The Rudolf Steiner Archive

Today we shall occupy ourselves with a general theme, and indeed with the question of the significance and the tasks of anthroposophically orientated spiritual science in the present, and then, on Tuesday, with a more individual theme concerning individual destiny and being.

We have indeed often emphasised that Anthroposophy has a special task and significance for mankind in the present age. Whoever occupies himself with anthroposophy as a thinking human being must put this question again and again to himself: What aims does this spiritual movement pursue, and how are they related to the other tasks of our age? These tasks can be illuminated from the most diverse points of view, as we have often done. Today we will try to grasp the evolutionary path of mankind at that point on which we ourselves stand, to look a little into the future, and then ask ourselves: What task has anthroposophy with especial reference to the evolutionary stage of mankind at which we stand at present?

We know that since the great Atlantean Catastrophe, which entirely transformed the earth as man's dwelling-place, up to our own time, five great epochs of civilisation are to be distinguished. We have often designated these five epochs of culture as the old Indian, old Persian, the Chaldaic-Egyptian, the Greco-Latin epoch, and then the epoch in which we ourselves stand, the fifth, which prepared itself in—let us say—the eighth, ninth and tenth centuries, and in the middle of which we now are. We must be clear that such divisions are naturally not meant as if any one epoch of evolution sharply came to an end, and then a new one began, but that the one gradually and slowly passes over into the other, and long before one such epoch has run its course, the new one already prepares itself within it.

Thus we can say of our own epoch of culture, of the fifth post-Atlantean epoch: there is already now being prepared, and indeed in a very significant way, that which will constitute the real characteristic of the sixth epoch of civilisation. And in general, human beings of our present age will separate themselves into two parts: those who today form no idea of all this, who know nothing of the preparation of the sixth epoch, who live as it were blindly, for the day, and those who form ideas for themselves that something new is preparing, and who also know that what is being prepared is fundamentally something which must be accomplished through human beings, must be prepared by mankind. We can in a certain connection place ourselves in the time as a human being and say we are doing what is generally the custom, what the others do, what our parents have educated us for, or, we can so place ourselves that we know consciously the following: “If you will consciously be a link in the chain of humanity, then you must do something—either in yourself or in your environment—which contributes to what must come, i.e., to prepare the sixth period of culture as much as in you lies.” The possibility of thus making preparations for the sixth period of culture can only be understood by entering a little into the character of our own epoch. For this, the comparative method offers itself as the best.

We know that these epochs of time are essentially different from each other, and in the course of years, in our anthroposophical movement, we have brought forward various characteristics whereby they are distinguished. We have pointed to the old Indian Period of civilisation, and have shown that the soul-qualities of man then were different from what they later were, how man then was still endowed to a high degree with clairvoyant consciousness. And we have shown that evolution through the following epochs consisted in man losing this clairvoyance ever more and more, and having to limit his power of perception and understanding more and more to the physical world. We have seen how the fourth epoch of civilisation was slowly prepared, in which man, as it were, appeared entirely in the physical world, so that that Being Whom we call Christ Jesus could incarnate in the physical world as a being, as a human being of the physical world. We have then seen how since that time, through a certain stream, the following appeared: how all human powers strengthened themselves still further in the physical world, how indeed the materialistic tendency of our age, the whole urge of man only to hold as valid what offers itself in the physical surrounding world, is connected with a further descent of man into the physical world. But by no means should things remain thus in evolution. Humanity must ascend again into the spiritual world, ascend with all the attainments men have acquired, with all the fruits of the physical world. And Anthroposophy should be just that which can bring to people the possibility of again ascending into the spiritual world.

Now we can say: “Immediately after the great Atlantean catastrophe, there were numerous human beings who knew through their direct powers of perception: Around us is a spiritual world. We live in a spiritual world.” Fewer and fewer became the human beings who knew this; more and more were the powers of man limited to the perception of the senses. But if, on the one hand, today, the power of perception for the spiritual world is the least conceivable, yet, on the other hand, something is preparing in our age which is so significant that already for a great number of people, quite different faculties will exist in that incarnation which follows the present one. As the faculties of man have changed during the five epochs of culture, so they will also change into the sixth, and a great number of people today will clearly show already in their next incarnation through their whole mood of soul, that their faculties have essentially changed. Today, we will make clear to ourselves how different these souls of human beings will be in the future, with a great number already in the next incarnation, with others, in the incarnation following.

We could also look back in another way into past epochs of human evolution. Then we would see that the farther we go back to the ancient clairvoyance, at the same time, the more we have united with the human soul, what one can call the character of group-soulness [Gruppenseelenhaftigkeit]. It has often been pointed out to you that the consciousness of the group-soulness was existing in the ancient Hebrew people in an eminent degree. He who felt himself—really consciously felt himself as a member of the ancient Hebrew people—said to himself—especial attention has been drawn to this—” As an individual man I am a transitory phenomenon, but in me lives something that has an immediate connection with all the soul-being which has streamed down since the racial father Abraham.” A member of the old Hebrew people felt that. We can indeed esoterically admit as a spiritual phenomenon what was thus felt by the old Hebrew people. We understand better what then happened if we keep the following in mind.

Let us consider an old Hebrew initiate. Although initiation was not so frequent among the ancient Hebrews as among other peoples, we could not characterise such a real initiate otherwise—not merely one initiated into the theories and the Law, but an initiate really seeing in the spiritual worlds—than by taking into consideration the entire racial peculiarity. It is the custom today in external science, which busies itself with documents without any misgiving, to take everywhere what stands in the Old Testament, to test it by all kinds of external records, and then find it unsubstantiated. We shall have occasion to point out that the Old Testament gives the facts more faithfully than external historical records. In any case, spiritual science shows that a blood relationship of the Hebrew people can really be demonstrated back to the racial father Abraham, and that the assumption of Abraham as racial father is fully justified. This was something especially known in the old Hebrew secret schools: Such an individuality, such a soul-being as that of Abraham, was not merely incarnated as Abraham, but is an eternal being, who remained existing in the spiritual world. And in truth a real initiate was inspired by the same spirit, as he who inspired Abraham, and he could testify for him of himself, that he was permeated by the same soul-nature as Abraham. There was a real connection between every initiate and the racial father Abraham. We must hold that fast: that expressed itself in the feeling of membership of the old Hebrew people. That was a kind of group-soulness. One felt what expressed itself in Abraham as the group-soul of the people. One felt group-souls similarly in the rest of humanity. Mankind in general goes back to group-souls. The farther we go back in human evolution, the less do we find expressed the single individuality. That which we still find today in the animal kingdom: that a whole group belongs together—that was existing among mankind, and appears ever clearer and clearer, the farther we go back to ancient times. Groups of human beings then belonged together, and the group-soul was essentially stronger than what constituted the individual soul in the single human being.

We can now say: Today in our time, the group-soulness of people is still not yet overcome, and whoever believes that it is completely overcome does not keep in mind certain finer phenomena of life. Whoever keeps it in mind will very quickly see that certain human beings not only appear alike in their physiognomy, but that also the soul-qualities are similar in groups of human beings: that one can, as it were, divide human beings into categories. Each person can still today be reckoned into a certain category; with reference to this or the other quality, he will belong perhaps to different categories, but a certain group-soulness is not only valid because the races exist, but also in other connections. The boundaries drawn between the single nations fall away more and more; but other groupings are still perceptible. Certain basic characteristics stand so connected in some people, that he who will only look, can still today perceive the last relics of the group-soulness of man.

Now we, in our present age, are living in the most eminent sense, in a transition. All group-soulness has gradually to be stripped off. Just as the gaps between single nations gradually disappear, as the single parts of different nations understand each other better, so also will other group-soul qualities be shed, and the individual nature of each single person come to the foreground more and more.

We have therewith characterised something quite essential in evolution. If we want to grasp it from another side, we can say: That idea whereby the group-soulness chiefly expresses itself loses meaning ever more and more in the evolution of mankind, i.e., the idea of race. If we go back beyond the great Atlantean catastrophe, we see how the human races are prepared. In the old Atlantean age human beings were grouped according to external characteristics in their bodily structure, far more strongly than today. What we call races today are only the relics of those important distinctions between human beings as were customary in old Atlantis. The idea of race is only really applicable to old Atlantis. Since we deal with a real evolution of mankind, we have never employed the idea of race in the most eminent sense for the post-Atlantean age. We do not speak of an Indian race, a Persian race, etc., because that is no longer correct. We speak of an old-Indian period of civilisation, of an old-Persian period of civilisation, etc. And it would be utterly devoid of sense if we would speak of our time preparing a sixth race. If relics of the old Atlantean distinctions, of their group-soulness, are still existing in our time, so that one can still say the racial division continues to work on—that which is preparing for the sixth period of time consists just in the character of race being stripped off. That is the essential. Therefore it is necessary that that movement which is called the anthroposophical movement, which should prepare the sixth period of time, adopts in its basic character this stripping off of the character of race—that especially it seeks to unite people out of all “races,” out of all nations, and in this way bridges over these differences, these distinctions, these gaps, which are existing between various groups of human beings. For the old racial standpoint had in a certain connection a physical character, whereas what will fulfil itself in the future will have a much more spiritual character. Therefore it is so urgently necessary to understand that our anthroposophical movement is a spiritual one, which looks to the spirit, and overcomes just that which arises from physical distinctions, through the force of a spiritual movement, It is, of course, thoroughly comprehensible that any movement has, as it were, its childish illnesses, and that in the beginning of the theosophical movement, matters were so represented as if the earth fell into seven periods of time—they were called Root-races—and each of these Root-races into seven sub-races, and that would always repeat itself, so that one could always speak of seven races, and seven sub-races, etc. But one must get beyond the illnesses of childhood, and be clear that the idea of race ceases to have any meaning, especially in our age.

Something else, in addition, is being prepared—something connected with the individuality of man in a quite special way—in man becoming ever more and more individual. It is only a question of this occurring in the right sense, and the anthroposophical movement should serve to this end, that human beings become individualities—or we could also say personalities—in the right sense. How can it do this?

Here we must look to the most striking new quality of man's soul, which is preparing. The question is often put: Well, if reincarnation exists, why does a person not remember the former incarnations? That is a question which I have often answered. Such a question appears as when one brings along a four-year-old child, and because it is a human being, and cannot reckon, one would say: Man cannot reckon. But let the child become ten years old, and then it will reckon. It is thus with the human soul. If today it cannot remember, yet, the time will come in which it can remember—the time when it has the same powers as he possesses who is initiated today. But just today that transition is happening. There exist today a number of souls who are so far on in our time, who stand close to the moment where they will remember their former incarnations, or at least the last one. A whole number of human beings today are, as it were, before the self-opening of the door to that embracing memory, which comprises not only the life between birth and death, but the previous incarnations, or at least, the last, in the first place. And when, after the present incarnation, a number of human beings are reborn, then they will remember this present incarnation. It is merely a question of how they remember. Anthroposophical development should give help and direction to remember in the right way.

In order to characterise this anthroposophical movement from this point of view, it must be said: Its character is that it leads man to realise in the right way what one calls the human “I,” the innermost member of the human being. I have often pointed out that Fichte rightly said, most human beings would sooner regard themselves as a piece of lava on the moon, than as an “I.” And if you consider how many people there are in our time who make any idea at all of what is in the “I,” i.e., of what they themselves are, then in general, you would come to a very dismal result.

When this question arises, I have always to call to mind a friend I had more than thirty years ago, and who as a quite young student was completely inoculated at that time by the materialistic mood—today it is more modern to say “monistic” mood. He was already injected by it, in spite of his youth. He always laughed when he heard something was contained in man which could be designated as spiritual being; for he was of the view, that what lives as thought in us, was produced by mechanical or chemical processes in the brain. I often said to him: “Look, if you earnestly believe this as a content of life, why do you continually tell lies?” He really lied, continually, because he never said: “My brain feels, my brain thinks, but: I think, I feel, I know this or that.” Thus he built up a theory which he contradicted with every word—as every man does; for it is impossible to maintain what one imagines as a materialistic theory. One cannot remain truthful, if one thinks materialistically. If one would say: My brain loves you, then, one should not say “you,” but, my brain loves your brain. People do not make this consequence clear. But it is something which is not merely humoristic, but something which shows what a deep basis of unconscious untruthfulness lies at the basis of our present education.

Now, most people really would sooner regard themselves as a piece of lava in the moon, i.e., as a piece of compact matter, than as that which can be called an “I” And today one naturally comes least of all to a grasp of the “I” through external science, which indeed, as such, must think materialistically, according to its methods. How can one attain this grasp of the “I”? How can one gradually get an idea, a concept of what he instinctively feels, when he says: I think? Solely and alone through this, that he knows by means of the anthroposophical view of the world, how this human being is constituted, how the physical body has Saturn character, the etheric body Sun character, the astral body Moon character, and the Ego, Earth character. When we keep in mind everything we thus get as ideas out of the entire cosmos, then we understand how the “I,” as the real Master-worker, labours at all the other members. And so we come gradually to an idea [Begriff] of what we profess with the word “I.” We gradually struggle up to the highest ideas of this “I,” if we learn to understand [verstehen] such a word. We not merely feel ourselves as a spiritual being if we feel ourselves within an “I,” but when we can say: In our individuality lives something which was there before father Abraham. When we cannot merely say: I and father Abraham are one, but: I and the FATHER, i.e., the Spiritual, weaving and living through the world. What lives in the “I,” is the same spiritual substance that weaves and lives through the world as Spirit. Thus we gradually work our way up to understand this “I,” i.e., the bearer of the human individuality, that which goes from incarnation to incarnation. In what way, however, do we grasp the “I”? Do we grasp the world at all through the anthroposophical view?

This anthroposophical view of the world arises in the most individual way, and is, at the same time, the most un-individual thing that can be conceived. It can only arise in the most individual way by the secrets of the cosmos revealing themselves in a human soul, into which stream the great spiritual beings of the world. And so the content of the world must be experienced in the human individuality in the most individual way, but at the same time, it must be experienced with a character of complete impersonality. Whoever will experience the true character of cosmic mysteries must stand entirely on the standpoint from which he says: Whoever still heeds his own opinion, cannot come to Truth. That is indeed the peculiar [eigenartige] nature of anthroposophical truth that the observer may have no opinion of his own, no preference for this or the other theory, that he may not love this or the other view more than any other because of his own especial individual qualities. As long as he stands on this standpoint, it is impossible for the true secrets of the world to reveal themselves to him. He must pursue knowledge quite individually, but his individuality must develop so far, that it no longer has anything personal, i.e., anything of his own peculiar sympathies and antipathies. This must be taken strictly and earnestly. Whoever still has any preference for these or the other ideas and views, whoever can incline to this or the other because of his education or temperament, will never recognise objective truth.

We have attempted here, this summer, to grasp Oriental wisdom from the standpoint of Western learning. We tried to be just towards Oriental wisdom, and truly presented it in such a way that it received its full rights. (The East in the Light of the West, cloth, crown 8vo, pp. 222. 7s. 6d) One must strongly emphasise that in our time it is impossible for independent spiritual knowledge to decide through any special preference for either the Oriental or the Occidental view of the world. Whoever says according to his different temperament he prefers the nature, the laws of the world as existing in the Oriental or correspondingly in the Occidental view, has not yet a full understanding for what is here essential. One should not decide, e.g., for the greater significance of, let us say, the Christ, as compared with what Oriental teaching recognises, because one inclines to the Christ through one's Occidental education or one's temperament. One is only fitted to answer the question “How is the Christ related to the Orient?” when from a personal standpoint the Christian is as indifferent to one as the Oriental. As long as one has preference for this or the other, so long is one unsuited to make a decision. One first begins to be objective when one lets the facts alone speak, when one heeds no reasons derived from personal opinion, but lets facts alone speak in this sphere.

Therefore something meets us in the anthroposophical world-view, if it meets us today in its true form, which is inwardly woven with the human individuality, because it must spring out of the “I”-force of the individuality, and on the other hand, must be independent, so that this individuality is again quite indifferent. That person in whom anthroposophical wisdom appears must be unconcerned by it, must be independent of it. This is essential, that he has brought himself so far, that he forces nothing of his own colouring into these matters. Then they will indeed be individual, because the spiritual cannot appear in the light of the moon, or the stars, but only in the individuality, in the human soul; but then, on the other hand, this individuality must be so far on that it can exclude itself in the production of what constitutes the wisdom of the world. Thus that which appears to mankind through the anthroposophical movement will be something which concerns each human being, no matter from what race, nation, etc., he is born, because it applies itself only to the new humanity, to man as such, not to an abstract, general man, but to each single human being. This is the essential. As it proceeds out of the individuality, out of the kernel of man's being, so it speaks to the deepest kernel of man's being, so it grasps this kernel of man. As we usually speak from man to man, fundamentally it is only surface speaking to surface, something which we have not united with the innermost kernel of our being. Understanding between man and man, full understanding, is hardly possible today in any other sphere, than in that where what is produced comes from the centre of man's being, and, when it is understood aright by another, speaks again to his centre. Hence in a certain connection, it is a new speech that is spoken by Anthroposophy. And if today we are still obliged to speak in the various national languages what has to be announced, the content is a new speech, which is spoken by anthroposophy.

What is spoken today outside in the world is a speech which is only really valid for a very limited sphere. In ancient times, when people still looked into the spiritual world through their old, dreamy clairvoyance, their word then meant something which existed in the spiritual world. The word signified something which existed in the spiritual world. Even in Greece, things were still different from what they are today. The word “idea” used by Plato signified something different from the word “Idea,” as used by our modern philosophers. These modern philosophers can no longer understand Plato, because they have no perception of what he called “Idea,” and they confuse it with abstract concepts. Plato still had something spiritual before him, even if already rarefied; it was still something quite real. Then also, one still had in the words the sap of the spiritual, if one may express it thus. You can trace that in the words. If anybody today uses the word “wind,” “air,” then he means something external, physical. The word wind here corresponds to something external, physical. If, e.g., in old Hebrew, the word wind, “Ruach,” was employed, one did not merely mean something external, physical, but a spiritual, which swept through space. When man breathes in today he is told by materialistic science that he simply inhales material air; in ancient times, one did not believe one inhaled material air, but then one was clear that one inspired something of spirit, or at least, of soul. Thus the words then were absolutely designations for spirit and soul. That has ceased today; today speech is limited to the external world, or at least, those who seek to stand at the peak of the age busy themselves seeing only a materialistic meaning, even behind those things where it is still obvious they are derived from soul and spirit. Physics speaks of an “impact” of bodies. It has forgotten that the word “impact” is derived from that which a living being performs out of its inner living nature, when it pushes another being. The original significance of words is forgotten in these simple things.

And so today, our speech—and this is most of all the case with scientific speech—has become a speech which is only able to express what is material. Because of this, what is in our soul while we speak is only comprehensible to those faculties of our soul which are bound to the physical brain as their instrument. And then the soul understands nothing more of all that is designated with these words, when it is disembodied. When the soul has gone through the gate of death, and no longer employs the brain, then all scientific considerations of today are forms quite incomprehensible to the disembodied soul. It does not even hear or perceive what one expresses in the speech of the time. This has no longer any meaning for a disembodied soul, because it only has meaning for what is the physical world. That again is something which is still more important to consider in what one can call the mode of thinking, the method of representation. It is even more important to consider it there than in theory, because it is a question of life, not of theory, and it is characteristic that one can see in the theosophical movement itself how materialism has crept in. Because it is the mode of the time, it has often crept into the theosophical view, so that real materialism prevails even in theosophy itself, e.g., when one describes the etheric or life-body. Whereas a person should exert himself to come to a grasp of the spirit, one mostly describes it as if it were a finer matter; and the astral body also. One starts as a rule from the physical body, goes further to the etheric or life-body, and says: that is built after the pattern of the physical body, only finer—thus one progresses to Nirvana. Here one finds descriptions which take their images from nothing else than the physical. I have already experienced that when one wanted to express the good feeling present in a room among those present, one did not do so directly, but one said: Fine vibrations are existing in this room. One did not heed that one materialises what exists spiritually in a mood if one thinks the space filled with a kind of thin cloud, permeated with vibrations. That is what I should like to call the most material way of thinking possible. Materialism has even got by the neck those who want to think spiritually. That is only a characteristic of our time, but it is important that we are conscious of it. And therefore we must pay especial heed to what has been said: that our speech, which is always a kind of tyrant for human thinking, has implanted in the soul a tendency to materialism. And many, who today would so willingly be thorough idealists, express themselves entirely in a materialistic sense, misled by the tyranny of speech. That is a speech which can no longer be understood by the soul as soon as it no longer feels itself bound to the physical brain.

There is, indeed, something else, you may believe it or not. For one who knows occult perception, real spiritual perception, the method of presentation often employed today in theosophical-scientific writings causes real pain—because it appears irrational to him, if he begins to think, no longer with the physical brain, but with the soul, which is no longer bound to the physical brain, i.e., which really lives in the spiritual world. As long as one thinks with the physical brain, so long can he go on characterising the world thus. As soon, however, as one begins to develop spiritual perception, then, to speak of things in this way ceases to have any meaning. Then indeed it even causes pain if one must hear the utterance: There are good vibrations in this room, instead of: A good feeling prevails here. That at once causes pain in anyone who can really see things spiritually, because thoughts are realities. Space then fills itself out with a dark cloud, if one forms the thought: Good vibrations are in this space, instead of: A good mood is prevailing.

It is now the task of the anthroposophical way of thinking—and the method of thought is more important than the theories—that we learn to speak a language, which is really not merely understood by the human soul so long as it is in a physical body, but understood also when this soul is no longer bound to the instrument of the physical brain; for instance, either by a soul still in the body, but able to perceive spiritually, or by a soul gone through the gate of death. And that is the essential! If we bring forward those ideas which explain the world, which explain the human being, then that is a speech which cannot merely be understood here in the physical world, but also by those who are no longer incarnated in physical bodies, but live between death and a new birth. Yes, what is spoken on our anthroposophical basis, is heard and understood by the so-called dead. There they are fully one with us on a basis where the same speech is spoken. There we speak to all human beings. Because in a certain connection, it is chance whether a human soul is in a body of flesh, or in the condition between death and a new birth. And we learn through anthroposophy a speech comprehensible to all human beings, whether they are in the one or other condition. Thus we speak a speech within the field of anthroposophy which is spoken also for the so-called dead. We really contact the innermost kernel of man, the innermost being of man, through what we cultivate in a real sense in anthroposophical considerations, even if they appear apparently abstract. We penetrate into the soul of man. And because we penetrate to the soul of man, we liberate man from all group-soulness, i.e., man becomes in this way more and more capable of really grasping himself in his ego, his “I.” And that is the characteristic, that those who come to anthroposophy today, who really take up anthroposophy, appear in comparison with others who remain far from it, as if through anthroposophical thoughts, their ego would crystallise as a spiritual being, which is then carried through the gate of death. With the others, in that place where the I-being is, which remains there—which is now there in the body, and which remains after death—there is a hollow space, a nothingness. Everything else which one can take up as ideas today, will become more and more worthless for the real kernel of man's soul-being. The central point of man's being is grasped through what we take up as anthroposophical thoughts. That crystallises a spiritual substance in man; he takes that with him after death, and with that he perceives in the spiritual world. He sees and hears with it in the spiritual world, with it he penetrates that darkness which otherwise exists for man in the spiritual world. And thereby it is brought about that when through these anthroposophical thoughts and way of thinking man develops this “I” in him today, which now stands in connection with all the world wisdom we can acquire—if he develops it—he carries it over also into his next incarnation. Then he is born with this now developed “I,” and he remembers himself in this developed “I.” That is the deeper task of the anthroposophical movement today, to send over to their next incarnation a number of human beings with an ego in which they remember themselves as an individual ego. They will be the human beings who form the kernel of the next period of civilisation. These people who have been well prepared through the anthroposophical spiritual movement, to remember their individual “I,” will be spread over the whole earth. For the essential in the next period of culture will be that these people will not be limited by single localities, but spread over the entire earth. These individual people will be scattered over the whole earth, and within the whole earth sphere will be the kernel of humanity, who will be essential for the sixth period of civilisation. And so it will be the case among these people, that they will know themselves as those who in their previous incarnation strove together for the individual “I.”

This is the right cultivation of that soul-faculty of which we have spoken. This soul-faculty so develops, that not only those just described will have this memory. More and more human beings will have this memory of their former incarnation—in spite of their not having developed the “I.” But they will not remember an individual “I,” because they have not developed it, but they will remember the group-ego, in which they have remained. Thus people will exist, who in this incarnation have cared for the development of their individual “I”—they will remember themselves as independent individualities, they will look back and say: You were this or the other. Those who have not developed the individuality will be unable to remember this individuality.

Do not think that through mere visionary clairvoyance one acquires the faculty of remembering the previous ego. Humanity was once clairvoyant. If mere clairvoyance sufficed, then all would remember, for all were clairvoyant. It is not merely a matter of being clairvoyant—humanity will already be clairvoyant in the future—it is a matter of having cultivated the ego in this incarnation, or not. If one has not cultivated it, it is not there as an inner human being; one looks back, and remembers as a group-ego, what one had in common. So that these people will say: Yes, I was there, but I have not freed myself. These people will then experience that as their FALL, as a new Fall of mankind, as a falling back into conscious connection with the group-soul. That will be something terrible for the sixth period of time; to be unable to look back to oneself as an individuality, to be hemmed in by not being able to transcend the group-soulness [Gruppenseelenhaftigkeit]. If one will express it strongly, one could say: The whole earth with all it produces (this holds at least as an image) will belong to those who now cultivate their individuality; those, however, who do not develop their individual “I,” will be obliged to join on to a certain group, from which they will be directed as to how they should think, feel, will, and act. That will be felt as a fall, a falling back, in the future humanity.

So we should regard the anthroposophical movement, the spiritual life, not as mere theory, but as something which is given us in the present, because it prepares what is necessary for the future of mankind.

If we grasp ourselves aright in that point where we are now, whence we have come from out the past, and then look a little into the future, then we must say: Now the time is come where man begins to develop the human faculty of remembering backwards. It is only a question of our developing it aright, i.e., that we train in us an individual “I;” for only what we have created in our own soul can we remember. If we have not created it, then there only remains to us a fettering memory of a group-ego, and we feel it as a kind of falling down into a group of higher animality. Even if the human group-souls are finer and higher than the animal, yet they are but group-souls. Humanity of an early age did not feel that as a fall, because they were intended to develop from group-soulness to the individual soul. If they are now held back, they fall consciously into it, and that will be the oppressive feeling in the future of those who do not take this step aright, either now or in a later incarnation. They will experience the fall into group-soulness.

The real task of anthroposophy, is to give the right impulse. We must thus grasp it within human life. If we keep in mind that the sixth period of time is that of the first, complete conquest of the racial idea, then we must be clear, that it would be fantastic to think that even the sixth “race” starts from one point on the earth, and develops like the earlier races. Progress is made by ever-new progressive methods of evolution appearing. By progress we do not mean that what was valid as ideas for earlier times should also hold for the future. If we do not see this, the idea of progress will not be quite clear to us. We will as it were fall again and again into the error of saying: So and so many rounds, globes, races, etc., and it all goes on revolving round again and again in the same manner.* (*This refers to the descriptions set forth in the books of the “Theosophical Society,” 1909.) One cannot see why this wheel of rounds, globes, races, etc., should always revolve again. It is a question of seeing that the word “race” is a term only having validity for a certain time. This idea no longer has any meaning for the sixth period. Races have only in themselves the elements which have remained from the Atlantean age.

In the future, that which speaks to the depths of man's soul will express itself more and more in the external nature of man; and that which man on the one side as a quite individual being has acquired, and yet, again experiences unindividually, will express itself by working out even to the human countenance; so that the individuality of man—not the group-soulness—will be inscribed for him on his countenance. That will constitute human manifoldness. Everything will be acquired individually, in spite of its being there through the overcoming of individuality. And we will not meet groups among those who are seized of the ego, but the individual will express itself externally. That will form the distinction between human beings. There will be such as have acquired their egoity; they will indeed be there over the whole earth with the most manifold countenances, but one will recognise through their variety how the individual ego expresses itself even into the gesture. Whereas among those who have not developed the individuality, the group-soulness will come to expression by their countenance receiving the imprint of the group-soulness, i.e., they will fall into categories similar to each other. That will be the external physiognomy of our earth: a possibility will be prepared for the individuality to carry in itself an external sign, and for the group-soulness to carry in itself its external sign.

