The Rudolf Steiner Archive

The last great incision into the historical evolution of mankind is the one that took place—we have often spoken of it—in the first third of the 15th century, and that marks the transition from the evolution more particularly of the Intellectual or Mind-Soul to that of the Consciousness or Spiritual Soul. For we live in an age when the evolution of the Spiritual Soul is taking place, and it is an age that is entirely bereft of true insight into the connections of the human being with the deeper impulses and forces of Nature, or rather of the Spirit that is in Nature. To-day, when we speak of man and his constitution as physical man, we speak, for instance, of the chemical substances, enumerating them under the heading of what the chemist calls the elements. But it is of about as much value for a man to know that something he eats contains carbon and nitrogen as it is for a watch-mechanic to know that the watch he has in his hand consists of glass and, shall we say, silver and some other substances. All this kind of knowledge that traces back the real substance of man's nature to these material abstractions—hydrogen, oxygen and the like—affords no true knowledge of the human being. The mechanism of the watch has to be understood by seeing in it a connected system of forces; and similarly, if we would understand the nature and being of man, we must recognise how the various impulses that are to be found working in all the kingdoms of Nature work in the human being;—for there they work differently than in the other kingdoms of Nature. In modern times however there is no longer any true vision of the connection of man with the Universe. Until the 14th or 15th century this vision and knowledge persisted; though degenerate, it was still present in greater or less degree, and instinctively gifted natures were able still to make use of it. But later on, save for a few men like Paracelsus, Jacob Boehme and others, the true insight into man's connection with the Universe, little by little, died completely away.

What does the newer Natural Science, that has gradually grown up since the 15th century, know of the relation, let us say, of the plant world or of the animal world to the human being? The scientist examines the plants in their chemical constitution and tries by some means or other to study these same chemical constituents of the plant as they appear in man. Finally perhaps he tries to form an idea—generally he fails!—of the influence of the substances on the healthy and on the diseased human being. All this investigation however results in a darkening of knowledge. The important thing to-day, if we are really desirous of going forward in our knowledge of man on the foundation of historical insight, is that we should learn to know again what is the real relation of the human being to the Nature that he finds around him.

Until the time of the last great revolution in men's consciousness that took place in the 15th century, there was still a clear perception of the great difference that exists in the metals, as between those that are found in the human being and those that are found in Nature. When we set out to consider the various substances in man's physical nature, certain metals show themselves in greater or less degree. For example, iron is present in the human organism, in combination with various other substances; magnesium is also present, and we could name many others. Before the 15th century men were keenly alive to the difference between such metals as these we have mentioned, that are found when we examine the human organism, and such metals as are present in external Nature but are not at any rate quickly apparent in the human organism. The men of these earlier times said: Man is a microcosm; whatever is present in the world outside him, in the macrocosm, is present in some form or other in him. And this was for them no mere general principle in the abstract: had they gone but a little way in initiation knowledge, it followed inevitably from what they knew of the nature of man and of the nature of the Universe. They knew that we can only come to a true understanding of man when we bring together in one the whole of Nature, with all her impulses, with all the substances that she contains. Then we have a picture, an imagination of the being of man. And a disturbing element enters the picture when we meet with something outside in Nature that cannot be found in man.

So thought a student of Nature of the 9th, 10th or 11th century. In those times, however, something else was known, namely, that that which man receives by way of physical nourishment is only a part, perhaps not even the most important part, of all that serves to maintain his physical organism, or rather his whole human organism throughout.

Now, to go beyond physical nourishment and include also breathing presents no difficulty to the man of the present day; for breathing too is a form of assimilation. But it would not occur to him to go any farther. The earlier student of Nature went farther. It was clear to him that when man uses his eye to perceive things, he does not merely see with the eye, but during the process of perception he receives through the eye in infinitely minute quantities something of the substance of the World-All. And not through the eye alone, but through the ear and through other portions of the organism. And the medieval student of Nature was fully aware of the very great importance of those substances which occur in a slight measure only in the human organism, such as, for example, lead, and which man receives in infinitely minute quantities that may be found where we little suspect their presence.

Lead is a metal that cannot immediately be demonstrated as occurring in man. But lead is, as a matter of fact, distributed throughout the entire physical Cosmos in a state of very fine dilution, and the human being takes up lead from the Cosmos by means of processes that are many times more delicate than the process of breathing. The human being is perpetually excreting substances, throwing them off from the periphery. You not only cut your nails, you continually throw off substances from your skin. But whilst substance is thus given off, other substance is taken up and received into the organism.

This was the kind of thought in which a student of Nature lived, who belonged to medieval times,—to the 9th, 10th, 11th or 12th century. He had no balances, he had none of the coarser measuring instruments with which to determine how the substances and forces worked; for him it was a matter of entering deeply into the inner qualities of Nature, of understanding her inner impulses and her connection with the human being. And men were able in this way to know many things that they will one day begin to know again. For, if truth be told, nothing is known to-day of the real nature of the human being.

You know how when we investigate the constitution of man, we sum it up in the following way,—in order to have some kind of classification and plan: man is composed of physical body, etheric body, astral body and ego, or ego-organisation. Well and good. In the first instance these terms are mere words: but it is good to begin with them, each person can form from them some small idea of the truth. But if we want to make use of this classification in practical life, especially if we want to use it in medicine—admittedly a highly important ‘practice’ in life, and one that depends at every step on our knowledge of the human being,—then we cannot possibly remain at the words, we must enter into that which is behind the words and gives them their content. We ask first: what about the physical body? How can we gain a true idea of it? (You will see presently why I am developing this line of thought). Take any object on the Earth, outside the human being; let us say, for instance, a stone. A stone falls to the ground. We say, the stone is heavy, it is attracted by the Earth, it has weight. We discover other forces working in the stone. If it is formed into a crystal, then form-building forces work in it. These too are related to the earthly forces. In short, when we look around in the world, we find all about us substances that are subject to the earthly nature.

Keep that clearly in mind: we have, to begin with, substances that are subject to the earthly nature.

Someone whose thoughts on these things are not clear, will perhaps come and show you a piece of coal, a piece of black coal. What is it in reality? In the neighbourhood of the Earth, it is coal; but the moment you were to take it but a short distance—comparatively speaking—away from the Earth, it would cease to be coal. What makes it coal is nothing but the forces of the Earth. Thus you can say: Here is the Earth, and the forces of the Earth are within it; but the forces of the Earth are also in every single object that I find here on the Earth. And the physical body of man, although of course it is marvellously combined and held together, is nevertheless essentially such an object, standing in subjection to these physical forces of the Earth, the forces that come from the centre of the Earth. The physical body of the human being can therefore be described as that which is subject to the forces coming from the centre of the Earth.

Now there are other forces on the Earth besides. These other forces come from the whole environment of the Earth, from the far circumference. Imagine for a moment that you are going out and out, away from the Earth into unmeasured distances. From these unmeasured distances forces work upon the Earth, working inwards to it from every direction. Yes, it is a fact, such forces do exist, coming from all directions of the Universe and working in everywhere towards the centre of the Earth. It is possible to gain quite a clear and concrete picture of them in the following way.

You will remember that the most important substance that forms the basis everywhere of the organism, whether it be of plant, animal or man, is albumen. And albumen also forms the basis for the germ of a new plant, animal or human organism. From a fructified germ cell proceeds that which evolves into an organism, and the substance of the germ is albumen. In these days, instead of pursuing true science, men build up all kinds of imaginations, and they make a picture to themselves of this albumen as composed of substances in intricate chemical combination. It is composed, so they say, of carbon, oxygen, hydrogen, nitrogen, sulphur, and a trace too of phosphorus, all in complicate combination. And so the atomist comes to see in albumen the example par excellence of chemical combination. The atoms and molecules have to be thought of as arranged in a most complicated manner. And in the mother-animal or mother-plant arises this complicated albumen-molecule, or whatever you choose to call it; it develops further and the new animal comes to birth from it, arising, that is, purely through inheritance.

From the spiritual point of view, all this is sheer nonsense. The truth is that the albumen of the mother animal is not a complicated chemical combination at all, it is all broken up, destroyed and reduced to chaos. The albumen that is otherwise contained in the body is still to some extent organised, but albumen that forms the basis for propagation is distinguished by this very characteristic, that it is in a condition of complete disorganisation. The substances that are contained in it are reduced to chaos and are in no sort of combination, they are tossed and jumbled together to form a mere accumulation without order or proportion; and on this very account the albumen is no longer subject to the Earth. So long as the albumen can by some means or other be held together in inward cohesion, so long is it subject to the forces that work from the centre of the Earth. The moment the albumen is inwardly split up and destroyed, it comes under the influence of the whole sphere of the Cosmos. Forces work in upon it from every quarter. And then we have the tiny particle of albumen that forms the basis for reproduction. This tiny particle is an image of the entire Cosmos, because albumen substance has been split up, destroyed and reduced to chaos—converted, that is, into cosmic dust and thereby fitted to become exposed to the working of the entire Cosmos.

Of all this men have to-day simply no knowledge at all. They imagine the old hen has the complicated albumen. This is included in the egg, and thence arises the new hen. It is the albumen continued, it has gone on evolving. Then the germinal substance is developed once again; and so it goes on from hen to hen. In actual fact it is not so. Every time the transition takes place from one generation to the next, the albumen is exposed to the whole Cosmos.

On the one hand, therefore we have the earthly substances, subject to the earthly or central forces. But we can also imagine these earthly substances exposed in certain circumstances to the forces that work in from all quarters, from the farthest limits of the universe. The latter forces are the ones that work in the human etheric body. The etheric body is subject to the forces of the Cosmos. These are real conceptions of physical body and etheric body.

Suppose you stand there and ask, what is my physical body? The answer is, it is that body which is subject to the forces proceeding from the centre of the Earth. What is my etheric body? It is that in you which is subject to the forces streaming in on all sides from the periphery. You can even show it in a drawing. Imagine that this is the human being. His physical body is the one that is subject to the forces that go towards the centre of the Earth. His etheric body is the one that is subject to the forces streaming in from all sides, from the ends of the Universe. Here we have a system of forces in man. There are forces that pull downward,—they are really present in all organs that are upright,—and there are forces that pour in from without, tending inward. You can actually perceive in the form of man where the one kind and the other are more represented. Study the legs and it is obvious, their form is due to the fact that they are more adapted to the earthly forces. The head is more adapted to the forces of the periphery. In like manner you may also study the arms, and this is not uninteresting. Hold your arms close to your body, and they are subject to the forces that go towards the centre of the Earth. Move them in a living way, and you yourself will be subjecting them to the forces streaming in from all sides of the periphery.

Such indeed is the difference between arms and legs. The legs are invariably subject to the central forces of the Earth, while the arms are so only in a certain posture, that is to say, conditionally. Man is able to lift them out of the domain of the earthly central forces and place them in the midst of those forces which we call the ethereal forces, the forces pouring in from the periphery. And so you can see for all the single organs, how they are placed in the whole cosmic system. Here then you have your physical body and your etheric body.

How is it with the astral body? In space, there is no other kind of forces besides these two. The astral body receives its forces from beyond space. While the etheric body receives them from everywhere, from the periphery, the astral body receives them from beyond all space.

We can actually find certain places in Nature where the physical forces of the Earth enter into the midst of the etheric forces that stream in from all sides. You may imagine albumen to begin with as a substance present in the physical Earth. So long as sulphur, carbon, oxygen, nitrogen and hydrogen are in any way chemically recognisable in it, the albumen is in fact subject to the earthly forces. But the moment it enters the sphere of the reproductive process, it is lifted out of the physical forces. The forces of the circumference of the Universe begin to work upon it in its disorganised condition. New albumen comes into being as an image of the whole Universe.

But you see, sometimes the following situation emerges. The disorganisation, the breaking down of the albumen cannot go far enough. You may have albumenous substance of this kind in connection with some animal for instance. For reproduction to take place, it should be possible for it to be divided, broken down entirely, so that it may submit itself to the forces of the whole Cosmos. But the animal is somehow prevented from delivering, for purposes of reproduction, such albumenous substance as would be able straight-away to submit itself to the whole macrocosm. To be capable of reproduction, albumenous substance must submit itself to the whole macrocosm. But the animal in this case is in some way unable to form albumenous substance capable of reproduction without further assistance. This is how it is with the gall-fly. What then does the gall-fly do? It lays its egg in some part of a plant. Again and again you may find these galls, in oaks, and in other trees where the gall-fly lays her eggs. In the leaf, for instance, you can see these strange formations. Within each one is the egg of a gall-fly. Why does it happen so? Why is the egg of a gall-fly laid in an oak leaf, with the result that the oak-apple is formed, holding within it the egg, which is now able to develop? The reason for this is as follows. The plant-leaf contains within it an etheric body, which is adapted to the whole cosmic ether. It comes to the assistance of the egg of the gall-fly. Left alone, the gall-fly's egg is helpless. Hence the gall-fly lays it in a portion of a plant which contains already an etheric body included in the whole system of the cosmic ether. The gall-fly therefore approaches the oak in order to get help in the breaking down of its albumen, so that the world-periphery may be able to work via the oak leaf, via the oak. Alone, the egg of the gall-fly would be doomed to destruction, for it cannot be broken down, it holds together too strongly.

Here we can gain an insight into a strange working of Nature. But this same working is present in Nature in other places too. Suppose for instance that the animal is not merely incapable of providing germ substance which can expose itself to the cosmic ether for the sake of reproduction; suppose it is not even able to transform any substances within it into inner means of nourishment, that is, to use them for its own inner nourishment. The example of the bee lies near at hand. The bee cannot eat anything and everything. It can only eat what the plant has already prepared for it. And now observe something very strange and remarkable. The bee goes to the plant, seeks out the honey juice, absorbs it, assimilates it within itself, and then builds up what we admire so, the wonderful cell structure of the beehive. Here we observe two most strange and wonderful processes: the bee sitting on the flower outside and sucking in the juice, and then, having gone into the beehive, building up from within itself in co-operation with the other bees the cells of wax that will be filled with honey.

What is it that really takes place? You must look carefully at the shape of the cells. They are like this and here comes another joined on to it, and so on, and so on. They are small cells, and similar in form to something else we find in Nature, only there the hollow space is filled up; they are shaped like quartz crystals, like the crystals of silicic acid. If you go into the mountains and examine the quartz crystals, you will find you can draw them, too, in that form. The drawing will, it is true, show some irregularity of shape, but in the main the form will be similar to the form of the bee-cells that are arranged side by side. Only, the cells of the bee are made of wax and the quartz is made of silicic acid.

When we follow up the matter, we find that long ago at a certain point of time in the evolution of the Earth the quartz-crystal was first formed in the mountains. It was formed under the prevailing etheric and astral influences, with the aid of silicic acid. There you have forces that come from the circumference, working, as ethereal-astral forces, and building the quartz crystals in the siliceous substance. Everywhere in the mountains you will find these crystals with their wonderful hexagonal forms. What you find in the solid crystals, you find again as hollow forms—as hollow spaces—in the cells of wax, in the beehive.

For what happens? The bee takes from the flower that which once upon a time brought the quartz crystal into being. The bee fetches it up out of the flower and makes with the substance of her own body imitations of the quartz crystal. A process thus takes place between bee and flower that is similar to what took place long ago in the macrocosm.

I tell you these things that you may understand how necessary it is not merely to take cognisance of the presence of carbon, nitrogen, hydrogen and oxygen, all of which analysis is piteously abstract, but to observe and note the marvellous formative processes, the intimate inner conditions that prevail in Nature and her processes. Once, long ago, science was instinctively built up on such observation. But that all passed away in the course of the historical evolution of mankind; it came to an end about the 15th century. We must win it back. We must find our way again into the intimate connections of Nature and of her relation with man. Only when we are able once more to recognise such connections can we hope to find again a true insight into the healthy as well as into the diseased human being. Otherwise all pharmacology remains merely a matter of testing and experimenting, without any perception of the inner connections that are at work.

The period from the 15th century until now may be described as an unfruitful period in the evolution of the human spirit. It has borne man down beneath its weight. Man has looked out upon plant and animal, upon human being and upon mineral, and all the while without any real knowledge of them whatsoever; he has been brought right out of connection with the world and the universe. Now at length it has landed him in chaos as far as his relation with the great world is concerned; he lives without knowing that he is in any sort of connection with the world around him. In the days when men pondered and meditated upon such things, it was known that every time reproduction took place, the whole macrocosm speaks. In the germ or seed that is capable of reproduction comes to birth a minute image of the whole macrocosm. All around is the great world; and in the tiniest germ is an offspring of the influences that stream in from the great world from every direction.

In the human being we may see working together, first of all the forces that are the physical-central forces of the Earth. These forces work in all the organs of the human being. But everywhere in him work also, in an opposite direction, the forces that stream in from all sides, the etheric forces. Look at the liver, for example, or the lungs: you will only understand them when you know that in them are working together the forces that come from the centre of the Earth and the forces that come in from every direction from the circumference of the Universe. Then we have also certain organs that are permeated by the astral body, or again by the ego-organisation, whilst others are less permeated by these higher members. In the condition of sleep, of course, the human being as a whole has not his astral body and ego-organisation in him at all. Now imagine that some organ, let us say one of the lungs has through some circumstance become too strongly affected by the forces that stream in everywhere from the Cosmic All. The lung will in consequence become diseased, for a certain harmony and balance is necessary between that which works in the lung from the centre of the Earth and that which streams in upon it from all parts of the circumference. If you can succeed in finding mineral substances which will provide a counterpoise in the lung to the too strongly working etheric forces, then you will have a remedy wherewith to eliminate their over-activity. The reverse may also happen. The etheric forces may become too weak, and the physical forces that work from the centre of the Earth grow correspondingly too strong. This time you will search the whole kingdom of the plants to discover something that shall strengthen the etheric forces in the organ where they are weak; and then you will have your remedy for this condition. It is quite impossible to find even the slightest remedy by an observation of the physical body alone, for the physical body of man has in itself no ground for telling anything about its own constitution. The so-called normal process that goes on in the physical body is a process of Nature. But the process that goes on in illness is likewise a process of Nature. If you have what is called a normal healthy liver, you have a liver in which processes of Nature take place. And if you have a liver in which there is an abscess, you have also a liver in which processes of Nature take place. The difference can never be found by investigating the physical body. All you can do from investigation of the physical body is to establish the fact that the appearance is different in the one case from the other. You can learn nothing of the cause. If you have an abscess on the liver, you will only be able to discover the cause of it when you know that in such a case, for example, the astral body enters much more powerfully into the liver than it should. What you have to do is to drive out of the liver the astral body, which has taken possession there too strongly. From all this it is clear that there is really no possibility of speaking about the healthy and the diseased human being in a way that accords with the facts, unless we go beyond the physical body and include also in our consideration the higher members of man's being. We shall indeed only regain a pharmacology when we go beyond the physical body, for the nature of illness is simply not demonstrable from the physical body alone.

At the present time my purpose is merely to set forth these things in their historical aspect and connections. It must, however, be pointed out that with the gradual dimming and darkening of that which has been brought over from olden times, all real knowledge of the human being has died right away. And now to-day we are faced with the necessity of acquiring once again a knowledge of the human being. Such knowledge will be attainable when we are once again in a position to understand the relationship of the human being to the surrounding kingdoms of Nature.

Suppose, then, we take our start from the ego-organisation of the human being. If, through initiation science, we have attained to imaginative cognition and are able to perceive the ego-organisation of man, then we may ask ourselves: With what portion of the human organism (in its present state) does this ego-organisation stand in especially near relation? It stands in an especial relation with all that is mineral in the human being. Hence when you receive into yourself some essentially mineral substance,—for example, when you take some salt on your tongue—it is the ego-organisation in you that immediately pounces upon this mineral substance. And as the substance is carried further into the body, all the while,—even when the salt substance is in the stomach—the ego-organisation remains with it. The salt goes still further, it undergoes various changes, it passes through the intestines,—never once does the ego-organisation leave hold of her salt! They behave like two closely related things, two things that belong to one another: the ego-organisation, and the salt that enters the human being.

It is quite another matter when you eat, for example, a poached egg, or any substance of a similar—albumenous—consistency. The ego-organisation is very little concerned when you have a piece of poached egg on your tongue. Afterwards, as it slips down into the stomach, the astral body concerns itself with it, but again only to a very small extent. Then it goes further. And now, first the etheric and then the physical body begin to act intensively upon it. They break down within you the albumen that you receive into your organism with the egg. The egg itself is now made entirely of mineral within you. It is broken down and destroyed. All life is driven out of it. It is destroyed within you. At the walls of the intestines the albumen substance that you have taken into you from outside ceases to be albumen in any sense, becomes entirely mineral in character. And now it passes over into the ego-organisation; from this point the mineralised albumen is taken up by the ego-organisation.

Thus, the ego-organisation concerns itself only with what is mineral. And all mineral substances are changed through its action; in the human organism they become different from what they were outside it. No mineral substance can remain the same within the human organism as it is outside. The ego-organisation has to look after this in a very thorough manner. Nor is it only such substances as cooking salt and the like that are seized upon by the ego-organisation and inwardly changed to something quite different. The human being is surrounded by a certain condition of warmth, but that external condition of warmth must never be allowed to penetrate the human being. You can never have your finger full of that which is all around you as external warmth. This warmth can but act as a stimulus, you yourself must create and produce the warmth that you have within you. The moment you are merely, so to say, an object and do not yourself create your own warmth or cold, but let the warmth from outside extend its influence into you exactly as it does into any external object,—in that moment you become ill. The external warmth,—not even a substance, but the warmth itself makes you ill. Suppose you have here a towel or a sponge, and over there is a fire. The warmth of the fire, which can spread out all around quite easily, will permeate the towel or the sponge. The towel or sponge only carries a little further the radiating warmth of the fire. When, however, the warmth of the fire reaches the skin of the human being and acts upon the senses, stimulating them, then it must no longer simply spread in this way; then the reaction must come, the inner warmth must be created from within. If a person catches cold, his condition results from the fact that he has not merely let himself be stimulated to create his own inner warmth, but has let the external cold enter to some extent beneath the skin. Thus he does not take his place in the world as a fully active human being who fills himself with his own activity and his own impulses, but plays rather the part of an object that lets the activities and influences of the outer world pass through him. That is the essential nature of the ego-organisation that it takes up into itself what is mineral and completely changes it from within, converting it into something altogether different.

Not until we have died does the mineral turn back again into the mineral of external Nature. So long as we are alive on the Earth, and have the mineral enclosed in our skin, so long does the ego-organisation continue to change it perpetually. Similarly, whatever we take up into ourselves that is of a plant nature is perpetually changed by the working of the astral body. It is in everything of a mineral nature that the ego-organisation brings about a thorough metamorphosis; not merely in the solid mineral, but also in the liquid and gaseous mineral, and the mineral that is in the state of warmth or heat.

Of course, when we speak in quite an ordinary way, we may say: Here is some water. I drink it. Now I have the water inside me. The truth is, however, that the moment my organism receives the water, then by reason of the action of my ego-organisation, the water inside me is no longer the same as the water outside. It only becomes the same again when I give it off in the form of perspiration, or in some other way convert it into water. Inside my skin water is not water, it is living fluid.

In this manner we shall have to alter our thought about a great many things. To-day I have only been able to give you small indications. Think them over. Think how the albumen has to be broken down and disorganised in order that it may be exposed to the influences of the whole macrocosm. Think how the water I drink becomes in me living fluid and is no longer the inorganic water it was before, but is water permeated by the ego-organisation. Think how, when you eat cabbage—outside you it was cabbage, inside you the astral body receives the cabbage into itself and transforms it into something new. And here we come to the consideration of very important processes in the human body. We learn to perceive how we have in our metabolic system processes that are only one evolutionary stage removed from the metabolisms that we have, for example, in our brain—the metabolisms that go to make up the nervous system, and so forth. I will speak further on this tomorrow and make clear, in connection with these processes, the radical difference between men of the 12th and of the 20th century. We shall thus come to see the necessity for new impulses to enter in, if there is to be progress in the understanding of health and disease, and if the knowledge of man is not to die out altogether and nothing more ever be known of the healthy or of the diseased human being.

We stand to-day under the sign of a painful memory, and I want to place what we have to take for the theme of our lecture to-day into the sign of that painful memory. The lecture I was able to give exactly a year ago in our old Goetheanum,—those of you who were present will remember how it took its start from descriptions of Nature, of relationships that can be observed in Nature on Earth, and led from these up to the spiritual worlds and the revelations of the spiritual worlds in the writing of the stars. And you will remember how we were able then to bring the human heart, the human soul and spirit in their whole nature and being into close connection with what is found when one follows the path that leads away from the earthly into the distant stellar spaces, wherein the spiritual writes its Cosmic Script. And the words that I then wrote upon the blackboard, writing for the last time in the room that was so soon to be taken from us, bore within them this impulse and this purpose: to lift the human soul into spiritual heights.

So on that evening we were brought into direct and close touch with that to which our Goetheanum in its whole intention and character was devoted. And to-day you will allow me to speak to you again of these things, as it were in continuation of the lecture that was given here a year ago.

In the days preceding the burning of Ephesus, when men spoke of the Mysteries, provided they were men who had some understanding and feeling for them, they spoke of them somewhat in the following manner: Human knowledge, human wisdom has a home and a dwelling place in the Mysteries. And when in those olden times the Spiritual Guides of the Universe spoke of the Mysteries, when the Mysteries were spoken of in the super-sensible worlds—I may be permitted this expression, although of course it is only a figure of speech to describe how thought and influence streamed down from the super-sensible into the sensible worlds—when, therefore, the Mysteries were spoken of in the super-sensible worlds, then it was somewhat in the following way: ‘In the Mysteries men erect places where we Gods can find the men who do sacrifice and who understand us in the sacrifice.’

For in point of fact men of the old world, men of the old world who knew, were conscious that in the places of the Mysteries Gods meet with men; they knew how all that carries and sustains the world depends on what takes place between Gods and men in the sacred Mysteries.

But there is a word,—a word that has come down to us in history and that can speak powerfully to the human heart even in external historical tradition, but that speaks with peculiar force and earnestness when we see it shape itself out of strange and unparalleled events, when we see it written with eternal letters into the history of mankind, though the writing be only visible for a moment in the spirit. I declare to you that, wherever the eye of the spirit is turned to the deed of Herostratus, to the burning of Ephesus, then, in those flames of fire may be read the ancient word: The Jealousy of the Gods.

Among the many and diverse words that have come down to us from olden time, and that were in use in the life of olden times in the manner I have described,—among all the words in this physical world, this word is, I verily believe, one of the most awful: The Jealousy of the Gods. In those times the term God was applied to all beings of a super-sensible nature,—to every form of being that had no need to appear on Earth in a physical body. Many and varied kinds of Gods were differentiated. The Divine-Spiritual Beings who are most closely united with mankind, from Whom man in his innermost nature originated and by Whom he was launched into the stream of time, the same Beings Whom we recognise in the majesty of Nature and in her smallest manifestations, and Whom we discover too in that which lives in our own inmost selves,—these Divine-Spiritual Beings can never be jealous. Nevertheless in that ancient time the ‘Jealousy of the Gods’ was something very real to man. If we study the period of human development that led up to the time of Ephesus, we find that the more advanced members of the human race received into their being much of what the good Gods held out to them in the Mysteries. For it is true to say that an intimate relationship exists between good human hearts and the good Gods, and this intimate relationship was knit closer and closer in the Mysteries. And thus it came to pass that certain other divine Beings, Luciferic-Ahrimanic divine Beings were made aware, that man was being drawn nearer and nearer to the good Gods. And there arose a jealousy on the part of the Gods, a jealousy concerning man. Over and over again in human history we have to hear how a man who strives after the Spirit falls victim to a tragic destiny. In olden times such an event was spoken of as brought about by the Jealousy of the Gods.

The Greeks knew very well that this Jealousy of the Gods exists; they traced back to it much of what took place in the history of man. With the burning of Ephesus it was made manifest that further spiritual evolution was only possible if men became conscious that there are Gods—that is, super-sensible Beings—who are jealous of the further advance of man.

It is this that gives the peculiar colouring to all history that follows the burning of Ephesus,—or I may also say, the birth of Alexander. And it is essential for a right understanding of the Mystery of Golgotha. We have to see a world filled with the jealousy of certain kinds of Gods. Ever since a time that follows soon after the Persian War, the soul-atmosphere of the world was filled with the effects of this Jealousy of the Gods. And that which had to be done in the Macedonian time had to be done in the full consciousness that the Jealousy of the Gods pervades the spiritual atmosphere over the surface of the Earth. But it was done with courage and daring, and in spite of the misunderstandings of Gods and men.

Into this atmosphere, filled with the Jealousy of the Gods, sank then the Deed of Him Who was capable of the greatest Love that can exist in the world. We only see the Mystery of Golgotha in a true light, when we add to all else we have learned concerning it this picture: the dark bank of cloud that hung in olden time over Greece, Macedonia, Asia Minor, Northern Africa and Southern Europe, the dark cloud that is the expression of the Jealousy of the Gods. And then into this cloud-filled atmosphere we behold streaming down the warm and gentle rays of the Love that pours through the Mystery of Golgotha.

But when we come to our own time, then that which in earlier ages was—if I may put it so—an affair between Gods and men, must in this epoch of human freedom be played out below in the physical life of men. We can already describe how it is being so played out. In olden times, when men thought of the Mysteries, it was in this sense that they spoke of them:—In the Mysteries, they said, human knowledge, human wisdom has a home. And when the Mysteries were spoken of among the Gods, it was said: When we descend into the Mysteries, we find the sacrifice done by human beings, and in the sacrificing human being we are understood. The burning of Ephesus marks the beginning of the epoch that saw the gradual and complete disappearance of the Mysteries in their ancient form.

I have told you how the Mysteries were continued here and there—in a sublime manner, for example, in the Mysteries of Hibernia, where the Mystery of Golgotha was celebrated in the ritual at the very time when it was taking place physically over in Palestine. Men had knowledge of it not through physical but through spiritual means of communication. Notwithstanding these survivals, the real being of the Mysteries retreated more and more in the physical world. The external centres which were the meeting places for Gods and men lost more and more of their significance. By the time of the 13th and 14th centuries it had almost entirely gone. For whoever would find the way, for example, to the Holy Graal, must know how to tread spiritual paths. In the olden times, before the burning of Ephesus, man trod physical paths. In the Middle Ages it is spiritual paths that he must tread.

