The Rudolf Steiner Archive

Although I will be giving a lecture this evening at eight o'clock for all course participants this week, which is to some extent outside the program, we are now at the end of our spring lecture series. In the short time available to us, we were only able to give hints and guidelines about what we have in mind for a certain goal. And this goal – as you will have been able to sense from these lectures – is none other than this: to show how what is referred to here as anthroposophically oriented spiritual science can have a fruitful effect on the various individual specialized sciences and also on the various branches of practical human life in the present day. In order to show how we envision this goal, we have first covered, day by day, those sciences that lead into the life of the outer world, of outer nature. We have endeavored to show how barriers and limitations are everywhere being erected by the cognitive endeavors of the present, but which cannot be real barriers and limitations to human soul activity at all, because if they could apply, that which must be the essential goal of knowledge for man, the insight into the human being itself, would never be attainable. And above all, there would have to be a lack of knowledge that can become the driving force of human will and human action. Human will and human action would have to be condemned to continue to shape social life only out of instincts and drives, while a dignified existence can only be established if spiritual insight has the power to dive beyond the mere contemplation of nature into the purely spiritual life and to bring from there moral and social ideals that are powerful enough to impel the will.

Thus, on the one hand, we had to point out how spiritual science seeks to overcome the limitations that are supposed to be placed on external science, insofar as it relates to external nature and the external world, according to the will and the opinion and belief of our time. And on the other hand, we had to point out the other direction of human knowledge: the one that goes inwards, that aims to grasp the human being and himself, so that one can descend into what lives in man as his actual core of being. And we have shown that only when this impulse truly penetrates into the inner being of the human being, lives in knowledge, can a real linguistics, for example, or a real historical science come about, and that this impulse of inner knowledge is necessary to penetrate and fertilize the linguistic and historical sciences.

Thus we have pointed out two directions in which we must go beyond the boundaries that contemporary science wants to set: outwards and inwards. And we have pointed out in these days how the appeal to such a spiritual knowledge resounds to us from the most important signs of the times.

On the one hand, we have the numerous signs that people in the broadest circles are striving to delve ever deeper into the mysteries of the human soul in order to find a secure hold there and maintain a proper balance with regard to their external social life. And when we listen to the most important voices of the human heart and mind, we must say that it sounds everywhere from the demands of the present that scientific knowledge must lead to what must be found for the inner security of the human soul. No prospect of such a goal can be found in current popular science. Because it is not to be found in this, spiritual science believes it must take the step of showing these other sciences how they can be fertilized by true spiritual scientific research.

From the other side, the sounds of social confusion can be heard. Great, formidable social tasks face the people of our time. We will only be able to cope with them if we realize that only what we can acquire in insight into human life, in knowledge of the human being, can give us the strength to approach the great social tasks of the present. The insights that arise from genuine, true spiritual scientific research must again become leading, because only that can also provide direction for the socially necessary endeavors.

It is precisely our intentions that are resented, that we have to approach the question indicated here in a somewhat different way than many of our contemporaries. I have already had to point out this difference on a wide variety of occasions. But this is something that must always be said again. Therefore, I want to say it here today, at the end of our event. Certainly, there are already many people who say: Insight must go beyond the broadest sections of the population; knowledge must be popularized, because it must live in a sufficiently large number of people; only if it lives in them will social insights also develop. And the good will that undoubtedly underlies it is evident from everything that is undertaken in the direction of establishing adult education centres, public libraries, popularization of science, as it is cultivated at our present educational institutions. It is believed that if we only spread what is cultivated at our educational institutions to the widest circles, then it should be avoided in the future that we enter into such catastrophic epochs as ours.

But can we believe that what was there for the people who were directly involved with the causes of this present catastrophic time, that what was broadcast by our educational institutions to the leading circles and did nothing has borne fruit in leading them to better deeds than those to which they have come, can we hope that the same 'spiritual knowledge', as it is also called, will now have an effect when it is spread among the masses? One can only believe such a thing if one wants to throw sand into one's own eyes. Because we do not want that, we who feel connected here with the aspirations of Goetheanism, therefore we must say, despite all that is immediately invoked in all possible enmity and antagonism: No, something else is still necessary! — Not only should something be carried out of our educational institutions, something should be carried in. What must be brought into them is that which can only be brought in if one wants to recognize spiritual research alongside external sensual and intellectual research. What is then brought into our educational institutions will already take hold of the hearts and minds of people, because it is drawn from the nature of the hearts and minds of people, because that which unconsciously slumbers in the depths of people is thus brought to light as a guiding force for human activity. We have already been put in the unpleasant position of having to admit that not only should something be brought into our educational institutions, but above all, much, much should be brought into them. And the fact that we dare to point out such things is what has earned us so much hostility.

Now, believe me: personally, it would be my dearest wish if the urge for such a spiritual calling of the sciences were to arise above all from the seats of our education to date, if there were those who would point out what is needed. Nothing would please me more, nothing would satisfy me more than to see such striving. Yes, that is why I really had some joy — forgive me for this interjected episode — when I was recently in Basel and discovered a writing in a shop window that was entitled “University Reform”, written by a university professor himself, as it turned out. That, I thought to myself, perhaps makes the pursuit of a foundation for the World School Association quite unnecessary when such voices come from such a source. And the writing begins in an extraordinarily auspicious way. One has the feeling that something must be struck with such sentences, which understands the signs of the times in a certain direction: “The organization of our universities suffers from great deficiencies. A reform is urgently needed here. But only those who know the university system from the ground up should participate in this work.

One could also be pleased about this, if those who know the university system from the ground up would participate. But because I would like to characterize a symptom in what I have further learned in this writing, you must allow me to speak briefly about the experience of this writing. On page 4, you will find an expression of what the author now excludes from his consideration of this reform work with regard to the universities: “For example, I will not comment on the question of the semester schedule and university vacations. Because these things are not yet ripe for discussion.”

Another thing that is to be excluded from this consideration: “Furthermore, I will leave the legal status of the assistants in our clinics or our scientific institutes undiscussed. Because I do not trust myself to make an expert judgment on this.”

Now, one could be quite satisfied if these two points were excluded from a consideration of how necessary a reform of our universities is.

Then the actual reforms are discussed in individual chapters. The first chapter is entitled: “The Division of University Teachers into Different Classes.” From this we learn that there are full and associate professors, private lecturers, honorary professors, lectors and assistants. One learns from this that it is necessary to start here with a major reform, that it is necessary, for example, that certain people who, according to current practice, have remained associate professors all their lives, because, for example, they only had to represent a minor subject – otolaryngology or Egyptology – must now, well, now, have to be appointed full professors too; only that one should not go too far, one learns that for all those who are to be appointed from associate professor to full professor, one will have to allow the salary to be less than that received by the real full professors.

Then we move on to the next chapter on the appointment of university teachers. Among other things, attention is drawn to the extraordinary and significant fact that discrepancies have arisen between the governments and the faculties or the professorial colleges, and that it would be somewhat questionable if, for example, too much reliance were placed on the fact that the professorial colleges themselves could be solely responsible for the appointment. Governments have sometimes done better than the professorial colleges.

One must look for a way out. It is true that the writing is written for German conditions, but I believe that it is at least symptomatic of world conditions and can therefore be cited here. They are looking for a way out, for a way to get around the fact that the discrepancies between the colleges and the governments are disappearing, and they point out that the important institution of a “Reich University Council” must be brought into being!

We come – I will quickly go over the things – to the third chapter: the salary of university teachers. Well, there is a discussion of the wishes regarding the salary regulations. I have already told you a little about it.

We come to the fourth chapter: the transfer of lecture fees to university teachers. It is pointed out that some who are very capable only have a very small college, while others who happen to read something popular have a large college and thus receive a lot of college fees. It is pointed out that, for example, someone who only has to read three hours on his subject is given five or six hours so that the lecture money is higher. In short, the only way out is to subject this matter to a thorough reform.

Then, in the fifth chapter, the awarding of prizes to university teachers is discussed, which is also a matter that requires thorough reform.

In a sixth chapter, the way in which university teachers leave their teaching positions is discussed. It is pointed out that many injustices could occur in this regard. However, if a “University Service Court” is set up, which consists in part of the most worthy members of the “Reich University Council”, then these matters will be taken care of.

Then it is pointed out how such instances as the “Reich University Council” and the “University Service Court” can bring order to what is stated in the seventh chapter, the “Service Criminal Law of University Teachers”, which has to be done if one wants to dismiss them or if they are only to receive a reprimand or something similar.

Then we find a special chapter on “Special service assignments for university teachers”. We find a chapter on the “administration of university affairs”, but it only talks about things that require discussion, including whether associate professors and private lecturers should perhaps participate through a representative, and how this should happen, in terms of what is decided.

In an eleventh chapter, the “university assets” are discussed. In a twelfth chapter, how to deal with people who have not quite passed their preliminary examination. In a thirteenth chapter, attention is drawn to the fact that, due to various circumstances, being a doctor is nonsense, and that in the future, therefore, one should not do a doctorate through exams, but that those who have passed the state exam, the assessor exam, the philological school teaching exam and the like should be entitled to call themselves a doctor in the future. But that in turn leads to difficulties, namely, if those who are employed by the state can call themselves doctors – I don't know the inner logical connection, I don't understand it – then there would be no guarantee that they would also be scholars, and therefore a scholars' examination would have to be introduced. Of course, one cannot expect people to be particularly keen on taking this additional academic examination; but one could introduce an extra substitute for it, for example, that the year in which the examination is taken should be counted double towards the period of service for those who have passed it and are subsequently awarded a doctorate.

Yes, my dear audience, I am talking about a very serious matter, I am talking about a book on university reform that begins: The organization at our universities suffers from major deficiencies, a reform is urgently needed, and I saw when I had gone through thirteen chapters, I had already reached page 43, now there were only one and a half pages left; I hoped, now it will come! But lo and behold, now comes a fourteenth chapter: “Scientific Research Institutes.” It says that there is indeed something to be done for these too, that, for example, only those who have been university professors should be employed as real researchers, because only they are real researchers. And then, on page 44, this document concludes: “It is therefore recommended that the salary of members of research institutes should not be set quite as high as that of full university professors of the same seniority; they cannot complain about it, since they are quite exempt from the heavy teaching load. Some kind of provision must also be made to ensure that the members of the research institutes do not use their position as honorary professors to secure excessive lecture fees."

Yes, that really is the end of the writing. And I actually left some things out without noticing. However, when I had finished reading the writing, I had the feeling that the universities consist of professors, ordinary and extraordinary professors, private lecturers, lecturers and assistants. But then I realized: at the university, there are also students, and I wondered if perhaps these students are also somehow connected with the purpose of the universities? I was then able to state that seven and ten lines are devoted to the student in this writing, which covers almost forty-four pages. But the first seven lines on page 5—I couldn't make anything special out of them. Because they actually say so terribly little positive: “Therefore, I will not go into whether the relationship between university teachers and students could not be made more intimate and, above all, whether the office hours of university teachers could be made more fruitful than is now generally the case. Because here administrative regulations would achieve nothing. Here any compulsion that came only from outside would be hopeless.”

Then I wanted to refer to the page about the student body, which deals with students in ten lines. But I couldn't do anything about that either, because they only deal with the “student disciplinary code”.

Now, I didn't actually share what I shared in order to be ironic, to provoke laughter or the like, but rather as a sign of the times, and I would like to make it explicitly clear that I consider the man who wrote this, I consider him to be an extraordinarily good and extraordinarily clever man who just can't decide to reflect on his reform work in terms of anything other than what – as he himself says – can be implemented through administrative measures. Well, I think we have more pressing needs today than those that can be implemented through administrative measures. The signs of the times demand something completely different.

But not only is the author of this paper on “University Reform” a well-meaning, clever person, he is also a person who knows himself well, and he reveals why he does not actually go beyond such things. And there we find something very strange on page 4: “Thus I shall pass over in silence the reform of university teaching in the narrower sense. It is, of course, very close to my heart and is at least as important as all the other reforms, which I will discuss in more or less detail in the near future. Therefore, I find it difficult to remain silent. But what I know about it would essentially only apply to teaching in law and economics, and would have little significance for teaching in philology, medicine, and the natural sciences. However, an investigation limited to teaching in law and economics would not fit into the framework of a treatise that deals with the reform of the university as a whole.

Yes, we think to ourselves, if a lawyer hadn't written the thing, it could say here: “My silence is therefore difficult for me. But what I would have to say about it would essentially only apply to teaching medicine and would therefore be of little importance for teaching law and economics. But an investigation limited to medical instruction would not fit into the framework of a treatise dealing with the reform of the university as a whole.

And now, with a change of subject, I could read this sentence to you quite often and you would see from it – if you call the underlying fact to mind – what specialization, in particular, has led to, as it has become rampant. It has condemned the scientist to inaction. No one knows enough about the big picture to talk about it because they are a lawyer, an economist, a medical doctor, a philologist, and so on. Today, one becomes a scientist in order to have to admit that one knows nothing about the actual matters of human knowledge. Such a symptom is significant because it comes from a clever, well-meaning person who also has the necessary modesty. But I think it points all the more to the necessity that something must be brought into the places in question, not just that something can be taken out to the ends I mentioned earlier.

Therefore, I believe that we not only had to, but must always point out what, on the part of spiritual science, is to have a fruitful effect on the individual branches of specialized knowledge, but ultimately also on the individual branches of practical thinking. For the way in which we have gradually arrived at abstractions in the sciences has given science a position in a dry, impractical, and unrealistic zone of existence. And one can experience it even for the social area that a man like Schumpeter, who is again an extraordinary, clever, clever man and has written a clever essay on imperialisms, concludes with the words: “An ethical, aesthetic, political or cultural evaluation of this process is far from the goals of these studies. Whether this process heals ulcers or extinguishes suns is, from their point of view (namely from a scientific point of view), completely irrelevant. It is not for science to judge.

That is to say, it is the business of science to produce something that stops short of life, that does not lead to evaluations in ethical, aesthetic, or cultural life. In the course of this lecture series, we have seen what a remarkable fact has emerged as a result of this abstract shaping of the definition of science. We have seen how the philosophy of value, the Rickertian, Windelbandian, and so on, has been drawn up. I think it was clear to you from Dr. Stein's remarks what it was about. The point was that on the natural science side, being is now being claimed, but that on the natural science side, where being is being claimed in its totality, one does not want to engage in any further philosophical work. They want to sit down on the chair of science, which represents existence, and they want to make out everything that can be made out about existence from the scientific point of view. On the philosophical side, they make no effort – forgive me, the image is not as bad as I mean it when I say it – to turn the chair into a bench, to push the others aside a little and sit down on the chair of being themselves. No, because the evaluation is left to you, because scientists say: ethical, aesthetic, cultural evaluations are far removed from science, are not a matter for science, you sit on the chair of evaluations so that you have a clear demarcation. One specializes to the point of intellectualism and loses the possibility of really approaching the human being, who certainly cannot help but, by living in being, to experience something that must represent an ethical, aesthetic, and cultural evaluation for himself.

The issues at stake today are truly profound. And that is why the contemporary world should develop the inclination to answer the fundamental question: Is this spiritual science, which claims that it can fertilize the individual specialized sciences and also branches of practical life, is this spiritual science itself scientific? And in this respect, spiritual science will take the view that any engagement with it from the individual sciences of the present day, with full scientific thoroughness and with good scientific prior knowledge — but of course not with dilettantism — is welcome to spiritual science, any engagement with it from a good scientific standpoint is welcome. It does not shrink from the scrutiny of those who know something, and it will be all the more pleased the more those know who want to scrutinize it from the point of view of the individual sciences.

That is the first thing I would like to say to you today at the end of our spring courses.

But the second thing is what many people reproach us for: that we strive for the supersensible in an impermissible way, that we talk to people about an investigation of the supersensible, but that this is unscientific from the outset, because one cannot know anything about the supersensible.

Now, the tenor of this week's lectures was, I might say, automatically directed towards showing that we do not want to go in for supersensible research because we want to go beyond science to some nebulous stuff, not to strive for the supersensible because we want to be unscientific, but to place ourselves on the ground of science as it is now, but to place ourselves honestly on this ground. And by placing ourselves honestly on this ground, we find where in these sciences the gates are out of themselves and into the supersensible world. Not because we want to go beyond the sciences, not because of unscientificity, we speak of the supersensible, but because we are led out of science itself into the supersensible on scientific grounds.

We profess a knowledge of the supersensible that is based on science. Not only is our supersensible knowledge scientific and can be tested by any scientific method, but because we recognize what the other sciences should recognize in their fields, we strive — out of scientificness, because we must out of this scientificness — to the knowledge of the supersensible.

In this way, however, we are truly led to an understanding of the human being as a whole. For what I just mentioned as the way out leads to clarity about the so-called limits of knowledge of nature. But it also leads to an insight into what the human being as a whole becomes when he immerses himself in a knowledge that assumes such limits. It is not just that we do science, but by doing science we are human beings, even if we do not take it into account. We become human beings through the practice of science. We can strike out of our consciousness the concepts of the human essence, but we cannot, in truth, dehumanize ourselves within science. We have to penetrate to the human essence. We cannot do this if we set ourselves the limits and boundaries that are spoken of today in popular science and that are also demanded in practical scientific work. We are set back, so that we lose abilities. If you do not use the muscles of a hand, they become weak. If you do not use certain abilities because you imagine that there are limits and that the abilities must not be applied because otherwise they would exceed the limits, you lose those abilities.

Now, dear audience, from what you have seen here over the past eight days, you will have realized what a connection exists between the development of these abilities, which do not bind themselves to the commonly assumed limits of nature, and that which lives in nature itself. That which only wants to go as far as the limits of the sensory world in the external nature, cannot develop those forces that lead down below the surface of the sensory being and from which something must also be gained for human life.

Goethe points to this, to what must be gained, in his very meaningful, I would even say weighty, statement: “When nature begins to reveal her secrets to anyone, he feels an irresistible longing for her most worthy interpreter, art.” Here we have the path where that which is living knowledge does not kill the artistic, but leads directly into the artistic.

When the last university courses were held here in the fall, I pointed out how what is said here should lead to what was instinctively present in humanity in ancient times: a unification of science, art and religion. This is found. For if we do not cut ourselves off from our abilities, if we do not paralyze them by accepting the “limits of natural knowledge” scientifically, then we will notice how, little by little, what we understand of the laws of education in nature must give way to what, out of this understanding of the laws of education, shapes itself artistically. One cannot understand the human form, which is also formed out of nature, if one does not convert into artistic intuition what are otherwise only general rules in one's own knowledge. When people then come and say: Yes, but an analysis of the cognitive faculty shows that we must not go beyond logic in cognition, but that we must grasp everything with abstract logical rules, and with observation, with experiment — then one must reply to them: But insight, spiritual-scientific insight into the facts of the world, shows something else. It shows that we can talk at length about how knowledge must be, how we must shape knowledge; but nature does not yield to such knowledge. For she herself creates artistically, and from a certain point on she wants to be understood artistically.

There is a continuous path from science into art. And the bridge is not an unnatural one, the bridge is a self-evident one. And the other way should lead across the boundaries that are erected within man. It has been hinted at during this week that one does not come to some nebulous, spongy mystical depth, but that one comes to a clear understanding of the human organization. But one comes to it by going this other way – spiritual science shows this by also ascending to insights on this other way – to something that one would now like to express with a word similar to the Goethean word just quoted. Goethe says: “To whom nature begins to reveal her secret, he feels an irresistible longing for her most worthy interpreter, art.” With regard to what one can really recognize when developing scientific thought truth, one can say: When the human soul begins to reveal its mysterious essence, one feels a deep longing for the most dignified feeling of religious devotion to creative existence.

