The Rudolf Steiner Archive

This week something will be given in the communications addressed to members in these columns, which may serve to bring us to a further understanding of the weekly ‘Leading Thoughts’.

The understanding of anthroposophical truth can be furthered if the relation which exists between man and the world is constantly brought before the human soul.

When man turns his attention to the world into which he is born and out of which he dies, he is surrounded in the first place by the fullness of his sense-impressions. He forms thoughts about these sense-impressions.

In bringing the following to his consciousness: ‘I am forming thoughts about what my senses reveal to me as the world’, he has already come to the point where he can contemplate himself. He can say to himself: In my thoughts ‘I’ live. The world gives me the opportunity of experiencing myself in thought. I find myself in the thoughts in which I contemplate the world.

And continuing to reflect in this way, he ceases to be conscious of the world; he becomes conscious of the ‘I’. He ceases to have the world before him; he begins to experience the self.

If the experience be reversed, and the attention directed to the inner life in which the world is mirrored, then those events emerge into consciousness which belong to our life's destiny, and in which our human self has flowed along from the point of time to which our memory goes back. In following up the events of his destiny, a man experiences his own existence.

In bringing this to his consciousness: ‘I with my own self have experienced something that destiny brought to me’, a man has already come to the point where he will contemplate the world. He can say to himself: I was not alone in my fate; the world played a part in my experience. I willed this or that; the world streamed into my will. I find the world in my will when I experience this will in self-contemplation.

Continuing thus to enter into his own being, man ceases to be conscious of the self, he becomes conscious of the world; he ceases to experience himself, he becomes feelingly aware of the world.

I send my thoughts out into the world, there I find myself; I sink into myself, there I find the world. If a man experiences this strongly enough, he is confronted with the great riddles of the World and Man.

For to have the feeling: I have taken endless pains to understand the world through thinking, and after all there is but myself in this thinking—this gives rise to the first great riddle. And to feel that one's own self is formed through destiny, yet to perceive in this process the onward flow of world-happenings—this presents the second riddle.

In the experience of this problem of Man and the World germinates the frame of mind in which man can so confront Anthroposophy that he receives from it in his inner being an impression which rouses his attention.

For Anthroposophy asserts that there is a spiritual experience which does not lose the world when thinking. One can also live in thought. Anthroposophy tells of an inward experience in which one does not lose the sense-world when thinking, but gains the Spirit-world. Instead of penetrating into the ego in which the sense-world is felt to disappear, one penetrates into the Spirit-world in which the ego feels established.

Anthroposophy shows, further, that there is an experience of destiny in which one does not lose the self. In fate, too, one can still feel oneself to be active. Anthroposophy points out, in the impartial, unegoistic observation of human destiny, an experience in which one learns to love the world and not only one's own existence. Instead of staring into the world which carries the ego on the waves of fortune and misfortune, one finds the ego which shapes its own fate voluntarily. Instead of striking against the world, on which the ego is dashed to pieces, one penetrates into the self, which feels itself united with the course of events in the world.

Man's destiny comes to him from the world that is revealed to him by his senses. If then he finds his own activity in the working of his destiny, his real self rises up before him not only out of his inner being but out of the sense-world too.

If a person is able to feel, however faintly, how the spiritual part of the world appears in the self, and how the self proves to be working in the outer world of sense, he has already learned to understand Anthroposophy correctly. For he will then realise that in Anthroposophy it is possible to describe the Spirit-world which the self can comprehend. And this will enable him to understand that in the sense-world the self can also be found—in a different way than by diving within. Anthroposophy finds the self by showing how the sense-world reveals to man not only sense-perceptions but also the after-effects of his life before birth and his former earthly lives.

Man can now gaze on the world perceptible to his senses and say: It contains not only colour, sound, warmth; in it are active the experiences passed through by souls before their present earthly life. And he can look into himself and say: I find there not only my ego but, in addition, a spiritual world is revealed.

In an understanding of this kind, a person who really feels—who is not unmoved by—the great riddles of Man and the World, can meet on a common ground with the Initiate who in accordance with his insight is obliged to speak of the outer world of the senses as manifesting not only sensible perceptions but also the impressions of what human souls have done in their life before birth and in past earthly lives, and who has to say of the world of the inner self that it reveals spiritual events which produce impressions and are as effective as the perceptions of the sense-world.

The would-be active members should consciously make themselves mediators between what the questioning human soul feels as the problems of Man and the Universe, and what the knowledge of the Initiates has to recount, when it draws forth a past world out of the destiny of human beings, and when by strengthening the soul it opens up the perception of a spiritual world.

In this way, through the work of the would-be active members, the Anthroposophical Society may become a true preparatory school for the school of Initiates. It was the intention of the Christmas Assembly to indicate this very forcibly; and one who truly understands what that Assembly meant will continue to point this out until the sufficient understanding of it can bring the Society fresh tasks and possibilities again.

Those who want to take active part in the Movement may find in the Leading Thoughts that are issued from the Goetheanum, an impulse and stimulus that shall enable them to bring unity and wholeness into all anthroposophical activity.

They will find in them, as they receive them week by week, guidance for deepening their understanding of the material that is already at hand in the lecture-cycles and for putting it forward in the Group Meetings with a certain order and harmony.

It would without doubt be more desirable for the lectures given in Dornach to be carried at once in all directions to the individual Groups. But one has to remember what complicated technical arrangements such a course would necessitate. The Executive at the Goetheanum are making every possible effort in this direction, and still more will be done in the future. But we must reckon with the possibilities that exist. The aims that found expression at the Christmas Foundation Meeting will be realised. But we need time.

For the present those Groups that have members who visit the Goetheanum, hear the lectures there and can bring back the substance of them into the Group Meetings have an advantage. And Groups should recognise that the sending of members to the Goetheanum in this way is a good thing to do. On the other hand, however, the work that has already been achieved within the Anthroposophical Society and that is embodied in the printed lecture-cycles and single lectures should not be undervalued. If you take up these lecture-cycles and call to mind from the titles what is contained in this one and in that, and then turn to the Leading Thoughts, you will find that you meet with one thing in one lecture-cycle, another in another, that explains the Leading Thoughts more fully. By reading together passages that are found separated in different lecture-cycles, you will discover the right points of view for expounding and elaborating the Leading Thoughts.

We in the Anthroposophical Society are wasting opportunities all the time if we leave the printed lecture-cycles quite untouched and only want always to hear ‘the latest’ from the Goetheanum. And it will readily be understood that all possibility of printing the lecture-cycles would gradually cease if they were not widely made use of.

Another point of view also comes into consideration. In spreading the contents of Anthroposophy, a strong sense of responsibility is necessary in the first place. That which is said about the spiritual world must be brought into a form such that the pictures of spiritual facts and beings which are given are not exposed to misunderstanding. Anyone who hears a lecture at the Goetheanum will receive an immediate and direct impression. If he repeats the contents of what he heard, this impression can echo from him; and he is able so to formulate them that they can be rightly understood. But if they are repeated at second or third hand, the possibility of inaccuracies creeping in becomes greater and greater. All these things should be borne in mind.

The following point of view is, however, probably the most important. The point is not that Anthroposophy should be simply listened to or read, but that it should be received into the living soul. It is essential that what has been received should be worked upon in thought and carried into the feelings; and the Leading Thoughts are really intended to suggest this with regard to the lecture-cycles already printed and in circulation. If this point of view is not sufficiently considered, then the nature of Anthroposophy will be constantly hindered from manifesting itself through the Anthroposophical Society. People say, though only with apparent justice: ‘What use is it to me to hear all these things about the spiritual worlds if I cannot look into those worlds for myself?’ One who speaks thus does not realise that such vision is promoted when the working out of anthroposophical ideas is thought of in the manner indicated above. The lectures at the Goetheanum are so given that their contents can live on and work freely in the minds of the hearers. The same applies also to the contents of the lecture-cycles. These do not contain dead material to be imparted externally, but material which, when viewed from different aspects, stimulates the vision for spiritual worlds. It should not be thought that one hears the contents of the lectures and that the knowledge of the spiritual world is acquired separately by means of meditation. In that way one will never make real progress. Both must act together in the soul. And to think out anthroposophical ideas and allow them to live on in the feelings is also an exercise of the soul. A person grows into the spiritual world with open eyes if he uses Anthroposophy in the manner we have described.

Far too little attention is paid in the Anthroposophical Society to the fact that Anthroposophy should not be abstract theory but real life. Real life, that is its nature; and if it is made into abstract theory this is often not at all a better but a worse theory than others. But it only becomes theory when it is made such—i.e. when one kills it. It is still not sufficiently realised that Anthroposophy is not only a conception of the world, different from others, but that it must also be received differently. Its nature is recognised and experienced only when one receives it in this different way.

The Goetheanum should be looked upon as the necessary centre of anthroposophical work and activity, but one ought not to lose sight of the fact that the anthroposophical material which has been worked out should also be made use of in the Groups. What is worked out at the Goetheanum can be obtained gradually by the whole Anthroposophical Society in a full and living sense, when as many members as possible come from the Groups to the Goetheanum itself and participate as much as possible in its activities.

But all this must be worked out with heart and mind; the mere imparting of the contents of the lectures each week is useless. The Executive at the Goetheanum will need time and will have to meet with sympathetic understanding on the part of the members. It will then be able to work in accordance with the intention of the Christmas Foundation Meeting.

From the time of the Foundation Meeting of the General Anthroposophical Society (Dornach, Christmas to New Year, 1923–24) until his death shortly before Easter, 1925, Rudolf Steiner wrote a Letter week by week, addressed to the members of the Society. The Letters were printed in the members' supplement to the Goetheanum Weekly and in the English edition of it, Anthroposophical Movement. The later Letters (forming a self-contained series from autumn 1924 onward) were published in book form in 1956, entitled The Michael Mystery (Vol. II of Letters to Members).

An urgent need has been felt for the earlier Letters in which Rudolf Steiner describes the character of the Society arising out of the Foundation Meeting and gives advice as to its conduct and its relation to the world. To meet this need, the Rudolf Steiner-Nachlassverwaltung has issued these Letters in a separate volume entitled Das lebendige Wesen der Anthroposophie und seine Pflege: Briefe an die Mitglieder, and has given the Council of the Anthroposophical Society in Great Britain permission to publish the translation contained in the following pages (Vol. I of Letters to Members).

RUDOLF STEINER HOUSE
London, N.W.1, 1963

Translated by Olin D. Wannamaker, revised

Anyone who speaks today about super-sensible worlds lays himself open at once to the quite understandable criticism that he is violating one of the most important demands of the age. This is the demand that the most important questions of existence be seriously discussed from a scientific point of view only in such a way that science recognizes its own limitations, having clear insight into the fact that it must restrict itself to the physical world of earthly existence and would undoubtedly become a degenerate fantasy if it were to go beyond these limits. Now, precisely the type of spiritual scientific perception about which I spoke at the last Vienna Congress of the Anthroposophical Movement (and shall speak again today), lays claim not only to being free from hostility toward scientific thinking and the scientific sense of responsibility of our times, but also to working in complete harmony with the most conscientious scientific demands of those very persons who stand on the ground of the most rigorous natural science. It is possible, however, to speak from various points of view regarding the scientific demands of the times that are imposed on us by the theoretical and practical results in the evolution of humanity, which have emerged in such a splendid way in the course of the last three or four centuries, but especially during the nineteenth century. Therefore, I shall speak today about super-sensible knowledge in so far as it tends to fulfill precisely this demand, and I wish to speak in another lecture about the super-sensible knowledge of the human being as a demand of the human heart, of human feeling, during the present age.

We can observe the magnificent contribution which scientific research has brought us even up to the most recent time—the magnificent contribution in the findings about relationships throughout the external world. But it is possible to speak in a different sense regarding the achievements which have come about precisely in connection with this current of human evolution. For instance, we may call attention to the fact that, through the conscientious, earnest observation of the laws and facts of the external world of the senses, as is supplied by natural science, very special human capacities have been developed, and that just such observation and experimentation have thrown a light also upon human capacities themselves. But I should like to say that many persons holding positions deserving the greatest respect in the sphere of scientific research are willing to give very little attention to this light which has been reflected upon man himself through his own researches.

If we only give a little thought to what this light has illuminated, we see that human thinking, through the very fact that it has been able to investigate both narrow and vast relationships—the microscopic and the telescopic—has gained immeasurably in itself: has gained in the capacity of discrimination, has gained in power of penetration, to associate the things in the world so that their secrets are unveiled, and to determine the laws underlying cosmic relationships, and so forth. We see, as this thinking develops, that a standard is set for this thinking, and it is set precisely for the most earnest of those who take up this research: the demand that this thinking must develop as selflessly as possible in the observation of external nature and in experimentation in the laboratory, in the clinic, etc. And the human being has achieved tremendous power in this respect. He has succeeded in setting up more and more rules whose character prevents anything of the nature of inner wishes of the heart, of opinions, perhaps even of fantasies regarding one's own being such as arise in the course of thinking, from being carried over into what he is to establish by means of the microscope and the telescope, the measuring rule and the scales, regarding the relationships of life and existence.

Under these influences a type of thinking has gradually developed about which one must say that it has worked out its passive role with a certain inner diligence. Thinking in connection with observation, with experiment, has nowadays become completely abstract—so abstract that it does not trust itself to conjure anything of the nature of knowledge or of truth from its own inner being.

It is this gradually developed characteristic of thinking which demands before everything else—and above all it seems—the rejection of all that the human being is in himself by reason of his inner nature. For what he himself is must be set forth in activity; this can really never exist wholly apart from the impulse of his will. Thus we have arrived at the point—and we have rightly reached this point in the field of external research—of actually rejecting the activity of thinking, although we became aware in this activity of what we ourselves mean as human beings in the universe, in the totality of cosmic relationships. In a certain sense, the human being has eliminated himself in connection with his research; he prohibits his own inner activity. We shall see immediately that what is rightly prohibited in connection with this external research must be especially cultivated in relationship to man's own self if he wishes to gain enlightenment about the spiritual, about the super-sensible element of his own being.

But a second element in the nature of man has been obliged to manifest its particular side in modern research, a side which is alien to humanity even though friendly to the world: that is, the human life of sentiment, the human life of feeling. In modern research, human feeling is not permitted to participate; the human being must remain cold and matter-of-fact. Yet one might ask whether it were possible to acquire within this human feeling forces useful in gaining knowledge of the world. One can say, on the one hand, that inner human caprice plays a role in feelings, in human subjectivity, and that feeling is the source of fantasy. On the other hand, one can reply that human feeling can certainly play no distinct role as it exists chiefly in everyday and in scientific life. Yet, if we recall—as science itself must describe it to us—that the human senses have not always, in the course of human evolution, been such as they are today, but have developed from a relatively imperfect stage up to their present state, if we recall that they certainly did not express themselves in earlier periods as objectively about things as they do today, an inkling may then dawn in us that there may exist, even within the life of subjective feeling, something that might evolve just as did the human senses themselves, and which might be led from an experience of man's own being over to a comprehension of cosmic relationships in a higher sense. Precisely as we observe the withdrawal of human feeling in connection with contemporary research must the question be raised: could not some higher sense unfold within feeling itself, if feeling were particularly developed?

But we find eminently clear in a third element in the being of man how we are impelled from an altogether praiseworthy scientific view to something different: this is the will aspect of the life of the soul. Whoever is at home in scientific thinking knows how impossible it is for such thinking to grasp the relationships of the world other than through causal necessity. We link in the most rigid manner phenomena existing side by side in space; we link in the strictest sense phenomena occurring one after another in time. That is, we relate cause and effect according to their inflexible laws. Whoever speaks, not as a dilettante, but as one thoroughly at home in science, knows what a tremendous power is exerted by the mere consideration of the realms of scientific fact in this manner. He knows how he is captivated by this idea of a universal causality and how he cannot do otherwise than to subject everything that he confronts in his thinking to this idea of causality.

But there is human will, this human will which says to us in every moment of our waking life of day: “What you undertake in a certain sense by reason of yourself, by reason of your will, is not causally determined in the same sense that applies to any sort of external phenomena of nature.” For this reason, even a person who simply feels in a natural way about himself, who looks into himself in observation free from preconception, can scarcely do otherwise than also to ascribe to himself, on the basis of immediate experience, freedom of will. But when he turns his glance to scientific thinking, he cannot admit this freedom of will. This is one of the conflicts into which we are brought by the condition of the present age. In the course of our lectures we shall learn much more about the conflicts. But for one who is able to feel this conflict in its full intensity, who can feel it through and through—because he must be honest on the one side concerning scientific research, and on the other side concerning his self-observation—the conflict is something utterly confounding, so confounding that it may drive him to doubt whether there is anywhere in life a firm basis from which one may search for truth.

We must deal with such conflicts from the right human perspective. We must be able to say to ourselves that research drives us to the point where we are actually unable to admit what we are everyday aware of: that something else must somehow exist which offers another approach to the world than that which is offered to us in irrefutable manner in the external order of nature. Through the very fact that we are so forcibly driven into such conflicts by the order of nature itself, it becomes for human beings of the present time a necessity to admit the impossibility of speaking about the super-sensible worlds as they have been spoken about until a relatively recent time. We need go back only to the first half of the nineteenth century to discover individuals who, by reason of a consciousness in harmony with the period, were thoroughly serious in their scientific work, and yet who called attention to the super-sensible aspect of human life, to that aspect which opens up to the human being a view of the divine, of his own immortality; and in this connection they always called attention to what we may at present designate as the “night aspects” of human life. Men deserving of the very highest regard have called attention to that wonderful but very problematical world into which the human being is transferred every night: to the dream world. They have called attention to many mysterious relationships which exist between this chaotic picture-world of dreams and the world of actuality. They have called attention to the fact that the inner nature of the human organization, especially in illness, reflects itself in the fantastic pictures of dreams, and how healthy human life enters into the chaotic experiences of dreams in the forms of signs and symbols. They pointed out that much which cannot be surveyed by the human being with his waking senses fords its place in the half-awake state of the soul, and out of such matters conclusions were drawn. These matters border upon the subject that many people still study today, the “subconscious” states of the life of the human soul, which manifest themselves in a similar way.

But everything which appears before the human being in this form, which could still give a certain satisfaction to an earlier humanity, is no longer valid for us. It is no longer valid for us because our way of looking into external nature has become something different. Here we have to look back to the times when there existed still only a mystically colored astrology. Man then looked into the world of the senses in such a way that his perception was far removed from the exactness which we demand of science today. Because he did not demand of himself in his sense life that complete clarity which we possess today, he could discover in a mystical, half-conscious state something from which he could draw inferences. This we cannot do today. Just as little as we are able to derive today, from what natural science gives us directly, anything other than questions regarding the true nature of man, just so little can we afford to remain at a standstill at the point reached by natural science and expect to satisfy our super-sensible needs in a manner similar to that of earlier times.

That form of super-sensible knowledge of which I shall speak here has an insight into this demand of our times. It observes what has become of thinking, feeling, and willing in man precisely through natural science, and it asks, on the other side, whether it may be possible by reason of the very achievements of contemporary humanity in thinking, feeling, and willing to penetrate further into the super-sensible realm with the same clarity which holds sway in the scientific realm. This cannot be achieved by means of inferential reasoning, by means of logic; for natural science justly points out its limitations with reference to its own nature. But something else can occur: the inner human capacities may evolve further, beyond the point at which they stand when we are in the realm of ordinary scientific research, so that we now apply to the development of our own spiritual capacities the same exactness which we are accustomed to applying to research in the laboratory and the clinic. I shall discuss this first in connection with thinking itself.

Thinking, which has become more and more conscious of its passive role in connection with external research, and is not willing to disavow this, is capable of energizing itself inwardly to activity. It may energize itself in such a way that, although not exact in the sense in which we apply this term to measure and weight in external research, it is exact in relationship to its own development in the sense in which the external scientist, the mathematician, for example, is accustomed to follow with full consciousness every step in his research. But this occurs when that mode of super-sensible cognition of which I am here speaking replaces the ancient vague meditation, the ancient indistinct immersion of oneself in thinking, with a truly exact development of this thinking. It is possible here to indicate only the general principles of what I have said regarding such an exact development of thinking in my books, Occult Science, an Outline, Knowledge of the Higher Words and Its Attainment, and other books. The human being should really compel himself, for the length of time which is necessary for him—and this is determined by the varying innate capacities of people—to exchange the role of passive surrender to the external world, which he otherwise rightly assumes in his thinking, for that different role: that of introducing into this thinking his whole inner activity of soul. This he should do by taking into his mind day by day, even though at times only for a brief period, some particular thought—the content of which is not the important matter—and, while withdrawing his inner nature from the external world, directing all the powers of his soul in inner concentration upon this thought. By means of this process something comes about in the development of those capacities of soul that may be compared with the results which follow when any particular muscles of the human body—for instance, the muscles of the arms—are to be developed. The muscles are made stronger, more powerful through use, through exercise. Thus, likewise, do the capacities of the soul become inwardly stronger, more powerful by being directed upon a definite thought. This exercise must be arranged so that we proceed in a really exact way, so that we survey every step taken in our thinking just as a mathematician surveys his operations when he undertakes to solve a geometrical or arithmetical problem. This can be done in the greatest variety of ways. When I say that something should be selected for this content of concentration that one fords in any sort of book—even some worthless old volume that we know quite certainly we have never previously seen—this may seem trivial. The important point is not the content of truth in the thing, but the fact that we survey such a thought content completely. This cannot be done if we take a thought content out of our own memory; for so much is associated with such a thought in the most indeterminate way, so much plays a role in the subconscious or the unconscious, and it is not possible to be exact if one concentrates upon such a thing. What one fixes, therefore, in the very center of one's consciousness is something entirely new, something that one confronts only with respect to its actual content, which is not associated with any experience of the soul. What matters is the concentration of the forces of the soul and the strengthening which results from this. Likewise, if one goes to a person who has made some progress in this field and requests him to provide one with such a thought content, it is good not to entertain a prejudice against this. The content is in that case entirely new to the person concerned, and he can survey it. Many persons fear that they may become dependent in this way upon someone else who provides them with such a content. But this is not the case; in reality, they become less dependent than if they take such a thought content out of their own memories and experiences, in which case it is bound up with all sorts of subconscious experiences. Moreover, it is good for a person who has had some practice in scientific work to use the findings of scientific research as material for concentration; these prove to be, indeed, the most fruitful of all for this purpose.

