to the point at which it is alone with itself. This experience of solitude strengthens the soul whereby it is able to delve not only into its own being but also to reach into the deeper realities of the world. The spiritual science described in this chapter does not attempt to lead behind the world of the senses by using the means of ordinary consciousness, such as reflection and theorizing. It recognizes that the spiritual world must remain concealed from that consciousness and that the soul must, through its own inner transformation, rise into the supersensible world before it can become conscious of it.

[ 30 ] In this way, the insight is also gained that the origin of moral impulses lies in the world that the soul perceives when it is free of the body. From there also the driving forces originate that do not stem from the physical nature of man but are meant to determine his actions independent from this nature.

[ 31 ] When one becomes acquainted with the fact that the “ego” with its spiritual world lives outside the body and that it, therefore, carries the experiences of the external world to the physical body, one will find one's way to a truly spiritual understanding of the riddle of human destiny. A man's inner life is deeply connected with his experiences of destiny. Just consider the state of a man at the age of thirty. The real content of his inner being would be entirely different if he had lived a different kind of life in his preceding years. His “ego” is inconceivable without the experiences of these years. Even if they have struck him serious blows of fate, he has become what he is through them. They belong to the forces that are active in his “ego.” They do not merely strike him from outside. As man lives in his soul and spirit with color that is perceptible only by means of its mirror-effect of the body, so he lives in union with his destiny. With color he is united in his soul life, but he can only perceive it when the body reflects it. Similarly, he becomes one with the effect of a stroke of destiny that results from a previous earth life, but he experiences this blow only inasmuch as the soul plunges unconsciously into events that spring from these causes. In his ordinary consciousness man does not know that his will is bound up with his destiny. In his newly acquired body-free consciousness he finds that he would be deprived of all initiative if that part of his soul that lives in the spiritual world had not willed its entire fate, down to the smallest details. We see that the riddles of human destiny cannot be solved merely by theorizing about them, but only by learning to understand how the soul grows together with its fate in an experience that proceeds beyond the ordinary consciousness. Thus, one will gradually realize that the causes for this or that stroke of destiny in the present life must be sought in a previous one. To the ordinary consciousness our fate does not appear in its true form. It takes its course as a result of previous earthly lives, which are hidden from ordinary consciousness. To realize one's deep connection with the events of former lives means at the same time that one becomes reconciled with one's destiny.

[ 32 ] For a fuller coverage of the philosophical riddles like these, the author must refer to his other works on spiritual science. We can only mention the more important results of this science but not the specific ways and means by which it can become convincing.

[ 33 ] Philosophy leads by its own paths to the insight that it must pass from a study of the world to an experience of it, because mere reflection cannot bring a satisfactory solution to all the riddles of life. This method of cognition is comparable to the seed of a plant. The seed can work in a twofold way when it becomes ripe. It can be used as human food or as seed for a new plant. If it is examined with respect to its usefulness, it must be looked at in a way different from the observation that follows the cycle of reproducing a new plant.

Similarly, man's spiritual experiences can choose either of two roads. On the one hand, it serves the contemplation of the external world. Examined from this point of view, one will be inclined to develop a world conception that asks above all things: How does our knowledge penetrate to the nature of things? What knowledge can we derive from a study of the nature of things? To ask these questions is like investigating the nutritional value of the seed. But it is also possible to focus attention on the experiences of the soul that are not diverted by outside impressions, but lead the soul from one level of being on to another. These experiences are seen as an implanted driving force in which one recognizes a higher man who uses this life to prepare for the next. One arrives at the insight that this is the fundamental impulse of all human soul experience and that knowledge is related to it as the use of the seed of the plant for food is comparable to the development of the grain into a new plant. If we fail to understand this fact, we shall live under the illusion that we could discover the nature of knowledge by merely observing the soul's experiences. This procedure is as erroneous as it is to make only a chemical analysis of the seed with respect to its food value and to pretend that this represents its real essence. Spiritual science, as it is meant here, tries to avoid this error by revealing the inner nature of the soul's experience and by showing that it can also serve the process of knowledge, although its true nature does not consist in this contemplative knowledge.

[ 34 ] The “body-free soul consciousness” here described must not be confused with those enhanced mental conditions that are not acquired by means of the characterized exercises but result from states of lower consciousness such as unclear clairvoyance, hypnotism, etc. In these conditions no body-free consciousness can be attained but only an abnormal connection between body and soul that differs from that of the ordinary life. Real spiritual science can be gained only when the soul finds, in the course of its own disciplined meditative work, the transition from the ordinary consciousness to one with which it awakens in and becomes directly aware of the spiritual world. This inner work consists in a heightening, not a lowering of the ordinary consciousness.

[ 35 ] Through such inner work the human soul can actually attain what philosophy aims for. The latter should not be underestimated because it has not attained its objective on the paths that are usually followed by it. Far more important than the philosophical results are the forces of the soul that can be developed in the course of philosophical work. These forces must eventually lead to the point where it becomes possible to recognize a “body-free soul experience.” Philosophers will then recognize that the “world riddles” must not merely be considered scientifically but need to be experienced by the human soul. But the soul must first attain to the condition in which such an experience is possible.

[ 36 ] This brings up an obvious question. Should ordinary knowledge and scientific knowledge deny its own nature and recognize as a world conception only what is offered from a realm lying outside its own domain? As it is, the experiences of the characterized consciousness are convincing at once also to this ordinary consciousness as long as the latter does not insist upon locking itself up within its own walls. The supersensible truths can be found only by a soul that enters into the supersensible. Once they are found, however, they can be fully understood by the ordinary consciousness. For they are in complete and necessary agreement with the knowledge that can be gained for the world of the senses.

[ 37 ] It cannot be denied that, in the course of the history of philosophy, viewpoints have repeatedly been advanced that are similar to those described in this final chapter. But in former ages these tendencies appeared only like byways of the philosophical inquiry. Its first task was to work its way through everything that could be regarded as a continuation of the awakening thought experience of the Greeks. It then could point the way toward supersensible consciousness on the strength of its own initiative and in awareness of what it can and what it cannot attain. In former times this consciousness was accepted, as it were, without philosophical justification. It was not demanded by philosophy itself. But modern philosophy demands it in response to what it has achieved already without the assistance of this consciousness. Without this help it has succeeded in leading the spiritual investigation into directions that will, if rightly developed, lead to the recognition of supersensible consciousness. That is why this final chapter did not start by describing the way in which the soul speaks of the supersensible when it stands within its realm. Quite to the contrary, an attempt was made to outline philosophically the tendencies resulting from the modern world conceptions, and it was shown how a pursuit of these innate tendencies leads the soul to the recognition of its own supersensible nature.

Rudolf Steiner: Good morning, gentlemen! Has an interesting question occurred to someone?

Question: Sir, in reference to anthroposophy: what is it actually? What is its aim and its task in the world?

Dr. Steiner: The questioner wants to know what anthroposophy is and what its significance is for humanity in general. I think he means its significance also for the working class.

It is obviously difficult to speak briefly about these matters. Those who have been here for a considerable time will have become more and more convinced that anthroposophy is something that had to enter the evolution of humanity. Those who have not been here long will naturally have some difficulty and only gradually be able to understand.

First and foremost, we must realize that people are little inclined to accept something new when it comes into the world. Remarkable examples could be given of how new scientific discoveries have been received. Think, for instance, of the extent to which everything today has been affected by the discovery of the power of steam and the invention of the steam engine. Think what the world would be like today if there were no steam engines in their many different forms! When the steam engine was first invented, a small boat, driven by steam, made its way up a river and was smashed up by the peasants because they said they were not going to put up with such a thing; it was such a silly, useless thing! Nor has it always been the peasants who behaved in that way. When an account of meteorites was given for the first time in a learned assembly in Paris, the lecturer was declared to be a fool. And I told you recently about Julius Robert Mayer, who is regarded today as a most illustrious man and a very great scholar: he was shut up in an asylum!