And so, by penetrating outward into nature, we find the path to art; by penetrating inward into the human being through knowledge, we find the path to religion. Whatever has specialized in these three fields must still interact uniformly in the human soul. The possibility of this unified interaction must be found. If, then, knowledge is once more able to immerse itself in the secrets of things, which, as you have seen, has been the aim here during these eight days, then it will be able to approach what wells up from the human being: the social question. Here, because the human being is the external embodiment of a spiritual soul, the impulses that we can gain from an understanding of the spiritual soul must help. The social question, which is so urgent and burning that it must touch our hearts today, especially if we belong to today's youth, can only be mastered, insofar as it must be mastered, if we find our way, so to speak, into the object of the social question, into the thinking, feeling, desiring human being, who is pushing for a dignified existence. That spiritual science strives in this direction is part of its essence.

And when one realizes what it has to say about man, then one will no longer be able to say: an ethical, aesthetic, political or cultural evaluation of the social process is far removed from the goal of such a study. Whether this process heals ulcers or extinguishes suns is completely irrelevant from the point of view of science. The only thing missing is for someone to say that the task of medicine is to understand the human organism, and that, from a scientific point of view, whether or not medicine succeeds in healing patients is completely irrelevant. The way of thinking that lives in sentences like the first one, and the way of thinking in such an absurd sentence as the one I have just quoted to you, is basically one and the same. We have come so far that we no longer recognize absurdities as such when they are clothed in popular scientific formulas, when they sound out into the crowd formed by authorities.

That is what moves us here at the Goetheanum to speak out. We cannot help it, even if there were so many enemies and opponents, but to work together with the student body in such a direction.

We know what it means to be a student. That means carrying in your hearts what must flow over as strength into the future. Yes, this future that now awaits humanity will need powerful souls in whose will and emotions a clear insight into the nature of the world and human life plays out. We know that you will need something like this, and so we speak to you, provided you are willing to meet us with understanding. We have truly called you here with us – although, as you can believe me, we all very much like to see you in person – we have called you here with us because we hope that you will become collaborators on a path that we see as necessary for the present and for the near future, and because we want to do the test – and we will do it more and more, I hope it will be possible despite all resistance – because we wanted to do the test to see how many people can be found in whose hearts there is an echo of what we believe to be a necessity of our time.

We now have to part again, my dear course participants. But I believe there is one thing we can all be united on, united in spite of the distance between us: the realization that we must move forward in the direction indicated here, that we must work, that we must develop the will in this direction, each to the best of our ability. He will develop this will if he gains the necessary insight.

We are not yet in a position – and this is addressed to you, my dear fellow students – to bring what we are able to offer you here to a conclusion by enabling you to pass final exams that will give you life-long positions. We are poor people in this respect, who can only appeal to the sense of truth and enthusiasm for knowledge that prevails in human souls and hearts. We can only hope that despite all the unhealthy influences at work in the examinations and job placements, there are still enough young people with hearts and souls who want to find the truth, for the sake of truth, in what can be believed to be necessary in the signs of the times, for the sake of this purely human necessity. We believe that there is still so much free feeling present that out of this pure desire for freedom, these two endeavors can arise.

Because we must believe this, we who have given these lectures and organized these events over the past week stand here to bid you farewell as you return to the rest of your lives. But we stand here, hoping that you will be our helpers, accompanying you with the thoughts that we have let pass through our souls together, accompanying you with the best wishes that your will to clarity, your will to appropriate action, be strong. In this hope and with these wishes, we part, hoping to see each other again, and from this place we say a heartfelt farewell and goodbye!

To me it seems fitting today to speak of something that concerns us very closely; this our home for anthroposophical work in Stuttgart. Perhaps for all of you who have entered this room, and then with a kind of inner vision try to survey the feelings which come to you here, there is a word which may describe what we should like to indicate as the special characteristic of our experience today, namely, mood, feeling; we have doubtless a special feeling, an exalted frame of mind when we are gathered together in this hall. If one follows this feeling further occultly, one may from their standpoint look into the foundation of our life. The most noticeable thing is that we are surrounded by a certain shade of colour which has been used for this room a deep ultramarine. The fact that in many respects combinations of colour play a great part with us, you will also have seen from the way in which we have tried to present the Mystery Plays, and also from the colours of other rooms which we have been able to dedicate to anthroposophical work.

Now it is by no means a matter of indifference to a person in a certain frame of mind what kind of colour he is surrounded by. And further, it is not immaterial what principle shade of colour acts upon a person of this or that temperament, intellectual nature of character. It is also not immaterial for the whole human organisation whether a certain shade of colour acts upon him by being repeated again and again for a long time, or whether it acts only temporarily. You will remember that we covered the hall which served us for the 1907 Congress with a certain shade of red; but from this the conclusion must not be drawn that red is always the right colour for a lecture room. The room here we have covered with a different colour, and if one enquires the reason for these different procedures, the answer is that the hall at Munich was used for a few days for a particular festive occasion, and event which was over in a few days, and was intended to arouse the frame of mind appropriate to this occasion. But here we have a workroom in which our Stuttgart friends will do their anthroposophical work and carry on their classes again and again from week to week. Essentially we are dealing with a room which will be used for oft-recurring classes.

You will best realise the importance of colour if we describe how it affects occultists. For this it is necessary that a person should free himself completely from everything else and devote himself to the particular colour, immerse himself in it. If the person who devotes himself to the colour which covers these physically dense walls were one who had made curtain occult progress it would come about that after a period of this complete devotion the walls would disappear from his clairvoyant vision; the consciousness that the walls shut off the outer world would vanish. Now what which first appears is not merely that he sees the neighbouring houses outside, that the walls become like glass, but in the sphere that opens up there comes a world of purely spiritual phenomenon, spiritual facts and beings become visible. We need only reflect that behind everything around us physically there are spiritual beings and facts. That which lies at the foundation of the physical objects outside in a certain way become visible, what becomes visible is not the same if there are different surroundings. The worlds which surround us spiritually are of many kinds, many different kinds of elementary beings are around us, These elementary beings are not enclosed in boxes or in such a state that they live in various houses. The law of impenetrability only applies to the physical world; penetrability is the law for the higher worlds. But they cannot all be seen in the same way; according to the capacity of clairvoyant vision there may be visible and invisible beings in the same space. When spiritual beings become visible in any particular instance, depends upon the colour to which we devote ourselves. In a red room, other beings become visible than is a blue room, when one penetrates to them by means of colour. We may ask: what happens if one is not clairvoyant? That which the clairvoyant does consciously is done unconsciously by the etheric body of a person if it is not clairvoyantly trained; it enters into a certain relation with the same beings. The consequence of this is nothing less than that, according to our surroundings, we come in touch with one or another kind of spiritual beings. Now, further, it is a case of being able to establish a favourable or unfavourable connection with the beings that surround us. Let us suppose that we use a colour for the room which brings us into connection with beings who disturb us in what we do in this room, then the colour is unfavourable. Conversely, our etheric body may be assisted by spiritual beings though using the corresponding colour; this is then, of course, favourable. Now this room is devoted to repeated study through which we desire to progress in our knowledge. If we have to work in such a room as this, it is necessary that we should be able fully to devote ourselves with our entire human organisation to what is brought before us. We do not wish to be disturbed by anything, we wish to work under the best conditions so that we may take in these things as well as possible; naturally one person will take then in better, another not so well, but the best possible conditions are to be made, so that each one can devote himself—so far as it is possible in accordance with his inner organisation—to the studies which are here brought forward. The colour surrounding us here, brings us in touch with beings in our spiritual environment who come to help us in our etheric body in the spiritual truths within us. In such a building and such a room as this, we are least disturbed, our etheric body is not burdened with fighting against prejudicial influences of certain elementary beings, but the forces of our etheric body are able to work more easily.

Thus we see that for work which is continually repeated and for which there must be a certain calmness of soul as a foundation, exactly this surrounding must be chosen. Let us suppose that we have to deal with something particularly earnest, but which is temporary; in this case if we consider the occult law it is very advantageous—if we are to have not only a festive spirit but also inward strength—to surround ourselves with red. If we have to make a strong decision of the will, we must overcome the spiritual beings which penetrate in. That is to say, on festive occasions we must become strong, so that what we may become a permanent impulse; and unsympathetic weakness of disposition and does not allow earnest decisions of the will to be made, which although roused in a short time, are to remain permanently. The effects of colour are extremely important.

Now you know that under certain circumstances in the general state of our cosmic environment, we see a fundamental colour outspread above us; the blue sky. This blue of the sky is very important to the people of our age, for though the blue expanse of space working upon our souls they continually receive the call to come into touch with the beings in the great world, these beings act upon us through this colour and call upon our etheric body to think of the spiritual. With regard to the blue sky it was not always with man as it is now. The people of the present day think that men have always been as they are now, but the entire constitution of man has changed in the course of time. In those ancient days when man possessed an original clairvoyance there was no blue sky such as exists for present humanity, but at that time when he gazed out into the expanse of space, it was not limited by the blue sky, but he saw into the spiritual worlds which lie out there in space. When our ancient ancestors spoke of heaven beginning there above, that is to say, that the spiritual beings of the Hierarchies are to be found there, they expressed the literal truth.

With these colours which appear transparent (the coloured windows) it is again different from what it is in the case of a colour which is on a wall which we cannot see through. When we observe this shinning bright colour we have to say: Just as through the colour which is on the opaque walls we enter into relation with certain beings, so through the transparent shining colour, we enter into relation with other beings. While the beings with whom we come in touch through the opaque walls are primarily outspread in space, but really have nothing to do with the three kingdoms below us, the mineral, vegetable and animal kingdoms, through shining colours we come in touch with the beings who are directly occupied with bringing the objects of the three kingdoms of nature into being. When we look particularly through shining red, we come in touch with quite a particular type of beings within the kingdom of nature. When shining red forms a kind of window through which to look clairvoyantly into the kingdom of nature, we meet with beings whose work forms the best forces for the future of our earth existence. They have to be there in the kingdoms of nature, so that inner forces may develop in man which make him more and more chaste in his blood, that is to say, in his passion life, and when we look into the kingdom of nature in this way, we are looking upon those beings which, although we may not be aware of it, incite us the most to rouse up and push forward in the purification of our passions.

Besides being surrounded here in this room by certain shades of colour, we see all kinds of tokens and symbolic figures. These are filled with meaning, although I do not mean the meaning which can be found by the intellect. Ingenious persons may discover in them all sorts of curious things, but to occultists explanations such as these mean nothing. The chief point is that these figures are actually here, and if we turn our physical eyes to any one of them, it is not merely the physical eye, but the whole organization, above all, it is the currents of the etheric body which come into motion in quite a special way, they are roused by the course of the lines and by the forms of these figures, so that the etheric body has different movements within it, according as one looks at one figure or another. This means that within the world of etheric substance, which surrounds us, with all the beings incarnated in it, the forms which we see here, are actually present, There are beings who really have these forms in the etheric world; and when we look at one of these figures our etheric body arranges itself in such a way that in its own movements it builds up forms according to these lines, that is, it produces a thought-form which then proceeds from it; and according to the thought-form, will our etheric body be able to make a real union with one or another kind of being. These figures are the means by which this may be accomplished, for when we look at them, we produce within ourselves the thought-forms, that is, the movement-forms in our etheric body. Now these figures are chosen in such a way that when looked at in a rhythmic consecutive order they yield something which is a whole, namely, something which corresponds to a certain stream of development in the outer etheric world, something which through a particular circumstance is favourable to our etheric body; our etheric body has within it the tendency to change, in a certain way it will be different when it is more perfect. The series of forms corresponding to the gradual perfecting of our etheric body will be developed in the consecutive order shown in these figures. When we display these symbolic figures, which are in accordance with certain occult facts, and can let our vision penetrate more deeply, this is a help towards what we are aiming at, and if we produce the corresponding thought-forms in the right consecutive order, we assist our inner being which is to open our understanding for the rhythm which exists when you are speaking of the seven principles of man. We have not placed these figures there merely for decoration, but because they are inwardly connected with what we wish to accomplish here.

We are placed in touch with the surrounding etheric world by means of the thought-forms which we ought to build up in the manner just described; by means of music we are placed in touch with the astral part of our surrounding world. Music acts directly upon our astral body, so that we are made receptive—because this works from within on the etheric body—to all that is incarnated in the astral word, not in the sense in which one speaks of the astral world as contained in kamaloka, but the universal astral world into which the devachanic world also streams down. The revelation through music is a more direct one than when the higher worlds clothe themselves in the forms around us in space; but that which is outspread in space, if it is in accordance with occult results, leaves us independent, whereas music constrains us.

We now come to a kind of action on human beings which affects the etheric body by first stimulating the astral body, also by means of the element of space, and we may also study an example of this in this room. Up above you see two pictures which were contributed to this special occasion by our friend, Stockmeier. These two pictures will later be painted differently, and they will then produce the full effect intended. The effect of these two pictures together, not of each one singly, is somewhat as follows; when first one picture works and then the other afterwards, under all circumstances, whether it is wished or not, the one picture and afterwards the other will together rouse up thought-forms particular formations in the astral body. This remains in the sub-consciousness, and because it is contained in the intention of the pictures—it is only reproduced in an abstract way by means of ideas. Our feeling may perhaps render somewhat more perceptible the thought-forms which our actual body will produce perfectly under all circumstances from these pictures, if Mr. Stockmeier, succeeds in painting them in the right way. The picture on the right; a certain astral form, an kind of dragon is vanquished by a great being who belongs to the higher Hierarchies (Raphael) merely by his magnetic gaze; and when through the development of his will man comes to receive the power of this being into his own will we shall have the powers of which the Greeks thought in connection with the divine powers of Aesclepius with which he healed. All that is contained in the spiritually magnetic gaze, which can have curative effects when it is suitable trained, may be called forth in thought if immediately afterwards we pass over to what belongs to this feeling in the other picture. The optical effects must be conveyed to the phantom, so that with the help of the phantom-forces of the physical body, the effect is strengthened which proceeds from the dragon which is then overcome by the power of Michael. When we acquire the power to feel this thought out of the forces of the universe and think how through the physical body it may receive a vehicle through the will-forces being strengthened, so that a person need no longer say in regard to such forces that the spirit is willing but the flesh is weak, when we have these consecutive feelings and formations of the astral body, we have something which subconsciously can strengthen the moral nature very much. Thus we can draw moral power directly from the consecutive consideration of the two pictures, and still more from three. But it must be expressly pointed out that this applies only to the united notion of such themes, not to one single theme. If it were to depend upon one picture it would have to be differently formed, the two motives would have to act together, as for example, in the Sistine Madonna; in that instance there is a crossing of two motives which can strengthen the moral nature to the highest degree. Up above the clouds out of which the angels heads are formed, and when we look at the child Jesus in the arms of the mother we perceive that it has originated through the consolidation of the same forces which bring the angels only to a cloud existence. That is one motive, in which we perceive the origin of the pure light-being of man out of the cloud-light of the universe, as it were. This motive meets that which in expressed in the mother; she is full of innocence and love, and from that which appears to us as the body, the face, the lines of the mother, we see coming forth, as it were the warmest love. Light from above, condensing into the pure light-body of the child Jesus, and warming love from below, meeting and touching in the position of the arm—the two motives blending together—this gives subconsciously to our astral body, whether it wishes it or not, if a person only has the patience to devote himself to it, the feeling: It is thy duty to bring thy love towards that which can reveal itself to thee from divine heights, so that thou takest it into thine own arms and realisest it in the world, that thou bringest impulses in life from the spiritual world. The Sistine Madonna is an alter picture in which this thought-form works together with a congregation. We have here to do with two motives which are to rouse in us the frame of mind in which we may become capable of holding fast in thought the laws and the principles of action of the spiritual world. That is the essential point in our anthroposophical work. Spiritual things are always in motion and to the untrained seer they are like dreams. It is difficult to hold fast in thought these moving, fleeting peculiarities of being, and, conversely, it is also difficult in thought to give thought itself such an inner consistency that ont receives the feeling: Thou art thinking a reality of the true spiritual world. We can receive this feeling if we allow these pictures to act upon us in the manner described, not be apathetic towards these things, but look at them repeatedly. Then the forces of the astral body are obliged to experience the effect which may be described by saying, that we come more and more to perceive the true content of anthroposophical thought. We are not coerced unawares, but this recognition is quite free; the co-operation of two motives is something which liberates the free powers of man.

Thus you see that in what surrounds us here all the laws are fulfilled which so-called white magic uses, not to work by means of any overruling force upon modern humanity, but to consider that which is to be worked upon in another human being as a sacred thing which must not be touched, which is to allow the forces of the spiritual world to come forth out of itself. If you bear in mind what has been said in this lecture you will realise how important it is to anthroposophical work that it should have its own home, for you will have received the feeling that such a home must be built and arranged within according to the laws of occultism itself, and indeed, according to laws of occultism which at first are somewhat remote. You will also understand what it means on the whole when we possess no such home and are obliged to give our lectures on Anthroposophy and carry on our studies in the ordinary rooms usually at our disposal. Our age has, indeed, very little talent in the domain which has been touched upon today, and the greatest sins are committed in the realms of form and colour. For instance, the way people dress and the colours they use are outrageous, and when one goes through the streets of a large town and looks at the shop-windows with a vision sharpened by occultism, he will be obliged to decide for himself the question whether what he sees comes from sound reason or from something else. And if the judgment as regards colour is bad, it is still worse with form. But this limited talent also exists in regard to the decoration of rooms, and when it takes place in full consciousness it is frightful to be obliged to hold our anthroposophical lectures in conventional rooms. When this fact is considered and then compared with our present surroundings, with all this which has proceeded from our intentions, which surrounds us not in any way from caprice, but as we must be surrounded, if we wish to work under favourable conditions, then we shall be able to realise the importance of what has been done here; and the words that I have said to you today are intended to help us to realise it.

Someone who pursues the spiritual life in the present recognises that many contemporaries search something exceptionally uncertain that they—if they want to form mental pictures of their human condition—do not know with which they should comply.

If you go into the reasons impartially why their search is so uncertain, you find probably that just the scientific insight into the outer processes of the world existence and the consequences arising from it for the practical life cause that.

One may easily say that this scientific insight, this habit of understanding the world scientifically works on the human being that the fact is associated with it that it is impossible to penetrate into the mental area in this way. Perhaps it will arise just from the today's considerations that it is connected with the triumph of scientific knowledge that natural sciences cannot explain the human soul life with their means.

However, this scientific way of thinking arrogates all habitual ways of thinking of the modern human being to itself in a way. It has changed certain mental pictures of the soul structure. If one sees back how before the rise of the modern cultural life the world was considered, it becomes apparent that the human being of that time formed mental pictures of the world that were suitable to get to information of the natural processes and of the soul life at the same time. Today one does not always note because we are not used to observing the development of the soul life properly how much the today's mental pictures differ from the older ones.

On the other side, all confessions are echoes from old times. In them, a certain way has remained to think about the human soul and its position in the world. The scientific authority has made that totter.

Today the human being is no longer content with that what is delivered to him from old times because he is accustomed to look scientifically at the world, and wants to have explanations about the position of his soul in the universe and his development from science. However, there one has just to admit that that which science offers cannot satisfy him. If one considers that what, for example, a philosophical psychology just offers, the human being who tries honestly to approach this psychology can find nothing of which he can make anything. There are striking examples of the fact that that is right which I have just said.

There is the strange philosopher Richard Wahle who is oddly discontented with his science which pretends to be able to give some indication of the most essential in the human being, but to which he cannot ascribe that it can give such explanation. I have pointed to that already last time.