If this is continued for a relatively long time, even for years, perhaps—and this must be accompanied by patience and endurance, as it requires a few weeks or months in some cases before success is achieved, and in some cases years—it is possible to arrive at a point where this method for the inner molding of one's thoughts can be applied as exactly as the physicist or the chemist applies the methods of measuring and weighing for the purpose of discovering the secrets of nature. What one has then learned is applied to the further development of one's own thinking. At a certain moment, then, the person has a significant inner experience: he feels himself to be involved not only in picture-thinking, which depicts the external events and facts and which is true to reality in inverse proportion to the force it possesses in itself, in proportion as it is a mere picture; but one arrives now at the point of adding to this kind of thinking the inner experience of a thinking in which one lives, a thinking filled with inner power. This is a significant experience. Thinking thus becomes, as it were, something which one begins to experience just as one experiences the power of one's own muscles when one grasps an object or strikes against something. A reality such as one experiences otherwise only in connection with the process of breathing or the activity of a muscle—this inner activity now enters into thinking. And since one has investigated precisely every step upon this way, so one experiences oneself in full clarity and presence of mind in this strengthened, active thinking. If the objection is raised, let us say, that knowledge can result only from observation and logic, this is no real objection; for what we now experience is experienced with complete inner clarity, and yet in such a way that this thinking becomes at the same time a kind of “touching with the soul.” In the process of forming a thought, it is as if we were extending a feeler—not, in this case, as the snail extends a feeler into the physical world, but as if a feeler were extended into a spiritual world, which is as yet present only for our feelings if we have developed to this stage, but which we are justified in expecting. For one has the feeling: “Your thinking has been transformed into a spiritual touching; if this can become more and more the case, you may expect that this thinking will come into contact with what constitutes a spiritual reality, just as your finger here in the physical world comes into contact with what is physically real.”

Only when one has lived for a time in this inwardly strengthened thinking does complete self-knowledge become possible. For we know then that the soul element has become, by means of this concentration, an experiential reality.

It is possible then for the person concerned to go forward in his exercises and to arrive at the point where he can, in turn, eliminate this soul content, put it away; he can, in a certain sense, render his consciousness void of what he himself has brought into this consciousness, this thought content upon which he has concentrated, and which has enabled him to possess a real thinking constituting a sense of touch for the soul. It is rather easy in ordinary life to acquire an empty consciousness; we need only fall asleep. But it requires an intense application of force, after we have become accustomed to concentrating upon a definite thought content, to put away such a content of thought in connection with this very strengthened thinking, thinking which has become a reality. Yet we succeed in putting aside this content of thinking in exactly the same way in which we acquired at first the powerful force needed for concentration. When we have succeeded in this, something appears before the soul which has been possible previously only in the form of pictures of episodes in one's memory: the whole inner life of the person appears in a new way before the eyes of his soul, as he has passed through this life in his earthly existence since birth, or since the earliest point of time to which one's memory can return, at which point one entered consciously into this earthly existence. Ordinarily, the only thing we know in regard to this earthly existence is that which we can call up in memory; we have pictures of our experiences. But what is now experienced by means of this strengthened thinking is not of the same kind. It appears as if in a tremendous tableau so that we do not recollect merely in a dim picture what we passed through ten years ago, for instance, but we have the inner experience that in spirit we are retracing the course of time. If someone carries out such an exercise in his fiftieth year, let us say, and arrives at the result indicated, what then happens is that time permits him to go back as if along a “time-path” all the way, for instance, to the experiences of his thirty-fifth year. We travel back through time. We do not have only a dim memory of what we passed through fifteen years earlier, but we feel ourselves to be in the midst of this in its living reality, as if in an experience of the present moment. We travel through time; space loses its significance, and time affords us a mighty tableau of memory. This becomes a precise picture of man's life, such as appears, even according to scientific thinkers, when anyone is exposed to great terror, a severe shock—at the moment of drowning, for instance—when for some moments he is confronted by something of his entire earthly life in pictures appearing before his soul—to which he looks back later with a certain shuddering fascination. In other words, what appears before the soul in such cases as through a natural convulsion now actually appears before the soul at the moment indicated, when the entire earthly life confronts one as in a mighty tableau of the spirit, only in a time order. Only now does one know oneself; only now does one possess real self-observation.

It is quite possible to differentiate this picture of man's inner being from that which constitutes a mere “memory” picture. It is clear in the memory picture that we have something in which persons, natural occurrences, or works of art come upon us as if from without; in this memory picture what we have is the manner in which the world comes into contact with us. In the super-sensible memory tableau which appears before a person, what confronts him is, rather, that which has proceeded from himself. If, for instance, at a certain definite point of time in his life he began a friendship with a beloved personality, the mere memory picture shows how this person came to him at a certain point of time, spoke to him, what he owes to the person, and so on. But in this life tableau what confronts him is the manner in which he himself longed for this person, and how he ultimately took every step in such a way that he was inevitably led to that being whom he recognized as being in harmony with himself.

That which has taken place through the unfolding of the forces of the soul comes to meet one with exact clarity in this life tableau. Many people do not like this precise clarity, because it brings them to enlightenment regarding much that they would prefer to see in a different light from the light of truth. But one must endure the fact that one is able to look upon one's own inner being in utter freedom from preconceptions, even if this being of oneself meets the searching eye with reproach. This state of cognition I have called imaginative knowledge, or Imagination.

But one can progress beyond this stage. In that which we come to know through this memory tableau, we are confronted by those forces which have really formed us as human beings. One knows now: “Within you those forces evolve which mold the substances of your physical body. Within you, especially during childhood, those forces have evolved which, approximately up to the seventh year, have plastically modeled the nerve masses of the brain, which did not yet exist in well-ordered form after your birth.” We then cease at last to ascribe what works formatively upon the human being to those forces which inhere in material substances. We cease to do this when we have this memory tableau before us, when we see how into all the forces of nutrition and of breathing and into the whole circulation of the blood stream the contents of this memory tableau—which are forces in themselves, forces without which no single wave of the blood circulates and no single process of breathing occurs. We now learn to understand that man himself in his inner being consists of spirit and soul.

What now dawns upon one can best be described by a comparison. Imagine that you have walked for a certain distance over ground which has been softened by rain, and that you have noticed all the way tracks or ruts made by human feet or wagon wheels. Now suppose that a being came from the moon and saw this condition of the ground, but saw no human being. He would probably conclude that there must be all sorts of forces underneath the earth which have thrust up these traces and given this form to the surface of the ground. Such a being might seek within the earth for the forces which have produced the tracks. But one who sees through the matter knows that the condition was not caused by the earth but by human feet or wagon wheels.

Now, anyone who possesses a view of things such as I have just described does not at all look, for this reason, with less reverence, for example, upon the convolutions of the human brain. Yet, just as he knows that those tracks on the surface of the earth do not derive from forces within the earth, he now knows that these convolutions of the brain do not derive from forces within the substance of the brain, but that the spiritual-psychic entity of man is there, which he himself has now beheld, and that it works in such a way that our brain has these convolutions. This is the essential thing—to be driven to this view, so that we arrive at a conception of our own spirit-soul nature, so that the eye of the soul is really directed to the soul-spiritual element and to its manifestations in the external life.

But it is possible to progress still further. After we strengthen our inner being through concentrating upon a definite thought content; and after we then empty our consciousness so that, instead of the images we ourselves have formed, the content of our life appears before us; now we can put this memory tableau out of our consciousness, just as we previously eliminated a single concept, so that our consciousness is empty of this. We can now learn to apply this powerful force to efface from our consciousness that which we have come to know through a heightened self-observation as a spirit-soul being. In doing this, efface nothing less than the inner being of our own soul life. We learned first in concentration to efface what is external, and we then learned to direct the gaze of our soul to our own spirit-soul entity, and this completely occupied the whole tableau of memory. If we now succeed in effacing this memory tableau itself, there comes about what I wish to designate as the truly empty consciousness. We have previously lived in the memory tableau or in what we ourselves have set up before our minds, but now something entirely different appears. That which lived within us we have now suppressed, and we confront the world with an empty consciousness. This signifies something extraordinary in the experience of the soul. Fundamentally speaking, I can describe at first only by means of a comparison what now appears to the soul, when the content of our own soul is effaced by means of the powerful inner force we apply. We need only think of the fact that, when the impressions of the external senses gradually die away, when there is a cessation of seeing, hearing, perhaps even of a distinct sense of touch, we sink into a state closely resembling the state of sleep. Now, however, when we efface the content of our own souls, we come to an empty state of consciousness, although this is not a state of sleep. We reach what I might call the state of being merely awake—that is, of being awake with an empty consciousness.

We may, perhaps, conceive this empty consciousness in the following way: imagine a modern city with all its noise and din. We may withdraw from the city, and everything becomes more and more quiet around us; but we finally arrive, perhaps deep within a forest. Here we find the absolute opposite of the noises of the city. We live in complete inner stillness, in hushed peace. If, now, I undertake to describe what follows, I must resort to a trivial comparison. We must raise the question whether this peace, this stillness, can be changed still further into something else. We may designate this stillness as the zero point in our perception of the external world. If we possess a certain amount of property and we subtract from this property, it is diminished; as we take away still more, it is further diminished; and we finally arrive at zero and have nothing left. Can we then proceed still further? It may, perhaps, be undesirable to most persons, but the fact is that many do this: they decrease their possessions further by incurring debt. One then has less than zero, and one can still diminish what one has. In precisely the same way, we may at least imagine that the stillness, which is like the zero point of being awake, may be pushed beyond this zero into a sort of negative state. A super-stillness, a super-peace may augment the quietness. This is what is experienced by one who blots out his own soul content: he enters into a state of quietness of soul which lies below the zero point. An inner stillness of soul in the most intensified degree comes about during the state of wakefulness.

This cannot be attained without being accompanied by something else. This can be attained only when we feel that a certain state, linked with the picture images of our own self, passes over into another state. One who senses, who contemplates the first stage of the super-sensible within himself, is in a certain state of well-being, that well-being and inner blissfulness to which the various religious creeds refer when they call attention to the super-sensible and at the same time remind the human being that the super-sensible brings to him the experience of a certain blissfulness in his inner being. Indeed, up to the point where one excluded one's own inner self, there was a certain sense of well-being, an intensified feeling of blissfulness. At that moment, however, when the stillness of soul comes about, this inner well-being is replaced completely by inner pain, inner deprivation, such as we have never known before—the sense that one is separated from all to which one is united in the earthly life, far removed not only from the feeling of one's own body but from the feeling of one's own experiences since birth. And this means a deprivation which increases to a frightful pain of soul. Many shrink back from this stage; they cannot find the courage to make the crossing from a certain lower clairvoyance, after eliminating their own content of soul, to the state of consciousness where resides that inner stillness. But if we pass into this stage in full consciousness there begins to enter, in place of Imagination, that which I have called, in the books previously mentioned, Inspiration—I trust you will not take offense at these terms—the experience of a real spiritual world. After one has previously eliminated the world of the senses and established an empty consciousness, accompanied by inexpressible pain of soul, then the outer spiritual world comes to meet us. In the state of Inspiration we become aware of the fact that the human being is surrounded by a spiritual world just as the sense world exists for his outer senses.

And the first thing, in turn, that we behold in this spiritual world is our own pre-earthly existence. Just as we are otherwise conscious of earthly experiences by means of our ordinary memory, so does a cosmic memory now dawn for us: we look back into pre-earthly experiences, beholding what we were as spirit-soul beings in a purely spiritual world before we descended through birth to this earthly existence, when as spiritual beings we participated in the molding of our own bodies. So do we look back upon the spiritual, the eternal, in the nature of man, to that which reveals itself to us as the pre-earthly existence, which we now know is not dependent upon the birth and death of the physical body, for it is that which existed before birth and before conception which made a human being out of this physical body derived from matter and heredity. Now for the first time one reaches a true concept also of physical heredity, since one sees what super-sensible forces play into this—forces which we acquire out of a purely spiritual world, with which we now feel united just as we feel united with the physical world in the earthly life. Moreover, we now become aware that, in spite of the great advances registered in the evolution of humanity, much has been lost which belonged inherently to more ancient instinctive conceptions that we can no longer make use of today. The instinctive super-sensible vision of humanity of earlier ages was confronted by this pre-earthly life as well as human immortality, regarding which we shall speak a little later. For eternity was conceived in ancient times in such a way that one grasped both its aspects. We speak nowadays of the immortality of the human soul—indeed, our language itself possesses only this word—but people once spoke, and the more ancient languages continue to show such words, of unborn-ness (Ungeborenheit) as the other aspect of the eternity of the human soul. Now, however, the times have somewhat changed. People are interested in the question of what becomes of the human soul after death, because this is something still to come; but as to the other question, what existed before birth, before conception, there is less interest because that has “passed,” and yet we are here. But a true knowledge of human immortality can arise only when we consider eternity in both its aspects: that of immortality and that of unborn-ness.

But, for the very purpose of maintaining a connection with the latter, and especially in an exact clairvoyance, still a third thing is necessary. We sense ourselves truly as human beings when we no longer permit our feelings to be completely absorbed within the earthly life. For that which we now come to know as our pre-earthly life penetrates into us in pictures and is added to what we previously sensed as our humanity, making us for the first time completely human. Our feelings are then, as it were, shot through with inner light, and we know that we have now developed our feeling into a sense organ for the spiritual. But we must go further and must be able to make our will element into an organ of knowledge for the spiritual.

For this purpose, something must begin to play a role in human knowledge which, very rightly, is not otherwise considered as a means of knowledge by those who desire to be taken seriously in the realm of cognition. We first become aware that this is a means of knowledge when we enter the super-sensible realms. This is the force of love. Only, we must begin to develop this force of love in a higher sense than that in which nature has bestowed love upon us, with all its significance for the life of nature and of man. It may seem paradoxical what I must describe as the first steps in the unfolding of a higher love in the life of man.

When you try, with full discretion for each step, to perceive the world in a certain other consciousness than one usually feels, then you come to the higher love. Suppose you undertake in the evening, before you go to sleep, to bring your day's life into your consciousness so that you begin with the last occurrence of the evening, visualizing it as precisely as possible, then visualizing in the same way the next preceding, then the third from the last, thus moving backward to the morning in this survey of the life of the day; this is a process in which much more importance attaches to the inner energy expended than to the question whether one visualizes each individual occurrence more or less precisely. What is important is this reversal of the order of visualization. Ordinarily we view events in such a way that we first consider the earlier and then the subsequent in a consecutive chain. Through such an exercise as I have just described to you, we reverse the whole life; we think and feel in a direction opposite to the course of the day. We can practice this on the experiences of our day, as I have suggested, and this requires only a few minutes. But we can do this also in a different way. Undertake to visualize the course of a drama in such a way that you begin with the fifth act and picture it advancing forwards through the fourth, third, toward the beginning. Or we may place before ourselves a melody in the reverse succession of tones. If we pass through more and more such inner experiences of the soul in this way, we shall discover that the inner experience is freed from the external course of nature, and that we actually become more and more self-directing. But, even though we become in this way more and more individualized and achieve an ever-increasing power of self-direction, we learn also to give attention to the external life in more complete consciousness. For only now do we become aware that, the more powerfully we develop through practice this fully conscious absorption in another being, the higher becomes the degree of our selflessness, and the greater must our love become in compensation. In this way we feel how this experience of not living in oneself but living in another being, this passing over from one's own being to another, becomes more and more powerful. We then reach the stage where, to Imagination and Inspiration, which we have already developed, we can now add the true intuitive ascending into another being: we arrive at Intuition, so that we no longer experience only ourselves, but also learn—in complete individualism yet also in complete selflessness—to experience the other being.

Here love becomes something which gradually makes it possible for us to look back even further than into the pre-earthly spiritual life. As we learn in our present life to look back upon contemporary events, we learn through such an elevation of love to look back upon former earth lives, and to recognize the entire life of a human being as a succession of earthly lives. The fact that these lives once had a beginning and must likewise have an end will be touched upon in another lecture. But we learn to know the human life as a succession of lives on earth, between which there always intervene purely spiritual lives, coming between a death and the next birth. For this elevated form of love, lifted to the spiritual sphere and transformed into a force of knowledge, teaches us also the true significance of death. When we have advanced so far, as I have explained in connection with Imagination and Inspiration, as to render these intensified inner forces capable of spiritual love, we actually learn in immediate exact clairvoyance to know that inner experience which we describe by saying that one experiences oneself spiritually, without a body, outside the body. This passing outside the body becomes in this way, if I may thus express it, actually a matter of objective experience for the soul. If one has experienced this spiritual existence one time outside of the body, clairvoyantly perceived, I should like to say, then one knows the significance of the event of laying aside the physical body in death, of passing through the portal of death to a new, spiritual life. We thus learn, at the third stage of exact clairvoyance, the significance of death, and thus also the significance of immortality, for man.

I have wished to make it transparently clear through the manner of my explanation that the mode of super-sensible cognition about which I am speaking seeks to bring into the very cognitional capacities of the human being something which works effectually, step by step, as it is thus introduced. The natural scientist applies this exactness to the external experiment, to the external observation; he wishes to see the objects in such juxtaposition that they reveal their secrets with exactitude in the process of measuring, enumerating, weighing. The spiritual scientist, about whom I am here speaking, employs this exactness to the evolution of the forces of his own soul. That which he uncovers in himself, through which the spiritual world and human immortality step before his soul, is made in a precise manner, to use an expression of Goethe's. With every step thus taken by the spiritual scientist, in order that the spiritual world may at last lie unfolded before the eyes of the soul, he feels obligated to be as conscientious in regard to his perception as a mathematician must be with every step he takes. For just as the mathematician must see clearly into everything that he writes on the paper, so must the spiritual scientist see with absolute precision into everything that he makes out of his powers of cognition. He then knows that he has formed an “eye of the soul” out of the soul itself through the same inner necessity with which nature has formed the corporeal eye out of bodily substance. And he knows that he can speak of spiritual worlds with the same justification with which he speaks of a physical-sensible world in relationship to the physical eye. In this sense the spiritual research with which we are here concerned satisfies the demands of our age imposed upon us by the magnificent achievements of natural science—which spiritual science in no way opposes but, rather, seeks to supplement.

I am well aware that everyone who undertakes to represent anything before the world, no matter what his motive may be, attributes a certain importance to himself by describing this as a “demand of the times.” I have no such purpose; on the contrary, I should like to show that the demands of the times already exist, and the very endeavor of spiritual science at every step it takes is to satisfy these demands of the times. We may say, then, that the spiritual scientist whom it is our purpose to discuss here does not propose to be a person who views nature like a dilettante or amateur. On the contrary, he proposes to advance in true harmony with natural science and with the same genuine conscientiousness. He desires truly exact clairvoyance for the description of a spiritual world. But it is clear to him at the same time that, when we undertake to investigate a human corpse in a laboratory for the purpose of explaining the life which has disappeared from it, or when we look out into cosmic space with a telescope, we then develop capacities which tend to adapt themselves at first solely to the microscope or telescope, but which possess an inner life and which misrepresent themselves in their form. If we dissect a human corpse, we know that it was not nature that directly made the human being into this bodily form, but that the human soul, which has now withdrawn from it, made it. We interpret the human soul from what we have here as its physical product, and one would be irrational to assume that this molding of the human physical forces and forms had not arisen out of what preceded the present state of this human being. But from all that we hold back, as we meanwhile investigate dead nature with the forces from which one rightly withdraws one's inner activity, from the very act of holding back is created the ability to develop further the human soul forces. Just as the seed of the plant lies out of sight under the earth when we have laid it in the soil, and yet will become a plant, so do we plant a seed in the soul in the very action of conscientious scientific research. He who is a serious scientist in this sense has within himself the germ of imaginative, inspired, and intuitive knowledge. He needs only to develop the germ. He will then know that, just as natural science is a demand of the times, so likewise is super-sensible research. What I mean to say is that everyone who speaks in the spirit of natural science speaks also in the spirit of super-sensible research, only without knowing this. And that which constitutes an unconscious longing in the innermost depths of many persons today—as will be manifest in another public lecture—is the impulse of super-sensible research to unfold out of its germ.

To those very persons, therefore, who oppose this spiritual research from a supposedly scientific standpoint, one would like to say, not with any bad intention, that this brings to mind an utterance in Goethe's Faust all too well known, but which would be applied in a different sense:

The little man would not sense the Devil
Even if he held him by the throat.

I do not care to go into that now. But what lies in this saying confronts us with a certain twist in that demand of the times: that those who speak rightly today about nature are really giving expression, though unconsciously, to the spirit. One would like to say that there are many who do not wish to notice the “spirit” when it speaks, although they are constantly giving expression to the spirit in their own words!

The seed of super-sensible perception is really far more widespread today than is supposed, but it must be developed. The fact that it must be developed is really a lesson we may learn from the seriousness of the times in reference to external experiences. As I have already said, I should like to go into the details another time: but we may still add in conclusion that the elements of a fearful catastrophe really speak to the whole of humanity today through various indications in the outside world, and that it is possible to realize that tasks at which humanity in the immediate future will have to work with the greatest intensity will struggle to birth out of this great seriousness of the times. This external seriousness with which the world confronts us today, especially the world of humanity, indicates the necessity of an inner seriousness. And it is about this inner seriousness in the guidance of the human heart and mind toward man's own spiritual powers, which constitute the powers of his essential being, that I have wished to speak to you today. For, if it is true that man must apply his most powerful external forces in meeting the serious events awaiting him over the whole world, he will need likewise a powerful inner courage. But such forces and such courage can come into existence only if the human being is able to feel and also to will himself in full consciousness in his innermost being, not merely theoretically conceiving himself but practically knowing himself. This is possible for him only when he comes to know that this being of his emerges from the source from which it truly comes, from the source of the spirit; only when in ever-increasing measure, not only theoretically but practically, he learns to know in actual experience that man is spirit; and can find his true satisfaction only in the spirit: that his highest powers and his highest courage can come to him only out of the spirit, out of the super-sensible.

