The Rudolf Steiner Archive

In connection with the public lectures and public gatherings, it always affords me a satisfaction also to be able to address this Group here in The Hague, and I shall try this evening to say some things that may be to you a more intimate continuation, a supplement, of what I was able to express in the public lectures. (Lectures given in The Hague, Rotterdam, and Delft, Holland, from October 31 to November 6, 1922)

In order to have knowledge of the spiritual world and for the acquirement of an inner life with the spiritual world, it is necessary most of all to see in the right light that which one might call the concealed aspects of human existence. Indeed, the concealed aspects of human existence are the more important aspects for the comprehensive judging and evaluation of human life. This may not be admitted willingly by people who merely think superficially and materially, but it is none the less true. No one can become acquainted with human existence, unless he is able to enter into its concealed aspects.

One could, perhaps, if I may thus express myself, demur against the Gods and say that they have put the most precious thing for man into the concealed aspects of his life; that they have not afforded him what is most precious in the visible aspect of life. If this had been done, man would in a higher sense remain impotent. We acquire spirit-soul strength, which then can permeate our whole being, through the very fact that we must first achieve our genuine human dignity and our human nature, that we must first do something in the realm of our soul and spirit in order to become man at all in the right sense of the word. And in this victory, in this necessity of having first to accomplish something to become man, in this lies that which can fill us with strength, which can permeate with forces the innermost depth of our being.

In order, therefore, to explain more definitely this leading theme which I have introduced today, I will speak to you again from a certain viewpoint about that concealed aspect of human existence which is enveloped in the unconsciousness of sleep. And then I will bring to your attention something of that which lies enveloped in states of existence that remain unconscious during earth life: those states of existence in pre-earthly life and the life after death.

The sleep life takes place in such a way for man that, after the transition through dreams—which have, however, but a very dubious existence and a very dubious significance for human life, if one simply accepts them as they present themselves—he falls into the unconsciousness of sleep, out of which he emerges only on awakening, when he immerses himself with his ego and his astral body in the ether body and physical body; that is, when he makes use of both these principles as a tool in order to perceive his physical environment and then to work within this physical environment through his will. But that which lies beyond birth and death is enveloped in that very part of man's being which becomes unconscious when he falls asleep... And the conditions which the human being experiences there I will describe to you as though they were conscious. They can become conscious only to the imaginative, the inspirative, and the intuitive consciousness. But the difference between this and what every man experiences in the night is only a difference in knowledge. The individual who, as a modern initiate, looks into the sleep life knows how it is, but this does not make the life of sleep into something different for him from what it is for every man, even for the one who passes through it quite unconsciously. Thus our description can be in conformity with reality when we describe that which remains unconscious as though the human being experienced it consciously. And this is what I shall now do.

After the transition through dreams—as I intimated before—man passes, as regards the normal consciousness, into unconsciousness. But the reality of this unconscious state, as it manifests itself to the higher, supersensible knowledge, is that, directly after falling asleep, man enters into a sort of contourless existence. If he should realize his condition consciously, he would feel himself poured out into an etheric realm. He would feel himself outside of his body, not limited, however, but widely diffused; he would sense or observe his body as some object outside of himself. If this condition should become conscious, it would be filled, as regards man's soul nature, with a certain inner anxiety or uneasiness. He feels that he has lost the firm support of the body, as though he stood before an abyss.

What is called the Threshold of the Spiritual World has to exist for the reason that the human being must first prepare himself to have this feeling, the feeling of having lost that support which the physical body affords, and to bear that anxiety in the soul which is caused by his facing something entirely unknown, something indeterminate.

As I stated, this feeling of anxiety does not exist for the ordinary sleeper; it is not in his consciousness, but he does pass through it, nevertheless. That which constitutes anxiety, for instance, in every-day physical existence is expressed in certain processes, even though they be subtle processes of the physical body: when man senses anxiety, certain vascular activities in the physical body are different from what they are when he feels no anxiety. Something occurs objectively besides what the human being feels as anxiety, restlessness, etc., in his consciousness. This objective element of a soul-spirit anxiety man experiences while he enters through the portal of sleep into the sleep state. But with the feeling of anxiety something else is connected: a feeling of deep longing for a Divine-Spiritual Reality that streams and weaves through the cosmos.

If man should experience in full consciousness the first moments after falling asleep—or even hours, perhaps, in the case of many persons—he would be in this state of anxiety and of longing for the Divine. The fact that we feel religiously inclined at all during the waking life depends first of all upon the fact that this feeling of anxiety and this longing for the Divine which we experience in the night have their after-effects upon the mood of the day. Spiritual experiences projected, so to speak, into physical life fill us with the after-effect of that anxiety which impels us to crave to know the Real in the world; they fill us with the after-effect of the longing we bear while asleep, and they express themselves as religious feelings during the waking hours of the day.

But such is the case only during the first stages of sleep. If sleep continues, something peculiar occurs; the soul exists as though split, as though split up into many souls. If the human being should experience this condition consciously—which only the modern initiate can completely behold—he would have the sensation of being many souls and consequently think that he had lost himself. Every one of these soul beings, which really are merely shadowy images of souls, represents something in which he has lost himself. In this state of sleep the human being has a different appearance according as we observe him before or after the Mystery of Golgotha. Namely, the human being requires cosmic aid from without in regard to this condition, if I may so express it, of being split into many soul reflections.

In olden times, preceding the Mystery of Golgotha, the initiates, the old initiates, gave to the people indirectly through their pupils, through the teachers whom they sent out into the world for mankind, certain religious instructions which evoked feelings during their waking life. And these instructions, which were expressed by the people in ritual acts, strengthened their souls so that the human being carried, in turn, a sort of after-effect of this religious mood over into his sleep life.

You can see the reciprocal action between being asleep and being awake! On the one hand the human being, in his longing for the Divine during the first stage of sleep, experiences that which induces him to develop religion during waking life. If this religion is developed during the waking life—and it was developed through the influence of the initiates—it has its effect again upon the second stage of sleep: through the after-effect of this religious mood the soul has then sufficient strength to bear the sensation of being split—at least to exist at all amidst this plurality.

This truly is the difficulty that irreligious people have: they have no such aid during the night in regard to this being split into many souls and thus they carry these experiences over into the waking life without the strength that religion affords. For every experience we have during the night has its aftereffect in the waking life. It has not yet been a very long time since irreligion and non-religiousness began to play so large a, part among mankind as it did during the last century, the 19th century. People still experienced the aftereffect of the influence of what earlier, more sincere, religious times meant to the human being. But, since the irreligious times continue, the ultimate result will be significant: people will carry the after-effect of this splitting of their souls from their sleep state over into their waking life, and this will principally contribute to the fact that they will not have the forces of coherence in their organism to distribute properly the nourishing effect of the food in their organism. And mankind will be afflicted with significant diseases in the near future as a consequence of this irreligion.

We must, indeed, not think that the spirit-soul part of our being has no bearing upon the physical! Its relation is not such that irreligious development will be immediately punished with disease by some kind of demoniacal gods—life does not run its course in such a superficial manner—but there does exist, nevertheless, an intimate relation between our experience in the realm of soul and spirit and our physical constitution. In order to possess health during the waking hours of the day, it is essential that we carry into our sleep life the feeling of our unity with the divine-spiritual Beings, in whose realm of activity we immerse the eternal kernel of our own being. And it is only by a right existence within a spirit-soul world between falling asleep and awakening that we can produce the right and health-bringing forces of a spirit-soul element, so necessary for our waking life.

During this second stage of sleep the human being acquires, not a cosmic consciousness, but a cosmic experience in lieu of the ordinary physical consciousness. As stated before, only the initiate goes through this cosmic experience consciously, but everyone has this experience in the night between falling asleep and waking up. And in this second stage of sleep the human being is in such a state of life that his inner nature carries out imitations of the planetary movements of our solar system. During the days we experience ourselves in our physical body. When we speak of ourselves as physical human beings, we say that inside of us are our lungs, our heart, our stomach, our brain, etc. ... this constitutes our physical inner nature. In the second stage of sleep the movement of Venus, of Mercury, of the sun, and of the moon constitute our inner spirit-soul nature. This whole reciprocal action of the planetary movements of our solar system, we do not bear it directly within us, not the planetary movements themselves; but facsimiles, astral facsimiles of them then constitute our inner organism. To be sure, we are not spread out into the entire planetary cosmos, but we are of extraordinary size, compared with our physical size in the daytime. We do not bear within us the real Venus each time that we are in the state of sleep, but a facsimile of its movement. In the second stage of sleep, between falling asleep and awakening, that which occurs in the spirit-soul part of our being consists of these circulations of the planetary movements in astral substance, just as our blood circulates through our physical organism during the day, stimulated by the movement of breathing. Thus through the night we have circulating within us as our inner life, so to speak, a facsimile of our cosmos.

Before we can experience this circulation of the planetary after-effects we must first experience the splitting of the soul. As I said before, the people of olden times, previous to the Mystery of Golgotha, received instructions from their initiates, in order that they might be able to bear this splitting of the soul and that the soul should find its way within these movements which now constituted its inner life. Since the Mystery of Golgotha something else has taken the place of this old teaching. Namely, something has occurred which the human being can now appropriate inwardly to himself as a feeling, a sentiment, a soul life, and a soul mood, when he really feels himself one with the deed which was accomplished for mankind by the Christ Being through the Mystery of Golgotha here on earth. The individual who truly feels his unity with the Christ and the Mystery of Golgotha to the degree that in him are fulfilled the words of St. Paul: “Not I, but the Christ in me”, he has, through this unity with the Christ and the Mystery of Golgotha, developed something in his feeling which has its after-effect in sleep, so that he now has the strength to overcome the splitting of his soul and the power to find his way in the labyrinth of the planetary orbits which now constitute his inner self. For we must find our way, even though we are not conscious in our inner being of that which constitutes for the soul the planetary circulation in place of the blood circulation during the day, which now continues in the physical body we have abandoned.

After this experience, we enter the third stage of sleep. In this third stage we have an additional experience—of course, the experiences of the preceding stage always remain and the experiences of the next stage are added thereto—in the third stage is included, what I should like to call the experience of the fixed stars. After experiencing the circulation of the planetary facsimiles we actually experience the formations of the fixed stars, that which in former times, for instance, was called the images of the Zodiac. And this experience is essential to the soul aspect of the human being, because he has to carry the after-effect of this experience with the fixed stars into his waking life in order to have the strength at all to control and vitalize his physical organism at all times through his soul.

It is a fact that, during the night, every human being first experiences an etheric preliminary state of cosmic anxiety and longing for the Divine, then a planetary state, as he feels the facsimiles of the planetary movements in his astral body, and he has the experience of the fixed stars in that he feels—or would feel if he were conscious—that he experiences his own soul-spiritual inner self as a facsimile of the heavens, of the fixed stars.

Now, my dear friends, for the one who has insight into these different stages of sleep, a significant question arises, I might say, every night. The human soul, the astral organism, and the ego being, leave the physical body, their inner self is filled with facsimiles of the planetary movements and of the constellations of the fixed stars. The question arising now is this: “How is it that every morning, after each sleep, the human being returns to his physical body again?”

And it is here where the science of initiation discovers that the human being would actually not return if, on entering the planetary movements and the constellations of the fixed stars, he did not also live his way into the forces of the moon while expanding outward into the facsimiles of cosmic existence. He lives his way into the spiritual forces of the moon, into those cosmic forces which are reflected in the physical moon and in the moon-phases.

While all other planetary and fixed star forces actually draw the human being out of his physical body, it is the lunar forces which again and again return him, when he wakes, to his physical body. The moon is connected in general with all that brings the human being from his spiritual life into the physical life. It, therefore, makes no difference—the physical constellation is not the thing to be considered, although a certain significance attaches thereto—whether we have to do with new moon, full moon, the first or last quarter of the moon; in the spiritual world the moon is always present. It is the lunar forces which lead the human being back into the physical world, into his physical body.

You can see, my dear friends, that, as I briefly describe to you the experience the human being has between falling asleep and awakening, I am, upon the whole, giving you something of a general description of his sojourn in the spiritual world. And this is the state of the matter. Fundamentally, we experience every night a reflection of the life between death and a new birth. If we look into pre-earthly life with the imaginative, the inspirative, and the intuitive consciousness, we see ourselves first of all as spirit-soul human beings in a very early state of pre-earthly existence. We see ourselves possessed of a cosmic consciousness. Our life there is not a reflection of the cosmos, as is our sleep life, but we are actually diffused through the real cosmos. About the middle of our life between death and a new birth we feel ourselves as spirit-soul beings, fully conscious—in fact with a much clearer and more intensive consciousness than we could possibly have anywhere upon the earth—surrounded by divine-spiritual Beings, by the divine-spiritual Hierarchies. And, just as we work with nature's forces here on earth, just as we use external objects of nature as tools, so in the same way does work take place between us and the Beings of the higher spiritual Hierarchies.

And what manner of work is this? This work consists in the fact that the spirit-soul human being, conjointly with an enormous number of sublime spiritual Beings of the cosmos, is weaving the cosmic spirit-germ of his physical human body in the spiritual realm. However peculiar this may seem to you—to weave the physical human body as spiritual germ out of the whole cosmos—it is the greatest, the most significant piece of work conceivable in the cosmos. And not only does the human soul in the state described work at this, but the human soul works at it conjointly with whole hosts of divine-spiritual Beings. For, if you visualize the most complicated thing that can be formed here on earth, you find it primitive and simple in contrast with that mighty fabric of cosmic vastness and grandeur which is woven there and which, compressed and condensed through conception and through birth, becomes permeated with physical earth matter and then becomes the human physical body.

When we refer to a germ here on earth, we think of it as a small germ which afterwards becomes relatively large. But, when we refer to the cosmic spirit-germ in relation to the human body as a product of the spiritual, this germ is of gigantic size. And from that moment on, which I have pointed out to you, when the soul is coming towards its birth, the soul-spiritually magnificent human germ is gradually diminishing. The human being continues to work at it with the aim constantly in view that this will be woven together, pressed together, condensed into the physical human body.

It was really not without reason that the older initiates—through a kind of clairvoyance which, to be sure, is no longer suitable to us, although the more recent science of initiation shows the same fact—that the older initiates called the human body the Temple of the Gods. It is the Temple of the Gods, for it is woven out of the cosmos by the human soul conjointly with divine Beings each time between death and a new birth. Later on—in a manner still to be described—the human being is given his physical form. While the human being is weaving the spirit-germ of his physical body at the stage indicated, he is, as regards his soul being, in a condition, in a mood, that can only be compared with what the modern initiates call intuition. The human being lives with his soul within the activity of Gods. He is wholly diffused in cosmic-divine existence. In this state halfway between death and a new birth he is participating in the life of the Gods.

But then, as the human being proceeds on his way, as he comes closer to conception or birth, a change takes place. In a certain way, his consciousness is then impressed with the fact that the divine-spiritual Beings of the Higher Hierarchies are withdrawing from him. And there appears to him only something like a revelation, like a reflection, as if the Gods had withdrawn and only their nebulous images were still standing before the human soul, and as if a kind of veil were being woven as a nebulous imitation of that which in reality had been woven before. The intuitive consciousness he formerly possessed now changes to a cosmic inspired consciousness. The human being lives no more with the divine-spiritual Beings of the Higher Hierarchies; he lives with their manifestation. But in place of this an inner ego develops more and more within the soul consciousness. During the climax, I might say, of life between death and a new birth, the human being lives entirely with the divine-spiritual Beings of the Higher Hierarchies; the ego has no inner strength; it becomes conscious again of its inner self only when the Gods withdraw and only their manifestation remains. The glory of the Gods, their radiation, enters a kind of inspired consciousness; but, as a recompense, the human being feels himself as a self-existent being. And that which now awakens first in him is, I might say, an eager desire, a kind of craving.

Midway between death and a new birth, the human being works at the spirit-germ of his physical body, so to speak, out of a deep inner satisfaction. Although he realizes that the ultimate goal will be his physical body in his next earthly life, he is not permeated with an eager desire, but only—we might say—with admiration for this physical human body, considered from a universal standpoint. At the moment when the human beings is living no more in divine worlds, but only in the manifestations of divine worlds, the eager desire arises in him to reincarnate upon the earth. Just while the ego consciousness is becoming continually stronger does this eager desire awaken. We withdraw, so to speak, from the divine worlds and come closer to what we shall become as earthly human beings. This eager desire becomes continually stronger, and what we see around us is also undergoing a change. Prior to this, we were living in nothing but Beings, in the divine-spiritual Hierarchies; we knew ourselves to be one with them. When we spoke of our inner self we were really speaking of the cosmos—but the cosmos itself consisted of Beings, Beings in sublime stages of consciousness with whom we were living. Now an outer glory is to be seen, and in this outer glory the first images gradually appear of that which, ultimately, are the physical reflections of the divine-spiritual Beings. This glory emanates from the Being which man knew there beyond as the Sublime Solar Being, and in this glory appears, so to speak, the sun as seen from without, or as seen from the world. Here on earth we look up to the sun. There, while descending to the earth, we at first see the sun from the other side. But the sun emerges, the fixed stars emerge, and behind the fixed stars the planetary movements emerge. And with the emergence of the planetary movements a quite definite kind of forces emerges: the spiritual forces of the moon; they now take control of us. It is these lunar forces which, little by little, carry us back into the earthly life.

Such is actually the aspect of things which the human being beholds on his descent from cosmic worlds to earthly existence: that, after an experience of divine-spiritual Hierarchies, he proceeds to images of them. But these images of Beings gradually become star-images, and the human being enters into something which, I might say, he first sees from behind: he enters that which is manifest from the earth as the cosmos. The details of what the human being there consummates can be discerned, and the modern science of initiation can penetrate quite deeply into what man there experiences.

Just through details in this domain do we begin to become acquainted with life. For no one knows life who is able to see the human being in connection with earthly existence alone. What great value does our connection with the earthly existence have for us then? During the enormously long stretches of time between death and a new birth the earth, at first, really means nothing to us, and that which gleams towards us, as the external, so to speak, is transmuted into entire worlds of Gods, in which we live during these long stretches of time and which appear externally to us again as stars only when we are nearing the earth for another earthly existence.

What the human being at first wove, as the spirit-germ of his physical body, he knows, for the time being, to be one with the whole universe, with the spiritual universe. Later, when he sees only the manifestation of the divine-spiritual worlds, this germ gradually becomes his body, which is now also a facsimile of the cosmos. And out of this—his body—arises the eager desire for an earthly existence, for an ego consciousness in his body.

This body now still contains much which is untouched by the earthly existence, for it is a spirit body. As regards this body, the fact still remains entirely undetermined at a certain stage whether, for instance, the human being will be a male or a female personality in his next earthly existence. For, during this whole time between death and a new birth, up to a very late stage, before we are born upon the earth, there is no meaning in the question of man or woman. The conditions there differ entirely from those that are reflected on earth as man and woman. There are also conditions which occur in the spiritual existence and are reflected on the earth; but that which appears on earth as man and woman acquires significance only relatively late, prior to our descent to earth. When the human being, according to certain former karmic connections, thinks it best to experience his next incarnation on earth as a woman, we can trace in detail how, on his descent to the earth in order to unite with the physical embryo, he chooses that time which is known here on earth as the time of full moon.

We can say, therefore, when we are looking from any region here on earth at the full moon, that we then have the time which the beings choose for their descent to the earth who desire to become women, for then only is this decision made. And the time of new moon is the time which beings choose who wish to become men.

Thus, you see, the human being enters his earthly existence through the portal of the moon. But the force which the male requires in order to enter life on earth is then flowing out into the cosmos; we move toward it as we come in from the cosmos, and this force is radiated by the moon when it is known as new moon for the earth. The force which the female requires is radiated from the moon when it is the full moon; then its illuminated side is turned toward the earth, and its unilluminated side is toward the cosmos—and this force, which the moon can send out into the cosmos from its unilluminated side, the human being requires if he wishes to become a woman.

What I have now been describing to you shows that the ancient concept of astrology, which nowadays has been brought to a complete decadence by the ordinary astrologers, was well grounded. Only, we must be able to achieve an inner view of the connection of things. We must not look merely at the physical constellation in a calculating manner, but must see into the corresponding spiritual element. There it is really possible to enter into details.

As you know, the human being descends from the cosmos in a definite state. From the spiritual cosmos he enters the etheric cosmos. Now I am still speaking of the etheric cosmos alone; the physical aspect of the stars is, in this connections, taken less into consideration, as is, likewise, the physical aspect of the moon. The essential moment when the human being decides to descend to the earth depends, as I have stated, upon the phase of the moon during this descent, and thus it may happen that he exposes himself to a decisive new moon in order to become a man, or to a decisive full moon to become a woman. But then—since the descent is not made so very rapidly, but he remains exposed for some time—if he is descending through the new moon as a man, he may still, for one reason or another, decide to expose himself to the coming full moon. Thus he has made the decision to descend as a male; he has made use to this end of the forces of the new moon; but, during his descent, he still has at his disposal the remainder of the moon's cycle, the phase of the full moon. He then fills himself with lunar forces in such a way that they do not affect his condition as man or woman, but rather the organization of his head, and what is connected with the organization of his head from without, from the cosmos, if that constellation occurs of which I have just spoken. Thus, after the human being has made the decision; “I shall become a man through the time of the new moon”, and continues living in the cosmos, so that he has not passed completely through the lunar influence but is still exposed to the next full moon, then, through the influence of the lunar forces in this condition he will, for instance, have brown eyes and black hair. Thus we may say that the manner in which the human being passes the moon determines not only his sex, but also the color of his eyes and hair. If, for instance, the human being has passed the full moon as a woman and is later exposed to a new moon, the result may be a woman with blue eyes and blond hair.

Grotesque as this may seem, we are absolutely predestined by the manner of our experience through the cosmos, as to the way in which our soul-spirit organism works its way into our physical and our etheric organism. Prior to this time there has been no decision made as to our becoming a blond or a brunette; this is determined only by the lunar forces as we pass them, on our descent from the cosmos into earthly existence.

And just as we pass by the moon, which really guides us into earthly existence, so do we pass by the other planets. It is not immaterial, for example, whether we pass Saturn in one or another way. We may pass by Saturn, for instance, when the constellation is such that the force of Saturn and the force of Leo in the Zodiac co-operate. Because of our passing the region of Saturn just as its force is being increased through Leo in the Zodiac, our soul will—conditioned, of course, by our preceding karma—acquire the strength to meet intelligently the outer contingencies of life so that they do not defeat us over and over again. If, however, Saturn is being dominated more by Capricorn, we shall become weak human beings that do succumb to the outer contingencies of life.

All these experiences we bear within us as we prepare from the cosmos our earthly existence. Of course, we can overcome this through an appropriate training, but not by voicing the opinion of the materialists that all this is nonsense, that we need not pay any attention to it at all. On the contrary, it can be overcome by the fact that we develop these forces, really develop them. And in the future mankind will learn again, not only to insure that a child shall have good milk to drink and good food to eat—although no objection is to be made to this—but mankind will learn again to observe whether this or that person has within him forces of Saturn or Jupiter active under this or that influence.

Let us suppose that we find that a human being has within him, through his karma, forces of Saturn under the most unfavorable influence—of Capricorn or of Aquarius, for instance—so that he is exposed to all life's difficulties. Then, in order to strengthen him we shall search most carefully for other forces within him. For instance, we shall ask ourselves whether he has experienced the passage through the sphere of Jupiter, of Mars, or through any other sphere. And we shall always be able to correct and annul one condition by means of the other.

We shall simply have to learn to think of the human being not only in relation to what he begins to eat and drink in the earthly existence, but we shall have to consider him in relation to what he becomes, because of his having passed through the cosmic worlds between death and a new birth.

When the human being is close to his earthly course of life, then he experiences a sort of loss of his being. You know from my description that he was connected with what he has woven as the spirit-germ of his physical body. Into this spirit-germ he has woven, besides, the experiences during the descent through fixed stars and planets. At a definite stage, actually quite close to conception and birth, this spirit-germ is no longer there. It has, in the meanwhile, descended with its forces as a system of forces to the earth. It has fallen from the human being. It has united itself on the earth independently with the physical substance of heredity which the ancestors, father and mother, afford. What is being woven there in the organism descends to the earth sooner than the human being himself as a spirit-soul being. And then, when the human being realizes that he has actually surrendered to the parents that which he himself had woven in the cosmos, he is able, in the last stage prior to his earthly existence, to take to himself from the etheric world what is essential for his own etheric organism—since there is no longer a necessity to do any more weaving on his physical body, which is essentially complete and has been surrendered to and been made a part of the flow of heredity. Now he draws together his etheric organism; and, together with this latter, he unites with that which he himself has prepared through his parents. He takes possession of his physical body, in which all this cosmic fabric of the spirit-germ is drawn together, and which is interwoven with what the human being himself united with it as he descended through this or that stellar region. It is, indeed, not arbitrarily that he passes through new moon or full moon and causes himself to become man or woman, or to have black or blond hair or blue or brown eyes, but all this is intimately connected with the results of his preceding karma.

This shows you that, whereas the human being in the sleep state experiences as his inner nature merely facsimiles of the planetary world, the world of the fixed stars, he now passes through these worlds in their reality between death and a new birth. He passes through these worlds; they become his inner nature. And it is always the lunar forces which bring us back to the earth. They differ essentially from all other stellar forces in this respect, in that they bring us back to the earth. In the sleep state they bring us back to the earth; they bring us back also after we have experienced all that I have briefly described, in order to enter once more a life course on the earth.

But let us consider once again that which is there outside of the physical body, in the form of astral body and ego organization, between falling asleep and awakening. It is not fabricated from physical bones and physical blood; it is a spirit-soul entity. But our whole moral intrinsic quality is woven into it. Just as we consist, when awake, of bones, blood, and nerves, so does that which leaves us during sleep and returns on awakening consist of the actualized judgments of our moral deeds. If I have accomplished a good deed during the day, its effect is reflected in my sleep body within the spirit-soul substance that leaves me during sleep. My moral quality lives within this. And, when the human being passes through the Portal of Death, he takes with him his whole actualized moral evaluation. It is a fact that, between birth and death in the earthly life, the human being creates within himself a second being. This second human being, who leaves the body every night, is the result of our moral or immoral life, and we take it with us through the Portal of Death. This result, which is merged with our eternal essential being, is not the only element we possess within the spirit-soul substance which passes out of us during the night. Just after death, however, when we are first in the ether body and then in the astral body, we hardly see anything in ourselves but this moral entity of our being. Whether we were good or bad, this is what we behold; we are this. Just as here on earth we are a, human being in whom the skin forces, or the nerve forces, or the blood forces, or the bone forces predominate, so, after death, we are, to our own perception, what we were, morally or immorally.

And now after death we proceed on our way, first through the sphere of the moon, then through the sphere of the fixed stars... until the time arrives when we can begin to work with the Beings of the Higher Hierarchies on the spirit-germ of our future physical body. But, if we were to take this moral element up into the highest worlds, where we are to weave our future physical organism in its spirit-germ, this physical organism would turn out to be a monstrosity. For a certain length of time between death and a new birth, the human being must be separated from what constitutes his moral quality. Indeed, he leaves his moral quality behind in the moon sphere.

It is an actual fact that, when leaving the moon sphere, we leave our moral and immoral human being in the moon sphere and enter into the pure sphere of the Gods, where we can weave our physical body.

I must now revert again to the difference between the times prior to the Mystery of Golgotha and those following it, including the present. The older initiates made very clear to their pupils—and through them to all mankind of the civilization of that time—that, in order to be able to find the transition from the world which I called in my book Theosophy the soul-world, and which we really experience in its entirety while still in the moon sphere, into the world which I called the spirit-land, the human being must develop on earth the feelings that enable him to be led upward by the spiritual Sun Being, after having left behind the whole bundle of his moral after-effects in the moon sphere.

All that history relates to us in regard to the first three Christian centuries, and even the fourth century, is fundamentally a falsification; for in those centuries Christianity was quite different from the thing described. It was something quite different for the reason that within it there held sway the conception which came from understanding the ancient science of initiation. From this wisdom of initiation it was known that, in the life after death, the sublime Sun Being led the human being out of the moon sphere, after he had left behind his moral bundle, and, on his return, led him back again into the moon sphere. This gave the human being the strength—which he could not have had through himself—to make this moral being a part of himself, at a certain time before his birth, in order to fulfill his destiny on earth within his soul, and to prevent it from entering his body. For otherwise, the human being would be born a monstrosity and be utterly diseased in his body. This moral bundle had to be taken over again in the moon sphere, during the descent, in order that it should not enter into the body.

Those initiates who were living at the time of the Mystery of Golgotha, and even in the three or four centuries following thereafter, said to their pupils: Previously the sublime Sun Being was only above in the spiritual worlds. But, as mankind progressed, the ego consciousness has become so bright upon the earth that it becomes all the more obscured in the spiritual world. In other words, the brighter our ego consciousness is by means of the physical body only, here below on the earth, the darker is it above. The human being would no longer come into contact with the Sun Being, he would not find through his own power the transition after death from the moon sphere to the higher spheres, had the Christ not descended and passed through the Mystery of Golgotha. The Being whom the human being met formerly after death only in the spiritual world has now descended; He has lived here upon earth ever since the Mystery of Golgotha; and now the human being can establish a relation to Him according to the words of St. Paul: “Not I, but the Christ in me”. In this way the human being takes strength from the earth with him, strength given to him by the Christ here on this earth, which enables him to leave behind in the moon sphere his moral being which he creates within himself and to proceed to higher spheres, there to work on the spirit-germ of his physical body. It also gives him the strength on his descent through the moon sphere to take up his karma again of his own free will, take up the after-effects of his good and evil deeds. In the course of historical evolution, we have become free human beings. But the reason we have become such is that the Christ force we have acquired has enabled us through free inner strength to take over our karma on our descent through the moon sphere. No matter whether we like this or do not like it here on earth, we do this at the stage I have described, if we have become true Christians on earth.

I have been endeavoring, my dear friends, to show you a little of the way in which the modern science of initiation can see into worlds which we might call the concealed aspects of human existence, to show you how really everything pertaining to the human being can be elucidated only as we are able to see into these concealed aspects. And at the same time I tried to show you in connection therewith what the Christ Impulse means to mankind of the present time; for we will have constantly to revert to it. Since the Mystery of Golgotha, we cannot be a whole human being, unless we find the way to this Christ Impulse. Therefore it is necessary that Anthroposophical spiritual science shed light more and more upon the Christ Impulse in the right way. For the manner in which light was shed on the Christ Impulse in the past, when man's consciousness was obscured, would, if continued, deprive a large part of mankind—just think of the Orientals, think of the inhabitants of other continents—of the possibility of embracing Christianity. But that Christianity which is rooted deeply in Anthroposophical spiritual science will actually—if once the essence of spiritual science, as it is here intended, is understood thoroughly—be eagerly grasped particularly by the Orientals, who are endowed with an ancient spirituality, even though it is in decadence.

In this way only can that peace prevail on earth which must proceed from the soul and spirit of men, and which is so indispensable to the earth, as every impartial person feels today. We shall have to be much more convinced of the fact that all present-day thinking concerning outer institutions is really worthless, and that it is very necessary on the other hand, to appeal directly to human souls. But we can appeal to the souls only if we are able to say something to them about the true home of the soul, about the experiences of the human being that lie beyond his physical existence, in those states of consciousness I have been describing to you today. Even if those states of consciousness do not exist during the earth life, their effects do exist. Oh, my dear friends, the one who has insight into life sees in the countenance of every human being a reflection of cosmic destinies which the individual has experienced between death and a new birth!

I have described to you today how destiny—whether one has become a man or a woman—can be understood by means of the cosmos, even how the color of the eyes and hair can be understood only when we can look into cosmic existence. Nothing in this world is comprehensible unless it can be understood by means of the cosmos. The human being will feel himself to be truly a human being only when we can inform him through true spiritual knowledge of his relation with that which is back of the sensuous-physical existence. Even though the human beings on earth are not yet aware of it, mankind unconsciously thirsts for such a knowledge. What is developing convulsively today in all domains, be it the domain of the spiritual, the externally juridical, or the economic life, all is ultimately a result of the spiritual. Only as the human being learns again to know of his relation with extra-physical existence, can all this be transformed from forces of decadence into upward moving forces. For physical existence is meaningless unless seen in connection with super-physical existence. The physical human body becomes significant only then when we can see it, so to speak, as the confluence of all those sovereign forces that are woven between death and a new birth. This is the tragic character of materialistic knowledge of the world that, in the final analysis, it does not know matter itself. We lay the human body upon the dissecting table; we examine it most carefully as to its tissues and its individual physical component parts. This is done in order to acquire a knowledge of matter. But we do not learn to know it in this way, for it is the product of spirit, and only as we are able to trace it back to those stages where it is woven out of spirit do we know it. Human beings will comprehend precisely this physical-material existence only when their souls are led cosmically into the realm of soul and spirit.

If we permeate ourselves with the consciousness that we should comprehend more and more our connection with the spirit-soul realm of the cosmos, we then become true Anthroposophists. And you, my dear friends, will surely not ridicule me when I say that the world is in need today of true Anthroposophists who will bring about an ascent for humanity through that consciousness which results from experiencing the spiritual, even though at first we should only grasp it as a reflection and not ourselves have attained to clairvoyant knowledge. We need not be clairvoyant in order to work beneficently after we possess spiritual knowledge. Just as little as a person needs to know what constitutes meat when he is eating it and it nourishes him, just as little does a person need to be clairvoyant in order to be efficacious through his work and through his whole association with the life of the higher worlds. If we accept spiritual science before we are clairvoyant, it is as though we were consuming it. Fundamentally, clairvoyance adds nothing to what we can become for the world through spiritual knowledge. It satisfies merely our knowledge. This knowledge must, indeed, exist. Of course, there have to be people who examine the composition of meat, but this knowledge is not required in order to eat. Likewise there must be clairvoyant persons today who can investigate the nature of man's connection with the spiritual world; but, in order to bring about that which is essential to mankind, it is necessary that we be healthy human souls. If they are informed of the science of the spirit, they will sense the digestive power of the soul nature; they will appropriate this spiritual science, digest it, and assimilate it into their work. And this is what we need today throughout the civilized world: external human work which is spiritualized through and through in the right and true sense.

Appendix

In connection with this lecture that Rudolf Steiner gave on November 5, 1922, in The Hague, he addressed the members of the Anthroposophical Society in the following words:

“And now, my dear friends, after these explanations permit me to add some remarks to today's lecture which are, to a certain degree, connected with the lecture itself. Pardon me for speaking of my own anxieties. These anxieties of my own, to be brief, have to do with the possibility of being able to go on with the building of the Goetheanum, in Dornach.

My dear friends, the fact is that since the building of the Goetheanum has been begun, and it is in large part completed, it must be continued to completion. What if this could not be done? This is bound up with the very fact that this Goetheanum is a symbol today for that spiritual movement which is to be born into the world through Anthroposophy. If there had never been a circle of friends through whom the beginning of the building of the Goetheanum could be brought to realization, then Anthroposophy would have had to find some other avenue of expression. Today the building of the Goetheanum cannot simply be discontinued without damage. And it is this, my dear friends, that weighs heavily on my soul; for, if the results of what I have said in this regard remain the same as they have thus far, it will not be months, but only weeks for the moment to arrive when we shall come to a complete stoppage in Dornach.

Naturally, I cannot make such a statement without remembering with heartfelt gratitude that in this very country individual friends have made sacrifices in a most devoted manner for what has been accomplished thus far in building the Goetheanum. My thanks for this are profound and heartfelt, and I know that many of our friends have done their utmost in this matter. This I must, naturally, presuppose. But, on the other hand, I cannot do otherwise than to emphasize the fact—without wishing to criticize anything—that the worry weighs heavily on my soul over the fact that we shall not be able to continue with the building of the Goetheanum unless we receive abundant help on the part of a greater number of our friends, and that this Anthroposophical Movement, which has been active these last years at all possible points of the periphery, will tie without a center.

Therefore, my dear friends, I cannot but tell you what is at stake. Anthroposophy as such has spread very much in the world; and I assure you that, even here in Holland, the dear friends present today are only a very small part of the people who are in touch with Anthroposophy. We can judge this by the sale of our literature and we can see how, in many ways, Anthroposophy has become important to many persons.

On the other hand, something different can be observed—we can voice this without malice, even though we may create an impression of malice—we know that, on the other hand, the enemies of truth have made their appearance. And these, my dear friends, are well organized. Among them exist strong international ties. The enemies of Anthroposophical work are as well organized as our Anthroposophical Movement—pardon me for saying this—is badly organized! This is something we have yet to realize.

How is it that we have to say today that, in a few weeks, the Goetheanum may be without any means for its progress toward completion? You may have everything possible on the periphery—Waldorf Schools, etc.—all this is naturally void of power if there is no center. But for this center the right heart is lacking among the membership!

Let it be understood that I am not saying that this or that person is not giving all he has or, perhaps, does not have; it is not in the least my intention to go into such details. But, if our souls possessed the same enthusiasm for Anthroposophy which our opponents of all shades have today for anti-Anthroposophy, we should be very differently established. Then it would not be so difficult to collect the pennies, trivial in comparison with the wealth of the world—in spite of the impoverished world of today—to finish the Goetheanum. But the right heart for this is really lacking, my dear friends; yet we cannot do otherwise than to save this symbol in Dornach from failure. It can be saved from ruin if we can combine a strong enthusiasm with all our longing for Anthroposophical knowledge.

In these remarks I am not referring to any individuals. But, on the whole, the prevalent spirit within our circles is to start things with great apparent enthusiasm. The building of the Goetheanum was begun with enthusiasm. This enthusiasm has vanished, particularly in those who in the beginning displayed great enthusiasm. And these very persons have left this problem of going on to me alone. It has in many instances become characteristic, my dear friends, that people cannot remain enthusiastic; that something flares up—and those who shared in this sudden blaze leave the fire and do not keep feeding it. The warmth of heart dies out. And then come those worries. And, in view of the seriousness of the matter, my dear friends—why should I not call attention in this intimate circle to such a thing? The seriousness of the cause demands it. On the other hand there really exists the necessity to extend spiritual science as such. Be assured, a heavy responsibility rests on the one who is able to state at all that it depends on the conditions of the cosmos, in one way or another, whether a human being becomes a man or a woman, whether he has blue eyes and blond hair or brown eyes and black hair. I mention this only as an example. A statement like this cannot he made carelessly. It requires years of research before one arrives at the point of making such a statement, for one who does this without being conscious of his responsibility will usher disaster into the world. But it is necessary today, on the one hand, to extend this spiritual science; on the other hand, my dear friends, new cares spring up because of the developments in the periphery, when the enthusiasm does not persist, through the very fact that these things are there. New establishments are founded, and they have to be cared for. The worries have to be borne. These two things do not coincide unless the Society, as bearer of the Anthroposophical Movement, is a reality built on firm inner ground. Societies, that are realities built on firm ground, can surely accomplish great things! But it is imperative to observe that along with the need to deepen spiritual science more and more, there moved along, at the same time, an increasingly badly organized Society, a will displaying less and less enthusiasm for making the Society itself an instrument.

And the first thing for which I repeatedly beg our friends, since we are confronted by urgent necessity, is that they shall make the Society into a living, active being in the world.

This is highly essential, my dear friends. It is greatly to be desired that the center in Dornach shall not crumble, but that friends shall be found who will give us help.

There is, for instance, the wonderful possibility of gradually achieving significant results in the field of medicine, of therapeutics through the discoveries of remedies, based on spiritual science. But all this depends on the existence of the center in Dornach. The moment the Dornach center breaks down everything breaks down, and it is this that I want our friends to be conscious of, for it has in many instances disappeared from their consciousness. And I must say, it has really become an extremely heavy burden for me, a crushing burden.

I am saying this for the reason, my dear friends, that you may find the opportunity to think with me about these things in your good heart; for these things have to be thought out.”