Spiritual paths above all were necessary from the 13th, 14th and especially the 15th century onwards, if one wanted to receive true Rosicrucian instruction. For the temples of the Rosicrucians were hidden from outer physical experience. Many a true Rosicrucian frequented these temples, it is true, but no outer physical eye of man could find them. None the less there were disciples who came to these old Rosicrucians; for in scattered places the true Rosicrucians could indeed be found. They were like hermits of wisdom and of consecrated human action. And any man who was able to perceive the language of the Gods in the gentle radiance of their eyes, would find them so. I am not speaking in mere pictures. I am relating a reality, and a reality which was of cardinal importance for that time. To find the Rosicrucian master the pupil must first attain the faculty to perceive the language of Heaven in the gentle light of the physical eye. Then it was possible to find here and there in Mid-Europe, in the 14th and 15th centuries, these remarkable men, living in the most simple and unpretentious manner—men who were God-inspired, connected in their inner life with the spiritual temples which did indeed exist, albeit the access to them was no less difficult than the access to the Holy Graal, as described in the well-known legend.

Observing in the spirit what took place between such a Rosicrucian master and his pupil, we can hear many a conversation, wherein is shown once again—though in a form that belongs to a more modern age—how the Wisdom of the Gods lives and moves upon Earth. For the instructions of these masters were essentially objective and concrete. There in his loneliness some Rosicrucian master was found by the pupil who had spared no pains to seek him out. Gazing into the gentle eyes of the master out of which spoke the language of the Gods, this pupil would receive in all humility an instruction somewhat as follows:—

Look, my son, at your own being! You carry about with you a body which your physical eyes can see. The centre of the Earth supplies this body with the forces which make it visible. This is your physical body.

But look around you at your environment on Earth. Behold the stones! They can exist on Earth by themselves, they are at home here. And if they have once assumed a certain form, they can preserve this form by virtue of the Earthly forces. Look at the crystal; it bears its form within it. The Earth enables it to keep the form which belongs to its own being. Your physical body cannot do that. When your soul leaves it, it is destroyed, dissolved in dust. The Earth has no power over your physical body. It has the power to form and also to maintain the transparent crystal mountains with their wonderful configuration; but the Earth has no power to maintain the form of your physical body, it must dissolve it in to dust. Your physical body is not of the Earth, it is of high spirituality. To Seraphim, Cherubim and Thrones belongs the form and figure of your physical body. Not to the Earth, but to the highest spiritual powers which are accessible to men, does this physical body of yours belong. The Earth can destroy it, but never build it up.

And now, within this physical body dwells an etheric body. The day will come when your physical body will be received by the Earth for its destruction. Then will your etheric body dissolve in the wide expanse of the Cosmos. The far spaces of the Cosmos can indeed dissolve, but they again cannot build your etheric body. Only the divine spiritual Beings can build it up—the Beings of the hierarchy of Dynamis, Exusiai and Kyriotetes. To them you owe your etheric body.

With your physical body you unite the physical substances of the Earth. But that which is within you transforms these substances into something utterly different from all that is physically present in the environment of the physical body. Your etheric body brings into movement all that is fluid within you, all that is water within you. The saps and fluids in their circulation stand under the influence of your physical body. Behold your blood! It is the Exusiai, Dynamis and Kyriotetes who cause the blood to circulate as a fluid through your veins. It is only as a physical body that you are man; in the etheric body you are still animal, albeit an animal that is inspirited by the second Hierarchy.

What I have here gathered up into a very few words was the substance of a prolonged instruction given by that master in the gentle light of whose eyes the pupil discerned the language of Heaven. And then his attention was turned to the third member of the human being, which we call the astral body. And it was made clear to him that this astral body contains the impulse for the breathing—for all that is airy in the human organism, for all that pulsates as air within this body of ours. Now it is true that for a long time after man has passed through the gate of Death, the earthly nature strives as it were to make disturbances in the airy element, so much so that the clairvoyant vision can observe in the atmospheric phenomena of the Earth for many years, the noising of the astral bodies of the dead. Nevertheless the Earth with its encircling sphere can do no other in relation to the impulses of the astral body too than dissolve them. For these again can only be created by Beings of the third Hierarchy—the Archai, Archangeloi and Angeloi.

And then the master said,—and his words struck deep into the heart of his pupil: In your physical body, inasmuch as you receive within you the mineral kingdom and transform it, you belong to the Seraphim, Cherubim and Thrones. In so far as you are an etheric body, you are like an animal. Here however you belong to the Spirits whom we designated as those of the second Hierarchy—the Kyriotetes, Exusiai, Dynamis. Inasmuch as you live and move in the fluid element, you belong not to the Earth but to this Hierarchy. And as you live and move in the airy element, you belong not to the Earth but to the Hierarchy of Archai, Archangeloi and Angeloi.

When the pupil had received this instruction in sufficient measure, he no longer felt that he belonged to the Earth. He felt forces proceeding from his physical, etheric and astral bodies which united him with the Hierarchies. For he felt how, through the mineral world, he is united with the first Hierarchy; through the water of the earth, with the second Hierarchy; and through the atmosphere, with the third Hierarchy. And it was plain to him that he is an inhabitant of Earth purely and solely on account of the element of warmth that he bears within him. In this way the Rosicrucian pupil came to the perception that the warmth, the physical warmth he has within him, is what makes him ‘man on earth.’ And he learned increasingly to feel how closely related warmth of soul and warmth of spirit are to physical warmth.

The man of later times gradually lost all knowledge of how his physical, etheric and astral content are connected—through the solid, the fluid and the aeriform—with the Divine. The Rosicrucian pupil however knew this well; he knew that what made him earthly was not these elements at all, but the element of warmth.

The moment the pupil of the Rosicrucian teacher perceived this secret of the connection of the element of warmth with his life on earth as earthly man, in that moment he knew how to link the human in him on to the spiritual.

Now the pupils who came to these often-time humble haunts where such Rosicrucian masters lived were prepared before-hand in a way that was frequently quite unsought by them and that appeared no less than marvellous in their eyes. An intimation would come to them, to one in one way, to another in another; often to all outward appearance it came by a mere chance. The intimation would be given to them: You must seek out a place where you may be able to bring your own spiritual nature into contact with the Spiritual of the Cosmos. And after the pupil had received the instruction of which I told you, then, yes then, he was able to say to the master: I go from you with the greatest comfort that could ever be to me on Earth. For in that you have shown to me how earthly man has his own proper element in warmth, you have opened to me the possibility to connect my physical nature with soul and spirit. The hard bones, the flowing blood, the airy breath,—into none of these do I bring my soul nature, but only into the element of warmth.

It was with an infinite peace and rest that the pupils departed from their masters in those days. In their countenance was expressed the great comfort they had received, and from this look of peace developed gradually that mild and gentle gaze whence the language of Heaven can speak. And so we find in those earlier times and on into the first third of the fifteenth century a profound instruction of the soul being given in these humble and secluded haunts. It is indeed unknown as compared with the events of which external history relates. It went on none the less, and was an instruction that took deep hold of the entire human being, an instruction that made it possible for the human soul to link its own nature on to the sphere of the Cosmic-Spiritual.

This whole spiritual atmosphere has disappeared in the course of the later centuries. It is no longer present in our civilisation. An external, God-estranged civilisation has spread abroad over the countries that once upon a time saw such a civilisation as I have just described to you. We stand here to-day bearing within us the memory of many a scene like that I have described, although the memory can only be created in the Spirit in the astral light. And when we look back into the older times, that are so often pictured to us as times of darkness, and then turn our gaze upon our own times, a deep longing arises in our hearts. From out of the spiritual revelations that have been accessible to man since the last third of the nineteenth century, is born a longing to speak to men once more in a spiritual way. But to do so it is not enough to speak with abstract words; to speak spiritually demands the use of manifold signs and symbols; our speech has to be wide and comprehensive. Such a language, my dear friends, such a form of speech as needed to be found for the Spiritual Beings Who have to speak to modern humanity, was given to us in the forms of the Goetheanum that was destroyed by fire a year ago. In very truth, the forms were built and moulded to that end, that what was spoken from the platform in ideas should speak on further in them.

And so in a certain sense we may say that in the Goetheanum we had something that could awaken in an altogether new form a memory of the old.

When the pupil for initiation entered the Temple of Ephesus, his attention was directed to the statue of which I have spoken to you in these lectures, and the statue called to him in the language of the heart with these words: Unite yourself with the Cosmic Ether, and you will behold the earthly from out of the Ether heights.

Many a pupil at Ephesus did so behold the earthly from out of the Ether heights. And a certain race of the Gods was jealous. Centuries before the Mystery of Golgotha took place, brave men were already finding a way to meet this Jealousy of the Gods. They found a way to foster what had come down to them from ancient holier years of mankind's history and had worked powerfully in human evolution up to the time of the burning of Ephesus. True, it was dim now and feeble, but even in this enfeebled form it could still continue to work.

Had our Goetheanum been brought to completion, then as you entered from the West, your glance would have fallen on a Statue that bade man know himself in his cosmic nature, know himself as a being set between the powers of Lucifer and Ahriman, God-maintained in the midst in inner balance of being. And when you looked upon the forms of the columns and of the architrave, these forms spoke a language that was a continuation of the language which was spoken in words from the platform, where it was sought to express the spiritual in ideas. The sound of the words flowed on into the plastically moulded forms. And above in the dome were displayed the scenes which could bring before the eye of the soul the past evolution of mankind. Whoever looked upon this Goetheanum with feeling and understanding could find in it a memory of the Temple of Ephesus.

The memory, however, grew to be terribly painful. For in a manner not at all unlike that which befell Ephesus in earlier time, exactly at the moment in its evolution when the Goetheanum was ready to become the bearer of the renewal of spiritual life, in that very moment was flung into it the burning brand.

My dear friends, our pain was deep and indescribable. But we made the resolve to go forward, unhindered by this tragedy that had befallen us, to continue our work for the spiritual world. For we were able to say to ourselves in the depths of our own hearts: When we look upon the flames that rose from Ephesus, we behold written into the flames these words: The Jealousy of the Gods. That was a time when men were still unfree and must needs follow the Will of the good and the evil Gods. In our day men are marked out for freedom. A year ago, on New Year's Eve, we beheld the destroying flames. The red glow rose to Heaven. Tongues of flame, dark blue and reddish yellow, curled their way up through the general sea of fire. They came from the metal instruments concealed in the Goetheanum; the gigantic sea of fire glowed with all manner of changing colours. And as one gazed into this sea of flame with its swift lines and tongues of colour, one had perforce to read these words, words that spoke pain for the soul: The Jealousy of Man.

Thus are the words that speak from epoch to epoch in human evolution bound together in deepest calamity and unhappiness. In the time when man still looked up to the Gods in unfreedom, but had it as his task to make himself free, there was a word that was significant of the deepest unhappiness and grief to him. He beheld inscribed into the flames: The Jealousy of the Gods. And by a thread of spiritual evolution our own calamity is linked with this word. We live in a time when man has to find in himself the power of freedom, and now we behold inscribed in the flames another word: The Jealousy of Man. In Ephesus the statue of the Gods; here in the Goetheanum the statue of Man, the statue of the Representative of mankind, Christ Jesus. In Him, identifying ourselves in all humility with Him, we thought to attain to knowledge, even as once in their way, a way that is no longer fully understood by mankind to-day, the pupils of Ephesus attained to knowledge in Diana of Ephesus.

The pain does not grow less when one beholds in the light of history what that New Year's Eve brought to us a year ago. When for the last time it was given to me to stand on the platform that was itself built in harmony with the whole Goetheanum, it was my intention and purpose to direct the gaze, the spiritual gaze of those present away from earthly realms to the ascent into the starry worlds where the Will and Wisdom, where the Light of the Spiritual Cosmos are brought to expression. I know well, sponsors were there present at that time,—spirits of those who in the Middle Ages taught their pupils in the manner I have described to you.

One hour after the last word had been spoken, I was summoned to the fire at the Goetheanum. At the fire of the Goetheanum we passed the whole of that New Year night.

One has but to speak these words, and thoughts unutterable surge up in all our hearts and souls. But whenever it has happened in the evolution of mankind that something sacred to that evolution has been torn away, then there have always been a few who have pledged themselves, after the dissolution of the physical, to continue the work in the Spirit, to which the physical was dedicated. And gathered here as we are in the moment that marks the anniversary of the tragic loss of our Goetheanum, we do well to remember that we shall bring our souls into the right attitude for this gathering when we pledge ourselves one and all to bear onward in the Spirit on the advancing wave of human progress that which was expressed in physical form and in physical image in the Goetheanum, and which has been torn away from physical sight by a deed like the deed of Herostratus. Our pain and grief cling to the old Goetheanum. But we shall only show ourselves worthy of having been permitted to build this Goetheanum, if we fulfil the task that yet remains to us, if we take to-day a solemn pledge, each one of us before the highest, the Divine, that he bears within his soul, a pledge to hold faithfully in remembrance the spiritual impulses that have had their outward expression in the Goetheanum that is gone. The Goetheanum could be taken from us: the spirit of the Goetheanum, if so be that in all sincerity we will to keep it, can never be taken from us. It will least of all be taken from us, if in this solemn hour, that is divided by but a short space of time from the actual moment a year ago, when the flames burst forth from our beloved Goetheanum,—if in this solemn hour we not only feel a renewal of our pain, but out of the very pain pledge ourselves to remain loyal to the Spirit to which we erected our Goetheanum, building it up through ten years of work. If this resolve wells up to-day in all sincerity from the depths of our hearts, if we are able to change the pain and grief into the impulse to action, then we shall also change the sorrowful event into blessing. The pain cannot thereby be made less, but it rests with us to find in the pain the urge to action, to action in the Spirit.

Even so let us look back upon the terrible flames of fire that filled us with such unutterable sadness, but let us at the same time feel how to-day, as we dedicate ourselves with solemn vow to the highest divine forces that are within us, a spiritual flame lights up in our hearts. Yea, and the flame in our hearts shall shed new light and warmth on all that was purposed and willed in the Goetheanum, on all that we are now resolved to carry forward on the advancing wave of human evolution.

Let us then, my dear friends, recall at this time and write deeper in our hearts the words that I was able to speak to you over there in the Goetheanum almost in the very same moment of time a year ago. On that night I spoke somewhat in the following words: We are at the eve of a New Year, we must go forward to meet an oncoming Cosmic New Year. If the Goetheanum were still standing, this demand and this call could in this moment be renewed. It is no longer standing. The same call can, however, be uttered again on this New Year's Eve, can be uttered, as I believe, with redoubled power just because the Goetheanum is no longer there. Let us carry over the soul of the Goetheanum into the Cosmic New Year, let us try to erect in the new Goetheanum a worthy memorial to the old!

May our hearts be thus knit to the old Goetheanum, which we had perforce to give over to the elements. And may our hearts be closely knit to the spirit and the soul of this Goetheanum. And with this solemn pledge to the highest and the best that is in us, we will carry our life over not only into the New Year, but into the Cosmic New Year, we will go forward into it, strong for action, upheld and guided in soul and spirit.

My dear friends, you received me by rising in memory of the old Goetheanum. Let us now rise in token that we pledge ourselves to continue working in the spirit of the Goetheanum with the best and highest forces that we have within us. So be it. Amen.

And we will hold to this our solemn pledge, we will be true to it as long as we are able, we will hold to it with our will,—for our will it is that unites these human souls of ours with the souls of the Gods. We will remain faithful to the spirit in which at a certain moment of our life we first sought the Spiritual Science of the Goetheanum.

And let us understand and know how to keep the promise we have made.

Of peculiar importance for the understanding of the history of the West in its relation to the East is the period that lies between three or four hundred years before, and three or four hundred years after, the Mystery of Golgotha. The real significance of the events we have been considering, events that culminated in the rise of Aristotelianism and in the expeditions of Alexander to Asia, is contained in the fact that they form, as it were, the last Act in that civilisation of the East which was still immersed in the impulses derived from the Mysteries.

A final end was put to the genuine and pure Mystery impulse of the East by the criminal burning of Ephesus. After that we find only traditions of the Mysteries, traditions and shadow-pictures,—the remains, so to speak, that were left over for Europe and especially for Greece, of the old divinely-inspired civilisation. And four hundred years after the Mystery of Golgotha another great event took place, which serves to show what was still left of the ruins—for so we might call them—of the Mysteries.

Let us look at the figure of Julian the Apostate.¹ Julian the Apostate, Emperor of Rome, was initiated, in the 4th century, as far as initiation was then possible, by one of the last of the hierophants of the Eleusinian Mysteries. This means that he entered into an experience of the old Divine secrets of the East, in so far as such an experience could still be gained in the Eleusinian Mysteries.

At the beginning of the period we are considering, stands the burning of Ephesus; and the day of the burning of Ephesus is also the day on which Alexander the Great was born. At the end of the period, in 363, we have the day of the death—the terrible and significant death—of Julian the Apostate far away in Asia. Midway between these two days stands the Mystery of Golgotha.

And now let us examine a little this period of time as it appears in the setting of the whole history of human evolution. If we want to look back beyond this period into the earlier evolution of mankind, we have first to bring about a change in our power of vision and perception, a change that is very similar to one of which we hear in another connection. Only we do not often bring the things together in thought.

You will remember how in my book Theosophy I had to describe the different worlds that come under consideration for man. I described them as the physical world; a transition world bordering on it, namely, the Soul-world; and then the world into which only the highest part of our nature can find entrance, the Spirit-land. Leaving out of account the special qualities of this Spirit-land, through which present-day man passes between death and a new birth, and looking only at its more general qualities and characteristics, we find that we have to give a new orientation to our whole thought and feeling, before we can comprehend the Land of the Spirits. And the remarkable thing is that we have to change and re-orientate our inner life of thought and feeling in just the same way when we want to comprehend what lies beyond the period I have defined. We shall do wrong to imagine that we can understand what came before the burning of Ephesus with the conceptions and ideas that suffice for the world of to-day. We need to form other concepts and other ideas to enable us to look across the years to human beings who still knew that as surely as man is united through breathing with the air outside him, so surely is he in constant union through his soul with the Gods.

Starting then from this world, the world that is a kind of earthly Devachan, earthly Spirit-land,—for the physical world fails us when we want to picture it,—we came into the interim period, lasting from about 356 B.C. to 363 A.D. And now what follows? Over in Europe we find the world from out of which present-day humanity is on the point of emerging into something new, even as the humanity of olden times came forth from the Oriental world, passed through the Greek world, and then into the realm of Rome.

Setting aside for the moment what went on in the inner places of the Mysteries, we have to see in the civilisation that has grown up through the centuries of the Middle Ages and developed on into our own time, a civilisation that has been formed on the basis of what the human being himself can produce with the help of his own conceptions and ideas. We may see a beginning in this direction in Greece, from the time of Herodotus onward. Herodotus describes the facts of history in an external way, he makes no allusion, or at most very slight allusion, to the spiritual. And others after him go further in the same direction. Nevertheless in Greece we always feel a last breath, as it were, from those shadow-pictures that were there to remind man of the spiritual life. With Rome on the other hand begins the period to which man to-day may still feel himself related, the period that has an altogether new way of thought and feeling, different even from what we have observed in Greece. Only here and there in the Roman world do we find a personality such as Julian the Apostate who feels something like an irresistible longing after the old world, and evinces a certain honesty in getting himself initiated into the Eleusinian Mysteries.

What Julian, however, is able to receive in these Mysteries has no longer the force of knowledge. And what is more, he belongs to a world where men are no longer able to grasp in their soul the traditions from the Mysteries of the East.

Present-day mankind would never have come into being if Asia had not been followed first by Greece and then by Rome. Present-day mankind is built up upon personality, upon the personality of the individual. Eastern mankind was not so built up. The individual of the East felt himself part of a continuous divine process. The Gods had their purposes in Earth evolution. The Gods willed this or that, and this or that came to pass on the Earth below. The Gods worked on the will of men, inspiring them. Those powerful and great personalities in the East of whom I spoke to you—all that they did was inspired from the Gods. Gods willed: men carried it into effect. And the Mysteries were ordered and arranged in olden times to this end,—to bring Divine will and human action into line.

In Ephesus we first find a difference. There the pupils in the Mysteries, as I have told you, had to be watchful for their own condition of ripeness and no longer to observe seasons and times of year. There the first sign of personality makes its appearance. There in earlier incarnations Aristotle and Alexander the Great had received the impulse towards personality.

But now comes a new period. It is in the early dawn of this new period when Julian the Apostate experiences as it were the last longing of man to partake, even in that late age, in the Mysteries of the East. Now the soul of man begins to grow different again from what it was in Greece.

Picture to yourselves once more a man who has received some training in the Ephesian Mysteries. His constitution of soul is not derived from these Mysteries: he owes it to the simple fact that he is living in that age. When to-day a man recollects, when, as we say, he bethinks himself, what can he call to mind? He can call to mind something that he himself experienced in person during his present life, perhaps something that he experienced 20 or 30 years ago. This inward recollection in thought does not of course go further back than his own personal life. With the man who belonged, for instance, to the Ephesian civilisation it was otherwise. If he had received, even in a small degree, the training that could be had in Ephesus, then it was so with him that when he bethought himself in recollection, there emerged in his soul, instead of the memories that are limited to personal life, events of pre-earthly existence, events that preceded the Earth period of evolution. He beheld the Moon evolution, the Sun evolution, beholding them in the several kingdoms of Nature. He was able, too, to look within himself, and see the union of man with the Cosmic All; he saw how man depends on and is linked with the Cosmos. And all this that lived in his soul was true, ‘own’ memory, it was the cosmic memory of man.

We may therefore say that we are here dealing with a period when in Ephesus man was able to experience the secrets of the Universe. The human soul had memory of the far-past ages of the Cosmos.

This remembering was preceded in evolution by something else: it was preceded by an actual living within those earlier times. What remained was a looking back. In the time, however, of which the Gilgamesh Epic relates, we cannot speak of a memory of past ages in the Cosmos, we must speak of a present experience of what is past.

After the time of cosmic memory came what I have called the interim time between Alexander and Julian the Apostate. For the moment we will pass by this period. Then follows the age that gave birth to the western civilisation of the Middle Ages and of modern times. Here there is no longer a memory of the cosmic past, still less an experience in the present of the past; nothing is left but tradition.

Present Experience of the Past.
Memory of the Cosmic Past.
Tradition.

Men can now write down what has happened. History begins. History makes its first appearance in the Roman period. Think, my dear friends, what a tremendous change we have here! Think how the pupils in the Ephesian Mysteries lived with time. They needed no history books. To write down what happened would have been to them laughable. One only needed to ponder and meditate deeply enough, and what had happened would rise up before one from out of the depths of consciousness. Here was no demonstration of psycho-analysis such as a modern doctor might make: the human soul took the greatest delight in fetching up in this way out of a living memory that which had been in the past. In the time that followed, however, mankind as such had forgotten, and the necessity arose of writing down what happened. But all the while that man had to let his ancient power of cosmic memory crumble away, and begin in a clumsy manner to write down the great events of the world,—all this time personal memory, personal recollection was evolving in his inner being. For every age has its own mission, every age its own task.

Here you have the other side of that which I set before you in the very first lectures of this course, when I described the rise of what we designated ‘memory in time.’ This memory in time, or temporal memory, had, so to say, its cradle in Greece, grew up through the Roman culture into the Middle Ages and on into modern times. In the time of Julian the Apostate the seed was already sown for the civilisation based on personality, as is testified by the fact that Julian the Apostate found it, after all, of no avail to let himself be initiated into the Eleusinian Mysteries.

We have now come to the period when the man of the West, beginning from the 3rd or 4th century after Christ and continuing down to our own time, lives his life on Earth entirely outside the spiritual world, lives in concepts and ideas, in mere abstractions. In Rome the very Gods themselves became abstractions. We have reached a time when mankind has no longer any knowledge of a living connection with the spiritual world. The Earth is no longer Asia, the lowest of the Heavens, the Earth is a world for itself, and the Heavens are far away, dim and darkened for man's view. Now is the time when man evolves personality, under the influence of the Roman culture that is spread abroad over the lands of the West. As we had to speak of a soul-world bordering on the spiritual world, on the land of the Spirits that is above,—so, bordering on this spiritual oriental world is the civilisation of the West; we may call it a kind of soul-world in time. This is the world that reaches right down to our own day. And now, in our time, although most men are not at all alive to the fact, another stupendous change is again taking place.

Some of you who often listen to my lectures will know that I do not readily call any period a period of transition, for in truth every period is such,—every period marks a transition from what comes earlier to what comes later. The point is that we should recognise for each period the nature of the transition.

What I have said will already have suggested that in this case it is as though, having passed from the Spirit-land into the Soul-world one were to come thence into the physical world. In modern civilisation as it has evolved up till now, we have been able to catch again and again echoes of the spiritual. Materialism itself has not been without its echoes of the spirit. True and genuine materialism in all domains has only been with us since the middle of the 19th century, and is still understood by very few in its full significance. It is there, however, with gigantic force, and to-day we are going through a transition to a third world, that is in reality as different from the preceding Roman world as this latter was different from the oriental.

Now there is one period of time that has had to be left out in tracing this evolution: the period between Alexander and Julian. In the middle of this period fell the Mystery of Golgotha. Those to whom the Mystery of Golgotha was brought did not receive it as men who understood the Mysteries, otherwise they would have had quite different ideas of the Christ Who lived in the man Jesus of Nazareth. A few there were, a few contemporaries of the Mystery of Golgotha, who had been initiated in the Mysteries, and these were still able to have such ideas of Him. But by far the greater part of Western humanity had no ideas with which to comprehend spiritually the Mystery of Golgotha. Hence the first way by which the Mystery of Golgotha found place on Earth was the way of external tradition. Only in the very earliest centuries were there those who were able to comprehend spiritually, from their connection with the Mysteries, what took place at the Mystery of Golgotha.

Nor is this all. There is something else, of which I have told you in recent lectures,² and we must return to it here. Over in Hibernia, in Ireland, were still the echoes of the ancient Atlantean wisdom. In the Mysteries of Hibernia, of which I have given you a brief description, were two Statues that worked suggestively on men, making it possible for them to behold the world exactly as the men of ancient Atlantis had seen it. Strictly guarded were these Mysteries of Hibernia, hidden in an atmosphere of intense earnestness. There they stood in the centuries before the Mystery of Golgotha, and there they remained at the time of the Mystery of Golgotha. Over in Asia the Mystery of Golgotha took place; in Jerusalem the events came to pass that were later made known to men in the Gospels by the way of tradition. But in the moment when the tragedy of the Mystery of Golgotha was being enacted in Palestine, in that very moment it was known and beheld clairvoyantly in the Mysteries of Hibernia. No report was brought by word of mouth, no communication whatever was possible; but in the Mysteries of Hibernia the event was fulfilled in a symbol, in a picture, at the same time that it was fulfilled in actual fact in Jerusalem. Men came to know of it, not through tradition but by a spiritual path. Whilst in Palestine that most majestic and sublime event was being enacted in concrete physical reality,—over in Hibernia, in the Mysteries, the way had been so prepared through the performance of certain rites that at the very time when the Mystery of Golgotha was fulfilled, a living picture of it was present in the astral light.

The events in human evolution are closely linked together; there is, as it were, a kind of valley or chasm moving at this time over the world, into which man's old nearness with the Gods gradually disappears.

In the East the ancient vision of the Gods fell into decay after the burning of Ephesus. In Hibernia it remained on until some centuries after Christ, but even there too the time came when it had to depart. Tradition developed in its stead, the Mystery of Golgotha was transmitted by the way of oral tradition; and we find growing up in the West a civilisation that rests wholly on oral tradition. Later it comes to rely rather on external observation of Nature, on an investigation of Nature with the senses; but this after all is only what corresponds in the realm of Nature to tradition, written or oral, in the realm of history.

Here then we have the civilisation of personality. And in that civilisation the Mystery of Golgotha, with all that pertains to the spirit, is no longer perceived by man, it is merely handed down as history.

We must place this picture in all clearness before us, the picture of a civilisation from which the spiritual is excluded. It begins from the time that followed Julian the Apostate, and not until towards the end of the 19th century, beginning from the end of the seventies, did there come, as it were, a new call to humanity from the spiritual heights. Then began the age that I have often described as the Age of Michael. To-day I want to characterise it as the age when man, if he wishes to remain at the old materialism—and a great part of mankind does wish so to remain—will inevitably fall into a terrible abyss; he has absolutely no alternative but to go under and become sub-human, he simply cannot maintain himself on the human level. If man would keep on the human level, he must open his senses to the spiritual revelations that have again been made accessible since the end of the 19th century. That is now an absolute necessity.

For you must know that great spiritual forces were at work in Herostratus. He was, so to speak, the last dagger stretched out by certain spiritual powers from Asia. When he flung the burning torch into the Temple of Ephesus, demonic beings were behind him, holding him as one holds a sword,—or as it might be, a torch; he was but the sword or torch in their hands. For these demonic beings had determined to let nothing of the Spirit go over into the coming European civilisation; the spiritual was to be absolutely debarred entry there.

Aristotle and Alexander the Great placed themselves in direct opposition to the working of these beings. For what was it they accomplished in history? Through the expeditions of Alexander, the Nature knowledge of Aristotle was carried over into Asia; a pure knowledge of Nature was spread abroad. Not in Egypt alone, but all over Asia Alexander founded academies, and in these academies made a home for the ancient wisdom, where the study of it could still continue. Here too, the wise men of Greece were ever and again able to find a refuge. Alexander brought it about that a true understanding of Nature was carried into Asia.

Into Europe it could not find entrance in the same way. Europe could not in all honesty receive it. She wanted only external knowledge, external culture, external civilisation. Therefore did Aristotle's pupil Theophrastus take out of Aristotelianism what the West could accept and bring that over. It was the more logical writings that the West received. But that meant a great deal. For Aristotle's works have a character all their own; they read differently from the works of other authors, and his more abstract and logical writings are no exception. Do but make the experiment of reading first Plato and then Aristotle with inner concentration and in a meditative spirit, and you will find that each gives you quite a different experience.

When a modern man reads Plato with true spiritual feeling and in an attitude of meditation, after a time he begins to feel as though his head were a littler higher than his physical head actually is, as though he had, so to speak, grown out beyond his physical organism. That is absolutely the experience of anyone who reads Plato, provided he does not read him in an altogether dry manner.