This is the meaning of earthly evolution, that man acquires more and more the power of expressing externally his inner being. There exists an ancient script in which the greatest ideal for the evolution of the “I,” the Christ Jesus, is characterised by the saying: When the two become one, when the external becomes like the inner, then man has attained the Christ nature in himself. That is the meaning of a certain passage in the so-called Egyptian Gospel. One comprehends such passages out of anthroposophical wisdom.¹

After we have attempted today to grasp the task of anthroposophy out of the depths of our knowledge, we will consider something on Tuesday which as a spiritual problem—as a specially individual affair of man—can lead us to his destiny, to his being.

• 1. f. Dr. Steiner's Gospel of St. Matthew, lecture 6, published by Rudolf Steiner Publishing Company.

It affords me the deepest satisfaction to find that here in England you are ready to consider founding a school on Anthroposophical lines.¹ This may truly signify a momentous and incisive event in the history of Education. In pronouncing such words as these one may well be accused of lack of humility, but there really is something very special underlying all that is to come about for the Art of Education as based on Anthroposophy. And I am overjoyed that an impulse has arisen to form the first beginnings of a College of Teachers, teachers who from the depths of their hearts do indeed recognise the very special quality of what we call Anthroposophical Education. It is no fanatical idea of reform that prompts us to speak of a renewal in educational life, but we are urged to do so out of our whole feeling and experience of how mankind is evolving in civilisation and cultural life.

In speaking thus we are fully aware of the immense amount that has been done for education by distinguished persons in the course of the nineteenth century, and especially in the last few decades. But although all this was undertaken with the very best intentions and every possible method has been tried, we are bound to state that a real knowledge of the human being was lacking. These ideas about education arose at a time when no real knowledge of man was possible owing to the materialism that prevailed in all departments of life and indeed had done so since the fifteenth century. When, therefore, people expounded their ideas on educational reform they were building on sand or on something even less stable; rules of education were laid down based on all sorts of emotions and opinions as to what life ought to be. It was impossible to know man in his wholeness and to ask the question: How can we bring to revelation in a man what lies, god-given, within his nature after he has descended from pre-earthly life into earthly life? This is the kind of question which can be raised in an abstract way, but which can only be answered concretely on the basis of a true knowledge of man in body, soul and spirit.

Now this is how the matter stands for present-day humanity. The knowledge of the body is highly developed. By means of Biology, Physiology and Anatomy we have acquired a very advanced knowledge of the human body; but as soon as we wish to acquire a knowledge of the soul, we, with our present-day views, are confronted with a complete impasse, for everything relating to the soul is merely a name, a word. For even with regard to such things as thinking, feeling and willing we find no reality in the ordinary Psychology of today. We still use the words thinking, feeling and willing, but there is no conception of what takes place in the soul in reference to these things. What the so-called psychologists have to say about thinking, feeling and willing is in reality mere dilettantism. It is just as though a physiologist were to speak in a general way of the human lungs or liver, making no distinction between the liver of a child and that of an old person. In the science of the body we are very far advanced. No physiologist would fail to note the difference between the lungs of a child and the lungs of an old man, or indeed between the hair of a child and the hair of an old man. He will note all these differences. But thinking, feeling and willing are mere words which are uttered without conveying any sense of reality. For instance it is not known that willing, as it appears in the soul, is young, while thinking is old; that in fact thinking is willing grown old, and willing is a youthful thinking in the soul. Thus everything pertaining to the soul contains youthfulness and old age, existing in man simultaneously.

Naturally, even in the soul of a young child we have the old thinking and the young willing together at the same time. There they are contemporaneous, and indeed these things are realities. But today no one knows how to speak of these realities of the soul in the same way as he can of the realities of the body, so that as teachers of children we are quite helpless. Suppose you were a physician and yet were unable to distinguish between a child and an old man! You would of course feel helpless. But as there is no science of the soul the teacher is unable to speak about the human soul as the modern physician can of the human body. And as for the spirit, there is no such thing! One cannot speak of it, there are no longer even any words for it. There is but the single word “spirit,” and that does not convey much. There are no other words in which to describe it.

In our present-day life we cannot therefore venture to speak of a knowledge of Man. Here one may easily feel that all is not well with our education; certain things must be improved upon. Yes, but how can we improve matters, if we know nothing at all of Man? Therefore all the ideas for the improvement of education may be inspired by the best will in the world, but they possess no knowledge of Man.

This can even be noticed in our own circles. For it is Anthroposophy which at the present time can help men to acquire this knowledge of man. I am not saying this from any sectarian or fanatical standpoint but it is so that he who seeks knowledge of man must find it in Anthroposophy. It is obvious that knowledge of the human being must be the basis for a teacher's work; that being so, he must acquire this knowledge for himself, and the natural thing will be that he acquires it through Anthroposophy. If, therefore, we are asked what the basis of a new method of education should be, our answer is: Anthroposophy must be that basis. But how many people there are, even in our own circles, who try to disclaim Anthroposophy as much as possible, and to propagate an education without letting it be known that Anthroposophy is at the back of it.

There is an old German proverb which says: Please wash me but don't make me wet! Many projects are undertaken in this spirit but we must above all both speak and think truthfully. So if anyone asks you how to become a good teacher you must say to him: Make Anthroposophy your foundation. You must not deny Anthroposophy, for it is only by this means that you can acquire your knowledge of Man.

We have no knowledge of Man in our present cultural life. We have theories, but no living insight, either into the world, life or men. A true insight will lead to a true practice in life, but we have no such practical life today. Do you know who are the most unpractical people at the present time? It is not the scientists, for although they are clumsy and ignorant of life, these faults can be clearly seen in them. But in those who are the worst theorists and who are the least practical in life these things are not observed. These are the so-called practical persons, the commercial and industrial men and bankers, the men who rule the practical affairs of life with theoretical thoughts. A bank today is entirely composed of thoughts arising from theories. There is nothing practical in A; but people do not notice this, for they say: It must be so, that is the way practical people work. So they adapt themselves to it, and no one notices the harm that is really being done in life because it is all worked in so unpractical a way. The “practical life” of today is absolutely unpractical in all its forms.

This will only be noticed when an ever increasing number of destructive elements enter our civilisation and break it up. If this goes on the World War will have been nothing but a first step, an introduction. In reality the World War arose out of this unpractical thinking, but that was only an introduction. The point now at stake is that people should not remain asleep any longer, more particularly in the domain of teaching and education. Our task is to introduce an education which concerns itself with the whole man, body, soul and spirit; and these three principles should be known and recognised.

Now in so short a course as that to be given here, we can only speak of the most important aspects of body, soul and spirit, in such a way as will give a direction to education and teaching. That is what we shall do. But the first requirement, as will be seen from the start, is that my hearers shall really endeavour to direct their observation, even externally, to the whole man.

How are the basic principles of education composed in these days? The child is observed, and then we are told, the child is like this or like that, and must learn something. Then one thinks how best to teach so that the child can learn such and such a thing quickly. But what is a child, in reality? A child remains a child for at most twelve years, or possibly longer, but that is not the point. The point is that he must always be thought of as becoming an older human being some day. Life as a whole is a unity, and we must not only consider the child but the whole of life; we must look at the whole human being.

Suppose I have a pale child in the school. A pale child should be an enigma to me, a riddle to be solved. There may be several reasons for his pallor, but the following is a possible one. The child may have come to school with some colour in his cheeks, and have become pale under my treatment of him. I must admit this, and be able to judge as to why he has become pale; I may perhaps come to see that I have given this child too much to learn by heart. I may have worked his memory too hard. If I do not admit this possibility, if I am a short-sighted teacher, having the idea that a method must be carried through regardless of whether the child grows rosy or pale thereby, that the method must just be persevered with, then the child will remain pale.

If, however, I were able to observe this same child at the age of fifty, I should probably find him suffering from terrible sclerosis or arterial hardening, the cause of which will be unknown. This is the result of my having overloaded the memory of the child when he was eight or nine years old. For you see, the man of fifty and the child of eight or nine belong together, they are one and the same human being. We must know what the result will be, forty or fifty years later, of our management of the child; for life is a unity, it is all connected. It is not enough merely to know the child, we must know the human being.

Again, I take great trouble to give a class as good definitions as I can, so that the concepts shall be firmly grasped, and the child will know: this is a lion, that is a cat, and so on. But is the child to retain these concepts to the day of his death? In our present age there is no feeling for the fact that the soul too must grow! If I furnish a child with a concept that is to remain “correct” (and “correctness” is of course all that matters!), a concept which he is to retain throughout his life, that is just as though I bought him a pair of shoes when he was three years old, and each successive year had shoes made of the same size. The child will grow out of them. This however is something that people notice and it would be considered brutal to try and keep his feet small enough to go on wearing the same sized shoes! Yet this is what we are doing with the soul. We furnish the child with ideas which do not grow with him. We give him concepts which are intended to be permanent; we worry him with fixed concepts that are to remain unchanged, whereas we should be giving him concepts capable of expansion. We are constantly squeezing the soul into the ideas we give the child.

These are some of the ways in which we may begin to answer the challenge that in education we must take the whole human being into consideration, the growing, living human being, and not just an abstract idea of man.

It is only when we have the right conception of man's life as a connected whole that we come to realise how different from each other the various ages are. The child is a very different being before shedding its first teeth from what it becomes afterwards. Of course, you must not interpret this in crudely formed judgments, but if we are capable of making finer distinctions in life, we can observe that the child is quite different before and after the change of teeth.

Before the change of teeth we can still see quite clearly at work the effects of the child's habits of life before birth or conception, in its pre-earthly existence in the spiritual world. The body of the child acts almost as though it were spirit, for the spirit which has descended from the spiritual world is still fully active in a child in the first seven years of its life. You will say: A fine sort of spirit! It has become quite boisterous; for the child is rampageous, awkward and incompetent. Is all this to be attributed to the spirit belonging to his pre-earthly life? Well, my dear friends, suppose all you clever and well-brought-up people were suddenly condemned to remain always in a room having a temperature of 144° Fahrenheit? You couldn't do it! It is even harder for the spirit of the child, which has descended from the spiritual worlds, to accustom itself to earthly conditions. The spirit, suddenly transported into a completely different world, with the new experience of having a body to carry about, acts as we see the child act. Yet if you know how to observe and note how each day, each week, each month, the indefinite features of the face become more definite, the awkward movements become less clumsy and the child gradually accustoms himself to his surroundings, then you will realise that it is the spirit from the pre-earthly world which is endeavouring to make the child's body gradually more like itself. We shall understand why the child is as he is, if we observe him in this way, and we shall also understand that it is the descended spirit which is acting as we see it within the child's body.

Therefore for one who is initiated into the mysteries of the spirit there is nothing that can fill him with such wonder and delight as to observe a little child. In so doing one learns not of the earth, but of heaven; and this not only in the so-called “good children.” In their case, as a rule, the bodies have already become heavy, even in infancy. The spirit cannot properly take hold of the body; such children are quiet; they do not scream and rush about, they sit still and make no noise. The spirit is not active within them, because their bodies offer such resistance. It is very often the case that the bodies of the so-called good children offer resistance to the spirit.

In the less well-behaved children who make a great deal of healthy noise, who shout properly, and give a lot of trouble, the spirit is active, though of course in a clumsy way, for it has been transported from heaven to earth; but the spirit is active within them. It is making use of the body. We may even regard the wild screams of a child as most enthralling, simply because we thereby experience the martyrdom the spirit has to endure when it descends into a child-body.

Yes, my dear friends, it is easy to be a grown-up person—easy for the spirit, I mean, for the body has then been made ready, it no longer offers the same resistance. It is quite easy to be a full-grown person but extremely difficult to be a child. The child himself is not aware of this because his consciousness is not yet awake. It is still asleep, but if the child possessed the consciousness he had before descending to earth he would soon notice this difficulty: if the child were still living in this pre-earthly consciousness his life would be a terrible tragedy, a really terrible tragedy. For you see, the child comes down to earth; before this he has been accustomed to a spiritual substance from which he drew his spiritual life. He was accustomed to deal with that spiritual substance. He had prepared himself according to his Karma, according to the result of previous lives. He was fully contained within his own spiritual garment, as it were. Now he has to descend to earth. I should like to speak quite simply about these things, and you must excuse me if I speak of them as I would if I were describing the ordinary things of the earth. One can speak of them thus because they are so. Now when a human being is to descend, he must choose a body on the earth.

And indeed this body has been prepared throughout generations. Some father and mother had a son or a daughter, and these again a son or a daughter, and so on. Thus through heredity a body is produced which he must now occupy. He must draw into it and dwell therein; but in so doing he is suddenly faced with quite different conditions. He clothes himself in a body that has been prepared by a number of generations.

Of course, even from the spiritual world the human being can work on the body so that it may not be altogether unsuitable, yet as a rule the body received is not so very suitable after all. For the most part one does not fit at all easily into such a body. If a glove were to fit your hand as badly as the body generally fits the soul, you would discard it at once. You would never think of putting it on. But when you come down from the spiritual world needing a body, you just have to take one; and this body you retain until the change of teeth. For it is a fact that every seven or eight years our external physical substance is completely changed, at least in the essentials though not in all respects. Our first teeth for instance are changed, the second set remain. This is not the case with all the members of the human organism; some parts, even more important than the teeth, undergo change every seven years as long as a man is on the earth. If the teeth were to behave in the same way as these we should have new teeth at seven, fourteen, and again at twenty-one years of age, and so on, and there would be no dentists in the world.

Thus certain hard organs remain, but the softer ones are constantly being renewed. In the first seven years of our life we have a body which is given to us by outer nature, by our parents and so on; it is a model. The soul occupies the same relation to this body as an artist to a model which he has to copy. We have been gradually shaping the second body out of the first body up to the change of teeth. It takes seven years to complete the process. This second body which we ourselves have fashioned on the model given us by our parents only appears at the end of the first seven years of life, and all that external science says today about heredity and so forth is mere dilettantism compared to the reality. In reality we receive at birth a model body which is there with us for seven years, although during the very first years of life it begins to die out and fall away. The process continues, until at the change of teeth we have our second body.

Now there are weak individualities who are weakly when they descend to earth; these form their second body in which they live after the change of teeth, as an exact model of the first. People say that they take after their parents by inheritance, but this is not true. They make their own second body according to the inherited model. It is only during the first seven years of our life that our body is really inherited, but naturally we are all weak individualities and we copy a great deal. There are, however, also strong individualities descending to earth, and they too inherit a good deal in the first seven years. That one can see in the teeth. Their first teeth are still soft and subject to heredity, but when children have good strong second teeth that can crack things easily, then they are strong individualities, developing in the proper way. There are children who at ten years of age are just like children of four—mere imitators. Others are quite different, the strong individuality stirs within them. The model is used, but afterwards they form an individual body for themselves.

Such things must be noted. All talk of heredity will not lead you far unless you realise how matters stand. Heredity, in the sense in which it is spoken of by science, only applies to the first seven years of man. After that age, whatever he inherits he inherits of his own free will, we might say; he imitates the model, but in reality the inherited part is thrown off with the first body at the change of teeth.

The soul nature which came down from the spiritual world is very strong in us, and it is clumsy at first because it has to become accustomed to external nature. Yet in reality everything about a child, even the worst naughtiness, is very fascinating. Of course we must follow the conventions to some extent and not allow all naughtiness to pass unreproved; but we can see better in children than anywhere else how the spirit of man is tormented by the demons of degeneracy which are there in the world. The child has to enter a world into which he so often does not fit. If we were conscious of this process, we should see what a terribly tragic thing it is. When one knows something of Initiation, and is able to see consciously what lays hold of this body in the child, it really is terrible to see how he must find his way into all the complications of bones and ligaments which he has to form. It really is a tragic sight. The child himself knows nothing of this, and that is a good thing, for the Guardian of the Threshold protects him from any such knowledge.

But the teacher should know of it. He must look on with the deepest reverence, knowing that here a being whose nature is of God and the spirit has descended to earth. The essential thing is that we should know this, that we should fill our hearts with this knowledge, and from this starting point undertake our work as educators.

There are great differences between the manner of man which one is in the spiritual-soul life before descending to earth, and that which one has to become here below. The teacher should be able to judge of this because he has before him the child in whom are the after-effects of the spiritual world. Now there is one thing which the child has difficulty in acquiring, because the soul had nothing of this in the spiritual life.

On earth man is very little able to direct his attention to the inner part of his body; that is only done by the natural scientists and the physicians. They know exactly what goes on inside man within the limits of his skin, but you will find that most people do not even know exactly where their heart is! They generally point to the wrong place, and if in the course of his social life today it were required of a man to explain the difference between the lobes of the right and left lungs, or to describe the duodenum, very curious answers would be given. Now before he comes down into earthly life a man takes but little interest in the external world, but he takes so much the more interest in what he may call his spiritual inner being. In the life between death and a new birth man's interests are almost entirely centred on his inner spiritual life. He builds up his Karma in accordance with experiences from previous earth-lives and this he develops according to his inner life of spirit. This interest which he takes in it is very far removed from any earthly quality, very far removed from that longing for knowledge which, in its one-sided form, may be called inquisitiveness. A longing for knowledge, curiosity, a passionate desire for knowledge of the external life was not ours before our birth or descent to earth; we did not know it at all. That is why the young child has it only in so slight a degree.

What he does experience, on the other hand, is to live right in and with his environment. Before descending to earth we live entirely in the outer world. The whole world is then our inner being and there exist no such distinctions as outer and inner world. Therefore we are not curious about what is external, for that is all within us. We have no curiosity about it, we bear it within us, and it is an obvious and natural thing which we experience.

So in the first seven years of life a child learns to walk, to speak and to think, out of the same manner of living which he had before descending to earth. If you lay stress on arousing curiosity in a child with regard to some particular word, you will find that you thereby entirely drive out the wish he had to learn that same word. If you count on a longing for knowledge or curiosity you drive out of the child just what he ought to have. You must not reckon on a child's curiosity, but rather on something else, namely that the child becomes merged into you as it were, and you really live in the child. All that the child enjoys must live and be as though it were his own inner nature. You must make the same impression on the child as his own arm makes on him. You must, so to say, be only the continuation of his own body. Then later, when the child has passed through the change of teeth and gradually enters the period between the seventh and fourteenth years, you must observe how little by little curiosity and a longing for knowledge begin to show themselves; you must be tactful and careful, and pay attention to the way in which curiosity gradually stirs into being within him.

The small child is still but a clumsy little creature, who does not ask questions, and one can only make an impression upon him by being something oneself. He questions his environment as little as a sack of flour. But just as a sack of flour will retain any impressions you make upon it (especially if it is well ground), so too does the little child retain all his impressions, not because he is curious, but because you yourself are really one with him and make impressions on him as you would do with your fingers on a sack of flour.

It is only at the change of teeth that the situation alters. You must now notice the way the child begins to ask questions. “What is that? What do the stars see with? Why are the stars in the sky? Why have you a crooked nose, grandmother?” The child now asks all these questions; he begins to be curious about the things around him. You must have a delicate perception and note the gradual beginnings of curiosity and attention which appear with the second teeth. These are the years in which these qualities appear and you must be ready to meet them. You must allow the child's inner nature to decide what you ought to be doing with him; I mean, you must take the keenest interest in what is awakening with the change of teeth.

A very great deal is awakening then. The child is curious, but not with an intellectual curiosity for as yet it has no reasoning powers; and anyone who appeals to the intellect of a child of seven is quite on the wrong lines; but it has fantasy and this it is with which we must deal. It is really a question of developing the concept of a kind of “milk of the soul” For you see, after birth the child must be given bodily milk. This constitutes its food and every other necessary substance is contained in the milk that the child consumes. And when he comes to school at the age of the changing of the teeth it is again milk that you must give him, but now, milk for the soul. That is to say, your teaching must not be made up of isolated units, but all That the child receives must be a unity; when he has gone through the change of teeth he must have “soul milk.” If he is taught to read and write as two separate things it is just as though his milk were to be separated chemically into two different parts, and you gave him one part at one time and the other at another. Reading and writing must form a unity. You must bring this idea of “soul milk” into being for your work with the children when they first come to school.

This can only come about if, after the change of teeth, the children's education is directed artistically. The artistic element must be in it all. Tomorrow I will describe more fully how to develop writing out of painting and thus give it an artistic form, and how you must then lead this over artistically to the teaching of reading, and how this artistic treatment of reading and writing must be connected, again by artistic means, with the first simple beginnings of Arithmetic. All this must thus form a unity. Such things as these must be gradually developed as “soul milk” which we need for the child when he comes to school.

And when he reaches the age of puberty he will require “spiritual milk.” This is extremely difficult to give to present-day humanity, for we have no spirit left in our materialistic age. It will be a difficult task to create “spiritual milk,” but if we cannot succeed in creating it we shall have to leave our boys and girls to themselves at the so-called hobbledehoy stage, for there is no “spiritual milk” in our present age.

I just wanted to say these things by way of introduction and to give you a certain direction of thought; tomorrow we will continue these considerations and go more into details.

• 1. “The New School,” Streatham Hill, London, S.W.16, was opened in January 1925. In 1935 the name was changed to “Michael Hall.” In 1945 the school was moved to Kidbrooke Park, Forest Row, Sussex.

I have given you some idea of the forces which determined the first two periods of the anthroposophical movement. But in order to create a basis on which to deal with what happened in the third stage, I still wish to deal with a number of phenomena from the first two.

The first period, up until approximately 1907, can be described as being concerned with developing the fundamentals for a science of the spirit in lectures, lecture cycles and in subsequent work undertaken by others. This period concludes approximately with the publication of my Occult Science.¹

Occult Science actually appeared in print some one and a half years later, but the publicizing of its essential content undoubtedly falls into this first period. Some hope was definitely justified in this period, up to 1905 or 1906, that the content of anthroposophy might become the purpose of the Theosophical Society's existence.

During this time it would have been an illusion not to recognize that leading personalities in the Theosophical Society, and Annie Besant in particular, had a very primitive understanding of modern scientific method. Nevertheless, despite the amateurish stamp which this gave to all her books, there was a certain sum of wisdom, mostly unprocessed, in the people who belonged to the Society. This became more marked as the focus of the Theosophical Society gradually moved to London and slowly began to feed, in a manner of speaking, on oriental wisdom. It sometimes led to the most peculiar ideas. But if we ignore the fact that such ideas were sometimes stretched so far that they lost all similarity to their original and true meaning, such books as Annie Besant's Ancient Wisdom, The Progress of Mankind, and even Christianity transmit something which, although passed down by traditional means, originated in ancient sources of wisdom.

On the other hand one must always be aware that in the modern world beyond these circles there was no interest whatsoever in real spiritual research. The reality was simply that the possibility of kindling an interest in a truly modern science of the spirit existed only among those who found their way into this group of people.

Yet within this first period in particular there was a great deal to overcome. Many people were working towards something, but it was in part a very egoistic and shallow striving. But even such superficial societies frequently called themselves theosophical. One need only think, for instance, of the theosophical branches spread widely throughout central Europe—in Germany, Austria and also Switzerland—which possessed only an exceedingly anaemic version of Theosophical Society tenets, impregnated with all kinds of foolish occult views.

One person who was very active in such societies was Franz Hartmann.² But the kind of profound spirit and deep seriousness which existed in these shallow societies will become obvious to you if I describe the cynical character of this particular leader. The Theosophical Society was at one time engaged in a dispute in connection with an American called Judge³ about whether or not certain messages which had been distributed by Judge originated with persons who really had reached a higher stage of initiation, the so-called Masters. Judge had distributed these “Mahatma Letters” in America.

While they were both at the headquarters in India, Judge said he wanted some letters from the Masters in order to gain credibility in America, so that he could say he had been given a mission by initiates. Franz Harmann recounted how he had offered to write some Mahatma Letters for Judge, and the latter had replied that this would not permit him to claim their authenticity. They were supposed to fly towards you through the air; they originated in a magical way and then landed on your head, and that is what he had to be able to say. Judge was a very small fellow, Hartmann told us, and so he said to him “Stand on the floor and I will stand on a chair and then I will drop the letters on your head.” Then Judge could say with a clear conscience that he was distributing letters which had landed on his head clean out of the air!

That is an extreme example of things which are not at all rare in the world. I do not really want to waste your time with these shallow societies. I only want to point out that the close proximity of the anthroposophical to the theosophical movement made it necessary for the former to defend itself against modern scientific thinking during its first period.

I do not know whether those who joined the anthroposophical movement later as scientists, and observed anthroposophy during its more developed third stage, have gained sufficient insight into the fact that a critical assessment of modern scientific thinking took place in a very specific way during the first period of the anthroposophical movement. I only give instances, because this process occurred in a number of different areas. But these examples will show you how the theosophical movement was strongly influenced by the deference to so-called scientific authority which I described as particularly characteristic of modern education.

Annie Besant, for instance, tried to use in her books all kinds of quotes from contemporary science, such as Weismann's theory of heredity,⁴ which bore no relevance to the science of the spirit. She used them as if they provided some sort of evidence. If you recall, at the time when we were in a position to start a centre for the anthroposophical movement in Munich many homeless souls were already organized in the sense that they belonged to various societies. Of course centres for the movement had begun to develop gradually in Berlin, Munich, Stuttgart, Kassel, Dusseldorf, Cologne, Hamburg, Hanover and Leipzig, and in Vienna as well as in Prague. When we were establishing the branch in Munich it became necessary to assess critically the various larger and smaller groups which were then in existence.

One group called the Ketterl, consisting of extremely scholarly people, was very much concerned with providing proofs from natural science for the claims which were made on behalf of the science of the spirit. If anthroposophy spoke about the etheric body, they would say that science has recognized this or that structure for atoms and molecules. Their formulae and definitions and so on were applied not to processes of the spectrum or electro-magnetism but to processes in the etheric or astral field. There was nothing we could do about that. The whole thing dissolved more or less amicably. In the end we no longer had any links with these investigations.

Not so very different were the efforts of a Dr. Hübbe-Schleiden,⁵ who played an important role in the Theosophical Society. He was a close friend of Blavatsky, and was the editor of Sphinx for a long time. He, too, was obsessed with proving what he felt was theosophical subject matter by means of natural-scientific thinking. He took me to his home, a little way outside Hanover. It was perhaps half an hour by tram. He spent the entire half-hour describing the motion of atoms with his index fingers: Yes, it has to happen in this way and that way and then we have the answer. The atoms move in one incarnation and then the wave motion continues through the spiritual worlds; then it changes and that is the next incarnation. In the same way as modern physicists calculate light in terms of wave lengths, he calculated the passage of souls through various incarnations.

A special version of this way of thinking was evident in the debate about the permanent atom, which took place in the Theosophical Society over a long period. This permanent atom was something awful, but was taken incredibly seriously. For the people who felt the full weight of modern science postulated that while of course the physical body decomposes, a single atom remains, passes through the time between death and a new birth, and appears in the new incarnation. That is the permanent atom which passes through incarnations.

This may appear funny to you today, but you simply cannot understand the seriousness with which these things were pursued, specifically in the first period, and the difficulty which existed in responding to the challenge: What is the point of theosophy if it cannot be proved scientifically! During that conversation in the tram the point was forcefully made that things have to be presented in a manner which will allow a matriculated schoolboy to understand theosophy in the same way that he understands logic. That was the thrust of my companion's argument. Then we arrived at his home and he took me into the loft, and up there—I have to repeat that he was an exceedingly kind, pleasant and intelligent man; in other words, a sympathetic old gentleman—were very complicated wire constructions. One of the models would represent the atom of a physical entity; the next model, which was even more complex, would represent the atom of something etheric; the third model, still more complex, was an astral atom.

If you pick up certain books by Leadbeater,⁶ a leading figure in the Theosophical Society, you will find such models in grandiose form. Atomism flourished nowhere as greatly as among those who joined our ranks from the Theosophical Society. And when younger members such as Dr. Kolisko⁷ and others are engaged in the fight against the atom in our research institute in Stuttgart,⁸ we might well recall that certain people at that time would not have known how to get from one incarnation to the next without at least one permanent atom.

That is something of an image of the way in which the strong authority of so-called natural-scientific thinking exerted its influence in these circles. They were unable to conceive of any other valid way of thinking than the natural-scientific one. So there was no real understanding in this quarter either. Only as the anthroposophical movement entered its second stage did these atomistic endeavours gradually subside, and there was a gradual transition to the subject matter which continued to be cultivated in the anthroposophical movement. Every time I was in Munich, for instance, it was possible to give a lecture designed more for the group which gathered round a great friend of Blavatsky's. Things were easier there because a genuine inner striving existed.