I am not at all willing to awaken the belief that such single personalities with their views have a deeper influence on the thinking, on the mental pictures of the contemporaries. I believe that the opposite is true: in such personalities appears what pulsates in many contemporaries.

Well, this philosopher talks oddly about his philosophy. He says, one can compare the philosophers of former times—he is also extremely discontented with them—with cooks and waiters in a restaurant who pass rotten dishes to the people. However, one can compare the modern philosophers to cooks and waiters who are standing and have nothing to do in the restaurant.—So this philosopher wants to say about his science that it was good for nothing in old times, could not give any explanation of the most important in the human being and that it is not only good for nothing today, but also offers nothing.

As odd it is, if a man thinks about his science in such a way, nevertheless, it is justified that such phenomena appear in our time. Since with the appearance of the modern natural sciences mental pictures have formed which are substantially different from the old mental pictures that matched nature and spirit equally well according to the need of the past.

Psychology has not changed the old mental pictures. It has stopped at the old mental pictures with which the human being cannot be content just today because he has learnt to think scientifically, and because in him the unaware demand awakes to be able to investigate the soul also in such a way as natural sciences investigate the outer nature. This causes an inner conflict just with the best of our time.

This inner conflict comes to light in the fact that they have to recognise: in psychology that what is offered, consists partly of empty phrases. One wants to explain what is a mental picture, a feeling, or a will impulse. One wants to take this as starting point of the question for the transient or everlasting being of the soul. Someone who approaches these things with common sense notices very soon that he has, actually, nothing substantial, nothing real in that which is said about the soul life that the old mental pictures have lost their carrying capacity compared with the scientific mental pictures and that new ones have not yet been formed.

That is why people look around instinctively for a new psychology, for a new knowledge of the soul. However, there is not yet clarity in the public consciousness how one should search.

From these undergrounds, the anthroposophically oriented spiritual science has originated. One considers it today often as anything and everything, but not as that what it is. As the outflow of any sectarian current as something that wants to found a new religion or as the case may be. No, this anthroposophically oriented spiritual science wants to be that what the modern human being needs most of all.

It wants to give that with which one can comply if one should search the riddle of the human soul life in the modern sense. Indeed. The ways that this spiritual science has to take are so unusual to the modern thinking that many people find it difficult how one speaks about these things; others find it paradoxical or fantastic. However, every newly appearing spiritual achievement shares this fate with anthroposophy.

Hence, I would like to speak in particular about the most important soul questions and their coherence with the bodily life from the viewpoint of this science. At the beginning, I would like to point out that spiritual science is not that which a big part of our contemporaries imagines. On the contrary, the scientific progress urgently demands it. This scientific progress has just brought one thing nearer to the human beings with a certain authoritative habituation of thinking. This is the belief that there are certain limits of knowledge, which one cannot cross.

One says to himself, perhaps there is nothing beyond these limits of knowledge. On this side of the limits of knowledge is only the material world.—That is why either one has generally to refrain from assuming a mental-spiritual life, or alternatively one has to say to himself, one cannot cross the limits which separate us from this mental-spiritual life. It is this essential point which those realise who contemplate much about such things which, however, vaguely, subconsciously and instinctively worries all thinking human beings today. From this viewpoint, just spiritual science begins. Since it takes two inner experiences as starting points of this soul science, they are associated with the appearance of the limits of knowledge. It does not want to be contradictory in amateurish way to natural sciences if they arrive at limits of knowledge, no, it just tries to cope with the experience of the limits of scientific knowledge properly. Spiritual science does not theorise, but it attempts with the scientific methods to progress to cognition with the help of scientific mental pictures. It tries to find its way with full inner clearness to the point where one can have the feeling: here you stand at the limits of scientific knowledge.—Then it tries to experience what one can experience at these limits of knowledge.

Lo and behold, this psychology or soul science has to admit these limits of knowledge at first. Just while it familiarises itself thoroughly with how natural sciences do research, it gets to an experience at the limits of knowledge which I want now to characterise.

It says to itself, one can pursue processes of nature with scientific thinking, but one will always arrive at certain cornerstones of knowledge that one cannot pass. I could bring in many such cornerstones, but I want only to state “energy and matter.” The human being can realise if he develops scientifically that he can make progress with dismembering physical processes that then he feels compelled, however, to accept certain concepts, just energy and matter. He has to say to himself then, compared with these concepts that show realities in the sensory world you do not get further, there you cannot enter with natural sciences.

If you do not take the Kantian view one-sidedly as starting point, but check this inner experience at the limits of knowledge impartially, you ask yourself, why does this scientific method put us to such a limit, to certain cornerstones of thinking?—The human beings normally do not get on it because they do not order their thinking in such a way as I want to characterise it after, and, hence, they do not get to the observation of the inner life. They do not note that the human being himself is to blame for the fact that he has to approach such cornerstones. The human beings cannot ask themselves: why do we face such cornerstones? They cannot go over from such an experience to another scientific experience, to a soul experience. If you become able of it in a way, you experience limits of the scientific knowledge on one side.

Then you try on the other side to obtain clarity about the inner experience that you simply have if you face another person. You will note if you have developed your soul life: facing a physical process scientifically analysing is a different thing than facing a person with whom you want to consort, to come close emotionally. You notice if you can compare now in this area that that soul force which enables you to face the person with understanding builds a bridge between human being and human being and makes the human life only possible. This soul force—because it is always between us because it must also always be there because it cannot be neutralised if we do research scientifically—leads us to the limits of knowledge.

We could not simply feel love or sympathy from person to person if we did not have the soul force that obstructs the scientific cognition. Because the human being is a whole because he must also have the capacity for love and because this capacity for love is continuously active if one recognises scientifically, the scientific limits arise. The same force that allows us to love puts scientific limits to us. The spiritual researcher recognises if natural sciences were not put at limits, the human being could not love.

This one important experience activates the inner driving forces of the soul, so that one gets to the anthroposophically oriented spiritual science. You must not be an opponent of natural sciences; you must be able to react to them if you want to be active spiritual-scientifically. However, you have to change that what the naturalist normally has as a theory only into experience, and then from the experience appears that this is in such a way as I have just explained it with the peculiar interaction of the scientific cognitive faculties and the capacity for love.

Some people realise this consciously, some unconsciously. They feel it instinctively. Then they turn in another direction to overcome the limits of scientific cognition and to get to a knowledge of the soul. Then they search in mystic way what natural sciences cannot offer.

You realise from that which I have said that one cannot get with natural sciences to any soul research. However, one does wrong by spiritual science if one confuses it with mysticism. Since just as the spiritual researcher must have experienced that it is impossible to find his way to the mental area with scientific knowledge, so that he has the right starting point, he must also have the other experience that shows that the usual mysticism does not enter into the soul life.

Spiritual science imitates neither natural sciences nor mysticism. However, it has to have gone through the mystic experience, as well as it must have gone through the experience with natural sciences. As it has arrived at the limits of the scientific knowledge, it must get the insight on the other side that it is impossible to penetrate into the inner life with mysticism and to find thereby the core of the human soul, the connection with the everlasting. The spiritual researcher has also to know the mystic limits well. He has to recognise on the mystic ways that he enters into something uncertain that finally says nothing to him. Of course, this is only a sensation at first. If he continues investigating, he finds that also an inner soul force is active which prevents from obtaining a psychology with mysticism as the capacity for love prevents from getting to a psychology scientifically.

There appears the following: if the human being makes an effort ever so much with the usual consciousness to descend in his inside, nevertheless, he finds nothing but what has slipped in the soul life during the life between birth and death in any way. Of course, on this point scientists who tend to mysticism become entangled in a big vagueness. They often believe to be able to get out this and that with contemplation what can give some indication of the riddles of this soul life. However, today we have already advanced so far with researching the physical processes of the human being that we are no longer deterred by such a contemplation if we go forward thoroughly.

I want to bring in an example from literature as evidence as it were, so that you can check it.

(As in the previous talk, Steiner describes Louis Waldstein's experience where he was made smile while reading a title of a book because a hardly audible melody elicited a pleasant memory in him unconsciously.)

You realise how the human soul life functions, actually, how little one is inclined to pay attention in the usual life to this inner soul life and its structure.

However, the expert of this inner soul life knows first that a lot of that which the human being believes that he has not experienced it most certainly but originally gets out of the soul, is nothing but any memory of the childhood or youth or as the case may be. As mystic one is often inclined to believe, for example, that one can bring out something of his soul; and, besides, one brings out memories of his youth or as the case may be. But the expert knows that not only these impressions can change in the course of time that they become something quite different, yes ,that they change into symbols and are not at all similar to the original if they emerge again. Nevertheless, one deals with nothing but with that what one has just brought up. Thus ,there is many a mystic who gets percepts of the divine from his subconscious, of the eternity of the soul, great truths, as he means, and lo and behold: the great truths are nothing but the transformed tones of a barrel organ which have remained as memories. With it, I want to say only how necessary it is if one talks of mysticism to pay attention to these things.

It is true, spiritual science is not an intellectual game, but is scientifically founded. That is why it looks closely at the inner soul life. Then there it gets the result, why with the methods which I immediately want to characterise one finds an inner soul force that prevents us from descending in the everlasting core of the human being.

In exactly the same way as the capacity for love prevents us from penetrating into the inside of nature, there is a soul force which prevents us from descending in our inside. Without this inner soul force, our usual consciousness is not healthy. It is simply the memory that holds us together as human beings in our consciousness between birth and death. This memory power prevents that we look down into our everlasting because we can look with the usual consciousness only at that surface at which our experiences are reflected. Thus the memory power sets limits to us which the mystic experiences.

This is the second experience. The one is that you cannot get to the mental area with natural sciences; the other is that you cannot penetrate into your inside with mysticism because the memory power opposes. If one experiences spiritual research intensely, has experienced these things, one attains the force for further things just with the disappointments of these experiences, with the inner tragedy of these experiences. What does this other consist of? This other consists of the decision to renounce on one side to penetrate with the usual consciousness into the riddles of the things; but also to look for another consciousness at the same time. Both experiences induce the spiritual researcher to add another consciousness to the usual one.

The new psychology has to add to the old, no longer suitable psychology that one cannot get any information about the soul life with the usual consciousness, neither scientifically nor mystically, but that it must evolve into another consciousness.

Hence, the spiritual-scientific research develops such method by which a science is searched which does not only research with the usual consciousness, but which changes the soul into another state of consciousness in which one investigates the soul life. This new psychology is able not only to speak about words as the official psychology does today, but also to approach mental realities.

Now I want to indicate the methods of the development of the consciousness only in principle, which is able to lead into the riddles of the soul life. There you must develop a certain soul force at first that transforms your memory. The memory prevents us from penetrating into the human soul core.

You find viewpoints among the methods in my writings how one gets around to carrying out such internal soul performances without appealing to the memory. I may state here how I have noticed decades ago how difficult it is to change this inner soul force to get to soul research.

(As in the previous talk, Steiner tells how difficult it was for him as pupil to keep mathematical formulae in mind that he had to derive them, therefore, always ad hoc.)

I found out for myself that in the fact of not reflecting the memory is contained a soul arrangement. This was for me the starting point to look then further for those methods that I have described in my books and which consist in the fact that one envigours the imagining with meditation as usually the internal soul life with perceiving.

It is a certain liveliness in our soul life if we perceive with the senses and accompany the percepts with our mental pictures, isn't that so? While meditating you make this different. While meditating you use mental pictures that you have formed yourself that you can exactly survey with which you exactly know that they do not contain any memories, but you have created them yourself, you can survey them clearly.

To such mental pictures you dedicate yourself, strengthen the inner soul force gradually,—without getting to imagining with the outer percepts—so that it comes to life as the mental stay in percipience which is accompanied by mental pictures. However, you note something else if you pursue this spiritual research. It becomes obvious that the mental pictures that you grasp then, just the most essential, the most important and most basic ones, must be created always anew that they do not transition into memory. These mental pictures live in the soul without appealing to the memory.

What I say to you now, is just simple experience, it is something that one can only describe; of course everybody can say, this must be proved first. Inner experience does prove it. Not by spiritistic arrangements, not by any outer mechanistic things, but only by the fact that one evokes this quite different consciousness that does not appeal to memory you get around to beholding into the real spiritual life.

Since only such mental pictures that do not appeal to memory are suitable to lead into the spiritual life. Indeed, they only deliver pictures of this spiritual life at first. While the human being if he perceives with his senses has immediately the feeling—the epistemologists may argue against that—that he faces reality, the human being knows also if he advances to such imagining which does not appeal to memory that he can experience something with these mental pictures that he cannot experience, otherwise, but only in pictures. Now he gets clear on this level of the soul life, which he has reached in this way that he is related to the sense-perceptible world with his body as he is related with his soul to a spiritual world that emerges to him in pictures at first. A soul science of the present and the future is not possible, because the old one is no longer useful due to the scientific imagining, without this great experience.

It is significant that another consciousness can develop from the usual one and that this other consciousness gives information: not only a sense-perceptible world surrounds the human being, but also a spiritual world. As it is true that every human being lives with his body in the sense-perceptible world, it is true that he is with his soul in a spiritual world, in a world of macrocosmic beings. The human being if he has this experience ceases speaking with unclear pantheism: there is spirit and spirit and spirit... [Gap in the transcript].

Pantheism is nothing but an illusionary worldview. That what appears, indeed, only in pictures at first, is a concrete spiritual world that faces the soul in details as spiritual beings as the sense-perceptible world faces the soul in concrete details. However, these are pictures.

That is why I call the level of consciousness that the human being attains the Imaginative consciousness in meditative way. The spiritual world approaches the human being, as the sense-perceptible world approaches him in colours, in light and darkness. However, he also has the consciousness if he develops his imagining only, that he deals with pictures. You realise that a development of imagining is necessary if the human being should become able to behold into the spiritual world that way.

If the human being wants to get beyond the pictures to spiritual realities and beings, he has to develop not only the imagining but also the will. As we imagine in the usual consciousness, actually, only by the way and form thoughts about the outside world,—but this is more or less a concomitant—, the will is a concomitant for the usual consciousness.

We can observe the will as a rule only in such a way that we direct our activities upon the outside world. However, thereby we do not get to know the will really. If we think about the will, we do not cope with it. You normally do not look into this area. You realise with the usual consciousness only that the human being goes over from his inner life to an outer life, while he lets his will transition into the action, while his outer life just becomes a copy of his will impulses. By the observation of this will with the usual consciousness, you cannot penetrate into the being of the will.

It is about the following: as the imagining is developed to the Imaginative knowledge while one produces a certain relation to memory, a certain relation of the human will to the capacity for love has to be produced. This happens by the fact that as it were inner light is brought in the will that the human being becomes much more active internally in his will than he is usually. Thereby he can bring in the will into another sphere.

(As in the previous talk, Steiner mentions two ways of writing, a body-conditioned one and a kind of painting or drawing which such persons show who exhibited great capacity for love in their youth.)

This only shows that with the usual writing the human organisation is usually involved. However, he can also slip that in the writing what works, otherwise, only in the intellectuality or in the knowledge, he can slip the observation, the imagining in. However, this is connected internally. Even as it is connected with love if a person copies the letters in his whole life in such a way as if he were a painter or illustrator, the love penetrates objectively always into the will if the ability of observing joins the will. You can attain this with strict self-discipline, namely in the following way.

Someone who can look back only a little at his life knows that today he has another spiritual condition than ten years ago. Not only because we change because of new experiences, but also because our habitual ways of thinking have changed. However, we do this unconsciously for the most part. Life, education, the conditions bring us forward. Somebody who wants to research spiritually must be able to pursue this inner development consciously. He has to develop the power in himself that he really changes by his mental pictures, by his ideas. This simply belongs to the preparation of spiritual research.

You cannot penetrate into the inside of the spiritual life if you cannot incorporate the same development impulses by imagining. Consider only how the usual life works in this respect. People often have the best intentions if they want to cast off this or that quality or to appropriate this or that quality. They appropriate other qualities, but by education, by the conditions, by the outer life. Nevertheless, just the inner soul life is not strong enough to intervene in the will.

However, the methods that I have described in my books enable the core of the person to settle down into the will. Then a special development of the capacity for love takes place. While on the one side one has to develop an ability in the spiritual research, which does not appeal to memory, on the other side one has to develop an ability, which immensely deepens the capacity for love, makes it objective.

Since what militates against the fact that our innermost mental pictures transform us? Nothing but self-love. The possibility to change by inner imagining is because you can change self-love into objective love. If you progress this way, you can attain a state of consciousness that is different from the usual one. Then you may say to yourself, I have pictures; I know, there is a spiritual world around me in which my soul lives. Now I know: these pictures correspond to a reality that I touch because I have developed an impulse with systematic efforts.

You face now not only the pictures of spiritual beings but also the spiritual reality itself. You have attained this level. You have got out another consciousness from the usual one. You can now really figure out the human soul life with these just described abilities. Above all one thing becomes obvious that the spiritual researcher can describe only how he gets to these things. Then people may easily say: where are your proofs?—The proofs just are that he describes how he has got to these things that one can check these things with common sense and that every person can get around to them if he checks the things.

That which can appear, for example, as a first possibility if you have appropriated the abilities of this supersensible consciousness is that you can now give some indication of the rhythmical change of waking and sleeping what you could not do up to now because of the thresholds, the mystic one and the scientific one. If you have developed this consciousness, you wake in such a way that you know clearly: from falling asleep until awakening I had an inner soul life that is different from that while I am in my body, at no time I was in nothingness. Now you notice that beside the bodily processes the soul processes take place that they are drowned only from awakening until falling asleep by the bodily experiences. The human being lives from falling asleep until awakening in the spiritual world beyond his body and that which he experiences there is extinguished when he wakes up and enters into his body because he needs the bodily tools to get percepts. It is an echo there in the human being; but you recognise clearly that you have lived in the spiritual from falling asleep until awakening if you have learnt to live in such mental pictures that do not appeal to the memory.

Since this is just the interesting: we have a soul life from falling asleep until awakening, but we forget because we were trained to know that only with the usual consciousness that we can keep in mind. So that the healthy soul life can be, we cannot grasp the mental pictures of sleep in the usual consciousness, which are not designed to become memories in the usual sense but to be forgotten. We can grasp them only if we have a soul life that is not designed to oblivion but to memory.

Hence, we may say, as you look back at the room if you have advanced in the room, you can look back, if you have awoken, at that what you have experienced. Remembering changes into inner looking back. However, because you develop such abilities, it is given at the same time that these abilities of a supersensible consciousness increase more and more and you become more able to study the soul life.

You can study as a first, for example, the emotional life. It is good if you take your starting point from the emotional life and are oriented towards the experience of awakening and falling asleep with the developed abilities of the supersensible consciousness. If you investigate the feeling of the human being at any time of his life with the consciousness of which I have just spoken, the strange comes to light that in this emotional life everything flows together at one moment that one has experienced before and what one will still experience after.

I have attempted to ascertain this matter spiritual-scientifically with examples with which one can ascertain this, for example, with Goethe. One takes his feeling life in 1790. Now one can study what Goethe had experienced what he had thought and felt until 1790 and that what he experienced then from 1790 to 1832: if you take the basic character of the experiences before and after 1790 as effective, you find the emotional state of Goethe in 1790. The emotional state of a human being at any time is the confluence of his immediate past since his birth, and of that which he will experience until his death.