With Aristotle it is different. With Aristotle you never have the feeling that you are coming out of your body. When you read Aristotle after having prepared yourself by meditation, you will find that he works right into the physical man. Your physical man makes a step forward through the reading of Aristotle. His logic works; it is not a logic that one merely observes and considers, it is a logic that works in the inner being. Aristotle himself is a stage higher than all the pedants who came after him, and who developed logic from him. In a certain sense we may say with truth that Aristotle's works are only rightly comprehended when they are taken as books for meditation. Think what would have happened if the Natural Scientific writings of Aristotle had gone over to the West as they were and come into Middle and Southern Europe. Men would, no doubt, have received a great deal from them, but in a way that did them harm. For the Natural Science that Aristotle was able to pass on to Alexander needed for its comprehension souls that were still touched with the spirit of the Ephesian age, the time that preceded the burning of Ephesus. Such souls could only be found over in Asia or in Egypt; and it was into these parts that this knowledge of Nature and insight into the Being of Nature were brought, by means of the expeditions of Alexander. Only later in a diluted form did they come over into Europe by many and diverse ways—especially, for example, by way of Spain,—but always in a very diluted or, as we might say, sifted form.

The writings of Aristotle that came over into Europe direct were his writings on logic and philosophy. These lived on, and found fresh life again in medieval scholasticism.

We have therefore these two streams. On the one hand we have always there a stream of wisdom that spreads far and wide, unobtrusively, among simple folk,—the secret source of much of medieval thought and insight. Long ago, through the expeditions of Alexander, it had made its way into Asia, and now it came back again into Europe by diverse channels, through Arabia, for instance, and later on following the path of the returning Crusaders. We find it in every corner of Europe,—inconspicuous, flowing silently in hidden places. To these places came men like Jacob Boehme,³ Paracelsus⁴ and a number more, to receive that which had come thither by many a roundabout path and was preserved in these scattered primitive circles of European life. We have had amongst us in Europe far more folk-wisdom than is generally supposed. The stream continues even now. It has poured its flood of wisdom into reservoirs like Valentine Wiegel⁵ or Paracelsus or Jacob Boehme,—and many more, whose names are less known. And sometimes it met there,—as for example, in Basil Valentine⁶—new in-pourings that came over later into Europe. In the Cloisters of the Middle Ages lived a true alchemistic wisdom, not an alchemy that demonstrates changes in matter merely, but an alchemy that demonstrates the inner nature of the changes in the human being himself in the Universe. The recognised scholars meanwhile were occupying themselves with the other Aristotle, with a misstated, sifted, ‘logicised’ Aristotle. This Aristotelian philosophy, however, which the scholiasts and subsequently the scientists studied, brought none the less a blessing to the West. For only in the 19th century, when men could no longer understand Aristotle and simply studied him as if he were a book to be read like any other and not a book whereon to exercise oneself in meditation—only in the 19th century has it come about that men no longer receive anything from Aristotle because he no longer lives and works in them. Until the 19th century Aristotle was a book for the exercise of meditation; but in the 19th century the whole tendency has been to change what was once exercise, work, active power into abstract knowledge,—to change ‘do’ and ‘can’ into ‘know.’

Let us look now at the line of development, that leads from Greece through Rome to the West. It will illustrate for us from another angle the great change we are considering. In Greece there was still the confident assurance that insight and understanding proceed from the whole human being. The teacher is the gymnast.⁷ From out of the whole human being in movement—for the Gods themselves work in the bodily movements of man—something is born that then comes forth and shows itself as human understanding. The gymnast is the teacher.

In Rome the rhetorician.⁸ steps into the place of the gymnast. Already something has been taken away from the human being in his entirety; nevertheless we have at least still a connection with a deed that is done by the human being in a part of his organism. What movement there is in our whole being when we speak! We speak with our heart and with our lungs, we speak right down to our diaphragm and below it! We cannot say that speaking lives as intensely in the whole human being as do the movements of the gymnast, but it lives in a great part of him. (As for thoughts, they of course are but an extract of what lives in speech). The rhetorician steps into the place of the gymnast. The gymnast has to do with the whole human being. The rhetorician shuts off the limbs, and has only to do with a part of the human being and with that which is sent up from this part into the head, and there becomes insight and understanding.

The third stage appears only in modern times and that is the stage of the professor.⁹ who trains nothing but the head of his pupils, who cares for nothing but thoughts. Professors of Eloquence were still appointed in some universities even as late as the 19th century, but these universities had no use for them, because it was no longer the custom to set any store by the art of speaking; thinking was all that mattered. The rhetorician died out. The doctors and professors, who looked after the least part of the human being, namely his head,—these became the leaders in education.

As long as the genuine Aristotle was still there, it was training, discipline, exercise that men gained from their study of him. The two streams remained side by side. And those of us who are not very young and who shared in the development of thought during the later decades of the 19th century, know well, if we have gone about among the country folk in the way that Paracelsus did, that a last remains of the medieval folk-knowledge, from which Jacob Boehme and Paracelsus drew, was still to be found in Europe even as late as the sixties and seventies of the last century. Moreover, it is also true that within certain orders and in the life of a certain narrow circle a kind of inner discipline in Aristotle was cultivated right up to the last decades of the 19th century. So that it has been possible in recent years still to meet here and there the last ramifications, as it were, of the Aristotelian wisdom that Alexander carried over into Asia and that returned to Europe through Asia Minor, Africa and Spain. It was the same wisdom that had come to new life in such men as Basil Valentine and those who came after him, and from which Jacob Boehme, Paracelsus and countless others had drawn. It was brought back to Europe also by yet another path, namely through the Crusaders. This Aristotelian wisdom lived on, scattered far and wide among the common people. In the later decades of the 19th century, one is thankful to say, the last echoes of the ancient Nature knowledge carried over into Asia by the expeditions of Alexander were still to be heard, even if sadly diminished and scarcely recognisable. In the old alchemy, in the old knowledge of the connections between the forces and substances of Nature that persisted so remarkably among simple country folk, we may discover again its last lingering echoes. To-day they have died away; to-day they are gone, they are no longer to be heard.

Similarly in these years one could still find isolated individuals who gave evidence of Aristotelian spiritual training; though to-day they too are gone. And thus what was carried east as well as what was carried west was preserved,—for that which was carried east came back again to the west. And it was possible in the seventies and eighties of the 19th century for one who could do so with new direct spiritual perception, to make contact with what was still living in these last and youngest children of the great events we have been describing.

There is, in truth, a wonderful interworking in all these things. For we can see how the expeditions of Alexander and the teachings of Aristotle had this end in view, to keep unbroken the threads that unite man with the ancient spirituality, to weave them as it were into the material civilisation that was to come, that so they might endure until such time as new spiritual revelations should be given.

From this point of view, we may gain a true understanding of the events of history, for it is often so that seemingly fruitless undertakings are fraught with deep significance for the historical evolution of mankind. It is easy enough to say that the expeditions of Alexander to Asia and to Egypt have been swept away and submerged. It is not so. It is easy to say that Aristotle ceased to be in the 19th century. But he did not. Both streams have lasted up to the very moment when it is possible to begin a renewed life of the Spirit.

I have told you on many occasions how the new life of the Spirit was able to begin at the end of the seventies, and how from the turn of the century onwards, it has been able to grow more and more. It is our task to receive in all its fullness the stream of spiritual life that is poured down to us from the heights.

And so to-day we find ourselves in a period that marks a genuine transition in the spiritual unfolding of man. And if we are not conscious of these wonderful connections and of how deeply the present is linked with the past, then we are in very truth asleep to important events that are taking place in the spiritual life of our time. And numbers of people are fast asleep to-day in regard to the most important events of all. But Anthroposophy is there for that very purpose,—to awaken man from sleep.

You who have come here for this Christmas Meeting,—I believe that all of you have felt an impulse that calls you to awaken. We are nearing the day—as this Meeting goes on, we shall have to pass the actual hour of the anniversary—we are coming to the day when the terrible flames burst forth that destroyed the Goetheanum. Let the world think what it will of the destruction by fire of the Goetheanum, in the evolution of the Anthroposophical movement the event of the fire has a tremendous significance.

We shall not however be able to judge of its full significance until we look beyond it to something more. We behold again the physical flames of fire flaring up on that night, we see the marvellous way in which the fusing metal of the organ-pipes and other metallic parts sent up a glow that caused that wonderful play of colour in the flames. And then we carry our memory over the year that has intervened. But in this memory must live the fact that the physical is Maya, that we have to seek the truth of the burning flames in the spiritual fire that it is ours now to kindle in our hearts and souls. In the midst of the physically burning Goetheanum shall arise for us a spiritually living Goetheanum.

I do not believe, my dear friends, that this can come to pass in the full, world-historic sense unless we can on the one hand look upon the flames mounting up in terrible tongues of fire from the Goetheanum that we have grown to love so dearly, and behold at the same time in the background that other treacherous burning of Ephesus, when Herostratus, guided by demonic powers, flung the flaming brand into the Temple. When we bring these two events together, setting one in the background and one in the foreground of our thought, we shall then have a picture that will perhaps have power to write deeply enough in our hearts what we have lost and what we must strive our utmost to build again.

• 1. Flavius Claudius Julianus, called the Apostate by the Christians, was Roman Emperor from 361–363.
• 2. See the 8th and 9th lectures in Mystery Knowledge and Mystery Centres.
• 3. (1575–1624), mystic. See Eleven European Mystics by Rudolf Steiner, Rudolf Steiner Publications, New York, 1971.
• 4. Theophrastus Paracelsus (1493–1541), physician. See Eleven European Mystics.
• 5. (1533–1588), mystic. See Eleven European Mystics.
• 6. Alchemist and Benedictine monk, lived from 1413 onwards in the Monastery of St. Peter in Erfurt. His writings were not discovered or printed till the beginning of the seventeenth century. See Eleven European Mystics.
• 7. Rudolf Steiner spoke in detail about this for instance in A Modern Art of Education by Rudolf Steiner, Rudolf Steiner Press, London, 1972 and Human Values in Education by Rudolf Steiner, Rudolf Steiner Press, London, 1971.
• 8. Rudolf Steiner spoke in detail about this for instance in A Modern Art of Education by Rudolf Steiner, Rudolf Steiner Press, London, 1972 and Human Values in Education by Rudolf Steiner, Rudolf Steiner Press, London, 1971.
• 9. Rudolf Steiner spoke in detail about this for instance in A Modern Art of Education by Rudolf Steiner, Rudolf Steiner Press, London, 1972 and Human Values in Education by Rudolf Steiner, Rudolf Steiner Press, London, 1971.

Dear fellow students, If I attempt to present to you today something from the field of what for a number of years I have been calling anthroposophically oriented spiritual science, I do so in the knowledge that this evening, in what is effectively a first lecture, I will be able to give nothing more than a few suggestions and that I am under no illusion that such a presentation will instantly create any kind of conviction. But perhaps it will be possible, after the general description that I will give, to satisfy specific wishes and to address specific questions in the discussion that follows.

In order not to take up too much of our time, I would like to address the most important point first, and that is to give a characteristic of what spiritual science in an anthroposophically oriented sense actually wants to be. It differs from what is usually called science in the method of its research. And it is convinced that, in the latest period of time, a serious and honest striving in science, if consistently pursued, must ultimately lead to its method. I would like to speak to you in a thoroughly scientific sense, since I myself truly did not start from any theological point of view, nor from any world-view questions or philosophies in the sense in which they are usually cultivated, but rather I myself started from technical studies. And out of technical studies themselves, this spiritual science presented itself to me as a necessity of our historical period of development. Therefore, I am particularly pleased to be able to speak to you this evening.

When we do natural science, in the sense of today's thinking, we first have something in front of us that extends around us as the world of sensual facts. And we then use our thinking, we use in particular our methodically trained thinking, to find laws from a corresponding pursuit of these sensual facts. We look for what we are accustomed to calling natural laws, historical laws and so on. This way of relating to the world is not something that the humanities reject, but they want to stand on the firm ground of this research. But it does its research, standing on this firm ground, I might say, by starting from the point of view of human life itself. It comes, precisely because it wants to do serious scientific research, simply to the limit of scientific knowledge, which is fully admitted by level-headed natural scientists. And with regard to what natural science can be, it is entirely on the side of those who say: In the summary of external facts, we advance to a certain level with scientific methodology, but we cannot go beyond a certain limit if we remain on the ground of this natural scientific research itself.

But then, when what is sought in ordinary life and also in ordinary natural science is achieved, only then does the goal of spiritual science as it is meant here begin. We come to certain boundary concepts by thinking about and understanding the facts around us. I am mentioning here only such limiting concepts, whether they are conceived as mere functions or as realities, limiting concepts such as atom, matter and so on. We operate at least with them, even if we do not seek demonic entities behind them. These limiting concepts, limiting ideas, which confront us particularly when we follow the scientific branches that are fundamental to technology, stand there as it were like pillars. And if you want to stop at the limits of ordinary science, you will remain standing right in front of these boundary pillars.

But for the spiritual researcher, as I mean him here, the actual work begins only at these border pillars. There it is a matter of the spiritual researcher, in what I call meditation - please do not take offense at this, it is a technical term like others - entering into a certain inner struggle, an inner struggling of life with these concepts, more or less with all the border concepts of natural science. And this inner struggle does not remain unfruitful for him.

In this context, I must mention a man who taught here in this city, at this university, in the second half of the last century, and who repeatedly emphasized this struggle that man enters into when he comes to the limits of ordinary science. It is Friedrich Theodor Vischer who knew something of what the human being can experience when he arrives at the concepts of matter, atom, natural law, force, and so on. What I mean here does not consist in brooding, but in consulting everything in the depths of our soul that has led to these concepts, in trying to live with these concepts in meditation.

What does that actually mean? It means establishing the inner discipline within oneself to be able to look, just as one otherwise looks at external objects, at what one finally has in one's soul when one arrives at such a borderline concept; I could name many others to you besides those I have just mentioned. Then, when one tries to concentrate the whole range of the soul on such concepts, abstracting from all other experiences, one makes an inward discovery. And this inner discovery is something quite overwhelming. It shows us that from a certain point in life, in our inner life, our concepts become something that grows in our soul through itself, that is different after such inner meditative work than it is when we take it only as the result of external observation. Just as we observe in the growing child how certain organs, which first appear more undifferentiated, become more differentiated, how we perceive how organs grow, so in such meditative devotion to the results of scientific experience we feel how an inner growth of the soul takes place. And then comes the shocking realization that it is not through speculation, not through speculative philosophy that one goes beyond what is called the limit of natural knowledge, but through direct experience, that is, by transforming what one has gained through thinking into inner experience of beholding.

That, ladies and gentlemen, is the first step that is taken. It can be clearly felt how the method becomes quite different and how, therefore, something completely new occurs in comparison to the usual scientific method, which can be objectively recognized more than by anyone else, but also by me, in that mere thinking, mere comprehension, passes over into inner experience. And then, through consistent, patient, persistent experience in this direction, what occurs cannot ultimately be called anything other than an experience of spiritual existence. One cannot speak about the experience of the spiritual world in any other way from an anthroposophically oriented spiritual science. For this experience of the spiritual world is not something that is innate in man. It is something that must be achieved by man. When one has reached a certain level of this experience, one realizes that our thinking, which we otherwise use to grasp our environment, is in a different relationship to our entire physical being than one is forced to assume from mere knowledge of nature.

From the mere knowledge of nature, one notices how the physical changes and transformations, with youth, with old age and so on, also change the states of the soul. With scientific thinking, one can go further physiologically. It can be shown how the nervous system and the brain actually express the structure and configuration of our thinking. And if you follow this matter consistently from one side, you can say: Yes, something emerges from something else, which of course today could only be established hypothetically, that which is thinking, that which is life in thought.

The one who has experienced this inwardly, which I have characterized as being able to be experienced, speaks differently, saying: When one walks, for my part over a soggy road or when a car drives over a soggy road, then one has the impression of furrows, of footsteps. It would obviously be quite wrong to put forward the theory, just because you don't know, that it must have been an extraterrestrial being that created these footsteps, these furrows, or to put forward the hypothesis that there are certain forces below the earth's surface that work in such a way that they have caused these footsteps, these furrows.

Thus one says – and I say expressly, with a certain right – from a scientific point of view: That which is the physiological formation of the brain is what, in the end, is expressed in the function of thinking. The person who has experienced what I have characterized does not say it that way; they say: Just as these grooves and furrows are not raised from within by the inner forces of the earth, but rather as if something has passed over them, so the physical brain has been placed in its furrows by the body-free thinking. And that which, in a certain way, when we entered physical existence through birth, changes these furrows, that is also what, descending from spiritual worlds, does the work of shaping these furrows in the first place.

In this way, it is established that the soul is absolutely the active principle, that it is what first gives form to the body. I know, my dear audience, that hundreds of objections can be raised against what I am saying, if one starts only from the intellectual-theoretical point of view. But spiritual science must point to the experience. It must point out that until this experience takes place, one is justified in believing that thought life arises as a function from the physical brain, whereas when one experiences this thought life oneself, one knows how it is active in itself, how it is substantial and moving in itself, and how it is actually active in relation to the passivity of the physical body.

So what is presented as a first initial experience is not something that is gained through a straightforward continuation of ordinary scientific methods, but only through a metamorphosis, only through a transformation of the ordinary scientific method into a method that can only be experienced, which consists not in speculation but in an inner experience.

That is one side of it. The other side of this inner experience relates more to the inner development of the human will. By looking at our lives, we can see the transformations we have undergone in life. We think back to how we were in our inner soul and outer bodily state one, five, ten years ago, and we say to ourselves: we have undergone changes, transformations. These changes, these transformations that we undergo, how do we undergo them? We passively surrender to the outside world in a certain way. We just need to say: hand on heart, how active are we in what we have initially become through the outside world? The outside world, heredity, education and so on, shapes us; and what shapes us in it continues to have an effect. As a rule, we are actually the passive ones. If we now transform this into activity, if we form out of it what one could call in the most eminent sense self-discipline, and in the way I will characterize it in a moment, then the second element is added to what we have characterized as the first element in the path of spiritual research. If one brings it to that - and this can only be achieved through methodical schooling in the sense presented in my book “How to Know Higher Worlds” and in other books - if one brings it to that through methodical schooling, to say to oneself, “I will plan, even if only a small part of what that is to arise in me, I will resolve that this or that quality shall become mine. And if I succeed in actually producing such a quality in me, perhaps only after years, by a strong arousal of the will, if I make of myself that which I would otherwise only passively experience in life , if I take my will, if I may express it somewhat paradoxically, into my own hands and take full control of my development – in a certain part one can of course only do so – then what otherwise is merely memory, in a certain way, also comes together to form a real area. You get a kind of overview of your life, as if you were looking at a series of things, and you then come to know the will in its true character.

While one gets to know thinking as something that actually detaches itself from the physical the more one enters into life, one comes to recognize one's will in such a way that it actually encompasses the physical more and more, permeates us more and more, flows through us, and that basically death is nothing more than a struggle of the will with the physical functions have reached a certain limit when we pass through an earlier or later death, and that then that which can no longer work our body in this way, the will, is completely absorbed in what the body does, that this will detaches itself and that an element of the soul now actually enters a real, a spiritual world when we pass away.

So it is a matter of the fact that what is usually called the idea of immortality is not pursued by any speculation of the spiritual science meant here, that basically this spiritual science completely breaks with the way in which the world usually approaches this idea. The point is that spiritual science, as a continuation of scientific research through the training of thought and will, actually manages to grasp what we carry within us, thinking and willing, in such a way that we can also grasp it when this soul, which lives in thinking and willing, lives in a disembodied way that can no longer be reached by the senses.

Of course, what I have briefly explained here will be regarded by the widest circles of our present time as something fantastic and visionary. But how could it be otherwise? Everything that comes into the world as something new and seemingly contradicts what was already there is initially regarded as something fantastic and visionary. But I do not believe that it will remain so for all time, that people will not recognize that what has been described here as the method of spiritual science, at least in two of its characteristic elements, is only a continuation, but a lively continuation, of what natural science actually achieves, but with which natural science comes up against a certain limit.

Today, when one speaks of the spirit in general, it is no longer entirely taken amiss. This was still the case in the last third of the 19th century, when a certain materialistic way of forming a world view out of scientific knowledge was used to draw the only logical conclusion of scientific thinking itself. Today it is again permitted to speak of the spirit, at least in a speculative way. But one is still very much taken aback when one speaks of the spirit in the way I have just done, because that has a certain consequence.

When one has acquired what I have called in my book “The Riddle of Man” the “seeing consciousness,” when one has acquired what arises out of such developed thinking and willing, then one knows oneself in a spiritual world through this seeing consciousness - just as one knows oneself through one's eyes and ears in a world of color and sound. In a sense, the world around us is filled with spirit. Just as the world around a person who was born blind is filled with something new when, after undergoing an operation, he begins to see colors at a certain point in his life, so it is when this seeing consciousness occurs. The world, to which one was accustomed to look upon as the world of the senses and of the combining intellect, is filled with spirituality. And the spirit becomes something concrete. The spirit becomes something that one can follow in its concrete formation. One no longer speaks of the spirit in general. When someone speaks of the spirit in general, it is as if a person were walking across a meadow where flowers are growing. If you ask him: what kind of flower is that and what kind is that, he will answer: they are all plants, plants, plants. So today we also allow people to say: behind the sensory world there is a spiritual world. But spiritual science cannot stop there. It must examine the spiritual facts in the concrete – because the spiritual world is around us just as the colored or the sounding world is – in the same way that one otherwise examines the colored and sounding world with the senses and the combining intellect. And in doing so, one acquires, above all, a very specific way of relating to the world. It is also the case that if you are born blind and suddenly gain your sight, you acquire a different relationship to the world. You first have to find your bearings; you know nothing about spatial perspective, you have to learn it first. So, of course, you also have to acquire a certain relationship, a certain position to the world when you pass over into the seeing consciousness. Then many things appear to you in a peculiar way. That is why the spiritual researcher is still misunderstood by his contemporaries.

You see, the spiritual researcher never says that what has been gained through the method of strict natural science, or what has been drawn from the consequences of these results of strict natural science, is in any way logically incorrectly followed or anything of the sort, but he is compelled to add something from his spiritual insight, which is then not merely added on, but which in many respects completely changes the results of natural science.

Take geology, for example. I will pick out one example. It is better to talk about specific questions than to use general phrases. I understand completely and was able to follow this method myself: if you examine the geological layers that lie on top of each other from what is happening around us today in the formations of rocks, in the deposits of rivers and water and so on, and then calculate - even if the subject is not always a real calculation, but only something approximate – when you calculate how long these rock layers have existed, then you get the known figures. And then, as you all know, we arrive at the beginning of the earth's development, where the earth - as is hypothetically assumed - formed out of something, out of a kind of primeval nebula or something similar. I do not need to go into this in more detail. You are familiar with all this.

But for the spiritual researcher it is so, simply because he has experienced such things as I have described to you - though only in outline, to stimulate interest, not to convince - for the spiritual researcher it is so that he must say to himself: I assume that someone is examining the changes in a human organism, say the changes in the heart every five years. I follow how the human heart or another organ changes over the course of five or ten years, what happens there. And now I calculate what I have seen, if I simply consistently deduce from what I have calculated what it was like three hundred years ago. I get a certain result, albeit purely arithmetical, of what this human heart was like three hundred years ago. The only objection to this is that this heart did not even exist at that time. Just as correct as the geological approach would be to conclude from the small changes in the human heart what that heart was like three hundred years ago, only it was not even there at that time. Equally correct – for I fully recognize that what geology reveals has at least a relative correctness – is also everything that is deduced from the geological facts for the development of the earth. But we then transpose what arises for us as a consequence of our calculation into times when the earth did not yet exist in its present form. Or we transpose what arises from our observations, which were made over a limited period of time, into an epoch that lies millions of years ahead, by calculating an end state and speaking of entropy or the like. For the spiritual researcher, this is the same as if he were to calculate what the nature of the human heart will be after three hundred years.

That is what you arrive at when you convert the ordinary scientific method into something that can be experienced. Because, you see, man is actually like an extract of the whole cosmos. In man you find - somehow changed, somehow extracted, compensated or the like - what is present in the cosmos as a law. You will ask me: Yes, how can you, a dreamer, claim that the earth has not yet existed in its present form? You must show us a way to arrive at such a claim.

I will attempt to characterize, albeit only sketchily, how one arrives at such assertions as I have put forward. One discovers, by experiencing the volition, the thinking, as I have described to you, that man really is a kind of microcosm. I do not say this as a phrase, as the nebulous mystics say, but in the awareness that it has become as clear to me as any solution to a differential equation, out of complete logical clarity. Man is inwardly a compendium of the whole world. And just as in our ordinary life we do not know only what is sensually surrounding us at the moment, just as we, by looking beyond what is sensually surrounding us at this moment, look at the image of something we have experienced about ten or fifteen years ago , how it emerges before us as something that no longer exists – but something of it is present in us, which enables us to reconstruct what was present back then – it is the same with the expanded consciousness that arises from the transformation of ordinary thinking and willing. In that man was actually connected with all that is past, only in a more comprehensive sense, in a completely different sense, in a more spiritual sense, was connected with what is past than he was connected with experiences ten or fifteen years ago, which he can bring up again from his inner being, so it is possible, when consciousness is broadened, we simply find out what was there from a cosmic memory, where we were present, and what does not live on in us for ordinary consciousness, but what lives on for the consciousness that has arisen through the metamorphosis that I have described.

It is therefore nothing more than an expansion, an increase of that power which is otherwise our power of remembrance, whereby man inwardly, simply from his own nature, which is a summary of the macrocosm, constructively resurrects that which actually was on our earth in a certain period of time. Man then looks at a state of the earth when it was not yet material. And whereas he would otherwise have to construct something from the present-day experiences of geology that was supposed to have existed at that time, he now looks at a point in time when the earth was not yet there, when it was in a much more spiritual form. He sees, by constructively recreating what lives in him, that which actually underlies the formation of our earth.

And it is the same with what can emerge in us in a certain constructive way from a future state of the earth. I know how unsatisfactory such a sketchy description must be, but you can see from it that what I characterize as spiritual science is not drawn from thin air or from fantasy.

It is, of course, something unusual. But then, once you have completed the metamorphosis of consciousness, what you constructively represent inwardly is just as clear to your consciousness as what you conjure up in mathematics or geometry, which is also constructed from within the human being.

And when someone comes and says, “Yes, but you have to assert something that all people can understand,” I say, “Yes, that is also the case, but the first thing to be considered is that the person who wants to understand something must first go through everything that is necessary to do so – just as someone who wants to solve a differential equation must first go through what will enable him to solve it.

And if someone objects on the other hand: Yes, mathematical geometry only presents something to our consciousness that we apply when we follow the reality of the external world – then I say: Yes, that is so, but if we constructively present this to ourselves, then we arrive at the conviction that it is a mere formality. If you are aware of what is being characterized, you know that it is a reality. And if someone says that this might be self-suggestion, then I say: everything that gives us the possibility of saying that something is real is only a result of experience. And when some people object that someone could be mistaken, that someone could, for example, have the vivid thought of citric acid when drinking something and if they are sensitive, they could even have the taste of lemon – I say: that is possible. But just as in ordinary life one can distinguish the mere thought of heat from the heat that comes from actually touching a hot iron, so too, through inner experience, if one has the seeing consciousness, one can distinguish between what is mere imagination, what is mere suggestion, and what is reality, because the grasping of all reality is an inner experience. And it is necessary to follow things through to the end, not to stop somewhere. Anyone who stops short of where the path should actually lead may succumb to suggestion. I therefore say: It is indeed possible, if someone is sensitive and gives themselves over to autosuggestion, to say: I have the thought of lemonade, I even feel the taste – but the thought of lemonade will not quench one's thirst. What matters is that one passes from the sensation of taste to quenching one's thirst, that one follows the path consistently. The experience must be pursued consistently, then the fact that one designates something as reality in the spiritual sense is also entirely the result of the experience. The designation of a sensual reality or reality cannot be theoretically established, but is a result of experience.

Now, dear attendees, I have characterized the spiritual science that comes to a modern, natural scientific person when they go through what life offers today. This life has truly changed extraordinarily in the last thirty to fifty years, especially through the advances in technology. When I think back to the time when the first chair of technology was established in Vienna in the early 1880s, and consider all that has happened since then, I get some idea of how much this modern man has changed as a result of everything that has been drawn into our cognitive, our moral, but especially our social life. Those who have honestly gone through this, who do not say out of some prejudice: Oh well, science can't give us anything! but who takes the view that natural science can give us a great deal, who is completely absorbed in the triumphs of modern natural science, can come to realize that what underlies the world spiritually must be grasped in the way I have tried to present to you today.

Then one looks back to earlier times in the development of humanity and says to oneself: In these earlier times of human development, people hardly spoke of the spirit at all. And the way in which they spoke of the spirit has been preserved traditionally in various religious beliefs, which, if one is completely honest and does not want to keep double accounts of life, one truly cannot reconcile with the results of ordinary natural science today. These spiritual experiences, it must be said, arise from a completely different state of consciousness in people. What we have learned through the three to four centuries in which scientific methods have been developed, what we have become as a state of mind through the Copernican and Galilean way of thinking, through Kepler, we have gone through everything that has subtracted the technical laws from the laws of nature in more recent times, through Kepler, by The entire configuration of the soul has changed, not by becoming more theoretical, but by becoming more conscious. Through the development of humanity, we have necessarily left certain instinctive states of earlier ages. And we look back at what earlier ages sensed as spirituality, which has been preserved in religious traditions, and we say to ourselves: What was there then as spirituality was grasped by human instinct. One could not say that this was dependent on such a heightening of consciousness through the methods of natural science, through the methods of social experience in modern times. People spoke in such a way that, when they saw natural phenomena, these natural phenomena, as it were, endowed them with the spirit of what they were speaking about. How did an ancient civilized Egyptian relate to the world? He looked up, followed the course of the stars, the configuration of the starry sky. He saw not only what Copernicus, Galileo and Kepler saw in this starry sky, but he saw something that at the same time revealed a spiritual reality for him. Just as, when I move my arm, a soul-active underlies this hand movement, so the human being of earlier epochs felt in what happened externally that which underlies this external event as a spiritual, but instinctively.