Within our own ranks, too, there was a call at that time to justify the content of anthroposophy using the current natural-scientific approach. It was less radical, nevertheless, than the demands made by external critics today. A large number of you heard Dr. Blümel's⁹ lecture today. Imagine if someone had responded by saying that everything Dr. Blümel spoke about was of no personal concern; that he did not believe it, did not recognize it and did not want to test it. Someone else might say: See whether it is accurate, examine it with your reason and your soul faculties. The first person says: It is no business of mine be it right or wrong, I do not want to become involved with that. But I call on Dr. Blümel to go to a psychological laboratory and there, using my psychological methods, I will examine whether or not he is a mathematician.

That is, of course, piffle of the first order. But it is exactly the demand made today by outside critics.

Sadly, it is quite possible today to talk pure nonsense that goes undetected. Even those who are upset by it fail to notice that it is pure nonsense. They believe that it is only maliciousness or something similar, because they cannot imagine the possibility of someone who talks pure nonsense acquiring the role of a scientific spokesman simply as a result of their social standing. That is the extent to which our spiritual life has become confused. The kind of things which I am explaining here must be understood by anyone who wants to grasp the position of the anthroposophical movement.

Well, undeterred by all that, the most important human truths, the most important cosmic truths, had to be made public during the first stage. My Occult Science represents a sort of compendium of everything which had been put forward in the anthroposophical movement until that point. Our intention was always a concrete and never an abstract one, because we never attempted to do more than could be achieved in the given circumstances.

Let me quote the following as evidence. We established a journal, Luzifer-Gnosis,¹⁰ right at the outset of the anthroposophical movement. At first it was called Luzifer. Then a Viennese journal called Gnosis wanted to amalgamate with it. My sole intention in calling it Luzifer with Gnosis was to express the practical union of the two journals. Of course that was completely unacceptable to Hübbe-Schleiden, for instance, who thought that this would indicate an unnatural union. Well, I was not particularly bothered, so we called it Luzifer-Gnosis with a hyphen. People were very sharp-witted and they were keeping a close eye on us at that time!

Of course we started with a very small number of subscribers, but it began to grow at a very fast pace, relatively speaking, and we never really ran at a deficit because we only ever printed approximately as many copies as we were able to sell. Once an issue had been printed the copies were sent to my house in large parcels. Then my wife and I put the wrappers around them. I addressed them and then each of us took a washing basket and carried the whole lot to the post office. We found that this worked quite well. I wrote and held lectures while my wife organized the whole Anthroposophical Society,¹¹ but without a secretary. So we did that all on our own and never attempted more than could be managed on a practical level. We did not even, for example, take larger washing baskets than we could just manage. When the number of subscribers grew we simply made an extra journey.

When we had been engaged in this interesting activity for some time, Luzifer-Gnosis ceased publication—not because it had to, for it had many more subscribers than it needed, but because I no longer had the time to write. The demands of my lecturing activity and of the spiritual administration of the society in general began to take up a lot of time.

To cease publication was a natural consequence of never attempting more than could be managed on a practical level, one step at a time. This belongs to the conditions which govern the existence of a spiritual society. To build far-reaching ideals on phrases, setting up programmes, is the worst thing which can happen to a spiritual society. The work in this first period was such that between 1907 and 1909 the foundations of a science of the spirit appropriate to the modern age were put in place.

Then we come to the second phase, which essentially concluded our attempt to come to grips with natural science. The theologians had not yet made their presence felt. They were still seated so firmly in the saddle everywhere that they were simply not bothered.

When the issue of the natural sciences had been dealt with, we were able to approach our other task. This was the debate over the Gospels, over Genesis, the Christian tradition as a whole, Christianity as such.

The thread had already been laid out in Christianity As Mystical Fact, which appeared in 1902. But the elaboration, as it were, of an anthroposophical understanding of Christianity was essentially the task of the second stage up to approximately 1914. As a consequence I gave lecture cycles on the various parts of the Christian tradition in Hamburg, Kassel, Berlin, Basle, Berne, Munich and Stuttgart.

That was also when, for instance, The Spiritual Guidance of the Individual and Humanity¹² was drawn up. It was, then, essentially the time in which the Christian side of anthroposophy was worked out, following on from the historical tradition of Christianity.

This period also included what I might call the first expansion of anthroposophy into the artistic field, with performances of the mystery dramas in Munich.¹³ That, too, took place against the background of never wanting to achieve more than circumstances allowed.

Also during this time those events occurred which led to the exclusion of anthroposophy from the Theosophical Society, a fact which was actually of no great significance to the former, given that it had followed its own path from the beginning. Those who wanted to come along were free to do so. From the outset anthroposophy did not concern itself with the spiritual content which came from the Theososphical Society. But practical co-existence became increasingly difficult as well.

At the beginning there was a definite hope that circumstances, some of which at least I have described, would allow the real theosophical movement which had come together in the Theosophical Society to become truly anthroposophical. The circumstances which made such a hope appear justified included the serious disappointment about the particular methods of investigation pursued by the Theosophical Society, specifically among those people who possessed a higher level of discrimination. And I have to say that when I arrived in London on both the first and second times, I experienced how its leaders were basically people who adopted a very sceptical attitude towards one another, who felt themselves to be on very insecure ground which, however, they did not want to leave because they did not know where to look for security.

There were many disappointed people who had great reservations, particularly among the leaders of the Theosophical Society. The peculiar change which took place in Annie Besant from, say, 1900 to 1907 is an important factor in the subsequent course of events in the Theosophical Society. She possessed a certain tolerance to begin with. I believe she never really understood the phenomenon of anthroposophy, but she accepted it and at the beginning even defended against the rigid dogmatists its right to exist. That is how we must describe it, for that is how it was.

But there is something I must say which I would also urge members of the Anthroposophical Society to consider very seriously. Certain personal aspirations, purely personal sympathies and antipathies, are absolutely irreconcilable with a spiritual society of this kind. Someone, for instance, begins to idolize someone else, for whatever underlying reasons within himself. He will not acknowledge whatever compulsion it is, and sometimes it can be an intellectual compulsion that drives him to do it. But he begins to weave an artificial astral aura around the individual whom he wants to idolize. The latter then becomes advanced. If he wants to make an especially telling remark he will say: “Oh, that individual is aware of three or four previous lives on earth and even spoke to me about my earlier earth lives. That person knows a lot!” And this is precisely what leads to a spiritual interpretation of something which is human, all too human, to use an expression of Nietzsche's.

It would be sufficient to say: “I will not deny that I like him.” Then everything would be fine, even in esoteric societies. Max Seiling,¹⁴ for instance, was very amusing in certain ways, particularly when he played the piano in that effervescent way of his, and he was amusing to have tea with and so on. All would have been well if people had admitted: We like that. That would have been more sensible than idolizing him in the way the Munich group did.

You see, all these things are in direct contradiction to the conditions under which such a society should exist. And the prime example of someone who fell prey to this kind of thing is Annie Besant. For example—and I prefer to speak about these things by quoting facts—a name cropped up on one occasion. I did not bother much with the literature produced by the Theosophical Society, and so I became acquainted with Bhagavan Das's¹⁵ name only when a thick typewritten manuscript arrived one day. The manuscript was arranged in two columns, with text on the left side and a blank on the right. A covering letter from Bhagavan Das said that he wanted to discuss with various people the subject matter which he intended to reveal to the world through the manuscript.

Well, the anthroposophical movement was already so widespread at that time that I did not manage to read the manuscript immediately. That Bhagavan Das was a very esoteric man, a person who drew his inspiration from profound spiritual sources—that was approximately the view which people associated with Annie Besant—spread about him. His name was on everyone's lips. So I decided to have a look at the thing. I was presented with a horrendously amateurish confusion of Fichtean philosophy, Hegelian philosophy, and Schopenhauer's philosophy; everything mixed up together without the slightest understanding. And the whole thing was held together by “self” and “not self”, like an endlessly repeated tune. The idolization of Bhagavan Das was based purely on personal considerations. Such things demonstrate how the personal element is introduced into impulses which should be objective. The first step on the slippery slope was taken with the appearance of this phenomenon, which became increasingly strong from about 1905 onwards. Everything else was basically a consequence of that.

Spiritual societies must avoid such courses of action, particularly by their leaders—otherwise they will, of necessity, slide down the slippery slope. That is, indeed, what happened. Then there was the absurd tale connected with Olcott's death,¹⁶ referred to as the Masters' nomination, which really represented the beginning of the end for the Theosophical Society. That could still be smoothed over, at least, by saying that such foolishness was introduced into the Society by particular people, even if they were acting on the basis of certain principles. It was, however, followed by the Leadbeater affair,¹⁷ the details of which I do not want to discuss just now. And then came the discovery of the boy who was to be brought up as Christ, or to become Christ, and so on. And when people who did not want to be involved in these absurd matters refused to accept them, they were simply expelled.

Well, the anthroposophical movement followed its set course throughout the whole of this business and our inner development was not affected by these events in any way. That has to be made absolutely clear. It was really a matter of supreme indifference—just as I was not especially surprised to hear recently that Leadbeater has become an Old Catholic bishop in his old age. There was no sense of direction and everything was going topsy turvy.

Indeed, there is no particular need to change one's personal relationship with these people. Two years ago a gentleman who had delivered a lecture at the Munich congress in 1907¹⁸ approached me with the old cordial spirit. He still looked the same, but in the meantime he had become an Old Catholic archbishop. He was not wearing the garments, but that is what he was!

It must not be forgotten that the stream which we have been describing also contained precisely those souls who were searching most intensively for a link between the human soul and the spiritual world. We are not being honest about the course of modern culture if these contrasts are not made absolutely clear. That is why I had to make these additional points today before going on to the actual conditions which underlie the existence of the Anthroposophical Society.

• 1. The appearance of Occult Science: An Outline (Translated by G. and M. Adams. Rudolf Steiner Press, London, 1969) had been announced in 1905 as a continuation of Theosophy which was published in 1904. For technical reasons, however, it did not appear until 1910 (the preface is signed: written in December 1909). “Only the absolute necessity of uninterrupted lecturing activity by the author has delayed the publication of this book for so long. Now it is to be made available to the public whatever the cost.” (Rudolf Steiner in the journal Luzifer-Gnosis, No. 33 from 1907.)
• 2. See Lecture Two, Note 8
• 3. William Quan Judge, 1851–1896. One of the co-founders of the Theosophical Society. In 1895 he split away from the Adyar-based society and became the leader of a secessionist movement in America.
• 4. August Weismann, 1834–1914. Medical doctor, zoologist. Disputed the heredity of acquired changes.
• 5. Dr. Wilhelm Hübbe-Schleiden, 1846–1916. From 1886–1896 edited the occultist monthly journal Sphinx. See Rudolf Steiner, The Course of My Life, Chapter XXXII, and Briefe II.
• 6. Charles Webster Leadbeater, 1847–1934. Prominent member of the Theosophical Society in England. See in this context the book Occult Chemistry by Annie Besant and C. W. Leadbeater, a series of clairvoyant observations about the chemical elements and atomic theory.
• 7. Dr. Eugen Kolisko, 1893–1939. Medical doctor and teacher at the Stuttgart Waldorf School.
• 8. The scientific research institute was one of the sections of Kommende Tag, a company set up for the promotion of economic and spiritual values, Stuttgart 1920–1925. The biology department (L. Kolisko) was transferred to the Goetheanum by Rudolf Steiner in 1924.
• 9. Dr. Ernst Blümel, 1884–1952. Mathematician and teacher, first in further education at the Goetheanum and subsequently (1927–1938) at the Waldorf School in Stuttgart.
• 10. The journal appeared from June 1903 to 1908. cf. The Course of My Life, Chapter XXXII. Rudolf Steiner's essays in Luzifer-Gnosis have been reprinted in the volume of the same name in GA 34.
• 11. See Aus dem Leben van Marie Steiner-von Sievers, pp.40ff.
• 12. Rudolf Steiner. The Spiritual Guidance of the Individual and Humanity (1911). Translated by H. B. Monges. Anthroposophic Press, Hudson, New York, 1992.
• 13. Rudolf Steiner, The Four Mystery Plays. Translated by A. Bittleston. Rudolf Steiner Press, London, 1982.
• 14. Max Seiling: member of the Anthroposophical Society for a time. He turned against it when a book which he wanted to have published by Philosophisch-Anthroposophischer Verlag had to be turned down. See Rudolf Steiner's lecture of 11 May 1917 in GA 174b (not translated).
• 15. Bhagavan Das: prominent member of the Theosophical Society. Resigned his office as General Secretary of the Indian Section in 1912 because he disapproved of the goings-on within the Order of the Star of the East in connection with the Krishnamurti-Alcyone cult, and of the behaviour of the President of the Theosophical Society who approved of and encouraged these events unworthy of the society.
• 16. Henry Steel Olcott, 1832–1907. Founder President of the Theosophical Society. See Rudolf Steiner, “Henry Steel Olcott (Obituary)”, in the journal Luzifer-Gnosis, No. 33 (March/April 1907). Olcott had proposed Annie Besant as his successor. Some of the circumstances surrounding this nomination had become public, which is why Rudolf Steiner wrote in this issue:
  
  “… The deceased President did not merely state that he nominated Mrs Besant as his successor, but he informed the General Secretaries through a variety of circulars—which then found their way into the theosophical press and, unfortunately, beyond—that the elevated individuals who are described as the Masters, and those in particular who are especially connected with theosophical affairs, had appeared at his death bed and had instructed him to nominate Mrs Besant as his successor.
  … Now this addition to Mrs Besant's nomination could simply have been ignored. For whether or not one believes that the Masters genuinely appeared in this case, the source of Olcott's advice has no relevance to the members casting their vote in accordance with the Statutes. Whether he was advised by the Masters or by some ordinary mortals is his business alone. The voters have to adhere to the Statutes and solely ask themselves whether or not they consider Mrs Besant to be the right choice. An immediate difficulty arose, however, through the fact that Mrs Besant announced that she had been called upon by her Master to accept her nomination and that for this reason she would assume the burden; indeed, that she considered the order from the Masters as decisive in determining the outcome of the election. Objectively that is a disaster … There would have been no reason to write these lines if the affair were not being discussed so much outside Germany. But under the circumstances the readers of this journal can rightly demand that it should not keep silent about a matter which is the subject of so much debate elsewhere.”
• 17. C. W. Leadbeater (see Lecture 6, Note 6) left the Theosophical Society in 1906 after the emergence of serious differences between him and the Society. But in 1909 he was re-admitted by Annie Besant, despite her earlier condemnation of his methods.
• 18. The person concerned is James Ingall Wedgwood. See Emily Lutyens, Candles in the Sun. London 1957.

Dr. Steiner answers questions from the officials of the Societies on the various Paragraphs of the Statutes.

To a question on Paragraph 11 regarding the admission of individual members who do not wish to join a particular group he answers as follows:

This Paragraph would only come into consideration if it proves entirely impossible to bring these efforts to a satisfactory conclusion. Only then should individuals or groups apply for membership direct to Dornach. Efforts must first be made to join the relevant national Society and only if this fails for some reason would we admit an individual or a group here in Dornach.

Herr Hohlenburg asks what is meant by: ‘Only for those for whom it is quite impossible to find entry to a group.’

Dr. Steiner: The Statutes are phrased in such a way as to include everything in as few words as possible. Perhaps it is necessary to clarify the sentence ‘Only those for whom it is quite impossible to find entry to a group should apply directly to Dornach for membership’ by adding that this refers not only to the group not agreeing to admit the individual but also to the individual finding it inwardly impossible to join the group. Thus for instance a person who is convinced that he cannot thrive in a particular group can, if all efforts fail, become a member in Dornach. Here in Dornach we for our part shall of course endeavour to convince the individual to join a group. When I was writing down this sentence I was thinking not only of external obstacles coming from the group but also of obstacles arising out of an individual's convictions.

Herr Hohlenburg: Are all those who are already members to have their membership confirmed?

Dr. Steiner: This will be desirable if only for the reason that we are having proper membership cards printed to replace the old, not very beautiful membership cards, and every member will enjoy seeing a membership card which is somewhat larger and which commands a certain degree of respect. Therefore it would be good to send a circular to the individual groups letting them know that all the old membership cards can be exchanged for new ones.

Mademoiselle Sauerwein asks: If a number of members in a particular country want to form themselves into a group and elect a new officer who is not an officer of the national group, would they be allowed to do this or not?

Dr. Steiner: Of course nobody can be denied this right. All that can be done is to make efforts to prevent it, but nobody can be denied the right to form groups which would, of course, not be the national group but simply a private group. It would not be possible for it to be the national group because, of course, the national group already exists, does it not? But this cannot be included in the Statutes. The Statutes must contain the principles. But it can be included in By-Laws which we shall still have to elaborate.

Herr Donner wants to ask whether a group which does not want to be affiliated with the national Society in its own country can instead be affiliated with the Society of another country.

Dr. Steiner: In principle this would not be impossible. To exclude this on principle would be too great an infringement of the freedom of the individual members. We cannot exclude this possibility, but we would have to make efforts not to let such a situation arise in which a group in one country joins the Society of another country; if such a group were not to join the national Society, then it would join directly in Dornach. This could come about as a matter of usage. It cannot be excluded on principle. For instance it would not be possible to prevent a group coming into being in France and registering with the German Society. We would not be able to prevent this.

Madame Muntz: Should we make efforts to bring it about that individuals who do not live in Belgium and yet do belong to our group apply for membership in their own countries, or not?

Dr. Steiner: In cases where they have done this from sympathy, this is all right. Cases where those in question have sympathies in a particular direction might as well be allowed to remain. But for the future it would be preferable for this not to happen. We need not take up a pedantic position; there is no need for this, but we do need something that can give us a certain degree of support.

Dr. Unger: There are quite a number of people in South America who are members of the German Society and who have expressed their wish to remain so. Arrangements are, however, being made for a Society to be formed among the different groups. I have been asked to bring to this meeting the need expressed there that a South American Society should be planned. For the moment they wish to remain attached to Germany, and the method of transferring these groups will gradually come about.

Dr. Steiner: The configuration of the Society being what it is, it is of course the case that from the administrative point of view everything will have to be taken into consideration not in a bureaucratic way but in a way that is necessitated by human factors. Take Paragraph 14 of the Statutes: ‘The organ of the Society is Das Goetheanum, which for this purpose is provided with a Supplement containing the official communications of the Society. This enlarged edition of Das Goetheanum will be supplied to members of the Anthroposophical Society only.’ Would you not agree that this implies that if the South American groups belong to Germany they would be supplied with Das Goetheanum not by us here but that it would be sent to them from Germany? Similar situations are still likely to arise. Here we are of the opinion that things should not remain confined to paper. The things that are written in the Members' Supplement are things which every member wants to know as quickly as possible. So I think it would be a good thing for groups which exist outside their national groups to join directly in Dornach so that anthroposophical life can flourish as much as possible without having to make all kinds of detours.

Dr Wachsmuth informs the meeting that the South American Society had written a letter just before Christmas, having heard about the new decisions. He reads a statement from them.

Herr Leinhas: I have had a similar letter. It arrived only a few days ago, and I have been asked for the moment to represent the national Society, which is to have its seat in Rio.

Dr. Zeymans Van Emmichoven:In point 5 mention is made of the three Classes of the School of Spiritual Science in Dornach: ‘Members of the Society will be admitted to the School on their own application.’ I should like to ask whether the national Societies have anything to do with this or whether this is a purely personal matter for each member.

Dr. Steiner: What is contained in point 5 will be a matter for the Goetheanum in Dornach as far as the overall leadership is concerned. Everything that belongs to the configuration of this School of Spiritual Science will have to be taken in hand by the leadership at the Goetheanum in Dornach. Among the things that will have to be dealt with will of course be the matter of making contact not only with officers but also with members who are doing certain work in one place or another. Members of the First, Second and Third Class of the Goetheanum will be everywhere, having been nominated by the Goetheanum. How they are chosen will depend entirely on the individual case, for it will be essentially an esoteric matter, but an esoteric matter which is handled in a modern way. Once things have got going it will become apparent that there will be members in the different national Societies who belong to one of the Classes of the Goetheanum. For these the Goetheanum will nominate their own leadership in the different countries, so that matters are territorially delimited and do not expand boundlessly. This matter, then, will be handled essentially by the leadership at the Goetheanum; I shall describe it in more detail as our Conference progresses. Point 7 also refers to this matter: ‘The organizing of the School of Spiritual Science is, to begin with, the responsibility of Rudolf Steiner, who will appoint his collaborators and his possible successor.’

To begin with, I intend to set up, in addition to the three Classes, Sections which will be in charge of the different fields of research. For example there will be a Section for General Anthroposophy, another for what used to be called in France Belles-Lettres, a Section for Natural Science, for Education, for Art, for the various realms of art. Each Section will have a Section Leader and together these will constitute the leadership of the School of Spiritual Science. The members of the different Classes will be scattered all over the place; they will be members, for their pupilship is their own private affair. This is an independent institution which the national Societies will undertake to protect and guard as a matter of course.

Fräulein Henström: In Sweden, as far as I know, more than a third of the members have not joined a branch. In small villages this is natural, but there are a good many in Stockholm who do not wish to belong to the groups. They believe that they can work more freely if they stand by themselves and study the lectures alone. There are a good many of us who understand how important it is to stand firmly together and that it is therefore necessary for members to get to know one another personally. I think it is quite impossible if members refuse to conform to the groups and I wondered whether some encouragement could not be given from Dornach to bring about an improvement in this direction.

Dr. Steiner: We shall make every effort towards encouraging members in the different countries to join the main groups, which in most countries will mean the national Society. But we do not want to exert any pressure by means of some statute or other. We do not want to exert any pressure from Dornach in any direction, but we shall make every effort to help people understand, so that for instance in Sweden any members who live in an isolated situation, even if they want to remain isolated as far as their way of living is concerned, can nevertheless join the Stockholm Society or the national Society.

Fräulein Henström: I too would not want any compulsion to be brought to bear.

Dr. Steiner: We shall certainly endeavour to bring about an understanding of this matter.

Mr Monges enquires about the point of view and the manner in which the General Secretaries in the different countries are selected and whether this shall be a democratic procedure or what else?

Dr. Steiner: This is a further matter which I would not wish to lay down in any way by means of statutes for the various groups all over the world. I can well imagine, for example, that there are national Societies who will most certainly want to employ democratic procedures. I can also imagine that there will be others who will want to be thoroughly aristocratic in their approach, agreeing with the wishes of a particular individual upon whom they confer the task of nominating the other officers and so on. Thus I rather assume that the, shall I say, somewhat aristocratic method I have adopted with regard to appointing the Vorstand may well be imitated. In some quarters, however, this method may be regarded as highly undesirable, and in those quarters the democratic method could be used. An election is naturally all the easier the smaller the group in question, whereas I consider elections in a gathering as large as ours today to be totally meaningless. It is impossible to nominate and elect anybody in a situation where there is to start with so little mutual recognition. So in this gathering such a procedure would not be possible. But I can well imagine that a democratic institution of some kind might come into being in one place or another. In a general way, however, I do not find this question to be of paramount importance as a matter of principle. If on the one hand the selection is made by means of an election that is thoughtless, then the Societies will not flourish. They will come to nought if someone is simply nominated so that the election may be settled in a hurry, as is the case with political elections. Nothing can come of this in our circles.

The matter will be different, though, if consideration is given to those who have already earned some merit, or done certain work, or if their way of working has been observed. In such cases a majority is likely to come about quite naturally. But if the antecedents are all set for some kind of election, I do not believe that amongst us, since our main concern is for the work, some kind of democracy could prevent this work. In other words, in practice there will be little difference between democracy and aristocracy. We might try this out over the next few days. We could ask whether the Vorstand I have suggested would be elected or not. This would give us a democratic basis, for I do consider their election to be a necessary condition, otherwise I myself would also have to withdraw! Freedom must reign, of course. But, dear friends, I too must have freedom. I cannot allow anything to be imposed on me. Anyone who is expected to carry out a function must have freedom above all else. Is this not so? Thus I rather assume that what I have just said will be born out everywhere, for the most part. Whether democracy or aristocracy is the method, the Society will not look much different.

Mr. Monges: We in America are very political.

Dr. Steiner: If Dornach is permitted to have its say to a certain extent, then everything will work out satisfactorily.

Fräulein Schwarz: It was said some time ago that members of the old Theosophical Society cannot become anthroposophists, that is they cannot belong to the Anthroposophical Society. Will this continue to be the case or not?

Dr. Steiner: Who said that? I certainly never said such a thing! Never. The decision as to whether a person shall be admitted or not has to be taken individually in each case. I have always expressly stated that it matters not a jot whether someone belongs to a carpenters' club, or an insurance company, or a scientific research society, or the Theosophical Society. The only thing that matters is the human being. I have never said that the stamp of membership of any other society presents an obstacle for joining the Anthroposophical Society. Of course there might be individual cases in which membership of the Theosophical Society could present an obstacle. It is naturally questionable whether Mrs Besant³⁹ or Mr Leadbeater,⁴⁰ should they apply for membership of the Anthroposophical Society, would be admitted or not. So the question might arise in individual cases. But as a matter of principle it can have no validity whatsoever; otherwise we would come down to principles which would not be in keeping with a society that is to be formed in the modern style.

The Duke of Cesaro brings up a question regarding the number of votes allotted to members. There was once some unpleasantness in a national section of the old Theosophical Society, for example; and the solution had been to break up the whole group in order to gain more votes. Such things ought no longer to be possible.

Dr. Steiner: As you say, Your Grace, it is desirable that such things should not happen. But on the other hand there are certain difficulties involved in fixing the number of members at the lower end. There you come up against the question: How many members should there be in a group? So far we have had quite a definite view on this. But problems might now arise in this connection: Should we perhaps put everything pertaining to matters of modern usage into Paragraph 3, so that everything esoteric is contained in Paragraph 3, or should we name the number of members a group ought to contain? In the latter case the minimum number would be seven, because only seven can yield a true majority. In the case of three and five there can of course be a seeming majority. But those who understand the nature of the human being know that with a majority of two to one arrived at amongst three members, or of three to two arrived at when there are five members, the one who makes the seeming majority does not count properly. Not until you can have four to three can you arrive at a possible majority, which results if on the one side you have three and on the other side one third more. This then makes a true majority possible. So the minimum number would be seven members. I would not object to including this number here, but I did consider that these Statutes are more likely to be respected in the eyes of the world if we refrain from including things like the number seven. I therefore think, Your Grace, that your suggestion would be better included in the By-Laws, which would mean that in practice this is how the matter would be handled. This is probably the solution for us in this case.

Professor Dr.Maurer: I want to ask whether it might not be possible to curtail the other Paragraph as well, as regards the Classes. Perhaps it would be preferable not to launch this aspect on the public. I rather fear that all kinds of historical and other parallels might once again be dredged up and possibly used against us.

Dr. Steiner: Take Paragraph 5 as it is formulated here and ask yourself whether it could not be applied to any university just as it stands. As it stands it is applicable to any university and cannot possibly cause any offence. Everything else will be a matter of how we handle it.

Professor Dr.Maurer: Yes, I agree it is applicable, but there are other points which are open to attack. Taken in its usual sense it could remind people of something which did exist historically.

Dr. Steiner: Historically it was never the custom to speak of ‘Classes’, only of ‘Degrees’.

Professor Dr.Maurer: Nevertheless people will immediately jump to the wrong conclusion and I merely wanted to prevent the incidence of such mistaken and warped conclusions.

Dr. Steiner: It would be the greatest possible mistake to include anything in our Statutes arising from any conclusion. We cannot avoid having misunderstandings attached to what we do. But anyone interpreting Paragraph 5 wrongly must really want to do so. We cannot prevent this. Paragraph 5 is phrased in such a way that absolutely nobody can say anything other than that in this School of Spiritual Science in Dornach there are three Classes, just as if in Freiburg there were a university with four medical classes, a four-year course. The description in Paragraph 5 accords exactly with the pattern of universities in the outside world, so there is not the smallest opportunity for objection that could be seized with any even seeming justification. The same applies to the way the affairs of the School are conducted. You know that at a university it is the leadership who decide whether a student is ready to move on to the next year or not.

Professor Dr.Maurer: This has not always been the case. In the faculties of philosophy it was never a matter of moving up to the next class; this did not happen at Strasbourg under Professor Windelband⁴¹ or anywhere else for that matter. You simply presented yourself and were accepted. Naturally what you gained from the lectures depended on your abilities. Nowadays I agree that in the interest of the students a certain amount of grading has been introduced. I only wanted to draw attention to this matter because our opponents will immediately point it out.