The fate of the railroads has been particularly remarkable. As you know, they have not been in existence very long; they came into use for the first time in the 19th century. Before that, people had to travel by stagecoach. When it was proposed to build the first railroad between Berlin and Potsdam, the Director of Mallcoaches³³ said that two went empty from Berlin to Potsdam every week, so he couldn't imagine what use railroads would be. It didn't occur to him that once the railroads were there, more people would travel by them than by the stagecoach.

Even more interesting was the attitude of a body of medical men,³⁴ in the forties of the 19th century. When the railroad from Furth to Nuremberg was being built, these learned gentlemen declared that the work should be stopped, because the speed could very easily make a traveler ill by damaging his nerves. When the people refused to accept this ban, they were told that high plank walls must be erected on both sides of the tracks, in order to save the peasants from concussion of the brain when the trains passed! You can still read about this in delightful old documents. But despite all this opposition, the railroads made rapid headway. And anthroposophy, too, will make its way in the world, simply because it is a necessity, because nothing in the world can really be understood unless the spiritual foundation of things is recognized and known.

Anthroposophy has not come for the purpose of opposing natural science: it has come just because natural science is there. But science with its elaborate instruments and remarkably clever experiments has discovered a mass of facts which—in the way it presents them—cannot really be understood. Nor will they ever be understood until it is realized that the spiritual world is behind everything and within everything.

Let us take a very ordinary, practical matter: the eating of potatoes. Once upon a time there were no potatoes in Europe; they were introduced into Europe from foreign countries. It is maintained that Sir Francis Drake³⁵ introduced potatoes, but that is not correct; they were introduced from a different source. Yet in Offenburg there is a memorial statue of Drake. During the war we were once obliged to stop at Offenburg, and I was curious to find out why this statue had been erected. I looked in the encyclopedia and there it was: A memorial statue of Drake stands in Offenburg because he was the man who first brought potatoes to Europe.

But now what about potatoes? Suppose a scientist or a doctor were asked to say what effect potatoes have when they are eaten. As you know, potatoes have become a staple. In some places it is very difficult to dissuade the people from feeding almost exclusively on them. What does the modern scientist do when he tests potatoes for their nutritional value? He makes a laboratory investigation to find what substances are contained in the potato. He finds carbohydrates, which consist of carbon, oxygen, and hydrogen in definite proportions; he also discovers that in the human body these substances are finally transformed into a kind of sugar. But he gets no further than that; nor can he do so. For think of this: if some animal is fed on milk, it may thrive. But if the milk is analyzed for its chemical components and if these chemical components are given to the animal instead of the milk, it will waste away for lack of nourishment. Why is that? It is because something is working in the milk in addition to the chemical components. And in the potato, too, there is something more than the mere chemical components: namely, the spiritual element. A spiritual element works everywhere, in all of nature.

If in spiritual science (anthroposophy is, after all, only a name) genuine investigation is made into how the potato nourishes the human being, the potato is found to be something that is not completely digested by the digestive organs, but it passes into the head through the lymph glands, through the blood, in such a way that the head itself must also serve as a digestive organ for the potato. When potatoes are eaten in large quantities, the head becomes a kind of stomach and also digests.

There is a very great difference between eating potatoes and, for instance, good, wholesome bread. When wholesome bread is eaten, the material part of the rye or wheat is digested properly and healthily in the digestive tract. And consequently only what is spiritual in the rye or wheat comes into the head, where it belongs.

This kind of knowledge can never be derived from natural science. When things are genuinely investigated with respect to their spiritual quality, it becomes apparent that in this modern age humanity has been seriously injured by the excessive consumption of potatoes. Spiritual science finds that the eating of potatoes has played a very large part in the general deterioration of health in recent centuries. That is a crude example of how spiritual science can investigate the excellent results of natural science by taking them as the basis for its research.

But there is something else as well. Every substance in the world can be examined to determine its spiritual quality. That is the only way in which real remedies for illnesses can be discovered. So spiritual science provides a very definite foundation for medicine as well.

Spiritual science is only an extension of natural science; it is by no means something that refutes natural science. And besides that, we have in spiritual science something that investigates the spiritual in a scientific way and therefore does not ask people simply to believe things that are said. Matters of faith are thus replaced by scientific inquiry.

It must also be said that in all provinces science acquires a certain amount of knowledge. Humanity cannot, of course, concern itself with scientific details, but every individual ought at least to know something about the essential things in the world.

I'd like to tell you something that will show you how important it is to be able to recognize how the spirit actually works. In the year 1773, a rumor suddenly spread in Paris that a distinguished scholar³⁶ was to give a lecture in a certain learned Society, in which he would prove that a comet was about to collide with the earth and destroy it. In those days it was believed that such a thing could be proven exactly and scientifically. So at that time, in the 18th century, when superstition was still rife, a terrible panic spread through the whole of Paris. If we read the records of what happened in Paris at that time, we find that there were enormous numbers of miscarriages: the women gave birth prematurely out of sheer terror. People who were seriously ill, died; others became ill because of fright. There was terrific agitation throughout Paris because it became known that a learned man would announce in a lecture the coming collision of a comet with the earth and the consequent destruction of the earth. The police—who, as you know, are ever on the alert—forbade the lecture, so the people never discovered what the professor had intended to say. But there was anxiety nevertheless! You may now ask: Was the professor who wanted to give the lecture right or wrong?

Well, the matter is not quite so simple as that. For since Copernicus propounded his new theory of the universe, everything has become a matter of calculation, and the calculations at that time led to the following conclusion: The sun is taken to be the center of the universe; then come Mercury, Venus, Moon, Earth, and Mars, then the planetoids, then Jupiter, then Saturn. And now the comets and their orbits. And now think of it: the earth is circling and men can calculate when it will reach a certain point where the comet will be approaching it. Bang!—according to the calculations-they will collide. And at that time, gentlemen, they would actually have collided—only the comet was so small that it dissolved in the air! Not exactly in the air over Paris, but somewhere else. The calculation was therefore quite correct, but there was no ground for anxiety.

In the year 1832 there was an even stranger story. For then it was calculated that a comet—it was the Biela comet—was about to cross the earth's orbit and would pass quite near to the earth. This comet was not such a midget as the other, and was likely to be more dangerous. But the calculation turned out happily, for it showed that when the comet would be passing the earth it would still be 13,000,000 miles away—and that's at least a tiny bit away, don't you think? So there was no need to fear that the earth would be demolished. But even so, the people were very alarmed at the time, because heavenly bodies are mutually attracted to each other, and it had to be expected that the comet would cause great convulsions in the oceans and seas through the force of gravity, and so on. Nothing very special happened-there was, it is true, a general unrest in nature, but nothing of particular interest. The comet was 13,000,000 miles away—the sun is thirteen times farther away—so no harm was done to the earth at that time.

In 1872, when I was a boy living with my parents at a small railroad station, we were always reading in the papers: “The world is going to be destroyed!”—for the comet was due to appear again. Certain comets always do return, and this one, on its return, would now be nearer to the earth and therefore more dangerous. This remarkable comet had already come in 1845/46 and again in 1852—but it had then split in two! Each half had become more rarefied in consequence of the split. And what was there to be seen in 1872? Something like a gleaming rain of shooting stars, a great number of shooting stars! The comet had indeed come nearer but it had split and was throwing off rarefied matter that came down like shining rain. Everyone could see it, for when such a tremendous array of shooting stars occurs in the night, they can be seen coming down from the sky. And some people who saw this happening believed that the Day of judgment had come. Again there was great alarm. However, the shooting stars dissolved in the atmosphere.