If we pause in our anthroposophical considerations and raise the question of what attracts us to such a spiritual movement as our own, then naturally we can provide an answer from a variety of aspects. One of the most important aspects that engages our feelings most deeply, though not the only one, is the consideration of the life of the human soul between death and a new birth. In fact, the happenings that occur during the long period between death and rebirth are truly not less significant than the events between birth and death. We can consider now only a few of the most important events that we experience. But one may add that in such considerations one has the profound conviction that humanity is approaching a period when it must know and experience something of super-sensible worlds.

Let us broach the matter concretely. When the seer who is able to perceive life between death and rebirth meets the following event, this in itself is sufficient for him to feel it a duty to work towards a cognition of the spiritual world. A person has died. The seer seeks to find him some time after he has passed through the gate of death. In the manner that one can communicate with the dead one may gather the following from him. I am quoting an actual instance, “I have left my wife behind on the earth; I know that she is still there.” Obviously this is not conveyed by means of earthly words. “When I was living with her in the physical world she was always like sunshine to me as I came home from work. I experienced her words like a blessing and I could not have conceived of life without the light-filled presence of my beloved companions. Then I went through the gate of death and left her behind, and now I long to go back. I feel the lack of all I had. Longingly in my soul I seek a path to my life-long companion but I cannot find her. I cannot penetrate into her presence. It is as if she were not there. When from time to time I feel as if she were there, as if I were with her, then she appears unable to speak. It can be compared to two people, one of whom would like the other to say a few words, but the other is dumb and unable to say anything. And so the soul who was a blessing to me during the long span of physical existence has become dumb.”

Now if one investigates the basis of such facts one finds the following answer. In this case there is simply no common language between the one who has died and the one who remains on earth. There is nothing that could permeate the soul with that substance by means of which it would remain perceptible. Because there is no common language, these two souls feel severed from one another. This was not always so.

If we go back in the evolution of mankind, we find that souls possessed a spiritual inheritance that enabled them to remain perceptible, irrespective of whether they were both on the physical plane or one in the physical and the other in the spiritual world. That spiritual inheritance is exhausted today. It is no longer present, and the painful cases just described occurs where the soul of a loved one cannot be found after death because in the soul of the one who has remained on earth there is nothing that can render it perceptible to the one who has died. What can in fact be seen by the dead is spiritual knowledge, feeling and experience. That is the connection of souls here on earth with the spiritual world. If a soul who has been left behind on earth occupies himself with knowledge of the spiritual worlds, allows such thoughts to cross his mind, then these thoughts can be perceived by the one who has died. The religious feelings of the past are no longer sufficient to give the soul what it needs in order to be perceived by the dead.

If he pursues the matter further, the seer discovers that even when these souls have gone through the gate of death, they have but a dim perception of one another. They will only be able to achieve a mutual understanding under considerable difficulty, or not at all, because a common language is lacking.

The seer realizes what anthroposophy is in a deeper sense. It is the language that will be spoken by the living and the dead, by those who live in the physical world and those who dwell between death and rebirth.

Souls who remain behind and have acquired thoughts about the super-sensible worlds can be seen by the dead. If they have radiated love before death, they can also do so after death. This carries the conviction that anthroposophy is a language that renders it possible for those in super-sensible realms to perceive the events of the physical world.

The prospect that stands before humanity is that souls will become even more lonely, will be unable to find a bridge to one another, unless a link is forged from soul to soul by means of spiritual concepts. That is the reality of anthroposophy, for it is not a theory.

Theoretical knowledge is of the least importance. What we take into ourselves is a genuine soul elixir, a real substance. This substance enables the soul who has gone through the gate of death to perceive the soul who has remained behind. In fact, the seer who has gained insight into such a situation, where the one who has died cannot find those he has left behind because that family has not connected itself with spiritual science, knows that he can follow no other course than to speak to his fellow men about spiritual wisdom. He sees the sorrow with which the soul is burdened by such a lack of communication. He knows that the time has come when spiritual wisdom must take hold of human hearts.

Those whose mission to speak about the super-sensible stems from the knowledge of the spiritual worlds, experience it as an urgent necessity that they cannot counter in any way. It would be the greatest sin if they did so. They feel it a necessity to proclaim revelations about the super-sensible worlds.

From what has just been said you can gather the immense seriousness connected with the proclamation of spiritual revelation. There is, however, yet another aspect to the understanding between the living and the dead. In this connection we have not progressed very far as yet but it will come about. In order to grasp how the living will gradually develop an understanding for the dead, let us consider the following.

Man knows little about the physical world. How does he gain knowledge of this world? He makes use of his senses, brings his imagination to bear, has certain sensations conveyed to him by the external world. But that is only the minutest portion of the content of the world. There is something quite other contained in it.

I would like you to realize that there is something of far greater importance than sense reality. I do not mean the super-sensible world, but something other than that.

Imagine for a moment that you are in the habit of leaving home every morning at eight in order to go to work. One day you suddenly notice you are leaving three minutes later. You go through a particular place where there is kind of overhand, the roof of which is supported by pillars. When you arrive there three minutes later than usual you realize that if you have arrived on time, you would have been crushed by the falling roof. Imagine this quite vividly! It does happen that a person misses a train that is later involved in an accident. Had he caught the train he would have been killed. When such things do not occur we pay no attention to them. If you become dramatically aware of such an occurrence, it makes a certain impression on you. Similar things, which fail to strike you in the course of the day, can happen from morning till night. They cannot be surveyed. Such occurrences may appear as “clever conjecture,” and yet they belong to the most important aspects of life.

To take another example, you gain a particular feeling when you consider that a man in Berlin had already got his ticked for the Titanic. He meets a friend who urges him not to sail on the Titanic. The friend succeeds in persuading him not to sail on this ship. The Titanic sinks, and he escapes from death. This makes a lasting impression on the person concerned!

That is a special case, and yet such things are happening all the time without being noticed. When one does become aware of them they make an impression on the heart and mind.

Let us consider this matter from another aspect. How many impressions of heart and mind escape us because we have been protected unawares from danger! If we were aware of the many things from which we are constantly preserved, we would go about the world in a totally different frame of mind. Furthermore, the seer discovers the following possibility. Let us assume that things actually happened in the way described. You arrived three minutes later than usual at that spot. This is the most opportune moment for a person who has died to make himself perceptible to your soul. You may have the feeling, “Where does that come from that arises in my soul?” It need not occur only in such a special case as quoted. It may take manifold forms. A beginning will be made when people become attentive not only to the world of outer reality but also to the sphere of probabilities. The considerable number of herring in the ocean is a reality. They become possible only because a vast quantity of eggs was released. In this way an infinite number of possibilities forms the basis of life.

This makes a profound impression on the seer also when he reaches the boundary of two worlds. He feels, “How infinitely rich in possibilities is the spiritual world. Only a minute part of it becomes a reality in our sense world!” This is accompanied by the feeling, “An enormous amount lies hidden in the very ground of being.” This feeling grows as one occupies oneself with anthroposophy. One develops the feeling that at every point where something happens externally a hidden something lies behind it. Each flower, each breath of air, each stone and crystal hides an endless number of possibilities. Ultimately this feeling will bring about a growing sense of devotion towards what is hidden. As this feeling develops, one will quite naturally become aware that at such moments they can communicate with one who for earthly life is dead. In the future it will occur quite normally that a person will feel that the dead has spoken to his soul. Gradually he will realize from whom the communication comes, that is, who has spoken into him. It is only because people are so little aware of the endless, fathomless realm of possibilities that they cannot hear what the dead would speak to the hearts of the living.

This twofold consideration will indicate the radical change that will be brought about for the whole of humanity by the spreading of anthroposophy. On the one hand, the thoughts of anthroposophists will become perceptible for the dead. On the other, the dead will be able to speak to the hearts of those who have developed a spiritual sensitivity. A bridge will be built between this world and the world beyond. In fact, life between death and rebirth will also be different. This will not be mere theory, but reality. An understanding will be achieved between the so-called living and the dead, who are in fact far more alive. Souls on earth will also feel what is fruitful for the dead. One cannot really make life fruitful for them unless one feels what an immense service one bestows on the dead by reading to them.

Let us consider an extreme case. One will no doubt have come across it in relation to other people. One lives with a sister, parent, a husband or a wife. The more the one feels the urge to connect himself closely to anthroposophy, the more the other develops a strong animosity towards it. How often can one experience this! It may take this form in consciousness, but it need not be so in the soul itself. There something different may take place.

The unconscious works in the astral body. It may be that the more a person slanders and rages against spiritual science, the more deeply in his unconscious he harbors an urge, a longing, to hear about spiritual science.

When we go through the gate of death we encounter truth. There nothing can be concealed. Here on earth one can lie and pretend but after death things take on their true coloring. Things reveal themselves as they really are.

However much one has stupefied oneself and slandered spiritual science during one's lifetime, after death an urge towards it is noticeable. One suffers because this urge cannot be satisfied. But now the living can imagine himself in the presence of the dead, and he can think spiritual thoughts and the dead will understand. Even if the one who died was not an anthroposophist, the dead will nevertheless be able to perceive the living one who occupies himself with spiritual thoughts.

There is a certain inclination on the part of the dead towards the language he used to speak during his lifetime, because during the early phases after death he is still connected with his particular language. It is therefore advisable to clothe one's thoughts in language the dead used to speak. But after five, six, eight years, and on occasion earlier, we find that the language of the spirit is such that the external language presents no obstacle whatever. The one who died can also understand spiritual thoughts in a language that he did not know during his lifetime.

At any rate, the outcome of reading to the dead, even if they were not anthroposophists, has proved itself to be particularly beautiful. It has shown itself to be a special service and one of the greatest deeds of love that can be performed.

In order to reach our aims it is not only a question of spreading anthroposophy externally—this must be done and it is important—but anthroposophy must also be cultivated more quietly within the recesses of the soul. Spiritual positions of responsibility may be created by means of which much can be achieved for the development of the soul after death. Some find it almost impossible to do so.

The seer also sees souls between death and rebirth who are compelled to carry out tasks that they themselves do not understand. For example, the seer may discover souls in that realm who are the servants of the powers of death and disease for a period of time. This does not refer to the regular occurrence of death but to events relating to people being taken away in the flower of youth. Illnesses are of a physical nature. They are caused, however, by powers that play in from super-sensible realms. Epidemic illnesses can be traced back to the deeds of super-sensible beings and certain spirits have the task of bringing about untimely death. We cannot discuss now how this can be substantiated as part of a wise guidance, but it is important to note that certain souls are yoked to such beings. Although the seer must have accustomed himself to a certain equanimity, such situations are painful and shattering to behold. Such souls are compelled to serve and bring death and disease to mankind.

If the seer looks back into the lives of such souls before death, he discovers why they are condemned to serve as servants to the spirits of death and disease. The cause lies in a lack of conscience in such souls during their earthly life. In accordance with the extent of their lack of conscience they condemn themselves to become servants of those evil beings. As truly as cause and effect obtain in the case of impinging billiard balls, so, too, must people who have no conscience become servants of these evil beings. That is indeed shattering!

The seer beholds yet another fact. Souls who are under the yoke of ahrimanic beings have to prepare the spiritual origin of all that occurs on earth as obstacles, as impediments to our deeds. Ahriman also has this task. All obstacles that arise here on earth are directed from the spiritual world. They are servants of Ahriman. Why have such souls condemned themselves to such service? Because during their lives on earth they indulged in love of ease and comfort. If you but consider how widespread love of ease has become, you will find that Ahriman has a considerable number of recruits. Love of ease is uppermost in life today. Modern economists do not only reckon with egoism and competition, but also with the comfort of the human being. Love of ease and comfort are important factors.

Now there is a difference in whether one has such experiences and is able to understand why one has them or whether one experiences them quite unconsciously without realizing why one has to serve such spirits. If one knows why one is yoked to the spirits that bring epidemics about, one also realizes the virtues that have to be developed in the next life in order to work towards a cosmic compensation. If one remains ignorant of the reason, one does in fact create the same karma, but the compensation can only occur in a second incarnation. Actual progress is thereby postponed.

It is important, therefore, that man should learn about such things on earth. One will experience them after death but one learns to orient oneself down here. Here we have yet another fact that makes it essential to bring about a new sense or orientation by spreading spiritual truths. The old means of orientation are no longer available.

We can ask, “Why are we anthroposophists?” We can give an answer out of the spiritual facts themselves that speaks directly to our feelings rather than to our intellect. So anthroposophy becomes increasingly a universal language. It becomes a language that will render it possible to tear down the partition that stands between the different worlds in which we live, one time in a physical body, another without a physical body. Thus the wall between the physical and the spiritual world will crumble when spiritual science really takes hold of the souls of men. We should feel this. It can give us the right inner enthusiasm for spiritual science.

Let me bring another matter to your attention. For the seer there is during the lives of souls between death and rebirth a moment that reveals itself of special importance. It is also of importance for others after death. For some this point lies earlier, for others, later. If one beholds the life of sleep with super-sensible cognition, one sees the human being with his astral body and ego outside the physical body. Looking back, one gains the impression that the physical body is slowly dying.

It is only from the first years of infancy until the child develops an understanding, until the moment that memory begins, that the body during sleep has a blooming, flourishing appearance. A slow withering process in the physical body sets in shortly after life begins. Death is but the final occurrence in this dying process. Sleep is there in order to compensate for the forces that have been exhausted but the compensation is incomplete. Each time there remains a small residue of death forces. When so much residue has been accumulated that the upbuilding forces are unequal to the task, physical death ensues. Therefore, as one considers the human physical body one sees how death gradually fulfills itself. In reality we slowly die from birth onwards. This makes a solemn impression as one becomes aware of the facts.

Between death and rebirth the moment occurs when forces begin to develop in the soul that lead to a next incarnation. Let me attempt to explain what I mean by way of an example. There are a number of books that deal with Goethe's predisposition. One examines Goethe's ancestors in order to ascertain the hereditary origin of this or that quality. The sources are sought within the physical hereditary line of descent. I have no quarrel with the fact that they can be found there, but he who can trace the life of soul between death and rebirth discovers the following.

Let us take the soul of Goethe. For a long time before birth the soul worked on its ancestors out of the super-sensible worlds, and because of its own forces, developed a relationship with its forefathers. The soul even worked to the extent of bringing together those men and women who could provide over a long period of time the appropriate predispositions needed by that individuality. This is not an easy task because many souls are involved in this process. Picture to yourselves that from souls of the sixteenth through the eighteenth centuries human beings descend. All these souls must already have collaborated, and you will gather from this that such a working together is a matter of great importance. Souls born in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries must already have reached a reciprocal understanding in the sixteenth century in order that the complete network of relationships may come about.

There is much to do between death and rebirth. Not only the objective tasks have to be performed such as the temporary service that has to be given to the spirits of opposition, but we must labor at the forces that in fact enable us to reincarnate. That means that we have to shape the general form archetypally. This makes the opposite impression from what the seer beholds when he observes the sleeping physical and etheric bodies. The physical and etheric bodies in sleep have a withering appearance, but the upbuilding of the archetype and its descent into the physical realm makes a blossoming, flourishing impression.

The important moment between death and rebirth lies at the point between the recollection of the earlier existence and the transition period where man begins to prepare so that his physical organism may come into being. If you now picture to yourselves physical death and compare it with this moment, then you have the opposite pole of physical death. Physical death marks a transition from being into non-being. The moment described above is the transition from non-being into a state of becoming. This moment is experienced quite differently if one understands it than if one does not.

The concept of the polar opposite of death, the moment that arises between death and a new birth, should become feeling within the soul of an anthroposophist. It should not merely be understood intellectually, but should become inner experience. Then we shall be able to sense how much our life is enriched when such thoughts are received by the soul.

There is yet another aspect, namely, that gradually the soul develops a feeling for all that is in the world. If, after having meditated upon the concepts I have just mentioned, one goes for a walk through a forest in the spring, one will find that one is not far removed, providing one is attentive, from experiencing the spiritual beings that weave among the physical phenomena. To experience the spiritual world in reality would not be at all difficult if human beings were not to create their own obstacles. One should attempt to translate what has been received in the form of concepts into a feeling experience, to awaken it vividly within oneself. Such a striving can lead to a beholding of the spirit. The questions I have broached today are intended as a contribution to enliven the impulse toward spiritual science. Whenever one speaks about matters such as these, one feels that it is a mere stammering because our language belongs to the physical world. One has to make a considerable effort, by way of special descriptive means, to evoke at least a limited concept of these matters. But to speak precisely about these matters in this way can release from our hearts what may be termed anthroposophically as potency of feeling.

Spiritual science should become for us that which quickens feeling and life. The acquisition of spiritual concepts should not become a matter of lesser concern. We should gladly pursue it. Yet we should also refrain from considering the concepts as of chief importance, but rather what anthroposophy can make of us as human beings.

Today I would like to insert certain things which will afterwards make it possible for us to understand more closely the karmic connections of the Anthroposophical Movement itself. What I wish to say today will take its start from the fact that there are two groups of human beings in the Anthroposophical Movement. In general terms I have already described how the Anthroposophical Movement is composed of the individuals within it. What I shall say today must of course be taken in broad outline and as a whole; but there are the two groups of human beings in the Anthroposophical Movement. The things which I shall characterise do not lie so obviously spread out ‘on the palm of the hand,’ as we say. They are by no means such that crude and simple observation would enable us to say: in the case of this or that member, it is so or so. Much of what I shall characterise today lies not in the full everyday consciousness of the personality, but, like most karmic things, in the instincts—in the sub-consciousness. Nevertheless, it does thoroughly impress itself on the character and temperament, the mode of action and indeed the real action of the human being.

We have to distinguish the one group, who are related to Christianity in such a way that those who belong to it feel their attachment to Christianity nearest and dearest to their hearts. There lives in these souls the longing, as anthroposophists, to be able to call themselves Christians in the true sense of the word, as they conceive it.

This group derives great comfort from the fact that it can be said in the widest and fullest sense: The Anthroposophical Movement is one that recognises and bears the Christ Impulse within it. Indeed, for this group, pangs of conscience would arise if it were not so.

Now as to the other group:—In the manifestations of their life, those who belong to it are indeed no less sincerely Christian. And yet, they come to Christianity from rather a different angle. To begin with they find great satisfaction in the anthroposophical cosmology—the evolution of the earth from the other planetary forms, and so forth. They find satisfaction in all that Anthroposophy has to say about Man in general. From this point they are then led naturally to Christianity. But they do not feel in the same measure an inward need of the heart, to place Christ in the central point at all costs.

As I said, these things work themselves out to a large extent in the subconsciousness. But whoever is able to practice true observation of souls will be able to judge the different individuals in the right way in every single case.

Now the origins of this grouping go back into very ancient times. You know, my dear friends, from my Occult Science that at a certain period of earthly evolution the souls took their departure as it were from the continued evolution of the Earth and came to dwell on other planets of our system. Then, during a certain time—during the Lemurian and Atlantean times—they came down again to Earth. Thus the souls came down again from the various planets—not only from Jupiter, Saturn, Mars, etc., but also from the Sun—to take on an earthly form. And we know how there arose, under the influence of these facts, what I described in Occult Science as the Oracles.

Now there were many among these souls who tended through a very ancient karma to come into that stream which afterwards became the Christian stream. We must remember, after all, that less than a third of the population of the earth are professing Christians to this day. Thus only a certain number of the individual souls who came down to earth unfolded the tendency, the impulse, to evolve towards the Christian stream.

The human souls came down at different times. There were those who came down comparatively soon, in the first periods of Atlantean civilisation. But there were also those who came down relatively late—whose sojourn, so to speak, in the pre-earthly, planetary life was long. When we look back into the life of such a soul—beginning with the present incarnation—we come perhaps to a former Christian incarnation and maybe to yet another Christian incarnation. Then we come to the pre-Christian incarnations. But we reach comparatively soon the earliest incarnation of such a soul, whereat we must say: Tracing the life still farther back from this point, it goes up into the planetary realms. Before this point, these souls were not yet present in earthly incarnations.

In the case of other souls, who have also found their way into Christianity, it is different. We can go very far back; we find many incarnations. It was after many incarnations, pre-Christian and Atlantean too, that these other souls dived down at length into the Christian stream.

For intellectualistic thought, such a thing as I have just mentioned is exceedingly misleading. For one might easily be led to suppose that those who by the judgment of present-day civilisation would be considered as particularly able minds, are the very ones who have had many incarnations. But this need not by any means be the case. On the contrary, people who have excellent faculties in the present-day sense of the word—people who are well able to enter into modern life may often be the very ones for whom we find comparatively few past incarnations on the earth.

Perhaps I may here remind you of what I said at the time when the anthroposophical stream which we now have in the Anthroposophical Movement was inaugurated. I may remind you of what I said at the Christmas Foundation Meeting, when I spoke of those individualities with whom the Epic of Gilgamesh is connected.¹ I explained certain things about such individualities. We find, as we look backward, that they had had comparatively few incarnations. But there were other individualities again who had many incarnations

Now, my dear friends, for those human souls who come to Anthroposophy today—no matter whether there are still other, intermediate incarnations or not—that incarnation is important, which falls roughly into the 3rd or 4th or 5th century after Christ. (We find it nearly always, spread out over a fairly long period,—two to three centuries. Sometimes it is later—even as late as the 7th or 8th century). Above all things, we must look into the experiences of these souls in that early Christian time. We then find a subsequent incarnation when all these experiences were fastened or confirmed. But I will connect what now I have to say today most definitely with what we may describe as the first Christian incarnation.

Now in the case of all these souls, the important thing is: According to all their past conditions, their former lives on earth, how were they to relate themselves to Christianity? You see, my dear friends, this is a very important karmic question. Later on we shall have to consider other, more subsidiary karmic questions; but this question is so to speak a cardinal question of karma, because, passing over many other subsidiary things, it is through their deepest, innermost experiences in former incarnations—through what they underwent with respect to world-conceptions, religious beliefs and the like—that human beings come into the Anthroposophical Society. With respect to the karma of the Anthroposophical Society, this must therefore be placed into the foreground. What have the souls in this Society experienced, in matters of Knowledge, World-conception and Religion?