My dear friends! Today, we will first continue our reflections from yesterday and then see how we can further develop the matters touched on yesterday. Yesterday, I wanted to talk to you about the inner side of community building in the religious field. I would now like to move on to the second area, which you yourselves have identified as particularly important to you: to the cult.

It is absolutely true that without the inauguration of a certain cult with its so-called symbolism, the religious deepening of humanity cannot be brought about, and I would like to explain this to you with a few words, because one can only work within a field if one understands the conditions and forces involved.

You see, in more recent times, the whole process of human development in the civilized part of humanity has basically taken on an intellectual form, a form that makes mere concepts in their abstractness the content of consciousness. And such a thorough feeling has arisen from it that one can only gain real insights in this abstractness, that this feeling has passed over to actually only appreciate the abstract content of consciousness in a certain way. Now one can understand that this abstract content of consciousness had to be appreciated at a time when the assertion of the individual emerging from the whole human being was increasingly emerging as a human demand. After all, abstract content of consciousness presents us with something completely universal. One has the feeling that through abstract world comprehension one can bring all understanding of the world into the individual human being.

Where should our concepts reach? They should initially suffice to comment on that which presents itself to us in the sense world as perception, in the most diverse ways, and to find laws there, the so-called laws of nature or historical laws. But then this intellectual content also sets about forming hypotheses about that which is not perceived, partly such hypotheses that extend to that which is not perceptible in time and space, partly to that which is not perceptible for reasons of principle. The beginning and end of the earth, for example, is not perceptible in time and space. From the intellectualism of modern times we have received hypotheses about the origin of the earth and about the end of the earth arising out of physical and geological connections. We have hypotheses regarding the spatial, let us say, about the inner nature of the sun or other world bodies, such as the world nebula, as they are called, and so on. One usually does not consider that when one says that the sun is so or so constituted, that this is nothing more than a hypothesis, and one even believes that one has a physical result in this hypothesis. The physicists would be very astonished if they could perceive, could see, what really is at that point in space, where they put a kind of very thin gas out into space as a solar ball. In reality, there is not something comparable to our gases, not even to our ether, at that point; it is not just empty space at that point, but something that we describe as negative in comparison to the intensity of our empty space; it is a recess in space at the point where we speak of the sun. There is not only space emptied of matter, there is not even the intensity of the void that we usually call space in the abstract. There is less present at the point than space, and in this way we move from the physical to the spiritual. One can only speak of the sun in a spiritual sense.

I only mention this today to draw your attention to the way in which intellectualism, which is perfectly justified in the field of natural science, has taken hold of all fields in recent times. It then extends to the imperceptible, to the world of molecules and atoms, which, in principle, cannot be perceived for the simple reason that heat, light and sound are said to arise from the movements of these molecular and atomic structures, so that nothing perceptible is introduced into the atomic world. Something is hypothetically introduced that is supposed to be present.

Thus, intellectualism has spread over the temporal and spatial of the external world of space and time and over the unperceivable in principle; but it has also spread over everything that is historical and over everything that is religiously historical. If you follow the entire literature and scholarship of the Gospels, and indeed all of 19th-century biblical scholarship, it will become clear how this entire biblical scholarship gradually moved from a completely different kind of soul content to an intellectualistic grasp of the Bible and the Gospels. It can be said that by the end of the 19th century, so much intellectualism had been applied to the Gospel that there was actually nothing left of the Gospel even for theologians. It must be characteristic that this intellectualism has taken on those forms that it shows, for example, in the theologian Schmiedel, where we see that the personality of Christ is no longer inferred from what is in the Gospels, but a number of passages in the Gospel are sought where something detrimental is said about Christ Jesus, where, for example, it is said that he did not care about his mother and siblings. And from this small number of defamations, which are compiled about the personality of Christ Jesus in the Gospels, it is concluded that they must refer to something true, because one would not, if one wanted to invent something, have added such a defamation, but one would have invented hymns of praise.

Now you can see the depths to which the intellectual approach has sunk in its attempts to get at the Gospels at all. I mention this because it has emerged from the theological side, for what has been achieved by the non-theological side in terms of extravagance has, after all, reached the point of the monstrous. You only need to remember that there is extensive psychiatric research on the Gospels today, that we have literary works today that clearly express the view that one cannot understand what the Gospels actually contain and that describe the messages [in the Gospels] as abnormal things, as one would view things from a psychiatric point of view. It is even the case that the origin of Christianity is assumed to be a mental illness of Christ Jesus, which has had an infectious effect on all Christians. Thus, the origin of Christianity is derived from the mental illness of Christ Jesus, which he fell prey to.

It would be an understatement to say that any description is too strong when one wants to point out that the entire so-called intellectual life of the present, which moves in intellectualisms, must actually lead to the undermining of precisely the Christian-religious element, and with the greatest speed. The fact that this fact is not sufficiently examined is one of the great damages of our time. If one were to look at it, one would come to the conclusion that, above all, those who take religious life seriously must ensure that this religious life is wrested from intellectualism.

I do not want to dwell critically on the fact that in the last four centuries, through Protestantism itself, a great deal has been done to achieve this intellectualism in the religious sphere as well. More and more, perhaps unconsciously, one finds a pagan element in the cult and the symbolism. Now, what has prevented us from adhering more to the cult and to the symbolism does not lie in the feeling that we have something pagan in it, but rather it lies in the fact that we no longer have any sense for those forms of expression that lie in the cult and in the symbolism. Consider this: through intellectual comprehension of the world, man is led to believe that he can make sense of the whole world with the content of his soul, that he can bring everything into intellectual concepts. Therefore, the intellectual man feels in possession of the whole world when he has his intellectual concepts. It is precisely because man deceives himself into believing that he has grasped the entire content of the world, it is precisely through this universal element that man feels intellectually satisfied and believes that he no longer needs any other element to comprehend the world, to feel the world. It is understandable that intellectualism has been able to gain the upper hand in our time, because man believes that he can understand the world in intellectual terms. But because man is satisfied in this way, in that he seemingly gets the whole world into his ego, he loses the social connection with the rest of the world, and that which should live as a social being is atomized, atomized right down to the individual. We have already seen this in the youth movement in modern times, that simply by the prevalence of the intellectualist, people fall apart into individual atoms, so that everyone wants only their own religious belief. They are absorbed in saying that religion is a thing that cannot go beyond the human skin. That is what indicates the reasons why the universalistic intellectual life in particular fragments and atomizes religious life, so that the particular form of modern science must undermine religious life. And the strongest force for the destruction of religious life is actually present in those university and other educational theologians who have adopted the scientific thinking of our time in order to understand the religious, the facts of religion as such.

Not as much is being done to undermine religious life through the laity of today as through modern theology; and it is a pity that such efforts have not made more progress than those of Overbeck, which were set out in the extraordinarily significant book “On the Christianity of Our Present-Day Theology,” in which the case is made that the modern theologian is unchristian. Overbeck, the Basel church historian, who was a friend of Nietzsche and on whom he had a very deep influence, wanted to prove that modern theology is the most un-Christian, has completely thrown off Christianity and contributes most to the undermining of Christianity because it has become purely intellectualistic through the universal suggestion that intellectualism has exerted on the modern educated world. Until you realize that modern theology, as it is taught at the modern faculties, leads to the undermining of Christianity, you will not get the right impulse into your endeavors.

Now, what is at stake is that we learn again to progress to a form of experiencing the world other than the purely intellectual one, and the other form consists precisely in the pictorial, in that which can pass over into cult and into symbolism.

You see, when we set up the Waldorf School here – I would like to show you things from the perspective of the here and now – when we set up the Waldorf School here, the first thing that had to be done was to act more in line with the spirit of the times and to make it clear to the world that our aim in setting up this Waldorf School was not to found a school of world view. It is the worst slander against the Waldorf School when people outside say, and this is already being repeated as far away as America, that it exists to teach anthroposophy to children. That is not its purpose! It is not a school of world-view. What can be gained through anthroposophy can be incorporated into pedagogy and didactics. Only that which can be fathomed by anthroposophy should lie in the pedagogical treatment itself. Therefore, from the very beginning — because it cannot be any different as long as you have not yet worked — we have had a Catholic priest teach religious education to Catholic children and a Protestant priest teach religious education to Protestant children. Now, the Waldorf School was initially created for the children of the Waldorf-Astoria workers; they were the foundation. Many children of Social Democrats and dissidents came along. The question arose: should these children grow up without any religion? There was a certain kind of concern. But there were also parents who did not want their children to grow up without religion. So we were obliged to give some kind of anthroposophical religious education, just as we had Catholic instruction given to Catholic children and Protestant instruction given to Protestant children. And most children found it useful, at least I think so, isn't that right?

Ernst Uehli: By far the majority.

Rudolf Steiner: Well, by far the most children. On the other hand, there are a relatively large number of children who are taught Catholic religion, and the children taught Protestant religion are in the minority. Well, we couldn't help it, we certainly didn't want to take business away from the Protestant religion teacher, and at first we even thought it was unfortunate for our school when the Protestant religion teacher once said that he couldn't really make any progress because the children were gradually moving over to the Anthroposophical religion lessons. It was up to him to keep them. We couldn't help it if they ran over. We don't have anthroposophy as just any subject in the school curriculum, but just as the Catholic and Protestant religious education is brought in from outside. We have tried to get a methodology for it and so on. All this is, of course, in its infancy, because things that work with reality cannot be created overnight; it is something that can only come from practical, extensive experience, but it must be started with that. From an unbiased observation, the need arose – and this is important for our consideration yesterday – to add a cult to religious instruction, namely our Sunday activity, which two of your colleagues observed last Sunday. Of course, this is also something that is just beginning. So far, we have a ritual for such a Sunday activity — every Sunday — and a ritual for children who have reached the age of fourteen, the completion of elementary school, and who in this ritual first experience what is thought to be experienced through confirmation. But you have to look at it all as being at the beginning, but the necessity to move on to a kind of cult, to a kind of working through ritual, that has arisen entirely from the matter. And if you follow your matter with real inner participation, you will have no choice but to say to yourself: cult, ritual, symbolism must be added.

Because, you see, it is the case that all religious life must disappear if it cannot represent reality, if religious life is only supposed to be something that can be spoken of in such a way that everything can be expressed in intellectualized thought. Then this religious life cannot be cultivated at all. Something must be able to happen through religious experience; there must be processes that, as such, as processes, have not only an eternal significance [for man], but are something in world events.

And here we must admit that everything we intellectually grasp in our soul, everything that modern science recognizes as a scientific achievement – not what we form in our soul as living concepts , we gradually acquire during our childhood, and this then transforms itself in the course of our lifetime – but the intellectualized content, even if it extends to the most complex natural laws, is mortal with us.

Do not take this sentence lightly. That which is the intellectual content of the soul is, at best, only an image of the spiritual; it is mortal like the human body. For it is precisely the intellectual that is completely mediated by the body. All soul experiences that are mediated intellectually arise after birth and perish at death. That which is eternal in the soul comes only after the intellectual. So, no abstract concept goes through the gate of death with us, but only what we have experienced in life beyond abstract concepts. That is why many souls from the present population have to lead a long 'sleeping life' after death, because they were only involved in intellectuality and because intellectuality fades away after death and it takes a long time for a person to acquire a super-intellectual content, which he can then process for the next life on earth. It is a fact that much of the present life is lost to man in his overall development through intellectual life.

This is regarded as foolishness by our contemporaries today, at least by our theologians; but it is a proven spiritual-scientific result. The fact that our entire education today is based only on intellectualism, the fact that we are so proud of this intellectualism, means that we deprive the human being of immortal content to the same extent that we instill this mortal intellectualism into him from the most diverse points of view. You must take this to heart.

My dear friends, it is absolutely right to statistically count how many of a population are non-literate, how many can read and write in relatively early childhood. But if education is built only on intellectualism, as it is in today's schools, then this means killing the soul-spiritual and not awakening the soul-spiritual. This is how it must be for the earth. But on the other hand, a counterweight must also be provided. That is why we do not have an intellectual approach to teaching reading and writing in our pedagogy and didactics at the Waldorf School. Here, too, the child learns from the pictorial, from the artistic, precisely in order not to kill everything immortal. It learns by being given the letter out of the pictorial, the abstract out of the concrete pictorial, which is our letter today, in order at least not to take from the child what is still a real soul life. This pedagogy and didactics of the Waldorf school always emerges from the anthroposophical understanding of the whole of human life. And the strong hatred that is shown towards it shows how much people feel that here, once again, something is being addressed that has been extinguished in the outside world over the last three to four centuries – albeit to the detriment of the life of modern humanity. We should hardly be surprised that religious life has been dampened, because we have a science that simply can no longer talk about the immortal. And the further culture that has emerged shows even more clearly that science has become nothing but a bauble; a froth of thinking has shown itself in the general culture of humanity.

We have a word for “immortal” in the newer languages; but man has only done so out of his egoism, out of his desire to be eternal. We have a word for “immortal,” but we have no word for “to be unborn.” We do not have a word for “to be unborn” that can be used in everyday speech. But we would have to have that, as well as the word “immortal.” We see only one end of life when we speak of the eternal in the soul. And with this goes hand in hand the atomization, the fragmentation, the weaving of the intellectual into the individual life, where today it is even sought in the subconscious, as in the James School in America and so on. If we are serious about cultivating the religious, we must confront this with the power of the image, of action, of ritual in the best sense of the word. Just consider – I will show it with an example – what this ritual as such means.

I certainly do not want to do the opposite of the iconoclasts who wanted to eradicate images and the cultic stormers who wanted to eradicate cult, and I do not want to express the opposite of that here today. But I would like to use an example to show what the cult means.

Take the Mass offering. The Mass offering cannot, strictly speaking, be considered a Roman Catholic institution. It must not be, because the Mass offering goes back to ancient, pre-Christian times. It can be said, however, that the Mass offering was shrouded in the mysteries of the ancient cultic rites in the mysteries, that it has been greatly transformed over time; but as we see the Mass offering today in Roman Catholicism, it is just something that has been partially transformed from the Egyptian and Near Eastern mysteries.

And what was it then? What was that ritual that eventually developed into the Mass Sacrifice, the meaning of which only the most initiated Catholics really know, while the broad masses of Catholics have some idea of it? What was it that underlies the Mass Sacrifice?

It was an outward image of what is called initiation or ordination. It is absolutely so. If one follows the Mass sacrifice and disregards what has been added to the basic components – partly quite rightly, partly through misunderstanding – if one looks only at these basic components, then the Mass sacrifice is an outward pictorial expression of initiation or ordination.

The four parts are: the reading of the Gospel, the offertory, the consecration – transubstantiation – and communion. The essence of the Mass lies in these four parts.

What does the reading of the Gospels mean? It means the resounding, the revelation of the word into the community. This is clearly based on the awareness that the word only has real content when it is not discovered by man through intellectual work, but when man experiences the inspired word that comes from the spiritual world. Without this consciousness, without the awareness that the supersensible world is embodied in the word, the reading of the Gospel would not be a real reading. Thus, in the first part of the Mass Sacrifice we have the divinely glorified proclamation of the teaching. What the supersensible world gives to man in the sensual world, we have in the Gospel reading.

What the human being can give of himself to the supersensible world, what is attempted of him in the offering of the sacrifice, so to speak as a counter-gift, the real prayer, that comes before us figuratively in the offertory. The offertory, the sacrifice, symbolically expresses what a person can feel in his soul as a sense of consecration to the supersensible. This is said through the symbolic action of the offertory, in a sense in response to the gospel reading. This is the second part.

The third part, transubstantiation, the change, consists in the fact that it is symbolically represented that consciousness which develops in man when he feels the divine substance within him, when he feels the divine substance in his own soul. For the Christian, this transformation is nothing other than the expression of the Pauline saying: It is no longer I who live, but Christ lives in me. He does not just sacrifice himself, he becomes aware that the supersensible lives in himself. This is what is meant by the image of transubstantiation. And it is always a beautiful and significant side effect of transubstantiation that, while the Holy Sacrament is being raised up over the chalice, the faithful are actually supposed to close their eyes and turn inward, so that they experience transubstantiation not through outward looking but through their innermost consciousness. It is also significant that the Holy Sacrament actually consists of the bread and the bread holder, which has a moon-shaped form, so that in the Sacrament Symbol, which envelops the Holy Sacrament (see drawing $.100), sun and moon are present in the picture, which clearly indicates that in the times when the sacrifice of the Mass was being developed in its original form, there was an awareness of the connection between Christ and the sun and between Yahweh and the moon. What the world has received in Christianity and what has been built on the lunar religion of Yahweh is fully expressed in this placement of the host on the lunar form, and it is truly a symbol of the confluence of the mortal in man with the immortal.

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And the fourth part of the Mass is Communion, which is meant to express nothing other than this: after the human being has grown together with the supersensible, he allows his entire earthly being to be poured into union with the supersensible. This fourth part pictorially represents what the person to be initiated, the one to be initiated, also had to experience in the older and newer mysteries.

The first main section consists of learning to transform what one receives as knowledge and feeling for the world into an abstract form, so that one can say with inner honesty: In the beginning was the Word, and through the Word everything came into being. — I ask you, my dear friends, to consider how far modern Christianity has strayed from an understanding of the Gospel of John. Consider that today, in general, there is only the awareness that the Creator of the world is found in the Father God. God the Father, who is also confused with the Jewish god Yahweh, is regarded as the Creator God, whereas the Gospel says: “In the beginning was the Word, and all things came into being through Him; and apart from Him nothing came into being that has come into being. — That which we have within us as something created is the creative, the word in the truest sense of the word, and one should actually have the idea of the Father God that he subsists in everything, and in the Son of God he has given the world that which signifies the creative of the world.

I only want to say this because the understanding of the person to be initiated has to advance to the fact that the word that is proclaimed sounds entirely from the supersensible, while our word that is currently in vogue sounds from the intellectual, from the transitory. That is the first act of initiation: that the content of the soul is formed into a word as a supersensible revelation, as a real event, an event that emerges from the Angelion All, from the sum of the spiritual world. What is raised up out of the spiritual world and takes on the form of a word in us is the first act of the sacrifice of the Mass. In the conscious speaking through itself one should become aware that this is a proclamation of the supersensible, and that it does not represent a proclamation of the sense world.

The second thing is that through sacrifice man enters into a real relationship with the supersensible. If we can find a way to hint at the sacrifice, that is, to hint at the counter-gift to the divine, then we actually have before us in all its many-sidedness what must surely be there. You see, in modern times Catholicism has allowed itself to become obscured. Modern Catholicism actually wants to receive everything from the Godhead and give nothing back to the Godhead.

Now, we did not want to go against the prejudice of today's world too much in our ritual [the Sunday service at the Waldorf School]. But we were obliged, simply in the question of the one who performs the sacrificial act, to address the child, asking whether it wants to strive for the Spirit of God, and in response: “Yes, I will seek Him, I will seek for the Spirit of God,” to give at least a hint in words of the real relationship. Something should happen, something should be said, when each child is asked whether he wants to seek the Spirit of God. We had to at least hint at the Lord's Supper [in our Sunday service], and the rest just has to come later.

Now, you see, in the third act, it becomes clear that the supernatural is not merely present, but that the human soul can connect with it. And in the fourth act of the Mass, during Communion, the fourth act of initiation is then depicted, which consists of man completely permeating himself with the supersensible, so that he feels himself to be only an external sign, an external world symbol, that he makes the word true: Man is the image of the Godhead.

The awareness of these connections has been so lost that today one can only point them out with certain difficulties. One can therefore say that in the sacrifice of the Mass – which of course cannot simply be taken over from Catholicism, but must be developed in the sense of our present time – one has before one's eyes that which so often presents the profoundly significant spiritual path of the human being in the image. And so it should be that we accompany important stages in life with such ritualistic acts, such as the transition from school to life, but that we also work with adults through ritual, that is, through the image, because the image works not only on the intellectual, but on the whole human being. If I am to grasp something intellectually, then I grasp it entirely within myself. When I stand before a picture, it goes much deeper into the layers of my humanity than the intellectual aspect does. And when what happens through the ritual enters into the members of a community, they experience something supersensible together, and what is atomized by the teaching material is synthesized in the act of worship. What is reproduced in the teaching material, if you put it in abstract terms, from intellectual forms of ideas, which leads to fragmentation, to analysis in the individual, is reunited, synthesized, when one tries to speak in images.

You see, in modern times only one community has actually learned to speak in images, but that is a community that abuses this symbolic, imaginatively inspired speech, namely Jesuitism. And you see, I must keep pointing out how, in Jesuit educational institutions, but precisely to the detriment of humanity, it is taught quite methodically to always summarize something when you have taught something.

I will give you a very vivid example, because I myself once experienced the tremendous significance, theoretically I might say, since I wanted to see for myself how the thing works. It was about a famous Jesuit pulpit speaker – it was ten years ago – he preached about the institution of Easter confession. He wanted to reduce to absurdity what the opponents of Catholicism say: that Easter confession, the demand for Easter confession, is a papal and not a supernatural institution. He wanted to reduce this to absurdity before his faithful. I also looked at it. If Klinckowström, that was the name of the Jesuit preacher, had wanted to teach his former audience in the abstract form in which one otherwise preaches, in this way, as one is accustomed to preaching in the Protestant area, he would not have achieved anything; he would not have achieved the slightest thing. He did it in the following way, by saying in summary: “Yes, my dear Christians, you see, when we say that the Pope has instituted the Easter confession, it is really as if we were saying the following: Imagine a cannon, and at the cannon stands the gunner; the gunner holds the fuse in his hand, and then the officer stands a little further away. What happens? The gunner holds the fuse, the officer gives the command; and at the moment when the officer gives the command, when the word of command sounds, the gunner pulls the fuse, the gun goes off, and through the powder in the gun, everything that happens when the gun is fired is produced.” “This whole congregation was like one soul when this image was vividly presented to them.” ‘Now,’ he continued, ”imagine that someone came and said that the gunner did everything, that everything actually happened through him. But he only pulled the fuse at the officer's command, and the officer could not have ordered the shot without the powder. Those who say that the Pope introduced the Easter confession go much further, because that would be the same as if someone claimed that the gunner, if he only pulls the fuse at the officer's command, invented the powder! It is just as wrong when people say that the Pope introduced the Easter confession. He was only present, he, as the representative of the transcendental world, pulled the fuse."

Everything was imbued with the truth of what Father Klinckowström proclaimed. It is not that this was due to the particularly happy disposition of this priest. You can see for yourselves that it is part of the Jesuit method of teaching to express everything in such images. There is even a work of literature today – why it has been published? I have not checked it; the Catholic Church will also have some kind of intention there, because it always has intentions -, in which it is described in detail how to move the index finger when speaking this or that word, how to move the hand when saying this or that. There are even drawings for this; there is a methodical work down to the smallest detail, a work that is incorporated into the picture. And one must just say: Why is no attempt made to develop that which is developed for the harm of people on the one hand, also for the good of people? Because it can also be developed for the good, it can and must also be developed for the good, the strength must come from the earnest spiritual intentions to transform the abstract into the pictorial, and this pictorial must be experienced with the community. In this way the soul of the community is uplifted, and only in this way is the sense of community truly established. The cultic service is what holds the community together; without it the community can only disintegrate. To oppose this on theoretical grounds is to start from prejudice.

I would like to draw your attention to the fact that a friend of our cause, an Old Catholic pastor – as such, he reads the mass in German, in the national language, and performs other rituals in the national language – did not want to perform the rituals in the strange translation that one reads in many cases today. He prompted me to bring some of the practicable Catholic rituals into the form that was actually originally in them. Only through this does one see how the spiritual world in these things comes to life in many ways, and one sees what has been distorted since the time of Jerome.

Now, you need not think, as has often been said, that I am somehow tainted by Catholicism when I talk about the Catholic Church's worship. I just want to see things objectively and draw your attention to the fact that it is quite impossible to truly cultivate religious life without making the transition to worship, to speaking in the symbolum. No matter how well you know how to convince, how to work through intellectual presentation, in the religious field you will only achieve something if you can let the theoretically presented in your speech fade away into the symbolum in the appropriate places. You must experience the symbolum yourself as a truth, so you should only think of such symbolic representations that are really connected with what is real in the world.

But there are still many difficulties to be faced, and I want to draw your attention to them. Take for instance the following case: someone is supposed to imagine the physical becoming of a human being on earth. Yes, if you turn to science today with all the things it gives you about the female ovum, the male fertilizing cell, the growing out, the growing in of the fertilized ovum and so on, then despite the scientific achievements, despite the fact that one must admire what has been achieved through purely scientific thinking about such things, you do not get ideas that help you to grasp the being, but you get ideas that directly cover the truth piece by piece. You see, the most important component of the human, the animal, the organic in general, is protein. Compare the constitution of albumen with the constitution of any mineral substance in the world. It is so different that today, of course, the scientist says – and he is right to say so – the constitution of albumen is an extraordinarily complicated one, we cannot get at it, and we cannot find a bridge between any crystallized, inorganically constituted matter and what is present in albumen as a constitution. But, you see, today's science does not know that if we have any — I will draw it symbolically — inorganic form, which we can simply follow in this way (a), and we compare it with the protein constitution (b), then we initially have something that appears to be tremendously complicated; in all the substances of our food, everywhere in the organic, this seemingly complicated constitution fits in. We then say: the inorganic is more intricately constituted in the organic, and only then is the human body, for example, built up from this intricately constituted organic substance; this happens through cell division, through a certain configuration of the tissue, and so on. But the whole thing is, isn't it, nothing but nonsense. Because what really happens is the complete annihilation of all inorganic forms. The complexity of the protein consists in the fact that everything inorganic comes into chaos. The protein is always on the way to chaos, in order to dissolve the form corresponding to the inorganic and to transfer matter into chaos; and the matter that is most strongly transferred into chaos is that which is present in the fertilized egg cell. This is simply matter driven into chaos. The entire earthly natural law can no longer do anything with this chaos; it is eliminated. To have become albumen at any level means to be eliminated from the earthly natural law. And what is the consequence? That the extra-earthly natural law, the constellation of the planets, the whole extra-earthly world begins to act on this chaos in order to give this chaos a constitution again. Through the transmutation into protein, the matter enters into chaos, and thus becomes ready to receive again; not only to receive from the earthly, but to receive its constitution from the whole universe, from the cosmic. And in this consists the reproduction of the human head, which after all reproduces the vault of heaven.

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Of course, we will only have a true natural science when we go beyond these earthly things. The whole of natural science has become accustomed to deriving everything purely from the inorganic. Today, natural science is something that leads to everything dying, because natural science only accepts as valid for the intellect what can be researched in abstracto. At the moment when you have to think about the transition from that which can only be investigated in intellectual form to chaos, you have to stop thinking and start looking, and move on to a different kind of knowledge. And that is where the difficulty lies. For you see, intellectualism not only makes us into people who reject the pictorial, it even prevents us from getting out of the intellect and forming pictures ourselves. Once you have become completely intellectualized and abstract, you simply cannot do it!

The fact is that this intellectualistic culture of modern times has such great power over people that they all seem like someone who, as a little girl or even as a little boy, wants to learn to embroider in a Waldorf school and only manages to let the different threads run from top to bottom and from bottom to top; he can embroider, but he cannot create real pictures. He cannot do that. The soul activity of our modern culture, in which we have harnessed ourselves, presses so hard that no one has the spirit to be flexible enough to realize that in the egg white, everything is simply erased by these scientific results, and that matter is opened up to conception from the cosmos. This is what then points to the necessity of seeking religious renewal through anthroposophy. That is why I emphasized yesterday: Of course it is the case that we must also draw on those from today's preaching stand who come with an honest heart as so-called Protestants and who therefore reject what I have just discussed today. But the effective core on which everything should be built must actually be anthroposophists. For anthroposophy seeks to achieve what is sought in vain everywhere else: it seeks to lead to a true grasp of reality. Without having gone through this process ourselves, this coming out of the natural scientific comprehension of the world, which has already taken hold of theologians today, we will not be able to find symbolic images with which we can truly express ourselves before the believing community. And if one can approach this anthroposophical grasp of the world — you can follow it everywhere in my cycles —, at certain points one simply has to let it run out into the picture. And if you read my “Geheimwissenschaft” (Occult Science), in which I described the preliminary stages of the earth as the sun and moon, I was speaking only in images. When I say that something looks like a taste sensation, then a whole dozen of scientists like Dessoir, Oesterreich and so on cannot understand it, cannot do anything with it.

In the practical exercise of the ministry, anthroposophy is what is meant by inspiration, so that one can actually enter into the handling of the symbolic, the ritual and the cultic, and thereby have the possibility of forming a community. Otherwise one will only have the opportunity to speak to individuals. The formation of communities will never be achieved through the abstract in life.

I would like to present the matter so far and then continue it tomorrow and move on to the actual content of the sermon. We will be back tomorrow at 11 a.m., and I suggest that we also continue our discussion today about the other areas today at 7 p.m.

Now I would just like to say: Yesterday I suggested to the gentlemen from “Der Kommende Tag” that a kind of bridge should be created through “Der Kommende Tag” to what is to take place in your circle here. I have emphasized the most important thing, namely that this matter be financed, so to speak. However we think of our matter, it must be financed. It must lead immediately to the free formation of communities, even if this must be won primarily from the present church. I must say that I believe that if we work in a truly appropriate way, it could be possible to get so far in three months that the financing work will pay for itself. In other words, I think that there will at least be enough to pay for the financing work and to fill a position with someone who will start this work. “Der Kommende Tag” will agree to take care of these three months; and I believe that you have agreed to ask Dr. Heisler to take on this financing work. Initially, the matter will be on firm ground if Dr. Heisler takes it on. I am thoroughly convinced that when one has come as far as we have with such a matter, one cannot afford to wait long, because circumstances are pressing, and one often does not notice how strong the forces of decline are today, and how easy it can be to miss the boat altogether if one waits too long.

We would be much further along with the threefold order today if the matter had been properly grasped back in the spring of 1919. At that time, a cultural council was established on the basis of my cultural appeal. It was rightly imagined that people in office and dignity would also make the matter their own. They even took people in office and authority into consideration, and they worded the matter in such a way that they did not get too many goose bumps, because they wanted to appear realistic. But of course the people could not be kept in line. It is true that they could not be kept in line and that nothing helped. They will therefore be forced to turn to young people, to the younger generation, who have realized that the older generation has simply grown old and can no longer keep up. We must try not to lose any time. That is why I would like to say to you that we should try to build a bridge across, because I believe it is a legitimate feeling that, for this in particular, the financing, if it is done properly, cannot be too difficult. You will find people who are sympathetic to this, and I believe that Dr. Heisler's eloquence will find open doors if he limits himself in the next few months to persuading individuals to open the stock exchange or write the bills. Of course, you can't win people over with lectures. People won't give anything away there. You have to go to the individuals. He will have to see his task as spending all his time going to the individuals. The only unpleasant thing is that you are dismissed with words – but only with words, other cases have not yet occurred. There is no other way, you just have to accept it, and in the majority of cases you are not dismissed with words. For example, in the collection of the Swiss “Futurum AG,” I heard from all the gentlemen who were commissioned with the collection that a single instance of being thrown out with words had taken place; otherwise, people limited themselves to being extremely friendly and amiable and finding the matter extremely interesting, but just not opening the stock market. Some people then write a letter afterwards; of course, there is no need to answer that. Of course you have to realize that you will only achieve something in a small percentage of cases, but you just have to try. It's no different than having to work only towards selections, having to try a lot to have success in a few cases.

Would it perhaps be possible to discuss something else, or to pursue this further? Perhaps some of you have something to say about this. We will then extend the discussion this evening to include all three main topics that you mentioned yesterday.

Gottfried Husemann: I think we would like to talk about the extent to which we now have to prepare ourselves for the preaching profession, for speaking in a pictorial way. We cannot expect the university to prepare us for this.

Rudolf Steiner: Are you saying that something can be done in this direction? Positives, right? In these lessons I can only give the guidelines; of course I cannot go into individual points. To go into details requires at least a fortnightly course. So, one could certainly think along these lines, that if our circle has grown in the next few months, we will organize such a course, which will then give in a fortnight what is taught in the teaching institutions under the title 'symbolism', but which is actually nothing. Only in the Catholic Church faculty does symbolism still mean something. You may not yet see its inner structure quite clearly.

You can see this inner structure best from the facts. I have experienced that a large number of Catholic priests who held a position as a high school teacher - which was still quite common in Austria at the time - or who had read as a university lecturer not only at the theological faculty, but also at the philosophical and other faculties, that such Catholic priests - they were mostly religious who were later called modernists - have been reprimanded by Rome. Now I once spoke with a man who was tremendously significant in exegesis, and I asked how it was that he had been reprimanded by Rome for the content of his speech, which actually did not deserve a reprimand at all, while – if if one starts from the point of view from which the reprimand was issued, one had to say that Professor Bickell, who belonged to the Jesuits, went much further than just being an extreme liberal, but was persona grata in Rome. I told him that, and he replied: I am a Cistercian, and [in Rome] one expects of the Cistercians that the moment they no longer say what the content established by Rome is, they might then follow their convictions and gradually depart from Catholicism. — This is assumed with Cistercians. With the Jesuits, as with Professor Bickell, one knows that, however liberally they speak, they are loyal sons of Rome; they do not stray [from Rome]; one is quite certain about them, they are allowed liberalism, they may base their teachings on completely different things than on the doctrinal material.

The Catholic Church does not have this lack [of flexibility], so it is much more viable in its approach. For example, about forty years ago I once got into a conversation with a Catholic theologian who was a professor at the Vienna Theological Faculty and so learned that people said of him that he knew the whole world and three more villages into the bargain. He was a profoundly learned Cistercian. Even a Cistercian was able to discuss the subject matter in the following way. During the conversation, we came to speak about the [dogma of the] conceptio immaculata, and I said to him: Yes, you see, if you remain within Catholic logic, you can admit the immaculate conception, the conceptio immaculata Mariae. That is not the dogma of the immaculate conception of Jesus, which has always been there in the Church. But the immaculate conception, as it is claimed by Catholics on the part of St. Anne, that is, the ascent from the immaculate conception of Mary to the immaculate conception of St. Anne? If you use the same logic, you have to go further up through all the following generations. – Yes, he said, that doesn't exist, we can't do that, logic doesn't demand that. We have to stop at St. Anna; if we went further, we would end up with “Davidl,” and with Davidl we would have a bad time with the conceptio immaculata. –

Such words do not express a pure sense of truth. When the man speaks outside the Church, a completely different formulation of the truth impulse speaks, and that is present everywhere [in the Catholic Church]. The concepts are formed in such a way that they can be assimilated by the broad masses – they are not formed according to any kind of logic – that is what makes Catholicism so great. This cannot be approved of in any way, but it must be recognized. You have to know who you are dealing with.

It is the case, for example, that a real engagement with the world – in the sense of thinking, not only in an intellectualist sense, but in the sense of pure thinking, is engaged with the world – is sometimes present in Catholic priests to a certain extent. I have met many Catholic priests through the circumstances of my life. Among them was the church historian at the University of Vienna. The man was an extraordinarily interesting person, but very traditionally Catholic, so Catholic that he even admitted that he no longer goes out on the street when it is dark in the evening and the lanterns are not yet fully lit. When I asked him why he no longer walked on the streets, he said: “There you only see people in vague outlines, and in Vienna you also encounter Freemasons, and you can only see a Freemason in sharp outline because you can only pass him if you can clearly distinguish yourself from him.” You can be absolutely learned and steeped in all of theology and still have the opinion that it means something in the real world when you walk past a Freemason without rejecting him through the sharp outline. The auras merge, and it is not possible to have such a mishmash of Catholic priest and Freemason.

Ernst Uehli: The Catholic Church has worked very much with legends; and I think it is true that the Catholic movement has been very much supported by the legend. It is easy to imagine that a future church community could lead to a new formation of legends.

Rudolf Steiner: That is how it is. And if you read some of my lectures that I gave in Dornach, you will even find the attempt to express certain things that can now be expressed in legend form. I gave whole lectures in legend form; and I draw your attention to one thing. I once tried to characterize the essence of the arts. You cannot get into the essence of the arts with concepts; everything that is built up in the abstract remains external. If you want to depict such a thing, you have to resort to images. The booklet 'The Essence of the Arts' is presented entirely in images. And here again one is misunderstood. When I had spoken these words entirely out of my imagination, an old theosophist stepped forward and said, “Yes, so you have transformed the nine muses.” – Wasn't it? It was as far from my mind as anything could be to think of the nine muses; it all resulted from the necessity of the case. It was far from my mind to reheat old stories, but one could think of nothing else but that it was an abstract procedure.

So it must be said that the need to resort to images is definitely there again. For example, we still don't have an image for a very important thing. Consider the abundance of bull legends, bull narratives at the beginning of the 3rd millennium at the transition of the vernal point into the constellation of Taurus. Consider the legends of the Argonauts' journey when, in the pre-Christian 8th century, the sun entered the constellation of Aries. Now it is in the constellation of Pisces. This legend still has to be made up. We need a pictorial legend. Although the matter is already alive, we still have no legend for it. This imaginative element still needs to be developed. And so there are numerous other things that today only live in the abstract, that should be transformed into images from world events. This needs to be worked on. It is through this that we must find our way back to the world. Today, the world is actually only that which can be grasped intellectually. What is the world for today's human being? One could almost say: for the intellectual man of today the whole cosmos is nothing but rigid mathematics and mechanics. And we must again come to go beyond mere mathematics and mechanics, we must come to the imaginative, to the pictorial and also to the legendary.

We just have to realize that research such as that presented by my late friend Ludwig Laistner in his book 'The Riddle of the Sphinx', which is about sagas, myths and the formation of legends, can be of great help. I would like to emphasize that Ludwig Laistner knew nothing about spiritual science. I would just like to say that the book can help with research, although Laistner traces all myths and legends back to dreams. But it is interesting to follow how he does not seek the formation of legends in the insane way in which today's Protestant and Catholic researchers seek them, by saying to themselves: the ancient peoples made things up, they imagined the gods in a thunderstorm, and in the struggle of winter with summer. As if people had never known a peasant mind; the peasant mind never writes poetry. These people, to whom the poetry is attributed, are as far from poetry as the peasants are. It was all imaginative. Ludwig Laistner traces everything back to dreams; nevertheless, it is interesting [to read how he sees a connection between a person's inner experiences in the Slavic legend of the Lady of Noon and the legend of the] Sphinx in Greece. That is why the book is called “The Riddle of the Sphinx”. Legends must flow out of life, now in full consciousness. This is extremely important.

In our literature, we already have a rich and extensive body of material from which we can educate ourselves about the various facts that spiritual science is now able to bring down from the supersensible worlds, and our branches are able to work with the help of this material. Therefore, it will be advisable if, when we meet in person, we also talk about how this material may relate to our soul life, how we introduce it into life, how we ourselves can find refreshment, enlivenment and invigoration, in short, it will be advisable if, on such occasions, we focus more on the affairs of our spiritual movement, because, by the nature of things, we can only meet in person less often.

Many of you will notice that even today, when you immerse yourself in spiritual science or anthroposophy, you still face many difficulties. Isn't it true that you first find your way into spiritual science through the needs of your soul, in that the soul must ask questions about the most important riddles of life? One finds one's way into spiritual science in particular when one looks at today's life with all that it can give, and sees how little the various spiritual directions, be they religious or scientific, can really provide satisfying answers in the deeper sense to the great riddles of life. And then, when one has found one's way into this spiritual-scientific movement through one's urge for knowledge, through one's longing for knowledge, when one has immersed oneself for a while in what has been extracted from the spiritual worlds to date, then difficulties often arise, difficulties of the most diverse kinds. They are different for everyone, so it is not easy to describe them in a few words. Our friends often say: By finding my way into spiritual science I have indeed gained something extraordinarily valuable, something meaningful for life; but it has also isolated me in a certain way, torn me away from the views, from the community of other people, it has also made life difficult for me, so to speak. Those who, by the very nature of their spiritual striving, are dependent on the opinions of the outside world feel this particularly strongly. This really gives rise to the most diverse difficulties.