Dr. Steiner: It is certainly not the case that a medical student who has just arrived at the university will be allowed to attend the special classes on anatomical medicine. There are proper classes for this, are there not. I do not believe that he would be allowed to attend immediately.

Professor Dr.Maurer: No, of course not.

Dr. Steiner: In the case of the philosophical faculty there are good reasons which have come about historically. A justification can certainly always be found for these things. Originally there was no such thing as a philosophical faculty at the universities. The three faculties were those of theology, medicine, and jurisprudence. These three faculties were always graded into classes. The philosophical department was at the basis of all three. First you attended the faculty of philosophy. This is where you started, whether you wanted to study theology, jurisprudence or medicine. Then you moved up from this faculty of philosophy into the different faculties. From then on you moved up in classes. I do not believe that it is any different in other countries. So if you take our Constitution to be the general anthroposophical and philosophical faculty, then advancing on from there you have the three Classes. The set-up is absolutely identical with that of a university. I have taken the utmost care to ensure that it shall be absolutely indisputable. In universities, though, the faculty of philosophy gradually developed into a faculty in its own right. More and more lectures were given till the whole situation degenerated into anarchy and chaos. No one entering the faculty of philosophy has any idea what lectures he ought to attend, indeed he can go to lectures he cannot understand at all. This is a chaotic situation that has arisen at the universities.

What we have written down here corresponds exactly to what was customary at universities, in Vienna for instance, up to the year 1848. This is entirely indisputable. And I believe that this is the case to this day in Paris; and also in Italy there are universities which still conduct matters in this way. At German universities there are certain things which have developed chaotically. But what we have written down here is absolutely indisputable. If we were to do these things without including them in our Statutes—and do them we must, otherwise Paragraph 8 about the lecture cycles would also have to be modified—we would immediately find ourselves in another situation which would not serve our purposes at all. This Paragraph must stand as it is and so must Paragraph 8. Of course we can consider requests for changes regarding details, but a complete suppression of the School with its three Classes would not be acceptable.

Professor Dr. Maurer: I quite see that it will be necessary to move up Class by Class. I was merely concerned that it might give our opponents something on which they could seize.

Dr. Steiner: The only change that could be considered would be to say: ‘The Anthroposophical Society sees the School of Spiritual Science in Dornach as the centre for its activity. The School will be composed of three classes after the manner of other universities.’ If you wish to include this we can certainly do so.

Baroness de Renzis: Should the report on our work in Italy and the direction it is taking be given now, or are we to discuss the Statutes only?

Dr. Steiner: I would request you to speak tomorrow about the work in Italy.

Baroness de Renzis wishes to ask a question about the direction the work is taking in general.

Dr. Steiner: I would ask you to give your report tomorrow.

Baroness de Renzis: Ought we to announce the anthroposophical character of any undertaking or initiative arising out of our Movement from the start, thus provoking the danger of having it rejected, or should we endeavour to disseminate an anthroposophical understanding within public opinion without throwing down the challenge of it being judged and rejected? It is necessary to decide this so that we know what is to determine the attitude of our groups in the future.

Dr. Steiner: It is of course not the word ‘Anthroposophy’ itself that matters but there are other things that do matter. Take the following example. Medicine is a case in point. It is today not possible to take medicine beyond the point it has now reached, which is not far enough, without starting to speak of the etheric body of the human being, and also of the astral body and the ego-organization, for it is here that the real causes of illness lie. So it is necessary simply to place before the world the substance of what Anthroposophy contains. We have gained some extremely instructive experience in this matter. Frau Dr Wegman has run courses with me in London, Vienna and The Hague.⁴² One of these took place at Dr Zeylmans' Dutch institute. I have given lectures to doctors in which I spoke quite directly of anthroposophical matters. At appropriate moments I have spoken about the astral body, the etheric body and so on. In doing this it is barely relevant what terminology is used. In some instances one feels it is more appropriate to name the etheric body and in others it is better to use different words in describing it. For example when you want to speak of the etheric body you can say: The effects on the physical substances which come not from the centre of the earth but from the periphery of the universe. Only those who have not fully come to grips with their subject matter are tied to a specific terminology, is this not so? We have found that when we speak in this way people can make something of what we say. They know that this is something new making its appearance in the world. If you avoid speaking clearly, all people can say is: Well, here is another opinion about the effect of this or that medicament on the human organism; it has been held before and was then replaced by another; now here is yet another opinion. They cannot distinguish whether a clinical report or a clinical dissertation comes from some external source or from us. But if we want to bring what can really lead us to the centre of the illness, then we cannot avoid speaking about the etheric body and so on, even if we use different terminology. Then people know what is what. We go furthest when we act in this way. It is not in the first instance a matter of the actual name of Anthroposophy; what matters is nowhere to shy away from whatever is necessary to explain something properly. If you try to dress Anthroposophy up in ‘this is what the parson says too’, then people have no idea what you are getting at. I myself once proved this point. I gave a course of twelve lectures in Vienna⁴³ ranging over every aspect of Anthroposophy including its practical applications. If you read this cycle today you will not find a single mention of the word Anthroposophy. It is perfectly possible for there to be occasions when it is inappropriate to use the word Anthroposophy. This is for sure. For me what matters is the actual subject itself, the spirit of the subject. You have no idea how many well-meaning people have come to me saying: People dread the expression ‘etheric body’; could we not say ‘the functional element in the human organism’? But this is a meaningless expression. To speak of the etheric body you have to distinguish between the physical body in which all the forces are related to gravity, the mechanical pull of gravity, and the etheric body in which all the forces can be related to the periphery, to all that is ever in weaving movement. This is the difference. The ‘functional element in the human organism’ refers to the function and not to this fundamental contrast. So these well-meant suggestions that come, often from outsiders, cannot be taken into account.

Baroness de Renzis: Is it sufficient to speak of the ‘essence’ of things?

Dr. Steiner: It is not necessary to throw the actual word ‘Anthroposophy’ at people, but if asked whether you are an anthroposophist it would be quite a good thing if you did not say: No!

We shall continue this meeting tomorrow. We must try to make sure that we have enough breathing space during this Conference.

• 39. Annie Besant, 1847–1933. From 1907, following the death of the Founder-President H. S. Olcott, President of the Theosophical Society.
• 40. Charles Webster Leadbeater, 1847–1934. Influential colleague of Annie Besant. Inspired the founding of the order ‘Star of the East’.
• 41. Wilhelm Windelband, 1848–1915. Philosopher, 1882–1903 professor in Strasbourg.
• 42. See lectures in London on 2 and 3 September, Vienna on 2 October and The Hague on 15 and 16 November 1923 in Rudolf Steiner Spiritual Science and the Art of Healing, Anthroposophical Publishing Company, London 1950. GA 319.
• 43. See Rudolf Steiner The Tension between East and West, Hodder & Stoughton, London 1963. GA 83.

We have heard how there grew out of the Mysteries that which unites the consciousness of men with the world in such manner that this union comes to expression in the festivals of the year. We have understood above all how the Easter Festival grew out of the principle of initiation. From all this you will have realised how great a part the Mysteries have played in the whole evolution of mankind. All the spiritual life that passed through the world and evolved through mankind proceeded in ancient times from the Mysteries. The Mysteries were very powerful with respect to the whole guidance of the spiritual life.

Now mankind was predestined from the outset to evolve to spiritual freedom. The development of freedom necessarily involved a decline in the ancient Mysteries. For a period of time human beings had to stand less in connection with such a mighty guidance as proceeded from the Mysteries; they had to be left more to their own resources. Certainly we cannot say that the time has already come today when men have won true inner freedom and are ripe to pass on to what should follow the age of freedom. Decidedly we cannot say so. Nevertheless a sufficient number of human beings have passed through incarnations in which the power of the Mysteries was felt less than in former ages. And though the fruits of these incarnations are not yet ripe today, though the harvest is not yet, nevertheless it is there within the human being, it is latent in their souls.

If, as we have often said, a more spiritual age is now approaching once again, human beings will indeed evolve in time what in their dim consciousness they have not yet evolved today. But this above all will be necessary, that the knowledge, the vision, the conscious experience of the Spiritual that can arise from present-day Initiation shall be met out of the very freedom which men have gained with reverence and true respect. For if we do not revere, if we do not treasure it, true knowledge or indeed any spiritual life of mankind is in reality impossible. And in this sense we shall rightly use the times of the sacred festivals, we shall use them by trying to plant, however little, into our souls all this reverence for the spiritual life that has evolved in the course of human history. We shall learn to look as intimately as we can and see how the outer historical events signify facts and carry the spiritual life from one age into another.

We know in the first place that human individuals themselves return to the Earth again and again in their repeated earthly lives. Thus they carry with them experiences of former epochs into later ones. The human beings themselves are the most important factor in the progressive evolution of all that has taken place in human history. But the human beings of every age live in a particular environment. And the environment created by the Mysteries is among the most important. Thus it is a most important factor in the progress of mankind to carry from one age into another what human beings experienced in the Mysteries and what they then experience again, be it once more in sacred Mysteries working forth into mankind, or be it in some other forms of knowledge. Today it has to be in other forms of knowledge. For the real life of the Mysteries has more or less receded so far as the outer world is concerned and has not yet emerged again.

It is indeed the case that when that spiritual impulse which has gone forth from here, from the Goetheanum through the Christmas Foundation meeting, really finds its way into the life of the Anthroposophical Society—(the Society leading on to the Classes partially begun)—this Anthroposophical Society will provide the foundation for the Mysteries of the future. The future life of the Mysteries must consciously and deliberately be planted by this Anthroposophical Society. For this Anthroposophical Society has ever before it an event which can be turned to good account in future evolution even as a similar event was turned to good account once upon a time, namely, the burning of the Temple of Ephesus. Then and now, a great and deep wrong was done. Yet on the different planes of life these things appear in different ways and it lies in the freedom of mankind to turn to good account that which on one plane is a dreadful wrong, for it is just through these terrible events that a real progress of mankind can be achieved.

Now to enter into these things with sympathetic understanding we must grasp them, as I already said, as intimately as possible. How did the spiritual life of the world live in the Mysteries? I showed yesterday how the fixing of the yearly Easter Festival proceeds from the constellations of the Sun and Moon considered in a spiritual sense. I showed how the other planets are seen from the standpoint of the Moon. According to what is there experienced in beholding the other planets, man as he descends from his pre-earthly life into his earthly life is guided and instructed in the forming of his light-ether body.

We want to gain a true and vivid conception of how this light-ether body is created through the Moon forces, through the observation if I may put it so, in the spiritual Moon observatory. We want to understand how these ethereal forces are transmitted to the human being. To this end we may either observe it, as we have tried to do, out of the Cosmos directly, where these things are inscribed, where they exist as a real fact; but it is also important to let our hearts and minds be impressed by the part which human beings took in such a truth as this in different ages.

Never did human hearts and minds partake so intimately in this descent from the pre-earthly into the earthly life with regard to the final stage, the investment of man with his etheric body, never did they partake in this fact so intimately and deeply as in the Mysteries of Ephesus.

In the Mysteries of Ephesus the whole service that was devoted to her who is exoterically known as Diana or Artemis, the Goddess of Ephesus, was calculated to enable man to experience and enter into the spiritual life and movement within the ether of the Cosmos. We may say indeed that when the adherents of the Mystery of Ephesus approached the image of the Goddess they had a feeling, a sensation which grew into a spiritual listening and may be thus expressed. It was as though the Goddess spoke: “I delight in all things fruitful and creative in the far cosmic ether.”

A deep impression was made on those present when the Temple Goddess thus expressed her joy in all things growing, springing, sprouting in the far-spread ether of the world. And there was a feeling deeply akin to the springing and sprouting of life, a feeling that was wafted through the spiritual atmosphere of the Ephesian Sanctuary as a magic breath. For the Mystery was so arranged and instituted that we may truly say, nowhere have men lived with the growth of the plant life, with the springing and sprouting of the Earth into the plants, as they did in Ephesus.

And as a consequence a certain instruction could be given with great clearness in these Ephesian Mysteries, an instruction, if I may call it so, whose aim was to bring specially near to the heart and mind of those who belonged to Ephesus the secret of the Moon of which I told you yesterday.

This was something that every one of them had as his own experience. He knew what it was to feel himself as a form of light, for this process of receiving one's form of light through the Moon was made alive and vivid to the Ephesian pupils and Initiates. And there was a certain institution in the Ephesian Mysteries such that he who could let it work upon him in the sanctuary was altogether transplanted into this creating of one's being out of the Sunlight that wove around the Moon. And then there sounded forth towards him as though it were sounding from the Sun: J O A. (I O A).

He knew that this J O A calls to life his “I” and his astral body. J O—“I”, astral body; and then the approach of the light-ether body in the A—J O A. Now, as the J O A vibrated within him he felt himself as Ego, as astral body, as ether body.

And then it was as though there sounded forth and upward from the Earth—for man himself was transported into cosmic regions—it was as though there sounded to him upward from the Earth that which should permeate the J O A: eh-v. These were the forces of the Earth rising upwards in the eh-v.—J eh O v A.

And now in the JehOvA he felt the entire human being. He felt a premonition of the physical body which he would only have on Earth in the consonants belonging to the vowels; while the latter indicate, in the J O A, the “I”, the astral body, the etheric body. It was through this living penetration into the JehOvA that the Ephesian disciple could experience the final steps of man in his descent out of the spiritual world.

And in this feeling of the J O A one felt oneself as the very sound J O A within the light. Then one was truly MAN - resounding “I”, resounding astral body, clothed in the light-radiant etheric body. One was sound within the light. And so indeed one is as cosmic man, and as such one is able to perceive what is seen in the surrounding Cosmos just as here on Earth one is able to perceive through the eye what takes place within the physical horizon of the Earth.

And when the Ephesian pupil bore within him this J O A, when he bore this within him, he really felt himself as though transported into the Moon sphere; he partook in all that could be observed from the standpoint of the Moon.

At this stage the human being was still human being in the widest sense. Only at his descent to Earth did he become man and woman. But the disciple felt himself transported up into this region of the pre-earthly life which we pass through as we approach the Earth once more. It was in Ephesus that it became most intimately possible thus to arise into the Moon sphere, and then the disciples bore in their hearts and souls what they had witnessed and experienced, and it resounded in them somewhat as follows: [e.Ed: The original German is printed at the end of this lecture.]

 Offspring of all the Worlds! Thou Form of Light, Firm framéd by the Sun, with Luna's might, Endow'd with sounding Mars' life-stirring song, And swift-wing'd Mercury's motion in thy limbs, Illum'd with royal Jupiter's all-wisdom And grace-bestowing Venus' loveliness—That ghostly Saturn's ancient memoried devoutness Unto the world of Space and Time thee hallow! 

Every Ephesian was permeated by this experience which he felt among the greatest things that pulsated through his human being.

 Offspring of all the Worlds! Thou Form of Light, Firm framéd by the Sun, with Luna's might, Endow'd with sounding Mars' life-stirring song, And swift-wing'd Mercury's motion in thy limbs. Illum'd with royal Jupiter's all-wisdom And grace-bestowing Venus' loveliness—That ghostly Saturn's ancient memoried devoutness Unto the world of Space and Time thee hallow! 

It was indeed an experience in which the adherent of the Ephesian Mysteries felt himself as man fully and intensely, when there resounded in his ears that which lies hidden in these verses. For he felt: Now it has dawned upon me how I am connected with the planetary system in the forces of my etheric body. Pregnantly he brought this to expression, for these words are addressed to the etheric body by the great universe:

 Offspring of all the Worlds! Thou Form of Light, Firm framéd by the Sun, with Luna's might. 

Here man is feeling himself within the power of the Moonlight.

 Endow'd with sounding Mars' life-stirring song. 

The sound which has an active, a creative, quality sounded forth to him from Mars. And then came that which fills the limbs of man with strength so that he becomes a mobile being:

 And swift-wing'd Mercury's motion in thy limbs. 

And from Jupiter the light pours forth:

 Illum'd with royal Jupiter's all-wisdom, 

And from Venus:

 And grace-bestowing Venus' loveliness—

So at length Saturn may gather it all up, rounding man off both inwardly and outwardly, preparing him to descend to the Earth and clothe himself in a physical body that he may live on, on Earth, as this being who in a physical garment bears the God within him:

 That ghostly Saturn's ancient memoried devoutness Unto the world of Space and Time thee hallow! 

From all that I have here described, you will see that the spiritual life in Ephesus was filled with radiant light and colour. In this life of inner light and colour there was contained all that they knew of the true dignity of man throughout the Cosmos gathered together in the Easter thought. Many of the wanderers of whom I told you yesterday, who went from Mystery to Mystery that they might experience the life of the Mysteries in its totality, many of them declared ever and again with inner light and intimate joy how the harmony of the spheres had sounded forth to them in Ephesus when they had gazed into the Cosmos from the standpoint of the Moon, how the radiant astral light of the world had shone forth for them, how they had felt it in the Sunlight quivering around the Moon, the Sunlight filled with the spirit of the astral light, even as man himself is filled with living soul. In other places they had not experienced it thus, not at any rate with such joy and gladness and inner artistic understanding.

Now all these things were bound up with the Temple Sanctuary which then went up in the flames lit by the hand of a criminal or of a madman; but as I told you during the Christmas Foundation Meeting, [e.Ed: See: World History in the Light of Anthroposophy. (Eight lectures given at Dornach, 24^th – 31^st December, 1923. Obtainable from Rudolf Steiner Press.)] two Initiates of the Ephesian Mysteries were reincarnated in Aristotle and in Alexander. And these Individualities then came near what was still to be felt of these things in their time in the Mysteries of Samothrace.

At this point a seemingly chance event is of great spiritual significance in the evolution of the world. We have already mentioned it in our circle, indeed we mentioned it many years ago. When the Temple of Ephesus was burning it was the hour of Alexander's birth. But as the Temple burned something was really taking place.

How infinitely much had happened in the course of centuries for those who had belonged to this Temple. How much of spiritual light and wisdom had passed through these Temple spaces! Now that the flames broke forth from the Temple, all that had gone on in these Temple spaces was communicated to the cosmic ether. Thus we may truly say: The continuous Easter Festival at Ephesus which had been contained within these Temple spaces has since been written—albeit in letters less clearly visible—written in the great orb of the heavens inasmuch as the heavens are ethereal.

And it is so with many things. Very much of what is now human wisdom was in ancient times enclosed in Temple walls. It escaped the Temple walls, it is written in the cosmic ether and is visible there as soon as a man rises to spiritual Imagination. Spiritual Imagination is, as it were, the interpreter of the secret of the stars. Thus we may say, into the cosmic ether are written what were once upon a time the secrets of the Temples and we can read them imaginatively.

But we can also put it differently and it still remains the same. We can also say: I rise in the starlit night and look up to the heavens and give myself up to the impression of it all. And if I have the necessary faculty, all that is contained in the forms of the constellations and in the movements of the planets is transformed as it were into a great cosmic script.—And when we read the cosmic script a real content emerges of the kind which I described yesterday for the secret of the Moon. These things are really to be read in the cosmic writing, when the stars mean more to us than something merely to be calculated mechanically, mathematically, namely when they become for us the letters of the cosmic script.

To develop this idea still further, I must now refer to the following. In the time when the ancient Mysteries were already receding, the Mysteries of the Kabiri at Samothrace still existed. At the time of Alexander, Samothrace was still there as a place of remembrance, nay more, as a place for the active cultivation of the Mysteries, while as a general rule the life of the Mysteries was in its decline.

And there came the moment when through the influence of the Mysteries of the Kabiri there arose for Alexander and Aristotle something like a memory of the old Ephesian time which both of them had lived through during a certain century. And once more the J O A resounded and once again the words resounded:

 Offspring of all the Worlds! Thou Form of Light, Firm framéd by the Sun, with Luna's might, Endow'd with sounding Mars' life-stirring song And swift-wing'd Mercury's motion in thy limbs, Illum'd with royal Jupiter's all-wisdom And grace-bestowing Venus' loveliness—That ghostly Saturn's ancient memoried devoutness Unto the world of Space and Time thee hallow! 

But in this remembrance, in this historic remembrance of an ancient time, there lay a certain power to create something new. And from that moment there went forth the power to create a new thing, yet a strange new thing which has been little noticed by mankind. You must come to understand what was the real character of the new creation that went forth from the working together of Alexander and Aristotle.

Take any great work of poetry or any other work. Take the most beautiful works written in German if you like, take a German translation of the Bhagavad Gita, take Goethe's Faust, or Iphigenia, or anything you value highly. Think of the rich and imposing content, let us say, of Goethe's Faust, and now think, my dear friends, through what is this great content transmitted to you? Let us assume that it is transmitted to you as it is to most people. At some time in your life you read Goethe's Faust. What is it that meets you on the physical plane? What is there on the paper? Nothing else but combinations of abcdef, and so forth. The whole mighty content of Faust dawns upon you simply by using combinations of the letters of the alphabet. There is nothing there on the paper that does not coincide with one or other of its twenty or so letters. From these twenty letters there is conjured on to the paper that which awakens for you, if you can read, the abundant content of Goethe's Faust. Nay more, you are free to say that this perpetual repetition of abcdef is a dreadful bore, it is the most abstract thing imaginable. And yet these most abstract things rightly combined give us the whole of Faust.

Now when the cosmic sounding in the Moon was there again and Aristotle and Alexander recognised what the fire at Ephesus had signified, when they saw how this fire had carried forth into the far ether of the world the content of the Mysteries of Ephesus, then it was that there arose in these two the inspiration to found the Cosmic Script. Only the Cosmic Script is not founded on abcdef. As our book writing is founded on letters, so is the Cosmic Writing founded on thoughts. Now there arose the letters of the Cosmic Writing.

If I now write them down before you they are as abstract as abcd:

 Quantity Quality Relation Space Time Position Activity (or Action) Passivity (or Suffering) 

There you have so many concepts. Take these concepts which Aristotle first expounded to Alexander and learn to do the same with them as you have learnt to do with abcd. Then with Quantity, Quality, Relation, Space, Time, Position, Activity, Passivity, you will learn to read in the Cosmos.

But in the age of the abstract a strange thing happened in the logic of the schools. Imagine a school in which it was the custom not to teach people to read, but if you will, to manufacture books in which they have to learn abcd etc., again and again, in all manner of combinations, ac, ab, be, and so on. And suppose they never came to the point of using these letters in order to place before the soul rich and abundant contents. That would be the very thing which the world has done with Aristotle's Logic. In the textbooks of Logic these Categories, as they call them, are introduced. We learn them off by heart but do not know what to do with them. It is just as though we learn abcd off by heart and do not know what to do with the letters. Just as the content of Faust can be resolved into something as simple as the letters abcd and so forth, so the reading in the Cosmic Script resolves itself into these simple things which we must only learn to deal with. And fundamentally speaking, all that Anthroposophy has brought forth, and all that it can ever bring forth, is experienced from out of these concepts just as what you read in Faust is experienced from out of the letters. For in these simple concepts as the Cosmic Alphabet, all secrets of the spiritual and physical worlds are contained.

This was what happened in the further evolution of the world. Formerly there had been immediate spiritual experience for which the realities of Ephesus were still most characteristic. But now another thing came to take its place. It takes its start in the time of Alexander, but it was only in later times, throughout the Middle Ages, that it evolved in its peculiar form. It is a doubly hidden, double esoteric thing. Doubly esoteric is the meaning that dwells within these eight or nine concepts (for we may also extend the number to nine). Indeed we learn ever more and more to live in these simple concepts, and to experience them in our souls as vividly as we experience the abcd when we have before us the rich and manifold spiritual content of a book.

Thus you see, what was a mighty revelation of instinctive wisdom through thousands and thousands of years flowed at length into concepts whose inner force of life and strength must once more be revealed in time to come. In very truth the time will come when man will find again what is truly resting as in a grave, namely the cosmic wisdom and the cosmic light. Man will learn to read once more in the great universe. He will experience the resurrection of what lay hidden in the intervening time of human evolution between the two spiritual epochs.

And we, my dear friends, are here to make manifest once more the things that are hidden. We are here to create an Easter Festival as an experience of all mankind. And as on other occasions we could say: “Anthroposophy is a Christmas experience”—so we may say today: “Anthroposophy itself, in all its working, is an Easter experience, an experience of resurrection bound up with the experience of the grave.” It is important just at this present Easter Gathering for us to feel, if I may so describe it, the full festivity of the Anthroposophical striving. For we must feel that today we may go to some Spiritual Being who may perhaps be near to us immediately behind the threshold, and in face of him we say: “Ah! once upon a time mankind was blessed with a divine-spiritual revelation whose light still shone most radiantly in Ephesus. But now all this lies buried. How shall I dig out of the grave what thus lies buried? For surely one would imagine that that which has been can still be found in some historic way, can be found lying in the grave.” And then the Being will answer us as in a similar case once upon a time the corresponding Being answered: “That which ye seek is no longer here; it is in your hearts, if only ye open your hearts in the true way.”

Anthroposophy is there indeed; it lies at rest in human hearts, only these human hearts must be able to open themselves in the true way. This is what we must feel. Then in full consciousness, not instinctively as in ancient time, we shall be led back again into that wisdom which lived and shed its light in the ancient Mysteries.

This is what I would fain bring to your hearts at the present Easter time. For to permeate ourselves with this sacred, solemn feeling which can arise from Anthroposophy—this too will play its part and carry us upward into the spiritual world. This too must be united with the Christmas impulse which was given to us at Dornach. For the Christmas impulse must not remain a merely intellectual, theoretic and abstract one. It must be an impulse of the heart, it must not be dry and matter-of-fact. It must be sacred, solemn, joyful, not in sentimentality but out of the reality of the thing itself. Then even as Aristotle and Alexander used the fire of Ephesus when it flamed forth anew in their hearts, when it flamed forth in the Cosmic ether and bore down to them anew the secrets that were afterwards gathered up into the very simple concepts—then even as they could use the fire of Ephesus, so will it be our part to use what has also been carried out into the ether—for we may say so in all humility—in the names of the Goetheanum; namely all that has been intended and that shall be intended with Anthroposophy. But what does this imply? at the annual festival of mourning, at the time of Christmas and New Year, the very time in which our misfortune came upon us, it was granted us to send forth a new impulse from the Goetheanum. Why was it so? Because we may rightly feel that what hitherto was more or less an earthly thing, what was achieved and won and founded as an earthly thing, was carried forth with the names into the cosmic spaces. Just because this misfortune came upon us, when we recognise and know the consequence of it, we may justly say: henceforth we understand that we can no longer merely represent an earthly concern, but we represent a concern of the wide ethereal universe wherein the Spirit lives. For the concern of the Goetheanum is indeed a concern of the far and wide ether wherein there dwells the spirit-filled wisdom of the world. It has been carried forth and we may now fill ourselves with the Goetheanum impulses as with impulses coming in towards us from the Cosmos.

Take this as we will, take it as a picture. The picture signifies the deepest truth and this deep truth is expressed in simple words when we say: Since the Christmas Foundation impulse anthroposophical work shall be permeated with an esoteric character. This esoteric character is here because what was once earthly rayed forth into the cosmic spaces through the astral light that played its part in the physical fire, and because this returns again as a living power into the impulses of the Anthroposophical Movement if only we are able to receive them.

Then, when we can do this, we shall feel as one part of all that lives in Anthroposophy the Anthroposophical Easter mood which can never, never think that the spirit dies, but that it rises again and again. And Anthroposophy must hold to this Spirit that arises ever again out of eternal foundations.

Let us receive this as an Easter thought and as an Easter feeling into our hearts. Then, my dear friends, we shall carry with us from this Gathering feelings that will give us courage and strength to work when we stand once more in our different places when this Easter visit is over.

 (Original of verse in this lecture): Weltentsprossenes Wesen, du in Lichtgestalt, Von der Sonne erkraftet in der Mondgewalt, Dich beschenket des Mars erschaffendes Klingen Und Merkurs gliedbewegendes Schwingen, Dich erleuchtet Jupiters erstrahlende Weisheit Und der Venus liebetragende Schönheit—Dass Saturn's weltenalte Geist-Innigkeit Dich dem Raumessein und Zeitenwerden weihe! 

From our last lecture you will at any rate have seen that the man of to-day, constituted as he is in his bodily nature and by education, cannot easily bring into his present incarnation such spiritual contents as are seeking to enter in from former incarnations. He cannot even do so when this present incarnation is so strange and unusual a one as that of which I spoke last Sunday. For, in effect, we are living in the age of evolution of the conscious, spiritual soul. This is an evolution of the soul which evolves most especially the intellect, i.e., that faculty of the soul which governs the whole of life to-day, no matter how often people may be crying out for heart and sentiment and feeling. It is the faculty of the soul which is most able to emancipate itself from the elementarily human qualities, from that which man bears within him as his deeper being of soul.