Now in those early centuries of Christian evolution, one could still take one's start from traditions of knowledge—which had existed ever since the founding of Christianity—about the Being of Christ Himself. In these traditions, He who lived as Christ in the personality of Jesus was regarded as a Dweller on the Sun, a Being of the Sun, before He entered into this earthly life. We must not imagine that the attitude of the Christian world to these truths was always as negative as it is today. In the first centuries of Christianity they still understood the Gospels, certain passages of which speak so distinctly of this Mystery. They understood that the Being who is called Christ had come down into a human body from the Sun. How they conceived it in detail is less important for the moment; the point is that this conception was still theirs. It certainly went as far as I have just described.

At the same time, in the epoch of which I am now speaking, the possibility of really understanding such a conception had dwindled very much. It was hard to understand that a Being coming from the Sun descends on to the Earth. Above all, many of the souls who had come into Christianity having a large number of earthly incarnations behind them—far back into Atlantean times—could no longer fully understand how Christ can be called a Being of the Sun. The very souls who in their old beliefs had felt themselves attached to the Sun-Oracles, and who thus revered the Christ even in Atlantean times inasmuch as they looked upward to the Sun—the souls therefore who according to the saying of St. Augustine were ‘Christians before Christianity was founded upon Earth,’² Christians as it were of the Sun—these very souls, by the whole character of their spiritual life, could find no real understanding of the saying that Christ was a Sun-Hero. Therefore they preferred to hold fast to that belief which—without such interpretation, without this cosmic Christology—simply regarded Christ as a God, a God from unknown realms, who had united Himself with the body of Jesus. Under these conditions, they accepted what is related in the Gospels. They could no longer turn their gaze upward to the cosmic worlds in order to understand the Being of the Christ. They had learned to know Him only in the worlds beyond the Earth. For even the Mysteries on Earth—the Sun-Oracles—had always spoken to them of Christ as a Sun-Being. Thus they could not find their way into the idea that Christ—this Christ beyond the Earth—had really become an earthly Being.

These Christian souls, when they afterwards passed through the gate of death, came into a strange position, which I may describe—somewhat tritely perhaps—as follows. These Christians, in their life after death, came into the position of a man who knows the name of another man and has heard many things about him; but he has never made his acquaintance in person. To such a man it may happen, at a moment when all the support which served him as long as he merely knew of the name are taken away, that he is suddenly expected to know the real person, and his inner life completely fails him in face of this new situation. So it was with the souls of whom I have now spoken: those who in ancient times had felt themselves belonging especially to the Sun-Oracles. In their life after death, they came into a situation in which they had to say, ‘Where, then, is the Christ? We are now among the Beings of the Sun, where we had always found Him, but now we find Him not.’ That He was on Earth, this they had not really received into the thoughts and feelings which remained to them when they passed through the gate of death. So after death they found themselves in a state of great uncertainty about the Christ and they lived on in this uncertainty about Him. They remained in many respects in this uncertainty. Thus, if in the intervening time another incarnation followed, they tended easily to join those groups of men who are described to us in the religious history of Europe as the various heretical societies.

Then, no matter whether they had passed through such another incarnation or not, they found themselves together again in that great gathering above the earth, which I described here the other morning, placing it at the time of the first half of the 19th century. Then it was that these souls among others found themselves face to face with a great super-sensible cult or ritual, consisting in mighty Imaginations. And in the sublime Imaginations of that super-sensible ritual there was enacted before their spiritual vision, above all other things, the great Sun-Mystery of Christ. These souls, as I explained, had as it were come to a blind alley with their Christianity. And the object was, before they should descend to earthly life again, to bring them, in picture-form, at least, face to face with Christ, whom they had lost—though not entirely—yet to such extent that in their souls He had become involved in currents of uncertainty and doubt.

Now these souls responded in a peculiar way. Not that they found themselves in a still greater uncertainty through the fact that all this was enacted before them. On the contrary it gave them a certain satisfaction in their life between death and a new birth—a feeling of salvation from many doubts. But it also gave them a kind of memory of what they had received about the Christ—albeit in a form that had not yet been permeated in the true cosmic sense by the Mystery of Golgotha. Thus there remained in their inmost being an immense warmth and devotion of feeling towards Christianity, and at the same time a subconscious dawning of those sublime Imaginations.

All this was concentrated into a great longing, that they might now at last be able to be Christians in the true way. Then when they descended—when they became young again, returning to the earth at the end of the 19th or at the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries—having received the Christ by way of inner feeling though without cosmic understanding in their early Christian incarnation, they could do no other than feel themselves impelled towards Him. But the impressions they had received in the Imaginations to which they had been drawn in their pre-earthly life, remained in them only as an undefined longing. Thus it was difficult for them to find their way into the anthroposophical world-conception, inasmuch as the latter studies the cosmos to begin with and leaves the consideration of Christ until a later point.

Why did they have such difficulty? For the simple reason, my dear friends, that they had their own peculiar relationship to the question ‘What is Anthroposophy?’ Let us ask: What is Anthroposophy in its reality? My dear friends, if you gaze into all those wonderful, majestic Imaginations that stood there as a super-sensible spiritual action in the first half of the 19th century, and if you translate all these into human concepts, then you have Anthroposophy. For the next higher level of experience—for the adjoining spiritual world whence man descends into this earthly life—Anthroposophy was already there in the first half of the 19th century. It was not on the earth, but it was there. And if Anthroposophy is seen today it is seen indeed in that direction: towards the first half of the 19th century. Quite as a matter of course one sees it there. Nay, even at the end of the 18th century one sees it.

For example, one may have the following experience. There was a certain man who was once in a peculiar position. Through a friend, the great riddle of human earthly life was raised before him. But this his friend was not altogether free of the angular thinking of Kant (“das kantige Kant'sche Denken”), and thus it came to expression in a rather abstract philosophic way. He himself—the one of whom I am now speaking—could not find his way into the ‘angular thinking of Kant.’ Yet everything in his soul stirred up the same great riddle, the great question of life. How are the reason and the sensuous nature of man connected with one another? And lo, there were opened to him—not merely the doors but the very flood-gates, which for a moment let radiate into his soul those regions of the World in which the mighty Imaginations were being enacted. And all this—entering not through windows or doors but through wide-open flood-gates into his soul—translated as it were into little miniatures, came forth as the fairy-tale of the Green Snake and the Beautiful Lily. For the man of whom I speak was Goethe.

Miniatures—tiny reflected images, translated even into a fairy-like prettiness—descended thus in Goethe's Tale of the Green Snake and the Beautiful Lily. We need not therefore wonder that when it became necessary to give Anthroposophy in artistic scenes or pictures, (where we too must naturally have recourse to the great Imaginations), my first Mystery Play, ‘The Portal of Initiation’ became alike in structure—albeit different in content—alike in structure to the Fairy Tale of the Green Snake and the Beautiful Lily.

You see it is possible to look into the deeper connection even through the actual things that have taken place among us. Everyone who has had anything to do with occult matters, knows that that which happens on earth is the downward reflection of something that has taken place long, long before in the spiritual world, though in a somewhat different way, inasmuch as certain spirits of hindrance are not mingled in it there.

These souls now, who were preparing to descend into earthly existence at the end of the 19th or at the beginning of the 20th century, brought with them—albeit in their subconsciousness—a longing also to know something of cosmology, etc., i.e. to look out upon the world in the anthroposophical way. But above all things, their heart and mind were strongly inflamed for Christ. They would have felt pangs of conscience if this whole conception of Anthroposophy—to which they found themselves attracted as an outcome of their pre-earthly life—had not been permeated by the Christ Impulse. Such was the one group, taken of course ‘as a whole.’

The other group lived differently. If I may put it so, the other group, when they emerged in their present incarnation, had not yet reached that weariness in Paganism which the souls whom I described just now had reached. Compared to those others, they had indeed spent a relatively short time on earth—they had had fewer incarnations; and in these incarnations they had filled themselves with the mighty impulses which a man may have, if through his lives on earth he has stood in a living connection with the many Pagan Gods, and if this connection echoes strongly in his later incarnations. Thus they were not yet weary of the old Paganism. Even in the first centuries of Christianity the old Pagan impulses had still been working in them strongly, although they did incline more or less to Christianity, which, as we know, only gradually worked its way forth from Paganism.

At that time they received Christianity chiefly through their intellect. Though indeed it was intellect permeated with inner feeling, still they received it with their intellect. They thought a great deal about Christianity. Nor must you imagine this a very learned kind of thinking. They may indeed have been relatively simple men and women, in simple circumstances; but they thought much.

Once again it matters not whether there was a subsequent incarnation in the meantime. Such an incarnation will of course have wrought some changes; but the essential thing is this: When they had passed through the gate of death, these souls looked back upon the earth in such a way that Christianity appeared to them as something into which they had not yet really grown. They were less weary of the old Paganism; they still bore within their souls strong impulses from the old Pagan life. Thus they were still waiting, as it were, for the time when they should become true Christians.

The very people of whom I spoke to you a week ago, describing how they battled against Paganism on the side of Christianity—they themselves were among the souls who in reality still bore much Paganism, many Pagan impulses within them. They were still waiting to become real Christians. These souls, then, passed through the gate of death. They arrived in the spiritual world. They passed through the life between death and a new birth, and in the time which I have indicated—in the first half of the 19th century or a little earlier—they came before that sublime and glorious Imagination; and in these Imaginations they beheld so many impulses to fire their work and their activity. They received these impulses paramountly into their will.

And, if I may say so, when we now look with occult vision at all that these souls are carrying today, especially within their will, we find—above all in their life of will—the frequent impress of those mighty spiritual Imaginations.

Now the souls who enter their earthly life in such condition feel the need, to begin with, to experience again here upon earth—in the way that is possible on earth—what they experienced in their pre-earthly life as a determining factor for their karmic work. For the former kind, for the former group of souls, the life in the first half of the 19^th century took its course in such a way that they felt themselves impelled by a deep longing to partake in that super-sensible cult or ritual. Yet they came to it—if I may so describe it—in a vague and mystic mood, so that when they afterwards descended to the earth, only dim recollections remained to them; albeit Anthroposophy, transformed into its earthly shape, could make itself intelligible to them through these recollections. But with the second group it was different. It was as though they found themselves together again in the living after-effect of the resolve that they had made. For they, even then, had not been quite weary of Paganism. They still stood in expectation of being able to become Christians in a true way of evolution. And now it was as though they remembered a resolve that they had made during that first half of the 19^th century: a resolve to carry down on to the earth all that had stood before them in such mighty pictures, and to translate it into an earthly form.

When we look at many an anthroposophist who bears within him the impulse above all to work and co-operate with Anthroposophy most actively, we find among such anthroposophists souls of the kind that I have now described. The two types can be distinguished very clearly.

Now, my dear friends, perhaps you will say: All that you have here told us may explain many things in the karma of the Anthroposophical Society; but one may well grow anxious: ‘What is coming next?’—seeing that so many things are being explained about which one might well prefer not to be torn away from blissful ignorance. Are we now to set to work and think, whether we belong to the one type or the other? My dear friends, to this I must give a very definite answer. If the Anthroposophical Society were merely to contain a theoretic teaching or a confession of belief in such and such ideas of cosmology, Christology, etc.—if such were the character of this Society—it would certainly not be what it is intended to be by those who stand at its fountain-head. Anthroposophy shall be something which for a true anthroposophist has power to change and transform his life, to carry into the Spiritual what is experienced nowadays only in unspiritual forms of expression.

I will ask you this: Has it a very bad effect upon a child when at a certain age certain things are explained to him or her? Until a certain age is reached, the children do not know whether they are French or Germans, Norwegians,—Belgians or Italians. At any rate this whole way of thinking has little meaning for them until a certain age. One may say, they know nothing of it in reality. We need only put it radically:—You will surely not have met many Chauvinist babies, or even three-year old Chauvinists! ... It is only at a certain age that we become aware: I am German, I am a Frenchman, I am an Englishman, I am a Dutchman and so on. Yet in accepting these things, do we not grow into them quite naturally? Do we say it is a thing unbearable, to discover at a certain age of childhood that we are a Pole or a Frenchman, or a German or a Russian or a Dutchman? We are used to these things, we take them as a matter of course. But this, my dear friends, is in the external realm of the senses. Anthroposophy is to raise the whole life of man to a higher level. We must learn to bear different things, things which will only shock us in the life of the senses if we misunderstand them. And among the things we are to learn to recognise there is this too:—We must grow just as naturally and simply into the self-knowledge which is to realise that we belong to the one type or the other.

By this means too, the foundation will be created for a right estimation of the other karmic impulses in our lives. Hence it was necessary, as a kind of first direction, to show how the individual—according to the special manner of his pre-destination—stands in relation to this Anthroposophy, to this Christology, and in relation to the greater degree of activity or passivity within the Anthroposophical Movement.

Of course there are transitions too, between the one type and the other. These however are due to the fact that that which comes over from the previous incarnation into the present is still irradiated by a yet earlier incarnation. Especially with the souls of the second group, this is often the case. Many things still shine over from their genuinely heathen incarnations. For this reason they have a very definite pre-disposition to take the Christ in the sense in which He must truly be taken, namely as a Cosmic Being. But what I am now saying shows itself not so very much in the ideal considerations; it shows itself far more in the practical things of life. The two types can be recognised far better by the way in which they tackle the detailed situations of life than by their thoughts. Thoughts indeed have no great significance—I mean, the abstract thoughts have no such great significance for man. So, for instance (needless to say, the personal element is always to be excluded here) we shall frequently find the transition types from the one to the other among those who somehow cannot help carrying over the habits of non-anthroposophical life into the Anthroposophical Movement. I mean, those who are not even inclined to take the Anthroposophical Movement so very seriously, and those above all who are always grumbling in the Anthroposophical Movement, finding fault with the anthroposophists. Precisely among those who are always finding fault with the conditions in the Anthroposophical Movement, especially with the personalities and all the little petty things, we find the transition types, flickering from the one into the other. For in such cases the intensity of neither of the two impulses is very strong.

Therefore, my dear friends, at all costs—even though it may sometimes mean a searching of conscience and character—we must somehow find it possible, each one of us, to deepen the Anthroposophical Movement in this direction, approaching such realities as these and thinking a little earnestly on this: How do we, according to our own super-sensible nature, belong to the Anthroposophical Movement? If we do this, there will arise a purer conception of the Anthroposophical Movement; it will become in course of time an ever more spiritual conception. What we have hitherto maintained in theory—and it need not go so very deep, when we merely stand for it as a theory—this we shall now apply to real life. It is indeed an intense application to life, when we learn to place ourselves, our own life, into connection with these things. To talk a lot of karma, saying that such and such things are punished or rewarded thus and thus from one life to the next, need not strike so very deep; it need not hurt us. But when it reaches so to speak into our own flesh and blood—when it is a question of placing our own present incarnation, with the perfectly definite super-sensible quality that underlies it—then indeed it goes far nearer to our being. And it is this deepening of the human being which we must bring into all earthly life, into all earthly civilisation through Anthroposophy.

This, my dear friends, was a kind of Intermezzo in our studies, and we will continue from this point next Friday.

• 1. See World History in the Light of Anthroposophy. Rudolf Steiner Press, 1977.
• 2. St. Augustine: Retractationes. I.xiii.3. “When I said (in his book De Vera Religione) ‘That is in our times the Christian religion, to know which, is the most secure and certain salvation,’ it was said in relation to the name, not in relation to the thing itself, of which it is the name. For the thing itself, which is now called the Christian religion, was there among the people of antiquity, and was not wanting from the beginning of the human race, down to the time when Christ came in the flesh; whereafter the true religion, which was always there, began to be called Christian. For when the Apostles began to preach Him after the resurrection and ascension into heaven, and very many believed, first of all at Antioch, as it is written, they were called Christian disciples (Acts X1, 26). Therefore I said: ‘This is in our times the Christian religion,’ not because it was not there in earlier times, but because in later times it received this name.” (Tr. from the Latin text).

Dear attendees! Today's lecture makes no other claim than to be merely an introduction to the considerations that I will be discussing in the next few days, considerations about the relationship between anthroposophy and the various fields of science and life.

One of the most significant facts of recent intellectual life is undoubtedly the coexistence, collaboration and thinking together of Goethe and Schiller, especially in the very early days of their friendship in the last decade of the eighteenth century. And it is extraordinarily significant that during this time, when two of the greatest geniuses of humanity found each other intimately, a burning intellectual question between these personalities was, so to speak, discussed and considered on all sides. Both Goethe and Schiller were artists at heart. But during the period in question, they were deeply concerned with the relationship between art and knowledge, as revealed in scientific observation, on the one hand, and, although somewhat less clearly, the relationship between art and religious feeling and perception in humans, on the other. And if one lets the keynote sink in, which resounds through all Goethe's and Schiller's discussions of the mutual relationship between knowledge, art and religion, then one comes to say: Above all, for these two minds, this question was one of the following: How do the powers of knowledge, art and religion work together in the human being to lead the human being to live out and express his full, harmonious human nature for himself and for the world?

Anyone who enters into this lively treatment of the question will no doubt be most deeply impressed by what has come to light in Schiller's examination of this question in his, unfortunately far too little appreciated, “Letters on the Aesthetic Education of Man” and by what Goethe added to Schiller's reflection in his “Fairytale of the Green Snake and the Beautiful Lily”, which forms the conclusion of the “Conversations of the German People”.

On the one hand, Schiller saw the scientific consideration, to which he was led in a certain sense by what his external position had to become at the time, by his professorship in Jena, and also by the fact that he wanted to enlighten himself about the philosophical foundations of art from Kantian philosophy. But every such question took on a character that led to the general human, to the more comprehensive question: What is the actual essence of man, what contributes most to this essence of man within the development of culture and the mind? And so the question became: How does man attain the possibility of coming onto the path of his destiny, out of knowledge, out of science, out of artistic striving? This question became a burning one for Schiller. He posed this question in the essay he wrote on the aesthetic education of the human race. At this time, Schiller often said to himself that there was something unsatisfactory about scientific observation when one wants to strive for the highest, purest development of the human being. Schiller made some remarkable statements in this regard. For example, when he received a piece of Goethe's “Wilhelm Meister” and read it with the utmost interest, he wrote to Goethe about his feelings about the artistic treatment on Goethe's part in this work, beginning with the sentence: “The artist is, after all, the only true human being, and the best philosopher is, after all, only a caricature next to him.”

What did Schiller mean by such a radical statement? He meant that by engaging in artistic creation or immersing himself in works of art in an appreciative, artistic way, man feels his full humanity to be inwardly active and inwardly alive, and that what he experiences in true works of art is something quite unsatisfactory compared to what he can experience in scientific knowledge. It was out of such feelings that Schiller arrived at the peculiar solution which he gives to this question in his Letters on Aesthetics. He said to himself something like the following: When we, as human beings, are most closely in touch with the highest things here on earth, when we are devoted to the contemplation of the world of ideas, which after all is the goal of all scientific endeavor, then we feel the necessity to be logical; we dare not deviate from the laws of reason, which, as it were, takes possession of our spirit and our soul and prescribes the paths for us. We are not truly free inwardly when we engage in this kind of cognitive activity, and in our inner freedom we can only truly live out our humanity.

In this cognitive activity, Schiller sees, as it were, the one pole of human activity; he sees the other pole in man's surrender to the natural necessity of his own being, to his instincts, his drives, to his capacity for desire, which in ordinary life emerges from his lower organism and his drives. It is out of these impulses that man acts, it is on these that he initially bases his life. But one is surrendered to the natural necessity of one's own being when one is surrendered to one's drives and instincts; one follows, so to speak, one's drives and instincts as much as outer nature follows its natural conditions; one is not free. Between these two states, surrender to the necessity of reason and surrender to the necessity of nature, Schiller seeks that “middle state” in which the human being can find himself, and which he calls the aesthetic state, that state in which man is as an artist or as an artistic enjoyer. How does Schiller now describe this middle state from his experience of art?

He says: When we enjoy a work of art as human beings, we do not feel the rigid, strict rational necessity that must guide us in our understanding, but nor do we feel the mere desire that lives in our urges and instincts; for when we work our way up to the free enjoyment of the beautiful, we must not get stuck in what only our sensual urges give us. The spiritless sensual impulses can never rise to the real understanding of the work of art. But in giving ourselves to the artistic, we do not live in an abstract, spiritually withdrawn, unsensual way, as is the case with scientific knowledge when it advances to the level of ideas; we live, because what appears sensually is also is the artistic, in that middle state of devotion to a sensual thing, but we live in devotion to a sensual thing in such a way that at the same time our own sensual nature is laid aside, that we are not devoted to its necessity, that we have spiritualized it, ensouled it. We have descended from the rigid necessity of reason into sensuality, which is appropriate and congenial to us in the artistic; we have torn ourselves away from the rigid necessity of reason; but on the other hand we have also torn ourselves away from the oppressive necessity of nature. In this intermediate state, we are truly free human beings. When we create art, for example, we do not follow methodical rules like those we have to observe in science; we surrender to the free play of what rules in our own soul. The inner free lawfulness, which at the same time appeals to our sympathy and antipathy, guides us as we create art. We are in a free state of mind.

It is from this background that Schiller dares to speak out so radically in these aesthetic letters. In this activity, which is governed by the senses and yet is spiritual, as spiritual as the necessity of reason without surrendering to this necessity of reason, and as sensual as only life in sensuality can be without losing itself to the necessity of nature, Schiller's gaze is drawn to the free play of the child, who does not yet know a necessity of knowledge, but who has also not yet immersed himself so deeply in his sensuality, as he indulges in his free play, unfolding from his sympathy and antipathy. It was in this mood that Schiller coined the radical sentence: Man is only fully human when he plays, and he only plays in the true sense of the word when he is fully human.

What Schiller expressed here belongs to a higher level of spiritual development. Here the German spirit was trying, so to speak, to enlighten itself about humanity from an extraordinarily high point of view. The German spirit was trying to grasp the whole inner essence of the artistic by asking: What can art be in order to bring man as high as possible in his development through the artistic essence?