Then came the more recent period, the time of natural science. I would like to say that we look back on a long period of human development that did not actually reach its conclusion until around the middle of the 15th century, when people could not help but see what was around them with their senses as something spiritual at the same time. When we speak of physical states today, of solid, liquid, gaseous forms, we speak in such a way that we consider the material. Ancient man, when he spoke of what are for us today the physical states, saw them as elements, but these elements were not merely material; they were the spiritual that manifested itself in them. What surrounded man as the material world was for him just as much the external physical-spiritual expression of the spiritual-soul as the physical organism is for us an expression of the spiritual-soul - but all instinctively. This path has necessarily been abandoned in the last three to four centuries, when humanity passed over to something quite different, which then became guiding in civilization. Mankind moved on to what distinguished the observation of nature from mere observation, which is always connected with the instinctive, with the spiritual observation of nature, which is still hidden in the name 'contemplation'. Man moved on from mere observation of nature to what could be called experimental comprehension of nature.

Since Bacon and others have been working, the mere observation of nature has been replaced by the experimental comprehension of nature. We do the experiment in the laboratory, in the physics cabinet, which we then extend to the technical work. In that which we ourselves bring about as a condition for some natural event, we survey these very conditions. Through the experiment, we are in a different position than in mere observation of nature. In nature, I cannot know whether what is revealed to me, be it for my mind or for my imagination, whether that is also some totality or whether I have to delve into it, much, much deeper than the thing initially presents itself to me. In short, despite all exact observation, what I observe in nature remains before me as an unknown. When I have an experiment before me, I establish the conditions myself; I follow how one thing is evoked out of another, and what is then still unknown is basically what is actually of interest. When you design an experiment and then observe what can be observed, you are actually looking at the result of what follows from the conditions that are manageable for you. In the experiment, everything is transparent in a completely different way than what I observe in nature.

And so, little by little, people have become accustomed to regarding themselves as interpreters of nature in the manageable context of the experiment, to some extent to tracing the law of nature where they themselves can trace the conditions of its manifestation. However, this experimental method is still linked to a certain inner yearning that used to underpin knowledge through and through. In those ancient times, when there was as yet no technology, no natural science in our sense, what was regarded as science had emerged primarily from the desire to know, from the desire to recognize, to explore, “what holds the world together in its inmost being,” if I may express it in this way. Now that the experimental method has emerged, it is not only the desire for knowledge that drives us, but also the desire to recreate what nature forms. But the old desire for knowledge still lives on. We recreate what we want to see in the experiment in order to unravel nature itself through what we can see. In recent times, technology has emerged from this experimental method with a certain matter-of-factness, and with technology we have entered a new phase.

We can therefore say that in the history of human development, we first have research determined by the desire for knowledge, then the experimental method, which, however, still combines the longing of the old quest for knowledge with the recreation of nature. But if we trace the path from what can be experienced through experimentation to what happens as a result of the laws of nature that are recognized through experimentation, to what then happens through technical design, which so deeply intervene in human and social life, we have to say to ourselves: there is a third element present that passes from what we still have in recreating nature to what is now creative in man himself. This creative power – I do not believe that I am speaking to completely insensitive souls when I say the following about this creative power: the person who, with that peculiar characteristic style, with that peculiar state of soul constitution is undergoing a technical training, feels differently in this training than someone who is undergoing, for example, a theological training, which is a reproduction of the oldest methods of knowledge, or an already experimental scientific training. Those who undergo an experimental scientific training apply the mathematical, the geometrical, the theoretical-mechanical, the photometric, and so on, to what they observe there. He, as it were, recalculates nature.

One stands on a completely different level of consciousness when one first has before one that which is, as it were, completely inwardly transparent: the mathematical, the geometrical. And when one applies this not only in experiment, that is, in reproducing nature, but when one applies it in completely free creation to the design of machines. When you see that what you have experienced as mathematics, as theoretical-mechanistic chemistry, penetrates into the design of a technical structure, you experience the world in a completely different way than the mere naturalist or the theorizing technician.

What is the actual difference? One often fails to consider this. Imagine that in our ordinary, trivial lives we describe everything as “real”, even that which is not real in a higher sense. We call a rose “real”. But is a rose real in a higher sense? If I have it here in front of me, torn from the rose stem, it cannot live. It can only be shaped as it is when it grows on the rose stem, when it grows out of the rose root. By cutting it off, I actually have a real abstraction in front of me, something that cannot exist as I have it in front of me. But this is the case with every natural structure to a certain extent. When I look at a natural formation, even at a crystal, which is the least likely to exist, I cannot understand it just by looking at it, because it basically cannot exist by itself any more than the rose can. So I would have to say: this crystal is only possible in the whole environment, perhaps having grown out of a geode in the mountain formation.

But when I have before me something that I myself have formed as a technical structure, I feel differently about it. You can feel that, even feel it as something radically significant in the experience of the modern human being, who looks at what technology has become in modern life from the perspective of his or her technical education. When I have a technical structure that I have constructed from mathematics, from theoretical mechanics, I have something in front of me that is self-contained. And if I live in what is basically the scope of all technical creation, then I have before me not just a reflection of the laws of nature, but in what has become technical entities out of the laws of nature, I actually have something new in front of me. It is something different that underlies the laws of the technical structures than what also underlies inorganic nature.

It is not just that the laws of inorganic nature are simply transferred, but that the whole meaning of the structure in relation to the cosmos becomes different, in that I, as a freely creating human being, transfer what I otherwise experience from the design of physical or chemical investigations into the technical structure.

But with that, one can say: in that modern humanity has come to extract the technical from the whole scope of the natural, in that we had to learn in modern times to live in the realm of the technical in such a way that we we stand with human consciousness in a completely different relationship to the technical than to that which is produced in nature, we say to ourselves: Now it is for the first time that we stand before a world that is now, so to speak, spiritually transparent. The world of nature research is in a certain way spiritually opaque; one does not see to the bottom of it. The world of technology is like a transparent crystal - spiritually understood, of course. With this, a new stage in the spiritual development of humanity has truly been reached, precisely with modern technology. Something else has entered into the developmental history of humanity. That is why modern philosophers have not known how to deal with what has emerged in this modern consciousness precisely through the triumphs of technology. Perhaps I may point out how little the purely philosophical, speculative way of thinking could do with what has seized modern human consciousness, precisely from the point of view of technology. Today we are much more seized by what emanates from the leading currents of human development than we realize. What is now general consciousness was not yet there when there were no newspapers, when the only spiritual communication was that people heard the pastor speak from the pulpit on Sundays. What is now general education flows through certain channels from the leading currents into the broad masses, without people being aware of it. And so, basically, what came through technical consciousness has, in the course of a very short time, shaped the forms of thought of the broadest masses; it lives in the broadest masses without them being aware of it.

And so we can say that something completely new has moved in. And where a consciousness has become one-sided - which, fortunately, we have not yet achieved in Europe - where a consciousness has become one-sided, almost obsessed with this abstraction, a strange philosophical trend emerged, the so-called pragmatism of William James and others, which says: truth, ideas that merely want to be truth, that is something unreal at all. In truth, only that which we see can be realized is truth. As human beings, we set certain goals for ourselves; we then shape reality accordingly. And when we say to ourselves: This or that is real according to a natural law, we form a corresponding structure out of it. If we can realize in the machine, in mechanics, what we imagine, then it is proved to us by the application in life that this is true. But there is no other proof than that of application in life. And so only that which we can realize in life is true. The so-called pragmatism, which denies all logical internal pursuit of truth and actually only accepts the truth of truth through what is accomplished externally, figures today in the broadest circles as American philosophy. And that is something that some people in Europe have also grasped for decades, even before the war.

All those philosophers who still want to think in the old ways know of no other way to proceed with what has emerged as a newer technique, as the awareness of newer techniques, than to set the concept of truth aside altogether. By stepping out of the instinctive grasping of nature, out of the experimental recreation of nature, towards the free shaping of nature, nothing remains for them but free external shaping. The inner experience of truth, that spiritual experience of the soul that can permeate the soul, is actually denied, and only that which can be realized in the external, purposeful structures is considered truth. That is to say, the concept of truth that is inherent in the human soul is actually set aside.

Now, another development is also possible; it is possible that we will experience how something is emerging from the actual substance of technical structures, something that is no longer natural, in which there is now nothing that we can intuit, but only what we can survey. For if we cannot grasp it, we cannot shape it. By experiencing this, by thoroughly permeating ourselves with what can be experienced in it, a certain need must awaken in us all the more. This new external world presents itself to us without the inner realization of the ideas, without the inner experience of the ideas. Therefore, through this new experience, we are prepared for the pure experience of what spirituality is, of what man, abstracted from all external observation, must experience within, as I tried to outline at the beginning of my reflections today.

And so I believe that, because we have advanced in the developmental history of humanity to a view of that reality that we can survey externally, where we can no longer see any demoniacal, ghostly aspect in externality, because we have finally arrived at the point where we can no longer interpret the external sensual in such a way that we say it is opaque to us and we can assume that behind it there is something spiritual. So we must seek to find the forces for the spirit within us through the development of the soul.

It has always seemed to me that a truly honest experience of the consciousness that comes to us precisely from technology calls upon us – because otherwise what is intimately connected with our human nature would almost would otherwise be lost to us - to experience in our inner being what spirituality is, and thus to add to the one pole of transparent mechanics and transparent chemistry that which can now be attained through spiritual insight, that which can be presented to people in the spirit. It seems to me that it is necessary in our time for the spiritual insight of Anthroposophy to reveal itself for the reason that we have indeed reached a certain stage of development in human history.

And there is another factor, honored attendees: with this newer technology, a new social life has emerged at the same time. I do not need to describe how modern technology has created modern industrialism, how this modern technology has produced the modern proletariat in the form it is in today. But it seems to me that if we only want to take the standpoint of the earlier scientific method, the standpoint of that which emerges from observation, then our thoughts fall short. We cannot grasp what is truly revealed in social life. To grasp what emerges in social life from the human, it is necessary that we come to truths that reveal themselves only through human nature itself. And so I believe that Marxism and other similar quackery, which today put people in such turmoil, can only be overcome if one finds special methods that are applied as a necessary counterbalance to technology applied to the social life of human beings, and if, through this, it becomes possible to bring spirituality into the outer life, into the broad masses, because one has found this spirituality through inner experience, hard,

Therefore it is no mere accident that out of the same soil out of which anthroposophically oriented spiritual science arose for me, there also grew, truly unsought, what I tried to present in my book 'The Core Points of the Social Question'. I simply tried to draw the consequences for social life from what spiritual-scientific knowledge is. And what I have presented in this book emerged quite naturally.

I do not believe that without spiritual science one can find the methods to grasp how man stands to man in social life. And I believe that, because we have not yet been able to recognize social life, this life will not allow itself to be conquered by us and that we will therefore initially be plunged into chaos at the moment when, after the terrible catastrophe of war, people are faced with the necessity of rebuilding it. It is necessary to carry out what is to be carried out on the basis of spiritual laws, not on the basis of the law that a misconceived understanding believes can be based on natural laws, as is the case in Marxism and other radical formulations of social science.

So, dear attendees, I was able to give a reason for something that is actually quite personal to me, right here in front of you. And I may say: Speaking to you now, I feel transported back to an earlier time, to the 1880s, when we in Central Europe were living in a time that was felt by all to be a time of ascent. We – those people who, like me, have grown old – have now arrived at a point in time where the hopes of the springtime that emerged back then take on a rather tragic form in our minds. Those who look back on what then seemed like an invincible ascent now look back on something in which, for many people, something reveals itself that was in fact an error in many respects.

In speaking to you, I am speaking to fellow students who are in a different situation. Many of you are probably the same age as I was when I experienced that springtime hope; now you are experiencing something that is very different from the fantasies that arose from the springtime hopes of that time in the human soul. But someone who is as filled with the possibility and necessity of spiritual knowledge as the one speaking to you can never be pessimistic about the power of human nature; he can only be optimistic. And that is why it does not appear to me as something that I do not present as a possibility before my soul, that once you have reached the age at which I am speaking to you today, you have gone through the opposite path – that opposite path that now leads upwards again from the power of the human soul, above all from the spiritual power of the human soul. And because I believe in man out of spiritual knowledge, I believe that one cannot speak, as Spengler does, of a downfall, of a death of Western civilization. But because I believe in the power of the soul that lives in you, I believe that we must come to an ascent again. Because this ascent is not caused by an empty phantom, but by human will. And I believe so strongly in the truth of the spiritual science described to you that I am convinced: This will of men can be carried, can cause a new ascent, can cause a new dawn. And so, my honored audience, I would like to close with the words that first fell on my ears as a young student when the new rector for mechanics and mechanical engineering in Vienna delivered his inaugural address. At that time, for people who also believed in a new ascent, and rightly believed in it, even if only a technical ascent came later, not a social, not a political ascent. But now we are in a period in which, if we do not want to despair, we can and must think only of an ascent. That is why I say what that man said to us young people back then: “Fellow students, I conclude by saying that the one who feels honestly about the development of humanity in the face of what is to arise from all science and all technology can only say: Always forward!”

Discussion

Question: What entitles us to go beyond the limits of thinking, to leave the unity of thinking and to move from thinking to meditation?

Rudolf Steiner: Dearly beloved! It seems to me that this question is about something very significant, which, however, can only be fully understood through thorough epistemological and epistemological reflection. But I will try to point out a few things that come into consideration when answering this question.

Perhaps I may draw attention to the last chapter that I added to the second edition of my book “The Riddles of Philosophy”, in which I described the development of philosophy itself and in which I then tried to show how, at the present moment in human development has arrived at the point where philosophy, so to speak, demands of itself this going beyond of thinking about the point of view of thinking that arises precisely when one has reached the limits of the knowledge of nature. I tried to show the following at the time:

People can, if they study the methods of knowledge acquisition in detail, as the great physiologist Du Bois-Reymond did, arrive at the point of view that Du Bois-Reymond expressed in his lecture “On the Limits of Natural Knowledge” at the famous natural science conference in Leipzig in the 1870s and also repeated in his lecture on “The Seven World Riddles”. I will only briefly point out that at that time Du Bois-Reymond spoke of the fact that with the application of what has been called “unified thinking” here, one comes to develop the so-called Laplacian mind, that is, to develop such thinking about matter as is possible when one seeks to grasp the course of the planets of a solar system using astronomical-mathematical methods.

If we now turn our attention, through a certain inner contemplation, to what takes place within ourselves, if we try to make the subject into the object, then it turns out that this thinking, which we develop, cannot be defined as being there to depict some external world or to combine the facts of an external world. In what is thought about thinking, I must still see a last remnant of that old teleology, that old doctrine of purpose, which everywhere asks not why but for what purpose, which does not ask how it comes that the whole organization of man or any other organism or an organ like the hand is formed in a certain way, but which asks how this hand would have to be formed for a certain purpose. This is also extended to the consideration of thinking, although today people are no longer aware of this or have not yet become aware of it. One asks: What is thinking actually for? One does not always realize this, but unconsciously one asks it. Thinking, one thinks, cognition in general, is there to draw an outer world into oneself, so that what is first outside, is then within, even if only as an image. But now, through realism, but of course spiritual realism, one can follow what thinking actually is. Then one realizes that this thinking is a completely real force that shapes us ourselves.

You see, this spiritual science of which I speak here is not an abstract theory, not something that merely wants to be a world view in ideas. Among other things, I have recently given a pedagogical course here in which I tried to apply spiritual science to pedagogy. It was a course for teachers before the Waldorf School was founded. In addition to this pedagogical course, I also gave a course that tried to take the therapeutic aspect of medicine from spiritual science and show how spiritual research can shed light on something that can never be fully understood by using only today's methods of physiology and biology. Now, I do not want to tell you something specifically therapeutic, but there is one thing I would like to mention to characterize the method. That is, in current philosophy today, there is actually only speculation about the connection between the spiritual-mental and the physical-corporeal. There are all kinds of theories about interactions, about parallelism and so on, all kinds of materialistic interpretations of the soul processes. But actually, in a certain abstraction, we always have on the one hand the observation of the spiritual-mental, on the other hand that of the bodily-physical, and then we speculate how these two can come into a relationship with each other. Spiritual science really studies methodically - but precisely with the thinking that is awakened there - how the soul-spiritual works in the bodily-physical. And even if I expose myself to some misunderstanding, that what I say is taken as paradoxical, I want to emphasize one thing:

When we observe a child growing up until the change of teeth around the seventh year, we notice that not only does the change of teeth take place, but that the configuration of the soul and spirit also undergoes a significant change. If you now think back over your own life, you will find – even if you are not yet conducting methodical research – that the sharply contoured thoughts, which then solidify into memory and reproduce themselves for the course of life, that these sharply can only be formed out of the power of thought at the time when the organism is driving out what are called second teeth – it is something that comes from the whole organism, not just from the jaw. If one pursues this methodically, one comes to say to oneself: Just as, for example, in physical processes, some kind of force, such as mechanical force, can be converted into heat and one then says: heat is released, heat appears - so in the course of human life one has to what remains in the organism – we have completely lost the expression for this – in the change of teeth, and what is then released when the change of teeth gradually takes place, what then passes from the latent state to the free state, what initially only worked internally. The second teeth have appeared; there is a certain connection of forces at work, a system of forces within, until these second teeth emerge. Then this interrelatedness of forces is released, and in its release it appears as that spiritual-soul element which then gives the sharply contoured thoughts of memory.

With this example I only want to show how this spiritual science is actually applied to areas that one does not think of today. It is a continuation of the natural sciences. It is exactly the same form of thinking that is applied when one speaks of the release of warmth. The same form, which has only just emerged, is then applied to human development, and one says to oneself: that which appears as memory, as thinking power, that pushes the second teeth out - if I may express myself trivially.

In this case, one is not speculating about the connection between body and soul, but rather one is pursuing, in a completely empirical way, as one is accustomed to doing as a natural scientist, only with more highly developed methods of thought, that which can be observed. Only the whole of what one has around one is also observed spiritually. And so one comes to speak no longer in an abstract, nebulous way about the interaction of body and soul and spirit, but one states how at a certain age a force works physically, which then emancipates itself as a spiritual-soul force at a different age. And one comes to enter with the spirit into the material, to understand the material spiritually. That is the peculiar thing, that materialism has not understood the material, that it actually stands opposite matter in such a way that it remains incomprehensible to it. Materialism has not understood matter. Spiritual science, which is meant here, advances to the understanding of the material through its spiritual method. And it was indeed extremely interesting for the doctors and medical students who attended the course for physicians to be shown how one can really get to effectively represent the spiritual and soul in the physical, how, for example, one can show how the heart, in its function, can be understood from spiritual science in a completely different way than with the methods of today's physiology or biology.

So it is a matter of developing thinking not just through some kind of fanciful elaboration, but through a real continuation, which must simply pass through a borderline or critical state. In this passage through the borderline state, thinking becomes something else. You must not say that the unity of thinking is somehow destroyed by this. For example, the power that works in ice does not become something that should no longer be when the ice melts and turns into water. And the power that works in water does not become something else when the water passes through the boiling point and through vaporization. So it is a matter of the fact that at the point that I have characterized as a point of development for thinking, this thinking power passes through such a borderline state and then indeed appears in a different form, so that the experience differs from the earlier experience like steam from water. But this leads one to understand the thinking power itself, thinking – I could also prove the same for willing – as something that works realistically in man. In the thinking power that one has later in life, one then sees what has been working in the body during childhood. So everything becomes a unity in a remarkable way.

I readily admit that spiritual science can err in some individual questions. It is in its early stages. But that is not the point. The point is the direction of the striving. And so one can say: an attempt is made to observe what reveals itself in thinking in its shaping of the human being, to observe it as a real force that shapes and forms the human organism. Thought is observed in its reality. Therefore, one can say in conclusion: Those who still look at thought in a cognitive way, asking only one question: Why is thought such that it combines outer sense perceptions? – they are succumbing to a certain error, an error that I would like to characterize for you now.

Let us assume that the grain of wheat or the ear of wheat grows out of the root tip through the stalk; the plant-forming power manifests itself and can shape a new plant out of the seed, which in turn grows into a seed and so on. We see that the formative power at work in the plant is continuously effective in the plant itself, from formation to formation, as Goethe says: from metamorphosis to metamorphosis. In spiritual science, we try to follow thinking, which expresses itself in human beings, as a formative force, and we come to the conclusion that, in so far as thinking is a formative force in the human being, a side effect also comes about, and this side effect is actually ordinary cognition. But if I want to characterize thinking in its essence according to this secondary effect, then I am doing exactly the same as if I were to say: What do I care what shoots up through the root, the stalks into the ear of corn as a formative force in the plant; I do not care about that; I start from the chemistry of nutrition and examine what appears in the wheat grain as a nutritional substance. This is, of course, also a legitimate way of looking at the wheat grain. You can also look at it that way. But if I do, then I disregard what actually flows continuously in plant formation. And so it is with cognition. In what is usually thought by epistemologists, by philosophers and by those who want to ground natural science with some kind of observation, there are the same effects that occur when thinking, which actually wants to shape us, expresses itself outwardly in a side effect. It is as if what grows in the wheat plant is only thought of as the basis for the nutrition of another being. But it is wrong to examine the wheat only in terms of this. This has nothing to do with the nature of the wheat grain. I am introducing a different point of view.

Thus, philosophy today is on the wrong track when it examines cognition only in terms of the apprehension of the external world. For the essential thing is that cognition is a formative force in man, and the other thing appears as a mere side effect. And the way of looking at it that wants to leave thinking only in the state in which it abstracts natural laws, collects perceptions, is in the same position as someone who would claim that one should not do plant biology to get to know the nature of the plant, but nutritional chemistry.

These are things that are not thought about today, but they play a major role in the further development of the scientific future, that scientific future that is at the same time also the future for such a social organization through which man, in grasping social life through the spirit, can truly intervene in this social organization. For it seems to me that this is precisely what has led to the catastrophe: that we no longer master life because we do not think that we have entered a state of human development in which life must be mastered from the spirit, from that spirit that is recognized from within and thereby also recognizes what confronts us in the external world.

Yes, my dear audience, with such things one is considered an eccentric in the broadest circles today, a dreamer, and in any case one does not expect such a person to really see through the outside world realistically. But I believe that I am not mistaken when I say: the application of spiritual science to the entire external world can be compared to the following. If someone lays down a horseshoe-shaped piece of iron, a farmer comes and says: I will shoe my horse with that. Another, who knows what kind of object it is, says to him: That is not a horseshoe, it is a magnet, it serves a completely different purpose. But the farmer says: What do I care, I will shoe my horse with it. This is how science appears today, refusing to admit that the spiritual lives everywhere in the material. Those who deny the spiritual in the material are like the man who says, “What do I care about the magnet, I shoe my horse with the iron.” I believe, however, that we must come to the realization that in all material things we have to recognize not only an abstract spiritual essence, but also a concrete spiritual essence, and that we must then be willing to study this concrete spiritual essence in the same way as we do in the material world, and that this will mean progress in cognitive and social terms for the future.

But it is easier to express speculative results and all kinds of philosophies about what the spirit is, it is easier to be a pantheist or the like out of speculation, than to follow the example of strict natural science, only with the experiential method, as I have described it, to continue the scientific research and then to find the spiritual in the material - just as one brings warmth to light, even if it does not express itself, by showing under which circumstances that which is latent reveals itself. If we apply this method, which is usually applied externally, to the internal, but especially to the whole human being, then we will understand the spiritual in the material from the inside out. And above all, that which has actually been resonating to us from ancient times and yet, for human beings, is a profound necessity, that which still resonates from the Apollonian temple at Delphi to the ears of the spirit: “Man, know thyself!” And just as philosophers and theologians have spoken of this “know thyself”, so too has the naturalist Ernst Haeckel, who was more or less inclined towards materialism. This “know thyself” is deeply rooted in human nature. And modern times have now reached a point where this “know thyself” must be approached in a concrete way.

With these suggestions, I believe I have shown that it is not a matter of violating the unity of thought, but of continuing the thought beyond a boundary point. Just as it is not impossible to bring the forces in water to a completely different manifestation after passing through the boiling point, so too, there is no sin against what is experienced in the combining thinking with the perception when this thinking is taken beyond the boundary point. It is quite natural that a metamorphosis of thinking is then achieved. But by no means has a uniformity of thinking been violated. You will not find at all that spiritual science leads to the rejection of natural science, but rather to a deeper penetration of it. One arrives precisely at what I consider to be particularly important for the development of humanity: the introduction of scientific knowledge into the whole conception of the world, which fertilizes life, but which can only be achieved by our ascending from the spiritual observation of nature to the pure experience of the spiritual, which can then also pour into our will and become a living force in us. Because it can do this, because living knowledge makes us not only wise but also skillful, I believe in a future for humanity, in human progress, if in the future more attention is paid to the spiritual in the material than has been the case so far, if the spiritual is sought in the material, which can then also be transferred to the social, so that in the future the solution of the social question will appear to us as the spiritualization of social life, as spiritualization with that spirit which we can achieve precisely as a continuation of scientific research.

Professor Dr. Th. Meyer: I am in complete agreement with Dr. Steiner that the limiting concepts of scientific knowledge are not the limiting concepts of existence and reality. I have also heard him speak with warm and moved heart of the hopes that the German people may cherish for the future despite their collapse. But I do have some doubts on the point of whether spiritual science oriented towards anthroposophy will possess precisely the ability to lead to a new height to which Germany should aspire. And I think the concern lies in the following: Dr. Steiner has repeatedly emphasized that the path to the higher worlds, of which he has spoken, is achieved through vision, through a seeing consciousness, through an experience, and that this path is absolutely scientific, not imaginative. This inner vision naturally has the same status as something that is evident in logic. That is to say, what I have seen with my outer or inner eyes cannot be disputed. I see a tree and do not need to prove that the tree must be there. There is no metaphysical proof for it, it is evident that the tree is there. Dr. Steiner now claims this evidence for his inner vision. That means he sees the higher world and sees the connections of the higher world, and because he sees them, precisely for that reason this higher world is there; it is indisputable. I do not want to dispute that the higher world is evident to him who beholds it. The only question is whether it is evident to everyone, and here I have a reservation. Ever since I have known anthroposophy, it has been based on the fact that this inner vision, this seeing consciousness, is ancient, that there have long been people who rise to the height of this seeing consciousness, have long since risen to it in India. That is why anthroposophy also adopts a whole series of expressions from the Indian language. It needs Indian expressions for the various spiritual insights it imparts. But the fact of the matter is that Dr. Steiner claims that he is bringing something new. However, there were a number of Theosophical Societies in Germany and England before Dr. Steiner came on the scene. Dr. Steiner originally belonged to these Theosophical Societies, then he came into conflict with them and resigned from these associations. He just, because he came into inner conflict with them, no longer referred to his view of things as theosophy, but because his inner vision is different from the inner vision of the other theosophists, he called it anthroposophy.

Now I would like to say: If the earlier intuitive consciousness was mistaken, if Dr. Steiner was the first to bring the right thing, who guarantees me that another will not come and say: This higher intuitive consciousness that Dr. Steiner brought has not reached the ultimate goal. Another person may arrive at a quite different goal. In that case Steiner's vision becomes subjective. It is the vision of an individual. It is doubtful whether one can rely on it.

This is my concern, which arises in relation to the supersensible of the whole movement, that there is a different inner vision. There should be no discord between the different visionaries. But I do not want to conclude without expressing my sincere and warm thanks to Dr. Steiner for the many fine suggestions he has given in his speech tonight.

Rudolf Steiner: Ladies and Gentlemen, I do not need to keep you any longer, for I will only have to point out that the esteemed gentleman who spoke before me has made a few errors in the most important point that he has raised.

First of all, I would like to start from the end and correct a few errors. The fact is not that what I have presented to you here was preceded by the teachings of other theosophical societies to which I belonged. It is not like that. Rather, I began writing my interpretations of Goethe's world view in the 1880s. At the time, they were published as an introduction to Goethe's scientific writings in Kürschner's “Deutsche National-Literatur” in Stuttgart. Anyone who follows them will find that the germ of everything I have presented to you today lies in those introductions. You will then find that in my “Philosophy of Freedom”, in the first edition of 1894, I tried to show how man gradually develops his thinking to a certain level and how, after that, what then leads discursive thinking into intuitive thinking follows.

Then it happened, in Berlin around 1902, that I was once asked to present what I had to say about the spirit in a circle that called itself theosophical. At that time I had become acquainted with various Theosophists, but what they had to say did not really prompt me to follow with any attention the Theosophical literature that was common in this Theosophical Society. And so I simply presented what had emerged from my own intuitive research. The result was that people in England who had read my book Mysticism in the Dawn of Modern Spiritual Life very soon translated these lectures into English and published them in an English newspaper. I was then invited to give lectures to a number of people in the society that called itself the Theosophical Society. I have never hesitated to speak to those who called upon me, whether they called themselves by this or that name, about what I had to say. But I have never advocated anything in any of these groups other than what I had to say on the basis of my own research. Thus, during the time that I belonged to the Theosophical Society, I advocated nothing other than what I have to advocate on the basis of my own research.

That I called what I presented “Anthroposophy” even then may be gathered from the fact that at the same time - not only later, when I had come to a different view from that of this society - I also presented to a different circle of people in Berlin, and I did not present a single iota of what I had to present from my research. And there I announced my lectures – so that people could not possibly be in error – as anthroposophical observations on human development. So for as long as any human being can associate me with Theosophy, for as long have I called my worldview “Anthroposophy”. There has never been a break. That is what I would like to say about it now, so as not to keep you waiting too long.

Now, dear ladies and gentlemen, some people say that if you study the history of philosophy, you find that philosophers - starting with Thales and going up to Eucken or others - have put forward all sorts of views and that they have often contradicted each other; how can you arrive at a certainty of knowledge? This is precisely what I set out to do in my book “Riddles of Philosophy”: to show that the matter is not so, but that what appear to be deviations in the various philosophies worthy of the name only ever come from the fact that one person looks at the world from one point of view, while another looks at it from a different point of view. If you photograph a tree from one side, what you see in the picture is only from a certain side. If you photograph the tree from a different side, you get a completely different picture – and yet it is the same tree. If you now come to the conclusion that many truly truthful philosophies do not differ from one another in that one deviates from the other, but that they simply look at one and the same thing from different points of view, because you cannot come to a single truth at all, then you realize that it is a prejudice to say that the philosophies contradict each other.