A certain consciousness of this emancipation of the intellectual life does indeed find its way through when people speak of the cold intellect in which men express their egoism, their lack of sympathy and compassion with the rest of mankind, nay even with those who are nearest to them in their life. Speaking of the coldness of the intellect one has in mind the following of all those paths which lead, not to the ideals of the soul, but to the planning of one's life on utilitarian principles and the like.

In all these things people give expression to a feeling of how the element of intellect and rationalism emancipates itself within the human being from what is truly human. And indeed if one can fully see the extent to which the souls of to-day are intellectualised, one will understand also in every single case how karma must carry into the souls of to-day the high spirituality which these souls have passed through in former epochs. For I ask you to consider the following.—Let us take quite a general case. I showed you a special example last time, but let us now take the general case of a soul that lived in the centuries before the Mystery of Golgotha or even after the Mystery of Golgotha in such a way as to take the spiritual world absolutely as a matter of course. Let us think of a human being who in such a life could speak of the spiritual world out of his own experience as of a world that is no less real and present than the many-coloured warm and cold world of the senses.

All these things are there within the soul. And in the interval between death and a new birth, or in repeated intervals of this kind, all these things have entered into relationship with the spiritual worlds of higher Hierarchies. Many and manifold things have been worked out in such a soul.

But now, let us say through other karmic circumstances, such a soul has to incarnate in a body which is altogether attuned to intellectualism, a body which can receive from the civilisation of to-day only the current conceptions which relate, after all, only to external things. In such a case this alone will be possible, for the present incarnation: the spirituality that comes over from former times will withdraw into the subconscious. And such a personality will reveal in the intellect which he evolves perhaps a certain idealism, a tendency to all manner of good and beautiful and true ideals. But he will not come to the point of lifting up from the subconscious into the ordinary consciousness the things that are there latent in his soul. There are many such souls to-day. And for him who is truly able to observe with a trained eye for spiritual things, many a countenance to-day will contradict what openly comes forth in him who wears it. For the countenance says: in the foundations of the soul there is much spirituality, but as soon as the human being speaks, he speaks not of spirituality at all. In no age was it the case in such a high degree as it is to-day, that the countenances of men contradict what they themselves say and declare.

We must understand that strength and energy, perseverance and a holy enthusiasm are necessary in order to transform into spirituality the intellectualism which after all belongs to the present age. These things are necessary that the thoughts and ideas of men to-day may rise into the spiritual world and that man may find the path of ideas upward to the Spirit no less than downward into Nature. And if we would understand this, then we must fully realise that intellectualism to begin with offers the greatest imaginable hindrance to the revelation of any spiritual content that is present within the soul. Only when we are really aware of this, only then shall we, as Anthroposophists, find the true inner enthusiasm. Then shall we receive on the one hand the ideas of Anthroposophy which must indeed reckon with the intellectualism of the age, which must remain, so to speak, the garment of contemporary intellectualism. Then shall we also become permeated with the consciousness that with the ideas of Anthroposophy, relating as they do, not to the mere outer world of sense, we are destined really to take hold of that to which they do relate, namely, the spiritual. To enter deeply and perseveringly into the ideas of Anthroposophy—it is this in the last resort which will most surely guide the man of to-day upward into spirituality, if only he is willing.

But what I have said in this last sentence, my dear friends, can truly only be said since about the last two or three decades. Previously one could not have said it. For although the dominion of Michael began already with the end of the seventies, nevertheless it was formerly the case that the ideas which the age provided were so strongly and exclusively directed to the world of sense that even for the idealist to rise from intellectualism to spirituality was possible only in rare, exceptional cases in the seventies, eighties and nineties of the last century.

To-day I will give you an example to reveal the outcome of this fact. I will show you by an example how strong and inevitable a force is working in this age to drive back and dam up the spiritual contents which are surging forth from former times in human souls. Nay, at the end of last century such spiritual contents had to withdraw and give way to intellectualism if they were to be able to reveal themselves in any way at all.

Please understand me rightly. Let us assume that some personality living in the second half of the 19th century bore within him a strong spirituality from former incarnations. Such a personality lives and finds his way into the culture and education of this present time (or of that time) which is intellectualistic, thoroughly intellectualistic. In the personality whom I now mean, the after-working of former spirituality is still so strong that it is really determined to come forth, but the intellectualism will not suffer it. The man is educated intellectually. In the social intercourse which he enters into, in his calling or profession, everywhere he experiences intellectualism. Into this intellectualism what he bears within his soul cannot enter. Such a human being would be one of whom we might say that Anthroposophy would truly have been his calling. But he cannot become an Anthroposophist, though the very thing which he bears within him from a former incarnation, if it could enter into the intellect, would have become Anthroposophy. It cannot become Anthroposophy; it stops short; it recoils as it were from intellectualism. What else can such a personality do? At most he will treat intellectualism again and again as a thing into which he does not really want to enter, so that in one incarnation or another what he bears within his soul may be able to come forth. Of course it will not come forth completely, for it is not according to the age. It will very likely be a kind of stammering; but it will be visible in such a man how he recoils and shrinks again and again from going too far, from being touched too closely by the intellectualism of the age.

I want to give you an example of this very thing to-day. To begin with I will remind you of a personality of ancient time whom we have mentioned here again and again in all manner of connections, I mean Plato. In Plato the philosopher of the 5th and 4th centuries B.C. there lives a soul who forestalls many of the things that mankind ponders on for centuries to come. You will remember when I drew your attention to the great spiritual contents of the School of Chartres, how I referred to the Platonic spirit which had been living for a long time in the development of Christianity. And in a certain sense it was in the great teachers of Chartres that this Platonic spirit found its true development according to the possibilities of that time.

We must realise that the spirit of Plato is devoted in the first place to the world of Ideas. We must not, however, conceive that the “Ideas” in Plato's works are the abstract monster which ideas are for us to-day, if we are given up to the ordinary consciousness. For Plato, the “Ideas” were to some extent almost what the Persian Gods had been, the Amschaspands who as active genii assisted Ahura Mazdao. Active genii attainable only in imaginative vision—such in reality were the Ideas in Plato. They had a quality of being, only he no longer described them with the vividness with which such things had been described in former times. He described them as it were like the shades of beings. Indeed this is how abstract thoughts henceforth evolved: the Ideas were taken by human beings in an ever more and more shadow-like way. But Plato, as he lived on, nevertheless grew deeper in a certain way, so that one might say: well-nigh all the wisdom of that time poured itself out into his world of Ideas. We need only take his later Dialogues, and we shall find matters astronomical, astrological, cosmological, psychological, the last named expressed in a most wonderful way, and matters concerning the history of nations. All these things were found in Plato in a kind of spirituality which, if I may so describe it, refines and shadows down the spiritual to the form of the Idea.

But in Plato everything is alive, and in Plato above all this perception is alive: that the Ideas are the foundations of all things present in the world of sense. Wherever we turn our gaze in the world of sense, whatever we behold, it is the outward expression and manifestation of Ideas.

Withal there enters into Plato's world of conception yet another element which has indeed become well known to all the world in a catchword much misunderstood and much misused—I mean the catchword of Platonic love. The love that is spiritual through and through, that has laid aside as much as possible of that egoism which is so often mingled with love—this spiritualised devotion to the world, to life, to man, to God, to the Idea, is a thing that permeates the Platonic conception of life through and through. It is a thing which afterwards recedes in certain ages only to light up again repeatedly. For Platonism is absorbed by human beings ever and again. Again and again at one place or another it becomes the staff by which men draw themselves upward. And Platonism, as we know, entered most significantly into all that was taught in the School of Chartres.

Plato has often been regarded as a kind of precursor of Christianity. But to imagine Plato as a precursor of Christianity is to misunderstand the latter, for Christianity is not a doctrine, it is a stream of life which takes its start from the Mystery of Golgotha. It is only since the Mystery of Golgotha that we can speak of a real Christianity. We can however say that there were Christians before the Mystery of Golgotha in this sense, that they revered as the Sun Being and recognised in the Sun Being the sublime Figure who was subsequently recognised as the Christ within the earthly life of mankind. If, however, we speak of precursors of Christianity in this sense we must apply the term to many pupils of the ancient Mysteries, among whom we may indeed include Plato. Only we must then understand the thing aright.

Now I already spoke at this place some time ago of a young artist who grew up while Plato was still living, not exactly in Plato's School of the Philosophers but under Plato's influence. Indeed I mentioned this matter already many years ago. Having passed through other incarnations in the meantime this individuality was reborn, not out of the Platonic philosophy but out of the Platonic spirit. He was reborn as Goethe, having karmically transformed in the Jupiter region what came to him from former incarnations, and notably from the one in which he partook of the Platonic stream, so that it became that kind of wisdom which does indeed permeate all the contents of Goethe's work. Thus we can indeed turn our gaze to a noble and pure relationship between Plato and this—I will not say “disciple”—but follower of Plato. For as I said, he was not a philosopher but an artist in that Grecian incarnation. Nevertheless Plato's eye did fall upon him and perceived the infinite promise that lay within this youth.

Now it was truly hard for Plato to carry through the following epochs, through the super-sensible world, what he had borne within his soul in his Plato incarnation. It was very hard for him. For although Platonism lit up here and there, when Plato himself looked down upon the Platonism that evolved here on the earth, it was for him only too frequently a dreadful disturbance in his super-sensible life of soul and spirit.

I do not mean that that which lived on as Platonism was therefore to be condemned or harshly criticised. Needless to say the soul of Plato carried over livingly into the following epochs piece by piece and ever more and more, what lay within him. But Plato above all, Plato who was still united with the Mysteries of antiquity, of whom I said that his Doctrine of Ideas contained a certain ancient Persian impulse—Plato found the greatest difficulty in entering a new incarnation. When he had absolved the time between death and a new birth—and in his case it was a fairly long time—he found real difficulty in entering the Christian epoch into which, after all, he had to enter. Thus although in the sense I just explained we may describe Plato as a forerunner of Christianity, nevertheless the whole orientation of his soul was such as to make it extraordinarily difficult for him, when ready to descend to earth again, to find a bodily organism into which he might carry his former impulses in a way that they might now come forth again with a Christian colouring.

Moreover Plato was a Greek. He was a Greek through and through, with all those oriental impulses which the Greeks still had, which the Romans had not at all. Plato was in a certain sense a soul who carried philosophy upwards into the higher poetic realm. The Dialogues of Plato are works of art. Everywhere is the living soul, everywhere the Platonic love which we need only understand in the true sense and which also bears witness to its oriental origin.

Plato was a Greek, but the civilisation within which alone he could incarnate, now that he was ripe for incarnation, now that he had grown old for the super-sensible world—this civilisation was Roman and Christian.

Nevertheless, if I may put it so, he must take the plunge. And to repress the inner factors of opposition, he must gather together all his forces. For it lay in Plato's being to reject the prosaic, matter-of-fact and legalistic Roman element, nay indeed to reject all that was Roman.

And there was also a certain difficulty for his nature to receive Christianity, for he himself represented in a certain sense the highest point of the pre-Christian conception of the world. Moreover even the external facts revealed that the real Plato-being could not easily dive down into the Christian element. For what was it that dived down into Christianity here in the world of sense? It was Neo-Platonism, but this was something altogether different from true Platonism. We remember how there evolved a kind of Platonising Gnosis and the like but there was no real possibility of taking over into Christianity the immediate essence of Plato. Thus it was difficult for Plato himself, out of all the activity which he bore within him as the Plato-being and the results of which he must now bring with him into the world—it was difficult for him to dive down in any way. He had as it were to reduce all this activity.

And so it was that he reincarnated in the 10th century in the Middle Ages as the nun Hroswith—Hroswitha, that forgotten but great personality of the 10th century, who did indeed receive Christianity in a truly Platonic sense and who carried into the Mid-European nature very, very much of Plato.

She belonged to the Convent of Gandersheim in Brunswick and carried infinitely much of Platonism into the Mid-European nature. This in truth it was only possible at that time for a woman to do. Had not Plato's being appeared with a feminine character and colouring it could not have received Christianity into itself in that age. But the Roman element too was strong in all the culture of that time which had to be received. Perforce, if I may put it so, it had to be received. And so we see the nun Hroswitha evolving into the remarkable personality she was, writing Latin dramas in the style of the Roman poet Terence, dramas which are of extraordinary significance.

You see, it is appallingly easy to misrepresent Plato wherever he approaches one. I often described how Friedrich Hebbel made notes of a play—it never got beyond the plan—Friedrich Hebbel made notes of a play in which he would give a humorous treatment of the following theme.—Plato reincarnated sits on the benches of a grammar school.—A mere poetic fancy, needless to say, but this was Hebbel's idea.—Plato is reincarnated as a schoolboy while the schoolmaster puts him through the Platonic Dialogues and Plato himself, reincarnated, receives the very worst criticism with respect to the interpretation of the Platonic Dialogues. These things Hebbel noted down as the subject for a play which he never elaborated. Nevertheless it shows, it is like a divination of how easy it is to misunderstand Plato. Now this is a feature which interested me most especially in tracing the stream of Plato. For this very misunderstanding is extraordinarily instructive in finding the right paths of the further life and progress of the Platonic individuality.

It is indeed highly interesting. There was a German philosopher (I do not remember his name, it was some Schmidt, or Müller), who with all his scholarship “proved” up to the hilt that the nun Hroswitha wrote not a single play, that nothing was due to her, that it was all a forgery by some Counsellor of the Emperor Maximilian. All of which proof is of course nonsense, but there you have it. Plato cannot escape misunderstanding.

And so we see arising in the individuality of the nun Hroswitha of the 10th century, a truly intensive Christian and Platonic spiritual substantiality united with the Mid-European-Germanic spirit. And in this woman there was living so to speak the whole culture of that time. She was indeed an astonishing personality. And she among others partook in those super-sensible developments of which I told you. I mean the passage of the teachers of Chartres into the spiritual world, the descent of those who were then the Aristotelians, and the discipleship of Michael. But she took part in all these things in a most peculiar way. One may say: here was the masculine spirit of Plato and the feminine spirit of the nun Hroswitha wrestling with one another, inasmuch as they both of them had their results for the spiritual individuality. If the one incarnation had been of no significance, as is generally the case, such an inward wrestling could not afterwards have taken place. But in this individuality it did take place and indeed it went on for the whole succeeding time.

And at length we see the individuality ripe to return to earth once more in the 19th century. He became an individuality of the very kind I described above as a hypothetical case. For the whole spirituality of Plato is held back, recoils and shrinks back in the face of the intellectuality of the 19th century which it will not come near.

And to make this process the easier the feminine capacity of the nun Hroswitha has been instilled into the same soul. Thus as the soul appears on the scene, all that it had received from its incarnation as a woman, great and radiant as she was, makes it the more easy to repel the modern intellectualism wherever it is not liked.

Thus the individuality stands upon earth anew in the 19th century. He grows up into the intellectuality of the 19th century but lets it come near him only to a certain extent, externally, while inwardly he is perpetually shrinking back from it. Platonism comes forward in his consciousness not in an intellectualistic way, for again and again, wherever he can, he speaks of how Ideas are living in all things.

The life in Ideas became an absolute matter of course to this personality. Yet his body was such that one continually had the following impression: the head simply cannot give expression to all the Platonism that is seeking to come forth in him. But on the other hand there could spring forth in him in a beautiful way, nay in a glorious way, that which is hidden behind the word “Platonic Love.”

Nay more, in his youth this personality had something like a dream-intuition of how Mid-Europe cannot and may not after all be truly Roman. For indeed he himself had lived as the nun Hroswitha. Thus in his youth he represented Mid-Europe as a modern Greece. Here we see his Platonism striking through. And he represented the rougher region that had stood over against ancient Greece, namely Macedonia, as the present East of Europe. There were strange dreams living in this personality, dreams from which one could see, and this was very interesting, how he wanted to conceive the modern world in which he himself was living, like Greece and Macedonia. Again and again, especially in his youth, there arose the impulse to conceive the modern world—Europe on a large scale—as Greece and Macedonia magnified.

The personality of whom I am speaking is none other than Karl Julius Schröer. With the help of all that I have now brought together you need only take Karl Julius Schröer's writings. From the very beginning he speaks in a thoroughly Platonic way. But this is so strange: with a kind of feminine coyness, I might say, he takes good care not to enter into intellectualism wherever he has no use for it.

When he spoke of Novalis, Schröer was often fond of saying: Novalis—he is a spirit whom one cannot understand with this modern intellectualism which knows only that twice two is four.

Karl Julius Schröer wrote a history of German poetry in the 19th century. In this history, wherever one can approach a thing with Platonic feeling, it is very good, but wherever one requires intellectualism it is suddenly as though the lines were to sink away into nothingness. He is not a bit like a professor. He writes many pages about some who are passed over in silence by the ordinary histories of literature, while about the famous ones he sometimes writes only a few lines.

When this history of literature was first published, how the literary pundits did wring their hands! One of the most eminent among them at that time was Emil Kuh, who declared: this history of literature is not written by a head at all; it simply flowed out of a wrist.

Karl Julius Schröer also published an edition of Faust. A professor—in Graz—for the rest a very good fellow—wrote such a dreadful review of it that I believe no less than ten duels were fought out among the students at Graz pro and contra Schröer.

There was indeed much grievous misunderstanding, failure of recognition. This poor estimate of Schröer went so far that on one occasion at a social gathering in Weimar where I was present, the following thing happened. In that circle Erik Schmidt was a highly respected personality and dominated everything when he was present. Conversation turned on the question, which of the princesses and princes at the Weimar Court were wise and which were stupid. This was being seriously discussed and Erik Schmidt declared: the Princess Reuss (she was one of the daughters of the Grand Duchess Reuss)—the Princess Reuss is not a clever woman for she considers Schröer a great man.—This was his reason!

But you must go through all his works, down to that most beautiful little book Goethe und die Liebe, for there you will really find what one can say without intellectualism about Platonic Love in immediate and real life. Something extraordinary is given to us in the style and tone of this little book Goethe und die Liebe. It came to me beautifully on one occasion when I was discussing the book with Schröer's sister. She called the style “völlig süss vor Reife”, fully sweet unto ripeness—a pretty expression. And such indeed it is. It is all—I cannot say in this sense so concentrated—but it is all so fine, so delicate in its form. Refinement indeed was a peculiar quality of Schröer's.

And yet this Platonic spirituality, repelling intellectualism, this Platonic spirituality that did not want to enter into this body made at the same time a quite peculiar and strong impression, for in seeing Schröer one had the distinct perception: this soul is not quite fully there within the body. And then when he grew older one could see how the soul, not being really willing to enter into the body of that time, withdrew little by little out of that body. To begin with the fingers grew swollen and thick. Then the soul withdrew ever more and more, and as we know, Schröer ended in the feeblemindedness of old age. Certain features of Schröer, not the whole individuality, but certain features, were taken over into my character Capesius, Professor Capesius, in the Mystery Plays.

Here indeed we have a remarkable example of the fact that the spiritual currents of antiquity can only be carried over into the present time under certain conditions. And one may well say that in Schröer the recoiling from intellectuality showed itself characteristically. Had he attained intellectuality, had he been able to unite it with the spirituality of Plato, Anthroposophy itself would have been there.

And so we see in his karma how his paternal love for his follower Goethe, if so I may describe it, becomes transformed. It had arisen in the way I told you, for in that ancient time Plato had indeed loved him in a paternal way. We see this love karmically transmuted; Schröer becomes a warm admirer of Goethe. Thus it emerges once again.

There was something extraordinarily personal in Schröer's reverence for Goethe. In his old age he wanted to write a biography of Goethe. Before I left Vienna at the end of the eighties he told me about it and afterwards he wrote me about it. But of this biography of Goethe which he would have liked to write he never wrote in any different vein than this.—He said: Goethe is continually visiting my soul. It always had this personal character which was indeed karmically predestined as I have now indicated.

The biography of Goethe was never written, for Schröer fell into the feeble-mindedness of old age. But we can indeed find a luminous interpretation of the whole character of his writings if we know the antecedent which I have now explained.

Thus in the well-nigh forgotten character of Schröer, we see how Goetheanism came to a standstill before the threshold of intellectualism transformed into spirituality. And if I may put it so, one could really do no other, having once been stimulated by Schröer, than carry Goetheanism forward into Anthroposophy. There was no other course to take. And again and again this deeply moving picture (for so it was for me) stood before the eye of my soul: Schröer carrying the ancient spirituality of Goethe, pressing forward in it up to the point of intellectuality. And I understood how Goethe must be grasped again with modern intellectualism, lifted up into the spiritual domain. For only so shall we fully understand him. Nor did this picture by any means make things easy for me. For owing to the fact that that which Schröer was could not directly and fully be received, again and again there was mingled in the striving of my soul, a certain element of opposition against Schröer.

Thus, for example, when at the Technical University in Vienna Schröer conducted practice classes in lecturing and essay writing, I once gave a pretty distorted interpretation of Mephisto merely to refute my instructor Schröer with whom at that time I was not yet on such intimate and friendly terms. There was indeed a certain opposition stirring within me.

But as I said, what else could one do than loose the congestion that had taken place and carry Goetheanism really onward into Anthroposophy!

Thus you see how world-history really takes its course. For it takes its course in such a way that we may recognise: whatever we possess in the present day emerges with great hindrances and difficulties. Yet on the other hand it is well prepared.

Read the wonderful hymn-like descriptions of womanhood in Karl Julius Schröer's writings. Read the beautiful essay which he wrote as an appendix to his History of Literature, his History of German Poetry in the 19th Century. Read his essay on Goethe and his relation to women. If you take all these things together you will say to yourselves: truly here is living something of a feeling of the worth and character of womanhood which is an echo of what the nun Hroswitha had lived as her own being. These two preceding incarnations harmonise and vibrate together wonderfully in Schröer's life, so much so that the breaking of the thread became indeed a deeply moving tragedy. And yet in Schröer of all people there enters into the end of the 19th century a world of spiritual facts, immensely illuminating towards an answer to this question: How shall we bring spirituality into the life of the present time.

Herewith I wished to round off this cycle of lectures.

Today I would like to begin by telling you a little story from the world of knowledge in the 19th century, so that we can use it to orient ourselves to the great changes that have taken place in the soul of Western man. I have emphasized it often: the person of the present time has a strong awareness that people have actually always thought, felt and sensed as they do today, or that if they felt differently, it was because they were children developing, and that only now, I would say, has the human being advanced to the right manliness of thinking. In order to really get to know the human being, one must be able to put oneself back into the way of thinking of older times, so that one is not so sure of victory and haughty about what fills human souls in the present. And when one then sees how, in the course of just a few decades, the thoughts and ideas that existed among the educated have changed completely, then one will also be able to grasp how radically the soul life of human beings has changed over long periods of time, which we were indeed obliged to point out again yesterday.

One of the most famous Hegelians of the 19th century is Karl Rosenkranz, who, after various residences, was a professor of philosophy at the University of Königsberg for a long time. Rosenkranz was a Hegelian, but his Hegelianism was, first of all, colored by a careful study of Kant – he saw Hegel, so to speak, through the glasses of Kantianism – but, in addition, his Hegelianism was strongly colored by his study of Protestant theology. All of this – Protestant theology, Kantianism, Hegelianism – came together in this man from the mid-19th century.

Hegelianism had disappeared from the horizon of educated Central Europe by the last third of the 19th century, and it is hard to imagine how deeply thinking people in Central Europe were steeped in it in the 1840s. That is why it is difficult today to get an idea of what it actually looked like in a soul like that of Karl Rosenkranz.

Now, after all, Rosenkranz was a person who, in the 1940s, thought in a way that was expected of someone who had abandoned old, useless thinking, who had submitted to modern enlightenment and was not superstitious, according to the educated way of thinking at the time. One could think that Rosenkranz was such a person, who was, so to speak, at the height of the education of the time.

Now this Karl Rosenkranz – it was in 1843 – once went for a walk and on this walk met a man named Bon, with whom he had a conversation that was so interesting for him, for Rosenkranz, that Rosenkranz recorded this conversation. Bon was a Thuringian, but by no means, in the sense that Rosenkranz, a man who had grown entirely out of his time. Bon, for his part, probably thought of Rosenkranz as being obsessed with the latest ideas, and as a person who, although unprejudiced in a sense, no longer understood the good old wisdom that Bon still possessed.

And so these two – as I said, it was in 1843 – entered into a conversation. Bon had been educated at the University of Erlangen and had been mainly a student of the somewhat pietistic philosopher Schubert, who, however, was still full of older wisdom, of wisdom that placed a great deal of emphasis on using special dream-like states of consciousness to get into the essence of a person. Schubert was a man who thought very highly of the old wisdom handed down and who had the belief that if one cannot bring something to life in oneself through a meaningful inner life of the good old wisdom, then one cannot really seriously know anything about man through the new wisdom. In this respect, Schubert's works are extremely interesting. Schubert liked to delve into the various revelations of human dream life, including the abnormal states of mind, as we would perhaps say today, the states of mind of the medium who was not a fraud, the states of that clairvoyance that had been preserved as if atavistically from ancient times, in short, the abnormal, not the fully awake states of mental life. In this way he sought to gain insight into the human being.

One of Schubert's students was Bon. But then Bon had come here to Switzerland and had adopted a spiritual life in Switzerland that today's Swiss are mostly unaware of, that it once existed here. You see, Bon had adopted so-called Gichtelianism in Switzerland. I don't know if much is still known among today's Swiss that Gichtelianism was quite widespread; not only in the rest of Europe – it was at home in the mid-19th century in the Netherlands, for example – but it was also quite common in Switzerland.

This Gichtelianism was namely that which remained in the 19th century, also through the 18th century, but still in the 19th century, of the teachings of Jakob Böhme. And in the form in which Gichtel represented Jakob Böhme's teachings, this teaching of Jakob Böhme then spread to many areas, including here to Switzerland, and that is where Bon got to know Gichtelianism.

Now, Rosenkranz had read a lot, and even if he, due to his Kantianism, Hegelism and Protestant theologism, could not find his way into something like that in an inwardly active way as Jakob Böhme's teachings or their weakening in Gichtel, then at least he understood the expressions, and he was interested in how such a remarkable person, a Gichtelian, spoke.

Now, as already mentioned, Rosenkranz recorded the conversation that took place in 1843. Initially, they discussed a topic that was not too incomprehensible for either Kantians or Hegelians of the 19th century. In the course of the conversation, Rosenkranz said that it is actually unfortunate when you want to reflect deeply on some problem that you can be disturbed by all sorts of external distractions.

I would like to say that, when Rosenkranz says this, one already feels something of what came later to a much higher degree: the nervousness of the age. One need only recall that among the many associations that formed in pre-war Central Europe, one originated in Hanover and was called “Against Noise.” The aim was to strive for laws against noise, so that in the evening, for example, people could sit quietly and reflect without being disturbed by noise from a neighboring inn. There are magazine articles that propagated this association against noise. The intention to establish such an association against noise is, of course, a result of our nervous age. So one senses from Karl Rosenkranz's speech that one could be so unpleasantly disturbed by all sorts of things going on in the environment when one wants to reflect or even when one wants to write a book. One can sense some of this nervousness. And Bon seems to have had a lot of sympathy for the complaint of a man who wants to think undisturbed, and he then said to Rosenkranz: Yes, he could recommend something good to him, he could recommend the inconvenience.

Rosenkranz was taken aback. He was now supposed to do exercises in inconvenience, so Bon recommended that he should learn to develop inconvenience within himself. Yes, said Rosenkranz, it is unpleasant when you are disturbed by all sorts of things. - Then Bon said: That's not what I mean. And now Bon explained to Rosenkranz what he actually meant by inconvenience. He said: “You have to see that you become so firm within yourself that you are not affected in your own constellation by the turba of other events in the surrounding area, so that the pure tincture can develop in your own astra.”

Now, that's what Bon had learned here in Switzerland from the Goutuelians, to say that one should take care not to be disturbed in one's own constellation by the turba of the other processes in the surrounding area, so that the pure tincture of one's own astrum could remain. As I said, Rosenkranz understood the expressions. I believe that today not even everyone understands the expressions, even if they want to be a very learned person.