Schiller was faced with this question. It was no less pressing for Goethe. Goethe followed with interest all the thoughts and ideas that Schiller developed, as it were, through the question: How is man made free through the content of his spiritual life? But Goethe, by nature, could not get used to the more abstract trains of thought in Schiller's aesthetic letters. For Goethe, who was an artist in a completely different, in a broader sense, than Schiller, the question was not as simple as it was for Schiller. Goethe said to himself: Schiller sees three forces at work in man: the necessity of reason, the necessity of nature, and in between the aesthetic state; from their mutual relationship, he wants to recognize the free human soul in a spiritual way. But it's not that simple, Goethe said to himself. Because this human soul is something endlessly complicated; you can't see through it by just piling up three such abstract forces, no matter how ingeniously you philosophize about it. Goethe couldn't just follow Schiller's philosophy. For him, the answer to the same question took the form of an image, that powerful image with the most diverse sub-images that we encounter in his “Fairytale of the Green Snake and the Beautiful Lily”. I will now pass over all the other figures contained in this fairy tale and describe the actual situation, how the soul wants to reach its goals, its freedom, its experience of its true nature, by different paths.

The paths that the individual characters – there are about twenty of them – take in Goethe's fairy tale are all paths of the soul, not intended allegorically or symbolically, but in the way that Goethe had to speak of these paths of the soul. Anyone who sees allegories or symbols in something like this “Fairytale of the Green Snake and the Beautiful Lily” has not yet penetrated into the real, genuine spiritual life, as it prevails in Goethe, for example. If someone says: In these figures I see only allegorical or symbolic representations of states of mind or the like, then he has no idea how rich Goethe's experiences were on the individual soul paths, and how Goethe could not express what he wanted to reveal about the paths of the soul in any other way than in images that are ambiguous but also promising. But I would just like to point out the target figures: all the different personalities in this fairy tale ultimately move towards the temple of the four kings, towards the temple of the golden king, the silver king, the bronze king and the king who is composed of these three substances in an irregular manner. And we see how Goethe wants to lead the entire plot towards the goal of a certain relationship emerging with the golden king, the silver king and the bronze king, who, in a sense, by acting on another person in the fairy tale – on the beautiful lily – the essence of the world onto the deepest human; and as these three mighty personalities radiate the innermost essence of the world onto humanity, we see how the fourth king, who is chaotically mixed from the substances of the other three, collapses into himself.

If one tries to express in somewhat abstract words what Goethe felt at this encounter between the fair lily and the four kings, one must say: He wanted to show how the human soul, if it wants to come to true humanity, must ultimately arrive at a certain relationship to what the golden king represents: the cognitive, that which leads man to wisdom; how he must arrive at the silver king, who gives man that which is beauty, that which is artistic; and how he must arrive at that which is represented in the brazen king, at the good, at real pious deeds. Thus, for Goethe, man ultimately arrives at knowledge as it lives in science, at the beautiful as it lives in art, and at the good as it exists in the religious. But in that Goethe portrays how, separately, each of the three kings radiates this threefold world-being of wisdom, beauty, and goodness upon man, while at the same time man comes to comes to his true humanity, as that which previously influenced him – the mixed king, who is chaotically mixed together from the three substances – collapses and no longer has any existence. Goethe wants to show how true humanity can only be achieved through a very specific relationship between wisdom, beauty and goodness, or – as one could also say – between science, art and religion, in that these three revelations of the world have an effect on man.

What Goethe means by this should not really be expressed in abstract sentences, because it represents, one might say, the whole sum of Goethean experience in relation to wisdom or science, to art or beauty, to religion as it manifests itself in the kindness of human beings. Goethe had to attempt to depict in individual images what Schiller presented more in abstract, philosophical ideas. That alone is significant. It is significant for the reason that, out of his entire epoch with its characteristic intellectual life, Goethe – like Schiller – came to the question: How must science, art and religion fit into human life? And he found no way to express this other than in a fairy-tale-like way at first. Nevertheless, one can see that for him it was a burning question, just as it was for Schiller. Schiller saw in the merely cognizant a caricature of the true human being. But ever since he had come to a real, awakened consciousness of humanity, Goethe actually always strove to seek the foundations of the artistic essence and artistic creation and the significance of this artistic essence and creation for humanity in the nature of the world itself. And one arrives, I would say, at extraordinarily intense ideas and feelings in the indicated area when one follows how Goethe intensively studies Spinoza's philosophy with Herder, how he reads Spinoza's “Ethics” with Herder, how he wants to gain ideas from this ethics about how divine necessity, in its conformity to law, rules and weaves through the world. In a sense, God in the workings of the world – that is what Goethe wants to bring to life in himself by studying Spinoza. But basically he remains unsatisfied. And how he remains unsatisfied can be seen from the extraordinarily characteristic statements to his friends in the letters he wrote to his Weimar friends from his Italian journey. There, in Italy, he felt that he was in an element that suddenly began to satisfy him when confronted with works of art that gave him an idea of the artistic nature of the Greeks. We read in the letters that he wrote back to Weimar the words: Now, in the face of these Italian works of art, I am getting a feeling for Greek art; I have the suspicion that the Greeks, in creating their works of art, proceeded according to the same laws by which nature itself proceeds, and which I am on the trail of. Goethe believed he recognized: the eternal, iron laws of nature that he wanted to feel from Spinoza's philosophy, but could not find there, but which he felt from his own studies of nature and which he was then able to trace into his art in order to feel science and art in a unity. He could only feel this unity where he believed he was looking at the essence of Greek art. He believed that the Greeks had come to understand the essence of natural necessity, and that they had elevated this understanding and essence in their works of art, but in such a way that the same thing lives in these works of art – but in a transformed form – that otherwise only lives within nature. By feeling this, by feeling the necessity of artistic creation in what he now imagined to be Greek art, Goethe came to the shattering utterance, which he now wrote to his Weimar friends, standing before the works of art that he was able to see at the time: “There is necessity, there is God!”

We can see the path that Goethe took: he sought out necessity, divine conformity to law in the nature of the world, from the philosophy of Spinoza in order to gain knowledge; he stood in front of the works of art that he regarded as the most perfect, and he sensed from them what he strove for with all the fibres of his soul. It was in the presence of these works of art that he experienced what he felt to be a sense of the divine. But we also see from this that Goethe could not simply understand art as a mere optional addition to life, but that he strove to recognize how art is deeply rooted in the roots of the world in its forms. And perhaps a particularly characteristic saying of Goethe's, which, I would like to say, leads very deeply into what Goethe experienced and felt in this area. He once objected to speaking of the “idea of truth”, the “idea of good”, the “idea of beauty”. You can read about this in his “Sayings in Prose”. He said: There is only one idea, and it lives in nothing other than in the perceived all-embracing spirituality, as the form in which it can appear to man. He says of this idea that it can express itself as truth, as beauty, as goodness. In a sense, Goethe wanted to have established in the roots of the world, in the nature of the world, that which he shaped artistically; he wanted what the artist created to have its source not only in free human arbitrariness, but at the same time, as a free artist, the human being should stand within the nature of the world. And so it was that not only the question of true humanity developed for him through the question of art, but also the other question: How does the essence of the world prevail in man when he is truly an artist? How do the laws of the world continue to work in the creative, free artistic human being?

I have only mentioned this because it shows how, in the case of Goethe and Schiller, the full depth of the question of the harmonization of science, art and religion in the nature of man himself emerges in the spiritual life of modern times. I believe that anyone who approaches the minds of Goethe and Schiller with both an open mind and heartfelt devotion must feel this question, the question of the harmonization of science, art and religion. For these two outstanding geniuses of humanity considered it one of the most important questions in their lives to fathom how the world essence is a unified one, what relationship man gains to this world essence when he is cognitively active, when he is artistically active and when he is religiously active. Now, I would like to say that the deepest inspiration for a correct, intensely deep approach to this question can be drawn from Goethe and Schiller. But it cannot be denied that we, in an epoch that is so long after Goethe and Schiller, must also freely confront what they raised as a significant human question. And so it was precisely from a deeper, from a truly — I may say it without being immodest — devoted study of Goethe and Schiller that the human question appeared to me as the question of freedom at the time when I set about writing my 'Philosophy of Freedom'. It could not make sense to me that man is a truly free being only by living in the artistic. What Schiller asserted is certainly the case: that in the cognitive observation of the world of rational necessity, one must, so to speak, follow a spiritual compulsion. But something else is at hand: when one follows this rational necessity, when one devotes oneself to scientific observation in this sense, then one lives in what one experiences of nature, of the world in general, and even if it is the ideas of the laws of nature, in ideas.

One lives with it in images, and one feels that one cannot really fathom anything in nature unless one allows free inner human activity to prevail, and that even if the necessity of nature forces us, it cannot force us to act, but that we must freely take up the activity. One feels the pictorial nature of what nature and the world always are, and then, in knowing, one feels one's own free human nature in a very special way. This is what I wanted to present in my Philosophy of Freedom. When one advances to the real impulses of moral action, and when these impulses of moral action become pure thinking, then man lives again, prompted to action by images. We feel the pictorial nature in our cognition, and when we bring our morality to the same pictorial nature, then we feel ourselves in freedom. This is also what actually made man free in the age in which science emerged in the modern sense.

Only life in that which does not actually immerse itself in nature, and therefore also has its limits in relation to nature, only life in the realm of thought, in the realm of images, frees the human being from the necessities into which he is placed as a natural being, and only then could scientific activity have the possibility of full inner freedom when it really brought people to inner pictorial experience. One cannot be unfree in the face of images. One can be pushed or shoved into action by some other force, physically, emotionally or intellectually. Imagine whether you can be prompted to do anything by a mere image — compare mental images with linguistic images — they are powerless and impotent. And so our images are powerless and impotent in a moral sense. But if we start from mere images, then we are free human beings in moral action. It must therefore be said that man is a truly free being not only in the aesthetic state, but also when he elevates his morality to such heights that he can rule, when he devotes himself to a truly free cognitive activity.

Thus it becomes necessary to seek the inner harmonization of knowledge, art and religion in a new way in the post-Goethean age. And anthroposophy, which does not want to be just any old theoretical, abstracted world view, but which wants to be a spiritual content that has an effect on the whole, on the full human being, because it and flows from the whole, complete human being, anthroposophy must, above all, seek to relate what it can give to knowledge, to artistic creation, and to religious experience. I would like to say that this does not lead to some kind of artificiality of the anthroposophical path, but rather that this anthroposophical path naturally leads to it, and by standing on anthroposophical ground, one can be fully in harmony with the particular way of posing questions in this field, as it arose with Schiller and oethe.

Dear attendees, I have to draw on something that is indeed one of the elements of anthroposophical research, but which I would like to sketch at least in a few lines to show how anthroposophy comes to a harmonization of knowledge, art and religion in a very natural way, and not through some contrived invention.

If one wants to characterize how anthroposophy proceeds, it is of course always necessary to point out how the forces of knowledge that lie dormant in the soul, and are not active in the ordinary life of man and in ordinary science, must be developed through certain intimate soul exercises. And the importance of such soul exercises for human life must also be spoken of in the most varied ways. At this point I would merely like to suggest that these soul exercises consist of meditation and concentration, but in a completely different way than they were once practiced in the Orient. In such meditations and concentrations, where the cultivation of thoughts is undertaken in a very special way, thoughts become more alive and more intense. Through through special exercises, one comes to live, not in mere shadowy thoughts, as in ordinary science, but in such strengthened thoughts, to live as one otherwise only lives in outer sense experience, where one is given over to sense experiences with one's eyes and ears. The essence of meditation is that one is given over to the life of ideas in an intense way, as one never otherwise lives in mere thinking. In this way thoughts come to life. One feels how one gradually frees oneself from the physical conditions of thinking and, as it were, learns to think free of the body. Thinking becomes, without becoming pathological, inwardly fuller, more intense. One arrives at images. What I have called in my writings imaginative cognition occurs. Through this one arrives at the first significant results of the anthroposophical world view.

When one has strengthened one's thinking in this way for a while, so that it has become more intense and alive and no longer needs the body for support, then one no longer experiences one's thoughts as a mere tableau of memories, but rather as an overview of the workings of forces within us that are in us because we are human beings on earth. In our contemplation, we have a tableau before us in which we see how our thought life has become intense and has become related to what works in us as growth forces, what itself works in us as forces of metabolism. We learn to recognize that, in addition to our physical body, which is already in space, there is a time body, a body of formative forces within us, which permeates our physical body and is in perpetual motion. We see through this body of formative forces in a single tableau. And by so elevating ourselves to get to know the first supersensible aspect of the human being in this body of formative forces, we get to know a thinking that is much more alive than ordinary, abstract thinking, so that we also come to experience all those realities where the thoughts of time overflow into organic growth. One sees into the workings of a spiritual body that has permeated us since our birth. By rising up to it, one comes to look very particularly clearly at that epoch in our human development which otherwise always lies outside our consciousness. In ordinary life we remember our earlier childhood back to a certain point. Before this point, up to birth, there is a time that is about as dark to us as the experiences of the soul in the state of sleep.

A kind of sleep state manifests itself to us, looking backwards from the point from which we remember, to birth, in this period of our life. This epoch of our earthly life begins to shine forth in its essence before imaginative knowledge, before this looking into the spiritual world. I would like to say that, alongside what is experienced as knowledge, a spiritual body, a body of formative forces, rules in us. Alongside this, one gets the great, powerful, moving impression of what has ruled in us since we entered the physical world at birth. At that time, the forces that shape our brain so plastically out of the wisdom of the world, so that it can become a tool of wisdom, were most intensely at work; the brain's formative forces shaped the rest of the organism. By elevating ourselves to an understanding of the body of formative forces, we experience what has ruled and woven in the very earliest years of childhood, and how everything that once works in human life, even if it weakens for other epochs, will appear again later. Thus, what is effective in the first years of childhood is most particularly, most intensely effective in shaping the human being during these years; it is also effective later, but then only quietly, while in the first years of childhood it is powerfully, mightily effective. And we learn to look at the forces that prevail in the first years of childhood, when the human being has just overcome infancy and still particularly needs the care of the outer world; we learn to look at how he, emerging from the first earthly dreaming, forming the physical human organism; we learn to look at something that now makes the impression on us that it is artistically greater, more sublime than anything we can develop in the world in terms of art. And by looking at it, we learn to recognize what the essence of artistic imagination and artistic enjoyment actually consists of. Only now do we begin to understand the real connection between later human life and earlier life, to recognize it in artistic creation and artistic enjoyment.

When we look directly at a work by a creative genius, we see that this genius has absorbed more from this first childhood period into later life than any non-artistic person. Likewise, a person who is particularly good at artistic enjoyment has more of these powers radiating into his life than an abstract person, a dullard. Without wishing to be in any way sophisticated, we learn to apply a biblical saying in the following way: Unless you learn to recognize the importance of the first childlike state, you cannot enter the realm of artistic experience. — It simply pours itself into artistic life with its special organic powers. That is why art is felt to be such an invigorating element in the whole human being, because art brings to life in us what was the strongest life at the starting point of our earthly existence.

So I would like to say: the primal forces of artistic activity in man arise quite naturally when we in anthroposophy — purely cognitively — ascend to the first supersensible, to the formative forces body of the human being, to imaginative knowledge. And if we then want to ascend to the next level of knowledge, we must indeed develop it in the following way. We develop the first, imaginative stage by repeatedly placing certain ideas at the center of our thinking in a meditative state of concentration, thereby awakening our powers of thought. However, we must also develop the opposite activity. We must learn to withdraw from our consciousness those images to which we have first directed all our attention, so that they become fixed in our consciousness to a certain extent, and then to create a completely empty consciousness. This creation of an empty consciousness is the second important step on the way to supersensible knowledge.

When we have developed this empty consciousness to such an extent that we know while awake: we have nothing in our consciousness now, neither of external impressions nor of internal memories, we have made the consciousness completely empty, then a spiritual world, hitherto unknown to us, penetrates into this consciousness; we thus make acquaintance with a spiritual world, as we make acquaintance with the ordinary world through our outer senses and through ordinary consciousness. Inspired knowledge then enters and with it the second result of anthroposophical research. We can now also suppress the whole formative forces body, everything that particularly organizes that from which we can ultimately gain an artistic sense, we can suppress it and create an empty consciousness in relation to the formative forces body. But then we have the essence of our spiritual soul before our soul eye, as it was before we descended from a spiritual-soul world into the earthly world through birth or, let us say, through conception with this spiritual soul from a spiritual-soul world, before we took on flesh and blood through our parents. We are now learning to recognize the eternity of the human soul – on the one hand, on the side of the unborn.

But we also learn, when we turn our feelings and perceptions to what arises for us as an insight into the spiritual and eternal being, to recognize now how this human soul lived in a purely spiritual and divine environment before its earthly existence, how, as it were, divine powers radiated through it in its existence, like natural forces in earthly existence. Just as the substances and forces that we absorb in our earthly existence give rise to those forces that in turn live in our organism, so the divine-spiritual rays of light live in our spiritual-soul existence before we penetrate into earthly life. There we are permeated by divine forces, just as we are permeated by natural forces here in physical earthly life.

We can certainly stop at mere anthroposophical spiritual science; then we come to the body of formative forces. But we can also turn our feelings, our heart life, to what the knowledge of this body of formative forces gives us; then we encounter the liveliness of the full human scope of what permeates us in the first years of our existence like a dream-like, like a sleeping life, but what works in the formation of our physical body. Likewise, we can remain purely cognitively and scientifically in the contemplation of the spiritual soul within us, as it was permeated by divine spiritual forces before our earthly existence. But we can turn to this being itself and turn our feelings to it; then we learn to recognize what this soul experienced inwardly at that time. It experienced the urge to embrace earthly existence with the divine spiritual forces that surrounded it.

The reason why the soul has immersed itself in the earthly body is to connect with the physical through the divine spiritual. This reason is none other than that which lives in the shadowy afterimage of earthly existence in religious feeling and religious piety. If we have religious piety, we may not concern ourselves with what this soul-like nature is before it has descended into earthly life. These are the powers of feeling and perception towards which the soul soul strove to live the soul-life into earthly existence, that is, when it strove for physical embodiment; but when we think of these powers in the lingering image of the earth, they live themselves out in religious life. Just as art is a radiance of the forces of the first child life into later life, so religious life is an echo of what the soul went through before descending into physical life.

And so we find that if we stop at the level of knowledge and rise to the idea there, as long as we dwell in mere earthly life, where we have to use our organism for knowledge, we find only knowledge, alongside which stands art, which can at most be considered aesthetically, and alongside which stands religion, which can be considered theologically. But with physical science we do not arrive at a living transition into artistic feeling or religious experience. When we rise to anthroposophical knowledge, we have thoroughly true scientific knowledge, but this rises to imagination. Imagination can remain thoroughly scientific. By remaining so, it does not become artistic. Therefore, no one needs to fear that by creating art they will fall back into allegory and symbolism if they are imbued with anthroposophy; they would do so if they merely stopped at ideas.

But anthroposophy is not like other sciences in that it stops at mere ideas; it continues to penetrate, feeling its way from the contemplation of the body of formative forces to the experience of the laws of that which first shaped us in our earliest childhood and continues to influence our lives, and through which we feel so stimulated in our imagination. This is not to say anything against the elementary nature of imaginative creation; but imagination can be stimulated by advancing in the manner described to epochs of life that would otherwise elude external observation. And by advancing further to the experience of the soul before its descent into earthly existence, one comes to sense what lives here on earth in the afterimage of religious life and experience, when we live in such a way that our life through what God is in us is at the same time something willed by God, so that the mood of doing what is willed by God is the echo of what was an important deed willed by God when God Himself still worked in the soul as a spiritual deed before the soul descended into earthly life.

If we consider the whole of human life with the eternal nature of the human soul, we find that there is a natural transition from science to art, to religion. For that which appears in knowledge appears in art and in religion if we follow it only to the corresponding human spheres. I would like to say that Anthroposophy cannot help but stimulate the human being artistically when it takes hold of him in his capacity for feeling and emotion. And Anthroposophy cannot help but, when it takes hold of the human being in his or her life of will, allow that person to feel an echo of how, in some way, they have committed themselves to the divine world-shaper in their earthly existence, and to do what is willed by God. Then the will is stimulated to religious experience.

Dear attendees! In the ancient mysteries, what later divided into three for the sake of humanity's enrichment, emanated from a unity. In the ancient mysteries, in the wisdom schools of gray antiquity, which are hardly known to external history but which anthroposophy is getting to know, science was so imbued with spirit that, in relation to the human soul, this spirit-imbued striving was also beauty. What a person recognized, he incorporated into matter; he made his wisdom creative and artistic. And by feeling what he learned in his liveliness as the world-ruling divine-wise, the mystery school student offered his act of worship to the divine, so to speak, having re-created sacred art into a cult. Science, art and religion were one. Man could not remain in this unity. For the sake of human wealth, the threefold division into art, science and religion had to arise: into scientific certainty, artistic taste and religious belief.

Today, however, we have once again reached a point where the inner harmonization of science, art and religion has become a question for the most outstanding minds. We have seen this in Goethe and Schiller. Today we must again strive to bring together that which has come to us in outward differentiation. Anthroposophy does not want to contribute to the chaotic mixing of religion, science and art, after they have historically differentiated – and this has its justification; it would thereby fall prey to the fourth king in Goethe's fairy tale. It seeks to develop wisdom, the gift of the golden king, beauty, the gift of the silver king, virtue and religion, the gift of the brazen king, in an ideal separation; then they can radiate together into the human being. When the human being directs his attention to the whole human being, then what lives in him as the whole of life, and which is particularly expressed in the first years of childhood, becomes the source of nourishment and also of the fertilization of art. But what the soul has experienced before descending to earth becomes the source of fertilization of religious life.