Now think of this: If the comet had remained whole, our earth would have suffered badly in the year 1872. As I said, papers reached our station announcing the imminent destruction of the earth. The astronomers had calculated the time. According to scientific reckoning this was quite correct. And it really would not do to put on record how many people at that time paid large fees to their priests—to be safely absolved from their sins. In 1773 too, in Paris, the father-confessors had made a great deal of money because the people wanted to be absolved from their sins immediately!

There was an astronomer called Littrow³⁷ who made a noteworthy calculation about what would have happened if things had remained as they were in the year 1832, that is, if the comet had not split up as it subsequently did. In the 19th century it was still thirteen million miles away from the earth, but every time it came it came closer. Littrow reckoned quite correctly that in September 1872 there would be the danger of the comet colliding with the earth. If the comet had then reached the point which as a matter of fact it did not actually reach in that year until November 27th, it would not just have been a matter of meteor showers but it would have been a serious matter. Such things do indeed happen. Littrow calculated that in 1933 (we are now in 1924), if the comet had remained as it still was in the 18th century, a collision would be inevitable and the earth would be demolished. The calculation was correct to the breadth of a hair. But the comet had not remained as it was! And so already at that time people could say: The comet has been merciful, for if it were still fiery, in 1933 it would be striking the earth in such a way that all the seas would surge from the equator to the North Pole and the whole earth would perish. Yes, the comet split up and it threw off the substance that had become too heavy for it, in the form of meteor stones that are not harmful.

So you see, we are living at a time when we can say: If that comet had not been merciful, none of us would be sitting here today! That is a fact. What has finally happened is this: The comet no longer appears as a comet, but on those dates when in the ordinary course of events it would have appeared, there are always showers of meteors. Gradually through the centuries it is throwing off its entire substance. Soon it will no longer be visible because it will have given up its substance to the universe and to the earth.

But now I want to show you the other side of this matter. It is obvious that in the process of human evolution man's spiritual faculties are constantly changing. Those who do not believe this simply do not understand the spiritual evolution of mankind. For think of it: All our modern discoveries would have been made long ago if men had possessed the same spiritual faculties that they possess today. In ancient times their spiritual faculties were not less, but they were different. I have explained this to you in the most various ways, also in answer to questions on the subject.

And now to return to the comets. The comet of which I've been speaking is not the only one that was merciful enough to split up and dissolve in cosmic space at the right time. There is a large number of other comets that have done the same. A great deal of superstition has always been connected with the subject of comets. Anthroposophy approaches the matter in an absolutely scientific way.

But now, what will happen if we go on developing in the same direction as we are developing today? Mankind is now so dreadfully clever! Just compare a man of today with all his cleverness, with all that he has learnt in school, with someone living in the 12th or 13th century, when very, very few people could write. Think of this: there is a beautiful poem by Wolfram von Eschenbach,³⁸ who was a nobleman of the 13th century. He composed the poem, but he could not write, so he was obliged to call in a priest to whom he dictated it. And that poem was the “Parzival” from which Wagner composed his opera. So you see, in those days people had different faculties. We need to go no further back than the 12th or 13th century. At that time a nobleman could not write. Wolfram von Eschenbach could read but not write.

These faculties of ours do not come to us ready-made; they are developed. And if we continue our present way of living, when between the ages of seven and fourteen we are crammed with scientific knowledge of every kind – there is, of course, a good side to this as well—we'll gradually all suffer from something that was previously quite unknown and that is now so prevalent. We'll all suffer from what you call “nerves”, from nervous illnesses. This shows you that those wise doctors in the forties of the last century who believed so “stupidly” that people would not be able to live if railroads were built, were—from the knowledge they had—not so stupid after all! For everything they knew at that time convinced them that if a man travels in trains, he will eventually become utterly incapable of work, lose his memory, exhaust his nerves and become shaky and abnormally restless. The science of their day justified them in their conviction. Moreover, what they said was correct, absolutely correct.

But there is one thing they left out of account. People have indeed become more nervous. You yourselves, when you get home from work, are not quite like the people of the thirties and forties of the last century who would simply put on their nightcaps in the evening and be snug and cozy without any trace of “nerves”. The world has certainly changed in this respect. But what was it that those Nuremberg doctors could not know at that time? They could not know that while they were learning all these things from their science, the comet was already in the process of dissolving. And what has the comet done? It gives us the meteors, the fine meteor rain. Instead of colliding with the earth and breaking people's heads it is giving all its substance away, and this substance, every piece of it, is in the earth. Every few years the comet gives something to the earth. And people who want to live by science alone and who will not admit that the earth receives something from the cosmos are every bit as stupid as someone who would say that when a person eats a piece of bread, it is not in him. Obviously, what the comet gives us is in the earth, but science takes no notice of it. Where, then, is it to be found? It goes into the air, is passed from the air into the water, from the water into the roots of the plants, from the roots of the plant into the food on our tables. From there it passes into our bodies. We eat what the comet has been giving us for centuries! This, however, has long been spiritualized. Instead of the comet putting an end to the earth in 1933, its substance has long been in the earth as a means of earthly nourishment, and it is a remedy, a cosmic remedy: it alleviates nervous troubles in human beings.

There, you see, you have a little piece of history. The comets appear out there in the heavens, and after a time they find their way into us out of the earth. By that time their substance has become spiritualized.

Such things play a real part in human life. History can no longer be presented as it is still being presented by those who want to be philistines; account must now be taken of what is going on in the world spiritually. That is possible only when light is shed upon the world through anthroposophy. You may say: Oh, well, life will go on just the same. All that comet business shows that it doesn't matter if we're stupid, and there is no need for us to bother about it! Although people want to be enlightened, in practice they are dreadfully fatalistic, thinking that everything in the world will go on “as it is meant to.” Well, perhaps—but there is also the opportunity either to take up a true science or to ignore it.

You recall, gentlemen, that for years I gave lectures to workers.³⁹ And I often called attention to a splendid lecture given by Lassalle⁴⁰ in 1863 entitled “Science and the Worker”. I don't know whether there is still any widespread knowledge of it, but in the meantime I've grown older and I've witnessed the rise of the labor movement. From my parents' house in the early seventies of the last century I could look out the window and watch the first Social Democrats—they still wore big hats, “democratic hats”—marching out into the woods where they held their meetings. So I've seen all stages in the development of the movement. At that time Lassalle was still greatly venerated; wherever workers' meetings took place, busts of him were displayed. Today these things have been more or less forgotten, for fifty years have elapsed since then. I was ten or eleven years old at the time, but I was already paying attention to what was happening. Lassalle had given this lecture, Science and the Worker, about eight or nine years earlier. In it he had stressed that science is absolutely crucial for the solution of the whole labor problem and that out of science the workers have developed a social outlook that has occurred to no one else. In a certain sense this was an extremely important thing that he said.

But now think what has happened since that time. I ask you: Are you satisfied? Can you be satisfied with the way the labor problem has developed, with the form it has taken? Are there not many widespread complaints about the way the workers are tyrannized by their labor unions and so forth? These things are in the air and the worker is aware of them. But what he does not perceive is where these conditions come from. Where do they come from? The answer is that in very fact the solution of the labor problem cannot be found without science. Formerly, these problems were solved through religion and the like; today they must be dealt with by means of science. But this requires genuinely scientific thinking—which was nowhere to be found because attention was invariably riveted upon matter, and science itself was sheer materialism. Nothing that is contained in our social problems will ever be solved until science becomes spiritual again.