In my book “The Riddles of Philosophy”, I have shown that it is a prejudice to say that philosophers contradict each other. There are, of course, those who are in a certain contradiction, but these are only those who have made a mistake. If two children in a class solve a problem differently, one cannot say that it is therefore not certain who has found the right solution. If one understands the correct solution, one already knows what the right thing is. So it cannot be deduced from the fact that things are different that they are wrong. That could only be deduced from the inner course of the matter itself. One would have to look at the inner course of the matter itself. And it is an external consideration when one says: Steiner resigned from the Theosophical Society. First of all, I did not resign, but after I was first dragged in with all my might to present my own world view, nothing else at all, I was - perhaps I may use the sometimes frowned-upon expression in front of you - thrown out, and for the reason, my dear dear attendees, because the “other kind of truth”, namely the madness of those theosophists, prevailed. These theosophists had finally managed to present an Indian boy who was claimed to be the newly appeared Christ; he was brought to Europe and in him the re-embodied Christ had appeared. Because I, of course, characterized this folly as folly and because at that time this folly found thousands of followers throughout the world, this following took the opportunity to expel me. I did not care. At any rate, I did not believe that what one had gained through inner research seemed uncertain simply because a society that calls itself theosophical expelled me, a society that claims that the Christ is embodied in the Indian boy.

Such things should not be considered superficially, simply overlooking the specifics and saying, “Well, there are different views.” One must take a closer look at what is occurring. And so I would like to leave it to you, when you have time - but you would have a lot to do with it - to compare all the quackery that has appeared in the so-called theosophical societies with what I have always tried to bring out of good science. I say this not out of immodesty, but out of a recognition of the reality of the matter and out of spiritual struggle. And bear in mind that I myself said today: “Some details may be wrong, but the important thing is to show a new direction.” It does not have to be the case that the absolutely correct thing is stated in every detail. So someone could well say that they are looking at a right-angled triangle and getting all sorts of things out of it. Then someone comes along and says: The square of the hypotenuse of a right-angled triangle is equal to the sum of the squares of the other two sides. You can't be sure whether it could be universally true just because he is the only one saying it. No, if it has become clear to you through an intuitive insight into the nature of mathematics that the square of the hypotenuse is equal to the sum of the squares of the other two sides, then a million people may say it is otherwise, but I know it is so and I will contradict a million people. For the truth has not only an external basis for agreement, but above all a basis in its inner substantiality.

Of course, anyone can check this. And I have never claimed anything other than that anyone who wants to can learn about the spiritual scientific method just as easily as they can learn about the methods of chemistry. But once the things have been researched, they can be verified by any thinking person. And so what I say or write and have written from the spiritual science can be verified by every thinking person. There will certainly be many errors in it, of course, but that is the same as with other research. It is not about these errors in detail, but about the basic character of the whole.

Have I used a single Indian expression to you today? And if something is sometimes referred to by using some old expression, then that is just a technical term used because there is no such expression in current usage. Even if I can prove the Pythagorean theorem on the blackboard or something else, can one be reproached for the fact that it was already there centuries ago? For me, it is not a matter of putting forward ancient Indian or similar ideas, but of putting forward what arises from the matter itself. Just as today, anyone who grasps and understands the Pythagorean theorem grasps it from the matter itself, even though it can be found at a certain point in time as the first to emerge, so of course some things must, but only seemingly, agree with what was already there. But it is precisely this that I have always most vigorously opposed: that what is being attempted here from the present point in the development of human consciousness has anything to do with some ancient Indian mysticism or the like. There are, of course, echoes, because instinctive knowledge found much in ancient times that must resurface today. But what I mean is not drawn from old traditions. It is really the case that what is true, what is true for me, is what I wrote down at the time when I wrote the first edition of my book Theosophy in 1904: I want to communicate nothing but what I have recognized through spiritual scientific research, just as any other scientific truth is recognized through external observation and deductive reasoning, and which I myself can personally vouch for. Some may certainly hold a different opinion, but I put forward nothing but what I can personally vouch for. I do not say this out of immodesty, but because I want to appear as a person who does not want to present a new spiritual science out of a different spirit than out of the spirit of modern science and also of newer technology, and because I think that one can only understand this new consciousness in terms of its scientific and technical nature, when one is driven by both to the contemplation of the spirit.

I ask that my words not be taken as if I had wanted to avoid what the honorable previous speaker said. No, I am grateful that I was given the opportunity to correct some factual errors that have become very widespread. But much, very much even, of what is being spread today about what I have been presenting in Stuttgart for decades is based on errors. And it seemed necessary to me, as the previous speaker commendably did, to address what was presented, because it is not just a matter of correcting what affects me personally, but also something that the previous speaker brought together with the substance of the question, to correct it through the historical.

Question: If Dr. Steiner proves just one point of spiritual science to me in the same way that the Pythagorean theorem can be proved, then I will gladly follow him, then it is science.

Rudolf Steiner: Dear attendees, who can really prove the Pythagorean theorem? The Pythagorean theorem cannot be proved by drawing a right-angled triangle on the blackboard and then using one of the usual methods of proof. That is only one illustration of the proof. The point is that anyone who wants to prove the Pythagorean theorem is put in the position of having to have what can be constructed mathematically in their mind's eye - even if only in the inner vision of the geometric space vision. So imagine a consciousness that did not have this spatial vision. He would not have the essential part of the Pythagorean theorem before him, and it would make no sense to prove the Pythagorean theorem. We can only prove the Pythagorean theorem by having the essential part of the spatial perception and spatial organization before us. The moment we ascend to another form of consciousness, something else is added to the ordinary spatial view (space view) (space view) (space view) (space view) (space view) (space view) (space view) (space view) (space view) (space view) (space view) (space view) (space view) (space view) (space view) (space view) (space view) (space view) (space view) (space view) (space view) (space view) (space view) (space view) (space view) (space view) (space view) (space view) (space view) (space view) (space view) (space view) (space view) (space view) (space view) (space view) (space view) (space view) (space view) (space view) (space view) (space view) (space view) (space view) (space view) (space view) (space view) (space view) ( Only, as long as one has no conception of the configuration of space, one cannot at all arrive at the observation that leads to the proof of the Pythagorean theorem. And only as long as one has not yet made the transition from ordinary consciousness to experiencing consciousness, as I have described it, does one believe that the results of spiritual scientific research cannot be proved in the same way.

I started from the assumption that the experiencing consciousness is there first. And just as he who does not have a spatial view cannot speak of the Pythagorean theorem, so one cannot speak of the proof of any proposition of spiritual science if one does not admit the whole view. But this view is something that must first be attained. It is not there by itself. But our time demands that we decide on something completely new if we want to move towards this progress in science. And I do believe that there is still a great deal to be overcome before spiritual science is advocated in broader circles in the way that Copernicus's world view was advocated over all earlier ideas of the infinity of space. In the past, people imagined space as a blue sphere. Now we imagine that there are limits to our knowledge of nature that cannot be overcome, or that we cannot go beyond ordinary thinking. Such things are well known to anyone who follows the history of human development. And I can only say: either what I have tried to present is a path to the truth – not the finished truth – in which case it will be trodden, or else it is a path to error, in which case it will be overcome. But that does no harm. What must not be extinguished in us, not be swept away by hasty criticism, is the everlasting striving upwards and onwards. And it is only this striving that really animates what I have tried to characterize today as the path that anthroposophically oriented spiritual science wants to take.

Question: We must have the firm belief that the effort we expend will also be worthwhile. Is it at all possible to recognize spiritual life in and of itself? Dr. Steiner says that it is possible to recognize the spirit of the world, the spirit of all life and of all nature, and to come into contact with it. Is that possible with our spirit, with our thinking? I doubt it. Thought consists of images. I think in pictures.

Rudolf Steiner: If I were to go into the question, I would have to keep you very busy for a long time. I do not want that and I will not do it. I only regret that this question was not asked earlier, then I could answer it more thoroughly.

You can find in my writings everywhere those things that I hypothetically object to and that are also discussed there, so that you can find a remedy for your doubts in the literature. Here, however, I would just like to say the following: It is the case with certain people that they make it virtually impossible for themselves to get ahead of the phenomenon through preconceived notions. They point to the phenomena and then say: What lies behind them, we do not recognize. The whole of Kantianism is basically based on this error. And my whole striving began with the attempt to combat this error. I would like to make clear to you, by means of a comparison, how one can gradually come to a resolution of these doubts.

When someone looks at a single letter, they can say: This single letter indicates nothing other than its form, and I cannot relate this form to anything else; it tells me nothing else. And when I look at, say, an electrical phenomenon, it is exactly the same as when I look at a letter that tells me nothing. But it is different when I look at many letters in succession and have a word, so that I am led from looking at them to reading them. I also have nothing in front of me other than what is being looked at, but I advance to the meaning. There I am led to something completely different. And so it is also correct that as long as one only grasps individual natural phenomena and individual natural elements – elements in the sense of mathematical elements – one can rightly say that one does not penetrate to the inner core. But if one tries to bring everything to life in context, to set it in motion with a new activity, then, as in the transition from the mere individual letter to the reading of the word, something quite different comes about. That is why that which wants to be spiritual science is nothing other than phenomenology, but phenomenology that does not stop at putting the individual phenomena together, but rather at reading them in the context of the phenomena. It is phenomenology, and there is no sin in speculating beyond the phenomena; rather, one asks them whether they have something to say about a certain inner activity, not only in terms of details but also in context.

It is understandable that if one only looks at the individual phenomena, one can take the same standpoint as Haller when he said: No created spirit penetrates into the innermost part of nature; blessed is he to whom nature only reveals the outer shell. But one also understands when someone grasps phenomenology as Goethe did – and spiritual science is only advanced Goetheanism – that Goethe, in view of Haller's words, says: “Into the innermost nature – oh, you philistine! — “No created spirit penetrates the innermost nature, blessed he to whom she shows only the outer shell.” I have heard this repeated for sixty years; I curse it, but furtively; I say to myself a thousand, a thousand times: She gives everything abundantly and willingly; nature has neither core nor shell, she is all at once. You, most of all, test yourself, whether you are core or shell."

at the Anthroposophical College in Zurich

Jakob Hugentobler opens the evening of disputations.

A student: A young, enthusiastic person wants to study astronomy, wants to learn what Kepler, Newton and all those men up to Einstein have produced. He wants to get a clear picture of what is going on in this field. This person wants to get to the bottom of things objectively. He is referred to the field of mathematics, and must either make the effort to penetrate the very complicated states of consciousness of higher mathematics, struggle through to what a Gauss or Beyer have produced, or he will stop halfway. A person in the present day can have worked through everything, can have read Plato, Feuerbach, Averroes, and yet he may lack certain soul dispositions that could open up a certain knowledge to him. He will have to say to himself that he has not yet learned anything about those spiritual worlds that are mentioned in anthroposophy. If you tell him that he needs to prepare himself in a certain direction, he will either be stimulated or not, because from an epistemological, purely psychological point of view, the most diverse variations and laws of life can occur. He thinks he has no right to doubt this or that. He does not wish to offend anyone present, but an aesthetic view of life is not suited to perceiving anything essential. A person who has to struggle through adversity and so on is much closer to the whole movement than those who devote themselves to things as a pastime because they have nothing else to do.

Rudolf Steiner: I would like to make a few comments on what the previous speaker said. It has just been rightly emphasized that need and suffering actually lead the way that should go out into the world, which is characterized by anthroposophy. Now, I would like to take up this last remark in particular. I have often made a similar remark in the course of my lectures, only always, I might say, taken out of some context. I have often said: Man lives his existence in alternating states of joy and pleasure, of pain, need and suffering. If one believes to have attained a certain higher realization – in all modesty – then one must still admit that one tends to emphasize, perhaps for very understandable reasons, the joys and pleasures one has experienced in life and for which one is grateful to the Powers of the Universe. But one does not really owe this realization to them. One owes insight only to the sum of the pains one has gone through. And when one speaks of insight in the true sense, it is something that emerges from the sum of the pains.

However, it is certainly the case that in our external lives we can go through the most diverse pains and hardships - hardships that can weigh us down, that at times, I would say, can even stop us from breathing spiritually. But there are also those that experience the real pains of a worldview - pains that, without wanting to offend anyone, I would say, perhaps a large proportion of people do not know too much about. The experiences one can have on the path of knowledge are of such a nature that they can sometimes take more than just breathing of the soul. It was not in vain that in older times, on paths that we can no longer follow, the old - I would like to call them as they called themselves - the old initiates, that is, the old cognizers, were trained. It was absolutely the case that they were led through pain and suffering, because it is needed for the right preparation for knowledge. And indeed, from all the hopelessness that arises on the path of knowledge, pain and hardship arise, which a person, with a certain indifference in living, can perhaps resolve within himself.

But now it is still necessary for the human being to place himself in a way that is demanded by the time into existence. It has been emphasized in earlier lectures here in Zurich over the last few years that the time suffering, the time need, is ultimately connected with what has been omitted by people in the field of knowledge in recent times. It is just these discoveries, which have indeed celebrated the greatest triumphs in recent times and from which all kinds of technical advances can and have emerged and much more will emerge, but these discoveries were, because they only wanted to move in the realm of necessity, not in the realm of freedom, of which I spoke today, not suitable for generating sociological and social thinking.

This is the great task of our time: we must be able to think not only about nature, which gives us guidance through its solid structure of necessities, but we must also be able to think free thoughts that have strength because they in turn are immersed in necessities. Without such free thoughts, we will decline in the new civilization. We cannot find social ideas if we only have the kind of epistemological foundation that we have in modern times. It is quite true that man enters into certain complicated developments of consciousness when he follows the mathematical-naturalistic endeavors of Kepler, Galilei, Copernicus, Newton, and Einstein. But we must not forget that, although all this has already been pushed beyond the merely mathematical by Gauss, for example, it has only opened up one-sided paths, and that all this does not contain the starting points for ideas that can deal with social need. The same applies to the epistemological positions that, for my part, go from Descartes to Mach and Avenarius. But there is another path, one that opens up through anthroposophical spiritual science! And this is already intimately connected with that which is significant as the kind of knowledge that has brought great triumphs in natural science, but which, as I have tried to show today, leads to anthroposophical research, anthroposophical observation.

The speaker before me was right about the aesthetic world view. But perhaps we need to look at the words 'aesthetic world view' a little more in terms of contemporary history. If we consider the thinking that has developed out of scientific endeavors, we must indeed say that it does not sink its roots into social necessities, that it does not penetrate to the spiritual foundations of existence. From this, a certain mood has arisen, which has been extraordinarily profound, especially in the last third of the 19th century and the first decade of the 20th. Anyone who has observed how people have begun to take an interest in certain higher questions could see that people have begun to take an interest in higher questions in the broadest circles. I just want to point out how widespread the discussions were that were connected, for example, with Björnsons “On Our Strength” and so on; many examples could be given in this direction. It may be said that a certain interest in the transcendental world has taken hold precisely in this age.

But how? People preferred to receive things when they were presented to them in an aesthetic form, so to speak, when they did not have to engage with their knowledge, if I may put it that way, when they could enter into it as they could in a drama or a novella and say to themselves: Well, you can get involved with something like that with your imagination. But they didn't feel any kind of obligation to bring things into line with reality. People were happy if they didn't have to bring things into line with reality! There was a certain sensationalism about it, to a great extent. This need developed at the end of the 19th century, beginning of the 20th century, but people didn't want anything to do with relating it to real life. This flight from real life is something that has emerged more and more – this disconnection, this not taking something seriously, this having only a certain sensational interest in something. Above all, this is what must be taken away from humanity, I would say, if civilization is to continue, if we do not want to end up in the kind of conditions that Oswald Spengler describes in his 'Decline of the West'; that must come. Basically, it is really just a fleeing from the painful sides of existence, in a certain respect a setting aside of the painful side of existence.

It is, I would say, an extremely tragic phenomenon, which emerged in the last third of the 19th century in Friedrich Nietzsche. There is no need to go into what Friedrich Nietzsche says or what he means; one need only go into his life. Consider, my dear audience, the suffering that this soul went through in the succession of three stages of development, and put that in the context of the whole of contemporary history!

You see, Nietzsche grew out of a proper philologist's life, only that he did not devote himself to philology out of a certain external sense of duty, as other philologists did, but rather he sensed the constricting nature of this philological method early on. And from this constricting material he selected that which in the sixties, and even at the beginning of the seventies, and well into the seventies, was still flourishing in the circles in which Nietzsche lived. He immersed himself in what had emerged from Schopenhauer and which, in wide circles, was nothing more than pessimistic talk, talk about misery, in order to numb himself to the misery of life in a certain way. And Nietzsche suffered from all this. And it was really only a yearning to inwardly overcome this unidealistic mood of the development of the times by means of a certain kind of insight. So Nietzsche suffered, roughly until 1866, from what was then the immediate scholarly formation of the times. At first he wanted to counter this scholarly formation of the times with his 'Birth of Tragedy out of the Spirit of Music', with his 'Untimely Meditations'. These works were written out of deep pain. But around 1876, he had come to the point where he had to say to himself: This is just another deception; one must go much deeper into human nature. And then he came to say to himself that, actually, man devotes himself to many thoughts — many that are untruthfulness. And now he wanted to overcome untruthfulness through knowledge. Isn't it true that people have preserved ideals from ancient times? Nietzsche also still believed in these ideals in the early days of his work, but in the end he saw the instincts behind the ideals. And so he wrote something like “Human, All Too Human”. It was a second form of time development that he suffered from, only to finally come to the third, where he suffered the problem most deeply in his soul, so to speak, where he felt the emergence of the human from the subordinate natural being weighing on his soul. Because he was unable to penetrate to the spirit, the problem remained: Man is only a transition from worm to superman. And so he could only express this process of the soul in human terms lyrically in his “Zarathustra”, only vaguely hinting at something in his great conception of the “return of the same”, which is to be represented by anthroposophy as repeated earth lives and also as the successive metamorphoses of the world system. He was the personality who suffered most deeply from the education of modern times and was broken by it.

Nietzsche has undoubtedly – for me it is unquestionable! – proved that one can break the body from the soul, because it is, after all, characteristic that an excellent psychiatrist could only give the verdict that it was an atypical case of paralysis regarding Nietzsche's illness. And what was later fabled about Nietzsche's illness, going beyond the usual medical schematizations, is, for anyone who truly looks into what was suffered there, what was suffered under the tension, to grasp the supersensible – it is, for anyone who can look at it impartially, quite unquestionable that this tension could break the body. I would say that it is immediately apparent how this organism was actually destroyed by the soul. And the external symptoms also correspond to this.

Consider this tragic situation as it arose. I will describe it. Nietzsche studied together with Paul Deussen, who later became a scholar of Indian antiquity and Indian philosophy, at the Gymnasium in Schulpforta in Thuringia, and they were very close friends. When Nietzsche was already quite ill in his nineties, Deussen visited him once. Deussen stood before Nietzsche and spoke with him; Nietzsche did not participate in what he said. Then Deussen began to speak of old times, telling all sorts of stories from the past. Nietzsche said, “Yes, you know, I can tell you that a person you don't even know took part in those times; the good, dear Deussen took part in those times.” He said this to Deussen himself, who was standing there before him! What he had experienced in his youth was present in Nietzsche, but what had been at work in his environment in the immediate present had been extinguished.

I cite this one scene – it could be multiplied by many – to make a point. What was being acted out there, of course, is pathological, and can be traced in Nietzsche from a very early stage. Twenty years ago, I wrote a paper, “The Psychopathological in Nietzsche's Writings,” and I was able to go back to his earliest writings, which are ingenious and magnificent, but in which one can see that the dissociation of ideas is already present. But these were ideas that arose entirely from the splitting apart of the time's culture for those who, from the center of human being, wanted to bring this time's culture into harmony with the supersensible. And one would like to say: It is precisely in such a personality, who is broken by the culture of the time - for that is the real problem of Nietzsche - that one sees what it means to struggle, to struggle inwardly with inner needs and sufferings. And it is actually in overcoming such suffering that the path to knowledge lies.

And it was already difficult to walk in the old days, because the aesthetic world view – which is certainly extremely justified in its field, but which does not want to take it seriously with the reality of that for which it has a certain sense, a certain sensationalism —, because this aesthetic world view had become so widespread in the period in which, on the one hand, people were quite willing to struggle through from Newton to Einstein, from Descartes to Mach or Avenarius. But for our time it has now become necessary to struggle through to the other — which is precisely what is being attempted through the anthroposophical path — to struggle through to what every human being can struggle through to. If one says that not every human being can struggle through to it, then that can only be said “cum grano salis”, because after all, not every human being struggles through to higher mathematics either. And I believe that anyone who not only struggles through to higher mathematics but also to a certain inner understanding, for example, of the transition from ordinary geometry and mathematics to synthetic geometry, is, in terms of his soul situation, just as well on the way to finding his way into imaginative knowledge as one has to find the way into function theory.

And it would be possible to proceed much more quickly along this path if the prejudices of the time did not always work against it so much. The belief that it takes a very special mind to make progress in anthroposophy is actually much more widespread than it should be. The truth is that every person can advance along this path just as much as they can along any other scientific path. And I would like to emphasize this because it is absolutely true: hardship and misery lead people to the gate of knowledge, but the point is not only to find, I would say, a certain inner mood, but the real spiritual world. Only through the knowledge of the real spiritual world can one then also achieve, in a social sense, what is necessary in today's world in terms of material life, provided one finds understanding, because, of course, that is what it is all about. Therefore, on the one hand, one must have understanding for the meaning of pain and suffering, but on the other hand, one must also gain understanding for the implementation of spiritual knowledge in concrete terms.

Dear attendees, we have actually had enough of the general talk about a spiritual being in the pantheistic sense – that does not really lead anywhere. Those who only speak in general terms about a spiritual world and want to establish it epistemologically are like someone walking across a meadow and saying: Oh well, I'm not interested when people say that this is a meadow saffron, that one is a lily, that one is a tulip, and so on. I'm not interested in all that, because everything is unified life, everything is plants. So people who have more pantheistic thoughts always want to say: Spirit, spirit, spirit! One can be satisfied if one recognizes the spirit. One can satisfy a certain inner voluptuousness with this pantheism in what I call “modern mysticism”. But what the world needs today is concrete knowledge about the supersensible worlds. And that is what is most resented about anthroposophy today: that it strives for this concrete knowledge. And so people want to believe that it proceeds in the same way as other mystical paths. But anyone who wants to approach this anthroposophy will see that it really does follow paths that can be presented in such a way that anthroposophy can be held accountable before the strictest science, albeit in worlds that one must first open up.

This is only in connection with the very interesting remarks of the previous speaker.

Another speaker: When I first heard about spiritual science, I took the matter seriously as a whole, I would say. Today in the lecture, one had the feeling of simply listening to a scientific lecture. A scientist could have come to such a scientific lecture, but I am a painter or a musician and have to work productively in my field. Someone could have come who says to himself: I want to acquire knowledge in the natural sciences in a higher scientific sense. My question now is: Must not anthroposophy be understood in a much broader sense?

Now I would like to know how one should relate to Anthroposophy in practice. Is it enough to have any profession, to have any mission, is it enough to acquire this knowledge? Or is it necessary to follow this path of how to enter the spiritual worlds and how Dr. Steiner described it, oneself? I would like to ask how one should relate to this.

Rudolf Steiner: May I just make the preliminary remark: In the last lecture, which is announced here, I will speak about the building in Dornach - not only externally about the building, but in such a way that it will be very interesting for a painter or sculptor in particular, but it can also be of interest for all people.

I would compare what one can acquire anthroposophically with climbing a high mountain. You can start from a variety of different points below and you will always reach the summit. In the same way, you can start from a variety of different points in your development. And one still likes to do it even after one has started from one point. We built this Dornach building because we wanted to create something, artistically as well, that is the expression of this anthroposophical world view, just as the nutshell is the expression of the nut itself. Anyone with a sense of morphology will say to themselves: actually, the nut could only have the shell that it has. The same formative forces are contained in the shell as in the edible part of the nut itself.

Now, when the anthroposophical world view is represented at our Goetheanum in Dornach, for me that is the actual nut, the other is the shell. So it had to be built out of the same impulse from which the speech is given inside and so on. It is indeed the case that one can start from the most diverse points. For example, one can follow up the things Dr. Kolisko has said today about the threefold human being. The strange thing about it is that if you follow it up, you will see that, in the end, you enter into a completely different state of mind than the one you started with. The principles that are being discussed are so rooted in life that they not only lead the human being to all kinds of conclusions in the logical process, but they actually work in his soul in a real way. And when one carries out these things - which are real principles - one's soul is brought to life with real forces. And in the end one gets an insight into the human form. What initially appears to be a theory is transformed all by itself into a vivid perception of the human form, and one gets to know and understand the human form from the inside out. This is how an attempt was made to work on the sculpture at the Goetheanum in Dornach in order to understand the human form from the inside out.

And it goes even further! Attempts were also made to treat the material. Only then do the principles of spatial design emerge. It is particularly interesting, for example, when working by hand, to see what a big difference there is between working on a human head, for example when carving out an eye, between a material like clay or marble and a material like wood. You realize: with wood you have to scrape, and it is important that you work into the concave. What is worked in clay must be worked into the convex; you must always keep your eye on working into the convex when you are working in a solid material. By contrast, with soft wood, the idea is to scrape things out.

In this way, I would say, what at first seems theoretical is transformed into a certain artistic creation, into a living into those formative forces that one would like to say are the formative forces of nature itself. And that is the inner transition between our starting point and our final goal, for example, the transition to the artistic. That is the remarkable thing about it: anthroposophy does not stop at a particular soul situation, but leads to other soul situations. And it is the case that in understanding the human being, one first finds the transition from anatomy and physiology, which work abstractly or at most sensually, to the inner formative forces of the human being. Science becomes artistic perception. This transition can certainly be doubted: nature itself is not only in the metaphorical sense, but actually in the real, true sense an artist.

Now, one finds oneself drawn to the artistic. Good, say the people, the epistemologists – knowledge, that must happen logically! Knowledge must not somehow work visually in some sense as intended here, but knowledge must proceed from conclusions – one must, so to speak, proceed along the lines of logic. Fine, but that is only a subjective requirement. If nature does not create in the sense in which we prescribe it, then our logic will escape us precisely what the deeper meaning of nature is. And so we can only come close to nature by entering into this metamorphosis of the soul situation with complete impartiality. That is one thing.

The other aspect, for example, is the transition to the practical. You see, I have written these “Key Points of the Social Question”, and they are widely read in this day and age. But understanding has not yet come far, otherwise people would have to say to themselves: The book is not really meant to be read – excuse me for saying something so paradoxical – but the book is written to be put into practice, to be done in some way, each one individually according to his or her situation. The book is actually written only from the perspective of observation, written in a very practical way. Of course, one has to express oneself through words and sentences, but that is only to point out what is actually meant. And there again is the transition to direct practice.

And that is what anthroposophy actually wants to be: anthroposophy leads to the most practical areas of life just as naturally as it leads to the artistic. It leads to skill. And in the end you actually come to things that some people naturally find quite contestable. I have often said in my lectures – because one feels compelled to express certain truths differently – that I cannot imagine that someone is a good philosopher who is not also a good chemist or potato digger when it comes down to it. It is actually not possible to reason about concepts and ideas if one cannot chop wood when it comes down to it, or perhaps when it does not come down to it. I believe that when you are chopping wood or digging up potatoes, for example, if you are fully present with your whole personality, you might do it more cleverly or at least learn just as much logic as you sometimes do in the logical colleges. You may find this paradoxical, but it is so. And above all, anthroposophy wants to assert that there is a unity in everything, a concrete unity.

Therefore, I would like to answer your question in a very positive way: if you look around at what is already available in our various fields today, you are bound to find points of contact somewhere. And from there, you can go anywhere. Anthroposophy does not want to be one-sided, but you can start at the wrong end, and by what you strive for as a human being, you will get into the right thing, even if you initially say to yourself that it is not really any of your business. The main thing is the will - if it is to make any sense at all to start - to continue now. And there is the window to get straight to my point. And because anthroposophy is far from being pedantic, it should actually be understood that you can start with it wherever you want, and you will reach a goal. One can start from more of such considerations as are given in the book “How to Know Higher Worlds,” and if one goes far enough, one can arrive from there at every field. Or, one can start more from the scientific point of view, as explained, for instance, in the lecture by Dr. Kolisko, and arrive from there at whatever you need.

The previous speaker explained that he meant something very specific. He finds it very logical that one can reach the summit from all points. One could take an example from artistic circles. It could be a sculptor or a painter: from both could arise what one already has today in terms of profound art, for example expressionism or futurism. He had found, however, that no universal human being such as Goethe, for example, emerged, even if one worked one's way into and lived in what the anthroposophist or the actual rose crosser has: the ascent to the Devachan level. He wonders whether it is necessary to take this one path in particular, to work one's way up through these levels – purely spiritually, intellectually – or whether one could also start from a different philosophical point.

Rudolf Steiner: If we take the examples you have mentioned – Expressionism, Futurism and so on – I would like to say that today one can sometimes find it a bit naive, quite childish, quite paradoxical and so on. Nevertheless, I would like to say that in all of this there is a healthy, justified impulse to turn to the spiritual from a more materialistic world view. I do not want to speak merely of theoretical materialism, but of the materialistic world view. And from this point of view, I can nevertheless, in the many attempts, which, compared to Goethe's versatile genius, may seem very one-sided, nevertheless only find things that have a future. You just have to give it time. I think things have a future. You see, I have to look at it this way: Take a contemporary expressionist; if he is a painter, he will paint a picture in such a way that you won't know whether it is a house or a tree stump, or whether it is supposed to be an elephant or something like that. But that is basically never a question of artistry, if I am to express myself paradoxically. It is really not an artistic question what it should represent – at least not the first question – but rather the question is why you are dealing with this color on this surface and so on. And then you do come across questions, for example, where you see: there is something that is of course not as universal as in Goethe, but which still has a future. Perhaps I may draw your attention to the following.