With other friends, after they have immersed themselves in spiritual science for a while, something arises that one might say is like timidity, something that causes anxiety, fear of all kinds of questions: how to cope with life and so on. Many of you have no doubt had similar questions arise in you. Such questions are often questions of feeling and perception. I would like to take such difficulties in our inner soul life as my starting point for today's reflection.

The right context of these manifold feelings, which can be different for everyone, the real connections, are sometimes difficult to see. We must always bear in mind that we, as people who feel drawn to anthroposophical truths, are still a very small group. We are in the midst of a life struggle that is being waged outside our circles with means that are sharply different from ours. And anyone who reflects a little on what Anthroposophy seeks to achieve in life will be able to see how fundamentally different the goals of thinking, feeling and willing become under the influence of Anthroposophical ideas from the goals that the vast majority of humanity sets itself today. And since thoughts and feelings are real facts, we must realize that our small group, that is, each one of us, is in a mass of energy that is still relatively small compared to the, one might almost say, in most cases completely opposite thoughts, perceptions and feelings of the rest of humanity. Even if the difficulties of life that arise for us take the most diverse forms and do not immediately show that they are connected with what I have just described, they are nevertheless connected with it; and we must try to how we can cope with such difficulties, with the difficulties that arise from the fact that we remain true to the cause of anthroposophy, but as a result come into conflict with the rest of the world.

As I said, things obscure themselves, and they do not always show the right face. What we have to introduce into our souls, as it were, as a remedy, in order to find more and more inner harmony despite the contradictions of the outer world, thereby strengthening the soul so that it can withstand the often arises in the form of disharmony, that is: a clear, correct view of the relationship between those who profess or are interested in anthroposophy and the rest of humanity. To think clearly and sharply about this matter purifies our soul so that we can also be strong when external powers that are full of contradictions beset us. If you think about it from a narrow perspective, you might say: Yes, but what does it help me if I am now clear about what separates Anthroposophy from the rest of the world? After all, it doesn't change my circumstances! It would be a mistake to think so; for our life circumstances may not change overnight through clear thoughts, insightful thoughts, but the strength we gain through such clear thoughts in the direction just indicated, these clear thoughts, they strengthen us little by little in such a way that they do change our life circumstances. Sometimes, however, we do not yet find the possibility to develop really clear, sharp and therefore sufficiently strong thoughts in this direction.

With regard to what we want to achieve through spiritual science or anthroposophy and what we want to achieve not only for ourselves but for the world - and we must once bring this before our soul as one of these clear thoughts before our soul, today's civilized humanity lives in a terrible, more or less conscious or unconscious lie, and the effect of this lie within civilized humanity is tremendous. This is actually saying something very significant, and let us try to clarify this point a little more.

It is hardly possible for a truly thinking person with a completely healthy mind to regard what exists today as general culture in the so-called civilized world without realizing that this culture lacks much, that above all this culture has no impulses for life that are sufficient for itself. Yet there is much in this culture that is far-reaching in its ideals. What a wealth of ideals there are in our time, as people call them, the reasons for founding associations and clubs that set themselves programs through which these or those ideals are to be expressed! All of this is extremely well-intentioned, so well-intentioned that one can say: Those people who, under the influence of these or those ideals, join together in smaller or larger associations from all walks of life, want to do good from their point of view, and these people's attitude is to be fully respected. But these people mostly live under the inhibiting influence of a certain constraint, arising from unconscious timidity, from unconscious spiritual cowardice, precisely in the face of what is most important for humanity today. We say: the most important! What humanity needs today is spiritual knowledge and the introduction of certain spiritual insights into our lives.

This was indeed a big question in the course of the 19th century. You know that there are spiritual laws, laws about the spiritual worlds. At all times certain people knew about this, and of course even in the course of the 19th century, when spiritual science had not yet appeared in the form in which it is now appearing, there were so-called occult societies, which were more or less worthy of the name, which wanted to cultivate occult truths, spiritual truths, in the most diverse ways, and which also had a certain insight into what spiritual truths mean for the world. Now, in the middle of the nineteenth century, a crisis occurred in relation to the deepest impulses of modern human development. This crisis consisted in a particular rise of materialism in all areas, in the area of knowledge, in the area of life. Materialism reached a high tide. We know, of course, that numerous people emerged who wanted to establish a comprehensive world view based on scientific materialism. But this theoretical materialism would not have been the most pernicious aspect; rather, it is the practical materialism, the materialism that is particularly involved in ethical and social life and in the religious feelings of people, that has led humanity to a crisis in the course of the 19th century. And those who still knew something, precisely from the more or less reputable occult societies mentioned, directed their attention, especially from the middle of the 19th century onwards, to how one could remedy the rampant materialism. In certain circles, those who had spiritual-scientific insight - only not yet the kind that alone can be effective and that is striven for in the form that we humbly attempt to strive for - those, that is, who had an ancient traditional or otherwise somehow outdated spiritual insight into the development of humanity, they asked themselves: How do we help from the point of view of what, like a disaster, dawns on modern humanity through materialism? And they said to themselves: We can help by providing people with proof that just as there are sensual facts in our environment, so too are there spiritual facts and spiritual beings in our environment. But, I would like to say, people were only accustomed to experimental thinking and to external experience and perception. And so these people with spiritual insights, who had concerns like those mentioned, knew of no other solution than to prove the spiritual world in the same way that one proves the natural processes of the external sensory world. And so then all kinds of things were tried. And we see movements emerging in the course of the 19th century that are aimed at convincing people of the existence of a spiritual world. The crudest of these movements, I might say, is the spiritualist movement. While scholars today find it difficult to get to grips with the relatively transparent methods of our spiritual science, truly brilliant scholars of the 19th century seriously studied spiritualism.

Now, spiritism has the peculiarity that it should work in an external way, through something that can be presented to the external senses like a chemical or physical experiment. To a large extent, this method, which seeks to emulate the spiritual science of natural science, is already bankrupt today – to a large extent, I say – and it will become more and more apparent that it is bound to fail, because, of course, you cannot let people see the spirit with their own hands, figuratively speaking. Therefore much of what has been done by certain so-called occult societies in the course of the nineteenth century and up to our day, through all kinds of mysterious machinations, has done more to discredit spiritual scientific research than to support it. And so we see that especially among the best-intentioned people, who have insight, especially in social matters, but also in other areas relating to the practical conduct of life, there is much that has to happen from the present on into the future. We see that people who understand this are almost shocked when it is said that the most important impulses needed in our time and in the near future must come from true spiritual insight, from the realization that real spiritual forces and spiritual beings are in our human environment just as there are sensory facts and sensory beings. People who are well-meaning about the progress of humanity are truly shocked. Let me give you an example first. We can learn a lot from examples like these that deal with comprehensive life phenomena. When we turn our gaze to a great movement, it also shows us clearly what we, each and every one of us, actually encounter every day in small ways.

A truly important man who was truly sincere about the social progress of humanity was murdered in Paris the day before the outbreak of this unfortunate world war: Jaurès. Jaurès was certainly one of the most honest personalities of the present day in the field of social endeavor, and he was also one of those who, with all human insight, sought to gain insight into the present conditions of life and into the reasons why they are increasingly leading to absurdity, increasingly and increasingly to impoverishment and immiseration in the spiritual and material spheres of humanity. And he strove with all his might to find ideas and thoughts that he could convey to people, so that, in a joint effort, the great issues of the present day could be resolved to some extent. We can learn much from personalities such as Jaurès, for we learn most when we see the great defects of our own time from the spiritual-scientific point of view, when we realize the necessity of thinking clearly about them, and when we see these defects embodied, not in small but in great personalities, in whom we can be convinced, above all, of their pure intentions and honest striving for knowledge, and also of a certain ability to understand the times. We have much more to gain by testing the damage of our time on people whom we respect and esteem than by testing it on people whom we respect less because we cannot ascribe to them a benevolent and good attitude in the highest sense. Now such people, who have devoted all their thoughts, feelings and willpower to the service of humanity, to the service that must be performed in raising humanity to a higher social level, such people as Jaurès find it extraordinarily difficult – and he is truly no exception, but we see the best people of our time in this difficulty – such people find it truly difficult to talk about things like our spiritual science. And it is precisely these very gifted people who would only be able to achieve what they want to achieve for humanity if they could say: Everything that I can achieve with my ordinary means of thinking and scientific means only provides me with impulses that are too weak to really take hold of life; I have to realize that all these impulses that I want to provide to humanity on my way have no foundation. First I must create a foundation for myself; I must penetrate and suffuse what I have believed up to now with the deeper foundations of spiritual science. I must recognize spiritual facts, real spiritual facts.

You see, the person who does not recognize such spiritual facts and who forms all kinds of thoughts and ideals about how human progress can be promoted today is like the person who has a garden in front of him with many plants that are beginning to show signs of dying, and he does this, that, and much more, and strives all the time - but he achieves nothing. Yes, one plant is a little better, the other a little worse, but overall the plants are not getting better. Why does it not get better? Because some disease may have seized the roots, which he does not check. It is the same with the social endeavors of people like Jaurès. They put an enormous amount of effort into it, and they also achieve an enormous amount with regard to the surface, but they do not penetrate to the roots, because in the roots of our present human life, there is a lack of recognition of a real spiritual world. And no matter how many seemingly well-founded social insights are established, they will not bear fruit for humanity in reality if they are not based on those insights that can only come from spiritual science. Therefore, real progress for present-day humanity will only be possible when spiritual science can be recognized to the extent that the most important part of spiritual science for our time – the recognition of real spiritual entities and spiritual forces – no longer encounters any difficulties among people, especially among the best people. Let us just realize that the best people, those of good will, have difficulties precisely with regard to the most important thing in our cause: the recognition of the spiritual world as such.

I called attention to a point over there in Zurich that makes this particularly clear. There is a person who has spoken very favorably about our spiritual science and has even had what he said printed. This man has also taken courage before a very educated audience and no longer regards what lives within our spiritual movement as mere folly. But this man cannot help but stop precisely at the most important thing, at the recognition of the spiritual world. What does he say? “We must seek to understand it [this spiritual movement], at least in the circle gathered around Steiner, rather as a religious movement among our contemporaries, if not of an original but only of a syncretic kind, but still directed to the bottom of all life; we may judge it as a movement to satisfy the , and thus as a movement beyond realism, which clings to the sensual; we may recognize in it, above all, a movement that points people to self-reflection on the moral problems that face them, and that aims at a work of inner rebirth, ing out of a scrupulous attention to self-education; one need only read Steiner's book An Introduction to Theosophy to notice the earnestness with which man is pointed to the work of his moral purification and self-perfection."

I am not reading these words to you out of some kind of silliness, but because we really want to see clearly how the outside world relates to our aspirations. We see that he is a well-meaning person who, however, regards our movement as a syncretic one because, above all, he does not know it. He does not know how it is a thoroughly new movement simply because it is also based on something that is new in the world: on the new direction of natural science, which is, after all, its foundation. He cannot give any information about this because he does not understand it; but he is well disposed towards our movement. And if you now let this whole lecture, which he has given - “The Thought World of the Educated” - sink in, you can see that the man reflects that a spiritual education of the human being is necessary in our time, and he finds one of the attempts to promote this spiritual movement of humanity in our movement. But then he says, and this is the characteristic thing: “In its speculation directed to the supersensible, it is further a reaction against materialism; in doing so, however, it easily loses the ground of reality and gets carried away in hypotheses” — he believes that real spiritual knowledge is hypotheses, not knowledge - “in clairvoyant fantasies, in a realm of dreams, so that it no longer has sufficient strength for the reality of individual and social life.”

You see, despite his benevolent judgment, he says afterwards: “But after all, we want and must register Theosophy as a corrective phenomenon in the course of education in the present day.” He feels compelled to stop short of all that, without which our movement cannot be conceived without, and what we bring right at the start: supersensible facts; because without man gaining connection with supersensible facts, humanity cannot be brought out of the impasse into which it is now mired. But even well-meaning people believe that – while our movement is seeking firm ground under its feet, without which all other social ideals are left hanging in the air – this movement leads to the realm of dreams, that it no longer has “sufficient strength left” in terms of shaping social life. As I said, this is not due to ill will or mistrust, but rather to a mistrust that arises from unconscious timidity, unconscious discouragement in the face of the recognition of spiritual facts. It is the clear lack of insight, or rather, it is clear that it is the lack of insight into what spiritual science can contribute to the foundation of social striving.

And so, of course, people like Jaurès find themselves in life today without any possibility of recognizing, from the thoughts they have absorbed from their education and from their entire contemporaneity, that everything that happens physically is dependent on spiritual worlds, and that man, in the sphere in which he is called upon to intervene in life, for example also with regard to social life, can only intervene correctly if it is made possible for him by knowing the spiritual laws by which the spiritual world can be introduced into the physical. And the fact that such men are confronted with this impossibility, that this is really a widespread modern-day phenomenon among the best people of the present time, is due to the significant, albeit unconscious, but no less significant life-lies in our age. These life-lies can be found almost everywhere.

Let us consider the case of Jaurès, as a typical example. He was a man who stood before the rest of humanity and sought by every means of social knowledge to improve what he rightly recognized as leading people only to a dead end. There stands a man before the rest of humanity who, in order to gain the necessary insights in this field, really familiarizes himself with all historical facts, who studies the history of past times and wants to learn from the facts of earlier times what can happen in the present, so that mistakes that have clearly shown themselves to be mistakes in earlier social experiments by humanity can be avoided. In all his endeavors, Jaurès, like others, is confronted with the impossibility of truly recognizing a spiritual world, of truly recognizing that through human beings, continuous streams of spiritual life flow down from the spiritual world into this world. One of the fine essays that Jaurès wrote is about the relationship between socialism and patriotism in the Jaurès sense. There Jaurès tries to show how historical events intervene in the development of humanity and have an effect on it. After he has brought various things before his mind that had an effect in the Roman Empire, in order to learn from them how to act in the present, what had an effect in the Greek world, in order to learn from it how to act at other times, after he has really brought various things before his mind with an extraordinarily thorough urge for knowledge, he also brings a chapter from more recent times before his mind. A remarkable chapter is in this book Jaurès, which deals with the proletariat and patriotism, and it is interesting to present this little chapter to oneself in order to see what is actually going on in the souls of the best people around us today.

In this chapter, Jaurès's aim is to show that in recent social progress, it is not land that is the main thing, but industry and so on, but we will not go into these things; the important thing is that here he is forced to refer to the personality of Joan of Arc, the Maid of Orleans. Now imagine, a man who lives entirely in the ideas of the present points to the Virgin of Orleans, a personality whom everyone who knows modern history knows – anyone who objectively recognizes the fact will have to admit – that the map of Europe today would simply be completely different if she had not intervened. Of course, Jaurès also sees this. He says:

Here we see a man who is condemned because he, steeped in the materialistic thinking of the present, can only think on the basis of materialistic principles, so to speak, but who, because he also wants to be historically honest, is forced to point to this remarkable phenomenon of Joan of Arc and to take it as seriously as we can see from his words. So Jaurès is confronted with the full historical significance of Joan of Arc. But now we ask ourselves: what, after all – and this may be taken too far, even for Jaurès personally, when we assert it – but for many others who act in Jaurès' spirit it is certainly not taken too far – what, for a person like that, who lives in such a social view of society as Jaurès did, be other than someone who, through a certain religious ecstasy, which one should not aspire to if one wants to remain a reasonable person, has arrived at the impulses that she has now arrived at? These people will certainly not recognize what must be clear to us from spiritual science: that at a time when the modern developed spirit knowledge that we have today could not yet be attained, streams of spiritual life flowed from the spiritual worlds through such more or less consciously active personalities such as the Maid of Orleans, that she was a medium, not for people, of whom mediums are so often misused in modern times, but for divine spiritual worlds that wanted to have an effect on the physical world. It had to be recognized that what came from the Maid of Orleans was of more value than what the others could and wanted to communicate from their human insights. That the spiritual world spoke through this Joan of Arc, of course, such people could not recognize. And yet, if they speak of the real facts, they must speak of such people as the Maid of Orleans, they must even recognize them. They must therefore attribute what is happening - just consider that: what is happening - to personalities whose spiritual life they do not recognize, whose spiritual life they certainly would not want to emulate.

Even if people do not want to admit it today – one can also numb oneself to this fact – this is nothing but the deepest lie of life. This is a real lie, and I am characterizing for you only one case of the lie that pulsates everywhere today through our social life, and which is due to the fact that people do not recognize what really is, what is most real, but must regard it as a fact through what the newer development of the spirit brings forth. Lies are now also facts, and they work accordingly. And even if they are well-meaning, earnestly striving, significant people, like Jaurès – since they are bound by the conditions of the times in such a lie of life, what comes from them cannot, nevertheless, have a liberating effect on humanity.

Yes, we are faced with this in a present-day fact of life, which we must allow to have a clear and distinct, a profound effect on our souls. We must have the courage to look at such life-lies with clear insight, and we must find the strength from this clear looking to sustain ourselves against all that comes from all sides, and which sometimes comes from one or the other side very masked and concealed from this life-lie. What real inner insight into the interrelationships of human life can people who live in such a lie actually gain? They must think: Oh, there are such strange characters who want to have a relationship with the spiritual worlds like the Maid of Orleans, and one must even ascribe historical significance to them; but one really does not have to present this as an example to follow, so that one can somehow introduce spiritual powers into the physical world! Much water will flow down the Rhine before wider circles of people understand and recognize the full gravity of the fact we have been talking about. Today, even the natural scientists have adopted the airs and graces that theologians once adopted towards Joan of Arc. For what Jaurès draws attention to at the end is part of the deep tragedy of the phenomenon of Joan of Arc at the time. The theologians of the day said: What she brings forth as her spiritual knowledge of the world does not correspond to what we recognize through our theology! In those days, the theologians spoke from the same attitude; and today, after a relatively shorter time than was the case with theology, the natural scientists are speaking from the same attitude. The Maid of Orleans of old replied to those who judged her from the standpoint of theology and said that she must justify her miracles and her mission from the Holy Books: There is more written in the Book of God than in all your books! These are historic words. But they are also words that are still valid today. From the standpoint of spiritual science, they can be used to counter all objections, theological and scientific: More is written in the Book of the spiritual worlds than all that the adversaries could dream up. And Jaurès adds to these words: “A wonderful word, which in a certain respect stands in contrast to the soul of the peasant, whose faith is rooted above all in tradition. How far removed is all this from the dull, narrow-minded patriotism of the landowner! But Jeanne hears the divine voices of her heart by looking up to the radiant and gentle heights of heaven.”

Yes, such an acknowledgment may sound good in the mouths of our contemporaries, but what is it in the mouths of even the best of our contemporaries? An acknowledgment of something that they more or less consider a work of fiction, a work of fiction that can make life more or less beautiful, but which they do not admit is real. And that is what the living lie does!

We can see, then, that we need clarity about the existence of this life-denying delusion. We encounter its effects everywhere, and it is preventing spiritual science from gaining the influence it should have. But more and more people will not only have to gain a theoretical insight into spiritual science, they will also have to find the strong inner strength to introduce spiritual science into the various branches of life. This could be demonstrated in the most diverse areas of life. And again, one can say that the true facts are masked here. For apparently one can object to everything that is said about spiritual science. Let us take an area of life that is most likely to be appreciated by humanity, for the simple reason that it is very close to external healing. You see, spiritual science could have an enormously beneficial effect if people would only bring themselves to allow the medical faculties, medicine and pharmacology to be influenced by this spiritual science. For modern scientific development has led more and more to medicine itself taking on a materialistic character. Of course, through this materialistic character it has also brought about many beneficial effects, and one need only point to the extraordinarily great progress that has been made in the field of surgery to find some justification for saying again and again what I also say: that one must admire the more recent advances in natural science. But there are other, no less important aspects of medical knowledge and skill that suffer tremendously under the materialistic approach and that can only approach a beneficial future by introducing spiritual-scientific knowledge into the relevant investigations.

Through such spiritual scientific knowledge, connections in the human organism are recognized for which today's medical science only knows the details. Of course, such things are often instinctively suspected by more insightful researchers; but progress cannot happen fast enough as a result, and one can say: if such a fantastic rejection of everything spiritual did not prevail in the medical field and medicine did not strive to be monopolized as a power by the corresponding authorities and governments, then, for the benefit of humanity, tremendous achievements would be made in the field of medicine on the basis of spiritual science. You may say: Well, nothing prevents a spiritual researcher from bringing about such progress! - That is precisely why things are masked, because it is simply not true. The materialistic practice of medicine as it prevails today does indeed prevent spiritual research from intervening. For it is a completely false belief that the spiritual researcher, who sees through things today, can help an individual person in all cases. He is prevented from doing so by the external materialistic practice of medicine, and will be prevented more and more if the materialistic practice of medicine continues for a long time. One cannot say to the spiritual researcher in the field of medicine: “Here is a problem, now solve it,” because his legs are not freed to dance. Certainly, there are many commendable efforts being made to counter the prevailing materialism in medicine; but these efforts are all insufficient because, above all, there is a lack of insight that one must not only must oppose materialistic medicine, but that above all it is necessary to work with what modern medicine has acquired: namely, the external aids that are needed in this particular field. But humanity would be amazed at the results if spiritual-scientific views were to be introduced into clinics and dissecting rooms today, and if spiritual-scientific views were to be applied to all the other resources and remedies of the medical profession. But efforts must also be made in this direction. The aim must not be to disregard materialistic medicine, but to bring spiritual science into this materialistic practice. And until that is done, it is not possible to help in individual cases. The reasons why this cannot be, cannot be discussed in such a short lecture; but it is so. Thus, in a field that is so closely related to the outward well-being of man, an enormous amount could be achieved if only there were a little unprejudiced thinking.

And with regard to the burning social questions, it would become evident that although many attempts are still being made to improve this or that in the social field, to improve these or those conditions of life, all these attempts will fail. Only when we come to base social knowledge on spiritual-scientific axioms, just as mathematics or geometry are based on axioms, only then will we find truly effective means.

And so we live in a world that, above all, our own soul, when we are seized by spiritual science or anthroposophy, must encounter with radically different thoughts and feelings. We live, as it were, in an atmosphere that demands of us a strong display of strength, a strong sense of self-preservation. And these are the deeper reasons why we can often become disheartened, feel lonely, and why perhaps one or the other cannot cope easily with life because of their commitment to spiritual science. But if we have a clear insight into the magnitude of that in which we are placing ourselves in the context of humanity as a whole, and how it appears only as something small today because we are still at the beginning, we can also find this strength, can then really find it. Everything great in the development of humanity must take a small beginning.

I would also like to point out here, as I have done in Zurich these days, how limited, illogical and incoherent our present-day thinking is. This is because, in the more recent development, natural science has had a blinding effect on this newer humanity. This natural science has produced magnificent, admirable results with regard to the external world of the senses, and those people who used to administer the spiritual wealth of humanity felt, I might say, pushed aside, pushed aside more and more. In particular, certain theologians have not fared well. It is wrong to simply reject out of hand what people have brought forth as theology through the development of humanity. This “theology” contains profound, significant basic truths about the human soul; even if they first have to be examined more closely by spiritual science in many respects, there are basic truths in it. Just because they are not advocated in a way that meets the needs of today's humanity, today in the thinking man and in the feeling soul the longing for an answer to the question of spiritual science must arise. But the theologians, who did not want to go along with such a spiritual-scientific endeavor, ended up in a strange state: they had truths, but these truths could not be applied to anything because the other sciences had taken away the objects for these truths. The theologians had truths about the soul – but the soul was taken away from them by natural science. And now theology perhaps expresses truths in words, but it does not concern itself with the objects; it even wants to let natural science examine the objects, because theologians are in many respects too idle to really take on natural science. And that is what we must see as significant in spiritual science: that this spiritual science completely takes on the natural sciences, gets involved in everything that natural science has acquired, and has its say by adding the spiritual scientific principles to the natural scientific endeavor. The theologians did not want to do this; they are sometimes there when it matters to participate, to hold the objects, inspired by a very strange attitude.

One who is considered an extraordinary theologian in certain circles, both as a professor, who he used to be, and as a pastor, has written a little book in which he reproduces religious lectures; and in this little book he expresses thoughts that one might find strange coming from him. One sees into the soul of an important man of the present time. Yes, I cannot say otherwise, one is sometimes overwhelmed by the thoughts that an important man can bring to light today! For example, in the very first lecture, this famous, important man says that one must approach natural science and give up the natural man; only the man of freedom may be retained as a theologian. But in this sense, freedom itself becomes a mere word! Does he not say that he leaves the soul's entire content to natural science? He retains nothing but a wisdom of words, and he even gives a rather cute reason for his attitude, saying quite dryly that this is his attitude. So here is a theologian who, in these lectures, wanted to describe to his audience the most modern form of Christianity, and he says right in the first lecture: “Man, as we encounter him in zoology, the two-legged, upright walking homo sapiens, equipped with the finely developed backbone and brain, is just as much a part of nature as any other organic or inorganic organic or inorganic formation, is part of nature, is composed of the same mass, the same energies, the same atoms, interwoven and governed by the same power; in any case, the whole physical life of man, however complicated it may be, is scientifically determined in its entirety, ordered according to law like everything else in nature, living and non-living. In this respect, there is no difference between a human being and a jellyfish, a drop of water or a grain of sand.

Theological lectures, lectures by a theologian, a pastor! But this theologian does not only speak in this way with regard to the physical; he continues: “The mental functions that are accessible to the scientific approach are subject to just as strict a lawfulness as the physical processes; and the sensations we have, as well as the ideas we form, are just as much forced on us by nature” – please note: the sensations and ideas! - “as the nervous processes that lead to sensations of pleasure and pain. They are just as much mechanical ideas as those of a steam engine.”

You see, the soul slips away from the natural scientists, and the theologian retains only the old theological phrase, for which he comes up with empty phrases; because the last pages, the last lectures now consist only of empty phrases, in order to wrap what has been discussed in theological phrases. But he does reveal the attitude that lies behind his present liberal attitude in the surrender of the objects. And here one is caught out by a quite remarkable attitude: think, he says, theologians must act as he does, one must go even further, he says: 'This determination of man by natural law concerns not only his bodily but also his mental functions. That is what theologians have always refused to admit,” — only he has gone further, he has risen higher, he now admits it - ‘because we confused the scientific concept of the soul with the theological one and feared unpleasant consequences for the faith.’

But now he has come so far that he no longer fears unpleasant consequences for the faith that he admits! Then he says: “But these arise precisely when one does not allow science to reach its full result;”. So now he says: Let us give in to this science, otherwise it will have unpleasant consequences! Otherwise it will have nasty consequences, this science. – And then we see him in a truly remarkable light: “because then you lose the trust of thinking people.”

There you have what the great theologian strives for today! People have come to those feelings in all these ways that I have described to you today - the best ones - with which they turn their trust to us when we speak of the spiritual; one should not lose that, and therefore not apply the real inner soul power, which could stand on the ground of spiritual insight! We see that if we catch people in what we might call their innermost being, if we do not thoughtlessly pass by such things, then people today turn out to be strange. We must have clear insights into this. On the basis of these clear insights, we should not be surprised that when such thoughts are cultivated by those who are officially called upon to provide the religious and spiritual education of humanity today, we have a difficult time placing ourselves in the world with something that is radically opposed to it.

We must always remind ourselves of the cause we are actually serving in the context of humanity by countering the seductive thoughts that come to humanity today from such quarters with those that alone can be fruitful. And such a thought can always lift us up again and make us strong again, even in the deepest depression. Such a thought is absolutely important in every second of our life, and it is important that we practise spiritual science in such a way that we show it as little as possible in our outer life, but absorb it so strongly and intensely within us that we ourselves have the strength to say to the tests it imposes on us: they must be there! Since our karma has led us to it, we also want to accept what it can impose on us as a test. For the opposing forces in the world of spiritual science are today tremendously difficult, and basically people do not know. For of course, this man has no idea of what the nature of thinking and feeling actually is and what can only be revealed by gaining a clear view from the spiritual science into the whole corruption and destruction of such thinking. Therefore, no blame can be attributed to him, he cannot be disregarded, but such a fact must be accepted quite objectively like an earthquake, like a volcanic eruption, which also has a destructive effect on humanity - albeit in a small area - with external physical means. But the man really cannot think. And in this he is only one example of the most important people of the present time who cannot think. He cannot think! Imagine him saying: 'Of course we hand the human body over to natural science, there is no other way; after all, what should we theologians do with it? We cannot examine the body, can we? That if you really examine the spirit, this spirit is a co-builder of the body, that you cannot separate the body at all and give it away as it were, as was explained yesterday in the public lecture, this man has no idea. He gives away the body; but he also gives away the soul – because it feels practically like a steam engine – he only retains, as he expressly says, for theology, the “human being as freedom”. He even generously gives away “man as nature”; he retains “man as freedom.” But now, after he has kept back man as freedom, he says, of course: “Man as nature loses his independence and freedom as a component of nature; everything he experiences, suffers, he must suffer according to the law of nature.”

Thus man loses this freedom through his nature. And now just think about what this theologian actually leaves out! First he says: man as nature, he gives that to nature and reserves man as freedom; but then he states: man as nature is such that, as a component of nature, he loses his independence and freedom, and “everything he experiences, he suffers, he must suffer entirely according to the law of nature.” Now he has absolutely nothing! It is therefore not surprising that he then only speaks in empty phrases. But the good man does not notice this, and he is a typical example of how the most important people today are unaware of the discontinuity of thought that is at work today. Humanity has now reached a stage of development where that which is to be thinking about physical life must be fertilized by those thoughts that also relate to the spiritual world; otherwise, those thoughts that relate to the physical world will break down in all places because people who have a say today are not familiar with the simplest facts of the world's interrelations.

We know that people today are in a period of transition. We are not speaking in the superficial sense in which one speaks of transitional periods now, but in a different sense. We are in those transitional periods in which the old atavistic clairvoyant instincts have died out and in which conscious entry into the spiritual worlds must be attained. This is an obvious fact for the spiritual researcher. But those old atavistic clairvoyant abilities that people had also gave them effective thoughts, insofar as they needed them in their cultural epoch. History reports only a little of the greatness that the Chaldean cultural epoch or the Egyptian cultural epoch had in terms of thoughts that intervene in human life. However little they may be able to withstand our criticism today, they existed for their time. Our time must again gain thoughts that are capable of intervening in reality! But it can only do so if it is fertilized by the spiritual world just as the ancient times were fertilized by the spiritual world. But people today are not being fertilized unconsciously. Therefore, consciousness must arise if spiritual-scientific knowledge is really to be recognized by people. And we ourselves have this man, whom one can so easily prove to be seized by the worst effects of the thoughtlessness of our time, that he causes immeasurable harm by infecting so many people with his thoughtlessness, and one has no ill-willed man; one even has an insightful man before him, namely one who has precisely that insight that one can have in our time if one cannot advance in a certain respect to the real spiritual world, in the sense that even people like Jaurès cannot advance. But even people like the one who gave these religious lectures, even people like that know that humanity today is at a dead end in some respects, that we cannot continue with the thinking, feeling and willing that the old attitudes and the old elements of world view have given us. And he also knows that in modern times this has led to materialism, and he knows that things have to change. And basically he is not at all radical, because he talks about the fact that the 19th century has led people to have such concepts as sportism, comfortism, and mammonism. The man talks about all these things, which are the dark sides of materialism, and he is quite prepared to say: sportism, comfortism, mammonism, as they emerged in the 19th century, must be fought. But the way he says it, it remains a phrase for, at the end of the first lecture – one does not trust one's eyes, one does not trust one's powers of perception – the following is stated. The following can be said today by an important, famous man. He begins by saying quite correctly: All the things that happen should be evaluated differently, 'they must no longer be the ultimate goal. There must be no more merchants for whom the acquisition of money is an end in itself; enjoyment of life must no longer become the content of life; there must be no more people who live only for their health.

So, he is very radical. From the point of view of spiritual science, we will certainly not put forward such radical things; we will rather leave people to their own freedom, and we know that if they understand karma and reincarnation and the rest of what spiritual science gives, they will find their way in life in detail. But this man, who knows that people have brought themselves to a deadlock, says quite radically that people should no longer earn more money, no longer enjoy life, no longer live at the expense of their health. I once came to a sanatorium run by a famous man, which had nervous patients. I could see whole crowds of nervous patients marching past as they went to lunch. It seemed to me that the most sickly, fidgety nervous patient was the famous director of the hospital himself! But now our man, our theologian, is radical, he says: the content of life must become different; no one should live only for his health and so on. But now the following lines: “That means” - he says, and with that he comes to the end of his lecture - “everything that has been done so far should be done, but something else should be considered in the process.”

That is life reform! Just think, this is the life reform of a person who looks so deeply into what is necessary: everything must become different, that is, nothing must become different, but everything must be thought about differently: “These things must not represent the innermost, the goal, the highest value. They must be striven for with the same energy, but they must be valued – that is, they must be thought of – on a different scale than before.

Well, there is nothing more to be added about these things! It is necessary to draw attention to them, for they are not found in a single person; they are to be found throughout the civilized world today. And what people experience in their destinies comes from nothing other than this defectiveness in thinking and intuiting; that is the karma of this defectiveness of thinking and intuiting! This is what we must first focus on. At least as scholars of the spirit, we must find the strength not to listen to the things that are sweeping and raging through the world today and that are recognized as “highest values” from other impulses . But in this respect one must really be able to see these main things without being clouded by all kinds of other feelings that rule the world today and under whose influence so much lying takes place. These things have their influence. We live in such a sphere - I have already said it in Zurich - that this man, who passes on such stuff to people, so that, by listening to him, these thought beasts enter into their hearts and minds, may say: “The content of this booklet consists of 12 speeches that I gave last winter in...” — now comes the city, which I do not want to name — “before an audience of more than a thousand people.”

But – the city is completely unimportant – it now goes to thousands! That must be seen through. And it is necessary to really put all the seriousness and the whole meaning of such a consideration before the soul.

And having extracted much from the spiritual world, we must recognize what this extracted material from the spiritual world must be for us; thereby also recognizing that we are, as it were, looking into the counter-image of the world-view that is prevailing in people today much more than we realize. Unfortunately, people live far too thoughtlessly today! That is what weighs so heavily on the soul: having to look at the widespread dullness, the dullness in which humanity lives in relation to what works and guides the course of human development. We must also obtain the necessary nuances of feeling for the kind of truth contained in spiritual science by allowing ourselves to be given these nuances of feeling from the contemplation of the counter-image. What is important, therefore, is not just to look for all kinds of fine words that sound good, as if they were high ideals to be presented to humanity; rather, it is to recognize above all that it is the spiritual world that must be opened up, something that the best of our contemporaries cannot recognize. There are good reasons – and why this is so cannot be explained here because it would be too long – there are good reasons why, for centuries, humanity has been reluctant to understand Christianity in a spiritual sense. In the first centuries of Christianity there was a gnosis. You all know that our spiritual science is not a revival of gnosis, but in those days gnosis first made the effort to arrive at a spiritual science; it was suppressed because people did not want to see the Christian truths in spiritual light. The same tendency then continued and has also taken hold in scientific endeavor. Humanity has also learned a great deal from the fact that it has fought against the possibility of understanding the spiritual for centuries. But now the time has come when it will be most difficult for those who are completely immersed in our present-day culture – which is still materialism, even if it is not admitted – to recognize a real spiritual world; not just a vague talk about the spiritual world, but a direct knowledge of a spiritual world. We must, however, realize that the acknowledgment of this spiritual world is one of the most important things, and that only then can the rest come, that which must come as a new foundation of the ethical, the social, and also the other practical order of life, when one creates foundations through spiritual science, through the acknowledgment of real spiritual facts and spiritual entities.

It gave me great satisfaction that we were able to meet here in St. Gallen again after a long time, and so I considered it my task today to add to what you can learn from our literature, some of what may need to be said personally, from soul to soul, within our movement, so that it is understood in the right sense. For within our movement it is not just a matter of absorbing this or that from spiritual science in a catechism-like way, but it is a matter of finding the right relationship of our soul to the knowledge from the spiritual world. Then spiritual science will not just be a science for us, but truly a way of life, it will be soul food for us. But it is soul food that does not undermine our spiritual health and spiritual but, on the contrary, stimulates it in such a way that, despite all the resistance of the outer world, the nature of which we have partly sought today, we can still place ourselves in the world in a harmonious way. My intention today was to speak to you about the attitude of soul towards spiritual science. And if it was necessary to present to you contemporary phenomena that can perhaps only be illuminated in this way by spiritual science, it was because only a clear, distinct insight into the course of the world in which we live can also allow us, as professors of the anthroposophical world view, to find the right inner attitude, which is harmony. And from this inner harmony, harmony in our lives will also arise. And that this harmony in our lives is brought about more and more through spiritual science is, after all, our spiritual scientific ideal. In the spirit of this ideal, I wanted to give you a small contribution today.

Since I was asked to speak about the therapeutic principles which have developed out of the anthroposophical view of the world, I will gladly meet this request. However, it is difficult to be brief, especially about this kind of subject matter which is so extraordinarily extensive. In one brief lecture, which can only be aphoristic, one can hardly develop correct ideas of what is important. In addition, certain deliberations must be undertaken in such an attempt which are quite removed from what people generally think about. Nevertheless, this evening I will attempt to present the relevant issues in as generally comprehensive a manner as possible.

The fact that within our anthroposophical movement there is also a medical-therapeutic endeavor is certainly not based upon our desire as anthroposophists to participate in everything and to stick our noses, so to speak, into everything. That is absolutely not the case; but as the anthroposophical movement sought to make its way through the world, physicians too found their way to this movement. They are seriously striving physicians; and a relatively large number of such physicians had come to a more or less clear awareness of how uncertain, how vacillating the views of contemporary, official medicine actually are, of how in many cases the foundations for the actual comprehension of processes of illness and healing are lacking. These foundations are lacking in official medicine because today the claims for scientific validity are actually based exclusively upon generally accepted natural science. This natural science in turn believes itself to be moving with certainty only with what it can determine in a mechanical, physical or chemical manner from outer nature. It then applies the discoveries made through physics and chemistry about outer natural processes in order to come to an understanding of the human being. But even if there is a kind of concentration, a microcosmic concentration of all world processes within the human being, nevertheless, the outer physical and chemical processes never proceed within the human organism in the same form in which they proceed outside in nature. Man takes the substances of the earth into himself, substances which are not merely passive, but which are actually always permeated by nature processes. A substance only appears outwardly as if it were resting within itself. In reality, everything lives and weaves in the substance. Thus man also takes into his organism these processes, this living and weaving activity, proceeding chemically and physically in nature; but he transforms it immediately in his organism—he makes it into something different.

This something different, which develops out of the nature processes in the human organism, can only be understood if one attains a comprehensive observation of the human being based on reality. But contemporary natural science actually excludes from its realm what proceeds in the human being as intrinsically human. Even, for example, what proceeds as intrinsically human in the physical body is attributed exclusively to physical and chemical processes; for in the physical body of man nothing takes place which is not at the same time subject to the influences of etheric processes, of astral processes, of ego processes. But as natural science totally ignores these ego processes, these astral processes, this etheric living and weaving, it actually does not at all approach the human being. Therefore this natural science can not really look into the inner activities of the human being in order to comprehend how the outer chemical and physical processes continue to work in him: how they continue to work when he is healthy, and how they continue to work when he is diseased.

How shall it then be possible to properly judge the effects of medicaments, of a remedy, if one has not acquired an understanding for how some substance of nature which we introduce into the human organism, or with which we treat the human organism, continues to work in that organism.

It could indeed be said that the greatest progress imaginable in medicine in more recent times has actually only been made in the area of surgery where one is dealing with external mechanical manipulations, as it were. In contrast, in the area of actual therapy, there reigns great confusion—(this is not my judgment, but the judgment of those physicians who have become conscious of all this). The reason for this confusion is that the connection between any object of nature and its effect upon illness cannot be understood if, by virtue of a specific point of view which one has about natural science, one actually excludes the human being from scientific considerations.