This can happen only when science is prepared to look for the spiritual element in every single thing—whether it be a potato or a comet. For spiritual knowledge alone enables us to investigate the true connections of things. The true connections of social problems, too, can only be discovered through spiritual knowledge. These connections must be fully understood; and when they are, it will be found that the things which have been brought into prominence through Marxism, for example, were extremely well-meant, but they were based upon an erroneous science. I will show you in what respect this was the case. Nothing that is based on an erroneous science can really prosper.

Marx's arguments and calculations are uncommonly astute, uncommonly clever, and cannot be denied, because the principles upon which he bases them are from a science that is purely materialistic. Everything tallies, just as it tallied for the astronomers who calculated that the comet would collide with the earth in 1773, but then actually the comet had dissolved to such an extent that no harm was done to the earth! (This was the earlier, not the later comet.) The conclusions reached by Marx are based upon an equally meticulous but equally incomplete science.

One of his calculations was the following. He said: When a man is working, he uses up inner forces. The forces are given up to his work and in the evening he is fatigued. During the day he has used up a definite quantity of force or energy. Naturally, the worker needs something that enables his forces to be restored. It can be calculated with exactitude how much pay will make it possible for the worker to restore his forces. Yes, but along these lines expounded by Marx, does one really get at the right and proper wage for labor? The question is: Does one get at it in that way? Obviously, up to now no great progress has been made in this direction, but the fact is that it simply cannot be got at in that way—because although the science itself is admirable, it is untrue.

Think of someone who does no work the whole day long, someone who has private wealth. He can go for walks, or he can move from one armchair to another—and from morning till night he's using up his forces just the same. I've noticed at workers' concerts that those who had been working all day were much less fatigued than the well-to-do people who had done nothing at all. The latter kept yawning, while the others were bright and lively.

You see, there is an error in the calculation. The forces used up inwardly in our organism are not the ones we use in our outer work or labor. That is why the calculation cannot be based on scientific foundations. The whole matter must be approached in a different way; it must be based upon the intrinsic dignity of man, upon his rights as a human being, and so forth. The same applies in many other spheres. And the consequence is that science, as it has presented itself up to the present day, is responsible for dreadful confusion of thought, for ignorance in the social field.

Spiritual science will show you what nutritive value there is in potatoes, in cabbage, in salt, and so on. And then you can get at what the human being needs in order to be healthy and to thrive. You can only get at this through spiritual science, only on the basis of knowledge that comes from spiritual science. Then you can proceed to the study of social problems. And then the labor problem will look quite different. It will finally be given a sounder basis, because everything in connection with it will be looked at from a spiritual point of view.

People today simply don't understand how things are connected in this world; they believe everything goes on just as it is. But that is not true. People must understand how things in the world are constantly changing. And the greatest misfortune, one might say, is that in earlier times humanity was superstitious and now it is scientific! For little by little, superstition has crept into science itself. Today we have a natural science that is full of superstitions. People believe that when their stomach is full of potatoes, they have had a nourishing meal. The truth is that the health of their head is impaired, because the head itself then has to become a digestive organ.

Thus all problems should be dealt with in such a way that the spiritual aspect is not ignored as it has been for a long time now. It should be included in every consideration. In the sixties and seventies of the last century, people said: The worker must have science!—and rightly so. But it must be a true science. In those days it was not in existence. Now it is to be found in spiritual science, which has the name, anthroposophy. Anthroposophy refuses to put the cart before the horse as was done formerly. It will put spirit before matter, where it belongs. Then people will discover how things really are. And they will find proper educational methods. There will be a pedagogy that educates children as they really should be educated. Upon that, very much, very much indeed depends. And then human beings will find their right place in society.

In a single hour, naturally, I can give no more than hints; but we have arranged these lectures so that you could indicate by your questions what you want me to talk about. And so perhaps I should speak further on today's subject in the next session. Today I could only lay the foundation. But at least you have been able to glean something as to the real aim of spiritual science.

So we'll meet again next Wednesday.

• 33. Karl von Nagler, 1770–1846, Prussian statesman. Postmaster 1823 – 1846. Initiated our modern mail system.
• 34. See R. Hagen, “Die erste deutsche Eisenbahn,” 1885.
• 35. Sir Francis Drake, 1540–1596. Famous British navigator.
• 36. J.J.L. Lalande, 1732–1807. French astronomer.
• 37. Joseph Johann Littrow, 1781–1840, Über den gefürchteten Kometen des Jahres 1832 and über Kometen überhaupt, Wien, 1832.
• 38. Wolfram von Eschenbach, 1170–1220, “Parzival,” completed in 1210. Richard Wagner, 1813 – 1883, “Parsifal, a sacred dramatic festival” appeared as poem in 1877; the opera was finished in 1882.
• 39. Rudolf Steiner taught in the Arbeiterbildungschule, a workmen's college, Berlin, 1899 – 1904. See The Course of My Life chap. 28, Dornach, 1962. Anthroposophic Press, Hudson.
• 40. Ferdinand Lassalle, 1825–1864. Founder of Socialism in Germany.

Today I would like to address some fundamental anthroposophical questions about life and then move up from these fundamental questions, from the everyday to the all-encompassing, the fundamental. The most fruitful gain of our striving should be that we learn through spiritual science to judge life more and more in its truth, in its reality, to judge it in such a way that this judgment itself can lead us most efficiently and energetically into life and how it can place us in the position that we have to fill out of our karma, that we have to fill out of our greater or lesser mission in the time in which we are embodied in the earthly body.

And so I would like to start with some of life's qualities that present themselves to us every day, either in ourselves or in our surroundings. We only begin to understand the full scope and significance of these qualities when we are able to view them in the light of spiritual science. I would like to start with two vices in life and then talk about some virtues, starting with the virtues of goodwill and contentment and the vices of lying and envy.

Let us first consider these two vices, which we often encounter in life. It cannot be denied that in the broadest circles, both among the simplest people and among those who, so to speak, already belong to the leaders of life, there is a deep, deep aversion and antipathy towards what we can call envy and mendacity. To mention right away some people who were among the leaders of life, I refer to the sculptor Benvenuto Cellini and to those passages in his autobiography where he says that on close self-examination he must accuse himself of many vices, but may still say that he was never really a liar. This artist therefore finds a certain satisfaction in the fact that, on the basis of his self-observation, he can exclude lying from his character traits. And Goethe once says, as a result of his self-observation, that he must accuse himself of many things, but that envy, this ugly vice, had not really eaten at his heart. Thus we see, as it were, at the summits of life, how one feels antipathy for mendacity and envy, how one is told everywhere, where one is accustomed to look at life a little deeper, even where great abilities are, as it were, inherent in the life of the soul: You must guard against these vices in particular. And who would deny that this fundamental antipathy to falsehood and envy runs through all, all layers of our humanity. You only need to remember how much it would eat away at your heart if, in a certain moment, you had to say to yourself during truly honest and correct self-observation: I am an envious person. If you had to admit this resolutely to yourself, you would certainly feel in this confession that you would have to take something into yourself, such as fighting against this envy, fighting against envy. It is a deeply rooted feeling that mendacity and envy are ugly human traits. Why do we feel that way, then? Yes, you see, people do not always realize why they have such a deep antipathy to this or that. They often do not realize what is slumbering in the more or less subconscious part of their soul life and is undoubtedly present. In the face of envy and mendacity, man feels that he is violating something that is connected with the very essence of humanity and the very essence of human value. We need only utter a word and we will feel this. Spiritual science should gradually make us aware that, in addition to the individual personalities incarnated in the flesh, there is something like a unified, universal humanity that dwells in all souls in the same way as the divine-human. And here it is precisely spiritual science that presents this to us as a great ideal and that gradually leads us to have an understanding of the universal human. And yet, in an emotional way, there is something in all human hearts that always says in a certain way: Seek a bond that holds all people together, that always entwines itself from soul to soul, and you will find it. — And the corresponding feeling is expressed in the word “compassion”. Compassion is such a general human quality that we have to say: In this compassion, it is darkly announced the bond that goes from every soul to every soul. And there one feels again in the subconscious how one is violating compassion, the recognition of what is common in all people in the most eminent sense, with falsehood and envy.