If I may make this personal comment: I have been thoroughly involved with Goethe for forty years, my first literary endeavor was directed towards Goethe, and since then I have not left this field again. Now, you see, at a very specific time, I became interested in very specific Goethe problems. These are the problems where Goethe did not cope with something, and he actually did not cope with many things. Think of Pandora, think of The Natural Daughter and so on, or something like Nausicaa. So, there is a lot that Goethe actually could not finish. Goethe was an honest man, and not being able to finish something always meant for him to struggle through to a certain point, where he then had to leave things as they were. He did not get through; he could not break through! It is very interesting to see how he got to a certain point with “Pandora”, for example. After that, only sketches came. He had wanted to continue writing Pandora, to carry out what we find hinted at in the sketches. One could say that he could have left it and then worked on the sketch later. But it couldn't have worked that way, because if he had written it eight days later, it would have been something completely different again. And there is no reason to say that Goethe should have worked from such a sketch; he would have changed the whole thing again. Yes, he reached the point where he just couldn't get any further, and it's easy to see why.

It was precisely for this reason that Goethe came very far in his contemplation of a certain external metamorphosis. It is truly magnificent to see how Goethe develops this idea of metamorphosis on his 'Italian Journey', how he applies it to the human being. But he cannot actually apply it to the shaping of the spiritual. And why not? Why can he not go where the spiritual shapes the material itself? For example, it lies perfectly in the direct line of Goethe's thought of metamorphosis – I am never afraid to express these things, they simply belong to what I call not only my conviction but also my knowledge, however be taken as it will, it lies in the direct line of this thought to arrive at the conclusion that the formative forces which today underlie the human head, the metamorphosed formative forces of the organism, are derived from an earlier earth-life. Thus this entire remarkable shape of the skull in relation to the rest of the human organism is the result of a very extensive metamorphosis. But Goethe could not break through to the spiritual! And this is also evident from the fact that he had to stop where he should have become spiritual. He was quite honest - he stopped there. Take the second part of “Faust” yourself: it is simply not quite finished! The fact is that it is simply not completely finished, because the last scenes are such that Goethe took the Catholic concepts and forced them into the matter. It has become something magnificent as a result, but it is something that has been artificially contrived. And when you compare this conclusion with certain other things, you can see the power that Goethe applied to get it done.

And I just said that in this most contestable, abstract final stage lies precisely this moment, where one comes to the breakthrough into the spiritual. No matter how little people are able to do it, it is a beginning, and that is why it is justified to say these things. And so I think one can say: Today it is really a matter of people being able to make something out of the most diverse points that are close to them today, if they are honest with themselves. I believe, for example, that the most natural way would be for people to start from the things they are currently involved in and then come together for something productive. People should start from the areas in which they are currently involved; they will then come together. It is not so bad that they do not understand each other at first - from a certain point on, they do understand each other. It is also a matter of, for example, waiting for the right moments and so on, and fate will see to that. But I cannot find – I have also experienced many things in this regard – that this abstract jumping up – forgive me for expressing myself somewhat clearly – this jumping up from 'plan' to 'plan' is now something particularly promising for the person. In most cases, it is something that does not arise from complete inner honesty. Of course, you can also achieve something in this way, but as a rule you become unworldly in the process. And that is what is actually needed least in our time, in today's difficult times. I do not mean it frivolously, but it is the case. I would like to put it this way: This rushing about from 'plan' to 'plan', there is so much coquetry mixed up in it, so much inner dishonesty, that I do believe that we should strive to start from the point where we are firmly grounded, and then people will also find each other. In a way, this has proved to be practical.

You see, there are some of us who are artists or doctors, such as Dr. Kolisko, for example, another is a philologist - perhaps you will hear one of them here in the course of this lecture - or a mathematician, and yet another is a complete practitioner. We have practitioners among us who are simply striving to create the most practical institutions possible in which the anthroposophical spirit can live. Mr. Molt, a member of the Council of Commerce, is among us today; he has endeavored above all in this direction. Is that not true? Today, it is indeed a problem of time, and so it is necessary to start from where we are today and then seek understanding. This is something that has already proved practical and in which I see something promising, whereas in a world-renouncing striving to go up into the higher worlds, I can see nothing that is really honest. It is quite true that one can only see through the world by striving for it, but it is also true that one must say: The one who starts from a particular area of life is much more likely to achieve a higher level of insight. Above all, he achieves it in a much more concrete way. He can then say something about the higher worlds; he knows what the higher worlds look like. It benefits him to start from a particular area of life, whereas the unworldly ascent does not really lead to anything real, at least not for humanity – for the individual it can lead to something. That is simply speaking out of what corresponds to the course of time. I will certainly not be against the development of the abilities of supersensible knowledge – I have myself described how it should be. But I think that in doing so, man must not neglect the area of life in which he is immersed. That is the case everywhere.

A speaker: Mr. Heisler said in his lecture that Dr. Steiner presumed to gain insights into the higher worlds, and he even quoted Goethe as proof. I have to say in advance that I have not yet read any of Steiner's writings. I would now like to ask whether, if one had knowledge of the deceased – for example, whether they are in agony – one would not also have a certain proof of the existence of God. Anyone who has studied Nietzsche and perhaps has long since lost their belief in a God might find it easier to accept it from within if they could regain their faith through Dr. Steiner's way of speaking about God. This occult field has been taken up again from various sides, for example by Schrenck-Notzing in Munich and so on.

Rudolf Steiner: Today I could only hint at some things in the lecture, but I want to say the following. You see, today we live in an age in which some people are striving to tear open an abyss between knowledge and belief. Some see something healthy only in a science that relates to the purely factual, to recording, systematizing, and permeating with laws. Others, on the other hand, believe that they can only exist in the realm of religion by demanding faith.

Now, this is nevertheless only a characteristic of a passing age. Just as in earlier times man's soul was divided into the most diverse soul powers, so today it is divided into a field of knowledge and a field of faith. But if the soul is completely honest with itself, it cannot really bear this division. One realizes what is at stake when one sees the reason for this division. You see, you can still speak today to a relatively large number of people about life after death or about the divine world teaching based on faith. You can do this without appealing in any way to those inner powers of conviction that lead to proof. You do appeal, though, when you speak of life after death, to human desires, to human fears and so on. The matter is quite different when you speak about what I also spoke about today: about preexistence, about human life, the soul-spiritual life of man before birth or, let us say, before conception. That, in turn, is done through anthroposophy in the broadest sense. We talk more about the prenatal, that is, about life before conception, that is, about the pre-existent life, which, of course, results in life after death as a matter of course.

We talk more about this pre-existent life because people's egoism reaches less into it. People are not at all indifferent to their egoism as to whether they live on after death or not; but out of their egoism they are much less interested in whether they have already lived before they descended to earth. However, if one opens the sources of knowledge for this life in the beyond, in which we were before we came to earth, then the other one arises. You will find it described in detail in my writings, if you look into them. We more or less take this for granted. But at the same time something else occurs. One can speak about the life after death out of a certain faith, but, as I said, it accommodates selfishness and arises from an egoistic knowledge. By speaking about pre-existent life, man is at the same time led into the spiritual-supernatural world through knowledge. And so, when we turn again to the pre-existent life, the abyss between faith and knowledge, which is actually destructive for the human soul, is overcome.

You see, in older worldviews we have knowledge of these things based on a certain instinctive knowledge - we cannot strive for this again, we must strive for conscious knowledge. I must emphasize again and again that anthroposophy speaks in an intense way of the pre-existent life, even of repeated earthly lives. And when Lessing took up this idea of repeated earthly lives in his 'Education of the Human Race', he said: This idea of repeated earthly lives arose in the most ancient times. Should it be any less valuable because it arose in the most ancient times, before it was corrupted by all the various schools? — You see, those who are literary researchers or the like today take it that way — well, let's say aesthetically. They do not respect it very much, they do not want to see it as reality. That is why they say: Lessing is a great man, but the 'Education of the Human Race' was a concoction of old age. Lessing was a great man. But if you read between the lines, it turns out that he actually always adhered to the idea of repeated earthly lives. And it is certainly the case that knowledge of the supersensible worlds and also knowledge of the concrete content of the spiritual, of the spiritual world government in general, is acquired by occupying oneself with prenatal life, not merely with post-mortem life. But in the more recent development of the times, this has gradually been completely lost. We can see this from an external point of view.

You see, we have a word that means “immortal”. We speak of “immortality” when we are properly prepared for it. We use the word “immortality”, but we do not speak of a word that means “unborn, being unborn”. Because as much as we live on after death and are immortal, as much we are unborn. And we should have a separate word for being unborn, a word as natural as “immortality”. But we don't have that. Because people in civilization have completely lost their way in understanding the immortal, it will only be understood again when one can look at being unborn in the same way as at being immortal, because just as as at one pole of life the soul is released when death occurs and ascends into the spiritual world, so birth or conception is the other pole through which the soul reenters the physical world. And just as the soul does not die, it is not born either. Only when one really considers this pre-existent life does faith join with actual knowledge. That is what leads further. This supersensible life must again deal with the pre-existent, it must lead over to the path that really leads to the goal.

As for the remark that anthroposophy is supposed to be presumptuous – yes, that depends, doesn't it, on how you look at it. Well, until 1827 the Catholic Church found it highly inappropriate to admit that a Copernicus once came along and said that the earth moves around the sun. So it was only in 1827 that Catholics were given permission to believe it. Today, official science does not yet give permission to believe in repeated earth lives, just as one was not allowed to believe in the movement of the earth around the sun back then. We can indeed wait until these people allow us to believe in and hold on to those things that are given to us through anthroposophy. Until then, we will have to accept the reproach of presumption, for that is how it is in the world.

Question: What is Anthroposophy's view of vaccination as a means of protection against epidemics?

Rudolf Steiner: This question is somewhat out of keeping with what has been said before. But I will try to say something anyway. The fact is, as has already been stated today, one must not believe that anthroposophy is polemicizing against the justified successes achieved in the newer fields of natural science and medicine. In some cases it can be shown that a certain success, such as that to be achieved through vaccination – for example, against smallpox – has actually been achieved. The fact remains that infectious diseases have been largely reduced by more external, more hygienic measures, which have of course become necessary, and by protective vaccination. Admittedly, numerous vaccinations were not such that one could say that they had had a similar success for other diseases. But one must certainly admit the effectiveness of this principle.

On the other hand, however, this question is something that can be viewed more psychologically. Today there are very many opponents of vaccination. These opponents of vaccination are actually parties whose psychology cannot be approached rationally. They are people who, out of an inner reluctance, act against the way in which it is attempted to work. And they cannot say, out of their realization, that the vaccination methods are ineffective, because there are effects. And anyone who resists is resisting these vaccination methods out of a certain unconsciousness.

Anthroposophy must start from deeper points of view. If you think about the nature of illness together with what has been explained to you here today, namely about repeated earthly lives, if you are convinced that there are repeated earthly lives, then you must also bring together what a person experiences in the case of illness in the present life with what he has experienced in a previous earthly life. When one is willing to see this, when one has the will to see this, regardless of what epidemiology has to say, in the science of infection, regardless of that, one must know that there is a certain connection between what a person has been through in a previous life and what happens when he is now exposed to a particular infection. It is said that something happens by chance. But it is not admitted that man is driven there from the subconscious, where he then comes into contact with the infection story. Regardless of some of what he may experience as a result, one can still come to many other views of what is connected with an illness.

When it is realized that certain illnesses have something to do with the peculiarities of the soul of the person, that in a certain respect they are an overcoming of what the person could not achieve in a previous life on earth, and that these physical disease processes , which one must endure, are a form of compensation – the disease process is also linked to psychological phenomena – then one can also understand why, out of a certain unconsciousness, instinct, some have an aversion to this healing elixir. They actually unconsciously say to themselves that, with what is present as illness, an inner soul development upwards to the spirit should go parallel with the outer healing. And if the vaccination that is used makes it possible for things to succeed completely as one imagines, one would still have to say: Even if one manages through appropriate procedures to extinguish all epidemics , that one limits the illnesses, but the question still arises as to whether something else is not also necessary, which must, so to speak, accommodate this process by simultaneously promoting an inner spiritual development. People should realize that such a procedure is possible. One can acknowledge everything that science says, but one must be clear about the necessity that, in addition to the external healing methods that are available, there must also be something that helps the soul to progress inwardly and that points to earlier spiritual connections, to earlier lives. Anthroposophy will never object to what science brings.

Question: How can one form an imagination oneself? Where can one take its content from, if it is not to be linked to a sensual or a memory-based presentation?

Rudolf Steiner: This is based on a misunderstanding! I said that what is to be used for meditation and what then leads to imagination should be manageable, one should have complete oversight of it, so that reminiscences do not occur, so that the subconscious does not participate in the corresponding soul process. You see, if you take, for example, some experience from the past and then meditate, many elements live in the image of such an experience that you have left more or less unconsidered. These elements emerge from the subconscious, and so you do not fully engage in what you have set out to do. It depends on the manageable. For example, one can meditate by calling up a circle with a triangle inscribed in it before one's soul. It is important that the soul does its exercises on something so manageable. It can also be qualitative things. If one lets such manageable things rest in the soul in order to meditate on them, then there is no danger of reminiscences arising from the subconscious. It is not important that one does not use something sensual or reminiscent for meditation - one can use both, but it must be manageable, it must not be one that then causes all kinds of conscious or unconscious processes. What matters is manageability, not imagining anything at all that encompasses many things.

If someone meditates on the concept of “city”, for example, he has been through so much in life, so much has accumulated in the concept of “city” that he cannot possibly know what is all emerging. An example that is also recorded in the literature: a learned naturalist is walking down the street in the city and comes to a shop window. He stops, looks into the shop window and sees the title page of a treatise on earthworms – something that must interest him, surely? But while he is looking and sees the book on the anatomy of earthworms, he suddenly has to smile. A naturalist who suddenly has to smile while looking at a book about earthworms! It seems quite unlikely to him that he has to smile, and yet he wants to find out how it happened. So he turns away, really away, closes his eyes and now tries to figure it out in the dark. Lo and behold, he hears the sounds of a barrel organ in the distance. He had not taken any notice of it, either unconsciously, where he had gone, or consciously, when he was looking at the book. But the sounds had reached his ears; they lived in him in a certain relationship and even made him smile, quite unconsciously. So, he now hears the tones of the barrel organ, and he thinks it is the same melody that he once learned to dance to thirty years ago. He has never thought of this important event again, that he learned to dance to this melody. But this event has lived in his soul in such a way that he now had to smile – even as a naturalist. So, there is a great deal in the subconscious of a person. And I can tell you: there are mystics who hear angels – which can certainly be reality – but with some mystics who somewhere think they hear something in the world of angels, it is still the case – because these things not only remain in the subconscious as reminiscences, but also undergo metamorphoses – that such supposed angels are sometimes transformed barrel organ tunes! And many a thing that appears to one as a significant revelation is merely the transformed notes of a street organ.

That is what one must know above all. The anthroposophical method is an absolutely reliable method. The more one enters into the spiritual world, the more one resists everything that, because it comes out of things, can bring all sorts of misleading and absurd things. So, it is not a matter of meditating on things that cannot be grasped, but on things that are composed by someone who understands such things, or are chosen by oneself as things that can be grasped. It depends on how you look at a triangle, of which you know it has three sides, it has three angles totaling 180 degrees – you can look at it, not much from the subconscious can come up in the process. The meditations must be so manageable that one does not descend from the arbitrary into the involuntary, into the unconscious, that there does not arise something merely from memory or something that was once a sensation, like the distant sounds of a barrel organ, but something must be present in consciousness that is as manageable as a mathematical idea. In this way one can practise imaginative recognition. Of course, everything that is formed from memory must be imagined in a materialistic way. It is not important that it is formed from memory, but the matter must be surveyed. A speaker at the discussion: Dr. Kolisko mentioned something today that interested me greatly. When he spoke of the three centers, he mentioned, as it were, that the head consumes everything that flows up from the lower organs as vital life force. So the lower organs always create something living, which the head, as it were, eats up again. I would like to know how Anthroposophy thinks about the actual physical body.

Dr. Steiner mentioned today in the case of Nietzsche that the physical body had broken the soul, that is, the soul was not strong enough to overcome the body. From the general point of view, without having the physical body, from one direction I have heard something about it - I got to know Dr. Hanish's method. What use is it to me if I know higher worlds and have a toothache? If I cannot help myself when I have a toothache, what use is it to me to know something about the spiritual world? Do you have to approach the physical body from the material or from the spiritual side?

Eugen Kolisko: First of all, one must become clear about the nature of man. Only then can one understand what health and illness of man actually consist of. If one says: What use is it to me if I know something about the world connection and still have a toothache and am at the mercy of all kinds of illnesses —, then one must realize that this is a very one-sided way of looking at it. What was said earlier can be applied to it in particular: that the human egoistic is present to an extraordinarily strong degree when one says, 'I want nothing to do with the spiritual, because it will not relieve me of my toothache'. Knowledge is something one must undergo, something that simply drives one not to let go, something one must simply continue with – even in overcoming the toothache.

So, a point of view that is so thoroughly permeated by a kind of materialistic, selfish striving – even if it were to speak of supersensible worlds – cannot be recognized. But it is important that we first grasp the essence of the human being in order to move beyond a merely materialistic view of the care of the body, because you cannot care for the body, nor can you work therapeutically, if you do not have an insight into the whole context of the forces that make up the essence of the human body.

Rudolf Steiner: I would like to take the liberty of making a few additional comments and illustrating them with examples. You are probably all familiar with a very frequently used saying that says: There are many, countless illnesses, but only one health. I believe there is nothing more wrong than such a saying. Indeed, there are countless illnesses, but there are also countless forms of health. Every person, no matter how healthy, has their own health, and such a sweeping statement is not acceptable under any circumstances. It is absolutely true to say, even from the most spiritual point of view, that a person must take care of the health of their organism in every way. My spiritual research has led me, for example, to regard the life of imagination in such a way that I see a radical error in believing that brain activity as such could somehow be the basis for mental activity. I see an error in this, which I would like to characterize by the following example: Suppose you have a road that has just been made soft by rain. People walk on it; footsteps dig tracks into it. And now someone comes along and says: Yes, this road is configured, you see all kinds of lines and so on. That must be brought about by forces that come from below, that is brought about by something that is inside, under the earth. When you hear something like that, you are likely to say: That's nonsense, the footprints are engraved from the outside and not from below. So, of course, spiritual research leads me to see something quite right in the brain configurations, and in the nerve configurations that the gentlemen physiologists demonstrate, but they are something that is engraved by the soul and spiritual life and can be felt as an imprint in it. But at the same time, it is a matter of the fact that this entire physical being between birth and death is the firm ground on which consciousness develops; the counterforce must be there. Otherwise, the life of the imagination could not develop in this way; in order for it to be able to reflect back, it must have the counterforce. The mirror needs a base. So, even from the most spiritual point of view, the physical organization of the human being is to be formed as healthily as possible. But now it is a matter of developing real views about a healthy physical constitution - and only this is meant when one has acquired a more comprehensive way of looking at things through spiritual science. A few examples of this - really not to boast, but only to suggest what is the basis of my view of life, which is founded on spiritual knowledge.

About 36 years ago, I was recommended to a family as a private tutor for one boy. Among the four boys in the family, one was about eleven years old at the time. He was considered by everyone, including the family, who were of course also prejudiced, to be a failure. They were unhappy about the boy because when he was supposed to take a test at school at the age of eleven, he could not do anything except draw a huge hole in his paper. And that was the extent of this eleven-year-old boy's knowledge in all subjects. The mother was terribly unhappy, the father somewhat skeptical. The family doctor, who was one of the most excellent practical physicians I have ever met – he was truly an excellent man – had already given up on the boy. Well, I was brought in to educate the three other boys. I took one look at the lad and said to the mother, who was the only one of the entire family who still had understanding, coming only from her motherly heart, that I couldn't promise her anything, but that I would use all my strength, as far as I had it, to make something decent out of the boy after all. “But he's been given up by the family doctor,” the other family members said, looking at me as someone to whom one had to ask whether the other three boys could be entrusted to him – after this opinion about the fourth boy! But the mother then pushed it through – it took some pushing before I got the boy for education. I said I had to have an absolutely free hand, had to be able to do and not do everything that I thought was good. The boy was extremely hydrocephalic. He was really in a very bad way.

Well, basically I just applied a method of mental hygiene. I actually only applied what I would call an economy in teaching concepts, skills and so on. I decided that the boy should be exposed to as much piano playing as I chose and so on, and that he should have other things to the extent that I wanted. I may say that I sometimes studied for three hours in order to be able to work with the boy for a quarter of an hour! But through such mental and pedagogical hygiene the boy could be brought to the point in two years where he could transfer to high school. The head had really become smaller. Now, you may say that it might have been good anyway. But truly, it is not the case that it could have been good on its own; the boy really was hydrocephalic through and through; before, his head did not want to and did not want to get smaller. If he had stayed alive anyway, he would certainly not have gone to high school after two years – based on the results that had been achieved with him so far. It was really a matter of being able to bring the boy so far through two years of intensive work – precisely in this individual care, in the hygienic response to this organism, which was completely out of order and which one had to treat. So, it was not a matter of general rules – although the general matter may be quite correct – but of an intimate knowledge of the human being in general.

As for the saying that only a healthy body can be the expression of a healthy soul, if you wanted to translate this saying into real life, it would be completely wrong. Another example: An important doctor came to me one day and said that he now had a special case that interested him very much. A patient had come to him who had fallen once - it was some time ago - and broken his nose, so that now the nose was somewhat narrowed as a result. He would like to operate on him, but he would like us to talk about it. With a certain deeper knowledge of human nature, one sees things differently than one necessarily sees them from a mere external examination of health. I could say nothing other than to advise the doctor: Do not operate on it, because this is a stroke of luck that rarely succeeds, because the man now gets just as much air as he can tolerate in his lungs. He has just the right width of nasal passage for his particular case, for his constitution. One should leave it just as it is. After all, it has been shown that the man is actually comfortable with the small constriction. There are many other things that could be mentioned. The general principle is quite correct: one must work towards a healthy body, but always in quite different ways.

It can make a strange impression – I have often observed it in naturopaths, who always come and say: Yes, this person has something, there is something irregular in the heart movement, you have to cure that. – In such cases, when you take a closer look, you often have to say: Let it be! Let the man have his heart defect, it may be just what he needs; if you try to cure him, he will become really ill. Because people have a very definite stereotype in front of them, a lot of unnecessary things are often done in this direction. You see, in many cases people apply general methods that are not much different - at least in terms of the logic of the matter, the factual logic of the matter - than it was, for example, with a lady who was a faith healer. A terrible thing! She said all kinds of things that you had to imagine; you would become strong and healthy if you believed in her. You would become hardened, she said. But I have never seen a person look as miserable as this faith healer, who was very careful to make sure there was not the slightest breeze, because every little draft caused her the most terrible conditions.

These are things that must be seen in their reality and not merely from a certain, I might say stereotyped point of view. On the other hand, it is certainly true that one must work towards physical health as much as possible; but the insight into what is healthy must arise from spiritual knowledge. Man must not only pay attention to his own health, but he must also know: I am actually a member of the Cosmos. And isn't it true that the air that is now inside me was outside in the Cosmos a short time ago? And so it is with everything else. As a member of the Cosmos, that is what man must actually look at in the world.

We can only interpret such general things in this way, and I would like to have pointed out only this with these remarks.

Jakob Hugentobler expresses his thanks and closes the event.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Of all the different points of view on the world, which were represented at the Fourth International Congress of Philosophy, many of our contemporaries consider the theosophical one to be the least scientific. One cannot be surprised at this fact. For much that at one point in time was considered fantastic and unfounded was in a later epoch a recognized, often even an obvious truth. Although theosophy is used as a term for schools of thought that have often appeared in the development of culture, as it was characterized in a short lecture at this congress, it represents an absolutely new school of thought. It aims to open the gates to a supersensible world. And it aims to find this world not through mere speculative thinking, but through real perception, which is as accessible to the human soul as the perception of the physical senses. It is usually thought that such spiritual perception only occurs in states of vision, of ecstasy in the soul, and that it is not subject to scientific control in those who are endowed with it. That is why it is not considered to have any value other than as a personal experience of individual human beings. Modern theosophy has nothing in common with this kind of spiritual experience. It shows that in the human soul there are dormant powers of knowledge that do not come to light in ordinary life or in external science. These powers can be awakened through meditation and through a vigorous concentration of the inner life of feeling and will. In order to achieve this, the soul must be able to shut itself off from all external impressions and also from everything that the memory retains of such external impressions. Meditation is the soul's intense devotion to ideas, sensations and feelings, in such a way that one does not develop any awareness of what these ideas or feelings mean for the physical world, but in such a way that they prove to be forces within the soul's life, which, as it were, radiate through the soul and thus draw out powers from its depths, of which the human being is not aware in ordinary life. The effect of this inner contemplation is such that through it the human being becomes aware of a spiritual reality of his own being, of which he is otherwise unaware. Before he engages in such exercises, he recognizes himself as an entity that knows something about itself and the world through bodily organs. After such exercises, he knows that he can unfold a life within himself, even without his bodily organs imparting such a life to him. He knows that he can separate himself spiritually from his physical body and that through this separation he does not have to sink into a state of unconsciousness. And he acquires such knowledge not only about himself, but also about a supersensible world, which for ordinary knowledge is hidden behind the physical-sensible world and in which lie the true causes of this latter world.

In this way man also learns to recognize that he, as a soul-spiritual being, is descended from soul-spiritual beings just as he, as a physical being, is descended from his physical ancestors. He must only feel that the soul-spiritual being from which he descends is himself, while he distinguishes his physical ancestors from himself. This opens up the prospect of repeated earthly lives. Through actual observation, he comes to understand that human life truly consists of the life of the soul in the physical body between birth and death, and that this is followed by a spiritual existence, which is usually considerably longer than the physical one. After this spiritual existence, a physical embodiment must follow again, and so on until the cycle of physical embodiments is fulfilled with the goal of the earth itself.

This idea of repeated lives on earth (reincarnation) must necessarily appear to most of our contemporaries as paradoxical, even grotesque. But it will be the same with it as with the idea of Francesco Redi, who, a few centuries ago, first proposed the idea, against the resistance of his contemporaries, that a germ of life cannot arise from the combination of inanimate substances, but only as the descendant of a similar living being. What seemed to be a fantastic idea of Francesco Redi's to people only a few centuries ago is now a generally accepted truth.

This is just one of the many results of modern theosophy. Most of the misunderstandings that arise in regard to it arise from the fact that people think it wants to be a renewal of Buddhism. It is not in the form it has taken in the West. For if there had never been a Buddhism, the characterized development would have to lead higher cognitive powers in the soul to the discovery of the theosophical truths.

In its modern form, Western Theosophy does not want to be or found a religion, but an extension of science into the supersensible realm. In doing so, it does not become a religion itself, but an instrument for deepening our understanding of religious life. It approaches Christianity as such an instrument; and it shows that in Christianity there are depths of life that can only be found by approaching it with a science of the supersensible. It shows how the foundation of Christianity can only be understood as an act that originates in a supersensible world and which has cast its rays into the physical historical development of humanity. It is precisely through the realization that man achieves his full life on earth in repeated embodiments that the superhuman, divine nature of Christ comes to the fore. The Christ Being was present in a physical body only once for true supersensible observation. And since the event at Golgotha, it has been connected with the development of humanity on earth. The highest peak of supersensible observation is that in the spiritual world, Christ is recognized as the directing force. The more the soul develops supersensible powers of recognition, the closer it comes to the Christ presence. Theosophy in no way disturbs the religious faith of the Christian, but rather strengthens it by elevating it to a supersensible-scientific truth. If for ordinary science the nature of Christianity can be doubted by many people, it becomes an unshakable truth for scientific spiritual observation. Through the instrument of Theosophy, the truths contained in the Gospels can only be seen in the right light.

For those who have followed the theosophical school of thought since it was founded in 1875 by the Theosophical Society, it may seem strange that Christianity is being discussed here from a theosophical point of view. This is because it is thought that the main teachings of Theosophy agree with oriental religious systems, especially with Brahmanism or Buddhism. And it is also true that at present many representatives of Theosophy still present it in a way that justifies such an opinion. But it must be said that the first founders of Theosophy did not understand the essence of Christianity, and that many important representatives of Theosophy still do not understand it at present. Theosophy itself must first reach a certain level to recognize that Christianity not only represents progress compared to all previous religious systems, but that it actually unites the true aspects of all other religions within itself, if it is properly understood.

Theosophy cannot be a religion as such; but it is a path to the full understanding of religion, just as it is a path to the true understanding of nature and the mind. Because this is misunderstood, opponents of Theosophy are currently still emerging, both from the religiously minded and from those opposed to religion. The former think that they might lose their religion through Theosophy. On properly immersing themselves in Theosophy, they will recognize that true religiosity is lost no more through Theosophy than the splendor of natural phenomena is lost through scientific observation.

The others believe that 'Theosophy must lead back to blind faith. They can convince themselves, through a real acquaintance with Theosophy, that the course of human history is not a succession of errors, but a development of truth. They will come to the realization that true science does not comprehend the most beautiful blossoms of human spiritual life – precisely the religious ones – by revealing the same as illusions, but by bringing their truth to light.

Anyone who observes the development of the soul in our time must find that there is a thirst for knowledge of the supersensible world. The ordinary sciences show a wonderful progress. They have completely transformed our culture in a relatively short time. They have provided solutions to questions for our outer life and will provide many more in the future. For the life of the soul, they have not provided any solutions, but instead, they continually raise new questions. No answer to such questions is given by traditional religious concepts. One cannot object that these answers are available, but that many of our contemporaries no longer feel them to be answers. The fact that they are no longer felt as such is the essential point that presents modern humanity with new tasks for the inner life. If humanity grasps these tasks through the science of the supersensible, harmony can be created between the longings of souls that arise from modern life. If this understanding does not come about, then the new questions would remain unsolved, leaving the souls burning with thirst. But questions that souls must ask themselves without being able to find answers mean soul-emptiness, soul-unhappiness; finding the answers to such questions means soul-peace, soul-strength, soul-happiness. And modern humanity needs this if its magnificent outer culture is not to remain without soul itself.