Without any chaotic mixing of these three areas, anthroposophy in particular can lead people in a completely natural way to science, art and religion, to truth, beauty and goodness, by allowing each to exist in its own nature, but still allowing it to have an effect on people in such a way that in human experience, what is found as truth may encounter the beautiful, the artistic – and respond to it as directly related, as another expression of the nature of the world – and in turn encounter the good, the religious, and also respond to it as another expression of the nature of the world. Goethe, although not yet standing on the standpoint of Anthroposophy, felt this very strongly. “He who possesses science and art also has religion; he who possesses neither, let him have religion!” — thus spoke Goethe; and thus, in essence, must Anthroposophical spiritual science speak again today, in the world being, forming three interlocking organized links: religion, art and science. And man finds his true humanity only by allowing the essence of each of these world revelations to permeate his soul, while maintaining his full individuality. But in him they find each other in full inner harmonization when he becomes a whole human being through it. And in this harmonization of science, art and religion, man can find his full humanity, his development worthy of a human being through all levels of existence of his being.

The opponents of anthroposophical thought claim that it robs man of reverence for the unknowable. This assertion is based on the fact that anthroposophy seeks means of knowledge for the spiritual world. That it wants to build a bridge between faith and knowledge. But, it is said, man's position to the spiritual must not be “dragged down” into the realm of knowledge. The essence of faith must be based on the fact that man professes its content out of free devotion, through childlike trust, while scientific knowledge does not demand such trust, but is satisfied with the recognition of what is spread out before the senses and can be grasped by the universally valid intellect. The objects of knowledge cannot, by their own nature, elevate man above himself. If anthroposophy wants to explore the supersensible, it does not promote religious feeling, but undermines it.

One cannot deny that for many religiously minded people today, these assertions have a great impact. And yet they are only brought about by the state of mind of the materialistically oriented view. Through the self-confidence with which it presents itself, it has fostered the habit of thinking that claims as a matter of course that only it proceeds from secure presuppositions and arrives at its results by logical demonstration. Without examining this approach more closely, religious natures submit to the assertion that approaches them with great certainty. They become apprehensive for their religious sensibilities; and out of this fear they would like to push the supersensible as far away as possible from the knowable. They feel that the materialistic view ultimately obscures the view of the spiritual; and because only it can be scientific, one must resort to something that man recognizes, although he must renounce all scientific insight with respect to it.

Today, anyone who expresses such thoughts is said to be speaking in an outdated way. Real science has, after all, abandoned the materialistic point of view in many of its recognized representatives. And therefore, one should no longer ascribe to them advanced science. But this objection is based on an illusion. Those who make it do not realize that although many have come to understand that the sensory and the intellectual everywhere point beyond themselves to a supersensory reality, they only accept a type of research that has been brought up through materialism. They would like to think beyond the material, but they do not accept thoughts that really break away from the material. The religiously minded cannot be satisfied with what they put forward. Therefore, they prefer to accept the older opinion that science must necessarily be materialistic; the truth about the spirit can therefore only be accessible to a non-scientific faith.

An unprejudiced historical reflection on the origin of creeds must shake this opinion. For it shows that all religious beliefs have their origin in something that mankind has once recognized as knowledge. Science has progressed; and those who have not kept pace with progress have retained an older layer of knowledge than their creed. This has thereby become a belief. Every creed was once considered to be science.

Now, however, every older science had a body of ideas about the supersensible. The older knowledge, which later became creeds, was not opposed to a “modern” “true” science that was directed only towards the sensual and material. This state of affairs has only arisen in the last three to four centuries in the development of humanity. It reached its zenith in the nineteenth century. Science has banished the spiritual from its realm altogether.

Humanity had to come to this point of development. Only through the compulsion to which the human soul must submit by following the strictly necessary course of natural facts with its thinking, could it develop the logical discipline that had to be implanted in it in the course of progress. At this point of development, natural science arose, which knows nothing of the spiritual. It has its justification in the history of human development.

What are accepted today as articles of faith are older layers of knowledge with spiritual content. They now stand in opposition to “modern” science. If one wants to accept them, one must give them a basis in truth that has nothing to do with the science that one recognizes as such.

Anthroposophy now stands in contrast to this. It fully understands the essential character of genuine natural science. It only seeks to show that the latter's turning away from the spiritual arose out of a merely temporal necessity. It takes the strict method of research of modern science as its starting point, but does not stop at the form that has developed in recent times. Rather, it shows that the human being can develop other powers of knowledge just as consciously as sensory observation and the mind that is bound to it, and thus arrive at a science of the spiritual that comes from the same mindset as natural science.

Anthroposophy recognizes how to overcome the prejudice that knowledge hinders man's trusting devotion to the spiritual. It demands that before man approaches the study of the spiritual, he must transcend himself through the development of supersensible powers of knowledge. If he reaches the spiritual in this way, then the religious mood is connected with knowledge. If science were in itself capable of inhibiting this mood, then all creeds should have suffered this result. For they were all once “science”.

This brings us to one of the points on which antagonism to anthroposophy is fuelled. It is particularly suited to show how this antagonism arises from an inadequate appreciation of the facts, from an unquestioned acceptance of what is rooted in ingrained habits of thought. Anthroposophy does not want to be accepted uncritically; but anyone who takes it up into their convictions with full awareness knows that it has nothing to fear from close examination. The opponents think that it can only be based on a belief in authority. They often do not realize that their rejection rests solely on just such a belief in authority.

The spiritual science of Anthroposophy, which I had the honor of speaking about here in The Hague last Tuesday and yesterday evening, does not just pursue cognitive goals, nor just the goal of deepening our knowledge of the human being in scientific, moral, and religious terms. It also has practical goals. And it was requested that I speak this evening about one of these practical goals, about the goal of education.

Since this spiritual science strives above all to achieve a true knowledge of the whole, the complete human being - the human being in relation to his physical, his soul and his spiritual being - it can also impart knowledge of human nature in practical life, knowledge of human nature in relation to all ages. And for the art of education, knowledge of human nature in relation to the child itself is, of course, essential.

The question of education is essentially a question of the teacher. It is a question of the teacher in so far as it concerns whether the teacher, whether the educator, is able to solve the human riddle in practice with the child. Perhaps it is in this riddle of childhood that we most clearly perceive the meaning of that ancient saying, which is written like a motto over human knowledge: the saying that the solution to the riddle of the world lies within man himself.

Many people are afraid that if a solution to the riddle of the world were pointed out, human knowledge would then have nothing more to do. But if one is of the opinion that man himself is the solution to all the countless secrets that the universe holds, so to speak, as the ultimate goal of this world development, then one knows that one has to seek the solution to the riddles of the world in man, but man himself, if one wants to get to know him, again requires immeasurable effort, immeasurable work, to gain insight into his nature.

If one is so inclined towards the human being in the world that an immortal is hidden in him, then one also comes to have the shy reverence for the child that one must have as a teacher and educator if one wants to approach this child in the right way.

Today, with regard to the knowledge of human nature, I will endeavor to refrain from the arguments that I have been making in recent days about the knowledge of the human spirit and the spirit of the world. I will try to express the spiritual-scientific content in the most popular terms possible, so that those of our honored listeners who were not present in the last few days can also follow the arguments.

The point is this: anyone who deepens their views on life through what can give them a real – not abstract – knowledge of the human soul and spirit sees, above all, major divisions in the life of the human being; they see that they have to structure the entire life of the human being into epochs. These epochs are not always regarded with the proper interest and deep insight that they deserve. But anyone who wants to have a truly human relationship with a child as an educator or teacher must have a thorough knowledge of these epochs.

We see such an epoch in the child's life coming to a close around the age of seven, when the child gets the second teeth. The person who is a judge of character regards these second teeth only as the external symbol of a significant change in the child's physical, mental and spiritual development. And anyone who is able to practise the art of education in a proper and professional manner will also see a change in the child's mental characteristics and spiritual abilities as the teeth change. Let us just consider the fact that a metabolic turnover also takes place in the human organism at a later age, that after eight or nine years we no longer have the same material composition, the same substances within us, that we had before. If we consider this, we must nevertheless say to ourselves: What happens in the seventh year during the change of teeth is a powerful development of strength that the organism does not repeat in later life and that is also not a one-off event or an event that occurs over a short period of time. Anyone who has an insight into the development of the human organism knows how everything is prepared in the most intimate metabolic processes during the first seven years of life, which then, so to speak, finds its conclusion, its end point, in the second teeth.

And with regard to the soul, we see how, for example, memory, but also imagination, works differently with these second teeth – above all in terms of its nature – than it did before. We see how memory previously developed to a high degree unconsciously, as if from the depths of the child's physical being, and how it later becomes more spiritual. These things must be delicately hinted at, for they hardly lend themselves to a rough approach.

But what is especially important for the educator above all is that the child in the first years of life, up to the change of teeth, is completely devoted to the outside world as an imitative being. The child's relationship to the outer world is based on the fact – I do not say this to express a paradox, but to describe something very real – that in the first seven years of life, almost in these seven years, the child is almost entirely a sensory organ, that it perceives the environment not only with its eyes and ears, but that its whole organism is given over to the environment, similar to the sensory organs in later life. And just as the images of external things and processes are prepared in the sense organs, which are then only mentally recreated within, so it is the case with the child's organism that the child, as an imitative being, wants to imitate inwardly everything it sees outside. It wants to give itself completely to the outside world. It wants to imitate within itself everything that presents itself outside. The child is a complete sensory organ. And if one were to look into a child's organism with the clairvoyant sense, with the exact clairvoyance of which I have spoken in recent days, one would perceive, for example, how taste, which for an adult is experienced on the tongue and palate, extends much further into the organism in a child. Thus, one does not err when one says: In the infant, for example, it is the case that he also experiences breast milk with his whole body according to the taste.

We must enter into such intimacies of the human physical life if we really want to gain the delicate knowledge necessary for the art of education.

And when we look at how the child is an imitator through and through, then we understand, I would say in every single aspect, how the child learns to speak. We can literally follow how the child is led to follow, step by step, through imitation, what is struck as a sound, and to make its own inner being similar to what is perceived externally. And we can look into all the details of the child and see everywhere how the child is completely a sensory organ, completely an imitator, completely devoted to the sensory world around it.

In this respect, we can understand the child in relation to certain things that should not be judged in the same way as in the older child or even in the adult. I will illustrate this with an example. A father once asked me - this really happened in real life -: “What should I do with my boy? He stole money from his mother.” I asked the father: How old is the child? The child was not yet six years old. I had to say to the father: He who really understands the child cannot speak of theft here; the child had – as it turned out in the conversation with the father – seen daily how the mother took money out of the drawer. The child is an imitator; it also took money because it saw her do it. The entire action is exhausted in imitation, because the child did not attach any importance to having some of the so-called stolen money himself. He bought sweets with it and even gave them to other children. Hundreds of such examples could be given.

The mental life of the child after the change of teeth presents itself differently. We see how the child begins to give itself not only to sensory impressions, but to live completely within these sensory impressions and to make itself inwardly similar to what it sees around it. The child now begins to listen to what is said to it in words. But what the child encounters in its environment is needed in such a way that it is carried by the human personality. Therefore, we may say: until the second dentition has changed, the child is an imitative being; from the second dentition onwards - and this essentially lasts until sexual maturity - it becomes a being that no longer imitates but follows what comes to it through the imaginations of the personalities around it. And the teacher and educator must above all ensure that what he says to the child actually becomes a norm and guiding principle for the child. With the change of teeth, the imitative life transitions into a life in which the child, through his natural sense of right and wrong, wants to follow self-evident authority.

All teaching and education in this second phase of life, from the change of teeth to sexual maturity, must be geared towards this natural sense of authority. At this age, the child learns to recognize as true that which the beloved, authoritative personality presents as true. What is beautiful, what is good, is felt to be sympathetic by the child or followed in dependence, in authoritative dependence on the beloved educational personality. And if we want to teach a child something between the ages of seven and fourteen or fifteen that will be fruitful for the child throughout his or her life, then we must be able to clothe everything we teach the child during this time in this authoritative element.

My dear audience, anyone who, like me, was able to refer yesterday to his “Philosophy of Freedom”, written more than thirty years ago, will not assume that he wants to focus too much on the authoritarian principle. But anyone who loves freedom above all else, who sees in freedom the self-evident law of social life, must point out, based on a true understanding of the human being, that the period between the ages of seven and fourteen is the time when a child thrives solely by being able to draw strength and inspiration from a personality that it perceives as a self-evident authority. Thus we would like to say: in the first seven years of life – this is all approximate, more or less – the child is an imitative, intuitive creature; in the second seven years of life, from the change of teeth to sexual maturity, the child is a being that listens to its human environment and naturally wants to be placed under an authority.

Anyone who, like the anthroposophical spiritual science referred to here, follows the development of the human being in terms of body, soul and spirit, knows what an enormous significance it has for later life, and perhaps even for old age, if the human being was able to reverence, even if only in the form of a special education for a short time. For example, if one was able to hear about a personality highly revered in the family when one was eight or nine years old, and to really absorb some of that reverence through hearing about them. And then the day approaches when one is supposed to see them for the first time. That day when everything is clothed in shyness and reverence and one expectantly gets the door opened to see this personality for the first time. If one knows how such an experience works, when the soul, in relation to authority, is surrendered to the outer world, as in the first years of childhood the whole human being is surrendered as a sense being — then one knows what a benefit one does to the child during the sculptural age when one lets him experience a great deal of this shy reverence for the self-evident authority.

One must observe such things if one wants to become an educator or teacher out of knowledge of human nature. Then one will consider above all that the human being is not only a spatial organism, in which the individual limb of his body stands in spatial interaction with some other distant limb, but that the human being is also a temporal organism. Knowledge of human nature cannot be acquired without being oriented towards the human being as a time organism. If you take any limb of the right hand, it is in interaction with every other limb of this spatial organism in the human being through an inner overall organization. But if you look at what a person is first in childhood, then in later childhood, in the period of youth and maidenhood, in adulthood, in declining age, then in old age - then everything is intimately connected in time. And anyone who, as an educator and teacher, only looks at the child's present life, at the eight- to nine-year-old child, is not fully fulfilling their duty. Only those who know that what they do for the seven- to eight-year-old child continues to have an effect in the temporal organism, which is a unity - from the child, from the middle-aged person, from the elderly person - and that what that which is kindled in the soul during childhood continues to work, but becomes different, metamorphosed: only those who can form an idea of the way in which this changes, transforms, can educate in the true sense of the word.

I would like to give you an example. You see, it is considered so important that a child understand everything that is taught to him with his still-tender mind. This contradicts the principle of self-evident authority. But anyone who only wants to convey to the child what it can immediately grasp with its delicate mind does not consider the following example. It means a great deal if, in one's eighth or ninth year, one has accepted something as a matter of course and authority as true, beautiful, good, that an honored authority describes as beautiful, good, and true, and one has not yet fully understood it. In the thirty-fifth year, or perhaps even later, it comes up from the depths of the soul. One has become more mature in the meantime. Now one understands it, now one brings it up, now one illuminates it with mature life experience.

Something like this – when, at a later age, one understands out of maturity what one had previously accepted only out of love for authority, when one feels such a reminiscence coming up in later life and only now understands it – something like this signifies a flare-up of new life forces, an enormous principle in the soul, of which one is just not always fully aware.

In another way, I can make it even clearer what I actually mean by the principle that one should educate in such a way that what one brings up works for the whole of life. You know that there are people who enter into any environment where other people are and work like a blessing just by their presence. They do not need to exert themselves much in speaking, their words are breathed out, warmed through by something that has a blessing effect on other people. As a rule, these people will be of mature or advanced age, and will be able to exert such a blessing effect through their mere presence in a very special sense.

Those who study the human being not only in the present moment, but really throughout their entire life – which is a difficult study. In physiology, in the ordinary study of man, it is easier to study only the present moments or short periods of time. But those who whole human life, knows how such a blessing effect, which comes from later in life, is usually connected with the fact that the person in question was able to worship, to look, to look devoutly at another person as a child. And I would like to express it paradigmatically by saying that no one who has not learned to fold their hands as a child can effectively use them to bless in old age. Folded hands in children contain the spiritual seeds of hands that bless in old age. The human being is not only a spatial organism, but also a temporal one, and everything is connected in the temporal life, just as the individual limbs are connected in the spatial organism in interaction.

Anyone who fully understands this will also avoid teaching the child such concepts that cannot be changed in later life. It is so easy for the teacher or educator to be tempted to approach the child with the greatest possible certainty, to give him or her concepts and ideas with sharp contours. This would be just like putting the delicate hands of the child, which are still to grow and change, in brackets so that they cannot grow. Just as the child's physical organism must grow, so too must the forces of growth inherent in what the teacher, the educator, has taken into his soul. We can only bring this into the child if we also shape the education and teaching artistically during the compulsory school age.

By way of illustration, I would like to point out how we at the Waldorf School - which was founded a few years ago by Emil Molt in Stuttgart and which I run - incorporate this artistic principle into our teaching. I can only give you a brief sketch of it today.

For example, when teaching reading, we do not assume that we can directly teach the child what letters are. These letters are, after all, something quite alien to human nature. Just think of how, in earlier times, there was a pictographic writing, a pictographic writing that arose primarily from the fact that what had been perceived was imitated in the picture. In this way, writing was very close to what was perceived. Writing had something directly to do with the human being. In the course of the development of civilization, the forms of letters have become detached from the human being. There is no need to study history to such an extent that the old pictographic script is brought to life again in school. But it is good for the teacher to let their artistic imagination run free, to let the children draw and paint forms that reflect what the child feels, in which the child lives.

Thus, at the Stuttgart Waldorf School, we do not start with learning to read or learning to write in the usual way, but rather artistically, with painting and drawing. We develop the forms of the letters out of this drawing, and in fact we always develop out of the artistic realm first. We also let the children work with paints, even though this is more difficult and must be developed out of the dirty. We begin with the artistic realm and develop writing out of it, and only then reading. And in this way an artistic quality should permeate the entire lesson.

This can happen right up to the point when the children learn arithmetic, if the teachers are there for it, those teachers who have become experts through a real deepening of their own soul treasures by absorbing the guiding forces of a real anthroposophical spiritual science into their minds, into their knowledge, into their feelings, into their will. Those who have assimilated spiritual science in this living way can work from the spirit to transform all teaching into an artistic activity. But when the teacher of this childhood stage becomes completely artistic in his dealings with the child, then he works not so much through what he knows, but through the nature of his personality. He works through his individuality. And the child receives through this in his mind something that has the power of growth in it, just as the physical organism has the power of growth in it. Later on, in one's thirties or forties, one is then in a position not only to think back, as if remembering, to the fixed concepts one was taught at school and which one should recall. No, these concepts have grown with one, have changed. This is how we must work as teachers; we must be able to treat the child as an educator.

In this way we exercise authority, but at the same time we work in the truest sense of the word for the freedom of the child; for we must always be clear in our own minds that we are true educators only when we can also guide in the right way those people who will one day be more capable than we are as teachers. It could well be that we find ourselves teaching in a school, let us say in a class with two geniuses. And if we as teachers are not geniuses ourselves, we must educate the children in such a way that we do not hinder the development of their genius. If we educate in the sense and spirit that I have just mentioned, that we artistically bring to the child with our personality what it needs, just as in earlier years it needed to imitate what it perceived through the senses, so now it needs that what we ourselves are as teachers, then we will be no more of an obstacle to the forces that may not even be in us than a mother carrying the germ of a child within her is an obstacle to genius if she is not a genius herself. We become custodians of the child's qualities and will not be tempted to impose on the child what we ourselves are. That is the worst educational principle, to want to make children into an image of ourselves. We will not be tempted to do so if we acquire knowledge of human nature in the sense of spiritual insight, and if the child is a mystery for us to solve at every stage of life.

My only regret is that we cannot yet have a kindergarten so that younger children too can be educated in these principles. We are not yet able to do so for financial reasons. But those who are teachers at the Stuttgart Waldorf School feel how what is revealed in the human physical organism as soul and spirit through the gaze, through the physiognomy, through the word, through everything possible, makes use of the body — which is by no means neglected in this education — how it has descended from divine spiritual heights and united with what has become of it from the father and mother in the hereditary current through conception or through birth. Anyone who approaches the child with the feeling that this child has descended from the spiritual world to you, and that you are to solve its riddle from day to day, from hour to hour, has in his mind the loving devotion to the child's development that is necessary to guide this child through all possible imponderables on its path through life. And it is such imponderables – that is, those things that cannot be grasped in a rough and ready way – that are often involved in education and teaching. It is truly not only that which a systematizing educational science wants to accept as prevailing between the educator and the child.

I would like to illustrate what I mean with another example. Let us assume that a teacher has the task of teaching a child in a childlike, simple way about the immortality of the human soul. This must be taught to the child, who is between the change of teeth and sexual maturity and is preferably attuned to receiving images – not yet abstract concepts – and who wants to accept everything on the basis of self-evident authority, precisely through an image.

Now this image can be presented to the child in two ways. You can say: I, the teacher, am terribly clever. The child is still terribly foolish. I have to teach it about the immortality of the soul. I will use an image. I will say to the child: look at the butterfly chrysalis, the butterfly will crawl out of it. It will crawl out as a visible being. Just as the butterfly crawls out of the chrysalis as a visible being, so your soul will separate from the physical body at death, as from a chrysalis, and fly away into the spiritual world.

Of course I am not saying that this is philosophical proof. It is certainly not that. But a view can be taught to the child in this way. I can do it – as I said – the way I have just described it. I say, I know all this well, because I am clever and the child is stupid. I teach it to the child. It is a foolish comparison, but the child should believe it.

Now, my esteemed audience, you will not achieve anything by approaching the child in this way, because the child may remember it, but what you are supposed to achieve, raising the soul's level, filling the soul with a life-giving content, you cannot do that in this way. But it can be done in another way, if you do not say to yourself: You are clever as a teacher, the child is foolish, but if you say to yourself - forgive me for speaking so paradoxically -: Perhaps the child is even much cleverer than you are in the subconscious depths of his soul. Perhaps you are the foolish one and the child is cleverer. In a sense this is true, because who knows how the still unformed internal organs, namely the brain, are shaped by the still unconscious soul, the dreaming soul of the child, how an immensely significant wisdom is formed in the earliest years of childhood. Anyone who has an appreciation for such things, who is not a crude philistine and cannot appreciate such things, still says to himself: All the wisdom we acquire in life, no matter how beautiful machines it may produce, is not as far advanced as the unconscious wisdom of the child.