What did the Goutelian Bon actually mean back then? Well, you see, Bon lived in the propagated ideas of Jakob Böhme. I recently characterized this Jakob Böhme a little. I said that he collected the wisdom that had remained popular from all folklore. He has absorbed a lot from this popular wisdom that one would not believe today. This popular wisdom has even been preserved in many cases in the expressions of so-called reflective people, as I have just quoted them from the mouth of Bon. And one could imagine something under these expressions that had a certain inner vitality. Traditions still existed of what an older humanity had absorbed in the older clairvoyance. This older form of clairvoyance consisted of forces that emerged from the physicality of the human being. It is not necessary to say that this old form of clairvoyance lived in the physical. That would be to misunderstand that everything physical is permeated by the spiritual. But actually the old clairvoyant drew what he had placed before his soul in his dreamlike imaginations from the forces of his physicality. What pulsated in the blood, what energized the breath, even what lived in the transforming substances of the body, all this, as it were, evaporated spiritually into the spiritual and gave the old clairvoyant grandiose world pictures, as I have often described them here. This old clairvoyance was drawn from the physical.

And what was revealed to you when you were living, as if you felt the whole world in a violet light, felt yourself as a violet cloud in violet light, so that you felt completely within yourself, that was called the 'tincture'. And that was felt as one's own, as that which was connected with one's own organism. It was felt as one's own Astrum. This inwardness, sucked out of the body, was called by the Gouthelean Bon the pure tincture of one's own Astrum.

But the time had come – actually it had long since come – when people could no longer extract such things from their physicality. The time had long since come when the old clairvoyance was no longer suited to man. Therefore, people like Jakob Böhme or Gichtel felt that it is difficult to bring these old ideas to life. Man had simply lost the ability to live in these old ideas. They, as it were, immediately passed away when they arose. Man felt insecure in them, and so he wanted to use everything to hold on to these fleeting inner images, which still, I might say, came up through the inner sound of the old words. And just as he felt the pure tincture of his own astral within him, so he felt when anything else approached that it would immediately displace the images. This other, that which lived spiritually in the things and processes of the environment, was called Turba. And through this Turba one did not want to let one's own constellation, that is, one's soul state, be disturbed, in which one could be when one really immersed oneself in the inner sound of the old words, in order to, so to speak, have one's humanity firmly through the preservation of this traditional inner life. Therefore, one strove not to accept anything external, but to live within oneself. One made oneself “inconvenient” so that one did not need to accept anything external.

This inconvenience, this life within oneself, is what Bon recommended to the Rosary in the form I have just shared with you. But you see, this is actually a glimpse into the spiritual life of a very old time, which was still present within the circles of Goutelianism in the mid-19th century, albeit at dusk, fading away. For what was dying away there was once an inner experience of the divine spiritual world in dream-like, clear-vision images, through which the human being felt much more like a heavenly being than an earthly one.

And the prerequisite for that old state of mind was that the person had not yet developed the pure thinking of more recent times. This pure thinking of more recent times, which has only really been spoken about in full awareness in my “Philosophy of Freedom”, is something that is not really felt much about today. This pure thinking is something that has initially developed in connection with natural science.

If we look at a part of this natural science that shows us what is to be said here in a particularly characteristic way, we turn to astronomy. Through Copernicus, astronomy becomes purely a world mechanics, a kind of description of the world machinery. Before that, there were still ideas that spiritual beings were embodied in the stars. Medieval scholasticism still speaks of the spiritual essence of the stars, of the intelligences that inhabit the stars, that are embodied in the stars, and so on. The idea that everything out there is material, thoughtless, that man only thinks about it, is a recent development. In the past, man created images for himself, images that combined with his view of a star or constellation. He saw something living, something weaving for itself in there. Not pure thinking, but something soul-living connected man with his environment. But man has developed pure thinking in this environment first.

I have said here before that older people also had thoughts, but they received the thoughts at the same time as their clairvoyance. They received clairvoyant images from their environment, and then they drew their thoughts from the clairvoyant images. The elderly did not directly extract pure thoughts from external things. It is a peculiarity of modern times that man has learned to embrace the world with mere thought. And in this embrace of the world, man first developed this pure thinking.

But now something else is linked to all these things. Those people to whom something like what the Bon said about the rosary still points back, these people did not experience sleep in the same way as the merely thinking modern person experiences sleep. The merely thinking modern person experiences sleep as unconsciousness, which is interrupted at most by dreams, but of which he rightly does not think much. For, as the state of mind of man in modern times is, dreams are not of much value. They are, as a rule, reminiscences of the inner or outer life and have no special value in their content. So that actually unconsciousness is the most characteristic feature of sleep. It was not always that. And Jakob Böhme himself still knew a kind of sleep in which consciousness was filled with real insights into the world.

A person like Jakob Böhme, and then also Gichtel, who still worked hard to find his way into such a state of mind, said: Well, if you observe the things of the senses with your eyes, grasp the world with your other and then further grasps with thoughts that which one grasps there with the senses, then one can indeed learn many beautiful things about the world; but the real secrets of the world are not revealed there. Only the outer image of the world is manifested.

As I said, Jakob Böhme and Gichtel knew such states of consciousness, where they neither slept nor merely dreamt, but where the consciousness was filled with insights into real world secrets hidden behind the sensual world. And they valued this more than what was revealed to their senses and to their minds. Mere thinking was not yet something significant for these people. But the opposite was also present for them, namely the awareness that a person can perceive without his body. For in such states of consciousness, which were neither sleep nor dreaming, they knew at the same time that the actual human being had largely detached himself from his body, but had taken with him the power of blood, had taken with him the power of breathing. And so they knew: Because man is inwardly connected with the world, but his waking body obscures this connection for him, man can, if he makes himself independent to a certain extent from this waking body, through the finer forces of this body, which the old clairvoyance, as I have explained, has sucked out of the body, gain knowledge of the secrets of the world.

But in this way, precisely when he entered into such special states of sleep, man came to an awareness of what sleep actually is. People like Jakob Böhme or Gichtel, who said to themselves: When I sleep, then with the finer limbs of my being I am also outside in the finer nature. I submerge myself in the finer nature.

They felt themselves standing in this finer nature. And when they woke up, they knew: That with which I, as a finer human being, was in the finer nature during sleep, also during unconscious sleep, that also lives in me while I am awake. I fill my body with this when I feel, when I think, which at that time was not just pure thinking. So when I think and create images in my mind, this finer humanity lives in these images.

In short, it had a real meaning for these people when they said: That which I am in my sleep also lives on in me during waking. And they felt something like a soul blood pulsating on into sleep during the waking states of consciousness.

A person like Jakob Böhme or Gichtel would say to themselves: When I am awake, I continue to sleep. Namely, what happens in me during sleep continues to have an effect when I am awake. This was a different feeling from that of the modern person, who has now moved on to mere thinking, to pure intellectual thinking. This modern person wakes up in the morning and draws a sharp line between what he was in his sleep and what he is now awake. He does not carry anything over from sleep into waking life, so to speak. He stops being what he was in his sleep when he begins to wake up. Yes, modern humanity has grown out of such states of consciousness as still lived in a person like Bon, who was a Goutelian, and in doing so it has actualized something that has actually been present in the first third of the 15th century. It has actualized this by moving into the waking day life of mere intellectualistic thinking. This, after all, dominates all people today. They no longer think in images. They regard images as mythology, as I said yesterday. They think in thoughts, and they sleep in nothingness.

Yes, this actually has a very deep meaning: these modern people sleep in nothingness. For Jakob Böhme, for example, it would not have made sense to say, “I sleep in nothingness.” For modern people, it has become meaningful to say, “I sleep in nothingness.” I am not nothing when I sleep; I retain my self and my astral body during sleep. I am not nothing, but I tear myself out of the whole world, which I perceive with my senses, which I grasp with my waking mind. During modern sleep, I also tear myself out of the world that, for example, Jakob Böhme saw in special, abnormal states of consciousness with the finer powers of the physical and etheric bodies, which he still took with him into his sleeping states.

The modern person not only breaks away from his sensory world during sleep, but also from the world that was the world of the ancient seer. And of the world in which the human being then finds himself in from falling asleep to waking up, he cannot perceive anything, because that is a future world, that is the world into which the earth will transform in those states that I have described in my 'Occult Science' as the Jupiter, Venus and Vulcan states. So that in fact the modern man, who is trained in intellectualistic thinking - forgive the expression - lives in nothing during sleep. He is not nothing, I must emphasize it again and again, but he lives in nothing because he cannot yet experience what he lives in, the future world. It is nothing for him yet. But it is precisely because the modern human being can sleep in the void that his freedom is guaranteed; for from the moment he falls asleep until he wakes up, he lives into the liberation from all the world, into the void. It is precisely during sleep that he becomes independent. It is very important to realize that the special way in which the modern human being sleeps guarantees his freedom.

The old seer, who still perceived from the old world, not from the future world, who perceived from the old world, could not become a completely free human being, because he became dependent in this perception. Resting in the void during sleep actually makes the modern human being, the human being of the modern age, free.

Thus, there are two counter-images for the modern human being. First, during waking hours he lives in thought, which is a mere thought, no longer containing images in the old sense; as I said, he regards them as mythology. And during sleep he lives in nothingness. In this way he frees himself from the world and gains a sense of freedom. Thought images cannot force him because they are mere images. Just as little as the mirror images can force, can cause anything, the thought images of things can force man to do something. Therefore, when man grasps his moral impulses in pure thoughts, he must follow them as a free being. No emotion, no passion, no internal bodily process can cause him to follow those moral impulses that he is able to grasp in pure thoughts. But he is also able to follow these mere images in thought, to follow this pure thought, because during sleep he finds himself freed from all natural laws in his own physical being, because during sleep he truly becomes a pure free soul that can follow the non-reality of thought; while the older person also remained dependent on the world during sleep and therefore could not have followed unreal impulses.

Let us first consider the fact that the modern man has this duality: he can have pure thoughts, which are purely intellectualized, and a sleep spent in nothingness, where he is inside, where he is a reality, but where his surroundings show him a nullity. Because now comes the important part. You see, it is also rooted in the nature of modern man that he has become inwardly weak-willed as a result of everything he has been through. Modern man does not want to admit this, but it is true: modern man has become inwardly weak-willed. If one only wanted to, one would be able to understand this historically. Just look at the powerful spiritual movements that have spread in the past, and the will impulses with which, let us say, religious founders have worked throughout the world. This inward will impulsiveness has been lost to modern humanity. And that is why modern man allows the outer world to educate him in his thoughts. He observes nature and forms his purely intellectualistic thoughts from natural processes and natural beings, as if his inner life were really only a mirror that reflects everything. Yes, man has become so weak that he is seized with a terrible fear when someone produces a thought of his own, when he does not merely read thoughts from what external nature presents. So that at first pure thinking developed in the modern man in a completely passive way.

I do not say this as a rebuke; for if humanity had immediately proceeded to actively produce pure thought, it would have brought all sorts of impure fantasies from the old inheritance into this thinking. It was a good educational tool for modern humanity that people allowed themselves to be tempted by the grandiose philistines, such as Bacon of Verulam, to develop their concepts and ideas only in the outside world, to have everything dictated to them by the outside world. And so, little by little, people have become accustomed to not living in their concepts and ideas, in their thinking itself, but to letting the outside world provide their thinking. Some get it directly by observing nature or looking at historical documents. They get their thoughts directly from nature and history. These thoughts then live within them. Others only get it through school. Today, people are already bombarded from an early age with concepts that have been passively acquired from the outside world.

In this respect, the modern human being is actually a kind of sack, except that it has the opening on the side. There he takes in everything from the external world and reflects it within himself. These are then his ideas. Actually, his soul is only filled with concepts of nature. He is a sack. If the modern human being were to examine where he gets his concepts from, he would come to realize this. Some have it directly, those who really observe nature in one field or another, but most have absorbed it in school; their concepts have been implanted in them.

For centuries, since the 15th century, man has been educated in this passivity of concepts. And today he already regards it as a kind of sin when he is inwardly active, when he forms his own thoughts. Indeed, one cannot make thoughts of nature oneself. One would only defile nature by all kinds of fantasies if one made thoughts of nature oneself. But within oneself is the source of thought. One can form one's own thoughts, yes, one can imbue with inner reality the thoughts that one already has, because they are actually mere thoughts. When does this happen? It happens when a person summons up enough willpower to push his night person back into his day-time life, so that he does not merely think passively but pushes the person who became independent during sleep back into his thoughts. This is only possible with pure thoughts.

Actually, that was the basic idea of my “Philosophy of Freedom”, that I pointed out: into thinking, which modern man has acquired, he can really push his I-being. That I-being, which he - I could not yet express it at the time, but it is so - frees during the state of sleep in modern times, he can push it into pure thinking. And so, in pure thinking, man really becomes aware of his ego when he grasps thoughts in such a way that he actively lives in them.

Now something else is linked to this. Let us assume that Anthroposophy is presented according to the model of modern natural science. People take in Anthroposophy, at first they take it in the way that modern people are accustomed to, in the manner of passive thinking. One can understand it if one's human understanding is healthy, one does not need to apply mere belief. If the human intellect is merely healthy, one can understand the thoughts. But one still lives passively in them, as one lives passively in the thoughts of nature. Then one comes and says: Yes, I have these thoughts from anthroposophical research, but I cannot stand up for them myself, because I have merely taken them in - as some people like to say today: I have taken them in from the spiritual-scientific side. We hear it emphasized so often: the natural sciences say this, and then we hear this or that from the spiritual-scientific side. What does it mean when someone says, “I hear this from the spiritual-scientific side”? That means he points out that he remains in passive thinking, that he also wants to absorb spiritual science only in passive thinking. For the moment a person decides to generate within himself the thoughts that anthroposophical research transmits to him, he will also be able to stand up for their truth with his entire personality, because he thereby experiences the first stage of their truth.

In other words, in general, people today have not yet come to pour the reality that they experience as independent reality in their sleep into the thoughts of their waking lives through the strength of their will. If you want to become an anthroposophist in the sense of absorbing anthroposophical thoughts and then not simply passively surrendering to them, but rather infusing through a strong will what you are during every night of dreamless sleep into the thoughts, into the pure thoughts of Anthroposophy, then one has climbed the first step of what one is justified in calling clairvoyance today, then one lives clairvoyantly in the thoughts of Anthroposophy. You read a book with the strong will that you do not just carry your day life into the anthroposophical book, that you do not read like this: the day before yesterday a piece, then it stops, yesterday, then it stops, today, then it stops, etc. Today people read only with one part of their lives, namely only with their daily lives. Of course you can read Gustav Freytag that way, you can also read Dickens that way, you can read Emerson that way, but not an anthroposophical book. When you read an anthroposophical book, you have to go into it with your whole being, and because you are unconscious during sleep, so you have no thoughts - but the will continues - you have to go into it with your will. If you want to grasp what lies in the words of a truly anthroposophical book, then through this will alone you will at least become immediately clairvoyant. And you see, this will must also enter into those who represent our anthroposophy! When this will strikes like lightning into those who represent our Anthroposophy, then Anthroposophy can be presented to the world in the right way. It does not require any magic, but an energetic will that not only brings the pieces of life into a book during the day. Today, by the way, people no longer read with this complete piece of life, but today when reading the newspaper it is enough to spend a few minutes each day to take in what is there. You don't even need the whole waking day for that. But if you immerse yourself in a book that comes from anthroposophy with your whole being, then it comes to life in you.

But this is what should be considered, especially by those who are supposed to be leading figures within the Anthroposophical Society. Because this Anthroposophical Society is being tremendously harmed when it is said: Yes, Anthroposophy is proclaimed by people who cannot stand up for it. We must come to a point where we can find our way into these anthroposophical truths with our whole being, rather than just passively experiencing them intellectually. Then the anthroposophical proclamation will not be made in a lame way, always just saying, “From the spiritual-scientific side we are assured...” Instead, we will be able to proclaim the anthroposophical truth as his own experience, at least initially for what is closest to the human being, for example for the medical field, for the physiological field, for the biological field, for the field of the external sciences or of external social life. Even if the higher hierarchies are not accessible at this first level of clairvoyance, what is around us in the form of spirit can truly be the object of the human soul's present state. And in the most comprehensive sense, it depends on the will whether people arise in our Anthroposophical Society who can bear witness to this, a valid witness, because it is felt directly, felt as a living source of truth, a valid living witness to the inner truth of the anthroposophical.

This is also connected with what is necessary for the Anthroposophical Society: that personalities must arise in it who, if I may use the paradoxical expression, have the good will to will. Today one calls will any desire; but a desire is not a will. Some would like something to succeed in such and such a way. That is not will. The will is active power. That is missing today in the broadest sense. It is lacking in the modern man. But it must not be lacking within the Anthroposophical Society. There calm enthusiasm must be anchored in strong will. That also belongs to the living conditions of the Anthroposophical Society.

The aim of everything we have been considering during the last three days, my dear friends, has been to point the way in which the human being can once more be converted, as it were, from an earth citizen to a citizen of the cosmos, how the horizon of his life can be expanded to the reaches of the universe, and how thereby his earthly life, too, can be enriched, not only as regards such expansion, but in the intensity of his inner impulses as well.

Yesterday I told you how a genuine spiritual approach can disclose the true nature of the planets: that they are not the mere physical bodies of which modern astronomy tells us, but rather that they can enter our consciousness as manifestations of spiritual beings. In this connection I spoke of the moon and of Saturn. It is not possible in the allotted time to consider each separate planet, nor is it necessary for our present purposes. My aim was merely to point out how our whole frame of mind can be expanded from the earth to cosmic space. But only in this way does it become possible to feel the outer world as part of ourself, in the same way as we do all that takes place inside our skin—our breathing, circulation, and so forth.

Present-day natural science considers our earth merely a dead mineral body. In our civilization it never occurs to a man who is studying some aspect of cosmology, for example, that there is no element of reality in what he has in mind. The present frame of mind is astonishingly obtuse in the matter of a feeling for reality. People cheerfully call a saline crystal “real,” and also a rose, without in any way differentiating these realities from each other. Yet a saline crystal is a self-contained reality bounded within itself, while a rose is not. A rose can have no existence other than in connection with the rosebush. A rose—I refer to the flower—cannot come into being of itself. So if we imagine the flower of a rose at all—even if it fills us with delight to see this conception realized—we have an abstraction, for all that we can touch it: we have not the reality represented by the rosebush. Nor is there any true reality in that earth of primitive rock, slate, limestone, etc., described by modern external science for there is no such earth as that: it is purely fictitious. Has not the earth produced substantial plants, animals, human beings? That is all part of the earth, just as much as is the crystalline slate of mountain ranges; and if I only consider an earth consisting of stone I have no earth at all. Nothing that external natural science deals with today in any branch of geology is a reality.

So what we should do in this our last lecture is to proceed not only logically but realistically. The obvious errors in the general knowledge of today are not very formidable obstacles because they can readily be refuted. The worst evil in present-day knowledge and cognition is what appears to be absolutely irrefutable. You see, the calculation of everything in the modern science of geology that pertains, for instance, to the origin of the earth, so and so many million years ago, calls for mental brilliance and exact knowledge. True, these calculations disagree by a trifle: some call it twenty million years, others two hundred million; but people of today take such figures in their stride—in other fields as well. {In the matter of post-war inflation, for example, the situation reached a point in 1923 at which 2 billion Marks had the value of 1 pre-war Mark.} In spite of all this, however, the method employed for such computations really calls for the greatest respect. It is exact, it is accurate—but in what way? It is comparable to the following procedure: I examine a human heart today, and then again in a month. By some sort of more sensitive examination I discover changes in this human heart, so I know how it has altered in the course of a month. Then I observe it again after the lapse of another month, and so forth; that is, I apply the same method to the human heart that geologists use to calculate geologic epochs by millions of years: they compute the little changes by the variations of deposits in the strata, and so forth, in order to arrive at the time lapses. But what am I going to do with the conclusions arrived at concerning the changes in the human heart? I can apply that method to these changes and figure out how this human heart looked three hundred years ago and how it will look in another three hundred years. The calculation may be quite correct, only this heart was not in existence three hundred years ago, nor will it be three hundred years hence.—Similarly, the most brilliant and exact methods of computation tempt the present science of geology into setting forth how the earth looked three million years ago, when there was no trace of Silurian or other strata. Again, the figures can be perfectly correct, but the earth was not in existence. The physicists today calculate the changes that will occur in various substances in twenty million years. In this direction American scientists have done some extraordinarily interesting research and have told us, for instance, how albumen is going to look then—only the earth will no longer be in existence as a physical cosmic body.

Logical methods, then—exactitude—these really constitute the greatest danger, because they are incapable of refutation. Given the correct method, a statement of what the heart looked like three hundred years ago, or how the earth appeared two hundred million years ago, cannot be disproved, nor would it be of any avail to occupy oneself with such refutations: what we need is a realistic way of thinking, a realistic way of looking at the world.

The indispensable factor in every domain of spiritual science is just such a universal grasp of reality; and by means of such methods as I have described—inner, intimate methods that lead to an acquaintance with the population of the moon and that of Saturn—one learns as well, not only the relation of the earth to its own beings, but the relation of every being of the universe to the being of the cosmos. Everywhere in the world matter contains spirit, for matter is, of course, only the expression of spirit. At every point imagination, inspiration, and intuition find the spirit in the sensible, in the physical—not as enclosed in sharp contours, but as incessant mobility, as perpetual life. And just as there is no reality in the stone formations offered us by geology—for it is a matter of seeking the earth, including its production of plants, animals and physical men—so, if it is to be grasped in its all-embracing entirety, the earth must be understood as the outer, physical configuration of spirit.

Through imagination we learn first how the spirit principle of the earth differs from that of the human being, if I may so express it. In confronting someone, I perceive many different expressions of his being: I notice how he walks, I hear how he speaks, I see his physiognomy and the gestures of his hands and arms; but all this impels me to seek a homogeneous psycho-spiritual principle dominating him. And just as here one instinctively searches for a unified psycho-spiritual principle in the self-enclosed human being, so imaginative cognition, in contemplating the earth, finds not an undivided earth-spirit principle, but a multiplicity of manifold variety. It is therefore wrong to infer by analogy, for example, a homogeneous spirit principle in the earth from the spirit principle of man; for true vision reveals a multiplicity of earth spirituality, of spiritual beings, as it were, that dwell in the kingdoms of nature. But these spiritual beings are passing through a life: they are in a process of becoming.

Now let us see what this imagination perceives during the course of a year in the way of earth activity when it is supplemented by inspiration, and we will direct our soul's gaze first to the winter. Outwardly, frost and snow cover the ground, and the germs of the earth beings, of the plants, so to speak, are received back into the earth. All that is connected with the earth as germination—we can here ignore the world of animals and men—is withdrawn by the earth into itself. In addition to the familiar burgeoning life of spring and summer, winter shows us dying life. But what does this dying life of winter mean in a spiritual sense? It means that those spiritual beings whom we call elemental spiritual beings—beings that constitute the life-giving principle proper, especially in plants—withdraw into the earth itself and become intimately connected with it. Such is the imaginative aspect of the earth in winter: it takes into its body, as it were, its spiritual elemental beings and shelters them there. In winter the earth is at its most spiritual; that is, it is most fully permeated by its elemental spirit beings.

Like all super-sensible observation, all this passes over into feeling, into sensibility, in him who envisions it. As he feelingly observes the earth in winter and sees the snow on the ground, he knows that this makes a covering for the earth's body so that within it the elemental spirit-beings of earth life themselves may dwell. With the coming of spring the relation of these beings to the earth is transformed into a relation to the cosmic environment. Everything in these beings that during the winter had produced a close relationship with the earth itself becomes related to the cosmic environment in spring: the elemental beings seek to escape out of the earth; and spring really consists of the earth's sacrificial devotion to the universe in letting its elemental beings flow out into it. In winter these elemental beings need repose in the bosom of the earth; in spring they need to stream up through the air, through the atmosphere—to be determined by the spiritual forces of the planetary system, namely, of Mercury, Mars, Jupiter, and so on. Nothing that can act upon the earth spirits from the planetary system does so in winter: this commences in the spring. And here we can observe a more spiritual cosmic process, and compare it with a corresponding but more material one in the human being: our breathing process. We inhale the outer air, hold it in our own body, then exhale it again. In-breathing, out-breathing—that is one component of human life.

Now, in the winter the earth has inhaled its whole spirituality, and with the commencement of spring it starts to exhale it again into the cosmos. In the very old periods of human evolution, when there still existed a sort of instinctive clairvoyance, men felt this; and therefore they felt it to be in conformity with earth existence to celebrate the Christmas Festival during the winter solstice. Then the earth was at its most spiritual—that was the time when it could hold the mystery of the Christmas Festival. The Redeemer could unite only with an earth that had drawn all its spirituality into itself. But for the festival intended to induce a feeling in man that he belongs not only to the earth but to the whole universe, that as an earth citizen his soul can be awakened through cosmic agencies, for this festival of resurrection only that season could serve which carries all the spirituality of the earth out into the cosmos. That is why we find the Christmas Festival linked with phenomena pertaining to the earth, with the dark of winter, with a sort of earth sleep, while on the other hand we see the Easter Festival so fitted into the course of the seasons that we determine it not by earthly but by cosmic events: the first Sunday after the first full moon of spring. It was the stars that in former times had to tell men when Easter should be celebrated—the time when the whole earth opens itself to the cosmos. One resorted to the cosmic script: man had to become aware that he is an earth being, and that at the Spring Festival of Easter he has to open himself to cosmic reaches.

It positively hurts to hear people discussing such glorious thoughts of a bygone age as they have been doing now for twenty or twenty-five years: well-meaning people who do not want the Easter Festival to be so movable. At the very least, they say, it should be held on the first Sunday in April; they want it all quite external and abstract. I have had to listen to arguments pointing out that it creates confusion in commercial ledgers to have Easter so movable, and that business could be carried on in a much more regular way if the date of Easter were strictly assigned. It is really distressing to see how world-alien our civilization has become—this civilization that fancies itself practical. A suggestion such as the one just mentioned is as unpractical as can be, because our civilization can establish something that may be practical for a day, but never for a century. In order to be practical for a century, the matter in question must be in harmony with the universe. But herein the cycle of the seasons must ever be able to point man to his inner life in conjunction with the entire cosmos.

Advancing from spring toward summer, the earth more and more loses its inner spirituality. This spirituality, these elemental beings, pass from the terrestrial to the extra-terrestrial realm and come wholly under the influence of the cosmic planetary world; and in a former epoch this was celebrated in the great and profound rites performed in certain Mysteries at the height of summer, the season in which we have instituted the Festival of St. John. This was the time when the initiates of yore, the Mystery priests of those sanctuaries where the St. John Festival was celebrated in its original significance, were deeply permeated with the contemplation: That which in the winter time, during the winter solstice, I had to seek by gazing into the interior of the earth through the blanket of snow that became transparent for me, that I will now find by directing my vision outward; and the elemental beings that during the winter were determined by what pertains to the inner earth, these are now determined by the planets. From the beings which in winter I had to seek in the earth I gather, at the height of summer, knowledge of their experiences with the planets.—And just as we experience our respiratory process unconsciously, simply as something inwardly a part of our existence, so man once experienced his existence as part of the course of the seasons in the spirituality that pertains to the earth. In winter he sought his kindred elemental nature-beings in the depths of the earth, in midsummer he sought them high in the clouds. In the earth he found them inwardly permeated and saturated with their own earth forces coupled with what the moon forces have left behind in the earth; and in the summertime he found them given over to the vast universe.

And when summer begins to wane after the St. John season, the earth starts inbreathing its spirituality again; and once more the time approaches for the earth to harbor its spirituality within.

We are nowadays little inclined to observe this in-and out-breathing of the earth. Human respiration is more a physical process; the breathing of the earth is a spiritual process—the passing out of the elemental earth-beings into cosmic space and their re-immersion in the earth. Yet it is a fact that just as we participate, in the tenor of our inner life, in what goes on in our circulation, so, as true human beings, we take part in the cycle of the seasons. As the blood circulation inside us is essential for our existence, the circulation of the elemental beings between earth and the heavens is indispensable for us as well; and only the bluntness of their sensibility prevents men today from glimpsing the factors within themselves that are conditioned by this external course of the year. {See: Rudolf Steiner, Calendar of the Soul, Anthroposophic Press, New York.} But the very necessity which in the course of time will compel men to learn to receive the ideas of spiritual science, of super-sensible cognition—the necessity to develop the inner activity indispensable for a full realization of what spiritual-scientific revelations entrust them with—this in itself will sharpen and refine their capacity for sentient receptivity.