Since anthroposophy strives to know the human being comprehensively—insofar as he is a super-sensible as well as a material being—it is also possible that anthroposophy can yield knowledge concerning the treatment of illnesses with various natural substances.

Fundamentally speaking, we are already confronting today a kind of boundary in medicine if we ask only for the actual nature of illness. What is illness? This question cannot be answered out of contemporary scientific knowledge. For, what, according to these natural scientific views, are all the processes which proceed in the healthy human being? From the head to the tip of the toes these are processes of nature. But then what are the processes which take place during illness in the liver, kidney, head, heart, wherever? What kind of processes are these? These are also natural processes! All healthy processes are processes of nature; all processes of illness are also processes of nature. Why then is the human being healthy with one sort of natural process and ill with the other sort of natural process?

It is not a matter of speaking in vague generalities: well, yes the healthy processes of nature are normal, but the sick processes of nature are not. One can get the impression that, if one doesn't know anything, there arises “at the proper time,” a word, a label for our ignorance.

What is actually going on when customary natural science is applied in approaching the human being? The predominant practice is not to look at the living being, but at the corpse; here and there a piece of the organism is sampled and then various abstractions are made about what kind of healthy or sick natural processes proceeded within it. Thus it actually doesn't matter whether one takes some kind of tissue out of the head, out of the liver, out of the big toe, or the like. Everything is finally reduced to the cell. Gradually histology, the study of tissues and cells, has actually become the most highly developed teaching of the human being. Of course, if one goes into the smallest parts and ignores all other forces, all other relationships, then, as at night all cows are grey, all organs are the same. The result is a benighted “grey cow science,” not a true science which acquaints itself with the uniqueness of the separate organs in man.

What must provide the basis there I actually dared to express only a few years ago. Although it is generally imagined that it is easy for spiritual science to come to its results, this matter has occupied me for more than thirty years. It is thought that one only needs to look into the spiritual world to find out everything, while it is difficult if one has to work in laboratories or in a clinic—there one must really struggle. In spiritual science it is only a matter of looking into the world of the spirit and then one finds out everything. It really isn't that simple. Thorough and responsible spiritual investigation demands more effort and above all more responsibility than the manipulations in the laboratory or in the clinic or observatories. And so it is that the first conception of what I will now briefly indicate in principle stood before me approximately thirty-five years ago. I was only able to speak about it a few years ago after everything was worked through and, above all, verified completely on the findings of the entire contemporary official natural science. It was under the influence of these principles of the membering of the human being that what I just told you about developed—this medical-therapeutic endeavor within our anthroposophical movement.

Even if we confront the human being as a solely physical being, we must definitely distinguish three members which differ one from another. These three different members can be labeled in the most varied ways, but we can best approach them if we characterize them by saying that one system of the physical being is the nerve-sense system which is primarily localized in the head. The second system is the rhythmic system, which encompasses respiration, blood circulation, the rhythmic activities of the digestive system, and so forth. The third system is represented in the interconnection between the movement system, the system of the limbs, and the actual metabolic system, This interconnection becomes immediately evident to you if you think of the fact that the metabolism is enhanced especially through the movement of the limbs and that inwardly the limbs are organically connected with the metabolic organs. That is directly evident also in anatomy. Just look at how the legs are continued inwardly into the metabolic organs and, similarly, how the arms are continued inwardly. Thus we can now distinguish the nerve-sense system, located primarily in the head; the rhythmic system, located primarily in the chest; and the metabolic limb system, located primarily in the limbs and the attached metabolic organs.

This membering, however, may not be done as a professor once did who wanted to ridicule the anthroposophical movement. He did not attempt to penetrate into what is actually meant with this membering. He said: these anthroposophists maintain that man consists of three systems: a head, a rump consisting of chest and abdomen, and limbs. Of course, in this manner it is easy to ridicule the matter.

What matters is not that the nerve-sense system is only in the head. It is primarily in the head, but it extends over the entire organism. The head organization spreads out through the entire organism. Similarly, the rhythmic system extends upwards and downwards through the entire organism. Spatially speaking the human being is entirely metabolic-limb system. If you move the eyes, the eyes are limbs. So these systems are not spatially next to one another; instead they interpenetrate one another. They totally interpenetrate and one must accustom oneself a little to an exact thinking if one wants to evaluate this membering of the human being in the right way.

Now both these systems, the first and the third, the nerve-sense system and the metabolic-limb system, are placed polarically opposite each other. What the one creates destroys the other. What destroys the other is created by the one. They thus work in completely opposite ways. And the middle system, the rhythmic system, establishes the connection between the two. There is a kind of vacillation, oscillation, between them, so that a harmony can always exist between the destruction of the one system and the construction of the other system. If, for example, we look at the metabolic system, we recognize that it naturally works with its greatest intensity in the lower body of the human being; but that which goes on within the human abdomen, or the lower body, must call forth the polar opposite activity in the head, in the nerve-sense system, when the person is healthy.

Imagine now that the activity actually inherent in the human digestive system intensifies so much that it extends right up to the nerve-sense system, so that the activity which should actually remain in the metabolic-limb system reaches over to the nerve-sense system. Then you have a natural process, so to speak, but you can see immediately how that natural process becomes an abnormal one. It should remain in the metabolic system, but breaks through, so to speak, upwards into the nerve-sense system.

That results then in the various forms of the illness treated by medicine today as insignificant, but not treated in that way by a large part of humanity because these various forms of illness are known everywhere. What develops is known as the various forms of migraine. In order to understand migraine in its various forms we must comprehend this process which ought only to take place in the metabolic system but which breaks through to the nerve-sense system so that the nerves and senses are so affected that the metabolism shoots into them instead of remaining in its own place.

The reverse can also take place. The process which ought to be most intensive in the nerve-sense system, and which is completely opposite to the metabolic process, can in a certain sense also break through to the metabolic system. Consequently an enhanced nerve-sense process takes place in the metabolic system where normally a merely subordinated nerve-sense process should be active. Thus what belongs to the head, as it were, breaks through into the lower body. If this happens then the dangerous illness develops which is known as typhoid fever.¹

Thus we can see how a fundamental understanding of this three-fold human being makes it possible for us to understand how a process of illness develops out of a healthy process. If our head, with its nerve-sense system, were not organized as it is, then we could never have typhoid fever. If our lower body were not organized as it is, we could never have migraine. The head activity should remain in the head, the lower body activity in the lower body. If they break through then such forms of illness develop.

And just as we can point to two especially characteristic forms of illness, so can we point to other forms of illness which always develop when an activity which belongs to one organ system asserts itself in another place, in another organ system.

If one proceeds only anatomically one merely observes the status of the smallest parts in the tissues of the organism. But one does not see the working of polar opposite activities. When studying the nerve cell you can only study that its organization is opposite to that of the liver cell, for example. If, however, you were able to look into the totality of the organism in such a way that it appears to you in its three-foldness, then you will also notice how the nerve cell is a cell which continually tends to dissolve, which continually tends to be broken down if it is healthy: and how a liver cell is something which continually tends to be built up if it is healthy. Those are polar activities. They work in the right way upon one another if they are appropriately distributed in the organism; they work incorrectly within one another if they penetrate into one another.

The rhythmic system is in the middle and always strives to create the balance between the two opposed polar activities of the nerve-sense system and the metabolic-limb system.

I would now like to select a special example to let you have insight into how one can find the relationship of a remedy which has been taken from nature with its forces to the health-giving and illness-generating forces active within man.

Let us direct our gaze to an ore which can be found in nature, so-called antimony. As soon as we look at it externally we see that it has an extraordinarily interesting property. Its form in nature is such that certain rods develop—stem-like, lance-like structures which lie next to one another—so that if we were to draw the ore schematically we could draw the following:

It grows almost like a mineral moss or a mineral lichen. One can see that this mineral wants to order itself into threads. One can see this even more clearly if we subject it to a certain physical-chemical process. Then the thread-like crystals become even thinner. It orders itself into clusters of very fine threads. Especially important, however, is what occurs when this antimony is subjected to a certain kind of combustion process. You get a white smoke which can then condense on the walls and becomes mirror-like. That is called the antimony mirror. It is hardly respected at all today but in older medicine it was widely used. This antimony mirror, which first arises out of the combustion process and condenses on the walls so that it shines like a mirror is something exceptionally important.

In addition there is another property. I will emphasize only this: if antimony is subjected to certain electrolytic processes and it is brought to the so-called electrolytic cathode, then it is only necessary (after the antimony was subjected to the electrolytic process on the cathode), to exert a slight action on it and a small antimony explosion will occur. In brief, this antimony has the most interesting properties.

If antimony is introduced into the human organism in a moderate dose one can study various processes which show how in fact the same forces which behave as I have just described experience a kind of continuation in the human organism and how they take on all kinds of forms of forces and effects within it.

I can naturally not explain all the details and proofs to you: I only want to briefly sketch for you what is inherent in these forms of activity. These processes which arise in the human organism occur especially strongly wherever blood coagulates. Therefore they strengthen or enhance the coagulation of blood. However, if we use those methods of study which are consistent with an understanding of the threefold human organism, we are permitted to gradually look into the human being and gain knowledge of how the separate systems behave in the different organs. If we look into the human organism in this way, we find that what lives in antimony lives not only outside in the mineral antimony, but also is active as a force-system in the human organism. This force system is always present in the healthy human organism. In the sick human organism it takes on forms of the kind which I have just explained to you.

This antimony process existing in the human organism is opposed in a polar way to another process. It is opposed to that process which arises where the plastically active forces, for example, the cell-forming forces occur. These are the forces which round out the cells, which form the cellular substance of the human organism. I would like to call these forces, because they are primarily contained in protein substance, the albuminizing forces. Thus we have in the human organism the forces which we find outside in human nature in antimony if we subject antimony, for example, to combustion, and bring about an antimony mirror. In addition we also have the opposing forces active, the albuminizing forces, which immobilize, which take away the antimonizing forces.

These two force systems, albuminizing and antimonizing, work against one another in such a way that they must be in a certain state of equilibrium in the human organism. One must now recognize that the process which I have described to you before in principle, and which lies at the basis of abdominal typhus, is essentially based on a disturbance of the balance between these two force systems.

In order to look properly into the human organism one must be able to take recourse to that which I have described to you from the most varied—although not medical—points of view in these morning lectures.

In them we have seen how man has not merely his physical body, but also an etheric body—a body of formative forces, an astral and an ego organization. And just yesterday I was able to explain to you how there is an intimate connection on the one hand between the physical body and the formative force body, and on the other, between the ego and the astral body. There is a looser connection between the astral body and the formative force body, for they separate every night.

This interconnection, which consists of a working into one another of the forces of the astral and etheric bodies, is radically disturbed in typhoid fever. In this illness the astral body becomes weak and is unable to work with a corresponding intensity into the physical body because it works for itself thereby bringing about that excess which presses downward, so to speak, the nerve-sense organization, which is primarily subject to the astral body. Instead of transforming itself into metabolic activity, it remains active as astral activity. The astral body works for itself. It does not work properly into the etheric body. The consequences are the symptoms of illness which give us the symptomatology of typhus.

Now that which occurs as antimony is active in such a way that antimony denies its mineral nature. It gets crystalline threads, so that even the antimony mirror, wherever it deposits, appears like ice-flowers in the window, thereby showing the inner force of crystallization as in nature. This force of crystallization, which becomes active in antimony, if it is properly incorporated into a remedy and introduced into the organism, works in such a way that it supports this organism enabling it to insert its astral body with its forces into the etheric body in the right way, so that it can bring these bodies again into the right connection.

With antimony prepared in a proper way into a remedy we support that process which opposes the typhus process. And just with this antimony remedy, to which other substances are added, one can battle against the illness by stimulating and supporting processes in the organism so that it unfolds its own, I would like to say, antimonizing force which has as its goal to call forth the proper rhythm in the working together of astral body and etheric body. Other substances must be mixed in to establish a proper connection to the organism depending on whether an illness takes one or another course.

Thus an anthroposophical consideration leads to the recognition of a relationship between what is active in the objects of nature, as I have shown you with the example of antimony, and that which is active within the human organism. You will be able to follow up this albuminizing, this plastically rounding force, and the other force which works linearly right into the germ cell.

Whoever has truly gained knowledge in this field—however uncomfortable it may be for him to say so, because he knows he will call forth hate and antipathy in certain people—and who thus looks into the operation of the human organism will consider the otherwise amazing and wonderful microscopic studies about the germ cell, exceptionally dilettantish. There people look externally at the egg cell, observe the development of the so-called centrosomes—you can read about that in any textbook about embryology,—without knowing how these albuminizing forces, which also rule throughout the entire human organism, are opposed, polarically opposed, to the antimonizing forces. The rounding of the egg cell as such is brought about by the albuminizing forces; the centrosomes, after fertilization, are called forth by the antimonizing forces.

That, however, goes on in the entire human body; and by preparing remedies in the right way, and knowing through the diagnosis where one must support the human organism, one introduces into this organism the forces which can work against a process of illness.

By bringing anthroposophical points of view into medicine a connection is established between the macrocosm and the human being. Naturally I would have to say much more about antimony if I wanted to scientifically explain it in detail, but I only want to point out general principles here. In addition I wanted to tell you about the processes which antimony is able to bring forth out of itself, which it has in itself, depending on how one treats it.

I could also show you now, as an example, the entire behavior within nature and its processes for that which we call quartz, or silicic acid. It is one of the constituents of granite. It is transparently crystalline and so hard that you can't score it with a knife at all. If we treat this substance in the proper way and administer it to the human organism—in the proper doses that are determined from the diagnosis—then it gains the characteristic of being able to support that which is to be active in the nerve-sense system, which the organism through the nerve-sense system is to bring forth as the intrinsic forces of this system. So what, by rights, the senses actually should do is supported by the remedy, which is prepared in the right way from quartz, or silica and administered in the proper doses. It is necessary then, depending upon the accompanying symptoms, to add still other substances, but here it is primarily a matter of the effect of that which lies in the silicic acid formation process. Thus if one brings this silicic acid formation process into the human organism, then a weak activity in the nerve-sense system is supported so that it then works with the proper strength. Now if this nerve-sense activity becomes too weak, then the digestive activity is able to penetrate through to the head and the migraine-like symptoms develop.

If one then supports the nerve-sense activity in the right way with a remedy which is produced in the proper manner out of silicic acid, the nerve-sense system becomes so strong in the person suffering from migraine that it can again press back the digestive process which broke through.

Naturally I am characterizing these matters somewhat crudely, but you will see what is significant here. What matters is to really be able to see through the healthy or ill human organism, not merely in accordance with its cellular composition but according the forces active in it, whether they work co-operatively, rhythmically or in opposition. Then one can look in nature for what in the human organism can fight against this or that process of illness.

Thus one can find, for example, how the process which is contained in phosphorus is in outer nature a process which, if introduced into the human organism, works in a supportive way upon a certain kind of inner disability of the human organism; namely, when the human organism becomes incapable of allowing to act in the right way certain forces, which should always work in the healthy organism. This is when a person has too little strength and cannot let certain forces be active within him which are a kind of organic combustion process which is always present in the transformation of substances in the human organism. This takes place in every movement, in all that man does, and also in what is active within organic combustion processes. Now the human organism can become too weak to regulate these organic combustion processes in the proper way, for they must be inhibited in a certain manner. If they are insufficiently inhibited, they develop an excessive activity. The organic combustion processes in themselves actually always have an immeasurable, unlimited intensity. If that were not so, an excessive fatigue would arise immediately, or one would be unable to keep moving. However, the organism must also continuously have the possibility of inhibiting the boundless intensity of the organic combustion processes.

If now these inhibiting forces are neither in an organ system nor in the entire organism, if the organism has become too weak to inhibit its organic combustion processes in the proper way, then there develops something which manifests itself as tuberculosis in the most various forms. The suitable nutrient soil for the bacilli is created through this organic loss of strength, through the inability of the organism to inhibit the combustion processes.

Nothing will here be said against the bacterial theory which to a certain extent is very useful. In the various ways by which bacilli arise here or there one can naturally find out many things; for purposes of diagnoses one can generally get a lot of information. In no way do I want to say anything against official medicine, except that it needs to be augmented and developed further when it arrives at certain boundaries—and it can be developed further when the points of view of anthroposophy can be applied to it.

If phosphorus is then introduced into the human organism, then these capacities of containing the organic combustion process are supported. But one must see to it that this containment can emanate from the various organ systems. Let us begin by looking at the system which primarily works in the bones. There the activity of phosphorus in the human organism must be supported in that one directs it towards the bones. That can happen when one combines the remedy phosphorus—in a way which becomes clear through a more exacting study of the matter—with calcium or a calcium salt. When dealing with tuberculosis of the small intestine one will mix some kind of copper compounds in the right dosage with the phosphorus. When dealing with a pulmonary tuberculosis, one will add iron to the phosphorus. But still other additions come under consideration since pulmonary tuberculosis is an exceedingly complicated disease. Thus you see that the possibility of a true therapy is based on how the chemical and physical processes continue to work on in the human organism.

Official medicine often starts out from the opinion that the working of the antimony forces outside in nature is the same as it is in the human organism, but that is not the case. One must be clear about how these processes work on in the human organism, and this can be seen if one applies actual anthroposophical insights to the experiments which must be done.

We have seen how antimony establishes the rhythm between the astral body and the etheric body. Now we can see how the forces which are active in quartz are especially suitable to reestablishing the proper relationship, when it has been disturbed, between the ego and the astral body, in order thereby to work in a healing way upon the nerve-sense system. We can also see how calcium—especially that calcium which is obtained from the calcium excretions of animals—provides remedies which establish the proper relationship between the body of formative forces, the etheric body and the physical body.

Thus one can say that a correct view of the human being leads to the use of calcium or something similar, namely, what is secreted from the animal organism,—oyster shells, for example—in order to establish the proper relationship between the etheric body and the physical body, which, if out of balance, always expresses itself in physical processes of illness. That is what one must reflect upon when preparing remedies from such calcareous or similar excretions.

When dealing with an arhythmic working together of the body of formative forces and the astral body, one must look for what is present in antimony, and also in numerous other metals. If one wants to use remedies prepared from plants, one must also look especially into those constituents which are contained in the middle parts of the plants, those which are particularly present in the leaves and stem, whereas those forces which correspond to the phosphorus process are contained primarily in the blossom organs of the plants. Those processes which correspond to the silicic acid process are contained in the root organs of the plant. Thus one finds relationships between the forces which are in the various parts of the plant and the human organism. The root forces have a definite relationship and connection to the human head and to the nerve-sense system; the leaves and the stem organs have a specific connection to the rhythmic system; the blossom organs have a special connection to the metabolic system.

If one therefore wants to give assistance in a simple way to the digestive, metabolic system, that can often successfully be done—after having made the diagnosis in the correct way—by choosing certain blossoms of which one makes a tea. In this way one can assist the digestive organs. If one wants to gain a remedy which works especially upon the nerve-sense processes, upon the head organization, one would have to extract the salts from the roots by a special extraction process.

Thus it is necessary to penetrate into nature on the one hand and into the human organism on the other. Then it is possible to really find the remedies in nature so that one can see how the two are connected. Otherwise one does things by trial and error in order to find out how something works only to discover that it is not valid, or to write up a number of cases where 90% or 70% showed a favorable result, but 40% were unsuccessful. Then the matter is statistically treated, and depending on what result the statistics yielded, a determination is made whether or not a particular remedy should be used.

Because of the brief time available I can only speak about these matters aphoristically in order to indicate how in fact, without succumbing to dilettantism or medical sectarianism, one can proceed strictly in accordance with science in approaching illness processes through remedies which come out of a full perception of man.

Just as the correct knowledge of natural substances and natural processes is important in order to create a remedy, so it is equally important to know the specific manner of application of the remedy.

One can either work upon the nerve-sense system in bringing about, in the right manner, the process of healing, or one can work on the rhythmic system, or on the metabolic-limb system. In order to work on these different systems it is essential to know how the method of treatment must be initiated, for almost every remedy can be used in three different ways. To begin with it can be taken orally. This makes it possible for a person to take up the remedy through the metabolic system, which then in turn works upon the other systems. Some remedies are meant to be used in just this way.

There are also, however, remedies which can be used in a way which allows them to work directly on the rhythmic system. (In this connection antimony will provide a good example for finding the proper method of treatment.) This is where administration by injection must be introduced. Injecting the remedy intravenously or sub-cutaneously is the mode of administration which can best work upon the rhythmic processes in man.

In those remedies used in ointments, or in baths, or even wherever there is a question of treating the human organism in an external, mechanical way, for example in massage, then one can count upon this method of treatment as working primarily upon the nerve-sense system.

One can thus work through every organ system in the most varied ways in an effort at working towards a healing process. Let us assume we have silica, or quartz. It makes quite a difference whether we prepare this remedy to be taken by mouth or to be injected. If we count upon the fact that it will be taken by mouth then we will be preparing it to work through the digestive system, and the digestive system in turn can send forces into the nerve-sense system. We are then introducing the quartz processes by detour through the digestive system. If, however, we see that more quartz processes need to be transmitted to the nerve-sense system by introducing them via the rhythmic system, via the blood and breath, then we inject the remedy and thereby attempt to heal by way of the rhythmic system.

If we want to work therapeutically by way of the digestive organs with aromatic ether substances contained in the blossom of the plant, then we will prepare a tea and introduce it into the gastro-intestinal tract by having the patient drink it. If we want to bring etheric oils which, through their aromatic properties, work directly upon the nerve-sense system—or working first upon the nerve-sense system and then into the rhythmic system—then we could make some kind of bath to which we add the juices of the blossoms. In this manner we work upon the nerve-sense system.

Thus we see how the healing effect of the different substances brought into a relationship to man depends on the various methods of application and treatment. This will become transparently clear if anthroposophical knowledge is more and more applied to bringing about a connection between nature processes and the human being. It can then become evident through anthroposophy which remedies one needs to apply and how one needs to apply them.

In this way something can be brought about in the laboratories within our clinical-therapeutic institutes and other endeavors in which physicians are involved making it possible that on the one hand, remedies and therapeutic methods can be tried out, and on the other hand, the remedies themselves can be prepared. We have such clinical institutes as well as chemical-pharmaceutical laboratories in Arlesheim, near Dornach, as well as in Stuttgart.

I must point here especially to the Clinical-Therapeutic Institute in Arlesheim (now the Ita Wegman Klinik) which is under the exceptional direction of Frau Dr. Ita Wegman, who unfolds an activity full of blessing for that institute because she has that which I would like to call “the courage to heal.” It is evident that this courage to heal is necessary, especially if you look on the one hand into the complexity of natural processes out of which healing processes must be drawn forth, and on the other hand into the immense complexity of processes of illness and health in man.—If a physician confronts this vast field even if he only has a certain number of patients, then she or he is required to have courage in order to heal.

Attached to this Arlesheim Institute is the International Pharmaceutical Laboratory (now the Weleda) in which remedies are produced. They can be used today in the entire world. The pharmacy produces the remedies and it is up to others to find the ways and means to make use of them. That is the essential point. People must find the right ways and means to arrive at the right remedies without being dilettantes. Then contemporary science will not be negated; rather, it will be taken further, extended.

If this knowledge becomes widely known, the success of such an endeavor as the International Pharmaceutical Laboratory in Arlesheim will not be a problem. But it is difficult in the face of the prevalent, purely materialistic direction of medicine to bring into the world effective therapeutics which are based upon a full knowledge of man. To bring about a change one would have to count upon the insight of every person who has a heartfelt interest in the health of his fellow man.

In pointing to that which can be achieved through natural remedies and their appropriate application, I certainly do not want to exclude what can be achieved by more soul-spiritual processes of healing. In this realm one can make especially fruitful observations. If we now carry hygienic-therapeutic considerations—as always must be the case in a proper pedagogy—into the school, one can see how the manner in which one works upon the children in a soul-spiritual manner in instruction can have an effect on the health and illness of a person—if not immediately, then certainly in the course of life. When I give pedagogical lectures I naturally speak about these matters in greater detail. I will mention only one example: the teacher can proceed properly in relation to the memory of the child only if he expects neither too much nor too little. If he proceeds improperly, if he places too many demands on the memory in the eighth, ninth, tenth, and eleventh years of life, then he does not have the proper pedagogical tact. What the soul must go through in an excessive activity of memory, or artificially nurtured activity of memory, will live itself out later in life as all kinds of physical illnesses. It is possible to establish a connection between diabetes and erroneous methods in education in relationship to memory. So too can the use of memory in education to the opposite extreme also have unfavorable effects upon a child.

I can mention this only in principle, but one can see from it not only how the natural remedies work in health and illness, but also how the special manner in which the soul itself works can be significant to health and illness.

Starting from there one can also find one's way to those methods whereby we attempt, through purely soul-spiritual influences, from person to person,—which I naturally cannot describe in detail any more today—to bring about processes leading to healing. Especially in this realm, however, it is very easy to get into dilettantism. One can, for example, harbor the belief that the so-called mental illnesses can be most easily healed through spiritual influences (for example by discussion). However, mental illnesses especially distinguish themselves by the fact that one can hardly approach the ill person with rational discussion. As a matter of fact it is just that impossibility of rational exchange which closes off the soul against outer influences in the so-called mentally ill. But one will find over and again that especially in so-called mental illness—which actually has been, as such, incorrectly named—physical processes of illness are present in a hidden way somewhere. Before one wants to meddle in a dilettantish way with mental illness, one ought actually, with the proper diagnosis, to determine which physical organ is involved in the illness. Only then will one be working beneficially through a corresponding healing of the physical organism.

One can help physical illnesses much sooner through all kinds of soul-spiritual (mental-psychological) influences, This is being done today but generally in a dilettantish way. I will not go into that now, Especially in physical illness much benefit will come in this way and the outer process which is brought about through remedies and the like will be supported in different ways.

I can only indicate this, Those methods which are based on the foundation of anthroposophy certainly do not exclude therapeutic soul-spiritual influences; rather, they include them. You have evidence of this in the Clinical Therapeutic Institute in Arlesheim-Dornach. Besides the physical-therapeutic methods you also find curative eurythmy.

This curative eurythmy consists in taking what you have seen here as artistic eurythmy and transforming it into health-giving movements for the person moving them, The vowel aspect is transformed so that the person makes healthy movements which are drawn out of eurythmy and are applied specifically in support of those forces which earlier I have called the albuminizing forces in man, while the consonant forces in many ways support the antimonizing forces, Thus it is possible through the working together of consonant and vowel eurythmy to bring about a balance between these two kinds of forces, And it can show there, if things are done properly, not in a dilettantish manner, how other healing processes, also in chronic illnesses, can be immensely supported through this curative eurythmy.

This curative eurythmy is actually based upon the fact that soul-spiritual processes are awakened through that which man does with his limbs. If one knows which movements want to come directly forth out of the healthy human organism, then one can also find the corresponding movements which will work in a healing way if one works back from the limbs, i.e. from the human movement, upon the processes of the inner organs.

In the Clinical Therapeutic Institute in Arlesheim the possibility exists to look at this curative eurythmy and to see how it, as a therapy, can be a specialized branch within the entire therapeutic process, a therapy which can be discovered out of true anthroposophical knowledge of man. It would naturally be going too far to discuss details in this area. The principles are actually given in what I have presented to you.

Thus it has happened that in the most varied ways we have had to develop this therapeutic endeavor within the anthroposophical movement because those involved in therapy have approached us. It has been a demand arising from the condition of the times. It was so-to-speak demanded by contemporary civilization. Anthroposophy has only given the answers to questions which were posed to it.

I really could only present the principles aphoristically to you today. More has not been possible during the available time. If I wanted to present matters in their totality, then I would have to do what I refused to do two days ago during the lecture on eurythmy. I would have to invite you to stay here through the night and listen to me till tomorrow morning, until the morning lecture. But that is something that would make you sick, and it would certainly be inappropriate for someone who wants to speak about bringing health to make people sick in this way. Therefore I must send you home for a healthy sleep following this sketchy presentation.

• 1. A febrile illness of prolonged duration which is marked by hectic fever, delirium, enlargement of the spleen, abdominal pain, and a variety of systemic manifestations such as headache, diarrhea, skin lesions, and more.

Continuing our study of the evolution of European Cultures in the Fifth Post-Atlantean epoch, we come to the culture for which I found the following design when I was working out the forms for the columns in our Building. It includes a drop-like motif above (a). The justification for this design can be felt when one studies the Middle-European culture of the Post-Atlantean epoch. I say Middle-European expressly. The reason for this will emerge from the subject-matter itself.

In this Middle-European culture the most varied national elements have for centuries been gathered together, making it impossible to speak of a “national” culture in the same sense as in the case of the cultures of the Southern and Western peoples of Europe.

In considering this Middle-European culture we must bear in mind at the outset that at the present time it is to all appearances composed of the people of two State-organisations. Remember, please, that in these lectures I am not speaking specifically of States but of cultures, and am saying here that the Middle-European culture is composed of two State-organisations—the German Empire and Austria.

In the case of Austria we see immediately that it would be absurd to speak of a national State, for in Austria there is an agglomeration of national cultures of the most varied kinds. This has been brought about by history, and Austrian life really consists in the interplay of these national cultures.

History is also responsible for the fact that the culture of the German Empire appears today in a certain unified form. Let us enquire, to begin with, only into the culture of the German population of Germany, and that of the German population of Austria, which has indeed many connections with that of Germany, geographically too, but on the other hand is geographically separated from it by great mountains. We will think first of the German element in a general sense.

If we ask: What is German?—this question cannot be asked in the same sense as the question: What is French? What is English? What is Italian? This cannot be done, because a member of the German people—if this expression can be used at all—never knows in any particular period under what definition he stands. What he would necessarily express if he were to say: “I am a German”, would quickly change, and in a comparatively short space of time; from age to age he would nave continually to be moairying the concept of “German nationality” (Deutschtum).

It is highly significant that when during Germany's period of distress Johann Gottlieb Fichte gave his famous “Addresses to the German Nation”, in two of these Addresses he struggled to find a concept to express “German-hood” (Deutschheit). It was a struggle to find a concept to express “German-hood”, just as one struggles to find concepts for something one confronts quite objectively—not subjectively, as a people usually confronts the concept of nationality.

There lies in the striving of an inhabitant of Middle Europe a trait that must be described as an “aspiration to become something”, and not as an “aspiration to be something”. To “become” something, not to “be” something—so that in Middle Europe a an who understands his own nature would have to rebel against being classified under some particular concept. He wants to become what he is. What he is to become hovers before him as an ideal. Therefore Goethe's “Faust” characterises the innermost aspiration of Middle Europe in these words:

“Whoe'er aspires unweariedly
Is not beyond redeeming.”

or again:

“He only earns his freedom and existence,
Who daily conquers them anew.”

It is being in a state of becoming, being that is never stationary, perpetually aspirins towerds something, beholding in the far distance what it desires to become.

And so it can be said that the work that is so essentially characteristic of the Middle-European nature was necessarily an outcome of human aspiration. This work is Goethe's “Faust”, which in spite of its many perfections has countless imperfections; it is not a work of art finished and complete in itself. “Faust” could be written again in a later epoch and written quite differently, but even so it would still be an expression of the nature of the man of Middle Europe.

If we ponder deeply upon this we shall get the picture of the upward striving Ego in Middle-European humanity serpent-entwined.

Serpent-entwined! This means, striving with the wisdom that is undetermined, the wisdom that is forming? in process of becoming never living in any certainty of complete fulfilment. Such is the situation of the man of Middle Europe.

And then there is Faust's ascent into the spiritual world at the end of Part II. Through Goethe, Faust becomes a Messenger of the gods—if I may put it so. There can be no more graphic expression of this than the “caduceus”—the staff of Mercury.

But in still another way this German element can best be described by saying that its members are “messengers”. The messenger of the Spirit was Mercury. It is only necessary to consider what has happened, and we shall find that to be a bearer of the message of culture lies in the deep foundations of the character of the German people.

By way of illustration I will quote particular instances connected with Austrian culture. In examining the remarkable, very complicated structure of the Austrian State, we can recognise three filaments of the population. There were once—they have now for the moot part disappeared or are in process of disappearing—the inhabitants of northern Hungary in the Zipser district, certain inhabitants of Siebenbürgen and certain inhabitants of the lower Theiss district, the Banat. Who were these peoples? Thy were peoples who in earlier centuries: migrated from regions more to the West and had brought with them from there their German thinking and their German language. One of these filaments settled south of the Carpathians in northern Hungary. In my youth they were called the “Zipser Germans”. Today they are largely merged in the Magyars, They have entirely surrendered their folk-nature, but it has not entirely disappeared: it lives on in many impulses that are present among the Magyars, but also in the achievements of the industrious people of northern Hungary. They have not clamoured for any especial recognition from ths surrounding people, for they have made no real effort to avoid surrendering their German element to the general nature of their environment.

The inhabitants of Siebenbürgen are Saxons; they are of Rhenish descent. I myself came across them in the year 1887 when I gave a lecture in Hermannstadt. Today they are on the point of being absorbed into the Magyars, like the Zipser Germans. The folk-substance lives on but no claim is made for stress to be laid upon their own national element.

In the southern Theiss region (Banat) the people are pure Swabians who have migraterd. The inhabitants of Württemberg are called Swabians. The seine happened to them as to the people of the Zipser region; they were messengers, in the truest sense, of the element that is now dissipating under the influence of a quite different language. And if one is more closely acquainted with the situation, one knows how necessary it was that these people should be merged in a common Middle-European element, in order that this element might itself thrive.

The same thing could be demonstrated in numbers of other cases. Anyone who wants really to understand and not merely to judge according to stereotyped concepts, will find that such things disclose an overcoming, a suppressing of the nationalistic principle. Everything in Middle Europe is adapted to lift man out of the nationalistic principle and to promote the expression of his own nature as man.

Hence it would be ridiculous to call Faust a German figure, although he could have originated nowhere except in Middle Europe, and in the truest sense the play is to be numbered among the works most truly representative of Middle-European culture.

If these matters are really to be understood, we must bear in mind the many intertwinings that take place in the evolutionary process and disclose themselves when we think, for example, of what was said yesterday: that in French culture there has been a revival of ancient Greek culture. In a certain respect, of course, ancient Greek culture also lives in German art, especially in German poetry and dramatic art. Does not the Greek Iphigenia live again in Goethe's Iphigenia? Did not Goethe write an “Achilleid”, or at any rate a part?

One must always go to the very root of these matters. The Greek element does indeed live in Middle-European culture; but the essential point is how ancient Greek culture, born as it was out of the Intellectual Soul, lives again in the elements of the Intellectual South in French culture. The Greek element does not live in the thinking of the individual Frenchman, in his individuality, but in the way in which the folk-soul takes expression. In the individual Frenchman, indeed, it lives perhaps less consciously than, for example, in its reappearance in Goethe or in Schiller, but it is at work in French culture.

The whole inner impulse of ancient Greek culture lights up in French culture. One can of course refer to some such thing as Voltaire wrote in a letter of the year 1768, where he says: “I have always believed, I still believe and shall continue to believe, that as far as tragedy and comedy are concerned, Athens is surpassed in every respect by Paris. I boldly declare that all Greek tragedies are like the works of tyros compared with the glorious scenes of Corneille and the consummate art of Racine's tragedies.” This sentiment can be compared with what Schiller once wrote to Goethe, saying, in effect: “As you were not born a Greek or an Italian, but in this northern clime, you have had to let an ideal Greece come to birth within you.”—But for all that, one must not suppose that Hellenism appeared in Middle Europe in a form as adequate as that in which it appeared in French culture. In Goethe's “Iphigenia” the yearning for Greek culture can be perceived. Goethe believed that he had acquired a new understanding for art after experiencing it in Italy, yet his “Iphigenia” has something about it that is quite different from anything in a Greek work of art. The essence of the matter is the artistic form in which things are presented. A very great deal could be said on this subject, but in these lectures I am trying merely to give indications. The revival of the Intellectual or Mind soul culture in the French people is shown in their way of living, their modus vivendi.

When we study Voltaire's assessment of the evolutionary history of humanity, he seems to us entirely Greek. Here and there, of course, people have indulged in fantastic notions about ancient Greek culture. but if one known the kind of thing a Greek might have said and then reads a little poem by Voltaire, one can feel what is meant by speaking of the revival of Greek culture. The gist of this little poem is as follows: Full of beauties and of errors, the old Homer has my profoundest respect; he, like every one of his heroes, is garrulous, overdone—yet for all that, sublime.

A Greek, of course, could never have expressed himself about Homer in this way, but about other things, certainly. It is quite typically Greek.

Looking for an expression to use instead of the word “nationality” in the case of Middle-European culture, we find, even from geographical considerations, the words: “Striving after individuality”. And within this striving after individuality we include not the German only, for Middle Europe must be taken to embrace a number of other peoples as well, in all of whom this striving is present in a most marked degree. This striving after individuality is to be found in the Czechs, the Ruthenians, the Slovaks, the Magyars, in spite of all their external differences; and finally it is to be found at the other pole of German culture, in the Poles. In them, the element of individuality is developed to the extreme. Hence the intensely individualistic world-outlook of really great Poles: Tovianski, Slovacki, Mickiewitz. Hence, too, the very essence of Polish philosophy, which emanates entirely from the individual as such. (Whether this philosophy is attractive or the reverse, according to taste, is not the point at all; these things must be looked at objectively.) As for the Polish attitude to religion, the fact that in a given case the one concerned happens to be a Pole can always be ignored. And it is the same in this whole agglomeration of peoples which constitutes Middle European culture; one trait is common to them all a striving after individuality.

Polish Meseianism is only the other pole of this striving; it takes the form more of a philosophical ideal, but it is the same in essence as what comes to expreesion in Goethe's “Faust” as the character of the striving personality, of the single individual.

The following design expresses what is at work in Middle Europe. What comes from above is indicated in this upper, twofold motif; it must be two-fold, because on the one side there is the idealism that is present in Middle Europe and on the other, the sense for the practical. The important thing in the design is not the relative size of the forms but the fact that the one (a) is at the side of the motif and the other (b) arches above the motif. The latter (b) represents what expresses itself in the peculiar, not very strong, kind of tie which the population of Middle Europe has with the soil, in one case more, in another case less marked.

The form at (a) indicates the trait that expresses itself in the thought element of Middle Europe, with its inclination towards philosophical speculation. There was a suggestion of these two motifs, although what they really indicate was but little understood, in a characterisation of the Germans once in in a foreign nation, to this effect: The Germans can till the soil and they can sail in the clouds—(this did not refer to ballooning, but to flights of mind)—but they will never be able to navigate the seas.

This is a strange utterance when one thinks of the German Hanseatic League, but it was actually made. It does, after all, point to two capacities with which the spiritual worlds have endowed the Germans—and these are at the same time Middle-European capacities.

The Ego is that principle in the human soul which has first and foremost to come to terms with itself; consequently there will be a seething and a swirling in this Ego-element. Whatever foreign wars the Germans have waged and will wage, the really characteristic wars are those which Germans have waged against Germans, in order to bring about inner clarification. If one follows the course of the wars fought out inside Germany, one has a faithful picture of what goes on within the enclosed Ego of man himself.

I have pointed out—the thought is to be found in many of my lectures—that the Ego could never have become conscious of itself if it were not kindled anew every morning by the outer world. The Ego wakens into consciousness through being kindled by the outer world; if this did not happen the Ego would be there, certainly, but it would never become a centre of consciousness. Every guiding-line given by Spiritual Science concerning the being of man is confirmed by the external facts.

The configuration assumed by the Middle-European States does not really originate from these States themselves but has been determined from outside. I will speak of Austria first. When I was young, numbers of people there were constantly saying that this agglomeration of peoples which constituted Austria must soon dissolve, that it was ready for dissolution. Those who understood something about world-evolution did not hold this view, because they knew that Austria was not held together from within but from outside. This can be demonstrated in all details by history.