Teachers who work in anthroposophical settings believe that the butterfly can emerge from the chrysalis, because they say to themselves: I am not making this comparison, nature itself is making this comparison. What happens at a higher level, the release of the immortal soul from the body, is modeled in nature by the deity itself in the butterfly emerging from the chrysalis. If I imbue what I hold in front of the child as an image with my own feelings, then I give the child what is right, I give it life force with it. Nothing that I do not myself believe in with all my might can have the right effect on the child. These are the imponderables that should be at work between the teacher and the child, the unspoken, that which lies only in the exchange of feelings, the supersensible in teaching. If that is not there, then, I would say, only the gross, not the imponderable, is at work, and then we do not give the human being what is right for the path of life.

I wanted to use these things to point out, above all, how an artistic element, I would like to say a pious mood towards the human being, belongs in education and teaching. This is particularly evident when we turn our attention to the religious and moral education that we want to give the child. And here anthroposophical spiritual science, which I have had the opportunity to speak about here in The Hague during the past few days, shows us how, precisely in relation to the religious and moral element present in the human being, this temporal organism has its great significance for the whole human being and his earthly life. If we can gain insight into the attitude of the very young child, who imitates everything, towards his whole external world, and if we can put ourselves in this child's place, then we cannot characterize it other than by saying that the child is completely given over to the external world; he loses himself to the external world. Just as the eye loses itself in the outer world of colors and light, so the child loses itself in the outer world. The inner world dawns only very gradually. Out of dreams that are still completely absorbed in the outer world, more definite ideas gradually emerge.

Now, my dear audience, when you have truly appreciated this mood in the child, do you know what it is? It is in truth the pious mood, it is in truth the religious mood, placed in the midst of the sense world. However strong a tomboy the child may be in other respects, in relation to its relationship to the sense world, in relation to its devotion to the sense world, the child is religiously minded. It wants to be itself wholly what it beholds in its surroundings. There is not yet any religion in which the child finds itself. But this mood, which is present in the child especially in the first years and gradually fades away until the change of teeth, this mood, which is no longer present when the self-evident sense of authority sets in with the change of teeth, reappears in a remarkable way later on for the insightful teacher.

When children reach primary school age between the ages of nine and ten, the truly insightful teacher and educator may be faced with their greatest challenge. For it is then that they will notice that most of the children entrusted to them approach them and have a particular need for them, that they do not always have explicit questions but often have unspoken ones, living only in their feelings. These questions can take on hundreds of thousands of forms. It is much less important to give the child a specific answer. Whether one gives one answer or another is not as important as the content of the answer. What is most important, however, is that you instill the right trust in the child with the right feeling, that you approach the child with the right feeling at just the right moment, which for children always occurs between the ages of nine and ten.

I can characterize this moment in the most diverse ways. When we teach the child, we notice that before this moment, which lies between the ages of nine and ten, he does not yet properly distinguish himself from his environment, does not properly experience himself as an ego - even if he has long been saying “I” to himself. In this moment of life, he really learns to distinguish himself from his environment. We can now no longer just influence the child with fairy tales and all kinds of lessons, in which we bring the outside world to life. We can now already draw attention to the fact that the child distinguishes himself from the outside world as “I”.

But something else of fundamental importance occurs, which is deeply connected with the moral development. This occurs: in the early days of that epoch of life in which the child is subject to authority, he takes this authoritative personality as it is. Between the ages of nine and ten – it does not even need to be conscious of this, it can happen deep within the feeling, in the subconscious, as it is called, but there it is – the child sees itself forced, through its development, to look through the authoritative personality at what this authoritative personality itself is based on. This authoritative personality says: This is true, this is good, this is beautiful. Now the child wants to feel and sense where this comes from in the authoritative personality, what the knowledge of the good, true and beautiful is, the will in the true, good and beautiful. This comes from the fact that what I would like to say in the depths of the soul has been retained during the change of teeth and even afterwards, which in early childhood was, if I may use the strange word, a sensual-pious surrender to the outside world, because that has disappeared there in the depths of the soul and now emerges spiritually as if from the depths of the human being. What was sensual in the infant until the change of teeth, what as sensual is the germ of all later religious feeling towards the world, that emerges soulfully between the ages of nine and ten, becomes a soul need.

Knowing this, and reckoning with the fact that, just as one lovingly tends the plant germ so that it becomes a plant, one now has before one, in soul form, that which was once prepared in the child in a sensually germinal way, and has to be cared for in soul form, gives one a special relationship with the child. And in this way one lays the religious germ in the child.

Then the educators will notice that in later life, towards the seventeenth or eighteenth year, what has emerged as a religious feeling in the soul, that then emerges spiritually, that it is absorbed into the will, so that the person builds up their religious ideals during this time.

You see, it is extremely important to understand these things at the fundamental level if we want to educate and teach in a meaningful, truthful and realistic way. After all, nature has taken care of the physical organism of the human being, otherwise we might not be sure whether - especially if the people concerned are modern futuristic painters - people might even think of putting their ear in the wrong place or something similar. Such things could well happen if nature had not provided for the whole corresponding organization of the human being. So we, as teachers and educators, must take care of the time organism. We must not try to cultivate the religious sense of the child's soul in any other way than in preparation for the moment between the ages of nine and ten. We must handle this time body of the child with care. We must say to ourselves: Whatever religious feelings and concepts you teach the child before that remains external to him; he accepts them on authority. But between the ages of nine and ten something awakens in him. If you perceive this and direct the feelings that then arise of their own accord out of the soul in the religious sense, you make the child into a religiously true human being. There is so little real psychology of the age today, otherwise people would know where the false religious feelings and sentiments that are present in social life today come from: because it is believed that anything can be developed in a person at any age, because it is not known what exactly needs to be brought out of the child's soul between the ages of nine and ten.

If we organize the entire curriculum in such a way that by the age of twelve the child has absorbed so much from the natural sciences – entirely in keeping with primary school education and teaching – that he has an overview of some physical and botanical concepts and so on, not in a scientific but in a thoroughly childlike sense, then at this age, around the age of twelve, we can look at the child and the child treated accordingly – that conflict that arises when, on the one hand, we look up to the divine governance of the world, to which the child can be guided between the ages of nine and ten, and that contrast that arises when we only take note of the external – not moral, not divine-spiritual – unfolding of forces in the natural phenomena that manifest themselves before us. These natural phenomena present themselves to us without appearing to be permeated by moral principles, without our directly perceiving the divine in them.

This is what brought modern people into the conflict in the first place, which on the one hand directs the mind to the religious sources of existence, and on the other hand to knowledge of nature. Around the age of twelve, our knowledge of human nature tells us that we can gently address these conflicts in the maturing child, but that we are also in a position - because the soul-religious feelings are still so strong, so fresh, so full of life, so youthful, as they can only be in a twelve-year-old child, then to be able to guide the child in the right way, so that in later life he does not need to see nature itself as divinized, but can find the harmony between nature and the divine-spiritual essence of the world.

It is important that one allows this conflict to arise around the twelfth year, again taking into account the right development of the temporal organism in man, because it can be most effectively bridged by the forces that are present in the human soul at that time.

In turn, for anyone who is able to observe social life today in truth — not lovelessly, but with a genuine psychology — the art of education offers the insight that many people cannot overcome the conflict mentioned because they were not led into this conflict at the right age and helped to overcome it.

The main thing is that the teacher and educator know about the life of the human being in general, so that when they encounter an individual child or young person, they can recognize what is right at the right time and know how to orient themselves at the right time.

Religious experience also lies within the human being itself. We cannot graft it into him; we have to extract it from the soul. But just as we cannot eat with our nose, but have to eat with our mouths, so we have to know that we cannot teach the religious to a person at any age, but only at the appropriate age. This is something we learn primarily through a true knowledge of the spirit: to bring the right thing to the child at the right age. Then the child takes that which is appropriate to his abilities.

And when we look at this child development and know how everything between the change of teeth and sexual maturity is geared to the personal relationship between teacher and child, and how there must be something thoroughly artistic in this personal relationship , then we will also see that for the child it must initially be a kind of pleasure and displeasure, sympathy and antipathy, which in turn develops out of imponderables in the face of self-evident authority.

The teacher either talks to the child in stories, in parables – there are hundreds of possible ways – about what he finds morally good and what he finds morally evil. If he is really able to develop an artistic education, then the artistic element between the educator and the child works in such a way that the child, precisely through this inclination towards the self-evident authority, learns to look with sympathy to good and antipathy to evil, and that between about seven and fourteen years of age a moral sense develops in the child out of pleasure and displeasure.

It is completely wrong to try to get the child to obey rules during these years. We either enslave the child or make it malicious, stubborn, and rebellious against the rules. It does not understand why it should follow the commandments. But it can like or dislike what the self-evident authority finds right or wrong, good or evil, and it can learn to follow it with sympathy or antipathy. And this sympathy and antipathy becomes the self-evident content of the soul.

What develops in a scholastic way during this period of life, what has been established in the child's moral sense between the ages of seven and fourteen in the manner indicated, only comes to the fore in the seventeenth or eighteenth year as a volitional impulse, provided that the personality is present later on who, through his own enthusiasm for moral ideals, for beautiful human ideals, shines forth for the young person as a later guide in life - as a volitional impulse only appears in the seventeenth or eighteenth year.

Just as the plant germ is not yet the plant, but the plant germ must first come into being for the plant to arise, so too must the moral will in a healthy way be able to become the ripe fruit of the moral person in the sixteenth or seventeenth year, with all its strength, if the moral feeling has developed between the seventh and fourteenth year, in the process of clinging to the self-evident authority.

And what is the safest way for us to develop this moral sense? If we direct all instruction, all education, in such a way that the child learns to develop a feeling above all else. If possible, the education of even the very young child, long before the change of teeth, can take care of this if we direct this child in such a way that it learns to develop feelings of gratitude towards everything it receives in life. The feeling of gratitude is underestimated today. This feeling of gratitude connects people with the world and allows people to recognize themselves as a part of the world. If a child is guided in such a way that it can develop a clear feeling of gratitude for the smallest of things, then the child does not shut itself away in selfishness, but becomes altruistic and connects with its surroundings. Then one arrives at directing the lessons in such a way, even at school age, that the child gradually receives its physical existence, its soul existence, its spiritual existence, so to speak, in gratitude from the powers of the world, from the physical, from the soul and from the spiritual powers of the world, and that this feeling of gratitude spreads into a feeling of gratitude towards the world from whose bosom one has sprung.

Thus can the feeling of gratitude towards parents, educators, towards all the environment, be transferred into the great feeling of gratitude towards the divine rulers of the world.

This feeling of gratitude must be there before any knowledge that a person can ever acquire. Any knowledge, no matter how logically justified, that does not at the same time lead to the feeling of gratitude towards the world, is detrimental to a person's development, and in a sense maims them mentally and spiritually.

This is shown by spiritual science, which I have had the honor of representing here these days: that every, even the highest, even the most exact knowledge, can lead to feelings, but above all to feelings of gratitude. And if you have planted the feeling of gratitude in the child, then you will see that you have planted the soil for moral education. For if one has cultivated this feeling of gratitude and this feeling of gratitude proves to be compatible with all knowledge, then the child's feeling easily becomes one of love, as one must have it for all other people, and ultimately for all creatures in the world. One will be able to develop love most surely out of the feeling of gratitude.

And in particular, one will be able – again from that point in time, which lies between the ninth and tenth year of life – to gradually transform authority into an authority imbued with love. The teacher's whole behavior must be organized in such a way that this authority, which at first, I would say, is neutral in the face of love, becomes a matter of course, a matter of obedience, a free obedience when the child is nine or ten years old, so that the child follows in love the self-evident authority, in a love that it already awakens in itself, in a love that it already understands.

If one has developed feelings of gratitude and love in the right way in one's soul, then later on one is also able to bring the moral sense of the child or young person to the point where the person now life really sees that which is the very basis of his human dignity to the highest degree: he sees that which elevates him above the mere sensual world, above the mere physical world, which lifts him up to a truly spiritual existence.

In these days I have tried to describe the spiritual world from a supersensible knowledge in certain respects. The spiritual researcher can acquire knowledge of this spiritual world. But with our moral inner life, we also stand in a spiritual way in our ordinary life at all times when we feel the moral with the necessary strength and the necessary purity. But we achieve this if we teach the child a very definite knowledge of human nature. And we should not dismiss any child from the school that is the general school of life, the general elementary school, without a certain knowledge of human nature. We should dismiss the child only when we have imbued it to a certain degree – and it is only possible to this degree – with the motto: “Know thyself”.

Of course, this “know thyself” can be brought to an ever higher level through all possible science and wisdom. But to a certain extent, every elementary school should teach the child to fulfill the “know thyself”. To a certain extent, the human being should recognize himself as body, soul and spirit. But this knowledge of the human being, as it follows from real knowledge of the spirit, establishes a true connection between good and between human beings.

Why does today's recognized science not go as far as to recognize this connection? Because it does not fully recognize the human being. But just as one would not be a complete human being if one lacked blood circulation in some organ - the organ would have to atrophy - so one learns, when one really looks at the whole human being in terms of body, soul and spirit, to recognize that good is what makes a human being human in the first place, and that evil is something that comes from the human being remaining incomplete.

A child who has been guided through life with gratitude and love ultimately comes to understand that a person is only complete when they see themselves as the embodiment of the divine order of the world, of good in the world, in their earthly existence. If one has based moral education on gratitude and thus overcome selfishness in a healthy way – not through mystical-moral declamation or sentimentality – if one has transformed gratitude into love in a healthy, non-sentimental way, then in the end one will be able to young person who loves the world to the realization that the person who is not good as a whole person in body, soul and spirit is just as crippled in the spiritual as someone who is crippled in having one leg missing. One learns to recognize the good in the imagination, in the etheric knowledge of the spirit as the complete human being.

And so, just as if you were to find a diagram of the nervous or circulatory system, a fleeting glance at which resembles a shadow of the human being itself, so too, when you form an image of the good through intuitive knowledge, this is the model for the whole human being.

But here moral education unites with religious education. For only now does it make sense that God is the source of good and man is the image, the likeness of God. Here, religious and moral education will lead to man feeling - and incorporating this feeling into his will - that he is only a true man as a moral man, that if he does not want the moral, he is not a real complete man. If you educate a person in such a way that he can honestly feel that he is being robbed of his humanity if he does not become a good, moral person, then you will give him the right religious and moral education.

Do not say that one can easily speak of these things, but that they must remain an ideal because the outside world can never be perfect. Of course the outside world cannot be perfect. He who speaks out of the spirit of spiritual science knows that quite certainly and quite exactly. But what can permeate us as an attitude, in that we teach or educate, what can give us enthusiasm in every moment and with this enthusiasm brings us to be understood by the childlike soul, that we find the way to the childlike will, that lies nevertheless in what I have just hinted at - in a true knowledge of human nature, which culminates in the sentence: The truly complete human being is only the morally good human being, and the religious impulses permeate the morally good human being.

Thus all education can be brought to a climax in moral and religious education. But here too we must realize that the human being carries within him a time organism, and that in order to educate the child we must, in a spirit of spiritual insight, learn to observe this time organism hour by hour, week by week, year by year. We must lovingly enter into the details.

I have thus indicated to you how guidelines can be obtained from a spiritual knowledge for a part of practical life, for education. I am not just describing something that exists in gray theory. I have already indicated to you that those educational principles which I could only sketch out very briefly have been applied for years at the Stuttgart Waldorf School, that from the outset what I have suggested here for religious education permeates the entire curriculum, a curriculum that is based on the pre-service training of the Stuttgart Waldorf School teachers. And I may add that now, looking back over the first years of the school's development, we can say, even if everything remains imperfect in the outer life, that it is possible to make these principles practical principles so that they reveal themselves in the unfolding of the child's life.

And so these impulses of religious and moral education also show themselves, just as the fruitfulness of the impulses of physical education shows itself on the other side, guided from the spiritual and soul side, for example in the application of the art of eurythmy in school. I mention this only because it has been shown how children naturally find their way into this eurythmic art, just as they find their way into speaking the sounds at an earlier age, and to show you that those who want to see religious and moral education practised in such a way, as discussed today, do not want to neglect physical education at all. On the contrary, anyone who looks at the life of the child with such reverence and spiritual activity does not neglect physical education either, because he knows that the spiritual and soul-like is expressed in the body down to the individual blood vessels and that anyone who neglects it is, so to speak, pushing the spirit back from the sensory world into which it wants to manifest itself.

Above all, the child is a unity of body, soul and spirit, and only those who understand how to educate and teach the child in this totality as a unit, based on genuine observation of human beings, are true teachers and educators.

This is what we are striving for at the Waldorf School in Stuttgart and what has already been practically proven to a certain extent in relation to what I have tried to show you today as just one side of education. But what must always be said with regard to this area and other areas of life – and it is obvious to turn our gaze to the whole of social life, which is stuck in so many dead ends today, it is obvious from the point of view of education – is this: social conditions today can only experience the desirable improvement if we place people in social life in the right way, not just by improving external institutions. When all this is considered, the importance of a true, realistic art of education becomes clear; and it is this kind of realistic art of education that Waldorf school education, Waldorf school didactics, wants to introduce into the world as a prime example of an art of education.

It has already experienced a great deal of success, and anyone who is enthusiastic about a realistic art of education based on spiritual science naturally wants it to be widely adopted. For it is built, I would say, on an archetypal truth. Education is also something that must be seen as part of the social life of human beings. For this social life is not only the coexistence of people of the same age, it is the coexistence of young and old. And finally, part of social life is the coexistence of the teacher, the educator, with the child. Only when the teacher sees the whole human being in the child and can, in a prophetic, clairvoyant way, see what depends on each individual educational and teaching activity that he undertakes in terms of happiness and destiny for the whole of life, will he educate in the right way. Because all life, and therefore also the life of education and teaching that takes place between people, must be based on the principle that Everything that happens between people only happens right when the whole person can always give themselves to the whole person in right love.

But this must also be true in the whole field of education. Therefore, in the future, the art of teaching will be based on a secure and realistic foundation when the teacher is able to bring his best humanity to the best humanity in the child, when the relationship between teacher and child develops in the most beautiful sense of the free relationship between human beings, but also in the relationship given in the necessity of the world.

Those who describe the intellectual life of Germany from the end of the eighteenth and the beginning of the nineteenth century usually see, alongside the high point of art in Lessing, Herder, Schiller, Goethe, Mozart, Beethoven and others, only an epoch of purely speculative thought in Kant, Fichte, Schelling, Hegel, Schopenhauer and a few less important philosophers. It is widely believed that the latter personalities should be recognized merely as workers in the field of thought. It is admitted that they have done extraordinary work in the speculative field, but one is all too easily inclined to say that these thinkers were quite remote from actual occult research, from real spiritual experience. And so it happens that the theosophically striving person expects little profit from delving into their works.

Many who attempt to penetrate the thought-web of these philosophers give up the work after a time, because they find it unproductive. The scientific investigator says to himself: These thinkers have lost the solid ground of experience under their feet; they have built up in the nebulous heights the chimeras of systems, without any regard to positive reality. And for those interested in occultism, they lack the truly spiritual foundations. He comes to the conclusion: They knew nothing of spiritual experiences, of supersensible facts, and merely devised intellectual constructs.

As long as one stops at merely observing the outer aspects of the spiritual development, one will not easily come to a different opinion. But if one penetrates to the underlying currents, then the whole epoch presents itself in a different light. The apparent airy constructs of mere thought can be recognized as the expression of a deeper occult life. And Theosophy can then provide the key to understanding what these sixty to seventy years of spiritual life mean in the development of humanity.

In Germany at this time, there are two sets of facts, one of which represents the surface, but the other must be regarded as a deeper foundation. The whole thing gives the impression of a flowing stream, on the surface of which the waves ripple in the most diverse ways. And what is presented in the usual literary histories is only these rising and falling waves; but what lives in the depths and from which the waves actually draw their nourishment is ignored.

This depth contains a rich and fertile occult life. And this is none other than that which once pulsated in the works of the great German mystics, Paracelsus, Jakob Böhme and Angelus Silesius. Like a hidden power, this life was contained in the worlds of thought that Lessing, Herder, Schiller, Goethe, Fichte, Schelling and Hegel found there. The way in which, for example, Jakob Böhme had expressed his great spiritual experiences was no longer at the forefront of the prevailing literary discussion, but the spirit of these experiences continued to live on. One can see how, for example, this spirit lived on in Herder. Public discussion led Herder, like Goethe, to the study of Spinoza. In the work which he called “God,” Herder sought to deepen the conception of God in Spinozism. What he contributed to Spinozism was nothing other than the spirit of German mysticism. One could say that, unconsciously to himself, Jakob Böhme and Angelus Silesius were his guides. It is from such hidden sources that we can explain how, in the “Education of the Human Race”, a rationalist spirit such as Lessing was, could have incorporated ideas about reincarnation. The term “unconscious” is, however, only half accurate, because such ideas and intuitions may not have been on the surface of literary discussion in Germany, but they certainly lived a full life in the most diverse “occult societies” and “fraternities”. But of the above, only Goethe can be considered as having been initiated into the most intimate life of such “fraternities”; the others had only a more superficial connection with them. Much of it found its way into their lives and work as inspiration, without their being fully aware of the real sources.