You will receive interesting results, for example, in the following way with this new psychology: you look for the soul life of persons shortly before they die. Someone who has an unbiased view realises everywhere that a rapid death expresses itself just in the emotional life; since the emotional life is the confluence of that what was there before, and what will be after, what is already there, however, like the summer lightning of the future, which expresses itself in the colouring of the feelings. Thus, you get to know the inside of the course of life, which consists mainly of flowing feelings. Then you can ascend, after you have investigated the feeling in this way, to imagining. However, you can explain the imagining only if you have enabled yourself by the development of the supersensible consciousness to look, for example, really at the moment of awakening where the awakening makes its impression in the body. You know that awakening is immersing in the body.

You recognise the independence of the soul in this way. Now you get to know that this awakening of the mental takes place repeatedly as it were in short, successive rhythms in the usual thinking and imagining. These rhythms take place in the ongoing usual consciousness what you hardly note what single modern psychologists have noted; John Ruskin (1819-1900, English art critic, social thinker) describes this in detail.

Hence, the real process is always in such a way that only a miniature of awakening is there. You are awaking perpetually if you go over from non-imagining to imagining. This is exceptionally important.

If you get to know the nature of imagining this way, you can build the bridge between imagining and awakening, you know that the imagining is only a minor awakening, you also know that the independent soul moves to and fro in the bodily. While one builds the bridge from imagining to awakening on the one side, one can get the ability to build the bridge from awakening to immersing of the mental in the bodily at conception or birth on the other side.

The spiritual-scientific psychology is able to point to this continuous way. If you get to know the imagining in its reality, the straight bridge leads from imagining to awakening, from observing the transition of the independent soul life to the bodily life, but from there the other bridge leads to the beholding of the spiritual life before conception. Someone who can bring that what he has developed in the supersensible consciousness into the usual imagining knows that he not only looks back at the former spiritual life, but he knows that this former spiritual life also works on the present imagining.

Here is the point where one can laugh even today or mock if spiritual science points to a pre-birth spiritual life of the soul, points to former lives on earth which one gets to know from own experience. One may laugh; but the way can be indicated with which this is scientifically investigated, after one has brought about the possibility of this scientific investigation.

As well as I have shown today how spiritual science originates, how it looks for the immortal of the human soul with conscientious research, and gets to the certainty of the immortality of the human soul by immediate perception, spiritual science is suitable to perform that which I shall bring forward the day after tomorrow of which many people believe today to perform it with quite different means. You cannot investigate the soul life unless you penetrate into the supersensible consciousness. You cannot investigate the basis of the social structure of the human society unless you penetrate with the means of the higher consciousness into the basis of the moral, the religious, the sociopolitical life in modern sense. It becomes necessary also historically that the human being, so that he can fulfil the big demands which face him from the necessities of the evolution, penetrates with this supersensible consciousness into that what people are thinking, doing and willing. I would like to show that the day after tomorrow. Today, however, I wanted only, I would like to say, to deliver the preparation of this talk which is more keeping with the times.

One has either to look for these new ways, which I have indicated, for a new psychology to satisfy the biggest inner needs or one would generally have—what would be unfortunate—no psychology. One will either search a new anthroposophic psychology or renounce any psychology. However, humanity will never do this.

Hence, someone who knows the spiritual way has the consciousness and hope that this spiritual way does not originate from mere subjective arbitrariness, but that it arises from the social progress of the human race and that, therefore, humanity will take it.

First, as in previous lectures here, I must take a moment to ask for apologies, as I cannot give the lecture in the language of this country. Since this is not possible for me, I must make the attempt to be understood in my customary language. Secondly, I beg to apologize as I've arrived here with a cold, and so perhaps there will also be interruptions here and there throughout the lecture.

When one speaks in the present time of the question that has been announced for today's topic, a question that is indeed related to the deepest needs, the deepest yearnings of the human soul, then there emerges out of today's education the objection that questions so bereft of discovery cannot be spoken of scientifically at all, that one must be satisfied to let such questions remain within traditional beliefs, within the same things said about these things as are perception and feeling on the fingers. This is the familiar view nowadays, and therefore everything that is put forward from the point of view of a truly spiritual knowledge will be perceived as somewhat strange. Yet all that is brought forward here, that has arisen from valid points of view, can absolutely stand on the same ground as the accustomed scientific views over the course of the last three or four centuries, when the natural sciences actually climbed and arrived at the point of their highest success. But if one applies only the same methods of knowledge that are allowed by science today, then a way cannot be found into those areas for which answers must be sought, as far as is possible for people regarding such matters as those that we want to deal with today, questions of the soul's eternity, of the eternity of the innermost being of man.

Now the point of view here submitted wants nothing further than to continue within those natural scientific methods set down, but not just to those points from which one can gain a glimpse into the supersensory world, from which alone a possible view into the eternal nature of the inner man can be won. One must initially want to succeed in the acquisition of such knowledge so as to set the sights overall on the expectation of the knowledge itself. One must ask whether the insight, the inner realization, will stop within the ordinary consciousness as we apply it towards the phenomena of nature by measuring, by experiments in balance, through counting, arithmetic and so on, or whether a further glimpse into the supersensory is possible; whether an entirely different cognitive perception ought to be gained or not. So that we understand by such means this different cognitive perception, allow me next to make a comparison. I do not from the start want to prove anything by this comparison, but only to make myself understandable so that what I want to add as more evidence of any nature can be captured in just the right way.

Even in ordinary life we know of two states of consciousness within the human being that are strongly different from one another. We know the state of wakefulness, where we are from morning till night, and we know the state of sleep, in which we are outside of the ordinary circumstances of life, and from which arise colorful iridescent dreams. If we maintain a reasonable point of view, we do not attribute the same perspective of reality to these dreams that we experience in the waking state.

But let us consider: by what means in general do we come to speak of the dreams that arise out of the sleeping state—in general so to speak—so that they often carry, namely, an interesting character, but have a lower reality value, or perhaps in a certain sense they do not quite have the reality value compared to what we experience when awake? We come to an assessment of the dream world only by the fact that we wake up, and by awakening we come to an entirely different state of consciousness. What happens because of this awakening? We switch our will on, especially in our body, in our physical tasks. These depend on the will. After all, what we perceive through the awakened senses is also essentially caused by the awakening of the will in the senses, in the switching on of the sense organs. To a certain extent this goes on in our entire organism, our entire organism is taken hold of; we are able to turn ourselves to the natural world through our organism. And by what we experience because of this activity we are quite capable of assessing the value of the dream's reality. We could never come within the dream to any other insight about the dream than that which the dream itself presents as full reality. So long as we dream we see everything as real, what the dream presents to us in its colorful, dazzling variety.

Let us allow ourselves, once, to take up a certain correct, daring, paradoxical hypothesis. Allowing for this even once we would never awaken throughout our entire earthly life, but would constantly dream. Then we would fill ourselves during our conscious life on earth with all the ideas that we know only from our dreams. And one with such a problem could therefore definitely think that any force of nature—or by my account any spiritual being—could drive us to our actions, and in everything that we do from morning until evening our outer life thus proceeds as it proceeds. We would be accompanied not only with waking concepts, we would be doing something completely different of which we know nothing. However, we would dream our entire lives through, and we would come only to the thoughts that are not true reality. For that which occurs when we grasp things, when we see with the eyes, such as we have in the waking state, would not occur at all.

Thus we know our dream state only from the point of view of the Guardian's judgement. If such a thing is taken seriously, if we do not pass lightly out of habit over the usual events of life, then there arises just opposite the deeper soul questions this hypothetical view: Yes, is it not then perhaps also possible to some extent from a higher point of view to turn from our habitual everyday Guardian and awaken to something new, to a higher state of consciousness? Can we not allow ourselves to think that, if we can wake up out of the dream into everyday reality, we can also awaken out of everyday reality into a higher consciousness? Just as a higher consciousness is given with which we can judge the reality of the everyday world—where we are from morning until evening—can we not also judge the reality value of the dream from the standpoint of wakefulness?

I have put this before you first of all as a question, as an entirely hypothetical question. The same scientific point of view that I have here asserted now shows that it is actually possible for the human being to come to such a second awakening. Just as the shift from sleeping to dreaming in life occurs out of ordinary wakefulness, so this occurrence can increase to another higher level whereby one awakens out of this ordinary everyday life to a higher state and, from this, everyday life likewise appears as though out of dreams.

Now in order to take such a point of view at all, something is necessary that I always call, in this context, intellectual humility. This intellectual humility, however, does not belong to present-day man. Indeed, present-day man says to himself: “Well, when I was a small child, I dreamed in a certain way within life. Then I left childhood, I had to do so, yes, and I came to parenting through becoming older, through life itself. I was then in my entire soul constitution a different person. Each intellectual point of view that I had won for myself I had not brought into the world, for I had first developed it within myself out of the dull, dreamy state of the child's consciousness.” This is indeed the man of today, but here he stops, and then he says: “Well, I have this point of view. What appears to me to be true from this point of view is true; what appears to me to be false from this point of view is false. Through this point of view that I once won for myself, I am the sovereign ruler over truth and falseness, error and accuracy.”

Yes, one should not have this gesture of immodesty if one really wants to ascend to true knowledge of the supersensory world. So care must be taken: just as the human being has evolved out of the dull, dreamy soul-state of the child, so must it be presumed that from the standpoint of the soul—where he has already come once—he can continue to develop himself when he becomes an adult. Now it will be shown whether such a second awakening as I have hypothetically constructed is possible, whether such a development can be produced.

First of all, we naturally use those cognitive and mental powers that are already there when we want to enter into true, exact spiritual research. For there is nothing else the human being can use in relation to his soul constitution than what is already there; this he can try to develop further. Now there is a soul force that the more perceptive philosophers admit to, even in respect to our day, and if one looks at this properly it is already pointing clearly to the eternal essence of man. This suggests, however, that man will not develop even this soul force further; he will merely engage in philosophical speculations about it. That is to say, he wants just enough to stop in ordinary reality, and it is as though he, the dreamer, does not want to wake up, but wants to dream further about the dream in order to give himself an insight about the dream. He does not want to wake up a second time. The soul force I refer to is indeed beyond the power of memory. I do not want to engage in wide-meshed philosophical arguments here—naturally there is no time for it; in other circumstances there could very well be—I want to remain entirely within the popular consciousness. Let us imagine once that this popular consciousness actually works in man just as the power of memory and the power of perception do. Events that we may have gone through decades ago are accordingly brought up from the depths of the soul—or, preferably, we should say out of the depths of the human being so that we do not present a hypothesis about the soul. Out of the depths of the human being thought pictures will be conjured before the human soul that are the same as those that perhaps years ago were experienced in all of their vitality. What is actually occurring here? There lies before us something in memory that is different from what had been perceived in the outer world. In order to perceive the outer world it must be there. When the eye sees, that which is seen must be there. When the ear hears, that which is heard must be there, and so forth. What is experienced by the one perceiving is provided by the perception. With memory we have something in the soul that is not now present. What began as a perception, perhaps a long time ago, but is now no longer there, is conjured up before our souls by the memory.

From these facts intended here to emanate from spiritual science and not from philosophical speculation, connections can now be taken up and developed further through exercises of the soul. The question is this: if we are capable through ordinary memory of having something of the perceptions and the thoughts that are no longer there, but once were there in our earthly life, could we not perhaps also, through further development of such soul exercises, arrive at what refers to something that was never in earthly life, to something that is a more highly developed memory, yet is not actually a memory but an Imagination where the memory is so far advanced that something is presented that was not originally there? This can be achieved the more that we really develop the thought life that is used for ordinary consciousness.

This is not to criticize, but only to show the facts of mental life. Because for natural science and for the ordinary consciousness of the practical human being, only the external impressions of his consciousness are taken into consideration, and it is entirely correct that he surrenders to and passively experiences the thoughts of these external impressions. However, through this second process the higher awakening of which I have spoken can come about, but one must surrender all of the work and activities of thought life, surrender the forces of thought.

There then occurs that which should not be confused with what today is often called clairvoyance, which of course is based upon all possible associations dependent upon human organic functions. That which is acquired here presupposes that each step during practice is completed with as much prudence as the mathematician takes with his arithmetic for the mathematical sciences; so it is known exactly and precisely how to practice every forward step of the soul, just as the mathematician customarily carries out his work. Only the works of the mathematician are in objective forms, while here the work is to bring forward your own soul forces. In this manner you are finally led to remember. You live in an entirely different mental power than previously. Previously the power of thought was just abstract; you could think about something through your thoughts, but now, now you are internally experiencing the power of thought as a real force, just as you experience the pulsation of your blood. Now you experience thinking and action as a reality within you—now you see that the power of memory also lives in thought, only it is a dilution—if I may express myself figuratively—of that which is seen as a much greater power of thought, like the pulse of organic forces. You experience the reality of thought. And you can experience this reality of thought in so far as you really feel something that has not yet been felt. It has been felt in the physical body, and now one begins to feel a second, higher person. And this second, higher person then takes on a very definite shape.

So you have more than life in this time-body, the head is free: you have a human being in the etheric cosmos. That which I now recognize and know only in its importance as the earthly human being—and it actually has the I-sense—this is the human being as earth man, this is only the physical body that evaporates in space.

What we are as human beings as we go around in ordinary life, we are in that we carry a space-body with us, a fleshly space-body. Then we experience what I would call a time-body. One can also call this an etheric or formative forces body, as I have done in my books.

We experience namely that which emerges as a powerful tableau, an overview of our previous life on earth, from the point of time that we have reached, going backwards until the beginning of childhood. As otherwise we experience only a space tableau, now we experience a time tableau that occurs suddenly and is an overview of the entire previous life on earth. This is the first supernatural experience that the human being can have, his own earth lives suddenly appearing before him as a tableau.

Now someone can say: Yes, but perhaps this is only a somewhat complicated picture from memory. Indeed, one could likewise place together in thoughts what has been experienced and then form a continuous stream of memory; yes, one could just receive this picture as a memory picture. And perhaps we are brought to a state only of some self-deception here, to nothing other than such a memory picture from what you describe to us on the basis of your active guidance.

This would assuredly be so if there were no differences in accordance with the content! Indeed, if these things were really faced as though one were a scientist, confronting scientific things in laboratories, in physical cabinets, at the clinic and so forth, and then considering: is this an ordinary memory image? Imagine how people have approached us, how they have done this or that to us, how this or that has touched us with sympathy or antipathy, and so on. This can perhaps also provide us with a memory image that represents how natural phenomena has approached us. But it is always this that comes to us: what the thing mainly is when it is merely recollected.

In this tableau to which I have just drawn attention, it is not that the things draw near to us, but rather that everything comes out of us. This appears chiefly to be like that which we confront out of the inner forces of the soul as natural phenomena and the human being, yet everything appears from within us. This is real self-knowledge, real, concrete self-knowledge, which in fact occurs initially out of the previous earth life. And if we compare what we see overall, then we must say: that which we have produced from our previous life on earth does not behave like an ordinary recollection, but—like a sealing wax impression in a signet—it is the correct reverse image. And whoever simply makes this comparison will know that this is the first step of a new knowledge, of an increased memory that is not just more memory but represents an overall Imagination of a previous earth life. This is the first stage where one feels that he is this higher human being who carries within himself this time-body; this is not just something that the space-body has conjured out of itself, but something that has worked itself into this space-body ever since we have been on earth as human beings. For we recognize that the powers that lie in this space-body are of the same nature as the power of growth, the same kind that, in addition—for instance, when we were children—has wonderfully modeled our first—I want to say—unplastic, amorphous brain to the wonderful form that this brain gradually becomes, and so on.

And in settling into this time-body of the human being, into this first stage of the supernatural experiences of the human being, what must be rejected are all of the narrow-minded notions of the ego that one has, such as that the I is resting inside of the human skin. Now one feels as though he belongs together with the entire cosmos. Now one feels that he really is in his etheric body, in his time-body as a member of the entire cosmos, and he has a concept that is very real: if I cut off a finger of my body then it is no longer a finger; the finger has meaning only in the context of the organism. So by focusing on this time-body, you have a clear awareness: as a human being within this higher being you have the sense of being a member of the entire etheric cosmos, you belong to the etheric cosmos. It is really correct that the I now recognizes itself in its significance as an earthly human being; knows that it is actually owing to the physical space-body that the human being has the I-sensations as earthly man.

However, this is only the first stage of a super-sensible knowledge that can be acquired in order to feel the eternity of the human soul. The following higher stage actually leads, in truth, to a second awakening. For in the first stage we have reached nothing other than the self-knowledge of the earthly human being. The higher level will now be achieved with the same power with which one has initially, through active thinking, concentrated fully on concepts, and, with the same intensity of soul life, now carries away in turn such concepts from consciousness; only one has to come back to them time and again.

In the handling of all of these processes there is nothing suggestive; it proceeds as something with the fullest deliberation, like the course of mathematical procedures. But still, the one who finds himself surrendering such concepts, such thoughts in a strong manner, the one who moves as in the described example into the center of his consciousness, this is the one who at first is wholly devoted to these concepts.

And it is more difficult to get rid of these than the passively acquired ideas of ordinary consciousness. Therefore, in order to forget or carry away something from your consciousness, a stronger force must be applied than would otherwise be applied. But this is good, because through the fact that you apply this stronger force you can reach yet another higher state of consciousness.

You need only think honestly about what occurs in human consciousness when the familiar, passively acquired conceptions stop. Think first of all about stopping these visual concepts and you know that the person will fall asleep—such attempts have indeed also been made in psychological laboratories. This is exactly what now occurs in the human being when he, as a spiritual investigator, has first concentrated all of the powers of his soul on certain conceptions and then clears them away again. There then occurs in him a state which I call the deepest silence of the human soul, empty consciousness. And within this deepest silence of the human soul something very significant is actually said. Thus, the concepts that were first brought into consciousness with all of your strength are again released, and then you have an empty consciousness. This is simply so. You can wait in mere wakefulness for that which the inner life of the soul then reveals, but in that which I can only describe as the deep silence of the soul, something else enters in.

If we can agree on this soul experience, allow me to make the following comparison. Think to yourself: at first we are in one of the big, modern cities, where, if we go out onto the street, such real noise and tumult reign that we cannot understand our own words. Then, removed from the city, five minutes away, it is always silent, and another five minutes away it is even more silent, and more silent. Let us imagine then that we come to the deep, silent solitude of the forest. We can say: all around is silence. With the environment itself in silence our soul comes to silence.—But you see, we have not yet attained that silence which I now speak of as the deep silence of the soul. When one speaks of the silence of the forest over the din of the city, it is said that sounds very gradually cease. At the state of zero—having arrived at the zero state over the loud din—we call this, then, rest. But there is something that goes beyond the zero! Distract yourself, once, with one who has a fortune; he gives continuously of this wealth until he has little, yes, until he has less than nothing.

Nowadays we see that one does not particularly stop when he has nothing, but goes further. How does he do this? He goes below the zero, goes—as the mathematician says—into the negative, into debts that are made against the assets, into that which is negative in respect to zero, which is less than zero. Regarding the silence, think of this: we can go from the loud roar to the rest—zero—yet we can go still further, so that we enter into the regions of silence where the silence is stronger than the mere zero-silence. And the life of the soul enters into such regions, where there is a greater peace within than the mere zero-silence. If this occurs as I have indicated, the complex concepts of the consciousness are first powerfully extinguished; then the soul moves into the growing emptiness toward the inner experiences. There then emerges from the deep silence of the soul, contrary to the opposite sensual world, the objective spiritual world. Thus the spiritual researcher has arrived at the level I have described, and from the deep silence of the soul he meets the spiritual world, and he is gradually within the spiritual world, just as the human being through his eyes, through his ears, is in the physical-sensory world. And in the deep silence of the soul the objective spiritual world is revealed.