If one were to speak quite objectively of the latest configuration of Middle Europe, of the German Empire; one would have to say: The German has always talked of the ideal of the one united German Empire. But perhaps it would still not be there if the French had not declared war in 1870 and so forced on apace the founding of the German Reich. It was really consolidated frcm outside rather in the way the Ego is kindled each morning by the outside world. Otherwise it might still be a goal to be striven for, an ideal existing, perhaps, only in the minds of the people.

All these things must be weighed quite objectively, particularly by those who adhere to the principles of Spiritual Science. Only so can one survey, calmly and dispassionately, what is taking place in the fifth Post-Atlantean epoch of culture. I can give guiding-lines only, for the subject could obviously not be exhausted in fifty lectures. And every lecture would present further proof of the truth of what can only very briefly be indicated here.

So we may say that the spiritual scientist can acquire a picture of European culture in which he perceives the interworking of Sentient Soul, Intellectual Soul or Mind Soul, Consciousness Soul and Ego. And through this knowledge a lofty ideal can stand before us that of being able to play our part in bringing it about that in place of the present chaos, harmony shall arise in the individual human soul.

This is possible, but only possible if every single individual presses on toward objectivity. The individual man stands at a higher level than the nation. in our time these things are obscured in many ways. It is necessary to say these things, once at any rate. It is my spiritual duty to say them, and only because it is my spiritual duty do I say them at the present time.

We are living in an age when perception of what constitutes the harmony between the soul-members represented by the several peoples, and also of everything that is taking place around us, seems to be more clouded than ever before. In so saying I do not lay the main stress upon what is happening on the battlefields—for that must be judged in the light of other necessities—but upon the judgments now current among the peoples. They all seem to be at utter variance with what ought to be.

I have already spoken here about a symptomatic experience I have had in connection with my last book (“Die Rätsel der Philosopnie”). I had written up to page 206, and then the war broke out. What follows after this point—the brief outline of Anthroposophy—was written actually during the war. I tried to give an objective picture of the philosophy

of Boutroux and of Bergson. I do not believe that anyone could fail to realise the complete objectivity of what I said, even though only a brief space could ba allotted to the subject. It was necessary to call attention to the fact that Bergeon's philosophy is not original and in a certain way is lightly formulated. From pages 199-204, the views of Boutroux and Bergson were set forth without comment, and then on page 204, I said: “Out of easily formulated, easily attainable thoughts, Bergson presents an idea of evolution which, as the outcome of very profound thinking, W. H. Preuss had already presented in his book “Geist und Stoff” (“Spirit and Matter”) in 1882. Then, on pages 205-69 the philosophy of the lonely thinker Preuss is dealt with. It would naturally have been Bergeon's duty to make himself conversant with the ideas of Preuse. I say expressly, it would have been his duty to know something about the philosophy of Preues, for a philosopher ought to be aware of the ideas of his contemporaries if he proposes to write. Please bear in mind that I said, it would have been his duty to know this philosophy—for I may very possibly be accused of having said that Bergson intentionally kept silent about Preuss. I said no such thing and the passage quoted above stands there for all the world to see.

Now suppose that everything the different peoples have said about each other during these last weeks had not been said—in that case the above reference to Bergson would have been considered an objective statement. But now it will in all probability not be so regarded. Naturally, I shall not at any other time be able to speak differently about this matter. Those who stand on the ground of Spiritual Seience must remain objective. At the present time, things that ought to be clearly perceived are clouded over; but when a sufficiently large number of people have taken Spiritual Science to their hearts and are really steeped in it there will emerge out of this obscurity the ideal arising from the truths of Spiritual Science.

What we know of these truths—it is only a question of being steeped in them deeply enough—enables us to develop the right feeling for them. Let those who want to feel the true relationship between the different cultures, read what is contained in the forms of our columns and architraves, let them contemplate the curves and forme, and they will understand the spiritual relationships between the several nations. Not a single motif is accidental. When you look at a motif, when you see how it passes over from the third pillar to the fifth, you have there an expression of the relationship between the peoples corresponding to the two columns. From these architraves you can envisage the inner configuration of the soul-life of the peoples.

You enter the Building by the West door, and as you move towards the East you can feel what makes man truly man, in that he gathers into his soul what is good and admirable in each of the particular cultures—and then, as we hope, it will all sound together in harmony in the second, smaller part of the Building under the small cupola. Those who open their hearts to the Building will find the way out of tie prevailing obscurity; those who do not, will be swept along in it.

As we go towards the East, this next motif links on to the last (see pages 1 and 11). It is evident that this new form has arisen out of the foregoing Staff of Mercury! whereas in the latter the serpent-motif spreads horjzonally into the world, here the main motif points upwards and forks downwards, receiving what comes from above like a blossum opening downwards.

In this, which is the Jupiter motif as the former was the Mercury motif, the East of Europe is expressed. With its tapering slenderness this motif suggests folded hands stretching upwards to what comes from above, and gliding by their side that with which earthly man has to connect himself as it comes down from above like a flower.

It is not at all easy for the European to understand this motif and what lies behind it, because it is connected much more with the future than with the present. On account of the character of modern language it is extremely difficult to find words to characterise what lies behind this motif. For once spoken, the words would immediately have to signify something different, if they were to be really expressive. One cannot speak of the Russian element in the same way as one can speak of the English, French and Italian elements. We have already seen that we cannot speak of a “national” element in the case of Middle-European culture in the same sense as in the case of the cultures of Western Europe; still less can we speak of the Russian element in this sense. For does Russia present a picture similar to that presented by the English, French or Italian peoples? Most, certainly it does not! There is something in the Russian nature that is like a transformation of Western Europe, but a transformation into something totally different.

In the West of Europe we see national cultures whose fundamental character can be discerned by deepening our knowledge of the culture actually existing there. In the German nature we find a state of incompleteness, a striving after something that is not present, but is there as an ideal only. But this striving after the ideal lives in the blood, in the astral body and the etheric body of the man of Middle Europe. Looking over to the East we see a magnificently finished philosophy of religion, a culture that is eminently a religious culture. But can it be called “Russian”? It would be absurd to call it Russian, even though the Russians themselves do so, for it is the culture that came over to them from ancient Byzantium; it is a continuation of what originated there.

Naturally, what lives in the Sentient Soul comes from the Sentient Soul; what lives in the Intellectual Soul comes from the Intellectual Soul; what lives in the Consciousness Soul comes from the Consciousness Soul; and what lives in the Ego, even though it is in flow, in a perpetual state of becoming, proceeds from the Ego. But what comes from the Spirit Self is something that descends out of the Spirit into the Sentient Soul, the Intellectual Soul and the Consciousness Soul.

The Spirit Self comes down from above towards Sentient Soul, Intellectual Soul, Consciousness Soul and Ego. This Spirit Self must announce itself through the fact that something foreign hovers down, as it were, upon the national culture. So we see that, fundamentally, everything it has hitherto experienced as its culture is foreign to tbe Russian soul, and has been foreign over since the time when the Greco-Byzantine culture was received, up to the external institutions that were imported from outside by Peter the Great. So we see bow through the Spirit Self there daecends the force which strives down to the soul-forces; but the Spirit Self will be able to give effect to its true force, its true character, only in the future. The Russian soul has, however, to make preparation for the reception of the Spirit Self.

Quite obviously what has reached the Russian soul from foreign elements is not the Spirit Self that will come in the future. But just as the Byzantine influence, Eastern Christianity, Western culture, have descended upon Russian souls, so, one day, the Spirit Self will descend. At the present time there is nothing more than preparation for it, nothing more than an inclination towards receiving it.

Examples can be given to illustrate everything for which Spiritual Science gives guiding-lines. Here is an example lying close at hand.—I have often spoken of the greatness of the philosopher Solovieff. His greatness was first revealed to me through spiritual observation, for I know that he is even greater, has effected even greater things, since his death in 1900 than he had effected before his death.

But let us consider the facts; you can convince yourselves from Solovieff's own writings. Many of them have been translated. There are the translations by Nina Hoffmann, by Keuchel, and now the excellent translation by Frau von Vacano, “Die geistigen Grundlagen des Lebens”.

If a man of Middle Europe steeps himself in the works of Solovieff, he can have a remarkable experience—especially since the latest translation has become available. It is extraordinarily interesting. One who is really conversant with Western and Middle-European philosophy will ask himself at first: Is there anything new in Solovieff? If we compare Solovieff with Western philosophy, we shall find not a single new thought as far as the actual text is concerned; there is nothing, absolutely nothing, not even in a turn of phrase, that could not equally well have been written in the West. And yet there is something altogether different.

But if you search for this difference in the philosophy itself, in what has been written, reading it as you read an ordinary book, you will not discover what is different. For what is different is something that is not contained in the sentences themselves. It is not in them, and yet it is there. What is contained within and behind the sentences will eventually be found by the sensitive soul, despite the conviction, after reading the book, that it contains nothing that differs from West European philosophy. What is contained in Solovieff's works is a certain nuance of feeling which may seem to the man of Middle Europe like a sultry atmosphere. Sometimes one feels as though one were in an oven, particularly when great and far-reaching questions are involved. If you follow a sentence closely, you will discover that nothing of exactly the same kind emerges as it does in the case of a West European philosopher. There is a certain tone of feeling which resounds as if it were unending expectant; this tone of feeling has a mystical character; certainly, it is still a sultry mysticism which may even contain an element of danger for the man of Western Europe if he allows himself to be affected by it.

But if one knows what lies in the substrata of the human soul—and it is necessary to know this—and really gets to the root of this element of sultriness, then it is certainly not dangerous. I believe that unless anyone has knowledge of the undertones of the life of soul, the essence of the difference in Solovieff's works will escape him and he will simply be convinced that he is reading a philosopher belonging to Western Europe. It is a very strange phenomenon, a phenomenon which clearly shows that what must come out of the East has not yet been uttered, above all has not yet been put into words.

We can recognise the characteristic traits of the European cultures from another angle by considering, for example, the following.—Something of the very essence of French culture, the Intellectual Soul culture, is contained in a certain saying of Voltaire. It will certainly be discerned by anyone who is able to perceive realities from symptoms. The saying, “If God did not exist, he would have to be invented”, is rightly attributed to Voltaire. This presupposes—otherwise the utterance would have no sense that God would have to be believed in; for he would hardly be invented for amusement.

Such a saying could be formulated only by a mind working entirely out of the Intellectual Soul, the Mind Soul, and having confidence in what arises from it—even in the matter of invention; for this belongs to the sphere of the Intellectual Soul.

Now let us take a Russian: Bakunin. He formulated the saying differently—and that is very remarkable. He says, “If God existed, he would have to be abolished.” He discovers that he cannot tolerate the existence of God if he is to claim validity for his own soul.—And another saying of Bakunin is very characteristic: “God is—and man is a slave”—the one alternative. The other is: “Man is free—therefore there is no God.” He cannot conceive a way out of the circle and decides to choose between the two alternatives. He chooses the second: “Man is free—therefore there is no God.”

This is a picture of the contrast between culture in Western and in Eastern Europe. West-European culture can still reconcile the idea of the free man with the idea of God. But in East-European culture there may be no God who coerces me, otherwise I am not free, I am a slave.

One feels the whole cleft between Sentient Soul, Intellectual Soul, Consciousness Soul and Ego on the one side and the Spirit Self, which is present now, as it were, in counterpart, and is only preparing, its true being. We feel the whole cleft in what confronts us from the East, and we feel the lack of kinship of the East with the West when we perceive what effect representative personalities of the East make upon West-European culture. Who in the West, if he is not already a student of East-European culture, could understand what the Devil says to Ivan Karamazov? Who could reallyunderstand what Gorki calls “gruesome, yet veritable truth”?—“Yes, well, what is the truth? Man is the truth! What does it mean—Man? You are not it, nor am I it, and they are not it.—No! But you, I, they, old Luke, Napoleon, Mahomet all of us together are it! That is something quite tremendous! That is something wherein all beginnings are lodged, and all endings.—All in man, all for man. Man alone exists; all else is the work of his hands and of his brain. Man! Simply colossal! The very sound is exalted! MM—A—N! One should respect man! Not take pity on him—not degrade him by pitying him—but respect him!”

And how does one who has been an actor speak about his relationship to the public? And how the convict?—“I have always despised those people who are too much concerned with satiety. Man himself is the main thing! Man stands at a higher level than the satisfied stomach!”

It will be very difficult for the West to understand such things, for they give expression to the mystical suffering of the East; they let the cleft be felt between what is yet to come in the East and what lives in the West and in Middle Europe.

This immense cleft indicates to us that what is there in the East today is not the real East at all. I should have a great deal to say on the subject but can only indicate these things. This East is something of which the East itself still knows little, something concerning which it only dimly senses what it will become in the future

We understand well that it must be difficult for this East of the future to find, the bridge leading to its own true nature, to find itself, for we are confronted by no less a phenomenon than that the East still lives in feeling, still in something that is unutterable; it is seeking for a form of utterance. It seeks it in the East, seeks it in the West. The East was greatly enriched by what the Byzantine element brought to it but when the East gives expression to this, it no longer belongs to the East's own being; it is foreign to the East's own being.

But one thing leads above all clefts, namely, what we know as the true Science of the Spirit. And if what is now going on in West and Middle Europe can show us that without Spiritual Science the further course of evolution must lead ad absurdum, the East shows us that progress is utterly impossible unless understanding is reached through Spiritual Science.

Through Spiritual Science men will find and understand one another—in such a way that not only will their theoretical problems be answered, but the sufferings of culture will also be healed.

Even more than elsewhere there will be opportunity for the East to feel the events of today as a hard testing. For what must needs be felt there in particular strength will be in complete opposition to every impulse, in the East that willed this war. And still more than in the West and still more than in Central Europe does it hold good for the East, that self-identification with the active motives of this war is a denial of its own true being. Everything in the East that has led to this war will have to disappear if the sun of salvation is to rise over the East.

Our Building should become part of our very hearts, my dear friends, for it expresses everything that I try to say about it in sketchy words. More deeply than by any words you can understand what I have now said when you have a right feeling for the Building, when you feel that everything is contained there—in every curve, in every motif.

Our Building should be something that can be called “A Dome of Mutual Understanding among European Humanity”, So it is perhaps in a particular sense—I must say this, for it is my duty to say it—also a contribution towards what is to be found in the preface to my book “Theosophy”, namely, that Spiritual Science is something that our age rejects in the intellect and on the other side longs for in the soul, and of which it is in dire need.

When we contemplate the events of today we can say that Anthroposophy is something from which European humanity in the present epoch is as remote as it ought to be near, is something that it should long for with every fibre of its being. For if Spiritual Science penetrates our hearts in a way that could at the moment only be indicated in interpreting the forms of the columns and architraves, then the souls of European humanity will stand in the right relationship to each other.

If Anthroposophy—and for our immediate present this is still more important—if Anthroposophy fulfils its task in the human soul in having a clarifying effect in the thoughts of men, bringing real clarity into them, permeating and rectifying them, then a very great deal will have been achieved for the immediate future. For as well as the fact that men's hearts are not rightly related to each other in our materialistic age, the karma of which we are experiencing, men's thought, too have gone astray. Men do not want to understand each other; but not only that; they have perhaps never lied about each other to such a colossal extent as they do in our time! That is still worse than what is happening out there on the battlefields, because its effect lasts longer and because it works up even into the spiritual worlds. But at bottom it is sheer slovenliness of thought that has brought us to the pass we have already reached. Therefore Anthroposophy is today the most urgent of all necessities in the evolution of humanity!

Already one can ask the question: Are people today still capable of thinking? And further: Do not people feel that they must first have knowledge of the actual facts about which they want to think and speak?

I raise these two questions today because, as I have said, it is my duty to do so. What is at work in Middle Europe was called “Bernhardism” by the American ex-President Roosevelt. I will not discuss what the ex-President has said but will point to something that is not usually noticed. Fundamentally, this book which I have in my hand and is the one alluded to by Roosevelt, is a very serious book: “Germany and the Next War”, by Friedrich Bernhardi, written in 1912. The author was one who knew a great deal about this impending war from an external, exoteric, point of view, and for this reason the book is extraordinarily instructive. But what kind of thinking do we find in a book that in its own way is honest and sincere? Here is a chapter entitled: “The Right to make War”. Naturally, if one talks of a right to make a war, one must take a standpoint determined by a community of people, not by individuals; in other words, one speaks out of the consciousness of the Luciferic and Ahrimanic spirits. Here is a passage which from the standpoint of the author is well meant, full of good intention. The attempt is made to explain that as long as there are separate nations, these nations have a right to make war on each other. The passage continues: “The individual can perform no nobler moral action than to sacrifice his own existence to the cause which he serves, or even to the conception of the value of ideals to personal morality... Similarly, nations and States can achieve no loftier consummation than to stake their whole power on upholding their independence, their honour, and their reputation.”

The first part of the passage is correct, but the thought behind it as a whole is absurd; States cannot adopt a selfless standpoint, because with them totally different conditions prevail. We must be clear in our minds about this. Imagine yourselves in the shoes of an Austrian statesman after the events which culminated in the assassination of a Serb at Serajevo.—Can one speak there in the sense of the foregoing passage? Most certainly not! A statesman is obliged to act as the egoism of the State demands. And so quite correct utterances are made today while the thought behind them is utterly false. This is only one example. The spiritual-scientific attitude here will he illuminating in the truest sense of the word, if only there are a sufficient number of people to represent it. These are not trivial matters; they are matters of vast significance. For they have all combined into what has now led to this terrible outbreak of war. I say this, becausel I know it. I say it because at the same time I can truly say—so far as anything of this nature can be said in the sense in which an occultist means it—that I have suffered and am still suffering enough from the events of these last weeks. I have gone through enough shattering experiences beginning with the Serajevo assassination and including much else. Never before have I myself seen anything as astounding, nor have I heard from occultists of anything as astounding, as what followed upon the assassination at Serajevo. A soul was there lifted into the spiritual worlds who produced an effect entirely differerst from that produced by any other soul; this soul became, as it were, a cosmic soul, forming a cosmic centre of force around which all the prevailing elements of fear gathered, All the existing elements of fear gravitated towards this soul—and lo! in the spiritual world exactly the opposite effect was produced than had been produced in the physical world. In the physical world, fear held back the war; in the spiritual world it was an element that hastened on the war, hastened it rapidly. To have such experiences for the first time is one of the most shattering moments that can occur in occult observation. If at some time or other, what has happened in the last eight or ten weeks is objectively surveyed, it will be possible, even by following the outer events, to recognise something that is like a mirror-image of what was happening in the spiritual.

It is the task of Anthroposophy, today more than ever, to learn objectivity from the evente of the time—true objectivity, which is so remote from the attitude prevailing today. I tried to bring out this point by asking two questions: “Are people today still capable of thinking?” and “Do people try, do they accustom themselves to look for the real facts when they want to think or speak?” Do they really do this?

Wherever we look—when men and whole nations are lying about each other on such a colossal scale—everywhere it is evident that the feeling of duty to put facts to the test, to go into the real facts, is lacking, even in high places.

This duty to test facts must be deeply engraved in the hearts of anthroposophists. We must learn to realise that among people who are to be taken. seriously, things must no longer happen as they are happening today, so universally.

As anthroposophists we must realise that these things need to be kept firmly in minds for otherwise we shall not emerge from this chaos in cultural life. With strict earnestness we must adhere to our basic principle: “Wisdom is only in the Truth”. Our whole Building is an interpretation of this principle. We must learn to read our Building—that is the important thing. When it is rightly read, an attitude of earnestness, of conscientiousness, of longing for truth, will grow in our hearts in connection with cultural and spiritaal life.

If our friends permeate themselves with the conviction that the truth rests upon the foundation of the facts of evolution, then their activities will bring blessing everywhere, no matter to which nation they belong. But if they themselves adopt a one-sidedly nationalistic standpoint, they will certainly not be able to do what is right in the anthroposophical sense.

The reason why Blavatsky's Theosophy went astray was that from the outset the interests of one portion of humanity—not the English, but the Indian—were placed above the interests of mankind as a whole. And it is true in the deepest sense that only that leads to genuine occult truth which at all times places the interests of humanity as a whole above those of a portion of humanity—but does so earnestly, with the most earnest, deepest feelings. Occult truth is clouded over the very moment the interests of one part of humanity are made to override the interests of the whole. Difficult as this may be at a time like our own, nevertheless it must be striven for by those who in the true sense of the word call themselves anthroposophists.

What I am going to say today is intended to deal with primary and secondary education, and to deal with it in such a way that what is of essential value can be useful for the present time, the grave times, in which we are now living. I believe you will have seen for yourselves that what could be given only as outline in my book The Threefold Commonwealth has many deep contributing factors—indeed very many, if we take into consideration all that arises from the new shaping of the world. So that actually in everything that must be said on this subject, preeminently where fresh activity has to be aroused, only guiding lines can be given to begin with instead of anything of an exhaustive nature.

When we look at the times in which we are living—and we need to do so for we have to understand them—it must constantly strike us what a gulf there is between what must be called a declining culture and a culture that may be described as chaotic, but all the same on the up-grade. I expressly draw attention to the fact that today I am wanting to deal with a special aspect of my subject, and therefore ask you to take it in connection with the lectures as a whole, once they are brought to completion.

I should like to start by drawing your attention to something that is clearly noticeable, namely, how the culture based on bourgeois social contract is in rapid decline, whereas we are witnessing the dawn of another culture based on what is largely not understood and represented by the proletariat. If all this is to be understood—it can be felt without being understood but will then lack clarity—we must grasp it in its symptoms. Symptoms are always a matter of detail; I ask you to remember this in what I am saying today. I shall naturally be forced by the subject itself to take details out of their context, but I shall take pains so to shape this symptomatology that it will not be able to work in the way of agitators or demagogues, but will really be shaped by the relevant circumstances. We may meet with much misunderstanding in this direction today, but that we shall have to risk.

Now in the course of years I have often asked you to bear in mind that, on the ground of the world-outlook represented here, it is perfectly possible to be a real upholder and defender of the modern natural scientific approach to the world. You know how frequently I have referred to all that can be said in defense of this approach! At the same time, however, I have never failed to point out what a fearful counterpart it has. Quite recently I reminded you that this can be seen at once when anyone, as a result of what we call here the symptomatic method of study, points to some particularly telling example and goes to work quite empirically. Now in another connection I have had to sing the praises of a recent remarkable work by the outstanding biologist Oskar Hertwig, Das werden der Organismen—Eine Wiederlegung der Darwinischen Zufallstheorie. Then, to avoid misunderstanding after the publication of a second book of his, I have had to remark how this man has followed up a really great book on natural science with a quite inferior work on social conditions. This is a fact fraught with meaning for the present time. It shows that even on the excellent foundation of the natural scientific approach to the world, what is pre-eminently necessary for an understanding of the present times cannot arise, namely, knowledge of the social impulses existing in our age. I want today to give you another example to bring home to you with greater emphasis how, on the one hand, bourgeois culture is on the decline and can be saved only in a certain way; how, on the other hand, there exists something that is on the ascent, something that must be carefully tended with understanding and judgment if it is to be a sarting point for the culture of the future.

Now I have before me a book that is a symptomatic and typical product of the declining bourgeoisie. It appeared immediately after the world war with the somewhat pretentious title The Light Bearer. This light bearer is admirably adapted to spread darkness over everything which today is most necessary for social culture and its spiritual foundation. A remarkable community of people have foregathered, who in separate articles have written remarkable things about a so-called rebuilding of the social organism. Naturally I can quote only certain passages from this rather voluminous work. To begin with we have a scientist named Jakob von Uexkull, really a good typical scientist who—and this is the important point—has not only a certain knowledge of natural science, is not merely well versed in it, but in his research work is recognised as an accomplished scientist of the day. He feels impelled, however, like others bred in the scientific tradition, to treat us to his views upon organising the world socially. He has learnt about the 'cell-state' as the organism is often called in scientific circles. He has certainly learnt to develop his mind, with which he then observes the social life. I want to refer you just to a few instances from which you may be able to see how this man, not from his knowledge of natural science but as a result of his scientific method of thinking—really quite correct but wholly absurd for practical life—how he now looks at the structure of modern society: he turns to the social organism, to the natural scientific organism, the organism as it is in nature, and finds that "the harmony in a natural organism can at times be disturbed by processes of disease"—and referring to the social organism goes on to say:

“All harmony can be disturbed through disease. We call the most terrible disease of the human body cancer. Its characteristic is the unrestrained activity of the protoplasm which, without considering the preservation of the organs, goes on producing more and more protoplasmic cells. These press upon the bodily structure; they cannot, however, fulfil any function themselves for they are lacking in structure.

“We recognise the same disease in the human community at large when the people's motto: liberty, equality, fraternity, replaces the motto of the state: compulsion, diversity, subordination.”

Now here you have a typical scientific thinker. He looks upon it as a cancerous disease when the impulse towards liberty, equality and fraternity arises out of the people. In place of freedom he wants to put compulsion, in place of equality, diversity, in place of fraternity, subordination. This is what from the 'cell-state' he has learnt to adopt as his method of viewing things, and which he then applies to the social organism. The rest of what he puts forward too is not without significance when considered from the symptomalogical point of view. He goes so far as to find something in the social organism that corresponds in the natural organism to the circulation of the blood, not at all in the way I have described it in various lectures, but as he himself pictures it. He goes to the length of looking upon gold as blood circulating in the social organism and says: “Gold possesses the faculty of circulating independently of commodities, finally reaching the collecting centres represented by the great banks (Gold heart)”. Thus this scientist seeks a heart for his social organism and finds it in the collecting centres of the great banks, “which can exercise an overwhelming influence on the movements of both gold and commodities”.

Now I particularly stress that I have no intention of making fun of anything here. I want just to let you see how a man, who from this point of view has the courage to think things out to their logical conclusion, is actually obliged to think. If today many people deceive themselves about our having during the last three or four centuries brought evolution to the point of making this kind of thinking quite intelligible, then it is evident that these people are asleep in their souls, that they give themselves up to cultural narcotics which prevent their looking with wide awake souls at what is concealed in bourgeois culture. For this reason I have shown you a symptom that sheds light on this light bearer, sheds light on the elements of present-day culture, in so far as, out of the scientific method of thinking, this culture understands the social life. In a further examnple I want to show you how different a result we experience from what we meet within the spiritual sphere.

Among those belonging to the society just mentioned there is a man with a more spiritual bent, by name Friedrich Niebergall. Now this Friedrich Niebergall is quoted because his attitude towards certain things we consider of value is most sympathetic. But I should like to say here that what matters is the nature of the sympathetic attitude with which from such a side certain matters are approached. If we know this, and if we are not mere egoists but understand the great social impulses, perhaps we do not value this sympathetic attitude very highly; and it would be good if in these matters we were not to give ourselves up to illusion. We know, some of us at least could know, that what we carry on here and call spiritual science, or anthroposophy, we have for some time considered to be the true spiritual foundation of what today is on the ascent. Here, it is true, extremes meet; and I have always been forced to experience how some of those very people who participate in our anthroposophical endeavors turn to other movements they feel to be closely akin, but which differ from our endeavors in that they belong to the worst phenomena of the bourgeois decline, whereas spiritual science has from the first been strongly opposed to all that is behind this. So we find confused together in a certain Johannes Müller, who has no power of discriminating the different streams—like Niebergall for example—we find in this Johannes Müller a phenomenon showing just the characteristics of our decadent culture; and on the other hand (you know I do not say these things out of mere foolishness) you find mention of my name. It is true that all kinds of elegant things, most elegant things, are said about what I try to accomplish. You must, however, realise how in all that is put forward in anthroposophy my every effort is directed towards taxing man's understanding and fighting in a pronounced way against anything in the way of nebulous mysticism or so-called mystic theosophy. This could be done only by approaching the highest spheres of knowledge with clear insight, lucid ideas, which will be striven for when through natural science we have learnt, not the natural scientific outlook of today, but true thinking. After the gentleman in question has declared how fine much of anthroposophy is, he adds: “Round this basis of practical truth there then springs forth a confused medley of alleged knowledge concerning the life of the soul, of mankind and of the cosmos—as once was the case in the all-embracing gnostic systems offered out of the secret wisdom of the East to an age seeking in like manner inner depths and peace of soul.” It is not possible to say anything less to the point than this. For the fact that the author describes this as confused nonsense, a confused medley, rests solely on his lacking the will to adopt the mathematical method of our spiritual science. This is generally the case with those wishing to gain conceptions from a knowledge that is on the decline. The result of disciplining inner experience by mathematical method appears to this author therefore to be a confused medley. But this conf used medley that brings into the matter mathematical clarity, perhaps indeed mathematical dryness, is what is essential, for it preserves what is meant to be pursued here from all fantastic mysticism, all nebulous theosophy. Without this so-called confused medley there can be no real foundation for the future life of spirit. It is true that by reason of our social conditions there had to be a struggle to make it possible for spiritual science to be carried on in the very modest dimensions it has reached today. We had to struggle with what very often appears as a result of most people—who now have time, and nothing but time, for the affairs of spiritual science—still having those old habits of thinking and perceiving which are on the decline. Hence, we have to struggle so hard against what easily spreads in a circle such as ours, namely, sectarianism, which naturally is the very opposite of what is meant to be cultivated here, and against every kind of personal wrangling which, it goes without saying, leads to the systematic slandering that has flourished so exuberantly on the soil of this movement.

Now whoever studies the life of spirit today from symptoms such as these will soon come to the point of saying: What is particularly needed in the sphere of spiritual endeavour is a return to original sources. The clamor for a new form of social life is always heard at a time when people harbor the most widespread anti-social impulses and anti-social instincts. These anti-social impulses and instincts are particularly evident in people's private intercourse. They are to be seen in what men give or do not give—to each other. They are to be seen in the characteristic way people ignore the thoughts of others, talk others down, and finally pass them by. In our day the instinctive capacity really to understand the people we meet is extraordinarily rare. The following also is a disappearing phenomenon—the possibility of people nowadays being convinced of anything unconnected with their social status, education or birth. Today people have the most beautiful thoughts, but it is very difficult for them to be enthusiastic about anything. In thought they pass by all that is best, and this is a deeply rooted characteristic of our age. As consequence of this fact—you know that recently I have talked of logic based on fact as being important for the present time in contrast to mere logic of thought—as consequence of this a longing exists in men today to have recourse to authority and the pronouncements of feeling rather than by their own inner activity to work through to things. Those today who talk a great deal about freedom from authority are the very people who, at heart, believe in it most firmly and long to submit themselves to it. Thus we see, only it is generally unnoticed because most people are asleep, a rather questionable tendency among those who, without finding any way out of it, are involved in this cultural decline, namely the tendency to sink back into the bosom of the old Catholic Church. Were people to realise what lies in this tendency to return to the Catholic Church they would be much astonished. Under the present conditions, if this tendency were to increase, at no very distant date we should have to witness a mighty swing over to the bosom of the Catholic Church by masses of the people. Whoever is able to observe the special features of our present culture knows that this is threatening us.

Now whence does all this arise? Here I must draw your attention to an essential phenomenon of our present social life. The special feature of what in the last few centuries has increased to ever wider dimensions, and will increase further in those lands which will preserve their civilisations throughout the present chaos—this special feature is the technical coloring of the culture, the particular technical shade taken on by the culture of recent times. Were I to speak exhaustively on this subject, I should have to point in detail to all that now is referred to just in passing; and one day I shall do so. This technical culture has indeed one quite definite quality; this culture in its nature is through and through altruistic. In other words there is only one favourable way for technical accomplishments to be wide­spread, namely, when the men actively engaged in them in contrast to egoism, develop altruism. Technical culture makes it increasingly necessary—and those who are able to observe these things see the necessity on every fresh advance of technical culture—for work organised on a technical basis to be entirely free from egoism. In contrast to this there has developed at the same time what has had its origin in capitalism, which must not necessarily be linked to technical culture or remain so linked. Capitalism, when it is private capitalism, cannot work other than egoistically, for its very being consists in egoistic activity. Thus in recent times two streams meet in diametrical opposition to one another: modern technical life which calls upon men to be free from egoism, and, coming from the past, private capitalism, which can prosper only by the assertion of egoistic impulse. This is what has made its way into our present situation, and the only means of extricating ourselves is to have a life of spirit which has the courage to break away from the old traditions.

Now today there are many people concerned with the problems of future primary and secondary education, school education, and of professional training for human beings. Especially when we are studying the question of primary and secondary education we must say to these people: Well and good, but with the best will in the world, can you interest people at large in primary and secondary education if you do nothing to change present conditions of education and matters of the spirit? Have you the material for the work? What actually are you able to do? With your principles—perhaps socialistic in a good sense—you may be able to found schools for a great mass of the people and to found institutions for their higher education. You may organise everything of this kind to which your good will impels you. But have you the material really to organise for the benefit of the people what you want with good will to extend to them? You tell us that you found libraries, theatres, concert halls, exhibitions, lecture courses, and polytechnics. But the question must arise: What books do you have in your libraries? What kind of science is dealt with in your lectures? You place on your library shelves those very books which belong to the bourgeois culture that is on the decline; you hand over the scientific education in the polytechnics to men who are products of that bourgeois culture. You give the nature of education new forms, but into these new forms you cast what you have absorbed of the old. For instance you say: For a long time we have been trying to give primary and secondary education a democratic form; up to now the various states have been against this for they want to educate men to be good civil servants.—True you are opposed to this education of good civil servants; you allow the people to be educated by them, however, for up to now you have nothing else in mind but these civil servants whose books are on the shelves of your libraries, whose scientific method of thinking you propagate by means of your lectures and whose habits of thinking permeate your colleges.—You see from this that in these serious times the matter must be taken far more profoundly than it generally is today.

Now let us just look at certain details to have at least something clear before us. We will begin with what we may call primary and secondary education. Under this heading I include everything that can be given to the human being when he has outgrown the education to be acquired in his family, when to this must be added the education and instruction obtained at school. Those who know the nature of man are clear that school education should never be a factor in the evolution of the human being until approximately the change of teeth has taken place. This is just as much a scientific law as any other. Were people to be guided by the real nature of human beings instead of by mere dummies, they would make it a regulation that school instruction should not begin till after the change of teeth. But the important question is the principles upon which this school instruction of children is to be based. Here we must have in mind that whoever is able to bring his thoughts and efforts into harmony with the ascending cultural evolution can really do nothing today bµt recognise, as inherent in the principles holding good in school education and instruction, what lies in the nature of the human being himself. Knowledge of human nature from the change of teeth until puberty must underlie any principles in what we call primary and secondary education. From this, and from a great deal of the same nature, you will realise that, if we take this as our basis, the result will be the same education for everyone; for obviously the laws which hold good in human evolution between approximately the seventh and fifteenth years are the same for all human beings. The only question we need answer concerning education and instruction is: To what point have we to bring human beings by the time they reach their fifteenth year? This alone may be called thinking in terms of primary and secondary education. At the same time this alone is thinking in a modern way about the nature of instruction. The consequence of this today will be that we shall no longer ignore the necessity of making an absolute break w1th the old school system, that we shall have in all earnest to set to work on organising what, during the years specified, is to be given to children in accordance with the evolution of the growing human being. Then a certain basis will have to be created—something that , when social goodwill exists , will not be a nebulous idea for the future but something practical which can be immediately acted upon. The basis for this will have to be created in the first place by a complete change in the whole nature of examination and instruction of the teacher himself. When today the teacher is examined, this is often done merely to verify whether he knows something that, if he is at all clever and doesn't know it, he can read up in a text book. In the examination of teachers this can be entirely omitted, but with it will go the greater part of such examinations in their present form. In those that will take their place the object will be to discover whether the man, who has to do with the education and instruction of the developing human being, can establish with him a personally active and profitable relation; whether he is able to penetrate with his whole mentality—to use a word much in fashion—into the soul of the growing human being, into his very nature. Then the teacher will not just teach reading, arithmetic or drawing; he will be fit to become a real moulder of the developing human being.

Thereupon, from all future examinations, which will take a very different form from their present one, it will be easy to discover if the school staff are really creative in this sense. For this means that the teacher will know: I must help this pupil in some particular way if he is to learn to think; another in another way if he is to unfold his world of feeling.—For the world of feeling is intimately bound up with the world of memory, a thing few people know today, most modern professors .being the worst possible psychologists . The teacher must know what to give to his pupil if the will is to unfold in such a way that the seeds, sown between his seventh and fifteenth years, may bring about the strengthening of the will for the whole of his life. The cultivation of will is brought about when everything that has to do with practical physical exercises and artistic pursuits is adapted to the developing being. Whoever is a teacher of those who are in process of development will concentrate all his effort on enabling the human being to become man. In this way he will discover how to utilise all that is conventionally called human culture—speaking, reading and writing. All this can best be utilised in the years between seven and fifteen for the development of thinking. However strange it may seem, thinking is the most external thing in man, and it must be developed on wha tever establishes us in the social organism. Consider how the human being on coming into the world through birth lacks any propensity towards reading and writing and how these belong to his life as a member of a community. Thus, for the development of thinking we must, comparatively early, have good instruction in languages, naturally not in what was spoken formerly but in languages as used today by the civilised peoples with whom we have contact. This efficient teaching in languages would naturally not consist in teaching the grammatical anomalies as is done today in the grammar school; it must be started in the lowest classes and continued. It will be important too that teaching should be given in a conscious way to unfold the feeling and the memory bound up with it. Whereas everything relating to arithmetic and geography—of which children can absorb an extraordinary amount when it is given them rightly—stands between what has to do with thinking and what has to do with feeling, everything taken into the memory has more to do with pure feeling, for instance, the history that is taught, the myths and legends that are told. I can only touch on these things.

But it is also necessary in these first years to give particular attention to the cultivation of will. Here it is a matter of physical exercises and artistic training. Something entirely new will be needed for this in these early years. A beginning has been made in what we call eurythmy. Today we witness a great deal of physical culture that is decadent and belongs to the past; it pleases many people. In its place we shall put something that so far we have had occasion to show only to the employees of the Waldorf—Astoria factory through the sympathetic help of our good Herr Molt; we shall put what—if it is given to the growing human being instead of the present gymnastics—promotes culture in both body and soul. It can so develop the will that the effect remains throughout life, whereas cultivation of the will by any other means causes a weakening of it when vicissitudes and various experiences are met with in the course of life. In this sphere particularly, however, we shall have to go to work with common sense. In the way instruction is given, combinations will have to be made little dreamt of today; for instance drawing will go hand-in-hand with geography. It would be of the greatest importance for the growing pupil to have really intelligent lessons in drawing; during these lessons he would be led to draw the globe from various sides, to draw the mountains and rivers of the earth in their relation to one another, then to turn to astronomy and to draw the planetary system. It goes without saying that this would have to be introduced at the right age, not for the seven-year-olds but certainly before they reached fifteen, perhaps from the twelfth year onwards, when if done in the right way, it would work on growing youth very beneficially.

What in a didactic and pedagogical way I have just now been discussing concerning primary and secondary education will, in accordance with the logic of facts, have a quite definite consequence, namely that nothing will play a part in teaching that is not in one form or another retained for the whole of life. Today, as a rule, only what is included among the faculties plays its part rightly—what is done by learning to read is concentrated in the faculty of reading, what is done in learning to count is concentrated in the faculty of arithmetic. But just think how it is when we come to things having rather to do with feeling and memory. In this sphere children today learn a great deal only to forget it, only to be without it for the rest of life. In future, stress must be laid on this—that everything given to a child will remain with him for life.

We should then come to the question: What is to be done with the human being when having finished with the primary and secondary school he goes out into life? Here it is important that everything unsound in the old life of spirit should be overcome, that at least where education is concerned the terrible cleft made by class distinction should be abolished.