What do we actually do when we tell a lie? We do nothing else than erect a partition between us and the other person. What should connect us with him, the common knowledge of some truth that should live in our soul and in his, if things were right, we tear that apart by telling him a lie. We do not recognize, in the moment when we tell the untruth, that we should actually live in the other with the best part of ourselves.

And when we envy someone, be it for abilities or for something else in life, then we sin against compassion in the way that we do not recognize the person for what he or she should actually be for us, as something that actually belongs to us and whose advantages and gifts and strokes of luck we should actually rejoice in if we felt truly connected to him or her.

So we are sinning against the most beautiful thing in human life, against compassion, when we are envious and untruthful people. And why is this so vehemently expressed in the dissatisfaction with these two qualities? Why is that? Well, both qualities can show us how that which resides in our soul reproduces itself, progresses to the shells of our being and has a meaning for these shells.

Envy is something that, when observed occultly, is clearly expressed in a very specific nature of the astral body when it is present in a person. And an envious person, no matter how much he is able to hide this envy from the outside world, reveals the quality of envy in his astral body. Our astral body has very specific basic properties. Even if it is different in every person and shows the most diverse differences in different people, it still has certain basic properties. And when we look at it with clairvoyant vision as an aura, it has very specific color properties. These fade in a remarkable way in the case of envious people; they fade, they become weak and dull. And the astral body of an envious person becomes, as it were, poor in the strength that it should supply to the whole human organism.

In the case of untruthfulness, it is again the case that it, and also every single lie, expresses itself in the etheric body. The etheric body loses vitality and life energy when a person is untruthful. This can even be observed externally. However strange it may sound for our age, it is nevertheless true that wounds, for example, heal more slowly in people who lie a lot than in truthful people, under otherwise similar conditions. Of course, one should not draw absolute conclusions, there may also be other reasons. But all other things being equal, wounds are more difficult to heal in dishonest people than in truthful people. It is good to observe such things in life. And that is also easily explained. The etheric body of a person is the actual life principle, it is what must contain the life forces. But these are undermined by untruthfulness. So that the etheric body cannot give as much life force as is necessary for a healing if this etheric body has had its life force withdrawn through untruthfulness, if it has not always been permeated by those movements, by those facts that arise from truthfulness. We should pay attention to such things, for we shall understand life better in many respects if we do.

Now you know that we must see what is happening to people in the light of two powers that influence human life as it develops from incarnation to incarnation. We must look at human life under the influence of the forces of Lucifer and Ahriman. The forces of Lucifer are those that act on our astral body, that radiate their power into our astral body and tempt us in relation to it. The forces of Ahriman are those that tempt us in relation to our etheric body. Yes, it is Lucifer who, so to speak, grabs us by the scruff of the neck when we are envious people. Envy is truly a Luciferic quality, a quality that comes from Lucifer, whereas untruthfulness is a quality that comes from Ahriman. For Ahriman sends out the forces and powers that radiate into our etheric body.

Now we can say: It was absolutely necessary that Lucifer and Ahriman were delegated by the wise powers of the world so that they could influence us to become independent. In that they cause us to abuse our independence, they are in a sense enemies of the higher development of mankind. But even if they are in a sense enemies of man in his higher development, they are very friendly and make very peculiar compromises among themselves. We can speak of these compromises when we consider human qualities such as envy and lying.

Envy! The moment a person who is not completely corrupt says to himself, 'I am an envious person', he will do anything to fight that envy. You don't have to be particularly high to do anything. But sometimes things are much deeper than our power, which comes from consciousness. And sometimes people imagine that it is too easy to fight such things. So it happens that they fight such things because they perceive them as ugly, but they do not go away, they actually only change their form, they reappear in a different area. They then appear in masks, in disguises. And because one hates envy so much, one fights against it, but if the soul is not yet strong enough to fight it thoroughly, it disappears as envy but reappears in another form.

You all know that human trait that is so common and that you could call: criticism and faultfinding, paying attention to the faults of our fellow human beings. When someone has to say to themselves, “I am an envious person, I don't want my fellow human beings to have advantages,” they feel bad. They feel that they have to fight it. But when they can say, He feels that the fault-finding is justified to a certain extent, and he feels right in his element. Just imagine, if that were not the case, how many coffee parties and beer societies would have to be abandoned, where basically nothing else is done so often but to give rein to this carping and fault-finding. And then man finds himself justified before himself. He says to himself: Yes, one sees the faults, one must see them, one cannot close one's eyes. — It is only a matter of why we see the faults of our fellow human beings, whether we see the intention to improve life, or whether we follow a tendency of our soul, which is often nothing more than a masked envy. People fight envy because they hate it, but they are too weak to uproot it. So it takes on the guise of a critical nature and continues to roam the soul in this way. Then you have not fought envy, you have only forced it into a different metamorphosis. In reality, what has happened is that man has fought Lucifer, because he is above the envy of the Regent, as he is above much. But Lucifer then says to Ahriman, if I may express it thus: 'See, dear Ahriman, man hates my mode of ruling envy; he does not want to be envious. Now you take him in relation to this quality! Then Ahriman says: Yes, I will press that into the etheric body. — And it is pressed into the etheric body as a critical mind, as a critical spirit, as a misguided judgment about the world. For the ability to judge always has something to do with the movements and forces of the etheric body. Here the command of our soul passes from Lucifer to Ahriman. And so many qualities, which if they presented themselves in their original form we would hate and fight against, appear in disguise. Sometimes they present themselves in such a way that we actually find them very justified and even take some pride in being able to see what is right in life. Then we are truly caught in the tentacles of the other power, the Ahrimanic power. We must not forget that a quality is much more dangerous when it appears in disguise than when it appears in its original form. Therefore, when we see this or that in life, it is always good to ask: Is it not perhaps only a transformed other vice? — This is extremely necessary so that we learn to look at life in its truth. We can only do this if we use the guidelines that anthroposophical wisdom gives us to properly observe life.