And then one can go further in the exercises. Just as one can get rid of a concept, so can one get rid of this entire picture of life that he had at the first stage of his super-sensible cognition, as I have described it, and that was experienced as real self-knowledge. This he can now clear away with all of his strength, clear away this time-person just as when, in the moment of realization when he had come to the time-person, he had already rid himself of the space-person with his strong I-feeling. Now the time-person can be removed. And out of the silence of the soul one is inflamed when one compares his own self-knowledge, the real self-knowledge, to the waking consciousness that has come in the deep silence of the soul. There is now revealed nothing spiritual, but through the outer work of his time-person he enters into the same world where he was before he descended to take on the physical body that had been prepared by his parents and forefathers. And from the deep silence of the soul there is revealed, in addition to the simultaneous spiritual world events, one's own spiritual and soul being, what he was before he descended to this earthly existence. Now he looks into the life that he went through with others before an earthly garment, if I may call it so, was accepted, purely spiritual-soul beings. The existence of the human being prior to birth or prior to conception actually occurs before the soul seeks to connect with others.

It is this that is the point of view represented here. One does not begin to speculate on any viewpoints so as to determine whether or not the soul is immortal. Nothing can be expected from this, because that would be as though one had pulled oneself out of the dreams, out of the dream that had won enlightenment. One must awaken in order to educate himself about the dream. Now one can awaken in the deep silence of the soul to a higher stage and clarify what life on earth is. It is formed from that existence that he had gone through before the step through birth—or rather through conception—and the descent to this earthly existence.

Spiritual science in the sense meant here wants to show the methods by which the vision of the eternal can be acquired by the human soul. This however is the second stage of spiritual knowledge by which we can climb to the secrets of the world, and which can also give us, in addition, the secrets of our own being.

A third stage is scaled through the fact that something is now a power of knowledge, although it is not a power of knowledge in ordinary consciousness, nor is the power of memory an actual power. We remember what we have experienced.

Just as little is another power of the soul a power of cognition. And when I say it is to be a power of cognition, then any scientist who sits here—I can understand quite well, because you have first to think as a scientist about these things, I know very well, and no one should actually speak with full responsibility about the exact spiritual knowledge asserted here who is not fully familiar with the usual scientific methods. So if scientists do not receive from the above the silent "goose bumps," they will at least receive a little if I now also claim that a force which otherwise plays a huge role in ordinary life—but should not be scientifically availed upon in ordinary life—that this will be now be taken as a power of knowledge for the soul to complete: the power of love.

Yes, certainly love plays a huge role in existence, but it is said that she is blind. It may not be taken as some sort of complete power of knowledge. But if one has driven the power of knowledge so far that we have come to the deep silence of the soul, then there occurs above all within this deep silence of the soul what one might call a distinct impression: When you want to see you have first to deprive your sight of the outer sense world.

You must pull it out of your physical body, pull it out even from the time-body. And then it fades so to speak, that coarser part that is bound to the physical body; the I-feeling very strongly goes yet further, as I have described earlier, where you feel that the time-body is already one with the entire cosmic existence.

But if—through the exercises that are described in detail in the books mentioned—you become acquainted with this deprivation, in which there occurs, in a very real sense, deprivation of the physical, deprivation of the time-body—if you look to existence as it was before you descended into physical existence on earth then you will experience something like a deep pain of the soul. And the true higher knowedge is actually born out of this pain.

Do not believe, if you are honest, that you can describe higher knowledge as being born out of desire! It is born out of pain. And you must gradually acquire the endurance to win against this pain.

If one acquires the endurance to win against the pain, then he will learn as a spiritual researcher to turn back repeatedly to physical-sensory existence in a slightly different way. Because he will understand, yes, that he will have what I have described as a higher knowledge—that may be acquired in the characterized example—for only a very short time. It is not about getting caught in a higher world if you are a spiritual researcher, for when you have stepped through the higher world you must return ever and again to the ordinary physical-sensory world.

However, one returns from the moments of higher intuition in which one has first learned, in deepest pain, to do without this physical-sensory world. Then you get a very different stance with respect to this physical-sensory world, since you actually get to know what may be called the feeling of being a victim. One really has this feeling, that remains within, of being a victim, and with full awareness—not only out of instinct but with full awareness—he surrenders himself to other beings or even to other natural processes.

While the instinct of love so acts that the sensation of love is felt to a certain extent in the physical body, then the love can be so developed that it runs in bodily-free activity if it is carried up and formed as a sacrifice to the other, in the spiritual world and also in the physical-sensory world. Then this love itself gradually becomes the power of knowledge. And then you get to know just what you can really only know when love becomes the power of knowledge.

You see, through love we come into a relationship with another being who may at first be foreign to us, and we feel ourselves standing next to the other being if we carry across our own existence into that existence. We need the certainty of the sense of our building a bridge to the unknown being through love. If love—at a higher level, I would like to say—so awakens as I have just indicated, then we obtain our ego again, like a foreign being that—yes—we have lost along the way, as I have described.

But how do we obtain our ego? As the one whom we were in former earth lives, who is as strange to us in this earth life as a different personality, taken to a higher scale by the spiritualized, refined level of love. Our ego is not given back earlier to us, not until we can grasp it in love as entirely foreign. We have not desired to see this ego as it has lived in former lives on earth, and then passed through the time that lies between death and a new birth.

However, we discover our ego where we are able to perceive ourselves out of the deep silence of the soul, before we descended to earth life, and look back to the previous earth life as it was before this purely spiritual-soul life.

But, I want to say—we must first have developed an entirely selfless higher love as a power of knowledge; this then gives us an unsought insight into a former life on earth. Then we know that we had to go through these former lives on earth. And we have so risen that we can see the ego, how it was and how it had a body other than the body that we have now, that has carried us since birth to this point of time in earthly life. Then we have arrived at this moment, to be able to really comprehend ourselves as entirely free of the body—that is, recognizing the moment to live through that we then live through as real when we pass through death. For we have placed the physical body into reality.

In the stage of knowledge that is gained in love, we remove the physical body of knowledge and we experience ourselves in the same elements where we will be with our eternal inner being when we pass through the gate of death into the spiritual world, from which we have descended into physical existence on earth. And so we experience immortality when we—forgive me when I use the term—first recognize the experience of unbornness.

But the eternity of the human soul consists of these two: from unbornness, for which we do not even have a word in our contemporary educated language, and from immortality. Only when one comprehends these two as two sides of the eternity of the human soul can one really approach understanding. In the intellectual conceptions of today, people unfortunately treat these things with a certain egoism. They say to themselves—without having to voice this—more unconsciously they say to themselves: Well, that which has preceded our life on earth does not interest us, for we are here. It interests us that we are here. But we are interested in what happens after death because we do not yet know this.

This is egotism, but the results are not knowledge. Knowledge results only from unegotistical essence. Therefore, no one can gain a real knowledge of the immortality of the soul who does not have the will to achieve knowledge of the soul's unbornness. Because the eternity of the human soul is composed of the soul's unbornness and the soul's immortality.

This also results in the outlook of repeated earth lives, as indicated at the third level of knowledge after full awakening out into the spiritual world; the memory not only extends into premortal existence, it also extends into the stages of existence in the previously-lived earth life.

Thus we know that there really is before us a second awakening of the soul. Out of the dreams we switch our will on in the body. As a result we live in the world of space while the images otherwise proceed, and we accept these passing dream images as realities; we recognize the awakened nature of the image. But by what means are the images images? By the fact that they stand as images. As we awaken, we switch on our bodily functions. I want to say, we see red as red, the same whether we are awake or asleep; we hear tones the same way, whether we are dreaming or awake. But while we are awake, having turned our will on to bodily functions, we go over to some extent to the realities—in crossing over the hard things we are not speaking now of philosophical speculations, but are entirely within the popular consciousness. Thus to a certain extent when we are awake we do not retain the picture in sensory perceptions, but cross broadly over the hard things. We are switched on to the same element that presents to us the things of the world, in the sense of physical existence.

Now we have gradually switched into a new world as a spiritual researcher. Why have we done this?

When you compare the thinking, the feeling, and the will of the human being as they exist in the soul and also in the waking state, they are actually a dream. We actually only wake up with sensory thoughts and ideas together in the outer world, and these are combined as sensory perceptions. As soon as we look within ourselves with ordinary consciousness, we are dreaming. Even our thoughts, when we turn inward, are more or less dream perceptions. This remains so dreamlike, even the will is asleep. For when we have decided upon any action we know how this action that we initially had as an idea continues down into our limbs as an idea, so that we begin to move the limbs. Only through spiritual science can one see what is going on in the muscles, what is going on in the entire organism; usually that which is a voluntary action remains inhibited during sleep. First we have only the idea. Then it all goes down into an unconscious state. Then the idea of the action occurs again. And what the soul by itself can only dream about even in the waking state, we gradually switch on through reinforced thinking, through the deep silence of the soul, through the power of knowledge awakened by love in the spiritual existence of the human being, as we switch on the ordinary awakening of the will in bodily existence.

Thus we learn to judge the eternal in the human being from the point of view of the ordinary physical-sensory life that we absolve between birth and death, as we judge the content of the dream from the point of view of physical-sensory life. We advocate recognizing the eternal in this way!

Again and again I have to say on such an occasion: of course the objection is given that these things only apply to those who want to be a spiritual researcher, who look into these worlds.—No, ladies and gentlemen, the spiritual researcher actually has these things for himself as a human being only slightly, when he brought them down with the usual introduction into ordinary language, into ordinary life. And this can happen as well for everyone who hears these things from the spiritual researcher.

Just as one has grown accustomed to accept the things that the botanist or the astronomer has explored with his difficult methods, so one will gradually have to get used to the things that the spiritual researcher has explored after he gives an account of his method, as I have described today—to accept, to accept more readily, for there is the same relationship between ordinary common sense and these truths as there is between the right aesthetic taste and a beautiful picture.

You have to be a painter to paint a beautiful picture, but you do not have to be a painter to judge the beauty of its image! One needs only to have healthy taste.

One must be a spiritual researcher in order to know the things as they have been portrayed. But just as little as one needs to be a painter in order to judge the beauty of a picture, just as little does one need to be a spiritual researcher in order with complete common sense to be in agreement with what the spiritual researcher says. Apart from this, for people today at a certain level it is possible that each one can be a spiritual researcher. The one who delves into the books I have mentioned, who does the corresponding exercises, can today—no matter in what profession, in what life situation—get as far at the least as to control in a completely satisfactory manner that of which I have spoken this evening, and many other things.

What is this knowledge that leads into the eternal soul? It is a realization that is not only grasped in the head of the human being, it affects the entire person. For that which is the world of color, the eye will grasp. For that which is the world of tone, the ear will grasp. For that which is the law of nature, the human mind will grasp. For that, however, which is the spiritual world—as I have indicated here today—that will be grasped by the entire human being.

Hence, allow me in conclusion to say something personal by way of illustration, although this is not meant to be personal, but is meant rather to be entirely objective.

If you really want to capture that which is disclosed by the spiritual world, you need presence of mind, because it slips so to speak, turns away quickly; it is fleeting. That which is to a certain extent advanced through an improvement in the power of memory imprints itself only with difficulty upon the ordinary memory. One must use all of his strength to bring down what he beholds in the spiritual world, to bring this down to ordinary language, to ordinary memory-thought.

I would not be able to lecture about these things if I did not try by all means to bring down what arises in me of what can be beheld in the spiritual world, especially to really bring these thought-words down into physically audible regions. One cannot comprehend with the mere head, because the entire human being must to a certain extent become a sense organ, but a spiritually developed sense organ. Therefore I attempt every time—it is my custom, another has another one—I attempt every time if something is given to me from the spiritual world, not merely to think it through as I receive it from the spiritual world, but to write it down as well, or to record it with some characteristic stroke, so that the arms and hands are involved as well as the soul organs. So something else other than the mere head, which remains only in abstract ideas, must be involved in these findings: the entire person.

I have in this way entire truckloads of fully-written notebooks that I never again look at, which are only there in order to be descriptions, in order to provide preliminary work in the physical world for that which is from the spiritual world, so that the spiritually beheld world can then really be clothed in words; whereby the thoughts of which memories are usually formed or that usually apply in life can actually be penetrated—Thus one obtains a science that relates to the whole person.

I will have to show you tomorrow how this science provides us with the opportunity not only to understand the cultural development of humanity, but it might also socially promote namely a foundation, a true, real foundation for a true, real education, for a true, genuine pedagogy, for Waldorf education.

These things, how the development of the humanity and the education of humanity in light of this spiritual-scientific world view is excluded, this I will have to describe tomorrow. Today I wanted only to evoke the idea of how this spiritual-scientific point of view, through knowledge, is based to a certain extent on a second awakening, the soul of the human being in its eternity again returning to the full life.

Yes, we have to experience this out of our awareness of time, that scholarship has just spoken of a doctrine of the soul without soul, in a certain sense.—I will have to touch upon this question tomorrow—even of religion without God.

Spiritual science as it is meant here wants in turn to enter into the fullest intensity of the soul of the human being, into the eternity of the soul; it wants religious consciousness, the godly-religious content to enter again into the development of humanity and the education of humanity, precisely so that man can come through awareness to his full dignity. And he, conscious of his dignity which results from his knowledge of the connection of his soul with the eternal, with the ur-eternal powers of the world, realizes that this is part of his true nature, as the physical body, as something that stands in everyday life, is connected with him, is part of his life.

This is that which people themselves have followed as knowledge, and already many, many of them crave the equivalent, if it is not fully conscious to them. That which today torments people, what they feel as the uneasiness of life that makes them basically nervous about what drives them so that they feel undermined in their whole existence, this is the burning question of the eternal forces underlying the temporal forces that we need to develop in normal and in social life. This spiritual science is here so that people who want to have knowledge of these eternal forces—that spiritual science here intends—can find methods to lead others to this realization, so that others can also engage in this knowledge in social life; that they and their fellow man not only see something as it were that is borne by the stream of life on earth, to be born with birth and die with death, but that they learn rather of something that will go through all eternity, guided by the stars and the aims of people through the cosmic goal so that this cosmic goal gives the correct meaning to all earthly goals.

Anthroposophy wants to speak to people of this cosmic sense, the sense of the goals of earth. This is what it would awaken in souls again as feeling and sensation in the relationship of the human soul with all of the forces of eternal life, for people of the present and of the future.

And this, ladies and gentlemen—if you are going on honest advice you will have to admit—is what one needs as a human being at the present time. And what one will need more and more as a human being of the future.

Dear Participants! It is my duty to extend the warmest greetings to you, who have gathered here for the spiritual work to be done during the next eight days here at the Goetheanum. You will believe me when I assure you of my sincere and heartfelt conviction that what is to be achieved here in this Goetheanum should not arise from the subjective arbitrariness of a single person or group of people, but that it should be the fulfillment of the demands placed on present-day humanity by the spirit of the time itself, for everyone who is able to hear it. And so I not only greet all of you here, but together with all of you who have come together for honest work, I would also like to greet this spirit of our time, this spirit of the present, which speaks so clearly of the forces of decline that most diverse areas of life and human work and what must be replaced by new forces from the mind, from the heart, from the souls of human beings, by new forces that can only be found if certain spiritual sources of the human inner being are tapped into in this present time: This spirit of the time, one would like to greet it through everything that can be achieved here in this Goetheanum, which itself has its origin in its demands. But there are many things standing in the way of the fulfillment of this demand at the present time. There is an enormous amount that comes from a certain kind of inner human laziness; there is much that comes from a very particular kind of human fear. And finally, there are many obstacles rooted in old habits of thinking that are difficult to overcome. It is hardly possible for anyone to offer the spirit of the modern age a completely honest greeting if they cannot come to terms with all the obstacles that lie in this mental laziness, in this spiritual fear, in these inherited habits of thinking. People have become so accustomed to the great, significant, genuine fruits of human development that have been brought forth by the last few centuries that they now find it quite uncomfortable to seek a transition to anything new.

At the end of the Middle Ages, humanity found a transition from belief in external authorities in spiritual matters to a certain inner freedom. But in the last three to four centuries, it has become dependent on something else, on all kinds of authorities that it believes to carry in its own heart, but which, in essence, are again only [external] authorities. It is the indeterminate, barely comprehensible authority of what one has been accustomed to calling “scientific” and there are other external authorities that lie in the social institutions to which the man of the present wants to submit and from which he can only escape if he escapes them out of his very own initiative, out of complete human freedom, if he outgrows them in activity, which he [but] finds so difficult to outgrow because he would prefer to continue comfortably in the way that the precepts of science or of external social institutions may suggest; he sinks, as it were, into what customary education, what customary general scientific belief, general culture have brought. He seeks, as they say, his place in the social world and does not find the very own initiative of the soul life, the complete freedom of the inner being. For the latter is uncomfortable: one cannot think in the worn-out ways, one must get out of them. This can only be done through inner courage, through inner initiative, and out of a complete sense of freedom. It is comfortable to move in well-trodden paths that have been laid out through the centuries. It is uncomfortable to seek out the demands of the spiritual in our present time from spiritual heights with inner courage, inner freedom, and inner initiative.

And the second thing, esteemed attendees, is, I would almost say, a mysterious fear that is present in humanity today. There is no other anxiety to be found in this present time; but it is as if the sum of all anxieties that could accumulate in the human mind were summed up in a common inner fear, the fear of the new, the fear of the still unknown rising forces in all areas of the soul and of the outer life that we need. But this fear does not appear in its true form. People today would be ashamed if this fear were to appear in its true form and they had to show it. This fear appears in a mask. It appears in a mask that does not seem so ugly, in a mask that is even very seductive. It occurs in such a way that the one who is actually merely afraid of the new, the unknown, in the face of the older, seeks all possible logical and intellectual reasons by which he can substantiate it. We experience it every day that the fear of the new, the unknown, actually sits in the souls of people. They come and say: What is being brought to us, that contradicts, as can be proved, the certain scientific results. Often such alleged proof appears in a tightly closed form, so that one can hardly escape its web of thoughts. But these thought webs are nothing more than the pleasing mask in which the fear of the new and the unknown is clothed. And because it is basically so nice to be able to say: You can prove something logically, all the individual reasons against the new are correct – you also mask the fact that you are afraid of the new, a fear that you would be ashamed of if you showed it in its true form. Much of what appears today with seemingly scientific justification, with seemingly strict logic, is nothing more than the mask of inner fear of the new, the unknown. Anthroposophical spiritual science, as it is meant here, wants nothing more than to lead these inner soul dangers for the further progress of the present time before the soul's eye in full deliberation.

And the third thing is to persist in those habits of thinking that have been brought up since the last three, four, five centuries, truly not from worthless sources; they have come up from what has really developed in strict science since the time of Galileo, which reached a certain culmination in the 19th century. Strict inner disciplines, disciplines of outer observation and experimentation, have come upon humanity; they have poured the spirit of their work and labor into even the lowest schools. But with that, those habits of thought have also emerged, which - because they are basically so easy to achieve, even though the methods are strict - also take root most intensely in the human soul, those habits of thought that we find everywhere today, wherever we hear any conversation about science and about faith, about art, about the progress of humanity, about social life. And these habits of thinking are most intimately connected with the outer life. Man has learned in a magnificent way to deal technically with the outer life, precisely through these habits of thinking. Therefore, these habits of thinking have also connected most intensely with egoism, with all that has brought it, this human being, into modern social life. And so these thought habits, which are only the product of the last four to five centuries, appear to today's human being as something that leads to thinking in all absoluteness itself. And while a person, once he has acquired certain habits, clings to these habits to such an extent that, out of an unconscious belief, he thinks that if he were to abandon these habits he would lose part of his own being, it is even much worse with thought habits, especially with those thought habits that have formed within humanity in the most recent epoch. Man regards what is only a habit of thinking as the actual essence of thinking itself. And since he rightly believes that thinking is connected with the deepest nature of man, he clings to these habits of thinking because he believes that they are the only correct thinking and thinks that he would lose his self, his human essence, with these habits of thinking. He believes that he would lose all ground of a world view, of a conception of life, if he abandoned these habits of thinking. And often he has not even an inkling of how much he has fallen prey to these habits of thinking of the last four to five centuries, habits of thinking that must be overcome just as the habits of thinking of older epochs have been overcome.