This, my dear Friends, is what you really should await as a result of deep absorption in that super-sensible cognition aimed at by anthroposophy. You see, if you read a book or a lecture cycle on anthroposophy just as you read any other book—that is, as abstractly as you read other books—there is no point whatever in reading anthroposophic literature at all. In that case I should advise reading cookery books or technical books on mechanics: that would be more useful; or read about How to Become a Good Business Man. Reading books or listening to lectures on anthroposophy has sense only when you realize that to receive its messages a frame of mind is called for totally different from the one involved in the gleaning of other information. This is confirmed even by the fact that those who today fancy themselves particularly clever consider anthroposophic literature quite mad. Well, they must have a reason for this view, and it is this: Everybody else describes things quite differently, presents the world in an entirely different way; and we cannot stand these anthroposophists who come along and change it all around.

And indeed, the conclusions reached by anthroposophy and appearing in the world today are very different from what emanates from the other quarters; and I must say that a certain policy adhered to by some of our friends, namely, that of making anthroposophy generally palatable by minimizing the discrepancies between it and the trivial opinions of others—such efforts cannot be approved at all, though they are frequently met with. What is needed is a totally different attitude, a different orientation of the soul, if the message of anthroposophy is to be considered plausible, comprehensible, understandable, intelligent—instead of mad.

But given this different orientation, not only the human intellect but the human Gemüt will in a short time undergo a schooling that will render it more sensitive to impressions: it will no longer feel winter merely as the time for donning a heavy coat, or summer as the signal for shedding various articles of clothing; but rather, it will learn to feel the subtle transitions occurring in the course of the year, from the cold snow of winter to the sultry midsummer of earth life. We shall learn to sense the course of the year as we do the expressions of a living, soul-endowed being. Indeed, the proper study of anthroposophy can bring us to the point at which we feel the manifestations of the seasons as we do the assent or dissent in the soul of a friend. Just as in the words of a friend and in the whole attitude of his soul we can perceive the warm heartbeat of a soul-endowed being whose manner of speaking to us is quite different from that of a lifeless thing, so nature, hitherto mute, will begin to speak to us as though out of her soul. In the cycle of the seasons we shall learn to feel soul, soul in the process of becoming; we will learn to listen to what the year as the great living being has to tell us, instead of occupying ourself only with the little living beings; and we shall find our place in the whole soul-endowed cosmos.

But then, when summer passes into autumn, and winter approaches, something very special will speak to us out of nature. One who has gradually acquired the sensitive feeling for nature just described—and anthroposophists will notice in due time that this can indeed be brought about in the soul, in the Gemüt, through anthroposophical endeavor—such a one will learn to distinguish between nature-consciousness, engendered during the spring and summer, and self-consciousness proper which thrives in the fall and winter. What is nature consciousness? When spring comes, the earth develops its sprouting, blossoming life; and if I react to this in the right way, if I let all that the spring really embraces speak within me—I need not be conscious of it: it speaks to the unconscious depths of a consummate human life as well—if I achieve all this I do not merely say, the flower is blooming, the plant is germinating, but I feel a true concord with nature and can say, my ego blooms in the flower, my ego germinates in the plant. Nature-consciousness is engendered only by learning to take part in all that develops in the burgeoning and unfolding life of nature. To be able to germinate with the plant, to blossom with the plant, to bear fruit with the plant, that is what is meant by “passing out of one's own inner self” and by “becoming one with outer nature.” Truly, the term “to develop spirituality” does not mean to become abstract: it means to be able to follow the spirit in its being and expansion. And if, by participating in the germinating, the flowering, and the bearing fruit, man develops this delicate feeling for nature during the spring and summertime, he prepares himself to live in devotion to the universe, to the firmament, precisely at the height of summer. Every little firefly will be for him a mysterious revelation of the cosmos; every breath in the atmosphere in midsummer will proclaim the cosmic principle within the terrestrial.

But then—if we have learned to feel with nature, to blossom with the flowers, to germinate with the seeds, to take part in the bearing of fruit—then, because we have learned to dwell in nature with our own being, we cannot help co-experiencing the essence of the fall and winter as well. He who has learned to live with nature in the spring learns also to die with nature in the autumn. Thus we attain again by a different way to those sensations that once so intensely permeated the soul of the Mithras priest, as I have described. He sensed the course of the seasons in his own body. That is no longer possible for present-day mankind; but what will become more and more incumbent upon humanity in the near future—and herein anthroposophists must be the pioneers—is to experience the cycle of the seasons: to learn to live with the spring and to die with the autumn.

But man must not die: he must not let himself be overpowered. He can live united with burgeoning, blossoming nature, and in doing so he can develop his nature-consciousness; but when he experiences the dying in nature the experience is a challenge to oppose this dying with the creative forces of his own inner being. Then the spirit-soul principle, his true self-consciousness, will come to life within him; and by sharing in nature's dying during the fall and winter he will become in the highest degree the awakener of his own self-consciousness. In this way the human being evolves: he transforms himself in the course of the seasons by experiencing this alternation of nature-consciousness and self-consciousness. When he takes part in nature's dying, that is the time when his inner life force must awake; when nature draws her elemental beings into herself the inner human force must become the awakening of self-consciousness.

Michael forces! Now we feel them again. In the old days of instinctive clairvoyance the picture of Michael's combat with the Dragon arose from quite different premises. Now, however, if we vividly comprehend the idea embraced in nature-consciousness—self-consciousness: spring-summer—autumn-winter, the end of September will once more reveal to us the same force that points us to the victorious power which should evolve on this grave if we take part in the dying of nature: the victorious power that fans the true, strong self-consciousness of man into bright flame. Here we have again Michael vanquishing the Dragon.

It is indispensable that anthroposophical knowledge, anthroposophical cognition, should stream into the human Gemüt as a force. And the way leads from the dry and abstract, although exact conceptions of today to that goal where the living enlightenment taken into our Gemüt once more confronts us with something as full of life as was in olden times the glorious picture of Michael in battle with the Dragon. This infuses into our cosmogony something very different from abstract concepts; and furthermore, do not imagine that such experience is without consequences for the totality of man's life on earth!

I have frequently set forth in our meetings here in Vienna how we can enter and feel at home in the consciousness of immortality, in the awareness of prenatal existence. At this meeting I wanted particularly to show you how we can gather into our Gemüt the spiritual forces from the spiritual world, in the wholly concrete sense. It is truly not enough to talk in a general, pantheistic, or other vague way about spirit underlying all matter. That would be just as abstract as it would to be satisfied with the truism: Man is endowed with spirit. What possible meaning could that have? The term spirit takes on meaning only when it speaks to us in concrete details, when it keeps revealing itself to us concretely, when it can bring us comfort, uplift, joy. The pantheistic “spirit” in philosophical speculations means nothing whatever. Only the living spirit, that speaks to us in nature in the same way as the human soul in man speaks to us, can enter the human Gemüt in a vitalizing and exalting way. But when this does occur our Gemüt will derive powers from the enlightenment transformed in it, precisely those powers that are needed in our social life. During the last three or four centuries mankind has simply acquired the habit of considering all nature, and human existence as well, in intellectual, abstract conceptions; and now that humanity is confronted with the great problems of social chaos, people try to solve these, too, with the same intellectual means. But never in the world will anything but chimeras be brought forth in this way. A consummate human heart is a prerequisite to the right to an opinion in the social realm; but this no man can possess without finding his relation with the cosmos, and in particular, with the spiritual substance of the cosmos.

When the human Gemüt will have received into itself spirit-consciousness—the spirit-consciousness engendered by the transition from nature-consciousness (spring-summer) to self-consciousness (autumn-winter)—then will dawn the solution, among others, of the social problems of the moment. Not the intellectual substance of such problems as the social question, but the forces they need, depend in a deep sense upon the contingency of a sufficient number of men being able to make such spiritual impulses their own.

All this must be brought to our Gemüt if we would consider adding the autumn festival, the Michael Festival, to the three we have: the festivals of Christmas, Easter and St. John, that have become mere shadows. How wonderful it would be if this Michael Festival could be celebrated at the end of September with the whole power of the human heart! But never must it be celebrated by making certain arrangements that bring about nothing but abstract Gemüt sensations: a Michael Festival calls for human beings who feel in their souls in fullest measure everything that can activate spirit-consciousness.

What does Easter represent in the year's festivals? It is a festival of resurrection. It commemorates the Resurrection realized in the Mystery of Golgotha through the descent of Christ, the Sun-Spirit, into a human body. First death, then resurrection: that is the outer aspect of the Mystery of Golgotha. One who understands the Mystery of Golgotha in this sense sees death and resurrection in this way of redemption; and perhaps he will feel in his soul that he must unite in his Gemüt with Christ, the victor over death, in order to find resurrection in death. But Christianity does not end with the traditions associated with the Mystery of Golgotha: it must advance. The human Gemüt turns inward and deepens more and more as time goes on; and in addition to this festival that brings alive the Death and Resurrection of Christ, man needs that other one which reveals the course of the year as having its counterpart within him, so that he can find in the round of the seasons first of all the resurrection of the soul—in fact, the necessity for achieving this resurrection—in order that the soul may then pass through the portal of death in a worthy way. Easter: death, then resurrection; Michaelmas: resurrection of the soul, then death. This makes of the Michael Festival a reversed Easter Festival. Easter commemorates for us the Resurrection of Christ from death; but in the Michael Festival we must feel with all the intensity of our soul: In order not to sleep in a half-dead state that will dim my self-consciousness between death and a new birth, but rather, to be able to pass through the portal of death in full alertness, I must rouse my soul through my inner forces before I die. First, resurrection of the soul—then death, so that in death that resurrection can be achieved which man celebrates within himself.

I trust these lectures have contributed a little toward bridging the gap between the purely mental enlightenment anthroposophy has to offer, and what this anthroposophy can mean to the human Gemüt. That would make me very happy; and I should be able to look back affectionately on all that we have been privileged to discuss in these lectures, which were truly not addressed to your mind but to your Gemüt, and through which, in a manner not customary nowadays, I wanted to point out, among other things, the social stimulus so sorely needed by mankind today. Humanity will become attuned to such social impulses only by an inner deepening of the Gemüt. That is what fills my soul, now that I must bring these lectures to a close. It was from an inner need of my heart that I delivered them to you, my dear Austrian friends.

The fundamental feeling which I have wanted to call forth is this:—The individual who finds himself within the Anthroposophical Movement should begin to feel something of the peculiar karmic position which the impulse to Anthroposophy gives to a man. We cannot but confess that in the ordinary course of life man feels very little of his karma. He confronts his life as though the things that become his life's experience happened by fortuitous concatenations of circumstance. He pays little heed to the fact that the things that meet him in earthly life from birth till death contain the inner, karmic relationships of destiny. Or, if he does not consider this, he is all too prone to believe that a kind of fatalism is herein expressed,—and that human freedom is thereby called into question, and the like.

I have often said that the more intensely we penetrate the karmic connections, the more do we see the true essence of freedom. We need not therefore fear that by entering into the karmic relationships more accurately we shall lose our open and unimpaired vision of the essence of human freedom. I have described the matters connected with the former earthly lives of those who come into the Michael community, and with their lives between death and a new birth. You will have seen that with all such human beings, that is to say, in the last resort, with all of you—it is of the greatest importance, that the Spiritual plays a deep and significant part in the whole inner configuration of the soul.

In our materialistic age with all its conditions of life, of education and upbringing, a man can only come sincerely to a thing like Anthroposophy (otherwise his coming to it is insincere)—he can only come to it sincerely through the fact that he bears within him a karmic impulse impelling him towards the Spiritual. In this karmic impulse are summed up all those experiences which he underwent in the way I have described before he came down into the present earthly life.

Now, my dear friends, when a man is thus strongly united with spiritual impulses which work immediately upon his soul, he will as he descends from the spiritual into the physical worlds, enter less deeply, unite himself less strongly with the external, bodily nature. All those who have grown into the Michael stream as above described, were thus predestined to enter into this physical body with a certain reservation, if I may put it so. This too lies deep in the karma of the souls of anthroposophists.

In those, on the other hand, who out of an inner impulse quite consciously and anxiously hold themselves at a distance from things anthroposophical, we shall always find that they are fully and firmly established in the physical bodily nature. In the men of today who turn to that spiritual life which Anthroposophy would give, we find a looser relationship at any rate of the astral body and Ego-organisation with the physical and etheric organisation.

Now this means that such a man will less easily come to terms with his life. He will find life less easy to deal with, for the simple reason that he has more possibilities to choose from than other men. And he easily grows out of the very things that other men easily grow into. Think only, my dear friends, to what an intense degree many a human being of today is what the connections of outer life have made of him. No one can doubt that he fits into these connections, however questionable the thing may sometimes be in other respects. We see him as a clerk, a City man, a Builder, a Contractor, a Captain of industry and so forth. He is what he is as an absolute matter of course. There is no question about it. True, such a man will sometimes say he feels he was born for a better, or at any rate a different kind of life; but such a saying is not taken so very seriously. And now compare the infinite difficulties we find in those who are drawn by an inner impulse into the spiritual life of Anthroposophy. Perhaps we see it nowhere with such remarkable intensity as in the youth, and notably the youngest of the youth.

Take for instance the older pupils of the Waldorf School, those in the top classes of the school. We find, both in our boy and girl pupils, that they progress comparatively quickly in their development of soul and mind and spirit. But this does not make life any easier to take hold of for the young people. On the contrary, it generally becomes more difficult—being, as it is, more complicated. The possibilities become wider and more far-reaching. In the ordinary course of modern life, (certain exceptions being omitted) it is not overwhelmingly difficult for those who stand as teachers or educators beside the growing adolescent, to find the ways and means of giving sound advice. But when we bring our children on as we do in the Waldorf School, it becomes far more difficult to give advice, for the simple reason that the universal humanity is more developed in them. The wide horizon which the boy or girl acquires in the Waldorf School, places before their inner vision a greater number of possibilities.

Hence it is so necessary for Waldorf teachers—who again have been guided to this calling by their karma—to acquire a wide horizon and a broad outlook, a knowledge of the world and a sound feeling of what is going on in the world. At this point all the detailed educational principles and methods are far less important than wideness of outlook. Here again, in the karma of such a teacher, we see how large the number of possibilities becomes; far, far greater than in ordinary life. The child or adolescent confronts the Waldorf teacher, once again, not with definite and defined, but with manifold riddles,—differentiated in all conceivable directions.

The real karmic conditions and pre-disposing causes of all that impels a man to Anthroposophy will best be understood if we speak not in pedantic outline and definition, but rather hint at the things in one way or another, characterising more the atmosphere in which, if I may put it so, anthroposophists unfold their lives.

All this makes it necessary for the anthroposophist to pay heed to one condition of his karma—a condition that is sure to be present in him to a high degree. Much can be said,—and we shall still have to say many things—about the reasons why one or another character or temperament is drawn to Anthroposophy after the events of the spiritual world which I have described. But all these impulses, which bring the single anthroposophists to Anthroposophy, have as it were one counterpart, which the Spirit of the World has made more strong in them than in other men. All the many possibilities that are there with respect to the most manifold things in life, demand from the anthroposophist initiative—inner initiative of soul. We must become aware of this. For the anthroposophist this proverb must hold good. He must say to himself: “Now that I have become an anthroposophist through my karma, the impulses which have been able to draw me to Anthroposophy require me to be attentive and alert. For somehow or somewhere, more or less deeply in my soul, there will emerge the necessity for me to find inner initiative in life,—initiative of soul which will enable me to undertake something or to make some judgment or decision out of my own inmost being.” Verily, this is written in the karma of every single anthroposophist: “Be a man of initiative, and beware lest through hindrances of your own body, or hindrances that otherwise come in your way, you do not find the centre of your being, where is the source of your initiative. Observe that in your life all joy and sorrow, all happiness and pain will depend on the finding or not finding of your own individual initiative.” This should stand written as though in golden letters, constantly before the soul of the anthroposophist. Initiative lies in his karma, and much of what meets him in this life will depend on the extent to which he can become willingly, actively conscious of it.

You must realise that very, very much has been said in these few words. For in our time there is extraordinarily much that can lead one astray with respect to all that guides and directs one's judgment; and without clear judgment on the conditions of life, initiative will not find its way forth from the deep foundations of the soul. Now what is it that can bring us to clear judgment on the things of life, especially in this our age? My dear friends, let us here consider one of the most important and characteristic features of our time. Let us then answer the question: How can we come to a certain clarity of judgment in face of it?

You will see presently that in what I am now going to tell you we have a kind of “egg of Columbus.” With the egg of Columbus the point was to have the happy idea—how to set it up so that it would stand. In what I shall now tell you the point will also be to have the happy idea.

We live in the age of materialism. All that is taking place, by forces of destiny around us and within us, stands in the sign of materialism on the one hand, and of the intellectualism that is already so widespread, on the other. I characterised this intellectualism yesterday when I spoke of journalism and of the impulse everywhere to expatiate on the affairs of the world in public meetings, mass meetings and the like. We must become aware, to what an extent the man of today is subject to the influences of these two currents of the time. For it is almost as impossible to escape from these two, from intellectualism and materialism, as it is to avoid getting wet if you go out in the rain without an umbrella. These things are around us everywhere. After all, there are certain things we simply cannot know (and yet we have to know),—which we cannot know unless we read them in the papers. There are certain things we cannot learn (and we have to learn them) unless we learn them in the sense of materialism. How is one to become a doctor today, unless he is willing to consume a goodly portion of materialism? He can do no other than take the materialism too. He must do so as a matter of course, and if he is unwilling to do so he cannot become a proper doctor in the sense of the present age. Thus we are perpetually exposed to these things. This surely enters very strongly indeed into our karma.

Now all these things are as though created purposely to undermine initiative in the souls of men. Every public meeting, every mass meeting to which we go, only fulfils its purpose as such, if the initiative of the individual human being, with the exception of the speakers and leaders, is undermined. Nor does any newspaper fulfil its purpose if it does not create an atmosphere of opinion, thus undermining the individual's initiative.

These things must be seen. Moreover, we must remember that this ordinary consciousness of man is a very tiny chamber in the soul, while all that is going on around him, in the forms which I have just described, has a gigantic influence on his sub-conscious life. And after all, we have no alternative. Beside the fact that we are human beings pure and simple, we must be “contemporaries” of our age. Some people think it is possible in a given age to be a human being pure and simple, but this too would lead to our downfall. We must also be men and women of our age. Of course it is bad if we are no more than this; but we must be contemporaries of our age, that is to say, we must have a feeling of what is going on in our own time.

Now it is true that many anthroposophists let their minds be carried away from a living feeling of what is present in their time. For they prefer to paddle in the Timeless. In this respect one has the strangest experiences in conversation with anthroposophists. They are very well aware, for instance, who Lycurgus was, but their ignorance of their contemporaries, every now and then, is simply touching.

This too is due to the fact that such a man is pre-disposed to the unfolding of inner initiative. His karma having placed him in the world with this quality, he is always in the position (forgive the comparison) of a bee that has a sting but is afraid to use it at the right moment. The sting is the initiative, but the man is afraid to use it. He is afraid, above all, of stinging into the Ahrimanic realm. Not that he fears that he will thereby hurt the Ahrimanic. No, he is afraid that the sting will recoil into his own body. This, to some extent, is what his fear is like. Thus through an undetermined fear of life the initiative remains inactive.

These are the things which we must see through. On all hands, theoretically and practically, we meet with the materialism of our time. It is powerful, and we let our initiative be put off by it. If an anthroposophist has a sense for these things, he will perceive how he is being confused, put off, thrown back on every hand by materialism theoretical and practical, even in the deepest impulses of his will. Now this gives a peculiar form to his karma. If you will observe yourselves truly, you will discover it in your lives day by day, from morning until evening. And out of all this there naturally arises as a prevalent feeling of life: How shall I prove, theoretically and practically, the falsehood of materialism? This impulse lives in the hearts and minds of many anthroposophists. Somehow or other they want to convict materialism of falsehood. It is the riddle of life, the riddle that life has set so many of us in theory and practice: How shall we contrive to prove the falsehood of materialism?

Here is one who has been through the schools and has become a learned man. You will find many an example in the Anthroposophical Society. Now he is awakened to be an anthroposophist. He feels a tremendous impulse to refute materialism, to fight it, to say all manner of things against it. So he begins to attack and refute materialism, and maybe he thinks that in this very act he stands most thoroughly within the stream of Michael. But as a rule he meets with little success, and we cannot but admit: these things that are said against materialism, though they often proceed from a thoroughly good will, do not succeed. They make no impression upon the materialist in theory or practice. Why not?

This is the very thing that hinders our clarity of judgment. Here stands the anthroposophist. In order not to be hampered in his initiative, he wants to be clear what it is that confronts him in materialism. He wants to probe the wrongness of materialism to its foundations. But as a rule he finds little success. He thinks he is refuting materialism, but it is ever on its legs again. Why is this so?

Now comes what I have called the egg of Columbus. Why is it so, my dear friends? It is due to the simple fact that materialism is true. I have said this many times. Materialism is not wrong, it is quite right. Here lies the reason. And the anthroposophist should learn in a very special way the lesson that materialism is right. He should learn it in this way:—Materialism is right, but it holds good of the outer physical body only. The others, who are materialists, know the physical only,—or at least they think they know it. Here lies the error, not in the materialism itself. When we learn anatomy or physiology or practical outer life in the materialistic way we learn the truth, but it holds good in the physical alone. This confession must be made out of the inmost depths of our human being. I mean, the confession that materialism is right in its own domain—nay more, that it is the splendid achievement of our age to have discovered what is right and true in the domain of materialism. But the thing also has its practical, its karmically practical aspect.

This is what will happen in the karma of many an anthroposophist. He will come to have the feeling: Here am I living with human beings with whom indeed karma has united me. (I spoke of this yesterday). Here am I living with human beings who know materialism only. They only know what is true of the physical life, and they cannot approach Anthroposophy because they are put off by the very correctness of the knowledge that they have.

Now, my dear friends, we live in the age of Michael, and in our souls is the Intellectuality that fell from Michael. When Michael himself administered the Cosmic Intelligence, these things were different. From the materialism of that time, the Cosmic Intelligence was ever and again tearing his soul away. There were of course materialists even in former ages, but not as in our age. In former ages a man might be a materialist. Then with his Ego and astral body he was implanted in his physical and etheric body. He felt his physical body. But the Cosmic Intelligence, that Michael administered, tore his soul away from it ever and again. Today we are side by side—indeed we are often karmically united—with men in whom it is as follows. They too have the physical body; but the Cosmic Intelligence has fallen away from Michael and is living individually,—personally, as it were,—in the human being. Hence the Ego—all that is soul and spirit—remains in the physical body. Thus there are standing, side by side with us, men whose soul and spirit has dived deep down into their physical body.

When we stand side by side with non-spiritual human beings, we must see these things according to the truth. Our standing beside them must not merely call forth in us sympathy or antipathy in the ordinary sense. It must be an experience that moves our soul deeply, and it can indeed be a shattering experience, my dear friends.

To realise how tragic, how deeply moving an experience it must be, to stand thus side by side with materialists (who, as I said before, are right in their own way) we need only look at those among them who are often highly gifted and who out of certain instincts may have very good impulses indeed; yet they cannot come to spirituality. We see the tragedy of it when we come to consider the great gifts and noble qualities of many of those who are materialists. For after all, there can be no question but that they who in this time of great decisions do not find their way to the Spirit, will suffer harm in their soul-life for the next incarnation. Great as their qualities may be, they will suffer harm. And when we see how through their karma a number of human beings today have the inner impulse to spirituality while others cannot come near to it,—when we behold this contrast—our karmic living-together with such as I have here described should find a deep response within our souls. It should touch us and move us with a sense of tragedy. Until it does so, we shall never come to terms with our own karma. For if we sum up all that I have said of Michaelism, (if I may now so call it) then we shall find: the Michaelites are indeed taken hold of in their souls by a power that is seeking to work from the Spiritual into the full human being, even down into the Physical. I described it yesterday as follows. I said: these human beings will put aside the element of race,—the element which, from natural foundations of existence, gives the human being such or such a stamp. If a man is taken hold of by the Spirit in this earthly incarnation inasmuch as he now becomes an anthroposophist he is thereby prepared in future to become a man no longer distinguished by such external features but distinguished rather by what he was in the present incarnation. Let us be conscious of this in all humility: The time will come when in these human beings the Spirit will reveal its own power to form the physiognomy,—to shape the whole form of man.

Such a thing has never yet been revealed in the history of the world. Hitherto the physiognomies of men have been formed on the basis of their nationality, out of the Physical. Today we can still tell by the physiognomy of men, where they hail from,—especially when they are young, when the cares of life or the joys and divine enthusiasms of life have not yet left their mark. But in the time to come there will be human beings by whose physiognomy and features alone one will be able to tell what they were in their past incarnation. One will know that in their past incarnation they penetrated to the things of the Spirit. Then will the others stand beside them, and what will their karma then signify? It will have cast aside the ordinary karmic affinities.

My dear friends, in this respect he above all who knows how to take life in real earnest will tell you: One has been karmically united, or is still karmically united, with many who cannot find their way into this spirituality. And however many a kinship may still be left in life, one feels a more or less deep estrangement, a justified estrangement. The karmic connection, as it would work itself out in ordinary life, falls away; it goes. But it remains for something different. I would put it in this way:—From the one who stands outside in the field of materialism to the one who stands in the field of spirituality, nothing else will remain of karma; but this one thing will remain, that he must see him. He will become attentive to him. We can look to a time in the future, when those who in the course of the 20th century are coming ever more into the things of the Spirit, will stand side by side with others who were karmically united with them in the former life on earth. In that future time the karmic affinities, the karmic relationships, will make themselves felt far less. But of all the karmic relationships this will have remained: Those who are standing in the field of materialism will have to see and witness those who stand in the field of spirituality. Those who were materialists today will in the future have to look continually upon those who came to the things of the Spirit. This will have been left of karma.

Once again a shattering, a deeply moving act, my dear friends. And to what end? Truly it lies in a far-reaching Divine cosmic plan. For how will the materialists of today let anything be proved to them? By having it before their eyes—by being able to touch it with their hands. Those who stand in the field of materialism will be able to see with their eyes and touch with their hands those with whom they once were karmically united, perceiving in their physiognomy, in their whole expression, what the Spirit really is, for it will have become creative in outer form and feature. In such human beings it will thus be proved, visibly for the eyes of man, what the Spirit is as a creative power in the world. And it will be part of the karma of anthroposophists to demonstrate, for those who stand in the field of materialism today, that the Spirit truly is, and proves itself in man himself, through the wise councils of the Gods.

But to come to this, it is necessary for us to confront intellectualism, not in a vague and nebulous and ill-advised way, but truly. We must not go out, my dear friends, without an umbrella. I mean, we are exposed to all that I described above as the two streams—all the writing in the papers, all the talking in public meetings. As we cannot escape becoming wet if we go out without umbrellas, so these things too come over us, we cannot escape them. In the tenderest age of childhood,—when we are twenty to twenty-four years old—we have to pursue our studies (whatever they may be) through materialistic books. Yes, in this tender age of childhood—the age of twenty to twenty-four—they take good care to saturate and well prepare our inner life. For, as we study what is there put before us, we are trained in materialism by the very structure and configuration of the sentences. We are utterly defenseless. There is no help for it.

Such a thing cannot be countered by merely formal arguments. We cannot keep a man of today from being exposed to intellectual materialism. To write non-materialistic text-books on botany or anatomy today, simply would not do. The connections of life will not permit of it. The point is, my dear friends, that we should take hold of these things in no merely formal sense but in their reality. We must understand that since Michael no longer draws out the soul-and-spirit from the physical bodily nature as in times past, Ahriman can play his game with the soul-and-spirit as it lives within the body. Above all when the soul-spiritual is highly gifted and is yet firmly fastened in the body, then especially it can be exposed to Ahriman. Precisely in the most gifted of men does Ahriman find his prey,—so as to tear the Intelligence from Michael, remove it far from Michael. At this point something happens which plays a far greater part in our time than is generally thought. The Ahrimanic spirits, though they cannot incarnate, can incorporate themselves; temporarily they can penetrate human souls, permeate human bodies. In such moments the brilliant and overpowering spirit of an Ahrimanic Intelligence is stronger than anything that the individual being possesses,—far, far stronger. Then, however intelligent he may be, however much he may have learned, and especially if his physical body is thoroughly taken hold of by all his learning, an Ahrimanic spirit can for a time incorporate itself in him. Then it is Ahriman who looks out of his eyes, Ahriman who moves his fingers, Ahriman who blows his nose, Ahriman who walks.