Now the Greeks, even the Romans, were able to devise for themselves an education that had its roots in their life, that was bound up with their way of life. In our time we have nothing which binds us in our most important years with our quite different mode off living. Many people, however, who later take up positions of authority, learn today what was learnt by the Greeks and Romans, and thus become divorced from life today; added to which this is spiritually the most uneconomical thing possible. Besides, we are today at a point in human evolution—if people only knew it—when it is quite unnecessary for preserving our relation to antiquity that we should be brought up in their ideas. What people in general need of the old has for a long time been incorporated in our culture, in such a way that we can absorb it without years of training in an atmosphere foreign to us. What we should imbibe of Greek and Roman culture can be improved upon, and this has also been the case; but that is a matter for scholars and has nothing to do with general social education. What is to be imbibed from antiquity for our general social education, however, has been brought to such a stage through the work of great minds in the past, and is so much in our midst, that if we rightly absorb what is there for us we have no need to learn Greek and Latin to deepen our knowledge of antiquity; it is not in the least essential and is no help at all for the important things in life. I recall how, to avoid misunderstandings, I found it necessary to say that, though Herr Wilamowitz is most certainly a Greek scholar of outstanding merit, he has nevertheless translated the Greek plays in a way that is really atrocious; but, of course, these translations have been acclaimed by both the press and scholars. Today we must learn to let people participate in life; and if we organise education so that people are able to participate in life, at the same time setting to work on education economically, you will find that we are really able to help human beings to a living culture. This, too, will enable anyone with a bent towards handicraft to take advantage of the education for life that begins about the fourteenth year. A possibility must be created for those who early show a bent towards handicraft or craftsman ship to be able to participate in what leads to a conception of life. In future, pupils who have not reached their twenty-first year should never be offered any knowledge that is the result of scientific research and comes from scientific specialisation. In our day, only what has been thoroughly worked out ought to have a place in instruction; then we can go to work in an out-and-out economic way. We must, however, have a clear concept of what is meant by economy in didactic and pedagogical matters. Above all we should not be lazy if we want to work in a way that is economic from the pedagogical point of view. I have often drawn your attention to something personally experienced by me. A boy of ten who was rather undeveloped was once given over into my charge, and through pedagogical economy I was enabled to let him absorb in two years what he had lacked up to his eleventh year, when he was still incapable of anything at all. This was possible only by taking into account both his bodily and his soul nature in such a way that instruction could proceed in the most economical way conceivable. This was often done by my spending three hours myself in preparation, so as in a half-hour or even in a quarter to give to the boy instruction that would otherwise have taken hours—this being necessary for his physical condition. If this is considered from the social point of view, people might say that I was obliged in this instance to give all the care to a single boy that might have been given to three others who would not have had to be treated in this way. But imagine we had a social educational system that was reasonable, it would then be possible for a whole collection of such pupils to be dealt with, for it makes no difference in this case whether we have to deal with one or fourteen boys. I should not complain about the number of pupils in the school, but this lack of complaint is connected with the principle of economy in instruction. It must be realised, however, that up to his fourteenth year the pupil has no judgment; and if judgment is asked of him this has a destructive effect on the brain. The modern calculating machine which gives judgment the place of memorising and calculating is a gross educational error; it destroys the human brain, makes it decadent. Human judgment can be cultivated only from and after the fourteenth year when those things requiring judgment must be introduced into the curriculum. Then all that is related, for example, to the grasping of reality through logic can be begun. When in future the carpenter or mechanic sits side-by-side in school or college with anyone studying to be a teacher, the result will certainly be a specialisation but at the same time one education for all; but included in this one education will be everything necessary for life. If this were not included matters would become socially worse than they are at present. All instruction must give knowledge that is necessary for life. During the ages from fifteen to twenty everything to do with agriculture, trade, industry, commerce will have to be learnt. No one should go through these years without acquiring some idea of what takes place in farming, commerce and industry. These subjects will be given a place as branches of knowledge infinitely more necessary than much of the rubbish which constitutes the present curriculum during these years. Then too during these years all those subjects will be introduced which I would call world affairs, historical and geographical subjects, everything concerned with nature knowledge—but all this in relation to the human being, so that man will learn to know man from his knowledge of the world as a whole.

Now among human beings who receive instruction of this kind will be those who, driven by social conditions to become workers in a spiritual sense, can be educated in every possible sphere at schools specially organised for such students. The institutions where people today are given professional training are run with a terrible lack of economy. I know that many people will not admit it but there is this lack of economy; above all validity is ascribed to the most curious conceptions belonging to the world-outlook that is on the decline. Even in my time I have experienced this—people have begun to press where it is a question in the universities of historical and literary subjects, for fewer lectures and more "seminars"; today we still hear it said that lectures should be given as little space as possible on the programme but seminars encouraged. One knows these seminars. Faithful followers of a university tutor gather together and learn strictly in accordance with the ideas of this tutor to work scientifically. They do their work under his coaching and the results of the coaching are forever visible. It is altogether another matter if a man, in the years when he should be learning a profession, goes of his own free will to a course of intelligent lectures, and then has the opportunity of embarking upon his own free exposition—though certainly this would be connected with what the lectures contained. Practical application can certainly be included in the programme but this exaggerated emphasis on seminars must be stopped. That is just an undesirable product of the second half of the nineteenth century, when the emphasis was on the drilling of human beings rather than on leaving them to develop freely.

Now when we are discussing this stage in education it must be said that a certain educational groundwork ought to be the same for everyone, whether he is destined to be a doctor, a lawyer or a teacher; that is one aspect of the matter; in addition to this, everyone must receive what contributes to the general culture of man, whether he is to become a doctor, a machine maker, architect, chemist or engineer; he must be given the opportunity of receiving general culture, whether he is to work with his hands or his head. Today little thought is given to this, though certainly in some places of higher education many things are better than they were. When I was at the Technical College in Vienna a Professor was giving lectures on general history. Each term he started to give his general history; after three or perhaps five lectures he ceased—there was no longer anyone there. Then, at this college, there was a Professor of history of literature . Thus there were the means to receive what was universally human besides specialised subjects. To these lectures on the history of literature, which included exercises in rhetoric and instruction on how to lecture, like those given, for example, by hand—to these lectures I always had to drag someone else, for they were held only if there was an audience of two. They could be kept going, therefore, only by a second being dragged in, and this was someone different practically every time. Except for this, the only attempt to provide students with the information they needed about conditions in life was by lectures on constitutional law or statistics. As I said, these things have improved; what has not improved is the driving force that should exist in our whole social life. This will improve, however, when there is a possibility for all that constitutes the universally human not to be made intelligible only to those with a definite professional view but intelligible from a universally human aspect. I have often been surprised how distorted my lectures on anthroposophy have been by my audience; for if they had taken them in a positive way they could have said: we won't bother about the anthroposophy in these lectures, but what is said about natural science, which receives great praise when coming from the ordinary natural philosopher—that is enough for us. For as you all know these lectures are always interspersed with general information about nature. But there are many people who are not interested in taking things from a positive angle, preferring to distort what they have no wish to accept. What they refused to accept, by the very way in which the thoughts were formed, by the whole mode of treatment, as well as the necessary interspersing of natural science, could be taken as contributing to universal human knowledge, which the manual worker could receive just as well as the scholar, and which was also generally intelligible as natural science. Just consider other endeavors towards a world-outlook. Do you imagine that in monistic gatherings, for instance, people can understand anything if they have not a scientific background? No, and if they have not, they merely gossip. What here we pursue as anthroposophy is something that can change all knowledge of nature, and even of history, so that everyone will be able to understand them. Just think how intelligible to everyone what I have shown to be a great leap historically in the middle of the fifteenth century can be. That, I think, is intelligible to everyone. But it is the groundwork without which there can be no understanding at all of the whole social movement in our time. This social movement is not understood because people do not know how mankind has developed since the middle of the fifteenth century. When these things are mentioned people come forward and declare: Nature does not make leaps, so you are wrong to assume there was such a thing in the fifteenth century. This foolish proposition that nature never makes a leap is always being harped upon. Nature continually makes leaps; it is a leap from the green leaf of a plant to the sepal which has a different form—another leap from sepal to petal. It is so too in the evolution of man's life. Whoever does not teach the history that rests on senseless conventional untruth, but on what has really happened, knows that in the fifteenth century men became different in the finer element of their constitution from what they were before, and that what is brought about today is the development of what they have grasped in the centre of their being. If there is a desire to understand the present social movement, laws of this kind in historical evolution will have to be recognised. You have only to call to mind the way in which matters here are dealt with and you will say: To understand all this no special knowledge is necessary; there is no need to be a man of culture; everyone can understand it. This indeed will be what is demanded in the future—that no philosophies or world-conceptions should be propagated which can be understood only by reason of a form of education belonging to a certain class. Take up any philosophical work today, for example, by Eucken or Paulsen, or anyone else you want information about, take up one of those dreadful works on psychology by university professors—you will soon drop it again; for those who are not specially trained in the particular subject do not understand the language used. This is something that can be set right only by universal education, when the whole nature of education and instruction will be absolutely changed in the way I have tried to indicate today.

You see, therefore, that in this sphere too we can say: here we have a big settling-up—not a small one. What is necessary is the development of social impulses or, rather, social intincts, through instruction, through education, so that people do not pass by one another. Then they will understand each other so that a practical living relation is develcped—for nowadays the teacher passes his pupil by, the pupil passes his teacher. This can happen only if we run our pen through what is old—which can be done. The facts of the case do not prevent this; it all goes back to human prejudice. People cannot believe that things can be done in a new way; they are terrified that their life of spirit may lose what was of value in the old way. You have no idea how anxious they are on this score. Naturally they are unable to take all this in; for instance they cannot see all the possibilities created by having an instruction that is economical. I have often told you that provided this is done at the right age it is possible from the beginning of geometry—the straight line and the angle—up to what used to be called the pons a sinorum, the Pythagorean theorem. And on my attempting this you should have seen the joy of the youngsters when, after three or four hours work, the theorem of Pythagoras dawned upon them. Only think what a lot of rubbish has to be gone through today before young people arrive at this theorem. What matters is the enormous amount of mental work wasted, which has its effects in later life; it sends its rays into the whole of life, right into its most practical spheres. Today it is necessary for people to come to a decision in these matters—fundamentally to re-organise their way of thinking. Otherwise—well, otherwise we simply sink deeper into decline and never find the path upwards.

By devoting oneself to spiritual life, it is necessary to become aware of why we, as human beings in today's world, by grasping our task as human beings in today's world, have the longing and the urge to cultivate spiritual life. This is because, since the last period of the last century, people can relate to the higher worlds in a completely different way than was the case in earlier centuries. This is something that is basically far too little taken into account: that the development of humanity from epoch to epoch always produces new impulses.

Whereas it was relatively difficult in the 14th, 15th and 16th centuries to gain an understanding of the spiritual world and spiritual life from within the human soul, it will become more and more a natural need of the human soul in the coming times to seek spiritual understanding. For since the last third of the 19th century, the gates to the spiritual world have, in a sense, opened so that spiritual knowledge flows from the spiritual world for everyone who wants to receive it. In this sense, we are in a completely new epoch of human development. Those who today are drawn to anthroposophy and the anthroposophical movement as if by instinct feel what is written in the signs of the times. Fifty years ago, it would have been completely impossible to gather together to discuss the spiritual secrets of existence, because the waves of spiritual understanding had not yet begun to flow down to humanity. And we must understand that what we strive for and want must become more and more general. To do that, we must also look at the symptoms that characterize the overall development of humanity today. Today, only a few people are interested in spiritual life and have the urge to gain knowledge of the spiritual world. The masses still vigorously reject any spiritual knowledge. Now we must know how to delve into all that has led to such a state of affairs in our human development. Among the ideas that best show what has emerged as a symptom of the present era, perhaps the idea of freedom is the most important, for it is the idea that can best illustrate the evolution of the last few centuries.

It is only natural that a person out in the world today who is not seeking spiritual knowledge but who wants to be informed about the laws of the world and the human soul life, takes refuge in official science, which in turn is dominated by natural science. How do people come to know about the world? They turn to people who have learned to gain a scientific understanding of the world and who may have then also laid down in popular scientific writings how one should think about the human soul, about nature and freedom and so on. How would someone like that come to a different idea than by asking such people?

Now, in the nineteenth century, official science, in its desire to become a world view, underwent a very strange but symptomatic development. But people do not notice such very strange symptoms at all. If you ask a great scientist whether there is such a thing as an idea of freedom, he will answer: It does not exist in the sense in which the old worldviews understood this idea, because today we know that when a person, for example, consumes a certain substance, that substance immediately affects his brain, and then he can no longer properly control his brain. You see that man is dependent on his brain, so how can he be free? Or they say: In rational psychology, we show that a person who is afflicted with a mental illness and cannot speak or remember speech sounds shows abnormalities in his brain. How can you talk about freedom when man is dependent on his brain? This is what ordinary psychiatry says. For ordinary, trivial thinking, all these reasons carry a great deal of weight. Such things sound very plausible and gradually take hold in people's thinking. Unless a spiritual worldview sets minds straight again, people will fall prey to a worldview that completely denies the idea of freedom.

In this respect, science has come a long way. In the 18th and early 19th centuries, people were always looking for purpose in nature. They wondered: why does the bull have horns, why do apples grow on apple trees? — A wise world guidance, they said, has done that. It gave the bull horns to be able to push with, and it has apples grow so that man can eat them and so on. Enlightened minds of the 18th and 19th centuries have scoffed at these utilitarian reasons. They have said, ironically: Why did the world's existence cause this or that tree to grow? — Because man wants to drink wine and needs cork stoppers for his wine bottles!

Such objections to the careless way in which nature was thought of as man are entirely justified. With a person, you can always ask: what purpose does he pursue with what he does? — Now, nature had been humanized or anthropomorphized, an anthropomorphic worldview had been created that asked about goals in nature just as one can ask about a person's goal. It was perfectly legitimate for the nineteenth century to oppose this anthropomorphism, which saw nothing in nature itself, but only introduced human beings into nature. The spirits of the nineteenth century wanted to look at nature directly, to ask it themselves. They did not want to fantasize human purposes into nature. This striving was entirely justified, because the old way of looking at things transferred human soul life into nature. And it is justified to say that one wants to look at nature as it is, apart from man. It was said: We want to throw out of nature everything that belongs to man. This then led in the 19th century to an image of nature in which there was no longer anything of man in it. This gave rise to a materialistic natural science. Human concepts were pushed out of nature. In a sense, it was a correct reaction against the old doctrine of utility or teleology.

Thus a materialistic natural science arose on the premise that nothing of man can be found in this natural science. At the time, this was a perfectly justified demand. But in the second half of the 19th century, it became clear that we must also consider the human being as a natural product, we must also consider the human being as nature. This second demand, to consider the human being according to the material conditions of nature, changed everything, because the human being had been thrown out of nature. It was quite clear that man could no longer be found in this science of nature, which had been so arranged. This developed in the course of the 19th century. It was then that everything belonging to the human soul was distilled out of natural science, which can be compared to saying: I have a bottle, there is water in it. But I want an empty bottle, so I pour the water out of the bottle. And then one is surprised that there is no more water in the bottle. With the bottle, everyone immediately notices that the bottle is then empty. With science, people did not realize the folly of wanting to understand man from nature emptied of man. I am convinced that a materialistic assembly would only laugh at these simple considerations, because they are not aware of this capital mistake. Among these misconceptions, the idea of freedom, immortality and the like suffered the most. For anyone who looks at the matter as it has just been described finds it quite natural that no information about these concepts can be obtained from science.

Now it is a matter of the fact that it is indeed necessary, especially for a spiritual world view, to come to the realization that although man in his corporeality belongs to external nature and its laws, he carries something within him as a soul that can only be found by spiritual means. In other words: If we want to recognize the human being in his very own essence, then we must not look at that in man which is his outer shell between birth and death, but we must look at that which, going from incarnation to incarnation, is his actual, true essence. And it will be the task of anthroposophy to direct people's attention to those processes of the inner life that prove that there is such an eternal core of being within the human being, independent of the outer physical body.

If we first consider the human being in such a way that we admit that the actual human essence not only lives between birth and death, but is also that which places the human being in the physical world and which remains after death, then one will recognize the necessity of guiding human knowledge and cognition up to the regions where the human being, through its knowledge, participates in that higher world to which it belongs through its soul-spiritual nature. But in the moment when man enters with his knowledge into the higher worlds, he comes together with spiritual beings of the higher worlds just as he does here in the physical world with the beings of the three natural kingdoms.

Now, the most unjustified view is that which Pascal, the famous Christian researcher, once expressed and in which Maeterlinck, for example, today quite rightly agrees with him, saying that Pascal wanted that once and for all. - Pascal says: We actually have nothing from earthly existence but that it hides eternity, infinity, from us. It must be said that this belief is very widespread. Wherever one goes, one finds a justified longing for the spiritual, the eternal, which is expressed in such a way that one says: after all, earthly existence is quite unsatisfying. Only in the contemplation of the eternal can man really find satisfaction. But when one really penetrates into the eternal worlds, then something else is added to Pascal's saying. When one penetrates into eternity, one experiences that it by no means conceals earthly existence, but rather shows that everything there is designed to lead back to earthly existence.

The most peculiar objections are sometimes raised against the doctrine of re-embodiment. A lady, to whom I explained the necessity of re-embodiment with all its reasons, said to me: I do not want to come back to earth, I do not like life enough. — I tried to make her understand that her feelings had nothing to do with the matter. She listened to me and then left. From the nearest railway station she sent me a postcard on which was written: I don't want to be born again! One can laugh at such an attitude. One finds it often. One does not consider that the attitude is not important, not important what one says here on earth within this life. One just does not know that it can be quite insignificant whether one wants to return or not. They do not realize that in the time between death and the new birth they carry all the forces in their soul that long for re-embodiment, that want to return. These forces are indeed present. There everything is geared to the fact that the forces one develops there can only be satisfied when one enters earthly life again. One senses that the soul has remained imperfect, that it has not developed certain qualities in its last life on earth. Here on earth it may be unimportant whether one is perfect or imperfect, but not in the life between death and a new birth. There are irresistible forces to transform imperfection into perfection. One realizes that in many cases this can only be achieved through suffering and pain, and one knows that in order to achieve perfection, one must undergo the sufferings and joys of an earthly life. And so one enters a new incarnation with all one's might.

I have mentioned this because from such a matter one can see very clearly that our world view must become all-encompassing, that one must not draw conclusions from life between birth and death, as it presents itself to our desires and interests, about the desires and interests that one has between death and a new birth. Man only learns to think in a thorough, energetic way when he trains himself in this way to be all-round through the spiritual world view, when he learns to recognize that every thing must be considered from different sides. Even the practice of life forces man to do so in ordinary life. If one says: fire is beneficial – he is right. But if one says: Fire is very harmful, because it burns towns and villages, then that is also true. The absolute statement: Fire is good, or: Fire is evil, does not apply. With regard to fire, practical life already teaches us to recognize these two sides. But if the same is demanded for beings of the higher worlds, for example, Lucifer and Ahriman, then one does not readily accept it, but one asks: Is Lucifer a good or an evil being? Is Ahriman a good or an evil being? People want to have definitions that give them an answer to such questions, and they consider an answer to be highly unsatisfactory that says: Lucifer and Ahriman can be both good and evil. This is not demanded of fire. Here, practical life helps us to transform an incorrect judgment into a correct one.

Among the many things that are now circulating in Germany, for example, to attack us, is the fact that it was recently said: He — that is, Dr. Steiner — presents things in his public lectures as they present themselves to his view, but he avoids giving specific concepts or judgments. My dear friends, in a Greek school of philosophy, they once wanted to have a very definite concept of what a human being is. After much discussion, they agreed to say that to define the concept of a human being, a human being is a being that walks on two legs and has no feathers. The next day someone brought a plucked cockerel and said: So this is a human being, because it has two legs and no feathers. According to the definition, this must therefore be a human being! — It just so happens that when you look more closely, 'certain concepts' can be very unrealistic. Therefore, the spiritual world view will accustom people to characterizing things in a comprehensive way. Natural science has also produced a good deal of one-sided thinking, and even those who, with their spirit, would like to rise above natural scientific thinking often show - with all good will - a certain admirable naivety. In this field, one must really develop the will bit by bit to achieve full clarity.

Just as I tried to show yesterday how people who may be regarded as thorough natural scientists and whose names should not be vilified are unable to judge in the field of spiritual scientific research, so one should not, without being unjust, be immediately amazed by an idea that may be put forward with good intentions but is not sound. There is, for example, the natural scientist William Crookes. He has achieved many significant things for scientific research, but at the same time he was someone who wholeheartedly committed himself to research into immortality. He wanted to gain certainty about immortality using the usual scientific methods, and he achieved wonderful results in his mediumistic research. Now he once expressed an idea in such a way that one can also appropriate this idea, go along with it to a certain point. When someone claims that we see colors depends on the nature of our eyes, that we hear sounds, we owe to our ears, and if we had other sensory organs, the world around us would be quite different – that is quite right. When William Crookes says, “Why do you then deny the existence of a supersensible world, which is not there for you only because you have such organs that are not suited to perceive it?” — so that is also correct. He expresses this fully justified idea more precisely by assuming that he says: We perceive colors, we hear sounds, but we only see effects of electricity and magnetism. They are forces of nature, the essence of which man does not know, even if he applies them in practical life. This is found everywhere, that it is said to be natural forces, the essence of which man has not fathomed. — Admitted! In reality, it means nothing more than: Man has his eyes for colors, his ears for sounds, and so on; in the case of magnetism, man sees that the magnet attracts the iron, but he does not see magnetism itself, that which magnetism actually is. With electricity, he perceives light and heat effects, but not electricity itself. Now William Crookes says: What would the world be like for beings that could perceive electricity and magnetism directly with special sensory organs, but not light, colors, sounds, and so on? If we could not perceive light, a crystal would be opaque to us, as would glass, and there would be no point in putting windows in. They would only prevent us from having contact with the outside world. If, on the other hand, we had organs for electric current, we would see a telegraph wire as a line of light running through the dark space; we would perceive flowing, luminous electricity there. If we had an organ for magnetism, we would perceive magnets in such a way that magnetic forces would radiate in all directions, and so on. William Crookes now says: It is not unlikely that there are such beings whose organs are attuned to vibrations that our organs leave untouched. Such beings live in a completely different world from us. And he then considers what this world would look like. In this world, glass and crystal are dark bodies; metals, because they conduct electricity, are somewhat lighter, interspersed with dark parts. A telegraph wire would be a long, narrow hole in a body of impenetrable solidity. A working dynamo would resemble a conflagration, and a magnet would even fulfill the dream of medieval mystics of an eternal lamp that never goes out.

William Crookes has dealt with this beautifully, and in this way one can already give an idea of how nonsensical it is to claim that this sensual-physical world is the only one, that there is no other world than just ours, and that there cannot be beings other than human beings. All true! But there is something else that can be said about this idea – and this is where the other side of the matter begins, which concerns the true spiritual researcher. Let us suppose that we ask the question: What would it be like if, instead of eyes, man really had these organs to perceive electricity and magnetism directly, if this idea, which a person naively puts forward, were realized in us humans, what would it be like? Then we human beings would find our way around in the realm of electricity and magnetism just as directly as we now find our way around in the realm of light and sound. But that would have a consequence. If man had an organ for the direct perception of electricity and magnetism, then, at the same time as this organ, which would then be an organ of knowledge for him, he would have the power and the authority to kill or make sick every other human being. This ability would be conferred directly by such an organ.

This is what spiritual science has to say about William Crookes' idea, because spiritual science knows that the human being is permeated by such forces, which have a kinship here on earth with magnetic and electrical forces. Now the question takes on a completely different meaning; now the touch of naivety in the simple posing of such an idea becomes really apparent. While a person who has no higher vision posits the idea of looking into the electrical and magnetic forces, for the spiritual researcher what has just been said follows immediately from it. When we realize this, we first come to realize that we must not remain on the surface if we really want to delve into and understand the wisdom that underlies the order of the world. For this insight of the spiritual researcher shows us that it is very good for man that he does not have the electrical and magnetic organs, that he cannot harm his fellow human beings with them. In this way, his lower instincts and desires cannot be satisfied in such a way as to be fatal for him and the world. Man has a world around him that allows him, through a slow and gradual education, to conquer these lower forces and then ascend to the higher forces.

That is the whole purpose of evolution on earth: that man, passing through many earth-lives, in manifold undulating movements, gradually heads towards perfection, but in such a way that he learns to put his lower powers, instincts and longings at the service of higher ideas and motives. He would not be able to do this if, at the time when he was only developing morality in the course of his evolution on earth, he had been given organs that allowed him to perceive electricity and magnetism directly, because then the temptation would have been too strong to kill people he did not like for whatever reason, and to leave only those people on earth who were right for him.

Thus we see that only the spiritual world view actually gives us the opportunity to look at existence from all sides and to penetrate deeper into it. When a person really becomes a spiritual researcher, as could only be briefly characterized in yesterday's public lecture, he really enters the spiritual world and then becomes aware that the higher hierarchies are around him there, as the three kingdoms of nature are around him here. There we learn to recognize certain entities, which we call the luciferic and ahrimanic beings. What then are the luciferic beings? They are those that belong to beings who, during their previous incarnation on earth, in the old lunar age, remained behind in their development, thus did not enter into the full hardening of earthly existence, into which the human being has entered, but remained at a stage that lies before the materialization of the human being. As a result, they and their powers have remained more spiritual than the human being is. In their development they could only reach a stage that is more spiritual than the stage in which man undergoes his earthly embodiments. By permeating human nature with their powers, they have caused human nature to contain more spirituality than it should actually have. If these Luciferic forces had not been present, man would have had in his astral body, in the lower unconscious forces as compared with the conscious ego forces, a personal spiritualization in the form of the Luciferic forces, but not such forces as he now has. Through the Luciferic influence man's lower nature has become more spiritual than it would otherwise have been. Man would have received everything he should have received on earth from the progressive powers, but he would not be as spiritual as he is today. He would have escaped the Luciferic impact.

But man would also lack something else. Without this influence, man could not have had freedom, because if this influence of Lucifer had not come, he would have carried out all his actions in such a way that, when he had to do this or that, he could only have looked to the motives that would have come to him from the spiritual world in the form of ideas. Whatever man would accomplish on earth, he would accomplish in such a way that he would see the idea underlying it like a picture showing him what had to happen, without him having to form this idea. It would be like an inspiration from the higher worlds, and this would affect him in such a way that he could not possibly resist it. He would naturally follow the will of the gods.

But now the Luciferic influence was there. Through it, man has come into the position of not simply allowing the motives for an act to flow to him, but he must first prepare these motives himself through his own work from the depths of his soul. He must educate himself to moral ideas, and man would not be able to educate himself to moral ideas if the Luciferic influence had not come. For through this a more spiritual element has entered into our astral nature. Thus it is not only the idea of morality that works in our consciousness of self — for the idea of morality would work in such a way that it would not occur to any human being to do evil, since the idea of good for an action would be directly presented to his spiritual eye by divine spiritual beings — but the instincts and passions also work with it. This idea would not be able to arise in the consciousness of the ego at all if its astral nature, individually shaped by the influence of Lucifer, did not confront it. This influence of Lucifer has brought about that in our nature, out of the unconscious and towards consciousness, purification must take place, that we must work our way up to conscious moral ideas and motives in the struggle with ourselves, and then follow these ideas of our own accord. Thus it is Lucifer who enables us to follow moral ideas after we have first worked them out for ourselves.

Now we can say: So there is a power that arises from within us when we work towards moral ideas. Where is this power in man, if man is not moral by nature but must educate himself to be so; where is the power that works in the soul from out of the unconscious to present moral ideas to man? Where is it in us that we can bring it out of ourselves? If man becomes a spiritual researcher, if he is able to look into the spiritual world, then he also discovers where the power that generates moral ideas is to be found. It is constantly at work in the unconscious forces; it is in man, but in the ordinary world it is used for something quite different. When we act in the ordinary world before we have set ourselves moral goals, we act under the influence of our urges, desires and instincts. But we can only act when we put our body into action. Here we are constantly working with unconscious forces, for unless one has studied spiritual science, who knows what forces are at work when one bends an arm, puts one foot in front of the other, and so on? Without spiritual science, one does not know what forces are at work in man. No one knows how his movements, how everything that works so that he can be an active person in the physical world, how that comes about and what force is at work. This is only noticed by the spiritual researcher when he comes to so-called imaginative knowledge. First, one makes images that work by drawing stronger forces from the soul than are otherwise used in ordinary life. Where does this power come from that unleashes the images of imaginative experience in the soul? It comes from the place where the forces that make us active human beings in the world are at work, that make us move our hands and feet. Because this is the case, you can only access your imagination if you are able to remain still, if you can bring the movements of your body to a standstill, if you can control it. Then you notice how this power, which otherwise moves the muscles, flows up into the soul and mind and forms the imaginative images. So you are actually rearranging the forces. So down there in the depths of the body is something of our very own nature, of which we feel nothing in ordinary life. By switching off the physical, the spirit, which otherwise comes to expression in our actions, penetrates up into the soul and fills it with what it would otherwise have to use for the physical. The spiritual researcher knows that he must withdraw from the body what the body would otherwise consume. For imaginative knowledge, therefore, the bodily must be eliminated. In ordinary life, we do think, we do form ego-conscious images, but the just-discussed power flows down into our organs in our organism in waking consciousness, becomes effective there and is not used at all, as a rule, to become spiritually visible in the soul.

If we are not spiritual researchers, we have no control over this power; we have to leave it down there in the subconscious, but it does something, this power. It works on our moral ideas. When it flows up consciously, one educates oneself by means of this power to imaginative knowledge; if it is not consciously used for that, it serves man in his actions in the world. But man is not always in action, in activity; then this power, which sits below, is unconsciously released, and it then also works on the realization of moral ideas. So the same power that moves the limbs, that spiritually permeates the body so that man can grasp, walk, and so on, that power sometimes releases itself in the human 'body and produces moral ideals. If you can admire a moral thinker somewhere, who alone develops lofty ideals, you see in these ideals the release of the same forces that play in his hand movements and so on. So, to develop moral ideals, man must, so to speak, first come to rest.

But one can also develop moral ideals and then not follow them, because the forces we use to develop moral ideas, we also use to move and they can be used for one and for the other. Developing moral ideals does not yet mean being moral. Only following them means acting morally. The moral ideals then emerge like memories. As long as you still have to educate yourself to them, you have to use the same strength to generate them that you will need later to follow them. We carry them as memories within us as our moral norms. Therefore, man must be educated in morality so that these memories arise within him as his moral norms and he can follow them.

Who is it then that works in us to conjure up these moral ideals from our nature? That is Lucifer. He urges us to produce our moral ideas, our free morality, out of ourselves. Man owes it to Lucifer that he must produce his moral freedom out of himself. There is no freedom in nature. Freedom is only found by carrying out and realizing that which permeates the human being spiritually and soulfully. By penetrating the lower desires of the human being, Lucifer not only became the seducer of the human being, but at the same time the creator of human freedom. Through Lucifer's impulse, man was made free.

So when we study the innermost nature of our physical body in the way that science studies nature, and follow the laws of logic, we come to this origin of human freedom. If someone were to say today: I don't believe in magnetism, I only see an iron and that cannot possibly attract another iron, that's fantasy —, then this refutes life practice. But in the realm of soul and spirit, people do behave in such a way as to deny the forces that are present. Luciferic forces are inherent in freedom. Without these luciferic forces, we could not be free beings; we could never develop ethical impulses from the depths of our souls and act upon them. We will only understand freedom when we understand that the physical-sensual nature of man is permeated by a spiritual-soul nature, which is already expressed in the hand movement, but which can be released consciously in the imaginations of the spiritual researcher, unconsciously in the presentation of moral motives. When we look within, we also get to know the good side of Lucifer, and one can no longer say: Lucifer is an evil being – for he is also the bringer of human freedom.

Now, however, man also transforms other forces in his soul into bodily functions, for example, when speaking, when the speech organ is set in motion by the brain. In this case, we are not in action with the whole body, but by setting the organization of the physical body in motion from the spiritual-soul, we perform an inner activity. When we speak, spiritual-soul forces intervene in the so-called Broca's organ, which is located in the third cerebral convolution, and then in the larynx. If we withdraw this power, which acts on the Broca's organ, from speaking, as it were, if we become aware of it without using it to speak, then we have grasped it in its spiritual-soul aspect. Let us suppose, for example, that you meditate in such a way that you place yourself in the forces of your soul, which would otherwise be expressed in speech, without speaking, you remain silent. When one thus arrests the soul-life in its inner being, before it intervenes in the bodily, one has grasped a power in oneself that leads to so-called inspiration, to spiritual hearing. The occult saying about so-called “silent knowledge” is based on this. What is meant is a kind of silence in which one inwardly applies the forces that would otherwise flow into the larynx. These forces penetrate into the soul and make it inwardly active. In this way one enters into the world of inspiration.

This world of inspiration is basically a world that is separate from the world of mere imagination when the spiritual researcher enters it. It is a world through which other beings of the spiritual worlds express themselves to us. In our present cycle of time, it is the case that, as if by a law of nature, such forces are unconsciously coming more and more to expression in man as well, which otherwise only live out in the organs of the physical body and their inner activities.

When the power that a person would otherwise use to speak is released in him as if by natural necessity, this power enables him to perceive a spiritual reality, which corresponds to inspiration. This is different from perceiving images in imaginative knowledge with the eye of a true seer. This power, which is active in our moral ideas, enables us to recognize the good side of the Luciferic beings. When we can perceive with this power, which is otherwise used to speak, then we enter into the sphere for which, without all religious prejudice, the Gospel of John gives us the right understanding by saying: “In the beginning was the Word.” This “Word” is heard when one can so subdue one's own word, one's own corporeality, that the power which otherwise speaks through the larynx can be held back before the larynx, and thus be set free.

So what was the obstacle that prevented people from perceiving the word of the world from the very beginning? It was that they had to learn to speak! But in the process of further development, language will indeed become something very strange. Language has changed a great deal in the course of human development. If we go back to the original stages of language, people were still directly connected with language. Even today, in the country, we find that man lives and moves much more in it, is more closely knit to it. He still feels, when uttering a word, that there lies in it something like an image of what he sees around him. The further human evolution advances, the more abstract the word becomes; it becomes only a sign of what it is meant to express. Language becomes more and more inorganic,

increasingly arabesque-like, ever more alien to the human being. Why is this so? In this alienation of language from the inner meaning of words, those forces that were formerly used to develop language are laid bare. This in turn is connected with the fact that spiritual perception of the Christ-being will soon come, precisely because man's power to form speech is being released. In ancient times speech was closely connected with the human organism, now it is beginning to emancipate itself from it. Thus the power to form speech is being released and will be used for the perception of the World Word, the spiritual Christ.

Thus we have considered two sides of human nature; how man, on the one hand, uses the luciferic power in the free creation of moral ideals, and how, on the other hand, through the release of the speech-forming power – through something, therefore, that he shares with all mankind, since these powers are released within all mankind – he attains the power to perceive the Christ spiritually. We can penetrate to the Christ impulse because we are members of the whole human race. To the same extent that language becomes more and more abstract and the power of speech emancipates itself from the organism in human nature, man prepares himself to truly perceive the spiritual Christ. This is the other side of human evolution. While man has inwardly become freer through the influence of Lucifer, in that the latter gave him the possibility of forming his moral ideas, he will, as through an external force, acquire for himself the ability to connect with the Christ. The Christ will approach man in such a way that He will pour out His nature as the epitome of moral ideas over the whole evolution of mankind. When the Christ-being thus becomes known to all mankind, the Christ-entity will have in itself something of the nature of moral motives. And here we touch on something that shows how anthroposophy can rise to a level where the highest sense of truth can unite with the noblest moral motives. In my book 'The Philosophy of Freedom', which was completed twenty years ago, I tried to show that real freedom is present in the human soul when a person follows the moral motives that he has raised to consciousness. What is the nature of these moral motives? They do not force; we follow them without compulsion. No motive is moral that forces. Motives that we follow out of compulsion are brought to us from the outside world. Moral motives can be recognized by the fact that we cannot follow them either. We must let their value penetrate us in a free way. Man only professes the ethical-moral motives in a truly moral way when he goes to them, when they do not impose themselves on him. That is the characteristic of moral motives. The Christ, when humanity recognizes Him in spirit, will have this in common with ethical motives: that one can also deny Him, that He forces no one to acknowledge Him. The old gods still worked on other powers of the human soul. They still touched man where he had not yet raised himself to consciousness. But the Christ will consciously appear to man in his spirituality to the extent that man has freed himself in consciousness and will have risen to him. He will be there for all who want to recognize him, without forcing anyone to acknowledge him. He will appear before humanity in such a way that people can follow Him freely. Just as a moral motive does not force a person, but leaves him free to follow this motive or not, so it will also be with the Christ-Being: a person must be fully aware of the value of this Christ-Being if he wants to follow it. In the future, the recognition of the Christ-being will be at the same time a free deed of the soul for every single human being. This will be the infinitely significant fact that we may struggle to a truth that does not force us to recognize it, but that we only recognize when we see its full value.

Thus, the idea that anthroposophy gives us of Christianity — which will only come into its true form — will indeed bring a truth to people that is, in the most eminent sense, a free truth at the same time. The following, given in pictorial form, can be added to this, which can then be further understood through meditation. The same word has been used twice in the development of humanity: Once at the temptation in Paradise, when Lucifer said to man: “You will be like the gods; your eyes shall be opened.” This is the pictorial expression for the Luciferic impulse. With it, Lucifer poured spirituality into the lower nature of man and in return gave man the possibility of attaining inner freedom through moral motives. And a second time it was said, now by the Christ: Are you not gods? The same Word! From this it is evident that it is not only the content of a word that is important, but the essence that a word expresses, the way in which a word is spoken. There we see the necessary connection between the act of Lucifer and the act of the Christ, also expressed in a figurative way, as the religious documents tend to do.

Lucifer is the bringer of personal freedom for the individual human being; Christ is the bearer of freedom for the whole human race, for all humanity on earth. That is the significance of anthroposophy: it teaches us that the recognition of the Christ-being will take place in such a way that it is up to the individual to recognize the Christ or not, just as it is up to the individual not to be moral.

The Christ should be a free truth for the human soul. All other truths, which belong to all mankind, constrain us. But there are still truths in the bosom of the world that are connected with the Mystery of Golgotha, the recognition of which must be free acts of the human being and which ennoble and refine this human being by being recognized by the human being of his or her own free will. Thus does free truth, free concrete truth, reach so deeply into the developing nature of man on earth. It shows us how truth, won in freedom, belongs to the fundamental laws of human evolution.

It has been shown to us how freedom could only come into human development through the influence of Lucifer, and that man first had to rise to the truth with the help of this Luciferic impulse. In this way, humanity was still compelled to the truth; one could only recognize the truth through compulsion. But man can see this as an ideal for the future, that he can develop in such a way towards freedom and recognize truths in a free way, as set out here. Much could be said about anthroposophy, but it would be difficult to find anything more intimately connected with our need for freedom than the above statement about free truth. It must speak in the most profound and noble way to what lies at the core of our human destiny.

We can only truly grasp what it means to be human on earth when we realize what stands before us as a conscious ideal: the ideal of freedom and truth, of truth that will create an outer body for itself in freedom.

It was necessary to speak to you about such ideas of freedom at the very moment when we have won our own liberation as an Anthroposophical Society from fetters that had become impossible for us, in order to use these ideas to give a feeling-based indication of the way one should think in a society that makes such ideals the goal of its togetherness.

Now I would like to say to you in the warmest way – as all friends who have come together with our Swedish friends here from out of town will feel with me – how deeply satisfying it is, and even more deeply satisfying at the end of our event, that here in this country, what has been presented here has met with such a deep, fundamental understanding, that such a fundamental understanding has developed here for what we want with the founding of the Anthroposophical Society. And truly, not to fight against anything, but to serve in the right way our freely conceived anthroposophical ideal, may this be chosen as a farewell word. May the society that you have founded among yourselves contribute much more work and achievement to what we were able to discuss today in our lecture on the freedom of the soul in the light of spiritual scientific knowledge. May that which is already there, waiting and hoping, flow down from the spiritual worlds through this work, and may it surely come true for us humans when our work is done, which will be so tremendously significant for the development of humanity's spiritual striving. May this be the work of this branch in particular! With these words, I would like to have said my farewell to you.