Now we must say: What appears in life as this or that vice, whether in its true form or in disguise, we often see as a karmic effect in a single incarnation. We do not even have to wait for the transition from one incarnation to another. We see the karmic effect of a quality that occurs in any period of life in one incarnation. And those who really want to observe life and pay a little attention, will not get to know life if they always forget tomorrow what happened today, but if they consider longer periods of human life, they will find karma at work even in one embodiment, in one life. It is really necessary to pay very, very careful attention to how the sins of life basically only show up after decades. But people are a forgetful generation. Of all the races, beginning with the human race and extending to all higher worlds, people are truly the most forgetful generation. Even if we have known someone for decades, we forget what came to light ten years ago; we are very happy to let it fade from our memory. I may have already mentioned a small example here, but it can show us how we have to look at life in larger periods of time if we want to recognize it in its true form – something external that I just want to insert. It concerns the time in which I had the opportunity to observe many children in different families. When you educate children, you not only have to observe the children you are educating yourself, but also the more or less young offspring of uncles, aunts, nieces and nephews, and so on. And you can take note of many things for life. Well, it was a long time ago, fashions change. When I had children of my own, it was fashionable for their teachers to give them quite a few tins of red wine with their meals during the day as a form of sustenance. It was done, and it was thought to be a good thing. If you made a note of it at the time: this child and that child were given red wine and the other was not, you can now, if you have the opportunity again, as I always try to observe what has become of these children, gather strange insights. I can say that the two- to three- to four-year-old children of yesteryear – now people of twenty-seven, twenty-eight, twenty-nine years – who were given red wine as children, are fidgety, nervous people who sometimes find it extremely difficult to find their way in life. Of course, one should not just make one's observations over a period of five years. Today it is so common to try this or that, and if it shows some success in the next few months, it is quickly a widespread remedy. People are forgetful in this area too. How many remedies have gone out of fashion after five years, people have forgotten again. But, as I said, if you extend your observation over decades, then you can really feel how life works. There really is a big difference between children who were given red wine in those days and those who were not given any. But you would have to make your observations over three decades, so to speak, to see that. And that is how it is. I have included this to show that if you want to see karma at work, it is necessary not to be forgetful, but to extend your observations over longer periods of time. The same applies to what comes to light in a more psychological way.

If you look at the second half of a person's life in context with the first, you can see how a person who was untruthful or envious, or who expressed envy under the mask of criticism, will experience the karmic effect of this in the second half of their life. Dishonest people always show a certain karmic effect of dishonesty in one incarnation: a certain shyness, an impossibility, one might say, to look people straight in the eye. That will certainly come true. Just try to observe the matter. You will find it confirmed. Folk proverbs sometimes have a deep, wise core. It is not without reason that in many regions people say that one should beware of a person who cannot look another in the eye. This is because of the karmic effect of untruthfulness.

Envy, on the other hand, or envy masked as criticism, manifests itself in a later life epoch of the same incarnation in such a way that the person in question has the characteristic of not being able to stand on his or her own two feet, so that he or she has the longing to lean on others, to need advice on all sorts of things, and always wants to run to someone else for advice. Independence in life is lost through envy, criticism, and a tendency to find fault. Such a person becomes weak in spirit.

Now these qualities, with their karmic effects, confront us spiritually when we consider one incarnation. We will take a moment to consider how the karmic effects play out as we move from one incarnation to another.

But now, so as not to be one-sided, we also want to consider good qualities: goodwill and contentment. Everyone knows what a benevolent person is. A benevolent person is someone who feels satisfied when someone else succeeds or achieves something, when they notice good qualities in someone. Goodwill is present when, in a sense, one experiences what the other person experiences as one's own. This goodwill, in turn, has a very specific effect on our astral body, which is almost the opposite of the effect of envy. We see how the lights of the astral body shine when a person expresses goodwill. The astral body becomes brighter and more radiant when there are feelings of goodwill in the soul of the person. The aura becomes more luminous, more radiant and thus richer; it becomes more saturated, and it is then able to infuse into the person first something like warmth of soul and then even a sense of well-being.

And when we see a contented person before us, a person who is not inclined to be grumpy about everything from the outset, to be dissatisfied about everything, then the etheric body shows us very definite qualities. It is important that we take note of this in a certain way. For we should actually realize how much of our dissatisfaction basically really depends on ourselves. There are those who cannot do enough to ferret out everything that can make them dissatisfied. And we feel that not only happier natures, but also better natures, are capable of paying a great deal of attention to the fact that, however bad things may be, we still have reasons to be happy about this or that. There are such reasons. And if someone does not want to admit that these exist, it is their own fault. Satisfaction, especially when it is brought about by a better quality of our soul, strengthens the etheric body in terms of its life force. And again it is the case – all other conditions being equal – that wounds or other things heal more easily in a contented person who has good reason to be contented, and does not get worked up about what happens to him, than in a grumpy and discontented person who gets worked up about everything and, as I said, leaves unsatisfied, under otherwise similar circumstances. Now we can also see quite clearly in a lifetime – and this is important for us to bear in mind when educating others – that someone who is truly imbued with contentment during a certain period of their life and who strives to seek out things that can satisfy them, perhaps despite pain and suffering, that a karmic effect will occur in the same life, even if it takes decades. This is expressed in particular by the fact that such a person, who has endeavored to acquire contentment in a certain period of his life, radiates a certain beneficial balance of life to his environment. You know that this exists. There are people around whom others have to fidget, and there are those who simply by being there calm others. People who have endeavored to be content in one epoch of their lives gain, as a karmic effect for the next epoch of the same life, the possibility of having a harmonizing effect on their environment, so to speak, purely by their existence, being benefactors to their environment.

We can always observe that benevolent people who have endeavored to be benevolent reap the karmic effect of all things that depend on them and are intended by them succeeding in a later epoch of life. Sometimes it seems inexplicable to us that some people succeed in everything, that they feel up to whatever they undertake, while others do not succeed and everything they touch fails. This leads back to the karmic cause of goodwill or ill will. You can observe these things, which I am presenting to you as guidelines, in life. If you exclude the sources of error that exist, you will see that life confirms what I have said.

When we now pass from one incarnation to another, we have to say: in one incarnation, the karmic effects can actually only show themselves in the soul. The effects of envy show themselves in certain weaknesses and in a lack of independence, the effects of untruthfulness in shyness, the effects of goodwill and contentment as I have described them to you. In this incarnation we do not have the same thorough and profound influences on our bodily organization that would enable us to make more progress with the karmic effects than a psychic basis. These things only take effect in the body, in the structure and organization of the body, in the next incarnation. And while we make ourselves spiritually dependent on others in one incarnation through envy and a tendency to find fault, these have the effect of constituting the body weakly and building it up weakly into the next incarnation. A weak body is built up by someone who was formerly plagued by envy or by masked envy, by a tendency to find fault, to be critical.

But now, if we have studied spiritual science a little, we must also say that it is truly not by chance that we are brought together with this or that person in a new incarnation. We are led into the family and environment with which we have something to do. And so you will not find it very strange if I say: If someone in an incarnation was an envious person, he will be reborn with the people – be they his parents or others – whom he envied, judged or gossiped about, or blamed. He will be reunited with them. And we may be reunited with them because we are led into this environment with weak organization. This makes the matter very practical, bringing the teaching of karma close to our practical life. We can say that when a human child is born with weak organization, This is the consequence of the envious disposition of the previous incarnation, and we are the ones who were envied, and this human child has been brought together with us karmically because we are the ones who were the target of their envy and gossip. It is fruitful when we say to ourselves: If karma has any meaning at all, it is justified to look at it this way. So let's look at it that way.