In this respect, Schiller represents an interesting phenomenon of intellectual development. We cannot understand the real intellectual nerve of his life if we do not delve into his youthful works, which can be found in his writings as “Correspondence between Julius and Raphael”. Some of the material contained in it was written by Schiller while he was still at the Karls School in Stuttgart, while some of it was only written in 1785 and 1786. It contains what Schiller calls the “theosophy of Julius” and by which he refers to the sum of ideas to which he had risen at that time. It is only necessary to cite the most important thoughts from this “theosophy” to characterize the way in which this genius assembled his own edifice of ideas from the rudiments of German mysticism that were accessible to him. Such essential thoughts are, for example, the following: “The universe is a thought of God. After this ideal image of the spirit had passed over into reality and the born world fulfilled the design of its creator – allow me this human conception – so the vocation of all thinking beings is to seek out in this existing whole the first drawing, the rule in the machine, the unity in the composition, the law in the phenomenon, and to transfer the building backwards to its ground plan... The great composition that we call the world now remains strange to me only because it exists, symbolically describing to me the manifold expressions of that being. Everything in and outside of me is only a hieroglyph of a force that is similar to me. The laws of nature are the ciphers that the thinking being puts together to make itself understood to the thinking being – the alphabet by means of which all spirits negotiate with the most perfect spirit and with themselves... A new experience in this realm of truth, gravity, the discovery of blood circulation, the Linnaean system of nature, mean to me originally just what an antique, excavated in the Herculaneum - both only a reflection of a spirit, a new acquaintance with a similar being to me ... There is no longer any wilderness for me in all of nature. Where I discover a body, I sense a spirit. Where I perceive movement, I divine a thought... We have concepts of the wisdom of the supreme being, of his goodness, of his justice – but none of his omnipotence. To describe his omnipotence, we help ourselves with the piecemeal notion of three successions: Nothing, His Will, and Something. It is waste and dark – God calls: Light – and there is Light. If we had a real idea of His active omnipotence, then we would be creators, like He is...

Such were the ideas of Schiller's theosophy when he was in his early twenties. And from this basis he rises to the comprehension of human spiritual life itself, which he places in the context of cosmic forces: “Love, therefore, - the most beautiful phenomenon in the creation of the soul, the almighty magnet in the spiritual world, the source of devotion and the loftiest virtue – love is only the reflection of this one power, an attraction of excellence, based on an instantaneous exchange of personality, a confusion of beings. When I hate, I take something away; when I love, I become richer by what I love. Forgiveness is the recovery of a lost possession—hatred of men is prolonged suicide; selfishness is the greatest poverty of a created being.” From there, Schiller then seeks a God idea that corresponds to his feelings, which he presents in the following sentences: “All perfection in the universe is united in God. God and nature are two forces that are completely equal... It is a truth that, like a fixed axis, runs through all religions and systems - ‘Draw near to God, you who believe’.”

If we compare these statements of the young Schiller with the teachings of the German mystics, we will find that the latter have sharply defined thought contours that appear in his work as the exuberant expression of a more general world of feeling. Paracelsus, Jakob Böhme, Angelus Silesius have as a definite view of their intuitive mind what Schiller has in mind in the vague presentiment of feeling.

What comes to light in such a characteristic way in Schiller is also present in other of his contemporaries. Intellectual history only has to describe it in his case, because in his epoch-making works it has become a driving force for the nation. One can say that in Schiller's time, the spiritual world of facts of German mysticism as intuition, as direct experience of spiritual life, was hidden as if under a veil; but it lived on in the realm of feeling, in intuitive perceptions. People had retained devotion and enthusiasm for that which they no longer directly saw with the “spiritual senses.” We are dealing with an epoch in which spiritual vision was veiled, but in which feeling and intuitive sensing of this world were not.

All this process is now based on a certain lawful necessity. What entered into seclusion as spiritual vision emerged as artistic life in this period of German intellectual life. In occultism, one speaks of successive cycles of involution and evolution. Here we are dealing with such a cycle on a small scale. The art of Germany in the epoch of Schiller and Goethe is nothing more than the evolution of German mysticism in the realm of outer sensuous form. But in the creations of the German poets, the deeper insight recognizes the intuitions of the great mystical age of Germany. The mystical life of the past now takes on an entirely aesthetic, artistic character.

This is clearly expressed in the writing in which Schiller reached the full height of his world view, in his “Letters on the Aesthetic Education of Man”. The occult dogmatist will perhaps find nothing in these Letters either but the brilliant speculations of a fine artistic mind. In reality, however, they are dominated by the endeavour to give a guide to a different state of consciousness from the ordinary one. They describe one stage on the way to the “higher self”. The state of consciousness that Schiller describes is indeed far removed from the astral or devachanic life of experience; but it does represent something higher than our everyday life. And if we approach it with an open mind, we can very well recognize in what can be called the 'aesthetic state', according to Schiller, a preliminary stage of those higher forms of intuition. Schiller wants to lead people beyond the standpoint of the 'lower self'. This lower self is characterized by two qualities. Firstly, it is necessarily dependent on the influences of the sensual world. Secondly, it is subject to the demands of logical and moral necessity. It is thus unfree in two directions. The sensual world prevails in its drives, instincts, perceptions, passions and so on. In his thinking and in his morality, the necessity of reason prevails. But only the person who has ennobled his feelings, drives, desires, wishes, and so on, so that only the spiritual is expressed in them, and who, on the other hand, has so completely absorbed the necessity of reason in himself that it is the expression of his own being, is free in Schiller's sense. A life led in this way can be characterized as one in which a harmonious balance has been achieved between the lower and higher selves. Man has ennobled his desire nature to such an extent that it is the embodiment of his “higher self”. Schiller sets this high ideal in these “Letters”, and he finds that in artistic creation and in pure aesthetic devotion to a work of art, there is an approach to this ideal. Thus, for him, life in art becomes a genuine means of educating the human being in the development of his “higher self”. For him, the true work of art is a perfect harmony of spirit and sensuality, of higher life and outer form. The sensual is only a means of expression; but the spiritual only becomes a work of art when it has found its expression entirely in the sensual. Thus the creative artist lives in spirit, but he lives in it in a completely sensual way; through him, everything spiritual becomes perceptible through the senses. And the person who immerses himself aesthetically perceives through his external senses; but what he perceives is completely spiritualized sensuality. So we are dealing with a harmony between spirit and sensuality; the sensual appears ennobled to the spirit, the spiritual comes to revelation to the point of sensual vividness. Schiller would also like to make this “aesthetic state” the model for social coexistence. He regards as unfree a social relationship in which people base their mutual relationships only on the desires of the lower self, of egoism. But a state in which mere legislation of reason is called upon to rein in the lower instincts and passions seems no less unfree to him. As an ideal, he posits a social constitution within which the individual feels the 'higher self' of the whole to be so strong as his own being that he acts 'selflessly' out of his innermost urge. The “individual ego” should come to the point where it becomes the expression of the “total ego”. Schiller perceives social action that is driven by such impulses as the action of “beautiful souls”; and such “beautiful souls”, which bring the spirit of the “higher self” to revelation in their everyday nature, are for Schiller also the truly “free souls”. He wants to lead humanity to “truth” through beauty and art. One of his core sayings is: Only through the dawn of the beautiful does man enter the land of knowledge.

Thus, from Schiller's world view, art is assigned a high educational mission in the evolutionary process of humanity. One could say that what Schiller presents here is the aesthetic-artistic mysticism of the earlier period of German intellectual life.

It might now appear that it is difficult to build a bridge from Schiller's aestheticism to another personality of the same period, but who is no less to be understood as coming from an occult undercurrent, namely Johann Gottlieb Fichte. On superficial examination, Fichte will be seen as a mere speculative thinker, as an intellectual. It is true that his domain is that of thought, and that those who want to seek out spiritual heights that lie above the world of thought will not find them with Fichte. Those who want a description of “higher worlds” will look for them in vain with him. Fichte has no experience of an astral or mental world. According to the content of his philosophy, he is concerned only with ideas that belong to the physical world. But the matter presents itself quite differently when one looks at his treatment of the world of thought. This treatment is by no means a merely speculative one. It is one that corresponds entirely to occult experience. Fichte only considers thoughts that relate to the physical world; but he considers these as an occultist would. Therefore, he himself is quite aware of leading a life in higher worlds. One need only see how he expresses himself in the lectures he gave in Berlin in 1813: “Imagine a world of the blind-born, to whom only those things and their relationships are known that exist through the sense of touch. Stand among them and speak to them of colors and the other qualities that are perceived only through the light of sight. Either you speak to them of nothing, and this is fortunate if they say so; for in this way you will soon notice the error and, if you are unable to open their eyes, you will stop talking to no avail... Or, for some reason, they want to give your teaching reason after all: so they can understand it only in terms of what they know through touch: they will want to feel light and colors and the other relationships of visibility, assume they feel it, contrive something within the feeling and lie to themselves about what they call color. Then they misunderstand, distort, and misinterpret.” At another time, Fichte says directly that for him his contemplation of the world is not merely a speculation about that which the ordinary senses give, but that a higher sense, reaching beyond these, is necessary for it: ”The new sense is is the sense for the spirit; for the one who is only spirit and absolutely nothing else, and to whom even the other, the given being, takes on the form of the spirit and is transformed into it, to whom therefore being in its own form has indeed disappeared... This sense has been seen in this way since the beginning of time, and everything great and excellent in the world, which alone makes humanity endure, comes from the visions of this sense. But that this sense should have seen itself in its difference and contrast to the other ordinary sense was not the case. The impressions of the two senses merged, and life disintegrated into these two halves without a unifying bond.” These last words are extremely characteristic of Fichte's place in the world of spiritual life. For the merely external (exoteric) philosophical striving of the West, it is indeed true that the sense of which Fichte speaks “did not see itself”. In all mystical currents of spiritual life that are based on occult experience and esoteric contemplation, it is clearly expressed; but, as already mentioned, the deeper basis for this was unknown in the prevailing literary and scholarly discussions of Fichte's time. In the terminology of contemporary German philosophy, Fichte was indeed the scout and discoverer of this higher meaning. That is why he started from something quite different than other philosophers. As a teacher he demanded of his students, and as a writer of his readers, that they should first of all perform an inner deed of the soul. He did not want to impart knowledge of anything outside of themselves, but he did make the demand that they perform an inner act. And through this inner act they were to ignite the true light of self-awareness within themselves. Like most philosophers of his time, he started from Kant's philosophy. Therefore, he expressed himself in the form of Kant's terminology, just as Schiller did in his mature years. But in terms of the height of inner, spiritual life, he surpassed Kantian philosophy very far, just as Schiller did. If one attempts to translate Fichte's demands on his listeners and readers from the difficult philosophical language into a more popular form, it might be expressed something like this: Every thing and every fact perceived by man imposes its existence on him. It is there without any action on the part of man, as far as his deepest inner being is concerned. The table, the flower, the dog, a light phenomenon and so on are there through something foreign to man; and it is only for man to determine the existence that has come about without him. For Fichte, the situation is different with the “I” of man. It is only there in so far as it attains being itself through its own activity. Therefore the sentence “I am” means something quite different from any other sentence. Fichte demanded that one should become conscious of this self-creative process as the starting point for any spiritual contemplation of the world. In every other realization, man can only be receptive; in the case of the “I” he must be creative. And he can perceive his “I” only by looking at himself as the creator of this “I. Thus Fichte demands a completely different way of looking at the ‘I’ than at all other things. And he is as strict as possible in this demand. He says, ”Most people would be more easily persuaded to consider themselves a piece of lava in the moon than an I...” He who is not yet at peace with himself on this point does not understand fundamental philosophy, and does not need it. Nature, of which he is a machine, will guide him without any effort of his own in all the business he has to carry out. To philosophize requires independence: and this one can only give oneself. - We should not want to see without the eye; but we should not claim that the eye sees either."

This very sharply delineates the boundary between ordinary experience and the occult. Ordinary perception and experience extend no further than the organs of perception that are objectively built into the human being. The occult begins where man begins to build higher organs of perception for himself through the dormant powers within him. Within ordinary experience, man can only feel himself to be a creature. When he begins to feel himself as the creator of his being, he enters the realm of the so-called occult life. The way Fichte characterizes the “I am” is entirely in line with occultism. Even though he remains in the realm of pure thought, his contemplation is not mere speculation, but true inner experience. But for this very reason it is also all too easy to mistake his world view for mere speculation. Those who are driven by curiosity into the higher worlds will not find what they are looking for by delving into Fichte's philosophy. But for those who want to work on themselves, to discover the abilities slumbering in their souls, Fichte can be a good guide. He will realize that what matters is not the content of his teachings or dogmas, but the power that grows in the soul when one devotedly follows Fichte's thought paths. One might compare this thinker to the prophet who did not enter the promised land himself, but led his people to a summit from which they could see its glories. Fichte leads thinking to the summit from which entry into the land of the occult can be made. And the preparation that one acquires through him is as pure as can be imagined. For it completely transcends the realm of sense perception and the realm of that which originates from the desire and covetousness of man (from his astral body). Through Fichte, one learns to live and move in the very pure element of thought. One retains nothing of the physical world in the soul except what has been implanted from higher regions, namely thoughts. And these form a better bridge to spiritual experiences than the training of other psychic abilities. For thought is the same everywhere, whether it occurs in the physical, astral or mental world. Only its content is different in each of these worlds. And the supersensible worlds remain hidden from man only as long as he cannot completely remove sensual content from his thoughts. When the thought becomes free of sensuality, then only one step remains to be taken, and the supersensible world can be entered.

The contemplation of one's own self in Fichte's sense is so significant because, with regard to this “self”, man remains without all thought content if he does not give himself such from within. For all the rest of the world, for all perception, feeling, will and so on, which make up the content of ordinary existence, the outer world fills the human being. He needs - in Fichte's words - basically to be nothing more than the “machine of nature”, which “manages its business without his intervention”. But the “I” remains empty, no outer world fills it with content if it does not come from within. Therefore, the realization “I am” can never be anything other than man's most intimate inner experience. Thus, there is something speaking in this sentence within the soul that can only speak from within. But the way this seemingly empty affirmation of one's own self occurs is how all higher occult experiences take place. They become richer in content and more vital, but they retain the same form. Through the experience of the I, as presented by Fichte, one can get to know the type of all occult experiences, at least in the purely mental sphere. It is therefore correct to say that with the “I am” God begins to speak in man. And it is only because this happens in a purely mental form that so many people do not want to recognize it.

But now, precisely with the keenest minds, which walked in such ways as Fichte, a limit of knowledge had to occur. Pure thinking is namely only an activity of the personality, not of the individuality, which passes through the various personalities in recurring reincarnations. The laws of even the highest logic never change, even if in the stages of re-embodiments the human individuality ascends to the stage of the highest sage. The spiritual perception increases, the perceptive faculty expands when an individuality that was highly developed in one incarnation is re-embodied, but the logic of thought remains the same even for a higher level of consciousness. Therefore, that which goes beyond the individual incarnation can never be grasped by any experience of thought, no matter how subtle, even if it rises to the highest levels. This is the reason why Fichte's way of looking at things, and also that of his contemporaries who followed in his footsteps, could not bring them to a realization of the laws of reincarnation and karma. Although various indications can be found in the works of the thinkers of this epoch, they arise more from a general feeling and are not necessarily and organically connected with their thought-structures. It may be said that the mission of these personalities in the history of thought was to present pure thought experiences as they can take place within an incarnation, excluding everything that reaches beyond this one embodiment of the human being.

The evolution of the human spirit proceeds in such a way that in certain epochs portions of the original esoteric wisdom are transferred into the consciousness of the people. And at the end of the eighteenth and the beginning of the nineteenth century, it fell to the German national consciousness to shape the spiritual life of pure thought in its relationship to the individual personal existence. If we consider what has already been said in connection with Schiller's personality, that at this time art was to be placed at the center of intellectual life, then we will find the emphasis on the personal point of view all the more understandable. Art is, after all, the living out of the spirit in sensuous, physical forms. But the perception of these forms is conditioned by the organization of the individual personality living within the one incarnation. What projects beyond the personality into the supersensible realm will no longer be able to find expression in art directly. Art does reflect the supersensible, but this reflection is only carried over as the fruit of artistic creation and experience by the abiding essence of the soul from one reincarnation to another. That which enters into existence directly as art and aesthetic experience is bound to the personality. Therefore, in the case of a personality from the characterized epoch, a theosophical world view in the most eminent sense also has a thoroughly personal character. This is the case with Friedrich von Hardenberg, who as a poet bears the name Novalis. He was born in 1772 and died as early as 1801. What lived in this soul, which was entirely permeated by theosophical sentiment, is contained in a few poems and a series of poetic-philosophical fragments. From every page of his creations, this attitude flows towards the reader; but everything is such that the highest spirituality is coupled with an immediate sensual passion, with very personal drives and instincts. A truly Pythagorean way of thinking lives in this young nature, which was further nourished by the fact that Novalis worked his way up to become a mining engineer through a thorough mathematical and scientific education. The way in which the human mind develops the laws of pure mathematics out of itself, without the help of any sensory perception, became for him the model for all supersensible knowledge in general. Just as the world is harmoniously structured according to the mathematical laws that the soul finds within itself, so he thought this could be applied to all the ideas underlying the world. That is why man's relationship to mathematics took on an almost devotional, religious character for him. Sayings like the following reveal the peculiarly Pythagorean nature of his disposition: “True mathematics is the actual element of the magician. ... The highest life is mathematics... The true mathematician is an enthusiast per se. Without enthusiasm, there is no mathematics. The life of the gods is mathematics. All divine messengers must be mathematicians. Pure mathematics is religion. One can only attain to mathematics through a theophany. Mathematicians are the only happy people. The mathematician knows everything. He could do it even if he didn't know it... In the East, true mathematics is at home. In Europe, it has degenerated into mere technique. He who does not grasp a mathematical book with reverence and read it as the word of God does not understand it... Miracles as unnatural facts are amathematical – but there is no miracle in this sense, and what is called a miracle is precisely understandable through mathematics, because there is nothing miraculous about mathematics."

In such sayings, Novalis has in mind not merely a glorification of the science of numbers and spatial magnitudes, but the idea that all inner soul experiences should relate to the cosmos as the pure, sensuality-free, mathematical construction of the mind relates to the outer, numerically and spatially ordered harmony of the world. This is beautifully expressed when he says: “Humanity is, as it were, the higher meaning of our planet, the eye that it raises to heaven, the nerve that connects this limb to the upper world.” The identity of the human ego with the essence of the objective world is the leitmotif in all of Novalis's work. Among his “fragments” is the saying: “Among people, one must seek God. In human affairs, in human thoughts and feelings, the spirit of heaven reveals itself most brightly.” And he expresses the unity of the ‘higher self’ in all of humanity in the following way: ”In the I, in the point of freedom, we are all in fact completely identical - only from there does each individual separate. I is the absolute total place, the central point.” In Novalis, the position that the consciousness of the time assigned to art and artistic feeling is particularly evident. For him, art is something through which man grows beyond his narrowly defined “lower self” and through which he relates to the creative forces of the world. In the creative artistic imagination, he sees a reflection of the magical forces of action. Thus he can say: “The artist stands on man as the statue stands on the pedestal.” “Nature will be moral when, out of true love for art, it surrenders to art and does what art wills; art, when, out of true love for nature, it lives for nature and works for nature. Both must do it at the same time, of their own choosing, for their own sake, and of the other's choosing, for the sake of the other... When our intelligence and our world are in harmony, we are equal to God.” Novalis's lyric poems, especially his ‘Hymns to the Night,’ are imbued with such sentiments, as are his unfinished novel ‘Heinrich von Ofterdingen’ and the little work ‘The Apprentices at Sais,’ which is rooted entirely in mystical thinking and feeling.

These few personalities show how German poetry and thought in that period was based on a theosophical-mystical undercurrent. The examples could be multiplied by numerous others. Therefore, it is not even possible to attempt to give a complete picture here, but only to characterize the basic note of this spiritual epoch with a few lines.

It will not be difficult to see, however, that individual mystical and theosophical natures with a spiritual-intuitive mind found the theosophical basic ideas themselves in part in their own way from this whole life. Thus, theosophy shines out beautifully for us from the creations of some personalities of this epoch. Many could be cited where this is the case. Lorenz Oken could be mentioned, who founded a natural philosophy that, on the one hand, points back to Paracelsus and Jakob Böhme through its mystical spirit, and, on the other hand, is a forerunner of the justified parts of Darwinism through ingenious conceptions about evolution and the connection between living beings. Steffens could be cited, who sought in the processes of the development of the earth reflections of a cosmic spiritual life. One could refer to Eckartshausen (1752-1803), who sought to explain the abnormal phenomena of nature and soul life in a theosophical-mystical way. Ennemoser (1787-1854) with his “History of Magic”, Gotthilf Heinrich Schubert with his works on dream phenomena and the hidden facts in nature and the spirited explanations of Justinus Kerner, and Karl Gustav Carus are also rooted in the same school of thought. Schelling went from pure Fichteanism more and more to theosophy, and then in his “Philosophy of Mythology” and “Philosophy of Revelation,” which were not published until after his death, traced the developmental history of the human spirit and the connection between religions to their starting point in the mysteries. Hegel's philosophy should also be viewed in theosophical light, and then one would see how wrong it is in the history of philosophy to consider this profound spiritual experience of the soul to be mere speculation. All this requires, if it is to be treated exhaustively, a detailed work. Here, however, only a little-known personality is to be mentioned, who, in the focus of his mind, combined the rays of theosophical world-view and created a structure of ideas that in many respects completely coincides with the thoughts of theosophy that are being revived today. It is J. P. V. Troxler, who lived from 1780 to 1866 and whose works include, in particular, “Glimpses into the Essence of Man”, published in 1812. Troxler objects to the usual division of human nature into soul and body, which he finds misleading because it does not exhaust nature. He initially distinguishes between four elements of human nature: spirit, higher soul, soul (which he considers the lower soul) and body. One need only see this classification in the right light to recognize how close it is to the one commonly found in theosophical books today. The body as he understands it coincides completely with what is now called the physical body. The lower soul, or what he, in contrast to the body, calls the body, is nothing other than the so-called astral body. This is not something that has been inserted into his world of thought, but he himself says that what is subjectively the lower soul should be characterized objectively by resorting to the term astral body used by the ancient researchers. “There is therefore,” he explains, ”necessarily something in man which the sages of ancient times sensed and proclaimed as a σῶμα αστροειδες (Soma astroeides) and οὐρανόν σῶμα (Uranion soma), or as a σχῆμα πνευματικόν (schema pneumatikon), and what is the substrate of the middle sphere of life, the bond of the immortal and the mortal life?” Among the poets and philosophers who were Troxler's contemporaries, theosophy was alive as an undercurrent; but Troxler himself became keenly aware of this theosophy in the intellectual world around him and developed it in an original way. Thus, he comes to many of the ancient wisdom teachings through his own efforts. It is all the more appealing to delve into his thought processes, since he does not directly build on old traditions, but rather creates something like an original theosophy out of the thinking and attitudes of his time.