Only when we are confronted with the full magnitude of the task that arises from overcoming our inner psychological comfort, spiritual fear and thought habits, will we find the right path to the place where the spirit of the present wants to speak in a comprehensible language about the demands that are necessary so that the forces of decline do not carry away the victory over the forces of the rising sun. They have led humanity down into chaos. And this spirit of the time, it speaks quite clearly of the fact that people must seek a knowledge, a view of the supersensible, of the immortal, of the eternal, in contrast to the sensual, the transitory, the temporal. Especially that which has become so ingrained in the habits of the soul and in the habits of thought of modern times, my dear audience, is always connected with a human tendency towards the transitory, the temporal, the sensual.

This is not a criticism of the temporal and the transitory. Nor is it a cheap criticism of the temporal and the transitory. On the contrary, when one stands on the ground of anthroposophical spiritual science, one fully recognizes that humanity once had to go through what lies in having a world view that thoroughly deals with the transitory and the temporal. It is recognized, for example, that the greatness of the 19th century is based on the fact that man learned to see through, with the strictest views, the essence of the transitory, the essence of the temporal. But it would be a sad state of affairs for humanity if, in turn, the eternal, the imperishable, were not seen above the transitory and the temporal. But this eternal, this imperishable, cannot be seen with those powers of the soul that have been of great, great service to research in the transitory and in the temporal. These powers of the soul, the intellectual powers, the powers of abstract thinking and experimental research, have been developed to their highest level in the last few centuries. These last centuries have indeed developed in man everything that could lead to the feeling of freedom, to the awakening of the inner human personality values. But that which one develops in one's own human soul when one only draws near to the external transience and the temporal being does not penetrate inwardly to the full human being, and so, in a certain way, in his latest ascent, man has lost precisely that which is connected with his own human being.

It is easy to object: So the anthroposophical spiritual science, the Goetheanism, leads away from the proven, outwardly practical world, into dizzying, bottomless cloud cuckoo lands, into that which wants to rise to fantastic heights away from the strict methodology of the last centuries. One wants to forget and oversleep here – one could object – in this Goetheanum everything that the Galilei era has brought, and one wants to dream oneself back into the eternal, for example in a Platonic way. They want to enthuse about the eternal and the immortal in Plato's world of ideas because they lack the patience to engage with the achievements of the last few centuries in relation to the real external world. But if one only really got to know it without prejudice, this anthroposophy, as it is cultivated here in this Goetheanum, one would find that one does not want to flee here with a careless skipping of Galileism into a dreamt-up Platonic world, but that one wants everything here that man can achieve in truly understanding this outer, transitory sense world, in terms of the practice of outer life, that one wants to take up Galileism fully in order to carry its rigor and discipline to the heights to which Plato was allowed to ascend without this modern culture. Plato lived in his world of ideas, which was a living one for him, and he could do so because of the limitations of his epoch, before the age of Galileism. We would have to descend into the abyss, into enthusiasm, into fantasy, if we were to enter the Platonic world of heights in a dreamy state without the preliminary stages of what the times of Galileo, Copernicus, Kepler and Giordano Bruno brought us. Therefore, if one only gets to know what the anthroposophy meant here intends, then one will not reproach it for wanting to turn away from life in a fanciful, enthusiastic way into a Platonic world of ideas. No, it wants to draw the forces full of reality from the spirit in order to penetrate into real practical life. And just as the anthroposophy in question does not want to dream and fantasize about the outside world, it also does not want to lead to the inner life of the human being in such a way that the human being as a mystic becomes a hermit of life, that he wants to steal away like a hermit from all that is his task in real, outer, practical life.

Anthroposophy knows very well that methods such as those cultivated in India, such as the yoga method, have had their time; it knows very well that anyone who, with a complete misunderstanding of the spirit of modern times, wants to return to old mystical systems, that such a person is striving for something that should be avoided here. He strives for a certain mysticism of which nothing else can be said than the following.

My dear audience, there is a superficiality towards the outer world that never wants to go into the real facts, that does not want to follow the finer gradations of the facts, that, I might say, wants to enjoy life arbitrarily on the outside in large meshes. There is such a superficiality on the outside; but there is also a superficiality of the heart. This is the superficiality that, without thoroughly experiencing the inner human secrets, only ever speaks of withdrawing from the perception of the outside world, of cultivating the innermost. Such mystical striving, as it is making its way into many circles today, does not correspond to the demands of the spirit of the time, but rather adds to the external superficiality the superficiality of the heart. And in many circles that today think of themselves as particularly mystically exalted, nothing lives but that mysticism which is inner soul superficiality. With this soul superficiality one does not penetrate into the eternal secrets of life. One can only penetrate them if one has the patience to truly awaken the forces slumbering in the soul or at least to engage intellectually with what the forces slumbering in the soul can find from stage to stage. Only by overcoming the superficiality of the heart, by overcoming this superficial mysticism, lies the possibility of finding those powers of the soul that lead upwards in the right way, from the temporal, from the transitory to the eternal, to the everlasting. But when grasped in this way, it is truly capable of having a fruitful effect on the most diverse areas of today's life. And we need this fertilization. We have a magnificent science that has taken hold of the external course of things out of intellectualism and external observation. We need to advance from this science of the senses to a spiritual science, which is carried out in the same way as the pursuit of sensory science. Just as if it always had to give account before the strict methods and disciplines of the outer sensory science, the anthroposophical spiritual science meant here would like to fertilize today's scientific life in general.

Other branches of life sometimes show an impossibility of being fertilized by ordinary science in its present form. The intellectualism and abstract concepts that have been brought forth in more recent times are avoided by the artist; the artist believes that the more elementary power and force of his artistic experience would be taken from him if the mildew of science were to be poured into his heart, if he were to try to deepen his artistic experience with the help of today's science. And so many people say: Yes, spiritual science also wants to fertilize artistic life, but we understand how destructively scientific life affects artistic life. — People only say this until they realize how closely related artistic experience is to what the soul of a true spiritual scientist must go through to enter the realms where spirit and soul truly live. On this path one must not reflect, one must create, one must connect with that which lives and abides in the essence of things, which constitutes the secret of things. And soul-forces are released from the innermost being with the same vividness, with the same directly effective presence as they have in the artistic experience. And when one first becomes acquainted with the extraordinarily living, creative and formative side of spiritual science, then one will realize that this spiritual science does not bring abstract concepts, but directly inner impulses of life, which again to those spiritual regions from which the artist must draw if he does not want to imitate mere external nature in a superfluous way and thereby fall prey to a superfluous naturalism. What the spiritual scientist has to go through is intimately related to what the artist has to go through. And what the artist forms in his imagination, the spiritual researcher forms in supersensible intuition. These are two different paths that can lead to a good understanding, as many people in the past have understood each other. Those, for example, who, out of a deep intuitive perception of the secrets of the world, have presented something before their soul, as it then lives through Raphael in the Sistine Madonna, as it lives in Leonardo's Last Supper. Again, we have to reach into regions of spiritual life, but in the sense of the newer time, the modern time, so that we also have something in the artistic field that is not just an imitation of nature. Because imitation of nature, that is not possible for anyone. Whatever one wants to imitate in nature, nature can always do better. Only then can one find the way to art, when one finds the way to the spirit.

And if we look at another area in which the newer life has led to a real inner tragedy for many individual human personalities, we see how, in the religious sphere, the depth needed for a real religious experience has been lost. Anthroposophy, as it is meant here, is not meant to be a new foundation of religion! To say that is to defame it. For what we need is not a new religion; what we need is a deepening of the religious impulses in the human heart, in the human soul, but this can be found by man again finding the paths to the spiritual essence of the world. Just as science and art can be fertilized by the anthroposophical spiritual science meant here, so religious life can be deepened through it. And I believe I need not speak of it at all for all those who, looking beyond the immediate everyday, see how we have come into a social existence in the civilized world that is truly threatening, with every year growing larger, that is already horrifying enough today. All sorts of speculations as to how this or that institution should be set up, what should be done from state to state, from nation to nation, have certainly not been lacking in the old ways of thinking. There has been much talk about such things, but nowhere is there any prospect that social chaos might be resolved in a better light.

Does this not indicate how necessary it is for individuals to find their way to the social life, those individuals who find their way to the innermost part of the human soul, from which understanding can be found for what is necessary between human and human, between nation and nation, between race and race! Only when social life is absorbed in spiritual clarity in each individual will the age of individualism also be able to become a social age. But one does not arrive at these social impulses, these social feelings, in the human individuality by, for example, talking in fine phrases about deepening the human soul, about all kinds of social impulses that people should educate in themselves. We only arrive at this when we learn to belong to the world of the senses with our sensory organism, as we have learned to do in the last three to four centuries; when we learn to belong to a spiritual world with our spiritual organism; when we learn to belong to a spiritual world with our spiritual organism, when we are able to carry down ideas about the great destiny of humanity into the individual everyday life.

Humanity has become so proud of the practice of life developed in recent times. What has this practice of life revealed itself to be? It has withdrawn more and more into small circles in certain gestures of life, and in the end it has led to a situation where people can no longer follow the overwhelming course of world events fleeing into chaos with their thoughts. What has emerged is not real life practice, but routine in individual areas, mere life routine. What the human body would be without soul and spirit is this life routine without the fertilization of ideas, which can only come from the acknowledgment, from the realization of the spiritual regions. The most mundane, the smallest things in life become routine if they cannot be directed in the right way towards that which can pulsate in a person out of their sense of connection with the all-encompassing spiritual world. We will not arrive at such a practice, which in turn can support our social life, if we do not introduce the spirit into everyday life, going beyond all routine. For only a life of everydayness that is truly spiritualized and ensouled is truly practical.

Therefore, what wants to be spiritually worked on here in this Goetheanum does not want to become something unworldly, something fanciful, something that leads people away from the practice of life like a hermit; on the contrary, it wants to place them completely within it. We need true and genuine practical life. Every day shows us this when we are told how every day more and more humanity is drawn into decline. Therefore, in these eight days, we will speak of that which in turn leads to the rising, what the spirit of the time demands of the person of the present, what it demands in the sense that only from the insight into the eternal, into the supersensible, into the immortal, can that strength be gained which is needed to transform the forces of decline into forces of ascent. We need only recognize in the right sense how the inner obstacles of mental laziness, spiritual fear, and thought habits lie before us, and we will feel that what we need — inner initiative, activity of the soul , the courage to do something new, the fearlessness in the face of the new and the unknown – that all this can be won if we are so seized by the spirit that it is the spirit itself that lives in all our impulses. For just as the world is created by the spirit, so human activity, human endeavor, human knowledge will be true when they are permeated by the spirit. May all that is to be worked out in experiments bear witness to such spirit-filled practice and knowledge, as has been the case in previous such events during these past eight days here in this Goetheanum. And inspired by this wish that we may work together here in accordance with the great demands of the spirit of our time, I wanted to bring you today the warmest greeting from the spirit that should prevail here in this Goetheanum dedicated to anthroposophy at the beginning of these working days, and I wanted to greet the spirit itself, which should and may prevail here more and more during these eight days and always.

Dear attendees! At the kind instigation of Baron Rosenkrantz, a number of questions have been put by our friends, which are now to be answered within the framework of this event.

Before that, however, since the request has been expressed so frequently and I have also asked some friends personally, I would like to ask those artists present here and a few others who have never seen the wooden group, which is still in progress, to come to the studio tomorrow at 9 a.m. This group will then be shown. But I ask you to take this matter very seriously and I really ask only those to come who have never seen the group before.

Now a number of questions have been handed to me.

Question: If the content of a work of art is the most important thing, why can't we express it in accordance with the Greek ideal?

Dr. Steiner: The question is not quite clear. I would like to think that it alludes to what I have often said about Goethe's view of art, which was expressed when Goethe, upon arriving in Italy, wrote to his friends in Weimar: When I look at these Greek works of art, I believe that the Greeks, in creating their works of art, proceeded according to the same laws by which nature itself proceeds, and which I am trying to grasp. I would just like to note that if it is possible for a person to truly find a way to experience and relive the creative forces of nature, as I have indicated on various occasions when discussing this building, then we do not actually become imitators of nature, but we do create with our materials in the same way that nature creates. We need only remember that, in the full perception of man, the aim should not be to imitate nature, because whatever we encounter in nature, whether in the form of landscape or anything else, is always done more perfectly by nature than even the most accomplished artist can achieve. Art is only justified if, in the Goethean sense, it does not imitate nature, but continues nature's work from the same forces that nature uses to create. And then, if we create in this way, we can recreate nature just as the Greeks did. We must only be clear about the fact that humanity does not go through various stages of development in vain, just as the individual human being does not either, but that our present humanity has different developmental impulses from those of the people of the Greek age. What the Greeks had in common with nature in their art is there for us in a different form, and if we accept and understand this metamorphosis of the whole coexistence of man with nature, then we can definitely say that what we create is just as “recreated according to the laws of nature” as the Greek works of art are.

Question: If we take beautiful colors from nature, why shouldn't we be able to take beautiful forms from nature?

Dr. Steiner: I would not be able to see that either. But I ask you to consider again how I repeatedly spoke about colors in connection with this building and how I spoke about forms in my lecture on art. It is not a matter of imitating the inartistic, which is characteristic of an inartistic present time, but of not imitating nature's colors, but of experiencing them. We do, after all, inwardly experience color and then create from the world of color. Likewise, we can, of course, also experience form from within, and then we will create forms for ourselves as they also appear in nature. But we must bear in mind that when we draw, we are actually demanding not to imitate nature's forms, but to counterfeit them. We have to draw the surfaces.

It is indeed the case in nature itself that the horizontal line, when we draw it, is a fake – I said a lie a few days ago. What can be seen is the blue sky, the green sea, and the form is the result of the color. This is already in nature, and when we work artistically out of color, the form arises just as the form arises in nature itself.

Question: Should color be used in painting from a moral point of view?

Dr. Steiner: If I understand the question correctly, it is asked whether one should try to translate a moral intention into colour or even into colour harmony if one has a moral intention.

I believe that anyone who tries to embody human and moral thoughts in colour in this way actually creates in an unartistic way. Only that which can be experienced as spiritual in the world of color can be embodied in color. To the same extent that one has the moral intention of artistically forming what has been morally conceived, one falls back on symbolizing, and allegorizing is always inartistic.

To illustrate what I actually mean, I will say the following: I was once obliged to reconstruct the forms of the Kabirs, the Samothracean gods, the Samothracean mysteries, for the purpose of a Faust performance here. They had to be shown while the Goethean text was being spoken. I believe that I was able to construct these Kabirs out of spiritual contemplation. Then – and I say this not out of immodesty but because it is a fact that should be communicated – then it occurred to one of our members to have these Kabirs, who fell, as well and they should be photographed. Now, the thought of photographing a three-dimensional work is so repulsive to me that I actually want to run away from every photograph of a sculpture, because what is really artistically created is created out of the spiritually experienced feeling for material, and because it is impossible to directly experience what is conceived in spatial forms in the form of a surface. Therefore, at the time, I preferred to do it again in black and white, because I wanted to take this wish into account, and then you could photograph it.

Anyone who thinks that moral intentions can be realized in painting is thinking that you can take any content, I mean a novella, and then pour it into any material. That is not true. It is artistically untrue. In a material, any artistic thing can only be formed in one way.

Question: Does this mean that in the future sculpture should express inner feeling and painting inner wisdom?

Dr. Steiner: I will allow myself to answer this question now because it belongs together with another question, in connection with the other question.

Question: Would art under the influence of anthroposophical teachings not tend to become monotonous, which would not be interesting? Is there not a danger that art would bear an anthroposophical stamp, as if from a particular school of painting? Dr. Steiner: If one grasps what can really arise out of anthroposophical thinking as art, grasps it correctly, then I think the question will not arise at all, and one will not be led to believe that anthroposophy could ever aspire to influence art through anthroposophical teachings. To think in any other way than that the artistic can arise out of the experience of the spirit flowing in the material, out of living together with the material, cannot actually be assumed from an anthroposophical attitude.

In a somewhat primitive way, many anthroposophists understand this to mean, for example, that they somehow paint what they have been given in the teaching of the Rosicrucians on a blackboard, and then one encounters these images in all the individual branches. There is inner feeling, inwardly intended, outwardly recorded. I usually help myself with regard to such “artistic attempts” by not looking at them in the respective branches, because these are admittedly primitive and not very far-reaching, but they are precisely wrong attempts to transfer what can be represented in the spirit, which now becomes word, which becomes teaching, into some artistic aspect. That is nonsense. You cannot carry what is teaching into the work of art.

But what real anthroposophy is, whether you approach it through the teachings or through art, leads to the inner experience of something far more original than anthroposophical teaching and anthroposophical art is, of something that lies further back in human life. If, on the one hand, artistic forms are created that have nothing at all to do with the anthroposophical teachings, and if, on the other hand, one focuses on the word, on the thought, then, from the same foundations, one creates contexts of ideas. Both are branches that come from the same root. But you cannot take one branch and stick it into the other.

In any case, I cannot understand how a life that has developed out of such art could possibly become monotonous, because – and I am speaking only illustratively now – I can assure you that if I had to build another one after this one is finished, it would be completely different, it would look completely different. I would never be able to build this structure again in a monotonous way; and I would build a third one differently again – it will certainly not come to that in this incarnation. But I feel, especially in what underlies the anthroposophical as the living, that in art, beyond everything monotonous, it comes to life. I can tell you, one always only wishes to comply with what one can do, with what presents itself to the soul, and not at all in a monotonous way, but to show in great variety what one would like to show.

The questions that were asked in English have now been answered, and since Mrs. Mackenzie has promised to tell us about some of her intentions, I believe that we may use the time we still have left to listen to Mrs. Mackenzie about her intentions.

Mrs. Mackenzie: (remarks in English not written down)

Dr. Steiner: I would like to express my heartfelt thanks to Mrs. Mackenzie and ask Baron Walleen to translate her words into German.

Baron Walleen: (translation:) Dr. Steiner has given his consent to hold a seminar for teachers here around Christmas time. Mrs. Mackenzie has taken on the responsibility of finding suitable individuals in England and America who could be accepted as students in these seminars, and Mrs. Mackenzie hopes that if such a beginning is made, it will be possible to gradually develop a teacher training seminar for the whole world here. The matter is being handled quite informally in order to gain time, so that when she returns to England, Mrs. Mackenzie will immediately try to make contact with such personalities as she finds suitable to attend this course. It would be important to know early on, in October, which personalities and how many can and will come here. Of course, Dr. Steiner himself will lead the course.

Dr. Steiner: I would just like to say this very briefly in response to Mrs. Mackenzie's words: if this extraordinarily satisfying plan can be realized, everything should be done here to bring satisfaction to those who are making such efforts to expand the effectiveness of the Goetheanum in this important area. Thank you very much on behalf of our cause and the promise that all efforts will be made here to implement your intentions in a dignified manner!