Of course, the only way to make it fruitful is to ask ourselves: What should we do in the face of such a weak human being? We only need to ask ourselves: What seems morally best in ordinary life when someone persecutes us with their envy and criticism? Perhaps it is not always possible to do the best in our ordinary, everyday lives. But what seems best to us? - Now, most certainly, forgiveness seems to us to be the very best. We may say that our lives are perhaps not such that we can always forgive, but the best is undoubtedly the forgiveness, and the most effective and also the most fruitful in life is the forgiveness. We cannot always practise it in our ordinary lives, but if we can say that the best thing in life is to forgive, it turns out that the real application of the principle of forgiveness is in the right place in all circumstances. This is when we have to acknowledge what I have said as a karmic effect from past incarnations. If a weak human child is born into our environment or brought together with us, we must then say to ourselves: Since karma should not remain merely a theoretical idea, we must think that we were the envied ones, the gossiped about. Now, under all circumstances, we can practice in our deepest hearts the feeling of forgiveness and of forgiveness. We can, so to speak, envelop such a human child in an atmosphere of repeatedly stirred feelings of forgiveness. If we did that in life, if we felt united with people who are weak, and did not just grasp the idea of forgiveness in theory, but always renewed the feelings in our souls, I have something to forgive you for, I want to forgive you, and always renew this feeling, then that would be a practical introduction of the anthroposophical attitude into life. You would certainly see the effect. Just try to put it into practice and you will see that people who are born into our environment in a weak state will flourish when you forgive them in this way and renew the feeling of forgiveness, that our feeling has a healing and invigorating effect on them. And we can become healers, healers of the people with whom we have been brought together by karma. In this way, anthroposophy becomes fruitful if we do not merely regard it as a collection of ideas that interest us. It is basically quite selfish when we begin to get enthusiastic about anthroposophy because the thoughts of anthroposophy inspire us and seem true to us. For what are we satisfying then? We are satisfying our longing for a harmonious worldview. That is very beautiful. But the greater thing is when we permeate our whole life with what results from these ideas; when the ideas go into our hands, into every step and into everything we experience and do. Only then does anthroposophy become a principle of life, and until it does, it has no value.

We can also speak in a similar way with regard to the other qualities. If, for example, we have been liars in a previous incarnation and are born again, we will be brought together with those to whom we may have lied to their faces. It is not uncommon, if one is a true student of the occult, to find that a human being is born into an environment to which he cannot find the right relationship, is not understood by it and does not understand it. Sometimes we have a peculiar effect on our environment. I don't know if you have already observed that this has a much wider impact than just on people. There are certain people: if they want to raise flowers, these flowers thrive, they have a lucky hand for it. The fact that it is they who raise the flowers makes them thrive. Other people can do whatever they want: the flowers wither. That happens. There are simply much more mysterious relationships between the individual beings of existence than one usually thinks. These mysterious relationships are, of course, mainly from person to person. And if we are brought together through karma with a human child who brazenly lied to us in a previous incarnation, it is so that we, so to speak, find it difficult to relate to this child. We should pay attention to this. We should not judge this merely according to our temperament, but karmically. We should say: “This comes from the fact that we were perhaps often lied to by this human child.” Now we can in turn help this human child, strengthen and empower him.

What is the best way to forgive something that can be expressed something like this, another person tells you a lie. The best way to forgive that is to teach him a truth. With the other, by rectifying the lie, you are already doing some good, but you have not helped the person any further. You can help him further by trying to teach him a useful truth. You have to follow a kind of policy in your dealings with people, and that helps people to progress. If we are obliged to look at the matter karmically, it is particularly advantageous that we endeavor to be truthful to people with whom we are karmically brought together and who we know do not find a relationship with us because they are shy around us. Then we will see how these people in turn flourish under our openness and how this openness is of great advantage to them. Thus we see how we can gain life principles by looking at the workings of karma in a practical way.

What we have just characterized as the effect of goodwill in a single life, we can see as having the effect of harmonizing life, but initially in the soul. People in whom this has an effect from one incarnation to the next, we find that they are actually born with a happier organization, which we can call 'skillful'. Good will, contentment in one incarnation, brings about skillfulness in another incarnation. It is true that this is the case, because it can always be proven in the field of occult research. And one can very well observe oneself and experience some of the ways in which the previous incarnation works its way into the present one. We can be quite sure that it is so in the case of people whose fingers are quite unsuitable for sewing on a button that might tear, or in the case of people who, when asked to carry a glass into the cupboard, happily throw it to the floor – I am exaggerating a little now. But in more subtle nuances, there are very many people who are so organized that they cannot help but move their fingers in the wrong way, that they always make awkward mistakes. Whether one can use the instrument of one's body well or whether it presents treacherous obstacles at every turn has a profound significance for one's life. This is extraordinarily important. And when we see a clumsy child growing up, we must assume in most cases that in the previous incarnation he lacked contentment and goodwill. When we see skill emerging, so that the person, when he touches something, already literally knows how to do it, then that is most certainly the karmic effect of goodwill and contentment. |

If we look at it this way, we can say that we can actually have a wonderful effect from one incarnation to the next. It is possible for us to really work on our next incarnation. And we will change a lot for our next incarnation if we seriously resolve to observe whether we have a little bit of faultfinding and criticizing in us after all. If we try to examine ourselves to see if we have even a little of this, we find that we have it to a considerable extent. It is good to try to examine ourselves to see if we have even a little of it. Then the process of working on ourselves begins. And we may be able to avoid being born weak and pale in the next incarnation, avoid in this life becoming, so to speak, dependent human beings.

When we consider these things, we will say to ourselves: It is no longer a fantasy to combine the individual incarnations like links in a human chain and to really regard the earth as a kind of training through which we learn to use what is offered to us in the individual incarnations so that we come higher and higher, go further and further. After all, why are we incarnated, in principle? We can best understand this by asking ourselves what the two great differences are between our incarnations in the old, pre-Christian times and our present incarnations, which are taking place after the Christ Impulse has been present. There is a very, very significant difference.

This difference between our incarnations in ancient pre-Christian times and our present incarnations could best be described by saying: When you look back at the incarnations of people in the pre-Christian era, to a certain extent the souls in that pre-Christian era had all retained something of what all souls had at the beginning of their earthly incarnations. All souls had natural clairvoyance, an insight into the spiritual world. And the progress of incarnations consists precisely in the fact that this inheritance from the spiritual world, from the spiritual origin, has gradually been lost, that people have increasingly emerged onto the physical plane, and the spiritual world has increasingly faded from them. The Christ impulse means that when we find the possibility to receive the Christ in us, to connect him with our ego, we in turn begin to ascend more and more to what we were at the beginning, only richer. That we are again at the end of the incarnations in the spiritual as we were at the beginning of our incarnations, is effected by the reception of the Christ power, when we apply our next incarnations so that we absorb more and more of the Christ. These are the great differences between pre-Christian and post-Christian incarnations. We are actually still in a transitional period in this regard. We have been pushed far out of the reach of normal human perception onto the physical plane, onto mere physical perception, and today is actually a high point in terms of physical perception. For the Christ impulse is only just beginning, and in subsequent incarnations people will truly take up the Christ, will only come to love these incarnations because they give them the opportunity to experience what can only be experienced through earthly existence: the acceptance of the Christ impulse into the soul. We can observe this even in great personalities, how there is, so to speak, a tremendous difference between the incarnations before the Christ impulse on Earth and after. I would like to tell you a detail.

Some time ago I was called upon to spend a few days lecturing in our southernmost European branch – I mean in so far as we speak of Rosicrucian Theosophy – in Palermo. And when I entered Sicily from Naples by ship, I already had the very definite feeling that there was something to be learned there about occult facts that are difficult to study in the north alone. For there is a personality, an individuality that emerged, which I cannot name now, that played a certain role at the turn of the Middle Ages and the modern era, which made a lot of noise in our and neighboring areas and which makes the occultist wonder: What was the previous incarnation of this personality? That was an important research question for me, and strangely enough, I hoped to find out something about this question through the occult research that was possible there, especially at this entrance to Sicily. And that was indeed the case very soon. Of course, what is being told is something intimate, but within our branches, there is no longer any need to hold back on these intimate things. Something very, very remarkable has been poured out into the whole spiritual atmosphere of Sicily – I do not say the outer, but the spiritual atmosphere. And the pursuit of this remarkable thing really led at last to its origin, to a great sage who worked in Sicily and who is also dismissed with a few words in the history of philosophy, but whom we really know very little about in an outwardly exoteric way. His name is Empedocles.