To some of you it may seem superfluous in discussing such weighty subjects at our annual meeting for me to include a consideration of what contemporary science has to say about these matters. I have no intention of constructing an elaborate bridge across the gap separating us from the aforementioned erudition. Nothing of the sort is necessary within our circles, because the great majority of those who join us feel in their souls a certain connection with the spiritual life. They do not come to us to have the spiritual world proved to them in a so-called scientific manner, but to become acquainted with it in a concrete form; hence the calling in of such erudition might seem superfluous.

Another objection could be made that anthroposophists often face the obligation to intercede for anthroposophy, to refute objections, produce evidence and substantiations, but it is only possible to a slight degree to convince our opponents by means of any proofs whatsoever. Philosophies depend not so much on proofs as on habits of thought, and if a person is unable to penetrate—his thought habits being what they are—into the spiritual-scientific way of looking at the world, he will for the time being certainly remain deaf to proofs.

Such matters as were discussed yesterday were brought up in order to meet and alleviate the confusion that might arise in the minds of our members when again and again they must hear people say, “Your philosophy lacks a scientific basis.” Anthroposophists should feel ever more strongly that their world view rests upon a solid foundation and is proof against whatever recognized science has to say.

To propound everything needed for coming to terms with modern science would take a long time, and references to external science are intended only to arouse a feeling for the fact that there are ways and means of meeting that science, and that in championing anthroposophy one stands upon a firm foundation. So the aim is to indicate the manner of approach, when the time is available, rather than the approach itself. A modern science of external corporeality may be fraught with many a disagreement, but one praiseworthy feature of such a science is that its subject, external corporeality, is not disputed. In dealing with the science of the soul, on the other hand, the science of psychology, one enters a region in which there are people who deny the reality of the subject itself, the soul. Not only must we nowadays face the materialistic world conception, but we find ourselves enmeshed in a sort of psychology intended to be a science of the soul without a soul.

Yesterday we made the acquaintance of an Aristotelian scholar of our time who turned his keen wits to an investigation of the subject known as the soul. Of Aristotle it can be said that there was no question of his denying the existence of the spirit, but we found that Brentano shrewdly halted before the spirit, so that we do, indeed, find there a standpoint concerned with pneumatosophy, or the science of the spirit, that denies not only this or that law but the subject itself, as such.

To many people the spirit is a highly debatable fact anyway, hence we must seriously consider the question why this can be so. The body is perceived through the outer senses and with all the force of facts that exist for us automatically. Outer physical facts affect the human soul with such force that it is incapable of denying what they have to tell. We are in a similar position with regard to the soul, for we do, in fact, experience its flowing content. We experience feelings, conceptions, impulses of will; we experience all that results as destiny from the course this soul life takes; we experience suffering and happiness, joy and sorrow. So unless you were to call all that nothing, or at most a sort of surface foam from the waves of physical facts, you cannot but recognize the soul in a certain sense, at least to the extent of admitting its reality. The spirit, however, is primarily something super-sensible, imperceptible, and this alone suffices to explain how plausibly its existence may be denied. It explains why one might marvel at the idea of searching for the spirit, on the ground that it does not enter the world in which we live.

From the standpoint of anthroposophy we have stated often enough that the real facts about the spiritual world are derived through a method of observation that must be created by means of a certain self-cultivation, a certain self-education through meditation, concentration, and so forth. Thus the facts of the spiritual world are not directly given to man. They can be gleaned only if he is able to rise to a cognition differing from that of everyday life. It might seem as though this spiritual world were completely hidden from man, perceptible only after he had entirely transcended his normal way of cognition and risen to another.

Well, if that were the way matters stood, we could ask how man happens to long for a world that really in no way discloses itself to him as he is in ordinary life. Against this objection only the man of faith, not the scientist, can really feel himself adequately armed. True, the former could answer this objection by stating that the spiritual world had indeed manifested itself through revelations received in the course of human development, so that man could have obtained his knowledge of the spiritual world through revelations from the super-sensible. One who is not inclined to recognize such revelations or such faith, however, will object that there may be a spiritual world, but there is no immediately apparent reason why we should take account of it, as it does not manifest itself in any way in the outer world. Against this, an objection has been raised again and again throughout the ages by an idealistic or spiritualistic philosophy, namely, that recognition of the spiritual world by this or that philosopher depends largely upon his having taken seriously the refutation of the first objection by means of the second. Certainly it is possible to transcend the world that is primarily revealed by outer perception; the human being can build up a world of truth in his own inner being, and he could never be satisfied with what the outer world of perception has to give for the simple reason that he is a human being. Thus he builds a world of truth within himself.

If we examine this world of truth seriously, we find that it comprises something that already transcends all that is external-physical as such. One then cites ideas produced by man about the world—grand, comprehensive points of view that never could have originated through the outer senses alone, and that must have come, therefore, from the other side. Thus, the fact of the world of truth is in itself sufficient to convince us that we participate in a spirit world and live in it with our truth. Naturally, a philosopher like Hegel, for instance, would find plenty of justification for a spiritual world, as opposed to the objection set forth—justification for recognizing a spiritual world that embraces thinking as well, in so far as thinking is independent of the senses. Philosophers whose whole disposition equips them to recognize the absolutely independent world of truth will find in this independent activity of the spirit, moving as it does in truth, sufficient reason for assuming the existence of the spirit. It can be said, then, that there will always be people in the world in whose view the concrete actuality of the true world of ideas is sufficient proof of the spirit. In a certain sense it can be said that even in Aristotle something like faith is discernible, faith that in his concepts and ideas, in the nous, as he calls it, man lives in a spiritual world, and because it exists in man, it exists, and is thereby sufficiently substantiated.

Granting this, it is permissible to draw conclusions from what can be learned within one's own spiritual world as such when moving within it, that is, conclusions regarding other beings and facts of the spiritual world. Thus Aristotle draws his conclusions concerning the Divinity, the immortality of the soul, and arrives at inferences such as were described yesterday. Hegel speaks of an independent activity of the spirit, meaning the independent activity of concepts, that has no connection, as regards the laws governing it, with the outer world, but is an activity of the spirit itself. He maintains that the spirit reveals itself in the presence of this independent activity.

More recent attempts such as that of Rudolf Eucken, which spiritual science certainly cannot regard as particularly inspired, talk of a self-grasping of the spirit and of self-proof of the existence of the spiritual being. This path leads to no proof, however, and it furnishes anthroposophists the opportunity of perceiving how difficult it is to prove anthroposophy as such. Truth per se and taken alone does not necessarily prove anything with regard to the spirit. That is a point that is never-taken seriously enough. The existence of the world of truth as such does not necessarily prove anything concerning the spirit.

I will now sketch briefly, somewhat in the manner of a parable, something that really should be thoroughly presented in a whole series of lectures. Let us assume that actually nothing existed but corporeality, the outer physical world. Let us further assume that this physical world with its forces, or “energies,” as it is now the fashion to call them, expressed itself in the mineral world and became complicated. That is, that it did not gather new energies but merely became more and more complicated in the plant and animal worlds, until finally it became so complicated that it built up man out of a combination and co-operation of purely physical energies—built him in such a way as to enable him to produce thoughts from the complicated instrument of the brain. All this we assume to proceed in the manner in which physical processes run their course within corporeality. Imagine for a moment that the materialists' extraordinarily crude assertion were to be taken seriously—the assertion that the brain secretes thoughts in the same way that the liver secretes bile. Suppose the human brain to be built up out of mechanico-physical energies in such a way as to produce what appears to man as his spiritual life. In short, suppose materialism were right, and that there were no spirit as such. Would it then be possible, in the materialists' sense, to speak of a world of truth—for instance as presented in Hegel's philosophy—in the world of concepts? If it were possible to answer this question in the affirmative, it would automatically show that materialism itself could explain—that is, prove—a philosophy like Hegel's. In other words, it could reject all spiritualistic or idealistic philosophies.

One need only imagine, and this is the point, which to explain thoroughly would call for many lectures, that what springs from the complicated human brain as thought, in so far as the world of truth is made up of thoughts, were nothing more than the reflection of the outer physical world. You can place an object before a mirror, the mirror reflects the object's image, image and object are identical. The image is not the object, but purely material objects bring about the image by means of the mirror. You need admit nothing more than that you are dealing with a mere image that has no reality; then you don't have to prove the reality of the image. In the same way, you can take a materialistic standpoint and say, “There is really nothing there but external energies reflected in the brain, and all we have in the way of thoughts are merely such reflections of the outer world.” Then you are not obliged to prove the existence of the spirit, for all thoughts are but reflections.

Nor would we stand much chance of convincing those who might get up and say, “But there are concepts that cannot be taken from outer perceptions, abstract concepts, like a circle or a triangle, that we never encounter in reality.” We can reply, “True, as they are, they do not appear in the outer world as images of the thought world, but there are innumerable approximations.” In short, though it cannot be denied that truth is super-sensible, materialism can undoubtedly cope with the objection that man creates super-sensible truth within himself; hence truth as such would furnish no argument against materialism.

Now we're in a pretty predicament. This truth, being undeniably super-sensible, appears to countless people as sufficient proof of the existence of a spiritual world, or an indication of one, but it is not a proof of the existence of a spiritual world! Truth is super-sensible, yes, but it is not necessarily real. It could be a sum of images, then no one need accept its reality. So we must keep in mind that the possession of truth is not proof of the reality of a spiritual world, and that merely by penetrating to truth and living and functioning in reality, man can never reach the spirit. The objection would always stand that truth might be but an image of the outer physical world.

At this point one might object that in that case it is difficult to see how anywhere in the wide world any argument could be found that might persuade man, such as he is in everyday life, to recognize a spirit. Then, when people like Feuerbach, for example, come along and say that men assume gods or a god, but that what they experience within themselves is nothing but the content of their soul, their thoughts, which they deify and project into the world, it is easy to prove the unreality of the divine world, because it is merely an outward projection of the unreal world of thought. Aristotle does not go about it right when he cites the objectivity of the thought world as proof of the existence of a god. He argues simply that man has a mind and the mind can be applied to objects. This presupposes that all objects are permeated by the divine nous, or mind, but as he describes the latter, it is nothing but the human mind projected outward, a reflected image. Thus the divine nous is merely an image reflected outward, and is incapable of forming the basis of any proof.

Anthroposophists must really be able to face such matters clearly, and to realize that the usual methods of attempting to arrive at recognition of the spiritual world from without prove, upon closer examination, to be inadequate. Are we compelled, then, to admit unconditionally that there is no possibility of achieving conviction concerning the existence of the spirit, other than through clairvoyance? It would almost seem as though only those people were justified in speaking of the spiritual world who either envision it as clairvoyants or believe what clairvoyants have to tell. It would seem so, but it is not the case.

The outer world as such, with its material content, does not of itself point to a spiritual world, unless we know of it already, nor does the inner world of truth, which might be a reflection of the outer world. Hence the question arises as to what else there is. Well, there is something else, and it is error. We must forget nothing in the world when dealing with a complete picture of it, and in addition to truth we have error. Now, error naturally cannot lead to truth, and it would be a strange thing to proceed from error as a starting point. The fact that the soil of truth is sterile is no reason for taking the standpoint of error; that would hardly reduce the number of our opponents. We shall not take error as the starting point in our search for truth; that would be not only foolish but absurd. There is one aspect of error that cannot be denied. It exists, it is present in the world, it is real; above all, it can arise in man's nature and achieve being there.

When the outer world has created for itself a reflecting apparatus in the brain and is reflected, and the sum of truth is the sum of the images, it could naturally still be possible that, instead of truth, error might arise through a condition analogous to a distorting mirror that reflects caricatures of objects. If you were to use a mirror of that sort, you would simply get a false image, and the error would be comparatively easy to explain. It is merely a matter of the organ producing a false reflection, and this, too, can be explained. Truth and error can be explained as reflections. But what cannot be explained? The correction of the error, the transformation of error into truth; this cannot be explained as a reflection. Try as you will, you cannot induce a mirror producing caricatures to convert these into true images; it abides by its error. The difference in the case of man is that he is not compelled to stop at error, but is in a position to conquer it and transform it into truth. Man thereby proves that while there is such a thing in the phenomenon of truth as a reflection of external reality, the transformation of error into truth shows that error as such is more than a mere reflection of the outer world, and hence has no raison d'être in the world that surrounds us. Truth has justification in the external physical world, but the acceptance of the external physical world is not sufficient justification for accepting error. Something must enter in that does not pertain to the outer world, that has no direct connection with it. If the sensible is reflected in truth as a super-sensible image, and if it is reflected as error, the cause of error must lie elsewhere than in the sensible itself.

What meets our eye, then, when we recognize the existence of error? We behold a world that is not made up of outer physical phenomena only. Error can only originate in the super-sensible world, can only proceed thence. That is for the time being a conclusion. Let us now see what super-sensible research has to say about this, not in order to prove anything, but to illuminate the matter. What does it tell us about the peculiar position of error in the world?

Suppose we were so far lacking in self-esteem that out of an inner urge we were to think, voluntarily, a conception that we knew for certain to be an error. Let us think an error. At first sight this might not seem a desirable thing to do, but in a higher sense it can be useful because, if you bring to bear the requisite force and energy and frequent repetition in voluntarily thinking an error, you will notice that this error is something real in the soul, that it has a real effect. The error we think voluntarily, knowing it to be an error, proves nothing, elucidates nothing, but it works in us. The effect is all the more remarkable in that we are not distracted by any prospect of arriving at truth; when we voluntarily think an error we are quite alone with ourselves. By continuing this process long enough we achieve what we have always described in spiritual science as the calling into being of forces hidden in the soul, forces that were not there before.

Continual devotion to outer truth does not get us very far along the path under discussion, but the voluntary encouragement of error within ourselves can lead to the birth of certain hidden soul forces. As I have presented it now, you will not be able to use it as a precept; hence in my Knowledge of the Higher Worlds and Its Attainment and in my Occult Science I omitted the advice to keep thinking as much error as possible (for the purpose mentioned). That was left out, but a certain other aspect of the matter is similar to something I did set forth there. I said that we should not proceed from some obvious, glaring error, but that two conditions must be fulfilled. We must visualize something that has no counterpart in external reality, like that of the rose cross, for example. Now, red roses don't grow on a black cross; looked at from one angle, that is an erroneous conception. The rose cross represents no external truth, but it is a symbolical visualization, an allegorical conception. It expresses no truth directly, but it is the allegory of a super-sensible truth. In its relation to sense reality it is an erroneous conception, but as an allegory it is spiritually significant. In meditating on the rose cross we yield ourselves to a conception that in its relation to external reality is an error. We are not yielding ourselves to an ordinary error, however, but rather, by meditating on the allegory, on the significant conception, we are fulfilling a definite condition.

This brings us to the second condition. A certain premise must be fulfilled when we devote ourselves to meditation, concentration, and so forth. If you penetrate into the whole spirit of what is set forth in Knowledge of the Higher Worlds and Its Attainment, or in the second part of Occult Science, you will see that a certain frame of mind is indispensable for proper meditation and concentration. Certain moral attributes of the soul are indicated that must be present if what is to take place is to take place in the right way. Why are these given as a condition? Why are certain moral qualities indispensable? To enable us to yield ourselves to an allegorical conception of this sort, to a conception that in the external sense is false.

This again is something that must be taken into account. As a rule, nothing desirable is attained by meditating and concentrating without first having sought the frame of mind that has been sufficiently described because experience shows that without such a foundation, the world that is opened up through the awakening of hidden soul forces is in reality one that acts destructively upon man, rather than tending to further his development. It has a health-giving, developing effect only when it grows out of a frame of mind such as has been explained. That is what experience shows. Further, it shows what pathological phenomena, as they may be called, are symptomatical in those who seek the higher worlds from motives of passion or curiosity, instead of in the right frame of mind. Such people do receive a reality into themselves, for error is a reality and it acts in the soul. It is a reality not present in the outer world as revealed by the senses; hence such people absorb a super-sensible force, a super-sensible entity into their souls. This error is actually something efficacious, but its roots can only be in the super-sensible world, not in the outer sense world.

This super-sensible world must not be permitted to act upon us unless we have the special foundation this moral frame of mind provides. This can only be because we are aware that error, though a superhuman force, leads us first into a super-sensible world that is not a good one. Though truly a super-sensible force, it is in the first instance quite certainly not a good force. It can only become such when it is implanted in a good moral frame of mind. Now translate that into words for yourselves such as are often used to discuss such things on an anthroposophical basis.

You see, by learning to know error we can get to know a super-sensible world. It is not necessary to approach the super-sensible world by artificial means. The super-sensible world looms into the sensible world through the medium of error, and then in turn through error it leads us out into the super-sensible world. But it is not a good world. We must bring the good world to it from the other side, a frame of mind through which alone error can have the right effect. Paradoxically it could be said that in the sense world we actually become acquainted with the super-sensible world because we have error. So the feature of the super-sensible world you meet first is the devil, for at first you encounter a world in no wise good, a world that reveals itself as anything but good.

For this reason Mephisto's remark could be appropriately applied here, “These fellows would not scent the devil out, e'en though he had them by the throat.” The devil is present. We can also say that our first acquaintance with the super-sensible world is made by way of the Luciferic power. We meet the super-sensible world first in the shape of the Luciferic forces, and these we can only escape by the ostrich method, that is, by burying our head in the sand. This can, of course, be done, but it does not do away with those forces. That is the point that should be elaborated in many lectures if it were not to be merely sketched. The super-sensible world is given with the existence of error, but at the outset all that is revealed is the Luciferic element, the adversary of the nature of man.

Is there any particular point in talking about just these matters? If a man lacks the requisite moral frame of mind when penetrating into the super-sensible world by means of an error voluntarily accepted in his thinking, he falls prey to Lucifer! Yesterday we cited Aristotle's statement that in addition to what man comes by from parents and ancestors in the line of heredity, he receives his super-sensible nature from the God, so that through a relation to the God every human being entering the moral world is endowed with the spirit as a new creation¹ by the Divinity. We could not come to terms, however, with Aristotle's assertion. We found it contained much that contradicted the assertion itself. Now, Dr. Unger has rightly shown and clearly proved the justification for contradiction in the outer world,² but certainly this recognition and justification cannot apply to a contradiction that leads to inferences refuting the assertion itself. Yet that is what we find in Aristotle.

If the God were to create a super-sensible man, then, as we saw, an unsatisfied state would arise in all men after death. It would follow that the God created man for a state of discontent, but that cannot lie within Aristotle's meaning either. We cannot admit a philosophy which maintains that, along with what is given through birth, a super-sensible part is received directly from the God—as more recent world conceptions interpret the concept “God.” Even if this is based on truth, nothing can be proved by it, for truth proves nothing concerning the super-sensible world. A proof of that sort can in no way be applied to the super-sensible world. That is the first point, and the second is that if we assume that man, in his super-sensible component, is created by a God, it would be unthinkable that after death he should pass to an imperfect state. Aristotle's position is therefore untenable.

What Aristotle failed to take into account is that the first element of the super-sensible world accessible to man—active even in our immediate human experience—is a Luciferic one, and that we can only make headway by admitting the Luciferic principle at the inception of super-sensible man, by letting it participate, so to speak, in so far as we look up from the man of the physical world to the super-sensible world. Thus man cannot derive from a God alone, but only from a God in conjunction with the Luciferic principle. I ask you to keep well in mind the facts just referred to. They have unconsciously passed over into the feeling of occidental peoples, whatever their theories about a spiritual world, and right into our own time they have prevented the learned lights of the West from ridding themselves of their prejudices against the idea of reincarnation and repeated earth lives.

In former times, of course, men did not express the matter as we have done today, by saying that at bottom there is greater compulsion to believe in the devil than in anything else that is super-sensible, but they felt exactly what has just been expressed in the form of ideas, felt the presence of the Luciferic along with the Divine. They also felt—the justification of which will become manifest later in these lectures—that side by side with what we have as corporeality, a spiritual element is vouchsafed us, something begotten of God. Try as they would, they never could harmonize the cognition of the external physical human being on the physical plane with the descent of man from a super-sensible origin.

They could not get around this contradiction. It was much more difficult for the occidental than, for example, for the Buddhist, whose whole way of thinking and feeling facilitates his acceptance of the doctrine of reincarnation. One could almost say that with him it is congenital to believe that external corporeality really represents a sort of denial of the Divine, a fall from Grace, and that he is justified in striving to be free of it and to rise into worlds in which it means nothing. Quite different is the standpoint of Aristotle from that of Buddha's disciples. Aristotle says that we pass through the portal of death and take with us our super-sensible part, but then we must look down on what we had been, and our further development depends upon that physical life. The Divinity introduced us into a physical body because we needed it. Aristotle proclaims the importance of outer sensual form, outer sensual life. It is not a question here of concepts, ideas, abstractions, but of the content of the philosophers' minds. The Buddhist's mind held no such content as Aristotle's. The essence of his attitude was a feeling that contact with the physical world constituted a defection. He was aware that in arriving at sensuality, man had encountered precisely that from which he must free himself, that a man became more of a human being after having cast off all that.

It was impossible for Aristotle, as a representative occidental, to feel Buddhistically, as indeed no one rooted in the Occident can genuinely feel. He can acknowledge Buddhism theoretically, but really only by repudiating the content of his inner soul. Aristotle values the sense world not for its own sake, but as a condition of rising into the spiritual world. Western feeling always leads in the end to a certain recognition of a divinely, spiritually permeated sense world. Though materialism denied this for a time, it nevertheless lived on in the soul and must persist as long as the fundamental conditions of the occidental spirit exist.

Aristotle felt this to be a condition of the total evolution of humanity. It lived on even into the nineteenth century, and it is one of the elements that have prevented prominent minds of the West from becoming reconciled to the idea of reincarnation. A sensing of the Luciferic principle on the one hand, and the assumption of a divine principle on the other, led to a feeling such as I should like to point out to you in the works (1889) of the distinguished philosopher, Frohschammer, on the philosophy of Thomas Aquinas. There he onsets his own philosophy against that of Thomas Aquinas. Among other things, he expresses his views on the plausibility of what we call reincarnation. In a certain respect Frohschammer must be regarded entirely as a representative of Western mentality. He says, “Deriving as it does from God, the human soul can only be regarded as the product or work of divine imagination, for while the human soul and the world itself must in this case originate in divine forces and activity (since nothing can derive from mere nothingness), yet this force and activity of God must act as a preparation for creation and as formative forces for its realization and perpetuation; that is, as creative force not merely formal but actual. It must be an imagination immanent in the world, continually active and creative, a sustaining force or potency; a world imagination, as was explained earlier.”

I must add here that Frohschammer also wrote a brilliant book dealing generally with imagination as a world-creative principle, as Hegel dealt with the idea and Schopenhauer with the will. “As concerns the doctrine of the pre-existence of the soul (souls that are regarded either as eternal or as transitory, but in any case created in the beginning and all together), a doctrine that appears to have been resurrected in recent times and is considered capable of solving all sorts of psychological problems, it is connected with the doctrine of the transmigration of souls and their confinement in earthly bodies.”

This was written in 1889, and in the Carlsruhe lectures. From Jesus to Christ (October, 1911), I mentioned that the doctrine had always had adherents, even in the nineteenth century. Naturally, Frohschammer knew that too, hence he continues,

“According to this doctrine, neither the direct, divine creation of souls nor the creative production of new human beings as regards body and soul would take place at procreation, but only a new union of the soul with the body, a sort of becoming flesh or an immersion of the soul in the body, at least partially, so that one part would be encompassed and bound by the body and the other would transcend it, asserting a certain independence as spirit. The soul, however, cannot break away from the body (according to this doctrine) until death severs the union and brings liberation and deliverance, at least from this union. The spirit of man would in that case resemble, in its relation to the body, the poor souls in Purgatory as they are usually represented on votive tablets by daubers; that is, as bodies half engulfed in roaring flames, but with their upper parts, the souls, protruding and gesticulating. Consider the position and significance this conception would imply for the contrast of the sexes, the concept of human species, wedlock, and the relation of parents to their children! The contrast of sexes is but a system of bondage; wedlock, an institution for fulfilling the task it involves; parents, minions of the law for holding and imprisoning the souls of their children, while the children themselves owe this miserable, weary imprisonment to their parents, with whom they have nothing further in common. Everything connected with this relationship would be based on wretched illusion, as would all that humanity associates with the contrast of the sexes. What a formidable rôle this bisexuality plays! How intensely man's planning and longing are determined by it! What yearning it excites, what bliss it yields, what a source of bodily and spiritual transport! What an inexhaustible subject of artistic and particularly poetic creation! Now we are to believe that this subject is but a process for embodying and imprisoning poor souls that are thereby committed to earthly misery, consigned to the toils, passions, temptations and dangers of this earthly existence, rising at best with only a portion of their being into a Beyond; are, as it is called, transcendental—or better, transcendent. The significance of such a sex relationship, then, is not to be found in a continuous renewal, a rejuvenation corresponding to the spring of existence; quite the contrary, and the underlying longing and rapture it engenders would not be based upon the satisfaction of a lofty creative urge, as one would assume should be the case, but would emanate from a pitiful ambition to imprison new souls in bodily forms that obscure and estrange the greater part of their real selves.”³

Here, as you see, is a man who speaks sincerely and honestly out of the spiritual life of his time, and we have every reason to inform ourselves concerning the difficulties encountered by occidental philosophies of the past in recognizing what must be the basic nerve of our world conception. All who approach it honestly will meet with great difficulties. One of the tasks of anthroposophy is to become acquainted with these problems that face those who, steeped in the occidental cultural life, would achieve recognition of the spirit as it is represented by spiritual science in general and pneumatosophy in particular.

• 1. “Aristotle's world picture presents itself as follows. Down below, objects and processes representing matter and ideas have their being, and the higher one looks, the more everything of a material character disappears. What is purely spiritual comes into view, disclosing itself to man as ideas—the world sphere in which the divine holds sway as pure spirituality that animates all. To this world sphere the spiritual human soul belongs. It does not exist as an individual being before combining with the elements of body and soul, but only as part of the world spirit. Through this union it acquires its individual existence, detached from the world spirit; and after the separation from corporeality it lives on as a spiritual being. Thus the individual soul being commences in conjunction with the human earth being, then lives on, immortal. A pre-existence of the soul before the earth life is assumed by Plato, but not by Aristotle.” (Rudolf Steiner, Riddles of Philosophy, Vol. I.)
• 2. Carl Unger, Gedanken zur Philosophic des Widerspruchs. Stuttgart, 1964.
• 3. J. Frohschammer, Die Philosophic des Thomas von Aquino, Leipzig, 1889

It is a little difficult to continue what has been given in the last lectures, because so many friends who have not taken part in these studies are here to-day. On the other hand it is hardly possible to make a new beginning, for many things contained in the previous lectures have still to be completed. Friends who have just arrived will have to realise that if some of our thoughts to-day prove somewhat difficult to understand, it is because they are connected—inwardly, though not outwardly—with preceding lectures. At Easter we shall have a self-contained course, but to-day I must continue what has gone before. We did not expect so many friends at this date, although needless to say we are extremely glad that they have come.

In recent lectures we have been speaking of definite karmic relationships—not with the object of finding anything sensational in the successive earthly lives we have studied, but in order to arrive step by step at a really concrete understanding of the connections of destiny in human life.

I have described successive earthly lives of certain historic figures, in order to call forth an idea of how one earthly life works on into the next—and that is not an easy matter.

Again and again it must be emphasised that a new trend has come into the Anthroposophical Movement since the Christmas Foundation Meeting at Dornach. Of this I should now like to say a few introductory words.—You know, my dear friends, that since the year 1918 there have been all manner of undertakings within the Anthroposophical Society. Their origin is clear. When the Anthroposophical Society was founded, this question was really being asked, out of a deep occult impulse: Would the Anthroposophical Society continue to evolve by virtue of the inner strength which (in its members) it had acquired until then? There was only one way to make the test. Until then, I, as General Secretary, had had the leadership of the German Section, which was the form in which the Anthroposophical Movement had existed within the Theosophical Society. The only way now was for me no longer to take in hand the leadership of the Anthroposophical Society but to watch and see how this Society would evolve through its own inherent strength.

You see, my dear friends, that is something quite different from what the position would have been if already at that time (as at our Christmas Foundation Meeting) I had said that I would undertake the leadership of the Society. For the Anthroposophical Society, if led by me, must naturally be an altogether different thing than if led by someone else. Moreover, for certain deep reasons, the Society might have been led all the better if I myself had not had the administrative leadership. Many things might have been done if human hearts had spoken—things which in fact remained undone, or which were even done from outside, often enough under resistance from the anthroposophists.

During the War, of course, we had little opportunity to unfold our forces in all directions. So it came about that after the year 1918, the prevailing state of affairs was taken advantage of by those from many quarters who wanted to do this or that. If I had said at the time, “No, these things shall not be done”, then of course we should hear it said to-day: “If this or that had only been allowed, we should now have numbers of flourishing undertakings.”

For this very reason it was the custom at all times for the leaders of occult movements to let those who wanted to do something try it out and see what became of it, so that convictions might be called forth by the facts themselves. For that is the only way to call forth conviction. And so it had to be in our case too.

The upshot of it all has been that since the year 1918, opposition to our Movement has grown rife, and has brought about the present state of affairs, when it is impossible for me, for instance, to give public lectures in Germany.

At the present moment these facts must in no way be concealed from the Anthroposophical Movement. We must face them with all clarity. As long as we work with unclear situations we shall make no progress.

As you know, all manner of experiments were made in the hope of being ‘truly scientific’—shall we say? Quite naturally so, in view of the characters of those concerned! Scientists who also partake in our Society naturally like to be scientific. But that is the very thing that annoys our opponents. When we say to them, “As scientists we can prove this or that truth”, they come forward with all their so-called scientific claims, and then of course they become furious. We should be under no illusions on this point. Nothing has annoyed our opponents more than the fact that our members have tried to speak on the same subjects as they themselves do, and in the same manner, only—as these our members often used to say—“letting a little Anthroposophy flow into it.” It was precisely this which called forth our opponents in such overwhelming numbers.

Again, we offend most strongly against the life-conditions of Anthroposophy if we give ourselves up to the illusion that we can win over the adherents of various religious communities by saying the same or similar things as they, only once more “letting Anthroposophy flow into it.”

But now, since the Christmas Foundation Meeting, an entirely new element must come into all that is being done in the field of Anthroposophy. Those of you who have observed the way Anthroposophy is now being presented here, or the way it was presented at Prague and again at Stuttgart, will have observed that impulses are now at work which call forth something altogether new, even where our opponents are concerned. If we try to be ‘scientific’ in the ordinary sense of the word—as, unfortunately, many of our members have tried to be—then we are presuming, so to speak, that it is possible to enter into discussion with them. But now take the lectures that have been given here, or the lectures at Prague, or the single lectures at Stuttgart—can you believe for a single moment that there can be any question of entering into discussion with our opponents on these matters? It goes without saying: we can enter into no discussion with our opponents when we speak of these things. How, for example, should we discuss with any representative of the civilisation of to-day the statement, for example, that the soul of Muavija appeared again in the soul of Woodrow Wilson?¹

Thus in the whole Anthroposophical Movement there is now a prevailing quality which can tend to nothing else than this.—We must take it at last in real earnest that there can be no question of entering into discussion or argument with our opponents. For if we do so, it will in any case lead nowhere. Thus we must realise that, with regard to our opponents, it can only be a question of refuting calumnies, untruths and lies. We must not give up ourselves to the illusion that these things can be discussed. They must expand by their own inherent power; they cannot be decided by any dialectic.

Through the whole tenor of the Anthroposophical Movement as it has been since Christmas last, this will perhaps be realised increasingly, even by our members. Henceforth the Anthroposophical Movement will take this attitude: It will no longer pay heed to anything other than what the spiritual world itself requires of it.

It is from this standpoint that I have placed before you various thoughts on karma. Those of you who were here, or who heard my last lecture at Stuttgart, will remember that I tried to show how the individualities who lived in the 8th and 9th centuries A.D. at the Court of Haroun al Raschid in Asia, having continued to evolve after death in different directions, played certain definite parts in their new incarnations. At the time of the Thirty Years' War (and a short time before) we have on the one hand the individuality of Haroun al Raschid, reincarnated in the Englishman, Bacon of Verulam. And a great organiser at the Court of Haroun al Raschid, who had lived at the Court—not indeed as an Initiate, but as the reincarnation of an Initiate—this individuality we found again as Amos Comenius, whose field of action was rather in Middle Europe. From these two streams, much in the spiritual part of modern civilisation flowed together. In the spiritual and intellectual aspect of modern civilisation, the Near East—as it was in the time immediately after Mohammed—lived again, on the one hand through the reincarnated Haroun al Raschid, Bacon of Verulam; and on the other hand through Amos Comenius, who had been his counsellor.

In the present lecture I wish to emphasise the following fact:—The evolution of man does not merely take place when he is here on earth, but also when he is between death and a new birth. Bacon as well as Amos Comenius, having fastened Arabism—so to speak from two different sides—on to the civilisation of Europe, died again and passed into the life between death and a new birth. And there they were together with many souls who came down to earth after their time. Bacon and Amos Comenius, having died in the 17th century, lived on in the spiritual world. Other souls, who came down to earth in the 19th century, were in the spiritual world together with the souls of Bacon and Amos Comenius from the 17th to the 19th. On the one hand there were souls who gathered mainly around the soul of Bacon—Bacon whose work became so dominant. Then there were the souls who gathered around Amos Comenius. And though this is rather a pictorial way of speaking, we must not forget that there are ‘leaders’ and ‘followers’—albeit under quite different conditions—even in the spiritual world which men pass through between death and a new birth. Such individualities as Bacon or Amos Comenius worked not only through what they brought about on earth—through their writings, for example, or through the traditions of them which lived on on earth. No, these leading spirits were also working through the souls whom they sent down, or the souls with whom they were together and who were then sent down; they worked by causing certain tendencies to germinate in these souls in the spiritual world. Thus among the men of the 19th century we find souls who had become dependent already in their evolution in the pre-earthly life on one or other of these two spirits—the discarnate Amos Comenius, and the discarnate Bacon.

As I said, I want to lead you more and more into the concrete way in which karma works. Therefore I will now draw your attention to two personalities of the 19th century whose names will be known to most of you. One of them was especially influenced in his pre-earthly life by Bacon, and the other by Amos Comenius.

If we observe Bacon as he stood in earthly civilisation—in his earthly life as Lord Chancellor in England—if we observe him there, we find that his working was such that an Initiate stood behind him. The whole Bacon-Shakespeare controversy, as it is outwardly pursued by the historians of literature, is appallingly barren. All manner of arguments are brought forward which are supposed to show that Shakespeare the actor did not really write his dramas, but that they were written by Bacon the philosopher and Lord Chancellor, and so on ...

All these things—working with external methods, seeking out similarities in the way of thought in Shakespeare's dramas and Bacon's philosophic works—all these are barren superficialities. They do not get at the real truth. For the truth is that at the time when Bacon, Shakespeare, Jacob Boehme, and a fourth were working on the earth, there was one Initiate who really spoke through all four. Hence their kinship, for in reality it all goes back to one and the same source. Of course, these people who dispute and argue do not argue about the Initiate who stood behind, especially as this Initiate—like many a modern Initiate—is described to us in history as a rather intolerable fellow. But he was not merely so. No doubt he was so sometimes in his external actions, but he was not merely so. He was an individuality from whom immense forces proceeded, and to whom were really due Bacon's philosophic works as well as Shakespeare's dramas and the works of Jacob Boehme, and also the works of the Jesuit, Jacob Balde.

If we bear this in mind, then we must see in Bacon, in the philosophic realm, the instigator of an immense and far-reaching stream of the time.

It is most interesting to observe what could become of a soul who lived throughout the two centuries, in the life beyond the earth, under the influence of the dead Bacon. We must turn our attention to the way in which Bacon himself lived after his death. For our studies of human history it will in fact be more and more important to observe the human beings who have lived on earth not only until the moment of their death but in their working beyond death, where they work on and on upon those souls who are afterwards to descend to earth. This applies especially to those who have themselves been responsible for great spiritual achievements.

No doubt these things may be somewhat shocking for men of the present time. So for instance I remember—if I may make this digression—I remember on one occasion I was standing at the entrance to the railway station in a small German University town with a well-known doctor who went in a great deal for occultism. Around us stood many other people. Presently he warmed up to his subject and out of his enthusiasm said to me in a loud voice, so that many of those who were around could hear him: “I will make you a present of the biography of Robert Blum; but that is a biography which begins only after his death.” Spoken loudly as it was, one could well observe the shock it gave to those who were standing around us! One cannot say without more ado to the people of to-day, “I will make you a present of the biography of a man, but it begins only after his death.”

For the rest—apart from this two-volumed biography of Robert Blum, which begins not with his birth but with his death—little has yet been done in the way of relating the biographies of men after their death. Biographies generally begin at birth and end at death; there are not yet many works that begin with a man's death.

Yet, for the real happenings of the world, what a man does after his death is immensely important, notably when he passes on the results of what he did on earth—translated into the spiritual—to the souls who come down after him. We cannot understand the age which succeeds a given age if we do not observe this side of life.

Now I was specially interested in observing those individualities who surrounded Bacon after his death. Among them were individualities who were subsequently born as natural scientists. But there were also others who were born as historians; and if we observe the influence of the dead Lord Bacon on these souls, we see how the materialism which he founded upon earth—the mere researching into the world of sense (for, as you know, everything else was for him an ‘idol’)—translated into the spiritual, reverts into a kind of radicalism. And so indeed, in the very midst of the spiritual world, these souls received impulses which worked on in such a way that after their birth, having descended to the earth, they would attach no value to anything that was not a concrete fact visible to the senses.

I will now speak in a somewhat popular form, but I beg you not to take my words too literally, for if you do so it will of course be only too easy to say: ‘How grotesque!’ Among these souls there were also some who, by their former tendencies—derived from former earthly lives—were destined to become historians. And among them was one who was the greatest. (I am still speaking of the pre-earthly lives of all these souls). One among them was the greatest. Under the influence of Lord Bacon's impulses, all these souls said to themselves, in effect: It is no longer permissible to write history as it was written in former times, to write it with Ideas, investigating the inner connections. Only the actual facts must now be the object of our research.

Now I ask you, what does this mean? Are not the intentions of men the most important thing in history?—and they are not outwardly real! These souls, however, no longer permitted themselves to think in this way; and least of all did the soul who afterwards appeared again as one of the greatest historians of the 19th century—Leopold von Ranke. Leopold von Ranke was a pre-earthly disciple of Lord Bacon.

Study the earthly career of Leopold von Ranke as a historian. What is his principle? Ranke's principle as a historian is this: nothing must be written in history save what is to be read of in the archives. We must compile all history from the archives—from the actual transactions of the diplomats.

If you read Ranke you will find it so. He is a German and a Protestant, but with his sense of reality this has no effect on him. He works objectively—that is to say, with the objectivity of the archives. So he writes his History of the Popes—the best that has ever been written from the pure standpoint of archives. When we read Ranke we are irritated, nay dreadfully so. It is a barren prospect to imagine the old gentleman—quick and alert as he was until a ripe old age—sitting forever in the archives and merely piecing together the diplomatic transactions. That is no real history. It is history which reckons only with the facts of the sense-world—that is to say, for the historian, with the archives.

And so indeed, precisely by taking into account the life beyond the earth we have the possibility to understand why Ranke became what he was.

But now we can also look across to Amos Comenius, and observe how he worked on the pre-earthly willing of souls who afterwards descended to the earth. For just as Leopold von Ranke became the greatest disciple of Bacon—of Bacon after his death—so did Schlosser become the greatest disciple of Comenius after his death.