I would like to say a few words about the building idea, with the supporting, direct view of the building. From the outset, the view could arise that if one must first speak about such a building, it indicates that it does not make the necessary impression as an artistic work; and in many cases, what is thought about the building of Dornach, about the Goetheanum in the world, is thought from a false point of view influenced by a sensory view. For example, the opinion has been spread that the building in Dornach is meant to symbolize all kinds of things, that it is a symbolizing building. In reality, you will not find a single symbol when looking at this building, as is popular in mystical and theosophical societies. The building should be able to be experienced entirely from artistic perception and has also been created from these artistic perceptions in its forms, in all its details. Therefore, it must work only through what it is itself. Explaining has become popular, and people then want explanations; but in mentioning this here before you, I also say that such explaining of an artistic work always seems to me to be not only half, but almost completely unartistic, and that I will now give you a kind of lecture in the presence of the building, a lecture that I fundamentally dislike, if only because I have to speak to you in abstract terms about the details that arose in my mind when designing the building, the models and so on, and what was created from life. I would rather speak to you about the building as little as possible.

It is already the case that a new stylistic form, a new artistic form of expression, is viewed with a certain mistrust in the present. I can still hear a word that I heard many decades ago when I was studying at the Technical University, where Ferstel gave his lectures. In one of them, he says: “Architectural styles are not invented, an architectural style grows out of the character of a nation.” Therefore, Ferstel is also opposed to the invention of any new architectural style or type of building. What is true about this idea is that the style that is to stylize the characteristics of a people must emerge not from an abstraction, but from a living world view, which is at the same time a world experience and, from this point of view, comprehensively encompasses the chaotic spiritual life of contemporary humanity. On the basis of this thoroughly correct idea, it becomes necessary to transform what was peculiar to previous architectural styles into organic building forms by incorporating the symmetrical, the geometrically static, and so on.

I am well aware of what can be said, and rightly said from a certain point of view, by someone who has become inwardly attuned to previous architectural styles, against what has been attempted here in Dornach as an architectural style: the transference of geometrical-symmetrical-static forms into organic forms. But it has been attempted. And so you can see in these forms of construction that this building here is an as yet imperfect first attempt to express the transition from these geometric forms of construction to the organic. It is certain that the development of humanity is moving towards these forms of construction, and when we again have the impulses of clairvoyant experience, I believe that these forms of construction will play the first, leading role. This building should be understood in the same way through its relationship with the organizing forces of nature as the previous buildings are understood through their relationship with the geometrical-static-symmetrical forces of nature. This building is to be viewed from this point of view, and from this point of view you will understand how every detail within the building idea for Dornach must be completely individualized here. Just think of the lobe of your ear: it is a very small part of the human organism, but you cannot well imagine that an organic form such as the lobe of the ear is suited to grow on the big toe. This organ is completely bound to its place within the organism. Just as you find that within the whole organism a supporting organ is always shaped in such a way that it can have a static-dynamic effect within the organism, so too the individual forms in our building in Dornach had to be such that they could serve the static-dynamic forces. Every single form had to be organized in such a way that it could and had to be in its place what it now appears to be. Look at each arch from this point of view, how it is formed, how it flattens out towards the exit, for example, how it curves inwards towards the building itself, where it not only has to support but also to express support in an organic way, thereby helping to develop what only appears to be completely unnecessary in organic formation. Ordinary architecture leaves out what goes beyond the static, which the organism develops. But one senses that the building idea has been transferred to the organic design of the forms, and that this is also necessary.

You will have to look at every column from this point of view; then you will also understand that the ordinary column, which is taken out of the geometric-static, has been replaced by one that does not imitate the organic – everything is so that it is not imitated naturalistically – but transferred into organically made structures. It is not an imitation of an organic structure. You will not understand it if you look for a model in nature. But you will understand it if you understand how human beings can live together with the forces that have an organizing effect in nature and how, apart from what nature itself creates, such organizing forms can arise. So you will see in these column supports how the expansion of the building, the support, the inward pointing, and, in the same way as, say, in the upper end of the human thigh, the support, the walking, the walking and so on, is embodied statically, but organically and statically. From this point of view, I also ask you to look at something like the structure with the three perpendicular formations at the top of the stairs here below. The feeling arises here of how a person feels when he climbs the stairs. He must have a feeling of security, of spiritual unity in all that goes on in this building, indeed in everything he sees in this building. Everything came to me entirely from my own intuitive perception. You may believe it or not, but this form came to me entirely from my own artistic intuition. As I said, you may believe it or not, but it was only afterwards that it occurred to me that this form is somewhat reminiscent of the shape of the three semicircular crescents in the human ear, which, when injured, cause fainting, so that they directly express what gives a person stability. This expression, that stability is to be given to the human being in this structure, comes about in the experience of the three perpendicular directions. This can be experienced in this structure without having to engage in abstract reflection. One can remain entirely in the artistic.

If you look at the wall-like structures while handling them, you will find that natural forces have been poured into the forms, but in such a way that these forms, which are radiator covers, are first worked out of the concrete material of the building, and then further up out of the material of the wood, and that they are thereby metamorphosed. You will find that in these structures the process of metamorphosis is elevated to the artistic. It is the idea of the building that should have a definite effect on such radiator covers, which are designed in such a way that you immediately feel the purpose and do not need to explore it intellectually first. This is how these elementary forms, half plant-like, half animal-like, came to be felt. Only after having shaped them out of the material does one realize that they must be so. And it also follows that it is necessary to metamorphose them, depending on whether they are in one place or another, depending on whether they are long and low or narrower and higher. All this does not result from calculating the form, but the forms shape themselves out of the feeling in their metamorphosis, as for example here, where we have come so far, where the building is a concrete structure in its basement and where one has to empathize with the design of what concrete is. You enter here at the west gate. This is the room where you can leave your coat. The staircase, which leads up here on the left and right, takes you up to the wooden structure containing the auditorium, the stage and adjoining rooms.

Please follow me up the stairs to the auditorium.

We are now entering a kind of foyer. You will notice the very different impression created by the wooden cladding compared to the concrete cladding on the lower floor.

I would like to note here: When you have to work with stone, concrete or other hard materials, you have to approach it differently than when you have to work with soft materials, such as wood. The material of wood requires you to focus all your senses on the fact that you have to scrape corners, concaves, and hollows out of the soft material, if I may use the expression. It is scraping, scraping out. You deepen the material, and only by doing so can you enter into this relationship with the material, which is a truly artistic relationship. While when working with wood you only succeed in coaxing out of the material that which gives the forms when you focus your attention on deepening, when working with hard material you do not have to do with deepening. You can only develop a relationship with the hard material by applying it, by working convexly, by applying raised surfaces to the base surfaces, for example when working with stone. Grasping this is an essential part of artistic creation, and it has been partially lost in more recent times.

You will see when we enter the auditorium how each individual surface, each capital, is treated individually. A capital in this organic structure can only be such that one feels: in what follows each other, a kind of repetition cannot be created, as is otherwise the case with symmetrical-geometric-static architectural styles. In this building, which is the product of an organic idea, you have only a single axis of symmetry, running from west to east. You will find a symmetrical arrangement only in relation to this, just as you can find only a single axis of symmetry for a higher organism, not out of arbitrariness but out of the inner organization of forces of the entity in question.

At this point, I would like to mention that the treatment of the walls also had to be completely different under the influence of the organic building idea than it was before. A wall was for earlier architects what demarcates a space. It had the effect of being inside the room. This feeling had to be abandoned in this building. The walls had to be designed in such a way that they were not felt as a boundary, but as something that carries you out into the vastness of the macrocosm; you have to feel as if you are absorbed, as if you are standing inside the vastness of the cosmos. The walls had to be made transparent, so to speak, whereas in the past every effort was made to give the wall such artificial forms that it was closed and opaque. You will see that the transparent is used artistically at all, and that was driven from elementary foundations into the physical in these windows, which you see here and which you will see under construction. If you see windows in the sense of the earlier architectural style, you will actually have to have the healthy sense that they break through the walls, they do not fit into the architectural forms, but they only fit in through the principle of utility. Here, artistic feeling will be needed down to the last detail. There was a need to present the wall in such a way that it is not something closed, but something that expands outwards, towards infinity. I could only achieve this by remembering that, using a single-colored windowpane, you can, as it were, scratch out designs using a kind of etching method, a glass etching method. And so monochromatic window panes were purchased, which were then worked on in such a way that the motifs one wanted could be scratched out with the diamond pencil. So for this purpose, a glass etching technique was conceived, and the windows emerged from that.

When you consider the motifs of the windows, you must not think that you are dealing with symbolic design alone. You can see it already on this larger windowpane: nothing is designed on these windowpanes other than what the imagination produces. There are mystics who develop a mysticism with superficial sentences and strange ideas and constantly explain that the physical-sensual outer world is a kind of maja, an illusion. People often approach you and say that so-and-so is a great mystic because he always declaims that the outer world is a maja. There is something about the human physical countenance that is maya, that is thoroughly false, that is something else in truth. What appears on this windowpane is not something that symbolizes; it is a being that is envisaged, only it does not look to the spiritual observer as it appears to the senses. The larynx is the organ of vision for the etheric; the larynx is already Maja as a physical larynx, and that which is a mere physical-sensual view is not reality. What is behind it spiritually? The spiritual fact that what is whispered into the ear, left and right, are world secrets. So that one can truly say: the bull speaks into the left ear, the lion into the right ear. If one wants to express this as a motif in a picture or in words, then one can only attach to the word that which is already in the picture itself. However, one must be clear about the fact that one can only understand such a picture if one lives in the world view from which it has emerged. A person who does not have a living Christian feeling will also not be able to behave sympathetically towards the pictorial representations that Christian art has produced.

The artist experiences a lot when he lives into a vision; but such an experience must not be translated into abstract thoughts, otherwise it will immediately begin to fade. An example of the artist's experience is this: When Leonardo da Vinci painted his Last Supper, which is now so dilapidated that it can no longer be appreciated artistically, people thought it was taking too long. He could not finish the Judas because this Judas was to emerge from the darkness. Leonardo worked on this painting for almost twenty years and was still not finished. Then a new prior came to Milan and looked at the work. He was not an artist; he said that Leonardo, this servant of the church, should finally finish his work. Leonardo replied that he could do it now; he had always only sketched the figure of Judas because he had not found the model for it; now that the prior was there, he had found the model for Judas in him, and the painting would now be quickly completed. - There you have such an external, concrete experience. Such external, concrete experiences play a much greater role in all the artist's work than can be expressed in such brief descriptions.

Dear attendees, you have entered the building through the room below the organ and the room for the musical instruments. If you look around after entering, you will see that the architectural idea is initially characterized by the floor plan depicting two not quite completed circles, whose segments interlock. It seems to me that the necessity for shaping the building in this way can already be seen when approaching the building from a certain distance and if one has an idea of what is actually supposed to take place in the building. I will now explain in more detail what the building idea is. First of all, I would like to point out that you can see seven columns arranged in symmetry solely against the west-east axis, closing off the auditorium on the left and right as you move forward. These seven columns are not formed in such a way that a capital shape, a pedestal shape or an architrave shape above it is repeated, but the capital, pedestal and architrave shapes are in a continuous development.

The two columns at the back of the organ area have the simplest capital and pedestal motifs: forms that, to a certain extent, strive from top to bottom, with others striving towards them from bottom to top. This most primitive form of interaction between above and below was then metamorphosed into the following forms of architraves, capitals and pedestals. This progressive metamorphosis came about through artistic perception, in that, when I was developing the model, I tried to recreate what occurs in nature. What takes place in nature, where an unnotched leaf with primitive forms is first formed at the bottom of the plant, and then this primitive form metamorphoses the further up it goes, into the indented, intricately designed leaf, even transformed into petal, stamen and pistil, which must be imitated - albeit not in a naturalistic way. One must place oneself inwardly and vitally into it and then create from within, as nature creates and transforms, as it produces and metamorphoses. Then, without reflection, but out of much deeper soul forces than those of reflection, one will achieve such transformations of the second out of the first, of the third out of the second, and so on.

It can be misunderstood that, for example, in the fifth column and in the architrave motifs above the fourth column, something like a kind of Mercury staff appears. One could now believe that the caduceus was placed in these two positions by the intellect. I believe that someone who had worked from the intellect would probably have placed the caduceus in the architrave motif and below it - the intellect has a symmetrizing effect - the column motif with the caduceus. The person who works as we have done here finds something else. Here, with the motif that you see as the fourth capital motif, only by sensing the metamorphosing transformation, without me even remotely thinking of forming a Mercury staff, this Mercury staff emerged as a petal emerges from the sepal. I did not think of a past style, but of the transformation of the fourth capital motif from the third. One can see how the forms that have gradually emerged in the development of humanity have developed quite naturally.

Then we come to the epoch when man intervenes in the evolution of his soul-life. When this is individualized and worked into the column, it follows later what is worked on this architrave surface earlier. That is why you see the caduceus on the capital later than on the architrave.

A plant that is thin and delicate develops different leaf shapes than a sturdy one. Compare just a shepherd's purse with a cactus, and you will see how the filling and shaping of space is expressed in the figurative design. At the same time, a cosmic secret emerges in it, as one feels evolution all around. There has been much talk of evolution in recent times, but little feeling for it. One only thinks it out with the mind. One speaks of the evolution of the perfect from the imperfect. Herbert Spencer and others have done much harm in this regard, and the idea has arisen that is completely justified in the mind, but which does not do justice to the observation of nature: In intellectual thinking, one starts from the assumption that in evolution, the simpler forms are at the beginning and that these then later become more and more differentiated. Spencer in particular has worked with such evolutionary ideas. But evolution does not show it that way. There is indeed a differentiation, a complication of the forms; but then one comes to a middle and then the forms simplify again. What follows is not more complicated, but what follows is simpler again. You can see this in nature itself. The human eye, which is the most perfect, has, so to speak, achieved greater simplicity than the eye forms of certain animals, which, for example, have the xiphoid process, the fan, which has disappeared again as the eye in evolution moved further up to become human.

Thus it is necessary that man connects with the power of nature, that he feels the power of nature, that he makes the power of nature his own power and creates out of this feeling. So it has been attempted to design this building in an entirely organic way, to design every detail in its place as it must be individualized from the whole. You can see, for example, that the organ is surrounded by sculpted motifs that make it appear as if the organ is not simply placed in the space, but that it works out of the entire organic design as if growing out of it. So everything in this building must be tried to be made in the same way.

You see here the lectern on which I stand. With it, the first consideration was to create something in this place that would, as it were, grow out of the other forms of construction, but in such a way that it would also express the idea that from here, through the word, one strives to express everything that is to be expressed in the building. At the moment when a person speaks here, the forms of the spoken word must continue in such a way that, like the nose on a face, its form reveals what the whole person is. Anyone who has made artistically inspired nose studies can turn a nose study into the “architectural style”, the physiognomy of the whole person. No one can ever have a nose other than the one they have, and there could never be a lectern here other than the one that is here. However, if one asserts this, it is meant in one's own view; one can only act in one's own view.

That an attempt has been made here to truly metamorphose the body can be seen from the fact that the motifs here in the glass windows are in part really such motifs that arise as images of the soul's life. For example, look at the pink window here. You will see on the left wing something coming out like the west portal of the building; on the right wing you see a kind of head. There you see a person sitting on a slope, looking towards the building, and another person looking towards the head. This has nothing to do with speculative mysticism; it is an immediate inner visual experience. This building could not have been created in any other way than by mysteriously sensing the shape of the human head in it, and the organic power on the one hand and the shape of the human head on the other hand result in the intuitive shape of the building. Therefore, the person sitting on the slope sees the metamorphosis of the building in his soul, sometimes as a human head, sometimes as the building revealing itself to the outside world. This provides a motif that leads, if I may say so, to an inner experience.

There you will find in the blue windowpane a person who is aiming – on the left – to shoot a bird in flight. In the right-hand pane you will see that the person has fired. The bird in the left-hand field is in a sphere of light. Around the man you will see all kinds of figures vividly alive in the astral body, one when he is about to shoot, the other when he has fired. This is a reality, but one from mundane life. I can imagine that those who always want to be dripping with inner exaltation may be offended if they experience such things as they are meant here, simply as a human being shooting. Yes, I was pleased when an Italian friend once used a somewhat crude expression about theosophists, who are such mystics. The friend who had already died said it, and I may say it in the very esteemed company here, because the person concerned was a princess, and what a princess says, that can also be said. She glossed over such people, who always want to live in a kind of inner elevation, by saying that they are people with a “face up to their stomachs”. I also repeat her not quite correct German. Now, ladies and gentlemen, the same idea was also implemented in painting. I can only talk about the actual painting, about spiritual painting, by referring to the small dome. Only in the small dome was it possible for me to carry out what I have indicated as the challenge of a newer painting: that behind the effort to create a window experience, drawing disappears altogether. I had one of my characters in the first mystery drama express this as follows: that the forms appear as the work of color. For when one feels with the feeling for painting, then one feels the drawing, which is carried into the pictorial, as a lie. When I draw the horizontal line, it is actually a reproduction of something that is not there at all. When I apply the blue sky as a surface and the green below, the form arises from the experience of the color itself. In this way, every pictorial element can be formed. Within the world of color itself lies a creative world, and the one who feels the colors paints what the colors say to each other in creation. He does not need to stick to a naturalistic model; he can create the figures from the colors themselves. It is the case that nature and also human life already have a certain right to shape the moral out of the colored with a necessity.

Yesterday, Mr. Uehli quite rightly pointed out how newer painters already have an intuitive sense of such effects resulting from light and dark, from the colors themselves, and how they come to paint a double bass next to a tin can. They are pursuing the right thing in itself, that it is only a matter of seeing how the light gradates in its becoming colored when it falls on a double bass and then continues to fall on a tin can. That is the right thing. But the wrong thing is that this is again based on naturalistic experience. If you really live in the colors, it arises from the colored something other than a can and a bass violin. The color is creative, and how it puts together, but it is a necessity of the mere colored out, you have to experience. Then you do not make a can next to a bass violin, because that is again outside the colored.

So here I have tried to paint entirely from the colors. If you see the reddish-orange spot here next to the blue spot and the black spot, this is initially a vivid impression from the colors. But then the colors come to life, then figures emerge from them, which can even be interpreted afterwards. But just as little as one can make plants with the human mind here, so one can just as little paint something on them that one has thought up with the human mind. One must first think when the colors are there, just as the plant must first grow before one can see it.

And so a Faust figure with Death and the Child emerged. The entire head emerged from the colors with all its figuration. Only in the human soul does a spiritual-real object form by itself.

For example, you can see above the organ motif how something is painted that a philistine, a person attached to the sensual world, will naturally perceive as madness. But you will no longer perceive it as madness when I tell you the following: If you close your eyes, you will, as it were, feel something inside the eye, like two eyes looking at each other. What takes place inwardly can certainly be developed further in a certain way. Then what, when viewed in a primitive way, looks like two eyes glowing out of the darkness towards you, and what is experienced inwardly, can be shaped in such a way that, when projected outwards, an entire beyond, an entire world-genesis can be seen in it. Here again an attempt has been made to create out of color what the eye experiences when, by narrowing the pupil, it sees itself in the darkness. One need not merely read the secrets of the mind, one can see them - suddenly they are there.