If one wants to characterize Empedocles as an occultist – and I would like to do this for you – then one must say: in some respects, Empedocles was very much ahead of his time, he was overripe for his time. In other respects, however, he could not go beyond his time. There was a deep conflict in his soul. Empedocles is truly a great, all-embracing personality. He was active in Sicily not only as a philosopher, not only as a mystery teacher, but also as a statesman, as an architect, as all kinds of things – he was a kind of organizer, this wonderful Empedocles. Empedocles lived in Sicily about four or five centuries before the Christ Impulse, and he was ahead of his time in that he had the urge to delve into the material world. In the past, people had never delved into matter as superficially as they do today. When someone spoke of water, like T'hales, for example, they meant something spiritual. Empedocles was the one who, in a certain respect, nevertheless anticipated a materialistic principle by composing all being out of the four elements, which he, however, conceived materially. And by mixing and unmixing this matter, he conceived the constitution of the world. He lost the spiritual because he — precisely as an occult personality, looking back on his incarnations — should have found the Christ impulse; he would have been called to do so. When we look back in the Akasha Chronicle today, we find the Christ impulse at a very specific point; but the one who lived before the Christ impulse could not do so. He could not absorb it as an earthly impulse, because it had not yet existed physically. Empedocles lacked that, it could not pour into his soul. He did not have the counterweight against the materialism that flared up in him. But because he was a personality with strong impulses, albeit with the impulses of an occultist, this led him to live out this disharmony. That is what turned out to be the truth. This led him to want to be one with the material of the four elements, just as one would otherwise, when seeking the truth, want to unite with this spiritual in spirit. And he plunged into the Atna. He really did throw himself into it to be one with the elements. He sought the divine in the material, identifying with the divine that appeared to him in the material image. And I would like to say: this product of Empedocles' combustion in the fiery floods of Etna is still present today in the atmosphere of Sicily as a fertilizing force, like the effect of a sacrifice. Something great and mighty is present, but it is emanating from this, one might say, false, blasé, wrongly placed in time – do not misunderstand the term 'false' – materialism. Empedocles, who, looking back, could not find the Christ, although he should have found him, throws his life away. Thus it happened that he came to life again in such a remarkable way at the beginning of the newer time and lived quite differently. It is not yet time to speak of the personality in which he was reborn. A wonderful view of what the Christ Impulse actually is in the course of evolution arises. Between the previous and the later incarnation of Empedocles stands the Christ event in the midst. And by comparing the two incarnations of Empedocles, one can see, by observing his individuality, what effect it has, whether one, as a spirit belonging to the newer observation, can look back and find the Christ impulse or not. This makes an enormous difference. Just as souls in ancient times had to go back from incarnation to incarnation to see how they had allied themselves with the divine spiritual being in earlier incarnations, so we must have the opportunity, when we go back from our own incarnation and trace the time from our birth to our previous death and again from that to our previous birth and so on, to find the Christ impulse in this way. The spiritual researcher in particular must find it. This Christ impulse lights a light for him, whereas otherwise he would be plunged into darkness at this moment and everything that existed would lie in darkness. We need the Christ impulse like a torch in the field of spiritual research, otherwise darkness comes, otherwise we cannot see clearly into the true reasons of the Akasha Chronicle of ancient times. This can be observed in a wonderful way in examples such as that of Empedocles. Then one gets a feeling for how these incarnations follow one another in our earthly existence; how, so to speak, man has moved in a descending direction up to the Christ Impulse, how he has emerged further and further onto the physical plane, and how we are in the process of gradually ascending into the spiritual realm again. The last great spirit of descent is the great Buddha, the first great impulse for ascent is that of Christ Jesus, and perhaps there is no better way to feel the tremendous difference between the Buddha principle and the principle of Christ Jesus than by contemplating something that the great Buddha once said to his most intimate disciples, looking back at his enlightenment, which is symbolically called the enlightenment under the bodhi tree. There Buddha says: When I look back on earlier incarnations, I see how I proceeded from the divine-spiritual source of the world, how I went from incarnation to incarnation, always dwelling with the spiritual essence in the outer body temple, descending into the physical world. But now, in this incarnation, I have found the possibility of no longer having to return to an incarnation. From body temple to body temple I have gone, in every incarnation the Godhead has erected the temple of my body for me. But now, as I am embodied in it for the last time, I feel how the beams of this body temple are cracking and that I no longer need to return to such a temple. For that is what he proclaimed: that the true striving must be to escape from this earthly activity, to no longer have any connection with this temple of the body, but to strive out of it to the last incarnation, in order to live on only in the spiritual. That was the last reference to man's descent, to the memory that men can have of primeval wisdom, of what stands at the beginning of the human race.

Oh, it must move us when we see the Buddha standing, saying: From temple to temple of the body I have passed; now I feel that it is for the last time. If we compare this – and disregard all metaphysical backgrounds – with an intimate saying of Christ to his intimate disciples, with the words: “Destroy this temple, and in three days I will raise it up again”, we see that in the Buddha was a great longing for the beams of the temple of the body to collapse, so that there would be no need to return to it; but that in Christ there was the promise: “Tear it down, and I will rebuild it in three days.” The love for the earthly world expresses itself in the fact that for the following incarnations of human beings, in which they find the possibility to build their body temple again and again, so that they can learn again and again and ascend higher; so that then, when the earth has reached its goal, the earth itself will become a corpse, so to speak, fall away from the soul of all humanity, just as our body falls away from the soul when we pass through the gate of death. But then people will have come higher and higher. By becoming Christianized, people will be able to live on to new levels of existence as humanity. What is meant by Christ's saying that he himself wants to return to the physical body, but that he will return to the principle of building the body, that he will remain in the earthly existence until the end of the earth.

That is what I tried to express in what I say through Theodora, the seer in the Mystery Drama, where you can see how the Christ will become more and more familiar to human life, although he does not return to a physical body. But he is experienced in the physical body temples of human beings. And in this saying of his, “Destroy this temple, and in three days I will raise it up,” lies the promise: Yes, I will make it true that I can enter into the souls of men, so that more and more people can come who, in the sense of Paul, can say, “Not I, but the Christ in me!”

Thus we see how we can contemplate in a small way spiritual science as a principle of life, by gaining the possibility of seeing certain qualities of our character and soul taking effect karmically between birth and death, and of seeing them working their way into the bodily organization of the next incarnation. And so we see how spiritual science presents the loftiest ideals to us and tells us what we will become — Christ-like human beings — when the Earth will become a corpse and fall away from the soul-like in man, when man will be called upon to progress to other planetary conditions. Spiritual science can thus give us the greatest ideals and can flow into the smallest circumstances of life. In this way it becomes practical for everyday life, and it can and should become more and more so. When we become anthroposophists in the sense that all our actions, no matter how remote from what might be considered anthroposophical activity, are imbued with anthroposophical thinking and feeling, only then can we say that our beings have been imbued with anthroposophy. Anthroposophy must be regarded not as a theory but as a way of life, but as a way of life that needs to be learned. And basically we must realize that we have to encourage ourselves through the true, concrete content of anthroposophy if it is to be a way of life for us, not wanting to say: I understand this from anthroposophy and that is the right thing to do, but rather that we first have to familiarize ourselves deeply with what spiritual science has to say to us. Then it must become the strength of our lives. And it can only do so when we permeate ourselves with it. But then it will do so in the smallest and in the greatest, then the perspective for the connections of human progress and for the smallest facts of everyday life will open up for us.