Read Schlosser's History; observe the prevailing tone, the fundamental note he strikes. On every page there speaks the moralist—the moralist who would fain seize the human heart and soul—whose object is to speak right into the heart. Often he scarcely succeeds, for he is still rather a pedant. He speaks, in effect, like a pedant speaking to the heart. Nevertheless, being a pre-earthly disciple of Amos Comenius, he has absorbed something of the quality that was in Comenius himself, who was so characteristic by virtue of the peculiar quality of his spirit. For after all, Comenius too came over from Mohammedanism. Though he was very different from the spirits who gathered around Lord Bacon, nevertheless Comenius too, in his incarnation as Comenius, concentrated on the real, outer world. Everywhere he demanded visibility, objectivity, in education. There must always be an underlying picture. He demands vision—object lessons, as it were; he too lays stress on the sense-perceptible, though in quite another way. For Amos Comenius was also one of those who at the time of the Thirty Years' War believed most enthusiastically in the coming of the so-called Millennium. In his Pansophia he wrote down great and world-embracing ideas. He wanted to work for human education by a great impulsive power. This too worked on Schlosser. It is there in Schlosser.

I mention these two figures—Ranke and Schlosser—in order to show you how we can understand what appears as the spiritually productive power in man only if we also take into account his life beyond the earth. Only then do we understand it—just as we have also learnt to understand many things by taking into account repeated lives on earth. For in the thoughts which I have recently placed before you, we have observed this marvellous working across from one incarnation to another. As I said, I give these examples in order that we may then consider how a man can think about his own karma. Before we can dwell on the way in which good and evil—or illnesses or the like—work over from one incarnation to another, we must first learn to perceive how that which afterwards emerges in the spiritual and intellectual life of civilisation also works across from one incarnation to another.

Now my dear friends, I must admit that for me one of the most interesting personalities in modern spiritual life, with regard to his karma, was Conrad Ferdinand Meyer. Anyone who observes him closely will see that his most beautiful works depend on a peculiar fact, namely this: Again and again, in his whole human constitution, there was a kind of tendency for the Ego and astral body to flee from the physical and the etheric bodies.

Morbid conditions appear in Conrad Ferdinand Meyer, bordering very nearly on dementia. But these morbid conditions only express in a rather more extreme form what was always present in him in a nascent state. His soul-and-spirit tends to go out—holds to the physical and etheric only by a very loose thread. And in this condition—the soul-and-spirit holding to the physical and etheric by a very loose thread only—the most beautiful of his works originate; I mean the most beautiful of his longer works and of his shorter poems too. Conrad Ferdinand Meyer's most beautiful poems may even be said to have originated half out of the body. There was a peculiar relationship between the four members of his nature. Truly there is a great difference between such a personality and an average man of the present time. With an average man of this materialistic age we generally find a very firm and robust connection of the soul-and-spirit with the physical and etheric. The soul-and-spirit is deeply immersed in the physical and etheric—‘sits tight’, as it were. But in Conrad Ferdinand Meyer it was not so. He had a very tender relation of the soul-and-spirit to the physical and etheric. To describe his psyche is really one of the most interesting tasks one can undertake when studying the developments of modern spiritual life. Many things that emerge in Conrad Ferdinand Meyer appear almost like a dim, cloudy recollection—a recollection which has however grown beautiful in growing dim. When Conrad Ferdinand Meyer writes we always have the feeling: He is remembering something, though not quite exactly. He changes it—but changes it into something beautiful and form-perfected. We can observe this wonderfully, piece by piece, in certain of his works.

Now it is characteristic of the inner karma of a human being when there is such a definite relationship of the four members of his nature—physical body, etheric body, astral body and Ego. And in Conrad Ferdinand Meyer's case, when we trace back this peculiarly intimate connection, we are led, first of all, to the time of the Thirty Years' War. This was the first thing clear to me in his case: there is something of a former earthly life at the time of the Thirty Years' War. And then there is a still earlier life on earth going back into the pre-Carlovingian age, going back quite evidently into the early history of Italy.

When we endeavour to trace Conrad Ferdinand Meyer's karma, the peculiar, intangible fluidity of his being (which none the less expresses itself in such perfection of form)—the peculiar, intangible fluidity of his life somehow communicates itself to our investigation, until at length we feel: We are getting into confusion. I have no other alternative but to describe these things just as they happened in the investigation.

We go back into the time of the 6th century in Italy. There we have the feeling: We are getting into an extraordinarily insecure element. We are driven back again and again, and only gradually we observe that this is not due to ourselves but to the object of our research. There is really in the soul—in the individuality—of Conrad Ferdinand Meyer something that brings us into confusion as we try to investigate him. We are driven to return again and again into his present incarnation or into the one immediately before it. Again and again we must ‘pull ourselves up’ and go back again.

The following was the result.—You must remember, all that has lived in a human soul in former incarnations becomes manifest in the most varied forms—in likenesses which are often quite imperceptible to outer observation. This you will have seen from other instances of reincarnation given here.

So at length we come to an incarnation in Italy in the early Christian centuries—at the end of the first half of the first millennium A.D. Here we come to a halt. We find a soul living in Italy, to a large extent at Ravenna, at the Roman Court. But now we come into confusion. For we must ask ourselves: What was living in that soul? The moment we ask ourselves this question (in order to call forth the further occult investigation), the whole thing is extinguished once again.

We become aware of the experiences which this soul underwent while living at the Court at Ravenna—at the Roman Court. We enter into these experiences and we think we have them, and then again they are extinguished—blotted out from us; and we are driven back again to Conrad Ferdinand Meyer as he lived on earth in the immediate past. At length we perceive that in this later life he obliterates from our vision the content of his soul in the former life. Only after long trouble do we perceive at length how the matter really stands. Conrad Ferdinand Meyer—or rather the individuality who lived in him—was living at that time in a certain relationship to one of the Popes who sent him, among others, to England on a Roman Catholic, Christian Mission.

The individuality who afterwards became Conrad Ferdinand Meyer had first absorbed all that wonderful sense of form which it was possible to absorb in Italy at that time. The Mosaic art of Italy bears witness to it; also the old Italian painting, the greater part, nay practically the whole of which has been destroyed. This art did not continue.

And then he went on a Roman Catholic Christian Mission to the Anglo-Saxons. One of his companions founded the Bishopric of Canterbury. What afterwards took place at Canterbury began essentially with this foundation. The individuality, however, who after-wards appeared as Conrad Ferdinand Meyer, was only there as a witness, so to speak. Nevertheless, he was a very active person, and he called forth the ill-will of an Anglo-Saxon chieftain, at whose investigation he was eventually murdered. That is what we find to begin with.

But while he lived in England there was something in the soul of this Conrad Ferdinand Meyer which robbed him of real joy in life. His soul was deeply rooted in the Italian art of his time—or, if we will call it so, in the Italian spiritual life. He gained no happiness in the execution of his missionary work in England. Yet he devoted himself to it with great intensity—so much so that his assassination was a reaction to it.

This constant unhappiness—being repelled from something which he was none the less doing with all force and devotion out of another impulse in his heart—worked on in such a way that when he passed through his next earthly life there ensued a cosmic clouding-over of his memory. The inner impulse was there but it no longer coincided with any clear concept.

And so it came about that in his subsequent incarnation as Conrad Ferdinand Meyer, an undefined impulse was at work in him, to this effect: ‘I was once working in England. It is connected somehow with Canterbury. I was murdered owing to my connection with Canterbury.’

So indeed the outer life of Conrad Ferdinand Meyer in this incarnation takes its course. He studies outer history, he studies Canterbury, studies what happened in Canterbury, in connection with the history of England. He comes across Thomas à Becket, Chancellor of King Henry II in the 12th century. He learns of the strange destiny of Thomas à Becket, who from being the all-powerful Chancellor of Henry II, was murdered virtually at his instigation. And so in this present incarnation as Conrad Ferdinand Meyer, his own half-forgotten destiny appears to him in Thomas à Becket. It comes before him, half-forgotten in his subconsciousness, for I am speaking of course, of the subconscious life which comes to the surface in this way. So he describes his own fate in a far distant time. But he describes it in the story of what actually happened in the 12th century between King Henry II and Thomas à Becket of Canterbury, whose fate he recounts in his poetic work Der Heilige (The Saint). So indeed it is—only all this takes place in the subconscious life which embraces successive incarnations. It is as though within a single earthly life a man had experienced something in his early youth in connection with a certain place. He has forgotten it. He experienced it maybe in the second or third year of his life. It does not emerge, but some other similar destiny emerges. The very same place is named, and as a result he has a peculiar sympathy for this other person's destiny. He feels it differently from one who has no ‘association of ideas’ with the same place.

Just as this may happen within one earthly life, so it took place in the concrete instance I am now giving you. There was the work in Canterbury, the murder of a person connected with Canterbury (for Thomas à Becket was Archbishop of Canterbury), the murder of Thomas à Becket at the instigation of the King of England. All of these schemes work in together. In the descriptions in his poem he is describing his own destiny.

But now the thing goes on—and this is most interesting in Conrad Ferdinand Meyer's case. He was born as a woman about the time of the Thirty Years' War—a lively woman, full of spiritual interest in life, a woman who witnessed many an adventure. She married a man who first took part in all the confused events of the Thirty Years' War, but then grew weary of them and emigrated to Switzerland, to Graubünden (Canton Grisons), where he lived a somewhat philistine existence. But his wife was deeply affected and impressed by all that took place in the Graubünden country under the prevailing conditions of the Thirty Years' War.

This too is eclipsed, as though with another layer. For it is so with this individuality: That which is living in him is easily forgotten in the cosmic sense, and yet he calls it forth again in a transmuted form, where it becomes more glorious and more intense. For out of what this woman observed and experienced in that incarnation there arises the wonderful characterisation of Jürg Jenatsch, the man of Graubünden, in Conrad Ferdinand Meyer's historic novel. Observing Conrad Ferdinand Meyer in this incarnation, we have indeed no explanation of his peculiarity if we cannot enter into his karma. I must say—speaking with a grain of salt—that I envy the people who ‘understand’ him so light-heartedly. Before I knew his reincarnations, all that I understood was that I did not understand him. This wonderful inner perfection of form, this inner joy in form, this purity of form, all the strength and power that lives in Jürg Jenatsch, and the wonderful personal and living quality in The Saint,—a good deal of superficiality is needed to imagine that one understands all this. Observe his beautiful forms—there is something of clear line in them, almost severe; they are painted and yet not painted. Here live the mosaics of Ravenna. And in The Saint there lives a history which was undergone once upon a time by this individuality himself; but a mist of the soul has spread over it, and out of the mist it emerges in another form.

And again one needs to know: All that is living in his romance of Graubünden, Jürg Jenatsch, was absorbed by the heart and mind of a woman; while in the momentum, the driving power that lives in this romance there lives again the swashbuckler of the Thirty Years' War. The man was pretty much of a philistine, as I said, but he was a swashbuckler. And so, all that comes over from former experiences on earth comes to life again in a peculiar form in Conrad Ferdinand Meyer. Only now do we begin to understand him. Now we say to ourselves: In olden times of human evolution, men were not ashamed to speak of Spirits from beyond descending to the earth, or of earthly human beings finding their way upward and working on from spiritual worlds. All this must come again, otherwise man will not get beyond his present outlook of the earthworm. For all that the natural-scientific conception of the world contains, it is the world-outlook of the earth-worm. Men live on earth as though only the earth concerned them, as though it were not true that the whole Cosmos works upon all earthly things and lives again in man. As though it were not true that earlier epochs of history live on, inasmuch as we ourselves carry into later times what we absorbed in former times.

We do not understand karma by talking theoretic concepts about successive earthly incarnations. To understand karma is to feel in our hearts all that we can feel when we see what existed ages ago flowing into the later epochs in the souls of men themselves. When we begin to see how karma works, human life gains quite a new content. We feel ourselves quite differently in human life.

Such a spirit as Conrad Ferdinand Meyer feels his former earthly lives like an undertone—an undertone that sounds from far away. We understand what appears in him only when we develop an understanding for this undertone. The progress of mankind in spiritual life will depend on its ability to regard life in this way, to observe in all detail what flows across from former epochs of the world's evolution into later epochs through the human beings themselves. Then we shall cease, in the childish way of psycho-analysts, to explain the peculiarities of souls by speaking of ‘hidden underlying regions’ and the like. After all, one can ascribe anything one likes to what is ‘hidden’. We shall look for the real causes. In some respects, no doubt, the psycho-analysts do quite good work. But these pursuits remind us of the story of how someone heard that in the year 1749 a son was born to a certain patrician. Afterwards this son emerged as a very gifted man. To this day we can point to the actual birth-place in Frankfurt of the man who afterwards came forth as Wolfgang Goethe. ‘Let us make excavations in the earth and see by dint of what strange emanations his talents came about’. Sometimes the psycho-analysts seem to me just like that. They dig into the earth-realm of the soul, into the hidden regions which they themselves first invent by their hypotheses, whereas in reality one ought to look into the preceding lives on earth and lives between death and a new birth. Then if we do so, a true understanding of human souls is opened out to us. Truly the souls of men are far too rich in content to enable us to understand their content out of a single life alone.

• 1. See Vol. I, lecture X.

I should like during these few days to say something rather especially for the friends who have come here to attend the Easter Course,¹ and who have not heard much of what has connections. Those who were present at the lectures before Easter may find some repetitions but the circumstances make this inevitable.

I have been laying particular emphasis on the fact that study of the historical development of the life of mankind must lead on to study of the human being himself. All our endeavours aim in the direction of placing man at the centre of our study of the world. Two ends are attained thereby. Firstly, it is only in this way that the world can be studied as it truly is. For all that man sees spread around him in nature is only a part—gives as it were one picture of the world only: and to limit study of the world to this realm of nature is like studying a plant without looking beyond root, green leaf and stem, and ignoring flower and fruit. This kind of study can never reveal the whole plant. Imagine a creature that is always born at a particular time of the year, lives out its life during a period when the plant grows as far as the green leaves and no further, dies before the plant is in blossom and appears again only when roots and green leaves are there.—Such a creature would never have knowledge of the whole plant; it would regard the plant as something that has roots and leaves only.

The materialistic mind of to-day has got itself into a similar position as regards its approach to the world. It considers only the broad foundations of life, not what blossoms forth from the totality of earthly evolution and earthly existence—namely, man himself. The real way of approach must be to study nature in her full extent, but in such a way as all the time to realise that she must needs create man out of herself. We shall then see man as the microcosm he truly is, as the concentration of all that is to be found outspread in the far spaces of the cosmos.

As soon, however, as we study history from this point of view, we are no longer able to regard the human being as a resultant of the forces of history, as a single, self-contained being. We must take account of the fact that he passes through different earthly lives: one such life occurs at an earlier time and another at a later. This very fact places man at the centre of our studies, but now in his whole being, as an individuality. This is the one end that is attained when we look in this way at nature and at history.

The other is this.—The very fact of placing man at the centre of study, makes for humility. Lack of humility is due to nothing else than lack of knowledge. A penetrating, comprehensive knowledge of man in his connection with the events of the world and of history will certainly not lead to excessive self-esteem; far rather it will lead the human being to look at himself objectively. It is precisely when a man does not know himself that there rise up in him those feelings which have their source in the unknown regions of his being. Instinctive, emotional impulses make themselves felt. And it is these instinctive, emotional impulses, rooted as they are in the subconscious, that make for arrogance and pride. On the other hand, when consciousness penetrates farther and farther into those regions where man comes to know himself and to recognise how in the sequence of historical events he belongs to the whole wide universe—then, simply by virtue of an inner law, humility will unfold in him. The recognition of his place in universal existence invariably calls forth humility, never arrogance. All genuine study pursued in Anthroposophy has its ethical side, carries with it an ethical impulse.

Unlike modern materialism, Anthroposophy will not lead to a conception of life in which ethics and morality are a mere adjunct; ethics and morality emerge, as if inwardly impelled, from all genuine anthroposophical study.

I want now to show you by concrete examples, how the fruits of earlier epochs of history are carried over into later epochs through human beings themselves. A certain very striking example now to be given, is associated with Switzerland.

Our gaze falls upon a man who lived about a hundred years before the founding of Christianity.—I am relating to you what can be discovered through spiritual scientific investigation.—At this period in history we find a personality who is a kind of slave overseer in southern Europe.

We must not associate with a slave overseer of those times the feelings that the word immediately calls up in us now. Slavery was the general custom in days of antiquity, and at the time of which I am speaking it was essentially mild in form; the overseers were usually educated men. Indeed the teachers of important personages might well be slaves, who were often versed in the literary and scientific culture of the time. So you see, we must acquire sounder ideas about slavery—needless to say, without defending it in the least degree—when we are considering this aspect of the life of antiquity.

We find, then, a personality whose calling it is to be in charge of a number of slaves and to apportion their tasks. He is an extraordinarily lovable man, gentle and kind-hearted and when he is able to have his own way he does everything to make life easier for the slaves. In authority over him, however, is a rough, somewhat brutal personality. This man is, as we should say nowadays, his superior officer. And this superior officer is responsible for many things that arouse resentment and animosity in the slaves. When the personality of whom I am speaking—the slave overseer—passes through the gate of death, he is surrounded in the time between death and a new birth by all the souls who were thus united with him on earth, the souls of the slaves who had been in his charge. But as an individuality he is very strongly connected with the one who was his superior officer. The fact that he, as the slave overseer, was obliged to obey this superior officer—for in accordance with the prevailing customs of the time he always did obey him, though often very unwillingly—this fact established a strong karmic tie between them. But a deep karmic tie was also established by the relationship that had existed in the physical world between the overseer and the slaves, for in many respects he had been their teacher as well.

We must thus picture a further life unfolding between death and rebirth among all these individualities of whom I have spoken.

Afterwards, somewhere about the 9th century A.D., the individuality of the slave overseer is born again, in Central Europe, but now as a woman, and moreover, because of the prevailing karmic connection, as the wife of the former superior officer who reincarnated as a man. The two of them live together in a marital relationship that makes karmic compensation for the tie that had been established away back in the first century before the founding of Christianity, when they had lived as subordinate and superior officers respectively. The superior officer is now, in the 9th century A.D., in a commune in Central Europe where the inhabitants live on very intimate terms with one another; he holds some kind of official position in the commune, but he is everyone's servant and comes in for plenty of knocks and abuse.

Investigating the whole matter further, we find that the members of this rather extensive commune are the slaves who once had their tasks allotted to them in the way I told you. The superior officer has now become as it were the servant of them all, and has to experience the karmic fulfilment of many things which, through the instrumentality of the overseer, his brutality inflicted upon these people.

The wife of this man (she is the reincarnated overseer), suffers with a kind of silent resignation under all the impressions made by the ever-discontented superior officer in his new incarnation, and one can follow in detail how karmic destiny is here being fulfilled.

But we see, too, that this karma is by no means completely adjusted. A part only is adjusted, namely the karmic relationship between the slave overseer and his superior officer. This has been lived out and is essentially finished in the medieval incarnation in the 9th century; for the wife has paid off what her soul had experienced owing to the brutality of the man who had once been the superior officer and is now her husband.

This woman, the reincarnation of the former slave overseer, is born again, and what happens now is that the greater number of the souls who had once been slaves and had then come together again in the large commune—souls in whose destiny this individuality had twice played a part—came again as the children whose education this same individuality in his new incarnation has deeply at heart. For in this incarnation he comes as Pestalozzi. And we see how Pestalozzi's infinite humanitarianism, his enthusiasm for education in the 18th century, is the karmic fulfilment in relation to human beings with whom he had already twice been connected—the karmic fulfilment of the experiences and the sufferings of earlier incarnations.

What comes to view in single personalities can be clear and objectively intelligible to us only when we are able to see the present earthly life against the background of earlier earthly lives.

Traits that go back not merely to the previous incarnation, but often to the one before that, and even earlier, sometimes show themselves in a man. We see how what has been planted, as it were, in the single incarnations, works its way through with a certain inner, spiritual necessity, inasmuch as the human being lives not only through earthly lives but also through lives between death and a new birth.

In this connection, the study of a life of which I spoke to those of you who were in Dornach before Easter, is particularly striking and interesting—the life of Conrad Ferdinand Meyer.

Conrad Ferdinand Meyer presents a very special enigma to those who study the inner aspect of his life and at the same time greatly admire him as a poet. There is such wonderful harmony of form and style in his poems that we cannot help saying: what lives in Conrad Ferdinand Meyer always hovers a little above the earthly—in respect of the style and also in respect of the whole way of thinking and feeling. And if we steep ourselves in his writings we shall perceive how he is immersed in an element of spirit-and-soul that is always on the point of breaking away from the physical body. Study the nobler poems, also the prose-poems, of Conrad Ferdinand Meyer and you will say to yourselves: There is evidence of a perpetual urge to get right away from connection with the physical body. As you know, in his incarnation as Conrad Ferdinand Meyer, it was his lot to fall into pathological states, when the soul-and-spirit separated from the physical body to a high degree, so much so that insanity ensued, or at any rate conditions resembling insanity. And the strange thing is that his most beautiful works were produced during periods when the soul-and-spirit had loosened from the physical body.

Now when we try to investigate the karmic connections running through the life of Conrad Ferdinand Meyer, we are driven into a kind of confusion. We cannot immediately find our bearings. We are led, first, to the 6th century A.D., and then again we are thrown back into the 19th, into the Conrad Ferdinand Meyer incarnation. The very circumstances we are observing, mislead us. I want you to realise the extraordinary difficulty of a genuine search for knowledge in this domain. If you are satisfied with phantasy, then it is naturally easy, for you can make things fit in as you like. For one who is not satisfied with phantasy but carries his investigation to the point where he can rely upon the faculties of his own soul not to play him false—for him it is no easy matter, especially when he is investigating these things in connection with an individuality as complex as that of Conrad Ferdinand Meyer. In investigating karmic connections through a number of earthly lives it is no great help to look at the particularly outstanding characteristics. What strikes you most forcibly in a man, what you see at once when you meet him or learn of him in history—these characteristics are, for the most part, the outcome of his earthly environment. A man as he confronts us is a product of his earthly environment to a far greater extent than is generally believed. He takes in through education what is present in his earthly environment. It is the more intangible, more intimate traits of a man which taken quite concretely, lead back through the life between death and a new birth into former earthly lives.

In these investigations it may be more important to observe a man's gestures or some habitual mannerism than to consider what he has achieved perhaps as a figure of renown. The mannerisms of a person, or the way he will invariably answer you—not so much what he answers but how he answers—whether, for example, his first tendency is always to be negative and only when he has no other alternative, to agree, or whether again in quite a good-humoured way he is rather boastful ... these are the kind of traits that are important and if we pay special attention to them they become the centre of our observations and disclose a great deal. One observes, for instance, how a man stretches out his hand to take hold of things; one makes an objective picture of it and then works upon it in the manner of an artist; and at length one finds that it is no longer the mere gesture that one is contemplating, but around the gesture the figure of another human being takes shape.

The following may happen.—There are men who have a habit, let us say, of making a certain movement of the arms. I have known men who simply could not begin to do anything without first folding their arms. If one visualises such a gesture quite objectively, but with inner, artistic feeling, so that it stands before one as a plastic, pliable form, then one's attention is directed away from the man who is actually making the gesture. But the gesture does not remain as it is; it grows into another figure which is an indication, at least, of something in the previous incarnation or in the one before that. It may well be that the gesture is now used in connection with something that was not present at all in the previous incarnation—let us say it is a gesture used in picking up a book, or some similar action. Nevertheless, it is for gestures and habits of this kind that we must have an eye if we are to keep on the right track.

Now in the case of an individuality like Conrad Ferdinand Meyer, the point of significance is that while he is creating his poems there is always a tendency to a loosening of the soul-and-spirit from the physical body. There we have a starting-point but at the same time a point where we may easily go astray.

We are led, as I told you, to the 6th century A.D. We have the feeling: that is where he belongs. And moreover we find a personality who lived in Italy, who experienced a very varied destiny in that incarnation in Italy, who indeed lived a kind of double existence. On the one side he was devoted with the greatest enthusiasm to an art that has almost disappeared in this later age, but was then in its prime; it is only in the remaining examples of mosaics that we are still able to glimpse this highly developed art. And the individuality to whom we are first impelled, lived in this milieu of art in Italy at the end of the 5th and the beginning of the 6th century A.D.—That is what presents itself, to begin with.

But now this whole picture is obscured, and again we are thrown back to Conrad Ferdinand Meyer. The darkness that obscures vision of the man of the 6th century now overshadows the picture of Conrad Ferdinand Meyer in the 19th; and we are compelled to look very closely into what Conrad Ferdinand Meyer does in the 19th century.

Our attention is then drawn to the fact that his tale Der Heilige (The Saint), deals with Thomas à Becket, the Chancellor of Henry II of England. We feel that here is something of peculiar importance. And we also have the feeling that the impression received from the earlier incarnation has driven us up against this particular deed of Conrad Ferdinand Meyer. But now again we are driven back into the 6th century, and can find there no explanation of this. And so we are thrown to and fro between the two incarnations, the problematic one in the 6th century and the Conrad Ferdinand Meyer incarnation—until it dawns upon us that the story of Thomas à Becket as told in history, came up in Conrad Ferdinand Meyer's mind owing to a certain similarity with an experience he had himself undergone in the 6th century, when he went to England from Italy as a member of a Catholic mission sent by Pope Gregory. There we have the second aspect of Conrad Ferdinand Meyer in his previous incarnation. On the one side he was an enthusiastic devotee of the art that subsequently took the form of mosaic.—Hence his talent for form, in all its aspects. On the other side, however, he was an impassioned advocate of Catholicism, and for this reason accompanied the mission. The members of this mission founded Canterbury, where the bishopric was then established.

The individuality who afterwards lived in the 19th century as Conrad Ferdinand Meyer was murdered by an Anglo-Saxon courtier, in circumstances that are extraordinarily interesting. There was something of legal subtlety and craftiness, albeit still in the rough, about the events connected at that time with the murder.

You know very well, my dear friends, how even in ordinary life the sound of something remains with you. You may once have heard a name without paying any particular attention to it ... but later on a whole association of ideas is called up in your mind when this name is mentioned. In a similar way, through the peculiar circumstances of this man's connection with what later became the archbishopric of Canterbury—the town of Canterbury, as I said, was founded by the mission of which he was a member—these experiences lived on, lived on, actually, in the sound of the name Canterbury. In the Conrad Ferdinand Meyer incarnation the sound of this name—Canterbury—came to life again, and by association of ideas his attention was called to Thomas à Becket, (the Lord Chancellor of Canterbury under Henry Plantagenet) who was treacherously murdered. At first, Thomas à Becket was a favourite of Henry II, but was afterwards murdered, virtually through the instigation of the King, because he would not agree to certain measures.

These two destinies, alike in some respects and unlike in others, brought it about that Conrad Ferdinand Meyer transposed, as it were, into quite different figures taken from history, what he had himself experienced in an earlier incarnation in the 6th century—experienced in his own body, far from what was at that time his native land. Just think how interesting this is! Once we have grasped it, we are no longer driven hither and thither between the two incarnations. And then, because again in the 19th century, Conrad Ferdinand Meyer has a kind of double nature, we see how his soul-and-spirit easily separates from the physical. Because he has this double nature, the place of his own, actual experiences is taken by another experience in some respects similar to it ... just as pictures often change in the play of human imagination. In a man's ordinary imagination during an earthly life, the picture changes in such a way that imagination weaves in freedom; in the course of many earthly lives it may be that some historical event which is connected with the person in question as a picture only, takes the place of the actual event.

Now this individuality whose experience in an earlier life worked on through two lives between death and rebirth and then came to expression in the story Thomas à Becket, the Saint,—this individuality had had another intermediate earthly life as a woman at the time of the Thirty Years' War. We have only to envisage the chaos prevailing all over Central Europe during the Thirty Years' War and it will not be difficult to understand the feelings and emotions of an impressionable, sensitive woman living in the midst of the chaos as the wife of a pedantic, narrow-minded man. Wearying of life in the country that was afterwards Germany, he emigrated to Graubünden in Switzerland, where he left the care of house and home to his wife, while he spent his time sullenly loafing about. His wife, however, had opportunity to observe many, many things. The wider historical perspective, no less than the curious local conditions at Graubünden, worked upon her; the experiences she underwent, experiences that were always coloured by her life with the bourgeois, commonplace husband, again sank down into the foundations of the individuality, and lived on through the life between death and a new birth. And the experiences of the wife at the time of the Thirty Years' War are imaginatively transformed in Conrad Ferdinand Meyer's tale, Jürg Jenatsch.

Thus in the soul of Conrad Ferdinand Meyer we have something that has gathered together out of the details of former incarnations. As a man of letters, Conrad Ferdinand Meyer seems to be an individuality complete in itself, for he is an artist with very definite and fixed characteristics. But in point of fact it is this that actually causes confusion, because one's attention is immediately directed away from these very definite characteristics to the elusive, double nature of the man.

Those who have eyes only for Conrad Ferdinand Meyer the poet, the famous author of all these works, will never come to know anything of his earlier lives. We have to look through the poet to the man; and then, in the background of the picture, there appear the figures of the earlier incarnations.

Paradoxical as it will seem to the modern mind, the only way in which human life can be understood in its deeper aspect is to centre our study of the course of world-events around observation of man himself in history. And man cannot be taken as belonging to one age of time only, as living in one earthly life only. In considering man, we must realise how the individuality passes from one earthly life to another, and how in the interval between death and a new birth he works upon and transforms that which has taken its course more in the subconscious realm of earthly life but for all that is connected with the actual shaping of the destiny. For the shaping of destiny takes place, not in the clear consciousness of the intellect, but in what weaves in the subconscious.

Let me now give you another example of how things work over in history through human individualities themselves.

In the first century A.D., about a hundred years after the founding of Christianity, we have an exceedingly significant Roman writer in the person of Tacitus. In all his work, and very particularly in his ‘Germania’, Tacitus proves himself a master of a concise, clear-cut style; he arrays the facts of history and geographical details in wonderfully rounded sentences with a genuinely epigrammatic ring. We may also remember how he, a man of wide culture, who knew everything considered worth knowing at that time—a hundred years after the founding of Christianity—makes no more than a passing allusion to Christ, mentioning Him as someone whom the Jews crucified but saying that this was of no great importance. Yet in point of fact, Tacitus is one of the greatest Romans.

Tacitus had a friend, the personality known in history as Pliny the Younger, himself the author of a number of letters and an ardent admirer of Tacitus.

To begin with, let us consider Pliny the Younger. He passes through the gate of death, through the life between death and a new birth, and is born again in the 11th century as a Countess of Tuscany in Italy, who is married to a Prince of Central Europe. The Prince has been robbed of his lands by Henry the Black of the Frankish-Salic dynasty and wants to secure for himself an estate in Italy. This Countess Beatrix owns the Castle of Canossa where, later on, Henry IV, the successor of Henry III the Black, was forced to make his famous penance to Pope Gregory.

Now this Countess Beatrix is an extraordinarily alert and active personality, taking keen interest in all the conditions and circumstances of the time. Indeed she cannot help being interested, for Henry III who had driven her husband, Gottfried, out of Alsace into Italy before his marriage to her, continued his persecution. Henry is a man of ruthless energy, who overthrows the Princes and Chieftains in his neighbourhood one after the other, does whatever he has a mind to do, and is not content when he has persecuted someone once, but does it a second time, when the victim has established himself somewhere else.—As I said, he was a man of ruthless vigour, a ‘great’ man in the medieval style of greatness. And when Gottfried had established himself in Tuscany, Henry was not content with having driven him out but proceeded to take the Countess back with him to Germany.

All these happenings gave the Countess an opportunity of forming a penetrating view of conditions in Italy, as well as of those in Germany. In her we have a person who is strongly representative of the time in which she lives, a woman of keen observation, vitality and energy, combined with largeness of heart and breadth of vision.

When, later on, Henry IV was forced to go on his journey of penance to Canossa, Beatrix's daughter Mathilde had become the owner of the Castle. Mathilde was on excellent terms with her mother whose qualities she had inherited, and was, in fact, the more gifted of the two. They were splendid women who because of all that had happened under Henry III and Henry IV, took a profound interest in the history of the times.

Investigation of these personalities leads to this remarkable result: the Countess Beatrix is the reincarnated Pliny the Younger, and her daughter Mathilde is the reincarnated Tacitus. Thus Tacitus, a writer of history in olden times, is now an observer of history on a wide scale—(when a woman has greatness in her she is often wonderfully gifted as an observer)—and not only an observer but a direct participant in historical events. For Mathilde is actually the owner of Canossa, the scene of issues that were immensely decisive in the Middle Ages. We find the former Tacitus now as an observer of history.

A deep intimacy develops between these two—mother and daughter—and their former work in the field of authorship enables them to grasp historical events with great perspicacity; subconsciously and instinctively they become closely linked with the world-process, as it takes its course in nature as well as in history.

And now, still later on, the following takes place.—Pliny the Younger, who in the Middle Ages was the Countess Beatrix, is born again in the 19th century, in a milieu of romanticism. He absorbs this romanticism—one cannot exactly say with enthusiasm, but with aesthetic pleasure. He has on the one hand this love for the romantic, and on the other—due to his family connections—a rather academic style; he finds his way into an academic style of writing. It is not, however, in line with his character. He is always wanting to get out of it, always wanting to discard this style.

This personality (the reincarnated Pliny the Younger and the Countess Beatrix) happens on one occasion brought about by destiny, to be visiting a friend, and takes up a book lying on the table, an English book. He is fascinated by its style and at once feels: The style I have had up till now and that I owe to my family relationships, does not really belong to me. This is my style, this is the style I need. It is wonderful; I must acquire it at all costs.

As a writer he becomes an imitator of this style—I mean, of course, an artistic imitator in the best sense, not a pedantic one—an imitator of this style in the artistic, aesthetic sense of the word. And do you know, the book he opened at that moment, reading it right through as quickly as he possibly could and then afterwards reading everything he could find of the author's writings—this book was Emerson's Representative Men. And the person in question adopted its style, immediately translated two essays from it, conceived a deep veneration for the author, and was never content until he was able to meet him in real life.

This man, who really only now found himself, who for the first time found the style that belonged to him in his admiration for the other—this reincarnation of Pliny the Younger and of the Countess Beatrix, is none other than Herman Grimm. And in Emerson we have to do with the reincarnated Tacitus, the reincarnated Countess Mathilde.

When we observe Herman Grimm's admiration for Emerson, when we remember the way in which Herman Grimm encounters Emerson, we can find again the relationship of Pliny the Younger to Tacitus. In every sentence that Herman Grimm writes after this time, we can see the old relationship between Pliny the Younger and Tacitus emerging. And we see the admiration that Pliny the Younger had for Tacitus, nay more, the complete accord and understanding between them, coming out again in the admiration with which Herman Grimm looks up to Emerson.

And now for the first time we shall grasp wherein the essential greatness of Emerson's style consists, we shall perceive that what Tacitus displayed in his own way, Emerson again displays in his own special way. How does Emerson work? Those who visited Emerson discovered his way of working. There he was in a room; around him were several chairs, several tables. Books lay open everywhere and Emerson walked about among them. He would often read a sentence, imbibe it thoroughly and from it form his own magnificent, free-moving, epigrammatic sentences. That was how he worked. There you have an exact picture of Tacitus in life! Tacitus travels, takes hold of life everywhere; Emerson observes life in books. It all lives again!

And then there is this unconquerable desire in Herman Grimm to meet Emerson. Destiny leads him to Representative Men and he sees at once: this is how I must write, this is my true style. As I said, he had already acquired an academic style of writing from his uncle Jacob Grimm and his father Wilhelm Grimm, and he then abandons it. He is impelled by destiny to adopt a completely different style.

In Herman Grimm's writings we see how wide were his historical interests. He has an inner relationship of soul with Germany, combined with a deep interest in Italy. All this comes out in his writings.

These are things that go to show how the affairs of destiny work themselves out. And how is one led to perceive such things? One must first have an impression and then everything crystallizes around it. Thus we had first to envisage the picture of Herman Grimm opening Emerson's Representative Men. Now Herman Grimm used to read in a peculiar manner. He read a passage and then immediately drew back from what he had read: it was a gesture as though he were swallowing what he had read, sentence by sentence. And it was this inner gesture of swallowing sentence by sentence that made it possible to trace Herman Grimm to his earlier incarnation. In the case of Emerson it was the walking to and fro in front of the open books, as well as the rather stiff, half-Roman carriage of the man, as Herman Grimm saw him when they first met in Italy—it was these impressions that led one back from Emerson to Tacitus. Plasticity of vision is needed to follow up things of this kind.

My dear friends, I have given you here another example which should indicate how our study of history needs to be deepened. This deepening must really be evident among us as one of the fruits of the new impulse that should take effect in the Anthroposophical Society through the Christmas Foundation Meeting. We must in future go bravely and boldly forward to the study of far-reaching spiritual connections; we must have courage to reach a vantage-point for observation of these great spiritual connections. For this we shall need, above all, deep earnestness. Our life in Anthroposophy must be filled with earnestness.

And this earnestness will grow in the Anthroposophical Society if those who really want to do something in the Society give more and more thought to the contents of the News Sheet that is sent out every week into all circles of Anthroposophists as a supplement to the weekly periodical, Das Goetheanum. A picture is given there of how one may shape the life in the Groups in the sense and meaning of the Christmas Meeting, of what should be done in the members' meetings, how the teaching should be given and studied. The News Sheet is also intended to give a picture of what is happening among us. Its title is: ‘What is going on in the Anthroposophical Society’, and its aim is to bring into the whole Society a unity of thought, to spread a common atmosphere of thought over the thousands of Anthroposophists everywhere. When we live in such an atmosphere, when we understand what it means for all our thinking to be stimulated and directed by the ‘Leading Thoughts’, and when we understand how the Goetheanum will thus be placed in the centre as a concrete reality through the initiative of the esoteric Vorstand—I have emphasised again and again that we now have to do with a Vorstand which conceives its task to be the inauguration of an esoteric impulse—when we understand this truly, then that which has now to flow through the Anthroposophical Movement will be carried forward in the right way. For Anthroposophical Movement and Anthroposophical Society must become one. The Anthroposophical Society must make the whole cause of Anthroposophy its own.

And it is true to say that if once this ‘thinking in common’ is an active reality, then it can also become the bearer of comprehensive, far-reaching spiritual knowledge. A power will come to life in the Anthroposophical Society that really ought to be in it, for the recent developments of civilisation need to be given a tremendous turn if they are not to lead to a complete decline.

What is said concerning successive earthly lives of this or that individual may at first seem paradoxical, but if you look more closely, if you look into the progress made by the human beings of whom we have spoken in this connection, you will see that what is said is founded on reality; you will see that we are able to look into the weaving life of gods and men when with the eye of spirit we try in this way to apprehend the spiritual forces.

This, my dear friends, is what I would lay upon your hearts and souls. If you take with you this feeling, then this Easter Meeting will be like a revitalising of the Christmas Meeting; for if the Christmas Meeting is to work as it should, then all that has developed out of it must be the means of revitalising it, of bringing it to new life just as if it were present with us.

May many things grow out of the Christmas Meeting, in constant renewal! May many things grow out of it through the activity of courageous souls, souls who are fearless representatives of Anthroposophy. If our meetings result in strengthening courage in the souls of Anthroposophists, then there will grow what is needed in the Society as the body for the Anthroposophical soul: a courageous presentation to the world of the revelations of the Spirit vouchsafed in the age of Light that has now dawned after the end of Kali-Yuga; for these revelations are necessary for the further evolution of man. If we live in the consciousness of this we shall be inspired to work courageously. May this courage be strengthened by every meeting we hold. It can be so if we are able to take in all earnestness things that seem paradoxical and foolish to those who set the tone of thought in our day. But after all, it has often happened that the dominant tone of thought in one period was soon afterwards replaced by the very thing that was formerly suppressed. May a recognition of the true nature of history, and of how it is bound up with the onward flow of the lives of men, give courage for anthroposophical activity—the courage that is essential for the further progress of human civilisation.

• 1. Easter as a Chapter in the Mystery-Wisdom of Man. (on-line as: The Easter Festival in Relation to the Mysteries) Dornach, 19th–22nd April, 1924.