Anthroposophists must not recoil from knowledge such as this. For such a thing alone can bring the realities of intellectualism before our souls. Ahriman is a great and outstanding Intelligence, and Ahriman's purpose with earthly evolution is overwhelming and thorough. He makes use of every opportunity. If the Spiritual has implanted itself so strongly in the bodily nature of a human being,—if the bodily nature is taken hold of by the Spirit to such an extent that the consciousness is thereby in a measure stunned or lowered or impaired,—Ahriman uses his opportunity. And then it happens (for in our age this has become possible) then it happens that a brilliant spirit takes possession of the human being, overpowering the human personality; and such a spirit, dwelling within a human personality and overpowering him, is able to work upon earth—able to work just like a human being.

This is the immediate striving of Ahriman, and it is strong. I have told you, my dear friends, of what will be fulfilled at the end of this century, with those who now come to the things of the Spirit and take them in full earnestness and sincerity. This is the time above all, which the Ahrimanic spirits wish to use most strongly. This is the time they want to use, because human beings are so completely wrapped up in the Intelligence that has come over them. They have become so unbelievably clever. Why, we are quite nervous today about the cleverness of the people we shall meet! We can scarcely ever escape from this anxiety, for nearly all of them are clever. Really we cannot escape from this anxiety about the cleverness of men. But of a truth the cleverness which is thus cultivated is used by Ahriman. And when moreover the bodies are especially adapted to a possible lowering or diminution of consciousness, it may happen that Ahriman himself emerges, incorporated in human form. Twice already it can be demonstrated that Ahriman has thus appeared as an author. And for those who desire as anthroposophists to have a clear and true vision of life, it will be a question of making no mistakes, even in such a case.

For what is the use of it, my dear friends, if someone finds a book somewhere and writes his name on it and he is not the author? The true author is confused with another. And if Ahriman is the author of a book, how can it be of any benefit if we do not perceive who is the true author, but hold a human being to be the author? For Ahriman by his brilliant gifts can find his way into everything—he can slip into the very style of a man. He has a way of approach to all things. What good can come of it if Ahriman is the real author, and we mistake it for a human work? To acquire the power of discrimination in this sphere too, is absolutely necessary, my dear friends.

I wanted to lead up to this point, describing thus in general a phenomenon which is also playing its part in our present age. In next Friday's lecture I shall have to speak of such phenomena in greater detail.

When we set out today to speak about Anthroposophy and the Threefold Movement with its various consequences—which indeed arise out of Anthroposophy, and must really be thought of as arising out of it,—then we must first of all hold before our souls that it is difficult to make oneself understood. And, without this feeling—that it is difficult to make oneself understood—we shall hardly be able to succeed as lecturers for anthroposophical Spiritual Science and all that is connected with it, in a way satisfying to ourselves. For if there is to be speaking about Anthroposophy which is appropriate, then this speaking must be entirely different from what one is accustomed to in accordance with the traditions of speaking. One has often fallen into the habit of speaking also about anthroposophical matters in the way one has become used to speaking in the age of materialism; but one is more apt thereby to obstruct the understanding for Anthroposophy, rather than to open up an approach to it.

We shall first of all have to make quite clear to ourselves what the content of the matter is that comes towards us in Anthroposophy and its consequences. And in these lectures I shall deal as I said yesterday, with the practice of lecturing, but only for anthroposophical and related matters, so that what I have to say applies only to these.

We must now make clear to ourselves that primarily it is the feeling for the central issue of the threefold order that must at first be stirred in our present humanity. It must after all be assumed that an audience of today does not begin to know what to do with the concept of the threefold order. Our speaking must slowly lead to the imparting first of a feeling for this threefold order in the audience.

During the time in which materialism has held sway, one has become accustomed to give expression to the things of the outer world through description. In this one had a kind of guidance in the outer world itself. Moreover, objects in the outer world are, I would say, too fixed for one to believe that, in the end, it makes much difference how one speaks about the things of the outer world; one need only give people some guidance on the way for perceiving this outer world. Then, in the end it comes to this: if, let us say, one delivers somewhere a popular lecture with experiments, and thereby demonstrates to people how this or that substance reacts in a retort, then they see how the substance reacts in the retort. And whether one then lectures this way or that way—a bit better, a bit less well, a hit more relevantly, a hit less relevantly—in the end makes no difference. And gradually it has tended to come to the point that such lectures and such talks are attended in order to see the experimenting, and what is spoken is just taken along as a kind of more or less agreeable or disagreeable side noise. One must express these things somewhat radically, just in order to show the exact direction in which civilization is moving in regard to these things.

When it is a matter of what to stimulate in people for doing, for willing, one is of the opinion that one must just “set up ideals”. People would have to accustom themselves to “apprehend ideals”, and thus one gradually glides more and more over into the utopian, when it is a matter of such things as the threefold order of the social organism.

So it has also happened in many an instance that many people who lecture about the threefold idea today absolutely call forth the opinion, through the manner in which they speak, that it is some utopia or other that should be striven for. And, since one is always of the opinion that what should be striven for in most cases cannot be expected to come in less than fifty or a hundred years—or many extend the time even further—so one also allows oneself, quite unconsciously, to approach speaking about things as if they would first ripen in fifty or a hundred years. One glides away from the reality very soon, and then talks about it thus: How will a small shop be set up in the threefold social organism? What will be the relation of the single person to the sewing machine in the threefold social organism?—and so on. Such questions are really put in abundance to any endeavor such as the threefolding of the social organism. As regards such an endeavor, which with all of its roots comes out of reality, one should not at all speak in this utopian fashion. For one should always evoke at least this feeling: the threefold order of the social organism is nothing which can be "made" in the sense that state constitutions can be made in a parliament—of the kind for example, that the Weimar National Assembly was. These are made! But one cannot speak in the same sense of making the threefold social organism.

Just as little can one speak of "organizing" in order to produce the threefold order. That which is an organism, this one does not organize; this grows. It is just in the nature of an organism that one does not have to organize it, that it organizes itself. That which can be organized is no organism. We must approach things from the start with these feelings, otherwise we shall not have the possibility of finding the appropriate expression.

The threefold order is something which indeed simply follows from the natural living together of people. One can falsify this natural living together of people—as has been the case, for example, in recent history—by extending the characteristic features of one member, the states-rights member, to both others. Then these two other members will simply become corrupted because they cannot prosper, just as someone cannot get on well in an unsuitable garment, that is too heavy, or the like.

It is in the natural relation of people that the threefold order of the social organism lives, that the independent spiritual life lives, that the rights or states life, regulated by the people's majority, lives, that the economic life, shaped solely out of itself, also lives. One can put strait jackets on the spiritual life, on the economic life, although one does not need them; but then its own life asserts itself continually nevertheless, and what we then experience outwardly is just this self-assertion. It is hence necessary to show that the threefolding of the social organism is implicit in the very nature of both the human being and the social life.

We see that the spiritual life in Europe was entirely independent and free until the 13th or 14th centuries, when, what was the free, independent spiritual life was first pushed into the universities. In this time you find the founding of the universities, and the universities then in turn slip by and by into the life of state. So that one can say: From about the 13th to the 16th or 17th century, the universities slip into the states-life, and with the universities, also the remaining educational institutions, without people really noticing it. These other institutions simply followed. This we have on the one hand.

On the other hand, until about the same period, we have free economic rule that found its true, middle-European expression in the free economic village communities. As the free spiritual life slipped into the universities, which are localized at first, and which later find shelter in the state, so does that which is the economic organization first receive a certain administration in the “rights” sense, when the cities emerge more and more. Then the cities, in the first place, organize this economic life, while earlier, when the village communities were setting the pace, it had grown freely. And then we see how increasingly, that which was centralized in the cities seeks protection in the larger territories of the states. Thus we see how the tendency of modern times ends in letting the spiritual life on the one hand, the economic life on the other, seek the protection of states which increasingly take on the character of domains constituted according to Roman law. This was actually the development in modern times.

We have reached that point in historical development where things can go no further like this, where a sense and a feeling for free spiritual life must once again be developed. When in a strait jacket, the spirit simply does not advance; because it only apparently advances, but in truth still remains behind—can never celebrate real births, but at most renaissances. It is just the same with the economic life.

Today we simply stand in the age in which we must absolutely reverse the movement which has developed in the civilized world of Europe with its American annex, the age in which the opposite direction must set in. For what has gone on developing for a time must reach a point at which something new must set in. Otherwise one runs into the danger of doing as one would when, with a growing plant, one were to say it should not be allowed to come to fruition, it should grow further, it should keep blooming on and on.—Then it would grow thus: bring forth a flower; then no seed, but again a flower, again a flower, and so on. Therefore it is absolutely necessary to familiarize oneself inwardly with these things, and to develop a feeling for the historical turning point at which we stand today.

But, just as in an organism every detail is necessarily formed as it is, so is everything in the world in which we live and which we help to shape, to be formed as it must be in its place in the sense of the whole. You cannot imagine, if you think realistically, that your ear lobe could be formed the very least bit differently from what it is, in conformity with your whole organism. Were your ear lobe only the least bit differently formed, then you would also have to have quite a different nose, different fingertips, and so forth. And just as the ear lobe is formed in the sense of the whole human being, so must also the lecture in which something flows be given—in the sense of the whole subject—that lecturing which is truly taking on new forms.

Such a lecture cannot be delivered in the manner which one could perhaps learn from the sermon-lecture. For the sermon-lecture as we still have it today, rests on the tradition which really goes back to the old Orient,—on a special attitude which the whole human being in the old Orient had toward speech. This characteristic was continued, so that it lived in a certain free way in Greece, lived in Rome, and shows its last spark most clearly in the particular relationship which the Frenchman has to his language. Not that I want to imply that every Frenchman preaches when he speaks; but a similar relationship, such as had to develop out of the oriental relationship to language still continues to live on in a definite way in the French handling of speech, only entirely in a declining movement.

This element which we can observe here in regard to language came to expression when one still learned speaking from the professors, as one could later, but now in the declining phase—professors who really continued to live on as mummies of ancient times and bore the title, “professor of elocution”. In former times, at almost every university, in every school, also in seminaries and so on there was such a professor of elocution, of rhetoric. The renowned Curtius [Note 1] of Berlin actually still bore the title “professor of elocution” officially. But the whole affair became too dull for him, and he did not lecture on elocution, but only demonstrated himself as a professor of elocution through being sent out by the faculty council on ceremonial occasions, since that was always the task of the professor of elocution. Nevertheless, in this Curtius made it his business to discharge his duties at such ceremonial occasions by paying as little regard as possible to the ancient rules of eloquence. For the rest, it was too dull for him to be a professor of elocution in times in which professors of elocution did not fit in any more, and he lectured on art history, on the history of Greek art. But in the university catalog he was listed as “professor of elocution”. This refers us back to an element that was present everywhere in speech in olden times.

Now, when we consider what is quite especially characteristic in the training of speech for the middle European languages, for German, for example, then indeed everything denoted in the original sense by the word “elocution” has not the least meaning. For something flowed into these languages that is entirely different from that which was peculiar to speaking in the times when elocution had to be taken seriously. In the Greek and Latin languages there is elocution. In the German language elocution is something quite impossible, when one looks inwardly at the essential.

Today, however, we are living definitely in a time of transition. That which was the speech element of the German language cannot continue to be used. Every attempt must be made to come out of this speech element and to come into a different speech element. This also is the task, in a certain sense, to be solved by him who would speak productively about Anthroposophy or the threefold idea. For only when a fairly large number of people are able to speak in this way, will Anthroposophy and the threefold idea be rightly understood in public, even in single lectures. Meanwhile, there are not a few who develop only a pseudo-understanding and pseudo-avowal for these.

If we look back on the special element in regard to speaking which was present in the times out of which the handling of elocution was preserved, we must say: then it was as if language grew out of the human being in quite a naive way, as his fingers grow, as his second teeth grow. From the imitation process speaking resulted, and language with its whole organization. And only after one had language did one come to the use of thinking.

And now it transpired that the human being when speaking to others about any problem had to see that the inner experience, the thought experience, to a certain extent clicked [einschnappte] into the language. The sentence structure was there. It was in a certain way elastic and flexible. And, more inward than the language was the thought element. One experienced the thought element as something more inward than the language, and let it click into the language, so that it fitted into it just as one fits the idea of a statue or the like into marble. It was entirely an artistic treatment of the language. Even the way in which one was meant to speak in prose had something similar to the way in which one was to express oneself in poetry. Rhetoric and elocution had rules which were not at all unlike the rules of poetic expression. (So as not to be misunderstood, I should like to insert here that the development of language does not exclude poetry. What I now say, I say for older arts of expression, and I beg you not to interpret it as if I wanted to assert that there can be no more poetry at all today. We need but treat the language differently in poetry. But that does not belong here; I wanted to insert this only in parenthesis, that I might not be misunderstood.)

And when we now ask: How was one then supposed to speak in the time in which the thought and feeling content clicked into the language? One was supposed to speak beautifully! That was the first task: to speak beautifully. Hence, one can really only learn to speak beautifully today when one immerses oneself in the old way of speaking. There was beautiful speaking. And speaking beautifully is definitely a gift which comes to man from the Orient. It might be said: There was speaking beautifully to the point that one really regarded singing, the singing of language, as the ideal of speaking. Preaching is only a form of beautiful speaking stripped of much of the beautiful speaking. For, wholly beautiful speaking is cultic speaking. When cultic speaking pours itself into a sermon, then much is lost. But still, the sermon is a daughter of the beautiful speaking found in the cult.

The second form which has come into evidence, especially in German and in similar languages, is that in which it is no longer possible to distinguish properly between the word and the grasping of the thought conveyed—the word and the thought experience; the word has become abstract, so that it exempts itself, like a kind of thought. It is the element where the understanding for language itself is stripped off. It can no longer have something click into it, because one feels at the very outset that what is to be clicked in and the word vehicle into which something is to click are one.

For who today is clear, for example in German, when he writes down “Begriff” [concept], that this is the noun form of begreifen [to grasp; to comprehend] be-greifen (greifen with a prefix) is thus das Greifen an etwas ausfuehren [the carrying out of the grasping of something]—that “Begriff” is thus nothing other than the noun form for objective perceiving? The concept “Begriff” was formed at a time when there was still a living perception of the ether body, which grasps things. Therefore one could then truly form the concept of Begriff, because grasping with the physical body is merely an image of grasping with the ether body.

But, in order to hear Begreifen in the word Begriff it is necessary to feel speech as an organism of one's own. In the element of speaking which I am now giving an account of, language and concept always swim through one another. There is not at all that sharp separation which was once present in the Orient, where the language was an organism, was more external, and that which declared itself lived inwardly. What lived inwardly had to click into the linguistic form in speaking; that is, click in so that what lives inwardly is the content, and that into which it clicked was the outer form. And this clicking-in had to happen in the sense of the beautiful, so that one was thus a true speech artist when one wanted to speak.

This is no longer the case when, for example, one has no feeling any more for differentiating between Gehen [to go] and Laufen [to run] in relation to language as such. Gehen: two e's—one walks thither without straining oneself thereby; e is always the feeling expression for the slight participation one has in one's own activity. If there is an au in the word, this participation is enhanced. From running (Laufen) comes panting (Schnaufen) which has the same vowel sound in it. With this one's insides come into tumult. There must be a sound there that intimates this modification of the inner being. But all this is indeed no longer there today; language has become abstract. It is like our onward-flowing thoughts themselves—for the whole middle region, and especially also for the western region of civilization.

It is possible to behold a picture, an imagination in every single word; and one can live in this picture as in something relatively objective. He who faced language in earlier times considered it as something objective into which the subjective was poured. He would as little not have regarded it so, as he would have lost sight of the fact that his coat is something objective, and is not grown together with his body as another skin.

As against this, the second stage of language takes the whole organism of language as another son' skin, whereas formerly language was much more loosely there, I should like to say, like a garment. I am speaking now of the stage of language in which speaking beautifully is no longer taken into first consideration, but rather speaking correctly. In this it is not a question of rhetoric and elocution, but of logic. With this stage, which has come up slowly since Aristotle's time, grammar itself became logical to the point that the logical forms were simply developed out of the grammatical forms—one abstracted the logical from the grammatical. Here all has swum together: thought and word. The sentence is that out of which one evolves the judgment. But the judgment is in truth so laid into the sentence that one no longer experiences it as inherently independent. Correct speaking, this has become the criterion.

Further, we see a new element in speaking arising, only used everywhere at the wrong point—carried over to a quite wrong domain. Beautiful speaking humanity owes to the Orient. Correct speaking lies in the middle region of civilization. And we must look to the West when seeking the third element.

But in the West it arises first of all quite corrupted. How does it arise? Well, in the first place, language has become abstract. That which is the word organism is already almost thought-organism. And this has gradually increased so much in the West, that there it would perhaps even be regarded as facetious to discuss such things. But, in a completely wrong domain, the advance already exists.

***

Humanism and pragmatism. The need for developing a true ethics of speaking.

You see, in America, just in the last third of the 19th century, a philosophical trend called “pragmatism” has appeared. In England it has been called “humanism.” James [Note 2] is its representative in America, Schiller [Note 3] in England. Then there are personalities who have already gone about extending these things somewhat. The merit of extending this concept of humanism in a very beautiful sense is due to Professor MacKenzie [Note 4] who was recently here.

To what do these endeavors lead?—I mean now, American pragmatism and English humanism. They arise from a complete skepticism about cognition: Truth is something that really doesn't exist! When we make two assertions, we actually make them fundamentally in order to have guide-points in life. To speak about an “atom”—one cannot raise any particular ground of truth for it; but it is useful to take the atom theory as a basis in chemistry; thus we set up the atom concept! It is serviceable, it is useful. There is no truth other than that which lives in useful, life-serviceable concepts. “God,” if he exists or not, this is not the question. Truth, that is something or other which is of no concern to us. But it is hard to live pleasantly if one does not set up the concept of God; it is really good to live, if one lives as if there were a God. So, let us set it up, because it's a serviceable, useful concept for life. Whether the earth began according to the Kant-Laplace theory and will end according to the mechanical warmth theory, from the standpoint of truth, no human being knows anything about this—I am now just simply reporting—, but it is useful for our thinking to represent the beginning and end of the earth in this way. This is the pragmatic teaching of James, and also in essence,the humanistic teaching of Schiller. Finally, it is also not known at all whether the human being now, proceeding from the standpoint of truth, really has a soul. That could be discussed to the end of the world, whether there is a soul or not, but it is useful to assume a soul if one wants to comprehend all that the human being carries out in life.

Of course, everything that appears today in our civilization in one place spreads to other places. For such things which arose instinctively in the West, the German had to find something more conceptual, that permits of being more easily seen through conceptually; and from this the “As If” philosophy originated: whether there is an atom or not is not the question; we consider the phenomena in such a way “as if” there was an atom. Whether the good can realize itself or not, cannot be decided; we consider life in such a way “as if” the good could realize itself. One could indeed quarrel to the end of the world about whether or not there is a God: but we consider life in such a way that we act “as if” there were a God. There you have the “As If” philosophy.

One pays little attention to these things because one imagines: there in America James sits with his pupils, there in England Schiller sits with his pupils; there is Vaihinger, who wrote the “As If” philosophy: there are a few owls who live in a kind of cloud-castle, and of what concern is it to other people!

Whoever has the ear for it, however, already hears the “As If” philosophy sounding everywhere today. Almost all human beings talk in the sense of the “As If” philosophy. The philosophers are only quite funny fellows. They always blab out what other people do unconsciously. If one is sufficiently unprejudiced for it, then one only seldom hears a human being today who still uses his words differently, in connection with his heart and with his whole soul, with his whole human being, who speaks differently than as though the matter were as he expresses it. One only does not usually have the ear to hear within the sound and the tone-color of the speaking that this “As If” lives in it,—that fundamentally people over the whole of civilization are seized by this “As If.”

Whereas things usually come to be corrupted at the end, here something shows itself to be corrupted at the beginning, something that in a higher sense must be developed for handling of speech in Anthroposophy, in the threefold order and so on. These things are so earnest, so important, that we really should speak specially about them. For it will be a question of elevating the triviality, “We need concepts because they are useful for life,” this triviality of a materialistic, utilitarian theory, of raising it up to the ethical, and perhaps through the ethical to the religious. For, if we want to work in the sense of Anthroposophy and the threefold order, we have before us the task of learning good speaking, in addition to the beautiful speaking and the correct speaking which we can acquire from history. We must maintain an ear for good speaking.

Until now, I have seen little sign that it has been noticed, when, in the course of my lectures I have called attention to this good speaking—I have done it very frequently. In referring to this good speaking I have always said that it is not only a question today that what is said be correct in the logical-abstract sense, but it is a matter of saying something in a certain connection or omitting it, not saying it in this connection. It is a question of developing a feeling that something should not only be correct, but that it is justified within its connection—that it can be either good in a certain connection or bad in a certain connection. Beyond rhetoric, beyond logic, we must learn a true ethics of speaking. We must know how we may allow ourselves things in a certain connection that would not be at all permitted in another connection.

Here I may now use an example close to hand, that could perhaps have already struck some of you who were present lately at the lectures: I spoke in a certain connection of the fact that, in reality, Goethe was not born at all. I said that Goethe for a long time endeavored to express himself through painting, through drawing, but that nothing came about from it. It then flowed over into his poetic works, and then again in the poetic works, as for example Iphigenia, or especially in Naturliche Tochter [“Daughters of Nature”], we have indeed poetic works not at all in the sentimental sense. People called these poems of Goethe's “marble smooth and marble cold,” because they are almost sculptural, because they are three-dimensional. Goethe had genuine capacities which really did not become human at all; he was actually not born.—You see, in that connection in which I spoke lately, one could quite certainly say it. But imagine, if someone were to represent it as a thesis in itself in the absolute sense! It would be not only illogical, it would be of course quite crazy.

To speak out of an awareness of a life connection is something different from finding the adequate or correct use of a word association for the thought and feeling involved. To let a pronouncement or the like arise at a particular place out of a living relationship, that is what leads over from beauty, from correctness, to the ethos of language—at which one feels, when a sentence is uttered, whether one may or may not say it in the whole context. But now, there is again an inward growing together, not with language, but with speaking. This is what I should like to call good speaking or had speaking; the third form. Aside from beautiful or ugly speaking, aside from correct or incorrect speaking, comes good or bad speaking, in the sense in which I have just presented it.

Today the view is still widespread that there can be sentences which one forms and which can then be spoken on any occasion, because they have absolute validity. In reality, for our life in the present, there are no longer such sentences. Every sentence that is possible in a certain connection, is today impossible in another connection. That means, we have entered upon an epoch of humanity's development in which we need to direct our view to this many-sidedness of living situations.

The Oriental who with his whole thinking lived within a small territory, also the Greek still, who with his spiritual life, with his rights life, with his economic life, lived on a small territory, poured something into his language that appears as a linguistic work of art must appear. How is it though in a work of art? It is such that a single finite object really appears infinite in a certain realm. In this way beauty was even defined, though one-sidedly, by Haeckel, Darwin and others: It is the appearance of the idea in a self-contained picture.—The first thing which I had to oppose in my Vienna lecture on “Goethe as the Father of a New Aesthetics,” was that the beautiful is “the appearance of the idea in outer form.” I showed then that one must mean just the reverse: that the beautiful arises when one gives to form the appearance of the infinite.

And so it is with language, which in a certain way also acts as a limited territory—as a territory which encloses the possible meaning within boundaries. If that which is actually infinite in the inner soul- and spirit-life is to click into this language, it must there come to expression in beautiful form.

In correct speaking the language must be adequate; the sentence must fit the judgment, the concept, the word. The Romans were compelled to this, especially as their territory became ever larger and larger; their language transformed itself from the beautiful into the logical. Hence the custom has been retained, of conveying logic to people precisely in the Latin language. (You have indeed learned logic quite well by it.)

But we are now once again beyond this stage. Now, it is necessary that we learn to experience language with ethos—that, to a certain extent we gain a kind of morality of speaking in our lecturing, while we know that we have in a certain context to allow ourselves something or to deny ourselves something. There, things do not click-in, in the way I described earlier, but here we make use of the word to characterize. All defining ceases; here we use the word to characterize. The word is so handled that one really feels each word as something insufficient, every sentence as something insufficient, and has the urge to characterize that which one wishes to place before humanity from the most varied aspects—to go around the matter to a certain extent, and to characterize it from the most varied aspects.

You see, for free spiritual life—that is to say spiritual life that exists out of its own laws—there is as yet not very much understanding in present-day humanity. For, mostly what is understood by free spiritual life is a structure in which people live, where each one crows his own cock-a-doodle-doo from his own dung heap—excuse the somewhat remarkable picture—and in which the most incredible consonances come about from the crowing. In reality, in free spiritual life, harmony comes about through and through, because the spirit, not the single egoists, lives—because the spirit can really lead its own life over and above the single egoists.

There is, for example,—one must already say these things today—a Waldorf School spirit definitely there for our Waldorf School in Stuttgart that is independent of the body of teachers,—into which the body of teachers grows, and in which it becomes ever more and more clear that possibly the one can be more capable or less capable, but the spirit has a life of its own.

It is an abstraction, which people today still represent to themselves, when they speak of “free spirit.” This is no reality at all. The free spirit is something that really lives among people—one must only let it come into existence; and what works among people—one must only let it come into existence.

What I have said to you today I have also said only so that what we are meant to gain here may proceed from fundamental feelings, from the feeling for the earnestness of the matter. I cannot, of course, suppose that every one will now go right out and, as those in olden times spoke beautifully, in the middle period correctly, now all will speak well! But you may not for this reason object: of what help, then, are all our lectures, if we are not at once able to speak in the sense of good speaking?—It is rather a matter of our really getting the feeling of the earnestness of the situation, which we are thus to live into, so that we know: what is wanted here is something in itself so organically whole, that a necessity of form must gradually express itself even in speech, just as a necessity of form expresses itself in the ear-lobe, such as cannot be otherwise depending on how the whole human being is.

Thus I shall try to bring still closer together what is for us the content of Anthroposophy and the threefold order with the way in which it should be presented to people. And, from the consideration of principles I shall come more and more into the concrete, and to that which should underlie the practice of lecturing.

I have often emphasized that this must be Anthroposophy's manner of presenting things. I have often emphasized that one should not indeed believe that one is able to find the adequate word, the adequate sentence; one can only conduct oneself as does a photographer who, in order to show a tree, takes at least four views.

Thus a conception that lives itself out in an abstract trivial philosophy such as pragmatism or humanism, must be raised up into the realm of the ethical. And then it must first of all live in the ethos of language. We must learn good speaking. That means that we must experience as regards speaking something of all that we otherwise experience in relation to ethics, moral philosophy.

After all, the matter has become quite clear in modern times. In the speaking of theosophists we have an archaism simply conditioned through the language—archaic, namely as regards the materialistic coloration of the last centuries: “physical body”—well, it is thick; “ether body”—it is thinner, more nebulous; “astral body”—once again thinner, but still only thinner; “I”—still thinner. Now, new members of the human being keep on coming up: they become even thinner. At last one no longer knows at all how one can reach this thinness, but in any case, it only becomes ever thinner and thinner. One does not escape the materialism. This is indeed also the hallmark of this theosophical literature. And it is always the hallmark that appears, when these things are to be spoken about, from theoretical speaking, to that which I once experienced within the Theosophical Society in Paris, (I believe it was in 1906). A lady there who was a real rock-solid theosophist, wanted to express how well she liked particular lectures which had been given in the hall in which we were; and she said: “There are such good vibrations here!” And one perceived from her that this was really thought of as something which one might sniff. Thus, the scents of the lectures which were left behind and which one could sniff out somehow, these were really meant.

We must learn to tear language away from adequacy. For it can be adequate only for the material. If we wish to use it for the spiritual, in the sense of the present epoch of development of humanity, then we must free it. Freedom must then come into the handling of language. If one does not take these things abstractly, but livingly, then the first thing into which the philosophy of freedom [spiritual activity] must come is in speaking, in the handling of language. For this is necessary; otherwise the transition will not be found, for example, to the characterization of the free spiritual life.

Notes:

Note 1.Ernst Curtius, 1814–1896, archeologist and historian.

Note 2.William James. 1842–1910, American philosopher.

Note 3.F. C. S. Schiller. 1864–1937. Representative of pragmatism in England which he combined with humanism.

Note 4.S. MacKenzie, born 1860. Professor in Cardiff.