At the Section for the Philosophy of Religions, Dr. Rudolf Steiner of Germany spoke about the psychological foundations of Theosophy and their scientific justification. The speaker pointed out that he had to represent a subject that is not yet considered scientific in the broadest circles. This is quite understandable, however. For the school of thought in question has a completely different kind of knowledge in mind than the other current philosophical trends. These ask, what is the human soul like, and what can it know by virtue of the fact that it is constituted in a certain way? Theosophy, as expounded by the speaker, maintains that the soul can rise above its so-called normal state and thereby extend its powers of knowledge from the realm of the sensual and intellectual to that of the supersensible. However, by such a different state of the soul is not meant that which is referred to in ordinary psychology as the “subconscious” or “unconscious”, nor that of a vision, ecstasy or the like, but a state that can be achieved under the strictest self-control of the soul. To achieve this state, the soul must subject itself to strict and intimate exercises. It must imbue itself with ideas, thoughts and feelings that do not bear the usual character of images of an external reality, but rather have a more symbolic character. The soul must now exclude from its life all sensual, memory-based and intellectual impressions and contents, and through constant repetition become completely one with the characterized symbolic representations. The result is a very specific experience in which the soul perceives itself as an inner reality that rests within itself independently of the bodily organization. Through this experience, the human being knows that they can truly live independently of their body as a soul. The exercises must proceed from this point. The human being must remove the symbolic images from his soul life and direct the inner sense only to the activity through which he has experienced the symbols within himself. Through this practice, a condensation of the soul independent of the body is achieved; and into this inner life the content of a spiritual world now flows in the same way as sensual content flows into sensual perception when eyes and ears are directed towards the physical outer world. This opens up new levels of cognition; the first, in which the symbolic representations transform the soul life, can be called imaginative cognition, and the second, which only arises when the symbols have been removed from consciousness, can be called cognition through inspiration. The speaker then points out how the theory of science at present cannot agree with a development of the soul as described, because it transfers the “I” of the human being into the bodily inner world from the outset. But a future theory of knowledge will recognize that the I in truth already lies in the spiritual outer world and only reflects the ordinary I as its image in the bodily organization. Such a theory of knowledge will be able to fully reconcile itself with theosophy.

The speaker's brief remarks were followed by a lively debate. The well-known Platonist Dr. W. Lutoslawski asked the speaker a series of questions. These led to the further discussion that the soul exercises of modern man are not based, as those in ancient times were, on physical isolation from one's surroundings, on an extremely ascetic life and the like, but that they place the main emphasis on the development of those spiritual-mental powers which, within man, bring about his isolation of consciousness. In response to another question from Lutoslawski, the speaker remarks that the methods of soul training, as appropriate for the human being in modern cultures, have been developed by leading spiritual figures since the eleventh and twelfth centuries.

Another speaker, Dr. Stark, asks whether an objective criterion can be given for what a person, after the appropriate preparation, finds to be facts of the spiritual world. The speaker replies that research and experience in the supersensible worlds require a soul that has been prepared as described. If, however, the facts of these worlds are presented in a logical form, then the truly unbiased logic of ordinary consciousness can decide on them and recognize them as correct. In response to a question from the same speaker, Dr. Steiner adds that the epoch seems to be beginning in which the theosophy described above will flow into spiritual cultural life and develop into a recognized common good of human science.

Since the form of “spiritual science” to which the author of these pages professes has attracted some attention among contemporaries, especially since the idea of building a place for the cultivation of this science, a “University for Spiritual Science” (in Dornach in the canton of Solothurn), was conceived, attacks from its opponents have been coming from all sides. They try to attribute the insights of spiritual research to the musings and fantasies of its representatives, to its spread across a whole range of civilized countries to the blind faith of its adherents and to many other things that they endeavor to present in unflattering terms. The adherents of various religious denominations find something in spiritual science that they feel they have to fight against. They paint all kinds of dangers that supposedly threaten religious sentiment.

Those who really want to penetrate to the true meaning of spiritual research will find it easy to see the unfounded nature of the opponents' attacks. In almost every case, the fabric of objectively incorrect assertions on which these attacks are based could easily be uncovered. And in those cases where such attacks do speak of the findings of spiritual research, they are mostly based on the most inadequate and misleading conception of these findings. Distorted images of these findings are given, which the opponents themselves first work out; and it is easy to find a “refutation” of these.

The writer of these remarks does not intend to deal with this or that individual attack in the same way; on the other hand, he would like to say something in general about the meaning and significance of spiritual science in the face of the prejudices that are held against it.

First of all, it may be noted that such “attacks” can be particularly surprising when they are made on spiritual research by representatives of religious denominations. One needs only a little insight into this research to recognize that it does not want to oppose any religious confession on its own initiative. For it does not consider itself as a new religious confession; it is as far away as possible from any kind of founding of a religion or formation of a sect. It wants to be the genuine, true continuation of the scientific way of thinking, as this has become incorporated into the spiritual life of humanity at the dawn of modern culture through Copernicus, Kepler, Galileo, Giordano Bruno and others. Out of the same attitude of mind with which Galileo, Bruno and others regarded the realm of nature, spiritual science seeks to regard the realm of the spirit. And just as little as Copernicus's doctrine that the earth moves did any harm to true religiousness, so little can the law, correctly understood in terms of spiritual science, that the human soul undergoes repeated earthly lives, endanger true religiousness. After Copernicus' appearance, it was believed that his teaching was detrimental to religion; but one can think differently about this belief than a learned priest who, elected rector of a large university, gave a speech about Galileo spoke such convincing words that the contemporaries of Copernicus turned against him out of a misplaced religiousness, whereas in our time the truly religious person should recognize how every new insight into the workings of the world must add a new piece to the revelation of divine world governance. World history has progressed beyond the attitude that wanted to reject Copernicus, and those who grasp spiritual science in its true sense must admit that the opposition that arises against this science in our time will be overcome much more quickly. For even where this antagonism arises from good faith, it is inspired by no different attitude than that which was directed against the Copernican world view. One is tempted to ask why the supporters of such an attitude do not make use of the teachings that can be drawn from the fact that so many have not grown tired of saying that Copernicus's theory contradicts the Bible? If they did so, they could no more accuse spiritual science of being an opponent of the Bible than they certainly no longer do so with the theory of the earth's movement.

Spiritual science is the true successor of natural science research in that it strives to recognize the realm of the spirit with the means that are suitable for this realm. As a continuation of natural science, it cannot itself be mere natural science. For the methods that have brought this science such tremendous triumphs were able to do so precisely because they were highly adapted to the study of nature and because this research was not compromised by others that were not suitable for the natural field. In order to accomplish something similar in the realm of the spirit as natural science has accomplished in the realm of nature, spiritual science must develop other cognitive abilities than those applicable in natural science. In doing so, it must, of course, assert a point of view that, understandably, can meet with many doubts in the present day. Just look impartially at what is said about these “other cognitive abilities”. They are abilities that lie entirely within the developmental line of the ordinary human soul powers. How must spiritual science understand its difference from natural science? The study of nature can only be cultivated with the powers of cognition that man acquires in the natural course of his life and that are supported for the purpose of this research by regulated observation and scientific experimental tools. In order to penetrate into the spiritual world, man must develop it further through spiritual and soul exercises beyond the point to which it develops by itself, so to speak, without such exercises. In this way, something similar happens to the human being at a different level to what happens to the child, which develops the abilities of its later years from those of its early years. Just as the child learns to use its soul abilities in such a way that the body becomes a good tool for experiencing the world of the senses, so the human being can develop his powers of cognition further so that he can perceive and experience in a state free of the body – purely as a soul. This happens when the soul intensifies to an unlimited degree certain activities which it already employs to a small extent in ordinary life, and thus brings about a state in which it draws out of the body, as it were, everything that is soul and spiritual in it. She can then experience her body as being outside of her, but for short, limited periods of time. She can know herself to be transported into a world in which she lives with spiritual beings and spiritual processes, just as she is surrounded by sensual processes and beings in the sensual world. The kind of spiritual-mental exercises by which this is achieved is described in my books: “How to Know Higher Worlds?” and “Occult Science”. What the soul experiences as a change in itself through such exercises is described in my book: “The Threshold of the Spiritual World”. Anyone who does not want to engage with the description of such actual processes as described in these books will be able to deny the possibility of a soul life free of the physical body, just as someone could say: I do not believe that hydrogen, as something quite different from water, can be developed out of water. He can say this if he does not want to concern himself with the fact that water is broken down into hydrogen and oxygen by means of chemistry. But man can — through a kind of spiritual chemistry — break himself down into physical corporeality and into soul-spirituality. The mode of thinking in spiritual science is the same as that in natural science; only this mode of thinking must be further developed in order to go beyond nature. But the following must always be emphasized: to investigate the beings and processes in the spiritual world, the development of the characterized soul powers is necessary; but to understand and grasp what the spiritual researcher finds through these soul powers, all that is needed is an unbiased, unprejudiced consideration of the results of spiritual research with the ordinary soul abilities. And it may be said that the reason why so many people reject these results is not because they do not prove convincing to the ordinary understanding, but solely because these people allow their understanding to be clouded by prejudice and bias. Indeed, it takes a certain impartiality to admit: Man, as he is in ordinary life, is not yet so perfect; he can still develop slumbering soul powers within him, indeed, these powers must even be developed if the spiritual world is to reveal itself. But spiritual science shows that only the sensual world, subject to death, is perceptible to the senses and the ordinary powers of the soul, and that another world, not subject to death, can only reveal itself to the soul forces that have first been opened up to it.

Anyone who gains insight into these things can only feel the deepest satisfaction that in our time, in almost all civilized countries, people are showing an interest in spiritual science. For this interest, this spread of spiritual science, is a testimony to a healthy sense of truth, to the will to grasp life impartially. Those who do not want to gain this insight will be able to claim of the adherents of spiritual science that they are following their representatives out of blind faith. The truth of the matter is that the true adherents of spiritual science are such precisely because they can rise above blind faith. The opponents of spiritual research are fond of suspecting blind faith in those who adhere to anything but the often quite “blind faith” of these opponents themselves.

A much-loved and yet misleading way of speaking disparagingly about spiritual science is to give a distorted picture of the “composition of the human being” in the sense of this science, and then criticize this distorted picture. Anyone who takes the trouble to recognize from my Theosophy the way in which spiritual science arrives at this “composition” can find that the striving to recognize the nature of man, as it was an ideal of all worldviews, is to be brought into a form that meets the demands of contemporary science. What is fundamentally new about this “composition” is only what is gained through the spiritual abilities characterized above. The rest can be found in the works of a great number of insightful students of the soul. If the number seven is found to be a revealing number for the human constitutional elements, then it should also be found to be revealing that the light in the seven colors of the rainbow, the sound in a seven-part scale (where the octave is again the fundamental) must be conceived as coming to manifestation. For in the same sense, only on a higher level, the human being reveals himself in seven members, of which three, bound to the body, perish, three - as spiritual - are immortal, and one in the middle forms the connecting link between the mortal and the immortal part of the human being. There will come a time when it will be no more of a “superstition” to recognize that man has these “seven” members than it is considered “superstition” today that the rainbow consists of “seven” colors. Those who simply say that the Theosophists are not satisfied with body, soul and spirit, they want to have found out that man is composed of “seven” members, are misleading, because by withholding the true reasons for this “seven-number” from their listeners and readers by withholding the true reasons for this “number seven”, he gives rise to the idea that the seven limbs have been arbitrarily assumed, whereas they arise as a result of careful spiritual research.

And how often is it claimed that the law of “repeated lives on earth” is based on “mere belief”. In truth, it is based on the most careful and profound spiritual-scientific investigations. Through these, one finds that in the life of man between birth and death, a “soul core” is revealed in development, which is just as much the basis of a new human life as the plant germ developing in the plant is the basis of a new plant life, which is thus already found in the predecessor plant. Since the plant germ is of a physical nature, it can be found by means of the senses; since the 'soul core' is of a spiritual-soul nature, it can only be observed by the soul, which places itself in a body-free state in the sense described above. And so, in man, the immortal soul-core is found in a strictly scientific way; it is not merely imagined to be analogous to plant life. It reveals itself to spiritual observation as that which already exists in the present life between birth and death, but which contains the forces to lead the soul beyond death into a purely spiritual life between death and a new birth, and after the course of this life to guide it back to a new life on earth. That something similar to this is found at a higher level for human beings – only with the difference that it is spiritual-soul – as at a lower level for plant life, testifies that spiritual science is the true successor of natural science. The plant germ, as a physical being, can perish without bringing forth a new plant-being; the soul-germ proves to be imperishable; there is nothing that can prevent its continuing the life of the soul. And just as the “repeated earth-lives” are the result of research and not “mere belief”, so it is also the case with the law of the connection of these earth-lives. A following earth-existence shows itself to spiritual research in relation to the abilities, the character and also the fate of man as an effect of the earth-lives spent earlier.

It is really not necessary to exert one's intellect particularly in order to find apparent refutations of the statements made by the spiritual researcher regarding special connections between the individual earthly lives of human beings. Indeed, it is not particularly difficult to ridicule many things in this field, since they belong to the “hidden depths of existence” and can easily appear strange to the field of ordinary thinking. If, for example, the spiritual researcher says that it may happen that a person was an idiot in one life on earth, but that it is precisely through his experiences as an idiot, which he looks back on after death, that he acquires the strength for a subsequent life on earth to become a philanthropic genius, then people of a certain disposition will naturally laugh and sneer at such a remark; but anyone who, through insight into true spiritual-scientific research and the mood of the researcher that is necessarily associated with it, gains an idea of the deep seriousness that must underlie such a statement, of the spiritual work through which such a statement is wrung from the soul, will no longer laugh and scoff. But he will also deepen his soul's contemplation of the depth, glory and inner dignity of all human and world existence.

Furthermore, how easy it is to say: yes, what becomes of human freedom if a person's actions are determined by his previous lives on earth? For if man acts according to a law of fate, then he does not act freely. The logic that is revealed in such an objection is somewhat flimsy. When I put my foot forward, I act according to the laws of life of my leg. Can anyone believe that freedom is endangered by this? Will someone say: yes, if I walk in accordance with the laws of life of the leg, then I am not free while walking? Nor should anyone be tempted to make the logical error of saying: if man acts in accordance with the law of fate, then one cannot speak of freedom. One can find that a truly thorough and serious logic is in harmony with the results of spiritual research everywhere; however, this cannot be said of a defective logic, which all too often considers itself infallible. One cannot demand or expect this of such a logic.

If there is at least an apparent reason for the adherents of various religions fearing a danger to religious life from the advances in the scientific way of thinking, then this should no longer apply to spiritual science itself after a little sober reflection.

What spiritual science has to say about the Christ-being is particularly offensive to many people. And yet this is also based only on a misunderstanding. If someone says, for example, that spiritual science claims that Jesus did not mature into the Christ from an early age under the guidance of the Holy Spirit, but that during the first thirty years of his life he only prepared the physical shell in which the Christ took up residence at his baptism by John, then he is distorting the results of spiritual science on this point. Spiritual research investigates what actually happened through John's baptism, which, according to the Bible, undoubtedly has to be regarded as an important event in Jesus' life. (There are translators of the Gospel who render the important passage in Luke as: “This is my beloved Son; today I have begotten him.”) And this research finds that the Christ-spirit, which had guided Jesus of Nazareth as if from without until his thirtieth year, then, in that year, entered into the innermost part of his being. Future biblical research will surely recognize that on this point, too, the Gospel is proved not by the opponents of spiritual science, but by this one. Why do Christians attack the Christ teaching of spiritual science at all? It contains nothing, absolutely nothing that denies what Christianity has said about Christ up to now. It only broadens and elevates the concept of Christ. One would think that anyone who honestly has Christ at the bottom of his heart would rejoice at this. When spiritual science scientifically recognizes the event of Golgotha in its worldwide significance, nothing is taken away from the recognition that any Christian can claim for it. Where does one end up when one finds it unacceptable that someone believes something else about the Christ than one is willing to believe oneself? One ends up saying: I not only demand of you that you believe what I believe; but I disapprove of you wanting to know something that I do not want to know and do not want to believe.

These remarks were intended to give only a few points of view that may serve to point out some of the incorrect judgments about spiritual science. If one wanted to discuss each individual thing that is said about it here or there, one would have to write more than a few pages. But one would certainly not silence the false judgments that have been circulated, for example, in the wake of the construction of the Dornach “School of Spiritual Science”. This building will serve the Anthroposophical Society, which is dedicated solely to the cultivation of the spiritual science characterized here. This society did indeed emerge from the so-called “Theosophical Society”, but now has nothing whatsoever to do with it. For a number of years, the members of this Anthroposophical Society have been organizing spiritual and artistic presentations in Munich every summer. Members from all Western European countries gathered for these events. The growing number of participating members became so large that the construction of a separate building had to be considered. Western Switzerland is certainly the best location for such a building; in this area, the building is at the center of the part of Europe where most members of the Anthroposophical Society reside. And this location of the building enables them to visit the magnificent natural beauty spots of Switzerland after the events. It is in the nature of this science and its significance for the spiritual life of the present time that in the future the events will extend over longer periods of the year and thus a “School of Spiritual Science” will naturally arise. Anyone who has even a slight acquaintance with the spirit and work of the Anthroposophical Society need have no fear — as was feared in the wake of the Dornach building project — that this Society will engage in disruptive propaganda in the vicinity of the building site or anywhere else. However, anyone who objects that books on spiritual science are being published, that lectures are being given, and asks: Is that not propaganda?, needs no reply. For he might also object: You do talk about spiritual science, so you are doing propaganda. But it must be said that the entire way in which the Anthroposophical Society works is not based on propaganda, but rather on the fact that truth-seeking souls, out of the fullest inner freedom and only on the basis of their own judgment, find a place where truth is sought about the spiritual worlds.

Postscript

The immediate cause for these remarks was the publication in the appendix to the “Tagblatt für das Birseck, Birsig- und Leimental” of a lecture: “What do the Theosophists want?”, Which Pastor E. Riggenbach gave at the family evening of the Reformed Church in Arlesheim on February 14, 1914. The editorial staff of the above-named newspaper was kind enough to print a detailed response of mine in its columns, at the end of which I said that “I fully appreciate Pastor Riggenbach's calm, objective, and heartfelt discussion and am grateful to him for it.” In response to my response, the paper printed the following lines from Pastor Riggenbach:

A final word on the question: “What do the Theosophists want?” Dr. Steiner has provided a detailed response to my presentation at the Reformed Church's family evening, and it does not seem right to me to simply ignore it. Therefore, it is not my intention to continue the theoretical discussion, because despite all the common ground, the starting points are too different for us to reach an understanding, let alone unite. The readers have now had the opportunity to see the teachings of the theosophists in both lights, and we will leave it to them to decide for themselves on one or the other evaluation. I have no intention of continuing the discussion for the time being, and I will keep to myself what I might have to say in objection to Dr. Steiner's corrections and refutations. But I do feel the need to thank Dr. Steiner sincerely for his appreciation of my efforts to do justice to his cause. He has understood me correctly when he has read from my whole presentation that I can reject a doctrine as false and misleading without wanting to discredit the representatives of that doctrine in any way. Rather, I hope that we will continue to live in good understanding with the members of the Society who have now become our guests.

Arlesheim, March 2, 1914
E. Riggenbach, Pastor

This loyal comment by Pastor Riggenbach causes me to deviate from my original intention of publishing my reply as a printed document, as it appeared in the “Tagblatt für das Birseck, Birsigund Leimental”. I have written the arguments of this reply quite separately from their relation to Pastor Riggenbach and the necessary statements, and have expanded them with some additional remarks. When dealing with an opponent who presents his point of view in such a distinguished manner as Pastor Riggenbach does, I am reluctant to print what I have said a second time with reference to him.

What is the purpose of spiritual science?

A reply to “What do Theosophists want?”

The supplement of the “Tagblatt für das Birseck, Birsig- und Leimental” contains the reprint of a lecture: “What do the Theosophists want?”, which was held by Pastor E. Riggenbach at the family evening of the Reformed Church in Arlesheim on February 14. Since this lecture also aims to deal with the “spiritual science” that I represent, the honorable editorial team will grant me the request to be allowed to say the following about the speaker's remarks. I will only take into consideration what is said in relation to this “spiritual science”. For even in the time when I was a member of the so-called “Theosophical Society”, I never advocated anything other than this spiritual science; and I believe that if we look more closely at the world view I have expressed, even Pastor Rig genbach would not insist on his misleading statement: “that the whole system of thought with which Dr. Steiner appears is essentially the same as that invented by Ladies Blavatsky and Besant”.

First of all, the efforts of Pastor Riggenbach to do justice to the cause of “spiritual science” from his point of view should be unreservedly acknowledged. The noble tone of the arguments, the warm-hearted search for truth and the noble loyalty to conviction of the Reverend are most sympathetic; and I would ask him to accept what I have to say quite objectively and without expecting the slightest personal barb from me.

Every “attack” made by a representative of a religious community against “spiritual science” amazes me, to a certain extent, because I hardly ever miss an opportunity to emphasize again and again that this spiritual science does not want to oppose any kind of religious confession, since it does not see itself as a new religious confession, but as the genuine successor of the scientific mode of thinking, as this has been incorporated into the spiritual life of humanity at the dawn of modern culture by Copernicus, Kepler, Galilei and Giordano Bruno. From the same attitude of mind with which Galileo and Bruno regarded the realm of nature, spiritual science wants to observe the realm of the spirit. And just as little as Copernicus's teaching that the earth moves around the sun has detracted from true religiosity, so too can the law of “repeated earthly lives”, understood correctly in terms of spiritual science, do no harm to genuine religiosity. After the appearance of Copernicus, people believed that his teaching was detrimental to religion, just as Pastor Riggenbach currently believes this about spiritual science. World history has progressed beyond this belief, which felt compelled to reject Copernicus; and those who understand spiritual science in its true sense must admit that the opposition that this science is currently facing will be overcome much more quickly than that which was directed against Copernicus. Again and again I am reminded of the beautiful words spoken by a priest who, as a professor of theology, took up the post of rector of a university a little over ten years ago: He said that our contemporaries have turned against Copernicus out of a misguided religiosity; at present, the truly religious person will recognize that every new insight into the workings of the world adds a new piece to the revelation of the glory of divine world governance. Why not make use of the experiences of those who have not grown tired of emphasizing that the teaching of Copernicus contradicts the Bible? If Pastor Riggenbach did this, he would express some of his words differently, for example, by stating that spiritual science contradicts the Gospel.

When spiritual science speaks of “higher cognitive abilities,” it does so, however, from a point of view that is still doubted from many sides in the present day. But just take what is said about these abilities without prejudice! They are abilities that lie entirely within the developmental line of ordinary human soul forces. When a person voluntarily develops their thinking, feeling and willing from the point to which these have developed without their intervention, something similar happens as in the case of a child, which transitions from the abilities of its first years into those of its later years. Just as the child learns to use the faculties of his soul in such a way that his body becomes a good tool for him to experience the world of the senses, so can the human being develop his powers of knowledge further, so that he finds himself in a state of soul free of the body. In this state he then experiences the processes of a spiritual world and knows that he is surrounded by spiritual beings, just as he knows that he is surrounded by beings of sense in the world of the senses. That this is possible can be seen by anyone who opens himself to what is set forth in my book, “How to Know Higher Worlds.” He who does not want to open himself to it can deny the possibility of a soul-life free from the body, just as someone could say, “I do not believe in the existence of hydrogen,” when he is not interested in the fact that water consists of hydrogen and oxygen. Just as the chemist demonstrates hydrogen apart from water, so the spiritual researcher demonstrates the insights of the soul freed from the body. The mode of presentation of spiritual science is the same as that of natural science; only this mode of presentation is applied to the spiritual realm.

No one who takes into account what has just been said and considers it in the context of how spiritual science is disseminated by me, for example, can have the slightest doubt that Pastor Riggenbach is making a misleading when he says: “In this, too, the way of the Theosophists directly contradicts that of Jesus, in that they form a narrow, closed circle of initiates and carefully withhold their best for them. Jesus never wanted anything to do with such secrecy.” Who can uphold this claim, considering that in my writing ‘How to Attain Knowledge of the Higher Worlds’ it is said for everyone who opens up access to the knowledge of spiritual science? Who can raise the accusation of secretiveness when one considers that I say everything that can be understood from the present-day spirit of the age in numerous public lectures that are accessible to everyone? When spiritual science is practiced by certain circles in a way that goes beyond this, the reason for the seclusion of such circles is that one can only arrive at certain parts of spiritual science if one has previously acquired others. But this is no different in this science than in any other; and anyone who accuses spiritual science of secrecy should also do so with regard to university science, which does exactly the same in this respect; namely, only to talk about certain things to those who have acquired an understanding of them. In no other sense is spiritual science secretive like any other science.

I know that no one who has properly studied the insights of spiritual science will discuss the comments I have made on the Lord's Prayer, on the passage in the Gospel of John “He who eats my bread he tramples me underfoot” or about the words of St. Paul: ‘The whole of nature groans in labor pains, awaiting adoption as children’ in the way that Pastor Riggenbach has done. Anyone who wants to understand what I have said in relation to these things cannot, as Pastor Riggenbach does, take them out of context. If you do that, then you can't just say that “I'm always lively when interpreting; if I'm not interpreting, I'm subverting”; you can't just say, “In my opinion, such an interpretation of the Savior's words borders on blasphemy”; you could say much more: you could claim that such an interpretation is complete nonsense. But anyone who takes into account the type of lecture, the way of presenting and thinking, within which these supposed “interpretations” occur, will no longer use these things for criticism in the way that Pastor Riggenbach does. If well-meaning criticism, as is decidedly the case with Pastor Riggenbach, proceeds in this way, then one can imagine that on the part of the friends of spiritual science, some precautions are taken so that lecture cycles, for example, which are intended only for those listeners who know other, preparatory ones, do not fall into the hands of such persons, who must find them quite fantastic because they do not have the prerequisites for understanding. From such completely matter-of-fact and not at all fundamentally significant measures, the unfounded accusation of secretiveness has developed.

Pastor Riggenbach also practices a much-loved yet misleading way of providing information about the “composition of the human being” in the sense of spiritual science. Anyone who takes the trouble to compare my Theosophy with the way in which spiritual science arrives at this “composition” can find that the striving to recognize the nature of man, as it was an ideal of all world views, is to be brought to a form that satisfies the demands of current science. The only thing really new in this classification is that which is gained through the spiritual faculties characterized above. The rest can already be found in a whole series of insightful students of the soul. If the number seven is found to be a captious number for the expressions of the soul, then it should also be found captious that light must be conceived as coming to revelation in seven rainbow colors, and sound in the seven-membered scale (the octave is again the keynote). I will not argue with Pastor Riggenbach when he says: “From the Bible we are accustomed to distinguishing three parts in man: body, soul and spirit.” There were ‘divine scholars’ who were so little accustomed to this from the Bible that they accused all those who asserted this tripartite of heresy of the true Christian teaching. There will come a time when people ‘from spiritual science’ will be ‘accustomed’ to distinguishing seven members of the human being, just as they now distinguish seven colors of light. Anyone who simply says, “The Theosophists are not satisfied with this — with body, soul and spirit; they have found out that man is composed of seven parts...” is misleading because he gives his listeners and readers the idea that the seven parts of man have been arbitrarily assumed; while they arise from careful spiritual research.

Pastor Riggenbach follows a process similar to the one he applies to the seven-limbed nature of man for the laws of “repeated earthly lives” and “karma”. He first adapts these laws to his own way of thinking and then criticizes not what I, for example, present about these laws, but what he has first made out of them.

The law of “repeated earthly lives” is not based, as Pastor Riggenbach seems to assume, on “belief”, but on a spiritual-scientific investigation. Through such a study, one finds that in the life of a human being between birth and death, a “soul core” is revealed in development, which is just as much the basis of a new human life as the plant germ is the basis of a new plant life, which is already found in the predecessor plant. Since the plant germ is of a physical nature, it can be found by the means of sense science; since the soul core is of a spiritual-soul nature, it can only be found by observing the soul when it has become free of the body. And so it is found, not by analogy (a comparison) with plant life. The fact that something similar is found at a higher level for the human being – only with the difference that it is spiritual-soul – as at a lower level for plant life, testifies that spiritual science is the true successor of natural science. The plant germ, as a physical being, can perish without founding a new plant being. The soul germ proves to be the eternal part in man that passes through repeated earthly lives. It imprints the experiences of successive earthly lives, which the plant germ cannot do, or only to a limited extent. Only so much can be said here about the many-sided law of “karma”. When Pastor Riggenbach, again taken out of context, mentions “more as a curiosity” what I once said about the karma connection of an idiot, he proves by the way he presents it how little he realizes what the spiritual researcher has gone through in his soul before daring to communicate to his listeners such a specific case as having been investigated by him. He shows how little he realizes the profound seriousness that underlies such a statement. Pastor Riggenbach believes that the true Christian draws the “truth from the Bible” and then sees it confirmed by his “religious and moral experience.” I would ask him: Can he really not imagine that knowledge as difficult as that of the karma of an idiot, wrung from the soul, is later confirmed by experience? In this case, the pastor allows the non-pastor to freely confess that I find his treatment of me, especially in this karma case, to be less than Christian.

And I would like to say almost the same thing when Pastor Riggenbach makes the comment: “For those who take karma seriously, love, which believes everything and hopes everything, and endures everything and bears everything, must appear as an illusion.” Where can Pastor Riggenbach get the reasons for such an assertion? Certainly not from seriously meant spiritual science. For the latter never tires of pointing out the karmic connections of unloving actions and attitudes. But the fact that Pastor Riggenbach can achieve many things with his logic that are completely foreign to spiritual science is proved to me by a truly astonishing sentence in his remarks. He says: “It does sound very contrived and sophisticated when he — Steiner — writes at one point: ‘It is not fate that acts, but we act in accordance with the laws of our fate.’ Yes,” — so Pastor Riggenbach continues, “if we act in accordance with the laws of our fate, that means nothing other than that we act under the compulsion of our fate and with that freedom is gone.” With all due respect: if I should ever say, “It is not the laws of my leg that cause me to move when I put my foot forward, but rather I put my foot forward in accordance with the laws of my leg,” you, Pastor Riggenbach, will then find this ” and sophistical” and perhaps even say, ”Yes, when we walk in accordance with the laws of the leg, it means nothing more than that we walk under the compulsion of our leg laws, and that freedom is lost.” You would hardly say that, and realize that one should not be so unchristian as to accuse someone of “sophistry” when it is so easy to get muddled in terms of logic.