In a similar way, attempts have been made to bring other motifs into reality, again not from the naturalistic imitation of signs and forms, but entirely from color. The ancient Indians and their inspiration, the seven Rishis, who in turn were inspired by the stars to paint with an open head, is, if you do it that way now, abstract, actually nonsense; I say that quite openly. But when one experiences what was experienced in the ancient Indian culture in the relationship between the disciple and the guru, the teacher, one feels as if the ancient Indian did not have a skullcap, but as if it had evaporated, and as if he were not a human being who lives in his skin, but one feels as a sevenfold being, as if his soul power were composed of the seven soul rays of the holy Rishis of ancient Atlantis, enlightening him, and that he then communicated to his world that which he revealed, not from his own spirit but from the spirit of the holy Rishis. The more one works out what is said here, the more one comes closer to what has been painted here. The intuitive perception has first placed itself in ancient India, in ancient Atlantis. That which can be seen there has been painted on the wall here, and only afterwards can one speculate when it is there. This is how the message can relate to artistic creation. This is how everything in this building should actually come about.

You will find this building covered with Nordic slate. The building idea must be felt through to the point of radiating outwards. The slate, or the material used to cover it, must shine in a certain way in the sunlight. It seemed to happen by chance here – but of course there is always an inner necessity underlying it. When I saw the Nordic slate in Norway from the train, I knew that it was the right material to cover the building. We were then still able to have the slate shipped from Norway in the pre-war period. You will certainly feel the effect when you look at the building from a distance in good sunshine.

My main concern while the building was being constructed was the acoustics. During the construction, the building was of course also provided with scaffolding on the inside so that work could be carried out upstairs. This did not produce any acoustics, the acoustics were quite different, that is, they were a caricature of acoustics. Now it so happens that the acoustics of the building were also conceived from the same building idea. My idea was that I could expect the acoustic question to be solved for the lecturer by occult research. You know how difficult it is; you cannot calculate the acoustics. You will see how it has been achieved, but to a certain degree of perfection, to carry out the acoustics. You may now ask how these seven pillars, which contain the secret of the building, are connected with the acoustics. The two domes within our building are so lightly connected that they form a kind of soundboard, just as the soundboard of a violin plays a role in the richness of sound. Of course, since the whole, both the columns and the dome, are made of wood, the acoustics will only reach perfection over the years, just as the acoustics of a violin only develop over the years. We must first find a way to have a profound effect on the material, to be able to feel through the building idea what is now sensed as the acoustics of this building. You will understand that the acoustics must be sensed best from the organ podium. You will also see that when two people here in the middle talk to each other, an echo can be heard coming down from the ceiling. This seems to be an indication from the world being that one may only speak from the stage or the lectern within the building and that the building itself does not actually tolerate useless chatter from any point.

Now, dear attendees, I have tried to tell you what can be said in this regard while looking at the building. I will have to supplement what I have spoken today in my presentation of the building idea, which I will give at the final event next Saturday. Then I will say what can still be said. Now we have to clear the hall for the next lecture.

Dear ladies and gentlemen! With your permission, I will expand on and supplement what I have already said during the tour of the Goetheanum, and present a summary of our building here today.

For many years, our anthroposophical movement worked by holding its meetings in ordinary halls, as can be found today. And even when we were able to present dramatic performances based on the impulses of the anthroposophical worldview, starting in 1909, we initially had to limit ourselves to having these performances in ordinary theaters and under ordinary theater conditions. As our anthroposophical movement grew, a large number of our friends came up with the idea of building a house for anthroposophy. And now I was given the task, so to speak, of creating a home for the anthroposophical movement. I would like to make it clear that the commission to build did not come from me, but from friends of the anthroposophical worldview.

The question now arose: how should the construction of such a house be approached? If any other society, an association with any task or goal, builds a house for itself today — and today there are all kinds of associations with all kinds of goals — then it consults with some architect. They agree on the style in which such a house is to be built: Greek, Gothic, Renaissance or some other style. This is the usual process today. If Anthroposophy had been a movement like all the others, it could have proceeded in this way. But Anthroposophy takes into account the great demands of our time for a thorough renewal of our entire culture, and therefore it could not be built in this way. Furthermore, Anthroposophy is not a one-sided body of ideas, but the ideas of Anthroposophy arise from the whole of human experience, from the deep sources of the human being. And that which lives in the ideas of anthroposophy has arisen from a primeval source, just as it was the case with the older cultures. And just as the words of Anthroposophy can be proclaimed by human mouths and given as teaching, so too can that which flows from the sources from which the Anthroposophical ideas also flow be given on the other side for direct artistic insight. It is not a translation or transposition of anthroposophical ideas into art that is at issue here, but rather a different branch that can develop as art from the same source of life from which anthroposophical ideas come.

What Anthroposophy has to reveal can be said from a podium in words that signify ideas. But it can also speak from the forms, from the plastic forms, from painting, without sculpture or painting becoming symbolism or allegory, but rather within the sphere of the purely artistic. This means nothing other than that if anthroposophy creates a physical shell in which it is to work, then it must give this physical shell its own style, just as older worldviews have given their physical shells the corresponding style. Take the Greek style of architecture, as it has partly been realized in the Greek temple: This Greek temple has grown entirely out of the same world view that gave rise to Greek drama, Greek epic, Greek views of the gods. The Greeks felt that in creating their temples they were building a dwelling for the gods. And this corresponds to what earlier cultural views saw in the further development of the human soul that had passed through death; there is a certain qualitative relationship between the Greek god and the human soul that has passed through death, as it was felt in earlier cultural currents. And something similar to how in ancient times dwellings were built for human souls that had passed through death, while still believed to be on earth, was later shaped by the Greeks in their temple. The temple is the dwelling of the god, that is, not of the human soul that has passed through death itself, but of that soul that belongs to a different hierarchy, a different world order.

Those who can see forms artistically can still feel in the forms that have been created by carrying and burdening and other things for the Greek temple, as in older times the dead, who still remained on earth after death, who, as a chthonic deity, as an earth , this house was formed out of the earth, so that the temple was built as a continuation of the gravitational forces of the earth, as they can be felt by man when he somehow looks through his limb-being, as such a connection of forces. A Greek temple is only to be considered complete when one views it in such a way that the statue of the god is inside. Those who have a sense of form cannot imagine an empty Greek temple as complete. They can only imagine, they can only feel, that this shell contains the statue of Athena, Zeus, Apollo, and so on.

Let us skip ahead in art history and look at the Gothic building. When you experience the Gothic building with its forms, with its peculiar windows that let in the light in a unique way, you always feel that when you enter the empty Gothic cathedral, it is not a totality, not complete. The Gothic cathedral is only complete when the community is inside it, whose souls resonate in harmony in their work. A Greek temple is the wrapping of the god who dwells on earth through his statue. A Gothic cathedral is in all its forms that which encloses the community in harmony and with thoughts directed towards the eternal.

The Greek worldview, or the worldview that took shape in the Gothic period, are dead worlds for today's humanity. Only the degenerate forces of decline that stem from them can still live today. We need a new culture, but one that is not only expressed one-sidedly in knowledge and ideas, but one that can also express itself in a new art. And so the development of art history also points to the necessity of an architectural style of its own for anthroposophy, which wants to bring a new form of culture.

The way anthroposophy is to be lived is based on the fact that, to a certain extent, a higher being in man, but which is man himself, speaks to the person who lives in ordinary life, which takes place between birth and death. By feeling this, the two-dome structure presented itself to me as the necessary building envelope for this basic impulse of the anthroposophical world view. In the small dome, what is inwardly large and wide is, as it were, physically compressed; in the large dome, what is inwardly less wide is spatially expanded, what inwardly belongs to the life that we lead between birth and death. And when a person enters this building in the sense of such an anthroposophical world view, they must find their own being. This is based on what has just been said. And while he is inside, he must feel the structure in such a way that he, as a human being, as a microcosm, does not feel constrained by the structure, but is externally connected to the universe, to the macrocosm, through the entire structure. But if you look at the structure from the outside, you must have the feeling: Something is going on in there that brings something unearthly, something extraterrestrial to earthly existence. Something is going on in there that is hidden in the earthly itself. So it must be possible to look at the building in terms of its overall form and also in terms of the sculptural extensions, which, as I said over there, must represent organic structures.

Dear attendees, We will take the liberty of presenting a performance of eurythmic art to you, one that will be performed by children, in order to illustrate the pedagogical-didactic value of eurythmic art. Since today we are dealing primarily with the educational and teaching side of eurythmy, I will present what needs to be said about eurythmy as art in particular at our next performance on Wednesday and will limit myself today to saying only what relates to eurythmy as an educational tool and subject of instruction. I would like to say a few words in advance to the effect that eurythmy is a truly inaudible, visible language, a language that is performed by the moving human being, that is, by movements of the human limbs, the whole human body, or that is also expressed by groups of people in space. What emerges as the eurythmic art, what is achieved on the basis of a visible language, is not an ordinary play of gestures, nor is it something in the ordinary sense of mimicry and least of all a dance art. Rather, it is a truly careful study of what the human organism wants to do, tends to do, by revealing itself in speech or song. The movements that the larynx and the other speech and singing organs are predisposed to perform are transferred to the whole human being according to the principle of Goethean metamorphosis. And because we are dealing with human movements that are natural and elementary way from the essence of the human organization itself, as language is taken in a natural and elementary way from the laws of the human organism, that is why eurythmy is also a means of education and teaching.

At the Stuttgart Waldorf School, which Emil Molt founded and which I direct, we have introduced this eurythmy as a compulsory subject from the earliest elementary school lessons up to the fourteenth or fifteenth year, as far as we have come with the Waldorf School so far. And it has already become apparent during the [two-year] existence of the Waldorf school that the children take this subject on with a special inner satisfaction. If we disregard the artistic aspect for the moment, we could call eurythmy in this respect: soul-inspired and spiritualized gymnastics. And as a subject, it is added to ordinary gymnastics like soul-inspired and spiritualized gymnastics. This ordinary gymnastics is, after all, only a logical consequence of the physiological study of the human organism, of the study of physicality.

The movements that children perform in eurythmy do not arise from this one aspect of the human being, the physical body, but from the body, soul and spirit, that is, from the whole human being. That is why the child also feels what it is doing as a soul-inspired gymnast, as if it has been taken out of the full human being, and it lives into these movements with particular satisfaction.

If we want to understand how this is, we need only think of how, for someone who is able to intuitively place themselves within the laws of the human organism, every possible movement that the body is striving towards is already present in the resting human form. The one who can see in this way sees in the resting human being how this being is constantly seeking to merge with the organism in movements that are already expressed in their formation in the formative or in the calm form. One only sets the human form itself in motion by moving from the observation of the sculpture of the human organism to this moving sculpture of eurythmy, which is at the same time a visible language. Anyone who is able to study the movements of the human being, which arise from the element of will deeply rooted in the subconscious, these possibilities of movement that lie within the human being, will find everywhere that these movements are nothing other than what, in turn, wants to come to rest in the same way as the human organism, when it rests, stands quietly or sits quietly, shows its calm form. You only need to look at a hand and the adjoining arm: If you look at the shape of the fingers, the forearm or anything else, you cannot imagine that it is meant to be at rest. Its resting shape is such that every possible movement and mobility is already expressed in the resting shape.

And when a person's arms and hands are moving, we see how only movements that are natural and elementary are possible, and these in turn point to the calm form of the hands and arms themselves.

The child senses that everything in eurythmy is derived from the inner laws of the human organism. That is why, as we see at the Stuttgart Waldorf School, they perform these eurythmic movements with such great enthusiasm, as spiritualized gymnastics.

And if we look even more at the soul, we have to say that ordinary gymnastics can actually only get out of the human being that which lies in his physical organization. One day we will think about these things more objectively, without today's prejudices. Then it will be seen how one-sided ordinary gymnastics is. I certainly do not want to go as far as a famous physiologist, perhaps even the most famous in Central Europe, who once sat here, listened to such an introduction, and who later told me: So, you consider gymnastics in general to be a one-sidedness that is taken out of physiology? I, as a physiologist, said he, I regard gymnastics as it is practiced today not at all as a subject for instruction, but as a barbarism.

Now, out of courtesy to our culture — one must always be polite too — I will not say that gymnastics is barbaric, but I would like to say: it is one-sided, it is only taken from the physiology of the human organism, while this inspired gymnastics, which occurs in eurythmy, is taken from body, soul and spirit, from the full human being. That is why it is used as a teaching tool, as an educational tool that brings out in the child what the present and future generations in particular will need very, very much, namely the will initiative, the initiative of the soul life.

This has already been demonstrated in the Waldorf school through the teaching of eurythmy, how the development of the will, the will initiative, is released from the subconscious depths of human experience during childhood. This has been achieved because eurythmy does not neglect the physical side, only address the soul and spirit, but takes into account all three elements of human life, developing the spirit, developing the soul, developing the body. that the child experiences eurythmy as something so natural that when it is brought to the child, the child learns to love it out of an equal inner urge, as is the case with speech. Just as with speech, when it is presented to the child, the natural urge in the child to reveal the speech is there, so too with eurythmy, when it is presented in a natural way, there is such an urge in the child to engage in eurythmy as in speech. And so we can hope, ladies and gentlemen, that eurythmy will be increasingly recognized as an educational tool in the pedagogical and didactic fields. What our time lacks, what our time needs, is for the introduction of eurythmy into the curriculum to be seen as a matter of course.

Dear attendees, Last Monday we were able to present eurythmy as an educational and teaching tool, and I took the liberty of talking about eurythmy as a form of gymnastics that is inspired and spiritualized. Today, eurythmy as a free art will be presented to you here. To explain that which seeks to reveal itself as art is actually an inartistic undertaking. For everything that is truly artistic must work through that which it presents directly in perception. And on the other hand, people demand of the truly artistic that they can grasp its whole essence, without first having to seek the way in some roundabout way through a conceptual or other explanation.

If I nevertheless take the liberty of saying a few words in advance, it is because the eurythmy we are trying out here at the Goetheanum and elsewhere is an art that draws from hitherto unfamiliar artistic sources and also makes use of an unfamiliar artistic formal language. And allow me to say a few words in advance about these artistic sources and this artistic formal language.

What reveals eurythmy as a free art are movements of the human being in his or her individual limbs, or also movements of groups of people in space. These movements are not mere mimicry or pantomime, nor are they merely gestural or even dance-like; rather, eurythmy is meant to be a truly visible language, and a visible language that is derived from the sensual-transcendental observations of the human organism itself, so that in eurythmy one can bring forth something from the human being that comes out of him just as organically - without being an instantaneous gesture or facial expression - as human language itself. And just as a sound, or a tone when singing, wells up in a lawful way out of the human soul, so too should that which emerges as eurythmy art come out of the human soul, out of the human organization.

As I said, it is important to carefully study, in a way that is both sensory and supersensory, which movement tendencies or tendencies to move begin in the human speech or singing organs when the person prepares to speak or sing. I say expressly: movement tendencies, because what I mean by this is not a real movement, but one can actually only observe what lies at its basis in the process of coming into being, so to speak in the status nascendi, because that which wants to form itself as movement in the organs of singing and speaking is stopped in its development by the singing or speaking person and converted into those movements that can then represent the tone or the sound, so that what arises in the individual organ systems, in the singing or speaking system in humans, must be transferred to the whole person. This is entirely in accordance with the principle of Goethe's theory of metamorphosis. Goethe regards the individual leaf as a simplified plant, and in turn the whole plant as a complicated leaf. What Goethe applies here only to morphological considerations can be elevated to the artistic. One can transfer what is assessed in a single organ system in terms of movement possibilities to the whole human being, just as nature transfers the form of the individual leaf to the whole plant in a more complicated form. Then the whole human being becomes a speech or singing organ. And even groups of people become a speech or singing organ. And one should seek just as little a connection between the individual movement and the individual soul process as one may seek a connection between the individual sound or tone and that which takes place in the soul. But just as speech as a whole is formed according to law, so too the formation of eurythmic movements as a whole is absolutely lawful. This can be achieved by allowing the human being to reveal himself through this eurythmy, to present in his very own element precisely that artistic element that underlies singing or speaking. For in speech, through the human organization, the conceptual and that which does not merely come out of the head like the conceptual, but rather comes out of the whole human being: the volitional, flows together. But the more the merely conceptual lives in any content, the less artistic that content is. The thought kills the artistic. And only as much as can pass through language from the element of will that comes from the whole, from the fully human, so much can be found in language that is truly artistic and poetic.

Therefore, the poet, who is truly an artist, must wage a constant war against the prosaic element of language. This is particularly the case with civilized languages, where language is increasingly becoming an expression of cognitive thought on the one hand or, on the other, of thought that is suitable for social convention. As languages grow into civilization, they become an increasingly unusable and unusable element for the expression of that spiritual reality which the artistic poet must truly seek. Therefore, the poet must go beyond the prose content and, through rhythm, rhyme, harmony, meter, the musical or imaginative-thematic, lead language back, as it were, to that element in which the human being, through sound or phonetics, makes himself the revealer of the spiritual and can thereby truly elevate the sound or phonetic into the spiritual-artistic.

Now, because of the particular way it expresses itself through movement, eurythmy works from the human will element in an elementary and natural way. It is precisely through this that the truly artistic, both musical and poetic, can be brought out in people. And what the poet, I would say, is already striving for in an invisible eurythmy, can be seen in the human movements that occur in eurythmy. One can create an accompaniment to any piece of music in eurythmy, and then, in a sense, a visible song is performed. One can also sing in eurythmy, just as one can sing audibly. And one can also present poetry in eurythmy, in which case what appears on stage as eurythmy must be accompanied by the recitation or declamation of the poem. In an unartistic age, there will be little understanding for what is necessary for recitation and declamation to accompany the eurythmic art. And today is such an unartistic age.

Today we understand little of what Goethe meant when he rehearsed his iambic dramas with a baton in his hand like a conductor with his actors. He did not look at the prose content, he looked at the artistic formation of the iamb. Or it is difficult to understand how Schiller, especially in his most significant poems, did not initially have the literal prose content in his mind, but rather a melodious theme into which he then incorporated the literal prose content, so to speak. In an unartistic age such as the present, when the importance of declaiming and reciting is seen in the fact that the prose content is emphasized and that what lies behind the prose content as rhythm, rhyme, harmony, musical and imaginative themes lie behind the prose content. In such an age, one will understand little about what forms recitation and declamation must take in order to be performed simultaneously with eurythmy.

But the unartistic person must understand how a secret eurhythmics is sought in real poetry and how this secret, invisible eurhythmics can reveal itself in the visible language in which it appears here. Before such performances I must always say that we ask the audience to be lenient because we know very well that this eurythmy is still in the early stages of development. But anyone who delves into its true essence can also know that it offers unlimited possibilities for development. For why? When Goethe says, “When nature begins to reveal her secret to him who beholds her, he feels the deepest longing for her most worthy interpreter, art,” it may be added, justifying eurythmy: “When human essence itself in its formation and in its movement begins to reveal its secret, feels the deepest longing to reveal to the eye that which lies within this human form in terms of possibilities of movement, of eurythmy.

If, as Goethe says elsewhere, when man stands at the pinnacle of nature, he sees himself as a whole of nature, taking order, harmony, measure and meaning together, in order to rise to the production of a work of art, then, with regard to eurythmy, one may say that this eurythmy does not use an external tool, but the human being itself, and in the human being all the secrets of the world are truly hidden. If we can draw them out of him, then the revelation of these secrets of humanity, of these microcosmic secrets, is a revelation of the macrocosmic secrets.

Eurythmy uses the human being as its tool, drawing from the human being's nature order, harmony, measure and meaning and presenting the human being as a work of art. By undertaking this, there must be unlimited possibilities for development within it, because if the human being is taken as a tool for artistic expression, this is in any case the most worthy artistic tool.

And so we may hope that artistic revelations will come out of eurythmy, which is still in its infancy today. These revelations may still be somewhat influenced by us, but will probably come first through others. These revelations can establish eurythmy as a fully-fledged younger art alongside its fully-fledged older sister arts.