The criticism of the Christ impulse, of which spiritual science speaks, is probably the most unfounded part of Pastor Riggenbach's arguments. It would be going much too far to refute the assertion that “this whole way” of understanding the Christ comes from so-called Gnosticism. No, it comes from spiritual scientific research independent of all antecedents. It is quite wrong to say: “According to this, Jesus did not mature into the Christ under the guidance of the Holy Spirit from an early age, as the Bible shows us, but rather, during the first thirty years of his life, he only prepared the physical shell into which the Christ descended at his baptism by John.” One cannot distort what spiritual science has to say about this point more than it is distorted by this assertion. This science examines what actually happened through John's baptism, which, according to the Bible, undoubtedly has to be regarded as an important event in Jesus' life. (Weizsäcker even translates the corresponding important passage in the Gospel of Luke: “This is my beloved Son; today I have begotten him.”) And spiritual research finds that the Christ-spirit, which guided Jesus of Nazareth as if from without until he was thirty, then entered into the innermost part of his being in his thirtieth year. Future biblical research will surely find that precisely on this point the Bible is also right about Mr. Pastor Riggenbach, but gives credence to spiritual science. I can be brief about everything else that Pastor Riggenbach brings forward against the Christ-teaching of spiritual science. Why does one attack this Christ-teaching at all, since it contains nothing that negates the views of any Christian confession about Christ? Nothing, absolutely nothing of what Pastor Riggenbach believes about Christ is negated by spiritual science. Spiritual science only brings about a significant broadening and elevation of the concept of Christ. One would think that even in the mind of Pastor Riggenbach, those who accept what he accepts and something more besides may still be called good Christians. If the cosmic significance of the event of Golgotha is also recognized, then nothing is taken away from the recognition that Pastor Riggenbach claims for himself. It is wrong to say: “The gospel is too simple, too plebeian for them - the theosophists.” It is an assertion that is again - forgive me the word - not very Christian towards people who put all their efforts into understanding the Christ event. Where does it get you when you find it unacceptable that someone believes something else about Christ than you yourself want to believe? One comes to say: I not only demand of you that you believe what I believe; but I disapprove of you because you want to know something that I do not want to know. And yet this is the ultimate consequence of the criticism that Pastor Riggenbach exercises on the Christ-concept of spiritual science. He would certainly reject this consequence, since he is a thoroughly well-meaning critic. But I must hear it in his remarks, and I find that these remarks sound to me as if someone were saying: You must not believe in Copernicus, because he does not speak about the processes of the world in the way it is written in the Bible. More will be said about this in my next lecture on “Spiritual Science and its Relationship to Contemporary Religious and Social Movements,” which I will give in Basel on March 13, 1914.

In conclusion, I would like to reiterate that I fully appreciate the calm, objective and heartfelt manner in which the pastor has addressed the issue and am grateful to him for it. Indeed, I wholeheartedly agree with him: “I do not regret this discussion on my part, because it is always interesting to engage with the ideas of others in honest debate. But I have no more reason to regret it because, from the humbler ground of spiritual science, 'the simple glory of the gospel stands out all the more brightly.

Dr. Rudolf Steiner

When my “Philosophy of Freedom” was printed in 1894, I personally handed the book over to Eduard von Hartmann. At the time, I was very keen to engage in a scientific discussion with this man about the fundamental views on which the structure of ideas in my book was based. My expectations in this regard seemed justified, since Eduard von Hartmann had been truly friendly in his approach to my literary work from the very beginning. Every time I sent him my writings published before the “Philosophy of Freedom,” he delighted me with often extensive written responses. In 1889 I had the opportunity of a long conversation with him, the subject-matter of which was the epistemological questions agitating the philosophical world at that time. And I expected much from a discussion of my book, particularly because, on the one hand, I was a warm admirer of the idealism of his philosophy, an attentive observer of his treatment of important vital questions, and, on the other hand, his decided opponent in all essentials of the epistemological foundation of a world view. In one important point, however, I was in complete agreement with him: the philosophical ethics of unselfish devotion of the human soul to the historical process of humanity as an ethical motive. Of course, I could not be taken in by the naive belief that I could convert the creator of the “Philosophy of the Unconscious” to my points of view in fundamental matters. But Eduard von Hartmann was always inclined to respond in a truly loving way to views that were contrary to his own; and his responsiveness led to those fruitful confrontations that are desirable in the field of world-view striving. Besides, even then it was far from my mind to make the estimation of a personality dependent on the extent to which I could be an opponent or a supporter of his ideas. The esteem in which I held Eduard von Hartmann led me to ask him in 1891 to accept the dedication of my small writing: “Truth and Science. Prelude to a Philosophy of Freedom”. He agreed. And so I was able to have the words printed on the second page of this writing in all sincerity: “Dr. Eduard von Hartmann in warm admiration dedicated by the author.” This happened despite the fact that Eduard von Hartmann had to completely reject the content of the writing from the point of view of his worldview.

I was not mistaken in my expectations regarding a discussion of the “Philosophy of Freedom.” For a few weeks after the presentation of the book, Eduard von Hartmann not only honored me with a friendly letter, but he also sent me the copy of the book that he had received, with his comments and objections, some of which went into great detail. He had entered them almost page by page into the book. At the end he had summarized his overall impression in a few sentences. He had been so sharp in his judgment that I could see in his words the fate that my world view would have to meet within contemporary thought. By concluding the present remarks with a discussion of this judgment, it will be possible for me to show how, from the beginning of my literary career, I strove to establish the epistemological foundation for what I later attempted to present in a series of writings as “spiritual science” or anthroposophy and on whose development I continue to work to this day.

In the 1880s, when I began my writing career, people were confronted with a world view that had basically blocked any access to a world of true reality for human cognition. It seemed necessary to me, above all, to strive for a scientifically sound epistemological basis in matters of world view. The opinions one encountered in this field at that time could be characterized from a myriad of contemporary writings. The one of the poet and philosopher Robert Hamerling shall be cited here. This again for the reason that I found myself in the most fundamental epistemological questions in complete opposition to this personality, whom I highly revered and esteemed. Robert Hamerling was writing his significant “Atomistik des Willens” (Atomism of the Will) at that time. Right at the beginning of this book, we encounter the following thought: “Certain stimuli produce a smell in our olfactory organ... Thus a rose has no scent unless there is a smeller to smell it. Certain vibrations of the air produce a sound in our ear. Thus a sound has no existence unless there is an ear to hear it. The shot of a gun would not resound if no one heard it... Anyone who grasps this will understand what a naive fallacy it is to believe that in addition to the view or idea we call “horse”, there is another, the real “horse”, of which our view is a kind of image. Outside of me there is only – let me repeat it – only the sum of those conditions which cause an idea to arise in my mind that I call a “horse.” Hamerling adds to these sentences: “If this does not make sense to you, dear reader, and if your ‘mind’ rears up before this fact like a shy horse, then do not read a single line further; leave this and all other books dealing with philosophical and scientific matters unread; for you lack the necessary ability to grasp a fact impartially and hold it in your thoughts.” The thoughts that Hamerling expresses were so much a part of the thinking habits of epistemologists in the second half of the nineteenth century that as early as 1879 Gustav Theodor Fechner wrote about them in his book “Die Tagesansicht gegenüber der Nachtansicht” (“The Day View Compared to the Night View”): “They are the thoughts of the whole thinking world around me. No matter how much and about what they may quarrel, philosophers and physicists, materialists and idealists, Darwinians and anti-Darwinians, orthodox and rationalists all join hands in it. It is not a building block, but a cornerstone of today's world view... What we think we see and hear in the world around us is all just our inner appearance, an illusion that one can praise oneself for, as I read recently; but it remains an illusion. Light and sound in the external world, ruled by mechanical laws and forces and not yet penetrated by consciousness, are only blind, mute waves that cross the ether and the air from more or less agitated material points, and only when they reach the protein coils of our brain, or rather only when they reach a certain point of it, do they become visible through the spiritualist magic of this medium. and air, and only when they encounter the protein coils of our brain, or rather only when they encounter a certain point of it, are they transformed by the spiritualist magic of this medium into luminous, sounding vibrations. The reason, essence, and details of this magic are debated; the fact is agreed upon; and of all the theories of thought and knowledge, in which philosophy now wants to exhaust and empty itself, as if it wanted to give birth to another philosophy, , none of them leads to doubting the correctness of this fact, unless it is to declare the doubt insoluble or to shatter the world into tiny specks of dust that illuminate only themselves but not the world."

For anyone who has kept his thinking far removed from such considerations, they may appear to be worthless fantasies. In the individual sciences and in activities more closely related to everyday life, they do not arise in such a way that one would have to take them into account. But anyone who wants to have a say in matters of world view must deal with them. In the second volume of my book “The Riddles of Philosophy” – in the section “The World as Illusion” – one finds a detailed presentation of the most essential forms in which these considerations have been expressed in recent times. Thirty years ago it would have been fruitless to place oneself in the current direction of thought with a Weltanschhauung without taking a stand on these considerations. For it was on this ground that judgments were formed as to whether a world-view had a legitimate starting-point or not. Gideon Spicker, who wrote a stimulating work on 'Lessing's World-View' and then published the two significant volumes 'From the Cloister to the Academic Chair' and 'At the Turning-point of the Christian World-Period', wrote to me wrote to me in 1886, after the publication of my “Epistemology of the Goethean World View”, that it would be necessary to finally stop constantly pondering the question of how and within what limits man can know. It would be better to start to really know something. But the observation of the time conditions in this field made it seem hopeless to come up with a worldview that did not advance its secure epistemological foundation.

The most diverse formulations of Schopenhauer's sentence: the world is my representation, presented itself at that time in all possible variations. Volkelt, the subtle dissector of Kant, the judicious author of the epistemological book “Erfahrung und Denken” (Experience and Thought), wrote at that time: “The first fundamental proposition that the philosopher must clearly realize is that our knowledge extends to nothing more than our ideas. Our perceptions are the only things we directly experience; and precisely because we experience them directly, not even the most radical doubt can rob us of the knowledge of them. By contrast, knowledge that goes beyond our perceptions – I am using this term here in the broadest sense, so that it includes all mental activity – is not protected from doubt. Therefore, at the beginning of philosophizing, all knowledge that goes beyond the representations must be explicitly presented as open to doubt.” Such assertions had become self-evident truths for philosophers in the last third of the nineteenth century; they still are for many today who are to be heard when it comes to judging whether a world view is based on legitimate ground or not.

One must familiarize oneself with the way of thinking that leads to such assertions if one wants to have a say in matters of world view in our time. It seemed to me that such familiarization showed that the fundamental questions about the process of knowledge must be posed quite differently from the way they are by many epistemologists, if the train of thought that is taken in such questions is not to lead to one standing at the end before a self-dissolution of that train of thought. To seek clarity in this area, clarity about the value and justification of the ideas under consideration, was the task I sought to solve through the research presented in my booklet “Truth and Science” and in my book “Philosophy of Freedom”. “Truth and Science” was intended as a ‘philosophizing consciousness coming to an understanding with itself’. This is also the title of the work as printed in the doctoral dissertation, which already contains its essential content.

At the time when I wrote these writings, I believed, and I still believe today, that the fundamental error of many epistemologies is to be found in the fact that the process of knowledge is viewed quite wrongly at its very root. One first thinks of the opposite: man and the world. One imagines that the world has an effect on man. The latter receives impressions from it. From these impressions, the world view in which he lives imaginatively is formed. From this thought, it is an almost natural progression to the opinion that everything that occurs within human consciousness is only a product of consciousness. Any thing or being of an external world lies beyond consciousness; for only when that which remains unknown, unconscious, of the external world is taken up by consciousness does it become a human world view. What things or beings are like outside of consciousness is a question that goes beyond the human capacity for knowledge. This mode of thought appears in various philosophies, tied up in tangles of concepts that are often thought of in such an unoriginal form, so far removed from their source, that some who have become accustomed to them cannot help but consider anyone who wants to reduce these concepts to their simple form to be a dilettante.

It cannot be denied that the train of thought described appears so firmly established from a certain point of view that an objection becomes almost impossible, and that Hamerling could say with some justification that anyone who does not accept this view lacks the ability to perceive a fact impartially and to retain it in thought. My aim was not to refute or criticize this way of thinking in the usual sense. I did not ask the question: to what extent is this line of thought incorrect? Rather, I tried to answer the other question exhaustively: to what extent is it correct? And it became clear to me that the epistemologists had made the mistake of not completing the answer. They had stopped halfway. A further progression leads from their starting point to different results than those asserted by them. Anyone with a sense for certain more subtle laws of human logic and psychology knows that one very often fails to recognize the truth value of a thought by allowing oneself to be captivated by refuting ideas that arise prematurely in the soul. In this way, fatal traps arise for an unbiased way of looking at things, which can prevent one from arriving at the right cognitive goals. In contrast, it is often better to immerse oneself in a train of thought and follow its course. If one does not lose sight of the scope and range of the individual thought processes, and does not allow oneself to be overwhelmed by the striving for one-sidedness that so many trains of thought entail, then even one-sided and imperfect thoughts can lead to the realm of truth.

Starting from such premises, I tried to arrive at epistemological results. What I found seems to me to be completely certain even today. The way man is placed in the world, he must admit to himself that his world picture is given to him as the essence of his organization demands. In this fundamental idea one can know oneself to be in agreement with Kantians, neo-Kantians, physiologists and their followers. One can profess with them: what appears to human consciousness occurs in such a way as the conditions of the perceiving human being demand. If one now clings to this idea and develops it one-sidedly in thought, without connecting with the reality of the human being in the progression, then one blocks access to a true grasp of the capacity for knowledge. I have tried to explain this in detail in my two aforementioned writings. The first form in which man's world view is given can be followed by a spiritual process in man's inner being that transforms this world view in that it deprives it of its subjective character and allows cognition to submerge into the objective. One can, of course, be of the opinion that this process is only a continuation, a kind of mental or methodical revision of the given world view. If one holds this view, then one will be able to see nothing in all that can occur within consciousness other than a kind of effect of consciousness of the true reality that remains beyond knowledge. I have now endeavored to show that cognition, in its further progress, overcomes the form given to the world picture by the human organization at its first appearance. However, in order to be aware of this fact, cognition must reach an activity that I have called that in pure thinking. This activity is denied from the outset by many epistemologists. But one could, to paraphrase Hamerling, say: anyone who does not accept the idea that an activity is possible in the inner thought process that moves only in inner, living thought processes and that uses the ideas of the sensory world no longer as images but only as illustrative images, lacks the ability to grasp a fact impartially and to hold it in thought. My epistemological research led to the conclusion that man, through his organization, first cuts himself out of true reality into an incomplete one, so to speak, and that he reintroduces himself into this true reality in the further progress of his knowledge, in the elevation to pure thinking. The aim of the books I have mentioned is to show that human knowledge remains unrecognized if we try to view it as an image that is indifferent to the objective process of the world, and then have to admit that it cannot be one. Knowledge presented itself to me as a developmental process rooted in the human being, leading this being from one stage to another. In his cognitive interaction with the external world, the human being initially experiences his own nature incompletely, in that his organization presents him with an incomplete picture of reality. In the further inner experience, he transforms the first form of his world view, which is an incomplete image of the external world, so that he stands in the true reality with his inner experience. Seen in this light, the process of knowledge appears different at its very root than it does to many epistemologists. A comparison can clarify what is being considered here. It is, of course, meant with all the limitations that apply to all comparisons. One can examine the substantial nature of the cereal plant with regard to the extent to which cereals are suitable as human food due to the substances they contain. This investigation can be carried out in a very scientific way. And yet, from a certain point of view, it can be said that such an investigation says nothing about the nature of the plant, insofar as this is expressed in the processes that lead to growth, flowering and fruit bearing. However, the inner nature of the plant is revealed in these processes. And what the plant becomes as human food is, in a sense, a side effect of the plant's nature. The human cognitive process is, by its very nature, a link in human development. What happens through it has its significance within this development. The fact that at a certain stage of this development, a reflection of the external world also comes to light in the activity of thoughts and ideas is not peculiar to the cognitive process in a similar sense to the entry of grain into human nutrition. If one thinks one must pose the main question of epistemology in such a way that one only looks at it: to what extent is cognition a reflection of an external world, then one shifts the consideration just as one would shift the main botanical question if one wanted to seek the essence of the plant through food chemistry.

In the final section of the second volume of my “Riddles of Philosophy” one finds a “sketchy presentation of an anthroposophy” (written in 1914). In it I attempt to show that a completely organic progression must be conceived, from the basic epistemological views of my writing 'Truth and Knowledge' and my 'Philosophy of Freedom', to the content of 'spiritual science' or 'anthroposophy', as I have further developed them. But anyone who reads these earlier writings of mine with an open mind will be able to see that the results developed in them have been obtained through purely philosophical research, and that therefore agreement with what is asserted in them is not dependent on the position that someone takes on the “spiritual science” I represent. In those books I consciously used only the means of thought and methodology that one is accustomed to finding in philosophical works. Thus it seems to me that the kind of research I call “spiritual science” has a secure philosophical foundation in my epistemological presentations, but that the philosophical judgment of this foundation can be kept quite independent of the spiritual-scientific superstructure. But for me there is a clear path from my epistemology to “spiritual science”. Anyone who is able to see without bias what kind of research underlies the content of my later books or the brief presentations in the first and fourth books of this journal will find that the possible epistemological difficulties are cleared up by my earlier writings.

In my spiritual scientific writings, I present those cognitive processes that lead, through spiritual experience and observation, to ideas about the spiritual world in the same way that the senses and the mind bound to them lead to ideas about the sensory world and the human life in it, then, in my opinion, this could only be presented as scientifically justified if it could be proved that the process of pure thinking itself proves to be the first stage of those processes by which supersensible knowledge is attained. I believe I have provided this proof in my earlier writings. I have tried to show in the most diverse ways that man, by living in the pure process of thinking, does not merely perform a subjective activity that is turned away from and indifferent to world processes, but that pure thinking is an event that leads beyond subjective human activity, in which the essence of the objective world lives. It lives in it in such a way that man, in true knowledge, grows together with the objective essence of the world. Anyone who is willing to consider my earlier writings impartially, including the introductory essay I wrote in the 1880s about Goethe's scientific writings in Kürschner's German National Literature, will feel the weight of the sentence I wrote in 1897 in my book 'Goethe's World View'. “He who speaks of the coldness of the world of ideas can only think ideas, not experience them. He who lives the true life in the world of ideas feels within him the essence of the world at work in a warmth that cannot be compared with anything.” In my recently published book, ‘The Riddle of Man,’ I have described the ‘seeing consciousness’ — in reference to Goethe's idea of the ‘contemplative power of judgment.’ By this I understand the human being's ability to bring a spiritual world to immediate contemplation and observation. My earlier writings treat pure thinking in such a way that it is evident that I include it among the activities of the “contemplative consciousness”. In this pure thinking I see the first, still shadowy, revelation of the stages of spiritual knowledge. Everywhere in my later writings one can see that I regard only those as higher spiritual powers of knowledge that a person develops in the same way as pure thinking. I reject as belonging to the domain of the spiritual powers of cognition every human activity that leads to mere thinking, and I recognize only that which leads beyond pure thinking. No supposed form of knowledge that does not recognize pure thinking as a kind of model and that does not, in the same sphere, possess the same level of deliberation and inner clarity as thinking that is sharp in its ideas, can lead to a real spiritual world. My position regarding the spiritual powers of human cognition, which presupposes the lawfulness of pure thinking for all cognition, placed me in a special position with regard to the kind of thinking that is sometimes called mysticism. If we define mysticism as a form of knowledge through which a person experiences their own being as connected to the essence of the world, then I must apply this definition to my own understanding of true knowledge. I must say that genuine mysticism can only be attained if the epistemological foundations that I believe I have developed are recognized. On the other hand, when I look at what is often referred to as mysticism and what precisely avoids the composure and clarity that characterize the thought process, then I see myself compelled to characterize such mysticism as I did in my book “Goethe's Worldview”: “Mysticism aims to find the source of things, the Godhead, in the human soul. The mystic, like Goethe, is convinced that the essence of the world will reveal itself to him in inner experiences. Only, immersion in the world of ideas is not considered the inner experience that matters. He has roughly the same view of the clear ideas of reason as Kant. For him, they stand outside the creative whole of nature and belong only to the human mind. The mystic therefore seeks to attain the highest knowledge by awakening special powers. He seeks to develop unusual states, for example through ecstasy, to achieve a higher kind of insight... The mystic immerses himself in a world of unclear sensations and feelings; Goethe immerses himself in the clear world of ideas. The mystics despise the clarity of ideas. They consider this clarity to be superficial. They have no inkling of what people feel who have the gift of immersing themselves in the living world of ideas. It freezes the mystic when he surrenders himself to the world of ideas.” This mysticism, which I have to characterize in this way, I must place far outside the realm in which I seek the powers of knowledge that open up the spiritual world. This mysticism drives the life of the human soul into a realm in which it becomes more dependent on the human organization than it is in ordinary sensory perception and in intellectual activity. But the true spiritual faculties of knowledge lead the life of the soul into a realm in which it acquires greater independence from the organization than in sensory perception and imagination, and which is entered with pure thinking even in its simplest form. The cognitive activity by which I think I am building the “spiritual science” has nothing in common with the dreamy, half-conscious soul-life of false mysticism. Unfortunately, the opponents and also those who want to be followers of this spiritual science all too often confuse it with false mysticism, although this confusion is that of a thing with its opposite. Those who do not cling to words and fashion arbitrary creations out of them will see everywhere in my writings where I am aiming at the relatively justified part of the definition of mysticism and where I am rejecting the confusions of false mysticism.

If the process of cognition is recognized as an experience of human development, then one can no longer admit the possibility of pointing to a reality that lies beyond all consciousness by means of mere logical conclusions or hypotheses, through concepts and ideas derived from the perceptions of the senses. One can then speak of a world that lies beyond the senses only in the sense that such a world reveals itself to the “visionary consciousness” in the same way as the world of the senses reveals itself to sensory perception. By making this view my own, I found myself in complete opposition to those philosophies that reject any experience of the realms of reality that lie beyond the sensory world and at most want to admit that there is a logical necessity to hypothetically assume a reality that is alien to consciousness. Within these philosophies, Eduard von Hartmann's “transcendental realism” occupies a particularly characteristic position. From his point of view, the given world picture of man, including all experiences attainable in thinking, appears as the result of the subjective human organization. But Eduard von Hartmann emphasizes the necessity, following from the nature of this world picture itself, to hypothetically conclude from the subjective, conscious to an objective reality, which, however, must be decidedly thought of as remaining in the field of the unconscious. In my “Philosophy of Freedom” I try to show that this is a mistaken way of arriving at a metaphysics. I strove for a unified world view and attributed the apparent dualistic form of it to the fact that man, in mere sensory perception, separates an imperfect form of this image from its whole essence, only to overcome this imperfection in the further progress of cognition. Eduard von Hartmann asserts an epistemological dualism that cannot be overcome by human consciousness and that makes all ideas about the nature of the world those that are conceived in terms of dualism. From my point of view, the metaphysical is that which is not unconscious by nature, but is only not seen by the bearer of consciousness as long as the powers of perception are not laid bare, which allow that which lies beyond sense perception to be experienced just as physical reality is for the senses. It hardly needs to be emphasized that the one who speaks in this way of the supersensible does not claim that with the exercise of the “seeing consciousness” all the secrets of the spiritual world are suddenly revealed to man. It is only that knowledge is extended beyond the sense world into a realm that offers explanatory foundations for this sense world and for human life in this world. The essential thing is to enter into the mode of existence of the spiritual, even if one must be convinced that the part of the spiritual world that can be recognized first is only a small area in its wide expanse. Nor should it be overlooked that the investigation of the details of the spiritual world truly requires no less care and scientific conscientiousness than that of the physical world.

In elaborating my two works based on epistemology, it seemed to me that the rejection of any metaphysics that was merely imagined and filled with content that could not be spiritually experienced was to be linked to Eduard von Hartmann's transcendental realism because I warmly approved of the way in which, regardless of this epistemological point of view, this philosopher was able to demonstrate the spirit in the form of the idea in all phenomena of the world and of life. What compelled me to always recognize Hegel's philosophy in its full value, and yet to lead my own understanding beyond it, applied to me in another respect to Eduard von Hartmann as well. In Hegel I saw how he had grasped the content of thinking in its spiritual reality, but was only able to hold it in such a form that thinking could not become the living initial link in a spiritual process of knowledge that opens up the supersensible world. In Hegel's system, the idea is spiritual reality; but as such it is only a means of expressing the sense-perceptible world and the life in it. Therefore, Hegel's philosophy has nothing to say about a spiritual world; its content is only the world of nature and history.

My position in relation to Hartmann's philosophy was that I was able to agree with his idealistic illumination of the sensory world and human life in it in many things; but that I had to see in his fundamental epistemological views not only a only a theoretical contrast to what I consider to be truth, but also a way of thinking that practically deprives human thought of the possibility of discovering and applying the cognitive powers of the “visionary consciousness” that lie dormant in the soul. That is why, in the second volume of my exposition of Goethe's scientific writings (in Kürschner's German National Literature) in 1887, I was able to write the following sentences about Eduard von Hartmann's idealistic illumination of the sensory and historical world with the utmost sincerity: “With his objective idealism, Eduard von Hartmann stands squarely on the ground of the Goethean worldview... He does not want to be a mere idealist. But where he needs something positive in order to explain the world, he does call on the idea for help... But not much is achieved by distinguishing between the conscious and the unconscious... But one must tackle the idea in its objectivity, in its full content; one must not only see that the idea is unconsciously effective, but what this effectiveness is. If Hartmann had stopped at the idea that the idea is unconscious, and had explained the world from this unconscious, that is to say from a one-sided characteristic of the idea, he would have added a new monotonous system to the many systems which derive the world from some abstract formal principle. And his first major work cannot be said to be entirely free from this monotony. But Eduard von Hartmann's mind is too intense, too comprehensive and penetrating to have failed to recognize that the idea cannot be grasped merely as unconscious; rather, one must delve into what one has to address as unconscious, one must go beyond this quality to its concrete content and derive the world of individual phenomena from it.

Since I was in such a frame of mind and in such scientific opposition to Eduard von Hartmann, his overall judgment of my “Philosophy of Freedom” seemed significant to me in 1894. Given the position that Hartmann's philosophy occupies in the intellectual world, it cannot seem offensive that I share this judgment, which was intended only for me at the time, here and discuss it. This may be considered all the more justified since it is clear from the above that I have a high regard for the personality and philosophical significance of Hartmann. At the time, I already foresaw in this judgment the difficulties that my world view would have to face within contemporary thought. All the confusion with other ways of thinking, which I myself reject and which my striving for is also thought to meet with in the unintentional – and now also intentional – combating of it: they were all basically anticipated in Hartmann's judgment. But I had before me the judgment of a personality whom I esteemed and whose scientific seriousness I could acknowledge, despite her rejecting my way of thinking. Eduard von Hartmann wrote: “In this book, Hume's phenomenalism, absolute in itself, is not reconciled with Berkeley's phenomenalism, based on God; nor is this immanent or subjective phenomenalism reconciled at all with Hegel's transcendental panlogism, nor is Hegel's panlogism reconciled with Goethe's individualism. There is an unbridgeable gulf between any two of these components. Above all, however, it is overlooked that phenomenalism leads with inevitable consistency to solipsism, absolute illusionism and agnosticism, and nothing is done to prevent this slide into the abyss of unphilosophy, because the danger is not recognized at all.” - What is it in my ‘Philosophy of Freedom’ that Eduard von Hartmann seeks to attack with this judgment? Absolute phenomenalism, as it was realized in Hume's philosophy, appears to have been overcome by the attempt to characterize thinking in such a way that, through this, the phenomenal character of the sensory world view is lost and it is made into an appearance of an objective world; Berkeley's subjective phenomenalism loses its justification in the face of this view , in that it is shown that in thinking man grows together with the objective world and that therefore the assertion loses all meaning that world phenomena do not exist outside of being perceived; in contrast to Hegel's Panlogism, thinking is seen as the initial link for purely spiritual human cognitive abilities, not as the final link of ordinary consciousness, which only reflects the sensory world in shadowy ideas; Goethe's individualism is developed by showing how the understanding of human freedom is only possible through a world view that is based on the epistemological foundations of the “Philosophy of Freedom”. Only when the objective essence of the world of thought is recognized and the soul connection of man with ethical motives as a supersubjective experience comes to light, can the essence of freedom be grasped. It is this understanding that I also tried to make culminate in the presentation of my book. The accusation of solipsism against my world view is unfounded because it assigns thinking its place in the objective course of the world, thus directly pointing to the means of knowledge that makes the fall into solipsism impossible. Only someone who misjudges the reality value of the living thinking that I characterize can fall prey to the mention of the danger of absolute illusionism and agnosticism in relation to my “Philosophy of Freedom.” And this happens unconsciously, because they are foisting their view of thinking onto me. If one sees only what Eduard von Hartmann sees in thinking, then, upon rejecting transcendental realism, illusionism and agnosticism do indeed result, whereas my view of thinking leads precisely to making all illusionism and agnosticism impossible through the power and scope of thinking. And at the end of his judgment Eduard von Hartmann senses that my fundamental epistemological view leads out of the conceptual as a mere reflection of the sensible and historical world. For him, all philosophy and all possible striving for a worldview ends at this point; for me, it is the point where human cognitive powers enter the world of spiritual science. He calls this the “slide into the abyss of unphilosophy”; I characterize it, as I did in my book “Vom Menschenrätsel” (The Human Riddle), as the ascent from ordinary to “visionary” consciousness.

I shall explain later on that my arguments concerning the world view of Friedrich Nietzsche and Haeckel, as they appear in my writings from the 1890s, are a direct continuation of the path that leads from my “Philosophy of Freedom” to the “spiritual science” or “anthroposophy” that I advocate. Anyone who is bent on finding contradictions and then constructing a system of contradictions — perhaps a very spiteful system — will easily find contradictions in the structure of a world view if that world view itself is not based on words and word definitions in a formulaic way, but seeks to draw from the fullness of life with all its contradictions. Such a contradiction-fisherman could indeed reproach the world itself with its contradictions. However, some opponents of my world view are clearly prevented from properly assessing what they call contradictions by their obvious lack of knowledge of the development of philosophical science. Attacks on my world view, even from dubious quarters, cannot appear incomprehensible to me, since I was confronted a long time ago with the judgment in question from a serious and highly esteemed source, and I saw myself confronted with all the difficulties that this world view must face in many circles.